Russian writers seem to have a special talent for highlighting the grimness and misery of ordinary life. Roadside Picnic, a novella by the brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, is a fine example of how this morosity shows up even in science-fiction. Computer gaming fans will know this novella, first published in 1972, as the ultimate inspiration for the STALKER series of games, albeit by way of the film version directed by Andrei Tarkovsky that was released in 1979.
Naturally, the original novella differs markedly from the video game. The novella for example is set in the fictional town of Harmont in some unnamed Commonwealth country, instead of the area around the Chernobyl reactor in Ukraine. This in turn is only one of six zones scattered around the global that were created by the alien visitation event. Still, many themes and even individual elements, such as how the stalkers use throw bolts to detect the boundaries of some types of anomalies, will be recognizable to STALKER fans.
Continue reading Roadside Picnic →
For the curious, I’ve recently moved to Seremban and have taken up a new job. This has left me with far less free time than I had previously, so I will no longer be able to update this blog regularly. Nevertheless, I shall try my best. So here is my belated round up of three of the most interesting science related articles I came across in July. Two of the articles in this entry deal wit optics, though in very different ways. The last article is a psychological study on the values championed in television shows.
The first article is from New Scientist and covers a new range of devices that might be called social x-ray specs. It’s basically a pair of spectacles that come with a built-in camera that tracks whatever the wearer is looking at. This data is then fed into computer about the size of a deck of cards and the results displayed to the wearer inside the spectacles itself. What’s interesting about the device is what it looks for. As everyone knows, when engaged in any sort of social interaction with other people, humans will inevitably give out all sorts of unconscious physical responses to their interlocutor. Think of examples such as subtly nodding your head, arching your brow or pursing your lips.
Continue reading Recent Interesting Science Articles (Jul ’11) →
The unexamined life is a life not worth living