It’s Halloween and this week Litopia After Dark goes to hell as the panel get their fangs into some of the juicy topics up for discussion.
The prominent atheist Richard Dawkins is stepping down from his post at Oxford University to write a book aimed at youngsters in which he will warn them against believing in “anti-scientific” fairytales. Prof Dawkins said: “The book I write next year will be a children’s book on how to think about the world, science thinking contrasted with mythical thinking. I haven’t read Harry Potter, I have read Pullman who is the other leading children’s author that one might mention and I love his books. I don’t know what to think about magic and fairy tales.” So, if fairytales are “anti-scientific”, should they be banned?
The biotech firm BioArts International, plans to offer five pet owners a chance to genetically Xerox their canine companions. Aspiring clog owners would participate in a series of online auctions, and the bidding will start at $100,000. Who would the panel clone, if they had the chance… and why??? Also, Scientific American carries an article by Gary Stix about another once-fictional scientific procedure that seems closer ever day. One day not so far away, Amazon.com may be linked directly to your hippocampus, which is the neural structure involved with forming memories. Cool technology – or the end of human beings? And finally, a new book has just been published on the matter of zombies. Glenn Kay’s ZOMBIE MOVIES: THE ULTIMATE GUIDE is out this week and the panel discuss, vampires or zombies – which is best?
All this and the horror of Pitch the Nasty Agent, the frighteningly freaky, Toad Suck, Arkansas, Reverse Shuffle Six Card Strip Pokerette and the nightmare of Cry for Help.
Our panellists this week are the frighteningly erudite regulars, Dave Bartram and Donna Ballman. Joining them we are delighted to welcome back two very special guests. Alan Gibbons is a prize winning children’s author and he is spearheading a campaign against library cuts in the UK. You can find details of his Campaign for the Book on his own blog, where you’ll find out how you can get involved in supporting this fantastic cause. Lynn Price is Editorial Director of a multiple award winning independent Publisher, Behler Publications. The Ustream Chatroom (8pm GMT) was suitably cobwebbed and bat infested. Join us next week after the clear-up.
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In The Telegraph, Martin Beckford and Urmee Khan…
The prominent atheist is stepping down from his post at Oxford University to write a book aimed at youngsters in which he will warn them against believing in “anti-scientific” fairytales.
Prof Dawkins said: “The book I write next year will be a children’s book on how to think about the world, science thinking contrasted with mythical thinking.
“I haven’t read Harry Potter, I have read Pullman who is the other leading children’s author that one might mention and I love his books. I don’t know what to think about magic and fairy tales.”
Prof Dawkins said he wanted to look at the effects of “bringing children up to believe in spells and wizards”.
“I think it is anti-scientific – whether that has a pernicious effect, I don’t know,” he told More4 News.
“I think looking back to my own childhood, the fact that so many of the stories I read allowed the possibility of frogs turning into princes, whether that has a sort of insidious affect on rationality, I’m not sure. Perhaps it’s something for research.”
But Prof Dawkins, the bestselling author of The God Delusion who this week agreed to fund a series of atheist adverts on London buses, added that his new book will also set out to demolish the “Judeo-Christian myth”.
He went on: “I plan to look at mythical accounts of various things and also the scientific account of the same thing. And the mythical account that I look at will be several different myths, of which the Judeo-Christian one will just be one of many.
“And the scientific one will be substantiated, but appeal to children to think for themselves; to look at the evidence. Always look at the evidence.”
“Are they all related?” a woman asks as she watches three puppies romp around Eastwood Park, a little slice of doggy heaven in Mill Valley, California. One of the pups, Mira, is notably larger than the other two, Chingu and Sarang, but they all share similar markings: white snouts and chests, darker fur on their backs and crowns.
“They’re clones,” Lou Hawthorne replies. The woman smiles as if Hawthorne’s joking, but he’s telling the truth; all three puppies were created at a commercial animal laboratory in Korea using tissue collected in the late 1990s from Missy, a beloved mixed breed that belonged to Hawthorne’s mother and died in 2002. Part collie, part husky, part who-knowswhat, these rambunctious mutts are the most expensive pets on the planet, the end result of a 10-year project that has cost approximately $25 million. In May 2008, Hawthorne announced that his biotech firm, BioArts International, plans to offer five pet owners a chance to genetically Xerox their canine companions. Aspiring clone owners would participate in a series of online auctions, and the bidding would start at $100,000.
In Scientific American, Gary Stix…
The cyberpunk science fiction that emerged in the 1980s routinely paraded “neural implants” for hooking a computing device directly to the brain: “I had hundreds of megabytes stashed in my head,” proclaimed the protagonist of “Johnny Mnemonic,” a William Gibson story that later became a wholly forgettable movie starring Keanu Reeves.
The genius of the then emergent genre (back in the days when a megabyte could still wow) was its juxtaposition of low-life retro culture with technology that seemed only barely beyond the capabilities of the deftest biomedical engineer. Although the implants could not have been replicated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or the California Institute of Technology, the best cyberpunk authors gave the impression that these inventions might yet materialize one day, perhaps even in the reader’s own lifetime.
In the past 10 years, however, more realistic approximations of technologies originally evoked in the cyberpunk literature have made their appearance. A person with electrodes implanted inside his brain has used neural signals alone to control a prosthetic arm, a prelude to allowing a human to bypass limbs immobilized by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or stroke. Researchers are also investigating how to send electrical messages in the other direction as well, providing feedback that enables a primate to actually sense what a robotic arm is touching.
But how far can we go in fashioning replacement parts for the brain and the rest of the nervous system? Besides controlling a computer cursor or robot arm, will the technology somehow actually enable the brain’s roughly 100 billion neurons to function as a clandestine repository for pilfered industrial espionage data or another plot element borrowed from Gibson?
For those who seek out movies with brains — and by that, I mean literal gray matter, not intelligence — chew on Glenn Kay’s ZOMBIE MOVIES: THE ULTIMATE GUIDE. It’s what’s for dinner!
As someone who very much misses the genre-themed VIDEOHOUND guide books from a decade ago, Kay’s book goes a long way toward filling that void, providing the single most comprehensive book on undead flicks I’ve ever run across. It’s knowledgeable enough to get by with its ULTIMATE subtitle, yet not so fanboyish that it will put off more casual readers.
Starting with 1932’s Bela Lugosi vehicle WHITE ZOMBIE, the book features chronological discussions of more than 300 films, organized in decade-long chapters. The real classics of the genre — George Romero’s DAWN OF THE DEAD, for instance — get more pages than the usual, while heavily obscure efforts may merit a capsule review. Only the most hard-to-find are mentioned no more beyond having their title listed.
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