The Future And You -- May 30, 2012

Stephen Euin Cobb is today's featured speaker.

Main Topic: A detailed description of a new form of Internet spam so cleverly disguised that you have probably read lots of it without even noticing. It's called Spintax (a contraction of the words spin and syntax).

Secondary Topics: A sampling of Forecasts for the next 25 years from the World Future Society; Nine Ways to Bias Open-Source Artificial General Intelligence Toward Friendliness (a new peer-review article by Ben Goertzel and Joel Pitt of Novamente); how to use Speakeasy Speedtest (a free website) to make sure you are getting all the Internet speed for which you are paying; the most popular free downloads at C/Net.com; a mention that your host recently switched from DSL (at 6.0 mbps) to cable modem (at 20.0 mbps).

Hosted by Stephen Euin Cobb, this is the May 30, 2012 episode of The Future And You. [Running time: 34 minutes]

Stephen Euin Cobb is an author, futurist, magazine writer and host of the award-winning podcast The Future And You. A contributing editor for Space and Time Magazine; he is also a regular contributor for Robot, H+, Grim Couture and Port Iris magazines; and he spent three years as a columnist and contributing editor for Jim Baen's Universe Magazine. He is an artist, essayist, game designer, transhumanist, and is on the Advisory Board of The Lifeboat Foundation. His novels include Bones Burnt Black, Plague at Redhook and Skinbrain.

Note: A listener named Rainer sent links to three lectures which are videos on YouTube. I watched the first one: a one hour lecture about the paleolithic diet by a medical biochemist. It was excellent: full of well-researched science. All three videos make a case for the paleolithic diet. Here are the second and third videos.

Announcement: For a limited time, one of my novels is on sale. The Kindle edition of Skinbrain (Cerebrodermus Fantastica), my most recent and most futuristic novel, has been reduced to just $2.99. That's right, under three bucks for what I consider my best novel.

Skinbrain description from Amazon.com: On an earth-like planet far from Earth the remains of a long dead alien civilization have been found, but this news has not reached the authorities—nor will it. Fourteen murderers—a mixed bag of human and alien criminals—have seen to that by killing the team of forty scientists who discovered the remains. These professional criminals combine their talents to search through the rubble for a hypothetical alien super-weapon. One under-age street-tough thinks she's got what it takes to rub shoulders and bump heads with the worst of them but soon realizes she’s in way over her head. Worse, as conflicts struggle to tear it apart, she learns just how unstable a team of criminals can be. Call it anything you like: treachery, betrayal, or just reducing the number with whom one must share the final spoils. Here, as in all of life, cowards and the dead reap nothing.

If you like science fiction, especially science fiction which involves strange alien worlds, strange alien species, strange alien cultures, and strange alien criminals. Check it out. If you enjoy reading Skinbrain a hundredth as much as I enjoyed writing it, you are in for wonderful experience.