People who have read my novel The Cunning Blood have giggled a little about my future history, in which Canada rules the world (or what's left of the world) by the year 2150, with the United States reduced to a province ruled by the Canadian-dominated world government. Part of the sequel I have in the cooker right now (The Molten Flesh) sees American insurgents going up against their Canadian masters. What I didn't know is that the US had a plan in place for invading Canada at least as long ago as 1930. Put down those guns, eh?
Speaking of which, Amazon has been quoting delivery times of 4-6 weeks for the novel since its publication, but I discovered today that this has been reduced to 5-10 days. (Yeehah!) This means that Amazon has (finally!) aligned its database with reality. When a distributor has stock on hand, Amazon doesn't require 4-6 weeks to fulfill an order. It's also interesting that The Cunning Blood was into five digits on the Big Amazon Stack Rank yersterday, up from 400,000 or so a couple of days ago. This means that somebody is buying the damned thing!
In 1992, I wrote up my concept of the "jiminy" lapel computer (and its optical P2P network) in PC Techniques, though I was working out the concept as early as 1983. Now a group is trying to create a pervasive mobile, peer-to-peer network that sounds a lot like what I envisioned in 1992, albeit more specifically for trading music automatically. The glitch here is that music tracks do not have a unique, standard identification number (as books do) but it'll be interesting to see if anybody really uses this, and what other uses (beyond trading music tracks) will evolve for it.
A week or two ago, Slashdot aggregated a wonderful article about things that science doesn't currently understand. (Alas, they call it "Things That Do Not Make Sense," which isn't quite the same thing and a really stupid title.) Hard SF is "the literature of the gaps," and here's a catalog of gaps for SF writers like me to play with. For some reason I particularly like the notion of tetraneutrons, which are basically alpha particles in which all four nucleons are neutrons. Gotta figure out how to work them in somewhere.