This is the most horrifying moment in Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan's zombie/vampire novel The Strain:

...the FAA had cleared a fifteen-minute window of downtime for airports within the range of the occultation [solar eclipse], out of concern for the vision of the pilots, who couldn't very well wear filtered glasses during takeoff or landing ( Read more... )

If you have ever needed an example of why our current system of copyrights needs radical improvement, this is it:

A Stanford University professor on Monday sued James Joyce's estate for refusing to give her permission to use copyrighted material about the "Ulysses" author and his daughter on her Web site ( Read more... )

Samuel R. Delany's The Start Pit is one of my favourite short stories by my all-time favourite author. So it's a real treat to come across this recording of The Star Pit radio play aired in November 1967 over New York's WBAI-FM station. Much gratitude to pseudopodium.org for proving the MP3 conversions and to Boing Boing for providing this link ( Read more... )

Going to the movies is not what it used to be. Security at the studio-owned theatres is heavy, it's not a trip to be taken lightly. But if you want to see the film everyone is talking about without waiting a year for the home release, you have little choice. When you enter the lobby the first thing you see are long ranks of tiny, thumbprint ( Read more... )

A classic little SF trick courtesy of crisper.