Links

Really Useful Organisations

• Amnesty International / Amnesty International Australia. If you think “human rights” is an abstract and ethereal topic, imagine the following scenario. You've just served a lengthy prison sentence for doing nothing more than peacefully expressing your political views. While in prison, you were subjected to such severe ill-treatment that your health has been permanently damaged. When you appeal to the authorities for compensation, you are immediately sentenced to another ten years on a charge of “incitement to subvert state power”, and your sister, who helped you mount the appeal, is sentenced to three years in a labour camp. This is a real case, one of Amnesty's February/March 2002 Worldwide Appeals. Amnesty International exposes this kind of grotesque injustice, puts pressure on the perpetrators, and works to strengthen the local and international laws and institutions that defend the basic rights that everyone on the planet ought to be able to take for granted.
• Médecins Sans Frontières / MSF Australia is active around the world, battling outbreaks of disease in refugee camps and war zones, as well as tackling longer-term problems such as the drug-resistant tuberculosis sweeping the former Soviet republics, and malaria, sleeping sickness, and HIV in Africa.
• The Oxfam federation (which includes Community Aid Abroad in Australia), is involved in both emergency responses to famines and natural disasters, and vital development projects which improve basic infrastructure such as water supplies and sanitation, and assist communities to become more resilient and self-sufficient.

Real Science

• John Baez is a mathematical physicist working in quantum gravity and category theory. His posts on the newsgroup “sci.physics.research” under the title “This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics” contain gleanings from journal articles, books and conferences, along with accounts of his own work, and tutorials on related subjects. These posts (and much more) can be found on his web site, with links that take you straight to copies on preprint servers of the papers under discussion.
• Erik Winfree and his colleagues are doing amazing things with DNA, working towards the goal of creating sets of molecular Wang tiles that could act as universal computers. Several of his papers can be downloaded from this site, but you will need some means of viewing or printing PostScript files. (If like me you don't have access to a PostScript printer, take a look at GhostScript.) For a recent report in print, see E Winfree, F Liu, L A Wenzler & N C Seeman, “Design and self-assembly of two-dimensional DNA crystals”, Nature 394, p539 (August 6, 1998).
• Dan Piponi is a mathematician and computer programmer who's currently working in movie special effects. He's devised a very nice method of visualising differential forms, which is complementary to the usual way, and in many respects much more natural and powerful.
• Max Tegmark has written a wonderful paper on “The Ultimate Ensemble Theory”, in which he suggests that there really is no difference between a mathematical structure and its physical realisation. All mathematical structures exist, and the only thing that brings our particular universe “to life” is the fact that its structure is rich enough to contain observers. This idea has a long history in various forms, but Tegmark's paper is one of the most persuasive treatments I've seen. He's also written another terrific paper, “Importance of quantum decoherence in brain processes”, which shows how unlikely it is that quantum effects play any special role in the brain. (Thanks to Dave Branning for showing me this.)
• David Deutsch is one of the pioneers of quantum computing, and a champion of Everett's “Many Worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics. In “Information Flow in Entangled Quantum Systems”, Deutsch and co-author Patrick Hayden use the Heisenberg picture to show that quantum information can always be localised, and that the key to understanding entangled systems is information located in part of the system that is accessible only via observations on the whole.
• Marvin Minsky is a writer, inventor, teacher and researcher most famous for his ideas on human and artificial intelligence. Draft chapters of his new book, The Emotion Machine, can be read on his web site.

Science Fiction

• Interzone is the major SF magazine in the UK, and one of the best in the English-speaking world. I owe my career to Interzone, so I'm biased, but many other people, from Bruce Sterling to Gardner Dozois, have expressed a high opinion of IZ, so if you've never seen an issue you should give them a try.
• Eidolon is a small SF magazine based in Perth, Western Australia. They have a very stylish web site, with almost every issue they've published now available on-line.
• The Asimov's Science Fiction web site carries excerpts from upcoming stories, samples of the magazine's non-fiction columns, subscriber information, and manuscript guidelines.
• Infinity Plus is a site packed with professional fiction and interviews, elegantly presented and thoughtfully structured, right down to the clear annotation for every link.
• Locus Online is an SF news-and-reviews webzine. It's closely affiliated with the print magazine Locus, but has grown into a major publication and online resource in its own right.
• Quarante-Deux is the web site to explore if you're interested in French SF. And even a boring monolingual Anglophone like me can attest that every page is beautifully designed, and the whole site is easy to navigate.
• Intercom is an impressive Italian SF site, with information, interviews and illustrated fiction, and great graphics throughout.
• Catalogo SF, Fantasy e Horror is a comprehensive and well-organised catalogue of Italian publications in these genres.
• El archivo de Nessus is a great Spanish SF site, an archive of reviews and articles maintained by Pedro Jorge Romero, one of the editors of the famous print magazine BEM.
• Gigamesh is a Spanish SF magazine, with an associated book imprint. They've published translations of several of my stories, as well as the Spanish editions of Quarantine and Distress.
• Alternative Factor is a very stylish and comprehensive Greek SF site, packed with information on authors, books, magazines and cinema.

Computer/Electronic Art

• Mark Landau's Surrealism Test Center is an eye-popping collection of art by Landau himself, plus “meta-galleries” leading into other electronic art sites.

Music

• They Might Be Giants. Almost everybody's heard “Birdhouse in Your Soul”, but most TMBG songs are an order of magnitude more gloriously strange. Not everything they do works for me, but at their best they create a world melted by imagination, as fresh and unsettling as a vivid childhood dream. Meet Chess Piece Face and the cow beneath the sea, then perish in the pencil rain.