Statik

ohh ooh!  i forgot one.

this one was a really good read and it's a classic to boot!

Metrophage by Richard Kadrey

think totalitarian health dept., drug dealers that have a pencahnt for snake venom, underground scientists, and of course various implant goodies.  good involving plot, great character development and interactions.  best of yet, you can grab it online for free!

http://www.speed.demon.co.uk/kadrey/

memento mori by sheriann lewitt

interface by stephen bury

sort of a gratuatous plug, but the subject is apropriated for it.

my website, Cyberpunk: Project Jericho houses a collection of freelance/amateur cyberpunk writing.  if anyone wants to look, the link is in my sig.  If anyone wants to contribute, my email address is listed on the site.

Madison, Wisconsin.  The 'silicon prarie' as it has been called (however, to my knowledge no Bond villan has had plans for here...yet)

Of couse all that silicon prarie is Bull####, but we do have pretty sweet grips on biotech.

I used to be czero for a little while way back when i was 15.

Around 19 i changed to Gent1eman L0ser, but about a year ago I got sick of people asking me why i used that name, so i changed to Statik, generic, somewhat common, but works good for me.

Braid Media Arts, they did the graphics for the older paperbacks of neuromancer and count zero.  also did the cover graphic to the neuromancer computer game.  they appear to have had something to do with the "hack your own brain" sequence in johnny mnemonic as well.

my screensaver is just a slideshow of their art, my computer is generally themed to it.

ooh ooh ooh!

you know that link at the beginning of this thread to the graphic novel?  that is the scanned version of MY copy!

i scanned it years ago for my own purposes, but gave it (and some other tidbits) to that wonderful website!

the artwork was pretty damn good i thought, molly looked about how i imagined her.  she always seemed kind of manish in my mind when reading it, it's just that i had always envisioned her eyes just being silver eyes, not glasses plated over them.  even though the book didn't describe them that way, that was always how i saw them, so the GN kinda screwed me over there.

everyone else essentially looked how i expected them too.  armatage was cheesy as hell, but it works since his character is so fake and fabricated.  i just wish i got to see 3Jane

read his book white light.

while it is not cyberpunk, it is still an interesting read.

it really reminds you that he is a math professor...

that trilogy is often refered to as 'the bridge trilogy'

and frankly, i liked the trilogy.  it wasn't as crazy as the first one, but it shows a very refined look at today's society thru the metaphor of the near future.

yes and no.  heackels drawings (this is old science, don't remember the date, but a long time ago) were very stylised and had some very convinient fudges.  the drawings are not accurate.  and his fully theory (ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny) is decided to be false.  however, looking at acctual photographs of animals in fetal stages still shows a remarkable conservation of form, not so much as in the original drawings, but still enough to lend support.

as for the gills.  that really isn't disproven.  my understanding of the argument saying that the gills (in no-gilled vertabrates) are non functional.  this is generally not disputed.  what evolutionists are saying is not "look, they have functioning gills!", but "look, here is an evolutionary artifact the hints back to an earlier form!".  the anti-gill slit argument is common amoung creationists, but is really a misunderstanding of the argument.

yeah.  DNA is a self replicating polymer.  as for sources and the like, i am afraid that i don't have those links and books handy.  im sure if you poke around a little bit on google you might turn something up.

we may be talking about different things.  what i was refering to used dental evidence for the most part, but come to think of it included feet too.  admittingly i only read a summary of it, as it is known to be a long, boring, dry book.  and i could care less about horse evolution

as for the toed thing, that isn't so strange.  every once and awhile we get two, three and four toed horses in modern day.  old genes have a tendancy to pop back on every once and awhile.  like humans that are born with tails.

i am a little unclear of what you are refering to here.

i can tell you that rock strata, well lots of things can screw that up.  i am not very well versed in geology, but there are cases of upsidown trees running through many strata.  from my understanding, using rock strata to determine age is sometimes very haphazard.  when looking back through the ages, it's like putting a puzzle together with 1/4 of the peices.

i like many other people was brought up christian, and believed the 6 days story of the origin of life.  in time, that, as well as other things in my christian teaching, started to seem very storylike and unplausable.  from an early age i was drawn to science because it required there to be at least some hard evidence that could be observed.  

as i learned about biology (my favorite part of science) outside of the classroom (i started at a relatively early age) i learned of evolution.  saw that, in a simplfied timefram, it can be observed directly (simple experiment.  take a single bacteria and put it on a dish.  it will grow into many many bacteria.  now add antibiotic to that dish, some will die, and some will thrive.  if we do not allow for mutation (the driving force of evolution) all the bacteria should be identical and thus all would die or all would survive.  a usefull mutation occured, the resulting bacteria has advanced a tiny bit.  now extrapilate the possibility of chage and adaptation for millions of years rather than a day or two.)  despite that, science explains many things about the way life on this planet works, most of the claims in the christian doctarine are false (the earth, despite the many references in the bible to the contrary, is not flat.  unless all the records of plane travel, satalites, and space travel is a conspiracy to make us think that...)

so i was presented with two different views of our world.  one that was ruled by forces unseen, and one that can be oberved.  i decided which to believe.

it is the fact that i and others personally could independantly  verify the claims of what i have learned in my science institutions that i can safely say that i am not brainwashed by it.

i mean no disrespect to your or anyone else's chosen religon, this is all my personal spin on things.  i think that evolution and christianity can coexist perfectly well.  the bible seems to me to be largely a metaphorical text.  if a book were to survive the test of ages with a shread of it's meaning intact, it would have to be.  think about explaining evolution to someone 2000 years ago, they wouldn't get it.  so you simplify it.  to say that creation events didn't occur exactly like it says in the bible, is not to say that the whole bible is trash.  there is nothing in the theory of evolution that says that god could not be part of that equation of probablity that made the life and the conditions around it the way they are.  evolution simply says that all life has common ancestory, and rests on the precept that earth is a very old planet (another concept that might be difficult to be accepted 2000 years ago.)  many biologists can hold their faith in one hand, and evolution in the other.

i recently read a new scientist article that talked about the how some nasa sceintists were working on cloning meat from animals.  they took a sample of goldfish meat, and fetal bovine syrum managed to make it grow bigger.  the meat appeared to be good for consumption (they couldn't acctually feed it to anyone yet, pending FDA approval for such tests).

as it is now, it uses bovine syrum, which is extracted from fetal cows.  so the process is still pretty damn grizzly, and expensive, however, they have made progress using a mushroom-derived syrum.

here we are, right on the cusp of a classic cyberpunk stock element.  i think it's pretty exciting.

this movie fell flat for me.  perhaps it is because it is the 4th movie in the last few years that deals with realizing that reality is not real.  the concept has been done to death, i don't want it anymore.

worse yet, the story line doesn't go anywhere, and as stated in an earlier post, "just as it was getting good, it ended"

the only thing is the fx.  the special effects were top notch.  the movie itself, from a technical aspect, is great.  great camera work, choice of film type, integration of effects, and color choice.  unfortunately, this movie was major style over substance...

Strange Days has always been my favorite of the cyberpunk movies.  However, I thought it had more in common with Fragments of a Hologram rose than with JM.  However, the character anaogies between JM and SD were something that I never noticed, but now see as blairingly obious.

Strange Days was good because you acctually felt pitty for Lenny, the way he kept replaying memories is like watching a wounded animal pick at their wounds.  Mace said sums up the movie with one line, "Memories are meant to fade, they were designed that way for a reason."   Very well done character development.

Okay.  I'm new in this forum so be easy on me.

I thought I would take a stab at this because I am a biology student, so this issue is one of my pets.

Adressing first the probability of evolution:  Many people claim that the probability of life forming on earth is something on the order of 1 to upwards of 4million.  Pretty cruddy odds.  The age old problem with this statistic is that it makes the assumption that the earth went from lifeless, to modern bacteria in one big jump.  In fact, there would very likely have been intermediary forms of life.  Proto to ProtoProtoBacteria.  Simple replicating lipids and polymers have occured (under controled conditions mind you) quite quickly.  Not to mention that the process is not random, it is governed by the laws of chemistry and physics (and complex organic compouds form all the time)

In addition to that, people have a direct misunderstanding of statistics.  They assume that evolution happens one try after another in a serial fashion.  However, the earth's oceans are huge, and millions of 'tries' can happen at once.  This drasticly increases probablities.

Lastly, as stated by others, just because something is improbable doesn't make it impossible.  Play a game of poker.  The probability of and 5 card combination is nearly 1 to 4million (52*51*50*49*48).  One does not receive their hand, study the probability, and then declare that the hand was never delt due to it's improbability.

Transitional Fossils:  Not sure if this one was ever brought up, but inevitably someone will make the claim that there are not fossils showing a species in transition to another.  The first thing to consider is how rare fossilisation is.  The animal must remain undecayed for a very long time.  A great example to make here is to take a walk in a small woods and count the number of dead animals you see.  At least a hundred died in the last year, but you will be lucky to see one.  For many small animals, dead animal bones (about the only thing that properly fossilizes) are a primary source of calcium (mice esspecially).  Then there is the rarity of us ever finding a fossil, which is low because we have covered the earth with habitat and infrastructure.  Plus, excavations cost alot of money.

So despite all this against us finding fossils in transition, the fact is that we have.  There is alot of fossils showing jaw formation between agnathens, placoderms, acanthodia, all the way up to sarcophterigii (a direct fish predicessor to land animals.)  Or the formation of metapetrygial fins that show precursors to many limb bones.  Or the whole book covering transitional fossils of anceint horse species.  

So that argument is false, and should be curtailed.

Irreducible Design: This argument is about the only thing new brought to the table by the Intellegent Design (which really is creationism dressed up like real science) people.  It states that certain things in life could not have come to be in a serial pattern because if one of the parts were not there, the mechinism would not occur.  Wings being a common example.  Three problems with this.

First off, it assumes that evolution only works in a direct order.  Take for example, Gene A processes a compound in a bacteria.  A mutation in another gene (or a mutation in a copy of gene A), Called Gene B, works with Gene A to boost efficiency.  This configuration proliferates.  Then a mutation occurs in A that streamlines it for working with Gene B.  Now both genes are required for processing the compound.  Irreducable complexity occuring by mutation.  Easy as pie.

Secondly, sometimes a body part will change roles.  In the wing example, they say that any of the earlier precursors to wings would be useless for flight and thus wouldn't occur.  However, wings are thought to not  have always been for flight, but for insulation and utilization of solar heat.  In that case, they could have evolved up until a point where the new function (flight) started to take form.

Lastly, mutations can cause cascade effects.  Sometimes one gene can effect the course of tissue interactions in embryonic development.  This is thought to be how snakes lost their limbs (in the evolutionary sense, snakes derived from tetrapod reptiles).  A single mutation could occure that would prevent mesenchyme tissue from interacting with AEF limb bud tissue, and thus limblessness would occur.  That combined with that undulating motion that reptiles maintained from back in the fish days would cause streamlining for certain land environments.

They state that mutations cause a net loss or corruption of genetic material: I have heard arguments stating that bacterial antibiotic resistance occurs by a mutation in a usefull part of the Bacterial genome and that thus there is no net gain in genetic material.  This is very incorrect and missleading.  The fact is that duplicate genes is one kind of mutation.  Now if you have a copy, mutations can occur on one copy and the other can remain the same.  That is a net increase in genetic material.

There are alot of other arguments out there, but the above are some of the most common anti-evolution ones.  As for those wanting some proof of evolution, well try to use creationism to explain why human DNA contains Lower mammal, Reptilian, Amphibian, all the way down to bacterial DNA.  Evolution does a pretty good job of answering that question and many others.  Further proof for evolution (which really only states that all life on earth has common ancestry) would be the reoccuring patternes of development.  Look at embryonic development, many reoccuring patterns amoung vertabrates exist, like the presence of gill slits at one time, or the same process of endochondrial bone formation.  

The fact is that in evolution, we started with a question (from where did life on earth derive?) and got an answer (from earlier life forms changing to beat each other out in their respective environments), thats science.  Creationists start with an answer (god did it.) and look for questions (often with very missleading errors) to support their answer (like the asking why there are no transitional fossils, when in fact there are).  The crux is that something scientific by nature must have some way of being disprooved (evolution could easily be disproved if we found a very different molecule than DNA for some animals than for others), but god and his actions on earth always have that convienient "he works in mysterious ways" cop out, there is no way to disprove god because god can (in theory) do anything to 'hide' himeself, that is not science.

I have always felt strongly on this subject because of the fact that 80% of americans choose creationism over evolution, even if there is no evidence for creationism and moutains of evidence for evolution.  It contributes to the general ignorance of the  american public, it just drags us down.  We are quite truely a nation of sheepeople, blindly following the blind.  However, it doesn't have to be that way.  Look around, look for solid evidence to back what you believe, not just some other person's opinion that came from another person and so on and so on.  Science can be observed, faith can not.