If you're in Austin Monday night for SXSW or otherwise, check out the Plutopia bash at Scholz Garten, 1607 San Jacinto. This most interesting of SXSW evening events is a collaborative gathering of two camps that normally don't pitch tents on the same terrain - green/sustainability advocates and techies.

Plutopia is the name of a collective including futurist, artists, technologists, and green activists that are aligned in their understanding that a sustainability economy is emerging and inevitable, and sustainability will be mediated by technology. If we're to opt out of business-as-usual and rething community organization, building, food production, etc., we'll be experimenting and finding alternatives. The Plutopia event at SXSW (where "Plutopia" was a mashup of "pluralist utopias") is an explosion of art and entertainment that has, as subtext, a creative consideration of possibilities. Bill McKibben will talk about economy, ecology, and community - the subjects of his book, Deep Economy - and The Heather Gold Show is a conversation about "opting out." The live premiere of producer Maggie Duval's Lance Van de Kamp Show is happeniing, too, featuring His Excellency Nikita Chrusov of Soviet Unterzoegersdorf. There'll be installations by Austin Green Art and The Robot Group. We'll also have performances by pioneer electronic composer Carl Stone, David Demaris, London's Intimate Stranger. And there's more (check out the site). Not sure how we filled the vessel quite so full...

Brain researcher Jill Bolte Taylor addresses the TED conference (video below) with the story of her own stroke, which she studied as it was happening. Because the stroke suppressed the operations of the left hemisphere of her brain, she had an expansive, relatively unfiltered experience of the right hemisphere. She had a kind of amplified meditation experience and gained new insight into the brain's role as a conduit between the individual consciousness and everything/everybody else. Powerful stuff. (Thanks to Brian Massey for the pointer.)

Obviously Arthur C. Clarke was a huge influence on anyone who paid real attention to science fiction over the last few decades. I read Clarke for years, but (like many) I was more influenced by Stanley Kubrick's more poetic interpretation of Clarke's 2001. I read about the film as it was in production and made a commitment to see the full-blown Cinerama version when it was released. My friend Pinky Arnold and I hit the road that summer, thinking we would drive to San Francisco for the summer of love, but were waylaid by beer-guzzling pals in Flagstaff, where we had many adventures before returning to Texas, our California dream unfulfilled. One thing we did accomplish, though, was a Sunday drive to Scottsdale, Arizona with our late friend Bill Morton. We saw 2001 at the Cinerama theatre there. In the year 2001, I wrote a remembrance of that trip for ReWired, called "2001 Blues." I just re-read it and made a few corrections. It's not well written - until recently, my approach to writing was casual and undisciplined. It's slightly interesting, at least, as a consideration of 2001's plot and characters. I don't believe an intelligent machine like the Hal 9000 was ever possible, though Clarke was famous for the accuracy of some of his speculations about the future. Not much that Clarke predicted in 2001 came to pass... we still haven't found evidence of advanced extraterrestrial intelligence, and we haven't build machines that truly think and are aware, and we haven't flown to Jupiter, mined the moon, or launched commercial space ventures, though we're close to the latter.

Clarke has a final book in press, co-authored with Frederik Pohl, called The Last Theorem. There's also a film in development of his novel Rendezvous with Rama.