May 2008

Welcome.

I have seen the future. Its name is LOLcode. For those of you too lazy to click on the link, allow me to give you a brief rundown. LOLcode is a programming language derived from LOLspeak. Specifically the LOLcats LOLspeak. You might remember the punchline from n00bs, a story in the February issue—that was LOLcat LOLspeak.

Why is this important? Why is this the future? Well, someone has taken programming language and internet slang and combined them. This means that you can look at LOLcode, with almost no programming ability and understand what is happening. It's like division or multiplication. Everyone knows how to do it, and once you learn, it's not likely you'll forget. You learn LOLspeak, and someone (a 10-year-old you meet online) explains the basics of variables and loops, except in a language as easy as 12 times 12.

The Islander
by Erik Schumacher

Imagine walking down the street, chatting to your friends, and you get a great idea for a little code. "Hang on, guys,” and you pull out your phone / mp3 player / camera / wristtop / water bottle / mini-nuclear reactor and record your voice speaking out 10 or 12 lines of code that you can easily speak because it's modeled after real (somewhat) naturally-developed language, not a harsh, rigid language developed by mathematical logicians and people obsessed with integrated circuits. See, even explaining this is more complex than learning it. Just like multiplication.

It gives me shivers just thinking about it.

Onto the stories! This quarter we have some amazing stories. We have stories by R. J. Astruc, Christopher Lockhart, Edward Cowan, Benjamin Chambers, Ray Tabler, Daniel P. Swenson, K. P. Graham and Sam J. Miller. Time travelers, monkeys, robots, the buzz, poker, artificial intelligence, machetes and Hewlett-Packards. There are also reviews of Bruce Boston's new novel The Guardener's Tale, Tamara Wilhite's new novel Sirat, and the new childrens' novel by Lucy & Stephen Hawking, George's Secret Key to the Universe, as well as fantastic issue art by Erik Schumacher.

All that's left is for you to enjoy.

Adicus Ryan Garton
editor Cosmic

P.S. You should probably go see Iron Man. It's fun.

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