Frankly I’m too knackered to do a proper post today so here’s a lazy list of links that pale in comparison to the useful list of links that some other, better bloggers, do.

Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot
It’s a beautifully moving passage – a kind of secular Sermon on the Mount – by Carl Sagan, and it’s been set to music and pictures in all sorts of fabulous ways on the net. God bless YouTube.

The crass:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pfwY2TNehw

The obvious:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-aX4kT_N9c&mode=related&search=

The minimalist:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p86BPM1GV8M&mode=related&search=

And the brash:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47EBLD-ISyc&mode=related&search=

Iron Man
Okay, so the second half of this trailer is your bog standard action movie malarkey – but the first bit… Is it possible they might get Iron Man right?

http://www.apple.com/trailers/paramount/ironman/

Sci-fi futures
An amusing little article but, given that somewhere between a third and a half of the planet’s population are already living in approximations of numbers eight and six, I think there are people who might argue with the title: “8 most common sci-fi futures and why they won’t happen”

http://www.cracked.com/index.php?name=News&sid=2373

o:p>

You are a plaything of the corporate media!

Proof, if any were needed, of the way in which DRM and the corporations that espouse its use do so to manipulate their positions in a way that takes no account of the position of the citizen. Universal deliberately break their music so that it can’t be played on the world’s most successful MP3 player…
http://slashdot.org/articles/07/09/17/1927212.shtml

And finally…
Mysterious thing falls from space, strange emanations from crater, people get sick… It’s starting. It’s starting! WATCH THE SKIES! WATCH THE SKIES!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/space/article/0,,2171920,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=networkfront

Coming soon…
I might get round to telling you why John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War is an absolutely vile tract full of deeply unpalatable politics that you should avoid like the plague if it weren’t for the fact that it’s one of the most fun sf reads I’ve had in ages – I literally couldn’t put the book down, read it in one day and had an absolute blast. Then went and ordered the sequels. And all the time I was giving myself a stern telling off for indulging in such hopelessly reactionary bollocks.