In the Clouds of the multiverse, the legions assmble.

One of my favorite reads last year was Charles Stross's Accelarando, a book that started on the streets of Amsterdam when a bunch of uploaded lobster-brains called Manfred Macx's cellphone and asked him to launch them into space, far away from the increasingly chaotic human infoflux (Noosphere) which was too primate-dependent for their strange brains to navigate. At the other end of the book, twenty years later, Macx's grandson Sirhan sits in the park of a city he grew on the surface of Saturn, looking down at the acrimonious clouds below. In my imagination, the photo above (click to zoom) contains a tiny blot which, when magnified, resolves into a Mandelbrot-shaped colony of floating lilypads. This post is both a recommendation of that book (buy it here), and a hasty recommendation for you to check out this spectacular gallery of Cassini's photos from her four-year survey of Saturn's gravity well. Cassini will continue to monitor the Saturn system for another two solar cycles.

Future Today Brefing: Cassini's greatest hits
(via The Big Picture)