Science

** No Cake, Still Interesting ** I remember my birthday upon turning felicitous 9, and I can tell you it was a big deal. Protector spends much of its time orbiting a similar milestone, with less of a payoff. The book is almost a day-in-the-life entry: one Atevi, a few human youngsters, conversations, errands, and politics branching into more obscure and ancient obligations. Cherryh’s Atevi plots and manchi break down fractally into endless subplots of protocol and maneuver. That’s what we need to support the thousands of pages of prose! ...

A good book, except I don’t really think about the information I consume, and I’m not sure where to carve out the time, since I’m only consuming information in circumstances where I can’t do something else. Seems like it would be very useful if I were writing a book…. maybe I should write a book?

** Space Sucks, Science is Fun ** Every science nerd dreams that someday their years of learning esoteric knowledge will pay off. So for many, the real world, void of advanced math and driven by relationships and perception, is a disappointment. Andy Weir’s niche is science-fantasy to fill this gap, a high budget MacGyver where the protagonist can ‘science the shit’ out of any situation. While Hail Mary makes no reference to the Martian, it is a continuation of the same premise. Wise-cracking science geek Ted Lasso finds himself alone in space with enough tools to try hypotheses and find creative solutions. In a separate substory, a competent bureaucracy races against the clock in order to make a last ditch effort to provide assistance from the safe confines of earth. This setup plays to Weir’s strengths: no worldbuilding, no relationships or character development, only science, plot, and wisecracks. ...

** 12th book of 2021: Sci-Factoids ** To be a nerdy American millennial is to have unprecedented privilege in asking ‘what if?’ Not only do we benefit from sci-fi’s boom in American pop-culture, but wikipedia and search engines enable curiosity about time-paradoxes or quantum theory to be answered in an instant. So despite, or perhaps because of my proclivities in such pursuits, I found Exhalation underwhelming. As written in Truth of Fact, Truth of Feeling: We are made of stories, and nothing can change that. What sets a story apart from a wikipedia article is the setting and the characters, which allow synthesizing human emotion with interesting idea. This is Chiang’s achilles heel: settings were often flat and characters felt recycled from story to story. ...

Watch cosmos instead. Or take even a little bit of time to read a full book on the subject.

** 81st, 82nd books of 2020: Work = Success** China does well with standard education. In the 2018 PISA results, China Singapore, Macao, and Hong Kong scored 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th respectively. (Link (https://www.oecd.org/pisa/PISA-results_ENGLISH.png)) In the US, Asian Americans are sufficiently overrepresented in academic pursuits such that it has become a meme in American culture. One way to describe this difference is in how we get kids to do the things they don’t want to do. In Little Soldiers, Lenora Chu is unable to get her son Rainey to eat eggs. She is astonished to discover that her Chinese preschool teachers had succeeded but horrified to learn how they did it. Every time Rainey spat out the eggs, the teachers would put eggs back in, until eventually Rainy gave up and swallowed. To our American author this was terrible: force-feeding akin to what would be found in Guantanamo. To a Chinese preschool teacher, it was standard discipline - eggs are a good source of protein and Rainy needed protein to focus during the day. ...

43rd book of 2020. This is how the world ends. The Precipice is about ways in which humanity could perish. According to Ord, the chances that humanity could cease to exist within the next century are 1/6. Total Risk: 1/6 Unaligned artificial intelligence: 1/10. Engineered pandemics: 1/30. Unforeseen anthropogenic risks: 1/30. Other Anthropogenic risks: 1/50. All natural risks combined: 1/10,000 (asteroids, volcanoes, stellar explosion etc.) Ord makes a pretty level headed argument about the current path of humanity being at more risk over the next century of extinction than it has ever been. Here, trifling things such as war, or even nuclear war don’t count. Ord is looking for things that permanently damage civilization’s ability to exist. Many of these risks are actually correlated with a potential future great power conflict, in the same way that humans developed nuclear and chemical weapons out of the great wars of the 20th century. ...

3rd book of 2020. Sometimes I wonder if every topic is interesting when the right level of curiosity is brought to bear. Bernd Heinrich makes Ravens, and just about anything related to the forests of Maine interesting. In fact, Berndt could have written a book about paint drying and I would still like it. The book is structured with narrative, followed by info from published academic studies, and more general implications about cognition and intelligence at the end. ...

Hyperion was great, but only half the story. This book changes the narrative structure to a first person account from M. Severn, and a third person narrative of what was happening at the time tombs. I wasn’t invested in either Severn, Gladstone, or any of the central characters in the book, and the stories I was interested in seemed to be cutoff halfway. At a little over halfway into this book, I bailed and went for the plot summary.

Came into this book with no expectations and was pleasantly surprised. A series of short stories that hang together better than cloud Atlas, with something of a foundation style overarching plot. I enjoyed bother the cantos and the main plot, just sad to find out at the end that this book doesn’t even make am attempt to reach closure.