Yes, I always enjoyed the first book or two of Arthur C Clarke. After that he generally had shot his wad / overstayed his welcome.
2001 is really a visual opera so to speak, but it makes very little sense without the book/("programme"?). I felt like this was written after the movie.
2010 felt like much more of a read that was written before the movie with a deliberate plot.
Look at the very northern part of the sun. At the beginning, it's just a normal surface, but what looks like a giant cyclone forms over it about halfway through
Yes, the problem is
that HNers consider themselves intellectually superior to Redditors who tend to be the ones that upvote sensationalist articles. Apparently they don’t understand the heavy overlap between their collective behavior.
Poor quality of top posts in the front page, considering HNs etiquette about content strictly pertaining to anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity when it’s clearly not the case.
Also the cognitive dissonance of people here when their favorite platform gets compared to admittedly lower quality ones (Reddit). What should one expect however when the front page is for the most part infested with meaningless platitudes about trends that end up being short-lived but get hyped as life-altering innovations?
And I haven’t even touched upon the subject of the course of debates on the site (bold assumptions by commenters significantly lacking background but still considering themselves authority)…
And just yesterday we were blaming Google for passing on false information about astronomy. GIGO.
Edit: Sorry; tried to edit this before the post went live but the site crashed for me for several minutes. I meant to specify that we were blaming their language model. There's certainly plenty of an argument to be made that Google is partly responsible for the current state of SEO and all that garbage going in.
If you like it, you might enjoy a book called Seveneves. The first sentence involves the moon blowing up, and the rest of the book is about the consequences of that. Quite good, imo.
I really enjoyed the first "part" of Seveneves. I felt the second part went a bit off the rails and was almost _too_ out there for me (at least as it compared to the first part. Love Neil Stephenson though (Cryptonomicon was amazing and Diamond Age / Snow Crash hold a special place in my heart).
I’ve heard this sentiment a lot from people who’ve read it.
I think he wrote himself into a tight spot though, and I’m happy with the result. Part of me thinks the second act could’ve been broken down into maybe like 0-1000, 1000-5000, and then the final act could’ve been essentially as it was, stripped down a bit. It felt to me like he crammed a little too much worldbuilding into it and couldn’t draw on the resourcefulness and resilience of humanity that dominates the first act. But it makes sense in context, because they’re not in such dire straits in the second half, and are approaching the whole issue from complex standpoints of religion and meaning and societal archetypes.
I surely couldn’t have done better, I know that much.
I thought both books were entirely too generous in their depictions of humanity's ability to coordinate for enormous, earth-saving efforts. I have a feeling that a real extinction level crisis would be much more like Don't Look Up or Greenland(extra optimistic ending scenes not included) than we'd care to admit. Bureaucratic incompetency and political infighting leading to a tragic and preventable end in both cases presented in the books.
I think this happens a lot to Stephenson. He's great at creating worlds, and that's the genius of his writing. Then what happens in those worlds is sometimes underwhelming.
The answer to the (paraphrased) question "how long do you expect that to last?" is so subtly delivered and unexpected and unhyped, and beautifully sets up the rest of the first (of two) section of the book.
I had to read the small passage through a couple of times to make sure I had the right context.
Also read, and loved, and had emotional reactions to Project Hail Mary. Highly recommend.
I liked Project Hail Mary (and Artemis, and The Martian) but I thought it was a little too heavy in the programmer narrative style. I won’t spoil anything in case someone reads this comment who hasn’t read it, but a large section involving establishing a communication protocol really wore me down from the story.
The big revelation about how he got there also felt nearly translucent in how obvious it was when it was revealed.
I hope he writes a couple more books though, if I can ever get some grandkids outta my kids, Weir’s books will be in their collection for sure.
We Are Legion (We Are Bob) - Yes, the name is terrible, but the book series is actually quite good if you like hard sci-fi. It has that "written-by-an-ex-software-dev" vibe that is so popular around here.
I love the Bob series, but I'd recommend against it if you don't have a high tolerance for characters who are supposed to be extremely intelligent missing blindingly obvious solutions to problems.
The book flipped between 'missing the obvious' and 'that was way too easy and lazy writing'. It had some hard-fi, but most reviewers seem to give the author too much credit and ignore the poor plot
You get the constant impression he either didn't have an editor or had an editor with no power to force changes. Especially near the end of the third book where you can tell he's gotten tired of his Big Bad Guys and just decides to end them in half a dozen pages.
Yeah but in real life you could grab somebody and yell "Oh my god, stop moping about how scared you are of explosives and just put a goddamn steel blade on your flying murder-drones so they're not one-use-only."
Yeah but in the book he's literally having to ration his drones because he can't figure out how to kill a gorilla any way except suicidally ramming them head-on.
To be fair, he's still his old self with his old human skills only. The only thing is he's faster and can compute better. His skills may not have included military tactics but it took him pretty far!
He had a massive library to learn from. My skills don't include tactics either but he worked on this problem for months and never came up with anything better than a flying headbutt.
There are a million ways to build a drone to kill something that would not destroy the drone.
- String a wire between two drones
- Stick a spear to the front
- Have it drop acid
- Have it lift then drop the monster
- Have it lift and drop a stone on the monster
- Build in crossbow/ballistae
etc etc....
Critical Drinker made me realize a couple years ago that I'm not crazy and movies really are generally unwatchable these days, with a handful of exceptions, many of which he points out.
Maybe because it's less terrible. Some time I had a very surprising experience: I was shopping for a book and found it at bookdepository.com. It was nice experience: predictable price with no marketplace sellers or exchange rate shenanigans, shipping costs visible up front, and cheaper than Amazon. The surprise? Amazon owns it.
It is always nice to drop links to something other than the local monopolist that pops up on the top of search results. Like the original publisher, Wikipedia, or default to a search on bookshop.org
I would have linked to its wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Hail_Mary
which covers the whole book, upcoming movie, pretty well. Exciting story.
But completely unrelated to the recurring polar vortex. No sun-eating microbes, just H and He.
I always just assumed it was simply because it was a last-ditch effort.
But I just Googled it, and someone on Reddit pointed out: "Hail Mary full of Grace."
Groan... Actually makes me like the book a little less than I already did. (Edit: Which I know is against the grain here, as evidenced by the downvotes for not liking the book.)
Solar cycles are periodic 11-year changes in the Sun’s activity.
Presumably we've only been observing the sun for a few hundred years at most, and maybe less than a hundred and fifty with any level of precise accuracy and scientific rigour. That's maybe 30 cycles in total, and 12 or 13 where we'd really be able to tell what's happening. If you bring probes or telescopes that can look at the sun into the mix we've observed maybe 4 or 5 cycles.
The notion that something is extraordinary because we haven't seen it before is ridiculous. The sun probably does thousands of things we haven't observed yet. That doesn't make it weird or strange. That just means we've only been a scientifically literate species for an incredibly short time.
People hyping up their interpretations, asserting authority in explaining the things we've never seen before, are ridiculous and worthy of mockery: they speak from the wrong orifice.
However, sharing the joy of "we haven't seen this before, we don't know what it means," and speaking of incorrect and frankly even silly possible interpretations is how we collectively, eventually, understand these things. The process is chaotic and often ugly but works well enough that humans think they're more in control of this planet than the ants are.
Be careful that the justified ire against the authoritative tone of some dipshit reporter doesn't blind you to the wonder of new discovery.
I'm anticipating the "aliens are drinking the sun like a milkshake," theorists to have a field day with this one. I'll read their discussions for amusement and the possibility they might turn up details or implications no one else does, cuz no one else looks at the data the way they do.
>I'm anticipating the "aliens are drinking the sun like a milkshake,"
If that's the case, we should be studying the straw. If they have a straw that reaches all the way to our star, then they have all the star. So just think about the tech we could learn by just studying that straw
It was the "This is STRANGE!" bit that I was talking about. It (probably) isn't strange. It's probably happened a lot over the past 4.6bn years that the sun has been doing its thing. It's new to us because we've only been observing it for a tiny length of time. That's not the same as it being strange.
By that yardstick nothing is strange; there are so many trillions of cosmic bodies distributed across so many billions of years that any imaginable phenomenon has probably occurred zillions of times. Strangeness in science is synonymous with not being readily explicable by existing theory.
the article mentions the 11-year solar cycle and how strange things happen above 55 degrees around the end of those cycles, but is the sun currently at the stage that we'd expect to see strange occurrences?
I went down a fun rabbit hole recently. It started with the innocent question "How much iron is in the sun?" fun because the answer ranges from fractional percentages to the sun is a stellar remnant and most of it is iron.
Here is one of the more out there theories I found.
The fractional percent crowd bases their theory on the observed spectrum of the sun. the large iron core side bases their theory on the observed distribution of iron in the inner solar system.
It is interesting because too much iron and there would be no fusion, but think of the iron cores in the planets, the sun coalesced from the same dust, there has to be a large amount in there.
Reminds me of my fave new microgenre: foreign films about something going wrong with the sun that causes it to scour the earth with gamma radiation, eg. _Into the Night_.
A polar vortex formed in the north. video:
https://twitter.com/TamithaSkov/status/1621276153075109888?s...