Voder-Vocoder

Compare and contrast the mass-market and the hardcover covers of this book:

I like the mass-market (on the left) cover better.

(Here’s a new feature on the blog: Judging a Book by its Cover. I’ll present a book cover with no further commentary.)

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“Don’t worry about the sun dying! You and everyone you know will be long gone by then!” (link)

In the energy-efficient future:

Picture a Manhattan block in mid-December, crammed with high-rise apartment buildings full of lights, people, and warmth. Several thousand people live on the block. All of their electricity, the fuel for their daily lives, comes from a compact natural gas turbine running in an underground installation in the center of the blcok., The heat produced from the turbine is used to create hot water and warm the entire block. Each one of these people would have an energy footprint with an efficiency above 90%, compared with the current 33% Americans now live at.

From $20 per Gallon: How the Inevitable Rising Cost of Gas Will Change Our Lives for the Better by Christopher Steiner (9780446549547)

What have I read over the past year or so? Here's a partial list:

• Eric Flint (et alia)'s 1632 series.
• Roger Zelazny's Amber series (reread for the first time since college. They hold up well; I'm going to read more of him.)
• Randy Wayne White's Doc Ford series.
• David Weber and John Ringo's Empire of Man series
• Ursula K. Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness and three Earthsea books.
• Michael Williamson's Better to Beg Forgiveness
• Jack McDevitt's Seeker
• Jack Campbell's Lost Fleet series
• David Weber's Honor Harrington series
• Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father
• Norman F. Cantor's Antiquity: The Civilization of the Ancient World

What am I reading right now?

• Anathem by Neil Stephenson, for the second time. (9780061474095)
• John Lennon: The Life by Philip Norman (9780060754013)
• Food Matters : A Guide to Conscious Eating with More Than 75 Recipes by Mark Bittman (9781416575641)
• Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings by Jorge Luis Borges (9780811216999)

“All the librarians have to be armed when they’re on duty, of course.”

Let me mention a few books I’ve read this year that I want to recommend whole-heartedly.

Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother (9780765319852) from April 2008. Yes, it’s a YA title, but as far as I can tell that just means that protagonist is an adolescent, not that the story is dumbed down. Themes include hacking, cryptography, civil liberty, terrorism, data mining, linux, sex, and civil disobedience. Doctorow’s best book so far.

Neal Stephenson’s Anathem (9780061474095), to be released 2008-09-09. I can’t stress the awesomeness of this book enough. Themes include Platonic forms, directed acyclic graphs, kung fu, Gödel metrics, monasticism, space travel, long-term timekeeping, a cappella music, conscienceless, the chronology protection conjecture, and the true nature of quantum mechanics. Just reading that list might have given way half the story. The book is a masterpiece.

Charles Stross’s Saturn’s Children (9780441015948) from July. Not his best book, as far as plot go, but worth reading if you care about the extinction of humanity, robots, robot sex, and the slowness and uncomfortableness of space travel.

“The Deliverator’s car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt.”

I did the calculation just now. My 20 gallon gas tank has enough potential energy to put 9 pounds of bacon into the Asteroid Belt.

131 megajoules * 20 / G / ( (mass of sun / 414,703,838 km) – (mass of sun/ 149,597,887.5 km) – (mass of earth / radius of earth)) in pounds

Was reading Weber & Flint’s Crown of Slaves and thought: Heinlein never wrote a sequel to Citizen of the Galaxy. Why not?

I asked seven anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians if they would rather have been a typical Indian or a typical European in 1491. None was delighted by the question, because it required judging the past by the standards of today—a fallacy disparaged as “presentism” by social scientists. But every one chose to be an Indian.

[...] Imagine—here let me now address non-Indian readers—somehow meeting a member of the Haudenosaunee from 1491. Is it too much to speculate that beneath the swirling tattoos, asymmetrically trimmed hair, and bedizened robes, you would recognize someone much closer to yourself than your own ancestors?

—From 1491, by Charles C. Mann

My current reading project is to get to all those nonfiction books which I’ve have been meaning to read for years. The last two I read, 1491 and Jeffrey Sachs’s The End of Poverty have a common theme: the impact of disease on world events. One of the major points of 1491 is that our understanding of Native American civilization is skewed by the fact that as many as 95% of them died as a result of Old World disease. One of the major points of The End of Poverty is that many of the places in the world with endemic extreme poverty are in that position mainly as a result of diseases such as malaria and aids.

And it seems so foreign to me. I’ve never lost a single friend or acquaintance to a communicable disease. Cancer, heart disease, old age, emphysema, cirrhosis of the liver: these are the killers I know, not malaria or smallpox.