Standard disclaimer[1]

This is the second of three novels in the MaddAddam trilogy. The events in this book cover the same time frame as the first novel, but from the points of view of different characters. In that novel, we read about a girl named Bernice that Jimmy knew at the Martha-Graham Academy they both attended. She was a God’s Gardener. In this book, we learn more about her and much more about the Gardeners.

The mythology of the Gardeners is quite scientific. They are highly... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

This is the first of three novels in the MaddAddam trilogy. This one tells the story of Snowman, a lone, somewhat mad, man living on his own in a post-apocalyptic world, nearly bereft of other human life. The only other “people” around are a tribe of pleasant, but simple humanoids that Snowman calls Crakers.

Snowman remembers a time when there were more people than just the Crakers. He remembers a time when the planet was controlled by supra-national corporations that ran... [More]

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• Economy & Finance
• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Philosophy & Sociology
• ... [More]

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• Economy & Finance
• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Science & Nature
• Art &... [More]

What do we do when everyone’s consuming content and no-one’s producing it? The quality drops precipitously.

Standard disclaimer[1]

This is the sixth book of the The Expanse series. It starts with Marco Inaros and his Free Navy in charge of the Slow Zone and Medina Station in it. Michio Pa is at the heart of the small group of higher-ups in the Free Navy who are beginning to seriously doubt Marco’s qualifications and goals. Those goals always seem to change whenever Marco would have had to admit that he’d failed. He managed to destroy billions on Earth, but the blow strikes simultaneously at Belters... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

This is the fifth book of the The Expanse series. The book starts with a Belter raid on a Martian base on Callisto. A 15-year-old named Filip leads the raid. He is forced to leave a man behind, but the mission is otherwise a success. They’d managed to capture the stealth shielding from the Martians and made it look like a botched raid on a different warehouse.

The Rocinante is back at Tycho Station, this time for a half-year of repairs and upgrades. Amos heads to Earth to... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

This story takes place after Abaddon’s Gate. It tells the story of Paulo Cortázar, who started life as a somewhat gifted, but lazy student. He gets hooked on amphetamines during his latter years at university and manages to get his degree. He has some money set aside, but he also now has a pretty big monkey on his back. He seems to be chronically incapable of landing a job, so he sets up his apartment for a cleansing—he’s going to kick the drug habit that he, in a... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

To no-one’s surprise at all, this novel by Roth tells the story of a senior literature professor. His name is David Kepesh, but that doesn’t really matter. This is, apparently, the third in a series that started with The Breast. At least Roth is dead-honest about what he considers to be the most worthy literary subject of all time. It’s really hard not to feel that this is autobiographical to some degree.

A Cuban-American named Consuela Castillo is taken one of his courses... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

This is the fourth book in The Expanse series. It follows the Rocinante to a planet called Ilus (colonists) or New Terra (U.N.). The Roci is sent there by Avasarala and Fred Johnson to settle the dispute between colonists and the official science and security team sent by the U.N.

Basia Merton is a colonist, there with his wife Lucia, the colony’s doctor and their daughter Felcia. The colonists are mainly Belters, who arrived on the Barbapiccola. They’d managed to convert... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

This book argues that the paucity of good jobs these days is due not to a rise in automation, but to a massive decrease in manufacturing output. That is, slow growth rates coupled with a system-wide overcapacity are a much better fit for explaining how we got to where we are today: economies in the west with ostensibly very low unemployment, but largely in the service industry with a much different benefits structure than past jobs.

Benanav sees a UBI as a means to an end,... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

This is the seventh novel in The Expanse series. It picks up the story nearly three decades after the end of the last book. The Transport Union manages traffic between the Ring Colonies, led by Camina Drummer. She is comfortable in her role, but laments the hidebound nature of bureaucracy.

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• COVID-19
• Economy & Finance
• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Technology
• Programming... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

This is a 114-page document about various features of processor architectures and of programming languages and techniques that affect performance. It starts with a discussion of how memory (RAM or cache) even works, on an electrical level. How much maintenance overhead does a capacitor in a memory unit need in order to maintain its value? That is, there are cycles during which the RAM is refreshing its capacitance and cannot be read. If a processor request for that data... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

This is the third book of the The Expanse series. It tells the story of humanity’s first interactions with The Ring, an alien artifact constructed by the protomolecule on Venus and launched into orbit out near Uranus. The Ring is guarded by a coalition of Belter, Martian, and Earther forces, preventing anyone from approaching it until it can be investigated more thoroughly.

A young Belter takes his tiny “slingshot” ship on a mad ride out to The Ring and manages to shoot by... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

The second book of the The Expanse begins on Ganymede, where we meet Prax Meng, a botanist of consummate skill and education. He has a daughter Mei with a debilitating but controllable disease. She is kidnapped from her pre-school. We also meet Bobbie Draper, a Martian Marine deployed on the surface, opposing the Earth forces that are also stationed there. Tensions are already high when a mysterious humanoid without a spacesuit tears across the surface, eliminating the... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

This is a short book about the digital advertising business, including its history, its present, and possible futures. The history is that the advertising business has always struggled with the essential fact that they are selling a largely unquantifiable product. There are feelings about the effectiveness of advertising, but little evidence for the effectiveness of a particular ad. Effectiveness is measured in two ways: directly contributing to a sale (e.g. rebates, sales,... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

A girl named Cara lives on a planet named Laconia with her parents, who are part of a research team. Laconia is one of the 1300 ring worlds discovered by humanity in The Expanse novels. Cara enjoys visiting a local pond, where she watches the strange and alien local fauna, in particular the sunbirds. At twilight, “strange dogs” show up, but seem to pose no risk.

One day, Cara feeds a bit of her own food to a sunbird. She saw someone do something similar with a duck in a... [More]

I was at the NY Times this morning to look up a referenced editorial and landed on the home page instead. This is what greeted me, above the fold and prominently placed at the top and center of the site.

NY Times Front Page on 26.01.2022

I don’t usually see the NY Times home page. It’s possible that it always looks like this. I honestly hope not, but can’t rule it out. This is war propaganda, pure and simple. Their formulation has nothing to do with reporting and everything to do with pushing an agenda.

The first headline... [More]

The article So entwickeln sich die Corona-Zahlen in der Schweiz (SRF) is updated constantly. In the update from Monday, 24.01.2022, the matrix that shows the infection rate by age group was a particularly brilliant crimson.

Matrix of Infections by Age Group

If I’m reading this chart correctly, 4.5% of 10 to 19-year-olds were infected with COVID in the week from 10.01 to 17.01. That seems like quite a lot. Switzerland has a 7-day rolling average of about 32,300 cases per day. That makes about 226,000 per week. The latest population... [More] (Wikipedia)

In a recent article Links and Notes for December 17th, 2021, I noted that Doctor Mark Hanefeld seems to be underselling vaccine efficacy (predicted) and effectiveness (measured).

The podcast is linked below,

Coronavirus-Update Sonderfolge: Gerüchte und Fake-News zur Impfung einordnen | NDR Podcast by NDR Ratgeber (YouTube)

At 17:30, Herr Doktor Marc Hanefeld says,

“Nehmen wir mal einfach die Zulassungsstudien zu Biontech. Da haben wir eine 95% Effektivität. Und die Effektivität ist immer im Hinblick auf symptomatische Ansteckung. Das heisst, man wird angesteckt mit dem Virus und merkt was—hat... [More]”

As in 2020, this year COVID prevented my wife from spending the holidays with our family overseas, So, over the holidays, I was once again made to partake in a smattering of Christmas classics, of varying quality. Most of these stem from the late 60s and 70s and were already classics when we were growing up. Like watching Dinner for One in Switzerland, they are a tradition, regardless of their objective quality.

One of the newest in the stable is The Christmas Chronicles. That movie is more... [More]

I watched a video called “Do Lockdowns Work?” in late December and wrote down a bunch of notes and thoughts as I did so. The title is ostensibly interesting, but they didn’t really talk about that topic all that much in the 80 minutes of the video.

First off, I don’t want my picking on Jimmy Dore and Max Blumenthal to be read as support of the policies or ideas of whomever they happen to oppose. I listened to their rather long, 80-minute video because I’ve learned from them in the past and... [More]

Many months ago, I watched the first segment in Track 1, called Debunking “Bitcoin Wastes Energy” by Nic Carter (The B-Word). Below are my notes and thoughts about it. He started off by asserting,

“As a neutral, global monetary network, Bitcoin has a valid claim on some of society’s resources.”

Does it, though? You can try to make this axiomatic, but I’m going to respectfully ask for justification. As someone speaking at a Bitcoin conference, you obviously have to claim that. It’s good that he did. That means that if I... [More]

Have you noticed that there is more and more content available to help you learn how to program? For every topic under the sun, there seems to be a blog article or video of superficially reasonable quality. For every question on StackOverflow, there’s an effusive answer with examples.

This is all pretty great, honestly.

However, with the increase in content. there is also the need to be able to wade through it.

How old is that StackOverflow answer? How appropriate is the answer to your... [More]

Those who most easily deem something to be “fake news” are often the same people who can’t see the falsity in the news that they consider to be non-fake. They shout “conspiracy” at everything, except when a cabal of extremely wealthy people conspire to manipulate entire nations to keep money flowing upwards.

• They believe that that financial system is a free market and that it works for everyone.
• They believe that the rich pay too much in taxes.
• They believe that the military budget is... [More]

I recently saw an argument that says that people like Greta Thunberg—let’s use her as a placeholder for any semi-affluent first-worlder—can argue all she wants for a massive reduction of fossil-fuel usage, but that she’s privileged to be able to do so, as there is zero chance that her life will be impacted negatively by it. The argument is that stopping fossil fuels now will leave the developing world even farther behind because they won’t be able to benefit from the economic growth they... [More]

From the article Against Intelligence by Justin E.H. Smith (Hinternet),

“Our default folk-theory of the sky and its objects, as a vestige of the closed world cosmology, is one in which distances between star systems is not significantly different from those between the planets of our own system.”

And even those distances we grossly underestimate. The planets are light minutes if not light hours apart.[1] Months and years of even the most optimistic feasible journey time. But this lack suffuses most of how most humans—most... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

This story takes place after Caliban’s War, when Bobbie returns to Mars after having retired from the Mars Marines.

She’s living with her brother and his family. Her nephew David is a gifted student, enrolled in the terraforming program at school. He’s also a gifted chemist, so he’s tempted to make extra money by creating drugs for a local dealer. This is the Breaking Bad storyline, I guess. David is infatuated with LeeLee, one of the girls who orbits the leader of the... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

Janie Crawford returns to the village where she has a home, crossing past the hooting and hollering peanut gallery stationed outside the town store. She continues onward, ignoring them, to visit her friend Pheoby, who’d stood by her all the time she’d been gone and who was dying to know what had happened since she’d left.

The rest of the book is Janie recounting the story of her life that led to her, at about forty years old, sitting on that porch with her friend Pheoby.
... [More]