What I Read In 2021

TL;DR: Too much Twitter

I have been trying to wean myself off of doomscrolling Twitter, but it's hard, especially when I have such interesting people in my feed. But I did manage to read some books.

• The Salvation Sequence by Peter F. Hamilton: I finally finished the trilogy (Salvation, Salvation Lost, The Saints of Salvation). It took me quite a while as these are long books – much too long, actually. Hamilton follows the same mode of storytelling that he has in the last couple of series he's written, describing a spacefaring human civilization interspersed with a separate storyline in another very different setting. I almost gave up on the series partway through the second book and ended up skimming a lot through the last. I'm not sure I'll read anything more by him unless he comes up with something very different and shorter.
• The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. Here's what I said earlier in the year: "It's a brilliant and important book in many ways, but not a great novel. Parts of the story are chilling and compelling, but other parts are more like a treatise on non-capitalist economic policy - an important subject, but not one that makes for easy reading. I found myself skimming a lot. I did find the last third of the novel quite engaging and liked that he ended on an optimistic note, an optimism that I do not share."
• The Merchant Princes series by Charles Stross: I reread this series in the new omnibus editions (The Bloodline Feud, The Traders' War, The Revolution Trade) in preparation for reading the Empire Games sequel trilogy and thoroughly enjoyed it. Reading it straight through made it much easier to follow the many plot threads and appreciate Stross' world-building skills, which are considerable. The series starts out as a fairly straightforward portal fantasy and morphs into a rich, complex alternate worlds thriller. Highly recommended.
• Enpire Games and Dark State by Charles Stross. These are the first two books in the sequel series to The Merchant Princes. I'm halfway through Dark State as I write this and enjoying it very much. It's set about 17 years after the previous series and so far is a tense spy thriller with musings on the future of the panopticon surveillance state. 
• Bringing Columbia Home: The Untold Story of a Lost Space Shuttle and Her Crew by Michael D. Leinbach and Jonathan H. Ward: This is the story of the effort to recover the remains of the Columbia Space Shuttle and her crew from the swamps and forests of Texas and Louisiana. It's a fascinating story and one that deserves to be better known. 
• The Sandman: Season of Mists and A Game of You by Neil Gaiman: These are the fourth and fifth books in Neil Gaiman's epic series. I enjoyed them and will get back to the series next year.
• Dune: The Graphic Novel, Volume 1 by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson: This is the first of what will probably be three graphic novel adaptations of Frank Herbert's classic novel. I liked this a lot and am looking forward to the rest of them. Herbert and Anderson added some material that wasn't in the original novel (I assume it came from Frank Herbert's notes) that helped to deepen the characterization. 
• House Atriedes, Vol. 1-6 by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson: This is a graphic novel adaptation of the authors' Dune prequel series. I like the artwork in this one more than the Dune graphic novel, which I found somewhat bland. 

In thinking about it, I realized that I did read rather more than I thought at first. Most of the books I read were long. Not counting the graphic novels, I figure they totalled about 4500 pages. That's the equivalent of about 20 normal books. So I don't feel quite as guilty about neglecting my reading. 

As for next year, after I finish the Empire Games trilogy, I plan to read the last three books in The Expanse series. After that, I want to finish Alastair Reynolds' Revenger series and read Inhibitor Phase. I may take another crack at N. K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy, which I tried to read a while back and couldn't get into. Finally, I have several year's best anthologies, some of which I started browsing through but haven't fully read, that I really should finish. 

So Much For That Idea

The Bussard ramjet is an interstellar drive, proposed by physicist Robert W. Bussard in the 1950s, that would harvest interstellar hydrogen to feed a fusion rocket. It's been a staple of science fiction ever since (see stories by Larry Niven and Vernor Vinge in particular). 

Unfortunately, a recent study shows that it isn't practical.  

Their results were something of a “good news, bad news” situation. Consistent with what Fishback proposed, a “static ‘slowly-varying’ magnetic field is capable of funneling interstellar matter and guiding it into a fusion reactor. In this way, a consistent acceleration of one Earth gravity (1 g) can be sustained until relativistic speeds are achieved. However, when they calculated the size of the magnetic funnel, that’s where the bad news began.

To achieve a thrust of 10 million newtons (N) – equivalent to twice the main propulsion of the Space Shuttle – the magnetic field would need to be 4000 km (2485 mi) in diameter. Even worse, the field would need to be 150 million km (93 million mi) long to adequately capture and funnel ISM material into the ship’s fusion reaction. This is equivalent to the distance between the Sun and Earth, also known as one Astronomical Unit (1 AU).

I guess it's time to start looking at warp drives again.  

Featured Links - December 29, 2021

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

• How to Survive a Killer Asteroid. "The impact that wiped out the dinosaurs would probably have killed you too—unless you were in the exact right place and had made the exact right plans."
• Our Ladies of the Perpetual High. "How a New Age order of feminist nuns is reimagining spiritual devotion and trying to heal the world — one joint at a time."
• After hiatus, Machines Dream return with surprise album. If you like early Pink Floyd or Genesis, you should give this band a listen.
• The best free video editing software. "The best free video editing software to make movies without spending a thing."

Merry Christmas and All That

It's almost Christmas and it's time for me to take a break from blogging. It probably won't be a white Christmas this year, here in this part of the Great White North. That doesn't bother me at all because it means I might be able to get out and walk, which is not a good idea when there's snow and ice on the sidewalks. 

I may post something next week or maybe not. In any case, I should be back here after the New Year.

I hope you enjoy whatever holidays you celebrate and the company of your family and friends. In lieu of a Christmas card, here's a picture of our cat, CJ, in the Christmas tree

The New York Times Year In Pictures 2021

It's not quite the end of the year, but year-in-review articles and photo galleries are already coming out. The New York Times has published its year-in-pictures gallery for 2021 and it is excellent. All pictures are captioned and many have notes from the photographer. I spent more time than I should have viewing it.  

There are many dramatic pictures of course. This is one of the most striking.

2021 Hugo Award Winners

The winners of the 2021 Hugo Awards were announced Saturday night at DisCon III, the 79th World Science Fiction Convention. It was a solid group of winners. I was especially glad to see The Coode Street Podcast finally win a Hugo for Best Fancast. I've been listening to and enjoying it for years.

Here are the fiction winners.

Best Novel: Network Effect, Martha Wells (Tordotcom)

Best Novella: The Empress of Salt and Fortune, Nghi Vo (Tordotcom)

Best Novelette: “Two Truths and a Lie”, Sarah Pinsker (Tor.com 6/17/20)

Best Short Story: “Metal Like Blood in the Dark”, T. Kingfisher (Uncanny 9-10/20)

Best Series: The Murderbot Diaries, Martha Wells (Tordotcom)

Featured Links - December 20, 2021

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

• The best science images of 2021. "A helicopter on Mars, human–monkey embryos, volcanic ash and more." From Nature.
  
• Astronomers Capture Best Views Yet of Stars Moving Around Our Local Black Hole. "One star is orbiting the black hole at 5,431 miles per second, which is 0.03% the speed of light."
• How to Remove Unwanted Pre-Installed Apps on Android Without Root. "Got a load of pre-installed apps on your phone that you don't want? Here are two easy ways to get rid of them—without needing to root your phone."
• Psychologists say that America is going through what Carl Jung warned us would eventually happen -- a mass delusion. Well at least 40 percent of Americans, anyway. 
• How to Use CSS Selectors to Style Your Web Page. "CSS selectors are one of the most important parts of CSS. They give you the ability to target HTML elements on your web page that you want to style."
• Why Paxlovid is a Just-in-Time Breakthrough. "The first potent anti-Covid pill will be a big help." Production of this pill should be ramped up and not just in the US.

Photo of the Week - December 19, 2021

Sunset on Frenchman's Bay. 

Fujifilm X-S10 with 16-80 mm. F4 at 16 mm., F8, 1/600 second, ISO 400, -1 stop exposure compensation, Provia film simulation

Saturday Sounds - Pink Floyd - Live, Lyon 12 June 1971, Tokyo 16 March 1972

Pink Floyd recently released a bunch of live recordings from 1971 and 1972,  before Dark Side of the Moon took off and became one of the best-selling albums of all time. I was lucky enough to see them at the Ford Auditorium in Detroit on their first Dark Side of the Moon tour, and it was an amazing show. 

Today's recording is from two concerts. The first from Lyon, France features some of their psychedelic early material*. The second part, from Tokyo, Japan is an early performance of DSOTM. Flip the order around and you get most of what I saw in Detroit. 

Pink Floyd became one of the biggest touring acts, selling out arenas and stadiums around the world, but their later shows didn't have anywhere near the impact that they had when seeing them in a relatively small hall in 1972. They were one of the very few musical acts that actually scared me with their music (Echoes, if I remember correctly. It felt like a seance that was making contact with something primeval). 

*If, like me, you are a fan of pre-DSOTM Pink Floyd, do check out Nick Mason's Saucerful of Secrets. I missed their previous Toronto appearance in 2020, so was excited to find out that they will be on tour again in early 2022 with a Toronto date in January. Unfortunately, because of the current COVID-19 situation, I am not going to risk going (even assuming the concert happens as scheduled, which I very much doubt).

How Jimmy Carter Helped Save Chalk River

Back in 1952, there was a partial meltdown of a research reactor in Chalk River, Ontario. It was the first such accident of its kind anywhere in the world. I had read about it in the past, but until this week I didn't know that former US President Jimmy Carter was involved in the cleanup. 

Carter was called in to lead the cleanup because of his experience building the nuclear propulsion system for the Sea Wolf submarine. He described himself as pretty excited to be leading the team responsible for the operation, as well as being one of the few authorized to go into the nuclear power plant. 

The team had an exact replica of the reactor set up on a nearby tennis court to help their work. Due to the small amount of time they were able to spend in the reactor, every second counted.

"I had only seconds that I could be in the reactor myself. We all went out on the tennis court, and they had an exact duplicate of the reactor on the tennis court. We would run out there with our wrenches and we'd check off so many bolts and nuts and they'd put them back on," he wrote in his book, Why Not the Best?

Given the tradition exposure he experienced, I'm surprised he is still with us.  

Some Tips on VLC's Advanced Features

I've been using VLC* for many years but I keep finding things that I didn't know it could do. This article points out several features of VLC that I wasn't aware of. Among others:

• Download content from YouTube
• Convert videos to almost any format
• Loop a section of a video or audio file

* VLC = Video Lan Content Media Player, an open-source app that can play virtually any video or audio format.

Typography for Developers

Although many organizations have designers on staff who take care of the aesthetic side of application development, it's often the case that developers get tasked with choosing fonts and layouts for applications. It's been my experience that most developers know little or nothing about typography, so results can be mixed.

Here's a two-hour typography course for developers from the freeCodeCamp. 

You will learn how to choose a typeface, what to look for when laying out type, how to create typographic hierarchy, how to layout type, and how to create responsive typography.

It's a good introduction to the subject and would be appropriate both for developers and technical writers who have to produce online documentation.

 

 

Featured Links - December 13, 2021

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Ancient soil from secret Greenland base suggests Earth could lose a lot of ice. "Samples, lost for decades, rediscovered in Danish freezer." 

Finally, a Fusion Reaction Has Generated More Energy Than Absorbed by The Fuel. "A major milestone has been breached in the quest for fusion energy."

How Foundation preserved Asimov’s big ideas while bringing the story to vivid life. "Ars chats with showrunner David S. Goyer and science adviser Kevin Hand."

How to slash the shipping industry's enormous carbon emissions. "The climate crisis means we must urgently cut the huge emissions from sea transport. Engineering tricks, cleaner fuels and a return to the age of sail could all help swab the decks clean."

An absolutely bonkers plan to give Mars an artificial magnetosphere. "A torus of charged particles could give Mars a magnetic field."

Giving the Mona Lisa a Digital Makeover (YouTube) "An engineer used powerful lights, cameras, and computer software to digitally remove the varnish from the "Mona Lisa," allowing people today to see the painting as Leonardo da Vinci created it."

Tor.com Reviewers' Choice: The Best Books of 2021. There is much good SF and fantasy to read about here.

6 easy fixes for Android 12 annoyances. "Blast away Android 12's most bothersome buzzkills with these super-simple 60-second solutions."

Photo of the Week - December 12, 2021

Boats wrapped so people can spend the winter on them at Frenchman's Bay Marina. This was taken with my Pixel 4a.

Saturday Sounds - Genesis - Philadelphia - December 2, 2021

Today's post is a concert video of Genesis on their "Last Domino" tour recorded in Philadelphia, PA on December 2, 2021. It's a fan production so the audio is a good-quality audience recording and the video seems to be from multiple sources, most of which are decent quality.

I saw Genesis at Hamilton Place in Hamilton in the late 1970s and it was a very fine concert. They got to be hugely popular after that, and I lost interest in their music once they became a stadium act, but this show has a mix of early and later material and is quite enjoyable. Note that these guys are getting old and the vocals (especially from Phil Collins) are sometimes ragged. Collins' son Nic is drumming for them and is very capable. 

The lighting and staging are spectacular if you care about that sort of thing.

 

Photography Links - December 10, 2021

Here are some photography articles that I found interesting or useful.  

Taken with Fujifilm X-S10 and 16-80 mm. F4 at 80 mm., cropped and enhanced in Google Photos.

• The Quick Fix: Cataracts and the mature photographer. This will resonate with many photographers of a certain age.
• Dune Was Shot on ALEXA LF, Transferred to 35mm Film, Then Scanned Back to Digital. "The process of making Dune was pretty novel in terms of creating the imagery. The movie was shot digital (on the ARRI ALEXA LF and Mini LF), then was transferred to 35mm film, and then was scanned back to digital. All that to create the most accurate emulation possible, reducing the digital sharpness, and elevating softness. Read on about this fascinating process."
• The best Photoshop alternatives in 2021. "Capable, fast and subscription-free: these are the best Photoshop alternatives for Mac, Windows and mobile."
• How To Achieve the Optimum Exposure In Your Photos. This article has the best explanation of how exposure works in digital cameras that I have seen.
• Researchers shrink camera to the size of a salt grain. "The new system can produce crisp, full-color images on par with a conventional compound camera lens 500,000 times larger in volume, the researchers reported in a paper published Nov. 29 in Nature Communications."

Art in Practice: A Review

Art in Practice: Encountering the Buddha with the Philip Glass Ensemble is a  movie produced in conjunction with the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art. It features performances by the Ensemble recorded specifically for the film, clips of an interview with Glass, and images and video from the Buddhist art collection at the museum. 

I've loved the music of Philip Glass since I first heard it in the early 1980s and I've been lucky to see him and the Ensemble perform several times. While the Buddhist art and religious objects shown in the movie are beautiful and striking, what impressed me most about the film was the performances by the Ensemble. This music is challenging in the extreme to perform and to see the members close up during the performances is fascinating. 

Music performed includes excerpts from Powaquatsi, Kundun, Akhanaten, and Satyagraha, among others. All performances are superb, especially the final piece from Act III of Satyagraha, which moved me to tears/

The exhibition, Encountering the Buddha: Art and Practice Across Asia, has an excellent website that is well worth spending some time to view.

New Python-Based Data Visualization Tool

I've only had to deal with multi-dimensional data analysis once in my career. That was in the early 1990s, when I was working for a now-defunct software company called Alacrity. At the time, I was their office manager, which meant that I was their bookkeeper, technical writer, inside salesperson, and general jack of all trades.

The company got a contract to build a sales analysis tool for the local office of one of the big drug companies and I got roped in to help because I was a spreadsheet jockey. We built it in Supercalc, using pivot tables, to analyse five different dimensions of sales data (something like region, salesperson, product, product category, and profit). It wasn't a huge data set and even an early PC spreadsheet could handle the data. 

Since then I've been interested in seeing how people work with large data sets, which is something that scientists have to do all the time. Nature has an article about a new Python-based data visualization tool called napari. 

napari — the name refers to a Pacific island village midway between the developers’ bases in San Francisco and Melbourne — features a simple graphical interface with a built-in Python console in which images can be rendered, rotated and manipulated in 2D or 3D, with additional dimensions, such as the succession of temporal ‘slices’ in a time series, accessible using sliders beneath the image window. If available, graphics-processing units can be used to accelerate the software. “We make sure that we actually use the computer to its full capacity,” Royer explains. (ImageJ users can also work in Python using PyImageJ; see pypi.org/project/pyimagej).

Adobe Photoshop-like layers allow users to overlay points, vectors, tracks, surfaces, polygons, annotations or other images. A researcher could, for instance, open an image of a tissue in napari, identify cell nuclei with a click of the mouse, retrieve those points in Python and use them to ‘seed’ a cell-segmentation algorithm, which identifies cell boundaries. By then pushing the results to napari as a new layer on the original image, they can assess how well the segmentation process worked.

I'm going to pass this along to a couple of my former co-workers who are doing data analysis. I'm not sure you could apply it to visualizing stock market data but you never know.  

All of Tor.com's Fiction from 2021

Tor.com, the website for the preeminent SF and fantasy publisher Tor books, publishes a large amount of short fiction every year. Here's a list of all their short fiction published so far in 2021, and it is quite a list.  

Here's just a few of the authors, ones that I am familiar with.

• Sam J. Miller
• Annalee Newitz
• Michael Swanwick
• Sarah Pinsker
• Richard Kadrey
• Lavie Tidhar
• Elizabeth Bear
• Catherynne M. Valente

Featured Links - December 6. 2021

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Why e, the Transcendental Math Constant, Is Just the Best. "The solution to our puzzle about Euler’s number explains why e pops up in situations that involve optimality."

How to Download Anything on the Web for Free: 12 Tips and Tools. "Here's how to download anything from the web that you thought you couldn't for free... without breaking the law."

The Bulwer Lytton Fiction Contest. "Where 'www' means 'wretched writers welcome.'''

Neutron switches to methane/oxygen, 1 Meganewton Archimedes engine revealed. "Rocket Lab has provided a significant update in the progress of their Neutron rocket, a vehicle aimed primarily at the small-scale interplanetary and low Earth orbit mega-constellation markets at first."

Supersonic Projectile Exceeds Engineers Dreams: The Supersonic Trebuchet. Some people have too much time on their hands. 

On the pronunciation of Omicron. The authoritative word from the OED. 

Photo of the Week - December 5, 2021

I've walked by this tree hundreds of times.  

But I never really noticed the roots.

I took both pictures with my Pixel 4a.

 

Saturday Sounds - Miles Davis - The Lost Quintet - Rotterdam 1969

Here's a rare recording of Miles Davis' Lost Quintet. The group features the core of the Bitches Brew band (Dave Holland, Jack DeJohnette, Chick Corea, Wayne Shorter, and of course Mile Davis). This is a live recording from Rotterdam in 1969, after Bitches Brew was recorded but before it was released. Unfortunately, this group never recorded a studio album. 

Why You Can't Hear Movie Dialogue

I often have trouble following dialogue in movies and TV shows. I've attributed the problem to my aging ears and not having a good enough sound system (it's good but not up to current state-of-the-art). But according to this article, it may not be all my fault.

 As it turns out, the reason for poor sound is often inherent in the way the movie's sound is recorded and mixed. There are several reasons for this, which the article describes in detail. Another reason is the compression applied by broadcast and streaming services. I've noticed, for example, that Netflix usually has very good sound quality, while the sound on Amazon Prime Video can be quite variable. 

The article also discusses the sound quality (or lack of it) in cinemas. I haven't found this to be a problem, at least not in the last decade or so. (Don't get me started on projection quality, though). 

SpaceX Is Having Raptor Problems

Not long ago, the vice-president in charge of developing the Raptor engines that power SpaceX's Starship and Super Heavy booster left the company. I wondered at the time if they were having trouble producing the engines, and it turns out I was right.

Elon Musk has sent a company-wide email saying that the company's Raptor development is indeed having major problems. 

He described a dire situation the day after Thanksgiving in a companywide email, a copy of which was obtained by CNBC.

“The Raptor production crisis is much worse than it seemed a few weeks ago,” Musk wrote.

“We face genuine risk of bankruptcy if we cannot achieve a Starship flight rate of at least once every two weeks next year,” Musk added later.

As the article linked above indicates, the company is planning a new series of Starlink satellites and needs the Starship to launch them. 

I expect more details to be coming out in the space-related press in the near future.  

Update: And as I expected, more details are coming out. Here's an article from Ars Technica with more information. 

Movie and TV Reviews - November 2021

 Here are some short reviews of things I watched in November.

Movies

• Dune - Part 1: See my review here. 
• Shang Chi - The Legend of the 10 Rings: Something different from Marvel, based on Korean mythology. I'm not a fan of Marvel's recent direction, but this one is good. (Disney+)
• Finch: The plot and background of this make no sense at all, but Tom Hanks is good and it has a cute robot. What more could you want (not!). (Apple+)
• No Time To Die: This would be a good point to wrap up the Bond franchise, which is getting pretty long in the tooth. I'll stick to rewatching the earlier movies. (VOD)
• Red Ticket: Another heist movie that doesn't hold up if you think about it too much, but it's entertaining enough for a Saturday night. (Netflix)
• Sound from the Deep: A Norwegian short film with a Lovecraftian theme. It's very tense and watchable. (YouTube)

TV Shows

• Dalgliesh: Two made-for-TV movies based on novels by P. D. James. If you like you whodunnits dark and grim, you'll like these. (Acorn TV)
• Manhunt: The Night Stalker: The second season of this show based on the career of a famous British detective and starring Martin Clunes of Doc Martin fame. It's very well done and is easily the best detective series we've seen since Line of Duty (Acorn TV)
• The Wheel of Time: I've not read the books so I can't comment on the series' faithfulness to them, but it stands perfectly well on its own. (Amazon TV)
• Cowboy Bebop: I don't remember much about the original anime series. but I enjoyed this live-action remake a lot. (Netflix)
• Invasion: This one starts out slowly with several stories being set up in several locations. It's very well done but I hope it gets moving a bit quicker. (Apple TV+)