2024 Aurora Award Nominations

The nominees for the 2024 Aurora Awards have been announced by the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association. The winners will be announced on August 11.

These are the nominees for Best Novel.

Bad Cree, Jessica Johns, HarperCollins Canada

The Marigold, Andrew F. Sullivan, ECW Press

Moon of the Turning Leaves, Waubgeshig Rice, Random House Canada

Silver Nitrate, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Del Rey

The Valkyrie, Kate Heartfield, HarperVoyager

Featured Links - April 29, 2024

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

The marina has yet to wake up

• How AI mathematicians might finally deliver human-level reasoning (archive.ph link). "Artificial intelligence is taking on some of the hardest problems in pure maths, arguably demonstrating sophisticated reasoning and creativity – and a big step forward for AI."
• Here's the latest on H5N1—avian flu—and some resources tracking the virus. You may want to bookmark some of the sites mentioned in this article.
• SpaceX making progress on Starship in-space refueling technologies. "NASA says SpaceX is on track to demonstrate in-space refueling of Starship next year, a critical technology for returning humans to the lunar surface using that vehicle."
• The unspoken obnoxiousness of Google’s Gemini improvements. "Google's Gemini chatbot is seeing all sorts of upgrades on Android this week, but those advancements reveal a darker underlying reality."
• ‘In the US they think we’re communists!’ The 70,000 workers showing the world another way to earn a living. "The Basque Country’s Mondragón Corporation is the globe’s largest industrial co-operative, with workers paying for the right to share in its profits – and its losses. In return for giving more to their employer, they expect more back."
• Urbanist draws attention to city's design monstrosity in local community: 'So tired of pedestrian-hostile areas'. "A corner of TikTok is having a field day over a video bemoaning low-effort city planning, making life dangerous for pedestrians. The online community, especially through hashtags like #cityplanning, has been paving new avenues of communication for unsatisfied urbanites, especially in the United States."
• Restoring sight is possible now with optogenetics (gift link). "People suffering from macular degeneration, along with other diseases that impair sight, may soon benefit from gene therapy." I will have to talk to my ophthalmologist the next time I see him. It's probably too far down the road to help me though. 
• Plato's Burial Place and Details of His Last Night Revealed in Carbonized Scroll From Herculaneum. "Scientists have deciphered a document lost in the 79 AD eruption of Mount Vesuvius, using AI to read ink invisible to the naked eye."

Photo of the Week - April 28. 2024

I suppose that one of these days the city will come along and remove this tree, though perhaps not if it manages to produce a few leaves again this year. Taken with my Pixel 8 Pro.

Struggling tree on the beach

 

Saturday Sounds - Neil Young and Crazy Horse - San Diego, CA - 2024/04/24

Neil Young and Crazy Horse started their tour Wednesday night in San Diego and according to Rolling Stone they rocked like nobody's business. Judge for yourself. Here's a few reasonably good quality audience videos from the concert. The final chorus of Down by the River has some SERIOUS crunch. Play it loud!

Down by the River

Cortez the Killer

Powderfinger

Hey Hey My My

I'm Getting Worried About Bird Flu

I'm getting worried about bird flu (aka H5N1 avian influenza). Calling it bird flu is a bit of a misnomer now, as recent news makes it clear that it is spreading widely in mammals, now including cows. This has been happening for a while now, but it's getting widespread enough that the mainstream media is picking up on it.

The New York Times looks at recent large outbreaks (gift link), especially among sea lions, that have devastated colonies along the coast of North and South America. 

What they found was staggering: The virus had killed an estimated 17,400 seal pups, more than 95 percent of the colony’s young animals. 

 The catastrophe was the latest in a bird flu epidemic that has whipped around the world since 2020, prompting authorities on multiple continents to kill poultry and other birds by the millions. In the United States alone, more than 90 million birds have been culled in a futile attempt to deter the virus.

There has been no stopping H5N1. Avian flu viruses tend to be picky about their hosts, typically sticking to one kind of wild bird. But this one has rapidly infiltrated an astonishingly wide array of birds and animals, from squirrels and skunks to bottlenose dolphins, polar bears and, most recently, dairy cows.

The worry here, of course, is that the virus may mutate in a way that makes it easily transmissible among humans, where it has a mortality rate of at least 33 percent. 

In his Ground Truths blog, Eric Topol provides a more detailed summary of what we know about how H5N1 is spreading, starting with this.

Confirmation of H5N1 infected dairy cattle herds in 8 states. But the FDA report yesterday of commerical milk PCR positivity strongly supports that the cattle spread is far wider than these 8 states. Important to emphasize that (PCR) is testing for remnants of virus, not live virus, which would be unlikely with pasteurization. Other tests, assessing potential evidence for any live virus (egg viability and culture), are to be reported by the FDA going forward. Limited culture tests are all negative to date for any live virus in milk.

 Gizomdo has more details on the spread to cows and the response by the FDA.

Genetic evidence released to the outside science community on Sunday suggests that the initial spillover event from birds to cows may have occurred as early as December 2023, months before the first known cases were reported by local officials. And, coupled with the discovery of H5N1 in store-bought milk, it’s now looking likely that outbreaks are much more widespread than currently tallied.

“The dissemination to cows is far greater than we have been led to believe,” Eric Topol, founder of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, told CNN on Tuesday.

The major worry with avian influenza strains such as H5N1 is that they could someday develop the right assortment of mutations that would allow the virus to spread easily between humans while also causing severe illness in many. So, the longer it’s able to remain in cows, the greater the likelihood that some strains will adapt and become better at transmitting between mammals, humans included.

I'm not worried about finding genetic material from the virus in milk (pasteurization will kill any live virus), but I wouldn't drink unpasteurized milk (never a good idea even without the threat of H5N1). And keep a good stock of N95 masks around, even if you aren't using them now.

Windows 11 Annoyances

There may be people out there who love Windows 11 but I have yet to find one. The prevalent attitude online seems to range from grudging acceptance to outright hate. I fall into the first category but the more I use it, the more I wonder if I should take a closer look at Linux. 

Kyle Barr reviews computers for a living so he has to use Windows 11, but he's not happy about it. On Gizmodo*, he's compiled a list of the eight things he finds most annoying about Windows 11 along with some suggestions about how Microsoft could make it better.

Here are the first three items on his list:

• Microsoft Edge is a Dark Pattern Nightmare
• It’s Way Too Annoying to Change Default Apps
• There’s Constant Popups for Microsoft’s Services by Default

Some of his annoyances relate to his need to constantly install and reinstall Windows, something that most users won't have to do very often. Others, like his complaints about Microsoft Edge, will affect everyone. (Unless you live in the EU where you can uninstall it). 

I'm surprised the list isn't longer. For example, he doesn't mention the turgid mess that is File Explorer, or one of my pet peeves, how difficult it is to get Windows to resize text and apps away from the default settings. And then there's the Start menu, for which there is Start11, thank heavens. 

What's your biggest Windows 11 annoyance? 

* This comment is specific to Gizmodo (and several other sites) who have decided to use a slideshow format for articles like this and don't give users the option to view the article as one long page. Shame on you. 

 

Featured Links - April 22, 2024

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

A renovation instead of a new condo tower in Toronto

‘We’re a dead ship’: Hundreds of cargo ships lost propulsion in U.S. waters in recent years (gift link). "While the ship that felled the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore suffered a total blackout, such losses of engine power — including near bridges or ports — are hardly a one-off."

“Extremely Active” Atlantic Hurricane Season Could Be In Store This Year. "Forecasters have predicted that the season’s activity will be well above average." It's time to think about selling that Florida beachfront property.

WHO has published a report on updated terminology for disease transmission. Long Twitter thread from Prof. Jose-Luis Jimenez about the WHO and their reluctance to accept that COVID-19 is spread by aerosols. 

They quit liberal public schools. Now they teach kids to be anti-‘woke.’ (gift link). I find this incredibly disturbing. The rise of home schooling and the decline of the public education system is one of the major reasons the US is in trouble. 

Steganography used to hide Word and Excel attack. If you are using a version of Office from Office 2007 through Office 2016, make sure it is up-to-date. 

Substantial transmission of SARS-CoV-2 through casual contact in retail stores: Evidence from matched administrative microdata on card payments and testing. This is a smart piece of research. Keep wearing those masks! 

A new understanding of tinnitus and deafness could help reverse both (archive.ph link).  "Investigations of the paradoxical link between tinnitus and hearing loss have revealed a hidden form of deafness, paving the way to possible new treatments."

Exploring New Worlds: ‘Deep Sky’ And The Search For Life With The JWST. "The technological advancements and scientific potential of the JWST are also showcased in the IMAX documentary "Deep Sky." Directed by Nathaniel Kahn, the film brings the awe-inspiring images captured by JWST to the big screen, providing audiences with a visceral experience of the cosmos in unprecedented detail."

Photo of the Week - April 21, 2024

We had to take our dog to a vet clinic in central Toronto last week and I grabbed this shot of an apartment building as we drove by. It looks like some of the balconies need some work. Taken with my Pixel 8 Pro and the 5x zoom. 

Balcony curves

Saturday Sounds - The Black Crowes - Hapiness Bastards

This week's Saturday Sounds post is the latest album from The Black Crowes, Hopeless Bastards. I've always enjoyed their music though I've never seen one of their live shows. This album is about what you'd expect from them – crunchy, blues based Southern rock. Play it loud.

Photography Links - April 19, 2024

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

Spring trees

“Beyond Physics.” How Google Pushes Phone Photography Past Its Limits. "We visited Google’s top-secret Pixel design studio to talk to Isaac Reynolds, the man in charge of building cameras for Pixel devices." Six months in, I continue to be impressed by the quality of the photos I am getting with my Pixel 8 Pro. 

Fujifilm Launches New Service in Canada to Digitize Old Media. "Fujifilm has launched a service through its Printlife branding called Capture Canada, which offers consumers there the opportunity to digitize prints, film, slides, and videotapes by mailing them in." I may use this at some point. 

Scientists reveal SUV-sized camera that will change our grasp of space. "The United States' SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory is finishing the over 5.5-foot-tall, 6,200-pound (1.65-meter and 2,800-kilogram) LSST Camera, which will snap cosmic images at the much-anticipated Vera C. Rubin Observatory located in the lofty Chilean mountains. The lab posted new images online showing the over 12-foot-long (3.7 m) camera, with its imposing lens, in a clean room."

Long Before Photoshop, the Soviets Mastered the Art of Erasing People from Photographs — and History Too. "Like their counterparts in Hollywood, photographic retouchers in Soviet Russia spent long hours smoothing out the blemishes of imperfect complexions, helping the camera to falsify reality,” writes David King in the introduction to his book The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin’s Russia. “Stalin’s pockmarked face, in particular, demanded exceptional skills with the airbrush. But it was during the Great Purges, which raged in the late 1930s, that a new form of falsification emerged. The physical eradication of Stalin’s political opponents at the hands of the secret police was swiftly followed by their obliteration from all forms of pictorial existence."

World Photography Organisation announces professional finalists for Sony World Photography Awards 2024. "This year over 395,000 images from more than 220 countries and territories were submitted to professional categories, a new record for the 17-year-old competition. Organizers have whittled those entries down to three finalists and an assortment of shortlisted images in each of 10 categories: Architecture & Design, Creative, Documentary Projects, Environment, Landscape, Portfolio, Portraiture, Sport, Still Life and Wildlife & Nature."

Top tips on how to take great vertical landscape photos. "Landscapes can be portraits too. Our inspired vertical landscape photographer gives some wonderful insights into how."

How to Fill the Frame for Stunning Photos (A Quick Guide). "Photography is an art form where every detail counts, and one of the most powerful techniques at your disposal is filling the frame – that is, ensuring that your main subject takes up the majority of your photo."

 

A Couple of Useful Sites for Microsoft Word Users

Now that I'm retired, I don't use Microsoft Word as much as I did when I was working, when I sometimes would be spending entire days working with it (and sometimes against it). The last version I used at work was Word 2013; I'm now using the version that comes with Microsoft 365, which has many new features compared to Word 2013. 

For a several years, I subscribed to the WordTips Newsletter and bought some of their collections of tips and macros. I generally don't need to dig that deep into Word's idiosyncrasies now, but when I do the WordTips site has many useful articles that cover most of Word's features. If you're still using an older (pre-ribbon) version of Word, there's a separate site for help with those versions. (I would not recommend that these days because of security concerns; you would be better off switching to Libre Office). 

I am tempted to subscribe to WordTips again, just out of curiousity. 

What Maryland Police Thought About the Grateful Dead

It's no secret that the police generally did not like the Grateful Dead. There were exceptions (the police in Hamilton, Ontario were quite cool as I recall), but the travelling crowd of Deadheads that followed the band were often subjected to harassment.

Here's a report from 1991 posted on Reddit titled: The Grateful Dead And LSD A Study Into The Phenomenon by The Maryland State Police Criminal Intelligence Division.

Unfortunately, it's presented as a slideshow so I can't copy out excepts but in a nutshell it tries to make the case that Deadheads are LSD fiends and the parking lot scene is full of drug vendors. 

As several commenters pointed out, the parking lot scene was generally peaceful and there were more arrests at an average NFL football game. 

Featured Links - April 15, 2024

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

Living the life on the bay

Trump’s Brain Is Not Okay. "An expert’s view of Trump’s mental slide into dementia." I doesn't look good.

How a science fiction obsession led me to psychological war. Annalee Newitz talks about her forthcoming book about psychological warfare. There is a long discussion about the life of Paul Linebarger, aka the science fiction writer, Cordwainer Smith. 

What Chinese Outrage Over ‘3 Body Problem’ Says About China (gift link). "The Netflix series showcases one of the country’s most successful works of culture. Instead of demonstrating pride, social media is condemning it."

Crying Myself to Sleep on the Biggest Cruise Ship Ever. (archive link) "Seven agonizing nights aboard the Icon of the Seas." 

Drones are crowding Ukraine’s skies, largely paralyzing battlefield (gift link). "So many drones patrol the skies over Ukraine’s front lines — hunting for any signs of movement — that Ukrainian and Russian troops have little ability to move on the battlefield without being spotted, and blown up." The prevalence of drones on the front is changing the way war is waged.

Election Workers Are Drowning in Records Requests. AI Chatbots Could Make It Worse. "Experts worry that election deniers could weaponize chatbots to overwhelm and slow down local officials."

RocketStar Successfully Demonstrates FireStar™ Nuclear Fusion-Enhanced Pulsed Plasma Propulsion Drive. "The potentially groundbreaking device upgrades the company’s base water-fueled pulsed plasma thruster by injecting particles into the drive’s exhaust plume, resulting in a fusion reaction that dramatically increases the base drive’s power output."

There Appears to Be a Huge Problem with SpaceX's Starlink. "Did Elon Musk fib about the service breaking even."

Photo of the Week - April 14, 2024

This week's photo is of what appears to be a black hole in the centre of the lower level court at our local mall. I took this with my Pixel 8 Pro and boosted the colours slightly by using the Enhance filter in Google Photos. 

The black hole at the mall

 

Saturday Sounds - Somi - Zenzile: The Reimagination of Miriam Makeba

Earlier this week, I was listening to the jazz channel on SiriusXM and they played a song that really grabbed me by an artist who goes by the name of Somi. I found her on Spotify and am listening now to her latest album, Zenzile: The Reimagination of Miriam Makeba. 

Spotify has this to say about her: "Somi Kakoma is a Billboard charting and Grammy-nominated vocalist, composer, and writer. Born in Illinois to immigrants from Uganda and Rwanda, she is known in the jazz world simply as ‘Somi’. Having built a career of transatlantic storytelling, she is the first African woman ever nominated in any Grammy jazz category (2021 Best Jazz Vocal Album) for her live album Holy Room." 

I like African music and have seen several major African performers (among them Femi Kuti, Hugh Masekela, King Sunny Ade, and Miriam Makeba, the inspiration for this album). But I had never heard of Somi until now, and I am very glad that I have discovered her music. 

Zenzile is a lovely album and I recommend it highly, especially if you like jazz vocalists or African music. If you don't have time to listen to the whole album, I recommend 'Kwedini'; it's gorgeous. 

We're Toast 48

This post is a collection of links that support my increasingly strong feeling that the human race (or at least our technological civilization) is doomed. It is part of an ongoing series of posts.

During totality, looking towards the edge of the shadow

• Becoming Plastic People on a Plastic Planet. "Plastic pollution linked to increases in inflammatory bowel disease, cancers, obesity, infertility and heart disease."
• As obesity rises, Big Food and dietitians push ‘anti-diet’ advice. "General Mills warns of ‘food shaming’; dietitian influencers promote junk foods and discourage weight loss efforts."
• ‘Simply mind-boggling’: world record temperature jump in Antarctic raises fears of catastrophe. "An unprecedented leap of 38.5C in the coldest place on Earth is a harbinger of a disaster for humans and the local ecosystem." It's past the time to be worried; it's time to be scared. This should be front page headline news.
• The LLMentalist Effect: how chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic’s con. 
• The urban-rural death divide is getting alarmingly wider for working-age Americans. ":The cause is unclear, but poverty and worsening health care access are likely factors."
• Tenth consecutive monthly heat record alarms and confounds climate scientists. "If the anomaly does not stabilise by August, ‘the world will be in uncharted territory’, says climate expert."

How the World Dodged a Linux Bullet

A couple of weeks ago the world dodged a bullet. Not a giant asteroid or a super-sized solar flare, but hidden backdoor in a widely used Linux software program. If it hadn't been detected by an eagle-eyed Microsoft software developer, virtually every Linux-based computer in the world could have been at the mercy of a hacker or hacking group.

Steve Gibson, host of the long-running Security Now! podcast, discussed the exploit at length in episode 968. This is just a bit of what he had to say (from the show's transcript):

So the runner-up title for today's podcast, which I decided, I settled on "A Cautionary Tale," was "A Close Call for Linux" because it was only due to some very small mistakes made by an otherwise very clever malicious developer that the scheme was discovered.  What was discovered was that by employing a diabolically circuitous route, the system SSH daemon, which is to say the SSH incoming connection accepting server for Linux, would have had a secret and invisible backdoor installed in it that would have then allowed someone, anyone, anywhere, using a specific RSA public key, to authenticate and login to any Linux system on the planet and also provide their own code for it to run.  So to say that this would have been huge hardly does it justice.

In other words, had the exploit not been discovered and gone into widespread distribution, the owner of the exploit could have shut down every affected computer on the internet with a single command.

The exploit was serious enough that it rated coverage in the New York Times. 

The saga began earlier this year, when Mr. Freund was flying back from a visit to his parents in Germany. While reviewing a log of automated tests, he noticed a few error messages he didn’t recognize. He was jet-lagged, and the messages didn’t seem urgent, so he filed them away in his memory.

But a few weeks later, while running some more tests at home, he noticed that an application called SSH, which is used to log into computers remotely, was using more processing power than normal. He traced the issue to a set of data compression tools called xz Utils, and wondered if it was related to the earlier errors he’d seen.

(Don’t worry if these names are Greek to you. All you really need to know is that these are all small pieces of the Linux operating system, which is probably the most important piece of open-source software in the world. The vast majority of the world’s servers — including those used by banks, hospitals, governments and Fortune 500 companies — run on Linux, which makes its security a matter of global importance.)

Like other popular open-source software, Linux gets updated all the time, and most bugs are the result of innocent mistakes. But when Mr. Freund looked closely at the source code for xz Utils, he saw clues that it had been intentionally tampered with.

In particular, he found that someone had planted malicious code in the latest versions of xz Utils. The code, known as a backdoor, would allow its creator to hijack a user’s SSH connection and secretly run their own code on that user’s machine.

I highly recommend listening to Gibson's podcast, or at least the last half, where he discusses the exploit and some of its implications. They're not good.

What has just been discovered present in Linux demonstrates that the same asymmetric principle applies to large-scale software development, where just one bad seed, just one sufficiently clever malicious developer, can have an outsized effect upon the security of everything else.  Okay, now, I'm going to give everyone the TL;DR first because this is just so cool and so diabolically clever.

How do you go about hiding malicious code in a highly scrutinized open source environment which worships code in its source form, so that no one can see what you've done?  You focus your efforts upon a compression library project.  Compression library projects contain test files which are used to verify the still-proper behavior of recently modified and recompiled source code.  These compression test files are, and are expected to be, opaque binary blobs.  So you very cleverly arrange to place your malicious binary code into one of the supposedly compressed compression test files for that library, where no one would ever think to look.

I mean, again, one of the points here that I didn't put into the show notes is unfortunately, once something is seen to have been done, people who wouldn't have had this idea originally, you know, wouldn't have the original idea, they're like, oh.  That's interesting.  I wonder what mischief I can get up to?  So we may be seeing more of this in the future.

Let's hope he's wrong. 

 

Totality

Toronto and the eastern GTA was just to the north of the path of totality for today's eclipse, so we drove east to Port Hope in the hope that we might have clear skies. Port Hope was just inside the path of totality, but the sky was overcast and the sun not visible at all behind a solid bank of cloud. Still, it was a cool and eerie experience. It was strange hearing the birds coming in to nest as it got dark and then realizing it wasn't really night as it got brighter again 

These pictures were taken right around the short period of totality (maybe a minute). I used manual exposure mode on my phone as otherwise it would have made the scene brighter than it looked to the eye. These are pretty much exactly the way it looked. 

Looking southwest as totality started

Looking northeast during totality

Featured Links - April 8, 2024

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

The hydro marsh

• Throngs of Himself. "Paul Linebarger wrote science fiction as Cordwainer Smith. His multiple selves did not stop there." Long and fascinating article about an author who deserves to be better known.
• The Far Right Is Crawling With Eclipse Conspiracy Theories. "Everyone has lost their goddamn minds." I guess this is nothing new and I'm not surprised that Alex Jones and all would have fit perfectly into a Babylonian mindset.
• HarperCollins made a tiny tweak to its book design—and has saved thousands of trees as a result. "The publisher is reducing the number of pages in its books by tweaking their fonts and layout." When I was working as a technical writer, I always tried to reduce the page count in long documents, though my font choices were more limited than those at HarperCollins.
• Breakthrough in prime number theory demonstrates primes can be predicted. In terms of significance, this is the mathematical equivalent of Einstein's theory of relativity, assuming their research is verified. The examples in the paper look convincing, but the formal math is far beyond me. However, I have seen reports that people haven't been able to confirm some of the examples, so this may be one of those too good to be true bits of research. Remember cold fusion?
• A Vigilante Hacker Took Down North Korea’s Internet. Now He’s Taking Off His Mask. 'As “P4x,” Alejandro Caceres single-handedly disrupted the internet of an entire country. Then he tried to show the US military how it can—and should—adopt his methods.'
• Make Beautiful Things: The Aesthetic Drive Behind Rocket Lab’s Rise in Aerospace. "Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck has some unique approaches to innovation—and they seem to be working." Their next rocket is really interesting. 
• Buried rivers flow under Canadian cities, hidden in a labyrinth of tunnels and sewer pipes. "Will we revive them or let the waterways fade from memory? Jaela Bernstien and Emily Chung uncover hidden rivers across Canada.‍" This is an excellent interactive article. 
• Lawsuit filed against LG over appliance malfunction due to allegedly faulty parts. "It's a tremendous hassle. I think they should make it right." We have one of these fridges; I am keeping my fingers crossed we aren't one of the ones who have a problem.

Photo of the Week - April 7, 2024

This week's photo is a picture of our cat, CJ, taken with the wide angle lens of my Pixel 8 Pro as he crouched on my chest; something he does most nights as we go to bed. If he was a mouser, it would be the last thing the mouse saw.

CJ

 

Saturday Sounds - Led Zeppelin at Knebworth 1979

One of the regrets of my concert-going life is that I never got to see Led Zeppelin. I almost did in 1970. The brother of one of my university residence friends had a bunch of tickets to see them in Montreal and a some of us were going to take the train to Montreal to see them. Unfortunately, my friend decided to leave early and hitchhike there and got killed on the highway by a drunk driver. 

So this week's music treat is a tribute to Jim Hawley who died much to young around this time in 1970. It's a video of Led Zeppelin's concert at Knebworth in 1979. It's pro shot so my guess is that it was filmed either for a concert movie or TV broadcast. The sound is a bit thin but quite listenable and the performance is vintage Zep. Enjoy.

Singapore and Cities of the Future

The Reactor Magazine (formerly Tor.com) has published an interesting article about SF writer Arkady Martine and her reactions to visiting Singapore, a city that has sometimes been described as a "city of the future". Martine, the author of the Hugo winning novels A Memory Called Empire and A Desolation Called Peace (two books that I very much liked), is a trained city planner, something that comes across in her fiction. 

The article goes into some detail about her reactions to Singapore and how cities have been represented in science fiction. (Singapore has been used as the setting for several movies and TV shows including the third season of Westworld. 

“I don’t feel like you can sanitize a city, that it’s possible to do so,” she says. “Cities inevitably complicate… they’re full of a lot of people very close together; it’s the best thing about them and the worst thing about them at the same time.” And so in this dense mess of humanity, spontaneity and practicality tend to arise in unexpected ways – the use and reuse of space by its actual inhabitants rather than its designers. “So can a writer write a city of the future that isn’t authentic? Of course. If you’re thinking about designing an actual one, as soon as you’ve got it, it’s going to be used by people in it and it will develop forms of authenticity anyway.”

Martine, who has spent years living in multiple cities around the world, is still impressed by Singapore’s futuristic architecture, especially in the way greenery and nature are functionally incorporated into buildings to improve ventilation, air circulation, and heat management. “I’d only read about it in theory, I hadn’t seen it, and I’m really glad I got to,” she adds. “It’s an interesting place, it’s different than others I’ve been in.” She doesn’t feel like Singapore is a definitive city of the future or a “science fictional” place in the way that it is sometimes discussed, in games of online broken telephone about the payoff between the will of a one-party state and having omnipresent “smart” future-forward infrastructure. I agree with her that being here is easy; it is easy to be told what to do on the train or how to take the bus, where to stand or buy a ticket, but yet, Martine also finds it more complicated than the cities of her childhood. 

 

John Sinclair, RIP

Noted with sadness, John Sinclair has died at the age of 82. He was a major figure in the Detroit music scene when I was in university. The MC5, who he managed, were THE Detroit band at the time. If you want to hear some of the loudest, most intense, and political music ever recorded, check out their first album, Kick Out the Jams. Probably more important, he was a leader in the movement to legalize marijuana, something that still has to fully happen in the US.

Sinclair was arrested in 1969 and sentenced to 10 years in prison for possession of two joints (this was his third possession charge). This served as the bedrock for his and others to protest. John Lennon and Yoko Ono famously attended a 1971 freedom rally in Ann Arbor in solidarity, which also included Stevie Wonder, Allen Ginsberg, and Bob Seger among 15,000 people. Two days later, Sinclair was freed from jail.

He lived to see marijuana become legal in his home state in 2018 and in several across the country. He also had a hand working in the alternative press, writing for Detroit’s Fifth Estate, DownBeat and founding the Ann Arbor Sun.

The 2024 Hugo Award Nominees

The finalists for the 2024 Hugo Awards for the best science fiction and fantasy of 2023 have been announced. The awards are nominated and voted on by members of the World Science Fiction convention which will be held in Glasgow, Scotland later this year. 

These are the finalists for Best Novel:

The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, Shannon Chakraborty (Harper Voyager; Harper Voyager UK)

The Saint of Bright Doors, Vajra Chandrasekera (Tordotcom)

Translation State, Ann Leckie (Orbit US; Orbit UK)

Starter Villain, John Scalzi (Tor US; Tor UK)

Some Desperate Glory, Emily Tesh (Tordotcom; Orbit UK)

Witch King, Martha Wells (Tordotcom)

I was disappointed to see that Annalee Newitz's novel, The Terraformers, didn't make the list. I've not read any of the finalists, though I will probably pick up Starter Villain at some point.

Locus Magazine has the full list. 

Featured Links - April 2, 2024

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

Two lonely swans

• A Brief Guide to the Fiction of Vernor Vinge. "From his earliest novels to his magnum opus, Vinge crafted inventive, insightful works of hard science fiction." I can't recommend A Fire Upon the Deep highly enough. 
• This Woman Deconstructs 100-Year-Old Books To Restore Them (YouTube link). "Author, educator and book restorer Sophia Bogle has nerves of steel: one slip of the hand and a century-old first edition book could be ruined. Come inside her workshop as she breaks down the amazing deconstruction, revitalization, and reassembly that goes into her history preserving speciality."
• Your Air Fryer Is Just a Little Oven That Blows. "I'm sorry, but everything you know about your little, windy countertop oven is a lie." We don't have one, and as the article points out, our convection oven would probably work quite well for a lot of things you would do in an air fryer.
• Long-Lost Bombs From the World Wars Are Increasingly Likely to Blow Up, Scientists Say. "Live ordnance buried and forgotten after past conflicts may be become more sensitive to impacts as they age."
• Early arrival of spring in Ontario this year has screwed so many things up. "Even if the trend has meant some surprise (and very welcomed) patio days weeks ahead of schedule, it's also led to serious and noticeable impacts on local ecosystems." And not just in Ontario. 
• ‘We are essentially in a new Gilded Age’: As workers get laid off, CEOs and shareholders gobble up hundreds of billions in profits. "Taking a modern-century spin on “Let them eat cake,” shareholders are having the whole cake, and eating it too. It’s no shock the boardroom is able to stay above the fray as wealthy members are more equipped to weather economic downturns. But it turns out CEOs and shareholders are walking away with an even greater slice of profits than one might think." The emphasis on maximizing shareholder value has always bothered me, and don't get me started on the ridiculous compensation of CEOs. 
• One Of The World’s Most Important Ocean Currents Really Is Slowing Down. "It’s what oceanographers have feared, but had difficulty proving." Consequences include a colder Europe and warmer tropics.
• Climate models can’t explain 2023’s huge heat anomaly — we could be in uncharted territory. "Taking into account all known factors, the planet warmed 0.2 °C more last year than climate scientists expected. More and better data are urgently needed."

Movie and TV Reviews - March 2024

Movies and TV shows that Nancy and I watched in March. I do these posts mainly so I can keep track of what we've been watching, so the reviews are cursory. 

Movies

• Dune Part 2: See this post. (IMAX)
• American Fiction: A comedy about Blackness and the state of American publishing. Funny and sharp. Oscar nominee. (Amazon Prime)
• Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour. The staging and performances are totally over the top, but I can't really connect with the music. A more up-front vocal mix would have helped. I'll have to listen to some of the albums to get a better handle on her music, which I haven't paid much attention to. (Disney+)
• Road House (2024): If you liked the original, you'll probably enjoy this one too. It's a decent Saturday night popcorn flick but nothing remarkable. (Amazon Prime)
• Get Back: We finally finished watching this and enjoyed most of it. There are some parts that you would have to be a hard-core Beatles fan to enjoy, but it does show just how incredibly talented they were. Watching how songs like Get Back developed from a riff and a few words was fascinating. The rooftop concert was riveting. (Disney+)
• Road House (1989): Of course we had to watch the first movie, which I preferred to the remake, mainly because it had Jeff Healy as one of the bar's musicians. (Amazon Prime)

TV Shows

• Unforgotten (seasons 2-5): One of the better British police procedurals. Gritty, intense, and with more complex plots than usual. (BritBox)
  
• Vera (season 13): This one's getting a little long in the tooth but it's still enjoyable. (BritBox)
• Antiques Roadshow (season 28): It is really remarkable what people bring into this show, even in places like Anchorage that you wouldn't expect to be a hotbed of anitques. (PBS)
• Criminal Record: Another British police procedural. The story is a bit implausible but it's worth watching to see Peter Capaldi playing the nasty cop but with far more depth than you might expect.  (Apple TV+)
• Whitechapel (seaons 1-3): A British police procedural set in east London. The first season involves a copycat Jack the Ripper serial killer. Not the best of the recent shows but watchable. (Amazon Prime)