Wilbur

Danny Sullivan ranks the Dune books by un-filmability:

https://defector.com/dune-novels-ranked-by-unfilmability

8 hours ago, Ran said:

Sugar is intriguing, neo-noir but everything I've read repeats that it has a "genre-bending science fiction" element that is pretty wholly invisible as far as this trailer goes. Hmm... The most interesting thing, IMO, is that executive producer and director of the show is Fernando Meirelles, who directed the phenomenal City of God and also The Constant Gardener. 

That certainly makes it an intriguing entertainment option.  The trailer looked good, but science fiction as well?  Count me in.

One thing that the USN had better be on top of is the way that the Ukrainians have been so successful in attacking naval resources without any real Navy of their own.

Drone attacks on Russian Black Sea elements could very easily be replicated on American ships off Yemen pretty shortly, given how Ukraine has shown the world how to do it.

8 hours ago, Loge said:

The Russian propaganda makes a big fuss about their discussion of how to destroy the Kherch bridge.  

Who is the Russian propaganda supposed to influence?  I can't imagine any Americans giving a damn if the Ukrainians turn the Kerch Bridge into metallic fragments.  Do Europeans care?  Why?

I derived a lot of pleasure from reading Vonda N. McIntyre's Dreamsnake for the first time a few weeks ago, so I picked up another audio version of one of her books, Superluminal.  This audiobook was read by the consistent Rachel Evans.

Both of these books impress me with McIntyre's skill as a writer, although Superluminal is a very different kind of work.  In it, McIntyre combines several different flavors of science fiction, gathering some high-quality threads from Golden Age, New Wave, Hard, and even some feeling of proto-cyberpunk and definite early eco-SciFi.  I have no idea (other than some truly terrible book covers) why I have never read any of her work previously.

In Superluminal, she introduces a character who engages in the sort of meandering exploration of a very far future human society in the vein of a Jack Vance To Live Forever or Maske: Thaery sort of culture.  Another character is also introduced, and they form a relationship within the weird society, and the first ten percent of the novel is this growing relationship and unhurriedly exploring the culture that the two characters inhabit.  Then the book introduces a third character in a sort of ecological warfare SciFi situation for another 5% of the plot, and we explore that world.  Although I can't put my finger on why, this section brings to mind the sensibility of Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood in a positive sense.

So 15% of the book is taken up with this sort of conversation and world-building, but nothing really seems to be happening and who the protagonist is and what he or she wants is unclear, so I am wondering whether I should continue with it.  The writing is good, however, and the setting has some strong cyberpunk political undertones, so I stick with it.

Then all three characters suddenly get their marching orders and travel separately and then together, and the plot is both Golden Age space exploration and New Wave navel-gazing and some hard science mathematics all mixed together, and the Action quotient fires way up there, in a very James Blish-writes-a-Star-Trek-novel sort of fashion.  I am not sure what the stakes really are, because the brief New Wave-style navel-gazing is hard for me to keep in focus, but the characters have agency and are truly likeable or dislikeable as necessary for the plot to work.  And now they all have a sense of urgency and take action to get to where they think they need to be.  (Trying to write this without spoilers.)

Now, reading the previous three paragraphs, you wouldn't think that this novel could be wrapped up in a satisfactory manner than makes the reader happy to have spent that effort, particularly in the first portion of the book.  But Vonda McIntyre does indeed bring the book to a climax that makes sense and is satisfying.  And once again, she leaves the reader with a sense of wanting to know more about the world and the people she writes about.  These books are tricky to report on without spoiling future first-time readers, so let's say that some hidden and unexpected gems do appear to reward the careful reader.  I had to go back and re-listen to a specific chapter again.

This is another book where McIntyre deals with human sexuality in an extremely mature fashion, much more so than the New Wave authors had done in the decade prior.  You can see why Robert Heinlein dedicated Friday to her (among others), as he probably wished that he could deal with sexuality in his books with as much forthrightness and in such an open manner.  Maybe most men are just too prone to engage in wish-fulfillment when they address sex in their stories.  For McIntyre, though, sex is portrayed a valuable thing, not the motivator for the characters, but as a means of communication and intimacy.  Very positive stuff, and not cringey.

Vonda McIntyre was a writer worthy of her Hugo and Nebula awards based on these two books.

22 hours ago, NickGOT456 said:

I heard the 1960s American space race inspired many American youth to go into science or engineering and those children ended up giving us the 1990s tech boom.

I want to say one more thing about this 1960s-70s era generation of leaders, specifically and anecdotally.  Your contention seems right on to me, particularly in America.

My own career roadmap ran through the influences of numerous managers and executives who lived through this era, and although they were all very different individually and personally, almost all of them had one shared interest.  That interest was to foster science and exploration, and they manifested it by sharing their knowledge with younger, less experienced co-workers and encouraging, even mandating, outside involvement for their subordinates, thereby inculcating us with a similar ideal.

Some of these outside areas of exploratory focus included teaching weaving, math and cryptography on the Navajo Nation, leading a rocketry club at the local high school, coaching various sports at local schools, leading birdwatching trips for young kids, teaching / mentoring beekeepers, and various direct-action charitable endeavors (not United Way, but the real thing).  An eclectic bunch of hobbies, you might say, but the through-line for all of them is that they used their subject matter expertise to aid others to learn more about how the world works or to gain a foot up on their steps to an improved situation, very much in line with the spirit of JFK's most famous speech.

So for instance, for four years at Motorola I had a primary boss who enacted this paternalistic view of forcing us outside our narrow job responsibilities to participate in and contribute to the community.  Once a quarter we would shuck our work clothes and go drive forklifts and unload and re-pack stuff at St. Vincent de Paul as a department for a day or two to help them clear out backlogs in their warehouse.  My individual personal commitment under him had an agendum of "public presentation and guidance to educational groups", and as I was promoted up through management, this ended up with me addressing the MBA students once a semester at ASU.  I would talk for an hour and then answer questions about how to create and document a personal career roadmap, but also evangelize them on the idea that spreadsheets are not the ultimate driver of decision-making, and that they should always look to their people first.

This ASU address also gave me connections with the high-potential MBA students, a couple of whom I hired straight out of school, which was very different from the usual highly-experienced profile of my hires.  Of those two students, today one is a group CFO of a technology MNC and the other is the co-owner and president of a regional service business.

By contrast, I subsequently worked for a single year at what was at the time the world's largest OSAT.  The day after one of these sessions, the corporate treasurer, a young Jewish MBA originally from a New York consulting firm whose office was next to mine, asked what I had been doing.  When I told her, she upbraided me for "wasting time on unprofitable activities."  She would not listen to the idea that it was our responsibility as leaders to help the future generations.  To her, all of that was useless, since it didn't represent a positive outcome on the quarterly income statement, and she didn't care at all what happened in the vague future when the company would find it difficult to recruit and retain talented staff.  None of that could be calculated in her bonus equation.  Utter disdain for the idea would best describe her attitude.

Leaving that company was one of the easiest and most refreshing decisions I ever made.  Also, please note that they are no longer the world's largest OSAT, nor the process technology leader.  That young lady did become their CFO for a while, though, although correlation is not necessarily causation.

So your idea that the leaders of that generation had a paternalistic intention to engage in science and exploration and encourage us, the next generation, to do the same very much represents my personal experience.  My generation included a lot of leaders who, as Altherion noted, didn't give a damn about anything outside of this quarter's bonus money and pleasing those who held the purse strings.

11 hours ago, AncalagonTheBlack said:

Darwizzy! Are you not entertained? 

Gakpo is absolute poo! He's in danger of becoming a squad player if he continues to be poo!

Is Gakpo carrying an injury, or is he just not meshing with the players out their on the field this past month?

He seemed to fit very well with the Mane / Bobby / Jota / Salah group of forwards, and he has had good games with both Diaz and Nunez, but he really has seemed out of synch the last several games.

Also, a lot of the corporate drivers for students to go into STEM were killed off at the beginning of the century.

Old line, engineering-driven companies like Allied Signal (now Honeywell), Sun Microsystems, Motorola, Boeing, and IBM had their CEO positions taken from leaders who sought organic growth and market growth via technology ideation, and replaced by leaders who sought the approval of Wall Street and engaged in financial engineering instead.

These companies, the semiconductor ODMs, and others that shared that engineering, research and design-driven ethos, used to give engineers and researchers sabbaticals to extend their personal studies or to volunteer in schools.  I had high school classes taught for at least nine weeks of a semester by guys who worked at Monolithic Memories, Borland Software, and Motorola, and their war stories inspired me to also go into the semiconductor industry.

But this all changed.  When CEOs like Ed Zander and Sanjay Jha sat in the chair at Motorola, with one hand they closed down the Physical Science Research Labs, shuttered Motorola University, parted out the sectors, groups, and businesses and sold them off to General Dynamics, Continental AG, etc. or spun them off into companies like Freescale Semiconductor, On Semiconductor, etc. and "returned the proceeds to shareholders" until Motorola is practically now just a brand name used by Chinese companies.  Inventing the technology in the iPhone for Apple, a terrible customer, was a lot of work, while buying back stock and selling off business can be done in a conference room very profitably for executives.  With the other hand they gutted the internals of Motorola and stopped the community outreach that allowed R&D and engineers to teach and volunteer.

Same thing happened when Scott McNealy was succeeded by Jonathan Schwartz at Sun.  So much of how we interact with the online world today originated in Santa Clara on that lovely, lovely campus, where amazing engineers built the tools of tomorrow.  But Sun stopped innovating, reduced their investment in both R&D and outreach, and milked their cash cows to death.

Boeing - watch any one of the hundreds of videos about how Boeing went from a leader in aerospace innovation to a company trying to meet Wall Street's quarterly expectations by iterating on the 737, an airframe designed in the 1960s.  Boeing's presence in local school around Seattle is also nil these days.  How is that working out?

IBM was probably the leader in abandoning its leadership position in ideation and community involvement under Louis V. Gerstner.  Formerly one of the two massive, runaway leaders (along with Motorola) in internally-generated patent portfolios, with an R&D budget to match and a strong culture of community involvement up until Akers left the CEO suite, Gerstner, a banker and McKinsey alumni, changed the focus.  No longer would IBM invest in long-term, capital-intensive functions like materials science research for advancing semiconductor silicon on insulates.  Instead, IBM made the switch to services and stock buybacks.  Palmisano, Rometty and Krishna have all doubled down on that choice, and I bet no one on the board has ever seen an IBM employee in a classroom or a school club talking about engineer design.  And when you send out an RFP today, the team IBM sends to market their solutions is no longer the A-team.

Wall Street, McKinsey, and the MBAs with decision-making skills dependent on spreadsheets don't give a good god damn about organic growth, community involvement, or ideation as the key to success.  Corporations who genuflect to the unholy trinity will never "waste their resources" investing in the future of engineering.

Here endeth the lesson.

30 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

Funnily I saw the last 10 minutes of the Lynch version last night. Wow that is a terrible ending.

They fixed it in the re-edit.

5 hours ago, Ran said:

The cyberpunk anthology Mirrorshades has been made available for free online by the authors. Pretty great list of writers, including Gibson, Greg Bear, Pat Cadigan, and Bruce Sterling (who edited it).

That was a tremendous collection of stories and writers when it came out.  Back in the days of Internet 1.0, you still had to use books like this to see who the authors were who were writing in the genre unless you were hooked in to the Con circuit.

The Dune 2 trailer has been played in front of every movie we have seen this year, so we have seen it probably seven times.

The movie itself (Dune 2) may be amazing, but boy howdy is that trailer boring, particularly when it comes up right after the Mad Max Furiosa trailer or something like that.

It will be interesting to see if the Dune 2 can exceed the Re-Edition version in terms of story and pacing.  The non-director's cut improved on the original one hundred times.

Liverpool played like a team, while Chelsea continued with the theme of seemingly not having much familiarity with each other out on the pitch.

The Chelsea players individually looked stronger and more skilled, as demonstrated by the ease with which they would dispossess the youngsters in the second half and extra time.  But then on breakaways, I think they failed to make the obvious switch of the field three of four times.  At least one of those, had they distributed the ball correctly, should have been a goal.

Also, does Chillwell always chirp at the opposition players all game long like that?  Very unattractive behavior, although in today's officiating environment, he can probably do so without any retribution.

It was interesting how, no matter how inexperienced and young the players were that Liverpool fed into the game, they fit into the overall team effort.  No one was hiding or carried as a passenger, which is a tribute to the preparation at the Liverpool Academy.

6 hours ago, Gaston de Foix said:

...Currently stuck on what to read and open to trying something new/classic in sci-fi as I'm much less well read there. 

Basically looking for something that holds up to the Expanse.  I've read the Salvation Trilogy and enjoyed it (but had to skim read large parts tbh).  I downloaded some samples of genre classics (Consider Phlebas, Revelation Space, Exordia) but nothing seemed to click. I've looked at the recommendations threads too.  Suggestions please?

Another possibility you might enjoy is Walter Jon Williams' Dread Empire's Fall.

On 2/22/2024 at 6:29 PM, Jaxom 1974 said:

Oh I occasionally listen to the Sirus XM station dedicated to old radio programming.

 

Are you able to listen through an entire program at your own convenience, or do you need to start listening at a set time on Sirius XM?

3 hours ago, Werthead said:

I'm starting to think those unconfirmed stories that Ukraine has bootstrapped something to increase Patriot's range by 10-15% have something to them. Either that or the Russians are being really stupid with putting irreplaceable assets so close to their interdiction range.

Why not both?

4 hours ago, kissdbyfire said:

The persistence and maybe even worsening of this antivaxx trend is very discouraging. Not to mention completely idiotic and incredibly selfish. 

On a mostly unrelated note - and I say mostly b/c all this stuff connects through stupidity - conservatives in the US apparently want to ban recreational sex. At least this brilliant idea is one that will likely hurt them more than anyone else. 

https://www.alternet.org/experts-gop-end-recreational/

"Conservatives have to lead the way in restoring sex to its true purpose, & ending recreational sex & senseless use of birth control pills."

Honestly, these weirdos suddenly showed up and utterly destroyed the party of small government.

As Republicans, we should be standing for less government interference in the private lives of individuals.  Not printing up manifestos that declare all non-creative sex as sodomy.

The last thing I want is Ted Cruz peering into my, or anyone else's, bedroom and suggesting that what we are up to isn't appropriate.  Anyone subscribing to this sort of nonsense has truly forsaken the ideals of Eisenhower - they are the RINO.

This week I listened to Robert Colton's Pompeii: A Tale of Murder in Ancient Rome, specifically the audiobook read by Dan Curtis.

The audiobook is well-produced, and Dan Curtis is a fine reader.  The story is well-written, and if you ever wanted to understand more about how the larger Roman society operated on a day-to-day basis in The City as well as the surrounding towns, this is the book for you.

I sort of enjoyed the book, because the portrayal is both convincing and well-researched.  Spend a month or so in Rome, and then another couple of months in Pompeii.  The characters in the book are also fully realized, and the setting is also clear to the reader.  Good stuff.

I had some problems with it, though.  First of all, the protagonist is an idiot, and his cringey lack of agency are difficult to stomach.  Secondly, the murder mystery is irrelevant to him.  I could not figure out why he and his companion spent so much time and energy uncovering the reasons for a murder and some other murder.  It wasn't relevant to them or their needs or What The Protagonist Wants.  Perhaps I was distracted and missed the motivation, but I never had any strong idea WHY they pursued the issue.

If the second book pops up, I will give it a try, since Colton knows how to write and how Romans lived.  I will hope that he has a better explanation as to why main characters do stuff.

2 hours ago, Makk said:

There are claims that Ukraine has shot down a second A50. Wild if true, Russia has like 5 or 6 of them.

They certainly are getting their money's worth, playing peekaboo with those Patriot missile systems.

5 hours ago, Zorral said:

Woo -- look at those 10,551 comments!  Many of them comments from people who lost dear ones to measles or nearly died themselves or have had lasting impairment from measle,s

Florida surgeon general defies science amid measles outbreak

Shared/gift link --

https://wapo.st/49Gxfj9

 

Another pair of dipsticks, this time from back East rather than Europe, visited The Valley of the Sun this month while suffering from measles, and they exposed everyone who was in the same locales down in the East Valley - restaurants, patios, patisseries, bars, stores, barbecues, etc. across Queen Creek, Chandler, Gilbert, Tempe and Mesa.

Now the wait to see how many Anti-Vaxxers who live in these areas suddenly wish that they had, in fact, gotten the MMR jab for themselves, or more likely, their children.  This period of hushed wait and nervous discussions on Nextdoor/Facebook is eerily reminiscent of the week or so between the vanloads of Orthodox Jews arriving here in Scottsdale from NYC after the first news of Covid on the East Coast, and when Covid started showing up everywhere all at once up and down the city.  Lots of the same silly rumors mixed with irrelevant facts and crazy brave talk.

My neighbor, a doctor at Mayo Clinic, is so discouraged and downhearted about the whole thing, because he says that they know it will spread like crazy and cause serious issues among the unvaccinated.  He says he is afraid it will just be like Covid redux.

9 hours ago, SeanF said:

Piers Anthony has something of a fixation with … “cross-generational relationships.”

I remember one reviewer described him as “ a rancid pervert, or at the least, a very dirty old man.”

I think the same way.  The further into his career he got, the more his books portrayed inappropriate behaviors and relationships.

His books always had sexual themes and casual misogyny, but they got weirder and crossed some lines with regard to underage characters.

The constant, creeping expansion of internationals is eventually going to push top players out of their national teams.  And good riddance from my perspective, as international competitions don't hold my interest outside of the CAF - they are just opportunities for players to bring injuries and exhaustion back to their clubs.

Consider the way that Old Time Radio (OTR) would have selections from Crime, Thriller, Adventure, Science Fiction, Western, Mystery, Kids' Adventure, Soap Operas, etc.  Many pulp novels found a second life on the radio in the 1940s and 50s.

Quite a large number of Golden Age Sci-Fi was recast at OTR broadcasts; for example, this Dimension X's radio play of The Potters of Firsk by Jack Vance.  It seems to me that one of the shows, maybe X Minus One, had some sort of arrangement to broadcast radio plays of stuff that appeared previously in Galaxy magazine.

As an elementary age kid, the local college radio station would replay OTR stuff on Thursday nights.  If I hustled home from baseball practice, I could listen to the show while I bathed.  At that age, The Lone Ranger was my strong preference, with but I also remember lots of Noir stories that I didn't really comprehend, except for the inevitable gunshots at the end.

Specifically, I can remember they started in on Robert Heinlein's Space Cadet series, but we moved overseas before I got to finish listening to it.  

There are so many OTR broadcasts available online, some requiring payment, but others for free, that French DJs (Birdy Nam Nam, DJ Pone, etc.) started remixing it into their sets in the 2000s, the UK scene previously had this sort of thing, and here in the States we got stuff like this.

6 hours ago, Alytha said:

I've read a sample of The Portable Door by Tom Holt, and I thought it sounded like fun, but I'm afraid that there will be the seemingly inevitable romance (or attempt at it) between Paul and Sophie, and I'm not in the mood for that.

Has anybody read it and can advise?

I struggled through the first third of it and then laid it aside, for much those same reasons.

Plus, Tom Holt's office stories portray a world people by characters devoid of basic professional behavior, so that also hinders my enjoyment.  I would fire almost all of those characters within a week for their inappropriate language, inability to understand the critical path, and lack of focus - I don't want to spend reading time with them.

2 hours ago, Zorral said:

These very short books, in which protag and his ensemble don't ever get too disturbed, are perfect for fone/tablet reading while traveling --

Pearce, Michael. Mamur Zapt 19 book series -- first volume in 1988, last one 2016. Starts in 1903, pre-WWI, Anglo Egypt Cairo. The title is the head of the Secret Police/Intelligence, who is our protagonist, Gareth Cadwallader Owen, a Welsh army captain.

Michael Pearce's Mamur Zapt books are tremendous in that he absolutely gets the tone and worldview of the multi-ethnic post- (or nearly-post) colonial environment of places like Cairo.  His portrayal of what it is like to live in <an area with multiple, competing, distinct ethnic, cultural, and religious groups in an environment with different legal codes operant depending upon an individual's ethnicity or religion> is very accurate.

If you are an American, this is very likely a world so alien to your experience that it practically qualifies as Science Fiction.  But the stories are set in an historical reality of the Anglo-French colonial administration of Egypt.  And his characters and mysteries are interesting and well-plotted.  Pearce is a very good writer, and his prose is smooth and easy.  I highly recommend them.

I can speak positively to the concept of CC from the prospective of a parent.

Here in Arizona, the three four-year, public, land-grant universities are UofA, ASU, and NAU.  These are all part of a system administered by the state of Arizona.  In addition, the Higher Learning Commission also accredits and coordinates the ten CCs.  As a result, the process for students to transfer or accrue credits from all 13 schools into a single, unified transcript is quite easy, through the power of computers.

During high school, my daughter had four ways of earning college credits prior to graduation.  IB class credits, CLEP exams, AP exams, and dual-enrollment courses.  The dual-enrollment courses are exactly what it says on the box: the student takes a high school class and simultaneously completes the requirements for a CC class.  As a parent, the comparison between those four credit-earning activities was stark, as dual-enrollment required steady endeavor to complete the class, while the other three culminate in high-stakes exams that burn up A LOT of emotional energy.

Furthermore, the cost of a credit hour via dual-enrollment class in high school was ~10% the cost of a credit hour at ASU.  Similarly, summer session classes at the CC also cost that same ~10%.  As a result, my pocketbook was saved some serious cash by the summer classes and dual-enrollment classes compared to what it would have cost had she just waited to take them at ASU.

Between AP and dual-enrollment classes and summer sessions at CC, my daughter started her undergraduate work with a full academic year's worth of credits already on her transcript.  Another strong win in my book, as it gave her more freedom to create an efficient class schedule each semester.

My daughter indicated that the summer-session classes at the local CC were valuable and well-taught.  These were lower-level, required courses (100- and 200-level classes), but she was able to knock them off her required list and seemingly found no egregious differences from her classes in the Barrett school at ASU.

So as a bill-paying parent, community colleges, at least here in Arizona, are an obvious winner.  I have been counseling our Ukrainian friend's kids to enroll in as many dual-enrollment classes as they can squeeze in during high school.

Other states may not have this same system, and I recall that the experience of transferring summer session classes I took at a public land-grant university into my snooty private college registrar's domain to be a nightmare back in the dark ages.  So this interoperability may not be the same elsewhere.  But at least here in Arizona, community colleges ought to be high on any student's agenda, as well as their parent's.

The one downside is obviously the reputation of CC's.  However, I find that the people who look down on the CC classes are the same ones whose kids are not likely to be either officer material or to develop into technical subject matter experts.  They are instead spending four years engaging in social life, with occasional appearances in class, resulting in no significant economic or civic value upon completing their college experience.  YMMV.