Terrier

Terrier by Tamora Pierce
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Nominally this is a young adult book and I gave it a shot as an audiobook, based on praise for the author various places. I'd probably have enjoyed this more in print. I'm not always sure what "young adult" means with genre fiction of the mind-candy variety. Sure, the protagonist was a 16 year old and there wasn't explicit sex. But there was certainly some gruesome violence in this story of a young guardswoman serving her apprenticeship in the slums, and dealing with poverty, domestic abuse, broken homes, child killers and some miners in bad need of union representation.

Liked it but didn't love it; certainly I get why people recommended Pierce.

Zeus is Dead

Zeus Is Dead: A Monstrously Inconvenient Adventure by Michael G. Munz
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

About as much fun as you'd hope for from the title, which is to say quite a bit.

The Greek gods withdrew under edict from Zeus; they meddled in the world but only behind the scenes. After Zeus' murder they're back in all their vanity and pettiness, expecting worship. They don't get power from being worshipped, mind you--they just like it.

The muse Thalia (who has picked up science fiction as well as comedy) joins two mortals to try and solve the mystery and provides running commentary. Even sillier and more farcical than someone like Christopher Moore, Munz tosses in a joke whenever he can. Some of the fourth-wall breaking stuff gets tiresome, especially a tendency to write a sentence and then comment on its grammatical weakness in the next one. On the other hand, a few got audible snorts of amusement and the plot was at least 80% satisfying, so pretty happy taking a chance on this one.

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The Emerald Planet

The Emerald Planet: How Plants Changed Earth's History by David Beerling
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is something in between a history of plants on Earth, and a set of essays on that theme. It does start with the development of leaves, and then moves on to the plants' creation of massively high oxygen levels in the Carboniferous (the era of dragonflies with 5' wings) so the first two chapters felt like it would be a tour of plant evolution.

This is probably far too broad a topic, and in any event is not what we get. Nothing about the evolution of flowers or the period worldwide redwood forests, for example. Instead the themes are not merely what was important to plants, but when plants were important to the climate, or even our understanding, through fossils, of the climate. This is a fascinating picture of a dynamic planet, constantly changing in response to a dance between geological processes and plants, which respond and then change the atmosphere and soil in turn.

The chapters cover the science with some technical detail, but also the history of the science, and in some cases the quirks of the scientists. The implications of these sorts of changes to modern day climate change is mentioned more than once, but happily the science is treated as interesting on its own terms, rather than a tool for the present. Some of the research referenced seems cutting edge, which is actually both a complement and a concern--I'd expect at least one or two of the stories to change as we learn more about the distant past. (Not a knock on Beerling, who is quite up front about uncertainties.) My only other nitpick is my ebook was missing the full color plates.

For my own reference the chapters are below--spoilerized, although the stories are tens of millions of years old, it's probably better to just read the book.

Three Men in a Boat

Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This review is written a year after I listened to the audiobook, so details are scant, but this was one of the best audio choices I made.

A more-or-less totally fake memoir of Thames boat trip by three upper class twits in the late 19th century. Life on the Mississippi for the Eton crowd, as it were.

"Jerome K. Jerome" (the character) is a bit like Bertie Wooster, self-absorbed, pampered and clueless. He does, however, have a knack for narrating hilarious scenes of embarrassment and self-inflicted pain. He generally lacks Bertie's good nature or touching loyalty to his friends, which is actually good since he is so often the victim of his own shallowness that I was glad it wasn't happening to a nicer guy. There are some wry observations and wisdom but mostly just a series of very funny sketches.

Redshirts

Redshirts by John Scalzi
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Scalzi has some fun imagining a starship like the Enterprise from the redshirt's perspective, as they try to dodge away missions, figure out why the entire bridge crew beams down for no apparent reason, and try to understand why no one has noticed the captain of the fleet's flagship has the highest casualty rate in history.

The first third is all Galaxy Quest style jokes, and is pretty awesome. Then Scalzi seems to decide (probably correctly) that he couldn't keep that up for the whole book and develops both a plot and a theme. The end result is OK but part of me wishes it had been done by someone who embraced the farce the whole way through.

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CryoBurn! by Lois McMasters Bujold!

CryoBurn by Lois McMaster Bujold
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The exclamation points in my post title are not strictly required--the official book title has no punctuation and unlike David Malki !, Bujold does not appear to have attached an explanation to herself as a formal honorific.  But I wanted to express some of the considerable satisfaction this book left me with even before I got to the meat of the review.

I thought "cryoburn" might mean Miles was battling the health effects of his death some books back, but for the first book in a while he's offworld, in full Imperial Auditor mode, at the height of his powers--which is to say the book starts with him wandering through pitch black catacombs, drugged and hallucinating, on a planet where he has no legal authority and has to rely on some possibly corrupt consulate officials as backup. Against him is the corporate elite and social system of an entire planet, so it's not what you'd call a very challenging case.

The planet itself is a world where more people are in cryosleep than alive, awaiting cures from disease and old age to be discovered and/or centuries of compound interest to accumulate before awaking so they will all pop up and live as an immortal leisure class. The planet is remarkably similar to Clifford Simak's Why Call Them Back From Heaven, though since Miles is an offworlder it only takes a few pages for him to realize everything is bonkers and resolving the mystery doesn't shake his core beliefs or anything.

Above average entry in the series. And if for some reason you only want to read one book about a world full of corpsicles this one, not Simak's, is the one to pick.

The Spy Who Came In From the Cold

The Spy Who Came In from the Cold by John le Carré
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is Le Carre's first successful novel but not one I've read before. It does seem like a general (and very well executed) template for his later ones. Which is to say the characters live in an isolated world or deceit and artifice and the tiniest bits of true connection with another human become inordinately valuable because of their rarity. And then get used to torture the characters who foolishly indulged in them and gut-punch the reader.

The Sandman (Gaiman, not Hoffman)

The Sandman, Vol. 1: Preludes and Nocturnes by Neil Gaiman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

By finishing this book I've doubled my total intake of graphic novels, and I'll probably double it again this year since I was given the next two volumes as well. And then stop, because I'm still not really in my comfort zone with them.

But I did truly enjoy this one. Gaiman is very good at getting the idea of a character or mood across in a few words, so the little sketches of people and their dreams--vanishing from them or overwhelming them--pack a good impact.

The Box

The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger by Marc Levinson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Box is perhaps best visualized in cinematic terms. Before The Box, your scenes on the docks had burly longshoremen loading boxes and using forklifts, bars and brawls, Irish or Italian union bosses and outsiders took a streetwise guide to find what they wanted. After The Box, it's stacks of truck-sized containers, a computer printout to find the location of the one with smuggled goods, and a shoot out in a deserted maze of metal. This is the story of how one cliche became the other one.

Up until 1955 maritime shipping was run by nautical men. "Breakbulk" cargo--stacked in ships cargo holds in whatever containers or pallets it came on--was loaded and unloaded at each port manually, moved onto the next truck or train to get to its destination. This work was hard, slow and expensive. Half the cost and often more than half the time of shipping an item across an ocean was spent with your cargo not actually moving more than a few hundred yards along the dock.

Malcolm McClean was a trucker by background with no romantic connection to the sea. For him, cargo at sea might as well have been on a highway or moving over a bridge, and in 1956 he started treating cargo precisely that way--truck sized containers went on in one port, off in another, and sped on truck or train to their final destination. This is highly simplified--it took a decade to really standardize on technology, business and labor changes, and another decade for customers to start taking advantage of the costs--but ultimately those loading costs dropped to nothing.

The changes this wrought were huge. Most directly, the geography of the world's ports changed. San Francisco and other venerable cities have piers but no shipping because they were obsoleted by the container--the cranes in Oakland, Seattle and Long Beach are what you need today. Factories no longer need to be next to the waterfront, or even on the same continent. The whole ability to run international supply chains depends on the cheap and predictable transport that means a factory in Tennessee can count on suppliers in Korea.

There are of course amazing benefits to this and costs as well. You probably could read this as an unbridled success story of capitalist efficiency but I was a bit more ambivalent. The early chapters deal with the longshoremens' unions, which use to define port communities but employment dwindled to almost nothing with automation. Amazingly enough, they were able to negotiate a cut of the profits from this automation as it was phased in. Others would leave without much to show, from maritime companies and ports that couldn't keep up with the new capital investments (or guessed wrong on how to invest) to the workers and industries who could now be outsourced.

Metatropolis

METAtropolis: The Dawn of Uncivilization by John Scalzi
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a collection of five long short stories nominally themed around new cities, but I'd put more emphasis on the "Dawn of Uncivilization" subtitle than the main theme. For various not-quite-specified reasons--but clearly including massive environmental stresses--the state is no longer powerful, western civilization doesn't work, and people huddle in megacities trying to get by one way or another.

The first story by Jay Lake I basically didn't understand the point of--presumably out of boredom and lack of attention as it rambled on. Maybe there is something of value there but I put the collection down for a year after that one. Everything else was good. Scalzi's is sweet and almost young adult in tone. The other three could almost be Snow Crash or Diamond Age Neal Stephenson in setting and plot. Buckell & Bear's entries follow capable loaners on the fringes of a society that is almost all fringes. The last story, by Schroeder, throws in virtual reality and is probably the most imaginative. I'm glad I didn't give up on the collection forever--the later stories are good enough that I'll probably seek out other things by Buckell and Schroeder, who I was not previously familiar with.

Unreasonable Men

Unreasonable Men: Theodore Roosevelt and the Republican Rebels Who Created Progressive Politics by Michael Wolraich
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is essentially a history of progressives and conservatives in conflict from 1904 to 1912. It is framed in a popular style--each section opens with a narrative vignette before it gets to policy disputes. And mixed in with the policy is a whole lot about personalities.

And the personalities are gigantic. The "B-team" are progressives like Beveridge and Dolliver, journalists like Lincoln Steffens, and leaders of the conservative wing like Aldrich and Cannon get a fair share of time. But the big three are Taft, Roosevelt and La Follette.

Roosevelt is interesting, and in this account not necessarily in the way he thought he was. He was a man who talked loudly about "speaking softly" and his big stick was more for show than swinging. As president he would use the bully pulpit in style but settle for a compromise--often effective, sometimes tepid. But behind the scenes he was not a politician and loathed people who fought harder than he did.

La Follette was one of them. His strategy when faced with an obstacle seemed to be to run into as fast as he could, and when he bounced off it to assume it was probably weakened and try again. Because he embodied the spirit of the time, though, he was surprisingly effective. He railed against the rich and corrupt, the backroom deals, the political machines. In the pre-internet age he would literally read shipping rate schedules in his speeches to let people know how they were being treated by railroads. He would go to rallies for Republicans in Wisconsin and his hosts would sneak out the back as he got the crowd outraged about their votes on bills.

If La Follette was a man of the time, Taft was the one left behind. A loyal functionary who thought the way to get ahead was to do deals with "responsible" leaders like Aldrich and Cannon, he leaned on them even as La Follette and his allies finally succeeded in breaking their power. Taft is sincere and humane, conservative in temperament more than in policy. But because he had no power base except the conservatives it didn't matter. He failed to accomplish much but what he tried alienated the reformers completely.

The presidential election of 1912 saw an end to this era. Roosevelt, smarting from the personal affronts as much as the political, decided he was a radical progressive as well and opposed Taft for the presidency; La Follette made on of his few bad mis-steps, melting down in frustration as he was shunted aside by the re-invented Roosevelt. Woodrow Wilson won the election and the progressive era of the Republicans basically ended.

A good book all around. Doubly recommended for anyone in a mood to take a break from current politics and read and see the moneyed interests actually lose a few rounds.

The Odyssey Book IV: What Do Loose Lips Sink?

Book 4 is more of the same and while these posts aren't exactly real time, if I had listened far enough at that point I would have written them all up together.  Telemachus visits Menelaus and hears more about how cool his dad Odysseus was.  More of the good guest / good host ethic--M. welcomes our hero's son without recognizing him, and fetes him anyway.  Then there's some weird caginess I don't understand where M. has recognized him but holds back to see if Telemachus is going own up to his identity.  Why?  He's you buddy's friend, he's not running scam.  We don't get to see the end game as  Helen wanders downstairs and blurts out "Hey, Tel, haven't seen you since you were a kid!".

I remember being surprised Helen and Menelaus have no hard feelings  Run off with another man for a decade, start a continent-spanning war that destroys a city.  Who cares?  This is a picture of domestic bliss, the power couple acting as perfect host and hostess.  Helen tosses out a "What a shameless whore was I!" lament* but they've clearly moved on.

Then we're back to the suitors to see how the worst guests ever are doing.  The guy who loaned Telemachus the ship starts wandering around asking everyone if they've seen him, because he needs his boat back to do an olive oil run or something.  The suitors realize T. is probably gathering up support for kicking them out of the house, and respond by upping his game: They will ambush him and kill him.  Athena shows up in disguise and is clearly not going to stand for this, but it's a bit of a cliffhanger--the next chapters will move to the ends of the Earth as we finally catch up with Odysseus himself.



*This is literally the line in the Fagles translation.

Oh, and if memory serves there will be even fewer good depictions of women than you might expect.  In this case it's more fun to stick with the conceit that this is the series reboot under the original show runner.  Homer writes this scene with H. and M. together, someone points out that the first version ended with them not exactly as love birds, and Homer just shrugs and plugs in a reference to lampshade the problem.

Blogging the Odyssey: Books I to III

I'm listening to The Odyssey, Fagles' translation read by Ian McKlellan.  I did this about 10 years ago, found it awesome and used some Audible credits to pick it up again.  I knew the 'story' but that doesn't compare with the poem itself, which is much better than the sum of its cliched parts.

A Chain Store Gains My Respect

In Which a Student Exerts Himself

From the immortal SEK, aka Professor Office Sex.

Traitor's Blade

Traitor's Blade by Sebastien de Castell
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The remnants of a royal guard drift around in search of a purpose after the death of their king. A vaguely early renaissance setting with some good action scenes and banter between friends, mixed up with some really heavy melodrama.

I had mixed feelings about this one--I think the writing was above average and the pacing was pretty solid. The plot was good in concept but some of the twists that I think were meant to be surprising were over-telegraphed, while other elements still have me scratching my head--I think because they weren't at all resolved, as opposed to being too subtle for me.

Rated on the "Will I read the next one" scale: I think so. The story is probably worth two more books or so.

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Dresden Takes It, Dishes It Out

Changes and Turncoat by Jim Butcher
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

We've come a long way since the charm of the early books where professional wizard Dresden, with his add in the yellow pages, was a hardboiled dick in the classic mode, a tiny non-entity who kept getting dragged into problems above his weight class.

He's still outmatched, but only because he's facing enemies of unfathomable power instead of corrupt FBI agents or whatever it used to be. Enjoyable, but now the charm comes from seeing how over the top the stuff can get.

Turncoat is mostly White Council plotting, and pretty much action from page one.  I think it's the first time Butcher works in "Dresden is one of the elite wizards"--not just in the wrong place at the right time, but a real player based on raw talent, even without real allies on the council

Changes involves the half-vampire Susan, his fairy godmother, and some time in central America. Some stories that had their origins many books ago get tied up while adding in some new loose ends that will be doubtless picked up later.

Spider walks down the street in a hat like that . . .

"Sparklemuffin", aka Maratus jactatus.  While dancing, no less . . . that's its leg it's sticking up in the air.

from

Science Book Catch Up Day

As long as I'm catching up on science reviews, I'll park this quote here as well:

Unfortunately, many of the papers on asparagus urine are short and lack detail.

from http://udel.edu/~mcdonald/mythasparagusurine.html via metafilter.  Need to go back and read more on the site.  Any site that has that sentence is worth reading.

Merchants of Doubt

Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming by Naomi Oreskes
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It is alarmingly easy it is to spread doubt about settled science, if you have some cash to spare and are sufficiently motivated.

To be clear, this book is not about the science of second hand smoke, global warming, or CFCs, but how the science is filtered as it gets to the public and policy makers. You will not come away with additional arguments you can use against self-styled skeptics. I mostly just found it depressing (though well written & researched.)

Bill Bryson Has a Good Job

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book reads a bit like a TV documentary series on science. Thirty chapters that start with the big bang, move to the formation of the solar system, the Earth, the appearance of life and so on up to our species in the present day. The actual contents of each chapter are driven by accessibility and interest, though--what makes an entertaining twenty pages as opposed how best to explain some specific topic. So you could get the science, the history of the ideas, anecdotes about quirky scientists, or why it's possible that Wyoming could explode (yes, the whole state.)

Bill Bryson has a knack for entertaining explanations, so the book is wonderfully enjoyable. And I don't mean to imply I didn't learn anything--I learned a ton, even about areas I felt I was reasonably well informed about. I am a bit jealous, as "reading about science, interviewing scientists and writing an essay" sounds like a great job description that would suit me just fine, if you ignore that I'm missing the required research and writing skills. Instead, I settle for cocktail party anecodtes about Huxley asphyxiating himself (for science!) or Lavoisier's income as a tax collector (mind-bogglingly large.)

Endless Forms Most Beautiful

Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo and the Making of the Animal Kingdom by Sean B. Carroll
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I don't know how many articles I've read in the last 10+ years that have tried to explain some of the discoveries about how a cell "knows" it should become a liver cell or a skin cell and why we don't end up with shoulder blades in our kidneys. These articles got my level of understanding from "I bet it's complicated" to "It's complicated and has something to do with HOX genes."

Reading this book is the first time I feel I "got it"*, at least somewhat, but based on my own reading history I won't pretend I can explain in a couple sentences (or without embarrassing myself in some way or another with various factual errors--it's still complicated.) I will say it's amazing that scientists have figured out so much of how nature's evolutionary toolkit, used to fiddle with morphology over the eons. Those HOX genes are indeed at the center of it, and the discovery that humans and fruit flies share almost exactly identical core sequences is like discovering that the Egyptian hieroglyphics describing how to use an Ikea wrench to build the pyramids.



*Mutants, which I read last year, helped a bit too. A lot of the same science with a different approach.

Statistical Significance of Healtcare Studies

A post mostly to park this image so I don't have to hunt for it again:

Oregon gave a subset of people access to healthcare by lottery, so you essentially got a randomized population there with and without access.  Massachusetts implemented Romneycare.  Both are obvious things for researchers to study.  Massachusetts study found an effect on outcomes with improved insurance, the Oregon one did not.

So different conclusions from two conflicting studies?  Not at all.  The visualization is a simple illustration show that the studies do not conflict--in fact, they happen to agree embarrassingly well.  However, the Oregon study was at lower power so could not be reported as finding an effect.

The Only TED Talk You'll Ever Need

Except maybe for the Reggie Watts one:

DIY Climate Models

According to this American Scientist piece by Brian Hayes, there are a wealth of climate models available as public code, with different levels of complexity.  Some are designed to be pedagogical, others are professional scale.  Compiling one seems like it would be fun and probably cheaper than setting up a new aquarium.

See also http://bit-player.org/extras/climate/

The simple simulator above, with greenhouse effect halved.  The cold temperatures
are due to not just that change but the increased albedo caused by the year round
snow cover.

Things to Do: Sodium Triacetate

Take a supersaturated solution of sodium triacetate.  Add fingers.  Watch crystals of the trihydrate form around your fingers.

The Jet Sex

The Jet Sex

Per LGM, an excellent account of flight attendants and labor & gender issues around their employment.  The quote that adds it to my "to read" list is:

The supervisor handbook for American Airlines stated, “The first fundamental is appearance. A stewardess must be attractive. We can sometimes pretend a person is attractive, if we admire them for some other reason. This should be avoided."