The Dragon in the Sea
The Santaroga Barrier
Frank Herbert
About a year ago my brother lent me an old copy of Frank Herbert's first novel, The Dragon in the Sea, and I hadn't got around to reading it, but after watching the second of the new Dune films I …
more ...Too Like The Lightning
Seven Surrenders
The Will to Battle
Perhaps the Stars
New York City: Tor, 2016-2021
Ada Palmer
I wrote a review of the first part of Ada Palmer's novel (it's very much one book in four volumes) back when I read it in 2018. I caught up …
more ...This cosmology paper has the best acknowledgements section ever written
I'll admit that I had never actually read the paper in which Turing outlined his 'Imitation Game' until this week, and I really want to write a whole blog post which gives it a close reading. You should read it …
Since there's been a big influx from Twitter, here's an updated and shorter version of a Mastodon primer I wrote back in 2018.
For more detail on how federation works, see Elilla's Futuristic Mastodon introduction for 2021.
There's mastodon.social, which is run by the lead …
more ...Today's a one-off national public holiday to mourn Queen Elizabeth II. Since I'm no longer on Twitter I feel a bit insulated from the usual wave of discourse which events like this set off: the nearest I've come to it is seeing someone pose in a bandana on Facebook with …
more ...No One is Talking About This, London: Bloomsbury, 2021
Patricia Lockwood
I finished this in a couple of days and it was funny and touching—people probably think of Lockwood as a Twitter phenomenon but she'd have been a good writer no matter what platform she'd made her own. Mostly …
more ...A couple of months ago I got a bit obsessed with this recurring question on Metafilter from people who can't or won't learn to cook and are keen to know if a single food will supply all human dietary requirements. It's been asked so often that it gets its own …
more ...Thinking about yesterday's post and whether it really went anywhere, and whether the same criticism I levelled at the waffly IT blog post might be levelled at my own writing here, which doesn't need to come up to any real standards of coherence or clarity. That's what editors are for …
more ...Setting aside the question of whether LaMDA is sentient, or whether the Turing Test is valid, or whether general AI is possible or likely—there are a lot very strongly held opinions on the matter out there if you want to go looking for them—I've been thinking about what …
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