Before I Forget

I think that's going to be my new catchphrase: "Before I Forget". 4 novels in danger of being forgotten - time for the exocortex to get to work.

1. "The All-Consuming World", by Cassandra Khaw, 2021, 268 pages, 72k words. I think this is Khaw's 1st novel? I had read some of her shorter stuff and liked it, but then decided it was too much horror, which I've kind of quit reading. This novel, tho, I think had a good recommendation as a hard sci-fi space opera. It was indeed all of that. Tons of action, building to a satisfying conclusion. Joe Bob sez, check it out.

2. "A Choice of Gods", by Clifford D. Simak, 1972, 187 pages, 58k words. This was probably $0.99 or $1.99 at BookBub. An interesting premise. Reading this old stuff, the characters are always so ... white. The topics covered are pretty cosmic, it was worth the reread.

3. "The Circumference of the World", by Lavie Tidhar, 2023, 170 pages, 52k words. Tidhar writes really well. This novel definitely has a meta feel to it. Does the fabled book exist or not? Plus we have its author introduce us to many golden age sci-fi authors. It has a bit of a Philip K. Dick feel about it. A good read.

4. "Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town", by Cory Doctorow, 2006, 412 pages, 112k words. What an odd novel, totally unlike any other Doctorow I have read. Kind of meta, like the last one - the A brother, our protagonist, is writing a book. Meanwhile, his father is a mountain, his mother a washing machine, the B brother sees the future, the C brother is an island, the D brother is a malevolent zombie psychopath, brothers E, F, & G are Russian dolls, and his girlfriend has wings. Quite, what, postmodern? Definitely reminiscent of John Crowley, which is high praise from me. It's fairly long, LOL, I guess to make room for more weirdness. But somehow, it seems to be making a statement to the effect that there is no such thing as "normal". All the more reason for inclusivity.

The Unread shelf in the Kobo app on my iPad is at 135 books.

Oh No!

My wife & I finally decided to get new iPhones. We had iPhone 7s, 256 GB memory, maybe 5-6 years old. We both got new iPhone 14 Pros, me the smaller one with 1 TB memory, her the bigger one. I decided the better camera might help me take better pictures of birds.

They give us $40 each for the old phones, xfer our data to the new phones, and wipe our old phones. I like the new phone.

Next day, I'm going through and notice the Recorder app I have used for the life of the old phone is showing the "needs an update" flag by its icon - but, it is gone from the Apple Store! That app predates Apple adding the Voice Memo app, which addition probably meant it was going to go away someday. So not only did we get new hardware, we got new software, and that app was no longer supported.

For at least the life of my old phone, I had used that app to record snatches of melody or lyrics that would come to me randomly, with the idea that someday they might become the seed of a song. There were over 100 of them. I have lately been thinking that, since I am really not good at songwriting - I've written ~10 songs & none of them are very good - I would pass these on to someone else, maybe my nephew Logan who seems to have some songwriting talent.

Well, that is a moot point now. I looked at app storage usage & saw 300 MB for the Recorder app, got flustered, and deleted the reference to the app. It was now completely gone from the new phone. I don't think that really mattered, I think by that point I was already screwed.

Over the course of this discovery, I probably said "Fuck!" loudly ~20x. That didn't seem to help much.

The life lesson from this: take plenty of time before getting rid of your old phone. [Added 2023-05-08: why did I want to get rid of the old phone at all? 1/4 TB of storage, 22,000 tracks of music, it could have functioned as a 2ndary music player indefinitely. Worth way more than $40 I would guess. I think that was a bit of a bum rush from Apple.] As much as I refer to my devices as my exocortex, you'd think I would have realized that.

Meanwhile, I will take this as confirmation from the universe that I am definitely not meant to be a songwriter - a BS copout I know, but, as I've already said, it is now a moot point. Still hard to believe > 100 song snippets stretching over many years now completely gone. Oh well, live & learn.

Multiverse Fatigue

1st up, a duology from Stephen Baxter, whose series I have enjoyed over the years:

1. "World Engines: Destroyer", 2019, 523 pages, 142k words;
2. "World Engines: Creator", 2020, 500 pages, 136k words.

Set a few hundred years in a future, on a post-climate crisis world where humanity has decided that space exploration is a bad idea. Then, an artifact of a level 2 or 3 galactic civilization turns up, and it's pretty exciting from then on.

********************** SPOILER ALERT **********************

But then, stuff starts happening in multiple, parallel planes of the multiverse. In 1, Armstrong had a heart attack & died on the moon. In another, the British Empire didn't go away. Etc, etc, etc.

I think I 1st remember the multiverse being introduced in the Michael Moorcock Eternal Hero stories of the 1970's? It never caught on much.

But now that Marvel has gone that way, I suspect we'll be seeing more & more of it. My wife & I watched "Everything, Everywhere, All At Once". My wife actively didn't like it, I was like meh.

The thought that I have been entertaining is that, once you invoke the multiverse, science fiction becomes much more like fantasy - anything goes, internal consistency not required. I'm not sure this is a good thing.

Both books are well-written page turners, and worth reading.

********************** END SPOILER ALERT **********************

Next up, "Up Against It", Laura J. Mixon, 2011, 504 pages, 137k words. The main progagonist is an 18YO, so I guess this is a YA novel. A well-plotted tale of plucky youngsters helping to save their asteroid home. Lots of plot, good adult characters as well as our teenaged heros. I liked this enough that I purchased the 1st novel of a trilogy by Mixon.

Next up, "The John Varley Reader", subtitled "Thirty Years of Short Fiction", 2004, 899 pages, 244k words, 18 stories. I think this was a $1.99 special via BookBub. Varley has been 1 of my fav authors going back to his earliest stuff in the 1970s. These are some great stories, I had read most of them already. In addition to the stories, after having been reticent about discussing his work for years, Varley introduces each story with autobiographical info about when the story was written. A very pleasant read.

I was recommending Varlay to a young person who had just begun transitioning to being female. Not sure if that is good advice or not. Varley was writing about gender change from the beginning, late 1970s, but surely modern people know a lot more about it now.

Following those great words of wisdom from that emminent post-modern philosopher Bruce Ehrler - "wait a while" - I put off writing this long enough that I read a 5th book: "Wanderers", by Chuck Wendig, 2019, 975 pages, 265k words. Wow, was that book that long? It was definitely a page turner, I finished it at 1:30 am this morning. Published in 2019, a disease jumps from bats to ravage the human race? Seriously? If I had realized that was the plot, I might have skipped it. But, it was a very good read. Plus very spot on re white supremacist militias, christian nationalism, most of our modern political quarrels.

I will pick a couple of bones though.

********************** SPOILER ALERT **********************

Last line of the Interlude at the end of Part One:

And by then, it would be far too late for him — and for everyone else.

Middle of Chapter 15:

They had no idea how true that was.

Isn't this way heavy-handed foreshadowing? Or is this not foreshadowing, but some other blunt instrument? It reminds me of those true crime shows on cable, where they dole out the info in dribbles amidst dire insinuations of things to come. Pretty tacky.

********************** END SPOILER ALERT **********************

I have pre-ordered the sequel, which is due out in November.

Perfect timing, I'll switch over and clear the magazine stack. Momentarily tempted to ditch it, as I was tempted to blow off blogging these books. I may have a bit of process fatigue. But, I think that the older I get, the more important it is to keep my exocortex updated. So, brace up! Books blogged, #SongOfTheDay recorded, Music In processing proceeding, on to the magazine stack!

The End of Hippiedom

So got back from my walk, it is so damn muggy. I forgot to take a hat and the sun came out half way through, probably have a red nose tomorrow, hopefully not a red scalp. I took my shirt off. Not too many people out, hopefully no young children were traumatized by The Great White Whale ("Big as a mountain and white as the show, it's Moby Dick!"). I still tan on my trunk, but the 1st thing that happens after exposure to sun is that the hair on my chest all turns bright shiny white. I don't seem to tan at all from the knees down, I think from my 12 years of refereeing soccer and having a soccer tan from wearing knee socks.

So got home, needed to cool off before showering so I did another post (2 in 1 day!), somehow got my Blogger cookies/state screwed up by changing a setting, lost the post. Grrr. I've cooled off enough to shower now, but will try to recreate this while it's still fresh in my mind.

Anyway, there are some of my raps that I have been forgetting for years to add to this blog. Some have made it, like My Greatest Blasphemies, others haven't. So I had a good idea to help me remember these. Whenever I think of one, I e-mail it to myself at my home account, where I blog from. I have for years used the inbox of my e-mail as my todo list, both at work and at home. An e-mail that requires action, a response, or more thought stays in the inbox until it is processed (or it times out), at which point it is filed in an appropriate folder or deleted/archived. Crazy that I just thought to send e-mails to myself when I need to remember to do something. But, ain't having an exocortex great!

During most of my Cambridge/Boston years 1968-1974 I was a hippie. In high school, I had a friend, who was generally regarded as our token beatnik, who turned me on to Herman Hesse, "Steppenwolf", "Siddhartha", "The Bead Game" and other similar literature, and to Mississippi Delta blues. He also wanted to turn me on to smoking pot, but in the stupefying naivete of my youth ("the weenie factor" -- I graduated high school just before I turned 17), I didn't realize this until years later. He later was a Louisville blues singer for years.

I started playing music in around 1965. When I got to MIT in the fall of 1968, I had a great collection of psychedelic music and my heros were Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa, and The Grateful Dead. It took a very short time for the hippie contingent of my living group and me to realize we were kindred spirits. So I lived various aspects of the hippie lifestyle until I moved back to Jeffersonville in 1974 (but city hippie rather than country hippie).

So my contention is that Woodstock, in the summer of 1969, was the beginning of the end of the hippie movement. My bass player at the time went, I was working as a welder at JeffBoat to make money for college, I didn't go.

Woodstock was three days of great music, great drugs, and great fellowship, with lots of free love going around -- and Nothing Happened. Back then, we really thought that we could Change Things, in potentially magical ways. So with all the great vibes of Woodstock, Something should have happened:

• the mother ship should have landed and taken on some passengers, or
• a group mind should have formed, or
• superpowers like telepathy and levitation should have manifested.

But, aside from the usual births, deaths, and dancing, Nothing Happened. And this was the beginning of the end of hippiedom.

I think that the one lasting legacy of the hippie movement was the birth of the environmental movement. Hippies were its parents.

Odometer Reading (2)

So finally went biking this year 5/13/7. Did 11 miles in 1h5m, I totally sucked. Also got odometer reading: 961. Reading 4/23/6 was (per my external memory, this selfsame blog) 657. So last summer only biked 304 miles compared to 647 the year before. Ouch. Getting fat and old, give up, give up ...

I like Charlie Stross's term, from "Accelerando", for our increasing "external memory", like this blog -- the exocortex. I now know pretty much no one's phone number -- but my cell phone does a great job for me.

Theories are Compression Algorithms

Finished reading "Meta Math!" by Gregory Chaitin. A short (151 p plus appendices) and easy read. Basically, it's about the philosophy of math, following Godel and Turing. The main point is: all theories are about compressing information. A theory that has to detail all its results is not much of a theory. Similarly, DNA is a compression of an organism, axioms are a compression of the theorems you can prove from them.

Lots of interesting examples of this, always shown as input, processor, output:

• encoded message -> Decoder -> original message (per Shannon and information theory)
• scientific theory -> Calculations -> experimental data (the scientific method)
• program -> Computer -> output (AIT, Algebraic Information Theory)
• DNA -> Embryogenesis/Development -> organism (molecular biology)
• axioms -> Deductions -> theorems (FAS, Formal Axiomatic System)
• TOE (Theory of Everything) -> Calculations -> universe (physics)
• ideas -> Mind of God -> the world (Liebniz)

A lot of his stuff he ideas he traces back to Leibniz (who we enjoyed so much in Stephenson's Quicksilver novels) in the late 17th century. Also very interesting, a semi-proposal to do away with real numbers??? Basically, real numbers (the continuum) are transcendental (not algebraic, the solution of a polynomial equation), uncomputable, random and unnameable with probability 1. Plus they give physics fits and lead to attempts to get around the difficulties such as string theory.

Also interesting discussion of randomness, per Borel. You cannot formally define maximum randomness! Any definition limits the randomness of what you define, making it not maximally random?!?!?

Numerous references to Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science". Interesting that he supports the concept of mathematics as an empirical science. The intractablilty of the real numbers indicates, you just have to get out there and explore?!?!?

The subtitle of the book is "The Quest for Omega". Chaitin's main claim to fame is that he defined the Omega number: the probability that a program of n bits will halt.

For xmas, got a 10 million candle power spotlight from my father-in-law, the king of over-the-top gifts. 91 years old and still with 95%+ of his wits about him. Also got from my oldest daughter "Ratatat", eponymous, kind of ambient trancy stuff, 2 stars, and Bloc Party, "Silent Alarm", nice peppy alterna-rock, 3 stars.

I am moving ahead in moving more 3 star songs to 2 stars. When I first got iTunes, I was thinking about how many better query front-ends I had written than its smart playlists. The star classification system is chafing me too. Maybe hack iTunes, or write my own music librarian?

Movie-wise, watched "Mr. and Mrs. Smith", fun; "A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", more enjoyable than I expected; and "The Island", also more fun than I expected. In "The Island", tho, as with lots of pop culture, bad science is a little troubling. *** Spoiler Alert *** That clones could start to recall their original's memory has precedent in sci-fi, and what the heck, it's just entertainment, right? But, that they could not grow clones for organs and have the organs be healthy without allowing the clones to develop consciousness -- it's one of those things that could lead people to subconsciously oppose cloning -- for no good reason (not that there may not be good reasons).

The Greg Egan short story collections (last blog) had a few stories expressing his fear and mistrust of wishful, spiritualist thinking. Entertainment is good, but, for how many people is this what actually forms their opinions? Back to, need to make everybody smarter. Well, I have read, I don't remember where, that IQs are going up -- although I have seen far more stories on the ignorance of current high school graduates and college students. Still, the metacortex (ala Stross) seems to be growing individually and collectively, I think we may get there.