WebLog ???

I'm going to go all "origins of blogging" and post this:

http://blog.archive.org/2022/01/01/welcoming-recorded-music-to-the-public-domain/

The music that moved into the public domain on Jan 1, 2022.

Gawdamm, I luv the commons!!!

In Which I Finally Quit Stalling

I finally started Neal Stephenson's latest, "Termination Shock" a few days ago. An excellent read so far.

But I did do a bit more procrastinating before I began.

1st, "Lex Talionis", by R.S.A. Garcia, 2014, 440 pages, 119k words. The author is from Trinidad & Tobago, this is her 1st novel. It opens with a time-honored SF trope: terribly injured (but recovering miraculously quickly) hero wakes up in a hospital with total amnesia. Could they be The One?

Usually they break out of the hospital and start tracking themselves down in the 1st chapter or so. In this one, she doesn't get out of the hospital until ~40% of the way in. Then the next 40% is all flashback backstory, with some very obtuse side plots.

Then jump forward a couple years in the future. Some hints of what The One had been up to claiming her legacy. A couple of the major characters who had heretofore been ciphers reappear and remain ciphers.

Definitely read like a 1st novel, but, it was surprisingly fun and enjoyable?!?!?

Next up, "The Case of the Seven Sneezes", by Anthony Boucher, 1942, 227 pages, 75k words. The 3rd of the series the 1st 2 of which I blogged last time. Stranded on an island replaces a locked room for the murder scene. I think the common theme of these is that our cheap detective always almost gets the cases solved.

Back to science fiction, "All Systems Red", by Martha Wells, 2017, 116 pages, 31k words. The 1st book of the Murderbot series, which has been winning some awards lately. A good novella, in which a manufactured cyborg explores its humanity. Expanding the definition of personhood seems to me to be a recurring theme in science fiction in the LGBTQAZ era - a laudable thing. It was good read, I was going to get some more in the series, but they were like $10.99 for 30k word novellas, which stuck me as a little high. Well, maybe I'll revisit the decision when the Kobo Unread stack on my iPad is a lot below its current 90 books.

Variety again! "The Daughter of Odred", by Ursula K. LeGuin, 2014, 36 pages, 10k words. Supertitled "A new short story from Earthsea". Being an Earthsea fan from many decades ago, I had to check it out. A dark tale of adultery, betrayal, and revenge. Nice to be reading LeGuin again. I also purchased 3 YA novels of hers I had never heard of before.

Finally, "The Divine Invasion", by Philip K. Dick, 1980, 277 pages, 75k words. I didn't remember reading this, and it was like $1.99. It was his 3rd to last (ooh, semipenultimate) novel, and was the 2nd book in the VALIS trilogy.

********************** Spoiler Alert **********************

So, when Jebus died, Yah was chased from Earth by Belial to an extraterresterial planet where he now makes contact with colonists from Earth. He does the "impregnate a virgin" trick again, plus gives the poor woman MS so she has to return to Earth for treatment. Her son Manny (Emmanuel) confounds their enemies and makes it to earth to grow up - and recover his lost memories of how to be god. Zina the fairy - actually the embodiment of the torah - helps him recover his memory. Elijah the prophet is also a character.

Sci fi based on xtian mythology and hebrew kaballah. It was tough getting through at times. Totally inconclusive ending - existential I guess.

Back to the Stephenson.

Variety!

As threatened, I did go for something different and read a mystery - in fact 2 of them.

1st, "The Case of the Crumpled Knave" by Anthony Boucher, 1939, 244 pages, 66k words. The Fergus O'Breen Mysteries #1. Fergus O'Breen is a likable enough young cheap detective.

I think this was on sale for $0.99 or $1.99. Anthony Boucher was also a science fiction author, and was the editor of the 1959 2 volume "A Treasury of Great Science Fiction" which was maybe the 2nd or 3rd sci fi book I read Back In The Day - from the Jeffersonville Public Library.

It's not a bad mystery, and an easy read. It's set in LA, with Hollywood connections. It was a pleasant diversion. It was weird how it was pre-WWII.

Next up, "A Spindle Splintered" by Alix E. Harrow, 2021, 109 pages, 29k words. That length would make this a novelette? This looks to be the 1st book of the Fractured Fables series.

A very fun read: Sleeping Beauty in the Spidey-verse. Proud to see a neighbor - Harrow lives ~40 miles from Lexington in Berea, I think - writing such great stuff.

OK, maybe time for some easy science fiction: "The Galaxy, and the Ground Within" by Becky Chambers, 2021, 324 pages, 88k pages. Wayfarer #4. So, aliens from 5 races are stuck together in an inn by a communications system failure. Different species learn about each other. It is tied to the other books in that 1 of the aliens is the lover of the captain of the Wayfarer. There is a little bit of excitement - a medical emergency, and the doctor who comes is human, yay us! Still, I guess these are character/personality stories in this series. This novel has the least action yet.

Penultimately, our 2nd mystery, "The Case of the Solid Key" by Anthony Boucher, 1941, 298 pages, 81k words. The Fergus O'Breen Mysteries #2. Another diverting tale, with some mistaken identity stuff and more Hollywood tie-in. There is a locked room murder, and, despite going back and rereading Chapter 18 (of 20), I still didn't quite get the point of the solid key.

Finally, "Leviathan Falls", by James S.A. Corey, 2021, 589 pages, 160k words. The 9th and final novel of The Expanse. A well done conclusion, some good symmetry with the beginning.

I was also current on the TV version of The Expanse. It's very well done. But in the last season, the actor playing Alex, the pilot of the Rocincante, got hit with several accusations of sexual harassment. So he was fired, but not before an episode in which Alex dies of a stroke during a hard burn.

I understand that the actor had to go, but Alex and the other 3 core Rocincante crew members - Jim, Naomi, and Amos - are pretty much a family throughout the whole series. So I was relieved that Alex is still alive and figures with a normal prominence in this novel. After all, the actor was the problem, not the character.

The TV Expanse I think got through the 1st 3-4 novels. They could come back and pick with the next big plot pivot and get the rest someday if they choose to.

The magazine stack is cleared, not sure what I want to read next. A good problem.

4th (and Final) Batch of 2021 Music In

Finally. I thought this would put the iTunes library on my PC over 22,000, came up a little short: 21,988 tracks.

• Juana Molina, "Segundo (21st Anniversary)", 2000 (reissued in 2021), 15 tracks, Bandcamp. Her 2nd album (duh). This is really interesting stuff - almost the coveted "Unclassifiable" genre - and easy to listen to. Her more recent stuff was billed as Argentinian punk. This is more indie rock, although it does get a little experimental at times. 4 stars. Here's "¿Quién?".

• Half Moon Run, "Inwards & Onwards", 2021, 6 tracks, Bandcamp. The 5th album I have by this Montreal band. They continue to remind me of The Jayhawks. Consistently strong tunes. 4 stars.
  1 song definitely had some issues. "Fxgiving" seems like an angry breakup song, with the catchy line "I don't celebrate fxgiving" - a clever way of saying "I don't give a f#k" - as the song's main hook.
  Here's "Nosebleeds".

• The Mountain Goats, "Dark in Here", 2021, 12 tracks, Bandcamp. This is basically 1 guy, John Darnielle, from California, supported by various collaborators over the years. He definitely has a distinctive voice and sound and is an excellent songwriter. Some somewhat experimental stuff on this album as well. 4 stars. Here's "When a Powerful Animal Comes". I like the simplicity, and the sax & bass doubling each other.

• Big Red Machine, "How Long Do You Think It's Going To Last?", 2021, 15 tracks, Bandcamp. I was thinking out of Cincinatti, but, no, Eau Claire, WI. A ton of guest artists, including Taylor Swift and Fleet Foxes??? A very good album, very nice tunes, quite a pleasant surprise. 4 stars. Here's the last track, "Brycie".

• Kaidi Tatham, "An Insight To All Minds", 2021, 15 tracks, Bandcamp. From Belfast UK. Jazz? Fusion? Hah, iTunes has Afro-Jazz, I'll go for that. Very good stuff. 4 stars. Here's the title track.

• Cleo Brown, "Here Comes Cleo" and "1935-1951", both 27 tracks. 18 in common, so I cut "1935-1951" down to 9 tracks. I was looking for the Fats Waller song "You've Got Me Under Your Thumb" and saw a version by her. It had an intro! Her Wikipedia article describes her as "The Female Fats Waller". In 1935 she replaced Fats as pianist for the WABC orchestra in NYC! A very distinctive singing style. I already blogged about this at the bottom of this post. An enthusiastic 4 stars.
  Here's 3 by Cleo: 1st, "You've Got Me Under Your Thumb", which led me to her.

  2nd, here's the catchy "When Hollywood Goes Black and Tan".

  3rd, here's "My Gal Mezzanine". Cab Calloway also did this song.

  I liked most of these songs a lot! This was a great find.

• Count Basie & Sarah Vaughan, eponymous, 1961, 14 tracks. Note, the metadata says that Count Basie doesn't actually play on this album. The album is Sarah Vaughan and the Count Basie Orchestra. Kind of like hers from the last post, songs not that great, and I'm not that big a fan of big bands, which this is getting to be. Also, she was experimenting with different scat singing styles and I thought some if it didn't work well. Still, such a voice, 4 stars. Here's "Until I Met You".

A couple of last minute additions:

• Adele, "30", 2021, 12 tracks. Amazing how everyone loves Adele. She is in the crossword puzzles, clue: Largest selling musical artist of the 21th century. Ha ha, yesterday as well, clue: Only person to ever appear on the cover of UK and US Vogue.
  Like all her other fans, I have a personal connection to her - I heard "Chasing Pavement" on a TV music video the 1st time I was in London, UK, on business (2008?), and so was an early adopter. 1 reason I think she is so popular is that her songs are easy and great fun to belt out - think Glee and karaoke.
  4 stars. Here's "Love is a Game".

• Sting, "Soul Cages", 1991, 9 tracks. Rick Beato has recently done 2 shows about String: 1st, "Why Sting is Uncopyable", 16 minutes; 2nd, "The Sting Interview", 59 minutes. The interview is also with Dominic Miller, who has been Sting's guitarist for 31 years. He mentioned his fav album with Sting was "Soul Cages", the 1st he did. I did not have it, so I acquired it. A nice album, 4 stars. Here's "All This Time", which I remember from when it came out in 1991.

Yay, relatively caught up, all but 3 albums purchased in the last couple of weeks, which I will consider the start of 2022.

Now to go back through the Bandcamp recommendation emails dating back to July.

6!

Still doing a lot of reading while my bike accident injuries heal. I was able to go up and down stairs normally after ~2 weeks. Most of the bruising was gone after 3 weeks. Still have the knot on my right thigh. It's painful, but it's steadily getting smaller. I am still icing and heating. The stitch in my left back is still interfering with my sleeping. Nonetheless, I seem to be (slowly) healing.

1st off, I read the 1st 3 novels of the Wayfarers series by Becky Chambers, recommended by my son.

1. "The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet", 2015, 498 pages, 135k words. Humanity has fled a trashed Earth. They have finally been allowed to join the Galactic Commons, but they are very low status. The galactic civilization uses a lot of tech from prior civilization(s) that they don't really understand and can't reproduce.
   Meanwhile, a young woman fleeing family disgrace joins the motley crew of a wormhole-opening spaceship. They have a couple of adventures.
   These books aren't real big on plot - not a lot of stuff happens. They are big on accepting others regardless of whatever (Chambers is a married lesbian). So there is a human-humanoid alien romance, a human-reptilian alien romance, and a human-AI romance.
2. "A Closed and Common Orbit", 2016, 406 pages, 110k words. I figured this book would be further adventures of the motley crew of The Wayfarer, but it totally isn't. Instead it follows a minor character in the 1st book (a techie) as she attempts to help an AI make its way in an (illegal) humanoid body, and find and rescue the AI that helped her escape from childhood captivity.
3. "Record of a Spaceborn Few", 2018, 391 pages, 106k words. In another sharp turn, this story focuses the culture of the human diaspora fleet, 1000s of ships that are still home to a large part of the remnants of the human race. 1 of the characters is the sister of the captain of The Wayfarer. Again, relatively little plot - there are some people doing illegal scavenging.

These books are well written, good characters, but not a lot going on. Still, I have purchased the 4th 1.

Next up, the 4th and final book of the Terra Ignota series by Ada Palmer: "Perhaps the Stars", 2021, 602 pages, ?k words. Kobo did not have the page or word counts, so the page count came from Amazon. This thing seemed longer that 600 pages. I described it as "dense" to one of my friends when I was half-way through. And dense it indeed is, it is really a slog at times. I guess all the Greek, Latin, German, and French help set a tone, but ...
It is a satisfactory conclusion for a very complex series. War comes to our almost utopia. For at least the 1st 1/2 of the book, I was increasingly annoyed - they were fighting the wrong war! But they did finally get that straightened out, and I enjoyed the conclusion.

After finishing that weighty tome, I wanted something smaller and lighter. So I started with a novella by Adrian Tchaikovsky, "Elder Race", 2021, 148 pages, 40k words. A world settled many generations before by humans has lost its advanced technology and settled into a matriarchal feudal society. Weirdness leads a rebel youngest princess to contact the last human from a later anthropological team which came to study the planet - i.e., a wizard. A nice, quick, fun read.

That was enjoyable enough that I went on and read the sequel to Tchaikovsky's novella "The Expert Systems's Brother": "The Expert System's Champion", 2021, 148 pages, 40k words. Wow, same size as the prior book, that is craftmanship! I think I disliked 1 of the main premises of the 1st book, I liked it better in this 2nd one. Interesting conjectures about interesting alien races. Another nice, quick, fun read.

Meanwhile, Neal Stephenson's climate crisis novel, "Termination Shock" came in - 890 pages!!!. I think I'll go for some fantasy or maybe even a mystery before I wade into that.

3rd Batch of 2021 Music In

Moving right along ...

• Becca Mancari, "Juniata", 2021, 4 tracks, Bandcamp. 3 of the tracks are acoustic versions of songs off of her prior album. Nice alternative chick pop. 4 stars. Here's the only new track, "Annie".

• Julie London, "Lonely Girl", 1956, 13 tracks. Her 2nd album, with Al Viola on guitar as the sole accompanist. They were really pushing her sultry, breathy, pin-up girl image on this album, I really didn't care for the style much. 3 stars.
• Rita Payés & Elisabeth Roma, "Imagina", 2019, 12 tracks. Payés is a trombonist and vocalist (and also a guitar player I think). I support her on Patreon. I believe Roma is her mother, who is a great guitarist. I believe I had to order this as a CD from her website, and I had to sign for it as it was delivered direct from Spain. Very tasty stuff, so pleasant to listen to. 4 stars. Here's "A Rita"

• Sarah Vaughan, "After Hours", 1961, 11 tracks. Her 1st album accompanied by just guitar (Mundell Lowe) and upright bass, the year before she did "Sarah + 2" with Barney Kessel on guitar. I don't like this one near as much as "Sarah + 2" - I think it is just the song selection. She has such an amazing voice tho, so still 4 stars. Here's "In a Sentimental Mood" (written by Duke Ellington).

• Louis Armstrong, "Sachmo Plays Fats", 1955, 20 tracks. There are 11 unique tracks, 9 are alternate versions. I'm so glad I found this album! 1st, he has an intro to "Honeysuckle Rose", which I was excited to find. 2nd, I really liked "i'm crazy 'bout my baby (and my baby's crazy 'bout me)", which is a fun, catchy tune that I have worked up. Also on the album, "i've got a feeling i'm falling", which I had already worked up. Interesting, his wikipedia article says that Louis' 1929 recording of "Ain't Misbehavin'" "became his biggest selling record to date". That was the 1st Fats track I learned to play, from an arrangement by my teacher Rick Howard.
  The female vocalist on several tracks seems to be Velma Middleton, who sang with Louis from 1942-1961. In 1961, while touring in Sierra Leone, she suffered a massive stroke and died a month later, age 43.
  4 stars, and 2 samples: "Honeysuckle Rose" and "I'm Crazy 'Bout My Baby (And My Baby's Crazy 'Bout Me)".

• Children of Zeus, "Balance", 2021, 13 tracks, Bandcamp. A very talented duo out of Manchester, UK. I had their earlier work as Electronica/Dance, this one I put as R&B - slower, more soulful grooves. No, I think I'm going to make all their stuff Hip Hop. Some nice tunes as well as the rap. 4 stars. Here's "No Love Song".

• Blood Cultures, "LUNO", 2021, 8 tracks, Bandcamp. Out of Brooklyn. This sounds like 2 or 3 different bands - different styles, different vocalists. Some good tracks, but I think 3 stars until they settle down and find what their sound is.
• Madeline Kenney, "Summer Quarter, 2021, 4 tracks, Bandcamp. This is the 4th album of hers I have. Nice, catchy chill indie rock. Interesting guitar work. 4 stars. Here's the title track.

2nd Batch of 2021 Music In

I'm a machine, I tell ya, a music-processing machine.

• Stéphane Grappelli & Yo-Yo Ma, "Anything Goes", 1989, 10 tracks. Mostly Cole Porter songs. iTunes brought this in as a Yo-Yo Ma classical album. On the original album cover, Stéphane clearly had top billing as is appropriate. I was surprised I didn't like this as much as the "Skol" album Stéphane did with Oscar Peterson. Wow, looking at his Wikipedia page, he was a collaborating fool from the 1970s into the 1990s. Still I'll go for 4 stars. Here's the track I think best mixes the violin & cello: "So In Love".

• Olivier St. Louis, "Matters of the Heartless", 2021, 7 tracks, Bandcamp. From the First Word Records sampler. Great R&B, from Berlin, Germany. 4 stars. Here's "Jump The Line", which was on the sampler.

• katie dey, "urdata", 2021, 12 tracks, Bandcamp. I read the album title as "ur" as in archetypal or primordial, then I saw I had her album "mydata". So I'm guessing "ur" is "your". Cute. Conceptually, I like this album. But, it is a little too conceptual for me, much moreso than her earlier albums. Lots of beeps & boops & weird filters. Well done, but, again, a bit too conceptual for me. 3 stars.
• TYPHOON, "Sympathetic Magic", 2021, 12 tracks, Bandcamp. Kind of whiny emo solo guitar and vocals - with occasionally some richer orchestration. Some of the tunes are OK, but it's way too much of the same. 3 stars.
• Willie Nelson, "That's Life", 2021, 11 tracks. His 3rd album of standards? It's funny, now when I get a standards album like this, I compare with my set lists. This album has 5 songs that are in my book: "just in time", "i've got you under my skin", "you make me feel so young", "i won't dance", and "lonesome road". Still, overall, I did not find these performances very compelling. 3 stars.
• Herb Ellis and Joe Pass, "Two For The Road", 1974, 13 tracks. Like I mentioned last time re Joe Pass "Virtuoso", this is a really lot of notes often played very fast - it definitely takes some getting used to. This is borderline, but they do play well together, so I'll go for 4 stars. Here's "I've Found a New Baby".

• Superorder, "What We Became", 2021, 7 tracks, Bandcamp. Chill, trancy dance grooves from this keyboards/percussion duo. The percussionist is my most excellent nephew Max Heinz of Portland, ME. 3 stars.
• Lake Street Dive, "Obviously", 2021, 11 tracks, Bandcamp???. Their 7th album, more than I would have thought. But, they've been together since 2004. Great poppy, catchy tunes. A couple are a little trite, but overall a fabulous effort. 4 stars. Here's the 1st track, "Hypotheticals".

• Nubiyan Twist, "Freedom Fables", 2021, 9 tracks. 7 different guest lead vocalists, FTW! 10 piece power R&B band out of London, really, really strong. Gawd, in my experience, there is nothing more powerful in a rock/blues/r&b band than the wall of sound of a 4 piece horn section. Great world beats. 4 stars, Here's "Wipe Away Tears", featuring Nick Richards.

Getting a Lot of Reading Done - Oops!

Tearing through a few books lately. I've had more time to read, due to having had a fairly serious bike wreck on Thursday October 21. Biking the Legacy Trail with my wife, I got distracted where the trail crosses the main entrance to the Kentucky Horse Park and ran into 1 of the 3' tall steel posts in the middle of the trail (car discourager) going around 15 mph. Main point of contact was about 4" above the knee on my right inner thigh. Bruising the entire length of the leg, plus a 8" diameter bruise on my left lower back, which I suspect is where I hit the ground. Various pulled muscles in my back and groin, very little road rash. I have pix but I will not engage in injury porn.

8 days later, I am still limping around, with a knot the size and shape of 1/2 a pear in my right thigh, and trying as much as possible to keep off of the leg and keep it elevated. I suspect it will be weeks if not months before I am fully recovered.

I have been saying for years that I would know it was time to quit biking when I had a serious wreck. I would follow that with, "That's not a good algorithm, I clearly need to replace it." Too late, the algorithm has fired. Time to quit biking.

I've greatly enjoyed biking, both in Florida and especially in the beautiful rolling (or nasty steep and long) hills of the horse country around Lexington. Since I retired in 2012, I have biked most Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays. My app says that since 2013 I have biked 16,039 miles, an average of 1,782 miles/year. It looks like 2020 was my peak year, 2,447 miles, probably because I spent 9 months of 2020 in Florida.

But, at my age (70), I can't afford to be laid up for weeks, gaining weight and losing muscle mass. Plus, this was a bad wreck, and I'm lucky I didn't break anything. I'm not going to press that luck.

I'll keep walking Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday - although that was problematic for a while. March 4 I was 4.5 miles into a 5.7 mile walk when I got a sharp pain in the arch of my right foot. I had to lay off of it 6 weeks before I could start walking again. But, I now have arch support insoles in all my shoes, including the slippers I wear around the house all the time now - no more going barefoot, my southern heritage is officially betrayed - and I do many more stretches of my feet and ankles, particularly before I get out of bed in the morning. So hopefully I'm cleared to walk.

Maybe on my old biking days I'll add some weight work to my floor work. Hopefully I will feel safe using a gym soon.

---

The reading has been all good. 1st, Charles Stross, "Invisible Sun", 2021, 544 pages, 148k words. This is the 3rd and final book of the Empire Games series, and the 6th and FINAL book of The Merchant Princes extended series. Stross does his usual great job. Lots of interesting politics here. A fitting completion for these books, I gave it 5 stars, unusual.

Between this series and The Laundry Files, so much of Charlie's bandwidth has been eaten up over the last 2 decades or so. He is the only author extant where I have repeatedly had the thought, "I wish Charlie had a clone or 2.", such that he could do more of the other speculative narratives of his non-series novels, or other new ideas he has mentioned.

2nd, Adrian Tchaikovsky, "Shards of Earth", 2021, 524 pages, 142k words. Apparently #1 in The Final Architecture series. Mr. T is becoming my fav space opera author. Lots of flavors of aliens, some approaching god-like status, lots of flavors of humans, lots of plot, lots of action. Very enjoyable.

3rd & lastly, Benjamin Rosenbaum, "The Unraveling", 2021, 384 pages, 104k words. I think Cory Doctorow strongly recommended this book in his most excellent Pluralistic blog. I found it a little offputting at 1st. 1st off, it is set 550,000 years in the future. I'm sorry, that is way too far. Anything that far in the future involving humans had better be happening in at least 27 dimensions. I would put the tech in this book at a few 1000 years in the future, tops. Or maybe a few decades, if somehow The Singularity actually appears?

2ndly, I finally did figure out the gendering situation: 2 genders, Staids, who are emotionally repressed scholars of some infinitely long book, and Vails, who are more normal people who like the 3 Fs: fashion, fighting, and fucking. It kind of reminded me of 2 of 7 of Ada Palmer's hives: the Staids as Masons, and the Vails as Humanists. Where are the other 5 hives?

It also reminded me of the theistic Buddhist states, like Tibet say. Real people generating capital, theistic leaches at the top sucking it off.

The book's metadata points out Rosenbaum's apparent engagement with his Judaism. So maybe we see the Staids as Talmudic scholars ... boring.

The story then winds up being a Romeo & Juliet story - a forbidden Staid-Vail romance, shocking! Then we get an inequality based revolution, civilization overturned, dogs sleeping with cats, where will it end? Note that, although their civilization is designed to minimize economic inequality, the inequality they have is at the most basic level of humankind: who gets to reproduce, and who decides? I think that I have mentioned before, the right to reproduce w/o anyone's permission is the most basic and primitive of all human rights. Hence 2x kudos to the Chinese, who actually successfully curtailed the reproduction rights of their population. (But now their demographics are inverting, trouble ahead, oops!)

Overall, it was engaging towards the end. But, our Romeo & Juliet are 1st introduced to us at 9YO, then for most of the action of the book at 16YO. So, is this then a YA novel? The book does not appear to be much targeted at a YA audience. I was thinking, teenagers as protagonists === YA book.

Maybe not? After a bit of consideration, I'd say this book was hackneyed & predictable, but, still mostly an enjoyable read.

1st Batch of 2021 Music In

OK, I'm going to create this list as I upload these to my PC. Then I'll come back and rate and comment after I've listened to them a bit.

• Juana Molina, "ANRMAL", 2020, 11 tracks, Bandcamp. This was from late 2020 and got missed somehow. A full album of Argentinian punk. Really fun to listen to, a good variety of tunes. It seems to be a live album, it's so great that you can hardly tell anymore. Wow, looking her up on Wikipedia, she's 60 YO, 2nd generation show biz, been recording for 20 years. 4 stars. Here's "Eras". Hah, she's playing a cherry SG open-handed - FTW!

• Jorge Elbrecht, "Presentable Corpse 002", 2021, 12 tracks, Bandcamp. This is lot more poppy than some of his other albums - so I like it better. Still, 3 stars.
• Market, "2", 2021, 3 tracks, Bandcamp. From Melbourne, Oz. Very laid back, very chill, very dreamy. 4 stars. Here's "Show it".

• First Word Records, "Two Syllables Volume Seventeen", 2021, 16 tracks, Bandcamp. A sampler of their artists, and a good one - I got 2 new artists from it. I really like when record labels do these. My oldest daughter gave me 1 from Luaka Bop decades ago that opened a lot of doors for me. This one does too. 4 stars, but no video, I'll add for some of the individual artists.
• Ella Fitzgerald & Joe Pass, "Take Love Easy", 1973, 9 tracks. The 1st of 4 albums these 2 did together. I was really looking forward to this, but Ella's voice is not what it was in the 20s-50s. So sad, she is my favorite vocalist of all time, so I am being more critical than I am of many other aging artists. But in her prime, her voice, her timbre, were just magical. It's a good collaboration though. 4 stars. I almost went with 3, but, it's Ella. Here's "A Foggy Day".

• Joe Pass, "Virtuoso", 1974, 12 tracks. At 1st, I was overwhelmed by this. "Too many notes." But as I got used to it, I found it very enjoyable. 4 stars. Here's "Cherokee". Fast enough?

• Takuya Kuroda, "Fly Moon Die Soon", 2020, 9 tracks, Bandcamp. This comes from the First Word Records sampler. He is a jazz trumpeter with a great band and great tunes. I've often complained about jazz that it is too abstract and not hooky enough. None of that here, great tunes. A lot of the 2 bar, 8 beat pattern (the clave?) so dominant in international music. 4 stars. Here's the song from the collaboration, "Do No Why".

• Roxy Music, eponymous, 1972, 10 tracks. Someone insisted this was a classic I had to check out. I did. I had no idea this was Brian Eno's 1st band. Overall, it didn't do much for me. 3 stars.
• The Beths, "Future Me Hates Me", 2018, 10 tracks, Bandcamp. From Auckland, New Zealand. I liked their 2020 "Jump Rope Gazers". This 1 is good too. Nice energetic tunes. 4 stars. Here's the 1st track "Great No One".

This brings us up to 2021-01-12.

It's Not As Bad As I Thought

I've already said "Music In is a mess" too many times. I'm finally getting around to processing this. Again, the problem is integrating the music I download on my MacBook when I'm in Florida into my permanent collection on my desktop PC in Kentucky.

It looks like I have 8 albums added in Lexington from Sep to Nov of last year in _Unrated on the PC. So I will process those 1st.

Then, it looks like there are 30 albums on the MacBook to be moved to the PC and processed. I've listened to these I think a lot more than the ones on the PC - those I've been looping on for the last 2-3 weeks. So 38 albums total to process. Not too bad - my November 30 makeup post after spending March-September of last year in Florida processed 41 albums. So I've got a few less than that to process.

Rather than do a huge 41 album post again, I think I'll process these 6-10 at a time. Maybe based on when added to my collection? I can get the date for Amazon purchases, not sure if I can on BandCamp. Ahh, I can use the file creation dates on the MacBook.

So 1st the 8 already on the pc. Then the next post, the next 6 or so from Florida.

I've also gotten behind on checking out the new stuff recommended by bandcamp. I have emails going back to early July. I think I'll get to those as I get more caught up on the stuff I've already purchased.

[Updated 2021-10-10 I wrote that and made this list 2021-09-03. Just now getting back to it. I've definitely been putting it off. I decided, no new novels until this is done, and the 1st group of albums are uploaded to the pc.]

• Redeyes, "Selfportraits LP", 2020, 20 tracks, Bandcamp. Nice French (Toulouse) techno tracks. Very listenable. 4 stars. Here's "Selfportaits: The Movie" on YouTube. Nice!

• William Tyler, "New Veritas", 2020, 7 tracks, Bandcamp. Very ethereal alternative guitar rock. Pleasant listening, but nothing very memorable. And, of course, I think it could use vocals. 3 stars.
• Fleet Foxes, "Shore", 2020, 15 tracks. Their 4th album. I really feel like the power folk bands struggle to maintain a sound once they are successful with it. These guys seem to have stuck with their heavy reverb engineering. Some of these songs are inventive and strong, so I am going for 4 stars for the 1st time since their 1st album (eponymous). Here's "Cradling Mother, Cradling Woman" - not very folky, more Sufjan Stephens or even Grizzly Bear:

• Wendy Eisenberg, "Auto", 2020, 13 tracks, Bandcamp. Very pleasant quirky alternative music. Nice vocals. 4 stars. This track, "futures", had the most videos.

• Cribaby, "love songs for everyone", 2020, 5 tracks, Bandcamp. These are fabulously chill r&b female singer tracks, all totally great. 4 stars. Here's "some kinda voodoo": https://criibaby.bandcamp.com/track/some-kinda-voodoo
• Half Moon Run, "The Covideo Sessions", 2020, 11 tracks, Bandcamp. High energy neo-folkrock. In the same wheelhouse as the Jayhawks maybe. 4 stars. Here's "full circle":

• Andrew Bird, "Hark!", 2020, 13 tracks, Bandcamp. As a rule, I don't buy xmas albums. I have everything Aimee Mann has ever recorded, but I did not buy her xmas album. When I did #SongOfTheDay for 100 straight days, it included 14 straight days of holiday music, 2020-12-20 thru 2021-01-01. I mostly go for 4 stars for Andrew, but, he did 3 small pandemic albums. Those were 4*, so I've heard them probably enough. So I think I'll go with 3 stars.
• Gorillaz, "Song Machine, Season One: Strange Timez", 2020, 17 tracks. As always a good effort by Gorillaz. Quite the all-star cast of collaborators, including Elton John. 4 stars. Here's "Désolé ft. Fatoumata Diawara (Episode Two)".

OK. _unrated is empty. I will fill it up, and create the outline in the next Music In post as I go. Everything is clumped together as to date, I'll try to tease some date info out. Onward!

Both Pretty Good

I've been reading at a pretty good clip. A trilogy and a duology.

1st up, "The Age of Madness" trilogy by Joe Abercrombie. I enjoyed his 1st 2 trilogies. This story is set in the same world as the 1st trilogy, "The First Law", 20-40 years later. Some of the characters were around for the 1st trilogy. The 3 books:

1. "A Little Hatred", 2019, 683 pages, 186k words.
2. "The Trouble with Peace", 2020, 739 pages, 201k words.
3. "The Wisdom of Crowds", 2021, 733 pages, 199k words.

So what we have here is a 2,155 page book. There are 9 sections in the book, 3/volume, and the numbering spans the 3 volumes.

I like his writing. Humanly fallable characters. Lots of action. Great plot twists, all tied up nicely in the end.

Funny that the message of the book is so timely. Shakespeare was wrong when he wrote "First, we kill all the lawyers.". He should have said, "First, we kill all the bankers." Seems to me like a jubilee would be a lot easier.

2nd, I reread, for the 3rd or 4th time, "Songs of Earth and Power", by Greg Bear. The complete duology, only $2.99 on Kobo! What an entertainment bargain! The 2 component volumes are:

1. "The Infinity Concerto", 1984, 472 pages, 128k words.
2. "The Serpent Mage", 1986, 430 pages, 117k words.

I've always loved this series. A 17 YO young man is transported to The Realm - of Fairie - to be trained as a mage by Sidhi-human half-breeds (Breeds). It is a compelling story, well paced. I think this should be labeled YA - part of the plot concerns our young male protagonist having his 1st clueless encounters with women - a YA speciality.

I have complained before about theism in Bear's work. I will complain again. In both books the progagonist is in a tight spot and he prays to a very Jehovah-seeming God - despite the revelations in the book that all of earth's gods were Sidhi doing magic tricks to mislead and hold back human development. Sad that such a great mostly sci-fi author - this was his only fantasy until recently - should have his brain infested by theism.

I always loved this one quote from the very end. I think I have used the last line before, this time I'll include the whole thing. A nice humanistic toast:

“To all of us, of all races, and the matter we are made of, and the ground beneath our feet, and the worlds over our head. To strife and passage and death and life.” He held his glass higher. “To horror, and awe, and all strong emotions, and most of all, to love.”

Schrödinger's Dog

So a few days ago I was out walking in the morning. On the Beaumont trail behind the apartments heading for the Beaumont Parkway crossing, there was a little old woman pushing a baby carriage coming the other way. So what was in the carriage? A baby or a dog? For a woman that age, I would estimate both were equally likely.

As we passed, I did not turn and look. I did not collapse the wave function. I have no idea which it was. And if Penrose was right (probably not) and there are quantum tubules in our brains helping to create consciousness such that my decision not to look may have had a quantum component, does that mean that the baby/dog states both currently exist?

Of course, the woman was looking at the carriage interior the whole time. So she collapsed the wave function. So it was definitely a dog or a baby and not a quantum superposition of both.

Not sure I have blogged it, I'll mention it again: maybe the whole "observer collapsing the wave function" thing is a consequence of the fact that we are living in a simulation, and the simulation does not bother to compute and render things that no one is looking at. I'm totally not sure if that has any explanatory value or not. But maybe it does imply that once 1 observer collapses the wave function, it is collapsed for all observers. Seems intuitive, I guess.

Gnomon Is An Ireland

The horrible pun of the title comes from my high school classmate Steve Stansbury. The 1st book we read in AP English Senior year, Fall 1967, was James Joyce's "Dubliners". 1 of the stories used the word "gnomon" and Stansbury punned away. [Note that the title of Joyce's 1st novel "A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man" was the inspiration for the title of this blog.]

4 & 1/2 sci fi books to capture.

1st, "To Hold Up the Sky", by Cixin Liu, 2020, 421 pages, 114k words; a collection of 11 short stories. As with his "3 Body Problem" novels, Liu has a very different (Chinese) feel from most sci-fi I read. More energetic? More awe-filled? Very enjoyable stories.

2a, "Infinite Detail", by Tim Maughan, 2019, 296 pages, 80k words. I really did not care for this book. I think I gave it 2 stars, and I will not link to it, as I would recommend that you not buy it.

Post-apocalyptic - Internet bad, so destroy the internet. But maybe it will be replaced by a peer-to-peer system, incorruptible because ??? The author details why he thinks the Internet is so bad that it must be destroyed, but IMO he has completely misdiagnosed the problem. Capitalism is the problem, not the Internet.

One can even imagine a FaceBook that was not the current disaster of propaganda and misinformation if capitalism was removed from the picture. It can be done, look at Wikipedia. I was surprised recently to find out that Wikipedia is a European creation much more than a US one - 2/3 of the Wikipedia editors are European. Yet again the Old World socialists lead the way ...

2b, "Ghost Hardware", by Tim Maughan, 2020, 64 pages, 17k words. 3 short stories set in the "Infinite Detail" universe, providing backstories for the characters of the novel. The stories were even less likable than the novel. The 1 where teenagers playing a smash-and-grap online game trash a sporting goods store was totally mean-spirited and nihilistic. Ugh.

3rd, "The Hidden Girl and Other Stories", by Ken Liu, 2020, 470 pages, 127k words; a collection of 19 short stories. There is 1 3-parter. This is a fabulous collection, a lot of post-singularity stories, and some stories with humanity-at-the-end-of-time kind of cosmic themes. A really enjoyable read.

4th, "Gnomon", subtitled "A Novel", by Nick Harkaway, 2018, 875 pages, 238k words.

The reason for my opening pun reminiscence. This is a fabulous novel. 4 threads - no, 5 threads - no, ??? threads - that all come to overlap and flow together in a fascinating manner. A satisfying conclusion, and I was not surprised at all then the author violates the 4th wall at the end. The last 2 sentences in the book:

I am Gnomon.

From this moment, so are you.

Nice! This was the best sci-fi I have read in a good while. It reminded me a very little of maybe "Cloud Atlas" - but much more coherent and well-done. This novel probably could be considered literature rather than genre if you care about such things.

Looking up Harkaway on Wikipedia, his real name is Nicholas Cornwell, son of David John Moore Cornwell - pen name John le Carré. Le Carré died in 2020, hopefully he read it and was rightfully proud of son for this novel.

Bats

I love sitting on our back patio and watching the bats feed in the dusk.

Our backyard is inclosed on 3 sides by trees and on the 4th side by the house. I think it makes a bug bowl for the bats to feed in.

I have never seen fewer than 2 bats. Tonight there were 3. A few weeks ago, there were 4, and I actually captured a pic:

Usually they seem to fly independently of each other. Occasionally they seem to fly as a pair.

A few weeks ago, there were 2 bats flying together. 1 looked like it was following the other. Then the trailer sped up, bumped into the leader, and darted ahead. "Tag, you're it!" I have no idea if that is what was going on, but that was my snap judgement at the time.

Disappointment and Its Opposite

I was greatly looking forward to "We Are Satellites", by Sarah Pinsker, 2021, 418 pages, 113k words. I had really enjoyed her short story collection, reviewed here.

I wound up being very disappointed with the book. 2 main reasons:

1. There was way too much domestic fu, and it was boring. Too many conversations at the kitchen table, making supper, snuggling in bed.
2. I found the overall plot implausible. That a consumer device installation which involves brain surgery would not be totally vetted by the FDA I don't believe - or not yet anyway. Plus, the young male protagonist's inability to communicate his problems with the tech to anyone again just did not ring true to me.

Oh well, better luck next time.

I was pleasantly surprised by "Children of Time", by Adrian Tchaikovsky, 2018, 591 pages, 160k words, and its sequel "Children of Ruin", 2019, 567 pages, 154k words. In the 1st 1, religious terrorists destroy most of a terraforming mission to another planet. But, uplift nano-machines survive & instead of working on monkeys, work on hunting spiders! Yay, intelligent spiders, FTW! Not for the arachnophobic, I guess.

Then in the sequel ... uplifted octopuses!!! What could be better? A very different model of mentation. Plus, bonus, intelligent slime molds, with atomic level storage replacing DNA! And they get to meet the Humans & spiders! And in the end ...

At times the narratives seems stretched out & disjointed, but, with action taking place over 1000s of years, this is probably appropriate. Again, a surprisingly enjoyable read.

Lots

Well, this post is long delayed, behind the last 2 posts on the climate crisis & MMT. It's nice to be getting caught up.

#1, "Mythago Wood", by Robert Holdstock, 2003, 331 pages, 95k words. I suspect this was a cheapie from BookBub. So, virgin growth forest somewhere in rural England has magical powers: it instantiates corporeal instances of archetypal figures from the subconscious of humans living near it. A bad parent father & his 2 sons of course fixate on the warrior-princess Guinevere & succeed in creating several instances of her. I don't think you could write something more masturbatory if you tried. I won't be continuing with the series, LOL!

#2, "The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories" by Susanna Clarke, 2008, 243 pages, 66k words. 8 short stories set in the universe of "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Morrell". In general charming and, given Clarke's known issues with chronic pain which greatly limit her output, I was very appreciative to get to read these. And, again, "Piranesi" was 1 of the best books I have read in the last few years.

#3, "The Iron Dragon's Mother" by Michael Swanwick, 2019, 402 pages, 109k words. Swanwick was 1 of my favs Back In The Day. "Vacuum Flowers" was totally iconic when it 1st came out in 1987. This story is not bad, faerie overlapping with the mundane world, lots of plot, yak yak yak, etc. But, a bit too feudal for my current tastes.

#4, "The Once and Future Witches", by Alix E. Harrow, 2020, 555 pages, 151k words. What a great read! Totally conflating the women's suffrage movement of the early 20th century with a movement to restore women's witchcraft to public life! I'm so proud of Harrow, a fellow Kentuckian, who I believe lives in Madison County, 30 or so miles SE of me. How has no one else ever remarked on the fact that witches instantiate most effectively as trios of sisters: the 3 witches in Macbeth, in Cinderella, in Hocus Pocus! Oops, I have 3 daughters!!! A really great read, I was sorry when it was over.

#5 & #6, "The Dreamblood Duology", by N.K. Jemisin, 2016, 948 pages, 257k words. The original 2 novels were "The Killing Moon" and "The Shadowed Sun". A very unique mythos, with a monkish sect which has a few different flavors who manage life, health, dreams, and death. A very compelling read.

#7, "Robot Artists & Black Swans", by Bruno Argento (aka Bruce Sterling living in Turin (Torino) Italy), 2021, 311 pages, 84k words, 7 stories. This is a totally great collection of stories. I really wish Sterling were more productive, he has written so much groundbreaking SF over the last 35 years. And he actually follows me on Twitter, FTW, thanks Bruce! 1 thing I love about this collection is that several of stories have quantum endings: is the cat alive or dead? It doesn't matter! IT DOESN'T MATTER! What a great storyteller!

#8, "Little Brother", by Cory Doctorow, 2008, 399 pages, 108k words. I bought this in hardback several years ago (so I could pass it on), I think that contributed to my just getting around to reading it. What a great book! I read it in 1 day, I totally haven't done that in a while! Teenagers vs the fascist Department of Homeland Security - who are you going to root for? Kudos, next up "Pirate Cinema". Doctorow is indeed the Bard of the Revolution! Preach it!

Yay, caught up on blogging books read! What can I get caught up on next?

My Latest Mad Scheme

My last post was my review/summary of Bill Gates' book "How to Avoid a Climate Disaster". As I mentioned there, throughout most of the book, he kept talking about "how much this would cost", and "how expensive this is", and "Green Premiums" (cost differentials). And as I mentioned in that post, the whole time, I'm like, "wait a minute - MMT sez, worrying about costs is stupid. Money is software. The Fed can print as much as it wants."

At the end of the post, I proposed the following:

I kept having this thought as I approached the end of this book: how about we put 2 grad students to work and rewrite this book making the following changes: 1 grad student tallies how much everything costs - pretty much just as a thought experiment (Gedankenexperiment).

Meanwhile, grad student #2 identifies what the resources involved are, and where there are potential shortages thereof. We then know what we REALLY have to worry about trying to avoid a climate disaster. The other, the $$$, is BS.

OK, so now we've got the 2 grad students' data. What do we do with it? Why, we use it to support My Latest Mad Scheme, of course!

1. We clone both grad students for every country on earth. The clones replicate the computations for every country on earth.
2. We total up all the $$$ that are required to save the planet from the climate crisis for every country on earth. This total we call "$$$NeededToSaveThePlanet"
3. The World Bank creates a "Save The Planet" GL account.
4. Every country in the world with their own fiat currency computes their share of $$$NeededToSaveThePlanet from the following chart, taken from this Jan 2020 article.
   I think that this is fair - current wealth is probably fairly proportional to a country's share of CO2 that is in the atmosphere.
   
5. These countries then direct their central banks to create their share of the $$$NeededToSaveThePlanet and put it in the World Bank "Save The Planet" account. They do not create any entry for these $$$ in their national accounting or debt. This is something that the world will share together. As far as their national accounts are concerned, it is if these $$$ never existed.
6. For countries without fiat currencies, the fiat currency countries pick up their share, proportionally. The ECB covers all the EuroZone countries.
7. We then solve the climate crisis. The world spends from this account as is needed. If it runs short, all the contributing countries contribute again proportionally. What do they care if they do this? It is not going against any of their national account balances. Their Fed equivalent just creates a $$$ amount & places it in the World Bank "Save The Planet" account and forgets about it.
   At 1 point I thought, withdrawals are based on a country's population. But this is wrong, population doesn't matter. What matters is past, current, and future CO2 produced. But again, who cares? When the $$$ run out, the printing presses roll! MMT, FTW!
8. Grifters & other deviant capitalists (they're all just trying to make a buck, i.e., practice capitalism) will of course be a problem. We fund as much % of $$$NeededToSaveThePlanet as is needed to identify and remove from circulation the grifters. And, regardless, if they screw the $$$ #s up, we just PRINT MORE $$$.

So, that's the easy part. Let me repeat it - let me shout it out loud: THAT IS THE EASY PART! [And I think Bill Gates will still be worth > $100B after we do it. So, come on Bill, get on board! MMT FTW!]

The hard part is the resources. And tallying and computing the resources required.

And I think the even harder part is the tech: the 19 technologies Gates identified as being needed to save the planet.

But, following the flow above, we don't have to worry about funding the research for new tech. Just print the damn $$$. And keep our fingers crossed that most of the 19 techs Gates indentified (1 of which was nuclear fusion) are NOT like nuclear fusion, which has been 40 years away for the last 70 years.

OK! Climate crisis averted! Thank you in advance for all your hard work saving the planet! And remember, cost is no obstacle! There is no cost too great, no amount of meaningless $$$ we cannot create, if we can save the human race from extinction!

You're welcome!

How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

"How to Avoid a Climate Disaster", is a recent book by Bill Gates, 2021, 275 pages, 74k words. It is subtitled "the solutions we have and the breakthroughs we need". It has an Introduction, 12 Chapters, and an Afterword.

---

[Well, I finished this book in early April, and I have waited too long to write this review. In the meantime, Bill & Melinda Gates have announced they are divorcing after 27 years of marriage, possible driven by Bill's ties to sexual offender Jeffrey Epstein. Other tales of bizarre, entitled sexual practices by Bill are also circulating.

Meanwhile, among others, our previous author Cory Doctorow has called out Bill for his priorization of intellectual property rights (aka maximizing corporate profits) in the handling of the COVID-19 vaccine: talking Oxford University out of giving their patents to the world for free and instead giving them to AstroZeneca; and heading the to-date toothless vaccine charity program COVAX.

Professionally, I have disliked Bill Gates and Microsoft going back to the 1980s. Microsoft's monopolistic practices (make it child's play to pirate Word and Excel until they have driven WordPerfect and VisiCalc out of business, then start harping on intellectual property) were rightly busted by the Feds. Then W took office and it all went away. The complete lack of security in MS-DOS and early Windows still plagues the computer industry today.

Oh well. On to the review. I suspect I will be making short shrift of it.]

---

The introduction is titled "51 Billion To Zero". 51 billion is "is how many tons of greenhouse gases the world typically adds to the atmosphere every year". That the 1st 2 words of the book represent a number tells us that Gates is going to take a quantitative approach to this topic.

Gates gives us the motto of his foundation: "Everyone deserves the chance to live a healthy and productive life". This is a similar sentiment to the George Orwell quote which is my pinned tweet: "Either we all live in a decent world or no one does". So this is a good sentiment.

Gates also introduces us to Vaclav Smil, the Czech-born expert on ecology, particularly focusing on energy.

---

Chapter 1 is titled "Why Zero?". It lays some scientific groundwork.

Hotter air can hold more moisture, and as the air gets warmer, it gets thirstier, drinking up more water from the soil.

Gates calls out the danger of heatstroke, recalling the horrifying scenario that opens KSR's "The Ministry For The Future":

In the regions that are most in jeopardy — the Persian Gulf, South Asia, and parts of China — there will be times of the year when hundreds of millions of people will be at risk of dying.

---

Chapter 2 is titled "This Will Be Hard". Right at the time then the developing world can start to see the light at the end of the tunnel in getting lifestyies somewhat like the developed West, we realize that the light is the headlight of the onrushing train of the climate crisis. Gates states that

The best books I have read on this topic are Vaclav Smil’s Energy Transitions and Energy Myths and Realities ...

This is a pretty strong statement:

Unless we move fast toward zero, bad things (and probably many of them) will happen well within most people’s lifetime, and very bad things will happen within a generation. Even if climate change doesn’t rank as an existential threat to humanity, it will make most people worse off, and it will make the poorest even poorer.

---

Chapter 3 is titled "Five Questions To Ask In Every Climate Conversation". The 5 questions are Gates' "mental framework" for understanding the climate crisis. They are:

1. How Much of the 51 Billion Tons Are We Talking About?
   These are great numbers to have - the numbers are probably the book's greatest strength.
   
2. What’s Your Plan for Cement?
   Who knew that cement (which holds concrete together) was such an environmental disaster?
3. How Much Power Are We Talking About?
   Another great table.
   
4. How Much Space Do You Need?
   And another great table.
   
5. How Much Is This Going to Cost?
   Gates defines the term "Green Premium": how much more does the green, i.e. no CO2 emitted, solution to a problam cost than the current, presumably fossil fuel-based, solution.

   [I found myself at a disadvantage throughout these discussions - I think MMT has ruined me. Because once you start thinking in MMT patterns, the question "how much does it cost?" immediately triggers the MMT truism, "cost doesn't matter - only the availability of resources does". I'm going to try to put that aside for now and just address it at the end.]

   Meanwhile, Gates puts the "Green Premium" concept to use:

   Looking at all the different premiums, we can decide which zero-carbon solutions we should deploy now and where we should pursue breakthroughs because the clean alternatives aren’t cheap enough.

---

The next 5 chapters discuss in turn the 5 "things we do" listed in the 1st box above.

Given it's foundational nature, electricity generation ("How We Plug In") is discussed 1st. Clearly energy storage for renewables is 1 of the critical technologies that must be improved. Gates also is an advocate for (and investor in) nuclear power. I also believe that nuclear power should be vigorously developed.

It would surely be a lot easier to "avoid a climate disaster" if nuclear fusion power generation had been developed at any time in the last 70 years. This is a place where science and technology have let us down.

Gates provides many computations and estimates of the Green Premiums associated with activities and objects within these 5 domains.

---

Chapter 9 is titled "Adapting to a Warmer World". Gates raises an interesting point about the developing world - that helping them adapt to our warming world is more important than reducing their miniscule carbon footprint.

Please don’t take away vaccine money and put it into electric cars. Africa is responsible for only about 2 percent of all global emissions. What you really should be funding there is adaptation. The best way we can help the poor adapt to climate change is to make sure they’re healthy enough to survive it. And to thrive despite it.

Gates introduces us to CGIAR. Per Wikipedia, "CGIAR (formerly the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research) is a global partnership that unites international organizations engaged in research about food security." Gates is apparently a leader of the Global Commission on Adaptation.

---

Chapter 10 is titled "Why Government Policies Matter". Gates begins by talking anecdotally about the creation of the EPA as an example of government addressing environmental issues. Other successful government projects:

• Electrification;
• Energy security - pursued after the Oil Embargo of the early 1970s;
• Economic recovery - as was done after the Great Recession of 2008.

Gates lists 7 "high level goals they [government] should be aiming for." I think these section headers could have been a lot more explanatory.

1. Mind the Investment Gap ...
2. Level the Playing Field ...
3. Overcome Nonmarket Barriers ...
4. Stay Up to Date ...
5. Plan for a Just Transition ...
6. Do the Hard Stuff Too ...
7. Work on Technology, Policy, and Markets at the Same Time

---

Chapter 11 is titled "A Plan For Getting To Zero". Gates divides the elements of "the my plan" into 2 categories:

1. expanding the supply of innovations; ...
2. accelerating the demand for innovations.

Under the 1st branch, Gates details 19 innovations we need - quite a laundry list.

• Hydrogen produced without emitting carbon
• Grid-scale electricity storage that can last a full season
• Electrofuels
• Advanced biofuels
• Zero-carbon cement
• Zero-carbon steel
• Plant- and cell-based meat and dairy
• Zero-carbon fertilizer
• Next-generation nuclear fission
• Nuclear fusion
• Carbon capture (both direct air capture and point capture)
• Underground electricity transmission
• Zero-carbon plastics
• Geothermal plastics
• Pumped hydro
• Thermal storage
• Drought- and flood-tolerant food crops
• Zero-carbon alternatives to palm oil
• Coolants that don’t contain F-gases

Gates states that "To get these technologies ready soon enough to make a difference, governments need to do the following:"

• Quintuple clean energy and climate-related R&D over the next decade. ...
• Make bigger bets on high-risk, high-reward R&D projects. ...
• Match R&D with our greatest needs. ...
• Work with industry from the beginning.

Gates subdivides the second branch, the demand side.

The demand side is a little more complicated than the supply piece. It actually involves two steps: the proof phase, and the scale-up phase.

...

The proof phase is a valley of death, a place where good ideas go to die.

...

Governments (as well as big companies) can help energy start-ups make it out of the valley alive because they’re massive consumers. If they prioritize buying green, they’ll help bring more products to market by creating certainty and reducing costs.

This leads to the demand side list of goverment to-dos [I guess his editor didn't notice the lack of parallelism in these section headers]:

• Use procurement power. ...
• Create incentives that lower costs and reduce risk. ...
• Build the infrastructure that will get new technologies to market. ...
• Change the rules so new technologies can compete. ...
• Put a price on carbon. ...
• Clean electricity standards. ...
• Clean fuel standards. ...
• Clean product standards. ...
• Out with the old. ...

Gates discusses the roles appropriate to various levels of government:

The federal government ... collects most tax revenue, which means that federal financial incentives will be the most effective at driving change.

...

Two things are clear. First, the amount of money invested in getting to zero, and adapting to the damage that we know is coming, will need to ramp up dramatically and for the long haul. To me, this means that governments and multilateral banks will need to find much better ways to tap private capital. Their coffers aren’t big enough to do this on their own.

Second, the time frames for climate investment are long, and the risks are high. So the public sector should be using its financial strength to lengthen the investment horizon—reflecting the fact that returns may not come for many years—and reduce the risk of these investments. It’ll be tricky to mix public and private money on such a large scale, but it's essential. We need our best minds in finance working on this problem.

State and local governments also have their role to play, via state legislatures and agencies, and city councils and municipal agencies.

---

Chapter 12 is titled "What Each Of Us Can Do". Gates provides to-do lists for our different roles in society.

• As a Citizen ...
  • Make calls, write letters, attend town halls. ...
  • Look locally as well as nationally. ...
  • Run for office. ...
• As a Consumer ...
  • Sign up for a green pricing program with your electric utility. ...
  • Reduce your home’s emissions. ...
  • Buy an electric vehicle. ...
  • Try a plant-based burger. ...
• As an Employee or Employer ...
  • Set up an internal carbon tax. ...
  • Prioritize innovation in low-carbon solutions. ...
  • Be an early adopter. ...
  • Engage in the policy-making process. ...
  • Connect with government-funded research. ...
  • Help early-stage innovators get across the valley of death. ...

Here's the last paragraph of the book (not counting the Afterword on the COVID-19 pandemic):

I’m an optimist because I know what technology can accomplish and because I know what people can accomplish. I’m profoundly inspired by all the passion I see, especially among young people, for solving this problem. If we keep our eye on the big goal—getting to zero—and we make serious plans to achieve that goal, we can avoid a disaster. We can keep the climate bearable for everyone, help hundreds of millions of poor people make the most of their lives, and preserve the planet for generations to come.

---

This book is a quick read, and chock full of facts and figures. Thanks Bill! Kobo says it takes 5-6 hours to read, I strongly recommend that you do so. Meanwhile ...

---

At the start of Chapter 11, Gates states:

In energy, software, and just about every other pursuit, it’s a mistake to think of innovation only in the strict, technological sense. Innovation is not just a matter of inventing a new machine or some new process; it’s also coming up with new approaches to business models, supply chains, markets, and policies that will help new inventions come to life and reach a global scale. Innovation is both new devices and new ways of doing things.

To me this totally begs the question: what about innovation in our basic society, our basic economy, our basic monetary system? Particularly on the issue of money, we saw in Chapter 11 Gates talked about playing fast and loose with $$$ moving between governments, banks, and private capital - "We need our best minds in finance working on this problem". But he still is worried about investment and ROI.

I guess it goes back to the title of Naomi Klein's 2014 book "This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate". In Chapter 2 Gates admits that the climate crisis might represent "an existential threat to humanity", but then when it comes to addressing the threat, he takes pretty much a "business as usual" approach to the crisis.

Note, just to make sure we are all on the same page, "an existential threat to humanity" means that the human race could completely die out, could become extinct, could be totally wiped from existence.

What if "business as usual" is not enough? What if we need a "This Changes Everything" approach?

But of course Bill Gates is not going to go there. Why? Because he is 1 of the richest men in the world. So, by and large, he's really pretty OK with the status quo just as it is now. Capitalism, A-OK. Free markets everywhere, even when inappropriate, A-OK. And modern money theory (MMT), which says, money doesn't matter, only resources do?

LOL, probably the main purpose of money is to keep the rich people rich, and the ultra-rich even more so. So of course he's going to take a "business as usual" approach. [snark]He's in the finest 1st class suite on the Titanic, but he's still got to hold onto that privilege, and the power to abuse women and underlings that comes with it.[/snark]

I'll repeat a statement from Chapter 11:

To me, this means that governments and multilateral banks will need to find much better ways to tap private capital. Their coffers aren’t big enough to do this on their own.

Government "coffers aren't big enough"??? MMT completely disagrees - any government with its own fiat currency has infinite coffers of money. Gates probably knows that, but, again, that's not something 1 of the world's richest men is going to admit to.

Part of the reason that this review wound up being so late was that I was ruminating on My Latest Mad Scheme, which will be revealed in my next post.

But before that, I kept having this thought as I approached the end of this book: how about we put 2 grad students to work and rewrite this book making the following changes: 1 grad student tallies how much everything costs - pretty much just as a thought experiment (Gedankenexperiment).

Meanwhile, grad student #2 identifies what the resources involved are, and where there are potential shortages thereof. We then know what we REALLY have to worry about trying to avoid a climate disaster. The other, the $$$, is BS.

What does the book read like then?

---

[Updated 2021-06-01 2:18 pm]

1 thing I meant to mention and forgot: why aren't insurance companies being more activist in the face of the climate crisis? The continuing worsening of natural disasters is surely costing them $B or 10s or 100s of $B. I would think at some point it will become existential for them. Why aren't they acting?

How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism

"How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism", is a recent "anti-monopoly pamphlet" by Cory Doctorow, 2020, 103 pages, 27k words. It is a quick, easy read.

I am a big admirer of Doctorow. He seems to be a really hardworking guy. In addition to his fiction and non-fiction writing, he has been very active in the EFF and a champion of "right to repair". I just recently found his blog, "Pluralistic", which amazingly has I'd guess an average of 2 articles/day - and they are well-thought-out, well-written, and interesting.

I got to meet Doctorow in maybe 2012-13, when he and Charlie Stross were promoting "Rapture of the Nerds" (released September, 2012), at Joseph-Beth Bookstore in Lexington. I told him that he was a bard of the revolution, and to please keep it up. He totally has not disappointed.

In his blog, he describes this book as "an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution." "Surveillance capitalism" is easy to spot: think Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, aka Big Tech.

I tweeted my initial reaction to Doctorow's solution:

This is indeed Doctorow's solution: break up the monopolies, bust the trusts, make Teddy Roosevelt proud.

Why are the online surveillance companies bad? Why are they evil? Well, for starters, they allow Nazis to thrive & prosper. Even when they try to police the content on their platforms, Nazis can add new stuff as fast as Big Tech can take it down.

1 thing Doctorow contends that I thought was really interesting: that Big Tech vastly exaggerates the effectivity of their targetted ads.

Big Tech lies about just about everything, including how well its machine-learning fueled persuasion systems work.

Doctorow also contends that, by and large, the vast amounts of data collected by Big Tech are worthless. Location-based data is indeed highly useful (you're right out front, come in our store & buy something), but it has a very short lifespan (oops, you're no longer in front of our store). Seems to me, tho, that collating this data into 2nd order data (this person is often in front of our store between 12 & 2 pm on weekdays) would be less time sensitive. But Doctorow contends that, once the Big Tech companies are broken up, their mountains of data will quickly become worthless.

Whatever happened to antitrust? When was the last time a corporate merger was shot down as being monopolistic?

It seems like, increasingly, you can identify people who basically have been incredibly successful at fucking the rest of us under the radar. Like the Koch Brothers, who, via their minion Mitch McConnell, have succeeded in filling the Supreme Court with Federalist Society indoctrinated judges. If originalism is not lame, I do not know what is. I mean, of course, absolutely nothing meaningful has changed in the world since the US constitution was written [sarcasm]. I'm sure that the slave-owing Founding Fathers all treated their slaves very humanely.

Doctorow introduces us to Robert Bork: The Man Who Destroyed Antitrust. Originally, antitrust legislation defined monopolies as bad - period. Bork's book "The Antitrust Paradox", published in 1978, said, "No, no, no, monopolies are only bad if they adversely affect consumers". In the 4 decades since then, this has become the accepted approach.

But, come on - hire expensive PR firms and lawyers and EVERY merger can be made to look advantageous to consumers. Of course in practice, if it doesn't work out, what happens? Nothing. For the last few decades, I've been asking "Why does the FTC or the SEC not break up {$monopolist}'s monopoly?" Well, now I know the answer. Robert Bork, fucking us from beyond the grave. Well, at least the son of a bitch is dead, as of 2012. He's probably gloating his ass off as he burns in hell.

Doctorow dismisses the argument that we should own and commoditize our own data.

It’s tempting to reach for the property hammer when Big Tech treats your information like a nail—not least because Big Tech are such prolific abusers of property hammers when it comes to their information. But this is a mistake. If we allow markets to dictate the use of our information, then we’ll find that we’re sellers in a buyers’ market where the Big Tech monopolies set a price for our data that is so low as to be insignificant or, more likely, set at a nonnegotiable price of zero in a click-through agreement that you don’t have the opportunity to modify.

Doctorow discusses the roots of current online Nazism, concluding:

Inequality creates the conditions for both conspiracies and violent racist ideologies, and then surveillance capitalism lets opportunists target the fearful and the conspiracy-minded.

...

Antitrust was neutered as a key part of the project to make the wealthy wealthier, and that project has worked. The vast majority of people on Earth have a negative net worth, and even the dwindling middle class is in a precarious state, undersaved for retirement, underinsured for medical disasters, and undersecured against climate and technology shocks.

I am so pleased and hopeful that our new president Uncle Joe appears to be trying to address inequality - or at least trying to make life easier for the working man or particularly woman via things like universal preschool and child care. Hopefully this can restore some faith in government and keep people from giving credence to the lies of wannabe dictators like our prior president. But Doctorow points out that this will be a slow process.

Wouldn't be great to once again have trustbusters, righteously smiting the monopolists!

But trustbusters once strode the nation, brandishing law books, terrorizing robber barons, and shattering the illusion of monopolies’ all-powerful grip on our society.

Ha ha, I was thinking about removing the f-bombs above, but I don't think I will. I seem to be following Doctorow's lead:

“Knock it off. We all know what the Sherman Act says. Robert Bork was a deranged fantasist. For avoidance of doubt, fuck that guy.” In other words, the problem with monopolies is monopolism — the concentration of power into too few hands, which erodes our right to self-determination.

In the end, it all flows from 1 wellspring: capitalism.

As to why things are so screwed up? Capitalism. Specifically, the monopolism that creates inequality and the inequality that creates monopolism. It’s a form of capitalism that rewards sociopaths who destroy the real economy to inflate the bottom line, and they get away with it for the same reason companies get away with spying: because our governments are in thrall to both the ideology that says monopolies are actually just fine and in thrall to the ideology that says that in a monopolistic world, you’d better not piss off the monopolists.

Surveillance doesn’t make capitalism rogue. Capitalism’s unchecked rule begets surveillance.

Doctorow concludes by getting back in touch with his inner geek, and stressing the importance in today's automated and connected world of getting the tech right.

I am, secretly, despite what I have said earlier, a tech exceptionalist. Not in the sense of thinking that tech should be given a free pass to monopolize because it has “economies of scale” or some other nebulous feature. I’m a tech exceptionalist because I believe that getting tech right matters and that getting it wrong will be an unmitigated catastrophe—and doing it right can give us the power to work together to save our civilization, our species, and our planet.

Please read this book. Kobo says it only takes 1-2 hours. I have been watching a lot of movies lately, each about the same time investment as this, reading this book is definitely time better spent.

How To ... (2x)

I didn't realize until after the fact that I had read 2 "How To" books in a row:

1. "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism", by Cory Doctorow, 2020, 103 pages, 27k words.
2. "How to Avoid a Climate Disaster", by Bill Gates, 2021, 275 pages, 74k words.

I was going to put them in the same post but I decided that would be disrespectful to both books & authors. Both are important books.

So here comes 2 posts. It's not like it costs me extra. In fact, I should do more, smaller blog posts. RSN, I'm sure.