Stephen Baxter is one of those writers whose work I don’t actually know very well, but what I know of, I enjoy immensely. This is the fourth novel written or co-written by him that I have read, and the conclusion to a series I’ve downright admired, the Manifold Series. Manifold is a series of books dealing with different answers to the Fermi Paradox, which is based upon this question: if indeed the requisite materials and conditions for life as, indeed, as common as they seem to be in our universe, why do we not see evidence of life everywhere we …
Category: WTF
Lunar New Year Reads # 29 & #30
Technically speaking, only one of the two books was a Lunar New Year read, the other was a study, and was a book I studied off-and-on for more than a year. Still, as I completed it this year, I am including it in my log of books for purposes of memory, and of interest. 한국어 1, Language Education Institute, Seoul National University. 1993. Pale Fire, by Vladimir Nabokov. 1962. Book #29: 한국어 1 (Korean Level 1), Language Education Institute, Seoul National University. 1993. On the face of it, it seems a little pathetic that at the close of my fourth …
The Almost Finished And Barely Begun Books — Reading AND Writing Of Late
This “Lunar New Year” thing took a big hit when I started studying The Cantos with those guys at work. No more do I have spare hours to read through two or three books in a couple of weeks and post about them. These days, the spare time that isn’t taken up by other projects, and working on lesson plans, gets devoted to studying the Cantos in increasingly more detail, which is strange considering that the more I study the poems, the more I consider their author a kind of madman. In any case, I have only completed one book …
Innovation, WMD, and the Pressure Cooker Effect
Sometimes people think I am idealistic. I think, actually, most human beings are just easily caught in inertia. Although most people attribute the quote to Plato, it apparently was Philo or Alexandria who urged us to be kind to everyone we meet, “because everyone is fighting a harder battle.” It might seem funny to some of you that I am thought idealistic, but remember that idealistic doesn’t mean the same as optimistic. The most diehard pessimists usually have a history of idealism which reality never managed to live up to. This, in fact, is not so far from the case …
Pre-F5: Necessary Skills?
Back in September 2003, long before I joined the Friday Five, I noticed friends doing it. I even answered a question, ages ago, and then saved it to my drafts and left it. I saw this on my friend Adam’s site, a violently executed plan blog, and I figured that in the 20 minutes before my next class, to the sound of a classroom of men singing what sounds like some sort of religious sea shanty across the hall. “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, design a building, conn a …
This week’s F5
I don’t know why, but I cannot load Rob’s F5 question blog at my home. I mean, I can do it with an anonymous proxy like unipeak, but not without one. I cannot imagine why Hanaro Telecom would choose to block Rob’s site, so I’m guessing it’s some glitch in another blockage, which I can’t do much about. But anyway, I’ve had trouble connecting there and I’ve also been dreadfully busy, which is why I haven’t posted anything lately under the Friday Five section of the blog. But today, I’m picking up with the most recent question, a headache of …
Lunar New Year Reads, Book 28: The X President
Book #28: The X President, by Philip Baruth. You know, I’m crazy about time travel novels. There was a time when I hated them. No, wait, I despised and reviled them. And then I saw what Connie Willis did with the genre, in works like The Doomsday Book, and To Say Nothing of the Dog, and Fire Watch, and I changed my mind. Time travel stories, I decided, could be damned fine reading. It’s important I note that, before I discuss my dissatisfactions with this book, along with the things I liked.
The Day-Numbers Game
It’s funny how some people find more to complain about with regard to Koreans behaviour around foreigners, and other people find more to complain about with regards to foreigners in general. I was on the phone tonight with an old friend of mine who has just moved to Korea, and he said that after a few weekends in foreigner bars, in different cities no less, he found that it was all the same people. Literally, he said, Same people, different face, but the same damn people just the same. How true, in my experience, which is why it seems to …
That Ugly Beast
I found this wonderful quote: Simia quam similis, turpissima bestia, nobis! How like us is that very ugly beast the monkey! -Cicero … on this page of Latin quotes (with translations). And that quote’s over 2000 years old! How very tragically little things change.
Sling Media… anyone wanna let me try it?
My co-worker Leon passed on a link to the Sling Media website today. It’s basically a scheme by which a little box called a “Sling Box” streams the content of television to your computer, anywhere in the world. All you need is a cable subscription and a high-bandwidth connection in the source location, and a computer with high bandwidth in the target (viewing) location. Which means, yes, you could technically watch Canadian (or American) TV even here in Korea. Well, I don’t really watch TV, and I certainly wouldn’t be watching much that would be available on my schedule; but …