Search Results: "helen"

10 February 2024

Andrew Cater: Debian point releases - updated media for Bullseye (11.9) and Bookworm (12.5) - 2024-02-10

It's been a LONG day: two point releases in a day takes of the order of twelve or thirteen hours of fairly solid work on behalf of those doing the releases and testing.Thanks firstly to the main Debian release team for all the initial work.Thanks to Isy, RattusRattus, Sledge and egw in Cottenham, smcv and Helen closer to the centre of Cambridge, cacin and others who have dropped in and out of IRC and helped testing.

I've been at home but active on IRC - missing the team (and the food) and drinking far too much coffee/eating too many biscuits.

We've found relatively few bugs that we haven't previously noted: it's been a good day. Back again, at some point a couple of months from now to do this all over again.With luck, I can embed a picture of the Cottenham folk below: it's fun to know _exactly_ where people are because you've been there yourself.



22 July 2023

Andrew Cater: 20230722 - Releasing Debian testing for Debian Bookworm point release 12.1

And so we're back at Steve's in Cambridge for release testing. A few testers here: we're now well into testing the various iso images.So we have Sledge, RattusRattus, Isy, smcv and myself. We've also been joined here by Helen who has just done her first install. Online we've got a couple of new folk - luna, The_Blode. Thanks to everyone involved - we always need all the help we can get.
Cold and grey outside: usual warmth in here. Also the usual snake of cables to trip over across the floor.

28 December 2022

Chris Lamb: Favourite books of 2022: Classics

As a follow-up to yesterday's post detailing my favourite works of fiction from 2022, today I'll be listing my favourite fictional works that are typically filed under classics. Books that just missed the cut here include: E. M. Forster's A Room with a View (1908) and his later A Passage to India (1913), both gently nudged out by Forster's superb Howard's End (see below). Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's The Leopard (1958) also just missed out on a write-up here, but I can definitely recommend it to anyone interested in reading a modern Italian classic.

War and Peace (1867) Leo Tolstoy It's strange to think that there is almost no point in reviewing this novel: who hasn't heard of War and Peace? What more could possibly be said about it now? Still, when I was growing up, War and Peace was always the stereotypical example of the 'impossible book', and even start it was, at best, a pointless task, and an act of hubris at worst. And so there surely exists a parallel universe in which I never have and will never will read the book... Nevertheless, let us try to set the scene. Book nine of the novel opens as follows:
On the twelfth of June, 1812, the forces of Western Europe crossed the Russian frontier and war began; that is, an event took place opposed to human reason and to human nature. Millions of men perpetrated against one another such innumerable crimes, frauds, treacheries, thefts, forgeries, issues of false money, burglaries, incendiarisms and murders as in whole centuries are not recorded in the annals of all the law courts of the world, but which those who committed them did not at the time regard as being crimes. What produced this extraordinary occurrence? What were its causes? [ ] The more we try to explain such events in history reasonably, the more unreasonable and incomprehensible they become to us.
Set against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars and Napoleon's invasion of Russia, War and Peace follows the lives and fates of three aristocratic families: The Rostovs, The Bolkonskys and the Bezukhov's. These characters find themselves situated athwart (or against) history, and all this time, Napoleon is marching ever closer to Moscow. Still, Napoleon himself is essentially just a kind of wallpaper for a diverse set of personal stories touching on love, jealousy, hatred, retribution, naivety, nationalism, stupidity and much much more. As Elif Batuman wrote earlier this year, "the whole premise of the book was that you couldn t explain war without recourse to domesticity and interpersonal relations." The result is that Tolstoy has woven an incredibly intricate web that connects the war, noble families and the everyday Russian people to a degree that is surprising for a book started in 1865. Tolstoy's characters are probably timeless (especially the picaresque adventures and constantly changing thoughts Pierre Bezukhov), and the reader who has any social experience will immediately recognise characters' thoughts and actions. Some of this is at a 'micro' interpersonal level: for instance, take this example from the elegant party that opens the novel:
Each visitor performed the ceremony of greeting this old aunt whom not one of them knew, not one of them wanted to know, and not one of them cared about. The aunt spoke to each of them in the same words, about their health and her own and the health of Her Majesty, who, thank God, was better today. And each visitor, though politeness prevented his showing impatience, left the old woman with a sense of relief at having performed a vexatious duty and did not return to her the whole evening.
But then, some of the focus of the observations are at the 'macro' level of the entire continent. This section about cities that feel themselves in danger might suffice as an example:
At the approach of danger, there are always two voices that speak with equal power in the human soul: one very reasonably tells a man to consider the nature of the danger and the means of escaping it; the other, still more reasonably, says that it is too depressing and painful to think of the danger, since it is not in man s power to foresee everything and avert the general course of events, and it is therefore better to disregard what is painful till it comes and to think about what is pleasant. In solitude, a man generally listens to the first voice, but in society to the second.
And finally, in his lengthy epilogues, Tolstoy offers us a dissertation on the behaviour of large organisations, much of it through engagingly witty analogies. These epilogues actually turn out to be an oblique and sarcastic commentary on the idiocy of governments and the madness of war in general. Indeed, the thorough dismantling of the 'great man' theory of history is a common theme throughout the book:
During the whole of that period [of 1812], Napoleon, who seems to us to have been the leader of all these movements as the figurehead of a ship may seem to a savage to guide the vessel acted like a child who, holding a couple of strings inside a carriage, thinks he is driving it. [ ] Why do [we] all speak of a military genius ? Is a man a genius who can order bread to be brought up at the right time and say who is to go to the right and who to the left? It is only because military men are invested with pomp and power and crowds of sychophants flatter power, attributing to it qualities of genius it does not possess.
Unlike some other readers, I especially enjoyed these diversions into the accounting and workings of history, as well as our narrow-minded way of trying to 'explain' things in a singular way:
When an apple has ripened and falls, why does it fall? Because of its attraction to the earth, because its stalk withers, because it is dried by the sun, because it grows heavier, because the wind shakes it, or because the boy standing below wants to eat it? Nothing is the cause. All this is only the coincidence of conditions in which all vital organic and elemental events occur. And the botanist who finds that the apple falls because the cellular tissue decays and so forth is equally right with the child who stands under the tree and says the apple fell because he wanted to eat it and prayed for it.
Given all of these serious asides, I was also not expecting this book to be quite so funny. At the risk of boring the reader with citations, take this sarcastic remark about the ineptness of medicine men:
After his liberation, [Pierre] fell ill and was laid up for three months. He had what the doctors termed 'bilious fever.' But despite the fact that the doctors treated him, bled him and gave him medicines to drink he recovered.
There is actually a multitude of remarks that are not entirely complimentary towards Russian medical practice, but they are usually deployed with an eye to the human element involved rather than simply to the detriment of a doctor's reputation "How would the count have borne his dearly loved daughter s illness had he not known that it was costing him a thousand rubles?" Other elements of note include some stunning set literary pieces, such as when Prince Andrei encounters a gnarly oak tree under two different circumstances in his life, and when Nat sha's 'Russian' soul is awakened by the strains of a folk song on the balalaika. Still, despite all of these micro- and macro-level happenings, for a long time I felt that something else was going on in War and Peace. It was difficult to put into words precisely what it was until I came across this passage by E. M. Forster:
After one has read War and Peace for a bit, great chords begin to sound, and we cannot say exactly what struck them. They do not arise from the story [and] they do not come from the episodes nor yet from the characters. They come from the immense area of Russia, over which episodes and characters have been scattered, from the sum-total of bridges and frozen rivers, forests, roads, gardens and fields, which accumulate grandeur and sonority after we have passed them. Many novelists have the feeling for place, [but] very few have the sense of space, and the possession of it ranks high in Tolstoy s divine equipment. Space is the lord of War and Peace, not time.
'Space' indeed. Yes, potential readers should note the novel's great length, but the 365 chapters are actually remarkably short, so the sensation of reading it is not in the least overwhelming. And more importantly, once you become familiar with its large cast of characters, it is really not a difficult book to follow, especially when compared to the other Russian classics. My only regret is that it has taken me so long to read this magnificent novel and that I might find it hard to find time to re-read it within the next few years.

Coming Up for Air (1939) George Orwell It wouldn't be a roundup of mine without at least one entry from George Orwell, and, this year, that place is occupied by a book I hadn't haven't read in almost two decades Still, the George Bowling of Coming Up for Air is a middle-aged insurance salesman who lives in a distinctly average English suburban row house with his nuclear family. One day, after winning some money on a bet, he goes back to the village where he grew up in order to fish in a pool he remembers from thirty years before. Less important than the plot, however, is both the well-observed remarks and scathing criticisms that Bowling has of the town he has returned to, combined with an ominous sense of foreboding before the Second World War breaks out. At several times throughout the book, George's placid thoughts about his beloved carp pool are replaced by racing, anxious thoughts that overwhelm his inner peace:
War is coming. In 1941, they say. And there'll be plenty of broken crockery, and little houses ripped open like packing-cases, and the guts of the chartered accountant's clerk plastered over the piano that he's buying on the never-never. But what does that kind of thing matter, anyway? I'll tell you what my stay in Lower Binfield had taught me, and it was this. IT'S ALL GOING TO HAPPEN. All the things you've got at the back of your mind, the things you're terrified of, the things that you tell yourself are just a nightmare or only happen in foreign countries. The bombs, the food-queues, the rubber truncheons, the barbed wire, the coloured shirts, the slogans, the enormous faces, the machine-guns squirting out of bedroom windows. It's all going to happen. I know it - at any rate, I knew it then. There's no escape. Fight against it if you like, or look the other way and pretend not to notice, or grab your spanner and rush out to do a bit of face-smashing along with the others. But there's no way out. It's just something that's got to happen.
Already we can hear psychological madness that underpinned the Second World War. Indeed, there is no great story in Coming Up For Air, no wonderfully empathetic characters and no revelations or catharsis, so it is impressive that I was held by the descriptions, observations and nostalgic remembrances about life in modern Lower Binfield, its residents, and how it has changed over the years. It turns out, of course, that George's beloved pool has been filled in with rubbish, and the village has been perverted by modernity beyond recognition. And to cap it off, the principal event of George's holiday in Lower Binfield is an accidental bombing by the British Royal Air Force. Orwell is always good at descriptions of awful food, and this book is no exception:
The frankfurter had a rubber skin, of course, and my temporary teeth weren't much of a fit. I had to do a kind of sawing movement before I could get my teeth through the skin. And then suddenly pop! The thing burst in my mouth like a rotten pear. A sort of horrible soft stuff was oozing all over my tongue. But the taste! For a moment I just couldn't believe it. Then I rolled my tongue around it again and had another try. It was fish! A sausage, a thing calling itself a frankfurter, filled with fish! I got up and walked straight out without touching my coffee. God knows what that might have tasted of.
Many other tell-tale elements of Orwell's fictional writing are in attendance in this book as well, albeit worked out somewhat less successfully than elsewhere in his oeuvre. For example, the idea of a physical ailment also serving as a metaphor is present in George's false teeth, embodying his constant preoccupation with his ageing. (Readers may recall Winston Smith's varicose ulcer representing his repressed humanity in Nineteen Eighty-Four). And, of course, we have a prematurely middle-aged protagonist who almost but not quite resembles Orwell himself. Given this and a few other niggles (such as almost all the women being of the typical Orwell 'nagging wife' type), it is not exactly Orwell's magnum opus. But it remains a fascinating historical snapshot of the feeling felt by a vast number of people just prior to the Second World War breaking out, as well as a captivating insight into how the process of nostalgia functions and operates.

Howards End (1910) E. M. Forster Howards End begins with the following sentence:
One may as well begin with Helen s letters to her sister.
In fact, "one may as well begin with" my own assumptions about this book instead. I was actually primed to consider Howards End a much more 'Victorian' book: I had just finished Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway and had found her 1925 book at once rather 'modern' but also very much constrained by its time. I must have then unconsciously surmised that a book written 15 years before would be even more inscrutable, and, with its Victorian social mores added on as well, Howards End would probably not undress itself so readily in front of the reader. No doubt there were also the usual expectations about 'the classics' as well. So imagine my surprise when I realised just how inordinately affable and witty Howards End turned out to be. It doesn't have that Wildean shine of humour, of course, but it's a couple of fields over in the English countryside, perhaps abutting the more mordant social satires of the earlier George Orwell novels (see Coming Up for Air above). But now let us return to the story itself. Howards End explores class warfare, conflict and the English character through a tale of three quite different families at the beginning of the twentieth century: the rich Wilcoxes; the gentle & idealistic Schlegels; and the lower-middle class Basts. As the Bloomsbury Group Schlegel sisters desperately try to help the Basts and educate the rich but close-minded Wilcoxes, the three families are drawn ever closer and closer together. Although the whole story does, I suppose, revolve around the house in the title (which is based on the Forster's own childhood home), Howards End is perhaps best described as a comedy of manners or a novel that shows up the hypocrisy of people and society. In fact, it is surprising how little of the story actually takes place in the eponymous house, with the overwhelming majority of the first half of the book taking place in London. But it is perhaps more illuminating to remark that the Howards End of the book is a house that the Wilcoxes who own it at the start of the novel do not really need or want. What I particularly liked about Howards End is how the main character's ideals alter as they age, and subsequently how they find their lives changing in different ways. Some of them find themselves better off at the end, others worse. And whilst it is also surprisingly funny, it still manages to trade in heavier social topics as well. This is apparent in the fact that, although the characters themselves are primarily in charge of their own destinies, their choices are still constrained by the changing world and shifting sense of morality around them. This shouldn't be too surprising: after all, Forster's novel was published just four years before the Great War, a distinctly uncertain time. Not for nothing did Virginia Woolf herself later observe that "on or about December 1910, human character changed" and that "all human relations have shifted: those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children." This process can undoubtedly be seen rehearsed throughout Forster's Howards End, and it's a credit to the author to be able to capture it so early on, if not even before it was widespread throughout Western Europe. I was also particularly taken by Forster's fertile use of simile. An extremely apposite example can be found in the description Tibby Schlegel gives of his fellow Cambridge undergraduates. Here, Timmy doesn't want to besmirch his lofty idealisation of them with any banal specificities, and wishes that the idea of them remain as ideal Platonic forms instead. Or, as Forster puts it, to Timmy it is if they are "pictures that must not walk out of their frames." Wilde, at his most weakest, is 'just' style, but Forster often deploys his flair for a deeper effect. Indeed, when you get to the end of this section mentioning picture frames, you realise Forster has actually just smuggled into the story a failed attempt on Tibby's part to engineer an anonymous homosexual encounter with another undergraduate. It is a credit to Forster's sleight-of-hand that you don't quite notice what has just happened underneath you and that the books' reticence to honestly describe what has happened is thus structually analogus Tibby's reluctance to admit his desires to himself. Another layer to the character of Tibby (and the novel as a whole) is thereby introduced without the imposition of clumsy literary scaffolding. In a similar vein, I felt very clever noticing the arch reference to Debussy's Pr lude l'apr s-midi d'un faune until I realised I just fell into the trap Forster set for the reader in that I had become even more like Tibby in his pseudo-scholarly views on classical music. Finally, I enjoyed that each chapter commences with an ironic and self-conscious bon mot about society which is only slightly overblown for effect. Particularly amusing are the ironic asides on "women" that run through the book, ventriloquising the narrow-minded views of people like the Wilcoxes. The omniscient and amiable narrator of the book also recalls those ironically distant voiceovers from various French New Wave films at times, yet Forster's narrator seems to have bigger concerns in his mordant asides: Forster seems to encourage some sympathy for all of the characters even the more contemptible ones at their worst moments. Highly recommended, as are Forster's A Room with a View (1908) and his slightly later A Passage to India (1913).

The Good Soldier (1915) Ford Madox Ford The Good Soldier starts off fairly simply as the narrator's account of his and his wife's relationship with some old friends, including the eponymous 'Good Soldier' of the book's title. It's an experience to read the beginning of this novel, as, like any account of endless praise of someone you've never met or care about, the pages of approving remarks about them appear to be intended to wash over you. Yet as the chapters of The Good Soldier go by, the account of the other characters in the book gets darker and darker. Although the author himself is uncritical of others' actions, your own critical faculties are slowgrly brought into play, and you gradully begin to question the narrator's retelling of events. Our narrator is an unreliable narrator in the strict sense of the term, but with the caveat that he is at least is telling us everything we need to know to come to our own conclusions. As the book unfolds further, the narrator's compromised credibility seems to infuse every element of the novel even the 'Good' of the book's title starts to seem like a minor dishonesty, perhaps serving as the inspiration for the irony embedded in the title of The 'Great' Gatsby. Much more effectively, however, the narrator's fixations, distractions and manner of speaking feel very much part of his dissimulation. It sometimes feels like he is unconsciously skirting over the crucial elements in his tale, exactly like one does in real life when recounting a story containing incriminating ingredients. Indeed, just how much the narrator is conscious of his own concealment is just one part of what makes this such an interesting book: Ford Madox Ford has gifted us with enough ambiguity that it is also possible that even the narrator cannot find it within himself to understand the events of the story he is narrating. It was initially hard to believe that such a carefully crafted analysis of a small group of characters could have been written so long ago, and despite being fairly easy to read, The Good Soldier is an almost infinitely subtle book even the jokes are of the subtle kind and will likely get a re-read within the next few years.

Anna Karenina (1878) Leo Tolstoy There are many similar themes running through War and Peace (reviewed above) and Anna Karenina. Unrequited love; a young man struggling to find a purpose in life; a loving family; an overwhelming love of nature and countless fascinating observations about the minuti of Russian society. Indeed, rather than primarily being about the eponymous Anna, Anna Karenina provides a vast panorama of contemporary life in Russia and of humanity in general. Nevertheless, our Anna is a sophisticated woman who abandons her empty existence as the wife of government official Alexei Karenin, a colourless man who has little personality of his own, and she turns to a certain Count Vronsky in order to fulfil her passionate nature. Needless to say, this results in tragic consequences as their (admittedly somewhat qualified) desire to live together crashes against the rocks of reality and Russian society. Parallel to Anna's narrative, though, Konstantin Levin serves as the novel's alter-protagonist. In contrast to Anna, Levin is a socially awkward individual who straddles many schools of thought within Russia at the time: he is neither a free-thinker (nor heavy-drinker) like his brother Nikolai, and neither is he a bookish intellectual like his half-brother Serge. In short, Levin is his own man, and it is generally agreed by commentators that he is Tolstoy's surrogate within the novel. Levin tends to come to his own version of an idea, and he would rather find his own way than adopt any prefabricated view, even if confusion and muddle is the eventual result. In a roughly isomorphic fashion then, he resembles Anna in this particular sense, whose story is a counterpart to Levin's in their respective searches for happiness and self-actualisation. Whilst many of the passionate and exciting passages are told on Anna's side of the story (I'm thinking horse race in particular, as thrilling as anything in cinema ), many of the broader political thoughts about the nature of the working classes are expressed on Levin's side instead. These are stirring and engaging in their own way, though, such as when he joins his peasants to mow the field and seems to enter the nineteenth-century version of 'flow':
The longer Levin mowed, the more often he felt those moments of oblivion during which it was no longer his arms that swung the scythe, but the scythe itself that lent motion to his whole body, full of life and conscious of itself, and, as if by magic, without a thought of it, the work got rightly and neatly done on its own. These were the most blissful moments.
Overall, Tolstoy poses no didactic moral message towards any of the characters in Anna Karenina, and merely invites us to watch rather than judge. (Still, there is a hilarious section that is scathing of contemporary classical music, presaging many of the ideas found in Tolstoy's 1897 What is Art?). In addition, just like the earlier War and Peace, the novel is run through with a number of uncannily accurate observations about daily life:
Anna smiled, as one smiles at the weaknesses of people one loves, and, putting her arm under his, accompanied him to the door of the study.
... as well as the usual sprinkling of Tolstoy's sardonic humour ("No one is pleased with his fortune, but everyone is pleased with his wit."). Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the other titan of Russian literature, once described Anna Karenina as a "flawless work of art," and if you re only going to read one Tolstoy novel in your life, it should probably be this one.

17 April 2022

Russ Allbery: First 2022 haul post

I haven't posted one of these in a while. Here's the (mostly new) stuff that's come out that caught my interest in the past few months. Some of these I've already read and reviewed. Tom Burgis Kleptopia (non-fiction)
Angela Chen Ace (non-fiction)
P. Dj l Clark A Dead Djinn in Cairo (sff)
P. Dj l Clark The Haunting of Tram Car 015 (sff)
P. Dj l Clark A Master of Djinn (sff)
Brittney C. Cooper Eloquent Rage (non-fiction)
Madeleine Dore I Didn't Do the Thing Today (non-fiction)
Saad Z. Hossain The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday (sff)
George F. Kennan Memoirs, 1925-1950 (non-fiction)
Kiese Laymon How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America (non-fiction)
Adam Minter Secondhand (non-fiction)
Amanda Oliver Overdue (non-fiction)
Laurie Penny Sexual Revolution (non-fiction)
Scott A. Snook Friendly Fire (non-fiction)
Adrian Tchaikovsky Elder Race (sff)
Adrian Tchaikovsky Shards of Earth (sff)
Tor.com (ed.) Some of the Best of Tor.com: 2021 (sff anthology)
Charlie Warzel & Anne Helen Petersen Out of Office (non-fiction)
Robert Wears Still Not Safe (non-fiction)
Max Weber The Vocation Lectures (non-fiction) Lots and lots of non-fiction in this mix. Maybe a tiny bit better than normal at not buying tons of books that I don't have time to read, although my reading (and particularly my reviewing) rate has been a bit slow lately.

28 December 2021

Russ Allbery: Review: Out of Office

Review: Out of Office, by Charlie Warzel & Anne Helen Petersen
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Copyright: 2021
ISBN: 0-593-32010-7
Format: Kindle
Pages: 260
Out of Office opens with the provocative assertion that you were not working from home during the pandemic, even if you were among the 42% of Americans who were able to work remotely.
You were, quite literally, doing your job from home. But you weren't working from home. You were laboring in confinement and under duress. Others have described it as living at work. You were frantically tapping out an email while trying to make lunch and supervise distance learning. You were stuck alone in a cramped apartment for weeks, unable to see friends or family, exhausted, and managing a level of stress you didn't know was possible. Work became life, and life became work. You weren't thriving. You were surviving.
The stated goal of this book is to reclaim the concept of working from home, not only from the pandemic, but also from the boundary-destroying metastasis of work into non-work life. It does work towards that goal, but the description of what would be required for working from home to live up to its promise becomes a sweeping critique of the organization and conception of work, leaving it nearly as applicable to those who continue working from an office. Turns out that the main problem with working from home is the work part, not the "from home" part. This was a fascinating book to read in conjunction with A World Without Email. Warzel and Petersen do the the structural and political analysis that I sometimes wish Newport would do more of, but as a result offer less concrete advice. Both, however, have similar diagnoses of the core problems of the sort of modern office work that could be done from home: it's poorly organized, poorly managed, and desperately inefficient. Rather than attempting to fix those problems, which is difficult, structural, and requires thought and institutional cooperation, we're compensating by working more. This both doesn't work and isn't sustainable. Newport has a background in productivity books and a love of systems and protocols, so his focus in A World Without Email is on building better systems of communication and organization of work. Warzel and Petersen come from a background of reporting and cultural critique, so they put more focus on power imbalances and power-serving myths about the American dream. Where Newport sees an easy-to-deploy ad hoc work style that isn't fit for purpose, Warzel and Petersen are more willing to point out intentional exploitation of workers in the guise of flexibility. But they arrive at some similar conclusions. The way office work is organized is not leading to more productivity. Tools like Slack encourage the public performance of apparent productivity at the cost of the attention and focus required to do meaningful work. And the process is making us miserable. Out of Office is, in part, a discussion of what would be required to do better work with less stress, but it also shares a goal with Newport and some (but not most) corners of productivity writing: spend less time and energy on work. The goal of Out of Office is not to get more work done. It's to work more efficiently and sustainably and thus work less. To reclaim the promise of flexibility so that it benefits the employee and not the employer. To recognize, in the authors' words, that the office can be a bully, locking people in to commute schedules and unnatural work patterns, although it also provides valuable moments of spontaneous human connection. Out of Office tries to envision a style of work that includes the office sometimes, home sometimes, time during the day to attend to personal chores or simply to take a mental break from an unnatural eight hours (or more) of continuous focus, universal design, real worker-centric flexibility, and an end to the constant productivity ratchet where faster work simply means more work for the same pay. That's a lot of topics for a short book, and structurally this is a grab bag. Some sections will land and some won't. Loom's video messages sound like a nightmare to me, and I rolled my eyes heavily at the VR boosterism, reluctant as it may be. The section on DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) was a valiant effort that at least gestures towards the dismal track record of most such efforts, but still left me unconvinced that anyone knows how to improve diversity in an existing organization without far more brute-force approaches than anyone with power is usually willing to consider. But there's enough here, and the authors move through topics quickly enough, that a section that isn't working for you will soon be over. And some of the sections that do work are great. For example, the whole discussion of management.
Many of these companies view middle management as bloat, waste, what David Graeber would call a "bullshit job." But that's because bad management is a waste; you're paying someone more money to essentially annoy everyone around them. And the more people experience that sort of bad management, and think of it as "just the way it is," the less they're going to value management in general.
I admit to a lot of confirmation bias here, since I've been ranting about this for years, but management must be the most wide-spread professional job for which we ignore both training and capability and assume that anyone who can do any type of useful work can also manage people doing that work. It's simply not true, it creates workplaces full of horrible management, and that in turn creates a deep and unhelpful cynicism about all management. There is still a tendency on the left to frame this problem in terms of class struggle, on the reasonable grounds that for decades under "scientific management" of manufacturing that's what it was. Managers were there to overwork workers and extract more profits for the owners, and labor unions were there to fight back against managers. But while some of this does happen in the sort of office work this book is focused on, I think Warzel and Petersen correctly point to a different cause.
"The reason she was underpaid on the team was not because her boss was cackling in the corner. It was because nobody told the boss it was their responsibility to look at the fucking spreadsheet."
We don't train managers, we have no clear expectations for what managers should do, we don't meaningfully measure their performance, we accept a high-overhead and high-chaos workstyle based on ad hoc one-to-one communication that de-emphasizes management, and many managers have never seen good management and therefore have no idea what they're supposed to be doing. The management problem for many office workers is less malicious management than incompetent management, or simply no effective management at all apart from an occasional reorg and a complicated and mind-numbing annual review form. The last section of this book (apart from concluding letters to bosses and workers) is on community, and more specifically on extracting time and energy from work (via the roadmap in previous chapters) and instead investing it in the people around you. Much ink has been spilled about the collapse of American civic life, about how we went from a nation of joiners to a nation of isolated individual workers with weak and failing community institutions. Warzel and Petersen correctly lay some blame for this at the foot of work, and see the reorganization of work and an increase in work from home (and thus a decrease in commutes) as an opportunity to reverse that trend. David Brooks recently filled in for Ezra Klein on his podcast and talked with University of Chicago professor Leon Kass, which I listened to shortly after reading this book. In one segment, they talked about marriage and complained about the decline in marriage rates. They were looking for causes in people's moral upbringing, in their life priorities, in the lack of aspiration for permanence in kids these days, and in any other personal or moral failing that would allow them to be smugly judgmental. It was a truly remarkable thing to witness. Neither man at any point in the conversation mentioned either money or time. Back in the world most Americans live in, real wages have been stagnant for decades, student loan debt is skyrocketing as people desperately try to keep up with the ever-shifting requirements for a halfway-decent job, and work has expanded to fill all hours of the day, even for people who don't have to work multiple jobs to make ends meet. Employers have fully embraced a "flexible" workforce via layoffs, micro-optimizing work scheduling, eliminating benefits, relying on contract and gig labor, and embracing exceptional levels of employee turnover. The American worker has far less of money, time, and stability, three important foundations for marriage and family as well as participation in most other civic institutions. People like Brooks and Kass stubbornly cling to their feelings of moral superiority instead of seeing a resource crisis. Work has stolen the resources that people previously put into those other areas of their life. And it's not even using those resources effectively. That's, in a way, a restatement of the topic of this book. Our current way of organizing work is not sustainable, healthy, or wise. Working from home may be part of a strategy for changing it. The pandemic has already heavily disrupted work, and some of those changes, including increased working from home, seem likely to stick. That provides a narrow opportunity to renegotiate our arrangement with work and try to make those changes stick. I largely agree with the analysis, but I'm pessimistic. I think the authors are as well. We're very bad at social change, and there will be immense pressure for everything to go "back to normal." Those in the best bargaining position to renegotiate work for themselves are not in the habit of sharing that renegotiation with anyone else. But I'm somewhat heartened by how much public discussion there currently is about a more fundamental renegotiation of the rules of office work. I'm also reminded of a deceptively profound aphorism from economist Herbert Stein: "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop." This book is a bit uneven and is more of a collection of related thoughts than a cohesive argument, but if you are hungry for more worker-centric analyses of the dynamics of office work (inside or outside the office), I think it's worth reading. Rating: 7 out of 10

25 January 2021

Russ Allbery: Review: Laziness Does Not Exist

Review: Laziness Does Not Exist, by Devon Price
Publisher: Atria Books
Copyright: January 2021
ISBN: 1-9821-4013-5
Format: Kindle
Pages: 216
The premise of Laziness Does Not Exist is in the title: Laziness as a moral failing does not exist. It is a misunderstanding of other problems with physical or psychological causes, a belief system that is used to extract unsustainable amounts of labor, an excuse to withdraw our empathy, and a justification for not solving social problems. Price refers to this as the Laziness Lie, which they define with three main tenets:
  1. Your worth is your productivity.
  2. You cannot trust your own feelings and limits.
  3. There is always more you could be doing.
This book (an expansion of a Medium article) makes the case against all three tenets using the author's own burnout-caused health problems as the starting argument. They then apply that analysis to work, achievements, information overload, relationships, and social pressure. In each case, Price's argument is to prioritize comfort and relaxation, listen to your body and your limits, and learn who you are rather than who the Laziness Lie is trying to push you to be. The reader reaction to a book like this will depend on where the reader is in thinking about the problem. That makes reviewing a challenge, since it's hard to simulate a reader with a different perspective. For myself, I found the content unobjectionable, but largely repetitive of other things I've read. The section on relationships in particular will be very familiar to Captain Awkward readers, just not as pointed. Similarly, the chapter on information overload is ground already covered by Digital Minimalism, among other books. That doesn't make this a bad book, but it's more of a survey, so if you're already well-read on this topic you may not get much out of it. The core assertion is aggressive in part to get the reader to argue with it and thus pay attention, but I still came away convinced that laziness is not a useful word. The symptoms that cause us to call ourselves lazy procrastination, burnout, depression, or executive function problems, for example are better understood without the weight of moral reproach that laziness carries. I do think there is another meaning of laziness that Price doesn't cover, since they are aiming this book exclusively at people who are feeling guilty about possibly being lazy, and we need some term for people who use their social power to get other people to do all their work for them. But given how much the concept of laziness is used to attack and belittle the hard-working or exhausted, I'm happy to replace "laziness" with "exploitation" when talking about that behavior. This is a profoundly kind and gentle book. Price's goal is to help people be less hard on themselves and to take opportunities to relax without guilt. But that also means that it stays in the frame of psychological analysis and self-help, and only rarely strays into political or economic commentary. That means it's more useful for taking apart internalized social programming, but less useful for thinking about the broader political motives of those who try to convince us to work endlessly and treat all problems as personal responsibilities rather than political failures. For that, I think Anne Helen Peterson's Can't Even is the more effective book. Price also doesn't delve much into history, and I now want to read a book on the origin of a work ethic as a defining moral trait. One truly lovely thing about this book is that it's quietly comfortable with human variety of gender and sexuality in a way that's never belabored but that's obvious from the examples that Price uses. Laziness Does Not Exist felt more inclusive in that way, and to some extent on economic class, than Can't Even. I was in the mood for a book that takes apart the political, social, and economic motivations behind convincing people that they have to constantly strive to not be lazy, so the survey nature of this book and its focus on self-help made it not the book for me. It also felt a bit repetitive despite its slim length, and the chapter structure didn't click for me. But it's not a bad book, and I suspect it will be the book that someone else needs to read. Rating: 6 out of 10

5 January 2021

Russ Allbery: New year haul

For once, I've already read and reviewed quite a few of these books. Elizabeth Bear Machine (sff)
Timothy Caulfield Your Day, Your Way (non-fiction)
S.A. Chakraborty The City of Brass (sff)
John Dickerson The Hardest Job in the World (non-fiction)
Tracy Deonn Legendborn (sff)
Lindsay Ellis Axiom's End (sff)
Alix E. Harrow The Once and Future Witches (sff)
TJ Klune The House in the Cerulean Sea (sff)
Maria Konnikova The Biggest Bluff (non-fiction)
Talia Levin Culture Warlords (non-fiction)
Yoon Ha Lee Phoenix Extravagent (sff)
Yoon Ha Lee, et al. The Vela (sff)
Michael Lewis Flash Boys (non-fiction)
Michael Lewis Losers (non-fiction)
Michael Lewis The Undoing Project (non-fiction)
Megan Lindholm Wizard of the Pigeons (sff)
Nathan Lowell Quarter Share (sff)
Adrienne Martini Somebody's Gotta Do It (non-fiction)
Tamsyn Muir Princess Florinda and the Forty-Flight Tower (sff)
Naomi Novik A Deadly Education (sff)
Margaret Owen The Merciful Crow (sff)
Anne Helen Peterson Can't Even (non-fiction)
Devon Price Laziness Does Not Exist (non-fiction)
The Secret Barrister The Secret Barrister (non-fiction)
Studs Terkel Working (non-fiction)
Kathi Weeks The Problem with Work (non-fiction)
Reeves Wiedeman Billion Dollar Loser (non-fiction) Rather a lot of non-fiction in this batch, much more than usual. I've been in a non-fiction mood lately. So many good things to read!

30 December 2020

Russ Allbery: Review: The House in the Cerulean Sea

Review: The House in the Cerulean Sea, by TJ Klune
Publisher: Tor
Copyright: March 2020
ISBN: 1-250-21732-6
Format: Kindle
Pages: 398
Linus Baker is a case worker for the Department in Charge of Magical Youth. His job is to evaluate the orphanages to which children with magical powers are sent and ensure those children are treated properly. This must be done properly, with professional care and detachment and careful documentation so that his superiors can make the correct choices. Linus has no ambition or desire to be anything other than a case worker. He does his job meticulously by the book, namely the DICOMY Rules and Regulations, which he studies religiously. Linus is therefore caught entirely by surprise when he is summoned without explanation to the offices of Extremely Upper Management on the intimidating 5th floor. That summons turns out to be a new assignment for which Extremely Upper Management believes Linus to be ideal: an orphanage on an island far from the city, home to some highly unusual (and, in one case, disturbing) children and a headmaster who is as odd as his charges. Management is correct about Linus up to a point. He is a bureaucrat and a stickler for rules. However, Extremely Upper Management did not account for the possibility that Linus does the work that he does because he cares deeply about children, or that, if the two come into conflict, the children might matter more than the rules. The House in the Cerulean Sea is the sort of book that tells you exactly what it's doing, assures you that you'll enjoy it anyway, and then you actually do. The plot developments are obvious well in advance, the tugs on the heart-strings are telegraphed and obvious, and there are very few surprises. But the story is told with such charm and feeling that I at least didn't mind at all, and indeed would have been furious at the author if he hadn't delivered the expected ending. This is not the book to read if you want to delve deep into the implications of the world-building. It follows children's book logic in several important places: intentions matter more than institutional structure, sincerity is persuasive, and courage is rewarded. A few reviews compare it to Nineteen Eighty-Four, but this is wildly misleading beyond a few trappings of the setting. The internal logic of the book is closer to a cross between Good Omens and Dr. Seuss. It's a "good people are rewarded" sort of book and wears that on its sleeve. One of the things that Klune does extremely well is subtlety of characterization despite the relative lack of subtlety in the plot. Linus starts the book as a caricature whose life is nearly a blank canvas, and by the end of the book he feels like someone you know. Klune pulls this off less by filling in the canvas than by making careful use of all that negative space to put emotional weight and depth behind a few telling details like Linus's pyjamas, records, and cat. He also does an exceptional job with the mannerisms and habits of speech of both Linus and the headmaster of the orphanage. To say much more would be a spoiler; suffice it to say that Klune captures an interaction style that I have rarely seen in novels and certainly not in a fantasy novel of this type, and does it so well that I was strongly reminded of people I've known. Anyone who knows me is unlikely to be surprised that my favorite character in the book is Zoe, the sarcastic and fiercely protective sprite who owns the island on which the orphanage is located, but almost all of the characters are wonderful. One or two of the children are a bit one-note, but the group dynamics make up for that, and the suspicious, thoughtful, and respectful interplay between the three adults is beautifully done. My only real complaints on the characterization front are that some of the confrontations in the nearby village felt a bit strained, and I think Helen got short shrift and could have been fleshed out some more. I will say that the motives of the villains never made much sense, but they didn't have to; they're essentially monsters in Linus's story, and they do enough to serve that purpose. I now want to read the story of how Zoe and the headmaster met, although I'm not sure Klune is the right person to write it, and I'm not sure he left enough emotional space for another novel. Sometimes I want to read a positive, hopeful book in which people learn and grow and good things happen to good people, one where the author is unapologetically manipulating my emotions and I don't care because I want these people to be happy. If you feel the same way, I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It's lovely. Rating: 9 out of 10

20 December 2020

Russ Allbery: Review: Can't Even

Review: Can't Even, by Anne Helen Petersen
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Copyright: 2020
ISBN: 0-358-31659-6
Format: Kindle
Pages: 230
Like many other people, I first became aware of Anne Helen Petersen's journalism when her Buzzfeed article "How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation" went viral. Can't Even is the much-awaited (at least by me) book-length expansion of that thesis: The United States is, as a society, burning out, and that burnout is falling on millennials the hardest. We're not recognizing the symptoms because we think burnout looks like something dramatic and flashy. But for most people burnout looks less like a nervous breakdown and more like constant background anxiety and lack of energy.
Laura, who lives in Chicago and works as a special ed teacher, never wants to see her friends, or date, or cook she's so tired, she just wants to melt into the couch. "But then I can't focus on what I'm watching, and end up unfocused again, and not completely relaxing," she explained. "Here I am telling you I don't even relax right! I feel bad about feeling bad! But by the time I have leisure time, I just want to be alone!"
Petersen explores this idea across childhood, education, work, family, and parenting, but the core of her thesis is the precise opposite of the pervasive myth that millennials are entitled and lazy (a persistent generational critique that Petersen points out was also leveled at their Baby Boomer parents in the 1960s and 1970s). Millennials aren't slackers; they're workaholics from childhood, for whom everything has become a hustle and a second (or third or fourth) job. The struggle with "adulting" is a symptom of the burnout on the other side of exhaustion, the mental failures that happen when you've forced yourself to keep going on empty so many times that it's left lingering damage. Petersen is a synthesizing writer who draws together the threads of other books rather than going deep on a novel concept, so if you've been reading about work, psychology, stress, and productivity, many of the ideas here will be familiar. But she's been reading the same authors that I've been reading (Tressie McMillan Cottom, Emily Guendelsberger, Brigid Schulte, and even Cal Newport), and this was the book that helped me pull those analyses together into a coherent picture. That picture starts with the shift of risk in the 1970s and 1980s from previously stable corporations with long-lasting jobs and retirement pensions onto individual employees. The corresponding rise in precarity and therefore fear led to a concerted effort to re-establish a feeling of control. Baby Boomers doubled down on personal responsibility and personal capability, replacing unstructured childhood for their kids with planned activities and academic achievement. That generation, in turn, internalized the need for constant improvement, constant grading, and constant achievement, accepting an implied bargain that if they worked very hard, got good grades, got into good schools, and got a good degree, it would pay off in a good life and financial security. They were betrayed. The payoff never happened; many millennials graduated into the Great Recession and the worst economy since World War II. In response, millennials doubled down on the only path to success they were taught. They took on more debt, got more education, moved back in with their parents to cut expenses, and tried even harder.
Even after watching our parents get shut out, fall from, or simply struggle anxiously to maintain the American Dream, we didn't reject it. We tried to work harder, and better, more efficiently, with more credentials, to achieve it.
Once one has this framework in mind, it's startling how pervasive the "just try harder" message is and how deeply we've internalized it. It is at the center of the time management literature: Getting Things Done focuses almost entirely on individual efficiency. Later time management work has become more aware of the importance of pruning the to-do list and doing fewer things, but addresses that through techniques for individual prioritization. Cal Newport is more aware than most that constant busyness and multitasking interacts poorly with the human brain, and has taken a few tentative steps towards treating the problem as systemic rather than individual, but his focus is still primarily on individual choices. Even when tackling a problem that is clearly societal, such as the monetization of fear and outrage on social media, the solutions are all individual: recognize that those platforms are bad for you, make an individual determination that your attention is being exploited, and quit social media through your personal force of will. And this isn't just productivity systems. Most of public discussion of environmentalism in the United States is about personal energy consumption, your individual carbon footprint, household recycling, and whether you personally should eat meat. Discussions of monopoly and monopsony become debates over whether you personally should buy from Amazon. Concerns about personal privacy turn into advocacy for using an ad blocker or shaming people for using Google products. Articles about the growth of right-wing extremism become exhortations to take responsibility for the right-wing extremist in your life and argue them out of their beliefs over the dinner table. Every major systemic issue facing society becomes yet another personal obligation, another place we are failing as individuals, something else that requires trying harder, learning more, caring more, doing more. This advice is well-meaning (mostly; sometimes it is an intentional and cynical diversion), and can even be effective with specific problems. But it's also a trap. If you're feeling miserable, you just haven't found the right combination of time-block scheduling, kanban, and bullet journaling yet. If you're upset at corporate greed and the destruction of the environment, the change starts with you and your household. The solution is in your personal hands; you just have try a little harder, work a little harder, make better decisions, and spend money more ethically (generally by buying more expensive products). And therefore, when we're already burned out, every topic becomes another failure, increasing our already excessive guilt and anxiety. Believing that we're in control, even when we're not, does have psychological value. That's part of what makes it such a beguiling trap. While drafting this review, I listened to Ezra Klein's interview with Robert Sapolsky on poverty and stress, and one of the points he made is that, when mildly or moderately bad things happen, believing you have control is empowering. It lets you recast the setback as a larger disaster that you were able to prevent and avoid a sense of futility. But when something major goes wrong, believing you have control is actively harmful to your mental health. The tragedy is now also a personal failure, leading to guilt and internal recrimination on top of the effects of the tragedy itself. This is why often the most comforting thing we can say to someone else after a personal disaster is "there's nothing you could have done." Believing we can improve our lives if we just try a little harder does work, until it doesn't. And because it does work for smaller things, it's hard to abandon; in the short term, believing we're at the mercy of forces outside our control feels even worse. So we double down on self-improvement, giving ourselves even more things to attempt to do and thus burning out even more. Petersen is having none of this, and her anger is both satisfying and clarifying.
In writing that article, and this book, I haven't cured anyone's burnout, including my own. But one thing did become incredibly clear. This isn't a personal problem. It's a societal one and it will not be cured by productivity apps, or a bullet journal, or face mask skin treatments, or overnight fucking oats. We gravitate toward those personal cures because they seem tenable, and promise that our lives can be recentered, and regrounded, with just a bit more discipline, a new app, a better email organization strategy, or a new approach to meal planning. But these are all merely Band-Aids on an open wound. They might temporarily stop the bleeding, but when they fall off, and we fail at our new-found discipline, we just feel worse.
Structurally, Can't Even is half summaries of other books and essays put into this overall structure and half short profiles and quotes from millennials that illustrate her point. This is Petersen's typical journalistic style if you're familiar with her other work. It gains a lot from the voices of individuals, but it can also feel like argument from anecdote. If there's a epistemic flaw in this book, it's that Petersen defends her arguments more with examples than with scientific study. I've read enough of the other books she cites, many of which do go into the underlying studies and statistics, to know that her argument is well-grounded, but I think Can't Even works better as a roadmap and synthesis than as a primary source of convincing data. The other flaw that I'll mention is that although Petersen tries very hard to incorporate poorer and non-white millennials, I don't think the effort was successful, and I'm not sure it was possible within the structure of this book. She frequently makes a statement that's accurate and insightful for millennials from white, middle-class families, acknowledges that it doesn't entirely apply to, for example, racial minorities, and then moves on without truly reconciling those two perspectives. I think this is a deep structural problem: One's experience of American life is very different depending on race and class, and the phenomenon that Petersen is speaking to is to an extent specific to those social classes who had a more comfortable and relaxing life and are losing it. One way to see the story of the modern economy is that white people are becoming as precarious as everyone else already was, and are reacting by making the lives of non-white people yet more miserable. Petersen is accurately pointing to significant changes in relationships with employers, productivity, family, and the ideology of individualism, but experiencing that as a change is more applicable to white people than non-white people. That means there are, in a way, two books here: one about the slow collapse of the white middle class into constant burnout, and a different book about the much longer-standing burnout of being non-white in the United States and our systemic failure to address the causes of it. Petersen tries to gesture at the second book, but she's not the person to write it and those two books cannot comfortably live between the same covers. The gestures therefore feel awkward and forced, and while the discomfort itself serves some purpose, it lacks the insight that Petersen brings to the rest of the book. Those critiques aside, I found Can't Even immensely clarifying. It's the first book that explained to me in a way I understood what's so demoralizing and harmful about Instagram and its allure of cosplaying as a successful person. It helped me understand how productivity and individual political choices fit into a system that emphasizes individual action as an excuse to not address collective problems. And it also gave me a strange form of hope, because if something can't go on forever, it will, at some point, stop.
Millennials have been denigrated and mischaracterized, blamed for struggling in situations that set us up to fail. But if we have the endurance and aptitude and wherewithal to work ourselves this deeply into the ground, we also have the strength to fight. We have little savings and less stability. Our anger is barely contained. We're a pile of ashes smoldering, a bad memory of our best selves. Underestimate us at your peril: We have so little left to lose.
Nothing will change without individual people making different decisions and taking different actions than they are today. But we have gone much too far down the path of individual, atomized actions that may produce feelings of personal virtue but that are a path to ineffectiveness and burnout when faced with systemic problems. We need to make different choices, yes, but choices towards solidarity and movement politics rather than personal optimization. There is a backlash coming. If we let it ground itself in personal grievance, it could turn ugly and take a racist and nationalist direction. But that's not, by in large, what millennials have done, and that makes me optimistic. If we embrace the energy of that backlash and help shape it to be more inclusive, just, and fair, we can rediscover the effectiveness of collective solutions for collective problems. Rating: 8 out of 10

26 April 2020

Enrico Zini: Some Italian women

Artemisia Gentileschi - Wikipedia
art history people archive.org
Artemisia Lomi or Artemisia Gentileschi (US: / d nt l ski, -ti -/, Italian: [arte mi zja d enti leski]; July 8, 1593 c. 1656) was an Italian Baroque painter, now considered one of the most accomplished seventeenth-century artists working in the dramatic style of Caravaggio. In an era when women had few opportunities to pursue artistic training or work as professional artists, Artemisia was the first woman to become a member of the Accademia di Arte del Disegno in Florence and had an international clientele.
Maria Pellegrina Amoretti (1756 1787), was an Italian lawyer. She is referred to as the first woman to graduate in law in Italy, and the third woman to earn a degree.
Laura Maria Caterina Bassi (October 1711 20 February 1778) was an Italian physicist and academic. She received a doctoral degree in Philosophy from the University of Bologna in May 1732. She was the first woman to earn a professorship in physics at a university. She is recognized as the first woman in the world to be appointed a university chair in a scientific field of studies. Bassi contributed immensely to the field of science while also helping to spread the study of Newtonian mechanics through Italy.
Maria Gaetana Agnesi (UK: / n je zi/ an-YAY-zee,[1] US: / n -/ ahn-,[2][3] Italian: [ma ri a ae ta na a zi, - e z-];[4] 16 May 1718 9 January 1799) was an Italian mathematician, philosopher, theologian, and humanitarian. She was the first woman to write a mathematics handbook and the first woman appointed as a mathematics professor at a university.[5]
Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia (US: /k r n ro p sko pi /,[4] Italian: [ lena lu kr ttsja kor na ro pi sk pja]) or Elena Lucrezia Corner (Italian: [kor n r]; 5 June 1646 26 July 1684), also known in English as Helen Cornaro, was a Venetian philosopher of noble descent who in 1678 became one of the first women to receive an academic degree from a university, and the first to receive a Doctor of Philosophy degree.
Maria Tecla Artemisia Montessori (/ m nt s ri/ MON-tiss-OR-ee, Italian: [ma ri a montes s ri]; August 31, 1870 May 6, 1952) was an Italian physician and educator best known for the philosophy of education that bears her name, and her writing on scientific pedagogy. At an early age, Montessori broke gender barriers and expectations when she enrolled in classes at an all-boys technical school, with hopes of becoming an engineer. She soon had a change of heart and began medical school at the Sapienza University of Rome, where she graduated with honors in 1896. Her educational method is still in use today in many public and private schools throughout the world.
Rita Levi-Montalcini OMRI OMCA (US: / le vi mo nt l t i ni, l v-, li vi m nt l -/, Italian: [ ri ta l vi montal t i ni]; 22 April 1909 30 December 2012) was an Italian Nobel laureate, honored for her work in neurobiology. She was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly with colleague Stanley Cohen for the discovery of nerve growth factor (NGF). From 2001 until her death, she also served in the Italian Senate as a Senator for Life. This honor was given due to her significant scientific contributions. On 22 April 2009, she became the first Nobel laureate ever to reach the age of 100, and the event was feted with a party at Rome's City Hall. At the time of her death, she was the oldest living Nobel laureate.
Margherita Hack Knight Grand Cross OMRI (Italian: [mar e ri ta (h)ak]; 12 June 1922 29 June 2013) was an Italian astrophysicist and scientific disseminator. The asteroid 8558 Hack, discovered in 1995, was named in her honour.
Samantha Cristoforetti (Italian pronunciation: [sa manta kristofo retti]; born 26 April 1977, in Milan) is an Italian European Space Agency astronaut, former Italian Air Force pilot and engineer. She holds the record for the longest uninterrupted spaceflight by a European astronaut (199 days, 16 hours), and until June 2017 held the record for the longest single space flight by a woman until this was broken by Peggy Whitson and later by Christina Koch. She is also the first Italian woman in space. Samantha Cristoforetti is also known as the first person who brewed an espresso in space.

11 April 2020

Wouter Verhelst: Married!

If you read this post through Planet Debian, then you may already know this through "Johnathan"'s post on the subject: on the 29th of February this year, Tammy and I got married. Yes. Really. No, I didn't expect this to happen myself about five years ago, but here we are. Tammy and I met four years ago at DebConf16 in Cape Town, South Africa, where she was a local organizer. If you were at dc16, you may remember the beautifully designed conference stationery, T-shirts, and bag; this was all her work. In addition, the opening and closing credits on the videos of that conference were designed by her. As it happens, that's how we met. I've been a member of the Debconf video team since about 2010, when I first volunteered to handle a few cameras. In 2015, since someone had to do it, I installed Carl's veyepar on Debian's on-site servers, configured, and ran it. I've been in charge of the postprocssing infrastructure -- first using veyepar, later using my own SReview -- ever since. So when I went to the Debconf organizers in 2016 to ask for preroll and postroll templates for the videos, they pointed me to Tammy; and we haven't quite stopped talking since. I can speak from experience now when saying that a long-distance relationship is difficult. My previous place of residence, Mechelen, is about 9600km away from Cape Town, and so just seeing Tammy required about a half month's worth of pay -- not something I always have to spare. But after a number of back-and-forth visits and a lot of paperwork, I have now been living in Cape Town for just over a year. Obviously, this has simplified things a lot. The only thing left for me to do now is to train my brain to stop thinking there's something stuck on my left ring finger. It's really meant to be there, after all...

10 April 2016

Russ Allbery: Largish haul

Let's see if I can scrounge through all of my now-organized directories of ebooks and figure out what I haven't recorded here yet. At least the paper books make that relatively easy, since I don't shelve them until I post them. (Yeah, yeah, I should actually make a database.) Hugh Aldersey-Williams Periodic Tales (nonfiction)
Sandra Ulbrich Almazan SF Women A-Z (nonfiction)
Radley Balko Rise of the Warrior Cop (nonfiction)
Peter V. Brett The Warded Man (sff)
Lois McMaster Bujold Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen (sff)
Fred Clark The Anti-Christ Handbook Vol. 2 (nonfiction)
Dave Duncan West of January (sff)
Karl Fogel Producing Open Source Software (nonfiction)
Philip Gourevitch We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families (nonfiction)
Andrew Groen Empires of EVE (nonfiction)
John Harris @ Play (nonfiction)
David Hellman & Tevis Thompson Second Quest (graphic novel)
M.C.A. Hogarth Earthrise (sff)
S.L. Huang An Examination of Collegial Dynamics... (sff)
S.L. Huang & Kurt Hunt Up and Coming (sff anthology)
Kameron Hurley Infidel (sff)
Kevin Jackson-Mead & J. Robinson Wheeler IF Theory Reader (nonfiction)
Rosemary Kirstein The Lost Steersman (sff)
Rosemary Kirstein The Language of Power (sff)
Merritt Kopas Videogames for Humans (nonfiction)
Alisa Krasnostein & Alexandra Pierce (ed.) Letters to Tiptree (nonfiction)
Mathew Kumar Exp. Negatives (nonfiction)
Ken Liu The Grace of Kings (sff)
Susan MacGregor The Tattooed Witch (sff)
Helen Marshall Gifts for the One Who Comes After (sff collection)
Jack McDevitt Coming Home (sff)
Seanan McGuire A Red-Rose Chain (sff)
Seanan McGuire Velveteen vs. The Multiverse (sff)
Seanan McGuire The Winter Long (sff)
Marc Miller Agent of the Imperium (sff)
Randal Munroe Thing Explainer (graphic nonfiction)
Marguerite Reed Archangel (sff)
J.K. Rowling Harry Potter: The Complete Collection (sff)
K.J. Russell Tides of Possibility (sff anthology)
Robert J. Sawyer Starplex (sff)
Bruce Schneier Secrets & Lies (nonfiction)
Mike Selinker (ed.) The Kobold Game to Board Game Design (nonfiction)
Douglas Smith Chimerascope (sff collection)
Jonathan Strahan Fearsome Journeys (sff anthology)
Nick Suttner Shadow of the Colossus (nonfiction)
Aaron Swartz The Boy Who Could Change the World (essays)
Caitlin Sweet The Pattern Scars (sff)
John Szczepaniak The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers I (nonfiction)
John Szczepaniak The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers II (nonfiction)
Jeffrey Toobin The Run of His Life (nonfiction)
Hayden Trenholm Blood and Water (sff anthology)
Coen Teulings & Richard Baldwin (ed.) Secular Stagnation (nonfiction)
Ursula Vernon Book of the Wombat 2015 (graphic nonfiction)
Ursula Vernon Digger (graphic novel) Phew, that was a ton of stuff. A bunch of these were from two large StoryBundle bundles, which is a great source of cheap DRM-free ebooks, although still rather hit and miss. There's a lot of just fairly random stuff that's been accumulating for a while, even though I've not had a chance to read very much. Vacation upcoming, which will be a nice time to catch up on reading.

30 December 2015

Clint Adams: Oh what a night, late December 1963

24 Dec. 63 Dear Uncle Ron and Aunt Helen, It has been quite awhile since I have written you folks. I am not too much of one for writing, and when I do write, I keep putting it off, and putting it off; and the next thing you know, the weeks turn into months and then the months into years. I haven't sent any Christmas cards, so at this time I'll offer my best wishes for the season to you. It is Christmas Eve and I am working tonight. I will also work New Year's eve and day. It really doesn't seem like Christmas here, and there isn't that much to do in the evening's; So I'm just as well off working. As I had mentioned, I had intended to send you some coins from Korea but I believe that I put them in with a package that I had sent to Mom and told her to give them to you. In any event, here are some in this box. The Korean coin with the 10 on it is 10 Won, and worth about $.0769. The large copper coin is Japanese ( 10 Yen) and about 2.8 Wait! I was wrong on the Korean coins.They are 10 Hwan which is the old money. When they Changed to Won, they made 10 Hwan equal to 1 Won. (Sounds confusing and tongue-tying, doesn't it?) So these 10 copper pieces with the 10 on them altogether are only worth 7 / The Viet Namese coins with the former president Diem picture on them are soon being taken out of circulation. ( Since he was overthrown and killed, they are going to replace the money also.) The small pieces marked 1 dong are 1 piastre; also called one Viet Namese dollar. 1 piastre is about .7 . I also recall sending some coins home in my hold baggage. I'll tell Mom to look for them and give them to you. Now that I look back on it, the year I spent in Korea wasn't bad. It was difficult at first having to work for an arrogant Jew boss, but after a few months I got out of his office and was on my own working directly for the army people ( U.S.) The country of Korea isn't too bad. As you can see on the coins they were in the year 4294 last year. It is surprising for a civilization to be that far along in years and still live under very primitive conditions. Going from Korea to Japan is like going from the dark ages into the future science fiction world. Those people are really progressing in Japan. I spent several days in Japan after I left Korea. Then I went to Honolulu for almost a month. Then I went back to Japan for Leave for 3 weeks and then down here to Viet Nam in October. They were building like crazy in Japan to get ready for the Olympics. Working 4 hours a day, 7 days a week on construction. You could drive into Tokyo early in the evening and return late in the night and find the road you had gone in on was now completely torn away. And downtown Tokyo is vey nice. Lots of modern building and just about any modern gadget you can think of. I really like their cooking also. Their Kobe Beef is excellent. In this beef, the cattle are pampered from the time they are born until they are slaughtered. They massage them, feed them beer, and let them live a lazy life. I would really like to work a year or two in Japan. The hot baths and big tubs are also great. Only it is almost impossible to stand the hot temperatures that they can. Westerners always have to add quite a lot of cold water before they can get in the tub. The Viet Namese people are much dirtier than the Japanese or Koreans. They don't have any hot baths here in Viet Nam. In fact, the majority of hotels ( built by the French) don't even have hot water in them. The Korean houses don't look like much from the outside, but inside they are spotlessly clean. The older Japanese buildings look nic efrom the outside and are also clean inside. I am here in the town of Nha Trang. It is a small town on the coast of the China Sea. I like it here. My hotel is less than a hundred yards from the beach. We are now in the winter season also, but it just got a little cooler from having winds the past few weeks. This afternoon as we came to work there were all sorts of people in swimming. Lobster is also plentiful here and I eat quite a bit of it. Most of the restaurant make a creamed corn soup with lots of chunks of crab meat in it. This is very good. Being out here in Nha Trang, we missed the coup d'etat. Things were quiet here and the only way we knew what was happening was to listen to the radio and talk to our co-workers of our radio system in Saigon. When they lifted martial law and the curfew in Saigon, it took them several days later to follow suit here. There seems to be a noticed improvement since the coup. The people in general seem much happier and there appears to be much more general activity going on. Well, I guess that's about it for now. I think I may have some Korean Won notes back in my room and I'll check and enclose them if I can find them. Say hello to Ira & family when you see them, and also to Aunt Marie if she is still there with you. 'Bye for now Your nephew PS The Viet Namese coins with 50 XU on them are piastres.

8 November 2015

Andrew Cater: MiniDebconf Cambridge - ARM, Cambridge, 1340

Lightning talks -

David McBride Scalable infrastructure package distribution - even more mad idea than last year for his scalable package distribution round University of Cambridge - npn

Iain Learmonth - Vmdebootstrap sprint report detailing the work from the Sprint on Thursday/Friday. Live-build-ng needs more unit testing, boot testing, documentation. Working now and some images have been built but still in progress http://vmdebootstrap.alioth.debian.org

Helen (elgriff) talking about her weird keyboard
Repetittive strain injuries, carpal tunnel injuries.
Extensive computer use / brass instrument playing AND ignoring pain doing the above. Dont do this.
Vertical keyboards - SafeType and Yogitype.
You should care. If it hurts stop.You don't come with a five year warranty

Stefano Rovera (stefanor) - SVN-Git migration. Debian Python migration team did this for hundreds of packages. "Subversion is really, really evil - it's more evil than you thought"

Sledge - Update on ARM ports. Three ports - armel - older hardware. Armhf - ARMv7 hard float ABI. ARM64 / aarch64 - in Jessie - mostly working. Bits and pieces to be done. Over time, requirements have gone up and there are bits and pieces to work on. For the oldest machines in armel there's an amount of work to do - port may not survive beyond stretch: manpower / people who care is critical.


5 November 2015

Andrew Cater: MiniDebconf2015, ARM Cambridge 1320 5 November

Back after lunch - chatting about video and stuff with the Video Team sprint.
Thanks to the ARM employees swiping us in and out and shepherding the bunch of us over to lunch and keeping track of us.

From behind me, there's the chat over sorting out a switch to handle the LAN setup to test the video equipment later on.

Next door, they're busy, busy, busy - four tables full of people working fairly quietly. Steve McIntyre (Sledge) is running around facilitating, answering questions, sorting out "stuff"

Front desk are still front desking although most of us have arrived: I'm guessing they'll be busiest over the weekend.

Three of us on laptops doing whatever in here: Helen busy working to make sense of scribbled notes on whiteboards into a proper diagramming package - green and red marker pen on two walls full of whiteboard becomes a sensible project - objectives, bullet points, tasking - seemingly far too much organisation for this sort of thing and not the way some of us naturally work but necessary if we're not to forget something tiny but vital.

Thanks for this expertise, Helen, that most of us don't have :)


22 April 2015

John Goerzen: Today I FLEW A PLANE

DJI00694
For once you have tasted flight,
You will walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward;
For there you have been,
And there you long to return. Leonardo da Vinci
There is something of a magic to flight, to piloting. I remember the first flight I ever took, after years of dreaming of flying in a plane: my grandma had bought me a plane ticket. In one of the early morning flights, I witnessed a sunrise above cumulus clouds. Although I was just 10 or so at the time, that still is a most beautiful image seared into my memory. I have become meh about commercial flight over the years. The drive to the airport, the security lines, the lack of scenery at 35,000 feet. And yet, there is much more to flight than that. When I purchased what was essentially a flying camera, I saw a whole new dimension of the earth s amazing beauty. All the photos in this post, in fact, are ones I took. I then got a RC airplane, because flying the quadcopter was really way too easy. DJI00620
It s wonderful to climb the liquid mountains of the sky.
Behind me and before me is God, and I have no fears. Helen Keller
Start talking to pilots, and you notice a remarkable thing: this group of people that tends to be cool and logical, methodical and precise, suddenly finds themselves using language almost spiritual. Many have told me that being a pilot brings home how much all humans have in common, the unifying fact of sharing this beautiful planet together. Many volunteer with organizations such as Angel Flight. And having been up in small planes a few times, I start to glimpse this. Flying over my home at 1000 up, or from lake to lake in Seattle with a better view than the Space Needle, seeing places familiar and new, but from a new perspective, drives home again and again the beauty of our world, the sheer goodness of it, and the wonderful color of the humanity that inhabits it. DJI00120
The air up there in the clouds is very pure and fine, bracing and delicious. And why shouldn t it be? It is the same the angels breathe. Mark Twain
The view from 1000 feet, or 3000, is often so much more spectacular than the view from 35,000 ft as you get on a commercial flight. The flexibility is too; there are airports all over the country that smaller planes can use which the airlines never touch. Here is one incredible video from a guy that is slightly crazy but does ground-skimming, flying just a few feet off the ground: (try skipping to 9:36) So what comes next is something I blame slightly on my dad and younger brother. My dad helped get me interested in photography as a child, and that interest has stuck. It s what caused me to get into quadcopters ( a flying camera for less than the price of a nice lens! ). And my younger brother started mentioning airplanes to me last year for some reason, as if he was just trying to get me interested. Eventually, it worked. I started talking to the pilots I know (I know quite a few; there seems to be a substantial overlap between amateur radio and pilots). I started researching planes, flight, and especially safety the most important factor. And eventually I decided I wanted to be a pilot. I ve been studying feverishly, carrying around textbooks and notebooks in the car, around the house, and even on a plane. There is a lot to learn. And today, I took my first flight with a flight instructor. Today I actually flew a plane for awhile. Wow! There is nothing quite like that experience. Seeing a part of the world I am familiar with from a new perspective, and then actually controlling this amazing machine I really fail to find the words to describe it. I have put in many hours of study already, and there will be many more studying and flying, but it is absolutely worth it. Here is one final video about one of the most unique places you can fly to in Kansas. And a blog with lots of photos of a flight to Beaumont called Horse on the runway .

23 May 2014

Emanuele Rocca: A (very) brief history of Australia

This post is mostly a sum-up of the Wikipedia page History of Australia, with some content taken from History of the British Empire. Both texts are available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. I do not seem to be able to learn about a new topic without taking notes: in this case I have decided to publish my work, hoping that someone will find it useful. Some very important themes such as the Gold Rush and Australian History during the World Wars have been impudently ignored.
Indigenous Australians The ancestors of Indigenous Australians are believed to have arrived in Australia 40,000 to 60,000 years ago, and possibly as early as 70,000 years ago. By 1788, the population of Australia existed as 250 individual nations, many of which were in alliance with one another, and within each nation there existed several clans, from as few as five or six to as many as 30 or 40. Each nation had its own language and a few had multiple, thus over 250 languages existed, around 200 of which are now extinct. Permanent European settlers arrived at Sydney in 1788 and came to control most of the continent by end of the 19th century. Bastions of largely unaltered Aboriginal societies survived, particularly in Northern and Western Australia into the 20th century, until finally, a group of Pintupi people of the Gibson Desert became the last people to be contacted by outsider ways in 1984.
European explorers Terra Australis (Latin for South Land) is one of the names given to a hypothetical continent which appeared on European maps between the 15th and 18th centuries. Although the landmass was drawn onto maps, Terra Australis was not based on any actual surveying of such a landmass but rather based on the hypothesis that continents in the Northern Hemisphere should be balanced by land in the south. The first documented European landing in Australia was made in 1606 by a Dutch ship led by Willem Janszoon. Hence the ancient name "Nova Hollandia". The same year, a Spanish expedition had landed in the New Hebrides and, believing them to be the fabled southern continent, named the land: "Terra Austral del Espiritu Santo". Hence the current name "Australia". Although various proposals for colonisation were made, notably by Pierre Purry from 1717 to 1744, none was officially attempted. Indigenous Australians were less able to trade with Europeans than were the peoples of India, the East Indies, China, and Japan. The Dutch East India Company concluded that there was "no good to be done there". In 1769, Lieutenant James Cook tried to locate the supposed Southern Continent. This continent was not found, and Cook decided to survey the east coast of New Holland, the only major part of that continent that had not been charted by Dutch navigators. Cook charted and took possession of the east coast of New Holland. He noted the following in his journal:
"I can land no more upon this Eastern coast of New Holland, and
 on the Western side I can make no new discovery the honour of
 which belongs to the Dutch Navigators and as such they may lay
 Claim to it as their property, but the Eastern Coast from the
 Latitude of 38 South down to this place I am confident was never
 seen or viseted by any European before us and therefore by the
 same Rule belongs to great Brittan."
Colonisation The American Revolutionary War (1775-1783) saw Great Britain lose most of its North American colonies and consider establishing replacement territories. The British colony of New South Wales was established with the arrival of the First Fleet of 11 vessels in January 1788. It consisted of over a thousand settlers, including 778 convicts (192 women and 586 men). A few days after arrival at Botany Bay the fleet moved to the more suitable Port Jackson where a settlement was established at Sydney Cove on 26 January 1788. This date later became Australia's national day, Australia Day. Between 1788 and 1868, approximately 161,700 convicts (of whom 25,000 were women) were transported to the Australian colonies of New South Wales, Van Diemen's land and Western Australia. Early colonial administrations were anxious to address the gender imbalance in the population brought about by the importation of large numbers of convict men. In 1835, the British Colonial Office issued the Proclamation of Governor Bourke, implementing the legal doctrine of terra nullius upon which British settlement was based, reinforcing the notion that the land belonged to no one prior to the British Crown taking possession of it and quashing any likelihood of treaties with Aboriginal peoples, including that signed by John Batman. Its publication meant that from then, all people found occupying land without the authority of the government would be considered illegal trespassers. A group in Britain led by Edward Gibbon Wakefield sought to start a colony based on free settlement and political and religious freedoms, rather than convict labour. The South Australia Act [1834], passed by the British Government which established the colony reflected these desires and included a promise of representative government when the population reached 50,000 people. Significantly, the Letters Patent enabling the South Australia Act 1834 included a guarantee of the rights of 'any Aboriginal Natives' and their descendants to lands they 'now actually occupied or enjoyed'. In 1836, two ships of the South Australia Land Company left to establish the first settlement on Kangaroo Island. The foundation of South Australia is now generally commemorated as Governor John Hindmarsh's Proclamation of the new Province at Glenelg, on the mainland, on 28 December 1836. By 1851 the colony was experimenting with a partially elected council.
Development of Australian democracy Traditional Aboriginal society had been governed by councils of elders and a corporate decision making process, but the first European-style governments established after 1788 were autocratic and run by appointed governors. The reformist attorney general, John Plunkett, sought to apply Enlightenment principles to governance in the colony, pursuing the establishment of equality before the law. Plunkett twice charged the colonist perpetrators of the Myall Creek massacre of Aborigines with murder, resulting in a conviction and his landmark Church Act of 1836 disestablished the Church of England and established legal equality between Anglicans, Catholics, Presbyterians and later Methodists. In 1840, the Adelaide City Council and the Sydney City Council were established. Men who possessed 1,000 pounds worth of property were able to stand for election and wealthy landowners were permitted up to four votes each in elections. Australia's first parliamentary elections were conducted for the New South Wales Legislative Council in 1843, again with voting rights (for males only) tied to property ownership or financial capacity. Voter rights were extended further in New South Wales in 1850 and elections for legislative councils were held in the colonies of Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania. Women became eligible to vote for the Parliament of South Australia in 1895. This was the first legislation in the world permitting women also to stand for election to political office and, in 1897, Catherine Helen Spence became the first female political candidate for political office, unsuccessfully standing for election as a delegate to the Federal Convention on Australian Federation. Western Australia granted voting rights to women in 1899. Early federal parliamentary reform and judicial interpretation sought to limit Aboriginal voting in practice, a situation which endured until rights activists began campaigning in the 1940s.
Road to independence Despite suspicion from some sections of the colonial community (especially in smaller colonies) about the value of nationhood, improvements in inter-colonial transport and communication, including the linking of Perth to the south eastern cities by telegraph in 1877, helped break down inter-colonial rivalries. New South Wales Premier Henry Parkes addressed a rural audience in his 1889 Tenterfield Oration, stating that the time had come to form a national executive government:
"Australia [now has] a population of three and a half millions,
 and the American people numbered only between three and four
 millions when they formed the great commonwealth of the United
 States. The numbers were about the same, and surely what the
 Americans had done by war, the Australians could bring about in
 peace, without breaking the ties that held them to the mother
 country."
Though Parkes would not live to see it, his vision would be achieved within a little over a decade, and he is remembered as the "father of federation". The Commonwealth of Australia came into being when the Federal Constitution was proclaimed by the Governor-General, Lord Hopetoun, on 1 January 1901. Australia took part in WWI. The contributions of Australian and New Zealand troops during the 1915 Gallipoli Campaign against the Ottoman Empire had a great impact on the national consciousness at home, and marked a watershed in the transition of Australia and New Zealand from colonies to nations in their own right. The countries continue to commemorate this occasion on ANZAC Day. Australia achieved independent Sovereign Nation status after World War I, under the Statute of Westminster, which defined Dominions of the British empire in the following way:
"They are autonomous Communities within the British Empire, equal
 in status, in no way subordinate one to another in any aspect of
 their domestic or external affairs, though united by a common
 allegiance to the Crown, and freely associated as members of the
 British Commonwealth of Nations."
The parliaments of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Union of South Africa, the Irish Free State and Newfoundland (currently part of Canada) were now independent of British legislative control, they could nullify British laws and Britain could no longer pass laws for them without their consent. The Australia Act 1986 removed any remaining links between the British Parliament and the Australian states.

4 May 2014

Wouter Verhelst: 36

Next tuesday is my birthday. Since it's been a while since I last celebrated that, and since it's been a while since I last made some waffles, I decided to combine those two issues and do a waffle party next sunday (may 11th), at my apartment in Mechelen, between 12:00 and 17:00. If you can read this, and you have reason to assume I'll recognize you on sight, you're hereby invited. Please do let me know if you're coming though, and around what time, so I can prepare enough dough etc. See you there?

15 April 2014

Andrew Pollock: [life] Day 77: Port of Brisbane tour

Sarah dropped Zoe around this morning at about 8:30am. She was still a bit feverish, but otherwise in good spirits, so I decided to stick with my plan for today, which was a tour of the Port of Brisbane. Originally the plan had been to do it with Megan and her Dad, Jason, but Jason had some stuff to work on on his house, so I offered to take Megan with us to allow him more time to work on the house uninterrupted. I was casting around for something to do to pass the time until Jason dropped Megan off at 10:30am, and I thought we could do some foot painting. We searched high and low for something I could use as a foot washing bucket, other than the mop bucket, which I didn't want to use because of potential chemical residue. I gave up because I couldn't anything suitable, and we watched a bit of TV instead. Jason dropped Megan around, and we immediately jumped in the car and headed out to the Port. I missed the on ramp for the M4 from Lytton Road, and so we took the slightly longer Lytton Road route, which was fine, because we had plenty of time to kill. The plan was to get there for about 11:30am, have lunch in the observation cafe on the top floor of the visitor's centre building, and then get on the tour bus at 12:30pm. We ended up arriving much earlier than 11:30am, so we looked around the foyer of the visitor's centre for a bit. It was quite a nice building. The foyer area had some displays, but the most interesting thing (for the girls) was an interactive webcam of the shore bird roost across the street. There was a tablet where you could control the camera and zoom in and out on the birds roosting on a man-made island. That passed the time nicely. One of the staff also gave the girls Easter eggs as we arrived. We went up to the cafe for lunch next. The view was quite good from the 7th floor. On one side you could look out over the bay, notably Saint Helena Island, and on the other side you got quite a good view of the port operations and the container park. Lunch didn't take all that long, and the girls were getting a bit rowdy, running around the cafe, so we headed back downstairs to kill some more time looking at the shore birds with the webcam, and then we boarded the bus. It was just the three of us and three other adults, which was good. The girls were pretty fidgety, and I don't think they got that much out of it. The tour didn't really go anywhere that you couldn't go yourself in your own car, but you did get running commentary from the driver, which made all the difference. The girls spent the first 5 minutes trying to figure out where his voice was coming from (he was wired up with a microphone). The thing I found most interesting about the port operations was the amount of automation. There were three container terminals, and the two operated by DP World and Hutchinson Ports employed fully automated overhead cranes for moving containers around. Completely unmanned, they'd go pick a container from the stack and place it on a waiting truck below. What I found even more fascinating was the Patrick terminal, which used fully automated straddle carriers, which would, completely autonomously move about the container park, pick up a container, and then move over to a waiting truck in the loading area and place it on the truck. There were 27 of these things moving around the container park at a fairly decent clip. Of course the girls didn't really appreciate any of this, and half way through the tour Megan was busting to go to the toilet, despite going before we started the tour. I was worried about her having an accident before we got back, she didn't, so it was all good. I'd say in terms of a successful excursion, I'd score it about a 4 out of 10, because the girls didn't really enjoy the bus tour all that much. I was hoping we'd see more ships, but there weren't many (if any) in port today. They did enjoy the overall outing. Megan spontaneously thanked me as we were leaving, which was sweet. We picked up the blank cake I'd ordered from Woolworths on the way through on the way home, and then dropped Megan off. Zoe wanted to play, so we hung around for a little while before returning home. Zoe watched a bit more TV while we waited for Sarah to pick her up. Her fever picked up a bit more in the afternoon, but she was still very perky.

31 March 2014

Russ Allbery: Review: Sundiver

Review: Sundiver, by David Brin
Series: Uplift #1
Publisher: Bantam
Copyright: February 1980
Printing: September 1995
ISBN: 0-553-26982-8
Format: Mass market
Pages: 340
Sundiver is the first book of Brin's Uplift series, which I think it's fair to say are the books that made his reputation as an author. It's less well-known than the later sequels Startide Rising and The Uplift War for reasons that I'll get into in a moment. This was a re-read; I've read the first Uplift series before (and Startide Rising separately before that), but not in many years, and I wanted to re-read them and review them. I haven't finished doing that yet, several months after I re-read Sundiver, largely because this book wasn't as enjoyable as I remembered. The Uplift series is set in a heavily populated galaxy with a multitude of alien races. It follows the SF alien life pattern where the galaxy was well-populated and fully developed long before humans discovered it. The Earth is a relatively obscure backwater, and humans are expected to adopt to and follow the rules and restrictions that the other races had long-since established. This primarily means a complex and very formal system of caste and patronage: species brought to sapience by the technology of their patrons are expected to serve their patron races for millennia, and one's status in the galaxy is determined by the length of those patronage chains and the number of species one has fostered in turn. As is typical for stories of this sort, humans break the rules in unexpected ways. They have no known patrons, having apparently evolved sapience entirely on their own (although the galactic races are quite dubious of this theory). And they have uplifted two species to sapience (chimpanzees and dolphins) before their discovery by the rest of galactic civilization, although in fairly primitive ways and not properly by galactic standards. Set against this background, Sundiver is a science fiction puzzle story of a fairly old style. The protagonist, Jacob Demwa, is a scientific investigator who retired after a tragedy that killed his love. He's recruited out of that retirement and into this plot by an alien who is sympathetic to humans. A human exploration mission into the chromosphere of the Sun, treated as ridiculous by most of the galactics since the shared Library Institute certainly contains more information about stars than human technology could possibly uncover, has found strange and apparently sapient creatures living there: flocks of cattle-like creatures that are apparently being herded. There is no reference to such star-dwellers in the Library, which raises the possibility that humans have discovered something novel. That would be quite a coup against the galactics. But after the destruction of one of the solar exploration ships, it starts looking like these creatures are hostile. Jacob reminded me of a mix between a Larry Niven short story protagonist, working through the practical impact of a physics puzzle, and Isaac Asimov's Elijah Baley. What exactly is going on, both scientifically and politically, remains unclear for nearly the entire book. Both Jacob and the reader are constantly forming and then discarding hypotheses as events overtake them. The stakes are more interesting than a lot of science fiction novels: rather than survival or war, the stakes are prestige, influence, and status, with subtle but possibly vital effects on what position humans will take among the other species of the galaxy. All this sounds promising, and is why I remembered this book fondly. Unfortunately, re-reading it was a disappointing experience on several fronts. First, the characterization varies between trite and stereotyped. The aliens suffer from the standard alien characterization problem: each of them is an exemplar of their species, and all of the aliens feel like archetypes. While there are some twists in the inter-alien politics, one never gets a sense of the aliens as varied and complex societies in their own right. The humans are more varied, but that primarily means varieties of irritating. The worst is Peter LaRoque, a journalist who is set up as a villain of the story, and who is such an unremitting and over-the-top stereotype of everything possibly bad about journalists (and French people) that every scene containing him felt like someone scraping fingernails on a chalkboard. The other characters are a bit better, but not by much. Jacob himself has a bizarre, semi-mystical psychological problem from trauma that seems to give his amoral subconscious a life of its own. Brin appears to be setting this up to have major plot significance, but it never made any sense to me, didn't matter much in the end, and seems to mostly be an excuse for Jacob's hypercompetence. Sundiver's treatment of female characters also annoyed me enough to be worth a mention. The primary female character, Helene, is clearly intended to be a strong character with her own agency (she's both station commander and a starship captain), and Brin makes a lot of the humans switching to different words than male and female as a sign of a more egalitarian future. But this all feels skin-deep. The inevitable romance is all about Helene's attractiveness and ability to listen to Jacob, her logic is described as unscientific, and I got more and more annoyed by her portrayal as the book went along. She's not entirely without agency in the story, but she's much closer to a damsel in distress than the independent character Brin appeared to be trying for. It's hard to shake the feeling that she's being persistently belittled by the story. But this is a scientific puzzle story more than a mystery; characterization would be nice, but isn't strictly required. On re-read, the part of Sundiver that annoyed me the most was how much of a letdown the plot resolution was. I'm going to avoid any specific spoilers here, but I found the ending of both quite disappointing and a sign of the major problem with this series as a whole. The setup over-promises and Brin fails to deliver, a pattern that will repeat itself in this series. We get tantalizing hints of a new solar species, of revelations about the past of humanity, of deep galactic politics, and of vast knowledge contained in the Library that humans don't yet have access to. We get superficial archetypes for characters, politics that seem more like the bickering of children, plot twists that persistently take the story in more mundane and less interesting directions, and a sense of wonder, or lack thereof, that feels more like a Scooby Doo story than what I expect from science fiction. Some of the plot twists are unexpected and almost add some interest to the story, but don't make enough sense in the context of the story to be satisfying. And, of course, there's an climactic action sequence involving physical combat, as is required of all good Star Trek (original series) episodes. (I was waiting for Jacob's shirt to fall off.) The problem I have always had with Brin as a writer is that his ideas are far better than his ability to write characters and plots. In the hands of a better author, the Uplift universe background has so much potential. And I think Brin is a better author a few years later; my recollection is that both Startide Rising and The Uplift War do a better job of delivering on their promises. But Sundiver is deservedly forgettable. The good ideas rarely go anywhere beyond the obvious, the characters are irritating and often don't make sense, and the story is disappointing. I can't say I'm sorry to have read it, since my memory edited it down into a much better story, but I can only recommend it as background for later, better books. Rating: 4 out of 10

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