Hernando
A while ago (circa 6 years) I read a book called something like “Linux for dumb, naive and extremely clumsy people”. It got my attention as the tittle was really weird for a learning book, but I picked it up and read it.
It was interesting to read all the things the author said about those people who are not actually stupids but when you try to explain them something as hard as you can they just don't get it , they just simply don't understand that easily and that can happen to any people with any other topic.
This book reminds me that, in the way that many people don't really understand what's the deal with general relativity and then quantum mechanics and then with thermodynamics and then again with a world full of probabilities. But still, there are people out there with a profound gift to teach (like in this case ) who want to explain all those topics in simple words; The author here make things very simple, kind of like ELA5.
He gets quite emotional towards the end but I can understand why. He seems to be loving what he is doing as a theoretical physicist.
All the best for him and his team with that weird theory of loop quantum gravity.
First time reading something like this. It is sort of a debate book but with footnotes and without the proponents interrupting each other, and I actually liked the format. It would be nice to find something similar but not only focusing on religious proponents.
About the book itself, Ken Ham's is the guy which most conservative Christians will relate the most as it is basically Christian religion as taught in schools (or were) . I find his essay the weakest of all four, also the guy is quite annoying sometimes as he believes whatever he says is the true because “That is the true”, I later saw him on YouTube and he is even worst. Even the editor of the book had some trouble dealing with him that it made me laugh. Citing the editor:
“The most obvious discrepancy that remains is in the initial essays, where Ham's is noticeable longer than the others. He was unwilling to cut anything further, believing it only fair that he should be given more space than the others since he was the only one defending the young age of the earth and the authority of Scripture vs the authority of the scientific majority”. Quite a guy eh?.
Hugh Ross is an interesting case, as an Astrophysics he believes in like 99% about all the scientific consensus related to cosmic stuff, but he differ in the evolution and origins of life. Researching through his footnotes I see he has an interesting views that few non-religious people also consider, specially that about Fine-tuning of the universe. His weakest point I would say that is that he is actually making the bible to concord with everything Astrophysics find and that is why many people say that he tends to much to Concordism.
Haarsma is a proponent of almost everything that non-religious scientist believe, so most of those people will find her point of view the most compelling of all, but she add God into the equation. So she believes in the Evolution, Origins of life, the LUCA, etc as the scientific consensus says but also that God guided everything in any way. Her weakest point is actually the obvious one, what God has anything to do in all this if all this looked as He was unnecessary. Though Her reply to this opposition is quite interesting. She works for that organization (BioLogos) that is actually run by geneticist Francis Collins which it happens that he is the guy in charge of the NIH in the US and who led the Human Genome Project.
The last guy, Meyer, only based his essay on Intelligent Design so nothing to add to this as even though he has his own position on the age of the universe and origins of life most of his essay is basically explaining everything about ID including why it is not Pseudo-science.
Finally, the editor finish the book saying: “It takes enormous effort, then, on our part to listen to others and consider their critiques of our own positions. But if we're serious about pursuing the truth in the matters, it is important.”
I often find myself going back to the old classics, specially when I am busy and without enough time to read or when I am stressed and can not focus, just to find this. A fast paced, straight to the point and amazing ideas wisely packed in a short book.
The last 50p were absolutely great, everything was happening as if it were literally jaunting. Also all the crazy stuff with time-bending, elsewhere-elsewhen-NOW-etc were nicely done.
Indeed a very entertaining reading.
I almost gave up about 300p then again about 600p but I finished the book , from cover to cover.
I do not have any problem with expositions in any book (I actually like it ) but I honestly find that Kim Stanley Robinson does a better job on this than Neal Stephenson (taking Seveneves as a starting point) as I think that KSR when describing Space, ships, planets, etc is way more interesting, compelling and clear. I find the expositions on Seveneves almost boring and with too many ramifications that at the end were not even important to the plot.
On the other spectrum when the plot is actually happening and there is an argument Neal does an amazing job. I would say this book could be like 300p shorter.
For the last third that got so much criticism I do not think it is bad but I sympathize with those who say that it could be just another book.
I've been avoiding Stephen Baxter for a while and thought it was time to give him a try.
I read this one mostly because of the synopsis and the good reviews about his Xeelee series.
Timelike Infinity and Ring are considered the ‘main' story in the timeline between the all 4 books on this sequence. Raft and Flux being more like stand-alone stories.
I liked the book, lots of extravagant ideas with Wormholes, Singularities and Time travel which I truly enjoyed, even though it was not that easy to follow along the whole universe and time spans.
It was worth the time.
Update: Now After reading Ring which is another great one, I consider this one just a tiny bit superior than Ring.
This is a time travel story with a lot of imagination. I liked the explanations AR gave to the theories on it, and that he did not mess a lot with them. The seeds, the role of the AI, time-embedding, the noise in time and the interjection between minds are a few of the themes in the book and quite a different approach from other stories of this kind. I would have prefered the book to be a bit longer as the last 3rd of the book felt rushed. Also, I did not like the ending , it was not interesting at all. Or maybe it's just that I wasn't expecting to end too fast and took me by surprise (in a bad way).
A Classic SF book with many genres packed in a great fashion. We got Space Opera, Time travel, Thriller, Mystery, a bit of Horror, etc etc. I enjoyed each of the stories and did not feel bored with the characters, they all were interesting in some way. Don't know why I've waited for so long to read this book.
This is a Three-Body Problem Paraquel that adds some interesting ideas and reveals a few things to understand a bit more about Yun Tianming and everything that happened during-after Death's End. Here we also confirm how a useless character Cheng Xin is. If you disliked her in Death's End, this book in one page will increase that feeling.
In the other hand, the book leaves the usual SF and Physics approach and plays more with an Ultra Hyper Dimensional Universe of things (some people are considering it Fantasy), and I don't really know how to feel about it.
There is a pretty nice reference to Asimov's Foundation as well.
In a nutshell it's not in the same quality as the original trilogy but it is truly worth a read.
Pd: The English version of this book is coming out in a few months but I'm glad to found out that the Spanish version was already on the bookstores since last year.
Cixin Liu did something really impressive with this trilogy. Keeping the high quality throughout the 3 books is a great achievement, considering that a lot of series just go deep down after a second book .
The last 100 pages of this book were simply one of the most outstanding sections in all of three books. Such a dread and nostalgic sensation with all the memories of the old Earth.
Though the main character of the book is very naive and behave very odd for most of the situations , it did not compromise the whole experience of the story.
Superb!. TMoD is a very unique and different book. It’s a neat SF with massive chunks of philosophy. It has also some sort-of-poetic lines, i.e :
“As was my habit, I followed the afternoon to the ocean and ended up lounging on a shore of corroded boulders. The waters golden, the horizon blood. The squawking of mindless seagulls. Alone, leering at passersby, I grinned as Saturn brightened and watched feral waves swallow the fireball, savoring the taste.”
“Come midnight, a turquoise aurora hung over the land. Not as a fragile drape gliding down against the stars, but as a slow whip to bleed the firmament of its mysteries. A though out of those celestial wounds she would divine the whereabouts of the men she hunted.”
Often times the author is more straightforward:
“Even though we have more time, it’s the wrong kind of time. Everything moves so fast, and there’s barely a moment to stop and think and-“ “And people don’t understand each other at all, and we have wider but more superficial knowledge, and good ideas get lost in the noise”.
“We had lived in a present built on tomorrows. Wasted tomorrows.”
And sometimes existentialism fills the void:
“-Do you think we have free will?. -I think about it. I don’t think about thinking about it.”
The philosophical stuff is more dense and harder to grasp in one of the three narratives, specially when the character is deep-thinking.
The thing is, you can still enjoy the book even if you don’t care about the philosophical and the different prose and by just following the plot. But it is certainty a much better experience at least trying to understand the “book-in-itself”. It was so good that I was tempted to reread it right away after finishing it.
Just a few annotations:
“A big breakthrough in artificial intelligence. It seems somewhat likely that it will happen sometime in this century, but we don't know for sure”.
-I don't think so, but I truly hope to see that with my eyes.
“The idea of a coming technological singularity has been popularized, starting with Vernor Vinge's seminal essay and continuing with the writings of Ray Kurzweil and others. The term ‘Singularity,' however, has been used confusedly in many disparate senses and has accreted an unholy aura of techno-utopian connotations”.
-Agree.
“Machines matching humans in general intelligence have been expected since the invention of computers in the 1940s”
-Add another century to it.
“The fact that the best performance at one time is attained through a complicated mechanism does not mean that no simple mechanism could do the job as well or better. It might simply be that nobody has yet found the simpler alternative”.
-That's my bet for developing a SI.
“How far are we currently from achieving a human whole brain emulation?. One recent assesment presented a technical roadmap and concluded that the prerequisite capabilities might be available around mid-century, though with a large uncertainty level”.
- I also doubt a WBE in the near future. Probably in 2120?.
“Final goal: ‘make us smile'.
Perverse instantiation: ‘paralyze human facial musculatures into constant beaming smiles”.
- I laughed on this because it makes sense.
“...These observations make it plausible that any type of entity that developed a much greater than human level intelligence would be potentially extremely powerful. Such entities could accumulate content much faster than us and invent new technologies on a much shorter timescale. They could also use their intelligence to strategize more effectively than we can”.
- I liked this book a lot specially because of the Realistic Pessimism about an SI. I consider there must be a real concern to think about that level of intelligence.
This is my first Culture book (well even my first Iain banks) and I surely enjoyed it. At the beginning before starting reading this I though the synopsis was a tiny bit silly , like a guy who plays games and is very good but wants to play a totally different game on another far place, what's that?. Well actually it was pretty neat and it wasn't just about that.
Very promising premise but it was a bit boring and I can recall just a few interesting chapters. It supposed to be thrilling but I felt dissapointed, with little interest on the plot and annoyed with the neverending “have to keep my crew safe” from the main character. Also, the names, my goodness. Beside all that the science on the book was good.
I was a bit worried when I started reading this book thinking about the spiders and bringing my memories back when I read A Fire Upon the Deep and all the stuff with the Thines because that was the only thing I was bored a bit in AFUtD. Well I was surprised by how interested I was on the spiders and their world. I did not like the end but It was a great read.
The Man Who Folded Himself is a time travel story that is considered by many a master piece. A man inherits a time travel machine and starts playing with it. Sounds fun......until it doesn't.
To me, it is a pointless and silly book even within its own boundaries. One of the worst book I've ever read.
Fortunately is very short (less than 200 pages) but the whole story is supremely boring.
This is a fantastic account of some deep and fundamental questions that most of us had already asked ourselves before. It is done through multiple conversations between a man and his granddaughter.
I clearly do not believe all the question from the book were literally asked by the child, maybe just a few, but it is to me a very subtle literary device to explain what the author is trying to convey.
In my opinion, this is a much better book than Astrophysics For People in a Hurry by Neil deGrayson. It is more engaging and Although it has some of the same weakness in not going much deeper, I adventure to say that it does the job better in explaining every subject.
The guy is also an astrophysics, but I like how he articulates the ideas better. Some of the questions he is "asked" by his granddaughter are things like what are the stars made of, how can we tell the age of the sun, how distant are the galaxies and one very important, how do we know that is true or not.
The target according to the author is mainly 14 years old teens. In short, this is a very short but good overview of intriguing questions about our universe to pique the interest of young people but also for older ones to have the tools to do the same with their children and grandchildrens when the moment arrives.
If you have never come across the Fermi paradox then this book has a fantastic way to explain one of its solution. The dark forest hypothesis.
I consider this one of those slow but great books in speculative fiction. Much better than the previous one in my opinion due solely to its sheer scale.
The aliens found in the previous book, called Trisolarans, are coming and will reach the planet in roughly in 400 years. They become substantially dangerous as they are able to send subatomic particles that allows them instant knowledge of all human information, leaving us with barely anything to protect us as everything we can think of is already known by them and therefore end up sabotaged. The only thing they cannot know is what is inside peoples mind.
How do humans deal with Trisolarans with just that is the main plot of the book .
There are too many things here that are utterly insane. Reading the book for the first time was quite an experience. If you like mind bending ideas, plot twist, don't care much about the characters and are fascinated by old school Sci Fi, then this book is a must read.
I sort of liked this book, but it was too short on each topic that by the end it barely made sense to me reading it when most of the things are 2 seconds away on a web search. Actually, that was what I did for basically every chapter, as a way to know what else is missing and also explains why it took me longer to finish it. It does not go deep on anything and give you a very surface level understanding of the universe.
I guess that was the point of the book at the end, and I am being too picky here. Despise my rating, it was entertaining and enjoyable, just that I was expecting a bit more substance.
The first installment of the acclaimed trilogy. This set the tone of the upcoming books, but the scale here is much less.
This is not the most strict Hard Science Fiction by all means, but the author tries his best in doing everything possible with the modern understanding of the laws of Physics....... more or less.
The title of the book and focal point is about the problem described in physics and orbital mechanics about finding the subsequent motions of three celestial bodies using Newtons Law of Motion.
There is a bunch of surprises here as we get to look over some very well known historical figures and an alien culture trying to survive to the catalyst effects of their start system
With its flat but ok characters, the Chinese setting makes the story even more engaging.
The Gone World is an insteresting thriller with time travel elements and some bits of horror.
What is not is the marketing's salad combination of Inception, True Detective, 12 Monkeys, Interstellar, and The Silence of the Lambs.
I see how this book can appeal to those who enjoy the aforementioned movies, but it is definitely not all those things combined or even separated. It has nothing remotely close to Interestellar or Inception. Probably some bits of True Detective, but that's it. It also does a disservice to the book because I think it can stand by itself without being hyped with those blurbs.
Anyway, the story here is that of an officer from the NCIS who is sent to solve a case that involves murder and dissapearance. In the process, she finds herself traveling to the past and to many futures, trying to find answers to unraveling mysteries. This includes the end of the world, a different version of herself, etc.
An intriguing sense of gloom and doom is present throughout the whole story, captivating the reader with what could possibly be the resolution.
The book does a good job wiring paradoxes and blending thriller with Science Fiction elements.
Definitely one of the best surprises of the year. A year full of dull SF stories.
This is a dry, technical and well documented book/research about all the things that happened on planet earth to support life. Not only just any life but the author makes a strong claim that through the ages , on each singular event (Ice age, Cambrian explosion, etc.) the planet happened to be in the best possible state to support the most amount of life.
The main thesis here is that there are just too many things that needed to happen in order for life to even exist, and that improbability is a strong argument of a Creator.
I like that the book is significantly different than other books with a theistic point of view. Here the author paired with a biochemist try his best to give the readers with a high amount of peer reviewed papers on the origins of life and the evolution of the planet. It has almost 40 of 288 pages only for footnotes.
