Jury Razumau

This might have been a great book about sex work (the chapter on Backpage and other classifieds is very good), but on most other topics it is very shallow (and very US-centric).

On the surface, this is a book about people who discovered ancient skeletons (of dinosaurs and humans).

But mostly it’s a book about epistemology, about what you can say in public, and about how these two influence each other.

Ancient skeletons are a difficult problem in 19th-century Britain: if a species dies out, does it mean that God made a mistake? Since there was only one week of creation, what do you with the fact that birds seem to grow out of dinosaurs? How much weirdness can you sweep under the flood?

In early 19th century, a suggestion of a dangerous thought might get you banned from any social and professional life, but by 1871 Darwin can publish The Descent of Man, which not only fully accepts extinctions, but also replaces “God created man in his own image” with evolution.

I would like to understand this transition better: sure, bones have helped, but other social changes have helped paleontologists to discuss their progress publicly. What drove this change?

In particular, half of the scientists in this book seem to have rejected Christianity because of the regular old “God wouldn’t have allowed this child to die from a random disease this early”. Had this sentiment been common, Christianity wouldn’t survive the Middle Ages. However, child mortality for Victorian-era upper classes was already several times lower than for anyone before the 19th century, so maybe it was fair for them to have higher expectations?

This is also a book about Richard Owen being a dick to everyone who disagreed with him.

Three long articles originally published in The New Yorker.

1. If you do nothing, most of the Mississippi’s water flow would go into Atchafalaya. This would be bad for everyone near both rivers, and people have been controlling these water flows for more than a century.

2. If lava flows slowly, and it is close to a water source, and you have good pumps lying around, you can cool the lava enough to prevent it from flowing further and destroying your town and its bay. This has been done in 1973 on the island of Heimaey in Iceland.

3. If you live close to the San Gabriel mountains in Los Angeles, your house might get destroyed by a debris flow. You can dig a place for these flows to go into, but these places can turn out to be too small. And since many people move in and out, they are not ready: you couldn’t have seen that worst-in-20-years storm if you've only lived here for five years.

Omphalos is the best Ted Chiang's story yet.

Let’s say there are three items A, B, and C. You can combine A with B in five different ways, and B with C in six ways. And let’s say there are thousands of people who use items every day. It would be very unusual if these people would not go through all possible ways to combine these three items and figure out which of these ways are useful.

If you introduce these items in a fast-paced novel, a reader might not do this by themselves (they don’t have direct access to this universe to test their hypotheses), and they might accept that a discovery is surprising. But now, when you think about the state of the world before this discovery, something seems wrong about it. How come nobody bothered to check this? Isn’t it your main problem? Why is nobody really studying it?

(That is to say, somebody on Canticle would have discovered how to recharge sunhearts long ago without any outside help.)