oddbill

Just finished Cyberabad Days, it was much much better than I anticipated, and I had high expectations already.

Although this was a short story collection, and although the short stories were scattered through the years predating and postdating the year 2047, which was the year the associated novel River of Gods was set, the stories were so dense, and circled around several linchpin events (the damming of the Ganges, the adoption by different subcontinental nations of the US sponsored Hamilton Acts, the advent of genetic Brahmans) that the whole collection takes on the feel of a full second novel. It was easily that layered and rewarding, and actually advanced the narrative past that of the novel that spawned it.

Well, well worth it. I haven’t read near future science fiction this complete and natural seeming since Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars colonization books.

Now, I’m moving on to The Road. Want to read that before the film comes out. In between I’m reading a book called Schuyler’s Monster, which is an autobiographical memoir of a father learning how to raise a daughter who can’t use language. This is a really good book, well written and compelling in an everyday life kind of way.

After that, I must decide – back to Infinite Jest in an attempt to plow through to the end, or start a project I want to complete this year: reading all of Thomas Pynchon in chronological order. I’ll probably do Jest first, just to get it out of the way.

Trying to get words around what I dislike so much about Infinite Jest – it seems largely pointless. A jumble of excruciatingly long sentences with no destination in sight. There is definitely a lot of world building going on, and that’s something I usually respond well to. Footnotes that lead to greater depth of setting and character, a detailed fictional history built in and around the familiar. It’s actually a bit science fictional in several ways. But somehow all of this seems to be in the service of crude, unimaginative satire. That’s a shame, because the characters aren’t, for the most part, simplistic, and the quality of observation in the author’s voice is many times profound. But somehow, in this book, it all seems squandered on tarted up teenage angst and insecure sniggering mockery. I’m about 100 pages in and I just had to set it aside because it was making me tired and bored. I’ve been told it becomes worth the effort after 200 pages or so, and I’m likely to at least push through that far, but I’m not convinced any attraction to the text at that point wont simply be evidence of a kind of Stockholm Syndrome taking effect.

My old physics book club is coming back to life, thanks to a referral to a new meeting place I got from one of the members. I’m really excited about getting this going again. Check out our club’s meetup page:

Reading Physics in LA

We’ll be reading Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe:

We’re going to be meeting this time (and hopefully for the foreseeable future) at the Echo Park gallery of Machine Project. If you don’t know what that is, from their website:

When we opened Machine Project, we liked the idea that a space could be a machine for producing culture. We feed in ideas, people, resources, and through the social and philosophical mechanism that is machine project we produce art, experiences, and ways to understand the world. We view what we do as an alternative to the traditional art space, which serves primarily as a container for art produced externally. But you know, we also teach electronics and computers and such so it’s not surprising that people get confused. Even we’re confused.

I really like that as a mission statement. A gallery not to contain art produced in the outside world, but to serve as an engine to produce art and experience that will spill out into the the outside world.

In earlier posts in this blog I talk a lot about the idea of empowered amateurs as an engine for wealth creation, and wealth in the wider sense of richness of lived experience more than in the limited sense of monetizable material objects. The Physics club has always been something in that vein, an attempt by amateurs with access to books and each other to bootstrap up a better understanding of the more complicated aspects of this science.

Machine Project as an organization has also always been something in that vein as well, and I think we’ll fit in well there.

If you live in the Los Angeles area, you should sign up for the meetup and come read. It’s free! If you don’t live in LA but are interested in reading along, sign up and participate in our discussion board.

I imported all the posts from my previous blog A Transparent Life, and was reminded of an old feature I had there called Robot of the Week. I’d post a youtube video of some interesting robot, and it would either be a springboard for some topic, or it would just be fun to look at.

I was sad to discover many of those old videos are no longer available from youtube due to copyright challenges. I doubt anyone anywhere was losing any money over a couple minutes of robot demo video being viewable online.

To obtain vengeance, I’m starting the feature again. So, for the relaunch of Robot of the Week I’d like to introduce you to the worlds most sophisticated and expensive player piano:

Now, that’s neat for sure, and one day it will even be good at the violin – but this is the ethical equivalent of dressing a monkey in overalls and teaching it to smoke a cigar. Amusing to humans, but not what robots are for!

I wonder what insight there is to be gained from designing a humaniform violin playing machine? Probably it’s a good platform to experiment with coordinated finger-like manipulation. But I think equally or more complex multi-digit coordination is probably already commonplace in industrial assembly line robots.

He’s cute, but we are not impressed.