Wrapping Up 2022

It’s the end of the year, time to look back. 

This year marked the ninth year of daily blogging!  That’s crazy, not to mention pointless.  Literally no one asked for it. : – (

But you got it anyway.

Coverage continues about the same.  Dinosaurs and Robots.  Cryptocurrency and Quantum Computing.  Bugs (i.e., software bugs). 

And weekly book reviews.

In other news…

I’ll note that this year I shutdown my never really used twitter account—I was a trend leader in not using twitter!

I also shutdown and cleaned out all of my NFTs and crypto stuff.  These were basically experiments, intended to see how stuff works.  Again, I’m leading the trend, walking away from NFTs and crypto. Be smart. Walk away now.

And, after wanting to do it all my life, I installed solar panels!  Hey, look at me!  I’m a power company!  There is an app, natch, which tells me that I have generated 1.3MWhr of pure, clean, yummy solar electricity since June 21.  A-a-a-h!  Refreshing!

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Best Robot of the Year

I haven’t really been rating robots, but I realized that mostly I blog about robots that capture my childish sense of wonder.  Cool robots.  Weird robots.  Outstanding robots.

So, looking over the posts this year, what is the best robot of 2022 in this blog?

Obviously, the Ingenuity Mars Copter is in a category of its own! 

I mean it’s (a) real and (b) flying on Mars!!!!  Flying! On Mars!  This is what robots are supposed to be!

Down here on Earth, there are lots and lots and lots of robots and robot projects.  I’ll call attention to a few that stand out by not following the herd:

• Ibex – I want a robot I can ride.  With horns!
• Wheelbot – how does this even work?  It’s magical.
• Volodrone – one of the winners in the “that’s not big enough!” department!

But I’m going to tip my hat to the prohibitive favorite: The land of Real Gundam.

As my post indicated:  the purpose of this device is to BE AWESOME.  Why did we build it?  BECAUSE WE COULD.

Now THAT’S what I call a robot!

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Dave Barry Tribute Band Names

As always, I noted ideas for band names, taken from real science and technology articles.

Let me pick a couple of favorites:

Trilobite Eyes
Fluidic innervation

Most of this years list:

Ankylosaur’s Tail-Club
Ankylosaur’s Hair Club
Leidenfrost effect
Structured Thermal Armour
Embayment
Foehn wind 
Fluidic innervation
Sensorize
Ultrafast
Energy exchange
Two single Rydbergs
A jumping reaction wheel unicycle
Non-holonomic
Under-actuated dynamics
Two unstable degrees of freedom
Self-erection
Disturbance rejection
While balancing
Entanglement purification
Doubling architecture
Quantum memories
Entanglement fidelities
Brain slosh reductions (This should be a cocktail)
Contactless Fabrication
Full Acoustic Trapping
Elongated Parts
Speculative Side-channel Attack
A Forward Speculative Interference Attack
Reorder Buffer Contention
Speculation-invariant instructions
Delay-on-miss
Trilobite Eyes
Metalens
Extreme Depth of Field
Boasts Huge

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Books

As always, I read continuously and posted weekly book reviews.  This year I reviewed 22 non-fiction and 55 fiction.

Some Best Books

This year I read most of new fav Mick Herron’s Slough House, as well as recurring favs Stross, Aaronovitch, etc.

Special mention for The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi– because it’s such a pro-nerd fantasy.  There are plenty of stories by nerds and for nerds, but not so many about nerds.  Heroic nerds! 

Non-fiction of note:  Legacy of Violence by Caroline Elkins. As I wrote, “Hit ‘em again, Elkins!”, I say. “Let me hold your coat while you put the boot in!” 

Special mention for: Math Without Numbers – super great math book, and remarkably easy to understand. I gave this as gift.

All the reviews in loose chronological order.

Q1

Fiction

Anthem by Noah Hawley
Quantum of Nightmares by Charles Stross
Escape From Yokai Landby Charles Stross
Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
Tales from the Café by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
The Goodbye Coast by Joe Ide
Persephone Station by Stina Leicht
Mermaid Confidential by Tim Dorsey
Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid
Once Upon A Time In Hollywood by Quentin Tarantino
Century Rain by Alastair Reynolds
To Sleep in a Sea of Stars by Christopher Paolini
D (A Tale of Two Worlds) by Michel Faber
Creative Types by Tom Bissell
White on White by Ayşegül Savaş
Harrow by Joy Williams
Fan Fiction by Brent Spiner
Constance Verity Destroys the Universe by A. Lee Martinez
The Kaiju Preservation Societyby John Scalzi

Non-Fiction

Treasured by Christina Riggs
Spooked: The Trump Dossier, Black Cube, and the Rise of Private Spies by Barry Meier
The Modern Detective by Tyler Maroney
The 1619 Project ed. by Nikole Hannah-Jones, Caitlin Roper, Ilena Silverman, and Jake Silverstein
Math Without Numbers by Milo Beckman
Otherlands by Thomas Halliday

Q2

Fiction

Glitterati by Oliver K. Langmead
Razzmatazz by Christopher Moore
Bad Actors by Mick Herron
Slough House by Mick Herron
This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub
Book of the Night by Holly Black
Siren Queen by Nghi Vo
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
The Good Wife of Bath by Karen Brooks
The Impossible Us by Sarah Lotz
Amongst Our Weapons by Ben Aaronovitch
Portrait of a Thief by Grace D. Li
Out There by Kate Folk
Battle of the Linguist Mages by Scotto Moore
The Paradox Hotel by Rob Hart
The Left-handed Twin by Thomas Perry

Non Fiction

How to Take Over the World by Ryan North
The Method by Isaac Butler
Origin by Jennifer Raff
Legacy of Violence by Caroline Elkins
Seven Games by Oliver Roeder
Pandora’s Jar by Natalie Haynes
Ways and Means by Roger Lowenstein
What the Ermine Saw by Eden Collinsworth
The Pope at War by David I. Kertzer

Q3

Fiction

Total by Rebecca Miller
Calling for a Blanket Dance by Oscar Hokeah
NSFW by Isabel Kaplan
The Pink Hotel by Liska Jacobs
The Longcut by Emily Hall
An Honest Living by Dwyer Murphy
The Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
Bone Silence by Alastair Reynolds
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
The Absolute by Daniel Duebel
The 22 Murders of Madison May by Max Barry
Slow Horses by Mick Herron
Spook Street by Mick Herron
Real Tigers by Mick Herron
Dead Lions by Mick Herron

Non-Fiction

The Last Days of the Dinosaurs by Riley Black
Bad Mexicans by Kelly Lytle Hernández
A Quantum Life by Hakeem Oluseyi
The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt

Q4

Fiction

A Restless Truth by Freya Marske
The World We Make by N. K. Jemisin
The Oracle of Maracoor by Gregory Maguire
The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li
The Furthest Station by Ben Aaronovitch
Melancholy of Mechagirl by Catherynne M. Valente      
Astro-Nuts by Logan J. Hunder
The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik
August Kitko and the Mechas from Space by Alex White
Joe Country by Mick Herron
London Rules by Mick Herron
Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm by Laura Warrell
Viviana Valentine Gets Her Man by Emily S. Edwards
Secret Music at Tordesillas by Marjorie Sandor

Non fiction

Survival of the Richest by Douglas Rushkoff
Indigenous Continent by Pekka Hämäläinen
Magnificent Rebels by Andrea Wulf

Book Review: “The World We Make” by N. K. Jemisin

The World We Make by N. K. Jemisin

The City We Became (2020) was quite a cliff hanger, in a number of ways, not least in that it ends just as “the city” is barreling into COVID. 

The World We Make is the sequel, though Jemisin simply ignores the pandemic.  Hey, it’s an alternative universe (with it’s own multi-tentacled menaces), we don’t need to dwell on a couple of miserable years in our own space time continuum.

More important, we need to find out just what is this city that became.  How does this composite city work?  How does the war come out?  What, exactly, did we become.

I, for one, have been waiting eagerly for this book, and was not disappointed.

There was a lot of unfinished business, so a lot of stuff happens in this story.  Some of it continues the theme of pro-NYC propaganda, some of it is unsubtle satire (“Make New York Great Again”), there are some street fighting and car chases, and there is a whole lot of weird bollocks with way to many teeth and tentacles and glowing eyes.  (And there are some very New York love stories.)

In short, it’s exactly what we expect and hope for from Sensei Jemisin.  And a it’s a rollicking good sequel, with a pretty satisfying ending.

Just how does the city fight back and survive the savage, tetacle heavy, assault from another dimension? Basically, the New Yorkness of ordinary New Yorkers is the war winning weapon: the people make the city.

Now, personally, I have nothing to do with NYC or any such megacity, so I don’t really identify with the NYC-centric details.  I mean, I neither know nor care how the Bronx differs from Brooklyn, for instance. 

Not that I didn’t like the story, anyway. (Even if the characters seem to think that where I live is RepublicanVille and everyone is a racist who hates New York.)

Anyway.

Taking the fantasy concepts seriously,  I do have to wonder about the entire premise of the story that cities, and only cities, achieve supernatural avatar-ship (-ness?  -hood?).  I don’t get how this can work.

This is really apparent at the city line, where an arbitrary, artificial, and ultimately unreal concept separates New York from non-New York.  How can this possibly work?  How can some arbitrary political area achieve transcendence, while the next molecule over doesn’t? I don’t really get it.

New York-ness is a concept is people’s heads.  And just as Jersey City can “really be”a borough of New York”, there are pieces and traces of “New York” everywhere there are people.  I know more about New York City, and think more like New York City, than I do about most of the world except my local home town. Where I live isn’t inside the city lines, but the city lives in our heads.

This question is particularly salient to those of us who are just as attached to our home towns or even cultural regions that aren’t giant megacities.  What happens to us?  Do we not get a guardian avatar?  Is our heritage and culture out in the cold?  Do we have to move into a city to get into the big multiverse game?  If so, why?

Maybe there will be a sequel where we learn how the multiverse extends to everywhere.

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1. N. K. Jemisin, The World We Make, New York, Orbit, 2022.

Sunday Book Reviews