Tasty crunchy numbers!  The Economist describes this book as "geek heaven"; the author says he's just trying to cut UK's emissions of twaddle.  David MacKay, a Cambridge physicist, wades into the data with a calculator and a touch of snark.

"Every big helps," he says, and he takes the reader on a fact-based hunt to find the places where "big" can ( Read more... )

Author crush!  I've read one Tiptree novel and one Tiptree short story, and halfway through the biography I'm totally in love.  I haven't even gotten to the point where Tiptree writes anything. This is the first biography I've read in years, and the most stunning that I've read in ever. Everybody, everybody, everybody agrees.

I'd heard there was ( Read more... )

Kurt Vonnegut's books, no matter how slim, tend to dribble off into nowhere.  Except this one.

This was the first Vonnegut I ever read, and in bookstores all over the world I've kept an eye out for it.  I found it on the road and spent my overnight at Heathrow (times is hard) with a long-lost buddy.  A sincere, cynical, unreasonable buddy who wants ( Read more... )

A few years ago I read a newspaper story about a senior accountant who started giving away all his money because it was the right and rational thing to do.  They quoted his wife saying, "It wasn't the first 2 million that was hard to give up, it was the last $90,000, when we had to move to a smaller house and could no longer afford the kinds of ( Read more... )

First, it's bizarre.   Bizarre in a fantastic fuck-your-genres way.  Some thousands of years in the future, soon after the conclusion of serious galaxywide warring, people discovered that terrible atrocities had been committed upon a fragile alien race on the planet Damiem.  The beautiful and sentient aliens, when tortured, exude a substance that ( Read more... )

"I was raised as a dog," Michael begins.  He proceeds to give an account of his life in a Book-of-the-Dead/Judgment Day style, except that he is the judge, and in his judgment he was right and everyone else was weak and jealous and wrong.  I wish I had followed through on starting a book club, because I could gossip about Michael for a month.

( Read more... )

It's a good thing I've never seen this movie in the theater because I can't keep my bitching on the inside. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is a profound and miraculous book, if deeply fucked up. The first time I saw Bladerunner, I was furious at Ridley Scott's bastardization. The only connection to the book is that there's this guy Deckard ( Read more... )