I’m leaving on holiday to Taiwan soon and will be leaving my job after that. This means that this blog will probably be updated only intermittently while I’m a in transition phase. In the meantime, here are a few links to some of the most interesting things I’ve read recently.
As everyone knows by now, the Rapture did not in fact arrive on schedule. Or perhaps it did but no one, including the folks from Family Radio International who so hyped up the event, was judged worthy. The station’s owner and preacher Harold Camping has since come out with a statement claiming that he’d made a mistake. May 21st was merely the spiritual Judgment Day during which God evaluated everyone’s souls. But the judgment will actually be executed only on October 21st, five months from now, triggering the end of the world.
Thankfully Malaysian high schools are nothing like the hellholes that public US high schools seem to be but thanks to American shows and movies, we have a decent idea of what they’re like. One aspect of the US high school experience is how students are segregated into different groups that are organized into a hierarchy that revolves around popularity. This extended essay examines why nerds in school, who are consistently found to be smarter than their peers, are consistently among the least popular students and comes up with some interesting insights.
Many vegetarians don’t eat meat because of the perceived moral issues involved in killing an animal for food. What if meat no longer had to obtained by butchering animals? What if you could simply grow the meat in a test-tube? This article looks at how meat could be grown by immersing stem cell samples in nutrient-filled petri dishes, and then moving them into scaffolding platforms to get them to grow into muscle tissue. If this gets off the ground, not only will it dispense with the moral issue of eating animals, it will also be a far cheaper and more environmentally friendly way to farm the meat that we so crave.
When I mentioned on QT3 that Ted Chiang had never published a novel, a fellow fan was quick to correct me. Actually, it’s more like a novella than a novel, but you can judge for yourself since The Lifecycle of Software Objects is now freely available to be read online. To be honest I find it to be the weakest of Chiang’s works I’ve read and it’s really more of an essay presenting many different insights and ideas about conscious software as pets and children than a novel. The central thesis is that you can’t create an artificial intelligence by writing an algorithm and running it iteratively until it reaches sentience. Instead, you need to nurture it just as you would a pet or a child, patiently teaching it and allowing it to have a variety of different life experiences to enable it to grow.
Finally, just for Malaysians, here is a link to the latest report on house price indices for Malaysia, updated for the first quarter of 2011. Some very tentative conclusions are that overall house prices in Malaysia are still increasing and especially prices for terrace houses in the Klang Valley are still holding up. But prices for high-rises in the Klang Valley is stagnant and has dropped for Malaysia as a whole. Condo prices in Penang in particular seem to be dropped significantly and the index has dropped to 2009 levels. This is especially illuminating since I’ve heard many people complain about very low occupation rates for condos in Penang despite the high prices. As always, a single quarter’s worth of data is not proof of a developing trend and should be taken with the usual grain of salt.
Due to a combination of various factors including illness, an unexpected holiday and an abnormally slow Internet connection, I have been remiss in writing new posts this week. Here are a few links to some interesting items to tide you over:
China’s State Administration of Radio, Film & Television has effectively banned all plots involving time travel from films. The stated reasons are that such stories treat history frivolously and disrespectfully and time-travel itself is unrealistic bad science. The suspected real reason is that China does not want people to compare the society that they have now with living conditions in the past. I’d also hazard that China feels uncomfortable about exploring “what if” historical scenarios. Additional fun fact: the Hearts of Iron games are also banned in China because it depicts places like Tibet, Shaanxi, Yunan etc. as independent states.
Iphone and ipad users should be careful. Apparently Apple has been secretly tracking the movement of users of the devices. The devices seem to automatically log its geographic position together with a timestamp at irregular intervals and save the data to an internal file without asking permission from owners or telling them that it is doing so. As many Internet pundits have noted, if you’ve been having an affair or lying to your employer about where you have been, a look at the file will reveal all your secrets.
In the latest of many pages on the sins of the Catholic church, an investigative reporter has written a new book alleging that thousands of Vatican-based priests have illicit sexual relationships. The book tells stories of priests having families complete with children in secret, of paid sex with escorts and of gay priests partying in nightclubs in Rome. It also cites research alleging that up to a quarter of Catholic priests in the US are involved in heterosexual relationships with women. My take: it’s not the sex that is offensive, it is the hypocrisy that rankles.
Finally, I recently learned that Ted Chiang has a short story available for reading online. Exhalation was apparently made available for free when it was nominated for the Hugo Award for 2009. It won incidentally. It’s a fantastic story that successfully paints a picture of strange society of alien within just a few succinct paragraphs. Ted Chiang is probably my favorite writer of short science-fiction right now ever since Greg Egan’s quality dropped in the 2000s. My favorite story of his however is still Story of Your Life which examines free will from the perspective that language determines thought.
I picked up The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi solely on the strength of the blurb advertising it as having won both the Hugo and the Nebula for best novel. Not bad for a debut novel by a relatively unknown writer. It turned out to be a very pleasant surprise and I was particularly impressed by how deftly it portrays Southeast Asia. While I have misgivings about the plot and how events rush to an unsatisfying end, I still consider it to be one of the best novels I’ve read in recent years (not that I’ve been reading much admittedly).
Despite the title, the real star of the show here is arguably the city of Bangkok itself which is where the novel is set. In the 23rd century, the rising waters caused by global warming has destroyed many cities and even entire countries. With the world’s fossil fuels all but depleted, globalization as we now know it, is no more. The most powerful entities are the biotechnology companies who feed the world using their genehacked crops, maintaining their dominance by employing bio-engineered plagues to destroy natural food sources and even sending in private armies to topple governments when necessary.
But was she conscious – as much as the women who’d help build her would have been conscious if, for a few seconds, they’d forgotten themselves and focused entirely on their simple tasks: thinking of a word, matching a picture?
…
Still, at most it could only be a transient form of consciousness – with no conception of itself to underpin a fear of extinction. Splicing Fariba, and a thousand variants of her, into narratives in which they played no active part wouldn’t bolster their fragmentary minds into something more substantial; that was just the illusion that human players would receive. The Faribas would still live – if they lived at all – in an eternal present, doing their simple tasks over and over again, remembering nothing.
– Greg Egan in Zendegi
Perhaps the best thing that can be said about Greg Egan’s newest novel, Zendegi, is that it’s the most grounded and hence approachable of any of his books. Inspired by the real-life events in Iran in 2009 and backed by a personal trip that the author made to the country, the book starts out being more of a spy thriller than a hard science-fiction novel. In 2012 as Iran readies itself for a fresh round of parliamentary elections, Australian journalist Martin Seymour makes a break with his previous life as he is sent to cover them. However the elections turn out to be more exciting than anticipated when a scandal involving a member of Iran’s Guardian Council is unearthed, with Martin right in the heart of the events, making news rather than just covering it. This leads to a massive uprising that eventually leads to the reinstatement of true democracy in the country.
A lesser light once asked Ummon // Please deliver this learner from darkness and illusion quickly \\// Ummon answered // What is the price of fiberplastic in Port Romance]
– Dan Simmons in The Fall of Hyperion
Over two years ago, I ended my post about Hyperion with a note saying how unlikely it would be for its sequel to be worthy of the standards set by that excellent novel. Having stumbled across the book in a store in Kuala Lumpur and having devoured it over the course of my holiday, I am sad to report that this is indeed the case.
The Fall of Hyperion is a much more conventional space opera tale than the original was. It does away with the frame story device that made the original so memorable and tells the story in a more straightforward manner. There are now two narrative threads, one continuing the story of the six remaining pilgrims as they finally reach the Time Tombs. The other focuses on the government of the Hegemony as they respond to imminent war with the Ousters while trying their best to keep track with what is happening with the pilgrims on Hyperion.
As usual, I don’t write film reviews, only critiques and analyses, so get the hell away from this post if you have yet to watch this film. Come back only after you’ve done so.
Anyone who reads this blog should know that Christopher Nolan is easily my favorite director and that I eagerly look forward to every film that he makes. This has been true ever since I first discovered Memento. Since then, I’ve watched every one of his films, except for The Following, which I understand is sort of a student film made on a shoestring budget. With the sole exception of Insomnia, which, being an adaptation of a Norwegian film, is competent but otherwise unremarkable, all have been stellar.
My wife mocks me for taking the better part of a year to get around to finishing this book. In my defense, I offer the following excuses:
I’ve been busy catching up on my backlog of The Economist issues.
With 18 stories in all, it’s a pretty hefty collection.
Many of the stories are good but not great science fiction, and most would barely fit under the space opera label at all.
I don’t want to get into a lengthy discussion of what space opera is, let alone what “new space opera” would be. Suffice to say that old or new, space opera evokes images of starships and space battles, rip roaring action adventure on a grand scale and larger than life heroes. Think Star Wars instead of Star Trek (the pre-retcon version anyway). Most of the stories in The New Space Opera don’t really fit this mould.
