Science news always slows down in December due to the holiday season. It’ll pick up again next year.
Easily the most important article this month is this one about personality differences between men and women. Most people instinctively believe the sexes do tend to vary psychologically but the scientific consensus usually emphasizes that variances between individuals far outweigh general differences between the sexes. However more modern research now shows that there are in fact very significant differences between the sexes on narrower facets of personality and it is possible to predict whether a given person is male or female based on an overall personality profile. This suggests that the popular folk wisdom may be more justified than the previous politically correct scientific consensus.
Next is a paper that revisits the by now well known Flynn effect which describes that the average IQ of people are increasing over time. This paper however claims that this generalization masks important differences such as that over various age groups. Tellingly, it also seems that those with already high IQ saw gains over time but those with low IQ saw drops. The most important conclusion is that we need to measure larger samples from more countries before we can meaningfully talk about how IQ changes over the course of decades.
Then there’s this economics paper whose finding isn’t that all that interesting: giving medical insurance to people who previously lacked it reduces mortality. What is interesting is that the finding is based on a natural experiment that came about as a side effect of government policies. When the Obama administration wanted to penalize those who lacked health insurance, they found that their budget wasn’t enough to send letters to everyone. So instead they randomly chose people to send those letters to, inadvertently resulting in a randomized set of people in whose lives the government intervened to convince them to get insurance. This allowed the researchers to compare their outcomes with similar people who could have and did not receive the letters as a control group.
This last one probably counts as an economics paper as well. We all know about NIMBYism, here specifically referring to the phenomenon of residents of a locality systematically opposing any new construction of residence in their neighborhood. We naturally expect this attitude from homeowners but this paper shows data that renters share similar attitudes. Even though they support more construction of residences overall, they oppose new construction in the neighborhoods that they themselves stay in. This demonstrates how difficult it is to solve the problem of rising housing costs in major cities when the only real solution is to build more housing.
After finishing Reach for Infinity, I said I’d check out the other anthologies in the series and here I am with the first of them. Edited by Jonathan Strahan, it includes fifteen stories by a host of familiar names. I’m pleased to see that it opens with a story by Peter Watts, one of my current favorite writers. None of the other authors I especially like though I’ve read their stuff here and there.
This is somewhere in length between a novella and a novel. Despite being sold as a standalone, it forms part of the so-called Sunflower cycle which I failed to realize for some time and might be difficult to understand on its own. Conveniently one of my favorite stories from the Reach for Infinity anthology that I read only a few months ago is part of this series. The other two are readily available online. Since this book leaves many questions unanswered even at the end, reading those other stories helps quite a bit.
It occurs to me with this book that I haven’t properly finished reading a traditional trilogy of novels in a long while. I still think it’s ridiculous that every book in the trilogy won the Hugo and I don’t agree that it stands on the same level as the true greats of fantasy and science-fiction. But I would happily agree that this is a rollicking good read and this last book does bring the series to a more or less satisfying conclusion.
It’s been more than two years since I read Jo Walton’s What Makes This Book So Great and I’m still mining it for ideas on what to read next. So when a thread on Broken Forum talked about big idea books in science-fiction and multiple commentators cited this as a great example, it felt apt to pick this up. As I only recently noted, big ideas are rather rare even in science-fiction and what could be a bigger and more ambitious than trying to create Plato’s famous Republic.
This is the next book in George Alec Effinger’s Budayeen Cycle chronicling the adventures of his flawed protagonist Marîd Audran. Though the first book didn’t really feel like science-fiction, I loved the cyberpunk noir setting enough to want to read its sequels and so here I am.
It’s been a while since I last read a proper anthology of science-fiction short stories. I came across this book quite by accident while browsing through Amazon Kindle recommendations and discovered that editor Jonathan Strahan has a whole series of these books. I bought this one because it’s first story is by Greg Egan and the last one is by Peter Watts. After finishing this, I wondered why I ever stopped buying anthologies.
