Daniel > Recent Status Updates

Pretty good book so far. It shows examples of dismantling and servicing several differents kinds of faucets, shower heads, toilets, etc. Tip: your favorite AI LLM can answer specific questions. The book is optimistic that your old, scale-encrusted plumbing fixtures will come apart! I ran into a stuck set screw on the leaky Delta kitchen faucet I'm working on, and Google Gemini told me how to un-stick it.

The stupidity in this passage is hard to get my head around:

"Due to its industrial origins, the Second Law presents a definition of efficiency that favours high temperatures and the allocation of resources to big industry."

Every claim in that sentence is wrong or misleading in some way. Reading this book is like fact-checking a Trump speech. Ironic, considering the opposing political motives.

The amount of stupidity in this book is impressive. For example, the book presents Mitroff's study of Apollo program scientists who themselves studied Moon rocks as evidence that (all?) science is inherently subjective. Uh hello, did you notice that the Apollo program sent men to the Moon? Please tell me all the subjective ways to do that. Have any of these science critics heard of applied science?

Well, it sure is fun asking Gemini AI for help on how to use Goodreads. With Gemini's help, I learned how "exclusive" shelves work, and the "recs" attribute. I was able to unclutter my "Want to read" shelf (with a "paused" shelf) and stop some annoying book recommendations with a "say no to recs" shelf. Too bad the character limit won't let me explain how in this general update.

This is a fabulous book, despite being somewhat old (2001) and predating the genomics revolution. (That leads to a few goofs, such as an overestimate of the number of human genes that would soon be actually counted.) It corrects many misconceptions about sociobiology by its critics.

Pro tip: when adding a quotation to Goodreads (on the Quotes > Add page), I got stumped by the empty "Tags" field. But then I got the idea to ask an AI (Google Gemini) for tag suggestions, and I fed it a copy of the quotation. Gemini turns out to be rather good at this. Sounds like a feature request for Goodreads - AI tag suggestions.