Cole > Recent Status Updates

in bikeshedding news, I have switched my book-tracking over to LibraryThing (http://www.librarything.com), whose UI and business model I prefer to Goodreads'

I've switched to using LibraryThing (https://www.librarything.com) to track my reading.

This is written in a really weird style--constantly using baroque phrases and fanciful analogies without explanation. It feels muddled, unstructured.

The improvement in the writing over the course of the book is remarkable.

Finished the title novella. It's Wolfe all right!

Read most of the stories (out of order); not sure whether I'll get to the rest. "Alien Stones", "The Death of Dr. Island", and "Tracking Song" are particularly memorable.

"In some of the dark corners of England and Wales they have an immemorial custom of 'beating the bounds' of the parish. On a certain day of the year the whole population turns out and travels in procession from one landmark to another on the boundary line. At the most important points lads are soundly beaten with rods to make them remember the place in after life. They become authorities."

:|

the "number of sex acts : number of changes of clothes" ratio in this book is alarmingly high

Mostly finished with Ch. 1. By and large I love the book—only real complaints are that Jacobson sometimes makes confusing notational choices and the presence of some typos (I suspect many of these may have been introduced by the reprinting). Oh, and the section on normal series should really be in Ch. 1.

Things I don't like so far:

1. McPhee's writing is too smooth, and he's too caught up in the narrative to stop and explain things properly.

2. No bibliography. Grr.

This is quite good! Better than A Fire Upon the Deep in some respects (the lack of 10-year-old protagonists suits me just fine), with plenty of clever worldbuilding.

A joke about the doctrine of the Trinity? Stanisław Lem knows the way to my heart.

New (very) long-term Everest: the Nash-Moser inverse function theorem and proof.

"Scanners Live in Vain" is definitely the best of these so far. It deserved a more interesting ending, though.

what the *fuck*

Jaynes leans heavily on metaphor as a mechanism of thought, as manifested in language—I'd be more convinced if he brought in more instances of this from other languages than English.

BRING ON THE SANDHI