Tyson Adams's Blog, page 36
July 5, 2018
Book review: A Briefer History of Time by Stephen Hawking
A Briefer History of Time by Stephen Hawking
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Well, that was brief.
In the late 1980s, Stephen Hawking became the name synonymous with smart people, science, and computerised voices when he released A Brief History of Time. In the intervening 27 years (this book was published in 2005) a lot of progress has been made in physics and our understanding of the universe, so this is an update on curved space, quantum gravity, black holes, Newtonian physics, relativity, the Big Bang (everywhere stretch), wormholes and time travel, and the search for a grand unifying theory of reality.
Obviously, this all sounds like very complicated stuff that you’ll battle to wrap your head around. I have to admit, when I read A Brief History of Time in my 20s I struggled with it. Imagining 4-dimensional space was confusing, imagining another 6 dimensions on top of that with string theory was just too much for me. So maybe I’m older, wiser, smarter, and have added centimetres to my head circumference, because I found this book clear and easy to understand. Or maybe this updated version is clearer than the original. Or maybe I’m just more familiar with physics now and can kid myself that it isn’t that hard to understand.
Either way, I found this to be a clear, concise, and easy to understand overview of spacetime physics.
July 3, 2018
The Evolution of YA Fiction
Young Adult fiction is a term whose meaning has varied wildly over the years. It can apply to coming of age tragedies or serialized adventures of babysitters, or insert really dated twilight joke here. But where did this young adult genre come from? And why did it get so big?
The voting referred to in the video is here, but it is for North American people only. I mean, it is about the Great American Read after all. Which obviously means that the rest of the world’s opinion on that doesn’t count. Neither does South America’s.
July 1, 2018
Book review: An Introduction to Greek Philosophy by David Roochnik
An Introduction to Greek Philosophy by David Roochnik
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
If Western Philosophy is just footnotes to Plato, does that mean western society is just all Greek to us?
Professor Roochnik presents 24 lectures as an introductory course to Greek Philosophy… as it says in the title. This was quite a good overview of the pre-Socratics, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Like any lecture, insights are given into the further scholarship that can inform a topic – such as how Plato structures his writing so as to make you think rather than tell you what he thinks – and some points are hammered repeatedly for the sleepy students in the back row.
Having recently read The Republic, the insights this book offered would have been handy beforehand. The advantage of having a philosophy professor step you through philosophy rather than just winging it yourself is well worth it. So as a background pre-reading, this is a good place to start.
I was also reminded during one of the earlier chapters of how much knowledge has been lost to history. We have this common misconception about great works rising to the top and being revered through the ages. But the example of the prolific writer Democritus whose works have largely been lost shows us how even recognised intellectual giants can’t be guaranteed their works will be preserved.
June 28, 2018
Book vs Movie: The Lost World – What’s the Difference?
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This month’s What’s the Difference from Cinefix compares the book sequel written because the movie adaptation was successful and the director wanted more source material to ignore. Jurassic Park: The Lost World.
Honestly, I can never keep it straight in my head which parts of the novels ended up in which movie. As mentioned in the video, the opening scene of The Lost World was actually from the first book. There are other examples, like the “birdcage” scene in one of the other movies was in the first book… I think.
One thing is for certain: Spielberg knows how to make a film. He knows how to build tension, he knows how to establish sights, sounds, and characters so that sequences hang together, and he knows not to have a talking dinosaur in an aeroplane.
[image error]Yes, this is an actual scene from Jurrasic Park 3. Take a moment.
But The Lost World is an example of one the worst reasons you write or film a sequel: because the first one was successful. I don’t know exactly what Spielberg’s motivations were for the sequel – maybe he was under contract, maybe he needed a new wing on his house – but the film was dull. It was trying to recapture the lightning bottled in the first film. The same can be said of the book. Crichton didn’t originally want to write a sequel and was only convinced by Spielberg saying he’d give him lots of money that he would be keen to direct a movie adaptation of the sequel if one were written.
I’m on record as not being much of a fan of Michael Crichton’s books. He has a tendency to write solid thrillers that act as vehicles for anti-science rants by a raisonneur or mouthpiece. There is nothing wrong with doing this, per se, but science is awesome, so make sure your criticism is on point. Or don’t, depending on whether you want to impress me or someone who thinks chakras are a thing.
Needless to say, I was a fan of the first film, less so the book. The sequels… Put it this way, I haven’t bothered watching the new ones starring Chris Pratt yet.
June 26, 2018
Book review: Obscura by Joe Hart
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
In space, everyone goes a bit crazy.
Dr Gillian Ryan is frustrated. She is trying to develop a brain scanning technique in order to help her daughter to avoid the same fate as her late husband. Losian’s disease is thought to be caused by the rapidly increasing environmental destruction and affects memory and concentration. Then a team from NASA show up promising money and technology to help her work if she agrees to go to a space station to figure out what is wrong with their crew. Of course, NASA hasn’t been completely honest with her about where they are going and the risks involved, but that’s okay, she didn’t tell them about her painkiller addiction.
This novel was a lot of fun. Joe Hart has mixed together sci-fi, thriller, and suspense in good measures. The main character’s addiction and frustrations pour out on the page as you wonder if she is going mad or something more nefarious is happening. Added to that is the brisk pacing that doesn’t get bogged down like some novels with similar themes tend to. I don’t know what a hydro is, but after reading this novel I feel like I need one.
Well worth a read for sci-fi and thriller fans.
NB: I received an advanced review copy in exchange for an honest review.
June 24, 2018
Why everyone should read Harry Potter
Because I said so!!
And because of this:
REFERENCES 
June 21, 2018
We don’t know the world
A few years ago I saw a fantastic talk from Hans Rosling about the world and statistics. Okay, I probably lost a few people by implying statistics are fantastic, and now I’ll lose some more by saying statistics ARE fantastic. Unfortunately, Hans is no longer with us, but his son and daughter-in-law – Ola and Anna – are continuing his work with Gap Minder.
Recently they released the results of their 2017 survey of world knowledge. After looking at the results they decided to call it the Misconception Study.* You’ll see why.
That’s right, less than chance. People really don’t know that much about the world.
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Do you think you could do better? Well, find out! Take the 2018 quiz here. Of course, this is the part where I say that I passed the test. Humble-brag. But in fairness, as I’ve already mentioned, I’ve been following Gap Minder and I like statistics.
Could you pass the test?
*They probably called it that prior, but I’m making a point here, dammit!
June 19, 2018
When is the future?
I came across a very cool article about when the future is for science fiction. The question is interesting because we often think of THE FUTURE as being a long way away, but as the saying goes, some infinities are larger than others.
In response to a Tweet, iO9 and researchers Ben Vrignon and Gordon Jackson decided to look at the proportions of science fiction set in the near-future (0-50 years), mid-future (51-500 years) and far-future (+501 years). They took a random sample of 250 science fiction works (books, comics, movies, and TV) created between 1880 and 2010 that were available in the USA in English. Because only the USA matters. Eye rolls are appropriate here.
The results are interesting and broken into decades:
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As you can see, some periods of time emphasise some futures more than others, whilst other periods are more equally spread. The most notable of these is the shrinking of far-future science fiction from the 1970s until the late 1990s. It could be argued that the lack of far-future sci-fi in the 1990s could have been due to the rapid rise of technological change in society, such that everyone viewed the future as being just around the corner. Then after that time, we start to realise the technology just gave us cat memes and we still had a long way to go.
In the original article, they suggest that the changes were due to uncertainty about the future post-2001.
It’s possible that during periods of extreme uncertainty about the future, as the 00s were in the wake of massive economic upheavals and 9/11, creators and audiences turn their eyes to the far future as a balm.
Now it would be remiss of me to draw too many conclusions from this, nor try to offer explanations for any “trends”. We are talking about a dataset that only covers an average of 2 works per year. Two is hardly enough to be representative of any year, and 20 works is at best a smattering of any given decade. E.g. Futurama could be the only representative of far-future sci-fi in the 1990s yet Asimov’s Foundation Series was still going (he wrote his final novel for the series in 1993), the Xeelee Sequence had just started, as had the Hyperion series. Clearly, there were many works not being counted.
It would be interesting to see someone add more data to this analysis and do some breakdowns by media type. Make it so.
Supplemental Materials: More Detail on Middle Future Dates
One of the interesting discoveries we made was that the mid-future (51-500 years in the future) seems to be the most popular period for science fiction, across the last 130 years. So Stephanie created this chart breaking out our data on mid-future SF so you can get a sense of which periods are most popular — you can see that the 100-200 year future is common.
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June 17, 2018
How literate are we?
An argument that is often raised among the head shaking admonishment brigade, is that there is a woeful level of literacy in society. The argument usually points to comments on social media as examples of falling literacy, or to emoji laden messages, or is writ large in speciously reasoned blog posts like this one.
The reality is held within these charts:
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Yes, as you can see, for over 200 years the world’s literacy rate has been improving. If you go to the source article at Our World In Data you will be able to highlight the 1870-2010 trends. This shows that even quite well-educated nations have improved their literacy rates.
So what exactly are people complaining about? Well, let’s take some of the examples that are often proffered.
I recently reread a number of pulp novels from the sixties and seventies (with an occasional eighties and nineties thrown in for fun) – not literary fiction by any means, just thrillers the likes of which I grew up reading. What immediately struck me is how erudite the books were compared to modern fare. They were written at a much higher grade level than current popular fiction, because, bluntly, the average person was more literate, and the assumption was that folks wanted a little intellectual stimulation with their car chases and explosions – that words with more than a couple of syllables could be salted through a tome without fearing a slew of one star reviews written in Pidgin English bemoaning that the author was trying too hard or must have once seen a thesaurus. Source.
This is, of course, a personal opinion expressed by the blogger rather than hard data. You only have to look at the above charts to see that the average person they are referring to is actually more likely to be literate now than in the 1960’s. I think the blogger has leapt to the assertion that people are less literate now as an explanation for a style change that has occurred. Or just wants to whine about kids these days. Because what blogger doesn’t want to do that?
Now, why would a style change occur in the last 30 (or more*) years? Interestingly, some research suggested that the way we write changes the style of our writing. With the rise of word processors and computers, writers measurably changed their styles.
But has anything else has changed in that time period that could have impacted writing styles? I’m not sure if these are familiar to people or not, but television, gaming, internet, media, are all more popular now than they were 30 years ago. I.e. books now have to compete with more entertainment than ever. So stylistic changes will occur to capture and keep an audience’s attention, lest it strays from the latest literary masterpiece about a dog caring for its cat with terminal cancer to a YouTube video about how white nationalism is okay now for some reason (because of post-modern cultural marxism apparently).
Has reading and writing (literacy) actually changed much, though? It is one thing to say that people have passed the minimum standard level, but it is quite another thing to suggest high levels of literacy are being achieved by more/less people.
Studies on this were actually hard to come by. Yet there is certainly concern about reading and writing proficiency for high-school and university level students:
Three-quarters of both 12th and 8th graders lack proficiency in writing, according to the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress. And 40 percent of those who took the ACT writing exam in the high school class of 2016 lacked the reading and writing skills necessary to complete successfully a college-level English composition class, according to the company’s data.
Poor writing is nothing new, nor is concern about it. More than half of first-year students at Harvard failed an entrance exam in writing — in 1874. Source.
Given the last sentence in that quote, it is probably more accurate to say that the standards are changing. We now expect more of our literacy because more people are schooled and meeting basic literacy standards. For example, in the USA Master’s degrees are now as common as Bachelor’s degrees were in the 1960’s. People are expecting more of education and setting different standards than were held previously.
As an article on The Conversation concluded on this topic:
In 1997 academic Paul Brock gave an enlightening address to educators in which he carefully recounted the ways each generation has bemoaned the falling literacy standards of the younger generation whilst laying the blame at the feet of modern educational methods.
Apparently, we’ve been doing this since literacy first became a thing back with the Sumerians some 5,000 years ago.
The problem is not that literacy standards are falling, it is that literacy demands are changing – and we are not keeping up.
Schools have their role to play, and they can up their game in order to keep up with the times. But employers must also realise that workplace literacy is their core work, not a supplementary remedial program, and plan their businesses accordingly. Source.
In other words, declining literacy standards are a perennial myth that people love to complain about. Styles have changed. Literacy demands have changed. But that doesn’t mean things are going backwards. Much like kids these days arguments, we can expect to see these same points raised again and again with no evidence to support their claims. Because if there is one thing that never gets old, it is complaining about how things are different now than the good old days.
*The blogger’s larger post talks about a change occurring in the more recent 20-30 year period, despite referencing books from the 1960-70’s. You’ll also notice more links to evidence in my post… just saying.
June 14, 2018
Writer Advice: Alcoholism
Tip #1: Ice Tea looks just like whisky.
Do you need to hide just how much you are drinking from friends and family but can’t bring yourself to drink gin or vodka? Then “Ice Tea” might be your new preferred drink.
Tip #2: As long as you drink wine from a glass people will assume you are a connoisseur.
Wine is regarded as a classy drink, so as long as you drink it in a classy way, few will notice that some glasses can fit an entire bottle in them.
Tip #3: Don’t use crystal decanters.
Crystal decanters may look classy but they are expensive and are slowly giving you lead poisoning. Instead, just rub the label off of one of your bottles. A cheap and easy solution that won’t be poisoning you.
Tip #4: Wine and Whisky Clubs are your friends.
Even if no-one else loves you, subscription wine and whisky clubs love sending you a new supply of alcohol direct to your house. There is no longer a need to be reminded just how much you hate the rest of the world by having to venture out to the liquor store when home delivery is now a reality.
Tip #5: These lists always need to be five or ten items long.
Seriously, have you ever noticed that? Never four or seven, always five or ten. Sometimes if people are feeling keen, or have an auto-amalgamating post generator, they will stretch to twenty or thirty. Magazines used to do fifty and one hundred lists. Remember that? Of course, no one really cared to read the whole list. Usually, you’d just scan through for things that would catch your attention and then make note of the number one spot. And then write a comment arguing how the list was rubbish.
