Robot Apocalypse!

Recently, fellow WordPress blogger Anonymole mentioned in a comment here that he enjoyed Day Zero, a 2021 science fiction novel by C. Robert Cargill. I checked out the Wikipedia article about it, and thought it sounded interesting. Turned out my library had it, so I checked it out (in both senses of the word).

And I agree! It’s very good, and I’d recommend it for any science fiction fan, especially fans of hard SF. It’s the story of a robot uprising that kills most of the humans but as told from the first-person point of view of one of the robots.

It’s the story of his desperate attempt to save the child he was bought to nourish and protect as the world crumbles around them.

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Friday Notes (Apr 19, 2024)

Often, the hardest part of Friday Notes (and, in fact, most) posts is writing the lede. Very soon after I began back in 2011, I settled on a three-part opening structure consisting of (as my template puts it): Intro… More… Punchline… followed by the page break that divides the lede from the body of the post.

That page break comes into play when WordPress lists a bunch of posts as well as in the notification emails (except in the double-damned WordPress Reader, which corrupts everything in the name of sameness). And while I’m on the topic of WordPress, I’m getting really fed up with it.

But that’s a post for another day. For now, I’ve got Notes…

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BB #93: Cube Roots of One

Thinking back on your math classes, you may recall that the square root of a number has two answers, one positive and one negative. For example, the square root of +9 is both +3 and -3 (the first one is known as the principal square root). Squaring +3 gives you +9, of course, but so does squaring -3.

Square roots aren’t the only roots of a number. For example, the (principal) cube root of +8 is +2 because +2³+2 × +2 × +2 = +8.

But just as square roots have two answers, cube roots have three (and fourth roots have four and so on and so on).

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Resident Alien

Over the last few weeks, I’ve watched (on Netflix) two seasons of Resident Alien, a SyFy television adaptation of the same-named comic series. A third season finished airing on the SyFy channel earlier this month but isn’t yet available on Netflix.

Both the comic and its adaptation are stories about an alien stranded on Earth, but the adaptation is a severe departure from its source text. Worse from my point of view, the television show is an Idiot Clown comedy, and I’ve never cared for those. In its favor, though, it stars the inimitable Alan Tudyk.

The pity is that the comic story is much better — and much smarter — than the adaptation but has been almost entirely discarded.

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The COVID Toll

A bit more than three years ago (on February 3, 2021, to be specific), I posted a Wednesday Wow about COVID-19. Seeing the reported numbers in the news back then inspired me to obtain my own dataset and do some analysis. The results then were jaw-dropping, hence the Wow!

For quite a few months now I’ve been meaning to do an update to see what’s happened since then. Yesterday I pulled a new dataset and re-did the analysis.

The results are still jaw-dropping. And horrific and sorrowful.

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The Confused Clock

The last week or so, I’ve been feeling frustrated and angry (and hence, depressed) about people and politics (and bad television adaptations and Big Tech companies), but the numerologist in me finds a date like 4-4-24 hard to resist. Two fours in twenty-four; how can I not post something?

Because I’d rather curl up on the couch and read until I get over myself, this will be a short one (famous last words, I know).

In fact, it’s a (very) short story I wrote back in 2008.

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Three-Body

Over the last few weeks, on Amazon Prime, I’ve watched all 30 episodes of the first season of Three-Body, the Chinese television adaptation of the 2006 science fiction novel The Three-Body Problem, by Liu Cixin.

That’s the first book of the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy. The second and third books are The Dark Forest (2008) and Death’s End (2010). I haven’t (yet) read the novel, but the adaptation is said to be reasonably faithful to the text.

I enjoyed the TV adaptation but found certain aspects of it frustrating. I’m curious to see if my frustrations are due to the adaptation or inherent in the novel.

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Remember When?

Remember when politics was just frustrating but not completely insane? Remember when it was possible to have hope and belief? Remember when there was still an iota of intelligence in politics? No? I don’t blame you, but maybe this video will remind you:

It came across my YouTube feed and brought tears to my eyes. A highly intelligent, well educated, youthful, self-deprecating, sometimes humorous, balanced leader of and for the free world. A leader for everyone.

This year it’s critical to go vote. Vote for sanity and intelligence. Vote for decency and honesty. Vote against bigotry, hate, exclusion, and fear.

Stay sane, my friends! Go forth and spread beauty and light.


Friday Notes (Mar 22, 2024)

The last two weeks have been (by my lazy easy-going retirement standards) unusually productive. Two big and long-standing items off my TODO list — a huge relief. As a good friend said, getting stuff done feels so good you have to wonder why we let things go so long.

For me, a lot of it is sheer laziness. Often, something needs to break through to Urgent Level before I’ll get around to dealing with it. (I’d rather read and doing stuff cuts into my reading time.) There is also the subliminal fear things won’t go well, or will be a pain or, as has often been the case, a disappointment.

But regardless, time for another edition of Friday Notes.

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Equal Knocks

Today is the Vernal Equinox, the official starter gun for spring! Now we get six months of more sunlight than not. And the length of the day is changing (towards the long summer days) at its fastest rate during the year (except for the Autumnal Equinox, the other fastest).

Ironically, the last few days have been chillier than what has passed for normal this winter. The high three days ago (on 3/17) was only 30 degrees (Fahrenheit, of course).

The weather has been so strange (thanks to global warming) that I just had to make a bunch of charts to share here.

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