Monthly Archives: March 2022
For Sci-Fi Saturday I have to post about Farscape, a science fiction TV series from 1999-2003 that (on the advice of a friend) I just started watching. I’m only up to episode 18 of season one, but I’m enjoying the series so much I thought I’d post about it. There are four seasons comprising 88 episodes (22 per season), so my opinion could change, but so far, I’m totally loving it.
I also want to mention the third Ben Bova book I’ve read recently. Bottom line, I really enjoyed it. Definitely the best of the three. It restored my faith in Bova.
Lastly, this morning I had, what even for me was, a particularly weird dream experience. Our subconscious minds are quite surprising and just plain bizarre sometimes!
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20 Comments | tags: Ben Bova, dreaming, dreams, Farscape (TV series), liars, science fiction, science fiction TV, SF TV | posted in Life, Sci-Fi Saturday, TV
Being retired, along with doing all my TV watching via streaming services, has the consequence of almost completely disconnecting me from the weekly rhythm. Weekends mean nothing when every day is Saturday. To create some structure, I follow a simple schedule. For instance, Mondays I do laundry and Thursdays I buy groceries.
More to the point here, Monday (and sometimes Tuesday) evenings are for YouTube videos, many of which are science related. Last night I watched Jim Baggott give two talks at the Royal Institution, one about mass, the other about loop quantum gravity (LQG).
In the latter, Baggott mentioned gravity waves and that generated a Brain Bubble.
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13 Comments | tags: Albert Einstein, gravity, gravity wave, quantum gravity, quantum physics | posted in Brain Bubble, Physics
Earlier this month I posted about Quantum Reality (2020), Jim Baggott’s recent book about quantum realism. Now I’ve finished another book with a very similar focus, Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution: The Search for What Lies Beyond the Quantum (2019), by Lee Smolin.
One difference between the books is that Smolin is a working theorist, so he offers his own realist theory. As with his theory of cosmic selection via black holes (see his 1997 book, The Life of the Cosmos), I’m not terribly persuaded by his theory of “nads” (named after Leibniz’s monads). I do appreciate that Smolin himself sees the theory as a bit of a wild guess.
There were also some apparent errors that raised my eyebrows.
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6 Comments | tags: Copenhagen Interpretation, Lee Smolin, ontological anti-realism, quantum mechanics, quantum physics, realism | posted in Books, Physics
Recently I posted about one of my new favorite YouTube channels, The Critical Drinker, which features reviews of movies and TV shows. The Drinker is the alias of thriller novelist (and YouTuber) Will Jordan, and one reason I like his channel so much is that our tastes seem well aligned. (I confess that I also love his extremely blunt presentation style.)
Another reason I enjoy his channel involves how he reviews and highlights unregarded movie gems. He and I share an appreciation for some fairly obscure, but very worthwhile, movies many have never heard of (let alone seen).
For Sci-Fi Saturday I thought I’d present some of his SF recommendations.
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11 Comments | tags: Dark City, science fiction movies, SF, SF Movies, The Critical Drinker, The Fifth Element, Will Jordan, YouTube | posted in Movies, Sci-Fi Saturday
Puppy vs Borg cube
I try hard to face forward and appreciate what joy, wonder, and beauty, life brings, but the world all too often makes that a challenge. The past few weeks have been especially hard mostly because I’m at the end of my rope with tech companies. I wish I understood why we put up with such awfulness. Factor in the spam, the robocalls, and the junk mail, and I’m ready to go live in the woods far away from any of it.
On the top of my list right now is Apple with Sprint-is-now-T-Mobile in close second place. The library app, Libby, that I’ve raved about before is in third place with WordPress bringing up the rear. Not mention all the little stuff, some corporate, some personal.
Warning: Turn back now. The road ahead is bumpy. Falling rocks.
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23 Comments | tags: Apple Corporation, Apple News, Libby, Sprint | posted in Life, Society
Two weeks ago, for Sci-Fi Saturday I posted about Absolution Gap (2003), by Alastair Reynolds. It’s the third book in his Revelation Space series. If you read the post, you know I didn’t care for it. Really didn’t care for it, especially after some disappointment with his writing style in the second book in the series, Redemption Ark (2002).
Now I’ve read Inhibitor Phase (2021), the last book of the series. For the first three-quarters of the book, I was once again rather enjoying Alastair Reynolds. Unfortunately, the last quarter, not to mention the resolution to the series, was a huge disappointment.
In that previous post I also mentioned Uranus (2020), by Ben Bova. Now I’ve read the sequel, Neptune (2021), and it was… strange.
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16 Comments | tags: Alastair Reynolds, Ben Bova, hard SF, science fiction, science fiction books, SF, SF Books | posted in Books, Sci-Fi Saturday
It’s been a while since the last Wednesday Wow post. It isn’t so much a lack of things that invoked a “Wow!” so much as that they were the wrong polarity of wow — negative rather than positive. (Speaking of which, I’ll be posting soon about Sprint-which-is-now-T-Mobile, Apple, and some other tech companies that have wowed me in quite the wrong direction. Why are tech companies so awful?)
But as I watched some videos by one of my new favorite YouTube channels, The Critical Drinker, I was (in both senses of the word) positively wowed by two of his videos about two outstanding and worthwhile movies.
And in general, he does some of the best movie reviews I know.
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9 Comments | tags: The Critical Drinker, Will Jordan, YouTube | posted in Movies, Wednesday Wow
I recently read, and very much enjoyed, Quantum Reality (2020) by Jim Baggot, an author (and speaker) I’ve come to like a lot. I respect his grounded approach to physics, and we share that we’re both committed to metaphysical realism. Almost two years ago, I posted about his 2014 book Farewell to Reality: How Modern Physics Has Betrayed the Search for Scientific Truth, which I also very much enjoyed.
This book is one of a whole handful of related books I bought recently now that I’m biting one more bullet and buying Kindle books from Amazon (the price being a huge draw; science books tend to be pricy in physical form).
The thread that runs through them is that each author is committed to realism, and each is disturbed about where modern physics has gone. Me, too!
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24 Comments | tags: Jim Baggott, Lee Smolin, ontological anti-realism, Peter Woit, quantum mechanics, quantum physics, realism, Roger Penrose, Sabine Hossenfelder | posted in Books, Physics
Recently I watched the first season (twelve episodes) of a new Amazon Prime “original” series, The Legend of Vox Machina. I say “original” because Amazon didn’t originate it and, according to Wikipedia, the first ten episodes were funded by a Kickstarter campaign, so it seems Amazon didn’t really even pay for it.
On the other hand, by acquiring the rights and putting it on their streaming service, they allowed this animated series to be decidedly adult (which, in the USA, means over-the-top violence and gore with some bits of coy T&A because Americans wallow in blood and are scared to death of (yet obsessed with) sex… which is a weird definition of “adult” given it’s what I remember about being 12 years old).
That said, it has some good bits and nothing that really pissed me off.
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11 Comments | tags: Amazon Prime, animation, anime, medieval fantasy | posted in TV Tuesday
Logos con carne 