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I'm back from vacation, having gotten a bill payment returned postage due for the first time, and having forgotten my hat and to start the dishwasher back at Moonbase Sunnyvale.
For the week I was in Toronto, it rained more than it has in Sunnyvale in the last 2 years, I think. Even for Toronto, this has been a rainy year, the wettest on record already.
I tried to overcome my allergies by sheer will and loratadine, which never works, and it didn't work this time either. I eventually got better, but I was in bad shape for a week. Having asthma and a lingering cough while visiting Manitoulin island is a shame. Eventually I roused myself to walk with sweetzicke around the Niagara escarpment, and then with everyone except wonderfroggy along a recently-cleared trail down to the lake shore and back almost before a thunderstorm went by. I was half-expecting to get rained on so it didn't bother me particularly.
Something I hadn't realized until this time is that there are no chain restaurants or indeed chain anything except banks and gas stations. I'm guessing this is mostly because the year-round population is so low.
I am still boggled that it's possible to run the lights, water pump and purifier, and even a washing machine on solar power. This was helped along by turning off the water system at night.
Endymion, Dan Simmons, Random House:
The science... my head explode. Either someone forgot to look up a few medical references, or 30th-century humans are really tough customers. The plot needed another editing pass, I think. Overall, using another poem by John Keats as inspiration for a science fiction novel is kind of a strange thing to do.
Why Buildings Stand Up, Mario Salvadori, W.W. Norton:
This starts out with in-depth discussions of the basic elements of buildings like beams, columns, and slabs, and once that foundation is laid, goes on to cover skyscrapers, bridges (Brooklyn and otherwise), gothic cathedrals (including the cautionary tale of Beauvais), the Parthenon, and Filippo Brunelleschi's seemingly miraculous feat of building the Duomo of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence without anything to hold it up during construction. The Eiffel tower gets its own chapter, and there's one for the genesis and travails of the church and dome of Hagia Sophia through over a thousand years of history.
It turns out that dome roofs also work when inside out, so long as all the forces add up correctly, and there are more exotic roofs which would see more use if they weren't so labour-intensive to build. The relentless emphasis on the channeling of loads made it clear what is so interesting about tensegrity structures, which have no continuous path of compressive loads to the ground.
Why Buildings Fall Down, Mattys Levy and Mario Salvadori, W.W. Norton:
This has one of my favourite openings of a non-fiction book in a long time, but beware: these guys are professional structural engineers, and most of the failures they discuss are in modern buldings that fall down for relatively subtle reasons requiring a familiarity with statics, knowledge of the properties of materials, and a suspicious mind to discover. About my favourite story is one of the few non-disasters where hydrostatic equilibrium caused the entrance to a building to be below and then above ground over the course of a few decades.
A Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin, Bantam Doubleday Dell:
In the world of this story, winter and summer last for years, sometimes decades. This 4-5 page premise is spread out through 800-odd other pages involving intrigue and infighting among 7 kingdoms after the overthrow of an insane tyrant. Other factions across the sea are involved in an attempt to re-establish the old tyranny, while the "Night's Watch" in the north acts as a sort of foreign legion, staffed by criminals and political exiles, who "take the black" for life. At the time of this book it's mostly a barely-glorified penal colony, but winter is coming, a long cold dark one that promises to make their order relevant for the first time in millennia.
All very romantic, but the book has a lot more to do besides drawing the Night's Watch a pint of heavy. The rest is about the confluence of plots, counterplots, palace coups and force majeure that the realm plunges into, which turns out to be more of a beer-on-liquor kind of thing. The intrigue part is kind of annoying, since I am hopeless at figuring out where things are going to go next and end up just feeling stupid.
The Wreck of the Godspeed, James Patrick Kelly, Golden Gryphon:
The title story that opens this collection deals with a ship's computer that has adopted a quirky and outgoing persona, but is curiously silent about other goings-on aboard. The mystery eventually explains itself, in the nick of time, as usual, but of course answering one question just leads to others. At the risk of spoiling the ending, I will say that this XKCD strip expresses my misgivings concerning teleportation that involves "quantum" anything, in so far as a) to the best of my knowledge, you don't have to be that accurate, and b) if you really do use quantum teleportation to exactly duplicate the quantum states of the particles at the receiver, it won't work the way it does in the story.
There are 2 stories about aliens who for some reason show a marked preference for women, and I suppose they've always been that way, though the reasons vary. The mechanical mistress of "Bernardo's House" exists due to the more familiar preferences of men, but is missing hers, and has no notion of where he's got to until a stranger starts asking questions.
The most memorable apart from the first one is "The Edge of Nowhere", where a town that apparently got left out of an all-consuming technological evolution receives visitors who are apparently interested in, of all things, literature, especially if it hasn't been written yet. Closing the book, and the longest story, "Burn" is also about a technological backwater, deliberate this time, where an anti-terrorist and volunteer fireman takes advantage of a hospital stay away from the plain folk to try an internet search, unleashing all manner of complications.
