Sun of Suns by Karl Schroeder

Good story-telling and odd tech; decent awe-and-wonder of mysterious trans-humanism.  It is somewhat like Larry Niven's "smoke ring" (Integral trees) world.  Among the world building issues that pushed me out of the story is the existence of petrochemicals and manufacturing processes that rely on strong gravity.  I may not read the rest of the series or his later books, 3/5 stars.

The lost fleet beyond the frontier Steadfast by Jack Campbell

Poor treatment of the AI menace, good mystery and politics, 3/5 stars.

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mfw@wyle.org | 1.425.249.3936

Off Armageddon Reef by David Webber

Fun sci-fi with Napoleonic sea battles. Fun characters; 4/5 stars.

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mfw@wyle.org | 1.425.249.3936

Ach, diese Lücke, diese entsetzliche Lücke by Joachim Meyerhoff

Extremely heart-warming, emotional, funny, wonderful autobiography.  Now I have to go back and read the earlier books by Meyerhoff.  5/5 stars.

Keeper of Dreams by Orson Scott Card

Too short, great stories.  Can't wait for the next volume, 5/5 stars.

Ganymede Club by Charles Sheffield

Great space opera by the master, 5/5 stars.

Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Taken

Fun, entertaining, and actionable. 5/5 stars.

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mfw@wyle.org | 1.425.249.3936

new advances in understanding superpermutations

If a television series has three episodes, there are six possible orders in which to view them: 123, 132, 213, 231, 312 and 321. You could put these sequences together to give a list of 18 episodes for every ordering, but there’s a much more efficient way to do it: 123121321.  If you want to watch all possible rearrangement of sequences of a 7-part tv series, how many total episode viewings are required?  What if the tv show has an infinite number of episodes? A sequence that contains every possible rearrangement (or permutation) of a collection of n symbols is a “superpermutation.”

Progress on this interesting, and easily-understandable 25-year-old combinatorial problem in mathematics has upper- and lower-bound proofs discovered recently by a pair of unexpected authors: an anonymous contributor to 4chan and a science fiction author in Perth Australia.

Some University of Florida math professors, citing "unknown 4chan poster" have verified, clarified, and reformulated a proof for the lower bound to the length of any superpattern.  And Greg Egan, the famous SF author, has published a proof for the upper-bound along with C and JavaScript source code implementations of his algorithm.

Click here to kill everybody by Bruce Schneier

I enjoyed this one.  It was simple, quick, to the point, and insightful.  None of the concepts was complex and the summaries were not too simple to obscure the underlying crypto.  4/5 stars.

A mind at play, Claude Shannon by Jim Soni & Rob Goodman

Too long and rambling but interesting life and times, not enough rigor. 2/5 stars, meh.