Crossover by Joel Shepherd

I like the Spiral War series so I tried the first book of the Cassandra Kresnov stories.  There is a little too much for one book but it is great otherwise. I shall try to get the others. 4/5 stars.

The Utopia of Rules by David Graeber

This one is not nearly as good as Bullshit Jobs.  There are some interesting observations and analysis but the essays are very shrill and grating, 2/5 st

In the Heart of Darkness by Eric Flint & David Drake

The saga continues but the awe and wonder wears thin, 3/5 stars.  Lots of politics, intrigue, bad economics.

Rando Splicer by Joel Shephaed

I love this series.  5/5 stars.

The Fifth Head of Cerebus by Gene Wolfe

I never liked Gene Wolfe's books when I was young and I still don't like them now.  I did not like this story.  The "awesome" repository on github recommended the book so I read it. 2/5 Stars.

An Oblique Approach by Eric Flint

Intriguing universe, 3/5 stars.

Permanent Record by Edward Snowden

Fantastic!  Wow.  I have read all the other Snowden books, watched all the films, read some of the best technical materials released, and followed along as the saga continues.  This book is the very best so far.  I bought copies for people who work in this field.  Then I discovered the evil entities trying to kill Edward Snowden are also stealing all of the revenue for sales of Edward's books.  I shall try to get him to speak at eBay so that we can pay him for his important efforts on our behalf. 5/5 stars.  Internet Search Engines reveal where to find the book. 

The Emperor's New Mind by Roger Penrose

The first few chapters, Turing machines formalisms, and walk (inadequate) summary of Gödel's incompleteness theorems were terrible.  However the book warmed up during Penrose's commentaries about Quantum Theory, the odd uses of imaginary numbers, equivalences of large-scale Newtonian phenomena with Schrödinger's equation (my understanding from 1977 was wrong), and his introspective comments on "awareness," 3/5 Stars.

21st Century Life Skills

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWXcuqXaHsI

David's talk is interesting.  I watched at 1.5 speed.  10 minutes well worth the time. 

NeurIPS 2019 in Vancouver

In Vancouver this week (2019 week 50), over 13,000 of your closest personal friends are at NeurIPS-2019.  New this year, videos of the talks and their slides are webcast and recorded in real time here. The exponential growth of the conference predicts there will be over a million papers in four years. Personally, I attend neither NIPS NeurIPS, nor the international conference for machine learning (ICML) anymore unless I have a paper accepted, or I get sent there by my company to recruit.  In the words of Yogi Berra, "No one goes there anymore; it's too crowded."  

One theme that hit the twitterverse live blogging about NeurIPS-19 is that neural network deep learning research (but not application) is "hitting the wall" because of the narrow set of problems it solves (optimization with clear objective and loss functions).  At least two keynote talks highlighted the limits in current approaches and our woefully inadequate capabilities to solve more interesting "general AI" problems. In particular, this fantastic talk by Blaise Aguera y Arcas proposes a deeper simulation of biological systems (including neurons, evolution, & biological systems' learning) together with long-term short-term memory (LSTM) units in a simple topology as the basis for adaptable metalearning.  And in this talk, Yoshua Bengio explains some ideas for abstraction that he hopes will bring AI closer to general AI, including attention, consciousness, and causality.