Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Great story, well-crafted. 5/5 Stars

KTF part 1 by Nick ole & Jason Anspach

The long, meandering threads of the Galaxy's Edge books are starting to coalesce as some big reveals and fun adventures play out. 4/5 Stars.

types of people

There are two types of people.  There are people who don't believe in putting others into boxes and prefer to see everyone as unique individuals, and the other type  . . .

xkcd today has a great take on this concept:

"According to my unsupervised K-means clustering algorithm, there are currently about 8 billion types of people in the world."

Finally, chatGPT says: "People categorizers always have a map to make sure they never get lost in their own classifications."

Maelstrom by Peter Watts

I enjoy Peter Watts' books.  The background and world building are thought-provoking, exhilarating, and well-crafted. The characters are well-motivated and richly textured. I wish he did better research into computer science and engineering.  However the "mindless" wildlife net software is eerily prescient of well-trained large language models and chatGPT. The biology is a little simplistic but still fantastic as one would expect from Watts' background. 5/5 Stars.  I look forward to reading the next book.

Voodoo Warfare by Nick Cole

Slow start but fun story, with great one-liners and dialog, 4/5 Stars.

Zero Hour (Expeditionary Force 5) by Craig Alanson

There were way too many near-death experiences in the story line.  I need to put this series down for a little while. The "awe and wonder" space opera mystery stuff is still fun; 3/5 Stars.

Intelligence & Personality

This fascinating preprint appeared today in psyarchiv (https://psyarxiv.com/ar6g3/).  Personally, I have always found personality intrinsically interesting and I am very grateful Psych research has emerged from its history of weak science; Psychology is leading many other areas in combating the reproducibility crisis in science.  For the impatient, this preprint's results are:

Results showed that openness (ρ = .20) and neuroticism (ρ = -.09) were the strongest Big Five correlates of intelligence and that openness correlated more with crystallized than fluid intelligence. At the facet-level, traits related to intellectual engagement and unconventionality were more strongly related to intelligence than other openness facets, and sociability and orderliness were negatively correlated with intelligence. Facets of gregariousness and excitement seeking had stronger negative correlations. . .

Black Ops (Expeditionary Force 4) by Craig Alanson

The desperate trouble and bizarre events continue in book 4.  The inconsistencies of the magic system are starting to wear thin but the story is great, and the bro banter is still entertaining.  This one ends in a cliffhanger so I must start the next one immediately. 4/5 Stars.

Numbers Don't Lie: 71 Things You Need to Know about the Word

The information in this book is mostly covered in Peter Zeihan's The End of the World is Just the Beginning. But the numbers themselves are interesting and there are other interesting facts. 4/5 Stars.  Vaclav should keep the numbers updated online.

Gangsters vs Nazis by Michael Benson

Fun, interesting, well-researched history of a fascinating time in early to mid 20th century USA politics and social dynamics. It is unfortunately not well-written or edited and reads too much like a colorful textbook.  Despite the "Barbara Tuchman Telephone Book" style, I really enjoyed the anecdotes, stories, and commentary. 4/5 Stars.