Cage of Souls by Adrian Tchaikovsky

The author did a fantastic job of "world building" a bizarre far-flung future setting as the last remnants of humanity struggle to survive despite their descent into murderous barbarism.  I am disappointed in the magic system because the silly telekinesis & telepathy stuff is not needed for the story. The book is very long (600+ pages) with great subplots and characters in each section of the main character's adventures.  4/5 Stars.

Raymond Chandler Books as Radio Dramas by the BBC

The BBC did a great job in transferring these Philip Marlow stories by Raymond Chandler into fun radio plays.  Included in the collection are:

• The Big Sleep
• The Lady in the Lake
• Farewell my Lovely
• Playback
• The Long Goodbye
• The High Window
• The Little Sister
• Poodle Springs

During the long airplane trips I took recently these stories were a great distraction.  I never read these "Noir" detective stories but I did watch some of the Bogart movies, so the stories were mostly new.  Chandler uses very similar plot tropes across his books but he also occasionally drops some fantastic philosophical aphorisms and high literature writing.  I am glad I got this collection on Audible. 4/5 Stars.

Das Kind von Sebastian Fitzek

Dieses Buch ist sehr vulgär; die Geschichte ist gut geschrieben; aber die Ereignisse sind schrecklich und deprimierend. Ich wollte nichts über die Themen wissen, die in diesem Buch behandelt werden. 1/5 Sterne.

Giants by Peter Watts

Fun short story; I am glad I finally had time to read it. 5/5 Stars.

Two Parsecs from the Goldilocks Zone by Peter Watts

I finally had time to read this novella and it is fantastic, 4/5 Stars.  Aside:  My friend, who is a professional astrophysicist, told me the earth is at the inside border of our sun's "Goldilocks Zone," and the iron core, 24-hour day spin, van Allen belts, that deflect the cosmic rays, solar wind, etc. are needed for us to exist.  I think I had known that before, but it is a great reminder of why we have low coefficients in the Drake equation, partial explanations of the Fermi Paradox, etc.

Efficient training of deep networks with unitary matrices

Yann Lecun has given a few informal talks and published a couple of monographs about why "big data" is frequently not necessarily a good approach to solving difficult classification problems.  He cites his own failures at writing models that view radiological pictures (X-rays) to answer Yes / No questions about a patient. Almost all skilled radiologists solve these problems easily but ML models cannot.  The spectacular failures of IBM Watson in other medical fields is another example.  Lecun is looking for methods of using "good data" instead of "big data" for solving several narrow problems and then generalizing the approach to overcome bigger problems with bigger data.

Two of the major problems in recurrent neural net (RNN) deep learning when it is applied to large data sequences are setting the initial conditions and stabilizing the learning process. Learning normally consists of iterating a process of applying linear transformations and then a pointwise nonlinearity to the state data.   Sometimes the gradient disappears or becomes infinite, so the learning fails completely.

Bobak Kiani and a few other co-authors, including Yann Lecun have published a cool trick of using unitary matrices whose eigenvalues never go above or below a magnitude of one and therefore prevent these failures.  Not only will it always complete, but it will also run in O(kN^2) time.  The authors claim their new algorithm is faster in all cases and that even with k=1 it is nearly as accurate.

Security through Simplicity: there is no attack surface like NO ATTACK SURFACE

Another day, another major security vulnerability is uncovered in some complex system.  Amazon Web Service (AWS) provides a convenient Relational Database Service (RDS) service that hooks up to many AWS-hosted database systems like PostgreSQL.  AWS added support for some advanced features of PostgreSQL in a somewhat sloppy manner (including all keys & credentials in clear text in local files) that created a few severe security vulnerabilities. 

Gafnit Amiga uncovered these vulnerabilities and dutifully reported them to AWS, who fixed them quickly.  Her writeup is very easy to follow and quite entertaining.

Her conclusion emphasises my strong belief that simplicity is the most-important principle in software design; more specifically, there is no information security (InfoSec) attack surface as good as no attack surface.

Das Unmoralische Testament

Die Charaktere in dieser Geschichte sind primitive, dunkle Menschen, die alle Kriminelle sind. Ich habe keine Empathie für einen von ihnen. Interessant waren jedoch die Handlung, das Rätsel und seine Lösung. 2/5 Sterne.

The Seven Percent Solution by Nicholas Meyer & David Case

I remember watching the fun movie version of this book in 1976 when it premiered, but I was not interested in the book at the time. Earlier this year, I read Nicholas Meyer's second Sherlock Holmes book and added this first book to my queue. The film is, fortunately or unfortunately, a very good rendition of all of the events in the book, so I knew what would happen; but the writing is enjoyable.  If you have not seen the film and like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's books, I recommend this book. 3/5 Stars.  There are very many books, films, tv series, fan fiction, short stories, etc. that are based on Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes character.  I think my favorite series is by Laurie King where she chronicled the adventures of Mary Russel & Sherlock Holmes.

Number Needed to Treat (NNT)

Sebastian Rushworth, a medical doctor in Sweden, takes us on an interesting tour of the medications we take for our health through the lens of two thought experiments,  the NNT measurement, and the "number needed to harm" (NNH) measurement.  15% of adults in Western countries take Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI)  medications despite their 14% effectiveness (NNT = 7) and 25% chance  of seriously harmful side effects (NNH=4).  Worse, a quarter (25%) of adults over 40 take a high dose of a statin every day despite their 2% effectiveness (NNT = 40) and NNH = 2.4, i.e. 42% of these adults suffer a significant, harmful side-effect.  A few years ago, I went to my physician because of my ancestors' heart disease issues. He told me to go running more and eat better instead of taking harmful medications.