Weblog - page 2
Posts
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Sanitation Protocol
Three weeks into lockdown. We’re more fortunate than most, we have enough room in the house to keep to ourselves if we need to and a garden with a view. Both my wife and I are working from home and our employers seem secure for the immediate future, although who knows in the longer term. The kids are being set work each day (including, to their disgust, over what would have been the Easter break) and are old enough to get on with it with minimal supervision. I’m conscious the whole time that many are in a far worse situation and my thoughts are with them.
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Agency
I first read William Gibson as a teenager in the late 1980s. My father was a librarian and often brought me home books he thought I’d like. One of these was a yellow-jacketed Gollancz hard cover of Neuromancer. The book had a profound influence on me, and I still have a copy that was later withdrawn from the library in my collection (the 1985 second impression).
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Thinking, Fast and Slow
Not a new book, and a fairly well known one. I’ve been meaning to read this for ages. Daniel Kahneman has become so influential if you’ve read anything much on economics and risk or psychology and rationality over the past few years you’ll have encountered his ideas if not his name. This book is a tour of his life’s work on how people make and rationalise choices.
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Blackfish City
I got two gifts in the work Secret Santa this year, an NROL-39 Mission Patch sticker and a copy of Blackfish City, a science fiction novel by Sam J. Miller. I’d not heard of the book, but then I’ve not been paying much attention lately to the SF/F scene I guess – I read a lot more non-fiction these days.
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Destruction and Renewal
After years of neglect I’ve spent a bit of time reviewing and updating this site. I first put up a page in around 2001, served from my home directory on a server run by my then-ISP. I added the personal domain in 2004 and moved to Mythic Beasts in 2008 (with whom I have been happily hosting ever since and highly recommend). The last post to appear prior to this was in 2012. The site was initially based on Blosxom but now runs WordPress.