Annihilation carries the best of H.P. Lovecraft into the 21st century. Our unnamed narrator is the Biologist, member of a four woman expedition into Area X, a mysterious zone of otherworldly circumstances, overgrown and haunted by unknown horrors. Area X consumes expeditions, either by the assault of unknown forces, or psychological breakdowns and self-inflicted gunfire. The biologist is a consummate observer, someone who stands outside of events, who sees her own beauty in the natural world, and in whatever force is at the center of the Area X.

VanderMeer unrolls the strangeness and the fear in a great novella. I'm looking forward to seeing how the series goes.

Let me tell you about Pandas DataFrames. DataFrames are wonderful pythonic objects that support clever programming and fast execution via numpy. DataFrames can be masked, joined, manipulated, and plotted however you want. DataFrames rock, and Python is fun.

Unfortunately, real businesses run on SQL. Now, my workflow as a data scientist would be to load all my data into memory and work on in Pandas, and if I don't have enough memory, start a bigger instance on AWS. But sometimes you have to use a 70s vintage DBMS, and that means knowing SQL.

Forta's book is a solid introduction to SQL concepts, and how to do selects, filters, and joins. Your exact database will vary, but I find this book to be clear written, a good place to start, and a worthwhile addition to your knowledge base.

In 2019, conspiracy theories have gone mainstream. Trump became President on the back of a racist conspiracy theory that Obama was a Kenyan Muslim. Or maybe the conspiracy theory is some variant of le affair de Russe. Beyond the political, conspiracy theories ferment and multiply on Youtube, with the recommender engine pushing increasingly extreme content towards viewers. It seems like there's no escape from the rabbit hole.

Mick West is the administrator of MetaBunk, a popular conspiracy debunking forum that started with Chemtrails, and he believes that he can help. (As an aside, West made his money as a programmer on Tony Hawk Pro Skater. Heck yeah, Superman!) This book is written as an an aid to help "your friend", a hypothetical conspiracy theorist, find their way out, with examples drawing from Chemtrails, 9/11 Truthers, False Flag mass shootings, and Flat Earth.

West approach is one of patient respect. Getting people out of the conspiracy hole isn't easy. The trick is to avoid triggering emotional/cognitive defense mechanisms, while exposing your friend to outside information. Conspiracy "facts" are astoundingly shoddy, full of obvious errors, gaps, and contradictions. It's just that most people never bother going to any sort of primary resource, instead choosing to repeat comfortable lies and memes. As West puts it, all of us have a threshold for conspiracies. We might hold conspiratorial beliefs that we believe are totally rational (West's example is that he himself believes pharmaceutical companies collude to drive up health care costs), while having a line for something silly. "Bush did 9/11" Truthers don't much care for "nanothermite" Truthers, who think the tinfoil hats in the "space lasers" camps are insane.

Sadly, there's no magic bullet for undoing conspiracy theories. As West describes it, we're herd animals, and someone who's made conspiracy beliefs part of their identity takes a lot of love to save. But it can be done.

Second books are hard. I think everyone knows that. But I've rarely seen a second book splat as hard as Authority.

In the wake of Annihilation, the biologist, the surveyor, and the anthropologist have return via mysterious means, their memories erased and likely ridden with cancer like the other returnees. And of course, we know that two of them are dead in Area X, and the third transformed. With the new book, we also have a new main character, Control/John Rodriguez, a veteran intelligence officer from a dynasty of spies, and new director of Southern Reach, the shadowy government agency that studies Area X, and a new viewpoint, a tight third person.

The viewpoint shift matters. Annihilation felt intimate, for all its horror and unraveling mystery it was happening to you. Control is an ironic cipher, a manager who is very much not in control, a walking collection of John le Carré cliches and vague inferiority. He is not a protagonist, barely a character.

We meet the employees of Southern Reach, scientists and bureaucrats gone mad grappling with the insane, and the situation falls apart. Rather than existential dread, we get jitters of personal revelation and the literary equivalent of jump scares. The Southern Reach office building is full of creepy objects, half discarded. The psychologist from the last book was actually the Director of Southern Reach. And she was not some random academic, she might be the daughter of the Lighthouse Keeper, who survives transformed as the singular intelligence of the Crawler.

It is unfair to judge a book by what is not written; by what should have been written instead, but there is ample room for horror in bureaucracy that VanderMeer just misses. Bureaucracy is about routine, distribution of responsibility, institutional continuity. Yet Area X is a puzzle immune to every method of scientific investigation. The purpose of Southern Reach is to sacrifice expeditions to Area X. I'm particularly thinking of Charles Stross's Laundry Series, and what he has to say about the overlaps between bureaucracy and literal brain-eating monsters from outside the universe, and I just wish VanderMeer had thought a little more systematically about his system of politics and power.

Prediction is hard, especially about the future. And despite the importance people and organizations lay on having a clear view of the future, we're not very good at prediction. The authors, Tetlock and Gardner, argue that the state of prediction is similar to the state of medicine, before randomized clinical trials. Sometime forecasters are right, but mostly they're wrong, and there's no way to separate the potentially useful treatments from quackish nonsense.

But there might be a better way. Superforecasters is a write up of the authors' Good Judgement Project, an IARPA (Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency) effort to systemically study predictions. The Good Judgement Project smoked the competition, including in-agency experts and prediction markets. Tetlock and Gardner used their background in psychology to find out what made their top 2%, the titular superforecasters, tick better than everyone else.

The first finding is that most of us are astonishingly bad at prediction. Generally, people have three settings for probability: impossible, certain, and maybe. Kahneman's System 1, the intuitive rush to judgment, is terrible at complex problems. Perhaps the biggest step is to slow down, and engage System 2, the rational and logical side of the mind. Beyond that, people with ideological blinders are lousy predictors. If everything has to fit into Marxist dialectics, or the immortal science of Friedman-Hayek Thought, you'll overlook evidence that contradicts the theory.

The Good Judgement project provide some necessary structure. Instead of weasel words (most of, highly likely) and vague timelines (in the near future), participants are given clear factual statements with a definite endpoint. There are thousands of predictions, and participants are allowed to update their initial assessments as they do more research.

Superforecasters are adept at seeing a problem in numerous ways, rather that focusing on grand theories. They tend to be comfortable with statistics. Participants in The Good Judgement Project self-selected as more intelligent and better educated than the population at large, but superforecasters aren't notably smarter or more credentialed than their less accurate peers. Instead, they have a bulldog tendency towards research, an ability to question their own assumptions, update beliefs, and think inside-out and outside-in.

Superforecasting is a fascinating and very useful book for anyone who is thinking about the future.

Eternity is one very good novella, intermixed with an okay novella, and a mediocre one. Unfortunately, the mediocre one is the most important.

Roughly 30 years after the events of Eon, the characters are trying to make sense of what comes next.

The good part is Rhita, granddaughter of Patricia Vasquez from Eon, stranded on an alternate Earth dominated by Ptolemaic heirs of Alexander the Great. A gifted scholar, carrying the strange artifacts of her grandmother, Rhita lives in a deft, Greek inspired alternate Earth, and has to negotiate a way to open a gate back to the Way, without understanding the consequences. I loved the glimpses of alternate history, and wished there were more of that.

The okay novella follows Olmy, as he investigates the great secret of the Jart War. It seems that at some point, Hexamon Defense captured a Jart and hit it away in Thistledown. Olmy's last mission is to interrogate the Jart, a combination of diplomacy, cryptography, and mind-to-mind combat. It turns out the Jarts a cybernetic collective, with a goal of archiving every lived experience. They are interesting antagonists, though the military aspect of the series has always been a weak point.

The mediocre novella follows Lanier, now an old man who has refused regenerative medicine, and the political struggle between rebuilding Earth in the aftermath of a nuclear war, and reopening the Way. Pavel Mirsky reappears, an avatar of a godlike intelligence at the end of time, with a dangerous message. The Way must be destroyed for the universe to reach its fulfillment. The politics and cosmology are scattershot, and the meditates about death and the growing distance between Lanier and his wife Karen little more than cliches.

Marie Kondo has become an international star and meme on the basis of her tidying philosophy.

The core of Kondo's philosophy is an aggressive emotional minimalism. Your house should only contain things that bring you joy. The problem is that our homes are full of things which do not bring us joy. Clothes that we bought on impulse and never wore, gadgets for faddish hobbies, manuals for obsolete devices. As a participant in a consumer society, we just have too much stuff. The KonMari method is a way to enact a single, life-changing wave of tidying that gets you down to just the things you actually love, and then organize the rest. It's pretty simple. Hold an object in your hands, ask if it brings you joy, and if it does not, thank it and get rid of it. As a matter of best practice, Kondo suggests tackling objects of one type all at once, and in order: Clothes, books, documents, miscellaneous objects, and sentimental items.

Once you're down to a manageable number of things, it's easy to store things sensibly. Kondo is against complex organizational schemes. Beyond her style of folding clothes into neat rectangles, the advice is to store things vertically, like books on shelves, and never ever stack anything. Objects stored in plastic crates are basically lost forever.

I'm not going to say that KonMari is perfect, as someone moving and downsizing soon, I see a lot of fights over whether or not some dumb ornamental object actually brings us joy. But it's a start.

Cruvellier is a journalist specializing in crimes against humanity and international criminal courts. This book, self-consciously modeled after Eichmann in Jerusalem, follows the 2007 trial of Duch / Kaing Guek Eav, the commander of the notorious S-21 prison. S-21 was one of over 150 facilities established by the Khmer Rogue for the torture and execution of internal enemies. As commander, Duch oversaw the deaths of an estimated 20,000 people. The killing was meticulously organized and recorded, with an extensive archive of files containing photographs, biographies, and confessions of the doomed.

Revolutions invariably wind up eating their own, starting with Robespierre being lead to the guillotine, continuing through the 20th century, and culminating in the extraordinary bloodshed of the Cambodia genocide, which killed between 21 and 25% of Cambodia's population. S-21 was a central node in the machinery of death, where high ranking cadres were dispatched when they had run afoul on an internal power struggle. Pol Pot's paranoia was infinite. A single accusation would bring down subordinates, wives, children, in an ever-expanding web of death.

Two questions weave through the book. The first is about what type of man Duch must be, to commit such crimes? Eichmann was a bureaucratic nonentity, but Duch is somehow worse. Both before and after the revolution, he was a teacher, beloved by his students and peers as kind, reliable, and intelligent. Yet for a decade, he was an enthusiastic member of an apparatus of death, devoted to 'smashing' (the literal meaning Cambodian word used for execution) the enemies of the revolution. He handwriting is all over the archives, demanding more torture, proscribing executions, listing more victims to bring in.

The second is what manner of justice is possible, or even appropriate. The dead can never be brought back. The survivors will carry their wounds with them for a lifetime. I'm not even sure what manner of healing is possible for Cambodia, and neither is Cruvellier. the trial becomes a psychodrama, a grueling struggle which Duch initially controls, and then which takes its own momentum and breaks him. He acknowledges responsibility, but cannot find forgiveness. There are parallels between the obedience to authority which lead to Duch's crimes, and the obedience to authority on which the court runs. In the end a confession, whether extracted by torture or in a court of human rights, is a coercive bargain struck between those with power, and those at the mercy of power. Beneath the pomp and bureaucratic starch of the ICC is the mob, howling for blood.

The sequel to The Three Body Problem has humanity facing some serious problems. A trisolarian invasion fleet is en-route and due to arrive in 400 years, and intelligent subatomic particles called sophons created by the trisolarians mean that strategic deception and advances in physics are impossible.

The Dark Forest follows astronomer and cosmic sociologist Luo Ji, as he attempts to come to terms with what is going on. Luo is the target of repeated assassination attempts by the fifth-column Earth-Trisolar Organization, and then is promoted to Wallfacer, one of four senior strategists with an unlimited remit to create private defense against the alien threat. While the other Wallfacers have plans, as well as ETO operatives to break them, Luo retires to a luxury villa to live a life of peace with his literal dream woman. After all, victory is impossible.

Then his wife and child disappear into long-term hibernation to prompt Luo to action. He comes up with a plan to cast a spell on a star, to reveal it's location to the galaxy, and goes into hibernation as well. He emerges in a utopian future, where after a climate disaster that killed billions, humanity lives a life of plenty in underground cities, while powerful battlecruisers patrol the solar system. It seems like humanity will vanquish the oncoming ETO fleet, when a single trisolarian probe destroys all but a handful of ships. It turns out fundamental advances in physics are desperately needed.

But at the last minute Luo finds out that the spell he cast worked, the star was destroyed. The solution to the Fermi paradox is that the galaxy is a dark forest, full of predatory species that pounce on any species foolish enough to reveal itself in preemptive self-defense. Luo has a plan to reveal the location of Earth and the trisolarian world. The two species would join each other in death. With this mutually assured destruction in place, the trisolarians sue for peace.

There are some parts of the book I thought worked quite well. The build up of the might of Earth's fleet, and its destruction, was quite emotionally effective. The idea that the space force would have political officers to ensure faith in victory across centuries is both sensible, and a distinctly Chinese approach to space navies. Liu Cixin touches on weighty ideas beyond the titular dark forest, including future politics, ecological collapse, underground cities, and limited mind control, but the story has a little more room to breath. Almost too much room to breath, as chapters are wasted on Luo Ji's indulgences. I much preferred Ye Wenjie as a protagonist.

The popular image of the industrial revolution is of titanic forces unleashed by steam, of dark satanic mills and choking clouds of smog. But the machines did not spring into being, fully formed. Behind our modern age lies an obsession with precision, with exactitude in measurement and cutting that a medieval master craftsman would find extremely odd, and which we find extremely normal.



Winchester chronicles 250 years of precision engineering, starting with John "Iron-Mad" Wilkinson, a cannon manufacturer who armed the fleets that won Britain 100 years of empire, and who's technology, adopted in partnership with James Watt, created the first useful steam engine. Wilkinson's bores erred by no more than 1/10th of an inch, and in a few generations this would seem to be incredibly imprecise, as various engineers chased ever finer exactitude in manufacturing and measurement in the service of more reliable machines, economies of mass production, and eventually the atomic level precision of computer chips, GPS satellites, and LIGO, the gravity wave detecting observatory.

Winchester blends a love of precision equipment, such as Rolls-Royce cars, his father's Jo blocks, mechanical watches, and Leica camera lenses, with an a charming professionalism as a writer, leaping through centuries, biographical sketches, and ever finer tolerances. This is as good as popular history of technology gets!