What a tragic loss for music fans everywhere. Especially fans around my age.
Here’s an acoustic performance by Chris Cornell of the U2 song One while he sings the lyrics from the Metallica song One. Amazing.
I came across this video while browsing some of the live tributes to Chris Cornell performed by other bands. Unfortunately, most of these are low-quality bootlegs, but he obviously touched and inpired a lot of other musicians.
I finally finished Seveneves last night. I’ve been a fan of Neal Stephenson’s writing for years, going all the way back to Snow Crash. Seveneves did not disappoint.
If you’re familiar with Stephenson’s other work then you already know this is a dense, thick book. It’s 850+ pages filled with dizzying details about current and future technology. Stephenson does his homework. He deals with everything from robotics and orbital mechanics to nuclear power and even genetics. All of these complex subjects are seamlessly interwoven with a compelling story.
The book is divided into three parts. It might be better to think of it as a trilogy rather than a single book. Especially when you learn that part three starts with “Five thousand years later.” It’s here that Stephenson’s imagination runs wild and his talent really shines. His vision of the far future is fantastical, but explained so precisely and thoroughly that it is somehow still believable.
This is not a book to be undertaken lightly. It will take a while to finish, even for the fastest readers. But if the idea of an adventure spanning generations with a believable cast of characters and amazing settings sounds intriguing, you can’t go wrong with Seveneves.
A few days ago Jason Kottke linked to this review of a new book on the growing economic divide.
As someone who worked full time through college and financed classes and books with the help of my wife and our credit cards, I can relate. Passages like this bring back memories:
Here, the world of possibility is shrinking, often dramatically. People are burdened with debt and anxious about their insecure jobs if they have a job at all. Many of them are getting sicker and dying younger than they used to. They get around by crumbling public transport and cars they have trouble paying for. Family life is uncertain here; people often don’t partner for the long-term even when they have children. If they go to college, they finance it by going heavily into debt. They are not thinking about the future; they are focused on surviving the present. The world in which they reside is very different from the one they were taught to believe in. While members of the first country act, these people are acted upon.
Thankfully, that was almost 14 years ago and my family has moved on. For others, the situation is only getting worse.
I believe there are those in the “first country” who are willing to help (I like to think I’m one of them), but the current political climate makes this almost impossible.
» America is Regressing into a Developing Nation for Most People
I’m paid to spend my days staring at a softly glowing LCD. In the midst of writing code and attending meetings, I also browse the web. Most people would consider me an old-school web surfer. I still follow blogs and read posts in an RSS reader (Feedly if you must know).
I realize that long-form writing has mostly fallen out of favor, but I still enjoy it. As a matter of fact, I frequently come across articles that I feel need to be shared with the world. In the past, I’ve posted these articles on Facebook or Twitter, but I find that the less time I spend in the social media cesspool, the better I feel.
Having said all that, I plan to start adding links to articles that I particularly enjoy to this site. I’ll probably include a pithy comment along with a qoute or two. My interests are fairly varied — I still read a lot about programming, but trending towards more Python for data science and machine learning. I’m also interested in the current political situation and its effect on economics and the world.
If your interests overlap mine, you might enjoy some of the same articles. If not, feel free to keep on scrolling.