The Jesus Bomb (Ed The Elf #8)

Why are Elves always getting dunked on?

---

But wait a minute: Yes, and it was a valuable insight: But here was the problem: There was no hope of dramatically lifting the IQ of Project , men who missed a test question like this: If a farmer had a bucket of 24 eggs and he stumbled and broke half of them, how many eggs would he have left? The men who missed such questions were slow learners who were able to live happy, productive lives if they had a protective environment - a cozy haven with loving parents, helpful friends, and sympathetic bosses. Such was not the case for many Project , men. I would have liked more statistical and psychometric details such as a short literature review of the extensive studies of IQ and job performance especially in the military eg.

Kavanagh , how the probability of combat death correlated with lower IQ, why IQ interventions typically fail etc but it is probably unrealistic to expect that from Gregory, and in any case, given the extensive lying, fraud, falsification of documents, misclassification of members of the , etc, the statistics would likely greatly understate the true outcomes.

Like Thompson sampling, the Kelly criterion has been reinvented many times; Poundstone lists at least 4 inventors: Thus, notorious characters like Bugsy Siegel enter into a book about statistics as gambling becomes a major revenue source replacing the loss of alcohol. An interlude brings in Kelly and his Kelly criterion itself, and makes clear the connection to information theory and efficient markets: So Thorp moved onto roulette and the stock market.

Which sounds a bit paradoxical. And the risk of buying warrants can be offset just buy buying or selling short just some of the underlying stock. Thorp made money off warrants, and then published the strategy for increasing the credibility of his new hedge fund, and moved onto convertible bonds by applying similar reasoning: In one amusing anecdote, Black-Scholes used their pricing model to spot a particularly mispriced warrant; then the company changed the terms of the warrants, wiping out the warrant holders and Black-Scholes, in a way that insiders had known was coming and sold all their warrants.

Thorp returned to trading eventually, and in terms of his lifetime performance:. In May Thorp reported that his investments had grown at an average 20 percent annual return with 6 percent standard deviation over Over all, it would seem to be a moderately long run with a high probability that the excess performance is more than chance.

iTunes is the world's easiest way to organize and add to your digital media collection.

The Thorps recently endowed a chair at the University of California at Irvine mathematics department. The gift consists of one million dollars to be invested entirely in stocks, with the university limited to withdrawing only 2 percent a year. The fund is expected to compound exponentially in inflation-adjusted dollars. Ultimately, Thorp hopes, it will fund the most richly endowed university chair in the world, and will help draw exceptional mathematical talent to UC Irvine.

What is a little remarkable to me is how well Shannon did financially by 3 early venture capital investments, and how little Shannon contributed intellectually after his information theory paper; I had always somehow assumed that Claude Shannon, a genius who had offhandedly made a major contribution to genetics simply because his advisor forced him to work on genetics, and had created fully-formed information theory, had died in the s or something, because how else would such a genius have not made further major contributions?

Shannon died in ! Poundstone explains that Shannon was simply too unambitious and perfectionist to work hard on any big topics or write up and publish properly any of his findings! One of the more depressing demonstrations that raw genius is not enough. One downside is that despite the involvement of Jimmy Savage, Poundstone never mentions the connections to subjective Bayesianism, personal interpretations of probability, or Thompson sampling.

The Playboy interview II , ed. I only read Playboy for the articles , the joke goes, but the joke is funny because the interviews in Playboy were amazing. Each interview takes a good 20 pages, and these are not small pages, either, but hefty small font pages. Particularly memorable was this exchange:. You announced in a speech not long ago that Negroes are responsive to the phases of the moon.

Just what did you mean by that? Our research and studies have found that there is more stirring and movement of the nigra when they have a full moon; they show a higher increase in the rate of crime and sex during the full moon.

Can you name the scientific sources on which this research was based? What was that about giving hostages to fortune? Almost all of the interviews are worth reading and include good tidbits I wish I could excerpt from my print copy, but overall, I would say the best interviews were: The case-studies are in chronological order and primarily WWII-oriented:. Or as he puts it: Arguably, all of these principles could be boiled down to a single principle of speed - complex unrehearsed operations with multiple objectives by uncommitted troops against a waiting enemy cannot be fast, while speed dictates all of the other requirements except perhaps security.

Why then are spec-ops not doomed to failure? The commandos sting the elephant and flee before the tail can smash them into paste. The parallels with computer security and cyberattacks is clear: A Silicon Valley startup analogy also makes itself; indeed simplicity, security, repetition, surprise, speed, and purpose would not be a bad set of founding principles for a startup!

The case-studies themselves are interesting. McRaven was able to interview a number of people involved in the case-studies as well as visit the locations to see them for himself. Deception plays surprisingly little role in most of the operations considering its outsized role in the public imagination the St Nazaire raid ship briefly pretended to be German; Gran Sasso brought along an Italian general in the gliders to confuse the Italians; Operation Entebbe likewise involved the commandos pretending to be locals until they reached the building with the hostages, apparently successfully confusing the terrorists inside.

The thesis was apparently quite popular and was republished in as Spec Ops: Case Studies in Special Operations Warfare: Disadvantages to the online thesis version: A skim of the Libgen EPUB version suggests that you might be better off with that edition although it appears to drop the photos entirely. The author starts off in WWI with the first applications of operations-research thinking to naval problems, by Thomas Edison of all people, who quickly focused on optimizing convoys patterns to avoid German U-boats, a relevant historical tidbit as it was WWII submarine warfare that would summon the OEG into existence to stem the catastrophic loss of shipping in the Atlantic.

For example, Tidman discusses the vulnerability of carrier groups to massed missile attacks. Surely OEG has cast a cold eye on whether aircraft carriers make sense at all or are just vast white elephants, regardless of how upset the Navy might be by the findings?

Are the Ten Commandments really the basis for our laws? - Bad Astronomy : Bad Astronomy

Perhaps a book about the OEG written now could be more candid, and thus, much more informative. Some tidbits that I noted as I went:. OEG remained quite active after Vietnam, but unfortunately the interesting examples peter out around there. So the post-Vietnam sections tend to degenerate into vague discussions of studies of field exercises and weapon systems analyses.

Hard to take any of that as a clearcut success story of OR. If societies were a bacteria with a genome, they would succumb to mutational meltdown almost instantaneously. There is not and cannot be an explanation for the majority of cultural practices; from a genetics or information theory point of view, the replication fidelity and selection pressure just is not there, and this is why not just most cultural practices or beliefs but entire fields are nulls. Or the vast array of superstitions?

I read the Project Gutenberg edition , which appears to be the first version which is shorter but generally said to be the better version. Most drugs that inspire prose tend to be psychedelics, and given the modern opiate epidemic, one is a little surprised to come across an opiate memoir, but de Quincey, when writing about opium, sounds remarkably like a modern drug writer, whose sentiments would fit right in at a s California powwow, right down to his speculation that humans possess enormous powers of memory or thought which are suppressed in ordinary life but may reveal them under the proper perhaps chemical influence.

I had heard the phrase opium dream but somehow it had never dawned on me that this might be quite literal and smoking opium, like DMT, might cause dissociated states with engrossing hallucinations in addition to the euphoria and pain-killing aspects one expects from opiates. The parts dealing with opium, however, are brief and could easily be excerpted in a review. The bulk of the work, which is hardly quoted, turns out to be a turgidly overwritten Romantic autobiography of de Quincey, where he professes to confess the troubles of his life and his innermost emotions; however, with de Quincey, author of On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts , the more he confesses about his life, the more puzzling it becomes why he is boring us with his melodramatic autobiography which ultimately has so little to do with the humdrum entirely ordinary circumstances of his opium addiction, the less one believes him, and the more suspicion builds up that de Quincey is doing the exact opposite of confessing, he is instead an octopus camouflaging his real gothic self under a cloud of ink.

One senses that de Quincey is engaged more in playing a role: No one is to blame for this missed encounter, least of all Galland. Having gotten through the biography part, one finally gets the opium proper and since it is such a short book really, an essay , the opium parts are surprisingly short for what is the first major description of opium and opium addiction in English. Some of the excerpts:. It is a rest introductory to another rest, and divided by a whole day and two nights from the renewal of toil.

On this account I feel always, on a Saturday night, as though I also were released from some yoke of labour, had some wages to receive, and some luxury of repose to enjoy. For the sake, therefore, of witnessing, upon as large a scale as possible, a spectacle with which my sympathy was so entire, I used often on Saturday nights, after I had taken opium, to wander forth, without much regarding the direction or the distance, to all the markets and other parts of London to which the poor resort of a Saturday night, for laying out their wages.

Many a family party, consisting of a man, his wife, and sometimes one or two of his children, have I listened to, as they stood consulting on their ways and means, or the strength of their exchequer, or the price of household articles. Gradually I became familiar with their wishes, their difficulties, and their opinions. Sometimes there might be heard murmurs of discontent, but far oftener expressions on the countenance, or uttered in words, of patience, hope, and tranquillity.

And taken generally, I must say that, in this point at least, the poor are more philosophic than the rich-that they show a more ready and cheerful submission to what they consider as irremediable evils or irreparable losses. Whenever I saw occasion, or could do it without appearing to be intrusive, I joined their parties, and gave my opinion upon the matter in discussion, which, if not always judicious, was always received indulgently. If wages were a little higher or expected to be so, or the quartern loaf a little lower, or it was reported that onions and butter were expected to fall, I was glad; yet, if the contrary were true, I drew from opium some means of consoling myself.

And now came a tremendous change, which, unfolding itself slowly like a scroll through many months, promised an abiding torment; and in fact it never left me until the winding up of my case. Hitherto the human face had mixed often in my dreams, but not despotically nor with any special power of tormenting. But now that which I have called the tyranny of the human face began to unfold itself. Perhaps some part of my London life might be answerable for this.

Be that as it may, now it was that upon the rocking waters of the ocean the human face began to appear; the sea appeared paved with innumerable faces upturned to the heavens-faces imploring, wrathful, despairing, surged upwards by thousands, by myriads, by generations, by centuries: A young Chinese seems to me an antediluvian man renewed. Even Englishmen, though not bred in any knowledge of such institutions, cannot but shudder at the mystic sublimity of castes that have flowed apart, and refused to mix, through such immemorial tracts of time; nor can any man fail to be awed by the names of the Ganges or the Euphrates.

It contributes much to these feelings that southern Asia is, and has been for thousands of years, the part of the earth most swarming with human life, the great officina gentium. Man is a weed in those regions. The vast empires also in which the enormous population of Asia has always been cast, give a further sublimity to the feelings associated with all Oriental names or images. In China, over and above what it has in common with the rest of southern Asia, I am terrified by the modes of life, by the manners, and the barrier of utter abhorrence and want of sympathy placed between us by feelings deeper than I can analyse.

I could sooner live with lunatics or brute animals. All this, and much more than I can say or have time to say, the reader must enter into before he can comprehend the unimaginable horror which these dreams of Oriental imagery and mythological tortures impressed upon me. Under the connecting feeling of tropical heat and vertical sunlights I brought together all creatures, birds, beasts, reptiles, all trees and plants, usages and appearances, that are found in all tropical regions, and assembled them together in China or Indostan.

From kindred feelings, I soon brought Egypt and all her gods under the same law. I was stared at, hooted at, grinned at, chattered at, by monkeys, by parroquets, by cockatoos. I ran into pagodas, and was fixed for centuries at the summit or in secret rooms: I was the idol; I was the priest; I was worshipped; I was sacrificed. I fled from the wrath of Brama through all the forests of Asia: Seeva laid wait for me. I came suddenly upon Isis and Osiris: I had done a deed, they said, which the ibis and the crocodile trembled at. I was buried for a thousand years in stone coffins, with mummies and sphynxes, in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids.

I was kissed, with cancerous kisses, by crocodiles; and laid, confounded with all unutterable slimy things, amongst reeds and Nilotic mud. I thus give the reader some slight abstraction of my Oriental dreams, which always filled me with such amazement at the monstrous scenery that horror seemed absorbed for a while in sheer astonishment. Sooner or later came a reflux of feeling that swallowed up the astonishment, and left me not so much in terror as in hatred and abomination of what I saw.

Over every form, and threat, and punishment, and dim sightless incarceration, brooded a sense of eternity and infinity that drove me into an oppression as of madness. Into these dreams only it was, with one or two slight exceptions, that any circumstances of physical horror entered. All before had been moral and spiritual terrors. But here the main agents were ugly birds, or snakes, or crocodiles; especially the last. The cursed crocodile became to me the object of more horror than almost all the rest. I was compelled to live with him, and as was always the case almost in my dreams for centuries.

And so often did this hideous reptile haunt my dreams that many times the very same dream was broken up in the very same way: I heard gentle voices speaking to me I hear everything when I am sleeping , and instantly I awoke. It was broad noon, and my children were standing, hand in hand, at my bedside-come to show me their coloured shoes, or new frocks, or to let me see them dressed for going out.

I protest that so awful was the transition from the damned crocodile, and the other unutterable monsters and abortions of my dreams, to the sight of innocent human natures and of infancy, that in the mighty and sudden revulsion of mind I wept, and could not forbear it, as I kissed their faces. The dream commenced with a music which now I often heard in dreams-a music of preparation and of awakening suspense, a music like the opening of the Coronation Anthem, and which, like that , gave the feeling of a vast march, of infinite cavalcades filing off, and the tread of innumerable armies.

The morning was come of a mighty day-a day of crisis and of final hope for human nature, then suffering some mysterious eclipse, and labouring in some dread extremity. Somewhere, I knew not where-somehow, I knew not how-by some beings, I knew not whom-a battle, a strife, an agony, was conducting, was evolving like a great drama or piece of music, with which my sympathy was the more insupportable from my confusion as to its place, its cause, its nature, and its possible issue.

I, as is usual in dreams where of necessity we make ourselves central to every movement , had the power, and yet had not the power, to decide it. I had the power, if I could raise myself to will it, and yet again had not the power, for the weight of twenty Atlantics was upon me, or the oppression of inexpiable guilt.

Deeper than ever plummet sounded, I lay inactive. Then like a chorus the passion deepened. Some greater interest was at stake, some mightier cause than ever yet the sword had pleaded, or trumpet had proclaimed. Then came sudden alarms, hurryings to and fro, trepidations of innumerable fugitives - I knew not whether from the good cause or the bad, darkness and lights, tempest and human faces, and at last, with the sense that all was lost, female forms, and the features that were worth all the world to me, and but a moment allowed-and clasped hands, and heart-breaking partings, and then - everlasting farewells!

And with a sigh, such as the caves of Hell sighed when the incestuous mother uttered the abhorred name of death, the sound was reverberated - everlasting farewells!

And again and yet again reverberated - everlasting farewells! Apropos of an investigation into Long Bets as a charitable giving opportunity , I read through them.

What is Kobo Super Points?

Market is, Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway stay away from the general stock market. Reading through, I am stuck by the critical roles played by captive insurance companies and by buying private companies which are not on the stock markets; the methods are radically different from those of hedge funds like Thorp or RenTech, which focus on mispricings in the stock market and whose long-term successes might indeed show substantial weaknesses to the weak EMH.

As Buffett puts it:. Occasionally, though, either because of company-specific problems or a worldwide shortage of credit, maturities must actually be met by payment. For that, only cash will do the job. Borrowers then learn that credit is like oxygen. When either is abundant, its presence goes unnoticed. Even a short absence of credit can bring a company to its knees. By being so cautious in respect to leverage, we penalize our returns by a minor amount.

Having loads of liquidity, though, lets us sleep well. Moreover, during the episodes of financial chaos that occasionally erupt in our economy, we will be equipped both financially and emotionally to play offense while others scramble for survival. Step 2 is interesting. Given all these facts, one has to ask: If he went into why BH insurance was so efficient and well-priced, I might have been more impressed by his skills.

Step 4 is something of an exception that proves the rule. If Buffett has to wait a decade for major vulture buying opportunities, that implies that such mispricings are actually quite rare, since he is not out routinely making such deals. Here he clearly benefits from the unique access to insurance floats to have lots of large but very cheap capital to throw around. One has to suspect that any returns from that are not that impressive after accounting for that, a pool of money simply not available to most investors.

So the critical steps are either forever vanished there will never be inefficiencies in stocks and warrants as enormous as they were in the ss, and there will perhaps never again be an economic boom to compare with the US post-WWII return on all American equities or irreproducible there are only so many insurers , and Buffett appears to have benefited from a large helping of luck: Looking at how he did it, I feel certain that if Buffett were reborn today and handed a copy of Graham, he would find it thoroughly useless and not die a billionaire.

This is not going to end well and indeed it did not - and in early letters he focuses heavily on inflation long after it had been tamed at what cost to investment decisions, one wonders , and then in the s forecast doom for the US via the trade deficit which thus far has not eventuated and he quietly dropped the topic altogether. So to sum up based on his letters: Buffett made his money largely off the efficient stock markets in irreproducible ways exploiting individual irrationality while benefiting from historical and personal luck and is a poor example for anyone trying to argue that the weak EMH is sufficiently false as to make stockpicking a good idea.

His investment advice is not particularly impressive or actionable does anyone need to be told to invest in indexes now? Keene, as it happens, wrote a preface to this edition. Keene is, if anything, far too kind to the Introduction. Loyalty, filial piety, brotherly affection, conjugal devotion, faithfulness, etc, taught by Confucianism, were virtues that had naturally grown within, and been fostered by, the clan system of Japan. As Keene notes, the mentions of poverty undercut the Edenic pretensions, to which I would add the disturbingly frequent regularity of dead bodies by the road side, drafting peasants for border guards, conquest expeditions, and vagueness and lack of mention of any genuine accomplishments in the frequent praise of the emperors.

I suppose as a surviving example of imperial propaganda, the Introduction is of some interest on its own but I wonder if it can be trusted for background and if Keene was right in keeping it unedited from the original version. In any event, the poems are the main event, and Keene praises the translation as of high literary quality, so I should not be let down. They are clearly ancestors, showing both the early development of the waka and what would become stock themes, but also roads not taken , in particular the long verse forms like the choka.

The waka could never express a vivid description of warfare like Hitomaro does in one choka, and it would be difficult indeed to think of a waka or several waka which could equate to his choka mourning his wife. On the downside, while the choka are impressive, for the most part, I am left unimpressed by the MSY corpus. Almost all poems come across in the English as plain statements and restatements. Yes, I know the MSY style is to be straightforward and not as indirect or complicated as the later Heian poems like the Kokinshu - but still.

A poem should not read like prose. And for the most part, they do. Photography book of cluttered Tokyo apartments, illustrating messy everyday life and various approaches. The brief biography sketches mention rock music critics, music critics, teachers, students at an elite art college, fashion models, NHK documentary cameramen, computer programmer American expats, mangaka, etc, so Tsuzuki clearly recruited by word of mouth and personal acquaintances so I must note that this is not remotely a representative population sample.

Scanning my own books has saved me a great deal of space, and in many respects a scan is more useful. Fax machines are obsolete everywhere except Japan and can be thrown out. Modern flatscreen TVs take up much less space than the old CRT boxes and can be put on shelves because they are so thin, costing no usable space. Radios and boom boxes are obsoleted by smartphones, as are landlines and the giant chunky wireless phones and the answering machines and the grotesquely large word processor I spotted in one room. Even appliances like heaters or air conditioners have gradually shrunk in size and improved in efficiency over the past 20 years.

It ended in with the announcement of a Kickstarter for his book Renaming of the Birds. I was not pleased to hear that it was ending in favor of a short novel, but I did notice in the announcement:. Barn Owl reward plus the original artwork for the Series 2 Buttercup Festival comic of your choice! First backers are first choosers, so let David know your top choices in order of preference.

Now that was a different story. Plus, apparently I might get some books or something as well. I immediately subscribed and submitted my preferences:. The Kickstarter succeeded and the printing of the book went through apparently without much issue, so I received my package in early January The original of comic turns out to be a sheet of stiffish paper about So I was satisfied and just needed to find a frame for it. I scanned it to have a backup copy:. The cooling, still-warm blue of September rolls westward …Their daughter toe-steps among the twizzles of melon vine, which follow everything, seek everything, labouring now and again to fatten a soul sweet and blind.

We roll up our sleeves to the shoulder, we dip our children in greeny ponds. It is only for us that catbirds mock cats. It is only for us that pumpkinseeds float in weedy splendour, flecked like whittles of sun. There is one short poem at the end, but it seems they were all split out as the companion pamphlet The Fountain along with unused illustrations. The Kickstarter for it describes it as. The book is in the form of a journal kept by the clerk, and proceeds through a whole year, as he ventures farther and farther into the woods, looking for new birds to rename.

He ends up sleeping outdoors, travelling all around, building a winter den and going a bit crazy. This is not inaccurate a summary, but it overemphasizes the renaming part: Which is too bad because I thought it was a nice parody; for example, the letter with the assignment:. It has been determined that the recent phenomenon of Bird Death Unhappiness will best be avoided by a process of de-bird-familiarization.

We are therefore undertaking to render birds less familiar, and this will be accomplished through the assignment of new bird names. The task of bird name reassignment will be passed to the appropriate local agencies, to be staffed at their discretion. Agents should rename every type of bird within their town.

I had to read that fifteen or twenty times before it began to sound like real words. But the gist of it, I think, is that they wanted me to rename the birds. It is Orwellian bureaucratic reasoning that would not be one bit out of place in England. So he sets off to the woods, and of course meets a woman there. In a few more vignettes wandering the woods, he kills time and renames some more birds.

He declines to rename swans, and is puzzle by sparrows. It becomes an extended camping trip: He survives the snow by making a lean-to. After winter, he wanders his way back, eventually returning to his house. Wandering around some more, he re-meets the woman and together they wander out into the woods and watch birds. The writing is fair enough. It does indeed feel like a journal of a long camp-out, and Troupes is doubtless taking a lot of material from life. Krebs has been engaged in a little war with Russian spammers: All the leaks means he can do an unusually thorough job of documenting it and the principals, and the involvement of the Russian government in the e-crime scene.

One downside is that the book comes off as a bit stream of consciousness and disorganized: And I used the word journalistic deliberately: His overheated writing aside, his own sources make the case that spam is not that important; eg towards the end:. The two are now widely reviled on cybercrime forums for costing spammers tens of millions of dollars in profits, and for focusing attention from law-enforcement officials and security experts on individual spammers. These two fuckers killed the spam business, Vishnevsky said in a May interview.

It was never super profitable for most guys; maybe five to ten guys earned really good money with spam. But after Pavel and Gusev started their war, everyone started thinking that every spammer is a millionaire and started hunting for spam and spammers. This business went to shit when Pasha [Vrublevsky] got busted. If Pasha and Gusev [had] not start[ed] that stupid war, everyone would be much happier. The spam industry has indeed taken a huge hit in the past few years.

According to Symantec, by March , spam levels had fallen to just over one billion junk messages per day, and the total has hovered at or very close to that diminished level ever since. In other spots, Krebs makes mistakes or does not exhibit as much critical thinking as one would like: As is not that surprising in retrospect, inasmuch as the language turned out to be the obvious one and lots of proper names survived into Greek sources and so were available for Rosetta Stone-style comparison. So a sobering double lesson for modern researchers: One of the things I dread in a work like this is an author who is in a hurry to cover up and hide all the technical details and dreads that her audience is too dumb, ignorant, and impatient to reach any genuine understanding and settles for lies to children.

She seems to avoid this trap and I felt, at least as a non-classicist and non-linguist, that I got an intelligible and reasonably accurate understanding of the intellectual puzzle and accomplishment of the decipherers. But was Linear B really worth reading about? The decipherment of hieroglyphics, of course, unlocked an extraordinary array of Egyptian riches from the baroque mythology, endless ancient Egyptian history, and many interesting magical, religious, and everyday letters and documents; there is no question as a layperson that you are interested in what hieroglyphics have to say even more than in how they say it and how they were unlocked.

Mesopotamian clay documents are often boring, but so many survive and give us things like Gilgamesh that there too the results seem worth learning about, even the commercial ones which can build up a whole market economy before our eyes. With Linear B… the deciphering turns out to be the most interesting part.

The documents are boring and the world depicted in the administrivia is about exactly what you would expect from reading about the palace, a totalitarian agricultural economy, and are a disappointment. A few enigmatic names and allusions are a poor catch. With Linear B, the journey is more interesting than the destination, which makes the account somewhat sterile.

The end of the battle sees a stack of revelations unfold, including at least two that could be called literal deus ex machina s, the failure of the Great Crusade and the second resurrection of the No-God. I would worry about spoilers here but seriously, you are reading R. This sets the stage for, presumably, another trilogy covering the fight against the No-God and Achamian re-enacting the First Apocalypse. Home Site Me New: Dysgenics Bibliography External links. Somewhere in California, in the s, a nuclear weapons lab develops advanced technologies for its post-Cold War mission.

Advanced as in not working yet. Mission as in continued funding. A scandal-plagued missile defense program presses forward, dragging physicist Philip Quine deep into the machinations of those who would use the lab for their own gain. The Soviet Union has collapsed. But new enemies are sought, and new reasons found to continue the work that has legitimized the power of the Lab, its managers, and the politicians who fund them.

Quine is thrust into the center of programs born at the intersection of paranoia, greed, and ambition, and torn by incommensurable demands. Deadlines slip and cost overruns mount. He is drawn into a maelstrom of policy meetings, classified documents, petty betrayals, interrupted conversations, missed meanings, unanswered voicemail, stolen data, and pornographic files. Amid all the noise and static of the late twentieth century made manifest in weapons and anti-weapons, human beings have set in motion a malign and inhuman reality, which now is beyond their control.

More than a critique of corrupt science and a permanent wartime economy, Radiance is a novel of lost ideals, broken aspirations, and human costs. Failure is just another word for opportunity. Spin is a property not of atomic particles but of the news cycle. Nature is a blur beyond the windshield, where lives are spent on the road, on the phone, on the make, in fierce competition for financial, political, and intellectual resources.

It is a world which language is used to evade, manipulate, and expedite. Years ago, I ran into a book review titled Its awful and enticing radiance: Timmel Duchamp; about a novel I had never heard of by an author I had never heard of, but it sounded interesting and I read the review until towards the end, it quote a key passage in Radiance: A murmur of rain had started again.

He lay there in the abyss of his thoughts as her breathing beside him steadied and deepened. Almost a voice stirred in him. It starts before Hanford, it almost said. Who could imagine that this radiance at the heart of matter could be malign? That with its light came fire? Yet from the first the ashen bones were there to see within the flesh. It starts with Becquerel carrying the radium in his pocket that burned his skin, and darkened the unexposed film.

It starts with Marie Curie poisoning herself in that pale uncanny glow. With Rutherford guessing at this new alchemy, guessing that matter, giving up its glow, transformed itself one element into another. With the miners at Joachimsthal, deep under the Erzgebirge, inhaling the dust of uranium and dying of mountain sickness.

With Oppenheimer at Jornada del Muerte that morning of Trinity. With the scientists who had prised open the gates to that blazing realm past heaven or hell. What were they now at the Lab in all their thousands, but the colonial bureaucrats of that realm, the followers and functionaries, the clerks and commissars?

Mere gatekeepers of that power. Or in its keeping.

Bad Astronomy

It goes of its own momentum beyond Hanford, to Trinity, to Hiroshima, to the prisoners, the cancer patients, the retarded children, the pregnant women injected or fed this goblin matter to see would it bring health or sickness, the soldiers huddled in trenches against the flash, bones visible in their arms through closed eyes, staring up at the roiling cloudrise, the sheepherders, the farms, the homes, the gardens downwind.

And in his sleep the voice long stilled spoke once more. It starts with Sforza; in case of need I will make bombards, mortars, and firethrowing engines of beautiful and practical design. It starts where we start. It is mind, it is hunger, it is greed, it is defense, it is mischief, it is the devil, it is the god; it is life. The force of the incantation struck me and a few years later, a copy finally appeared in my local library system.

A hallmark of Radiance is the Gibsonian sense of alien entities and organisms clashing for life, at a level above individuals: Here I borrow a term from Kevin Kelly and refer to the Technium: Section two turns to the unseated Highet: The Biblical and Wagnerian overtones are strong in this section.

Section three completes the work. Just like Dune Messiah thoroughly subverted and undermined the simplistic narratives presented for the reader to swallow in Dune , part three shows the reader how Quine in his own turn is fully subverted by the environment, his sense of duty, and yes, his own belief in the desirability of progress. The imagery and parallelism at times is not even subtle: And finally, having been corrupted but having succeeded in securing the future of the National Ignition Facility which runs to this day , Quine is dealt the final blow: The Technium strives toward openness and proliferation.

Technology may be amoral but it has imperatives of its own. The book ends in Quine in despair and granted a moment of lucidity: He was on the shoulder turned sideways. Through the passenger window he saw traffic rush toward him and pass behind him. Ahead of him, smoke rose from fields of stubble, and a flight of bird, scattered by some disturbance, wheeled, now black, now white, against the empty burning sky.

In the heart of that light, lucid and inevitable, all that was scattered cohered. Superbright and all its progeny stood plain before him in conception and in detail and in its component part and its deepest strategies and in its awful and enticing radiance. He saw the design and the making of that device complete, and of further devices without end, and he stood apart from them as if it mattered not at all whether the deviser was himself or whether they came into being sooner or later. Trembling he stared across the burning fields and whispered, —Stop.

But the traffic rushed on. The 3 sections form closed circle: The reader expecting further satire will not be pleased by this section. And what would a tragedy be without there being a great gap between what we hoped a character might accomplish and what actually happens? The higher they can fly, the sadder a crash. Coyote, First Angry, enemy of all law, wanderer, desert mind, outlaw, spoiler, loser, clown, glutton, lecher, thief, cheat, pragmatist, survivor, bricoleur, silver-tongued Taliesin, latterday Leonardo, usurper Sforza, adulterer Lancelot, tell, wily one, by any means, of the man with two hearts, of knowledge and desire safely hidden from each other.

Did not Paracelsus command us to falsify and dissimulate so that ignorant men might not look upon our mysteries? Did not the noble da Vinci hide the meaning of his thought by the manner of his script? What man has not two masters, two minds, two hearts? Tell of the man so wounded in himself that he tore his second heart from him and cast it out, naming it the world, and swore to wound it as it had wounded him.

Progress is not inevitable. Knowledge can be lost look at scurvy. Science is not a formalized process, but a spirit of honesty and inquiry, which can be aped and the wordless teaching lost how can Japanese or Chinese researchers run hundred of experiments, apparently complying with all known standards, every single one of which concludes acupuncture works, when results elsewhere show dramatically lower success rates?

Anti-vaxxers to our left, Creationists to our right. Highet is not wrong - just one-sided.

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.

Far From the Madding Crowd

And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? Throughout the book, we know the work goes on. Transmutation has been realized as radioactive decay, while modern medicine would astound Bacon, and it does not seem absurd that in the next few centuries mankind will cure aging.

The double aspect pops up again, of fraud and greatness: Once upon a time, there was a man who was convinced that he possessed a Great Idea. Indeed, as the man thought upon the Great Idea more and more, he realized that it was not just a great idea, but the most wonderful idea ever. The Great Idea would unravel the mysteries of the universe, supersede the authority of the corrupt and error-ridden Establishment, confer nigh-magical powers upon its wielders, feed the hungry, heal the sick, make the whole world a better place, etc.

The man was Francis Bacon, his Great Idea was the scientific method, and he was the only crackpot in all history to claim that level of benefit to humanity and turn out to be completely right. It starts with Bacon… But the traffic rushes on. And the work goes on. Reminds me of Watchmen. Or to borrow from the official summary: An introverted teenage girl with an unconventional superpower, Taylor goes out in costume to find escape from a deeply unhappy and frustrated civilian life.

As she risks life and limb, Taylor faces the dilemma of having to do the wrong things for the right reasons…Readers should be cautioned that Worm is fairly dark as fiction goes, and it gets far darker as the story progresses. Just the opposite on every count, really. I recommend reading single arcs at a time: The work is not perfect. The opening is perhaps too slow: Diary of Anfisa Kramskaya. The Amazing Adventures of Cat and Mouse.

The Total Package Stories Collection 1 Stories Elf Finale Ed The Elf Elf Promotion Ed The Elf 4. Kids Attack Ed The Elf 7. Collection 2 Stories How to write a great review. The review must be at least 50 characters long. The title should be at least 4 characters long. Your display name should be at least 2 characters long. At Kobo, we try to ensure that published reviews do not contain rude or profane language, spoilers, or any of our reviewer's personal information. You submitted the following rating and review. We'll publish them on our site once we've reviewed them.

The title should be at least 4 characters long. Your display name should be at least 2 characters long. At Kobo, we try to ensure that published reviews do not contain rude or profane language, spoilers, or any of our reviewer's personal information. You submitted the following rating and review. We'll publish them on our site once we've reviewed them. Item s unavailable for purchase. Please review your cart. You can remove the unavailable item s now or we'll automatically remove it at Checkout.

Continue shopping Checkout Continue shopping. Chi ama i libri sceglie Kobo e inMondadori. Collection 2 Stories by Laura Fantasia. Buy the eBook Price: Available in Russia Shop from Russia to buy this item. Or, get it for Kobo Super Points! Ratings and Reviews 0 0 star ratings 0 reviews. Overall rating No ratings yet 0. How to write a great review Do Say what you liked best and least Describe the author's style Explain the rating you gave Don't Use rude and profane language Include any personal information Mention spoilers or the book's price Recap the plot.

Close Report a review At Kobo, we try to ensure that published reviews do not contain rude or profane language, spoilers, or any of our reviewer's personal information. Would you like us to take another look at this review? No, cancel Yes, report it Thanks! You've successfully reported this review. We appreciate your feedback. December 21, Imprint: You can read this item using any of the following Kobo apps and devices:

• The Christmas Gift. 13. The Chinese Figurine
• Astucias de Namorada, e Um melodrama em Santo Thyrso (Portuguese Edition)
• Culture, Capital and Representation
• Random Acts of the Alphabet
• Nature, History, State: 1933-1934 (Athlone Contemporary European Thinkers)
• Understanding the Child with an Atypical Personality (Understanding the Unique Personality of your Child Book 3)
• The Friendly Keyboard: Making Learning a Light-hearted Activity