Just Finished Reading: The Discovery of the Titanic by Dr Robert D Ballard (FP: 1987)

No one would have believed in April 1912 that after the RMS Titanic hit an iceberg on its maiden voyage across the Atlantic that it would ever be seen again. After all when it slipped beneath the waves that fateful night it had 2 miles of water beneath it before striking the muddy bottom. It wasn’t until many decades later that the technology had developed enough to even contemplate a return to the greatest of all shipwrecks.

But even with the technology it was to be no easy feat. First they had the find the wreck itself which proved to be much more difficult than first thought – especially as the last known position given by the stricken liner was guesswork as much as anything else. The first expedition tried and failed in its attempt using sophisticated sonar to map the ocean floor. But Bob Ballard had other ideas – his team would visually survey the ocean floor using the latest in video surveillance drones. The first team (largely French) swept the area and, despite some tantalising contacts, came up empty. The second team, mostly American, extended the area and finally had something to report and on September 1st 1985 announced to the waiting world that they had discovered the last resting place of the world’s greatest maritime legend.

Of course that wasn’t the end of things. After press conferences and TV spots the work behind the scenes went ahead and a second more detailed expedition was planned for the following year. Using state of the art and often completely experimental equipment the new team managed to extensively film, photograph and experience first-hand the majesty of the Titanic which (surprisingly to me at least) was largely intact with gleaming brass work, intact railings and even woodwork looking almost as new as the day she sailed. After a week on site Ballard’s team left some plaques commemorating the sinking and left the site largely undisturbed.

This was yet another of those books that I bought years previously, skimmed the text, looked at the many pictures and put the one side to forget about until recently. Although the technology has dated a great deal – photographs of the ships computers made me snigger – the results of the dives are quite staggering. Many of the photographs taken at the bottom of the ocean are reproduced here and provide a fascinating insight to what happened that night. Ballard had hope to confirm (or deny) the gash down the hull theory but discovered to everyone’s irritation that the front of the ship (now in two pieces) was too deeply buried in mud to answer that all absorbing question one way or another. Also having a much clearer idea of exactly where she sank, and the probable position of other near-by vessels (particularly the Carpathia and the Californian) Ballard was able to speculate on the Californian captain’s denial that he was in easy striking distance of Titanic and could, if he had acted correctly, have saved hundreds of more lives.

Overall this was an interesting book rather than a gripping one – but more than made up for this with its wealth of photographs and the author’s style of writing which was very open and accessible. Definitely recommended for any Titanic fans – or anyone interested in marine archaeology in general and the discovery of wrecked ships in particular.  

Cartoon Time.

Just Finished Reading: The Flame Throwers by Rachel Kushner (FP: 2013)

After graduating from Film School ‘Reno’ heads to the only place she can think of to learn her trade and start producing the art she knows she’s capable of – New York. It’s 1977 and New York is the art capital of the world. But after months of looking and trying nothing has happened – until she wanders into a bar meets a strange couple in the middle of a long running argument and is invited to a party downtown. Days later she receives an invitation to show her around the city by someone she is immediately drawn to. Having already learnt the danger of asking direct questions she slowly discovers that he’s the younger son of an Italian tyre and motorbike empire ‘slumming it’ in New York to escape his overbearing family in Milan – an empire that produces her favourite motorbike. Trying out her latest set of wheels (care of her now boyfriend) she hooks up with a group of Italian mechanics supporting a land speed record attempt and (briefly) becomes the fastest woman in the world at Bonneville Flats. Invited to go to Milan on a promotional photoshoot – and to create her first proper documentary film – her reluctant boyfriend agrees to ‘tag along’ and introduce her to his family. It’s a situation that quickly spirals out of control and Reno flees to Rome in an attempt to escape from her boyfriend’s betrayal. There she is at ground zero for an explosion of political radicalism, demonstrations and the terrorism of the Red Brigades. It’s all quite a coming of age.

The brief synopsis above hardly does credit to this frighteningly good novel (the author’s second). ‘Reno’ – the only name we know the main character and sometime narrator of her own life by – is fantastic as the youth addicted to speed, motorbikes and the need to find meaning in celluloid. Late 70’s New York is a fascinatingly chaotic, dangerous and run-down place seemingly full of offbeat, damaged and intriguing figures many of whom you don’t know whether to take seriously or not. The conversations are sparkling and disturbing in equal measure but never, never dull. Rome takes things to a whole new level. You can almost taste the tear gas in the back of your throat and hear the rhythm of the riot police as they bang their riot sticks against their shields prior to charging into the crowd. The tension on the city streets is quite palpable and certainly stays with you long after you’ve turned the last page. Above all else, character, plot, background, minor and major story diversions, the thing that struck me most about this quite excellent novel was the beauty of the writing. Above all else it was a delight to read. The crafting of every scene, every page, and every sentence was often astounding. I caught myself re-reading passages, not because I had lost my way or was struggling to understand a particularly difficult section but because I just loved the way it sounded – in my head or out loud. Luckily I read it mostly at home or my work colleagues would probably have thought that I’d finally tipped all the way over into madness (and my work would have suffered terribly as I wouldn’t have wanted to put the book down after my lunch break)!

Not only is this one of the best books I’ve read in a while I’d have to say that it’s one of the best I’ve read at all – and I’ve read quite a few. I’ll definitely be hunting out her earlier work and looking out for her next when it hits paperback. I’m not sure if I can recommend it too highly. There’s a lot going on – not exactly clear from my poor synopsis – and you do have to keep your eye on the ball – but the quality of the writing helps a great deal in keeping the focus where it’s needed. While not entirely effortless this is a dream of a read. I’m certainly glad that I impulse bought it when I did.  

Cartoon Time.

New Study Outlines 'Water World' Theory of Life's Origins

From  JPL NASA

April 15, 2014


Life took root more than four billion years ago on our nascent Earth, a wetter and harsher place than now, bathed in sizzling ultraviolet rays. What started out as simple cells ultimately transformed into slime molds, frogs, elephants, humans and the rest of our planet's living kingdoms. How did it all begin?

A new study from researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and the Icy Worlds team at NASA's Astrobiology Institute, based at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., describes how electrical energy naturally produced at the sea floor might have given rise to life. While the scientists had already proposed this hypothesis -- called "submarine alkaline hydrothermal emergence of life" -- the new report assembles decades of field, laboratory and theoretical research into a grand, unified picture.

According to the findings, which also can be thought of as the "water world" theory, life may have begun inside warm, gentle springs on the sea floor, at a time long ago when Earth's oceans churned across the entire planet. This idea of hydrothermal vents as possible places for life's origins was first proposed in 1980 by other researchers, who found them on the sea floor near Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. Called "black smokers," those vents bubble with scalding hot, acidic fluids. In contrast, the vents in the new study -- first hypothesized by scientist Michael Russell of JPL in 1989 -- are gentler, cooler and percolate with alkaline fluids. One such towering complex of these alkaline vents was found serendipitously in the North Atlantic Ocean in 2000, and dubbed the Lost City.

"Life takes advantage of unbalanced states on the planet, which may have been the case billions of years ago at the alkaline hydrothermal vents," said Russell. "Life is the process that resolves these disequilibria." Russell is lead author of the new study, published in the April issue of the journal Astrobiology.

Other theories of life's origins describe ponds, or "soups," of chemicals, pockmarking Earth's battered, rocky surface. In some of those chemical soup models, lightning or ultraviolet light is thought to have fueled life in the ponds.

The water world theory from Russell and his team says that the warm, alkaline hydrothermal vents maintained an unbalanced state with respect to the surrounding ancient, acidic ocean -- one that could have provided so-called free energy to drive the emergence of life. In fact, the vents could have created two chemical imbalances. The first was a proton gradient, where protons -- which are hydrogen ions -- were concentrated more on the outside of the vent's chimneys, also called mineral membranes. The proton gradient could have been tapped for energy -- something our own bodies do all the time in cellular structures called mitochondria.

The second imbalance could have involved an electrical gradient between the hydrothermal fluids and the ocean. Billions of years ago, when Earth was young, its oceans were rich with carbon dioxide. When the carbon dioxide from the ocean and fuels from the vent -- hydrogen and methane -- met across the chimney wall, electrons may have been transferred. These reactions could have produced more complex carbon-containing, or organic compounds -- essential ingredients of life as we know it. Like proton gradients, electron transfer processes occur regularly in mitochondria.

"Within these vents, we have a geological system that already does one aspect of what life does," said Laurie Barge, second author of the study at JPL. "Life lives off proton gradients and the transfer of electrons."

As is the case with all advanced life forms, enzymes are the key to making chemical reactions happen. In our ancient oceans, minerals may have acted like enzymes, interacting with chemicals swimming around and driving reactions. In the water world theory, two different types of mineral "engines" might have lined the walls of the chimney structures.

"These mineral engines may be compared to what's in modern cars," said Russell.
"They make life 'go' like the car engines by consuming fuel and expelling exhaust. DNA and RNA, on the other hand, are more like the car's computers because they guide processes rather than make them happen."

One of the tiny engines is thought to have used a mineral known as green rust, allowing it to take advantage of the proton gradient to produce a phosphate-containing molecule that stores energy. The other engine is thought to have depended on a rare metal called molybdenum. This metal also is at work in our bodies, in a variety of enzymes. It assists with the transfer of two electrons at a time rather than the usual one, which is useful in driving certain key chemical reactions.

"We call molybdenum the Douglas Adams element," said Russell, explaining that the atomic number of molybdenum is 42, which also happens to be the answer to the "ultimate question of life, the universe and everything" in Adams' popular book, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." Russell joked, "Forty-two may in fact be one answer to the ultimate question of life!"

The team's origins of life theory applies not just to Earth but also to other wet, rocky worlds.

"Michael Russell's theory originated 25 years ago and, in that time, JPL space missions have found strong evidence for liquid water oceans and rocky sea floors on Europa and Enceladus," said Barge. "We have learned much about the history of water on Mars, and soon we may find Earth-like planets around faraway stars. By testing this origin-of-life hypothesis in the lab at JPL, we may explain how life might have arisen on these other places in our solar system or beyond, and also get an idea of how to look for it."

For now, the ultimate question of whether the alkaline hydrothermal vents are the hatcheries of life remains unanswered. Russell says the necessary experiments are jaw-droppingly difficult to design and carry out, but decades later, these are problems he and his team are still happy to tackle.

[Looking good for life – indeed complex life – on Europa and Enceladus. Definitely sitting here with seriously crossed fingers!]

Just Finished Reading: To Save Everything, Click Here – Technology, Solutionism and the urge to fix problems that don’t exist by Evgeny Morozov (FP: 2013)

Can Technology in general or the Internet in particular solve all of our problems (or even most of them)? The author think the answer to that is a resounding NO. Why? Because those who are proposing their particular solutions – normally those most deeply embedded in the philosophy of ‘the Internet’ - are trying to fix problems that aren’t actually problems at all.

Peppered with countless examples of how these so-called ‘revolutionary times’ demand of us a radical rethink of everything we’ve done before (normally predicated on the old = bad/new = good dichotomy) this gripping, funny and thought provoking book is difficult to precis adequately. What is clear is that those who push ‘the Internet’ as the source code of solutionism do so either by being ignorant of or simply by ignoring the fact that similar ‘revolutions’ have happened before – notably with printing, the telegraph, radio and television that generated equally absurd claims of them heralding in a new (and very different) age allowing – or demanding – that we ditch everything that went before and start again with a new. Clean and (technologically much improved) slate. Computers, and the physical Internet they combine to create, have accelerated many of the already existing processes and (potentially at least) given many access to more but this itself is not a revolutionary break with the past. There is no great chasm in time between a world before and after the Internet came into being.

Those who believe that such a change has indeed occurred are convinced that, because we are living through an epoch changing revolutionary process, we must use the power we now have in our hands to advance the programme of change into every nook and cranny of human existence – from the way we buy books (who needs libraries when you have Amazon, e-readers and ‘the Cloud’), listen to our music (where algorithms can determine which music you’ll like before you know it yourself and can produce music to order at the touch of a button), read our newspapers (tailored to your tastes, beliefs, attention span and ability to pay), vote for our politicians (where we can listen to everything they’ve ever said and have ‘soundbites’ directed to our mobile devices reinforcing or destroying our confidence in the person, party or political process), and do our science (who needs elitist ‘experts’ when we can tap into the wisdom of crowds wiki-style to produce the next great breakthrough and where cutting edge research is crowd-sourced from the outset). What a brave new world we have to look forward to – where efficiency reigns and messy humanity is slowly eliminated through the application of more technology and greater processing power – coupled to ever greater disclosure of information so that we can be judged in the free market of ideas and traded as if we are commodities just like the things we wish to buy (and sell) to get by in a fast unforgiving world.

The author, as you might expect, will have none of it. Filled with highly intelligent and severely biting sarcasm, I found myself nodding in agreement, laughing out loud, shaking my head in exasperation (not at the author but at his unearthing of the latest stupid idea originating from Silicon Valley) and finding myself even more sceptical about the supposed advantages of the latest gadget, fad or social media website. One thing I remember making me chuckle a great deal was an honest piece of advice an Internet guru gave in an interview that if you started dating someone only to discover that they didn’t have a Facebook profile/account that you should find this very suspicious and should consider ditching them for someone with less to hide. There is even, apparently, a growing suspicion amongst global security agencies that not having a Facebook (or equivalent) presence on-line should be a red flag warning that the person is a (at least potential) subversive attempting to hide from the authorities! It made me wonder when such things are going to be made compulsory. If you do have any suspicions about the way things are going or have just wondered what the future on-line is likely to be like then this is definitely the book for you. Be warned though it might make you reconsider your on-line activities which might get you on a watch list somewhere. You have been warned!  

Cartoon Time.

Eye-Catching Titles

Having a roving eye and a butterfly mind (a rather dangerous combination sometimes!) I do, rather inevitably, zero in on books with interesting covers or eye-catching titles. Stephen over @ This Week at the Library posted something recently on such titles and I was just going to post a handful of my books in response – until I actually went through my archives and ended up with over two pages worth! Some are more eye-catching than others but all of them I feel have a special something that made me notice them. They are (in reverse order of review):

You are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier

The Little Old Lady Who Broke All the Rules by Catharina Ingelman-Sundberg

Zombie Economics – How Dead Ideas still Walk Among Us by John Quiggin

The Fishing Fleet – Husband Hunting in the Raj by Anne De Courcy

French Women Don’t Get Fat – The Secret of Eating for Pleasure by Mireille Guiliano

Philosophy for Life and Other Dangerous Situations by Jules Evans

Dracula Cha Cha Cha by Kim Newman

Star Trek and Philosophy – The Wrath of Kant edited by Jason T Eberl and Keven S Decker

The Lord of the Rings and Philosophy - One Book to Rule Them All edited by Gregory Bassham and Eric Bronson

Spies in the Sky – The Secret Battle for Aerial Intelligence during World War II by Taylor Downing

Wired for War – The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century by P W Singer

Heaven – A Traveller’s Guide to the Undiscovered Country by Peter Stanford

Your Inner Fish – The amazing discovery of our 375-million-year-old ancestor by Neil Shubin

The Immortalization Commission – The Strange Quest to Cheat Death by John Gray

Love & Sex with Robots – The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships by David Levy

Stoic Warriors – The Ancient Philosophy behind the Military Mind by Nancy Sherman

Terminator and Philosophy – I’ll be Back, therefore I Am edited by Richard Brown and Kevin S Decker

A Girl’s Guide to Guns and Monsters edited by Martin H Greenberg and Kerrie Hughes

Unless the Threat of Death is Behind Them – Hard-Boiled Fiction and Film Noir by John T Irwin

How to Survive the Titanic or The Sinking of J Bruce Ismay by Frances Wilson

Zombies, Vampires, and Philosophy – New Life for the Undead edited by Richard Greene and K Silem Mohammad

The Fly in the Cathedral – How a small group of Cambridge scientists won the race to split the atom by Brian Cathcart

The Buried Soul – How Humans Invented Death by Timothy Taylor

The Planet in a Pebble – A Journey into Earth’s Deep History by Jan Zalasiewicz

Say It With Bullets by Richard Powell

Dune and Philosophy – The Weirding Way of the Mentat edited by Jeffery Nicholas

Strange Days Indeed – The Golden Age of Paranoia by Francis Wheen

The Age of Absurdity – Why Modern life makes it hard to be Happy by Michael Foley

Slayers and their Vampires: A Cultural History of Killing the Dead by Bruce A McClelland

A Pelican in the Wilderness – Hermits, Solitaries and Recluses by Isabel Colegate

The Golden Compass and Philosophy – God bites the Dust edited by Richard Greene and Rachel Robinson

Guns, Germs and Steel – A Short History of Everybody for the last 13,000 Years by Jared Diamond

The Philosopher and the Wolf – Lessons from the Wild on Love, Death and Happiness by Mark Rowlands

Pastwatch – The Redemption of Christopher Columbus by Orson Scott Card

Amazing Tales for making Men out of Boys by Neil Oliver

Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of the Soul – A Study in Heroic Individualism by Leslie Paul Thiele

The Shock of the Old – Technology and Global History since 1900 by David Edgerton

The Vengeful Virgin by Gil Brewer

Black Mass – Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia by John Gray

Rousseau’s Dog – Two Great Thinkers at War in the Age of Enlightenment by David Edmonds & John Eidinow

Basic Flying Instruction – A Comprehensive Introduction to Western Philosophy by Charles Gidley Wheeler

The Coming Anarchy – Shattering the Dreams of the post Cold War by Robert D Kaplan

Empires of Belief – Why we need more Scepticism and Doubt in the 21st Century by Stuart Sim.

Narcissus in Chains by Laurell K. Hamilton

The Last Stand of the DNA Cowboys by Mick Farren

Warrior Politics – Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos by Robert D Kaplan.

Six Impossible Things before Breakfast – The Evolutionary Origins of Belief by Lewis Wolpert.

The London Vampire Panic by Michael Romkey

God's Funeral by A.N. Wilson

The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet by Margaret Wertheim

Cartoon Time.

A Quote that keeps on Giving.........

Microsoft reveals details of Windows 10 usage tracking

By Chris Baraniuk for BBC News

7 January 2016


Microsoft has revealed details about the data it is tracking via its new operating system (OS), Windows 10. In a blog, the firm listed statistics on how many minutes had been spent by users in total in the Edge browser and the number of photographs which had been viewed in the Photo app. The firm also said that Windows 10 was now active on over 200 million devices. However, some people have questioned whether the data tracking is a threat to privacy.

Since Windows 10 was launched, Microsoft has been tracking information about how those with the OS are using it. Until now though, relatively little has been known about what data is being collected. "Microsoft is deeply committed to protecting our customers' privacy," a spokesman for the company told the BBC. "Consistent with all modern services and websites, the Windows 10 information highlighted in the blog on January 4 is standard diagnostic, anonymous analytics that enables us to deliver the best Windows 10 experience possible. We are committed to delivering industry leading privacy protection for our customers, as shared in a recent blog from Terry Myerson."

The company blog listed a range of figures, including:

  44.5 billion minutes spent by users in the Microsoft Edge browser across Windows 10 devices
  2.4 billion questions asked to virtual assistant Cortana
  30% more Bing search queries per Windows 10 device versus previous versions of  the OS
  82 billion photos viewed with the Photo app
  More than four billion hours spent playing PC games

Microsoft also reported that Windows 10 continued to be the fastest growing version of Windows, outpacing the adoption of both Windows 8 and Windows 7. Security expert Prof Alan Woodward told the BBC he was interested to know the long-term plans for the data. "[This information] might be collected for one purpose, but how long will it be stored for? What else are they going to use it for?" he said. "As soon as it goes outside the EU it's no longer protected by things like the UK's Data Protection Act." Recently, Microsoft announced it would be opening UK data centres for corporate clients in a move the firm hoped would address privacy watchdogs' concerns about "data sovereignty". However, it is not clear where data relating to the company's own operating system is transmitted and stored.

It is possible to increase the privacy controls in Windows 10 by setting the feedback option to Basic, so that activity data is not sent to Microsoft - bar error reports. However, Prof Woodward suggested that users of the new OS may not be fully aware of the range of options and what they do. "I've noticed it because I've been installing it a lot recently. The default is for them to track a whole lot of things about usage and send details back to Microsoft," he said. "I think some people are walking into it blindfolded, they don't necessarily realise what's going on."

[No great surprise there – Windows 10 is spyware – or at least has spyware components to “deliver the best Windows 10 experience possible”. Maybe you want to check your settings? Especially as 85% of people never change the defaults on any device they have. Needless to say I have not yet installed my ‘free’ ‘upgrade’.]

Just Finished Reading: The Separation by Christopher Priest (FP: 2002)

After finishing his study of the German invasion of Russia historian Stuart Gratton is looking for another topic to investigate. He could try another epic already approved by his publisher about the US war in China and the subsequent decline of America in world affairs or something more focused, more personal, a mystery of identity. For as long as he can remember Gratton has been fascinated with the end of the war in Europe which coincided with his birth on May 10, 1941. Now he has found something else about that fateful date so long ago – the involvement of twin brothers, one in RAF Bomber Command and the other a worker in the Red Cross mentioned in Winston Churchill’s magisterial account of the conflict. But there the confusion starts – Churchill has confused the conscientious objector with the squadron leader and asked his staff to find out more. Is it just a misunderstanding too trivial to publically resolve or is there more to it. Would Graffton be wasting his time even investigating something so trivial and would a book resolving any mystery sell in numbers to justify the expense? But when the squadron leaders daughter provides him with an unpublished manuscript the mystery deepens even further. Memories of participating in huge bombing raids over Germany at late as 1945 call everything into question as do reports of surviving or dying during a crash into the English Channel in 1941. Which account is true? Whose memory is playing tricks? Did the twins even exist as separate people and what has Rudolf Hess got to do with everything?

Chris Priest is one of those authors with a gift. It’s the way he can start a story on solid ground and then, little by little, in logical steps, bend reality in such a way that you start to question everything. It’s not that fantastic elements overwhelm the story, it’s completely rational and makes complete sense. The war ended in 1941 and/or 1945. Bomber pilot Jack Sawyer, died/survived in 1941 and continued to fly until being shot down over Germany and spent the last 2 years of the war as a prisoner until the camp he was in was liberated by the Americans who never actually entered the war in Europe as Pearl Harbour never happened and anyway the European war was over in the Spring of 1941. To hold that many (and more) alternate histories in the palm of your hand and to keep them all nicely interacting until you no longer know what is or is not the ‘real’ history of the world post May ’41 without sending the reader mad is quite something to behold.

As you can imagine for such a superbly crafted but oh so complex plot you really, and I mean really, need to keep your wits about you. This is definitely not a book you can breeze through. You need to concentrate. Fortunately it’s gripping in a way that I haven’t read for some time. The book literally fascinates and I found myself turning pages late into the night (thankfully on my Christmas break). It got me thinking about a great deal – for days afterwards – about how the war could have ended in 1941. Could Britain, with Churchill in charge, really have signed a separate peace with the Germans? If so how would the world have turned out? I know that Hess flew to Scotland in 1941 but was there any real hope of peace at that point? Could our reality just be a failed version of what really did happen at the peace conference in Portugal where a lasting peace was brokered by the Red Cross and the Neutral Powers? I know that Hitler tried to make peace with Britain a few times but was he really serious? I don’t really know and, to be honest, it’s not a subject that gets talked about much in any WW2 books I’ve ever come across to date. They were bad, we were good, and we won. End of story. But what if…..?

It came as no surprise that this excellent work of SF/Alt History won the 2003 Arthur C Clarke Award. It’s one of the best SF books I’ve read in years and goes well beyond being merely thought provoking. Because of it I will be focusing a lot more on the first two years of ‘our’ WW2 to see if it could have been any different than it was. I wonder what I’ll find in the shadowy background and in-between the cracks of reality. Very highly recommended and a cracking start to 2016.

Cartoon Time.

Just not going to happen.....................

The Best Books of 2015

I reviewed 69 books here in 2015 although I rejected one of them after around 200 pages (which in the grand scheme of things isn’t bad and means that I can at least pick readable books). I think 2015 was a pretty good year book wise with a lot of variety and I’ve been pleased by my introduction of the ‘blitz’ method of reading three books on a particular subject is short succession rather than allowing my butterfly mind to drift around as the whim takes it. There will definitely be more blitzing this year! Ever so slowly I am getting my reading under a bit more control though I have built in a bit of randomness just in case. But to the books themselves:

Fiction:

The Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie
Every Last Drop by Charlie Huston
Divergent by Veronica Roth
The Greenstone Grail by Amanda Hemingway
The Other Queen by Philippa Gregory
Labyrinth by Kate Mosse
The Traitors Sword by Amanda Hemingway
The Mechanical by Ian Tegillis
Zero History by William Gibson
The Blood Spilt by Asa Larsson
The Winter Queen by Boris Akunin
Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada
Under Fire by Henri Barbusse

That, I think, is a nice mix of Crime, SF, Fantasy, Historical and Vampire fiction. There’s also a gratifying number of female and non-Anglo-American authors appearing in the list which is good from a multi-perspective point of view. So I’m pleased with that.

Non-Fiction:

1913 – The World Before the Great War by Charles Emmerson
How to Live – A Life of Montaigne by Sarah Bakewell
Singled Out by Virginia Nicolson
Iron Curtain by Anne Applebaum
Conquest – The English Kingdom of France in the 100 Years War by Juliet Baker
Empire and the English Character by Kathryn Tidrick
Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit
Butcher and Bolt by David Loyn
Return of a King by William Dalrymple
The Republic by Charles Townshend
Drone Theory by Gregoire Chamayou
The Rebel Sell by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter
Titanic Lives by Richard Davenport-Hines

That’s a lot of History as you might expect from my defining interest in the subject although I think it’s a wide ranging historical focus rather than anything too narrow (I’m too interested in too much to be focused on anything for very long). I do feel that I’m ignoring WW1 a bit – contrary to my original plan – and I seem to be skirting around the edges of WW2 but that’ll be rectified this year. I’ve recently developed a real interest in the first 2 years of the war – basically between September 1939 and December 1941 – when Britain basically stood alone against the Germans. So 2016 should see some reading on The Battle of Britain, North Africa, The Battle of the Atlantic, Dunkirk and various early attacks on Fortress Europe…. At least that’s the plan. Of course I’ll be continuing my ‘blitz’ method and the next few will include Germany, The Human Race, The Working Class, Tanks, The Vikings and War Reporting. If I can fit all of that into a single year I’ll be impressed with myself. I’ll try to increase my output a little (75 should be achievable although 80 would be even better) but some of the upcoming reads are 500+ pages so I’ll have to fit in a few more shorter faster reads as well. But that’s all in the future. I’m looking forward to it.

Cartoon Time.

Still no snow here - or for the next 5 days......

US military shelves Google robot plan over 'noise concerns'

From The BBC

30 December 2015

The US army says it has mothballed plans to deploy a robot developed in conjunction with Google because it is "too loud". The Legged Squad Support System - referred to by some as "the big dog" – is capable of carrying 400lbs (181.4kg) of equipment over rugged terrain. But the US Marines now say its petrol-powered engine is too noisy for them to use in battle. Google has long said it planned to move away from its military contracts. The LS3 was developed by Boston Dynamics - a robotics firm acquired by Google in 2013 - as part of a tie-up with the Pentagon's research arm, the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa).

The robot can follow troops on foot through rugged terrain, carrying their gear. It can also interpret verbal and visual commands. However, after a major field trial in 2014, flaws in the robot also became apparent, according to Kyle Olson, a spokesman for the Marines' Warfighting Lab. "There was the challenge of seeing [its] potential... because of the limitations of the robot itself," he told Military.com. "They took it as it was: a loud robot that's going to give away their position." The machine, which has a gas-powered engine, is said to emit a lawnmower-like noise that would be unviable in combat situations. It is also thought to be difficult to repair. In response, Boston Dynamics did create a quieter, electric-powered alternative, called Spot. But despite successful trials in September 2015, the Marines have decided not to take it forward either. This, they said, was because Spot is smaller, can only carry up to 40lbs, and lacks the automation capacity of the LS3.

Google said as far back as 2013 that it planned to move away from its military contracts, which it inherited as part of its acquisition of the company. The tech firm has said it intends to develop robots for use in manufacturing and industry instead. Noel Sharkey, co-director of the Foundation for Responsible Robotics, told the BBC: "Spot ... lacks the autonomous operation of Big Dog, but that really is not so much of a problem and would not require a vast amount of research. The problem is that to take the extra steps need to upgrade the battery-driven Spot to the level of Big Dog could require a couple of years development or more and thus a new Darpa contract. So, what this looks like is a face saving statement by the Marine Corps to make it look like they are dumping Google/Boston Dynamics before they got dumped themselves."

[Interesting. It looks like the advent of military robotics isn’t just around the corner. Also interesting that, yet again, compact low noise power plants are the problem. I’m sure if someone can sort out decently powerful batteries they’d be raking in money faster than you could say – well, anything really. But of course there are plenty of applications where stealth isn’t so important. Maybe in the not too distant future we’ll have our parcels delivered by dog sized robots rather than drones?]

Happy New Year! I hope that last night lived up to expectations and that 2016 will exceed them!