Blathering for Sunday, 20 July 2008, and other posts

Content here is by:
Michael Still
mikal@stillhq.com

All my Open Source projects
Extracted view of CVS
Home
Site map

See recent comments. RSS feed of all comments. Raw dump of all comments for research purposes.

ImageMagick book
MythTV book


	Sun, 20 Jul 2008

Blathering for Sunday, 20 July 2008

18:00

The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete

At what point does one say that its easier to simply measure all occurances of something than it is to develop a model which would allow you to predict (inaccurately) what would happen if you did perform such a measurement?

Tags for this post: blather()

posted at: 18:00 | path: /blather | permanent link to this entry

Comment on this post.

The Currents of Space

ISBN: 0553293419
LibraryThing

"The Currents of Space is a 1952 novel by the American science fiction author Isaac Asimov. It is the second of three books labelled the Galactic Empire series. Each occurs after humans have settled many worlds in the galaxy after the second wave of colonisation that went beyond the Spacer worlds and before the era of decline that was the setting for the original Foundation series. Each of the three is only loosely connected to other works, being separated by a fairly large gulf of centuries."

That's the description from Wikipedia. This book is completely separate from The Stars Like Dust, in that while it might use the same universe the characters are entirely different and there quite a distance between the books in the time line of the series. Really, they're separate novels entirely.

I found it quite hard to get into this book, and I don't think it is as well written as The Stars Like Dust. The problem might have been that I found it pretty hard to care about Rik, and the Florina / Sark division was a bit shallowly constructed. Its hard to imagine a segregation system which is as completely effective as the one described. How did it ever occur? Why didn't people fight back? Did people never randomly fall in love with the "wrong" set of have affairs?

I persevered however, and the second half of the book is much better that the first, including some twists I didn't expect. Overall an ok book, but not fantastic.

Tags for this post: book() Isaac_Asimov()

posted at: 04:44 | path: /book/Isaac_Asimov | permanent link to this entry

Comment on this post.

Sun, 20 Jul 2008