Tachy

Review: The Russo-Ukrainian War by Serhii Plokhy

2025-10-18T00:00:00Z

The Russo-Ukrainian War by Serhii Plokhy

Fascinating, readable take on the historical and current driving forces behind Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and its rippling effects on the rest of the world. The second half does devolve a bit into a list of military engagements, and the portrayal of the Ukrainian army feels uncomfortably close to hagiography—granted, it is impossible to sympathise with Russia in this conflict. But I found this to be an enlightening and enjoyable read overall, including the closing chapters that step into the implications for the US-China rivalry.

Review: Imperial Spain by J.H. Elliot

2025-10-18T00:00:00Z

Imperial Spain by J.H. Elliot

It's surprisingly difficult to find an introductory book on early Modern Spain intended for a general audience. This one is the go-to recommendation on r/AskHistorians. I found the opening chapters interesting and easy to follow, taking me through the union of Castile and Aragon, the Reconquista, and Columbus and the New World. After this, though, I really struggled to keep going amidst the tedious tables of figures and non-chronological ordering of subsequent chapters. This might have been exhilarating reading for a university student, but it was too dry for me. I did learn quite a bit about this fascinating period in Spain's history, but I can't say it was an enjoyable experience.

Review: Caliban's War by James S.A. Corey

2025-10-18T00:00:00Z

Caliban's War by James S.A. Corey

So far this still hews closely to the TV adaptation (okay, other way round). Avasarala's perspective is fun to read, and Bobby is much less annoying than she was during early Season 2. The climax was a bit of a let-down, though. Overall decent brain candy, but I don't feel compelled to pick up the next entry right away.

Review: The Middle Kingdoms by Martyn Rady

2025-09-22T00:00:00Z

The Middle Kingdoms: A New History of Central Europe by Martyn Rady

A mostly chronological overview of Central European history, starting from the fall of the Roman Empire to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Some parts I found particularly enlightening, such as the postulated origins of the various ethnic groups, the transition from the Roman Empire in the West to the Holy Roman Empire, the partition of Poland-Lithuania, and basically everything from the Napoleonic Wars onwards, through the 1848 revolutions, to both world wars and the post-Soviet era. There's a segment on the industrialised and bureaucratic aspects of the Holocaust that I found bone-chilling and riveting. The closing chapters that weave in post-communism, Zizek, turbofolk and Laibach were magnificent. Some parts in the middle felt a bit messy and—dare I say—boring, mostly the ones about local administrations in the early modern states. But that's probably more a me problem than a book problem.

Overall an engaging, coherent and rewarding read. Also enjoyed his other book about the Habsburgs.

Review: Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey

2025-09-13T00:00:00Z

Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey

Good pulpy scifi fun. I'd avoided this for the longest time, as I wasn't sure if the 9-book investment was worth it after finishing the TV adaptation (which I thoroughly enjoyed). I think watching the show first helped me get into this book—the excellent production design brought the story to life in my mind's eye while reading, and I clearly pictured Wes Chatham and Thomas Jane during all the Amos and Miller bits.

Ultimately though, this is popcorn entertainment, and the dialogue leaves much to be desired, especially among Holden and his crew. But the prose is adequate, and the pacing is great, with each chapter picking right up from the last one. I'd say Miller and the compelling setting made it worth the read, and I look forward to continuing the rest of the (completed!) series. The last three books should be interesting since they aren't covered by the TV show.

Review: Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe

2025-09-11T00:00:00Z

Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe

This is an all-timer. The Troubles is messy from start to finish, full of internecine conflicts with far reaching consequences in the present day. This book manages to capture a large slice of it with incredible clarity and nuance. You can feel the weight not just of this awful history, but also of the staggering amount of effort that went into producing this account of it.

Review: House of Lilies by Justine Firnhaber-Baker

2025-09-11T00:00:00Z

House of Lilies: The Dynasty That Made Medieval France by Justine Firnhaber-Baker

Superb guided tour of a consanguineous maze of Philips, Louises and Joans.

When learning about the Norman Conquest, the Anarchy and the early Plantagenet kings, I'd encountered the Capetians mostly from the perspective of their English contemporaries. This concise volume filled in the gaps wonderfully, sketching an eminently readable and illuminating portrait of the Capetian dynasty, beginning from Hugh Capet and ending with Philip the Fair and his sons. I found this a delightful page-turner, chock full of continental politics, crusading kings and shifting borders. Most importantly, it's well researched, with footnotes and sources aplenty, not to mention the author's academic bona fides.

Review: Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

2025-08-31T00:00:00Z

I very nearly gave up on this doorstopper, even though I'd started it with ample warning from numerous reviews about its slow pace and character-driven narrative. I'm so glad I didn't. This was a profound literary experience, on the order of Shogun and LOTR.

McMurtry's prose is effortless and beautiful, but the first half of the book felt like wading through treacle. Cowboys doing cowboy things? Fun, sure, but there wasn't enough happening to sustain my attention for a novel running just shy of a thousand pages. Many say it gets better once the cowboys embark on their journey, but for me it took a bit longer than this. At around the halfway point, I was hooked, and I stayed hooked till the very end.

There's nothing to say about this that hasn't already been said, so here is some unapologetic gushing. The characters are compelling and lifelike. I went from finding Gus and Call irritating in different ways, to loving them, despairing for them, and cheering for them. It's not just about them, though. The cast is fairly large, and one of the joys of reading this was seeing the characters' paths converge and intersect across the vast land. And each POV character was distinct and well formed. I would happily read a whole novella about Clara working on her ranch. I found Lippy a familiar and comforting presence by the end. There's no shortage of despicable characters either, whether they're violent psychopaths or more mundane but still-awful-in-their-own-way bipedal turds.

The themes exist on interpersonal and macroscopic levels, and they are subtle and cleverly woven into the characters motivations and fates. I didn't appreciate how subversive some of the underlying messages were, until I got off the roller-coaster ride of emotions and took a few moments to ponder. This is far from an archetypal Western with glamorous cowboys and thrilling gunfights.

Bottomline: I think the hype is absolutely deserved (assuming my opinion counts for much against a Pulitzer). There are a few potential dealbreakers, apart from the pacing, such as a few gory scenes and more frequent period detail "-isms"—but oh boy it's been one of the highlights of my ~~reading~~ life.

Review: Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy

2025-07-06T00:00:00Z

Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy

Climate fiction with a heavy dash of gothic salt (eh?). Surreal, mysterious, alluring, eerie, isolating - I was fully immersed in the setting. The beginning also gave me real Annihilation vibes. The botany factoids that peppered the story were charming. Sadly, there were a few things that soured my experience. The reveal was a letdown. The character dynamics veered into the saccharine. The antagonist's motivations were both eye-rolling and handwavy. Overall a decent read despite these flaws.

Review: Anything Is Possible by Elizabeth Strout

2025-07-02T00:00:00Z

Anything Is Possible by Elizabeth Strout

It was fun to see Amgash fleshed out, and I think Strout nails the theme of "life is messy". But I enjoyed My Name Is Lucy Barton quite a bit more, with its tighter writing. I know it's apples and oranges, but there you are.

Review: The Illegals by Shaun Walker

2025-06-20T00:00:00Z

The Illegals by Shaun Walker

Fresh off the Karla trilogy, I blazed right through this epic account of Russia's spy program. The focus is on a series of KGB "illegals", whose exploits and struggles brought The Americans back into my mind with every other turn of the page. Like, this kind of stuff actually did happen, complete with betrayals and assassinations and tumultuous family drama. There's even an illegal who managed to pull off becoming the ambassador of a country on the other side of the world. Walker also provides just enough historical context at every turn, giving us a coherent narrative all the way to Putin's invasion of Ukraine. Tremendous non-fiction with the perfect balance of rigour and readability.

Review: Smiley's People by John Le Carré

2025-06-10T00:00:00Z

Smiley's People by John Le Carré

A fitting end to the Karla trilogy. The plot is convoluted, the pacing languid, but these were never the things that got me hooked on Le Carré when I first picked up Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Even the authentic and grimy Cold War period detail—which I adore—plays second fiddle to the magnificent characterisation, dialogue and themes.

Le Carré is a master of human psychology and behaviour, which manifests not only in his cast of characters but also in the mannerisms of the bit players and bystanders. Compelling characters with distinct motivations, personalities and flaws are my jam. Smiley is by far the most fully formed, and his struggles to reconcile sense of duty with disillusionment, love with betrayal, resonated deeply. Plenty of familiar faces make an appearance, and their conversations with Smiley are invariably poignant and rife with delicious tension, especially the ones with Ann.

And oh, the ending! Everything comes full circle, moral injury leans heavily on Smiley, and I was really guessing until the very end (given what happened with The Spy Who Came in from the Cold). The stakes are at once grandiose and global, yet intensely personal. The best literature lingers in our minds long after they are read, and this masterpiece might as well be tattooed on my cortex.

Review: All the Sinners Bleed

2025-06-04T00:00:00Z

All the Sinners Bleed by S. A. Cosby

This started promisingly. After an appropriately foreboding prologue steeped in Southern Gothic flavour, the stakes are set with reasonable swiftness. About a quarter of the way in, though, the book turned progressively sour for me. Make no mistake—Cosby can write a poetic turn of phrase, but he overdoes it to the point of parody. Every other sentence is a simile, often forced and awkward. The edgelord-y violence, unsubtle themes, cartoonish characterisation, topped off by a mopey protagonist who can't stop feeling sorry for himself and the rest of the human race, all made for a disappointing read. Small Mercies this is not.

Review: The Honourable Schoolboy

2025-06-01T00:00:00Z

Bloated, bogged down in places, but still loved it, albeit less than Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy.

The opening scene with the journalists in Hong Kong was especially painful, evoking unpleasant flashbacks of Thady Boy Ballagh's court antics. But the strength of le Carré's character work kept me going, as did the crackling and atmospheric prose. Loved hopping around colonial Hong Kong and Southeast Asia. The ending was not entirely surprising, but it was consistent with Westerby's emotional arc and still hit like a truck.

Taking a break before I get to Smiley's People.

_{We are back, baby. Trying out some short and breezy book reviews which don't include the synopsis—I'm not writing a column.}

p-value p-rimer

2021-10-11T00:00:00Z

The much-maligned p-value is a concept first encountered when learning about probability distributions, and later when learning about statistical hypothesis testing. These are my notes from a week-long deep dive into p-values and hypothesis testing.

Definition

Assuming the null hypothesis (along with all other model assumptions) is true, the p-value is the probability of getting a result at least as extreme as the one observed.

More generally, it is

... the probability under a specified statistical model that a statistical summary of the data (e.g., the sample mean difference between two compared groups) would be equal to or more extreme than its observed value. -- American Statistical Association 2016 statement

This "statistical summary" is usually a test statistic (e.g. t-statistic) that measures departures from the null hypothesis.

p can be used as a measure of how compatible the observed data are with the model used to compute it. 0 = totally incompatible, 1 = totally compatible.

If the model and the null hypothesis are correct, then p will vary randomly in a uniform distribution (but only for continuous data as shown in Murdoch et al 2008) and take on values less than $\alpha$ about 100* $\alpha \%$ of the time (Greenland 2019). This is because if the null and the model assumptions are correct, the p-value reflects random error from study to study.

History of the p-value

Summary of Kennedy-Shaffer 2019.

The p-value is widely attributed to Karl Pearson, who introduced it with his Chi-squared test in 1900. However, similar formulations of the same concept can be found as early as 1710 in John Arbuthnot's examination of the male:female birth ratio. In the 1800s, mathematicians such as Laplace, Poisson, and Cournot used similar techniques in their work.

1902: William Palin Elderton publishes tables of p-values for Pearson's Chi-squared distribution.

1908: William Gosset ("Student") publishes his t distribution with similar tables of probabilities.

1922: Ronald Fisher expands on the use of p-values in three monographs:

i) On the Mathematical Foundations of Statistics

Likelihood and maximum likelihood estimation

ii) On the Interpretation of χ2 from Contingency Tables, and the Calculation of P

Calculating p-values from contingency tables using the $\chi^2$ distribution

iii) The Goodness of Fit of Regression Formulae, and the Distribution of Regression Coefficients

Significance testing on regression coefficients using the t distribution

Statistical Methods for Research Workers

Fisher fleshed out the details of p-values in his 1925 book, Statistical Methods for Research Workers, and introduced the (in)famous 0.05 threshold for significance. These tables allowed scientists to look up values easily without tedious manual calculations. The tables inverted the order of Pearson's and Gosset's tables—they let you look up the test statistic based on a range of pre-specified p-values, instead of the other way round. This also had the effect of emphasising the concept of levels of significance.

Brief notes on hypothesis testing

p-values are the focal point of modern null hypothesis significant testing (NHST). NHST is borrows key elements from Ronald Fisher's original significance-testing framework and Jerzy Neyman and Egon Pearson's hypothesis-testing approach. Not included: details of the famous squabbles that erupted among these esteemed granddaddies of statistics.

Fisher (significance testing)

If the data are rare under the model (small p), then this is evidence against the null hypothesis.
The value of p is a continuous measure of evidence against the null. The smaller the value, the stronger the evidence against the null.
Influences the scientist's belief about the truth as part of an inductive process (particular → general).
Terms can be determined post hoc.

Steps

Choose a statistical test e.g. chi-squared test, t-test.
Define the null hypothesis—not necessarily a hypothesis of zero effect. "Null" refers to the objective of nullifying a specific hypothesis.
Calculate the theoretical probability, p, of the observed results given the null hypothesis.
Assess statistical significance - there is no "bright line" threshold. If p is small, either a rare event has happened, or the null hypothesis is false.

Neyman-Pearson (hypothesis testing)

Without hoping to know whether each separate hypothesis is true or false, we may search for rules to govern our behaviour with regard to them, in following which we insure that, in the long run of experience, we shall not be too often wrong. -- Neyman and Pearson (1933)

Testing is a way to choose between the null hypothesis and an alternative hypothesis.
Allows us to minimise long-term error rates—meant for long-run sequences of repeated experiments (whereas Fisher's p is from a single experiment).
Makes a distinction between inductive belief and behaviour: the scientist using the Neyman-Pearson framework can decide to take actions based on accepting a hypothesis without necessarily believing it is true. Whereas Fisher favoured an inductive approach (particular → general), Neyman and Pearson adopted a deductive stance (general → particular).
Aids pragmatic decision-making.
Good for processes that involve repeated sampling (e.g. quality control).
Terms need to be determined a priori.

Steps

Define an alternative hypothesis with an effect size of interest.
Choose a statistical test with suitable power. Power = probability of rejecting a false null hypothesis (= sensitivity) i.e. the probability of not making a false negative error.
Evaluate these two types of errors:
- Type I: Rejecting $H_0$ when $H_0$ is true (false positive), denoted by $\alpha$
- Type II: Accepting $H_0$ when $H_0$ is false (false negative), denoted by $\beta$ ( $= 1 - power$ )
Optimise the decision rule by minimising type II error rate where the maximum tolerable (e.g. based on cost) type I error rate is set to a significance level $\alpha$ (determined a priori)

$\alpha$ is an arbitrary value set a priori, $\beta$ is controlled by choosing a sample size based on power calculations. See Scucz and Ioannidis 2017.

See Lehmann 1993 for a useful comparison of the Fisherian and Neyman-Pearson frameworks.

Nitpicky note: Lehmann equates the Type I error rate to the significance level but Hubbard (2004) and Greenland (2019) say this is wrong—significance is a Fisherian construct and is determined by p.

Alpha

$\alpha$ is not the actual type I error rate. $\alpha$ is set a priori as a maximum tolerable type I error rate; the actual error rate will deviate if the data are not continuous or if the assumptions of the model and test are not perfectly valid. See Greenland 2019.

If the null is true, over many experiments, you would (falsely) reject it $\alpha$ proportion of times. It is an upper bound of the type I error rate.

Note also that $\alpha$ (false positive rate) is not the false discovery rate.

False positive rate = No. of false positives (rejecting $H_0$ ) / No. of negative results ( $H_0$ is true)

False discovery rate = No. of false positives / No. of all positive results

Null hypothesis significance testing (NHST)

An anonymous hybrid consisting of the union of the ideas developed by Ronald Fisher, on the one hand, and Jerzy Neyman and Egon Pearson, on the other. -- Hubbard 2004

Comparing p to $\alpha$ was not what Fisher or Neyman and Pearson had intended (whether this fact is important is debatable IMO).
p is a feature of the data, $\alpha$ is a feature of the experimental procedure.
"Never accept the null hypothesis" comes from Fisher. In Neyman-Pearson's framework you accept either the null or the alternative.
Dichotomous results: "significant" or "not significant"

Steps

Compute p, report its exact value and its nominal level of significance (highly significant, marginally significant etc.) ← Fisher
Compare p to a threshold level ← N-P
If p $\leq$ threshold then reject the null and claim evidence of an effect

Cross Validated: Is the "hybrid" between Fisher and Neyman-Pearson approaches to statistical testing really an "incoherent mishmash"?

Why 0.05?

In a standard normal distribution, a two-tailed p = 0.05 corresponds to about two standard deviations (1.96) from the mean. 5% would have been an arbitrary but socially acceptable criterion for how strong evidence should be before we take it seriously (Stigler 2008)

Factors affecting significance

See Greenland 2019 for details.

Effect size

Larger effect size → larger deviation → larger test statistic → smaller p-value

Precision

The more precise the estimate, the greater the evidence against the model produced by a deviation from a model prediction

Measurement precision

Higher precision → smaller standard error → larger test statistic → smaller p-value

Sample size

Larger sample → higher precision → smaller standard error → larger test statistic → smaller p-value

The problem with large samples

In very large samples, the p-value becomes overly sensitive to small deviations from the null or the model assumptions.

Common misconceptions

Greenland et al 2016 contains a concise and illuminating summary of common pitfalls in NHST.

p = Probability that the null hypothesis is true

p is calculated by assuming that the null hypothesis is true.

p = Probability that the observed results occurred by chance

p is calculated assuming that chance alone produced the effect (null hypothesis is true).

This quantity is instead given by the false discovery rate (= false positive / all positives)

Statistically significant = practically significant

Practical significance depends on the effect size and other contextual factors such as implementation costs, number needed to treat, adverse effects etc. A significant p-value tells you there is likely to be an effect, without giving direct information about the magnitude of the effect.

p = significance level

The significance level is $\alpha$ , which is determined a priori. p is an a posteriori value calculated from the data.

"p > 0.05" = no effect observed/no association/no evidence for effect

As long as p < 1 there is some incompatibility with the model that assumes no effect.

p is the probability of a type I error

Cross Validated: What is the Relationship between p-values and Type I Errors?

If $p > \alpha$ , then the probability of a type I error is zero because we wouldn't reject the null hypothesis in the first place.

If $p < \alpha$ (we reject the null hypothesis) and the null hypothesis is true, then the probability of a type I error is 1.

The type I error rate is a long-run probability over repeated experiments. A single p-value from a single experiment is not the same things as this long-run error rate.

Advantages of using p-values

~~Simple~~ Quick heuristic to help distinguish true effects from random noise—this entire post highlights how the p-value is the opposite of simple.

Arguments against p-values

The p-value has been blamed in part for the reproducibility crisis in biomedical research due to p-hacking.
Promotes false equivalence between a lack of statistical significance and "no difference", "no association".
Draws attention away from the effect size.
Dichotomous use of p (> 0.05 -> not significant, <= 0.05 -> significant) is silly, especially because "statistically significant" and "not statistically significant" is often not statistically significant (Gelman and Stern 2006).

Calls for reform

Nuzzo 2014 Nature editorial on p-values.
Amrhein et al (2016) in Nature against statistical significance.
2019 editorial in The American Statistician advocating against "statistical significance".

... and many more.

How should p be used?

Not as a dichotomous, reductive decision aid.
In combination with effect sizes (Gosset had raised this in response to Fisher's framework).
In combination with confidence intervals, which include other effect sizes that may be important. Consider the implications of these effect sizes.
Include the p-value prediction interval (similar to a confidence interval for effect size).
In the context of study design, measurement quality, validity of assumptions, external evidence.
Report exact values. p = 0.04 is not the same as p = 0.01 and should not be lumped together by merely stating p < 0.05
As a screening test for multiple hypotheses in high-throughput studies, such as GWAS and gene expression studies Huber 2016

p-oetry

This list of bullshit phrases selling p-values is absolutely mesmerising.

Useful discussions on Cross Validated

Day 34 of #100DaysToOffload

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

2021-09-12T00:00:00Z

What follows is a (truncated) summary from my reading of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn, as well as some personal reflections. You can read the full original text, complete with postscript, here.

Summary

The key question

How does science progress over time?

Science is not (merely) cumulative

A common portrayal of scientific progress is that of a cumulative process, where new ideas build upon old ones in a clear trajectory towards the truth.

Kuhn argues that this is an inaccurate view of the trajectory of science. Instead, science consists of two interleaving phases: normal science and revolutionary science.

Normal science

Normal science resembles the then-conventional view of science as a cumulative process.

Kuhn describes the activities of normal science as "puzzle-solving". Puzzles are well-defined problems with reasonably straightforward solutions. Normal science results in an accumulation of puzzle-solutions.

The aim of normal science is not to discover novel things, but to:

Gather facts: constants, laws
Match facts with theories
Articulate theories

Normal science is guided by past achievements which have become foundational to a discipline (paradigms).

Paradigms

The word "paradigm", now rooted in common parlance (especially in corporate-speak, yuck), was notoriously amorphous in the main body of Structure. In the postscript, Kuhn later clarifies two distinct usages of "paradigm":

Sociological: beliefs, values, techniques
Exemplars, or model problems

This second definition of the paradigm as a set of model problems and solutions is easier to pin down. Some examples Kuhn provides include seminal texts containing foundational theories and their applications to important problems, such as:

Ptolemy's Almagest
Newton's Principia
Lavoisier's Traité élémentaire de chimie

Paradigms are necessary for a mature science. They specify the boundaries of a scientific discipline by:

Suggesting new puzzles
Providing potential approaches to solve those puzzles
Providing a standard to evaluate proposed solutions

Note that Kuhn also uses the term "disciplinary matrix" interchangeably with "paradigm".

Anomalies

Anomalies are puzzles that resist solving by a paradigm.

According to Karl Popper, any given anomaly is enough reason for a scientific revolution. Kuhn argues that it usually takes more than one anomaly for this to happen, and there is no scientific basis for which particular anomalies lead to revolutions.

When enough anomalies accumulate, more and more scientists lose confidence in the current paradigm and a crisis occurs. There are three potential responses to a crisis:

Normal science is able to resolve it
The anomalies are left as problems for future generations to solve with better tools
Scientific revolution (paradigm shift)

Revolution

When a scientific revolution occurs, the old paradigm is replaced partly or entirely by the new one. Kuhn likens this process to a political uprising, where members of a community lose confidence in the existing institutions. Any number of new candidate paradigms come into play to be chosen as the new paradigm.

In addition to purely scientific factors, sociopolitical factors such as the nationality and personality of scientists may influence which paradigm prevails in a revolution. Kuhn gave the example of Kepler's "sun worship" (I'm not sure how literal his worship was) as being pivotal to his adoption of Copernicus' heliocentrism.

Incommensurability

Lots of syllables that mean "lacking a common standard of measurement"—or more colloquailly, "apples and oranges". Two differing paradigms cannot be easily compared because paradigms are incommensurable with one another. There are three reasons for incommensurability:

1. Methodological differences

Each paradigm has its own accepted methods and criteria for evaluating a given theory.

2. Perceptual differences

The prevailing positivist view was that observation is a way to independently evaluate competing theories, but Kuhn argues that observation is affected by the paradigm a scientist subscribes to. Scientists practicing in different paradigms perceive the world differently.

3. Semantic differences

The same term may have different meanings. See, for example, Newtonian mass and Einsteinian mass.

So what's the big deal?

Paradigms as exemplars help explain how scientists come up with new hypotheses and solutions. Kuhn suggests that these exemplars help scientists frame new problems in terms of established model puzzles, which makes it easier to come up with puzzle-solutions. The acceptability of new solutions is based not on rational rules, but on their similarity to exemplar solutions in the reigning paradigm.

The idea of paradigm shifts may not seem all that, er, revolutionary, but Kuhn was the first to formulate a theory of scientific change that deviated from the conventional heroic, cumulative view. Kuhnian revolutions are also discontinuous: for example, a new paradigm is often unable to solve all the problems addressed by its predecessor (this phenomenon is known as "Kuhn loss").

Another far more controversial idea is that through revolutions, scientific communities develop theories with better puzzle-solving abilities (simplicity, precision, etc.), but these theories do not necessarily draw closer to the truth. The reason for this is the aforementioned incommensurability: if two paradigms cannot be meaningfully compared, the reason scientists pick one over the other is based not on approximation to the truth, but on changes in world view. Despite likening scientific change to revolutions throughout much of the book, Kuhn drops an analogy to evolution in the final chapter. While science may evolve from historical progenitors into diverse, specialised forms, it may not converge towards a single idealised goal.

Many of the ideas in this book were interepreted (not always fairly) as attacks on the rational core of science. Kuhn was accused of being a relativist, which is the position that objective reality does not exist. Kuhn also cast doubt on the picture of scientists as neutral, rational agents. In a period of crisis, proponents of competing paradigms argue their cases using rhetoric rather than relying only on cold, hard evidence. Revolutions are by and large invisible to scientists because the writers of textbooks provide a conventional account of progress at the cost of diminishing the role of past, outdated achievements.

Personal reflections

Structure kicked off a slew of debates that remain far from resolved. Kuhn's arguments and the immediate responses to them should therefore not be taken at face value. Indeed, Kuhn's own views on the matter changed significantly as he revisited these topics through the course of his life. Make sure you read the postscript as well as the responses by Kuhn's contemporaries to avoid missing important context. Even then, they form the mere tip of the iceberg. See the SEP entry on Kuhn for a nice overview of a pretty darn deep rabbit hole.

As someone who is keen on a career in biomedical research, I'm glad I finally read this book in its full, raw glory after having come across its ideas in many editorials and articles. Hot takes about truth and rationality aside, the sheer breadth and scope of ambition of Structure is infectious (there's more than a brief nod to Wittgenstein, and some appeals to gestalt psychology). However, you should know that this is firmly big picture stuff, dealing with philosophical questions about the nature of science itself. I honestly don't see how this affects the working scientist in any meaningful way, other than perhaps forcing you to think hard about whether your chosen field is a legitimate science. Don't get me wrong, this is thought-provoking and mind-expanding—but don't expect it to change the way you think or work as a scientist.

Day 33 of #100DaysToOffload

Review: The Book of Why

2021-03-07T00:00:00Z

The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect is a collaborative effort aimed at a general audience by Judea Pearl, a professor of computer science at UCLA, and Dana Mackenzie, a science writer. As a medical student with a laughably poor formal education in statistics, I believe I qualify as a card-carrying member of the general audience. Here's my review in three parts: i) an overview of topics covered by the book, ii) my thoughts, and iii) links to other reviews and further reading.

The book grounds Pearl's theoretical work on causal inference in a multitude of realistic and real examples, drawn from a range of disciplines including economics, biology, and law. Pearl himself is a pretty Big Deal in computer science. Throughout the book, he demonstrates how his causal methods can be applied to many diverse fields of research, but it's clear that what excites him the most is its potential in artificial intelligence.

What is causal inference? When we perform scientific studies, we're often interested in the relationship between variables (treatments, risk factors, diseases, outcomes). Scientific studies that investigate these relationships can be divided into two types: observational and interventional. Observational studies can identify associations, but they cannot tell you anything about the direction of that association. There may be other variables that distort your results by concealing a true relationship, or worse, by generating false ones. That's why researchers turn to interventional studies as a more reliable source of evidence—specifically, randomised controlled trials (RCTs). The problem is, RCTs are not always ethical or feasible, and they require more resources to set up and run. Enter the exciting field of causal inference, which aims to answer questions about cause and effect from observational data.

A brief word on what causal inference is not—this is something that took me a while to wrap my head around. Causal inference doesn't tell us from scratch what the causes of an event are. Nor is it able to "prove" that one variable caused another. Those questions belong to the realm of causal discovery. Instead, causal inference aims to draw richer interpretations beyond mere associations from observational data. We can answer questions such as:

Which of these variables actually affect the outcome?
What is the magnitude of effect of each individual treatment variable on the outcome?
What are the mechanisms underlying a complex problem such as cancer?

The catch is that, whether explicitly or implicitly, you must make assumptions in the first place about the directions of causality among the variables. In many cases, the data can support your assumptions, but any relationships you observe in the data without considering these prior assumptions are purely correlation. And you know the drill, correlation is not causation...

There are many approaches to causal inference, of which Pearl's is characterised by two techniques: graphs (DAGs) and do-calculus. More on that in a minute.

Ladder of causation

Rung 1: Associations, observational data (seeing)

Rung 2: Intervention (doing)

Rung 3: Counterfactuals (imagining)

Pearl proposes this framework which we can use to categorise the various techniques of causal inference. At the bottom lies passive observation of a system, allowing us to find direction-free associations. The next rung up is intervention: by explicitly setting the values of treatment variables, we abolish the effects of confounders. This is even more effective with randomisation, which is why RCTs are hailed as the gold standard of scientific studies.

Going beyond intervention is the idea of the counterfactual, or what-if thinking. If this person had never smoked, would he still have gotten lung cancer? Counterfactuals are subtly but crucially different from interventions. These hypothetical questions pertain to what might have been, and cannot actually happen in the real world. We can intervene by stopping that person with lung cancer from smoking now, but we can't erase that lung cancer patient's 50-year history of smoking, which is the counterfactual question we're asking in this case. Think of counterfactuals as parallel universes. Counterfactuals strengthen the case for a causal relationship: if $A$ causes $B$ , then $B$ shouldn't happen in the abscence of $A$ . Of course, things are rarely this simple in real life, and the authors also discuss necessary and sufficienct causes.

DAGs

DAG stands for "directed acyclic graph". A DAG is simply a diagram containing nodes that are connected by edges (lines) with directions, and tracing these edges according to their directions should not result in a closed loop. In causal analysis, DAGs are used to represent the relationships between variables in a system, with the directed edges indicating the (assumed) direction of causation.

Pearl is a vocal proponent of graphical models in causal inference. DAGs, he argues, are much more intuitive than algrebraic expressions in illustrating complex problems. Importantly, DAGs can clearly tell us which variables should be controlled for and which ones should be left as they are. Confounders (common causes) are commonly defined as variables that are associated with both the treatment variable and the outcome variable, and everyone knows we need to control for confounders. However, there are in fact other types of variables that are associated with both the treatment and the outcome that should not be controlled for. A common example is collider variables (common effects); controlling for a collider will create a spurious association between treatment and outcome, where there was previously none. DAGs are invaluable in highlighting these potential pitfalls as our models get more complex.

See here for graphical representations of confounders, mediators, and colliders.

do-calculus

do-calculus is the other pillar of Pearl's approach to causal inference, refined over the years by his students. I have to admit that this entire topic has flown right over my head, and the authors don't make it easy to follow in the book. Reading about how do-calculus was derived and how it may be used felt a lot like "How to Draw An Owl" material.

At a high level, do-calculus is basically a formalised, mathematical way of expressing interventions in contrast to observations. Conditional probabilities contain no information about causality. $P(A \mid B)$ represents the probability of $A$ given that $B$ is observed, a concept that lies at the bottom rung of Pearl's Ladder of Causation. To show the probability of $A$ when you cause $B$ to happen in an experiment, you would write $P[A \mid do(B)]$ instead. When you're able to manipulate a treatment variable statistically, you can also delete arrows pointing towards it in a DAG, which may reveal new confounders, colliders, and mediators. Using front-door adjustment, we can also control for unobserved confounders, which is pretty darn nifty.

Topics

As its subtitle suggests, The Book of Why is ambitious in scope and touches upon a dizzying array of seminal ideas from the 19th and 20th century. These are the main topics covered in each chapter (paraphrased by me to be more informative; not actual titles).

Chapter 1: Pearl's Ladder of Causation
Chapter 2: Sewall Wright and path analysis, a major influence on Pearl
Chapter 3: Bayes' theorem and Pearl's work on Bayesian networks
Chapter 4: Confounders, mediators, colliders, and back-door adjustment
Chapter 5: How causal inference could have resolved the smoking-and-cancer debate
Chapter 6: Causal inference applied to statistical paradoxes (Monty Hall problem, Simpson's paradox, Berkson's paradox, Lord's paradox)
Chapter 7: do-calculus, front-door adjustment, and instrumental variables
Chapter 8: Counterfactuals, potential outcomes, and structural equation modelling
Chapter 9: Mediation analysis
Chapter 10: The role of causal inference in Big Data and AI

My thoughts on The Book of Why

Let's start with the obvious. This book dwells on the history of statistics a lot, and statisticians, as the authors would have you believe, are zealots who have conspired to keep causal thinking out of their field right from the start. That is, until Pearl instigated the "Causal Revolution", as he dubs it, the latest and greatest gift to modern science. I have no dog in this fight, but Pearl (whom I assume is the source of most of these opinions put to paper by Mackenzie) often comes across as wildly biased and grandiose. For what it's worth, I doubt that statisticians as a whole are anywhere as malicious or ignorant as they're portrayed in this book.

I'm confused about the intended audience. This book is simultaneously too simplistic for experts and too technical for lay people (i.e. me). I suspect the ideal reader lies somewhere in between: someone with a solid grasp of basic statistics and maths who is interested in causal analysis. The authors' contempt and mischaracterisations of the entire field of statistics are unlikely to sit well with said reader, though.

There are many minor errors in the edition I have, including some inexplicably basic ones that conflate odds and probability, but this PDF contains the errata.

Overall, I'm pretty satisfied with what I got out of this book, I think. While Pearl's opinion of statistics and of his own work are on extreme ends of a spectrum, and similarly irksome, there is much to celebrate in this strange tome. I really appreciate the breadth of topics and historical anecdotes that feature here, sprinkled with a healthy dash of philosophy. I'm also very intrigued about the applications of causal inference in biomedical research, and this book has led me to the opening of many tantalising rabbit holes. However, I strongly recommend reading Pearl's technical overview instead (link below), which is very similar to The Book of Why, but more concise and palatable.

Other reviews and associated discussion

Review: The First Law trilogy

2021-02-21T00:00:00Z

So how many things have been said for Logen Ninefingers? The answer is 19, according to this post.

I'm going to preface my review of the First Law trilogy by saying if you have the slightest inclination to pick this up, do it with as little prior knowledge as possible for maximum enjoyment. Otherwise, read on if you'd like a little information to help you decide whether to give this 1600-pager a shot. I promise to do my best to avoid obvious spoilers.

I was hankering after something medieval and gritty, and even though I'd enjoyed the Game of Thrones TV show, I was never particularly interested in 'grimdark' books a la Bakker and Donaldson. One, I wasn't sure if the violence would be more than I can tolerate; and two, I prefer darkness in fiction to thrill and to explore interesting themes, rather than bum me out in the service of 'being realistic'.

Over three books, we follow a cast of walking fantasy archetypes: there is ~~Logan~~ Logen, the hirsute barbarian with a murderous reputation; Jezal, the dashing captain and skilled fencer; and Glokta, the unstable and crippled inquisitor. There are wizards, too. Trouble brews in Adua, the heart of the Union, with enemies looming from the north and the south. All that sound familiar? Well, the First Law series wears its subversive heart proudly on its sleeve, as you'll see quickly. The story is written from the third-person limited point of view, with the perspective switching frequently among the multilayered characters.

The Blade Itself is an unexpectedly slow burn, and the ending makes it clear that this is a prologue. Its purpose is clearly to introduce the cast of characters and set up plot points. Normally, I'm reluctant to go through an entire book that is nothing more than setup, but the narration is so compelling and the character voices so distinctive that I didn't mind that at all. I started the next book immediately after finishing this one.

And the next book is excellent. Before They Are Hanged enters full-blown quest territory, and the action kicks up a good few notches. It has the same characters you love/hate/love-to-hate/hate-to-love from The Blade Itself, but with a plot that moves more quickly. The world opens up beyond Adua and the North, and the characters are thrust outside of their comfort zones. A delicious sense that sinister happenings are afoot permeates the whole book.

I feel more ambivalent about Last Argument of Kings. While the narration remains intimately focused on the characters, the stakes are raised to epic proportions. My problem with it is the oddly detached tone—I don't know if it's because the writing gets a little repetitive, or if it's the recurring sense of resignation. By the time I reached the end I was surprised to find that I didn't hate it, though I felt the story had already lost some steam before that point.

That said, I was pleasantly surprised to find many small pockets of hope throughout the trilogy. One central theme is that change for the better is hard, whether on an individual or a societal level. That doesn't stop the characters from trying, in their own stumbling or deeply misguided ways. This tiny spark of cautious optimism stays alive to the very end of the trilogy.

"Then you've got the chance to do better next time."

"Next time?"

"'Course. Doing better next time. That's what life is."

Logen to Jezal, from Before They Are Hanged

Abercrombie's writing style is neither beautiful nor ugly, but it is evocative and instantly recognisable. It serves the story perfectly well: whilst not a thing of beauty in itself, it flows naturally, paints atmospheric scenes, and, above all, creates the darkly humorous tone that carried me through this bleak story. Action scenes are cinematic, impactful, and don't drag on forever. The result is a story that is more cynical than overtly nihilistic.

Want fantasy that ventures outside of medieval European settings? This isn't that, I'm afraid. Adua is part of Midderland, with ~~England~~ Angland to the north, and the ~~Scots~~ Northmen further north still. The ~~Ottoman Empire~~ Gurkhish Empire, led by Uthman-ul-Dosht and the prophet Khalul, encroaches upon ~~Europe's~~ the Union's doorstep. There are citadels and army barracks and parapets, with a healthy dose of feudalism. The geography of the larger world is somewhat more interesting, however, and I personally didn't mind the generic setting.

For all its twists and critiques of heroism, I'd argue that the First Law trilogy can be just as predictable as the type of fantasy it's in conversation with. But ask anyone who enjoyed this series why they like it, and you'll undoubtedly be told it's because of the character work. The First Law is about more than just Logen, Jezal, and Glokta, and no character feels too minor. Most of them are multifaceted, and all of them exude a distinctive personality. Whether you enjoy this series or not will hinge on how much you're invested in the characters: you may not like them, but if you're not interested in what happens to them, you're going to have a rough time.

Thankfully, the First Law isn't as gross I feared it might be (although everyone has a different bar, of course). The physical violence is brutal, there are a few explicit torture scenes, and swearing is a given. There are at least a couple (heh) explicit depictions of consensual sex, and one mercifully short attempted rape. My subjective experience was that they rarely felt gratuitous and never felt like the central focus of the story.

Make no mistake, this was a really fun experience and I'll definitely continue with the rest of Abercrombie's books. Say one thing for Joe Abercrombie, say he's a—you get the idea.

Day 31 of #100DaysToOffload

Canine S-index

2021-02-03T00:00:00Z

Or, which of these doggos is most similar to a sausage?

View on GitHub

Sausage dogs are among the cutest creatures in existence, no doubt. Just look at this majestic unit:

Credit: Igor Bredikhin via Wikipedia

Corgis and Basset Hounds are two other sausage dogs in contention for ultimate sausage-ness, but which of these sausage dogs are objectively closer to the sausage ideal? Where do other dog breeds fall on the sausage-ness spectrum? These are important questions that need answering.

The most important metric to consider when measuring sausage-ness is, of course, the side profile of the dog: is it longer than it is tall? We can use the ratio of (back) length to height to compare dogs on this metric. I'm going to call this ratio the S-index in my code, but you can call it sausage-ness if you like.

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import pandas as pd
import seaborn as sns

Data source

It's surprisingly difficult to find morphometric data for dog breeds. The American Kennel Club provides height and weight information but not back length, which is crucial in determining S-index. The authors of this paper collected a large variety of measurements, including back length, but they haven't supplied any raw data. If this were a proper scientific study, I'd have to contact the authors with a request for data, but I've already invested more time than I should in this study of sausage dogs, so here we go.

The design-focused website dimensions.com does provide back lengths. Instead of the withers height which is used by the American Kennel Club, height in the rest of this notebook refers to standing height. This is simply because I don't currently have the time to collect the withers height. Using withers height would probably give us a better indicator of sausage-ness.

Note that this website doesn't cite the source of their data, so take this otherwise scientifically rigorous study of sausage dogs with a large heap of salt. Only 51 dog breeds are available here, which is an okay but rather modest sample size. Furthermore, only minimum and maximum values are provided, so I had to settle with using mid-range as a measure of central tendency.

I collected the necessary data from dimensions.com and stored them in a csv file. All measurements are in metric units. No cleaning necessary, which is always nice!

df = pd.read_csv('data.csv')
df

	breed	length_min	length_max	height_min	height_max	weight_min	weight_max
0	Pomeranian	24	28	20	24	1.4	3.2
1	Chihuahua	24	38	22	33	1.4	2.7
2	Yorkshire Terrier	30	39	27	33	1.8	5.4
3	Papillon	30	43	30	42	2.3	4.5
4	Maltese	34	44	30	38	1.4	3.6
5	Shih Tzu	38	44	33	38	4.1	7.3
6	Cavalier King Charles Spaniel	48	51	38	42	5.9	8.2
7	Pug	39	52	33	43	6.4	8.2
8	Jack Russell Terrier	46	55	36	43	4.1	6.8
9	French Bulldog	46	55	39	47	7.3	12.7
10	Bichon Frise	46	56	33	41	5.4	8.2
11	Beagle	51	64	46	56	9.0	11.0
12	Dachshund	55	64	33	37	7.3	14.5
13	Basenji	58	64	48	51	9.1	11.8
14	Havanese	48	65	32	43	3.2	5.9
15	Pembroke Welsh Corgi	56	66	36	43	10.0	14.0
16	Bulldog	51	69	38	48	18.0	25.0
17	Shiba Inu	58	71	44	55	6.8	10.9
18	Cocker Spaniel	61	74	46	56	12.0	16.0
19	Whippet	58	79	61	71	7.0	14.0
20	Standard Schnauzer	71	79	58	66	14.0	20.0
21	Standard Poodle	62	81	61	83	20.0	32.0
22	English Springer Spaniel	69	84	65	79	18.0	25.0
23	Australian Cattle Dog	71	84	53	64	14.0	16.0
24	Dalmatian	79	84	70	76	20.0	32.0
25	Border Collie	71	86	56	69	12.0	20.0
26	Collie	74	86	66	81	18.0	29.0
27	Siberian Husky	76	88	67	79	15.9	29.5
28	Basset Hound	66	89	41	53	20.0	29.0
29	Boxer	76	89	72	84	22.7	36.3
30	Samoyed	72	90	62	76	15.9	29.5
31	Australian Shepherd	71	91	64	81	16.0	32.0
32	Bull Terrier	80	98	60	74	20.4	36.3
33	Belgian Malinois	86	102	72	84	18.1	36.3
34	German Pointer	86	104	53	64	20.0	32.0
35	Alaskan Malamute	89	105	75	88	34.0	39.0
36	Bernese Mountain Dog	89	105	76	91	32.0	52.0
37	Newfoundland	93	107	83	95	45.4	68.0
38	Golden Retriever	94	107	72	80	25.0	34.0
39	Rottweiler	98	107	77	86	42.0	55.0
40	German Shepherd	91	108	67	79	23.0	41.0
41	Great Dane	90	109	108	126	50.0	79.0
42	Akita	93	110	79	93	31.8	59.0
43	Tibetan Mastiff	90	113	72	90	31.8	68.0
44	Bullmastiff	102	113	76	86	45.4	59.0
45	Doberman Pinscher	102	117	76	90	27.2	45.4
46	Saint Bernard	102	119	81	94	54.0	82.0
47	Irish Wolfhound	117	128	104	114	52.2	81.6
48	Great Pyrenees	103	133	81	103	36.3	54.4
49	Mastiff	113	135	89	107	54.4	104.3
50	Cane Corso	105	140	83	109	38.6	49.9

def calc_mid(a, b):
    '''
    Get mid-range from min and max. 
    '''
    return (a+b) / 2

df['length_mid'] = df.apply(lambda x: calc_mid(x['length_min'], x['length_max']), axis=1)
df['height_mid'] = df.apply(lambda x: calc_mid(x['height_min'], x['height_max']), axis=1)
df['s_index'] = df['length_mid'] / df['height_mid']

df.head()

	breed	length_min	length_max	height_min	height_max	weight_min	weight_max	length_mid	height_mid	s_index
0	Pomeranian	24	28	20	24	1.4	3.2	26.0	22.0	1.181818
1	Chihuahua	24	38	22	33	1.4	2.7	31.0	27.5	1.127273
2	Yorkshire Terrier	30	39	27	33	1.8	5.4	34.5	30.0	1.150000
3	Papillon	30	43	30	42	2.3	4.5	36.5	36.0	1.013889
4	Maltese	34	44	30	38	1.4	3.6	39.0	34.0	1.147059

sns.set_theme()
sns.set(font='monospace')

Plots

Scatter plot

I initially planned to display the data in a scatter plot, but labelling each point would create too much visual clutter. Nonetheless, it shows that most dog breeds in our sample are longer than they are tall.

g = sns.lmplot(data=df, x='height_mid', y='length_mid')

Bar plot

We lose information about absolute height and length by using the S-index ratio, but it makes it easier to compare sausage-ness directly.

fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(20, 18))

sns.barplot(ax=ax, data=df.sort_values('s_index', ascending=False), x='s_index', y='breed', color='#42b7bd')

# Vertical line at x=1
#ax.axvline(1, ls='--')

ax.set_title('Sausage-ness of dog breeds', fontsize=24, pad=30)
ax.set_ylabel('Breed', labelpad=20, fontsize=18)
ax.set_xlabel('Length / Height', labelpad=20, fontsize=18)


# Annotation with box
bbox_props = dict(boxstyle="rarrow,pad=0.6", fc="cyan", ec="#42b7bd", lw=2)
t = ax.text(1.35, 49, 'Approaching theoretical sausage ideal', bbox=bbox_props)

# Annotation with arrows
ax.annotate('Tall bois', xy=(0.993056, 49), xycoords='data', xytext=(1.1, 49), textcoords='data',
           arrowprops=dict(arrowstyle='->', color='red'))
ax.annotate('', xy=(0.850427, 50), xycoords='data', xytext=(1.15, 49), textcoords='data',
           arrowprops=dict(arrowstyle='->', color='red', connectionstyle='angle'))

plt.tight_layout()
plt.savefig('sausageness.png', dpi=300)

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Dachshund is the most sausage-y of sausage dogs, followed closely by the Basset Hound. I'd expected the Corgi to have a higher S-index than it does here. The Havanese isn't a breed I would normally classify as a sausage dog at first glance, but it goes to show how deceiving all that fur can be.

It's also interesting to note that we have two tall bois in our sample. The Great Dane and the Standard Poodle are both taller than they are long.

Credit: Lilly M via Wikipedia

Credit: Tim Wilson via Wikipedia

Now you know which sausage dogs are more sausage-y, where other dogs lie on the sausage-ness (cough S-index) spectrum, and which dogs are tall bois. You're welcome.

Things I Learned

This project is more than a little tongue-in-cheek, but I managed to get a surprising amount out of it.

Mid-range

My first instinct was to use mean or median height and length as a measure of central tendency, but I stopped short as sooon as I realised that I only had access to the minimum and maximum values. I Googled around and found this thread about the mid-range as an estimator of the mean. It's a pretty dismal statistic, but you work with what you have.

Seaborn

I haven't used Matplotlib and Seaborn in a while. Though I love Seaborn for abstracting away a lot of finicky styling decisions, I now realise I need to go through the Seaborn docs properly to understand how it interfaces with Matplotlib. Specifically, I should read up on figure-level and axes level Seaborn functions (in this notebook, the scatter plot and bar plot are figure-level and axes-level functions respectively).

Day 30 of #100DaysToOffload

Review: The Borgias: The Hidden History

2021-01-31T00:00:00Z

Prior to reading The Borgias: The Hidden History by G. J. Meyer, I knew next to nothing about the Borgias other than their infamous reputation in popular culture and depictions in a certain stealth-parkour video game. Many books—fiction and non-fiction—have been written about this infamous family. Some notable authors of popular histories include Paul Strathern, Christopher Hibbert, and G. J. Meyer. It's surprisingly difficult to find recommendations for a good introduction to the Borgias, in the vein of Mary Beard's SPQR about the Roman Empire. I went with Meyer because his book is more recent and appears well-received on Goodreads (not the best metric, I know, but there you go).

You should know that Meyer is not a historian by training, but rather a journalist who has written a number of popular history books. His thesis is ultimately that all the terrible deeds of the Borgias—incest, poisoning, corruption, and general depravity—are rooted not in fact, but in the lies of their enemies such as Giuliano della Rovere (later Pope Julius II) and Girolamo Savonarola. Meyer also casts doubts on the parentage of Cesare Borgia and his siblings, whom many historians have asserted to be Rodrigo Borgia's offspring. Although Meyer seems like a really smart bloke, his assertions are based mainly on the work of a single Vatican clergyman named Peter de Roo.

My aim was to get a basic overview of the Borgias, and to this end the book does an excellent job. Meyer focuses heavily on three members of this family: Alfonso, Rodrigo, and Cesare, each of whom held power in distinct and fascinating ways. The history of the Borgias is wrapped up in the history of the Catholic Church and of Renaissance Italy; Meyer doesn't assume much prior knowledge on the part of the reader, and he buttresses every chapter with background details about the geopolitical structures and events of the time. We meet various players in the Italian Wars, such as the Medici of Florence, the Sforzas of Milan, and the monarchs of France and Spain. This was also the age of the condottieri, the colourful mercenaries who shaped the political fortunes of the Italian states.

Meyer has superb writing chops, and reading this substantial tome rarely felt like a slog. It's as close to feeling like a historical novel as you can get while still remaining an academic work. Meyers has done a great job of coaxing a coherent and engaging narrative out of the murky alphabet soup of Borgia history. That said, I do wish Meyer had included inline citations rather than dumping a list of references at the end.

Remember how I mentioned Meyer's very specific and rather iconoclastic stance on the Borgia reputation? At times, it felt like he leans too hard in the opposite direction, painting Rodrigo in particular in an almost saintly light. Justified or not, it can come across as grating and repetitive. I actually appreciated the background chapters on Italy and the Church more than the ones about the Borgias, if only because they felt less prone to Meyer's digressions into his pet theories about the Borgias.

All things considered, this is a solid work of non-fiction that I recommend wholeheartedly as an introduction to the Borgias and the world they inhabited. The author makes his biases clear from the start, and, again, while I lack the knowledge to comment on the veracity of his claims, I think anyone looking for a stepping stone to the Borgias and Renaissance Italy could do worse than to start here. Personally, I suspect the truth about the Borgias to be somewhere in between the two versions that confront us, but what do I know?

Day 29 of #100DaysToOffload

Late to the Focal Fossa Party

2021-01-03T00:00:00Z

Eight months after Ubuntu 20.04 LTS was officially released, and five months after Ubuntu 19.10 reached end-of-life, I finally upgraded. That should have been plenty of time to iron out the bugs right? Not quite, as it turns out, though I'm not sure how much of them are release-related and how much is just due to me tinkering with things beyond my understanding. Here are some bugs(?) I experienced on my ThinkPad x250 running Lubuntu.

Note: I switched from Windows to Linux around a year ago, in case the following doesn't make it clear that I'm a total n00b.

VLC crashes when opening video files

VLC started up fine, but whenever I tried to load a video it would freeze and crash. Sometimes it just froze and locked up my system entirely. I fixed this by going to Tools > Preferences > Video and changing the 'Output' from 'Automatic' to 'X11 Video Output'.

Steam crashes on launch

Steam kept crashing just when the login screen would normally show up. I found this Ask Ubuntu thread about missing 32-bit libraries, but all the necessary 32-bit libraries were already installed on my system. I also had no issues installing Steam from the official repo.

I was fairly sure it was a graphics driver issue after finding this thread. My x250 only has Intel HD 5500 integrated graphics, so I didn't have to worry about Nvidia or AMD drivers.

Note: Launching Steam from the terminal with the flag STEAM_RUNTIME=0 returned an error related to the Iris driver. I can't remember the actual error message and I'm kicking myself for not taking a note of it at the time. But here's what I did.

I tried the following but they didn't help:

Running Steam with i965 drivers: env MESA_LOADER_DRIVER_OVERRIDE=i965 steam (Launchpad)
Adding DRI 3 as an option in my Intel Xorg config (GitHub issue)

This was my Intel Xorg config in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d:

Section "OutputClass"
	Identifier "Intel Graphics"
	MatchDriver "i915"
	Driver "intel"
	Option "TearFree" "true"
EndSection

I changed "i915 to "i965" and it worked: Steam now launches and I can play all my games as before. Yay!

Not so fast. Turns out I'm actually still using i915 driver instead of the i965 one:

$ lspci -k | grep -EA3 'VGA|3D|Display'
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation HD Graphics 5500 (rev 09)
    Subsystem: Lenovo HD Graphics 5500
    Kernel driver in use: i915
    Kernel modules: i915

Something in my original Intel config file must have been causing issues, and I've somehow managed to get around them by avoiding the use of the config file entirely (effectively the same as deleting it as mentioned here). So, problem not solved. But I'm reluctant to mess around now that everything seems to be working fine, and I don't want to break my system again.

On further reading, this seems related to my VLC issues as outlined in this thread. There's also something called modesetting that I should read up on.

Calibre crashes on launch

Calibre installed fine from the official repo but on starting it would crash with the error message AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'cancel'.

This bug was fixed in later releases, but unfortunately the Focal Fossa package for Calibre is stuck at 4.99.4. I should probably switch to a PPA instead but for now this is a quick and dirty workaround:

Open /usr/lib/calibre/calibre/utils/ipc/server.py
Edit line 110 as shown in the link above

xrandr and dual monitors

I'm almost always connected to a second monitor when I use my x250. Before I updated to Focal Fossa, this line in my i3 config dealt with my dual monitor setup upon starting a session from lightdm:

exec xrandr --output eDP1 --primary --left-of HDMI1

After updating, my second monitor went into mirrored mode on startup. Entering the xrandr command above in a terminal returned warning: output eDP1 not found; ignoring.

This took me longer than it should have, but changing eDP1 to eDP-1 and HDMI1 to HDMI-1 solved the problem. This thread makes me think it's another quirk to do with the video drivers.

Conclusion

Drivers, am I right? Ugh. What are drivers even. Actually, what are drivers? I don't know much beyond the fact that they allow software to communicate with hardware. Time to do some reading ...

Day 28 of #100DaysToOffload

Review: House of Suns

2020-12-29T00:00:00Z

Lurk on any sci-fi book forum and you're bound to come across Alastair Reynolds sooner rather than later. It's not easy to find a good starting point with Reynolds, since his magnum opus, the Revelation Space series, is long and reportedly hit-and-miss in places. Two other frequently recommended standalone novels of his are Pushing Ice and House of Suns—the latter is unanimously praised everywhere I've seen it mentioned, and I dove into it eagerly after finishing Use Of Weapons.

House of Suns is set in a different universe than the Revelation Space series, and centres on a group (family?) of shatterlings (clones) called Gentian Line. Along with cool depictions of transhumanism, Reynolds raises some interesting questions about consciousness and identity. Ultimately, though, the book fell well short of my expectations.

One major selling point is the feeling of deep time: the lifetime of a shatterling stretches into millions of years, and a typical journey through space can take thousands of years. In this respect Reynolds somewhat succeeds, though these passages of time eventually lose their impact and become mere statements of fact.

At the risk of sounding too harsh, "statements of fact" sums up everything I dislike about this book. The wooden dialogue serves as a vehicle for exposition and little else. The characters are just as bland as their dialogue, with motivations and loyalties that are either cliched or bewildering. Underneath the pages and pages of awkward dialogue is a plot that appears intricate at first but left me feeling underwhelmed at the end. The tension that finally developed a good third into the book dissipated quickly, and the more I read the more disappointed I was about the neatly resolved plot points.

I have mixed feelings about Reynolds' writing style. On the one hand, I appreciated his attention to detail, especially his careful use of medical and anatomical terms. It just felt oddly sterile and didn't strike the intended emotional notes in me. With too much telling and not enough showing, he leaves little for the reader to speculate and infer.

It wasn't all bad. Like I said, I liked a lot of the ideas woven into the background. I enjoyed the descriptions of the Golden Hour, and of Abigail's uncannily shifting house. The flip-side of his tendency to over-describe is that all the surreal and haunting scenes were conjured effortlessly in my mind. Shame we didn't get to read more about the mysterious Curators of the Vigilance. Reynolds also does a decent job of simplifying cool science concepts, such as faster-than-light travel and the violation of causality.

If House of Suns is representative of Reynolds' novels as a seasoned writer, I doubt I'd appreciate his other long-form works. I'm glad I read it, but I really didn't enjoy the experience of reading it. Disappointing, as I was very intrigued by his darker brand of sci-fi in the form of the Revelation Space series. Perhaps I'll have better luck with his short stories.

Day 27 of #100DaysToOffload

Review: The Dying Earth

2020-10-25T00:00:00Z

Notions of apocalypse have gripped the human imagination for millennia, and apocalyptic fiction remains a familiar presence across all of pop culture. I've never felt particularly drawn towards the subgenre myself, but I was enamoured by the subtly different spin on it in Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun. Instead of a specific cataclysmic event caused by the hubris of man or the unpredictable wrath of celestial forces, Wolfe's apocalypse is simply the natural, entropic conclusion of a tired world that has run its course. Reading Wolfe naturally led me to Jack Vance, and while Vance did not pioneer this flavour of apocalypse, he certainly popularised it such that his famous work has lent it a familiar name: The Dying Earth.

The Dying Earth is a collection of six short stories published in 1950. Each story is self-contained, but they take place on the same Earth of a distant future when the sun is a dim, red echo of itself, evoking a quiet but persistent sense of melancholy and nihilism. Reading this book is akin to falling into a painting (I imagine), and Vance depicts a dizzying range of fully realised landscapes by using a masterful economy of words. This is a truly vivid and surreal journey, taking readers from the lush forests of Ascolais and its bizarre inhabitants to the decaying magitech-powered city of Ampridatvir.

Vance writes with a distinct style, blending starchy, ceremonious dialogue with fantasy and pulpy tropes. The end result is stories with a mythological bent but a definite down-to-earth, sword and sorcery feel. He is fond of archaic words, some of which I'm half-convinced are made up; as with Gene Wolfe, this often ends up determining whether you love it or hate it. To me, these words are a feature and not a bug, as they imbue the stories with a decadent, almost Tolkienesque atmosphere. In place of elves, dwarves, and orcs, Vance shows us some refreshingly original creatures, such as Twk-Men (tiny salt-loving men who ride on dragonflies) and pelgranes (bird-men who prey on unwitting travellers).

Speaking of Tolkien, whose influence pervades so much of modern fantasy, Vance's legacy can be easily identified in many titans of SF/F. Besides the aforementioned Book of the New Sun, the D&D role-playing game owes its magic system to Vance's depiction of the use of spells. The city of Ampridatvir bears a striking resemblance to the twin cities of Besźel and Ul Qoma in China Miéville's The City and the City. There are many more sources of inspiration like these that a reader more experienced than I would be able to identify.

While there are nods to big ideas such as biotechnology, the stories lack thematic complexity, which is understandable given that they are among Vance's earliest publications. Where The Dying Earth excels is at pure storytelling, the ability of a good yarn to entertain strangers by the proverbial campfire, and Vance does a great job in combining elements of sci-fi, fantasy, and horror to bedazzle, thrill, and terrify (some of his creatures such as Blikdak, Chun the Unavoidable, and the oasts are very unsettling). I think they've aged well, and I'm curious to see how his writing matured over time.

One thing you won't find in The Dying Earth is nuanced and meaningful character development, mainly because these are short stories in a shared setting, but also because the characters are rather superficial. It feels almost as if they are puppets on a stage that came straight out of myths and fairy-tales of our own world. I don't mind the weak characterisation, as Vance's style and imagination more than make up for it. Another pitfall is the invariable objectification of women, though I understand Vance's writing is much less overtly sexist than many of his contemporaries. Still, it's pretty damning that the male hero and female trophy archetype of the first story doesn't change much throughout The Dying Earth.

For readers interested in the classic roots of genre fiction, this is surely one that mustn't be missed. Many fans of Jack Vance suggest the later entries in the Tales of the Dying Earth collection - the Cugel stories, specifically - are a better introduction to Vance's works, but it takes no time at all to go through these six stories, and come away with an intricately detailed dreamscape of a dying earth.

Day 26 of #100DaysToOffload

Review: Because Internet

2020-10-20T00:00:00Z

Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language was published in 2019. It is written by Gretchen McCulloch, a linguist from McGill University who has found a niche writing about language on the internet. In this book, she explores how the internet has shaped language and vice versa - with the caveat that it's heavily focused on North American English, which she points out in no uncertain terms.

I'm a total stranger to the world of linguistics, and I found this an incredibly accessible, entertaining, and informative read. Obviously I can't vouch for the scholarly merit of this book, but McCulloch is a household name in the geeky realm of internet linguistics, having written extensively for publications such as WIRED and The Toast in addition to her podcast, Lingthusiasm.

McCulloch starts with a broad overview of what linguists do and the forms of language that interest them. Informal writing, she writes, is one that was difficult to study in pre-internet times. Now that so much of the world is online, social media sites such as Twitter are a rich vein of data for researchers to tap into. McCulloch then describes the intricate relationship between language and society, and how one cannot survive without the other. To study linguistics is to dive into the tangled web of anthropology, to learn about interesting cultural and historical phenomena in human societies - in this case, our singular, wonderful internet. An entire chapter is dedicated to how each generation was introduced to the internet, while a later chapter traces the evolution of chat interfaces. Equal attention and care is given to the linguistic components of the internet: emoji, slang, and yes, memes.

McCulloch displays an intimate familiarity not just with linguistics, but also with the internet. A self-described Full Internet Person, her love and enthusiasm for both subjects are evident throughout this incredibly entertaining book. She writes with a wink and a knowing smile, proudly displaying all the linguistic idiosyncrasies of the internet that is the very subject of this book. Her passion and intellectual curiosity are infectious, as is her warm and humanistic approach. Her optimism about social media is a refreshing drink in our current hellscape.

This book is a must-read for anyone curious about linguistics or the internet. Don't let the page count put you off: McCulloch has included plenty of references to point the reader to all manner of rabbit holes. I hope someday I'll find a niche as special to me as internet linguistics is to McCulloch. Here are some personal takeaways from the book.

Predictive text and spellcheckers are susceptible to our biases and perpetuate them. For example, the insistence on the '-ise' suffix by British English spellcheckers when both '-ise' and '-ize' are commonly accepted. Other biases affect more marginalised groups.
Related the the point above, there are newer spellcheckers that are trained on corpora derived from social networks, which may more accurately capture changes in language.
The development of language conventions is a closed loop. Lexicons and dictionaries look to published, edited prose to establish rules, while editors rely upon them in the same way. Language conventions are therefore somewhat arbitrary and don't always reflect everyday use.
Slang and jargon are usually introduced by marginalised social classes, appropriated by the privileged classes, and then co-opted by commercial brands.
Different styles or 'dialects' of writing convey a different sense of intended audience.
Arabizi is an interesting chat alphabet that represents Arabic in romanised letters and numerals. It is commonly used on social media.
Emoji is literally "picture character" in Japanese. Not derived from "emotion" as in emoticon.
Kaomoji are like vertically-oriented emoticons: T_T and o.O . Kaomoji express emotions via the eyes, while emoticons do so via the lips. This reflects the different ways East Asian and Western Caucasian people interpret emotions in facial expressions shown in some studies.
Emoji serve as gestures in informal writing. There are two types of emoji: illustrative (e.g. birthday cake) and emblems (eggplant). Emblems have specific meanings associated with them.
The first chat interface to display a linear stream of messages was CB Simulator, which aimed to recreate the experience of ham radio in a printed format. Earlier interfaces used separate boxes for each user.
'lol' has been around since the 1980s. It's meaning has changed from purely an indicator of humour to many subtle variations, including as a social lubricant.
A social network has weak ties (acquaintances) and strong ties (close friends). Weak ties introduce linguistic changes, while strong ties spread them through the network. Weak ties are abundant in online social networks.
Minimalist typography (typing in all lowercase) is a conscious effort to subvert the default conventions, considering the ubiquity of autocapitalisation.
Phatic expressions (how's it going, what's up) are social cues that have little meaning in themselves. Contrast this with literal expressions (what's that).
Memes are unique to the internet and are distinct from jokes, which have existed since time immemorial (see also faxlore and Xeroxlore). Memes are weird and often obscure, and serve as in-group references.
Language isn't contained in books. It's a network that is constantly in flux.

Day 25 of #100DaysToOffload

Review: Black Sun Rising (Coldfire Trilogy #1)

2020-09-30T00:00:00Z

Black Sun Rising is the first book of C.S. Friedman's Coldfire Trilogy, first published in 1991. Most reviews I've seen of this relatively obscure series are vague and steeped in nostalgia, so I was hesitant to take the plunge.

After reading Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun—a sublime but exhausting experience—I sought out shorter reads and spent some time with non-genre fiction and non-fiction. Eventually, I wandered back to my SF/F backlog for some escapist fun and found Black Sun Rising, and boy was it (almost) everything I'd been looking for.

We're introduced to the world of Erna mostly through the eyes of Damien Vryce, a priest of the Church (with a capital "C") who also happens to be a badass wandering swordsman. After tragedy befalls a close companion, Damien embarks on a quest to the hostile rakhlands with a band of sorcerors that includes the notorious and feared Hunter: Gerald Tarrant.

Black Sun Rising is science fantasy, with sensibilities that lovers of Hyperion, Lord of Light, and, yes, the Book of the New Sun will appreciate. The planet Erna resembles Earth at first glance but obeys starkly different laws of nature that fuel magical abilities. There's no obvious technology in this book; instead, it blends a typical medieval fantasy setting with interesting scientific concepts. The atmosphere is dark and brooding, bringing to mind the Witcher books. And while it isn't technically horror, there are moments steeped in grisly, stomach-churning detail. The malevolent creatures of this world are closely tied to the psyche of its human inhabitants, such that fear itself will result in even more horrors.

Friedman has created some compelling characters, but even more captivating is the dynamic between Damien and Tarrant, an aspect often cited as a highlight of the series. These polar opposites are at odds in their principles, ideology, and abilities. One protects life even as the other seeks to subjugate it. Damien soon finds Tarrant an essential boon to his quest, however deep his hatred of Tarrant's twisted nature. Damien's struggle to come to terms with his dependence on one who is anathema to his personal values allows a tired cliche—the co-existence of good and evil, and their relationship to power—to stand unabashed. This is a darker kind of fantasy with complex and sympathetic characters, and none of the overwhelming nihilism and senseless violence of 'grimdark'.

All of this is delivered through sweeping, sensuous writing that still manages to be crystal clear. Friedman's prose has a cascading quality that sweeps you off your feet into her immersive world. Things familiar and foreign are both described in visceral detail, without the over-explaining that some SF/F authors seem all too ready to indulge in.

As I hinted at earlier, parts of this book are less stellar in my opinion. The pacing is very uneven, and large swathes of the story involve slogging through unforgiving landscapes, so Lord of the Rings haters beware! The way characters retread earlier monologues is also repetitive and adds to a bloated feeling in between truly mind-blowing scenes. Moments that feel melodramatic and forced are a consistent and annoying feature that I had to learn to ignore. Sure, there are rare moments of wit and levity, but I got the feeling that this is a story that takes itself a bit too seriously. Many chapters end in a dramatic pronouncement of despair, or on a profound one-liner that somehow feels hollow.

Those who demand fight scenes and/or rock-hard magic systems will be disappointed, I suspect. However, I can't recommend Black Sun Rising enough if you're hunting for an underrated gem to cleanse your jaded SF/F palate. It's also an excellent dark fantasy for those who, like me, don't have the stomach for straight-up horror but want something a little more unsettling for a change.

Day 24 of #100DaysToOffload

A Tale of Two Heart-stoppers

2020-09-26T00:00:00Z

An NEJM case report published last Thursday (paywalled, but Ars Technica has a nice write-up) described a rare example of liquorice poisoning in a 54-year-old man that led to cardiac arrest. He was rushed to a hospital but died unfortunately despite treatment. Along with some pretty wild changes on his ECG, he had a dangerously low potassium level, which presumably led to his heart stopping (potassium is needed for heart muscle to relax after each contraction). Extensive investigations ruled out other causes of low potassium, and revealed a daily habit of eating one or two "large" bags of black liquorice. Turns out, liquorice contains a substance called glycyrrhizin, which increases cortisol levels in the body (cortisol is also known as the 'stress hormone'). Among other effects, cortisol lowers blood potassium by increasing its excretion in the kidneys. This poor chap had been consistently eating so much liquorice that his heart, kidneys, and blood vessels had been wrecked by uncontrolled excess cortisol.

In a time when randomised controlled trials occupy a hallowed place in biomedical research, the humble case report appears to have fallen into relative obscurity. But case reports are very much alive if you keep an eye out for them, and they can shed light on rare and interesting occurences (like this one), or draw attention to important exceptions to seemingly established rules in clinical practice. But I digress. Let us return to the topic of treacherous edibles.

I'm reminded of a case report (also paywalled, but you can easily find the inevitable news coverage of it) I stumbled upon last year, also involving food and cardiac capriciousness. A 60-year-woman who was attending a wedding mistook a large dollop of wasabi for an avocado and chomped down on it. Nasty surprise aside, minutes later, she developed a pain in her chest that spread to her arms, lasting for hours—a classic picture suggesting an acute coronary syndrome (including myocardial infarction, otherwise called a 'heart attack'). The pain subsided eventually and she stayed at the wedding. The next day, she felt weak and went to the emergency department, where ECGs showed changes consistent with myocardial infarction; this was confirmed by lab tests. During cardiac catheterisation, when the doctors took X-ray images of her heart vessels, she was diagnosed with takotsubo cardiomyopathy, also known as 'broken heart syndrome'.

Takotsubo cardiomyopathy—so named for the characteristic ballooning of the heart due to weakened heart muscle, resembling an octopus trap used in Japan—is a condition that can occur following abrupt, intense emotional or physical stress. It's an intriguing phenomenon that lends some scientific credence to the phrase 'dying of a broken heart', but who knew something as innocuous as a heap of wasabi could also be to blame? I'm not a fan of wasabi, and I sure am going to stay the hell away from it now.

It goes without saying that deaths attributed to liquorice are very rare, and those to wasabi rarer still. Liquorice lovers should nonetheless refer to this FDA guidance for safety.

[ Obligatory disclaimer: not medical advice, please consult your physician before going on a liquorice or wasabi binge.]

Day 23 of #100DaysToOffload

Review: A Pale View of Hills

2020-09-16T00:00:00Z

No spoilers.

A Pale View of Hills is Kazuo Ishiguro's debut novel, and also the first of his works I've read. The novel centres on Etsuko, a Japanese woman who moved to England some time after World War II. It opens with a visit by her daughter, Niki; they soon find their conversations inevitably drawn towards Keiko, Etsuko's older daughter who had recently committed suicide. Etsuko struggles to discuss this with Niki, and the rest of the novel shows her reminiscing about her life in Japan.

This short novel, running just under 200 pages, is bursting with themes, the most prominent of which is perhaps that of the interplay between memory, trauma, and personal narrative. As Etsuko tells us about her life in post-war Nagasaki, we're told nothing about Keiko, and the story focuses instead on the period when Etsuko was pregnant with Keiko. Aside from her first husband, Jiro Ogata, and her father-in-law, Seiji, Etsuko mostly interacts with Sachiko, a slightly older war widow, and Sachiko's daugher, Mariko. These two timelines appear to have little to do with each other, until they abruptly intersect amidst some remarkable parallels, conflicting memories, and bizarre distortions in narrative voice. It's a brilliant exploration of the unreliability of our memories, as well as an example of what processing grief and trauma may look like.

This personal trauma is set against a backdrop of tumultuous societal change across the generations, punctuated by a world war. Seiji Ogata struggles to connect with his son, Jiro, who brushes him off with excuses about his busy job. Seiji is also tormented by an article by a former student of his, in which he is denounced for his imperialist stance as a schoolteacher during the run-up to the war. The role of women in Japanese society also undergoes a welcome evolution, and Niki's life in London would be incomprehensible to Seiji.

The prose is quiet and elegant, striking a perfect balance between pretty descriptions of scenery and the detached, almost depersonalised tone with which Etsuko recounts her memories. Add to that some masterfully crafted dialogue, and we get an overall atmosphere that is contemplative, pensive, and haunting, at times eerie and outright horrific. The characters are written incredibly well, and they are both instantly believable and intricately layered.

I found this a very powerful read that will linger in my mind for much longer than the short time it took to complete it. Far from being an overpoweringly tragic tear-jerker, it's nonetheless a meditative and thought-provoking book about painful subjects.

Some useful analyses Eckert, Ken. "Evasion and the Unsaid in Kazuo Ishiguro's A Pale View of Hills." Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, vol. 10 no. 1, 2012, p. 77-92. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/pan.2012.0013.

Michael R. Molino (2012) Traumatic Memory and Narrative Isolation in Ishiguro's A Pale View of Hills, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 53:4, 322-336, doi: 10.1080/00111619.2010.494258

Lydia Gaukler (Autor), 2006, The Aspect of Memory in Kazuo Ishiguro’s 'A Pale View of Hills', München, GRIN Verlag, https://www.grin.com/document/71528

https://www.abebooks.com/blog/2009/03/10/beth-reads-kazuo-ishiguros-a-pale-view-of-hills

Day 22 of #100DaysToOffload

Review: The Folding Knife

2020-09-13T00:00:00Z

No spoilers.

The Folding Knife is the second K.J. Parker novel I've read after Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City. The Folding Knife was published in 2010, and like Sixteen Ways, it's a historical fantasy set in a secondary world devoid of magic.

This novel is written in the third-person and almost entirely from the point of view of Basso, a cunning banker who quickly claws his way to the top of the government. As First Citizen, he reshapes the financial and political institutions of the Vesani Republic to suit his needs. The Folding Knife is a study in hubris, and the opening chapter depicts a disgraced Basso in the present; it is the road to this inevitable fall that takes up the rest of the story. Personal and political conflicts are closely intertwined, suffused with tragic moments that tug at the heartstrings.

The setting appears heavily based on the Byzantine Empire, and the names of characters and places successfully tread the fine line between historically plausible and clearly fictional. The customs and beliefs of the Vesani, along with the various tribal factions, feel authentic and natural.

While I loved Sixteen Ways, I struggled to get through The Folding Knife. It's longer, yes, but I also found large swathes of it bloated and plodding. The prose is bare and uninspiring. Very little is left to the reader's imagination, and every nuance and detail is indiscriminately spelled out on the pages, usually in the form of melodramatic dialogue. Attempts at witty comebacks fail to stick more often than they land. Aside from the highest parentheses-per-paragraph count I've seen, there are some rather abrupt POV shifts within scenes, which make for a jarring reading experience.

I enjoyed the technical (but dumbed down for readers like me) talk of economics, warfare, and numismatics in Sixteen Ways, and this book delivers even more of it. The bits about epidemiology were a nice touch in particular, though they strained my suspension of disbelief considering the time period. That said, I really like this aspect of Parker's style, and I hope to continue seeing it in his other books.

As far as characters go, Basso is sufficiently fleshed out to have captured my interest. He's much less likeable than Orhan, but is nonetheless an interesting character to follow. I can't say the same for the other characters, who are mostly bland cut-outs or bureaucratic drones with a Latin name attached to them.

The Folding Knife is not a bad book, but it did not match the hype at all, and it's not exactly a short read. There are flashes of brilliance, but I found it much less polished than Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City. I'd strongly recommend those interested in K.J. Parker to try the latter instead.

Day 21 of #100DaysToOffload

Review: The Book of the New Sun

2020-08-23T00:00:00Z

No spoilers.

Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun was published in four parts, as The Shadow of the Torturer, The Claw of the Conciliator, The Sword of the Lictor, and The Citadel of the Autarch. It tells the story of Severian, an apprentice of the torturers' guild, who undertakes a long and undulating journey through the bizarre lands of Urth. Totalling a little over 1000 pages, the books are written in the style of a memoir with a notoriously unreliable narration.

The story is about many things, but what I noticed most of all were compelling ideas about memory, truth, identity, and time. Right from the start, Severian claims to have a perfect memory, but does he really recall everything as they were? If not, is he lying to us? This is a sticking point for most readers, and, combined with some crazy warping of identity and time, makes for a marvellously disorienting and psychedelic experience.

The Book of the New Sun doesn't seem to be discussed much outside of a few enclaves of hardcore SF/F readers, probably due to its reputation of being dense, labyrinthine, and outright incomprehensible at times. Characters are often described as one-dimensional and bewildering, and the plot, when it can be followed, as one of many straightforward instances of the hero's journey. Fairly or otherwise, Wolfe has earned comparisons to Melville and Joyce.

There is truth in all that has been said, but my experience as someone who hasn't read any Gene Wolfe—or much SF/F, for that matter—has been overwhelmingly positive. I felt lost, enthralled, frustrated, and repulsed, often all at once. I was shocked to realise I'd finished the whole thing in two weeks.

These books are frequently described as literary puzzles; in order to make any sense of the story, one must presumably analyse every word in painstaking detail, cross-reference them with musty lexicons, and take copious notes, preferably on a Crazy Wall. This is a gross exaggeration. While Wolfe peppers his story with many, many archaic terms, the surface plot is easy to follow, and most events are eventually explained by Severian. The story as told by Severian is enjoyable on its own, but when you notice glaring inconsistencies and unspoken details, you start to pay closer attention and peer between the lines. Some books need to be re-read to be enjoyed, but this isn't one of them. If you re-read this, it's only because you already like it enough on the first time to dive in and discover all the nitty-gritty details you missed.

The prose itself is elegant but simple, and the archaic words lend their own distinctive charm. Many of them are taken straight from ancient Greek, and they say a lot about the Urth of Severian's era. I got the impression that none of the words are made up, and even the ones that don't appear in standard dictionaries have clear roots in the languages and mythologies of our own world. The Lexicon Urthus is a valuable supplement with definitions for these obscure words, but it also contains spoilers, which may not be ideal on a first read; I found a simple Google search to suffice whenever I was desperate to look up a particular term.

I was hooked from the beginning by the unique setting. The lines between fantasy and sci-fi are blurry at best here, if they even exist. While this kind of science fantasy setting isn't uncommon, it's so seamless and authentic that it feels like a living, breathing world that we've been dropped into. The atmosphere is hauntingly beautiful, with lush and vivid scenery belying a sense of decay and finality. The series is sometimes compared to Dark Souls, not just in storytelling style, but also in terms of ambience and tone.

Perhaps more difficult for me than the archaic terminology and obtuse narration was Severian's misogyny. It's important to distinguish between the author and their characters, and I also know nothing about Wolfe's personal views in this matter. However, that doesn't make it easier to read about Severian's reprehensible thoughts and actions towards the women he encounters. I say this not to criticise, but to give any potential readers fair warning, because while the misogyny isn't very graphic, it rears its ugly head throughout all four parts of the story.

That aside, it's clear that Severian is a complex and layered character whose narration colours the entire story, and isn't necessarily a hero we should root for, insofar as there are heroes in this story. I found the other characters equally intriguing and even more enigmatic, and it's a real joy to puzzle out their backstories and motivations.

Some advice from a first-time reader of The Book of the New Sun to potential readers: don't worry about missing details. The story holds up really well even if you don't spot them all. Be patient, and most questions will be answered in time. It's easy to put down the book for a while and pick it up again, thanks to the short chapters. This series is divisive and isn't for everyone. Despite loving it, it has also been a somewhat exhausting experience. I highly recommend trying Shadow and finishing at least that; if you dislike it, it's safe to say you wouldn't enjoy the rest of The Book of the New Sun.

Whilst I take a break from Gene Wolfe, I plan to check out the subreddit and the Alzabo Soup podcast, which I've had to force myself to stay away from in fear of spoilers. I haven't fallen down a rabbit hole this deep in a while.

Note: I've also posted brief, spoiler-free thoughts on Shadow, Claw, and Sword if you want to check them out.

Day 20 of #100DaysToOffload

Pit Stop: The Sword of the Lictor

2020-08-20T00:00:00Z

No spoilers.

The Sword of the Lictor is the third entry in Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun. Severian has finally arrived in Thrax, and he settles into his new role swiftly.

The Claw of the Conciliator was a difficult read, but I'm glad I've stuck with The Book of the New Sun this far. Sword is chock-full of revelations and callbacks, and even on a first read the pay-off was incredible. Many cryptic characters from the earlier books re-appear, and their motivations and backgrounds are much more fleshed out, if not fully explained. The history of Urth is sketched out in more detail, and it makes the Dying Earth setting even more haunting and compelling.

Sword is also really fun to read as a story in itself. Severian heads out on his own pretty early on and wanders the mountains in the north, where he runs into plenty of danger and intrigue. It feels like a more traditional sword-and-sorcery story featuring a lone wanderer on a personal quest, complete with terrifying foes, mysterious dwellers, and heart-pounding fights. The ending of Sword is as climactic and satisfying as those of Shadow and Claw were frustratingly abrupt. I also adored Wolfe's gorgeous depictions of the mountains; if you hate Tolkien's page-long descriptions of scenery, though, you probably won't like these parts very much.

Unlike with the book-within-a-book chapter in Claw, I really enjoyed the one in Shadow (yes, there's another one of those plucked from Severian's brown book). Perhaps I was just more prepared for it this time.

The larger stakes of the overarching story somehow become clearer and muddier at the same time. Who is the Conciliator? Who is the New Sun? What is the Autarch's deal? What do Abaia and co. really want, and what do the cacogens have to do with all this? Many hints have been dropped since Shadow, and I know there are even more I've missed, but I'm super pumped to see it all come together in The Citadel of the Autarch.

Day 19 of #100DaysToOffload

Pit Stop: The Claw of the Conciliator

2020-08-14T00:00:00Z

No spoilers.

I'm now halfway through Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun. The Claw of the Conciliator skips ahead a little after the abrupt ending of The Shadow of the Torturer, and that gap is filled in much later in Claw. I suppose feeling disoriented is par for the course when reading Wolfe.

Despite this slight jump ahead in time, I found myself fully immersed during the first half of Claw. Wolfe has created an eerie and beautiful world, and we finally venture outside the Wall of Nessus, as Severian continues his slow and detour-filled journey to Thrax. The genre borders are blurrier than ever. I've learned to appreciate Wolfe's use of archaic words, and I'm no longer as resistant to looking them up as I go. As before, the prose is simultaneously elegant and lush, and it's a remarkable experience once you settle into its rhythm.

I frequently see complaints that the side characters of the Book of the New Sun lack personality and depth, constituting nothing more than ciphers. I've found them to be quite the opposite, and I hope some of their tantalising backstories are revealed eventually, or at least hinted at in greater detail. Sure, they verge on being caricatures, but they're still thematically consistent. In a world that's so similar to ours yet starkly different, I wouldn't expect the characters to behave entirely like normal humans.

Shadow was a challenging but enjoyable read, and I have to say Claw was less enjoyable and more challenging. Shadow has many slow moments—and I understand this whole series is a slow burn—but there are perhaps (and hopefully) none as infuriatingly jarring as the book-within-a-book chapter midway through Claw. There's also a protracted chapter slightly further on that's the script of a stage play, but at least that felt more directly related to the main story. This book-within-a-book chapter is a sly distortion of a myth, however, it just felt so incongruous that it hit me like a brick wall and left me feeling less charitable towards Wolfe's obscurant style. Thankfully, the pace picks up after that, and there are some interesting callbacks to the first book along with one pretty shocking bombshell, culminating in a thrilling final stretch.

Regarding my comment on Severian's dodgy attitudes to women in an earlier post, someone mentioned that it gets worse in the other books. Unfortunately, they were absolutely right. There were many moments when I couldn't help feeling enraged at Severian, and perhaps that's the point, but damn it gets old when he describes feeling "a desire like never before" every time he ogles the female characters. Severian recounts and commits some heinous deeds in Claw, and the unreliable narration leads me to strongly suspect he outright omits a similar scene earlier in the book. If I'm not mistaken, at this halfway point in the series, women have always been the victims in the torture scenes, which really doesn't help shake the strong misogynistic undertones.

While I heartily recommend that everyone should give Shadow a try, if only to see what all the fuss is, I can't say the same for Claw. This feels like a watershed moment for readers, and many will drop the series for some reason or another. Frankly, this book felt exhausting, but I'm still dying to see the rest of the story play out and try to figure at least some of the weird puzzles, and so I must carry on.

Day 18 of #100DaysToOffload

Drinking the Productivity Kool-Aid

2020-08-13T00:00:00Z

Years have passed since I first encountered the Zettelkasten method, the latest craze in note-taking hipsterdom. I suspect much of its resurgence is driven by the hype around Roam Research, a shiny new platform that will set you back at least $100 a year.

As far as I understand, a Zettelkasten is merely a specific approach to creating a wiki or knowledge base. It's basically a big box of notes (think index cards). Each note contains a discrete, 'atomic' idea. Notes contain links to other notes, including backlinks ("what other notes link to this one?"). Notes aren't sorted in any kind of hierarchy, which reduces the friction of making them and enables easier connections.

Do I really need a Zettelkasten?

All my permanent, archival notes are stored as a bunch of lists in Org files. Searching them to find specific items to reference is a breeze, but although I love the simplicity, the problem lies in periodic reviewing and extracting useful insights. My current reviewing method entails going down a list of entries rather haphazardly; I tend to be put off from revisiting larger lists for this reason. That's fine for notes related to personal interests, but I worry it's holding me back in my work-related pursuits. Plus, linking notes can be tedious in vanilla Org mode. Simply put, I need more structure.

I could use a conventional wiki, but I get the idea that a Zettelkasten may be more useful for generating and developing ideas. Most of all, I'm intrigued by the idea of atomised ideas that I can reuse and shuffle around freely to discover interesting connections.

In that case, why not just use a mind map or concept map? Mind maps impose a tree structure, which I find too restrictive for complex topics. I've also explored concept mapping software in the past, but found them extremely clunky. I prefer the 'box of index cards' model of Zettelkasten.

My aim is to start with adding notes related to my research projects (clinical neurosciences), along with other areas I'm interested in personally.

What I'm not using it for

My Zettelkasten is not a catch-all knowledge base. I intend to be extremely selective about the types of information I add to it. Notes that are trivial (recipes, fiction reviews, hobby stuff), personal (reflections, life stuff), or 'how-tos' will stay in my Org files.

I'm not using it for medical school knowledge. It's not worth the effort, especially since there are many high-quality, up-to-date, and professionally maintained sources of knowledge and synthesised evidence. Related to that, my Zettelkasten is not for memorising facts; Anki is perfect for that.

My Zettelkasten is not for productivity in the usual sense, like to-do lists and scheduling. I don't see the value it provides over literally any other tool, not to mention the startup cost of learning a new system.

Lastly, this is not a capture device for unfiltered thoughts. I record those either directly in my Org files, or on paper or mobile. Notes must undergo some degree of refinement before entering my Zettelkasten.

Software

It seems like there's new Zettelkasten software born every week. I initially planned to stick to an Emacs/Org mode-based implementation, but then reminded myself that I still barely understand Emacs. As impressive as packages like org-roam are, I'm certain I'll drown in the whirlpool of madness that is my Emacs config.

At the same time, I want something that works on plaintext files, and if I can't use Org mode, then Markdown is the next best bet. No need to worry about vendor lock-in or cross-platform availability and all that.

In the end, I chose Obsidian, a months-old Markdown knowledge base with a pretty active community. I can point it to any existing folder of notes on my machine, so I lose nothing if I decide to switch away. The built-in features are very conducive to a Zettelkasten-based system, with automatic backlinks and link updating. It can even generate a graph for a visual representation of my network of notes.

This better not be a case of Working on the Tooling for the Thing Instead of Doing the Damn Thing. If you see more posts about Zettelkasten here, it means I've failed.

Resources

Day 17 of #100DaysToOffload

Pit Stop: The Shadow of the Torturer

2020-08-11T00:00:00Z

No spoilers.

As someone who hasn't read lots of SF/F, Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun is up there with the Malazan series as famously dense reads reserved for the future. The idea of books that involve re-reading as a major part of the experience also didn't appeal to me. They certainly seem to be divisive, receiving love and scorn in equal measure.

I spent a good couple of days trawling through forums and subreddits about Wolfe's magnum opus, in an effort to decide whether I should take the plunge. Well, here I am, exactly two days after I picked up The Shadow of the Torturer. Too quickly for real fans, I know, but I was absolutely hooked and couldn't pace myself.

This isn't meant to be a proper review, but rather a pit stop to gather my thoughts before moving forward. I intend to finish the rest of The Book of the New Sun, and I feel I can't judge it fairly in its entirety having only made it a quarter of the way through. Perhaps I won't be able to do so even after finishing it.

The story is written in the style of a memoir, and told from the first-person point of view of Severian. We follow his journey from the guild of torturers in the Citadel out into the strange city of Nessus.

It's so good! The first fifty pages were interesting but nothing too crazy, and I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop and experience Severian's notoriously unreliable narration. But the surface plot really isn't difficult to follow, and the language, whilst peppered with archaic and obscure words, is poetic in the best way: precise, beautiful, simple.

The complexity, it seems, lies in the interpretation of the text. Allusions and allegories abound in every page, even though they flew over my head almost without exception. You also start to see weird cracks appear in the fabric of the story, and hallucinatory moments intrude upon the detached, calm recollections of Severian without warning. I read this with a strange mix of fascination and apprehension and it's really unlike anything I've ever read.

The mood and atmosphere of the story were what kept me hooked. The comparisons with Dark Souls are apt, both in storytelling and in tone. Severian's time is set far into the future when the world is slowly dying, and Wolfe paints images of strange buildings and wildlife that somehow manage to be both vivid and elusive at the same time.

There's lots of oft-conflicting advice out there for those who are considering a shot at the Book of the New Sun. Here's what worked for me: don't get bogged down in trying to figure things out immediately. I found my enjoyment soared exponentially when I stopped worrying about not getting every reference or deeper meaning. I'll save those for the inevitable re-reads. However, do pay full attention while reading and don't skim, as Wolfe rarely wastes a single word. Don't worry about dictionaries and looking up every archaic word as you go along, as a lot of their meaning can be gleaned from context. If you desperately need to find definitions, a simple Google search is best. The Lexicon Urthus, while a worthy addition, contains many spoilers that should be avoided on a first read. Don't look up the books online too much or you'll inevitably run into spoilers like I did.

As has been pointed out ad infinitum, this won't be for everyone. The plot is meandering, Severian is a deeply flawed character who doesn't show much agency, there is occasional sex and violence, and the archaic words can feel needlessly frustrating at times. None of those were really a problem for me, but I can't say the same for the portrayal of women in this book. Severian's attitudes to women are awful, which is perhaps unsurprising given his upbringing, but it doesn't make the odious sexism and misogyny any more palatable. It's a conscious struggle, but - and I know this comes from a position of privilege - if you manage to look past that, there's plenty else to enjoy in this book.

This first book feels more like setup than anything else and ends abruptly, but as far as setups go it achieves more in less than 330 pages what some struggle to do in more than 1000. All that said, I'm almost certain the weirdness is going off the charts in the subsequent books. I can't wait.

Day 16 of #100DaysToOffload

It's Roguelike, Not Rougelike

2020-08-10T00:00:00Z

Click on the images to enlarge them.

Having multiple hobbies doesn't scale well: once you're past two or three of them, you'll have to live with the fact that you can't possibly shower each one with equal amounts of love and attention. Either you rotate them constantly, or you maintain one or two core hobbies and dip into others when time allows. Reading has been my core hobby for quite a while, and even before I picked up writing, I found that I didn't have as much time for video games as I once did. Thus video games have been relegated to holidays and the odd weekend.

That is, until I discovered roguelikes fairly recently and found them a perfect fit for my schedule. Games don't tend to last long (they're meant to be difficult, but yeah, I suck), and their turn-based nature means I can step away at any time and return later to pick up exactly where I left off. Don't let the simple graphics fool you—roguelikes employ deliciously intricate mechanics and offer endless replayability. Did I mention that most roguelikes are free? If you're interested in the history of the genre, here is a wonderfully in-depth article to start with.

My first foray into the genre was Brogue. It's simple and short, and is an example of a coffeebreak roguelike, so named because they can be played in the span of one. Brogue is frequently recommended as a first roguelike for beginners because of its simple mechanics and clean interface, but I find it surprisingly tough¹. Brogue is classless, meaning that you have to shape your play-style according to the items you find. It also has the most beautiful ASCII graphics I've seen that puts many tilesets to shame. There's a small but active community that participates in weekly "seed" challenges.

I hopped onto DoomRL—or DRL, as it was renamed in the wake of some dicey copyright trouble—after getting burned out on Brogue. It's inspired by Doom, of course, and it's every bit as awesome as that sounds. Complete with sound effects, this is a frantic and fast-paced shooter. The impressive variety of guns and relentless onslaught of abominations will keep you on your toes constantly. A perfect little adrenaline-delivery system, also playable within the confines of a coffee break.

Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead skews towards the Dwarf Fortress end of the spectrum of video games, minus the ridiculous FPS death. CDDA also has a much saner user interface. I stayed away from this one for a while because I'm not a fan of horror (CDDA is set in a zombie apocalypse), but I regret not jumping in earlier. Oddly, I find it calming instead of spooky, especially because there's a huge map to explore and so many things to do. It's a survival sim with remarkable depth, especially once you get to know the crafting system. There's no set goal except to survive, which takes more than a few frustrating tries to get to grips with. Each update adds even more features to a game that's already overflowing with them—in a good way! This is for you if you're looking for a kitchen-sink game, but found Dwarf Fortress overwhelming to the point of despair. If you need more convincing, head on over to Rock Paper Shotgun for some high praise. Check out the official forum and the subreddit for the essential tips and tricks that will help you survive past the first day.

Tales of Maj'Eyal draws frequent comparisons to Diablo, and for good reason. It looks and plays very similarly to an aRPG, with its infinite loot system and ability cooldowns. The classes are myriad and the skill trees are overwhelming, with more branches than a simian Git developer could handle. ToME comes with enough lore to match any self-respecting cRPG, with frequent DLCs that add some pretty interesting content. Interestingly, it started off as a variant of Angband, a seminal entry in the history of roguelikes. As much as I was intrigued, though, this felt like a big time investment with a steeper learning curve than I could deal with. I'll have to give it another shot at some point.

Last, but far from least, is Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. This one has retained my attention the longest, and something about its charm just clicks with me. DCSS is a more traditional, well, dungeon crawler, with a nice range of species and classes to choose from. There's also a deity system that grants your character some interesting abilities, adding an interesting dimension to gameplay. It's very beginner-friendly, with sensible default key bindings and an actually useful tutorial. The community is relatively large and friendly, which you can check out at this forum or the subreddit. There are many wikis and tutorials that make learning to play a real joy, and frequent online tournaments that keep the community active. You don't have to download DCSS if you don't want to, as there are online servers that allow you to play from your web browser. DCSS is also a fascinating example of open-source game development, at one time having more than 200 developers working on it. Each update aims to streamline the game alongside new introductions and remove the extraneous bloat that characterises other famous roguelikes such as NetHack and Angband, and bar a vocal minority seems to keep its passionate community happy. In any case, there are many interesting DCSS variants that have spawned following controversial updates.

All of these games are available on most platforms (did I mention they are free?) including mobile, with the exception of ToME. As with any other game genre, the community is a big part of the appeal. Whether you want to dive right into roguelikes, or just lurk in the discussions for a bit, I suggest heading over to the r/roguelikes subreddit. RogueBasin is the wiki to check out.

Note: This website was absolutely free of images before today, and now I've included five in a single post. Not using images goes against every mainstream blogging convention, but I kinda liked the spare and minimalist look I had going on. Now I feel like I've broken not one, but five curses. One thing I refuse to compromise on is keeping my site GIF-free unless absolutely necessary, especially for my book reviews, because I hate this.

Footnotes:

¹Refer to the comment above with respect to me sucking. ↩

Day 15 of #100DaysToOffload

Review: Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City

2020-08-06T00:00:00Z

Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City by K.J. Parker is a historical fantasy published in 2019, the sequel to which is apparently out this month. Sixteen Ways is set in a secondary world that mirrors the Roman Empire (here called Robur) and has zero magic. The story is told from the point of view of Orhan, chief of the military engineers, who winds up in the unenviable position of defending the heart of the empire against a mysterious and powerful army.

This first-person POV of Orhan is a key feature. The plot, while fast-paced and exciting, plays second fiddle to this vivid character study of Orhan. The prose brims with Orhan's personality and presents a shining example of windowpane prose done right. In short, he's the best at his job, cynical and nihilistic, relentlessly smart-mouthed, and unscrupulous in his endeavours, yet he remains a very sympathetic character. The flawed genius is a character trope that crops up frequently in pop culture, and I was unsure if Orhan could stand out among the Sherlocks and Tony Starks. Perhaps it's just an innate magnetism that such characters possess when they're done well, but I found Orhan to be wonderfully engaging in his own way.

Orhan is confronted with problem after problem in the face of insurmountable odds, and it was immensely riveting to see him spin up his clever schemes and tactics. I found his internal struggles deeply affecting as well, and they add plenty of nuance and complexity to his character. The story is full of twists and turns, both in the external battle against the enemy army and in the ethical and moral quandaries Orhan finds himself floundering in.

There are few scenes of physical conflict, and you won't find any big, explosive battles or long, drawn-out duels. Instead, we follow Orhan as he re-jigs the entire infrastructure of the City to cope with the siege. I never thought I would be so thrilled by talk of numismatics, construction, or supply-chain management. It felt refreshing to read a fast-paced story that isn't fuelled by physical action. The warriors in this story that would otherwise hog the limelight in most epic fantasy take a back seat to Orhan the engineer.

Another place this book shines is in its grounding in history. My knowledge of ancient Rome doesn't extend very far past Mary Beard's SPQR (great read, by the way), but what little I know matches up with a lot of little details in Sixteen Ways. For example, the Robur Empire expanded its influence by actively assimilating other peoples; similarly, the Roman Empire grew so quickly in its early days by liberally granting citizenship to non-Romans.

The one thing I'm not a big fan of is the ending. I don't hate it, but there's something about its abruptness that bugs me. Parker attempts to use the first-person, unreliable narrator framing device to justify this somewhat. Overall it's not a big deal and it's still reasonably satisfying, so don't let that put you off from reading this wonderful book.

I haven't read the sequel yet, but Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City stands perfectly well on its own. If you like reading about a hyper-competent protagonist, if you like dry, snarky humour, and if you like historical fiction, I think you'll find this a very enjoyable read that offers so much more than just that.

Day 14 of #100DaysToOffload

Review: Lord of Light

2020-08-03T00:00:00Z

Lord of Light is a stand-alone novel by Roger Zelazny published in 1967. It holds up really well for its age, and it's a brilliant example of science fantasy. I see this book mentioned more often in sci-fi circles, but I highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys the broader speculative fiction genre. I'll definitely be exploring Zelazny's other works.

The story centres on a war among gods, sparked by a rebellion led by one of their own. It's a dizzying and intoxicating blur of sci-fi and fantasy, rife with bizarre anachronisms. It gets a little messy at times, but I loved it anyway. Gods and demons co-exist alongside radio towers and flamethrowers; the flowery, poetic, and dignified language is punctuated occasionally by modern colloquialisms and the rare insult. There's an underlying tension between the ancient and the advanced, between faith and science, and between myth and fact.

The opening lines grabbed me immediately, but the next fifty pages or so were confusing as I tried to make sense of the chronological jumps and the large cast of characters with their many names. This is not a condemnation of the book, but merely a suggestion to stick with it until at least halfway through before you decide whether or not to continue. All is revealed eventually.

Most of the background is delivered slowly through dialogue, and while this skirts a bit more closely to telling rather than showing, I thought it was masterfully done. These bits always felt thematic and natural, answering just enough questions to satisfy without being heavy-handed. The dialogue itself is fluent and snappy and really delightful to read.

Characters don't display black-and-white morality, and their alignments are often vague and flitting, so if you're looking for a straight-laced good vs evil story, this ain't it. Although most characters are fairly one-dimensional, I found them believable and compelling overall, and they added lots of flavour to the story.

If the book could be distilled to a single "what-if" question, it would be this: what if mortal men adopted the positions and powers of Hindu deities? Zelazny demonstrates a broad knowledge of the source material, and he delivers a damning criticism of colonialism in this story of mortal men appropriating Hindu and Buddhist mythology for their own ends. I can't say I'm completely happy with this portrayal of cultural appropriation, but at the very least I'm glad it's sparked some much-needed personal introspection. Another thing to note is that while Zelazny seems to know his stuff, the mythological elements can feel rather superficially transposed onto his story. If you're well-versed in Hindu mythology, I suspect you won't enjoy this very much.

To end with a fun fact: there were short-lived plans to make a film adaptation of Lord of Light in the 1970s. The CIA acquired some of the material and used it for a fake Hollywood project during the Iranian hostage crisis; this scheme was the subject of the 2012 film, Argo.

Day 13 of #100DaysToOffload

Exploring Chinese Fantasy

2020-07-16T00:00:00Z

I firmly believe in the benefits of reading widely, across not only genres but also cultures. There is great value in venturing outside the familiar and having our ideas and sensibilities challenged. This Reddit comment thread brought up the lack of translated fantasy novels, and why it's not easy to find non-English recommendations. So here's a post I hope will spur some interesting discussion.

While I haven't kept up with modern Asian fantasy à la Ken Liu and R. F. Kuang, I have read some Chinese literature while growing up, and I can offer some examples that might interest fantasy readers hoping to dabble in non-English fiction.

Some disclaimers before I begin: I'm not a literary expert. Asia is huge, and I'm only focusing on Chinese fantasy here. I've only read the original Chinese versions of the following works, so I can't vouch for the quality of the translations.

Genre definitions are always contentious. Here, I take fantasy to mean "stories that are unlikely take place in our world", which leaves out classic historical fiction such as Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Water Margin and Dream of the Red Chamber. I urge you to check them out nonetheless.

Oldies but goodies

Why classics? Well, because they've been around for a while, there's a good chance you'll find a translation or two in your preferred language. Also, classics are classics for a reason - for better or worse, they're the surviving representation of the past, and their stories have retained enough relevance to weather the passage of time.

Journey to the West by Wu Cheng'en

Journey to the West is one of the Four Great Classic Novels in Chinese literature, along with the three I mentioned above. Set during the Tang dynasty, the Monkey King, which has roots in Hindu and Buddhist mythology, goes on a quest with a Buddhist monk to retrieve the sutras. Accompanying him are a pig warrior¹ and a deity-turned-river-demon-turned-monk².

Wikipedia has a list of notable translations; W. J. F. Jenner's has been praised in particular, an excerpt of which you can find here.

The Investiture of the Gods by Xu Zhonglin

Written during the Ming dynasty, this is a mythologised portrayal of the dawn of Imperial China. The last tyrant king of the ruling Shang dynasty faces an uprising, in an ensuing series of epic battles against earthly and heavenly forces.

As far as I know, there are two English translations: this one is more recent, and this one seems to be more difficult to find.

Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio by Pu Songling

This collection of folk tales features ghosts, demons, fairies and all manner of mythical beings dropping in on the everyday lives of humans. Beneath the surface of these stories about love and lust, the author, a disillusioned bureaucrat, slips in critiques of the rich and corrupt.

Herbert Giles' translation is freely available at Project Gutenberg, but has been lampooned for its prudish editorialising. Penguin has a more recent translation. Words Without Borders has a free excerpt from yet another translation.

Jin Yong and wuxia novels

Jin Yong's stories are near and dear to my heart, and he sits next to Tolkien in my personal pantheon of authors. Jin Yong is the pen name of Louis Cha, a Hong Kong writer who popularised the modern wuxia genre. His novels are a terrific blend of drama, martial arts, and a touch of mysticism, all set against historically accurate backdrops. They are epic in scale, spanning lifetimes and distant borders. Add to that prose that is poetic but accessible, and you have the makings of a masterpiece. The wuxia genre has been a part of Chinese literature for a long time, but Jin Yong single-handedly breathed new life into it with his literary chops and his skilful use of genre tropes.

There's action and factions aplenty, and the stories revolve around martial artists and a myriad of secret societies, sects, and cults. Wuxia is low fantasy: aside from the admittedly superhuman abilities that characterise fight scenes, the characters are decidedly human, and the stories focus heavily on their emotional struggles. There are no supernatural elements, and none of the overt magic of the xianxia subgenre.

Far from being popcorn fantasy, these novels possess a rich depth of culture and philosophy. We also see timeless themes such as the nature of good and evil, loyalty, heritage, love, family... the list goes on. Jin Yong was remarkably progressive in his portrayal of women, especially since his stories were all published in the 1950s to the 1970s. Female protagonists and villains alike are thoughtfully depicted and feature prominently.

WuxiaSociety provides a comprehensive overview of Jin Yong's novels, as well as fan translations for most of them. Of his 15 books, five - or four and a half, more accurately - have been officially translated into English. The Legend of the Condor Heroes is the latest to get the treatment; there are four planned volumes, of which the first two are published.

Closing thoughts

Unsurprisingly, we've barely scratched the surface of Chinese fantasy. Liang Yusheng and Gu Long were famous contemporaries of Jin Yong, and I'm sure you've noticed the current proliferation of translated webnovels. If you read sci-fi, you've likely come across Liu Cixin and Hao Jingfang, as well as many short story writers. As I alluded to earlier, fantasy is alive and kicking outside of the Anglosphere, and I hope we see more well-made translations.

Day 12 of #100DaysToOffload

Footnotes:

¹Yes. ↩

²Yes. ↩

Review: The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

2020-07-11T00:00:00Z

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet is Becky Chambers' debut novel. Chambers initially self-published it as part of a Kickstarter campaign, making waves in the speculative fiction community before it got picked up swiftly and republished via the traditional route.

This novel with its mouthful of a title focuses on the crew of the Wayfarer, contractors who build tunnels (wormholes, I think?) that connect distant areas of the Galactic Commons. We follow this diverse, not-exclusively-human cast of characters on their journey to the eponymous planet. This novel has been described as 'slice-of-life' fiction, with not much in the way of plotting and a heavy emphasis on the everyday lives of the characters—the Long Way features much more than the Small, Angry Planet.

I enjoyed the episodic feel of each chapter. However, even though I wasn't expecting lots of quick action and shocking twists, it took me a good while to warm up to the book. Complaining about pacing in a slice-of-life story might sound silly, but some parts detailing the setting can be a little tedious, which slows it down even more. The cosy, optimistic tone which is the selling point for most people—myself included!—occasionally tips over into saccharine sweetness, especially when characters are being introduced. If you're after a novel with conventional amounts of conflict, this might not be for you. I was also put off by how cartoonish some of the characters seem, at least at first glance.

But these negatives fade as the story progresses, and I was hooked slowly but surely. The prose flows easily, and it's descriptive without being overwrought, simple without being lifeless. As obvious as it may seem, the magic really does lie in the characters. Eschewing epic space battles and political intrigue, the dramatic tension of the story emerges from the relationships among the crew of the Wayfarer, old and new. Character interactions feel natural and satisfying, and it doesn't hurt that they're wholesome and heartfelt. The warmth and cosiness is balanced out by moments of contemplation, and there are bits that deal with more sombre and dispiriting aspects of life.

It's not just the characters that make this such an enjoyable story. The Galactic Commons is described in dizzying but consistent detail, along with the fascinating and bizarre groups that inhabit various planets and outposts. The descriptions of food are lovely, from the crab-like red coast bugs to the steaming, fluffy smoky buns. Interspersed throughout are scenes that capture the haunting and awesome beauty of outer space.

Comfort reads don't have to be all fluff and no substance. At its core, this novel is about families of choice. Besides themes surrounding gender, sexuality and inclusivity that are seamlessly woven, there are also brief explorations of colonialism and transhumanism in the great sci-fi tradition. One thing that particularly resonated with me was the story of how humans left Earth and splintered across different pockets of the galaxy; it mirrors how my great-grandparents, along with so many others, left China a century ago in search of a better life. As a minor quibble, I found it a bit strange how quick the non-human characters were to point out the shortcomings of the human species, considering the overarching message of respecting each other's differences. I think the criticisms of the human condition could have been handled with more nuance.

If you liked the parts in Mass Effect where you talk to your crew on the Normandy, if you wished you could see the crew members talk to each other more, and if you enjoyed reading the descriptions of cool planets and alien species, then The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet will scratch some itches. I found it a nice book to take me through a couple of weeks of soul-shattering exam prep, a few short chapters at a time, but I'm sure it works just as well as a quick read. It's a cliche at this point, but this is a welcome salve for dark times such as these.

Day 11 of #100DaysToOffload

Review: The City and the City

2020-06-25T00:00:00Z

May contain spoilers.

China Miéville is one of those authors whose works I see mentioned frequently but have never gotten around to reading. He's a heavy hitter in the "New Weird" genre, which has roots in the pulp horror published in magazines like Weird Tales. Turns out New Weird isn't strictly horror, but incorporates elements from science fiction, fantasy, and horror in an effort to subvert and unsettle.

The City and the City is low on horror and written in the style of a hard-boiled, noir detective story. A perfect introduction for a scaredy cat like me, in other words. It starts with a murder, and through the eyes of Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Beszel Extreme Crime Squad, we get to explore two neighbouring cities that co-exist in a bizarre kind of geographical superposition.

Set in post-Soviet Eastern Europe, the titular cities feel incredibly real, once I got to grips with Miéville's neologisms. Beszel and Ul Qoma exist in a world that's a perfect replica of ours, as far as I can tell. There are references to Microsoft Windows, Chuck Palahniuk, and Michel Foucault. The vivid and sensual imagery evokes memories of the sprawling city of Budapest. There's also a relentless sense of paranoia, of being watched by forces unknown, that I've rarely encountered in other books.

The ubiquitous descriptions of "unseeing" in the story represent fairly obvious social commentary, but they are never preachy or ham-fisted. It really drives home how this kind of psychic blindness—for want of a better phrase—is deeply ingrained in us. There is a tendency to ignore, or avoid engaging, people and things that don't directly affect our daily lives. This is a timely reminder for me to pay closer attention to the things happening around me, and to overcome apathy and resignation. There is a fine balance to be struck between maintaining a healthy distance from news cycles, and being a responsible member of civil society.

I definitely felt some echoes of George Orwell's 1984. While we don't see the Orwellian abuse of language here, there is a similar kind of cognitive dissonance going on. Even as they share the same topography, all citizens have to "unsee" and "unsense" anything that doesn't belong in their own city. Anyone who fails to do so is in breach, and end up at the mercy of the sinister deep state known as Breach. I was struck by how plausible it all seems, how no fancy magic or technology is really needed to recreate such a society. We also see how individual mannerisms and idiosyncrasies, rather than principles and values, form an integral part of national identity. Besz and Ul Qomans can spot outsiders by their attire, belongings—even by the way they walk.

This story is predominantly about the setting, but everything else is excellent. The plot is well-paced, requiring some attention while still being easy to follow. The prose is crisp and punchy without being skeletal, and really emphasises the "noir"-ness of the setting and genre. The characters, while fairly one-dimensional, are nicely written and keep the spotlight firmly on the intriguing setting. We're able to inhabit Borlú's character and really experience the cities. The dialogue feels remarkably natural. The storytelling is organic, free of clumsy exposition and info dumps.

Overall, The City and the City is an incredible read that deserves every bit of hype it gets. I'm looking forward to exploring more of Miéville's work, once I manage to steel myself for the purported grotesque and stomach-churning stuff.

Day 10 of #100DaysToOffload

Review: Shorefall

2020-06-15T00:00:00Z

May contain spoilers.

When we last left our heroes, we saw the beginnings of the titular Foundryside, a newly established merchant house born in the wake of Orso's cunning plan to escape the wrath of the city council. I really liked that ending: after the squeaky bum time that was Orso's trial, our motley crew nabbed a well-deserved spot next to the other merchant houses of Tevanne. A happy ending to an exciting adventure romp.

Shorefall, then, is the Empire Strikes Back of Robert Jackson Bennett's Founders trilogy. Three years after the events of Foundryside, Sancia and co. now face the wrath of Crasedes Magnus, the "first of all hierophants" who was repeatedly mentioned in the first novel but who never appeared, until right at the very end. Crasedes has finally arrived in Tevanne with a vengeance, wreaking havoc as he unfolds his plans to regain his former powers. The stakes are as high as they get, stretched to their breaking point. And just like The Empire Strikes Back, this story has an ending that's more bitter than sweet.

Crasedes is Thanos from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, in a nutshell. Name whispered in hushed tones before making an actual appearance? Check. Incredible, piss-inducing power? Check. An idealistic and utopian goal, but achieved through wantonly ruthless means? Check, and... check. Don't get me wrong, he is a reasonably effective and engaging villain, despite being a Thanos clone. My quibble is that he's flippant in a way that feels forced and overused, and which gets on my nerves since we're given his point of view quite a bit. I liked him a lot more in the first novel (ironic, given his absence then), and the image of him as a powerful undead dude in fancy dress doesn't jive well with the Lovecraftian monster I was led to expect. Doesn't help that Crasedes is always floating through the air in a "weirdly meditative cross-legged pose".

I found all the villains in Shorefall compelling and nicely cloaked in shades of grey, but Ofelia Dandolo was my favourite of the Terrible Trio, insofar as she's more villain than victim. Even though all the antagonists have similar noble but distorted ideals, Ofelia being the only truly human one struck all the right chords for me. Her personal story is wrapped in a tragedy that taints Gregor, and my heart broke every time she confronts him, right till the very end. Those poor, poor Dandolos.

The cyberpunk markings really shine here, and I eagerly lapped them all up. We see the full extent of Sancia's decker-like abilities, and each merchant house has its own proprietary scriving language. Orso, on the other hand, has turned Foundryside into an open source creative commons. There's talk of escalating permissions and privileges to bend reality, and I felt a bit like a l33t m4g1c14n popping a root shell in Renaissance Italy.

Beyond the interesting setting, the characters were what kept me hooked after Foundryside. Here, Sancia and Berenice are the only ones who emerge from the ruins of Tevanne in one piece. Gregor just can't catch a break! I loved his calm idealism and unwavering sense of justice, and cheered when he stormed the Perch and Lark in Foundryside. But then he was transformed into the Winter Soldier, and his vim and vigour is gone as he grapples with his terrible scriving. That's perfectly fine with me, and I saw it as a metaphor for mental illness, but then in the space of a few chapters, he's a) forced to kill his family and b) merged with a rogue AI god. Still, I'm clinging on to the hope that this isn't the last we'll see of him. This can't be how the Revenant of Dantua finally perishes.

But Orso gets an even rougher deal, in my opinion. He's portrayed as mean, ungrateful and prejudiced in Foundryside, but turns out he now has grand visions of liberating Tevanne from the merchant houses and creating a more egalitarian society in its place. A true friend of the people. Granted, Shorefall takes place three years later, but I still would've liked to see his character develop in real time. He doesn't really contribute much to this story, and he's abruptly, cruelly sent to certain death at the end.

The philosophical ideas are more concrete here, and the central question becomes clearer: does humanity inevitably use technology to oppress each other (scriving being the stand-in for technology here)? Crasedes and Valeria both think so; the former sees the forfeiture of free will as a solution, while the latter wishes to remove scriving from the equation entirely. Sancia hints at using Orso's twinning technique to "connect" people; I really hope this doesn't turn out super cheesy or super creepy.

The action is just as thrilling as ever. Bennett seems to have piled on the horror elements with relish in Shorefall—the ghost ship at the start is just one genuinely terrifying example. It's much darker than Foundryside overall, dripping with blood and guts and self-mutilation.

It's okay, I guess. Similar writing, but not as good of a story as Foundryside. But good enough that I'll pick up the third novel when it drops.

Day 9 of #100DaysToOffload

Review: Foundryside

2020-06-14T00:00:00Z

May contain spoilers.

Foundryside is the first novel of a planned fantasy trilogy by Robert Jackson Bennett. The story opens with Sancia, a thief on her way to steal a mysterious key. She finds herself in constant danger after obtaining the key, when many powerful people in the city try to hunt her down.

I wasn't impressed going in. The opening scene is a pretty standard fantasy heist, but with lots of heavy-handed exposition and info dumping. Not a great start, in other words. And the main character, Sancia, reminded me an awful lot of Vin from the Mistborn series—another thief with a mysterious power that aids her thievery. It doesn't help that this power is constantly referred to as Sancia's "talent". I cringed a little every time that was mentioned.

But the setting drew me in almost immediately. In my mind, the city of Tevanne contains many echoes of Dunwall from the video game Dishonored, with its smoking foundries and dark alleyways. Tevanne is composed largely of four powerful merchant houses, each with its own campo (enclave), casting a long shadow over the regular folk who live in the Commons. It's an industrialised steampunk city built on scriving, the magical system that underlies every piece of technology. Scrivers can inscribe symbols on objects to bend them to their will. For example, construction beams can be scrived to adhere to each other more tightly than if they are merely nailed or bound together. Buildings everywhere in Tevanne are made of such scrived materials. This is but a mundane example of the many fantastical and wildly imaginative things we see later on.

Tevanne is obviously inspired by Renaissance Italy, described using various wonderful Italian-esque neologisms, but the mysterious Occident that lies to the west also intrigued me greatly. The Occident was once the land of the hierophants, mortal men who gained terrifying godlike powers through inhumane rituals. I thought the imagery of sinister priests performing rituals that tampered with human souls in great tombs hidden under sandy deserts juxtaposes quite nicely with fantasy Renaissance Italy.

It didn't take long for me to realise that Foundryside is really a cyberpunk novel in fantasy clothing. Scrivers are like computer programmers, and they scrive objects (write code) to make them perform useful functions. Scriving even involves defining basic parameters such as distance, weight, and so on, which further solidifies the resemblance to programming. Changing these scriving definitions can cause scrived objects to behave differently from their intended function—just like hacking. Here in Tevanne, the campos fulfil the role of the big bad corporations of the cyberpunk aesthetic. There's even an AI-like entity, known as a "Construct". And you know what? This fusion of subgenres didn't feel gimmicky at all; I'm unapologetically, 100% on board.

The story gets going pretty quickly, and it keeps its foot firmly on the pedal right to the end. Loads of thrilling action and startling twists kept me turning page after page after page, and I tore through the entire novel in just two days. The overall plot is nothing groundbreaking, but it's well-paced enough that I was never bored or confused. Though there was never a dull moment, each character still felt like they were given enough room to develop in my mind.

And the characters are wonderfully drawn and brimming with personality, each one of them possessing more than meets the eye. Sancia, despite her unique abilities, never feels like an annoying Chosen One/Mary Sue. Importantly, her struggles feel real. Gregor is the scion of the Dandolo household who gives up his glamorous position, and instead patrols the lawless waterfront to impose some semblance of justice and order. Orso is the head scriver, or hypatus, of House Dandolo, and he comes off as a real jerk before (and even after, actually) joining forces with Sancia. But his prickly-with-a-heart-of-gold character has enough emotional resonance to avoid feeling trope-y. Berenice is Orso's assistant with an eidetic memory, which makes her a real badass scriver. The cherry on top is the interactions between these characters, as well as the ways in which they are introduced to each other.

Even the scrived objects make for some compelling minor characters. Sancia's main ability allows her to 'see' scrivings, and hear the thoughts of scrived objects. From run-of-the-mill scrived locks to the Candiano Mountain, every scrived object has a distinctive and colourful voice. Who knew inanimate objects could be so endearing?

Underneath all that rip-roaring action are allusions to freedom and oppression. Sancia is a former slave who fled the plantations in search of a better life in Tevanne. Along with the casual brutality dealt abundantly to the enslaved, Sancia was experimented on in horrific ways during her time at the plantation. Gregor gets his own taste of an even more extreme form of enslavement, when he loses control of his body and gets used as a killer automaton. These are heavy themes that don't really get much more than surface treatment, but they occupy a more central spot in the sequel, Shorefall.

The info-dumps get less annoying as the story progresses, but the exposition is still clunky sometimes. Characters' thoughts often feel really artificial and are obvious vehicles for exposition. Like "I need to get out of here!" or "This feels like a trap!" type of thoughts. It's not just that Bennett tells way more than he shows; I also didn't like how nothing is left to the reader's imagination or deduction. That's not to say that Bennett can't write well, however, because he paints stunningly vivid images. His prose is economical in a graceful way. He uses analogies and metaphors that just click. The dialogue feels natural and engaging. He can write very well. But he's not subtle, and I frequently felt like the pages were being rudely swatted at my nose.

In short, Foundryside feels like a nice blend of Dishonored, The Lies of Locke Lamora, and the first Mistborn trilogy. If you wish fantasy heist novels had more, well, heists in them, this novel will be right up your alley. In any case, I wholeheartedly recommend Foundryside if you're looking for a fun and easy read.

Day 8 of #100DaysToOffload

Review: Cat's Cradle

2020-06-04T00:00:00Z

May contain spoilers.

This is my second Kurt Vonnegut novel after reading Slaughterhouse-Five, well, five years ago. A journalist, in his quest to write a book about one of the creators of the atomic bomb, finds himself on the fictional Caribbean island nation of San Lorenzo. In typical kooky Vonnegut fashion, the journalist goes there after finding out that one of the scientist's sons, who used to work at a hobby shop making model trains, is now a Major General in San Lorenzo.

For such a short novel, Vonnegut managed to fit in a huge cast of wacky, colourful characters. There's "Papa" Monzano, the dying dictator of San Lorenzo. Hazel Crosby never fails pounce on Indiana residents discussed in conversation, and insists on everyone else calling her "Mom". Her husband, H. Lowe Crosby, is a cartoonish American capitalist who goes to San Lorenzo in search of cheap labour. Julian Castle left the sugar business to set up a humanitarian hospital on San Lorenzo, but turns out to be a cynical asshole in person. And, of course, there's Bokonon, the holy man who started a fake/real religion and a fake/real war with the state of San Lorenzo, and whose calypsos pepper every chapter of the story.

To me, the most powerful message in Cat's Cradle is how poorly equipped we humans are to handle the power of technology. This book was published soon after the Cuban Missle Crisis; reading it at the time must have been a horrifying experience. Now it's a quietly uncomfortable read, reminding us in between absurd punchlines of the knife's edge on which our geopolitical climate is delicately poised. We learn early on that after the war, Felix Hoenikker, the scientist whose children accompany our journalist narrator on San Lorenzo, developed ice-nine, a solid form of water that causes liquid water to crystallise into more ice-nine on contact. Felix Hoenikker is a caricature of the Man of Science, a scientist who seems to lack a human soul, and it is his ice-nine that destroys the world in a moment of slapstick comedy. Instant destruction, in much the same way the atomic bomb levelled Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Science without humanism and ethics to guide it, and without art to lend it context, can be a mindless and destructive machine. Scientists have a moral obligation to consider the ethical implications of their work. They cannot claim to be objective and rational beings who have no stance on how the fruits of their research are used.

Vonnegut is a true wordsmith with the ability to churn out delicious turns of phrase. I find his writing as poetic as it is simple. His prose flows naturally, and his humour never fails to entertain. To be sure, there are some awfully dated slurs, and he doesn't treat people of colour, women, and possibly people of short stature very well in his writing.

The novel is made up of short, punchy chapters, which Vonnegut has described as a series of jokes making up a mosaic. Here's a non-exhaustive list of bits I enjoyed:

Poo-tee-weet
National Chairman for Poets and Painters for Immediate Nuclear War
"Papa's" death rattles being amplified by a microphone
"Papa" being referred to as "Papa"
Every single one of Bokonon's calypsos
Bokononist terms such as "duprass" and "karass" and "granfalloon"
"Dynamic tension", a concept in Bokononism, being a term used by a mail-order bodybuilding instructor to describe isometric exercises
Death by hook being inspired by Madame Tussauds, and turning from a fictional punishment into an actual one
The Hundred Martyrs to Democracy getting wiped out before leaving the San Lorenzo harbour
McCabe and Bokonon pretending to be enemies, then becoming actual enemies
Bokonon declaring himself an outlaw
Dr Vox Humana being named after the church organ that killed his mother
Everyone on San Lorenzo, including Papa, being a Bokononist--on the island where Bokononism is outlawed and its adherents sentenced to death on the hook.

Though not as uniformly depressing as Slaughterhouse-Five, this story is no less bleak and pessimistic. The titular cat's cradle is referenced by Newt, who asks the narrator: where is the cat? And where is the cradle? Our existence is meaningless, in spite of our propensity to divine meaning from a tangled mess of string. It may simply be the naivety that comes with my age, but I just can't bring myself to agree with Vonnegut's nihilistic view that humans are fundamentally cruel and stupid--understandable as that may be given his wartime experiences. To be fair, he does offer humour as a way to cope, but the laughter contains just a bit too much bitterness for my taste. As absurd as the world may seem--and believe me, 2020 has done a great job of driving that home--the answer can't be to lie down on a hilltop, eat some ice-nine, and die while defiantly flipping off the heavens with a smile. Sure, I don't have the answers, but for now it seems enough to take each day as it comes and find joy in all the small things.

Quotes

His pores looked as big as craters on the moon. His ears and nostrils were stuffed with hair. Cigar smoke made him smell like the mouth of Hell. So close up, my father was the ugliest thing I had ever seen. I dream about it all the time.
My soul seemed as foul as smoke from burning cat's fur.
The words were a paraphrase of the suggestion by Jesus: "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's." Bokonon's paraphrase was this: "Pay no attention to Caesar. Caesar doesn't have the slightest idea what's really going on."
... the brainless ecstasy of a volunteer fireman.
It posed the question posed by all such stone piles: how had puny men moved stones so big? And, like all such stone piles, it answered the question itself. Dumb terror had moved those stones so big.
Perhaps, when we remember wars, we should take off our clothes and paint ourselves blue and go on all fours all day long and grunt like pigs. That would surely be more appropriate than noble oratory and shows of flags and well-oiled guns.

Day 7 of #100DaysToOffload

Review: Exhalation

2020-05-28T00:00:00Z

May contain spoilers.

In the titular story from Ted Chiang's latest collection, the universe is a sphere, its inhabitants mechanical humanoids who run on air, and whose lungs need refilling at regular intervals. Our nameless narrator is a scientist, an anatomist to be precise: in this land of strange beings driven by gears and actuators, the study of their anatomy is as fundamental a science as physics is in our world.

The anatomists are preoccupied with questions about memory: how is it formed and stored in the brain? The nature of memory is deeply entwined with the nature of the brain itself, and there are two competing schools of thought. Are memories inscribed on sheets of gold foil inside their heads? Or are they stored in the precise and dynamic configuration of moving parts in the brain?

At some point, someone noticed that the clocks, which run on air themselves, seem to be going faster. Not slowed down, but sped up. The narrator is convinced that the answer to this bizarre phenomenon lies in understanding how their brains work. In an extreme example of experimenting on oneself, the narrator devises a contraption that lets them observe and manipulate the inner workings of their brain.

The narrator arrives at a devastating conclusion: the air pressure of the universe is decreasing. When everything, including thought itself, depends on air flow, this means the end of all life is clearly visible on the horizon. Every thought and action inevitably accelerates the clocks.

What a gorgeous piece. I devoured this story in one sitting and now, weeks later, it remains fresh and resonant in my mind. The prose is elegant and flowing, the ideas wildly imaginative. The notion of human thought slowing to a halt as the universe approaches its heat death is haunting and melancholic, yet strangely beautiful. Our dying sighs echo that of the universe as it exhales in one deep long-held breath, first drawn in during the Big Bang aeons ago. And even the smaller details captivate: the design of the experimental setup that lets the narrator perform self-dissection; the intricate pieces that make up their brains; the copper sheets on which these words are supposedly recorded¹.

This story is framed as a journal left behind by the narrator for a future explorer to find. It drives home the fact that all life has to end someday, even if that day is as far ahead as the eventual death of the universe itself. But perhaps questions of when and how the end will arrive are less important than they seem; the fact that we have existed is a cause for celebration and wonder. To experience life--to encounter others, to love and be loved, to create and appreciate art in all its forms--imbues our existence with plenty of meaning, regardless of why we're here in the first place.

It's remarkable how many ideas are featured within the confines of the word count. Ted Chiang introduces these fascinating ideas and fleshes them out in mind-boggling detail. For example, the fact that these humanoids run on air isn't merely a premise to prop up the story; we see how this shapes their society, in the way the filling stations serve as social hubs for the humanoids to congregate and exchange their lungs. I also thoroughly enjoyed the descriptions of the inner workings of their brains, as well as the different hypotheses about memory. The idea of an inevitable tendency towards a state of perfect equilibrium contains echoes of Taoism.

This is easily my favourite in a collection chock full of brilliant stories. I heartily recommend checking it out, which you can do so for free at Lightspeed magazine.

Footnotes:

¹I would totally buy a copy of Exhalations inscribed on copper. ↩

Day 6 of #100DaysToOffload

Cast Your Pod to the Wind

2020-05-27T00:00:00Z

Podcasts are huge now. Everyone and their aunt seems to have one, and as a long-time consumer of podcasts, I welcome this boom with open arms. Here are the podcasts I listen to almost immediately whenever a new episode pops up in my feed, in no particular order.

Reply All is the first podcast I got really invested into. As in would have binged it to death if I'd discovered it more recently, with more unlistened episodes waiting. It's a podcast about the Internet, but really, it's about the quirky, heartfelt, and unsettling stories that exist due to the Internet. The hosts have wonderful chemistry and... powerful bear-repelling laughs, and the stories they tell are the most addictive ear biscuits ever. It's a perfect storm of Internet rabbit holes, obsessive investigation, and witty banter. Here's their list of suggested starting points.

99% Invisible is about design. The term "design" is applied to all aspects of urban life: architecture, sounds, manufacturing, clothing, you name it. Mostly interviews about topics that are thought-provoking, intriguing, entertaining, and informative, each episode usually runs around half an hour long. I adore the overall aesthetic of the show, and it's opened my eyes to so many things I otherwise take for granted or fail to notice. They also have a list of starter episodes, but I'd suggest looking through the catalogue and picking topics that grab you.

Hello Internet is a conversational podcast by Brady Haran and CGP Grey. I can't really explain what this podcast is about, because it seems like it's about anything and everything the hosts want to talk about. Beekeeping. NASA. Flags. Hello Internet is whimsical and charming and cosy in a really authentic way that I haven't seen in any other podcast. It's like the Geocities of podcasts. Listening to it feels like sitting out on the balcony on a sunny fall afternoon. It's also been around for a while and predates a lot of two-dudes-talking podcasts (I think this may be the canonical two-dudes-talking podcast). This is one where it would be best to start with the very first episode.

Do By Friday is another conversational podcast that releases every week. At the end of each episode, the hosts come up with a challenge that they aim to complete in time for the following week's episode. The challenges are really only half of what makes the show so great. They usually start off by catching up with one another, and shooting the breeze about current events. I enjoy their highly entertaining conversations interspersed with silly and manic humour, but I get the feeling that it's not for everyone. If you're put off after one episode, you probably won't like the rest of them since the humour and tone are pretty similar. They also have strong political views, which is fine with me because a) I share some of their viewpoints and b) I'm not American (you'll see what I mean). That said, if this is your thing, welcome on board to the Do By Friday Powder Nation. I suggest starting with any recent episode and seeing if it clicks.

Overdue is a podcast by two guys about books. Each episode, one of them tells the other one about a book he's just read. I'm amazed at how consistently Andrew and Craig release episodes despite having day jobs. I mean, it's not just two dudes talking--it's two dudes talking about a book they've read specifically for each episode. Every single week! And the discussions are always insightful and funny. The books they discuss span every genre and taste. I'm not exaggerating. One episode they discuss Infinite Jest, and on another they talk about the Twilight novels. They've even done quite a few episodes about CYOA books. I enjoy listening to them talk about books I've read, books I haven't read but plan to, and also books I know I'll never read. You can find their suggested starter episodes here, but I think you can also just pick one where they discuss a book you've read.

My Brother, My Brother & Me is one I've fallen hard for fairly recently. It's been around for a while--10 years!--but I tried it once, had no idea what was going on, and gave up five minutes in. Earlier this year, I listened to an episode of The Adventure Zone, their D&D podcast, just for fun and really dug it. I gave MBMBAM another shot and never looked back. Each episode, the McElroy brothers pick out questions on community Q&A sites (mostly Yahoo answers, so you can see how this usually ends up), attempt to answer them, and basically riff off on each other's jokes. I love their offbeat, goofy humour, and more importantly, they seem like genuinely decent people. This is one that takes a little time to grow on you but once it does, you'll be grateful for the massive back catalogue of episodes. I recommend starting with any recent episode that isn't a live show.

If you're looking for a podcast app for mobile, might I suggest two stellar options? Podcast Addict is available on Android, and Overcast on iOS; both are free and packed with wonderful features.

Review: The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate

2020-05-26T00:00:00Z

May contain spoilers.

The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate is the first story in Ted Chiang's collection, Exhalation: Stories. Set in the Medieval Islamic World, it is told from the point of view of a fabric merchant speaking to a caliph. The narrator describes how he meets a shop owner at a marketplace who owns a time travel device, which can send you twenty years in the past or the future.
The shop owner then tells the narrator about other people who had used his device. This stories-within-a-story structure reminded me of Arabian Nights. As each mini story unfolds, the connections between each seemingly unrelated character are revealed. They all find out that the broad strokes of their personal lives are fixed; even when they travel through time to change things, the outcomes don't change. The only thing that changes is their own knowledge of what was, or what might have been.
The narrator decides to use the device to go back twenty years, in order to speak to his now-deceased wife. We find out that he spoke to her unkindly before he left on a trip, and when he returned, it was all too late. His wife had perished in a collapsed building, and he was left with a crippling guilt to bear. Now here was a device that could bring him to that point in time before she died.
And so he goes back twenty years in the past, where a cruel truth awaits him: in spite of (or because of) the long and arduous journey, he has arrived too late. The building is already rubble--his wife is still dead. Shortly before he is arrested for acting suspiciously, he finds out about his wife's last words, and that she forgave him for his harsh goodbye before her death. This is enough to make his disastrous journey worthwhile.
We collect regrets as we age, and sometimes we try to atone for our sins--albeit unsuccessfully, as in the case of the narrator. The idea of an immutable future does raise questions about free will, but ultimately, perhaps we can attain some measure of peace simply by learning more about the past and the future. And in the face of such uncertainty, where every imminent moment is stochastic and potentially life-altering, we shouldn't leave things unresolved for too long. Our timeline is much less malleable than the ones in this story.
This was my first Ted Chiang story, and boy am I impressed! The aren't any groundbreaking ideas here, but the writing is beautiful and moving. The words conjure vivid images of Baghdad and Cairo during the Islamic Golden Age, replete with sights and sounds and smells. This sense of place and time is made even stronger by the flowery language used by the characters. For example, the time travel device is called a 'Gate of Years'. I like the fact that the narrator is trapped in his past, and how the story ends with him awaiting to hear his fate from the caliph. It adds another note of poignancy to a deeply human story.
Quotes

Past and future are the same, and we cannot change either, only know them more fully. My journey to the past had changed nothing, but what I had learned had changed everything, and I understood that it could not have been otherwise. If our lives are tales that Allah tells, then we are the audience as well as the players, and it is by living these tales that we receive their lessons.
Nothing erases the past. There is repentance, there is atonement, and there is forgiveness. That is all, but that is enough.

Day 4 of #100DaysToOffload

Review: Shards of Honor

2020-05-14T00:00:00Z

Shards of Honor is the first book in Lois McMaster Bujold's critically acclaimed Vorkosigan Saga. It is written entirely from the point of view of Cordelia Naismith, a captain in the Betan Astronomical Survey. She finds herself marooned on an unknown planet, her crew and ship missing. Besides a young ensign, the only other person with her is the fearsome Barrayaran soldier, Aral Vorkosigan.
I came in looking for some meaty character-driven writing and was not disappointed. Bujold has described her approach as planting an eavesdroppping device in her main character's brain: this is pretty much true for the entire book, and we never once leave Cordelia's side.
Which works well, since Cordelia is awesome. She's tough and manages to brave her way through the multitude of setbacks thrown at her - including, but not limited to, a shipwreck and multiple harrowing imprisonments. She's also compassionate, refusing to abandon her ensign after he is permanently incapacitated by a nerve disruptor, the barbaric weapon of choice of the Barrayarans. Aral is just as fleshed out, his personality and values shining through at every part of the story. These were characters I could really root for, and whose emotions resonated strongly with me.
Shards of Honor is ostensibly a love story, but it's also a rollicking space adventure with generous sprinklings of social commentary and political intrigue. Barrayar is depicted as a feudalistic and warmongering planet, at odds with the technologically advanced and democratic Beta Colony. There are definite echoes of our Earth in both; I look forward to exploring these intriguing societies in the later books.
I was much less impressed with the prose. Bujold does have some fantastic turns of phrase¹, but I encountered some awkward bits fairly often. Filler words are used judiciously in dialogue. We're privy to seemingly every single thought going through Cordelia's mind, which, when coupled with descriptions of her outward actions, felt clumsy and heavy-handed. There were also some truly dark and horrifying moments that were breezed past, with a tone that felt oddly incongruous with the subject matter.
Just as good prose greatly enhances my enjoyment of a story, so does mediocre prose stick out like a sore thumb (Mistborn, I'm looking at you). Now the prose in Shards of Honor isn't great, and were it not part of the hugely successful Vorkosigan Saga, I would probably not continue with the other books.
In any case, I picked up Barrayar after breezing through Shards of Honor, and boy am I glad I did. But that's a post for another day.

Footnotes:

¹Such as The seconds spun like spiders down her spine. ↩

Day 3 of #100DaysToOffload

In these Testing Times

2020-05-10T00:00:00Z

Following the scramble to institute various forms of quarantine, most countries are now concentrating on COVID-19 testing. Here's what I know about the common methods of testing for viruses, kept as jargon-free as possible (I am not a qualified expert; this is an attempt to brush up on my pre-clinical knowledge).
Broadly speaking, we can test for a virus in two ways: see if the body has produced antibodies in response, or look for the virus itself. Before my brief and simplified rundown of virus testing, here's a brief and simplified rundown of the infection process.

The infection process

When a virus infects a host, it enters cells and hijacks them to produce copies of itself. Viruses, along with other types of germs (and buses), have structures on their surface that mark them as foreign. What happens next depends on whether the body has been exposed to this particular virus in the past.
Suppose this is the first encounter with the virus. Patrolling immune cells spot the foreign invaders and call in other types of immune cells for help. They usually manage to get rid of the virus without much trouble but this can take some time, during which we may feel a bit crap. At the end of it, our immune system 'remembers' this episode and files away the virus in its criminal records.
On subsequent infections, the immune system mounts a much quicker response, clearing the virus before it gains a foothold. This is thanks to antibodies that were produced during the first infection. Antibodies target the virus specifically by binding to viral antigens - these antigens are special molecules on the surface that act like a fingerprint, and they are more unique to the particular virus than the generic structures in the previous paragraph. Think of a lock (antibody) that acommodates a key (antigen) cut to a particular shape. Antibodies deal massive crits and repel the virus more effectively than the generic immune cells in a first infection.

Detecting antibodies

Two main types of antibodies are relevant to lab tests: IgM and IgG. IgM antibodies appear in reponse to a new infection and increase in number over a few weeks. They disappear after that and only provide temporary protection. IgG antibodies appear a bit later than IgM antibodies, but persist after the infection has resolved and confer immunity.
Antibody tests are also known as serological tests, as they are performed on blood samples. Positive IgM antibodies suggest a recent infection, whereas positive IgG antibodies indicate exposure to the infection in the past (including vaccination). However, an undetectable IgM level does not exclude a current infection; IgM takes time to increase in number, and may be undetectable in the early stages.
These tests can paint a fuller picture in retrospect, but on their own, they aren't very useful in diagnosing an ongoing infection. There's some debate about the use of antibody testing in the current pandemic.

Detecting the virus

Viral culture

Why not look for the virus itself? We can test for the presence of the virus in tissue samples such as saliva, sputum, and cerebrospinal fluid (pretty much any bodily fluid). Before the advent of fancy molecular techniques, the standard approach was to grow the virus in cell culture¹ and then look at it under a microscope. The trouble is, many viruses either grow slowly in culture or not at all, and this method is only useful for a select number of viruses.

Antigen detection

We can make use of specific antibody-antigen binding to detect antigens. Variations of this method rely on attaching a probe to each antibody before mixing the antibodies with tissue samples. If viral antigens are present in the sample, the probes stuck in the sample light up like a Christmas tree. Rapid antigen tests that don't require lab setups, while not the most reliable, are useful screening tools.

Nucleic acid detection

If there was only test we could choose, it would have to be quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction, or qPCR for short². This method lets us identify the culprit directly, based on its genetic makeup. Using enzymes that work on DNA, qPCR allows us to make millions to billions of copies of small fragments of viral genetic material, like a money printer going 'brrr'³. Under proper lab conditions, qPCR is highly accurate, and even tiny amounts of virus can be picked up. Best of all, each test takes less than an hour to run! No need to wait days for the virus to (maybe) grow in culture.

COVID-19

qPCR testing of swabbed samples is the cornerstone of mass testing at the moment. Newer tests based on detecting antibodies or antigens are being rolled out in places, but it will take a while to determine how reliable they are. In the meantime, stay safe and - especially if your name is Ralphie - stay away from buses too.

Footnotes:

¹Fun fact: besides human cells, the most common cells used for culture are monkey kidney cells. ↩

²There is also reverse transcription PCR, which is commonly shortened to RT-PCR. The quantitative version of that is real-time RT-PCR. Quantitative reverse transcription PCR is RT-qPCR. Are medical acronyms confusing? You bet. ↩

³Sorry. ↩

Day 2 of #100DaysToOffload

YAFP (Yet Another First Post)

2020-05-09T00:00:00Z

"Should I start a blog?" is perhaps the early 2000s equivalent of "Should I start streaming on Twitch?". Some say that blogging is still alive, but social media juggernauts have undeniably relegated blogs to smaller pockets of the Web. A search for "blogging 2020" reveals many WAYS TO MAKE MONEY BLOGGING published by - that's right, other blogs.

Why do people write blogs? In the Good Old Days^TM, blogs were a bona fide mainstream social network, enabling people to form genuine connections on the Internet. Some bloggers became wildly successful and made a fortune off their sites. Today, from what I can see, authentic and personal blogs that aren't run by content marketing gurus seem to fall largely into two camps: highly technical or niche hobby blogs, and more general diary-like blogs that have been around since the golden age of blogging.

I've thought about starting a blog many times in the past, and have even made a few short-lived attempts. My interest never persisted beyond getting the website itself up and running on the Internet. In hindsight, those projects were doomed to fail precisely because my primary intent was for my blog to reach some measure of Internet popularity. After weeks of basically zero traffic, I would abandon my website, only remembering it when the email came to tell me my domain had expired. And then I would do it again a few years later.

Writing is a tremendously rewarding activity, and I want to get better at it. I already keep notes religiously and journal sporadically; I try to turn ideas into short stories. But these are all kept entirely private, and I've often found my notes written sloppily, my thoughts captured only in sparse fragments. Writing only for myself may not be the way forward, it seems.

Recently, I came across #100DaysToOffload, a challenge to write 100 blog posts. Even more so than the challenge itself, seeing non-technical people starting their own blogs and joining in has inspired me to give this another shot. It feels like a nice, huge conversation that's a bit less ephemeral than posts on social media.

Is there any point to posting my writing online if no one reads it? Maybe. The non-zero chance that someone might see this forces me to think harder, write better, and edit more. I'll still write primarily for myself, but also for the random stranger who arrives here by accident.

Besides, building a website is just fun. My previous websites died more quickly than Game of Thrones' Season 8 ratings¹, but I enjoyed the heck out of the process. I learned tons about web development and web technologies - probably more than a layperson like me needs to know, actually.

So, to answer the perennial question, why start a blog? Hopefully it will help me to:

crystallise my thoughts
write better
be more creative

If you happen to not be a bot, hello and welcome. Here's to this project having a somewhat more respectable lifespan this time.

Footnotes:

¹A death more brutal than any on the show, if you ask me. ↩

Day 1 of #100DaysToOffload

Tachy

Review: The Russo-Ukrainian War by Serhii Plokhy

Review: Imperial Spain by J.H. Elliot

Review: Caliban's War by James S.A. Corey

Review: The Middle Kingdoms by Martyn Rady

Review: Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey

Review: Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe

Review: House of Lilies by Justine Firnhaber-Baker

Review: Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

Review: Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy

Review: Anything Is Possible by Elizabeth Strout

Review: The Illegals by Shaun Walker

Review: Smiley's People by John Le Carré

Review: All the Sinners Bleed

Review: The Honourable Schoolboy

p-value p-rimer

Definition

History of the p-value

Statistical Methods for Research Workers

Brief notes on hypothesis testing

Fisher (significance testing)

Neyman-Pearson (hypothesis testing)

Null hypothesis significance testing (NHST)

Why 0.05?

Factors affecting significance

Effect size

Precision

Measurement precision

Sample size

The problem with large samples

Common misconceptions

p = Probability that the null hypothesis is true

p = Probability that the observed results occurred by chance

Statistically significant = practically significant

p = significance level

"p > 0.05" = no effect observed/no association/no evidence for effect

p is the probability of a type I error

Advantages of using p-values

Arguments against p-values

Calls for reform

How should p be used?

p-oetry

Useful discussions on Cross Validated

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Summary

The key question

Science is not (merely) cumulative

Normal science

Paradigms

Anomalies

Revolution

Incommensurability

1. Methodological differences

2. Perceptual differences

3. Semantic differences

So what's the big deal?

Personal reflections

Review: The Book of Why

Ladder of causation

DAGs

do-calculus

Topics

My thoughts on The Book of Why

Other reviews and associated discussion

Further reading

Review: The First Law trilogy

Canine S-index

Data source

Plots

Scatter plot

Bar plot

Things I Learned

Mid-range

Seaborn

Review: The Borgias: The Hidden History

Late to the Focal Fossa Party

VLC crashes when opening video files

Steam crashes on launch

Calibre crashes on launch

xrandr and dual monitors