@RanaldClouston@fediscience.org
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RanaldClouston

@RanaldClouston@fediscience.org

Lecturer in Computer Science at Australian National University.

He/him.

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RanaldClouston, to scifi
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#FinishedReading this slim volume of early 50s #SciFi by #AEVanVogt . The goofy title and stories of visiting inhabitable Mars and Venus makes this look like super old fashioned stuff, but that, like much else in this book, is an illusion. This is pure Cold War paranoia, with disorienting temporal and character shifts, mind control drugs, sinister conspiracies etc, and in general this feels like a bridge to the high points of Philip K Dick. #Bookstodon @bookstodon

RanaldClouston,
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@Dhmspector @bookstodon no, I don't think it's propaganda (if anything is problematic by today's standards, it would be the absent / subservient role of women in this 1950s vision of the future), but it's drenched in concerns about nuclear annhiliation, the possible development of other novel weapons, espionage, etc.

kenthompson, to books
@kenthompson@mastodon.world avatar

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams.
Quite improbably, you are rescued from Earth minutes before its destruction, only to find the galaxy poorly mismanaged and under the influence of intradimensional rodents, and everyone looking for meaning where there is none, which rather gets in the way of having a good time.
4 of 5 library cats 🐁 🐁 🐁 🐁.

#bookstodon @bookstodon #books #reading #humor #mice #SciFi #humor #towels #life #dontpanic #encyclopedias

RanaldClouston,
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@kenthompson @bookstodon My 11 year old just read this and is lobbying for the next one in the series!

RanaldClouston,
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@mvilain @kenthompson @bookstodon oh he knows already :)

RanaldClouston, to bookstodon
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#FinishedReading my first foray into 18th century literature, although I doubt much of the rest of it reads like this, with its twisted structure, absurd digressions, and typographical jokes. Some of it is incredibly quotable, fresh, and fun; other parts border on incomprehensible as the centuries render the jokes obscure. #Bookstodon @bookstodon #TristramShandy #LaurenceSterne

A page from Tristram Shandy, in which the author describes the progress of the story in various chapters diagrammatically, with meandering looping lines

RanaldClouston,
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@bookstodon This page is a highlight, with the most glorious selection of 18th century insults - "blockheads, numsculs, doddypoles, dunderheads, ninny-hammers, goosecaps, joltheads, nincompoops, and sh--t-a-beds" - then going on to claim it was necessary to write the 25th chapter before the 18th. The moral is drawn, "let people tell their stories in their own way"

RanaldClouston,
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@johncarlosbaez @bookstodon he's pretty explicit about his influences in the text - Cervantes and Rabelais get mentioned again and again - but I suspect it was still a pretty strange book in its era, as it would be in any era

KitMuse, to sciencefiction
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I need your help . One of the classes I'm taking at the graduate level this semester is Religion & Science Fiction. I read more fantasy, and would like to do my research paper on something that's not obvious (like ST/BS5/Matrix/etc.) & I'd love to use more modern sf rather than the golden age classics.

Anyone have any interesting ideas for my research paper on regarding the intersection of religion and science fiction?

@bookstodon

RanaldClouston,
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@KitMuse @bookstodon I know you're already inundated by suggestions, but highest recommendation to Snare by Katherine Kerr

RanaldClouston, to bookstodon
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This odd little book starts as a quite nice pop sci glance at time in 20th century physics, then shifts to speculations in philosophy of science. It comes with ecstatic blurbs from e.g. Phillip Pullman and Nick Hornby, who (like me) lack expertise to judge the meat of the book. Is it bullshit? Is it original? The whole package, including its sometimes strange language choices (who still uses 'Peking'?) left me intrigued but sceptical. @bookstodon

RanaldClouston,
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@bengo I'm far from an expert but I don't think this is at all close to Rovelli's views; Rovelli argues (broadly) that time has no place at all in fundamental physics, but only arises through consideration of entropy, which is a macroscopic, statistical, and (in some sense) subjective phenomenon

RanaldClouston, to Logic
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this 1854 book by George , which summarises his thoughts (first published a few years earlier) on , as well as probability. Boole built the world I live in as a logician (and to extent, the world we all live in in the age of computers) but this is the first time I've read him in the original, so I thought I might make a thread with a few notes in it as I read it over the next few weeks.

RanaldClouston,
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This footnote is an example of the arithmetical approach to making life terrible for ; given that x² (i.e. x and x) = x is an axiom, shouldn't x³ = x hold? Apparently not, as x³ - x = 0 'factorises' into gibberish terms like 1 + x (we can't add new things to the universe), or -1, which has no meaning at all (not to be confused with the negation of 1, which is 1 - 1 = 0). I must admit to my doubts about the well-definedness of this whole enterprise!

RanaldClouston,
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@johncarlosbaez right; although Boole's logic does not form a Boolean ring. + is not xor, but rather is a partial operation that is undefined if the left and right have intersecting denotations

RanaldClouston, to bookstodon
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I don't often bail out of books before finishing, but 30ish pages of this thesaurus abuse was all I could tolerate. @bookstodon

RanaldClouston, to fantasy
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's magisterial prequel to Priory of the Orange Tree. It does retread a fair amount of ground from the previous book, but the writing and characters are so vivid I didn't much mind. @bookstodon

RanaldClouston, to random
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Too cold... a perfect sentiment for midwinter https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GL8P9eVLIQs

RanaldClouston, to random
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Probably not news to those who follow modern closer than I do, but I've recently discovered . He has an unusual biography for a comics writer as an ex-CIA agent, and all three works of his I've read (Mr Miracle, Omega Men, ) focus on the impact of grim forever wars on participants and civilians; important in a culture that seemed to start forgetting Iraq / Afghanistan before those wars even ended. Great humour & art too!

RanaldClouston, to random
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As promised, a blog post on 'Normalization for Multimodal Type Theory' https://updatedscholar.blogspot.com/2023/04/discussing-normalization-for-multimodal.html by @danielgratzer . It appears I have much to learn to fully appreciate some recent developments in ...

RanaldClouston,
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Next week I'll retreat a little from the cutting edge to read over Martin-Löf's classic 'Intuitionistic ' (1984, but based on lectures given in 1980) https://archive-pml.github.io/martin-lof/pdfs/Bibliopolis-Book-retypeset-1984.pdf

RanaldClouston, to bookstodon
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#FinishedReading a story of a Malaysian American woman returning to Penang with her parents and getting tangled up in the local ghosts, spirits, and gods. The dialogue is mostly Manglish (Malaysian English) whose distinctive syntax makes for quite a fun reading experience; I suspect #ZenCho has dialed it back a fair bit to keep it readable for non-Malaysian readers, mind. #Bookstodon @bookstodon

RanaldClouston, to bookstodon
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I read and enjoyed #ChrisFlynn 's novel Mammoth, which is narrated by a wisecracking Mastodon skeleton. This short story collection is more of the same, with each story having animal or object narrators. Given that most of them also adopt the same quip-heavy voice, the effect is quite repetitive. The only story I liked was Shot Down in Flames, which mixes up the narration much more. The final story is also a bit different, but I found it unreadable. #Bookstodon @bookstodon #FinishedReading

RanaldClouston, to bookstodon
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#FinishedReading This book was pretty much the funniest thing ever when I first read it as an adolescent, and it's been fun to see my 11 year old son discover it. Re-reading it now is a rather different experience as the surprise of the jokes has mostly gone, but even that is testament to how effective #DouglasAdams was at inserting his gags into my long term memory. A comfort read for sure #Bookstodon @bookstodon

RanaldClouston, to bookstodon
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#FinishedReading #MichaelKing 's biography of Te Puea Herangi, indefatigable organiser of the Māori King movement in the first half of the 20th century. Her forceful charisma, flaws and all, pops off the page in the hands of NZ's most iconic historian. The scale of change in her lifetime for Waikato Māori and NZ is fascinating, as are the insights into other prominent figures like Apirana Ngata and Gordon Coates. #Bookstodon @bookstodon #NZHistory

Title page of Te Puea, signed by the author to my grandparents in 1977

RanaldClouston, to scifi
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#FinishedReading this collection of stories 1998 - 2009 by Australian #SciFi author @gregeganSF . Along with Crystal Nights, which I've read before in a different anthology, my favourite stories were three set in his vast utopian Amalgam universe. Egan combines an extremely high level of interest and knowledge of mathematics and physics with an ability to find beauty, drama, and emotion in worlds that have moved beyond war, scarcity, and aging. #Bookstodon @bookstodon

RanaldClouston, to scifi
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#FinishedReading the followup to #AnnLeckie 's Imperial Radch trilogy. Although it is set in a different milieu, very much recommended to read the Ancillary books first because the conclusion of that series is a plot point here. Leckie is one of the best in #SciFi for inventing alternative cultures and seeing how they can clash or cooperate; here the high concepts are wrapped in a fun and twisty, somewhat noirish, tale of murder and politics #Bookstodon @bookstodon

RanaldClouston, to history
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#FinishedReading this #HistoryOfScience on the non- Western contribution to science from 1450 on; stories range from brutal exploitation of indigenous biological knowledge to scientists like SN Bose who worked in more collaborative and acknowledged ways. Prose is a little pedestrian and academic but the material is really interesting. Not impressed with the erasure of Rutherford's New Zealand nationality though! #Bookstodon @bookstodon

Excerpt from book, describing Ernest Rutherford as British and using this as an example of a non-European scientist (in this case, Hantaro Nagaoka) not gettting proper credit for discoveries.

RanaldClouston, to scifi
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on my beach holiday 's selection of short from 1997. His collections seem to be always great although this is not his most diverse by authors or themes; a lot of uploading oneself into virtual reality in the air in 1997! My favourites were by @gregeganSF , Brian Stapleford, Carolyn Ives Gilman, Walter Jon Williams, Ian McDonald, and Gregory Benford & Elisabeth Malartre. @bookstodon

RanaldClouston, to fantasy
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#FinishedReading we picked this up because it was first in a series, but it turns out to be Book 9 of some giant metaseries! It seemed pretty accessible, and I loved the part of the book set in the 9th century, but I wonder if the 12th century part, which has more fantastical elements, might have been better with more context on the world. The book uses exclusively Celtic (mostly Welsh I think) language, culture, and folklore as its inspiration. #Fantasy #KatherineKerr #Bookstodon @bookstodon

RanaldClouston, to bookstodon
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By my count I finished 34 books this year, not counting ones read with my kids. These are 4 of my favourites, in no particular order: a biography of eccentric mathematician Paul Erdos; a self contained SFF epic about the future of religion; a fascinating look at bird intelligence; and a moving Australian sci fi story of virtual reality and the gap between those who embrace it and those who reject it #BooksOf2023 #Bookstodon @bookstodon

Snare, by Katharine Kerr
The Bird Way, by Jennifer Ackerman
Every Version of You, by Grace Chan

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