Okay, I'm back
Took a week off the usual newsletter schedule to deal with, y'know. And also to figure out what the fuck is going on with my taxes. I won't bore you by complaining about that here, but let me assure you: shit's fucked.
Recommendation: Blindsight
In Peter Watts' novel Blindsight, a group of specialists are sent to make first contact with what appears to be an alien vessel at the very edge of the solar system. The resulting encounter begs terrifying questions about language, xenobiology, and the nature of consciousness itself.
This is hard sci-fi, and I mean hard. There's a list of citations in the back. It's ended up on the syllabus of more than one neuroscience class. I first read it at age 16, and it permanently altered my brain chemistry.
You can get Blindsight most places books are sold, but Watts has also made it available under a Creative Commons license on his website here.
This Week's Links
There is no EU cookie banner law
Companies are making your life hard by choice. They got told by the EU they could not be secret abusers anymore, so now they decided to be irritating on top.
Billionaire Says His Long-Delayed ‘Titanic II’ Ship Will Be Antidote to ‘Woke’ Politics
The headline kind of says it all, but this feels like a good time to mention that I Will Fight You did an episode on the movie Titanic 2.
Trash from the International Space Station may have hit a house in Florida
It is notoriously difficult to predict where a piece of space junk will reenter the atmosphere. US Space Command precisely tracks tens of thousands of objects in Earth orbit, but the exact density of the upper atmosphere is still largely an unknown variable. Even a half-day before the reentry, US Space Command's estimate for when the battery pallet would fall to Earth had a window of uncertainty spanning six hours, enough time for the object to circle the planet four times.
And if you don't know when something will reenter the atmosphere, you can't predict where it will come down.
Speaking of Peter Watts, he was also a "genetics consultant" on Jurassic World Dominion, a gig that apparently consisted of drinking in a hotel room and complaining about the first Jurassic World movie. And then they spelled his name wrong in the credits. I guess there's worse ways to earn money.
-K
