3. Hugo Award winners (can any of you vouch for any of these?).
4. Peter Orszag's first NYT column.
5. Optimal sleep prizes for children.
6. How does space flight change people?
7. More evidence on how good studying works, and might this also bear on the multi-tasking debates?
I can vouch for The City and the City.
4. I love how people always say “half our spending is promises to old people, so we can’t touch that, the rest is hard, so that leaves raising taxes.”
In general, why are spending promises more sacred than taxing promises.
Many people want to become astronauts, few are chosen. The selection process is heavily biased towards candidates who project the right image and can become effective public speakers, who can talk articulately about grand visions of “what it all means” for the human race. And the candidates must truly buy into these values, because they are usually ridiculously overqualified with multiple degrees and life experience and yet have to spend nearly their entire career waiting patiently on the ground and repetitively drilling on mundane physical tasks.
So, does the experience of having flown in space really make people embrace “universal” values, or was that always innate in the sort of people who are successful astronaut candidates? If you read autobiographies of former Marines, they would probably talk about how military service made them more patriotic. But there was a reason they chose to become Marines in the first place.
Re: #6 (astronauts)
…also, autobiographies are not exactly the most impartial source, since the authors invariably wish to portray themselves in a positive light.
Nobody buys autobiographies that say “Yep, I’m pretty much the same cranky git as before”, and no publisher would publish it (unless you’re someone like Howard Stern and that’s your shtick). Ghostwriters would touch it up as necessary to make it saleable.
If you live through an experience that the public considers extraordinary, the most common question that you will constantly be asked about is how it changed your life. And people genuinely react badly to a flippant or non-”meaningful” answer. Sooner or later you need to come up with a stock answer, a narrative that will satisfy them.
If nothing else, they have a very strong financial motive to spin a tale, because giving motivational speeches on the public speaking circuit can be astoundingly lucrative, with even minor celebrities usually charging a five-figure sum per speech. Many people (former Olympic champions, etc) literally make their living telling uplifting stories of personal spiritual growth, redemption, and adversity overcome. What you tell the audience is what they paid to hear.
Space flight changes people in that it makes them spend the rest of their life telling people what they want to hear about how space flight changes people.
# 2
I am surprised by the lack of red comforters/sleeping bags in China. Most prominent colors are blue, pink and green.
I wholeheartedly recommend anything by Charles Stross. Palimpsest can be found in “Wireless”, his short-story collection. His novels “Glasshouse” and “Iron Sunrise” seem to be the most popular, but I think “Accelerando”, about a venture altruist, is one of his best. He’s one of the few sci-fi authors willing to write about — and have fun with — economics. His “Laundry” series is like a mix of Dilbert and HP Lovecraft. His “Merchant Clan” books are the weakest but definitely have their moments.
The City & The City is Mieville’s strongest work to date–I think it helps that by setting his book in a slightly more “realistic” environment, he is restrained from conjuring up the more bizarre/fantastic twists and turns of his earlier novels that, while entertaining, prove difficult to resolve in the novels’ final portion.
Also there was some earlier conversation in the comments about The City & They City in this MR post: http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/05/middle-east-peace-proposals.html
I very much enjoyed The Windup Girl. The future it shows was (to me) as believable and interesting as, say, early Neal Stephenson. Much less optimistic but no less engaging.
I couldn’t get into The City & The City at all. Maybe I’ll give it another go.
I vouch for Patrick Nielsen Hayden.
@RobF, The Windup Girl comes from the setting and world as Bacigalupi’s “Calorie Man”.
re: Stross. I agree with the comments that his ideas are extraordinary, and give a big payoff. I’ll read pretty much anything he writes, but can’t seem to pick up the Merchant Clan. His writing has improved, a lot, I find that it no longer interferes with the story and the ideas.
Moon is a fantastic movie, Dollhouse (nominee, not a winner) was a hugely underrated show (though with questionable acting at times), and The Wind-Up Girl has an excellent premise but somewhat dreary writing and I found the ending a cheap way out.
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