🗄️ Reading list

I greatly enjoyed Borges' work. I also like Georges Perec, especially Life: A User's Manual
Gene Wolfe: Peace is maybe his best book IMO if you are hesitant to read something as long as the Solar Cycle

• [2019-02-27]
  

  The entire block is primarily presented frozen in time, on June 23, 1975, just before 8 pm, moments after the death of Bartlebooth. Nonetheless, the constraints system creates hundreds of separate stories concerning the inhabitants of the block, past and present, and the other people in their lives. The story of Bartlebooth is the principal thread, but it interlinks with many others.
  

Love and recommend "Brainchild" just for this. Explores multiple different angles of what we call intelligence.
https://www.amazon.com/Brain-Child-Novel-George-Turner/dp/0688105955

Among technical books, books by Cornelius Lanczos are some of the best (less popular) books I've read. Some quotes from his "The Variational Principles of Mechanics":
From the Preface:
Many of the scientific treatises of today are formulated in a half-mystical language, as though to impress the reader with the uncomfortable feeling that he is in the permanent presence of a superman. The present book is conceived in a humble spirit and is written for humble people.
From Chapter 8:
Put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground. -- EXODUS III, 5

• Why is it true that mathematics is so good at modeling processes in the physical sciences?
  
• Everything fundamental is assumed to be atomic or discrete; and thereby so is everything else.
  
• The principle of simplicity has driven us to reluctantly make a decision—in this paper DP is a particle model and all processes in DP are consequences of the motions and interactions of particles.
  

His remarkable book The Road to Reality4 gives an extensive overview of theoretical physics, largely from the point of view of general relativity rather than particle physics
, and can be consulted for a summary of the main ideas of twistor theory
from Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law for Unity in Physical Law

How sci-fi should be done in 2019. You may not agree with the moral thrusts (I don't, at times), but the work is undeniably imaginative; an enchanted dream, refreshing in the age of shattered illusions. And don't miss the maze of secondary material! https://t.co/rFfrVF6Fgs
https://twitter.com/simpolism/status/1190774586905911298

from Blindsight by Peter Watts

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Reinventing-Discovery-New-Networked-Science/dp/0691160198

For more details on the history of quantum field theory, see the excellent book “QED and the Men who Made it” by Sam Schweber.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/02/different-worlds/

People curious to know more about these kinds of things should be aware that there’s a large literature on these topics. A sort-of-okay-ish book on related topics is Handbook of Individual Differences in Social Behavior. It covers a wide variety of ways in which different people behave differently or interpret behaviour differently. One of the main things I learned from that book is that there are a lot of ways in which people are different (many more than I’d have thought), and everybody will likely have a lot of ‘blind spots’ in terms of these things because there are just so many ways in which people vary that it’s very difficult to spot all of them and keep them in mind, even if you know about their existence.

todo
from ip Shtetl-Optimized » Blog Archive » Freeman Dyson and Boris Tsirelson

https://twitter.com/SagaSFF/status/1238523906652352512

COVER REVEAL
The Year’s Best Science Fiction Vol.1 cover is here! This anthology is a must-have collection of the best short sci-fi and speculative fiction of 2019.
And we have ANOTHER sneak peek for you! Also check out the Table of Contents!

If you liked Ted Chiang, then I assume you like hard sf.
I recommend to check out: Greg [Egan](http://gregegan.net/BIBLIOGRAPHY/Online.html), Alastair [Reynolds](https://www.freesfonline.de/authors/Alastair_Reynolds.html) and Peter [Watts](https://rifters.com/real/shorts.htm).
I linked to short stories online, but they all have paper collections as well.

https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebook/plato-at-the-googleplex-1
https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?m=201406

Namely, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein—who’s far and away my favorite contemporary novelist—published a charming new book entitled Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away.

https://twitter.com/gregeganSF/status/1178809696527908864

I wrote a short story, “Transition Dreams”, which concludes that almost all experience goes unremembered.

As a child, I tried to figure out how to start with a grain of sand and end up with a working computer. Today, I'm a computer programmer who creates custom systems for heavy industry. Somewhere along the way, I became interested in the question of just how far the human mind can go, assuming a sufficiently advanced technology. Maybe sometimes...a little too far. I am the author of THE METAMORPHOSIS OF PRIME INTELLECT and several short stories in the Mortal Passage series -- including "Mortal Passage" itself, a novelette recently republished in Volume #5 of the science fiction magazine, Bull Spec. (

Forward's book Dragon's Egg is similar: civilization evolves on the surface of a neutron star.

todo
from “Our stability is but balance” — Freeman Dyson on how to imagine quantum fields

https://twitter.com/weirdnik

“The Electric State” by @simonstalenhag
 is one of the best science fiction books in existence.

from The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics (Popular Science) by Penrose, Roger

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5895503-the-ego-tunnel

https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/6382468?sort=review&view=reviews
read alphyna's recommendations?

Have I mentioned lately that Borges is one of my favorite authors ever since I was a little kid? Few authors have grown up with me so well. https://t.co/0yjXbRbBTm

https://twitter.com/gwern/status/1142510178312605696

His best books for me are _Schild's Ladder_ and _Diaspora_. The first chapter of _Diaspora_ was originally published as a short story and is available online as ["Orphanogenesis"](http://www.gregegan.net/DIASPORA/01/Orphanogenesis.html).
I would be careful about _Distress_, the first chapter was really disturbing and it doesn't lighten up all that much. It's really good, just, pushes boundaries about personhood and bodily integrity. And of course has an underpinning of weird physics, like always...
_Quarantine_ - there's like three or four stories in this one, all entangled together. The primary arc really plays wicked games with the Copenhagen Interpretation, taking it way literally.
["Riding the Crocodile"](http://www.gregegan.net/INCANDESCENCE/00/Crocodile.html) and _Incandescence_ take us to a galaxy that's as far beyond the world of _Schild's Ladder_ as they are beyond us, but where people are still people no matter how much of what defines us has become optional.
["Dust"](https://archive.org/stream/Asimovs_v16n08_1992-07/Asimovs_v16n08_1992-07_djvu.txt) and _Permutation City_ combine strange physics and strange computational neurology in odd ways. A large part of the story involves an experiment that Egan later decided was horribly unethical, and he returns to it with a whole different viewpoint in ["Crystal Nights"](http://ttapress.com/553/crystal-nights-by-greg-egan/).

https://twitter.com/gregeganSF/status/1159953634269913088

@arula_artwork @robinhouston "Dichronauts" is just the geometry of special relativity applied to 3 dimensions that the protagonists see as space. Everything about that is explained in a few short web pages. "Orthogonal" took 80K words of supplementary material to explain fully ... so that's how they compare.

https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome-scifi#hard-science-fiction

https://thedeemon.livejournal.com/140306.html

Я "джва года ждал" (с) ее выхода. Когда эта книга уже была готова, и до выхода оставалась пара дней, автор выпустил серию своего подкаста, где за пару часов практически пересказал все содержание, может даже еще лучше, чем в самой книжке. Рекомендую ту серию послушать, она взрывает мозг и делает это несколько раз. В книжке у него примерно все то же, но более подробно. Последовательно излагается многомировая интерпретация (MWI), показывается, почему она самая простая и прямая. Что это "суровая квантовая механика" - что получается, если брать чисто формулы и их предсказания за содержание, не добавляя никаких дополнительных постулатов вроде коллапса волновой функции, различия между квантовым и классическим мирами и т.п. Недавно широко известная в узких кругах теорфизики Sabine Hossenfelder сперва похвалила эту книжку Кэрролла, а потом отдельным постом попыталась объяснить, в чем ее претензии к многомировой интерпретации, но у меня так и не получилось ухватить ее мысль, даже после некоторых ее уточнений в комментариях

https://thedeemon.livejournal.com/140306.html

Click-baity заголовок долго меня отпугивал от этой книжки, но после явной наводки Кэрролла я все же решил ее открыть. И скажу вам, это лучшая книга, что я вообще читал/слушал в этом году, и может быть не только в этом. Книга не топит ни за одну конкретную интерпретацию (в отличие от явного эвереттиста Кэрролла), не дает окончательных ответов (увы), зато очень здорово рассказывает историю развития взглядов, идей и интерпретаций за последние 115 лет. Все основные персонажи - Планк, Эйнштейн, Бор, Гейзенберг, Шредингер, фон Нейман, Бом, Уилер, Эверетт, Белл, Дойч, Zeh, Zurek и пр. - показаны очень живыми и конкретными людьми в конкретных исторических событиях, видно, как их идеи не возникали из воздуха, а рождались в интересной борьбе на фоне других важных событий, часто не относящихся напрямую к науке.

Related: I've been rereading Carl Sagan's book "Cosmos" - another great transcendental narrative - and am wondering how it would be different if written in the first person plural (rather than singular)?

https://twitter.com/michael_nielsen/status/1220175113259085825

None
Book Review: Reframing Superintelligence
in context

The Quark and the Jaguar

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22095277

teddyh 18 days ago | parent | favorite | on: Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have r...

The Network Revolution – confessions of a computer scientist (1982)¹ is the title which immediately springs to mind. I never see anyone else mention this book, but I liked it. One of the many interesting things it contains is an anonymized telling of what happened with Doug Engelbart and why, even after giving the dazzling “The Mother of All Demos”², the SRI company did not succeed in its grand plan for the future of computing.

It also talks a lot about very early Internet history, and gives the history of many things which I have not seen others reference, like Lee Felsenstein and Community Memory.

Just finished "The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories" be Ken Liu and it was marvelous. The stories each pulled me in, some brought me close to tears, while others left me pensive. It was just a great experience.
Previously I have enjoyed "Stories of Your Life and Others" and well as the new "Exhalation: Stories" both by Ted Chiang. Thought those were both great as well, and at this point I've come to appreciate short stories much more than I used to, so I was wondering if there is more like this out there, or if there is any short story collection that is dear to your heart that you could share with me?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22528597

The relevant book for this is Measuring and Managing Information Risk: A FAIR Approach by Freund and Jones[0].
Both books are worth reading; Hubbard's influence on FAIR is noticeable and positive. FAIR has the advantage that it comes with a fairly built-out ontology for assembling data or estimates. The OP touches on the top level (Loss Event Magnitude and Loss Event Frequency), but the ontology goes quite deep and can be used at multiple levels of detail.

https://twitter.com/skdh/status/1282476055907926016

@skdh: Finished reading @JimBaggott's new book "Quantum Reality" which was more interesting than I thought, given the number of popular science books about quantum mechanics I've read already. Very recommended; review to follow. pic.twitter.com/UN25Zv...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/bjhdyq/72_upcoming_sff_books_that_qualify_for_this_years/

https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/audiobook/reach-for-infinity-1

 Reach for Infinity
 by Pat Cadigan, Aliette De Bodard, Greg Egan, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Ellen Klages, Karen Lord, Ken MacLeod, Ian McDonald, Linda Nagata, Hannu Rajaniemi, Alastair Reynolds, Adam Roberts, Karl Schroeder, Peter Watts
Narrated by Denice Stradling, Michael Orenstein, Courtney Patterson, Alex Wyndham, Vyvy Nguyen, Michael G. Welch

https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebook/upgraded-1

Upgraded
by Neil Clarke, Greg Egan, Elizabeth Bear

 https://www.reddit.com/r/suggestmeabook/comments/7ezv7l/book_similar_to_daniel_keyes_flowers_for_algernon/
 n a Sci-fi context, Solaris

A couple more that are removed from the works you describe in genre, but pivot around the transcendent, and meditate on the relationship between that which can be known, oneself, one's place in society, and the Absolute, are Housekeeping.

Todo
from The Strangest Man by Graham Farmelo

Fire Upon The Deep by Vinge should be on the list

hotz recommendation?

Jim Baggott’s new book, Quantum Reality, is now out here in US, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the issues surrounding the interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Ringworld goes into this topic quite a bit, so it was interesting to me to see that the author is an astrobiologist who wrote "The Knowledge", about restarting civilization from scratch

The paperback edition of my book "Lost in Math" is out now!
https://basicbooks.com/titles/sabine-hossenfelder/lost-in-math/9781541646766/

Foundations of Math and Physics One Century After Hilbert

The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-hour Workweek 

somewhat cliche, I guess it was cool years ago when it was released… but now it doesn't read as anything exciting
… just yet another cyberpunk setting, with some hackers, some cyberspace etc etc

https://www.quantumdiaries.org/2014/

Gerard ‘t Hooft, Stefan Vandoren
In Time in Powers of Ten: Natural Phenomena and their Timescales, Nobel Laureate Gerard ‘t Hooft and theorist Stefan Vandoren, both of Utrecht University in the Netherlands, step back and forth in time from the minutest fractions of a second to the age of the universe and beyond. Observations range from the orbits and rotations of planets and stars, down to the decay times of atoms and elementary particles and back to geological time scales.

This is the premise of Ryan North's recent book [How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler](https://www.howtoinventeverything.com/).

Big Egan fan myself. I would recommend Accelerando by Charles Stross and Schismatrix by Bruce Sterling.

• [2019-06-26]
  

  Arcadia is a 1993 play by Tom Stoppard concerning the relationship between past and present, order and disorder, certainty and uncertainty.
  It has been praised by many critics as the finest play from one of the most significant contemporary playwrights in the English language.
  the Royal Institution of Great Britain named it one of the best science-related works ever written
  

• on blinkist
  

• [2019-06-26] The Old New Land is a utopian novel published by Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism
  

https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=29 – also recommends it here
and here https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=93

• [2019-03-17] https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?m=200511
  

My favorite novel about mathematicians, Rebecca Goldstein’s The Mind-Body Problem, gets much of its mileage from this ancient connection.

(from PBS Space TIme guy)

I don't know these books but here is one by Bohr:
https://amazon.com/Atomic-Physics-Human-Knowledge-Dover/dp/0486479285
One reviewer writes "Bohr must be the worst writer in the history of the written word" - sounds true, there's a famous paper where he left out some sentences, it didn't make sense, but nobody noticed.

https://amazon.com/Physics-Philosophy-Revolution-Modern-Science/dp/0061209198/
I guess I should read it sometime!   3/3

By contrast, fish do not have any neural architecture unique to the consciousness-related parts of the brain and are probably unable to feel fear or pain in the way a human would – we strongly encourage you to read this article in full to convince yourself of this claim. Although fish show pain-like responses to harmful stimulus and do so less if given painkillers, this is true even when the entire telencephalon (which includes the forebrain) is removed so on balance it is unlikely they are having a qualitative experience to accompany that response.

in which he argues for the benefits of teaching computer literacy in primary and secondary education.