User Profile

David Whitmarsh

whitmad@bookwyrm.social

Joined 1 year, 3 months ago

Read widely, but mainly science fiction, which I also write.

I'm also at @whitmad@wandering.shop and @whitmad@paper.wf

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avatar for whitmad David Whitmarsh boosted
Mary Doria Russell: Sparrow, The (AudiobookFormat, 2008, Brilliance Audio on CD Unabridged Lib Ed) 4 stars

The Sparrow is a novel about a remarkable man, a living saint, a life-long celibate …

Ambitious but flawed

3 stars

Content warning Some hints as to the outcome

Mary Doria Russell: Sparrow, The (AudiobookFormat, 2008, Brilliance Audio on CD Unabridged Lib Ed) 4 stars

The Sparrow is a novel about a remarkable man, a living saint, a life-long celibate …

Ambitious but flawed

3 stars

Content warning Some hints as to the outcome

avatar for whitmad David Whitmarsh boosted

Long-winded, but provides an interesting perspective

3 stars

In the absence of any examples of alien life, there is little we can definitively say about it, but Arik Kershenbaum in this book makes a respectable stab at deducing some constraints on the physical forms, consciousness, sociability and languages of alien species by working from the physics of the likely environments for life to occur, and on the processes of evolution.

Much of the argument is, to me at least, clear and sensible. There are areas that the author suggests are harder to constrain - biochemistry, genetics, reproduction. A particularly interesting passage discusses the genetics of bee reproduction and how that relates to the altruism of the worker bees.

Whilst I found much of the argument persuasive, the text can be somewhat repetitive and long-winded. It could have been condensed to half the size. The section on artificial intelligence came across as somewhat muddled. The author implying, without clearly …

Long-winded, but provides an interesting perspective

3 stars

In the absence of any examples of alien life, there is little we can definitively say about it, but Arik Kershenbaum in this book makes a respectable stab at deducing some constraints on the physical forms, consciousness, sociability and languages of alien species by working from the physics of the likely environments for life to occur, and on the processes of evolution.

Much of the argument is, to me at least, clear and sensible. There are areas that the author suggests are harder to constrain - biochemistry, genetics, reproduction. A particularly interesting passage discusses the genetics of bee reproduction and how that relates to the altruism of the worker bees.

Whilst I found much of the argument persuasive, the text can be somewhat repetitive and long-winded. It could have been condensed to half the size. The section on artificial intelligence came across as somewhat muddled. The author implying, without clearly …

Winchester Simon: Exactly (Paperback, 2018, William Collins) 4 stars

Review of 'Exactly' on 'Goodreads'

2 stars

Nice idea, and some interesting background to the history of technology. Unfortunately it suffers from excruciatingly low information density. The prose is verbose and repetitive as if was being padded to some target word count. I'm sure it could be edited to a quarter the size without losing any information.

I was losing the will to live after the nth page and yth time I read another paraphrase of "they f***ed up" in the chapter about the incorrectly ground Hubble mirror.