Just this guy, you know?

How to Listen to Jazz by Ted Gioia has given me so much homework. Hours and hours of listening to go. So I’m not really done with the book but I have finished the reading portion.

I’ve had a passing interest in Jazz for a while but never really ventured beyond the odd playlist on Spotify. Turns out the stuff I’ve been listening to is Nu-Jazz (Bill Laurence, GoGo Penguin, Too Many Zooz, Get the Blessing).

As you might have read Postman is deprecating the Scratchpad feature. At work we have been using this feature to create and share collections of requests that are useful for manually driving APIs in non prod environments. We commit the collections and environments to repos for posterity. Well now that’s going away we’ve been looking for alternatives. There are other apps like Insomnia which look nice but seem ripe for enshittification. We could write some custom code but that’s a lot of effort for a thing we’re doing rapidly.

“There is more than health to not being dead”

The Socially Distanced Sports Bar recommended this a while back. Their chat about how schools destroy people’s interest in physical activity resonated with me so I thought I’d give this a spin.

I love a book that isn’t afraid to say that things are complicated. In every chapter Daniel Lieberman comes to this conclusion. Lieberman frames the science by busting some myths, I don’t think that works particularly well but the discussion of the anthropology, biology, evolution, etc is excellent. The science is very easy to follow (even for someone who last took Biology in 2010 at AS). There is a pretty strong narrative going from definitions, to evolution, to modern medicalised exercise, unfortunately it sort of peters out at the end. I think he could have cut the idea of myths.

Hands in the air, I did a module at university based on this book for my BSc. Simon Goodwin writes and lectures in a style that I enjoy, retain, and understand. At a charity lecture I “cosplayed” as Simon, frankly our styles of metal t-shirts under collard shirts weren’t that dissimilar anyway. Long live Epica.

XLT covers the possibility and search for Extra Terrestrial Life and was written in 2001. There are some wonderful sentences that hope for progress in the field of exo-biology in the following decades. Lady Luck hasn’t delivered but the science in this book remains incredibly interesting and very well described (even to the layperson I am today).

I’m not optimistic about the future of Artificial Intelligence. This book reinforced that despite a quite optimistic outlook on AI. It describes flaws with current AI and how we might change tack to create beneficial artificial intelligence. Unfortunately I must refer to one of my favourite memes:

A bit of a change. On holiday I read the rule book for Blücher. It’s a scale agnostic Napoleonic big battle game. Some friends got into it and I must join them.

It’s been a long time since I read a rule book from cover to cover. Blücher seems great. A real geometric puzzle to out manoeuvre your opponent.

I’ve ordered the funky looking bases and some 6mm Austrians (Brits and French are already accounted for in the wargaming group).

This one was a recommendation from a colleague. I picked it up as an audio book.

It’s a very fun sci fi horror. The twist sticks the landing well and the ending is satisfying. It’s got the right amount of joking about corporations being evil, more like Alien rather than The Outer Worlds.

My one criticism is with the audiobook (from Audible, sorry). It’s read by one person who brings more performance to the reading than I’d like. There are moments where your POV character is having a bad time and is panicking, their internal monologue is also breathless/panicking in a way just feels off for statements of fact. Other characters as well very much play up to horror archetypes which, if I were reading, would be skimmed over rather than have full dramatic performances. There are moments of me thinking: “yeah, yeah, yeah, you’re seeing stuff that doesn’t make sense and is spooky. Get on with it an attack the mystery head on please”.

Back in 2017 I wrote about the podcasts I was listening to. Five years later here’s an update. I’m embedded in the Apple ecosystem so now my podcatcher is Apple Podcasts. This year’s choice cuts are as follows.

2 Good Boys is a classic Friends Chatting podcast.

AvTalk. I’ve been listening to this since just before the pandemic. It’s all about commercial aviation and is dead interesting.

Doctor Who: Too Hot For TV is my top pick for DW podcasts. It’s about spin off material, think Big Finish, Books, Comics, etc.

To quote CMB “It’s so sad man”

I am led to believe this is a book about real events. That makes it all the more sad. Having read The Demon Haunted World as a teen it’s obvious that that this would rile me up.

I’d like to have had a premonition to not bother with it. Why didn’t The Bureau let me know, was I not in the (generous) 3% success rate?

I finished book 3 of the George Smiley series a week or so ago. It’s not got a lot of George here and I missed him.

The broad story was enjoyable but is felt like a drag. It takes a while establishing the key spy shit. Then there’s a large repetition in an interrogation then trial.

I had a cheeky peek at the reviews of the next in the series. Might have a little break and have another go at The Culture series.