The Romanian language has a word: deștept. It means smart, but it leans into knowledgeable, so it means both "knowing things" and "thinking fast". There is no relation to wisdom and this is the case in other languages as well. Sometimes wise is used to denote knowledgeable, yet I don't think they are related. While to know things means to be able to recall things you have learned, wisdom, I've come to realize, means to understand what little you know. Someone might be wise and know very little and think rather slowly. Wisdom is the maturation of the soul, like a well kept wine it provides subtle flavors.

Even a superficial and forgetful person as myself can gain wisdom in time. It is important to note this, because as people get older, stuck between that limit of usefulness and the onset of senility, we tend to dismiss them, flaunt our new found (and invented) knowledge to their faces, ignoring a very important aspect of their evolution: wisdom. Sure, their wisdom might not apply to your field or need, but even if it were, are you acknowledging it?

Just a thought.

As far as I can see, Ted Chiang's Tower of Babylon is the first thing he published. It's a short story (that you can find online for free) about two workers climbing the tower of Babylon to dig through the Vault of Heaven.

In this story the tower is not struck down and the people have been working on the tower for centuries. It's a fun read, although not particularly funny or captivating. It does show Chiang's penchant for speculative fiction, though. I liked it, but not enough for four stars and three seems too little. Read it. It's short and I don't want to write more about it than it is itself in length :)

I am writing this post to let people know why a particular annoying problem happens on Windows 10 with regards to notifications. Before it was called "Focus Assist" it was called "Quiet hours" and you would turn it on to make annoying notifications not show while you were working or playing. After a Windows update, Microsoft renamed it to Focus Assist and turned it into a more complex setting, rather than on/off. But then the problems appeared.

Symptoms:

• Notification traybar bubble is white (outline filled) and going over with the mouse it either says nothing or says "1 notification"
• When you click on it, it shows no notifications and the bubble remains filled
• If you right-click it, none of the options in the Focus Assist menu seem to be working and none are checked
• If you go to Settings and click on Focus Assist, Settings crashes with no error message
• You also may have Avast antivirus installed

People have been tracking the problem on this Microsoft forum: Settings app crashes accessing "Focus Assist" settings and here are our findings:

1. The problem comes from Avast (or some other source) turning off the Windows Push Notifications User Service. Turning it on, restores Focus Assist functionality.
2. Avast has something called Silent Mode, which many people use because Avast started pushing all these annoying messages lately
3. In the Avast configuration (go to Menu , Settings, Components, scroll down the page until Performance, Do Not Disturb Mode, then Customize) there is a setting called "Silence notifications from 3rd-party apps". By default it's on. Turn it off and Avast will no longer kill the service
4. If the cause of this behavior is different from Avast's silent mode, let me know. An immediate fix is to go to Services (services.msc), scroll down to Windows Push Notifications User Service (followed by underscore and some meaningless numbers and letters) and make sure it is started.

Hope this helps.

A Conjuring of Light ends the Shades of Magic trilogy, although apparently a new trilogy set in the same universe is on its way. All the major threads are closed, although some of them felt a little forced and some of the drama was clearly artificial. But at least it all ends, which is one of the major reasons I read this book, only to see how Victoria Schwab's characters will end up.

I felt that this was the more ambitious volume of the three in the series, with all three Antari having to interact, with foreign dignitaries stuck in the royal palace while it was under siege from a demented magical creature who believed itself a god, with ties with families and past revealed, with new places and new magic. However, the book was quite inconsistent. For example, there is a plan to use a spell to seal the god in a body. When it is inside one, they forget about it and fight him with knives and fire and what not. There is a spell that could restore Kell's memory. He wonders if he should use it, then we forget about it. As for Grey London (ours) and Black London (the one where the creature originated), they are completely ignored.

The personalities of the characters also change a lot, with everyone acting brave and selfless (sometimes to stupidity) as if forgetting we are talking about a ruthless street thief, a killer turned sociopath by years of torture and so on. To me it seemed as if the author wanted a tough story, but she couldn't help turning it into a classic hero quest with a happy ending.

Bottom line: I had fun reading the series, but I won't continue with the next trilogy. It's not bad, but it's not above average either.

Paranoia Agent (or Delusion Agent, maybe) is an anime by famous anime director Satoshi Kon, unfortunately killed by cancer in 2010. His work is always more than it seems, focusing on the inner worlds of people and how they all perceive things differently.

The anime is only 13 episodes and starts with a simple case of violent assault on the street and then becomes stranger and stranger until it is not clear which is real and which is in someone's head. It critiques the repressive Japanese society and human nature in general, it goes from police procedural to slapstick comedy, from horror to psychological drama. The ending is, as they say, a mystery that doesn't stay solved for long. I quite liked the anime and I recommend it highly. It is rarer and rarer to find Japanese anime which is not derivative or simply idiotic.

It involves Russia! The story of how Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago got popularized and received the Nobel prize for literature is fascinating and one of the reasons why my wife and I decided to read it as part of our own private book club. She loved the book, although she admitted she didn't understand a lot. I couldn't finish it because I didn't understand it at all!

Let me get this straight, this is not a bad book, the fault lies solely with me. That being said, I've read half of it before I decided to watch the TV adaptation from 2002 and realized I had no idea who anyone was. I had read half of a book, enjoying the way Pasternak describes individual lives, but I didn't remember one character or scene. And the explanation is simple: this is like Crash, on steroids, had sex with Gone With The Wind and had this bastard child around the first World War in Russia. People have three different names, plus nicknames, that the author just splays around without explanation. Events are described through short chapters that sometimes connect via a character seeing the same things from a different perspective or saying something about a character, using a different name than the one we read about it previously. And all these people keep bumping into each other again and again. Sometimes there is no rhythm in how things are written, sometimes it sounds like poetry. There is huge attention to some details and complete ignoring of others. And so on. It is not an easy book; it requires your full attention.

It is obvious that Pasternak loved people and he described their experiences and toils during times of great upheaval, but for him those paled compared with the love stories and the feelings of the characters involved. I can understand how he was confused on why people thought his book was against the Soviet system, where it was clearly about people. I am sure this book is great, it is just not for me. If you want to try it, I suggest you read the summary in Wikipedia so you understand what is going on and you do not read it in bits of 15 minutes in the subway.

I liked Binti, even it is a short story. It is my first contact with the Nigerian-American author Nnedi Okorafor and I loved how African ideas blended with science fiction concepts in Binti. I will probably read the others in the trilogy, sooner or later.

The story is about a girl that leaves her tribe and planet to go to a university she was just admitted to. Just when getting there, an alien race of Medusae kills everybody except her. You will have to read why that happens and how she becomes the ambassador of the aliens, because the story is short enough to get spoiled by a detailed review. The writing is not without flaws and the character is dangerously close to the one in Who Fears Death, but I felt that it made a lot more sense in the context of an interstellar Federation as in Binti.

Read it. It was fun.

Who Fears Death is an interesting book mainly because of the Nigerian background of Nnedi Okorafor, the author, and the subject vaguely inspired by the atrocities in Sudan. The fantasy plot revolves around a girl resulted from intertribal rape who has to deal with the injustices of her world using her magical powers. Imagine a Harry Potter book in a German extermination camp scenario where he is a Jewish girl and you get close. In fact, this and other books on the subject of tribal hatred in Africa should make any white supremacist feel good about themselves, because there is no worse racism than between violent religious uneducated tribes that pretty much look the same.

Yet the book's interesting factor kind of stops there. The African culture references throughout the story keeps it entertaining, but the plot is a classic hero arc with pretty much all of the flaws inherent to the genre. Hero is young and powerless, discovers powers, is guided by mentors that keep from her just about everything there is to know and use up until she needs it, evil villain to whom she has a direct connection and opposition, friends that are there just to support the hero, things that happen for no other reason than they needed to further the story in a particular direction, she has amazing powers but uses them sparingly and often is stopped from using them for moral reasons by her friends and so on. In fact, it gets a lot worse, considering the hero is an African girl who could get killed at any moment by an angry mob just for the color of her skin, moving around in a society where even her boyfriend thinks it's OK to keep things for himself or treat her patronizingly just because of her gender, not to mention the old male mentors.

So while the book is interesting and well written, it does have a major flaw in the way it was structured as a story. Perhaps the docile Black woman who occasionally gets upset and then regrets it resonates better with African audiences, but for a Westerner it might get a little frustrating. It is a book worth reading, mainly because of the culture shock one experiences while reading it, but it could have been better.

Who writes like this in this day and age? Around 10% in the book I was convinced The Great Influenza was written sometime in the middle of last century, when people still did painstaking research and paid attention to every detail, not like now, when researching something involves trying different Google keyword combinations ad nauseam. And how many people can pack so much information and knowledge into a book that is also easy to read and incredibly captivating? Apparently, John M. Barry, with this book published in 2004.

I can't stress enough how much I liked this book. I would give it 6 stars out of 5 just because I rated books with 5 stars and this is an order of magnitude better. Imagine that I only found it because I was curious about the influenza epidemic from 1918, what is popularly known as The Spanish Flu, and at the time I was worried that one book on the subject would clearly not be enough. Not only would it present just one point of view, but surely various interests or lack of resources would influence (pun not intended) the end result. Instead I was shamed, that is the right word, by the amount of care the author used to research and write this book.

In order to explain what the book is about I would have to write a lot about The Spanish Flu, a disease that killed between 50 and 100 million people globally within six months in the middle of a five year world war that killed just 20 million in military and civilian deaths combined. Yet very few people care about it or even know about it. There are few documents about it, no movie that I know of, very few books. Inside the pages of The Great Influenza are the seeds of a dozen Steven Spielberg war movies, various crossings of The Outbreak with The Knick and a few Netflix series - I find it criminal that no one thought about it so far. Therefore, I urge you to first read a little about the disease itself, on Wikipedia and Google like normal people, then read this book. It will blow you away.

John Barry is clearly an investigator at heart. Not only does the work for this book, but clearly empathizes with the people who fought to understand disease and find cures, locked in laboratories and sacrificing everything for understanding. He calls them The Warriors, the name of the first part of the book, where he describes the history of medical science in the Unites States and the people how would ultimately champion it further and fight the outbreak. The second part (out of ten) describes the disease: a type of influenza so virulent that it makes the immune system destroy the body it's supposed to protect. Only from the third chapter on we start reading about how the pandemic started, what influenced its movements, how people reacted and so on. The last two chapters are solely about the after effects (almost as important as the ones during the pandemic). A whopping 10% of the book is just notes and thanks and references.

Also relevant, I think, is the fact that Barry is American and clearly proud of it. The book has a very American centric view, not only because of the nationality of the author, as probably because it would have been a lot more difficult to research the actual events in other parts of the world. Yet even for an American patriot the book is filled with outrage at the way governments and local authorities and narrow minded bureaucrats treated the disease and the people affected by it. For an European as I am, the way a fanatical American president managed to turn an entire country into a weapon, effectively disabling the values that Americans are known for: democracy, freedom of speech, pursuit of happiness, etc, is beyond chilling. America was a sleeping giant way before Pearl Harbor and the way it awakens and consumes everything and everyone that stands in its way is ironically similar to the way the influenza virus swept the world. One of the main reasons people don't know about the disease is because any mention of it that could have affected morale during times of war was censored in the land of the free. The name Spanish Flu itself comes from the fact Spain was not censoring its media at the time.

Bottom line is that I urge everyone to read this book. It's a wonderful example of how one man can dedicate seven years to research and document something as scary, monumental and mysterious such as the great influenza pandemic of 1918, analyse it from multiple viewpoints, name, quote and praise the people who were right in the midst of battle, the unsung scientist heroes of unheard of laboratories and the people who gave them the wind under their wings. Great job, John Barry, great job indeed!

I liked A Gathering of Shadows more than the first book in the series, A Darker Shade of Magic. It felt more grounded, more meaty. A large part of the book is split into two parts as Kell and Lila walk their separate paths only to collide in the middle and be tragically broken apart towards the end. There are more characters, more world building.

Not all is rosy, though. There are still huge swaths of pointless exposition, followed by truncated bits of action. In this book, a part of the focus is on a magical tournament that all characters are somehow involved with, so a big part of the story you wait to see what is going to happen when wizards fight each other. And then there are the scenes of battle which are either a few paragraphs long or simply summarized because Victoria Schwab didn't really care for the characters fighting or because she wanted to focus on a (bloody hell, I am so tired of this cliché!) love triangle. I also wish Lila would have had a more interesting arc, other than going to sea for 4 months and returning a world class magician without an actual event to drive her evolution. It's basically a "she read some books, watched some YouTube tutorials and she was smart" story.

I found it funny that this book ends in a gigantic cliffhanger. So large, in fact, that in the acknowledgements at the end the author apologizes. She managed to write four books that didn't end in cliffhangers, so she is allowed this one, she reasons. Is this an emotional need for writers, to hang their readers? Something so powerful that they just have to do it from time to time in order to feel alive? Kind of like magic, eh? :)

Anyway, I am happy to say that I will probably read the next book in the series and not only because of the cliffhanger, but because I am actually interested in what the characters will do. I have other things on my plate first, though.

In 2014 Yuval Noah Harari became world wide famous for the English publication of his book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. A lot of my friends recommended it, I couldn't turn around without hearing about it, but before I could read it, I watched some videos and TED talks from the guy so I was hearing the slightly whiny voice and I was imagining the face and mannerism of Harari while I was reading the book. And the truth is the book feels just like an extended version of one of his lectures. I found the book interesting, with some insights that were quite nice, but I think it started a lot better than it ended.

It goes through the history of our species, starting with the origins, going through the changes that shaped our society and identity. It goes on to explain, for example, how almost everything our society is based on is a myth that we collectively cling to and give power to. And he is not talking about religious myths only, but also notions like country, nation, race, money, law, human rights, justice, individuality, good, bad, etc. Like a house of cards, once we started to be able to think abstractly and communicate ideas, we've created a world that is based on assumptions on top of assumptions that we just choose to believe. I thought that was the most interesting point in the book and the one that made me think most. If our entire life as a species and as individuals is axiomatic, then how different could lives be if only based on other axioms?

Another great insight was that liberalism and individuality, coupled with the capitalist growth model that is based on a scientific and technological trust in a better future, are very recent inventions. Most of human history, even up to the nineteenth century, people were content with the status quo, were nostalgic about some bygone era that was "golden" and better than today, and people were stuck into their lives with no hope or even thought of changing them. The explosion of new discoveries and conquests comes from a new found hope in a better future, one based on technological progress and scientific discovery. Other ways of living weren't worse, they just were obliterated by people who chose to accept that they don't know everything and started looking for resources to plunder and answers to their questions. In contrast, whole societies and empires based on the holiness of stations manned by people who assumed knew everything stagnated for centuries.

Yet another point that I found interesting was about the state and commercial institutions eroding and replacing the traditional. Before the legal, moral, support, educational and emotional systems were part of the family or the extended community. Now they are outsourced to law, financial institutions, psychologists, schools, which thrive on the concept that we are individuals and need no one.

Harari makes the point that we are the product of evolution, not different from any other animal, but once we went over a threshold, we created new arenas in which to evolve. Something I didn't particularly agree with is his view that hunter gatherers were living a better, more content life, than farmers. Rather than working all day for a very limited diet, they were free to roam and enjoy the seasonal food that was literally hanging around. Further on we went through the Industrial Revolution and people were even more restricted by the rules of technology and industry. A big portion of the book is dedicated to this kind of thoughts about how our success bound us to a way of life we now cannot escape. The author even uses the word "trap".

In the end, Sapiens tries to analyse our state: is it better now than before? It goes through chapters that talk about happiness: what is it? do we have it? does it matter? Harari is probably agnostic, but he does favor Buddhist ideas of meditation and escaping misery by removing craving, and that is pretty obvious by the end of the book.The last chapter contains a short and kind of reused discussion about the future of us as gods that remake the very fabric of our bodies, minds and reality and, of course, the singularity. But while at the beginning each historical step of Homo Sapiens was analysed with scientific attention, with insights that were clearly coming from a lot of thought on the subject, by the end the rhetoric devolved into just expressing opinions.

So, I did like the book. It felt a bit too verbose, because Harari's style is to explain something, then give an example to make it clearer. If you understand what he explained, the example feels superfluous most of the time. I also didn't like that the book started great, with careful analysis and beautiful insights, and ended with obvious personal opinions superficially backed by facts. I could have accepted either one, but having both just highlights the contrast between them.

As a final thought, Harari mentioned Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997) as one of the greatest inspirations for the book by showing that it was possible to "ask very big questions and answer them scientifically". I tried reading that and it was way too thorough and heavy. So having something like Sapiens is like light reading for people who are interesting in science but not very bright :)

The idea is nice: multiple versions of the same city of London, somehow named the same, even when the countries and the languages and the magic is different from world to world. Then there is the magician who can go between worlds and the charismatic female thief who accidentally steals from him exactly in the moment of a great change in the structure of power between these worlds.

While I liked the idea and even enjoyed the characters, I felt like Victoria Schwab was more in love with the story than with the characters. Barely sketched, they do things because they do things, not because of an inner drive that makes a lot of sense for them. Even the villains are standard psychopaths doing bad things because they like doing bad things. Plus they kind of suck. I liked A Darker Shade of Magic, I think I may read the rest of the series, but I barely managed to feel anything for the characters. Whenever something needed to happen, some prop or person appeared right then and there. Everybody had stunted emotions that only seemed to push people to action when the plot required it, rather than as a natural consequence of feeling something and plot holes were a plenty.

The bottom line is that I can't recommend this book to anyone, even if I enjoyed reading it.

On the 3rd of August I get this email from IFTTT, a service I have been using to automatically post Blogger posts to Facebook: Hello siderite,

Facebook has recently made significant changes to their platform. One of those changes includes removing the ability for third party applications, like IFTTT, to publish status messages, link posts, and photos on your behalf to your personal Facebook profile.

The following three Facebook actions will be removed from IFTTT starting today, along with any Applets that used them:

• Create a status message
• Create a link post
• Upload a photo from URL

While it’s unfortunate to see some of your favorite Applets removed, we support Facebook’s decisions to evolve their platform in the way they best see fit.

Thank you for your understanding.
The IFTTT Team

It was nice that at least they warned me, but how can anyone imagine that the best way to announce breaking changes in your clients' systems is to write an email that says "from this very second we are going to rip it all away from you"? Even funnier, they link to this Facebook policy change link that was published on April 24th and which announces their own breaking changes starting from the 1st of August. See, IFTTT? This is how you warn your customers: three months in advance.

Strangely enough, some of the applets work, while some just disappeared. I don't mean disabled, I mean completely gone, with no trace or warning on what they had been. Probably these will soon be gone as well. So expect (from this very second) that blog posts will not appear regularly on Facebook until I fix the problem with my own tool. On the other hand, you can always subscribe to the blog itself via RSS, a well proven technology ever since 1999 (that's the reason they partied then). You know that something is good quality when engineers name it: the first letter of its acronym comes from another acronym and when you don't understand what it means even if you have all the words.

Imagine Me Gone is one of those books that I thought I should read because it received prizes for great writing. Maybe I'm too stupid to understand why something that doesn't say anything in the first 5% of it is a good book. The subject is great, too: a family of five people that each describe their lives while battling crippling depression.

I think Adam Haslett found a good way to convey depression: talk endlessly about random pointless things, describe the weather, the way light bounces off of things no one cares about, don't actually express anything or mention anything interesting and occasionally say something really heavy or personally relevant with the same boring and bored rhythm and style. It makes sense, it's the way people feel when in the thralls of this terrible affliction: nothing matters, nothing stands out, it's all grey and pointless. However, a good book means more than just making the reader feel suicidal, it has to have some story to care about, some characters that stand out, anything than just forcing the reader to fight throwing away the book in boredom.

That is why I couldn't even begin to finish the book. I wasn't interested in the depressed description of someone I couldn't care less about, talking about how she handles the depression of others. I can only assume that the high marks for the book are coming either from writing that went completely over my head or from people who were affected by mental illness in the family and read about themselves and got the book. My family is not without its share of psychological problems, but I've had just about enough of it as it is.

I've read some books in Alastair Reynolds' Revelation series and I more or less liked them. So when I've heard of a new book from the same author I've decided to try it. The result is mixed. For most of Revenger I disliked the characters and the story, but the ideas in it made me want to see what was going to happen next.

What you need to understand is that this is a straight pirate story, only set in the future and in space. It starts with two girls that decide to leave their world and join a spaceship crew in order to make some money. Only they get jumped by pirates, so one of the girls must fight the system and her own nature to become hard enough to find the pirates and save her sister.

The problem is that the characters are hard to empathize with, are pretty inconsistent and always stretch belief in this world in which space crews are uneducated louts speaking in jargon and going from world to world in search for ancient technology they cannot understand that was left by long gone alien races. The only part of the book that made me want to read the next one was the very end, the rest was people acting weird, not thinking too much and speaking a lot.

Bottom line: I can't recommend the book. I might read the next one, after all the books in Revelation Space had wildly varying degrees of quality. The ideas are nice, the implementation is what hurts the book.