Hi, all!
I have been working on the blog lately and I want to know what you think of the new format. Changes include: infinite scroll in the main page for more than 800px width, being able to choose in Tools your own color theme or custom font - including for dyslexia, better thumbnail support for list pages, style improvements, testing for various browsers. Let me know by commenting, using the chat or open the blog and start typing...

Thanks!

The second book of The Expanse is much better written than the first, however the story is a little weaker. There are more of the details one would already be familiar with from the TV show, the character of Chrisjen Avasarala is introduced and chapters are written from the perspective of many more characters than just Miller and Holden. That means there are many more chances to completely dislike a chapter if you hate the character. For me, that character was Prax, someone who would endanger everybody and himself with random emotional outbursts. Perhaps he was put there just to offset the slightly similar behavior of Holden, who now looks like the paragon of professionalism in comparison.

The plot revolves around yet another alien infestation, this time on Ganymede, only it is not clear who or what is actually responsible. The already angered Mars and Earth navies use this as a pretext to attack each other, while the Rocinante crew find themselves agents of the OPA, sent to find out what happened. As opposed to Leviathan Wakes, the book adds two major female characters, Avasarala and Bobbie, a Martian marine, and a lot of the story is about their interaction. In truth, what the Rocinante does on Ganymede is almost inconsequential until they make contact with the two women, which felt like the main characters of the book, if I had to choose. This is also a sign of a better built world, in which one has to struggle to identify the lead characters.

While the book was clearly better (some even suggest it is the best in the series), I didn't find myself attracted so much by the story. Instead of a mystery, like in the first, we pretty much discover from the beginning what is going on and only halfheartedly root for the characters to get in the same position the reader has been all along. I like Avasarala's character, but in order to show how badass she is, we have to go through all the political machinations in the UN which I couldn't care less about. Bobbie was slightly more interesting, but she starts off with such low confidence that until she gets to embrace her role there is so much filler. And Prax... don't get me started on that asshole! He is central to the Rocinante crew quickly finding out what has happened, but for the rest of the book he just drags along. He would have been a perfect character to be killed off, adding to the darkness of the tale.

And I think this is where the books and the TV series diverge the most. While the show is perfectly content to show a dark, hopeless world, the books fight to maintain some sort of feeling of normalcy, of hope, leading to reasonably happy endings. The show recognizes that in a Solar System built on exploitation, armed spaceships and politics there is no hope for the little man, there is no silver lining, there are just people trying to survive while colossal forces push them around like leaves in the wind: another reason to watch the series, at least the first season, before starting reading the book.

Bottom line: Caliban's War, by James S.A. Corey, contains no reference to a character called Caliban, which is a Shakespeare character. In the play The Tempest, Caliban is a part-human monster and slave who rebels against his masters. Even starting from the title, the authors spill the beans on what the story is all about. While I enjoyed the book and now I am reading the third one in the series, I can't help wishing they would have maintained the tension and mystery of Leviathan Wakes.

I absolutely love the TV series The Expanse and so, after ten torturous weeks in which I would alternatively get filled with joy at the release of another episode, then fall into despair when it ended, I've decided to cut out the middleman and read the damn book. And now that I've read it, I have to say that I am really glad to have seen the show first. It's not that it is a bad book - it is not, it's very good - but the show is better and having the characters in the series blend with the ones on the page is turning them into something more fleshed out, more complex. And I am not the only one thinking that.

For example, in the book the viewpoint alternates, chapter by chapter, between Miller and Holden. The chapters don't even have other titles other than these two names. In the book Naomi is a slight romantic interest, but nothing more than that. Amos is just there, doing stuff. Alex is barely fleshed out. It is Holden who is the undisputed captain of the Rocinante and that's it. Similarly, Miller's partners or even Anderson Dawes are just shadows of the complex characters they appear in the TV show. One of the things that I really loved about the show was that it was reasonably accurate scientifically and I kind of thought the book would be even more detailed about it. In the contrary, it was not. The authors even said in an interview that they never intended to make a hard sci-fi thing, but just to tell the stories of people in the less used fictional period between stuck-on-Earth and interstellar humanity. The weird language melange that is shown in the TV series is only vaguely mentioned in the books. Also the Earth lady in the show is not in this book at all.

But enough about the show. Leviathan Wakes is the first in The Expanse series of more than five books, written by James S.A. Corey, which is actually a pen name for Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, both collaborators of George R.R. Martin (Franck was his personal assistant, for example). More than five books because there are also some interstitial short stories and I am sure they are going to write some more stuff. The plot of the book is about people living and working in space. You have densely populated Earth, a colonized Mars that is undergoing terraforming and the Belt, people living on the large asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. And of course, people being people, they hate each other. Enter an unknown entity that lights the powder keg for reasons unknown that are slowly revealed as the book goes on.

Miller is the typical noir detective, cynical, not trusting, obsessive to the extreme and trying to prove to the world and himself that he's still "got it". Holden is the typical good guy, wanting to save everybody and hoping that all will be well if people just know the truth. Their dynamic is interesting, but for me the story was more captivating when they hadn't met each other. The first season of the show ends when the book is about half way through, but from then there is a period of inactivity, one of those parts when everybody knows what is going on and still they have to go through the movements. In real life this is where the role of the characters would be over, but since it is a book, the same characters continue the story, although it feels a bit disconnected. The ending of the book is epic, in its grand scale, but almost boring from a literary standpoint.

Bottom line: I will continue reading the next books of The Expanse, however I have to say that I am shocked at the difference in quality between the show and the book. Probably it is much easier to do that when you have good actors carrying the load and a lot more book material to work with before you start envisioning your world, but still awe is the feeling I am getting from the TV show.

If there is anything that I am forced to say about Adrian Despot, the frontman of Vita de Vie, is that he is a true artist. The concert tonight was spot on, even if I am not a fan of the band. The guest bands were pretty good, too, but I have to admit that for most of them I was waiting for them to stop playing so I can listen to the great playlist from DJ Hefe. The audience was really mixed, ranging from little kids to old people. It felt great to see all these people singing along and reliving some of the greatest hits of the band.

I started watching the concert online. It was kind of extreme to go there at 16:00 and stay until 23:00, especially since I was worried about the food/drink/toilet situation and there was an afterparty as well. I have to say that all my worries were for naught. Really decent access to the food and drink stands and there was no queue at the toilets outside. Of course, the drinks and food were shitty and overpriced, but that was to be expected. It also was a really wonderful thing to stand in the middle of a crowd of people and not feel like I was smoking a cigar. The law against smoking in public places has finally reached Romania so it felt really wonderful.

By the time we got to the concert hall - umm, heated tent, but it was better than it sounds - the last band before Vita de Vie was playing, the rather good Relative, from Cluj. Energetic, professional, kind of bad public speakers, but they have time to improve. They were pretty emotional about their first venue in Bucharest and performing before so many people, so they were sweet. Then the main show started, with light shows, projections and a volume that felt like twice as loud as the bands before. My ears are still ringing.

Unfortunately something happened that ruined my evening, so I went home after the concert, rather than go to the after-party at Fabrica. I wish I was in the mood for that, but well, shit happens. So yeah, the show was great, the music pretty good - although I felt like the band would have done a better job with another lead singer :) The point is that Vita de Vie, like any other band - let's be honest, is a project. Individual people don't count unless they push the project further, make it better somehow. Adi Despot made that obvious when he called the previous members of the band to play some songs, as well as some collaborators in sideprojects started by current members of the band. Like him or not, he did bring showmanship to the project and he deserves to be the frontman.

Bottom line, I was impressed by the way the concert was organized (I am used to those really bad things where people just stand brushing against each other, suffocating in smoky improperly ventilated places, trying their best not to slip into the beer and piss left by people who couldn't get fast enough to the few malfunctioning toilets provided). I was also impressed with the guest bands, doing a really professional job, even if they have a lot to learn still.

You might be interested in the Facebook link of the event.

I wasn't expecting much from this book, as another from the same page offering free books from their authors was kind of disappointing. However, this is a true book: it is long enough, well written, with developed characters and with an end that delivers closure to all the story arcs. Indeed, it closes all of them so well that is kind of weird to see that it is part of a series, containing the same characters no less. I mean, come on, how many times can the same people save the planet? Shut up, Marvel!

It was surprising to me to find out that Breakthrough was Michael C. Grumley's debut book. It is professionally written. Nothing exceptional, mind you, but nothing you can possibly find wrong with it. And the subject of the book was complex and interesting, involving talking dolphins, undersea aliens, covert military operations (no, it is not a Seaquest ripoff), which reminded me a little of Creatures of the Abyss.

The ending was a bit rushed, I guess, and contained that annoying trope "You are not yet ready, humans!". Fuck you, aliens, if all you've got to show for your evolution are plans to either destroy or patronize us! Plus some crowd pleasing death avoidance which felt wrong. But overall it was a good book, way above what I would call average. Since it is offered for free, you can download it and read it right now. And if you like it, the author offers even more free stuff on his site.

I have implemented a system that logs what people do on my blog, with the intent of making it more useful to my readers. In doing so I created a live dashboard where people going and leaving are displayed in real time. The conclusion is pretty humbling, but I have also noticed a pattern that might reflect badly on the state of the Internet today.

The conclusion I was talking about is that, even if I write about a lot of things, from books to software, from WPF to Javascript, the most visited posts by far are about why the Bittorrent client gets stuck, how to remove ads by installing Privoxy and Sift3, my string comparison algorithm. All of that info one can get from the Popular posts column in the right of the blog, but I had no idea how many people visit it only to find how they can download their movies faster!

And then there are the programming blog posts. I am filled with pride when people open a link to learn something from my experiences. And then I see that they are looking at the posts about Crystal Reports, AjaxControlToolkit and the old ASP.Net Ajax calls. Occasionally they come for the WPF bit, which is great, but the conclusion is clear: people are mostly interested in the old posts, the ones describing older technologies that no one is talking about anywhere anymore. True, I have not posted anything significant in the last two years, but still, I feel disappointed. My blog's merit here seems to be that it is still online!

But then I realized something else. Sometimes I feel joy at seeing that a visitor opens a post that no one has opened recently. Yet, in a very short time, other people are starting to open the same link. It has happened repeatedly several days in a row, so it can't be a coincidence. And people are coming from all over: Canada, US, Brazil, Mozambique, Ghana! I can only explain it with the theory that once visited, a link increases in visibility, its Google rank goes up, thus passing a threshold that makes it appear on the first search pages. It is a snowball effect, which in part I understand and agree with, but can't stop wondering if it doesn't apply everywhere. Instead of going for the relevance that Google and other big search engines aspire towards, they cheat by treating each click as a Facebook Like! More people read it, so more people should read it, which they do, and so on and so on.

The bottom line is that I wouldn't want to see a race towards a common goal be treated as a common race towards a goal. Let all pages share the glory, rank them based on content, not the preferences of people searching for stuff. How long before Google will helpfully suggest to me to go download a movie rather than search for something for work?

I've got this from a website where several self published authors shared free e-books for promotion purposes. I chose Better World because of its description: "The last humans spent centuries searching for a new Earth. Now they face extinction.
For three hundred years, arks have carried the last remnants of humanity through dark space. The ships are old, failing, and every colonist must do their duty to ensure the fleet’s survival." Pretty cool premise, if you ask me.

Now, Better World is not accidentally a free book. It is short, ends with a "to be continued" and has no other purpose than to pull the reader into Autumn Kalquist's Legacy Code series. To me it felt a bit amateurish, which is weird. I would have thought something that would pull your audience into your work should be better edited, if not better written.

The basic plot revolves around this 18 years old girl called Maeve, a low class citizen of the colony ships fleeing Earth to find a better world. The story starts with her trying to kill herself, while a dogooder boy who is obviously hot for her stops her at the last minute. I found it interesting that the heroine of the story starts off as weak, egotistical, scared, with low self esteem and living in a world where she is pretty much powerless. Everything that - if the book were written by a guy - would have prompted people to denounce his misogynistic view of the world. Yet every writing book worth mentioning affirms that the character has to begin as powerless and defective in order to evolve. And indeed, by the end of the book you find that Maeve realizes her own strength and courage when faced with true challenges, not just with teenage angst.

However, the scenes lacked power and, whenever something interesting happened, the author introduced new characters and new ideas instead of focusing on the potential of the current situation. Maeve wants to kill herself, a savior male is introduced. She rebels against authority, a younger more naive girl is introduced in order to suffer the consequences for her. The young girl gets hurt, a love interest - another girl - appears out of nowhere to take away focus from the shame and guilt. An "enforcer", a weak minded man drunk on his policing power, is making her life hell, she reminisces about her dead parents, killed by another enforcer's decision in the past. Every single time the plot was getting close to good, something was introduced that devastated the tension and the potential and gave the reader the impression that the story evolved as Kalquist wrote, with no clear idea of who her characters were or what the final shape of the plot will be.

And then there was the climax, the moment I was waiting for, when our hero gets stuck on an unforgiving planet with her torturer as her only ally... and they just walk a little to another group of people where she shows how good she is at fixing things. So much potential down the drain. Bottom line: the author comes off as a beginner in writing, but at least she is not pretending her work is the greatest and/or puts her friends to post positive reviews. Even with this short story I could see the wheels turning smoother and smoother as I went along, which probably means her writing will improve. Unfortunately, as standalone work, Better World is not more, not less than space pulp fiction, with no real impact behind the characters or the storyline.

I really missed reading a good science fiction book and when I was in this vulnerable mental state I stumbled upon this very positive review on Ars Technica recommending Ann Leckie's trilogy Ancillary. Ars Technica is one of the sites that I respect a lot for the quality of the news there, but I have to tell you that after this, my opinion of them plummeted. Let me tell you why.

The only remotely interesting characteristics of the Ancillary series is the premise - that an AI gets trapped in the body of an "ancillary" soldier that was used as only a physical extension among many others - and the original idea of using no gender when talking about people. You see, in the future, the empire language has lost its need of defining people by gender and therefore they are all she, mother, sister, etc. It is important that the genre is translated into our backward English is all female, as to balance the patriarchal bias of our society. Way to go, Ann! The books also won a ton of awards, which made me doubt myself for a full second before deciding that notorious book awards seem to be equally narrow in focus as notorious movie awards.

Unfortunately, after two books that only exposed antiquated ideas of space operas past, boring scenes and personal biases of the author, I decided to stop. I will not read the third book, the one that maybe would give me some closure as the last in the series. That should tell you how bad I think the books were. On a positive note it vaguely reminded me of Feintuch's Seafort Saga. If you want to read a similarly out of date space opera, but really good and captivating, read that one.

You see, it all happens on ships and stations, where the only thing that doesn't feel like taken from feudal stories are... wait... err... no, there is nothing remotely modern about the books. The premise gets lost on someone who focuses exclusively on the emotions of the Artificial Intelligence, rather than on their abilities or actual characteristics. If I were an AI, I would consider that discrimination. The same ideas could be put in some magical kingdom where magical people clone themselves and keep in touch. I don't know who invented this idea that the future will somehow revert to us being pompous boring nobles that care about family name, clothes, tea and saucer sets (this is from the books, I am not making it up), but enough with it! We have the Internet. And cell phones. That future will not happen! And if it would, no one cares! The main character acts like a motherly person for stupid or young people, no doubt reflecting Leckie's mood as a stay-at-home mom at the time of writing the books. You can basically kill people with impunity in this world of hers, if you are high enough on the social ladder, but swearing is frowned upon, for example.

OK, ranted enough about this. I don't care that her vision of the future sucks. I wouldn't have cared if her writing was bad - which it isn't. It's not great either, though. I do care when I get flooded with review titles like "The book series that brought space opera into the 21st century", by Annalee Newitz, or "Ancillary Justice is the mind-blowing space opera you've been needing", by Annalee Newitz, or "Why I’m Voting for Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice", by Justin Landon - a friend of Annalee Newitz' from the Speculative Fiction compilations, and "A mind-bending, award-winning science fiction trilogy that expertly investigates the way we live now.", by Tammy Oler, who is writing with Annalee Newitz at Bitch Media. Do you see a pattern here?

I have to admit that I think it is a feminism thing. So enamored were these girls of a story that doesn't define its characters by gender, that they loved the book. Annalee's reviews, though, are describing the wonderful universe that Leckie created, with its focus on social change and social commentary, and how it makes one think of how complex things are. I didn't get that at all. I got the typical all powerful emperor over the space empire thing, with stuck up officers believing they know everything and everything is owed to them and the "man/woman of the people" main character that shows them their wicked ways. The rest is horribly boring, not because of the lack of action, but because of the lack of consequence. I kind of think it's either a friend advertising for another or some shared feminist agenda thing.

Bottom line: regardless of my anger with out of proportion reviews, I still believe these books are not worth reading. The first one is acceptable, while the second one just fizzles. I am sure I can find something better to do with my time than to read the third. The great premise of the series is completely wasted with this author and the main character doesn't seem to be or do anything of consequence, while moving from "captain of the ship" to "social rebel" and "crime investigator" at random.

Japanese culture is certainly special. The music, the drawing style, the writing, the cinematography, they are all easily recognizable and usually of high quality. Yet I think it is even cooler when artists are able to blend Japanese feeling with Western cultural artifacts. Check out this Japanese traditional sound... made metal: Akatsuki no Ito (The Thread of Dawn?)

Long story short: I thought FOSDEM 2016 was terribly non-technical.

The entire conference took place at the ULB Solbosch Campus in Brussels, Belgium, which is composed of several buildings in which many rooms are being used for presentations. That meant that not only you had to plan the speeches that you wanted to attend to, but also consider the time it took to move from one building to another (in the cold and rain). Add to this the fact that the space was still insufficient for most talks, and if you didn't get there before the talk started, it wasn't uncommon to find the room full and be turned down at the door for security reasons (meaning fire hazards and the likes, not stupid terrorism). I thought the mobile app FOSDEM Companion was very helpful in keeping track of what is what and where and when.

The talks themselves, though, were mostly 20-25 minutes long. While some reached to 45 minutes, most of them were short presentations of one product or another. Someone would speak in front of a Powerpoint (or some alternative) slide and the most common template was: "I am X I work at Y and we are doing product Z. Here is a history of the product, here is what it can do for you and you can find more at these links." They were open source and free, alright, but other than that it felt like it was a marketing conference, not a technical one. I have seen only one presentation that included actual code.

This doesn't mean I didn't enjoy myself. I've met old friends and some of the presentations were really interesting. I was particularly impressed by something called Ring, which is a completely peer to peer and securely encrypted communication system. Basically it allows you to find people, talk to them (via text, sound, video), while having no central server. It was something that I was looking for and that uses DHT as a discovery mechanism.

So my conclusion is that if you are not there for a specific project or topic, so that you end up finding the people that are interested in the same thing and network with them, FOSDEM is pretty superficial. The talks were recorded and the videos will slowly appear on the FOSDEM video archive site, so actually going there just to see the presentations alone might not be necessary. Being from a slightly different technical domain, I wasn't interested in socialization, and I think that was my biggest mistake.

The people there looked interesting. A friend of mine summarized it well: "one of the few places where there is a queue at the men's bathrooms and not at the women's". There were of course plenty of facially haired, pony-tailed, black leather wearing, Linux laptop carrying hackers running around, but most of the people there didn't look that young or that "hacky". In fact, I think the age average was probably around 40.

That's about it for my FOSDEM report. If you need any more information, leave me a comment and I will fill any holes in the description.

Update:
The talks that I went to and I liked were these:

• Can a true peer-to-peer architecture, with no central point of control, be a universal and secure solution? - talking about Ring. I believe that with TOR like location anonymization and turning that into a more basic protocol that you can piggy back anything on, from communications to pure connectivity, Ring shows a lot of promise. I was considering it as a distributed DNS architecture, so that there are no DNS servers that can be coerced to hide site IPs, for example.
• CoreOS: A Linux distribution designed for application containers that scale - a Linux distribution desighned to have a kernel partition that updates automatically, thus solving the dependency hell for the basic operating system
• Micro-benchmarking JavaScript tips: Why the JavaScript engine will mislead the micro-benchmarking you carefully crafted - this talk focused on the fact that Javascript engines are interpreting your code and optimizing it more and more to the point that there is little correlation between your lines of code and what actually gets executed
• Other stuff was related to WebRTC and XMPP, as communications protocols that can carry anything, but compared to what I saw with Ring, XMPP seemed obsolete
• There were a lot of presentations that I wanted to go to, but there were like 10 going on at any given time. Do use the video archive link above, since it will probably hold many interesting talks that I missed

This book was recommended by Jeff Atwood, of Coding Horror and Stack Overflow fame. He liked it, I wasn't impressed. In The Last Policeman, Ben H. Winters attempts to describe a world that is powerlessly waiting for the arrival and impact of a 7km wide asteroid. While smaller than the one that killed the dinosaurs off, it would still pretty much end human civilization and most of the life on Earth. As a result, people are killing themselves in depression, quit jobs to "go bucket list", nothing is working, nothing gets repaired, etc. In all of this, a detective is trying to solve a case that looks like just another suicide, but he feels it's not. It is an interesting concept and it was well written by Winters, but I had difficulty believing in the world he was describing. More than that, except rumors of something Iran is planning there is no mention of any other country. I believe that in this situation a lot of people would inertially and routinely continue what they were doing until they figured out that it doesn't make sense (and that probably it didn't make sense to begin with), but there would certainly be more aggressive social changes that the author completely ignores. Plus that "going bucket list" would certainly become frustrating once you can't go on a cruise because no one is sailing the thing or you can't enjoy your favorite food because the restaurant got closed.

Worse than that, at the end of the book I was pretty satisfied with it. It was short, to the point and while not perfect, it was enjoyable. And then I learn that it is part of a trilogy. This automatically diminishes the act of reading it somehow and the book entire by the fact that I can't convince myself to read the other two books. So yeah, bottom line: I thought it was kind of average.

Write Right! is a monster. It goes through every step of writing a book, including the one that the author, Kendal Haven, considers the most important: editing. Then, in its second half, it contains exercises for improving writing. The intended audience of this book is teachers of creative writing, not just beginner writers, so that makes it even more valuable.

The mystery for me was how can someone write about captivating and engaging writing in a book as dry as Creative Writing Using Storytelling Techniques. I understand it is mostly a manual, but it was really difficult to go through it, as it was full of information start to finish. Now I must reread it at speed and make a summary of the techniques in order to even begin to absorb the huge amount of very useful information in the work. Not to mention actually doing the exercises at the end.

What I really liked about this book is that it is very algorithmic. At every page I was considering - and still am - how I might codify this into a software to help me evaluate a piece of literature and maybe even suggest improvements automatically. If I am to extract an essential idea of the work it would be "editing is very important". The author acknowledges the need to write fast, from your gut, to lay the words out there, not even considering spelling or grammar, just vomit your thoughts onto the page, but then he submits that the process of evaluating each scene, each chapter and the book for structure, wording, verb uses, sense involvement, specificity of language, action, dialogue, sequels (not book sequels, but that thing that details what characters think and feel about what just happened), etc. is perhaps the most important in translating that story that you have into an interesting book to read. And after getting a final version you are happy about, he makes you eliminate 15% of the words. Ruthless! :)

Let me make this clear, though: writing is damn tough. It consists of two parts: observing the world and describing the world. In a recent post I was complaining at how bad I am at the former, but this book makes it clear how complex is the latter. Making the written word express what is in your brain at the moment of creation is extremely difficult and complicated. This book helps in defining exactly what that is and give you tools to do it and improve on doing it. A great tool!

To sum it up: This is not light reading. It is a manual for writing teachers (what the hell are those? I wish I had some in school). It helps tremendously if you are self-taught, also. It requires multiple readings or at least a summarizing effort at the end, to structure it in a way that makes it easy using it as a reference. And then, of course, are the exercises for improving writing which take the second half of the book

In January 2016 SpaceX made history by landing the first stage of a rocket that they have just launched. I know, Blue Origin did it first, but SpaceX rockets are designed for GEO orbits, while Bezos' reusable rocket is for LEO, so different animals. However, they have tried doing the same three times, last time just yesterday, only landing on a special barge at sea. Each time this have failed. But let's watch the three attempts, see what's going on.

First time, a year ago, January 2015, you can see that something was wrong with the way the stage came down, it was already angled and the horizontal speeds were really high.


Second time, three months later in April 2015, it almost got it right:


Third time, yesterday, 18 December 2016, it actually landed, then a landing leg gave out:


But what happened? Each time the stage reached the landing spot, each time in a vertical position and with low vertical speeds. Every time the engine exploded it did when the stage tried to stop and fell over. Wouldn't a specialized grabbing mechanism have prevented some of these accidents? Maybe even the first one!

Now, I understand that the purpose of SpaceX is to have a first stage that can land anywhere, and so they must rely on their device only, assuming nothing of the landing site, but once they go through the engineering issues, just catch it in a net, intersect three metal cables to support the upper part of the stage, do something. Look of those things, slowly falling down: you want to jump and catch them, like you would a drunken friend. Make your rocket understand it's not alone, Elon, that it's got our support! :)

Seriously now, I can't even imagine what would happen if the wind started blowing harder while the rocket tried to land on the barge. Since you have a specialized landing vehicle, make it better. The rocketry is fine, it is time to work on the support infrastructure with just as much aplomb and creativity.

"Take us to your master and have him give us food!"

Just a short revelation that I had. It starts with the definition of free speech, which is considered free if it does no harm. This is what is called the principle of harm. But what is increasingly happening all over the world is that more and more of what people do is considered harmful. Things like racism or misogyny have been now joined by online bullying, pro-life discussions, fat shaming, you name it. The result is a reduction of free speech.

If you want free speech, then brave the words of others. It is the penchant of humans and all life in general to categorize the world and then act in different ways based on discrete cases. It is not entirely correct, but it is how nervous systems work since worms were invented. It is a biological impossibility to be confronted with human behavior and not consider one category of people better than another based not only on color, but whatever you see differentiate them. And while I understand the need to push back with legislation against some biases that have become counterproductive, we have to eventually dial back even on those. Adding more exceptions to how thinking and feeling works just pushes people away and stifles the ability to speak freely.

An especially worrying trend puts copyright and commercial interests higher and higher on the list of things you should not cross. It is becoming so powerful a concept that it is increasingly used to stop people from expressing themselves. Online reviewers are being sued for not liking a product, people are being stopped from reading controversial material by buying the rights and then not publishing it and so on. But even small things that seem proper at first glance are just as toxic, like protecting children from all kinds of perceived threats. Forget they are children, just analyse the social cost of having them exposed to something; people learn from experience, there is always a balance between harm and evolution.

When will it end, you might ask yourself. Think of border cases like Snowden. Do you side with him, for disclosing information that affects all of us, literally, or do you side with the people that say he committed treason? Do you think encryption should be banned, so that governments can better take care of us by knowing everything there is to know about what we communicate? How about getting fined by the hotel you've just been to because you write a negative review. Are all these worth stopping people from calling you fat, gay, colored, old, stupid, or whatever you feel offends you most?