The title of Altered Carbon refers to flesh, human flesh in particular. Richard Morgan describes a world in which people record their experiences while they live, then get transferred to other bodies when their own die or if they need to go to another planet or if they are rich enough to want a different experience or alternate bodies just for the sake of it. The alteration of the normal relationship between consciousness and physical existence is the backdrop of the book.

The good part about this cyberpunkish story is that it is personal enough and simple enough to read in one gulp. I did that, always wondering what was going to happen next and excited enough to not get distracted by something else. The bad part is that most of the props are used only to further the story and are never explored in depth. The way people are always so easily "re-sleeved" into another body and yet almost never walk with different bodies at the same time, the way "Meths" - rich people that are practically immortal, having cloned bodies waiting in case anything happens - have all this influence, but in the end fear laws and have a conscience and human failings, just as if they didn't live for centuries, and so on. I could have gotten over that more easily if all these rules would not have been waived aside whenever the main character needed them waived.

The plot is that of a detective story set in the future. A former Envoy - soldiers trained to easily switch bodies and move from planet to planet to preserve The Protectorate - is sleeved back on Earth to investigate the suspicious body-death of a rich and influential man - a Meth. During this mission, he lives dangerously, gets people to try to kill or manipulate him, women to fall for him - quite a lot actually - and in the end solves it all. So in a way, it's an interstellar James Bond.

Some of the elements in the story are haphazardly thrown around and never explained or having any connection to the main plot, like an apparent discovery of Martians, also an interstellar civilization, long gone for reasons unknown and remembered through racial memory only by whales. It was a silly proposition and pointlessly left in the book, but for me it served to show that the writer is not perfect and, even if his first book is not perfect either, it still was a nice enough read for me to do it in one swoop. Morgan has written another two books with the same character, Takeshi Kovacs, and in the other two the Martian motif is truly explored. I may end up reading them.

In conclusion, Altered Carbon is more pulp fiction than cyberpunk, with a strong backbone of detective story with a moral and a thin body of future world, disruptive technology and exploratory writing. Even if it felt naive at times, it was a pleasant read and I don't regret wasting a Saturday finishing it.

The Windup Girl, acclaimed by many as a very good book, shows a Thailand that Paolo Bacigalupi declares as "a future version", but given scientific realities I would call it an alternate world Thailand. Wikipedia calls the book "biopunk", although I wouldn't quite call it that way, either, as the bio bits in the book didn't feel absolutely necessary to the story; more of an eco-thriller, perhaps. The book takes place in a nation that is fighting the encroaching ocean, in a time where global warming is rampant and sea levels have risen. Also, there is no more oil, no real use of electricity or combustion and everything revolves around genetics. Large elephant derivations are used to generate power; "kink-springs", a sort of mechanical energy battery, are powering just about everything; cats have been engineered to color shift to blend into their environment; human derivatives have been created, sterile, but beautiful and always healthy, slaves for things varying from military use to sex toys. But the most important element of this strange world is the overwhelming power of genetic companies. The same ones who created successful and copyrighted versions of food crops, they also released horrible diseases onto the world, making their products the only viable alternative and creating a depopulation incident.

In the book, Thailand is one of the last countries to resist the "calorie companies" through a combination of cultural and religious fanaticism, but also with the help of a hidden seed bank and a defecting company geneticist. The country is rife with political and economical tension and the main characters of the book are all caught up in this large game. You have the artificially created girl who was left behind by the Japanese and now is a sex toy to be abused every day for the pleasure of others, the AgriGen company man, his only purpose to get his hands on the seed bank, the Chinese refugee from Malaysia, where the brown skinned Muslims took over the country by ethnically cleansing anybody else, the different Thai factions and their agents, all playing the field amongst the "innocent" population of Bangkok.

The thing is that the book is not really about the "windup" genetically engineered girl, but about this world that Bacigalupi is describing. The girl herself has a pivotal role in all of this, but she is merely a secondary actor. I feel like the author wanted to give this impression of all the characters of the book, that they are transient, unimportant, even the human race as a whole, even when they are the driving force of the events around them. A very Asian perspective from a European, I guess. The writing style is good and fluent and I rarely got bored, even when the events described were not terribly exciting. The plot focuses almost exclusively on people, with the technical or logistical aspects thrown in there as afterthought. I think this is what makes the book a good one, because any inconsistency with our own world can be easily dismissed, at least for lack of evidence.

Bottom line, The Windup Girl is a very nice book, well written by Paolo Bacigalupi to describe an alternate future version of Thailand. The fantastical elements of the book are there mostly for support of the story, which in its essence is not really science fiction. One could easily imagine the same plot in a real world country, maybe modern Thailand itself. But, if you are going to write a philosophical commentary about human society and our place in the world, why not place it in an imaginary universe, as well?

I met a few friends for a drink and they recommended to me (or rather seemed amazed that I had not heard of it) Dragonlance. I looked it up and, to my chagrin, found that it is a huge series with over 20 books and a lot of short stories - actually, in 2008 there where over 190 novels in the same universe. Resigned myself to read them all, I googled for the right order in which to read the saga and came up with Chronicles, which is a trilogy of books, as the correct starting point.

As in the story, there is balance between the good and the bad in my assessment of the books. For one, I will not read the rest of the books and waste a lot of my time, but for the other, I already start regretting reading the first three. You see, the entire plot seems to have the only purpose of supporting a canon of the classic fantasy genre that the writers have thought up.

Probably emerging from games of Dungeons and Dragons, like many fantasy universes, the world of Krynn has nothing remotely original. There are elves, humans, dwarves, goblins, dragons, pegasi, unicorns, centaurs, and other races like that. From the very first pages, you meet the heroes that form the quest party and they seem to have gathered all the possible cliches in the genre in their travels: the dwarf is old and grumpy and complains a lot, the half-elf is tortured by his double ancestry, the knight is rigid and honorable, the mage is tiny and frail and frustrated about it, his big (twin) brother is huge and completely non-magical, etc. In fact, the mage character is the only one which seems remotely interesting, all the other being busy posturing most of the time, like real size commercials for their D&D class and specialization.

But what I thought was the most offensive of all was the premise of the trilogy. Beware, here be dragons... and spoilers. Do not read further if you think you might want to read the books.

You see, the world has been reeling after a huge Cataclysm, a fiery mountain hitting the planet and causing havoc. At the end of the book we learn that the gods, in their infinite wisdom, did that because the world was too unbalanced towards good! And we learn this from the good god, who for the entire duration of the story just nudged our heroes in one direction or the other while the evil god was amassing armies and killing everybody. How is that for balance?

Even so, you can hardly complain about a book being cliché if you don't read more of the genre and, to be honest, except for a few books, I didn't really read much fantasy. So I had an opportunity to enjoy this, even if the writing was simplistic, the characterization almost non existent and the story bland. But there was something in the books that kept me at arms length from enjoying it. It finally dawned on me in the middle of the second book, when, after reading about the emotional turmoil of everybody, having the men pair with the women - unless they were there for comic relief, like the dwarf and the kender (which one could consider a pair, if I think about it) - and making chaste promises to one another (like not having sex until they can focus on the relationship and stuff like that)... after all that, I realized that Dragonlance was written by two women. (Even later I realized that one of the women was actually a man. Shame on me! The rest of the review stands)

I don't want to sound misogynistic here, I really wanted to read something cool written by women, but for a series entitled after a weapon - albeit something long and thin, with a thick bulbous appendage at the tip - the story was surprisingly devoid of any detailed battles, tactics, strategy or even decent brawls. The heroes are always running around, talking about their feelings or thinking about them and, in case there is a huge battle between the forces of good and evil, quickly skips forward to the conflict between the two women that love the same man.

Also, as if it all wasn't formulaic enough, no one really dies from the group, unless it is something that fulfills their purpose in life, while the support cast keeps perishing without anyone actually giving a damn. Check out the bit where an entire ship crew - including the woman captain and the minotaur second that I had read a lot about in previous pages - just die without the characters even remembering it. Or the battle of the knights with the dragon armies, where one phrase describes how the knights held, but half of them died. Just like that. I may have written more about that bit than there was written in the book.

To end this terrible rant, if you thought Wheel of Time was childish, as I did, this is worse. T'is true, the fair maiden that hath captured my heart and recommended the books hath read said scrolls of wisdom when she was 16, so that might explain her fond memories and my tortured journey towards the end of the story. I also really really wanted to believe that by writing more, the authors would become more skilled at it. It didn't seem to be the case. I refuse to read another dozen books just to keep the faith.

In conclusion, I cannot in good conscience recommend this to anyone, including children or young adults - to which I think the story would be tantamount to poison, teaching all the wrong lessons in the worst possible way. These books sucked lance!

As always, this post will reflect my personal opinion. I know that The Listeners is a classic book, one that has been cited by SETI as a major factor in the project becoming known and supported by others. I know that at that time, doing a reasonable sci-fi book was a feat. I know that the writer was a believer in the contact with aliens and human nature and so on, and thus he must have been a nice guy, with similar desires to mine and other space-looking people. However the book annoyed me to no end.

The first and biggest of all problems is the insistence of the writer to add to the book all kinds of quotes from various works, many of them in a foreign language - that is, other than English. It was the reason why originally publishers refused his manuscript. Now, even if I understand the language, I don't know the quote. There is an annex at the end of the book that translates everything, but really, when a character randomly interrupts a perfectly good conversation to spout something unintelligible in another language, that guy is an asshole!

Then there was the construction of the book, the Project being presented like something that held sway over the human heart. All you had to do to convince anyone of anything was turn on the speakers so that they hear static, while the main character would do PR work, knowing exactly what to say to manipulate the other person. I would not have a problem with that, if the manipulation would not be completely obvious and most of the time completely ridiculous. It felt like a Naruto episode where the other ninja, filled with power, suddenly decides to switch sides because Naruto is such a nice guy. I know I don't inspire confidence when I compare a classic sci-fi book with a Japanese manga, but for me it was the same quality of work, which may be entertaining, but not great.

All the people and events changed in order to conveniently support the plot. It felt fake and it is a lousy writing technique, more suited to pulp. I did not enjoy that.

As for the plot itself, it is about this Project, which is pretty much SETI, that suddenly receives an alien signal piggybacked on 90 years old radio transmissions. What people do and say is so underwhelming that it felt like I was wasting my time while reading the book. That is why it took so long to finish it. My conclusion: while a classic for the science fiction genre, I did not enjoy the book or empathise with its characters. The plot is difficult to swallow and the story is very dated. I would not recommend it.

I was just thinking about Coma a few days ago. I don't know why. I thought I miss one of their beautiful songs. And here I see on YouTube they released a new video just when I was thinking of them. This one is a very nice combination of Catalin's lyrics, melodic and hard sounds and a cool interweave of the voices of Catalin and Dan - it's not the usual contrast between singing and shouting, but rather a vocal collaboration which works surprisingly well. Without further ado, here it is.
Chip, by Coma:
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Also, if you want to see a live version:

I've reached the last of the animes in the Studio Ghibli series that I wanted to watch (again) and it was nice that this one got to be the final one. You see, before that I had watched The Cat Returns and I rated it mediocre, so unlike the beautiful movies from the same collection. Whisper of the Heart seems to be the film designed to redeem it.

The story is that of a young girl who likes to read a lot of books. She notices that most of the books that she borrowed from the library had the same name on their library cards, a boy that she didn't know. Coincidentally she follows a fat cat, apparently named Muta, to the shop of an old man who has a beautiful doll of a cat in a suit: the Baron of Gikkingen. You guessed it, two characters from The Cat Returns. And behold, the old man is the grandfather of the boy that kept borrowing the same books.

Whisper of the Heart seems to just take beautiful elements from other Ghibli animes and bring them all together in a wonderful union. The windy hills of Tokyo, which still has beauty despite the expansion of the city. The young girl who is not only smart and sensible, but also ambitious and kind. The family who is sometimes annoying and overbearing, but that in the end is the source of support for the development of the child it nurtures. The indolent fat cat :)

And then the love story, something that springs from common interests and a karmic connection between two people who seem to have been meant for each other. But there is more. They don't just click and that's it; they get motivated and energized to be the best of what they can be in order to honor the relationship in which they enter. In a way, it is a continuation of the warm and supporting family model from which both protagonists come.

One of the scenes in the anime was so funny to my wife that she spoke the Japanese words from it for a week. What a wonderful thing to have a film that not only makes me want to be a better man, but that already does make me be so by connecting me stronger to the one I love. And I watched it on Valentine's day, too! How can I rate it any less than with a perfect 10?

Returning to The Cat Returns, it somehow felt to me that the story linked to it also from the perspective of the ever aspiring artist; the rough and unpolished plot there sounds a lot like the story Shizuku writes, her first but one in many, the stone that will allow her to get to the skill and experience to do this story, which is so much better and complete. It does seem that way to me, since I watched The Cat Returns first, but chronologically Whisper of the Heart was made seven years earlier.

Now I don't know exactly in which proportion is Hayao Miyazaki responsible for the great quality of this film and story and how much Hiiragi Aoi, the writer of the original manga, but I heartily recommend the end result. I may be exaggerating, but this could be the best anime Studio Ghibli ever did, and that is saying much.

I can't say that Neko no ongaeshi had a great effect on me. The animation was OK, the story was like a fairy tale, but it lacked something, a special feeling that I was expecting to have.

The plot is that a young girl saves a cat from death and finds herself uncomfortably rewarded by the entire hidden nation of cats with a trip to their kingdom, a marriage to their prince and a free transformation into a feline. She doesn't want this, but helped by new friends, she manages to escape. I am not really spoiling anything here. It wasn't like at any moment I felt that she might be in real danger, which I think was the biggest flaw of the story. Another anime from Studio Ghibli, Spirited Away, features a much more beautiful and scary foray in a magical world and one of the novels of Clive Barker, The Thief of Always, brings the required tension and fear that is missing in this film.

Another issue I had with this is that, other than eat mice and fish, the cats behaved exactly like humans, missing entire opportunities to delight the viewer with so many catty things. They don't use their claws, they don't do acrobatics, they live in a feudal community and are loyal to each other. The whole concept of a feline kingdom passed right by the creators of the anime.

My conclusion is that this is a film for very little children or a lazily made one. It's not that I didn't enjoy watching it, but was completely bland, devoid of any inspiration that would make it rise above average.

I always liked animes from Studio Ghibli., but until now I didn't quite get why. It is because they have calm. Everything today has to be over the top, flashy, fast. Ghibli stories take their time, they feature normal people with normal desires and rhythms. behaving normally.

The Ocean Waves is about a cute girl moving from Tokyo to a provincial highschool in Kochi. Everybody is curious about her, but she is a loner and quite rude. Two friends are both interacting with her, but it's never clear what's in their hearts. Slowly, but surely, we start to understand each of the actors and the story comes full circle after graduation, at the first highschool reunion.

I've learned so much about Japanese culture from animes, but the ones from Ghibli make me understand the people. The stories often have what is missing in not only animation, but real actor movies as well: people that you can empathise with, because they are like you (or rather, like you would like to be, but not in infantile fantasies, but in your hopeful dreams).

Really nice movie, it certainly worth seeing.

When I first started watching the movie and I saw the way it was drawn - colored pencil style, I thought it is some sort of children thing and I would not like it. But the minimalistic animation works very well for this film, which shows the everyday life of a Japanese family. They are not very smart, good looking or have anything special. They are forgetful, self centered and lazy. But they have each other and they are happy. That's a beautiful message in a world dominated by heroes, celebrity and egotism.

One might not like one thing, that the story is merely descriptive. There is no "end" to it, just a funny enumeration of family moments. I enjoyed it, though. The speech at the beginning, from the woman advising the newly weds what life is and how they should spend it together is both funny, mostly true and descriptive of the rest of the film. The part with "life is hard when you are alone, but even two losers can go through life if they are together" cracked me up, as well as the part with "have children, it will help you appreciate your parents; they will come and take care of them for you from time to time".

The bottom line is that this is a movie that families should watch together. It would relieve the pressure of never appearing to make mistakes, trying to be a perfect whatever and missing the joy of life. Now, it's too late for my family, but this film may be a way to screw up your children less.

So, while this would not be for everyone, The Yamadas is one of those Studio Ghibli. animes that makes you have warm feelings.

A lot of people nowadays are born in the city or a large town somewhere; nature and animal life is something you see on TV. Few older people, though, may remember what life used to be mere decades ago, when wild nature was what awaited you when you got out of your yard and people were three times fewer.

Pom Poko is a movie about the changes urban development brings to the land, as seen from the perspective of a playful and intelligent race of racoons, magically endowed with the ability to shapeshift into anything they choose. Worried, scared and finally enraged by the destruction of their home forests by the expansion of Tokyo, they decide to fight back. Alas, their efforts are in vain, there is no stopping the humans.

A beautiful anime, nicely drawn, very imaginative, it is almost impossible to dislike. The only problem I see is the rapid shift from the playfulness of the raccoons to their grief and despair and then back again. Sometimes I didn't know if to feel sad or to laugh; sometimes I could not stop myself doing both at the same time. And that is saying much: I am city born and bred and can't stand nature much, so it was an inspiring movie.

Watch this, it is another animation gem from Studio Ghibli.

Written in 1951 by George R. Stewart, Earth Abides describes the end of civilisation by way of a deadly pandemic. The main character is an intellectual, used to observe rather than do, therefore he gains comfort in the idea of observing the end of the world. He is immune to the disease, as are few others, and so he becomes not only the observer, but the patriarch of a whole new tribe of people.

The pace of the storytelling is rather slow and the story itself spans several decades, until Ish dies of old age. The book is clearly well written, and I would say well thought, as well, but I take issue with Ish's character. He is proud of being an intellectual, of reading books, he worries all the time about the fate of civilisation, but he really does nothing to share his knowledge or do something of what he is thinking of. I know that's a trait I share, unfortunately, but his level of passivity is insane.

If at the beginning of the book I was relishing the description of the single guy finding ways to survive, both physically and mentally, then liking the way the little group of people was growing into a tribe, then I kept waiting for something else to happen. Instead, they all become complacent, living in houses they didn't know how to maintain, using products from abandoned shops they did not care to learn how to make, forgetting how to read, and so on. The biggest calling of an intellectual is to continually learn and teach. Instead, in what I see as great hypocrisy, Ish is merely content to be slightly more learned than the people around him, thinking to himself like he was reading from the Bible, even if he considered himself as an atheist rationalist, then having hopes that his child will grow to be an intellectual and spread it around, as he was doing none of that. He just complained endlessly about how stuff should be! That was infuriating.

Perhaps that is why it took so long to finish the book, as the ending felt horrifying and even insulting to me: people living like the old American indigens and caring not one bit of the immense body of knowledge that came before them. Perhaps what was worse is that this scenario seems very plausible, too.

What was refreshing (if you can use this word for a book that is 60 years old) is that there were no depictions of warrior groups roaming the land, looking for slaves or whatever, or any other type of antagonistic situations that required heroic violent response. It seems to me that this is almost a requirement in modern apocalyptic sci-fi, if not in most of it.

The style of the writing and the thoughts of its main character are a bit dated, but not terribly so. Electricity is not really useful for much other than lightning and maybe listening to radio, so they don't feel they need to maintain it one bit. Women are not as learned or smart as are the men, but that's OK, because they are women. It is normal for some people to not know how to read. A man can decide for another what is best, just because he thinks he is smarter, and it is only civilised to let them choose for themselves and completely optional. Buildings are mostly wood, so a big fire would burn a town to nothing. And so on and so on.

I can't put my finger on it, but there is something 50ish about the mindset of the lead character that definitely feels alien to me now. Perhaps the idea that, even if he were to make the effort to teach the children to read, the only books that would be of use would be technical or science. That's an incredibly weird point of view to find in a fantasy literature book.

Anyway, as one D.D.Shade lamented in a 1998 review of this book: When you're talking to someone you just met and you discover they 'love' science fiction, and you ask with great anticipation if they have read Earth Abides, the answer is "No, should I?". I agree with the man. The book should be read and should be known, as a classic of the genre and a reminder of how "the first Americans" thought about these things. Don't expect to go all "Wow!" while reading it, but as it stands, there are few books that are as thorough about the end of civilisation as this one.

I've read Legends of Earthsea and so I knew a little bit who the characters were and what the story was supposed to be. And still I got confused on what exactly had Tales from Earthsea in common with the books I remember. First of all it is a loose adaptation of the third book, so if you don't know who Sparrowhawk or Tenar are, you are out of luck. Also the Nipponification of the characters makes things a bit lame; for example Tenar is a kind and spirited woman, but completely helpless and always in need of a male to come rescue her. Even Sparrowhawk, the greatest mage in existence, is easily captured or fooled. Then there is the repetition of the same bullshit that without death there can be no life, the reason that Cob needs to be defeated. It's such a Japanese way of accepting fate that has nothing to do with the Le Guin books.

Basically Goro Miyazaki turned this beautiful fantasy into a moralizing piece of crap, where the biggest sin is that one wants to avoid death. The anime is missing the point of the books, it's completely unintelligible without reading those books, and finally does nothing for the viewer. Just read the books and enjoy the story. Or at least see the mini series ecranization of the first three books, with Shawn Ashmore as Sparrowhawk and the beautiful Kristin Kreuk as Tenar. This anime, unfortunately, had nothing working for it except the excellent animation.

Just to understand how bad this film is, I went to Imdb to rate it and I noticed that I had already rated it before. So I have seen it already, but forgotten about it. That's how unmemorable it is.

A lot of the political discourse these days relates to the difference between democratic and non-democratic systems. More close to home, the amount of choice a government allows and - do not forget that part - demands from the individual. The usual path of such discourse is either "We let you do what you want!" or "We won't allow people do what you don't want!". I am telling you here that there is only a difference of nuance here, both systems are essentially doing the same thing, with top-to-bottom approaches or bottom-to-top. Like with the Borg in Star Trek, there is a point where both meet and make definition impossible.

My first argument is that the ideal democracy encourages personal freedom as long as it doesn't bother anyone else. That makes a lot of sense, like not allowing someone to kill you because they feel you're an asshole. Many people today live solely because of this side of democratic society. But it also means something else, something you are less prone to notice: you are demanded to know what everybody affected by your actions would feel about them. Forget the legal system, which in its annoying cumbersome way is only a shortcut to the principle described before. This is what it means, people: know your friends, know your enemies, join up! Otherwise you will just offend hard enough somebody who is important enough to make it illegal.

The non-democratic societies function like the all mighty parent of all. Under such governorship, all individual are children, incapable of making their own choices, unless supported by the whole of society or at least a large part of it. That's terribly oppressive, as it lets you do only what is communally permissible. But it also allows you the freedom of ignoring the personal choices of others. You don't need to know anything about anybody, just adhere to a set of rules that defines what you are allowed to do. It's that easy! That's why the system is so popular with uneducated people. Or maybe I should say lazy, to involve also those super educated people who end up supporting one radical view or another because it is inconvenient to find a middle ground compromise.

I am a techie, as you may know, so I will reduce all this human complexity to computer systems. Yes, I can! The first computer systems, created by scientists and highly technical people, were almost impossible to use. Not because they didn't let you do stuff, but because they let you do anything you wanted, assuming you were smart enough to understand what you were playing with. Obviously, few of us are really that smart. Even fewer want to make the effort. This is an important point: it's not that you are stupid, that you didn't read the manual, or anything like that. It's a rather aristocratic reason: you don't want to, don't need to, you expect comfort from the people who give you a complicated piece of machinery to operate. I mean, if they are smart to build one, why can't they make it so easy to use that a child could do it? (child sold separately, of course)

The answer to these complex UNIX systems was DOS, then Windows, then IOS. Operating systems increasingly dumbed down for the average user. Now everybody has a computer, whether a desktop, a laptop, a tablet, a smartphone or a combination of these. Children have at their fingertips computers thousands of times more powerful that what I was using as a desktop in my childhood, and it is all because they have operating systems that allow them to quickly "get it" and do what they feel like. They are empowered by them to do... well.. incredibly idiotic things, but that is what children do. That's how they learn.

You get where I am getting at, I guess. We are all children now, with tools that empower us to get all the information and disinformation we could possibly want. And here is where it gets fuzzy. The totalitarian systems of yesterday are failing to constrain people to conform to the rules because of the freedom technology brought. But at the same time the democratic systems are also failing, because the complicated legal systems that were created as a shortcut for human stupidity and lack of understanding of the needs of others completely break down in front of the onslaught of technology, empowering people to evolve, change, find solutions faster than antiquated laws can possibly advance. The "parents" are in shock, whether biological ones or just people who think they know better for some reason.

Forget parents, older brothers can hardly understand what the youth of today is talking about. Laws that applied to your grandparents are hardly applicable to you, but they are incomprehensible to your children. The world is slowly reaching an equilibrium, not that of democracy and not that of totalitarianism, but the one in between, where people are not doing what they are allowed to, but what they can get away with! And that includes (if not first and foremost) our governors.

This brings me to the burden of choice, the thing that really none of us wants. We want to be able to choose when we want to be able to choose. And before you attack my tautology, think about it. It's true. We want to have the choice in specific contexts, while most of the time we want that choice removed from us, or better said: we want to be protected from choice, when that choice is either obvious, difficult to make or requiring skills we don't have. That is why you pay an accountant to hold the financial reins of your company, even if it is your lifeblood, and you trust that that person will make the right choices for you. If he doesn't, your life is pretty much forfeit, but you want it like that. The alternative is you would understand and perform accounting. Death is preferable.

You know that there are still operating systems that allow a high level of choice, like Linux. They are preferable to the "childish" operating systems because they give you all the options you want (except user friendliness, but that bit has changed too in the last decade). The most used mobile operating system nowadays is probably Android and if it not, it will be soon. It swept the market that Apple's IPhone was thought to master because it gave everybody (users and developers) The Choice. But the off the shelf Android phone doesn't allow that choice to the average user. You have to be technically adept first and emotionally certain second that you want to enable that option on your own phone! It's like a coming of age ritual, if you will, the first "jailbreak" or "root" of your smartphone.

How does that translate to real life? Right now, not much, but it's coming. It should be, I mean. Maybe I am overly optimistic. You get the accountants that find loopholes to pay less taxes, the lawyers that find the path to getting away with what normally would be illegal, the businessmen that eskew the rules that apply to any others. They are the hackers of the system, one that is so mindbogglingly complex that computer science seems a child's game in comparison. If you mess with them, they quickly give you the RTFM answer, like the Linuxers of old, though.

The answer: make the system user friendly. Technology can certainly help now. There will be hackers of the system no matter what you do, but if the system is easy to use, everyone will have the choice, when they want it, and will not be burdened by it, when they don't want it. People talking to find a solution to a problem? When did that ever work? We need government, law, business, social services, everyday life to work "on Android". We need the hurdles that stop us from enabling the "Pro" options, but they must not be impossible to get through. Bring back the guilds - without the monopoly - when people were helping each other to get through a problem together. Liberalize the banking and governmental systems. Forget about borders: just "subscribe" to a government, "like" a bank, "share" a life.

You think this is hard, but it is not. You can survive in an old fashioned system just as much and as well as you can survive in real life without using a computer. You can't! You can dream of a perfect house in the middle of nowhere with the white picket fence, where you will be happy with your spouse, children, dog, but really, that doesn't exist anymore. Maybe in a virtual world. Where the spouse will not nag, the children will actually love you instead of doing things you don't even begin to understand and the dog will never wake you up when you need to sleep. Use the tools you have to make your life simpler, better, depth first!

I assume some people would give me the attitude that is prevalent in some movies that try to explore this situation: "you want to escape reality!" - Yes! Who doesn't? Have you seen reality lately? "you want to play God!" - Yes! I like playing and I would like being God: win-win! And if I cannot, I will get real serious and not play, just be! Is that OK? "this is fantasy, this cannot be!" - Join the billions of dead people who thought the same about what you are doing daily without thinking about it. "You are an anarchist! The government as it is today knows what to do!" or "Allah/Jesus/Dawkings know best!" - no, they don't! And if they knew, they wouldn't tell you, so there.

It all comes to dynamical systems versus static ones. You don't go to the web to search for things and find what you were actually looking for because there is a law against sites hijacking your searches. It is because people want it enough so that a service like Google appeared. You can still find your porn and your torrents, though.

Consider every option you may possible have as a service. You need the service to be discoverable, but not mandatory or oppressive in its design, it has to be easy to use. You want to be able to find and use it, but not for it to be imposed on you. A good example for this is copyright. A small community of producers and a significantly larger one of intermediaries trying to leach on them are attempting to force a huge community of consumers abide to the (otherwise moral and reasonable) laws of paying for what you want and others worked for. The procedure is so annoying that people spontaneously organize to create the framework that democratizes theft. Someone is risking jail to film the movie in the cinema so you can download it free. Why is that? Because technology increases the dynamicity of the system with orders of magnitude. Another service is sex. Porn be damned, prostitutes don't stay on street corners anymore, they wait on the web for you to need them. Supply and demand. So the important point is what are you really demanding?

You know what you won't find on the web? Easy to use government sites. Services that would make it simple to interact with laws, lawmakers, local authorities, country officials. All similar attempts are notoriously bad, if at all present. Why is that? Because the system itself is obsolete, incapable of adapting. Built from centuries of posturing and politicking, it has as little connection to reality as a session of Angry Birds. And you may be enjoying the latter. They survived as long as they have because they were the best at one thing: limiting your choices. Even if you hated it, you enjoyed other people being as limited as you. But the dam is breaking, the water is sipping through, it will all vanish in a deluge of water and debris. It's already started, with peer to peer banks and online cryptographic currencies and what not. Why wait for it? Join the nation of your choice; if there isn't one you like, create one. Be God, be Adam, Eve, the serpent or any combination thereof - whatever you do, just don't be yourself, no one likes that.


I leave you with the beautiful words and music of Perfect Circle: Pet. Something so awesome an entire corporation was created to offer the ability for people to share the song with you, for free, even if theoretically it's illegal.

I can't emphasize enough how cool the video courses from The Teaching CompanyThe Great Courses are. They are in the format of a university course, but no one is there to take notes so the pace of presentation is natural, it is all recorded on video. No black or white boards, either, as the visualizations of what the presenter is saying are added later via computer. Most courses have from 10 to 40 lectures, all in an easy to understand language, but no trace of the ridiculous tricks and populist stupidities in TV documentaries.

This course - Mysteries of the Microscopic World, presented by Bruce E. Fleury - in particular is very interesting, as it discusses microorganisms in relation to human culture. Especially interesting are lectures 11 to 13, discussing the hideous pandemic of 1918, of which nobody seems to be talking or making heroic movies about or even remember, even if it killed from 50 to 100 million people. In comparison, first world war killed a measly 8.5 million. Why is that? Is it as Dr. Fleury suggests, that the pandemic was a horrible and completely unstoppable phenomenon from which no one felt they had escaped or in face of which there were no heroes? I find this almost as disgusting as the disease itself, that people would only want to document their triumphs.

Anyway, for an old guy, Bruce is a funny man. He is very eloquent and not at all boring, despite his fears. The course goes from explaining what microorganisms are, how they evolved, the perpetual arms race against other organisms, including us, how they influenced history and even how they were used in biological warfare, AIDS and even allergies, all in 24 lectures. I think a lot of information in this course is something unlikely for you to have accidentally overheard or to have been exposed to, therefore of high quality.

As an additional bonus, you get to understand not only the evolution of medicine, but of all the quack snake oil ideas that are periodically emerging in "naive populations", truly epidemics in their own right, and even the source of some of the most common sayings and symbols. For example the symbol of medicine has little to do with the wisdom of snakes, but more with the procedure to remove nematode worms from someone's flesh by wrapping them slowly around a stick.

All in all a wonderful course, created and presented by a guy who is clearly adverse to bullshit and who has read and has worked quite a bit to make it. Give it a try!

I read about Dark Universe online, in a "best" sci-fi book list from somewhere. Richard Dawkins recommended it as a very good book and one of his favourites. I can see why the book would appeal to Dawkins, perhaps he even read it when he was a child. The idea is that the book is classical pulp fiction; the characters are simple and undeveloped, the logic strained and the science only consistent with the times in which it was written. At first, when I started reading, I was captivated by the world of people living underground after a nuclear apocalypse, but then I started getting more and more annoyed with the leaps of logic and superficial characterisation. I thought it was a book written by a teenager, like Eragon maybe, but instead it was written by a grown man in the 50s. When I learned about this I understood more of why the book existed at all and why people seemed so... stupid and onetracked. The ending, something that almost offended me, not by its quality - which wasn't good to begin with, but by its implications, is classic 1950 "scientific" thinking. The hope of humanity as small minded arrogant assholes.

Bottom line, it is a simple and easy to read book, in a bad way. The science for it is lacking, the characters are simplistic and the plot classic pulp (prince and princess kind of crap). Too bad that a good initial concept was wasted by a mediocre writer in a mediocre time.