Chasm City is the second book from the Revelation Space series written by Alastair Reynolds. It is set in the same universe, give a few hundred years, and it felt to me as a better, more mature book than Revelation Space. However, truth be told, the ending had the same flaw: the personality of the author bled through all the characters, transforming them into a do-good Scooby Doo gang, eager to solve mysteries and help people. Sorry, Mr. Reynolds, you're just too nice of a person! :)

Anyway, this time the plot revolves around issues of personal goals and identity, the very definition of a persona and of quality of life. While the story is intricate enough to make it a great book, I thought many of the concepts in it were very interesting, but insufficiently explored. Then again, explore any concept long enough and you never get to the other end, so at least having a complete coherent story that spans the entire plot is a big plus.

I just started Redemption Ark, the third book, which (finally! :) ) deals with the Conjoiners and a technologically advanced alien race. Or at least it starts that way. Happy reading!

I usually don't like Mecha anime, with silly robots fighting battles that make no sense. I also dislike the Ecchi style, where young almost preteen boys and girls fall in love or are dressed in a sexual manner, with no sense either. At first, this is what Guren Lagan seemed to be. However it evolved into something else, and there is a pun in this phrase.

The series revolves around the "spiral power" (enough with the puns already!), the power of evolution, which allows people to get to new heights every time they meet an obstacle. Even if the animation was pretty basic and the story about always shouting robotic pilots that power their machines with the strength of their souls (geez! :) ), I just have to give it points for rapidly changing form and evolving in style.

We follow a bunch of "villagers" escaping from their underground almost stoneage dwelling and getting to the surface, where, in the course of 7 years, reach another universe and destroy the very beings intent on annihilating humanity with a robotic starship. Now that's fast :)

However, this is not it. What began as a simple courageous brawl twisted into a story about friendship, then despair, then rebuilding, going through the unforgiving politics of unintelligent human masses and ending with a galactic... no, universal battle for the survival of the human race, all in 27 episodes. I say not bad! I was expecting to see tens of episodes going nowhere and then ending suddenly when the funding was gone, but no, it was a complete story, evolving from the level of 7 year olds up to almost adult (in a timescale sense :P) level.

So watch it, it might surprise you. Prepare yourselves for really corny dialogs and a rather simple animation, though. Oh, also, you might find a Guren-hen movie that is like a summary of what happened from episodes 1 to 11 in the series. If you have watched the series already, the movie is made of fragments of it, so you don't need to watch it. If you are in a hurry and you have seen neither, watch the movie, then the series from episode 12 upwards.

Yay! Post 600! I will post about a new song that you have certainly heard during movie trailers or if you watched Requiem for a Dream: Lux Aeterna, composed by Clint Mansell. No video for this one, even if the embed is from YouTube.

It's just nice and hints on the rithm of development of both myself and the blog ;) Have fun!

I had not read a scifi book in quite a while, but then I heard of Alastair Reynolds, once an employee of ESA, and now turned hard sci fi writer. I just had to read something by him and I started with Revelation Space, the first of the Revelation Space universe books, which spans 5 books and several short stories and novellas.

What can I say? I loved the book. Not in a very intellectual way, though. Certainly the universe in which the action takes place is very ingenious and the story full of twists and hi-tech marvels, however, I felt like the writing style was not completely to my liking. The characters are all very much alike, the leaps in logic are pretty big and only to support previous ideas that the book had put forward. It seemed lazy to me. But I did say I loved the book, once I got over the "revelation" that the PhD in Astrophysics and the ESA work did not compel Mr. Reynolds to be very thorough. Besides, it's only the first volume. Maybe the next ones will be more natural, now that a first book has established the rules of the universe.

Prepare to delve in a place where technology is way more advanced than today, but faster than light travel is not yet possible and the lives of people on spaceships, frozen in stasis and moving at relativistic speeds, feel like weeks have passed between a world and another, while for the people on the planets decades or even centuries have passed. Extinct races, time spans of billions of years and impressive armament (both in the physical and virtual realms), favourably offset the fact that humans are pretty much the same and they all sound like Asimov characters :)

Wow! This book is a must read. Not only because it is short, well written and freely available online, but because it does what very few books manage to do lately: actually showing you how to practically apply the knowledge and the consequences of that. Basically, it's like a technical book with a story.

As the title suggests, Scrum and XP from the Trenches is a book about software management, moving step by step through all the requirements of the management process in a Scrum environment and showing in detail what Henrik's actual implementation was, the problems he encountered, the options he had and why he chose one, the other, or a combination thereof. Even if he talks mostly about Scrum, he does mix in the elements of XP that he thought worthy of borrowing, making this not a book on any management theory, but of a real life process.

As previously mentioned, the book is freely available on InfoQ, although you are highly encouraged to buy the book to support Henrik Kniberg and other endeavours like his. A must have for any manager or team lead, and a very good read for any developer, having the chance to glimpse at a real software work environment.

For me I am glad to have read it and to see more of my current job in the book than the previous one, which means I have actually moved upwards and not only horizontally.

Something really cool from the TED blog, this image is an optical illusion of grand scale. See the Cyan/Green spirals? Well, they are the exact same color. Trust me, I opened Paint.NET and checked their RGB values. Event at immense zoom, the colors still appeared as different.

A while ago I saw the anime Fullmetal Alchemist and I was really starting to like it. An interesting melange of dark horror, funny kid stuff and magic in a very consistent alternate universe. Unfortunately the anime ended, in a somewhat unsatisfactory way.

Enter Brotherhood. This is the "continuation" of the original series to match the progress of the manga. I believe it will quickly tell the story up until the end, then ignore the previous ending and continue in a new way. Unfortunately I already know what is going to happen, having read the manga, and also don't especially like that storyline either. I hope it will not suck like Berserk did. After a brilliant start it just failed utterly.

Anyway, hopefully the anime story arches will be more interesting than those in the manga.

A while ago I was writing about the novel Infected, a sci-fi thriller written by Scott Sigler. In it, an automated alien probe was using biological reconstruction to create a portal for unspeakable (and not described) evil that awaited on the other side. Alien probes being as they are, the operation failed, but not permanently, since the probe remained undiscovered and ready to plan more mayhem.

Enter Contagious, Sigler's latest book, also freely available in weekly installments on his personal blog in both MP3 and PDF versions. Is the guy too nice or what? Today the final episode was released and I can finally comment on the book.

It is clearly a better book than Infected. Not by too much, but definitely more intense. It's like Aliens to the Alien film, only for Infected :) The probe is logically doing all kind of stupid stuff, including duplicating part of his functionality in the brain of a little girl. I mean, we humans have enough trouble as it is with girls, be them small or grown up, albeit the alien probe had no idea I suppose. The US centric approach was kept, there are more explosions, lots of killing, contagious yet centralised alien organisms... in other words, a decent sequel. The only thing I couldn't really get is the father-son relationship between Perry and Dew. Couldn't believe that for a moment, although it may be my fault.

All in all I read all chapters with pleasure, anxiously waiting for the next episode. It would make a nice manga :) I can only thank mr. Sigler for allowing me to read his book without feeling like a thief getting it through a file sharing service.

So, is humanity doomed in this one? Well, yeah... I mean, we still have girls... and besides, I can't possible spoil the ending now, can I? Rest assured that there will be a third book and our favourite aliens may still get rid of the human infestation and bring the love of God on our planet. Hmm, why did I say that? My tongue feels funny, too.

Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter has won a Pulitzer Prize and I believe it is the only thing that ever made me want to read other Pulitzer Prize books. I have to thank Meaflux for pointing me to this book and if he ever writes anything in his blog, you can find it here. Anyway, here is my humble review:

I have just finished reading the book and, in its self-referential spirit, I am also starting reading it. A strange loop of sorts, when starting to read a book follows finishing it. It is not an easy read, but it is certainly worth it. I was instantly both in awe and full of envy on this Hofstadter guy that I have never even heard about before.

What is the book about? I believe the most basic answer is it is about the roots of consciousness, and before you run away thinking this is some sort of new age pseudo (or fully) religious crap, let me assure you it is not. The title itself shows the perspective one gains by reading it: look at the same thing from the viewpoints of a mathematician (meta-mathematician, at that), an abstract painter and a great music composer. It's a definition of abstract thought by intersecting the works of three great abstract thinkers. But it is more than that.

The most intriguing part of the book it is how self referential it is. There are portions in the book that are modeled after Bach fugues while paraphrasing Escher drawings in order to illustrate a mathematical idea of Gödel. It talks about artificial intelligence, consciousness, the workings of the brain, formal systems, computer programming, music, art, science, mathematics, quantum mechanics, biology, genetics and does so in a way that links all these things together in a reasonably easy to understand way. It does not feel like a book made out of separate chapters, but one master-single-piece linked to itself in the most imaginative and twisted ways.

I urge you to buy the book, if you find it. I have read a text OCR version of it and I know I missed a lot. If you can't afford it, there it a torrent on the net with the PDF scanned version as well as the music, paintings and other media the book talks about.

The bottom line is that it is an amazing book. For someone like me, a software programmer dreaming of AI, it was a shame I didn't read it before. I almost believe that you will see me in buses like those old ladies reading the Bible, only with GEB in hand. I can't imagine anyone over 15 years of age that shouldn't read this book. I doubt anyone under 15 can truly comprehend it and, as Frank Herbert's Dune, it must be read every 10 years or less, just to see how much more you can understand from it.

Update: I found on the Internet a full length movie based on Hofstadter's ideas. Interesting, in a geeky/goofy kind of way. Here it is: Victim of the Brain.

The finale of what seemed to become my favourite sci-fi series ever (at its beginning) left me with a bitter taste in my mouth. Not only it makes no sense, but it is overall incredibly idiotic. If you haven't watched the end of the series, don't read further, because this is the mother of all ranty spoilers ever.

What makes it so emotional for me is not only that I really liked the show, but that this was not a show that was ended because of lack of planning or budget or the economical crisis, so nothing was rushed or changed. This was "meant to happen". And it sucked! Sucked worse that a vampire caught in the event horizon of a black hole that is falling into another black hole!

Not only did it not explain anything in a manner that would make sense to me, but instead it went completely overboard on all the things that I hated in the show. God exists, he somehow planned all this (oh, yeah, real modesty here, mr. Moore!), the model 6 in Gaiuses head was an angel, so was Kara Thrace, in the end they all reach Earth (this Earth) and decide to leave all technology behind (they throw the ships in the sun!!!) in the hope that starting anew would make them "break the cycle" and Hera became the chromosomal mother of all future humans. I guess leaving all that technology behind wasn't a good survival strategy for the rest of the 38000 people left alive, was it?!

If everything was God's plan, then there was no cycle except in its brain!! Forgetting mistakes is NOT a step towards not repeating them. Leaving behind technology is just as stupid! And ending the show with a couple of angels walking on Earth now and making bets on if we repeat the mistakes again or not, with background videos of the latest developments in robotics was.... there is no word in the English language for it. It is dumber than creationist! And the last half of the last episode was all about people saying goodbye to one another then going to live alone (read DIE!!) somewhere!

There is a glimmer of hope left though. The centurions were given their freedom and the last baseship. I will be looking at the sky hoping for them to return, nuke Moore and then air an all Cylon TV show about how they didn't repeat any mistake and just carried on!! Gods, this was frakking retarded!

And, of course, there is one more good thing in the series, and that is the Bear McCreary's remix of Bob Dylan's/Jimmi Hendrix's All Along the Watchtower. I am embedding the video with the cool transition from simple piano to all the instruments. Pretty cool!.

Guess what? F***ing YouTube removed the video because of a copyright infringement. What? One minute and a half of a movie scene? Geez! Couldn't find the same scene, so I am embedding All Along The Watchtower.

[youtube:qMo7WybtTWI]

The sound bit of the scene, sans the scene, can be found here. You can also see the live performance of the song here. You might also want to try Bob Dylan's original song.

Update: check out this Google event with McCreary playing the BSG theme with Raya Yarbrough as the vocalist.

Update: the manga is now completed, after 65 chapters. The ending was a bit disappointing, but at least it didn't drag on for ages like in other situations.

You can read Pluto, by Naoki Urasawa, up to chapter 62 on onemanga.com. It is updated often and I found it impossible to stop reading. The entire story is placed in a possible future where people and high intelligence robots coexist. There are only a few robots that have human like appearance and intelligence, and they are just beginning to understand feelings. A terrible killer is destroying them one by one, though. Who is he and what does he want?

I can hardly talk about the plot without spoiling it for you, but I can speak about my own impressions. Even if the logic/science in the series is not very consistent, the overall feeling is of great attention to detail, especially since the science is not as important as the philosophical perspective on consciousness and the soul. The drawing is also very carefully done and many of the slides are in color, as well. The plot is fascinating and it belongs to the group of stories the Japanese are so good at: the perils of too much power and the discovery of one's own limits.

I highly recommend this to lovers of manga and scifi alike. I will try to get the anime for Monster and I will probably get into reading the manga as well.

Another pearl in the anime pond. One just has to dive and grab this fairy tale and watch it. Seirei no Moribito is the story of a female bodyguard, bound by honor and personal history to defend a child prince from the assassins sent by his father, the emperor. The anime is not really a fighting anime, though, no one battles for the sake of battle. More than that, the "ona yojimbo" has vowed to save lives, not take them, so she never kills anyone. All characters in the story are clearly drawn up, with their own particularities and personal motivations to do things and in the end, there is even a eco green moral. :)

My advice it to watch it, as it is both a beautiful story, as well as a complex one, fit for both adults and young children. Only 26 episodes, but it is worth it. I would really like to see animes for the rest of the books in the series. You can also read the first two chapters of the manga at Mangafox.

Dennou Coil is a cross between Ghost in the Shell and Tonari no Totoro. How can it be possible? Simple! First remove all that usual Japanese obsession with boys in high schools (you know, everything happends to some high school children, usually boys, all in the same class, maybe some opinionated women, they fight, they grow in "level", etc). Instead use girls in elementary school. Then move it in some future world where people merged the real world with the virtual, and add cute creatures like from Tonari no Totoro (and the girls) in the virtual world! Yatta! :)

Anyway, getting more serious now, the anime is really nice. The Augmented Reality concept is pretty cool and (even if towards the end it gets a little spiritual and unnecessarily action like) stays pretty consistent. Imagine wearing clear glasses that add to your usual display of reality information like virtual pets, virtual laptops, keyboards and displays, maps of your current location and so on.

The children are all drawn towards a strange phenomenon that adults seem to regard as fantasy, called Dennou Coil, where the consciousness of people gets transferred to a virtual nether world via the quantum circuits in the glasses.

Towards the end, adults try to confiscate the glasses from the children and, after a hearty discourse about how real things can be touched, I thought the whole cool idea of the series would be perverted towards some social goal of keeping children "real", but it was not so. You will have to watch the series to know what I mean :)

Bottom line: pretty interesting and captivating. A little too childish, but without resorting to silly behaviour or self referential comedy that I see so much lately in animes. The anime has only 26 episodes, with little chance of more. The manga itself is complete as well. Couldn't find the manga free online. If you know where to find it, leave me a comment.

Recommendation: watch it!

The previous post was the 500^th post in this blog! And I haven't even noticed. Let's celebrate late with news about the end of the world!

How bored can I be? I've read this article about the asteroid Apophis striking the Earth in 2029 or 2036 and my first thought was "oh man! Why so late?". I was already calculating how unfair it is that I would have to live to be 59 years old before the world ends. So I have to cope with it until then, then, close to my retirement, the pleasant moment when I get money from the state and do nothing while my mind slowly rots away, it all goes away. Then it hit me: I am a complete idiot! What was I thinking? Sheesh!

Anyway, here is a cute animation made by a guy on youtube. I personally prefer the first one, the one that is only graphics and no realism. Again, who wants real? But it wouldn't be in the spirit of the blog :) So watch the second one, the one made to satisfy the critics.

Update: the guy REMOVED (who does that?!) the videos from YouTube. I am putting another ridiculously grand video of a possible asteroid (although this seems more like a dwarf planet :) ) destruction of the Earth to satisfy the ones hungry for obliteration.

[youtube:InPNk44v7uw]

Wow, think how many blog posts I would have written until 2036!

I heard a bit of this song in a super market and remembered it and couldn't get it out of my head. The funny thing is that when I listened to it properly, it didn't sound so good as I remembered it... Is there another version or is my memory playing tricks on me?

Anyway, here it is, British singer Bryan Ferry playing with his band Roxy Music.