Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 24

Works great. You only have to set it up once (unless you’re adding or removing new lists/calendars), and then it seamlessly syncs your address books, calendars and tasks between your CardDAV or CalDAV server and your Android device, and you can use them with any app on your phone that uses the system calendars and contacts.

I can use my Nextcloud contacts with K-9, GMail, the built-in Contacts app or Fossify Contacts, and even for phone calls. OpenTasks works great for my to-do list. And I can use my Nextcloud Calendars with anything from Simple Fossify Calendar up through the Google Calendar app, and it all syncs up and down.

Note: With Nextcloud, syncing may be faster with an app-specific password.

On rewatching years later, The Phantom Menace is better than I remember. Attack of the Clones…is not. To be honest, I think it’s the weakest of the prequels and of the six that George Lucas was actually involved in.

I could see what they were trying to do, but it doesn’t hold together as well, and the story hinges on a romance that is, frankly, unconvincing. It’s like an early draft of a script went into full-blown production, but no one could tell Lucas, hey, maybe you should try something different here, or keep working on the dialog there, etc.

The effects are amazing. The music – John Williams is still at the top of his game here, and “Across the Stars” is one of the best Star Wars pieces written (up there with “Duel of the Fates” IMHO). There are cool concepts and interesting characters, and good actors doing the best they can with what they have. (When they can.)

And there are great moments too! Like Dooku telling Obi-Wan the absolute truth about the Republic having fallen under the sway of a Sith Lord, just in a way that Obi-Wan can’t believe it. Or Padme quietly picking the lock on her handcuffs in the background while Anakin and Obi-Wan argue in the foreground.

Mainly I think it needed more script revisions. And to let someone else direct it.

First-Viewing Twist

There was one thing that I remember making a big impact the first time I saw the movie, way back when it was new and the Clone Wars were still some mysterious thing that we knew happened between The Phantom Menace and the rise of the Empire.

The moment the Jedi arrived on Geonosis with zillions of clone troopers, their armor evoking Imperial storm troopers, it hit me: The Jedi are on the wrong side. They’re helping build the Empire, and the Geonosians’ coalition is the precursor to the Rebellion!

It quickly became clear that it was more complicated. Dooku’s heavy involvement with the Separatists despite being Sith showed that, along with the preliminary Death Star designs. And of course we now have another movie and multiple seasons of cartoons making it clear that Darth Sidious was running both sides of the conflict. There was no “right” side, and the Jedi were unwitting pawns like everyone else.

But that weird feeling of wrongness stuck with me through the end of the movie.

Modern archaeology has drastically increased what we can learn from ancient ruins, and Newitz turns this lens on the history of how cities form, how they thrive, and how they die. The writing is engaging and accessible, flowing through what we know, how we know it, how certain we are about it, and the author’s first-hand experiences with archaeologists at the actual sites.

The book has added a lot to my understanding of Pompeii and Angkor. Çatalhöyük is fascinatingly weird. And I’d really like to know more about Cahokia. (So would the people studying it!)

Satellites and Microscopes

There’s a recurring theme of re-examining what we thought we knew, using either new technology or new perspective. Angkor is perhaps the best example: LIDAR surveys in the last 10-15 years have revealed the remains of building foundations and an irrigation network outside the walled temple complexes. It wasn’t a medium-sized city crammed into those stone walls. It was a large city built around them. And mundane records of things like workers’ shift assignments and rations, previously ignored by Western archaeologists, hint at changing political conditions in later years as the infrastructure failed.

Even Pompeii, with its ruins remarkably preserved under volcanic ash, and written records still available of not just administrative details but first-hand accounts of the eruption, benefits from taking a new look at records we already have: Cross-referencing census and death records for Pompeii and nearby towns reveals where survivors resettled.

There are no written records of Çatalhöyük (in modern Turkey) or Cahokia (in modern Illinois), only ruins and artifacts, but sometimes those artifacts have stored surprisingly detailed information: There are indications of a drought during the time the city was inhabited…and sure enough, residue from stews in cooking pots indicate that the people shifted to eating animals that need less water, and that the animals ate more drought-tolerant plants, around the same time.

Lifecycle of a City

Newitz makes a point of drawing parallels to modern cities. (Pompeii had fast food carts, ads, and sports riots!) Çatalhöyük is the most alien. It’s one of the oldest cities known, and it seems people were still figuring out how to make one. All the buildings are basically cubes attached to each other, accessed through doors in the roof, and they all seem to have pulled multiple duty as bedrooms, kitchens, storage, etc. Kind of like a Minecraft house, if you could bury your dead relatives under your bed. (Sometimes they’d keep the skull in a wall niche, though!)

It’s easy to think of these ancient cities as dead ends where civilizations failed. Unlike, say, Rome, where you can see a continuous line from the ancient city to the modern. But they weren’t all cataclysms, and the people didn’t just disappear. Cahokia seems to have been wound down when people were done with it, Çatalhöyük and Angkor slowly emptied out as people moved, and even Pompeii had survivors who resettled nearby.

They’re not dead ends. They’re stops along the way.

Annalee Newitz’ Non-Fiction (official site)

A fun look at what it would be like to visit other planets or star systems, weaving together sci-fi scenarios, the science behind them, and the history of how those discoveries were made.

It starts with worlds we know the most about – our moon and Mars, where we have plenty of direct measurements and photos from the surface – and works its way out through asteroids, gas giants and their moons, and finally Pluto.

The second half of the book delves into more speculative situations. Types of places we know exist, like star clusters and nebulas and different types of stars. Plait links these to specific locations where possible. We know a system of planets exists around the red dwarf star TRAPPIST-1, for instance, and we have a rough idea of how big, how far, and how fast the planets are that we’ve spotted so far. From there he imagines: if one of the three planets in its habitable zone is enough like Earth to visit, what would it be like to experience a red sun, multiple planets with visible phases, and so forth.

There’s some repetition, but I think part of that is trying to make each chapter stand on its own in case you want to jump ahead to, say, visiting a black hole. (You do not survive the encounter.) And while there’s a lot that I knew already from following space exploration from a distance, there are newer discoveries I’d missed, things I’d known pieces of but never really connected, and a deep dive into topics I’d only skimmed the surface of before.

Also, there’s an insert in the middle of the book with photos. I didn’t notice it until I got there, so I’d been looking up NASA and ESA pictures of the specific comets and asteroids on my phone while reading!

Some fun facts:

1. Martian sunsets are blue!
2. The biggest asteroids are like miniature planets. The smallest are like bags of rocks without the bag. (Or a really unpleasant 3D ball pit.)
3. Saturn’s rings are surprisingly thin. Like, millions of miles across but only 40 feet thick in places.
4. The Orion Nebula is a bubble at the near edge of an even bigger cloud of dust. We can only see it because it broke through on our side!
5. It’s entirely possible for a planet to have a stable orbit around one star of a binary pair – or both! Sunsets on a world like Tatooine would actually look like they do in the movies!
6. I’m still amazed at how much we managed to get from a single high-speed fly-by past Pluto.

Phil Plait writes the Bad Astronomy Newsletter.

It’s been ages since I read any Discworld, but it seems appropriate that I came back to it with a time travel story involving a rebellion and barricades. [1]

It’s an interesting mix of serious and silly, sometimes both at once, often treating serious things as comedy and vice versa. The situation is messy, with good cops, bad cops, really bad cops, time cops monks, and a rebellion that today’s Sam Vimes knows won’t accomplish what it hopes to, even if it nominally succeeds. There’s plenty of comedy in Vimes mentoring his younger self and trying to clean up the “old” watch just enough to keep history on track, how the ordinary citizens handle the rebellion [2], and yet it can still manage to punch you in the gut when you finally find out what the lilac sprigs in the present are all about.

Night Watch is in the middle of the City Watch series, but it takes enough time to establish the now that while I still spent a good chunk of the book wondering who I was supposed to already recognize, I had a good sense of what had changed over the years and the future Vimes is fighting to protect – and how hard it is to put it aside so he can focus on the job in front of him.

Definitely recommended even if you haven’t read the other Watch books!