Tootfinder

Just finished "The Terraformers" by Annalee Newitz (@…). It was recommended as a "solarpunk" book, and I'm currently on a quest to find more speculative fiction as good as Le Guin or Butler, so I was eager to dig in. Having tagged the author (hi) I'll try to be polite here, but I'll admit I was disappointed.
Newitz clearly has a powerful imagination and there's lots of great stuff in the book, but it's not at all pushing boundaries in terms of imagining future societies. I think the message and intent was good in a lot of places, but off or self-contradictory in others. I absolutely adore the relatively small point made at the end about revolutions being complicated and not boiling down to heroes and battles, but despite the book's attempt to avoid that, I think it still falls into that pattern. Without too many spoilers, the way that some big problems are resolved near the end leans too much on a legal framework without questioning how it's enforced, and that resolution then means that a few heroic acts are enough to tip the balance, which undermines the point about messy histories.
The biggest contradiction of the book to my mind though is with a central theme. The book really explores a world in which "anyone of any species can be a person, as long as we just bioengineer them to be intelligent enough," and it tries to make a point about how engineering limited intelligences is cruel. At several points characters comment about how personhood shouldn't depend on intelligence. There's even a brief quote about how maybe rivers could be people... But... the point could have been "anyone can be a person, regardless of intelligence." This would have made for much more interesting philosophical territory to explore IMO (how do we then bound personhood; how do we reconcile predator/prey relations between persons, etc.). These are also questions that the indigenous traditions Newitz draws on (and consulted about, as mentioned in the acknowledgements) has interesting answers for, but we don't get to explore them through Newitz' world, and because the question of personhood regresses to the question of intelligence, it feels like the moral philosophy of the ERT folks isn't any better than the "InAss" they disparage.
It's not a bad book overall, even if it doesn't engage with the questions I'm hungry to see others engage with. Newitz' efforts to sketch out a more vibrant and diverse future are still monumental and inspiring in a lot of ways. I'm just still looking for something more. Ultimately, I think it lives up to the "solar" but not very much to the "punk."
#AmReading #ReadingNow #Bookstodon

Stock Up, Down For Dallas Cowboys Rookies After Second Week of OTAs https://www.si.com/nfl/cowboys/onsi/stock-up-down-dallas-cowboys-rookies-after-second-week-otas

I was asked by @… how some of the elements of the #LeftWordle Share Text that gets posted are modified. I have attached two images. The first is the settings modal which is accessed by clicking the gear icon to the far right on the header line. The second is an example of th…

PSA: When was the last time you checked your smoke alarms?
If the answer isn't "earlier this year" you're probably overdue. Do it today.

I wonder if tall walls outside the zoo serve any zoological function. These next to green terrains. Or if they're just a matter of angry greed: "either you pay for a ticket for our whole huge facility, or you won't even see a single sparrow that flew inside."

Hittade ett angrepp av någon form av svampväxt på stammen. Jag tror jag stoppade det genom att torka av allt, pensla med rikligt med Atamon, och låta växthuset, och pumpan, torka ut lite. Nu ser den så där äventyrlig ut igen efter att ha sett lite moloken ut i några dagar.
Jag klippte bort 10 småpumpor från den, lämnade 4. Den svarade med att skjuta ut nya rankor åt alla håll.
Hokkaidopumpa, är det ett annat namn för 'hydra'?

"everything is brittle and at the mercy of anyone angry enough to poke it"
As a magnet, sticker, mug or more.
Get yours: https://davidaugust.threadless.com/designs/warehouse-fire/accessories/sticker
h/t @…

Does anybody know of a locally hosted, open source, slop-free calculator tool that can do complex unit conversions from algebraic/text input similar to e.g. wolfram alpha, and properly handle SI prefixes etc?
Examples of things I want to be able to do:
1 / (10.3125 GHz) to ps (expected answer 96.97)
(50V / 10K ohms)^2 * 10K ohms to mW (expected answer 250)

Unexpected oof.
"People can do terrible things when they feel safe and powerful. Your father had probably gotten his way for so long that he thought he was untouchable, and that is a dangerous way for a person to feel."
-Becky Chambers, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

Is Dee Winters the answer at LB for the Dallas Cowboys? https://insidethestar.com/is-dee-winters-the-answer-at-lb-for-the-dallas-cowboys