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So, in fact, this project is a little too engrossing at times. On Tuesday I wanted to finish up with one directory, and I did, but by then it was 4 a.m. I went home at 10:30 p.m. on Wednesday, which wasn't too hard a decision since I was so tired I hadn't even finished my tea.
Speaking of tea, since August I've more or less spontaneously cut down my daily caffeine intake at work to a thermos of same. This gunpowder green tea that I got at the tea place in downtown Mountain View is a lot milder than the usual brand that I used to hunt down, that came in dark green boxes.
Speaking of work, they're talking about parallel programming, and given the deliberative pace of CAD software development, that means that it has built up unstoppable momentum everywhere else. As usual, the thrilling advances in the state of the art boil down to the usual advice to someone who complains of headaches after banging their head against a wall: Don't do that, then.
Before I empty out my file of links to view on my laptop, and consign all the URLs therein to the Great Nothing:
Star Wars According to a 3 year old. - Some editing, well, a lot of editing, yields a remarkably coherent summary.
Sesame Street - W for Wehrmacht - More evidence that Bert is evil.
滑り込むねこ - Olympic cardboard box sledding - cat division.
Rotofugi - The Collectors - "The fact that they have never been opened increases their value over time." One of those self-aware ironic ads.
A Day in the Life of World Air Traffic - Not surprisingly, the flight activity in any given place tapers off at night.
Axis, Robert Charles Wilson, Tom Doherty Associates:
This is a sequel to Spin, concentrating on the new world "appended" to Earth via the huge arch (or arches, I don't remember) that appeared at the end of the previous novel. As ever, anyone expecting a rational explication of the actions of the Hypotheticals in putting Earth in the slow-time freezer, taking it out again billions of years later, and providing transportation between it and an apparently terraformed world elsewhere, will be disappointed. Irrational explications are another matter.
The main subject of the book is the community of "Fourths", recipients of a treatment instantly developed (from the viewpoint of Earth) by the Martian colonists in Spin, which increases humans' already remarkable lifespan by another third or so, and alters behaviour, rendering Fourths less aggressive and less gullible. They're also sterile, which I guess is supposed to give them some motive to care about the welfare of the unaltered population. Given that they're the main element from Spin on a human scale, it's pretty much inevitable that they feature in the sequel.
Some people in the story describe the Fourth alterations to behaviour as "subtle", but in fact they're pretty drastic by present-day standards, and the government(s) of Earth are very concerned about the persistence of an underground community of Fourths on Earth and in the New World. I don't know why the Department of Genomic Security would care, since Fourths can't mess up the human gene pool, and in fact they don't care much. Real action is usually taken by other parties, who operate in semi-secrecy, although the results of their investigations do periodically wash up on the beaches of Equatoria, the New World's main continent.
All very macho, but mostly irrelevant to the main action, which involves a community of Fourths in the central desert of Equatoria, who have created a child who they hope will be a communicant with the Hypotheticals. This ethically dubious act is motivated by the leader Avram Dvali's near-religious fascination with them, it appears. The child, Isaac, does eventually provide some very sketchy answers, but not much to the satisfaction of Dvali, to put it mildly.
The story is told through a multitude of characters, starting with Lise Adams, whose father disappeared in Equatoria after getting mixed up in the fringes of the Fourth undeground. Her ex-husband Brian Gately is in a position to find out what Robert Adams' fate might have been by virtue of working in Genomic Security. A mysterious fall of ash while Lise is meeting with a one-time lover and bush pilot Turk leads to meetings with characters from Spin, Dvali's project and/or cult, a Martian Agent, and a confrontation on the very eve of the culmination of part of the Hypotheticals' life cycle and/or mental processes. That part reminds me of a similar scene in The Harvest, and some of the characters' reactions do, too.
The character of Turk never really took shape for me, and at times he seems to exist merely to advance the plot, which is too bad, since his back-story is pretty interesting. Fleshing him out a little better might have lengthened the book significantly, but at 303 pages it's pretty short by modern SF novel standards.
