This is another one I read in the recent bout of reading astronomy, but it is a rather specialised book. It details the – in principle easy to understand – danger of night sky pollution through an enormous number of existing and in particular planned fleets of satellites. Interesting, alarming, and well-written and quite readable, too.

But here, the message is much more important than the book. Best I quote the author from his web page:

I love Astronomy. I love Space Exploration. I love the Internet. Until 2020, I assumed that these three loves do not clash, and indeed that they feed each other in a virtuous cycle. It now seems that was just a Moon Age Daydream. A new generation of satellite megaconstellations – fleets of thousands of low orbit satellites – is on its way, aimed at producing ubiquitous global high-speed internet connection. All very exciting – but these objects pollute the night sky, streak across our astronomical images, blare loudly and unpredictably at our radio telescopes, and increase the danger of spacecraft collisions, pushing us towards a space debris run-away that may make space industry unsustainable. The scary thing is that this may be the thin end of the wedge… opening the door to tens of thousands more, and maybe even sky advertising.

My fellow astronomers round the world have been forming professional working groups, and doing technical studies – you can read all about those and follow the links in the book. This is a bit different. Its aimed at the general reader, its a very personal view, and tries to set the issues in context. My aim is to bring the issue to as much public attention as possible.

https://andyxlastro.me/losing-the-sky/ (as of 2021-10-03)

This is a dreadful prospect.

 On a recent break with time for reading on my hands, I finally read Emily Levesque's The Last Stargazers <https://thelaststargazers.com/>. It is a popular science book styled as a collection of anecdotes about astronomical observation, but as that it is a whole history of the same, from the astronomers who had to draw their observations by hand (before photography) to the large and largely automated survey telescopes like the Sloane and the VRO, which make parts of human observation somewhat obsolete. This is, of course, narrative, but not with the story arc that felt a bit forced with Finkbeiner's A Grand and Bold Thing. Very entertaining and informative.

Some time ago I found this book mentioned at some other place and immediately resolved to read it, which I finally did.

Fox is a cultural anthropologist by trade, and as such, embarks on the IIRC self-appointed endeavour to investigate the English. While this is a serious study, she presents it with lots of humour, making this book both interesting and funny.

At the end she arrives at the result that at the core of Englishness sits what she calls the "social dis-ease", a non-relaxedness, an awkwardness of the English in dealing with each other (except with close friends and family). This social dis-ease results not only in hypocrisy, class snobbery, and eeyorishness, but also in humour, modesty, and fair play.

But not only the result is interesting, but also all the details she gets into. Her own embarrassment when she experiments with queue-jumping, all those consequences of the money-talk taboo, a broad perspective on rites of passage — there is a lot in here, and all really fascinating to see so thoroughly scrutinized.

Everywhere in that book I recognized things that also applied to me, or rather to the northern German society I grew up in, and things that did not. It would be most interesting to read the same book about my own tribe; alas, of course it is impossible to find the same kind of anthropologist from northern Germany doing the same thing.

So this must stand alone, but as such, it is an extremely interesting book, and great fun to read.

This is not the first of Crichton's books I have picked up for a second time. I really liked it on first reading for its fast-paced story-telling and, other than, for instance, the Da Vinci Code, for the story itself. That is what Crichton does (or rather did) so well: write gripping and highly entertaining stories that are not stupid. They may not be the most distinguished and sophisticated art, but page-turners that I don't feel bad about afterwards.

Anyone who, like myself, is not into quantum physics will not really notice the boundary between fact and fiction when that drivel about quantum effects and time travel comes up. This makes the willing suspension of disbelief easy, and it doesn't get into the way of the story. Well, at least for me it works, as the story is good in distracting the reader from the technical things. Have you ever faced a really dangerous and angry knight in a joust who will probably try to kill you as soon as he sees a chance? I thought you haven't.

Lamenting, as always, the lack of baggage space, the beloved wife and I finally resolved to try ebooks. As a budget-priced option Amazon's new Kindle (the new one without keyboard or touch screen) was chosen, after I had established that it is indeed reasonably possible to read ebooks on it that come from independent sources. It doesn't work with epub, but (for instance) Calibre can convert epub to mobi format. It can also display PDF and plain text documents.

Alas, the selection of ebooks available from Amazon has its shortcomings. Newish books are very similar in price to the print editions, but lack their flexibility -- you cannot easily lend them to others, give them away, resell them, etc. While some of this is possible, as I understand, it is not easy. So this is not an option for the mystery novels the beloved wife consumes at an alarming rate.

But then there are a lot of classics with expired copyright available for free (as in beer, dunno if they are DRMed or not) directly from Amazon, meaning they can be copied to the device with a single click. Lots of others are available from Project Gutenberg in Kindle format, even in German. (BTW, that "Gutenberg-DE" thing is a commercial enterprise that makes it as difficult as possible to download and carry away whole books -- they want you to read the stuff on their site, to generate income by advertising, and by selling stuff on CD-ROM.)

Apart from the free stuff there is also a lot of quite cheap content available from Amazon, only not necessarily what you have been looking for. It is worth a look, though.

The Kindle, with 1.4 GB free for books, can hold a lot, given that most books are just a few 100 KB. This is of course excellent for a vacation, and exactly what we had been looking for.

It took me a while to get used to reading stuff on the Kindle and not be distracted by the technical device itself, but after that it is quite pleasant. The hardware is a good compromise between being small and being good to hold in one or two hands. The page turn buttons are very well placed on the sides. The screen is excellent to read when brightly lit and bearable when not so well. I found it useful to adjust the font size accordingly; I use one size smaller than the default with my reading glasses in good light and one size bigger in not-so-good light or with my normal glasses on.

Now, the books:

Neal Stephenson: In the Beginning was the Command Line

This is the first ebook I actually started reading -- I had already begun reading it on the Android phone that I carried for (the previous) work, so it naturally landed on the Kindle as well. I read a bit further into it during this vacation. But the more I read of it, the more I failed to miss his point and wondered "so what is he getting at?" Apart from that, I was more and more annoyed by him not really having understood many of the technical things he talks about.

Sara Paretsky: Hardball

Years ago I have read lots of her V.I. Warshawski novels, and this is another one. Actually the beloved wife wanted to read this one, so it was in German. The translation has a few bugs, but is bearable. It isn't extraordinary, compared to the other ones, even fulfilled more V.I. clichés than I'd have cared for (she gets beaten up multiple times, deeply annoys her late father's police colleagues and other authorities only to be reconciled with the good ones in the end, digs up a major conspiracy, gets close to getting killed, and succeeds only with the help of her close friends), but I still liked it.

Steven Pinker: How the Mind Works

The print edition, even hardcover, has been sitting on my shelf for years, as it is too big and too heavy to read on the move. Now, as an ebook, even relatively cheap for just a bit over € 10, it was easy to carry with me. I began it during this vacation, but didn't get through it. I have read nearly half of it now, and it is still too big. More to the point, I find it too fluffy. So many anecdotes, so much trying to keep it an easy read, all this makes it a bit tiring for me, as the actual information rate is too low and I have to dig through so much fluff. Of course there is is a lot of interesting information in it, and I will read it to the end. But it seems that Pinker's efforts to make the information more accessible have made it less accessible for me.

Hans Christian Nickelsen: Meine lieben Enkel! ("My dear Grandchildren!")

In his last years, my grandfather wrote up some memories, addressed to his grandchildren. This is probably not interesting at all for anyone not related to him or at least very interested in what it meant to be a teacher in the 1930s to 1960s, especially at a german school in the (formerly german) parts of southern Denmark. It is for me, though, and while my father finds it painful to read for all his father's difficult conceptions of his family, my own personal distance is big enough to find it bearable in this respect. I formatted this as a PDF document exactly for the Kindle's page size, so I could choose a typeface that suits me better than the builtin ones. Unfortunately the dots of the german umlauts (äöü) don't correctly line up with the letters, though.

The final words: Reading ebooks on the Kindle (or any other ebook reader) can be fine, but it has its limitations. Apart from the mentioned consequences of DRM I cannot, for instance, thumb through the book to see how far that particularly boring passage goes, I have to page through it one by one. Most new ebooks are too expensive given the limitations. I find the possibility of putting stuff on the device by USB cable necessary, but also appreciate the ability to load them via email.

The house we had near Gdansk had a small selection of books, most in English. Realizing after a few days that my own choice of books that I had brought with me was not really fit for the occasion, I took one of those. I didn't get through it during that week, but I could buy it used later over Amazon for € 0.01 plus € 3.00 for shipping. (Why do they do that? There cannot be much profit in that, can it?)

In early 2002 Janie, in her later 30s, decides to separate from her husband, for whom she has lost the respect, although not the love. When she wakes up the next day, she realizes she is back at her parents' home and 16 years old, but still with the knowledge and consciousness of her previous existence. After the initial confusion she settles into her new old role of 1981 and prepares for making everything better. That includes making some money from the knowledge she has (by buying shares of IBM and Tesco), but also saving Lady Di and Prince Charles from their ill-fated marriage, making more mature decisions regarding the people in her life, and above all preparing for the day when she meets her to-be husband, with the aim to make their relationship better as well as him a better man.

As the reader has suspected long before, this does not work out. Instead, her life takes a quite different course. All the while she wonders what the exact purpose was of sending her into the past -- there must be one, as there are some mysterious people involved in her fate, but instead of putting her in the know, they just tell her to wait for later instructions all the time.

I found the book a bit disappointing at the end. A big surprise was not totally unexpected as such at that point, but it did much less to wrap up the whole story than I had hoped for. Anyway, that was some nice light reading, solidly entertaining and quite funny in parts, although not much more.

This one I have been wanting to read for ages. When I finally bought it this summer, I was not so intrigued, though. But that came when code for a Lisp interpreter began to pour out of my brain in fall (see http://hic-sunt-lambdas.de/), and the vacation in November was perfect for reading this book.

It takes a bit of getting into it, because the terminology is different from the later established one in some parts. But then there is all that which is so familiar to anyone who loves Lisp. And much more about implementation details than I had hoped for. Not that any of those is really applicable to my own implementation, though, but it has gives me some ideas that I might like to follow.

"We children of the war children -- the generation in the shadow of the second world war" is the translation of the title. Ustorf shows how people whose parents were children in the war or post-war period can still be strongly affected by war traumas passed on by their parents.

I read this because because I was curious if this is an issue for me, too. After all my parents were born 1937 and 1938, and my mother and her family even refugees from East Prussia. But after reading this book I can say that I am apparently unaffected by these transgenerational traumas.

There is this aspect of having no real Heimat, a region where I grew up and am familiar with everything, because my parents moved around a lot when I was a child. But while this is typical for war and refugee traumas to some degree, both my parents' families tended to move around even before the war, so this is unlikely to be a particular consequence of the war in my case.

Jones was the head of scientific intelligence at the british intelligence service during the second world war, and this book is an account of his efforts in that time: anticipating the german efforts in scientific warfare based on intelligence findings, and developing countermeasures. The primary technical areas were bomber guiding systems, radar, and the V1 and V2 weapons.

Much of this is very interesting. His detailed accounts of the internal politics of british intelligence are a bit tiring at times, but maybe this only reflects how he himself has felt about these issues.

One of Paretsky's V. I. Warshawski detective novels. I read most or even all of them some 10 years ago and liked them a lot. Now for some reason I got the idea of reading one again, and still liked it.