I’m in love with Zarenyia. I’m delighted with Cabal’s disconcert at being liked. I love a savage grin that once sent a Hellhound running, yelping for its mother. I loved the clever way the big bad was defeated.
This is a review only of Jonathan L. Howard’s Johannes Cabal story The House of Gears.
(I also read Kat Howard’s Choose Your Own Adventure, which was beautiful and chilling and marvelous.)
(Other authors in this issue are Peter S. Beagle, Carrie Vaughn, John Joseph Adams, N. K. Jemisin, and Genevieve Valentine.)
spoilers
Necromancer vs. Steampunk AI. The description of the mechanical brain is marvelous, clanky, clunky yet eerily Kubrick. There is Howard’s trademark dry humour: Cabal hiding behind an Aspidistra in a Chinese pot waiting for the antagonist to change his mind when an improvised flash bomb wipes out one day’s long-term memory; Samhet’s apotheosis conveyed in a shot of his brain in formaldehyde, pickled in a jar of pickled onions. There is also horror of the proper old sort: the brief mention of of dried blood and bone dust clogging a drill, indicating Samet’s sheer determination to endure the pain of days or weeks of decanting. What Lovecraft needed two pages of piled up adverbs and adjectives to convey, Howard achieves in two sentences.
The choice of the image of Möbius loops for the memory devices. The hideous aesthetics of the poor little mad genius. The dull horror of the pithed, mechanized necromancers. Cabal’s efficient vengeance in the form of reprogramming Samhet for Cabal’s own future use. The only difference between them, then, that Samhet is actively malevolent; Cabal only reactively so.
Howard’s stories alternate between supernatural and steampunk. The steampunk is excellent, but the supernatural is better: Cabal’s personality is deeper, more nuanced, and more interesting in the horror stories; he is slightly more sketchy or perhaps stereotyped or perhaps, dare I say, mechanical, in the steampunk stories.
As promised in the prologue, the book reads like a student’s class notes for an introductory course.
Professor Cohen is an expert in Machine Learning who took an interest in the applicability of his subject to bioinformatics and wrote this short book as a summary of his preliminary reading. It is not accessible to someone lacking a good high-school background in biology and organic chemistry; neither will it adequately refresh the details for one for whom the subjects have lain dormant for long. It will, however, prime the mind beautifully for the rest of the journey which it is presumed one to whom this book appeals intends to undertake.
The first section sketches DNA transcription and replication; the long middle section is a very detailed overview of some modern experimental techniques and the final brief section touches on the applications of computer science to bioinformatics.
I was struck particularly by Prof. Cohen’s metaphor for experimental biology: we are rather like giants smashing up great collections of minute and complicated machines and coarsely examining the aggregate detritus for a rough sense of the composition of the machines. (His metaphor is delightful extended: imagine a pile of personal computers laid out on a shag carpet, crushed by steamrollers, blown by the fan of a jet engine; the lighter parts blow further before the carpet snags them. We are left with bands of material graded from heavier to lighter and might conclude that a computer is composed of two or three sorts of metal and plastic organized in concentric shells.)
An illuminating section on reaction rates discusses molecular motion, the relative viscosities of cellular membrane and plasma (as butter to water), distances covered by diffusion (under random walk motion the time to cover a certain distance is as the square of the velocity, not linear with velocity) and contact probabilities, which may explain why diffusion is adequate in bacteria but that in larger cells reactions often take place along two dimensional membrane surfaces, where constrained motion increases the chances for reaction.
Other highlights: the behaviour of ion channels in nerve cells is nicely explained, protein gated channels a little less so (they are more complicated), discussion of energy transfer is too large a topic; the notes are merely a starting point.
In short; exactly as advertised, an excellent re-orientation and a guide to what to study next.
“Hugo, the missing manual”. The website documentation is thorough, but I couldn’t get the big picture and couldn’t get started. Mr. Hogan guided me through making a portfolio site and now I get it.
The book has you write a theme from scratch, so that you learn the file organization for content and layouts, how partials work, how to display taxonomies and images. It covers more advanced material as well: site search, asset piplines, data from remote sources, rss, and deployment. Clear, detailed instructions that are never plodding.
Highly recommended.
Written for Welsh people who grew up not speaking Welsh who wish to know more about their linguistic heritage, and for interested non-Welsh.
A very clear and graceful history of the language, its literature, and its development into the 21st century.
Last year I undertook to learn Latin1. I’d stumbled on Hans H. Ørberg’s Lingua Latīna per se Illūstrāta and it clicked2. A “natural method” text, it is a novel about Roman family life in the early empire, proceeding from the very simplest sentences (“Rōma in Italiā est”) to fully natural sentences in context. The story is compelling. The book is in Latin only, with marginal illustrations to support explaining the text. (As in early children’s books, the simple pictures are subtle and crucial parts of learning to read.) Each chapter is followed by a grammar section (in Latin, but carefully designed both to teach the grammar and to re-inforce the use of Latin) and exercises. (Answer keys are published separately.)
As I learned, I found myself introspecting on the process by which I was learning. I decided to write a computer program that learned with me. The input was to be the chapter text and the assessment questions. The output was to be answers to the questions and the evaluation metric was comparison with my answers.
I knew the program would need to break sentences into words, learn the idea of endings, declensions and conjugations; I was both expected to infer the notion of word changes, and was shown the morphology explicity in the marginal notes and the grammar section, so I would have to encode was I was taught explicitly in the program, and figure out what and how I was inferring. It would have to have some kind of memory of the facts in the story, and models of emotional and social life to fill in inferences about why the people in the story felt and did the things they felt and did. There would need to be a question answering modules. Yes, yes, this is the recapitulation of fifty years of work in natural language processing, cognitive modelling, artificial intelligence, commonsense reasoning - no, no, I didn’t imagine I was going to do it all, and all myself. But day-dreams are nice.
The first chapter being a remarkably “begat” like beginning of simple statements naming towns, countries and rivers, I decided to start with an ATN, an antique form of state transition diagram. I thought I might try to infer it from the text, but quickly gave up that notion and wrote the ATN by hand, augmenting the augmented transition network as needed for each each new sentence and sentence pattern.
I’d made three previous attempts: decades ago via Frederic M. Wheelock’s venerable Wheelock’s Latin 3rd edition, my pons asinorum being chapter IX on Hic, Ille, Iste; the Quasillum latin study lists run by dedicated volunteer moderators who collates the weekly assignments of participants working through some particular text together, a low-pressure mildly social means of collective self-study; and an early partial version of Duolingo’s Latin tree. ↩︎
If you decide to use the text, I recommend you consider the Dowling Method and Luke Ranieri’s YouTube lessons and other material. ↩︎
Simak characters speak with a gracious mid-20th century mid-western formality of speech. Most of the characters speak similarly. There is little to tell between them, but it is enough. I like his short sentences. Each sentence is a complete, clear thought. I think a fine radio play might be made of this story, which is largely dialogue. What little is not, could be made so, or assigned to a narrator.
Clifford Simak has always struck me as a gentle writer. I’m not quite sure what I mean because people kill and are killed, hurt and are mistreated, and there is danger physical and ideological. But always there seems to be a goodness in everything and things work out. Everyone is likeable, villians can be pitied. There is mystery: enough is explained, but never everything.