Caveat Emptor

Today I got an alert in email to several deeply discounted books by Dean Koontz. I never read anything by him, but was kind of curious about the guy. With so many #1 spots on this bestseller list or that, he can't be entirely bad, can he, his hyperproduction notwithstanding? (BTW, do be suspicious when a popular author increases their publishing cadence substantially. For example, Tom Clancy's techno-thriller/military/spy novels were quite good while they were still been written by Clancy; when his "workshop" took over, they got something in the range of total garbage to on the low side of mediocre.)

What additionally piqued my curiosity was that the book was advertised as containing "Kindle in Motion" features - I never saw those before. Moreover, the Audible version was also deeply discounted - I never used those, either.

To make a long story short, I succumbed. I still don't know is the novel any good (the first few pages seem a bit pretentious in tone, but it is too early to tell; the book got back to the end of the reading queue to be read by some future incarnation of myself.) Audiobook version, though, is pretty terrible. It sounds as if it was read by a very competent text to speech program, rather than an actor. The whole sentence intonation, speech cadence, stresses, all is based only on punctuation, not on the meaning of what is being read. Every comma brings a pause, each one the same, for example. Perhaps Koontz overuses commas, but the reader should have compensated for that.

So, that's the actual topic of this post: there is a "download sample" feature on Amazon for narrated versions of the books, too. Use it!

And, BTW, that "Kindle in motion" "feature" announced garishly on the novel's product page is totally useless in this book: it consists of slightly distorting cover and animated author's signature. Oh, miracle!

Petites Madeleines

Marcel Proust famously wrote (in Stephen Hudson's translation; sorry, I speak no French):

She sent out for one of those short, plump little cakes called ‘petites madeleines,’ which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim’s shell. And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. 

My recent episode of olfactory-induced autobiographical memory, as psychologists would call that, was, sadly, more unpleasant, albeit perhaps not that intense: I recently bought a bottle of hand sanitizer (store brand of a more or less pan-European chain - others I ran out of were bought in a local pharmacy, and of different brand), something we go through rapidly in these strange times. I used it this morning for the first time, and was immediately and quite strongly struck by flashback of my rather unpleasant two week stay in hospital for a bad case of erysipelas. It turned out I used the same brand then, both in hospital and during my rather prolonged convalescence. 

Strange machines, our brains...

There's an app for that! (Or is there?)

I mentioned previously, so all of my zero readers will know, that I recently caved in and switched from my old trusty Nokia to a smartphone (a midrange Android). To my surprise, I find myself more and more often browsing through links recommended by Google, Medium and others, and find them interesting fare more often than I expected. OK, for most of them I just skim the article, mumble "nothing new" and go on, but sometimes I want to save it for later perusal (that is, actually reading it):

An obvious way is to "share" the URL via e-mail. OK, that kind of works, but is quite cumbersome. But, wait, isn't there an app for everything ? Let's see: of course, dozens of apps for "saving and organizing links". I downloaded several and, of course, found them utterly useless. First, they are all carbon copy of each other - the same to baroque workflow, the same colorful, glitzy, epilepsy-inducing GUI, the same lack of ability to see saved links somewhere else, eg. in the browser on my desktop.

OK, time to Google. An article I found recommends two even more baroque, even flashier, even more colorful in a way three year olds like, but somewhat promising contraptions, only, in order to see the stores stuff on your desktop, you just need a little script in a well known integration tool. What? Ah, I realized finally - the "article" is actually a promo for that same tool. (I won't name it; it is actually quite good, but a tad too expensive for my stomach.)

So, after two hours of dicking around it dawned to me that appropriate tools exist for a decade or so - any old cloud storage. and that's what I use now - none of "clever" special purpose "link storage and organizing" apps, just good old cloud store. After selecting the app as the share target only one additional tap is required, and the link is all over your devices in seconds. This isn't exactly the application these tools were built for, but they are better than those which were.

OK, one more aspect: Kindle. For some unfathomable reason Amazon decided to support sending only files, not web content, to Kindle if you are on Android. (Laptop/desktop browsers do have plugins/extensions that do that quite capably, albeit not perfectly.)

So, I repeated the journey with "Send-to-kindle" apps. Again, most are just obnoxious, requiring the explicit interaction with you e-mail client. Finally, I found one, not free, not perfect, but with exactly the right workflow (that is, no workflow at all except for selecting it as the share target) and with very responsive developers who react to each and every report of imperfectly transmitted web pages: I think they deserve a plug: https://www.fivefilters.org/ 

I though this was going to be a rant, but I cooled down - so, here is just my experience.

Engage!

If you show any interest in popular science, Google or another spy you allow to watch over your shoulder while you are browsing will have recommended an article in some pop-sci news aggregator about the new work by a German gentleman Erik W. Lentz about a novel way to break the lightspeed barrier which, while for the time requires energy equivalent to the mass of dozens of Jupiters, does not ask for humongous amounts of something we don't know how to make, namely negative energy (or mass - same thing). As you might remember, this is not the case with Alcubierre drive. 

In the case you are intrigued but havent received any such recommendation, here is one of many similar articles.

But this is not the (mail) topic of this post. I wanted to read the original paper (I might be a lapsed physicist, but I still can find my way around an equation or two if pressed hard enough.) I folloed the link to it in Classical and Quantum Gravity, a journal published by IOP Publishing, one of the smaller robber barrons scientific publishing houses. Naturally, the page offers the abstract and several ways to buy or rent (!) the full article from a number of middlemen. Copyright? Why, IOP Publishing Ltd, naturally!

But not all is lost. Lentz published the article on good old "pre-print" site arXiv.org from where you can download it for free. Now, that is not the "official version", that is, that's the paper's draft before it has passed peer review, such as it is these days. But I will bet you a six-pack of good Belgian abbey beer that no signifficant differences exist between the two versions.

Pre-print sites like arXiv are more or less the only alternative to "pirate" sites such as Sci-Hub if you don't happen to work for a well-heeled university or other similar employer. Science journals are increasingly fragmented by sub-sub-specialities and subscription fees are astronomical. There are so-called "open access" journals, but they charge authors thousands of dollars per paper. In any case, peer reviewers don't get a beer.

Like real scientists ranting about this problem, I don't know the solution. Perhaps this is the best we will get. This reminds me of a scene in a novel by Ken MacLeod (Cosmonaut Keep, I think) where two of the main characters coming from different societies, over beer or something, start the well known phrase, a proverb almost, "Information wants to be..." which they finish in unison, one with "free!" and the other with "paid!". 😠

You might be interested in this video on the topic by one of my favorite YouTubers, Dr Rohin Francis of Medlife Crisis.

Ephemerality

I have always been a proponent of appropriate, specialized, "do one thing but do it right" tools. Something like Unix/Linux command line tools philosophy. Don't hammer a screw in, don't open a can of soup with a screwdriver or scissors. So, I did my computing (that's my profession now), e-mail and web browsing on a desktop with two large monitors (which were separate from my TV), navigated via a Garmin navigator, took photos with one of several digital cameras (from a tiny pocket one suitable for having in your coat pocket at all times to a far more serious but still very far from professional one), read my eBooks (no, PDFs are not eBooks) on a succession of proper eInk Kindles, listened to my music on largest capacity hard-disk iPods (or which I still use several and have more spares) and, most importantly, made my phone calls using a phone - you know, one of those things with buttons (those of you who shouted "rotary dial" go into the corner and be ashamed of yourself.)

Then, the slide down the slippery slope began. First I got an Android tablet with my fiber to home bundle. Well, it fit in coat pocket, made checking mail in a cafe possible, and the proverbial embarrassment of riches of good navigation applications were either free or cost all together less than Garmin's map update subscription. Hmmm. 

You know where this is going. I am still writing this on my, well, not desktop but laptop, but with external keyboard and two large monitors, read on Kindle and occasionally hunt for a nice scene with a Sony camera, but when people at work practically made me take a mid-range Samsung Galaxy smartphone, I succumbed.

I am still annoyed by the lack of buttons. But, I started browsing through blogs and content recommended by Google or offered in notifications from the sites I frequent in bed, during lunch break, and, of course, while in the loo. Concentration of everything, for lack of a better word, is seducing. But what I very soon realized is that everything is meant for just the most fleeting moment of interest. Everything is like Instagram and Snapchat "story" items that disappear if you blink. Notifications are gone after you follow them, and if you were led down some rabbit hole of links reading an article there is no way to start over. There is no "forward" button to undo "back". "Feeds" in YouTube or Quora refresh themselves with new content before you digested the old. You get my idea. Everything is like the "breaking news" ticker tape down the TV screen.

I found myself using "share" button a lot, sending mails to myself with links to content to be perused later, at leisure. That's just wrong - if I still need my laptop to actually read what I found interesting, what's the point of my "information concentrator"?

So, here is an idea for you budding app developers: make a library, an "information attic" app for us oldtimers to send everything from large essays in Medium or Aeon to pundits blathering in The Economist to news on Space.com and ScienceDaily to YouTube videos, Facebook posts and Quora questions and discussion items on all of them to one place, from which we can retrieve and digest them at leisure. You know, when we are out of the loo and are comfortably reclining in our armchair with a pipe and Lagavulin. De-ephemeralize our content. And make it syncable to "normal" browsers, so that we can use our tablets, laptops, desktops and Linux supercomputers.

BTW, have you noticed that every "social" platform after a while resembles Facebook? Even Quora and LinkedIn? And that discussions on YouTube and Facebook and Quora are far more difficult to follow than on the good old Usenet (and its successor Google Groups) or especially on proper discussion board software? (I admit, I tried neither Reddit nor Discord.)

Ah, well...