Lindsay Ellis' Sequel to *Axiom's End* is even better than the original!

 I recently finished the sequel to Axiom's End:

This one is even better! Aliens exist and there's a political fight over how to handle them and what rights to give them ... I don't want to spoil the story so I'll just say: five stars!

SF recommendations from Libby and YouTube

 I recently read via Libby a number of enjoyable SF novels. I started with one of my favorites, Iain M. Banks.

After I'd read a few of those I started getting recommendations from Libby, finally trying one that received my five-star award:

This is the story of an alternate history 2005-2010, where the big story wasn't the Iraq War, but a Wikileaks type character (the father of the protagonist of the story, Cora) who outs George W. Bush for lying about Aliens Among Us. ... that's enough without getting into spoiler territory. I found this one deeply satisfying!

Lindsay Ellis is also a YouTube personality

....where I found my next recommendation:

This is another alien story with a quite different vibration. A quick synopsis: A huge statue appears in the middle of the night in New York City, and aspiring YouTubers take video of it and are the first to be on this story ... identical statues have appeared in cities all over the world.

Complications ensue ... I still quite enjoyed this one ... four stars.

Hank Green turns out to be the younger brother of John Green,  Hank and John are together the Vlog Brothers, who have an enjoyable YouTube channel with posts of generally about 4 minutes:

Last but not least ... I got this recommendation from one or another of YouTube book recommenders, and it's the darkest of the three here:

The author is Rick Yancey .. I went into this one knowing nothing about it and I will do the same for you. Five stars! Already a motion picture, too ...

Back to reading ...

Book recommendations via YouTube and my newfound ability to read fiction without skimming

 For some years I have been partaking most fiction via Audible, since in the past I have been to much a skimmer to read fiction the normal way.

But recently I've tried some recommendations from my local library and from these YouTube book recommenders (see below) and found that I read without skimming and very much enjoyed some.

I'll have another post on my book recommendations for this period, but now for some of the YouTubers I've been watching lately:

 

 This guy's not exclusively a BookTuber, but this is the first one of his I watched.

I also got a couple of excellent recommendations from my local library on their Libby app.

Last but not least, there's Kindle Unlimited, I had this pegged as "just unsellable cruft" but that's no longer so if it it ever was! It's $10.85 per month.

Two vivid examples:

I just found Bloomberg Businessweek there, for which I have been paying $70 per year for a print-only subscription.

The Murderbot Diaries, Martha Wells' series of fabulous novellas, have the first two now on Kindle Unlimited for free. I recently read both of these and found them "virtual pageturners" even though I'd heard both the stories before on Audible.

Overall it's a feast of reading for any reader!

Michael Lewis' latest: An Unputdownable Pandemic Story

 I recently finished this one:

And it was so good, I read it again almost immediately!

The book is an interwoven bunch of stories of the people who were behind the working parts of the government's pandemic response, including the "social distancing" stuff we've all been doing the past year plus. It turns out the initial reading of the 1918 flu pandemic showed that social distancing didn't work, but these researchers looked at the original sources. They found that it didn't work in Philadelphia because the city leaders waited too long to put it in practice.

I'll spare you the actual picture of Philadelphia in those days, where "bodies were stacked up like cordwood."

In St. Louis, where they got going on it faster, it worked much better.

But they had the same stuff going on then that we have today, with business leaders lobbying to relax social distancing rules.The cities that caved into this experienced big second waves of disease; those that didn't, avoided them.

The star of the book is Dr. Charity Dean, who was a public health physician who was tasked with keeping track of tuberculosis and hepatitis C in Santa Barbara county at the beginning of the book, then has a big role to play later when the pandemic starts.

Just get a copy of the book! You can get one from your local library in about a year ... or if you're in more of a hurry, it's  available wherever books are sold ... and where they haven't yet run out.

This is my favorite work of nonfiction for at least the last 5 years. Thank you, Michael Lewis!

A Driving Safety improvement: My new Bluetooth Speaker

 I like to listen mostly to podcasts from my phone as I drive. I have read the research on phone use and driving, and I have been mostly very careful not to be messing with the phone while the car is moving.

But ... My phone is 3 years old now, and the formerly 3.5mm receptor for audio plugs is now 3.77mm or something, anyway big enough that the receptor can jiggle out when the car hits a bump. This is not only highly aggravating; it also tempts me to fix the situation while the car is moving.

My wife's car has bluetooth, and that solves the problem ... play the audio through bluetooth and you can set it and forget it!

One nuance of bluetooth that I was not expecting: even in Do Not Disturb mode, the phone will still ring via bluetooth. On my phone, I have to set my phone to Total Silence to turn this off, which keeps me from podcasts ... I don't have a good solution to this except for ignoring the phone's rings when driving. [UPDATE: I found this in the Android Settings for Bluetooth

My phone's menu is similar ... just unselect the Phone Calls menu item!]

I finally realized that I could buy a bluetooth speaker for my non-bluetooth-enabled car and have the same benefits there. I found this one:

One thing I hadn't expected: I was listening to a podcast when driving and got this BOOP BOOP sound, first thinking it was on the podcast. But no, it happened repeatedly. Turned out it was the speaker crying "CHARGE MY BATTERY!" ... Otherwise it boops saying THAT"S AS LOUD AS I CAN GO, SORRY.

Overall, for $19 well worth and much safer than trying to get the phone to stay connected in its increasingly widening connector.

A Book Recommendation to Anyone thinking Vaccines are a bad idea

 

Don't mess with crows, if you know what's good for you

Research has shown that crows remember who their friends (and enemies!) are and communicate their impressions to other crows. 

I read this article a few days ago & thought it was fascinating:

https://harpers.org/archive/2021/04/the-crow-whisperer-animal-communicators/

Here's a YouTube recommendation for crows:

Be nice to these birds (or else!) :-)

MIke Luckovich reports from the 2021 CPAC & a CNN report on QAnon

 

And as a bonus, here are his wacky supporters:

Interesting times we live in!

How to Reduce the Possibility of Being Hacked

 First, to completely eliminate the possibility of being hacked:

But that makes your computer a lot less useful.

If you do leave it plugged into the network (or, these days, connected via Wi-Fi, most likely, that gives you the Internet, with all its joys .... and dangers:

Here are the security suggestions I've been following since seeing them on a UW Colloquiam a few years ago:

(0) If you are on a version of Windows no longer supported by Microsoft, you need to stop using it immediately. Specifically, Windows 7 is no longer supported by Microsoft, so any Windows 7 machine connected to the Internet is ... toast.

(1) Use a different password for every website. I know, how to keep track of all these? Look at the next item.

(2) Don't store passwords in your browser for anything sensitive (bank, brokerage, etc.)

Instead: use a password manager on your computer .. Password Safe is a good one for Windows; Password Gorilla for Mac and Linux.

(3) Use a different browser for banks and brokerages and such than  you use for normal browsing. For example, if you use Chrome for most browsing, switch and use Firefox for sensitive browsing.

(4) Use your sensitive browser in "private browsing" or "incognito" mode, which keeps you from exchanging "cookies" and other information with the site. 

So you will absolutely need to type in your username and password every time for these sites. You also may be subjected to some other security methods like 2-factor authentication more often than when using normal cookie-centric mode.

(5) Make sure the password for your router (the box that connects to your ISP) isn't left as the default password. Change it to something complex and keep that password in your Password Safe repository. This is crucial ... if anybody gets control of your network router they can crack the machines behind the router at leisure.

(6) Don't click on a link in email unless you are POSITIVE where it came from ... most banks these days will not send a link to their service in email, but hackers trying to get you to put in your username and password will send an email that looks EXACTLY like your bank ... or Microsoft ... or your brokerage ... trying to get you to put in personal information. This is called Phishing, and it's the thing that got the Democrats' emails exposed to the world in the 2016 election. Don't!

(7) Last but certainly not least: don't delay system updates, many of which contain urgent security upgrades! Windows update can be set to run automatically in the middle of the night: DO THAT!

Eternal vigilance is pretty much the price to keep hackers and phishers at bay ... but there isn't currently any way to avoid this.

Questions? Leave me a comment below!

Still hesitant about the Vaccine; just look!

 I've been reading Covid stuff for months, including all the negative effects it can have on humans:

• Loss of sense of smell and taste
• Pychosis
• "long haul" with multiple hospitalizations
• And of course: death, for 0.1% of the U.S. population and climbing still

Get the vaccine if you still haven't, please!