Book review: Not Even Wrong

Not Even Wrong by Peter Woit (damn! That is one determinedly old-skool website) is about The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law. I read his blog; it is great, even if I disagree with most of his political takes. I've even listened to some of his lectures on Youtube.

This book is about 1/2 about developments leading up to the Standard Model; about 1/6 thoughts-beyond-the-SM; and about 1/3 String-theory-and-what-is-wrong-with-it. If you blip over the really difficult bits it is fairly easy reading, especially if you have already got some background in strong / weak forces, and some kind of understanding of group theory. If you try to read through all the hard passages (I couldn't), it is hard work, because all that stuff is genuinely hard, and because of course he can only gesture towards explanations in a book like this.

As a summary of to-the-SM I think it is good; it is presented through a symmetry / groups approach, and he gives a lot of credit to Hermann Weyl. I realise now that the SM was "finished" in 1973, and accepted by say 1979, and yet I, going to university around 1983, thought that quarks were only conjectural. Knowledge takes a long time to percolate out, or at least it did then.

His basic complaint is that little of physical substance has happened since then, and so in that sense the book - published in 2006 - is largely up to date. The only thing missing I think is the discovery of the Higgs; there's a point where he notes that one (of several) objection against theory X is that we might not find the Higgs, and / or the mechanism might not work; I think it is now know that it does, though I know I don't understand the details. Since 2006 we've had two more decades of lack of progress in string theory, which IMHO vindicates his essential complaint.

He is polite in almost everything, and I believe tries to be fair to the stringy folk.

Book review: Nettle and Bone

Wiki tells me that Nettle & Bone is a 2022 fantasy novel by Ursula Vernon, writing as T. Kingfisher. The novel has been described as a dark fairy tale. It won the 2023 Hugo Award for Best Novel. It is, somewhat self-consciously, indeed a fairy-story-esque novel; "dark" is doubtful; the tone is almost always light and fluffy, and there is a reasonable sprinkling of gentle humour. I don't think it is as good as Uprooted or Spinning Silver but in its own way it is charming. As a negative the prose doesn't quite live up to the story.

I picked this up almost in despair at finding anything in Waterstones that I wanted to read, and found myself enjoying it in its various aspects. For one example, the Fairy Godmother who is weak and near useless only because she refuses to use her real talent for cursing people, and who finally comes into her own at the end when she slips in a "will grow up fatherless" curse on the child.

Some of the Goodreads reviews get a touch carried away about the story being "about" the oppression of women or somesuch; that's an element in the story but really, I think, just an element of the story.

Newsletter 2025

Some people are kind enough to send us newsletters. This is a return, of sorts. I also did this for 2024, if you're interested in history.

The big news for 2024 was Miriam retiring. The big news this year... was me retiring. So far this is going well and I'm not bored.

Miriam spent most of spring on three months away on Retreat, finishing up being Ordained into her buddhist Order.

Of the infants: Daniel remains at Darktrace, with a recent promotion; and Miranda remains at Natwest helping AI make other people redundant, ditto.

We had a summer holiday en famille in Sweden plus little Mi, canoing around Stora Le, a large lake, and indeed the name literally means big lake. There are 428 pictures in the unlikely event of you wanting to see. We cooked over open fires, swam, and slept out in hammocks. And this bookended with weekends in Oslo, and Goteborg and Stockholm.

We've all managed more climbing this year. D is now good enough that, were he female, he would be winning local competitions; the rest of us are at a lower level. Amongst others we made it to Stanage and Froggatt; I made it to Pembroke with the 4C's; and using my new-found free time I wandered around France and Italy and later, the Tirol, finding the snow that my heart desires. I'm still rowing; we went down one over all this year.

On a sadder note, Baby Marbles is no more; she will be remembered each spring when the daffodils come up.

Book review: Pavane

And oldie from Keith Roberts. I liked it enough that I've just ordered The Grain Kings, which I also read oh so many years ago. These are not super high quality stuff, but they have a flavour which modern stuff lacks.

This is an alternate-history "novel" constructed from some loosely-connected short stories: Queen Elizabeth was assasinated, the Armada succeeded, the Catholic Church controls the world; edicts such as Petroleum Veto restrict progress. But in a way it is really about the Isle of Purbeck and Corfe Castle. I think I'd like to visit there in the spring. Let's see if I remember.

Mixed into the stories of traction-engine folk, with their lovingly-described tending, and the signalling, and the lords and ladies, there is the Faery folk as an edge presence, nicely handled, almost as a ghost story when first introduced. Possibly not quite consistently - this is fixup after all - because the Seneschal turns out to be one. Trivia: in the end, the Seneschal turns out to have a primitive radio; but it doesn't do much and it isn't clear how he got it, or who he talks to. This seems to be an oddity. I think this is part of a not-quite-realised plan to have tech start creeping in.

Wiki says "The location and flavour, nostalgic yet tragic in outlook..." which fits fairly well; tragic is too strong though. As everyone say, the coda - "explaining" the Church's cunning plan to restrict science just long enough that humanity has time to mature and not to nuke ourselves to death - jars; I recommend not reading it.

Trivia: given the detail about headers and duplex and routing protocol from the semaphore chains, I'd expected him to have some kind of technical background, but it seems not.

Book review: The Witch Roads

By Kate "Cold Magic" Elliot, though I read that before I started routinely reviewing stuff. Perhaps I'll now read volume three. Aanyway, as to this: I enjoyed it, though it feels somewhat Young Adult-y, although then again perhaps that is why I enjoyed it. And I look forward to volume two.

There are decent characters, decent world-building, and a decet plot. Is that all a bit too decent, perhaps?

The takeover of the Prince by the Haunt - only a minor spoiler - is a good excuse for insinuating <low-status, female, main character> into the plot. And the setup of the Empire is nice, complete with Interlocutor to speak for officials whose status is too high to allow them to speak to peons; shades of White Queen. The shame is that Our Author allows herself to break these rules, so that the <spunky low-status characters> can speak up. It would have been a better, more interesting, book if this wasn't allowed. Or if she would let her characters get cuffed to the ground for their temerity.

Kem being Kema being female is a bit weird. At least in volume one it is apparently pointless, and appears out of character for the society. Although it isn't obvious that the society is quite consistent: females occupy high-status positions, yet the soldiery is rather "rapey", as one Goodreads review put it.

Trivia: the climatic crossing-of-the-gap-by-rope-bridge is a bit strange, as the bunch of wimps that they are require four ropes, two for feet and two handrails, to get across, even in an emergency. This is pretty feeble; one-hand-one-foot would not be out of order; and really, with some kind of support loop just one rope would be enough, so I say they're a bit wet. Trivia two: the theurgist avoids climbing out of the hole-behind-the-waterfall by using up one of her bound air spirits. This is obviously stupid: they are limited and valuable, why waste one merely in order to give the other characters something to talk about?

New heart rate monitor

My Garmin chest-strap heart rate monitor became unreliable, and I realised it was because the casing was falling apart; I "fixed" it but that made it totally dead; so after a few weeks without and realising that the Forerunner 55 light-based HR is unreliable for climbing or erging, I decided to buy a new one. Initially I assumed I needed a Garmin one; but "research" said that any Ant or BT one should do; so I risked a Polar. And lo, it connects and works. Here it is.

And here is the old Garmin one.

They are about the same size and weight; the strap design is similar; they both take coin cell batteries. The Polar one was a "Polar H9 Heart Rate Sensor – ANT Plus/Bluetooth - Waterproof HR Monitor with Soft Chest Strap for Gym, Cycling, Running, Outdoor Sports", £49. A replacement Garmin one would have been £79 I think.

Book review: Maigret a New York

In French, no less. I read it for my mental health. My French comprehension is acceptable, but my vocabulary by no means includes all the words that Simenon uses, so I read this with a combination of blipping, guesswork and Google translate. Wiki isn't interested in it.

This feels to me more like mood-music than klewful: by which I mean it isn't a Poirot, where the Klews are laid out for you if you care to follow them; instead it is more of a novel that happens to be a detective story. Either that or my poor French missed the clues.

Side note: the book is of course in French, as is all the dialogue, except where rarely someone speaks to Maigret in very deliberate English. But it is understood that Maigret is actually speaking English to the New Yorkers. I think this would not in practice have worked: his English, as he notes himself, just isn't good enough.

Laying that aside, what of the story: the famous Commissionaire Maigret, despite being retired, goes to New York at the behest of a Young Man, concerned that his loving father has had a strange change of tone - letters are shown - and perhaps fears for his life. Arriving by ocean liner, this being 1946, the young man disappears and Maigret meets the Father, and Strangely Undocile Secretary. They are uninterested in Maigret and his mission, and curiously uninterested in the disappearance of the young man.

After anough local colour has been applied to make an interesting book, and enough alcohol drunk to render an entire police department senseless, it turns out that the SUS is actually a lovechild of the F but only Recently Reunited after being given away at birth; that the F had - somewhat improbably, but roll with it, - killed the mother, who he loved, jealous of an affair, thirty years ago; and is being blackmailed by the archetypical and always available New York Gangsters including the notorious Sicilians. Anyway, the RR and the NYG explain the change of tone of the letters, since the YM, the second son of the second wife, was always a bit meh, and only loved when he was the only one available; some flim-flammery excuse is offered for his disappearance-at-disembarcation. Maigret decides not to trouble the NYPD about the stale murder, and sails off home. The End.