Stats for nerds
4recommend
8mentions
8people
2011–2023years
50% recommend38% neutral13% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Words of warning though - if you watch Legend Of The Galactic Heroes (or read the novels), read Webers Honorverse books as well some of the space battle material on Orions arm 99% of warship depictions in SF will look to you unrealistically small-scale and mundane in comparison.
Like who goes in to battle with less than 20 thousand warships (LotGH), closes to less than 100 000 km before firing (Honorverse) or starts a campaign without god-AI driven relativistic autowar swarms of death (Orions Arm)? ;)
- If you want a space opera with more realistic setups/politics/internal logic, Legend of the Galactic Heroes is top tier stuff
- Some of my favorites this year:
Fiction:
- Jude The Obscure, Thomas Hardy. The way Hardy 'smuggles' Jude's viewpoint into the narrative is so ridiculously well crafted, a pleasure to read.
- Legend Of The Galactic Heroes - a big anime from the 80s which was based on Japanese soft SF novels, which are now finally being translated. Worth a read if you're into space operas and large scale politics, I'm happy that the age of ebooks allows for such 'niche' interests to get translated.
Non-fiction:
- Secondhand Time: The Last Of The Soviets, Svetlana Alexievitch. It's her 'usual' style, a selection of interviews with a 'chorus' of shorter interviews, this time about the fall of the Soviet Union. Lots of interesting stuff from people whose world was replaced with another world overnight.
- The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648-1815, Tim Blanning. This is actually an entry in the long row of Penguin History of Europe, but I haven't read the others. It examines certain aspects of change in Europe (starting with how transport networks moved from mud roads to proper streets and culminating in how the nation state was invented)
- Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe, Norman Davies. As the title says, a collection of essays on small kingdoms and countries which have only existed for a short time, some for which no current country claims 'ancestry'. It's always important to remind yourself what a random patchwork current European borders are.
- Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe. This is a collection of notes on young Eckermann's conversations with the aging Goethe. Goethe is famous for always challenging himself, always trying to create, make and be involved until his last day, it's absolutely inspirational. Before this book I didn't understand why he's such an icon for Germans (and I read a few biographies), but I get it now, he lived the 'man is his own marble' saying.
Computer stuff:
- Introduction to Machine Learning with Python, Mueller and Guido. This is essentially a more detailed version of the scikit-learn documentation with more elaborate exercises (even though some of it overlaps), highly readable. The scikit-learn documentation itself is among the best python package documentation out there and is something you can read 'cover to cover'.
- Write Great Code - I've only started to read this one, it's very much about the basics of what a computer does when you're running high level code, so you can adjust your coding style. So far it's very useful.
Stats:
- Discovering Statistics Using R, Field/Miles/Field. A very opinionated, highly amusing (the constant humor may annoy some), huge waltz through statistics and how to use the methods and interpret their output in R.
- If you can stand anime, find an old series called "Legend of the Galactic Heroes". It's long, it's decently hard sci-fi in places, and it's got wonderful reflections on war and politics.
It very much feels like old Pournelle/Heinlen stuff, with a healthy amount of cynicism about the politicians causing the various conflicts.
On the surface, it's just Space America versus Space Prussia, but there's so much more going on.
- > Gone are the traditional awe-inspiring scifi, in are the post-apocalyptical dystopia where teenagers are being oppressed by old people and the teenagers have to overturn the old ruling class.
There have been two Gundam series and two Gundam movies in the past year alone. Legend of the Galactic Heroes, Yamato and Macross have all had movies come out within the past two years. Just because they disappear within the flood of content doesn't mean that they don't exist.
> the post-apocalyptical dystopia where teenagers are being oppressed by old people and the teenagers have to overturn the old ruling class.
That is so hyper-specific that it applies to a tiny handful of shows, at most elements of which are indicative of trends. It probably applies to one show this season. There's 157 other things coming out this season according to MyAnimeList.
- I ran into that issue when trying to read Yoshiki Tanaka's Legend of the Galactic Heroes. The translation for the first two books in the series was ok but not amazing, but for the third book they changed the translator and it became a complete and utter mess. I remember one part where a character says the complete opposite of what they said the previous sentence, and I'm 99% sure it was an issue with the translation and not with the original Japanese.
Still better than the copy of Miyamoto Musashi's The Book of Five Rings that I once found that appeared to have been copy-pasted into Google Translate at least.
