Stats for nerds
2recommend
3mentions
2people
2013–2017years
67% recommend33% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- The Third Policeman, Flann O'Brien
Ubik, Philip K. Dick
900 Grandmothers, R.A. Lafferty
Moderan, David R. Bunch
Radiance, Carter Scholz
Little, Big, John Crowley
Lizard Music, Daniel Pinkwater
Camp Concentration, Thomas Disch
Peace, Gene Wolfe
- I spent a bit of time over the last 3 months typing up & annotating an obscure but excellent SF/literary novel, _Radiance_ by Carter Scholz ( http://www.gwern.net/docs/2002-radiance ). It's all about the Lawrence Livermore SDI scandals and then the process of them getting NIF, so I read up on the historical background.
I was a little flabbergasted at the overall progress of the laser fusion research program: apparently back in the early '70s, the first LANL people predicted that you could achieve laser fusion with just 1kj of input. Millions were spent, ignition was nowhere near, so they got funding for another, bigger laser, which failed too, so they got funding for more lasers, and those failed too, so they got funding for an even bigger multi-billion dollar laser called NIF, and not only has that failed to reach ignition once as promised - despite going up to 1.7mj (quite a long way from 1kj) - LANL managed to run over budget by at least 400% and took something like a decade longer to finish NIF than promised!
- I know it's easy to joke about a SV twist, but there's actually a novel, _Radiance_ by Carter Scholz ( http://www.gwern.net/docs/2002-radiance ), where da Vinci's letter to Sforz is a big theme, as it encapsulates the troubled relationship of science to the military, which repeats throughout history and especially in Silicon Valley and the national nuclear labs descending from the Manhattan Project. It's bleak, but it's one of my favorite novels.
