Permutation City Blog

Winston Niles Rumfoord is converted into energy and, apparently, can then predict the future and travel between planets. However he now has little control over his own life. He in turn manipulates people and indeed entire planets. Most of the actual action concerns these other people. This book didn't work for me, none of the characters is actually likable.

A book to help you perform you personal environmental audit. It's has a series of questions and scores you out of three for each. In between is a chat from the author about personal incidents relating to each section. It's a good set of ideas although I don't necessarily agree with all of them.

The author builds a roundhouse near a sustainable community group. It's made from the trees and clay from his land, some straw from nearby farms, and a few extras from further away. He lives very close to nature with grapes growing inside his home and, more worryingly, some mushrooms as well. This is obviously the extreme end of low impact living but for him it's a cosy home.

The city is a thousand million years old. The people in the city are never born, never die, and never want to leave. Alvin knows he is different but does not know why. This was a good read and played with some interesting ideas about eons of time.

I suppose this a classic version of Mars of a desert mars with the little remaining water in the canals. Settlers have arrived from Earth and are doing badly. The story features autism and schizophrenia and the alternate world views that they create. The title refers to an attempt take advantage of these illness to look into the future. Didn't enjoy this one, several of the characters got on my nerves.

This is a book I picked up during my teenage years and I've read many times before. I'll read again when I'm next in the mood. I suppose it's a book about someone leaving their old life behind and succeeding in their new life.

This website contains a variety of mathematically inspired images and animations. In particular I watched a series of animations which explain the geometry of four dimensions. This had some of the best visualisations of this that I'd seen.

The last two books in the Hyperion Quartet. It came as an uncomfortably large paperback book and, as a result, linger on my shelves for a long while. However, once I got reading, it was engrosing. The third book switched back and forth between a pair of stories, keeping a great pacing and driving you to read more. The fouth book had more story lines and felt somewhat muddled as a result. There was also a clumsy infodump about artificial life, perhaps made worse because I knew the exact source material it had been cribbed from.

This is a programming methology book. It doesn't say any one programming language is best. Instead it talks about how people have gone about programming UNIX and why that way is good. It has some typical lessons about modularisation and clean interfaces. However this goes further than most operating systems and the command line interface encourages each program to do just a single job. I disliked the beginning of the book when it treated UNIX as the one true way but later on it admitted there were problems. It even made me reconsider my longer term views on emacs.

A collection of religious groups settled a planet and built marvelous cites. The cities were programmed according to the scriptures and soon found that mankind was wanting. All were expelled and a thousand years they later still wander the planet looking on at the empty cities. However the cities stripped of purpose are dying.