As soon as I saw the new iPod nano, I thought: This would be a great watch.

I don't normally wear a watch; my phone keeps my calendar and tells me when I have to be somewhere. Watches are semi-functional jewelry now. I have a nice (digital, but artistic) watch from Diesel, but a new one is neat.

A cloth/velcro Timex watch strap cost $8 at a drug store. The strap has a loop up top which the nano's clip fits through, so it doesn't chafe against my arm. But I'd prefer leather, and I'll be looking around for a nicer one soon.

It looks pretty awesome:

Design (A+)

Wow. It's just a black screen on perfect, rounded metal frame, the three hard buttons you want (power, volume +/-), and the dock port and headphone jack. Note: No visible logos on surface. It speaks for itself, you don't need a ton of stickers and logos shitting up the surface.

I do want to get a cover for the dock port, electronics exposed to Seattle weather do poorly.

Clock (A-)

The ostensible purpose of a watch. Looks great, very smooth almost mechanical face. It only has analog, which is a little disappointing; the stopwatch digits have a very cool mirrored surface look, which would make a great digital watch. It has a stopwatch and timer, though you have to have headphones in to hear it go off. No alarm, but again, my calendar is on my phone.

Also, the display only stays on for 60 seconds, then goes off until you hit power again. There is no setting for this, which I would prefer.

iPod (B)

The iPod player is a little awkward, but on a watch it's reachable. It's definitely designed to be used while clipped to something, not held in your hand. The cover art looks nice at this size and DPI. Again, no speaker.

There is a serious bug in the current software: Smart playlists do NOT sync the list. The music syncs, but the playlist shows 0 songs, and all your music is only playable by shuffle. Until Apple fixes it, probably the only workaround is to drag the contents of a smart playlist to a dumb playlist, and sync THAT to iPod. Shit.

Apple ships their cheap earbuds without inline controls. If you buy the nice in-ear headphones with controls, you can just click those to pause/forward/back music.

FM Radio (B)

Apparently radio is still broadcasting! Works fine, and I had a few good local stations. Requires wired headphones as an antenna, and there's no speaker.

Pedometer/Nike+ (A/C)

The pedometer seems to work great, gives you immediate access to your exercise history. What doesn't work great is the Nike+ integration. You visit the Nike site, create an account, log in. Then sync your nano. Sometimes it connects and saves the entries, sometimes it doesn't. I had to quit iTunes & retry several times. Nike's site is a flash abomination, which makes me even less interested. I need to find a better desktop or iPhone app to sync it with.

Apple's made the best watch yet. There's room for improvement, but it's gorgeous, and I'm going to keep wearing it.

Python's string formatting tools annoy me. And what annoys me, eventually gets fixed, even if it's with an evil hack.

In Perl (and originally in Bourne Shell), you can write:

print "It is ${foo}!";

In Python up to 2.4, you would write:

print "It is %s!" % (foo,)

print "It is %(foo)s!" % {"foo":foo}

In Python 2.5 and later, there's a new formatter:

print "It is {foo}!".format(foo=foo)

In Python 3.0 and later, it's now:

print("It is {foo}!".format(foo=foo))

This is a mess. You can't even find the message in all that line noise, and the name is repeated 2 extra times. Printing several values is unmaintainable.

Hack #1: Use vars() to hide the redundant name assignment.

print("It is {foo}!".format(**vars()))
# **aDict expands the dict as keyword args

print("It is %(foo)s!" % vars())

Still a lot of noise, but foo is just pulled from local scope. Maybe I can hide that vars() assignment?

Hack #2:

print(fmt("It is {foo}!"))

Sweet! How did I do that? It is magic! But it's black, vile, corrupt magic, and it's about 120x slower than the ugly one (though still unnoticeably fast on modern hardware).

""">>>import inspect
>>>x=2
>>>fmt("{0} {x} {y}", 1, y=3)
'1 2 3'
"""
def fmt(s, *args, **kwargs):
	c_frame = inspect.getouterframes(inspect.currentframe(), 1)[1][0]
	c_args, c_varargs, c_varkw, c_locals = inspect.getargvalues(c_frame)
	d = dict(c_locals)
	if kwargs: d.update(kwargs)
	return s.format(*args, **d)

In 2007, I wrote Amazon's Kindling, or, "Burn Before Reading" and Throw More Kindling on the Fire, where I ripped on the Kindle's terrible aesthetics, reading experience, and lock-in to Amazon's store.

But at the time, it had no real competition (apart from Sony's apathetic marketing of the E-Reader), and it did reasonably well. The aesthetics and user interface improved marginally, though it's still pretty awful to use, still unreadable in dim light, still gray-on-gray, still tied to Amazon only.

Now that the iPad is available, the Kindle and all other e-ink readers (Sony's E-Reader, Barnes & Noble's "Nook", Border's "Kobo") are doomed. The iPad has a bright high-contrast display, color, better fonts, and has iTunes, movies, and the App Store if you get bored of reading.

The iPad's iBooks app does page flips instantly (well, half a second animation; wish I could turn that off) instead of several seconds like Kindle, has a tappable dictionary, notes, and highlighting (instead of trying to use the Kindle paddle control), illustrations, and a gorgeous user interface. It's not "as good as a paper book", it's better in every way (people with a fetish for rotting wood pulp feel & smell can turn one into a case).

If you have a bunch of Kindle ebooks, they can be read in the iPad Kindle app, making the Kindle device irrelevant.

The first release of iBooks was a little underwhelming, given the very limited store, but Apple is backfilling it fast. I have 8 purchased books on it now, and a bunch of "free samples" I use as bookmarks to buy when I'm done with these. I've bought two new release hardcovers (not in iBooks store) since iPad was released, but no more paperbacks, and maybe I never will again.

In other countries, the iBooks store is probably going to lag a while; every publisher has different publishing deals in every country, so Apple can't just turn on books everywhere, they have to wait for the publisher to work out the rights. It may take a few months or years to untangle the legal mess of long centuries of print publishing.

On the con side, an iPad costs $500 base, Kindle costs $189; iPad weighs 0.68 kg, like a hardcover, Kindle weighs 0.28kg, like a thick paperback. But you can only use the Kindle for one thing, and it does it poorly. You have space in a satchel or purse for one book-sized object. If you KNOW you're going to read in a brightly-lit area and do nothing else, the Kindle alone is sufficient; if you have any possibility of doing anything else, you'll take the iPad and leave the Kindle gathering dust.

[Update: @girasquid points out that the iPad brightness may be too high for some to read on, but the brightness and sepiatone controls in iBooks give you a lot of control over your comfort level.]

[Update 17:13: See ZDNet's iPad vs. Kindle vs. Sony E-Reader reading comparison, where iPad did poorly outdoors, but was better for indoors and night. I've had better outdoors experiences with it, but I live in Seattle where "the Sun don't shine".]

Scott Sigler's Ancestor was originally released as a podcast and PDF several years ago, but finally in print (just as print is dying, go figure).

It's a fast-paced science fiction horror story in the vein of Michael Crichton, Robin Cook, etc., with a medical company genetically engineering a common ancestor of all mammals to use as a universal organ transplant source. Of course, everything goes wrong, horrible monsters are produced, many cows die, and then many people die on a tiny island in Canada.

So. It's a fun read, and I really like some of the characters, old man Clayton and crazy geneticist Jian in particular.

However, there's a bunch of problems that kept knocking out my suspension of disbelief.

The über-badass Canadian Special Forces psycho killer, Magnus. Canada's Airborne Regiment had the "Somalia Affair", but that's far short of what Magnus seems to have done in his career. Disbelief isn't a strong enough term for this.

The plan. Making a universal organ donor is a great idea. But a common mammalian ancestor won't do that, because it'll still be recognized as foreign material and be rejected. I can halfway give them a pass, since they're actively optimizing for non-reactive, but I don't see how it's possible. And there's something Jian does, which… isn't clear how much that affects the outcome. Still, I'm dubious.

The "ancestors". These things are basically Thrinaxodon, the earliest, most primitive mammals, and were small burrowing carnivores, somewhat equivalent to a badger. Even if you massively increase their size, they're just not getting that much tougher. There's no way they were great hunters, certainly not the ravening pack shown. There is no creature that can gestate and be born that ready to fight, and in any case, Thrinaxodon was egg-laying (yes, they can still be mammals; the Platypus still lays eggs). It has spines from Dimetrodon, a distant more-reptilian cousin of Thrinaxodon; where would Jian get the genes for that? Augh. And it's smart, maybe as smart as an angry Chimpanzee, which is about 240 million years anachronistic for tiny-brained Thrinaxodon. Almost nothing about this thing makes sense.

The heroes are obviously immortal. There's no way that certain people are ever going to die, and you can see it right off. I don't mind a happy ending where it makes sense, but the last few chapters go from "scrappy hero escapes tough situation" to "plot immunity". By the time the last character is saved, I was almost resigned, like I was on a crashing train, nothing to do but watch it crash. Yeah, of course [SPOILER] will win that fight and be okay in the icy water and everyone is safe. Ha ha ha.

I loved Sigler's Infected and Contagious, and I'm looking forward to Pandemic. But I may be passing on Descendent, the sequel to Ancestor, or at least waiting for cheap paperback or ebook.

I'm not at WWDC this year. By the time they announced it late, and with an increased price, I had to stop and think hard about that money… and then it was sold out 8 days later, making my lack of decision easier. I'll get the videos later, I guess.

But for now, I'm watching the video from the Apple Keynote podcast.

The tone of this piece is pretty angry. There's some serious problems in Apple Land, videogames, and tech "journalism", and all three were showcased heavily in the keynote. I'm not anti-Apple, and I'm not quitting iOS dev to eat nuts and berries and code on Android and hope someone puts a few pennies in my begging cup. Let's not be stupid here. But there are problems, and I'm angry at them. Apple have changed their minds in response to anger before, so maybe it'll happen again. OH, GREAT SPIRITS, HEAR MY ANGRY BLOGGING. Should I sacrifice a goat, too? I dunno where to get a goat around here.

Steve Jobs Lies About Rejections.

First, I have no problem with HTML5 as an "unrestricted" SDK. I've written "HTML5" apps (more precisely, "HTML/CSS/JavaScript/AJAX + web server", which just ROLLS off the tongue). I like working with those, if they're green-field new apps which only run on Safari. Legacy JavaScript and cross-browser web dev is horrible. HTML5 performance is not as good as native, but it's as good as or better than Flash now. So really, can't complain too much.

I also have no problem with a "curated" store for software that works as advertised. However. 95% approval in the App Store? That's 750 rejections per week. Many are NOT for crashing, private APIs, or misrepresentation. Those may be the "top 3", I'm going to assume Steve isn't lying blatantly here, just by omission, but he is lying. The big additional reasons for rejection are:

Interpreters, the infamous 3.3.1 clause

Any interpreter other than JavaScript in WebKit gets rejected. A few games have got away with locked-down internal interpreters (I won't name names, for fear of getting them caught), but many others have been rejected. Briefs was recently rejected for doing exactly what Keynote or any book or magazine app does: Presenting text and media with click regions to launch new slides.

There are limited justifications for this. Interpreters can be done wrong and expose a security hole. Allowing interpreters allows Flash or C# users to publish on the App Store, and nobody wants that. Explicitly banning specific bad tools would work better than napalming an entire jungle to get two bad guys.

But by and large, this is a giant imposition on one of the most basic and favorite tools programmers have: Domain-Specific Languages. We love making little languages that express domain concepts concisely. This is important stuff, and it does hurt developers. I wish Apple would pull their head out of their ass on this, but I expect another year or two of rectal-cranial inversion.

Things That Look Like Other Things

You apparently can't make a desktop-like app with floating widgets, like MyFrame; nor a plain analog clock (though my ridiculous UnixTime clock is okay); nor a phone, as Google Voice was kept in limbo ("not denied", just never approved) forever. Making anything that looks like something Apple is doing or wants to do will get you rejected. Maybe they're trying to avoid "Watsoning" any future apps, but if so they're doing it in the most ham-fisted way possible. This I can attribute more to incompetence than malice, but it still makes Apple look petty and stupid.

Porn

Apparently children can be breastfed until they're 2, but then cannot EVER see boobies again until they're 18, or they will turn into ravening sexual predators. Or at least their parents will feel very uncomfortable, and we wouldn't want that, would we?

The iPhone and App Store already have age restrictions in place. They classify unrestricted Internet access as 17+. In Settings, General, Restrictions, you can set age limits on music, movies, TV shows, and apps, and disable many "adult" apps like YouTube. If you have kids, and you don't use some kind of parental controls, you are almost certainly a bad parent and should have your kids taken away.

But restricting what adults buy and look at is worse, it's bad citizenship. Wanting to censor other adults is a vile, evil mental sickness. It is not benevolent, it is not helpful. The Nazis liked censorship, book-burning, puritanical behavior, and Godliness because those encouraged obedience to the state and "approved" procreation to make more soldiers. Why a bunch of supposed free-lovin' hippies from California are emulating Nazi morality is baffling.

Perhaps in third-world countries like China and Alabama, setting parental controls on by default is appropriate. In civilization, it is not.

You Are Cattle. You Are Being Farmed.

The Farmville app demo looks like shit. They have an art budget, right? It sure doesn't look like it. It scrolls like crap; I like turn & grid games, but this is not even doing that right. People pay money for this? People pay money to keep playing this?

Mark Pincus of Zynga is an unapologetic drug pusher, he even acts like some hopped-up midwestern meth-head pimp with a junkie wife, nothing more. I wasn't anti-Zynga before, but seeing this prick praising junkies for waking at 2am or neglecting their jobs to "farm"… Fuck that guy.

If you're playing Farmville, you are being farmed by this shithead. He is using you, and taking your money for NOTHING. It's not even a good game. Animal Crossing is one of the greatest games ever made, or Harvest Moon for the slightly more hardcore, and are the same idea done pleasantly, fairly to the players, with beautiful art and music and cool surprises, and you only pay once.

Air Guitar Is Not An Instrument.

The Activision pretend-you're-playing-music demo is fine, except it's still a game where you pretend you're playing music instead of actually playing music. How about you make a game where you play music on a real instrument, and the game judges your quality and trains you? Wouldn't that be awesome? You could actually learn something WHILE having fun! Yeah, I know, it's Activision, where fun has gone to die for over 20 years, but still. I remember and miss Pitfall.

The Tragedy Of The Common WiFi User.

So, the wifi problem in the demo. 570 people were broadcasting wifi access points. WWDC has wifi, last year they had 3 networks: One secured for Apple, one public for MacBooks, one public for iPhones. This worked quite well. There are 11 standard "channels" in wifi. If you have more than about 11 broadcasting in a close area, nobody can connect to any of them reliably, and all of them slow down to uselessness.

This is an example of the Tragedy of the Commons. Each blogger/"journalist" wanted their own access, JUST IN CASE Apple shut the public one down or it overloaded. Each blogger operating their own access point is polluting the public space just a bit. If only a few of them did it, there would be no problem. When all of them do, the entire area is poisoned, and Apple can't give the demo which is the purpose of their keynote.

Now obviously, nobody can expect journalists to be rational creatures; even the ones I like are at best remoras, and the worst are parasitic ticks. Still, the entire day after that keynote, all the journalists were bragging about how they hid their "MyFis" under their fat asses, or just blatantly ignored Steve's request. The arrogance and ignorance on display is stunning. They didn't comprehend at all that they were at fault, or that they should do anything except more of what they were doing.

I expect that next year Apple will have security search the aisles and evict violators. You can't reason with a "journalist" who thinks his story justifies any offense, you can only drag him into a back alley and beat him into a coma.

Bing Goes The Internet.

This is so stupid. Because of Google's little lover's tiff with Apple, Apple's now making out with ugly, hairy Bing, and putting it "as an option" in the search fields of Safari on desktop and iOS.

The problem is, Bing search results are naïve, they have no "similar" suggestions. They spend a lot of effort adding wizards for travel, etc., but it's not a viable alternative to Google.

Read Us "Winnie The Pooh" Again, Papa Steve!

Great Eeyore, does Steve read any other book than Winnie the Pooh?

iBooks on iPhone is nice. And it has left justified text now, instead of the harder-to-read fully-justified previously! Syncing notes, place, bookmarks between devices, all very nice stuff copied from Kindle. Not that I like Kindle, I'll happily switch to iBooks when the store has more content, but these are not new features, just Apple playing catch-up with their prettier but less functional app.

PDFs included in iBooks is a small but much-appreciated improvement. Yes, I already have GoodReader. But they belong in iBooks.

Dick Tracy, Or Tracy's Dick.

Videophones, AKA "FaceTime". Okay, first, Star Trek communicators were voice only. Kirk would flip it open, turn the little knob to tune in, and bark out "MORE POWER OR WE'RE ALL DEAD, MISTER SCOTT!" Both Star Trek and Jetsons showed video chat on large fixed screens, and we already have that, iChat AV. It works fine, it was a nice demo on Mac OS X some years ago, including those silly background replacements.

Turns out most people don't want videophones, because you can't lie as easily, you have to put on pants, etc. Text is best, voice is second, video is a distant third.

Worse, it doesn't work over 3G networking. It only works over wifi. Which you would probably have at home, where your desktop computer with iChat is. If you're out, where you might want to facial, er, "FaceTime" someone, that would likely be on 3G, and you can't use it.

The people who will get some benefit from this are parents calling kids, if the spoiled brats have an iPhone 4G. And sexting now becomes live porn chat with your S.O., or with a sexy phone line operator. THAT is pretty cool.

Of course, I did think of a good use for it. If you've been bad, I mean really bad, so bad you earn a spot in one of my diatribes, you may receive a FaceTime call. It will be a pale, hairy blob, with a pit of eternal darkness in the middle. This will be my most profound way of calling you an asshole.

TOTALLY not related to that, does anyone have Steve's phone number? ;)

I got my DODOcase for iPad today, a mere 5 weeks after ordering (for something hand-crafted... not bad!).

The traditional unboxing photos after the break:

• Embossed back cover
• Side, empty
• Interior, empty
• Interior, filled
• Side, filled

It really looks and feels like a big Moleskine. With the cover folded back and rubber-banded in place, the spine is just big enough to grip in portrait, and provides a shallow but usable slope for typing in landscape. I might, maybe, prefer if the cover could fold flat, but it's pretty good as it is.

The foam corner grips are serious business. It's difficult — not impossible, but requires force and strong fingers — to remove the iPad from the grips. It's unlikely to shake out. I'll see how that lasts in the months and years to come, but for now I'm very pleased with the solution. All of the ports are accessible. It doesn't fit in the dock, but the cables go in and I can reach the switches.

If I have one complaint, it's that it doesn't have an interior pocket like a real Moleskine. I may glue one into the front cover interior.

All in all, an excellent iPad case, that really solves my problems of safety and landscape support.

So, I'm not inherently the most productive monkey on the planet. I am, in fact, near-amnesiac, easily OOH SHINY distracted, and have no willpower against fun (say, making that "shiny" joke which was funny once a hundred years ago).

Out of desperation is born solutions. I track what I've done and what I'm doing in two complementary ways:

• Work Journal.

  Whether it's a cheap spiral-bound or a fancy Moleskine or little Field Notes, every day I start a new line with the date, write down what I plan to do.

  As I go, I write down what I'm actually doing, and what I need to do, or any reminders to myself. I lead unfinished items with "-", resolved with "+" or a checkmark, questions with "?".

  My journals are kind of boring, just "fix the framistan" or "remember to CFRelease(bob)", but they're better than my memory.

  Every few weeks (or months) I trawl through my old journal entries and type up any unresolved items which are still relevant.

• Marker Comments.

  Inline in my code, I write // FIXME: xxx for known bugs, or // TODO: xxx for things I plan to do.

  This has two advantages. First, Xcode recognizes these comments and lists them in the function dropdown in the editor.

  Second, they're easy to search for with grep or Xcode's project search. When I'm looking for something to do next, I'll find one of these to work on. In Java, I had an Ant task that marked those comment lines as warnings, so I got notified on every build.

Old games never die, they are periodically reanimated to stagger forth, frighten townsfolk, throw small girls into wells, and finally exact bloody revenge on their creators for abandoning them to a cruel world.

Myst Online: Uru Live (MOUL, or Uru) is just such an old, cranky Frankenstein's monster of a game. It was first designed and beta tested by Cyan Worlds in 2003. In 2004, publisher Ubisoft killed the online game and released a single-player version. In 2006, Cyan released a sort of samizdat version called "Until Uru", where fans ran unofficial shards of the online game. In 2007, GameTap hosted Uru, and let it run on minimal budget for another year, then cancelled it in 2008. Here in 2010, Cyan is hosting it themselves, for free, and collecting donations to keep the servers running. Their plan is to eventually release the system and building tools as open source, but run an official server.

I first played Uru in the GameTap era, since that was the first Mac client.

On the positive side, it had beautiful graphics, sound, and world design, a few great puzzle Ages, and a ton of Myst story. The multiplayer design wasn't bad, though the population was very small and not very communicative. The private island home, Relto, can be customized with a bunch of new features (see my screenshots below).

On the disappointing side, it had very few puzzle Ages, a small and reclusive player population, and a general air of neglect and abandonment. Lag in any public area with 20+ players was (and is) a serious problem. The non-game UI and cursors are hideous, sub-Linux, jarring badly with the lovely, detailed game world.

During the beta of 2003 and again in the GameTap era of 2007, Cyan ran a few in-character "events" to drive the storyline. Unfortunately, they did this in the worst way imaginable: Staff logged in as their avatars, found random online players, and played out the events with them and whoever happened to be on. Everyone else heard about it second-hand or read chat logs.

In the new release, I'm somewhat more optimistic. There are 3 "new" (built in the time at GameTap) puzzle Ages, a multiplayer toy Age, and several sight-seeing ages online, which pretty much doubles the amount of gameplay, to the point where it would be a commercially-acceptable game.

The revived player base is currently fairly active, and higher quality than what I saw during the GameTap era. It's all hard-core Myst fans, because nobody else really knows it exists. There is no sign there will be a repeat of the cheesy events, though more out of lack of time/finances than because they've seen reason.

The tools for the fan-created Ages aren't usable yet, but there's a high likelihood they will be this year. THAT will make all the difference. Uru right now is still a short game with nothing to do except chat after you're "done". With fan-created Ages, not only will you have an unlimited-ish amount of content, you can make your own if you're competent with 3D modelling and Python programming.

You can find it at Myst Online, though Mac users have to jump through a few hoops to get the old Cider wrapper updated to run it.

If you're in-cavern, send KI-mail to mdhughes / KI 05422418. I'm still checking in at least once a week, just to see if anyone needs a hand, to chase my Great Zero marker times down to something tolerable, or on specific event dates. As fan material makes its way in, I'll be in more often.

There's a ton of information, hints if you really get stuck, occasional news and special events, and support for technical problems at various forums:

• Guild of Greeters
  • Beginner's Guide
  • Glossary
• Myst Online forums
• Cavern Today podcast
• Cavern Communications Network podcast

A few of my screenshots (all 1280x800, open in a new window)

• Relto-start
• Relto-island2
• My-Bookshelf
• Phils-Bookshelf
• Cleft
• Dni-Aegura-Stairs
• Kadish-Arch
• Kadish-Pyramid
• Ahnonay-Statue
• Spy-Room
• Unreachable

"The way we look at it is, we don't want to get into something unless we can invent or control the core technology in it, because we'll get slammed if we don't. And the more we look at it, the more and more consumer devices, the core technology in them is going to be software.

If you really look at the iPod, we looked at that at the very beginning, we said the ultimate competitive barrier is going to be software in this thing. I mean, we're pretty clever at hardware, but eventually people will copy us and do other things.

But the competitive barrier will be software. And the more consumer products as we see them evolve, the more and more they look like software in a box. And a lot of traditional consumer electronics companies haven't grokked software."

—Steve Jobs, D2, 2004

So there was Steve, laying out the strategy for the next decade. An iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad is just "software in a box". There's almost nothing to them but software, one home button, which I expect to go away next.

Why is Apple so obsessive about excluding Flash, or using the Safari "WebKit" engine they control instead of Firefox's "Gecko" engine, or not incorporating every random media codec (WMA, OGG, etc.) in iTunes, or controlling what native apps are carried on the App Store? "We'll get slammed if we don't." Later he gets in an argument with Walt about playing WMA in iTunes, and states they spend their energy on things they control.

And I laughed out loud at this:

Walt Mossberg: "So you're feeling quite good about the music thing right now, in terms of your market share for music players and the stores, but aren't you headed for real trouble? You can't possibly believe that Microsoft will have no impact on this when they bring their store out. Maybe you want to say that, I assume they'll have some impact."

Steve Jobs: "Oh, I think they'll have a lot of impact. If you're Roxio or MusicMatch, you're gonna get destroyed. They're gonna eat their young. So that's one thing they're gonna do, it's gonna be painful to watch."

Andrew Sullivan asks: "If I may intrude, and ask a questoin I do not mean to be loaded, just curious: I wonder what Kevin thinks happens to him when he dies? And how does he feel about that - not just emotionally but existentially?"

A reasonable atheist simply doesn't fear death. We weren't unhappy before birth. We get a life; however good or bad it is, at least it's life. We won't be unhappy after death.

It's only made-up stories of immortality and eternal torment that make people fear death.

I'll try to stay alive as long as I can, but there's no reason to fear it ending someday, because I certainly won't care afterwards.

You prepare [for death] for it by facing up to the truth, which is that life is what we have and so we had better live our life to the full while we have it, because there is nothing after it. We are very lucky accidents or at least each one of us is -- if we hadn't been here, someone else would have been. I take all this to reinforce my view that I am fantastically lucky to be here and so are you, and we ought to use our brief time in the sunlight to maximum effect by trying to understand things and get as full a vision of the world and life as our brains allow us to, which is pretty full.
—Richard Dawkins, The Vision Thing, 15 August 1994

Immigration in the U.S. is a giant problem for only one group of people: Racists.

The U.S. is built on illegal immigration. Pre-Columbian North America was inhabited by millions of people. They were at a stone age technology level, but it was still their country.

The Spanish, French, and English arrived and waged war, sometimes made treaties, sometimes kept those treaties and often didn't, and got "lucky" that their diseases (e.g., smallpox) were deadlier than the Native Americans' diseases (e.g., syphilis). This was not legitimate immigration.

Later, nativists fought to prevent the Irish (especially during the Potato Famine), Jews, Italians, and Chinese from immigrating or becoming legal citizens once here. Fortunately, the nativists lost, the U.S. got a large work force, and they're now "just Americans".

For the last century, Mexico and the U.S. have had an intertwined economy, as we hire their workers for our cheapest labor, and those workers send much of their money home, propping up Mexico's economy. There are exploitative elements to this system, but it's voluntary and benefits both sides of the border. If we made immigration easier, the exploitative elements might ease up and we might make more income tax off of the immigrants. Making immigration harder hurts everyone.

Yet, determined to always be on the wrong side of history, the Republicans and the state of Arizona are opposing immigration. Arizona has seriously passed a law straight out of the law books of Nazi Germany, that anyone (who isn't white enough) has to present papers showing that they're citizens, or be deported. If this was the plot in a dystopian novel, I would find it implausible. And yet here we are, with crazy people running Arizona.

So. I have a better plan for U.S. citizenship & immigration:

1. Anyone who wants to be an American, and can pass the NIS U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Naturalization Test, gets citizenship. We should do some minimal background checking to prevent career criminals and known terrorists from becoming citizens, but not to the point where innocents are barred.

   
   Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
   With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
   Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
   A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
   Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
   Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
   Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
   The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
   "Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
   With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
   Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
   The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
   Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
   I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
   —"The New Colossus" by Emma Lazarus

2. Natives must also pass the same test at 18. If they fail, they are illegal aliens. They must then find another country, go to prison, volunteer for military service to earn citizenship (à la the French Foreign Legion or the Roman army's barbarian recruits), or take a long walk off a short pier.

This would allow Mexican laborers to get citizenship, pay income tax, and participate legally in our society. This would allow us to "brain drain" the best, brightest, and most adventurous people from around the world to make America better. And it would fulfil the best principles of our country, and reject fear-mongering, hate, and isolationism.

I've done a bit of writing on the iPad in Pages ($9.99 on the App Store) now.

Propping the iPad up on my lap like a paper notebook is entirely possible, and typing on it in landscape mode is quite pleasant. I can't type as fast as with a hardware keyboard (with caffeine and typing from copy, I do 90 wpm), but I'm getting 40-50 wpm with very few errors unless my fingers get off by one, in which case I'm s;; rttptd gpt s gre eptfd all errors for a few words. It only requires the lightest tap on the screen, it's not like the old unpleasant membrane keyboards.

Pages is almost functional for writing, but there are some blocking issues.

You can only do formatting from portrait mode. This is my most serious complaint. You can type in landscape, but then have to rotate the device to do any formatting. DRIVES. ME. INSANE. If it just had a style selector, I'd be happy with this view. [Update: Pages 1.1 added the formatting ruler to landscape. Pages is now useful all the time.]

Creating a numbered list is easy: Type 1. whatever [return]:

1. whatever
2.  

Creating a bulleted list is not obvious or easy: Type [.?123][hold down -, choose optional char •] whatever [return]

• whatever
•  

On Pages/Mac, and almost every word processor I've ever used, you can just use * whatever to start a bulleted list. I do this many many times whenever I write, I think in lists, so this is deeply frustrating.

On Pages/Mac, when you select a header style, type a line, and hit return, it switches to Body style, because you would almost never type multiple headers in a row. On Pages/iPad, styles stay locked in until you manually switch, which is a total pain in the ass. Basically I've been reduced to leaving text notes h1. Some Header, then I go back and style it up later.

So I'm thinking perhaps tomorrow I'll hit the Apple Store, get an Apple wireless keyboard, maybe a dock, so I can prop the iPad up in portrait mode and still type. Yes, I could instead use my MacBook Air just like I'm doing now. But for non-programming writing, Pages/iPad is close to usable, and so much more portable, and the battery lasts for days of serious use, so maybe I don't always need the laptop & power supply, if I'm just going to go out and sit in a park or café and write.

Apple should get some professional writers to work with Pages/iPad for a while, and address their needs. This is so close to being a laptop killer…

The Import/Export Business

You can get documents from Pages/Mac to Pages/iPad in four ways:

1. Pages Share menu: Share via iWork.com, click Share (apparently you MUST share all three formats in order to get a working document, even though this results in my 128KB Pages doc becoming 26MB on iWork.com). In iPad Safari, go to iwork.com, pick your document, and "Open in Pages".
2. Pages Share menu: Send via Mail as PDF, Pages, or Word. When you get the mail, click on the attachment, it opens in Pages. Then remember to delete that mail because it's wasting mailbox space with an attachment.
3. Pages Share menu: Send to iWeb as PDF or Pages, which adds the document as an attachment to a blog post on an iWeb site. Hit Publish in iWeb. Browse to your site on iPad, and click on the link. It opens in Pages.
4. Manually: Open iTunes, connect your iPad, click the iPad device, click the Apps tab, click the Pages icon down in the lower area, find the document in Finder (cmd-click the title bar and choose the folder under the document name), then drag the document from Finder into the "Documents" area in iTunes, Sync your device again, then finally launch Pages on iPad, go to My Documents, hit the folder icon at the top, and pick the document from the Import window. Whoever made this process should get a red rubber stamp of "THIS SUCKS!" on their forehead.

I've been using iWork.com. iWork.com is still in beta, and I'm desperately hoping Apple just makes it part of MobileMe, but this works quite well. It isn't a "sync" or revision control, it's just copying the document from Mac to iWork, and iWork to iPad, and reverse. If you make changes on the iPad, and different changes on the Mac, it won't resolve them for you. If you're working solo, this is fine. In a team environment, it's probably not fine.

The mail solution works well enough, but it's an extra step in the way, and litters your mailbox. I don't like litter.

If iWeb was just a little bit smarter and had the ability to edit templates, I might well use it for my own web sites, and for casual users it's a fantastic way to make a simple web site and blog. But there appears to be no (easy) way to give a Pages document a new page that isn't a blog post. I could use Cyberduck to upload the document to my public folder on MobileMe, then paste a link from that into iWeb… Which defeats the whole point of iWeb, not dealing with all that crap.

The other problem for import/export is that Pages/iPad has a limited subset of formatting, and does not understand a lot of advanced word processing features. So if you dump a formatted document onto iPad, work on it, and send it back to Mac, it will have stripped out most of your formatting. Use Pages/iPad for word processing, NOT for layout, not for change tracking, not for gigantic shared business documents.

[Update: 2010-04-21: Mea culpa, I confused the import process for iWork.com and manual earlier.]

There is a significant missing feature in Mobile Safari on iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad: View Source.

Drag the javascript link below to your browser address bar, and sync your bookmarks to your iThings. When you "visit" the bookmark, the visible page will be replaced with a source view! Click on the link at the top or hit back to revisit the site.

View Source

The iPad is lovely, but it's still a giant sheet of glass with a slick metal back. I don't feel safe without some protection.

The Apple iPad case is appalling. It's fuzzy & tacky on all surfaces, so it's almost impossible to slide the iPad in and out, and it collects dust & lint on every surface, including the closed flap, so your screen gets dirty. I can barely stand to touch it after it's been out in the world for a few hours, it's so grimy. The design is okay, but the surface is vile.

What I want is: A case that stays on the iPad, has a flap to cover the screen, but can be folded back around so I have something to grip. Two options look good:

Incase Convertible Book Jacket

Almost the same design as the Apple case, but with better materials. The Apple Store did not have this in stock, but after handling some other Incase gear, I'm going to pass. It's not bad, but seemed kind of cheap.

M-Edge Executive Jacket for Apple iPad

This looks higher-quality, and it's easier to get the iPad in and out. So I think I'm waiting for this to be released.

In lieu of either, I bought a Belkin Grip Sleeve for iPad, and I'll just be careful when holding the iPad outside the case. It's a bit of a girly man-purse, but fits nicely in my satchel's outer pocket.

The iPad's "killer feature" is, in many ways, just as an electronic book. I hear you say, "$500 or more to replace a simple $25 hardcover? Crazy!", but when you consider that it can (in theory) hold EVERY book you EVER bought, an entire library in your hands, it makes a lot more sense. It's not one book, it's all books. And with that realization, it goes from "expensive toy" to "you'll take my iPad from my cold dead hands which'll be wrapped around your throat cuz you were trying to take my books".

Apple's iBooks app is, as seen in the iBooks Guided Tour, very pretty, and the store has a decent interface for searching and browsing through sections of books, though they all seem to be recent best-sellers.

If you can find what you want there, or if the free copy of Winnie the Pooh is all you need (me, I would've gone with The Wind in the Willows or Alice in Wonderland), iBooks is gorgeous, and an excellent reading interface. It would be nice to have more font options, and ragged right edges instead of justified text, but it's fine for long stretches of reading.

Naturally, I wanted one of my favorite books, the most appropriate book possible for an electronic book reader, that wholly remarkable book by Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

However, the iBooks Store is very, very new, and very, very empty, like the deep, endless emptiness of space. It does not have the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, or indeed any Douglas Adams. In fact, it has somewhere between "Bugger" and "All" in the way of books. It has books in much the same way as the Monty Python Cheese Shop has cheese.

Sigh.

So I went over to Amazon.com (you can't shop from within the app, it opens a web browser to buy the book), got a Kindle book, and read it on the Kindle app for iPad. The good part about the Kindle app is that it has the Kindle store on Amazon, and a ton of books, and they all sync between Kindle readers (ugh), the iPhone app (too tiny), the Mac desktop app (too ugly, because they used fucking C++/Qt to develop it), and now the iPad app. The iPad Kindle app is spartan. It has a nice title screen, but beyond that it does its level best to make the iPad look as dull and drab and boring and featureless as the Kindle reader. For variation in reading options, there is one serif font with 5 sizes, and three choices of color, and that's all.

It is also very sloppy about positioning. Spatial memory and keeping page breaks consistent is important when reading, but Kindle has no concept of this. It's really more of a web browser with page breaks than a "book reader", except that a web browser has better reading amenities. Footnotes are an especially bad case:

1.	2.
3.

Sigh.

At some point, either iBooks will have a decent selection to go with the great reading experience, or the Kindle app's reading experience will be improved to the point where I don't care, or the Vogon constructor fleet will arrive and destroy the Earth. No bets on which comes first.

Like many Mac users, I have .Mac MobileMe. I think this is a good value: For $100 (or $70 if you buy new hardware) every year, you get:

• Email, with any number of aliases.
• Chat/audio chat/video chat/screen sharing on AIM, again with any number of aliases.
• Syncing/online backup of your mail, contacts, calendars, preferences, and sometimes other apps (especially Yojimbo).
• Photo and video galleries
• Easy (if very limited) web publishing with iWeb.
• "Find my iPhone/iPad", an anti-theft/"where the hell did I put my phone" service.
• 20GB of storage at iDisk.

I use all of these features (even iWeb for quickie web sites), and they're pretty fantastic. A Mac without MobileMe is only half a Mac.

But iDisk is problematic. Using iDisk from Finder is a terrible experience: It's very slow, often craps out and fails to transfer big files, or can lock up the Finder and force you to log out or reboot! For years I'd blamed this on it being WebDAV, which is a read/write protocol based on HTTP.

Well, it turns out that's not at all a problem with iDisk or WebDAV. Finder just has crappy support for WebDAV. If you use a file transfer program like Cyberduck or Transmit (both are good, but I prefer Cyberduck), you can connect to your iDisk, just drag & drop files, and it's as stable as any FTP server.

The setup process I used:

1. Open System Preferences, MobileMe, iDisk, and make sure iDisk Sync is OFF (hit Stop if it's not). Now your iDisk will live only on Apple's servers. You won't be able to read the files if you're not online, but that's usually what you want.
2. Run Cyberduck.
3. Hit the Open Connection toolbar icon, change "FTP" to "MobileMe iDisk (WebDAV)", enter your me.com name and password, Connect.
4. Hit Action, New Bookmark, and close the info panel to bookmark your iDisk connection. Then drag that bookmark to your desktop.
5. Hit Disconnect and quit Cyberduck.

Now you can click on that rubber duckie icon on your desktop, and it'll launch Cyberduck and connect to iDisk.

You now have a nice file browser for your iDisk. If you drop files into a folder on it, they transfer up, it tells you how fast it's going and what % remains, and it never locks up.

The one drawback is that there's no trivial way to see how much space you have left on your iDisk. You can open System Preferences, MobileMe, iDisk, and it'll show you there, or go to MobileMe, Preferences. Leave some free space and check it once in a while, and you'll be fine.

Any time I complain about iDisk, a bunch of nerds reply "use Dropbox". This is not at all useful advice. It's like if I said "My car's out of gas", they'd reply "Buy a boat!"

• I already have 20GB on iDisk, and I have a bunch of other good reasons to use MobileMe, so it's "free".
• DropBox only gives you 2GB free (for the math-impaired, that's only 10%), which I can blow through in a single file. It's not in any sense useful to me. For an extortionate $120/year, you get 50GB, which is $2.40/GB.
• Additional iDisk storage is also expensive ($50/20GB = $2.50/GB), but additional storage on an FTP server elsewhere is dirt cheap, pennies per GB. If I was adding more storage, I wouldn't use DropBox OR iDisk.

As noted by Daring Fireball: New iPhone Developer Agreement Bans the Use of Adobe’s Flash-to-iPhone Compiler.

This pretty much is aimed directly at Adobe's upcoming Flash CS5, which claims to produce "iPhone apps". The trouble is, those Flash iPhone apps are gigantic bloated slow things, because they pack an entire Flash runtime into every app. They make the iPhone look bad, and if they're allowed, there'll be a flood of crappy bloatware from Flashmonkeys.

There is a way out for Adobe. If they make Flash CS5 produce WebKit-optimized HTML5, using Canvas and video tags, then Flashmonkeys can publish their "apps" to the web, and they'll run just fine on the iPhone and iPad. They can't be sold in the App Store, but they can be distributed the same way as modern Flash apps, and monetized with ads or placement on sites like Kongregate.

Of course, this is like making Adobe put a bullet in the head of their own Flash plugin, because who needs Flash if you have HTML5, but that makes everyone except Adobe happy, too.

I'll be discussing the Apple iPad sometime next week, after I've had time to fully absorb it. But first, a bit of history of tablet computers, because as George Santayana said: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

Before there were real tablets, there were theoretical demos, like Alan Kay's 1968 "Dynabook", then-Apple CEO John Sculley's 1987 "Knowledge Navigator", and Douglas Adams' 1990 "Hyperland".

In 1989, Jeff Hawkins created the GRidPad, the first true tablet computer, running MS-DOS. It sold some to vertical markets and military, but the public ignored it. It was heavy, expensive, and inferior to even the limited laptop computers of the time.

GRidPad 1910

All through the '80s and early '90s, there were cheap "pocket PCs", Personal Digital Assistants (PDA), and electronic organizers, like the 1983 Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100, the 1989 Atari Portfolio, and the 1991 Psion Series 3. These had keyboards and LCD non-touch screens, and were aimed at replacing a paper Rolodex™ and DayRunner™, not a desktop computer, but were programmable and quite useful.

TRS-80 Model 100

Atari Portfolio

Psion Series 3

In 1993, Apple released the MessagePad 100, the original Newton OS device, and the first device that could be considered a "modern" tablet; give it a color screen and it would have been competitive up until the iPad's release. It was also seriously flawed, with terrible handwriting recognition, poor syncing with desktops, and high prices.

Apple MessagePad 100

In 1996, Palm (created by Jeff Hawkins) released the Palm Pilot, the first cheap, portable, usable PDA:

Palm Pilot 1000

The Newton OS survived until 1998, when its poor sales got it shut down at Apple. The Palm Pilot line continued successfully until 2008, with the last Palm OS Treo.

Almost all of the previous devices were pen-based or keyboard-based, and very linear developments from either DOS or Macintosh user interface. Palm OS was blatantly derived from the original Macintosh interface. Newton tried to break out of that paradigm and adapt to the pen, but those were among the worst-implemented parts of its interface.

Other PDAs were absorbed into cell phones, leading to maliciously bad user interfaces. Every try adding an address book entry on a typical cell phone? It's like playing an untranslated Japanese console RPG: "If I push every button, I'll find out what it does".

Making a good interface in the constraints of a mobile device is so hard that almost every company that has ever tried it has failed; only Apple and Palm have ever made reasonably good mobile interfaces, despite billions of dollars spent on the problem by dozens of companies.

The iPhone and iPod touch were released in 2007, and while the underlying iPhone OS is basically Mac OS X stripped down, with a much simpler GUI layer, it's also very different, radically redesigned for use with touch controls.

In 2001, Bill Gates, always 5 years late to the party, started pushing what he called a "Tablet PC" running "Windows XP Tablet PC Edition", with no success at all. Microsoft's latest fumbled entry into this field was Steve Ballmer holding up a mocked-up HP "slate" running Windows 7 at CES 2010, just weeks before the iPad was announced, and concept videos of "Courier", which will never exist as shown.

Microsoft's efforts have always failed because they attempt to shove a huge, bloated, memory-hogging, mouse-oriented desktop computer OS onto a portable, resource-limited, touch-screen device. It's as if they're trying to fail.

The JooJoo (aka "Crunchpad") finally came out in March 2010, months late and $500 instead of the original $200, and no surprise, it has nice hardware but appallingly bad and uncreative software. "Put a web browser on it!" was all the user interface design they had. They didn't plan to fail, but they failed to plan.

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) has scrapped their fantasy two-screen XO-2, and is now promising a tablet-style XO-3 that looks like a wafer of glass. The reality will of course be more Fisher-Price™ like the XO-1. The Linux-based "Sugar" interface does have some creative ideas, and it gives the user easy access to Python. For smart kids and geeky adults, it's a clever interface… But it's still unfinished, not usable for real work, and given the current state of OLPC, never will be. It's certainly not suitable in its current state for a touch-screen tablet; it relies heavily on the keyboard and trackpad.

Various companies are threatening to make Android-based tablets, which will be as appalling to use as the Android-based phones, with yet another splintered Android marketplace. The more Android devices there are, the less successful any of them will be. Like Microsoft, it's as if they're trying to fail.

Given the utter incompetence everyone else shows, Apple's iPad release is like a beautiful, precision-engineered, carefully user-centered-designed tank rolling over armies of ugly cavalry carrying spears and bows. It's not just a defeat for them, it's a massacre.

Tomorrow is the most important day of the year (so far? I'm calling it for the year): iPad Eve. With twitching hands, I'm waiting for the Apple Store to open tomorrow so I can get my iPad (32GB).

There is a bit of last-minute controversy over the iPad, from the usual suspects, bitching again that it's not "open".

The terms "open" and "closed" get thrown around a lot without definition.

A fully open device lets you get to all of the system software, change and recompile everything, install anything you want. Sounds great, right? Except… Who really does that? A handful of Linux nerds, who get more thrill from "pwning" their devices than from actually using them, like rednecks with cars on blocks in front of their trailers, who enjoy working on the cars more than driving them. The devices they create and use, like the OpenMoko, are ugly and non-functional; "open" has led not to futuristic technology, but to amateurs building inadequate devices with the same awful C++/Qt environment as every other failed Linux handset. The only apps are amateur junk, because professional developers want to get paid. But if what you want is hobbyist tinkering, not a sleek, functional device, open is the way to go.

A fully closed device, like most electronics, the original iPhone 1.0, most cell phones, or game platforms like the Sony PSP & PS3, Nintendo DS & Wii, Microsoft Xbox360, etc. have no user-serviceable parts, no loadable software except maybe webapps and software licensed (at great difficulty and expense) with the publisher. These devices DO have a place in the world, they're extremely robust, simple, and consistent. If you want a pure consumer-level device, fully closed is the way to go. It's not for people who have to tinker with every device they own, but it's great for anyone else. These devices have been and will continue to be very successful, and very pleasing to a large audience.

The current iPhone and iPad are in between the two. They're "closed" in that you can't easily or legally replace the OS, and can't just shove any random app on them. But they're "open" in that development is available to anyone with a few bucks laying around. As I discussed in Developing in the Future, those who want to develop software will acquire the tools and opportunity. With those, you can write software for your own device, or even for friends' devices (if they have a dev license or as an ad-hoc build). If you want to sell an app to the public, you have to do it through Apple's App Store, with Apple's approval. But given that 150,000 apps (most of very limited quality or utility) have been put out, it doesn't seem to be a giant barrier to entry, and certainly the sales & distribution side of the App Store is a nice deal (a mere 30% cut, instead of the 70-90% cut traditional publishers took).

Cory's perspective is not any of these three somewhat reasonable views, though. He calls publisher gatekeeping "evil", and likens it to bullies, the Mafia, or civil rights violations, because he only sees the world in terms of his own selfish desires, he has no empathy or perspective for the user or for anyone else's business decisions. Hypocritically, he's extremely closed in his own publishing enterprise: BoingBoing won't publish any random person's post or comments, and he actively censors comments he disagrees with; not just offensive or spam, but simply different opinions. Anyone who was published by BoingBoing who has a falling out with him or Xeni, like Violet Blue (NSFW), becomes an unperson.

This doesn't make Cory unique, he's just one of the most outspoken of a sociopathic fringe among Linux nerds (it's an uncommon behavior from Linux users, but almost nonexistent elsewhere)… Not every developer has a loudspeaker like BoingBoing, but we're not voiceless. You have to measure the merit of a person's opinion on a subject by their experience in it, and Cory's a fantasy novelist, not a programmer, he's telling you not to ship software for this device because of his ideology, when he's never shipped software and doesn't live by his own ideology.

Greg Egan is one of my favorite authors. You can learn a lot about how I view existence by reading "Axiomatic", "Reasons To Be Cheerful", "Learning To Be Me", and Permutation City.

Oceanic is a collection of Egan's short stories published in the UK. All of the stories are also in the US collections Dark Integers and Other Stories and Crystal Nights and Other Stories; Oceanic does not include "Luminous" (also found in the UK collection with the same name) or "TAP" (online at Infinity Plus).

You should read "Luminous" before "Dark Integers"; few of Egan's short stories depend on continuity, but these do. So in that sense, Oceanic is incomplete. On the other hand, Oceanic is a single volume with a great set of stories, and even paying import prices, less than the price of the two US volumes. I had already read quite a few of the stories, but as a set, as a concentrated dose of Egan, it's still a great ride.

Several of the stories are in the same Amalgam setting as Incandescence, where multiple planets have produced biological life, which coexist peacefully, and travel and sometimes live as digital encodings, though they mostly prefer biology.

"Lost Continent" ★/5

A brief and apparently incomplete story about refugees from a war-torn middle eastern country being taken to "safety" across parallel universes… Where they are treated like refugees often are. Part of this reminds me of H. Beam Piper's paratime story "Time Crime", but mostly, it seems to be Egan's commentary on Australian and US policies on asylum seekers. If it was finished, maybe it'd be interesting, but there's no punch. It's an appallingly weak first story, and should have been cut from the book.

"Dark Integers" ★★/5

A gripping, world-spanning adventure of mathematicians waging war with an alternative reality by proving axioms with computers, if by "gripping" you mean nerds sitting at computers abusing Internet Protocol packets. I liked it well enough as a weird tale, though "Luminous" was better, but the premise is silly. Mathematicians are axiomatically insane, and this reads like the crackpottiest of crackpot math stories.

"Crystal Nights" ★★★½/5

A computer company with no product uses enormous computing resources for a couple of years trying to produce AI, through extremely ethically dubious means. I would mock the business plan, but I've been employed by less potentially profitable companies. The irresponsibly lax safety measures are hard to believe, except I've seen dumber moves in startups. There are two quantum leaps in ability that I found hard to swallow. Still, as a classical tragedy, with hubris leading inevitably to catastrophe, quite good.

"Steve Fever" ★★★★/5

A goofy little story about hubris, lab rats, and man's unending quest for Steve. I buy NONE of the premise, yet enjoyed it completely.

"Induction" ★★★/5

A much too brief story about more-or-less-immortals almost doing something meaningful, but mostly letting the robots do the work. In itself, the story isn't much. As kind of a summary of many of Egan's latest stories, it could be the back-cover blurb.

"Singleton" 0/5

Hated it. Nearly hurled the book across the room a couple times. A guy with a delusional understanding of how quantum mechanics affect him personally, decides to do something about it. The problem is, he's completely wrong about the importance of Always Doing One Thing. If his invention worked as described, he'd be completely crippled and unable to act, would act according to unseen forces like a crazy person, or possibly die instantly.

The one sympathetic character, the AI robot daughter, is used for a Law & Order: SVU episode, but doesn't mind, and her rescue is as horrific and traumatic as her ordeal. I feel like cutting these pages out, using them for toilet paper, and mailing them to Egan as "editorial comment".

"Oracle" 0/5

A sequel of sorts to "Singleton", about a Qusp-enabled time/timeline-traveling sexy robot girl rescuing war hero mathematician Alan Turing from torture by the British government for the crime of being gay. I love Alan Turing as much as any computer nerd does, but holy shit this is a terrible story. It's amateur Alan Turing fanfic complete with an all-powerful Mary Sue. C.S. Lewis's religious mania is briefly amusing, but the debate is the worst didactic crap I've ever seen Egan produce.

"Border Guards" ★★★★★/5

A great story about life, love, and gameplay in computational environments, and people feeling guilt for entirely too long. One of Egan's best, both for the world, the mathematics of the Border Guards game, and the characters (WOW, Egan wrote actual characters and not just mouthpieces for cool ideas!)

See Greg Egan's site for the full text of the story, a Java applet to play Quantum Soccer, and math notes.

"Riding the Crocodile" ★★★★/5

A long story about a couple in the Amalgam culture taking one last adventure before voluntary death, trying to make contact with a culture(?) that doesn't want to make contact. Interesting characters (though I find their death motive implausible), good problem-solving, somewhat weak on the reveal.

"Glory" ★★★★/5

Glory deals with a question I've long had about Egan's settings. His settings (especially the Amalgam, which this is in) are almost monolithically peaceful, cooperative, nurturing. There's no fighting over scarce resources, territory, or creative work, there's no possible way to do more than trivially annoy someone. So where did the violent, aggressive, resource-hungry, expansionist, hegemonizing swarm cultures go? What happens to a culture that's too passive and inward-looking? It doesn't answer that entirely, but at least it recognizes the existence of that conflict.

"Hot Rock" ★★★★★/5

There's a dark, lonely, starless world hurtling through the galaxy. But it's not cold and icy, there's warmth and life. A pair of explorers from the Amalgam then go on a nice picaresque adventure and provoke a war of sorts. I love the planet Tallulah, and the multiple levels of biology and technology in it. I'm not so convinced by the mechanics of the unobtanium, but it's a fine macguffin. I want a whole novel of this world.

"Oceanic" ★★★★½/5

A novella about a retrograde, primitive colony on a water planet, and the origins of religion. The natives are almost human, but there's one part of their biology that makes me sing a King Missile song. Good story, great scientific premise (I much prefer Egan's biology/nature-of-mind stories), and a couple of good characters, but also many shadow-thin puppet characters who appear, spout a few lines to teach the protagonist a lesson, and exeunt stage left. Still, Egan won a Hugo for "Oceanic" for good reason: It's close enough to "literature" to satisfy the feel-good people, hard science enough to satisfy the nerds, bluntly atheist enough to satisfy blunt atheists, but remote enough from Earth to let fence-sitting agnostics and apologists feel it doesn't apply to THEM.