I could not agree more... with you. On top of that, good luck onboarding new recruits or people that move departments.... Cute names are just like abbreviations, they are jargon and are an unnecessary hurdle to become effective.
This year I've put myself to the challenge to read at least one book per week which I primarily could complete by reading in the middle of the night while holding our sleeping baby in my arms. It has been an interesting challenge which gave me a lot of fulfilment and has certainly changed my mind on how I view the world. This comment became quite a long read, apologies for that.
Books I highly recommend:
Churchill by Andrew Roberts (p:1105)
A biography about one of the most interesting figures in politics and WWII. Roberts gives a very detailed description of the life of Churchill and manages to keep you interested the entire length of the book.
The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins (p:374)
In The God Delusion Dawkins gives arguments why there is no God, why we do not need a God and why religion is damaging to our society. If you are religious it might not be the book for you unless you are open to hear his arguments and line of reasoning. Dawkins will challenge your worldview.
The Bomb by Fred Kaplan (p:384)
Kaplan describes the policy of different US presidents on the atomic bomb and war in general. And primarily on the inability of US presidents and policy-makers to tune down its military. A chilling read which makes you appreciate a nuclear holocaust did not happen (yet)....
Poor Economics by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo (p:320)
Banerjee and Duflo give a gripping portrait of how poor people live. They offer an insight in the choices and decisions people make surviving on less than 1 USD a day (corrected for purchasing power). It made me completely rethink my own view on poverty and development aid; stressing even more that in order to help one need to have a complete understanding of the individual's situation and the local boundary conditions.
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir (p:476)
This book triggered my science fiction reading. For some reason I never was interested in science fiction. Most likely triggered by reading Foundation by Asimov a few years back which apparently is not a book to my taste. But Andy Weir completely annihilated that wrong perspective on science fiction. Project Hail Mary is interesting, funny and gripping book.
Kindred by Octavia Butler (p:287)
This book.... From page one I was hooked and almost read it in one go. Butler is a wonderful author and Kindred is a must-read. The book is about a woman traveling back in time to end up on a slave plantation. It's a chilling account of slavery.
Other books I read this year, ask me anything about one of these books. I've added a + if I think its worth a recommendation
Biography:
Navalny by Dollbaum, Lallouet and Noble (p:280); The Man from the Future by Ananyo Bhattacharya (p:354) +
Sociology; Politics; Economics; Business:
Only the Paranoid Survive by Andrew S. Grove (p:224); The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli (p:140); Winter is Coming by Garry Kasparov (p:290); Twilight of Democracy by Anne Applebaum (p:224) +; Man's Search for Meaning by Victor E. Frankl (p:164) +; We Are Bellingcat by Eliot Higgins (p:272); De Zeven Vinkjes by Joris Luyendijk (p:200); Waarom vuilnismannen meer verdienen dan bankiers by Rutger Bregman (p:104)
Comedy: The Dilbert Principle by Scott Adams (p:336)
History:
Band of Brothers by Stephen E. Ambrose (p:432); The Nuclear Jihadist by Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins (p:413) +; The Spy and the Traitor by Ben Macintyre (p:384) +; De Heineken Ontvoering by Peter R. de Vries (p:347); Red Famine by Anne Apllebaum (p:384); Night by Elie Wiesel (p:115) +
Science, Technology, Mathematics:
Fermat's Enigma by Simon Singh (p:315) +; A Mathematician's Apology by G.H. Hardy (p:153); The Great Influenza by John M. Barry (p:546); The Rise and Fall of the Dinousaurs by Stephen Brusatte (p:404) ++; The Double Helix by James Watson (p:144)
Sport:
Run or Die by Killian Jornet (p:208); The Secret Race by Tyler Hamilton (p:290) +; The Rise of the Ultra Runners by (p:304); Tom Dumoulin by Patrick Bernhart (p:203)
Fiction:
Anthem by Ayn Rand (p:105); Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (p:704); The Bourne Identity by Robert Ludlum (p:566); Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton (p:466); Live and Let die by Ian Fleming (p:229)
Classics:
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (p:104); The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (p:201); The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzergerald (p:180); Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson (p:139); Animal Farm by George Orwell (p:122) +; Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (p:227) +; The Time Machine by H.G. Wells (p:118)
Science Fiction:
The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin (p:399); All Systems Red by Martha Wells (p:144) +; A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine (p:462) +; A Psalm built for the Wild by Becky Chambers (p:160); Dune by Frank Herbert (p:658); Foundation by Isaac Asimov (p:244); The Martian by Andy Weir (p:384) +;
The Forever War by Joe Haldeman (p:278)
Excellent list - Inspired and intrigued - thanks for sharing the list. I hardly get to do sit down and read, and became heavily reliant on airpod+audible after the baby - do you want to share a little more on your reading habit? Like did you get everything on kindle or paperbooks etc.
Thanks again ...
I love the feeling of an actual book in my hands. So during the daytime I read paperbooks. During the evenings/nights I read on my ereader as this requires less light so i dont wake up my spouse or the baby. I make sure I have both so I can read whatever I like.
Something which I discovered this year is reading multiple books in parallel. And start reading the book which you feel like reading, not the book which you think you should read. That way I always had the mindset to enjoy a particular book.
Are you retired, by chance? With work, I can only read perhaps a max of 50 paperback pages a night. I would love to read more, but am just stuck on the computer with work so much.
Richard Dawkins, enter even more impressive credentials here, also wrote a book "The God Delusion" in which he - as part of the overal story that there is no god - spends some pages completely debunking the claim of Collins.
And this has been going on for ages and we simply are universe X in time.
Alternative hypothesis the OP seems to refer to is the one of Lee Smolin in which a black hole from a previous universe creates a new universe. Smolin wrote a book about his theory, The Life of the Cosmos. I haven't read it nor do I know / understand his theory fully, so interested to learn others viewpoint on this theory.
The simulation theory is not very satisfying. It might answer some of the questions we have but leaves a much bigger one: who/what/how made this simulation?
My fun answer for this one is that there is a future civilization facing collapse / extinction / "great filter" and they're (humans or AI) running infinite life simulations to try to determine what actions will give them the greatest probability of escape / survival. We're living in one of those simulated worlds. But that's very human / AI centric, and doesn't answer any of the same questions higher up. Maybe they know.
Exactly... Now you could argue there is an even more complex civilization running simulations of the simulation-running civilization. But you are creating this ever increasing complexity you cannot get away from. In that aspect it's a bit similar to the Gods hypothesis
Very frustrating and you end up with the same problem.
I have some fun thoughts around this problem which is maybe just as a lonely sculptor might sculpt a human-like figure that they can converse with to feel less alone (and from "one" make "two"), maybe a universal consciousness decided to create something & the illusion of "separatedness" (from one, many) in consciousness to feel less alone. Hence make a universe with lots of manifestations of consciousness to observe and interact with one another, and keep any true knowledge of itself a mystery to preserve the illusion.
But that's not a very scientific perspective, and all the questions above still remain.
Science doesn't apply to anything outside the universe (since we cannot observe it), so the question of who/why is a philosophical one. In fact, "why are we here" is one of the functions of religion, although not all attempt to answer it. For instance, the Jewish and Christian answer is we are God's children. But the only way we can know is if whatever is beyond the universe (if anything) communicates with us. Then there is the question of how and what form can such a being communicate with us. Any such communication would, by definition, be super-natural, but once the communication happens (via an experience of some sort or as an artifact) it necessarily becomes part of the natural world, either as part of our neurons that record the experience or as the physical artifact. So we cannot see the super-natural part (which is sort of obvious), and if any such being has communicated with us, we will need some sort of faith to accept it the physical experience/artifact as from the outside, especially if we did not personally receive the communication.
It is either nation state actor trying to breed a defence AI, or a private entity trying to get an edge trading. Those are the most powerful forces I see.
they're just making small realities in order to transform text queries into novel graphic artwork, by creating billions of AIs some of which make new art, some of which create conditions for new art to be created, and a simulated space-time to give some base physical references to the ais, all of which is simulated.
Krang inputs 'teletubbies having tea with elon musk in the style of milo manara' and somewhere on deviantart someone makes it and the universe has a reason to be kept going.
ASML and Intel are two completely different companies. ASML makes lithography machines which is one of the many steps in producing a chip. ASML machines are used by all chip manufacturers. The challenge for chip manufacturers like Intel, but also tsmc, Samsung among others, is to optimize the entire production process. And that has been / is not easy with a lithography step (EUV) which is so drastically different then what the industry has been using before.
One of the challenging choices for chip manufacturers was to drastically change the process and implement EUV or to go self-aligned quadratic patterning. The latter, if you take a simplistic view, can be seen as an evolution on existing processes.
We know see that those companies who went aggressively into EUV are having an edge on their competitors.
