Forty Signs of Rain by Kim Stanley Robinson

on a lunch time lecture at the NSF:

These were people still interested enough in ideas to spend a lunch hour listening to a lecture on the philosophy of science. It would be like that in some departments at USD, perhaps even on most university campuses, despite the insane pace of life. Surplus time and energy, given over to curiosity; a fundamental hominid behaviour. The basic trait that got people into science, that made science in the first place, surviving despite the mind-numbing regimes of its modern-day expression.

p. 239

Forty Signs of Rain by Kim Stanley Robinson

North on the freeway, crowded but not impossibly so, people zipping along like starlings, following the flock rules keep as far apart from the rest as possible and change speeds as little as possible. The best drivers in the world.

p. 159

I like the idea of traffic as a flock - great explanatory power.

Please comment

I have heard from a couple of people that they are reading these.

Please let me know what you think about these quotes. What do they make you think about?

Let's have a talk abut these things.

Forty Signs of Rain by Kim Stanley Robinson

California is a place apart.

Gold chasers went west until the ocean stopped them, and there in that remote and beautiful land, separated from the rest of the world by desert and mountain, prairie and ocean, they saw there could be no more moving on. They would have to stop and make a life here.

Civil society, post Civil War. A motley of argonauts, infused with Manifest Destiny and gold fever, also with Emerson and Thoreau, Lincoln and Twain, their own John Muir. They said to each other, Here at the end of the road it had better be different, or else world history has come to naught.

So they did many things, good and bad. In the end it turned out the same as everywhere else, maybe a little more so.

p. 155

I love it - California as the end of the road, the end of the world. But them I am an unabashed Californian.

Forty Signs of Rain by Kim Stanley Robinson

[After his infant son and a youth with a ballon have caused a whole car of subway riders to laugh.]

Charlie got out, grinning, and carried Joe into the Blue/Orange level. He marveled at the infectiousness of moods in a group. Strangers who would never meet again, unified suddenly and a toddler playing a game. By laughter. Maybe the real oddity was how much one' fellow citizens were usually like furniture in one's life.

P. 138

Our fellow beings are like furniture in our lives. What a thought here in Japan. Japanese often completely ignore others in public spaces. I think they really can't see them. However, it may be a realistic adaptation to the extreme crowding. If you watch and get involved with all those people you will go insane.

Forty Signs of Rain by Kim Stanley Robinson

But science didn't work like capitalism. That was the rub, that was one of the rubs in the general dysfunction of the world. Capitalism rules, but money was too simplistic and inadequate a measure of the wealth that science generated. In science, one built up over the course of a career a fund of "scientific credit," by giving work to the system in a way that would seem altruistic. People remembered what you gave, and later there were various forms of return on the gift - jobs, labs. In that sense a good investment for the individual, but in the form of a gift to the group. It was the non zero-sum game that the prisoner's dilemma could become if everyone played by the strategies of always generous, or, better, firm but fair. That was one of the things that science was  -- a place that one entered by agreeing to hold to the strategies of cooperation, to maximize the total return of the game.

p. 124

What a wonderful description of the process of science, the cooperation to build something more than the sum of the parts. What a great thing!

Next books

Hi,

I am a bit sorry about not writing for a while. I have been reading, but there hasn't seemed to be much that I want to share. For some of the authors, I think that is a bit disappointing. For others, it is that what I liked was not the turn of phrase, but the general story. This is especially true of satirical works.  I have also beent ravelling, having returned to CA for two weeks and then off to a week in Dubai. Then back for the start of school.

But all of that is about to change. I am reading one of my favorite authors, Kim Stanley Robinson. When I read his books I often want to mark stuff down and put it on paper so I can keep it after I close the book. He is a very preceptive observer of humanity and well versed in science of all sorts. I have started reading his latest series: Forty Signs of Rain, Fifty Degrees Below, and Sixty Days and Counting.

And I pulled out my page points. (They were originally sold by Levenger, but they changed their design and I like this design better. IT seems to me to be the original design.) I have been carrying them around so I can mark what I read for posting here. I will pull out the first few quotes today and then let in a few more over the next days and weeks.

Stay tuned.