Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 16

Modern archaeology has drastically increased what we can learn from ancient ruins, and Newitz turns this lens on the history of how cities form, how they thrive, and how they die. The writing is engaging and accessible, flowing through what we know, how we know it, how certain we are about it, and the author’s first-hand experiences with archaeologists at the actual sites.

The book has added a lot to my understanding of Pompeii and Angkor. Çatalhöyük is fascinatingly weird. And I’d really like to know more about Cahokia. (So would the people studying it!)

Satellites and Microscopes

There’s a recurring theme of re-examining what we thought we knew, using either new technology or new perspective. Angkor is perhaps the best example: LIDAR surveys in the last 10-15 years have revealed the remains of building foundations and an irrigation network outside the walled temple complexes. It wasn’t a medium-sized city crammed into those stone walls. It was a large city built around them. And mundane records of things like workers’ shift assignments and rations, previously ignored by Western archaeologists, hint at changing political conditions in later years as the infrastructure failed.

Even Pompeii, with its ruins remarkably preserved under volcanic ash, and written records still available of not just administrative details but first-hand accounts of the eruption, benefits from taking a new look at records we already have: Cross-referencing census and death records for Pompeii and nearby towns reveals where survivors resettled.

There are no written records of Çatalhöyük (in modern Turkey) or Cahokia (in modern Illinois), only ruins and artifacts, but sometimes those artifacts have stored surprisingly detailed information: There are indications of a drought during the time the city was inhabited…and sure enough, residue from stews in cooking pots indicate that the people shifted to eating animals that need less water, and that the animals ate more drought-tolerant plants, around the same time.

Lifecycle of a City

Newitz makes a point of drawing parallels to modern cities. (Pompeii had fast food carts, ads, and sports riots!) Çatalhöyük is the most alien. It’s one of the oldest cities known, and it seems people were still figuring out how to make one. All the buildings are basically cubes attached to each other, accessed through doors in the roof, and they all seem to have pulled multiple duty as bedrooms, kitchens, storage, etc. Kind of like a Minecraft house, if you could bury your dead relatives under your bed. (Sometimes they’d keep the skull in a wall niche, though!)

It’s easy to think of these ancient cities as dead ends where civilizations failed. Unlike, say, Rome, where you can see a continuous line from the ancient city to the modern. But they weren’t all cataclysms, and the people didn’t just disappear. Cahokia seems to have been wound down when people were done with it, Çatalhöyük and Angkor slowly emptied out as people moved, and even Pompeii had survivors who resettled nearby.

They’re not dead ends. They’re stops along the way.

Annalee Newitz’ Non-Fiction (official site)

A fun look at what it would be like to visit other planets or star systems, weaving together sci-fi scenarios, the science behind them, and the history of how those discoveries were made.

It starts with worlds we know the most about – our moon and Mars, where we have plenty of direct measurements and photos from the surface – and works its way out through asteroids, gas giants and their moons, and finally Pluto.

The second half of the book delves into more speculative situations. Types of places we know exist, like star clusters and nebulas and different types of stars. Plait links these to specific locations where possible. We know a system of planets exists around the red dwarf star TRAPPIST-1, for instance, and we have a rough idea of how big, how far, and how fast the planets are that we’ve spotted so far. From there he imagines: if one of the three planets in its habitable zone is enough like Earth to visit, what would it be like to experience a red sun, multiple planets with visible phases, and so forth.

There’s some repetition, but I think part of that is trying to make each chapter stand on its own in case you want to jump ahead to, say, visiting a black hole. (You do not survive the encounter.) And while there’s a lot that I knew already from following space exploration from a distance, there are newer discoveries I’d missed, things I’d known pieces of but never really connected, and a deep dive into topics I’d only skimmed the surface of before.

Also, there’s an insert in the middle of the book with photos. I didn’t notice it until I got there, so I’d been looking up NASA and ESA pictures of the specific comets and asteroids on my phone while reading!

Some fun facts:

1. Martian sunsets are blue!
2. The biggest asteroids are like miniature planets. The smallest are like bags of rocks without the bag. (Or a really unpleasant 3D ball pit.)
3. Saturn’s rings are surprisingly thin. Like, millions of miles across but only 40 feet thick in places.
4. The Orion Nebula is a bubble at the near edge of an even bigger cloud of dust. We can only see it because it broke through on our side!
5. It’s entirely possible for a planet to have a stable orbit around one star of a binary pair – or both! Sunsets on a world like Tatooine would actually look like they do in the movies!
6. I’m still amazed at how much we managed to get from a single high-speed fly-by past Pluto.

Phil Plait writes the Bad Astronomy Newsletter.

It’s been ages since I read any Discworld, but it seems appropriate that I came back to it with a time travel story involving a rebellion and barricades. [1]

It’s an interesting mix of serious and silly, sometimes both at once, often treating serious things as comedy and vice versa. The situation is messy, with good cops, bad cops, really bad cops, time cops monks, and a rebellion that today’s Sam Vimes knows won’t accomplish what it hopes to, even if it nominally succeeds. There’s plenty of comedy in Vimes mentoring his younger self and trying to clean up the “old” watch just enough to keep history on track, how the ordinary citizens handle the rebellion [2], and yet it can still manage to punch you in the gut when you finally find out what the lilac sprigs in the present are all about.

Night Watch is in the middle of the City Watch series, but it takes enough time to establish the now that while I still spent a good chunk of the book wondering who I was supposed to already recognize, I had a good sense of what had changed over the years and the future Vimes is fighting to protect – and how hard it is to put it aside so he can focus on the job in front of him.

Definitely recommended even if you haven’t read the other Watch books!

Takes the pain out of setting up and running SSB. Unfortunately it doesn’t overcome SSB’s inherent challenges of discovery, data size or multiple devices. (So far?)

Simple to-do list that works great with a Nextcloud server or local storage on your phone. It’s a bit of a challenge to set up the separate sync app, DAVx⁵, but once that’s done, you don’t really have to touch it unless you add or remove entire lists. Update: Nextcloud handles recurring tasks now, which was the only thing I missed before.