The prison at the end of the universe…. human evolution and science is at a dead end, the sun is changing and forcing rapid evolution everywhere else. This book made an impression on me, twisting multiple times and adding yet another layer to the world building and the story. A gripping story in a highly oppressive setting. I appreciate Tchaikovsky’s SF a lot.

Most of what I’ve read by Adrian Tchaikovsky I’ve liked, and this book is no exception. The setting is very different, on earth in a future where the sun is dying, than his other books that play out in space on alien planets.
The prison at the end of the universe…. human evolution and science is at a dead end, the sun is changing and forcing rapid evolution everywhere else outside of the last remaining city. This book made an impression on me, twisting multiple times and adding yet another layer to the world building and the story. A gripping story in a highly oppressive setting.

Bookmarked Livewired (by Robin Rendle)

Robin Rendle mentions how David Eagleman’s Livewired posits cortical takeover (if you don’t use your eyes, other body-mapped brainfunctions will takeover that region of your brain) as a reason for dreaming. To prevent a hostile take-over of your visual cortex. Reminds me of a previous article I read that posits dreaming as a way of keeping your brain from overfitting. That last one by Erik Hoel of Tufts University, enables falsifiable hypotheses w.r.t. sleep shortages etc. Does Eagleman’s theory do too? Will need to read the underlying article.

..we dream so that the parts of our brain that control our legs or ears or nose don’t “override” our eyes during the night. That’s wild!

Robin Rendle w.r.t. David Eagleman’s Livewired

The tree of life is not a tree but shaped like this. Read this article which puts archaeons on the right hand branch, bacteria on the left, and us with all other eukaryotes as a result from a unexpected joining of a bacterium into an archaeon.

Lovelock mentions this in Novacene, where he basically uses this to support his thesis that on the known universe’s timescale there is too little time for alien species to have evolved. We are alone he says.

(found via Jeanie McGeehan)

Some links I thought worth reading the past few days