As regular readers know I have recently jumped into Arduino and hardware hacking full-time. One of the things which fascinates me is the idea of monitoring our environment. I mean not only the global environment but also our own local spaces. Sensors and computation are incredibly cheap. Network access is almost ubiquitous. This means we can easily monitor our world and learn interesting things by analyzing simple data points over time.
World of Ptavvs, Larry Niven, 188pp, 1966
I've always meant to go back and read some of the really old scifi that people have always talked about but I've never read. Now is finally that time. As a fan of mainly 50s through 70s (Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Niven), I've rarely read anything earlier than the late forties. (Jules Verne being a notable exception.) My goal is not so much to read the novels for pure enjoyment, but to determine if they really are worth of their place in history? Were they really that good? Did scifi get better? Has it gotten worse again? In that spirt, lets the the time machine to 1917.
I'm home all by myself this weekend (the missus took the baby to CA to visit family for a few days) so I am at long last catching up on some reading. Today's book is