What are you reading now? (Chapter 2)

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Re: What are you reading now? (Chapter 2)

Post by macdoc » Sun Jul 31, 2022 3:59 am

Group listen - partner doing jigsaw and i'm kicking back in my day bed resting back and eyes while listening to great north road by peter hamilton - great narration
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Re: What are you reading now? (Chapter 2)

Post by macdoc » Sun Jul 31, 2022 10:05 pm

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I do like send ups and this is funny and smart... :demon:
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Re: What are you reading now? (Chapter 2)

Post by Svartalf » Sun Jul 31, 2022 10:37 pm

Is it good? I didn't know daddy Isaac had dabbled in that subject.
Embrace the Darkness, it needs a hug

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Re: What are you reading now? (Chapter 2)

Post by rasetsu » Mon Aug 01, 2022 12:00 am

Svartalf wrote:
Sun Jul 31, 2022 10:37 pm
Is it good? I didn't know daddy Isaac had dabbled in that subject.
Supposedly it's good. I'm doing the bible in a year on audiobook and using it as a companion. It's early still.

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Re: What are you reading now? (Chapter 2)

Post by macdoc » Mon Aug 01, 2022 8:29 am

This is wonderful.
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Ambassadors from Earth: Pioneering Explorations with Unmanned Spacecraft: Outward Odyssey: A People's History of Spaceflight
A history of space flight from pre- WWII through to current today. Good narrator and the Russian portion has fascinatin bios of the major players. ( as does the US section. )

Laika - first dog in space was a rescue dog....one of the bits of info.
Good read here about Laika
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithson ... 180968728/
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Re: What are you reading now? (Chapter 2)

Post by Tero » Tue Aug 02, 2022 6:01 pm

The Estonian book, in Finnish. He places both Finns and Estonians on the two sides of the Gulf of Finland about 1000 BCE. From there they separated to two cultures, mostly after the Viking age.
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There is not much of this in English yet but the Wiki page translated reads:
https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suomalais ... uper%C3%A4
Second wave of immigration

The migration of Finnish ancestors from the Volga to the Baltic Sea and via Northern Estonia to Finland and Central Sweden during the Bronze and Iron Ages, according to Valter Lang . [13]
The second wave of migration is characterized by interconnectedness, fortified settlements established along waterways, cattle breeding and primitive farming , and the use of horses as mounts. [14] [15] They were started to be built in the Volga and Oka region around the 11th–9th centuries before the start of the countdown and they quickly spread westward from there, following the same route as the first migration wave. The communities in the fortified settlements were larger than the tribes that had previously settled on the shores of the Baltic Sea. They consisted of fixed communities of about 50-100 people, which almost certainly had some kind of clearer power hierarchy than the earlier tribes, and were probably more warlike. The behavior of these communities can be seen, for example, in the fact that in Kivutkalnsin the territory of present-day Latvia, they established their own fortified residence on the burial site of the local people. [15]

Fortified settlements in eastern Latvia and the lower reaches of the Väinäjoki spread after the 10th century BC. and they arrived on the coast of Estonia in the middle of the 8th century BC. This migration of the Western Urals passed through the Baltic settlements on the banks of the Dnieper. As a result, especially in the Väinäjoki area, a culture of mixed settlement of Western Uralians and Baltic peoples was born, which is widely reflected in the vocabulary of the current Finnish language. [15]

The wave of migration was not one large group of people traveling with loads, but it consisted of the movement of many groups along the waterways leading to the west. The march consisted of the front troops, the basic troops, those who came behind, some traveling quickly and others more slowly. We were also sure to get stuck on the journey, and some could also go in the opposite direction. [14]

The main group of the migration wave arrived on the northern and western coasts of Estonia around the middle of the 8th century BC. There they encountered groups that spoke an early Germanic language, whose language influenced the sound structure of Baltic Finland and provided the language with numerous new loanwords. The groups of the first migration wave had stayed away from the Germanic speakingof the population, but the second migration wave of the fortified settlements established their abode right in their midst. The main group did not stop at the coast of Estonia either, but soon also headed across the sea to Finland, where the vanguard of the migration wave had already arrived earlier.* Together with the population that came from the Laatoka direction, these groups also inhabited the eastern part of Central Sweden. where the wave of migration stopped. The following centuries were characterized by the close connections between the coastal areas of Estonia, Finland and central Sweden, which were based on the common Baltic Finnish ethnic background of their populations. [16]
The map is there
https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suomalais ... mukaan.png

*There is no linguistic evidence of this. Lang disagrees with Wikipedia there.
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Re: What are you reading now? (Chapter 2)

Post by Tero » Tue Aug 02, 2022 6:07 pm

The author, born in Siberia when his family was there in exile.
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https://esapolitics.blogspot.com
http://esabirdsne.blogspot.com/
Said Peter...what you're requesting just isn't my bag
Said Daemon, who's sorry too, but y'see we didn't have no choice
And our hands they are many and we'd be of one voice
We've come all the way from Wigan to get up and state
Our case for survival before it's too late

Turn stone to bread, said Daemon Duncetan
Turn stone to bread right away...

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Re: What are you reading now? (Chapter 2)

Post by macdoc » Sun Aug 07, 2022 11:28 pm

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the guy can write :tup: based on a true story
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Re: What are you reading now? (Chapter 2)

Post by Tero » Thu Aug 11, 2022 1:25 am

The trouble with the book
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is that the Finns came over from Estonia somehow, for 1000 years. They came in the bronze age, when ships were poorly made in most cultures, for rivers. This is a 50km trip on the ocean. They appearently did not walk around the gulf of Finland.
https://esapolitics.blogspot.com
http://esabirdsne.blogspot.com/
Said Peter...what you're requesting just isn't my bag
Said Daemon, who's sorry too, but y'see we didn't have no choice
And our hands they are many and we'd be of one voice
We've come all the way from Wigan to get up and state
Our case for survival before it's too late

Turn stone to bread, said Daemon Duncetan
Turn stone to bread right away...

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Re: What are you reading now? (Chapter 2)

Post by macdoc » Fri Aug 26, 2022 5:09 am

Otherland is blowing my mind and I'm feeling VERY insignificant
I’m sure learning a lot
snip
Stand in the centre of Adelaide, the largest city in South Australia, and look north. The road into the midday sun from Adelaide and Port Augusta leads through the Flinders Ranges, one of the most ancient continuous mountain ranges in the world, and into the great deserts of the centre of that wide, sweeping country. Follow it far enough, as it gets smaller, dustier and ever more isolated, through the lands of emu and kangaroo, dry eucalyptus shrubland and the longest dunes on Earth in the Simpson Desert. The land here is older than even the Flinders Ranges, part of the ancient continental centre – the craton – of Australia, and contains minerals laid down as ores billions of years ago. At the mines of Mount Isa, where these metals are extracted at vast scale, the road curves westwards, and eventually it reaches the largest city in the north, Darwin.[1]

The journey through the history of life is at times unfathomably long. Put into physical terms, imagine that the city of Darwin, perhaps appropriately, marks the time in Earth’s history at which all extant life, every living being on the planet, was united as a single species, LUCA, the so-called Last Universal Common Ancestor, and that the centre of Adelaide marks the present day. Travelling along that road, every millimetre through the Flinders Ranges is equivalent to a single year; every kilometre of that 3,500-kilometre journey one million years back into the history of life in Australia. Take but one step, and all colonial influence is gone. A mere 17 metres down the road, and we are back in the Pleistocene, the time of the northern mammoth steppe, when humans shared Australia with cow-sized wombats, giant pythons and Thylacoleo, the clambering, cat-like relative of koalas known as ‘marsupial lions’, with their sharp, bladed secateurs for premolars. A single city block away from our starting point, and human history on the Australian continent is over. By the time we pass the city limits, a marathon’s distance from its centre, we are already back in the Eocene, when marsupials inhabit the wide-ranging, lush forests from Australia, across Antarctica, to South America. And there is still a continent of time ahead.[2]

So, we keep walking, and thousands of millennia fall by the roadside, unfolding in reverse.The Australian craton floats around the world, joining and parting with other continents, as species and seas rise and fall, ever changing in reverse, before life abandons the land for the salt water. After a fortnight’s hike, 550 kilometres down the road, 550 million years in the past, we find ourselves among the hills of Ediacara, and stop to catch our bearings. Ahead, in the endless outback of early Earth history, are only microbes.[3]

On land, nothing lives, just as it has always been. Seas may evaporate and rain on the lands, but they bring no life to the sandy ground. In the yawning expanse of geological time, mountains have risen in tectonic uplift, have been eroded once more by elemental forces, sand and mud brought down by lifeless rain. In the steep descent towards the ancient Australian coast, a braided river weaves towards the sea, its wide, ever-changing path veering back and forth like rain on a window as the sediment brought down from the hills piles up, building bars and eyots in the flow. Sedimentation, compaction, mineralization, perhaps some metamorphism, uplift and erosion. A tireless cycle of minerals, around and around and around, from sea to shining sea. So it has been since the continents solidified and the oceans formed, 3.9 billion years ago. The seas are certainly shining tonight, under the light of a full and enormous moon in the Ediacaran sky.[4]

To eyes used to the modern constellations, even the sky looks very different. We think of the stars as permanent, fixed in the firmament, but they move with respect to the sun. The Ediacaran is more than two galactic years in the past – that is, the solar system has circled the black hole at the centre of our galaxy more than twice in the intervening time, a total voyage of over 350,000 light-years. Our nearest stellar neighbours are on different trajectories, and we have left them all behind. Even if we had not, many of the stars we are familiar with are yet to be born. We may be in the northern hemisphere, but you won’t find Polaris, which first shone out in our Cretaceous. None of the seven stars that make up Orion’s distinctive shoulders, feet and belt, is older than the Miocene. Sirius, the brightest night-star of the modern day, has a long history, but even its Triassic birth is further into the Ediacaran future than the Holocene past. Two of the five stars in the W-shaped constellation Cassiopeia are venerable enough to exist somewhere in the galaxy, but, for the most part, the scaffold from which we will paint shapes in the heavens has yet to be constructed.[5]

Even the moon is startling. Ever since a collision between the young, molten Earth and an enormous asteroid placed the moon in the sky, it has slowly been moving away from the Earth, and will continue to do so. Over the minuscule timescale of human history, it has hardly moved at all, but small changes add up over 550 million years, and the Ediacaran moon is 12,000 kilometres closer and 15 per cent brighter than the moon of even the most romantic of poets. Stay a while, and you will discover that the day is shorter, too, a mere twenty-two hours between sunrises, before friction gradually slows the Earth’s rotation. This is truly an alien world, more like a watery Mars than the Earth we know today. And yet, in that water, we find complex life.[6]
I'm just astonished at what scientists with modern tools are able to tease out of truly ancient earth. Even the maps of the shifting continents are mind bending.
and this Pre-Cambrian supposedly devoid of animals....the descriptive writing is just superb
Behind a shallow sandbar, the water is calmer, less affected by waves. There has been a slump of silt here, too, but the mud has settled more quickly, the still water allowing it to simply fall slowly out of suspension, the difference between a bottle continually shaken and one left to sit. All life has been buried, and the sea floor is left barren and homogenous. But then there is movement. Like water down a plughole, a circle of fresh white sand regularly pulses downwards, sucked by an unseen force. A stiff hood of scale-mail armour emerges, its owner shuffling with a rippling muscular foot. Other pulsing circles of sand appear and more armoured creatures follow; a small herd of Kimberella. The general impression of each is of a scaly silicone hovercraft: a flexible, rubbery hood reinforced with firmer scales, resting on a muscular bed that bulges under the weight of its armour. From one end, a round head at the end of a stretchable and bendy, almost hydraulic, digger-like arm explores the sand, searching for food.[22]
Before burial, these Kimberella were grazing alongside Dickinsonia and the fronded Charniodiscus, using their heads to rake circles of sediment towards it like a croupier gathering chips. When the underwater landslide happened, they drew themselves under their incipient armour for protection, and each used its slug-like musculature to dig a vertical burrow out of the collapsed fan. Not all have made it. Younger and smaller Kimberella can get trapped, unable to muster the force or survive for long enough to make it to the surface. Their futile attempts will be preserved, too; vertical tubes that simply end where others reach the new surface, memorials cast in stone to a doomed last-ditch scramble for survival.[23]
:tup:
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Re: What are you reading now? (Chapter 2)

Post by Sean Hayden » Sun Sep 04, 2022 1:32 am

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Re: What are you reading now? (Chapter 2)

Post by macdoc » Sun Sep 04, 2022 2:41 am

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lovely Nordic noir.
His Lady and the Ape is just entrancing
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Re: What are you reading now? (Chapter 2)

Post by rasetsu » Sun Sep 11, 2022 2:06 pm

Listening to The Brothers Karamazov, McDuff translation. Thanks to my Kindle Unlimited trial, I picked up the audiobook of a serviceable translation of Don Quixote cheaply, to which I'll probably turn next, though I might lose the printed version when my Kindle Unlimited subscription ends. I was listening to Stranger In A Strange Land, but got to a disappointing inflection in the story and paused my efforts. I'll get back to it, but I need to capitalize on my Kindle Unlimited subscription during my trial. As to that, if I can take time away from Dostoevsky, I'll try The Three Body Problem.
Last edited by rasetsu on Sun Sep 11, 2022 2:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: What are you reading now? (Chapter 2)

Post by rasetsu » Sun Sep 11, 2022 2:08 pm

[wrong button again]

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Re: What are you reading now? (Chapter 2)

Post by macdoc » Sun Sep 11, 2022 9:05 pm

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