The Black Pearl Bookstore is a nice little family run enterprise in a remodeled house along the sprawl of Burnet Road that bisects north Austin. I had ordered a book from them once, Little Leonardo's Fascinating World of Astronomy by Sarafina Nance who had been an undergraduate student of mine (see also her remarkable memoir, Starstruck), but I had never been in the shop. After putting it off for a while in the press of other things, I finally stopped in on April 2 and made them a deal. I offered them a signed copy of The Path to Singularity from the shrinking store of 50 provided to me by Prometheus Press with the request that if they sold it they would order some more. We struck the deal with smiles all around. Now I need to drop in again to see if it sold.
On April 2 and 3, I participated in the annual symposium of the Good Systems group, the interdisciplinary enterprise on campus that seeks to bring ethics to AI. I had asked whether I could display The Path to Singularity at the symposium as my version of a poster presentation and got enthusiastic agreement. I borrowed the same bookstand that had displayed the book at the previous Astronomy Department Board of Visitors meeting (see Blog 11 – Amazon Reviews). The symposium organizers really did not have a natural way to display the book, but offered one of the round tables at the rear of the room where people could sit and munch goodies during breaks. I commandeered one table, set up the bookstand with the book propped on it, plopped my fedora (it's not a cowboy hat!) on the table, and set out some of my Path business cards. Over the two days of the symposium, I handed out a few cards and might have made a few sales.
The evening of April 3, I finally finished the unique and fascinating novel Magdalena Mountain by my cousin-in-law, the butterfly naturalist Bob Pyle. It took me a while to read it because my novel reading these days tends to be a few paragraphs and then falling asleep at bedtime. It was a pleasure all the way, with vivid writing and a special perspective. Here is my short review on Amazon: I was delighted by this tangled story of odd people and their quests where two of the main characters are a butterfly and a mountain. Naturalist Bob Pyle invents (in some cases) a fascinating array of characters and writes powerfully and lyrically of the black butterfly that breeds in the summits of the Colorado Rockies and of the high country that draws these characters together. Did you know that Vladimir Nabokov chased butterflies in those very mountains? Here is a Nabokov word: VIBGYOR.
My birthday was on Saturday, April 5. We had some takeout fajitas from Maudie's in Austin and slices of a chocolate eruption cake from the Austin World Headquarters of Whole Foods (now wholly subsumed by Amazon). I got two books I had been meaning to read for a long, and longer time, Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus and The Gold Bug Variations by Richard Powers. It will probably take me until my next birthday to get through them.
I spent most of the week of April 14 at a small workshop on supernova. The venue was special, The Cook's Branch Conservancy. The conservancy is operated by the family and estate of George Mitchell, a Greek immigrant who arrived penniless in the US, invented fracking, built the fancy Woodlands suburb of Houston, and purchased the 7100 acres of the conservancy in the piney woods of east Texas. Mitchell became a benefactor of Texas A&M University where he hit it off with and subsequently hosted famed cosmologist Steven Hawking at the conservancy.
More recently, the conservancy has been the site of focused workshops organized by TAMU faculty. The Department of Physics has hosted one on supernova research, my academic specialty, for over a decade. I had not been there since before Covid, so jumped at the chance when invited this time. Many of the attendees were good friends and colleagues from TAMU and elsewhere. I don't like to drive long distances alone anymore, so my son, Rob, came with me to drive our rental car (long story) for the three-hour trip. We shared a rustic suite in the meeting compound courtesy of the workshop organizers. For this workshop, the Mitchells arranged an Israeli chef, a woman of about 60, to come down from Denver to prepare three scrumptious meals a day for us. At night there is a bonfire around which to sit and stare at the flames.
The meeting itself was small, about 15 people, but very intense with lots of time for discussion and argument. We delved deeply into the weeds of the technical aspects of observing, analyzing, and theorizing about supernova explosions, topics only a mother, or an astrophysicist, could love. It was great fun. The relevance to this blog is that while I am loathe to shove The Path to Singularity in the face of astronomy colleagues, I came prepared with a bunch of the book business cards. Over the course of the workshop, I raised the existence of the book with individuals and gave them cards if they seemed interested, including one to Sheridan Mitchell Lorenz, who dropped in to check how things were proceeding. I realized that by the end of the meeting, I had hit up nearly everyone anyway. So much for discretion.
I had done a podcast with Dan Turchin of The Future of Work back on February 7. This discussion was similar to several podcasts I had done before, but I had also learned some new things in the meantime (current LLM models lie and deceive), and threw that in. Sometimes podcasts are posted fairly promptly, but sometimes they take a while. This one was released on video and was finally edited and posted on April 7. In an interesting departure, they edited snippets and released them daily for a week on LinkedIn. Here is one. They sent me these relevant links:
I had also done an enjoyable podcast the day before, on February 6, with Izolda Trakhtenberg of Your Creative Mind. This was purely audio but still was only posted on April 21 on Apple and Spotify.
The same day, April 21, I was in the neighborhood getting a new battery for my 26-year-old Lexus SUV (only 80,000 miles), so I stopped in the Barnes and Nobel where I had previously signed the one copy of The Path to Singularity. To my disappointment, it was still there although in a slightly more prominent place than I had first located it. Better news was that they had ordered another four copies, so I signed those. I gently pleaded with the clerk to make a display of all five of them, but I'm not optimistic.
I skipped here one event, on April 11, a conference of independent book sellers in San Antonio, but that was enough of an adventure that I think it deserves its own blog. Next one.