Christmas tree
None of This Is True by Lisa Jewell, Book Review
This is such a good book title. You can hardly come up with anything better than it. It can apply to anything. Get a speech or a news announcement or even a billboard, you say the title and it gets a new meaning.
In our case, the book is an unusual thriller. Think Freida McFadden but with a very different tempo. Radical show, don’t tell.
Alix is a podcaster who thinks she found a hidden gem. Josie is a mom of two and in the middle of some kind of a tragic situation, living with a probable elderly molester. Josie is the gem Alix found. Josie will reveal a career-defining story. But what part of the story is true and what will be the consequences?
This summary sounds pretty ordinary. This book isn’t ordinary. The story doesn’t follow any familiar or common patterns. I can give you some cringe or rare examples of similar books but don’t want to as I don’t want to spoil anything. It is weird and a bit slow, or at least has a slow start, but it will not disappoint if you give it a chance and stay with it long enough.
On my records, it gets a full 5*/5, a rare jewel in a genre, dominated by strong law enforcement people, tricking the evil.
Print and translation were also great.
I already purchased another book by the same author.
Some insights from Sabine Hossenfelder’s book Lost in Math
I’m reading the book Lost in Math by the famous Youtube content creator and scientist Sabine Hossenfelder.
The author shares stories around a common theme – beauty shouldn’t be an argument in science. According to Sabine Hossenfelder, scientists have the tendency to chase beautiful ideas and dismiss hacky, unnatural solutions that explain the world very well due to their ugliness. She gives the heliocentric model as an example. Scientists from the past had difficulties accepting that stars are as far as we know they are because the numbers were too large, which felt unnatural. I’m encountering this type of problems relatively often, with beauty being used as an argument for expensive ideas, for example new standards, or second systems / rewrites.
Who could’ve imagined that this is where I’ll find cues on my quest on figuring out web experimentation (yeah, I’ve not blogged about that, but maybe it’s a good moment to start). I’ll just share two quotes.
…you could go most of your life without having to confront [the results of an] experiment”
Apparently, physicists sometimes run experiments that take a really long time, like decades. For example, particle accelerators that are expecting to produce a new particle in decades, meanwhile postponing decision making and facing the realities of known models not producing the expected results. In my world, where experiments are run on web, I’ve also encountered long-running web experiments. Usually because the sample size is small or because we expect some distant future event to happen, which never comes.
“If you are an honest physicist, 99.99 percent of your ideas, even good ideas, are going to be ruled out, not by new experiments but already by inconsistency with old experiments.”
Same applies to web experimentation as well, although the share is probably not 99.99% (as it isn’t for theoretical physics either). Verifying ideas against prior experiments can filter out many of them quickly. But there’s always the problem – does that old experiment still apply even if we ran it X years ago? What if something in the setup was wrong and it works now?
This book touches my chords despite being unrelated to my work. Something in the area of process is overlapping. I don’t know why yet but I’ll keep reading.
A playground
Sofia is very flowery these days
The wet and long spring resulted in an explosion of roses everywhere. Sofia is a bit jungle-like, most green areas do not have central maintenance or it is minimal, part of the anti-tick controls. What we end up having is grass, usually green but sometimes yellow, and some shrubs, except where a local takes care of an area and it looks nice and maintained. But this year the roses shine well beyond anything I remember seeing.
Roses and a linden branch.
It’s beautiful season here.
Veselin.blog 