Hopefully Interesting

2019 is dead, may it rest in peace.  One thing I hope to take from the year, though, is all the things I learned in the books I finished that year.   I'm not going to review them all, there are too many, but I'll break them down into categories and bold the ones I particularly liked.  Within a category there're in chronological order, except when I mixed them up when reshuffling categories but it should be mostly right.  Some books are hard to categorize, for instance is a history of DARPA science or technology?  So it's a bit arbitrary but hopefully useful. Science The Ends of the World: Supervolcanoes, Lethal Oceans, and the Search for Past Apocalypses by Peter Brannen The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution by Gregory Cochran Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life  (reread) by Nick Lane The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect  by Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie  ...

It’s sad that books, TV shows, etc always overlook Callisto when talking about people having settlements on Jovian moons.  Basically nobody puts one on Io except as a weird research station which is great, because Io is objectively a terrible place to have to be unless you want to learn more about how hot sulfur behaves in high radiation environments. Europa is a common one and there are reasons for that.  We can be sure it has a liquid ocean under all that ice, which means there’s a possibility of life.  If you want a colony in a Moon’s ocean that’s an ok place to put it but we think that Ganymede and Callisto also probably have oceans too.  And they have stuff that, like, isn’t water on their surfaces if you want access to other elements for some strange reason.  If you’re not going to put a colony underwater then Europa’s surface is super radioactive and unprotected humans will tend to get a lethal dose after one day on the surface, though under a kilomete...