overworld building stories

not enough people writing about the world take as big a picture view as these writers do.

here's my eco-spec reading list as of 3.1.2026. additions or criticisms welcome as welcome as weather.

here be funghi bigger than countries, global networks that bring planetary motion into question, radioactive dogs, and octopi. and the odd human. and synth.

the overstory, by richard powers

circular motion by alex foster

when there are wolves again, by ej swift

the ministry of the future, by kim stanley robinson

all the birds in the sky, by charlie jane anders

the mountain in the sea, by ray nayler

hopeland, by ian mcdonald

venemous lumpsucker, by ned beauman

the calcutta chromosome, by amitav ghosh

for good measure, honoruable mention to the windup girl, by paolo bacigalupi

if you are reading these in the england, then read rain by melissa harrison, purely for atmosphere.

or william gibson's agency series...if only because of its subtle allusion to the "jackpot"

Under World Building Rating or is it underrating world builds....

There's a lot of very fancy CGI these days - not least movies like Dune (like a bit but maybe prefer Lynch's flawed earlier take) or Avatar (hate), but I went back to some older stuff and was surprised really how very fine some older efforts (maybe not so old) are...

First off, Altered Carbon on Netflix - while they slightly softened the politics, which was almost as harsh as the contrasts in the great Ursula le Guin Disposessed, and then some, they got the world(s) (two seasons are planets apart) bang on for me - as a contrast, see The Expanse (good), which got historical scoping right (much much better than Foundation, which I hated), the adaptation of Richard Morgan's really excellent trilogy got vibe which was really something.

Then there's the Riddick franchise. Got totally hooked by Pitch Black, which is actually a minor masterpiece of horror/creature feature (wish someone would make a similar movie series of Harry Harrison's seriously great Deathworld books, or if they had the wit, the Stainless Steel Rat).... but then the whole Chronicles thing got out of hand - I read that there's a fourth movie in the pipeline. I like Vin Diesel. He knows his limitations and when he plays within them, like Bruce Willis (perhaps not quite that good:-), he's fun. But the world look in the Chronicles is top rank - the planet scale up/down views remind me of classic covers of Astounding Sci Fi magazines, or great moments at the end of the 1950s movie, This Island Earth's epic ending. (not to mention Forbidden Planet...).

Then there's Serenity. A lot has already been written about this, so not a lot to add, but the angle of making it like a western,  plus the end-of-an-era mood about the whole thing is just fantastic.

There are tons of films like this (Brother From Another Planet, Liquid Sky, Repo Man, Attack the Block, Hardware, I could go on, but new year's eve beckons, and I need to go out and fetch another pail of air.

cyberdark

There was criticism of the Turing Institute for not warning the government about LLMs, and praise for its defense program.

But no-one criticised the defense and security folks for failing to warn the imminent  Jaguar Land Rover cyberattack. Or Tescos. Or Asahi Super Dry. Or many others. There have been cybersecurity centers of excellent across the UK for 10 years or more and a public face to national security, the NCSC, and what do we actually have to show for that in terms of a rugged/resilient defense of the digital realm? What are the costs and what benefit can these organisations and institutes transparently report?

Sure cyberdefense is a complex (wicked) problem because a large fraction of the initial vectors are social engineering and people are difficult to re-train to think suspiciously the whole time. But then there's the actual technical part component (including the recovery - why are ransomeware attacks so difficult to recover from? what's wrong with integrity checked secured backup/restore?). etc etc

Meanwhile, the government passes laws like the online harms bill, which largely annoys civilians but does zilch to prevent actual large scale industrialised economic damage and very little to even help prevent id theft. Oh yeah, digital identity will fix that, won't they? (answer: no, likely make it worse - because? see above).

In another space, we have chat about possible war. Where are our drone defense plans? It is clear that rapid evolution of swarms of low cost quadcopters are a problem, but also they are pretty slow - so easily bought down e.g. by more drones, and a bit of AI driven planning/deployment/reaction. Could also have competitions (like robot wars in the air) to train up a new generation of kids at high school/uni engineering&computing departments to provide a set of actually new ideas on demand...

Lamentable.

a rough guide to the UK PhD examination processes (based on a sample of 100, so probably missing some variants)

 

rule 1: there are no rules for the UK viva/defense

rule 0: it is nice the calm the student down at the start

and one way to help is to ask them to do a brief (max 20 mins, preferably 10 mins) outline of the contributions of the research - if they insist on slides, ok.

typically should list 3 main new ideas, methodology(s) and results (and possibly consequences for future research(ers).

rule 2: take a break if the viva looks like taking more than 90mins.

rule 3. unless there's something weird going on, a viva rarely takes less than 60 mins

rule 4: if you hit 5 hours, you are doing something even weirder.

unless (happened to me) the work has led you (the examiners) to come up with a new idea and you are writing a paper about it.

rule 5: make sure reports a(especially written feedback including _detailed_ specification of corrections) are made available the _day_ of the viva, or even right at the end of the defence if you bought them with you.

rule 6: there are usually two examiners, one of whom is from same institute as candidate (though not necessarily same department) and should not be a conflict i.e. wasn't supervisory in any way nor co-authored any papers on the work doing the research. Sometimes the local examiner is there "just" to make sure rules/process is followed fairly, and may not know a lot about the topic. That said, they should still have read the dissertation and written a report and have questions to ask. Sometimes (rare), the local examiner can be a bit bossy, and the external should say that they are there to maintain comparison/quality control so the internal isn't meant to override that aspect of things.

rule 7: there are sometimes extra people (e.g. from faculty, or from some due diligence bit of the institute. If the student is super nervous, they can sometimes request for an advisor or friend to attend, though normally, those people are not allowed to say anything in the viva.

rule 8: as an examiner you should have read the thesis. three times. and written notes on it. and checked everything in maths, analysis, graphs, equations, algorithms, and results. and bibliography. and any legends/tables. and related work.

and written a report and (if there are minor) list corrections - and suggestions for improvement (e.g. to structure) or additional experiments needed (with a justification as to how they will support the argument) if you think its needed.

rule 9: the viva may change your opinion as to the outcome. usually this may be to convince you that corrections could be minor rather than major. very occasionally (rare0 that there's a major problem you had not perceived - sometimes the other examiner might raise this.

rule 10. you should have exchanged reports and recommendations with the other examiner ahead of the viva (worst case, delay starting the defence for 10-15 mins to discuss how to run it given your questions)

rule 11. questions? yes, you should have a list of questions to ask the candidate. not just corrections. question 1 leads to rule 0.  other questions are about background, and then about methodology or clarification of results.

rule 12. if the work is inter-disciplinary, take care to respect that you may not know much about the "other" discipline, and the other examiner might do, and that a grade should not be the average of your two views, but the sum.

rule 13. there are no rules.

Rule 14. If in doubt, ask for faculty input/advice.

Rule 15. Outcomes are (usually):

Pass, minor corrections, major corrections, resubmission, fail (sometimes with option for masters)...

Minor corrections are things that take some number of days max and are usually "cosmetic"

Major corrections may involve modest amounts of new work

Resubmission involves perhaps significant additional work, but on the order of max a year

Fail is very very rare. And should involve serious conversation with the

faculty as something went wrong if a student was allowed to(or insisted)

to submit something like that.  Indeed, If it is the first examination of

the thesis then the student can’t usually fail - the worst case is a resubmission.

In my experience, pass is about 5% of the time. Minor corrections something like 75% of the time, major corrections 10%, resubmission 5% (in supervising 60 students, I had 1 fail with just a masters) but these stats probably vary by discipline.

Rule 16. In the first 3 (or even 4) outcomes, the student should be congratulated and possibly there will be a post viva celebration, though nothing as fancy as the Scandinavian Karronka (no sword and hat either, sadly).

Rule 17. Before ending, give the student the opportunity to volunteer things they'd like to have been asked about!

Rule 18. Some institutions don't let you tell the student the "result", although obviously if there are corrections, you have to communicate them with the student, and if there are no corrections, then they can infer the result (if they can't, then they don't deserve the phd:-)

Rule 19. It is fairly standard to ask the student to wait somewhere at the end of the actual viva so that you and the internal examiner can discuss the outcome, and possibly finish any point report/ feedback, before inviting the student back in to the defence to tell them the (hopefully good) news...

Rule 20. There is no rule 20, nor are there any other rules.

its the law - but we can change that

new scientist ran a xmas competition to change laws of physics for benefit of humanity -

one year the winner was reduce to speed of light by 1% so the sun still works but you can't build nukes (on earth).

my proposal: change planck's constant so that biochemistry is still ok, but computers aren't feasible.

with gods on our side....

 If I was more philosophically inclined, I'd observe that the last time we had such a shift in the notion of what constituted "power" was the Enlightenment (and its various related changes outside of Europe), when the power base shifted from religious to secular (or if you like, from superstition to science).

At the current state of development of AI, this seems like a retrograde step :-) But being prepared for it is probably a good idea...

...a friend of mine has seriously discussed using GenAI to create new religions (for profit, somwhat as  L.Ron Hubbard did with Scientology). There's an interesting section in the fictional work SNow Crash by Neal Stephenson, where he discusses the organisation of religion in ancient mesopotamia 

where the use of something akin to neurolinguistic programming (think of this as viral social media) was used to control society (for good - e.g. to inform the population (who had then only relatively recently moved from hunter gatherer to the worlds earliest city builder/deweller supported by a large settled agricultural working class) when to carry out various important tasks (plant/pick crops, avoid floods,  deal with locusts/plagues etc)

you can easily (I think) imagine a modern society organised around the cathedrals (aka data centes) hyperscale companies and their open AI priests...

I'm not sure this is what the various AI Safety Institutes are thinking about, sadly...

the Biometric Panopticon Digital Internal Exile- where Bad People go to DIE or a Very Modern Approach to Ostracism

if you are very bad (think billionaire oligarch owner of a hyperscaler polluting the planet), maybe we can publish your biometrics (easily got) and then everyone could collectively refuse to serve you 

the world would see you (as per panopticon) and not ostracise the wrong person (because biometrics unique) and you would become an exile in your own home, the only planet we all have to share, but you refused to.