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Manny Rayner's book reviews
I love reviewing books - have been doing it at Goodreads, but considering moving here.
Currently reading
The Greatest Show On Earth: The Evidence For Evolution
R in Action
Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies
McGee on Food and Cooking: An Encyclopedia of Kitchen Science, History and Culture
Epistemic Dimensions of Personhood
Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning (Information Science and Statistics)
Relativity, Thermodynamics and Cosmology
The Cambridge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition
EARTH IS ROOM ENOUGH
The standout in this quite good collection is definitely "Satisfaction Guaranteed", even if it's so 50s that it feels like you need subtitles to understand it. US Robots have developed a housework robot, which they are going to field test in the home of one of their employees. The action focusses on the uneasy relationship that develops between the robot and the bored housewife, who's plagued with general feelings of helplessness and inadequacy; the robot, programmed with the Three Laws and obliged to protect her from anything that might be liable to cause her harm, does its best to address the problem. If someone told me it was an adapted version of a Colette short story, I'd be prepared to believe them.
