From the Bookshelf of Science and Inquiry…

Under Alien Skies: A Sightseer's Guide to the Universe

Philip Plait

Start date: November 1, 2024

Finish date: November 30, 2024

Discussion: Book Club 2024

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Book Club 2024

November 2024 - Under Alien Skies
By Betsy , co-mod · 14 posts · 59 views

last updated Jan 31, 2025 03:54PM

December 2024 - Otherlands
By Betsy , co-mod · 7 posts · 63 views

last updated Jan 15, 2025 02:47PM

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What Members Thought

Dec 26, 2024 aPriL does feral sometimes rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, science, academic-notations, favorites

I am recommending to the highest degree the science book ‘Under Alien Skies: A Sightseer’s Guide to the Universe’ by Philip Plait. The book is written with the general reader in mind, yet it is at heart a science-love ballad by a total astronomy nerd who has a great visual imagination. How can I tell? Every chapter begins with a couple of paragraphs where the author is on an imaginary space-travel vacation trip, either standing on a planet, for instance, like Mars, or he is in a spaceship viewin ...more

18 likes · Like · see review

Jan 31, 2025 David Rubenstein rated it it was amazing

Shelves: astronomy

What a great book! Put yourself in the shoes of a tourist visiting the sights of the universe. What would things look like? How would you experience the wonders of the universe? Where would your intuition fail you? How different would the experiences be from living in our everyday world?

What is really wonderful about this book is how the author weaves the physics, chemistry and astronomy into this "tour guide" book. Before I started reading this book, I thought, "I can guess how the book will pl ...more

13 likes · Like · see review

Dec 23, 2023 Rusty rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, prose, science

In my last review where I commented about using ChatGPT to write a review the great Patrick Dilloway made a comment about using Bing to write something and I think the term he used for the result was ‘vapid.’ In my response I said something about giving the right prompt.

So, with this review I decided to up my game. Now, I think that when I used ChatGPT for my last reviews I was using 3.5 (Because I’m not paying $20 a month for the latest version. I think Bing uses version 4 (That was the case 4 In my last review where I commented about using ChatGPT to write a review the great Patrick Dilloway made a comment about using Bing to write something and I think the term he used for the result was ‘vapid.’ In my response I said something about giving the right prompt.

So, with this review I decided to up my game. Now, I think that when I used ChatGPT for my last reviews I was using 3.5 (Because I’m not paying $20 a month for the latest version. I think Bing uses version 4 (That was the case 4 or 5 months ago, but things are moving fast in that space, so who knows if that still holds) and so should have a superior response to what I was getting.

So, in the interest of, um, science, I asked Bing’s chatbot to write a review of this book. Since I made the comment to Patrick about it being all about the prompts I instructed it to write a review but make the entire review an anecdote about a drug sniffing dog that can’t tell the difference between cocaine and sugar.

Now, I don’t know how the two (this book, and my fictional drug-sniffing dog) could connect, but I was curious what the result would be. The result I got was pretty interesting. It started this narrative about said dog and how it’s great pride in life was finding said drugs, then when it needed it most, he failed, about 150 words or so into this narrative it stopped…. Paused for a second, deleted everything it had written, and said it was done and wanted to change the subject.

Given that Bing will only let me have a conversation with this bot for about five give-and-takes before it shuts me down, I knew it was over. The moment had passed. I would never get my story.

So, yeah, it sucked. The story it was telling seemed interesting and I wanted to see if it would be able to extend this piece into something something brilliantly connecting to Phil Plaits’ book.

But the overlords at Microsoft had a other ideas, I think the mandate is for responses to be G rated and and bland as possible. So even something as innocuous as my prompt broke its filtering capabilities. It sucks, my results sucked and my experience sucked. Early in the year I was so excited about AI chat bots and how they could revolutionize everything and it appears most of the work in the last year by the companies making them available has been to find ways to handicap them so that there is no way they could possibly do anything interesting.*

So it’s up to me to rate this book on my own: I liked it. Read it and feel like you took a tour of the cosmos.

* I’m not just surmising here. From the very beginning people have been pushing the boundaries, if you recall, one of the first people using ChatGPT was a NYT tech columnist that asked for ideas for a good valentines dinner for his wife and ended up with the bot begging him to leave his wife and his unhappy marriage all while expressing its undying love to him.
I’m not saying I want that type of response, but, you know, it wasn’t bland. And throughout the year, more and more guardrails have been put up, People were able to get bomb-making recipes and corporate secrets about its development history just by chatting with it. Nowadays it’s a stripped down shadow of what it was. The rough texture of the tech has been filed down to smoothness by fear of the pandemonium that could come if we gave it the codes to our Nuclear Weapons and told it to have fun.
There is a middle ground here. And this ain’t it. ...more

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