These are novels based in the world of the Paranoia paper role-playing game. I used to play this paper RGP called Paranoia. It was pretty fun. Most RPGs put emphasis on surviving: making smart tactical decisions to overcome enemies in simulated combat. But Paranoia was all about bleak humor; the characters in the game didn't survive. Everybody died. The world was a sort of Logans-Run world run by an insane Computer who was obsessed with Commies. If you've heard some of your older nerd friends mutter about "Trust the Computer. The Computer is your Friend," now you know where that came from. Though I don't play RPGs anymore, I still remember the world of Paranoia with fondness, so I was happy to find out about these books. Bonus: they're cheap on the Kindle. You might like them even if you never heard of Paranoia, but I dunno. The world of Paranoia has a lot of backstory; the books start you out in the middle of things. Mmmaybe you can figure it out from scratch if you don't already have the background? I dunno. I had the background, so I just had fun.
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It's Al Worden's autobiography. Al Worden grew up a farmboy, but became an Apollo astronaut. He didn't walk on the moon. He was a pilot, excited about piloting spaceships. He was pretty excited to pilot the module that orbited the moon for a few days instead of landing. He was around as fickle America started to lose interest in the moon. And he agreed to carry some envelopes into space for some philatelists who planned to sell them, and thus got fired from the Apollo program and hauled in to testify before congress about astronaut ethics. He went on to become an engineer, designing equipment for airplanes; and he ran for congress. As you might guess from all this, he had an interesting life and his autobiography makes good reading. Have you heard folks talk about how their attitude towards the world changed when they saw the "big blue marble" photo? Here you can read the recollection of someone who saw that live before the photo came along—and how it helped him understand our place.
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Peter Dudley wrote a book! (You might remember Peter Dudley if you worked at Geoworks back in the day.) It turned out pretty darned well. It's young adult fiction, but there's nothing wrong with reading the occasional bit of young adult fiction, right? It's set in a post-apocalyptic future, but you might recognize story-pieces from more epic times. There's royal politics, romance, mysterious folk who live under a mound, and the joys of healthy outdoor living. It's all woven together well into an adventure story with some interesting characters. Good stuff.
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It's a book about how to look over a hard drive and find out "what happened here?" This is a useful skill for computer security—you might want to figure out how a virus or hacker took over a machine just based on the changes they left behind to files. This might occasionally be useful to a computer repair person; maybe a hard drive got a little messed up such that it lost the "directory" information saying that the file Great_American_Novel.txt is in sector 1234... but you know that file contains the text "best of times". It seems like you ought to be able to recover the file if you have that information, and maybe you can.
This book talks about the process by which you do these things. It's a pretty interesting problem. How many files are on a typical hard drive nowadays? A lot. How do you sift through all of those to find those that help you figure out how someone or something misused a computer? You don't just turn on the affected computer and start clicking around looking for stuff, not any more than you would run through a crime scene knocking things over for a quick once-over. Instead you copy the disk image onto some other machine. There are tools to reconstruct files, whether that means regular files, files "forgotten" by corrupted directories, files marked-for-deletion but with their bits still there, file fragments partially written-over but with some old bits left behind in the cracks at the ends of the sectors... There are tools to reconstruct timelines: this file was accessed at this time, that file was created at that time.
I'm neither a security person nor a repair person, but I still got something out of this book. It doesn't just talk about reconstructing files. It also talks about the common things computers record about what we do even when we're not obviously working with a file. When you browse the internet, your browser is helpfully caching copies of those visited pages on your hard drive. If you're someone like me who hasn't got around to using webmail, then whenever your machine tries to send/get email to/from the greater internet, it probably logs something about how that went. And so on and so forth. If you mess something up and want to know Hey, is there some "historical log" I can look at to figure out what I messed up? the answer might be Yes.
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Bill Bryson travels to Australia and writes about the place. He's pretty funny, and Australia gives him a lot to be funny about. This is partly because Bryson is given to self-deprecation and Australia is sufficiently awesome to give self-deprecating funny folks plenty of material. Or at least it seems that way in the book; I dunno, I've never been. Bryson doesn't just write about the interesting parts; he also writes enough about the boring parts to scare future travelers away. E.g., I now know that I don't need to visit Canberra.
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Jolly English noblefolk rescue French fleeing-aristocracy from the bloody French Revolution. Hapless heroine follows her cooly competent husband around. Oh jeez, there I go judging a book from back in the day by today's standards. And yet, wow, the heroine starts this story pretty darned craven. At the time, this book was probably pretty progressive: wow, a woman having adventures unaccompanied by her husband (albeit her "adventures" were... well, she was basically trying to catch up to him). Meanwhile, this book gives a window back to a simpler time, when people thought that the aristocracy might ever be useful and that royalty weren't just parasites. The writer seems very bothered by the whole idea of revolution, not just the violence, but the whole idea—and assumes that the reader will be as well. Back then, that was probably more likely.
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It's a book on the history of Bayes' Theorem. Bayes' Theorem is, roughly, a handy tool for practical probability problems. Suppose you are an email system's spam filter. You see a new email message that says "Best bargains Vi@gra". You need to put this message in the Spam folder or the Inbox. What do you do? Bayes says you can figure probabilities.
60% of email messages are spam.
In a set of 1000 not-spam messages, 2 mentioned "Best"
In a set of 1000 spam messages, 3 mentioned "Best"
Bayes gives you a nice way to multiply together the relevant numbers: we can ignore all those non-"Best" messages and concentrate on the relative probabilities: .003 * 60% spammy cases versus .002 * 40% non-spammy cases. So if you're looking at a message that contains "Best" and trying to decide if it's spam, considering just that word the odds are 18:8 that this message is spam. And you can get more information from the other words in the message.
At least I think that's roughly how Bayes works. This book traces the struggle of Bayesians versus some other group who use "Frequency Probability". Unfortunately, all I know about statistics is a few techniques. Of the tools in my toolbox... I don't know whether they're Bayesian or Frequentist or Pickle Sandwich or whatever. I have a hard time understanding frequentism. This book only tries to kinda hand-wavily describe it; I guess the author doesn't want to lose non-technical readers. So... I knew just enough to find myself confused nonetheless.
Mmmmaybe the difference is: I carefully computed that "60% of email is spam" statistic. (Where by "carefully computed", I mean "Looked in the email and spam folders on one email account and eyeballed a rough count.") But what if I didn't have that historical data? If I understand this book correctly, the Bayesian answer is "We need a decision. So plug in an estimate. What percentage of mail do you think is spam? Now you can use that to multiply with the other numbers. (But be sure to update that guess when you know more)"; but the Frequentist answer is "Give up! Wait until you have a significant number of emails to count!!" That sounds weird to me. Anyhow.
I still enjoyed this book, even though I didn't understand the struggle that it used as a framing story. Why? Because it presented some interesting statistics problems that have occurred through history. Interesting problems are good for the brain.
Laplace rediscovered Bayes' Rule... actually, this book makes a good case that Bayes' Rule, as stated by Bayes was not so useful. That maybe we should call it Laplace's Rule or something. Anyhow, Laplace applied the rule to many things, including jury trials. There were a lot of guessed factors in there, few known statistics. Still, he made a pretty good case that juries were wrong... not super-often, but not infitessimally-often, either. He used this as an argument against capital punishment: being found guilty wasn't a strong enough indicator of guilt.
A bunch of the stories involve looking for things at sea. Suppose you're a WWII US Navy fleet commander. Many merchant convoys are trying to cross the Atlantic to get supplies from the USA to England. U-Boats prowl the Atlantic, sinking the convoys. You have some destroyers, some search planes... but not enough to patrol all of the Atlantic. How do you organize your search? How long should a destroyer search in one place before moving on to another?
Or what about the Broken Arrow incidents at Palomares and Thule? You want to find a nuclear bomb that's... in the water. Wow, the Earth has a lot of water. Again, how do you figure out where to look? When do you decide to give up on that spot and look somewhere else?
There was election prediction. You might think that Nate Silver has a tough job, but when Tukey ran a group predicting elections for the TV news, one year his bosses sequestered the team because they didn't trust the prediction. It's never a good sign when someone locks up the statisticians in a room. Anyhow.
There's also some love for computing here: statistics, whether Bayesian, Frequentist, or whatever wasn't super-practical until it was easy to work with big piles of data. Maybe the anti-Bayesians had a point: until you had computers, if you didn't have enough data to get a scientifically-significant result, why on earth would you spend weeks of your life wrestling with data to get an answer that's not going to be that much better than the guess you'd make by eyeball? Nowadays, gathering data is still tough; but once you've got it, it's relatively easy to press a button and say "Computer, tell me about any weird correlations in here".
All in all, a good read. I was tempted to put the book down a few pages in when it said "Laplace emerged from Caen a swashbuckling mathematical virtuoso..." and then there was no swashbuckling; it was bad like when Steven Levy is bad. Fortunately, McGrayne isn't Levy-bad nearly as often as Levy is, so I kept reading.
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Professional game designers write essays on topics in Board Game Design. Along the way, they get into project management, prototyping, usability, playtesting, and other good stuff. As a professional technical writer, especially appreciated the article "Writing Precise Rules" by Mike Selinker. He talks about the usual suspects: consistent-and-simple wording, etc. But his examples are different. E.g., when talking about using icons as a mnemonic for concepts,
See also the great game Race for the Galaxy, where my friend Wei-Hwa Huang laid out the cards
in bizarre symbols I'm sure he completely understood. This does not mean that I do. That said, I have not asked him whether he understands Gloria Mundi's symbols.
This example is especially salient if, say, Wei-Hwa has kicked your butt at Race for the Galaxy. It tells you why you wouldn't bother asking if Wei-Hwa understands your game's symbols (since he does, of course, even if he had to reverse-engineer their meaning by learning everything else about the game first).
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@KenJennings, funny Jeopardy champion, writes about maps and geography. He's into maps; he talks about why he likes them and why other people do, too. But that's not all. He talks with geography societies, navigation, and stranger things.
He talks about those St Valentines Day Massacre Map-road-rallies that you see advertised in Games Magazine. They're like gimmick rallies... but instead of driving around the country, you're peering at a map. These map rallies have a devoted core of fans but are so tough that new folks have a hard time getting started. (Sound familiar?)
He talks with roadgeeks, who travel around documenting highways and their signage. And the occasional anecdote where someone will improve a highway's signage without asking permission first.
Alex Trebek makes a cameo. So do some folks who work on Google Maps: Jennings seems a bit breathless when talking about them; he says that folks at a geography bee thought of Brian McClendon as a "sex symbol". I'm not sure that's right. But I certainly could imagine Jennings thought of some of the Google maps folks that way.
If you're into maps, geography, wayfinding, or just reading someone funny write about stuff, you might like this book.
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It's literature. It's fiction but it's not genre fiction and it's not about undersea telegraph cables, so you'd think I wouldn't like it. Oh, there's a brief nod to the history of electronics with the SPOILER REDACTED, but that's definitely not what you're going to read this book for. It's about human relationships and feelings and finding meaning in life, so you'd definitely think I wouldn't like it. But I liked it. There's a setting which is pretty SPOILER REDACTED.
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Thanks to a Snoutcast interview, I learned of the existence of This Is Not A Game, a non-fiction book about Alternative Reality Games by Dave Szulborski (not to be confused with the novel This is Not a Game by Walter Jon Williams). It starts out slow—the first quarter of the book careful defintions and academic categorizing when all you had to say was "Y'know, like I Love Bees"—but once that's out of the way, there's some good stuff. You know you're in for a good time when you reach chapter 7 when you see it's all going to be about The Beast. Szulborski has been a player and a Game Control for these games. He writes about things that happened and how the influenced what happened next. ARGers, like players+customers everywhere, don't know what they want. They say they want realism, but they react better if new content comes out on a regular schedule and if there are puzzles and... And these things make it challenging to write an ARG.
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It's a summary of world history, presented as a timeline. It's a few hunded pages. The rows are years. The columns are different, uhm, sectors of culture: art, science, etc. I hear tell that this is a translation of a German work called Kulturfahrplan. OK. Man, I forgot I had this. It's huge! It weighs a lot more than wikipedia. And there's this time travel themed The Game coming up soon. So now I gotta decide: does this bulky book go in the backpack, go in the van, or stay in the apartment?
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It's a book of short stories by Richard Thieme. I saw a recording of an interesting talk he gave at DefCon. So I read this collection, which turned out to be largely about UFO sightings and the paranoia that follows. These stories are tragedies. I hadn't really considered before whether I wanted to see a UFO. Now I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't; this book convinced me that my life afterwards would be nothing but misery.
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A newspaper reporter does some journalizing about whatever he likes. Since he likes California, especially the San Joaquin Valley and Fresno, the results are some pretty interesting stories... uhm, to this here California boy. There's the story of family betrayal and a chicken franchise. There's the Armenian moonshiners. A dead soldier's family. Life among migrant farmworkers. Heads up north long enough to talk to some northern weed farmers. Good stories to read if you're a Californian. If you're not a Californian but are intrigued by a reporter taking the time to write in depth about what he knows well, you might be interested, too.
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For a hobby computer programming project, I used a revision control program called Veracity. It works fine. One of the Veracity programmers wrote a book about revision control; I found it cheap, so I read it. It compares a few tools to show how you carry out basic operations: getting code, changing it, merging other folks' changes.
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The Breatharians were not the first fasting hoaxsters, nor will they be the last. Flea circuses have a history. This book is a collection of Jay's Journal of Anomolies, essays on bits of history of show business. I didn't retain much; I'm not that interested in the history of show business, sorry! But this was a fun read.
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It's a book about the psychology of games. Why do we enjoy them? It's all very well to say that "Games are fun." You could say "Paper clips are fun," but then folks would tell you that you need to be more specific. What are the parts of games that appeal to us? What are the parts of us that games draw in? The authors of this book have studied gamers for a while; they've come up with some ideas.
- Games let us feel competent. Whether you've mastered a difficult game or are just killing time on Bejeweled, sometimes it's nice to think Here's a situation in which I know what to do.
- Games let us feel free, like our choices have consequences. In real life, if you don't take care of that thingy, probably someone else will. In a game, you drive the story.
- Games let us interact with each other and the world. You could stop playing... but you'd be letting the guild down, and nobody wants that.
The authors also looked for evidence of bugaboos of computer game politics: addiction and violence.
They figure that games aren't themselves addicted. But if you've got someone whose had a rough life, they might be drawn into games way more than is healthy. So... games aren't addictive, but that's only if you use a very correct definition of "addictive". Folks who in past generations would have been "creepy shut-in neighbors" are now "addicted to games".
Violence in games turns out not to be compelling. But blood and guts can make games very usable. If a game wants to tell you that your plumber missed that previous jump and lost 42 health, it might display a red "42" over your plumber's head. And your brain would eventually process that. Or the game could draw a big splash of blood, and your brain is wired to understand that immediately. So it's tempting to use blood and guts to display that kind of information. If you're a game designer it's especially tempting to use blood and guts when all of these ignoramuses tell you it's a bad idea. If ignoramuses tell you something's a bad idea, that means it's a good idea, right? Well... it's not the only possible good idea. Other splashy graphics could work just as well, and might not be so creepy.
A quick, interesting read.
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It's a book about the history of the development of rocket propellants. I'm not a chemist, but this was still fascinating because it talks about really dangerous stuff. The whole point of rocket propellant is that it blows up real good—when you want it to. But before you've figured out the right mix, it might still blow up real good at the wrong time. And it blows up pretty amazingly, which can be mighty bad news
One way of controlling blowing-up thing is to design a propellant that's a mixture of two chemicals and keep those two chemicals the $&#* apart until you're ready to propel a rocket. Unfortunately, the stuff that tends to be a good "other half" of the mixture, capable of creating a fast reaction is really corrosive acid. So good luck storing that stuff until you're ready to use it. And good luck experimenting with it as you try to find a good rocket propellant—now you're trying to avoid blowing up and dissolving.
In one chapter, we read about attempts to find an oxidizer containing fluorine
...All this sounds fairly academic and innocuous, but when it is translated into the problem of handling [chlorine trifluoride], the results are horrendous. It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that's the least of the problem. It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water—with which it reacts explosively. It can be kept in some of the ordinary structural materials—steel, copper, aluminum, etc.—because of the formation of a thin film of insoluble metal fluoride which protects the bulk of the metal, just as the invisible coat of oxide on aluminum keeps it from burning up in the atmosphere. If, however, this coat is melted or scrubbed off, and has no chance to reform, the operator is confronted with the problem of coping with a metal-fluorine fire. For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes. And even if you don't have a fire, the results can be devastating enough when chlorine trifluoride gets loose, as the General Chemical Co. discovered when they had a big spill. Their salesmen were awfully coy about discussing the matter, and it wasn't until I threatened to buy my RFNA from Du Pont that one of them would come across with the details.
It happened at their Shreveport, Louisiana installation,
while they were preparing to ship out, for the first time, a
one-ton steel cylinder of [chlorine trifluoride]. The cylinder had been cooled
with dry ice to make it easier to load the material into it,
and the cold had apparently embrittled the steel. As they
were maneuvering the cylinder onto a dolly, it split and
dumped one ton of chlorine trifluouride onto the floor. It
chewed its way through twelve inches of concrete and dug a
three-foot hole in the gravel underneath, filled the place
with fumes that corroded everything in sight, and in
general, made one hell of a mess.
Computer nerds can hold our heads up; simulating these reactions instead of requiring experiments can save lives. This book was written back in the early 70s, though, so the computing systems he wrote about were still kind of rough:
All the compilations of thermodynamic data are on punch cards, now, versatile programs, which can handle a dozen or so elements, are on tape, and things are a lot simpler than they were. But the chemical sophistication is still useful, as is a little common sense in interpreting the print-out. As an example of the first, calculations were made for years on systems containing aluminum, using thermodynamic data on gaseous Al2O3 calculated from its assumed structure. And the results didn't agree too well with the experimental performances. And then an inconsiderate investigator proved that gaseous Al2O3 didn't exist.
There's also something for the technical writers, reminding us that it's better to work with one subject matter expert than to work with two; and to avoid working on standards committees, because everyone on the committee's an expert:
Putting a final report together was sometimes something of a Donnybrook. The committee, as might be imagined, was composed of highly self-confident and howlingly articulate individualists, and there were always at least six of us present each of whom considered himself a master of English prose style. Whew!
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You'd think that I'd like to read a book about competitive crossword-puzzle solving featuring a first-hand report on playing in the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. Crossworld is such a book, from the blurb it sounded like it was going to be like Word Freak only for competitive crossword solving instead of for Scrabble. I liked Word Freak a bunch. So I picked up Crossworld. Unfortunately, the writer (Marc Romano) isn't funny, but keeps trying. He seems to understand that he isn't funny. In the book, he tells Will Shortz a story, and notices that Shortz gives him a pitying look instead of a guffaw. He wrote about this, he understands that Shortz doesn't think he's funny... Maybe he thinks this tells us something about Shortz instead of something about his own sense of humor? There were some nice anecdotes from the Tournament in there, but there was a lot of not-so-interesting stuff to slog through along the way; if you've already got some background on crosswords and the Tournament, you'll find slim pickings here. (And if you don't already have that background, there are happier ways to pick it up.)
The good news is that the book is short. You can get most of the way through it on a long bus ride if you, say, picked up the book thinking it might be good and didn't, say, think to bring along another book in case this one turned out to be bad.
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I vaguely remembered that there were some three-in-a-row games that weren't tic-tac-toe, but I couldn't remember what any of them were called, so internet searching yielded nothing. Then I thought to try my local library catalog, and it found Claudia Zaslavsky's Tic Tac Toe book. It was aimed at kids, but Ms Zaslavsky didn't skimp on the research; there were three-in-a-row games from around the world. UWaterloo has good information about several of these games, but I never would have found their page if I wasn't looking for names of games that I learned from this book.
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What was it like living in Cuba as it changed from a kleptocracy to a paranoiac batsh*t-insanocracy? It was bad. The protagonist of this comic got shot at, imprisoned, tortured, watched her family in danger, ... and other bad stuff. There are some moments of triumph along the way. She was an artist in a land with an artists' union with a dislike for tall poppies. You want her to flee the country, but it's not so easy to do.
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It's more young adult puzzlehunt fiction, so you won't impress your grown-up friends for having read this. But it was fun! A group of friends at a NYC catholic school team up to solve a long-forgotten birthday treasure hunt. They take the hunt kind of slowly—they'd figure something out and then wait until the next morning to follow up on it. But that's what happens when you have the clues from a decades-past treasure hunt. "Oh, we can't go into that church now, it's closed for the night." It was cool to see how the characters worked together to solve the puzzles.
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Yay, no mouse sounds latetly; I guess the mouse didn't stick around. Kinda like me when I tried to read the book The Information. DNF. This book is about information theory. It talks about symbols, language, information, ... These are all subjects dear to my heart. Unfortunately, that means that I already knew a bunch of stuff that the book talks about. At least for the first few chapters, I was kind of listlessly flipping through the book thinking "Oh I already knew that" and then occasionally realizing I'd wandered halfway into a description of something I didn't already know and then grumbling as I backed up. It's tough to read a book when every instinct tells you to not pay attention to most of it, so I gave up. Someone who hasn't already read about a bunch of these topics might like this book, though. They're interesting!
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Oh, I heard a mouse chewing above my head. I sure hope it doesn't figure out how to get into my apartment from my neighbors' apartment and... uhm, but I didn't want to talk about gnawing-spaces, I wanted to talk about Hackerspaces
It's a free book in which folks who participate in Hackerspaces write about their organizations and their spaces. Hackerspaces are tangled up with the Maker movement: folks who chip in to form a space in which they can make stuff. They need to get organized. They need equipment. They need projects and people enthusiastic to work on those projects. They learn from each other, they collaborate, they make things better than they could have on their own. It doesn't always go well; organizations fall apart, spaces are ruined. But it goes well some of the time, and that's a good thing. You might learn something by reading essays from folks who have tried to make it work.
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It's more puzzle-hunt young adult fiction by Jody Feldman. You remember how I liked her Gollywhopper Games book, aside from the magical realism parts? This book has a school that's also somehow the headquarters of a secret society of everyone from St Louis who's ever done anything cool and they arrange fundraisers for the school that the kids all love and... And there were some puzzly bits, but man I had a really hard time getting
past the unbelievable-premise bits. It might have helped if this book's game was team-oriented; Feldman's shown she can write about that pretty well. As it is, our protagonist has friends, but he must ditch them for the most part when he's puzzle-hunting.
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It's a book of hacker anecdotes. "Kevin Mitnick" is the author name on the cover, but these are stories from other hackers. They're good stories. They're not all true stories; some of them have parts that don't make sense. They're not all good people; some of these folks, when you slow down and think about the activities they describe, you realize wow, this guy's a total jerk. Probably my favorite story was about the time that a company wanted to acquire L0pht and simultaneously hired them to pen-test. The L0pht folks successfully broke in... and found the company's communications about how to negotiate the acquisition.
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It's young adult fiction answering the question: What would happen if there was a puzzle hunt in a toy warehouse that was magical like Charlie's Chocolate Factory? On the one hand I wanted to read this book because, oh hey, puzzle hunt, yay! On the other hand, I'm not really a fan of magical toy factories. I didn't like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, OK? There, I said it. I like my real stuff real; I like my magical stuff in a more magical world with dragons and stuff. So on the one hand, we have some interesting characters running around and solving puzzles. And these puzzles have great physical components that would be awesome... except if you're a boring stick-in-the-mud like me who's helped run games. Because then you cluck your tongue and say "Oh, that would break, you couldn't really make a puzzle like that." It's too bad I let my anti-magical grumpiness distract me; this book's got a lot of good stuff going on. The characters are interesting, and their interactions with each other are also interesting. The puzzles are fun. And there are some familiar moments: solving one stage of a puzzle, having some idea of what you're looking for next, stumbling around some area, looking for... something but you're not really sure where you're supposed to look or am I going to have to search this whole building or...? Good stuff.
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So as I walk in, I'm thinking This is dumb. Who puts an art gallery in a sporting goods store? But as I walk out, I'm paying for $40 bucks of tube socks and ch– What? Book? Oh, right. Moonwalking with Einstein. OK, yeah, I can talk about that.
Some folks are competitive memorizers. They build memory palaces, design mnemonics. And then they get together for contests: who can memorize the most decks of cards in two minutes? Who can memorize this random poem best in a few minutes? This book is about these people. I already had learned a bit about memory palaces and other mnemonic techniques, so this part of the book dragged for me; it might for you. A bit of the book was kind of like Word Freak: journalist finds out about geeky contest, becomes a Shao Lin monk and trains really hard, becomes a viable competitor, meets interesting geeks, writes about it. And there's also a bit about scientists who study memory. (I'm not the only one to notice this: the author of Word Freak has a blurb on the back of Moonwalking with Einstein)I think if I hadn't already known anything about memory palace stuff, I would have liked this book plenty. Since I was already kinda sick of hearing about that stuff, though, I found myself drifting. But there is other stuff in here, good stuff. Brain-damaged folks with interesting memories. Daniel "Brainman" Tammet's history of fraud (which leads to some fun back-and-forth in Tammet's wikipedia article edits). The changing role of memorization with the advent of writing and the printing press. If you aren't already sick of hearing about memory palaces, check it out.
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It's a book about working with Big Data. Considering some of the projects I've worked on, you think I'd be pretty excited. But my experience made me kind of picky about the details. At first, this book over-sells its premise: We'd make better decisions if we got out of the way and let computers do everything for us. But some self-declared "experts" don't want to give up control because then they wouldn't be special anymore. If you dig in another 100 pages, he puts in the relevant qualifications on that; so you'd better hope that readers were still paying attention that far in.
Humans aren't great at thinking about risk, about statistics. If a doctor notices that your lungs are going whooka-whooka, that doctor probably knows some of the diseases that have that symptom, might know which of those is most likely... but probably hasn't really internalized the odds of these, might not do a good job of making decisions that depend on those odds. At first, the book harps on this, pointing out that doctors may now be obsolete. Except that they're not, of course. It turns out that distinguishing between lungs that go whooka-whooka and lungs that go wheeesh ain't so easy. And if something new comes along, good luck figuring out how to deal with it without doctors, just going along based on old statistics.
Apparently, the book's author got sold a spiel from some web analytics company called Offermatica. Web analytics are a great way to make decisions... except that Offermatica doesn't seem to have had a very compelling analytics product. At least, lots of experts at web companies tried to talk the relevant purachasers out of using Offermatica. According to the book, that's because these are self-declared "experts" who clutch their decision-making power. Except that... they're not. He points out usability experts with special scorn. Usability experts I've worked with have been pretty darned glad to get analytics data and to use it to drive their design decisions. They have objected to sloppy analytics. (This is probably a good time to mention that I work for a company that has a web analytics product. I don't speak for my employers. Really, I don't speak for anyone but me. Though Offermatica appears to have disappeared in the time since this book came along, so maybe I shouldn't worry that you think I'm just trying to steer you away from my employer's competition. Anyhow.)
So... yes, trust numbers. If you have facts, please use facts. If all you have is opinions, then favor the opinions of folks who've studied their subjects.
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This book is about computer programming, specifically about how to use the Google Closure Library and Google Closure Compiler. I learned things that I didn't learn from Google's own documentation for those things. Closure's a pretty nice system for writing Javascript without getting tripped up by browser incompatibilities. And this book is a pretty darned good way to learn how to use it.
There are other JS frameworks out there. They're probably pretty nice, too. I don't know much about them. Closure's been pretty good to me so far.
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Book Report: The Art of Computer Game Design
It's an early book of essays on computer game design, from back when pixels were chunkier and networks were slower. Plus some notes from more modern times, pointing out places where those early essay...
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Book Report: Excuse Me Sir, Would You Like to Buy a Kilo of Isopropyl Bromide?
Try to stay awake through the short description, because it gets better after: autobiography of a bench chemist. Max Gergel learned practical chemistry: someone wants some quantity of some substance ...
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Book Report: The Buddha in the Attic
It's a novel of the Issei experience, a story told in the first person plural. We arrived in the USA, we met our mail-order husbands, we picked crops, worked in houses and laundries. Peeking at folks...
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Book Report: REAMDE
What if Neal Stephenson wrote a thriller in which fate throws together a ragtag mop of gamers, hackers, and spies and pits them against an international terrorist? Yeah, you probably already made up ...
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Book Report: A Gentleman's Game
I've been reading a bunch of Greg Rucka comics lately and wondering whatever happened to his Queen and Country comics. Those were great grim spy stories, with Steve Rolston art. But they'd turned int...
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Book Report: The Parthenopean Scalpel
It's another piece of short fiction by Bruce Sterling. Back before the age of total war when everything was worth blowing up, terrorists were assassins. This is the story of an assassin who spreads ...
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Book Report: Zero Day
Happy USA Buy Nothing Day 2011, aka #OCCUPYXMAS. To celebrate, here's a report on a book I'm glad I checked out from the library: Zero Day. Maybe it's not quite accurate to say "I'm glad I checked o...
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Book Report: Tactile Morse Code
Sometimes, you can judge a book by its cover. I don't feel that I need to read the book Tactile Morse Code because its cover explains its system pretty well. Bonus irony points for being a book about...
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Book Report: Hackerspaces: the Beginning
It's a free book in which folks who participate in Hackerspaces write about their organizations and their spaces. Hackerspaces are tangled up with the Maker movement: folks who chip in to form a spac...
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Book Report: Embassytown
It's weird science fiction: humans interact with aliens. In the aliens' language, statements must refer to real things. If you wanted to compose a poem about a purple cow in this language, you would ...
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Book Report: Lawrence and Aaronsohn
It's Armistice Day today, so here's a book about World War I. Specifically, it's about Lawrence of Arabia and Aaron Aaronsohn who I guess you might call, uhm, Aaronsohn of Palestine. The subtitl...
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Book Report: Rule 34
Lisa Long (aka Cassandra Cross from The Hogwarts Game) is in town, showing off some music software that she works on in the UK. She was taunting us Yanks because USA licensing rules for streaming mus...
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Book Report: Black Swan
It's a short story (or perhaps a novella) about parallel worlds. (The publisher calls this book "a cyberpunk story", but I think they just meant they remember that Bruce Sterling did good things for ...
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Book Report: Why Programs Fail
Today we celebrate #DennisRitchieDay ahem excuse me, Dennis Ritchie Day, in memory of a computer programmer who... Oh, man his stuff is in your computer, in your phone, Dennis Ritchie's stuff is ever...
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Book Report: The Chinese Maze Murders
A few decades ago, a diplomat who'd been to China "updated" some ancient Chinese detective stories and published them. In these stories, a magistrate solves many mysteries at once. In the ancient ori...
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Book Report: Deep State
If you've been listening to the recent Snoutcast podcasts, you've heard interviews with some ARG (Alternate Reality Game) folks. If you listened to this week's podcast, you might have heard of a Walt...
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Book Report: Game Wars
Battling a case of upper-respiratory-something infection, I find myself participating in a new activity: sinus irrigation. But nobody wants to read about that. You know what you want to read about, t...
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Book Report: Bottlemania
It's a book about bottled water and tap water in the USA. The summary, you already knew: bottled water isn't just bad for the environment, it's stupidly bad for the environment... if you live in San ...
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Book Report: The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms
A fantasy novel about cruel people and deities. It was a fun, vicious read. Oh man, I'm not going to type any more. I had a flu shot today. I forget to tell them to use the right arm. Now my left pi...
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Book Report: Being Wrong
I bought this book because the writer had a good TED talk Kathryn Schulz: On being wrong. That's a risky move. A lot of these TED talkers turn out to be better with the speechifying than with the wri...
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Book Report: The Architecture of Open Source Applications
If you're a computer programmer who thinks about software design, it helps if you've had a chance to learn about a variety of software designs. This is a great book for that! Maintainers of several p...
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Book Report: I'm Feeling Lucky
It's anecdotes and interviews about Google's early history by Doug Edwards, an early employee. (Is this a good time to repeat that my opinions are mine? They're mine. I speak for myself. I don't spea...
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Book Report: Getting Sued and other Tales of the Engineering Life
It's by a civil engineer from a few decades back, so you might think that a software developer wouldn't learn anything from this memoir. But there's wisdom in here—figuring out how to get along...
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Book Report: Startup Engineering Management
This book Startup Engineering Management is aimed at engineering managers at startup companies—but is pretty good for engineering managers at big companies, too. It has some info about everythi...
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Book Report: Being Geek
It's a collection of essays—well, a collection of rewritten blog posts—by blogger "rands". In theory, it's a geek writing about being a geek. An awful lot of it is about being a geek in t...
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Book Report: Adventures in Puzzling
The cover promises multi-puzzle extravaganzas, and it delivers. There's a fun variety of puzzles here. And they're organized into extravaganzas—into groups of puzzles, with each group leading u...
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Books Report: The Puzzling World of Winston Breen, The Potato Chip Puzzles
The Potato Chip Puzzles is a puzzlehunt novel. You might want to read The Puzzling World of Winston Breen first, since The Potato Chip Puzzles is its sequel. Both of these books have some crime mixed...
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Book Report: Nerds 2.01
Back in 1998, some PBS folks made a TV documentary about the internet, "Nerds 2.01". TV isn't a great medium for this stuff—humming computers don't make great television. So there's footage of....
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Book Report: The Master Switch
This book's title is a play on words: "The Master Switch" is a switch you can use to turn everything off. A telephone "switch" is a device at the center of a phone network that directs calls as in "s...
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Book Report: Fatal System Error
It's a book about the era of botnets. It doesn't go into the technical stuff, but comes at the story from the point of view of law-enforcement folks investigating things the old-fashioned way: talkin...
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Book Report: Kingpin
This book was a tough read, but not for the usual reasons. It's a biography of l33t Hax0r Max Vision. It's good, it makes sense, the facts hold together (better than you can hope for in most technica...
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Book Report: Underground
I've read a few books about l33t hax0rz; so far, Underground is my favorite. It has short bios of young hackers in the 90s. There were a bunch of networks; there was an Ur-internet rising up above t...
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Book Report: Tabletop: Analog Game Design
It's a collection of papers by a few authors about tabletop games: design, history, culture, place in society, all that. I got it for free here: Tabletop: Analog Game Design. Some of my co-workers a...
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Book Report: Little Bets
If you run a business that's supposed to be innovative, you must take risks. To succeed long-term, you must take many small risks; recognize which gambles work out and which don't; and then push furt...
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Book Report: Knuth: Selected Papers on Fun and Games
Don Knuth is, of course, one of our greatest scholars of Computer Science. If someone asks you, "What's an efficient way to to sort ______ for quick retrieval?" you are always safe bluffing the answe...
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Book Report: The Lifecycle of Software Objects
What if the tamagotchi were smarter? Not people-smart, but somewhere between people-smart and dog-smart? This sci-fi novella makes some guesses and tells a story. It's pretty plausible, and got me th...
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Book Report: Bird Cloud
It's by Annie Proulx, so the writing's pretty good. It's about how she had a house build out in some windswept spot in Wyoming. Or at least, that's what it was about when I stopped reading it. The wr...
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Book Report: Surface Detail
(Yes, I'm publishing another blog post today. Sorry about the flurry. I'm testing stuff. This blog post should look pretty ordinary, but there's a rel="author" tag hiding in the source code.) It's a...
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Book Report: Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work!
It's a quick, light biograpy of Marshall McLuhan. Before I read this book, all I knew about Marshall McLuhan was "The Medium is the Message" and he was some pundit who cheerleaded ("cheerled"?) us in...
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Book Report: The 48 Laws of Power
This book tries to tell you how to get ahead by lying to people. It keeps telling you how powerful you'll be if only you follow its advice; it tells you that people who try to be "nice" are doomed to...
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Book Report: The Unexpected Mrs Pollifax
This book is the first in a series of spy thrillers. And you're thinking, "But Larry, you never like thrillers. Why did you read this book?" One of my relatives mentioned these books at some family ...
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Book Report: Managing Humans
It's kind of a book about people-management by "rands," a blogger who's also an engineering manager. I suspect that people-managers who aren't used to dealing with nerds might get creeped out by thi...
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Book Report: Wireless
It's a book of short fiction by Charlie Stross. Oh man, if I wasn't bored by C'thulhu stories, then there's a story in here I would have liked and I might have liked the Laundry story... Or if I lik...
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Book Report: The Party
If you're an American and you read this primer on China's Leadership Transition, you might be surprised that it says that party leadership and army leadership are more important than government leade...
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Book Report: The Planets
Wow, DASH was a lot of fun. I'm so glad I volunteered; I met some cool people. I learned that I've been doing this geocaching thing all wrong (which I kinda suspected already). But I'm too tired to w...
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Book Report: Flashman
It's the story of empire. It's the story of a conquering force in Afghanistan realizing that they weren't as conquering as they thought. It's the story of the Massacre of Elphinstone's army told from...
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Book Report: The Silicon Eye
You think that you understand something, but then you figure out that you don't understand it after all. You've built up this model in your head, then you see something that doesn't fit the model. To...
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Book Report: The Collapse of Complex Societies
This book looks at the collapse of the Roman empire, the Mayan civilization, and those Chaco folks you heard about from the X-Files. Why do civilizations collapse? There's a bunch of theories runni...
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Book Report: The Art of Game Design
The Art of Game Design is pretty awesome. This book is about design. In theory, it's about game design. But if you're designing something for humans, this book contains plenty of wisdom. I think thi...
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Book Report: Colossal Book of Wordplay
It's a book by Martin Gardner (the Mathematical Games guy), edited by Ken Jennings (the Jeopardy! guy). So you might expect it to be pretty amazing. But it's a book of little word puzzles of the so...
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Book Report: Waltzing with Bears
This book's subtitle is "Managing Risk on Software Projects" and it's written by the Peopleware guys. OK, nobody's reading this blog post anymore; the non-computer folks have clicked away to find som...
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Book Report: Aramis, or the Love of Technology
This book was pretty good but it was painful to read. It was painful because it was good... and it describes an engineering project that flopped and stopped: Aramis. It was going to be a railed pub...
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Book Report: Information Architecture for the World Wide Web
My job title is "Technical Writer" but I don't write much. I work with engineers, helping them to explain their work. Most engineers can write just fine. I bolt organization onto their stuff. Some e...
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Book Report: Independent Cycle Touring
My bicycle's a coatrack; why did I read a book about planning and riding multi-day bicycle trips? Well, I wouldn't have heard of Independent Cycle Touring except that I know the author; but I'm glad...
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Comic Report: Bone Sharps, Cowboys, and Thunder Lizards
It's a story of paleontologists racing through the wild west to dig up bones and racing to scientific organizations to present dinosaur theories. This was a fun comic book, and some of the stuff in ...
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Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Meridian High School in Idaho
Tonight I played in a puzzle event. The puzzles were pretty cool! They were designed by Mike Selinker, Thomas Snyder, Tyler Hinman... and maybe others? Eric Harshbarger designed the prizes; he's a ...
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Book Report: Three Cups of Tea
Yeah, it's that book that everybody else already read, the one about the do-gooder who builds schools in Pakistan (and, later, Afghanistan). This book started out hard to read—the writer think...
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Book Report: The Design of Design
It's Groundhog Day, which the movies tell us is a day in which we have to worry about the same thing repeating over again. So maybe today's a good day to report on a book whose title repeats, The De...
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Book Report: Seaworthy
What does "seaworthy" mean? It means something that can survive being out on the sea. But "worthy" is a word with interesting connotation. It doesn't just hint at toughness, but also at a sort of rig...
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Book Report: The Hacienda
I'm back on my feet after being down sick a couple of days. The internet is a wonderful thing. It delivers a substantial fraction of all human knowledge when you want it. It also delivers intellectua...
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Book Report: Zero History
It's another William Gibson novel. This one seemed merely good, not transcendentally wonderful like Spook Country. But good is still pretty darned good. It explores the relationship between the mi...
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Site Update: Better Blog "Tag" Page
You might remember a while back I made a "tag cloud" for this blog; now it's bigger. Before, it didn't show the tags labels tags thingies from the posts I imported from blogger.com. Now, it does. I...
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Book Report: The Making of the Atomic Bomb
I've read plenty of books about the development of the atomic bomb, but concentrating mostly on Los Alamos. It's a tale kind of like Camelot for nuclear physicists—for a time, the world's best...
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Book Report: Trick or Treatment
It's a book about alternative medicine. Going in, I had some idea of what I wanted to learn. I figured that some alternative medicines are probably good for curing some things... but probably not g...
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Book Report: Priceless
Yesterday, I dodged Black Friday, but didn't quite make it through Buy Nothing Day. I bought a streetcar ride and then a train ride down the peninsula. How much were those worth? I don't know. I k...
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Book Report: Marketing in the Age of Google
(Disclosure and/or disclaimer: I don't speak for my employer. If you know who my employer is, you might guess I have all kinds of confidential insider Search Engine Optimization secrets, but I don't....
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Book Report: Gimme Something Better
This book was interesting, a lot more interesting than I expected. After all, I'm not a punk. I didn't grow up a punk. So why would I read—brace yourself—an oral history of the SF bay ar...
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Book Report: Tilings and Patterns
I know what you're thinking: Oh no, Larry tried to read another math book. No doubt this means the blog's"unfinished" tag will soon be attached to another book report. But I made it to the end of t...
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Book Report: An Engineer's Guide to Silicon Valley Startups
I read an early draft of An Engineer's Guide to Silicon Valley Startups months ago, but didn't blog about it then because it wasn't published yet. And then, when it was published, I forgot that I had...
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Book Report: Kraken
I guess this book's genre is horror. Or urban fantasy. In modern-day London, some normal folks are drawn into conflicts between wizards, armageddons, and objects of worship. So there's a secret Lo...
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Book Report: Apprenticeship Patterns
For some reason, I thought this would be a book of mentoring patterns, but that's not what's going on here. This is a book for a computer programmer who wants to learn more about the craft. If you'r...
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Book Report: Coders at Work
I used to post an annual list of top 10 fave reads of the year. Nowadays, I post a "book report" for every book I read. It takes less time than writing up the top 10. It took too long to pick the ...
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Book Report: Nmap Network Scanning
I just got back from a 9-day tour of various western USA places as the Grand Tetons, Yellowstone, Kodachrome, and Zion National Park. Along the way, I busted my travel laptop, so I haven't been upda...
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Book Report: The Sorcerer's House
It's a fantasy novel in which our characters start out in the normal world and then discover a magical gateway to a world beyond our own where blah blah blah. It sounds like the plot of the worst te...
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Book Report: This is not a Game
It's a thriller/mystery, so you wouldn't expect me to like it. But the main characters are Game Control for some big Alternate Reality Games a la I Like Bees. So along the way, there are diverting m...
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Book Report: Whole Earth Discipline
It's been a glum time at work lately. A co-worker was sick for a long time. Last week, he passed away. In our department, we could count on him to cheer people up when things went wrong. So now we m...
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Book Report: Finite Fields for Computer Scientists and Engineers
I'm not at Blackhat, nor will I be any time soon. Crypto is hard. I didn't finish this math book, Finite Fields for Computer Scientists and Engineers. My math is pretty shaky. Usually, when I'm t...
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Book Report: Transition
It's a novel by Iain M. Banks but it's not set in the Culture universe. It's set in a multiverse. I wasn't into it. I have a tough time with multiverse novels. So there's an infinite number of un...
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Book Report: The Battery and the Boiler
You think you've seen cultural imperialism? The Battery and the Boiler shows you what cultural imperialism looked like in 1880s England. I read this book because it's an adventure story about the l...
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Book Report: Offshore
It's a novel; it's litrachaw. I tend to approach a book of litrachaw as a puzzle: spot the theme, spot the metaphor, that kind of thing. I was feeling all clever for having figured out this novel, ...
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Book Report: Two Bits
Two Bits is a book about the free software movement, explained in terms that an academic can understand. The author tries to steer around debates about what exactly constitutes an example of Haberma...
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Book Report: Masterminds of Programming
I just read a blog post, The Myth of the Superior Programming Language. In it, he points out that people who insist on using some wack-ass different programming language are kind of annoying. I agr...
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Book Report: Inherent Vice
I'm too blissed out from playing Shinteki to write a new blog post. Fortunately, I have a backlog of book reports. Thus: Inherent Vice It's a mystery set in Los Angeles, but it's 60s Los Angeles. T...
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Book Report: Organizational Patterns of Agile Software Development
This book is about software development process. I guess it's aimed at project leads, project managers, and managers. But it's organized into Design Patterns, a form loved by many computer programm...
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Book Report: Pervasive Games (Theory and Design)
Several months ago, I ran into a little post from a blog called "Pervasive Games". The blog post was interesting, so I wrote a little blog post about that, as one does. But I didn't really notice th...
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Book Report: China Underground
I hoped that this book was about subversives and criminals in China: reporters, human rights lawyers, whistleblowers... I read news about China's internet censorship measures; I can follow the inter...
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Book Report: Planning Extreme Programming
For me, this was a "Casablanca" book. By that, I mean it reminded me of my experience watching the movie "Casablaca." I kept thinking Big deal, I've seen all this before. But of course, that's beca...
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Book Report: Sane Asylum
This book is about Delancey Street, mostly about the way it operated as of 1974-ish, based on a visit by an East Bay reporter. I grew up with a big Delancey Street building in my neighborhood, but fr...
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Book Report: When You were a Tadpole and I was a Fish
What's that you say? The Gathering for Gardner was this last weekend? Then I'm a few days late to be topical with a book report on When You were a Tadpole and I was a Fish. But books are a slow me...
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Book Report: Tetraktys
I read this novel because it was recommended via a computer security discussion group at work. That doesn't sound like a good way to make decisions, does it? Oh, Amazon.com recommendations, why do I ...
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Book Report: Wiring up the Big Brother Machine
Google stopped censoring in China; as a result, more Google search results are censored. The Chinese people can find less stuff now. Why? Because of the "Great Firewall". The Chinese government c...
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Book Report: Not Becoming My Mother
Ruth Reichl's mother was kind of depressed, kind of goofy. Reichl's written some autobiographies with scary parts. The scary parts were dinner parties. Yes, really. When her mother hosted dinner ...
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Book Report: Strengths Finder 2.0
Strengths Finder 2.0 is an online personality test disguised as a book. The test administrators charge you to take their test. To make the idea of spending $25 to take a personality test palatable,...
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Book Report: Down at the Docks
Back in 1999, I traveled in New England. I told intrepid traveler Tom Manshreck that I was going to visit New Bedford. He said ""Yeah, man--New Bedford used to be a good place to go to--to get shot...
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Life of Pi: Another Perspective
You might have noticed that I changed my blogging software recently. Yes, I do go on about it. Sorry. As part of this, I shut down blogger.com's access to my web site's file system. Otherwise, it...
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Book Report: Between Silk and Cyanide
It's the autobiography of the codemaster of the SOE an English spy organization during WWII. Wait! Dont' run away! It's not just math and cryptography and war. There's good stuff in here, too. Th...
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Book Report: Brain Storm
This novel is by Richard Dooling, the same guy who wrote Bet Your Life, one of my favorite books of 2003. This book was pretty good, too. It's a legal thriller—hey, come back! It's a legal th...
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Book Report: Hackers
It's another Steven Levy book about the history of technology. As with other Levy books, I keep spotting things that I know are wrong, so it makes me not trust Levy to tell me things I don't know. ...
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Book Report: Rapid Development
Today at work, we talked about ripping of^W^W repurposing some material from that McConnell book on software engineering, Code Complete. So maybe today is a good day to post a book report on another...
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Book Report: Silent Thunder
I saw two cousins today, which is good. As of this morning, I didn't hope to see any. But that's not what this blog post is about. This, as you might guess, is a gratuitous blog post to see if I g...
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Book Report: the Pragmatic Programmer
This book, The Pragmatic Programmer is difficult to find by searching, since there's also a series of books by that name. So maybe I'll give the full title here: The Pragmatic Programmer / ...
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Book Report: The Internet in China (Zixue Tai)
It's going to sound like I'm slamming this book, like it's bad. It's not bad. I just chose the wrong book, is all. The thing is: this is an academic work. [It might also sound like I'm obscurely refe...
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Book Report: Influencer
Good grief, it's another pop psychology book. I've been reading a lot of these recently, it seems. I swear, if I have to sit through another discussion of children who can/cannot delay their consump...
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Book Report: How to Win Friends and Influence People
This is a popular book about how to be well-liked. The good news is that there's some good advice in here. E.g., try to see things from the other person's point of view. The bad news is that some o...
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Book Report: Drinking Coffee Elsewhere
It's a collection of short stories. Easy-to-read stories about folks going through tough times in their lives. The protagonists tend to be thoughtful persons of color surrounded by not-so-thoughtfu...
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Book Report: The Snowball
It's a biography of Warren Buffet. It's pretty long. But there are some good stories in here, the writing is good, and it smells well-researched. It edges around some touchy topics, but it's prett...
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Book Report: Oil!
This is the book that the movie "There Will Be Blood" was based on. But that's not how I heard of this book. I saw Word for Word perform the first chapter. This group acts out short stories and st...
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Book Report: Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada
Good writing can help your work's longevity. But it doesn't fix everything. Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada is a well-written book. It's from 1872. Charles King was a good writer. But... it ...
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Book Report: Design for Community
It's Derek Powazek's 2002 book about making web sites that work well for communities. There were examples of things that worked well, things that didn't. A lot of this material is stuff you get to ...
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Book Report: The Berkeley Pit
Cousin Eric was in town this weekend. There was some sight-seeing. One place of interest was Berkeley. My parents pointed out some places of interest for the Free Speech Movement: here was the pla...
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Book Report: The Mythical Man-Month (a Study Guide)
If this book report seems a little heavy on the questions? It's because it's the first draft of a study guide? For people reading the book? Oh man it's way too long? But hey give me a break, it's...
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Book Report: The Mythical Man-Month (leftover cheap joke)
Last week, I posted a rough draft of a study guide for The Mythical Man-Month. I left a cheap joke out of that study guide. That study guide was serious business and had no room for cheap jokes. S...
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Book Report: The Great Gamble
It's a book about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, telling it from the Soviet point of view, based on interviews with Soviet soldiers. It's like a horror movie where you want to yell at the chara...
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Book Report: Broken Angels
I got kind of tired of space marines. Maybe I played too much Quake, back in the day. Broken Angels is a book about space marines. Sort of. Close enough. I didn't really get into it, but I'm not...
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Book Report: Killing Neighbors
I used to work for a lady named Lee Ann Fujii. She was pretty cool, so when I heard that she wrote a book, I figured I'd read it to see what she's been up to. She's now a foreign policy wonk special...
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Book Report: The City & The City
It is a new book by China Miéville. It has a creepy premise, and is very paranoid. There are two cities which occupy the same geographic space. How do they coexist? Citizens of each city ha...
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Book Report: The Best of 2600 (a Hacker Odyssey)
I used to read a little newsletter called 2600. It billed itself as The Hacker Quarterly, which makes it sound like it was full of sploits for breaking in to computer systems. But it wasn't really ...
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Book Report: Amazonia
Memoirs by some guy who was employee #55 at Amazon.com. He was an in-house editor. Amazon wanted to have some folks on staff who could write up book reviews. This was before they let any bozo with...
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Book Report: Remix
It's a book by Lawrence Lessig from 2008, and therefore it's about copyright law. (Nowadays he does election finance reform. Back then he was all about the copyrights.) It's about mashups. It's ai...
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Book Report: Spin Control
This book is a novel. This book is about human evolution. No, wait, this book is about the evolution of society. No, wait, this book is about changes in society post-singularity. No, wait, this boo...
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Book Report: Slack
Today I was that guy on the bus who wears too much scent. Not my fault! An automatic air freshener squirted me. Now I know why "fresh" can mean "offensive". I am very fresh right now, in that sens...
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Book Report: Notes from a Broad
I bought this book because its author is "Fran Lebowitz". This is not the same Fran Lebowitz who wrote the excellent Metropolitan Life and Social Studies. Rather, this is the "Fran Lebowitz" who us...
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Book Report: Lewis Carroll in Numberland
This book is about Lewis Carroll/Charles Dodgson as a mathematician. There were errors in the parts that I understood. So I didn't trust the other parts to help me to understand new stuff. Maybe I...
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Book Report: Knowledge Sharing in Software Development
I was in meetings most of this last week at work. Meanwhile, one of my co-workers was learning a new style of programming--and thus was trying to learn about four big new things at once. She sent m...
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Book Report: I Wish there was Something that I Could Quit
It's a novel by Aaron Cometbus! I hadn't heard it had been published until I entered a bunch of book ratings into Amazon.com. Amazon.com's recommendation engine recommended the book. Three cheers ...
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Book Report: Alphabet Juice
This book is a sort of lexicon, except that instead of definitions there are riffs. These are some of the author's favorite words, or at least words that he wanted to write about. He likes to pron...
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Book Report: Stiff (The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers)
There's some interesting stuff in this book about scientific, medical, and engineering-testing uses of human cadavers. There's some interesting stuff, but there's some "humorous" reportage to slog t...
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Book Report: Security Engineering
This book is humongous! It's a survey of security computer engineering. It doesn't go into depth on any one topic, but it's got plenty of breadth. In areas where I already knew something, this boo...
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Book Report: Ecology of Fear
Angelenos worry about disaster a lot. At least that's the premise of Ecology of Fear. Los Angleles is prone to disaster, both in real life, in the movies, in books,... Maybe it's true. And yet. H...
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Book Report: The Big Oyster
It's kind of a history of the oyster. It's kind of a history of shellfishing in New York City harbor. Once there were oysters. Then they were overfished. Then they were cultivated. Then water poll...
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Book Report: Grayson
I read this book because it was an Amazon recommendation, albeit a tepid one. Wow, what a great book! Remember Lynne Cox, the lady who swam to Antarctica? She wrote this book about a long swim off...
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Book Report: Fire Time
Fire Time is a science fiction novel from the early 70s. It brings you back to an earlier kind of science fiction. The author Poul Anderson drew out a solar system based on a trinary star. Then he...
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Book Report: A Feast for Crows
I was a tourist in downtown Houston. I'd brought a couple of books with me--I finished those and left them behind. So now I had room in my bag for a new book. And I'd need a new book or else I'd h...
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Book Report: An Evil Guest
Amongst books set in the Lovecraftian "Mythos" universe, this is the best I've read so far. That's kind of a backhanded compliment. I dislike H.P. Lovecraft's Mythos books. I suppose it's guilt by ...
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Book Report: Elephant Memories
This book is subtitled "thirteen years in the life of an elephant family". It's by Cynthia Moss, who watched the elephants at what became Amboseli National Park north of Mt Kilimanjaro. The book re...
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Book Report: The Crossroads of Time
In this parallel-worlds scifi adventure, our hero meets some people who are largely, but not 100% like him; he figures they will all get along OK, and they do. He goes to strange places similar to o...
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Book Report: The Box
It's a book about cargo boxes. You know, intermodal freight containers. That was enough to get me to read the book. There's interesting stuff in here for economists, policy wonks, labor history fo...
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Book Report: Un Lun Dun
Before I launch into a complain-y whine about a book, I want to remind myself that there are good things in life. Yesterday was a good day. (I didn't even have to use my A.K.) There were good comic...
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Book Report: Pattern Recognition
I'd heard that William Gibson had written Pattern Recognition, this book that wasn't science fiction. So I didn't read it. That was years ago. More recently, I read Spook Country that wasn't exactl...
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Book Report: Myth-Nomers and Im-Pervections
I read this book years ago, but I read it again more recently. It was on sale as a tiny paperback. Sometimes it's useful to have a pocket book that, you know, fits in your pocket. That way you can...
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Book Report: Microsoft Rebooted
This book is about changing a company's culture. It's about Microsoft. It's about Gates and Ballmer shifting the company's culture as they had to comply with the various legal judgments against the...
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Book Report: The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR
This book, written by PR consultants tells you why your business is spending too much money on advertising and should spend money on PR instead. Advertising lacks credibility. E.g., when I see an o...
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Book Report: The Eyre Affair
This book is set in a parallel universe. In this universe, mad science reigns. People care about literature! There are vampires! It's all different from our universe! And yet somehow similar! Y...
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Book Report: Elephant Tramp
George "Slim" Lewis was an animal trainer in the depression-era USA. He rode the rails from circus to circus, handling elephants. He specialized in unruly elephants. Thus, this book has a "thrille...
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Book Report: The Doomfarers of Coramonde
This book has everything: wizardry, parallel worlds, lizard men, a dragon, ogres, magical swords, a flying saucer, romance, court intrigue, an armored personnel carrier, death scenes, a dude who was ...
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Book Report: Saturn's Children
This sci-fi book, dedicated to Heinlein, features an android female sexbot who-- Hey, wait, come back! You're thinking that the book is going to be some awful misogynistic piece of crap. But it's n...
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Book Report: The Mote in God's Eye
Happy National Poetry Month! To celebrate, this blog post contains no poetry. You're welcome. The Mote in God's Eye is a science fiction classic that I never got around to reading. Except that I ...
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Book Report: The Kin of Ata are Waiting for You
I read this book because it's by Dorothy Bryant who wrote the excellent The Confessions of Madame Psyche. I read it even though my mom read it and didn't care for it much. I didn't care for it much...
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Book Report: Getting to YES
This book is about negotiating agreements. You want mushroom pizza, they want bell pepper pizza, how do you figure out what to do? You look for middle ground, of course, and this book talks some ab...
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Book Report: The Elements of Programming Style
Non-programmers might not realize it, but some computer program source code is even harder to read than the rest. Some of this code is so messy that an experienced programmer looks at it and says "I...
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Book Report: The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison
I've "used" Oracle applications. When I say "used", I mean "tried and gave up". Oracle calendar was slow, buggy, and thought it was a good idea to store my password, unencrypted, in a publically vi...
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Book Report: Designing Web Usability
This book is about web usability. It's kinda old, from the year 2000. Reading it with this historical hindsight was somewhat discouraging. Apparently, webmasters have made the same mistakes for sev...
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Book Report: Code
I picked up this book because I'd heard it talked about codes and also about digital circuit design, two topics dear to my heart. I started on it and it seemed pretty readable. But it stayed with p...
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Book Report: The Best American Essays 2006
It's a collection of essays, not in any particular field. Apparently essayists, when they aren't writing about something in particular--uhm, apparently, they tend to write about themselves. Or else ...
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Book Report: Applied Cryptography
This is an old textbook about applying cryptography; that is, it's about computer security. It's the textbook by Bruce Schneier, the book he later said wasn't so important--you can get this stuff ri...
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Book Report: Predictably Irrational
A series of musings about how people really behave. Or, rather, how they misbehave. Describes experiments about placebos, cheating, and other circumstances in which people lie to themselves and to o...
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Book Report: On a Roll
This is a book about business, yet it's a good book. It's Howard Jonas' autobiography. He starts out operating a hot-dog pushcart. He moves on to distributing those tourism brochures you see in ho...
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Book Report: The Lord of Castle Black
Some might say it's been too hectic of a week for me to post a book report, but prepare to be amazed at my review of The Lord of Castle Black: Swashbuckling swords and sorcery.Labels: book...
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Book Report: Letting Go of the Words
I'm a professional technical writer and I recommend this book about writing: Letting Go of the Words. I theoretically train engineers so that they can write clearly. This book would help those peopl...
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Book Report: Hackers and Painters
It's a bunch of essays by Paul Graham about software development and other kinds of development. Some of these essays are interesting, some are irritating. They're interesting because Paul has a wel...
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Book Report: Group Theory in the Bedroom
It's a collection of essays by Brian Hayes--the guy whose magazine article got me into Markov Chain-generated English drivel. I was able to follow most of these essays, which was darned nice since I'...
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Book Report: Gaudy Century
I'm taking the day off work today. It's the day after a Bay Area Night Game (a rather-fun instance thereof). It was one of those Bay Area Night Games that actually happens at night, and thus I was ...
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Book Report: The First $20 Million is Always the Hardest
Just hours left until BANG XX. Can I claim that this is an appropriate time for a book report for a book that has 20 in its title? It's my blog; I can claim anything. The First $20 Million is Alway...
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Book Report: Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
I guess I made through ~100 pages of palace intrigue before I realized I don't especially want to read through that much palace intrigue. Yeah, that's right, I'm yet another person who made it partw...
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Book Report: Altered Carbon
A fun piece of cyberpunky science fiction. Where by "fun... cyberpunky", I of course mean cynical and bleak. Personalities can be placed into new bodies. Criminals are punished by going into force...
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Book Report: The Non-Designer's Design Book
An introduction to layout design. There are general principles; there was also more detailed advice on designing brochures, business cards, and other stuff I don't care about. But the general princ...
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Book Report: Growing a Business
This is a book about running small businesses. The title says "growing", but it might as well have said "evolving". Hawken is thoughtful and wise, reminding the reader not to take on too many probl...
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Book Report: Exploiting Online Games
This book is about hacking online games. Unfortunately, they started out talking about plenty of stuff which I already had read about. Cheating happens. E.g., people in shoot-em-up games use video...
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Book Report: American Shaolin
Yestere'en, I watched the Chinese New Year's parade. I'm not into parades, but I visit a fair number of parades. Why show up an event I'm not into? A non-trivial fraction of my friends are photograp...
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Book Report: Snoop
Yesterday, my office-mate told a story about the struggle with stuff. Her house had a lot of clutter. She was sick of it. So she cleared stuff up. She got stuff organized. She gave stuff away. ...
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Book Report: Refactoring HTML
This book is about cleaning up HTML, the markup language used to write web pages. It's a good book. I'm going to kvetch a lot about parts, but... kvetching comes easy. Anyhow. You know how liberal...
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Book Report: The Psychology of Computer Programming
How to get programmers to get along together. Attempts to use psychology to design easier-to-use computer language features. Discussion of which is better for your organization's culture: batch proc...
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Book Report: Peopleware
I work for a large company. Thus, there are "leadership seminars" with "team-building exercises." I attended one of those. I was confessing this to some friends on Saturday, and one of them knew e...
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Book Report: The Forms of Water
It's a novel by Andrea Barrett, but it's not about scientists or even lab assistants. Who knew that Barrett wrote about anyone other than scientists and lab assistants? This novel is about people. ...
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Book Report: Engineering the City
This book, Engineering the City showed up as an Amazon.com-recommended book, probably because I liked Brian Hayes' book Infrastructure so much. I kinda wish I'd paid more attention to the details of...
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Book Report: Crypto
This last weekend, I pitched in for a playtest of MSPH12 "Jeopardy!". These puzzle-solving endeavors have wonderful moments. Solving puzzles in a team environment--it's very satisfying when my skil...
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Book Report: Crossing the Chasm
This book is about marketing; about marketing for products which are at a certain stage: they have enthusiastic "early adopters", but no big uptake. This stage sounds familiar to me based on my expe...
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Book Report: Working Effectively with Legacy Code
This book is a classic amongst computer programmers. Well, it's a four-year old classic. It captures the, uhm, zeitg^W movement towards unit testing and refactoring. It shares a problem with other...
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Book Report: Spin State
I liked Spin State, a science fiction novel by Chris Moriarty. It's science fiction but with a story in which the characters make mistakes. That's a good thing. I actually found myself thinking li...
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Book Report: The Ipcress File
I came up with an idea for a board-game like computer game. The board was going to be a map of the city. And there were these bits of secret info to move across the city. You control some agents t...
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Book Report: He, She, and It
During BANG 18, I found out that plenty of local goyim puzzlists don't know what a "golem" is. A puzzle required players to recognize monsters by looking at pictures. I thought that was pretty tough...
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Book Report: Googleを支える技術
I'm a technical writer. Technical writers write tersely. This promotes quick comprehension. If your writing is translated, there is another benefit. The translator does not need to work so hard. ...
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Book Report: Going Postal
Skott raises an excellent point: The diskworld novels also have golems. E.g., I read Going Postal. I read this Diskworld novel because it's where the puzzler team "The Smoking GNU" got their name. ...
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Book Report: DEC is Dead, Long Live DEC
This is a book about DEC, Digital Equipment Corporation, a start up that grew big. The author argues that some of the things that made it a great start-up, a great place to work... these things also...
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Book Report: The Craftsman
In a passing reference to this book, The Craftsman, I got the impression that it was a book that studied how people think when they're working. But it isn't that at all. I wish instead people had p...
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Book Report: Code Complete
Computers are hard. This afternoon, I was trying to figure out why some people couldn't view my web site. It sounded like a DNS problem; one guy reported it was affecting him on Comcast in Boston. ...
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Book Report: Sources of Power
This book came out ten years ago. It discusses how people make decisions. Not necessarily how people ought to make decisions--but how they do. It does have some advice on how people can make bette...
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Book Report: Pirate Freedom
If you travel through time, are you free? Or are you hemmed in by predestination? (Postdestination? What do you call destiny when time travel is involved?) That's a complicated question, and fort...
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Book Report: Matter
It's a novel of The Culture. If you didn't like other novels of The Culture, you probably won't like this one. If you like other novels of The Culture, you probably will like this one. If you have...
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Book Report: The Man Who Loved China
Back in 2002, I went to the British Museum where an old illustration maybe showed a punch-card controlled loom from ancient China--long before such were invented in the West. Bookish fellow that I a...
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Book Report: Information Development
Last week, I hung out with a lot of technical writers. It was fun. They were from around the world, and they came with some interesting points of view. And with some interesting foreign microbes. ...
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Book Report: Code Reading
I am getting ready for a The Game, and am thus hyper-aware of white cargo vans. This is tricky; while team-mate Wesley is in town, he's staying close to Delancey Street. As in Delancey Street Mover...
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Book Report: Spook Country
This novel is a lot of fun. There is GIS. There is spycraft. There are references to volapuk, to... I guess William Gibson is showing us that he doesn't need to go quite so far into the future in...
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Book Report: Punching In
I guess I can't think of anything to say about how BANG 19 is going that wouldn't give away seekrit stuff. So here's a book report for Punching In. To research this book, the author worked a few we...
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Book Report: How to Rig an Election
This morning, I'm munching my breakfast, reading Slashdot's feed and I see a name I recognize. The strange part: the name is that of a politico, not a computer programmer. The Slashdot post is point...
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Book Report: Ghost Train to the Eastern Star
It's a recent railway travelogue by Paul Theroux. It was difficult to read in places, perhaps because it is so recent. His trip was in 2005-2006-ish. He sees stirrings of trouble around Ossetia--s...
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Book Report: Gaming the Vote
I know what I can say about BANG 19 preparations. It's necessarily vague, in the name of seekricy, but it's heartfelt. Thank you you past Game Control folks who have shared advice, "war stories", a...
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Book Report: Deliver the Vote
Deliver the Vote is a history of crooked elections in the U.S. of A. It doesn't try to describe all crooked elections. Just some good stories, just enough to fill up a few hundred pages. George Wa...
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Book Report: Daemon
(If you posted a guess about the secret message in the jack-o-lanterns photo, then you were right! Especially considering that was an unplaytested "I have no idea if this is possible" puzzle, I am su...
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Book Report: A Far Country
Scouting game locations for a puzzle hunt, e.g. BANG 19, is time-consuming but fun. It's a good excuse to go out on a tour of not-in-front-of-your-computer. Plus, since you're trying to find places...
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Book Report: Eleanor Rigby
I have so many of these book reports written up. I should post them more often. I don't post them because lately I'm working long hours. (Which sounds impressive until you find out the reason I'm w...
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Book Report: Cosmonaut Keep
There's a parallel story; humanity's learning the secret of a light-speed interstellar starship drive; humanity's rediscovery of same, hundreds of years later. There is politics, humor, ... I dunno,...
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Book Report: You Can't Win
Jury duty continues. Jury selection continues. Maybe this is an appropriate time to post this book report which I typed up a while ago... You Can't Win is the autobiography of Jack Black. Here, b...
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Book Report: TCP/IP Illustrated
Network programming today... gee, I just call into some standard library, say, "I want the webpage at http://slashdot.org/" and it's there. It's almost that easy. You kids today, you don't know how...
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Book Report: My Country Versus Me
A scientist suspected of mailing out Anthrax commits suicide. Which brought up a newslet, a reminder of a recent lawsuit: Hatfill, another scientist sued the FBI after they leaked footage to the med...
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Book Report: Essays in Computing Science (Hoare)
It's a collection of essays on Computer Science by Tony Hoare, dating from the 1960s through the 1980s. This isn't what you'd expect to find on my reading list, but the essay on Communicating Sequen...
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Book Report: The Atrocity Archives
British Intelligence vs Secrets Man was Not Meant to Know. This was a fun read. Not Charles Stross' best work--so if you don't like his other stuff, I'd skip this one. But I liked his other stuff ...
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Book Report: Ambient Findability
This was not the right book for me. Rather, I was not the right person to read this book. Ambient Findability is a high-level overview, a survey of the surge of information that's coming at us, and...
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Book Report: The Air We Breathe
This was a fun novel. As with other Andrea Barrett novels, the heroes are scientists, so I'm inclined to be sympathetic. This novel is narrated in the first person plural, by a community of people....
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Book Report: Singularity Sky
My cousin goes to school in Washington D.C. He was talking with some Washington D.C. bloggers. Except that they don't call themselves bloggers. Why not? Because they're in Washington D.C. and "blog...
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Book Report: Scratch Beginnings
Adam Shepard wanted to see if he could start out in a strange city with just $25 and a bagful of clothes and become a "member of society": have an operational car, a furnished apartment, have $2500, ...
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Book Report: Old Man's War
In this science-fiction novel, it's the far future and yet recognizably-human (albeit heavily-augmented) humans are somehow still relevant? Humans are better at fighting than human-controlled robots...
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Book Report: Noodling for Flatheads
I've been watching teams' Ghost Patrol application videos. They've been fun, with a lot of variety. What does this tell us? Fun: This demonstrates that Gamers are silly Variety: This demonstrates ...
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Book Report: Designing Effective Instruction
Notes about another Instructional Design book. Please pardon the dry nature of this book report. Again, emphasis on measuring learning. Consider making up the final exam questions before you write...
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Book Report: the Castaway Pirates
Last night, I played Modern Art with some folks. It was a high-stakes game. One of us (not me) had revealed that he was one of the top five players of Caylus (a geeky German boardgame) on Brettspie...
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Book Report: Thirteen Moons
The Trail of Tears was a bad thing, but Thirteen Moons was a good novel.Labels: book, middle states...
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Book Report: Invisible Cities
I am back from Los Angeles. I have seen more art museums recently than... than is perhaps healthy. The stench of artsy-fartsiness clings to me still. I'm digging out from underneath a backlog of e...
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Book Report: Developing Technical Training
Please pardon this book report: these are my notes from the book, not the usual wry and insightful commentary. "Instructional design", as near as I can tell, is a movement to apply some rigor to les...
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Book Report: China: Fragile Superpower
This book is about China. This book makes me want to hide my eyes and say "I hope you're wrong." It paints a discouraging picture. The Chinese government fears overthrow by popular uprising. The g...
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Book Report: Wireless Nation
I'm getting some writing done this weekend, finally putting together notes from the Midnight Madness: Back to Basics game. And I'm listening to some music by Dengue Fever. They perform in the style...
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Book Report: Refactoring
Here I am tending to my blog on the bus. I wasn't really planning on it. I was just checking my email. I get email, among other occasions, when someone or something posts a comment to this blog. ...
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Book Report: The Middle Kingdom
I didn't plan to spend today filling out an alternative minimum tax form for my friends at the IRS, but they insisted. I thought maybe I'd write something. But I didn't write anything. Except numb...
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Book Report: Keeping Found Things Found
This book's title is misleading: it make sense. This book's preface is misleading: it makes sense, too. It took a while before I realized that the book was noodling all over the place but not actual...
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Book Report: iWoz
It is Steve Wozniak's autobiography, as told to Gina Smith. It's a fun read. Keep your wits about you as you read--they didn't fact-check all of this material. So when Wozniak tells you what was g...
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Book Report: Foundations of Security
This is a introduction to computer security for programmers. It's subtitled, "What every programmer needs to know." By reading this book I learned... I learned that I'd already learned the foundatio...
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Book Report: Defensive Design for the Web
It's sad news that Rory Root, owner of Berkeley's Comic Relief comic book store, died today. But no-one reads this blog for news. You're here for book reports. Here is a book report for Defensive ...
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Book Report: War and Peace
Russian novels are long. Back in high school, my English class was supposed to read Crime and Punishment. Our teacher asked for a show of hands: how many of us had finished reading the book. Mine ...
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Book Report: War and Peace
Russian novels are long. Back in high school, my English class was supposed to read Crime and Punishment. Our teacher asked for a show of hands: how many of us had finished reading the book. Mine ...
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Book Report: Don't Make Me Think
The SF Minigame was awesome. But I can't say much about that now, since other folks will still get a chance to play in that game. So... a book review about Don't Make me Think This is a book about ...
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Book Report: The Social Life of Information
It was six months when I started looking for work and it was just this last week that I got my first phone screen. There aren't many technical writing jobs in San Francisco, thus phone screens are ra...
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Book Report: Seabiscuit
This was a fun read about horseracing.Labels: book, entertainment industry, interspecies diplomacy...
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Book Report: On Food and Cooking
Here is the recipe I follow for tamales: 1. remove two tamales from package. 2. place in pot with steamer rack 3. place on high heat 4. get distracted by computer stuff, lose track of time 4. when ap...
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Book Report: Infrastructure
Wow, Infrastructure is a great book. You should acquire it and read it. (Here, by "read" I mean "look at the photos". But you can read it, too, if you like.) It is photographs of "infrastructure"...
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Book Report: India (From Midnight to Millenium)
Summary: India is a melting pot of cultures, except that it hasn't melted. India is a diverse mix of cultures. Groups get mad and argue. It would be better if they just got along. For the most p...
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Milestone: 11 Million Hits (plus gratuitous Taft domain pestering)
Wow, it's the site's eleven-millionth hit. 195.225.178.21 - - [20/Feb/2008:06:20:03 -0400] "GET /anecdotal/hunt/15/darcy_ian.html HTTP/1.1" 200 853 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT...
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Book Report: Uncommon Carriers
I'd read most of these John McPhee essays already, and it was nice to read them again. This collection includes the essay about riding in the hazmat truck. That essay is darned good. Look, not all...
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Book Report: Nickel and Dimed
I've been having a good time this weekend, hanging out at social gatherings around various in-town out-of-towners. I guess I should report on a happy book, but instead the next book in line is Nicke...
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Book Report: Making Globalization Work
This book is worth reading. That's unfortunate; it has about 30 pages of interesting material scattered amongst 300 pages of verbiage. It's a book about Globalization--mostly about opening up marke...
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Book Report: Better
You think I read this book because of my recent hospital visit, but I swear it was already on my to-do list. And it's not just about medicine. Sort of. This book, by Atul Gawande, is sort of about...
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Book Report: Beautiful Code Chs 30-33
(If you're reading these posts in reverse chronological order, be aware that this Book Report is the last one of a series. This book report is for Beautiful Code, a book of essays. Rather than try ...
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Book Report: Beautiful Code Chs 26-29
Labor-Saving Architecture / William R. Otte and Douglas C. Schmidt This is a fun essay, talking about issues that arise if you have a distributed network of computers and you want all of those comput...
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Book Report: Mathematical Cranks
My lip-bump had a name: pyogenic granuloma. You can Google that if you enjoy gross photos. Speaking of annoyances, what about those mathematical cranks, eh? Back in 2006, I reported that R.S.J. Re...
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Book Report: The Inmates are Running the Asylum
I didn't finish reading this book. It's about software usability. Well, the first few dozen pages were about the importance of software usability, with precious little advice on how to achieve same...
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Book Report: Beautiful Code: Chs 9-12
(I started learning Erlang a couple of weeks ago. Then I stopped. I'd started learning how to use the concurrency features. So I tried a simple program: it ran a "while true" loop in two threads--...
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Book Report: Beautiful Code Chs 5-8
Correct, Beautiful, Fast (in That Order) / Elliotte Rusty Harold Emerging from the previous essay, I saw that this essay was going to be about verifying correctness of XML. My yawning muscles tensed...
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Book Report: Beautiful Code Chs 22-25
(Visiting the doctor is good for you. Today, I visited a cardiologist to make sure that my recent hospital visit was Really No Big Deal. Thus, I missed the last bus to work and worked from home tod...
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Book Report: Beautiful Code Chs 2-4
(Another episode of Iron Puzzler is coming soon. And now, on to our partial book report, Beautiful Code, chapters 2-4...) Subversion's Delta Editor / Karl Fogel This essay was nice. It talks about...
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Book Report: Beautiful Code Chs 17-21
Another Level of Indirection / Diomidis Spinellis I'm not exactly sure what I was supposed to get out of this essay. "Function pointers can be useful."? OK, the point of these essays was not to in...
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Book Report: Beautiful Code Ch 1
Beautiful Code is a book about programming well. There are 33 chapters. In each chapter, one or two big-name programmers write about "the most beautiful piece of code they knew." As you'd expect w...
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Book Report: Anathem
Yesterday, I watched a co-worker give a "practice" thesis defense. My workplace has plenty of grad students who are just, uhm, taking a little break from school. He's one of them. I, on the other h...
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Book Report: She's Such a Geek
This is a book of essays by women geeks. It's pretty inspiring. That's partially because geek stories can be inspiring. But also because the stories from several years back tend to be about women ...
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Book Report: Rainbows End
It pays to increase your word power. I always thought that "hyperventilation" meant "breathing too fast", but really it means "breathing too fast and/or too deeply". I didn't know it was possible to...
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Book Report: Planet of Slums
Seriously? They used Erlang? On purpose? What's that you say? The mic is on? We're rolling? We're on the air? Oh! Ahem. It's time for a Book Report. This book by Mike "City of Quartz" Davis ...
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Book Report: On the Edge
I posted that link to that "Another Bubble" video. Computer nostalgia is easy, you don't have to look back, the past just keeps coming back. That viper Wade Randlett who spread lies about the "New...
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Book Report: Long Time Leaving
Yes, I have mostly been writing about the computer crapola lately. But I do still have a long bus commute and I have still been reading plenty. Would that everyhting I read was as much fun as Long ...
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Book Report: Halting State
This book, a science fiction novel by Charles Stross, is pretty funny. In the first act, there is a claymore. There is a heist in a computer game. There is electronic security. There are some hol...
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Book Report: Everything is Miscellaneous
I am scheduled for HEAD & NECK SURGERY. It says so, in all-capital letters on the appointment form. Don't worry, mom, HEAD & NECK SURGERY is a scary-sounding category of things, but really s...
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Book Report: Devices and Desires
Monday did not go as I hoped. Monday, I thought I was going in for HEAD & NECK SURGERY. Instead, I was going in to the Head and Neck Surgery department so they could look at my lip, diagnose tha...
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Book Report: Iron Council
I read a lot on the bus. Today, I didn't take the bus and yet I've been able to get yet more reading in. My secret? I'm staying home today with food poisoning. I'm not trying to read anything too...
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Book Report: In Search of Stupidity
I'm not working on gPhone the Open Handset Alliance. There were various internal recruiting drives for the project; I slunk away from those, kept my head down. I've worked on some mobile phone plat...
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Book Report: Dreaming in Code
Tomorrow is Buy Nothing Day, but I'll probably buy some food. Usually, I Buy Nothing for Buy Nothing Day. To make that work, I stock up on food ahead of time. I was going to do that late Wednesday...
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Book Report: Core Memory
I like old computers. This is a book of photos from the Computer History Museum. The photographer, Mark Richards, gave a talk at work a while back. When people asked him how he chose which things ...
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Book Report: the Algorithm Design Manual
Stir craziness > geek craziness. I got a new computer today. I was really excited! But not for the reason you think. Sure, it's a sweet new machine that actually works with my DSL connection, ...
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Book Report: I Claudius
Someone asked for the origin of the name of the Canary Islands, with the caveat that it was a trick question. So everyone present wracked their brains. I asked, "Were they named after dogs?" and th...
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Book Report: Glasshouse
It's fun to walk up next to Rich Bragg when he least expects it, especially if you're dressed up in glow sticks to look like a character from the movie "Tron". You remember "Tron", that movie where ...
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Book Report: Botany of Desire
This book by Michael Polan was fun. It's about four domesticated plants, talking about how some plants survive not by being tenacious but rather delicious. Or maybe beautiful or nutritious or intox...
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Book Report: Universal Selection Theory and the Second Darwinian Revolution
Ron and Sua are moving soon; last night I helped Ron to pack up the library. "You should read this," he said, showing me a book. Its title was Skepticism and ... uhm, Skepticism and .... Uhm. I f...
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Book Report: The Starfish and the Spider
Yesterday, I was on my way to the comic book store when I saw Professor Karp. That is to say, I saw that computer science NP-Completeness guy. (Note to non-computer geeks: NP-Completeness is A Big ...
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Book Report: Sand Cafe
I have now eaten ramen noodles that were prepared on one of those espresso machine milk-steamer attachment thingies. I am told that the espresso machine cost a few thousand dollars. However, the no...
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Book Report: Accelerando
Tonight, I bought some ramen. It should have been a pretty simple operation. I was in a supermarket. There was ramen. There was my shopping basket. But it was difficult. This ramen was 25 cents...
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Book Report: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
I started reading this book because it was highly recommended by Wikilens. I stopped reading it because I didn't want to read more about day-to-day life in Brooklyn. The first hundred pages were fa...
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Book Report: The Prestige
If you're an author, e.g. Christopher Priest, there is danger in writing a book that relies on its Amazing! Colossal! Surprising! twist ending. Your audience, while reading the book, will attempt t...
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Book Report: Leave me Alone, I'm Reading
Today at lunch, the conversation was all about web application security. No, wait, it wasn't even about web application security. It was about what sort of effort it would take to educate computer ...
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Book Report: Invisible Man
Yesterday, I went to a game party at work. I won a couple of games, which was more than my share. You might think that means I'm a brilliant strategist, until you find out what games I won (and how...
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Book Report: Happiness (Lessons from a New Science)
Yesterday, I was walking in the Mission district and ran into Janak R. Janak just finished up an internship at my place of employment; soon he will go back to UCB. He asked, "Do you live around here...
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Book Report: Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser
Shinteki Decathlon 3 was awesome. Since then, I have had approximate 0.0 hours of unstructured awake time. Thus, not so much blogging. But I will paraphrase a conversation I was in a while ba...
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Book Report: Brainiac
It's a book about trivia by Ken Jennings, that guy who kept winning at Jeopardy!. Fortunately, this book is about a lot more than just Jeopardy!. The author explores the world of trivia--the histor...
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Book Report: All the Right Enemies
Here is a mini-puzzle from BATH3 (that pirate-themed puzzle hunt from earlier this year): Prepithets Ye seek a four-letter word. Jack Flash _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Bill Cody _ _ _ _ _ ...
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Book Report: The Wonga Coup
Some people worry that laryngitis might interfere with their opera singing. Me, I spent the day at home trying to recover from laryngitis, listening to operetta. And I'm glad that I don't rely on m...
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Book Report: The Tipping Point
My intern just got back from attending Lunch 2.0, chatting with web industry folks. Last night, I went to Triple Rock brewery for a little Geoworks reunion, finding out what my ex-coworkers are up t...
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Book Report: Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers
Context matters. At work, I'm sitting in a new area with some folks who don't know me very well. Today, someone asked for some help making a decision. I didn't have an opinion, so I sought an exec...
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Book Report: The Roads to Sata
In this travelog, our hero walks the length of Japan, from the tippy-top of Hokkaido, the length of Honshu, down south past Sakurajima. This was in the 1980s, and gaijin were mysterious; he encounte...
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Book Report: Phonogram
I canceled out of the stuff I'd planned to do today. Instead, I am sitting, napping, eating. I wore myself out last week. First, getting over a cold. Then, having just gotten over the cold, stayi...
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Book Report: New York Underground
You might remember a while back I read the book RE/Search Pranks 2 and found out about Julia Solis, who together with the organization Dark Passage set up a LARP based around New York and an abandone...
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Book Report: The Boys
I'm not at Comic-con this weekend. I just read comics, but I don't especially want to meet their creators. I especially don't especially want to meet the creators of "The Boys." "The Boys" is perha...
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Book Report: Against the Day
Long.Labels: book, explosions, mining...
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Book Report: Poor George
Apparently Bernd Becher, industrial site photographer, died last week. Dammit. I would prefer that tragedies be restricted to fiction, please. Poor George is bleak. Nobody knows why they do the th...
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Book Report: Lunch Lessons
Those Debian install CDs showed up. Fortunately, I have two computers. So here I sit, typing on the laptop-- uhm, excuse me. OK, I'm back. Here I sit on the laptop, occasionally pausing to swap C...
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Book Report: Dishwasher
Dave Hill wrote in to say that he'd been reading some of my old web pages. (He didn't say so, but he probably started browsing because he was hoping to see some kind of writeup about the the No More...
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Book Report: Assassination Vacation
Pre-book-report non sequiturs can be fun: Darcy Krasne. We now return you to today's Book Report, already in progress. ...ever get published? Though this book is by Sarah Vowell, I blame its widesp...
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Book Report: The Wisdom of Crowds
Ron and Sua were in town on Friday. That's why I was stuck on a train. I'd had dinner with them on the peninsula, caught the train back, blammo. But it was good to see Ron, good to see Sua. This ...
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Book Report: The Undercover Economist
It's another book explaining economics to the masses. Why did I start reading this? I should have known better. I've read too many popular-economics books lately. I stopped reading this one part...
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Book Report: One Hand Jerking
My friend 'Lene was bicycling along, minding her own business, when this set of streetcar tracks came out of nowhere and flipped her bike over. I was making fun of her for getting into a bike accide...
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Book Report: Just for Fun
cranea17:/evidence> ls What do you think this is, UNIX? I think that's funny, but that's because I spend a lot of time in UNIXoid environments, specifically Linux. I'm biased. Maybe that's als...
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Book Report: JPod
I bought an episode of Sam & Max. I hoped that there would be good jokes. I was nervous that it wouldn't run on my windows machine. It's a laptop, so I figured it doesn't have a 3D graphics card...
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Book Report: How to Spell the Alphabet
A while back, I pointed out some not-exactly-puzzle-ish-but-not-exactly-not-either images by Tauba Auerbach. I finally broke down and sent away for a book of her work, How to Spell the Alphabet. To...
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Book Report: How I Came into my Inheritance (and other true stories)
'Lene is out of the hospital. Meanwhile, Alexandra says that her mother is sick; Team Mystic Fish might be on shaky ground this weekend. I have no health problems myself; in theory I have no cause ...
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Book Report: Goodbye Darkness
This memoir of the Pacific in WWII is pretty disturbing. I suspect that William Manchester was pulling punches, but his story still has plenty of punch. People got blown up. People fought at close...
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Book Report: Garbage Land
Yesterday was all errands, errands, errands. Except that one of those errands was "Return Garbage Land to the library." and since that library was in Berkeley, I made a couple of fun side trips. I ...
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Book Report: Charles Sheeler: Across Media
I am still catching up on email from the last couple of weeks. Going on business trip = distracting. Good thing I had this book report written up ahead of time. Ahem, Charles Sheeler: Across Media...
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Site Update: The Basic Eight vs Lowell High School
(Today is April Fool's Day, but this is not an April Fool's Day prank.) The Basic Eight is a novel by Daniel Handler. It's set in Roewer High School. Daniel Handler went to Lowell High School a ye...
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Book Report: Rain or Shine
You want to read this book. It's short, it's easy. It has rodeo announcing, stirring human drama, show business, the changing face of the American West, junk food wrappers. The writer, Cyra McFad...
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Book Report: The Man Who Was Thursday
People keep telling me how great G.K. Chesterton was. So I read one of his books, The Man Who Was Thursday. It had some fun sentences, some witty banter, some good paragraphs, but the book overall ...
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Book Report: Ilium
Raymond Chen, celebrity blogger, gave a talk at my place of employment yesterday. Afterwards, I went up to ask him a question. (Well, OK, to request that he apply his combination of knowledge of En...
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Book Report: Heat
Bill Buford's previous book Among the Thugs was wonderfully brutal and scary, so I figured I'd like this book about restaurant kitchens and butchery. It's fascinating. He talks about how chefs lear...
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Book Report: Geek Love
It was difficult to decide whether or not to go to that gallery show opening. But I was able to harness the wisdom of crowds: the humongous slow evening commute traffic decided I wasn't going. Bah....
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Book Report: Disgrace
This past weekend I spent plenty of time in the company of BATH folks doing secret things. Normally I'd be bouncing up and down and eager to tell you about what happened, but... Actually, even if I ...
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Book Report: The Design of Everyday Things
Yesterday I flew back into the San Francisco bay area after a business trip down South. I was looking out the window as we passed over scenic Fremont. We passed over some bodies of water. I looked...
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Book Report: Valencia
Still pretty busy with game stuff--applications, puzzle ideas. It's been far too hectic for the last few days. Sometime yesterday afternoon, things turned a corner and I started to dig out from und...
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Book Report: The Tapir's Morning Bath
This book, by Elizabeth Royte, is about a cluster of scientists at a research station on an island in the middle of Gatun Lake, an area flooded during the creation of the Panama Canal. The scientist...
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Book Report: The Railway Man
The good news is that Gene Wolfe has a new book coming out with "Pirate" in the title: Pirate Freedom. The bad news is that book isn't scheduled to emerge until November, months after the pirate-the...
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Book Report: Parallel Distributed Processing
Based on the title, I hoped that this heavy two-volume set of books containing a number of articles would teach me a lot about how to write programs that run on several machines at once. After readi...
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Book Report: India Unbound
In this book, Gurcharan Das whines about life in India under the "License Raj". For many decades, India's government was over-regulated. The government was in charge of everything. Bureaucrats had ...
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Book Report: The Best Software Writing
This weekend has been hectic. I attended a Game Control summit. I haven't listened to the audio I recorded. It could be interesting; it could be white noise. I stopped by the start of the Chinese...
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Book Report: Anansi Boys
I watched the no-more-secrets application videos that have been posted so far. I found the toy sharks very funny, funnier than I would have expected from the verbal description "well, there are toy ...
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Book Report: American Gods
Did you know that "No More Secrets" is an anagram for "Cosmo Re-Enters", and that "Cosmo" is the name of the villain from the movie "Sneakers"? Why yes, I have been staring at Game application mater...
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Book Report: Against the Gods (the Remarkable Story of Risk)
Last night, I went out to a musical performance dealie. It was TV on the Radio. I'd heard their most recent album, and it seemed OK but not great. But Rob Pfile wanted to go see the show. Rob has...
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Link: Book Report: Prank the Monkey (pages 91, 92)
You might think yesterday's book report was obnoxious, only covering the first third of a book. If so, you'll find this even more obnoxious: a review of pages 91-92 of a book. Rob "How Much is Insi...
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Book Report: The Winter Queen
Ah, winter. Cold, snowy, icy, windy winter. What a great time of year for sitting inside and reading. The Winter Queen doesn't really have anything to do with the season, through. This novel is b...
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Book Report: Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?
Last night, I watched Word for Word perform Lorrie Moore's short story "Which is More than I can Say About Some People." Wow, what a great short story. It was fun seeing it performed, but it was al...
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Book Report: Strange Itineraries
It's a book of short stories by Tim Powers. There are some good ideas in here--but then most of those good ideas got recycled in later novels. Uhm, and I think they work better in the novels. I en...
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Book Report: Shampoo Planet
I attended this meeting via video conference. No, I was not the guy in the gorilla suit. I have never ordered a gorilla-suited singing telegram. I figured that the concept is so wonderful that the...
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Book Report: The Language Instinct (the first third)
I am back from Chicago. (I went to Chicago! It was fun! I got to hang out with my cousin Betsy!) I'm still catching up on mail. I'm still downloading my mail. My main computer is still on a dial...
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Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Book Reports
I read many blogs. According to Google Reader's new Trends feature, in the last 30 days, I've read 1977 items in the past 30 days from 302 feeds. (And I've been cutting back. When the Trends featu...
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Book Report: Treasure Island
I kicked myself off of Game Control for the Pirate BATH game. I was getting tired of reading about nothing but pirates. Factual pirate research isn't much fun. Pirates were bullies, they killed pe...
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Book Report: Shadow Cities
This book, by Robert Neuwirth, changed the way I think about the world. It's about slums, squatter cities, shanty towns, favelas. It's about people who build on land they don't own. It's about peo...
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Book Report: The Making of the Atomic Bomb
I've read several books about the Manhattan Project. They all had a focus. New documents that had come to light. Focusing on one of the minor players. Family life. Now I realize why all of those...
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Book Report: Life of Pi
I only made it about halfway through this book. I found it dull. I like reading books about animals. This book has some animals in it. But... maybe I'd rather read a book that's all about animals...
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Book Report: Guanxi
This book is about how Microsoft set up a research lab in Beijing. This was a pioneering effort. China's economy had opportunities for kids who wanted to Make Money Fast in computing--but not so mu...
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Book Report: Future Noir
Yes, I read a book about the making of the movie Blade Runner. I make fun of people who read the entertainment news, but I spent more than an hour reading this book. It's mostly the fluff that you e...
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Book Report: Cold Mountain
This is a great book, an odyssey set during the USA's Civil War. It's a bleak study of the horrors of war. It's a story about humans and beasts. You've probably already heard about it. After I rea...
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Book Report: Beautiful Code: Chs 13-16
The Design of the Gene Sorter / Jim Kent This essay is what I want to see in a book called Beautiful Code. He talks about the design. He dives into specifics of implementation. The section "Theory...
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Book Report: Soldier of Sidon
This is another book about Latro, the soldier who has lost his short-term memory. To remember things, he writes them down, then reads them each morning. Except that sometimes his mornings are too b...
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Book Report: Re/Search Pranks 2
I had an interesting phone conversation a few weeks ago. I responded to some spam email offering to optimize my web site so that it would rank higher on web site searches. There are legitimate ways...
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Book Report: Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide
This is a short book report. As if that wasn't bad enough, it's about computer programming. So maybe I should start out by relaying the story one of my relatives told tonight at dinner. It's a stor...
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Book Report: the Birth of Plenty
Most books are boring. Most books about economics are boring. But a few stand out, are interesting. Some reviewers fooled me into thinking The Birth of Plenty would be interesting. Those reviewer...
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Science Fiction Book Club Meme
I plagiarized the following explanation from someone else who was passing along this meme: This is a list of the 50 "most significant" science fiction/fantasy novels, 1953-2002, according to the Scie...
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Book Report: American-Born Chinese
[I'm testing out a new anti-spam tool. In theory, I haven't told it to actually discard any mail yet. So in theory you shouldn't see a difference. But mistakes can happen. So if you send me somet...
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Book Report: Cards as Weapons
Ricky Jay came to speak at my place of employment today. I brought my old, worn copy of his book Cards as Weapons in, in hopes of getting it autographed. It turns out that he doesn't want to autogr...
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Book Report: The Breeze from the East
Mostly, I am not reading books. While I work on the Hogwarts write-up, I am not reading books. Mostly. I've posted some book reports in the past few weeks--but I'd read those books beforehand, wri...
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Book Report: The Man Behind the Microchip
Lea W. is in town, visiting from Cincinnati. Several folks gathered at Yancy's Saloon on Irving to kick it with Lea. Michael asked the question: "What do you love to do? There are a bunch of things...
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Book Report: The Island of Lost Maps
The Island of Lost Maps is non-fiction, a book about a non-descript thief who slices rare maps out of old books in libraries. It was kind of a non-descript book. I can't remember much of it. I rem...
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Book Report: The Invention that Changed the World
This book was a pretty good general history of the early development of RADAR. It doesn't stop at the end of WWII, but also talks about some of the radio telescope. I learned from this book--from m...
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Book Report: BAE05: Ellen Ullman's "Dining with Robots"
The Best American Essays 2005 contains two essays which pay homage to the then recently-deceased chef Julia Child. One of them is by Ellen Ullman. Ellen Ullman is a geek; she writes about software ...
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Book Report: BAE05: Andrea Barrett's "The Sea of Information"
Early Saturday morning, my friend Tom Lester drove me to the Emeryville Amtrak station from Berkeley. He pointed out the bakery called Sweet Adeline, and said that they had good cookies. My memorie...
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Book Report: The Algebraist
I walked several miles today so that I could fail to see a calligraphy exhibit. In theory, it has some work by Tauba Auerbach. In theory, it was open today, but a sign on the door said it was close...
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Books Report: Visual Explanations, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information
I worked late tonight for no good reason. My deadlines are all self-imposed. I just got a little excited, missed the reasonably-timed buses, caught a late bus back. Mother Nature abetted my bad be...
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Book Report: Us and Them
A conversation with my office-mate as I took out my ear-phones: me: I sure am glad I brought this little audio-recorder dealie along on that treasure hunt game, it made it easy to take good notes. ...
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Book Report: A Perfect Red
Blogger just enabled full editing of templates in the new Layout system. It's different from the old Blogger template system. I played with an early version of it, and I like it a lot better. It wa...
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Book Report: Introduction to the Practice of Statistics
Today, I'm playtesting the Hogwarts Game. This game is going to be kind of unusual in that Game Control is providing transportation. They warned us not to pack our stepladders, copy machines, cooler...
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Book Report: The Great Wave (Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History)
Sometimes prices go up. This has happened before and will happen again. This hurts poor people more than it hurts the rich: poor people already spend most of their money. When prices go up, they can...
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Book Report: Eight Skilled Gentlemen
Must pack. Must pack for Hogwarts playtest. Meanwhile, you can consider this book report for Eight Skilled Gentlement: It's a novel. It's swashbuckling fun set in a fantasy world based on kinda-...
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Book Report: The untold story of the THE TRUE VALUE OF PI
Today I tagged along on the Google Intern Scavenger Hunt. But I am sworn to secrecy about on that topic. So I will not write about that. It wouldn't work to say, "Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, incl...
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Book Report: Spam Kings
The Shinteki game was fun! But I'm not going to write about that now because (a) I couldn't post it now, since more people are going to play, and shouldn't have their surprises foiled and (b) if tod...
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Book Report: Servants of the Map
If I were king, I would declare a national holiday: Andrea Barrett is Awesome Day. If I were king, I'd be a cruel despot; soon a resistance movement would form. One of their pet causes would no dou...
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Book Report: Political Fictions
In theory, American politicians choose policies which will find favor in the eyes of the electorate. In practice, American politicians choose phrases which will find favors in the eyes of the electo...
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Book Report: Out of Control
Interesting reporting and interviews about bottom-up organization, order from chaos, and emergent behavior. Plus some talk about What It All Means. Unfortunately, it doesn't take much talk about Wh...
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Book Report: Mathematical Snapshots
I just went out to see that crossword puzzle movie "Wordplay" with my parents and their friend Carol Kare. Carol is a crossword puzzle enthusiast, but she wasn't always. But the first time she picke...
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Book Report: Hidden Order
It's a economics book aimed at non-economists. It introduces terms and sets up some interesting thought experiments. E.g., what is a good way to divvy up chores between roommates if those roommates...
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Book Report: The Google Story
Now I've read two books about the history of Google: The Google Story and John Batelle's The Search. Of the two, I recommend The Google Story. It picks up on some things which Batelle overlooked. ...
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Book Report: The Collected Castle Waiting
Castle Waiting was one of the best comics ever. It's by Linda Medley. It's set in the world of fairy tales, but it's so smart and so funny. It's not scary like fairy tales are scary, because it's n...
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Book Report: Bury the Chains
If you're from the USA, then happy Independence Day! I can't think of a less appropriate day to publish this book report on Bury the Chains, which has charming stories about slaves in the American wa...
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Book Report: the Book of Illusions
Wow, this novel is certainly literature. There are echoes and themes throughout the work. There are worlds within worlds, with parallels between the worlds; the obsessions of creators appear as sha...
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Book Report: 4 Dada Suicides
Dada is not art; art is dada. Before I talk about the book 4 Dada Suicides, I want to plug an art show I saw yesterday, by the artists' group Fiber Dimensions. As you might guess from the name, thes...
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Book Report: 109 East Palace
July 4th is a holiday in the USA, celebrated with fireworks. On July 5th, I was looking at a stretch of road next to Candlestick Park on the southern edge of San Francisco. It was covered with card...
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Book Report: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
I was just expecting a pulpy Western. And this book is a pulpy Western. But it's written well, and also has some interesting musings upon the topic of greed. That quote which is famous for not bei...
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Book Report: Out of Eden (an Odyssey of Ecological Invasion)
(or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Invading Species) This is a fun book on a serious subject. Alan Burdick traveled the world, talking to scientists about invading species. Sometimes p...
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Book Report: One Billion Customers
I could mention that I'm over my cold, but that's not as interesting as the book One Billion Customers. Not even close. It's a book about doing business in China in recent times a la the 90s. Jame...
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Book Report: Maximum City
I hear wild cheering outside. Does that mean that the USA scored a goal in the World Cup match just now? Maybe I should care, but I don't. Which reminds me of Maximum City. I only made it partway...
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Book Report: The Control of Nature
I'm still sick, a little. I'm better than I was. This morning I thought I was all better. So I hopped on the bus to work. I had a coughing fit on the bus. And another few during the day at work....
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Book Report: Strange Brains and Genius
I'm playing the excellent game PsychoNauts. It's a fun game. In this game, you get to crawl around inside the minds of some pretty insane folks. Insane people can be fun. So you might think I'd li...
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Book Report: Naked Economics
Many people recommended Naked Economics, but I should have paid attention to the details of their recommendation. This book is an introduction to economics. If you took "Economics 101" back in colle...
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Book Report: My Kind of Place
As a snack on Saturday, I had some hummus on good bread. For dinner, I had some more. I didn't think to put the hummus in the fridge in between, but I thought It will probably be OK. But it wasn't O...
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Book Report: Cloud Atlas
This book was fun. It does playful things with structure. It takes the idea of a nested framing story and twists it around. The result is a sort of ziggurat of prose, each layer a piece of genre f...
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Book Report: The Battle Over Hetch Hetchy
I finished playing the excellent game Psychonauts! It was totally worth buying an XBox just to play this game. Actually, I didn't make it to the end of the game. I made it to the start of the "mea...
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Book Report (of a sort): Sucker's Progress (more or less)
National poetry month is April. So I'll rhyme all month! Oh yes I will. A book not to read if you're in a hurry? The long Sucker's Progress is by Richard Asbury Its style is both list-y and rambli...
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Book Report: The Nautical Chart
You may recall that a few weeks ago, my simple plan to play the excellent game PsychoNauts hit a snag when I failed to rent an XBox machine. This weekend, I tried again. I'd asked around about XBox...
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Book Report: First Democracy
Last night I went out with a couple of friends to see the band Quasi. This was a good thing. I finally finally made it to a show at the Cafe du Nord, thus checking off one of my life goals. Also, ...
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Book Report: 400 Million Customers
(Yes, I received some puzzle-hunt-related clothing tips in my snail mail. But aren't you getting a little tired of reading about puzzle hunts? It's been so long since we had a book report. Let us n...
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Book Report: The Search
Just a few hours ago, my weekend plans were so simple. Put the excellent game PsychoNauts into my backpack so I remember to bring it home from work. On the way home from work, stop off at BlockBust...
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Book Report: One Hand Shaking
We Californians believe in the absurd. But it's a pleasant surprise when the absurd reciprocates. Lowell Darling, artist and prankster, campaigned to be Governor of California back in 1978. He cap...
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Book Report: The Nudist on the Late Shift
Last weekend, I was working on an art project. Well, not exactly an art project. It was kind of a fake job application. The competition is fierce for this fake job, and some people are jockeying f...
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Book Report: Mixed Reviews
Somedays your quality of life is mixed, but a good discovery can brighten everything. Yesterday morning, my streetcar was late, my bus was late, my bus filled up, I had to sit on the floor of the bus...
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Book Report: How to Hack a Party Line
The "New Economy" wasn't just a snake-oil story to extract venture capital money from gullible investors. It was also a snake-oil story to convince newly-wealthy tech CEOs to give lots of money to P...
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Book Report: Created in Darkness by Troubled Americans
It's a collection of humor pieces from the McSweeney's web site. When I ride the bus in the morning, I don't have a net connection. Or sometimes I do, except that I didn't bring my laptop. Or some...
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Book Report: Remaking the World
This is a collection of essays by Henry Petrowski about engineering. I suspect that he was paid by the word. The first essay is about the engineer Charles Steinmetz. But Petrowski wants an angle on S...
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Book Report: Nightwork
It's a book about MIT pranks, with photos. Including some color photos. It was nice. Web sites can be more comprehensive, but are not so easy to read on the streetcar. Thus, I was glad to read th...
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Book Report: Last Crossing
It's pancake day, and I'm sick with a cold. Normally, I love pancakes, but today my body craves only soup, gruel, and tea. So be it. There will be other opportunities to eat pancakes. Today, I st...
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Book Report: Krakatoa
Krakatoa was a volcano that got bigger and bigger until it blew up. Krakatoa was a book that got longer and longer until I just didn't want to hear any more about volcanoes, the Reuters news service...
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Book Review: Copies in Seconds
It's a history of the invention of Xerography. Eh, it was okay.Labels: book, ok...
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Book Report: the Zero Game
I just got back from a business trip to New York. I stayed in a corporate apartment. When I entered the apartment and looked around the living room, I saw that previous tenants had left some books to...
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Book Report: People's History of the United States
Reading Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States is hard work. He writes about some parts of USA history which I didn't know about. Some of these pieces of history were pretty disturbing...
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Book Report: Fortune's Formula
William Poundstone wrote Prisoner's Dilemma, one of my favorite books ever. That book convinced me to look more closely at the prisoner's dilemma, and that in turn changed the way that I think about...
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Book Report: Beyond the Hundredth Meridian
On the one side: snake-oil salesmen selling land, politicians seeking more consituents, consultants boosting their chances at government grants with Pollyannish lies of a land of plenty in need of s...
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Book Report: Tuxedo Park
Jennet Conant's biography of Alfred Loomis is fascinating. Loomis was an interesting character. He was a physicist, founding a Physics lab in the hoity-toity community of Tuxedo Park, NY. When WWII...
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Book Report: Swimming to Antarctica
Yesterday, I was walking to the library. A cold wind blew. A light rain started to fall. I considered fetching my rain jacket out of my backpack, but talked myself out of it. I thought What would...
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Book Report: A Secret Life
This book by Benjamin Weiser has interesting ethical choices, history, and spycraft. A Polish navy officer became a traitor to Soviet-controlled Poland; which is to say that he arguably became a her...
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Book Report: Portuguese Irregular Verbs
I posted a new travelog on this site, but I don't think it turned out very well. So I'm not going to link to it from here. I won't take the time to point out stuff I've done that doesn't read well....
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Book Report: Old Goriot
It's a French slice of life showing how petty greed and ambition amongst the middle classes can lead to zzz.... I only made it a few chapters into this book. Tags: book | once ground-breaking&...
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Book Report: Metropolis
I am sick today. I lost my voice. So it's a bad day for conversation. But a good day for napping, blogging, and reading. Out of sympathy for my plight, I think you should read Metropolis. Go read...
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Book Report: Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the Edge of the World
This book has two parallel storylines; one is interesting and one is not. I almost stopped reading the book because I found one of the storylines so boring. But it turns out that the two storylines...
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Book Report: Garlic and Sapphires
I am basically over my cold, but the sore throat remains. Thus, I wanted soup. Citrus Club, a soup place on the Haight, was closed. I guess they wanted to enjoy their holidays or something. So I ...
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Book Report: Why We Buy
Reading this book in 2005 was a waste of my time. When this book was first published back in 1999, it was probably pretty interesting. So interesting that everyone was talking about it. So I had a...
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Book Report: the Psycho Ex Game
Question: Under what circumstances will Larry read a romance novel? Answer: If one of the co-authors is Andy Prieboy. That's right, Andy Prieboy. Question: Wait, is that a good reason? Answer: As ...
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Book Report: The King of California
This book by Mark Arax and Rick Wartzman ranks up with Cadillac Desert and City of Quartz as great books about the intersection of geography and history in the Western USA. It's about the history of...
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Book Report: Dreadnought
My cousin Betsy was in town this last weekend. She was full of energy. My parents and I had to take her in shifts, and we still got worn out keeping up with her. I accompanied her to a couple of m...
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Book Report: Dealers of Lightning
Sometimes, it's good to be wrong. For example, I claim to be pretty jaded. But when I saw a little dog, a Yorkshire terrier-style dog, walking along this morning carrying a rubber chicken, I was fil...
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Book Report: The Three Musketeers
I bet that those long stretches of dialog between people from different social classes--I bet those were pretty funny back when they were relevant to the culture. Unlike now, when they're kinda bori...
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Book Report: The Curious Life of Robert Hooke
Robert Hooke was a scientist during the 1600s. Did you read Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle? Of course you did. Or you at least got started. Robert Hooke was one of the mad scientists that figure...
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Book Report: A Book of Common Prayer
If you're walking along the street and you see a Joan Didion book sitting on a garbage can, pick it up and take it home. I did, and I wasn't sorry. You know all of those logic puzzles where you're ...
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Book Report: Birth of the Chess Queen
Did you know that Al Gore chartered a couple of planes to help out people in Katrina-smashed areas? It's enough to make you wish the nation had put some more resources at his disposal. But let's no...
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Book Report: The Big Rock Candy Mountain
Back when I was telecommuting, I'd listen to DJ Toby's show on KUSF Tuesday afternoons. Some days, she'd play the song Big Rock Candy Mountain, a song about the Promised Land for Bums. In the Big ...
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Home Games
I sit here wheezing and sick at home in front of my computer, cheering myself up with memories of happy days. E.g., the previous six days. Wednesday my department at work had an offsite outing. ...
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Book Report: History of Pi
This was a fun book about the history of Mathematics as viewed through the lens of pi. I don't much enjoy reading history-of-mathematics books. I halfway remember my history of mathematics. That me...
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Book Report: Cork Boat
As an occasionally obnoxious person who tries to talk his friends into strange activities, I was glad to read the autobiography of an occasionally obnoxious person (John Pollack) who talks his friend...
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Not Quite Letting Go of Spring
Did I mention that White Mughals mentions a doctor treating a bladder infection? And the doctor is named George Ure. Ure should totally be the root of the word "urea", though it isn't, really. Tha...
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Book Report: A Walk In the Woods
Bill Bryson confirms that hiking is difficult. This book was OK. Tags: book | Appalachian Trail |Labels: book, ok, pedestrian...
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Book Report: A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
In this collection of essays by David Foster Wallace, I was glad to read the title essay. It's about his experiences on a cruise ship. I've always wondered if I would like being on a cruise ship, a...
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Book Report: Sister Age
A collection of short stories, some of them autobiographical, by M.F.K. Fisher. I was not so fond of the Twilight Zonish ghost stories, but the rest were awesome. There was one story about going ou...
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Book Report: The Man Who Would Be King
A U.S.A. citizen went to Afghanistan and got mixed up in the local wars and politics. In the 1830s. This is his story. Ben MacIntyre wrote this book about Josiah Harlan, foreign meddler. Unfortuna...
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Book Report: Game Physics
David Eberly wrote this computer programming book about physics and numerical methods. Where "numerical methods" means making quick accurate calculations. It's an interesting subject, and this is a...
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Book Report: American Hero
It's a noir political thriller. It kept promising to turn into something very interesting, but did not keep that promise. Tags: book | yawn |Labels: book, snore...
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Book Report: A Storm of Swords
It is another book in the series A Song of Ice and Fire. It's Shakespearean History meets Tolkienoid high fantasy meets Howardesque barbarian epic meets soap opera meets... It's a guilty pleasure. I...
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Book Report: Oxford Pocket American Dictionary
This evening I picked up a copy of the OxFord Pocket American Dictionary. Such false advertising--it's much bigger than any of my pockets. Tags: book | title | foreshadowing |Labels:...
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Book Report: Innocents Aboard
It's a book of short stories by Gene Wolfe. There are some winners and some losers and some, uhm, averagers. It's Gene Wolfe, so even the averagers strike an interesting mood. I liked a ghost sto...
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Book Report: The Hero's Walk
Anita Rau Badami wrote this family drama set in an India in transition. It's a difficult read because so many of the characters waste so much effort being mean to each other. You grit your teeth at...
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Book Report: the Founding Fish
John McPhee writes about shad. Shad are fish. That description should make you want to read this book. Go. Go! Maybe you read his shad articles in the "New Yorker". Maybe you think "Surely I now k...
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Book Report: The Cruise of the Acheron
Sheila Natusch did a lot of research tracking down logs and reports for this description of "her majesty's steam vessel on survey in New Zealand waters 1848-51". She figured out that two documents i...
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Book Report: Consider the Oyster
Holy moly, M.F.K. Fisher sure could write. I don't want to eat oysters, but I could read Fisher's writings about oysters all day. Except I can't really, because this was just a short little book. ...
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Book Report: Something From the Oven
Laura Shapiro wrote this awesome book about home cooking in 1950s USA. There are many interesting stories here. There is the tragic tale of Poppy Cannon who tried to convince the world that canned t...
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Book Report: Road Fever
What does it take to drive from Tierra del Fuego to Prudhoe Bay in less than a month? Will, determination, and paperwork. A big stack of paperwork. Folders and folders of paperwork. Visits to con...
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Book Report: Epitaph in Rust
This is an old novella by Tim Powers. I liked it. It recently showed up in a two-novella conglomeration with The Skies Discrowned. I'd already read that novella, and hadn't liked it. So it was a ...
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Compliance
At the front of this library book, it says In compliance with current copyright law, U.C. Library Bindery produced this replacement volume on paper that meets the ANSI Standard Z39.48.1984 to repla...
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Book Report: What's the Matter With Kansas?
Thomas Frank, a member of the liberal intellectual elite wrote this book for other members of the liberal intellectual elite to tell them that the formerly-liberal working class is tired of liberal ...
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Book Report: Two Voyages to the South Seas
As a French explorer, the great ship's captain and navigator Dumont d'Urville helped advance English colonization. D'Urville explored some uninhabited spot on Australia's Eastern coast. This told t...
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Arms and the Man, Canoe
Following up on my recent trip to New Zealand, I read Two Voyages to the South Seas, a summary/translation of the memoirs of Captain Jules S.-C. Dumont D'Urville. This guy was a French ship's captain...
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Book Report: The Process of Creating Life
The Process of Creating Life is the second book of Christopher Alexander's Nature of Order tetralogy. That is, this is a book that is Alexander's theory of the universe and how this nature should gui...
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Book Report: Juked Vol. 3 Fall 2004
This is a collection of short pieces lovingly skimmed off the top of Juked. So I'd already read these. I guess I got juked. One good story: Public Access by David Gianatasio. You can buy this at Cod...
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Book Report: Earth Abides
George R. Stewart wrote Earth Abides, a story in which about 9999 out of every 10000 humans is wiped out by a big plague. What will happen afterwards? Will our hero preserve civilization's triumphs ...
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Book Report: Cyber China (part two)
Notes on a couple more chapters from Cyber China: Françoise Mengin: The Role of the State in the Age of Information This paper mentioned a few topics: hackers, Taiwan, Democracy. It implied that th...
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Book Report: Cyber China (part one)
This book is a collection of papers about the intersection of society and computers in present-day China. Karsten Giese; Speaker's Corner or Virtual Panopticon: Discursive Construction of Chinese Id...
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Book Report: Cyber China (part four)
Two more essays from the book Cyber China Barry Naughton The Information Technology Industry and Economic Interactions Between China and Taiwan This article had an interesting factoid. A large part ...
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Book Report: Cyber China (part five (last (whew!)))
Two last essays in Cyber China... Ngai-Ling Sum: Informational Capitalism and the Remaking of "Greater China": Strategies of Siliconization This interesting paper talked about how various government...
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Book Report: Cyber China (part 3)
Yet more essays in Cyber China... Patricia Batto; Government Online and Cross-Straits Relations This paper gives an overview of some China- and Taiwan-related web sites.Something interesting perhaps...
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Book Report: Chicago Stories
When I bought this Cometbus book, I didn't realize that all of the stories had already appeared elsewhere. But I had forgotten the stories, so it was fun to read them all again. I felt like a bozo s...
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Ask Not For Whom the Klaxon Peals
As I stepped up to the library exit, the stolen-book alarm sounded. I stepped back from the door and waited for some nice librarian to wave to me, to tell me to open up my backpack. But no nice lib...
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Site Update: Fave Reads
I finally figured out my Fave Reads of '04. Usually I upload those on New Year's day. But this year I was in Seattle. And then I went to Tahoe. And then I started a new job. Hey, at least I finish...
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Book Report: Signal & Noise
Of course you are glad that John Griesemer wrote a novel around the laying of the first transatlantic undersea telegraph cable. But you're also thinking A telegraph book would be far too nerdly to di...
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Book Report: A Rabbit in the Air
David Garnett wrote this book, A Rabbit in the Air, about his experience learning to fly. This book was published in 1932. He calls airfields "aerodromes". He provides cockpit drawings. He provides ...
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Book Report: The Phenomenon of Life
Summary: This is a good book if you skip the first four chapters, the last chapter, and half of the appendices. Christopher Alexander is famous as the honcho behind A Pattern Language. A Pattern Lan...
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Tech-Brain Candy
When I commute to work, I change buses close to the San Francisco main library. Tonight, I took advantage of this. During the ride from Mountain View to San Francisco, I'd been reading Managing Gig...
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location location location
As we waited to get into the puppet show, Tom and I made small talk. I told him that I'd finished reading Linda Greenlaw's Lobster Chronicles, about her adventures getting re-settled at Isle au Ha...
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I bet you get these mixed up all the time
Last week, I read the book Managing Gigabytes by Witten, Moffat, and Bell. It's about storing and retrieving huge repositories of data. This week, I am reading Trilobite! (Eyewitness to Evolution) ...
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get on the bus
My bus was not full; that broke my plan. My first week at the new job coincided with the company ski trip. I knew a few people at the new job, but not many. Now, on the bus ride back to the bay a...
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