Larry Hosken: New: 2017

Book Report: The Powerhouse It's a book about advanced battery research in the USA. I learned that this field is favored by "charismatic thieves, swindlers, who are tricking people." Not all such researchers are charlatans; som...
>> Scrubbed my to-read list of books I realistically won't get around to reading. Is that the opposite of a New Year's Resolution? ...
>> I've been lurking on some right-wing websites, hoping to get a view outside my bubble. I was especially curious about voter fraud. There are some specific things that keep coming up—maybe the f...
Book Report: Work Rules It's a book about business people operations by Google's Laszlo Bock. (Ex-Google, but at Google when he wrote the book…) There's important advice in there even if your company doesn't have gey...
Guesses about this year's MIT Mystery Hunt Theme? I'm preparing to update the commonly-used-word list and commonly-used-phrase lists at the phraser page. The MIT Mystery Hunt is approaching rapidly. So I'm freshening the "raw material" for those lis...
>> As previously threatened, I've updated the phrase and word lists linked from the phraser page with more modern language. E.g., podesta was the 82,350th most "common" word on the old list, but with ne...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Cambridge/California Part II: Electric Boogaloo This weekend, I once again joined up with team Left Out to play in the MIT Mystery Hunt. It was a lot of fun! Once again I played with the California contingent of this distributed team. Beforehand, ...
Book Report: Three Eight Charlie It's a memoir of the first solo woman around-the-world airplane voyage. Many of the challenges back then weren't so much the flying as the primitive airport technology and bureaucracy. This wasn't a ...
>> Question for folks who say "Don't punch Richard Spencer": Suppose I see Richard Spencer on the street giving an interview or whatever. What should I do instead? I concede that punching him probably w...
CA congress-callers, you have 2 senators I love reading tweets&posts from my friends calling their congress critters. The 5 Calls web site is pretty excellent for keeping track of issues to call about; and I see a lot of folks are using...
USA congress-callers, you have other sites If 5 Calls isn't working for you today, here's a similar site: The 65. It doesn't conveniently show you your senator/rep's phone # on the same screen as info about the issue… but you...
USA congress-callers, interesting bills If you're already calling your US senators and/or representatives, maybe nudge them to support: Senate bill 200 H.R. bill 669 These bills say that the President can't do a nuclear first strike on...
USA congress-callers, bills to support/oppose Some more bills you might be for/against to keep in mind when you call your senators/reps for things which you already heard about on 5 Calls or One Thing You Can Do or wherever: HR. 804 "To a...
Book Report: SevenEves It's science fiction with some marvels of engineering. The story follows the destruction of life on earth and what comes afterwards (which is more than what you'd think after the destruction of life ...
Link: Obama's Lost Army After Obama was elected, some of his campaign folks wanted to set up tools and organization to foster grassroots civic participation. The DNC saw this as competition and shut it down. If you wonder w...
Book Report: Internal Medicine It's a book about learning to be a doctor. All I remember now is that he works at an asylum with folks who want to self-harm. They found some horribly creative ways to carry out that self-harm which ...
Game: Troubador Tour Board I made a phone game: Troubador Tour Board. You play it by walking around with your phone, occasionally pressing a button. Nowadays, that's not so unusual for a game. This game's unusual in that you d...
Book Report: The Intel Trinity It's a biography of Robert Noyce, Andy Grove, Gordon Moore, and the early days of Intel. Though Moore's Law (chip processing power you get from a chip per size per cost doubles every ~18mos.) comes ...
Book Report: Homeland It's a sequel to Little Brother. Much of the action takes place during protests. Uhm, and that's pretty much all I remember. Remember back when my website got zapped for a few weeks? The good news i...
>> Huh. Neither of my senators' voicemail boxes were full this morning. Maybe I should start leaving longer messages. ...
Link: Inside the Recount Pretty interesting article about the 2016 Presidential Election recount efforts: New Republic | Inside the Recount https://newrepublic.com/article/140254/inside. The story as I understood it before r...
Book Report: The People's Platform The internet was going to be this great thing that returned the voice to the people. That gave power to the people. I thought that. Like, maybe I thought that the Declaration of Independence of Cyber...
>> Today in 2017 Congress-calling history: I spoke to a live human. Not a voicemail, not a web form, a human. June seemed like a nice lady. She totally didn't make fun of me for hesitating while I waite...
Help me find a programming job? [Update:] Job found! Hello excellent friends, especially local computer nerd friends. I'm looking for work. Specifically, I'm looking for work as a programmer in the San Francisco Bay Area. Behold,...
>> Job search is done: I accepted an offer at Token, which writes software to help banks do bank-y things on the internet. Many thanks and appreciations to folks who pointed me at places, pointed places...
Book Report: My Dateless Diary It's a memoir/travelog: An author from India travels in the USA in the 1950s. Although at the time he liked America, with some hindsight, this book reminds us that "the good old days" were not so goo...
>> The new job starts Monday. The main programming language there is Java. I haven't done much with Java in years. In my remaining free time, I took a few whiles to catch up on how the language has chan...
Book Report: Empire of Cotton It's a history of the cotton business. Cotton was one of the first global businesses. Cotton's not so perishable; you can grow it in one place; spin+weave it somewhere else; sell the resulting cloth ...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Vancouver BC This linked-to photo makes me think puzzly magician David Kwong snuck a puzzlehunt into a recent TED event‽ ...
Book Report: Philanthropist It's a novel set in San Francisco. I was hoping that San Francisco would have more of a starring role, but it's a novel about people. Remember back when my website got zapped for a few weeks? The go...
>> Ever wonder why the engineering department doesn't normally get business headshots? ...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Fremont Once again, I traveled to volunteer at DASH, that puzzlehunt that takes place in many, many cities nationwi worldwide. This year, I didn't "travel" very far: the first GC to ask for a volunteer was i...
Book Report: Data and Goliath Bruce Schneier once again writing a normal-person-understandable policy-ish book about implications of computer security SNAFU. Plenty of organizations gather info about us. Some of this information...
>> My bus slowed to a crawl behind the naked march. Fans of nudity slowly slowly ambled down the middle of Haight Street, in the way traffic. It seemed rude. Did they really feel justified blocking buse...
Book Report: The Gateway Arch The St Louis Arch is magnificent. I'm glad I saw it. This here book talks about how the Arch was made; not so much in the "it's made of stainless steel" sense as the "it's made of political sausage"....
>> At work, we'll soon move to our new San Francisco office. But for now, we're in a co-working space in a mall. In the morning, I walk through the mall. It's not open for business so early, so it's nea...
Book Report: How to Ruin a Record Label and Punk USA It's two books about Lookout! Records, the East Bay record label. Before I read these books, I had the broad outline. Lookout! Records had the excellent luck to publish the first Green Day music. And...
>> This morning I tried out the Metaverse augmented reality game, which might or might not still be in beta, depending on where I read about it. In this game, you wander around looking at a map on your ...
Book Report: It's Complicated It's about teenagers using social networking sites… Speaking of social networks, I'm lahosken@mastodon.social on Mastodon. What? What was I talking about? Right, the book It's Complicated. It...
>> Curtis Chen has a new novel out and a new game-ish thingy to provide some backstory. Go visit www.kangaroo2.com to learn more about the novel Kangaroo Too. And then visit __.kangaroo2.com for the gam...
Book Report: Scaling Teams It's a book about managing and directing software developers. It's pretty good. It has a bag of tricks; it tells you which tricks are appropriate for which situations; it tells you symptoms of those ...
Milestone: 32 Million Hits Wow, it's the site's 32 millionth hit.(Well, sort of… remember a few months back I whined about how my then-web-hosting provider had messed up some things? I lost a few weeks' worth of logs th...
Book Report: Kangaroo Too Kangaroo Too is the yearlong-awaited sequel to Waypoint Kangaroo. There is science-fiction thrilldom; there is wise-cracking. There are folks figuring out how to act humanely amidst the paranoia of a...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even your mailbox Matt Cleinman sent this out to some of the usual mailing lists: Gather your team! Registration has just opened for the Hunt for Justice, an October solve-at-home puzzlehunt. Almost none of the puzz...
Book Report: The Beautiful Struggle It's an autobiography of an African American nerd growing up in/around Baltimore around the time that I was growing up. This book has a lot of unexplained references. I understood some of the nerd re...
Book Report: Leading Teams I'm used to management books aimed at team leaders. This book seems aimed higher, perhaps at directors. E.g. it talks about different levels of autonomy to grant a team; when I read this part, I thou...
Book Report: A Visit from the Goon Squad Maybe it's a novel; maybe it's a collection of interlocked short stories. There's a variety of styles and viewpoints here. I think I picked this book up because someone said there was a part set in S...
>> I read the James Damore manifesto in which he calls for Google to stop trying extra-hard to recruit/retain women and under-represented minorities. I had first heard of this manifesto through the medi...
Book Report: Black Against Empire It's a history of the Black Panther Party, especially their politics. In the late 1960s, the Panthers found a political sweet spot. They armed themselves and defended themselves against illegal polic...
Book Report: The Last Days of New Paris In a fantastic alternate-reality World War II Paris, magicians summon works of art into the real world. Our protagonist is a war-weary Surrealist in magical pajamas with an affinity for Exquisite Cor...
Book Report: Disrupted In this memoir, a reporter flees journalism to join the marketing department of HubSpot, a snake-oil-ish computer startup. At first I thought he was being overly harsh about the snake-oil-ish-ness. F...
Book Report: Hell and Good Company It's a history of the Spanish Civil War. I didn't know much about it before I read this book, just about what happened to Orwell. This book is mostly little snippets of biography against a little his...
Book Report: The Second Machine Age It's a survey of high-tech stuff. That is, it's a high-level overview of things I've already learned about in detail. I guess. I mean, I sat still and read through a chapter about the idea of exponen...
Book Report Rise of the Rocket Girls It's a history of computers at JPL, the rocket people. But the focus is on their computers. These were "computers" in the sense of "ladies who compute things by hand because we haven't invented elect...
>> As a wordplay enthusiast, I was excited to hear about an old book called Ars Magna by Ramon Llull that tried to find new occult truths by re-arranging letters. The letters of "Ars Magna", after all, ...
LA People: The Heritage Scare real-world game with imaginary murder It's not exactly a haunted house, more of a chance to score points or something. http://www.theheritagescare.com/ ...
Book Report: Last Man Off It's a survivor's story from a fishing boat that sank in Antarctic waters. Not everyone on that boat survived; this book might be a good gift for someone who's become blasé about boating safety. It's...
Long before the Two-Tone Game puzzlehunt …there was a two-tone ska single decorated with a crossword puzzle, as seen on the Puzzlenation blog. ...
Puzzzle Hunts are Everywhere thanks to USPS There was a puzzlehunt-by-mail recently, the Hunt for Justice. It was mostly done by other folks, but I did some things. I designed one of its puzzles, collaborating with other GC folks. I helped ou...
Book Report: Thunder At Twilight It's a history of famous folks in Vienna during the lead-up to World War I. Cowardly Adolph Hitler dodges the draft and shrieks racist tirades. Future Russian Commie leaders write political arti...
Book Report: The Next Perfect Trade It's a book on investment strategy. Since I'm not a full-time investor, a lot of this was lost on me. I had to look up a lot of jargon. E.g. "pyramiding" an investment. That's when you take the profi...
Book Report: A Burglar's Guide to the City It's a good book with a great premise: how burglary and anti-burglary security interact with architecture and city planning. I came away with some good nuggets but also a feeling of unmet potential. ...
>> I'm learning Objective-C for work. (We have SDKs for folks who want to write apps that talk to banks, and one of those SDKs is for iOS, which is an 🍎 thing, and thus uses Objective-C.) It's been a tr...
Book Report: A Man of Misconceptions It's a biography of this kinda-scientist kinda-pseudo-scientist of renaissance times. It's about a priest, Kircher. Kircher wrote some true things about music theory. And he lied about medical and ma...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even your local Cinematheque Puzzle nerds and movie buffs, you might be interested in this email I got after a phone call today: Larry - good chatting with you. To recap our conversation: I'm Jack Kelley, producer of the fort...
>> Remember that list of phrases and/or that list of words in a text file handy for designing/solving word puzzles? I updated those lists again with some fresh content. While I'm here: Happy Thanksgivi...
>> After Thanksgiving dinner, my parents figured out they could brew more coffee faster if they had two coffee filter cones—they could brew two pots at the same time. They haven't had much luck fi...
Book Report: Whiteout (Lost in Aspen) In which journalist Ted Conover lives in Aspen for a couple of years… yes, Aspen the ski resort which has been taken over by celebrities and the super-rich. There is skiing. There are mines. T...
Book Report: The Sugar King of Havana Biography of a sugar magnate in Cuba before, during, and after Castro's revolution. Tales of market-cornering. The satisfaction of a local Cuban running sugar mills more efficiently than Americans tr...
Book Report: The Burglar who Liked to quote Kipling It was a fun read. Now it's a week later, and it's pretty much faded from my memory. It's one book in a series. ...
Book Report: York / The Shadow Cipher It's YA fiction in which the city of New York has a puzzlehunt embedded in it that residents have tried to solve for decades. You might think that's an overly fanciful premise—cities change con...
>> Are you kicking yourself because you missed Hunt for Justice? Well, we're re-running it. So if you missed it the first time and are now thinking something like "Awwww, if I'd known there were going t...
Book Report: Manhattan Atmospheres NYC's Washington Bridge Apartments were built over an expressway. This idea was brilliant: let humans use space now wasted on cars. This idea was stupid: we weren't as good at channeling fumes as we ...
Book Report: Life in Code It's a collection of essays by Ellen Ullman, a writer about technology who has actually worked as a programmer and thought about it and isn't a blowhard. I'd seen some of these before, but some appea...