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Looking forward to a few days of knowing what needs to be done with no idea how to do it. ...
- Book Report: Dark Days, Bright Nights
It's a history of the USA Black Power movement up until the near-present day. I'd already read plenty about the 1960s, but this book (though it writes about Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and their l...
- Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Cambridge via Left Coast
I spent last weekend solving MIT Mystery Hunt puzzles. I took some photos, but Kiki took the best photo. ...
- Book Report: Boomer
It's a memoir by a lady who worked as a railroad switchyard "brakeman." I think I picked up this book because someone recommended her writing about caboose cars. (A Ted Conover article? Vasona Branch...
- Book Report: Can You Solve My Problems?
It's a book about puzzles and brainteasers. There are puzzles, there are brain-teasers, there are essay-ish bits exploring some ideas in detail. There were some puzzles that I hadn't encountered befo...
- Milestone: 33 Million Hits
Wow, it's the site's 33 millionth hit. As usual, these "hits" aren't a measure of humans visiting pages; that count would be much lower. It's just requests to the website: every time a robot visits s...
- Book Report: American Spies
It's a summary of the USA surveillance debacle of recent decades. Such a summary can be useful. For a lot of these tech-y news-summary books, I say "Why would I read that? I followed the news then." ...
- Book Report: From Here to Eternity
It's a book about what folks do with bodies after death around the world. I'd read the author's previous book about how things go in the USA. Here she travels to far-off places (and some places in th...
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It's nice weather to sit inside and mail out hints for puzzles all day. #puzzleops ...
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I went with an aunt and an uncle to see another aunt perform in a play. So it was family drama but, like, on purpose. ...
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Team Hobgoblin has earned the "Postcard" badge on the Octothorpean online puzzle hunt site, the second team to do so. It's been a little over three years since the first team earned that badge. Maybe...
- Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, sometimes twice over
As threatened, we ran another session of the Hunt for Justice game for folks who didn't get a chance to play the first time. I took a couple photos on one of the puzzle-assembly days, which you can s...
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The Dutch word "scheepvaart" means "maritime", not ovine flatulent whatever. ...
- Book Report: Sourdough
I'm acquainted with a former computer programmer who ditched that life to become a baker. But he didn't have magical-realism sourdough starter that responds to music. So maybe this book isn't that re...
- "Incrediby Excited"
Startups are risky; I got laid off from Token.io this morning. I'm not in a rush to find my next job (but if you're about to tell me something that would change my mind, then by all means go ahead)....
- Book Report: The Lost art of Finding our Way
This book is darned near perfect: It's about how folks navigated back before there was a GPS phone in every pocket. Had things I didn't know about Vikings and about Marshall Island stick chart wave m...
- Book Report: Lifelike
Are there really people who think that a camera can steal your soul or is that an urban legend? Anyhow, in this novel you can steal part of someone's soul by paying close attention to them as you pai...
- Book Report: Beautiful Trouble
It's a bag of tricks, principles, theories, and case studies for political action: rallies, hoaxes, sit-ins, etc. It's interesting, and might inspire someone to expand their repertoire by pointing ou...
- Urban Morphology is Everywhere, even the Ferry Terminal
At the Stephan Leonoudakis Golden Gate Ferry Terminal the other day, I noticed that one of the two pay phones had gone away. That's not surprising; nowadays, pay phones tend to go away. But I'd based...
- Book Report: Confessions of a Political Hitman
Autobiography of a guy who did political opposition research back when that meant travelling to county seats and looking at old voting records on microfilm or somesuch. He mostly worked for right-win...
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There's a special exhibit at San Francisco's deYoung Museum with works by Charles Sheeler and other Precisionist folks. I'm a fan of Sheeler, so I went. Out in front of the exhibit there's some inter...
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I went to see the Rube Goldberg exhibit at San Francisco's Contemporary Jewish Museum—or rather, I went to see "Contraption," an exhibit accompanying the Rube Goldberg exhibit. There was a Rube...
- Book Report: October
A history of the months between the overthrow of the Tsar and the rise of Lenin, as told by China Miรฉville taking a break from writing science fiction long enough to untangle this mess such that one ...
- Book Report: Doctor Illuminatus: A Ramon Llull Reader
It's an illustrated method for organizing arguments plus some arguments constructed by this method. This guy Ramon Llull came up with them centuries ago as a way to organize his thoughts. A while bac...
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A while back, you'll recall I made a phone game that involved walking around and "checking in" to various landmark-y locations. The game got its information about local landmarks from Foursquare, tha...
- Book Report: The Readymade Thief
This novel has the art of Marcel DuChamp, a cult, a secret society, cult mind control and deprogramming, urban exploration, burglary; perhaps enough of those to make up for a fair amount of cruelty i...
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If you like puzzles and/or beer & are free this Tuesday evening, maybe you want to do Puzzled Pint. In a bold departure from making puzzles about the # typographic symbol, I drafted some puzzles ...
- Book Report: Bleeding Edge
A novel set in a alternate-but-not-too-far-off history. I think maybe we're supposed to wonder about what sort of alternate history it is? One character hints that the world is a simulation; rumors o...
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I took an overnight trip to Monterey, which has a scenic rocky coastline and a big aquarium. I took some photos of rocks and of people looking at fish. ...
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Rest in peace, Esther. I already miss talking to you. ...
- Book Report: Draft โ 4
John McPhee, a great writer, writes about writing instead of about rocks or oranges or what-have-you. It turns out that behind-the-scenes at "The New Yorker" is less interesting than rocks and orange...
- Book Report: Tower Dog
For a while (a few years?), the most dangerous job in the USA was climbing cellular towers to install and/or remove phone equipment. Tower Dogs introduces you to some of the fearless folks who work t...
- Puzzle Extravaganzas are Everywhere, even Waterholes Worldwide
I wrote a set of puzzles for Puzzled Pint. And I'd like to write some notes about what it's like for a puzzle-designer to go through the Puzzled Pint process. But I'm just now getting around to it be...
- Book Report: The Woman Who Smashed Codes
Before I read this book, I vaguely knew that Elizebeth Friedman was a skilled codebreaker but figured I would never know the deets since her work was classified. But this biography pulls some impres...
- Book Report: Walkable City
For a few decades, Americans thought that they wanted out of the inner city; bought cars, moved to newly-developed suburbs. These sparsely-developed areas weren't "walkable"—Getting anywhere in...
- Book Report: The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2017
It's a collection of popular science articles. I checked it out because one of the articles is about wave-based navigation by Marshall Islanders. If I hadn't already read so much about the topic, thi...
- Book Report: Code Girls
At the start of WWII, the USA's spy organizations were clown-shoes clumsy. During WWII, the USA sent its healthy men off to fight. But we (gradually) figured out that we wouldn't squander so many of ...
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With Scott Pruitt's resignation from the EPA, Trump must find a replacement. Did we ever figure out who's still pumping CFCs into the atmosphere? Seems like that person would be the consistent choice...
- Book Report: The Big Rig
It's about about USA long-haul truck drivers working darned hard for darned little pay. This book gets into the historical and sociological (Is that a word?) reasons for the "little pay" part. Some ...
- Book Report: A Voyage for Madmen
In the late 1960s, someone single-handedly sailed around the earth. This inspired a newspaper to sponsor a race for someone to single-handed-sail around the earth without stopping at port for repairs...
- Book Report: Krakatoa
It's a book about the big volcanic eruption at Krakatoa. This was a popular book back in the day; a lot of folks talked about it. Thus, instead of learning new things by reading this book, I mostly w...
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I volunteered to pick up trash today. Lately, San Francisco's been in the news for outlawing plastic straws but having streets littered with needles and human poop. So I kept count of some things as ...
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If self-driving trucks ever learn how to navigate our roads, how will they deal with self-contradictory nigh-paradoxical loading dock instructions? (If you're wondering "Is there some way to 'chec...
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Facebook changed its rules, and thus my blog posts can no longer automatically appear on Facebook. So… if you've been using FB to keep up with the books I read or trash-picking adventures or w...
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๐บ๐๐ป๐๐๐ ...
- Book Report: A Gentleman in Moscow
In this novel, the protagonist's special ability is kindness. It's super effective. ...
- big ol' text corpus
Project Gutenberg is a collection of Important Works kept online. E.g., if you'd like to read Shakespeare's sonnets and don't want to schlep off to some library for a physical book (ugh), you can dow...
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I've blundered into an American-Colonies history-mystery. Today I visited the American Bookbinders Museum. They have old-timey equipment on display such as one might use to bind books by hand. And o...
- #Book Report: Balancing on Blue
It's an account of walking the Appalachian Trail, hiking for months to travel 1000s of km along mountain ridges. Folks hike this if they're in great shape and want to get away from civilization for a...
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I made a little program to generate "ransom note" text using fancy international symbols like "ฤฐ ๐บฤโ
๐ผ ๐ธ ๐ฉ๐ลฆฦฌ๐๐ แญ๐ฅโฒ๐ถ๊
๐ฐ๐บ t๐ ๐พฦละแa๐ฃ๐ธ 'แ๐ข๐ฎ๐ฒโโฉ ลโฦฌ๐ฆ' ฦฌ๐ธ๐ฟt ๐ผเบฃi๐๐ถ ๐ก๐๐๐พฮณ ๐๐๐๐ดRnโฉ๐ฤฐโฌฏโฒaโ เด๐บแฮฒโโS." ...
- Book Report: Personal History
It's the autobiography of Katherine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post during Watergate times (and other times) (and other roles at the paper at other times) (and other roles not at the paper)....
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A team reported a typo in an Octothorpean Order online puzzlehunt puzzle's hint. So, no problem. I fix up the puzzle file on my computer, and go to upload it to the Octothorpean site… and get ...
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"tell us your age without using numbers" When I see "CZI," I think "Count Zero Interrupt", not "Chan Zuckerberg Initiative" ...
- Book Report: Habeas Data
It's a book about recent USA data search-and-seizure law. It describes laws and supreme court cases revolving around convictions based on creepily-acquired data. So you can read about how some bay ar...
- Comic Report: Berlin
Do you remember way back 20 years ago when you were reading comics and there was this lovely stark black-and-white comic "Berlin" by Jason Lutes? About Berlin in the Weimar republic? Street fights be...
- Book Report: Brotopia
It's a book about various ways women in tech are made miserable by men in tech, focusing on some recent news stories. (It's not all recent stuff. E.g., we find out that part of the reason that progr...
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I'm a week into calling up my new COBRA provider begging them to let me pay them, occasionally mailing them checks (yes, mailing out physical checks like a caveman). There are some "qualifying life e...
- Book Report: The Unseen World
It's a novel about a young lady who grows up amongst researchers at something kinda like MIT's AI Lab, but different. There's learning and forgetting and machine learning and I suppose machine forget...
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At first I was upset when I found out that my health provider had terminated my account (since they haven't yet heard that the relevant COBRA provider finally let me give them money last week). But t...
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OK, USA politics is still pretty bad… But without its inspiration, I couldn't have attained this 50K-long Twitter block list, so that's something. ...
- Book Report: Broad Band
It's a book of capsule biographies/short histories of women who programmed internet stuff (or maybe some other stuff) and/or created some early internet content. Thanks to this book, I know I want to...
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I have health coverage again! I'll stop snarking about automatic-but-not-really payment systems for a while. ...
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I'm researching the California election. There are two candidates for Secretary of State, the incumbent and the challenger. The challenger wants me to know that California elections are in sorry shap...
- Californians, Don't vote for Mark Meuser
I'm researching the California election. There are two candidates for Secretary of State, the incumbent and the challenger. The challenger wants me to know that California elections are in sorry shap...
- San Francisco Voter Guides
Sparing you a google web search and rummaging around: SF Dept of Elections voter info, CA voter info. Candidate statements, arguments for & against propositions. SF League of Pissed-Off Voters....
- Book Report: We, the Navigators
It's a book about navigation techniques of Pacific Islanders. I'd thought this was a lost art, only written about by westerners recently, carefully-hidden mysteries of guild-like navigator clans. But...
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Someone left offerings to Hippocrates today, including flowers, a gavel, a slice of pizza, and water. I didn't think leaving offerings to Hippocrates was a thing(?). But apparently it is today at UCS...
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If you live near SF and are interested in election machines and/or election security, you might want to visit the SF Poll Worker Practice Lab on Nov 4 where you can set up, tear down, and operat...
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If you're in the USA remember to vote Tuesday (if you haven't already). If you're near Berkeley and you like drama and scholarship, you might want to know Shotgun Players is putting on the play "Arc...
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If you're in the USA, #BeAVoter . Vote tomorrow if you haven't already. Even if you and I don't agree on things, I want you to vote. Seriously. I'd rather that you vote than that you give up on the ...
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I survived my day as a precinct poll clerk volunteer. Did civilization survive? I don't know, I mostly kept my phone off. ...
- Book Report: Troublemakers
It's a swath of Silicon Valley history in the 70s and thenabouts; short biographies of some folks I'd heard of and others I hadn't. There's a good variety. I didn't learn much about the organizations...
- Clerk Life
I volunteered as a poll worker in the recent election; you can read my notes about it. Spoilers: I got a lapel pin, much snazzier than a mere "I Voted!" sticker; a bird flew into our polling place bu...
- Comic Report: Form of a Question
It's an autobiographical graphic novel structured around the author's run on Jeopardy!. In the world of trivia, there are clear answers, but not so much in the real world. I'm guessing not so many fo...
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The smoke is clearing from San Francisco's air. I went out to get coffee, but mostly just fill my lungs with fresh air. Breathing is the best thing and I want to do it for the rest of my life. ...
- Book Report addendum: Cards as Weapons
Rest in peace, Ricky Jay. He wasn't just a magician and magic-historian. He was also a skilled technical writer: he wrote a book that taught a bunch of kids stuff. Specifically, in the 1990s, a bunc...
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A few months back, I mentioned that I'd boosted phraser's word lists by using data from Project Gutenberg's huge stash of old books… and mentioned that I wished I'd thought to omit the non-Eng...
- Book Report: Puzzlecraft (Humble Bundle edition)
I flipped through this book recently. Maybe "flipped through" isn't the right phrase. I was viewing the .pdf on a tablet. I'd already read an older edition of the book, now I wanted to flip through i...
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This crossword puzzle auto-fill program coincidentally got ยพ of the way to a mini-theme by randomly picking phrases out of a hat… M S I O INSIDEUSA T R U N N O ERIKSATIE N E G ...
- Risk-Limiting Audits
The new hotness in election integrity is Risk-Limiting Audits. I'm going to ramble a bit about them here because so far I've pretty much missed the point of what the "Risk-Limiting" phrase means. But...
- Book Report: We'll Show the World
A surprisingly-relevant book about World Expo '88. Why should I, a San Franciscan, care about a world exposition that took place 30 years ago in Brisbane, Australia? I didn't especially want to read ...
- Book Report: Hunger Makes me a Modern Girl
It's a memoir by one of the members of the music group Sleater-Kinney. I hazily remembered that she'd had a well-written web site back in the day, read this, and was not disappointed. E.g., she write...
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"Septuple" has eight letters but "Octuple" has seven. The English language fights you at every turn. ...
- Book Report: Alternate Routes
What if the myth of Dรฆdalus, the Minotaur, and the Labyrinth was real and furthermore explained Los Angeles' tornadoes? This is a fantasy novel by Tim Powers, who specializes in novels of the form "W...
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If anyone asks why I'm busy, I'm just gonna go take all my ๐ฐ out of the bank and hide it under my mattress after seeing an ATM frozen on this screen. ...