Larry Hosken: New: 2021

Link: Open Infrastructure Map Open Infrastructure Map: It's a map of power lines, communications towers, gas lines, and stranger infrastructure-y things. It's not complete. You may have heard of the Open StreetMap project—a...
Three Popular Blog Posts Once again, I'm posting links to three popular blog posts from 2020. In theory I'm doing this for Facebook folks, who don't have an easy way to view my blog. (On Facebook, I'll post a link to this bl...
Book Report: Satyajeet Bhargav (A Truth Seeker) This book of short stories was described as "Like Sherlock Holmes but in old-timey India." This was apt. There are mysterious crimes. There are unlikely observations. There are dramatic denouements. ...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even the eastern part of Golden Gate Park On Nextdoor, someone (Zadie Oleksiw?) mailed out a "scavenger hunt" which was a set of riddles leading to locations in the eastern part of Golden Gate Park. As someone who's lived in the area for som...
>> My morning thoughts: Put Stacey Abrams in charge of the vaccine rollout. If anyone can organize that shit, she can. My evening thoughts: Put Stacey Abrams in charge of the Department of Homeland Sec...
Book Report: Attack Surface This novel is a sequel to Homeland and Little Brother. It's OK. It leans pretty hard on your suspension of disbelief; a major plot point involves some programmers being good both at hacking security ...
>> Occasionally, my web alert for "Hosken" turns up a winner. Genital shape key to male flies' sexual success "Male genitals generally, and in Drosophila specifically, evolve very quickly, so we were...
Book Report: Humble Pi This book talks about math errors and the consequences that follow. There are errors of engineering, software errors (dear to my heart), and plain old computation errors. Some of these get pretty int...
Book Report: Mazes for Programmers This book is about randomly generating mazes by writing computer programs. Before reading this book, I'd tried randomly generating some mazes, but those mazes hadn't pleased me: too many little nubbl...
New Glasses Selfie On the day my new glasses were ready, I found my spare pair of glasses. It sure would have been nice to find those a month and a half ago, yep. Anyhow, my new glasses have metal under-rims instea...
>> The US Postal Service announced new stamps for 2021. One title especially caught my eye: "Mystery Message." Wow, a stamp with a hidden message. Sounds like something right up my alley. According...
>> I've been digging these interviews with early employees at tech startups. (Note: I didn't say "with founders"—instead, these are the first hires, wacky risk-takers who maybe weren't that convin...
>> I had some thoughts about automatically-generated mazes rattling around in the back of my head and figured out a way to apply an algorithm from that Mazes for Programmers book to a problem I'd notice...
>> I enjoyed this crossword puzzle's gimmick: https://www.theatlantic.com/free-daily-crossword-puzzle/?id=atlantic_20210221&set=atlantic&puzzleType=crossword ...
Book Report: The Doomsday Calculation (How an Equation that Predicts the Future Is Transforming Everything We Know About Life and the Universe) Back when I was a humble computer science university student learning how to write operating systems, we learned a simple trick. A computer might run several programs at the same time: a web browser...
wordnet, is-a ColinTheMathmo asked folks to think of animals that were also verbs, like "bug". I thought of some and then it occurred to me: wordnet ("wn") is a computer tool that knows the meaning of many many wo...
The Walk Lately, I've been playing The Walk to make my walks more interesting. During the pandemic, my usual way of keeping walks interesting doesn't work. I'd hop on a bus/train so I could walk someplace I ...
Circly I made a picture filter. I call it "circly" because it's kinda like pixelize, but with circles. And then I made a web page of circle-drawing animations so you can lose yourself in watching lots of ci...
>> My local Nextdoor is full, as ever, of whiners. Lately, car drivers have been squawking about streets that got closed to through traffic to ease pandemic exercise—give folks space to bike and r...
>> With another wildfire season approaching, I finally got off my butt and bought an air purifier. At last, I am ready for wildfires! (Not really; I wouldn't mind if we skipped the wildfires this year/f...
>> Many people have made the joke "Those pants are on their last legs," but few point out that the statement is both figuratively and literally true. Or at least I didn't notice any in the top few Googl...
>> I saw this sign at the Lawn Bowling Club in Golden Gate Park: Why did they call it a "decoy bird" instead of a "scarecrow"? I never saw the fake bird. I looked around and thought I spotted a co...
>> Current post shot #2 status: Bracing myself for side effects and/or superpowers. ...
>> (For folks who are trying to gauge vaccine side effect trends: My arm was a little hurty yesterday near the infection site. Today I feel fine.) ...
💉💉 It's been two weeks since my second COVID vaccine dose. I'm about as immune as I'm gonna get. San Franciscans, I'm about on pace, vaccination-wise, with the median city resident over 16 years...
Book Report: Forced Perspectives This book, sequel to Alternate Routes, further explores a world in which ghosts' haunting behavior obeys physical laws that living humans only halfway understand. Also, self-negating cultists seek to...
MIT Mystery Hunt 2020 report From January 2019 to January 2020, team Left Out put together the 2020 MIT Mystery Hunt. Since I was on the team, I helped out. I wrote some puzzles, did some web stuff, asked some nice folks to do s...
Google Ngrams Download There's a new-to-me set of Google Ngrams (big files with frequency counts for common and not-so-common English words&phrases&word-strings): Google Ngrams Download. I mention this because when...
Comic Report: The Secret to Superhuman Strength It's a graphic novel memoir by Alison Bechdel, who you might remember from Fun Home. It's about her attempt to keep mens sana in corpore sano (sound body, sound mind). She talks about her experiences...
Orna, another walking-around game (or not if you'd rather stay put) Lately, I've been playing Orna, an RPG-style phone game in which your character moves around in the game world when you, the player, move around in the real world. E.g., in the picture below that loo...
>> The Ice Cream Bar, my local ice cream parlor, requires everyone inside to wear masks at all times. (This makes sense; a sizable fraction of their customers are kids too young to vaccinate.) Thus, the...
Updated "phraser" word list I updated that big ranked "phraser" word list (and also the even bigger ranked phrase list). It counts words (and phrases) from different sources than it did before. The Expanded Crossword Name Dat...
>> My local Starbucks will let me bring in my own coffee cup again. I can resume my old pre-contagion caffeine consumption levels without burying the earth under a pile of discarded paper cups. Not sur...
>> My local Peet's will let me bring in my own coffee cup again, just like my local Starbucks. But maybe I shouldn't ask them to fill the cup all the way up to the top because I a-a-apparently l-l-lost ...
>> I'm working on getting the # Octothorpean # puzzlehunt back online. You know how the first 80% of the project takes 20% of the time? I think that's about where I am on getting this thing ba...
>> Personal triumph: Remembered my ATM PIN after using credit cards to pay for everything for a year. For this feat, I was rewarded with cash. ...
>> Wow, it's the site's 38 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...
Zine Report: Cometbus #59 During 2020 when the USA's pandemic was in full swing, a new issue of Cometbus came out and I didn't notice because pandemics are distracting. But I'm catching up! This issue of interviews looks at w...
>> If you're a San Francisco-area* man who has sex with other men and have grumbled at my blood-donation humblebrags: There's a study going to confirm that the you-can't-give-blood policy is stupid; Go ...
Book Report: Permanent Record It's whistleblower Ed Snowden's autobiography. I'd already read+watched plenty about him and knew that he had discovered and leaked details of the NSA's unethical, illegal, and pointless spying on Am...
>> I walked around San Francisco Bay July 1-7, 2021. You might think Big deal, Larry walked around the bay before. But before, I only walked most of the way around the bay, stymied by the lack of a pede...
>> Consider this a "soft re-opening" announcement for Octothorpean. Also, I'm asking for bright ideas on a UI/usability thing. Update: a couple of smarties suggested using "Import/Export" instead of "...
Octothorpean is Back Octothorpean is back up and running, hooray! The next time you're talking with someone about your puzzlehunting activities and they sputter "How would you even get started learning how to do that?" t...
>> I may not be the Bay Area's best puzzler, but sometimes I'm the one with the most free time. This can result in fabulous prizes, e.g. Maybe y'all can't be first to solve the relevant puzzles, bu...
>> I should clarify: I didn't solve 510 puzzles. I solved five puzzles about Oakland, which is in the 510 telephone area code. ...
>> Oof, San Francisco's summer 2021 COVID case rate is higher than summer 2020. Time to re-start postponing nonessential travel, I guess. Yesterday I rode the bus to+from an exercise walk. If I'd seen t...
Link: Free Burger Force Some time back, I recommended a comic book called Burger Force with the caveat that it was tricky to acquire, being published in the far-off land of Australia. Thanks to the power of the internet and...
>> On this morning's exercise walk, I encountered some racist horseshit flyers. They were stapled to some wood in a bus shelter. When I went to rip them down, I discovered that they weren't just stapled...
>> I snapped a picture behind the Starbucks in case wildfire smoke blows in later and I want to remember what clean air looks like. ...
>> The dahlia garden at the San Francisco Conservatory of Flowers is OK. (Also I may be tinkering with figuring out how to make my blog pictures show up in Twitter by means of Twitter "cards" and a...
>> My most recent grocery delivery came with free samples. Among those samples lurked a couple of packets of ground coffee. The supermarket chose a bold strategy. Avoiding swapping air during the pandem...
Further Bewordled I read Allison Parrish's article "Rewordable versus the alphabet fetish," in which she discusses the design of the card game Rewordable. Like Scrabble and Bananagrams, in Rewordable a player builds u...
>> Important follow-up news: Today's grocery delivery came with more free samples, including a small tube of instant coffee from Starbucks. Thank you, Starbucks, for not assuming that I have coffee filt...
>> Nabisco workers are on strike. A few weeks back, Frito-Lay workers were on strike. I appreciate that they didn't all strike at the same time, enabling me to maintain 100% snack uptime. ...
>> I updated the public Octothorpean source code. It said something like "This is the source code to the Google App Engine .go program behind 'Octothorpean'," though that's been wrong for a year. I copi...
>> Some Texans made a pro-life whistleblower web site to persuade other Texans to anonymously report each other for personal medical decisions about abortion. These awful people, “Texas Right to L...
>> September is National Preparedness Month (NPM) here in the USA. Unfortunately, I didn't find out about the existence of NPM until we were already well into September, so I didn't have any cool prepar...
>> I had a fun time solving Patrick Berry's puzzle extravaganza "Containment Policy." It took a while to get through. The puzzles were pretty straightforward to solve, but then I spent a while staring a...
>> On Tuesday, September 14 2021, I volunteered at a local polling place for the California Governor Recall Election. This was my third time working a polling place, so I didn't have a web page's worth ...
Link: Kissinger Death Tontine I grabbed some dates in October 2025. I don't know whether or not I expect Kissinger to survive that long, but earlier Octobers were taken. ...
Book Report: Catch and Kill Content Warning: Rape, Abuse, Stalking, Harvey Weinstein, Matt Lauer, Woody Allen, Donald Trump, etc. This is the autobiography of one reporter working on exposing Harvey Weinstein, serial rapist mo...
>> Got my flu shot. Apparently, it is flu shot season. ...
Link: Puzzle Testing Sharon Wong wrote about running puzzlehunt playtests. Sharon gets it. ...
>> I enjoyed playing the game Neo Cab. It's a story game full of conversation trees. You play a rideshare driver in a cyberpunk future. There are several passengers to ferry, but not too many. Thus, yo...
Palace Games: The Attraction Today I helped play the The Attraction escape room experience at Palace Games. It was awesome and fun. As usual with escape rooms, there's not much you can say specifically about them, lest spoilers....
>> The future is amazing. FedEx: Hello Lawrence, I'm the FedEx Virtual Assistant. I'm here to help you with your questions regarding FedEx® services. Lawrence: I uploaded a file to print but g...
>> Steve Yegge is shooting videos about working at big tech companies. Nerds of a certain age may fondly remember Steve Y's blog rants (and, more recently, Medium rants), in which he wrote about working...
>> I got wind of a new-ish public word list for crossword constructors, the spread the word(list). So I grabbed a copy and tossed it into the big pile of data that feeds the "Phraser" phrase and word li...
Clown Music is Always Appropriate I finally learned enough about Android audio settings to make "Entrance of the Gladiators" my clock alarm noise. ...
>> I started playing the game Fallen London. If you also play, my character's name is lahosken if you'd like to correspond or somesuch. (You might think it strange that I just now started playing a 10-...
Book Report: Gnomon I didn't finish reading this book. I guess this is a fine book. I don't read much fiction nowadays; I don't have much patience for fiction nowadays. There were some neat ideas. After I gave up on the...
Book Report: Planning Your Escape It's a book about escape rooms and it's pretty interesting. I came at the book as someone who knows plenty about puzzle hunts and some things about puzzles and has picked up a fair amount of immersiv...
>> Marvel Comics should rename the villain Morlun to "Spider-Mans Georg." (This statement isn't really "on-brand" for me, not my usual topics. Sorry, regular readers! But it needed to be said and nobod...
>> You may recall that some months back I started playing a walking-around game called Orna. I'm still playing it these days and hit a milestone this morning: My character is №100 in my region (Northern...
>> oh gee whiz this recruiting mail …We at the [San Francisco] Department of Elections thank you for your past service and hope you will be available to serve as a poll worker again in all four...
>> On Hallowe'en evening, kids in St. Louis don't just say "Trick or treat," they ask jokey riddles. Unfortunately, these little kids make up their own jokes, and the results are abusrdly unfunny. Each ...
>> Lately, I've been playing a new walking-around game: Pikmin Bloom. As I walk, I look at a map on my phone, where I see that I'm leaving a trail of little flowers behind me. I also see trails of littl...
>> I got a TDAP booster today, a.k.a. a booster vaccine against tetanus, diptheria, and whooping cough. I remember back when antivax was a loony left-wing thing and the new age hippies of Marin County h...
>> There were four relatives at Thanksgiving dinner this year. That doesn't sound like many—but if you consider that's a 33⅓% increase over last year, it sounds pretty darned impressive. ...
Rest in Peace, Stephen Sondheim Along with his Broadway accomplishments, Sondheim was important to puzzles and puzzle hunt culture. He collected puzzles. He ran puzzle hunts. He wrote "The Last of Sheila," a movie that features a s...
>> When I walked past the UCSF Parnassus Emergency Room, its parking lot was overflowing with ambulances. An ambulance that didn't fit was parked in a nearby bus stop. As I kept walking, another ambulan...
>> #boosted Current status: waiting for side effects ...
>> Today, I note a major milestone in my recovery from shelter-in-place. (To be clear: I don't think I caught/recovered from COVID. This is recovering from the measures I took to evade COVID.) The miles...
>> This picture shows the landward exterior wall of the Stephan C. Leonoudakis Ferry Terminal; this picture does not show pay phones. There used to be pay phones on that wall; they were still there a...
>> The upcoming MIT Mystery Hunt will once again be "virtual": teams will play online rather than physically on MIT campus. As I sit here in California and read the list of teams that have signed up for...
>> This week's 50 Years of Text Games post is about Universal Paperclips. Universal Paperclips is an online "clicker game." Well, it's kinda online. It's a web page; but all of the game's programming ru...
>> Today at sunrise, I snapped a picture of Sutro Tower. Turns out I wasn't the only one. ...
>> When I popped out of the coffee shop on the homeward leg of this morning's walk, a rainbow dazzled me. San Francisco doesn't get much rain; I don't see many rainbows. This one caught me by surprise. ...
>> Oh gee whiz, my apartment building's hot water heater blew a gasket and they can't get a replacement soon because Xmas. So I don't have a way to take a hot shower before the big family gathering tomo...
>> One swell thing about running family gatherings via videoconference is that you can snap a group picture without having to herd everyone onto one side of the room. ...