It's all about USA policy for electricity generation, transmission,
distribution, and retail. It gets complicated; there's some
nation-level control, but mostly everything is different from
region to region. From place to place, some organizations are
publicly traded companies, some are government departments… just
because you're an expert in your home town's system, don't assume
you know how things work in the next town over, the next state over,
in Texas (Texas is weird), and so on.
The book gets into the details. In my imagination, this book got
started when the author, an electricity policy wonk, was explaining
a spreadsheet of
[ generation | transmission | distribution | retail ]
organizations with a client who asked "You ever think of writing
all this down?" I didn't retain those details; but some vibes remain.
E.g., public vs private power. Should your
state/county/city/whatever have a power department or a
monopoly power company? In theory, a power company could
innovate more, motivated by profit, benefiting consumers.
In practice, every time a power company makes a mistake,
the state/county/city/whatever regulates the heck out of it.
Take out some big loans to build a new thingy, fall behind
on the loans, and go bankrupt? The state/county/city/whatever
will make good, because they need to keep the electricity flowing.
But they'll also apply a ton of new regulations so that it doesn't
happen again. Sign up to build a few extra nuclear reactors because
you believe that they'll produce power "too cheap to meter" and
demand will skyrocket? When the state/county/city/whatever figures
out that the power will, in fact, be more expensive than non-nuclear
choices, they'll cancel the extra reactors and regulate big new projects.
Oh, and the neighboring states/counties/cities/whatevers
also impose regulations on their local power companies, because
they saw the political disaster unfold and they don't want to get voted
out of office.
So… In the long run, you probably won't get more innovation
out of a monopoly company than out of a government department;
voters will (reasonably) freak out when things go wrong and demand
regulation.
Back when nuclear power was new, a lot of places really did sign up
to build a lot of reactors, anticipating a lot of new demand that didn't
materialize.
Back when nuclear power was new, the feds decided an interesting way
to encourage it: if a company built a reactor and the reactor had a big
accident, the feds put a cap on the liability. If I'm a citizen, this
particular incentive makes me very NIMBY about nuclear reactors.
What was the reasoning behind this incentive? If big, horrible accidents
are rare, this guarantee doesn't affect anything, so why offer it?
If big, horrible
accidents are common, then I do not want a reactor near
me, near my water supply, near anyone I care about…
Remember Enron? Remember how much you hated Enron?
That hate was justified.
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A few months back, I played in SFPursuit, a San Francisco
challenge hunt. Uhm, where "challenge hunt" is a phrase I
made up just now for "Something like a puzzlehunt, but most
of the activities aren't puzzle-y, but they are still challenging."
One of the activities involved looking over a physical book
that had been created for the hunt. A few bookstores across
San Francisco had one copy each of the special book. Each
player's phone directed them to the nearest such bookstore.
There, they could find the special book, gather data from it,
solve the book's riddle, and enter the answer on their phone
to complete the challenge.
Thus I found myself in
Fabulosa Books,
negotiating with fellow hunt enthusiasts to snap pictures
of the pages from a false birdwatching guide.
Unsurprisingly to anyone who's participated in such events,
everyone was very focused on solving the riddle;
nobody bought any books.
I remembered back to when
I helped run 'Terngame 2012
for Twitter interns. I'd set up one puzzle at
Isotope Comics and then watched over the puzzle,
in case any interns needed help solving it.
All of the interns were hyperfocused on
the puzzle; none of them dawdled in the
store after solving to browse or buy.
I felt pretty sheepish for having asked the store's
propietor to let me set up the puzzle there.
I might as well have used a conference room
back at company HQ.
That's what was on my mind when I bought a book at Fabulosa.
Oh? What's that you say? What did I think of the book?
In the novel The Fellowship of Puzzlemakers,
the protagonist goes on a quest of self-discovery.
He's been given a crossword puzzle; he's been instructed
to seek out the answers to the puzzle along his journey.
So one of the answers might be BEAUTY and the
protagonist might encounter a really-nice sunset and
contemplate its BEAUTY. And everyone reading
the book is nodding "Yep, I saw that BEAUTY when
I first solved the crossword, and now here we encounter
it in the story; this whole story is satisfyingly interwoven."
The puzzle's kinda weird, tho. The book takes place in England,
most of the characters are English. But the central-theme
crossword puzzle uses American-style
definition clues, not British-style cryptic clues.
The book explains the reason thusly: The protagonist doesn't
think of himself as smart enough to solve cryptic clues; the
quest-giver knew this, and wanted the puzzle to be solve-able.
But but cryptic clues are just a small part of why
British-style puzzles can be difficult. A much bigger problem
is that their grids are "sparse"; not every square is part of
of an across-word and a down-word. In an American-style puzzle,
if you don't know the across answer, the first name of
whazzerface Świątek you might still be OK: Maybe you'll know
the down-answers that intersect. But in a British-style grid,
even if you have all the intersecting answers, you don't have
all the letters.
A British-style crossword grid from Wikipedia
Maybe you're looking at S□A□E and you're not sure
whether it's
SCALE,
SHADE,
SHAKE,
SHAME,
SHAPE,
SHARE,
SLATE,
SNAKE,
SPACE,
SPARE,
STAGE,
STATE, or what-have you.
If the clue is British-cryptic-style, you have some hope: the clue
has two halves: one definition, one wordplay. If the definition is
so vague that you're not sure whether the answer is SHAPE
or SPACE, probably the wordplay will clear things up. (oh,
a "change" of phase, ok)
So… our not-amazing-puzzler protagonist has to solve
a crossword in a British-style grid and doesn't have an answer
key, so he has to just hope that he picked the right words,
that □E□T□E might be CENTRE or KETTLE…
Also, one of the crossword clues is wrong: it points you at a noun,
but the answer is the verb form of that noun. It's weird that
one clue was wrong. In a novel structured around a crossword,
I either expect no mistakes (a puzzle nerd trying their hand
at novel-writing) or many mistakes (a novelist who doesn't know
the rules of crosswords but nevertheless wants to incorporate one).
Here's my best hypothesis: The author's first draft of this novel used
a British-style crossword with cryptic clues. The author was delighted
when an American publisher picked up the novel: His work would reach
a big audience! But the publisher imposed a condition: Those cryptic
clues had to go; you couldn't expect Americans to understand them.
The author, gnashing his teeth at this slight to his culture, swapped
out his cryptic clues for grudgingly-written defintion-clue replacements,
not noticing that he'd messed one of them up.
Oh? What's that you say? What did I think of the book?
It was OK. It did a great job of structuring the story around
the crossword. If the crossword had been a mistake-less cryptic,
maybe I'd be calling this book masterful.
Permalink
Much of the internet runs on ads; but maybe it's a house of cards.
Apps, web pages, other content-thingies show ads to defray
their costs. Advertisers want to show their messages to
potential customers, and pay to do so. Everybody wins.
Except it doesn't always work so smoothly. A small business
might want to show their ads on news sites and phone games
and Google searches and other places; but maybe doesn't want
to keep track of how their ads are doing at all those different
places. So maybe the small business signs up with a couple
of intermediary services, each service promising to show the ad to some
desired demographic. Maybe everything's working fine? Maybe it's not?
It's hard to tell.
The small business starts getting billed for ads.
Thanks to creepy surveillance, that phone game thinks it knows
its players' demographics, and thus will show the ad to the
right people. But what if it has the demographics wrong?
Or what if the intermediary service messed up and asked for
the wrong demographic? Or what if the intermediary service
is crooked, never actually places any ads, just sends a
plausible-looking bill? Or what if…
It turns out, a lot of this stuff is pretty opaque.
Publishers and advertisers have to take a lot on faith.
We know ads aren't always shown to the right people, but
we don't know how often.
We know there's fraud out there, but we don't know how
much.
The book's author compares the situation to the subprime
mortgage meltdown: We know there are some bad assets out
there. We know the rating system has incentive to be lazy
about seeking out that badness. Is it all about to fall apart?
Maybe. That could be darned bad news for news sites; even
if the advertising markets only crash for a short while, it
might be long enough for shoestring news organizations to go under.
Permalink
I enjoyed the puzzle-y game-y comic book The Beyond, by Jason Shiga, though I played it wrong.
Like his previous work Leviathan,
The Beyond is a choose-your-own-adventure book, but comics instead of plain ol' text.
This game's gimmick: you encounter some special items, each of those special items has a number.
Sometimes when the instructions tell you which page to turn to, you use an item and add its number,
so the item affects what happens next in the plot. It's a neat gimmick.
I played it wrong. I followed instructions: in the game, I found an item. Later on, I used the item
and that affected what happened next in the plot, neat. But I failed to notice that in the comic,
my character had left that item behind. Later on, I encountered other special-number items, and then
a situation where I could use them. Not realizing that my character had left the first special-number
item behind, I "used" it, again adding its number to decide which page to turn to—and jumped to
a page in the book that the author didn't expect. So I was looking at a bit of comic with an abrupt
transition. But I knew that Jason Shiga is a tricky writer, and I can be pretty tricky myself, so I
"cleverly" constructed a probable plotline in my head, bridged the strange transition from my old
situation to my new situation, figured that the author had just elided some
parts and expected me to figure out what had happened. Then I encountered a puzzle where I was supposed
to use my knowledge of the number that had brought me to this point…but of course I had used
the wrong number. So when I applied my "knowledge," things got weirder and I figured out that
I should start over. And when I played again, I finally noticed how the book was trying to call
my attention to that first item getting left behind. Ahem. Anyhow. I eventually finished the comic-game legit.
I notice that the computer game version of this comic-game-thingy
is coming out in a few days. Maybe it will have an "inventory" system that keeps track of which items
you carry with you (or leave behind); maybe it won't, though. I dunno. Anyhow, if you like books,
get the book. If you like computer games, get the game. It's tricky, and if you're too-clever-by-half, you can
make it even trickier.
Permalink
It's the second volume in a set of books about the history
of keyboards, text entry, the user experience of working with
text on various devices. This volume got into more modern history.
Sometimes I was learning stuff, but other times I was just
wallowing in nostalgia.
Or maybe "nostalgia" isn't the right word. What's the word
for when you find out that you misunderstood what was going
on at the time?
Decades ago, I thought I cured my repetitive strain injury by
making sure I used different types of keyboard at home and at
work. Now, reading this book, I figured out that what really
cured my RSI is that the new "different" keyboard I bought for home
was thinner than older keyboards, and thus didn't encourage my
wrists to bend so much.
(OK, there was regular ol' nostalgia, too.
Talking about Japanese text entry, I remembered
how the then-newfangled Canon WordTank was so
much easier to use than my Nelson's
paper kanji dictionary. At the time, such
a game-changer. Nowadays, the idea of a separate
dictionary device seems absurd, tho.)
Anyhow, there's modern keyboard history, how keyboards
migrated onto our phones, then (alas) to our phone screens.
There are a couple of
chapters about modern keyboard enthusiasts who soup up
their keyboards with custom designed keys, custom-built
boards… Uhm, I didn't really try to follow those
chapters too closely because I already have enough hobbies.
(Also, I would feel bad if I spilled snacks on a
nice keyboard, so that's a deal-breaker.)
Permalink
It's
a journey through space and time.
In 1769, the Spaniards of Portolá expedition walked
from San Diego to San Francisco Bay; a couple of
people on the expedition took pretty good notes.
Some time passed. A few years ago,
author Nick Neely
walked from San Diego to Palo Alto by San Francisco Bay, at
the same time of year, keeping to Portolá's route and pace, mostly.
In this book, he writes about his walk;
but he also writes about layers of intervening history.
The result is a report that swings wildly through time,
moving steadily through space.
What do I mean by swinging through time? As the author
tried to keep to Portolá's route, he relied on
expeditioneers' notes about geological formations; those
pretty much stayed the same.
But plenty else had changed over the centuries. The author
outpaced the expedition a few times. Where the expedition
had to chop through undergrowth to clear a path for their
pack animals, the author walked on a paved road. Where the
expedition got bogged down in marshes, the author hiked across
now-drained land. Where the expedition went slowly because
of scurvy, the author didn't have scurvy because now we know better.
The author got "separated" from the expedition
a couple of times: Where the expedition kept to a straight
course, the author went around USA military bases, because
the expedition route is bombarded nowadays.
The author's hitch-y adherence to Portolá's timeline
reminded me of
my attempt to navigate SFMoMA's lobby for artist
Janet Cardiff's video walk. In this immersive experience
(he said, self-consciously),
I carried around a little video player, watching a video
shot by the artist making her way through the SFMoMA lobby. So I had to glance
down at the video player to see where I should walk next; and I had
to glance up to make sure that I didn't crash into any other
present-day museum visitors. And more than once I caught myself
instead dodging around recorded museum visitors, nearly crashing
into present-day folks. So, I wasn't dodging military ordinance,
I operated on a much smaller scale, but yeah, I get it,
I kinda understand the dissonance.
Speaking of my challenges being much smaller scale than
the author's: Yeah,
I walked around SF Bay and I'm proud of that,
but I'm not going to
pooh-pooh the author's stunt of this long walk in California.
Walking around SF Bay, I was never more than a half-day's walk from
a motel. This book's author tromped through wilderness,
tourist-resistant housing developments, farmland…
He camped a lot; he trespassed and camped a lot, not
because he's some raving scofflaw, but because plenty of nights
he didn't have choices. Maybe my SF-Bay walks made me more impressed
with his stunt? Uhm, I used to make fun of people who ate at Taco
Bell while in California, a region with much better Mexican food available.
But I notice in my around-SF-Bay walks, there's a Taco Bell in
South San Mateo I stop at. The cuisine is nothing special;
but I hit that spot at the end of a long day of
walking. My brain exhorts if we just walk a little further,
we can have much tastier food, but my legs say yeah, no,
that "little further" is not happening today.
So I eat Taco Bell burritos and check into a motel and go to
bed and rest my poor, tired legs. Anyhow, the author gets food
from gas stations, convenience stores, from Taco Bell;
and I get it, I sympathize.
Speaking of recognizing that one's chosen challenge is much punier than
that taken on by others: The author enountered some people on a
Peace and Dignity run,
Native Americans relay-running from Fairbanks Alaska to Panama:
waaaaay further than a piddly half-the-length-of-California
650 mile
stroll. At Panama, those runners would meet another group that had
run up from Tierra del Fuego. Hoo boy. Anyhow. Anyhow.
Anyhow, swinging through time; it's not just ping-ponging
between Portolá's
time and the present day. Some historical displays
teach current Californians how folks lived before the Spanish
showed up. We get a bit of the history of Los Angeles' water system.
Fossils tell us about life long before those folks.
Zebras near the central coast survive and remind us of Hearst's
folly. I learned more than I expected to about connections between
the Portolá expedition and the Ortega Chile Company.
I got glimpses of the Spaniards' enslaving California natives;
thankfully I didn't get so many glimpses of the USA's killing
of more natives
(which didn't happen so close to the expedition route).
The author passed through areas hit by nearing-present-day forest fires.
And there are plenty of present-day points of interest;
the author visited a farmland produce warehouse; a freeze-drier
who turns animals into displays for natural history museums;
a baseball game. He talked with homeless folks and folks with homes.
He navigates around that beach that Vinod Khosla is trying to forbid
the public from visiting. (Advice to Khosla: let some branch
of the USA military conduct live-ordnance-style actvity on your beach; they
will definitely forbid visitors.)
I thought it was pretty interesting.
Permalink
It's the first volume in a set of books about the history
of keyboards, text entry, the user experience of working
with text on various then-newfangled devices.
I learned a lot, which might kind of surprise you; I'd already
learned plenty about the history of
this technology and that technology.
But focusing on text brings you to some weird corners.
E.g., in the very-early days of typewriters, a typist
couldn't see what they'd typed; the marks were under the paper,
hidden by the typewriter mechanism. You might say "Well, any
serious typist learns to touch-type at some point;
but I dunno if I could work up the resolve to learn touch typing
if I couldn't see my work when I was starting out.
I learned about Linotype spacebands. A linotype lets a typesetter
make a line-of-type by typing text, laying out an array of letterform
molds. But this tool, for book and newspaper publishers, supports
full-justified text. It did that by changing the spacing between words;
not so hard if they're just blips of light on a computer screen, but
tricky when they're pieces of metal sitting in a track.
It turns out that while the letter-pieces were flat, spaces were
spacebands,
tall subtly-slanted wedges.
|..____⚺____⚺___⚺__⚺___.|
When you'd entered a line of text, the machine would push down on the
wedges, forcing apart the words until those words hit the edges of the
track.
|_____ _____ ____ ___ ___|
V V V V
They fit snugly enough such that when hot lead was poured over the track,
it probably didn't leak past those wedges.
I learned something about the history of the telegraph, surprising
since I studied that pretty hard while coming up with ideas for that
Telegraph Hill puzzle hunt. I learned about some of the also-ran
devices that were devised, false starts towards usability. Many people
saw that electricity could be used for communication. Someone at point
A closes an electrical circuit; this causes something to
happen at point B, far away but also on that electric circuit.
But what should happen? It shouldn't require too much power; you'd have
to drive that much power through the circuit. (Modern folks
might think "why not run a little trickle of power through the circuit
and use it to trigger a transistor to something more powerful at
the receiving end?" but of course this is all before transistors.)
I read about the efforts Francisco Salva Campillo, who had the idea
of using
twitching
severed frogs' legs at the receiving end to indicate when the
circuit was closed. I'm really glad I didn't
try to write a puzzle around that.
So far, so good. Onward to Volume №2.
Permalink
It's a survey of puzzles: word puzzles, logic puzzles, physical puzzles, jigsaw—you get the idea.
I'm not really in the target demographic for a survey; I already knew most of this stuff from, y'know,
participating in puzzle events for the past not-quite-twenty years. Sure, the author has a unique set
of opinions; but I've encountered most of those opinions piecemeal while talking with other puzzle nerds
for the past not-quite-twenty years. So why did I read this targeted-elsewhere book? OK, remember
back in 2020 I helped run the MIT Mystery
Hunt, including a pancake Pictionary event, and one of the participants had a TV crew with him?
That participant was the book's author, A.J. Jacobs. I don't know a
ton about him, but apparently he roped some TV outfit into covering some of his more eye-catching book research.
It turns out he's kind of a big deal. You remember some years back, some guy spent a year trying to follow
all the rules of the bible? Same guy. So: kinda famous.
I'm quite grateful that he attended the 2020 MIT Mystery Hunt. He didn't say a ton about it; that's appropriate,
since he was aiming for a survey of the whole world of puzzling and was writing a book carry-able without help from
a forklift. Why am I grateful? Because he was willing to work on that puzzle that used surgery videos as puzzle data.
A lot of folks couldn't bring themselves to look at that puzzle; I certainly couldn't. I remember making sure
that its videos were hooked up correctly by peeking at them between my fingers… hoo boy. Jacobs was willing
to work on that puzzle; and when he chose a sample MIT Mystery Hunt puzzle to include in his book, he chose
"Bobcat" by the same author (but much less disturbing).
So the author dove in deep to the world of the MIT Mystery Hunt, participating, solving puzzles… and then wrote
a little about it for this book. It kinda makes you wonder what ended up "on the cutting room floor." And that sums up
what I thought about other sections of the book. He has a chapter about chess puzzles. Wow, he interviewed Garry Frickin' Kasparov
for his chapter about chess problems… uhm, but while I bet it was an interesting conversation, not a lot of it made
it into the book. (Or maybe most of the interview made it into the book except for the part where hypothetically
Kasparov said "I have a bus to catch, I can give you five minutes"?) Uhm, it's cool that someone wants to write
a breezy, readable survey of puzzling aimed at the layperson; it's cool that someone writing about chess problems talked
to Kasparov; it's just kinda jarring that they're the same book, I guess?
I was mulling this over while talking with someone who recently read The Dawn of Everything, a book which
compares how various cultures solved various problems historically. And that book is 700 pages, and it's a lot.
And maybe it would have been a kindness to readers to pick one problem that various cultures solved various ways
and write one much shorter book about that problem. Or maybe if there had been an editor who was willing to lay down
the law and say "This book is all very well, but ⅔ of it has got to go." So, like, I get it that if this guy
wants to write a book that appeals to his large existing audience, he's gotta keep it short, keep it breezy.
I guess I'm just so accustomed to mass-audience books being kinda sloppy, it's jarring to see something
so rigorous and yet targeted to mass-audience.
Permalink
It's a history of text-centric computer games structured
as 50 essays about 50 games, choosing one game published
each year 1971-2020. It's pretty interesting. It took me
a long time to get through this book. When I was reading,
it went quickly. But I kept wandering off play the games
it described.
E.g., the book only mentions the game
Ditch Day Drifter
in passing, but I figured it might be the closest
I could ever get to participating in Caltech's Ditch Day.
And maybe the game felt more like something you'd find
in Zork's Great Underground Empire than in Pasadena, but
it was still pretty good. And there's a few hours gone
to play a game that was a few sentences in the book.
In recent years, a lot of text games have been something like
computer-enhanced Choose Your Own Adventure books; except
they've concentrated on storytelling. The original
CYOA books couldn't have much story; each book
was kinda short; and whenever the reader made a choice,
the book needed a whole set of pages reflecting
the outcome of that choice. So maybe each version of
the story, you were just reading eight pages.
But thanks to computers' nigh-infinite storage, a "book"
can hold a lot. And maybe a book doesn't need
totally-distinct "pages" to reflect the effects of choices.
Maybe in one scene, the reader's presented with a choice:
Adopt Chunko the Wonder-dog?
- [ Yes, give Chunko a home ]
- [ No, I have enough problems ]
Depending on which button the reader chooses to tap, different
things might happen. But maybe the author doesn't need to write
totally-different stuff. In a dramatic confrontation with
the sinister Master of Horridness, the author might write a little
paragraph:
Chunko the Wonder-dog barks at the sinister Master of Horridness.
"Bark! Bark, bark!" The Master of Horridness hisses and clutches
his cape closer.
The author can specify that if the reader adopted Chunko, that paragraph
should appear; but not otherwise. It's a little flourish
that might give the reader warm fuzzies, but doesn't require writing two
versions of the whole narrative.
These games have caught the eyes of writers who want to use them
for actual storytelling. And so they write these games: you, the
reader can make choices about how the story will go, guiding the
protagonist. And so you're trying to "win" by working towards a
compelling story, navigating the path of narrative. To jump
nimbly as Mario,
you must master timing; to choose wisely
in a 16-chapter genre mystery
story, understand that your prime suspect in chapter three
is a red herring, with maybe a 50-50 chance of surviving the
next four chapters.
Anyhow, I've been reading/playing a lot of these games. When I slowed
down, I'd go back to reading 50 Years of Text Games,
make it about three pages further—and them,
bam, I read something that made me return to the games.
For example, after I played a few too many romance games with a
billionaire/prince love interest, I got pretty sick of them.
The billionaire would whisk my character off on a private jet
flight to Rome for a plate of penne; and I, the reader, was
supposed to ignore the whole climate-change implications of private
jet flights and think
This character has earned a life of luxury by dint of their sweetness,
and if the glaciers must melt to drive this point home, so be it..
It made me want to re-word the
classic @dril tweet
Food: 200 CO2 lbs.
Data: 150
Housing: 800
Monthly pasta jaunts: 3600 CO2 lbs.
Utility: 150
someone who is good at the ecology please help me, my planet is burning
After I played one two many games with that plotline, I avoided
anything else with "billionaire" in the title or blurb.
When I saw the blurb for the game
Elite Status: Platinum Concierge
"How far would you go to make a billionaire's dreams come true?"
I noped out of there in a hurry.
But then I was reading 50 Years of Text Games again, and
Emily Short came up again, and I decided to seek out some works.
And it turns out she co-wrote that Elite Status: Platinum Concierge game.
So I played that game after all. And it was good;
she didn't treat billionaires as over-the-top wish-fulfillment machines.
That story had some gnarly choices.
Writers want to exercise writerly techniques.
Some literary devices don't mesh well with games. In a plain ol' book,
an author might build suspense by revealing information to the reader
unknown to the protagonist. Perhaps a chapter shows the sinister Master of
Horridness making evil plans with his minions, the Horrid Horde.
Oh no, the protagonist is unaware of this looming menace!
In a game, this feels weird. The reader gets this "inside info," and
then makes choices on behalf of the protagonist, who's unaware.
You're heading out for a walk. Want to wear your motorcycle helmet?
- [ Yes, oddly. I would. ]
- [ No, don't be ridiculous. ]
You, the reader, might choose differently if you watched the Master of
Horridness planning to drop a piano from some rooftop: oddly, a helmet
seems like a good idea, hmmm. But how to explain
why the protagonist donned the helmet? Unconscious psychic powers?
Monumental good luck? Aliens?
Things get weirder when you combine story, game, and capitalism.
The book 50 Years of Text Games covers both art-for-art's-sake
highfalutin' works and commercial games. These days, a lot of the
commercial text-y choose-y games are free-to-play, but make money by
charging the reader for extras.
So after you read that scene in which the protagonist has a tense
conversation (replete with fleeting glances and significant pauses)
with Cragfield the brooding, good-looking local landholder,
you might see the choice:
See that same conversation again, but from Cragfield's point of view,
including exclusive interior monologue and innermost thoughts?
If you choose Yes, you'll spend 10 gems, available at your device's
app store for perhaps a dollar. And thus you'll get to find out that
Cragfield is secretly obsessed with you and also with
memories of some mysterious figure in his
tragic backstory.
(Well, you probably already guessed that if you've ever read a genre
romance story. Presumably, spending 10 gems on the scene also yields
some more-specific insight.)
Later on, perhaps you can choose to have the protagonist flirt outrageously
with Cragfield, despite the offputting demeanor. Why would
the protagonist think flirting would work? Extreme good luck?
It might feel as though the protagonist somehow deserves good luck,
since you, the reader, spent a dollar.
But within the context of the story, it still feels strange.
Another literary trope: If the protagonist makes a bad decision early on,
that's strong character motivation: They feel responsible; they
want to fix the problem
they created. If I'm reading a plain ol' novel and the main character makes
a stupid decision, maybe I notice at the time, but probably I don't.
I probably just
ride along, enjoying the book. Later, when consequences emerge, I might
think Aw, too bad that happened. Welp, better get to work fixing that.
In these games, on the other hand,
I'm paying pretty close attention to the
main character's choices. Often, I'm doing the choosing. If asked to choose
between three bad ideas, I don't just nod my head and ride along. I notice
I'm being set up. My eyes narrow; my hackles rise.
As motivation, it works in novels; but it backfires in these novel-adjacent
games.
It can work. In stories or in games, maybe that character's bad decision
doesn't just steer the plot. Maybe it shines a light on some aspect of
their personality. I've seen this work well in comedies and a tragedy.
A character in a tragedy or comedy might have some exaggerated trait:
a tragic flaw or funny quirk. In the
Episode app game
Competitive Edge, the main character is hilariously hyper-competitive
and arrogant. The reader often faces choices that might be summarized:
How do you reply to your rival's question?
- [ Over-the-top confident answer ]
- [ Over-the-top competitive answer ]
- [ Over-the-top narcissistic answer ]
The consequences of these choices are bad for the character, but darned
funny for the reader. Later in the story, a meanie character
manipulates the main character into an obvious trap; the reader sees it
happening, but grins and goes along with it, well-trained by previous
rewards. (OK, I grinned and
went along with it. Your mileage may vary.)
When nudging the player to grin along with bad choices, consistency matters.
In the Choices App
game The Cursed Heart, at the story's start, we establish that
the main character is overly trusting. Midway through the game, the main
character misplaces their trust and falls for an obvious trick. It feels
stupid: before this, the reader has been presented with choices,
and can steer the main character away from traps. When I played I thought,
Thanks to my paranoi expert guidance, the main character has
overcome their naiveté. I'd only induced some momentary aberrations,
but the game didn't make that clear until that jarring forced misstep.
The Choice of Games game
"Tally Ho!" makes it safe to make bad choices, even if the main character
isn't absurdly flawed. This game is a comedy in the style of P.G. Wodehouse;
as such, it's about the upper classes in England. It's possible
for the main character to face consequences for bad decisions, but quite
unlikely. Meanwhile, the effects of failure can be pretty
funny, sometimes funnier than success.
I mentioned the Choice of Games game "Elite Status: Platinum Concierge,"
in which you're something like a personal assistant to a few billionaires.
In this game, you face situations with no good choices, only choosing
who to harm. In this game, it works; it's a tragedy, and you expect a
character in a tragedy to face terrible choices.
When one of these book-ish games works well, it feels like the player and the author[s] are
telling a story together. When it doesn't work well, it gets clunky.
When a heist game rewards you for making good choices with a bigger
heist take, that's all very well. But then you have to second-guess
your choices: do they make sense? Do they make sense in the context
of a cinematic heist story? Should you knock out that palace guard
by clonking him on the head? In real life, no; you shouldn't concuss
someone.
In a heist story… maybe? How realistic is this heist story?
Maybe the story is light and glib, knocking guards out is totally cool,
everybody guaranteed to be all recovered in the next scene. Maybe the
story's more realistic and you should be worried about concussions.
If you choose to handcuff the guard instead of knocking him out, will
the game penalize you, lower your score for making a choice that doesn't
fit the mood, taking things too seriously?
How well do you understand the story that the game's author wants to tell?
Are you sure you want to be part of it?
Oh… the book? Right, that's what I'm supposed to
be writing about. Yeah, I recommend it. It talks about the games;
talks about changes in what each, uhm, artistic movement? Sure, let's
say artistic movement. The book talks about what each successive
artistic movement has tried to accomplish. It's interesting.
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Book Report: Software Engineering at Google
It's a pretty-good survey of important systems (technical systems and people-systems) at Google Engineering. When I say "survey" I mean it covers a lot of topics lightly. E.g., the chapter "How to W...
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Book Report: The Indomitable Florence Finch: The Untold Story of a War Widow Turned Resistance Fighter
Content warning: Horrors of war. Death, starvation, torture, rape During WWII, Japan invaded The Philippines, overthrowing USA colonizers. The USA had acted pretty awful, so you might wonder why Jap...
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Book Report: She Come by it Natural
It's a biography of Dolly Parton braided together with a bit of the book author's family background. That family background might be summarized as "poor, hard-working woman," and helps the probably-p...
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I pre-ordered the book 50 Years of Text Games and you can, too. It's a book of 50+ essays about computer games; the author chose one game to write about per year from 1971 to 2020. If that has you th...
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Book Report: Abolish Silicon Valley
It's a memoir by a computer nerd who bought into the startup myth, and then was very disillusioned very quickly. I worked at a pre-IPO software startup. We IPOed, but at a low price. The investors...
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Book Report: The Suitcase Clone
It's a heist set in the same universe as Sourdough, and thus the object of the heist isn't some jewel-encrusted MacGuffin, but is gastro goop—our protagonist goes to Italy to steal grape vines ...
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Book Report: The Anarchy
It's a history of how the East India Company took over the Indian subcontinent. It's such a grim book; maybe it's a book to keep handy in case you meet someone nostalgic for the good ol' days. How I...
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Leviathan by Jason Shiga
I enjoyed the puzzle book Leviathan by Jason Shiga. It's a sort of choose-your-own-adventure comic book. (Shiga's made other such CYOA comics before, you might remember Meanwhile… from some years bac...
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Book Report: Imagine That!
It's the autobiography of Ed Smith, one of the first African-American people to work in electronics design, video games, and personal computers. Dude grew up in a then-bad neighborhood and seemed des...
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Book Report: Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties
CW: police violence It's a survey of 1960s Los Angeles radical politics. This is a long book; Los had so much radical politics back then. As you read the history, you find out why there was so much...
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Book Report: Stolen Skies
It's another novel by Tim Powers, who writes speculative fiction with the plotline What if this weird real-life event because that silly legend is true? They're good books. But when reading this book...
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Book Report: Unix (a History and Memoir)
Brian Kernighan wrote some remembrances of his time working on Unix-y things at Bell Labs. Some of it was new to me; some I'd already read elsewhere. (When I think about the timing, I suspect that th...
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If your memory is very good, you might remember there was a TV crew getting footage at the 2020 MIT Mystery Hunt. Specifically, I dodged around that crew as I carried pancakes at the Pancake Pictiona...
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Book Report: Practical Doomsday
Happy Great 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire anniversary! It's a good day to read Practical Doomsday, a guide to disaster preparedness. It's written by an author who's familiar with prepper cul...
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Oof, I'm just now finding out that large parts of fave novel Angle of Repose were plagiarized from the journals of Mary Hallock Foote. I really liked the authentic-sounding descriptions of life in th...
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Book Report: America, Inc.
America, Inc is speculative fiction; but instead of the usual technology-speculation, it's organization-speculation. In the USA nowadays, corporations are people with free speech rights. This novel e...
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Book Report: S v Z
This book accompanies Tauba Auerbach's exhibit now showing at SFMoMA. It's an interesting piece of art in its own right. That's a good thing, I guess? I find myself comparing it to an earlier book d...
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Book Report: On the Plain of Snakes
The author traveled from the USA to Mexico. A famous author, he could access places you or I could not: Local writers gave him letters of introduction; but nobody knew what he looked like,* so he co...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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 ...
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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. ...
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Book Report: Fall; or Dodge In Hell
Did Not Finish. This science-fiction novel posits a digital afterlife. Some of the narrative takes place in this afterlife, some in the real world. Alas, I found the afterlife bits dull. I think I wa...
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Book Report: Ninth Step Station, Season 2
I read the next part of this cyberpunk buddy-cop boo serie unit of fiction. It was fun. I gave up on waiting for it to come out as an ebook. It's published as a serial; in theory, each "season" of th...
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Book Report: The Dark Net
[Content warning: oh gee whiz, the book has just about all of them.] This book is a survey of sketchy places on the internet… and it gets pretty darned sketchy. Some of it is mostly harmless...
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Book Report: How to Do Nothing
In How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell exhorts us to occasionally look up from social networks and instead look around at the places and people around us. These days, at least here in the SF Bay Area, thi...
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Book Report: The Vapors
Once upon a time in the USA, gambling was illegal across the land. A few cities and towns went ahead and had illegal gambling. Those cities stopped one by one until just one was left: Hot Springs, Ar...
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Book Report: Agency
The characters in Agency do as they are bid, going to and fro with little understanding of their place in history. I'm not sure if that means that the title is a pun or an anti-pun or some ironic com...
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Book Report: Lean Impact
This book advises do-gooders (workers at NGOs, charities, and the like) how to apply Lean Startup principles to their good works. I.e., don't try to come up with a perfect plan at the beginning; inst...
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Book Report: One Person, No Vote
It's a whirlwind tour of voter suppression in the USA. Nowadays, Depending on who you ask, North Carolina is no longer considered a fully-functioning democracy; how did we land in this situation? No...
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Book Report: The Library Book
Susan Orlean writes about the Los Angeles main library. There's history, an unsolved mystery, but my favorite bits were about day-to-day operations at the modern-day library. There's not so much emph...
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Book Report: Republic of Lies
This book explores some recent hoaxes and fake news, concentrating on stories that got gullible folks to take political action. (Does blundering around with a rifle count as "political action"? Maybe...
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Book Report: The Grid (The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future)
In my head, an electrical company's control room looks like some Hollywood vision of NORAD: a map of the region with blinking red lights to indicate imminent-brownout warnings. But my head is wrong....
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Book Report: Cult of the Dead Cow (Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World)
Nowadays we talk about the Centers for Disease Control a bunch but back in the Aughts, when we said the cDC, we probably meant the Cult of the Dead Cow. This was a group of hackers. Some of them were...
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Book Report: The Fighters (Americans in Combat)
The USA invades countries every so often. This book tells the stories of some American soldiers in combat. Some things go well. Some things go wrong. If I knew a kid considering joining the military,...
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Book Report: Gideon the Ninth
It's a horror-scifi-mystery: necromancers travel to a distant world to study secret death magic. They're murdered one by one. Fortunately, they're terrible people. Thus, instead of sorrowfully mourni...
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Book Report: Misbehaving
It's an autobiography of an economist who wanted to affect policy. This is difficult: If you want to convince a politician to do something that they didn't already want to do, you probably need some ...
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The Devil's Chessboard
It's a biography of Allen Dulles—Nazi sympathizer, CIA director, Bay of Pigs fiasco-driver, Warren Commission Report obfuscator. The story of this terrible human being reminds us that one perso...
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Book Report: How Not to be Wrong
A mathematician writes about how to think about the universe. A lot of the math-for-the-layperson material was old news to me, but there were some new-to-me bits. E.g., I'd read about instant runoff ...
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Book Report: The Great Getty
This biography tells the story of J. Paul Getty, oil tycoon. Getty made his millions the old-fashioned American way: his father was an oil tycoon. Reading about his early years as he lucks into a for...
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Book Report: Season of the Witch
It's a history of San Francisco, concentrating on the weirdness of the 1970s and early 1980s. Jonestown, AIDS, … I'd read about bad things from those days, but hadn't followed Mr Rogers' advic...
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Book Report: Hello World
It's a book about AI and ML, especially where they bump into ethical questions. Part of the problem we get into is… computers nowadays (as in the past) are good at things humans are bad at; bu...
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Book Report: Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age
It's a combination biography of Grace Hopper and story of the development of COBOL, the first mumble programming language (where historians and quibblers enjoy arguing about what exact phrase goes in...
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Book Report: Bad Blood
Content warning: all the gross bodily fluids Today I was walking along, minding my own business, and I felt something wet on my hip. I looked down and saw blood and guts on my sweatshirt. My brain s...
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Book Report: All At Sea
It's a writer's memoir about joining up with a documentary film crew hoping to document seamanship techniques by nomadic sailors based near Thailand, sort of. But things go off the rails and it's a r...
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Book Report: Silence on the Wire
It's a book with ways to indirectly find out internet-security-ish info about things. E.g., if you're curious to know whether visitors to your website also frequent the San Francisco SPCA website, yo...
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Book Report: Ninth Step Station, Season 1
It's cyberpunk detectives fighting crime in a divided city. It's fun. There are fun bits of spycraft, drone walls, and the kinds of nasty side effects from extreme body modification that Mike Pondsmi...
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Book Report: Paper
Some months back, I learned that back in pre-USA days, the American Colonies had to import rags from the old country to make paper with. I thought that was weird. My mom noted that Mark Kurlansky had...
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Book Report: The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler
Speaking of heavily redacted documents: Raymond Chandler discarded most of his notebooks, but overlooked some. This little book has some excerpts. It's of interest only to the completist; there's not...
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Book Report: How Smart Machines Think
When Sean Gerrish isn't automating the creation of wordplayish portmanteaux, he wrangles artificial intelligence… or writes this book about it. It's a popular-science survey of modern AI. You ...
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Book Report: [REDACTED] [REDACTED]
My mystery hunt team is kicking around theme ideas. If there's a theme to the theme ideas, it's: books I hadn't read yet, movies I hadn't seen yet, TV shows I had yet to watch, etc. So lately I've be...
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Book Report; The Fifth Season
This science-fiction novel depicts a cruel society, laying out some tragic consequences. It was a saddening read. ...
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Book Report: Manhattan Beach
It's a novel. People enter the water, people exit the water. People change names, people change themselves. There's some WWII waterfront life bits, which were fun; and shipwreck raft survival which w...
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Book Report: Reporter
content warning: war crimes, uspol It's an autobiography by Seymour Hersh, who reported on (among other things) the My Lai massacre, Watergate, and Abu Ghraib. There's an important lesson for soldi...
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Remember a couple of weeks back when that Ninth Step Station serial started on Serialbox but their web signup was b0rken so you couldn't do anything? Their web signup is fixed now, try it again. ...
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Book Report: Breaking Cover
Autobiography of a lady who used her CIA ops training to interview 140+ displaced Iraqi families to screen them for bad folks so the not-bad folks could escape the war and live in Slovakia. As you mi...
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Book Report: Factfulness
It's a book by the GapMinder folks reminding us that India, China, world-health do-gooders and other folks have changed human society plenty in past few decades. On the one hand, this is happy "news"...
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Book Report: Alternate Routes
What if the myth of Dædalus, 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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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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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 ...
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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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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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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...
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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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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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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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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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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...
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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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#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'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...
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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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Book Report: A Gentleman in Moscow
In this novel, the protagonist's special ability is kindness. It's super effective. ...
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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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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...
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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 ...
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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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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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Book Report: Draft № 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...
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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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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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Book Report: October
A history of the months between the overthrow of the Tsar and the rise of Lenin, as told by China Miéville taking a break from writing science fiction long enough to untangle this mess such that one ...
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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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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...
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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...
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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...
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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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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." ...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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 ...
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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...
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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. ...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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. ...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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 ...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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"....
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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...
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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...
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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 ...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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...
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Book Report: The (Mis)Behavior of Markets
I kept hearing recommendations for this book. But I'm not really a finance guy, just a recreational math guy. I'd already heard this book's gist: financiers keep getting into trouble because their fo...
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Book Report: Stress Test
It's a memoir by Tim Geithner, Treasury Secretary under Obama associated with government bailouts following the mortgage crisis. I wasn't a fan of the bailouts. I read this book figuring I'd learn ...
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Book Report: Spam Nation
Brian Krebs writes about computer crime. In this book, he traces the spam economy. Want to know how America's health care system keeps Putin in power? (Yes, I read this book a while back, before we k...
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Book Report: Geek Sublime
Though we can all agree that Paul Graham was full of shit when he said computer hackers were like painters (in his essay Hackers and Painters), I guess I don't want to read these essays by someone wh...
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Book Report: Wild
It was a bestseller. Everybody read this before I did. You probably already read this or decided you wouldn't. Anyhow. It's a memoir of grief on the Pacific Coat Trail. I saw the movie before I read ...
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Book Report: The Hot Rock
It's a heist novel. It's a fun multi-heist novel. I'm glad I read it; it was fun and I always wondered what the Sleater-Kinney album was named for. ...
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Book Report: The Checklist Manifesto
We humans are inordinately proud that we're somewhat cleverer than lizards. The good news is that we can do some complex things. The bad news is that we think we're really great at handling that comp...
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Book Report: Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous
It's a book about the social movement Anonymous. That's a tricky thing to write about because anyone can be part of it. I could don a Guy Fawkes mask and declare that Anonymous' new purpose was const...
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Book Report: The Lost Frenchman
It's a thriller in which puzzly geocachers are unusually qualified to seek a treasure. It is fun in much the same way the National Treasure movies are fun, but with better puzzles. If that sounds lik...
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Book Report: The Undersea Network
It's a book about undersea cables: telegraph cables, coaxial cables, fiber. That sort of thing. The examples are from around the Pacific. And the examples are pretty sweet. The author chased down a f...
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Book Report: Limits to Growth
Some folks wrote World3, a world economic simulator to answer questions along the lines of "if humans keep trying to use nonrenewable energy at their current rate, what will be the warning signs that...
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Book Report: Coyotes
Donald Trump is scared of undocumented Mexican workers. Then again, he's a coward who's scared of plenty of things. How much should you worry? In Ted Conover's book Coyotes, he (Conover, not Trump) t...
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Book Report: City Beasts
Oh, it's a Mark Kurlansky book I haven't read yet. He wrote books about Cod and Salt; those were good. reads two pages Oh, wait, this here book is fiction? Dang. Uhm, nevermind. ...
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Book Report: Thunderstruck
It's two intertwined biographies. One is a biography of Marconi, inventor of the wireless telegraph. One is a true-crime biography of a fugitive who was caught due to the wireless telegraph. The Mar...
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Book Report: The Glass Cage
I finished reading this pointless book. It was always in the "neighborhood" of saying something interesting. It's about things that technology gets wrong, a topic I'm interested in. I kept hoping! Bu...
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Book Report: Medusa's Web
It's one of those Tim Powers novels in which a carefully-researched history conceals magical conspiracy. What if the set designers and costumers involved with the silent movie Salome were transcendin...
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Book Report: Waypoint Kangaroo
Happy National Selfie Day! It's also the day that Amazon starts selling the excellent novel Waypoint Kangaroo, so here's a selfie of me holding up my laptop with the book's cover image: In this sc...
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Book Report: The Skies Belong To Us
It's a book about Roger Holder, Cathy Kerkow, and other skyjackers of 1972 and thereabouts. Then, as now, someone mentally-unhinged seeking fame could get media coverage by threatening many lives in ...
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Book Report: Nobody's Home
It's a novella set in the same world as The Anubis Gates. Ghosts, barges, and hopscotch in Dickensian London. Fun times. ...
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Book Report: Dragnet Nation
In which a reporter explores preserving privacy, trying out tools and processes to keep governments and companies from learning about her. This book could easily have devolved into tinfoil-hattery, b...
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Book Report: Smoke Gets in Your Eyes And Other Lessons from the Crematory
What happens to our bodies after we die? This book talks about preparing bodies, funerals, that sort of thing. We've got plenty of taboos around death. E.g., the author figures that leaving your body...
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Book Report: Liar's Poker
When Hillary Clinton took Wall Street money and passed laws to help Wall Street companies, was that so bad? Read this book for the practical jokes but also to remember Wall Street's outrages. Liar's ...
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Book Report: The Art of Travel
I went out for a cup of coffee this morning and it felt like an adventure because: rain. Should I write a few paragraphs to convey the exhilaration of walking through a shower in a drought-parched la...
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Book Report: Orbiting the Giant Hairball
In theory, this is a book of anecdotes about a creative person surviving/thriving in the bureaucracy of the Hallmark company. Mostly it seemed like anecdotes from someone overly anxious about authori...
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Book Report: San Francisco's Telegraph Hill
It's a book about San Francisco's Telegraph Hill neighborhood. I was interested because I wanted a puzzle hunt there. This book talked about local history. Back in the day, before folks had Facebook ...
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Book Report: She's Just Another Navy Pilot
A memoir by Loree Draude Hirschman about being one of the first women combat pilots for the US Navy, mostly about her first voyage as such on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln. As if learning to l...
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Happy New Year! Here's a couple of frames from the old silent movie Salome that might enhance your understanding of the novel Medusa's Web. Or might not. I'm only partway through. I just wanted to st...
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Book Report: Prisoners of Power
I wanted to try a book by the Strugatskys, who I keep hearing good things about. Unfortunately, they were novelists. I bet this book was pretty good for a novel, but I'm mostly into non-fiction these...
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Book Report: Collaboration
It's a book about things that can go right or wrong when a big organization encourages or discourages collaboration. Done well, it can help. Done poorly, it can harm. This book didn't really help me ...
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Today's mail brought a batch of Kickstarter goodies from Oubliette Escape: a booklet of short stories and some pretty postcards. I remember that some of these are puzzles and some aren't. I don't re...
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Book Report: Progress Principle
This book's cover is misleading; the book is good, but I almost returned it to the library without bothering to read it. The cover shows a Post-It attached by a thumbtack, which seems like the resul...
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Book Report: The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby
It's Tom Wolfe articles about culture, celebrities, and New York city. He wrote these in the early 60s. The culture writing holds up. Even if demolition derbies are no longer so popular, it's fun to...
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Book Report: The Everything Store
It's a history of Amazon. That's Amazon the company, not the Amazon region of what-have-you. As near as I can tell, mean people thrive as Amazon negotiators. In various areas, Amazon will start out w...
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Book Report: Hipster Business Models
In which the Pricenomics writers report on some small and/or modern businesses. These folks didn't necessarily set out to be hipsters. A writer who sat in the park and wrote stories on demand. As he ...
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Book Report: In Defense of Flogging
What if prisoners could shorten their sentences by choosing to be flogged instead? This sounds cruel…but then you think about how many prisoners would take that deal. Which gets to the book's ...
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Book Report: Revision
In this sci-fi novel, the coincidences are part of the plot. A fun quick read. ...
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Book Report: Lean In
I heard a bunch of bad things about this book. I read it so that I could make fun of it. But now that I've read the book, the bad things I've heard seem like they were about a strawman version. I'll ...
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Book Report: The Old Ways
It's a book of philosophical meandering ramblings about walking and sailing old routes. It starts out with a great deal of meandering musings, but if you can get past that, there are some interesting...
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Book Report: Being Mortal
It's Atul Gawande, thoughtful writer/doctor, on end-of-life issues. Gets into the question: why does society pressure doctors to make our last days miserable? Maybe because folks don't want to think ...
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Book Report: Bossypants
It's a biography by Tina Fey, writer/actress on the TV shows Saturday Night Live and 30Rock. I hadn't watched those (except for some SNL sketches where Fey played awful politician Sarah Palin), so I ...
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Book Report: The Quantum Thief
Yes it's been a few weeks since my most recent Book Report. I've been busy. Also, my shelf of New Yorkers filled up. I keep around old issues of the New Yorker to read on occasions it doesn't make se...
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Book Report: Countdown to Zero Day
The story of Stuxnet, the little virus that crept into Iranian control systems and convinced them to destroy some centrifuges. I already knew the basics, but I learned from this book. Over time, ther...
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Book Report: Infrastructure
If your memory is very good, you remember that a few years ago I reported on Infrastructure, a gorgeous book about the systems of industry, agriculture, transport, information, and waste that surroun...
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Link: Someone Else's Book Report
Dennis Bianchi of the SFPD reviews books. He reviewed Days of Rage, a book about violent extremists in 1970. ...
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Book Report: The Great A&P
A surprisingly interesting story about selling food in the USA, featuring lots of government regulation. I said "surprisingly", right? The story of the USA's first big chain store, the food merchant...
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Book Report: 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5 + RND(1)); : GOTO 10
It's a book about a little "one-liner" Commodore 64 BASIC program. What happens when a bunch of academics want to talk about the good ol' days of 1980s home computer programming? A book like this, th...
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Book Report: The Man with the Getaway Face
It's another "Parker" crime novel. A quick brutal read. ...
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Book Report: Give and Take
This book makes the case that you can behave nicely and still get ahead in business. Is this surprising? Does this need saying? Maybe; the author says that many folks don't think they can give others...
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Book Report: Cop in the Hood
A sociologist became a cop in Baltimore's Eastern District and lived to write about it. It's a good book, whether you're looking for some background on The Wire or just want some reminders about why ...
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Book Report: Russians: The People behind the Power
I went into this book thinking If Russians are so smart, why do they keep voting for the corrupt Putin? This book answered that question nicely. If I'd lived through what the typical Russian had, why...
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Book Report: The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian
Conan stories were influential, but I hadn't read any. I'd always been curious: how could a stupid barbarian interest folks so? (Yes, yes, Conan's actually a smart barbarian; but the cliche I'm used ...
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Book Report: Time Bandit: Two Brothers, the Bering Sea, and One of the World's Deadliest Jobs
It's about crabbing and fishing and nautical life in Alaska. There's some tough bits to slog through: bragging about having survived some harebrained stunts; an attempt at a framing story that makes ...
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Book Report: Ancillary Justice
Zombie space opera science fiction. It was fun. ...
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Wondering why California doesn't raise water prices during a drought? You might enjoy The King of California, the history of a California family farm; though this "family farm" was more of an agribus...
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Book Report: Rolling Nowhere
It's a journal about riding the rails—hopping freight trains and living with hobos in hobo jungles (at least the hobos that were still around in the 80s). I don't want to hop freights; and this...
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Book Report: This is Improbable
It's a book collecting and compressing "Improbably Research" topics. This book convinced me to go back to reading the Improbable Research blog. A chapterful of this stuff is a lot to get through in a...
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Book Report: The Hard Thing About Hard Things
Real-life Tech CEO worst case scenarios from Ben Horowitz. What to do when there's no clever fix for the company's problems. Choosing the least-bad of awful choices. Layoffs. Failures. Perhaps this b...
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Book Report: The Innovators
It's a book of mini-biographies and mini-histories from the history of computing. The angle: it's about people worked together to make things happen. I wish I'd read this book a while ago. Mostly, I...
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Book Report: The Peripheral
Ages ago, probably back when I was a teenager, my dad told me some reasons why "time machine" stories in sci-fi movies/books/etc. don't work so well—that time machine also has to be a teleporte...
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While the tourist rubes gawk at Lombard Street's twisty stretch across the street, serious scholars Bob Wilhelm and Jerry Hosken look over the Osbourne-Stevenson house (a.k.a. Robert Louis Stevenson'...
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Book Report: Livesaving Lessons
This book by swordfisherwoman Linda Greenlaw is different—it's about adopting a teenager. This feels like higher stakes than life-or-death actions out on the water: Greenlaw and her daughter ha...
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Book Report: 400 Things Cops Know
The number in the title makes this sound like an absurdly long listicle but this a really good listicle. Get a glimpse into the thinking of someone who's often lied to, deals with folks which other f...
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Book Report: How to Puzzle Cache
How to Puzzle Cache teaches you how to decode/decipher/unpuzzle many, many ways of hiding secret messages. I'm a puzzlehunter, so I was reading it and thinking it's useful for puzzlehunting. It's int...
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Book Report: Because I Said So!
It's a book by Jeopardy champ Ken Jennings debunking and/or bunking varius bits of folk wisdom. It's a funny easy, breezy read. On the other hand, I don't think I retained much of it. Other than: eye...
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Book Report: What the Dormouse Said
When I blogged about The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Daniel Fennelly (@danielfennelly) replied @lahosken I've heard good things about Markoff's "What the Dormouse Said" if you wan...
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Book Report: Mr. Lincoln's T-Mails
How the electric telegraph affected the course of the USA's Civil War. Historically, generals had a lot of leeway: whoever was in command out in the field made decisions out in the field. You wouldn'...
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Book Report: Freda
It's the third book in the young adult post-apocalptic trilogy that started with Semper. The story didn't go the way I expected, but instead [spoiler redacted] the [spoiler redacted]. I enjoyed the s...
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Book Report: The Impossible State
It's a book about North Korea taught me how far to go when running a kleptocracy. Can you starve your population, as long as you keep your army fed? Yep, you totally can. It doesn't backfire. Is ad...
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Book Report: The Long Way
In this memoir, Bernard Moitessier sails around the world solo. By the end, he either achieves some enlightenment or goes kinda loopy from being on his own for a few months. There is sailing. There i...
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Book Report: Creatvity, Inc.
It's a book about risk-taking at Pixar. If you're creating new things, you're taking risks: some of those new things won't work right. They almost certainly won't work right on the first try; you'll ...
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Book Report: Dataclysm
The OKCupid blog is pretty amazing. Way back when, it caused a stir talking about trends in USA interracial dating. Plenty of USA folks say they don't care about race. But when the OKCupid folks look...
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Book Report: Line Screw
Memoir of a poet/executive whose migraines force him out of such intense-thinking pursuits and into prison guarding. He was guarding Canadian prisons back when there was a higher ratio of guards to p...
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Book Report: Original Copies
It's a book about new housing developments in China, specifically those which have been made "Western-style". Why put up a copy of the Eiffel Tower in a newly developed Shanghai suburb? Why not? Ther...
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Book Report: The Shirley Letters
Letters from an 1852 California gold-panning camp. Speculation, risks, lack of gender diversity… maybe not much has changed. Oh, but back then there were more murders and dirt floors. And, tra...
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Book Report: Managing people across cultures
This book tells Human Resources folks how to take company culture into account when setting company policy for, e.g., performance reviews. That is: there's no one-size-fits-all policy that makes sens...
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Book Report: Everything is Bullshit
The Priceonomics blog wrote a book with a rude name. It's pretty interesting; a lot of it was stuff that I'd already read. (I wasn't subscribed to the blog, but other folks kept forwarding links&hell...
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Book Report: The Internet Police
Criminals use the internet. Some use the internet to commit crimes; others to plan real-world crimes. Law enforcement has had to learn to investigate crime on the internet. It's tricky. They're used ...
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Link: How to Puzzle Cache
A little bird told me about a new book: How to Puzzle Cache. It's about puzzle-geocaches. The author's Cully Long; he's one of the folks who put together the Dastardly Manhattan Puzzle Caches, some ...
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Link: How to Puzzle Cache
A little bird told me about a new book: How to Puzzle Cache. It's about puzzle-geocaches. The author's Cully Long; he's one of the folks who put together the Dastardly Manhattan Puzzle Caches, some ...
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Book Report: Carsick
In which cult film director John Waters hitchhikes across America. He spends a lot of time waiting. When he does get picked up, it's often because he's recognized. A non-celeb like you or me wouldn't...
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Book Report: Cool Gray City of Love
It's a book about San Francisco. Something of a cross between a history and a gazetteer; it's a collection of 49 essays, each using a San Francisco neighborhood as a leaping-off point for talking abo...
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Book Report: Newjack
How better to research prison life than to become a Corrections Officer for a year? Well, there are probably more pleasant ways, but this book's author worked a year in Sing Sing prison. This is a hi...
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Book Report: Flashfire
There's this character named Parker; mostly in books, but recently in a movie named "Parker." I liked some of the books, so I saw the movie. Then I was curious to know which book it was based on. It'...
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Book Report: In the Belly of the Beast
A long-time prisoner sent famous writer Norman Mailer some letters about prison life. This books collects excerpts from those letters. They talk vaguely about injustice. There are anecdotes that make...
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Book Report: A Sense of Direction
In which the author goes on a few walking pilgrimages, though he is not himself religious. He discusses what folks got out of pilgrimages back in the day. Similarly, he discusses what they get out of...
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Book Report: No Place to Hide
It's reporter Glenn Greenwald's perspective on the Edward Snowden story. As such, it's pretty scary. Most reporters don't know how to communicate using encryption. Thus, if you're a whistleblower han...
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Rock Breaks Scissors
Human brains give us amazing intuition. That is to say, they've evolved some pretty great shortcuts. But those same shortcuts make our brains stumble in some situation. This book points out some of t...
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Book Report: Hatching Twitter
(Have I mentioned lately that I don't speak for my employer? This would be a good time to mention that. I read this book about Twitter's history. It tells a fairly sad story. Sad enough such that I f...
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Book Report: Sailing a Serious Ocean
If you want to sail around the world and/or across big oceans, this book probably is a good introduction to how to think about planning, dealing with heavy weather, emergency boat repairs, etc. If yo...
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Book Report: Maps To The Other Side (The Adventures of a Bipolar Cartographer)
Maps to the Other Side is a memoir. If you're looking for straight up cartography, you won't find it. But if you're looking for a community organizer, organic farmer, mental health activist… y...
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Book Report: The Maze of Games
The Maze of Games is a puzzle extravaganza: about 52 puzzles leading up to four meta-puzzles leading up to another meta, along with some bonus puzzles. The variety was fun; and on those few occasions...
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Book Report: A Fighting Chance
It's an autobiography by politician Elizabeth Warren. Before she w19as a politician, she was an academic. She studied bankruptcy. When she started, there was received wisdom around bankruptcy: people...
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Book Report: Inside the Red Mansion
This is sort of an investigation of Lai Changxing, a Chinese smuggler tycoon from a few years back. By the time you're done, you've explored corruption in modern Chinese life. There might not be a wa...
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Book Report: Flash Boys
It's about high-speed trading; including shady deals by brokerage houses with high-speed traders. If you're setting up a stock market, some folks will pay to get early access to information about tra...
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Book Report: The Routes of Man
Better than a road trip, it's several road trips. Pirated lumber, mountainous roads, "the AIDS highway" years later, a Chinese road rally club, an ambulance in Lagos, … This book explores some...
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Book Report: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
It's a book about the rise of LSD culture in California. It's a book about Ken Kesey as something like a charismatic cult leader, about the Merry Pranksters. It's easy to look back and criticize thes...
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Book Report: Things a Little Bird Told Me
It's an autobiography by Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, co-founder of Jelly. At the start, it talks about crazy risks he took. Some of which, in hindsight, still seem pretty risky… Some of ...
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Book Report: Threat Modeling
There are unhelpful ways to fret over computer security. This book shows ways to channel those tendencies towards something useful. It also points out the Elevation of Privelege card game, an excuse ...
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Book Report: Ghost Spin
What if the quickest way to travel was to transmit your thought-state to another world so that you could be "uploaded" into a new body? What if you were "broadcast" and folks in several places upload...
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Book Report: the Adventures of T and T
In this parable, two ostriches are illuminated through a series of spiritual experiences including visions, a glimpse of the afterlife, and miraculous teleportation. ...
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Book Report: Chinese Playground
I picked up this book around the time that arms dealer Leland Yee was suspended from the California state senate. That case had some San Francisco Chinatown gangster connections. If you look around f...
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Book Report: The Puzzle Instinct
This book talks about how humans think their way through puzzles. It mostly does this by walking you through several classic puzzles. If you're already somewhat jaded of the classic puzzles, then lon...
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Book Report: Thursday's Children
It's a "best of" collection of Curtis Chen's 512-words-or-fewer flash fiction. Short storylets, one or two scenes apiece; that's about enough space for some wry witty banter and/or to start noodling ...
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Book Report: Ghost Spin
What if the quickest way to travel was to transmit your thought-state to another world so that you could be "uploaded" into a new body? What if you were "broadcast" and folks in several places upload...
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Book Report: Annabel Scheme
What if the quickest route to organize the world's information was a Faustian deal with a demon? Our heroine is an ex-hacker occult specialist who… uhm, these stories were silly but fun. ...
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Book Report: A Creator's Guide to Transmedia Storytelling
There are plenty of storytellers out there, but they tend to specialize. Meanwhile, these transmedia projects keep popping up: some story-pieces embedded in movies, comics, ARGs, radio plays… ...
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Book Report: China 3.0
I picked up this anthology of essays because it showed up in an author search for Michael Anti. Thus, I expected to have my pro-free-speech views reinforced. It turns out that Anti wrote just one ess...
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Book Report: Undiluted Hocus-Pocus
It's Martin Gardner's autobiography. It's about his life. It's not about logic puzzles, tricks with matchsticks, or computer simulations. Those are things he wrote about. His autobiography is about t...
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Book Report: Random House Puzzle Maker's Handbook
It's a book about how to make crossword puzzles (and other word puzzles) from 1995, a revision of a book first written in 1981. It's about how to make (and edit and market…) crossword puzzles ...
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Book Report: Puzzle Craft
"The subtitle's a lie, of course. We can't fit descriptions of how to make every type of puzzle into one book." And yet this book does show examples of many many kinds of puzzles. Along with each exa...
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Book Report: Don't Get Too Comfortable
It's essays by David Rakoff. The first few in the collection were so unenthusiastic about everything that I wondered how did this end up on my to-read list? Then I was reminded: this collection inclu...
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Book Report: Little Brother
Remind yourself it's fiction: after a terrorist attack, the DHS goes police state on San Francisco. That part's all too believable. The less-believable part: our hero is a teenaged computer programme...
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Book Report: Shady Characters
Thursday afternoon, talk at work turned to punctuation. Since work uses a lot of @s and #s, this should not surprise you. Someone hazily remembered that Shakespeare had invented “modern quotati...
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Book Report: Operation Mincemeat
It's about WWII spies. The central thread is a plot by English counterspies to fool the Nazis into thinking that the invasion of Sicily would actually be an invasion of Greece and Sardinia. It's a gr...
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Book Report: Confluence, Tech Comm, Chocolate
I'm a technical writer. I understand that folks don't always appreciate technical documentation. Sometimes the docs are bad. Sometimes the docs are good…at bearing bad tidings. Tech writer Roz...
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Book Report: Worm
Do I call it a "Book" report if it doesn't exist in book-ish form? Oh sure why not. Worm is a novel-length story posted online. It's about superheroes. What if there were thousands of superheroes in ...
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Book Report: Exploding the Phone
There are plenty of little articles about phreaking floating around; this book does a good job of pulling lots of little bits together into a flow of history. Along the way, I learned some things. E....
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Book Report: The Ludic City
Mostly, an academic jots down observations of people goofing around in cities' public spaces. Pedestrians waggle their arms. Buskers and street crazies accost passers-by. Bicyclists ride in perhaps-s...
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Book Report: Virtual Love
Virtual Love is a romance set in Google's early days. The author, Kim Malone Scott, worked at Google back in those days, wrote this. She wasn't so pleased with how it turned out, and left the manuscr...
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Book Reports are Everywhere: How to Run a Puzzle Hunt
Jonobie Ford of Team Liboncatipu wrote about lessons learned running a Microsoft Puzzle Hunt. The instant I heard of its existence on the Puzzalot blog, I knew I had to read this. And from this descr...
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Book Report: The Magus
ARGers and Situationists talk about this novel: its plot is something like that of the movie The Game, a sort of paranoid story in which several people playact around our protagonist, hoping to effec...
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Book Report: Beta China
I follow many feeds; I used to follow the tech news site PandoDaily. I ignored most of it; modern tech reporting has problems and PandoDaily illustrated plenty of those. But for a while, there was so...
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Book Report: Neptune's Brood
It's a science fiction novel. How do financial transactions work in an interstellar civilization which has that nasty speed of light to contend with? How would you defraud such a system? ...
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Book Report: How to Interview a Financial Advisor
The author, @choonpiaw, is a computer nerd who made good and didn't squander all his money. Maybe you're a computer nerd who just got lucky with an IPO… and in a few years you would like to be...
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Book Report: The Reputation Society
I'm not game control for every game out there. E.g., I'm not on Game Control for this game; I was just passing along word of its existence after I saw it mentioned on a flyer. But I can see why you m...
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Book Report: Griftopia
We've had a chance to reflect on the financial disasters and bailouts of 2008. What have we learned? We learned that America's most successful bankers aren't those who are best at computing loan risk...
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Book Report: The Art of Explanation
I'm a tech writer. "Professional Ignoramus" would be a more accurate job title, albeit not so likely to land me fun jobs working with clever software developers. Still, it's what I do. Here's what ha...
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Puzzle Hunts are Everywere, so Don't try to Think About Other Things
Working on the UI for the upcoming Ghost Patrol game, I took some little breaks. (Part of the UI is a little countdown timer that lets you know how long until the game starts—and eventually tel...
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Book Report: A Strange Wilderness
This afternoon, I thought back on wrong career decisions I've made. I thought about their consequences—totally overshadowed by consequences of things out of my control. It's like the lives of f...
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Book Report: Debugging
It's a book about debugging, about troubleshooting. It has some good advice and some fun anecdotes. As I write this, it's been a few weeks since I read it, and the anecdotes have all leaked out of my...
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Book Report: Nature Noir
It's a memoir by a park ranger about park rangering, but it's not nature hikes and checking trees for moss. It's grittier than that—more about crime and law enforcement. It turns out that plent...
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Book Report: Uncertainty In Games
Greg Costikyan has designed more games than you have, so I pay attention when he writes something. Uncertainty in Games didn't contain any startling revelations that knocked me out of my chair, but i...
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Book Report: Forsada
Politics and war in post-apocalyptic Lake Tahoe? Sounds like a great topic for some young adult fiction. Well, I liked it, though I'm not a young adult. Still. This is a sequel to Semper. ...
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Book Report: The Hydrogen Sonata
Maybe it's a science-fiction novel by Iain Banks, set in the far-future intergalactic universe of the Culture. Maybe it's a reflection on the nature of truth, especially when intertwingled with histo...
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Book Report: The Code Busters Club
It's young adult fiction in which young adults solve a Real Crime by solving some common codes. Set in the alternate universe like this one, but if you want to get a message to nice people without th...
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Book Report: Alif the Unseen
A fantasy novel swirling together the 1001 Arabian Nights with the Arab Spring. Along the way, we have a secret book containing a more-secret message about even-more secret magic. ...
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Book Report: Salvage and Demolition
A tightly-knotted time-travel novella. A secret society, a secret book containing a more-secret message about even-more secret magic, this story wraps up plenty of fun stuff in the snarls of its loop...
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Book Report: Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore
Like every novel-reading San Francisco bay area tech worker, I enjoyed Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore. Its computer and code bits are more science-fantasy than hard science fiction, but they support...
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Book Report: Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China
Deng Xiaoping steered China out of the disaster of the Cultural Revolution; he seemed pretty enlightened until June 4, 1989 when the military cleared Tiananmen Square of protesters. How did it go so ...
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Book Report: Subversives (The FBI's war on Student Radicals and Reagan's Rise To Power)
This book about Berkeley during the Free Speech Movement was pretty amazing. It was also a slow read. Usually you say "So good I couldn't put it down," but in this case I might say "So good that I pu...
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Book Report: City of Fortune
It's a history of Venice back in the days when Venice was a big deal. If you think that Realpolitik is hardass nowadays, go read your history and weep for the soul of humanity. Venice came to power ...
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Book Report: The Best Writing in Mathematics 2012
This was a mixed bag. The good news is that not all the writing in this collection is aimed at mathematicians, since I'm not a mathematician. The bad news is that a bunch of math writing for non-math...
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Book Report: Flow
I got this book on Kindle and kind of wish I'd read the paper version instead. The Kindle version is broken partway through: if you try to read past the first page of the endnotes, you get kicked out...
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Book Report: Java Concurrency in Practice
I work with the Scala programming language but Scala runs on the JVM, the Java Virtual Machine. This is pretty important. Java turned out to be an icky programming language, but some smart folks have...
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Book Report: An Object of Beauty
It's a novel about people and their relation to art: loving it, collecting it, selling it. In theory, art exists for beauty; but what if you own a painting that's beautiful and valuable? Maybe you co...
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Book Report: Tubes
It's a book about the physical structure of the internet. So you'd expect that I couldn't put it down. But oh man. Early on in the book, there's a sentence I share all these quotidian details of tr...
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Book Report: Just Kids
Before Patti Smith was a rock-and-roller, she was a poet. Well, she was an artist in search of a medium. So was Robert Mapplethorpe—they were a couple. And when they stopped being a couple, the...
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Book Report: The Mongoliad Book Two
Several characters flung across Eurasia. I wonder the authors are going to tie up all the loose ends. ...
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Book Report: The Work Revolution
We hold these truths to be self-evident: Company dress codes encourage workers to spend time thinking about their dry-cleaning. That's weaksauce. Incentives that reward time spent in process instea...
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Book Report: Professor Moriarty: the Hound of the D'Urbervilles
What if there were sequels to a bunch of pulp books I never read in which their protagonists confronted Professor Moriarty (of the Sherlock Holmes stories)? Those Sherlock Holmes stories that I thoug...
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th;dr
I was only partway through this book's intro before my wrists got tired just from holding it up. I had to stop reading it. Thank you, Kindle inventors! If it weren't for you, I probably wouldn't hav...
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Book Report: The Corner
It's a year in the life of an open-air drug market in Baltimore. Most of the folks in the neighborhood are addicts and/or dealers, and thus most of the folks in this book are, too. I didn't finish re...
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Book Report: Lightning Man
It's a biography of Samuel F. B. Morse, the namesake of my favorite puzzlehunt code. So it's about time I read up on the man's life. He wanted to be an artist. He wanted to paint beautiful scenes, n...
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Book Report: Many Subtle Channels in praise of potential literature
In honor of USA's Buy Nothing Day, a report on a book that I checked out of the library: Many Subtle Channels It's a book about the OuLiPo. You've probably heard of them: they're a literary cabal in...
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Book Report: How to Sharpen Pencils
I'm a technical writer. I write instructions. I often team up with a "Subject Matter Expert," someone who's really good at doing something. I ask them what they do and they write it down. You might w...
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Book Report: Liars and Outliers
It's a book about security. It's a book about how to think your way through security problems. Not just thinking about where to throw up barriers—also about how to think up policies that won't ...
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Book Report: Claudius the God
The people of the United States of America came together to elect a man who would turn this nation into a panopticon—choosing him over another man who was all that plus bigotry. Bigotry was vot...
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Book Report: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
@hpmor is Harry Potter fan fiction...no, wait, don't run away. I'm serious. It's funny because in this book, Harry Potter doesn't just let himself get pushed around by the plot. He thinks things thro...
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Book Report: The Elements of User Experience
This is a book with a great premise and then problems in the details. The story behind the book is this: Jesse James Garrett made a great diagram about how to organize... let's say it's about how to ...
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Book Report: Positively Fifth Street
I liked Word Freak, a book about a reporter who studies up and becomes a champion Scrabble player. And I told some automated recommendation services that I liked it. Thus, those automated recommendat...
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Book Report: Slayground, Plunder Squad, Butcher's Moon
It's action novels in which Parker the ruthless amoral thief. He is pursued into an amusement park that's shut down for the winter. And then a lot of ruthless people die. He gets involved with an art...
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Book Report: Team Geek
Ben and Fitz wrote a book about coexisting with your fellow geeks on team projects without going mad. Those of you who are still reading this book report instead of going to Amazon... probably don't ...
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Book Report: The Puzzler's Mansion
It's the third Winston Breen novel. Thus, it's a YA puzzle mystery. It's pretty awesome having a puzzlehunter protagonist who actually thinks like a puzzlehunter. E.g., he's at a puzzlehunt put on b...
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Book Report: Broken Ballots
A few people want to steal elections. A few billion people want fair elections. How do you make an election un-stealable? It's not easy. Elections do't run themselves; we need election officials. Fol...
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Book Report: Railsea
Post-apocalyptic Mevillean steampunk fantasy. Fun little read. ...
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Book Report: All the President's Men
I didn't think I'd learn anything from this book, but I was wrong. I thought everybody knows the story of All the President's Men: Plucky reporters Woodward and Bernstein investigate Watergate; they ...
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Book Report: Leaving Cheyenne
Three characters with intertwined fates grow old on ranch land in Texas. It starts in the early 20th century and makes it to mid-century and life gets easier but it never really gets easy. ...
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Book Report: Republic, Lost
When Solyndra was falling apart, Republicans were screaming: these green companies were just boondoggles, false fronts to scoop up government money. It's easy to dismiss their complaints as a bunch o...
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Book Report: Distrust that Particular Flavor
It's a book of articles by William Gibson; quick essays, book reviews, book introductions. There are some fun ones, there are some clunkers. If you think you'd like a book of Gibson articles, you're ...
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Book Report: A New Culture of Learning
It's a book about learning; it's a book about culture. Our culture has brought forth all of these fancy new communications technologies. If there are some facts I need to know, I can probably look t...
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Book Report: The Mongoliad, Book One
Book Two of the Mongoliad ships today so here's a report on, uhm, Book One. I'm a professional technical writer, but I did a stint with some instructional designers. Thus, I was forced to confront t...
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Book Report: The Tangled Web
The Tangled Web talks about why web programming is doomed to be insecure for a long time to come. Nothing works quite right: networks, name servers, OSs, browsers, web servers, headers, cookies, form...
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Book Report: Low Life
Many quick snippets about New York's criminals and underclass. It was kinda fun, but a few days after reading it, I remember almost nothing. I could say that was a metaphor for New York itself, alway...
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Book Report: The Evolution of Cooperation
It's a book by Robert Axelrod, who set up some groundbreaking game theory experiment/contests back in the day. He set up a computer program that would run other computer programs. Specifically, it ra...
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Book Report: Thinking Fast and Slow
Daniel Kahneman worked on some of the greatest psychological thingies of our time. Behavioral economics, he was there for that. The difference between things that we think make us happy and really ma...
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Book Report: Hide Me Among the Graves
Tim Powers writes historical... fantasy? Horror? He writes alternate histories as they should have happened if we lived in a world of the supernatural. He writes histories that show how much less unl...
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Book Report: The Vanishing Violin
It's another YA puzzle-mystery featuring the Red Blazer Girls. (You might vaguely remember that I read the first book in the series a while back. This time, the puzzlehunt story is a bit more believa...
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Book Report: Boswell's Life of Johnson
Oh man I only made it like halfway through part 1. People keep recommending this to me. Samuel Johnson was some writer. As such, he produced some interesting work. But at least as near as I coul...
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Book Report: Founders at Work
It's a book of interviews with people who founded high-tech companies. It's pretty darned interesting to hear the stories from the horses' mouths, as it were. There's not just one "Founder story". Re...
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Book Report: The Four Steps to the Epiphany
You're trying to put together a new product. Steven Gary Blank, author of The Four Steps to the Epiphany, doesn't want you to give the early version away. His test for a viable product isn't "Will pe...
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Book Report: Steve Jobs
About twenty years ago, I switched from using a Macintosh to Windows. I was surprised at how much easier the Windows machine was to use. I was a Mac user, I'd listen to a bunch of other Mac users all...
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Book Report: The Restoration Game
It's a scifi thriller whose protagonist is a game designer. This book was fun. ...
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Book Report: The Cowboy and His Elephant
It's a biography: The original Marlboro Man wasn't a ranch hand; he was more of an oil-tycoon-heir who dabbled in ranching. He's the "cowboy" in the title. I wasn't expecting the Marlboro Man, but I ...
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Book Report: The New New Thing
It's a biography of Jim Clark, a high-tech entrepeneur. This book talks about a period of his life after he helped found SGI and Netscape, when he was working on health-service software and designing...
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Book Report: Solaris
Humans try to communicate with alien intelligence and wacky tragedy ensues. Some science fiction authors use "first contact" scenarios to point out things about humanity; but you never really believe...
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The Bible Repairman and Other Stories
It's short stories by Tim Powers, the guy who wrote The Anubis Gates, Declare, and On Stranger Tides. If you liked those, you'll probably like these. ...
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Book Report: Bunny's Alphabetical Misadventures
It's a color art book that's only available for Kindle—so if you don't have a color Kindle, this one might not be so great for you. But if you do have a color Kindle, this book has cute bunny d...
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Link: Nordic Larp Won the Diana Jones Award!
Good to see careful documentation of far freaking weirdness get some recognition! ...
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Book Report: Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
I'm thinking about folks being brave today, so here's a book report about a story with a brave protagonist. My mom knew I'd like this novel: It's about a puzzlehunt. Or, rather, it's a sort of myster...
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Book Report: Ready Player One
It's a fun little story about some gamers. Some folks are really into this book and love it and will talk your ear off about it. Some folks have backlashed against that and will talk your ear off abo...
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Book Report: Taking People With You
It's a management book. It was written by a guy who worked at Pepsi, so you probably don't want his advice about what things are worth doing; he chose to sell sugar water instead of change the world....
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Book Report: The Mysterious Benedict Society
It's a young adult adventure novel that starts out with a puzzly quiz. Kids who do well in the quiz team up to battle an evil conspiracy. This book is science fantasy, and the fantasy lost me. It's t...
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Book Report: In the Plex
Why do I keep reading Steven Levy books? They're full of mistakes. He interviews people who know a lot... and then somehow still gets it wrong. I read In the Plex because, golly, he talked to all the...
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Book Report: Private Wars
It's been a thrilling time. I switched ISPs last week, and in so doing I b0rked my outgoing mail. But I didn't realize it. For a week, I've been thinking that I was sending mail when really I was bas...
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Book Report: By Blood
By Blood is literature but nonetheless pretty darned good. It's by Ellen Ullman so I picked it up hoping that there would be cool stories about stricken computer nerds. But it's straight-up literatur...
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Book Report: Too Big to Know
We know a lot, and nowadays we know that we know a lot. I read a lot of books. But I read only a teeny-tiny fraction of the books that get published. And books are, in turn, just a teeny-tiny fractio...
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Books Report: Paranoia T1 Stay Alert; S1 Reality Optional; Y1 Traitor Hangout
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 tactic...
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Book Report: Falling to Earth
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 pi...
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Book Report: Semper
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 read...
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Book Report: Digital Forensics with Open Source Tools
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 ma...
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Book Report: In a Sunburned Country
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 Austral...
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Book Report: The Scarlet Pimpernel
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 i...
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Book Report: The Theory that would Not Die
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 t...
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Book Report: Kobold Guide to Board Game Design
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 ...
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Book Report: Maphead
@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 soci...
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Book Report: No One Thinks of Greenland
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 th...
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Book Report: This is not a Game
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...
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Book Report: The Timetables of History
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...
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Book Report: Mind Games
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 paran...
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Book Report: West of the West
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, t...
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Book Report: Version Control by Example
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...
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Book Report: Jay's Journal of Anomolies
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 s...
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Book Report: Glued to Games
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...
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Book Report: Ignition!
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 prop...
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Book Report: Crossworld
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, fr...
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Book Report: Tic Tac Toe and other Three-in-a-Row Games
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...
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Comic Report: Cuba: My Revolution
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...
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Book Report: The Red Blazer Girls: The Ring of Rocamadour
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-forgotte...
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Book Report: The Information
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, l...
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Book Report: Hackerspaces: the Beginning
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 wa...
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Book Report: The Seventh Level
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 h...
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Book Report: The Art of Intrusion
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 par...
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Book Report: The Gollywhopper Games
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 th...
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Book Report: Moonwalking with Einstein
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. Moonwalki...
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Book Report: Super Crunchers
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 bo...
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Book Report: Closure: The Definitive Guide
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...
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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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