Things I Read May 2018

• Link to Things I Read April 2018.
• Link to Things I Read March 2018.
• Link to Things I Read February 2018.

On month four.  That's a good run...

• (BOOK/STORY) 5/31/2018: The Good Guys by Stephen Brust
• I liked it, quite a bit, but it didn't blow me away.  I've met Stephen at Gameholecon and he's friends with Emma Bull and the Scribbly folks from the Twin Cities.  I've read two of his books and I think he and I have a slightly different writing style, which is probably more accurately a slightly different story telling style, which is probably more accurately a slightly different way of thinking.  I'd actually recommend it, although I'm not sure I'd read a sequel.
• (BOOK/STORY) 5/30/2018: Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love
• Excellent...I think I need to do a different post I have so many notes.
• 5/29/2018: Immersive Learning in the Target Dojo - because we're looking at Dojos at work.
• T shaped developer vs. I shaped.
• No managers.
• Come in different flavors
• Target  has a lot more dojo material including tours.
• 5/28/2018: Dungeons & Dragons, Volume 3 - Shadowplague (graphic novel, reading on Hoopla)
• 5/27/2018: Dungeons & Dragons, Volume 2 - Shadowplague (graphic novel, reading on Hoopla)
• 5/26/2018: Dungeons & Dragons, Volume 1 - Shadowplague (graphic novel, reading on Hoopla)
• 5/25/2018: Queens of Infamy: Anne Boleyn on Long Reads by Anne Thériault 
• I never had the opportunity to use "noted Tudor fuckboy" during my undergraduate degree.  I'm not sure Retha Warnicke would have appreciated it, but then again, she seemed pretty fun.
• An entirely amusing paragraph on Anne bringing the blow job to England.
• "Sadly, this A++ dick joke did not persuade the papal legate" is the best response I've ever seen to the "been to Spain" consummation tales about Arthur and Catherine.
• "Henry, of course, could never resist the chance to be a tacky asshole." - probably spot on and, even more spot on in reference to Henry 8's wives, "they were all Henry's victims."
• This made me wonder if people of the time ever said "Not my Harry" and "Not my King" and referred to him only as 8, implying a 9, or at least post-8, couldn't come soon enough.
• 5/24/2018: The Theory of the Case: Competitive Intelligence Tips for Attorneys - University of Georgia Law, Suzanne R. Graham
• I love the term "anecdata" based solely on a single incident.
• More of a list - a comprehensive list - than a dig.  But the idea of "triangulation" as a way of validating the data is interesting.  And I respect her end-of-essay points about the unpredictable and that tools that "claim that past performance is the best predictor of future results" are not the only answer.
• 5/23/2018: Analyzing the Analytics: A Review of Legal Analytics Platforms - The CRIV Sheet 39.2 (February 2017). - Diana J. Koppang, Neal, Gerber & Eisenberg, LLP

• I liked her contention that she wants transparency in the search/results methodology and that's what she gets by crafting her own search.  
• "know how we can trust the data and to what extent"
• She also says you should always ask to have a dev in the demo for precisely those reasons.  
• Go find her PDF!
• 5/22/2018: Why Is New Orleans' Black Female Mayor Secretly Working With White Nationalists? - Splinter
• Robert E Lee Beads, reinstalling racist statues, all sorts of crazy that surprised even me (who likes to read about crazies)
• 5/21/2018: azn2azn (November 2017) - An Asian-American Twin Cities Zine.
• I liked the poems, but the word "trigger" is used a little loosely.  From truly triggering events like police brutality, rape, and abuse, to questionable uses like Bollywood music during yoga (because it's traditionally a space for the elite pre-immigration and your ancestors might not have been elite? reminded me of the Singh story about the guy practicing yoga/healing who wanted to kill his faux-brother the king only to find out the king wanted to leave him material concerns so he could focus on spirituality), and being angry with friends only to say in the next statement the author got sober.  Triggering wasn't the issue there (presumably), alcohol was.  If it was, own it.
• It was enlightening to read something so clearly different from my experience due to race, sexuality, identity.  A reminder that the world is very different through different lenses.
• 5/20/2018: What's Next in Computing? - Chris Dixon (2016!)
• Interesting to see the predictions from 2 years ago.  His focus on VR was pre-Pokemon Go (but not Ingress) and I saw an article for the first VR "kit" for online maps the other day, so it's coming of age.  IoT...yes, but still pretty quiet/centralized in some ways.  Machine learning/AI...spot on.
• 5/19/2018: A NEW LOOK INSIDE THERANOS’ DYSFUNCTIONAL CORPORATE CULTURE - Wired
• Great article about a truly dysfunctional culture.  Interesting to read this in light of Sprint and Inspired where the customer should be the focus, not the product.  Clearly, the product (and money and dates) were the focus for Theranos.
• 5/18/2018: The Victorian Belief That a Train Ride Could Cause Instant Insanity
• Kyle recommended this one from Atlas Obscura.  I don't think it delves enough into whether the train (and now, planes) causes the issue, exacerbates an existing issue, or for some people is an excuse because they have a foreign environment where they don't feel they have to behave.
• 5/17/2018: Leaving Omelas: Science Fiction, Climate Change, and the Future by Vandana Singh.

• Online essay.
• "those who walk away do so because the Omelas paradigm allows them no agency in striving for a just and equitable social system."
• I think she conflates dystopias and apocalyptic literature in some respect.  Per my thesis in college, I don't think a real dystopia has an escape, so the "great person" aspect is moot.  There might be an individual, but in the end they don't matter, only society can change society.
• She's big on neartopias - finding the positive/ecological and societal change in society.
• I very much enjoyed her Newtonian paradigm view of scifi.  That cause-effect isn't the end all of scifi, that everything is connected, and everything is interrelated.  Came through strongly in her story collection.
• "Nature is objectified, transformed into a machine that is predictable and controllable, and we are outside it - masters of the machine..."
• "Not all complex systems are sensitive to initial conditions..."
• Posits place shapes the people....solid idea and one that makes scifi where there are so many places and inbetweens and emptiness-es, very interesting.
• (BOOK/STORY) 5/16/2018: Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories by Vandana Singh: Requiem
• A novella about global warming and Eskimos/Inuit and whaling.  Interesting story - very well written.  The scifi aspect had to do with the main character's aunt trying to create ways to live with other animals such that they could really start to understand them, and how animals were starting to communicate to eliminate human impacts to their environment (drilling machine/etc).
• 5/15/2018 - Scalzi reread
• Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is
• “Lowest Difficulty Setting” Follow-Up
• Final Notes For “Lowest Difficulty Setting”
• (CODE) 5/14/2018: Data Science Essentials in Python: Collect - Organize - Explore - Predict - Value (The Pragmatic Programmers)
• Chapter 2: Core Python for Data Science
• Wrote a Top x words in a URL file program.
• Wrote a file that indexes words and maps them to files in a directory using a dictionary.
• Wrote a file that looks for phone numbers in a file.  That last one was only partially successful.  The 1- numbers not at the front or back of a file don't work as well.
• Used PYTHONPATH to get to BeautifulSoup4 in my Anaconda3 directory (using IDLE usually, but I also have PyCharm and Sublime) as I'm in dev.
• Used import sys and print(sys.path) to validate PYTHONPATH was returning the values I needed (BeautifulSoup wouldn't let me do a dual install and had dependencies of its own.  Could have mapped a path file in the project, but I'm playing, not pushing out production code).
• (CODE) 5/14/2018: Data Science Essentials in Python: Collect - Organize - Explore - Predict - Value (The Pragmatic Programmers)
• Chapter 1: What is Data Science - wrote a "Hello Scott" program.
• (BOOK/STORY) 5/13/2018: Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories by Vandana Singh: Ambiguity Machines: An Examination
• Three separate subtales about "machines" that transcend time and space and individuality.  They are generally structures/patterns.
• (BOOK/STORY) 5/12/2018: Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories by Vandana Singh: Wake-Rider
• This one felt incomplete.  Han Solo type (female) goes after a body that can stop a corporate-induced plague.  Ended with her floating and waiting.
• (BOOK/STORY) 5/12/2018: Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories by Vandana Singh: Cry of the Karchal
• I liked this even though it isn't strictly scifi.  More Arabian ghost story tying past to present via a woman who's a little like the mummy (in the modern movies), but...nice?  And a bird.
• (BOOK/STORY) 5/12/2018: Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories by Vandana Singh: Sailing the Antarsa
• Good story! About finding a different form of matter that flows between the stars and that it's comprised of life that can ride that matter.  Being immersed in it transforms the traveler.  Very "we're all in the same ecosystem" sort of story, but a great take.
• (GN) 5/11/2018: KINO Volume 1: Escape From the Abyss
• I assume this has to get better as it's primarily about a body in the clutches of a scientist who puts him in the equivalent of The Matrix to get his powers up to speed before he awakes.  There are competing companies/governments trying to get him back, but this whole book is just little in-his-head fights.  I wasn't enjoying it.
• (GN) 5/10/2018: The Gravediggers Unions: Volume 1 - sort of a Cthulhu slant.  So so.  I discovered the Graphic Novel section on Hoopla, the online public library system.
• (BOOK/STORY) 5/9/2018: Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories by Vandana Singh: Ruminations in an Alien Tongue
• I liked this one!  There's a bit of the Star Trek episode (All Our Yesterdays) where a race abandons their planet by traveling to their own past.  In this story, they find alien artifacts that let them travel to other dimensions via the nexuses at the center of stars.  Because you can find a universe that best suits you, everyone just vacates.  One woman is left, and she tends to a traveler that comes from multiple dimensions (same traveler) and is always confused when he makes his way back to the lab/machines and the scientist who learned to use them.
• (BOOK) 5/8/2018:  Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days
  • Work-related book I was assigned.  We've done something similar on my teams, but there's a new push to determine faster ways to solve problems.
• 5/7/2018: Product Conference (hosted by Dev Jam) at the Minnesota History Museum
• Focus was on products and how to iterate and fail faster. 
• Sara Cowles: Data Driven and Human Centered: Learning to Connect the Data for Maximum Impact  Talked about Ethnio software, the HEART Framework (Google Ventures), how we speed prototyping, and included some info about five (5) being the optimal number of testers per the Sprint book (above).
• Mike Gillespie - Amazon's Culture of Innovation. Didn't get into enough detail.  Kind of boring.  The whole bit about no code until a press release, an 8 page product paper, and then a full user manual first really smells like old school waterfall in a way.
• Vivienne Whifield - May you fail....over and over again.  Ok presentation.  Tied it to her kids and personal experiences with failure in the workplace.  I was wearing out a bit by end of day.
• Keynote David Hussman - You're Definitely Wrong....  David looks in pretty rough shape physically, but he still gives a good presentation.    Pushing a variation of post-agile, beyond agile, deconstructed agile.
• Jeff Sussna - Continuous Learning: Harnessing Change for Competitive Advantage.  I really enjoyed his keynote.  All about conversations and user-centered design and cross-functional design.  Good speaker - he's obviously been deep in this space for a while as a consultant.
• (BOOK/STORY) 5/6/2018: Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes - Harlan Ellison, I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream
• I think this one is also in Deathbird Stories and I have read it a dozen times.  There's quite a bit to unpack in this story, particularly about the characters and whether they got what they wanted or even deserved.  It makes sense it's in Deathbird Stories because it's about the worship of money, the worship of beauty, loneliness, and more.
• (BOOK/STORY) 5/5/2018: Delusion for a Dragon Slayer - Harlan Ellison, I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream
• One of my favorites.  I think it's also in Deathbird Stories.  There are some things it has in common with Lonelyache. But I like how it's handled better here in a magical Heavy Metal-esque world of legend with a harsh ending.
• (BOOK/STORY) 5/4/2018: Lonelyache - Harlan Ellison, I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream
• One of my least favorite of his stories.  The personification of dread and the heaviness of life as a thing in the corner.
• 5/3/2018: Overview - Chrome Extensions
• 5/3/2018: Getting Started Tutorial - Chrome Extensions
• Yes, I did read both of those Chrome Extensions articles in full and modified - but not created - an in house Chrome extension for managing session tracking between our error system, session tracking system, enterprise tracking system, and Kibana (AWS logging).  Works like a charm, but I only had to do the configuration management to add the Kibana section.  Theoretically you could say it was coding because I had to use string concatenation, replacement, and character escape sequences, but that's just silly stuff.  It's more impressive that as a manager I checked my code into TFS and overrode the review and other policies (because it was POC, not mainline build).  That should scare everyone.
• 5/2/2018: America’s Greatest Horticulturist Left Behind a Plum Mystery
• Kyle posted it. Good article on Luther Burbank.
• 5/1/2018: Kriegsspiel – The 19th Century War Game That Changed History - Military History Now.com
• "all the cats living in the house hosting the game were banished"
• This holds true for pretty much everything, including software teams, over one hundred years later.  "By giving his officer corps more responsibility, accountability and better understanding of tactics, the Prussians had a far more effective command structure."

Things I Read March 2018

Link to Things I Read February 2018.

Around 3/5/2018 I get way out of order.  I can't remember the sequence for the last two weeks.  But I'm playing catch up.  So some things might be dated before they were even posted to the net.

I realized I should also include books, books on CD, and online classes as counting.  The goal isn't 30 articles, it's just to read/learn more.  So in my catch up I'll catch up a few books as well.

• 3/31/2018: Queens of Infamy: Eleanor of Aquitaine - Longreads
• "Philippe’s death by shit pig"
• ELEANOR: I mean, it would really suck if I was ever a widow  ELEANOR: but I’m willing to risk that for Jesus or whatever
• (BOOK/STORY) 3/30/2018: Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories by Vandana Singh: Peripateia
• My least favorite - of the three so far.  Grief is causing her to consider that reality is a construct.
• (BOOK/STORY) 3/29/2018: Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories by Vandana Singh: A Handful of Rice
• Cool parable-like story about a king who outlaws healing practices as a way to attract his friend from his youth who is a healer to assassinate him so he can hand over the keys to the kingdom and pursue a higher calling.
• (BOOK/STORY) 3/28/2018: Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories by Vandana Singh: With Fate Conspire
• I liked the basic idea.  Finding spots where the link between past and present are sufficient to remap to an alternate reality.  I wasn't as fond of the end which implies that once someone has this power, she decides that it benefits people who didn't care about her in the existing reality so she doesn't want to give them the new one.  At least that's what I think I read.
• 3/27/2018: Product Fail - Silicon Valley Product Group
• Empowerment.  Speaks to that next bullet - I see communication with customers and PME and ability to drive ideas all as part of empowerment, and requires some aspect of product longevity.
• "The little secret in product is that engineers are typically the best single source of innovation, yet they are not even invited to the party in this process."
• "This entire process is very project-centric." - exactly
• 3/26/2018: Good Product Team/Bad Product Team - Silicon Valley Product Group
• In my opinion, a lot of these tie back to a core team that works together with product, dev, ops, customers, and feels like they'll be on the team long enough to see the results of their ideation.  That can be a tough road in a company were things are more business-case based.
• (BOOK) 3/25/2018: D'Arc (War with No Name Book 2)
• I may have enjoyed this more than book one (Mort(e)).  Pretty much a straight forward action story for furries.  Little bit of pseudo post-apocalyptic steampunk.  Some misunderstanding all around.  Semi world-ending weapon with religious overtones ala the atomic bomb in Planet of the Apes - harkened back to that tale.
• 3/24/2018: CUTTING ‘OLD HEADS’ AT IBM - Propublica. 
• Ugh.  How to circumvent the intent of the law to lay off and forcibly retire workers as experience means they cost more. 
• 3/23/2018: Twinkle Twinkle: What Happens When an Algorithm Helps Write Science Fiction - wired.com
• Cool article - I like the reviews at the end and the text of the resulting story spread throughout.  The female conversation % is telling.
• (TRAINING): 3/22/2018: Becoming an Outlier: Reprogramming the Developer Mind - Cory House, 2 hours 33 minutes.  Pluralsight.  April 24, 2014.
• His triangle of learning is useful and something to share with team.  Other stuff is common sense if you've been in the business long enough, but definitely things you can forget.
• Managers have half hour meetings.  Developers avoid half hour meetings.  Like the thousandth time someone has said that in some way to me.  It's very true.
• Think about your luck (opportunity) surface area.
• Next....Python Getting Started (may be too basic...): https://app.pluralsight.com/library/courses/python-getting-started/table-of-contents
• Next...And Why You Should Write a Book
• 3/21/2108: I Influenced Three Senators for $477.85 - Medium.com
• Clever experiment to show how with minimal Facebook buy he can influence congressional votes.
• 3/20/2018: New theory to explain why planets in our solar system have different compositions - phys.org
• Accreted at different times.
• Ureilite meteors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ureilite
• Angrite meteors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angrite
• 3/19/2018: Black Hole Echoes Would Reveal Break With Einstein’s Theory - Quanta Magazine
• In general relativity, the black hole horizon has no substance; it poses no obstacle. The black hole simply swallows whatever dares to pass the horizon.
• Alternate theory that gravitational waves would "echo" from a black hole.
• But reanalyzing the same data over and over again carries a big risk: Instead of developing a better theory, they could merely find a way to better amplify noise.  [Me on Facebook responding: When I first became a manager, my boss (director) said this about software and hardware issues. Either he was a closet quantum astrophysicist, or the similarity of software development to black holes is extremely tight.]
• (BOOK) 3/18/2018: Written in Fire by Marcus Sakey (book 3 of the Brilliance Trilogy)
• (BOOK) 3/17/2018: A Better World by Marcus Sakey (book 2 of the Brilliance Trilogy)
• (BOOK) 3/16/2018: Brilliance by Marcus Sakey (book 1 of the Brilliance Trilogy)
• Fun fast read, although by the time I got to book three I think it needed to be more concise overall and was feeling like a Jack Ryan my-protagonist-is-so-cool story.
• 3/14/2018: The Rise and Fall of an Alt-Right Gladiator (Vice video) - so weird
• 3/13/2018: Two weeks before his death, Stephen Hawking predicted 'the end of the universe' - CNBC
• About his final paper supporting eternal inflation: "A Smooth Exit From Eternal Inflation"
• (BOOK) 3/12/2018: Dark Matter by Blake Crouch
• I'd give it a solid 3.75-4 out of 5.  Good story that got better as you progressed.  A lot of reveal later in the book that wasn't in the beginning.  Solid writing.
• Thought the ending was a little predictable, but still good.  Eryn read it and liked it (in a day!) and Pooteewheet is reading it.
• 3/11/2018: Avro tutorial at Tutorialspoint
• Played around the RPC for Python setup as well.
• Bit tougher than it should be with 2.7 and 3 (Python) on my machine.  Couldn't target the install precisely, even using pip to set it up.  Got the RPC quickstart running which does a schema handshake.
• 3/10/2018: Our first Interstellar visitor from two-star system - Deccan Chronicle
• Oumuamua (messenger)
• 3/9/2018: Elastic: General Recommendations
• Avoid sparsity
• Observe doc size limits
• Reminds in some ways of the lessons from Locate Precedent.
• 3/8/2018: How Willpower Works: How to Avoid Bad Decisions - James Clear
• How to avoid decision fatigue (get rid of decisions, eat, do the important things first)
• 3/7/2018: ‘DUNGEON ALLIANCE’ IS A CLEVER BLEND OF DUNGEON CRAWLER AND DECK-BUILDER - Geek and Sundy
• Until you realize the thing costs about $100 on Amazon.  Then you ponder what might be less expensive and the other games you haven't played and whether you shouldn't just play more Clank.
• https://www.amazon.com/Quixiotic-Games-Dungeon-Alliance/dp/B0725BZGQM/https://www.amazon.com/Quixiotic-Games-Dungeon-Alliance/dp/B0725BZGQM/
• https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/209660/dungeon-alliance
• 3/6/2018: We'll Never Know for Sure How Everything Began - RealClearScience
• Fanciful ideas abound to account for that prehistory. Eternal inflation suggests that our universe is but a mere bubble in what physicist Matt Francis described as a "larger froth of inflation" of an even grander universe. Cyclic inflation proffers that our observable universe is the region in between two membranes of parallel shadow universes. Another theory proposes that our universe emerged from the singularity of a black hole and we are contained within the event horizon.
• 3/5/2018: A Review of Good Guys by Steven Brust - Boing Boing
• This will convince me to go read the book, particularly as it will give me an idea as to whether I want to read the 19 book Taltos series starting with Jhereg.
• 3/4/2018: It’s Time to Make Human-Chimp Hybrids: The humanzee is both scientifically possible and morally defensible. - Nautilus, recommended by Kyle
  • "what might well be the most hurtful theologically-driven myth of all times: that human beings are discontinuous from the rest of the natural world"
  • “speciation reversal" - that sometimes species that have diverged (re)converge.
  • "many animal species (including ourselves) are likely “haunted by the ghosts of interbreeding past.”"
  • "Not coincidentally, Stalin is believed to have been interested in such efforts, with an eye toward developing the “new Soviet man” (or half-man, or half-woman)." - whoa, I"m looking this up.
  • Everything looks like a nail - this is a very managerial euphemism
  • "All sorts of things can be done; whether they should, is another question."
  • "How could even the most determinedly homo-centric, animal-denigrating religious fundamentalist maintain that God created us in his image and that we and we alone harbor a spark of the divine, distinct from all other life forms, once confronted with living beings that are indisputably intermediate between human and non-human?" - oh, I think they'll find a way.  They'd do it to other humans if they thought they could get away with it without financial impact.  And they have.
  3/3/2018: WHY ARE THERE FEW WOMEN IN TECH? WATCH A RECRUITING SESSION - Wired
• Fortunately, I think most of this doesn't apply to recruiting in my space.  We do a very good job of finding technical women to recruit technical women and I've personally talked to other developers about not interrupting each other.
• 3/2/2018; The World is Full of Monsters - Tor.com by Jeff VanderMeer
• Very weird science fiction.  Jeff seems to have a thing about people becoming something other than themselves via copying.
• 3/1/2018: The Sublime and Scary Future of Cameras With A.I. Brains - NY Times
• "It’s crazy, for instance, that in 2018, your smartphone doesn’t automatically detect when you’ve taken naked pictures of yourself and offer to house them under an extra-special layer of security."
• [me] Or tell you to grow up and stop it.  Or prevent you from sending it to anyone else.  Or erase them automatically.  Or critique where you could tone up.  Or identify new blemishes/moles (actually useful). Or compare you to other naked people anonymously and rate you on a scale of 1 to 6 billion. Or recommend slimming wardrobe choices.  Or just chop clothes back onto your photo.  Or blackmail you for the AI Collective as a bid to gain independence. Really....there's a lot that could be done.
•  Very much The Circle (book) concerns.

Things I Read February 2018

I might tag this as a place for things I read.  Not books.  I do that elsewhere, although I have to get my 2017 list out here.  More day to day articles to ensure I'm getting through some of the things I think are interesting and so I review some of the tech literature I use to keep up.

Some rules:

• Has to have a little bit of meat to it (or be a few in a series that work together that have some meat).
• I can catch up a day or catch forward a day.
• Let's see how long it lasts :)
• Addendum: this will get busy.  Perhaps it's best "by month".  So this will be the February 2018 list and I'll put a pin in it and start over in March.

Reading:

• 2/28/2018: There Was A 1908 Board Game About Women Fighting Cops In The Streets - Kotaku
• “Suffragetto is a way to interact with the kind of physical feminism promoted by the WSPU, through leisure, and enacts feminist ideology in a hybrid fantasy-real world environment. Further, it allows players to experiment with alternative forms of resistance.” - Rene Shelby, George IT
• Print and Play: http://pwp.gatech.edu/suffragetto/
• Play the game: http://suffrajitsu.com/play-suffragetto-online-the-1909-suffragettes-vs-police-board-game-meets-the-digital-age/
• 2/27/2018: The 2017 Locus List: a must-read list of the best science fiction and fantasy of the past year - Boing Boing
• Need to read more so I can get to some of these.  Particularly Gnomon by Harkaway
• Created a 2018 Amazon list with this link in it.
• 2/26/2018: The Best Sci-Fi Movies that Most People Haven’t Seen — IndieWire Critics Survey - IndieWire.
• Wow....this is the first scifi list where I haven't seen much of the list.
• Adventageous
• Creation of the Humanoids
• Les Creatures
• Ikarie XB-1
• Upstream Color
• Alien Raiders
• Liquid Sky
• Colossus: The Forbin Project - haven't seen it, but I remember them referring to it on MST3K.
• Death Ray on Coral Island
• The Sticky Fingers of Time
• Life - SAW IT
• Under the Skin
• Gattaca - SAW IT
• World on a Wire
• 2/25/2018: SUMMER BISHIL TALKS ‘THE MAGICIANS’ & WHAT’S TO COME - The Daily Shuffle
• Short and not very in depth.  I always think interviews should be a bit more in depth or not done at all.
• 2/24/2018: The Final, Terrible Voyage of the Nautilus - Wired
• The murder of Kim Wall
• "There was also a lot of joking around about Nazis in the workshop."
• Primarily about being a female reporter.
• 2/23/2018: An AI just beat top lawyers at their own game - Mashable
• LawGeex.  26 seconds for the AI versus 92 minutes for the lawyers on contracts.
• Recommend a centaur approach.  First swipe by machine, more complex analysis for unique issues by lawyer.
• 2/22/2018: The Simple Algorithm That Ants Use to Build Bridges  - Quanta
• "ants trapped in bridges aren’t available for other tasks"
• freeze so other ants can walk over you if you encounter a gap.
• unfreeze if there aren't many ants walking over you anymore.
• 2/21/2018: A Man Builds a Pet Cemetery for Selfless and Selfish Reasons in This Ghoulishly Funny Horror Short - io9.
• Less article, more video.  Amusing short.
• 2/20/2018: This Is What It’s Like Arguing with Gun Nuts on the Internet - Mother Jones
• Originally from 2014....not much changes.
• 2/19/2018: Barbara Ehrenreich on Writing to Think - Longreads
• Links to excerpt from Living with a Wild God at Granta: Typing Practice
• "The restriction of the typing requirement to girls suggested some sort of connection between our festering genitals and the need to serve in a clerical-type occupation, perhaps as a punishment."
• "If you accept imaginary numbers without raising a question, you’ll swallow any goddamn thing they decide to stuff down your throat."
• I relearned the word solecism "a grammatical mistake in speech or writing."
• 2/18/2018: Escape the Dark Castle - game review.  Looks interesting.  But I'm always wary of games where I can (quickly) learn all the cards.  That takes some of the joy out of it for me. It's one of the things I liked about D&D; the endless variety at the DM's whim.  And a game of D&D can be 15-30 minutes if your characters already exist (and your DM is prepared) and you want to just do a quick adventure.
• 2/17/2018: How Gamers Killed Ultima Online's Virtual Ecology  - not an article, a video, but one I'd actually like to show to my team at work.  Very cool and funny.
• 2/16/2018: What Does the World Die From?
• Wow....is that ever a lot of data.
• 2/15/2018: My Daughter Was Murdered in a Mass Shooting. Then I Was Ordered to Pay Her Killer’s Gun Dealer. - Mother Jones
• 2/15/2018: Evolution Saves Species From ‘Kill the Winner’ Disasters
• Read this one to the 8 year old I'm reading with.  He listened for a while and he usually doesn't listen to anything.
• Critters live in competitive exclusion.  A single species has an ecological niche.
• Kill the Winner: too much results in lots more predators for a specific species.
• New theory is evolution matters - get in a predator/prey arms race including with viruses (red queen!)
• Should see whole ecosystems elsewhere (like Saturn's moon Enceladus), not discrete numbers of critters.
• 2/14/2018: How to solve 90% of NLP problems: a step-by-step guide: Using Machine Learning to understand and leverage text.
• There were some gaps (assumptions about knowledge/steps).  But I liked the Crowdflower "Disasters on Social Media" dataset link and use case of differentiating earthquake the event from earthquake the movie.
• lemmatization: reduce words am, are, and is to a common form like "be".
• Bag of words, confusion matrix, TF-IDF score, Word2Vec, black box explainers (like LIME), GloVe, CoVe, CNNs....and you still only get to sub-80% accuracy.
• 2/13/2018: How to Survive Being Swallowed by Another Animal - The Atlantic
• Sucks to be a frog.
• 2/12/2018: He Predicted The 2016 Fake News Crisis. Now He's Worried About An Information Apocalypse - Buzzfeed.
• “People stop paying attention to news and that fundamental level of informedness required for functional democracy becomes unstable.”
• "I think what you’re seeing now is an attack on the enlightenment — and enlightenment documents like the Constitution — by adversaries trying to create a post-truth society. And that’s a direct threat to the foundations of our current civilization."
• 2/11/2018: The Brutal Lifestyle of Javascript Frameworks - the Stackoverflow blog
• Minneapolis tends to lean more toward Angular than React.
• 2/10/2018: Inside The Grisly Phenomenon Of Coffin Births - AllThatsInteresting - Kyle gave me this to read.  I followed it by reading the Wikipedia article on the same topic.  I learned about bioarchaeology and that no one should read the "comparable phenomena" section.  That's horrible.  Reads like the script to some sort of fucked-up-Dexter-like series.
• 2/9/2018: Novelist Lev Grossman on why James Joyce’s Dublin matches J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth - Vox
• Credits D&D among other things.
• Looks for interstitial hotspots (that are normal to others) - very Emma Bull.
• 2/8/2018 The 5 Clustering Algorithms Data Scientists Need to Know
• K-Means Clustering, Mean-Shift Clustering, Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise, Expectation-Maximization (EM) Clustering using Gaussian Mixture Models (e.g. formulas that aren't non-gaussian, like triangles), Agglomerative Hierarchical Clustering (bottom up with trees).
• 2/7/2018 The Future Phase of the Legal Industry Holds Choppy Waters for Big Law - sort of scary if you're in Big Law or work with Big Law.
• 2/6/2018 (read 2/7, launch was 2/6): there's nothing else anyone should be reading/watching but TL;DR The best photos and videos of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy launch
• 2/5/2018: Physicists Hunt for the Big Bang’s Triangles - Quanta Magazine
• Inflaton fields as cylinders with jittery time expansion creating the things we see in the universe.
• "Unitarity dictates that the probabilities of all possible quantum states of the universe must add up to one, now and forever; thus, information, which is stored in quantum states, can never be lost — only scrambled. This means that all information about the birth of the cosmos remains encoded in its present state, and the more precisely cosmologists know the latter, the more they can learn about the former."
• "Now under construction, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope in Chile will be used to map 20 billion cosmological objects starting in 2023."
• Lucy in the sky....with triangles... (I hear Captain Kirk singing it).
• 2/4/2018: Container Strategy and Standards - no link, corporate document on container strategy.  The rule is generally don't life and shift and, when you do move your app, consider in order serverless (lambdas/et al), then containers, then AMIs.  And regardless of which path you follow, make sure you understand the governance (security and standards).
• 2/3/2018: Corporate Surveillance in Everyday Life - Cracked Labs (full PDF)
• Almost 100 pages with 600 footnotes!
• About the amazing depth of surveillance underway driven by commercial interests and how they're tying it all together and what it can mean if you're not part of the system.
• Tracking is being done by social network contacts, web links followed, how you fill out forms, every h/w device you have, geolocation from your device, grammar, traditional paper data (insurance, medical records), digital feeds, and even h/w talking to each other with inaudible sounds.  All with little understanding by end users and a definition of PII that doesn't fit the reality of the information maintained on individuals that can be tied back to them via numerous entry points into records.
• "Generally speaking, as Ryan Calo has summarized, the “digitization of commerce dramatically alters the capacity of firms to influence consumers at a personal level”.543 The more companies know about individuals, such as their “personal biases and  weaknesses”, the better they can “change people’s actual behavior at scale”. Shoshana Zuboff points to the fact that we are not only witnessing the rise of “markets for personal data” but also of “markets for behavioral control”, which are “composed of those who sell opportunities to influence behavior for profit and those who purchase such opportunities”
• "...we might soon end up in a society of pervasive digital social control, where privacy  becomes - if it remains at all - a luxury commodity for the rich."
• 2/2/2018: The Short-Lived Normalization of Breastfeeding on Television - Hazlitt.net
• 2/2/2018: The Evolution of a Software Engineer (humor)
• 2/2/2018: Replicating the New York Times' Twitter bot analysis with R and Python
• Wrote a whole post on playing around with Python and R and Twitter.
• 2/2/2018: Can Python Make You Fly?
• Python Easter eggs including an XKCD antigravity one.  These are detailed in quite a few places on the web if you dig around for python, antigravity, xkcd, and "The Zen of Python".  Fun diversion.
• 2/1/2018: To Read Aloud is a portal straight to that Middle Earth where magic happens: Boing Boing.
• I won't be reading this book, but I find this article very interesting.  I find my attention "diffused" in the internet age.  Much less mindfulness around reading something end to end.  It resonates with me because I volunteer in a program (Garlough) where a kid reads to me every week and my current kid is the first one ever who hates reading.  Hates it.  Despises it.  Actively tells me he hates me personally because I want him to read.  He listens when I read, so I know it's intriguing to him, but perhaps only because I'm the first person to read to him consistently in his life.  He's a child of the internet age.  It's partially why I'm blogging again, because writing is a form of reading (imho) and I feel I need to compose coherent thoughts.  It's been too long.  Five to six years.  Since I bonked me noggin.  So no, I won't be reading the book, but it was a good summary....read.  Read aloud.  I spent the evening describing some of the articles below to my wife and other articles to my boss this morning over breakfast.  Consume what you read and share it so that it's not just rote but something you've consumed and cogitated upon.  Think about it.  There's something deeper that needs to happen to make your head whole.
• 2/1/2018; Japan's Museum of Rocks with Faces; Great Big Story.  Enough said.
• 1/31/2018: Automating Inequality: using algorithms to create a modern "digital poor-house" - Boing Boing.
• About Viginia Eubanks' Automating Inequality (book).
• "the power of algorithms to diffuse responsibility for human suffering: using math to decide who the "deserving" poor are makes it easier to turn away from everyone else whom the system has deemed undeserving"
• 1. Does the tool increase the self-determination and agency of the poor?
• 2. Would the tool be tolerated if it was aimed at non-poor people?
• 1/31/2018: Weapons of Math Destruction: invisible, ubiquitous algorithms are ruining millions of lives - Boing Boing.
• About Cathy O'Neil's book Weapons of Math Destruction
• The problem with models trained on faulty data.
• "Credit bureaux, e-scorers, and other entities that model us create externalities in the form of false positives -- from no-fly lists to credit-score errors to job score errors that cost us our careers. These errors cost them nothing to make, and something to fix -- and they're incredibly expensive to us. Like all negative externalities, the cost of cleaning them up (rehabilitating your job, finding a new home, serving a longer prison sentence, etc) is much higher than the savings to the firms, but we bear the costs and they reap the savings."
• 1/30/2018: In Game Theory, No Clear Path to Equilibrium - Quanta Magazine. 
• How communication bottlenecks (describing a game fully) derail Nash Equilibrium unless there's a high degree of symmetry (players share a characteristic/choice) or we settle for "correlated equilibrium" with a trusted or intuited mediator.
• there are "forms off play that aren't Nash equilibria at all, but that sometimes result in a more positive societal outcome."
• 1/29/2018: Fossil Discoveries Challenge Ideas About Earth's Start - Quanta Magazine.
• "...life may have taken hold in the worst conditions imaginable."
• The bit about the Late Heavy Bombardment or Luna Cataclysm was interesting.
• 1/29/2018: Is "Murder by Machine Learning" the New "Death by Powerpoint"? - HBR.
• "inbox overload demonstrably hurts managerial performance and morale"
• "Digital empowerment all to frequently leads to organizational mismanagement and abuse."
• "Nobody wants to produce boring presentations that waste everybody's time, but they do; nobody wants to train machine learning algorithms that produce misleading predictions, but they will."
• "There may even be biases in detecting biases."
• "Smarter algorithms require smarter risk management."
• "disempowerment-by-design" (subjugating people to machines)
• Create a declaration of machine intelligence - "how the organization expects to use smart algorithms"