lahosken @lahosken@mastodon.social
He lives in San Francisco. He writes code. He loves everybody. https://lahosken.san-francisco.ca.us/
#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, this article would have been pretty amazing… but as it was, it just told me stuff I already knew, albeit in a well-written way.
There were other articles about other topics. You can read about how climate cha…
#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 impressive stories out of some recently-declassified material. There's good stories here, whether you like spymasters or codes or history.
It starts out with the part of the story I knew. Thanks to her background in Shakespea...
#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. This is an interesting topic, but this book didn't get into the aspects I hoped for.
I want enough technical details so that I can Monday-morning-quarterback the relevant engineers. But though everyone in this book climbs towers all day, there was scant detail about how one climbs a towe...
#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 oranges, but it's fun. There's an essay about fact-checkers which is pretty awesome because fact-checkers are pretty awesome.
I took an overnight trip to Monterey, which has a scenic rocky coastline and a big aquarium. I took some photos of rocks and of people looking at fish.
#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 of time-travelers pop up. But it's not clear what all is going on—which I suppose is realistic in a simulated world or in a world being messed with by time-travelers… but it's rough going for the reader.
#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 can try to understand it. It was a popular uprising in a place and time that wasn't set up for elections. No voting booths, no polls—to gauge "the will of the people," you'd wait for some firebrands to call for a strike/rally/etc and see how crowde...
There's a special #art exhibit at San Francisco's deYoung Museum with works by Charles Sheeler and other Precisionist folks. I'm a fan of Sheeler, so I went. Out in front of the exhibit there's some interpretive text giving a timeline of machine-y goings-on that inspired some of these machine-showing works.
One event on the timeline was the building of the Fort Peck Dam, along with a photo showing construction. That photo looked familiar: aha, no doubt it had inspir... https://lahosken.san-francisco.ca.us/new/2018/04/09/charles-sheeler-no-water/
#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-wing candidates digging up "dirt" on left-wing candidates where "dirt" all too often meant: voting to increase taxes or increase spending. But there are also stories of bringing actual corruption to light, both on the le...
Urban Morphology is Everywhere, even the Ferry Terminal
At the Stephan Leonoudakis Golden Gate Ferry Terminal the other day, I noticed that one of the two pay phones had gone away. That's not surprising; nowadays, pay phones tend to go away. But I'd based a puzzlehunt-puzzle on those two pay phones. The gist of the puzzle: find these pay phones. Suppose their phone numbers, encoded, are this; then what is that encoded message? With one of those pho...
#Book Report: The Lost art of Finding our Way
This book is darned near perfect: It's about how folks navigated back before there was a GPS phone in every pocket. Had things I didn't know about Vikings and about Marshall Island stick chart wave maps. There's an interesting theory that Viking "sunstones" might have been chunks of calcite "Icelandic spar", a naturally-occuring polarized crystal that could help you spot the sun's true direction on an overcas...
#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_ realistic. Anyhow, there's starter culture, startup culture, awareness of your place in the universe, an Alice Waters-ish figure who uses underhanded methods to keep in control of everything culinar…
#Book Report: From Here to Eternity
It's a book about what folks do with bodies after #death around the world. Anyhow, chapters here talk about Spanish viewings involving many panes of glass; a Japanese Columbarium with spiffy lighting design; the Ñatitas (heads attributed w/mystical powers) of Bolivia, Parsi vulture rituals… It's interesting reading but slow because my way of thinking about death involves a lot of denial...
https://lahosken.san-francisco.ca.us/new/2018/02/17/from-here-to-eternity-its-book-about-what-folks/
Milestone: 33 Million Hits
Wow, it's the site's 33 millionth hit. We can take a look at the log:
157.55.39.5 - - [07/Feb/2018:17:04:34 +0000] "GET /anecdotal/hunt/headlamp/ HTTP/1.1" 200 2704 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)"
This looks like the index crawler for the Bing search engine making sure that my Triclops Headlamp page didn't go away or change or something. Not much chance of...
#Book Report: Can You Solve My Problems?
It's a book about #puzzle s 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 before. I almost didn't see them; pretty early on the book has an essay really thinking through the problem in which someone really needs to ferry a fox, chicken, and chickenfeed...
#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 blog? Someone who writes about railstuff, but I didn't note down who.) She writes well about that and about maneuvering big ol' freight cars in modern switchyards. If you liked Wild, you…
#Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Cambridge via Left Coast
I spent last weekend solving MIT Mystery Hunt puzzles. I took some photos, but Kiki took the best photo. https://lahosken.san-francisco.ca.us/anecdotal/hunt/66/
#Book Report: Life in Code
These articles go back a ways. She writes about the aggravation of being a computer programmer during the Y2K hype cycle. But her more modern articles also ring true, as she shares her aggravation of modern day startup-culture snake oil hype and… Uhm, she doesn't just write about aggravation. There's articles about the joy of coding. She peeked in at some MOOCs and noticed some things that worked (a forum where students could help each o...
