Wordspeak (Posts about Reading)

The Martian

Edwin Steele — Fri, 27 Feb 2015 03:51:47 GMT

I just finished reading The Martian, by Andy Weir and it was captivating. The Martian is a Robinson Crusoe on Mars cum Apollo 13 story full of engineering problems and creative technical solutions with an entertaining monologue. It's a physics and chemistry lab-book fused with a personal journal and snippets of a technical design document and I found it to be suspenseful, believable and interesting throughout.

Now, where did those two days go?

Words and Pictures - Jan 2014

Edwin Steele — Mon, 10 Feb 2014 05:54:57 GMT

Building on November's feat of watching a whole film on DVD, my wife and I escaped to IMAX to see something current! Astonishing! Here's the full list of highlights form the month.

Reading:

The Builder’s High - Rands in Repose. There's such joy and satisfaction in creating something.
The NSA and the Corrosion of Silicon Valley - Michael Dearing. The NSA's activity is hurting US business. I'm actively avoiding using US-based companies where possible because of the US Government's overreach and the NSA's programs.
Command and Control - Eric Schlosser. An engaging look at the controls and technology behind the USA's Cold-War nuclear weapons systems, and the accidents that have occurred with those weapons systems. Having read this, I'm utterly amazed that there has not been a major incident with the US nuclear arsenal.
2014 Gates Annual Letter: Myths About Foreign Aid - Gates Foundation - Bill Gates. A long but informative piece, and well worth reading. I'm so glad we have thoughtful, empirically driven philanthropists like the Gates family.

Watching:

Breach - The story behind Robert Hanssen, an FBI agent convicted of spying for the Soviet Union. Ryan Phillippe and Chris Cooper are incredibly good.
Gravity - Seeing this at IMAX was a totally captivating experience. Brilliant.

Words and Pictures - November

Edwin Steele — Tue, 21 Jan 2014 23:48:51 GMT

I saw a movie in November. A whole movie with only a few interruptions from the kids. Amazing! I hope to do the same in 2014.

Reading:

Designing Offline-First Web Apps - Alex Feyerke (A List Apart). As a daily commuter with spotty mobile coverage, I appreciate when application developers take the time to consider "offline" as a valid state and not an error.
More And Better Nuclear Power - Nicholas Valéry (The Economist). I'm pro-nuclear, and would love to see old, unsafe light-water reactors replaced with newer models, particularly Thorium-fuelled thermal breeder reactors, that can make this a safe and effective power source.
The art of stealing - Lex Boon (NRC). The story of a major art heist in Rotterdam. Beautifully formatted - read this on the site instead of in Instapaper.
The Great Discontent: Merlin Mann - Tina Essmaker (TGD). I really like Merlin Mann. He's honest, funny and he's well read in more areas than one might expect given his exposure in the tech/productivity world. This is a great interview.

Pictures:

Pacific Rim - MechWarrior comes to life. What an absolute cracker!
Sanna Dullaway injects colour into historic photographs - John Hutchinson (Daily Mail). These photos seem more relevant and accessible when viewed in colour, even though they speak volumes in their original form.

Words and Pictures - October

Edwin Steele — Mon, 20 Jan 2014 21:57:22 GMT

The best reading for the month:

Bad Blood: The Life and Death of Alexander Litvinenko - Will Storr (Medium). Interesting background on Alexander Litvinenko, explaining why he was considered a target for assassination, and the pharmacological workings of polonium-210.
The Death of the Urdu Script - Ali Eteraz (Medium). New technological considerations in language preservation - what would happen if your pen only wrote words with American English spelling?
The White Spider - Heinrich Harrer. A classic mountaineering text about climbing the North Face of the Eiger. The first half was very interesting, but the second half was too slow to keep my attention.
Why would I donate my body to science? - Brooke Borel (Aeon Magazine). I'm already an organ donor, but this makes me consider going beyond organ donation.
The Slow Winter [PDF] - James Mickens. Brilliant and hilarious commentary on the evolution of CPUs. Best of the month. Seriously... it's that funny.

Words and Pictures - September

Edwin Steele — Mon, 20 Jan 2014 06:09:00 GMT

After work provided the most hectic half-year of my career, I'm finally reclaiming my headspace and posting some old links that I'd compiled previously but hadn't shared. They're too good to discard. September seemed to have an inadvertent linguistic and cultural focus.

Reading:

The Weirdest Languages (http://idibon.com/the-weirdest-languages/) - Tyler Schnoebelen. Mining the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) for common linguistic structures and behaviours. Kudos to the database maintainers, and to the author for some great storytelling.
In Chișinău - James Meek (London Review of Books). Perceptive analysis of a few cultural traits brought about by a lost passport in Romania.
What Is the Icelandic Word for "Four" - Daniel Tammet (Slate) - Language never ceases to amaze, and frustrate!
How to Write About the Balkans - Lily Lynch (The Balkanist). You'll recognise the format - very funny.
The Lady, or the Tire Iron? - Susan Schorn (McSweeny's). MythBusting the locked-in-the-boot (trunk) kidnapping scenario. Hilarious.
A Cartoonist's Advice - Bill Watterson (Zen Pencils). A beautifully illustrated, refreshing and liberating look at the flaws in modern corporate culture. Your work is not your life, or your meaning.

Words and Pictures - August

Edwin Steele — Fri, 01 Nov 2013 06:37:46 GMT

Words and Pictures for August? It's November!

I know. I've been doing other things, yet these articles were too good not to share.

Reading:

Have You Heard The One About President Joe Biden? - Jeanne Marie Laskas (GQ). Joe Biden sounds like a politician who isn't a Politician. Great writing - it made me feel like I was travelling with him.
Arabic: A Language With Too Many Armies And Navies - The Economist. An introduction to Arabic dialects. Technical enough to be interesting yet accessible to monoglots or infant polyglots like me.
In Praise Of Laziness - Schumpeter (The Economist). Knowledge workers need physical and mental space for creativity.
Forced Exposure - Groklaw. I read this as the seriousness of the Edward Snowden leaks was becoming clear. It's still terrible and I hope we, particularly the technical community along with political activism, can make move the balance back towards privacy.
The Powerball Jackpot Is \$425m. Should You Play? - James Harvey (Medium). Don't let a little bit of maths dissuade you - this is a great read.

Video:

Stargate SG1, Season 7. Fighting the Goa'uld System Lords without ever taking themselves seriously. I love this show.

Words and Pictures - June and July

Edwin Steele — Wed, 14 Aug 2013 07:31:00 GMT

A poorly scoped upgrade to my hosting left me without an easy way to publish until I rebuilt the entire world... entirely... and stuff. More on that later. In the meantime here's my favourite reading from the last two months.

Ars Technica - Anatomy of a hack: How crackers ransack passwords like “qeadzcwrsfxv1331” - You'll be amazed how easily your carefully chosen passwords are cracked; Enjoy the read, then get a password manager and have it create strong passwords for you. Mac users can do worse than 1Password (I use it)
Hayley Campbell - My Life As An Amateur Taxidermist - I laughed so hard that I cried (while on public transport).
Kieran Healy - Using Metadata To Find Paul Revere - How an expert can draw conclusions from a seemingly trivial data set. A case-in-point why I don't have a Google account and don't do Facebook. And the article helped me find out who Paul Revere is.
Geoffrey Pullum - Speech Recognition vs. Language Processing and Machine Translation Without the Translation - Great (and sometimes humorous) analysis on why text and language processing is useful in limited areas but is still far from perfect.
Antonio Mendez - Master of Disguise - A retired CIA agent tells interesting stories from his career, including the story on which the movie Argo was based. The first few chapters were a little slow, but it was very engaging from then on.
Michael Finkel (National Geographic) - Australia's Aboriginals - Life in a remote Aboriginal town; wonderful and saddening at the same time. Support Indigenous Literacy Day on September 4.

Words and Pictures - May

Edwin Steele — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 07:38:47 GMT

Fiction involving time-travel is inconsistent, and even some of my beloved Star Trek Voyager episodes have plot holes big enough for a truck, so I was surprised to find myself buying and devouring three volumes ¹ of the time-travel series "Kirov" last month. It was great reading, as were a number of other articles.

Reading:

The Kirov Series - John Schettler. A modern naval capital ship gets transported back to World War 2. I had low expectations because of the similarity to John Birmingham's Axis of Time series but I found the characters to be interesting and believable and the military side had an appropriate depth of technical detail. The three books fit well together and remained interesting. Highlight of the month.
Kareem: 20 Things I Wish I’d Known When I Was 30 - Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. My favourite: "Do one thing ever day you look forward to doing".
Morning and Evening - PM September 3 - Charles Spurgeon. God teaches us dependence on him as we go through hard times, and is with us continually in their midst.
A Guide for Game Hunting in England’s Premier League - New York Times. Or: "How to avoid offence even when the culture doesn't make sense"
Why Your Supermarket Only Sells 5 Kinds of Apples - Mother Jones Magazine. This taught me so many things apple varieties and cultivation. Very interesting.
The Cicada's Love Affair with Prime Numbers - The New Yorker. Fascinating.

Video:

This Is Water - Full Commencement Speech at Kenyon College - David Foster Wallace. (transcript). So insightful, and relevant quite apart from age and education.

Can a series of e-books be a volume, or is there another collective noun? ↩

Words and Pictures - April

Edwin Steele — Fri, 03 May 2013 08:09:37 GMT

This month I got stuck in a tome, and I found it hard to leave the office during the day, which meant my lunchtime Instapaper routine didn't happen very often, which means there aren't so many smaller articles for recommendation this month.

Notable reading:

All Hell Let Loose - Max Hastings. A large and well written book on WW2 events focusing more on government and society than units, movements and generals. The material is excellent and informative but I did not enjoy it, so I stopped about half way through. In another place, with more mental and emotional energy, I would have completed it. I suspect my war reading will remain in the sanitised combat-centric genre, even though Hastings reminded me of the horrific effects of war.
Ain't No Reason - Lex Friedman. Insight into pidgins, creoles, grammar and prescriptive linguists, in the context of African American Vernacular English (AAVE). Articles like this are the reason I keep reading Marco Arment's The Magazine (he's the guy who wrote the Instapaper iPad App that I so regularly use).

Movies:

Skyfall. If it weren't for the last 15 minutes and the rooftop bike scene, I'd have forgotten it already. Pithy, explosive enjoyment.
Bullitt. Come for the car chase, stay for the cinematography. My only expectations were of the green Mustang Fastback so I was surprised to find myself captivated by the scenes without dialogue and the periods of silence, which reminded me of the amazing safe-cracking scene in Rififi. Far more artsy than I expected, and very enjoyable.

Having just loaded a bunch of articles from Longform, and recently added the RSS feed from The Browser, I suspect I'll have some prize articles to list next month.

Words and Pictures - March

Edwin Steele — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 07:57:34 GMT

I actually got to watch some movies last month. My five month old and two year old made sure that I couldn't watch any of them in a single sitting, but at least I got to see them! (and I wouldn't change being a parent for the world):

The movies:

Argo - Spy thrillers can be hit and miss but this was really engrossing. I didn't know the historical outcome so the movie held me all the more. p.s.: Ben Affleck has the coolest beard.
Source Code - A engaging time-travel thriller. It had a few plot holes but nothing that detracted from the entertainment at all. Don't think too hard as you watch it and I think you'll like it. I did.

And the best reading of the month:

Folklore - Andy Hertzfeld - Life inside a start-up. Making history might be fun, but it's generally hard work. The background behind the hardware was fascinating, and took me back to 1990.
Michael Lewis - Obama's Way - It's Michael Lewis. What's not to like? Just read it.
Sci-Fi Structures Found on Earth Get Transported to Alien World - Some people are incredibly creative. I'd happily move into Atmospheric observation outpost Omicron (the third picture) - hopefully one will appear for sale in my local real-estate agent.
The Real Cuban Missile Crisis - I didn't realise that my view of the crisis was so heavily influenced by the writings of a pro-Kennedy hawk. Bias is most dangerous when you don't even realise it's there.