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.