January Reading

Well, the problem with recording reading, at least as far as I can tell at the moment, is way too much training.  I pretty much failed at keeping track in December. But I probably spent 40 hours in classes.  This month won't be much better - graphql, aws, github, react, vue, d3...two conferences on machine learning.  But I'm going to try anyway.  Reading small short articles is good for me.  I think better if I've got some variety.  Although I might record it here and then write more elsewhere if it's really interesting. So here goes...one more try.  My first though, however, is that a should code a short loop to spit out all the days of the month in the format I want....

• 1/31/2019: Chapter 5: "Creating a GraphQL API" - Learning GraphQL: Declarative Data Fetching for Modern Web Apps by Eve Porcello and Alex Banks
• 1/30/2019: Chapter 4: "Designing a Schema" - Learning GraphQL: Declarative Data Fetching for Modern Web Apps by Eve Porcello and Alex Banks
• 1/29/2019: Chapter 3: "The GraphQL Query Language" - Learning GraphQL: Declarative Data Fetching for Modern Web Apps by Eve Porcello and Alex Banks
• 1/28/2019: Chapter 2: "Graph Theory" - Learning GraphQL: Declarative Data Fetching for Modern Web Apps by Eve Porcello and Alex Banks
• 1/27/2019: Chapter 1: "Welcome to GraphQL" - Learning GraphQL: Declarative Data Fetching for Modern Web Apps by Eve Porcello and Alex Banks
• 1/26/2019: Sector Roadmap: Cloud Analytic Databases 2017 (Gigom via Snowflake) by William McKnight
• analytical, operational, transactional (types of databases)
• data warehouse >> database designers ended up answering questions, not business (what we saw even with some flavors of analytics engines).
• Lots of talk about supporting diverse data (XML, JSON) - this is an issue we saw with Microstrategy versus Datameer, the ability to JSON_VALUE out values stored in semi-structured fields.
• Learning that you can just "pause" SQL Server (Microsoft) is pretty cool.  Our ElasticSearch nodes require spin up/spin down time that's almost impossible to avoid / implement with our schedule.
• Redshift (AWS) got very low scores.
• Addressed: Robustness of SQL, Built-in optimization (cost versus rules based), On-the-fly Elasticity (an issue for us to scale up/down), dynamic environment adaptation, Separate of compute from storage (huge....really huge), and support for diverse data.
• (BOOK) 1/25/2019: The Stone Sky: The Broken Earth Trilogy 3 by N.K. Jemisin, 2017.  464 pages.
• 1/24/2019: This Mansplaining Chart Is Absolutely Heroic & Can Be Sent To Anyone Who Needs It - Bustle
• (BOOK) 1/23/2019: Lovecraft's Monsters (edited by Ellen Datlow), various.  432 pages.
• 1/23/2019: "Children of the Fang" by John Langan in Lovecraft's Monsters (edited by Ellen Datlow)
• 1/23/2019: "Haruspicy by Gemma Files in Lovecraft's Monsters (edited by Ellen Datlow)
• 1/23/2019: "That of Which We Speak When we Speak of the Unspeakable" by Nick Mamatas in Lovecraft's Monsters (edited by Ellen Datlow)

• 1/23/2019: "The Bleeding Shadow" by Joe R. Lansdale in Lovecraft's Monsters (edited by Ellen Datlow)
• 1/23/2019; "I've Come to Talk With You Again" by Karl Edward Wagner in Lovecraft's Monsters (edited by Ellen Datlow)
• 1/23/2019: "Waiting at the Crossroads Motel" by Steve Rasnic Tem in Lovecraft's Monsters (edited by Ellen Datlow)
• Solid tale with a noir Cthulhu bend.
• 1/23/2019: "Black as the Pit, From Pole to Pole" by Howard Waldrop and Steven Utley in Lovecraft's Monsters (edited by Ellen Datlow)
• 1/22/2019: "Jar of Salts" by Gemma Files in Lovecraft's Monsters (edited by Ellen Datlow)
• 1/22/2019: "The Sect of the Idiot" by Thomas Liggotti in Lovecraft's Monsters (edited by Ellen Datlow)
• 1/22/2019: "Love is Forbidden We Croak and Howl" by Caitlin R. Kiernan in Lovecraft's Monsters (edited by Ellen Datlow)
• 1/22/2019: Secrets of the Creative Brain - Nancy C. Andreasen in The Atlantic in 2014
  
  • I remember having some aspect of this excitement pulling together a number of technologies to create something new when I worked more closely with technology.  I don't think management always gives one the right tools/time to be creative unless you're approaching it as a way to "think big" and write a book or teach others.  But garbage - noise - gets in the way.  Process, source control, the minutae of stories rather than the bigger driven set of features.
  • threshold theory, which holds that above a certain level, intelligence doesn’t have much effect on creativity: most creative people are pretty smart, but they don’t have to be that smart, at least as measured by conventional intelligence tests. An IQ of 120, indicating that someone is very smart but not exceptionally so, is generally considered sufficient for creative genius.
  • divergent versus convergent (one answer) thinking - she notes that this doesn't necessarily explain creativity because both may be forms of creativity.
  • Many forms of creativity, from writing a novel to discovering the structure of DNA, require this kind of ongoing, iterative process.
  • One difference between a great writer like Shakespeare and, say, the typical stockbroker is the size and richness of the verbal lexicon in his or her temporal association cortices, as well as the complexity of the cortices’ connections with other association regions in the frontal and parietal lobes.
  • Many creative people are polymaths, people with broad interests in many fields—a common trait among my study subjects.
  • “There is no greater joy that I have in my life than having an idea that’s a good idea. At that moment it pops into my head, it is so deeply satisfying and rewarding … 
• 1/21/2019: Medieval Walls of Ávila - Atlas Obscura
• 1/21/2019: Ravens Are Evolving, and Not in the Way You'd Expect: Instead of branching into new species, raven groups experienced something called "speciation reversal."
• “What were once two distinct organisms can collide and become one, weaving their previously distinct genomes into a single tapestry. It's a complex but beautiful work of nature, really."
• 1/20/2019: Many Voters Think Trump’s a Self-Made Man. What Happens When You Tell Them Otherwise?
• "estimated that over the course of his lifetime, the younger Trump received more than $413 million in today’s dollars from his father."
• "Many Americans were and remain misinformed about the central aspect of Trump’s business career, which was his sole credential in his bid for office."
• "the practices of even serious journalists may not always produce an informed public"
• "As we enter the 2020 cycle, reporters and campaign workers may assume voters know about all sorts of things that they don’t. But our research shows that the basic information plugged-in elites take for granted is not known by many Americans, and can be consequential in political evaluations."
• Interesting how humans are still tied to mythologies and the need to believe in them.  Trump as the anti-Arthur.  Or, perhaps, Arthur, given how dubious some of that king's policies were.  That would be a fun mash up.
• 1/19/2019: Killers of the king: the men who dared to execute Charles I
• On Henry Marten: "For instance, he thought of the name of the body that would face the king: ‘the Good People of England’. That’s a very clever construct, because to take a king to trial you had to set up something fairly worthy."
• Re: one of the regicides, Harrison: "After he had been hanged, resuscitated and castrated, and while he was being gutted, he managed to swing a punch at his executioner."
• Added the book to my list; https://www.amazon.com/Killers-King-Execute-Charles-2016-02-16/dp/B01FIWHM96/
• 1/18/2019: Streampunks: YouTube and the Rebels Remaking Media by Robert Kyncl and Maany Peyvan via GetAbstract
• [There's a variation of this in my own company for subs and what happens during an economic downturn] - Subscription services flail if they lack a “funnel” – a loyal group of “free users” the service can persuade to start paying. Subscription services must cope with the dreaded “churn” – viewers who sign up for a subscription but leave. Free services seldom have to deal with churn. But if subscribers stick around after a few months, they become unlikely to churn. The subscription turns into a normal monthly expenditure. That resilience matters greatly when the economy slows down. During the 2008 recession, Netflix and Amazon Prime held onto a large percentage of their subscribers.
• [This surprised me - that's damn accurate] Content ID boasts a 99.7% accuracy rate at identifying uploaded videos. It compares anything uploaded against a vast reference file. More than 50% of YouTube’s payments to the music industry derive from ad revenue on fan-uploaded videos.
• 1/17/2019: Trumppunk Resists Presidential Bunk Or, Updating Obscuring Mirrorshades with Revelatory Magnifying Glasses Enhances Seeing the Forces of Normalcy
• Trumppunk—metafictional fictions about Trump’s fictions
• Trumppunk, unlike Cyberpunk, does not have mirrorshades, because Trump looks directly at the sun.
• "Literary agent Jonny Geller explains that the “commercial view among publishers seems to be that people are living it [Trumpism] and haven’t got the head space for reading it. . . . It is a lack of courage and imagination” "
• 11/17/2019: Mother of All Breaches Exposes 773 Million Emails, 21 Million Passwords
• I remember when Troy Hunt wrote semi Microsoft-centric security papers over a decade ago when I was a tech coach on the lawschool project.  His first in depth delineation of security concerns was a bible to me for a while when we started hardening our application.
• I think credential stuffing (same password multiple accounts) might be how my microsoft account was breached for a few moments before I MFA-ed it and changed passwords.
• 1/16/2019: (TRAINING) Code Freeze 2019 at the University of Minnesota all day.  I'll cover in a separate post - some great presentations on Machine Learning.
• 1/16/2019: Remembering ‘Babylon 5,’ One of the Smartest Sci-Fi Series Ever, 25 Years After Its Debut
• no kids, no robots
• not enough detail in the article - my wife and I watched the series when it was originally out and it was favorite for my friend Dan, who died last year, and me to talk about.  I remember how frustrated he was when an episode was moved.
• 1/15/2019: Something Is Broken in Our Science Fiction: Why can’t we move past cyberpunk
• there’s steampunk, biopunk, nanopunk, stonepunk, clockpunk, rococopunk, raypunk, nowpunk, atompunk, mannerpunk, salvagepunk, Trumppunk, solarpunk, and sharkpunk (no joke!)
• Moreover, as SF scholar Sean Guynes-Vishniac argues, publishers always want to find evermore-narrowly-sliced microgenres, hoping to squeeze every aesthetic niche dry.
• Cyberpunk derivatives on Wikipedia (may need to be its own reading entry)
• At its root, then, cyberpunk is arguably a kind of fiction unable to imagine a future very different from its present.
• retain the hope of writing fiction that confronts readers with new ways of thinking about their relationship to the future—our future
• 1/14/2019: Remnants by Fred Chappeli in Lovecraft's Monsters (edited by Ellen Datlow)
• 1/13/2019: " Inelastic Collisions" by Elizabeth Bear in Lovecraft's Monsters (edited by Ellen Datlow)
• 1/12/2019: "The Dappled Thing" by William Browning Spencer in Lovecraft's Monsters (edited by Ellen Datlow)
• 1/11/2019: Two years after #Pizzagate showed the dangers of hateful conspiracies, they’re still rampant on YouTube
• Cool, I didn't know this site existed: https://algotransparency.org
• More cool - you can see the code they use to walk Youtube here: https://github.com/pnbt/youtube-explore
• Or the Network Contagion Research Institute: http://ncri.io/
• I had no ideas about the Frazzle conspiracy nonsense.  Damn that's dumb.
• "The platform’s recommendation engine adds the power of repetition, allowing similar claims — no matter how preposterous — to be served again and again to people who show an initial interest in a subject."
• 1/10/2019:  (TRAINING) TCJUG (Twin Cities Java User Group) at Intertech.  Topic was Machine Learning 101. I'll cover in a separate post: http://www.nodtonothing.com/2019/01/machine-learning-101-tcjug.html
• 1/9/2019: "A Quarter to Three" by Kim Newman in Lovecraft's Monsters (edited by Ellen Datlow)
• 1/8/2019: New Paper: A 'Mirror Image' of Our Universe Existed Before The Big Bang
• Well, not many details.  But the notion that the scientist who's proposing a universe where time runs backward is called Turok.  That's funny.
• 1/7/2019: The ACLU made the Border Patrol reveal its terrifying legal theories
• Counsel for CBP has cherry-picked legal precedents to produce a kafka-esque litany of excuses for stops, including being close to the border, being on a "known smuggling route," driving "inconsistent with local traffic patterns," being "from out of the area," having a covered cargo area; paying "undue attention to the agent's presence," avoiding "looking at the agent," slowing down on seeing the agent, being dirty, etc.
• 1/6/2019: "The Same Deep Waters as You" by Brian Hodge in Lovecraft's Monsters (edited by Ellen Datlow)
• 1/5/2019: "Red Goat Black Goat" by Nadia Bulkin in Lovecraft's Monsters (edited by Ellen Datlow)
• Maybe my favorite in the book.
• 1/4/2019: "Bulldozer" by Laird Barron in Lovecraft's Monsters (edited by Ellen Datlow)
• 1/3/2019: "Only the End of the World Again" by Neal Gaiman in Lovecraft's Monsters (edited by Ellen Datlow)
• 1/2/2019: Watch “The Midnight Parasites,” a Surreal Japanese Animation Set in the World of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (1972) - a weird 9 minute video that does do a pretty good job of capturing the feeling of the painting in some ways.
• 1/1/2019: Was There a Real King Arthur?
• “Truth be told, the Arthur of Geoffrey of Monmouth is a deeply unlikable sociopath, a violent, quick-to-anger, murderous thug,” says Russell. “He is someone who very much fits the Dark Age idea of a successful king, but not a hero for the Middle Ages.”
• Good quote: “It’s clear that rather than inventing everything, Geoffrey used a variety of sources, including folklore, chronicles, king lists, dynastic tables, oral tales, and bardic praise poems, in order to create a patriotic British narrative,” he says. “Arthur is an amalgam of at least five characters. He is, in effect, a composite Celtic superhero—the ultimate warrior for the Britons.”