Tim's (still) not blogging

2021 media

You’re Wrong About - better than most “hey didja know” podcasts

_Code_ (Petzold) - really great book, goes from blinking a light bulb to building a computer. Just fantastic.

Discovery- ending strong

Almost through Picard S1

The Soul of a New Machine - well-recommended by somebody (maybe the folks with a podcast about starting a computer company, so there’s that). I have an old paperback, but the spine is really tight, so I looked at the library. Got my first Overdrive ebook loan at age 40, and it was really easy. Still love reading on the Kindle (Paperwhite, a few years old).

Some early-2000s book on the Millenium (math) Problems. Interesting and well-written backgrounds to some unsolved problems that didn’t interest me that much. (Still not sure what a manifold is.) But it did feel good to read about math again.

The Caledonian Gambit - almost lost me by starting with a space dogfight, afraid it was going too starwarsy, but quickly turned into a light spy novel. I don’t read much fiction, but this seems to just ride the edge of trying too hard to be Douglas Adams. Update: quite a fun read. Maybe never got all the way to “The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.”, but I can’t blame him for trying.

Limbo and Inside - both great and short enough to do in a few sittings. Play in the dark with sound up.

On deck:

The Annotated Turing - the other non-.NET Petzold book. - Finished in September. Very dense (36 pages of Turing wrapped in a 360-page explanation), but really interesting.

The Bayern Agenda - Nearly finished September. I didn’t know I needed space spies, but now I really do. Just as fun as Caledonian, an enjoyable read that flows really nicely. Still occasionally feeling like some passages don’t feel like literary prose (I’m not even sure what I mean here), but I often subvocalize lines, and they always feel right and make sense.

Maybe start picking away at my Kronecker Wallis collection - either Principia or Elements.

“The Man from the Future” - Saw this at the library, started reading it, and have been renewing it for months. Hardcover may slow me down a little compared to Kindle (not sure how I could test this), but it still feels good to hold a book. Also I don’t have a lot of reading time (hopefully increasing as Kindergarten starts), because I should have devoured this book. Hungary, math, quantum mechanics, atom bombs, computers, game theory. I realized pretty late that the book was shorter than it looks due to a huge appendix of endnotes. I may need to buy a copy so I can pore over all of these references. (Many are just citations, which really deserve some of them newfangled hyperlinks.)



Tacoma

Edith finch