I wasn't paying attention...

... and so I entirely overlooked the fact that the great Stanley Kauffmann died last fall, at the remarkable age of 97.

I originally started reading The New Republic when I was in college, but it changed over the years (or perhaps I changed?) and I stopped reading it.

But for more than 5 years after I had stopped reading The New Republic, I still subscribed to it, solely to read Kauffmann's work.

He was, in my opinion, the greatest film critic of all time (with great respect to Roger Ebert, Pauline Kael, etc.).

Late April reading.

We got a few showers this week. April showers bring Mayflowers, and Mayflowers bring Pilgrims!

Any-hoo...

• Republished on Slate is a strongly-worded article first published in The New Scientist: Mathematician Spies.

  For the past 10 months, a major international scandal has engulfed some of the world's largest employers of mathematicians. These organizations stand accused of law-breaking on an industrial scale and are now the object of widespread outrage. How has the mathematics community responded? Largely by ignoring it.

• Another Slate article, from last summer, linked by the above: An Open Letter to My Former NSA Colleagues

  I can only guess how much more horrified the ex-NSAers I know—you, my former colleagues, my friends, my professors, and my mentors—must be. Unlike me, you have spent much of your working lives helping the NSA build its power, only to see your years of work used in a way it was never supposed to be used. You could speak out now in a way that violates neither your secrecy agreement nor your honor. It's hard to believe that the professors I know at universities around the country would remain silent as the NSA abuses their trust and misuses their work.

• On to lighter topics. Remember that story about how thousands of game cartridges were buried in the New Mexico desert? Well, count that urban legend as "confirmed":
  • Number 1: The Worst Game of All Time: E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (Atari, 1982)

    In 1983, faced with literally millions of unsold and returned E.T. games added to its already sizeable inventory of unusable cartridges, Atari opted for an environmentally unfriendly (some would say downright hostile) solution: The company dumped them into a city landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico, where they were crushed, buried, and later covered in a layer of cement. The incident was reported in the New York Times and prompted protests and legislation from city officials.

  • Witness Video Game History: Attend Atari Landfill Excavation on April 26

    We’re excited to announce that the excavation of the long-rumored “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” video game burial site will occur on April 26, 2014 and will be open to the public. Spectators are invited to watch the team uncover the infamous Atari game cartridge grave.

  • Long-Buried E.T. Cartridges Unearthed at New Mexico Landfill

    The findings started out very promising, with an old, dusty Atari 2600 joystick buried in the landfill. Then an "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial" cartridge. A box. An instruction manual. And the confirmation of "a lot more down there." How many more, we don't know just yet -- but at this point, we can safely report that those long-buried cartridges are actually, 100 percent there. Crazy, isn't it!?

• Game Programming Patterns

  I wrote this book to answer those questions. It’s a collection of patterns I found in games to make code cleaner, easier to understand, and faster.

  It’s Free and Online!

  This is the book I wish I had when I started making games, and I want you to have it now!

• Zero to 95,688: How I wrote Game Programming Patterns

  I’m not doing this for the money, which means I’m doing it for my personal satisfaction. And what’s most satisfying to me is feeling like I got to put as much of my own creativity into it as possible without someone else calling the shots.

My new favorite vim/tmux bug

I didn’t have much time to play with it in the moment, but the very best thing happened - we were able to replicate it on any machine recently reimaged with our new workstation setup script! This meant I was able to get the bug onto my laptop! AW YEAH.

• TDD is dead. Long live testing.

  But first of all take a deep breath. We're herding some sacred cows to the slaughter right now. That's painful and bloody. TDD has been so successful that it's interwoven in a lot of programmer identities. TDD is not just what they do, it's who they are. We have some serious deprogramming ahead of us as a community to get out from under that, and it's going to take some time.

• Why Most Unit Testing is Waste

  This raised the overall corporate measure of maturity of its teams in one year, because you will certainly get what you reward. Of course, this also meant that functions no longer encapsulated algorithms. It was no longer possible to reason about the execution context of a line of code in terms of the lines that precede and follow it in execution, since those lines of code are no longer adjacent to the one you are concerned about. That sequence transition now took place across a polymorphic function call — a hyper-galactic GOTO. But if all you’re concerned about is branch coverage, it doesn’t matter.

• And last, but oh so not least, don't miss this epic: It’s Adventure Time: The bizarre magic of the world’s greatest kid’s—is it for kids?—television show.

  Adventure Time is a smash hit cartoon aimed primarily at kids age six to eleven. It’s also a deeply serious work of moral philosophy, a rip-roaring comic masterpiece, and a meditation on gender politics and love in the modern world. It is rich with moments of tenderness and confusion, and real terror and grief even; moments sometimes more resonant and elementally powerful than you experience in a good novel, though much of Adventure Time’s emotional force is visually evoked—conveyed through a language of seeing and feeling rather than words.

Reading my way to Ireland, part 3: a touch of history

On I go, finding my way somewhere through the pages of others.

I'm dipping back a bit, not too far, looking for the sort of easy-listening historical perspective that you might get from, say, James Michener, though I don't think Michener ever wrote of Ireland.

You know, the sort of thing that makes you feel like you know something, without making you have to work too hard.

Hey, at least I'm being honest.

So I picked three others:

• Angela's Ashes: A Memoir

  McCourt had an absolutely miserable childhood, and given that he grew up during the Great Depression and World War II, he might have had a miserable childhood wherever he was.

  But he was of Irish descent, and found himself in Ireland, and wrote an absolutely unforgettable book.

• Ireland: A Novel

  It's enjoyable and fast moving, and certainly the sort of book I was looking for.

• Trinity

  Uris was already world-famous by the time he wrote Trinity, and had mastered his particular style, but that doesn't make it any less entertaining.

Following Felix

What neither this, nor this, nor this say is where I go to continue reading Felix.

Anybody know?

Will he only be on TV now, and not in print?

Even Fusion themselves don't seem to know: Felix Salmon Joins Fusion; Twitter Asks "Wait, What is Fusion?!".

Send me info!

At last, a reason to go to Las Vegas...

• Come celebrate TOTAL FREEDOM at BUNDYFEST!

  Swing down to Vegas for a few days for some R&R, a few good buffets, and then HEAD ON UP TO BUNDYFEST!

• BundyFest

  Experience TOTAL FREEDOM at BUNDYFEST

• With a wink and nod, activist plans BundyFest! to protest rancher Cliven Bundy

  The Sun caught up with Shealy through Facebook. A transcript of the interview is below. The questions and answers have been edited for clarity, grammar and brevity.

Stuff I'm reading, mid-April edition

Tax day is over, as is my Korean adventure, so I'm catching up on stuff that flew by on the Internet...

• Agreement to Digitise 82,000 Manuscripts in the Vatican Apostolic Library

  “With this project, the Library consolidates one of its many relationships with institutions in various regions of the world, in the light of its overall policy, its aims and its objectives”, explained Archbishop Brugues. “It does so through is manuscripts, which are a sign of the universality of culture: the manuscripts which will be digitally archived range from pre-Columbian America to the Chinese and Japanese Far East, encompassing all the cultures and languages that have inspired European culture. The humanistic mission that characterises the Library opens it to all that is human, including mankind's various 'cultural peripheries'; and with this humanistic spirit it seeks to conserve and make available the immense treasure of humanity that has been entrusted to it. For this reason, the Library will digitise it and make it available on the web”.

• EU study finds honey bees death rates are lower than feared

  The study found that overall prevalence of the bee diseases American foulbrood was low in all the monitored EU member states, ranging from zero to 11.6 percent.

• Why UPS Trucks Don't Turn Left

  UPS engineers found that left-hand turns were a major drag on efficiency. Turning against traffic resulted in long waits in left-hand turn lanes that wasted time and fuel, and it also led to a disproportionate number of accidents. By mapping out routes that involved "a series of right-hand loops," UPS improved profits and safety while touting their catchy, environmentally friendly policy. As of 2012, the right turn rule combined with other improvements -- for the wow factor, UPS doesn't separate them out -- saved around 10 million gallons of gas and reduced emissions by the equivalent of taking 5,300 cars of the road for a year.

• David Foster Wallace: Five Common Word Usage Mistakes

  2. And is a conjunction; so is so. Except in dialogue between particular kinds of characters, you never need both conjunctions. “He needed to eat, and so he bought food” is incorrect. In 95% of cases like this, what you want to do is cut the and.

• Thirty five years later, Proposition 13 continues to re-make California: How Burrowing Owls Lead To Vomiting Anarchists (Or SF’s Housing Crisis Explained)

  Here is a very long explainer. Sorry, this isn’t a shorter post or that I didn’t break it into 20 pieces. If you’re wondering why people are protesting you, how we got to this housing crisis, why rent control exists or why tech is even shifting to San Francisco in the first place, this is meant to provide some common points of understanding.

  This is a complex problem, and I’m not going to distill it into young, rich tech douchebags-versus-helpless old ladies facing eviction. There are many other places where you can read that story.

  It does us all no justice.

• 15 Great Films That You Never Hear About on r/movies

• Security of Things: An Implementers’ Guide to Cyber-Security for Internet of Things Devices and Beyond

  This white paper outlines a set of practical and pragmatic security considerations for organisations designing, developing and, testing Internet of Things (IoT) devices and solutions. The purpose of this white paper is to provide practical advice for consideration as part of the product development lifecycle.

  While IoT products by their very nature encompass many forms of traditional embedded devices and supporting systems, we felt that distilling our knowledge and experience in the specific context of IoT would be useful. A lot of the concepts in this paper could easily be applied to many other related areas of software and hardware product development.

• "This Is Not a Barbie Doll. This Is an Actual Human Being."

  Not so long ago, images of a young girl washed over the Internet. She was impossibly blonde and impossibly shaped, and surely it was all a masterly work of Photoshop. Right? Michael Idov travels to meet with Eastern Bloc Barbie herself and discovers that her world is far more bizarre and twisted than anything in the photos.

• Let's audit Truecrypt!

  In case you haven't noticed, there's a shortage of high-quality and usable encryption software out there. Truecrypt is an enormous deviation from this trend. It's nice, it's pretty, it's remarkably usable. My non-technical lawyer friends have been known to use it from time to time, and that's the best 'usable security' complement you can give a piece of software.

  But the better answer is: because Truecrypt is important! Lots of people use it to store very sensitive information. That includes corporate secrets and private personal information. Bruce Schneier is even using it to store information on his personal air-gapped super-laptop, after he reviews leaked NSA documents. We should be sweating bullets about the security of a piece of software like this.

• The Invention of the AeroPress

  Among coffee aficionados, the AeroPress is a revelation. A small, $30 plastic device that resembles a plunger makes what many consider to be the best cup of coffee in the world. Proponents of the device claim that drinks made with the AeroPress are more delicious than those made with thousand-dollar machines. Perhaps best of all, the AeroPress seems to magically clean itself during the extraction process.

  There’s really nothing bad to say about the device other than the fact that it’s a funny-looking plastic thingy. Then again, its inventor, Stanford professor Alan Adler, is a world renowned inventor of funny-looking plastic thingies; while Adler’s Palo Alto based company Aerobie is best known today for its coffee makers, the firm rose to prominence in the 1980s for its world-record-setting flying discs.

  This is the story of how Adler and Aerobie dispelled the notion of industry-specific limitations and found immense success in two disparate industries: toys and coffee.

Korea: reflections

It appears that this is my tenth post about my trip to Korea; I suspect it will be my last.

Ten posts for a ten day trip: that seems about right, somehow.

Korea was certainly the most exotic location I've ever visited, but in many ways what's most apparent about Korea is how modern and efficient it is:

• The trains all run on time; the signs and announcements are all in four languages (Korean, English, Japanese, Chinese).
• The airport is spacious and well-organized; I've rarely had such an easy time traveling. I noticed that Incheon Airport has been voted Best Airport In The World for ten consecutive years; I'm not surprised.
• The cars and trucks and buses are all modern and well-maintained; the streets are all in good repair.

Korea is an amazing place. Whether it is cars, computers, televisions, smartphones, refrigerators, railroad locomotives, ocean-going freighters, or almost anything else, Korean companies are world leaders, and possibly among the first brands you think of.

Korean children are all learning both Korean and English, and many are also learning Chinese as well. Korean universities are churning out graduates. Korea has become a world leader in fields as wide-spread as plastic surgery, pop music, and chip design.

Korean food is delightful. Korean culture is old and fascinating. Many Korean customs and traditions emphasize things like respect, consideration, and cooperation.

Korea certainly has challenges, most notably the reunification question, but also they must overcome a certain xenophobia and defensiveness.

Yet, having come so very far in just the last few decades, you'd have to say that the future of Korea is looking quite bright indeed.

I really enjoyed having the opportunity to visit and learn about Korea; if you ever get a similar opportunity, take it!