Not a lot of links this month as I’ve been spending more time outside and more time reading books than being online. A highlight of the month was What We Can Know by Ian McEwan. Some reviews described it as speculative fiction, but I found those elements fairly minor. The general story revolves around a lost poem, shifting between a plot about literary scholars in the future searching for it and the story in our current time of the single time the poem was read to an audience at a party. The future scholars have access to the full digital lives of the author and party attendees, though we come to realize what is missing from that “complete” digital record. The book is roughly broken into two parts – I enjoyed the first part more than the second, but it was certainly worth finishing the whole thing. I’m also glad I went into the book spoiler free, because there are some excellent revelations along the way.
Uncovered is a writing-focused site for finding new books – scroll through the first pages of books, without context, until something strikes your fancy. I’d like some context on where the excerpts come from and the range of books they cover.
I’m saving this video of a game developer talking about how helpful it was to their game development process when they discovered how to use inheritance. I’m sure they were already aware of inheritance, but their enthusiasm for explaining exactly why it solved a hard problem for them is great. Definitely going to share with my students.
Toys and Games:
- Click the faces on the Rolling Stone to set the color/tone and then set it rolling to hear the effect
- Can you Gerrymandle?
Returning to images from the August 1983 edition of Byte, here’s a reminiscence of a time when magazines included code for you to type out or, in this case, examples of basic Unix commands and their effects. The explanatory comments for each command are nice. And yes, in the second image below, this is from back in the day when you could just look at the contents of the system password file.
