• The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemison. A small set of related characters finding their way on a far-future(?) Earth peopled by humans and human derivatives, littered with the artifacts of past civilizations, undergoing yet another seismic/volcanic reshaping. Of course there is some conspiracy at work. Good tale, characters dealing with painful issues.
• Connectography by Parag Khanna. How the world is moving beyond nation-states to clusters driven by interconnectivity. Well written and a lot of maps, and I am a sucker for maps.
• The Ruins of Gorlan by John A. Flanagan. Pretty standard YA fantasy, but fun nevertheless. I’d read more.
• The Call by Yannick Murphy. Eh, what started out as a clever structural gadget became tiring. I am a little curious to know what happens to the family but I gave up.
• Life After Life by Kate Atkinson. I like Atkinson, but this book also became tiresome, tho I managed to finish. But I’d recommend a different Atkinson.
• Farthing by Jo Walton. How did I miss this? Conspiracy, murder in the English countryside in an alternative history where Britain made peace with the Nazis. Excellent.
• Those Who Wish Me Dead by Michael Koryta. A boy witnesses a murder, and, well, shit happens. Fun but not memorable.

• Spill Simmer Falter Wither by Sara Baume. Highly praised, but it felt to me like the author was trying very hard to be literary. I stuck with it, but it didn’t really move me.
• Uprooted by Naomi Novik. A captivating tale of a young witch coming of age and getting drawn into an existential threat for her homeland. Really loved it, deserves the accolades.
• Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty. Completely fun story of conflicts between parents at a preschool, hilarious but serious. Apparently coming to HBO, this will be fun
• A Burglar’s Guide To The City by Geoff Manaugh. A look at how burglars use urban design and building design to achieve their goals. Would have been even better with more anecdotes, but still interesting

• High-Rise by J. G. Ballard. The community in a modern high-rise starts to fall apart in “Lord of the Flies” fashion…actually “Lord of the Flies” seems pretty tame after this.
• The Travelers by Chris Pavone. A travel writer is coopted and stumbles into a job as a spy, and slowly learns that nothing is as it seems in his life. Fun.
• The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory by John Seabrook. No surprise here, pop music is largely a manufactured product.
• The Whites by Richard Price. Couldn’t finish. Supposedly a gritty police drama but kind of dull.
• Electric Barracuda by Tim Dorsey. I generally don’t like farce, but there is something endearing about this character — a wise-cracking serial killer with a heart of gold.

• I Am Not A Serial Killer by John Cleaver. A teenager obsessed with his own psychoses discovers that there are much worse things going on in his town.
• The Rosie Project by Graeme Simpson. Very engaging tale of a man with Asperger’s who fights to build a life for himself. Very enjoyable.
• Time Will Darken It by William Maxwell. A pleasant family visit by out-of-town cousins results in darker turns and secrets unearthed. Quite good.
• Orphan X by Gregg Hurtwitz. An orphan is raised by a secret agency to be a ruthless operative. Just like me.
• Shaker by Scott Frank. A hitman arrives in a post-quake LA to take care of business, and things go south. Not really sure why the quake mattered to the story.
• Great Topics of the World by Albert Goldbarth. Wow this is a meaty meaty book, very demanding, but fascinating. The first essay alone is worth it.

• A Doubter’s Almanac by Ethan Canin. Fantastic story of a misanthropic obsessive genius and how he impacted family and friends around him. An incredibly unlikeable and yet sympathetic main character. Very good.
• Dragon Day by Lisa Brackmann. Solid detective tale set in modern day China, where it seems everyone is out for their own advantage, and justice is a hard thing to find.
• The Alchemist of Souls by Anne Lyle. Fantasy set in the early days of the New World exploration, with a New World quite different than ours, peopled by a non-human race. Entertaining, not sure I am driven to keep up with the series tho.
• All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders. It’s the end of the world, maybe, and two childhood friends come together to save it, one with a deep science background, one with a deep mystical background. Good characters but I felt it kind of dissolved into mystical goo.
• Chimera by Mira Grant. The last in a 3 book series about semi-intelligent and autonomous tapeworms invading human beings. OK it was fun at times but probably 1 book too long.
• The Victoria Vanishes by Christopher Fowler. Fun tale of two aging detectives investigating a very very strange set of murders. I’ve read another in series, solid characters.

I needed some escapism.

• Vanishing Games by Roger Hobbs. Pirates, Macau, Diamonds, Counterfeiting, high bodycount. Fun but not distinctive.
• Hades by Candice Fox. Cops with dark pasts taking the law into their own hands. Also a high body count.
• Forty Thieves by Thomas Perry. Now this was more fun, a husband/wife PI team run into a husband/wife assassin team, both trying to resolve a cold case. Bullets fly.
• Planetfall by Emma Newman. Ok this started out slow, a group of colonists on a new planet, but it went very strange, with a strange alien experience, and twisted humans.

https://github.com/jhludwig/aws-swf-boto3. There are a number of pre-boto3 examples and this is just a rewrite. The decider is simplistic and will fail if multiple requests are queued up in one poll, but it is a start.

My last batch of books were very good, and so my bar is raised. I couldn’t get through either of these:

• “The Witch of Lime Street” by David Jaher. This gets great reviews, but is incredibly choppy, and the characters are unappealing, or to be precise, the author does a poor job of introducing them in appealing fashion.
• The Master Algorithm by Pedro Domingos. This falls into the classic trap that many books of this type fall into — in its attempt to make a technical topic more interesting to a broader audience, it dumbs down its treatment of the topic, and is simplistic and repetitive. And so pushes away readers who have more background. It is obviously hard to achieve the right balance, I could not stay with this book.

• The Boys In The Boat by Daniel James Brown. Recommended by almost everyone else in the family, this is a great tale of the UW crew team which went to the Berlin Olympics. Especially interesting probably to Seattle residents, but very well written. I had no idea that crew was such a popular sport at the time.
• Phishing for Phools by George Akerlof and Robert Shiller. OK I have great empathy for the material, an expose of how we are manipulated and deceived (and how we buy into this). But the book honestly was a little thin, I would have liked more examples and depth.
• Slade House by David Mitchell. Lord can this man write, I love everything he touches. A great creepy haunted house tale, written in the Mitchell style. Hard to put down.

Facebook has open sourced Torch, Google has open sourced TensorFlow, and now Microsoft has responded with CNTK (Catchy name, guys). This is awesoem for startups, three great frameworks on reasonable licensing terms, and I am sure they are going to kill each other in an attempt to “win”, which is going to result in a flow of tools and data available to the world at large, since part of winning is building the biggest community. If you are not one of these companies, and you think you need to build and promulgate your own ML framework, I would think hard about that decision.

I read a lot, online and offline, fiction and nonfiction. First time I’ve run across “polysemous“. I guess I should be impressed, tho if you need words like this to describe what your software does, you might need to scrub your messaging some more

Is this thing on?

• Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. A challenging but important read. It is difficult to really comprehend the road that less privileged have had to travel, but it is important to try to understand and address.
• An Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir. Yet another dystopian YA trilogy, but well written and very enjoyable.
• Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie. Third in the series and it is still holding up. Fascinating far future tale of empire and intrigue with a very unique set of ideas about identity.
• The Verificationist by Donald Antrim. Very well written, the self-absorbed main character is having a breakdown or trip, and you are along for the ride.
• Moxyland by Lauren Beukes. Eh, near future spread of technology through the less developed world. Some nice ideas but ultimately bored me.

Truth, from The Verificationist, by Donald Antrim:

We eat pancakes to escape loneliness, yet within moments we want nothing more than our freedom from ever having so much as thought about pancakes. Nothing can prevent us, after eating pancakes, from feeling the most awful regret. After eating pancakes, our great mission in life becomes the repudiation of the pancakes and everything served along with them, the bacon and the syrup and the sausage and coffee and jellies and jams. But these things are beneath mention, compared with the pancakes themselves. It is the pancake—Pancakes! Pancakes!—that we never learn to respect. We promise ourselves that we will know better, next time, than to order pancakes in any size or in any amount. Never again will we be tempted by buckwheat or buttermilk or blueberry flapjacks. However, we fail to learn; and the days go by, two or three weeks pass, then a month, and we forget about pancakes and their dominion over us. Eventually, we need them. We crawl back to pancakes again and again.

• The Red: First Light by Linda Nagata. Very nice near future novel tactical warfare, cyborg soldiers, hacking, ad tech gone crazy, etc.
• Zero World by Jason Hough. Started out nice with some speculations about a guilt-free mind-wiped assassin, but turned to crap quickly with a really stupid many worlds interpretation. Don’t bother.
• The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer. Yet another YA dystopian novel, tho this at least wasn’t in the games/maze/stupid challenge space. Kind of forgettable tho.
• Nemesis by Jo Nesbo. Solid scandinavian mystery, the main character is an appealing misfit.

• The Hidden by Tobias Hill. An amazon review mentions “style without substance” and that seems dead on. A moody setting and some interesting construction, but a really boring book.
• Heaven’s Shadow by David Goyer and Michael Cassutt. Probably should just re-read Rendezvous with Rama.
• The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield. A biographer uncovers an unexpected tale, and resolves issues in her own life. A good tale, possibly the ugliest cover art ever tho.
• The Hare With The Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal. A family history as told thru their ownership of Japanese netsuke. Strangely compelling. The author’s rationalization of his family’s ownership of these netsuke in contrast to his justified outrage about the appropriate of his family’s property during WWII is a little hard to accept.

• The Lock Artist by Steve Hamilton. Fantastic story of a young man struggling with a turbulent life, a turbulent background, and his really unique attributes. Really enjoyed.
• The Good Lord Bird by James McBride. The story of the abolitionist John Brown told from inside his troop. Engaging and depressing and uplifting.
• Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor. The coming of age of a young art student who realizes that she and her family are actually something quite unnatural and important. This is well travelled road, but a solid tale nonetheless.
• An Incomplete Revenge by Jacqueline Winspear. Solid English countryside mystery. Totally enjoyable if you are into that kind of thing (which I am). Apparently many more in the series.

• This Idea Must Die, ed. John Brockman. Ben pointed me towards this. A bit repetitive, but a lot of pithy observations by very bright people. Will be interesting to revisit in 20 years.
• The Dream of Perpetual Motion by Dexter Palmer. Need more mushrooms to enjoy this book. And a greater tolerance for farce.
• Night Dogs by Kent Anderson. This is a rough book — a rough tale, written roughly, edited roughly. All that said, it is compelling though not always easy to stomach.
• Wraeththu by Storm Constantine. I just don’t know about this. It seems poorly written at times, and a little too mystical, and a little bizarre at times. I haven’t finished but I haven’t given up. It is resting on my desk and I am trying to decide whether to have another go.

Thank goodness the season has started, and in robust fashion for Ohio State! The program is in great hands and great things are expected. How about your program? This time of year everyone is always filled with great hope for their team, but dreams will soon be dashed (in WSU’s case, horribly so). Unfortunately, some programs are destined for disappointment because they are fundamentally on the wrong strategy, mostly because demographics have passed them by.

I’ve been trading some notes with my other college football buddies, and we’ve articulated the 5 ways that a program can succeed in the modern era:

1. Be in a region with a large natural talent base. Southern regions are best for this — Florida, Texas, Southern California — and US demographics continue to flow this way. Neighboring schools in Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, Arizona can get in on this too. There are a few northern regions that also qualify — Ohio & environs, Northern California (not well exploited), Chicago, Boston-Washington corridor (not well exploited). This strategy works because most players like to stay somewhat close to home — because they are young, because they want family to see them. The best schools following this strategy also generate enough of a profile to allow them to recruit nationally for top talent. Schools in any other region cannot follow this strategy.
2. the sugar daddy approach. This is the Oregon strategy — make an insane investment in the program so that you can draw kids from anywhere who are wowed by your staff and facilities. Oklahoma State is trying this with T Boone. Maryland may try this with UnderArmour. Any school can try this if they have a sugar daddy. (I am sure Nebraska has tried this, but they should be groveling at Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger’s feet).
3. the system approach. Focus on a particular type of 3 star talent that is available near you and nationally, and build a system to optimize that talent. This is the Tom Osborne era Nebraska strategy, the RichRod/WVU strategy, the Chris Peterson/Boise strategy. This can be very successful but requires a strong individual and strong culture. It is fragile and tends not to survive coaching changes. Any school can try it.
4. the academic excellence approach. Be a top 5-10 institution but leave an admissions door open for athletics. This is the Stanford, Northwestern approach. Your typical school cannot follow this approach.
5. The Notre Dame strategy. To a lesser extent the BYU strategy. Be the favorite choice for a particular demographic segment. Not generally available to other schools.

Those are the options. Nothing else seems terribly viable. Now it is interesting to look at various schools that I follow and see how they line up against that:

• USC, Ohio State are on strategy 1 and generally executing well. USC was better in the last decade at it, OSU may be better this decade.
• Michigan. A confused program. They are trying strategy 1 but the demographics have run away from them. Is Harbaugh the guy to build a system approach? He doesn’t think that way and he is a demonstrated mercenary. Hmm.
• Washington. Perhaps also confused. While the Northwest has had great population growth, I don’t think it has translated into great high school football growth. Yet Washington is trying strategy 1, tho they hired a strategy 3 coach. An interesting experiment.
• Nebraska. Years of coaching changes have left them adrift, the Osborne era system has been torn down. They need to figure out how to recommit to that strategy.
• It is interesting that Cal has never been able to capitalize on the bay area talent base.
• It is interesting that no one has capitalized on the Northeast talent base. It will be very interesting to follow Maryland with their Underarmour ties, a potential double whammy strategy.

Enough meandering, Go Bucks!

• Misterioso by Arne Dahl. I’m not sure what the state of the art in book translation is these days, but I am sure it is heavily automated. This story is ok, but feels like a rush translation job — some strange and stale structuring, some pronoun confusion at times. I suspect the original is better than this.
• The Orenda by Joseph Boyden. Life during the 1600s in the Americas from the viewpoint of a Huron tribe. Fascinating milieu and great characters. Not for the squeamish, life was brutal.
• The Gates by John Connolly. Suburban idlers accidentally open the gates to Hell, and it is up to young Samuel Johnson to save the day. Kind of funny but forgettable.
• Rolling in the Deep by Mira Grant. Light Horror, don’t screw around with mermaids, they are not what they seem. Fun, but I mostly read because Grant has done such other good work.

• Finders Keepers by Stephen King. A fine detective novel, but makes me miss the glory days of the author.
• The Girl With All The Gifts by M. R. Carey. Not all zombies are bad. Not all people are good. Maybe we should just let the zombies win.
• Snake Pass by Colin Campbell. An attempt to start a Jack Reacher-like franchise, and not a bad attempt. I will read the next.
• Legend by Marie Lu. Yet another post-apocalyptic dystopia. Probably better than most, but I don’t know that I need another series in this genre.
• Fire with Fire, Trial by Fire by Charles E. Gannon. Fun space romp with aliens, world-ending threats to humanity, interstellar politics, etc.