Aron 2 Blue

Reads like a who-dunnit thriller. It's pretty amazing that Lewis can make derivatives and credit-default swaps engaging and understandable.I found it a really good survey of what got us into the 'great recession'. It's told from the perspective of the people who foresaw the collapse, and bet that it would happen by shorting stocks or buying investments on the other side. Some of them eventually understood that they were enabling the system by providing a market for some of these credit default swaps. Recommended for those who have an interest in this area!

Young-adult fiction where young adults kill each other in a game televised to the oppressed masses. Privation and post-apocalypse. What more could you desire in a SF novel? Not spectacularly deep, but I'm interested in finding out how an oppressive system maintained for 75 years gets challenged in the next book. It's quite violent, with kids killing kids, and I'm mildly surprised that I've not seen it mentioned in the media with our current gun-violence focus. Only 4 posts in 2012 - too bad. I had this sitting in 'drafts' for quite a while. I'm also hooking up to G+, let's see what happens.

I came across a magic number today: -0.00132704 I was seeing a whole bunch of values initialized to this number in an automated test, and thought it must mean something. It  turns out it is used by Microsoft "to mark uninitialised allocated heap memory" - hex 0xBAADF00D coverts to -0.00132704 as a floating-point value. Searching for -0.00132704 turns up a number of interesting examples in other people's projects. :)

Engaging thriller. Unexpected twists for fun. I'm thinking he wanted to comment on terrorism, and also on gold-farming, and ended up bashing them into each other for this novel. That's ok, and made for a gripping read. It's not really scifi, it's more spy novel in the end. Some of the convergence was forced - there were some hard-to-believe chance encounters to drive everyone together at the end. amazon link

Compelling, unexpected. Not a pop-sci book. Personal experiences from the author, adjustments and discussion of how he changed his life. amazon link

Many of the gadgets are real: Festo air penguin , and manta ray . The smartphone was inspired by a DIY Linux phone, says twitter.

How can a dishwasher have a UI? Mine does. It's got a flat buttons on the front, so it's easy to lean on it and push one accidentally. So my wife likes to turn on "control lock", so that doesn't happen. Fine so far. To turn off "control lock", you hold it for 3 seconds. The fail? There is no indication when you've held it long enough. *press* One thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand *release*. Press Start. blinking control lock no-no light again! GRRRRRrrrrrrr!