Lives of Girls and Women

Born Standing Up

The Warden

Shopgirl

The Sorrows of Young Werther

A Gentle Introduction to Metaethics

In Plato’s Republic, Socrates and his companions examine whether ethics are a human construct or part of the fabric of reality. Thrasymachus argues that morality is an ideology that promotes the interests of the strong over the weak. Concepts such as repaying your debts or respecting property rights are useful for controlling people, rather than being objectively right. Glaucon has a more positive view of morality as a human construct. To him, ethics is a system for solving the problem of cooperation and living together. Socrates, however, rejects both positions, arguing instead that morality is an objective part of reality. 

The Time Machine

American Pharaoh: The Life and Times of Richard J. Daley of Chicago - Part III

Mayor: The Life and Times of Richard J. Daley of Chicago - Part II

Boss: The Life and Times of Richard J. Daley of Chicago - Part I

The Garden Party and Other Stories

The Garden Party and Other Stories is a 1922 collection of modernist fiction by New Zealand author Katherine Mansfield. The author is an extremely descriptive writer, more interested in people than plots. I’d describe her prose as literary impressionism, to a fault. Stories such as Bank Holiday contain only impressions and lack even a character to attach ourselves to. The best stories, however, describe the internal psychology of her characters, and in a short paragraph, she is able to convey a whole backstory and psychology of a person. 

Willa Cather's Great Plains Trilogy

The Great Plains Trilogy by Willa Cather is a classic of American fiction, telling stories of Scandinavian immigrant families coming West to homestead the prairie. The books are semi-autobiographical, inspired by the author’s experiences growing up in Nebraska. Many of the characters are directly inspired by people she knew.

The Ten Commandments of Refactoring

Refactoring by Martin Fowler is a book showing how to refactor code - restructuring a codebase to improve it without changing its functionality. The book provides general principles, a list of code smells, and how they should be refactored. Most valuable is the catalog of refactorings, such as extracting duplicated code into a common function or encapsulating a variable. Each entry in the refactoring catalog explains the motivation behind the refactoring and an example of the refactoring applied in real code, with the author noting common pitfalls. 

And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic

And The Band Played On by Randy Shilts is one of my top 5 books, a masterpiece of investigative reporting. It tells the story of the beginning of the AIDS epidemic in the United States, and how it was allowed to happen. All of our institutions failed to do anything: Gay political leaders treated it as a PR problem, the Reagan administration treated it as a budget problem, and the media largely ignored it. It is a story of how politics came before saving lives.

The Pragmatic Programmer: 20th Anniversary Edition

The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master by Dave Thomas and Andrew Hunt was given to me as a gift after an internship. The book gave me invaluable advice as I started out in my career as a professional software engineer. Re-reading it a decade later, I thought the general advice still held up well, but it made references to technologies such as CORBA that are no longer used and felt dated as a result. The authors agreed and wrote a 20th anniversary edition that was updated for modern developers. A third of the book is brand-new material, covering subjects such as security and concurrency. The rest of the book has been extensively rewritten based on the authors’ experience putting these principles into practice. We discussed the 20th anniversary edition in my book club at work. 

Family and Borghesia

Family and Borghesia is a collection of two novellas by neorealist Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg. Each novella features a large cast of characters trying to navigate the changes in family life in post-war Italy. Ennui is the dominant emotion; The characters are empty and dissatisfied with their lives, but they don’t want anything else either.

The Turnaway Study: The Cost of Denying Women Access to Abortion

In 1987, President Reagan gave a speech to a pro-life group, saying that while a personhood amendment was not in the cards for the foreseeable future, concrete steps were being taken by his administration to show that abortion harms women. Reagan had directed his Surgeon General, the conservative pro-lifer C. Everett Koop to find this evidence. To Reagan’s surprise, after Koop interviewed dozens of women and reviewed 250 studies, the Surgeon General found nothing. However, he did consider that the studies that had been done so far had methodological flaws and called for better research. This call would go unheeded for twenty years. Until 2007, when The Turnaway Study by Dr. Diana Foster began.

The Castle of Otranto

The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole is the original Gothic novel, the book that launched all the horror tropes we know and love from Dracula and Frankenstein. The book purports to be a manuscript from 9th–11th century Italy that was found and Walpole translated pseudonymously. It immediately became popular, gaining cachet with popular readers and critics alike. However, in the printing of the second edition, Walpole revealed that he had written it, inspired by a dream. Infuriated that they were tricked, critics dismissed it as fluffy romantic fiction and morally suspect. The ruse did, however, launch the trend of gothic literature as “found” literature.

Saving America's Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age

America’s cities are booming again. After decades of residents fleeing to suburbs, taking tax revenue and jobs with them, people have found urban living appealing again. And yet, in this new-found prosperity are the seeds of crisis. As more people move in, rents have climbed, burdening low-income renters. In 1960, one-fifth of renters spent more than 30% of their income on housing. Today, one-half do. in Los Angeles, nearly a third of renters paid 50% of their income in rent. Noone has stepped in to fix the problem. Affordable housing is blocked by community opposition, onerous regulations, and years of neglect. Government support has not been forthcoming either; despite more and more households qualifying for rental assistance, rent assistance has been reduced. What is to be done?

The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century

This 2020 collection of essays on feminist philosophy by Dr. Amia Srinivasan deals with issues in contemporary sexuality and feminism. The author is quite critical of some aspects of modern feminism, and confronts difficult subjects in her essays. I learned a lot about the history of feminism from her writing. This is not a book that provides answers to the questions raised, only complications.

Fast Joins in Apache Beam

At work, I was given a task of joining two different events coming in via a real time stream in Apache Beam. While joins are simple in a SQL batch job, they are significantly more challenging in real time streaming systems. In a batch job, the data is bounded - it is finite and eventually will be exhausted. In a real time streaming system, the data is potentially infinite - it must be broken up into a bounded set of records or your join will take an infinite amount of time. In addition, data comes in at different times - how long should you wait to decide the other side of the join is never coming? One solution to these problems is windowing. Windowing is breaking a real time event stream into bounded pieces. One example of windowing is a fixed window.

Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage

This 1998 book by Sherry Sontag, Christopher Drew and Annette Lawrence Drew explores the stories of the US submarines engaging in clandestine operations against the USSR. It was a high-risk game of machismo, with daring captains driving straight into Soviet territorial waters, no thoughts given to the niceties of international law. High government officials were often unaware of the risks being taken by their fleet. But the risks they took gave important technical information, and the opportunity to stop nuclear war before it started.

It's Our Turn to Eat: Corruption in Modern Kenya

This 2009 book by Michela Wrong is about John Githongo, a Kenyan anti-corruption crusader. He is invited to be the Permanent Secretary for Governance and Ethics in the new presidency of Mwai Kibaki. He quickly realizes that his position is to create the appearance of doing something about corruption, not to actually do anything. He discovers a scandal that goes all the way to the top that he is explicitly discouraged from investigating. But instead of giving up, he secretly records his colleagues’s and leaks it to the press.

The Culture Map: How to Navigate Foreign Cultures in Business

Have you ever found yourself working on a multicultural team and unsure how to interact with them? Then the book The Culture Map by Erin Meyer is for you. The author is a business professor that advises clients on how to work with multicultural teams. She divides cultures into 8 traits that fall onto a spectrum, and gives advice on how to work with cultures different than your own. For example, some cultures have different attitudes about time. Some cultures consider you late if you don’t show up at the exact time of an appointment (Germany), while some might give you a leeway of 10 minutes (France) and some might be an hour late (India). So on a spectrum, you might see it like this:

A Personal Data Architecture for Fun and Profit

I like doing amateur data analysis, so I’ve been capturing my personal data for the last couple of years and exploring it. Using free (as in beer) tools for getting data, processing it and generating reports, I’ve become more productive, healthier, and wealthier.

Mobility Hubs Toolkit

Today the Mobility Hubs Toolkit was released, a book I’ve been working on the past two years. The toolkit is a book dedicated to the concept of Mobility Hubs – the places where people change modes of transit, be that bus, biking, or walking. They provide a comfortable place to wait for the bus, provide bike racks for those who ride their bike to/from the Mobility Hubs, and nearby parks and art to make the site more interesting. And they are not just large transit stations – any bus stop is a Mobility Hub and should have at minimum a shelter, and bike racks for bike parking.

The House of the Dead

After some initial literary success, Dostoevsky joined a group called the Petrashevsky Circle, which was anti-tsarist and set up a printing press espousing some of their views. He was arrested and sentenced to death, but was granted a reprieve at the last minute. Instead, he was sentenced to four years’ prison and six years of exile. After being allowed to return to St. Petersburg, Dostoevsky published The House of the Dead as a description of prison life. Because of censorship, he publishes it simply as a factual description of prison life but it’s clear the Dostoevsky is against the institution and considers it cruel. And yet, what does one do with murderers?

Assigning an AWS Elastic IP In Place

Often, I find myself starting up an AWS cluster, but have forgotten to assign an Elastic IP. However, you cannot change the IP in the AWS console without shutting down and restoring the cluster(a lengthy process)

$ aws redshift modify-cluster --cluster-identifier CLUSTER --elastic-ip IP

An error occurred (InvalidParameterCombination) when calling the ModifyCluster operation: The request to attach the Elastic IP address must include setting PubliclyAccessible to true.

$ aws redshift modify-cluster --cluster-identifier CLUSTER --elastic-ip IP  --publicly-accessible

An error occurred (InvalidClusterState) when calling the ModifyCluster operation: The cluster is already publicly accessible.

This is quite the Catch-22 - You can’t modify it unless you’re setting it to --publicly-accessible and you can’t set it to --publicly-accessible unless because you’ve already set it! However, there is a hack around it:

$ aws redshift modify-cluster --cluster-identifier CLUSTER --no-publicly-accessible

$ aws redshift modify-cluster --cluster-identifier CLUSTER --elastic-ip IP --publicly-accessible

You reassign the IP by turning off --publicly-accessible, and then assigning the Elastic IP while setting --publicly-accessible​ at the same time.

DOOM

One of the things I like the most about franchised media is how it can continuously be re-invented and reinterpreted for modern times and audiences, while remaining true to its myth. How many times have superheroes been reborn, shakesphere redone, and classic literature retold? However, rebooting a video game franchise is a sign of trouble: a quick look at the wikipedia list of reboots is a graveyard of once great franchises with lackluster sequels. I’m happy to say that DOOM (2016) does not fall into this trap.

Interstellar

After a mild equivalent of a space winter post-Apollo, the world is getting excited about space again. Spacex, mars colonization, and fears of extinction have stimulated the public’s imagination for space exploration again.

Labyrinth

Labryinth is one of the few films made for a generation not yet born. It’s supposedly a children’s film, but it bombed in the box office only to become a millennial cult classic. It has most of the things that were successful about 80s pop-cinema, or at least the things we thought we liked about it. The puppetry is done by Jim Henson, music by David Bowie, and liberally uses the tropes of children’s fantasy from the period. And yet, the tropes presented here are cynically reinterpreted through mass media spectacle, capitalism, and Freud. The standard fairy tale is twisted into a teenage girl’s masturbatory fantasy while acknowledging the magic that made us fall in love with the genre in the first place.

From Bash to Zsh

This is not the first time I had tried to switch to zsh, but after running into problems with bash that could have been fixed by using zsh, I decided to give it another go. I ended up picking this book since it compared bash and zsh, offering an easy zsh upgrade path by showing you how to duplicate your bash configuration in baby steps.

Modern Romance

After hearing Aziz Ansari discuss his book on the Freakonomics podcast a few weeks ago, I decided to get a copy of Modern Romance from Amazon. In his book, Ansari teams up with sociological experts to discuss how technology has changed how we form and maintain romantic relationships. In addition, he set up a subreddit for ordinary people to tell their stories of romance from around the globe. It is a short read, but remarkably empirical, using stories to illustrate data rather than picking the most lurid stories and spinning them - he finds that online dating and texting have their benefits and problems, and suggests ways to improve the modern romance experience.

Lord Of War

Soon there’s gonna be a knock on that door and you will be called outside. In the hall there will be a man who outranks you. First, he’ll compliment you on the fine job you’ve done, that you’re making the world a safer place, that you’re to receive a commendation and a promotion. And then he’s going to tell you that I am to be released. You’re going to protest. You’ll probably threaten to resign. But in the end I will be released. The reason I’ll be released is the same reason you think I’ll be convicted. I do rub shoulders with some of the most vile, sadistic men calling themselves leaders today. But some of those men are the enemies of your enemies. And while the biggest arms dealer in the world is your boss, the President of the United States, who ships more merchandise in a day than I do in a year… sometimes it’s embarrassing to have his fingerprints on the guns. Sometimes he needs a freelancer like me to supply forces he can’t be seen supplying. So… you call me evil. But unfortunately for you, I’m a necessary evil.

Introducing Vimjects

I wrote my first amateur vim plugin, vimjects. It’s designed to source project-specific vim configurations, so that you can set options specific to your project.

Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines

It’s too bad the Vampire mythos has been reduced to the tween paranormal romance genre recently: they are one of the best monsters ever created, far more interesting the zombies of our current pop-zeitgeist; Unlike faceless hordes, Vampires manage to maintain a strong element of tragedy even when breaking our strongest taboos. Despite their threat to us, we ultimately root for the vampires for Vampires need not be monsters by nature. The Camarilla’s traditions that demand Kindred hold on to their humanity prevents the killing of innocent mortals, and the local blood banks are happy to sell to vampires. The reason they hide from is the same reason we reject them - fear. Instead a parallel world is created in image of our own society - the World of Darkness.

Alfred Baseconverter

I wrote a small workflow for Alfred 2: A system for converting between various bases in Alfred 2.

My time at the NIH

Recently, I completed my internship at the NIH. I really enjoyed my work there, as I got an introduction to data science, bioinformatics and developed a lot of practical skills developing software for non-programmers.

Openhatch Workshop

I attended an openhatch session last Sunday. Openhatch is a university workshop to help students start contributing to open source software. At the workshop, we were taught a bit about the open source community, git, IRC and bug trackers. We then learned about contributing on github. Breakfast and lunch was provided by the event.

Installing Tern for Vim

Recently, I started working on some javascript projects, and I sorely missed autocompletion provided by PyCharm and WebStorm. I found the tern project, which offers powerful javascript autocompletion in vim with YouCompleteMe. Setting it up however, was painful. For others trying to install tern for vim, here are the instructions:

Adding the Weather to the tmux status bar

I decided to add a weather feature in my tmux status bar. I saw this could be done via powerline, and I initially tried to add it through there. I gave up after a few hours of trying to patch my fonts, although I must say powerline looks nice done right.

On Sorting Badly

Recently, I saw this hilarious StackOverflow post: How bad a sorting algorithm can you make? Apart from the jokes, me and a few friends set out to make the worse algorithm we could in these constraints.

Interview Retrospective

I had an internship interview today. My thoughts on how it went:

Her Fearful Symmetry

Often the labels we use to describe ourselves are a prison of our own making. We so closely identify with them that change is impossible, even if the label will kill ourselves. In Her Fearful Symmetry, Audrey Niffenegger tells a story of people defined by labels imposed by the world and themselves.

Melancholia

We’d like to offer the depressed comfort in the form of a single life-changing pep talk. But in reality, depression eats away at the belief you can be happy again. Perhaps this is why feel-good films are poor fare; If only it were easy to believe that things will be better. Melancholia does not attempt to make anyone feel better, only offering sympathy and understanding. But it offers more solace to the depressed than any happy ending could ever hope to.

Cashback

Netflix has been pushing me to watch Cashback(2006, Sean Ellis) for a long time now, and so on a rainy Monday spent procrastinating, I brought it up. After watching the film, I’m a little hurt that the Netflix algorithm thinks so poorly of me. Never have I seen a film this misogynistic, this objectifying, this disturbing. The film promotes the nerd “nice guy” narrative, features plenty of soft-core nudity, and portrays sexual assault as romantic. All this is done while trying to convince us that the protagonist is still a great guy. As far as adolescent wish-fulfillment fantasies go, it doesn’t get much better than this.

Hackers and the Politics of Identity

The title “hacker” is back in vogue. Once a title that even denizens of Slashdot and Sourceforge reluctantly used, the rise of startup culture 2.0 has inspired a revitalization of the phrase. Hacker News, the leading technology aggregator, is chock full of recruitment ads for “iOS hackers”, “Rails hackers” or just “hackers”. All of them promise the sky to these enlightened individuals.