a hacker’s mind (bruce schneier) honestly, this didn’t get really interesting until the last 50 pages or so. there’s a couple of hundred pages of setup on what constitutes a hack, examples of “hacks” across the spectrum of society, etc. there was a bit of less than obvious discussion around how some “hacks” become entrenched into the law, how common law interacts with these “hacks” and a generally slow/ossified capability of our governmental/legal systems to address the use of said hacks....

don’t forget … when generating tree output: tree --charset unicode will do the old-school output as opposed to that newfangled spiffy line drawing. if i were really thinking, i’d convert that to an alias, but i don’t know how pervasively this is supported. meta location: minneapolis, mn weather: crap

the death and life of the great lakes (dan egan) more in the vein of my conservation kick. honestly, i have under appreciated the level of systems thinking that takes place in the world of wildlife biology. this is a fascinating rundown on the various ecological disasters that we’ve been stumbling through as we carve the st. lawrence seaway, reverse the river in chicago and engage in various bits of fishery hijinks in the south....

my winter climate malaise "The feeling of losing snow", in the the atlantic hit a little close to home for me. this has been an unseasonably warm winter for us. to be fair, we’d been expecting a little warmer weather this winter. el nino had us expecting that it would be a bit warmer than usual. but road biking on christmas day in Minnesota was not on my bingo card. that it’s january 14th and i’m thrilled to have what little dusting of snow and subzero temperatures we’re currently experiencing is kind of shocking to me....