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Out of curiosity, I typed a password (pictured here) which actually appears verbatim on an internal Google security presentation slide entitled "Weakest and easiest to guess passwords". Yahoo refers to this password as "strong". |
In the process of trying to comment on a friend's Flickr photo I had to sign in to the terrible Yahoo product family. Their login system seems even more broken than Google's, and after a bunch of attempts at reusing credentials, wrong saved passwords, and mis-typed CAPTCHAs, I ended up resetting my password.|
I selected this book to read based solely on its appearance from a Google search of books that have won both the hugo and the nebula awards (which if you don't know are both sci-fi novel awards.) This book is the most recent novel to meet that criteria, so I read it. The book takes place in an energy-poor, post-apocalyptic future, and is set almost entirely in Bankok, Thailand. It is imaginative, vivid, and unfortunately makes what I think are clever, plausible, and extremely bleak predictions about what the world will be like in 150 years. The characters are all interesting, all flawed, and all believable. I changed my mind several times throughout the story about who I liked, who I hated, and who deserved the messy and violent death that they were inevitably rushing towards. In a good way. Technology is a subtle backdrop for this book's characters rather than a subject in itself, although I think the science was very sound. The most advanced engineering is genetic; in an energy-poor future there are blimps and sail-hydrofoils and bicycles, but no rockets or super-computers or jet fighters. This is part of what gives the book its bleak feel. (Although not as bleak as Oryx and Crake--- good lord.) The book ends climactically, with nicely crafted closure for most all of the characters. And in a weird way it even left me feeling like perhaps it was, if not a "happy" ending, at least a vaguely positive and satisfying one. So I give Paolo high marks for being able to end a book. NEIL. My main caution about the book is that you need to be willing to read about futile desires, flawed characters, a pessimistic view of the future of mankind, and also some violence (including sexual violence) and of course tons of swearing. My favorite thing about this book is the vivid writing--- Paolo made me feel the oppressive heat, politics, disease, and conflict of Bankok, but without without pages and pages of descriptive text. Instead, he showed how the characters saw their world, as he told their stories, and that made it both more clear and more engaging. All the same, I probably won't rush to read something else by Paolo; I need to hug a bunch of kittens and stare at a rainbow for a while first. |
This entry is cross posted from the new |
I go to Yelp to find restaurants. It's definitely my preferred source for deciding where to eat. But it's important to clarify that drawing useful conclusions from Yelp reviews is not at all about just looking at the stars--- it's much more of a black art. Why?
Well mainly it's because so many reviewers are useless idiots. I could generalize by saying things like "everyone's a critic" and "everyone thinks they're an expert on food because everyone eats". While that's true, the resulting spectrum of useless Yelp reviews deserves some analysis. Typically after reading a couple of the 4 and 5 star reviews, and also looking at some of the stats, I skip straight to the bad reviews. They are where you really learn about a restaurant, and often times an angry idiot means a good restaurant. Here are some archetypal examples:
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