In this year’s battle of one-off kitchen tools: The SlotDog kind of smashes your hotdog, but it does seem to work, the hotdogs are attractive and tasty. The watermelon slicer is pretty erratic, it mostly just smashes your watermelon and produces a lot of oddly shaped pieces and juice. A sharp knife is a much better tool.

Congrat’s to Seattle’s Turi, acquired by Apple. And congrats to Nervana and to Brad and Chris at Fuel, in what seems to be a great exit. The markups on ML companies are tremendous – not surprising given the dramatic impact ML is having.

I’d expect to see many more dramatic ML exits.

Nat, sharp as ever. One of the reasons we started Surround.io was to take advantage of the Moore’s Law driven wave of sensing technology. Since sensors are just carved out of silicon now, using the same process technology as digital electronics, sensors (cameras, accelerometers, mics, etc) are increasingly ubiquitous, cheap, and powerful. The challenge is software to process the flood of data.

tweets to reboot your thinking around the "camera" in your "phone." all these sensors are riding the silicon curve. https://t.co/LdQ96RiHiH

— Nat Brown (@natbro) August 6, 2016

The Relic Master by Christopher Buckley. A caper set in the sixteenth century as various parties pursue the Shroud of Turin. Protagonist is memorable, humour level is good, overall a fun read.

Lots of blather about this. Two salient observations by Charles and Eric below. As Eric notes, it is impossible to think about launching a startup today without technology from Seattle.

@trengriffin Next time you hear the rhetoric ask the person on the other side to launch their company with no tech from Seattle

— Eric Fleischman (@efleis) August 6, 2016

An update to our geographic analysis of the Gartner IaaS Magic Quadrant.

Cloud City indeed. pic.twitter.com/bpbqMDkJbH

— Charles Fitzgerald (@charlesfitz) August 5, 2016

This seems pretty cool – Cold Casting. I don’t really want to work with hot metals, the last time I did that in college metallurgy lab a millions years ago, it was a near disaster. No scars but I remember the day well.

I was asked this recently. I draw from:

• The NYTimes Sunday Book Reviews. I especially enjoy the “By The Book” column, in which a living author talks about what they have read and are reading. Always some things off the beaten path there.
• The LA Times book reviews are useful as well.
• Various prize lists – Hugo, Nebula, Man Booker, Pulitzer, Nobel, Edgar. Tho I have found the Nobel prize winners to be rough rough going.
• Goodreads reviews and Amazon reviews. If a book doesn’t get great consensus reviews (or at least a strong positive rating from a subset of readers), I probably won’t read.
• I have a couple coworkers/friends who are big readers and I listen to their recos, and my college roommate is a voracious and critical reader, and I listen to him. And then anything that a family member recommends, I will consider.

I will read just about any genre with a couple limitations. I find most popular business books to be horrible – 1 or 2 good ideas that are worthy of an article, but nothing worthy of a book. And I do not enjoy farce in any genre, just not my thing.

Atlas of Remote Islands by Judith Schalansky. 50 islands you will probably never visit, and a little bit of their story. Not your regular atlas, each entry is a little historical vignette about the island – shipwrecks, nuclear tests, settlement, abandonment, hope, loss. Tristan da Cunha really grabbed me for some reason.

Too much fuss to install today but want to try – https://github.com/shagabutdinov/sublime-enhanced/blob/master/readme-installation.md

• Unruly Places by Alastair Bonnett. The stories behind some of the most unusual and unlikely places on the globe – places belonging to no nation, to many nations, floating, underground, in the sky – and an understanding of the meaning and importance of place.  Enjoyable.  
• The Rook and Stiletto by Daniel O’Malley. Great suspenseful adventure in a world filled with magic –  kind of a grown-up Harry Potter milieu.  The first page grabs you – the protagonist awakens with no memory, in a park surrounded by bodies, and in her pocket is a note that says “Read Me”. Stiletto isn’t quite as strong but still a fund read.  
• Dispatches From Pluto by Richard Grant. An English adventure writer decides to settle in the Mississippi Delta. Interesting look at the culture and issues of a part of the country that seems almost foreign to me.  
• The Dog Stars by Peter Heller. A different kind of post-apocalyptic novel, the world has largely been emptied out, a very few people try to find their way and remain human.  
• A Strangeness In My Mind by Orhan Pamuk. Tried to lift my literary sights, but as always, “Nobel Prize Winning” does not equal “interesting”.  
• Niceville by Carsten Stroud. Not a nice place. Solid horror/mystery.

Particle – https://console.particle.io/login, AWS – https://aws.amazon.com/iot/, Resin – https://resin.io/ – wonder which of these are most cost effective.

• 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.