Reviews and Comments

A charming guide to network infrastructure, in the style of a nature field guide, by @ingrid@everything.happens.horse, a self-proclaimed artist-not-techie. Like a good field guide, the sketches highlight the visual differences between, say, a public Wi-Fi access point and an automated license-plate reader.

Atlas Obscura wrote the review that I'd like to have written: www.atlasobscura.com/articles/mapping-the-hidden-structures-of-new-york-citys-internet-networks

[This is a resubmitted 2021 review that was lost in an instance migration.]

When written in 2009, this book covered a lot of networking concepts that may not have been general knowledge. Ethernet! Wi-Fi! Sharing a printer between computers! Our devices were yoked to individual machines by USB cables; we were dumb and happy.

Sixteen years later, we're much less dumb and much less happy. Anyone who needs to know what's in here already knows it. It feels unfair to rate a book poorly when it once was good, but really, you don't need to pick this up.

A small, inexpensive book, organized by situational themes, of common Dutch phrases relative to their representation in French.

Two things made this stand out: Some common phrases, like "exit" or "where is?", appear in multiple sections so that you don't have to flip around guessing where to find the part that you should "already know." And the pronunciation guides use the International Phonetic Alphabet; this is important to me as Dutch uses phonemes from (at least) English, French, and German. Most guides try to approximate the pronunciation in the reader's tongue, with varying (but generally low) levels of success. IPA removes that ambiguity, at the cost of needing to understand IPA itself.

Less a view of falling cats through a science lens, this is more of a survey science course seen through cat eyes. Most of the sciences are touched on: Newtonian physics, darkroom chemistry, anatomy and physiology, quantum mechanics.

There's a tremendous amount of history; my eyes glazed over from all the Important Old White Guys. It's worth flipping through if you like science, particularly if you like cats. It's a less compelling read if you just wanted to understand the cat trick.

[Reposted from old instance due to failed import]

i like this book, it's cozy without being too slow. but there's a thing that keeps happening whose cause seems really clear. if the main characters figure it out 50 pages ago, there's no story. but how did they not figure it out? or will it be the mother of all red herrings?

I didn't learn enough from the book to do the things listed on the tin, but there was enough high-level information that I could understand concepts and do productive searches for what I needed.