Here's a dark secret about myself as a data scientist. I'm really good with a Jupyter Notebook. It's a great interactive development environment, particularly for data heavy work that needs a lot of eyes on the data, and helps me deal with everyday problems why a column in my data is dirty, or how to get my tick marks to line up properly on a graph. You can do a lot with Jupyter Notebooks. My own Project Firemind was done entirely on Notebooks running on a ridiculous AWS deep learning instance.

But you get to the real world, and it turns out that it doesn't run on notebooks. Business wants you to do something every day. Business wants it to scale. Business wants lots of uptime. And Jupyter Notebooks don't do that. Data science in production is a decent introduction to going from a trainee data scientist working in notebooks, to a real data science working with models hosted on scaling clusters with web end-points. Weber is a data scientist with Zynga, so he knows his stuff. This book is mostly focused on applications, with specific tips on using AWS and Google Cloud Platform. Cloud tech is changing pretty quickly, so I'm sure the specific implementations will change, but this is a solid book of examples if you want to take the next step as professional.

And one note, I bought this book on Kindle and fought with the layout the whole time. The book is well-laid out, but in a way designed for vertical page views rather than flowing text, which makes sense for a programming book. You should get it on pdf.

What better way to celebrate the 8000th day of the actual year 2020 than reading a vintage technothriller from 1990 about 2020? The War in 2020 holds up on the basis of solid character work and some decent futurism.

Peters imagines a future with a declining America and an ascendant Japan, using next generation electronic warfare and lasers to crush an ill-planned 2005 expeditionary force in Africa. In the first dozen or so pages our protagonist, Taylor, is shot down, escapes back to friendly lines over thousands of miles of plague ridden anarchy, and survives a bout with the fictional Runicman's Disease, a complex and deadly viral infection. The action skips forward in time, though quelling riots in Los Angeles and counter-insurgency in Mexico, before again finding solid ground.

It's 2020 in Central Asia, and things are bad. The Soviet Union is falling back before a vast Muslim army consisting of Iraqi Sunnis, Iranian Shiites, and people from the various -stans. The army is slaughtering refugees with nerve gas, and the whole thing is being masterminded by Japan, which is supplying weapons and senior leadership. The last, best hope of stability in Central Asia is Taylor and his 7th Cavalry, reconstituted with M-100 gunships. The M-100s are tiltrotor VTOLS along the line of the V-22, but armed with a miniature railgun. Taylor and his men have to deal with Russian obstructionism and the friction, of combat, but they launch a sweeping cavalry raid that destroys the Japanese depots, and then when there's retaliation by a secret terror weapon (which I'll not spoil, because it's pretty good), Taylor has to launch one more desperate raid to hack the Japanese command computer. As he puts it in one of the book's better lines, a lot of wars are lost by the first side to give up, because you know how bad you're hurting, but you have to guess at the enemy's circumstances, and they might be even worse off than you.

As I said, the characterization is solid. Taylor is a stoic, classic soldier, but the bonds between his command staff feels very real. Peters has a talent for pacing, and not getting lost in the technical pornography of violence. He knows how to make the victories feel earned, because winning hurts.

An author's note at the end places this book as a serious attempt to grapple with the possibility that America might lose it's military-technological edge, and how that might resolve. As such, the Japanese are the adversaries, but there's very little of the worst kinds of 90s yellow peril. It's also an attempt to grapple seriously with political fundamentalist Islam (good foresight there), but it leads him down some Islamophobic roads, As the Muslim characters are universally murderous fanatics incapable of dealing with modernity. Finally, as a military thriller, this book is heavy on male perspective, and two women featured as viewpoint characters see themselves primarily through sexual bargaining. They're whores, whether in Moscow or Washington DC. The inability to form real relationships with women is a key psychological subtext. It's not great, but about par for the genre.

I picked this book up at an outdoor booksale and carted it around with me for years. Not sure this battered paperback will survive another bookshelf purge, but it's been a fun read.

The Ghost Army is a breezy, mostly oral and visual history, of one of the strangest units of World War II. The 23rd Headquarters Special Troops' mission was one of comprehensive deception, using a few hundred men to simulate armored divisions and other heavy units. Using a combination of inflatable 'tanks', giant loudspeakers playing tape of real armored formations, radio units capable of mimicking other formations, and a bottom-up initiative called 'atmosphere', where men would essentially LARP as officers from the units they were mimicking, with classic loose lips.

The 23rd pulled off dozens of roadshows with theatrical flare. It's tricky to evaluate their direct military impact, but there were operations that they were a part of, notably the breakout from Normandy and crossing the Rhine, where Nazi defenses were held in front of the deception for vital hours at the beginning of an attack.

Where this book excels is in the literal picture of the men involved. The heart of the 23rd was a lowkey mafia of New York artists and art students, and where other soldiers with downtime would gamble, the 23rd sketched and painted. The art is exceptional, and there's lots of excerpts from sketchbooks. Some of the men of the 23rd went on to great careers in art and design, and their talent shows through.

The authors do a solid job putting together the story, though real history buffs should probably just go right to the primary source with the 23rd's Official History, which is arguably the most entertaining official history in the Army's archives and only recently declassified. With this book and the PBS documentary, Beyer and Sayles have done an admirable job preserving the legacy of one of the oddest and most interesting military units.

If New Moon introduced a wild world, and Wolf Moon broke it on the hammers of war, Moon Rising attempts to find a new peace. Lucas Corta is back, having deposed the former titular ruler of the Moon with the help of an Earth-based alliance.

It's fast paced and dramatic, and full of those moments, but oddly minutes after finishing it, I can't really remember any of them in detail, except for a nine year old Luna Corta going around in half-skull facepaint with the Corta heirloom knives threatening to cut people. Various factions have their vision for the moon, and for human destiny in space. The Suns want Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism, running on top of a moon-sized digital stock market. The Vorontsevs and Mackenzies want to expand through the solar system on more bedrock bases of material. The Asamoah new biology and new life. And the Cortas? Family first, and they don't do democracy.

The ending is much the as the status quo ante, with one key difference, through one that's only peripherally mattered to our rich and powerful main cast. Oh, and a lot of people dead, but dead in a way such that the cycle of violence is broken, or maybe just suppressed for a generation.

This is a 3.5 book, but the prior two were really 4.5, so I'll round it to four stars across the board for the series.

The Ultra Secret is a personal account of some of the cryptographic exploits of the Second World War. Winterbotham was an intelligence officer in charge of Ultra, the Bletchly Park effort to break the Nazi codes. A former RAF pilot, he is proudly not a mathematician, and his explanation of code breaking is a mysterious 'bronze goddess' who spits out decrypts. Rather, Winterbotham handled translating and distributing messages to allied commanders, a system named Ultra run by a world-spanning network of Special Liaison Units. He saw himself as a 'shadow OKW', a British version of the Nazi command staff, which enabled Allied generals to fight with the enemy's cards on the tables.

This was an incalculable advantage. With Ultra, Churchill and Dowding knew the margins of Luftwaffe endurance in the Battle of Britain, and could hold out until the window for Operation Sea Lion had passed. Ultra outfoxed Rommel in North Africa, and reassured Allied commanders that deception plans for amphibious landings, including Overlord, were working.

The book is at its best when it goes to Winterbotham's personal judgement of character. He knew most of the senior Nazis from his time as an attache in Germany in the 1930s, where he gathered vital intelligence by asking questions and letting Hitler talk (loose lips sink conquests). He praises many generals, Patton especially, for bold use of Ultra to punch around concentrations. Montgomery earns mixed marks as a traditionalist who fought in deliberate ignorance of Ultra, and Mark Clark, commander in Italy, dramatically failed to exploit Ultra several times at the expense of his troops.

This book was probably stunning when it was published. Now it's light and short on details, a conventional WW2 history. Compared to R.V Jones' Most Secret War, which drips with personal insights and interest, The Ultra Secret is an anodyne, bureaucratic history.

Road of Bones is a masterpiece of military history, using an single battle to illuminate an entire conflict. Burma is the forgotten front of the Second World War. Relative to most military history buffs, I'm an expert in the theater, because I've read General Slim's memoir Defeat Into Victory, but that doesn't mean that there's plenty more to learn. Kohima was the turning point of the Burma campaign, which Feane uses as a lens to examine the British Empire at it's height, and the Japanese Empire at it's greatest extent.

The larger campaign of which Kohima was the final battle was one of those grand throws of the dice which had served Japan so well at Pearl Harbor and Singapore, and which would turn against them later in the war. The basic plan was to march an army through hundreds of miles of trackless jungle, across rivers and ravines, to conquer India, the diamond in the diadem of Empire. In the optimistic Japanese plans, Indian sepoy soldiers would turn against their white officers, and the difficulties of moving supplies would be obviated by capturing British stockpiles. This bold attack, carried out with stealth and surprise, would catch the British in their soft underbelly and lead to a wave of retreats and surrenders which would see IJA troops in Bombay in short order.

In execution, this attack required conquering the border post of Kohima first, with the 15,000 Japanese soldiers of the 31st Division facing off against roughly 2500 British and Indian defenders. The Allied forces in Kohima were line-of-communication troops, bolstered by the veteran King's Own Royal West Kent Regiment and the Assam Rifles. For two weeks, the Allies faced assaults characterized by the fanatic light infantry tactics that the Japanese army relied on. Then a relief column made it through, Japanese food supplies failed entirely, and they began the long, harrowing retreat.

This is more than a military history. Keane captures the entire feeling of the edge of empire in the twilight days of the Raj. I was particularly taken with Ursula Graham Bower, a British woman who was an anthropologist among the local Naga tribes, and who became a guerrilla commander against the Japanese. For reasons of language and literacy, this account is biased towards the British, who had the majority of survivors and surviving documents, but Keane does justice to the Japanese and the Indians who left records. The acrimony between Japanese commanders is astounding, and Keane's book serves as belated vindication of General Sato of the 31st, who did his best to achieve an impossible mission.

Simply an astounding book.

Salt is a meandering popular history through that most commonplace of kitchen aids, salt. Since earliest human history, salt has been valued as a key nutrient, preservative, and enhancer of flavor. A ready supply of salt was at the bottom of ancient military strength, as an army marched on salted provisions.

Salt can be gathered off the ground from dry lake beds, mined from subterranean deposits, or gathered in certain ocean marshes. Along sunny shores, evaporation ponds can hasten the process, while in northern and inland locations, salt must be boiled from brine, a labor and fuel intensive process.

As a popular history, this book plods through the centuries, and mostly discusses Europe, though sophisticated ancient Chinese saltworks get an appreciative nod. Recipes for salted cuisine add human interest. Unfortunately, the book peters out in the industrial era, with a cursory description of modern vacuum distillation boiling and the rise of Big Salt, most famously Morton's brand in the USA. The book is comprehensive and frequently interesting, yet also the very definition of trivial. The closest thing to a thesis are sections on the use of state monopolies of salt as the basis of economic and military power.

At the end of the first book, Gideon is dead, having sacrificed herself to stop Cytherea, a Lyctor turned traitor, and Harrowhawk meets Emperor, the Necrolord Prime, you can call him God. She's made it to the elite and dwindling ranks of Lyctors, the revenant saints who carry out the Emperor's will.

Except *freeze frame* *record scratch* the Emperor is being murdered, and Harrow has gone mad.

In the gap between the end of the last book and the beginning of this one, someone, likely her prior self, wrote 24 notes 'to be opened in the event of...' and then erased her memory. Half this book is written in the second person, a "You" of Harrow's present, in the months before the Emperor's murder that starts off the action. While Harrow is an incredibly gifted necromancer, the process to make her a proper Lyctor didn't take. And this is a serious problem, because she's now on a remote space station with Ianthe, the three surviving original Lyctors, the Emperor. The problem with the Empire, aside from the whole necromancy thing, is that the original act that created the Houses also created Resurrection Beasts, gas-giant sized masses of half-living half-dead flesh that drive all whole behold them mad, and send forth horrific Heralds. The Emperor and his Lyctors have been running from the Resurrection Beasts for 10000 years, and now Number Seven has them pinned. Worse, everyone has their own agendas, most of which involve a little murder, including Harrow's before the Resurrection Beast arrives to finish the score.

That half the book. The other half is flashbacks to the House of Canaan, and the events of the first book, except that Gideon has been replaced by the ponderous poet Ortus, and everything is subtly wrong. There's a new thing stalking the necromancers and their cavaliers through the house, a Sleeper in a hazmat suit with the power of Lots of Guns, and its murdering them one by one.

I can't help but be more critical to Harrow than Gideon. So much of the joy of the first book was in Gideon's sarcastic voice, her irony and lust drenched approach to life. When it turns out that *SPOILERS* the reason half the story is in second person is that it's still Gideon narrating, just as some kind of undead spirit watching from Harrow's body, the story gets much better. But it's a long while to get there. The 'something important is happening... now we start much earlier" is a cheap narrative trick, one the Battlestar Galactica remake loved doing when they ran out of good stories, and it never rises above cheap trick.

The Locked Tomb series runs at two levels, one of high concept space necromantic intrigue, and other as a metaphor for coming of age as a queer and slightly mad girl (and props to Muir for thanking all the people who made sure she took her antipsychotics. This is the kind of de-stigmatization of mental health we need). The second book is good, but it's slight of hand rather that genuine great storytelling.

*** 2024 **

On reread, everything in my review still holds. I miss the snarky badass purity of Gideon's narrative voice. Harrow's self-induced damage frame, in pursuit of some Mysterious Plan, is a thin replacement. The small bottle of characters and setting, and the vagueness of the spiritual River that souls cross, is nothing like the gothic monstrosity of Canaan House. The best parts of this book are the hints at how much the rest of humanity fucking hates fucking necromancers(FUCK!!!), which I think we'll get more of in Nona and Alecto.

The Heap is a bad J.G. Ballard pastiche, with a few bare scintillas of charm.

The story is set in the ruins of Los Verticales, an experimental tower city somewhere in the high desert which collapsed. Now the rubble is picked over by diggers, scavenging valuable items from the rubble. Somewhere inside the wreckage is radio DJ Bernard, miraculously alive and giving focus to the digging effort, especially his brother Orville, who is nominally the main character.

The best bits of the story are the interludes titled "The Later Years", sociological remembrances of the vast apartment complex written in the second person plural: We used to..., exploring a divided society of outers who had a window and inners who didn't, oppressive social conformity, covert sex in garages, and the meaningless forms of democratic participation under capitalism.

These are not gems, they barely rise to broken glass, but they're at least shiny. The mass of the story is an undifferentiated 'dumb conspiracy'. When Orville refuses to include commercial endorsements in his daily calls with Bernard, he is replaced by a vocal impersonator. It turns out that there is a whole covert guild of vocal impersonators willing to murder to maintain power, and managerially ambitious digger Lydia helps Orville free himself from the grips of the conspiracy, where they find out that Bernard is also a vocal impersonator, and the real brother is long dead. But the Heap and the Dig provides some focus in a world.

I care deeply about J.G. Ballard. He even has an adjective, Ballardian, defined as resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in Ballard's novels and stories, esp dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes, and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments. Thinking about it, the thing about true Ballardian scifi is its absolute sincerity and commitment. The characters are clearly obsessive madmen, driven to the point of destruction, but their obsessions are treated as irresistible urges linked to eternal universal truths, the escaping of thanatic and erotic energy in a post-industrial post-modern space-age atomic complex. Ballard's subject is alienation, and his alienation is richly textured.

By comparison, Adams is nothing but sidelong winks at absurdity. Look at how stupid American managerialism is. Look at the pointlessness of office life, of the tiny rituals we call community, at the cleverness of the decently distanced allusions to 9/11 and Ground Zero. Aren't I clever as an author? And with all these cleverness, he cores out the strength of the Ballardian project.

I understood entirely when I got to the end and saw in the author's biography that he attended the Iowa Writer's Workshop, which I can only conclude is an entire dojo of authors trained how to write a story wrong on purpose, likely as part of some all encompassing Author's Conspiracy.

At least the book is short.

New Moon has one foot firmly set in a hard science fiction tradition of lunar sociology best exemplified by Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and also worked on by Clarke, Asimov, and John Varley. In the early 22nd century, the moon is a mining outpost that provides Earth with vital Helium-3 and rare earth minerals. It's a harsh world of 1.8 million or so souls, with absentee corporate overlords, where everything is negotiable, beauty is cheap, and death is omnipresent in a thousand ways. This is a serious story about existence and flowering on the thinnest of margins.

But McDonald has a second inspiration, which I didn't realize until reading about this book afterwards, and that's the classic soap opera Dallas. The moon is ruled by the Five Dragons, great family corporations, and our heroes, the Brazilian Helium mining Cortas, are sliding towards a war against the dominant Mackenzies. The Cortas are lead by an old woman, with five children scrabbling for the future of the family. Rafa is the golden boy, the heir apparent, with a weak temperament. Lucas is the schemer, a Machiavellian with a deadly plan. Ariel is an outsider who abandoned the family to become a lunar lawyer. The last two siblings fade to colorlessness. Luna and Lucasinho, grandchildren, round out the family. Lucasinho in particular is a spoiled playboy, a viewpoint into lunar society. The other families are less developed, reptilian antagonists rather than characters.

It's melodrama, but to paraphrase a former FBI director, "I'm just a messy bitch from New Jersey who loves drama", and while this book takes it good time to find it's place, once it arrives it is utterly compelling. The finale, an orgy of shocking violence, is particularly well done. I can't say that New Moon is great. I can say that after finishing the book past midnight, I immediately grabbed the sequel and stayed up till 5:00 AM getting through part two.