History

I’ve been reading a few heady books recently. One of those books is Playing with Reality: How Games Shape Our World. by Kelly Clancy. The Economist has a comprehensive review of the book with a lot of details. Playing with Reality was very interesting and I learned great deal. Initially, I had thought it was going to be about the history of games and how they had impacted thought. That is definitely in there, but there is so much more to it than that.

I’m a big fan of Chelsea Troy. I watched a great presentation by her on O’Reilly the other day called Product Thinking for Engineers(need a subscription). The presentation was a bit different than I had anticipated. I was thinking it was going to be fairly tacitcal stuff about how to work within a product team as an sofware engineer, and there was that, but it was so much more. To me, the most interesting part was a wide ranging and insightful discussion about how we got to where we are with the current oligopolistic state of play in Big Internet.

I really enjoyed this article in Men’s Journal about a ride by Erick Cedeño to retrace a route ridden by 20 Black soldiers in 1897. I didn’t know that the U.S. Army had ever experimented with a bicycle troop, but apparently they did and assigned a very tough task to some soldiers stationed at Fort Missoula, MT. Mr. Cedeño’s ride sounds very difficult but nothing compared to what those soldiers must have experienced.