RW Book Club on Jamie Thingelstad

Mon, 15 Jan 2024 15:53:18 -0500

Have the next round of books to read for my book club assembled. 📚

Medici Money: Banking, Metaphysics, and Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence by Tim Parks
The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary by Sarah Ogilvie
The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future by Sebastian Mallaby
Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War by Pual Scharre
Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages by Guy Deutscher

Fri, 31 Dec 2021 21:39:09 -0500

Shelfie of next round of books my book club is reading: The Blocksize War (my pick), Empire of Pain, The Florentines paired with Aeschylus I (only first section), Addiction by Design, and Mni Sota Makoce. I’m looking forward to all of them! 📚

Tue, 12 Oct 2021 21:51:25 -0500

My book club enjoyed a delightful walk in Wood-Rill SNA tonight discussing Nature & Walking by Emerson and Thoreau.

Thu, 29 Jul 2021 22:58:37 -0500

I sat outside for two hours tonight with my book club and now my eyes are burning. The air is very smoky.

Fri, 16 Jul 2021 12:22:55 -0500

POAP 533122 at R/W Book Club: Klara and the Sun.

Wed, 16 Jun 2021 21:38:35 -0500

My book club met in person for the first time since Jan 30 2020. It was great to see everyone “IRL” and discuss Ishiguro’s “Klara and the Sun”. Great book, great conversation, and a great group of people to be with.

Mon, 18 Jan 2021 20:39:05 -0500

Starting to read The WEIRDest People in the World by Joseph Henrich. My book club is reading this. Looks interesting, and long. 📚

Book: Scale

Wed, 06 Feb 2019 23:15:00 -0500

My book club just finished reading Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies by Geoffrey B. West. This was a dense book focused on the concept of scaling, in the abstract. The author did a lot of research and shows some surprising scaling views to look at different animals, cities, and even companies. He identifies some amazing correlations that show how entities scale.

I felt like this book was profound, and important. However I wasn’t sure how I would action any of it. 🤔

Wed, 23 Jan 2019 00:15:07 -0500

Just signed up for a 4th site on Blot. This one will be to finally get a decent site for my Book Club.

Wed, 20 Dec 2017 21:45:55 -0500

Another super fun Book Club meeting tonight! Good conversation about Daemon by Daniel Suarez.

Sun, 05 Nov 2017 13:33:26 -0500

My book club is reading Daemon by Daniel Suarez this month! I’ve wanted to read this one for a while. 👍

Wed, 25 Oct 2017 21:44:00 -0500

Fun R/W Book Club meeting on A Crack in Creation tonight talking about CRISPR and gene editing! 📚

Mon, 02 Oct 2017 07:02:57 -0500

My book club is reading A Crack in Creation this month. Looks like a good read! 📚

Tue, 26 Sep 2017 22:03:57 -0500

Fun book club meeting tonight discussing How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer. 📚

Fri, 01 Sep 2017 21:30:21 -0500

Rough but functional version of R/W book club page is now up! Still a lot of 🛠 to do.

Sun, 27 Aug 2017 21:55:47 -0500

Got a great start getting my book club website relaunched. Not ready to share yet but coming along. Using Jekyll and Github Pages.

Wed, 28 Aug 2013 23:50:15 -0500

Excited to read This Machine Kills Secrets, my book club pick this month.

MediaWiki Template Filter Title

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0500

I was recently doing some cleaning on our Read/Write Book Club website and ran into an interesting challenge. All of the books in the wiki are in a couple of categories, but I wanted them sorted right ignoring A, An and The beginning of the title. MediaWiki supports this in the category tag allowing you to specify [Category:Book|Sort Title] and early on in the wiki I had a second field in the form for Sort Title asking the person editing the book to do this.

The result was nobody did it and all the books with “The” in the beginning of the title were all under T. Shouldn’t this be easy to just deal with in the wiki itself?

Well, it turned out to be much harder than you would think in large part because MediaWiki doesn’t honor spaces in template tags. My first attempt to do this was rather brute force, simply look for the three cases that I want to get rid of in the title and chop it off.

<includeonly>
{{#if:{{{1|}}} | {{#vardefine:title_filter_temp|{{{1}}} }}
{{#if: {{#pos:{{#var:title_filter_temp}}|The }} | {{#ifexpr: {{#pos:{{#var:title_filter_temp}}|The }} = 0 | {{#vardefine:title_filter_temp| {{#sub:{{#var:title_filter_temp}}|4}} }} }} }}
{{#if: {{#pos:{{#var:title_filter_temp}}|A }} | {{#ifexpr: {{#pos:{{#var:title_filter_temp}}|A }} = 0 | {{#vardefine:title_filter_temp| {{#sub:{{#var:title_filter_temp}}|2}} }} }} }}
{{#if: {{#pos:{{#var:title_filter_temp}}|An }} | {{#ifexpr: {{#pos:{{#var:title_filter_temp}}|An }} = 0 | {{#vardefine:title_filter_temp| {{#sub:{{#var:title_filter_temp}}|3}} }} }} }}
{{#var:title_filter_temp}}
| No parameter passed to [[Template:Filter title]]. }}</includeonly>

This worked in many cases, but not all. A book like Antifragile got in trouble with this approach since the “An” matched it got sorted in “T”. You would think this would be an easy fix right? Don’t look for “An” but instead for “An “, including the space in the match. Unfortunately it is nearly impossible to pass a space into a MediaWiki template. MediaWiki effectively trims all template inputs of spaces so a space by itself becomes, effectively, null. A different approach was needed.

After some consideration I came up with this approach that uses the Arrays extension. I like it a lot more than the first attempt! The basic idea is to break the title into an array of strings on the space (note that #arraydefine allowed me to use a regex pattern to avoid the problem of not being able to pass in a space). I then check if the first element in that array matches a set of targets (in the #switch statement). If it does, set the index to 1, otherwise 0, and build a new array from that index offset. Like this:

<includeonly>{{
#arraydefine:filter_title_temp|{{{1|No title was provided}}}|/\s/}}{{
#switch: {{#arrayindex:filter_title_temp|0}}
 | A | An | The = {{#vardefine:filter_title_i|1}}
 | #default = {{#vardefine:filter_title_i|0}}
}}{{
#arrayslice: filter_title_new | filter_title_temp | {{#var:filter_title_i}} }}{{
#arrayprint: filter_title_new | _ | @@@@ | @@@@ }}{{
#arrayreset:filter_title_temp|filter_title_new}}</includeonly>

This works great with one exception. I still get confounded with the space problem when assembling the new title in the #arrayprint method. I decided to print the new title with underscores where the spaces were. Since this is used for the sorting condition, this is fine. The end user never sees the title and the wiki will sort right if given Title_of_the_Book.

Now the sortable titles are all generated and the Book Category page looks awesome.

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 01:37:00 -0500

Thanks to sage guidance from Dan Frankowski I got my first AppEngine site running tonight at the “write” meeting of our book club.

Fri, 15 Jul 2011 21:33:00 -0500

I had a blast hacking MediaWiki tonight with my awesome book club gang: John Riedl, Dan Frankowski, Erik Jordan, and Tom Erickson.

Triumph of the City: Minneapolis

Sat, 09 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0500

My book club is reading Triumph of the City by Edward Glaeser, an economist at Harvard University. It has been an interesting read. I was a bit surprised to find Minneapolis with a short highlight on successful cities.

Many might also have written off Minneapolis, which lost 30 percent of its population between 1950 and 1980 and hardly seemed like a natural candidate for urban renaissance. The city’s winters make Boston seem balmy, and the advantages that once came from its riverside location became largely irrelevant after World War II. But Minneapolis, like Boston and New York, has come back. In 2009, per capita personal income in the Minneapolis metropolitan area was $45,750, making it the highest-earning metropolitan area in the Midwest and the twenty-fifth highest in the country.

The secret of the city’s success is education: 47.4 percent of the city’s adults have a college degree, and 37.5 percent of the Minneapolis area’s adults have a college degree, making it the seventh-best-educated metropolitan area with more than a million people in America. The Scandinavian Lutherans who originally settled the region brought with them a belief in learning, but most of all, Minneapolis’s highly educated population reflects its land-grant college, the University of Minnesota. The city’s most striking economic success stories have some link to that school.

Medtronic, which earns $14.6 billion in annual revenues and has thirty-eight thousand employees, was formed in 1949 when a graduate student in electrical engineering at the University of Minnesota partnered with his brother-in-law to make medical devices in a garage. The company’s early success reflected, in part, connections with people like Walt Lillehei, a University of Minnesota professor and a pioneer in open-heart surgery, who saw the need for a small, battery-powered pacemaker and turned to Medtronic to whip one up. Minneapolis’s megaretailer, Target, owes much of its success to Bob Ulrich, another University of Minnesota graduate, who helped create the chain’s blend of logistics and style. Target’s slightly more highbrow alternative to big-box competitors like Walmart and Kmart seems natural for the sophisticated Ulrich, a collector of African art who has spent a fortune endowing a Museum of Musical Instruments.

I didn’t realize Minneapolis ranked so high in education.

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 21:38:28 -0500

Another great book club meeting tonight. I relish book club nights.

Tue, 11 May 2010 00:00:00 -0500

After lugging all 740 pages of Team of Rivals from the library on the bus multiple times I finally caved and bought the eBook.

Fri, 23 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0500

My book club picked Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals, a whopping 754 pages. Wish me luck!

Mon, 28 Dec 2009 18:47:36 -0500

Book club night. Always smart and lively conversation.

Money-Driven Medicine

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 21:30:44 -0500

My book club meeting tonight was just awesome. Highly recommend people read the book Money-Driven Medicine. Great discussion.

Sat, 18 Apr 2009 07:15:20 -0500

(Number of Pages Left to Read) / (Days Until Book Club Meeting) > Number of Pages I Comfortably Read per Day

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 22:57:42 -0500

Finished the book for my book club! Meeting is tomorrow, just in time. Now I can catch up on everything I haven’t been doing while reading.