Moms - Yeong-shin Ma

A graphic novel about Korean moms who are mostly divorced and dating. Pretty funny, and fun to read, even if it was a little dark. I learned about "colatecs," alcohol-free dance clubs for the elderly.

http://www.nelsbeckman.com/books.jsp

Agency (The Jackpot Trilogy) - William Gibson

William Gibson has a way of describing things where you have no idea what is going on, but you still know that it's pretty cool. This book was great at first, though it did drag on a bit. The main characters kind of always had the right answer to every single problem. Still glad I read it.

http://www.nelsbeckman.com/books.jsp

How Google Works - Eric Schmidt & Jonathan Rosenberg

My second in the "books I read on my phone" series. This one was kind of sad, talking about so many parts of Google that seem to have disappeared. Am I a Smart Creative?

http://www.nelsbeckman.com/books.jsp

Pride & Prejudice - Jane Austen

You know the one! I had a free copy on my phone, thanks to Google Books. This is the first in a new series, books I read entirely on my phone, which is something I am doing lately in order to avoid browsing Twitter too much (after Wordle, and Korean vocabulary of course). This book is pretty good, as you already know. I've seen multiple movies/TV series about it, so I also had a pretty good understanding of what was going to happen.

http://www.nelsbeckman.com/books.jsp

Mortgages are Weird

Mortgages are weird. You do this thing where you pay a lot of interest up front, and not much principle until later. Then you start thinking things like, "man, if I could just pay the principle, this thing would be paid off so much faster and I wouldn't owe as much interest!"

It's always been confusing to me too, but I think I've finally found a way of thinking about it that makes sense to me.

Imagine you have a bank account with $100,000 that pays interest. You retire, and think, "I've probably got 10 years left in my life, so what I want to do is take out the same amount of money every month for the next 10 years." You don't want to die with money left in the account. That would be a waste! You also don't want to use it up too early, then how would you buy food? (Is this sounding morbid?)

At first you say, "I'll just divide $100,000 over 12 months for the next 10 years." But you realize pretty quickly that because of the interest, you'll be left with a bunch of money left over at the end of 10 years!

If you just used the interest to pay yourself, your would never use all the money, of course. That's when you have a realization. However much you take out, it will mean less interest paid the next month. And so on, and so on as you take our more and more money.

So that's when it all comes together. You'll start by taking out money that is mostly interest, but a little bit of the original $100,000 (if you didn't, you'd never use all the money)! But since you took out a little bit of the $100,000, next month you wouldn't have as much interest, so you'd have to take out more of the original $100,000. If you were really clever with math, you could make it work out perfectly so that you took out the same amount every month, the ratio of interest to the originally $100,000 slowly changing over time, until you were being paid almost no interest and you had to take out the last of that original $100,000.

This is a mortgage, except the roles are reversed between you and the bank.

Good Music, 2016

Hi folks! I'm listening to a bit less music these days, but here are some albums and songs that I really liked in 2016 (though not all released this year):

Albums:

• Misty Miller - "The Whole Family is Worried." (Angry British Lady Rock)
• Sky Ferreira - "Night Time, My Time" (Great Indie Pop)
• Mike Doughty - "The Heart Watches While the Brain Burns" (Mike's best since at least Golden Delicious)
• Tokyo Police Club - "Champ" (Just like regular rock n' roll but v. good.)
• Moana Soundtrack (OMG please see this movie the music is so good.)

Songs:

• Lizzo - "Worship"
• Big Data - "Dangerous" 
• Meghan Trainor - "Me Too"
• BØRNS - "10,000 Emerald Pools"
• Bahari - "Altar of the Sun"
• Mumford & Songs - "Ditmas"

Listen to all of these, please. Google Music Playlist

More Games of my Youth

Super Solvers Midnight Rescue was another favorite computer game of my early childhood. You can play it on archive.org.

https://archive.org/details/msdos_Super_Solvers_Midnight_Rescue_1989

Funny enough, this was a reading comprehension game, but I didn't quite get that part. I just remember taking pictures of all the robots.

And while this is almost passé, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego is surprisingly fun:

https://archive.org/details/msdos_Where_in_the_World_is_Carmen_Sandiego_Enhanced_1989

(We actually only had Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego, for our Macintosh LC, but the gameplay is basically identical.)