Russell Atkinson's Blog, page 11

An Honest Man by Michael Koryta

An Honest Man by Michael Koryta
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This book started rather normally for a murder mystery, introducing Israel, the main character, a convicted murderer in Maine now out on parole; he’s also serving as an informant or source for Jenn Salazar, a state police agent, but we are not clued in as to what she is investigating or how he’s helping. We meet his uncle, a corrupt local cop who hates him. It all went downhill from there. Israel finds a yacht floating with seven dead bodies in it, including rival U.S. Senate candidates. (Eye roll) I only made it halfway through, but if a book hasn’t garnered my attention by then, I rarely see fit to spend further time on it. The characters became both cliched and unbelievable. Israel is a trite overused unreliable narrator although he is supposedly the honest man of the title. Salazar seems out of her depth and on some sort of a vendetta. Worse of all, though, Israel’s father (the one he murdered years earlier) and his uncle are unspeakably evil and equally ridiculous, almost comic book villains. There is another character, Lyman, introduced early, who hides from his equally cruel, abusive father and is confronted by a hatchet-wielding girl. Apparently no one in the state of Maine is a decent human being. Halfway through the book we still don’t know how Lyman and all these characters relate to each other. I’m retired law enforcement and nothing in the police actions (or non-action) made sense. The murders were on a boat in navigable waters and the victims were candidates for national office; the FBI would have swarmed all over this case and pushed all the locals aside including Salazar and the uncle, but they’re nowhere to be seen. I got bored and found the subject matter borderline offensive so I stopped reading.

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Automatic Null cipher generator

A Null cipher, at least in American Cryptogram Association (ACA) usage, is a type of concealment cipher. The idea is to write normal sounding text but use a secret key or “rule” that tells the recipient how to extract the true message hidden inside. The rules used can be imaginative and, ironically, there are no real rules about what the rule can be. As a simple example, if the key is 123, the word ‘jog’ could be enciphered as ‘just too big” taking the first letter of just, second letter of too, etc. The key repeats throughout the length of the plaintext.

Just for fun I decided to try to write a program that would generate a null cipher given a plaintext and a numeric key like the example. My first attempt was to load in a large list of English words and then randomly choose words that fit the rule, followed by several rounds of substituting words that fit more naturally with its neighbors. When I tested it, the first step worked instantly, but it produced a meaningless jumble of words. It tended to choose long words simply because there are more long words than short, but in natural speech or writing we use many more short words. This method might produce ‘justification polemic signatory’ to encipher the above example. The subsequent rounds did tend to make it replace these words with shorter, more common, words, but it took forever because testing pairs of words for how frequent they are is a very time-consuming computing task. I never let it run to the end and the intermediate ciphertext was still not natural-sounding.

So I changed my strategy. Instead of using word lists, I sought a source that already had common words in a natural sounding order: literature. I had a large file of plaintext books, mostly classic novels downloaded from Project Gutenberg. This file had already been processed to have no punctuation, exactly one space between words, and be all lower case to facilitate computer searches and comparisons. This second version of my program reads a few dozen lines at a time and scan them to find N words in a row that met the criteria. I found that it was usually easy to find passages that would satisfy a four-word stretch at a time, and often a five-word stretch, but no more. Keys using smaller digits were more productive than  keys with eights or nines in them.

For example, when I enciphered ‘hail to the chief’ with the key 2141 my program produced, “What a delightful lazy stream of that history we could gather if we focused.” This is actually a patch of three 5-word outputs and I had to modify a couple of the words. It’s quite normal-sounding, but doesn’t make much sense. If I were to submit it, I’d be looking for better words, most likely for “lazy stream”. The program produced 13 passages for the first five letters ‘hailt’. I extended one of those to “The average individual likes stories of what he….” The program runs very fast and can be modified to fit other rules, not just numeric keys.

I don’t plan to submit any Null ciphers from this program, but I wanted to share it to show how ciphers in general and especially the ACA are a rich playground for recreational computing. I invite others to write a better null cipher generator and share their results here.

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Five Decembers by James Kestrel

Five Decembers by James Kestrel
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Joe is a detective for the Honolulu PD right before Pearl Harbor. He’s assigned to a double murder; the victims are a Japanese girl and an American man, the nephew of the local admiral, in fact. The trail of the murderer leads him on a chase through the Pacific until he reaches Hong Kong. Then December 7 happens. The story follows him through the war years and after. It’s replete with blood and romance and some very unlikely scenarios.

The book is published by Hard Case Crime and that tells you something. Expect fists, guns, and knives. I like the throwback noir style. The pacing is good, constantly tempting me to read a few more pages. It kept me hooked to the end, but I wasn’t entirely thrilled with it. The characters and events were so overdone that they were almost more like a superhero comic book than a novel. The bad guys aren’t just bad, they’re nazis of superhuman size or sadistic cruelty or both. Joe is inhumanly resourceful and intelligent, learning a foreign language fluently almost overnight and winning every gunfight. The women are all young and beautiful and Joe can have any of them – but will he? The final scene is both predictable and ridiculous. Still, it’s action-packed and a fun read.

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Praise for Residential Heating and A/C, Inc.

We all see plenty of complaints about various business we deal with. Today I’d like to cite one for excellent service and integrity. Residential Heating and A/C of Campbell deserves kudos. Here’s the story:

Residential replaced our aging gas furnace in December last year, right before the new emissions standards were to take effect. This saved us a lot of money since California’s new (2024) rules would have required a different furnace type that is more expensive to install and has high maintenance and repairs. I would not have known this unless they had pointed it out to me during a routine repair earlier in the year, a repair that was fast, efficient, and low cost. Unfortunately, when they did the replacement, which was in the attic, they cut or dislodged the wire to our doorbell. We did not notice this at first, but several days later someone pointed out our bell wasn’t working. I wasn’t sure it was related to the furnace replacement and I had some other work that needed to be done, so I hired a contractor to take care of all of it. He discovered what had happened during the furnace replacement; he had to saw up some of the base plywood the furnace was on and replace the wires and transformer for the doorbell. It wasn’t cheap to fix. I made a claim against Residential for the cost. I fully expected pushback because most contractors don’t admit fault in my experience. They sent out one of the workers who had done the install; he verified what the contractor had told me and took pictures. His manager approved the claim on the spot, although it took a few days to provide documentation, including checks, correspondence from the contractor, etc., but they sent a check for the full amount. Thank you for being honest. The furnace works perfectly; so does the doorbell now.

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From a Far and Lovely Country by Alexander McCall Smith

From a Far and Lovely Country by Alexander McCall Smith
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is at least my fourth No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency book. I’ve enjoyed them all but you have to be the right mood for them. I’m going to repeat my review of the last one I read because it fits this one equally well:

This is yet another charming addition to the #1 Ladies’ Detective Agency Series. Nominally mysteries, they are in reality musings on life and human foibles, written with humor and keen insight to human nature. The author has an obvious love of Botswana and depicts it as an easy living bucolic place where the simple things in life still dominate. Farming. Family. Friends. Not the hellhole where everyone lives in mud huts and has AIDS as one high U.S. government official has declared.

Those who are expecting action or even a real plot will be disappointed, but if this is read with the right mindset it can be enjoyed by anyone. It helps to be familiar with the characters. I believe the first few books in the series were better, with more of a plot line. This is not the best one to introduce yourself to the characters. The BBC/PBS series starring Jill Scott was absolutely wonderful. Hearing the accent and speech curiosities of Botswana sets the mood. Reading them on the page can seem a bit odd.

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Baby names: Max and Maxwell

I have a new grandson named Maxwell, nicknamed Max. I wanted to see how popular (or not) the name has been over the years. I didn’t update my data past 2020 but I think the trends are clear.

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Purified: How Recycled Sewage is Transforming Our Water by Peter Annin

Purified: How Recycled Sewage Is Transforming Our Water by Peter Annin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Toilet to Tap. That’s how opponents have characterized the process of recycling sewage into drinking water. That yuck factor has killed many such projects from San Diego to Tampa. But the reality is that purification is effective, safe, and cheaper than most other ways of augmenting drinking water supplies. This book explains the science only briefly and in layman’s terms. Instead it focuses on the politics behind it, and there are plenty. As droughts increased, aquifers dropped to record lows, and rivers dried up, opponents stopped finding the idea so repulsive. It became a lifeline in some places. There were politicians who supported it, then opposed it, then supported it again, all depending on the public attitudes. In reality we’ve all been drinking reclaimed sewage all our lives. Where do you think all that sewage goes from people uphill from you? And all the birds and beasts – yes they do it in the woods and that ends up in the rivers, reservoirs and groundwater that feeds our wells and systems. With climate change and overpopulation threatening our water supplies in so many places now, purifying sewage to augment drinking water just makes sense and is really the option for many places, at least until a low-energy, reliable, cheap, desalinization process is invented.

The book educated me to the different methods used to purify (West Coast and East Coast) and their advantages and disadvantages. Reverse osmosis (WC) uses a lot of energy and produces brine waste, but Southern California has lots of solar energy and an ocean to absorb the brine. Activated charcoal (EC) avoids those, but produces greenhouse gases and ash and is not quite as pure. Sanitation districts find resistance not only from the public but also from water districts who see them nosing in on their turf. There’s more to it, so read the book to find out. It does become a bit bureaucratic at time and spends a lot of time on identifying the people involved and their backgrounds.

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2034: A Novel of the Next World War by Elliot Ackerman and James Stavridis

2034: A Novel of the Next World War by Elliot Ackerman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The title tells you most of what you want to know. Stavridis is a retired Admiral who has imagined a conflict in the year 2034 beginning with an operation by China to destroy the U.S. fleet in the South China Sea in preparation for an invasion of Taiwan. A Commodore named Sarah Hunt becomes the lead characters for that phase. At the same time a plucky U.S. pilot named Wedge is doing a recon mission along the border of the airspace with Iran. In both cases the allied Chinese and Irani forces use cyber warfare to disable the U.S. “smart” weapons and are successful in destroying the fleet and capturing Wedge. As things escalate we are introduced to important political characters, especially a deputy National Security Advisor named Sandy Chowdhury, his uncle, a high-level Indian diplomat, a Chinese military leader, Lin Bao, and an Iranian Revolutionary Guard named Farshad.

At first I thought this book seemed very much like a Tom Clancy novel, especially by how the action is unfolding in multiple spots around the world and its heavy detail-oriented military action descriptions. Like a Clancy book, the plot line slurred into a series of diplomatic issues and fanciful imaginings of how the various governments would respond as things spiral out of control. But as it neared the end, it reminded me much more of Catch-22 and Dr. Strangelove. A combination of misjudgments, ego-driven decisions, technical glitches, and bad or good luck drive the plot to a comically avoidable climax. I had trouble finding any of the characters believable. If there’s any message intended here, it’s that the U.S. particularly and society in general is too dependent on technology, especially software, and we are all vulnerable to cyber warfare or smaller attacks.

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The Measure by Nikki Erlick

The Measure by Nikki Erlick
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book was a time filler for me. I listened to the audiobook and the reader was decent, but the story itself was too fanciful to get behind. Boxes show up on everybody’s doorstep, tent, cabin, etc., containing a string that indicated how long they will live. This happens worldwide with no one seeing how these boxes got delivered or why. So this is pure fantasy, not science fiction. It’s really nothing more than a thought experiment for the reader. If you got a box like that, would you open it? If you did and got a short string would you live your life differently? A long string? What if your spouse got one opposite of yours, and so on. The book is populated with characters having all the possible scenarios and all or most of the possible reactions – some with long strings doing reckless things as they feel invulnerable, some dumping their short string fiance, etc. There’s no real plot and the characters were too stereotyped to be credible. Still, it was inoffensive and at times thought-provoking. It was good enough to play solitaire to.

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The Housemaid by Freida McFadden

The Housemaid by Freida McFadden
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When I first started reading this I was disappointed since it appeared to be essentially a copy of The Turn of the Key, which was so-so. Here’s an English class assignment: Compare and contrast the two books. The protagonist is an attractive young woman (“Girl”) of limited resources and dodgy background who takes a job as a domestic in a wealthy home. The lady of the house who hires her seems nice at first but once Girl moves in, she becomes a total B-word who unfairly accuses Girl of all kinds of wrongdoing and even sets her up to fail. The man of the house clearly has eyes for Girl. A bratty child of the household hates Girl and undertakes to sabotage her. A hunky outdoorsy worker outside the household is kind and rescues Girl repeatedly. She fantasizes about him. So far the two books are pretty much identical.

Things change drastically after that. To avoid spoilers, I won’t say much more, but I will say that you shouldn’t trust anyone’s motives. There are some real twists in the second half. This book is fairly dull for the first half but it’s worth sticking through that for the twists. I’d give it four and a half stars if I could.

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