Polarization in American politics seems to be splitting the country apart. The election of Donald Trump was a wake-up call for me (and many others, I’m sure), and with the way the impeachment process has been going, it doesn’t seem to be getting better. For me, the question has been: what can we do individually and collectively to improve faith and patience in American politics? My personal (read: woefully uninformed) perspective is that this has to do with a decline in social capital maintained by most American’s.

Stories of Your Life by Ted Chiang is a collection of short stories. The entries were published independently over the course of ten years, and as you might expect, there’s very little uniting them. From ancient Mesopotamia in “Tower of Babylon,” to the Victorian-era European city in “Seventy-Two Letters,” to the not-so-distant future of “Understand,” there’s no common setting or atmosphere. The narrative style varies, too: there’s traditional first-person (“Story of Your Life”) and third-person (“Division by Zero”) and also more unique non-fiction forms (like the transcript of a fictional documentary in “Liking What You See” and even an academic white paper in “The Evolution of Human Science”).

Like all good folklore, this tale starts with conformance tests. Test262 is the official test suite for the JavaScript programming language. From browsers to servers and even embedded systems, lots of projects “interpret” JavaScript, and Test262 is one way they make sure they’re doing it right. In 2014, there were a bunch of new features coming to the language, and the test suite needed a lot of work to include tests for all the new stuff.

Somehow, I was expecting a science fiction story, but The Circle is not that. It’s true that technology takes a central role, and some of it is slightly beyond what’s possible today. There’s even some light speculation (e.g. society’s ready adoption of a universal identification system, or The Circle’s purchase of Facebook’s data), but it’s conveyed in passing and taken for granted by author Dave Eggers and his characters. The story doesn’t hinge on any of this, though, so the unchallenged predictions aren’t so much plot holes as they are expressions of cynicism.

Even though I’m not much of a fantasy reader, I had high hopes for A Wizard of Earthsea. It came highly recommended, and even a quick scan of the Wikipedia page demonstrates that everyone has loved this book for years. It was more than just hearsay, though: from The Left Hand of Darkness, I’ve learned that author Ursula K. Le Guin is a technically strong writer and particularly adept at exploring challenging themes.

Which web browser are you using right now? It’s okay if you’re not sure. Actually, that would be a good sign. If you said, “I’m using Chrome 68 because that’s the only way I can pay my bills,” then that wouldn’t make the web (or your banking website) seem like such a friendly place. If your answer was more like, “I’m using whatever my niece installed because it works fine,” then as a web developer, I’m glad you don’t have to worry about it.

Many developers work on the “web platform” because they believe in the model of competing and interoperable implementations (i.e. browsers). These folks (of which I am one) believe that competing and interoperable implementations is what makes the web fundamentally stronger than other platforms. Unlike Windows, iOS, or Android (for example), the web’s users have choice about how they participate. If they disagree with how their chosen browser is being managed, they can switch to another.

In Goodbye iSlave, author Jack Linchuan Qiu interprets the term “slavery” in relation to the electronics manufacturing industry. Like the title, most of the book’s content focuses on Apple and its supplier Foxconn, using the name “Appconn” to describe the alliance. Qiu’s concern is much more broad, though. In the opening pages, he writes, “The ailment of a Chinese factory, let me emphasize, is a symptom of global pandemic, for which Appconn is but one concentrated embodiment.

In The Cuckoo’s Egg, astronomer-turned-detective Cliff Stoll chases down a trespasser on his university’s computer network. The chase winds across the US, through the networks of US defense contractors and US military bases, past satellites in orbit, and even into computers as distant as Japan and Germany. Despite there being very little physical action, the process of untangling this path (and avoiding detection in the process) is surprisingly satisfying. Stoll recounts the whole ordeal with great detail, likely thanks to his rigorous practice of note taking.

Unless you’re a web developer, you probably missed the announcement that Microsoft Edge (the browser that comes with Windows 10) is being rewritten to use the Chromium project under the hood. Chromium powers the Google Chrome browser, so Edge is going to start to display websites just like Chrome does (even if the things like the URL bar and bookmark list look different). When VP Joe Belfiore announced this change, they shied away from explaining why this is necessary.