Google has a well-known book called Site Reliability Engineering, and they have now released a second book in the series titled The Site Reliability Workbook. It is meant as a complement to the first book, and it is available to download for free until August 23, 2018.

Update: fixed!

On the way home on the Burke-Gilman Trail tonight a cyclist traveling in the opposite direction angrily yelled “e-bike!” at me. According to Strava, I was going somewhere between 11 and 12 mph at the time. The other cyclist – by my judgement at the time – was going a little faster than I was.

Faust, a Python stream processing library showed up on Hacker News today. It’s kind of timely because I was thinking about wanting to explore using Apache Spark earlier today. I’ll throw Faust onto the list.

Every so often I start wanting to build or buy a boat. It’s just a thing I do, and I’m having those urges now. I’ve sailed the Beetle Cat at the Center for Wooden Boats (CWB), and then I found that CWB is planning to build a cat-rigged boat called a Kitten. They don’t have any photos of what a Kitten looks like, so I searched around and found this. I have no idea if that’s the same boat, but it led me down a path of looking at that boat yard’s other boats.

Scientists revealed the discovery of a lake beneath the southern polar region on Mars. The lake was detected using an instrument called MARSIS on the European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft. It’s apparently not necessarily a large lake, but it’s still exciting to have found. Read more about it here.

I can’t stop myself. I am turning into a big fan of Riese & Müller bikes. The Packster has been in the shop for a while to replace a faulty power cable (more on that when I know what’s going on, but it’s a little concerning). In the meantime, I was able to get a loaner bike: a Riese & Müller Load.

There is a scientific instrument called the IceCube Neutrino Observatory spanning a cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice more than 1.4 kilometers below the surface. This observatory is designed to detect neutrinos that pass through the instrument and interact with matter nearby. This is extremely rare because, although neutrinos are extremely common, they have a very low chance of interacting with matter.

I’ve always found it pretty cool that some types of spiders can “fly” using webs. I had believed it involved airflow, but that’s apparently not it. According to “Spiders Can Fly Hundreds of Miles Using Electricity”, that doesn’t even make a lot of sense. Instead, a pair of biologists have demonstrated that spiders can use electric fields to lift them into the air. From the article:

By request, I was taking the boys to the Science Center on Father’s Day. We were on the Packster and I saw a Greenpeace ship in South Lake Union. Tours were being hosted on board! It’s not often that I have a chance to tour an ocean-going ship, but the boys resisted and we moved on.