Enjoyable, and made me feel nice and fuzzy at times. Nothing crazy, I thought, but a good option for a somewhat emotional, optimistic, feel-good read.| Ben Kettle
Cool premise, and I enjoyed the last third or so of the book especially. Before that, it felt a bit slow at times. But I’m glad I read it.| Reading on Ben Kettle
I really enjoyed this. It is worth a read, I think.| Reading on Ben Kettle
An engaging, fun set of books—kept me interested, made me excited to read more, and so on. It spurs a bit of thought about what it means to be alive, but mostly it was fun and lighthearted entertainment. I especially enjoyed the fourth book (Heaven’s River), and liked the third book (All These Worlds) the least, but all of them kept me reading. I read them back-to-back, and they essentially felt like a single book to me, so they only get a single entry.| Ben Kettle
I enjoyed this, but didn’t get all that much out of it. The book opens with a utopian vision for the future and was fairly optimistic about our ability to build a better future for ourselves, and backed up this optimism with solid examples of recent technology successes that have noticeably improved our lives (mainly penicillin and the mRNA COVID vaccines). But it felt like an introduction, and I was surprised that it was over when it was—I actually believed that I was finishing the intro...| Ben Kettle
Whew. I’ve been meaning to read this for years ever since we read an excerpt in one of my urban planning classes. I finally decided to do it, and it is indeed as great as everyone says. The subject matter is amazing and the writing is excellent. It took me a couple of chapters to get into the book, but once I did, I did not get bored for the entire remainder of the 1100 pages.| Ben Kettle
Really good. Super engaging and gave me so much to think about. At times it felt like it was drifting into fantasy with some meandering worldbuilding, which I think I am not as into, but this was infrequent and not too long. Reading Sci-fi is so fun.| Ben Kettle
This sequel to The Three-Body Problem felt pretty different from the first book, but still very good. I think I liked the first book a bit better, but I was very engaged for basically the entire time and still didn’t want to put it down. Really fun read, I liked it a lot. Fiction is great.| Reading on Ben Kettle
I haven’t read fiction in a while, but every time I do I am so amazed by how entertaining it is. The Three-Body Problem, indeed, was a super fun read. I had a hard time putting it down and stayed up late(-er than my partner) several nights since I wanted to keep reading. This, assisted by some traveling I was doing, made it a pretty quick read for me—around a week and a half.| Reading on Ben Kettle
I found the first Strong Towns book extremely compelling—it was a big part of the inspiration that led me to make Little Fixes. So I’ve been meaning to read this book for a while, but when I started it a few months ago I switched to something else after the first few pages. It opens with a painful description of a tragic car-on-pedestrian collision and I wasn’t ready to read about more injuries and deaths on our streets at that point.| Reading on Ben Kettle
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I'm a Master's student in MIT's PDOS group working on improving security of embedded systems.| Ben Kettle
Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities abstracts cities to what Alain Bertaud claims is their fundamental purpose: a market for labor. Using this abstraction, the book explores land use, transportation, jobs, housing, and more in the context of markets. In this analysis, Bertaud draws on his years of experience as a city planner across the world to vividly describe the various forces that built everything from informal slums in Mumbai—the inevitable result, he argues, of regulations...| Ben Kettle
After four days of beautiful sun, our amazing hiking trip concluded with wet and foggy night nestled among soaked blades of grass.| Ben Kettle
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I'm a Master's student in MIT's PDOS group working on improving security of embedded systems.| Ben Kettle
I am way behind the times in reading this book, but after some recent discussion at work decided to give it a shot. The beginning of this book was really interesting—I previously did not know anything about the corn economy, number 2 commodity corn, and the huge range of products that corn is processed to become. He makes a compelling argument that industrial farming ignores millenia of evolution and replaces symbiosis with fossil fuels and the Haber process, and the foray into the more eco...| Ben Kettle
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A refreshingly different take on classic urban planning problems. Strong Towns builds a compelling economic argument for urbanism, arguing at the core that suburbanism is financially unstable and relies on indefinite future growth to finance maintenance of aging infrastructure.| Ben Kettle
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I couldn’t put this book down for two days until I finished it, maybe to the detriment of my thesis. It was nice to read something lighthearted and exciting again.| Ben Kettle
A high-level overview that covers many of the major urban planning ideas from perspective of making citizens happy. I find myself thinking back to examples like the correlation between street speed limit and friendliness with neighbors frequently as I walk around Cambridge and San Francisco. Quotes There is a place that has sought to deliver these things, in part by blotting out any sign of the discomforts and ugliness of the modern city.| Ben Kettle
Really interesting. Makes a compelling case that humans are the world’s dominant runners, and that running is a key part of our evolutionary history.| Ben Kettle
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Before reading this I had no idea what it meant to climb Everest. Now I know that I have absolutely no interest in attempting anything like it. Quotes The ratio of misery to pleasure was greater by an order of magnitude than any other mountain I’d been on; I quickly came to understand that climbing Everest was primarily about enduring pain. And in subjecting ourselves to week after week of toil, tedium, and suffering, it struck me that most of us were probably seeking, above all else, somet...| Ben Kettle
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Didn’t make it all the way through, yet. Lots of interesting stuff so far, but I’ve found it a bit hard to push through.| Ben Kettle
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Quotes We can learn and remember anything—the unique sound of your child’s voice, the face of a new friend, where you parked your car, that time you walked to the market all by yourself to buy sour cream when you were four years old, the words to the latest Taylor Swift song. Well, very few of us living in America would be able to experience, much less remember, the market story.| Ben Kettle
I thought this was a pretty good overview, but I didn’t come away with ideas that seemed especially notable. Quotes If someone comes along with a better technology 10 years down the road, you’re not going to just shut down your old plant and go build a new one. At least not without a very good reason—like a big financial payoff, or government regulations that force you to. It’s not clear that we could store hundreds of billions of tons of carbon safely.| Ben Kettle
An incredibly interesting (and sad) recollection of a simple day hike in the White Mountains gone wrong. What stuck out to me the most about this book were the ways that it made me reflect on everyday life.| Ben Kettle
I’ve since heard that some of the science in this book is questionable, but I really enjoyed it and think it was worth reading. It has had a big impact on how I prioritize sleep, which I think is a good thing.| Ben Kettle
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I think this one was a little too far into the Vonnegut cult for me—I hadn’t read enough of his other books to get as much as I should have out of it, and I couldn’t really get into it.| Ben Kettle
Read this to prep for my first backpacking trip :)| Ben Kettle
This might be the most interesting book I have ever read, and definitely one of the most fun to talk to people about. Filled with amazing statistics and appeals to common sense that are impossible to argue with, it makes a fairly compelling argument that parking requirements and poor parking management cause the vast majority of America’s problems. Quotes (I had hundreds of excellent quotes on my Kindle from this book, these are just a few semi-arbitrarily selected ones)| Ben Kettle
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This book is packed with several incredible stories about people surviving situations that I never thought possible. Throughout the stories, the difference between those that survived and those that didn’t is clear: those that survived acted methodically, while those that didn’t froze and panicked. Quotes Once fatigue sets in, though, it is almost impossible to recover from it under survival conditions. It is not just a matter of being tired. It’s more like a spiritual collapse, and rec...| Ben Kettle
I read this book as part of a great class I took called ‘The Ghetto: from Venice to Harlem’, and I really enjoyed it. It was maybe the beginning of my foray into urban planning literature. It’s an incredibly interesting and informative recollection of how America used the legal system to shape city and rural demographics. From redlining to white flight, it tells a compelling story that makes it hard to argue with the role that policy has had in the development of today’s still-segrega...| Ben Kettle
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I don’t remember much from this book except that it was entertaining.| Ben Kettle
Probably one of my favorite books that I read in high school. And I got to make a fun video with my friends in which we pretended to be Tralfamadorians. Quotes ‘Why don’t you write an anti-glacier book instead?’ The main thing now was to find the steering wheel. At first, Billy windmilled his arms, hoping to find it by luck. When that didn’t work, he became methodical, working in such a way that the wheel could not possibly escape him.| Ben Kettle
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Quotes As I said this, I suddenly beheld the figure of a man, at some distance, advancing towards me with superhuman speed. I had been accustomed, during the night, to steal a part of their store for my own consumption, but when I found that in doing this I inflicted pain on the cottagers, I abstained and satisfied myself with berries, nuts, and roots which I gathered from a neighbouring wood.| Ben Kettle
I read this in high school as part of a project, but I remember loving it.| Ben Kettle
Note: this is an early draft of these photos. I will come back and update this post after I edit the photos more thoroughly.| Ben Kettle
In winter 2022, in a pilot for a new lane layout on the Mass. Ave. bridge near MIT, MassDOT laid out hundreds of cones blocking one car lane of the bridge on each side, widening the bike lane. During an extended cold snap that left the river frozen for a few weeks, nearly all of the cones were thrown over either side of the bridge onto the icy surface below. Just before warmth returned to Boston, promising to melt the ice, MassDOT sent a group of divers in SCUBA gear to retrieve the cones and...| Ben Kettle
FIDO2 is growing as a solution to the password hell we all know too well by replacing passwords stored in brains with secret keys stored on dedicated hardware security keys. This new protocol brings a huge increase in security and in usability, but the security key poses an attractive new target for attackers. For my Master’s thesis, I implemented a safer FIDO2 security key that I call Plat. Plat is a new implementation of a FIDO2 security key that retrofits privilege separation onto an exi...| Posts on Ben Kettle
Tired of waiting for iMessage to load my messages from years ago, I printed them all out in a set of paperback books.| benkettle.xyz