Mengele's disappearance, Marta the laughingstock, and Řepka in Parliament. Oh, and a dancing snowman.

I slacked off on writing last week. I made up for it this week, much to my wife's annoyance, by writing a retrospective on recording CZ Podcast. I'd been meaning to do it since we prepared the 200th episode, but I only got around to it this week. Meanwhile, a pile of articles collected in my reader and I finished a few books. Today's newsletter is an informal review of those books and a few article recommendations.

Books

The Disappearance of Josef Mengele

The book by Olivier Guez caught my eye the moment I saw it in the bookshop, and it certainly didn't disappoint. It sits between nonfiction and fiction. I initially assumed much of the material about the Angel of Death and his life in South America was pure invention, but Wikipedia suggests otherwise. You wonder what Mengele must have been thinking. What went through his head as he lived in exile, worked menial jobs, constantly hid or fled, and found everyone distancing themselves from him, even his family?

It may have been a worse punishment for him than being strung up from a lamppost straight away. If he really gave himself peritonitis by nervously chewing his mustache, it was one more dose of “take that, you bastard.” The sad truth is that he escaped justice for good because there wasn't much public will to bring him in, rather than because he was a cunning criminal. Unfortunately that was also true at a crucial stage of the Mossad hunt. The agency became famous for abducting Eichmann, whose fate crossed paths with Mengele's in Argentina. Incidentally, there's a great book about the abduction, Mossad: Operation Eichmann.

Cosmonauts on the Brink of Death

I like Karel Pacner's books. I've read nearly all his books about spaceflight, and the ones about espionage too. Cosmonauts on the Brink of Death was the first of his audiobooks I'd listened to. I had some reservations. It runs for 21 hours, and I expected him to recycle stories, mainly about the Russian space program, that I'd already read in his earlier books.

In the end the book was a very pleasant surprise. There wasn't much repetition, and there were stories I hadn't heard, especially from after 2000. Sometimes the author wandered into parts of astronauts' and cosmonauts' lives that didn't particularly interest me. The fact that an astronaut was a lesbian, for example, may be interesting but has nothing to do with this subject. I enjoyed the accounts of Apollo 13, the Challenger disaster and more recent problems aboard the ISS or Mir. I was torn between three and four stars and settled on four. If you haven't read about the emergencies that have happened in space exploration and are curious about them, you'll enjoy the book.

Incidentally, the investigation into the Challenger disaster is covered in some detail by Nobel laureate Richard Feynman, a member of the investigating commission, in What Do You Care What Other People Think?

Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions

My favorite publisher, Jan Melvil, put out this book a while ago. I have to admit it sat on my Kindle for a long time and proved a tough nut to crack. The premise is interesting, but the writing is so ponderous that it spoils the book. It describes what computer science theory can tell us about the world around us. It could have been a great book if the authors had taken a more accessible approach. References and footnotes alone make up 40 percent of the ebook. I still learned quite a lot, but getting to it took work. Judging from the reactions on Twitter, I was surprised to find I wasn't alone in struggling with the style.

Articles and other odds and ends that got caught in the net

• A great article by Petr Dvořák about dreaming since childhood of being Batman's assistant Robin in a corporation, and now building his own company. He also nails what HR departments contribute to recruiting developers. I highly recommend When penguins don't dance, or how to get the best people for your tech company on the cheap.
• This time, without Filemon, I recorded a podcast about AI in basketball nets.
• The internet was originally designed to survive a nuclear attack. These days we worry about everything that might break. What breaks when Russia disconnects from the internet?
• A great column by Miloš Čermák: Why some people put up an “I'm in training” sign at work, and why it might be worth thinking about an “I quit” sign.
• XML guru Jiří Kosek is very funny about the REST API for editing Google Docs in XML is verbose, JSON not, not?. Today's generation of frontend developers may well have no idea what XML is.

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• Marta Nováková can give the absurdity of that API a run for its money with her claim that mobile data is expensive because we don't use it. David Slížek put it exactly right: The minister who is a joke (and a gift to the operators).
• The story of another, decidedly cleverer woman, Marie Curie-Skłodowska: Exposed to hatred and radioactivity. A scientist's life as a story of genius, prejudice and stupidity.
• At least Franta is holding the angle. MOST! forever.

Made me laugh

Fake Schwarzenberg

Řepka called to ask if he could do a few hours of community service here in the Chamber of Deputies. I reassured him that there is no work of benefit to the community in the Chamber.