Cypherpunks -- a quick, stirring, scary read -- transcribes a wide-ranging conversation between Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange, Jacob Appelbaum (Wikileaks/Tor Project), Andy Müller-Maguhn (Chaos Computer Club) and Jérémie Zimmermann (La Quadrature Du Net).

Edited together in thematic chapters (The Militarization of Cyberspace, Fighting Total Surveillance With the Laws of Physics, Private Sector Spying), Cypherpunks exceeded my expectations. I know some of the book's protagonists personally and know how smart and principled they are. But I was afraid, going into this, that what would emerge would be a kind of preaching-to-the-choir consensus, because all four of the participants are on the same side.

Instead, I found Cypherpunks to be a genuine debate, where each speaker's best arguments -- well-polished, well-spoken, and convincing -- were mercilessly tested by the others, who subjected them to hard questions and rigorous inspection. Most of our discussions about Wikileaks lack nuance, and they're often hijacked by personal questions about Assange. Whatever you feel about Assange, he is not Wikileaks -- Wikileaks is an activity, not an organization, and its participants, including Bradley Manning, are engaged in something important and difficult and fraught, and there is a place for a debate about whether the tactics of Wikileaks best serve a the strategic end of a free and open Internet in a just and humane society.

The debate recorded in Cypherpunks -- though leavened with humor and easy to follow -- covers a lot of nuance of the sort that has been missing from the discussion. The wider points -- that the universe's in-built mathematics favor the keeping of secrets because it is easier to encrypt a message than decrypt it, say -- may dazzle, but the getting down to cases afterward, the chewing the point over and challenging it, that's where the book shines.

There aren't many titles that pack as much argument, ambiguity and theory into as small a package as Cypherpunks. It's a book you can read in an hour or two, but you'll be thinking about it for years.

Cypherpunks

Peter Bagge is one of my favorite cartoonists. I was introduced to his work when it appeared in Robert Crumb's legendary Weirdo magazine. (Crumb later made Bagge the editor. When I was in my 20s I sent some of my samples to Weirdo. On his hand-written rejection postcard Bagge wrote, "You gotta be your own worst critic." Excellent advice!)

Bagge also created two long-running comic book series for Fantagraphics: Neat Stuff, a grab-bag of comic stories featuring a cast of recurring characters, and Hate, a comic that depicted the self-destruction of the Bradleys, a Seattle family (where Bagge lives). I eagerly snapped up each issue as it appeared on the rack.

Bagge also writes funny, curmudgeonly comics for Reason magazine, which are collected in Everybody Is Stupid Except for Me: And Other Astute Observations.

Bagge's latest comic book is a four-issue mini science fiction series called Reset, published by Dark Horse and now collected in a single volume. Reset begins in an enforced DUI education classroom. One of the people in the class is a has-been actor named Guy Krause. He's grumpy, bitter, and broke, so when he meets a woman in the class who offers to pay him to be a human guinea pig in a virtual reality experiment that will cause him to re-experience his life from early adulthood up to his current middle age, he accepts the offer without question. Through the experiment Guy is given a second chance to make decisions that could possibly lead him to a better place (or an imaginary better place).

As the story progresses, we begin to see clues that there are Truman Show-like elements at play -- where does reality and virtual reality begin and end? Who is behind the curtains? And does Krause really have a say in what is happening to him?

It's great to see Bagge mining new territory, and at the same time retaining his sharp sense of humor.

Reset

For the past couple of weeks my kids and I have been on a weird-but-true books kick. They've been reading Stranger Than Science, a 1960 paperback that I discovered when I was about 11 or 12. The stories in Stranger Than Science are very entertaining, but a lot of them have been debunked, or at least detoothed, over the years.

I wondered if there might be a modern weird-but-true book that is entertaining as well as truthful. I looked around and I think I found it. It's National Geographic's Tales of the Weird: Unbelievable True Stories. This fat book (540 pages) is loaded with the same kinds of stories found in Stranger Than Science and Strangely Enough, but it isn't afraid to punch holes in popular urban legends. It explains the truth behind the Maya "doomsday" calendar, and the latest thinking behind Bigfoot, Area 51, and Chupacabra. And it does so without taking the fun or mystery out of them.

But Tales of the Weird isn't all about busting myths. Most of the book focuses on the wonderfully strange things in our universe: Women can sniff out men with odorless pheromones. Your brain can take cat naps while you are awake. Eating crocodiles may have resulted in the development of bigger brains in human beings. Ladybug incubators enslaved by wasps. New death ritual found in Himalaya. Cocaine addiction uses same brain paths as salt cravings. Astronauts' fingernails falling off. Five weirdest bugs. The Freemasons: eight myths decoded. Why do birds fall from the sky? UFO-like clouds linked to military maneuvers? Giant, mucuslike sea blobs on the rise, pose danger. And hundreds of others.

When Jane (9) read the chapter on synesthesia she became very excited and told me that she thought she was the only person in the world who connected specific colors with letters of the alphabet (Q is a dark purple for her, for instance).

This is possibly the best bathroom reading book ever written.

Somebody tried to kill Elle Peterssen. She's comatose in the hospital. Her wealthy family doesn't seem to care much -- not her Korean tiger mom, not her emotionally vacant father, not her spoiled brother. They consider her hospitalization a major inconvenience. Elle's boyfriend, Dane, cares a lot but he's the prime suspect.

Elle, unconscious in a hospital bed, is somewhat aware of what's happening. Her disembodied, amnesiac mind inhabits a kind of spirit world with other coma patients. With the aid of a psychologist (also in a coma and in a hospital bed right next to her) and a British coma patient, Elle attempts to figure out who she is and how she ended up this way.

Meanwhile back on Earth, clues of a complicated plot concerning Elle reveal themselves in odd places -- in a hospital staff doctor who purges Elle's records, in hoodie-wearing nogoodniks skulking in doorways and whispering urgently in their cellphones about contingency plans, in office explosions, and in double-crosses.

Mind the Gap: Intimate Strangers collects the first five issues of Jim McCain (writer) and Rodin Esquejo's (artist) Hitchcock-esque comic book series of the same name. The art is superb and the story is a masterfully-paced, intriguing thriller.

Warning: this is an ongoing series so when you get to the end of this graphic novel, you'll want to find out what happens next. Fortunately Mind the Gap #6 is out. I'm going to wait for Volume 2 of the anthology series, myself.

Mind the Gap: Intimate Strangers

Brian sez, "At CES, someone told me that there are something like 15 consumer 3D printers on the market. Turns out that was a low-ball. Kits included, there are 24 in this roundup -- and that's not including some that didn't make the cut for a variety of reasons..."

CES 2013 proved to be something of a coming out party for consumer-facing 3D printers. Sure MakerBot earned a fair amount of attention at last year's show with the announcement of the Replicator, which snagged its share of awards from various press outlets. This year, however, saw a relative deluge in 3D-printing representation, with strong showings from 3D Systems, FormLabs, MakerBot and the cloud-based 3D printer, Sculpteo. Even with so many companies rising to prominence, the dream of truly mainstream 3D printing still feels a ways off -- if that is indeed where we're inevitably heading.

The shape of things to come: A consumer's guide to 3D printers (Thanks, Brian!)

Bill Willingham's amazing graphic novel series Fables is one of those unbelievably, game-changingly epic series, one where I'm just as excited to get a peek at the edges of the world and the backstory of the characters as I am to see how the grand sweep of the plot turns out. The last one of these I can remember is Stephen King's Gunslinger books, where the sidewise discursions were as exciting as the forward movement.

Volume 18 of the Fables was published last week, and it's definitely more sidewide than forwards. Cubs in Toyland is a blood-freezingly scary episode exploring the ancient parent's nightmare of a child spirited away, one that combines the inherent creepiness of anthropomorphic toys (Chucky, anyone?) with the mythic resonances of the Fisher King.

By the time it was over, I was wrung out, but not exhausted. For all that my emotions had been taken through the gamut of wonderment, fear, disgust, suspense and triumph, I wanted more. Specifically, more about the future of the Fables, and the place where they will all go when the tale has run its course. In other words, this is yet another volume where Willingham hits it out of the park; it's reason enough for you to start reading the series, or to keep up with it.

Fables, Vol. 18: Cubs in Toyland

Last week, my wife started reading Wild, by Cheryl Strayed. She couldn't put it down. I was sick in bed with the flu, and was looking for anything that would distract me from feeling sorry for myself, so I got the Kindle version. The story was so enthralling that I sometimes forgot I was sick for minutes at a stretch.

Wild is Strayed's account of the time she went on a 1,100-mile trek by herself along the Pacific Crest Trail in 1995. She was 26 years old. Months before, her mother had died, and she had been dealing with marital problems, destructive promiscuity, drug abuse, and other issues that were dragging her down. Her life was in a catastrophic tailspin. She decided that a 3-month hike was what she needed.

Her friend drove her to California and dropped her off at a motel in a Mojave Desert town. Strayed hadn't yet packed her backpack. She just had boxes of stuff she'd brought along with her on the ride. In the motel she crammed her belongings into the backpack. When she'd finished packing she realized she could hardly lift the backpack off the floor. She also had to wear a dromedary bag, which held about 20 pounds of water. The dromedary bag and the backpack together were so heavy that she could barely stand up. What's more, her hiking boots did not fit well. Nevertheless, she hitched a ride to the trailhead and began her trek.

For the last several years I've been using a Fujitsu S1500 ScanSnap scanner to digitaly store all my paper documents. As I've said before, the ScanSnap truly was a life changer for me. I had no idea that a sheetfed scanner could be so convenient, fast, and reliable. It accepts up to 50 sheets of paper, scans both sides, performs optical character recognition on the text, and uploads the records to Evernote (or other cloud service such as SugarSync, Google Docs, or Dropbox). It automatically detects if the document is in color, and determines the page size and orientation. It discards blank pages. It also has an ultrasonic sensor that can detect and warn you if more than one sheet goes through the scanner at the same time.

At CES this year Fujitsu announced its newest model, the ScanSnap iX500. Fujitsu sent me an evaluation unit, and I'm impressed with the improvements on a product I already loved. The iX500 represents the sixth generation of the ScanSnap line and it's as close to being a perfect scanner as I can imagine.

The first improvement is speed. I was perfectly happy with the S1500's 20 double-sided pages per minute (PPM) rate. AT 25 PPM the iX500 is 25% faster, but the most notable difference is the vastly reduced latency between the new model and the earlier one. When you press the scan button the paper almost immediately goes through the scanner. The previous model had a slight delay between each sheet of paper, but this one has no discernible delay. The pages whip through without pause.

One of the major enhancements to the iX500 is its much-touted wireless conductivity. You can now scan a document by installing an app on your iOS or Android device and touching the scan icon on the device's display. The ScanSnap will convert the document to a PDF or JPEG that goes directly to your iOS or Android mobile device, even if your computer is turned off. I can't say that I will use this feature frequently, but it may come in handy if I need to scan something and run out the door with it on my mobile device.

The iX500 also has a new feeding and paper separation system that was originally developed for Fujitsu's high-end industrial scanners. It has two gripper wheels instead of one, and from my experience so far, papers seem to go through more smoothly, and I have not yet encountered a paper jam.

At $467, the iX500 doesn't come cheap. But when I think of how much time I've saved by not having to file and look for paper documents, it's a great deal.

ScanSnap iX500

After I converted my parents from drinking filter coffee to making their morning brew with an Aeropress (something I do with missionary zeal wherever I go), the next step was to replace their antiquated electric kettle with something smarter. Living in the UK has accustomed me to the wonder of electric kettles (240V AC FTW!) but even in Canada, where my folks live, the weedy 110V mains can still produce a decent boil in reasonable time.

I shopped around a lot, and hit on the Breville BKE820XL Variable-Temperature 1.8-Liter Kettle, based both the online reviews and the feature-set, which allows you to set a specific temperature and tell the kettle to keep it there, much like the ubiquitous water-heaters you find in Asian hotels.

It's been more than a year, and the Breville is a winner. The lowest setting ("Green tea") heats water to perfect Aeropress temperature, and the thermostat makes the kettle perfect for making multiple cups (when I stay at my folks' place, my nickname is "coffee slave" and I often make three or four cups in a row). The additional temperatures are great for oatmeal, hot water bottles, black tea, etc.

I'm presently on a family holiday at a winter resort in Ontario with my folks and my brother and his family, and we brought the Breville, Aeropress, a small grinder, and some very nice beans (thank you, Sam James Coffee!) along, and as I marvelled anew at the kettle's usefulness and quiet design flourishes (in addition to being rather handsome, it has lots of grace-notes, like a pull-ring integrated into the AC plug to make it easy to unplug without stressing the cord), my mom said, "Why don't you blog it?"

So there you are. Happy, Mom?

Breville BKE820XL Variable-Temperature 1.8-Liter Kettle