June 3, 2009
Ode to joy, in a poetic way
The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within by Stephen Fry
My review
rating: 5 of 5 starsAnything Stephen Fry writes is bound to be a joyous experience, but this one has to rank among his best (possibly only beaten by his autobiography and "The Hippopotamus", my absolute favorite.)
In this peon to poetry, Stephen Fry shows the rules and rhythms of how to construct a poem, allowing you to see the many intriguing details and quite possibly get on with writing some yourself. I knew about trochees and jambs and so on, but had no idea about the villanelle, for instance - an intriguing and rhythmic poetic form.
Stephen Fry has a loving relationship to language, and manages to convey both his feelings and knowledge about it. Highly recommended if you like to read already and would like to read or possible write some poetry with a likable, humorous and extremely knowledgeable advisor at your side.
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May 15, 2009
Someone goes on a hungry journey
City of Thieves by David Benioff
My review
rating: 5 of 5 starsBleak and terse but very likeable story about an orphaned adolescent and a soldier on an impossible quest in and around St.Petersburg (Leningrad) during the 900-day siege. The authenticity and details are moving, the language and plot fluid and there are moments of suspense and quite a bit of laconic humor. Highly recommended.
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May 5, 2009
Art that is genuinely difficult to understand
Much art is hard to understand, often, I suspect, because there is no underlying message, just the implication of one. In this fun article by Stephen Levy (who is one of those writers I just read everything I can of) shows a piece of art which both is very germane to its owner (the CIA) and really contains underlying messages.
Brilliant!
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April 22, 2009
England excpects you to write home. A lot.
Nelson: Love and Fame by Edgar Vincent
My review
rating: 4 of 5 starsDetailed biography based on Nelson's correspondence, gives a good picture of Nelson as a person, his relationships with superiors, subordinates, his common-law wife Emma Hamilton and her husband. This book is widely regarded as one of the best Nelson biographies, but I would have liked to see a bit more on strategy and tactics of the battles themselves - as it is, the sheer number of anguished letters home for love, money and fame can be a bit overwhelming, though it gives a good indication of all the myriad things a captain and admiral had to deal with.
Great biography, but a little discipline and tightening up here and there wouldn't hurt.
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April 16, 2009
Kafka in reverse
How I Became Stupid by Martin Page
My review
Funny little ditty about Antoine, whose seeks to lighten the burden of his intelligence by willfully becoming stupid, with hilarious results. He tries becoming an alcoholic, suicide, and ends up using drugs to lower his intelligence and increase his financial fortune. Less fun for the storyline, which jumps here and there, than the paradoxical language and satirical exaggerations. Needs rereading to get it all, but then again, I think I have achieved part of what Antoine is trying to do...
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April 15, 2009
Shoah from the other side
The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell
My review
rating: 5 of 5 starsThis is an important book, of huge ambition and with a breathtaking canvas, though it occasionally, particularly towards the end, fails to quite live up to its ambitions. It has divided reviewers in every country it has been published (first written in French, relatively late translated into English.) I come down on the side of those who like it - or, rather, who admires the book while feeling rather nauseated by its contents.
Jonathan Littell has attempted to write the equivalent of Claude Lanzmann's Shoah - but from the perspective of the perpetrators. the books protagonist (it is written in the first perspective) is Dr. Maximilian Aue, a fictional SS-officer with an intellectual mind and an extremely complex and warped character, who is writing his autobiography with a dire warning to the reader: While he has done despicable things, who can say they wouldn't do the same, if they had grown up like him and been put in the same circumstances?
Aue joins the SS for practical reasons and gradually descends into the cesspool that was Nazi Germany, rising in the ranks and with increasingly deviant mind. On his way, he works with the Einsatzkommandos in Poland and Caucasus, narrowly escapes Stalingrad, inspects Auschwitz with a view to improving its efficiency, participates in the murder of the Hungarian Jews, and finally takes part in the fall of Berlin, always with an intellectual detachment and a cool rationalizations. A thinking SS man with powers to explore and observe, he is without will or ability to do something other than excel at his job. He is saddened by the killings but more appalled by the lack of a scientific basis for deciding who is Jewish and who is not (The description of a conference in Caucasus discussing whether a certain group is Jewish or not is obscene in its similarity to any other scientific debate, coolly trying to determine whether 6,000 people should be exterminated or not, ending with the Wermacht blocking the extermination because they want to avoid the local population joining the partisans.) He deplores the treatment of the prisoners less for the suffering than for the reduction in productive capacity it causes: When he tries to obtain clothing and food for evacuating Auschwitz prisoners, it is not for humanitarian reasons, but because he has orders to use them as a workforce.
Almost as a subplot (and less believable) are the civilian experiences of the main person: Imprinted with an incestuous love for his sister, he is unable to engage with women and instead seeks out homosexual partners to act out his fantasies of his sister. As he sinks deeper and deeper, his veneer of civilization scrapes off and he loses himself in amnesic episodes, including one where he probably kills his mother and stepfather. After that, he is followed by two policemen who, like a constantly reappearing conscience (much like the chorus in a classic Greek play), calls him to justice. It all comes together in the end, with the fall of Berlin and the fall of Aue - though he survives, escapes to France, and settles down as a minor industrialist. Aue is a reprehensible, but fascinating character - he is a Nazi, but this is not rank stupidity of a Frank Suchomel (a Treblinka prison guard interviewed in Shoah) speaking, this is a cultured German with a wide intellectual foundation and some pretty screwed up, seemingly internally consistent, ideas about the world, capable of enjoying music but, significantly, not playing it.
The book has been criticized for being overly long, for being sensationalistic (explicit sex and rape scenes) and for being written in an old-fashioned language. I disagree completely: The length of the book and its myriad of people assure that you forget some of them - an important reminder of the enormity of the crime described. People die like flies around Dr. Aue, and after a while you, along with him, hardly notice it anymore, aside from some single individuals (such as a 13 year old Jewish piano prodigy executed after hurting his hand and therefore not being able to play) that penetrate the protective shield the perpetrators erect around themselves. I used to work at a hospital many years ago, and recognize this protective shield and the holes in it: To function and be able to take care of patients, I had to make myself immune to their suffering - but occasionally, some single patient would break through my defenses, usually because I somehow could identify with them. Jonathan Littell, who has worked with aid organizations alleviating hunger in war-torn areas, seems to write from that perspective - but Dr. Aue does not heal people, he kills them.
The book contains a number of diversionary discussions - on the languages of Caucasus, on the psychology of increasingly sadistic prison guards (they hit the prisoners not because they see them as subhuman, but because the prisoners persist in being human however much they are humiliated), on the Kantian imperative (in a discussion with Adolf Eichmann, no less), on the differences and many similarities between Communism and Nazism. The book is also a study in bureaucracy and how to do projects that look good to your superiors even though the subject is execrable and the results, in the end, the same: The discussions on how many calories each prisoner should have, how much would disappear through theft, and to what extent one should reduce rations to weak prisoners in order to make the die faster seem surreal if it wasn't for how it would sound like any other bureaucratic hearing if the subject was changed. Dr. Aue gets better at shaping his reports and steering them through the bureaucracy, but he also loses sight of the real impact of what he is doing, if he has ever had it.
Jonathan Littell has derived his knowledge from books and from visits to the sites of many atrocities, and the book is historically accurate (with the stamp of approval from none less than Claude Lanzmann himself.) Aue meets many historical figures, and you can sometimes see (or think you see) influences from other books. The Communism-Nazism discussion reminds me of Pinker's The Blank Slate, Dr. Aue's reflections over word dead in many languages of how Robert Jordan reflects on death in Hemingway's For whom the bells toll, the description of the dead hippo floating in a pool in Tiergarten with an artillery shell in its back is straight out of Antony Beevor's The Fall of Berlin 1945. There is recurring symbolism with birds representing pure but vulnerable beauty: Ducks ("with beautiful green necks") are noted in reflective moments, Aue goes shooting with Albert Speer, cranes escape Berlin "not knowing how lucky they are." Overall, The Kindly Ones reminds me most of Günter Grass' Die Blechdrommel - and Grass, almost predictably, had war experiences he carefully kept secret.
This is not a book to like, but to admire, because you gradually become fascinated with Dr. Aue despite his abominations. As he says in the beginning: How do you know you wouldn't do the same, given the same upbringing and the same environment? Inhabitants of Jugoslavia, Darfur, Cambodia, Chechen, and Rwanda certainly would have no problem answering that question. Those of us living in more civilized societies should perhaps count ourselves deliriously happy we have never needed to confront it.
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April 3, 2009
No country for me, either
No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy My review
rating: 2 of 5 starsExtremely violent and dystopic, but fantastic writing, where the character reveal themselves through dialogue and quiet observations. This book has been highly praised by critics and turned into a movie, but for me it tipped over a bit - there is such a thing as too much blood and cruelty, even if it is painted with economic strokes and brilliant contrasts.
Too much.
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March 17, 2009
Shirky on newspapers
Clay Shirky, the foremost essayist on the Internet and its boisterous intrusion into everything, has done it again: Written an essay on something already thoroughly discussed with a new and fresh perspective. This time, it is on the demise of newspapers - the short message is that this is a revolution, and saving newspapers just isn't going to happen, because this is, well, a revolution:
[..]I remember Thompson [in 1993] saying something to the effect of “When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.” I think about that conversation a lot these days.
[..]
Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. In ordinary times, people who do no more than describe the world around them are seen as pragmatists, while those who imagine fabulous alternative futures are viewed as radicals. The last couple of decades haven’t been ordinary, however. Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply looking out the window and noticing that the real world was increasingly resembling the unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking mad. Meanwhile the people spinning visions of popular walled gardens and enthusiastic micropayment adoption, visions unsupported by reality, were regarded not as charlatans but saviors.
[..]
That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen. Agreements on all sides that core institutions must be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the agreeing. (Luther and the Church both insisted, for years, that whatever else happened, no one was talking about a schism.) Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can neither be mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify.
And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.
That simple. He draws the line back to the Gutenberg printing press and the enormous transition that caused - much more chaotic that you would think with 500 year hindsight.
Highly recommended. And another piece of reading for my suffering students....
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March 15, 2009
Real tale from a real assembly line
Rivethead: Tales from the Assembly Line by Ben Hamper My review
rating: 4 of 5 starsBen Hamper worked on the production line of the General Motors bus and truck plant in Flint, Michigan from 1977 to 1988, and wrote about the experience in this book. It is a rambling and often funny account of mind-numbingly dull work, schemes employed by the workers to make it less dull, and the equally inane managerial schemes to, well, manage. Witness Howie Makem, the "Quality Cat" mascot, an actor in a cat costume showing up at various intervals to get the workers to produce higher-quality vehicles.
The books should be required reading for business school students (and is in some courses) showing the sometimes vast difference between the managerial and worker view of the world. Hamper ridicules the ways of top management, while at the same time showing how, with relatively little effort (such as, when the factory in-house magazine reports that a country music singer was going to buy one of their cars, Hamper wants to know which car it would be and realizing that that was the first time he ever heard anything about who the customer was). In the end, the dull and hard work: Hamper develops anxiety attacks and eventually drops out from the assembly line. You kind of suspect it is from under-use of his brain - he likens it to forever dropping out of high school, staying in suspended animation in a never-ending adolescence, seeking relief in alcohol and mindless games.
Highly recommended because it offers a different view of things, sorely needed as something of a counterweight to all the starry-eyed management books out there. And it leaves you wondering, as Hamper does: If not the assembly line, what else can a middle-aged autoworker with no marketable skills do? Hamper can write and do auto shows. Most of his colleagues, you suspect, cannot. Given the current state of General Motors (at present, bankruptcy seems inevitable within a year) this is a question of more than fleeting interest for a sizeable portion of the US workforce.
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March 11, 2009
The view from the fringes
Them: Adventures with Extremists by Jon Ronson My review
Rating: 4 of 5 starsAlternately deeply disturbing and howlingly funny about the paranoid of the world - and the exclusive but increasingly out-of-touch elite meeting fora that feed the fringes.
I keep shaking my head when someone can get time on national television (in any country) claming that the world's leaders meet in secret places to plot wars and elections - and that most of them really are giant lizards inhabiting human bodies...
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March 7, 2009
Introducing Lord Peter Wimsey
Whose Body? by Dorothy L. Sayers My review
rating: 4 of 5 starsI actually read this on the web since it is in the public domain (due to someone forgetting to renew the copyright) and I have bought a small netbook computer which works quite well for reading.
Dorothy Sayers had a fascinating career: She was one of the first women to get a degree from Oxford, started working as a copy writer for an ad agency to make some money, and wrote detective novels to indulge in a bit of escapism and become financially independent. She created Lord Peter Wimsey, a seemingly scatterbrained but, of course, whip smart nobleman complete with WWI shell shock, monocle, a loyal butler named Bunter and, eventually, a girl friend named Harriet Vane who bears quite some resemblance to Sayers herself.
The funny thing is that Sayers wrote a number of religious and philosophical tracts as well as a translation of Dante's Divinia Commedia, but she is remembered for her detective novels, which, I should say, are remarkably modern and witty for something written in 1926. (In some circles, her essay The lost tools of learning has great currency.)
"Whose body?" concerns a naked body found in a bathtub, resembling a mysteriously disappeared financier. After few twists and turns, it is pretty easy to understand who the villain is, but how Lord Peter Wimsey gets there is less easy to figure out. Sayers strictly follows the classic rules of detection - always leave all clues visible to the reader, then surprise them - and does so here as well. It is not her best work - that would be Murder must advertise or The nine taylors (the latter rather complicated, but interesting) or perhaps Five red herrings. But it is available in the public domain, gives a great introduction to the unbeatable Lord Peter Wimsey, and is not the worst way to spend an hour or two before going to bed.
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February 14, 2009
Basketball math
Michael Lewis has a great article about Shane Battier and the use of basketball statistics, showing that your choice of measure (and ability to find new measures) defines what you see. It is a great piece of writing and transcends much of the cliched crap you usually read on the sports pages. Reminiscent of the late David Foster Wallace's articles on tennis.
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February 13, 2009
Interface with legs
My review
rating: 4 of 5 starsThis is an early Stephenson, written in the mid-90s. A fable about a conspiracy to implant a chip in the brain of a presidential candidate and remotely guide his utterances by automated polling - a candidate guaranteed to say what people will like.
There is much to like here - a deeply ironic humor and some interesting characters and characterizations that remain as fresh 12 years after (it helps that there was a Bush presidency for each decade). With some small exceptions, the technology is rather fresh as well, which is rare for a tech thriller/sci-fi fantasy.
I rather liked it - it got me through a trip back and forth to Las Vegas in economy, which was the reason I got it. So, yes, recommended. Though I won't read it as many times as I have Cryptonomicon...
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January 30, 2009
A thousand less than splendid fates
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
My review
rating: 5 of 5 starsMoving story of two women and their struggles to salvage some dignity and happiness out of an extremely bleak environment. I liked this book better than The Kite Runner - it is epic in form, gives a better understanding (I think) of Afghanistan, and lacks the slight sense of disbelief I had about the villainy presented. Obligatory reading for anyone trying to understand what is going on in Kabul and the rest of Afghanistan.
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January 20, 2009
Kafkaesque it isn't
Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami My review
rating: 5 of 5 starsExquisite metaphorical novel of loss and redemption, searching and finding. Anything in it that doesn't make sense, eventually does. Or not.
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January 17, 2009
Tintin and the US
The Economist analyzes Tintin, pegging his lack of fame in the USA on the fact that he is a very European hero, written to conform to a set of cultural norms (and laws) with restrained violence, no sex, and the hero as an overgrown boy scout, constantly doing the right thing.
I think the reason Tintin never was a hit in the USA is much simpler: The setting is seldom the USA, and especially not the USA after the second world war. The only album set in the US, Tintin in America (1932), is a deeply sarcastic portrait of the US during the prohibition years, with Tommy-Gun-toting gangsters and indian reservations being replaced by instant cities 10 minutes after oil is found.
There are rumors of Peter Jackson and Steven Spielberg making Tintin movies. I for one hope they maintain the irony and complicated plots of Tintins golden period from 1934 to 1956, with believable plots (well, there is Destination Moon, but that was fun, too, with Professor Calculus throwing temper tantrums) and interesting characters. Tintin is not an action hero, though he occasionally throws a few punches. The animated movies made of Tintin did not have the slickness and literacy of the books, but if Lord of the Rings is anything to go by, Spielberg and Jackson should be able to follow the books just fine.
As for the wider political analysis of Tintin as a "European hero" because he cannot change larger events - or the musings of his possible homosexuality - I think some people need to lighten up a bit. And stop reading the same albums over and over.
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November 29, 2008
Buffeting
The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life
Rating: 5 of 5 stars ( Goodreads review)
To succeed in business, be patient, look for value, be honest, and have cash in hand. And don't think about anything else. In fact, be an unrepentent monomaniac. Warren Buffett has become the worlds richest man by making investments that he gets derided for at 10-year intervals, then, when the bubble bursts, he is a saint again.... Buffett is extremely good at making money - and has a rather impressive idea about what to do with it (keep investing, give it all away to someone who is good at giving away money, such as Bill Gates.)
The biography is an impressive work in itself. 838 densely written pages about a man whose personal life has been rather unspectacular (hamburgers and Cherry Coke, poring over stock lists and annual reports). Schroeder is a business writer and financial analyst, so she has real knowledge about deals and can write with authority on complicated cases such as Salomon Brothers. I would have loved to see her write a biography on Bill Gates with the same level of business detail, though we will probably have to wait another decade or so for that to happen.
(Incidentally, I once heard Buffett speak, at the Harvard Business School in, I think, 1991. He was asked about what he thought of the derivatives market, which was beginning to take off at that point, and said that if he was alone on a deserted island with 100 people and the only sustenance was rice, he wouldn't have put 50 of them to work peddling rice futures....)
Recommended for the budding investor - and as a backgrounder on the financial crisis. It is up to date as of April 2008, which is rather impressive in itself.
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November 26, 2008
Ozzie and the cloud
Steven Levy, a tech writer whose every article I read if I can get my hands on it, has a fascinating Wired article about Ray Ozzie and his long march to make Microsoft survive and prosper in the cloud. Service-based computing can be a disruptive innovation for Microsoft, since customers become less reliant on a single, fat client (dominated by MS) and instead can use a browser as their main interface.
I have used Lotus Notes since well before the company was bought by IBM, and always considered it to be a fantastic platform that is somewhat underused, chiefly because while its execution is great, the user interface is somewhat clumsy (getting better, but still) and it is hard to program for. As an infrastructure play for a large corporation, Notes is just great. As a platform for software innovation and innovative interaction, it leaves a lot to be desired. The question is - can Microsoft gain dominance in this market (Sharepoint seems to execute on that one), extend it to consumers (Vista is not a good omen here), and somehow find a business model that works? (By that I don't mean one with it the same profitability as it has now, that just isn't possible. But one that is somewhat profitable long-term?)
If anyone is going to be able to pull that off, it will be Ozzie. The article paints, as I see it, a very complete picture and tells me a lot more about the relationship between Microsoft and Ozzie than I knew. But that is usual with Steven Levy articles, ever since he wrote "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
Highly recommended. (And since I like long and detailed articles: this one is at 6900 words or more than 40,000 characters including spaces. Just a hint to my Norwegian newspaper friends, who thinks anything more than 7000 chars won't be read by anyone.)
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November 3, 2008
Language Fryed and paroled
There are language bloggers, language nuts, language nitpickers, language experts, and then, deliciously, there is Stephen Fry.
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October 21, 2008
Anathematics
Brad Templeton has a long and good analysis (containing spoilers) of Neal Stephenson's Anathem
I love the language that Stephenson creates, and the notion of scientific communities locked in for either 1, 10, 100 or 1000 years (depending on how dangerous their exploits are, it seems) is very interesting. But the plot line could do with some sharpening, and the character descriptions are shallow at best. As is usual with Stephenson, mind you.
So, make up your own mind. I still think Cryptonomicon
(Minor quibble: I think I found an error, and am enough of a nerd to report it. On page 512-13, we find the sentence "Late yesterday, Yul had shattered the calm by starting the engine of Cord's fetch, and ...." But Cord's fetch was left on the other side of the pole, wasn't it (on page 416)? Oh well.....maybe I should update the Anathem Wiki. On the other hand, I have a life.)
Incidentally, Anathem may be the only book published so far that has its own video trailer without first being made into a film. Here it is:
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October 16, 2008
Andrew Sullivan on blogging and essaying
Andrew Sullivan has a thoughtful essay in The Atlantic on blogging and what it does for writing - his own and others'. Blogging is a substitute that frees the writer's mind and increases the premium on orderly thinking:
A blogger will air a variety of thoughts or facts on any subject in no particular order other than that dictated by the passing of time. A writer will instead use time, synthesizing these thoughts, ordering them, weighing which points count more than others, seeing how his views evolved in the writing process itself, and responding to an editor’s perusal of a draft or two. The result is almost always more measured, more satisfying, and more enduring than a blizzard of posts. The triumphalist notion that blogging should somehow replace traditional writing is as foolish as it is pernicious. In some ways, blogging’s gifts to our discourse make the skills of a good traditional writer much more valuable, not less. The torrent of blogospheric insights, ideas, and arguments places a greater premium on the person who can finally make sense of it all, turning it into something more solid, and lasting, and rewarding.
Good stuff. Read it.
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October 5, 2008
Education and technology - a historic view
Nice review of Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz's The Race between Education and Technology
Our central conclusion is that when it comes to changes in the wage structure and returns to skill, supply changes are critical, and education changes are by far the most important on the supply side. The fact was true in the early years of our period when the high school movement made Americans educated workers and in the post-World War II decades when high school graduates became college graduates. But the same is also true today when the slowdown in education at various levels is robbing America of the ability to grow strong together.
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September 22, 2008
Little brother pretty fast
Cory Doctorow's Little Brother (available for free download here if you don't want to buy it) is a "young adult" book on the topic of surveillance and personal freedom and privacy. The story is about Marcus, nicked M1k3y, who after a terrorist attack hits San Francisco gets detained by the DHS, denied his rights, and decides to take revenge. This involves quite a bit of hacking, security, cryptography and subterfuge.
The purpose of this book is both to tell a story and to teach the (young) reader something about personal freedoms, critical thinking and how to preserve your privacy in an increasingly connected and digitized world. This shows - there are some quite detailed discussions of this, somewhat simplified versions of Cory Doctorow's speeches and writings on these subjects.
I sort of liked the book - it is important from the perspective of raising a generation of youngsters that know enough about the technology to maintain some sort of privacy, and encourage creative thinking - loosely defined as demanding logic and actions in proportion to consequences from the authorities. Cory's book has gotten to the NYT bestseller list, and deservedly so. This is something to be happy about, for Cory spreads the word of his book electronically (as well as the book) and this nicely vindicates that strategy and points towards the future for aspiring authors. And, as someone struggling to get young people to read about and be interested in technology - not just what it does and how it looks but how it works - I see the value in the book.
But I do wish the literary qualities, such as the plot and the character development, were a bit more ambitions. On the other hand, Neal Stephenson does that, and Little Brother is an excellent introduction to Cryptonomicon, which set the reader up for the Baroque Trilogy and the idea that, well, history matters.
So, highly recommended. Wonder when we will see the first Norwegian translation? (I have translated for Cory before, but am a bit under the weather here. Anyone for a "dugnad"?). It is not like anyone needs to ask permission...
(On a side note, the paper copy I got from Amazon had half of page 197/8 torn out. Rather than sending it back to be replaced (which I know Amazon would do without argument), I printed out those pages from Cory's web site and put them inside the book. Saves work and time. Same thing as when I switched from a static web page to a wiki for my course syllabi - now the customers, i.e., my students, fix broken links without bothering me.....)
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September 15, 2008
David Foster Wallace dead at 46
This is sad news indeed. David Foster Wallace was one of my favorite writers. I never made it through Infinite Jest, but loved his essays - on television, cruise ships, and tennis (I, II and III) - with incredible humor, deep knowledge of many an arcane subject and limitless playfulness with language. Side sentences with parentheses with footnotes with footnotes, yet all of it making sublime sense.
And then he goes and hangs himself. What a loss, and what a waste.
(Via Paul Kedrosky.)
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September 14, 2008
CAMRB
Mary Beard wants a campaign for real bookstores, and solicits suggestions for "real" bookstores. Here are my favorites (and woefully incomplete, I know):
The Harvard Book Store, Harvard Square, Cambridge, MA. A must since Wordsworth disappeared. Good basement with used books and remainders.- The Harvard COOP, Harvard Square, Cambridge, MA. Managed by Barnes and Noble, but with enough sophistication and volume both for staff and clientele that the selection is good and the advice competent, unless you happen upon an employee from the days before B&N took over.
- City Lights, San Francisco. A bit of a legend and a tad long in the underground tooth, but excellent selection and very knowledgeable staff (even if you arrive in a business suit.)
- Tronsmo, Oslo. Small bookstore with interesting books (and really good on cartoons, which is not my thing). Truly independent, good for a surprise every time you stick your head in.
Blackwell's, Oxford, UK. Enormous and somewhat disorganized, but selection, selection, selection.- The Jeffery Amherst Bookshop, Amherst, MA. Only been there once, but liked it a lot (and so did my elder daughter.)
Other suggestions (or, by all means, leave comments over with Mary.)
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September 10, 2008
Classic writing...
ACM Ubiquity re-published something referred to as a classic today, which to me came as a surprise, especially since, well, I wrote that thing in an hour or so as the result of a direct question from John Gehl, former editor. But hey, being called a classic can't be all bad, can it?
Alternatively, cucumber season is raging across the pond...
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September 4, 2008
Big data in Nature
Nature (the magazine) has an excellent special report on big data, with articles on analysis, history, data centers, and much more. Best of all, it is freely available - enjoy!
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August 21, 2008
Not exactly anathema
Steven Levy goes nuts over Neal Stephenson's latest over in Wired. And I am on my way over to Amazon....
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June 24, 2008
Seagulls and Pixar
This review (by Michael Hirschhorn) of a new book on Pixar contains the best sentence I read today: "[Intellectual property lawsuits] follow successful entertainment businesses the way seagulls trail fishing boats."
Anyone else remember the "bert, bert, bert"* "mine, mine, mine" seagulls in Finding Nemo? Imagine them with briefcases.....
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June 11, 2008
Shared blindness
Ben Elton: Blind Faith, 2007
Ben Elton describes a society where reason is not allowed - where everything is based on faith and feeling, where everybody has to share what they are doing, where everything is ostensibly permitted, even encouraged, where everyone is famous. By law.
This world is a Web 2.0 version of 1984, nightmarish in its shallowness. Elton manages to make it both scary and believable - aside from the the inevitable screw-ups when it comes to technology (the hero creates some software that is decidedly primitive given real search-engines' capabilities for sentiment analysis and finding links between information items.
Recommended.
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May 25, 2008
Thinking about warfare, the last 100 years
Martin van Creveld: The Changing Face of War: Combat from the Marne to Iraq
Martin van Creveld gained fame for The Transformation of War
(As a digression, he characterizes the German invasion of Norway as rather risky and badly planned - it worked largely because the Norwegians were unbelievably unprepared.)
van Creveld divides war into two main phases: Before and after the atom bomb. After the atom bomb, total war was no longer possible, since it would mean mutual destruction. Instead, war has (for the most part) become guerilla war, where a militarily equipped power is battling a much weaker enemy, and, because the enemy is weak, become weak themselves.
There is almost no instances military powers successfully fighting insurgents - though since the history of fighting insurgencies are largely written by the losers, who argue that they could have won if not hindered by politicians, the press or lack of resources.
To fight an insurgency, the power in question must be legal, i.e., treat the insurgency like a criminal activity rather than a war (much as the British did in Northern Ireland, where they, incidentally, had a local police force and spoke the language.) Either that (which takes a lot of patience) or they must use cruelly applied force, with openness and without apology (as Hafez Assad did in Syria.) Trying to fight the war from a distance leads to a quagmire, but going in to fight the insurgents with their own means leads to losses and loses the war on the home front.
The book is admirably succinct when it describes the evolution in thinking about warfare up to about 1950 (showing, among other things, the increasing use of the scientific method in weapons and, to a lesser extent, tactics evolution.) It gets a bit repetitive on the question of how to fight insurgency. But the verdict on the US' fight in Iraq leaves no doubts about what the author thinks about the technical "revolution in warfare" and what it does:
Once the main units of the Iraqi army had been defeated and dispersed, most of the sensors, data links, and computers that did so much to aid in the American victory proved all but useless. In part, this was because they had been designed to pick up the "signatures" of machines, not people. But it was also because these sensors did not function very well in the densely inhabited, extremely complex environments where the insurgents operated. Myriad methods could be used to neutralize or mislead whatever sensors did work. Worst of all, sensors are unable to penetrate people's minds. As a result, almost four years after the war had started, the American troops still had no idea who was fighting them: Ba'athists or common criminals, foreign terrorists or devout believers. [...]
Soaking up almost $450 billion a year, the mightiest war machine the world has ever seen was vainly trying to combat twenty to thirty thousand insurgents. Its ultramodern sensors, sophisticated communications links, and acres of computers could not prevent its opponents from operating where they wanted, when they wanted, and as they wanted; [...] To recall the well-known, Vietnam-era song: When will they ever learn? (Ch. 6.5)
van Creveld offers few conclusions, aside from patience, people on the ground and good intelligence, all of which are hard to acquire and maintain. Otherwise, the insurgents will eventually win, if only because the military powers' only way of winning is not participating.
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Formula for spying
Mark Seal has a great article in Wired about how McLaren got hold of Ferrari's designs and the twists and turns that followed.
What blows my mind is the size of the budgets these guys are willing to throw away. A company like McLaren spends a lot of money and develops technology that eventually goes into production cars (at least, that's the theory), but with the hundreds of millions spent here, how can anyone recuperate it? Ferrari, at least, has a brand of car to sell, McLaren cooperates with Mercedes, but it still looks like rich man's game to me.
Anyway, an entertaining story, showing that you better treat your employees right (how could Ferrari management not react before their chief mechanic had spilled the beans?) and do your own scanning if you are hoping to avoid betrayal or getting caught betraying.
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May 9, 2008
You are what you eat, and we eat oil
Michael Pollan: The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, 2006
Michael Pollan is the author of In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, where he basically took on the flood of diet advice and replaced it with "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." In this book, he discusses the problem of what to eat today, which is not something most species wonder about, either because food is scarce and they will eat everything they can lay their hands on, or because they are so specialized that they can only eat one kind of food (like koalas and eucalyptus leaves, of pandas and bamboo shoots and leaves.) This choice is faced by all omnivores, such as humans.
The book tracks down the history of three meals: One industrial, one pastoral (i.e., organically grown), and one personal, where Pollan had to make everything himself, including hunting down the meat. Or, in other words, one meal from industrial society, one from the traditionally agricultural, and one from a society of foragers. The further back you go, the more he has to fudge the experience (and the same goes for the producers/foragers, I suspect.)
The industrial part of the book talks about corn, a plant that supplies the basis for most of what we eat (from corn flakes to meat (cattle now eat corn rather than grass) to sweeteners). Corn is highly productive, but cannot exist without human intervention. The rather twisted logic here is that the productivity of the farmer destroys farm life, and may destroy food as well.
The organically grown part is based on an analysis of an organic farm ("small" organic as opposed to "big" organic such as Whole Foods) which relies on local markets, crop and species rotation, and quality rather than quantity for profits. Back-breaking work and battles with a regulatory regime set up for industrialized farming (for instance, the meat processing plant needs to have a bathroom specifically for the USDA inspector).
The foraging part, of course, verges into the artificial - Pollan hunts feral pigs, but does it by SUV and with a high-powered rifle with a scope. But it is fun, and allows for some pretty interesting discussions of our relationship to food.
The book is full of interesting viewpoints and facts, and tells you things that you did not know - for instance that "free-range" chicken means that the chicken have access to grass and air. However, since they only live 8 weeks and have access to grass and air through a door that they don't dare venture out of, having always lived inside, this does not mean the chicken has had a life that much different from the fully industrialized chicken.
Here is one quote I liked (page 293): "The adult human brain accounts for 2 percent of our body weight but consumes 18 percent of our energy, all of which must come from carbohydrates. Food faddists take note [...]"
In other words, the book is the supply-side prelude to In Defense of Food. I have not read that one, but it is on my list of books to read, triggered by Omnivore's Dilemma. In the meantime, I listen to his talk at Google, and so can you:
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April 25, 2008
Cellphones against poverty
Excellent article about how cellphones reduce poverty from New York Times Magazines.
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April 12, 2008
The longest love story
Audrey Nieffenegger: The Time Traveller's Wife, Vintage, 2004
One of the favorite movies around our house, the kind that you bring out with a bottle of wine when you want to kick back and not think about anything in particular, is Groundhog Day. The premise is rather simple: Phil, a self-important and cynical weather man, played by Bill Murray, goes to small town to do a rather boring job of reporting on the annual awakening of the groundhog. A snowstorm closes the roads, the team has to stay another night - and when Murray wakes up the next morning, it is the previous day all over again. And so it continues - every day he wakes up to the same day, nobody except him remember what has happened.
Groundhog Day is a great movie not for that simple idea, but for how the movie manages to build on that simple premise. Aside from the one little thing of repeating the same day over and over, nothing Phil does is illogical, as he progresses from enjoyment to despair through development to, eventually, redemption. Anyone seeing it could imagine being Phil. It is a very intelligent comedy.
The Time Traveller's Wife (the book, that is, I haven't seen the movie) has a similar concept: The main protagonists are Henry and Clare, "who met when Clare was six and Henry thirty-six, and were married when Clare was twenty-two and Henry thirty. This can happen because Henry time-travels - involuntarily, always showing up buck naked in unexpected places, but very often around Clare. He even meets himself, at various ages. Clare and Henry have to come to terms with the misery of sometimes knowing what is going to happen in the future (which, of course, can be useful if you want to play the stock market) as well as the more practical difficulties of showing up in various places without clothes and with only a dim recollection of where you are and, especially, what time it is.
The novel succeeds for the same reasons that Groundhog Day succeeds: It manages to tell a believable story in an unbelievable setting. Clare and Henry must somehow shape a normal life out of an incredibly difficult situation, and how they do it is both funny and moving - a love story where you can never be sure of anything. At no point does Niederegger veer off into science fiction-like explanations of why Henry has this "rare condition", just as Groundhog Phil never tries to find out why he wakes up to the same day every morning. The book is also delightfully free of New Age-isms and spirituality. Instead, the focus is on the central characters and the relationship between them, how they have deal with the practicalities (stashing clothes in places Henry is likely to turn up, learning to pick pockets and locks to survive) and emotional turmoil. Both Clare and Henry learn things about each other's futures - how do you deal with knowing that something bad is going to happen, for instance, do you tell the person about it or not?
This is an extremely well thought out novel, at no point does the time-hopping (not to mention the oral form, where the characters tell their story in short episodes) get tedious (with a possible exception for their wedding, which gets a little contrived and sugary). It is a long love-story (76 years, to be exact) but worth the time spent.
Recommended.
(and thanks to Julie for leaving this one around the house so I could take it with me and make Frankfurt-LA seem a tad bit shorter.....).
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April 8, 2008
Geronotagressiveness
John Scalzi: Old Man’s WarI don’t read much science fiction – so far I think I have managed one Heinlein novel, a thick collection of classical sci-fi short stories (some of them extremely good, such as E. M. Forster’s The Machine Stops,) most of what Neal Stephenson has written, and now John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War. The latter was available as a free download from Tor Books (you have to sign up for their newsletters to be allowed to download it), and as such an excellent way to check out Scalzi’s serious writing (I am a faithful reader of Whatever, his blog.)
Well, I apologize, shouldn’t-look-a-gift-horse-in-the-mouth and so on, but this was a bit of a disappointment. The starting premise is fine, the language is straightforward, but I kept looking for a plot of some kind, and instead got a very basic picaresque about old people volunteering to be intergalactic soldiers fighting aliens in return for brand new bodies. (Not very picaresque either, since the hero becomes a highly decorated commander as the story progresses.) Entertaining and all that, competently written, the world Scalzi creates and populates is interesting, at least in the beginning, but the lack of any non-obvious plot to drive things forward makes it hard to get enthusiastic about the book.
It is obviously the beginning of a series, but still: Where are the surprises, the plot twists, the exciting insights? Not to mention, where are the personalities - these old people going out to fight a war all seem very cartoonish, without much difference in what they say and do, and certainly not much reflection about the task their are given, a few tactical shrewdnesses excepted. They all seem to shelve a lifetime of experience (and, presumably, thought) in favor of a "well, we would be dead now if it wasn't for joining up, so dying is no big deal."
I think I know why I don’t read sci-fi so much: Most sci-fi is, to put it bluntly, to the male mind what bodice-rippers are to females. Sci-fi works best, at least for me, when it says something about our own time, which is another way of saying that it works when it takes a current phenomenon and projects it out into the future. Excellent examples include Ann Warren Griffith's short story Captive Audience (written in the 50s, about how every product contains advertising, a surprisingly relevant point in these adsensical times); Philip K. Dick's Second Variety (written about 1953, too), about a future earth which has been evacuated by humans because autonomous weapon systems have taken over; or Neal Stephenson’s novels about virtuality (Snow Crash) and nanotechnology (Diamond age). This approach is hard work, for there has to be science – and thus research – in the fiction, or fiction in the science.
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March 9, 2008
Existential walkabout, in comfort
Walker Percy: The Moviegoer (1960)
Reread this one after 10 years, to see whether if I could understand better what the fuzz is about (The Moviegoer is regularly held up as a major event in American novel-writing.) The protagonist , Binx Bolling, lives a comfortable if nondescript life as a small-time stockbroker in New Orleans, going to movies and hitting on his secretaries. During most of the book goes on a "search", essentially trying to figure out what to do with himself. In the background lurks a changing society and traumatic experiences from Korea. Whether he succeeds or not is not clear by the end of the book, since the most dramatic thing happening is that he takes the train to Chicago from New Orleans and eventually figures out what to do (and whom to do it with).
I don't know. Somehow I have read this before, be it with Crime and punishment, Age of Reason, Hunger, or even Catcher in the Rye. The main distinction is that Binx Bolling is relatively well off and competent in what he does, even if most of his family and friends do not think much of it. The overwhelming theme of the book is Bolling trying to come to term with whether this comfortable life is all there is. Perhaps the book signaled the start of a more rebellious 1960s (it is comparatively racy for that time) but I think its time, unfortunately, has passed.
Or maybe I am just missing something. Is this really all?
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February 28, 2008
Wisfulness in portions
Neil Gaiman: Smoke and Mirrors
I haven’t read anything by Neil Gaiman, but one of my daughters has a copy of Coraline in her bookshelf. Nevertheless, he comes highly recommended from people I respect, so when I was picking over the airport bookstore in Orlando (admittedly not the most fertile of cultural hunting grounds) before an 18-hour flight to China, Smoke and Mirrors was a natural choice (actually, the only one).
The book is a collection of Gaiman’s early short stories, most of them realistically written with a slight twist of the supernatural. Each story at some point crosses into fairy-tale territory, but does it so discreetly that it seems natural and to be expected. I particularly liked Troll Bridge – about a young boy who meets a troll under a disused railway bridge – and Gold Fish Pond and other stories, which isn’t magical at all (it is a partly fictional reminiscence about a movie writer’s visit to Hollywood.) Gaiman's stories have a certain wistfulness about them, they are stories about people who want, somehow, to escape their surroundings and eventually do.
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February 1, 2008
The scientific method
I am currently re-reading Robert Pirsig's Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, and came across this section, which is one of the best explanations of the scientific method I know of (explained in terms of motorcycle maintenance, of course). So, here goes:...this morning I talked about hierarchies of thought--the system. Now I want to talk about methods of finding one's way through these hierarchies--logic.
Two kinds of logic are used, inductive and deductive. Inductive inferences start with observations of the machine and arrive at general conclusions. For example, if the cycle goes over a bump and the engine misfires, and then it goes over another bump and the engine misfires, and then it goes over another bump and the engine misfires, and then it goes over a long smooth stretch of road and there is no misfiring, then it goes over a fourth bump and the engine misfires again, you can logically conclude that the misfiring is caused by the bumps. That is induction: reasoning from particular experiences to general truths.
Deductive inferences do the reverse. They start with general knowledge and predict a specific observation. For example, if from reading the hierarchy of facts about the machine, the mechanic knows the horn of the cycle is powered exclusively from the battery, then he can logically infer that if the battery is dead, the horn will not work. That is deduction. Solution of problems too complicated for common sense to solve is achieved by long strings of mixed inductive and deductive inferences that weave back and forth between the observed machine and the mental hierarchy of the machine found in the manuals. The correct program for this interweaving is formalized as scientific method.
Actually I have never seen a cycle-type maintenance problem complex enough to really require full-scale formal scientific method. Repair problems are not that hard. When I think of formal scientific method, an image sometimes comes to mind of an enormous juggernaut. A huge bulldozer--slow, tedious, lumbering, laborious, but invincible. It takes twice as long, five times as long, maybe a dozen times as long as informal mechanic's techniques, but you know in the end you are going to get it. There is no fault isolation problem in motorcycle maintenance that can stand up to it. When you've hit a really tough one, tried everything, racked your brains and nothing works, and you know that Nature this time has really decided to be difficult, you say, "Okay, Nature, that's the end of the nice guy," and you crank up the formal scientific method.
For this you keep a lab notebook. Everything gets written down, formally, so you know at all times where you are, where you've been, where you're going and where you want to get. In scientific work and electronics technology this is necessary because otherwise the problems get so complicated you get lost in them and confused and forget what you know and what you don't know and have to give up. In cycle maintenance, things are not that involved, but when confusion starts, it's a good idea to hold it down by making everything formal and exact. Sometimes just the act of writing down the problem straightens out your head as to what they really are.
The logical statements written down into the notebook are broken down into six categories: (1) statement of the problem, (2) hypothesis as to the cause of the problem, (3) experiments designed to test each hypothesis, (4) predicted results of the experiments, (5) observed results of the experiments and (6) conclusions from the results of the experiments. This is not different from the formal arrangement of many college and high school lab notebooks. But the purpose here is no longer just busywork. The purpose is precise guidance of thought that will fail if they are not accurate.
The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure Nature hasn't mislead you into thinking you know something you don't actually know. There is not a mechanic or scientist or technical alive who hasn't suffered from that one so much that he's not instinctively on guard. That's the main reason why so much scientific and mechanical information sounds so dull and so cautious. If you get careless or go romanticizing scientific information, giving it a flourish here and there, Nature will soon make a complete fool out of you. It does it often enough anyway even when you don't give it opportunities. One must be extremely careful and rigidly logical when dealing with Nature: one logical slip and an entire scientific edifice comes tumbling down. One false deduction about the machine and you can get hung up indefinitely.
In Part One of formal scientific method , which is the statement of the problem, the main skill is in stating no more than you positively know. It is much better to enter a statement "Solve Problem: Why doesn't cycle work? Which sounds dumb, but is correct, than it is to enter a statement "Solve Problem: what is wrong with the electric system?" when you don't absolutely know the trouble is in the electric system. What you should state is "Solve Problem: What is wrong with the cycle?" and then state as the first entry in Part Two: "Hypothesis Number One: The trouble is in the electrical system." You think of as many hypothesis as you can, then you design experiments to test them to see which are true and which are false.
This careful approach to the beginning questions keeps you from taking a wrong turn which might cause you weeks of extra work or can even hang you up completely. Scientific questions often have a surface appearance of dumbness for this reason. They are asked in order to prevent dumb mistakes later on.
Part Three, that part of formal scientific method called experimentation, is sometimes though of by romantics as all of science itself because that's the only part with much visual surface. They see lots of tubes and bazaar equipment an people running around making discoveries. They do not see the experiment as part of a larger intellectual process and so they often confuse experiments with demonstrations, which look the same. A man conducting a gee-whiz science show with fifty thousand dollars' worth of Frankenstein equipment is not doing anything scientific if he knows beforehand what the results of his effort are going to be. A motorcycle mechanic, on the other hand, who honks the horn to see if the battery works is informally conducting a true scientific experiment. He is testing a hypothesis by putting the question to Nature. The T.V. scientist who mutters sadly "the experiment is a failure; we have failed to achieve what we had hoped for," is suffering mainly from a bad script writer. An experiment is never a failure solely because it fails to achieve predicated results. An experiment is a failure only when it also fails adequately to test the hypothesis in question, when the data it produces don't prove anything one way or another.
Skill at this point consists of using experiments that test only the hypothesis in question, nothing less, nothing more. If the horn honks, and the mechanic concludes the whole electrical system is working, he is in deep trouble. He has reached an illogical conclusion. The honking horn only tells him that the battery and horn are working. To design an experiment properly he has to think very rigidly in terms of what directly causes what. This you know from the hierarchy. The horn doesn't make the cycle go. Neither does the battery, except in a very indirect way. The point at which the electrical system directly causes the engine to fire is at the spark plugs, and if you don't test here, at the output of the electrical system, you will never really know whether the failure is electrical or not.
To test properly the mechanic removes the plug and lays it against the engine so the base around the plug is electrically grounded, kicks the starter lever and watches the spark-plug gap for a blue spark. If there isn't any he can conclude one of two things: (A) there is an electrical failure or, (B) his experiment is sloppy. If he is experiences, he will try it a few more times, checking connections, trying every way he can think of to get that plug to fire. Then, if he can't get it to fire, he finally concludes that A is correct, there is an electrical failure, and the experiment is over. He has proved that his hypothesis is correct.
In the final category, Conclusions, skill comes in stating no more than the experiment has proved. It hasn't proved that when he fixes the electrical system the motorcycle will start. there may be other things wrong. But he does know that the motorcycle isn't going to run until the electrical system is working and he sets up the next formal question: "Solve Problem: what is wrong with the electrical system?"
He then sets up hypothesis for these and tests them. By asking the right questions and choosing the right tests and drawing the right conclusions the mechanic works his way down the echelons of the motorcycle hierarchy until he has found the exact specific cause or causes of the engine failure, and then he changes them so that they no longer cause the failure.
An untrained observer will see only physical labor and often get the idea that physical labor is mainly what the mechanic does. Actually the physical labor is the smallest and easiest part of what the mechanic does. By far the greatest part of his work is careful observation and precise thinking. That is why mechanics sometimes seem taciturn and withdrawn when performing tests. They don't like it when you talk to them because they are concentrating on mental images, hierarchies, and not really looking at you or the physical motorcycle at all. They are using the experiment as part of a program to expand their hierarchy of knowledge of the faulty motorcycle and compare it to the correct hierarchy in their mind. They are looking at underlying form.(pages 99-103 from Pirsig, R. M. (1974). Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance. Bantam.)
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The technology canon
My first real boss, Erling Iversen, used to say that there were two kinds of IT people: Those who had read Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach and those who hadn't gotten around to it yet. In his opinion, what you got out of that book said much about how you thought about technology. Which leads me to wonder - do we have a canon of technology writing?
A canon is a list of books that you have to read to consider yourself knowledgeable - or, rather, educated in the classical sense - within a field. Creating lists is always controversial, and canons are more controversial than anything (witness all the discussions when Harold Bloom wrote The Western Canon.
The list I would like to create, though, is rather specialized: It consists of the books any technology thinker should read. I am not sure what I mean by that, aside from wanting to put together a list of books I like and that have influenced me, but hopefully the criteria becomes clearer as the list grows. One criterion is that the book must have stood the test of time, to be relevant even though the technology has changed (and, consequently, a book that I will occasionally re-read). A second (or perhaps it is the same criterion) is that its lessons apply outside the technology it discusses, whihc is another way to say that it will be readable by non-technologists.
Here is a brief start, just off the top of my head:
- Gödel, Escher, Bach: An eternal golden braid by Douglas Hofstadter
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig
- How Buildings Learn by Stewart Brand
- A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander
- Turing's Man: Western Culture in the Computer Age by J. D. Bolter
- The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder
- The Mythical Man-month by Frederic Brooks
- Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
- The Control Revolution by James Beniger
- Mastering the Dynamics of Innovation by James Utterback
- The Innovator's Solution by Clayton M. Christensen
- Consciousness Explained by Daniel C. Dennett
- The Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler
- The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World by Lawrence Lessig
...and probably others (a whole lot of Internet-oriented stuff missing here), but I am beginning to stray. Anyway, ideas for books that every technology thinker should have read.
Suggestions?
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January 26, 2008
Delightfully Absurdistan
Absurdistan bears the same relationship to Russia that John Kennedy Toole's Confederacy of Dunces bears to New Orleans: It paints a wildly satiric picture that somehow comes up more true than the original. The Ignatius O'Reilly of this book is Misha Vainberg, the grossly overweight, rich and rubbed son of a Jewish oligarch who eventually finds himself stranded in the rapidly disintegrating Republic of Absurdistan (known for its TV remote control factory), an oil-rich enclave by the Kaspian Sea. Misha wants to return to New York where went to Accidental college and learned to appreciate rap, junk food and assorted versions of psychoanalysis:
At Accidental College, we were taught that our dreams and our beliefs were all that mattered, that the world would eventually sway to our will, fall in step with our goodness, swoon right into our delicate white arms. All those Introduction to Striptease classes (apparently each of our ridiculous bodies had been made perfect in its own way), all those Advanced Memoir seminars, all those smposiums on Overcoming Shyness and Facilitating Self-Expression. And it wasn't just Accidental College. All over America, the membrane between adulthood and childhood had been eroding, the fantastic and the personal melding into one, adult worries receding into a pink childhood haze.
It really is no point trying to explain the plot here, to the extent that there is one. The language and the casual kicks in many directions (the role of the Golly Burton company in instigating civil war to get various military contracts, for instance) is howlingly funny and yet oddly irritating. Misha Vainberg is a despicable character, but with enough money and borrowed cachet that nobody seems to care. he blunders through a disintegrating republic where people are shot in the streets and bombed for the benefit of television, returing to his hotel room to read today's menu and seeking to escape on the American Express VIP train:
"Wow", I said in English. I turned around to look at my manservant. "Did you see that, Timofey? We did it. We saved a life. What does it say in the Tamud? 'he who has saved a life has saved and entire world.' I am not religious, but my God! What an accomplishment. how do you feel, Sakha?
But Sakha could not supply the words of gratitude I deserved. He merely breathed and drove. I decided to give him some time. I was already componsing an electronic message to Rouenna about the day's exploits. What had she told me in that dream about the eight-dollar apple? Be a man. Make me proud. Done and done. [...]
Respectful of the Hyatt sign, the soldiers waved us through, the locals banging on the sides of our vehicle, hoping we could enable their safe passage to the hotel. "Unfortunately we have to save our own hides first," I said to Sakha.
Unfortunately, Sakha, a local democracy advocate with uncertain background and appalling dress sense, gets shot about two minutes later. This eventually earns him a statue and Misha the post of Minister of Multicultural Affairs, with the job of trying to get Israel to finance a Holocaust center and the USA to invade.
And there you are - a novel impossible to classify, howlingly funny, and highly recommended.
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January 24, 2008
Carr on computers as current
Nicholas Carr: The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google.
In his excellent book Holidays in Hell, P. J. O'Rourke visits Future World (an attraction at Disney World) and says that it is "like opening a Chinese fortune cookie to read, 'Soon you'll be finished with dinner.'"
I get the same feeling reading Carr's book (an advance copy) - it is well written, stylish and easily recognizeable like Disney World - and understandable to the masses. The main message of the book is that because of faster networks, computing will be centralized and made accessible like electric power. Carr even draws a line back to the history of electric power provisioning. All very well, we already see this happening with Google applications and Gmail. But I first heard this prediction in 1990, spoken not as a wild speculation of the future but as a likely and not particularly exciting outcome by my thesis advisor, professor Jim McKenney at the Harvard Business School.
The centralized and ubiquitous computing future Carr eloquently predicts is, in principle, a return to shared mainframes accessed over telephone lines, only cheaper and faster by orders of magnitude. The mainframe lost dominance to the PC because people wanted control of their own computing and their own data, so they chose a cheap, weak and unreliable computing platform over one that offered stability, performance (at least in the aggregate) and reliable backups. Otherwise known as a disruptive technology.
Many hard disk crashes and viruses later, a significant portion of the populace have not yet moved their files to Google Docs and are unlikely to do so. For that matter, I would venture that more information and computing is still done on mainframes than on Internet-accessible servers. That is not where the innovation is, true, but new computing platforms come in addition to other platforms, not as replacements.
So we will move into the Cloud, but for social computing, collaboration, and information lookup. People will still want their local storage and (at least perceived) local control. And will end up with a three-tiered personal computer architecture: Traditional centralized computers for transactional systems that demand global recalculation (like airline reservation systems), personal storage and processing for the very personal (where are you going to store those photos, you said?) and cloud-based computing for stuff we want to find and share.
Oh well. This is not news. I know Carr's book is written for the great unwashed, and I admire his language and clarity of examples, but it is like Tom Friedman's The World is Flat: If you have been reasonably awake and facing in the right direction the last 10 years or so, you will not find any surprises here.
And that's a pity, for I read books for ideas, not for summaries. And this one, for all its elegance, had me dozing off more than switching on.
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January 22, 2008
Atlantic wall tumbling down
The Atlantic is following the New York Times lead (or, rather, example) and tearing down its paywall so that even non-subscribers can access its articles and archives. This is yet another indication that in the media world, the choice is now between not-quite-penniless relevance and no-longer-so-profitable obscurity, and that the scale is tipping further and further over from the latter to the former.
The point, of course, is that The Atlantic now is linkable, debatable and taggable in this Next Generation Enterprise of ours. I will celebrate by linking to two classic Atlantic articles by Tracy Kidder: Flying Upside Down and The Ultimate Toy, both of them from The Soul of a New Machine (1981), still the best case study (and, come to think of it, introductory text book) on leading techies I have ever read.
Enjoy. And link.
(Via The New York Times and Undercurrent.)
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January 7, 2008
Henry James taking a bow
David Lodge: Author, Author
I have seen this book described as "tepid", apparently because it does not contain scandals or a hard-hitting plot or whatever, but it is a study in indecisiveness - an author wanting to find money and fame as a playwright, but lacking the will both to shape his work to fit the format and a willingness to commit his best work to it. Many a scientist seeking money as a consultant will recognize the feeling, at least I do....
And it works - the "not quite documentary, not quite biograhy, not quite novel" format gives a great impression of the era moving from Dickens to Wilde, with Henry James wanting the latter's fame using the tools of the former. Another fascination is the time scale of things, and the easy living - while worried about money and deadlines, James had money for servants, a secretary, and leisurely trips to Paris and Venice for weeks and months to write and contemplate. His meticulousness with language was such that a large expense was telegraph fees for last-minute corrections. One suspects he would have been a great blogger, with infrequent but meticulously crafted, long entries.
Recommended, as is anything by David Lodge.
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January 3, 2008
System from the mess
David Weinberger: Everything is miscellaneous.
(Somehow it seems fitting to link to the blog rather than the Amazon page here.)
Weinberger argues (and here, for once, I can say that I have been there as well) that with the Web and digital, searchable information, we can rely on categorization less. We can move everything into the category "miscellaneous" and establish order by search, metadata extraction, etc.
The book lays out a detailed and very well written argument. I my summary seems overly short, it is because many of the ideas were familiar to me - but Weinberger writes beautifully, yet tersely, and this will, no doubt, be a standard reference for years to come.
Highly recommended!
Chapter summary (very short):
Chapter 1: The new order of order
Chapter 2: Alphabetization and its discontents
- alphabets are arbitrary, and alphabetization took a long time to be adopted
- topic-based ordering fails because of disagreements about order and the rate of change of knowledge
Chapter 3: The Geography of knowledge
- lists (the first order of order)
- Dewey decimal system
- knowledge is evolving, so system quickly becomes outdated
Chapter 4: Lumps and splits
- trees (the second order of order)
- Linnæus
- facet-based ordering (Colon Classification)
Chapter 5: The laws of the jungle
- tags (the third order of order)
- del.icio.us and Wikipedia
Chapter 6: Smart leaves
- metadata application; identification by UPC, RFID, tags
Chapter 7: Social knowing
- recommendation engines
Chapter 8: What nothing says
- metadata generation
Chapter 9: Messiness as a virtue
- semantic web too ordered, Flickr is a better metaphor, include and postpone
Chapter 10: The work of knowledge
- how the work of knowledge is changed, things defined directly in terms of their relationship to other things
- include and postpone, order applied later, emergent order
Coda: Misc.
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December 16, 2007
Goodreads is pretty good
My old colleague and fellow bookworm Nick Morgan invited med to Goodreads, a book community. This is a dangerously addictive site, I could envision moving my entire book collection into it. Slanted towards bestsellers and classics, but hey, that's what the world looks like...
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December 15, 2007
A really cool tool
For some reason, I have always like this passage from Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon:
Now, when Bobby Shaftoe had gone through high school, he'd been slotted into a vocational track and ended up taking a lot of shop classes. A certain amount of time was therefore, naturally, devoted to sawing large pieces of wood or metal in to smaller pieces. Numerous saws were available in the shop for that purpose, some better than others. A sawing job that would be just ridiculously hard and lengthy using a hand would be accomplished with a power saw. Likewise, certain cuts and materials would cause the smaller power saws to overheat or seize up altogether and there fore called for larger power saws. But even with the biggest power saw in the shop, Bobby Shaftoe always got the sense that he was imposing some kind of stress on the machine. It would slow down when the blade contacted the material, it would vibrate, it would heat up, and if you pushed the material through too fast it would threaten to jam. But then one summer he worked in a mill where they had a bandsaw. The bandsaw, its supply or blades, its spare parts, maintenance supplies, special tools and manuals occupied a whole room. It was the only tool he had ever seen with infrastructure. It was the size of a car. The two wheels that drove the blade were giant eight-spoked things with that looked to have been salvaged from steam locomotives. its blades had to be manufactured from long rolls of blade-stuff by unreeling about half a mile of toothed ribbon, cutting it off, and carefully welding the cut ends together into a loop. When you hit the power switch, nothing would happen for a little while except that a subsonic vibration would slowly rise up out of the earth, as if a freight train were approaching from far away, and finally the blade would begin to move, building speed slowly but inexorably until the teeth disappeared and it became a bolt of pure hellish energy stretched taut between the table and the machinery above it. Anecdotes about accidents involving the bandsaw were told in hushed voices and not usually commingled with other industrial-accident anecdotes. Anyway, the most noteworthy thing about the bandsaw was that you could cut anything with it and not only did it do the job quickly and coolly but id didn't seem to notice that it was doing anything. It wasn't even aware that a human being was sliding a great big chunk of stuff through it. It never slowed down. Never heated up.
This is what constitutes a really cool tool....Stephenson followed this up in his comparison of various kinds of computer systems in In the beginning...was the command line, a similar snippet of philosophy of the tools we use and the tools we are in awe of.
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November 27, 2007
Jipi and the paranoid chip
I just stumbled across this wonderful little story by Neal Stephenson: Jipi and the paranoid chip. Just the thing to assign to my students for the discussion of whether computers can be smarter than human beings some day.
In typical Neal Stephenson fashion, it has some of the meandering storyline of a shaggy dog story, with witty details on technology and economics. But fun, especially with the little twist in the penultimate sentence...
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November 24, 2007
A view from 2027
Cory Doctorow has a great short story called Other People's Money in Forbes - a snapshot from a future where it pays to be small and do physical fabrication. I remain unconvinced that the market for artfully designed retro-statues created from discarded consumer electronics would scale as elegantly as the fabrication and design process would in this story. But the take on VCs and the term "Silly Valley" made me smile.Posted by Espen at 5:34 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 18, 2007
Shaken, not speared
Apparently, Bill Bryson's latest book (published in the UK in September) is about Shakespeare. The Sunday Times had an essay on Shakespeare by Bryson in August. Looks like the introduction.
Chalk it up as a stocking stuffer...
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September 23, 2007
In a flat world, literally
Tom Friedman has come out with an updated version of The World is Flat, and on page 302, he cites my Ubiquity essay on why you should study math in high school:
Fame! Now, if only fortune would follow....
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Paul Fussell video interview
One of my favorite authors, Paul Fussell, is interviewed for two hours on Doing Battle - The Making of a Skeptic and The Boys' Crusade.
This shows the value of Wikipedia (where I found the link) and distribution of video over the Internet. I don't think there are that many people interested in an hour's interview with an author not much published in Norway. On a Sunday morning, to boot.
By the way, here is "The Mucker Pose", the essay Fussell talks about, unfortunately behind Harper's paywall, but they will learn eventually.
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September 18, 2007
The irrelevance and dangers of religion
Christopher Hitchens: god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, Twelve Books, 2007
Synopsis: Religion is, on overwhelming balance, a force for evil in the world. It is unnecessary, malevolent, and impedes mankind’s march towards truth and a livable future. Time to rid ourselves of it.
Christopher Hitchens, the current pretender to the throne of the independent and skeptical intellectual first occupied by Mencken in about 50 years ago, does not pull his punches in this extended essay. He sees no value in religion at all - “religion poisons everything”:
One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody – not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms – had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as comfort, reassurance and other infantile needs.) Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion, and one would like to think – though the connection is not a fully demonstrable one – that this is why they seem so uninterested in sending fellow humans to hell. (p. 64)
The man can write. And read. He analyzes the old and the new testament, the koran, and every other religion in between, including those long dead and those yet rising. For all of them, he shows how their foundations are built on sand – “fabricated non-events” – and have been changed up through the ages to suit the agenda of clergy and state. Hitchens speaks from first-hand experience: He has traveled widely, has been seen as a god himself (in Turkey), and was a witness against the beatification of Mother Theresa, showing how one of her purported miracles was due to new technology and old-fashioned journalistic gullibility and wishful thinking.
Hitchens systematically smashes each claim religion may have on our lives: Religion kills more people than it saves, it can be hazardous to your health, its claims to holiness and history are false (the three large monotheistic religions are largely plagiarized from other, older religions and each other), has nothing to offer when it comes to explain why the world is here and how it got started. It does not offer moral guidance – he argues that chances are people would behave more morally and ethically if they were sure this was the only life. God did not make man in his image – man made god in his.
The recent resurgence of fundamentalist religion, be it Christian or Muslim, has nothing to offer either:
Until relatively recently, those who adopted the clerical path [as a state form] had to pay for it. Their societies would decay, their economies contract, their best minds would go to waste or take themselves elsewhere, and they would consistently be outdone by societies that had learned to tame and sequester the religious impulse. […] Faith-based fanatics could not design anything as useful or beautiful as a skyscraper or a passenger aircraft. But, continuing their long history of plagiarism, they could borrow and steal these things and use them as negation. (p. 280)
Hithchens calls for a new Englightenment. Rather than the sordid and brooding atheism of Dawkins and Dennett and their establishment of a new grouping called “brights” (which, I assume, means fighting religion on its own terms, rather than those of rationality), he takes the more optimistic view that fighting religion no longer is the job for the outlandishly brave and superhumanly principled: This is an age where you can argue against religion and be safe. Not popular, perhaps, but relatively safe. The world moves forward, the new tools of analysis and knowledge dissemination mean that it gets harder and harder to misinform:
Religion has run out of justifications. Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, it no longer offers an explanation of anything important. Where once it used to be able, by its total command of a worldview, to prevent the emergence of rivals, it can now only impede and retard – or try to turn back – the measurable advances that we have made. Sometimes, true, it will artfully concede them. But this is to offer itself the choice between irrelevance and destruction, impotence or outright reaction, and, given this choice, it is programmed to select the worse of the two. Meanwhile, confronted with undreamed-of vistas inside our own evolving cortex, in the farthest reaches of the known universe, and in the proteins and acids which constitutes our nature, religion offers either annihilation in the name of god, or else the false promise that if we take a knife to our foreskins, or pray in the right direction, or ingest pieces of wafer, we shall be “saved.” It is as if someone, offered a delicious and fragrant out-of-season fruit, matured in a painstakingly and lovingly designed hothouse, should throw away the flesh and the pulp and gnaw moodily on the pit. (p. 282-3)
Mr. Hitchens is not an easy read, but he is very enjoyable. His references and examples go wide and deep, he has read everything and refers to it with little explanation and sometimes little context. But his searing wit, mercilessly logical chains of argument, and illuminating illustrations comes down on the better side of something that could have become a rant with any other writer. This is not a hastily composed monologue or an unconnected series of articles – Hitchens has been writing this book all his life, and will continue to write it.
Now if he would only make the next version include an equally powerful argument against alternative medicine and New Age superstition….
Highly recommended. If you are religious, you need this book to understand what you are in for (and what you need to surmount if you really want to believe.) If you are not, read it for pleasure and to stock up on arguments. In any case, read it for the language and the power of logic and learning.
PS: Here is a fun account by Hitchens himself about the book tour. Heaven forbid (there we go again) I would have to argue against him in any debate....
PSPS: Here is a great interview/radio debate with Hitchens, from WBUR Boston.
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August 28, 2007
Arrows and armour
B. H. Liddell Hart: History of the Second World War.
One of my enduring frustrations with books about WWII is poor mapping and relatively little focus on operational strategy. One reason for this, I have now found, is that Liddell Hart wrote the definitive book on the war in 1971, and every book since then either will have to concentrate on more details (such as Anthony Beevor's books on Berlin and Stalingrad) or take a more "themed" approach (such as John Keegan's WWII).
The book is cold-blooded and argumentative - with a focus on maneuver (nicely mapped) and evolving tactics. Liddell Hart spends more time on tank battles (in particular Rommel's campaigns in North Africa) than strictly necessary, and frequently introduces footnotes about his own role, pointing out how he had written critically about various weaknesses in British and US defenses long before anyone else. Then again, he has the right to do so - many of the newer tactics such as the Blitzkrieg and the "indirect approach" were developed or inspired by Liddell Hart's pre-war writings. This is war from the viewpoint of a professional soldier, with the benefit of hindsight and not a little admiration for the other side's competence and fortitude.
Liddell Hart is opinionated - he contends that the war could have been prevented if Britain and France had displayed more fortitude towards Hitler in the beginning, and that it could have been shortened if, among other things, Eisenhower had allowed Patton to surge towards Berlin. He also contends that the Allied policy of demanding an unconditional surrender prolonged the war both towards Germany and Japan, and that the dropping of the atom bomb was unnecessary, since Japan, having had all supply lines cut, was facing starvation and was actively looking for peace at the time they were dropped. I certainly am no historian, but his viewpoints seem very sensible, even with 35 years' worth of hindsight.
Liddell Hart's book is the one book every other historian refers to, and it is easy to see why. Indispensable reading. Go get it (I got mine on sale at Borders, so there.)
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August 19, 2007
De-programming the collective
Toby Segaran Programming collective intelligence (full description here) looks really interesting (brief pause here while I go to Amazon to get it.)
Note that Tim O'Reilly writes about his product on the corporate blog himself, with obvious interest and knowledge. That's CEO blogging the way it should be - and a role model for the publishers of the future, who otherwise will go the way of the music industry executive.
Changing that mindset, of course, would mean de-programming collective intelligence (or, perhaps, lack of it). The result remains to be seen....
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July 31, 2007
Reading about writing
Two books on writing: Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them and Stephen King's On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. Read Prose for practical advice (her main argument is that the writer should be concerned with writing good language, beginning with a good sentence, and ignore trends and fashion) and sheer enjoyment of good writing (with many examples). Read King for inspiration (the book is partially a memoir of his career, partially an exhortation to just write, with fairly simple advice, most notably "Second draft = First draft - 10%".)
Actually, both are good for inspiration, countering the dread of entering an airport bookstore and realising you have read it all....
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July 20, 2007
Moving writing (literally)
John McPhee (2006): Uncommon Carriers
John McPhee specializes, like Tracy Kidder, in detailed and ruminative reportages about things and people we see everyday, but seldom think about. In this collection of articles, he primarily studies transportation, describing the workings of long-distance trucking, coal trains, cargo ships, barges and a memorable case study of the workings of "The Sort", UPS' humongous sorting facility in Loisville, Kentucky.
I plan to use at least two of these articles in my classes - definitely the one on UPS, and perhaps the one on coal trains (following a crew from Union Pacific between strip mine and powerplant) or the one on interstate trucking (following a driver with a highly polished chemical truck moving WD-40 all around the US. Business school students (as, indeed, most of the population in Norway as well as the USA) have little experience with industrial scale enterprises, and McPhee's excellent reportages instill not just and understanding (and admiration) for the scale of these enterprises that no Harvard Business School case can come close to, but also an understanding and respect for the people running it, the unsung heroes of the eCommerce and air conditioning revolution.
Moving writing, quite literally. An example for any academic writer trying to explain what makes modern society tick.
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July 17, 2007
The science of the spooky
Mary Roach: Spook - Science tackles the afterlife, 2006
Roach does a fun romp investigating claims of the supernatural: Reincarnation (even going to India to investigate a purported case), various "scientific" investigations of spritism, ghosts and other kookery from the Middle to the New Age. She manages to be somewhat open - at least in the beginning, before becoming scientific and debunking things without descending into the at times tiresom earnestness of full-time skeptics.
The best part of the book is the language and the many funny foonotes, full of quips like reporting on someone communicating with a dead "Chopin (who has, we learn, resumed composing following a brief stint decomposing)". She looks into people trying to weigh the soul (by measuring body weight loss as a person dies) and various echtoplasm claims (spooky white material produced by mediums, mostly turning out to be cheesecloth.) An interesting explanation for ghosts may be that they are caused by infrasound, which can be produced by fans and other electrical equipment and be detected only by a few people, who may experience unease and blurry sights in the corner of their eyes.
Anyway, fun summer reading.
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July 14, 2007
Vacation slouching
One of the really great aspects of vacationing in friends' apartment is going through their bookcases. In this case, this is a little like reading boingboing on paper - and discovering small treasures such as Calvin Trillin's American Stories. A collection of New Yorker articles that never, ever would have been published in a Norwegian magazine on account of being more than 10000 characters long.
Anyway, it is now noon and all I have done so far is read while the family is waking up (some of them returning from an early morning shopping jaunt.) This is life.
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June 17, 2007
Airline overview
The Economist has a survey article on airline travel - not much new, and it goes into details less than what I would expect from such an august publication, but still a useful and updated overview of an interesting industry. Also an interview with Paul Markillie, the author of the article, who offers this quote:
In the airline industry, change is happening, but it's very slow. The result is you have an industry that brought the world globalisation, but has been unable itself to globalise.
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May 28, 2007
High-intensity low-intensity war analysis
Martin van Creveld: The Transformation of War, Free Press 1991.
This was was pushed on me by Eirik Newth, on the theory that I would be interested. He was right. Van Creveld shows how the traditional, Clausewitzian concept of war (as a fairly regulated game between two clearly identifiable nations, a "continuation of politics by other means") breaks down when the fight is not about land, but survival, and when the power differential between the two warring parties is too great, the nature of war will change towards terrorism and other forms of "low-intensity" conflicts, increasingly also targeting political or military leaders rather than their fortifications.
His definition of war is interesting: It is not a "real" war unless both parties are putting their lives at risk. Soldiers attacking a weak or unarmed enemy are committing an atrocity, which harms them morally and in the long term renders their cause unjust. Here is an excerpt of this in my opinion pivotal point (p. 175):
There are a number of other points as well - about the role of women in war, for instance: The smaller the group, the more directly active the women, but as soon as things become organized and regular, the women are relegated to support roles, so as not to spoil the game for the men.Another very important reason why, over time, the strong and the weak will come to resemble each other, even to the point of changing places, is rooted in the different ethical circumstances under which they operate. Necessity knows no bounds; hence he who is weak can afford to go to the greatest lengths, resort to the most underhand means, and commit every kind of atrocity without compromizing his political support and, more important still, his moral principles. Conversely, almost anything the strong does or does not do is, in one sense, unnecessary and, therefore, cruel. For him, the only road to salvation is to win quickly in order to escape the worst consequences of his own cruelty; swift, ruthless brutality may well prove more merciful than prolonged restraint. A terrible end is better than endless terror and is certainly more effective. By way of an analogy, suppose a cat and mouse situation. Its very size precludes the mouse from tormenting the cat, though it is capable of driving him crazy--a different matter altogether. The cat, however, must kill the mouse at once. should it fail to do so, then its very size and strength will cause its actions to be perceived as unnecessary; hence--had it been human--as cruel.
This book was written in 1991 and does, of course, not say much about the Iraq conflict, but it is, according to Wikipedia, required reading for US Army officers. It should be.
On the negative side, the writing is uneven and a bit repetitive - I found myself longing for a table or some sort of timeline of wars, and fewer restatements of the main hypothesis. But in most places, it shines.
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May 16, 2007
Sony Reader review
Kevin Kelly's very useful blog Cool Tools has an entry about the Sony Portable Reader, which the reviewer thinks trumps the Iliad. I have been meaning to get one of these devices for a while - looks like it will be Sony, on the theory that it is better to get one device that does things well than one that does many things less well. Anyone with Iliad experience?
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May 2, 2007
Delightfully book-mad
Nicholas A. Basbanes (1995): A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books.
This is the book to pick up if you feel guilty about having too many books: Basbanes tells of book collectors and their passion, describing the need to have many books and to keep them (and, occasionally, read them) as a psychological condition its sufferers have no need or desire to be cured of.
Basbanes writes beautifully, with passion and compassion, anecdote after story after chronicle of collectors from Winston Churchill to a man who stole more than 30,000 rare books from libraries around the USA. He dives into the rare book markets and their mechanisms and describes what collectors do to make sure that their collection lives after them (donates them to universities, mostly, with stipulations on where and how the books are to be kept.)
If you ever have felt guilty (as I have) about those cases of books in the basement and the lack of visible wall surfaces in your home, this is the cure: Basbanes make it all seem so normal, almost desirable.
How fitting that it is out of print - if you can get your hands on a copy, add it to you collection!
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May 1, 2007
An Indian argument
Amartya Sen: The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity (2006), Picador.
I picked this up in India, after having read Gurcharan Das' India Unbound and wanting to learn more about the history and society of a country that holds a fifth of the world's population and now, finally, is beginning to pull its weight in the international economy. Sen's collection of essays is the intellectual complement to Das' rather easier and less multifaceted account of the economic liberation of India, focusing on the central aspects of deliberation ("argumentativeness") and religious tolerance that has been central to India for centuries.
The book echoes my own impression of India: That it is a mosaic rather than a melting pot, and a mosaic that seems to be able to sort things out in a peaceful, democratic and intellectual manner. Notwithstanding certain dynastic tendencies (not unlike the USA, incidentally), India has always been a heterogenous society, tolerant of religious variety, open to ideas, with lively debates and a relative lack of coercion.
Any collection of essays, primarily built on speeches, runs the risk of repetitiveness and a certain heaviness of language, and this collection is no exception. I particularly like the chapter on Tagore and his role in the building of India (for some reason he is seen as a sometime-fashionable mystic by Western readers, at least as I dimly remember from my high-school days), as well as the discussions of India's argumentative tradition throughout the centuries - democracy did not come to India with the English, who rather built on a tradition of debate and openness that was already there. Sen cautions against an idea of India as a monocultural country in general, and as a militant Hindu contry in particular: India has 180 million Muslims, for instance, living peacefully among many other religions.
I have not heard this poem by Tagore, quoted by Sen in the book, but it sums up Sen's hopes for his country - and describes the foundation of heterogeneity and openness he sees as there to build on:
Where the mind is without fear and the head held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by Thee into ever-widening thought and action;
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
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April 26, 2007
Consulting as system and profession
Toppin, G. and F. Czerniawska (2006). Business Consulting: A Guide to How it Works and How to Make it Work. London, The Economist.
This is a useful but uneven book. Its main contribution lies in the development of a model called "the Business Consulting Ecosystem", which describes the various entities in the consulting profession and how they interact. There are also good descriptions of how the industry has evolved over time and good interviews with many consultants and clients. I particularly liked chapter 11, which describes the markets for ideas and how companies try to capitalize on them, though that may be because one of the companies described is Index, which I worked for in the nineties.
On the negative side, the latter part (second half) of the book and the conclusions feel quite a bit like a Powerpoint presentation, with bullet points giving the outline and filler text added in. The book is also slightly dated, since it was published in 2004 and things have moved on a bit, though it does report on the transition to outsourcing and the increasing polarization between advisory consulting and implementation.
So, smart in parts, useful in general, but uneven when it comes to drawing decisive conclusions. Sounds like the consulting business.
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April 16, 2007
Bryson on cricket
After three weeks in cricket-obsessed India, I came back and dipped into Bill Bryson's incomparable Australia travelogue, In a Sun-burned Country. I couldn't resist quoting his comments on cricket (note that Bryson's father was a baseball writer, so it is not like he doesn't know other games):
"After years of patient study (and with cricket there can be no other kind) I have decided that there is nothing wrong with the game that the introduction of golf carts wouldn't fix in a hurry. It is not true that the English invented cricket as a way of making all other human endeavors look interesting and lively; that was merely an unintended side effect. I don't wish to denigrate a sport that is enjoyed by millions, some of them awake and facing the right way, but it is an odd game. It is the only sport that incorporates meal breaks. It is the only sport that shares its name with an insect. It is the only sport in which spectators burn as many calories as players -- more if they are moderately restless. It is the only competitive activity of any type, other than perhaps baking, in which you can dress in white from head to toe and be as clean at the end of the day as you were at the beginning.
Imagine a form of baseball in which the pitcher, after each delivery, collects the ball from the catcher and walks slowly with it to center field; and that there, after a minute's pause to collect himself, he turns and runs full tilt toward the pitcher's mound before hurling the ball at the ankles of a man who stands before him wearing a riding hat, heavy gloves of the sort used to to handle radio-active isotopes, and a mattress strapped to each leg. Imagine moreover that if this batsman fails to hit the ball in a way that heartens him sufficiently to try to waddle forty feet with mattress's strapped to his legs, he is under no formal compunction to run; he may stand there all day, and, as a rule, does. If by some miracle he is coaxed into making a misstroke that leads to his being put out, all the fielders throw up their arms in triumph and have a hug. Then tea is called and every one retires happily to a distant pavilion to fortify for the next siege. Now imagine all this going on for so long that by the time the match concludes autumn has crept in and all your library books are overdue. There you have cricket.
But it must be said there is something incomparably soothing about cricket on the radio. It has much the same virtues as baseball on the radio - an unhurried pace, a comforting devotion to abstruse statistics and throughtful historical rumination, exhilarating micro-moments of real action - but stretched across many more hours and with a lushness of terminology and restful elegance that even baseball cannot match. Listening to cricket on the radio is like listening to two men sitting in a rowboat on a large, placid lake on a day when the fish aren't biting; it's like having a nap without losing consciousness. It actually helps not to know quite what is going on. In such a rarefied world of contentment and inactivity, comprehension would become a distraction."
My thoughts exactly. Restful in the extreme, much like watching snooker on late-night TV. Micro-excitement and levels of understanding you can dip into if you care to. But in general, you don't.
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March 30, 2007
Blinkenread
Gladwell, M. (2005). Blink. London, Penguin.Sometimes you make the right decision in two seconds, because intuition tells you so. This book is about those two seconds.
Snap judgments work because we use our unconscious to look for small cues that we don't know that we know. If we try to rationalize the process and explain why we reaced a decision, it will bear little relationship to reality: They are different decision-making processes.
Many interesting examples: Art experts instantly spotting fakes, analytically oriented strategies losing to quick improvisation in war games, police making fatal mistakes (such as the Amadou shooting), experts being able to tell when someone is lying by looking for millisecond facial expressions. The skill of snap judgements can be trained (and many police forces do.)
This is a light read, but well researched. I picked it up before a long plane ride, and did not regret it. (Looked at it in 2005, but I had overdosed on these kinds of books after reading The Wisdom of Crowds, which isn't nearly as good.)
Recommended.
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March 24, 2007
Military intelligence
Keegan, J. (2003). Intelligence in War: Knowledge of the Enemy from Napoleon to Al-Qaeda. London, UK, Pimlico.
Case stories of intelligence (from the Battle of Abukir, Shenandoah Valley, German-English sea battles in WWI, Crete, Midway, the U-boat war, and the hunt for the V-1 and V-2) and its strategic importance in warfare.
Main point (p.23):
"It is the intrinsic difficulty of communication, even, indeed above all, for the agent with 'access', which limits his - or occasionally her - usefulness in real time. By contrast, the enemy's own encrypted communications, if they can quickly be broken, will, of their nature, provide intelligence of high quality in real time.
The history of 'how, what, where, when' in military intelligence is therefore largely one of signal intelligence. Not exclusively, human intelligence has played its part and so, latterly, has photographic and surveillance intelligence. In principle, however, it is the unsuspected overhearings of the enemy's own signals which have revealed his intentions and capabilities to his opponent and so allowed counter-measures to be taken in time."
On keeping the Napoleonic expedition to Egypt a secret: "Gossip helped to refine the picture. Some of the academics who were to accompany the expedition began to boast, a notorious failing of clever men leading unimportant lives."
From the conclusion (p398):
"[...] it strikes this author that the organization of intelligence-gathering and subversion within the same body is undesirable. Subversion is a weak way of fighting, differing from conventional warfare by the total unpredictability of its results; moreover, in a democracy, it is always liable to disavowal by legitimate authority and denunciation by authority's political opponents. Intelligence-garhering, by contrast, can yield conflict-winning outcomes and , if securely and soberly conducted, is an activity only those of ill-will can condemn.
Yet, in the last resort, intelligence warfare is a weak form of attack on the enemy, also. Knowledge, the conventional wisdom has, is power; but knowledge cannot destroy or deflect or damage or even defy an offensive initiative by an enemy unless the possession of knowledge is also allied to objective force."
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The Wealth and Powerty of India
Gurcharan Das. (2002). India Unbound: From Independence to the Global Information Age. New Dehli, Penguin Books.
India Unbound is fascinating - a combination of autobiography and an essay series, where Gurcharan Das reflects on the various stages in his life and how what he learned changed his views on India, its politics and economic development. Das is a commentator and an essayist, and the book is colored by this: It repeat itself and belabors the same point from many angles. For a novice of Indian it is useful, best read with access to a computer so you can look up words and places like "haveli" and "octroi" as you go along. Das' language is fluent and content-packed, with an elegance reminiscent of Landes' The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (whom, incidentally, he criticises, rightly, for an overly simplistic explanation of India's lack of progress).
Highly recommended. This essay borrows much from the book. Check out his columns here.
Some quotes:
On India after independence: There were two competing visions. Mahatma Gandhi had a vision of self-reliant villages, with a reinvigorated agriculture and craft production. He opposed modern urban industry because it dehumanized man. Jawaharlal Nehru had a modern scientific mind, and he was much impressed by the economic gains of the Soviet revolution; but he was also committed to democracy. He had a vision of democratic socialism with the state leading the process of industrialization. He spurned capitalism because it exploited and it created inequalities. Both Gandhi's and Nehru's ideas were flawed, however, and we have spent a long time chasing after them. Gandhi distrusted technology but not businessmen. Nehru distrusted businessmen but not technology. Instead of sorting out the contradictions, we mixed the two up. We have to deal with holy cows: smal companies are better than big ones (Gandhi); public enterprises are better than private ones (Nehru); local companies are better than foreign ones (both). They so mesmerized us that the succeeding generation, whose job was to jettison these foolish ideas, failed to do so and did us incalculable harm. (p.11)
When ordinary human beings err, it is sad, but when leaders do, it haunts us for generations. (p. 51)
If America is a melting pot, India is a mosaic. (p. 72)
The economists, it seems, turned out to be hopelessly optimistic about the ability of poor countries to transform their economies through investment in import-substituting manufactures and overly pessimistic about their ability to export. (p.75)
The more rules there are, the less people will do on their own, and the more effort they will spend in getting around the rules. [...] The ordinary person will generally do the right thing, left to his or her own devices. The important thing is that people believe that only results will win them rewards.
In Hindu society the Brahmin (priest, teacher) is at the top of the four-caste hierarchy, followed by the Kshatriya (variously landholder, warrior, ruler). The Vaishya or bania (businessman) comes third, and the Shudra (laborer, artisan) is last. Below the four are casteless "untouchables" and tribals. The three upper castes constitute roughly 15 percent of India's population, and have ruled th ecountry for three thousand years. About half of India is laboring or Shudra caste, divided in turn into hundreds of subcastes. [occupational or geographic]. More than 20 percent of the population are the casteless or "untouchables" and tribals for whose uplift Mahatman Gandhi worked all his life. The remaining 15% of India belongs to other religions: 11 percent Muslim; the rest Sikh, Christian, Parsee, etc. (p.140)
Modern India's tragedy is not that we adopted the wrong economic model in the 1950s, but that we did not reverse direction after 1965.
Businessmen are fine producers of goods and jobs, but they are cowards and do not speak out.
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September 2, 2006
Hippopotic hysterics
In today's department for things worth reading we bring an excerpt from Stephen Fry's The Hippopotamus, which could be described as a comic mystery novel - though there is no crime involved, only some vaguely magical healings with an ingenious solution in the end. Howlingly funny and full of little side stories like this one, which you will find towards the end:
When Gordon Fell was knighted in 1987 he threw a celebration binge afterwards at the Savoy. Not the Dominion Club of course, as it should have been, but the Savoy. During the party he described to us the ceremony at Buckingham Palace. Gordie hadn't been the only man there that morning to be knighted, naturally. The Queen contrives to process dozens of candidates in one hit. They are disposed, it would seem, in rows of chairs, as at a lecture, while a band of the Guards plays anus-contractingly inappropriate tunes like "A Spoonful of Sugar" and "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" in the background. Gordon was due to kneel and be dubbed next in line after the self-important fool sitting beside him. This pompous little pip-squeak had wriggled his way into the chairmanship of some large charity or another and was now coming to collect what he regarded as his due reward.
The figure introduced himself with pride and whispered, after Gordon had told him his name, "And what do you to, then? The diplomatic, is it?"
"I'm a painter," Gordie said.
"Really?" said the fellow. "Not one of those awful moderns, I hope."
"Oh no," said Gordon. "Of course I am not a modern painter. I was born in the sixteenth fucking century, wasn't I? I'm an Old Master, me."
Not quite Buck House language, perhaps, but justifiable under the circumstances. The chap turned his shoulder on Gordie, disgusted that he could be sharing an honour with such an animal. Gordon pointedly scratched his groin and yawned.
Anyway, the turn came for the charity weasel to kneel and be serviced. It so fell out that this investiture into the Knights Commander of the Crawling Toads, or whatever order it was that he was in line for, took place unaccompanied by melody, the band being engaged in taking the sheet music of "Consider Yourself" off their stands and replacing it with "Born Free". her Maj's sword tapped the man's shoulders in hushed silence and he rose to an upright position with becoming dignity, bowing his head with a crisp snap that would have shamed an equerry. As he did so his nervous, uptight and excitable system delivered itself of an astoundingly sustained and quite startlingly loud fart. The monarch stepped backwards, which was all part of the programme as it happened, but which seemed to everyone present to be an involuntary reaction to the man's violent rip. The expression on his face as he trailed miserably down the aisle was one of deepest woe. Every person in the room stared at him or, worse, waited until he was level with them and then averted their eyes. Gordon, passing him in the aisle as he made his own way to the steps of the throne, murmured in a growl audible to all, "Don't worry, old boy. She'll be used to it. Keeps plenty of dogs and horses, don't forget."
The lips of the Queen, according to Gordie, were seen to curve into a smile at this and she detained him in conversation for longer than anyone else. When he returned to his seat next to the still-scarlet farter, Sir Gordon rasped out, in time with the band which was now operative again, "Bo-orn free, a-free as the WIND BLOWS."
Being the vindictive sod that he is, Gordie didn't stop there, naturally. In the mêlée of press that gathered outside the palace and especially around him, he was asked how the occasion had gone.
"That man over there," Gordon said, pointing at the chap, who was standing with his wife and only a photographer from a local Hampshire newspaper to bolster his self-esteem, "let out the most extraordinary fart, virtually in the sovereign's face. Quite astonishing. Some kind of anarchist, I suppose."
The pack flew to the spot like flies to a cow-pat and the pathetic creature was last seen streaking down the Mall, his silk topper bouncing on the pavement behind him. He lost his hat, his reputation and in all probability his wife in one Gordon Fell swoop. Never insult a painter. Not worth it.
Highly recommended!
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August 25, 2006
The VC version of Tech adoption
Coburn, P. (2006). The Change Function: Why some technologies take off and others crash and burn. New York, NY, Penguin Portfolio.
Picked this one up on a lark from Amazon. Written by a venture capitalist, it breezily argues that the many technologies fail because the perceived pain of adoption is too high.
I found this one hard to get into - my suspicion is that it is (like Women are from Venus, Men are from Mars) one of those books where the title suffices for understanding the main idea. In this case, the title doesn't, but Coburn helpfully provides this summary in the introduction:
ISSUE 1: High-tech failure rates stink
The commercial failure rate of nominally great new technologies is troublingly high. That failure rate is consistent with the hatred and distrust most normal human beings - which I like to call Earthlings - tend to have of high technology. That hatred and distrust is a bummer since our little planet can use all the help technology might provide.
ISSUE 2: Suppliers think they are in charge but in reality users are in charge
The technology industry operates according to an implicit supplier-oriented assumption. That assumption is that if one builds great new disruptive technologies and lets cost reduction kick in, markets will naturally appear. This is known as "build it and they will come."
He then goes on to provide a semi-mathematical formula of the "change function" with, I think, the likelihood of success (or, at least, technology adoption) as the product of "perceived crisis" and "perceived pain of adoption".
OK. The perceived pain of reading the rest of the book from that point on became a little too much for me, especially since a quick glance awakened reminiscences of 140-page PowerPoint presentations and hastily grabbed examples. Plus, my perceived crisis is in too much adoption. So I disengaged.
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July 30, 2006
New Yorker on Wikipedia
The New Yorker has a good article about Wikipedia, written by Stacy Schiff. Nothing really new here, but it is well written, has a fairly complete history of Wikipedia, and made me read about the Boston Molasses Disaster....Posted by Espen at 11:12 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
June 20, 2006
That word again
Not only brillantly written, but laugh-out funny without (overtly) trying to be: Fuck by Christopher Fairman (March 2006). It will be interesting to see which journal, if any, will publish this. Not to mention, who will debate him?
On a side note, I missed a reference to Bill Bryson's brilliant discussion of fuck in Mother Tongue, where he lays out all the various ways the word can be used. Brilliant, indeed.
(Via Feld).
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April 13, 2006
B. Akunin goes retro
Boris Akunin: Murder on the Leviathan, Phoenix, 2004Writers of historical detective novels have a dilemma: Should their protagonist be modern (in the sense that he or she is rational, humanist, evidence-based, and not hampered by the superstitions of the day) or saddled with contemporary racial, scientific and historical prejudices? Umberto Eco's Thomas of Ockam (in The Name of the Rose), for instance, has been criticised as almost superhumanely modern for the 14th century.
B. Akunin's hero Erast Fandorin strikes a nice balance, and I look forward to reading more of the books about him. The Leviathan is a classical (a tad bit too classical, actually) tale in the tradition of Agatha Christie, with a limited set of suspects, each with their own secrets that eventually come out, a conspiracy, and a bumbling police detective. The plot is fantastic, but I get a little bit annoyed with the breaking of one of the key rules of the classical crime novel: Thou shalt not introduce evidence the reader does not have access to as part of the explanation. Furthermore, I found the Parisian police inspector a tad bit too bumbling to be believable, and the alternative theories offered a bit too contrived.
But these are minor annoyances: B. Akunin cheats a little, but does even begin to sink to the Dan Brownish levels. I at first found the Japanese participant a little hard to believe, but since the author is a expert on historical Japan I will take him at his word. And the Victorian pace and language of the novel is not irritating, simply because it is done consistently and with great care. What the novel lack in tightness of the plot and terseness of description it makes up for in richness of characters and liveliness of villains. More Sherlock Holmes than Miss Maple.
In Norway, the Easter vacation is often spent reading mysteries - a tradition borne from skiing holidays spent in log cabins with bad weather and lack of electricity. I could think of worse company than B. Akunin's books, especially as a replacement of the musty Agatha Christie volumes commonly found there.
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April 12, 2006
Flatworld revisited
Edward E. Leamer, Chauncey J. Medberry Professor of Management at Anderson School, UCLA, has written an excellent critique of Tom Friedman's The world is flat. In fact, something close to the review I wish I had written rather than what I wrote.
Leamer has some issues with the imprecise language and confusion of direct and indirect causality of Friedman, but ends up concluding that the book communicates a message rather well - and that the market, despite his misgivings about the book, has concluded that it is good. Language and metaphor trumps academic discipline and data. Leamer reduces Friedman's ten forces to three (p.12):
- More Unskilled Workers: Economic liberalizations has injected a huge number of unskilled workers into the global labor market.
- New Equipment for Knowledge Workers: The Internet and the PC have fundamentally changed the nature of knowledge work, raising productivity and emphasizing talent.
- Communications Innovations: Cell-phones, beepers [beepers? who uses beepers?], e- mail and voice-mail keep us all wired and connected 24/7, thus eliminating the borderline between time at work and time at leisure. These same communication tools, together with the Internet and virtually costless telecommunications have extended the geographic reach of suppliers, and have increased the intensity of competition for mundane work.
and argues that the first two aren't "flattening", only the third (and he much prefers the term "smaller world"). In essence, we can communicate, so distance becomes less important. Another turn on Beniger's control screw, in essence.
Leamer also discusses the impact of the communications revolution on work, saying that the more "mundane" the work, to a larger extent it can be moved to a place with lower labor costs. He even provides this list of work in terms of its mundanity:
- Type this page.
- Edit this page.
- Write an article for an Economics journal.
- Write a good joke.
(Incidentally, I love this list, because I can, at least when I feel a need for self-justification, place blogging somewhere between 3 and 4 and thereby tell myself that I am doing something unique. Or perhaps something nobody else wants to do?) He also draws a useful distinction between trade that requires a relationship and trade that doesn't but stops short of discussing to what extent increased communication can establish relationships that will enable trade to move from the very mundane to the less mundane.
Where Leamer really shines is in the facts department, where he shows that the world is becoming flatter at a much smaller rate and in a much more localized pattern than Friedman postulates. Income in India and China is on the rise, but the top 18% of the world rises faster. (He also points to Yale professor William Nordhaus' excellent spinning globe, which indicates a kind of temperature chart of economic activity, showing red-hot localized areas (notably few in India and China) and solid blue for most of the globe.) Trade contributes to the decline in manufacturing jobs, but doesn’t seem to be the primary driver (technology is). Outsourcing of intellectual work is "a small drop in a very large bucket", and the US does not need to fear for its economic leadership in Tom Friedman's world.
Leamer concludes with a useful distinction between the computer as forklift (a source of income equality, since anyone can learn how to operate a forklift and thus obviate competitive advantages in strenght) and the computer as microphone (an amplifier of talent and thus a source of income inequality). He ends by saying that the world is not getting flatter, but that to a larger extent the difference will be between those with and without talent.
Which sounds a lot like a flatter world to me.
And therein lies my issue with Leamer's paper, to the extent I have one. To me, his conclusion sounds like Friedman's, albeit with less fancy metaphors (though still halting - a weak artist gets better with a microphone, and song distribution services like Pandora are income equalisers for talent, in that they decompose the delivery of music and thus reduces the need for recognizeable artists).
For my part, I think economists should do what I think Leamer is doing, but not quite admitting: Come to peace with Tom Friedman and his book, and use it (and, of course, Tom Friedman) as a communications vehicle to promote what Hans Rosling calls a facts-based discussion of globalization and economics. Tom Friedman creates language and ideas that may not be as precise and well-defined as academia would want, and his conclusions are definitely on the livelier side of average. But people read the book and, like it or not, it becomes the reference point. And I read Leamer's critique because, well, I read Tom Friedman's book.
Worse could have happened. Think of philosophers having to explain their ideas in terms of Sophie's World, The Tao of Pooh, and anything Ayn Rand has put out. Not to mention management researchers having to deal with Who moved my cheese? At least Friedman tells good stories and provides wonderful examples. It is up to academe to bring a more coherent story to the table, and make it as understandable.
(Via Marginal Revolution via Brad Delong.)
Posted by Espen at 5:11 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
February 28, 2006
Books on knowledge work
Jim McGee has a good list of books on knowledge work at his blog. I recognize a number of favorites (Information architecture; anything by Christopher Alexander, though the choice here is one of the denser ones; and Don Norman's Design of everyday things.) Others are not my favorites - Gause and Weinberger's "Are your lights on?" is one of the few books I have actually thrown out. Langer's Mindfulness I read in grad school and it irritated me with what I felt were rather simplistic exhortions to pay attention.
Much as I like many of these books (at least for the ones that focus on the thinking part of knoweldge work), I wonder whether we have a causality problem - is it that people who work smart and pay attention seek out books like these, or do reading them actually help in some way. I suspect that there is some sort of middle ground - people who are aware of the need to think creatively create crutches for themselves, partially by exposing themselves to many patterns, and then get a jump start in the writing, searching (an area missing from Jim's list, incidentally) or creative process by starting from a known example or platform.
In one of his books, Richard Feynmann explain a colleague's incredible performance in standup mathematics by saying that he had worked so much with numbers that when faced with any calculation he could approximate fast - "It was easy for him - everything was close to something he knew." Some of these books - and I suppose which book will work for whom is highly individual - will offer a few more known places to start from.
(And while you are at it, check out Jim's post on essays on research work as well. Great stuff.)
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January 19, 2006
hackoff.com on order
Tom Evslin still maintains that he will sign all pre-ordered copies of hackoff.com - so now I have ordered it. Still fun to read in installments, though. I especially like the use of links, graphics and other web paraphernalia in the book - and it is beginning to shape up as a real crime novel (now at chapter 14.4.)Posted by Espen at 9:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 18, 2006
Searching and finding - hard to get into
I am currently reading two books on what can only be described as Web 2.0: John Batelle's The Search and Peter Morville's Ambient Findability. I don't know why (maybe just my own overdosing on reading after starting my sabbatical), but I am finding both hard to get into.
The Search is better written - it is a mix of a corporate biography and a discussion of how search capability changes society. The language is tight - though sometimes cute, as in the phrase "the database of intentions" about Google clickstreams and archived query terms - and there is a thread (roughly chronological) through the book that allows most people who have been online for a while to nod and agree on almost any page. John Batelle has an excellent blog and plenty of scars from the dot-com boom and bust (I always liked Industry Standard and wrote a column for the Norwegian version, Business Standard, for a few years, so I am very favorably disposed), and his competence as a writer shows. The book reads like a long Wired report, but better structured, marginally below average in use of buzzwords and John has the right industry connections to pull it off.
Ambient Findability looks at search from the other side of the coin - how do you make yourself findable in a world where search, rather than categorization, is the preferred user interface? For one thing, you have to make your whole web site findable, make it accessible and meaningful from all entry points. Morville fills the book up with drawings and pictures on almost every page, comes off as a widely read person, but I am still looking for a thorough expansion of the central message - or at least some decent and deep speculation on personal and organizational consequences. It is more a book popularizing information science than a book that wants to tell a story, and it shows.
While both books are well worth the read if you are relatively new to the Internet, I was a little disappointed in the lack of new ideas - they are clever, but once you accept that the marginal cost of processing, storage and communciations bandwidth approaches zero, the conclusions kind of give themselves. Perhaps I am tired - actually, I am - perhaps I am unfairly critical after having treated myself to The Blank Slate, The World is Flat and Collapse, but these books, while both worthwhile, have failed to "wow" me.
Apologies. I will make a more determined re-entry once I wake up.
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December 29, 2005
Pinker's well-filled slate
Steve Pinker's The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature is a wonderful book, not only for its wide reach and deep discussion, but also for the lively and opinionated language. Like The Economist, Pinker writes obectively with a view - though he clearly has an a opinion, well thought out and researched, in the nature-vs-nurture debate, he is careful to examine evidence and give the other side its due. Not that there is much.
Pinker then goes on to what for me was the first new part of the argument - showing that there is no inherent moral position in either nurture or nature - in fact, showing that taken to extremes, they are both as bad. He positions Nazism as the ultimate genetic extremism - the belief that a certain race or other group of people has inherent superiority over others. Then he argues that the communism of Pol Pot - who killed a third of Cambodia's population - is the ultimate environmental extremism, arguing that anyone who exposed to the corrupting influences of modern ideas, such as education or even urbanism, should be killed ("Only the children are innocent"). (I suppose Mao's cultural revolution was based on some of the same thinking.) He mocks the idea that either stance frees us from responsibility for our actions. The beliefs, for instance, that criminals, as a group, are incorrigible or redeemable depending on whether you see them as monsters born to rob or innocent victims of unfortunate circumstances are both wrong.
Pinker attributes the anxiety about human nature - especially the idea that we may be more shaped by genes that we like to think - to four fears (p. 138):
- The Fear of Inequality: if people are innately different, oppression and discrimination would be justified
- The Fear of Imperfectibility: if people are innately immoral, hopes to improve the human condition would be futile
- The Fear of Determinism: if people are products of biology, free will would be a myth and we could no longer hold people responsible for their actions
- The Fear of Nihilism: if people are products of biology, life would have no higher meaning and purpose
In the subsequent four chapters, he deals with each of these fears, laying out a foundation for a humane moralism that does not rely on myths as its foundation, making humans responsible for their fate no matter their genetic setup. The downside of the misconceptions of the blank slate and the other ideas lies in their consequences: "persecution of the successful, intrusive social engineering, the writing off of suffering in other cultures, an incomprehension of the logic of justice, and the devaluing of human life on earth." (p.193)
The fourth part of the book takes as its starting point that much of our world-view is based on intuitions that served us well in a small society - nomadic hunter-gatherers - but which may no longer be true in a modern society, such as our fear of advanced science, of genetically modified food (all our food is genetically modified - by selective breeding through hundreds of years). We are prone to misinterpreting images, to misunderstanding evolution, and to overindulging in sanctimony, reasoning by moralism rather than sense.
The fifth and last part of the book deals with certain "hot buttons" that Pinker criticizes science for refusing to discuss, such as politics (why left and right fall into patterns), violence (humans are violent), gender (there are physical differences, notably that while the mean is the same, men have a larger variance than women, i.e., more idiots and more geniuses), children (shaped by genes and peers rather than parents, though the parents play a part in selecting the environment), and the arts (threatened less by lack of funding and quality than by "...a surfeit of of Ph.D.s pumped out by graduate programs that failed to practice academic birth control." (p401)). I especially liked his digs at postmodernism, which makes challenging of its authority impossible.
Wonderful stuff, deeply researched, fantastic language, strong arguments - what's not to like? Nothing. Read it.
Update 18 jan 2006: Here is a video of Pinker presenting and discussing his book at MIT.
------ NOTES:
(Below is a chapter list with some of my notes (I lost the book after having read the first part, found it again 10 months later, but the notes were gone) and various clippings that I liked. Caveat emptor.)
Attacs the notion of the blank slate (the mind as tabula rasa), the noble savage, and that there is a difference between the mind and the body (the Ghost in the Machine).
Quote:
Perhaps the hypothesis is wrong, but how would we ever find out whether it is wrong if it is "offensive" even to consider it? People who storm out of a meeting at the mention of a hypothesis, or declare it taboo or offensive without providing arguments or evidence, don't get the concept of a university or free inquiry.
Lots of good quotations:
On the reaction to Herrstein's article in the Atlantic Monthly about heredity of intelligence: "In 1971, the psychologist Richard Herrnstein published an article called "IQ" in the Atlantic Monthly. Herrnstein's argument, he was the first to point out, should have been banal. He wrote that as social status becomes less strongly determined by arbitrary legacies such as race, parentage, and inherited wealth, it will become more strongly determined by talent, espcially (in a modern economy) intelligence. Since differences in intelligence are partly inherited, and since intelligent people tend to marry other intelligent people, when a society becomes more just it will also become more stratified along genetic lines. Smarter people will tend to float into the higher strata, and their children will tend to stay there. The basic argument should be banal because it is based on a mathematical necessity: as the proportion of variance in social status caused by nongenetic factors goes down, the proportion caused by genetic factors has to go up. It could be completely false only if there were no variation in social status based on intelligence (which would require that people were either blank slates or clones.)" (p. 127)
Chapter outline:
Part I: The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine
Chapter 1: The Official Theory
Chapter 2: Silly Putty
Chapter 3: The Last Wall to Fall
Chapter 4: Culture Vultures
Chapter 5: The Slate's Last Stand
Part II: Fear and Loathing
Chapter 6: Political Scientist
Chapter 7: The Holy Trinity
Part III: Human Nature with a Human Face
Intro on page 138:
"The anxiety about human nature can be boiled down to four fears:
- if people are innately different, opression and discrimination would be justified
- if people are innately immoral, hopes to improve the human condition would be futile
- if people are products of biology, free will would be a myth and we could no longer hold people responsible for their actions
- if people are products of biology, life would have no higher meaning and purpose"
Chapter 8: The Fear of Inequality
Chapter 9: The Fear of Imperfectibility
Chapter 10: The Fear of Determinism
Chapter 11: The Fear of Nihilism
Part III summed up on page 193:
"In the past four chapters I have shown why new ideas from the sciences of human nature do not undermine humane values. On the contrary, they present opportunities to sharpen our ethical reasoning and put those values on a firmer foundation. In a nutshell:
- it is a bad idea to say that discrimination is wrong only because the traits of all people are indistinguishable
- it is a bad idea to say that violence and exploitation are wrong only because people are not naturally inclined to them.
- it is a bad idea to say that people are responsible for their actions only because the causes of these actions are mysterious.
- and it is a bad idea to say that our motives are meaningful in a personal sense only because they are inexplicable in a biological sense.
These are bad ideas because they make our values hostages to fortune, implying that someday factual discoveries could make them obsolete. And they are bad ideas because they conceal the downsides of denying human nature: persecution of the successful, intrusive social engineering, the writing off of suffering in other cultures, an incomprehension of the logic of justice, and the devaluing of human life on earth."
Part IV: Know Thyself
Chapter 12: In Touch with Reality
Chapter 13: Out of Our Depths
- our view of the world is informed by intuitions that serve us well in a basic society, but which are wrong in the modern one
p. 226: "Clones, in fact, are just identical twins born at different times. If Einstein had a twin, he would not have been a zombie, would not have continued Einstein's stream of consciousness if Einstein had predeceased him, would not have given up his vital organs without a struggle and probably would have been no Einstein (since intelligence is only partly heritable)."
p. 229: "Genetically modified food are no more dangerous than "natural" foods because they are not fundamentally different from natural foods. Virtually every animal and vegetable sold in a health-food store has been "genetically modiefied" for millenia by selective breeding and hybridization. The wild ancestor of carrots was a thin, bitter white root: The ancestor of corn had an inch-long, easily shattered cob with a few small, rock.hard kernels. Plants are Darwinian creatures with no particular desire to be eaten, so they did not go out of their way to be tasty, healty, or easy for us to grow and harvest. On the contrary: they did go out of their way to deter us from eating them, by evolving irritants, toxins, and bitter-tasting compounds."
Chapter 14: The Many Roots of Our Suffering
Chapter 15: The Sanctimonious Animal
- moralizing (smoking has been moralized, homosexuality amoralised)
- many questions are taboo (such as the blank slate), science often in the position of having to discuss the undiscussable
Summed up at end (p. 279):
"Glover notes that many twentieth-century atrocities were set in motion when the moral emotions were disabled. Decent people were lulled into committing appalling acts by a variety of amoralizing causes, such as utopian ideologies, phased decisions (in which the targets of bombing might shift from isolated factories to factories near neighborhoods to the neighborhoods themselves), and the diffusion of responsibility within a bureaucracy. It was often raw moral sentiment - feeling empathy for victims, or asking onself the moral-identity question "Am I the kind of person who could do this?" - that stopped people in mid-atrocity. The moral sense, amplified and extended by reasoning and a knowledge of history, is what stands between us and a Mad Max nightmare of ruthless pychopaths.
But there is still much to be aware of in human moralizing: the confusion of morality with status and unity, the temptation to overmoralize matters of judgment and thereby license aggression against those with whom we disagree, the taboos on thinking about unavoidable tradeoffs, and the ubiquious vice of self-deception, whcih always manages to put the self on the side of the angels. Hitler was a moralist (indeed, a moral vegetarian) who, by most accounts, was convinced of the rectitude of his cause. As the historian Ian Baruma wrote, this shows once again that true believers can be more dangerous than cynical operators. The latter might cut a deal; the former have to go to the end - and drag the world down with them."
Part V: Hot Buttons
Chapter 16: Politics
- discussion of the left/right positions, why they fall into patterns
Chapter 17: Violence
- not true that most soldiers don't fire their rifles in battle - "The belief turns out to be traceable to a single, dubious study of infantrymen in World War II. In follow-up interviews, the men denied having even been asked whether they had fired their weapons, let alone having claimed they hadn't." (the "dubious study" was Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command by S.L.A. Marshall, who based on this idea came up with the "camaraderie" training style (make men protect their unit) prevalent in military today.)
Chapter 18: Gender
- the argument that men tend to have wider distributions of capabilities than women, though the average is the same - meaning that at the tail ends of the variance, men will dominate. (Same argument held up in the Larry Summers debate.)
Chapter 19: Children
- 50% of child development is down to genetics, 0 to common environment, the rest to unique environment (child's own experiences)
- studies of parenting and child development are notoriously bad
- p385: "People behave differently in different settings. That includes children, who tend to behave differently inside and outside the home. So even if parents' behavior does affect how their children behave with them, it may not affect how their children behave with other people. [...] To show that parents shape their children, then, a study would have to control for genes (by testing twins or adoptees), distinguish between parents affecting children and children affecting parents, measure the parents and the children independently, look at how children behave outside the home rather than inside, and test order children and young adults to see whether any effects are transient or permanent. No study that has claimed to show effects of parenting has met these standards."
- children are shaped by their peers more than by their parents: "Children of immigrants acquire the language of their adopted homeland perfectly, without a foreign accent, as long as they have access to native speaking peers. They then try to force their parents to switch to the new language, and if they succeed, they may forget the mother tongue entirely."
- parents are important because they select an environment for their children and, in doing so, select their peer group
- however, much is chance (unique environment): even genetically similar organisms like roundworms (only 959 cells) raised in controlled environments differ individually
- enter fate.....
Chapter 20: The Arts
- "...a surfeit of of Ph.D.s pumped out by graduate programs that failed to practice academic birth control." (p401)
- "As a matter of fact, the arts and humanities are not in trouble."
- "In every era for thousands of years critics have bemoaned the decline of culture, and the economist Tyler Cowen suggests they are the victims of a cognitive illusion. The best works of art are more likely to appear in a past decade than in the presnet decade for the same resaon that another line in the supermarket always moves faster than the one you are in: there are more of them. We get to enjoy the greatest hits winnowed from all those decades, listening to the Mozarts and forgetting the Salieris."
- takes postmodernism to task, because it makes challenging of authority impossible
Part VI: The Voice of the Species
- selected choices from literature to show how human nature prevails
Appendix: Donald E. Brown's List of Human Universals (a list of things that are common across all human cultures, available at http://condor.depaul.edu/~mfiddler/hyphen/humunivers.htm)
Posted by Espen at 11:42 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 24, 2005
The flat and the unflattened
Friedman, T. L. (2005). The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century
I have long used chapters from Tom Friedman's The Lexus and the Olive Tree
That being said, my feelings are mixed on this one. Don't misunderstand me - everyone, from politicians to business leaders to students - should read this book, but perhaps less for the first 10 chapters, where Friedman describes how the world is going "flat" (that is, small and interconnected) than for the latter part of the book, starting with chapter 11, "The Unflat World", where he dives into the difficulties of globalization and the dangers of holding it up. While the first 10 chapters are interesting because Friedman writes extremely lively and documents relevant, if well known cases with clarity and wit, it is in the latter part of the book, where Friedman shows why he is the New York Times leading foreign affairs journalist and not their technology or business writer. In that part, the book starts to shine and really deserve the accolades heaped on it.
His key message is very similar to the closing passages of Landes' The Wealth and Poverty of Nations
That being said, the weakest chapter of the book is the one about business - aside from the brilliant example of Aramex, a Jordanian rapid delivery company, most of the advice there is trite to business researchers and, I suspect, not exactly news to the common reader. Friedman's saving grace is that he can and does travel, has an incredibly knack not only for picking the relevant examples (most of the companies mentioned, such as UPS, eBay, Wal-Mart, are overused in many other contexts but appear fresh here) but for writing them up in a style that makes them interesting. The best example by far is Dell Computer, where he simply traces (or, rather, gets Dell to trace for him) in minute but fascinating detail how the computer he wrote most of the book on came to be - showing that if China and Taiwan cannot agree politically, they are pretty good at supplying parts and know-how to each other and to the world.
Friedman has a great gift for the poignant expression (On the need to not shut the world out for fear of terrorism: "Leave the cave-dwelling to Osama.") but sometimes veers over towards the saccarine (On the India-Pakistan sabre rattling in 2002 and how big companies lobbied to get India to stand down: "The [India-Pakistani 2000] cease-fire was brought to us not by General Powell but by General Electric. We bring good things to life.")
His suggestion that the United States embark on a "man on the moon" project aimed at making the country energy-independent in ten years is nothing short of brilliant - it addresses a serious problem, is doable, would further research towards a great goal, and help the American and the world economy no end. And it would lessen the world's dependence on oil and thereby reduce the danger of future fallouts over access to energy. Go for it. It's a no-brainer.
Friedman also answers his critics, cheerfully admitting that he is a technological determinist - "guilty as charged" - but not a historical one. And his analysis of how the anti-globalization movement - which he thinks is extremely important - has been shanghaied by anti-Americanism and geriatric leftist ideology is both cooly rational but also heartfelt: Friedman is honest and world-wise enough to know that globalization, to be a beneficial evolution, needs a fact-based and rational opposition - focused on how we globalize rather than whether we are. Too many critics of globalization see it in terms of conspiracy theories - it is an evolution enabled by freedom of information, capital and to a certain extent people, and attempts to put the djinnie back in the bottle are not likely to be successful, to put it mildly. (Incidentally, Jared Diamond's Collapse, which I am halfway through at the moment, provides a much better foundation for this opposition than Naomi Klein's populistic but theoretically incoherent No Logo.) As Friedman says it: "What the world doesn't need is the anti-globalization movement to go away. We just need it to grow up. [...] You don't help the world's poor by dressing up in a turtle outfit and throwing a stone through a McDonald's window. You help them by getting them the tools and instutions to help themselves. [...] Just ask any Indian villager."
His best writing - and underlying anger - comes out when writing about the people for whom globalization is not as much a negative influence as a distant mirage. They constitute half the world's population, they will get restless unless as soon as they see what they can get, and if that isn't good enough reason to start thinking about how to use globalization beneficially rather than try to stop it from happening, I don't know what is.
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Possible error: On page 268, Friedman refers to a study of "leading universities" creating 4000 companies with 1.1m jobs and $232b in revenues, refers to the "Task Force on the future of American Innovation" On page 244, however, the same figures are repeated, but instead of "leading universities" it is MIT, and the reference is to a study by BankBoston.
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Notes after the jump, taken as I read through the book, offered here, caveat emptor, typos and all:
How the world became flat
One: While I was sleeping
- Tom was sidetracked by 9/11 and writing about the middle East and al-Qaeda and didn't see how everything has speeded up
Two: The ten forces that flattened the world
Flattener #1: 11/9/89 (the Berlin wall coming down, allowing people to think global, freeing up free trade, especially in India and China)
Flattener #2: 8/9/95 (Netscape going public, the rise of the web)
Flattener #3: Work flow software (interoperability standards - and how PayPal got to be eBay's standard because the users wanted it, not eBay's Billpoint. Essentially an explanation of network effects and the power of a customer community)
Flattener #4: Open-Sourcing (tells the story of the Apache web server and how it came to be. Eventually IBM signed up and was told to contribute their best engineers. Other examples are blogs, and the Wikipedia.)
Flattener #5: Outsourcing (Primarily India - enabled by cheap fiber (as a result of overinvesting), excellent technical education (no corruption in the Indian Institute of Technology) and strong demand driven first by Y2K and eCommerce, then demand for cheap engineers following the .com bust, eventually evolving to business process outsourcing)
Flattener #6: Offshoring: Essentially a description of China and offshoring of manufacturing - China has 160 cities with more than 1m inhabitants, for instance, and graduates 350K engineers annually. "90% of the output from US-owned offshore factories is sold to foreign consumers" p123. WTO membership in 2001 has made a large difference. But it has created competition within China as well - and probably would not have passed had it been put to a popular vote.
Flattener #7: Supply-Chaining: Using Wal-Mart as an example of lean supply chains. Enormous numbers, effective supply chains, vendors dealing direcly with Bentonville, ramshackle headquarters. "but make no mistake about one thing: Wal-Mart also became number one because this little hick company from northwest Arkansas was smarter and faster about adopting new technology than any of its competitors. And it still is. When started in the 60s, it decided to bypass wholesalers and to go straight to producers, but had to build a centralized distribution center for that to get good prices. Once this was established, the focus was on 1) working with manufacturers to get them to lower costs, 2) optimizing the supply chain from the manufacturer, and 3) constantly improving own IT. Bought $260b worth of goods in 2004, 108 distribution centers, 3000 stores in USA, 1000 more abroad. HP sells 400K computers through Wal-Mart in one day at Christmastime. RetailLink hugely important, partnering with producers. Moving to RFID. Subchapter: TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING: Wal-mart's insularity has caused it to misread public opinion many times."Wal-Mart is the China of companies. It has so much leverage that it can grind down any supplier to the last halfpenny. And it is not at all hesitant about using its ability to play its foreign and domestic suppliers off against each other." (p.137). CEO insists it is better for Wal-Mart that things are produced in the States, but the problem is the suppliers themsevles, who do not want to have responsibility for production and employees (especially health care).
Flattener #8: Insourcing (example of Fedex and UPS. UPS has 271 aircraft, 11th largest fleet in world. Repairs computers for Toshiba in Louisville and does logistics for Papa John's pizza. Friedman version of insourcing is when UPS engineers come in and design your logistics processes, then operate them. CEO Mike Eskew says the majority of customers are small companies who cannot build up a logistics chain themselves. Shows the connections between eBay sellers, UPS, PayPal, and eBay buyers. Also does credit risk, acting as trusted third party. Also works for large companies - UPS redesigned Ford's distribution network.
Flattener #9: In-forming (example of search engines. Google as the ultimate flattener. Sergej Brin (p.155): "people underestimated the importance of finding information , as opposed to other things you would do online. If you are searching for like a health issue, , you really want to know: in some cases it is a life-and-death matter. We have people who search Google for heart-attack symptoms and then dial nine-one-one." Yahoo Groups another example. Flip side: privacy, your reputation will follow you no matter what.
Flattener #10: The steroids: Digital, Mobile, Personal and Virtual. (Friedman call these "steroids" because they amplify the other flatteners.). Standard examples: Moore's law, growth in storage, Skype making voice calls free, wireless (exemplified by applications developed by NTT DoCoMo.)
Three: The triple convergence
Convergence I: Technical platform making it easy to store, process and transmit information - people flying Southwest Airlines now print out their own tickets (meaning that Tom, who got to the airport early, found the best seats taken already).
Convergence II: Organizational reconfiguring based on the technology - essentially, process organization.
Convergence III: More players - visa no longer needed.
Example from India, China and Russia: Dhruva, an Indian gaming software development company, doing everything from India. So you get Zippies - young upward mobile Indians. 3m books sold in China on how to prepare your child for Harvard. Boeing using Russian aerospace engineers to develop their next generation airplanes.
Great comment from Bill Gates: "As a result of China's drive to succeed, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates argued to me, the 'ovarian lottery' has changed - as has the whole relationship between geography and talent. Thirty years ago, he said, if you had a choice between being born a genius on the outskirts of Bombay or Shanghai or being born and average person in Poughkeepsie, you would take Poughkeepsie, because your chances of thriving and living a decent life there, even with average talent, were much greater. But as the world has gone flat, Gates said, and so many people can now plug and play from anywhere, natural talent has started to trump geography. 'Now', he said, 'I would rather be a genius born in China than an average guy born in Poughkeepsie.'
Smokescreen: The dot-com bust, 9/11, and Enron has obscured this development for many people, definitely for American politicians.Also, business leaders aren't talking - "they don't want to tell the kids."
Four: The great sorting out
"The most common disease of the flat world is going to be multiple identities disorder, which is why, if nothing else, political scientists are going to have a field day with the flat world. Political science may turn out to be the biggest growth industry of all in this new era." p.201.
Michael Sandel, political theoretician from Harvard: "What [Friedman] is arguing is that developments in information technology are enabling companies to squeeze out all the inefficiencies and friction from their markets and business operations. That is what your notion of 'flattening' really means. [....] Some obstacles to a frictionless global market are truly sources of waste and lost opportuniteis. But some of these inefficiencies are institutions, habits, cultures and traditions that people cherish precisely because they reflect nonmarket values like social cohesion, religious faith, and national pride. [...] That is why why the debate about captialism has been, from the very beginning, about which frictions, barrriers, and boundaries are mere sources of waste and inefficiency, and which are sources of identity and belonging that we should try to protect."
Example: Indian consulting firm wins the contract to upgrade the unemployment system for the state of Indiana. Would have saved $8m, was set up by pro-labor Democrats and politically torn up by free-trade Republicans. Sort that out. (p.207.) The left wants to protect workers but also help developing countries. The right wants to lower public spending and shrink government....
Multinationals becoming global also in their workforce. Lenovo bought IBMs PC division. Rolls-Royce's British chairman asked to come with Gerhard Schroeder to Moscow to drum up business for German companies....
From command and control to collaborate and connect: General Powell doing his own research on Google faster than asking an aide, email with other foreign ministers, SMSing with Jack Straw.
Multiple identity disorder: Wal-Mart pressuring workers, customers and shareholders benefit. Deregulation speeded up drug approval process but may have created problems, such as Vioxx.
Death of the Salesman: Everything is price now, negotiations via email.
Political realignment - the leftist free-market liberals with the business conservatives, the conservative Christians with the labor unions.
America and the flat world
Five: America and the free trade: Is Ricardo still right?
- jobs are lost in bulk, and recreated one by one or five by ten - which never makes the papers
- wages will increase for knowledge workers in India and China, it will take time
- markets open up
- Paul Romer: Idea-based products can be sold to the whole world at once, manual labor can only be bought by one factory or farm or whatever
- there is no limit on the number of idea-generated jobs in the world (once Google is there, you need it)
- the Indians and Chinese are not racing us to the bottom, they are racing us to the top - and that is a good thing (p.233)
Six: The Untouchables (Defined as people whose job cannot be outsourced)
Message: You have to upgrade your skills. All the time.
To his girls: Not "finish your dinner because people in India are starving. It is "finish your homework because people in India and China are starving for your jobs."
Four kinds of untouchables:
- those who are special (such as Michael Jordan). Only one of them.
- those who are specialized, such as specialized lawyers, brain surgeons, and other work that cannot be automated.
- those who are anchored, such as barbers and waitresses, health personnel and plumbers - location-specific.
- those who are adaptable - and those are the ones that will survive, because the other categories will see parts of their work being outsourced
Important to march forward with innovation, be adaptable. America has many advantages: Innovation and education, capital flow, openness, intellectual capital protection, flexible labor laws, a large domestic market, and political stability. Study by BankBoston: MIT students have created 4000 companies, started at least 1.1 million jobs world wide and generated sales of $232b. US has a relatively clean capital market.
But America will have to work at it, because the others are catching up. Are we working at it? No.
Seven: The Quiet Crisis
The USA like a third-generation rich family, squandering it. And it is a quiet crisis. A "perfect storm" is brewing.
Dirty little secret #1: The numbers. Not enough youngsters are choosing science, many engineers and science teachers are retiring. Cut in spending on basic research.
Great quote from Tracy Koon, Intel's director of corporate affairs: "Science and math are the universal language of technology. They drive technology and our standard of living. Unless our kids grow up knowing that universal language, they will not be able to compete. We are not in the business of manufacturing somehere else. This is a company that was founded here, but we have two raw materials - sand, which we have a ready supply of, and talent, which we don't."
Eight: This is not a test
The crisis is a little bit like the shock of the Sputnik in the fifties, and the USA needs a moon program. However, this is not a war, and people don't mobilize as readily. USA is a little bit like IBM before Lou Gerstner. Bush should start his own moon program: Make America energy-independent in 10 years.
Other suggestions:
- portable benefits
- portable health care
- wage insurance (cushion for people between jobs)
- "if you want to live like a Republican, vote like a Democrat" (to stave off social unrest)
Corporate social activism: Set standards for environment and labor, because otherwise you get a backlash.
- should not at cannot take the place of government regulation
Developing countries and the flat world
Nine: The virgin of Guadelope
- the chapter title refers to how statues of Mexico's national symbol are now being imported to Mexico from China
- discusses why China is overtaking Mexico as USAs biggest trade partner, puts it down to
-- education: Where are all the crash programs in learning English
-- attitude: there are islands of prosperity, such as Monterrey, but it doesn't spread
-- government: Signs that things are changing, but initial steps in globalization (privatization, changes in labor law) are hard to do in the face of politicians' graft and rampant populism
- after globalization (which is "wholesale") comes "retail globalization" or "glocalization" - how easy is it to do business? This is much harder because it cannot be done from the top, much harder to bypass the entrenched bureaucracies
- culture matters a lot, especially culture of tolerance. Islam has a problem here (ref. Dalrymple) because no questoning or reinterpretation of the Koran is allowed
- how about democracy? p. 353: "It would be easy to conclude from just looking at Mexico and China that democracy may be a hindrance to reform retail. I think it is premature to conclude that. I think the real issue is leadership."
-- democracries: Thatcher vs. German chancellors
-- autocracies: China is focused and has a meritocracy, Zimbabwe has leaders "so illegitimate that they are afraid of inflicting any pain."
- From McKinsey report: "Rather than fixating on jobs lost to China, [Mexico and other latin-American countries] should remember a fact of economic life: no place can remain the world's low-cost producer forever - even China will lose that title one day. Instead of trying to defend low-wage assembly jobs, Mexico and other middle-income counties should focus on creating jobs that add higher value. Only if more productive companies with higher-value-added activities replace less productive ones can middle income economies continue down the development path."
- self-confidence important: Luis Rubio`: "A lack of self-confidence leads a country to keep chewing on the past."
Companies and the flat world
Ten: How companies cope
(He says that he is not a business writer, and he is not. But the cases are fantastic.)
Rules for how to cope:
Rule #1: Don't build walls.
- example: The experiences of a small photographer, where the photography business, all aspects of it except the ability to take really clever pictures, are being commoditized
Rule #2: And the small shall act big.
- example: (great case) Aramex, Jordanian package company that was able to maintain a coalition of small companies and build their own software when their large partner Airborne was bought by FedEx.
Rule #3: And the big shall act small.
- Starbucks offering customization (19000 versions of coffee), many of the innovations (such as soy milk) coming from customer requests
Rule #4: The best companies are the best collaborators, because the world is becoming so complex you can't do it alone.
- example: Rolls Royce, doesn't make cars, from national to international, partnering as core competence, demand for skills in managing virtual, international teams.
Rule #5: In a flat world, the best companies stay healthy by getting regular chest X-rays and then selling the results to their clients.
- IBM business consulting analyzing companies systemically, breaking them down into components
- HP selling its internal capacities, such as taking an outsourcing contract for an Indian bank
Rule #6: The best companies outsource to win, not to shrink.
- and so on....
Geopolitics and the flat world
Eleven: The unflat world
Friedman is a technological determinist - technology that enables use will be used. But he is not a historical determinist - he does not know what the long-term result will be.
Half the world is outside the benefits of globalization, this is because they are
- too sick:
-- HIV/AIDS, malaria, TB and polio
-- examples of the medical research the Gates Foundation is supporting, such as development of vaccines that do not need refrigeration
- too disempowered:
-- people living in the twilight zone between unflat (abject powerty) and globalized. They can see it, but they can't get there
-- India is one example, for them the globalization cannot happen fast enough
-- antiglobalization movement doesn't help.
"Let's pause for a moment here and trace how the antiglobalization movement lost touch with the true aspirations of the world's poor. [...] It was driven by five disparate forces. One was upper-midlde-class American liberal guilt at the incredible wealth and power that America had amassed in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dot-com boom. At the peak of the stock market boom, lots of pampered American college kids, wearing their branded clothing, began to get interested in sweatshops as a way to expiate their guilt. The second force drving it was a rear-guard push by the Old Left - socialists, anarchists, and Trotskyites - in alliance with protectionist trade unions. [...] They claimed to speak in the name of the Third World poor, but the bankrupt economic policies they advocated made them, in my view, the Coalition to Keep Poor People Poor. The third force was a more amorphous group. It was made up of many people who gave passive support [...] because they [recognized] some kind of protest against the speed at which the old world was disappearing and becoming flat. The fourth force [...] particularly strong in Europe and in the Islamic world, was anti-Americanism." 9/11 transformed America from economic power to visible military power, strenghtening this anti-Americanism. "Finally, the fifth force [...] was a coalition of very serious, well-meaning, and constructive groups - from environmentalists to trade activitst to NGOs concerned with governance - who became part of the populist antiglobalization movement in the 1990s in the hopes that they could catalyze a global discussion about how we globalize. I had a lot of respect for this latter group. But in the end they got drowned out by the whether-we-globalize crowd [...]." The serious discussion about how to make globalization human disappeared, leaving a political vacuum. Best place to start: Rural India, which need better governance to build basic infrastructure so people can start to globalize.
"What the world doesn't need is the anti-globalization movement to go away. We just need it to grow up." --- "You don't help the world's poor by dressing up in a turtle outfit and throwing a stone through a McDonald's window. You help them by getting them the tools and instutions to help themselves. [...] Just ask any Indian villager."
-- example of HP selling photo-printing equipment to villagers, who set up businesses making photos for ID, but also family photos
- too frustrated:
-- Arab young men are frustrated because their religion tells them that they are superior, but others are living better. So they set out to destroy the others.
-- their religion is Islamo-Leninism, seeing themselves as a vanguard
-- quotes Dalrymple's essay on his interactions with young Muslims in British prison
-- Islam as utopian ideology, finding recruits in the many young Muslims who are living close to the flat world but not in it
-- humiliation is the key - Arab countries have about same GDP as Spain, but not the productivity.
-- this is why many Muslims secretly liked 9/11, because it gave rich and successful USA a bloody nose
-- the movement disregards the scientific achievements, such as algebra, that came from Baghdad and Alexandria
"Unfortunately, there is huge resistance to such modernization from the authoritarian and religiously obscurantist forces within the Arab-Muslim world." The political leaders in the Arab world are illegitimate, so they have to either quell opposition or buy it off. That does not stop the frustration.
- too many Toyotas
-- China (and India) is growing and needs oil, 1000 new cars in Beijing every day, need to find another Saudi Arabia by 2012.
-- developing countries will not agree to reduce their consumption, they want the same evolution as Europe and America.
-- China has only two parts of its foreign policy: Find oil, and no independence for Taiwan.
-- the only thing America can do is to set an example by reducing their own energy consumption
"I would love to see a grand China-United States Manhattan Project, a crash program to jointly develop clean alternative energies, bringing together China's best scientists and it spolitical ability to implement pilot proejcts, with America's best brains, technology and money."
Twelve: The Dell theory of conflict prevention
- traces out the entire production process of his laptop
- no two countries that are part of the same global supply chain will go to war (note: this is offered a tad tounge-in-cheek, but still)
- has worked already: Large US corporations pressuring India to slow down its quarrel with Pakistan in 2002
- Jiang Zemin's son is a partner in a wafer fabrication project in Shanghai with a Taiwanese company
"The [India-Pakistani 2000] cease-fire was brought to us not by General Powell but by General Electric."
Infosys vs. al-Qaeda: The freedom and inexpensive coordination that the Internet offers is available to and used by al-Qaeda as well.
Too personally insecure: al-Qaeda did not use nuclear weapons because it was beyond their capacity. Therefore, we must lock down the nuclear weapons.
Conclusion: Imagination
Thirteen: 11/9 vs. 9/11 (the downfall of the Berlin Wall vs. the fall of the World Trade Center)
- compare the startup of JetBlue to the startup of the al-Qaeda "airline"
- Americans cannot retreat from the world, need to stimulate hope and positive imagination (ref. to earlier: Where you have hope, you have a middle class.)
- "Leave the cave-dwelling to Osama."
- examples of such hope:
-- eBay serving as a platform for entrepreneurs (boy with MS starts business on eBay): Not market, but a self-sustaining community
-- India: Second largest Muslim population in the world, non-violent and tolerant. When Islam is embedded in democratic societies, it tends not to grow anger, but acceptance - see India, Turkey. "While a Muslim woman sits on India's Supreme Court, no Muslim woman is allowed even to drive a car in Saudi Arabia."
The curse of oil: "Nothing has contributed more to retarding the emergence of a democratic context in places like Venezuela, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, and Iran than the curse of oil. As long as the monarchs and dictators who run these oil states can get rich by drilling their natural resources - as opposed drilling the natural talents and energy of their people - they can stay in office forever. [..] The rules don't really have to pay attention to the people or explain how they are spending their money - because they have not raised that money through taxes." The most creativeness in the Arab-Muslim world today is in places that have no oil, such as Bahrain or Jordan. Iran spends its oil money on wasteful subsidies rather than building the future.
Trade increases exposure to the world, broadens imagination and increases tolerance and trust.
Need examples, such as Aramex: Successful Arab company, no oil involved.
Need to go from untouchables in the Indian sense, to untouchables in Friedman's sense: Example of school in India proving that untouchables has as much potential as any other, given education.
"The two greatest dangers we Americans face are an excess of protectionism - excessive fears of another 9/11 that prompt us to wall ourselves in, in search of personal security - and excessive fears of competing in a world of 11/9 that prompt us to wall ourselves off, in search of economic security."
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November 23, 2005
ADD history of technology and capital markets
Kessler, A. (2005). How we got here: A slightly irreverent history of technology and markets. New York, HarperCollins.
The title is accurate - this is a short history of how technology and capital markets evolved to where we are today (and, given the evolution of the Internet, the two will merge). Kessler connects many events in a very short format, sprinkling the text with a bit too many one-liner jokes. He does better on technolology history than financial markets, but I still enjoyed it. Quickly written and quickly read, with some good little tidbits here and there (such as the account of B.F. Skinner, psychologist and pigeon trainer, creating a bomb guidance system with pigeons inside the bomb nose cone trained to peck at outlines of Japanese war ships.
Not sure if I would recommend this - too quickie unless you already know the history (but then it is fun.) The definitive book on these topics is yet to be written. Notes:
Part I: The industrial revolutionCannons to steam
- Newcomen and his steam engine for pumping out water from mines
- Boulton & Watt and their reciprocating steam engines (no longer relying on condensation to pull the piston back in), decreasing costs and more horsepower
Textiles
- power looms and other production equipment demanding power to run
- cheap cotton clothing that was also better, because it stretched the cotton and didn't itch
Positively electric
- research into electricity (Franklin, Volta, Galvani)
- Jacquard and the punch card loom for patterns
- Babbage and the difference, later analytical engine
- Boole and logic by mathematics (reducing the necessary complexity of calculating engines)
Transportation Elasticity, Sea and Rail
- railroads, the railroad bubble, enabled by a nascent stock market
- explains this in terms of cost reduction: steam ships, the screw and later propeller
- the Suez canal in 1869 lowered transport costs from East to West with a factor of 3 or more
Part 2: Early Capital Markets
Funding British trade
- King (and sometimes Queen) needed money to fund Navy and colonialization
- introduced joint stock company
- King wanted to sell off monopolies, Parliament limited them to 20 years ->birth of the patent system
Capital Markets and Bubbles
- stock market and securities first took modern form in England, but they had learned it from Holland
- Bank of England introduced modern currency
- South Sea company in 1720, at the same time France had the Mississippi company (worth more than all the gold in France). Eventually killed mercantilism
- the Dutch had the tulip craze in 1630
(- in 1999, Priceline.com, which sold discount tickets for airlines, was worth more than the airlines....)
- after the bubble, Brits risk-averse, created consols (long-term lending)
Fool's gold
- mid-1800, England got its trade surplus in gold
- factory owners and workers underrepresented in Parliament, suffered from Corn laws which meant workers couldn't pay for food
- government borrowing against their gold reserves
- Newton fixed the price of gold in pounds in 1717, lasted until 1931
- the Gold standard held money supply constant and wages flexible, which turned out to be the wrong way around
Part 3: Components needed for computing
Communications
- the short history of the telegraph and the telephone
- the problem of amplification - power needed
Power Generation
- battle between Edison and Westinghouse on DC and AC
- Tesla invented AC, works better over long distances because the electrons don't have to move so far
- Edison invented a computer switch - but didn't realize what he had done
Part 4: Digital computers
Ballistics, Codes and Bombs
- Tesla invented radio by experimenting with sending electricity through air
- Marconi got it to work first
- Tesla also invented the AND gate, in 1903
- AT&T developed automated switches, then George Stibitz developed an adder since he needed to do calculations
- air force needed precision - if they had had it, atom bomb may not have been necessary
- (BF Skinner created a precision device with trained pigeons, who were rewarded with hemp seeds for pecking on Japanese war ship silhouettes)
- early computing history, Turing, Echert-Mauchly, von Neumann , etc
Transistors and Integrated Circuits provide scale
- the whole transistor story, up to Intel
Software and Networks
- basically the story of the Internet, via AlohaNet, Ethernet, etc.
- cisco (from Francisco) , made their money when the browser came, and the LAN traffic rule (80% internal, 20% external) flipped
GPS
- history of GPS
Part 5: Modern capital markets
Modern Gold
- from gold standard through Bretton Woods to Nixon ending convertibility in 1971
- necessitates a stock market to capture value
The Business of Wall Street
- stock market is good for three things:
-- provide expansion capital for businesses
-- agree on a price for a business
-- transfer shares from owners to others who may have a completely different risk profile or time horizon
- interplay with communications technology and the stock market
- increases in communications speed set off bubbles and panics, but the market survives
- increasing demand for information, not just prices
"Wall Street has a love affair with technology, to obtain valueable information faster than others, to handle crippling volumes of transactions, and then to invent profitable products."
Insurance
- fire insurance and life insurance privatize risk, but do little to reduce the risk by themselves
- health insurance set up to ensure that doctors got paid more than to make sure people had money to pay
The Modern Stock Market
- essentially a story of the impact of computers on Wall Street, but sloppily written
- NYSE was quick to do electronic trading but very slow on the back office, so stock certificates were piling up at the end of the 60s
- NASDAQ formed 1961, operational 1971
- Intel was a complicated company, required explanations - hence, the road show
- DTC (electronic certificates) implemented 1973
- fixed commissions disappeard in 1975 with the Securities Exchange Act
- Jeff Citron with Datek and programmer Josh Levine invented day trading when he found that he could trade on the small exchance system, which the bigger traders wouldn't - he could then trade within the spread
- as the regular traders moved off NASDAQ, Levine set up ECN, his own electronic matching service, which now has more than 50% of trades on NASDAQ
- increased liquidity enabled hedge funds, which rely on their ability to get in and out fast to keep profits stable
- argues that the NYCE is outdated, that trading in listed stocks is too expensive, and that everything will move to electronic trading, which will provide more risk capital but also more volatility
Appendix; ENIAC Press Release - because it was extremely ahead of its time
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November 18, 2005
The Penge Bungalow Murders
As a big fan of Horace Rumpole (John Mortimer's seedy but noble barrister-of-the-Bailey) I enjoyed Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders, though the office intrigues and the intricacies of the plot were somewhat simplified - dare I say mellowed - compared to the usual fare. Obligatory reading for anyone with an affinity for "she who must be obeyed" and "Chateau Thames Embankment", though.Posted by Espen at 3:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 13, 2005
Barbarians of times past
Just finished Barbarians at the gate: The fall of RJR Nabisco, which could be described as "the mother of all case studies." (For those who didn't hang around in the late 80s, it is about the first mega-LBO.) I did take a course with Michael Jensen, who provided much of the theoretical underpinning for the LBO craze, in 1991 - and I couldn't quite get what all the fuss was about.
Anyway, the book is a fascinating story of monumental egos: How RJR management (in a company that produced cigarrettes and cookies) had 6 jet airplanes, called the RJR air force. There are scenes of investment banks Salomon and Drexel nearly tanking the whole deal because they couldn't agree on who should be on the left side of the tombstone. Another LBO company, Forstmann and Little, dickering for a day over whether their press release should say that they had been "invited" or "welcomed" to bid for the company. The final chapters when deadlines are extended in 60 and 15 minute increments (with KKR being paid $45m to wait for one hour at one point) are priceless.
The book reads like a thriller, though it is a bit hard to remember who all the characters are. Anyway, it was fun to then open New York Times and read about how the LBO industry now is flush with cash, but is running out of companies to buy - and, not least, buyers for the pieces they want to shed once they have acquired them.
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November 12, 2005
A Ray of Singularity
I had an hour to spend last night, and used it to leaf through Ray Kurzweil's new book, The Singularity is Near, in which he argues that by (roughly) 2045, computer intelligence (or, at least, processing capacity) will be bigger than all human brains combined. This will lead to a merger of technological and human intelligence, and, in time, to the "awakening of the universe" - which I understood to be a sort of mobilization of every molecule in the universe in the service of creating intelligence.
Ray Kurzweil uses many exponential graphs to make his argument, which he sums up as the world going through six epochs (see figure) - physics, biology, brains, technology, merger of technology and humans, and, lastly, the awakening.
I don't know. Kurzweil has a great track record on predictions with his previous books, and certainly knows how to provoke. Whenever I want to irritate my students, I give them Alan Turings Computing Machinery and Intelligence and a couple of chapters from Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines. The following discussion is always interesting, especially when students have to come to terms with what "intelligent" means.
But I can't help feeling that there is some sort of Achilles and the tortoise about the singularity argument - I cannot bring myself to understand what happens as all these trends converge and their growth approaches infinity - nor that they necessarily do. I have always argued that processing and communication should be thought of as free resources, but, of course, within overviewable limits.
The upshot, of course, is that there is not need to panic - I'll be 84 in 2045, and even if I don't make it there (though, if Kurzweil is right, we all stand a pretty good chance of getting there and much longer) I will adopt a real options strategy, which is, I will wait and see, and not worry too much about it. We will know soon enough.
(Incidentally, a lot of stuff is available on the singularity.com website, including chapters 1 (the six epochs) and chapter 9 (response to various criticisms).
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November 9, 2005
Dalrymple on Paris
I am currently reading Theodory Dalrymple's Our Culture, What's Left of IT, as fine a collection of essays as you will find anywhere. Dalrymple is a conservative moralist, but contrary to the standard definition of that kind of person in the US, he is literate, balanced, thoughtful and erudite. There is much to like in the book, including a moving portrait of one of my favorite authors, Stefan Zweig, as well as a merciless comparison of the lives of Marx and Turgenjev, where the latter comes out as the human and the former as the monster.
In light of the recent riots in France, one of his essays is particularly prescient. It is called City The Barbarians at the Gates of Paris, is available on the web, and clearly shows that these riots are the product of a long evolutionary process that France has no reason to be proud of. Says Dalrymple:
[....] France has handled the resultant situation in the worst possible way. Unless it assimilates these millions successfully, its future will be grim. But it has separated and isolated immigrants and their descendants geographically into dehumanizing ghettos; it has pursued economic policies to promote unemployment and create dependence among them, with all the inevitable psychological consequences; it has flattered the repellent and worthless culture that they have developed; and it has withdrawn the protection of the law from them, allowing them to create their own lawless order.
Prescient, indeed. It was written in 2002.
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September 4, 2005
Mark "The Economist" Burnell
The Economist has a fawning review of Mark Burnell, which is interesting because it is markedly different from the reader comments on each of his books at Amazon.com vs. Amazon.co.uk. Either someone at the Economist really likes this guy, or US readers have greatly different ways of wanting their thrillers. Check out:
The Rhythm Section: US UK
Chameleon: US ("plodding sequel"), UK (The Economist: "Bigger and slicker in every way than his first novel. If you buy no other thriller this holiday season, buy this one.")
Gemini: US UK
The Third Woman: UK (not yet available in the States).
Only one way to find out, I suppose.....
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August 7, 2005
Snobbery snubbed
Julian Fellowes: Snobs
Picked up at an airport for light summer reading, this little novel about social climbers fits the bill, though I was a little disappointed. The main story is about Edith Lavery, a woman of middle class and high aspirations who marries into the landed aristocracy of England, to her later disappointment (her husband is crushingly dull). She is forced to choose between dull status and lively indistinction.
What she chooses really isn't that important - it seems the author ran out of steam towards the end, anyway - but the writing has its moments. The chief character in the book is not Edith, who is rather shallowly portrayed, but the narrator, an actor who has been born into the right social circles (knows everyone from school etc.), has the right manners and strategies (the convoluted explanations of WHY everyone behaves as weirdly as they do carries much of the writing), but also knows life outside stately homes and Sloan Square.
Surprisingly, the aristocrats are portrayed rather sympathetically: They are secure in their positions, but rather narrow in their mindsets and occupations (maintaining their homes, hunting and farming, as well as being present at the requisite social functions). Their way of life is threatened, but they are too well-bred to notice. It is the social climbers that are skewered. One high point comes when the aristocrats are invited out to a fancy restaurant by someone who wants to impress, without knowing - as the narrator, of course, does - that certain people never goes to restaurants for fancy dinners, preferring to do that at home. The evening ends up as an expensive disaster for the host, though entertaining for the readers.
All in all, an enjoyable book, but not one I will re-read in the immediate future.
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July 29, 2005
A pleasant overdose
Peter Mayle: A year in Provence, Toujours Provence, and Encore Provence.
Frances Mayes: Under the Tuscan Sun.
Sarah Turnbull: Almost French.
These books are a little like James Herriot's stories from his days as a mid-20th centry Yorkshire vet: They praise the simple country life (except Turnbull's, though the countryside features there, too) in the voice of an enchanted and formerly more or less uncultured (or, at least, uninformed) city dweller. I read (or re-read) them as a precursor to an Italian holiday - though, working on the theory that Provence is very like Italy (which it isn't) I didn't get through Mayes until after I was back. And Turnbull was read in two quick sittings because my daughter had promised it to a friend (and I got to blog it before her, so there).
The books are quite different, reflecting author background and goals of writing. Peter Mayle is a former ad man from London who has semi-retired to writing books and displays the laid-back (or, at least, wanting to seem laid-back) and self-disparaging tone of the English gentleman. His writing, despite numerous books to his credit, is studiously effortless and very relaxedly humoristic - reflecting, I think, the ideal of effortless and gifted amateurism as epitomized by Dorothy L. Sayer's Parker's Lord Peter Wimsey. Frances Mayes teaches creative writing and publishes poetry and cookery books, causing some delightful linguistic bulls-eyes and quite a few recipes. Sarah Turnbull is an investigative journalist and adds cultural analysis and self-reflection to what is a very personal journey (though not too personal).
All recommended, of course, as light-hearted reading in summer, but also as preparation for cultures which can be a bit harsh when experienced in the raw. Better then to have a little pre-cooking done by experienced, if ex-patriate, connoisseurs.
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March 2, 2005
English is as English does
Jeremy Paxman: The English: Portrait of a people
Fun book - really a collection of essays - on the English (not to be confused with Britain.....). A good companion to Bill Bryson's Notes From a Small Island, which Paxman pans a number of times with the huffiness of an academically oriented journalist beaten to the punch by an American with better jokes and fewer footnotes.
Paxman sees the English myth - of "mustn't grumble", uneducated elite and imperial post-partum depressions - as a big lie. Hooliganism, modernism and individuality are not aberrations, but the true English character, and have always been. Interesting chapter on the strict hierarchical relationship between the sexes, as well as the consequences of generations trained never to display emotion.
Recommended.
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January 27, 2005
Nostalgia unrequited
John Le Carre: Absolute Friends
John le Carre's novels tend to focus on goodhearted people caught in circumstances that are too big for them. This time it is Ted Mundy, sometime revolutionary and later spy, whose friendship and later contact with a German spy comes back to bite him when the Cold War is officially over.
Reading this book was an uneven experience - the first two thirds are vintage le Carre, describing espionage as only he can. Most of the last third is the mystery of the book, when new circumstances come up and the reader can share the main protagonist's confusion and alternative explanations. The conclusion of the book was, if unexpected, something of a disappointment - unlike most of Le Carre's books, which tend to be subtle to the point of confusion, the resolution feels like a tacked-on explanation for the lay and not too smart reader.
The thriller industry was badly served by the fall of the Berlin Wall. Le Carre has fared better than most, but this book, while enjoyable reading, leaves you with a feeling that he really would like to continue writing about the good old days of espionage. As do the characters he portrays.
Not that I blame him - masterpieces like Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley's People leave me wanting more, too.
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January 17, 2005
Punctuated inapropriam
Lynne Truss: Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
After reading this book, I can no longer read The Economist without noticing the very British overuse of commas, and have acquired a gnawing anxiety about my own punctuation, first-language English or not. I just wish someone would write a book like this for the Norwegian language. In fact, I wish Norway - the only country I know with two official languages and nobody that speaks either - would get used to the idea that languages have rules, and are stronger for it.
Anyway, recommended along with Strunk and White, Bill Bryson's Mother Tongue and Made in America. Sticklers, unite!
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January 11, 2005
Duality of race and belonging
Barack Obama: Dreams from My Father
Barack Obama is an amazing person: A child of an absentee black father (student from Kenya) and white mother (small-town girl from Kansas), he has been elected senator of Illinois and was the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review. At the last Democratic Party convention, his keynote address instantly positioned him as the new hope of the party, with his personification of the American Dream.
The book, a very introspective autobiography, sketches rather than chronicles his journey from small child in a somewhat protected environment up to going to Harvard for his law degree, much of the time spent as a community organizer in Chicago's South Side. He visits Kenya searching for an understanding of his father, finding the societal and familial relations in Kenya no less difficult than in Chicago. Though slightly dated (the book was written 10 years ago, and not updated save a new preface), the complexity of dealing with poverty and slums in Chicago and other urban areas are well described through personal experiences (a refreshing brake from the sometimes stereotypical reporterese commonly seen in NY Sunday Times Magazines and similar publications).
The book resonated with me because (while not multiracial as he is) I can understand and empathize with Obama's feeling of not belonging - or, rather, of simultaneously belonging many places and yet not completely identifying with any one of them. In an age of seemingly simpleminded politics and increasingly spin-oriented politicians, it is rather reassuring to know that at least one US senator has the experience of life in the less privileged lane; the perseverance and intellectual capability to analyze deeply entrenched issues and work at resolving them; and the willingness to keep the complex issues complex and (as his keynote speech at the Democratic convention shows) the simple things simple.
Highly recommended.
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January 10, 2005
My favorite bookstore bites the dust....
I am just back from a week's travel in New England. While it was fantastic to be back at Harvard Square again (one of my favorite places in the world), the happiness was considerably marred by the discovery that my favorite bookstore, WordsWorth, had closed just a month before.
WordsWorth was fantastic - you could spend hours in its rather small, but extremely well-stocked (100.000 titles) store. I have never gone in there without coming out again with something - often more than my budget and luggage allowance really would allow. And the service - I once asked for three different books: One technical book, a novel, and an (at least to me) relatively obscure book on history of economic theory - and the guy behind the counter not only knew where they were, but also that one was on order (the economic history) and would be there in a week. Without consulting the computer. Wow.
Oh well, I suppose one reason for the demise was that the Harvard COOP bookstore finally provided some serious competition when Barnes and Noble took over its management. Still, a sad story.
Luckily, there is the Harvard Bookstore, with its knowledgable staff and well-stocked used book cellar. And in Amherst, I found the Jeffery Amherst Bookshop, which has much more than their Emily Dickinson collection.
So there is still hope in variety. Harvard COOP isn't too bad (though the web site doesn't do it justice). But I'll miss WordsWorth.
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November 2, 2004
A System after the mess
Neal Stephenson: The System of the World (Volume Three of The Baroque Cycle)
The last of the three volumes in the Baroque Cycle, The System of the World, is both a detective story set in London in 1714 and a phantasy on the very early beginnings of the industrial age, where the natural philosophers leave their roots in alchemy and become real scientists. Isaac Newton and Gottfried von Leibnitz figure prominently here, with much rivalry but also some interesting philosophickal discussions, as do the personages from the earlier volumes, The Confusion and Quicksilver: Jack and Bob Shaftoe and various of their relatives, Eliza, Dappa, Van Hoek, Daniel Waterhouse, and the enigmatic Enoch Root.
The System seemed to me the most worked through of the three volumes - there are fewer digressions and meandering descriptions, the intrigue is tighter though perhaps more predictable. The language is less modern, the backdrop of old London interesting, and the research into the outline of the Tower of London or the details of justice metered and rendered is deep and more relevant than in the other volumes. I enjoyed The System the most of the three and found it the easiest to read.
Overall, there has been progression through the three volumes - somewhat unusual, though I wonder whether not sales have suffered because the Quicksilver was comparatively hard to get through, with more historic personages and less progression in the story. I like long books, philosophy of science, and enough magical realism (we never get an explanation for the denseness of the Solomonic Gold, for instance, as well as Enoch Root's longevity - he shows up in Cryptonomicon, too) that you get a sense of the playfulness of the author.
Recommended - though some perseverance is necessary with the first volume. Have fun.
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The Battle of Britain, from up high
Patrick Bishop's Fighter Boys is a thorough history of the young fighter pilots who saved Britain during the Summer of 1940, at enormous personal cost. The book covers strategy, tactics, organization, individual dogfights as well as the aftermath of Fighter Command.
As a child, I read my father's collection of Biggles books, and learned the difference between Hurricanes, Spitfires and Mosquitos, as children tend to do. This book gives the real story - and one of the things it taught me is that in the Biggles stories about the Battle of Britain, Captain W. E. Johns was authentic. The battle was fought by young men who saw it as a game, responding to the danger and the horrible injuries (primarily from burns, creating members of the Guinea Pig Club) with understated humour, but suffering badly in silence.
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September 23, 2004
Less confusion in The Confusion
Neal Stephenson: The Confusion (Volume Two of The Baroque Cycle)
I just finished The Confusion, the second volume of The Baroque Cycle (and it really is three books, you can't start at volume two or three) and liked it much more than the first volume. Where the first volume was confusing in its storyline and a tiny little bit pretentious in its wealth of researched detail, the second volume is more lighthearted and readable. There is much more swashbuckling, centering on the picareque of Jack Shaftoe meandering through Asia and Latin America with a merry and eventually shrinking Cabal of conspirators, and a hint of the creation of a world-wide system of currencies and trade, with Eliza's global financial machinations. But Stephenson has a problem with endings - like Norse sagas, his characters have a habit of suddenly disappearing.
Like Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose, The Confusion suffers from not being able to get fully into style: The modernity of language and thought of the main characters as well as their frequent communications with each other decreases realism while speeding up the plot. I suspect Stephenson made a deliberate decision here - whether it is motivated by consideration for his tech-enabled audience or by a belief that people thought and acted very close to how we do today then doesn't really matter.
The Confusion, much more than Quicksilver, was fun. It has an element of continuance, like the second of the Lord of the Rings movies, but also plenty of adventure, some humor, and a touch of magical realism. I liked it and have already ordered the last volume, The System of the World, which was published two days ago. Stay tuned.
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August 13, 2004
The day the world exploded
Interesting book on the Krakatoa explosion: Simon Winchester (2003): Krakatoa, New York, HarperCollins. Subtitled "The day the world exploded: August 27, 1883", this is a detailed account of the history of the Sunda straits and the Dutch colonial powers, prior eruptions, and the eruption that blew Krakatoa away and which was literally seen (or, at least, the pressure wave registered) all over the world. Winchester sees the event as the first "global" event - thanks to the newly established telegraphic network, the news was known within days all over the world. He also, less convincingly, sees Krakatoa as a catalyst to the Islamic rebellions against the Dutch colonial powers a few years after.
Most interesting to me was the explanation of the mechanisms of the eruption (the meeting of two tectonic plates of differing composition, water-rich material being pulled under one of the plates and then pressuring its way up again) as well as the sheer size of the eruption. The noise of the final explosion was so loud that it was heard 3000 miles away - on the island of Rodrigues, where people thought it was naval gunnery. This is equivalent to hearing a noise made in New York while sitting in San Francisco. Krakatoa remains largest single natural catastrophy known to modern man, at least by some measures. 38,000 people died, a paddle steamer was lifted 3 miles upland, and a number of tsunamis, the largest the height of a 10-storey building, swept away whole villages, harbors and ships.
Winchester writes in an almost Victorian detail, sometimes overdoing the flowery language - I suppose it is hard to avoide being influenced by one's sources. The book is very detailed - but I like that. One small irritation, however, was the low quality of the overview charts in the beginning of the book. It took me quite a while to understand precisely where Krakatau was the Sunda strait. A more detailed overview map with some of the places that were eradicated (such as Anjer and Merok) would have helped.
Recommended.
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August 7, 2004
Dante does it
Just as I was beginning to despair and think that another Name of the Rose wasn't possible (and that we forever are doomed to read the illiterate snippets of The Da Vinci Code,) along comes Matthew Pearl's The Dante Club to rewive our spirits.
This is a very good book - historically correct as far as possible, painting fascinating portraits of Longfellow, Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., and other literary figures of late 19th century Boston, and with a proper plot, shades of Sherlock Holmes mixed with modern-day notions of what happens after the conclusion of a war.
One of the critiques of The Name of the Rose was that it seemed a bit after the fact: That the main protagonist had ideas that were several hundred years ahead of themselves, in expression if not in content. I had the same feeling reading this book, but it seems based in the writings of the people involved - and I am continually amazed by how early ideas turn up, and how we seem to rediscover them in every generation.
Nevertheless, The Dante Club is a must read in the historical crime mystery genre (if there is such a thing), and a relief, as I watch the NYT Book Magazine carrying ads for talks on lectures on The Da Vinci Code. Pearl can write, is historically correct as far as possible, and can set up a plot. His book is not very filmable, though. But it is very readable.
Very highly recommended.
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Curious Incident of book about autism
Light summer reading that is neither shallow nor pointless: Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. About an autistic (at least that is what I assume he is, since all I know about the subject comes from Dustin Hoffmann's performance in Rain Man) boy who finds his neighbor's dog killed, and sets out to find out who did it. The journey he sets out on is one of very small and carefully planned steps - those of a person who is extremely smart in one dimension and handicapped in almost anything else. Wonderful insight in into the mind of a child with a psychiatric disorder - or, as the protagonist would say, we don't know whether it is an insight or not, since we can't get into other people's minds. But it feels right, which is something he would not say.
Highly recommended.
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May 26, 2004
Tony as columnist
My former and occasionally current colleague, friend and partner in highly vocal discussions (we were once asked to pipe down by an intimidated colleague who thought we would go for each other's throats, when we both thought we only had a friendly exchange of views) Tony DiRomualdo has snuck off to become a columnist at the Wisconsin Technology Network. Tony's articles reflects his deepfelt passion for giving people a fair deal in a world that is increasingly globalized and outsourced - without denying the economic benefits of sensibly done outsourcing. A much better argument than a lot of the populistic protectionism that seems to dominate politics these days - this middle ground is what we need if we are to make sense of globalization and offshoring, rather than make wars about it.
Tony is also a gourmet (responsible for a number of travel allowance discussions at our former place of work) - and he does talks, too..... Make sure dinner is included, and you might learn something, and not just about the food.
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Gladwell's articles
After reading about Malcolm Gladwell, the author of The tipping point (a great explanation of network externalities), in Dan Bricklin's blog, I discovered that he had a website with an archive of his articles in the New Yorker. Well worth a visit - great stuff on the myth of talent management (or, rather, why what worked for McKinsey did not work for Enron or, for that matter, for Swissair), on recognizing whether people are lying based on their facial microexpressions - and why SUVs are a bad thing because people think they are much safer than they are. Excellent writing, as with most things in the New Yorker, highly recommended.
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May 19, 2004
Paul Graham with new book
Wired has a review of Paul Graham's new book Hackers and Painters. The book is (apparently, since I haven't read it yet) a collection of Paul's essays, some of which have been available on his (stylish and minimalistic) web site for some time. Paul Graham, of course, should be a hero to every Web user for his popularization of the "Bayesian" spam filtering technique, now employed in Mozilla and almost every other email reader.
I haven't managed to get hold of the book yet, but Paul's essays are great - and you really can't beat a quote such as "If you think you're designing something for idiots, odds are you're not designing something good." Far too many applications today are user-friendly rather than usable (Blackboard, which I currently suffer to reach my students, is one example, though less bad than ClassFronter, which is too awful for words and what grade school teachers in Norway are forced to use).
So this just might be a book to get. Or, at least, a reason to go back to Paul's site (which does not offer an RSS feed) and reread some of his excellent writings.
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April 26, 2004
How to start a business (the Stephenson version)
My students persistently demand instruction in how to write a business plan for a startup company. I think their demand is fair - in fact, I think every MBA student should write at least two full business plans during their MBA program, simply because doing so requires them to think through most of their course literature and how to apply it to a practical situation. Nothing like excercise...
Which gives me the problem of how to teach them to do it. There are the usual sites that provide outlines and examples, of course, but for a number of reasons (including that it is never to late to teach people to read) I tend to give them an excerpt from Neal Stephenson's brilliant novel Cryptonomicon, in which my favorite (and not altogether facetious) description of a business plan is given (page 238ff.):
Epiphyte Corp.'s business plan is about an inch thick, neither fat nor skinny as these things go. The interior pages are slickly and groovily desktop-published out of Avi's laptop. The covers are rugged hand-laid paper of rice chaff, bamboo tailings, free-range hemp, and crystalline glacial meltwater made by wizened artisans operating out of a mist-shrouded temple hewn from living volcanic rock on some island known only to aerobically gifted, Spandex-sheathed Left Coast travel bores. An impressionistic map of the South China Sea has been dashed across these covers by molecularly reconstructed Ming Dynasty calligraphers using brushes of combed unicorn mane dipped into ink made by grinding down charcoal slabs fashioned by blind stylite monks from hand-charred fragments of the the True Cross.The actual contents of the business plan hews to a logical structure straight out of the Principia Mathematica. Lesser entrepreneurs purchase business-plan-writing software: packages of boilerplate text and spreadsheets, craftily linked together so that you need only go through and fill in a few blanks. Avi and Beryl have written enough business plans between the two of them that they can smash them out from brute memory. Avi's business plans tend to go something like this:
MISSION: At [name of company], it is our conviction that [to do the stuff we want to do] and to increase shareholder value are not merely complementary activities -- they are inextricably linked.
PURPOSE: To increase shareholder value by [doing stuff].
EXTREMELY SERIOUS WARNING (printed out on a separate page, in red letters on a yellow background): Unless you are as smart as Johann Karl Friedrich Gauss, savvy as a half-blind Calcutta bootblack, tough as General William Tecumseh Sherman, rich as the Queen of England, emotionally resilient as a Red Sox fan, and as generally able to take care of yourself as the average nuclear submarine commander, you should never have been allowed near this document. Please dispose of it as you would any piece of high-level radioactive waste and then arrange with a qualified surgeon to amputate your arms at the elbows and gouge your eyes from their sockets. This warning is necessary because once, a hundred years ago, a little old lady in Kentucky put a hundred dollars into a dry goods company that went belly-up and returned her only ninety-nine dollars. Ever since, the government has been on our asses. If you ignore this warning, read on at your peril -- you are dead certain to lose everything you've got and live out your final decades beating back waves of termites in a Mississippi Delta leper colony.
Still reading? Great. Now that we've scared off the lightweights, let's get down to business.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: We will raise [some money], then [do some stuff] and increase shareholder value. Want details? Read on.
INTRODUCTION: [This trend], which everyone knows about, and [that trend], which is so incredibly arcane that you probably didn't know about it until just now, and [this other trend over here] which might seem, at first blush, to be completely unrelated, when all taken together, lead us to the (proprietary, secret, heavily patented, trademarked, and NDAed) insight that we could increase shareholder value by [doing stuff]. We will need $ [a large number] and after [not too long] we will be able to realize an increase in value to $ [an even larger number], unless [hell freezes over in midsummer].
DETAILS:
Phase 1: After taking vows of celibacy and abstinence and foregoing all of our material possessions for homespun robes, we (viz. appended resumes) will move into a modest complex of scavenged refrigerator boxes in the central Gobi Desert, where real estate is so cheap that we are actually being paid to occupy it, thereby enhancing shareholder value even before we have actually done anything. On a daily ration consisting of a handful of uncooked rice and a ladleful of water, we will [begin to do stuff].
Phase 2, 3, 4, . . . , n - 1: We will [do more stuff, steadily enhancing shareholder value in the process] unless [the earth is struck by an asteroid a thousand miles in diameter, in which case certain assumptions will have to be readjusted; refer to Spreadsheets 397-413 ].
Phase n: Before the ink on our Nobel Prize certificates is dry, we will confiscate the property of our competitors, including anyone foolish enough to have invested in their pathetic companies. We will sell all of these people into slavery. All proceeds will be redistributed among our shareholders, who will hardly notice, since Spreadsheet 265 demonstrates that, by this time, the company will be larger than the British Empire at its zenith.
SPREADSHEETS: [Pages and pages of numbers in tiny print, conveniently summarized by graphs that all seem to be exponential curves screaming heavenward, albeit with enough pseudo-random noise in them to lend plausibility.]
RESUMES: Just recall the opening reel of "The Magnificent Seven", and you won't have to bother with this part; you should crawl to us on hands and knees, and beg us for the privilege of paying our salaries.
Moreover, the purpose of the business plan inside the company is nicely explained - this is the way it is supposed to be in real life, as opposed to the way it frequently is, where the business plan goes into a drawer after the monez has come in. After all, the only thing you know for sure with a business plan is that you will rewrite it (p. 240):
To Randy and the others, the business plan functions as Torah, master calendar, motivational text, philosophical treatise. It is a dynamic document. Its spreadsheets are palimpsests, linked to the company accounts and financial records so that they automatically adjust whenever money flows in or out. Beryl handles that stuff. Avi handles the words - the underlying, abstract plan, and the concrete details, that inform those spreadsheets - interpreting the numbers. Avi's part of the plan mutates too, from week to week, as he gets new input from articles in the Asian Wall Street Journal, conversations with government officials in flyblown Shenzen karaoke bars, remote-sensing data pouring in from satellites, and obscure technical journals analyzing the latest advances in optical fiber technology. Avi's brain also digests the ideas of Randy and the other members of the group and incorporates them into the plan. Every quarter, they take a snapshot of the business plan in its current state, trowels some Maybelline onto it, and ship out new copies to investors.
Furthermore, here is a description of a person that is altogether to often missing from most startup companies - especially in Norway, I should note (p. 187):
A woman comes into the room, burdened with tote bags, and beams an apology for being late. Beryl Hagen looks like a Norman Rockwell aunt, an apron-wearing, apple-pie-toting type. In twenty years, she has been the chief financial officer of twelve different small high-tech companies. Ten of them have gone out of business. Except in the case of the second one, this was through no fault of Beryl's. The sixth was Randy's Second Business Foray. One was absorbed by Microsoft, one became a successful, independent company in its own right. Beryl made enough money from the latter two to retire. She consults and writes while she is looking for something interesting enough to draw her back into action, and her presence in the room suggests that Epiphyte(2) Corp. must not be completely bogus.
(Incidentally, here is an interview with Stephenson where he talks about the novel and the business plan.)
So - do you have a business plan according to these specs, that everyone in the company understands and have contributed to, and someone experienced to hold the pursestrings? You're in business....
Posted by Espen at 11:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 22, 2004
Growing up on cotton
John Grisham (2001): A Painted House. New York: Dell.
Interesting portrait of life in the early 1950s in a cotton-farming community in Arkansas, as told through an increasingly precocious 7 year old boy. One gets the feeling that Grisham wanted to write To Kill a Mockingbird but couldn't quite stop being a thriller writer - consequently, a lot happens (love, birth, violence, wheather, natural disasters) in this area where nothing really happens. Still, I liked it a lot - the writing is exceptional, especially the slightly tongue-in-cheek descriptions of how news spread through the small farming community and the touching concern of the family with with their son who is in away in the Korean war. Recommended.
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April 13, 2004
Memories of flying
James Spencer (2003), The Pilots, New York: Berkley Books.
This was a fast read - a sort of naïvistic Catch-22 written by someone who has read a lot of Hemingway - but I liked it. The author claims to be a WWII bomber pilot who has written a novel - more of a series of short stories with a linked set of participants, again like Hemingway - based on his remembrances. The main protagonist is a fighter ace, batting it out with Japanese Zero pilots and seeing the gruesome details of a war that, at least in the beginning, can seem noble and distant.
I was a bit surprised to see this novel panned on Amazon.com, but people looking for the more traditional, technical and heroic type of war novel, with much detail on weapons and history, will be a bit disappointed. The fairly modern language and style detracts a little from the authenticity - you sometimes wonder whether the author really was a pilot or merely a student of one. But the personalities come out through the sketches and the author mercifully avoids clear-cut endings - such as whether the ambitious flight captain taking chances to become the top ace really is evil or merely confused. Excellent last chapter on how people deal with their experiences back in civilian life, when the young pilots come home to the GI bill and the occasional question about their experiences. Recommended.
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Death and corruption in Venice
Donna Leon (2003) Uniform Justice, New York: Penguin
This is the third book in a series about the Italian police commissario Brunetti, trying to solve a case of either suicide or murder in a military school for the elitistic (or, rather, fascistic) offspring of the top brass. An honest politician (and if the political landscape of Italy is anything like it is described in this book, that is a very rare catch indeed) is under threat from people whom his investigations into military procurement practices may uncover.
The whole thing is rather formulaic, from the politicised boss, the psychologist wife, and the computer-wizard female assistant who can dig up anything by accessing, legally or not, various computer registers. The book is set in Venice, and I was a little surprised at how the police uses gondolas or their own launch to move about - but I have never been there, so I can't vouch for the authenticity. This is Sjöwall & Wahlöö set in Italy, a bit repetitious, in fact. Not sure I'll bother reading any more from this series.
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April 2, 2004
Bill Bryson travels through science and natural history
Bill Bryson (2003). A Short History of Nearly Everything. New York, Broadway Books.
Any fan of Bill Bryson (and how can you be anything else after having read all his books) will see that he is, behind all his middle-aged-and-comically-disillusioned image, a closet academic. His books tend to pose as simple-minded reflections on travel and language, but he is betrayed (especially in In a sunburned country and his two books on the English language (Mother Tongue and Made in America) by his precise descriptions of history and natural science, and his careful references.
A Short History of Nearly Everything is the best popular science book I have read so far - and this is a popular book. As a child, I got as a gift a picture book on nuclear physics called Our Friend the Atom, which despite what I later realized was a rather simplistic (it was put together by Disney) in its view of the consequences of atomic energy, had the inestimable quality of making science interesting. Bryson's latest has the ability to do the same, but to adults - managing to make us fascinated about science and nature without for an instant succumbing to naïve "science marches on" clichés.
The book aims to give an overview of natural science, organized in six parts: Lost in the cosmos (about space and how our models of it have developed), The size of the earth (the development of our understanding of the physical aspects of the earth and the solar system); A new age dawns (Einstein, atoms, subatomic particles, quantum theory); Dangerous planet (a delightful diversion into naturalistic paranoia, explaining the many ways in which the Earth is vulnerable - volcanoes, asteroids, and earthquakes, to name a few); Life itself (the main part of the book, explaining life as a system from the atmosphere to the cell and eventually to DNA) and finally The road to us (human evolution - including paleontology, which turns out to be based to a surprising degree on conjecture.)
Throughout everything, Bryson describes not just the various theories, but also the people who developed them, using his trademark powers of one-line characterization (Iowa is "stratigraphically uneventful", for instance) to show that science, at a certain level, is as much a competition of opinion as a rational search for truth (and boy, does this make it more interesting!)
The references and explanations are, as far as I can tell, impeccable. My only quirk was that I was little surprised to see Bryson subscribe what I thought was an urban myth, the one about how glass is a kind of liquid, as evidenced by the oft-told story about antique window panes being thicker at the bottom. Physics aside, I always thought that the thicker-at-bottom phenomenon, if it indeed is true, could more plausibly be explained by ancient glassmakers not being able to produce flat glass, and window makers consistently putting the thickest side at the bottom (which is what I would have done, anyway). Bryson is also a little bit wide-eyed when it comes to some of the "dangers" of natural disasters such as the possible explosion of the Yellowstone caldera, but I ascribe that more to a fascination with possible dangers than to lack of scientific truth in storytelling. (Nevertheless, anyone can become a bit thoughtful after those chapters - the trouble is, who should you bequeath your possessions to when there is no one left?)
This is a book I would give to any young person wondering about science and any adult who feels that Discovery Channel is becoming a bit repetitive. Highly recommended. Just what is needed to make people interested in science and nature again.
Posted by Espen at 6:47 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
March 16, 2004
If you are what you read, then I'm in trouble
Last week, when botanizing for something to while away the time flying home, I came across Dale Carnegie's How to win friends and influence people. Halfway remembering a comment by a professor of organizational psycology about this actually being a good book, I bought it.
It is, at least, an interesting book, both in itself and in the place it occupies. It is, as far as I know, the first really modern self-help book, and the Carnegie Institute (or whatever its name is) is still around, preaching the principles of Carnegie to all and sundry. The book's message is deceptively simple: You can win friends and influence people by listening to them and behaving nicely - and the easiest way to do that is to actually mean it.
Despite the cheesiness, I like this book, mostly because the author writes very straightforward and without conceit. He does not try to cloak his argument in mysticism or displaced science. Instead, he sets up a principle for each chapter, then piles on the stories of famous people or course alumni who successfully or unsuccessfully have tried to apply it. No metaphors, no frameworks, just stories. Simple. In principle.
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March 12, 2004
The Da Vinci Clunker
This one was the disappointment of the year (but then again, it's only March). I bought Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code at Dublin airport at the recommendation of several friends. This is a NYT #1 bestseller, and I was looking forward to a complex and learned thriller with cryptography and history figuring prominently - kind of a combination of Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon and Unberto Eco's Name of the Rose, maybe with intertwingled fact and fiction like Shakespeare in Love.
That was not to be. The book is a clunker, and once you start noticing it there is no way back.
The premise is great and the plot at least starts out promising, but the writing, particularly the exposition, is breathless and shallow - Paris is described barely better than Marlo Morgan describes Australia. The book features a Harvard professor of "Religious Symbology" trying to make sense of the death of a Louvre curator - who turns out to be the grandmaster of a secret society guarding the 2000-year old secret of the Holy Grail. If released, this secret will bring down the Catholic church, so the curator is killed by a conveniently available self-flagellating albino monk on orders from the Opus Dei. Of course, the men are handsome, the women beautiful, and the obligatory nod to new age and political correctness is included in the form of a cryptographer heroine and a half-baked "legend of the goddess" running theme.
Worst, however, is the writing. The shallowness of the descriptions is nothing short of offending. For instance, the office of the deceased curator is described, seen through the professors' eyes, as having "Old Master" paintings on the wall. This same professor is supposedly so proficient in the arts that he can recognize the "famous parquet floor" of Louvre's Grand Galerie from a Polaroid (Polaroid? In this day and age?) when pulled out of bed at 2am. Would such as person describe the paintings by anything less that the artist' name?
Brown wallows in cheap suspense tactics - such as having the characters look at something, express their horror, and then move on without telling the reader what the horror is. This makes the book feel like a cable newscast, where the anchors are forever saying "next, ...." and you know you have to suffer through three commercial breaks and trivial news items before you come to the meat, which by then has become stale since you have guessed it anyway.
Brown borrows plot construction from Robert Ludlum (with characters routinely outdriving Parisian police in their two-seater Smart Car, essentially a mailbox on wheels) and jetting around Europe, displaying deep knowledge of obscure history but intermittent denseness when it comes to solving riddles. He borrows writing techniques (as well as self-promotion tactics) from Tom Clancy, with spurious italication meant to illustrate the main persons conversations with himself, as well as attempts at describing the proficiency of the heroes and villains by which weapons and cars they use, no technical detail forgotten.
In short, this is less a thriller than a movie script. As such, it has its good points - smart (or, at least, very filmable) ways of escaping police or villains with guns pointed in your direction, semi-clever rebus solutions and glorious locations. Even the product placements are included. But if you are looking for exciting reading and a plot with even a semblance of historical accuracy, you won't find it here.
Posted by Espen at 2:27 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
March 2, 2004
Rifleman Bowlby
The Recollections of Rifleman Bowlby by Alex Bowlby (Amazon) is a small book I picked up at Heathrow (funny how all my book buying is done at airports these days), and is, as the title hints, a memoir by the English version of a grunt during the 1944 Italian campaign.
This is fairly low-key as war memoirs go, written by a "gentleman" who chose to remain a regular soldier because he was, among the Cockney soldiers, "accepted for what he was rather than for what he was supposed to be."
Two aspects of this book made an impression: First, the everyday manner in which people die, making a profound impression on the others - not the death of one individual, but the gradual way in which this takes a toll on the participants. Secondly, the number of soldiers who desert or refuse to go into battle, and how this is dealt with by the officers, who, rather than having them automatically court martialled, will give them a rest and let the pressure from the other soldiers get them back into service.
You get the impression of a book written entirely honestly, by someone who was a little too young to understand what was going on, and who aged fast.
Posted by Espen at 8:06 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 27, 2004
Interesting times? (or, the political correctness of scientist superstition)
I am about 3/4 through Eric Hobsbawm's autobiography Interesting times (Amazon, Google search.) I picked this up at Heathrow airport on a lark (buying almost random books leads to unexpected discoveries.) Hobsbawm is a highly respected and famous historian - respected for his books, famous for remaining a Marxist to the bitter end.
The book makes me a bit uneasy. One one hand, it makes me want to buy some of his books - notably The Age of Extremes (Amazon), a history of the years 1914 to 1991, which I haven't read yet and look forward to. On the other hand, something about Robsbawm's recollections disturbs me.
Robsbawm is highly intelligent and learned - his analyses of the evolution of politics in the UK fascinates, partly from his excellent writing, partly from the people he has met and known (almost like Peter Drucker's Adventures of a bystander.) Moreover, he is aware of his surroundings, almost in real time. But a nagging question remains: How can such a smart person remain wedded to a political ideology that has proved its moral and practical impossibility over and over?
I have known a number of smart people myself, and some of them have, despite an awe-inspiring analytical brilliance in their work, espoused bizarre views and beliefs - political, religious, or just plain old superstitious - in their private lives. I ask myself how someone so smart can succumb to something so patently irrational? One thing is that entrepreneurs and businesspeople sometimes have non-rational views, but that may come with the territory - after all, one of the most important attributes of an entrepreneur is the willingness to suspend disbelief in a business idea. However, how can that be the case for academics, where scientific positivism (or, at least, scientific methods), openness to criticism, and continual revision of one's assumptions and prejudices is supposed to be not only the norm, but the whole justification for the activity? If you are a smart, learned and critical researcher - how come you do not apply those same criteria to the belief you have attached yourself to, and start to wonder why you pledge allegiance to such claptrap?
One thing is whether this belief is harmless - quite another if it's something that will cause other people harm - and quite another if the believer is in a position to use his or her "rational" background to influence others to adopt the same "irrational" beliefs. Most of the smart people with weird beliefs I know solve this by not mentioning their weird ideas at work - or to refer to them jokingly, in a way that cuts off discussion or at least signals that discussion should only proceed in a harmless fashion, not challenging the belief.
Moreover, what happens when the professional and private lives meet? Hobsbawm's loyalty to the Communist Party precluded him from writing modern history until the Party went out of existence. He offers this as an explanation, but does not apologize for it. In other words, he let his faith - or, if you will, irrational belief - get in the way of doing the scientific work he obviously wanted to do (instead writing about the 19th century). Scientists are usually quick to denounce this when it is forced on them, but do not seem to want to discuss it when the limitation in what is researchable is imposed by themselves.
J. M. Roberts, in his History of the world (Oxford, 2003, Amazon) observed that despite all our scientific progress, there does not seem to be any reduction in superstition and magical beliefs in the world. Religious sects, new-ageism, and most spam messages shows this. I wonder to what extent if would help if also scientists would be willing to acknowledge their superstitions and apply the same rigor to them?
Addendum two days later, when finished
The last chapter is about the US, with a Coda on the world post 9/11/01. Excellent observations, though I still feel uncomfortable.....
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