Archive of posts with tag 'Books'

Here’s a useful way of thinking about the domains of our three branches of government, from Yuval Levin’s American Covenant:

It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the Congress is expected to frame for the future, the president is expected to act in the present, and the courts are expected to assess the past. These boundaries are not perfectly clean, of course.

How distinct this delineation of roles is between the branches of government is up for debate, but this is a useful way to think about the Framers’ intention in designing the balanced separation of powers.

• Legislators frame laws for the future
• The president acts on them today
• Judges compare what’s happening today and planned for tomorrow against precedents set in the past

We tend to run into trouble when any of the branches strays outside its primary domain.

When the executive is designing Big Plans for the future, or when the judiciary is issuing punishments in the present, or (in what I’d say is our worst problem today) the legislative isn’t doing anything, we get into fraught territory.

While each of these has its primary focus on a particular time horizon, they aren’t the sole arbiters of decision making with respect to their domain. Our complex array of checks allows each to assert influence over other areas. I just find this a useful compression of the general model of the system.

Reading

Learning to Build, Bob Moesta
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The WEIRDest People in the World, Joseph Henrich
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The Network State, Balaji Srinivasan
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Dominion, Tom Holland
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Podcasts

21 episodes — 26 hrs, 24 min

TV

• Succession (4 episodes)
• Waco: American Apocalypse (3 episodes)
• The Mandalorian (3 episodes)
• Formula 1: Drive to Survive (14 episodes)

Film

Clockers (1995)

Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022)

Ad Astra (2019)

This year I got to several books that have been on my list for years, excited to finally dig into them.

Here’s the full list, with my favorites ⭐️ starred:

⭐️ Where Is My Flying Car? by J. Storrs Hall Published: 2021 • Completed: December 12, 2022 • 📚 View in Library

• Shelves: technology, history, futurism, economics
• ISBN: 9781953953186 (Goodreads)
• Format: Audiobook
• Buy on Amazon

⭐️ Helgoland Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution
by Carlo Rovelli Published: 2020 • Completed: October 17, 2022 • 📚 View in Library

• Shelves: physics, science, philosophy
• ISBN: 9780593328880 (Goodreads)
• Format: Kindle
• Buy on Amazon

⭐️ The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich A History of Nazi Germany
by William L. Shirer Published: 1960 • Completed: October 29, 2022 • 📚 View in Library

• Shelves: history, world war II, european history
• ISBN: 9780671728687 (Goodreads)
• Format: Kindle
• Buy on Amazon

The Captured Economy How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality
by Brink Lindsey, Steven Teles Published: 2017 • Completed: October 8, 2022 • 📚 View in Library

• Shelves: politics, economics, finance, business
• ISBN: 9780190627768 (Goodreads)
• Format: Kindle
• Buy on Amazon

Scene and Structure by Jack M. Bickham Published: 1999 • Completed: August 16, 2022 • 📚 View in Library

• Shelves: writing, film
• ISBN: 9780898799064 (Goodreads)
• Format: Paperback
• Buy on Amazon

⭐️ Underland A Deep Time Journey
by Robert Macfarlane Published: 2019 • Completed: August 5, 2022 • 📚 View in Library

• Shelves: history, science, nature, travel, geology, geography
• ISBN: 9780393358094 (Goodreads)
• Format: Audiobook
• Buy on Amazon

Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke Published: 1953 • Completed: August 4, 2022 • 📚 View in Library

• Shelves: classics, science fiction, speculative fiction
• ISBN: 9780345347954 (Goodreads)
• Format: Kindle
• Buy on Amazon

The Tacit Dimension by Michael Polanyi Published: 1966 • Completed: July 21, 2022 • 📚 View in Library

• Shelves: philosophy, science, psychology
• ISBN: 9780844659992 (Goodreads)
• Format: Paperback
• Buy on Amazon

⭐️ The Law by Frédéric Bastiat Published: 1850 • Completed: June 11, 2022 • 📚 View in Library

• Shelves: philosophy, politics, classics, government
• ISBN: 9781933550145 (Goodreads)
• Format: Kindle
• Buy on Amazon

The Future and Its Enemies The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress
by Virginia Postrel Published: 1998 • Completed: May 29, 2022 • 📚 View in Library

• Shelves: technology, government, philosophy
• ISBN: 9780684862699 (Goodreads)
• Format: Paperback
• Buy on Amazon

Knowledge and Decisions by Thomas Sowell Published: 1979 • Completed: May 3, 2022 • 📚 View in Library

• Shelves: philosophy, economics, history, politics, sociology
• ISBN: 9780465037384 (Goodreads)
• Format: Paperback
• Buy on Amazon

The Conservative Sensibility by George Will Published: 2019 • Completed: March 17, 2022 • 📚 View in Library

• Shelves: politics, history, philosophy
• ISBN: 9780316480932 (Goodreads)
• Format: Kindle
• Buy on Amazon

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team A Leadership Fable
by Patrick Lencioni Published: 2002 • Completed: February 22, 2022 • 📚 View in Library

• Shelves: business, management, leadership
• ISBN: 9780787960759 (Goodreads)
• Format: Kindle
• Buy on Amazon

From John McPhee’s Annals of the Former World:

Geologists on the whole are inconsistent drivers. When a roadcut presents itself, they tend to lurch and weave. To them, the roadcut is a portal, a fragment of a regional story, a proscenium arch that leads their imaginations into the earth and through the surrounding terrane.

This is a book I’d love to revisit. So many great bits of history.

Historian David McCullough died last week at age 89. If you’ve never read his work, it’s some of the best, most readable and engaging history you can find. I’ve read a few of his books over the years, like The Great Bridge (about the building of the Brooklyn Bridge), 1776 (the Revolutionary War), and his biography John Adams. Looking back on his bibliography, all of his others are on my reading list.

It’s always unfortunate to lose such a critical voice in American culture, but at least his books will stand the test of time and be read by generations.

Here’s a quote from John Adams, pulled from McCullough’s biography, with which he clearly resonated:

“The longer I live, the more I read, the more patiently I think and the more anxiously I inquire, the less I seem to know. Do justly. Love mercy. Walk humbly. This is enough.”

I just finished Robert Macfarlane’s Underland, a book about all things “underworld” — catacombs, cave exploration, underground rivers, tree root networks, and geologic time. He ties these stories together with historical backgrounds of each place, globetrotting from the Slovenian Dolomites to Greenland to Norwegian ocean caves. It’s an excellent read. Highly recommended if you like nature writing and narrative nonfiction!

In the final chapter he visits the west coast of Finland, specifically the Onkalo spent nuclear fuel repository, a 500m deep network of man-made caves designed to house up to 6,500 tons of spent nuclear fuel rods for 100,000 years. Here and at other locations like Yucca Mountain, mankind is inserting its own strata into the geologic record. The author describes the lengths the architects go to to protect future generations from the lethal material buried within. To reach the deadly uranium cache, you’d bore through layers and layers — granite, gneiss, bentonite, copper, iron, zirconium. Layers of protective housings to keep in the radioactive waste.

But the strangest aspect of the story involves a collection of Finnish folklore called the Kalevala:

The Kalevala is a long poem of many voices and many stories which — like the Iliad and the Odyssey — grows out of diverse and deep-rooted traditions, from Baltic song to Russian storytelling. It existed chiefly as a mutable oral text for more than a thousand years, until in the nineteenth century the Kalevala was collected, edited and published by the Finnish scholar Elias Lönnrot, giving us the mostly fixed version we now have.

There’s a story in the Kalevala about a hero called Väinämöinen, who has an underground encounter eerily related to what’s happening today at Onkalo:

Partway through the poem, Väinämöinen is given the task of descending to the underland. Hidden in the Finnish forests, he is told, is the entrance to a tunnel that leads to a cavern far underground. In that cavern are stored materials of huge energy: spells and enchantments which, when spoken, will release great power. To approach this subterranean space safely Väinämöinen must protect himself with shoes of copper and a shirt of iron, lest he be damaged by what it contains. Ilmarinen forges them for him. Clad in these insulating metals Väinämöinen approaches the tunnel mouth, which is disguised by aspens, alders, willows and spruce. He cuts down the trees to reveal the entrance. He enters the tunnel and finds himself in a deep ‘grave’, a ‘demon lair’. He has stepped, he realizes, into the throat of a buried giant called Vipunen whose body is the land itself.

Vipunen warns Väinämöinen not to bring to the surface what is buried in his caverns. He speaks of the ‘grievous pain’ of excavation. Why have you entered ‘my guiltless heart, my blameless belly’, Vipunen asks, ‘to eat and to gnaw / to bite, to devour’? He warns Väinämöinen that he will end up visiting terrible violence upon humans if he continues on his course, that he will become ‘a windborne disease / wind-borne, water driven / shared out by the gale / carried by chill air’. He threatens to imprison Väinämöinen by means of a containment spell so powerful that it is unlikely ever to be broken.

How does a centuries-old Finnish myth sound like it presages something dangerous buried underground in the 21st century? There’s even reference to copper as protection, and carrying a “windborne disease.” Ancient myths contain more practical knowledge than we think. It’s no wonder theories abound about aliens visiting earth in the past, or about advanced civilizations being around 50,000 years ago.

📚 The Next Chapter of Readwise: Our Own Reading App

Great to see this evolution of Readwise to enter the “read-later” app space. None of the options out there seem to be thriving anymore (Pocket, Instapaper, etc.), but some of us still rely on them as essential parts of our reading experience.

The Readwise team has been moving fast the last couple years with excellent additions to the product, and I can’t believe they were also working on this for most of 2021 along with the other regular updates. Impressive.

🪧 Book Review: The Revolt of the Public

Scott Alexander reviews Martin Gurri:

People could have lowered their expectations, but in the real world that wasn’t how things went. Instead of losing faith in the power of government to work miracles, people believed that government could and should be working miracles, but that the specific people in power at the time were too corrupt and stupid to press the “CAUSE MIRACLE” button which they definitely had and which definitely would have worked. And so the outrage, the protests - kick these losers out of power, and replace them with anybody who had the common decency to press the miracle button!

Revolt of the Public was published in 2014, a time when most of his diagnosis of political discontent was prescient. But as SA points out, most of the subject matter is received wisdom in 2021.

I still highly recommend Gurri as a writer, and RotP for its analysis of root causes more than its predictions of things to come. More on Gurri here and here, and give a watch to his Revolt of the Public in 10 Minutes talk to get the precis on his work if you’re unfamiliar.

🏛 The Helicopter State

Jonah’s G-File is one of the rare read-every-issue newsletters, and this one is one of my recent favorites:

The government can’t love you, and when it works from the premise that it can, folly or tyranny follow. We need people in our lives, not programs. Because people give us the very real sense that we are part of something, that we’re needed and valued. Programs treat us like we’re metrics in some PowerPoint slide.

Helicopter parenting has a negative perception, as it should, but it’s still done all the time. Helicopter governing should be treated the same, but is also promoted and defended far too often.

Jonathan Rauch’s latest book The Constitution of Knowledge just dropped, which sounds sort of like a sequel, or at least a redux of his classic Kindly Inquisitors.

Brookings held a panel on his book’s release with historian Anne Applebaum and novelist Neal Stephenson (yes, that Neal Stephenson). In Constitution he follows up his ideas on liberal science and free speech with further work on institutional decay, social coercion, and disinformation.

I wrote about Kindly Inquisitors and Rauch’s liberal science concept in Res Extensa #9. His work covers critical first principles that we’re gradually navigating away from.

This is a repost from my newsletter, Res Extensa, which you can subscribe to over on Substack. This issue was originally published in November, 2020.

In our last issue, we’d weathered TS Zeta in the hills of Georgia, and the dissonance of being a lifelong Floridian sitting through gale-force winds in a mountain cabin. Last week a different category of storm hit us nationwide in the form of election week (which it seems we’ve mostly recovered from). Now as I write this one, Eta is barreling toward us after several days of expert projections that it’d miss by a wide margin. We’re dealing with last-minute school closures and hopefully dodging major power outages. 2020 continues to deliver the goods.

There’s a lot in store for this week, so let’s get into it:

Seeing Like a State

I’ve been deep in James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State lately, so I wanted to riff this week on Scott’s notion of “legibility,” the book’s central idea. His thesis in SLAS is that central authorities impose top-down, mandated designs on societies in order to make them easier to understand through simplification and optimization techniques. Examples in the book range from scientific forestry and naming traditions to urban planning and collectivist agriculture.

Scott calls this ideology “authoritarian high modernism,” wherein governments, driven by a zealous belief in knowledge and scientific expertise, determine they can restructure the social order for particular gain: higher crop yields, more compliant citizenry, more efficient cities, or crime-free neighborhoods (a dangerous proposition when a “crime” is redefined at will by authorities). He’s ruthlessly critical of these ideas, as evidenced by the book’s subtitle, and presents dozens of cases of top-down-design-gone-wrong, the most extreme case being the Soviet Union’s collectivization program that led to widespread famine.

An interesting factor to think about is how and when to apply intentional design in service of legibility and control. It’s not an all good–all bad proposition, to be sure. Even though Scott levels a pretty harsh review of high modernist ideology, even he acknowledges its value in small, targeted doses for specific problems.

Legibility: A Big Little Idea

I linked to a piece a while back by Venkatesh Rao, the source where I first learned of Scott’s work.

The post is largely an introduction to the book’s themes, but adds a few interesting notes on the psychology behind legibility. Given all the history we have that demonstrates the failure rate of high modernist thinking, why do we keep doing it?

I suspect that what tempts us into this failure is that legibility quells the anxieties evoked by apparent chaos. There is more than mere stupidity at work.

In Mind Wide Open, Steven Johnson’s entertaining story of his experiences subjecting himself to all sorts of medical scanning technologies, he describes his experience with getting an fMRI scan. Johnson tells the researcher that perhaps they should start by examining his brain’s baseline reaction to meaningless stimuli. He naively suggests a white-noise pattern as the right starter image. The researcher patiently informs him that subjects’ brains tend to go crazy when a white noise (high Shannon entropy) pattern is presented. The brain goes nuts trying to find order in the chaos. Instead, the researcher says, they usually start with something like a black-and-white checkerboard pattern.

If my conjecture is correct, then the High Modernist failure-through-legibility-seeking formula is a large scale effect of the rationalization of the fear of (apparent) chaos.

Scott also points out in the book how much of the high modernist mission is driven by “from above” aesthetics, not on-the-ground results. He analyzes the work of Le Corbusier and his visionary model for futuristic urban planning, most evident in his designs for Chandigurh in India and the manufactured Brazilian capital of Brasília (designed by his student, Lúcio Costa).

While Brasília projects a degree of majesty from above, life on the street is a hollowed-out, sterile existence. Its design ignored the realities of how humans interact. Life is more complex than the few variables a planner can optimize for. It’s telling that both Chandigurh and Brasília have lively slums on their outskirts, unplanned neighborhoods that filled demands unmet by the architected city centers.

He juxtaposes the work of Le Corbusier with that of Jane Jacobs, grassroots city activist and author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Jacobs was a lifelong advocate of “street life,” placing high emphasis on the organic, local, and human-scale factors that truly make spaces livable and enjoyable. She famously countered the ultimate high modernist visions of New York City planner Robert Moses.

This contrast between failure in legible, designed systems and resilience in emergent, organic ones triggers all of my free-market priors. The truth is there is no “best” mental model here. Certain types of problems lend themselves well to top-down control (require it, in fact), and others produce the best results when markets and individuals are permitted to drive their own solutions. Standard timekeeping, transportation networks, space exploration, flood control — these are all challenges that are hard to address for a variety of reasons without centralized coordination.

Imposing legibility demands an appreciation of trade-offs. Yes, dictated addressing schemes and fixed property ownership documentation do enable state control in the form of taxation, conscription, or surveillance. But in exchange for the right degree of imposed structure, we get the benefit of property rights and land tenure.

Big Tech’s Legible Vision

Byrne Hobart touched on this idea in an issue of his newsletter. (The Diff is some of the best tech/business/investing writing out there, I highly recommend subscribing). He makes the point that wherever scale is required, abstraction and legibility are highly valuable. He calls up Scott’s usage of the term mētis, translated from the classical Greek to mean roughly “knowledge that can only come from practical experience.” The value of this local knowledge is Scott’s counter to legibility-seeking schemes: that practical knowledge beats the theoretical every time.

I like this point that Hobart makes, though, on seeking larger scale global maxima: that a pure reliance on the practical can leave you stuck in a local maximum:

But mētis is a hill-climbing algorithm. If it’s based on experience rather than theory, it’s limited by experience. Meanwhile, theory is not limited by direct experience. By the 1930s, many physicists were quite convinced that an atomic bomb was possible, though of course none of them had ever seen one. Because some things can’t be discovered by trial and error, but can be created by writing down some first principles and thinking very hard about their implications (followed by lots of trial and error), the pro-legibility side has an advantage in inventing new things.

He also brings up its implications in the modern tech ecosystem. The Facebooks, Googles, and Amazons are like panoptic overseers that can force legibility even on the most impenetrable, messy datastreams through machine learning algorithms and hyper-scale pattern recognition. The trade-off here may not be conscription (not yet anyway), but there is a tax. There’s an interesting twist, though: the tech firms have pushed these specialized models so far to the edge that they themselves can’t even explain how they work, thereby reconstituting illegibility:

Fortunately for anyone who shares Scott’s skepticism of the legibility project, the end state for tech ends up creating a weird ego of the mētis-driven illegible system we started with. The outer edges of ad targeting, product recommendations, search results, People You May Know, and For You Page are driven by machine learning algorithms that consume unfathomable amounts of data and output a uniquely well-targeted result. The source code and the data exist, in human-readable formats, but the actual process can be completely opaque.

Functional versus Unit Organizations

While legibility interests me in its applicability to society as a whole, I’m even more intrigued by how this phenomenon works on a smaller scale: within companies.

Org charts attempt to balance productivity and legibility, which often pull in different directions. Organizational design is driven by a hybrid need:

1. To ship products and services to customers in exchange for revenue and equity value, and
2. To be able to control, monitor, and optimize the corporate machine

Companies spend millions each year doing “reorgs,” often attributing execution failures to #2: the illegibility of the org’s activities. Therefore you rarely see a reorg that results in drastic cutback of management oversight.

Former Microsoft product exec and now-VC Steven Sinofsky wrote this epic piece a few years back comparing the pros and cons of function- and unit-based organizational structures. Each has merits that fit better or worse within an org depending on the product line(s), corporate culture, geographic spread, go-to-market, and headcount. The number one objective of an optimum org chart is to maximize value delivery to customers through cost reduction, top-line revenue gains, lower overhead, and richer innovation in new products. But legibility can’t be left out as an influence. The insertion of management layer is an attempt to institute tighter control and visibility, a degree of which is necessary to appropriately dial-in costs and overhead investment.

Look at this statistic Sinofsky cites about the Windows team’s composition when he joined:

One statistic: when I came to Windows and the 142 product units, the team overall was over 35% managers (!). But the time we were done “going functional” we had about 20% managers.

Even corporate teams aren’t immune to the pull of legibility. When its influence is stretched too far, you end up with Dilbert cartoons and TPS reports.

Emergent Order in Cities

It was serendipitous to encounter this same theme in Devon Zuegel’s podcast, Order Without Design. The show is a conversation with urbanist Alain Bertaud and his wife Marie-Agnes, an extension of his book on urban planning and how “markets shape cities.”

In episode 3 they discuss mostly sanitation and waste management in cities around the world, but my favorite bit was toward the end in a discussion on how different cities segment property into lots and dictate various uses through zoning regulation. Some cities slice property into large lots, which leads to fewer businesses and higher risk for large, expensive developments. But others, like Manhattan, segment into smaller chunks, resulting in a more diverse cityscape that mixes dining, retail, services, and many other commercial activities.

The shopping mall was an innovation that allowed developers with limited local knowledge to have tenants respond to customer demand in smaller, less risky increments. Malls in Asia notably differ from ours in the west in the breadth of goods and services they typically offer. Here’s Marie-Agnes from the episode:

…Remember the Singapore mall. In Singapore the malls have not only retail, but you find also dental offices, notaries, kindergarten schools, dispensaries, and all sorts of activities. Up to now and in general the concept of a mall in the US is for mainly shopping. You may have food court and some restaurants, but nothing like a real city where you have all sort of business.

Devon points out that this quality might make these malls more resilient to market stress than our retail-focused American versions.

Malls are by no means a modern innovation, of course. Ad-hoc congregations of commercial activity have been around for 5,000 years, evolving from purely organic bazaars of the Near East into the pseudo-planned, air conditioned behemoths we have today. Even in our technocratic culture, planners still realize that the flexibility to market demand is crucial to sustainability. Trying to pre-design and mandate a particular distribution of stores and services is a fool’s errand.

In Byrne’s newsletter, he says “once you look for legibility, you start to see it everywhere.” This has certainly been true for me as I’ve been reading Scott’s work. The deepest insights are the ones that cut widely across many different dimensions.

There’s no silver bullet in how to apply legibility-inducing schemes to any of these areas. But until you’re aware of the negative consequences, there’s no way to balance the scales between legible/designed and illegible/organic outcomes.

👨‍🎓 The American-Dream-as-a-Service

Antonio Garcia-Martinez interviews Austen Allred, founder of Lambda School. Lambda charges no tuition and builds its program on the ISA (income sharing agreement), in which you only pay when you get a salaried position in your field of study.

The cool thing about the incentive alignment is that we’re not going to train you to be a sociologist, because it just doesn’t work. A common critique of the ISA model is: oh, now people aren’t going to study poetry anymore. And my response to that is: yeah, we’re not a university, we’re a trade school. The university has 18 million things that it does for you, and we cut cut off a tiny sliver of that, which is: we’re going to help you get a better job, we’re going to help you improve your state in life. That’s all we do.

There are actually more high-paying jobs available than there are people to fill those roles. And that’s true all over the place. I think about it as an optimization problem. You’ve got all this latent human potential, and it’s just kind of bouncing around. Sometimes it goes to school, and it picks stuff at random to study, and you know what you know because of who you’re surrounded by.

📝 Content-Driven Growth

Lenny Rachitsky gets into different types of content marketing by startup, plotted on two dimensions: user-generated to editorial, and vitality-driven to SEO-driven. Useful structure here for thinking about where you want to be and what types of content and tactics fit.

🌍 Earth at a Cute Angle

Some great examples of oblique satellite imagery. Love the shots of the Tour’s mountain passes — Col du Galibier and Tourmalet.

📖 Fifth Column Podcast Reading List

Someone in the Fifth Column podcast community put together an archive of all the books mentioned on the show over the years. This’ll greatly extend the reading list, nice mix of classics and modern stuff.

💻 Microsoft Power Fx

Microsoft has open-sourced its simplistic formula language based on Excel.

I’ve gotten a lot more selective about books to read in the past few years. My 2020 reading goal was 30 books, giving me space to absorb them and take better notes, and to permit reading longer stuff I could take my time with.

Here’s my list for the year, with stars next to the favorites.

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley Published: 1932 • Completed: January 7, 2020 • 📚 View in Library

• Shelves: classics, science fiction
• ISBN: 9780060929879 (Goodreads)
• Format: Audiobook
• Buy on Amazon

I had never read Huxley’s classic dystopian science fiction. It was alright, but to me it’s one of those classics better in its influences than the original source material. Wasn’t bad, but didn’t enjoy it as much as I expected I would.

Zero to One Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
by Peter Thiel Published: 2014 • Completed: January 11, 2020 • 📚 View in Library

• Shelves: business, startups, economics
• ISBN: 9780804139298 (Goodreads)
• Format: Kindle
• Buy on Amazon

On the surface, Zero to One looks like pulpy tech startup how-to book, but it’s better described as an introduction to Thiel’s worldview about business.

Mastering the Market Cycle Getting the Odds on Your Side
by Howard Marks Published: 2018 • Completed: January 29, 2020 • 📚 View in Library

• Shelves: finance, investing, psychology
• ISBN: 9781328479259 (Goodreads)
• Format: Audiobook
• Buy on Amazon

Investor Howard Marks is well known for his memos that lay out his thoughts and opinions on the current state of the market. This book is sort of a collection of his thoughts on the cyclical nature of markets.

Deep Medicine How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again
by Eric Topol Published: 2019 • Completed: February 9, 2020 • 📚 View in Library

• Shelves: science, AI, medicine, health
• ISBN: 9781541644632 (Goodreads)
• Format: Audiobook
• Buy on Amazon

A solid read on the state and potential of AI applications in health care. There’s a ton of potential for AI and machine learning in the space, but also a load of hype distracting from its true prospects. Areas like radiology, documentation, note-taking, dictation, and other “mechanical” processes can be moved aside making space for greater unique human connection — things doctors can do that machines can’t. Some fascinating (and often sad) statistics about the methods of modern healthcare.

Where Wizards Stay Up Late The Origins of the Internet
by Katie Hafner Published: 1996 • Completed: February 29, 2020 • 📚 View in Library

• Shelves: internet, history, technology
• ISBN: 9780684832678 (Goodreads)
• Format: Audiobook
• Buy on Amazon

A brief history of the formation of ARPA and the evolution of the internet from the early 1960s to the mid-90s. A quick read and solid primer on the players involved in the early days.

The Phoenix Project A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win
by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford Published: 2013 • Completed: March 13, 2020 • 📚 View in Library

• Shelves: technology
• ISBN: 9780988262591 (Goodreads)
• Format: Audiobook
• Buy on Amazon

Three writers with engineering backgrounds write a novelization of a devops team encountering and solving dozens of problems from within their broken technology organization. A revival of Eli Goldratt’s The Goal, covering management science concepts like agile development and the theory of constraints. Much more entertaining than it sounds.

⭐️ The Dream Machine J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution that Made Computing Personal
by M. Mitchell Waldrop Published: 2001 • Completed: March 14, 2020 • 📚 View in Library

• Shelves: computers, history, technology, biography, science, computer science
• ISBN: 9781732265110 (Goodreads)
• Format: Hardcover
• Buy on Amazon

I’ve read a lot about the history of computers, but I didn’t realize the deep influence of JCR Licklider until reading this. This book is nominally a biography of “Lick”, but also uses him as a thread to wire together many of the seminal moments in the evolution of computers and the internet, since he was directly involved in so much of it: interactive computing, time-sharing, IPTO/ARPA, funding research at Stanford, UCLA, Berkeley, Engelbart’s work, Project MAC. This was one of my favorites in a long while. Probably generated 20 new books added to my reading list (a strong signal for an interesting work).

I wrote a thread after I finished it with some of the touchpoints of his career.

⭐️ The Revolt of the Public And the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium
by Martin Gurri Published: 2014 • Completed: April 9, 2020 • 📚 View in Library

• Shelves: politics, philosophy, sociology, economics, political science
• ISBN: 9781732265141 (Goodreads)
• Format: Kindle
• Buy on Amazon

I can measure the “interestingness” of a book by the highlights-to-page-count ratio. Since all of my highlights go to Readwise, it’s funny to look at this number and how accurate that statement is. This book was written in 2014, but reads like Gurri was living in the summer of 2020 when he was writing it. The deep insights into the root causes of dysfunction in institutions, media, and politics show that he was a proverbial Cassandra with the answers to why public outrage, distrust, populism, and social media firestorms have been happening more and more frequently. The book is light on solutions to these problems (Gurri says he “does not make predictions”), but the first step to knowing where to start is to accurately diagnose causes. A phenomenal read. I’m glad to see that Stripe Press reissued it to increase its audience.

Ubik by Philip K. Dick Published: 1969 • Completed: April 11, 2020 • 📚 View in Library

• Shelves: science fiction, classics
• ISBN: 9780547572291 (Goodreads)
• Format: Audiobook
• Buy on Amazon

PKD has a deep bibliography of drug-fueled speculative fiction, and Ubik is one of his most acclaimed. Set in a “future 1992”, it features psychics powers, corporate espionage, reality distortion, time travel — a blitz of crazy sci-fi storytelling in 200 pages.

The Three Languages of Politics Talking Across the Political Divides
by Arnold Kling Published: 2013 • Completed: April 20, 2020 • 📚 View in Library

• Shelves: politics, philosophy, psychology
• ISBN: 9781944424466 (Goodreads)
• Format: Kindle
• Buy on Amazon

For a few years I’ve gotten interested in the subject of polarization and why we end up with such steep divisions of opinion on literally every single topic. Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind is probably the richest analysis of this, picking apart the moral psychology of why people believe what they believe (and why they think so negatively about their “opposition”).

From his appearances on EconTalk, I started following the work of economist Arnold Kling, who wrote this short book breaking down these definitions from a perspective similar to Haidt’s. He posits that when two people hold differing beliefs and disagree, we’re actually speaking different languages, not even understanding the basis for arguments an opponent is making.

See also this interesting discussion between Kling and Martin Gurri on institutional decay.

⭐️ Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler Published: 1940 • Completed: April 21, 2020 • 📚 View in Library

• Shelves: historical fiction, classics, politics
• ISBN: 9780553265958 (Goodreads)
• Format: Audiobook
• Buy on Amazon

Picked this up from a mention on The Fifth Column. Koestler fictionalizes Stalin’s Great Purge, telling the story of an old party member called Rubashov, imprisoned and put on show-trial for treason. It’s told from his perspective as he sits in prison recalling the events that led to the party he helped create eating its own.

A Time to Build From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream
by Yuval Levin Published: 2020 • Completed: April 28, 2020 • 📚 View in Library

• Shelves: politics, philosophy, sociology, culture
• ISBN: 9781541699274 (Goodreads)
• Format: Audiobook
• Buy on Amazon

I’d heard good things about this from interviews with Yuval. There are strong ties from his ideas to those of Gurri in Revolt: the thesis that institutional decay is at the root of many of our modern problems.

How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens Published: 2017 • Completed: May 16, 2020 • 📚 View in Library

• Shelves: writing, productivity
• ISBN: 9781542866507 (Goodreads)
• Format: Kindle
• Buy on Amazon

Getting into Roam this year got me seriously rethinking my haphazard note-taking habits. Within the #roamcult community, Ahrens’s book is one of the canon works on the “zettelkasten” method, Niklas Luhmann’s approach to decentralized, network-based thinking. It’s helped me immensely in learning and recall, since I now have a more deliberate approach to knowledge capture from the many books I read.

It’s excellent to see the community springing up around continuous learning, writing, and richer note-taking. Tools like Readwise have also helped to take this to the next level.

Check out this interview with the author, which gives a great overview of his work.

Beastie Boys Book by Adam Horivitz, Michael Diamond Published: 2018 • Completed: May 31, 2020 • 📚 View in Library

• Shelves: music, biography, essays
• ISBN: 9780812995541 (Goodreads)
• Format: Audiobook
• Buy on Amazon

Music bios don’t make frequent appearances in my reading list, but I had to read this one. The Beasties are one of those groups that have maintained high status in my music rotation for 2+ decades. Rarified air, since most sort of tail off or become tired after long enough.

I have a copy of the fantastic hardcover edition, but I actually listened to this one in audio format. Guest narration from folks like Mix Master Mike, Chuck D, MC Serch, LL Cool J, Spike Jonze, and many more folks from their extended universe. Highly recommended.

Ra by qntm Published: 2014 • Completed: June 7, 2020 • 📚 View in Library

• Shelves: science fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy
• ISBN: (Goodreads)
• Format: Kindle
• Buy on Amazon

This one came across through Twitter, a self-published work from writer and programmer Sam Hughes. In the world of Ra, magic is real and studied as a branch of engineering. The protagonist is a practicing mage who ends up caught in a conspiracy. A creative and original work of fantasy/sci-fi.

⭐️ How Innovation Works And Why it Flourishes in Freedom
by Matt Ridley Published: 2020 • Completed: June 20, 2020 • 📚 View in Library

• Shelves: science, history, economics, progress
• ISBN: 9780062916617 (Goodreads)
• Format: Kindle
• Buy on Amazon

Innovation is a phenomenon frequently taken for granted in today’s world. Since we’ve seen booming improvements in scientific discovery, public health, industrialization, and economics over the past 3 centuries, no one alive today has ever known anything different. So it’s easy to think that innovation springs forth from the ground, a free and bountiful resource we all get to enjoy the fruits of.

But innovation isn’t automatic — it requires giving creative individuals the freedom to experiment, to drive toward continuous improvement through the relentless application of trial and error.

The front half of the book is full of examples sliced from the history of technology and how innovations we all value today originally came to be: Edison’s light bulb, the Wright flyer, nitrogen fixation, vaccinations, the steam engine. Every innovation we know of was not the result of magical, eureka-like discovery, but rather the slow and steady, compounding progression of building on thousands of prior incremental discoveries.

In the back half (which should be required reading in history classes), Ridley succinctly lays out innovation’s essential ingredients — it’s recombinant, team-based, serendipitous, gradual, decentralized — and many other core principles to define innovation’s evolutionary quality.

One of my top reads of 2020, for sure.

I’m hopeful that the rise of the progress studies movement this year will continue to catch on with more people, spreading the understanding of how innovation truly works to a wider audience.

The Lean Startup How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses
by Eric Ries Published: 2011 • Completed: July 16, 2020 • 📚 View in Library

• Shelves: business, marketing
• ISBN: 9780307887894 (Goodreads)
• Format: Kindle
• Buy on Amazon

This is practically required reading for anyone in the startup world, so I don’t know how I went so many years without reading it. Since it’s been built upon in the culture of tech and become a native part of the lingua franca of the industry, there wasn’t much news to me here. That being said, it’s a solid foundational work in the scene, with many core principles still relevant today and beyond.

The Gervais Principle Or The Office According to 'The Office'
by Venkatesh Rao Published: 2013 • Completed: July 30, 2020 • 📚 View in Library

• Shelves: psychology, business, politics, management
• ISBN: 9780982703038 (Goodreads)
• Format: Kindle
• Buy on Amazon

Venkatesh Rao is one of the most interesting people in the internet writer-verse these days. This one is a collection of long-form essays he wrote, building a theory of business organizations using The Office as a framing device for establishing the nomenclature and examples of his theory, which builds on top of a Hugh MacLeod cartoon from years ago.

It sounds absurd when you start reading it, but continuing through each part you realize how sharply spot-on this analysis of corporate culture is.

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro Published: 1989 • Completed: August 5, 2020 • 📚 View in Library

• Shelves: historical fiction, classics
• ISBN: 9780679731726 (Goodreads)
• Format: Audiobook
• Buy on Amazon

This one is highly acclaimed work of historical fiction. The writing is quality and dialogue is incredible, told from the perspective of an English butler at the tail end of his career. I felt it was sort of slow, but had some interesting moments. Would like to read more of Ishiguro’s other work.

Inspired How To Create Products Customers Love
by Marty Cagan Published: 2008 • Completed: August 27, 2020 • 📚 View in Library

• Shelves: product, business, marketing
• ISBN: 9780981690407 (Goodreads)
• Format: Kindle
• Buy on Amazon

Marty Cagan’s blog has been a resource for me for years as a product manager. This book collects up Cagan’s organizing principles for how product teams should be assembled and work together. Some solid insights here, but if you’ve read the archives of the SVPG blog, you won’t find any revelations you haven’t already seen.

Mythos The Greek Myths Retold
by Stephen Fry

part 1 of Stephen Fry's Great Mythology

Published: 2017 • Completed: October 2, 2020 • 📚 View in Library

• Shelves: mythology, history, short story
• ISBN: 9780718188726 (Goodreads)
• Format: Audiobook
• Buy on Amazon

For some reason mythologies are fascinating to me. Last year I read Edith Hamilton’s classic Mythology, and before that Gaiman’s revitalization of Norse Mythology and Joseph Campbell’s analysis of myth’s roots in The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Looking at how stories start to form as ways to explain the unexplainable, and how they pass down through culture helps provide a frame for how other ideas coalesce and spread.

Like with Gaiman’s take on the Norse gods, this one is humorist Stephen Fry’s rework of the Greek myths. Compared to other classicists like Hamilton or Bullfinch, Fry’s modern take is far more entertaining and approachable, while still deriving from the same original sources like Hesiod, Ovid, and Homer.

Bonus: Fry’s narration in the audio version is fantastic.

The Psychology of Money Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness
by Morgan Housel Published: 2020 • Completed: October 3, 2020 • 📚 View in Library

• Shelves: investing, finance, philosophy, economics, psychology
• ISBN: 9780857197689 (Goodreads)
• Format: Kindle
• Buy on Amazon

Morgan Housel’s blog is a treasure trove of fascinating ideas. I preordered this one early in the year when it was announced, and devoured it in a couple days when I got it. It’s a great primer on how to think about finances, savings, retirement, from a first-principles perspective, readable by anyone with no prior knowledge of investing or finance required.

The Decadent Society How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success
by Ross Douthat Published: 2020 • Completed: October 16, 2020 • 📚 View in Library

• Shelves: politics, sociology, culture, economics
• ISBN: 9781476785240 (Goodreads)
• Format: Audiobook
• Buy on Amazon

Back on the topic of stagnation and institutional decay, this one was New York Times columnist Ross Douthat’s entry on that theme. His basic framework defines “decadence” as a society rife with 4 qualities: stagnation, repetition, sterility, and sclerosis.

I’m not sure I share Douthat’s depth of pessimism about the stagnation hypothesis (which has been well written about elsewhere), but there’s some insightful analysis here about possible root causes to some of this stagnation.

Like with Revolt and A Time to Build, it’s hard to prescribe solutions to the problem, but worthwhile figuring out the diagnosis.

Peter Thiel wrote a good essay on the book earlier this year, if you want to read more about it.

Gut Feelings The Intelligence of the Unconscious
by Gerd Gigerenzer Published: 2007 • Completed: October 31, 2020 • 📚 View in Library

• Shelves: psychology, economics, science, philosophy
• ISBN: 9780670038633 (Goodreads)
• Format: Audiobook
• Buy on Amazon

I first learned of Gerd Gigerenzer on EconTalk where he discussed the ideas from this book. If you’re familiar with Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, this covers some of the same concepts, but in a much deeper and interesting way.

The core idea is that when we use our “gut” to make decisions, it’s not random, emotional guesswork driving the rationale; gut is driven by heuristics, rules of thumb, and complex impossible-to-articulate models of reality that we become programmed with through millions of tiny events and experiences. Gigerenzer draws a coherent picture of the theory with many examples of the counterintuitive power of heuristics.

The Splendid and the Vile A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz
by Erik Larson Published: 2020 • Completed: November 27, 2020 • 📚 View in Library

• Shelves: history, war, World War II, military, politics, biography
• ISBN: 9780593172070 (Goodreads)
• Format: Audiobook
• Buy on Amazon

This one is a great history of Britain through the Blitz of 1940. It mostly follows Churchill and his close circle of family members and advisors as they make their way through from the evacuation at Dunkirk through the German bombing campaign and the eventual entry of the United States into the War. I’ve never read any of Larson’s other work, but he’s a fantastic writer of narrative history. This one reads like a thriller in parts, with the UK perched on a knife’s edge in whether they could withstand the onslaught and successfully fight back.

I wrote a bit about the book in RE 5 a few weeks ago.

⭐️ Seeing Like a State How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
by James C. Scott Published: 1998 • Completed: December 2, 2020 • 📚 View in Library

• Shelves: politics, history, economics, philosophy, sociology, anthropology
• ISBN: 9780300078152 (Goodreads)
• Format: Kindle
• Buy on Amazon

I was tipped off to this one I think originally by a post from a Venkat Rao post, talking about the central theme of the book: legibility.

SLAS centers around a concept Scott calls “authoritarian high modernism”: an approach to organizing society that attempts a planned, centralized scheme for a system — could be a farm, a city, a company, an economic system, or an entire country — with the central goal of making the peripheries more legible to the center. High-modernist designers, planners, or government leaders look at “messy” systems of organization and see a lack of order. Scott’s claim is that this top-down worldview simply ignores or assumes useless what it cannot quantify, monitor, and manage. Complex systems exhibit apparent disorder, but at the lowest levels are often surprisingly rational.

This book is worth revisiting regularly. It was profound to me and connects dots between many other distinct theories and ideas I’ve been interested in.

I went deep on this idea in RE 4. Check that out to read more about legibility.

Competing Against Luck The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice
by Clayton Christensen Published: 2016 • Completed: December 6, 2020 • 📚 View in Library

• Shelves: business, marketing, product
• ISBN: 9780062435637 (Goodreads)
• Format: Kindle
• Buy on Amazon

Christensen is most renowned for his work on disruption theory (The Innovator’s Dilemma), but he’s been instrumental in developing “jobs theory”, which I find more practical to apply to the day-to-day process of building. In principle it guides you to think about products or services as things your customers are “hiring” to perform a “job”.

If you’re interested in Jobs Theory stuff, I’ve found Ryan Singer’s work fascinating, following these threads for product-building. His newsletter is great.

Kim by Rudyard Kipling Published: 1901 • Completed: December 12, 2020 • 📚 View in Library

• Shelves: classics, India, adventure, historical fiction
• ISBN: 9780140183528 (Goodreads)
• Format: Audiobook
• Buy on Amazon

I’ve had Kipling on my reading list for years and didn’t know where to start on his works. Kim tells the story of an orphan that finds himself drafted into the service of British intelligence in the “Great Game” of geopolitical influence against Russia.

The backdrop is an interesting tour through the different cultures of the Indian subcontinent.

⭐️ Thinking in Systems A Primer
by Donella Meadows Published: 2008 • Completed: December 23, 2020 • 📚 View in Library

• Shelves: science, psychology, environments, systems, economics, design
• ISBN: 9781603580557 (Goodreads)
• Format: Kindle
• Buy on Amazon

Throughout the year I kept encountering this subject of complex systems. Systems thinking is something I found intriguing, and as happens with many books, a perusal of the first few pages of Dana Meadows’s book quickly turned into consuming the whole thing. As the subtitle says, this book is a fantastic primer on the core principles, and lays out the central elements of stocks and flows with clear diagrams.

I went deeper on systems thinking and feedback loops in RE 6 a couple weeks ago.

Sid Meier's Memoir! A Life in Computer Games
by Sid Meier Published: 2020 • Completed: December 31, 2020 • 📚 View in Library

• Shelves: biography, games, history, memoir, design
• ISBN: 9781324005872 (Goodreads)
• Format: Kindle
• Buy on Amazon

While I’m not a gamer these days really, except for time with the kids, my youth was spent playing lots of PC games, especially the ones in Sid Meier’s catalog. Civilization II was absolutely formative for me in more ways than entertainment. I’d credit that game with sparking an interest in history, cementing a deeper one in geography, and was the starting point for a love of strategy games of the era.

I’m still working on what my reading goals will look like for this year. I’d like to be more purposeful about studying specific subjects more deeply rather than the semi-haphazard selections I tend to make normally.

In Erik Larson’s book The Splendid and the Vile, he tells the story of Britain during the Blitz of 1940-41.

In May of 1940, a strategic lapse by the Germans allowed the British to evacuate 330,000 Allied soldiers from the French coast in the famous Dunkirk evacuation. An assemblage of 800 mostly-ragtag vessels were able to slip those hundreds of thousands through air and u-boat attack to safety across the Channel.

There’s an anecdote in the book that I’d never thought about before, with respect to Britain’s response as they prepared for what they thought would be an inevitable amphibious invasion.

Here’s Larson:

One thing Churchill did not address in his speech was an underappreciated element of the Dunkirk evacuation. To those who cared to look, the fact that more than three hundred thousand men had managed to cross the channel in the face of concerted aerial and ground attack carried a darker lesson. It suggested that deterring a massive German invasion force might be more difficult than British commanders had assumed, especially if that force, like the evacuation fleet at Dunkirk, was composed of many hundreds of small ships, barges, and speedboats.

Wrote General Edmund Ironside, commander of Britain’s Home Forces, “It brings me to the fact that the Bosches may equally well be able to land men in England despite [RAF] bombing.”

He feared, in effect, a reverse Dunkirk.

With how successful the British were with a haphazard troop movement with mostly civilian boats, imagine what Germany could’ve accomplished moving a powerful (and much larger) invasion force in a dispersed fashion along the Kent coast? Moving inland through rural areas to regroup and move on London? If Germany knew in the summer of ‘40 how ineffective the Blitz air raids would be, maybe it would’ve happened?

In his book Political Order and Political Decay, Francis Fukuyama has a section on corruption in political systems and how it impacts economic development:

There are many reasons why corruption impedes economic development. In the first place, it distorts economic incentives by channeling resources not into their most productive uses but rather into the pockets of officials with the political power to extract bribes. Second, corruption acts as a highly regressive tax: while petty corruption on the part of minor, poorly paid officials exists in many countries, the vast bulk of misappropriated funds goes to elites who can use their positions of power to extract wealth from the population.

Today the most famously corrupt regimes lead the least liberal, least free societies. In these unstable environments, government jobs are among the most attractive to ambitious people. In part it’s because those jobs are more reliable than weak, inconsistent private sector jobs (and sometimes easier to get and retain), but the ease with which rents can be extracted in corrupted systems attracts people ambitious to build personal wealth.

You see the inverse of this phenomenon in states with strong free market systems. A certain class of ambitious person is still attracted to government, but more often for reasons of celebrity or power than financial reasons. The potential for personally-enriching rent extraction is much lower. Brain drain happens in the public sector because many of the most ambitious for wealth and status see faster, more lucrative paths in the private market. So paradoxically, the lack of this personally-enriching career path could be impeding potential economic development, just as in poisoned systems, but for different reasons.

It’s unfortunate that we squander our hard-won strong, corruption-resistant¹ government system’s performance because we can’t find the funding to better pay our public servants. Our federal (and state) agencies don’t realize how efficient this allocation of capital would be, compared to the many channels through which we hemorrhage money year after year. What would happen if we paid civil servants better? How many of the ambitious, entrepreneurial class would stick around and increase the state’s capacity if they didn’t become disillusioned with personal stagnation?

From Mark Levinson’s The Box, on the shipping container and its impact on global trade:

The true importance of the revolution in freight transportation would be found not in its effect on ship lines and dockworkers, but later, as the impact of containerization resonated among the hundreds of thousands of factories and wholesalers and commodity traders and government agencies with goods to ship. For most shippers, except perhaps government agencies, the cost of transporting goods was decisive in determining what products they would make, where they would manufacture and sell them, and whether importing or exporting was worthwhile.

A lesson in second- and third-order effects of innovation. At the time when Malcom McLean’s first standardized containers were unloaded from cargo ships in the 1950s, it seemed like a minor incremental advance (if it was even appreciated that much). Putting cargo in a consistently-sized steel box was something anyone could’ve started doing decades earlier, but even simple innovations are sometimes non-obvious.

It’s an interesting lesson in cascading effects once an invention is embraced. Containers lowered costs for shippers, which lowered costs for manufacturers, which lowered purchase prices for customers (as well as increased supply volumes). When you sum all those changes that compound in combination, you unlock all sorts of formerly-impossible economic adaptations. Amazing what sorts of scale of change can be unlocked by something as simple as a metal box.

In The Black Swan, Taleb raises the concept of the “Antilibrary,” using author Umberto Eco’s personal library of tens of thousands of books as an example. Here’s Shane Parrish on Taleb:

A good library is filled with mostly unread books. That’s the point. Our relationship with the unknown causes the very problem Taleb is famous for contextualizing: the black swan. Because we underestimate the value of what we don’t know and overvalue what we do know, we fundamentally misunderstand the likelihood of surprises.

I have no intention of physically stocking thousands of books I haven’t read, but a similar digital idea exists with services like Goodreads and the “To-Read” list. That’s been my method for tossing books into a queue for years (though a queue makes it sound like it’s an order in which I’ll read, really it’s a “these are interesting, I should remember them” list).

Avid readers like myself do enjoy the presence of physical books, though. Several months back I installed some bookshelves in our office/bedroom, which is now also my workspace. It’s the first time ever I’ve had storage space to put my entire library somewhere accessible.

Even though I have a larger library than most, I’m very selective about what physical books I buy. Kindle books I’ll purchase indiscriminately, but I’m conscious about buying more “stuff” to fill the house. With two young kids, that generates as much “stuff acquisition” as we can stand.

I’ve been slowly building out my own digital Antilibrary, though, moving my reading list from Goodreads over to a database in Airtable. When I visit my favorite used bookstores, I’ll pull this up on my phone to browse for interesting things to search for.

If I tracked my time spent in software tools, I’m pretty sure over the last 8 months Roam and Readwise would be top of the list.

All of my writing, note-taking, idea logs, and (increasingly) to-dos happen now in Roam. Since getting serious with it around the beginning of the quarantine, I haven’t used any other tool for writing things down.

I discovered Readwise about a year ago and it quickly entered routine use. My backlog of meticulously-kept-but-underused Kindle highlights was immediately made valuable through Readwise’s daily reviews. The ability to have my highlights deliver recurring value (compound interest!) has made more both more compelled to read and definitely more compelled to highlight and make notes.

One of the favorite uses I’ve discovered for Roam is to make literature notes from books. I’ll page back through a book after finishing it, review highlighted passages, and translate the key ideas and takeaways into a Roam note. The process takes a little time, but is well worth the effort for the resulting outcome. Paging back through usually turns into a light re-read or skim, not just reading the highlights but what also might be worth extracting adjacent to highlights that I didn’t include on the first read. I suppose this is similar to “progressive summarization,” but I’m not following a consistent process here, just doing what feels natural. When I recently went through How Innovation Works to build notes, it took 2-3 hours to translate the highlights into literature note form in my Roam graph. Then perhaps another 30 minutes to an hour to skim back over the notes to clean them up and add links to other pages.

Combining it all

All of these tools and processes make for a powerful system of study. Extracting and linking ideas between sources is fascinating so far as a means for concretely visualizing how ideas bridge between authors. And most importantly, it gives you a resource to mine for remixing source material into your own novel ideas.

A few weeks ago I got early access to Readwise’s latest big feature: direct integration with Roam. Even in beta after only a few weeks of usage, it’s been an amazing addition to this workflow. Let’s dive into how it works.

Readwise ⭢ Roam

First of all, it’s great that this feature works with highlights from any object type. Books, articles, podcasts, and Twitter threads can all be included in your Roam sync, giving more power to Roam as a system-of-record for collected knowledge.

When you set up the sync the first time, you can select item by item what you want to sync into Roam. If you want something to resurface in Readwise, but don’t need or want it in Roam, you can exclude things to your liking. Since it’s in beta, I’ve been selectively pulling in a few at a time each day just to go through them and see how they look on the Roam side (more on this step in a minute).

Highlights example page in Roam

Once your highlights are pushed over into Roam, Readwise publishes a new page with (highlights) appended to the name, and includes a few metadata elements at the top that you can customize to your liking in the sync configuration. One of my favorite things is how it appends highlights under a new block named “Highlights synced by Readwise [[September 9th, 2020]]”, which cleverly functions both as a historical record of when the highlights came in inside the page, but also shows up in your Daily Notes as a sort of log of your daily reading activity.

Over the past few weeks the Readwise team has already made some additions to the syncing options, including the ability to customize the metadata it uses (using Roam attributes, the :: method). The defaults have worked fine for me, but it’s good to have this ability for future tweaks to the PKM process. It’ll also include links to the highlight location, which (in the case of Kindle) deep-link to the location in the Kindle app, or with podcasts (from Airr) to the AirrQuote you saved.

Readwise logs in Daily Notes

Another addition to this workflow I’ve been tinkering with is how to integrate these into the rest of my Roam knowledge graph. Every couple of days I’ve been scrolling back through each page of synced highlights and annotating them with bi-directional links to key terms, ideas, or other pages — basically stitching them in with other content already in my Roam graph. Over time as I look back at previous evergreen notes or when I’m writing new pages, this will provide references at-hand for incorporating into new material in the knowledge graph. This has all the workings of a set of simple tools designed to do what Sönke Ahrens talked about at length in How to Take Smart Notes. Roam, Readwise, and Instapaper are working together to provide a slipstream for knowledge to enter the database, but in a living, breathing way (not just dumping notes into the archive).

The feature just publicly launched this week to all Readwise users, so it’s still early. But so far this is an excellent addition to an already-excellent set of tools for personal knowledge management.

In his piece “Why Books Don’t Work,” Andy Matuschak made a strong case that books are a poor medium for knowledge transfer. Even with the most advanced book experiences today (like digital ebook downloads to a Kindle), if you took away the digital e-ink screen, a reader from the 16th century would still recognize books as no different than what they had. We’ve added digital on-demand access, dictionary lookups, and the ability to have a library in your pocket¹, but the fundamental model for conveying the knowledge is still what Gutenberg would recognize, based on the “transmissionism” mode of teaching.

Matuschak quotes this great passage from Carl Sagan in Cosmos:

What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.

Knowledge is transmitted, as if by magic, across the decades and centuries. This makes it all-the-more unfortunate how bad our brains are at retaining all that information. We have a mechanism for cheap, reliable knowledge transfer, yet are still bad at hanging onto that knowledge.

One can also be reading books for enjoyment. The act of reading itself can be fun, even if the signal strength of retention is less than perfect. Fiction is like this, of course, where the primary goal is entertainment, not education. Not that there’s no wisdom embedded in fiction — in fact, I would make a case that fiction offers deep insights worthy of remembering². But I even see nonfiction works on my shelf that I remember enjoying years ago that I’ve mostly forgotten about, certainly in any conscious way that’s useful to me.

The defining purpose of nonfiction, though, is to educate, to convey ideas in a way that disseminates them to a wide audience and allows wisdom to compound over years by connecting dots in readers’ minds. Writers spend hundreds of hours distilling their ideas into works of a few hundred pages that we blaze through in a couple of weeks, retaining little.

Spaced repetition

Purely linear transmission is not the best model for understanding, but it’s the best that we have available to us today, cheaply and readily accessible. People like Andy Matuschak and his collaborator Michael Nielsen are busy behind the scenes working on this problem of how to build tools for thought that can harness the novel advantages of today’s technology. They experimented with this idea in their quantum.country project, using the complex subject of quantum computing combined with a “mnemonic medium” that integrated spaced repetition testing. The results they’ve shown from this experiment are promising evidence for the technique to increase retention. It’s a simple approach — interspersing simple questions within the text — but the problem is one of medium. Our existing reading and teaching tools don’t have affordances for this today.

Until we make headway in those new areas, what can we do to get more out of reading? How can we extract and retain the right ideas from what we read without having to reinvent the nature of books themselves?

Enter Readwise

One of the most useful tools I’ve discovered in the past year is Readwise, a service that’s working to solve this problem and enhance reading retention through a simple workflow:

• Readwise syncs your highlighted passages from Kindle, web articles, and even tweets
• See a sampling of those highlights in your inbox each day for review, through email or their mobile app (what they call your “Daily Readwise”)
• Highlights are selected randomly from your archive, and can be resurfaced with whatever regularity you prefer

It’s such a simple idea that, like all great innovations, makes the most of the pre-existing infrastructure around it. The goal is to help readers retain what they read. I love it because of how simple it is. Readers like me aren’t looking for something scientific or complex; even an incremental improvement in reading comprehension and recall is enough to enhance the overall nonfiction reading experience.

Because I read so much and highlight copiously, my Readwise has over a hundred books, each with dozens (if not hundreds) of highlighted passages. At last check I have around 5,000 highlights in the archive. As they come through in each day’s review, I regularly get to see things I highlighted years ago from books I sometimes barely remember reading. There have been numerous times where a passage has spurred me to go and re-download the book on my Kindle and skim back through. This trigger is exactly what I want out of a service like this: a reason to be more diligent in reading practice, highlighting, and regular review. Just in the past year or so of using it, I’ve been able to dredge quite a bit of fleeting knowledge back up into memory. Without a service like Readwise (even with highlighting), it’s highly unlikely I’d ever remember much more than a two-sentence synopsis of most books in my library.

Readwise follows a spaced repetition model for increasing recall. True spaced repetition systems use specific algorithms to extend the time between recall tests (like the Leitner system). For example, you might first get quizzed on an item a day after first being shown it, and if your answer is correct, then you’ll be asked again in 5 days, 10 days, et cetera. The correct/incorrect answer provides a feedback loop to the algorithm to best estimate the spacing for resurfacing it again.

Tuning your reviews

Since not all the books in your archive are of equal importance to you, you can tweak the frequency that highlights are resurfaced on a per-book basis. I only have a couple in my library that I’ve turned down. Usually the quantity of highlights in a book is a good proxy for how interested I am in retaining info from it, so books with very few highlights are already less likely to appear in the daily batch. You can also dial in the preferences for new versus old books. You can have it favor more recent reads to review information while the reading is fresh, or favor pulling up more items from farther back in time.

Integrations

The most commonly used integration is probably their Kindle sync service. It’s certainly the most high-volume for me. But in addition Readwise can sync from iBooks, and even has a slick camera-based OCR tool for clipping sections from physical books³. You can also pull in highlights articles through Pocket and Instapaper, and even save tweets or threads to include in your reviews. They’ve also got a super slick integration with Notion, if that’s something you’re interested in.

Active recall

A key feature related to the native concept of spaced repetition is Mastery mode, which allows you to generate flashcard-like questions from specific highlights. On each highlight shown in review, you can add it to your Mastery catalog, either generating a question & answer flashcard or a fill-in-the-blank version of the quote (a technique known as cloze deletion). I only do this for concrete statistics and facts that I find notable enough to want to remember. Depending on the types of works you read most frequently, though, this could be incredibly helpful, especially for content like digital textbooks.

In my now-hundreds of Daily Readwise reviews, there have been countless times that a highlight pulled up from the archives has prompted a thought or idea that I jotted down in my notes. Occasionally they’ve even spurred such deep thinking (usually because I see it in a moment of already thinking about a similar idea) that I haul off and write a blog post from it. This for me is the one of Readwise’s core values. Since writing is a medium for learning, a tool in the belt that helps you synthesize ideas for writing is a powerful one.

Readwise has been in everyday usage around here. I recently had a 110 day streak that I broke a week ago, but still I make it a point to pop it open every day when I get the morning push alert and flip through the clips it assembles.

Future Ideas

One unsolved (and maybe unsolvable) area is a way to address audiobooks. Certainly the technologies exist to do playback, capture, and speech-to-text transcription, but it’s a question of integrating these all together in a system that would work. Audible is the largest player by far, but it generally has poor support for integrations of any type, and also generally innovates at a snail’s pace. I’m not familiar with other audiobook players, but maybe one day there’ll be a way for a new entrant to encroach on Amazon’s monopoly in this space.

For podcasts there’s a new player called Airr that’s doing something interesting with this, using a feature they call “AirrQuotes.” It allows you to clip a segment of audio from a podcast, along with the text transcript to send to another app. I could see a future integration here where you could have podcast clips automatically transcribed and added to your Readwise archive. (Update: Airr integration is now live within the Airr app, like they’re reading my mind)

I’ve added a post-processing step to my reading to collect the noteworthy ideas, forcing myself to write a concise summary and bulleted list of the salient takeaways that resonated. I’ve done this now with my last few books and it’s been a fantastic way to parse through the content a second time — sort of like the first “active recall” review. This extra passthrough to aggregate thoughts into a system helps drive compound interest on the ideas.

It’s rare for new productivity tools to stick with me this long. All of the tools in my daily routines are ones I’ve relied on regularly, and it takes a while for new ones to really click. Readwise clicked for me early and earned its staying power right away. If you’re an avid reader, you’ll love it.

I think I probably read three different pieces this week alone that reference James Scott’s Seeing Like a State. It presents an argument about the desire for “legibility” that overthrows and reorders bottom-up, emergent systems that develop naturally.

In this piece, Venkatesh Rao dives into what legibility means and what happens when the pursuit of order and “governability” ignores locally-discovered motivations that could be at work informing why a system works the way that it does.

In classic “high modernist” architecture, design, urban planning — really it’s an ideology that can drive decisions in many areas — a belief that we can design our way to any idealized solution pushes toward this idea of legibility. The ability to clearly understand a system does not always (or maybe even ever) correlate strongly with improvement to the system at a local level:

Complex realities turn this logic on its head; it is easier to comprehend the whole by walking among the trees, absorbing the gestalt, and becoming a holographic/fractal part of the forest, than by hovering above it.

This imposed simplification, in service of legibility to the state’s eye, makes the rich reality brittle, and failure follows. The imagined improvements are not realized. The metaphors of killing the golden goose, and the Procrustean bed come to mind.

Another choice excerpt, confusing legibility and success:

High-modernist (think Bauhaus and Le Corbusier) aesthetics necessarily lead to simplification, since a reality that serves many purposes presents itself as illegible to a vision informed by a singular purpose. Any elements that are non-functional with respect to the singular purpose tend to confuse, and are therefore eliminated during the attempt to “rationalize.” The deep failure in thinking lies is the mistaken assumption that thriving, successful and functional realities must necessarily be legible.

I need to bump this book up the reading queue. I know it’s partially that it triggers all my bottom-up, Hayekian priors, but it’s referenced so frequently it must contain some great first principles insight. A lot of Chesterton fence-type references could be made around this principle of legibility. Looking forward to reading the book.

See also:

• Scott’s essay at Cato Unbound
• Florent Crivello on the book
• Rao’s The Gervais Principle covers similar ground in the context of businesses and the corporate world (highly recommended; I plan on writing more about it soon)

Jumping off from my Friday post on literature notes, I’ve taken the first step here in what will hopefully become something more meaningful over time.

I just finished up filtering back through all my highlights and notes on Matt Ridley’s How Innovation Works over the weekend. Part of what this process helped me figure out is a standard model for organizing literature notes by section, so if I publish the complete notes, they’ll be browsable by part and chapter of any book I have notes for.

All I’ve got up right now are Summary and Key Takeaways sections. I’m going to make myself put together both of these on any book with published notes, which will require deep thinking to distill the content of the book into a few paragraphs and bullet points. Again, I want to publish my key learnings here, not necessarily a complete synopsis or review. Reviews have a different place on the blog, and I’ll still be doing those separately from this.

I like this idea and think it’s something I‘ll enjoy doing. The forcing function of having to write sensible, consumable notes not just for myself, but for others should lead to better thinking. The effort to build coherent notes should be useful for others and create an archive I can openly reference in future writing. The long-term vision here is to eventually draw connections between books, making references between ideas for deeper insights. And if others learn something along the way from my effort, that’ll be fantastic.

If the work is in the open, it’ll make it better and more polished, though polish isn’t a hard requirement. I’m just hopeful that others may find it useful.

“But what about fiction books?” you ask? Or books that are shallow, or simply not good? That’s easy: no one’s making me go through this process for every book. Over time, if there are books in the library that have no published notes, that should speak their value and worthiness. I tend to have pretty discerning taste for what I’m willing to spend time on, so some books may get “read” enough to determine they don’t need to be on the shelf. I do plan on making notes on fiction, but we’ll see how that works out.

I have some other ideas in store for this later on. This is just a start.

With the last several books I’ve read, I’ve been trying to force myself to work through and document literature notes for my highlights, key ideas, and takeaways from books. Using a process (that perhaps I’ll one day go through in greater detail here) in Roam, I’ll scan through all of my highlights and write up notes on the content, editing it into my own words and phrasing. One of the goals of this process is to increase retention and recall, and as Sonke Ahrens suggests, it’s best not to simply copy and paste highlighted text into a document.

With this flow, what typically happens is that I’ll only write a note for about 75% of what I’d originally highlighted, but also expand on some of them with additional thoughts. So for a book with roughly 200 highlights, I could end up with a Roam page of literature notes of, say, 250 or so blocks. Where relevant and possibly useful down the road, I also try and follow the threads to original sources and insert links to those, but not for everything. Wherever there’s specific data cited or something I find particularly worthy of a future read, I’ll capture it¹.

I’ve been thinking about what I could do next with my Library to make it more useful and interesting. I want to find a way to publish my literature notes alongside or within those book pages. From the Library index page I could then mark which books have notes available and make them searchable and discoverable for anyone. This ties to a long-term goal I have to create a system for evergreen notes that could link between book notes and core ideas. Libraries of books are great, but what about one where you could quickly get access to the ideas within?

This is all experimental at this stage, but anecdote so far says I feel like I have a much deeper grasp on the material for which I’ve gone through this effort. If reading is for the purpose of building knowledge and retaining it, it should be well worth this up-front investment of time to get the payoff from all the reading I do. The next step is to incorporate the tactics of progressive summarization to enrich the literature notes and wire them in with other ideas. Being intentional about rediscovery and serendipitous resurfacing of information has been amazing at augmenting memory for me. Combining all of this with my regular use of Readwise makes reading such a more fulfilling experience.

I do most of my nighttime reading with my Kindle, but lately I’ve been reading a couple of books that don’t exist in ebook format. I actually do prefer reading paper books as an experience, but I still favor the ebooks especially for highlighting, but also for the obvious benefits of portability and availability.

Most of the clip-on book lights out there are clunky and annoying. Years ago I had something called a LightWedge that was pretty clever, but too expensive, fragile, and heavy for regular use.

I went out looking for a simple, affordable option that also had no blue light, since that can interfere with sleep quality. I found this option from Hooga that’s quite nice so far:

It’s a flexible, low-profile LED light that only has a single amber colored option (which is great). It charges via USB, and also flattens down nicely to fit in a bag when mobile or traveling. The clip on it works well. I just clamp it on to the back bunch of pages so it doesn’t interfere with page-turning. It stays out of the way but has a firm enough clip strength to stay on just fine.

Highly recommended so far. I’ve used it for several hours with no charging yet. Just what I wanted. For $10 it’s hard to beat.

Recently Nat Eliason started a thread on the subject of audiobooks, and how much lower comprehension and retention is when listening versus reading:

Kinda like how it's hard to go back to reading after watching more TV.

Audiobooks don't count as reading. https://t.co/QeZqB8xFTb

— Nat Eliason (@nateliason) May 26, 2020

I know where he’s coming from here. I probably consume half my books in audio form, and on certain dimensions here I would agree. My general pattern is very selective in what I’ll choose to listen to instead of read in text. Fiction is typically pretty safe, and with non-fiction I tend to make a judgement call on how much I’ll want to take notes, highlights, or generally move more slowly through the ideas. For example, right now I’m reading both From Dawn to Decadence and The Open Society and its Enemies, two books that are not only in the 800+ page range, but also are full of rich references and other things that make me want to take my time with them.

Often even after listening to a book, if it’s particularly thought-provoking I have no problem also buying a Kindle version to flip through and annotate after listening sessions. I’ve done this probably 10 or 12 times and it works fine for me. I think everyone would agree that re-reads are much more fruitful for deep comprehension, and doing it this way with audio-then-text is sort of like having a primer on the material that makes the text reading far more productive.

I would also add that audiobook listening itself is a skill. When I first started listening to books, it took me a while to get comfortable with the activity. I’d listen to fiction and totally lose the plot after a few minutes, unable to follow along with what was happening. Now that I listen to audio routinely, along with thousands of hours of podcasts, I believe my auditory comprehension rate is much higher than it was, say, 10 or 15 years ago.

So I think if you combine treating it like a skill you can improve with time, being selective about what you choose to consume through audio, and augmenting listening with text for certain engaging books, audiobooks can be a high-signal new channel for knowledge.

I recently added to my Library section to include the books I’m currently reading. At the top of the page now I’ll be including books in the rotation. You’ll notice that I’m always reading multiple things at once. Usually the batch is either a) modal: I’ve got something on Audible, a paper book, maybe a couple e-books, or b) type: nonfiction, fiction, etc.

Currently in progress:

• From Dawn to Decadence, Jacques Barzun. 2000.
• Ra, qntm. 2014
• How to Take Smart Notes, Sönke Ahrens. 2017.

Physicians hang diplomas in their waiting rooms. Some fishermen mount their biggest catch. Downstairs in Westborough, it was pictures of computers.

Over the course of a few decades dating beginning in the mid-40s, computing moved from room-sized mainframes with teletype interfaces to connected panes of glass in our pockets. At breakneck speed, we went from the computer being a massively expensive, extremely specialized tool to a ubiquitous part of daily life.

During the 1950s — the days of Claude Shannon, John von Neumann, and MIT’s Lincoln Lab — a “computer” was a batch processing system. Models like the EDVAC were really just massive calculators. It would be another decade before the computer would be thought of as an “interactive” tool, and even longer before that idea became mainstream.

The 60s saw the rise of IBM its mainframe systems. Moving from paper tape time clocks to tabulating machines, IBM pushed their massive resources into the mainframe computer market. S/360 dominated the computer industry until the 70s (and further on with S/370), when the minicomputer emerged as an interim phase between mainframes and what many computer makers were pursuing: a personal, low-cost computer.

The emergence of the minicomputer should be considered the beginning of the personal computer revolution. Before that, computers were only touched by trained operators — they were too complex and expensive for students, secretaries, or hobbyists to use directly. Minis promised something different, a machine that a programmer could use interactively. In 1964, DEC shipped the first successful mini, the PDP-8. From then on, computer upstarts were sprouting up all over the country getting into the computer business.

One of those companies was Data General, a firm founded in 1968 and the subject Tracy Kidder’s book, The Soul of a New Machine. A group of disaffected DEC engineers, impatient with the company’s strategy, left to form Data General to attack the minicomputer market. Founder Edson de Castro, formerly the lead engineer on the PDP-8, thought there was opportunity that DEC was too slow to capitalize on with their minis. So DG designed and brought to market their first offering, the Nova. It was an affordable, 16-bit machine designed for general computing applications, and made DG massively successful in the growing competitive landscape. The Nova and its successor sold like gangbusters into the mid-70s, when DEC brought the legendary VAX “supermini” to market.

DEC’s announcement of the VAX and Data General’s flagging performance in the middle of that decade provide the backdrop for the book. Kidder’s narrative takes you inside the company as it battles for a foothold in the mini market not only against DEC and the rest of the computer industry, but also with itself.

The VAX was set to be the first 32-bit minicomputer, an enormous upgrade from the prior generation of 16-bit machines. In 1976, Data General spun up a project codenamed “Fountainhead,” their big bet to develop a VAX killer, which would be headquartered in a newly-built facility in North Carolina. But back at their New England headquarters, engineer Tom West was already at work leading the Eclipse team in building a successor. So the company ended up with two competing efforts to create a next-generation 32-bit machine.

The book is the story of West’s team as they toil with limited company resources against the clock to get to market with the “Eagle” (as it was then codenamed) before the competition, and before Fountainhead could ship. As the most important new product for the company, Fountainhead had drawn away many of the best engineers who wanted to be working on the company’s flagship product. But the engineers that had stayed behind weren’t content to iterate on old products, they wanted to build something new:

Some of the engineers who had chosen New England over FHP fell under West’s command, more or less. And the leader of the FHP project suggested that those staying behind make a small machine that would solve the 32-bit, logical-address problem and would at the same time exhibit a trait called “software compatibility.”

Some of those who stayed behind felt determined to build something elegant. They designed a computer equipped with something called a mode bit. They planned to build, in essence, two different machines in one box. One would be a regular old 16-bit Eclipse, but flip the switch, so to speak, and the machine would turn into its alter ego, into a hot rod—a fast, good-looking 32-bit computer. West felt that the designers were out to “kill North Carolina,” and there wasn’t much question but that he was right, at least in some cases. Those who worked on the design called this new machine EGO. The individual initials respectively stood one step back in the alphabet from the initials FHP, just as in the movie 2001 the name of the computer that goes berserk—HAL—plays against the initials IBM. The name, EGO, also meant what it said.

What proceeded was a team engaged in long hours, nights and weekends, and hard iteration on a new product to race to market before their larger, much better funded compatriots down south. As West described it to his team, it was all about getting their hands dirty and working with what they had at hand — the definition of the scrappy upstart:

West told his group that from now on they would not be engaged in anything like research and development but in work that was 1 percent R and 99 percent D.

The pace and intensity of technology companies became culturally iconic during the 1990s with the tech and internet boom in that decade. The garage startup living in a house together working around the clock to build their products, a signature of the Silicon Valley lifestyle. But the seeds of those trends were planted back in the 70s and 80s, and on display with the Westborough team and the Eagle (which eventually went to market as the Eclipse MV/8000¹). Kidder spent time with the team on-site as they were working on the Eagle project, providing an insider’s perspective of life in the trenches with the “Hardy Boys” (who made hardware) and “Microkids” (who wrote software). He observes the team’s engineers as they horse-trade for resources. This was a great anecdote, a testament to the autonomy the young engineers had to get the job done however they could manage:

A Microkid wants the hardware to perform a certain function. A Hardy Boy tells him, “No way—I already did my design for microcode to do that.” They make a deal: “I’ll encode this for you, if you’ll do this other function in hardware.” “All right.”

If you’ve ever seen the TV series Halt and Catch Fire, this book seems like a direct inspiration for the Cardiff Electric team in that show trying to break into the PC business. The Eagle team could represent any of the scrappy startups from the 2000s.

It’s a surprisingly approachable read given its heavy focus on engineers and the technical nature of their work in designing hardware and software. The book won the Pulitzer in 1982, and has become a standard on the shelves of both managers and engineers. The Soul of a New Machine sparked a deeper interest for me in the history of computers, which has led to a wave of new reads I’m just getting started on.

Since I began tracking my reading habits a year and a half ago, I’ve been able to keep up with it regularly. It lives in a Google Sheet and allows me to log dates I started and finished books, attributes about them, ratings, links, and more.

I spent some time with Airtable importing and cleaning up the data so I could have a richer version with the ability to view, edit, and add to the library from my phone. Airtable has the ability to create Views (similar to what we do with Views in Fulcrum) which are essentially saved queries with specific formats — e.g. it remembers hidden columns, sort order, and grouping. I’ve got two main views: one for my “Current Library” (books I’ve read or am currently reading) and another “To Read” list with ones I’ve added for future reading. This lets me keep them all in a single table with a category for status, but can view my archive without seeing the hundreds on the reading list.

The data entry interface for adding new records isn’t that great (not as good at this as Fulcrum), but it is certainly better than Google Sheets for this.

My ‘Current’ Library (left) and Reading List (right)

Airtable also supports Zapier for automations, so I could potentially send the data entered to other services if I want to.

Check out the data here:

Discovering Readwise a few months ago caused me to resurrect my long-dormant Instapaper account. Instapaper was my go-to “read later” service, but I also used it as a general bookmark archive. After a while I’d fallen into only using it for the latter, which then made me go back to Pinboard since the single function of bookmark tagging is its specialty. I’m still using Pinboard heavily to archive interesting things, but I’ve found a new use for Instapaper with Readwise’s integration.

Readwise’s main feature is to sync all of the highlighted passages from your Kindle (via your Amazon account) and sent you a daily digest of 5 highlights from previous reads, with the goal of increasing retention of things you read. For any high-volume reader, you’re well-familiar with the problem of forgetting most of what you read, certainly any details beyond the basic gist of a book.

I didn’t know how much I wanted a tool for this until I started using it.

With its Instapaper integration, it’ll sync articles and their highlights into your Readwise archive, which then can be included in your daily reminder digests. Over the years I’ve toyed with tools like Evernote or Google Keep for clipping quotes or passages from web content, but none of them stuck for me or were that useful. The information going into an archive solves only part of the problem. What you want is a way to remember and reference those bits you clip from the web.

A related feature Readwise supports that I’ve used a few times now is archiving Twitter threads. Replying on a thread with @readwiseio save thread will store those posts in your Readwise account and include them in your daily highlight reviews alongside Kindle and article content. It works best for threads of things that are time-insensitive like ones on history, advice, business strategy, etc.

The Instapaper support has filled a gap in making bookmarking of articles more useful when you can play back interesting things you read that are worth remembering.

The Kindle launched in 2007, making ebooks accessible as a format not only because of a compelling device, but also a marketplace for content. Suddenly most books were available instantly for $10 a piece. No more trips to the store, expensive hardcovers and paperbacks, and importantly, no more paper taking up shelf space. As much as I love the Kindle, I have a growing list of gripes about the experience. Like with John Gruber’s recent post on the iPad, criticism comes from a place of love for the platform, and a disappointment with how little innovation there’s been over 13 years.

I still prefer the paperback format for pure experience, but the practicality of Kindle nearly always wins out. With Readwise I’ve gotten so used to heavily highlighting in my books, and it’s too much work to annotate in paper format when I’ve then got to transfer them somewhere else to ever see those notes again.

I’d used the Kindle iOS app since the beginning, but didn’t buy a Kindle device until 2015 (the Paperwhite, third-generation). I use both the app and the device every single day, so over time I’ve built up a back log of feature requests and documented shortcomings. There’s great opportunity for Amazon to make some amazing improvements.

But first, let’s start with the things Amazon’s done right.

What Amazon has gotten right

• Whispersync — After acquiring Audible in 2008 (audiobooks) and Goodreads in 2013 (social network for readers), they’ve added some integration between the platforms. Whispersync started as their cloud service for syncing progress between devices for ebooks. A few years ago they extended this to sync progress between the text and audio versions, if you own both. For times when I’ve read books that I have on both platforms, this is a fantastic feature. Works pretty reliably, and is a neat technology.
• X-Ray — I first saw this on Prime Video. The best description of X-Ray is that it’s like the old “Pop-Up Video” show on VH1, which would show “did you know?” style annotations on top of music videos. In video it allows you to see, in real-time, which actors are on screen and quickly look up their filmographies and whatnot. X-Ray for Kindle is similar: it breaks down common terms and keywords, themes, and subjects, with ways to navigate to those parts of the book.
• One-tap purchasing — This is always a delightful process. Search for a book (or see one recommended) and in one tap it’s downloading. I’ve bought dozens of books on a whim this way.
• Highlighting & annotation — I’ve been an avid book highlighter for years. Readwise now raises the value of annotations 10x. In the Kindle iOS app, the share sheet on a highlighted passage also lets you save a slick shareable screenshot of your highlight on social media.
• Audible narration — This is more technically cool than practical. If you own audio and text versions, you can download the audio inside of the Kindle mobile app. When playing the narration, it moves the text along with it. I’ve never used this in practice, but it’s impressive.

Plenty of things to love. But now time for my personal recommendations.

Requests for the Kindle platform

• Tighter social integration from Goodreads — Both the Kindle device and mobile apps now have connection to your account on Goodreads. They can see your “to-read” list, can mark things as read or currently reading, and can sync progress. But they haven’t done much of anything with the social aspects of Goodreads. I’d like to do things like enable seeing highlights my friends made in a book, and maybe an ability to put comments on those highlights just directed to specific friends. It could spark conversation around book topics you might not know had mutual resonance between you and a friend. Goodreads in general hasn’t gotten a lot of love since Amazon made the acquisition, but it’s integration with the live reading experience is one of the biggest places to expand into. It’d make the service more purposeful and engaging.
• Progress adjustments — When reading books on multiple platforms, it’s possible for your “furthest read” progress to get out of whack (for example, if you flip ahead to look at a footnote, more on those in a second). Then the waterline for where you’ve reached in the book gets baked and is impossible to adjust. It’d be nice to have a quick interface to enter the desired furthest read point that resyncs everywhere.
• Better footnotes — If you’ve read many nonfiction books (or a heavy footnoter like DFW), you’ve been annoyed by the inconsistency in how footnotes are formatted in books. Most of the time, tapping a footnote zooms you to the end of the book. They’ve recently added contextual back buttons to return where you were from the footnote, but if you flip around pages near the footnote, it’s possible to end up resetting your furthest progress point to 98%, where the footnotes are at the end. Some books (feels like a minority) have more functional overlay footnotes. When you tap those links a small popover appears at the bottom with the footnote text without leaving the page. This is even an improvement over most paper books. The former problem with footnotes at the end of the ebook is actively much worse than page-flipping in paper formats.
• More consistent formatting — This one may be largely out of Amazon’s control; I don’t know much about the process of authoring ePub/mobi files. But Amazon could certainly help more to provide an “IDE” for authors and publishers to use best practices for the platform when converting their works into ebook format. It seems like after 13 years there’d be much less of this inconsistency than I see from book to book. Footnotes are screwy, progress measurement is all over the place. Some books mark the 100% point at the end of the main text, some at the full end of the file (after the index/glossary). Page numbers are also an inconsistent mess.
• Deep linked references — The one that I’m the most interested in. Imagine this: you tap a citation link that displays a popover on the screen, then tapping a particular citation could deep link into an interactive “clip” from the source material’s ebook format, also showing links to add that source to your wishlist, or even buy for your library. It could even let you highlight from books you don’t yet own, and create a separate shelf of books on your device of referenced works you might be interested in reading in full. Over the years they’ve added both dictionary and Wikipedia lookup on selected text. I see this as a similar way to bridge into related, adjacent content. Would benefit readers and, if well executed, Amazon and publishers by more widely referring users to other works.
• Semantic web of references — If citations and references were deeply linked, you could also build a reference graph. If I’m reading Tom Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions, I could pull up a tab that shows all works referenced within, and also all works that reference it. Go both ways with it. Picking through bibliographies is frequently how new things get added to my reading list. This would give readers an exposed graph of related works or authors they may find interesting.
• Book lending — This is probably a long shot, but it’d be neat to be able to temporarily “lend” access to a book to, say, a friend on Goodreads, with a “return” date you could customize that revokes access and returns to you. Perhaps you could cap the limit to 60 days or something. It could give the social reading experience more of that feeling of sharing knowledge and reading experiences with friends. It could also show your highlights and annotations, like someone reading a highlighted hardcover book you lend them.
• Reading metrics — When did I start a book? When did I finish? How many days did it take to read? How many pages did I read each day? Data nerds like me would eat this up. Probably not of mass market interest, understandably. You could add gamification here, but I’d be reticent about that since the purity of reading doesn’t need any more distractions out there to keep you from deep immersion in something. Twitter and Instagram are already doing a great job at stealing users’ attention away from books.

Have any active Kindle users out there formulated their own lists like this? I’d love to hear others’ ideas. Maybe with enough of a conversation about them, Amazon could respond positively.

Tom posted a while back about his book review section, and adding schema.org microdata to those pages for book review-related data. The promise of these schema standards is to provide a semantic markup framework for unstructured text content, so things like recipes, movies, and products can conform to an attribute standard for (theoretically) better indexing and search.

Referencing his implementation, I went through my library templates and added schema attributes on the relevant properties I publish. I don’t know what value those’ll have, but I’m a supporter of the open web and bottom-up adoption of formats for data structures. I remember Microformats from way back in the early Web 2.0 days. They didn’t seem to catch on, but Google has over time rolled out JSON-LD (linked data) to feed those tasty machine-readable formats to the spider, for easier surfacing of useful content in search.

Here’s a snapshot of some of the data on an individual /book page:

<div class="book" itemprop=itemReviewed itemscope itemtype=http://schema.org/Book>
<h1 itemprop=name>The Quiet American</h1>
<h2>by <span class="author" itemprop=author>Graham Greene</span></h2>
<p class="book-meta">Published: <span itemprop=datePublished></span></p>
</div>

It’s pretty straightforward to add markup for title, author, completion date, ISBN, and other things. It’s also neat that the Book object type also “belongs to” the CreativeWork type, so it can contain those properties, as well.

One other thing I included here was a section to backlink to others’ posted book reviews on their personal sites. After Tom tweeted yesterday about doing this on his site, I decided I’d backlink to his, too. If you maintain a reading log and want to continue the viral spread of semantic indie blog cross-referencing, let me know. I’d be happy to link to others.

Next I wanted to try adding the appropriate JSON-LD tags for other parts of the site and see how that all works.

🥩 The Internet of Beefs

Venkatesh Rao has assembled a most compelling explanation for how the internet polarization machine works:

The semantic structure of the Internet of Beefs is shaped by high-profile beefs between charismatic celebrity knights loosely affiliated with various citadel-like strongholds peopled by opt-in armies of mooks. The vast majority of the energy of the conflict lies in interchangeable mooks facing off against each other, loosely along lines indicated by the knights they follow, in innumerable battles that play out every minute across the IoB.

Almost none of these battles matter individually. Most mook-on-mook contests are witnessed, for the most part, only by a few friends and algorithms, and merit no overt notice in either Vox or Quillette. Beyond a local uptick in cortisol levels, individual episodes of mook-on-mook violence are of no consequence.

🎭 The Curse of Culture

I have a working draft post on this topic for sometime in the future. This is one of my favorites from the Stratechery archives — on corporate cultures and how they impact company strategy:

As with most such things, culture is one of a company’s most powerful assets right until it isn’t: the same underlying assumptions that permit an organization to scale massively constrain the ability of that same organization to change direction. More distressingly, culture prevents organizations from even knowing they need to do so.

📚 Book Review: Secular Cycles

The Slate Star Codex review of Turchin and Nefedov’s Secular Cycles, which seeks to understand patterns in technological and social development, and underlying causes for expansion and stagnation periods.

Since I began tracking my books in a spreadsheet in 2018, I’ve got a bunch of data I can now look at on my reading habits.

One thing I took a stab at was a “duration chart” that could show the reading patterns over time, based on when I started and finished each book.

Using this stacked bar chart style, you can see which books I stalled out on and put down for long periods. Not a judgment on those books’ respective merits, more of a criticism of my dodgy reading habits. The Federalist had probably a full 6 month fallow period where I forgot about it.

Some other fun-but-meaningless statistics:

Total Pages

18,983¹

Type

• Fiction: 24%
• Nonfiction 76%

Formats

• Audiobook: 57%
• Kindle: 13%
• Real Book: 30%

Authors I read more than one from

• Nassim Taleb
• Cixin Liu
• HP Lovecraft
• Jonathan Haidt

Oldest book

• Epictetus’s Discourses, written 108 AD

Top 5 genres (from tags)

1. History
2. Philosophy
3. Psychology
4. Science
5. Business

🎮 How Do Bullets Work in Video Games?

A cool analysis of methods for rendering bullet physics in games.

🏟 Notes on “The Lessons of History”

Maksim Stepanenko’s notes on Will and Ariel Durant’s The Lessons of History. I’ve got this one on the shelf, and these nuggets make me want to pick it up now to read.

🧱 BrickLink

While working on some Lego sets with the kids, I wanted to know if some extra parts we had were from the sets they got, since everything had gotten mixed up. Since it’d been years since I had any Legos, I thought there might be databases out there to lookup parts by number. Lo-and-behold I found this one where you can input an individual part ID, and also find out what other sets contain the same part. A tool that I would’ve eaten up as a kid cataloging our Legos and searching for “custom” parts.

I just finished my last book I’ll complete this year, making the final tally 54.

Here’s the full list of everything I read:

• The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, Jonathan Haidt

• Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion, Sam Harris

• Meditations, Marcus Aurelius

• All Tomorrow’s Parties, William Gibson

• Globalhead, Bruce Sterling

• How the Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone, Brian McCullough

• Coming Into the Country, John McPhee

• At the Mountains of Madness, H.P. Lovecraft

• Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino

• Pebble in the Sky, Isaac Asimov

• 1776, David McCullough

• A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments, David Foster Wallace

• High Output Management, Andy Grove

• The Language Hoax: Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language, John McWhorter

• The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, Jonathan Haidt

• The Breakthrough: Immunotherapy and the Race to Cure Cancer, Charles Graeber

• Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries, Safi Bahcall

• Ego is the Enemy, Ryan Holiday

• Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster, Jon Krakauer

• Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams, Matthew Walker

• Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor E. Frankl

• The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Nassim Nicholas Taleb

• Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers, Geoffrey A. Moore

• Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society, Nicholas A. Christakis

• Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings, Jorge Luis Borges

• America Before: The Key to Earth’s Lost Civilization, Graham Hancock

• The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language, Mark Forsyth

• Wayfinding: The Science and Mystery of How Humans Navigate the World, M.R. O’Connor

• The Dark Forest, Cixin Liu

• The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, H.P. Lovecraft

• Measure What Matters, John Doerr

• Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, David Epstein

• Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body, Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson

• Abaddon’s Gate, James S.A. Corey

• Death’s End, Cixin Liu

• Pacific: The Once and Future Ocean, Simon Winchester

• The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy, Thomas Sowell

• The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World, Niall Ferguson

• Exhalation: Stories, Ted Chiang

• The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, Ken Liu

• Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness, Peter Godfrey-Smith

• The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism, F.A. Hayek

• On Intelligence, Jeff Hawkins

• The Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay

• The Soul of a New Machine, Tracy Kidder

• Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals, Tyler Cowen

• Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters, Ryan Singer

• The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race, and Identity, Douglas Murray

• Discourses: And Selected Writings, Epictetus

• An Elegant Defense: The Extraordinary New Science of the Immune System, Matt Richtel

• The Quiet American, Graham Greene

• The End is Always Near: Apocalyptic Moments, from the Bronze Age Collapse to Nuclear Near Misses, Dan Carlin

• Mythology, Edith Hamilton

• Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder, Nassim Nicholas Taleb

• Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don’t Make Sense, Rory Sutherland

My library page has links to each book, including the occasional review.

This one is part book review and part reflection on some personal experience, a chance to write about some science related to a harrowing past experience.

A couple of years ago I had a run in with genetics-gone-wrong, a life-altering encounter with cancer that would’ve gone much differently if I was older or had the run-in in the wrong decade. The short version of that story (which I still plan on writing more about one day on this blog) is that I made it through the gauntlet. A stage IV diagnosis, 6 months of chemotherapy, and 2 major surgeries, and now I’ve been at “NED,” as they say, for 2 years¹.

The fine doctors of the Mayo Clinic were able to navigate me through a treatment plan that had to do with genetics, and what’s possible nowadays with modern treatments that rethink the toolbox for cancer.

Working with the doctors and genetics team there², I got a crash-course in Lynch syndrome, an inherited disorder that results in increased risk of developing cancers — specifically colorectal, intestinal, liver, and a few others. To say that Lynch is complex is a massive understatement. The geneticist I met with had to draw diagrams and flowcharts to answer the seemingly simple question “Do I have Lynch syndrome?” (see the image below) To cut to the (strange) point, my cancer expressed Lynch, but not me (see, it’s complicated). This meant we could try something different. Genetic oddities like this can serve as targeting tools for specific drugs.

Thus began my experience with immunotherapy, a category of wonder drug that’s exploding on the medical scene as a weapon for battling cancer. More on this in a bit, but let’s explore the book and how it relates to all this.

The Elegant Defense

An Elegant Defense investigates the power, and sometimes lethality, of the immune system. Through four separate cases — a patient with terminal cancer, one with HIV, and two with autoimmune disorders — it looks at what happens when immunity works like it should, but also what happens when the system goes haywire. This book isn’t about cancer immunotherapy exclusively, it’s an overview of the immune system in general — the adaptive versus innate immune system, T cells, cytokines, inflammation, and much more. As a primer on the amazing adaptive machinery of human immunity, it’s a top-notch read.

Throughout the book, Richtel uses the analogy of a “peacekeeping force” to describe the immune system, an apt one that I think works well in most of his descriptions. Peacekeeping elements maintain law and order, of course, but sometimes under the wrong conditions, the peacekeepers can incite violence themselves. Instances of “autoimmunity” (any time the immune system inappropriately responds to stimuli by attacking healthy cells) he compares to phenomena like nationalism, xenophobia, or even Nazism — cases in sociocultural systems where what starts off as a “defense mechanism” goes on the offensive. It’s a fitting analogy that helps to make a deeply complex scientific topic accessible to a wider audience.

The highlight of the book was Part II, titled “The Immune System and the Festival of Life.” This section serves up the meat of the story, providing a background on how immunity works, its building blocks, and the history of the science of immunology. B cells, T cells, vaccines, the thymus, inflammation, transplants. Richtel does good work succinctly covering the basics of an incredibly complex system. How did this level of complexity emerge? What is the immune system evolved to respond to?

The Villains

The “Festival Crashers” come in several forms. Bacteria, viruses, parasites, and cancers each bring their own deadly tactics that our immune systems have to learn to defeat. The biggest challenge comes from the fact that these enemies know this and do everything they can to blend in, so the immune system has to identify friend or foe:

Survival depends on knowing what is self and what is alien. The immune system must cope with three major challenges: the variability of bad actors, the central circulatory system that sends rivers of blood throughout our body in seconds, and the need to heal.

And the immune system must do all that without so overheating that it kills us in the process. It walks the most delicate path. It succeeds with the help of peacekeepers so effective that their work could be mistaken for magic.³

Faced with this challenge, the body’s adaptive immune system needs to evolve along with its enemies, to get better over time.

Trainable Defenses

Taleb’s notion of antifragility is on glorious display with the human immune system. His central theory holds that for an antifragile system, stressors, shocks, failures, and challenges increase a system’s abilities over time. The stressors serve as information channels to help the system adapt to future ones. At birth, babies have weak immune systems; their bodies haven’t seen the millions of pathogens they’ll eventually run across. Being exposed in manageable doses to mild illnesses gives a child’s immune system the feedback loop it needs to counter future threats.

But what about completely novel threats? How can it, on first encounter, identify and eliminate threats it’s never seen?

How can your T cells and B cells react to a pathogen they’ve never seen, never knew existed, and were never inoculated against, and that you, or your doctors, in all their wisdom, could never have foreseen? This is the infinity problem.⁴

It’s my favorite part of the immune system story, the part that’s the closest to the supernatural. Proof of the incredible things the “tinkering” of evolution’s trial and error can develop.

It turns out that the genetic makeup of B and T cells is very different from other blood cells:

The antibody-encoding genes are unlike all other normal genes. Yes, I used italics. Your immune system’s incredible capabilities begin from a remarkable twist of genetics. When your immune system takes shape, it scrambles itself into millions of different combinations, random mixtures and blends. It is a kind of genetic Big Bang that creates inside your body all kinds of defenders aimed at recognizing all kinds of alien life forms.⁵

The system essentially pre-creates trillions of possible random combinations of genetic codes, creating an archive of “guesses,” keys to locks that could exist, but your body has no idea. Human genetics adapted a way to combat intruders by brute force.

Or if you prefer a different metaphor, the body has randomly made hundreds of millions of different keys, or antibodies. Each fits a lock that is located on a pathogen. Many of these antibodies are combined such that they are alien genetic material—at least to us—and their locks will never surface in the human body. Some may not exist in the entire universe. Our bodies have come stocked with keys to the rarest and even unimaginable locks, forms of evil the world has not yet seen, but someday might. In anticipation of threat from the unfathomable, our defenses evolved as infinity machines.⁶

It all seems impossible to believe.

A Bit of History

The potential to use the immune system as a controllable disease-fighting arsenal was first observed in the 19th century. In the pre-Germ Theory days of medical treatment, however, there was little hope of physicians figuring out what was really going on. True immunotherapy drugs have only been around since the 1970s, with the development of interleukins, followed by the cytokines (like interferon) and others.

In reading more about the history of immunology as a treatment path for cancers, I ran across the “father of immunotherapy,” bone surgeon William B. Coley. He noticed several cases in which patients with cancers developed unrelated bacterial infections, then had their tumors disappear, so he searched for a link:

Having noted a number of cases in which patients with cancer went into spontaneous remission after developing erysipelas, he began injecting mixtures of live and inactivated Streptococcus pyogenes and Serratia marcescens into patients’ tumors in 1891.

Coley achieved responses such as durable complete remission in several types of malignancies, including sarcoma, lymphoma, and testicular carcinoma. The lack of a known mechanism of action for ‘Coley’s toxins’ and the risks of deliberately infecting cancer patients with pathogenic bacteria caused oncologists to adopt surgery and radiotherapy as standard treatments early in the 20th century.⁷

In the days before antibiotics, Coley was bold enough to experiment with intentionally dosing patients with bacteria, with the theory that this was stimulating the immune system to handle the cancer on its own. Though it was much more empirical and experimental than based on scientific theory, it just seemed to work. This kicked off decades of exploration in how the immune system actually worked, and investigation into manipulating it to fight ailments like cancer.

Changing Tactics

One of the patients followed in the book is a guy named Jason, a friend of the author that throughout is in a battle with a vicious case of Hodgkin’s lymphoma. After every form of surgery, radiation, and chemo, he’s eventually put through trials on an immunotherapy, with incredible response that ravages the tumors (or rather, enables his immune system to do so). He gets the same thing that I had 12 doses of, a drug called nivolumab.

My first few months’ experience in treatment was a crash course in understanding the different options available. I was loosely familiar with chemotherapy and radiation, at least as broad techniques for treating the disease. Immunotherapy was completely new. Luckily the research doctors at Mayo are happy to give their patients crash courses in understanding the detailed science behind how the treatments work.

Oncologists are fond of analogies in comparing treatments:

• Chemotherapy is like carpet bombing, or even a nuclear weapon. The tactic is to blow up everything in the area and hope the disease goes with it.
• Contrast that with immunotherapy, which is more like a surgical strike. Find the right target and targeting method, and send in the cruise missile to kill the disease with minimal collateral damage.

Or a better way I like to think about it: compare immunotherapy to code-breaking. Figure out the foe’s patterns and algorithms, then formulate a key that defeats the “encryption.” As mentioned earlier, it’s much like the immune system’s natural solution to the “infinity problem.” But rather than generating those genetic keys, immunotherapies are only assisting the immune system in doing the job its already got the keys for. Cancer cells express proteins that essentially deactivate T and B cells, causing them to ignore the mutated monsters and turn away. All of the “checkpoint inhibitor” drugs like nivolumab function by ignoring these proteins so the immune system can attack.

It’s hard to describe the contrast in treatments without experiencing them (which no one should have to do). My chemo regimen was one called FOLFOX, which was a cocktail of several drugs delivered over the course of several hours, every 2 weeks. I also had Avastin added to the mix for additional factors⁸. Total all of that up and you’re under a flood of poison flowing through the bloodstream, leaving a trail of side effects like nausea, high blood pressure, terrible cold sensitivity, neuropathy, and brutal fatigue. My age plus excellent anti-nausea meds helped me work through it much better than I’d expected, and without more than mild symptoms. But toxicity builds up from treatment to treatment, so treatment 1 is bad mentally not physically, and treatment 10 is the reverse, since you feel worse, but your anxiety about the process is much lower.

Immunotherapy had zero side effects for me. I’d go and get my 30-minute infusion biweekly (contrast again with chemo’s 3+ hour infusion sessions), and head home as if nothing had happened. It’s wild to go from such a rough treatment process to something actually easier than most routine visits to the doctor.

Emergent Power

The infinity machines within our bodies are marvels of evolution. Understanding better how these machines work can give us deep insights into the complex and powerful emergent order of immunity, with opportunities to harness those T cells in lifesaving treatments. But the autoimmune story is a terrifying display of what can go wrong if we’re not careful. Toying too much with the infinitely complex immune system could result in the deadly overreactions that can kill in minutes.

The field of immunology research is complex, costly, and fraught with risks of exacerbating problems if trial and error isn’t kept in check or if researchers overshoot the target. But I’m personally thankful for the research institutions and pharmaceutical chemists out there on the edge figuring out new ways to understand disease and aid our bodies in doing magic.

Periodically I want to read on my computer, particularly when sitting at my desk. Amazon publishes a web app called Cloud Reader for reading Kindle books, which emulates pretty closely what their mobile apps look and feel like.

I found out they’ve got a full desktop client also, which seems they’ve had for years but I never discovered or tried it out. It turns out to be one of the better applications for reading ebooks I’ve seen, even though Amazon clearly hasn’t cared about it in years (if they ever really did).

The main reading interface looks just like what you’ll see on the other Kindle apps, but with more flexibility to change the reading pane size and layout given the differences in desktop screen sizes.

Since I’m an aggressive digital highlighter and note-taker, my favorite feature on the full macOS app is the “Notes and Highlights” drawer you can pull up and browse so easily. With that, the full table of contents panel, and fast search, the navigability of books in this app is much better than the mobile apps or the actual Kindle device (I have a Paperwhite). E-books still aren’t a great format for denser material, or for books prone to page-flipping, heavy on footnotes, or with reference diagrams. Maybe this format will make some of the denser material in my library accessible for digital reading and highlighting.

🌋 Why 536 Was the Worst Year To Be Alive

You may have thought the entire 14th century was pretty bad, or maybe 1918 with its flu pandemic and millions of war casualties, but how about the 6th:

A mysterious fog plunged Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia into darkness, day and night—for 18 months. “For the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during the whole year,” wrote Byzantine historian Procopius. Temperatures in the summer of 536 fell 1.5°C to 2.5°C, initiating the coldest decade in the past 2300 years. Snow fell that summer in China; crops failed; people starved. The Irish chronicles record “a failure of bread from the years 536–539.” Then, in 541, bubonic plague struck the Roman port of Pelusium, in Egypt. What came to be called the Plague of Justinian spread rapidly, wiping out one-third to one-half of the population of the eastern Roman Empire and hastening its collapse, McCormick says.

That sort of worldwide famine caused by devastating volcanic eruptions would’ve been impossible to deal with. And the Plague of Justinian was no small thing either, thought to have killed up to 25% of the global population.

Life is good these days.

👽 How Chinese Sci-Fi Conquered America

The Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy (translated by Ken Liu and featured here) is one of the best sci-fi works there is, regardless of origin or era. I also read and enjoyed Liu’s Paper Menagerie collection of short stories. I didn’t realize how involved he was personally in bringing so much new material here, and introducing so many Chinese authors to wider audiences:

He has found sci-fi stories in unusual corners of the internet, including a forum for alumni of Tsinghua University. Chinese friends send him screenshots of stories published on apps that are hard to access outside of China. As an emissary for some of China’s most provocative and boundary-breaking writers, Liu has become much more than a scout and a translator. He’s now a fixer, an editor and a curator — a savvy interpreter who has done more than anyone to bridge the imagination gap between the world’s current, fading superpower and its ascendant one.

His job as a translator, given the sensitivities of the material and the players involved, is a complex one:

“It’s a very tricky dance of trying to get the message that they’re trying to convey out, without painting the writers as dissidents,” Liu told me over coffee one day, as we sat in the kitchen of his home in Massachusetts. “A lot of Chinese writers are very skilled at writing something ambiguously, such that there are multiple meanings in the text. I have to ask them, how explicit do you want me to be in terms of making a certain point here, because in the original it’s very constrained, so how much do you want me to tease out the implications you’re making? And sometimes we have a discussion about exactly what that means and how they want it to be done.”

💬 Why Shared Channels Are So Cool

We’ve not scratched the surface much on Slack’s Shared Channels feature, but where we have it definitely makes staying plugged in with important tangential networks (like customers and partners) dead simple and much more engaging.

This network analysis uses some interesting visualizations to show the topology of the network, with its subnetworks creating a connection graph of communication pipes.

Also on an hourly basis, these mini-networks from the outer ring get sucked into the internal mega-network, as connections are formed between organizations on the inside and the outside. The overall result is a roiling sea of proto-networks surrounding an ever-expanding network of super-connected teams.

It’s been a while since I wrote a book review here, and a couple months since I read any fiction. A few of Graham Greene’s works have been on my shelf for years, so I decided to pick up his 1955 novel The Quiet American to give it a go.

(Note: spoilers here, if you care about that sort of thing for a 60 year old novel)

Given that this book was written in the mid-fifties by an English writer, it surprisingly and presciently foresees the quagmire of Vietnam and the naive interventionist tactics of the Cold War.

The story follows a British journalist stationed in Saigon in the early 1950s, covering the First Indochina War and France’s colonial presence there. A seasoned veteran reporter with over 2 years of experience living in a war-torn northern Vietnam, Thomas Fowler is the story’s anchor, the perspective through which the reader sees the conflict and the events that take place. His experience in the messiness of the fighting contrasts the relative naiveté of the other primary character, the titular American Alden Pyle. Pyle is there working within the American economic aid mission, ostensibly there in support of local manufacturing industry — a humanitarian cause. Throughout the story Fowler and Pyle go through a couple of encounters together in which the experienced Fowler learns more about Pyle’s philosophy: that his ideas on intervention and involvement stem from a devotion to York Harding, a fictional author who’s published a series of works on reshaping Southeast Asia (also based on little to no actual on-the-ground experience).

“York,” Pyle said, “wrote that what the East needed was a Third Force.” Perhaps I should have seem that fanatic gleam, the quick response to a phrase, the magic sound of figures: Fifth Column, Third Force, Seventh Day. I might have saved all of us a lot of trouble, even Pyle, if I had realized the direction of that indefatigable young brain.

Late in the story it’s revealed that Pyle is actually an undercover CIA operative, tasked with combating the Viet Minh through propping up a “Third Force,” supporting a rebellious general who’s fighting both the French and the communist Vietnamese. This meddling leads to some disastrous, tragic events with the general’s Caoadist militia conducting what amounts to a series of terrorist attacks in Saigon on innocent noncombatants.

The crux of the story is a warning against idealism and innocence, thinking you can enter a multi-sided conflict and “fix” the situation through theory and on-paper expertise.

I know very little about French colonial-era Vietnam and the origins of their involvement in Indochina, but the book does a remarkable job predicting much of what went wrong during US entry and involvement in Vietnam (and other places around the world since). Idealism, exceptionalism, and the like can be incredible tools for promoting freedom and progress, but at the same time dangerous when trying to impose a worldview from outside onto cultures with hundreds of years of history and their own values. The novel was a quick but impactful read. You can always tell great fiction when the ideas stick with you weeks after reading. I’m looking forward to some of Greene’s other novels in the near future.

⚾️ How Many Outs? Baseball Graphics Compared

Some top-notch baseball geekery, with Jason Snell comparing the graphics overlays from Fox, MLB Network, and ESPN’s telecasts. I’ve thought about this, too, but have to give it to the ESPN one, with Fox right up there.

🧘🏽‍♀️ Book Review: The Mind Illuminated

Scott Alexander’s review is an excellent in-depth look at this book on meditation. I’m still making my way through it, but it’s definitely a fantastic soup-to-nuts guide so far.

🇬🇧 The Crucial Century

From an objective observer in the 16th century, what site would have been the best bet to predict the flowering of the Industrial Revolution, based on contemporaneous evidence?

In fact, England in 1550 was not even close to being Europe’s preeminent naval power. It was Hispania, not Britannia, who ruled the waves. Even on maps made in England and for the use of the English government, the ocean off the west coast of England and to the south of Ireland was labelled The Spanish Sea. The foreign maps agreed. The North Sea, too, was the Oceanus Germanicus, or German Sea. It gives an idea of who controlled what. And England of course came close to catastrophe in 1588, when the Spanish decided to launch an invasion – it was largely only stopped by the weather. Despite having always been on an island, English policymakers only seriously began to appreciate Britain’s geographical potential for both defence and commerce in the late sixteenth century.

It took until the mid-17th century for promise to start taking hold in England. By then it’s growth and expansion had begun overtaking its neighbors.

I’m up here in Jacksonville for medical follow-ups, so I made my regular trip to Chamblin’s to do some shopping. Here are the latest pickups:

• One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
• Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age, Michael A. Hiltzik
• Isaac Newton, James Gleick
• The Alchemy of Air, Thomas Hager
• The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation, Jon Gertner

🏔 MARTINI: Real-Time RTIN Terrain Mesh

Some cool work from Vladimir Agafonkin on a library for RTIN mesh generation, with an interactive notebook to experiment with it on Observable:

An RTIN mesh consists of only right-angle triangles, which makes it less precise than Delaunay-based TIN meshes, requiring more triangles to approximate the same surface. But RTIN has two significant advantages:

1. The algorithm generates a hierarchy of all approximations of varying precisions — after running it once, you can quickly retrieve a mesh for any given level of detail.
2. It’s very fast, making it viable for client-side meshing from raster terrain tiles. Surprisingly, I haven’t found any prior attempts to do it in the browser.

👨🏽‍🎨 Design on a Deadline: How Notion Pulled Itself Back from the Brink of Failure

This is an interesting piece on the Figma blog about Notion and their design process in getting the v1 off the ground a few years ago. I’ve been using Notion for a while and can attest to the craftsmanship in design and user experience. All the effort put in and iterated on really shows in how fluid the whole app feels.

📚 Patrick Collison’s Bookshelf

I’m always a sucker for a curated list of reading recommendations. This one’s from Stripe founder Patrick Collison, who seems to share a lot my interests and curiosities.

Andy Grove is widely respected as an authority figure on business management. Best known for his work at Intel during the 1980s, his book High Output Management is regularly cited as one of the best in the genre of business books. After having it on my list for years and finally reading it earlier this year, I’d wholeheartedly agree. It’s the best book out there about business planning, management, and efficiency, still just as pertinent today as it was when it was first published in 1983.

Its relevance more than 30 years later attests to the universality of its value. I’ve mentioned before here my personal interest in understanding first principles approaches to thinking over derivative systems typically touted by the self-help and business publishing community. The book’s extreme practicality and information density falls in line with what you’d expect from an engineer like Grove — light on the fluff and “case study”-type stuff that permeates and inflates page counts of other business books.

I’ve written here before about a couple of specific topics from the book — about Grove’s perspective on meetings, and on the concept of “modes of control” — but I wanted to give some more space to the book overall, as I believe it’s one of those rare pieces of core reading material on which hundred of other works are based.

The thesis he lays out is simple in principle: a business is a machine, the people and processes are its parts, with inputs (human effort, ideas, work) and outputs (its products and services). To develop a high output system, you have to peel apart its internal components, inspect how they interface with one another, and create a management infrastructure throughout that enables high leverage. Throughout the book’s chapters he touches on the stables of a manager’s workload: planning, meetings, making decisions, reporting, oversight, training, and more. What’s truly important isn’t any one of these particular components, though, it’s in the efficiency of the connections between them. In the analogy of the business to a machine, effective management is the design of the parts, the connections between them, and the lubrication to avoid slippage.

I’ll point out here that the book’s value is not limited to those that manage people. If you manage any system or procedure at all you’ll get value out of it. In fact, it’s useful to anyone that wants to understand what makes their organization tick and where they might fit into the machinery.

Creating Clarity from Abstraction

One of the driving factors that’s created a cottage industry around business processes, teamwork, and strategy (an industry that’s generated thousands of how-to books on the theme) is that the modern era of “knowledge work” requires working in so many abstractions. In the good old days of industrial production, the inputs, outputs, and stages in between were manifest in physical systems you could watch working together. Grove recognizes this point early¹ (emphasis mine):

Of course, the principle of work simplification is hardly new in the widget manufacturing arts. In fact, this is one of the things industrial engineers have been doing for a hundred years. But the application of the principle to improve the productivity of the “soft professions” — the administrative, professional, and managerial workplace — is new and slow to take hold. The major problem to be overcome is defining what the output of such work is or should be. As we will see, in the work of the soft professions, it becomes very difficult to distinguish between output and activity. And as noted, stressing output is the key to improving productivity, while looking to increase activity can result in just the opposite.

Too many businesses sit down and “strategize” by developing high-altitude mission statements, corporate principles, and annual goals. There’s nothing wrong with these things, but they ultimately aren’t granular enough to become actionable by individual team members. Aligning around a well-articulated output at each employee’s level is critical to avoiding the “busyness” syndrome that plagues so much of the modern workplace. What’s missing is a tool to bridge this gap between high-minded mission statements and employees, one that arms them with actionable targets they can point at and measure progress on — enter OKRs.

Objectives, Results, and Measurement

A key concept articulated in High Output Management, one that’s been adopted widely today, is the Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) framework. It’s clear from the way Grove articulates it that he didn’t see OKRs as some kind of brand-building opportunity with an intent to sell this idea to the business community; he merely saw it as a way to give the company a circulatory system throughout to keep its teams in alignment on output. Like many of the ideas in the book, he has a succinct style of communicating these ideas that make them seem patently obvious, with a clarity that’s easy for anyone to comprehend.

Anyone in the knowledge work space (which is most of us) has seen this all over our organizations. Without the focus around the outcome — What exactly are we making? What do we want that to do for us? Why? — any organization can dissipate much of its energy in simply performing activities, the way an inefficient machine gives off much of its energy as heat from friction. The mission then is to make sure any activity performed at any level is clearly tied to output that stacks up with the organization’s top-level expectations.

The venture investor John Doerr, most known for his work with Kleiner Perkins and investments in Amazon, Google, Netscape, and other early internet companies, was an employee and colleague of Grove in the Intel days. I recently read his Measure What Matters, a book on the concept of OKRs and how they’re employed in various modern businesses. My problem with that book was that it’s simply a retelling of the core principles laid out in High Output Management, with most of the pages devoted to the “see how it works for organization X?” type of commercial trying to sell you on the idea of OKRs. That might be a good communication style for a certain type of reader, but I’d rather have the core building blocks and let me do the imagining of how it might impact my own work and organization. There are tons of other books and blog posts out there about OKRs, but I’d point anyone looking into them to High Output Management as a resource.

At the core OKRs are a great system because of how little “system” there really is. They’re intended to get a bunch of diverse people in a hierarchy working as a well-oiled machine, with the strongest emphasis on keeping the machine and it’s components focus on shared, agreed-upon outcomes. It’s about having the diligence to create a stacked set of priorities and goals, mutually agreed on, that cascade from the top down into the ranks. A well-designed OKR process should create a universe where everyone in the organization can point directly to their objectives, and any colleague can see the wiring up and down from there to the OKRs of others.

Writing as Reporting (and Thinking)

It’s partially my personal style, but I’m a huge believer in the idea of writing as a tool for status reporting, intra-office communication, and teamwork. Not only does writing things down create a log of someone’s idea or design concept, it’s a fantastic medium for forcing critical thinking. Jeff Bezos has famously required agendas for meetings at Amazon to be written up as long form proposals. This forces rigor in having focused meetings with thought out discussion topics. No one will spend time writing up a document if they don’t truly believe in it or haven’t thought it through, which saves everyone the wasted time of discussing poorly-considered ideas. The act of writing something down also forces you as the generator of an idea to ruminate on its implications, think about how to articulate it, and to create an element of knowledge to leave as an institutional guidepost for future coworkers thinking about related ideas.

Grove approaches managerial reporting and planning from a similar angle. While he highly values passing informal conversation in maintaining time-sensitive communication, he respects writing as a tool for clear thinking²:

I have to confess that the information most useful to me, and I suspect most useful to all managers, comes from quick, often casual verbal exchanges. This usually reaches a manager much faster than anything written down. And usually the more timely the information, the more valuable it is.

So why are written reports necessary at all? They obviously can’t provide timely information. What they do is constitute an archive of data, help to validate ad hoc inputs, and catch, in safety-net fashion, anything you may have missed. But reports also have another totally different function. As they are formulated and written, the author is forced to be more precise than he might be verbally. Hence their value stems from the discipline and the thinking the writer is forced to impose upon himself as he identifies and deals with the trouble spots in his presentation. Reports are more a medium of self-discipline than a way to communicate information. Writing the report is important; reading it often is not.

This same logic applies to so many things in business — the final version of a report, design spec, marketing strategy, or budget isn’t where all the value lies; the final output document is what enforces the discipline of that business process. The requirement to come away with the “Budget 2020.xlsx” file forces us to run through the planning process thoroughly. If done well, we only need to look at the document as a quarterly gut check. The planning process itself makes us think through priorities, objectives, and where we want to focus.

Add It to the Library

There’s a lot more excellent material in the pages of High Output Management than I can cover in a single blog post. My paperback copy sits on my shelf in my office and is scribbled all over. I pull it out regularly to cite paragraphs or reference things for my own communication within the company. It’s one of my first recommendations to anyone looking for a book on business or productivity.

🛰 How to Profit in Space: A Visual Guide

Fantastic visualizations from the WSJ team. Shows the history of satellite expansion divided by country, year, and orbits, both LEO and geosynchronous. A great use of maps for storytelling.

📚 The Antilibrary: Why Unread Books are the Most Important

This is a concept pulled from Taleb’s The Black Swan, which I recently enjoyed. As he notes, the antilibrary can function as a reminder of how much there is to know, and (as is a main point of The Black Swan, we tend to underestimate the value of what we don’t know).

The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have. How many of these books have you read?” and the others—a very small minority—who get the point is that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendages but a research tool. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means … allow you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.

Definitely rings familiar, for me, as someone with a large collection of books I’m anxious to read, but may never get to.

⚖️ Libra

The Facebook-designed and sponsored Libra is a more interesting idea than the much-discussed “FacebookCoin” entrance into cryptocurrency that’s been rumored. The gist is that it’s somewhere between an open blockchain and a closed system, with a consortium of funders in place to share control and add stability in the currency. I’m interested to see where this goes given Facebook’s massive reach to expose it to regular people. See also Ben Thompson’s sharp analysis of Libra from earlier this week.

Books are one purchase I don’t restrict my spending on. I’m not a big buyer of “stuff” in general, but I don’t hesitate at all about my money going to reading. I do try to be circumspect to not overwhelm myself, and to limit that spending to ones that I’m highly interested in and likely to read. I tend to think along the same lines as Shane Parrish here (and, by extension, Charlie Munger):

Books contain a vast amount of knowledge and knowing what most other people don’t know is how I make a living. While books can be expensive, ignorance is costlier.

This is why books are necessary. Charlie Munger loved to quote a line from an old machine tool ad: “The man who needs a new machine tool and hasn’t purchased it yet is already paying for it.” You’re already paying for the knowledge you need but don’t have yet.

(I’ll admit, this may be a way to self-justify the expense, but hey, you can waste a lot more money a lot more frivolously than on books.)

In recent years I’ve tried to keep the diet of books diverse between fiction and nonfiction, quick high-level stuff and deeper, richer ones. Since my interests are so varied already, covering a healthy swath of subjects isn’t a challenge. Over the years I’ve discovered my interests leaning toward “first principles” and classics. My very-occasional hauls from used bookstores show my preference for a lot of original sources and old standards for the library.

I’m also an avid user of Audible and read more (by volume) via audio than print. It’s become so second-nature to me to listen to books, I’ve become much more adept at retention of information from listening than I was before. I still avoid reading deep stuff or books with heavy visuals in audio form if I can. People think I’m crazy when I say I always listen to books while running, but I’ve gotten so used to it that music while exercising sounds weird to me.

Now you might ask: why not support the local library instead of buying? I wholeheartedly support libraries and want them to continue to thrive, but the process of searching for, checking out, and returning books adds overhead to the process of reading that I’d rather not bother with. Not to mention the selection may not even contain half the books I’m looking for. Again, it’s a personal thing. Part of that is due to my own patterns of reading sometimes 4 to 6 books simultaneously, with 1 or 2 in there that might take 6 months to finish. Once my kids get older and start spending time at the library, it may tip my behavior in that direction, as well.

You hear the criticism all the time around the business world about meetings being useless, a waste of time, and filling up schedules unnecessarily.

A different point of view on this topic comes from Andy Grove in his book High Output Management. It’s 35 years old, but much of it is just as relevant today as back then, with timeless principles on work.

Grove is adamant that for the manager, the “meeting” is an essential piece in the managerial leverage toolkit. From page 53:

Meetings provide an occasion for managerial activities. Getting together with others is not, of course, an activity—it is a medium. You as a manager can do your work in a meeting, in a memo, or through a loudspeaker for that matter. But you must choose the most effective medium for what you want to accomplish, and that is the one that gives you the greatest leverage.

This is an interesting distinction from the way you hear meetings described often. That they should be thought of as a medium rather than an activity is an important difference in approach. When many people talk about the uselessness of meetings, I would strongly suspect that the medium is perhaps mismatched to the work that needs doing. Though today we have many media through which to conduct managerial work — meetings, Slack channels, emails, phone calls, Zoom video chats — the point is you shouldn’t ban the medium entirely if your problem is really something else. I know when I find myself in a useless meeting, its “meetingness” isn’t the issue; it’s that we could’ve accomplished the goal with a well-written document with inline comments, an internal blog post, an open-ended Slack chat, or a point-to-point phone call between two people. Or, alternately, it could be that a meeting is the optimal medium, but the problem lies elsewhere in planning, preparation, action-orientation, or the who’s who in attendance¹.

We should focus our energies on maximizing the impact of meetings by fitting them in when they’re the right medium for the work. As Grove notes on page 71:

Earlier we said that a big part of a middle manager’s work is to supply information and know-how, and to impart a sense of the preferred method of handling things to the groups under his control and influence. A manager also makes and helps to make decisions. Both kinds of basic managerial tasks can only occur during face-to-face encounters, and therefore only during meetings². Thus I will assert again that a meeting is nothing less than the medium through which managerial work is performed. That means we should not be fighting their very existence, but rather using the time spent in them as efficiently as possible.

Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm is part of the tech company canon. It’s been sitting on my shelf for years unread, but I’ve known the general nature of the problem it illuminates for years. We’ve even experienced some of its highlighted phenomena first hand in our own product development efforts in bringing Geodexy, allinspections, and Fulcrum to market.

Moore’s “Technology Adoption Life Cycle” is the axis of the book:

In principle, the advice laid out rings very logical, nothing out of left field that goes against any conventional wisdom. It helps to create a concrete framework for thinking about the “psychographic” profile of each customer type, in order from left to right on the curve:

1. Innovators
2. Visionaries
3. Pragmatists
4. Conservatives
5. Laggards

It’s primarily addressed to high-tech companies, most of which in the “startup” camp are somewhere left of the chasm. The challenge, as demonstrated in the book, is to figure out what parts of your strategy, product, company org chart, and go-to-market need to change to make the jump across the chasm to expansion into the mainstream on the other side.

There are important differences between each stage in the market cycle. As a product transitions between stages, there are evolutions that need to take place for a company to successfully mature through the lifecycle to capture further depths of the addressable market. Moore’s model, however, distinguishes the gap between steps 2 and 3 as dramatically wider in terms of the driving motivations of customers, and ultimately the disconnect of what a product maker is selling from what the customer believes they are buying.

The danger of the chasm is made more extreme by the fact that many companies, after early traction and successes with innovators and visionaries, are still young and small. A company like that moving into a marketplace of pragmatists will encounter much larger, mature organizations with different motivations.

The primary trait displayed by the visionary as compared to the pragmatist is a willingness to take risk. Where a visionary is willing to make a bet on a new, unproven product, staking some of their own social and political capital on the success of high tech new solutions, the pragmatist wants a solution to be proven before they invest. Things like social proof, case studies, and other forms of evidence that demonstrate ROI in organizations that look like their own. Not only other companies of their rough size, but ones also in their specific industry vertical, doing the same kind of work. In other words, only a narrow field of successes work well as demonstrable examples of value for them.

Knowing about this difference between market phases, how would a creator prepare themselves to capture the pragmatist customer? One is left with a dilemma: how can I demonstrate proof within other pragmatic, peer organizations when they all want said proof before buying in? We have our own product that’s in (from my optic) the early stages of traction right of the chasm, so many of the psychographics the book provides to define the majority market ring very true in interactions with these customers.

Presented with this kind of conundrum in how to proceed, Moore’s strategy for what to do here is, in short, all about beachheads. He uses the example of D-Day and the successful Allied landings on the Normandy beachhead as an analogy for how you can approach this sort of strategy. Even if you have a broadly-applicable product, relevant to dozens of different industries, you have to spend so much time and energy on a hyper-targeted marketing campaign to connect with the pragmatist on the other end that you won’t have enough resources to do this for every market. The beachhead will be successfully taken and held only if you go deep enough into a single vertical example to hold onto that early traction until you can secure additional adjacent customers. Only then can you worry about moving inland and taking more territory.

All in all it was a worthwhile, quick read. Nothing revelatory was uncovered for me that I wasn’t already aware of in broad strokes. However, it is one of those books that’s foundational to anyone building a B2B software product. Understanding the dynamics and motivations of customers and how they evolve with your product’s growth is essential to building the right marketing approach.

In his new book Loonshots, author Safi Bahcall uses the concept of phase transitions to analyze how companies work. When a substance changes phase, like water going from solid to liquid, the same exact substance is forced to take on a new structural form when the surrounding environment changes.

As Bahcall points out in the book, companies exhibit a similar behavior in their inventions and strategy. He contrasts two different types of innovations that companies tend to be built to produce: “P” type innovations, where a company is great at producing new products, and “S” type innovations, where they can stay ahead of the pack by developing new business strategies for the same products. There are many examples presented in the book of both types of innovation done right — Juan Trippe and Pan Am, Steve Jobs, Edwin Land and Polaroid, Bob Crandall and American Airlines — each of them was (or has been) a pillar innovator with a specialty in P or S types.

Being great at a single type works great for a time, until the environment changes too much around you.

In the history of business, there are few examples of organizations able to straddle both phases simultaneously. Early on in the book there’s the example of Vannevar Bush, the engineer that led the historic Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War II. The OSRD was legendary for the systems and inventions developed during the war, many of which helped to tip the war in favor of the Allies. From the OSRD wiki page:

The research was widely varied, and included projects devoted to new and more accurate bombs, reliable detonators, work on the proximity fuze, guided missiles, radar and early-warning systems, lighter and more accurate hand weapons, more effective medical treatments, more versatile vehicles, and, most secret of all, the S-1 Section, which later became the Manhattan Project and developed the first atomic weapons.

What makes companies so focused on short term innovation, either in product or strategy? Humans (and organizations) are certainly known to be bad at having a long view of planning and decision making.

It’s a fascinating idea — that a successful, hard-to-kill organization becomes one by having a particular structure, one that can be water and ice at the same time. What Bush figured out 70 years ago was that the organization is what’s important. He focused on making organizations that could make great things, a focus on the process rather than its products:

This bit from a 1990 piece after his death sums it up:

He was an academic entrepreneur who co-founded Raytheon and was a vice president at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who consolidated the school’s reputation as having the nation’s finest engineering program. It’s not just that Bush was a brilliant engineer; it’s that Bush knew how to map, build and manage the relationships and organizations necessary to get things done. He knew how to craft the human networks that could build the technological networks.

The linguist John McWhorter has written a plethora of books on the English language. For an academic (he’s a professor at Columbia University), he has a very progressive view of English’s evolution, a supporter of the vernacular and everyday grammar with all its quickly-developing trendy figures of speech over the conservative, traditionalist approaches of Strunk and White. Many linguists of tend toward preservation, pushing standardization of grammar and even teaching “proper” usage that no modern speaker would say out loud. But McWhorter has a different perspective and supports change in usage with open arms, believing languages are not static entities. His previous book calls attention to this in its subtitle: Why English Won’t—And Can’t—Sit Still). If you’ve ever seen his talks or interviews, you’ll know he has an unconventional perspective on many things.

2014’s The Language Hoax focuses on a very narrow subject. It’s a deconstruction of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (“Whorfianism”), a theory that states, essentially, that language influences the speaker’s thoughts and worldview. If you’re interested in language and linguistics you may have heard of this theory already, also known as “linguistic relativity”. Whorfianism was a central element in Ted Chiang’s short story “Story of Your Life”, which most probably know from its film adaptation, Arrival — in which Amy Adams’s character learns to speak an alien language, and through learning it also gains their ability to perceive time nonlinearly). The dust jacket of The Language Hoax gives examples of what Whorfianism proposes:

Japanese has a term that covers both green and blue. Russian has separate terms for dark and light blue. Does this mean that Russians perceive these colors differently from Japanese people? Does language control and limit the way we think, such that each language gives its speakers a different “worldview”?

It’s a quick read. McWhorter doesn’t waste time diving right into criticisms of the theory, with many examples of its problems and thin supporting evidence. The differences in language and grammar from group to group, McWhorter argues, are driven by cultures. Culture drives linguistic structure, not the other way around. There are dozens of vivid examples in the book. In English we say “a long time” (time has length) and in Spanish you say “a lot of time” (time is a quantity) — but these differences don’t mean Americans have a finer innate understanding of time while Spaniards are more expert in volumetric measurement. McWhorter claims that most grammatic structures are the result of random chance — tiny variations in usage happening bit by bit over long stretches. One of the reasons I like McWhorter’s work is he has a tendency toward the Occam’s Razor approach to understanding these kinds of differences, versus working to justify a clever theory.

In the concluding chapters, he gets down to the reasons why he thinks Whorfianism is so attractive to its proponents, and while so many people are easily convinced of its validity, even in the presence of evidence to the contrary. From the book’s synopsis:

McWhorter shows not only how the idea of language as a lens fails but also why we want so badly to believe it: we’re eager to celebrate diversity by acknowledging the intelligence of peoples who may not think like we do. Though well-intentioned, our belief in this idea poses an obstacle to a better understanding of human nature and even trivializes the people we seek to celebrate.

The tendency to allow advocacy and activism to creep into the search for objective truth can be dangerous — and not only that, it can actually impact create negative impacts (as that quote suggests).

It wasn’t as enjoyable as some of his other books, but he makes a compelling case against a theory that, as he describes, is very easy to fall into the trap of supporting.

The short story is the perfect format for science fiction. A genre that’s keen on high concepts that can be very interesting often finds itself overreaching when certain concepts can’t sustain themselves through a 400 page full-length novel.

Bruce Sterling, one of my personal favorite authors, thinkers, and self-described “futurist” is one of the best in the business with the format. Globalhead is one of these collections from the early 90s, an eclectic mix of stories of varied genres — speculative fiction, post-apocalyptic, cyberpunk, crime thriller, Victorian steampunk — I begin to wonder if there’s a subject Sterling hasn’t dabbled in.

Of the group of 13 stories collected in Globalhead, 4 or 5 stood out to me as memorable and established worlds and characters within that I could see carrying their own longer-form works. Here’s a brief breakdown of my favorites from the bunch.

Our Neural Chernobyl

This one is presented as an excerpt from a historical archive about an event that spawned a terrible, irreversable genetic virus. Gene hackers, in a effort to cure AIDS and other genetic diseases develop DNA modifications that give humans a massive boost in neural capability, but has disastrous side effects including giving the same boost to many other species of mammals (and spawns an intelligent raccoon society with its own advanced culture). It’s a short, humorous setup without much substance, but surprisingly thought-provoking.

The Moral Bullet

A speculative fiction piece (in collaboration with author John Kessel about what can go awry with positive medical breakthroughs. After a life-extending drug is developed, the world is fragmented into tribal bandit groups and rival factions looking to hoard and protect supplies of the drug. The world is shown through the eyes of a scavenger playing the groups off of one another to his own advantage. The twist at the end is pretty slick for a short story to pull off. The world-building here is excellent — this is one of the bunch that could likely hold its own conceptually as a standalone work.

Storming the Cosmos

This one is a sign of the times, a hallmark of the Cold War era in which Sterling was writing much of his best stuff during the 1980s. This is another one with a co-author, this time cyberpunk writer Rudy Rucker. The plot here is presented as a retelling of a secret, unknown event in the history of the Soviet space program¹. It starts out as a fairly conventional science fiction story about a couple of space program engineers gets progressively more wild as they trek off to remote Siberia where a historical event unhinges the characters from spacetime. Like I said, Sterling can really sprint with a concept.

I’ve got copies of both Mirrorshades and Crystal Express, two other collections by Sterling that I’m eager to dig into. The first is actually an editing credit — cyberpunk stories penned by others and collected and annotated by Sterling.

Since The Origin of Species, Darwin’s theory of natural selection has been the foundation of our thinking about the evolution of life. Along the way there have been challengers to the broadness of that theory, and David Quammen’s The Tangled Tree brings together three core “modern” concepts that are beginning to take hold, providing a deeper understanding how lifeforms evolve.

The book mostly follows the research of the late Carl Woese, a microbiologist who spent his career studying microorganisms, looking for connections between creatures in the micro and macro. Beginning with Darwin’s tree of life, he sought to follow our individual branches back to the roots, looking for the cause of early splits and fractures in the genetic timeline that led us to where we are now.

The Tangled Tree traces the path of three separate yet interrelated discoveries over the past several decades:

• The discovery of the Archaea — through the work of Woese and his associates, we now know that what was formerly a two-kingdom world of “prokaryotes” and “eukaryotes” was more complex than that. Hidden within the prokaryote kingdom was actually a genetically distinct kingdom dubbed “archaea.” These are fascinating creatures more like alien life than visually-similar bacteria, often found at the most extreme habitats like volcanic vents and permafrost layers fathoms deep.
• Symbiogenesis — It was once thought that the organelles within cells developed on their own through natural selection and genetic mutation. This theory posits that certain components within cells were once their own independent (yet symbiotic) organisms, eventually subsumed by the host to become a single genetic lineage.
• Horizontal gene transfer — This process is the most radical of all, and is the most germane to modern science, particularly when it comes to combating bacteria that can mutate and become invulnerable to current antibiotics. The process involves genes moving between branches of the tree, versus in the strictly linear ancestor → descendant fashion we’re all familiar with from biology class. Humans likely have had material inserted into our genomes in the relatively recent past from life far different from ourselves.

Quammen weaves together all of these ideas through the stories of their discoverers. There are probably a hundred different scientists mentioned in the book, many of whom collaborated along the way, sharing research findings and data to build a case that evolution doesn’t work exactly how we thought it did.

The diversity of life is difficult to comprehend, and the book brought out many statistics and factoids that stayed with me long after reading. How do 4 acids configured into various protein structures manifest as “life”? The sheer quantity of life growing and evolving beyond our level of perception is mind-boggling. The total mass of bacteria on earth exceeds that of all plants and animals combined. Within a typical human body, bacterial cells outnumber all other “human” cells by a 3-to-1 ratio. A bacteria known as prochlorococcus marinus is the most abundant lifeform, with 3 octillion individuals presumed to exist.

I’ve never been deeply interested in biology compared to other sciences, but The Tangled Tree was a thought-provoking, fascinating look at how much there is yet to be understood right at our fingertips. While we’re trying to understand the origins of the universe and what star systems look like millions of light years away, there’s also a mysterious, terrifyingly complex world within our own bodies.

As I’ve been trying to bootstrap into a meditation practice, most of my learnings have been from various podcast episode discussions and a couple of books on the topic. My approach thus far hasn’t been to try and dig in way deep, but largely to kickstart a regular routine to form a healthy habit.

Since I already listen to Sam Harris’s podcast, I’d heard good things about his book Waking Up as a nice primer on meditation from a secular perspective — a neuroscientist’s view on the subject as a true contributor to health and well being. The book subtitled “A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion” is just that, an analytical look at the the science and biochemistry of meditation. He does touch on some of the historical background of the various forms of meditation and the religious contexts they originate from. But most of the book is focused on how it works and the neurological benefits of meditation practice.

It’s a quick read, but don’t expect to learn much about how to start a meditation routine.

I enjoyed the memoir aspects of the book. Harris gives some background on his own entrance into the field of study and his experiences in his early days of meditation retreats, trying to break down the benefits of regular practice.

Something I would skip over in any future re-read are the negative counter-argument parts in the final third of the book, railing against “pretenders” in the world of meditation teachers. It’s, of course, important to look out for the “fake enlightened”, either instructors or students touting their own overinflated positions on the practice. But to me this doesn’t differ from any other field of study. Maintaining skepticism and thinking for yourself are critical when approaching any new activity. Perhaps his problem is that with something as abstract and difficult to convey as the art of meditation, pretenders can more easily build followings they don’t deserve.

For anyone getting into meditation like me, it’s a worthy read to get objective opinion on mindfulness and what it’s all about.

I picked up John McPhee’s Coming Into the Country this week. You could think of it like a biography of Alaska: the region pre- and post-statehood, its people, the wilderness, wildlife, and its vastness.

Woven throughout are reminders of just how massive the untouched wilderness is in Alaska, and how far you really are from civilization out in the flatlands or up in the Brooks Range.

Early in the book he and his companions are traveling up the Salmon River, in the Kobuk Valley National Park (still not designated in 1977 at the time of writing):

The Kobuk Valley National Monument proposal, which includes nearly two million acres, is, in area, relatively modest among ten other pieces of Alaska that are similarly projected for confirmation by Congress as new parks and monuments. In all, these lands constitute over thirty-two million acres, which is more than all the Yosemites, all the Yellowstones, all the Grand Canyons and Sequoias put together — a total that would more than double the present size of the National Park System. For cartographic perspective, thirty-two million acres slightly exceeds the area of the state of New York.

The nearly 2000 year old Meditations by Marcus Aurelius is likely the first ever entry in the “self help” publishing genre. During his last days as Roman Emperor, reigning from 161-180 AD, he wrote the 12 “books” that comprise the Meditations. It’s a personal journal he wrote to himself, never intended for publication, with thoughts, ruminations, reminders, and short stories from his life, all with the objective of serving his future self as a reminder of how to live and act.

There’s not much of a thematic arc from book to book — each numbered paragraph entry largely stands on its own. Some are single, to-the-point declarations, some are longer stories about people in his life, including things he admired about them.

As a practitioner of Stoic philosophy, many of the original players from the Stoic school are mentioned, and their belief system is present throughout. Aurelius was clearly a devout follower of the Stoics, at least later in life. The writing is full of great quips that are helpful for readers of any age or generation to remember what’s important and to direct attention in productive and meaningful ways. Aurelius counsels to live according to a set of principles, avoid distractions, don’t think about what other people think of you, and to maintain a rational mind without letting emotion overcome you. I doubt that he knew what “mindfulness” was in the way we think of it today, or that the Buddhist tradition has, but much of the writing speaks to the act of being “present” in the moment and not dwelling on the things outside of your control — just like the array of mindfulness practices.

“You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”

One item of note that I didn’t discover until starting the book was how many varying translations are out there of the original work. It was originally written in Greek and has been translated hundreds of times in various languages over the centuries. I started out reading an older translation (not sure the source) that I found difficult to follow, unnecessarily given that there are more modernized versions. I eventually found the recently published translation by Gregory Hays and started over with his much more readable prose. Contrast the versions and see the simplicity of the text from Hays in this part from Book 2:

Original:

“Why should any of these things that happen externally so much distract thee? Give thyself leisure to learn some good thing and cease roving and wandering to and fro. Thou must also take heed of another kind of wandering, for they are idle in their actions, who toil and labour in this life, and have no certain scope to which to direct all their motions, and desires.”

Hays:

“Do external things distract you? Then make time for yourself to learn something worthwhile; stop letting yourself be pulled in all directions. But make sure you guard against the other kind of confusion. People who labor all their lives but have no purpose to direct every thought and impulse toward are wasting their time—even when hard at work.”

The same idea comes across, without the arcane English that muddies the meaning for the novice modern reader.

I thoroughly enjoyed Meditations and it’s a quick read. It’s a great candidate to become regular reference material for self-reflection and meditation practice.

My wrap up of books of 2018, continued from part 1.

The Order of Time & Reality is Not What it Seems, Carlo Rovelli

I don’t remember where I ran across Rovelli first; it may have been a YouTube video of one of his lectures that I found intriguing. Both of them I found supremely enjoyable — popular physics done succinctly, vividly, and in a lyrical style that’s completely unique. The Order of Time is about human perception and asks the question: why do we perceive time the way we do? What creates it?

In Reality is Not What it Seems, he tells the story of quantum gravity, a field that (like string theory) attempts to reconcile the major theories of quantum physics and relativity into a unified whole. It’s an immensely complicated subject, but I particularly enjoyed the historical background on the breakthroughs leading to the current understanding of the science. I wrote a longer review of this one few weeks back.

Deep Work, Cal Newport

I’ve lost interest in most “self help”-styled books. They’re usually chock full of fluff and are largely published to evangelize a consulting practice. I had seen Newport’s book well reviewed over the years so decided to give it a try. While the thesis is not necessarily groundbreaking (that longer, extended periods of focus are more productive), it did have some tips on how to fit “deep work” stretches into a schedule. We all have way too many distractions at our fingertips all the time, and any guidance on how to focus on the important over the urgent is helpful. A few tips that I’ve been trying, to varying degrees of success to create focus time: leave email apps closed, close all Chrome sessions frequently (I often end up with dozens of “I’ll read this soon” tabs open), and working from the iPad. One of the key topics is on recognizing when you’re working on work that “feels like work”, but isn’t:

The Principle of Least Resistance: In a business setting, without clear feedback on the impact of various behaviors to the bottom line, we will tend toward behaviors that are easiest in the moment.

Busyness as Proxy for Productivity: In the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in their jobs, many knowledge workers turn back toward an industrial indicator of productivity: doing lots of stuff in a visible manner.

You don’t have to spend much time working to see this in action, from others or yourself (if you’re self-aware). It’s an easy trap to fall into. We have to be conscious of the fact that the knowledge work we spend our time on in the modern world is completely unnatural, with no evolutionary precedent. Since our brains aren’t wired to be good at it, we have to make conscious effort to avoid traps.

A Conflict of Visions, Thomas Sowell

I don’t read any of the contemporary political books that you’ll find in the “current affairs” section. For one thing, I find political writing to be mostly awful, but even that which I agree with politically I find pointless to be reading. Most of it selectively seeks statistics to validate the single-threaded point at hand. With the political scene as toxic as its ever been, with so much bitter disagreement on so many things, rather than argue “my side” of the fence, I’d prefer to dig deeper and understand why so many smart people disagree so vehemently on many things.

A Conflict of Visions has the apt subtitle “Idealogical Origins of Political Struggles”, which is exactly what I want to better understand. Why do people left or right come at problems in such opposite ways? What mental programming is there that makes people see things so differently?

What Sowell puts forward is the idea that “visions” of how people see the world can be partitioned into the “constrained” and “unconstrained.” At a fundamental level, they go like so:

In the unconstrained vision, there are no intractable reasons for social evils and therefore no reason why they cannot be solved, with sufficient moral commitment. But in the constrained vision, whatever artifices or strategies restrain or ameliorate inherent human evils will themselves have costs, some in the form of other social ills created by these civilizing institutions, so that all that is possible is a prudent trade-off.

His argument makes the best case I’ve seen for the foundational differences between ideologies. Sowell doesn’t paint a picture of which is right or wrong (though his conservative views are apparent), he’s trying to give some context to what makes us see issues from completely different sides. Most political disagreements are not in the existence of an issue, but rather in the degree of the problem and the prescribed solution. This book is highly recommended for anyone interested in learning where the other side is coming from¹.

Scale, Geoffrey West

It’s been a while since I read this one, but it struck a chord for understanding the principles of systems as they scale. From biology, to cities, to companies, to economics, West draws out the similarities in structures and the properties of their networks. Very similar scaling proportions are present in tree branches, arteries, heart rates, life spans of creatures, and many more examples. It’s mind-bending to think of the relationships between seemingly unrelated systems. Why would so many things in the natural world scale by factors of 1/4? If there’s not some deeper connection between nature than we’re yet able to understand, that would be shocking.

The Tangled Tree, David Quammen

I recently watched a documentary on Netflix called The Most Unknown, which tells a brief story of each of nine scientists in varied disciplines on the bleeding edges of their fields. One of them studied Archaea, the third domain of life next to bacteria and eukarya (animals, plants, fungi, insects). For a few centuries that we’ve been classifying lifeforms, we didn’t even know this entire group of organisms existed. In 1977 a scientist named Carl Woese was the first to differentiate archaea from bacteria, and with this he discovered an important fact that threw up some question marks about evolution: archaea genetically resemble humans more than they do bacteria.

The Tangled Tree tackles the importance of this discovery and two others, to revise our understanding of evolutionary biology. Darwin’s theory of natural selection has been the dogma of evolution for 200+ years. Between the archaea, endosymbiosis, and a process called horizontal gene transfer, the book makes the case that how organisms evolve is more complex than the simple trial and error adaptation of natural selection. Cells can swallow entire smaller single-celled organisms and live symbiotically until they become part of the whole. Genes can move sideways from branch to branch on the tree of life, not only to their descendants.

I haven’t read much biology, but I found this one fascinating through and through.

Enlightenment Now, Steven Pinker

This isn’t the only book in this vein, making the case for the value and importance the enlightenment. Pinker’s goal here is to make the case (using myriad data and examples) that progress is happening at an unprecedented pace. Global suffering has plummeted, prosperity is spreading, things are much better than they seem. There’s plenty here to digest and he makes strong cases all around for the benefits of science, progress, and technology, even if there are growing pains along the way.

What I take away from this book the most, and why I’d recommend it to others, is the value of zooming out on the world and seeing things from a wider perspective. Just open Twitter on any given day and you’d think anarchy was right around the corner. Or totalitarian dictatorship. The opinion is different depending on your bubble, but the facts on the ground are the same. This type of catastrophizing is phenomenally unhealthy, does zero good, and changes nothing about the outcome unless you get up and do something about it. The truth is, though, that if you did get up to do something, you’d discover things aren’t as bad as they seem.

That’s a wrap on this year’s reading recommendations. I have a lot of awesome stuff on the reading list for 2019. Already digging into some good things I’ve had laying around a long time. Looking forward to the new year’s reading adventures.

This year was a productive one for reading. Even with all going on in life, I still managed to get through 43 books in 2018. Reading by quantity isn’t the measure of success, of course. I want my selection guided by interest, important, and impact, not sheer numbers. When I scroll back through the timeline, I can see my interests shifting around — from nonfiction to fiction and back, moving between politics, economics, and science.

Rather than run through an exhaustive review of everything I read this year, I’ll give the highlights of my favorites from some common categories I like to read. These aren’t necessarily the best books I read this year by some objective measure, but the most worthy of highlight.

The Southern Reach Trilogy, Jeff VanDerMeer

The first one on this year’s list isn’t one book, it’s three, forming the Southern Reach trilogy — Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance. The synopsis of the opening entry in the series was enough to get me in the door. Combine science fiction with elements of horror, mystery, and ecology-gone-wrong, I’m in. Each of the books is quite different, but form a complete picture of a strange place seen from multiple perspectives and time periods. The central character of the trilogy isn’t a person, it’s a place. Known in the books as “Area X”, for decades it’s a place where nature has reclaimed the surroundings, twisted and mutated much of the resident life, and destroys through madness and disease anyone who enters. In part 1, four unnamed characters enter the Area as part of a mysterious government agency’s (the titular “Southern Reach”) attempts to understand the causal catastrophe. The best way to describe the trilogy is “totally unique”. Reading it I found myself going back through chapters (especially in parts 1 and 3) to revisualize the environments described. VanDerMeer has a knack for inventing fantastically weird, grotesque, and beautiful scenes that stick with you after reading.

The Three-Body Problem, Cixin Liu

Another one in the science fiction category and the first in a trilogy, this is by Chinese author Cixin Liu. On the surface the story is an alien invasion plot, but one unlike any other. Set primarily in Cultural Revolution-era China, we don’t often read science fiction through that political and cultural lens. There’s almost no satisfactory way to describe or summarize the plot here, but it involves a virtual reality game, extraterrestrial intelligence, multidimensional physics, and political intrigue.

The Story of Maps, Lloyd A. Brown

For a detailed overview of this one, I wrote a post a few weeks back. I randomly bought this book at a used bookstore years ago, but never did anything but flip through looking at the graphics inside. It’s an excellent combination of history and scientific textbook-like coverage of the science of mapping. As it was written in the 1950s, it stops well short of anything we’d call “modern” on the technology front, but that’s just what interested me about it. I wanted a resource that’d help me understand the first principles of map making, the historical context in which advances were made, and the threads linking discoveries and advancements together through history. This book gives all of that, as long as you have the patience to bear through the drier parts.

The Elegant Universe, Brian Greene

This is one of the best-known works of popular science in physics, attempting to explain string theory to the layperson. The theory attempts to reconcile the conflict between two empirically-proven theories of reality: general relativity and quantum mechanics. Greene is a great writer when it comes to breaking down complex ideas into simple analogies. The framework of string theory is wildly intricate with its eleven dimensions and vibrating string particles, so I had trouble following the logic. I need to read more on that topic. What I got the most of out of this book was a stronger foundational understanding of relativity and quantum mechanics. Both of those ideas themselves are abstract and challenging.

Leonardo da Vinci, Walter Isaacson

I don’t pick up many biographies, but Isaacson’s profile of da Vinci is a model of how the genre should be done. It was well balanced between the relevant parts of his life, but devoted most of its attention to the material all readers want to spend time on. Da Vinci was an astonishing figure, with no equal in history as an inventive, diverse mind.

Check out Part 2.

Borders in today’s world are remarkably static, ever-present lines we all get used to separating territories as if there are hard barriers to interaction between the multicolored countries of your average political map of the world. Centuries of perpetual war, invasions, treaties, intermarrying monarchs, imperialism, and revolutions redrew the global map with regularity, but today we don’t see this level of volatility. When a new country is formed, a disputed territory shifts, or a country is renamed, it makes global headlines. It’s only every few years that you see territorial shifts.

This level of stability can be attributed to the interconnectedness of modern global society. In Connectography, Parag Khanna makes a compelling case for the dissolving relevance of international borders. His thesis is that cities are now the dominant focal point of human engagement and productivity rather than states, and that the grid of connection points between cities has largely superseded the importance of international borders: “a future shaped less by national borders than by global supply chains, a world in which the most connected powers—and people—will win.”

Worldwide economic growth has created a level of stability unprecedented in human history. In Thomas Friedman’s 1999 book The Lexus and the Olive Tree, he posits the “Golden Arches Theory” — that “no two countries that both had McDonald’s had fought a war against each other since each got its McDonald’s.” Meaning once economies are significantly integrated with one another, the cost of conflict increases, thereby deterring each side from sparring with one another. While this tongue-in-cheek theory offers an overly simplistic view of the world, the point still largely holds up today. Nations go to “economic war” more readily than armed conflict.

Expanding on Friedman’s theory from 20 years ago, Khanna clarifies that it isn’t specific enough to attribute stability to “globalization” in some broad sense. More concretely, it is interconnectedness that creates a shared sense of motivation, collaboration, and responsibility for progress. As he points out, some of the least connected places on earth are the ones with the least stability:

“Importantly, the geographies not knitting themselves together into collective functional zones—the Near East and Central Asia—are also generally where one finds the most failed states.”

The concept of “global cities” started to take hold in the nineties — cities that function as nodes on the global interconnected network thanks to the connective tissue of infrastructure: Shanghai, New York, London, Singapore, Hong Kong, and others. Modern telecommunications, energy distribution, and transportation networks wire people closely together while ignoring the man-made boundaries between nations, the social barriers of language and culture, and even the physical barriers in mountains and oceans. Khanna makes the case that we should redraw our maps to more vividly represent reality on the ground:

“The absence of the full panoply of man-made infrastructure on our maps gives the impression that borders trump other means of portraying human geography.”

With increasing human migration to to urban areas, the city is where human activity now takes place. Cities (especially global ones) are beginning to form economic and diplomatic bonds with one another, regardless of the proximity or cultural similarity of their respective states. Central to Khanna’s point is that this economic and technological expansion has enabled supply chains to drive the social order:

“Supply chains are self-assembling and organically connecting. They expand, contract, shift, multiply, and diversify as a result of our collective human activity. You can disrupt supply chains, but they will quickly find alternative pathways to fulfill their missions.”

Globalization and the ever-multiplying division of labor allows for even historically landlocked places excluded from the global economy to specialize and “plug into” the network, taking their place in the flexible supply chain. The competition to become a new link in the supply chain creates positive forces that motivate people to create value for others up the chain. What used to be a hierarchical order between large states has dissolved into hundreds or thousands of largely-independent nodes that invest in their own specialties, a decentralization that reworks the old world order:

“The interstate puzzle thus gives way to a lattice of infrastructure circuitry. The world is starting to look a lot like the Internet.”

One focal point of the book is on the policy tactics cities are using to embrace connection and openness within their current constraints of monarchy or centralized control. The “Special Economic Zone” (SEZ) is a tool in the arsenal gaining acceptance around the world to invite foreign investment in the form of corporate presence inside of a nation’s borders. As Khanna points out, they’re gaining in popularity with “more than four thousand SEZs around the world, the pop-up cities of a functional supply chain world.” Acting as if there’s little to no barrier to collaborative development, a US-based company can establish a presence in Shenzhen, Dubai, or Batam that was impossible 20 or 30 years ago. Powered by the infrastructural connections brought about by the internet, containerized shipping, and international financial investments, these SEZs provide havens for countries to ignore one another’s political boundaries. In places like China’s Pearl River Delta, this interconnectedness with other global cities has enabled unprecedented growth — now with nearly 60 million people plugged into an economy by leveraging its network proximity to the other centers of gravity, like a critical router in a network topology diagram. The savvy of the local government in attracting multinational corporate investment (even though counter to much of the party dogma) can be credited with an enormous jump in quality of life for millions of former rural Chinese that have since migrated to the region.

The book is full of rich examples of locales as diverse as colonial Southeast Asia, the Caucasus, the Near East, and East Africa. A theory this compelling on modern economic freedom and progress requires connecting the dots of history to understand how we arrived here. Throughout the book there are maps peppered in to visualize the pervasiveness of infrastructural connection. There’s even a website devoted to making the maps interactive, so you can see for yourself how interconnected the world already is, regardless of political rhetoric of the day.

Connectography is an engaging read for anyone interested in geopolitics, international relations, and geography. Khanna has developed a thought-provoking theory of economic development for the modern era.

Some fun facts from the book:

• 🏙 In 1950, the world had only two megacities of populations larger than 10 million: Tokyo and New York City. By 2025, there will be at least forty such megacities.
• 🇲🇽 The population of the greater Mexico City region is larger than that of Australia, as is that of Chongqing, a collection of connected urban enclaves spanning an area the size of Austria.
• 🏗 China consumed more cement between 2010 and 2013 than America did in the entire twentieth century.

For more on Khanna’s work on Connectography, check these out:

• How megacities are changing the map of the world — Khanna’s TED Talk on Connectography
• A New Map for America — redefining the US map based on economic “mega-regions”
• How Hyperconnected Cities are Taking Over the World

I started making this tool a long time back to extract highlighted excerpts from Kindle books. This predated the cool support for this that Goodreads has now, but I still would like to spend some time getting back to this little side project.

Eric Farkas has another tool that looks like it does this, as well, so that’s worth checking out as a possible replacement. What I really want is my own private archive of the data, not really my own custom extraction tool. The gem I was using for mine might’ve been the same one, or does something similar reading from Amazon’s API. It’s nice because it outputs the data in JSON, so then it can be easily parsed apart into yaml or Markdown to use elsewhere. Each excerpt looks like this:

{
  "asin": "B005H0O8KQ",
  "customerId": "A28I9D90ISXNT6",
  "embeddedId": "CR!CJ3JV6W1D918FDT8WZTVP0GG6CNN:86C04A71",
  "endLocation": 72905,
  "highlight": "Springs like these are the source of vein-type ore deposits. It's the same story that I told you about the hydrothermal transport of gold. When rainwater gets down into hot rock, it brings up what it happens to find there—silver, tungsten, copper, gold. An ore-deposit map and a hot-springs map will look much the same. Seismic waves move slowly through hot rock.",
  "howLongAgo": "2 months ago",
  "startLocation": 72539,
  "timestamp": 1446421339000
}

If I can soon I’ll spend some time tinkering and see if I can pull some for other books I’ve read since.

I’m making my way through The Federalist, which has been on my reading list forever, and for which I had my interest rekindled last year reading Alexander Hamilton.

For those that don’t know, it’s a collection of essays written by the trio of Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay to convince the populace of the need to ratify the then-draft US Constitution.

Up to Federalist No. 25, the focus is on a) the utility and importance of the “union of states” as a concept worth pursuing and cementing and b) the insufficiency of the Articles of Confederation to do the job of maximizing the combined strength of the states (for various reasons outlined in the essays).

One of the biggest takeaways so far, somewhat unexpected to me, is the depth of research done by the authors to make their case. They draw on a rich historical record and present research to identify pros and cons of what’s been tried in past institutions, what’s worked, and what hasn’t. On the history of the Swiss Confederacy:

The connection among the Swiss cantons scarcely amounts to a confederacy; though it is sometimes cited as an instance of the stability of such institutions. They have no common treasury; no common troops even in war; no common coin; no common judicatory; nor any other common mark of sovereignty. They are kept together by the peculiarity of their topographical position; by their individual weakness and insignificancy; by the fear of powerful neighbors, to one of which they were formerly subject; by the few sources of contention among a people of such simple and homogeneous manners; by their joint interest in their dependent possessions; by the mutual aid they stand in need of, for suppressing insurrections and rebellions, an aid expressly stipulated and often required and afforded; and by the necessity of some regular and permanent provision for accommodating disputes among the cantons.

Looking to historical evidence to validate or reject aspects of governing models helped guide us to the right approach for our new government; the record of trial and error is immensely helpful if you respect and understand the context. The varied governance structures of history allowed the Federalists to make a strong case for centralization (but just the right amount of it). The Founders also sought to maximize freedom of individuals and the states they thought crucial to a stable system.

In Federalist No. 20, Madison even references this fact directly:

I make no apology for having dwelt so long on the contemplation of these federal precedents. Experience is the oracle of truth; and where its responses are unequivocal, they ought to be conclusive and sacred.

“Experience is the oracle of truth.” Model new systems around what has previously worked, make adjustments, and ensure the system is an “anti-fragile” one that responds and gets stronger over time.

It’s quite a daunting task to explain anything in theoretical physics in 250 pages, but this is just what I like about Carlo Rovelli’s books. Earlier this year I read The Order of Time, and like that book, Reality is Not What it Seems gets right to the point. No time is wasted or point too embellished.

This time around Rovelli tackles his specialty: quantum gravity. While it is a work of popular science, he does an admirable job of explaining wildly complex theories — made all the more difficult because a cumulative understanding in sequence is required to keep following the thread.

About half of the book is devoted to the scientists and their discoveries that lead to the two most important scientific theories we’re still building on today: general relativity and quantum mechanics. But we can’t understand the origins of those breakthroughs without starting at the beginning.

Rovelli relishes the story of the great thinkers that each contributed stones to building the great structures of science we’ve erected today in modern physics. Anaximander, Democritus, Aristotle, and Galileo all play a role in establishing the foundation that propelled Isaac Newton to the discovery of what we know know as classical mechanics. His laws of motion and gravitation were the bedrock of physics for 200 years until Michael Faraday’s work on electromagnetism. The number of amazing discoveries recounted here is astounding, and the profoundness is stark when presented in rapid-fire order, albeit succinctly, which Rovelli excels at. Rutherford, Bohr, Maxwell, Planck, von Neumann, Born, Pauli. The trail leads us to the big players behind the current understanding of the universe, and geniuses behind relativity and quantum mechanics: Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, Paul Dirac, and John Wheeler. The time spent with each of the characters is brief, but meaningful; each of their achievements were astounding, especially given the technology and information each had available¹.

These theories of modern physics are mind-bendingly difficult to comprehend. Both lie beyond our everyday perception — relativity at cosmic scales, and quanta at the ultramicroscopic. For such a brief baseline, Rovelli does a good job framing up the two with vivid examples demonstrating general relativity’s four-dimensional latticework of space and time, and quantum mechanics’ probabilistic hecticness.

The second half of the book builds toward a merger of the two theories in “loop quantum gravity”, which is an attempt (as yet unproven) to merge the two conflicting theories on the nature of reality. The fact that two demonstrably, empirically “true” theories don’t square with one another clearly indicates we’re missing something.

Things get quite existential and philosophical, in Rovelli’s lyrical style. Toward the end we even get a look at how thermodynamics and information theory play a role in understanding quantum gravity. I can’t begin to summarize other than to say it involves foam, entropy, Claude Shannon, and the intertwining of heat and time.

Here are my core takeaways, trying to build my own understanding:

• Reality is relational — things only exist in relation to other things, there is no absolute
• Reality is reduced to interactions
• It is only in interactions that anything in nature exists — we only know of things we can interact with
• As such the world is made of events, not objects
• We are a flux of events — at the quantum scale, we are made up of processes

Where this leaves us, I don’t know. But I’m incredibly curious to continue reading about the subject. I have far from a comprehensive understanding. It’s endlessly fascinating to gain basic pieces of knowledge and feel like I have a better handle on how things work.

Image: Quanta Magazine

This is the first book review post since I put up my library section. I hope to do more of this in the future with each new book I add to the collection. Enjoy.

The Story of Maps took me a while to get through, but it’s the most comprehensive history I’ve seen on the history of geography and cartography.

Of particular note was the history of the figures in antiquity, their discoveries, and the techniques they used to advance the science of mapmaking. From Strabo, Eratosthenes, and Ptolemy to Ortelius, Mercator, and Huygens, Brown is extremely thorough in giving each of the critical figures their space on the page. The book is peppered with illustrations that give visual context to many of the maps and equipment devised by the cartographers, scientists, and inventors. I found myself down numerous Wikipedia rabbit holes whenever I’d see arcane place names in the periphery of the worlds known to the Greeks, Romans, or Carthaginians.

Naturally I had a good understanding of how most geographical systems and tools work — longitude and latitude, equinoxes, the tropics, time zones. What was a delight to read was the historical context in which these things were discovered or developed by people with little to no access to anything we’d consider “technology.” For millennia, making maps meant getting on a ship, horse, camel, or your feet, writing down what you saw, observing celestial patterns in the sky (or Jupiter if you were really clever), and tediously aggregating enough detail to make a representative picture of the world. Today we laugh at the distorted, backward views that scientists like Strabo assembled as his “known world,” but given the available resources, it’s honestly stunning anyone could map anything beyond their own village.

Brown addresses this in the introduction, that the history of science is one of failure and persistence:

The history of science as a whole is the record of a select group of men and women who have dared to be wrong, and no group of scientists has been more severely criticized for its errors than cartographers, the men who have mapped the world. Hundreds of weighty tomes have been written to prove how very wrong were such men as Ptolemy, Delisle, and Mitchell. For every page of text, for every map and chart compiled by the pioneers of cartography, a thousand pages of adverse criticism have been written about them by men who were themselves incapable of being wrong because they would never think of exposing themselves to criticism, let alone failure.

As cartoonish and silly as most maps made prior to the Renaissance appear, the historical frame Brown assembles around these works gives a great appreciation to the struggles of the pre-modern cartographer’s reality.

Venturing Into the Unknown

For most of human history, the map of the world was really one of the Mediterranean Sea. We’ve all seen ancient maps with extreme distortion beginning only a few hundred miles from the Med coast. One of my favorite sections of the book is about the Phoenician pioneering of navigation and sea charts, one of the earliest forms of map that had practical use beyond the artistic. Rather than an academic approach to the development of charts, the Phoenician methodology was driven by necessity. As a trading civilization with origins in modern-day Lebanon, seafaring was essential to the growth of the empire, therefore the need for charts purely for livelihood was paramount. As far back as 1200 BC, Phoenician sailors were cruising throughout the Mediterranean and Adriatic, and are even thought to have circumnavigated Africa in 600 BC. The role their knowledge of geography played put them at the center of importance to dozens of neighboring civilizations, making them the first truly expansive “trading” nations:

They mastered many of the “secrets of the sea” and the more important secrets of the heavens, but just how much they knew about the sea and the universe as a whole, and how far they were able to develop the science of navigation, history does not say. Certainly the Phoenicians never said. Their skill and their willingness to sail where others dared not go gave them a peculiar power over more powerful nations bordering on the Mediterranean who depended on them to transport their merchandise and fight their naval engagements for them. They were indispensable to the great political powers. Sennacherib, Psammetichus, Necho, Xerxes, and Alexander all depended on them to maintain their supply lines and transport their legions.

But they left no written record of their knowledge. What we know about their contributions and extents of their exploits is through the marks they left on the places they visited. The lack of any left-behind documentation was likely intentional — they guarded intensely their knowledge of sea lore:

It was all the same to the Phoenicians. They knew what they had and guarded their secrets concerning trade routes and discoveries, their knowledge of winds and currents, with their lives. The influence of sea power began to manifest itself at an early date, and the Phoenicians were cordially detested in Greece if not elsewhere. They were also feared.

This brings to the forefront an interesting thread that runs throughout the story: the intimate connection between mapmaking, military intelligence, and corporate competitive secrecy.

War & Commerce Drive Discovery

A common theme with many advancements in science, not just geography and cartography, is the need for intelligence to defeat an adversary. War-making has a longstanding relationship with geography since the time of the Babylonians and Greeks, and still does today. Throughout the Age of Discovery, many of the modern inventions we still use todayfor surveying, navigation, and cartography — coordinate systems, projections, and more — were endeavors financed by kings and tyrants in service of conquest. Until most of the seas were explored and documented by the 19th century, the domain of cartography was divided between three main groups: private enterprise, government sponsorship, and commercial atlas publishers (who were only left with the scraps the other two didn’t care about, which wasn’t much). In the first two concerns, secrecy was a default — a necessary element to maintaining an edge over the market or the enemy. In the 17th century, the Dutch East India Company developed a “Secret Atlas” for the exclusive use of the Company. Like a Google or Apple of 400 years ago, they invested heavily in developing maps to leverage for commercial gain, employing their own cartographers to develop highly protected data. Though unlike today’s private enterprise, they saw no advantage from exposing any of their work to the public:

This remarkable lot of 180 maps, charts, and views was made for the exclusive use of the Company by the best cartographers in Holland. Included in the collection, and of the utmost importance, was a series of consecutive survey charts, which, when pieced together, show the fairway through the Indian Archipelago, the route to India along the coast of Africa and through the Indian Ocean, and the best course to China and Japan. In addition there were many single charts on a larger scale which showed in detail the small islands and atolls that played an important part in the hit-and-run battles on the high seas. There are Colombo on Ceylon, Bantam, Makassar, Atjeh, and the Portuguese stronghold of Goa; Ternate and Makian and the strategic outpost of Mauritius.

The ties were close between the East India Companies and their patrons in their respective governments. The explorers of the age were all funded by monarchs in search of claim-staking, empire-building, trade, and colonization. Navigators saw themselves as the “keepers of secret knowledge” when it came to fundamentals we consider givens today (even obsolete) — like the development of the astrolabe, the quadrant, celestial charts, and accurate marine chronometers for measuring longitude¹.

The “Modern” World of Geography

Even in the modern era, for many decades governments were the only entities capable of bringing to bear the resources to map countries or continents. Today it’s easy to discount the monumental effort required to create a map of an entire country, since we have hyper-large-scale data accessible on our phones and watches. But for most of human history, knowing a place meant putting feet on the ground there. As late as the Second World War this was how mapping was done. Here’s Brown on the Allied strategy for gaining an edge on the Axis:

The fundamental data in many cases were not to be had by gift, theft, or purchase. A map is no better than the sources from which it is compiled, and too often the sources were not to be had, at least so far as the Allied nations were concerned. No amount of synthesis, scientific or artistic, no amount of high-speed printing on fine paper could remedy the fundamental lack, the basic objective of cartography — an accurate survey of the ground.

At the time of the book’s publishing (1949), the author couldn’t have imagined the world we live in now. Near the end, Brown sums up the current state of mapmaking as one driven by government bureaus and the post-war surge in the number of skilled surveyors, newly-minted after years of investment in the effort to supply mapping intelligence to warring nations around the world. Since the 1960s, the world of mapping has been propelled by the Space Age — from U-2 spy planes and Corona satellites during the Cold War to the Key Hole program that began for reconnaissance purposes and kickstarted the commercial satellite industry. While governments and militaries are still enormous contributors to Earth sciences and geography, private enterprise has taken the mantle of cutting-edge map data collection. All of us consume maps as a default behavior today, geotagging pictures, navigating with turn-by-turn directions, and searching for the next restaurant to visit happen as a matter of course. Machines are gathering data at a rate we aren’t even able to consume. For thousands of years, people were content if the could know only the physical space. Today physical geography is seen largely as a “solved” problem. We’re now able to map human movement patterns, financial transactions, weather, wildlife, events, and anything else that happens in space and time.

A Mine of Information

The bibliography is a treasure trove of further historical works. I still have to parse through it and flag other books that look interesting for further reading.

The one major critique I have of the book is its encyclopedic depth. If it were written today, much of the excruciating detail would be left on the cutting room floor, probably, but it’s bearable once your expectations are set. For certain elements of the history, I actually welcomed the level of detail. It prevented me from having to do further Googling to dig in on the parts I was more interested in. But quite a bit of it is unnecessary belabored.

I highly recommended The Story of Maps to the geographer with an interest in history. I haven’t found a better resource that starts at the true beginning. Most histories of science or cartography won’t go all the way to Anaximander and Strabo, but Brown showed no fear in devoting 100+ pages to the foundations of the science.

I just merged in a new project I worked on over the holiday to add a library section to this site. You’ll see it under “Books” from the top navigation menu.

Based around the library database I’ve been adding to over the last few months, I built a way to convert the record data for each book into content pages for the website. It uses Jekyll’s Collections functionality for building custom content types to use. Once you have the basic templating set up, creating new content records is as easy as making a new file in your collection (for my site it’s _books/) with whatever consistent metadata you want to use available in the front matter.

All of the metadata tracked from the database is in each collection entry to use for reference, as visible in that example. This’ll be cool so I can make it more interactive, to allow browsing by genre, publish year, format, etc.

I’m pretty happy with the setup so far. It should be simple to maintain and add new books to the library. To make life easier I added a new method to my command line utility to generate custom “base” templates to start with for new records. I’ve already got those set up for regular posts and new links, so it only involved adding a new file output structure for book entries. All of my completed reads are in there dating back to mid-2017. I’ll keep gradually adding them as I can. The way I’ve got this set up, each collection entry can also function as a “review” of sorts. A future plan includes adding a way to insert those as dated entries into the feed and main homepage. A “topics” section has also been gradually coming together. More on that soon.

In a future technical post I’ll write up how it’s all configured using collections and make reference to the relevant source on GitHub. Collections are one of the most powerful features of Jekyll and I’m sure generally underutilized.

My nonfiction interests have evolved quite a bit. When I browse what’s new, recent, or recommended I find most of it uninteresting. I now find myself picking up books I wouldn’t have attempted several years back; I’d have been too intimidated by their length or complexity.

But now I’m comfortable with those and interested to visit “first principles” on whatever the topic is. Rather than reading current takes on economics, I’d prefer to pick up Adam Smith, Hayek, or Keynes. Instead of modern political writing, I’ll go for Locke, Hamilton, or Burke.

That’s not to say I don’t enjoy contemporary writing. If newer works make reference to the original thinkers (which any worthwhile ones do), they’ll cite sources you can pick through to build a gold mine of other interesting angles to take on the same subject.

One of the biggest issues that plagues modern publishing is that books are too long. I don’t know enough about the industry to understand the reasoning, but more often than not I find a 300 page nonfiction book could be edited and condensed to 200 pages with no lost meaning or description. In fact it could result in a more concision, making the point quicker. I’m typically not in a hurry to get finished, but an author belaboring a point can diminish its effectiveness. Books in the “self help” category tend to exhibit this problem worse than others, in my experience. Biographies can be long-winded, also; but to me the experience of reading a biography sort of implies that you want to go deep on the subject’s life and experience.

This year’s books made an eclectic list. I don’t make big plans on what my “up next” looks like, but I’ll be curious to look back again this time next year to see how my interests have moved.

As always during trips to Jacksonville, I made a visit to Chamblin Bookmine, my favorite bookstore. I never have enough time to browse, this time had about an hour before I had to be somewhere. So I had to act fast and hit all the sections looking for my target buys.

• Thomas Sowell – A Conflict of Visions
• John Locke – Two Treatises of Government
• Will Durant – The Story of Philosophy
• Milton Friedman – Free to Choose
• F.A. Hayek – The Road to Serfdom
• George Alec Effinger – When Gravity Fails, A Fire in the Sun, The Exile Kiss

A few of these I’ve read (Sowell and Effinger’s Budayeen trilogy), but wanted to add them to the library for future re-reads.

I’ve been an avid user of Goodreads for tracking books for the last ten years. Tom MacWright wrote a post and a script utility last year to export and format items from Goodreads into pages that could work in a Jekyll site, like his and this one. On my profile I track more than just what I’m reading; I also log start and finish dates, ratings, reviews, and more. Getting a feed somewhere on the website would certainly be cool (I have a branch now with this in progress). On my way to getting that working, I took the Goodreads export format and put it in a Google Sheet, then edited a good bit to build out a richer dataset that I can keep adding to over time. I added fields for format, whether a book is part of a series, and a URL to get to book’s listing.

I have some ideas on some simple analyses to do on this data. Once I get the feed publishing my reading log inline with the blog posts, I’ll work on some experiments with visualizations that could be done with this dataset.

I’m on pace this year to read 40 books this year. Here’s a quick snapshot of the list so far, in rough order from beginning to end of year. I’m looking forward to writing up a week’s worth of posts this year on my favorites by genre.

• Homo Deus — Yuval Noah Harari
• The Stone Sky — N.K. Jemisin
• Elements of Eloquence — Mark Forsyth
• Robot Visions — Isaac Asimov
• Scale — Geoffrey West
• Artemis — Andy Weir
• Astrophysics for People in a Hurry — Neil deGrasse Tyson
• The Three-Body Problem — Cixin Liu
• Annihilation — Jeff VanderMeer
• Stranger in a Strange Land — Robert Heinlein
• The Innovator’s Dilemma — Clay Christensen
• Authority — Jeff VanderMeer
• Acceptance — Jeff VanderMeer
• The Name of the Wind — Patrick Rothfuss
• Norse Mythology — Neil Gaiman
• Who — Geoff Smart
• Skin in the Game — Nassim Taleb
• Leonardo da Vinci — Walter Isaacson
• Deep Work — Cal Newport
• Seveneves — Neal Stephenson
• Caldé of the Long Sun — Gene Wolfe
• Factfulness — Hans Rosling
• Jurassic Park — Michael Chrichton
• Enlightenment Now — Steven Pinker
• A Conflict of Visions — Thomas Sowell
• Cosmos — Carl Sagan
• The Hero with a Thousand Faces — Joseph Campbell
• The Order of Time — Carlo Rovelli
• The Elegant Universe — Brian Greene
• Suicide of the West — Jonah Goldberg
• Chaos — James Gleick
• Energy: A Human History — Richard Rhodes

I didn’t realize how many things I’d read this year. Looking back at the list, I enjoyed all of them. Here’s a snapshot of my favorites from 2017.

Political Order and Political Decay — Francis Fukuyama. 2014.

This is Fukuyama’s second volume in his treatise on political systems. Last year I read the excellent first part, Origins of Political Order, which chronicles the first forms of human organized societies and tracks the evolution through to the French Revolution. This part picks up where that left off up to modern governments. I had so many thoughts reading this one, and hundreds of Kindle highlights to revisit. It was deep enough to warrant its own blog post, so I’ll hold off here on diving in further and leave it for a future post. I’ll just say that I think these two volumes should be textbooks in college political science classrooms.

The Fifth Season and The Obelisk Gate — NK Jemisin. 2015, 2016.

The first two parts of the Broken Earth trilogy, this story is the most surprising, original, thought-provoking works of fiction I’ve ever read. Jemisin’s series has been well-reviewed, but I knew nothing about it going in other than its apocalyptic setting.

It’s set in the Stillness, a beyond-inhospitable place where people live in tiny communities banded together to survive the earth’s hostile “fifth seasons”. Due to some undescribed past event, the earth experiences these periodic cataclysmic weather, earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanoes. In the Stillness, there is a minority class of people called Orogenes with a mutant power of “orogeny”, essentially like The Force for manipulating earth, giving them the ability to create (or negate) earthquakes. Their counterparts are the Guardians, mysterious people who exist to control and suppress the Orogenes with their own special abilities to quell orogeny. Within this creative, mysterious world that Jemisin’s built, the reader gets to experience a captivating story unfolding to explain the mystery of what happened to this earth. Along the way is a plethora of commentary on race, class, politics, and survival that’s executed so subtly many readers may never even notice. But the story itself is so engaging I ripped through books 1 and 2 in a week.

In summary I’d say my favorite thing about it is its fantastic weirdness. I found myself thinking about it even when I wasn’t reading it — a bar for me that’s rarely surpassed even with great fiction. I’ve been recommending it to everybody, and continue to do so here. Just read it.

Ready Player One — Ernest Cline. 2011.

As I started reading this one, there was some groan-inducing corniness with the unending references to 80s culture and video games. Once I lightened up though, it was a fun, fast read. When I found out they’re making this into a huge-budget film next year, my first thought was “this’ll make a way better movie than a novel.”

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? — Phillip K. Dick. 1968.

This has been on the reading list for years. I finally got around to reading it before the release of Blade Runner: 2049. It was more enjoyable than I expected, but didn’t explore its themes very deeply. Both Blade Runner films present a more interesting exploration of humanity and consciousness, with their thin lines between humans and replicants.

The Gene: An Intimate History — Siddhartha Mukherjee. 2016.

It’s hard to recall many specifics since this one was early in the year, but I was engrossed in this one for a few weeks. It begins with the early discoveries in genetics by Mendel with his fruit flies and covers the entire history of the science including controversial subjects like eugenics, gene therapy, and other forms of genetic engineering.

The Grid: Infrastructure for a New Era, Gretchen Bakke. 2016.

It took some effort to get through the beginning of this one — a bit politically charged and opinionated when what I was looking for was a more comprehensive background on how the current power grid works. It’s well known that the current systems of power generation and distribution through the electrical grid are insufficient and under threat by many modern, distributed, renewable forms of energy. We’re not there yet with wide enough usage of solar, wind, tidal, and other generation methods. This book outlines how the current grid system works, the political machine behind why it works that way, and what likely needs to change if renewables are to be harnessed efficiently at scale. It was informative with just the right depth of technical background to satisfy what I was interested in.

Alexander Hamilton — Ron Chernow. 2005.

Chernow’s epic was the only biography on my list this year. Hamilton was a fascinating guy. He’s probably tied with Franklin for “most interesting Founding Father”. One of the takeaways I had from this book wasn’t specific to Hamilton but rather the time and political climate in which he lived. When people talk about the post-2000 era political environment as the most divisive, hostile time in our nation’s history (not that it isn’t plenty pointlessly divisive), they’re overlooking the shaky early years of the country’s formation, not to mention the Civil War era. During the year of the Constitutional Convention and the following half decade Hamilton served as the first Treasury Secretary, many of the governance structures we take for granted today were controversial and unproven. Thanks to his Federalist Papers arguing the case for strong central government to hold together the tenuous connections between states, and his advocacy of using (small and reasonable) debt to finance economic growth, the first two decades of the United States were prosperous, even though there was significant political upheaval, which the book chronicles in depth.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind — Yuval Noah Harari. 2011.

Best work of nonfiction I read in 2017. Not in a long time have I done so much highlighting and note taking with a book.

It’s an account of human history and evolution from the Stone Age to today. Harari begins by tracing where along the path of primate development that Homo sapiens diverged from the other species of early humans like Neanderthals. His thesis is that Sapiens came to dominate (and possibly eliminate) all other rival species through a distinguished ability to cooperate in large numbers — hundreds or thousands in cooperation rather than dozens. He argues that humans owe this capability for mass shared interest to our ability to create and “believe in” fictions or myths. Whereas other primates could only cooperate in tight-knit familial or band-level groups, Sapiens developed the capacity for creating shared myths: religions, governments, currencies, and more. I found it absolutely absorbing and am looking forward to rereading it soon.

Leviathan Wakes and Caliban’s War — James S.A. Corey. 2011, 2012.

During the summer I got into this: a fun, fast-paced series called The Expanse. It’s your classic space opera — big in scope, full of plot and action, and enough political intrigue to get interesting without getting so complicated as a “Game of Thrones in space”. It’s got a clever, semi-realistic setting in which people have spread throughout the solar system on the back of improved propulsion technology. But it stops well short of light speed travel and other wild concepts. There’s an interesting political dynamic where groups of people that have spread out beyond Mars to stations in the asteroid belt or distant moons of Jupiter and Saturn (known as “Belters”) have a strained relationship with Mars and Earth, who also have their own issues with one another. Against that backdrop a group of rag tag survivors end up thrown in the crossfire.

The Box — Marc Levinson. 2006.

Like a lot of nonfiction these days, this one was too long, but I did find parts of it interesting. In March I listened to Alexis Madrigal’s fantastic Containers podcast, an audio documentary on global economics and trade through the lens of shipping containerization. The Box is sort of like the history textbook version — an informative but somewhat dry account of how we went from breakbulk shipping everything (meaning longshoremen loading individual items piece by piece into ship’s holds) to modularized, automated shipping using standardized containers. What TCP/IP did for packetizing computer information, containers did for physical “stuff”.

Woken Furies — Richard K. Morgan. 2005.

This is the last part of the Altered Carbon trilogy, which I started last year. I felt this was the weakest of the bunch in terms of storytelling, but found it to have some of the most interesting ideas of the whole series. What I said last year about the first two parts mostly holds true here, but the overall plot felt a bit strained and had too much to accomplish to tie up the loose ends.

My favorite concept was the idea of “DeComs”. The book is set on Harlan’s World, the oft-mentioned home planet of Takeshi Kovacs. He joins up with a band of people who roam an uninhabited continent to find and decommission rogue AI-controlled robots — remnants of a past conflict gone haywire. His crew makes a living trekking out and battling the machines to “DeCom” them for cash. I have so much fun reading each subsequent idea or cyberpunk concept Morgan throws out there. With the new series coming to Netflix soon, I hope I have time to revisit part one beforehand. I really enjoyed that one.

This is part three of a series on Isaac Asimov’s Greater Foundation story collection. This post is about the first installment of the Robot trilogy, The Caves of Steel.

We’re still early in the timeline of Asimov’s epic saga. The short stories in I, Robot set the stage for dozens of future novels that take place in the same universe and along the same timeline. The far-future stories of the famous Foundation series have threads leading all the way back to the “3 Laws” and the Robot series, which starts off the action on Earth. The Caves of Steel is the first Robot entry, introducing the recurring character of Lije Baley. With this one, we set the stage for humanity’s eventual galactic expansion.

While I, Robot and Asimov’s other robot story collections lean toward the cerebral and philosophical, The Caves of Steel is a murder mystery, buddy cop procedural.

The setting is New York City millennia from now, on an inhospitable and mostly ruined Earth where humans are collected in domed megacities. In between the dense urban complexes the landscape is barren and in ruin. The city’s inhabitants never go outside, living 100% of the time within the “caves of steel”. As a result, Baley suffers from debilitating agoraphobia. Just outside of New York is Spacetown, a colony of “spacers” — humans from the 50 or so nearby “spacer worlds” that had been colonized hundreds of years before that return to Earth for trading purposes. Spacers look down on the “earthmen” as dirty, diseased, and lesser people. And while people of Earth have banned robots from their cities, spacers embrace them and promote the spread of human-robot cooperation.

Baley’s set on a mission to investigate the murder of Roj Sarton, a spacer roboticist from the planet Aurora that turns up dead in the outpost of Spacetown. Baley serves as the classic gut-driven detective cop, paired on the case with a humanoid robot partner named R. Daneel Olivaw, the straight-laced logical one of the duo.

The earthmen have a general distrust of robots, fearing that they’ll take their jobs. Most robots are machine-like, purpose-built laborers or assistants, but R. Daneel is humanoid, a spitting image of his creator, whom we later find out is the murdered Dr. Sarton. Baley is initially unaware that Daneel is a robot, but is impressed by his incredible investigative abilities. Through their work together hunting for the culprit, Baley comes around on his opinion of robots, eventually agreeing with the spacers that humans and robots should cooperate to expand to other planets.

The setting is fascinating given the year it was published. The urban sprawl megalopolis has been the host of countless sci-fi works over the last 50 or 60 years. Not to say Asimov invented the concept, but his version must have been in the minds of the creators of Coruscant, The Sprawl, or Los Angeles 2019. To his credit, Asimov does do a decent job with the political elements of spacer vs. earthman, the “medievalist” Luddites vs. the pro-robot camp. The resolution to that conflict is what plants the seed of the Galactic Empire trilogy. Given that he published these in all sorts of mixed up order, it’s impressive how well they hold together as a chronological series¹.

Aside from being a passable mystery tale, Asimov forms something of a parable about the risks of unjustified prejudice and presumption. The medievalist hatred of spacer outsiders has for hundreds of years stifled the advancement of Earth livelihood. Human survival is dependent on moving forward rather than standing still, and the elimination of prejudice from both sides (Earth to Aurora and vice versa) is essential to each’s survival; the Spacers and Earthmen need each other. Without the spacer worlds the Earth is in a tailspin of destruction, and the spacers have created societies too uniform and isolated, with shallow gene pools that need an injection of diversity after shunning outsiders for thousands of years.

I was pleasantly surprised with the quality of storytelling. Asimov puts together a compelling “whodunit” that had me hooked until the final act when the crime’s details are uncovered.

A couple years ago I bought a Kindle Paperwhite, after moving almost exclusively to ebooks when the Kindle iPhone app launched with the App Store. I read constantly, and always digital books, so I thought I’d write up some thoughts on the Kindle versus its app-based counterparts like the Kindle apps, iBooks, and Google Books, all of which I’ve read a significant amount with. For I long time I resisted the Kindle hardware because I wasn’t interested in a reflective-only reading surface. The Paperwhite’s backlit screen and low cost made it easy for me to justify buying. I knew I’d use the heck out of it if I got one.

I had a brief stint with iBooks when Apple launched that back in 2010. At the time, the Kindle apps for iOS platforms were seriously lacking in handling the finer details of the reading experience. You couldn’t modify margins or typeset layout, iBooks had better font selection, highlighting and notetaking worked inconsistently, and the brightness controls were poor. But eventually the larger selection available on Kindle and Amazon’s continued feature development in their app brought me back.

Buying the Paperwhite was a great investment. The top reasons are it’s portability, backlit screen, and the battery life.

When I say “portability”, it’s not about comparison to the iPhone (obviously the ultimate in portable, always-with-you reading), but with physical books. Prior to the Kindle, I’d do probably 1/3 of my reading on paper, and that’s now dropped almost to zero¹. Even with the leather case I use, it’s so lightweight I can carry it everywhere, and I don’t need to bring paper books with me on trips or airplanes anymore. It’s light enough to be unnoticeable in a backpack, and even small enough to fit in some jacket pockets.

The backlit screen is great and gives the advantage of eInk combined with the ability to use in darkness. The best thing about that screen is the fidelity of brightness control you can get versus an iOS device. In full darkness you can tune down the backlight to nearly zero, still read in the dark and not disturb anyone else. With my iPad, even at the minimum brightness setting it can light up the room if it’s really dark.

The battery life on eInk devices is unbelievable. In two years I’ve probably charged the Kindle a dozen times total. When it’s in standby mode it uses effectively zero power, and even in use (if the backlight’s not turned up) the drain is minimal. I almost forget that it’s electronic at all. In a world where everything seems to need charging, it’s great to have some technology that doesn’t.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the beauty of accessing the massive library of books directly from the device. With a few taps I can have a new book purchased and downloaded, reading it in seconds. Using the iOS version for so long, I’ve missed out on this. Thanks to the Apple IAP policies and Amazon (justifiably) not wanting to share revenue with Apple for book sales, the app is only a reader; there’s no integrated buying experience. I just dealt with this by going out and buying titles through a browser session, but I didn’t realize the smoothness I was missing out on until I had it integrated with the Kindle.

Amazon’s long been an acquirer of other companies, but doesn’t have a great track record of integrations. They bought Audible and Goodreads long ago (2008 and 2013 respectively), both of which I’ve used for years. Only recently have they integrated any of that into the Kindle experience. On their iOS apps they launched a “narration” feature that’ll play back the audio in sync with the pages if you own audio and text versions (a little goofy, but at least they’re integrated). There aren’t many titles I own both audio and text versions of, but the ability to sync progress between the two formats is really nice. On the Goodreads front, the integration there on the Kindle is fantastic. I have access to my “want to read” list right on the home screen for quick access.

With so many devices and quirky pieces of technology, it’s nice to have something reliable and simple that does one job consistently well.

As I started The Gene, I was assuming it’d be framed as a history of genetics. There’s a significant amount of history on the discoveries made the last few centuries as scientists gained an understanding of how hereditary traits are encoded and transmitted. But my favorite parts of the narrative are when Mukherjee seeks to look at the gene as the fundamental building block, making comparisons to bits and atoms.

It reminded me of another book I’d like to revisit: James Gleick’s The Information. That book is to bits what The Gene was to genetics. Claude Shannon’s information theory shares so many parallels with genetics: both required technology to see nanoscopic things, rested on huge amounts of prior knowledge in physics, chemistry, and mathematics, and involved breaking down building blocks into ever more tiny requisite parts. Nearly all of our understanding of each of these sciences was gained since about 1950. We’re only just figuring out the fundamentals of both, and the potential for engineering them to our whims — through advancements in computing and AI on one end and gene splicing and gene therapy on the other. Genes are biological information. So I wonder what the next few decades will look like as the two disciplines start to converge.

I’m currently reading Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Gene, a history of the building block of living things. A great read, the right mix of history and discussion of future possibilities like gene manipulation, splicing, and cloning (good or bad).

This bit struck me about the construction of anything, not just living organisms. It’s not the parts, but the relationship between parts that gives a structure its function:

A boat is not made of planks, it’s the relationship between planks. If you hammer a hundred strips on top of each other you get a wall, side to side you get a deck. Only a particular configuration, relationship, and order makes a boat.

Humans and worms have the about the same number of genes (about 20,000), and yet only one of these organisms is capable of painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. This suggests that the number of genes is largely unimportant to the physiological complexity of the organism.

Think about this with genes, bits, or atoms. It’s the same with all building blocks — the right pieces are nothing without the right relationships.

I haven’t done a book roundup in a couple of years. This year was more fiction than non-fiction, and my near-term list will probably continue that trend.

Annals of the Former World, John McPhee. 1998.

Top of the list for sure was this epic work from John McPhee. I wrote about this one in detail earlier this year. It’s a natural history of North America, told in 4 parts as McPhee travels with renowned geologists across the continent along I-80. Each part features a distinct aspect of geology — the Nevada basin and range, plate tectonics, glaciation and the Ice Age, Rocky Mountain uplifts, erosion in Appalachia, and the volcanism of Yellowstone. It’s an awesome example of narrative non-fiction to explore esoteric subject matter like geology. Couldn’t recommend it highly enough.

Altered Carbon and Broken Angels, Richard K. Morgan. 2002, 2003.

Westworld captured the zeitgeist of TV over the fall of last year. Its timing is just right to capitalize on the paranoia and unknown of what is now no longer science fiction: the development of artificial intelligence we now encounter in everyday life. While Morgan’s Altered Carbon isn’t really about AI specifically (though AIs feature heavily as characters), there are concepts he was writing about in Carbon that fit right in with much of the science as presented in Westworld.

Morgan wrote a trilogy featuring his antihero protagonist Takeshi Kovacs, a super-trained mercenary soldier in a 25th century future. A foundational concept of this universe is that humans have developed the ability to digitize human consciousness. With mind decoupled from body, people have their consciousness stored in “cortical stacks” installed at the base of their brain, meaning they can transfer between bodies, a process known as “resleeving”.

I’ve read the first two parts of the trilogy so far. Altered Carbon is a hard-boiled detective novel with Kovacs on Earth to help solve the murder of a billionaire “meth” (a “methuselah” is someone rich enough to live forever, endlessly resleeved). Broken Angels is a war novel with Kovacs caught in the midst of a war between a mercenary army and rebel extremists, all the while attempting a heist of an alien spacecraft. I loved both of these books and am already reading part 3. As a fan of William Gibson’s work, I could feel the influence of Neuromancer in style and substance in Morgan’s writing. The novels are chock full of originality and, like all great sci-fi, full of cool technology and political intrigue.

The Pine Barrens, John McPhee. 1978.

Another one from McPhee, this one a shorter work about the New Jersey Pine Barrens — a classic example of what makes his writing so compelling. He’s the only non-fiction writer I’ve ever read who could take such a seemingly-bland geography and its inhabitants and create a book that I couldn’t put down. He strikes just the right balance of building characters out of his subjects, describing the uniqueness of the geography, and conveying the importance of the people and places.

Elon Musk: Inventing the Future, Ashlee Vance. 2012.

I don’t read many outright biographies because I think they tend to be too long and focus on too many aspects of the subject I don’t care about. There’s a tendency to put too much emphasis on microscopic events in youth as extremely formative of future goals, decisions, and career moves. This one on super-magnate Elon Musk did a good job spending the majority of the time on Musk’s professional career and steps to where he is now: CEO or otherwise chief influencer of a half dozen companies and initiatives. As a creator of things, I like learning about the step-by-step processes people (or companies) take to reach goals in the face of detractors. In Musk’s case, no one else sets goals and chews away at them like him. “We need to get to Mars to save humanity” is about as Big as it gets when it comes to goal setting.

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, Brad Stone. 2013.

Amazon is my favorite company to follow in the tech space these days. Apple and Google do big, cool stuff, but they can’t touch Amazon in disrupting and transforming Old World “physical” industries. From shipping, warehousing, and logistics to datacenter management and (now) artificial intelligence, they’re an awesome example of how taking the long view on a business strategy can win you the market, if you can weather the storms along the way. Somehow Jeff Bezos has been able to woo shareholders into letting him bet big on what seem like insane new ventures with all of Amazon’s earnings each year. It’s part biography and part corporate history, well-researched and thorough in telling the whole story from start to finish.

Stories of Your Life and Others, Ted Chiang. 2002

This collection is 8 diverse works from Ted Chiang, science fiction author and short story specialist. My favorite thing about this collection (I’ve never read any of his work before this) is how wildly different each piece is, and how original they are. Of the 8 pieces, each one of them is one-of-a-kind. Sci-fi tends to be derivative of itself and accretive. It’s rare that I read a sci-fi work where I don’t say “Oh, this is sort of like insert novel here”. First is “Tower of Babylon”, a literalized retelling of the Tower of Babel myth. The fascinating “Seventy-Two Letters” tells of two scientists who discover true names for creating human life. Then there’s “Story of Your Life”, a personal narrative of a linguist telling her daughter’s life story, after her perception of time is changed when she learns an alien language¹. That last one’s a tear-jerker.

If you’re looking for something off the beaten path of sci-fi and thought-provoking, check this one out.

Reamde, Neal Stephenson. 2011.

I’ve read a few of Stephenson’s other works, which are always good for an outlandish, mind-bending story. This one fits into the more traditional “technothriller” class, his take on Tom Clancy. Even though it’s a traditionally plotting thriller, he packs it dense with the trademark Stephenson flair. Who else could mix an MMORPG video game, Chinese hackers, Russian mafia, and Islamic terrorists into a single intertwining story?

Countdown to Zero Day, Kim Zetter. 2014.

This is an excellent account of Stuxnet, the computer worm built to sabotage the Iranian nuclear program. The whole story is a terrifying look at the dark side of technology when connected systems are exploited. Not only is it possible to compromise sensitive information at scale, attackers can now effect changes in the physical world by exploiting flaws in industrial control systems. The “Internet of Things” certainly presents an exciting future where any object can be connected to the web, but Stuxnet demonstrates what happens when those connections are twisted with malicious intent.

The Exile Kiss, George Alec Effinger. 1991.

A few years back I read parts 1 and 2 of this series, and Exile wraps it up. In the same vein as Altered Carbon or Neuromancer, this series follows Marîd Audran, a hustler and enforcer in an organized crime syndicate. Effinger’s world shows a future where the Middle East is the world’s economic powerhouse, with the West in decline. Audran is framed for the murder of a police officer and stranded with his crime boss in the open desert of the Empty Quarter, and recruit the assistance of a Bedouin tribe to return and exact revenge. A fantastically original work of “cyberpunk” fiction. Read the whole series.

The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution, Francis Fukuyama. 2011.

Out of character for me, this was the only history book I read all year, but it was a great one. Fukuyama traces human institutions and social structures from the prehistoric all the way through to modernity, along the way analyzing the aspects that made societies form the way that they did. It’s fascinating to see the influence of geography, religion, biology, and cultural development on how government institutions developed over time. I found the time he spends discussing state structures in China and rule of law in India to be the most interesting bits of this book, since those subjects are largely invisible in civics education in the West. How someone can research and write something so extensive, I have no idea. There’s a second part called Political Order and Political Decay that I’m interested in reading this year.

I majored in geography in college and always liked earth sciences. I dabbled a bit with classes that were related, but not core to geography study — your basic geology courses and a class in geodesy. One of the classes I took called “Geology of the National Parks” had an applied approach to explaining the foundations of geology. Something about hopping from Katmai to Yosemite to the Everglades made me see geology as more than rocks and minerals. I loved the massive scope and scale of the Earth’s 4.5 billion years. Normally anything with a magnitude starting with a B or T is intangible (distances in deep space) or minuscule (numbers of molecules in a human body). But when talking about rocks, rivers, continents, strata, sediments — these things are very tangible and static, at least in passive observation. A year is a long time at the human scale, but a blink on the geologic. When comparing human and geologic timelines, it takes a while for this to sink in.

I’ve never read anything on the subject of geology. I previously enjoyed John McPhee’s The Control of Nature, and had Annals of the Former World on my reading list after browsing some of his other work. It’s a tome, but I decided to download it on my Kindle and give it a shot.

The book is a Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of 4 books independently researched, written, and published over the course of 20 years starting in the late 1970s. It’s an incredible piece of nonfiction writing, with just the right balance of well-researched science, facts and figures, storytelling, and narrative¹. The author tells a geologic history of the North American continent by way of the I-80 corridor across the lower 48 from New York to San Francisco, studying roadcuts and outcrops along the way. Each piece paints a picture of a slice of geologic science, with an emphasis on different landforms and processes. McPhee does an excellent job exposing the deep vocabulary of the geologist without being overwhelmingly technical. He’s traveling with (and quoting) scientists, and the book pushes 700 pages, so there’s no need for brevity.

In each section he splices together a healthy dose of history with scientific explanations of geologic processes. Each part contains a historical timeline of notable events, discoveries, or personalities that made breakthroughs in the science. Some of my favorite bits included foundations of what we know about Earth’s dynamism today, and the battles fought to get there in the scientific discoveries of the 18th and 19th centuries.

By the end of the book I was just beginning to get comfortable with the order and structure of the geologic time scale. The terms are so numerous that it takes repition to remember which came first, which age is within which epoch, and so on. Precambrian, Eocene, Devonian, Permian, Pennsylvanian, Proterozoic, Hadean, Ordovician — I had to have the trusty time scale at hand for constant reference.

Basin and Range starts things off with a study of the geologic province of the same name, mostly coinciding in the US with the state of Nevada. The expanse lies between the Great Salt Lake and the Sierra Nevada, with rolling folds of hills and valleys.

This section lays the foundation for modern geology by covering the work of two pillar figures: James Hutton and Charles Lyell. Hutton was a Scot that studied in the 18th century, and is known as the “father of modern geology”. As uncontroversial as rocks sound, it’s telling to keep in mind the context in which Hutton was publishing his work:

“Hutton published his Theory of the Earth in 1795, when almost no one doubted the historical authenticity of Noah’s Flood, and all species on earth were thought to have been created individually, each looking at the moment of its creation almost exactly as it did in modern times.”

Making claims that the Earth was billions of years old was as blasphemous to the scientific community of the era as Darwin’s work on evolution. Hutton’s theories of uniformitarianism didn’t stick in 1795. It wasn’t until years later that Lyell took Hutton’s original theories and popularized them in the 1800s with his own Principles of Geology. And Darwin, by the way, was heavily influenced by the work of both geologists:

“Voyaging on the Beagle, he was enhancing his sense of the slow and repetitive cycles of the earth and the giddying depths of time, with Lyell’s book in his hand and Hutton’s theory in his head. In six thousand years, you could never grow wings on a reptile. With sixty million, however, you could have feathers, too.”

In each of the book’s parts, McPhee is traveling with a different geologist in the field. In Basin and Range he’s following Ken Deffeyes, a specialist in the topography, mineral deposits, and stratigraphy of the region, on a mission to locate its abandoned silver mines and hunt unextracted ore using techniques not available during the 19th century mining boom. Most metal deposits have hydrothermal origins. Superheated water from deep underground melts and collects trace metals, makes its way upward through fissures in the rock, and precipitates them out in seams near the surface. As McPhee writes, “a vein of ore is the filling of a fissure. A map of former hot springs is remarkably close to a map of metal discoveries.” I’d love to check out some mining data and compare with geologic maps.

With the primitive theories of deep time and continental movement established in part one, part two, In Suspect Terrain, takes us to the Appalachians in the east. This part focuses mostly on the mountain-building, volcanism, and erosion that created the “suspect terrain” of Appalachia. From geologist Anita Harris we begin to understand the processes and results of glaciation, the most ruthless of Earth’s erosive forces. When the Wisconsinan ice sheet covered the continental US all the way south to Kentucky, it left scars and remnants scattered all over the country from Indiana to New York and up into Canada. The ice pulverized rock from the Adirondacks into gravel and powder and eventually carried it toward the Atlantic, depositing it as Long Island, which is made almost entirely of glacial deposits. The spine of the island is the ice sheet’s terminal moraine, and from there to the south shore is the outwash plain. It’s amazing how much of the country north of Tennessee is covered with topography resulting from the Ice Age glacial sheets. The pockmark lakes covering Ontario, Quebec, Minnesota, and Wisconsin are the “kame and kettle” landscape created by the grinding ice. An interesting statistic: Canada’s ponds, lakes, and streams hold a sixth of all fresh water on Earth.

McPhee peppers his writing with great little anecdotes that make the abstract scientific bits more real. For example: the millions of pool tables and chalkboards made from the slate of Pennsylvania’s Martinsburg formation metamorphosed from shale which was once silty mud on the bottom of the Ordovician ocean, 440 million years ago. I’ll definitely think of this every time I play pool from now on.

In Suspect Terrain introduces the final formation of plate tectonic theory in the 1960s. Nuclear proliferation in the 1950s had governments investing in seismic monitoring stations all over the world to feel for blast shocks. As a side effect, geologists detected and recorded earthquakes on a global scale, over the course of several years. Tossing those records on a map gives you a clear picture of the eggshell-like plates of crust, with thousands of vibrations marking the slip and slide of the plates against one another.

Part three, Rising from the Plains, takes us to the Rocky Mountains in the company of Wyoming native David Love. This part contains probably the least science, and instead substitutes some excellent tales of Love’s upbringing on his family’s isolated ranch in central Wyoming. In the early 20th century Wyoming was still very much the frontier, sparsely populated with little industry until the coal and uranium mining businesses boomed in the middle of the century. I love the title’s double meaning — Love and the Rockies formations he studied both spring from the eastern Wyoming flatness. The stories of his family roots hammer home how inhospitable and disconnected the West still was at the time.

This chapter dives into the region’s volcanic origins. With Yellowstone Park, it’s one of the most visible examples of hotspot geology in the world. Mountain building is covered in depth here, also, giving some context to how the Rockies built up, and how erosion has broken them and created the sedimentary structures of the outwash plain. The limestone layers in the high Rockies leave record of the Paleozoic ocean that once covered that part of the continent, and lifted only during the last 80 million years, which as McPhee points out is only “the last three percent of time”. Tidbits like this drill home just how deep deep time is. This bit about the Grand Canyon seems almost impossible:

The Colorado River, which has only recently appeared on earth, has excavated the Grand Canyon in very little time. From its beginning, human beings could have watched the Grand Canyon being made.

The origins and primary mission of the US Geological Survey are also covered in Rising from the Plains. The USGS mapped the expanses of territory acquired during the first half of the 19th century to catalog the nation’s resources, and as a result produced some of the original map data still in use through various public sources today².

The final installment aims to explain the origins of California and the Pacific coast, aptly titled Assembling California. The first point covered is the concept of “exotic terranes”, landmasses that move across oceans and suture themselves onto other continental bodies through subduction faulting. The Sierra Nevada formed this way, a Japan-like archipelago riding the Pacific plate across the ocean and colliding with the Nevada shorelines in the Jurassic. With great effect once again, McPhee explains how terranes come together:

Ocean floors with an aggregate area many times the size of the present Pacific were made at spreading centers, moved around the curve of the earth, and melted in trenches before there ever was so much as a kilogram of California. Then, a piece at a time—according to present theory—parts began to assemble. An island arc here, a piece of a continent there—a Japan at a time, a New Zealand, a Madagascar—came crunching in upon the continent and have thus far adhered.

Faults are fractures in the crust formed around plate boundaries, and covered in depth in this chapter. California’s San Andreas fault complex is a strike-slip transform fault, and one of the most well known to Americans. His story of California begins at Mussel Rock on the San Francisco peninsula, right where the San Andreas enters the Pacific.

The Smartville Block formation that makes up the bulk of California formed on the ocean floor — an ophiolite. There are other similar “ophiolitic” formations on the Earth, so the book includes travels to Cyprus, another ophiolitic complex similar to what prehistoric California may have looked like. Since geologists study how things were, traveling to far flung places with similar structures can transport them to the past. I got a healthy lesson in prehistoric geography from this book. I bookmarked several pages with map renderings of Gondwanaland, Laurasia, and the Tethys Ocean to get my bearings.

Natural history is a subject I don’t read enough of. This book is an incredible piece of writing in general, regardless of format or genre. Like all of McPhee’s articles, essays, and other books I’ve read, this one is right up there with the best nonfiction. If you enjoy long form writing, I highly recommend Annals of the Former World for those interested in science.

I’m a baseball fan from way back, and grew up as a Braves fan during the early years of their 1990s NL East dominance. As much as I always enjoyed following the sport as a casual fan, I’d never studied the game much, nor its history beyond the bits that are conventional knowledge to anyone with an interest in the sport (the seminal records, player achievements, and legends of the game). I’ve been on a kick lately of reading about sports I enjoy—baseball and soccer—and have picked up a few books on the subjects to find out what I’ve been missing.

I just finished reading George Will’s Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball, his 1989 book that dives deep on the strategy of the game. He sits down with 4 separate professional baseball men to analyze the sport and its component parts: managing with Tony La Russa, hitting with Tony Gwynn, fielding with Cal Ripken, Jr., and pitching with Orel Hershiser. One of the first things that attracted me to this as a re-primer to a newfound interest in baseball is that it’s not new. This book is over 20 years old, so most of the players mentioned in the text are ones I grew up watching.

The book offers a deep analysis of the tactics of baseball games. Rather than write about the specifics as an armchair expert, the author leaves most of the opinion about the elements of the game to the actual practitioners. He poses the question and lets La Russa’s 2,700 wins or Gwynn’s 3,000 hits do the talking. Will does pepper in some of his own opinions on things like the practicality of the designated hitter rule (he thinks pitchers hitting in the NL is a waste of time), and that Walter Johnson is hands-down the best pitcher to have played the game (a bold position, but not a surprising one). But it’s by no means a book of opinion on the game.

He spends a lot of the book’s introduction emphasizing the differences between baseball and other sports. No one would deny that baseball is extremely different than the other Big Three US sports, all of which are “get object to the other side to score” games. All of those sports have depths of complexity in and of themselves, but the important differentiation isn’t about which sport is “harder” or innately “better”. He points out that baseball is the only sport where the defense initiates every play—pitcher throwing to batter. This shows that no matter how dominant or overpowering a particular hitter is, he only gets 1 of every 9 team at-bats. One offensive player simply can’t dominate the entire game on behalf of his team if the other eight are consistently striking out. In football or basketball, the ball can be dished to the same runningback or power forward each play, if he’s dominating. The only player on the baseball field that can dominate is the pitcher, a part of the defense. I love these dynamics of baseball games, with each pitch functioning as a set piece with strategies set up for each hitter, count, baserunner position, batter tendency, and stadium configuration. A typical baseball game consists of 300 pitches or more, so the intricate interlock of the game’s components is incredibly complex when trying to compete at the big league level, for 162 games a season.

The theme throughout the book, touched on by each of the professionals, is that baseball is, fundamentally, a game of attrition. There are more opportunities to fail and go into a slump than there are to succeed, even for the cream of the crop. Even the winningest managers in the modern era (La Russa, Bobby Cox, Joe Torre) racked up 2,000 losses in their careers. At the end of the day, baseball is a game of failure, and excelling at the game is an exercise in minimizing failure as much as it is about success. There’s an excellent anecdote at the start of the book from Warren Spahn, the Braves’ left-handed legend, speaking at a dinner at the US Capitol with a host of congressmen:

Spahn was one of a group of former All-Stars who were in Washington to play in an old-timers’ game. Spahn said: “Mr. Speaker, baseball is a game of failure. Even the best batters fail about 65 percent of the time. The two Hall of Fame pitchers here today (Spahn, 363 wins, 245 losses; Bob Gibson, 251 wins, 174 losses) lost more games than a team plays in a full season. I just hope you fellows in Congress have more success than baseball players have.

The pros that get on top are the ones that overcome the ridiculous rate of failure to edge out the competition.

Much is said in the game about “luck” as an immovable fixture of the sport. You can’t watch a broadcast or listen to a manager’s press conference without them talking about luck or misfortune. Analysts in the last 10 to 15 years have created an entire science out of developing statistics that remove luck from the equation when measuring a pitcher, fielder, or hitter’s effectiveness on the field. Part of the reason luck becomes an interesting “metric” when analyzing the sport is the sheer number of individual events in a baseball season—pitches, hits, strikeouts, runs, stolen bases, the list goes on and on. A season is 2430 games, not including the playoffs, so there’s an enormous amount of data streaming out continuously, ripe for analysis.

“Luck is the residue of design.” -Branch Rickey

Because of this, baseball is a game of numbers and averages (with a “steadily thickening sediment of statistics”, in Will’s words). Lots of current baseball writing and analysis is overrun by esoteric sabermetricians hyperanalyzing the game in such ridiculous detail that casual fans wouldn’t even understand the meaning of the numbers. Look at stats like wins above replacement (WAR), batting average on balls in play (BABIP), or ultimate zone rating (UZR) and try to understand their meanings without detailed study. With Men at Work, I liked that Will’s approach was closer to the surface in reflecting on the practical aspects of the game, rather than the in-the-weeds examination of player performance and team contribution that’s become commonplace in the post-Moneyball era. There’s certainly no shortage of statistics or an appreciation of their importance to the sport, but they take a backseat to the observable strategies and decision-making processes of a La Russa or Hershiser. My favorite part about baseball statistics has always been looking at historical trends in player output, and many of the old school numbers work just fine for seeing individual and team performance.

I highly recommend Men at Work to anyone interested in baseball, and particularly more avid fans of the sport. This book deepened my appreciation of the game, and now makes me think differently about strategies unfolding on the field.

This is part two of a series on Isaac Asimov’s Greater Foundation story collection. This part is about the short story collection, I, Robot.

Picking up with the next entry in the Asimov read-through, I read a book I last picked up in college, I, Robot. This is the book that cemented his reputation in science fiction. His works on robots are probably his most well-known. He was an early thinker in the space (he even coined the term “robotics”), and wrote extensively on the subject of artificial intelligence. After reading this again, it’s incredible how much influence a 60 year old collection of pulpy science fiction thought experiments ended up having on the sci-fi genre, and arguably on real-world engineering technical development itself.

I, Robot isn’t a novel, but a collection of 9 short stories, each of which were published independently in several science fiction publications throughout the 1950s. The parts are stitched together within a framing story of Dr. Susan Calvin, the “robopsychologist” that makes appearances in several of Asimov’s robot stories, recounting her experiences with robot behavior working for US Robots and Mechanical Men, from the time of the earliest models to extremely advanced humanoid versions. Fundamentally, I, Robot is a philosophical study of Asimov’s famous Three Laws of Robotics, laws that dictate the allowable behavior of robots and which form the basis of much of his exploratory thinking on the nature of intelligence:

• A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
• A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
• A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

This simple set of rules form the basis for the stories of I, Robot. The groundwork of the Three Laws lets Asimov ruminate on logical, ethical thought process, and what differentiates the human from the artificial.

Each story is an analysis of an aspect of robotic technical development. As the stories progress and the technology advances, each plot line underscores elements of human thought taken for granted in their complexity and nuance. In order to poke and prod at the Three Laws, moral and psychological situations are presented to investigate how robots might respond to input, and by extension, how minor variations in inputs could dramatically change response. Asimov’s robots are equipped with “positronic brains“—three-pronged logic processors that weigh every decision against the Three Laws. Upon initial interpretation within the framework of the Laws, each plot’s situation appears to result in a conundrum or violation of the rule set. Asimov’s mystery storytelling then kicks in and invites the reader to deconstruct and solve the puzzle.

My favorite of the stories center around US Robots’ field engineers, Mike Powell and Greg Donovan. They appear in four of the nine stories, and serve as the corporate guinea pigs responsible for putting new robot models through their paces in a variety of settings, from remote space stations to inhospitable planets to asteroids. I loved how the technology always seems to get the better of them, only to have them figure clever solutions by twisting the Three Laws to their advantage. In “Reason”, Powell and Donovan are stuck on a space station with a robot named QT-1 (Cutie), a model with highly developed reasoning abilities. Cutie refuses to obey any of their commands because it reasons that a power exists higher than humans, which it calls “The Master”. They eventually discover that the Master is actually the station’s power source, which Cutie determines is of a higher authority than the stations human operators, as none of them could exist without it. It’s a 2001-esque series of events, though Cutie isn’t quite as insidous as HAL.

“Evidence” introduces the character of Stephen Byerley, a man suspected of being a highly-developed humanoid robot. Dr. Calvin attempts to use psychological analysis to determine if he is man or machine when physical means are exhausted, realizing that if he were truly a robot, he would be forced by programming to obey the Three Laws. But the investigation takes a turn when she realizes that his conformance with the Three Laws may “simply make him a good man”, since the Laws were engineered to model human morals.

In the final story, “The Evitable Conflict”, Asimov even hints at what our modern AIs will look like, with positronic brains embedded in even non-humanoid machines, a 1950s vision of Siri or Watson. These computers of the future are critical in managing the world’s economy, mass-production, and coordination. The computers begin experiencing minor glitches in decision-making that seem to be minor violations of the First Law. But it turns out that the computers have effectively invented a “Zeroth Law” by reinterpreting the First: A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm—making minor exceptions to the First Law to save humanity from themselves. Between Calvin and Byerley, there’s a sense of despair as humanity has given its future over to the machines. Would we be okay dispensing with free will in order to avoid war and conflict? It punctuates the final evolutionary path of robotic development, and provides a nice segue into the Robot novels in the future chronology of his universe.

“Think, that for all time, all conflicts are finally evitable. Only the Machines, from now on, are inevitable!”

I’m interested to see where the path leads as I continue to read more of his work, and to find out how these robot stories interconnect with his wider universe. Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It’s clever, thought-provoking, humorous, and will make you realize how many of our favorite works of science fiction in writing and film owe a tremendous debt to this book.

2013 was busy in so many ways. Our product matured beyond the level I’d hoped it could, we’ve done some incredible mapping work around the world, and I’m just getting started with my involvement in an awesome local hackerspace scene. Even with all that going on, I still managed to read a fair number of great books this year.

A few thoughts on some of the favorites:

Neuromancer, William Gibson. 1984.

I first read this one back in 2010, but after recently finishing up the Sprawl series with Mona Lisa Overdrive, I had to revisit it. The first time around, I found it difficult to follow and get engaged, but the second reading cemented it as one of my all-time favorites of any fiction. This is one of the seeds that sprouted the cyberpunk scene, a genre which might as well have been invented for me. The setting and culture of the book is completely fascinating, and Gibson’s prose drags you through its cities, space stations, and cyberspaces at pace, but with enough expression that you can taste the Sprawl’s grime and visualize the grandeur of Freeside, the massive spindle-like space station. Gibson’s writing oozes with style; he can turn a drug addict on a computer terminal (er, “console cowboy”) hacking a corporate network into an action anti-hero. I highly recommend this book to anyone.

When Gravity Fails, George Alec Effinger. 1987.

In this one, Effinger reverses the traditions of futuristic settings, with the West in decline and the Levant as the world’s economic core. It’s the first of a three-part series featuring Marîd Audran, a hustler from the Maghreb who lives in the fictional Arab ghetto of the Budayeen. In the slums and backalleys of the Budayeen, blackmarket clinics offer its brain-wired citizens installation of cybernetic add-ons and full personality replacement mods. Audran is an unmodified traditionalist (and drug addict), but quickly finds himself in the debt of Friedlander Bey, the Budayeen’s resident paternal crimeboss. The story follows Audran as he must himself get “wired” in order to track down a serial killer committing a string of inexplicable murders. Loved this unconventional work of cyberpunk, and looking forward to getting to the next two parts in 2014.

Consider the Lobster, David Foster Wallace. 2005.

I’ve had DFW on my reading list for years, but this first book of his I picked up is actually a collection of essays rather than fiction. Many of the pieces in the collection are works of journalism, with Wallace covering events or reviewing books. Reading a writer of his caliber covering something like the Maine Lobster Festival, or following the 2000 McCain campaign is rare, and his outsider’s point of view is refreshing.

The Revenge of Geography, Robert Kaplan. 2012.

I had been on the lookout for some time for a book about modern geopolitics, and this one was excellent. Kaplan begins by setting the historical context with the ideas of early geopolitical theorists. The central ideas of “sea-centric” vs. “land-centric” power are explained — the Rimland vs. the Heartland — and how significant historical events revolved around these two central strategies of geographic positioning. Kaplan then goes on to analyze the regions of the modern world, their connections with one another, and conjectures interesting possible outcomes, all through the lens of geography.

The End of Eternity, Isaac Asimov. 1955.

This one really surprised me, one of my favorite works of sci-fi. I wrote a post a couple months ago with my thoughts on this book, but suffice it to say that it’s my favorite piece of time travel fiction. And if you’ve watched Fringe, you’ll see the deep influence of this novel about 20 pages in.

The One World Schoolhouse, Salman Khan. 2012.

Our public education system is deeply flawed. In this book, Sal Khan analyzes the fundamental problems and posits a potential way forward. He’s the founder of the Khan Academy, one of the largest players in the world of MOOCs, striving to build an approach and set of tools to bring the same level of education worldwide with minimal access, and to wean ourselves off of the old world, hyper-structured Prussian education system we’ve been following for over a century. I have a deep personal interest in our education system, particularly the almost total lack of representation of my field as a foundational layer in primary and secondary schools.

Shadow of the Torturer & Claw of the Conciliator, Gene Wolfe. 1980.

I’ll round it out with the first two parts of Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun tetralogy. The series is set on a distant future Earth, and follows Severian, a torturer of the “Seekers for Truth and Penitence” (the guild of torturers) responsible for holding and extracting information from political prisoners. The depth of these novels is unmatched, and they’re quite difficult to follow at first. Severian tells the story in the first person, is sometimes an unreliable narrator, and from his point of view many places and things that cross his path he misidentifies or misunderstands, having never left the torturers guild until his exile. Wolfe uses language that is arcane or dead, many of the words derived from Greek or Latin (a few examples: fuligin, autarch, archon, aquastor, optimate), which will send you to the dictionary frequently. Becauses of the complexity of the story and writing, this was my second attempt to read these two books. If you make it through the first quarter, you’ll be handsomely rewarded with one of the most fascinating, deep, and original fantasy stories ever written.

This is part one of a series of essays on Isaac Asimov’s famous Greater Foundation story collection. In this first one I discuss the time travel mystery The End of Eternity.

The prolific science fiction writer Isaac Asimov published an astonishing body of work in his life. Though he’s probably most well-known for his stories, collections, and postulations about robots (and, therefore, artificial intelligence), he wrote a baffling amount speculating on much bigger ideas like politics, religion, and philosophy. The Robot series is one angle on a bigger picture. Within the same loosely-connected universe sit two other series, those of the Empire and Foundation collections. Altogether, these span 14 full novels, with a sprinkling of several other short story collections in between.

In deciding to read all the works in the collection, I first had to choose where to begin. Is the best experience had by reading in the order he wrote them? Or to read them in story chronological order? Trying to figure this out, I naturally ran across the sci-fi message board discussions arguing the two sides, with compelling arguments both ways. I wasn’t sure which had more merit until I read that Asimov himself suggests a chronological approach, rather than in the order of their writing, to lend maximum immersion into the galactic saga. Taking a tip from another reader, I also decided to go a step further and begin with one outside of the main series, but seen by many as a precursor to the other storylines — the 1955 time travel story The End of Eternity.

The novel is primarily a mystery-slash-thriller, set in a distant future. The story follows the experiences of Andrew Harlan, a man extracted from Reality and into “Eternity”, a place that exists outside of time where humans called “Eternals” have taken it upon themselves to police the timeline of human existence, altering Reality where necessary to minimize human suffering, and control the flow of history. Eternals are people recruited from various times throughout history for particular desired skills, from the 27th century, all the way up to the 30,000th and beyond. Within Eternity is something of a class hierarchy, with Eternals dividing up the duties: Sociologists use statistics to plot the lives of individuals, Computers calculate the long-term effects of Reality Changes, and Technicians pinpoint the exact moments in time at which to intiate the Reality Change. By traveling time and entering at an exact pre-calculated point, Technicians strive to introduce the “minimum necessary change” to induce a “maximum desired response”. In other words, the smallest modification to Reality possible to create the most positive outcome:

“…He had tampered with a mechanism during a quick few minutes taken out of the 223rd and, as a result, a young man did not reach a lecture on mechanics he had meant to attend. He never went in for solar engineering, consequently, and a perfectly simple device was delayed in its development a crucial ten years. A war in the 224th, amazingly enough, was moved out of Reality as a result.”

Harlan is one of the Technicians, who actually triggers these butterfly effect Reality Changes. Unlike most of the Eternals, he has a fascination with the “primitive centuries”, those of the era before the discovery of time travel in the 24th. He collects artifacts from the 20th and 21st centuries — magazines, books, and other relics of the past to understand what made people tick in the time before Eternity. So Harlan and the other Eternals go about this business, traversing time “upwhen” and “downwhen” along their temporal transit system, shaping history like plastic.

This story contains one of my favorite takes on time travel. It presents a set of rules, obeys those rules, and directly acknowledges the time paradoxes it introduces. The plot itself is set up as a mystery, flinging Harlan into a Twilight Zone-esque narrative, leaving us as perplexed as he is as to what is actually going on, and whether he’s being manipulated by those around him. Eternals are allowed no contact or personal relationship with any “Timers”, people not aware of Eternity and that still exist within the timeline of Reality. Since the reality changes they induce can remove the existence of friends and family from Reality, Eternals are supposed to sever ties with family and forget that they ever existed. Like much time travel-based fiction, keeping tabs on the plot can get confusing, even though there’s a logical framework for how time travel functions in this universe.

For a story written in 1955 (and about as “hard sci-fi” as you can get), I was pleasantly surprised with several scenes that felt like reading a fast-paced thriller, with twists and revelations popping up every few pages for the entire final third of the book. One in particular consists of Harlan entering a point in time he had entered previously, creating the first of several ontological paradoxes that become key plot elements. The characters in the story directly acknowledge these paradoxes, speculate about the effects of an Eternal meeting himself, and even hatch a scheme to save Eternity by intentionally creating one.

The grand experiment of social engineering created by the existence of time travel and reality change in Eternity is questioned by the characters as they imagine the impact of constantly molding time to maintain an unexciting equilibrium. Each time the Sociologists’ “life plots” predict some calamity, like nuclear war, they intervene to level things out. And as it turns out, the intention to do good by removing chaos and chance from the equation stagnates humanity’s expansion to greater things, and creates a never ending cyclical machine. History is doomed to repeat itself.

The best science fiction gives itself space to ruminate on the philosophical and moral implications of technology. I loved this book, and found it to be one of the most creative takes on time travel I’ve read, which says a lot given the quantity and variations on the subject in film, television, and writing. It’s all the more impressive that this was written in 1955, and isn’t even one of Asimov’s better-known works. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in science fiction. Its mystery structure keeps things interesting throughout, from a plot perspective, but it doesn’t shy away from classic sci-fi conventions, either.

I recently finished reading Spycraft, Robert Wallace and Keith Melton’s chronicle of the CIA’s spy tech divisions, specifically OTS (Office of Technical Services), the division responsible for creating technical espionage gear. Things like eavesdropping devices, dead drop containers, secret writing, disguises, and document forgery.

The story of OTS is fascinating and full of all sorts of straight-out-of-the-movies espionage games and tactics. The book is chock full of anecdotes of crazy operations from the group’s inception with OSS during World War II, through the years of the Cold War. For evidence, look no further than the Agency’s project codenamed “Acoustic Kitty”, a harebrained scheme to implant a listening device into a stray cat for listening in on meetings of an Asian statesman who had a penchant for cats that wandered in and out of the meeting areas.

The book tells stories of operations in Moscow involving several famous Soviet spies, and the field tradecraft and technical tools that CIA case officers used to communicate with their agents. With its focus on technical devices of the Cold War era, much of the book describes audio taps and clandestine audio recording.

Toward the end of the book, there’s an extensive section reviewing the principles of tradecraft — things like the use of disguises, assessment of recruitment targets, covert communications, and concealment devices — in the context of technology and devices involved.

The book does occasionally stray into the weeds a little, getting somewhat dry in parts, but it’s well worth the read for those interested in history and espionage.

I’ve been reading a lot lately about sociocultural geography — about how people interact with their environments and with one another across space and time. This topic is more relevant than ever with today’s borderless conflicts, asymmetric warfare, and technology behind the scenes leveling the playing field for groups at all levels. On a journey across the internet reading and watching various things about human geography, I stumbled upon this fantastic piece by Adam Curtis on his BBC blog.

It tells the story and background of counterinsurgency doctrine from its inception in revolutionary communist China and Indochina to implementation in modern-day Iraq and Afghanistan. Fascinating stuff.

The post begins with some background on David Galula, the French military theorist popularly credited as the father of counterinsurgency warfare. During his time as a military attaché in China during the 1940s, he observed the tactics of Mao’s communist guerrillas, taking to heart the tactics used by the communists against the Kuomintang — in short, they turned the population to their side.

The meat of the article’s background on the history of counterinsurgency is seen in several documentary clips about the actions of the French government during Algeria’s War of Independence in the late 50s and early 60s. Galula and the French instituted an experimental “village reeducation” program in the Aures Mountains region (a refuge for opposition forces), with French soldiers living and working with the locals. Questioning and interrogation of the now-moderately-friendly villagers rapidly devolved into torture and cruelty.

If you could persuade the local people to come over to your side - then that would leave the insurgents who lived among the people drastically weakened. And that meant you could destroy them.

But to do that you had to identify the insurgents - and that meant getting information from your new “friends” the local villagers. But sometimes they didn’t want to give that kind of information, possibly because they were frightened, or they might even be an insurgent themselves, just pretending to be a villager.

And that led to the French soldiers finding ways to persuade the villagers to tell them who was an insurgent. It was called torture.

The first true American experiment with counterinsurgency tactics happened in the midst of Vietnam. Galula’s theories along with the work of a couple of economists (including Samuel Popkin’s The Rational Peasant) produced a hybrid approach to fighting in the jungles of Vietnam that fused Galula’s traditional battle for “hearts and minds” with “selective incentives” (i.e. money for information from villagers). After a number of village “pacification” experiments, the CIA’s Phoenix Program was put into place to not only identify friend from foe, but to target and kill the enemy. And just as in Algeria, the plan mutated into what some former participants describe as a “full blown torture and assassination campaign”.

The article wraps up with a clip of Petraeus in Baqubah, Iraq during the 2007 surge, reviewing the fruits of our revival of the counterinsurgency. The net long-term effects of the modern COIN approach remain to be seen, but let’s hope it doesn’t metastasize into the horrific programs of previous conflicts.

I think we still have a long way to go perfecting the right balance of support, direct involvement, and advisement — and in the messy, protracted, and stateless conflicts of today, we certainly won’t get anywhere with a standoff approach. Getting down in the trenches is a requirement.

For further reading, take a look an original research work from David Galula published by the RAND Corporation (originally published in 1963), analyzing the pacification campaign in Algeria. A couple other works I’ll be checking out along these same lines are David Kilcullen’s Counterinsurgency, and also the film The Battle of Algiers, which I’ve always wanted to see, and Curtis mentions in his article.

A list of books I read in 2011:

• Soccernomics, Simon Kuper
• Count Zero, William Gibson
• Debt of Honor, Tom Clancy
• The Wise Man’s Fear, Patrick Rothfuss
• In the Plex, Steven Levy
• Connected, Nicholas Christakis & James Fowler
• Dying to Win, Robert A. Pape
• Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
• How Soccer Explains the World, Franklin Foer
• A Dance With Dragons, George R. R. Martin
• Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson

You can see more of what I’m reading and what’s on my reading list, too.