Coleman McCormick

Archive of posts with tag 'Reviews'

Weekend Reading: Readwise's Next Chapter, Reviewing Revolt of the Public, and the Helicopter State

September 17, 2021 • #

📚 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.

✦

Books of 2020

January 7, 2021 • #

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

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

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

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

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

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 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

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 ⭐️ 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

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 ⭐️ 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

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

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

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

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 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

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

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

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

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 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

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

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

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

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 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

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 ⭐️ 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

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

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

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

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

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.

✦

SSC Reviews the Origin of Consciousness →

June 4, 2020 • #

Scott Alexander wrote this review of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, which presents a fascinating idea about when the “theory of mind” emerges in human history. When did human beings realize their emotions, beliefs, and knowledge were internal to themselves, and not spiritual injections from the gods or voices of disembodied forces?

The book makes the claim that there was a turning point in theory of mind perception during the Bronze Age, between 1500 and 750 BC.

As you go about your day, you hear a voice that tells you what to do, praises you for your successes, criticizes you for your failures, and tells you what decisions to make in difficult situations. Modern theory-of-mind tells you that this is your own voice, thinking thoughts. It says this so consistently and convincingly that we never stop to question whether it might be anything else.

If you don’t have theory of mind, what do you do with it? Children don’t have theory of mind, at least not very much of it, and more than half of them have imaginary friends. Jaynes has done some research on the imaginary friend phenomenon, and argues that a better term would be “hallucinatory friend” – children see and hear these entities vividly. The atheoretical mind is a desperate thing, and will comply with any priors you give it to make sense of its experiences. If that prior is that the voice in your head is a friend – or god – it will obediently hallucinate a friend or god for you, and modulate its voice-having accordingly.

✦

Hardy Boys and Microkids

March 17, 2020 • #

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.

Data General Massachusetts Office

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.

The DEC PDP-8
The DEC PDP-8

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.

Data General's Eclipse S230
Data General's Eclipse S230

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.

  1. In those days, you could always count on business products to have sufficiently boring names. ↩

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Back to the Future →

February 20, 2020 • #

New York Times writer Ross Douthat has a new book out called The Decadent Society, which explores how we’ve arrived in a period of (in the book’s terms) stagnation, repetition, sterility, and sclerosis. This post is a review of the book from Peter Thiel, who’s been talking about the problems with stagnation and lack of progress for a decade or more.

Now the old family structure has been smashed, religion is in decline, patriotism is passé, and the cultural marketplace is fragmented. Because there is no longer a healthy dominant culture, would-be rebels have nothing to resist. So they playact the battles of a previous age.

Every aspect of decadence feeds back into the others. Legal sclerosis is likely a bigger obstacle to the adoption of flying cars than any engineering problem. Poor transportation makes it more expensive to raise a family and so lowers birth rates. ­Aging brings risk-aversion and arrests creativity.

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The Infinity Machine

December 22, 2019 • #

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.

A testing algorithm for Lynch syndrome (Goodenberger & Lindor, 2011.)
A testing algorithm for Lynch syndrome (Goodenberger & Lindor, 2011.)

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.

My genetic history as diagrammed by my geneticist
My genetic history as diagrammed by my geneticist

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.

  1. “No evidence of disease” in the oncologist’s lexicon. Their way of saying “everything we can see is gone.” ↩

  2. What kind of institution has a whole genetics division? Mayo Clinic is an incredible place, a marvel of science and patient care. ↩

  3. Richtel, An Elegant Defense, p. 55. ↩

  4. Ibid., p. 85. ↩

  5. Ibid., p. 85. ↩

  6. Ibid., p. 89. ↩

  7. A Brief History of Immunotherapy. ↩

  8. With the fancier generic name “bevacizumab.” ↩

✦

A Third Force

December 2, 2019 • #

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.

The Quiet American

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.

✦

Weekend Reading: Baseball Graphics, the Mind Illuminated, and the Crucial Century

October 19, 2019 • #

⚾️ 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.

✦

Managerial Leverage

August 5, 2019 • #

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.

Managerial leverage

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.

  1. High Output Management, p. 36. ↩

  2. ibid., p. 48. ↩

✦

Garmin fenix 5

July 23, 2019 • #

Wearables have become such a big market these days that there’s a wide variety of options to pick from if you want to monitor activity metrics. From the basic Fitbit step counters to more ruggedized outdoor watches to full-blown smartwatches, there’s a device for everyone.

I’ve been a devoted user of Garmin’s activity tracking watches for years now, starting out with the Forerunner 220. A couple of years ago I upgraded to the fēnix 5 model, one of their highest-end watches.

Garmin fēnix 5

I used the 220 model for about 3 years for run tracking. It was always reliable for me — water/sweat resistant, long enough battery life, and provided accurate GPS data. Because I also wanted to monitor heart rate during activities, I also used to use the chest strap HR monitor to feed that data to the watch. It worked reliably for a long while, but I think the contacts got corroded and the data started to get wonky after a time. I’d see huge surges in HR for no reason that would suddenly drop back down to normal.

I’ve now been using the fēnix for a couple of years and have loved it, one of the better devices I’ve ever owned. After a good experience with Garmin’s Forerunner series, I felt confident enough that I’d get benefit out of one of the higher end models. Let’s walk through some of its best features.

Multisport Activity Tracking

One of the things I didn’t like about the Forerunner was that it only supported recording run activities. The fēnix supports over a dozen activity types, indoor and outdoor, like cycling, climbing, swimming, and more. With the Forerunner it would still log GPX tracks that could be exported and treated however you want, but when synced to Garmin Connect or Strava, it would consider every activity a “run”. With fēnix when you select a different activity type, it gets picked up accurately in both sync services and treated differently for metrics reporting.

There are some differences between activity types in terms of instant feedback on the watch display. For example, between runs and rides, you can have different “lap” lengths to notify you of progress along an activity. So the advanced features like HR zones, pacing, and other things differ in how they’re fed back to you while you’re active.

I’m interested in incorporating swimming into my workout routine and to see how that would work with the watch.

HR Monitor

Having the HR monitor built into the device has some great advantages: mostly that it’s always on, and always available. I like that I get passive tracking of heart rate all the time to be able to see the resting heart rate during the day and during sleep (more on sleep tracking in a moment). I don’t have a good sense for the accuracy of the measurement with the on-wrist infrared sensor, but it seems generally consistent with what I used to see with the chest strap. To me it’s mostly important to have relative consistency between activities, and that I can see it in real time during activities. When I’m running I usually switch the watch display to view HR, which tracks amazingly closely with how I feel during a run. I can see a measurement of when I’m on the limit, so I typically use that readout to pace myself.

Battery Life

This is one of the best features about the fēnix, to me. Garmin reports 2 weeks of passive usage, 24 hours of active usage, which tracks pretty closely with my experience. What I tell people is that it lasts so long that I usually don’t remember exactly when I last charged it. This is the main reason that the Apple Watch has never interested me. I like the idea of richer apps on a wristwatch (especially with the phoneless-but-still-connected capability of the Series 3), but having to charge something every night is a nonstarter to me.

Sleep Tracking

Given that I wear the watch all the time, the sleep tracking is an easy side benefit. Ever since reading Why We Sleep recently, I’m more interested in prioritizing long enough sleep cycles (which with children simply means going to bed early). The watch reports not only sleep time, but also sleep stages somehow, through some combination of heart rate monitoring and movement tracking it buckets your sleep time into deep, light, and REM sleep stages. I don’t need hyper-accurate reporting, so this is a slick feature to get for free with an exercise tracker.

A rare example of 8+ hours of sleep
A rare example of 8+ hours of sleep

I’ve heard about the Oura ring as well for more detailed sleep tracking, but it’s a bit pricey for something I don’t have a big problem with right now. If I want to get more sleep, the simple solution is to prioritize it (which I don’t do well).

Smartwatch Capability

Through Bluetooth pairing, the fēnix also supports integration with push notifications from the phone. This can be convenient sometimes, but I’ve honestly never used it that much. Probably the most utility for me is quick access to turn-by-turn directions while in the car or on my bike. Quick readout of SMS and instant messages is convenient, too.

Strava Integration

You can set up Garmin Connect to sync with a number of services, including Strava, which is the only one I use for activity tracking. The main feature it has tied to Strava that I like is that with Segments in Strava, any segments you add to your favorites transfer to the watch for live progress tracking. It’s a feature they call Live Segments, and it’s cool because it’ll give you live feedback on your performance against your previous efforts and the KOMs from your friends. I love the ability to challenge myself on my own personal records on common routes.

The syncing works pretty flawlessly both with Garmin Connect and Strava. Never had a problem making sure my data is always up to date.

Any Downsides?

It’s been a rock-solid device for me, overall, with no major drawbacks.

The custom charging connector is probably the only downside, and not too acute because of the long battery life and rarity of needing to charge. It’d be much smarter for Garmin to use USB-C or micro-USB, but I don’t know what would motivate a custom interface. Given that the connector plugs in perpendicular to the watch back, it’s possible that there’s not enough thickness to fit the receptacle for a USB-type connector. Regardless, the need for a special cable to charge is an annoyance. I have keep one at home and a spare at the office so I can charge anywhere.

Overall it’s a very solid device, and I’d consider buying other Garmin devices down the road.

✦

Reaching the Early Majority

June 18, 2019 • #

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:

The chasm

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.

✦

Linguistic Relativity

April 7, 2019 • #

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.

✦

A Neural Chernobyl

March 11, 2019 • #

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.

  1. I just found out that this genre is known as “atompunk.” ↩

✦

The Origin and Transmutation of Species

February 10, 2019 • #

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.

Tree branches

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.

✦

Spirituality Without Religion

January 31, 2019 • #

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.

Sam Harris Waking Up

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.

✦

Self Reliance and Introspection

January 16, 2019 • #

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.

✦

Books of 2018, Part 2

December 30, 2018 • #

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?

Quantum Gravity

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

Mandelbrot set

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.

  1. I’m currently reading Jon Haidt’s The Righteous Mind, which so far is a fantastic companion to A Conflict of Visions for understanding morality and ideology. ↩

✦

Books of 2018, Part 1

December 28, 2018 • #

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.

Books of 2018

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.

Area X

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.

Triangulation

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.

String theory

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.

✦

A Globe of Connections

December 19, 2018 • #

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.”

Asia's web of connections
Asia's web of connections

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.

A lively, connected Arctic
A lively, connected Arctic

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:

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Quanta, Relativity, and the Nature of Reality

December 2, 2018 • #

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.

Quantum gravity

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

  1. If the genius of these savant-like physicists wasn’t already clear enough: Einstein published his paper on special relativity at age 26, and general relativity at 35. Heisenberg wrote the first equations of quantum physics at 25. Makes me perk up to think that all I do is send emails all day. ↩

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An In Depth History of Maps

November 28, 2018 • #

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.

The world according to Strabo
The world according to Strabo

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 French were early pioneers in geodesy
The French were early pioneers in geodesy

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.

  1. Dava Sobel’s Longitude is the canonical resource for that story. On John Harrison and his craft of chronometers. ↩

✦

Books of 2016

January 18, 2017 • #

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.

2016 books

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.

Bay City from Altered Carbon

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.

The Pine Barrens
The Pine Barrens

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

Stories of Your Life

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.

Marid Audran Series

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.

  1. If this sounds familiar, it was adapted into the 2016 film “Arrival”. ↩

✦

Annals of the Former World

March 15, 2016 • #
Strata

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.

Annals of the Former World

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.

Geologic Time

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.

Quake epicenters

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.

  1. McPhee is well known for his literary nonfiction, just look at his bibliography. ↩

  2. The USGS has a tool to browse its fantastic historical archive of topographic maps. ↩

✦

The Craft of Baseball

July 17, 2015 • #

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.

Dodger Stadium

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.

Baseball men

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.

Orel Hershiser

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.

✦

The Year in Books

December 21, 2013 • #

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.

2013 in books

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.

✦

Upwhen and Downwhen

October 30, 2013 • #

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.

End of Eternity

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.

End of Eternity cover

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.

✦

Spycraft

July 9, 2012 • #

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.

Acoustic kitty

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.

✦
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