The Shock of the Old

The Shock of the Old : Technology and Global History Since 1900 (2007) by David Edgerton is a fascinating book about how technology is actually used. The book carefully looks at how many technologies, like horses peaked well after their replacements were also in service.

Edgerton is a professor of the History of Science at Imperial College. He knows his subject deeply and brings up many fascinating facts throughout the book and his thesis, that we focus on inventions rather than use to our detriment, is made very well.

The book is full of fascinating facts, such as that horses in war peaked in WWII. Just how long battleships last and that the Manhattan project and the V2 were military failures is fascinating. It’s worth noting that Edgerton does make the case that the V2 and nuclear bombs had huge importance after the conflict in which they were invented.

It would be hard to read this book and not find out many new and fascinating books and to not appreciate, if not necessarily agree with the author’s premise that older technologies often stay around much longer than we realise and that the flashy new technologies that people are often obsessed with are not always the most important.

The Me 262 Stormbird

The Me 262 Stormbird: From the Pilots Who Flew, Fought, and Survived It (2012) by Colin Heaton describes the development of the Me 262 and how it was used and how some of the more famous units that flew it fared. The book also has appendices that catalog Me 262 pilots.

The Me 262 was a remarkable aircraft, it was the first operation jet fighter and was developed by the Germans during WWII when they were under incredible strain. After the war with far greater resources at their disposal it would take the US and the Soviets five years to build axial flow jets with swept wings like the Me 262. However, the Me 262 was incredibly unreliable with engines that lasted on average 10 hours and flamed out if the throttle was moved in any way but very gently. The Me 262 also had R4M rockets which were remarkably destructive but again, only when they worked. The electrical systems on the plane were also incredibly fragile. In addition while the 262 was almost unbeatable once it was flying comfortably it was also very vulnerable on take off and landing.The 262 was also flown against incredible odds. It was common for 50 to 1 or 100 to 1 to be the ratio of German aircraft to Allied aircraft when it was in service.

The book’s chapters on development are really interesting and discuss why a number of senior German officials didn’t fully support the program. While the Me 262 was an eventual success it wasn’t clear it always would have been. The book also discusses what would have happened if the Germans had brought the plane into service a year earlier and in numbers. It could, potentially have halted the Allied bombing campaign and possibly lengthened the war. The possibility that this would have resulted in Atomic Weapons being used against Germany is not discussed.

The chapters of the book on the operational use of the Me 262 are definitely interesting initially but become repetitive. The book also seems to collate information available in other books, however it provides an informative and interesting summary on the Kindle. The book also has a short interesting discussion on how the Allies scoured Germany for pilots and Me 262s after the war in order to strengthen their own militaries.

It’s a good book on a fascinating subject. It could have done with better editing. There are some really poor sentences in the book. The book is also padded with Me 262 pilot records that would be better just be kept online somewhere. But overall the book is an interesting account of the development of an incredible fighter and its operational history.

 

 

 

 

 

Chaos Monkeys

Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley (2016) by Antonio Garcia Martinez is a fun memoir of working in Silicon Valley.

The first part of the book is about Martinez starting a company and getting funding and then getting acquired by Twitter, the next part is about Martinez working at Facebook.

The book is far from perfect, Martinez is a very smart guy but is a bit prone to humblebrags, anyone who tells you they were in the bottom third of their PhD Physics program at Berkeley is really pushing it. Martinez also injects a few banal aphorisms and little theories of his into the book which it would be better off without.

However, the book is a lot of fun and has a lot of really interesting information about startups, advertising and Facebook. Having worked at a few small but unsuccessful companies that wanted to get bought out or make it big it’s also worth saying that Martinez captures the feeling of working at a start up really well. The discussion of how web advertising works was really fascinating. It’s a fun book that is worth reading for anyone interested in what’s going on Silicon Valley now.

 

 

The Buy Side

The Buy Side (2013) by Turney Duff is a well written memoir of career on Wall Street and a simultaneous drug addiction.

Turney paints himself well and is a sympathetic character. He charts his rise on Wall Street to a trader and also chronicles his use of alcohol and drugs. Stories of people on Wall Street are mixed with stories of parties. What a subset of Wall Street workers do with their money is carefully described.

Turney’s addictions get the better of him. It’s a sad descent but one that he comes through in a strange way. The book is interesting and entertaining, it’s not Liar’s Poker but it is an interesting chronicle of how a high functioning drug addict.

The Most Human Human

The Most Human Human (2012) by Brian Christian looks at how AI can make us reflect on what our human qualities are and how AI relates to them. Christian was one of the human participants in the 2009 Turing Test, where computers attempt to pass as humans as both chat to judges over written messages.

Christian has degrees in Computer Science and Philosophy and so is ideally placed to write about the subject of humanity and AI. The book is also well crafted. The story of Christian being a confederate in the Turing Test and his discussion of AI and humanity is interleaved skillfully.

Comparing chatbots and how people also follow scripts as well as how computers have improved at chess and other fields and pondering what makes humans different is definitely an interesting topic and the book does this all well.For anyone interested and how humanity is different and similar it’s definitely worth a read.

The High Frontier

The High Frontier (1976) by Gerard K O’Neill describes how humans could build large space colonies in the solar system. O’Neil was physicist who specialised in high energy physics.

The book outlines how space colonies could be built and how they would be superior to planetary colonisation. These large space habitats would be placed near stable Lagrangian points. The initial colonies would be rotating spheres and the equatorial regions would have centrifugal force to feel like gravity. Later colonies would be rotating cylinders. The materials would be obtained by mining the moon and asteroids for raw materials. These raw materials would be launched into space using a mass driver.

The book also has some letters written from the perspective of people living in the various colonies.

The book was written before the space shuttle program and it’s relative failure and is wildly optimistic about what the space shuttle will be capable of.

It’s interesting that the ideas proposed are not physically impossible. It’s not completely implausible. Indeed, given the appropriate economic drivers such structures seem like they would be possible.

The economics described that O’Neil thinks will drive people toward such colonies have been shown to be completely wrong. The 1970s fears of overpopulation have not come to pass. Space has also not been found to have the economic uses that O’Neill envisaged. O’Neill thought that zero gravity manufacturing would have a lot of applications. O’Neil also saw on the reasons for space colonies as being to create Space Solar Power Stations that would beam energy to earth.

The book is a little like the book on Project Orion, the story of the proposed nuclear explosive powered spacecraft. It shows that with real physical constraints space exploration and colonisation is possible.

Whatever You Do, Don’t Run

Whatever You Do, Don’t Run: True Tales of a Botswana Safari Guide (2007) by Peter Allison is a collection of stories from Peter Allison. Allison grew up in Sydney and then went to Africa and managed to get a job as a Safari Guide. The book is a collection of mostly humourous stories about his work in Botswana. It’s definitely a fun read. The stories of elephants, big cats and the people who come to see them are highly entertaining.

Grit

Grit : The Power of Passion and Perseverance (2016) by Angela Duckworth describes how people who persevere and overcome challenges succeed. In a way it describes why some people will put in effort to reach their peak performance and others won’t. It’s an interesting book to read in conjunction with Peak by Anders Ericsson.

Duckworth is a professor of Psychology. Duckworth describes a self-reporting scale where people say how likely they are to follow through with things. This was used and was shown to correlate with recruits who dropped out of West Point.

Grit looks at many successful individuals and shows how they are gritty and have used their grit. It also looks at how people can increase their own grit by making taking on challenges a habit, working with others with grit, uncovering a passion and realising how valuable grit is itself.

It’s an interesting book that undoubtedly has something to say. You have to work hard and have to find reasons to work hard and make sure you overcome challenges. This book looks at a useful way to think about the quality of grit and how important it is in life.

 

The Anti-Capitalist Mentality

The Anti-Capitalist Mentality (1956) by Ludwig von Mises outlines why von Mises thinks that many people are against capitalism. The book makes the mistake of assuming that anyone who disagrees with von Mises is daft or mean spirited. However the book does make some interesting points. Von Mises points out how he believes that the market itself was critical in providing the prosperity and levels of technology that are available. He also points out how people who dislike markets disregard their immense value in providing information. The book also points out that markets enable people to make a huge number of free choices all the time, another fact that detractors of markets often ignore. Von Mises also points out that most Marxists and critics of markets have little or no experience in creating or running businesses and fail to appreciate the work, skill and risk involved. The book is highly unlikely to convince anyone who dislikes markets that they are useful tools, it is of interest to anyone who wants to read something by Von Mises that is short and well written, even though it’s not fair minded.

GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History

GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History (2014) by Diane Coyle looks at how GDP is calculated. Coyle looks at the history of why and how it was originally calculated, the rise of the importance of GDP and how it has been altered to attempt to measure how economies have changed.

The book goes through economic eras while discussing GDP.The book first looks measurement of the economy prior to WWI and then how measures of the economy were needed. Then the creation of GDP in the 1930s and its rapid rise is charted. The book then looks at the golden age of Western growth from 1945 to 1975 and the crisis of the end of Bretton Woods, Vietnam and the Oil Shock into the 1980s. Following this the next Golden age from the early 1990s until the the GFC, the post GFC era and the future of GDP in the twenty first Century.

The book looks at revisions of GDP, how few countries have much of a history of calculation of GDP and the numerous serious acknowledged problems with the measure. The fact that while income from drugs and prostitution has been incorporated into GDP but household work has not, the problem of trying to account for the financial industry and the problem that GDP was created to measure production of more physical items and the problems that are now being encountered with services accounting for most of the economy in developed countries. The huge importance globally and the way that GDP has been altered by many governments to be poorer to attempt to get loans or to attempt to be richer in order to avoid debt to GDP ratios crossing different thresholds.

The book concludes by stating that although GDP is definitely flawed it is still the most useful measure that has been created for measuring economic activity. Coyle points out that other measures of welfare measurement have tended to be more subjective. Improving GDP and properly funding statistical agencies and giving them thorough independence is suggested.

The book is  a very good, short, crisp read that both traces economic history in the twentieth century and provides a thorough critique of a measurement that has become so important in global affairs.