Pre-spring 2024 books
23 things they don't tell you about capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang. I found reference to this in one of Aurelien's excellent blogs. Very good recent economic history, and why things are as fucked up at present now, along with unpleasant (largely forgotten) 2010 era tropes that are better ignored. Chang recognizes the huge problems associated with shareholder value extraction through the PMC, unlimited limited liability companies, the imbecile idea that people are utility optimizing robots, he noticed that Ricardo was a wanker (very based opinion for an economist), and government intervention and protectionism is ridiculously better for most people than "free trade" (which is basically good for oligarch Bezos and the Waltons). He also stands up some shibboleths about "free markets" and salary arbitrage that, as far as I can tell, nobody actually believes, but which makes some kind of dorky economist point (we don't believe in contemporary economics here: it's just a shaggy dog story festooned with differential equations in service of whoever is calling the shots). He also lies or at least elides over the truth in a number of places when he's trying to make a point, which is pretty annoying: I assume he's a member in good standing with the clerisy and was jockying for position for current year 2010 concerns. Really, this book is "23 things they didn't tell you in economics indoctrination classes," but there are more coffee house leftists buying books than economists, so he made the right branding choice. Of course Chang is an economist, and so he should be sewn up in a burlap sack with venomous animals and thrown in a river, but as books on the sins of economists goes, this is a pretty good one and most of his swings at economists connect.
Angle of Attack: Harrison Storms and the Race for the Moon by Mike Gray. Very interesting biography on a largely unsung aeronautics leader in the early jet and space age. Harrison Storms was a bigshot at North American Aviation. NAA built the most successful WW-2 era plane, the P-51 Mustang, and followed it on with the most successful early jet fighter; the F-86, and first supersonic fighter, the F-100. Other solid W's: the X-15, A-5 Vigilante, XB-70 Valkyrie, the unsung but hugely important SM-64 Navajo, the first US cruise missile, the second stage of the Saturn-V and the Apollo spacecraft. The company was kind of nuked by the Apollo command module fire, despite the fact that it was (according to the telling) a NASA bureaucracy problem rather than a prime contractor problem. Storms took a lot of the blame, and the company was sort of force-merged with one of those ubiquitous 60s conglomerates, Rockwell international (where it was later responsible for the B-1b and Space Shuttle); a company which was most famous for making truck axles and mitre saws -they acquired a water faucet, radio and printing press company around the same time as NAA. Oddly at the time NAA had a ton of cash and Rockwell had more debt than equity, which is why I figure someone must have been encouraging this crap (it might have been dumb luck too).
Industrial conglomerates fascinate me: I think they were encouraged by the government at the time as a way of preserving independent military contractors via diversification. Another weird one: Ling-Temco-Vought. Nuclear cruise missiles, railroads, car rentals, meat packing, golf clubs, steel and pharmaceuticals. None of these businesses have obvious synergy; I guess the idea was risk diversification and perhaps some financial economy of scale. The 1960s funded the creation of many of them via low interest rate takeovers: Gulf Western, Litton, ITT, Textron, General Electric, Teledyne. They all seemed to do a little of everything, including some military/strategic stuff, and often some propaganda/media stuff. This is good as military/strategic stuff is kind of cyclical, and capabilities can be preserved by other businesses. It's weird the US made so many of these in the 60s, only for most of them to blow up (from excessive debt and creative accounting) in the 70s, and be fragmented or specialized again back in the 80s through 00s. It's said that index funds (more or less started in the 70s) achieve the same purpose as a conglomerate for investors, and it's easier to look into one company doing one thing than some weird conglomerate doing dozens of things. The Japanese and Korean Zaibatsus and Chaebols resemble conglomerates, and I suspect many European, Chinese and Indian firms of having similar qualities. One could also look at Berkshire Hathaway as being a conglomerate: perhaps it requires men of a particular genius to make them work. Google seems to be trying and failing to become a technology conglomerate: as far as I can tell all of its subsidiaries with the exception of the investment arms are failures. It might be interesting to look more deeply at the failings and advantages of conglomerates like this.
Back to Harrison Storms: he was one of those guys who got his start in the wind tunnel at CalTech studying with Theodore von Karman. The X-15 and XB-70 were achievements of his. These achievements are easily the equal of anything the Skunkworks put out; hell they're the equal of everything the Skonkwerks put out. These were enough, but the Apollo spacecraft and 2nd stage Saturn-V kind of put him over the top as one of the all time greats. The earlier achievements are not really documented by this book, which is about Storms bid for the Apollo spacecraft and 2nd stage of the Saturn-V rocket. Really, Storms was a greater engineering manager than any of the other Kelly Johnsons of the world, but as said above; he took the blame for the Apollo-1 fire. Kind of insane from current year perspective; we presently live in an era where managers have no accountability, no matter how incompetent. The book is told from Storms perspective; it's a result of the author having a long sit down with Storms. Lots of political drama between contractors, various groups in NASA, and heart attacks during periods of extreme stress. Also a sad but glorious ending.
As a point of interest, a man with the same name and more or less same face, who I assume is his son, is a pretty interesting painter.
Burnham's Celestial Handbook by Robert Burnham jr. I've had this 3 book collection on the shelf for a year and a half now (obtained at tremendous personal difficulty). My edition is the 1978 rewrite. This is an encyclopedia of the night sky organized by constellation. I had to look half of them up, as it includes southern constellations I've never seen (I'm pretty sure Burnham never saw them either). Burnham was both amateur astronomer and resident astronomer at Lowell observatory. He was decidedly an amateur with no formal training; before he got his observatory job, he worked as a shipping clerk. He was homeless when the survey he was employed at Lowell completed, and barely made a living on book royalties and selling paintings of ... cats afterwords. He was such a loner his family didn't know he was dead until 2 years later. Very tragic figure in some ways, but the man had an inner life the likes of which few great men could aspire to. This series of books is matchless and a must-read for the amateur astronomer; a complete survey of the night sky with poetic descriptions of some of the more awe inspiring sights, vast historical content on the ancient people's views of the night skies, as well as current-year 1950s-1978 views as to the nature of the things you'll be looking at. It's not the type of book you can read from start to finish, though the introductory pages are worth it. I pull it out as bits of the night sky move past my east-facing balcony for what's going on there, and what Burnham has to say about it.
Blessed spergeloid amateur astronomer
Edison as I knew Him Henry Ford. It's little known that Ford got his start working in an Edison lab. It's also underappreciated how great a man Edison was (also, for that matter, Ford). This is a quick survey, I assume some sort of speech (presumably when dedicating the Edison Institute), of their work together over the years. Lots of stuff I didn't know about Edison; for example, he was home schooled, and he attributed his independent thinking and self-direction to this fact. Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms David MacKay. Years ago I read Cover on a plane flight across the US and was mind blown; Information theory is a very different way of thinking about data, and Cover is a uniquely lucid presentation. I bought MacKay at some point and occasionally leafed through it, but recently gave it the ole cover to cover. I had previously found it annoyingly chatty, but it's actually very good when read in order and it is filled with interesting little problems which actually push the reader towards understanding. Sometimes I think problem sets are just put in there because they're expected; these are actually helpful. I probably wouldn't care about information theory, or I might think of it as an annoyingly pretentious field involving boring error correcting codes (they're not boring) if it weren't for Cover, which is another incredibly good textbook: odd there are two texts this good in a relatively obscure, though important subject. Not sure information theory is still an active field, though all the machine learning researchers I respect seem to have a very strong background in information theory. Most of it is crap I know already, but I took a passing interest in Turbo codes and relatives, and MacKay has a decent chapter on this, hence this pass through. Reviewing all this stuff on occasion usually pays dividends for me, so this passing curiosity ought to help push the needle. About halfway through: will finish in another month or so. Warning: he has nice lectures but every time he uses chalk it squeaks most distressingly. If he weren't dead I'd send him fancy Japanese chalk.
https://videolectures.net/course_information_theory_pattern_recognition/
The Book of My Life by Girolamo Cardano. Looking around for renaissance autobiographies to avoid reading Benvenuto Cellini for the 3rd or 4th time: this one presented itself. Cardano was a mathematician: his contributions were enormous and largely unsung other than the shitcoin making him harder to google. Some of his math achievements: complex numbers, cubic equations, hypocycloids, negative numbers, binomial coefficients, odds ratios, probability theory in general, imaginary numbers, steganography. He also invented a combination lock, universal joints, gimballed gyroscopes, was a respected doctor who wrote many books (on all kinds of things unrelated to the above subjects). He also had a hard life and a lot of bad luck; his mother tried to abort him and it seemed to get worse after that. Lots of complaints about what seemed like fairly normal misfortunes of his era written from his perspective in his 70s. Lots of interesting coincidences he attributed meaning to. An interesting counterpoint to Cellini's life: it's apparently a lot better to be a flamboyant artist than a nerdy physician. It is an odd autobiography in that it more or less consists of lists of things he feels like telling us about; complaints, diet, habits, physical characteristics (of himself), things he wrote, places he visited. On the other hand it is a fucking bummer and he was self loathing and had no idea why he'd be appreciated in future times, so he mostly doesn't talk about those things. Honestly give it a pass unless you want to read some 15th century nerdoid complain about various vicissitudes of life, or read lists of his friends who you don't recognize.
Tamburlaine the Great by Christopher Marlowe. I've wanted to review some of the other Elizabethan playwrights upon reading myself some Shakespeare last year; Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker and maybe John Webster are perhaps worth a look, though everyone says Marlowe is the most important. I've read his Dr. Faustus in the past (IMO better than Goethe, and well presented in Jan Svankmajer's puppet movie) and found it as good as anything I've read of Shakespeare. I never studied language much, but I am quite fond of Marlowe's verse in ways I'm not of Shakespeare's, which often seems crabbed in comparison to Marlowe's limpid verse. On the other hand, Shakespeare's dramatic arc and characterization is a lot more interesting than Marlowe's, at least in Faust (as I recall) and Tamburlaine. Tamburlaine is a lowly bandit in Marlowe's story who, well, he just kicks ass and takes names to the woe and teeth gnashing of his enemies. It's sort of like a superhero movie where the hero is psychotic. This was probably great stuff to the people in the day; as I understand things, the excesses of Shakespeare were among the most popular parts. Supposedly a big influence on the Henry VI plays, but I haven't read 'em yet so I couldn't say. Was fun to read in any case; modest recommend after reading Faust. I may give his Edward the Second or Jew of Malta (an alleged gore fest and inspiration for Merchant of Venice) a shot; they're all in the reprint edition I have.