Tag: nonfiction

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Review

“In the Beginning Was the Command Line”

Neal Stephenson

My coworker mentioned this to me as we were discussing Snow Crash and Diamond Age, and did a great job of selling it with the summary “Microsoft and Apple are competing car dealerships on opposite corners, and then over on the other side of the street there’s a hippie commune giving away tanks for free.” Which, yes, really is an extended metaphor in this essay, and it really does make sense in Stephenson’s telling of it.

I’ll warn you right now that the word “essay” is rather underselling it — even with the scroll bar over there to warn me, it took me far too long to realize quite how big a chunk of writing this piece is. It’s novella-length.1

And in that span, it covers a whole lot of ground. It’s the history of computation, dating from before “a computer” was a machine at all, all the way back to the electromechanical teletype machines connected to the telegraph system. It’s a discussion of the psychology and business of selling operating systems. It’s an exploration of human nature, and choice, and culture. And it contains some truly wonderful lines, though my favorite standout quote has to be:

I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor.

There are parts of this essay which are certainly dated. There are parts that seem utterly incorrect, in retrospect. There are also things that feel eerily prescient. Stephenson has always been that kind of wonderful science fiction writer, able to pull things together like that.

So hey, take an afternoon, and go read about the command line. Stanford has helpfully provided it online.

  1. Specifically, 36,329 words. How did I check that? With the wc command-line tool that Stephenson mentions — that is, in fact, the exact part of the essay where I went “I wonder how long this whole thing is?” ↩
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Review

“How To”

Randall Munroe

This book is an exercise in decontextualization. It’s what happens if you take a Roko’s Basilisk style AI and ask it questions; you get things that are technically correct answers, but have left out all the context of, broadly, “being a human.” And, as always with Munroe, it’s hilarious.

For a general idea of what the book is like, one of the early chapters is “how to throw a pool party,” and consists almost entirely of instructions on how to build a pool. Said instructions include notes about how thick you would have to make the walls of an above-ground pool so that the water doesn’t burst out—if you were using Gruyere as the wall-building material. As it explains how the best bet for rapidly filling a pool, ignoring all costs, is to order tens of thousands of plastic water bottles and an industrial shredder—conveniently, the industrial-grade ones include the ability to separate out plastic shreds from liquids, which is probably quite useful to recycling facilities, and in the case of filling a pool means you should install it backwards—there’s an aside about the fact that using an atomic bomb is not an effective way to open water bottles.1

There’s also some neat guest appearances; Chris Hadfield answers a great many questions about… let’s call it flying a plane, as that’s the inspiration for most of the questions. Serena Williams makes an appearance, demonstrating that in the event of the drone apocalypse, she doesn’t need to worry.2

As with all of his books, “How To” is a delight to read, and I highly recommend it. Check it out.3

  1. One of my favorite jokes used in the book is the repeated instances of “this is a ridiculous question, and so of course the United States military studied it during the Cold War.” ↩
  2. I spent the entire chapter with this tweet stuck in my head: Screenshot of a quote tweet. The original tweet, from YouGov, reads “One in eight men (12%) say they could win a point in a game of tennis against 23 time grand slam winner Serena Williams”. The quote tweet, from Jason, reads “Confident in my ability to properly tennis, I take the court. I smile at my opponent. Serena does not return the gesture. She'd be prettier if she did, I think. She serves. The ball passes cleanly through my skull, killing me instantly” ↩
  3. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“SPQR”

Mary Beard

Very much inspired by my reading of the history of the Byzantine Empire, I realized that I also don’t know much about the history of Rome aside from the bits that you pick up by cultural osmosis, growing up here in the West. Bookstores are great for things like this, where you don’t know what specifically you want to read, but you do know the general topic—just wander over to that section and browse, and see what catches your eye! Which is how I arrived at this book.

I mostly enjoyed the read. I filled five or six pages of a memo book with quotes as I was reading, things that stood out to me, which I somewhat did with the thought in mind of pulling some of them for writing this review, but now that I’m doing the writing, I don’t think I’m actually going to follow through on the idea. Suffice it to say, it was well-written, and generally an enjoyable read. Easier to read than Norwich’s work was, at least, aided in part by being a single volume instead of three, and thus feeling like more of a general overview than the curriculum notes for a four-year course of study.

The reason that I don’t want to go for my notebook, though, is that I have one main thought that I’ve kept circling around for the entire second half of the book: the study of history is not neutral. By studying, and teaching, and writing about history, we impose our own views upon it; we, as humans, are not able to view any objective truth. We are subjective creatures. And this thought kept circling around and around in my mind from the moment the word “friend” was used.

Friendship is a fine thing! Lots of people have friends, it’s one of those fundamental human experiences that historians should keep an eye out for. It is not, however, the only thing, and sometimes calling someone a ‘friend’ is a disservice. In this case, when the source material you are citing is a man referring to another man as his “same-gender partner”, discarding that in favor of “friend” is wrong. We have a word for that: erasure.

There is a reason that a through line in anti-LGBTQ sentiment is “these things didn’t used to exist,” and that reason isn’t that said things actually didn’t used to exist; it is that historians over the last couple of centuries have gone to great lengths to pretend they didn’t, to bury or destroy any evidence that they did. And yes, there is an argument to be made that we shouldn’t try to paint historical figures with our modern terminology—but then, that argument only seems to come up when we’re talking about whether or not a historical figure can be called queer.

Historians are, historically, extremely eager to find any possible heterosexual explanation for things, even when doing so requires extensive leaps in logic. Some of Shakespeare’s sonnets were written for men? Well, you see, back then cultural morays about how much affection men could platonically show other men were different. Alexander the Great was so distraught at the death of the man he loved that he demanded he be deified, and that when he himself died, he be buried in the same tomb? They were just the best of friends. President Buchanan was so visibly in a relationship with Senator King that their nicknames in DC were “Uncle Fancy and Aunt Nancy”? Say, is that is why my history classes sorta just didn’t talk about President Buchanan at all? Nevermind, don’t worry, there’s a perfectly straight explanation for this — it’s just gals being pals.

Once that thought was in my mind, it was hard to let go of it and not read this book in a queer-history light, and boy, does it ever not hold up well to that sort of inspection. The only clear mentions of homosexuality at all are a passing remark about a Senatorial insult being someone ‘enjoying nubile slave boys to an uncouth amount,’ and some mention of Hadrian—which is itself rather unavoidable when talking about Hadrian.1

So, here’s my summary: this is a good overview of Roman history, but it is, like all studies of history, flawed. It got me to break my usual “no writing in books” rule, and correct the word “friend” to “boyfriend” out of something akin to spite; but it also gave me pages of interesting quotes about Rome and the Empire, and taught me a great deal that I didn’t know. Plusses and minuses. It’s worth a read.2

  1. Although, having said that it’s unavoidable, I immediately noticed that the Wikipedia info-box on Hadrian lists three different burial sites for him, but somehow doesn’t have room for the name of the man he loved so much that he had thousands of statues carved in his image all across the Roman Empire, so, modern historians haven’t improved. ↩
  2. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“Test Driven Development by Example”

Kent Beck

‘By example’ books really aren’t my cup of tea—going back and forth between a book and the actual thing in order to follow along is too much overhead for either activity to work well, and just reading along without doing it myself leaves the book feeling rather anemic a lot of the time. That said, this book wasn’t terrible; I enjoyed Beck’s writing style throughout the whole first part, he did a good job livening it up with some personality so it didn’t feel like reading a WikiHow article. But where my interest really kicked in was in the third part, where it switched to more of a traditional Programming Book style, just dispensing a bunch of condensed advice.

There’s some good little tidbits in the earlier part, though; I think my favorite one was:

[Automated] tests are the Programmer’s Stone, transforming fear into boredom.

A great way to think about it! Write tests so that instead of worrying something will break as you continue working on it, you just go ‘meh, now I’ve gotta wait for the tests to run.’1

This was a quick read; if you’ve been doing some form of TDD, it probably won’t continua much that’s new, but it’s a nice way to get an overview. And if you aren’t doing TDD, go ahead and read it; as I said, it’s quick, and Beck makes a better case for TDD than I will in a single blog post. It’s available in the O’Reilly Library.

  1. Although, ideally, it’s not much of a wait – this is the benefit of unit tests, in particular, that you make them small and very quick to run, and with that you’re able to run the relevant segment of them after every change. ↩
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Review

“Confessions of a Recovering Engineer”

Charles L. Marohn, Jr.

Having quite liked the Strong Towns book and some of the YouTube channels based on it, I’ve had the sequel-of-sorts on my list for a while, and was finally able to get around to reading it. My overall review is “this is definitely an addendum to Strong Towns” – you can read it on its own, it goes to pretty solid lengths to reiterate material when it’s referencing it, but even with that it doesn’t particularly feel like it can stand on its own.

As a book, I think it’s fairly well-written; the use of a single street and a single incident as something to reference back to throughout is an effective device for centering the policy discussion.

Said policy discussion really comes down to two things. Firstly, that there should only be Roads and Streets — Roads being a thing focused on getting people from place to place quickly, and Streets being a place that people go to.1 The word/concept “stroad” comes up quite often in the book — a sort of painful middle ground, something trying to do both things and as a result doing both very poorly. Think of how you get to Best Buy, or Walmart, or any other big box store like that; clearly that’s meant to be a Road, because it’s a terrible place to walk around so it can’t be a Street… except it’s also pretty bad at driving on, because there’s people trying to turn onto or off of it, and probably a bunch of stoplights, and a general poor attempt at being a Road. Marohn makes a very good argument for abolishing these awkward things and forcing every piece of driving infrastructure to be either a Road or a Street, and then to be good at being what it is.

Which leads to the second point, and for this I’ll just use his own words:

T one safe, the street must communicate the real level of risk to the driver. In other words, the driver must feel discomfort driving in a manner that is unsafe. (40)

Or, more viscerally: when was the last time you went 45 on a narrow, technically-two-lane-but-for-the-people-parked, tree-lined, watch-out-for-the-kids-playing-basketball neighborhood street? Probably never, because doing 45 there feels deeply unsafe. You didn’t have to look for a speed limit sign to know that you should be going slowly; you can tell that the street does not want you going fast, and that if you try to go fast, you’re gonna have a bad time.

And that’s the design policy he advocates for. Our infrastructure is built around the idea of forgiving drivers for their mistakes… but once you account for human psychology, that means that drivers will make more mistakes, because they know they don’t have to pay as much attention.

And now, really, I’ve kinda spoiled the whole book. Those are the core arguments; everything else is filling in details or repeating points to drive them home. There’s a couple chapters at the end that felt like later additions, and in particular the one about his legal arguments with the state licensing board feels entirely out of place. The whole section on transport technologies is entirely too generous to Elon Musk, but then, at the time this was written, his reality distortion field hadn’t failed yet, so we were all a bit more forgiving.

One last pull-quote, though, to which I’ll add emphasis, because I thought it was a really great way to discuss some of the issues with policing in the US.

Police target areas they perceive as high crime. When they discover criminal activity, which they inevitably do given the approach, it reinforces the initial perception. There is no control group receiving equally aggressive policing to create comparable statistics. (195)

An excellent point about sampling bias, at the end of a chapter that’s a pretty good quick overview of everything wrong with the ‘routine traffic stop’ as a concept.

Overall, this is a pretty good read; go for the first one first, and if you’re still interested in more, give it a read.2

  1. Interestingly, this concept can be broadened – I quite liked his discussion of how transit options like trains and planes are a form of road, whereas, say, a cruise ship is a street. Feels weird to say, but within this framework, it fits! ↩
  2. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“The Tenth Island”

Diana Marcum

“Travel” is a new book genre to me, and it may be a dangerous one, because about 2/3 of the way through I finally sighed and admitted to myself that I now want to visit the Azores, and added them to the list. Helpfully, I’ve even got a few notes about where specifically to go and what things might be good to visit. Broadly speaking, as described in the book, the Azores are something like Hawaii, but with the old-world European cultural flavor. There was a remark at one point about “in the village where I was staying, the garbage truck was pulled by a mule,” is the idea.

As a book, I found this a good read; Marcum did a really good job of bouncing back and forth between her life and the experience of being in the Azores, and provided a great deal of historical context, as well. It makes a lot of sense when you consider her background as a journalist; the Pulitzer win just locks that feeling in.

There’s a lot of short chapters, which makes for a good bit of light reading, and quite often there’s a good little life lesson or memorable moment tucked in there to end them. A collection of vignettes, rather than a single long narrative. It works well! And who doesn’t love little bits of advice, like:

When traveling, one should forget constant exploration. Go back to the same spots. You’ll be recognized as a familiar face and you’ll discover more.

It was a fun read, nice and light, and I enjoyed it. Check it out!1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“What If? 2”

Randall Munroe

One of the tropes of the internet that I really enjoy is the concept of “relevant xkcd”. As it turns out, when you spend nearly two decades publishing three comics a week, you wind up covering a staggering variety of topics, to the point that pretty much any topic will have a relevant xkcd to link to. And, in thinking about that, I’m amazed all over again at Randall Munroe’s work; there is so much xkcd. Thousands of comics… and they aren’t always stick figure things, a few times a year it’ll some sort of complex piece of software, or a gigantic world to explore, or some other exploration of what a “webcomic” really is in light of the technology of the web.

Anyhow, that’s all a digression, because in the spare time he’s apparently got from all of the above, he’s also had time to write a couple books, and all the ones I’ve read are delightful. A couple years later, I’m back to report on the sequel of the last one I reviewed, and it’s… exactly what the title implies. More “absurd hypothetical questions,” answered with a great deal of research. “Can a person eat a whole cloud?” Well, that depends — are you squeezing the air out first? If so, you can! If not, definitely no, and you may actually wind up dehydrated amidst a larger cloud than you started with.

It’s all things like that, and it really shows that Munroe is, in his way, a very effective science communicator. This feels like a great book to give to a curious kid to encourage that curiosity, and get them to ask some really interesting questions in class.1 It’s a delight, and, in the truest sense, fun for all ages. I absolutely loved this book; give it a read.2

  1. And, based on the notes in some of the questions submitted, a great many of those will quickly be directed back to Munroe, for a continuation of the series. ↩
  2. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“The John McPhee Reader”

John McPhee

To date, The Control of Nature remains my favorite McPhee book, and the one I’m most likely to recommend to a new reader, but this is a very strong contender. It is, as the title implies, something of a sampler platter of his work; subsections of a variety of pieces, and as a result, covering a far broader topic area than any of his other books. The books are usually more focused, tied around a single theme; in this one, that single theme is John McPhee.

It’s a broader swathe of his work than I’ve read before; if you skim through what I’ve read of his in the past, it definitely has that naturalist perspective locked in, but I haven’t spent time with his “focus on a single person” type things, or his sports coverage. It’s an interesting change of pace; I don’t really expect I’m going to dive into those as much as I have the outdoors, but I won’t go out of my way to avoid it, either.1

One part really captured me, and immediately added a book to my wish list: the excerpt from The Curve of Binding Energy. Somehow I hadn’t yet found out that he did an entire piece on the progenitor of Project Orion. My favorite nonfiction author, writing about one of my favorite topics? Sign me up.

Overall, I continue to love everything McPhee wrote. I’ve got another of his books in my queue, but I’m deliberately holding off on it, trying to space them out. If I haven’t yet convinced you to read some of his work, give this one a try; it is, like I said, a great introduction to his writing.2

  1. And I figure I will eventually read his entire oeuvre, it does seem to be what I’m working my way towards at this point. ↩
  2. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“Urban Trails: Portland”

Eli Boschetto

This was something of an impulse buy, but in the spirit of something I’ve been trying to do more of lately: ‘be a tourist in your own city.’ Get out and explore, find new things that you didn’t know about, generally just get yourself out your ruts.

Now, I’m aware that this post is going up at maybe not the best time of year for being outdoors in the Pacific Northwest, but that’s not a permanent state of affairs, and it’s a perfectly reasonable time to start putting together a todo list for nicer weather. And hey, some people are into the rainy-and-cold outdoorsmanship!1

Regardless, this was a fun read, and I’ve definitely taken notes for areas I’d like to explore myself. I also had the chance to do some of the exploring already—as I’m writing this, it’s the afternoon of a day where I spent the morning wandering around Hoyt Arboretum, entirely on the recommendation of this book. It’s a good little piece of reference material, and I recommend it!2 I’m also looking at another book by the same publisher about biking in Portland, because the mentions of biking in this one are something of an afterthought.

  1. I am not one of those people, but I’m told they exist. ↩
  2. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“97 Things Every Programmer Should Know”

ed. Kevlin Henney

Reviewing a “collected wisdom” book like this is rather difficult, as not only is there not a single plot line throughout it, there’s not even a single core idea to it. It is, in fact, 97 core ideas, each told in a couple of pages. Which does make it easy to pick up and put down, and read in fits and starts. The quality and relevancy of the advice varied, although not in precisely the way you’d expect—there’s a fair few that, with what they referenced, felt very dated but gave advice that remains useful, and then there were a couple that felt dated and gave dated advice. Itself a useful reminder that, for all the field likes being the latest and greatest, newest shiniest, age does not mandate that a piece of wisdom has grown less useful over time.

So hey, the book club at work continues to provide interesting books to read, and this was another one. Give it a read – you can pick up a physical copy1 or read it online through the O’Reilly library.

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“The Velvet Rage”

Alan Downs

Somehow I thought this book was a history of the gay rights movement, and I didn’t so much as read the subtitle to disabuse myself of that notion, so once I got into the book proper, it was a heck of surprise. Although, really, “the book proper” is the wrong way to put it, because, out of everything, I found the preface to be maybe the most powerful part. It certainly made for an effective hook!

For the majority of gay men who are out of the closet, shame is no longer felt. What was once a feeling has become something deeper and more sinister in our psyches—it is a deeply and rigidly held belief in our own unworthiness for love. We were taught by the experience of shame during those tender and formative years of adolescence that there was something about us that was flawed, in essence unlovable, and that we must go about the business of making ourselves lovable if we are to survive.

It was at about this point in the book—you know, a handful of pages into the preface, not even the introduction yet, that I realized I may have been wrong about what the topic of the book was.

Very few of us feel the shame, but almost all of us struggle with the private belief that “if you really knew the whole, unvarnished truth about me, you would know that I am unlovable.” It is this belief that pushes us, even dominates us with its tyranny of existential angst. In our own way, young and old alike, we set about the business of “earning” love, and escaping the pain of believing we are unlovable. It is this damned quest that pushes us to the highest of highs, and simultaneously brings us to the brink. This is both the creator of the fabulous gay man and his destroyer.

The thing that it brings to mind most, for me, is my favorite article of political coverage I have ever read—that description of Pete Buttigieg as the Best Little Boy In The Whole World. And it really is the same concept:

What would you like me to be? A great student? A priest in the church? Mother’s little man? The first-chair violinist? We became dependent on adopting the skin our environment imposed upon us to earn the love and affection we craved. How could we love ourselves when everything around us told us that we were unlovable? Instead, we chased the affection, approval, and attention doled out by others.

I’ve selected quotes, almost exclusively, from the preface. It was unquestionably the most powerful part of the book, and, again, an immensely effective hook. Which isn’t to say that the remainder of the book had no value—it’s just less quotable, and less immediately impactful. It’s a great example of one of the key points the book makes, actually: here’s the problem, and here’s the much more drawn-out solution. As with most things, solving the problem is a lot harder than just identifying it, and is the sort of thing that takes lots of small changes over a long time.

All in all, I am very glad I read this book. It opens with so accurate a summary of the gay experience that, as I said to someone, “I thought I was going to read this book, but instead it read me.” Or, to go with the more memeable syntax, the text message I sent to someone with the first quote, above: “this book walked into my living room and shot me”

If any of the quotes above hit for you like they did for me, go read this book.1 Right now. There’s no immediate, change-your-life-by-snapping-your-fingers advice in there… but 1% better, every day, adds up real fast. Or, as the last line of the book says:

I invite you to consider making a change for the better.

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“Byzantium: The Decline and Fall”

John Julius Norwich

I do like this bit from the epilogue, as Norwich sums up the various rulers the empire had over its 1,100-odd years of existence:

Of those eight-eighty [emperors], a few – Constantine himself, Justinian, Heraclius, the two basils, Alexius Comnenus – possessed true greatness; a few – Phocas, Michael III, Zoe and the Angeli – were contemptible; the vast majority were brave, upright, God-fearing, unimaginative men who did their best, with greater or lesser degrees of success.

Just the word “unimaginative” in there really got to me. What a painful legacy to leave!

It is, though, pretty fitting. A lot of the events of this book boil down to “and then something else went wrong, which would’ve been quite manageable if the Emperor had been slightly better at being Emperor.” Though, admittedly, there’s also a whole lot of them where the “would’ve been quite manageable” leads instead to “if the Who’s Who of Constantinople could’ve taken a break for one month from squabbling with each other in order to keep the Empire from slowly dissolving.” So much of the decline of the Byzantine Empire feels like a testament to selfishness. The Emperor is off trying to consolidate the recapture of some of the critical agricultural heartland of the empire? Sure, that’s probably important and all, but it also means he’s distracted, and now’s your chance to stab him in the back!

I think I’ll place this book at second place of the trilogy; the first was just overwhelming, the second did a better job at storytelling, and the third did an even better job at telling the story… but by this point in history, it was a really depressing story. That said, if you want to read about the slow decline of the Byzantine Empire, this is a pretty solid way to do so, and you’re welcome to give it a try.1

  1. This is an Amazon affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I prefer Bookshop affiliate links to Amazon when possible, but in this case, the book wasn’t available there, so it’ll have to do. ↩
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Review

“Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion”

Robert B Cialdini

Another one from the book club at work! I think this is the one I’ve enjoyed least so far, frankly. It reminds me of some of the pop psychology books I’ve read, though somewhat better-researched—which makes sense, I suppose, given that Cialdini is a name you’ll see a lot if you’re looking through academic papers in this field. Where the book falls down for me, though, is that it feels like Cialdini hasn’t really considered some of the implications of his work as well as he should. Then again, I’m coming at that thought with the perspective of someone living in 2023, and the original version of this was published in, like, 1980something.

The key point where that thought coalesced for me was the chapter on authority. It’s a long discussion of the impact of authority on how we think about someone’s trustworthiness, but it somehow gets through that entire discussion without ever seeming to acknowledge the concept of a power differential. One of the key examples he cites is a study about how well people listen to someone telling them to stand in a slightly different place on the street. Some low percentage listen if it’s a random person asking that; a higher percentage listen if it’s someone in a security guard’s uniform asking. Which is, sure, something of a useful data point, but he just stops there. Do a follow-up study with different uniforms! Use something other than a security uniform—do people listen if they’re in a paramedic’s outfit? Scrubs? One of those airline pilot hats? Y’know, any uniform that doesn’t carry all the cultural baggage of “this is a person somewhat trained to and distinctly more likely to apply violence as a solution to their problems.” Is it really the uniform that made people listen, or is it the implicit threat of that specific uniform?

Similarly, people are apparently more cautious driving behind a luxury car than an “economy” model. Cialdini attributes that to the aura of authority inherent in the luxury car, but again, is it an “aura of authority,” or is it the background knowledge of who’s likely to be driving that? If you get in a fender-bender with someone driving an economy car, it’s one thing; someone driving a $200,000 Porsche, though, has the implicit weight of “they can afford a lawyer and I can’t.”

Beyond that, I feel like Cialdini didn’t do enough to dissuade people from misusing the techniques he discusses. There’s the apparent disgust with people using them as sales techniques, but it never feels like he truly considers them being used for anything worse. And, here in 2023, that feels… deeply naïve. Hindsight, as they say, is 20/20.

Still, it’s an interesting overview of the psychology of persuasion, and I did appreciate that there’s a bit towards the end of each chapter discussing how to try to immunize yourself to the technique, so it may be useful. It’s worth skimming through, at least.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Review

“Table of Contents”

John McPhee

I’ve got quite the McPhee collection going, at this point; from the visual of the bookshelf, I think the only authors I have more of are Diane Duane and Tamora Pierce.1

A couple pieces in here that reminded me of “Control of Nature”—“Riding the Boom Extension” and “Minihydro” were both about people building infrastructure, though on a much smaller scale than usual.

There’s also a couple pieces that just felt like a great explanation of what John McPhee is right. The start and end of the book, even; we’ve got “Under the Snow,” which includes this great quote:

I was there by invitation, an indirect result of work I had been doing nearby. Would I be busy on March 14th? If there had been a conflict—if, say, I had been invited to lunch on that day with the Queen of Scotland and the King of Spain—I would have gone to the cubs. (Under the Snow, 4)

And doesn’t that just show his priorities? And then, ending the book with the story of meeting his fellow John McPhee—no, I will not elaborate—he’s also got some good lines:

On the ground as well as in the air, he does indeed some most in his element when he is out in the big woods, where he spends nearly all his wiring time and a good bit of whatever remains—“out in the williwags,” as he refers to the backcountry. A williwag, apparently, is a place so remote it can be reached only by first going through a boondock. (North of the C.P. Line, 256)

The largest one, the centerpiece of the book, was where I wanted to recommend this to a couple people I know. I’ll wait until they’ve finished med school, though, and have a bit more time for reading, although the contents of “Heirs of General Practice” may actually be a useful read when trying to decide on a focus.

Lastly, for me to mention at least, “Ice Pond” includes some names I recognize from prior research on different topics, and introduced a fascinating idea. I’ve seen discussion of thermal batteries—both the newfangled kind where you use silicates or molten salts to store heat, and the less-fancy kind where you use an insulated tank to store a lot of hot water until you need a lot of hot water.2 What was a new idea to me was building an inverse thermal battery, where you bank cold during the winter and use it over the course of the spring and summer. Fascinating idea!

As ever, I adore John McPhee’s writing, and I highly recommend it. Maybe not the best work of his to start with, but if I’ve sold you on his work before, give it a go!3

  1. This isn’t counting ebooks, of course, where my near-exhaustive collection of Discworld books gives Terry Pratchett a pretty unassailable lead. ↩
  2. Yes, your water heater is a thermal battery! See this video for a long explanation of how that works, and this one for some discussion of why that’s a super useful way to think about it as we try to electrify more and more of our homes. ↩
  3. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Review

“Plutopia”

Kate Brown

I’ve always had an interest in the technological arms race of the Cold War, which fits right alongside my interest in infrastructure. And, as with every other aspect of technological arms race, the nuclear technology race was ridiculous; where it differs is in the degree. Cyborg cat to spy on the other side? Ridiculous. Space race? Very cool, some actually good civilian uses, conceptually ridiculous if you didn’t grow up knowing it’s possible to put stuff in orbit.

Deliberately creating tons upon tons of one of the most toxic substances known to mankind, and in the process creating other incredibly toxic substances in amounts that render massive areas uninhabitable for tens of thousands of years? That’s not just ridiculous, that is obscene.

Plutopia focuses on that—the two cities, Richland, Washington, and Ozersk, Chelyabinsk Oblast, that were built around the production of plutonium. And boy howdy, does nobody look good in this story; the similarities in mistakes made would be comic, if it wasn’t a tragedy that’s going to be screwing over our great^100-grandchildren. In addition to just about everyone involved from the time the cities were founded onward.

Two anecdotes stand out in my mind. First, in what reminds me of the Uber business model, a fun fact: the third-worst radiological disaster in human history officially listed zero casualties from the cleanup. Pause for effect. Because the USSR only tracked the health outcomes of paid employees working on the cleanup, which effectively meant they were only worrying about the people managing the people doing the cleanup work. Hey, careful handing out those orders, pal, you don’t want to get any of the radioactive waste on yourself!1

Second one, which immediately feels like fodder for HBO to do a second season of Chernobyl:

A week after the explosion, radiologists followed the cloud to the downwind villages, where they found people living normally, children playing barefoot. They measured the ground, farm tools, animals, and people. The levels of radioactivity were astonishingly high. S. F. Osotin, a monitor, remembered that a colleague went up to the children and held up his Geiger counter. He said, “I can tell with this instrument exactly how much porridge you had for breakfast.” The children happily stuck out their bellies, which ticked at forty to fifty microroentgens a second. The technicians stepped back, shocked. The kids had become radioactive sources.

Overall, this book fascinated me. And horrified me! But I grew up downstream of Hanford, and this is apparently just the world we live in now, so what else can you do? Better to be informed, I suppose. Check it out.2

  1. Don’t get all patriotic about this, my fellow Americans—the Hanford site did the same thing in their statistics, as well as a repeated trend of calling anything other than “died of their skin melting off” or “died of a thyroid full of radiation” a death not caused by radiation. Grew up drinking from the aquifer that the high level waste pond was seeping into, got cancer of the everything at 20? Unrelated, we assure you. ↩
  2. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩