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 A Vast Machine
 -----------------
 
+Didn't entirely finish this book (it's laid out in sections like a textbook);
+was mostily interested in the earlier history bits.
+
+There's a great annecdote about an early computational weather prediction
+researcher who had a vision for a giant spherical building full of human
+computers calculating away and passing messages to their neighbors. A central
+panopticon-like tower would shine red and blue lights at different section to
+emphasize whether they were falling behind or getting ahead of the group.
+
 Shadow Libraries
 -------------------
+
+Read the libgen history chapter, which was very interesting, but only skimmed
+the rest. An academic book, so really just a bunch of case study papers
+published in the same volume. Any sort of comparison or cohesion between parts
+would be really valuable
+
+The libgen chapter complements John Backus' 2018 essays about the history of
+P2P file sharing techniques well.
+
+100 Years of Solitude
+----------------------
+
+Maybe should have read ages ago, but particularly loved it now. I remember not
+liking mystical realism when reading in school, but there's a dark ambiguity
+here that worked for me, particularly in the later chapters about the
+government massacre.
+
+Control of Nature
+-------------------
+
+John McPhee always delivers! It was great fun to travel to LA (and specifically
+Pasadena) just after reading the slide-control section.
+
+The Mississipi river part paired well with both "The Wizard and the Prophet"
+and "Cadillac Desert" (see below). Haven't finished the Iceland section.
+
+The Wizard and the Prophet
+----------------------------
+
+This book takes a too-large question (whether humans can master nature using
+science and technology) and oversimplifies down to two historical figures:
+Borlaug (a techno-wizard) and Voght (an ecologic Cassandra). The structure is
+largely in two parts: the first half tells the unlikely backstories of the two,
+and the second half documents their decline in face of political reality.
+
+The human stories in the first part stood up best for me; I don't have too much
+patience for dichotomy, but the author lets their contemporaneous life stories
+do most of the heavy lifting. There's no specific vision to be inspired by or
+new deep insight proposed here, but that's fine as long as you aren't expecting
+one.
+
+The Perfect Machine
+----------------------
+
+The long story of construction of the 200" Palomar telescope between 1928 and
+1948 or so.
+
+Some choice bits:
+
+- In the late stage of "figuring" (polishing to a parabola) the primary mirror,
+  opticians would use just a swipe or two of their thumbs (with
+  abrasive/resistive material) to "grind" the mirror. Similarly, touching the
+  mirror with a finger for a few seconds is enough to locally heat and distort
+  the glass.
+- The original control system for the dome shutters used a tiny model of the
+  whole telescope inside the control panel, with limit switches that would
+  control dome movement.
+- famously, when originally balanced and gears disengaged, a bottle of milk
+  could be placed on the mount and that was sufficient torque that the whole
+  thing would move. The fine adjustment equitorial drive was a fraction of a
+  horsepower.
+- the lead optician who ground the disk, "Brownie", work on grinding for more
+  than 11 years (with a gap for WWII), and when complete "signed" by scratching
+  his name into the central gap
+- a crazy fat solution was used to clean the mirror before aluminizing;
+  burning/boiling this solution off removed any other (eg, human skin) oil or
+  grease). I'm curious how they got the aluminum surface off without damaging
+  the mirror, and also how the aluminization worked to get an even deposition
+  layer; were there multiple heated points?
+
+There are archival videos online from construction.
+
+Kitchen Confidential
+---------------------
+
+Gulped this down in a single Keflavik-SFO return flight; a friend was on the
+same flight and apparently I was so engrossed I didn't even notice him. Boudain
+has become an almost universally beloved international food figure, which
+somehow made me suspicious and distrustful at first. And indeed, this book left
+me with the impression that he is, or at least was, not a fundamentally good
+person (and not just as an assumed persona), but in the end I buy his frank
+self-reflection act hook, line, and sinker.
+
+I certainly came away with the impression that I now know more about
+restauranteering and what industrial cooking is like, though maybe I just had
+smoke blown up my ass.
+
+The verison I read was some kind of special aniversery edition, which had
+sharpie-style commends scrawled in the margins, which was a gimick I liked
+better than the name-dropping appologetic epilog.
+
+Cadillac Desert
+-----------------
+
+*Loved* listening to the first chapters of this while driving back and forth
+across the Central Valley to hike in the Sierras; hat-tip to Logan. Replayed
+that experience with Lucy, including down Owens Valley via Mammoth Lakes, but
+by the time we got to I-5 the going was too dry for her.
+