From 98203494c951d755683635ca1e007e208ae251f9 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Bryan Newbold Date: Thu, 5 Sep 2019 12:52:59 -0700 Subject: film and books updates --- books/2019.page | 86 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 86 insertions(+) (limited to 'books/2019.page') diff --git a/books/2019.page b/books/2019.page index 8b8b446..762e1bf 100644 --- a/books/2019.page +++ b/books/2019.page @@ -80,3 +80,89 @@ Overall well written and different. During and after I keep thinking of this as young-adult or genre entertainment reading; there's more to it than that, but also less than more traditional adult literature. + +Energy by Richard Rhodes (201?) +-------------------------------- + +After "Making of the Atomic Bomb", a bit of a narrative disapointment, though +it is just a different sort of book. Felt like a series of snapshots, none deep +enough to feel like I really understood the course and pressures that lead to +success of different energy technologies. + +An over-arching theme was that ideas were had well before acceptance; it was +often a combination of small technical polish *and* external economic or +political changes that led to a new source being adopted. + +Narrative of coal, steam engine, and trains being intertwined was interesting: +coal nominally being used as a heating source, but required engines for +economical mining and transport; the engines themselves requiring cheap coal to +be worth developing. And along the way land-use regulation being a blocker. + +Surprising to hear how much the negative health impacts of fossil fuels were +known from the begining, and how bad the (local) environmental impacts were. +The global impact gets so much more attention today. The period belief from the +start that oil and coal reserves would run out. How poor Saudi Arabia was, and +how narrowly the kingdom survived by oil exploration taking off at just the +right moment. + +Part of what makes Niagra such a great power location is that the lake it +drains is a huge buffer of stored water (thus energy), and the flow rate can be +controlled at will (no flooding). More than a year of reserve water at full +full (including the fact that water level would be decreasing). + +Didn't know that religious minorities on Nantucket partially moved back to +Europe at some point to continue to pursue whaling. + + +Roadside Picnic +------------------ + +Oh, I really loved this. Very Russian. Explains "Stalker" the same way "2001: A +Space Odessy" makes sense if you read the script/narration. + +The informal/intimate stalkers against the official/institutional scientists +were so spot-on. This pattern doesn't always hold in sci/tech world, but it is +pretty common. + + +Devil and the White City by Eric Larson +------------------------------------------- + +Decent, easy flight reading. Focus on the serial killer thread is of course +only on the principle actors, but in the case of the fair, the focus on a +handful of leaders and planners was less compelling. + +The scale of the Fair as a singular and super-human event really comes through. +Will this sort of economic activity and make-work become more popular during +late capitalism? Or post-scarcity? I continue to be perplexed why the scale of +architecture gets less ambitious as society becomes more technically powerful; +was it really dependent on economic inequality and exploitation of labor? Don't +we have that again today? + +The background of economic recession, homelessness, and desparation against the +robber barons funding and directing the World's Faire seemed like the real +story and didn't get much coverage in depth. + +Combined with "Cadillac Desert", paints a story of agricultural development of +the American mid-west as an economic and policy tragedy of the same +incompetence as Soviet/Mao-ist economic planning, though of course far less of +a tragedy in the end as most were able to survive and freely relocated. + + +The Overstory by Richard Powers +-------------------------------- + +Decent, not spectacular. Most of the individual story threads would not have +stood well on their own. The tree protectors were the most compelling to me: +the aimless artist with a family flipbook of great tree growth, and the +near-death college dropout. The various endings are pretty dramatic. + +Had echos of "The Wizard and the Prophet". + + +Gandhi +---------- + +Easy read; very basic introduction to the person and this period in history. +Read because even this much I did not know! + -- cgit v1.2.3