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The Doomsday Machine, by Daniel Ellsberg
--------------------------------------------
First half is a personal narrative of Ellsberg's investigations into nuclear
command and control and general war planning issues, particularly in the pre-
and early ICBM period (when the Soviets has very few ICBMs, but many US leaders
thought they had thousands), up to the Cuban missle crisis.
Second half is a history, starting before WW2, of how "strategic bombing"
developed as the status quo of large scale warfare (at least by the USA and
allies), cumulating in the normalization of strategic nuclear bombing
infrastructure.
"Fire insurance executives, who were experts in averting the spread of fires
(to keep rates down), proved inventive in advising how to reverse that
process. American economists [...] came to London air headquarters as experts
in how an economy worked, how it hung together and what its nodes of
interdependence or bottlenecks were, and thus how it could be dismanteled by
bombing. This gradually merged with the unacknowledged quest of Bomber Command:
how to destroy a city." (p252)
"Sam, war is killing people. When you kill enough of them, the other guy quits"
-- Curtis LeMay
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.
New word: eleemosynary: of, or relating to, or dependent on charity
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.
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