CapitalistImperialistPig

I suppose that I've always been a bit of a sucker for the big book. War and Peace , Moby Dick , and The Brothers Karamazov made big impressions in my youth. I let myself be talked into buying The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ring before heading to a remote Army post in Arizona - but I wasn't about to lay about big bucks to buy the whole series. I quickly devoured those while in the temporary barracks there when another soldier arrived fresh from Vietnam, where he had only had The Two Towers , so a trade was quickly arranged. I still like the big books, but my tastes have changed a bit. Gravity's Rainbow , Infinite Jest , Ulysses , and Atlas Shrugged dimmed my enthusiasm for modern fiction. I have, however, acquired way too many thick physics and astrophysics books. Gravitation , AKA "The Black Hole", by Misner, Thorne and Wheeler is a familiar heavyweight at 1336 large format pages. Not one to rest on his laurels, Thorne teamed up with Blandford ...

I've started reading Yuval Noah Harari's book, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. He opens with some observations on how radically the world has changed in the last century or so. For most of the history of civilization, famine and plague cut huge swaths through populations. About 2.8 million French – 15 per cent of the population – starved to death between 1692 and 1694, while the Sun King, Louis XIV, was dallying with his mistresses in Versailles. Harari, Yuval Noah. Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (p. 4). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition. This was far from an isolated event. Even higher casualty rates afflicted Finland, Scotland, and Estonia at the time. Dozens of such catastrophic famines killed at similar rates in the much larger populations of China and India. Plague was equally catastrophic. The Black Death killed 25% of the population of Eurasia. The diseases carried by European explorers killed 90% of the population of the Americas and similar pe...

Well I've done it again - inhaled a 400 page Murakami novel in less that 24 hours. Why can't I read physics books like that? Dance, Dance, Dance concerns the further adventures of the narrator of Hear the Wind Sing, Pinball, and A Wild Sheep Chase. Here he sets off to find the long vanished girlfriend from Sheep Chase and curious characters enter the picture, including an old acquaintance who has become a famous actor, a thirteen year-old clairvoyant with famous and wealthy but incompetent parents, The Sheepman from Chase, a host of call girls and others who disappear or turn up dead. Because this is Murakami, paranormal stuff happens. Murakami is a terrific writer, and I loved this book despite the fact that I normally have no patience for paranormal goings on. Murakami's formidable erudition on music, culture, and much else combined with his eagle eye for character and setting make this joy, as do his vivid and witty descriptions. Incidentally, his characters, a...

During the 1950s, SAC commander Curtis LeMay and the US Air Force became absorbed in the idea of a preventive war against the Soviet Union. Eisenhower had specifically rejected the idea, but LeMay engaged in tactics that some considered designed to provoke such a war, in particular, repeated overflights of Russia with various US spy planes. Such flights apparently cost at least 20 planes and the lives of about 100 aviators - some of whom went to the Gulag. One of LeMay’s US reconnaissance crews remembered flying a B-47 deep into the USSR on May 8, 1954, and taking damage from a MiG-17. The mission made it back to England leaking fuel. LeMay ordered the crew to the US, the pilot, Hal Austin, recalled many years later: [LeMay] said, “I tried to get you guys a Silver Star,” but he said “you gotta explain that to Congress and everybody else in Washington . . . so here’s a couple of [Distinguished Flying Crosses] we’ll give you for that mission.” There wasn’t anybody in the room except ...

The downfall of Oppenheimer has the flavor of a Greek tragedy, but his persecutors were Americans, some naturalized and some born here. From The New York Review of Books: The man who provided the argument and the occasion was William Liscum Borden, a single-minded young zealot who thought he knew why Oppenheimer resisted Air Force demands for hydrogen bombs—“more probably than not,” Borden wrote the head of the FBI in November 1953, “J. Robert Oppenheimer is an agent of the Soviet Union.” But neither could have managed Oppenheimer’s destruction without the help of the obsessed H-bomb promoter Edward Teller, who had never forgiven Oppenheimer for choosing another man to run the theoretical division at Los Alamos, who dreamed of replacing Oppenheimer as the protean man of the hour, and who nursed matters forward as he methodically planted seeds of suspicion in the minds of Borden, Strauss, and Air Force generals that Oppenheimer’s “faulty judgment” could be traced to hidden loyalties...

Stan Ulam and Edward Teller invented the approach to making an thermonuclear bomb that turned out to work. Ulam's idea was using the hydrodynamic shock produced by a fission bomb to compress the fusion materials. Teller improved that idea by using the radiation pressure (rather than hydrodynamic pressure) to do the compression. Teller, who had been the tireless advocate of the H-bomb and spent many years on an idea that didn't work, didn't want to share credit. Edward Teller seems to have found it intolerable that someone might share credit for the historic invention on which he had been working single-mindedly for almost ten years; he moved immediately to take over the technical breakthrough and make it his own. After he and Ulam issued their joint report, Françoise Ulam observes, “my impression is that from then on Teller pushed Stan aside and refused to deal with him any longer. He never met or talked with Stan meaningfully ever again. Stan was, I felt, more wounded ...

A few weeks ago I ordered a brick from Amazon. Actually, it was a book, but it would make a pretty good brick, at least in heft (4.4 lbs). A couple of weeks ago I wrote about its peregrinations here. Having now received that selfsame brick, I wanted to document its itinerary. It was written by an American author and published and printed in the United States. Somehow it made its way to a bookstore in London, UK. I ordered it from Amazon, taking the cheapest price for a new book. From London, after a decent interval, it flew to Compton, California, perhaps for the purpose of enjoying a bit of West Coast rap. Straight Outta Compton, it flew over me to a location near Dallas, in Texas. From there, it made its way the thousand or so miles back to me in Las Cruces by US mail, arriving yesterday. It looks lovely, and not a bit worse for the wear due to its 13,000 or so miles of travel. It is interesting to me that such a roundabout route could provide the cheapest price. Comment...

For countless generations we survived only as members of a family and an intimate community. Prying us loose from that embrace was a difficult enterprise, but the state and the market managed it. Their magic selling point: romantic individualism. Discuss.

I've been reading Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild . Hochschild is a highly regarded sociologist who specializes in close up looks at groups of people who might be unfamiliar to many of us. Here she ventures into the heart of Tea Party country in Lake Charles, Louisiana. She prepped for the trip, she tells us, by rereading Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged , which is something of a Bible for the Tea Party founders. That alone tells me that her pain tolerance is a heck of a lot higher than mine. The area around Lake Charles is densely packed with petrochemical plants and has been devastated by pollution. Some of the nation's most productive rivers and estuaries used to be here, but many of them have now been killed by the deadly flood of chemicals. Hoschschild wanted to get a look into the mind of the Tea Party, and thought the pollution issue, which has devastated many, might be what she calls a "keyhole...

A Chinese visitor to Samarkand in the century before the Arab invasion wrote in his notes the following observation on young people there: “All the inhabitants [of Samarkand] are brought up to be traders. When a young boy reaches the age of five they begin to teach him to read, and when he is able to read they make him study business.”1 Another Chinese visitor, equally astonished, observed that young Central Asian men were not allowed to participate in trading trips abroad until they were twenty, prior to which time they were expected to be absorbed in study and training.2 These observant contemporaries enable us to understand something very important about the lost world of Central Asia before the Arab conquest: the high level of literacy that prevailed there. The mass destruction of books and documents carried out by the Arabs leaves us particularly dependent on the reports of outsiders like these. Starr, S. Frederick. Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia's Golden Age from the Ara...

Michael Lewis is one of our finest non-fiction writers, and any book of his is well worth reading. His subjects are drawn from areas one might not suspect of being of general interest - markets and sports. He has the ability to find the telling human detail and combine that with deep insight into general phenomena. Three of his books have been made into successful movies: Moneyball , The Blind Side , and The Big Short . Not bad for books ostensibly about, respectively, baseball statistics, the importance of offensive left tackles in football, and the great crash of 2007. Lewis's latest book, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds , was inspired, he says, by a review of Moneyball by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein , two University of Chicago colleagues of President Obama who led the introduction into economics and law of the ideas originating from two Israeli psychologists, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. He begins with a story about basketball and the kind...

Ruth Graham of Slate asks the question : is it gauche to display books that you aren't going to read? Well I do have a lot of books on my shelves (and in boxes in my garage, and in my office, on the bedside table, in the bathroom, and in closets here and there). It's also true that many of them have many unread pages. I have a couple of copies of blue Jackson and a couple of green Jackson, and I've only worked about three dozen of the problems. Of course one of those copies is actually my son's, who doesn't actually like books. (That's also true of one of my copies of MTW and a few other physics books). I think that I can honestly say that I've never bought a book for myself that I didn't intend to read, and in fact still usually intend to read. Given my age and declining intellect, most of them, I fear, will not get read. Graham leads with an exchange from our modern cultural arbiters, a couple of Kardashians: Kris: “I’m obsessed with books rig...

Eric H. Cline's book tells of the thriving civilization of the late Bronze Age Mediterranean and its catastrophic decline. From 1500 BCE to 1200 BCE thriving international trade among the empires created a cosmopolitan civilization with high art, and a vast trading network. The years following 1207 saw empires fall and become depopulated, written records disappear in many places, cities burned and abandoned, and evidence of widespread trade disappear or greatly diminish. It would take another three centuries before comparable conditions returned. So what happened? There are plenty of theories: earthquakes, invasions, internal collapse, disruption of trade, or even some butterfly flapping catastrophe best explained by complexity theory. Each of these theories has some support. There were earthquakes, and some cities broken by them. Large groups of peoples were on the move, and battles fought and cities destroyed amidst the evidence of war. In some cities, only the elite por...

I have taken to buying used textbooks, partly on the grounds that I'm too old to invest in new ones. Of course I'm also too old to invest in any advanced math textbook, but that's another problem. In any case, I've become interested in the story these books tell, or at least the story told by the page edges. My latest is a copy of Kreysig's Introductory Functional Analysis, a ridiculous $140 for the crappy paperback version. My hardcover was much cheaper. The tale of the page edges says that the original owner probably made it through only about 10 pages. Most physicists are probably familiar with Jackson's Classical Electrodynamics , a major early test for most US physics grad students (though it's junior year fare at Caltech, and probably some other elite schools). I used to work with a truly wizardly physicist turned antenna designer, and I recall that at one point he brought out his copy of Jackson. It would be a severe understatement to state th...

Kerson Huang's Fundamental Forces of Nature: The Story of Gauge Fields is one of the rare examples a semi-popular physics book with lots of equations. It tells the story of the gauge revolution and the standard model with many words and a sprinkling of equations. My own graduate work happened mostly before the gauge revolution in a department dominated by anti-field theory S-matrix people. My quantum field theory classes suffered from rather severe deficiencies in the book, the teacher, and, of course the student. Anyway, I didn't learn much. My work never used quantum field theory either. From time to time I've tried to remedy this gross deficiency in my education, and I've accumulated a considerably library of QFT books in the process, but somehow I always seem to get distracted or run out of energy before I get to renormalization - which, in any case, was mostly smoke and mirrors when I was a grad student. It's pretty hard for me to gauge (LOL) how much s...

As a science fiction writer, I grant you a lot of latitude, but really. You have your spaceship jump nine light years and the captain/pilot/navigator sees only an imperceptible change in the positions of the stars? Pulleeze! The night sky would be nearly unrecognizable nine light years from Earth in any direction. Many of the brightest stars are less than twenty light years away and nearly all are less than 100 light years away. Of the twenty-six brightest stars, only Deneb, Betelgeuse, and Rigel are far enough away (1500 and 1400 light years) that they would be shifted by only a couple of degrees. If you were writing about pirates on the Spanish Main I would expect you to know that Cuba was farther from Madrid than Barcelona is. Since you write about interstellar adventure, you ought to have some clue as to how stars are distributed. Distances to brightest stars.

The Amazon Kindle versions of lots of science books are terrible. This is because the super-sucky software cannot handle equations or figures appropriately. It's like postscript was never invented. Equations are frequently reduced to tiny images - pictures of equations rather than actual equations. Inline equations fare even worse - exponents are lost, Greek letters become inequivalent Roman ones, subscripts disappear. It's really something of a tragedy that Amazon has captured the e-reader market with its incompetent page rendering. I wonder if there are any plans to fix it.

I am kind of a fan of the Princeton physics in a nutshell series. The first one I bought was Tony Zee's Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell. I've bought five more in the meantime, including one electronic version ( Einstein Gravity in a Nutshell , also by Zee). The thing is, I kind of like the way the matching covers of the other four line up on my bookshelf. I don't find electronic textbooks easy to read, though Princeton's books seem better than those from Cambridge. So anyway, is the extra two hundred pages in the second edition of QFT worth it, especially if I consider the added benefit of the matching cover?

Thomas Piketty begins his book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century , with a look at some prophets of economic doom: Malthus, Ricardo, and Marx. Their points of view were very different: Malthus and Ricardo feared the social upheaval caused by increasing inequality while Marx cheered it on, but there was a common thread - seemingly ineluctable forces in demography and capitalism that immiserated the poor while increasing the concentration of wealth at the top. All of them ultimately proved wrong - at least in the medium run - for somewhat related reasons: the industrial revolution and the rapid progress of technology. Of course Marx did ultimately get his revolution, only, as Piketty points out it only happened in the most backward nation in Europe, while the advanced countries found other ways to deal with increasing capital accumulation. Piketty makes the point that all three were severely limited by the paucity of good data on what was happening and what had happened. The cent...

Reasonable people can agree, I think, that it makes no sense to buy books that you are never going to have time or energy to read. So why do I feel this strong urge to buy Quantum Field Theory and the Standard Model by Schwartz and this book by Andrew Zangwill? I mean they even have similar cover art. I already have 60 or so QFT books and I've reached the age where stupidity outraces learning. Bibliomania - an annoying disease.