CapitalistImperialistPig

I recently spent some fun time in New Orleans.  It was my first trip to Louisiana, so I thought I might read up a bit.  High on the list of recommended books is Robert Penn Warren's All The King's Men , so that was my first, and since it's pretty long (656 pg) it took several evenings, etc. It has some structural similarities to a couple of other books I've been thinking about lately, Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.  In each case the story is told by a narrator but the central character, part man and part myth, is often offstage. That central character in ATKM is Willie Stark, a thinly disguised simulacrum of Huey Long, the Governor and later Senator.  The narrator, Jack Burden, is a troubled, cynical, and difficult child of privilege who nonetheless rejects family money.  After various failures (a PhD dissertation abandoned almost complete, a rejected proposal, a failed marriage) he finds work as a reporter and starts covering...

Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb Aug 6, 1996 by Richard Rhodes, is a great book, but probably not for the faint hearted. If you have labored under the delusion that humans are rational animals, forget about it. We are sometimes an intellectual species, but a very irrational one, driven by vanity, paranoia and other prehistoric emotions, quite unsuited to life in a world with thermonuclear weapons. The penultimate chapter tells the story of the Cuban missile crisis, and it's pretty terrifying how close some pretty smart people came to utterly destroying the world. This was at a point when both sides had enough nuclear weapons to destroy civilization many times over. We had gotten to that point thanks to the paranoia and other frailties of some of the smartest guys around, including Curtis LeMay, Edward Teller, John Wheeler, and John von Neumann. Only the cool heads of Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy narrowly saved the day more than once. It's terrifying to think w...

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...

As calculations by Ulam, Everett and Fermi made it increasingly clear that Teller's design for the thermonuclear bomb (the so-called 'classical super') would not work, Teller became bitterly critical of Los Alamos, and campaigned for his own lab. In fact the failure was Teller’s, Hans Bethe observes, not the laboratory’s: That Ulam’s calculations had to be done at all was proof that the H-bomb project was not ready for a “crash” program when Teller first advocated such a program in the fall of 1949. Nobody will blame Teller because the calculations of 1946 were wrong, especially because adequate computing machines were not then available. But he was blamed at Los Alamos for leading the Laboratory, and indeed the whole country, into an adventurous program on the basis of calculations which he himself must have known to have been very incomplete.2138 Rhodes, Richard. Dark Sun: The Making Of The Hydrogen Bomb (p. 461). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.

Kim’s Soviet advisers had proposed the day and time; it matched Hitler’s invasion of the USSR on the morning of Sunday, June 22, 1941.2021 US Ambassador to South Korea John Muccio, tired from a late night playing strip poker with several of the embassy secretaries, cabled the news to the State Department.2022 Rhodes, Richard. Dark Sun: The Making Of The Hydrogen Bomb (p. 436). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition. Kim's idea - Stalin and Mao were not that eager.

Once master atom bomb spy Klaus Fuchs had been revealed the FBI started looking hard for the "other" spy they had reason to believe was at Los Alamos. Suspicion fell upon uber hawk Edward Teller. Teller was a “close associate of . . . Fuchs at Los Alamos.” Mici Teller had traveled to Mexico City with Fuchs and Rudolf and Genia Peierls “in the latter part of 1945.” “The Tellers had Fuchs at their home for dinner when Fuchs returned to this country in 1947.” “Dr. Teller had considerable contact with Fuchs in England in the summer of 1949.” Besides his affiliation with Fuchs, Teller also had recommended for postwar graduate study at the University of Chicago a man with whom he had worked at Los Alamos who “has been identified as a Soviet espionage agent while at Los Alamos.” Teller’s name had appeared on a list of possible espionage recruits that the man had compiled.1983 Teller had traveled to New York during the time periods bracketed in the NKVD cable decode and “made frequ...

In 1948, people in the AEC starting thinking that we ought to have a way to detect nuclear tests by other powers. Of the three possible methods of detection discussed (radioactive dust in the atmosphere, acoustic, and seismic) only the first could be quickly implemented, and Oppenheimer was convinced that it couldn't work. He and others at that time didn't believe air bursts would leave dust, the radioactive elements having been reduced to atoms. The Air Force had been given the job of doing it, and found a private company, Tracer Labs, eager to take up the challenge. Oppenheimer was shown to be wrong. Shortly after the Soviets exploded their first nuclear bomb near Semipalatinsk in September of 1949, the Air Force and Tracer Labs detected the signal, and followed it across the ocean, the US and the UK. Tracer labs was able to pin down the day and nearly the hour of the explosion. Despite independent evidence from intelligence, Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson and late...

When Curtis LeMay took over the Strategic Air Command (SAC) near the end of 1948, he found a disastrously unprepared force with no experience in realistic training. After some bloody pruning of the staff, he ordered a realistic simulated attack on Dayton Ohio by every aircraft SAC could get in the air. Richard Rhodes: Since Air Force intelligence could supply only vintage prewar aerial photographs of Soviet cities, LeMay gave his crews 1938 photographs of Dayton. He instructed them to bomb by radar from thirty thousand feet and to aim for industrial and military targets, not radar reflectors. “Oh, I’ll admit the weather was bad,” he recalled in retirement of the January 1949 mission. “There were a lot of thunderstorms in the area; that certainly was a factor. But on top of this, our crews were not accustomed to flying at altitude. Neither were the airplanes, far as that goes. Most of the pressurization wouldn’t work, and the oxygen wouldn’t work. Nobody seemed to know what life wa...

George Marshall: George Marshall, who replaced Byrnes as Secretary of State in January 1947, told a Pentagon audience some years later, “I remember, when I was Secretary of State, I was being pressed constantly, particularly when in Moscow, by radio message after radio message, to give the Russians hell. . . . When I got back I was getting the same appeal in relation to the Far East and China. At that time, my facilities for giving them hell—and I am a soldier and know something about the ability to give hell—was one and a third divisions over the entire United States.1250 That is quite a proposition when you deal with somebody with over 260 and you have one and a third.” Rhodes, Richard. Dark Sun: The Making Of The Hydrogen Bomb (p. 282). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition. The drastic US disarmament after World War II left the US at a drastic strategic disadvantage that made professional soldiers very nervous, especially when they looked at Stalin's quite different behavi...

I bought this book yesterday and just finished all 608 pages of it, so I guess one might call it a page turner. Murakami is masterful at sucking one in. Toru Okada is an ordinary sort of thirty year old guy, a sort of legal assistant who quits his job at a law firm because it doesn't seem like something he wants to stick with. That's when his troubles start, when first his cat and then his wife go missing. If you've read Murakami before, you probably won't be surprised that this is the start of some strange adventures, not all of them strictly of this world. He soon finds himself involved in the affairs of a number of rather strange women. The real world is always present in Murakami's version of magical realism, perhaps most grittily in the reminiscences of a couple of characters from the war in Manchuria and the subsequent captivity in a Siberian mining camp of a side character. There is no doubt in my mind that Murakami is one of the greatest living novel...

I used this book by Cathie Clarke and Bob Carswell to study for the fluid dynamics portions of my Astrophysical Dynamics and Fluid Dynamics course, and found it very useful. The authors base the book on lectures they have given to third year students at Cambridge. For me, the level was about right. It assumes no fluid dynamics but expects reasonable proficiency in vector analysis. Nearly all physics equations are carefully derived, usually with no missing steps that were too difficult for me to fill in. Most of the book is devoted to inviscid compressible fluids, with a strong focus on astrophysical applications, although the last three chapters (which I haven't studied) treat viscous astrophysical fluids and plasmas. I worked my way through much of the book, usually deriving every equation, and it's pretty amusing if you like that sort of thing. There is always a payoff in physical insight. Convection, hydrostatic equilibrium, sound waves, supersonic flow, shock waves...

After the war, Oppenheimer, Acheson and others were tasked with the problem of how to control the nuclear Genii they had loosed on the world. They came up with a plan, but Bernard Baruch torpedoed it. This fragment of dialog between Truman and Oppenheimer is a good illustration of the kinds of errors of judgement even a smart President can make: “When will the Russians be able to build the bomb?” asked Truman. “I don’t know,” said Oppenheimer. “I know.” “When?” “Never.” At some level, for Harry Truman, US monopoly mooted the issue of international control. Rhodes, Richard. Dark Sun: The Making Of The Hydrogen Bomb (pp. 241-242). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.

Juan Enriquez and Steve Gullans are venture capitalists and authors with an interest in life sciences. Gullans is a former professor at Harvard Medical school. Their book, or I should say micro-book, Homo Evolutus , seems to be based on a TED talk they gave. The subject is their thesis that the human race is about to "speciate," or give rise to a new species of Homo, thanks to the radical advances being made in biotechnology and genomics. Roughly the first half of the book is devoted to background material on the evolutionary history of the various human species (19 so-far known, by their count) and their biological underpinnings. The rest is a quick catalog of some of the extraordinary goings on at the interface of biology and technology, many of which were unfamiliar to me. A couple of examples: Not only did the two Chinese teams take mouse skin cells, and de-differentiate them back into pluripotent stem cells… They then took these stem cells and allowed them to re-g...

Rutherford supposedly said that there are only two kinds of science: physics and stamp collecting. History is like that too. Most historians concentrate on chronicling a sequence of events in some domain, what Toynbee called "one damn thing after another." Only a few choose the riskier path of seeking grand themes and patterns that unify the whole. It's a risky path, because choosing the grand stage requires more erudition than any single human actually has. Mistakes and oversimplifications are sure to become targets. Toynbee's monumental magnum opus was not the first in this vein, but it might be the first of our own age. Two such works have had a huge impact on my view of human nature, how the world works, and how we got here: Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies , and the present work, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind , by Noah Yuval Harari. Of the two, the latter is the most ambitious, taking mankind from the status ...

Prime Numbers and the Riemann Hypothesis by Barry Mazur and William Stein is a slender (142 pg.) book aimed at a varied audience of the mathematically curious. It is profusely illustrated, mainly with pictures of what the authors call the staircase of primes, a function that starts at zero and goes up by one each time a prime is encountered, though several recarpentried versions of the staircase also make the scene. The book is divided into 38 very short chapters, organized into four sections, with the first and longest section (chapters 1-24) aimed at readers without a calculus background. The second section demands a bit of calculus (not much!) and the third some Fourier analysis, while the fourth gets to the nitty-gritty of the zeta function. The figures and many of the calculations were done with Sage, a free mathware package developed by the second author, and made available to the eager experimenter. The first section has a lot of the lore primes that is accessible at the e...

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...

Despite my more or less disastrous encounter with the chapter on Phi, Tononi's theory of consciousness, I think this is a pretty good book. One can learn a lot about what makes consciousness possible and impossible, and the often ingenious techniques used to investigate it. Christof Koch's Consciousness has all that and more: historical and philosophical background of the problem, meditations on his own history and behavior, and some interesting stuff on his mentor and "Sun," Francis Crick. I recommend it to anyone interested in this fundamental concept. Koch is confident that consciousness is not something exclusively human. Chimps, dogs, mice and birds have some version of it. Perhaps even bees and flies have it. Many of the key insights into it have come from investigations of the mouse brain, a key target of the Allen Institute that Koch leads. Koch's studies have led him to a certain amount of respect for our junior partners in consciousness: Then, i...

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...

In 529 CE, not quite sixteen hundred years ago, Muhammad and ten thousand or so followers seized the city of Mecca and destroyed the hundreds of shrines of other religions in the city. By his death, Islam had expanded to much of the Arabian peninsula. Two hundred years later it had conquered North Africa, the Middle East, the Persian Empire, most of Spain, and parts of Central Asia. Muslim warriors and raiders penetrated far into France, but were handed a big defeat at Tours in 732 CE. After that, something like stalemate settled over the Muslim Christian divide for much of the next 700 years. Nearly all of that Muslim advance was at the point of a sword. The political systems established under Muslim rule waxed and waned but cultural conquests remained remarkably durable. By the dawn of the Sixteenth Century, the struggle between Muslim and Christian had again intensified. Spain had defeated the last Muslim power on the Iberian peninsula in 1492. Empires of the Sea: The Siege of...

The Indo-Europeans who spread over most Europe and a big chunk of Asia 4-5000 years ago, left their traces not only in language but in religion and social structure. A cardinal element of social structure seems to have been division into priests, warriors, and farmers, a social structure that existed ancient Greece, Rome, Germany and Ireland, and persisted in attenuated form even into the nineteenth century in Europe. It continues to play an important role even in modern India. The religions of ancient Europe all had similar elements, with the names and characters of gods, rituals, and legends sharing powerful commonalities. One common god, especially prominent in Greek and Roman mythology, was the one denoted by the Indo-European for father sky. (dyaus pita in Sanskrit, Ju piter in latin, and presumably *dyeus pəter in Proto-Indo-European). In much of the world the old gods have been chased out by the congenitally jealous Semitic God, but the old traces are not quite gone. T...