I ordered the ' target=_blank>The Board Book from Amazon ($18) to try to get some ideas for how to do a better job as a member of the PASS Board of Directors. It’s not bad reading, though it focuses more on larger companies and the for profit side of things. I marked a few notes from it to share:
Worth reading, but I’m still going to look for a book that focuses on industry centric non-profits.
In this case making money is about counterfeiting. The Art of Making Money: The Story of a Master Counterfeiter ($18) at Amazon is basically a biography of counterfeiter Art Williams. I was more interested in the technical approaches (not to give it a try!) and less in the bio, but it was a mildly interesting story for all of that. Most of you know that in the past few years they’ve put a lot of effort into making it harder to counterfeit US currency (and it wasn’t all that easy before), but this guy figured out how to in a pretty low tech way. It turned out his biggest obstacle was the watermark, he finally got around it by laminating two pieces of paper together with the outline in between. Worked fine when held up the light, but he couldn’t use him in humid climates because the edges peeled open!
It’s interesting to me for a couple reasons. One is that the general availability of color printers definitely encourages people to give it a try and it’s nice to know it ain’t that easy. The other part reminds me of magic, to large degree it’s about showing people what they expect to see. I mostly use credit cards for personal expenses and clients pay with checks or credit cards, so I don’t have to worry about bad money directly. I guess at the end it just leaves me wishing Williams had found a way to use his talents for good.
More stuff about the anti-counterfeit features at http://www.moneyfactory.gov/newmoney/.
Picked up Survival: How a Culture of Preparedness from the local library on a whim without looking at anything except the cover. I’ve had some learning over the years on various survival skills, thought a refresher that was family based would be interesting. Turns out the book doesn’t really match the title, it’s really an autobiography of General Russell Honore, one of the main leaders of the Hurricane Katrina rescue effort.
So, not much in the way of survival skills, some photos of recommended items like flashlights (seriously, I think I know what it would look like) and not much else. The biography part is ok, and it’s a look at both the culture of the Army and the politics and realities of trying to use Federal forces in a civilian emergency. I’d be interested in reading a more holistic review of the event, this one seemed one sided and it’s hard to know if that view is overly biased or not.
Read it if you’re interested in Katrina or the military/civilian angle of disasters.
The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War by David Halberstam ($15 at Amazon) was really the first reading I have done on Korea, and it was a frustrating story to read. The writing was fine, the story of the over done downsizing of the military after WWII, the poor decisions that lead to the conflict on our side, the incredibly bad leadership shown at times. Just not fun to read. This book focuses a lot on the politics of things (fair enough to include that) and also on MacArthur’s involvement – the latter in a very negative way. I’ve read other stuff about MacArthur that wasn’t complimentary either, but I guess I need to go read more to make sure I see both sides of the story. General Ridgeway seems to be the hero – if there is one – of the story, or at least the one that displayed some leadership. Lot’s of good personal stories in the book, stories about death, barely surviving, hard decisions about what to do when things go really bad.
It’s worth reading,I just don’t know if it’s the best book to learn about the war. Anyone have other recommendations on related books?
Magnificent Desolation by Buzz Aldrin ($18 @Amazon) is his second autobiography (haven’t read the first one Return To Earth). I happened to notice it while browsing at the local bookstore and noticed that he was coming to town for a book signing. Added to my calendar and waited to see if events at work would align so I could attend on a weekday afternoon. Things worked out on the schedule and I arrived at 3:30, 30 minutes earlier than the planned start time. Already a good number of people at the store and they explained things pretty well when I came in the door; buy your book(s), get a ticket, browse while you wait. The purchase line was short, only took perhaps 5 minutes, got my ticket – number 313! Start thinking about how long it will take him to sign at least 313 books and have visions of being their until 9 pm.
I get some coffee and sit on the patio to try to work some, 4 pm comes and goes. Buzz finally arrives about 4:15 or 4:20, and then does 15-20 minutes of comments. The monologue was interesting if rambling at times – going back to his days at West Point and going forward to what he’s doing today. You get a sense of a man (and this maybe colored by having read the book now) that struggled with life and finally found his place.
Now about the book…
The trip to the moon is really the introduction to this story, which talks about his life afterward. Lots of time doing PR for NASA and no real interest from NASA in making additional contributions, going back to the Air Force and not getting his dream job of leading the Air Force Academy, heading up the test pilot school, and then falling into deep depression and alcoholism. He talks about getting treated while in the military, a scary prospect back then. Finally decides to leave the military and at that point seems lost.
Plans to leave his first wife to marry another woman, other woman marries someone else. Ultimately divorces, goes through more depression and drinking, tries AA multiple times, meets a great woman and blows it by planning to meet another woman, and then returns to the great woman which lasts through today.
The last couple chapters are more of a ‘here’s what I’ve been doing lately’ and not as interesting as the earlier part of the book, but that’s just me. He’s still engaged in thinking about and evangelizing space travel, and I remember seeing him on TV quite a bit during the recent 40th anniversary of the moon landing.
I think my earlier impression of him was that he crashed because of ‘what do I do to top going to the moon’, and after reading this I think that the problems go back much earlier and that just added to the pressure, not the causing factor. I’d say also that my earlier impression was that he wasn’t the most likable guy, and that stands though not as much – hard to be harder on someone once you see their frailties revealed.
And back to the book store….
We get started about 4:45 and they have some interesting rules; no signed photos or memorabilia, no photos with him though there is a spot for those wanting a photo, he’ll only sign on an inside blank page, and no personalization's. The last one surprised me, isn’t that the point of a book signing to remember getting to meet someone interesting in a personal way? The other stuff I understand given that it would all wind up on Ebay. Still, too late to quit, so I start browsing. Went a lot faster than I expected and about 5:45 he signed my copies and I was done. Interesting experience, and I’ve got an extra signed copy set aside as a raffle item for a raffle as yet undefined.
I read The Connect Effect: Building Strong Personal, Professional, and Virtual Networks by Michael Dulworth ($16 @ Amazon) months ago, forgot to write up the review and finally getting back to it. The emphasis of this book – to me – is on the value of networks, and that was something I needed to read at the time. It’s interesting to read success stories about networking to know that somewhere and sometime it does pay off. If you’re just starting on networking you may find it useful just for that.
The more interesting idea he proposes is of having a ‘personal board of directors’, a team of people that you look to for advice, guidance, etc. That’s an interesting idea. I’m not terribly good at taking advice, but I do a lot better when I can just talk through something with someone that will be thoughtful about it. Making that group tangible seems worthwhile, if maybe more complex than just the adhoc ‘hey, what do you think I should do…’ kind of conversation.
Not a must read, but not a bad book either.
Found The Candy Bombers: The Untold Story of the Berlin Airlift and America's Finest Hour by Andrei Cherny ($20 @ Amazon) at the library and it caught my eye. It turned out to be an interesting story with some very interesting characters. It covers the end of WW II and how Berlin was governed by a multi nation council and how the people of Berlin were barely surviving for several years after the war even with the US providing some food – averaging about 1000 calories were day. Some of the behavior attributed to the Soviets in Berlin is pretty horrid, almost routine rape of women, killing children, and more. Eventually relations break down and the Soviets stop all resupply coming in to Berlin.
This was a huge problem, because the American military had been drawn down sharply after the war and just did not have the power to fight toe to toe with the Soviets, the only equalizer was the atomic bomb. That’s right, the beginning of the cold war. You get to meet the key Americans trying to convert Germany to democracy (trying to avoid the mistakes that lead to WW II from WW I), see Truman, Marshall, and Forrestal in DC, and more. Nothing smooth or elegant about the course of changes, but it feels real – life rarely feels elegant.
Flying in supplies isn’t very efficient compared to truck and train. They struggled in the beginning and once they got the right guy, they were landing planes every 3 minutes 24 hours a day.
All of that makes for good reading and a good story, but the author poses that one other guy changed everything about how Americans felt about Germans and vice versa. You can imagine post war there was a lot of residual ill will, you’re trying to convert them to democracy, and you’ve got communism in the mix too. Airlift pilot Gail Halvorson decides to give some German children his two sticks of gum (against orders to give away food) and then starts dropping candy bars tied to handkerchief parachutes. He keeps going, then word leaks out and other pilots start bring him candy. Then the boss finds out, he does some interviews (instead of getting canned), and pretty soon he has TONS of candy to drop, school kinds making parachutes, and more pilots dropping candy.
It doesn’t sound like much, but imagine the impact on kids with nothing, barely surviving for food, and then this guy shows up and promises that he’ll return the next day and drop candy from the sky. And then does it. Over and over again. The book has quite a few letters from the children in the book saying thank you – the best part of the book.
I don’t know if I’d call it our finest hour, though we did come through when even many of our people wanted to abandon Berlin and we did in a way that was – to me – uniquely American, 1 plane every 3 minutes…for months! Col Halvorson though, with a simple idea and the courage to do something good even if not ‘by the book’ made a unique difference in the world. Well done Colonel!
I finished reading Fault Line by Barry Eisler ($16.50 @ Amazon) a few weeks ago. I’ve been a fan for a while, reading a set of his book about Japanese-American assassin John Rain who specializes in making the assassinations look natural (including one by turning the victims pacemaker down to zero and another where he induces a bicycle crash at night).
But back to the book. This is a new direction, or at least new characters, those being two brothers. Brother #1 is a lawyer and gets involved with the upcoming IPO of some encryption software when things start to happen, including the death of his client. Things continue to happen and he calls for help from his estranged brother in the military, who it turns out possesses the exact skills needed to deal with the problem.
I enjoyed the book, but it did feel forced in places. The estrangement felt over and under done at times, and the nature of the bad guys turned out to be all too convenient – if not predictable in the beginning. That said, start with Rain Fall and work your way forward. For me, one of the best parts of reading is discovering a new author and enjoying the journey. He has a web site and blog at http://www.barryeisler.com/.
I finished up reading Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do by Tom Vanderbilt last week and enjoyed it. It’s interesting to see how much the people part affects traffic. One of the opening segments is about whether you are an “early merger” or “late merger”, and how early mergers get irritated at late mergers for ‘not playing by the rules’ – but it works out that late merging in generally best. We just don’t have that shared rule and it leads to chaos. The book talks about more signs are not necessarily better, and shows some cases where removing signs made things better. It also says that there are almost always unintended consequences of changes to roads, signals, and signs. You fix one thing and it changes behavior for the worse in another. Did you know roads are deliberately designed to never be straight for more than a short length to keep drivers engaged? Or that a roundabout works out to be safer than a traffic light because drivers perceive it as dangerous and pay more attention? Or that it’s always the other guy, whether you’re the driver or the pedestrian? You might learn some things about yourself while you read about traffic, and I think it’s a great book because it shows you that it’s not always simple to fix problems.
Highly recommended! Paperback version due out Aug 11 if you want to save a few bucks, and the author has a blog as well.
Rolling Thunder ($7.99 @ Amazon) by John Varley is the third book in the series. I previously reviewed Red Thunder and Red Lightening, having really enjoyed them both. In this third book the prime character is now the 3rd generation (or 4th depending on how you count I guess!) and is told from the perspective of Podkayne (Elizabeth), a singer and musician in the Martian Navy. She ends up on Europa (Jupiter moon) when an interesting and major event occurs with severe repercussions on Earth, and which makes her the most famous person in the universe.
I didn’t enjoy the book as much as the first two. Maybe part of that was that at times the story/character is pretty shallow – she’s 19/20 at the time the story starts and that’s not meant as sexist (though maybe it is), just that few 20 year olds think really deep thoughts. Parts of it just come together in a way that feels forced in an effort to arrive at the ending.
Though I didn’t enjoy it as much, I still like the series being told from different generational perspectives. Think that is a nice device and a nice change of pace.
As happens occasionally I had a stack of books on my desk that needed to be put away, and as I went to do that ran into a small challenge – no more space on the shelves. I need to get another bookcase, but as I looked at what I had realized it was probably time for a pruning session. I went through and pulled out some books that I had but didn’t really like, plus some on SQL 2000 that I don’t much use for anymore, and then went through a bunch of back issues of magazines, setting aside some of the SQL Server Standards and putting most of the rest in the ‘gotta go’ stack.
I could perhaps sell some of this stuff online, but I doubt I’d make enough to justify the time. Or I could recycle them, at least give the paper another go around. But before I do that I’m going to offer them to the attendees at the next oPASS meeting. Plenty of people still on SQL 2000, magazines still have good content, hoping that someone – maybe everyone – will find some value in things that I don’t use on a day to day basis anymore.
It would be great if user groups could support a true ‘library’, but I don’t know if the logistics would work out very well – anyone tried this in formal fashion?
I picked up a copy of this from the local library after reading The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Oppenheimer (Oppie) was definitely one of the main characters in that event and came across as interesting, so I decided to seek out more info. American Promethius: The Triumph and Tragedy of Robert Oppenheimer ($50 at Amazon) was a hard read, as biographies often are. He definitely struggled through the teenage and early adults years to find himself, reading that struggle bordered on painful. As he finally made his way into physics you get a real sense of how much was going on in the 1900-1950 time frame, with a lot of people trying to figure out things we mostly take for granted these days.
It's interesting that he became the main main in the bomb effort, as he wasn't at all the image of a perfect administrator, tending towards being unorganized. But he was also smart enough to teach himself how to be more organized when the role required it. Both books present him as someone with a great understanding of the nuclear side of things, but not someone who enjoyed the tedium of testing. He seems to have been great at understanding what mattered.
Of course the challenge of Oppie is that he was associated - arguably apparently - with the Communist party prior to his involvement in the bomb effort. That didn't stop him from being selected as the lead for the project, but after the war when he opposed the "super" (hydrogen bomb) because he believed it would spark a serious arms race he eventually fell out of favor with some key people and ended up having his security clearance revoked. Even reading it now it's hard for me to know how much was real and how much vendetta/witch hunt, but it feels like the latter - bolstered by the fact that years later the Kennedy administration made amends to the extent they could.
The part I liked most was when he rebuilt his institute as a home for thinkers, regardless of topic. Einstein was there, many others. Not often we see this even today, but it's nice to have a few places that encourage those with ability to use it without distraction.
When I read biographies I like to look for the defining moment - when did they realize their potential? I rarely see it clearly, but in this case you get the sense of a hidden moment in early adult stages where he focused and chose a path, and then later when he decided to commit to the bomb effort while understanding that doing so was going to lead to path he would have rather not taken. I also like to assess whether I would have liked the person. Not that it matters, but maybe it's a way to test/hone the skills required to evaluate peers and leaders today. I think I would have respected his ability, not sure I would have liked him, but he seems like the person where if he liked you then you were likely to like him (sorry for that sentence), but if he didn't like you....
The book was written over a period of 25 years! I can't image taking that long to finish a book, but it finally got done. Recommended if you're interested in the history around the atomic era, otherwise not.
First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong ($14 @ Amazon) was a good book, enjoyed reading it. Some interesting tidbits in it. He learned to fly before he was old enough to drive, was a test pilot at the same time as Chuck Yeager (and has a interesting story about flying with him once), flew in Korea, and suffered the death of his very young daughter. All of that leads up to his decision to join the space program, and then talks about his involvement in it and some of the personalities from his perspective.
There was a certain amount of luck in ending up on the crew of the mission that would make the first moon landing, but after that there was some politics (not quite the right word) behind who would end up actually setting foot on the moon first. From this book it seems like that it was a deliberate choice to pick someone that would show well, during and after. Not sure I’ve said that well, but it makes clear that it wasn’t about who was closest to the door in the lunar lander. I don’t fault them for that – imagine you’re a senior manager deciding who will be first person to step foot on Mars. Do you want a person who lusts for the fame? Someone who looks good on TV? Someone that might try to milk it for the money? I can see that 40 years ago those were valid concerns, today I can see it being even harder.
Another odd part is there are no good pictures of Armstrong on the moon. Plenty of Aldrin (remember the one of him saluting the flag?), but the best one of Armstrong is a reflection in a helmet visor. Some attribute that to Buzz Aldrin deliberately not taking photos, but none were explicitly planned and both state that it was just overlooked in the moment – something that seems entirely reasonable, but still sucks!
After Apollo he became a professor, and is often referred to as almost hiding out, but the book shows that he has remained visible – working as a spokesman for Chrysler at one point, participating in the Challenger investigation, and more. Yet it is clear he prefers some privacy, and does the events that he wants to do. He quit signing autographs because they were constantly being sold (some comment there on society I think). He was divorced after 30 plus years and then remarried, tore off part of a finger (reattached) in an accident on his farm.
There’s a great story about him touring many countries after the landing and trying to learn some of the languages in an effort to connect with the audiences (it worked) made all the more interesting because he didn’t really enjoy public speaking. He’s also had to put up with the conspiracy theories about not landing on the moon (I imagine that grates!) and a continuing rumor about having converted to a mid east religion (I’m trying to not add to that) which he states is flat wrong.
He comes across as a quiet, thoughtful, no nonsense kind of guy. Was there someone who would have been a better representative, or done a better job? No way to answer that, but I feel like he did well and has presented America well. He’s also someone that I think I’d genuinely enjoy meeting and talking with.
The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes ($14 at Amazon) was a book I picked up for travel, though at 928 pages it's not a travel sized book. This starts almost at the beginning with discussions of radioactivity and the state of physics at the start of the 20th century, and introduces in turn all the people that end up being major players in the development of fission and the atomic bomb as well as nuclear policy (Fermi, Bohr, Oppenheimer, Szilard, Groves, Rutherford, and of course, Truman).
I won't begin to say that I understand atomic physics, but I enjoyed the standing on the shoulders approach that brought about great leaps in the early 1900's all the way through 1950. Fission was a dream, and the hurdles to it were considerable. I think one fun/scary part was the first atomic pile (reactor) that was built in Chicago. I remember it vaguely from some bit of history, but they built this in pretty low tech fashion, hiring football players to stack the carbon blocks needed. When they began testing they had a control rod and a meter, and they just kept pulling out the control rod until the pile went critical. They had a hacked together fail-safe system, but in truth it was one very smart guy managing a chain reaction by telling someone to raise/lower a control rod. Luckily he was smart enough, or Chicago could have become a bad place to live.
When it moves into the Manhattan project era the scale of the problems and solutions is staggering to me. Over the course of a couple years we built every type of process there was for creating weapons grade uranium and plutonium. The cost ended up being equivalent to the US auto industry in size and spend, more than $2 billion in 1940's dollars. They basically solved the problem by saying if you could get an ounce or whatever of material from a single million dollar plant, just build a 100 of them to increase production.
It's also here that you start to understand why nuclear material is such a big deal. The first bomb (Little Boy) was essentially a gun, they fired one chunk of uranium into another. I won't say it's trivial, but the engineering was doable and then and I suspect easily doable now, the hard part was getting the weapons grade material. Plutonium is a different story, not all is it hard to produce but they opted for an implosion mechanism that wasn't trivial then or now - imagine building explosives that will perfectly and evenly compress a sphere the size of a softball to the density of the sun in a lot less than a SQL millisecond. Note that a "shake" was a term coined during all of this that equates to 10 nanoseconds!
This also shows the challenge of science, sometimes it leads to things that can have negative consequences, but hard to stop discovery from happening. And it talks about the beginning of the arms race and from my reading of it, it seemed almost inevitable. Interesting but sad.
If you'd like to just learn more about the bomb from a simpler perspective try Sum of All Fears by Tom Clancy. In that novel terrorists obtain the material and set about building a bomb. It may not be perfectly accurate, but it seemed to me that he did a pretty good job of research to present the story.
I'm glad I read this, but it's a dense read, took me more than 4 weeks of stopping and starting to get through it.
