Category — books

The best thing on the internet August 31: Prufrock451’s response to the question: Could I destroy the entire Roman Empire during the reign of Augustus if I traveled back in time with a modern U.S. Marine infantry battalion or MEU?

As with anything cool online, this has taken on a life of its own. The speed and intensity of the development of eight chapters of fiction, multiple movie posters and great fan fiction are exhilarating examples of just how quickly communities can spring up and create something interesting online.

Yes, you might be turned off by the military fantasy brewing on reddit, but the fermentation process is delicious.

You can continue to read or contribute to the story of the 35th MEU on Rome Sweet Rome

The original post: Could I destroy the entire Roman Empire during the reign of Augustus if I traveled back in time with a modern U.S. Marine infantry battalion or MEU?

In ‘War Made New,’ noted defense historian Max Boot runs through 500 years of battle to show that victory goes to the combatant who had digested and incorporated not just the latest weapon technology, but also the culture and bureaucracy most adept at exploiting this technology.

In other words, it’s not just the latest, greatest military tool that wins battles and wars.

These upheavals on the battlefield show how revolutions in military affairs quickly upend empires, assumptions and future warfare.

It is not hard while reading Boot’s authoritative descriptions of battles in Italy, Koniggatz and Tsushima for me to link the breakthrough tactics and organizations of those winners with the current array of challengers the modern media company faces daily.

The French canons of 1494 and the Prussian needle guns of 1866 were just as revolutionary as the rise of cable and the utility of the internet.

While media companies assail the post-modern methods of web journalism; outdated management techniques and labor fight the radical methods information gathering (When “good enough” journalism is better) while being slow to the punch to counter the hype and monetize the promise of online advertising.

The outcome of media’s struggle to survive depends less on the interest of the public in news, but more on the ability of media companies to deploy organization, staff, technology and tactics to innovate on the sales and content battlefields.

Media pundits sound like an outdated army, scoffing at the enemy’s unwillingness to line up and fight like men when complaints of “inaccuracy” (TMZ leads with early details, while Los Angeles Times and AP do the heavy lifting) and “you’re stealing” (Tighter copyright law could save newspapers: Connie Schultz) are lodged against the likes of TMZ, Newser and Wikipedia.

It’s high time for media companies to learn faster from the likes of Boot, who show how old methods and organization stand little chance and how difficult it is for incumbent s to realize continuous hegemony.

Everything is Miscellaneous and The Cluetrain Mainfesto, both in whole (Miscellaneous) and in part (Cluetrain) by David Weinberger, tell the story of what the internet is: A digital conversation.

Cluetrain is a quick and compelling read, and, it can be read online here.

Everything is Miscellaneous dives into what the digital nature of our online information means.
We’re in a third order of information – information that was once physically located in a book or as a specimen is now hindered if we treat it like its physical ancestors.

• For example, the role of editors in a digital world should not be to limit the amount of available writing on a topic – but rather to collect all available writing on a topic.
• And Wikipedia rules because it has adopted a working definition of neutrality that works in the messy intersection of people online: An article in Wikipedia is neutral “when people have stopped changing it.” It also engenders authority by recognizing when an article isn’t neutral, truthful or hasn’t been verified. (All things that my own workplace, wkyc.com could use a touch of). It also kicks more digital ass than wkyc.com by linking to topics directly within the text of an article*
• “Conversation improves expertise by exposing weakness”
• Pandora.com, Last.fm, Zillow, PropSmart, FareCast.com, Digg.com and kayak.com are examples of meta-businesses that provide users more ways to sort information.

Some web sites of note from Miscellaneous:

• Thinglinks.org
• Valdis Krebs (A greater-Clevelander)
• Librarything.com
• PLoS One

*But, Wikipedia does save links to outside sites for the bottom of an article.

Agreed.

More Sex Is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics by Steven E. Landsburg is a better read than Freakonomics, but not quite as good as The Undercover Economist.

A tasty morsel:

Though Dickens might not have recognized it, the primary moral of A Christmas Carol is that there should be no limit on IRA contributions.

One bone to pick:
I haven’t checked into any follow up Landsburg has done on this work, but I think he needs to revisit his assumptions about obesity. For example, he asks “Do big meals cause obesity or does obesity cause big meals?”

As one who has read Fast Food Nation and Fat Land, fast food companies increased porition sizes before the obesity epidemic struck and then took great measures to make sure the American consumer would eat more of these larger poritions.

Landsburg wants to take Big Food (McDonalds, ADM, etc.) off the hook, but the record suggests they played a part in the rise of obesity.

Read Missile Gap by Charles Stross online here Quick, smart sci fi novella.

I’m reading more books that are available online, and Stross’ experiments with online publishing are refreshing. Here’s a novel of his you can read online: Accelerando.

Now don’t be sad / cause two out of three aint bad
Meat Loaf, Two out of three ain’t bad

From outta the library to this blog:

Tim Harford’s The Undercover Economist should be required reading for humans. I would have majored in econ if I read this 10 years ago.

In contrast, An Army of Davids: How markets and technology empower ordinary people to beat big media, big government and other Goliaths bored me. It seemed like the book was a punched-up series of blog posts. While the overall message of “the internet will break down barriers” is a sound one, I still want my books to contain arguments backed up with research. Facts should have footnotes.

One of the books that Davids leaned heavily on is Ray Kurzwel’s The Singularity is Near, a fantastical look at the acceleration of technology and how it is quickly advancing/outpacing/replacing biology. Kurzweil’s premise is that humans don’t understand the accelerating, exponential changes that were born out of computer technology.

Some of the fun he dreams of? Machines with the power of the human brain will be available in the 2020s for the cost of a computer today.

From there, ideas come at a blistering pace as readers are introduced to “reversible computing” that could make a rock smarter than all humanity. And that’s just on page 134 of 487 densely-packed pages.

Ultimately, Kurzweil thinks we’re headed towards 2001: A Space Odyssey land here — namely that we’ll become machines, and then we’ll figure out how to bring information to matter, stretching into everything in our universe.

And who wouldn’t want to believe some of what he thinks will happen shortly? Come on — for the right price, we could live forever. And that’s my only complaint about the whole book. It’s too neat for this messy thing known as civilization.

I somehow doubt that I’ll be able to squirrel away enough money to be able to afford the nanobots necessary to fix the inevitable decay of my body. And I doubt my health insurance would cover that. But, Kurzweil says that upgrading my body will be something like purchasing mobile phone service: It will take awhile for the technology to mature, then it will be everywhere, just as mobile phone service took baby steps in the 80s and 90s and then exploded today so that now it’s assumed that you have a cell phone. I’ll take the T-Mobile life extension, thank you. Not-the-best-coverage, but I like the price.

More at kurzweilai.net

Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan team up in a terrific duo of business books: Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done and Confronting Reality: Doing What Matters to Get Things Right are like an MBA overview of current CEO best practices.

Then again, I’m not a CEO nor have I earned an MBA.

Execution is the better read for actually getting things done when you’re not in charge.

Jeff Goodell mines the rich history of coal in the United States to unearth the good it has brought and the destruction it has wrought in Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America’s Energy Future

Much like the authors of The End of Oil and Field Notes from a Catastrophe, Goodell paints an alarming picture of our near-future, pointing out that thanks to our reliance on coal fired electric plants, planet Earth will irrevocably enter a warming period in 2017.

In short, our addiction to coal is as perverse and damaging as any addition to oil.

This addiction began in earnest with the brilliant Samuel Insull, Jr., a protégé of Edison. Insull “set in motion a self-perpetuating cycle of rising [coal / electric] use and declining rates that eventually enveloped an urban society in a ubiquitous world of energy.” Heady stuff for one man.

Just as Earl Butz put America on the path to obesity in 1971, Insull hatched our crack-like need for electricity in the 1890s, creating big electric plants as far away from cities as possible, allowing government regulation to create an electric monopoly in a region and stimulating demand for consumer products that required electricity.

The greatest innovation of Insull — flat rate pricing for electricity. Sadly, our dependency on coal is largely invisible. Sure, I have asthma, but it’s hard to pinpoint what triggered it. Yes, coal miners are among the most exploited workers in America, but frankly, I don’t care about what happens to unlucky schmucks in West Virginia when I turn on my TV or recharge my cell phone. And most importantly, the cost to use my central air conditioning cost the same no matter the time of day. Although it costs more to create electricity when demand is high, us end users are “totally disconnected from the price of power.” Instead of a market for electricity, a market that might make our use of coal more rational and better for the world, we are stuck with a system hatched in the 1800s.

Most books that I really enjoy reading affect me in two ways:

1. Keep me up late night — can’t put ‘em down
2. Fire up a web of ideas that my brain spins off of the main narrative

The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer by Dean Baker fits the “perfect reading bill” nicely with the added bonus that the book is FREE.

Baker’s work, much like Lakoff’s don’t think of an elephant goes to great pains to show how progressives are doomed to lose on the national political scene because they do not take the time to properly frame their arguments. Baker shows time and again how supporters of the “conservative nanny state” use big government to keep money flowing from those with less income to those with greater income.

For those on the conservative side: Yes, Baker has an agenda. Yes, Baker supports ideas that mostly support the ideals of progressives. But yet, Baker uses market-based examples to show how the conservative nanny state creates artificial markets that allow the rich to grow richer. The books greatest success is not just highlighting the many ways in which conservatives rig the game thanks to big governemnt; rather, it is illustrating very clearly how progressives can use markets to increase prosperity for all Americans, not just those already at the top.

I held off reading this book for three months because I was too cheap to print the free download out. Sigh. Three months of waiting on a great book because I didn’t want to spend $3 in printer ink. Much like Common Sense, I hope the rapid distribution of The Conservative Nanny State helps bring about a new discussion on the role of government in our lives.

don’t think of an elephant!
Know your values and frame the debate by George Lakoff

A blazingly quick read on how progressives (they used to be called liberals until right-wingers made “liberal” seem a dirty word) are being out foxed through the conservative movement’s mastery of language and thought.

Lakoff’s strict father (Right wing) / caring family (Progressive) dichotomy rings true as he paints the emotional base for the Right’s arguments — a base that has reversed the direction of this country in a mere 40 years.

He points out progressives’ conceptual gaps, such as on taxation. The right owns current mainstream thought on tax cuts. They aren’t cuts, they are tax relief. As Lakoff imagines, progressives need to enshrine a different view on taxes, such as:

Perhaps Bill Gates Sr. said it best. In arguing to keep the inheritance tax, he pointed out that he and Bill Jr. did not invent the Internet. They just used it — to make billions. There is no such thing as a self-made man. Every businessman has used the vast American infrastructure, which the taxpayers paid for, to make his money. He did not make his money alone. He used taxpayer infrastructure.

More on Lakoff: Wikipedia | web site (hasn’t been updated in a while) | Some of his work

Finally: For progressives to succeed in taking back this country, we need to stay true to our values and communicate them effectively. To accomplish this mission, we need to be aware of the traps that have often tripped up progressives in the past.