nonlinear

My trips to the library begin with a scan of my Amazon.com wish list and/or my del.icio.us bookmarks as I attempt to find at least one book on my “to do” list that is available NOW at the library.
List in hand, I begin a strange trip at the library — zeroing in on books I [...]

In The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan preaches to the choir about the decline of science in mid-1990s America.
Among many targets, Sagan rightly questions the utter lack of attention science is given in mass media, offering a host of story ideas that would never be seen in today’s mainstream media — like “Solved Mysteries,” exposes of [...]

Oil, Anatomy of an Industry by Matthew Yeomans is a Cliff’s Notes to the tremendous importance of oil and the oil industry in creating and maintaining American life and supremacy.
This fast-paced opens with a tongue-in-cheek attempt by Yeomans to avoid oil for one day. It is, to say the least, an impossible task. Oil [...]

Based on a quote used in a P.J. O’Rourke book from an obscure Scottish economist, William J. Bernstein goes to great lengths to show that prosperity is the result of four factors:

property rights
scientific method
capital
technology (communication + transportation)

Bernstein shows that efficient and secure property rights ensure that land will move from being concentrated among a few [...]

It took me way too long to get turned onto the work of Peter F. Drucker. An amazing read on leadership today … one that’s no-doubt familiar to the economist but not as readily known as should be.
Some noteworthy quotes
Management … will increasingly have to be based on the assumption that neither technology nor end-use [...]