Getting there from here

Too Big to Fail

2012-01-10T11:42:00.002-07:00

I read "Too Big to Fail" to see if I could learn a bit more about what happened on Wall Street and in D.C. during the financial crash. I wanted to add to the knowledge that I got from "Republic, Lost", "Capitol Punishment", and "The Innovator's Dilemma". I learned a lot. The book is filled with the real time interchanges among the players and with the sense of complete panic as 'solutions' to the crisis just exposed other problems. On this level, the book is a fascinating read.

Unexpectedly, I ended up learning something completely different--about agent based economics.

I found out that while supply and demand is a standard paradigm in understanding markets, to understand markets for financial instruments a person has to realize that there are very few players, who all know each other and who compete and cooperate in real time independent of much of supply and demand and who change sides constantly. In "Too big to Fail", one person is actually working for the government, for a brokerage house, and for a bank at the same time. Another person's ego drove his running of a big brokerage house and resulted in the loss of thousands of jobs when this brokerage house was allowed to fail as part of a complex government deal to support a financial system in which trust between brokers was lost. The actual interactions were not what my understanding of traditional economics would have suggested at all.

It seems that agent behavior is much more important in economics than I wanted to think it was and this book is a great case study.

Los Alamos Entrepreneur Network

2012-01-06T06:35:00.002-07:00

I went to a surprisingly productive meeting last night of the Los Alamos Entrepreneur's Network. We met at the Hive and started to talk about how to use the Hive to get networking and products done in Los Alamos and independent of LANL and government grants.

The next meeting is at noon on 12 January and should be productive.

SUSY, the giant invisible rabbit

2012-01-06T06:32:00.002-07:00

According to New Scientist a Higgs at 125 GeV may be very good for SUSY or at least for particle physicists.

SUSYs would now exist at mass ranges higher than what is accessible to the LHC.

SUSY requiem

2012-01-04T08:58:00.002-07:00

From my Google reader of the day before yesterday, the AIP physicists working of supersymmetry are starting to be sure that supersymmetry ( SUSY ), in spite of its mathematical elegance, is wrong. By now with hundreds of trillions of collisions at the Large Hadron Collider--proton proton collisions and lead nuclei collisions--there should have been thousands of decays that showed the transient existence of supersymmetric particles. A sought after particle was the neutralino, the lowest energy member of the set of supersymmetric particles (squarks and selectrons are others) and a candidate for the particles of dark matter.
So far, no supersymmetric particles have been seen at all. So SUSY appears to be dead.

This leaves big problems in particle physics (not so much elsewhere where physicists and others assume that particles, atoms, and molecules are well behaved and do not spend much time wondering why).

In particle physics (please correct me when I am wrong and I will edit the post) the theoretical estimates of the Planck mass are wrong by 120 powers of ten, a serious discrepancy. SUSY was supposed to lessen this discrepancy by having particles from the Standard Model interact with supersymmetric particles and virtual particles as they moved about as modeled by Quantum Chromodynamics. If there are no supersymmetric particles, this method to get rid of the 10^120 is lost. Also, one of the candidates for dark matter does not seem to exist either.

This brings us to the Higgs, another necessary part of the Standard Model. I asked a colleague whether a particle such as a proton acquires mass by moving through a Higgs field or whether the Higgs field has to be populated with excitations (Higgs bosons) in order for the proton to have mass. She did not know so, with the help of Google and an AIP discussion group, I found a group of physicists talking about it. According to them, even if a Higgs boson exists, there are still lots of unresolved issues. First among them is the question of where a Higgs boson gets its own mass since it is not moving through a Higgs field to gain this mass. Second is the problem of the proton's mass. According to standard relativistic quantum mechanics, most of the proton's mass comes from the motions of the quarks that make up the proton. There is little left for the Higgs field to do. The puzzle of mass seems to extend far beyond the Higgs boson.

Which brings us to Lisa Randall, a theoretical physicist and clear writer. She said, in her book "Warped Passages", that for theorists one of the best results that could come from the Large Hadron Collider would be no new particles at all (Xb(3P) was predicted with the Standard Model but never seen and has been spotted). If there were no new particles, then there was something really inadequate about the Standard Model and theorists would have a lot of work to do. Apparently, they have a lot of work to do not only in new theories but also in proposing experimental tests of these new theories.

Republic, Lost

2012-01-02T12:15:00.001-07:00

Every now and then you stumble onto a book that seems to make sense out of things that made no sense before. "Republic, Lost" by Larry Lessig is one such book.

Lessg claims that there are very few in Congress or the administration who are corrupt in the classic sense of taking bags of money or hiding money in a freezer. He claims that 'corruption' now arises from good people doing rational things within a system that encourages behaviors not in the best interests of America as a whole. Lessig gives lots of examples.

Lessig calls modern corruption the corruption of dependency--the desire, often unconscious, to continue to behave in a certain way in order to continue to receive certain benefits. In politics, Lessig lists Lyndon Johnson as the catalyst for this corruption. Lessig says that President Johnson pushed hard for civil rights legislation (a good thing) and in this pushing alienated Southern white Democrats. The alienation of Southern White Democrats put Congress back in political play because Republicans, for the first time in many years, had a way to gain control of the House of Representatives and the Senate from the Democrats. The Republicans capitalized on this opportunity, raised the appropriate campaign cash to win, and took control.

Then, because control was continually in play, each party had to raise more and more cash to win even a few seats to regain control. Congress went from the Legislating Congress to the Fund Raising congress. The leaders, in each party, were the people who could raise the funds necessary to win and no longer the people who would make the best legislative decisions for the country. The life of a Congressperson became dominated by fund raising with legislating as a hobby. The congresspeople were not corrupt in a traditional sense but needed to focus on fund raising if they wanted to remain as congresspeople. The people who could provide the funding to win were the lobbyists on K street whether they were lobbying for the dairy industry, the sugar industry, the teachers' union, the oil industry, the pharmaceutical industry, or the automotive industry. If you wanted to be re-elected, you had to accept money from these lobbyists. At some later time, you might vote for some legislation that a particular lobbyist desired. There was no direct quid pro quo.

Also, the funder who showed up with the critical million dollars late in a campaign was more likely to be listened to than the citizen who showed up with $1,000 early on.

The exchanges were gifts, not tied to specific legislation, not quid pro quo. But gifts are eventually exchanged in the other direction. Within a particular congressional district, a Congressperson would get more gifts by appealing to the single issue organizations than by appealing to the broad middle. So, pitches to the constituency became more extreme.

Lessig argues in detail that the real world rational dynamics of campaign financing is giving us the government that many are frustrated with. Why should we be proud when a presidential candidate says that it will take $1,000,000,000 in campaign funds to elect the next president, who will then let us down? The need for large campaign war chests however., according to Lessig, compel exactly this result.

At the end, Lessig is great. He proposes fascinating ways to make the system much less dependent on the gift economy. One of his suggestions is to have non-politicians run for multiple offices in a single state with the promise that if the non-politicians clear the primary and the election, they will not occupy the office and will go back to private life. Lessig claims that these candidates,without the need to win, will change the behavior of the politicians so that the system will improve dramatically.

Great book. Here is a review from the New Yorker and another from the New York Times.

Dyslexia

2011-12-28T07:55:00.002-07:00

In "The Dyslexic Advantage" (2011) Brock and Fernette Eide layout what is known and not known about dyslexia. Their main point is that while dyslexics may have trouble reading quickly and well,this is the meaning of the term dyslexia, their difficulties in reading often give them advantages in other areas of cognition.
The Eides list these other areas, such as high level ability in spatial tasks, but, most importantly for me, they also list the areas of the brain that have been found to be nexuses for certain classes of processing. I guess that I will have to learn the names of these areas and stop avoiding this learning. My underlying series of questions are about the genetics of brain organization. My intuition says that there are important lessons to be learned in connecting genetics and the functional organization of the brain.
I will extend the review of the actual book when I finish it.

Shroud of Turin

2011-12-27T17:42:00.002-07:00

In a few weeks, I am starting a seminar/discussion on what is known about the Shroud of Turin. There is a lot--anthropological, theological, and scientific.

If you want to know more, let me know.

And now for something completely different

2011-12-27T17:36:00.002-07:00

If you have been reading a lot of these posts, you might be hungry.

Here is the recipe that I created for a deconstructed turkey soup.

1/2 a sweet potato, in 1/4 inch cubes.

Fry on high in a wok, in a little oil (that has had a garlic clove fried in it), coat the sweet potato in oil, add 1 cup water, 1/4 t salt, cook/steam covered for 5 minutes or until done.

Remove the sweet potato to a plate

Add 2 tsp oil
Fry a large bell pepper (mine was orange) chopped fine in the oil until soft and just cooked.

To a cup of water, add 2T good chili powder, juice of one lime, 1/2 t mustard powder, 1/8 t freshly ground cinnamon, 1/4 t ground ginger, 2 t chicken bouillon. Let this sit while doing the next step.

Stir fry 1/3 lb ground turkey, 1 finely chopped large serrano chili, 1/8 of an onion, finely minced.

When the turkey is cooked through and has acquired a bit of browning add the peppers, sweet potatoes and cup of stock and other ingredients.

Heat through. Adjust salt and pepper. Serve. (serves 2 to 4).

Photos

2011-12-27T17:32:00.001-07:00

I like to take decent photos. Here are the NYT's top photo books of 2011.

Self deception

2011-12-27T17:09:00.001-07:00

We all lie early and often. The first lie that babies tell is at about six months when they lie to their mother and tell her, chemically, that she needs to steal nutrition from the rest of her body and give it to them.

We lie to ourselves, according to the article, because by lying to ourselves the subsequent lies that we tell to others are more believable.

Things I don't write much about

2011-12-27T16:44:00.002-07:00

We are in the midst of making the next prototype engine.

The learning and memory work, CAL(tm) and its derivatives, are now at 50,000 'neurons' and about 1,000,000 'synapses' and are in daily use, mostly to control completely flexible adaptive filing structures. Products are starting to ship.

Documents and demos are being completed for other products including analysis of terabytes of data in real time and allowing doctors to be more mobile and get away from expensive operating rooms safely.

Let the particle zoo expand, go ATLAS

2011-12-27T16:42:00.000-07:00

http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2011/12/27/new-particle-discovered-at-the-large-hadron-collider/

A new particle has been seen at CERN, a complex boson.

Yay

The Good School

2011-12-25T08:18:00.003-07:00

I have finished a useful book on K-12, "The Good School" by Peg Tyre. Tyre, a journalist and author of "The Trouble with Boys" (about how boys may be underserved by current schooling methods), here talks about what is known to work and not work in K-12. According to Tyre, much of statewide testing measures the wrong thing. It keeps the scores constant while altering the test. It does this without regard to whether the test is a good measure of student learning. Also, there is emphasis on smaller and smaller class size. Smaller class size and better learning has a strong emotional appeal. Smaller class size also increases the need for teachers and for a larger and more powerful teachers' union. Tyre lists the studies that show that smaller class size is not an important variable in predicting student achievement. She also lists the studies that prove that very strong academics in preschool and strong 'let them play, they need to be free and natural kids' are both suboptimal for preschoolers. The best teachers of these kids mix play and academics in a way that is kidcentric. This approach works better. One successful approach is 'structured play' in which kids role play and learn not only the role but also how to have the first stages of self control, a key learning skill.
Tyre also lists the studies that show that phonics and phonics/whole word are the way to teach reading, not because of politics but because they work. Many kids read badly, especially 'dyslexics' not because they are transposing letters but because they do not 'hear' the different words correctly when they read.
Tyre points out how math is taught badly and how many elementary teachers are mathphobic.
Then she details why good teachers are a child's most valuable gift and how to train more novice teachers to become good teachers.
A great book.
I have to learn how my local school system measures up to the lessons of this book.

Capitol Punishment

2011-12-24T10:25:00.002-07:00

I try to recommend insightful, well written books only. "Capitol Punishment", by itself, is neither.
The book, written by Jack Abramoff, however struck me as instructive. It instructs from the point of view of narcissism, the personality types that D.C. attracts, agent based economics, and dependency corruption.

Each of these topics are covered in other books that I have written about, the best among them being "Republic, Lost."

The main reason to read "Capitol Punishment," to me, is to listen carefully to the words that a lobbyist chooses in describing himself and to compare them to words that the reader might choose to describe being in a similar situation.

I found it disconcerting that Abramoff always described himself as the victim of evil forces and as always battling evil forces. To Abramoff, almost everyone else is a narcissist. His family, relatives, and 'friends' come off as set pieces in a self absorbed life and not as real people.

On the other hand, Abramoff's lobbying for legislation to help Indian tribes struck me, if the tribes were replaced by the names of honored or politically correct companies or organizations, to be what lobbyists do. At one point in the book, I asked how different the story would read if the group that was being helped were the Children's Hospital in Memphis or St. Olaf's college instead of the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands. My feeling about the story would change but the facts of the story probably would not.

Most useful, and a strong reason to read the book, was that "Capitol Punishment" gave direct examples of the dependency corruption of campaign funding on funders and legislators that was referred to in "Republic, Lost." Abramoff struck me as a not very self aware incarnation of the people that Lessig says are central to how government does not serve the people.

Sicily or not Sicily

2011-12-13T08:44:00.002-07:00

I grew up in New Jersey and knew a little about the Mafia as it existed around New York City and in movies and magazines. I actually knew much less than I thought I did.

Peter Robb's book "Midnight in Sicily" brings Sicily, Cosa Nostra, and even the Taliban and Al Qaeda into much sharper focus through great research and compelling writing.

Overall the book is about the trial of former Italian prime minister Guilio Andreotti for being a mafioso and for setting up the murder of a journalist who would have exposed him, Mino Pecorelli.

Actually, it tries to make sense of Sicily from 500 BCE to 1996 (when the book was published). La Cosa Nostra is presented as a set of feudal estates that maintained order in a constantly invaded island and maintained it for millenia. In this setting the mafiosi resembled the samurai in Japan who defended their feudal lords. Once the second world war came to Sicily, things changed. The CIA and the Americans funded a change in the mafia. Cosa Nostra became rich by peddling drugs, heroin and others, to Americans and northern Europeans (See Michael Lewis' "Boomerang" for more details and related stories). The CIA funded this in its war against Communism!

Robb presents Cosa Nostra as an ancient way of life--revenge driven and killing at the slightest insult, respecting a wife and children and protecting them but having mistresses and violence as part of life. In "Midnight in Sicily", Robb lays out that, for many years in Italy, thousands of people were killed every year to support a government that was really the puppet of the mafia.

A well written, complex and fascinating book. Who knew that the Boy of Mozio may be the best Greek statue or that the artist Guttoso made thousands of beautiful drawings of his mistress of 20 years, Marta Marzotto, only to have his 100 million dollar fortune, made from these pictures, stolen by the state as represented by Andreotti?

Includes great recipes for pasta con le sarde and caponata.

Ain't no sunshine but maybe a hint of dawn

2011-12-13T07:00:00.007-07:00

http://arxiv.org/abs/1112.2577

Ain't no sunshine when she's gone
It's not warm when she's away
Ain't no sunshine when she's gone
And she always gone to long anytime she goes away, hay

Wonder this time where she's gone
Wonder if she's gone to stay
Ain't no sunshine when she's gone
And this house just ain't no home
Anytime she goes away (anytime she goes away)

Bill Withers, 1971

http://arxiv.org/abs/1112.2577

Edited version (see comment) I re-edited this because a commenter (which see) pointed out that the articles today can be fit together than I did at first.

The article referenced above says that the ATLAS project at CERN has found, with 95% confidence that between 140 and 300 Gev, there is no Higgs. String theorists made their first strong prediction about the mass of the Higgs. String theory has not been useful in making such predictions so far. They predicted that the Higgs would show up at 125 GeV.

It may or may not be there. There are 2.5 standard deviation hints that it is there but such hints have turned out to be wrong before.

So the anticipated sunshine of seeing Higgs and SUSY particles at CERN has not yet risen.

This lack of definitive particles leaves big questions in the Standard model unanswered. Some of these questions are:

1. How do particles get mass?
2. Why is the Standard model off in one of its predictions by a factor of 10 to the 120th while getting lots of other things right?
3. With the apparent non-existence of SUSY (she is not just dead, there is no body at all), what should the extension of the Standard model be and what experiments will prove that this extension is a correct extension.

As Lisa Randall said in "Warped Passages" the lack of finding of the Higgs or SUSY particles would mean that entire careers of a number of theoretical physicists will have been spent chasing a mirage. On the other hand, Randall says that after the depression passes for these theorists there will be a lot of work to do since physics and the universe is clearly even more weird than physicists thought it was.

Stay tuned.

Bill Withers song is still fun whether Higgs and SUSY are real or not.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIdIqbv7SPo

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/14/science/tantalizing-hints-but-no-direct-proof-in-search-for-higgs-boson.html?_r=1&hp

More articles (see above)

I would like it if someone could explain why, after so many collisions, there are only hints of the Higgs, not strong evidence.

In assessing the situation, please keep these well-known shortcomings of the Standard Model of particle physics firmly in mind.

1. The Standard Model is primarily a heuristic model with 26-30 fundamental parameters that have to be “put in by hand”.

2. The Standard Model cannot predict the masses of the fundamental particles that make up all of the luminous matter that we can observe.

3. The Standard Model did not predict the existence of the dark matter that constitutes the overwhelming majority of matter in the cosmos. The Standard Model describes heuristically the "foam on top of the ocean".

4. The vacuum energy density crisis clearly suggests a fundamental flaw at the very heart of particle physics. The VED crisis involves the fact that the vacuum energy densities predicted or measured by particle physicists (microcosm) and cosmologists (macrocosm) differ by up to 120 orders of magnitude (roughly 10^70 to 10^120, depending on how one estimates the particle physics VED).

5. The Planck mass is highly unnatural, i.e., it bears no relation to any particle observed in nature, and calls into question the foundations of the quantum chromodynamics sector of the Standard Model.

6. Many of the key particles of the Standard Model have never been directly observed. Rather, their existence is inferred from secondary, or more likely, tertiary decay...

The above is a comment from the NYT article.

Here is another song that might fit

They say the darkest hour is right before the dawn
They say the darkest hour is right before the dawn
But you wouldn't know it by me
Every day's been darkness since you been gone.

"Meet me in the morning" Bob Dylan

SUSY and Higgs

2011-12-03T11:07:00.001-07:00

The first reports of SUSY and Higgs may show up in the press from CERN in 10 days.

Dimi si che besognio tagliare piu

2011-12-03T09:07:00.002-07:00

"Tell me if I need to cut more."

Gabrielle Hamilton's book "Blood, Bones, and Butter" is about being a real person, a complex person, who is also a fanatical chef. Hamilton thinks that being a chef is not about the Food Network and being famous. It is about cooking simply and with perfection. This book is a multicourse amazing meal of human existence told by a pro.

On looking for food in the middle of Brooklyn at 4PM with 2 screaming kids in the car (p.260)

"I would rather starve and kill my children--Medea-like--than eat the truffle oil omelette with chorizo "foam" and poquillo peppers at Soleil or Blue Bird or whatever those restaurants are called on that stretch." Then she stops at a pork store, a little further on, and her blood sugar rises just by looking at her mortadella sandwich piled high with meat and on good bread.

"I will read this book to my children and then burn all the books I have written for pretending to be anything even close to this." Mario Batali.

If you like food, passion for life, writing or just enjoying yourself, read this book.

Christine Falls

2011-11-29T16:31:00.002-07:00

I have been told to read books by John Banville. This one, "Christine Falls," is the first one that I have read. Banville writes under the nom de plum of Benjamin Black. This novel is a mystery. A young lady, Christine Falls, dies in Dublin. Her death puzzles a pathologist--Quirke. Things get atmospheric, compelling, and fairly odd after that. Like a good joke the plot seems obvious only after the whole thing is over. Wonderfully written, absolutely worth reading.

Wimps win

2011-11-29T16:29:00.002-07:00

In the linked report from Brown University, the authors say that dark matter particles must be bigger than 40 GeV and can't be the things seen in the experiments in deep mines. To the authors, if the dark matter particles were lighter, there would be too many of them and the universe that they created would not be our universe.

Henrietta Lacks

2011-11-26T11:04:00.002-07:00

I have read a lot of books about scientists and science. Some of the best of them have been reviewed on this blog. Often, even when the writing is well done, the book's content is focused on science, "Just the facts, ma'am.", and not the cultural context or the interpersonal dynamics of those involved.
"The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" by Rebecca Skloot is multidimensional and nuanced. Skloot handles the scientific development of HeLa cells, cells from Lacks' cervical tumor, very well. I had worked with these cells but knew none of their history and really enjoyed finding out this history. Lacks and her family were treated by society and by each other in the ways that blacks were often treated in America at the time the cells were obtained and initially grown, the early 1950's.

The breadth and depth of this book is amazing. The writing and story telling finesse are first class and very rare. Read it.

Learning and memory

2011-11-26T10:59:00.002-07:00

CAL(tm), our platform technology for doing artificial intelligence in the way that biology actually does it--real intelligence, has moved a long way. The most recent insight is that CAL(tm) may have something useful to say about the P = NP problem in computer science.

Each of us, in things as mundane as putting a new glass into the dishwasher, appears to be solving a part of the P = NP puzzle but not in the way that computer scientists think about this puzzle.

"Liar's Poker"

2011-11-26T10:46:00.002-07:00

I am working my way through Michael Lewis' books. This one, "Liar's Poker" from 1989, has been eye opening. I had no idea that bond traders became popular because Paul Volker changed the rules on bonds and allowed the interest rates to float, thus making the bets on bonds much more lucrative. I also did not realize that the traders themselves were all adrenaline driven and in their mid 20's. The scoring within the investment house was not about profits, good of the country, or long term strategy. It was about how many dollars worth of bonds were sold today.
This very short term focus accomplished a few things.

There was no real business structure at Salomon Brothers, the subject of the book.
There was no real planning or strategy except using your wits to react to situations in real time.
There was little thought about the consequences of trading decisions a year after the trade.
Market efficiencies were often ruthless. A high profit trade easily became a low profit trade in hours as traders copied each other.
Rewards within Salomon were fairly meritocratic. You sold a lot of bonds and you were rewarded. You didn't sell a lot of bonds and you were fired.
The unmeritocratic rewards were often based on the personality of a single individual. So, mortgage bond traders and later equity traders became 'runners'--people who left Salomon when they could get more money somewhere else. When they left Salomon and started trading desks in other firms, the profit margins for each firm in this market often collapsed.
Well worth a read.

Tasks

2011-11-26T10:34:00.002-07:00

Here are a few tasks that I am in the middle of completing:

1. A review of the book "Disrupting Class". The review is for a national publication and is focused on effective ways to improve American education.

2. A blog post, in the blog Aguanomics, on agent based economics. My reason for writing this one is to understand how to interact better with government agencies. The realization that each employee of a government, large or small, comes with their own agendas and that these agendas are important in driving optimal interactions with these people is driving the writing of these posts.

If any of you wants to see these writings or, better yet, help me improve them, let me know.

SUSY's heart beats a bit

2011-11-23T12:35:00.002-07:00

The decay of Do and anti-Do at the LHC does not fit the standard model of physics and may be a hint that SUSY is real.

As for the Higgs, it may not be real. Yet another blow to the Standard model.

Time, relativistic time, will tell us what is real, i.e. detectable.

How to Build a Time Machine

2011-11-22T19:27:00.002-07:00

Other books on time travel, for instance by Brian Greene and Lisa Randall, assume that you have a pretty good background in theoretical physics and things like Riemannian manifolds. "How to build a time machine" by Paul Davies does not require this background. The book is a quick overview of whether building a time machine is possible (yes) and how you might build one (really, really hard to do).

One of the fun parts of the book, for me, was the indirect reference to physicists whom I know--John Wheeler, Steve Lamoureaux, Wojciech Zurek, and Mike Leitch. Their work was not explained and they were not mentioned, but it was fun to go 'Wait, I know who did that.'

Moneyball

2011-11-20T16:52:00.002-07:00

The link above is to Michael Lewis' book "Moneyball", a wonderfully readable account of how statistical analysis invaded baseball. Billy Beane, a guy who looked like the next baseball hall of famer in high school, did not pan out in baseball. Eventually, he became a general manager with a problem--he needed to build a playoff bound team with less than $40,000,000 when the Yankees and other teams had $140,000,000. His approach, along with Paul de Podesta and the great insights of Bill James, allowed them to come up with new statistics such as On Base Percentage plus Slugging that were good measures of whether a team would win and throw out archaic measures such as manufacturing runs, bunting and base stealing that were not predictive of winning. No one listened to Beane and Podesta. They did not care. On $40,000,000 they were beating the high income teams routinely.
The big payoff to me, besides it being a really interesting book, is in thinking harder about what things we measure for our success and which things are strongly predictive. The things that are predictive may not be the things that we are paying attention to.

Citizen's Handbook

2011-11-19T15:13:00.002-07:00

"Citizen's Handbook: To Influencing Elected Officials" by Bradford Fitch (2010) is a short and very practical guide to talking to your congressman, Senator, or local city or state official. The basic message is 'These are all real people who are working very hard. Be prepared. Be polite. Be concise. Ask for what you want. Stay on topic.'

I have been doing this approach for years. It works very well. The Handbook taught me subtleties that I need and will use next week.

Boomerang

2011-11-17T09:23:00.003-07:00

Michael Lewis' latest book "Boomerang:Travels in the New Third World" is a fascinating journey through collapsed and collapsing economies. Lewis' writing is insightful, funny, and easy to read. For Iceland, he asks why a country such as Iceland would think that global finance would have the same rules as fishing for cod or why the Irish would think that selling and reselling Irish real estate to themselves at ever greater prices was going to work out. It ends with California, a state and a set of people addicted to buying things that they can't afford. Great read.

P.S. A nickel is worth $0.06 in metal content. A guy in Texas bought 20,000,000 of them as an investment. When the bank asked him why, he said, "I like nickels."

McMafia

2011-11-14T07:47:00.002-07:00

"McMafia" by Misha Glenny documents the workings of organized crime around the world. It starts with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of Russian mafia and ends with the Yakuza and cybercrime. It covers Israel, Nigeria, Brazil, India, Dubai, Montenegro, Bulgaria, Germany, the U.S., India and other places in between. The story is very different than what I expected it to be. In many places organized crime arose to fill gaps. Either there was no local law or there were no local lawyers. Organized crime also filled gaps in law abiding societies. Britons wanted to smoke but did not want to pay 3 pounds a pack for cigarettes that cost 20 pence a pack where they were made in North Carolina. So, they bought smuggled cigarettes for 1.5 pounds a pack. I really liked the book and learned more from it than from any book that I have read in the last ten years.

The Trouble with Boys

2011-11-08T16:59:00.002-07:00

Peg Tyre's book "The Trouble with Boys" is fascinating. Boys are doing much worse in school than girls are. They are doing worse from pre-kindergarten through college. Tyre gathers the data from everywhere. She points out the strengths and weaknesses of the data, and, to me, does us all a great service by not drawing strong conclusions when the data does not support these conclusions. One of the interesting un-conclusions is that brain science is invoked to support some current idea on how to teach people. Tyre points out that the research measures glucose consumption in various parts of the brain and shows that this consumption is different in boys and girls, but she also points out that no one yet knows what these differences mean and whether they are important in guiding teachers to better teaching.

Retirement heist

2011-10-21T16:47:00.002-06:00

"Retirement Heist" Ellen Schultz 2011
If you think that your pension is in some company 'lockbox' and can't be stolen from you, think again. Delta Airlines pilot Denis Waldron was getting $1939 a month. After bankruptcy proceedings, Waldron was getting $95 a month. The rest went to Delta executives and creditors. All of it went legally.

If you live in Los Alamos, retired from Los Alamos National Laboratory, and are getting your pension through LANS, you really need to read this book. You will not like what you read, but you will realize that many of the events portrayed in corporate America are also occurring or have occurred in government owned, privately managed facilities.

There are strategies to protect yourself. The book gives an introduction to them.

The Innovator's Solution

2011-10-21T08:58:00.002-06:00

"The Innovator's Solution" Clayton Christensen 2003
This is the third Christensen book that I have read. The other two were "The Innovator's Dilemma" and "Disrupting Class", both reviewed in other posts here.
In all the books, Christensen is focusing on new approaches that destroy large existing companies routinely. He is trying to teach the companies how to avoid being destroyed.
From my point of view in trying to get small companies to be successful, Christensen is telling me how large organizations interact with small ones and what avenues to pursue, as a small organizationo, in order to be successful.
I like this book the best of the three because it explains the organzational dynamics that accounted for event such as the collapse of Pandesic and RCA as well as the movement of VC firms upmarket creating a dearth of new companies for the VC firms to invest in.

Better education

2011-10-16T18:41:00.002-06:00

"Disrupting Class" Clayton Christensen 2011
There are many claims that education in the U.S. is broken. Christensen claims that it is not broken so much as being measured against metrics that are incorrect. He claims that U.S. education has transformed itself over and over in ways that few companies have ever mastered.
He also claims that the next step in U.S. education is to tailor education to individual learning styles. He claims that students are not stupid but often are ill served by the one size fits all industrial paradigm of current education.

Then he lays out battle tested ways to improve education. These ways are an extension of his pioneering work in "The Innovator's Dilemma."
A fascinating, compelling, and practical book.

Manplus

2011-10-11T11:57:00.001-06:00

"Manplus" Frederik Pohl 1976

An interesting and very readable book about altering a human to survive without a space suit on the surface of Mars. Many of the topics, such as climate catastrophe and associated breakdown of society, are timely now. The characters are realistic and not cutouts. Especially fascinating to me are the thoughts of the man while being turned into a cyborg that can survive on Mars.

Constitution Cafe

2011-10-10T12:34:00.002-06:00

"Constitution Cafe" 2011 Christopher Phillips
Here are thoughts on the first 1/4 of the book. More thoughts will supplant these.

Thomas Jefferson thought that the Constitution should be rewritten, if needed, every twenty or so years. Phillips wanders around and talks to many average people about what that rewriting might be. In the process he lays out much of the history and content of the Constitution and the Declaration. Fascinating, especially for someone like me who was much more ignorant about both the Declaration and the Constitution than I realized I was. Well worth the read.

Dreaming in Chinese

2011-10-03T19:29:00.004-06:00

"Dreaming in Chinese" Deborah Fallows 2010
I have been trying to learn Chinese characters and written Chinese (see the Tuttle book, an earlier post, for great teaching of characters).
Fallows' book is about the spoken language. It is particularly about how to understand China through the way that its language works. Fallows taught me about the emergence of tones in spoken Chinese (reminiscent of the aliens in Mieville's "Embassytown"). There are only 400 syllables in Chinese. The four tones take this spoken number up to 1600 sounds. Even so, there are huge numbers of homonyms. One poem, by Chao Yuan Ren, is 92 syllables long. It is about a poet, Shi, who wants to buy some lions because he is hungry. He buys the lions and takes them home only to find that they are stone lions. In written Chinese the story is clear. In spoken Mandarin, the poem is 92 repetitions of the syllable 'shi' in its four different tones and so is very amusing.
The book is great and my understanding of China, spoken Chinese, Hanzi, and even LaoBaiXing. If I knew how to put the tones into this post I would.
A quick read and a wonderful book. Fallows is a clear observer and writer and, professionally, a linguist.

Fun Home

2011-10-03T07:51:00.002-06:00

"Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic" by Alison Bechdel 2006.
An autobiographical graphic novel and memoir.
"A splendid autobiography...generous and intelligent..has a depth of sweetness few can match." Entertainment Weekly.
"Heart stopping..a beautiful, assured piece of work" Salon.com
"The most ingeniously compact, hyper-verbose example of autobiography to have been produced. It is a pioneering work... The artist's work is so absorbing you feel you are living in her world."

Einstein's Dreams

2011-10-01T07:44:00.002-06:00

Einstein's Dreams is a series of dreams about places/worlds in which time moves differently. In one world,a lifetime is a single day. In another, time is a dimension just like 'up' and you can view or travel down this dimension. In another, each city has its own time. In some cities, time runs faster. In others it runs more slowly. The cities cannot communicate. Each world is 'situated' in a town in Switzerland and is presented through the thoughts and feelings of its residents. "It is at once intellectually provocative and touching and comic and so very beautifully written." Salman Rushdie.

Successful k-12 STEM education

2011-09-27T11:08:00.003-06:00

Beyond just reading books, I have had to make some sense of K-12 education. I have to do this so that I can determine, for two towns competing for my businesses, which one is better.

I get barraged by educationese and get confused.
I get confused because educators often talk in incomprehensible jargon, and, even if you can get someone to define the jargon terms, these same terms will mean something different to the next educator that you listen to. It is hard to understand what good sounding sentences mean once you find out that the words in the sentences do not have a stable definition or, sometimes, any definition at all.

So here (in the title) is a report from the National Academy of Sciences about what works in STEM and another one from Brookings.

That used to be us.

2011-09-25T20:00:00.002-06:00

"That Used to be us" by Tom Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum (2011) is a guide to how America lost its desire to be a world leader and how it can find this desire again to become not a another China but the America that we want and deserve to be.
Most importantly, whether it is in government, education, regulation, or other areas, the authors give examples, from different parts of America, about how to do thing well. An inspiring book.

Teenage brain development

2011-09-21T13:18:00.001-06:00

This fascinating article talks about the changes such as myelination and changes in reward to risk ratio that occur during the teenage years and how these changes may be selected by evolution.

Embassytown

2011-09-14T12:07:00.002-06:00

"Embassytown" China Mieville 2011 In this book Mieville explores what limits communication between people. One of the 'people' is humans. The other 'people' are aliens who speak so differently that they can't even tell that human sounds are language. One of the disconnects is that the alien have two mouths and only understand as language things that are said in two part harmony by one brain. As usual, the topic is fascinating and Mieville writes very well.

Average IQ

2011-09-07T10:53:00.002-06:00

IQ has interesting variability. It has been posited to vary with race, location, food availability, distance from sub Saharan Africa (humanity's point of origin), and other factors.

The strongest correlation is actually with infection in childhood. In places where childhood infection is high, IQs are low.

SUSY may not be dead, just shy

2011-09-07T08:32:00.002-06:00

A few experiments deep in the mines of Italy may have seen dark matter, in this case neutralinos, one of the stable and low energy states of proposed supersymmetry particles.

If this holds up, there is a double win for particle physics. First candidates for dark matter and for supersymmetric particles will have been detected. On the down side, it took more than a year to detect 20 putative neutralinos so experimental progress may be slow for a while. On the second down side, the detected particles appear to have much lower mass/energy than theorists wanted them to have.

Doing business

2011-08-24T12:22:00.003-06:00

"The Mormon Way of Doing Business" by Jeff Benedict (Warner Business Books, 2007)seemed to be a book giving insights into ways that Mormons might do business differently than non Mormons. It is much more than that. It is a book of great business and life practices. It focuses not only on being a good businessperson but also on how to balance business, family, and religious duties. An excellent book for all of us.
On the other hand, many of the lessons of this book are the lessons of great business leaders in certain kinds of businesses. The businesses that seem to apply to the lessons of this book are hierarchical, many person, businesses in which doing the same thing over and over and really well--sort of the mind set of Japanese businesses, and the Mormon church organization--is the best way to do things. This way of doing business may not apply to non-hierarchical tech businesses that are inventing new things instead of optimizing existing things.
Also, all of the women in this book came across as '50s style mothers--people who put their entire energies into raising families, not having careers, and going to college only to get married. The women apparently never saw their husbands. It is not clear how this model of men, women, and family might extend to other fields of work and life.
The author states that the family lifestyles touted as optimal are not possible unless some family member brings in a lot of cash. Many families do not have a lot of cash.
Like many other religion based approaches to an economy, this approach appears to be very productive in certain parts of an entire economy but less productive in other necessary parts.

The photographer's mind

2011-08-24T12:19:00.002-06:00

"The Photographer's Mind" by Michael Freeman (Focal Press, 2011) gives insightful thoughts from a professional photographer on all the aspects of great digital photography.

News

2011-08-14T11:18:00.002-06:00

"News is a Verb" by Pete Hamill, 1998. This book is triple fascinating. It is written well. It lays out the case for how to be a successful newspaper in great detail, including writing well throughout the paper, knowing your community and writing for the Sweeneys. It also resonates with current discussion on energy, climate change, and the deficit. It resonates because, for newspapers, it brings up all of the variables not just the ones that an author might like. You have to look at all the variables if you want to solve a problem not just get some money to not solve it.

Laser (edited)

2011-07-29T07:44:00.000-06:00

"Laser" by Nick Taylor is the story of the multi-decade attempt by Gordon Gould to get credit for inventing the laser and to get some monetary reward for doing it.

The writing is tolerable. The science is sometimes presented well and sometimes not so well. The story, however, is compelling.

It captures Gould's spark of invention, his serious patent wars against Nobel Laureates, universities, large corporations and even the Patent Office itself. Inspite of the fact that he was the first to invent and had all the documents, it took him 40 years to be vindicated.

It lays out how to get patents and how not to get patents, divisions, continuations in part, and the amazing travails of the patenting legal system. A very useful and interesting read.

Written in Stone

2011-07-26T10:49:00.002-06:00

Brian Switek assembles the paleontology of the mid 1800's with references as recent as last year in "Written in Stone." He documents how world views changed as new fossils were discovered, often fossils that were sitting in museum basements and were unexamined for decades. His latest references come from the literature of last year. The intriguing part of this book to me was that Switek instead of just saying 'Those old guys were wrong. How stupid they were. We are great.'lays out the scientific debates of the time and helps me understand why ideas that seem commonsense now seemed outlandish at the time of the discovery of the new evidence. Usually, the disconnect in my thinking came from anachronisms that I created. The evidence that I used to come to a decision did not exist when the scientists were fighting about some new fossil. Also, there is a lot more information in anatomical differences than I ever understood.

SUSY is still not found at LHC

2011-07-26T10:48:00.001-06:00

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20729-should-we-worry-about-what-the-lhc-is-not-finding.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news

Interesting new books

2011-07-19T19:00:00.002-06:00

"Predictably Irrational" - Daniel Ariely How people make less than optimal choices over and over. Sometimes the choices can be manipulated by environment.

"The City and ytic eht" --China Mieville a murder occurs in two cities that physically overlap strongly (often a house in one city abuts a house in the other city) but in which the residents of each city learn to unsee the other city and treat the other city as a foreign country.

"Where the Dark and the Light Folks Meet" Randall Sandke Many of the books about jazz have been ideologically driven -- African American have this talent that whites do not and created an entirely new musical form entirely by themselves. Sandke says that historically this narrative is wrong. Jazz, especially its development from about 1940 on, has always been multicultural and not the simple racist story that has been written about it.

Las Conchas

2011-07-02T08:17:00.002-06:00

I am getting to watch "Blur" in action.
The Las Conchas fire has been threatening my home town, Los Alamos, NM, for a week now. I am in Albuquerque waiting for the fire to die down and for the all clear to be sounded so that we can return.

The Las Conchas fire is big, 100,000 acres, and nasty--actively spreading. It seems to have moved north of the town.

blur

2011-06-15T11:50:00.002-06:00

There is a new book by a couple of journalists, "Blur."
The book gives directions on how to make sense out of the endless flow of news and how to tell where truth might lie. The main point is to look for verifiable facts, neutrality over time, and breadth and depth in the reporting. The book makes it easier to identify spin and to compensate for it.

We, the drowned

2011-06-13T12:44:00.003-06:00

The trouble with saying that a book is great is then someone gives you a better book and all the previous books move down the list.

That better book is

Jensen, Carsten; "We, the Drowned" 2006 (translated in 2010). Jensen takes the history of a small town of sailors, Marstal Denmark, and follows its development, crash and redevelopment through 100 years--from 1848 to 1948. He follows the town through the rise of great sailing ships to the rise of steamships and through the ships of war in WWII. He follows residents of the town as they traverse the world.
Even given this sweep, the story is compelling and holds together through the constancy of a few characters' development and through the constancy of the harsh sea. I liked the character development, the sense of place (both on the land and on the sea), the fact that each scene, even if unexpected, followed the internal logic of the book, and the insights into human behavior. I also liked that, in contrast to War and Peace, I did not have to remember hundreds of characters but only twenty. A great read.

horoscopes for the dead

2011-06-01T12:04:00.001-06:00

Collins, Billy, "horoscopes for the dead", 2011. To write an adequate review for this stunning collection of poems, I need better writing skills than I have. Just read it. Then read Collins' other poems.

When god was a rabbit

2011-06-01T11:27:00.002-06:00

Winman, Sarah; "When god was a rabbit" 2011. Winman's first novel follows Ell and her brother Joe for forty years in England starting when Ell was seven. It accomplishes the difficult task of being in the moment all the time and constantly being perceptive of and empathetic of people and things from the slow decline of a relative to the slow growth of a root on the opposite bank of a stream. The writing is luminous.

The Blue Star

2011-05-31T08:20:00.002-06:00

Earley, Tony; "The Blue Star", 2008. Earley's first book was "Jim the Boy." In this book, we see Jim, the high school student, on his way off to serve in the Army in WWII. Jim learns about girls, friends, enemies and becoming a man. The book is worth reading for the characters and for the wonderful creation of a rural town in North Carolina at the beginning of WWII. The rhythms of the town and the feeling of rural America draw the reader in quickly and thoroughly. I will read Earley's other books next.

No egg shape in electrons

2011-05-30T09:29:00.003-06:00

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21028145.100-ultracold-measurements-reveal-shape-of-the-electron.html?full=true&print=true

If SUSY was real, the electron should be oval, egg shaped. It isn't. Maybe SUSY is not the right path. SUSY particles have not been found at the LHC. They should have been.

If SUSY is wrong, what is the new version of the Standard Model?

Being Wrong

2011-05-28T07:21:00.002-06:00

In "Being Wrong", Kathryn Schulz explores the cost to each of us when we are unwilling to admit that we are wrong. Schulz suggests that we should embrace our errors so that we can learn from them. She also suggests that we can be happier by laughing at our mistakes, such as when she dived into her sister's car to avoid a deluge only to find that the car actually belonged to a different lady, one who was in the midst of breastfeeding her child and who was speechless when a drowned rat--Schulz--dove into her car. Schulz writes wonderfully. The book will require me to read it multiple times in order to absorb its insight. A find.

Foreign detainees

2011-05-23T08:32:00.002-06:00

A much better exposition of the intricacies of foreign policy than what I wrote in the last post can be found in a novel. This novel is 'Eclipse' by Richard North Patterson. It examines hostage taking by an African dictator in a very corrupt oil country. Patterson is a compelling novelist. The underlying story is true.

Court rights of foreign detainees

2011-05-21T18:19:00.002-06:00

In this op ed piece in today's NYT, the writer claims that the Supreme Court should not have ruled that foreign CIA detainees can be tortured abroad.

To me, the op ed piece goes for drama and ideology and leaves out a lot of important facts that I hope the Supreme court considered.

For instance,

1. The people detained were not American citizens, were not detained on American soil, and are therefore not subject to American laws.
2. If the executive branch of government has secrets that can't be disclosed in public, then it needs to have the ability to protect these secrets from forced disclosure in an American court.
3. If America is a country of laws, then detainees, as well as everyone else, needs to be subject to appropriate American laws and not subject to laws that are not appropriate.

The fact that the CIA permitted torture by foreign governments of foreign nationals and that this torture does not seem to work appears to be a matter between the White House and the CIA and not a matter for US courts.

So, my question is how should detainees be treated, what is the role of US courts in this treatment, what laws apply, and if American citizens do not like what the courts decided but what the courts decided is legal, then what should these citizens do next.

Thoughts?

Love Wins

2011-05-11T07:25:00.002-06:00

Bell, Rob, "Love Wins" 2011, non fiction. God loves us; you and your friends are going to hell. Heaven is out there beyond this life. The Hell of Dante is the real Hell. Bell, using extensive Biblical quotes, deconstructs all of these statements and says that God loves all of us Christian and non-Christian. God wants us to voluntarily stop sinning and will wait until we do. God loves the prodigal son and the non-prodigal son. This is a quick and very interesting read. Bell posits a Biblically supported loving future for all of us.

Why the west rules

2011-05-09T15:04:00.002-06:00

Morris, Ian; "Why the West rules--for now" 2010, non fiction. There are two camps about why the West rules the planet's development--the accidental theory and the lock-in theory. In the accidental theory, there are no causes. It just happened. In the lock-in theory, western genes or sociology or geography have put the West ahead always. Morris argues that both of these theories are wrong. Morris, an paleo-historian covers social development of the West (descendents of the Hilly Flanks in Iraq) and the East (descendents of a Chinese center near the Yangzi river in China) and finds that the West has been ahead of the East for fourteen of the last fifteen millenia but no for reasons of sociology or biology and not for reasons that were constant over time. A long (615 pages)but detailed and fascinating read. Not surprisingly, the crises that humanity is facing now bear strong resemblance to those that it has faced multiple times in the past, especially when humanity pushed up against hard boundaries in social development such as the collapse of the Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, or various Chinese dynasties.

The Threat Matrix

2011-05-04T10:39:00.000-06:00

I am reading a fascinating book, "The Threat Matrix", a detailed exposition on the FBI's evolution from an agency concerned only with bank robberies to an agency with world wide clout in fighting terrorism.

On page 232, Graff, the author, states that the U.S. has known where Osama has been, often within 50 feet, every day since 1997. He was not taken out on some days because the chance of success was low and, on most days, because U.S. politics ruled it out, for instance, on some days, being friendly with the Pakistanis was much more important than killing Osama.

Unexpected information but very credible.

Why yesterday was the day to take him out is unclear.

I am now about 450 pages through the 600 page book. With the constantly changing story from the White House about happened at Abbottabad, ut is fascinating to be reading about how similar stories, going back to 1933, were crafted to fit political needs not the facts of the case. "The Threat Matrix", because of its detailed journalism of the FBI, the CIA, DoD, and the White House over the course of decades has become a riveting read.

My main conclusions so far is that many in D.C. lie for short term rational political reasons that are not so good for the long term health of the country. The clash between the political appointees and the long term government workers is much harsher than I realized. It is also clear from the book that 'enhanced interrogation' almost never yields any new information. Establishing a bond with the detainee, on the other hand, seems to work almost all the time.

Higgs is hiding

2011-04-24T17:30:00.001-06:00

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2011/04/has-the-lhc-found-a-hint-of-th.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news

SUSY may not be dead after all, just shy.
A Higgs or something very interesting may have been found at 115 GeV.

The Big Lie

2011-04-20T09:43:00.002-06:00

Bianco, Anthony,"The Big Lie" The story of spying and scandal at Hewlett Packard in the Carly Fiorina, Jay Keyworth, Tom Perkins, and Pattie Dunn era--HP's Spygate. Fascinating. The big insight was the level of personal pettiness to the detriment of HP and the level of backstabbing.

Genderspeak

2011-04-19T08:30:00.002-06:00

Elgin, Suzette Haden, "Genderspeak"
Elgin's first book, "The Gentle Art of Verbal Self Defense", taught me that if a person's way of talking to me feels like an attack, it usually is. Then it taught me how to recognize such attacks and what to do about them. In this book, Elgin extends this approach to the area of male/female conversations, especially those conversations that go off the rails for reasons that neither conversant understands. Elgin has a lot of insights that I will have to process. For instance, she says that men do not have intimate conversations with the women they care about the most because men are taught not to have intimate conversations, because men are taught that intimate conversations are a sign of weakness, and, most importantly, because men have learned over a lifetime of interactions that this intimate conversation will be used like a knife when the woman is mad at him. This knife will hurt him badly and he knows no defense for the attack. So he may have a first intimate conversation but is unlikely to have a second one. Another insight is that men and women have different meanings for the same word, such as the word 'lie.' Men attach team sports based meanings to words such as lie. In team sports, pretending you have the ball when you don't is not lying. It is playing the game. If a woman attaches a school room type metaphor to the same action, then pretending that you have something you don't is lying. The actions are the same, the internal semantic landscape is different. If you would like to understand the nuances of conversation, especially conversation gone wrong, Elgin's books are a great resource.

Dissonance and the Naked Lady

2011-04-14T09:24:00.003-06:00

I just finished a book, "The Naked Lady who stood on her head", by Gary Small. The book is a set of essays about unusual psychiatric cases. For me, knowing of the existence of such cases is useful in trying to get the CAL work from where it is to larger scales. What caused the dissonance, however, was the author's chosen voice for the book. While claiming that he was part of the new empathetic brand of psychiatrist and not in it just for the money, he kept saying that he mainly looked for YAVIS patients (Young, Attractive, Verbal, Insightful, and Rich--the S standing for a dollar sign). Then while saying that he was not self-absorbed or superficial, he puts down other doctors for being self absorbed and dumber than he is and recounts his increase in ego because he was known by the self absorbed, successful, and superficial.
It came across as a book putting down narcissists but written by a narcissist. Very odd.

Writing in Restaurants

2011-04-10T19:35:00.002-06:00

David Mamet, "Writing in Restaurants" 1986. Mamet is a playwright most recently known for "Glengarry, Glenross" and "The Unit." This book is a series of essays about playwriting and acting. The writing is compact, lucid, and insightful. In my categories of writing, I think that I have to create an A+ category into which this book and very few others (Leguin, Tolstoy, and T.S. Eliot come to mind) will fit. This book is better than others that I have thought were great.

"Mr. Jelly Roll baker, can I please be your slave"

2011-04-09T11:55:00.002-06:00

"Jelly's Blues" (Reich and Gaines, 2003) is a great biography. It describes, in different keys, time signatures, and musical styles, the life of Jelly Roll Morton, the inventor of jazz, the first person to right jazz down on paper, a defrauded black jazz musician, and the author of compositions as distinct as 'Jelly Roll Blues', 'Frog-I-More Rag', 'King Porter Stomp', and 'Ganjam'--compositions that were 10 to 20 years ahead of other jazz musicians and that enriched the Melrose brothers, ASCAP, Duke Ellington, W.C. Handy, and Satchmo but never enriched Jelly Roll. Jelly Roll's story would never had been know except that William Russell was entranced by it and filled his New Orleans apartment with Mortoniana, a treasure trove that survived numerous New Orleans hurricanes.

SUSY and the Higgs may be dead, but!

2011-04-06T12:24:00.002-06:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/06/science/06particle.html?ref=science

A team at the Tevatron may have found a new particle at 144 GeV.
Like the new organisms found constantly by biologists, this new particle does not know how it is supposed to behave and so it does unpredicted things, in this case decaying into jets of electrons and W bosons by following a decay pathway that has not been seen before.

Balance of Power

2011-04-04T09:17:00.002-06:00

Richard North Patterson, "Balance of Power" 2003. I am starting to read more of Richard North Patterson. He takes on complex, current issues in intriguing and compelling ways. In this book, the President's wife's family is gunned down by a crazed brother-in-law using a gun that is inaccurate, lethal, and contains a 40 bullet clip. The fight is between the SSA (North's stand in for the NRA) and the President. As usual, the story is subtle, complex, and passionate. The unveiling of how power politics works and how much of it is about personal ego and not the welfare of the constituents was eye opening for me. But then, I am idealistic. The six hundred pages read quickly. There are really no places where is it easy to stop reading.

SUSY is dead

2011-03-30T16:28:00.001-06:00

Lots of collisions

No SUSYs

No Higgs

Lots of infinities in the mathematics

120 orders of magnitude unaccounted for

Now what?

The Art of Mingling

2011-03-29T08:37:00.002-06:00

If I go to a big gathering and know no one, I get intimidated and spend a decent amount of time leaning against the wall or sampling the food. I would rather meet new people, but I do not know how to become part of a group that is already talking nor do I know how to leave a group that is not interesting to me. Jeanne Martinet's "The Art of Mingling" has changed that. Now at the next gathering or party, I will mingle. Martinet gives simple, easy to remember approaches to meet people you do not know and to escape to meet other people. A very practical and useful book. I will use it tonight.

The Innovator's Dilemma

2011-03-28T10:47:00.002-06:00

If you are trying to run a small company and have a disruptive technology, you often read books on management, finances, etc. targeted at MBA programs. Many of these ideas are interesting and useful but do not work nearly as well as expected. Clayton Christensen, in "The Innovator's Dilemma" explains why they do not work. Most of the MBA books tell how to run a large existing company better and create new products for this company. Christensen call this process 'sustaining technology' and says that established companies are very good at it. Disruptive technology is the wobbly new born that does not really function well yet. Disruptive technology needs a place to grow strong--a small unstable emerging market. When the disruptive technology has grown strong and competes well with the existing technology, its companies routinely send the existing companies in the old market into bankruptcy. If you have a small company with a disruptive technology or are thinking of starting one, you have to read this book.

Body Language

2011-03-23T07:52:00.002-06:00

In many interactions, such as meetings, a lot of information is transmitted by body language, apparently most of the information. Reading this information transfer accurately will help the meeting go much better. The Pease's book "The Definitive Book of Body Language" is a tremendous guide to what you and others are saying by body language. It also tells why and how many women are better at reading body language than most men are.

Lying

2011-03-22T07:29:00.004-06:00

I have a number of meetings to go to and many people to interact with. Most of the people will be truthful. Some will lie to me, by commission or by omission. I felt the need to detect the liars faster and more accurately. Lieberman in "Never Be Lied to Again" gives me the tools to do this. The tools include listening more clearly -- especially for inconsistencies in stories,asking subtle probing questions, reading body language, lying to yourself, and standard approaches that others use in lying to you. A very useful book.

Bowling Alone

2011-03-22T07:21:00.002-06:00

For many years, I have felt a disconnectedness from my community. I assumed that this disconnectedness was mostly my fault. Then I assumed that the disconnectedness was due to living in a community of asocial introverts. Robert Putnam's book "Bowling Alone" gives me real facts, lots of them. It turns out that my feeling of disconnectedness is much broader than just me. It has been increasing for many years in the U.S. and has generational reasons and social reasons. "Bowling Alone" was written in 2000. For me, by 2011, it seems that the Internet and social networking is increasing our connectedness both across the Web and locally. I like it.

Authors that are fun

2011-03-22T07:16:00.002-06:00

I am a little squeezed for time, so no reviews at the moment.
To relax, I have been reading two new authors, Michael Crichton and Nevada Barr.
Crichton has very interesting and topical story lines.
Barr's Anna Pigeon series of novel are murder mysteries set in National Parks. The mysteries were hard for me to figure out. The writing about the parks and about Pigeon's interior dialogs was great.

In the name of honor

2011-03-10T16:01:00.002-07:00

"In the name of honor" Richard North Patterson 2010.
Patterson writes really well. I love "Exile." Here the topic is PTSD, Sadr City, and military honor and families. The characters are complex. The story is gripping and very compelling.

Ensouling Language

2011-03-08T06:53:00.000-07:00

Stephen Harrod Buhner; "Ensouling Language: On the Art of Nonfiction and the Writer's Life" 2010. At it's heart, Buhner says that nonfiction writing should not be grinding out of reasonably clear words in a simple order by following the 'rules of grammar' but should be as well done and inspiring as 'literature.' Beyond the grammar and lucidity lies the land of myth where each word is filled with meaning, a land of dreams and connections, a land in which pieces of wood become a 'chair'--part living wood, part craft, part the soul of the maker, part the souls of those who will use it. To Buhner, you have to push through your sentences until 'chair' is pushing to get out through every word. Only then have you written good non fiction. Buhner also points out that a first draft is always shitty; you have not yet found the underlying mythic structure. And a book proposal is a short story, a work of compelling fiction, designed to seduce the acquisitions editor at a publishing house. The finished book never resembles the proposal except in topic area. If it is important to you to write well, whether it is scientific proposals or papers or how to books for xeriscaping, read this book. Then write. And Edit. And Edit. And Edit. Edit until the underlying essence of the subject becomes Scylla and captures the reader.

Pushing, pushing, pushing.

2011-03-07T13:32:00.001-07:00

“Although it cannot be seen with the eye, there is a wall between the writer an the nonwriter. It is perhaps three feet thick, composed of the psychic equivalent of Plexiglass. Sometimes it feel so physical—for those of us who have not yet been published—that you can almost put your hand out and touch it, run your finger over its surface. All beginning writers know of its existence. The know they are on the wrong side and they want desperately to be on the other side of that wall:..”

1. The first and most important thing is to recognize the existence of the wall.

2. The second is the desire, more than anything else, to be on the other side of that wall.

3. The third thing you must do is to apply pressure on the wall. And this pressure must be unrelenting, that is, you can never let up.

4. Fourth, when an opening appears, you must force your way through it.

5. And fifth, trust that the things you feel, that insist they be said, are there inside you, pushing on you, for a reason, Trust that there are people out there that need to hear those things, just as much as you need to say them. Understand that, as Antonio Machado said, “My feeling is not only mine, but ours.” Trust the thing that leads you on and the writing to which it takes you.

The quote (Ensouling language. pp 12-15) is about writing nonfiction but also seems to apply to many other endeavors, such as science or entrepreneurship.

Disintegration

2011-03-06T11:43:00.002-07:00

Eugene Robinson, "Disintegration: The splintering of black America" 2010. Robinson posits that black America, a reasonably homogeneous group from 1900 to 1950 created by white pressure mostly in the South, has now divided into four groups--the Mainstream, the Transcendent, the Emergent, and the Abandoned. These groups do not share goals or cultures. The Transcendent are wealthy and powerful and no longer part of the black American experience. The Mainstream are middle class to upper middle class blacks whose ancestors emigrated from the segregated South and found a way to be solid citizens whose children will be even more successful. The Emergent come in two groups--the new immigrants(often coming from Africa and very educated and ambitious and the sons and daughters of biracial couples). The final group--the Abandoned--are those descendants of slaves who were left in the rural South and the inner city when the Mainstream moved out. Robinson talks in detail about the emergence of these groups and how they might change in the future. He also talks about ineffective approaches to bring a better future to the Abandoned and proposes an effective approach. A very interesting book that has lessons far beyond the black experience.

Cartoon Economics

2011-03-03T05:32:00.002-07:00

Klein, G."The Cartoon Introduction to Economics Vol. 1 Microeconomics" 2010 I learn best through clear examples that connect some theory to the real world. It is better if the examples are both serious and funny. For microeconomics, this is the book. Coase theorem, Pareto efficient, taxes, supply, demand, efficient markets, externalities and many other things are presented clearly from the point of view of individual buyers and sellers and groups of buyers and sellers. I sort of understood these terms before. My understanding is much better after 100 pages of good analogies, nice drawings, and appropriate comedy. I wish that economics were actually taught this way.

Griftopia

2011-03-01T08:33:00.002-07:00

Taibbi, Matt; Griftopia : bubble machines, vampire squids, and the long con that is breaking America non fiction, 2010
Very good insights castigating both the left and the right for naivete and then presenting a plausible financial oligarchy.
"An almost startling reminder of the power of good writing." Ezra Klein
"Matt Taibbi writes in a no-holds-barred, often profane, but always informative and stimulating style that gets under the skin of the powerful." Bill Moyers

El Rushbo

2011-02-25T12:40:00.003-07:00

Many of my book reviews are of very well written and deep books. This is neither of those things but is worth reading nonetheless.

Rush Limbaugh : an army of one by Chafets, Zeʾev.
New York : Sentinel, 2010.

Limbaugh is much more interesting than I knew. Chafets is a free lance writer for the New York Times.
Limbaugh's ideas resonate with millions of viewers (on average smarter folks than all other well known media outlets except NPR sometimes, Pew Research finding) because they articulate a world view not accepted in New York, D.C., San Francisco, or Los Angeles. In addition, Rush is friendly and funny.
Instead of buying in to the standard ad hominem attacks on him, you might want to read this book.
The interesting part of El Rushbo is his constant verbal judo, the verbal version of float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. He constantly gets those who disagree with his world view to overreact. Then he uses their power against them. A good strategy to remember, especially since in his case those who disagree with him never seem to realize that they are being played.

Best seat in the house

2011-02-23T12:03:00.002-07:00

Best seat in the house : a basketball memoir by Lee, Spike. One fun thing about trying out new books is that you find gems you would never have read otherwise. This one is a fan's view of basketball, mostly NBA and mostly Knicks. If you don't care about sports especially basketball don't read this. If you care, read it.

Stalling for Time

2011-02-22T06:37:00.003-07:00

I have read a lot of books on negotiation. A number of them are mentioned in this blog. My latest is "Stalling for Time" by Gary Noesner. Noesner was the principal hostage negotiator for the FBI. He was at Ruby Ridge, Waco, and many less publicized places. In this book, he lays out the world of a hostage negotiation, a high intensity negotiation where lives are on the line and can be lost very quickly. Noesner's book is a very interesting read and nicely complements other negotiation books.

American Grace

2011-02-22T06:29:00.002-07:00

I have anecdotal evidence of changing beliefs by Americans across cultural, age, and religious beliefs. Now, after skimming Robert Putnam's encyclopedic "American Grace", I have actual numbers. Conservative Christians, blacks, Latinos, Catholics, Jews, and mainline Protestants all view the world in different ways. These different views, such as how literal Scripture is and how reliable church hierarchy is, make it difficult to communicate across denominations. Active listening to each other would be a big step forward.

Attack of the Smart Pies

2011-02-15T07:39:00.002-07:00

Gonick, Larry; "Attack of the Smart Pies" fiction, 2005 The books that I recommend are well written and usually deep in a scientific or psychological sense. Then there was Hugh Laurie's "The Gun Seller"-a spy story told by a smart ass--which is just funny. Gonick, who brought us "The Cartoon History of the Universe" is sweet, funny, and insightful once again. A Muse, Feather (the vegetarian Muse), goes to the mall for a doughnut, meets a young girl who needs help, and gets attacked by Smart Pies from space. Light reading. Very funny.

Obama's rage

2011-02-14T08:40:00.002-07:00

Dinesh D'Souza; "The Roots of Obama's Rage" non-fiction 2010. I have been trying to understand who Obama is in his heart. The standard story lines: 'He is a socialist.' 'He is an angry black man.' 'He wants to rule the world.' 'He has no backbone and is an empty suit.' seemed incomplete or just wrong. These story lines seemed wrong to D'Souza as well. Finally, after four tries, D'Souza thinks he has a figured it out. D'Souza, like Obama, was raised mostly outside the U.S. D'Souza's world view is that of Third Worlder not an American. He claims that Obama's view is also that of a Third Worlder, not an American nor an American Black. He claims that Obama's core is that of his father and of Obama's mentors, all anticolonialists. He claims that Obama wants to diminish the strength of America in reparation for colonialism by European countries against his Kenyan father and neo-colonialism by America later on. Obama senior believed that Europeans destroyed the stable villages of Africa, raped and tortured Africans, pillaged the natural resources of the countries, and left capitalist ideas in Africa as ongoing neocolonialism. Obama senior wanted all white people out of Africa and an Africa that had African socialism--private companies that can be controlled by the government whenever the government thinks that it needs to control them. This is distinctive African socialism not European welfare capitalism nor traditional socialism that does not allow private ownership. I do not know whether D'Souza is right, but a lot of facts fit and the predictions are testable. A fascinating read. It will take a while to digest the implications of D'Souza's arguments.

Night falls fast

2011-02-14T08:13:00.002-07:00

Jamison, K.R.; "Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide" non-fiction 1999 I thought that I would read a couple of pages and take it back. Didn't happen. The book is very interesting. Jamison lays out the science and medicine of suicide. Suicides are not random. Most of them occur in the very depressed stage of bipolar or manic-depressive individuals. Every one gets depressed but only in these individuals does the depression lead to suicide. How long do you have to interact with a suicidal person before the suicide is completed? Five minutes.

Nanoprey

2011-02-14T08:06:00.002-07:00

In "Prey", the bad guys are tiny, not very smart, robots. These robots can fly, can aggregrate, and can build new organisms. In "Prey" these swarms of nanobots become predators and 'evolve' quickly. From our science point of view, these swarms are interesting in terms of what a swarm could learn and what it couldn't learn and why.

Prey

2011-02-14T07:49:00.002-07:00

Michael Crichton, "Prey", 2002 fiction. Crichton tells high speed stories of science getting out of hand and threatening mankind. "The Andromeda Strain" and "Jurassic Park" are his books. In "Prey", the things that get out of hand are swarms of nanobots. They get smarter and meaner by the page. A quick read and a fun read. The core of the underlying science was done in Los Alamos and Santa Fe.

Update

2011-02-14T07:43:00.002-07:00

I am making more sense out of how learning and memory work from the individual neuron to collections of thousands of neurons and hundreds of thousands of synapses to, now, entire brains. Up to tens of thousands of neurons, the logic and dynamics are solid. Beyond that, in the land of the amgdala, the prefrontal cortex, and manic depression; the logic is decent and probably right but not yet solid.
Many of the books to be listed and many of the books already listed are partly important to me because they clarify the operation of the amygdala and its friends. They are also written well.

Compassion

2011-01-28T08:19:00.002-07:00

I just finished "Twelve steps to a compassionate life" by Karen Armstrong (New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2011). It is a quick read, 200 small pages.
The book feels like a rush job by a well respected author. It is, however, worth reading.

Armstrong argues that we should all be more compassionate and empathetic towards others especially those whose world view differs from ours. The strength of the book is that she lays out day to day exercises that would get each of us to being more compassionate. She supports these steps with thoughts and quotes from the usual suspects Jesus, Hillel, Mandela, Gandhi, Buddha, Confucius, et al. What had me leave her proposed dao (path) was that she never tackled the hard questions such as 'If 20 of us are very empathetic towards each other but there is only food for 15 what do we do?', 'Who will produce the food for 15 and why will they choose to do this?', and 'If the person for whom we now have great empathy still wants to kill us and take our possessions, what do we do?'. Her listed answer is that we turn the other cheek and millions on 'our side' die so that our beliefs do not continue. I was hoping for a better answer.

An other thing that had me leave Armstrong's dao is that her ideal world seems to be a communist utopia in which everyone has the same world view and unnamed peons do the actual work. People have tried to create such a utopia many times. Creation has never been stable. The peons leave or die.

Still worth a read for the many thoughts it engenders.

Potential new topics

2011-01-25T10:28:00.002-07:00

There is lots going on that has not been posted here.
Here is a short list.
1. Serious amounts of swimming, currently working on improvement of techniques.
2. A multi-week discussion of how to view modern medical and biological breakthroughs through a lens of ethics or theology.
3. If you are trying to find a place for startup companies to grow, where should that
place be and why there? What do you need beyond rental space?
4. What are likely futures for Los Alamos? Which ones are people willing to work towards? What work has to be done by what people so that the preferred future becomes the actual future? This discussion is not really about Los Alamos but is about economic development in any community. The discussion is currently interspersed with facts from Los Alamos because those are the facts that I know best.

If any of these topics are of interest, let me know.

The Master and Margarita

2011-01-24T11:23:00.002-07:00

Bulgakov, Mikhail "The Master and Margarita" fiction, 1940. If you read a lot of books, you seldom stumble onto a new and wonderful author. Bulgakov is this author. This book is rated as the best Russian novel of the 20th Century.
Consider two Russian atheist authors in the 1920's, sitting on a park bench in Moscow. They are talking about how Jesus is fictitious and that the six proofs of Jesus' existence are nonsense. Then a man sits between them. He says there is a seventh proof.
"What?"
"I was there."
Beautifully written and compelling.

The Gun Seller

2011-01-23T04:08:00.002-07:00

Hugh Laurie, "The Gun Seller" 1994 fiction. Take a Ludlum or Clancy adventure with its non-stop action then make it really funny. This is the Gun Seller. Light, fast, and really fun.