Books I read in 2016

Last year was my lowest year in ten years for amount of books read.  To be honest, I was working through textbooks and FreeCodeCamp learning to code, which took away from my reading time.  Still, there were a lot of interesting books on this year’s list!

January

1.) 4th Generation Warfare Handbook – William S. Lind and Gregory A. Thiele

2.) The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom – Candida Moss

 

February

3.) Robopocalypse: A Novel (Robopocalypse #1) – Daniel H. Wilson

4.) Future Visions: Original Science Fiction Inspired by Microsoft – by Elizabeth Bear and Greg Bear et al.

5.) Algebra: Sets, Symbols, and the Language of Thought (The History of Mathematics) Revised Edition – John Tabak, Ph.D.

 

March

6.) Hannibal and Me: What History’s Greatest Military Strategist Can Teach Us About Success and Failure – Andreas Kluth

7.) White Needle: 5 (Shadow Squadron #5) – Carl Bowen

8.) Phantom Sun: 6 (Shadow Squadron #6) – Carl Bowen

9.) Uncertainty in Games (Playful Thinking series) – Greg Costikyan

10.) The Magician’s Nephew (Narnia Chronicles) – C. S. Lewis

11.) Gorilla Mindset – Mike Cernovich

12.) Foundation’s Fear (Second Foundation Trilogy #1) – Gregory Benford

 

April

13.) Law: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions #180) – Raymond Wacks

14.) Sociology: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions #12) – Steve Bruce

 

May

15.) The Circle – Dave Eggers

16.) Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War – P. W. Singer and August Cole

 

June

16.) Will I Ever Be Free of You?: How to Navigate a High-Conflict Divorce from a Narcissist and Heal Your Family – Karyl McBride, Ph.D.

17.) The Cartel Hit (Mack Bolan the Executioner #438) – Mike Linaker, Don Pendleton (Series Creator)

18.) Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World – Cal Newport

19.) The Tournament – Matthew Reilly

20.) Reinventing Your Life: The Breakthrough Program to End Negative Behavior and Feel Great Again – Jeffrey E. Young and Janet S. Klosko

21.) Scarecrow Returns – Matthew Reilly

22.) Progression – Sebastian Marshall

 

July

23.) Abyss Deep (Star Corpsman #2) – by Ian Douglas

24.) Express in Action: Node Applications with Express and Its Companion Tools – Evan Hahn

25.) Your Many Faces: The First Step to Being Loved – Virginia Satir

26.) Bitcoin for the Befuddled – Conrad Barski and Chris Wilmer

27.) Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money – Nathaniel Popper

 

August

28.) Star Wars: The Rise of the Empire – John Jackson Miller et al.

29.) Re-read GIS for Dummies – Michael N. DeMers

30.) The Blood of Gods (Emperor #5) –  Conn Iggulden

 

September

31.) Battlefront: Twilight Company (Star Wars canon) –  Alexander Freed

 

October

32.) Head First Mobile Web – Lyza Danger Gardner and Jason Grigsby

33.) The Water Knife – Paolo Bacigalupi

 

November

34.) Public Health 101: Healthy People – Healthy Populations – Richard Riegelman, Brenda Kirkwood

35.) Soil: Digging into Earth’s Vital Resource (Exploring Science: Earth Science) – Darlene R. Stille

36.) Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism – Stephen Graham

37.) Planet of Slums – Mike Davis

38.) Proxima – Stephen Baxter

 

December

39.) There Will Be War Volume X – Jerry Pournelle, Editor

40.) JavaScript: The Good Parts – Douglas Crockford

41.) Smashing Node.js: JavaScript Everywhere 2nd Edition – Guillermo Rauch

42.) Foundation and Chaos (Second Foundation Trilogy #2) – Greg Bear

The Circle: Mass Survelliance and the Slippery Slope

The Circle, by Dave Eggers

Alfred A. Knopf, NY NY 2013

This was easily one of the most frightening books I’ve ever read.  There were no monsters, and no really bad people.  Just idealists, driven to make the world a better place…through total and complete transparency.  The protagonist, Mae Holland, is a good person who gets hired by the Circle, which is kind of the worst parts of Google and Facebook combined.  Slowly but surely she gets drawn into the overall goals of the company, rarely questioning – and squashing doubts when she does – to make every bit of information known to every single person on the planet at will.  No secrets, from anyone, ever, anywhere.  No matter who it hurts, because it’s all in the name of the greater good.

 

The scary part about this book is this:  It could be done.  From the miniaturized cameras to the bio-monitors to the always-on social networks, we already have most of the technologies.  Now, granted, the main character is not really that realistic – I mean, everyone is going to have second thoughts – but the key point of the book is that she does what she does because she believes it is for the better.  The need to constantly be watching your social rank – that’s not to far off people constantly looking for likes (it’s been shown that we get a hit of endorphins when we get a comment or a like) on their posts on Facebook and Instagram.  And we can find out quite a bit of information on most people via Google – I’ve surprised interviewers by knowing more about them than they do about me.

 

It progresses one step at a time until all individual privacy is gone, and the worst part is, by the time it happens, by the time the line is crossed, it seems so…normal, so inevitable.  This book, to me, is a warning.  The panopticon could happen, is slowly coming, and rather than trying to stop it, we are eagerly accepting its technologies – Facebook, for always-on feedback; Instagram, for showing what we’re doing and eating all the time; drones – that can film us anywhere; and things like the Fitbit, that record our health state 24 hours 7 days a week.

Is privacy going to disappear?  Are we willingly going to give it up?  Maybe not now, but ten years from now – I”d say it’s a good possibility.

U.S. Strategy and the New Medievalism

I’ve noted before that I’ve done some work with the Matthew Ridgway Center for International Security Studies at the University of Pittsburgh.  Dr. Phil Williams, a noted scholar on transnational security threats, was the director, and was also a visiting scholar at the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College, and for them he wrote several monographs.  One in particular that caught my eye was “From the New Middle Ages to a New Dark Age: The Decline of the State and U.S. Strategy“.  At the time (two years ago) I toyed around with the possibility of a book-length expansion on this, going as far as working up a table of contents and listing some extra things that the book could cover that the monograph did not.

Real life intervened, as it often does, and I found myself back at work as an engineer, so I never got much further with the book.  Still, I think Dr. Williams’ paper deserves more consideration, and I’d still like to explore some of the ideas in the monograph in further detail.  Given the Arab Spring, Ukraine, and Syria, as well as the situation in the South China Sea, I think Dr. Williams foresaw a lot of things in this publication.  At the end of it, he gives some recommendations which are interesting in light of the cutbacks to the U.S. military that we are seeing.

I’ll explore different areas over the next few weeks – I’m aiming for one blog post per week.  For today, here is a synopsis of the monograph taken from the SSI website.  I encourage you to download and read it.

“Security and stability in the 21st century have little to do with traditional power politics, military conflict between states, and issues of grand strategy. Instead they revolve around the disruptive consequences of globalization, declining governance, inequality, urbanization, and nonstate violent actors. The author explores the implications of these issues for the United States. He proposes a rejection of “stateocentric” assumptions and an embrace of the notion of the New Middle Ages characterized, among other things, by competing structures, fragmented authority, and the rise of “no-go” zones. He also suggests that the world could tip into a New Dark Age. He identifies three major options for the United States in responding to such a development. The author argues that for interventions to have any chance of success the United States will have to move to a trans-agency approach. But even this might not be sufficient to stanch the chaos and prevent the continuing decline of the Westphalian state.”

My Books Read in the Last Year

Another year, another book list.  I read less book this year than last, but over two thousand more pages!  Here’s the list:

January

1.) Jesus Through Middle-Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies in the Gospels – Kenneth E. Bailey

2.) Thinking, Fast and Slow – Daniel Kahneman

3.) Fighting Talk: Forty Maxims on War, Peace, and Strategy – Colin S. Gray

4.) Debt: The First 5000 Years – Peter Graeber

5.) Warmth Disperses and Time Passes: The History of Heat – Hans Christian von Baeyer

6.) What’s Your Angle, Pythagoras? A Math Adventure – Julie Ellis

7.) Clausewitz’s On War: A Biography – Hew Strachan

8.) Tanks in the Cities: Breaking the Mold – Kendall D. Gott

February

9.) The Advent of the Algorithm: The Idea that Rules the World – David Berlinski

10.) The New Science of Strong Materials: or Why You Don’t Fall Through the Floor – J. E. Gordon
11.) Connected: 24 Hours in the Global Economy – Daniel Altman

12.) Nature’s Ratchet: How Molecular Machines Extract Order from Chaos – Peter M. Hoffmann

March

13.) Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality – Eliezer Yudkowsky

14.) The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why it Matters – Rose George

15.) A Magic Broken – Vox Day (Novella)

16.) What Language Is (And What It Isn’t and What It Could Be) – John McWhorter

17.) Shadow of the Hegemon (Ender Wiggin Saga) – Orson Scott Card

18.) Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology – Rosemary Radford Ruether

19.) Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim’s Tale – Ian Morgan Cron

20.) Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, & Politics in the Book of Revelation – Elaine Pagels

21.) The Pattern on the Stone: The Simple Ideas that Make Computers Work – W. Daniel Hillis

April

22.) The Weight of Glory, and Other Addresses – C. S. Lewis

23.) Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English – John McWhorter

24.) The Last Stand of Fox Company – Bob Drury and Tom Clavin

25.) The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate – Robert D. Kaplan

26.) The Faith and the Power: The Inspiring Story of the First Christians and How They Survived the Madness of Rome – James D. Snyder

27.) Liberation Theologies: The Global Pursuit of Justice – Alfred T. Hennelly, S.J.

28.) Human Security in a Borderless World – Derek S. Reveron and Kathleen A. Mahoney-Norris

29.) Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos – M. Mitchell Waldrop

30.) The Lessons of St. Francis: How to Bring Simplicity and Spirituality into Your Daily Life – John Michael Talbot

31.) The Mathematics of Life – Ian Stewart

May

32.) The Artist and the Mathematician: The story of Nicolas Bourbaki, the Genius Mathematician who never existed – Amir D. Aczel

33.) Blue Remembered Earth (Poseidon’s Children #1) – Alastair Reynolds

34.) The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes’ Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines & Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy – Sharon Bertsch McGrayne

35.) Beyond Geometry: A New Mathematics of Space and Form – John Tabak

36.) The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood – James Gleick

37.) Da Vinci’s Ghost: Genius, Obession, and How Leonardo Created the World in His Own Image – Toby Lester

38.) The Heart and the Fist: The Education of a Humanitarian, The Making of a Navy SEAL – Eric Greitens

39.) Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives – Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler

40.) Worm: The First Digital World War – Mark Bowden

June

41.) African Fractals: Modern Computing and Indigenous Design – Ron Eglash

42.) Schaum’s Easy Outlines Differential Equations – Richard Bronson

43.) Understanding Global Conflict and Cooperation: An Introduction to Theory and History (8th Edn) – Joseph S. Nye, jr and David A. Welch

44.) Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder – Nassim Nicholas Taleb

45.) Tiger Force: A True Story of Men and War – Michael Sallah and Mitch Weiss

46.) How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth – Gordon D. Fee and Douglas Stuart

47.) It’s a Long Road to a Tomato: Tales of an Organic Farmer Who Quit the Big City Life for the (Not So) Simple Life) – Keith Stewart

July

48.) Automate This: How Algorithms Came to Rule Our World – Christopher Steiner

49.) The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? – Jared Diamond

50.) Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence – Joseph J. Ellis

51.) Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty – Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson

52.) Elements of Biblical Exegesis: A Basic Guide for Students and Ministers (Revised and Expanded Edition) – Michael J. Gorman

53.) What the Numbers Say: A Field Guide to Mastering Our Numerical World – Derrick Niederman and David Boyum

August

54.) Beginning Programming – Adrian and Kathie Kingsley-Hughes

55.) Sure Fire (Rich & Jade #1) – Jack Higgins with Justin Richards

56.) Just My Type: A Book About Fonts – Simon Garfield

57.) HTML: Your visual Blueprint(tm) for designing Web pages with HTML, CSS, and XHTML – Paul Whitehead, James H. Russell

58.) The Visual Display of Quantitative Information – Edward R. Tufte

59.) Wrong Turn: America’s Deadly Embrace of Counterinsurgency – Col. Gian Gentile

60.) Head First HTML and CSS – Elisabeth Robson and Eric Freeman

61.) Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation – Parker J. Palmer

62.) The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right – Atul Gawande

September

63.) Star Wars: Scoundrels – Timothy Zahn

64.) Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation – Michael Pollan

65.) The Joy of X: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity – Steven Strogatz

66.) Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Think – Viktor Mayer-Schonberger and Kenneth Cukier

October

67.) The Tao of Programming – Geoffrey James

November

68.) The Myriad: Tour of the Merrimack #1 – R. M. Meluch

69.) Caliphate – Tom Kratman

70.) Kris Longknife: Mutineer (Kris Longknife #1) – Mike Shepherd

71.) Shadow Puppets (Ender’s Shadow series) – Orson Scott Card

72.) Starting Out With Visual Basic 2012 – Tony Gaddis and Kip Irvine

December

73.) Pursuing Justice: The Call to Live & Die for Bigger Things – Ken Wytsma with D. R. Jacobsen

74.) The City: A Global History – Joel Kotkin

75.) Starting Out with Java: From Control Structures through Data Structures – Tony Gaddis and Godfrey Muganda

76.) The Hunted: Tom Clancy’s Endwar #2 – David Michaels

77.) The Humanity of God – Karl Barth

78.) Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla – David Kilcullen

79.) Theology: A Very Short Introduction – David F. Ford

Books I Read in 2012

It’s that time of year again.  My reading was down a little this year due to the fact that I was working full time and reading some longer books.

January

 

1.) Christ Empowered Living: Celebrating Your Significance in God – Selwyn Hughes

2.) Regeneration (Species Imperative #3) – Julie Czerneda

3.) Chaos: A Graphic Guide (Introducing Series) – Zaiuddin Sardar and Iwona Abrams

4.) Catching Fire (The Hunger Games#2) – Suzanne Collins

5.) Astrobiology: A Brief Introduction – Kevin W. Plaxco and Michael Gross

6.) Thinking in Systems: A Primer – Donella H. Meadows

7.) Mockingjay (The Hunger Games #3) – Suzanne Collins

8.) Life in Space: Astrobiology for Everyone – Lucas John Mix

9.) War – Sebastian Junger

 

February

 

10.) The Voyage of the Dawn Treader – C. S. Lewis

11.) The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy – Sasha Issenberg

12.) Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics – John Derbyshire

 

March

 

13.) Stuff: The Materials the World is Made Of – Ivan Amato

14.) Success through Failure: The Paradox of Design – Henry Petroski

15.) One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way – by Robert Maurer, Ph. D.

16.) Centauri Dreams: Imagining and Planning Interstellar Exploration – Paul Gilster

17.) The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy: An Economist Examines the Markets, Power, and Politics of World Trade – Pietra Rivoli

 

April

 

18.) Sun in a Bottle: The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking – Charles Siefe

19.) Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis – Lauren F. Winner

 

 

May

 

20.) The Silver Chair (Narnia) – C. S. Lewis

21) Caesar’s Legion:  The Epic Saga of Julius Caesar’s Elite Tenth Legion and the Armies of Rome – Stephen Dando-Collins

22) Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think – Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler

23) The Detachment (A John Rain novel) – Barry Eisler

24) Fifty Shades of Grey – E. L. James

25) Fifty Shades Darker – E. L. James

26) Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next – Greg Lindsay and John D. Kasarda

 

June

 

27) Private Dancer – Stephen Leather

28) Fifty Shades Freed – E. L. James

29) Dubai Dreams: Inside the Kingdom of Bling – Raymond Barrett

30) A Book of Five Rings: The Classic Guide to Strategy – Miyamoto Musashi

31) Dubai: Gilded Cage – Syed Ali

32) Amped – Daniel H. Wilson

 

July

 

33) China Safari: On the Trail of Beijing’s Expansion in Africa – Serge Michel, Michel Beuret, Paolo Woods

34) All Fall Down – Vern McGeorge

35) City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism – Jim Krane

36) Looking for trouble: Adventures in a Broken World – Ralph Peters

37) When China Ruled the Seas: The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne 1405-33 – Louise Levathes

38) Ice: Stories of Survival from Polar Exploration – Clint Willis, ed.

39) Night Without End – Alistair Maclean

 

August

 

40) Untapped: The Scramble for Africa’s Oil – John Ghazvinian

41) Birds of Prey: The Battle Within – Gail Simone et al (Comic Book Graphic Novel)

42) Filters Against Folly: How to Survive Despite Economists, Ecologists, and the Merely Eloquent – Garrett Hardin

43) The Twelfth Imam – Joel C. Rosenberg

44) Batman: Battle for the Cowl – Tony S. Daniel et al (Comic Book Graphic Novel)

45) Batman: The Resurrection of Ra’s al Ghul –  Grant Morrison et al (Comic Book Graphic Novel)

46) Birds of Prey: Metropolis or Dust – Sean McKeever et al (Comic Book Graphic Novel)

47) Poisoned Wells: The Dirty Politics of African Oil – Nicholas Shaxson

48) Implosion: Can America Recover From Its Economic & Spiritual Challenges in Time? – Joel C. Rosenberg

49) Knocking on Heaven’s Door:  How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World – Lisa Randall

 

 September

 

50) Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West – Tom Holland

51) The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love – Kristin Kimball

52) Grow the Good Life: Why a Vegetable Garden Will Make You Happy, Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise – Michele Owens

53) Inch and Miles: The Journey to Success – By John R. Wooden et al.

54) Epicenter: Why the Current Rumblings in the Middle East Will Change Your Life – Joel C. Rosenberg

55) Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food – by Barbara Kingsolver

 

October

 

56) Why the West Rules – For Now: The Patterns of History and What They Reveal About the Future – Ian Morris

57) Eastward to Tartary: Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Caucasus – Robert D. Kaplan

58) Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens – Nicholas Shaxson

59) Fractions and Decimals Made Easy (Making Math Easy) (with Jacob) – Rebecca Wingard-Nelson

60) Isaac Asimov’s Robot City: Prodigy (Robot City #4) – Arthur Byron Cover

61) Fraction Fun – (with Jacob) David A. Adler

62) The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization – Jonathan Lyons

63) Working With Fractions – (with Jacob) David A. Adler

64) Hopping On the Number Line (Little World Math Concepts) (with Jacob) – Nancy Allen

65) Estimation (A Young Math Book) (with Jacob) – Charles F. Linn

66) Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam – John A. Nagl

67) What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East – Bernard Lewis

 

November

 

68) Pump Six and Other Stories – Paolo Bacigalupi

69) The Great Divorce – C.S. LewiS

70) Philosophical Tales: Being an Alternative History Revealing the Characters, the Plots, and the Hidden Scenes That Make Up the True Story of Philosophy – Martin Cohen

71) Contemporary Security Studies, 2nd Edition – Allan Collins, editor

72) What Do Muslims Believe: The Roots and Realities of Modern Islam – Ziauddin Sardar

73) Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism: Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church – James K. A. Smith

74) Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books – Azar Nafisi

75) Engineering Systems: Meeting Human Needs in a Complex Technological World – Olivier L. de Weck, Daniel Roos, and Christopher L. Magee

76) Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order – Steven Strogatz

77) Red Mars – Kim Stanley Robinson

78) Celtic Vision: Prayers, Blessings, Songs, and Invocations from the Gaelic Tradition – Esther de Waal (editor)

79) Five Golden Rules: Great Theories of 20th-Century Mathematics and Why They Matter – John L. Casti

 

December

 

80) Constantinople: The Forgotten Empire – Isaac Asimov

81) Female Soldiers in Sierra Leone: Sex, Security and Post-Conflict Development – Megan H. MacKenzie

82) Omnipotence and other Theological Mistakes – Charles Hartshorne

83) The Teeth of the Tiger – Tom Clancy

84) Exit Plan – Larry Bond

85) e: The Story of a Number – Eli Maor

86) Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic – Tom Holland

My Books Read in the Last Year

I read quite a bit last year, with an emphasis on linguistics, Counterinsurgency, complexity, and mathematics.  Fiction, as always was scattered throughout the year.  Lots of good links below; I encourage you to check them out, along with the reviews I did of several of them…

January
1) Your Child’s Growing Mind: A Guide to Learning and Brain Development from Birth to Adolescence – Jane M. Healey, Ph.D
2) Simplexity: Why Simple Things Become Complex (and How Complex Things Can Be Made Simple) – Jeffrey Kluger
3) The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis
4) A New Kind of Science – Stephen Wolfram
5) Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power – Robert D. Kaplan
6) The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity – Richard Florida (My review here)
7) Language: The Big Picture – Peter Sharpe (my review here)
8) Understanding Physics: Volume 1: Motion, Sound, and Heat (Understanding Physics) – Isaac Asimov
9) Seven Firefights in Vietnam – John A. Cash, et al.  (My review here)

February
10) Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages – Guy Deutscher (My review here)
11) Chaos Theory Tamed – Garnett P. Williams
12) Deep Simplicity: Bringing Order to Chaos and Complexity – John Gribbin (My review here)
13) The Defense of Jisr al-Doreaa: With E. D. Swinton’s “The Defence of Duffer’s Drift” – Michael Burgoyne and Albert Marckwardt (My review here)
14) The Age of the Unthinkable , Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us and What We Can Do About It – Joshua Cooper Ramo
15) The Quiet American (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) – Graham Greene
16) Muqtada: Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the Struggle for Iraq – Patrick Cockburn
17) Rock, Paper, Scissors: Game Theory in Everyday Life – Len Fisher
18) Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language – Seth Lerer (My review here)
19) Migration: Species Imperative #2 – Julie Czerneda
20) Euler’s Gem: The Polyhedron Formula and the Birth of Topology – David S. Richeson
21) Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means – Albert-Laszlo Barabasi (My review here)
22) Chicago Blues – Edited by Libby Fischer Hellmann

March
23) Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us – Dan Pink
24) The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently…and Why – Richard E. Nisbett
25) Pink Boots and a Machete: My Journey From NFL Cheerleader to National Geographic Explorer – Mireya Mayor (My review here)
26) A Cook’s Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines – Anthony Bourdain
27) Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World – Liaquat Ahamed (My review here)
28) Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions – Lisa Randall
29) The Mother Tongue – English And How It Got That Way – Bill Bryson
30) Raising Musical Kids: A Guide for Parents – Robert A. Cutietta

April
31) Thought Contagion – Aaron Lynch (My review here)
32) Prince Caspian (Chronicles of Narnia 2) – C.S. Lewis
33) Memories of My Melancholy Whores – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
34) Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age (Open Market Edition) – Duncan J. Watts
35) The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind’s Greatest Invention – Guy Deutscher
36) Hardwired – Walter Jon Williams
37) The Next Decade: Where We’ve Been . . . and Where We’re Going – George Friedman

May
38) Almost Human: Making Robots Think – Lee Gutkind
39) Understanding Physics: Volume 2: Light, Magnetism and Electricity – Isaac Asimov
40) Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (Collins Business Essentials) – Robert B. Cialdini
41) Bursts: The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do – Albert-Laszlo Barabasi
42) The Secret Servant (Gabriel Allon) – Daniel Silva
43) Pittsburgh Noir (Akashic Noir) – Edited by Kathleen George
44) Freedom (TM) – Daniel Suarez
45) Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Building Robots – Gareth Branwyn
46) The Traveler (Fourth Realm Trilogy, Book 1) – John Twelve Hawks
47) Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back – Douglas Rushkoff
48) Running Out of Water: The Looming Crisis and Solutions to Conserve Our Most Precious Resource – Peter Rogers and Susan Leal
49) Monk Habits for Everyday People: Benedictine Spirituality for Protestants – Dennis Okholm

June
50) Counterinsurgency – David Kilcullen
51) Hunter’s Run – George R. R. Martin, Gardner Dozois, Daniel Abraham
52) The Killing Ground (Sean Dillon) – Jack Higgins
53) One Shot (Jack Reacher, No. 9) – Lee Child
54) The Hard Way (Jack Reacher, No. 10) – Lee Child
55) Why Things Break: Understanding the World By the Way It Comes Apart – Mark E. Eberhart

July
56) Earth Strike: Star Carrier: Book One – Ian Douglas
57) Mediterranean Winter: The Pleasures of History and Landscape in Tunisia, Sicily, Dalmatia, and the Peloponnese – Robert D. Kaplan
58) The Post-American World: Release 2.0 – Fareed Zakaria
59) Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer – Novella Carpenter
60) The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization – Bryan Ward-Perkins
61) The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century – Thomas X. Hammes
62) Four Colors Suffice: How the Map Problem Was Solved – Robin Wilson
63) How to Build Your Own Spaceship: The Science of Personal Space Travel – Piers Bizony
64) The X in Sex: How the X Chromosome Controls Our Lives – David Bainbridge
65) The Art of the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain World – Peter Schwartz

August
66) The Language of Life: DNA and the Revolution in Personalized Medicine – Francis S. Collins
67) The Scar – China Mieville
68) The Profession: A Thriller – Steven Pressfield (My review here)
69) Symmetry: A Journey into the Patterns of Nature – Marcus du Sautoy
70) The Five Chinese Brothers (Paperstar) – Claire Hutchet Bishop and Kurt Wiese
71) Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America – Matt Taibbi
72) How to Talk to Your Child About Sex: It’s Best to Start Early, but It’s Never Too Late — A Step-by-Step Guide for Parents – Linda and Richard Eyre
73) The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris – David McCullough
74) Havoc – Jack DuBrul
75) Sundiver (The Uplift Saga, Book 1) – David Brin
76) Iraq and the Evolution of American Strategy – Steven Metz

September
77) The Rest of the Robots – Isaac Asimov
78) Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things – William McDonough and Michael Braungart
79) 7th Sigma – Steven Gould
80) 50 Mathematical Ideas You Really Need to Know – Tony Crilly
81) The Future of Work: How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organization, Your Management Style and Your Life – Thomas W. Malone
82) Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier – Edward Glaeser
83) Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working for Yourself – Dan Pink

October
84) The Future of Management – Gary Hamel with Bill Breen
85) 100 Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything, From Careers and Relationships to Family and Faith – Sonia Arrison
86) The Riemann Hypothesis: The Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics – Karl Sabbagh
87) Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity (Great Discoveries) – David Foster Wallace
88) The Final Warning (Maximum Ride, Book 4) – James Patterson
89) Re-read Where Eagles Dare – Alistair MacLean
90) The Caryatids – Bruce Sterling

November
91) Long for This World: The Strange Science of Immortality – Jonathan Weiner
92) Mathematical Mysteries: The Beauty and Magic of Numbers (Helix Books) – Calvin C. Clawson
93) The Mystery of the Aleph: Mathematics, the Kabbalah, and the Search for Infinity – Amir D. Aczel
94) Spousonomics: Using Economics to Master Love, Marriage, and Dirty Dishes – Paula Szuchman and Jenny Anderson
95) Reamde: A Novel – Neal Stephenson
96) The Poincare Conjecture: In Search of the Shape of the Universe – Donal O’Shea

December
97) Euclid’s Window : The Story of Geometry from Parallel Lines to Hyperspace – Leonard Mlodinow
98) Millennium Problems – Keith Devlin
99) The Hunger Games – Suzanne Collins
100) Godel’s Proof (Revised Edition) – Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman
101) Moscow Rules (Gabriel Allon #8) – Daniel Silva
102) The Bourne Legacy – Eric van Lustbader
103) Beautiful Outlaw: Experiencing the Playful, Disruptive, Extravagant Personality of Jesus – John Eldredge
104) Count Down: The Race for Beautiful Solutions at the International Mathematical Olympiad – Steve Olson
105) The Crowded Universe: The Search for Living Planets – Alan Boss

The Great Depression and today

In his book Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke The World, Liquat Ahamed writes the story of the Great Depression of 1929 by following the lives of the Central Bankers of four of the leading countries of the time – France, Germany, England, and the United States. It is a new perspective to me, and while I don’t pretend to know all the differences between the Austrian School and the Keynesians, I thought it was very interesting. Reviews of the book are generally positive although there are followers of Austrian theory that state that Ahamed, who worked in the past for the World Bank, is too accepting of Keynes.

Again, I’m not well read enough in economic theory to say. Ahamed does make a case that the slavish adherence to the gold standard by these men was a prime cause of the Great Depression and that the ultimate cause was a “…series of misjudgments by economic policy makers” both in the decade before and during the Great Depression. By economic policy makers he refers to the politicians and the central bankers of the era. An item that caught my eye was the fact that the Great Depression was the confluence of a number of cascading failures:

* “The contraction in the German economy that began in 1928

* The Great Crash on Wall Street in 1929

* The serial bank panics that affected the United States from the end of 1930

* The unraveling of European finances in the summer of 1931″

Ahamed compares these to (respectively):

* The Mexican Peso crisis in 1994

* The bursting of the Dot-Com bubble in 2000

* The financial crisis of 2007-8

* The Asian Flu of 1997-8

He states that had these events occurred together, we may have seen a financial disaster of the scale of the Great Depression. There are, however, a number of financial bloggers that believe that we are indeed headed for one anyway, and that the crisis of 2007-8 isn’t really over…

Some other items from the book I thought were interesting:

* Before World War I, Norman Angell, a British journalist, wrote a book called Europe’s Optical Illusion. In it, he stated that “…the economic benefits of war were so illusory…and the commercial and financial linkages between countries now so extensive that no rational country should contemplate starting a war. The economic chaos, especially the disruptions to international credit, that would ensue from a war among the Great Powers would harm all sides and the victor would lose as much as the vanquished. Even if war were to break out in Europe by accident, it would speedily be brought to an end.” Both Tom Friedman and Tom Barnett (especially with respect to China) make similar arguments today – let’s hope they’re not as wrong as Angell was when he was “…trusting too much in the rationality of nations and seduced by the extraordinary economic achievements of the era.”

* Related to the above: “The argument that it was was not so much the cruelty of war as its economic futility that made it unacceptable as an instrument of state power struck a cord in that materialistic era.”

* An English newspaper article after the 1884 panic on the New York Stock Exchange: “The English, however speculative, fear poverty. The Frenchman shoots himself to avoid it. The American with a million speculates to win ten, and if he takes losses takes a clerkship with equanimity. This freedom from sordidness is commendable, but it makes a nation of the most degenerate gamesters in the world.”

* The signs of a mania: “…the progressive narrowing in the number of stocks going up, the nationwide fascination with the activities of Wall Street, the faddish invocations of a new era, the suspension of every conventional standard of financial rationality, and the rabble enlistment of an army of amateur and ill-informed speculators betting on the basis of rumors and tip sheets.” Indeed, ten percent of households were in the market in 1929.

* Almost a third of the speculators were female. There were even special brokerage houses set up to cater to only women.

* “One is led to the inescapable but unsatisfying conclusion that the bull market of 1929 was so violent and intense and driven by passions so strong that the Fed could do nothing about it. Every official had tried to talk it down. The president was against it; Congress too; even the normally reticent secretary of the treasury had spoken out. But it was remarkable how difficult it was to kill it. All that the Fed could do, it seemed, was to step aside and let the frenzy burn itself out. By trying to stand up to the market and then failing, it simply made itself look as impotent as everybody else.”

All in all, I thought it was a well-written summary of the actions and lives of the Central Bankers of the era, and it was an easy read. Whether or not you agree with the Keynesians or the Austrians, you should definitely read this book as a way of beginning to understand the events of the last few years…and where we could be headed in the future.

Review – Pink Boots and a Machete by Mireya Mayor

I recently finished reading Pink Boots and a Machete: My Journey From NFL Cheerleader to National Geographic Explorer by Mireya Mayor. What does that have to do with International Security or Strategic Foresight, you ask? Well, consider this:

* 184 species of mammals, 182 species of birds, 162 species of fish, and 1,276 species of plants are critically endangered.
* Between 1990 and 2000, 3 million hectares of forests were cleared in Africa, Latin America, and the Carribean.

(Source: Contemporary Security Studies, 2nd edn, by Alan Collins, Oxford University Press, NY, NY, 2010)

Dr. Mayor is a Cuban-American whose mother escaped from Castro’s Cuba. With that kind of a pedigree, it’s no surprise that she grew up to become an explorer. But she never forgot her feminine side either – frilly dresses and time as a cheerleader for Miami (the Dolphins – Egad. We all have skeletons in our closet, eh?). But even as a child she loved to explore the outdoors, from crabs on beaches to bugs under the bed.

Mireya went on her first expedition to Guyana with a Hello Kitty backpack and pink boots. And a little black dress in her backpack…”just in case.” Her next trip was to Madagascar, where she investigated lemurs. As time went on, she ended up working for National Geographic, discovered a previously unknown primate, and earned a Ph. D. In one of the best chapters in the book, she describes what it was like to deal with three strong-willed men on a Jon Burnett (of Survivor fame) production (Expedition: Africa) that required her and the men to retrace Stanley’s footsteps across Africa to the place he found Dr. Livingstone. She was instrumental in the trip, and wasn’t just along to provide scenery but instead was a key member of the team.

And that is the best thing about the book. She talks about how hard it is to be taken seriously as a pretty face in the science field. She never slides into the trap of hiding her womanhood. She works hard and forces people to accept her for her skills and knowledge. She pushes through adversity and shows true grit. But she also still packs that little black dress…just in case. So in addition to the travelogue and the scientific thrills, she records the human side of her life, which helps you to see the real person she is.

In the last chapter of the book, Mireya talks about marriage and parenting. I was torn on this one. She has two daughters she doesn’t see for months at a time. She notes that she wouldn’t be a whole person if she had to give up exploring and that her daughters wouldn’t get her best if she wasn’t a whole person. Maybe. Although, their father is with them, so it’s not like they’re alone. But what is important is that they’ll learn how important it is to do something you love, how hard work can help to get you there, and finally, how important it is to be yourself. They may even learn an intriguing use for the stuffing in a tampon!

Nowadays, Dr. Mayor is active in conservation efforts. I hear a lot of rhetoric on both sides about this issue. But as I noted above, environmental security will be an issue in the Twenty-First Century, as China and India gear up their industrial production, as everyone continues the race for resources, and as third world countries try to raise their standards of living. Now, more than ever, it’s important to make sure that our children will still have wild places to see – and maybe, occasionally, a new species to discover!

Overall, I enjoyed the book. It’s an easy read, and never boring. Since budget limitations precluded maps in the book, I would suggest having an atlas nearby, especially for the locations on Madagascar (and if you don’t know where THAT is, you REALLY need the atlas!). I also hope Dr. Mayor will write other books in the future, such as on the primates of that island, or maybe on conservation efforts around the globe.

You can follow Dr. Mayor on Twitter – she’s pretty quick to respond! – at @mireyamayor
She also has a facebook page for both herself and the book
Finally, her official site is right here.

Does Language Affect Culture? Part 1

As I’ve been working with the Matthew Ridgway Center for International Security Studies, I’ve been amazed at the way so many fields are interlinked together and that are applicable to this area.  One subject area I recently discovered was that of linguistics and whether or not it can affect your view of the world.  I picked up some books on linguistics, and then I found that the February issue of Scientific American had an article on the very subject I was exploring entitled “How Language Shapes Thought!”  Such  serendipity has been occurring often as I go deeper into the field of security studies…

I haven’t really taken any English courses since grade school, so I decided a refresher course on linguistics was in order – especially after seeing the new Star Trek movie where Uhura mentions Xenolinguistics as her major.  To that end, I checked out Language, The Big Picture by Peter Sharpe because I wanted a book that was a general introduction to the field.

This was not that book.

It IS a good survey of the research in the field.  Sharpe begins with the origins of language and how our anatomy is related, and then moves on to why language change over time and variations by culture.  He discusses Noam Chomsky, who was the biggest influence on linguistics in the Twentieth Century, and various theories of how language is structured.  This is followed by a survey of semantics – how meaning is formed, and a discussion of semiotics, the symbols and signs of culture.  His final wrap-up talks about the mental representation of language.

This book is probably very good for use in a classroom, but not by someone who has little or no background in linguistics.  To be honest, I was looking for more detail on, as Jim Kirk said, “Morphology. Phonology. Syntax.”

I’ll be tackling Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages next.  I also found this video by Lera Boroditsky to be quite fascinating.  In the meantime, does anybody have any good suggestions for an introductory text on Linguistics?

Scott

Review of Richard Florida’s The Great Reset

Richard Florida was well-known (and somewhat notorious) when he taught at Carnegie-Mellon University here in Pittsburgh back at the end of the Nineties.  Our politicians were pushing the building of two new stadiums and Florida noted that it wasn’t going to improve Pittsburgh’s economy.

Well, here we are in 2010 with two shiny new stadiums and the city has been through bankruptcy, our Port Authority that runs the buses has had to cut routes and raise fares…I’d say Florida probably pretty much won that argument.

In his newest book, The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity, Florida uses the cycles of the last two depressions to try to get an idea of where the economy is headed after the Great Recession that began in 2008.  Those other two were the Panic of 1873 and of course, The Great Depression.  In each case, full recovery took ten or more years, and led to new living arrangements (what Florida calls “Spatial Fix”) and new ways of living, working and consuming.

Florida notes, for example, that after 1873 the country saw increased urbanization, and after the Great Depression it saw the growth of the suburbs.  In each case, these changes coincided with industrial changes – from agriculture to factories, from factories to knowledge work, and so on.

Today’s world is resulting in numerous changes thanks to the growth of creative work – a theme that has run through many of Florida’s books.  These changes are leading to thr growth of megaregions, a subject covered in Florida’s book, Who’s Your City: How the Creative Economy is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life.  For example, Pittsburgh is part of Chi-Pitts, a region with $1.6 trillion in economic output and 46 million people.  At 100,000 square miles it’s the second largest region in North America when rated by these numbers.  Despite the much heralded (and overused) phrase “The World is Flat,” Florida notes that the world is actually “spiky” and that creatives move to these regions to be near other creatives, which causes ideas to compound on each other and boosts innovation.

Florida makes recommendations on how to encourage this.  For example, he notes that light rail will allow smaller cities to be connected to the hubs of megaregions, and that these lines will encourage infill along the routes.  He says that retraining people who are downsized and providing a social net is key to encouraging prosperity.

One of his more controversial recommendations is to note that home ownership as a piece of the American dream is a thing of the past.  Wealth was tied up in houses in the recent bubble, he argues, instead of being put to use funding businesses and basic research.  Also, as job security becomes a thing of the past and people move constantly on to new opportunities, the more mobile workforce will find that a home can tie them down and keep them from going to where the jobs are.  Florida makes several recommendations about how to provide rental options for these workers.

Two areas I was glad to see him cover were service jobs, which are low paying drudgery for many – Florida notes that innovation by these people should be encouraged along with higher wages, and also the infilling of suburbs, which aren’t going away despite the move of people back into the cities.  He notes initiatives to try to turn these areas into so-called walkable communities.  That’s a subject I’d like to touch on in a later post, along with a number of other themes above.

This really only scratches the surface of the content of the book.  It’s a quick read – twenty-three short chapters, and whether you agree with Florida or not, it will give you much to think about…