Books – Page 94 – artdiamondblog.com

Early Cars Were Playthings of the Idle Rich

Source of book image: http://www.2luxury2.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Steven-Parissien-The-Life-of-the-Automobile-678×1024.jpg

(p. C14) Mr. Parissien writes that Frenchman Nicolas Cugnot may well have built the first mechanical vehicle in 1769, a two-ton, steam-driven colossus that reportedly went out of control and crashed into a wall. It wasn’t until 1885 that Karl Benz, the acknowledged father of the automobile, debuted the first gasoline-powered motorcar, in Mannheim, Germany. It carried passengers just slightly quicker than they could walk.

With the arrival of that breakthrough, however, the race was on for who could come up with a sturdier, faster, more reliable motor car. Many of the innovators’ names are still familiar: Renault, Bentley and Daimler among them. Even piano makers Steinway & Sons tried their hand at building cars. Other companies appeared for a time and then vanished–Durant, Lanchester, Panhard and De Dion-Bouton–victims of bad guesses or bad timing. Much of Mr. Parissien’s story is devoted to the personalities, and eccentricities, of the men who created what for many years amounted to a plaything of the idle rich. Italian luxury builder Ettore Bugatti refused to sell one of his cars to King Zog of Albania because “the man’s table manners are beyond belief.”
It is the despotic Henry Ford who looms large in automotive history, not only for the introduction of his Model T but for his revolutionary system of shoveling raw materials in one end of his half-mile long Rouge River, Mich., factory complex and sending “Tin Lizzies” out the other end.

For the full review, see:
Patrick Cooke. “Book Review: ‘The Life of the Automobile’ by Steven Parissien; The history of cars, from playthings of the idle rich to emblems of the working man.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., May 24, 2014): C14.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date May 23, 2014, an has the title “Book Review: ‘The Life of the Automobile’ by Steven Parissien; The history of cars, from playthings of the idle rich to emblems of the working man.”)

The book under review is:
Parissien, Steven. The Life of the Automobile: The Complete History of the Motor Car. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2014.

Entrepreneur Gutenberg’s Press Creatively Destroyed the Jobs of Scribes

(p. 32) Poggio possessed . . . [a] gift that set him apart from virtually all the other book-hunting humanists. He was a superbly well-trained scribe, with exceptionally fine handwriting, great powers of concentration, and a high degree of accuracy. It is difficult for us, at this distance, to take in the significance of such qualities: our technologies for producing transcriptions, facsimiles, and copies have almost entirely erased what was once an important personal achievement. That importance began to decline, though not at all precipitously, even in Poggio’s own lifetime, for by the 1430s a German entrepreneur, Johann Gutenberg, began experimenting with a new invention, movable type, which would revolutionize the reproduction and transmission of texts. By the century’s end printers, especially the great Aldus in Venice, would print Latin texts in a typeface whose clarity and elegance remain unrivalled after five centuries. That typeface was based on the beautiful handwriting of Poggio and his humanist friends. What Poggio did by hand to produce a single copy would soon be done mechanically to produce hundreds.

Source:
Greenblatt, Stephen. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011.
(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed word, added.)

New Details on Babylonian Version of Noah’s Ark

Source of book image: http://britishmuseumblog.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/the-ark-before-noah_544.jpg

(p. C8) Mr. Finkel, a curator of cuneiform inscriptions at the British Museum, details his own long-standing fascination with the ark and that of his British Museum predecessors. First among these was George Smith, who in 1872, at age 32, deciphered a clay tablet that demonstrated that 1,000 years before the likely composition of the Book of Genesis, ancient Babylonians had been brooding over the same story of divine retribution that we find in the biblical account of Noah. So great was Smith’s shock that, on confirmation, he began to run about the room tearing off his clothes.
. . .
The tablets containing what we now know as the Epic of Gilgamesh were unearthed in the ruins of Nineveh, capital of the last great Assyrian king, Ashurbanipal, who was an avid collector of texts. His famous library was torched in 612 B.C., but, as Mr. Finkel points out, “fire to a clay librarian” is not the disaster it is to one who studies works on paper. Fired clay tablets endure, and nothing, Mr. Finkel assures us, can equal the thrill of digging one out from the earth like a potato.
But the most important tablet of Mr. Finkel’s career didn’t come from the ground. It was delivered to him in 1985 by a man named Douglas Simmonds, who brought in a number of cuneiform tablets collected by his father, a member of the Royal Air Force in the Middle East at the end of World War II. One of these–an iPhone-shaped tablet–had what was recognizably the first lines of a Babylonian flood narrative, but the rest was illegible at a superficial glance, and Simmonds was reluctant to leave the tablet at the museum for analysis. It wasn’t until 2009 that Mr. Finkel was able to borrow this treasure and undertake a meticulous study, which revealed an “instruction manual for building an ark” in the tablet’s 60 lines.
. . .
So then what was the Ark Tablet for? It is puzzling that it contains no narrative, listing rather shape, size, materials and their quantities. Attractive though it may be to think it was a hand-held guide for the boat builder, Mr. Finkel suggests instead that it served as an aide-mémoire for an itinerant storyteller. The detail is explained by audience demand: No one wants to be put on the spot with difficult “how” questions when facing an audience who knew all about building coracles. Ancient audiences, it seems, were as intrigued–and as skeptical–about the ark as we are.

For the full review, see:
JANET SOSKICE. “Make Yourself an Ark; A newly deciphered tablet suggests the best shape for an ark: not a wooden box but a circular coracle made of reeds.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., May 17, 2014): C8.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date May 16, 2014, an has the title “Book Review: ‘The Ark Before Noah’ by Irving Finkel; A newly deciphered tablet suggests the best shape for an ark: not a wooden box but a circular coracle made of reeds.”)

The book under review is:
Finkel, Irving. The Ark before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood. London, UK: Hodder & Stoughton, Ltd., 2014.

How Sega Came Out of Nowhere to Leapfrog Near-Monopolist Nintendo

Source of book image: http://images.eurogamer.net/2014/usgamer/original.jpg/EG11/resize/958x-1/format/jpg

(p. C10) “Console Wars” tells how Sega, an unremarkable Japanese manufacturer of games played in arcades, came out of nowhere to challenge Nintendo for dominance of the videogame world in the first half of the 1990s. Nintendo, which had revived the stagnant home videogame category a few years earlier, had something close to a monopoly in 1990 and behaved accordingly, dictating terms to game developers and treating retailers as peons. Sega, in Mr. Harris’s telling, was a disruptive force in a highly concentrated market, introducing more advanced gaming technology, toppling Nintendo from its perch and becoming the largest seller of home videogame hardware in the U.S. by late 1993.

Mr. Harris’s hero is a former Mattel executive named Tom Kalinske, who became president of Sega of America, then a small subsidiary, in 1990. Mr. Kalinske assembled a team of crack marketers who would not have gone near Sega but for his reputation and persuasiveness. Within a year and a half, according to Mr. Harris, Mr. Kalinske’s leadership, along with a new gaming system called Genesis and a marketing assist from a mascot named Sonic the Hedgehog, made Sega the U.S. market leader in videogames.
And then, after only three years at the top, Sega fell from its pedestal. Sega’s management in Japan, suffering mightily from not-invented-here syndrome, rejected Mr. Kalinske’s proposals to collaborate with Sony and Silicon Graphics on new gaming systems. Instead, over his objections, Sega pushed out its ill-conceived Saturn game console in 1995. While Saturn flopped, Sony struck gold with its PlayStation; Silicon Graphics sold its chip with amazing graphics capabilities to Nintendo; and the game, so to speak, was over.
. . .
The author admits he has taken liberties: “I have re-created the scenes in this book using the information uncovered from my interviews, facts gathered from supporting documents, and my best judgment as to what version most closely fits the historical record,” he writes. The result is more a 558-page screenplay than a credible work of nonfiction.

For the full review, see:
MARC LEVINSON. “Sonic Boom; How a no-name company took on Nintendo, tied its fate to a hyperactive hedgehog, and–briefly–won.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., May 24, 2014): C10.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date May 23, 2014, an has the title “Book Review: ‘Console Wars’ by Blake J. Harris; How a no-name company took on Nintendo, tied its fate to a hyperactive hedgehog, and–briefly–won.”)

The book under review is:
J., Harris Blake. Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle That Defined a Generation. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2014.

How De Rerum Natura Aided the Early Italian Renaissance

I am interested in how the dominant ideas in a culture change. Greenblatt’s The Swerve discusses how some early Renaissance Italians sought lost and forgotten works from antiquity to broaden their ideas. In particular it emphasizes the rediscovery of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura.
I am not as unreservedly enthusiastic about Lucretius as Greenblatt is, but The Swerve includes much that is thought-provoking about a place and time that I need to better understand.
In the next few weeks I will quote a few of the passages that were especially memorable, important or amusing.

Book discussed:
Greenblatt, Stephen. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011.

Changes in artdiamondblog.com

During my sabbatical for the 2014-2015 school year, and including this summer and next summer, I plan to throw myself into completion of my book Openness to Creative Destruction. To make more time for that overarching project, I intend to streamline my blogging. I still plan to have an entry posted every day, but will no longer routinely post photos and images, saving the time spent finding, formatting and filing photos and images.
The main goal of my blog is to make evidence and examples widely available, that are related to my core interests of innovation and entrepreneurship. Fewer photos and images may make the blog less visually appealing, but should not interfere with this main goal.
I also plan to increase the percentage of entries that are directly or indirectly relevant to my current and future book projects,
I hope my blog will continue to be of use to the “remnant” of those who share my core interests.

“Long, Lonely Odyssey “from Heresy to Orthodoxy””

Source of book image: online version of the NYT review quoted and cited below.

(p. D5) As the Nobel committee put it in the 1997 citation for Dr. Prusiner’s prize in physiology or medicine, he had established “a novel principle of infection” — one so controversial that a few experts in the field still continue to search for that elusive virus. But as far as Dr. Prusiner is concerned, the Nobel confirmed that his long, lonely odyssey “from heresy to orthodoxy” was over.

The journey he details was full of hurdles. Some were of the kind likely to befall any researcher: insufficient laboratory space, poor correlation between needs and resources. (At one point, Dr. Prusiner calculated that for a single year’s worth of experiments he would have to house and feed 72,000 mice, an impossible multimillion-dollar proposition.) He submitted a grant application that was not just rejected for funding but actually “disapproved,” often the kiss of death for a train of scientific thought.
Some of his problems were a little darker but still universal — graduate students captured by competing labs, data appropriated and misrepresented by erstwhile colleagues, bitter authorship battles.
Some of Dr. Prusiner’s shoals, however, seem more particular to his personal operating style. As a teenager he was blessed with what he describes as indefatigable self-confidence, and this trait apparently endures, to the considerable irritation of others.

For the full review, see:
ABIGAIL ZUGER, M.D. “Books; A Victory Lap for a Heretical Neurologist.” The New York Times (Sat., May 20, 2014): D5.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date May 19, 2014.)

The book under review is:
Prusiner, Stanley B. Madness and Memory: The Discovery of Prions–a New Biological Principle of Disease. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014.

Open Source Guru Admits to “Mismatched Incentives” and “Serious Trouble Down the Road”

“Eric S. Raymond said that the code-checking system had failed in the case of Heartbleed.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. B1) SAN FRANCISCO — The Heartbleed bug that made news last week drew attention to one of the least understood elements of the Internet: Much of the invisible backbone of websites from Google to Amazon to the Federal Bureau of Investigation was built by volunteer programmers in what is known as the open-source community.

Heartbleed originated in this community, in which these volunteers, connected over the Internet, work together to build free software, to maintain and improve it and to look for bugs. Ideally, they check one another’s work in a peer review system similar to that found in science, or at least on the nonprofit Wikipedia, where motivated volunteers regularly add new information and fix others’ mistakes.
This process, advocates say, ensures trustworthy computer code.
But since the Heartbleed flaw got through, causing fears — as yet unproved — of widespread damage, members of that world are questioning whether the system is working the way it should.
“This bug was introduced two years ago, and yet nobody took the time to notice it,” said Steven M. Bellovin, a computer science professor at Columbia University. “Everybody’s job is not anybody’s job.”
. . .
(p. B2) Unlike proprietary software, which is built and maintained by only a few employees, open-source code like OpenSSL can be vetted by programmers the world over, advocates say.
“Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow” is how Eric S. Raymond, one of the elders of the open-source movement, put it in his 1997 book, “The Cathedral & the Bazaar,” a kind of manifesto for open-source philosophy.
In the case of Heartbleed, though, “there weren’t any eyeballs,” Mr. Raymond said in an interview this week.
. . .
The problem, Mr. Raymond and other open-source advocates say, boils down to mismatched incentives. Mr. Raymond said firms don’t maintain OpenSSL code because they don’t profit directly from it, even though it is integrated into their products, and governments don’t feel political pain when the code has problems.
With OpenSSL, by contrast, “for those that do work on this, there’s no financial support, no salaries, no health insurance,” Mr. Raymond said. “They either have to live like monks or work nights and weekends. That is a recipe for serious trouble down the road.”

For the full story, see:
Perlroth, Nicole. “A Contradiction at the Heart of the Web.” The New York Times (Sat., April 19, 2014): B1 & B2.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story was updated APRIL 18, 2014, and has the title “Heartbleed Highlights a Contradiction in the Web.”)

Raymond’s open source manifesto is:
Raymond, Eric S. The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, Inc., 1999.

“The World’s Greatest Inventor, World’s Greatest Damn Fool”

(p. 290) One of his employees recalled walking past him one day as the inventor stepped briskly between buildings at the lab. He cheerfully greeted his employer: “Morning, Mr. Edison.” Edison gave him a glance, raised his finger to show a major pronouncement would follow, and said, “The world’s greatest inventor, world’s greatest damn fool,” then hurried on.

Source:
Stross, Randall E. The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World. New York: Crown Publishers, 2007.

Reigning Intellectual Orthodoxy on Race Is Wrong

Source of book image: http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41BYpEQumNL._.jpg

(p. C5) The reigning intellectual orthodoxy is that race is a “social construct,” a cultural artifact without biological merit.

The orthodoxy’s equivalent of the Nicene Creed has two scientific tenets. The first, promulgated by geneticist Richard Lewontin in “The Apportionment of Human Diversity” (1972), is that the races are so close to genetically identical that “racial classification is now seen to be of virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance.” The second, popularized by the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, is that human evolution in everything but cosmetic differences stopped before humans left Africa, meaning that “human equality is a contingent fact of history,” as he put it in an essay of that title in 1984.
Since the sequencing of the human genome in 2003, what is known by geneticists has increasingly diverged from this orthodoxy, even as social scientists and the mainstream press have steadfastly ignored the new research. Nicholas Wade, for more than 20 years a highly regarded science writer at the New York Times, has written a book that pulls back the curtain.
It is hard to convey how rich this book is. It could be the textbook for a semester’s college course on human evolution, systematically surveying as it does the basics of genetics, evolutionary psychology, Homo sapiens’s diaspora and the recent discoveries about the evolutionary adaptations that have occurred since then. The book is a delight to read–conversational and lucid. And it will trigger an intellectual explosion the likes of which we haven’t seen for a few decades.
The title gives fair warning: “A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History.” At the heart of the book, stated quietly but with command of the technical literature, is a bombshell. It is now known with a high level of scientific confidence that both tenets of the orthodoxy are wrong.

For the full review, see:
CHARLES MURRAY. “The Diversity of Life; A scientific revolution is under way–upending one of our reigning orthodoxies.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., May 3, 2014): C5 & C7.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date May 2, 2014, and has the title “Book Review: ‘A Troublesome Inheritance’ by Nicholas Wade; A scientific revolution is under way–upending one of our reigning orthodoxies.”)

The book under review is:
Wade, Nicholas. A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History. New York: The Penguin Press, 2014.

They Begged for a Chance to Help Edison Create the Future

(p. 289) He, and anyone working for him, were perceived as standing at the very outer edge of the present, where it abuts the future. When a young John Lawson sought a position at Edison’s lab and wrote in 1879 that he was “willing to do anything, dirty work–become anything, almost a slave, only give me a chance,” he spoke with a fervency familiar to applicants knocking today on the door of the hot tech company du jour. In the age of the computer, different companies at different times–for example, Apple in the early 1980s, Microsoft in the early 1990s, Google in the first decade of the twenty-first century–inherited the temporary aura that once hovered over Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory, attracting young talents who applied in impossibly large numbers, all seeking a role in the creation of the zeitgeist (and, like John Ott, at the same time open to a chance to become wealthy). The lucky ones got inside (Lawson got a position and worked on electric light).

Source:
Stross, Randall E. The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World. New York: Crown Publishers, 2007.