I agree that it would make a fantastic miniseries.
If you read books about Native American history, Texas tribes and their interactions with Anglo settlers, northern plains tribes I can recommend a few titles.
Frontier Blood - Jo Ella Powell Exley : Tells the history of the Parker family clan. Their small fort in central Texas was raided by Comanches in 1836 and one of the children kidnapped was Cynthia Ann Parker who gave birth to Quanah Parker, the last great Comanche war chief. The book covers Parkers who helped shape the doctrine of the Baptist church too. It's a good read.
Nine Years Among the Indians, 1870-1879 - Herman Lehmann : This book was written by a man who was kidnapped by Apaches in 1870 and raised as Apache. He later left that tribe for the Comanches after he killed an Apache medicine man. In 1879 he was repatriated with his family in central Texas on the advice of Quanah Parker. He, like many others who spent time living with Native American tribes, preferred their way of life to that of his blood family. He talks about the challenge of reintegrating. He had to relearn to speak English and German and to adapt to all the technology and lifestyle changes encountered. It's a great book.
The Heart of Everything That Is - Bob Drury/Tom Clavin : This is Red Cloud's story told using his autobiography. Red Cloud was probably the greatest Native American war chief. It's an epic story.
I just finished reading a book that according to a NY Times book review is "The single best book I have ever read on Native American history". You may have heard of it.
Indigenous Continent - The Epic Contest for North America -- Pekka Hamalainen/Evin Rias
I almost want to say don't bother. This is a classic case of an attempt to condense a complex subject into a book that can be digested in a few days of casual reading. The book must leave out so much in order to cover so many things that it ends up almost unreadable.
There are formatting problems that should've been corrected by the publisher. Several maps that should fit on one page have parts of the map cut off and printed at the top of the next page. That is ridiculous.
Another thing that contributes to unreadability and leads to confusion in telling this epic tale is that the narrative jumps from one time period to another with no subheadings to warn that you are stepping back in time for context. Consecutive paragraphs describe events in different regions with no effort to tie them together or to make them fit. There is so much information that it feels that things the authors thought important are just worked in whether they fit or not so that interesting tidbits are told. Unfortunately this ends up creating a stew of a story where the author stirs the pot a little and instead of the beefy broth in the spoon you end up with potato chunks and a random bay leaf. The bay leaf flavoring their story is the history that they couldn't fit somewhere else so they just tossed it in there.
There is a lot of slavery in the book. This was a real thing historically so it is a very interesting treatment of that subject and for those who are under the impression that Anglo colonists started the institution of slavery in North America it will be enlightening for them to read about Native American treatment of captives.
All in all, there is so much history to cover that many events and characters have their own stories feel like Reader's Digest footnotes.
The best way to treat this book is to use it as a springboard for deeper study because it feels shallow. The physical book also could be improved by cleaning up the typesetting, adding headings, moving paragraphs around into more coherent narratives, and fixing the maps.
Anyway, this got long and I know you probably read some of these. Have fun.
> I agree that it would make a fantastic miniseries.
History is so full of fantastic stories, it's pathetic that Hollywood keeps cranking out miniseries with the same plot:
There was a mysterious murder in a small town. Detective DoesntFitIn investigates and finds the town is full of secrets! Can he solve the murder before the bodies pile up?
Pretty funny. This is exactly what I have noticed in watching movies the last few years. Same story line, different leading character actors. Predictable endings.
Real life is much more complex and rich in story lines. Lose ends sometimes just fray until they have unraveled the ties that bind us. The good guys don't always win and too many times the definition of "good guy" is dependent on the reader's perspective or life's experiences.
Life may seem that it moves in cycles and that we are trapped along a circular path with a known starting and ending point. In real life it is probably more that we are looking down the long axis of an infinite spring where events do repeat cyclically but each ending is forever disconnected from the starting point by the terminal forward velocity of time so there is no going back, there is only starting over with a new opportunity to learn from mistakes you might not remember making.
Kind of off-path from my regular reading, but I recently got absorbed into the planted aquarium world. This book was such a great way to get acquainted with the ecology and methods required, though once you do it... It's extremely obvious that it works, and why it works:
Having a slice of nature in my home that's genuinely self-sufficient by all practical means has been wildly educational, rewarding, and fascinating. So many species emerged from such small samples of local ponds, lakes, and streams where I found my materials. I thought I understood ecological diversity and the staggering number of living things out there, but seeing this thriving ecosystem in only 10 gallons of volume really drove it home... The earth is absolutely covered in life.
And it all came out of mud!
I highly recommend it to anyone who likes to nerd out on ecology, aquariums, water, etc.
Any guides on what kind of equipment and set up is needed to get started? I've been having thoughts of having a "slice of nature" like you said. But I don't know what's the way to get as close to a self-sufficient and passive system as possible.
Get a 20 gallon tank with grow light hood, add dirt (organic potting soil), cover with aquarium rocks, add aquarium plants, 6-12 shrimp, and 4+ snails, add a sponge filter, enjoy your little ecosystem.
This is pretty much it! The book promotes sand over aquarium rocks (ideally living sand from a lake, pond, or river bank, laws permitting), but I’ve seen people have success with fine gravel/coarse sand as well. If it goes in ‘dead’, it’ll be live within a month for sure.
Theres a great forum called ukaps (https://www.ukaps.org/) which has tons of resources for getting started. Its a highly addictive hobby! Also recommend watching some of the cinescaper videos on youtube for inspiration :)
I think you can get pretty far by searching on YouTube for “walstad method tank” or “walstad planted aquarium”.
Some people start with a large jar, while others try something like a 5–10 gallon tank. You can go very small to start.
In a tank system, it’s helpful to include either a small filter or power head to maintain water movement. If you’re adding a lot of plants, a head is sufficient because the plants and animals will do a great job of filtration. I use snails (naturally occurring) and shrimp (purchased, but I’d like to find a native equivalent) to aid with cleanup, and the water is crystal clear after several months with no water changes, only top ups to account for evaporation.
If you want to include animals like fish, you really should ensure you do some research first and establish something with a lot of plant life. The fish won’t thrive without a suitable habitat and usually, most species require some water movement and excellent filtration.
As for self sufficiency, the systems will run on their own for extended periods quite well, but if you add more fish for example, you’ll generally need to add more food. Even so, this can be a very occasional event. With mine I will add material I find from my worm composter such as small white worms which colonized on their own. I’ve also experimented with raising daphnia in a jar with baker’s yeast as their food. I think I’ve only added external food once per month or so, and I’m not sure this was actually necessary. The system produces a huge amount of micro fauna and algae which the animals go crazy for. The animals are all tiny, too, so their feeding requirements would naturally be far less than your typical fish tank system.
The book is also a great guide, though it’s a little advanced. It assumes you know a bit about the hobby of aquaria, both planted and with fish.
In any case, I’d say it’s easier than you think. With the right understanding, it’s hard to fail. It’s incredibly complex, but establishing a good culture and allowing it to thrive will generally ensure it remains well balanced with very little intervention.
Also highly recommended to anyone who wants to nerd out on ecology: Rachel Carson's Silent Spring https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20151002 , which among other things lead to the ban on DDT in agriculture in the US. Still relevant, and beautifully written.
material world by ed conway, fantastic book on basic minerals like sand, salt, oil and their supply chain and miracle process of converting ore to materials that we use everyday.
Learning about the supply chain for vital components like integrated circuits from mine to purification to processing to manufacture was so interesting.
I now understand how the "west" is even able to keep China out of the loop (for now) on the highest level of tech. Fascinating read.
Just finished Walter Bagehot's Lombard Street (1873). Bagehot was the editor of The Economist in the 1860s and 1870s. This book sketches out London's banking and finance system and, particularly, how liquidity crises are handled.
Perry Mehrling wrote “The New Lombard Street” covering all the new mechanics of international financial markets. It’s just as fascinating. He taught a course on the material called “Economics of Money and Banking.” I never felt I grokked the interplay between the Fed, USG, and Wall Street until I studied that course.
Just finished my third reading of The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. It really ruined most other history books for me by setting the bar so high.
I haven't read it so I can't compare them. What I love about TMOTAB is that it provides so much context for what historical events were informing the scientists, politicians and military leaders at the time, and it really gets into the details of nuclear chemistry (starting from before the turn of the century!), the course of the war, and all the policy decisions that were made and why. The many influences of the first world war. The efforts of individuals as well as of nations. You see the entire project at multiple scales, and it also gets into the German and Japanese nuclear weapons programs (which I didn't even know existed until I read the book).
It doesn't just describe the debate about dropping the bomb - it details the bombings of Dresden and Tokyo and other cities from the perspective of the survivors, the crews of the bombers as well as the leaders who ordered the bombings. It describes the resistance of the Japanese at Iwo Jima and other battles which cemented the belief that invading the Japanese homeland would be a bloodbath. And the chapter about the immediate aftermath of the atomic bombs as told by contemporary accounts is gutting.
Even this description is completely omitting a huge part of the book. It's a 53 hour audiobook with zero fluff.
I am reading it now too and i enjoy it a lot. Drawing the dots between all of those science discovery, which led to conduct chain reaction, compressing it to almost suspenseful, detective story and decorate it with events in which the whole world and individual people lived was great achievement of the author.
I finished his fourth book Twilight of the Bombs earlier this year - a great look at nuclear proliferation at the fall of the Cold War and how it shaped many US foreign policy decisions.
Dystopian-future novel with a backdrop of water scarcity in the western United States. A "water knife" is a name for a security contractor who enforces water rights...
Currently reading Accelerando[0] as a result of recommendations from prior HN book reading threads. Still in the first, Manfred Macx, section, but I look forward to settling down on the couch with it when I have the opportunity.
I loved the beginning and then liked it less and less as it moves not into three future and becomes more fantastical. I eventually stopped reading. The same thing happened to me with Rudy Rucker's Postsingular.
I can't find anything indicating it's part of a series. The entire novel itself, however, is 3 stories broken into 3 parts each:
From the Wikipedia entry[0]:
"The book is a collection of nine short stories telling the tale of three generations of a family before, during, and after a technological singularity. It was originally written as a series of novelettes and novellas, all published in Asimov's Science Fiction magazine in the period 2001 to 2004."
Stross has done better work since. I don't love his doctrinaire interpretation of Lovecraftian tropes, but the Laundry series still reads well, and he does manage later on to go some less well trod places with it.
'Ukridge' is perhaps the funniest collection of stories ever written, it's magic. I love all the books set in Blandings. While the Jeeves books were not my favorite when I was younger, I really really enjoy them now.
The other Psmith books are a growing up progression to that one. Psmith was his adopted daughter's fav so he stopped while young and beautiful like she did. Mike and Psmith is a proper YA school story which was where Wodehouse started. Psmith in the city something of a sequel. Psmith Journalists the nearest Wodehouse ever got to literature with a social point to make, definitely worth the read. Leave it to Psmith is, imho his masterpiece and the best written novel I've read. Sadly the last we hear of Psmith.
Wodehouse is amazing. Tied with Pratchett for the best humorist writer in my opinion.
I've searched a lot to find more humorist writers but it's a very limited genre. Most comedy writing is too cynical for me. By contrast Wodehouse and Pratchett manage to be funny while also being uplifting.
Does anyone have any recommendations for not-too-cynical humorist authors beside these two?
Have you read 'Three Men in a Boat' by Jerome K Jerome? It's a classic. I love how fresh and contemporary it still is. Perpetually re-readable as well. There is a follow-up book that's great too.
Death and Croissants, Ian Moore: gentle humorous crime thriller. Follows a divorced slightly unsuccessful middle aged man who has emigrated from Britain to france and runs a B&B. he bumps into a glamorous but mysterious woman who he struggles to keep up with. best listened to by the author.
gentle, fun and not cynical. Some of the characters are, but the series is not cynical, its slightly naive in it's own way.
Always have been interested to read something of that author. Would you say that these books are accessible for a non-native English speaker? I often read in English, but I fear I might struggle to catch subtle word-plays and the like...
In jeeves and wooster, there isn't much word play. It is somewhat antiquated english though, and wooster likes shortening words (the metrop, instead of metropolis/london, "thos" instead of thomas (almost pronounced "foss" but with a th sound))
I recently read two books about industries that previously seemed dreadfully boring: property/casualty insurance, and community banking. I'm not sure what possessed me to read these books but I was curious about both industries since they are significant parts of the economy but I knew next to nothing about them.
The banking book is called "The Most Fun I Never Want To Have Again: A Mid-Life Crisis in Community Banking"[0] and it tells the story of an attempted bank startup in Georgia just before the financial crisis. It has a very clear explanation of the bank business model and how small banks make money. One of the surprising things I took away from it is that bank founders think of starting a bank in ways that are very similar to how tech founders think of starting of company. The main difference is that the bank business model is already well understood to those in the industry and success depends much more on your positioning in the market than it does on innovation.
The insurance book is called "Risk & Reward: An Inside View of the Property/Casualty Insurance Business"[1] and is by Stephen Catlin, who founded an insurance company that he grew to several thousand employees with offices around the world and later sold for $4 billion. Very UK centered since that's mostly where his career took place but I don't think the fundamentals of the industry change that much around the world. Pretty detailed on the mechanics of how insurance underwriting works and what insurance underwriters think about when pricing risk. Made me realize insurance is much more like trading than I'd previously thought.
This was like the perfect HN recommendation -- something I never would have thought of, with enough context to show why I should care. Will read both these, thank you.
I've started with the banking one and love it so far. I never thought about what would be needed to start a bank, but now I know. A bunch of people, some of which having some banking experience, all putting down about 200k and convincing some agency that they will run a good bank.
I've recently finished <The Left Hand of Darkness>, and absolutely love it. The style is one of clarity, tenderness, and honesty, and just plain beautiful in the section where---avoiding spoilers---they journeyed through the ice sheet, which is such a breath-taking portrayal of that environmental harshness, the human vulnerability, and the tenacity of will.
It's often classified as Sci-fi, but there's nothing particularly sciency or techy about the story. As far as "how it works", there are lots of curiosity, and very few answers. The book reflects more heavily on society, politics, gender, and most centrally, the personal qualities of honor/face/loyalty.
Having recently start keeping snails, I naturally draw parallel between my dear invertebrates with the hermaphroditism in the book, which is an extra curiosity for me.
I read this book myself a few weeks ago. Ursula's work is great, it's strange that I never heard about her before.
I also finished another of her works, "The Word for World is Forest", just last week. This one is more about human nature. It is again brilliant, I could not put it down, and I highly recommend it especially to those already familiar with her writing.
I'll probably be picking up more of her books after I finish "A Fire Upon the Deep" by Vinge.
I always liked LeGuin. If you like her, maybe you'd like Louis McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga, which is an interesting combination of an unusually vulnerable protagonist and a traditional space opera setting. She's got some straight fantasy that's good, too.
book 2 (the dark forest) is probably my favorite piece of scifi of all time! stick with the series if you like it. there is also a canon 4th book written by a different author that puts a really nice bow on the series.
Was not aware of the 4th book. Looking forward to that. Thank you. The first three books were great and opened my eyes to the sheer breadth of what other intelligent life could be like.
Book two was such surprisingly good, because book one was bit tedious. The whole plot around Luo Ji and the small tidbit about siege of Constantinople was just too good.
I’m nearly finished book 3 and have the reverse opinion - for me book 2 was the weakest of them; books 1 and 2 my clear favourites. Wonder if this reflects our preferences for translation style as much as the quality of the sci-fi itself? Books 1 & 3 were translated by Ken Liu; book 2 by Joel Martinson.
If you thought it was "slapstick" then you probably won't enjoy the rest of the books in the series. That's just the nature of the aliens, but their behavior has been consistent from the beginning of the book.
I didn't get the slapstick element. The series is worth finishing - the scope of it is just incredible. I would say top 3 sci-fi stories of all time. I actually just read the 4th book which is a work of fan fiction that apparently was sanctioned by Cxin Liu. Love this series so much.
Book 1 felt different than the other two, yeah. Some things in 1 I found more of a stretch than in the others. Book 3 went kinda Inerstellar?
My takeaways from the series:
Bacteria and mosses and lichens live interesting lives; NASA's "shout" to Voyager 2 risked exposing us to other life in this dark forest; and the night sky is even more wonderful to behold. I like to imagine I'm stuck with my back against the earth, looking out instead of up.
I really enjoyed the whole trilogy, and highly recommend it to my friends. But its more for the different perspective of a chinese writer talking about western events, and the general outlook of how events progress - the downplay of individuality, the scope of things, and some history of the chinese point of view.
However what I didn’t like throughout all 3 books is just how predictable the antagonists are … like the main characters devise a plan, stick to it and things unfold generally how they’ve predicted, with very few (though big) exceptions.
Maybe thats also part of the chinese perspective? I’m used to Branden Sanderson type of narrative where the bad guys are smarter than the good ones, outplay and counter moves, and apply constant pressure, but can be outplayed themselves as well.
Three body problem was more like if the other side has an advantage, there’s nothing you can do, and if they don’t, just follow the plan … But apart from that incredible series.
Regarding Chinese fantasy/sci-fi novels, I really enjoyed Lord of Mysteries. Given that it is a web-novel, the style is rather bad, "hasty", but it has really outstanding, almost unmatched world-building. Started it as a guilty pleasures for those times were the brain isn't really working anymore, but quickly became quite addicted.
I have mixed feelings about it, the premise is interesting but the writing is very bad in my opinion. The pacing is all over the place and the dialogue is like aliens trying to imitate normal human conversation...
I would still recommend it to sci-fi fans, just don't expect a literary masterpiece.
I thought that also the sci part was not very good. You really need to suspend that disbelief. I was disappointed, especially by the final part of the book.
In contrast, Exhalation by Chiang, which I read in the same period, was an excellent book, with much less reliance on unknown physics/technology, and more what-if and near-future social exploration. It had one mind-blowing story that'll stay with me because of its sheer audacity: can we be alone if the Bible is 100% right?
It is incredibly difficult to translate Chinese well into English. Now that I'm thinking about it, I don't think I've ever read a Chinese novel with good dialogue in English.
The last impactful one on me was Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber.
Definitely disrupted my perspective on work and the monotonous, sometimes futile, insanity that some of us subject ourselves to in order to make a living.
These are great books for removing mental fog, confusion, about the nature of our existence. They have great healing value, allowing us to integrate the world around and within us. They can also help in dealing with practical challenges in how we run organisations, develop teams, and in general help people cooperate together. It is a kind of "red pill" to enter the matrix :)
I hope to write about this in detail sometime. Just giving myself some time for experience to percolate and synthesize into something worth publishing. Meanwhile, I'll give one instance of how it helps practically.
Say, I manage engineers, and I have a new intern, who is supposed to behave in a particular way, with particular standards. Their words strongly suggest sincerity, but again and again their actions go in the opposite direction. Why does this happen, what's the "problem"?
From Bohms framework, this sort of behavior is way too common, and it is due to the paradoxical nature of our psychological machinery. It's not a problem, it's a paradox. In the mind of the intern, there tends to be competing and opposing needs. One hand, they want higher quality output (verbally asserted). On the other hand, the unspoken parts of the mind demand comfort and energy saving. On top of this "incoherent" intentions/results, the intern will seem like they're lying, since words and actions/results don't match. They say they want quality, but behavior goes another way.
So, I see this entire situation clearly, so I become more patient. I understand it's not a simple situation, there's a lot going on underneath the hood. I can help this intern see their inner contradiction, generate higher awareness, make them work with less inner friction (and eventually less external friction). My process for helping someone out becomes accurate, crisp and helpful due to these additional insights from Bohm.
This is just one instance of Bohms framework helping me out in a practical organizational context.
Invisible China by Scott Rozelle. The book focuses on rural China and it's challenges. The gist of the book is that countries generally move from low to middle income by doing cheap labor. The move from middle to high income requires a educated workforce. If you don't have enough educated workers across the board you fall into the middle income trap where you have large structural unemployment and get high crime. This happened to Mexico and Brazil for example. China's rural population struggles with a low education level. The author investigated why. The answers come down to a mix of health issues, lack of education on how to raise babies, dysfunction in the education system and the houku system.
Short interesting read for anyone interested in China or development economics. The book does a great job composting to other countries and showing that way how development works and doesn't.
Thank you for the suggestion. I am interested in modern China, so I might check it out. Just curious about the ‘lack of education on how to raise babies’ - sounds a bit subjective. I mean, plenty of those babies seem to excel when transferred to environments that provide them with better opportunities.
Somewhat (by a few decades) behind the times here, but I finally found a set of Robert Caro's Years of Lyndon Johnson books at a 2nd-hand shop earlier this year. What a ride. I know it's a famous series, but I'm outside the US and so only recently became aware of its existence, and also therefore went in mostly blind as to the subject (I knew very little of LBJ prior). Am partway through the 2nd book now, with the conclusion of the 1948 Texan Senate Democratic primary, and my mouth just sort of hung open for pages at a time during that.
Caro's a talented writer, but what really shows through is just the sheer years of hard work he clearly put into the books. I don't know how one can focus for so many years on just one writing project.
I've been on the look-out for that too. Have lined up Mike Royko's "Boss" on Daley in the interim, though the bookshop owner wasn't as fond of Royko's writing style...
Just started Master of the Senate. Caro's books have reignited my love of reading. Cannot recommend his books enough for anyone interested in how power in organizations or government is culled and cultivated. His books read like thrillers, but are exhaustively researched and sourced.
Sony Pictures recently released a movie covering Caro and his recently passed editor, Robert Gottlieb, relationship and process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gv3CRojrbeE
It's a book from the 1980's about operational management. In particular, it focuses on physical manufacturing.
It's in the form of a fictitious personal tale. A plant manager struggles to save his plant from closure, and his marriage from falling apart.
The lesson is about lean management.
My main takeaway is the realization that when we try to optimize something, we focus on how to do something more efficiently. What more often is a problem is that people and processes are blocked from doing work. They spend a lot of time waiting and doing nothing. Focusing on reducing waits will produce better results than focusing on doing the work faster. Of course reducing the waits might mean doing some targeted piece of work faster. It could also mean doing better scheduling or focusing on other resource contention.
Recently I used this mindset to optimize a legacy DB struggling under the weight of a hodgepodge of unmaintained code. It worked wonderfully. Instead of fixing the slowest queries, focused on fixing the ones that block the most often. The result was that the DB was able to handle the workload after all.
The Phoenix Project was in fact inspired by The Goal:
>
“The Phoenix Project”, a popular business fable about DevOps, is an adaptation of “The Goal” by Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt. They are virtually the same book. The twist it takes on “The Goal” is that instead of focusing on manufacturing, the “The Phoenix Project” focuses on IT.
Sometimes there is a connection open to the DB which acquired a lot of locks during a long-running transaction. The DB is processing this transaction on one DB connection, and many other DB connections are blocked because they can not access certain tables, pages, or rows. The other sessions are literally doing nothing and are waiting.
Potential ways to improve it:
- Reducing the scope of transactions
- committing more often within the transaction
- optimizing just the most impactful queries which contribute to the blocking session's runtime (not ones that don't block at all)
- loosening the transaction isolation level
Previous attempts looked at the heaviest query in terms of processing time, IO, or execution count. Those certainly slowed the server down, but the really issue were application freezes of many seconds and even minutes. Fixing those unblocked the server. The heavy queries are still there, but no one cares.
More technically, before, people focused on individual queries with the hope of finding the one that is slowing down the server the most. When we instead focused on sessions, and which ones block others due to locks and DB transactions, we were able to fix the root causes.
The book is mainly credited with introducing the Theory of Constraints [1], which asserts that any manageable system's throughput is limited by exactly one bottleneck.
He goes on to encourage us to instantiate operating (and thinking) processes whereby we repeatedly discover and mitigate this bottleneck as each mitigation may result in a migration of the constraint.
The main observation is that most of us are inclined and almost always incentivized to focus on local optima (our area, our lane, our discipline) and that this striving is a great way to destroy any given system, or at best, do nothing useful. Any small experience in the world of business will illustrate this quite clearly, IME.
The sequel to The Goal is also quite good and is called, "It's Not Luck." This book takes the same characters into a larger organization where the constraints are in how their products are marketed, rather than produced in order to more fully demonstrate how the Theory of Constraints is not limited to activities on a factory floor.
As mentioned elsewhere, the narrative and writing style can be distracting, but the concepts are timeless and extremely powerful.
I have re-read or re-listened to both books at least once every year or two since the early aughts and I learn something new and relevant with each pass.
I tried to read The Goal and bounced off due in part to the aforementioned writing style, which seemed super trite and straw-mannish. Does the fact that you keep re-reading the books suggests that you haven't found a better way to re-approach that material?
I listened to it as an audio book. It was possible to ignore the style. It simplifies situations and trivializes the road to success bit. However, that seems necessary to keep the book clear, to the point, and of manageable size.
For me, the writing style is hard to get past and just isn't executed well when compared with high quality literature.
Despite the relatively naive execution, the underlying themes are powerful. I think the narrative approach is what makes it possible to revisit repeatedly and pattern match across widely varying contexts.
We're story telling creatures and a smarter, more academic recitation of a set of facts and observations probably wouldn't have held up as well.
I also agree that it doesn't appear to stand against even small amounts of critical argument while it unfolds, but the central position is so powerful, it's worth suspending disbelief for a bit, enjoy the story and then start taking it apart after it's complete.
IIRC, Critical Chain, the 3rd installment in that series, details transitioning from making widgets to a widget-as-a-service business mode. Radical at the time, the preferred strategy today. Talk about foresight.
Reading Goldratt, Deming, Drucker, Buckminster Fuller, and a few others, blew my mind. Most of my really good ideas and works were inspired by them.
Alas, being reality-based also impaired my career. Like during the dot-com bubble, the so-called New Economy, I just couldn't figure out wtf everyone was talking about. So I very pointedly did not jump on the crazy train.
My loss.
I wish there someone like Goldratt explaining grifts, cons, and investment banking.
I really enjoyed that book and how it attempts to simplify the nature of common supply chain constraints.
You probably know this already, but if not: Eli Goldratt (the guy that wrote that book) wrote an equally brilliant academic paper on the same subject - I think the title was ‘Standing on the shoulders of giants’. Just passing it on in the event you’re looking for a good follow-up read.
Where the book is a story and does not mention Lean Management, Toyota, and Taiichi Ohno, "Standing on the shoulders of giants" is a clear description of TPS (Toyota Production System).
It's awesome how the two varied styles of writing describe the same "thing". Where the "thing" is "how to operate efficiently".
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 332 ms ] thread[1]: https://stallman.org/Bob-Chassell
https://www.pbump.com/
It's a nice mix of being data driven but accessible.
• Fashion Climbing: A Memoir, an autobiography of Bill Cunningham who you might know from the street style photography he did for the NYT.
• Kings of their Own Ocean, a non-fiction history of Bluefin Tuna fishing.
https://www.amazon.com/Empire-Summer-Moon-Comanches-Powerful...
This would make an epic miniseries!
If you read books about Native American history, Texas tribes and their interactions with Anglo settlers, northern plains tribes I can recommend a few titles.
Frontier Blood - Jo Ella Powell Exley : Tells the history of the Parker family clan. Their small fort in central Texas was raided by Comanches in 1836 and one of the children kidnapped was Cynthia Ann Parker who gave birth to Quanah Parker, the last great Comanche war chief. The book covers Parkers who helped shape the doctrine of the Baptist church too. It's a good read.
Nine Years Among the Indians, 1870-1879 - Herman Lehmann : This book was written by a man who was kidnapped by Apaches in 1870 and raised as Apache. He later left that tribe for the Comanches after he killed an Apache medicine man. In 1879 he was repatriated with his family in central Texas on the advice of Quanah Parker. He, like many others who spent time living with Native American tribes, preferred their way of life to that of his blood family. He talks about the challenge of reintegrating. He had to relearn to speak English and German and to adapt to all the technology and lifestyle changes encountered. It's a great book.
The Heart of Everything That Is - Bob Drury/Tom Clavin : This is Red Cloud's story told using his autobiography. Red Cloud was probably the greatest Native American war chief. It's an epic story.
I just finished reading a book that according to a NY Times book review is "The single best book I have ever read on Native American history". You may have heard of it.
Indigenous Continent - The Epic Contest for North America -- Pekka Hamalainen/Evin Rias
I almost want to say don't bother. This is a classic case of an attempt to condense a complex subject into a book that can be digested in a few days of casual reading. The book must leave out so much in order to cover so many things that it ends up almost unreadable.
There are formatting problems that should've been corrected by the publisher. Several maps that should fit on one page have parts of the map cut off and printed at the top of the next page. That is ridiculous.
Another thing that contributes to unreadability and leads to confusion in telling this epic tale is that the narrative jumps from one time period to another with no subheadings to warn that you are stepping back in time for context. Consecutive paragraphs describe events in different regions with no effort to tie them together or to make them fit. There is so much information that it feels that things the authors thought important are just worked in whether they fit or not so that interesting tidbits are told. Unfortunately this ends up creating a stew of a story where the author stirs the pot a little and instead of the beefy broth in the spoon you end up with potato chunks and a random bay leaf. The bay leaf flavoring their story is the history that they couldn't fit somewhere else so they just tossed it in there.
There is a lot of slavery in the book. This was a real thing historically so it is a very interesting treatment of that subject and for those who are under the impression that Anglo colonists started the institution of slavery in North America it will be enlightening for them to read about Native American treatment of captives.
All in all, there is so much history to cover that many events and characters have their own stories feel like Reader's Digest footnotes.
The best way to treat this book is to use it as a springboard for deeper study because it feels shallow. The physical book also could be improved by cleaning up the typesetting, adding headings, moving paragraphs around into more coherent narratives, and fixing the maps.
Anyway, this got long and I know you probably read some of these. Have fun.
History is so full of fantastic stories, it's pathetic that Hollywood keeps cranking out miniseries with the same plot:
There was a mysterious murder in a small town. Detective DoesntFitIn investigates and finds the town is full of secrets! Can he solve the murder before the bodies pile up?
Real life is much more complex and rich in story lines. Lose ends sometimes just fray until they have unraveled the ties that bind us. The good guys don't always win and too many times the definition of "good guy" is dependent on the reader's perspective or life's experiences.
Life may seem that it moves in cycles and that we are trapped along a circular path with a known starting and ending point. In real life it is probably more that we are looking down the long axis of an infinite spring where events do repeat cyclically but each ending is forever disconnected from the starting point by the terminal forward velocity of time so there is no going back, there is only starting over with a new opportunity to learn from mistakes you might not remember making.
Ecology of the Planted Aquarium: A Practical Manual and Scientific Treatise https://www.amazon.ca/Ecology-Planted-Aquarium-Practical-Sci...
Having a slice of nature in my home that's genuinely self-sufficient by all practical means has been wildly educational, rewarding, and fascinating. So many species emerged from such small samples of local ponds, lakes, and streams where I found my materials. I thought I understood ecological diversity and the staggering number of living things out there, but seeing this thriving ecosystem in only 10 gallons of volume really drove it home... The earth is absolutely covered in life.
And it all came out of mud!
I highly recommend it to anyone who likes to nerd out on ecology, aquariums, water, etc.
Some people start with a large jar, while others try something like a 5–10 gallon tank. You can go very small to start.
In a tank system, it’s helpful to include either a small filter or power head to maintain water movement. If you’re adding a lot of plants, a head is sufficient because the plants and animals will do a great job of filtration. I use snails (naturally occurring) and shrimp (purchased, but I’d like to find a native equivalent) to aid with cleanup, and the water is crystal clear after several months with no water changes, only top ups to account for evaporation.
If you want to include animals like fish, you really should ensure you do some research first and establish something with a lot of plant life. The fish won’t thrive without a suitable habitat and usually, most species require some water movement and excellent filtration.
As for self sufficiency, the systems will run on their own for extended periods quite well, but if you add more fish for example, you’ll generally need to add more food. Even so, this can be a very occasional event. With mine I will add material I find from my worm composter such as small white worms which colonized on their own. I’ve also experimented with raising daphnia in a jar with baker’s yeast as their food. I think I’ve only added external food once per month or so, and I’m not sure this was actually necessary. The system produces a huge amount of micro fauna and algae which the animals go crazy for. The animals are all tiny, too, so their feeding requirements would naturally be far less than your typical fish tank system.
The book is also a great guide, though it’s a little advanced. It assumes you know a bit about the hobby of aquaria, both planted and with fish.
In any case, I’d say it’s easier than you think. With the right understanding, it’s hard to fail. It’s incredibly complex, but establishing a good culture and allowing it to thrive will generally ensure it remains well balanced with very little intervention.
I now understand how the "west" is even able to keep China out of the loop (for now) on the highest level of tech. Fascinating read.
https://archive.org/details/lombardstreetad00bagegoog/page/n...
https://youtu.be/7iu5xWByF5g
It doesn't just describe the debate about dropping the bomb - it details the bombings of Dresden and Tokyo and other cities from the perspective of the survivors, the crews of the bombers as well as the leaders who ordered the bombings. It describes the resistance of the Japanese at Iwo Jima and other battles which cemented the belief that invading the Japanese homeland would be a bloodbath. And the chapter about the immediate aftermath of the atomic bombs as told by contemporary accounts is gutting.
Even this description is completely omitting a huge part of the book. It's a 53 hour audiobook with zero fluff.
Dystopian-future novel with a backdrop of water scarcity in the western United States. A "water knife" is a name for a security contractor who enforces water rights...
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/arizona-restricts-phoenix-h...
[0]: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler...
Do you recommend starting with this? Or something else?
From the Wikipedia entry[0]:
"The book is a collection of nine short stories telling the tale of three generations of a family before, during, and after a technological singularity. It was originally written as a series of novelettes and novellas, all published in Asimov's Science Fiction magazine in the period 2001 to 2004."
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando
Skip "Equoid".
'Ukridge' is perhaps the funniest collection of stories ever written, it's magic. I love all the books set in Blandings. While the Jeeves books were not my favorite when I was younger, I really really enjoy them now.
I also like the Psmith books. I need to try Ukridge.
If you like Ukridge, then you could also read 'Love Amount the Chickens', which features the Ukridge character.
All should be out of copyright by now.
I've searched a lot to find more humorist writers but it's a very limited genre. Most comedy writing is too cynical for me. By contrast Wodehouse and Pratchett manage to be funny while also being uplifting.
Does anyone have any recommendations for not-too-cynical humorist authors beside these two?
I can vouch for it that it will make you laugh really hard.
gentle, fun and not cynical. Some of the characters are, but the series is not cynical, its slightly naive in it's own way.
In jeeves and wooster, there isn't much word play. It is somewhat antiquated english though, and wooster likes shortening words (the metrop, instead of metropolis/london, "thos" instead of thomas (almost pronounced "foss" but with a th sound))
Its not hard like oscar wilde, but its not overly easy. You _might_ want to try watching the Fry and Laurie version first: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkLulnrecAQ
The banking book is called "The Most Fun I Never Want To Have Again: A Mid-Life Crisis in Community Banking"[0] and it tells the story of an attempted bank startup in Georgia just before the financial crisis. It has a very clear explanation of the bank business model and how small banks make money. One of the surprising things I took away from it is that bank founders think of starting a bank in ways that are very similar to how tech founders think of starting of company. The main difference is that the bank business model is already well understood to those in the industry and success depends much more on your positioning in the market than it does on innovation.
The insurance book is called "Risk & Reward: An Inside View of the Property/Casualty Insurance Business"[1] and is by Stephen Catlin, who founded an insurance company that he grew to several thousand employees with offices around the world and later sold for $4 billion. Very UK centered since that's mostly where his career took place but I don't think the fundamentals of the industry change that much around the world. Pretty detailed on the mechanics of how insurance underwriting works and what insurance underwriters think about when pricing risk. Made me realize insurance is much more like trading than I'd previously thought.
[0]: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00ELPOA3S/
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B073NRDNSC/
Thanks for sharing the suggestions!
It changed the way I think about progress.
It's often classified as Sci-fi, but there's nothing particularly sciency or techy about the story. As far as "how it works", there are lots of curiosity, and very few answers. The book reflects more heavily on society, politics, gender, and most centrally, the personal qualities of honor/face/loyalty.
Having recently start keeping snails, I naturally draw parallel between my dear invertebrates with the hermaphroditism in the book, which is an extra curiosity for me.
I also finished another of her works, "The Word for World is Forest", just last week. This one is more about human nature. It is again brilliant, I could not put it down, and I highly recommend it especially to those already familiar with her writing.
I'll probably be picking up more of her books after I finish "A Fire Upon the Deep" by Vinge.
A pretty interesting history of Detroit in the 60s and 70s that relies heavily on first hand accounts and primary sources.
https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/458-detroit-i-do-mind-d...
https://www.amazon.com/Three-Body-Problem-Remembrance-Earths...
However, for those who have read books 2 and beyond, does the writing return to serious and deep or does a slapstick element remain?
However what I didn’t like throughout all 3 books is just how predictable the antagonists are … like the main characters devise a plan, stick to it and things unfold generally how they’ve predicted, with very few (though big) exceptions.
Maybe thats also part of the chinese perspective? I’m used to Branden Sanderson type of narrative where the bad guys are smarter than the good ones, outplay and counter moves, and apply constant pressure, but can be outplayed themselves as well.
Three body problem was more like if the other side has an advantage, there’s nothing you can do, and if they don’t, just follow the plan … But apart from that incredible series.
I would still recommend it to sci-fi fans, just don't expect a literary masterpiece.
In contrast, Exhalation by Chiang, which I read in the same period, was an excellent book, with much less reliance on unknown physics/technology, and more what-if and near-future social exploration. It had one mind-blowing story that'll stay with me because of its sheer audacity: can we be alone if the Bible is 100% right?
Definitely disrupted my perspective on work and the monotonous, sometimes futile, insanity that some of us subject ourselves to in order to make a living.
- Thought as a System
- On Dialogue
These are great books for removing mental fog, confusion, about the nature of our existence. They have great healing value, allowing us to integrate the world around and within us. They can also help in dealing with practical challenges in how we run organisations, develop teams, and in general help people cooperate together. It is a kind of "red pill" to enter the matrix :)
Say, I manage engineers, and I have a new intern, who is supposed to behave in a particular way, with particular standards. Their words strongly suggest sincerity, but again and again their actions go in the opposite direction. Why does this happen, what's the "problem"?
From Bohms framework, this sort of behavior is way too common, and it is due to the paradoxical nature of our psychological machinery. It's not a problem, it's a paradox. In the mind of the intern, there tends to be competing and opposing needs. One hand, they want higher quality output (verbally asserted). On the other hand, the unspoken parts of the mind demand comfort and energy saving. On top of this "incoherent" intentions/results, the intern will seem like they're lying, since words and actions/results don't match. They say they want quality, but behavior goes another way.
So, I see this entire situation clearly, so I become more patient. I understand it's not a simple situation, there's a lot going on underneath the hood. I can help this intern see their inner contradiction, generate higher awareness, make them work with less inner friction (and eventually less external friction). My process for helping someone out becomes accurate, crisp and helpful due to these additional insights from Bohm.
This is just one instance of Bohms framework helping me out in a practical organizational context.
Short interesting read for anyone interested in China or development economics. The book does a great job composting to other countries and showing that way how development works and doesn't.
Caro's a talented writer, but what really shows through is just the sheer years of hard work he clearly put into the books. I don't know how one can focus for so many years on just one writing project.
Sony Pictures recently released a movie covering Caro and his recently passed editor, Robert Gottlieb, relationship and process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gv3CRojrbeE
https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/12397.Peter_Singer
It's a book from the 1980's about operational management. In particular, it focuses on physical manufacturing.
It's in the form of a fictitious personal tale. A plant manager struggles to save his plant from closure, and his marriage from falling apart.
The lesson is about lean management.
My main takeaway is the realization that when we try to optimize something, we focus on how to do something more efficiently. What more often is a problem is that people and processes are blocked from doing work. They spend a lot of time waiting and doing nothing. Focusing on reducing waits will produce better results than focusing on doing the work faster. Of course reducing the waits might mean doing some targeted piece of work faster. It could also mean doing better scheduling or focusing on other resource contention.
Recently I used this mindset to optimize a legacy DB struggling under the weight of a hodgepodge of unmaintained code. It worked wonderfully. Instead of fixing the slowest queries, focused on fixing the ones that block the most often. The result was that the DB was able to handle the workload after all.
https://itrevolution.com/product/the-phoenix-project/
> “The Phoenix Project”, a popular business fable about DevOps, is an adaptation of “The Goal” by Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt. They are virtually the same book. The twist it takes on “The Goal” is that instead of focusing on manufacturing, the “The Phoenix Project” focuses on IT.
https://sobination.com/2017/08/08/the-goal-and-the-phoenix-p...
"Goldratt's Rules of Flow" https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0B9VH7TTZ
Sometimes there is a connection open to the DB which acquired a lot of locks during a long-running transaction. The DB is processing this transaction on one DB connection, and many other DB connections are blocked because they can not access certain tables, pages, or rows. The other sessions are literally doing nothing and are waiting.
Potential ways to improve it:
- Reducing the scope of transactions - committing more often within the transaction - optimizing just the most impactful queries which contribute to the blocking session's runtime (not ones that don't block at all) - loosening the transaction isolation level
More technically, before, people focused on individual queries with the hope of finding the one that is slowing down the server the most. When we instead focused on sessions, and which ones block others due to locks and DB transactions, we were able to fix the root causes.
I am simplifying a bit, but that is the jist.
The book is mainly credited with introducing the Theory of Constraints [1], which asserts that any manageable system's throughput is limited by exactly one bottleneck.
He goes on to encourage us to instantiate operating (and thinking) processes whereby we repeatedly discover and mitigate this bottleneck as each mitigation may result in a migration of the constraint.
The main observation is that most of us are inclined and almost always incentivized to focus on local optima (our area, our lane, our discipline) and that this striving is a great way to destroy any given system, or at best, do nothing useful. Any small experience in the world of business will illustrate this quite clearly, IME.
The sequel to The Goal is also quite good and is called, "It's Not Luck." This book takes the same characters into a larger organization where the constraints are in how their products are marketed, rather than produced in order to more fully demonstrate how the Theory of Constraints is not limited to activities on a factory floor.
As mentioned elsewhere, the narrative and writing style can be distracting, but the concepts are timeless and extremely powerful.
I have re-read or re-listened to both books at least once every year or two since the early aughts and I learn something new and relevant with each pass.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_constraints [2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/157385.It_s_Not_Luck
Despite the relatively naive execution, the underlying themes are powerful. I think the narrative approach is what makes it possible to revisit repeatedly and pattern match across widely varying contexts.
We're story telling creatures and a smarter, more academic recitation of a set of facts and observations probably wouldn't have held up as well.
I also agree that it doesn't appear to stand against even small amounts of critical argument while it unfolds, but the central position is so powerful, it's worth suspending disbelief for a bit, enjoy the story and then start taking it apart after it's complete.
Reading Goldratt, Deming, Drucker, Buckminster Fuller, and a few others, blew my mind. Most of my really good ideas and works were inspired by them.
Alas, being reality-based also impaired my career. Like during the dot-com bubble, the so-called New Economy, I just couldn't figure out wtf everyone was talking about. So I very pointedly did not jump on the crazy train.
My loss.
I wish there someone like Goldratt explaining grifts, cons, and investment banking.
You probably know this already, but if not: Eli Goldratt (the guy that wrote that book) wrote an equally brilliant academic paper on the same subject - I think the title was ‘Standing on the shoulders of giants’. Just passing it on in the event you’re looking for a good follow-up read.
The paper is in the appendix of the book.
Where the book is a story and does not mention Lean Management, Toyota, and Taiichi Ohno, "Standing on the shoulders of giants" is a clear description of TPS (Toyota Production System).
It's awesome how the two varied styles of writing describe the same "thing". Where the "thing" is "how to operate efficiently".