- Spufford, Francis. Backroom Boys: The Secret Return
of the British Boffin. London: Faber and Faber,
2003. ISBN 0-571-21496-7.
- It is rare to encounter a book about technology
and technologists which even attempts to delve into the messy
real-world arena where science, engineering, entrepreneurship,
finance, marketing, and government policy intersect, yet it is
there, not solely in the technological domain, that the roots of
both great successes and calamitous failures lie. Backroom
Boys does just this and pulls it off splendidly, covering
projects as disparate as the Black Arrow rocket, Concorde, mid 1980s
computer games, mobile telephony, and sequencing the human genome.
The discussion on pages 99 and 100 of the dynamics of new product
development in the software business is as clear and concise a
statement I've seen of the philosophy that's guided my own activities for
the past 25 years. While celebrating the technological renaissance
of post-industrial Britain, the author retains the characteristic
British intellectual's disdain for private enterprise and economic
liberty. In chapter 4, he describes Vodaphone's development
of the mobile phone market: “It produced a blind, unplanned,
self-interested search strategy, capitalism's classic method
for exploring a new space in the market where profit may be found.”
Well…yes…indeed,
but that isn't just “capitalism's” classic method,
but the very one employed with great success by life on
Earth lo these four and a half billion years (see The Genius Within, April 2003). The wheels fall off in chapter 5.
Whatever your position may have been in the battle between Celera
and the public Human Genome Project, Spufford's collectivist bias and
ignorance of economics (simply correcting the noncontroversial
errors in basic economics in this chapter would require more pages than
it fills) gets in the way of telling the story of how the human genome
came to be sequenced five years before the original estimated date.
A truly repugnant passage on page 173 describes “how science should be
done”. Taxpayer-funded researchers, a fine summer evening, “floated
back downstream carousing, with stubs of candle stuck to the prows,
… and the voices calling to and fro across
the water as the punts drifted home under the overhanging trees in
the green, green, night.“ Back to the taxpayer-funded lab early
next morning, to be sure, collecting their taxpayer-funded salaries
doing the work they love to advance their careers. Nary a word here
of the cab drivers, sales clerks, construction workers and, yes,
managers of biotech start-ups, all taxed to fund this scientific
utopia, who lack the money and free time to pass their own summer
evenings so sublimely. And on the previous page, the number of
cells in the adult body of C. elegans is twice given as 550.
Gimme a break—everybody knows there are 959 somatic cells
in the adult hermaphrodite, 1031 in the male; he's confusing adults
with 558-cell newly-hatched L1 larvæ.
- Powell, Jim. FDR's Folly. New York: Crown
Forum, 2003. ISBN 0-7615-0165-7.
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- Vallee, Jacques. The Heart of the
Internet. Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads Publishing,
2003. ISBN 1-57174-369-3.
- The author (yes, that Jacques Vallee) recounts
the history of the Internet from an insider's perspective: first as
a member of Doug Engelbart's Augmentation group at SRI from 1971,
and later as a developer of the pioneering Planet conferencing
system at the Institute for the Future and co-founder of the 1976
spin-off InfoMedia. He does an excellent job both of sketching
Engelbart's still unrealised vision of computer networks as a means
of connecting human minds in new ways, and in describing how it,
like any top-down system design, was doomed to fail in the real
world populated by idiosyncratic and innovative human beings.
He celebrates the organic, unplanned growth of the Internet so far
and urges that it be allowed to continue, free of government and
commercial constraints. The present-day state of the Internet
worries him as it worries me; he eloquently
expresses the risk as follows (p. 162):
“As a venture capitalist who invests in high tech, I have to
worry that the web will be perceived as an increasingly corrupt police
state overlying a maze of dark alleys and unsafe practices outside
the rule of law. The public and many corporations will be reluctant
to embrace a technology fraught with such problems. The Internet
economy will continue to grow, but it will do so at a much slower
pace than forecast by industry analysts.” This is precisely
the scenario I have come to call “the Internet slum”. The description
of the present-day Internet and what individuals can do to protect
their privacy and defend their freedom in the future is sketchy and not
entirely reliable. For example, on page 178,
“And who has time to keep complete backup files anyway?”,
which rhetorical question I would answer, “Well, anybody who isn't
a complete idiot.” His description of the “Mesh” in chapter 8 is
precisely what I've been describing to gales of laughter since 1992
as “Gizmos”—a world in which everything has its own IPv6
address—each button on your VCR, for example—and all connections
are networked and may be redefined at will. This is laid out in
more detail in the Unicard Ubiquitous
section of my 1994 Unicard paper.
- Solé, Robert. Le grand voyage de
l'obélisque. Paris: Seuil, 2004. ISBN 2-02-039279-8.
- No, this is not an Astérix book—it's
“obélisque”, not “Obélix”! This is the story of how
an obelisk of Ramses II happened to end up in the middle of la Place de la Concorde in Paris. Moving a 22 metre,
220 metric ton chunk of granite from the banks of the Nile to the
banks of the Seine in the 1830s was not a simple task—it involved a
purpose-built ship, an expedition of more than two and a half years
with a crew of 121, twelve of whom died in Egypt from cholera and
dysentery, and the combined muscle power of 350 artillerymen in Paris
to erect the obelisk where it stands today. One has to be impressed
with the ancient Egyptians, who managed much the same more than thirty
centuries earlier. The book includes a complete transcription and
translation of the hieroglyphic inscriptions—Ramses II must have
set the all-time record for effort expended in publishing banal
text.
- Hitchens, Peter. The Abolition of Liberty. London:
Atlantic Books, [2003] 2004. ISBN 1-84354-149-1.
- This is a revised edition
of the hardcover published in 2003 as A Brief History of Crime. Unlike
the police of most other countries (including most of the U.S.),
since the founding of the Metropolitan Police in 1829, police in
England and Wales focused primarily on the prevention of crime through
a regular, visible presence and constant contact with the community,
as opposed to responding after the commission of a crime to investigate
and apprehend those responsible. Certainly, detection was among the
missions of the police, but crime was viewed as a failure of policing,
not an inevitable circumstance to which one could only react. Hitchens
argues that it is this approach which, for more than a century, made
these lands among the safest, civil, and free on Earth, with police
integrated in the society as uniformed citizens, not a privileged
arm of the state set above the people. Starting in the 1960s, all of
this began to change, motivated by a mix of utopian visions and the
hope of cutting costs. The bobby on the beat was replaced by police
in squad cars with sirens and flashing lights, inevitably arriving
after a crime was committed and able to do little more than comfort
the victims and report yet another crime unlikely to be solved.
Predictably, crime in Britain exploded to the upside, with far more
police and police spending per capita than before the “reforms” unable
to even reduce its rate of growth. The response of the government
elite has not been to return to preventive policing, but rather to
progressively infringe the fundamental liberties of citizens, trending
toward the third world model of a police state with high crime.
None of this would have surprised Hayek, who foresaw it all The Road to Serfdom
(May 2002). Theodore Dalrymple's Life at the Bottom (September 2002) provides a view from the streets
surrendered to savagery, and the prisons and hospitals occupied by the
perpetrators and their victims. In this edition, Hitchens deleted two
chapters from the hardcover which questioned Britain's abolition of
capital punishment and fanatic program of victim disarmament (“gun
control”). He did so “with some sadness” because “the only way to
affect politics in this country is to influence the left”, and these
issues are “articles of faith with the modern left”. As “People do not
like to be made to think about their faith”, he felt the case better
put by their exclusion. I have cited these quotes from pp. xi–xii
of the Preface without ellipses but, I believe, fairly.
- Cellan-Jones, Rory. Dot.bomb: The Strange Death of
Dot.com Britain. London: Aurum Press, [2001]
2003. ISBN 1-85410-952-9.
- The dot.com bubble in Britain was shorter and more intense
than in the U.S.—the mania didn't really begin until mid-1999 with
the public share flotation of Freeserve, then collapsed along with
the NASDAQ in the spring of 2000, days after the IPO of evocatively
named lastminute.com (a rare survivor). You're probably aware of
the much-hyped rise, profligate peak, and ugly demise of boo.com,
poster child of the excesses of dot.com Britain, but how about First
Tuesday, which almost succeeded in raising US$15 million from two
venture funds, putting a valuation of US$62 million on what amounted
to a cocktail party? The babe on the back cover beside the
author's biography isn't the author (who is male), but British sitcom
celeb Joanna Lumley, erstwhile spokesblonde for ephemeral on-line
health food peddler Clickmango.com.
- Miranda, Eduardo Reck. Composing Music
with Computers. Oxford: Focal Press,
2001. ISBN 0-240-51567-6.
-