- Ferry, Georgina. A Computer Called LEO. London:
Fourth Estate, 2003. ISBN 1-84115-185-8.
- I'm somewhat of a computer history buff (see
my Babbage and UNIVAC pages), but I
knew absolutely nothing about the world's first office computer before
reading this delightful book. On November 29, 1951 the first commercial
computer application went into production on the LEO computer, a vacuum
tube machine with mercury delay line memory custom designed and built
by—(UNIVAC? IBM?)—nope: J. Lyons & Co. Ltd. of
London, a catering company which operated the Lyons
Teashops all over Britain. LEO was based on the design of
the Cambridge EDSAC, but with additional
memory and modifications for commercial work. Many present-day
disasters in computerisation projects could be averted from the
lessons of Lyons, who not only designed, built, and programmed the
first commercial computer from scratch but understood from the outset
that the computer must fit the needs and operations of the business,
not the other way around, and managed thereby to succeed on the very
first try. LEO remained on the job for Lyons until January 1965. (How
many present-day computers will still be running 14 years after
they're installed?) A total of 72 LEO II and III computers, derived
from the original design, were built, and some remained in service
as late as 1981. The LEO Computers Society
maintains an excellent Web site with many photographs and historical
details.
- Alinsky, Saul D. Rules for Radicals. New York:
Random House, 1971. ISBN 0-679-72113-4.
- Ignore the title. Apart from the last two chapters, which
are dated, there is remarkably little ideology here and a wealth of
wisdom directly applicable to anybody trying to accomplish something in
the real world, entrepreneurs and Open Source software project leaders
as well as social and political activists. Alinsky's unrelenting
pragmatism and opportunism are a healthy antidote to the compulsive quest for purity
which so often ensnares the idealistic in such endeavours.
- Heinlein, Robert A. For Us, The Living. New York:
Scribner, 2004. ISBN 0-7432-5998-X.
- I was ambivalent about reading this book, knowing that
Robert and Virginia Heinlein destroyed what they believed to be all
copies of the manuscript shortly before the author's death in 1988,
and that Virginia Heinlein died in 2003 before being informed of
the discovery of a long-lost copy. Hence, neither ever gave their
permission that it be published. This is Heinlein's first novel,
written in 1938–1939. After rejection by Macmillan and then Random
House, he put the manuscript aside in June 1939 and never attempted to
publish it subsequently. His first fiction sale, the classic short
story “Life-Line”, to John W. Campbell's Astounding Science
Fiction later in 1939 launched Heinlein's fifty year writing
career. Having read almost every word Heinlein wrote, I decided to
go ahead and see how it all began, and I don't regret that decision.
Certainly nobody should read this as an introduction to Heinlein—it's
clear why it was rejected in 1939—but Heinlein fans will find here,
in embryonic form, many of the ideas and themes expressed in Heinlein's
subsequent works. It also provides a glimpse at the political radical
Heinlein (he'd run unsuccessfully for the California State Assembly
in 1938 as a Democrat committed to Upton Sinclair's Social Credit
policies), with the libertarian outlook of his later years already
beginning to emerge. Much of the book is thinly—often very
thinly—disguised lectures on Heinlein's political, social, moral,
and economic views, but occasionally you'll see the great storyteller
beginning to flex his muscles.
- Schulman, J. Neil. Stopping Power. Pahrump, NV:
Pulpless.Com, [1994] 1999. ISBN 1-58445-057-6.
- The paperback edition is immediately available from
the link above. This and most of the author's other works are
supposed to be available in electronic form for online purchase
and download from his Web site, but the ordering links appear
to be broken at the moment. Note that the 1999 paperback contains some
material added since the original 1994 hardcover edition.
- Jenkins, Roy. Churchill: A Biography. New York:
Plume, 2001. ISBN 0-452-28352-3.
- This is a splendid biography of Churchill. The author,
whose 39 year parliamentary career overlapped 16 of Churchill's
almost 64 years in the House of Commons, focuses more on the
political aspects of Churchill's career, as opposed to William
Manchester's The Last Lion (in two volumes: Visions of Glory and Alone) which delves deeper
into the British and world historical context of Churchill's life.
Due to illness, Manchester abandoned plans for the third volume of
The Last Lion, so his biography regrettably leaves the
story in 1940. Jenkins covers Churchill's entire life in one volume
(although at 1001 pages including end notes, it could easily have been
two) and occasionally assumes familiarity with British history and
political figures which may send readers not well versed in twentieth
century British history, particularly the Edwardian era, scurrying to
other references. Having read both Manchester and Jenkins, I find
they complement each other well. If I were going to re-read them,
I'd probably start with Manchester.
- Szpiro, George G. Kepler's Conjecture. Hoboken,
NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2003. ISBN 0-471-08601-0.
- In 1611, Johannes Kepler conjectured that no denser
arrangement of spheres existed than the way grocers stack oranges and
artillerymen cannonballs. For more than 385 years this conjecture,
something “many mathematicians believe, and all physicists know”,
defied proof. Over the centuries, many distinguished mathematicians
assaulted the problem to no avail. Then, in 1998, Thomas C. Hales,
assisted by Samuel P. Ferguson, announced a massive computer
proof of Kepler's conjecture in which, to date, no flaw has
been found. Who would have imagined that a fundamental theorem
in three-dimensional geometry would be proved by reducing it to a
linear programming problem? This book sketches the history
of Kepler's conjecture and those who have assaulted it over the
centuries, and explains, in layman's language, the essentials of
the proof. I found the organisation of the book less than ideal. The
author works up to Kepler's general conjecture by treating the history
of lattice packing and general packing in two dimensions, then the
kissing and lattice packing problems in three dimensions, each in a
separate chapter. Many of the same people occupied themselves with
these problems over a long span of time, so there is quite a bit of
duplication among these chapters and one has to make an effort not
to lose track of the chronology, which keeps resetting at chapter
boundaries. To avoid frightening general readers, the main text
interleaves narrative and more technical sections set in a different
type font and, in addition, most equations are relegated to appendices
at the end of the book. There's also the irritating convention that
numerical approximations are, for the most part, given to three or
four significant digits without ellipses or any other indication they
are not precise values. (The reader is warned of this in the preface,
but it still stinks.) Finally, there are a number of factual errors
in historical details. Quibbles aside, this is a worthwhile survey of
the history and eventual conquest of one of the most easily stated,
difficult to prove, and longest standing problems in mathematics.
The proof of Kepler's conjecture and all the programs used in
it are available on Thomas C. Hales' home
page.
- Zubrin, Robert. The Holy Land. Lakewood, CO:
Polaris Books, 2003. ISBN 0-9741443-0-4.
- Did somebody say science fiction doesn't do hard-hitting
social satire any more? Here, Robert Zubrin, best known for his Mars
Direct mission design (see The Case for Mars) turns his
acid pen (caustic keyboard?) toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,
with plenty of barbs left over for the absurdities and platitudes
of the War on Terrorism (or whatever). This is a novel which will
have you laughing out loud while thinking beyond the bumper-sticker
slogans mouthed by politicians into the media echo chamber.
- Haynes, John Earl and Harvey Klehr. Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage
in America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1999. ISBN 0-300-08462-5.
- Messages encrypted with a one-time pad are absolutely secure unless the
adversary obtains a copy of the pad or discovers some non-randomness
in the means used to prepare it. Soviet diplomatic and intelligence
traffic used one-time pads extensively, avoiding the vulnerabilities
of machine ciphers which permitted World War II codebreakers to read
German and Japanese traffic. The disadvantage of one-time pads is
key distribution: since every message consumes as many groups
from the one-time pad as its own length and pads are never reused
(hence the name), embassies and agents in the field require a steady
supply of new one-time pads, which can be a logistical nightmare in
wartime and risk to covert operations. The German invasion of the
Soviet Union in 1941 caused Soviet diplomatic and intelligence traffic
to explode in volume, surpassing the ability of Soviet cryptographers
to produce and distribute new one-time pads. Apparently believing
the risk to be minimal, they reacted by re-using one-time pad pages,
shuffling them into a different order and sending them to other
posts around the world. Bad idea! In fact, reusing one-time
pad pages opened up a crack in security sufficiently wide to permit
U.S. cryptanalysts, working from 1943 through 1980, to decode more
than five thousand pages (some only partially) of Soviet cables
from the wartime era. The existence of this effort, later codenamed
Project VENONA, and all the decoded material remained secret until
1995 when it was declassified. The most-requested VENONA decrypts
may be viewed on-line at the NSA Web site. (A few months
ago, there was a great deal of additional historical information
on VENONA at the NSA site, but at this writing the links appear
to be broken.) This book has relatively little to say about the
cryptanalysis of the VENONA traffic. It is essentially a history
of Soviet espionage in the U.S. in the 1930s and 40s as documented
by the VENONA decrypts. Some readers may be surprised at how
little new information is presented here. In essence, VENONA
messages completely confirmed what Whittaker Chambers (Witness, September 2003) and Elizabeth Bentley
testified to in the late 1940s, and FBI counter-intelligence
uncovered. The apparent mystery of why so many who spied for the
Soviets escaped prosecution and/or conviction is now explained
by the unwillingness of the U.S. government to disclose the
existence of VENONA by using material from it in espionage cases.
The decades long controversy over the guilt of the Rosenbergs (The Rosenberg File, August 2002) has been definitively resolved
by disclosure of VENONA—incontrovertible evidence of their guilt
remained secret, out of reach to historians, for fifty years after
their crimes. This is a meticulously-documented work of scholarly
history, not a page-turning espionage thriller; it is probably best
absorbed in small doses rather than one cover to cover gulp.