February 2004

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.

 Permalink

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.

 Permalink

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.

 Permalink

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.

 Permalink

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.

 Permalink

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.

 Permalink

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.

 Permalink

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.

 Permalink