May 2004

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Miranda, Eduardo Reck. Composing Music with Computers. Oxford: Focal Press, 2001. ISBN 0-240-51567-6.

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