- Itzkoff, Seymour W. The Decline of Intelligence
in America. Westport, CT: Praeger,
1994. ISBN 0-275-95229-0.
- This book had the misfortune to come
out in the same year as the first edition of The Bell Curve
(August 2003), and suffers by
comparison. Unlike that deservedly better-known work, Itzkoff
presents few statistics to support his claims that dysgenic
reproduction is resulting in a decline in intelligence
in the U.S. Any assertion of declining intelligence must
confront the evidence for the Flynn Effect (see The Rising Curve, July 2004), which seems to indicate IQ
scores are rising about 15 points per generation in a long list of
countries including the U.S. The author dismisses Flynn's work in
a single paragraph as irrelevant to international competition since
scores of all major industrialised countries are rising at about the
same rate. But if you argue that IQ is a measure of intelligence,
as this book does, how can you claim intelligence is falling at
the same time IQ scores are rising at a dizzying rate without
providing some reason that Flynn's data should be disregarded?
There's quite a bit of hand wringing about the social, educational,
and industrial prowess of Japan and Germany which sounds rather dated
with a decade's hindsight. The second half of the book is a curious
collection of policy recommendations, which defy easy classification
into a point on the usual political spectrum. Itzkoff advocates
economic protectionism, school vouchers, government-led industrial
policy, immigration restrictions, abolishing affirmative action,
punitive taxation, government incentives for conventional families,
curtailment of payments to welfare mothers and possibly mandatory
contraception, penalties for companies which export well-paying jobs,
and encouragement of inter-racial and -ethnic marriage. I think
that if an ADA/MoveOn/NOW liberal were to read this book, their head might explode. Given the political
climate in the U.S. and other Western countries, such policies had
exactly zero chance of being implemented either when he recommended
them in 1994 and no more today.
- Appleton, Victor. Tom Swift and His Giant
Cannon. McLean, VA: IndyPublish.com, [1913]
2002. ISBN 1-4043-3589-7.
- The link above is to a paperback reprint of the original
1913 novel, 16th in the original Tom Swift series, which is in
the public domain. I actually read this novel on my PalmOS PDA
(which is also my mobile phone, so it's usually right at hand).
I always like to have some light reading available which doesn't
require a long attention span or intense concentration to pass the
time while waiting in line at the post office or other dreary moments
one can't program, and early 20th century juvenile pulp fiction on
a PDA fills the bill superbly. This novel lasted about a year and a
half until I finished it earlier today in the check-out line at the
grocery store. The PalmOS version I read was produced as a demo from
the Project
Gutenberg EText of the novel. This Palm version
doesn't seem to be available any more (and was inconvenient, being
broken into four parts in order to fit on early PalmPilots with
limited memory). For those of you who prefer an electronic edition,
I've posted downloadable files
of these texts in a variety of formats.
- Cabbage, Michael and William Harwood. Comm Check…The
Final Flight of Shuttle Columbia. New York: Free Press,
2004. ISBN 0-7432-6091-0.
- This is an excellent account for the general reader of
the Space Shuttle Columbia STS-107 accident and subsequent
investigation. The authors are veteran space reporters: Cabbage
for the Orlando Sentinel and Harwood for CBS News.
If you've already read the Columbia Accident Investigation Board
Report (note that
supplementary volumes II through VI are now available), you
won't learn anything new about the technical details of the
accident and its engineering and organisational causes here,
but there's interesting information about the dynamics of the
investigation and the individuals involved which you won't find
in the formal report. The NASA Implementation Plan for
Return to Flight and Beyond mentioned on page 264 is available online.
- Hayward, Steven F. The Real Jimmy
Carter. Washington: Regnery Publishing,
2004. ISBN 0-89526-090-5.
- In the acknowledgements at the end, the author says one of
his motivations for writing this book was to acquaint younger readers
and older folks who've managed to forget with the reality of Jimmy
Carter's presidency. Indeed, unless one lived through it, it's hard
to appreciate how Carter's formidable intellect allowed him to quickly
grasp the essentials of a situation, absorb vast amounts of detailed
information, and then immediately, intuitively leap to the absolutely
worst conceivable course of action. It's all here: his race-baiting
1970 campaign for governor of Georgia; the Playboy
interview; “ethnic purity”; “I'll never lie to you”; the 111 page list
of campaign promises; alienating the Democratic controlled House and
Senate before inaugural week was over; stagflation; gas lines; the
Moral Equivalent of War (MEOW); turning down the thermostat; spending
Christmas with the Shah of Iran, “an island of stability in one of he
more troubled areas of the world”; Nicaragua; Afghanistan; “malaise”
(which he actually never said, but will be forever associated with
his presidency); the cabinet massacre; kissing Brezhnev; “Carter held
Hostage”, and more. There is a side-splitting account of the “killer
rabbit” episode on page 155. I'd have tried to work in Billy Beer,
but I guess you gotta stop somewhere. Carter's post-presidential
career, hobnobbing with dictators, loose-cannon freelance diplomacy,
and connections with shady middle-east financiers including BCCI,
are covered along with his admirable humanitarian work with Habitat
for Humanity. That this sanctimonious mountebank who The New
Republic, hardly a right wing mouthpiece, called “a vain,
meddling, amoral American fool” in 1995 after he expressed sympathy
for Serbian ethnic cleanser Radovan Karadzic, managed to win the Nobel
Peace Prize, only bears out the assessment of Carter made decades
earlier by notorious bank robber Willie Sutton, “I've never seen a
bigger confidence man in my life, and I've been around some of the
best in the business.”
- Bell, John S. Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum
Mechanics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1987]
1993. ISBN 0-521-52338-9.
- This volume collects most of Bell's papers on the
foundations and interpretation of quantum mechanics including, of
course, his discovery of “Bell's inequality”, which showed that no
local hidden variable theory can reproduce the statistical results of
quantum mechanics, setting the stage for the experimental confirmation
by Aspect and others of the fundamental non-locality of quantum
physics. Bell's interest in the pilot wave theories of de Broglie
and Bohm is reflected in a number of papers, and Bell's exposition of
these theories is clearer and more concise than anything I've read by
Bohm or Hiley. He goes on to show the strong similarities between the
pilot wave approach and the “many world interpretation” of Everett
and de Witt. An extra added treat is chapter 9, where Bell derives
special relativity entirely from Maxwell's equations and the Bohr
atom, along the lines of Fitzgerald, Larmor, Lorentz, and Poincaré,
arriving at the principle of relativity (which Einstein took as a
hypothesis) from the previously known laws of physics.
- Schott, Ben. Schott's Original
Miscellany. London: Bloomsbury,
2002. ISBN 1-58234-349-7.
- At last—a readily available source one can cite for the
definition of the unit “millihelen” (p. 152)!
- Schama, Simon. Citizens: A Chronicle of the
French Revolution. New York: Vintage Books,
1989. ISBN 0-679-72610-1.
- The French Revolution is so universally used as a metaphor
in social and political writing that it's refreshing to come across
a straight narrative history of what actually happened. The
French Revolution is a huge, sprawling story, and this is a big, heavy
book about it—more than nine hundred pages, with an enormous cast of
characters—in large part because each successive set of new bosses cut
off the heads of their predecessors. Schama stresses the continuity
of many of the aspects of the Revolution with changes already underway
in the latter decades of the ancien régime—Louis
XVI comes across as kind of Enlightenment Gorbachev—attempting to
reform a bankrupt system from the top and setting in motion forces
which couldn't be controlled. Also striking is how many of the most
extreme revolutionaries were well-off before the Revolution and,
in particular, the large number of lawyers in their ranks. Far from
viewing the Terror as an aberration, Schama argues that from the very
start, the summer of 1789, “violence was the motor of the Revolution”.
With the benefit of two centuries of hindsight, you almost want
to reach back across the years, shake these guys by the shoulders,
and say “Can't you see where you're going with this?” But then you
realise: this was all happening for the very first time—they
had no idea of the inevitable outcome of their idealism! In a
mere four years, they invented the entire malevolent machinery of the
modern, murderous, totalitarian nation-state, and all with the best
intentions, informed by the persuasively posed yet relentlessly wrong
reasoning of Rousseau. Those who have since repeated the experiment,
with the example of the French Revolution before them as a warning,
have no such excuse.
- Djavann, Chahdortt. Que pense Allah de
l'Europe?. Paris: Gallimard, 2004. ISBN 2-07-077202-0.
- The author came of age in revolutionary Iran.
After ten years living in Paris, she sees the conflict over the
Islamic veil in French society as one in which those she calls
“islamists” use the words of the West in ways which mean one thing
to westerners and something entirely different to partisans of
their own cause. She argues what while freedom of religion is
a Western value which cannot be compromised, neither should it
be manipulated to subvert the social liberty which is equally a
contribution of the West to civilisation. Europe, she believes,
is particularly vulnerable to infiltration by those who do not share
its values but can employ its traditions and institutions to subvert
them. This is not a book length treatment, but rather an essay
of 55 pages. For a less personally impassioned but more in-depth
view of the situation across the Channel, see Le Londonistan (July 2003).
- Lewis, Michael. Moneyball. New York:
W. W. Norton, [2003] 2004. ISBN 0-393-32481-8.
- Everybody knows there's no faster or more reliable way
to make a lot of money than to identify an inefficiency in a market
and arbitrage it. (If you didn't know that, consider it free
advice and worth everything you paid for it!) Modern financial markets
are Hellishly efficient. Millions of players armed with real-time
transaction data, massive computing and database resources for data
mining, and more math, physics, and economics Ph.D.s than a dozen Ivy
League campuses are continuously looking for the slightest discrepancy
between price and value, which more or less guarantees that even when
one is discovered, it won't last for more than a moment, and that by
the time you hear about it, it'll be long gone. It's much easier
to find opportunities in slower moving, less intensely scrutinised
fields where conventional wisdom and lack of imagination can blind
those in the market to lucrative inefficiencies. For example, in
the 1980s generic personal computers and graphics adaptors became
comparable in performance to special purpose computer aided design
(CAD) workstations ten times or more as costly. This created a
situation where the entire value-added in CAD was software,
not hardware—all the hardware development, manufacturing, and support
costs of the existing vendors were simply an inefficiency which cost
their customers dearly. Folks who recognised this inefficiency and
moved to exploit the opportunity it created were well rewarded, even while their
products were still being ridiculed or ignored by “serious vendors”.
Opportunities like this don't come around very often, and there's a lot
of luck involved in being in the right place at the right time with
the skills and resources at hand to exploit one when you do spot it.
But just imagine what you could do in a field mired in tradition,
superstition, ignorance, meaningless numbers, a self-perpetuating
old boy network, and gross disparities between spending and
performance…Major League Baseball, say?
Starting in the 1970s and 80s, Bill James and a slowly growing group
of statistically knowledgeable and scientifically minded baseball
fanatics—outsiders all—began to look beyond conventional statistics
and box scores and study what really determines how many runs
a team will score and how many games it will win. Their results turned
conventional wisdom completely on its head and that, combined with the
clubbiness of professional baseball, caused their work to be utterly
ignored until Billy Beane became general manager of the Oakland A's
in 1997. Beane and his statistics wizard Paul DePodesta were faced
with the challenge of building a winning team with a budget for player
salaries right at the bottom of the league—they had less to spend on
the entire roster than some teams spent on three or four superstar free
agents. I've always been fond of the phrase “management by lack of
alternatives”, and that's the situation Beane faced. He took on board
the wisdom of the fan statisticians and built upon it, to numerically
estimate the value in runs—the ultimate currency of baseball—of
individual players, and compare that to the cost of acquiring them.
He quickly discovered the market in professional baseball players
was grossly inefficient—teams were paying millions for players with
statistics which contributed little or nothing to runs scored and
games won, while players with the numbers that really mattered were
languishing in the minors, available for a song.
The Oakland A's
are short for “Athletics”, but under Beane it might as well have been
“Arbitrageurs”—trading overvalued stars for cash, draft picks, and
undervalued unknowns spotted by the statistical model. Conventional
scouting went out the window; the A's roster was full of people who
didn't look like baseball players but fit the mathematical profile.
Further, Beane changed the way the game was played—if the numbers said
stolen bases and sacrifice bunts were a net loss in runs long-term,
then the A's didn't do them. The sportswriters and other teams thought
it was crazy, but it won ball games: an amazing 103 in 2002 with a
total payroll of less than US$42 million. In most other markets or
businesses competitors would be tripping over one another to copy the
methods which produced such results, but so hidebound and inbred is
baseball that so far only two other teams have adopted the Oakland
way of winning. Writing on the opening day of the 2004 World Series,
is is interesting to observe than one of those two is the Boston
Red Sox. I must observe, however, amongst rooting for the scientific
method and high fives for budget discipline and number crunching, that
the ultimate product of professional baseball is not runs scored, nor
games, pennants, or World Series won, but rather entertainment
and the revenue it generates from fans, directly or indirectly.
One wonders whether this new style of MBAseball run from the front
office will ultimately be as enjoyable as the intuitive, risk-taking,
seat of the pants game contested from the dugout by a Leo Durocher,
Casey Stengel, or Earl Weaver. This superbly written, fascinating
book is by the author of the almost indescribably excellent Liar's Poker. The 2004 paperback
edition contains an Afterword recounting the “religious war” the
original 2003 hardcover ignited. Again, this is a book recommended
by an anonymous visitor with the
recommendation form—thanks, Joe!
- Jacobs, Jane. Dark Age Ahead. New York:
Random House, 2004. ISBN 1-4000-6232-2.
- The reaction of a reader who chooses this book solely
based on its title or the dust-jacket blurb is quite likely to be,
“Huh?” The first chapter vividly evokes the squalor and mass
cultural amnesia which followed the fall of Western Rome, the
collapse of the Chinese global exploration and trade in the Ming
dynasty, and the extinction of indigenous cultures in North America
and elsewhere. Then, suddenly, we find ourselves talking about
urban traffic planning, the merits of trolley buses vs. light rail
systems, Toronto metropolitan government, accounting scandals, revenue
sharing with municipalities, and a host of other issues which, however
important, few would rank as high on the list of probable causes of
an incipient dark age. These are issues near and dear to the author,
who has been writing about them ever since her 1961 classic The Death and Life of Great American
Cities (Jacobs was born in 1916 and wrote this book at the
age of 87). If you're unfamiliar with her earlier work, the extensive
discussion of “city import replacement” in the present volume will go
right over your head as she never defines it here. Further, she uses
the word “neoconservative” at variance with its usual meaning in the
U.S. and Europe. It's only on page 113 (of 175 pages of main text)
that we discover this is a uniquely Canadian definition. Fine, she's
been a resident of Toronto since 1969, but this book is published in
New York and addressed to an audience of “North Americans” (another
Canadian usage), so it's unnecessarily confusing. I find little
in this book to disagree with, but as a discussion of the genuine
risks which face Western civilisation, it's superficial and largely
irrelevant.
- O'Neill, John E. and Jerome L. Corsi. Unfit for Command. Washington:
Regnery Publishing, 2004. ISBN 0-89526-017-4.
-