Author: geoff

I blog regularly about what music I’m listening to, so I thought for a change I’d write about what books I’ve been reading. Obviously I have plenty of reading time right now, so I’ll hit the highlights:

• “Death Note, Vols. 1-6” by Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata amzn
  A fascinating series of Japanese manga illustrated novels. (Yes, you have to read them right-to-left.) Hannah turned me on to these, and I’ve been waiting patiently for each volume to be published. The story is lively and fun, the artwork is stunning.
• “Chindi”, “Deepsix”, “Omega”, “Eternity Road”, “The Engines Of God” and other works by Jack McDevitt amzn
  I found myself without a light read for a cross-country flight, so I browsed the science fiction section of the airport bookstore and picked up “Chindi”. I liked McDevitt’s style, and slipped into the easy trap of reading more and more….
• “Intelligent Thought : Science versus the Intelligent Design Movement “ edited by John Brockman amzn
  OK, this is preaching to the choir…. but there are some delightful essays in this collection. In part I bought it because I had so much fun reading…
• “What We Believe but Cannot Prove : Today’s Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty” edited by John Brockman amzn
  This “certainty” crap keeps coming up (see this nonsensical piece which P.Z. ranted about. The argument seems to be that people demand certainty, science can only provide approximations to the truth, so religion must fill the gap. The flaws in that argument are obvious: anyone who expects absolute certainty is unreasonable and delusional, and every time the “approximation” of science has confronted the “certainty” of religion, science has won. Other than that….
• “Science and Religion: Are They Compatible?” edited by Paul Kurtz et al amzn
  One more collection on the same subject.
• “Richard Dawkins : How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think “ edited by Alan Grafen and Mark Ridley amzn
  In part a festschrift for Dawkins on the 30th anniversary of the publication of The Selfish Gene, but more than that: an excellent summary of how the field has developed since then, and a frank assessment of what Dawkins got right and what he missed.
• “The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels” by Michael Watkins amzn
  As you might imagine, I’ve been thinking a lot about new jobs. In retrospect, it’s interesting that although I took on a number of roles at Sun – software engineer, manager, standards guru, CTO, director, researcher – I never actually planned for any of them. Perhaps I should have done so: this persuasive, and very readable book argues that success or failure in a job can depend critically on how you approach, and plan for, the first 90 days. Good stuff.
• “IT Governance: How Top Performers Manage IT Decision Rights for Superior Results” by Peter Weill and Jeanne Ross amzn
  Of course, planning works best if you’re entering into a reasonably well-structured environment in which people actually understand the concept of governance: what decisions have to be made, who makes them, and how do we ensure that decision-making follows a predictable, repeatable, and transparent process. Obviously this is intimately connected to management culture, which is a long-standing interest of mine.
• “The Light Ages” by Ian R. MacLeod amzn
  An alternate history set in an industrial England suffused with magic: Philip Pullman chanelling Charles Dickens. (But not, as one rueful Amazon reviewer discovered, Jules Verne.) It’s not a quick or light read, and the author (or his editor) has a shaky grasp of personal pronouns(!), but I stuck with it and found it very rewarding.
• “A Nation Gone Blind : America in an Age of Simplification and Deceit” by Eric Larsen amzn
  Remember when debate revolved around facts and thinking, rather than rights, issues, and feelings? I do – just. Larsen’s polemic – impassioned without sacrificing reason and precision – skewers the bullshit that passes for analysis these days. Shades of Orwell, Upton Sinclair, and Paul Goodman.
• “The Fly in the Cathedral : How a Group of Cambridge Scientists Won the International Race to Split the Atom “ by Brian Cathcart amzn
  Brian Cathcart is an outstanding British journalist. He also happens to be a good friend of my mother’s, and she would often describe her conversations with him during the writing of this book. Rather than lugging a hardback copy home from England, I waited for the USA paperback edition. It’s a beautifully written story, really capturing the feeling of scientific research in pre-war Britain. If you want the hard science, look elsewhere: this is about the people and their times.

That’s enough for now. I’m still working on “On Intelligence”, “An Inconvenient Truth”, “Capacity Planning For Web Services”, and “Europe’s Macadam, America’s Tar”.