Hip hip hurray. For those of you that don't know my annual emotional cycle, I am completely unfriendly from say mid February to 4/15 every year as I procrastinate over taxes. I was not always like this. Decades ago I actually got refunds, even after we were married., Alas for years and years, we are either supporting a dependent family of six or as I would prefer to view it, helping defend the world from terrorists. So now, post filing, I can clear the decks of all the books I have read as evasion tactics from dealing with the IRS. This year, I am so fed up, I am coming over to the value added side.
But for this weekend's book. I believe it was recommended by the NY Post (as I refuse to buy the Sunday NYT's and only get week day versions when I have time during lunch at my desk to do the crossword puzzle). The book is To Be a Machine by Mark O'Connell and I will see if the library has any other of his books because this guy can write. OK OK I acknowledge my bias towards Irish writers and their gifts of gab.
In a way, O'Connell reminds me of A J Jacobs and his Mr Know It All, reading the entire encyclopedia Britannica or his other book about trying every diet known the man. It is loaded with healthy skepticism and subtle mockery. O'Connell here chooses to explore the world of transhumanism, a religion/philosophy/at least a movement that human brains can be coded and upload to other platforms and thereby obtain immortality.
At its essence, this posits that human life is entirely about problem solving and the brain is ultimately hierarchical above the body. O'Connell knows his literature, religions and philosophy and debunks this movement as something new, comparing it to many other eternal quests to deny animal death of our "meat" and live forever. He also slants his research to show it is a movement of West Coast geeks who define men as CPUs (I guess because they are all like characters on The Big Bang and cannot deal with their sexuality and other human/mammal emotions.
O'Connell mentions his young son and who his emotions and view of life changed with his birth. He is less obvious in itemizing the non-intellectual joys of every day life. What intellectual reward do I get from trimming bushes, chopping salad ingredients, god forbid dusting? Simple daily pleasures and the fulfillment of family or career related tasks do not factor into transhumanism. A disembodied brain does not have to go to the grocery store, listen to a concert or enjoy breaking the speed limit ... it has to make routine machine like decisions and of course a computer can do that better and perpetuate a person's algorithms.
He describes the key followers/leaders of this front as white male geeks and the multimillionaire computer company founders who support them, men who think machines are the evolutionary next step to humanity. So who are they SysOps? Who controls the maintenance and update cycles? Who deals with power outages? If my immortality and memory for my scions relied on on techies similarly talented to those I have today, I would not want my endless life dependent on reboots or bad system code.
Strangely, this book might drive me back to finish my book on Egyptian hieroglyphics, a book that tried to instruct humans centuries ago how to expect to live forever through being embalmed, entombed and cast to the heavens. Alas, We Are Stardust, We Are Golden and the way back to the Garden isn't in bits of zeroes and ones.
Monday, April 17, 2017
My Last Chernow ... Until Grant Comes Out
When I went to get my Hamilton signed by Chernow at Chancellor's Hall, I was impressed to see that many folk in line had copies of Titan or the House of Morgan instead of a book that they could pretend they read given the popularity of the play on Broadway. I slugged through Titan and really liked it. Chernow was neutral and the reader could decide for her/himself if she/he liked JD Rock. Actually, I did. This was not revisionist history and Rockefeller did what was needed for the country as well as profitable for himself, the latter not diminishing the need and then legality of the former.
Chernow at the lecture last fall detailed how he came to write histories of financial institutions first ... because of his then current employment recording on the Street. He said he chose The House of Morgan because it was not only a history of USA economic development, but a chronology of a family. That family pales against the Rockefellers and the book presents a conclusion of the rapacity of Wall Street, even to the current day.
I have a woman on my team at work who used to work at JPM and the complicated work she does for me could not be performed by anyone else in the agency. When asked if she wanted to read the book, she declined. I don't think this is because of the lateness under which Morgan came to value the female sex as having brain power, but I hesitate to delve further.
This book is not as strong as Titan because the business eventually loses its identification with its founding family. By the end of the book, I expected Gordon Gecko to appear,
What I will remember from this book is: 1. how pitifully happy I am satisfied to be with my returns on my investments and how being a day trader probably wouldn't help anyway; 2. how for-me-dable, as the French say, the Street is, holding its own against lesser talents in DC and globally; 3. Morgan's involvement in the world wars and all the international ties that interlock with my other by the pound readings this year.
I really think of all the Chernow, this is the weakest I've read and it does not motivate me to read his other financial book. Waiting for Grant and his blunders into investment will suit me fine. It might even be more enjoyable than my 1000 piece puzzle of Grant and his generals which my family criticized me for buying a picture of the "wrong" side. At least we have Stonewall and Lee nutcrackers.
Chernow at the lecture last fall detailed how he came to write histories of financial institutions first ... because of his then current employment recording on the Street. He said he chose The House of Morgan because it was not only a history of USA economic development, but a chronology of a family. That family pales against the Rockefellers and the book presents a conclusion of the rapacity of Wall Street, even to the current day.
I have a woman on my team at work who used to work at JPM and the complicated work she does for me could not be performed by anyone else in the agency. When asked if she wanted to read the book, she declined. I don't think this is because of the lateness under which Morgan came to value the female sex as having brain power, but I hesitate to delve further.
This book is not as strong as Titan because the business eventually loses its identification with its founding family. By the end of the book, I expected Gordon Gecko to appear,
What I will remember from this book is: 1. how pitifully happy I am satisfied to be with my returns on my investments and how being a day trader probably wouldn't help anyway; 2. how for-me-dable, as the French say, the Street is, holding its own against lesser talents in DC and globally; 3. Morgan's involvement in the world wars and all the international ties that interlock with my other by the pound readings this year.
I really think of all the Chernow, this is the weakest I've read and it does not motivate me to read his other financial book. Waiting for Grant and his blunders into investment will suit me fine. It might even be more enjoyable than my 1000 piece puzzle of Grant and his generals which my family criticized me for buying a picture of the "wrong" side. At least we have Stonewall and Lee nutcrackers.
What I Didn't Learn in Physics Class
Remember, I was taking science in a Catholic high school in the early '60s where the boys were on the first two floors and the girls on the third and fourth; nuns taught us, brothers the guys. So my beloved Latin teacher was also my chemistry and physics instructor. I would never make it in today's environment that encourages girls to take STEM classes as my interest in anything non-literature or non-history ended with first year algebra and biology (come to think of it, I really didn't get much out of earth science either except my love malachite and knowledge of what refractories are).
Dear Sister Ruth was encouraged to get me through the Regents tests for chem and physics by bribes from my mother of homemade brownies. Now in the early 60s and in a Catholic school, the periodic table probably had 80 elements on it, and physics was essentially mechanical, up to energy equals mass squared, probably instilled in us to realize how deadly a car crash could be. So last fall when my college roommate's husband encouraged me to read The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes and would not part with his personal copy, I bought one and added it to the "books by the pound pile" for snowed in reading. And success, I managed to finish the book before I head back to see him again last weekend for his daughter's wedding. (Neither the rehearsal dinner, wedding nor the reception seemed like the appropriate place to convene a book club, so here goes my impressions.)
While you understand by now, I am never going to be a nuclear physicist, but actually the science seemed more understandable to me (teenagers have so many other important things on their minds). I was going to title this review, What Remains, because waiting several weeks after finishing a book lessens the urge to quote paragraphs verbatim, so what I will remember about TMOTAB:
1. I knew of Oppenheimer and his leadership at Los Alamos, but never heard of Groves and his connection to Albany. Vicarious pride. Why doesn't NYS tout that connection? I can identify with him as a master of logistics, something I strive to be, to cut through delay and red tape to get the job done, and his ability to keep the peace between super talented staff. He gives me a model much better than any organizational theory book.
2. There were many six degrees of separation incidents where I could tie in Roosevelt's and Churchill's reactions to my WWII triology. I love how my seemingly random reading strives to find connections to make it a whole.
3. The only page I marked on the title page for future reference was that articulating Bohr's assessment of what the bomb would mean: "When nuclear weapons spread to other countries, as they certainly would, no one would be able any longer to win. A spasm of mutual destruction would be possible. But not war." I vaguely remember going to a play on Broadway that was a dialogue between Bohr and X. Even then the nuclear physics was unfathomably and I recall it was a good vs evil type of portrayal. In TMOTAB, there are no falsely painted evil scientists.
4. It was news to me about how aggressively several nations were pursuing splitting the cell as pure science. I was also surprised by how readily the US of A was able during war time to pull together the resources for construction, raw material, land acquisition, testing, etc. While it seemed like a purer stage of America's history, it is still a marvel that so many industries could be converted to the war/science cause. How could we mutate car assembly lines for tanks when cars aren't made in America by American companies? Where would the steel, bronze, dynamite come from?
So I gathered more context for the current state of the world and wish we had more assassins to take out the saber/bomb rattlers that threaten peace today.
Dear Sister Ruth was encouraged to get me through the Regents tests for chem and physics by bribes from my mother of homemade brownies. Now in the early 60s and in a Catholic school, the periodic table probably had 80 elements on it, and physics was essentially mechanical, up to energy equals mass squared, probably instilled in us to realize how deadly a car crash could be. So last fall when my college roommate's husband encouraged me to read The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes and would not part with his personal copy, I bought one and added it to the "books by the pound pile" for snowed in reading. And success, I managed to finish the book before I head back to see him again last weekend for his daughter's wedding. (Neither the rehearsal dinner, wedding nor the reception seemed like the appropriate place to convene a book club, so here goes my impressions.)
While you understand by now, I am never going to be a nuclear physicist, but actually the science seemed more understandable to me (teenagers have so many other important things on their minds). I was going to title this review, What Remains, because waiting several weeks after finishing a book lessens the urge to quote paragraphs verbatim, so what I will remember about TMOTAB:
1. I knew of Oppenheimer and his leadership at Los Alamos, but never heard of Groves and his connection to Albany. Vicarious pride. Why doesn't NYS tout that connection? I can identify with him as a master of logistics, something I strive to be, to cut through delay and red tape to get the job done, and his ability to keep the peace between super talented staff. He gives me a model much better than any organizational theory book.
2. There were many six degrees of separation incidents where I could tie in Roosevelt's and Churchill's reactions to my WWII triology. I love how my seemingly random reading strives to find connections to make it a whole.
3. The only page I marked on the title page for future reference was that articulating Bohr's assessment of what the bomb would mean: "When nuclear weapons spread to other countries, as they certainly would, no one would be able any longer to win. A spasm of mutual destruction would be possible. But not war." I vaguely remember going to a play on Broadway that was a dialogue between Bohr and X. Even then the nuclear physics was unfathomably and I recall it was a good vs evil type of portrayal. In TMOTAB, there are no falsely painted evil scientists.
4. It was news to me about how aggressively several nations were pursuing splitting the cell as pure science. I was also surprised by how readily the US of A was able during war time to pull together the resources for construction, raw material, land acquisition, testing, etc. While it seemed like a purer stage of America's history, it is still a marvel that so many industries could be converted to the war/science cause. How could we mutate car assembly lines for tanks when cars aren't made in America by American companies? Where would the steel, bronze, dynamite come from?
So I gathered more context for the current state of the world and wish we had more assassins to take out the saber/bomb rattlers that threaten peace today.
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