Books – Page 116 – artdiamondblog.com

Heretics to the Religion of Global Warming

Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

(p. A19) Suppose for a minute–. . . –that global warming poses an imminent threat to the survival of our species. Suppose, too, that the best solution involves a helium balloon, several miles of garden hose and a harmless stream of sulfur dioxide being pumped into the upper atmosphere, all at a cost of a single F-22 fighter jet.

. . .

The hose-in-the-sky approach to global warming is the brainchild of Intellectual Ventures, a Bellevue, Wash.-based firm founded by former Microsoft Chief Technology Officer Nathan Myhrvold. The basic idea is to engineer effects similar to those of the 1991 mega-eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines, which spewed so much sulfuric ash into the stratosphere that it cooled the earth by about one degree Fahrenheit for a couple of years.
Could it work? Mr. Myhrvold and his associates think it might, and they’re a smart bunch. Also smart are University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt and writer Stephen Dubner, whose delightful “SuperFreakonomics”–the sequel to their runaway 2005 bestseller “Freakonomics”–gives Myhrvold and Co. pride of place in their lengthy chapter on global warming. Not surprisingly, global warming fanatics are experiencing a Pinatubo-like eruption of their own.
. . .

. . . , Messrs. Levitt and Dubner show every sign of being careful researchers, going so far as to send chapter drafts to their interviewees for comment prior to publication. Nor are they global warming “deniers,” insofar as they acknowledge that temperatures have risen by 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit over the past century.
But when it comes to the religion of global warming–the First Commandment of which is Thou Shalt Not Call It A Religion–Messrs. Levitt and Dubner are grievous sinners. They point out that belching, flatulent cows are adding more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than all SUVs combined. They note that sea levels will probably not rise much more than 18 inches by 2100, “less than the twice-daily tidal variation in most coastal locations.” They observe that “not only is carbon plainly not poisonous, but changes in carbon-dioxide levels don’t necessarily mirror human activity.” They quote Mr. Myhrvold as saying that Mr. Gore’s doomsday scenarios “don’t have any basis in physical reality in any reasonable time frame.”
More subversively, they suggest that climatologists, like everyone else, respond to incentives in a way that shapes their conclusions. “The economic reality of research funding, rather than a disinterested and uncoordinated scientific consensus, leads the [climate] models to approximately match one another.” In other words, the herd-of-independent-minds phenomenon happens to scientists too and isn’t the sole province of painters, politicians and news anchors

For the full commentary, see:
BRET STEPHENS. “Freaked Out Over SuperFreakonomics; Global warming might be solved with a helium balloon and a few miles of garden hose.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., OCTOBER 27, 2009): A19.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Packard Was Told, If He Wanted a Better Car “He Had Better Build It Himself”

The steering wheel of the 1954 Packard Panther. Source of photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 11) The company may have started on a dare, according to “Packard: A History of the Motor Car and the Company,” edited by Beverly Rae Kimes (Automobile Quarterly Publications, 2002).

After graduating from Lehigh University’s engineering school and returning home to Warren, Ohio, James Ward Packard considered buying his first car, a Winton. When Packard asked for some special features, he got this response from Alexander Winton: “The Winton waggon (sic) as it stands is the ripened and perfected product of many years of lofty thought … and could not be improved in any detail. If Mr. Packard wants any of his own cats and dogs worked into a waggon, he had better build it himself.”
Despite the rude reply, Packard bought the car, but it broke down often. Commiserating over dinner with George Weiss, a friend (and Winton stockholder), Packard decided to take Winton’s words seriously. It must have been an especially satisfying day for Packard on June 17, 1899, when Weiss sold his Winton stock and invested in Packard’s new business, soon to be named the Ohio Automobile Company.
Although its first cars looked conventional, they had some unusual features. It was one of a few cars with an accelerator pedal, and its H-gate gearshift pattern, a Packard patent, was widely used in later years.
Packard’s reputation for reliability and durability was established with its model A and B cars, but the company did not stop development there, even taking the lessons of early mishaps to improve subsequent vehicles.
During the summer of 1900, a model B swerved into a ditch after hitting a pothole — a hazard on cars with tiller steering, as the impact could jerk the steering lever from the driver’s grasp — injuring the passenger and damaging the car. Packard started work on a solution; when the model C was introduced later that year, it featured the industry’s first steering wheel.
. . .
After flirting with Nash in the early 1950s, Packard purchased Studebaker in 1954 (which explains why the Packard Predictor resides in the Studebaker Museum). Studebaker was larger but struggling. The merger hastened the end of both makes.
Still, Packard left its mark on the American auto industry.

For the full story, see:
ROBB MANDELBAUM. “Collecting; Packard’s Visions of the Future, When It Still Had One .” The New York Times, SportsSunday Section (Sun., September 10, 2009): 11.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Did Fairchild Fail Due to Bad Management or Disruptive Technology?

Clayton Christensen has shown how good management, following respected practices, can fail in the face of disruptive technologies. It would be interesting to investigate whether Fairchild was an example of what Christensen is talking about, or whether it just did not have good management.

(p. 89) Andrew Grove . . . had played a central role in bringing Fairchild to the threshold of a new era. But Fairchild would not enjoy the fruits of his work. Following the path of venture capital pioneer Peter Sprague were scores of other venture capitalists seeking to exploit the new opportunities he had shown them. Collectively, they accelerated the pace of entrepreneurial change–splits and spinoffs, startups and staff shifts–to a level that might be termed California Business Time (“What do you mean, I left Motorola quickly?” asked Gordon Campbell with sincere indignation. “I was there eight months!”).

The venture capitalist focused on Fairchild: that extraordinary pool of electronic talent assembled by Noyce and Moore, but left essentially unattended, undervalued, and little understood by the executives of the company back in Syosset, New York. Fairchild leaders John Carter and Sherman Fairchild commanded the microcosm: the most important technology in the history of the human race. Noyce, Moore, Hoerni, Grove, Sporck, design genius Robert Widlar, and marketeer Jerry Sanders represented possibly the most potent management and technical team ever assembled in the history of world business. But, hey, you guys, don’t forget to report back to Syosset. Don’t forget who’s boss. Don’t give out any bonuses without clearing them through the folks at Camera and Instrument. You might upset some light-meter manager in Philadelphia.
They even made Charles Sporck, the manufacturing titan, feel like “a little kid pissing in his pants.” Good work, Sherman, don’t let the big lug put on airs, don’t let him feel important. He only controls 80 percent of the company’s growth. Widlar is leaving? Great, he never fit in with the corporate culture anyway. Sporck has gone off with Peter Sprague? There are plenty more where he came from.
“It was weird,” said Grove, “they had no idea about what the company or the industry was like, nor did they seem to care. . . . Fairchild was just crumbling. If you wish, the semiconductor division management consisted of twenty significant players: eight went to National, eight went into Intel, and four of them went to Alcoholics Anonymous or something.” Actually there were more than twenty and they went into startups all over the Valley; some twenty-six new semiconductor firms sprouted up between 1967 and 1970. “It got to the point,” recalled one man quoted in Dirk Hanson’s The New Alchemists, “where people were practically driving trucks over to Fairchild and loading up with employees.”

Source:

Gilder, George. Microcosm: The Quantum Revolution in Economics and Technology. Paperback ed. New York: Touchstone, 1990.
(Note: the first ellipsis was added; the others were in the original. The italics were also in the original.)

Steve Perry’s Passion for Better Education

Source of book image: http://www.renegadebook.com/Man%20Up!.jpg

I have seen Steve Perry interviewed on education issues a couple of times on CNN, and have been impressed. He makes a credible case for vouchers.
I have not read either of the books pictured in this entry, but have put them on my “to read” list.

The books are:
Perry, Steve. Man Up! Nobody Is Coming to Save Us. Renegade Books, 2006.
Perry, Steve. Raggedy Schools: The Untold Truth. Renegade Books, 2009.

Source of book image: http://www.raggedyschools.com/images/bookstore_photo.jpg

“Every Physicist Wants Two Things: Glory and Money”

(p. 54) . . . in 1950, Shockley published his book Electrons and Holes in Semiconductors, which stood for many years as the definitive work in the field and confirmed his credentials for the Nobel Prize that he shared with Brattain and Bardeen in 1956. The fact was that for his theory of the field effect transistor that later dominated the industry and for the junction transistor that was dominating it at the time, Shockley deserved the prize alone. He had at last made his point.

Yet Shockley was not satisfied. “Every physicist,” he said at the time, “wants two things: glory and money. I have won the glory. Now I want the money.”

Source:

Gilder, George. Microcosm: The Quantum Revolution in Economics and Technology. Paperback ed. New York: Touchstone, 1990.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Gilder’s Microcosm Tells the Story of the Entrepreneurs Who Made Personal Computers Possible

Source of book image: http://images.indiebound.com/923/705/9780671705923.jpg

Many years ago Telecosm was the first George Gilder book that I read; I enjoyed it for its over-the-top verbal exuberance in detailing, praising and predicting the progress of the then-new broadband technologies. I bought his earlier Microcosm at about the same time, but didn’t get around to reading it because I assumed it would be a dated read, dealing in a similar manner with the earlier personal computer (PC) technology.
In the last year or so I have read Gilder’s Wealth and Poverty and Recapturing the Spirit of Enterprise. There is some interesting material in Gilder’s famous Wealth and Poverty, which has sometimes been described as one of the main intellectual manifestos of the Reagan administration. But Recapturing the Spirit of Enterprise has become my favorite Gilder book (so far).
In each chapter, the main modus operandi of that book is to present a case study of a recent entrepreneur, with plenty of interpretation of the lessons to be learned about why entrepreneurship is important to the economy, what sort of personal characteristics are common in entrepreneurs, and what government policies encourage or discourage entrepreneurs.
In that book I read that the original plan had been to include several chapters on the entrepreneurs who had built the personal computer revolution. But the original manuscript grew to unwieldy size, and so the personal computer chapters became the basis of the book Microcosm.
So Microcosm moved to the top of my “to-read” list, and turned out to be a much less-dated book than I had expected.
Microcosm does for the personal computer entrepreneurs what Recapturing the Spirit of Enterprise did for a broader set of entrepreneurs.
In the next few weeks, I will occasionally quote a few especially important examples or thought-provoking observations from Microcosm.

Reference to Gilder’s MIcrocosm:
Gilder, George. Microcosm: The Quantum Revolution in Economics and Technology. Paperback ed. New York: Touchstone, 1990.

Other Gilder books mentioned:
Gilder, George. Recapturing the Spirit of Enterprise: Updated for the 1990s. updated ed. New York: ICS Press, 1992. (The first edition was called simply The Spirit of Enterprise, and appeared in 1984.)
Gilder, George. Telecosm: The World after Bandwidth Abundance. Paperback ed. New York: Touchstone, 2002.
Gilder, George. Wealth and Poverty. 3rd ed. New York: ICS Press, 1993.

Walt Disney, Like Brer Rabbit, “Constantly Wriggling Out of the Snares Set for Him”

(p. 325) The real Disney may yet elude his most fervent admirers’ and detractors’ suffocating grasp. When he was young, he was a sort of human Brer Rabbit, constantly wriggling out of the snares set for him by the likes of Charles Mintz and Pat Powers (not to mention Laugh-O-gram’s creditors). He emerged finally, and unexpectedly, as the creator of a new art form, one whose potential has still scarcely been tapped, by him or anyone else. It is hard to imagine that man–the passionate young artist, the intense “coordinator,” the man who scrutinized every frame of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs with a lover’s zeal–trapped forever in anyone’s briar patch.

Source:
Barrier, Michael. The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney. 1 ed. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007.
(Note: italics in original.)

The Real Disney and the Disney of Academic Critiques

(p. 324) Disney seems no more real in the growing body of academic critiques of the man and the company that bears his name. Many of these critiques are vaguely if not specifically Marxist in their methodology, and they display the usual Marxist tendency to bulldoze the complexities of human behavior in the pursuit of an all–embracing interpretation of Disney’s life and work. What fatally cripples most academic writing about Walt Disney is simple failure to examine its supposed subject. Disney scholarship, like many other kinds of scholarship in today’s academy, feeds on itself. The common tendency is for scholars to rush past the facts of Disney’s life and career, frequently getting a lot of them wrong, in order to write about what really interests them, which is what other scholars have already written. It is this incestuous quality, even more than such commonly cited sins as a reliance on jargon, that makes so much academic writing, on Disney as on other subjects, claustrophobically difficult to read.

Disney has attracted other writers whose unsupportable claims and speculations sometimes win approval of scholars all too eager to believe the worst of the man. The persistent accusations of anti-Semitism are only the mildest examples of an array whose cumulative effect is to portray a Disney who was, among other vile things, racist, misogynist, imperialist, sexually warped. a spy for J. Edgar Hoover, desperate to conceal his illegitimate Spanish birth, (p. 325) and so terrified of death that he had his body cryogenically frozen. Pathologies are undoubtedly at work here, none of them Disney’s.

Source:
Barrier, Michael. The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney. 1 ed. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007.

Walt Disney: Motive Was “Fun” (Not “Money”)

(p. 291) Said Bob Gurr, a member of the WED staff: “One big thrust behind our design work for the World’s Fair was the fact that we were going to own all the equipment. In other words, somebody else would build the pavilion, on somebody else’s property, but the show equipment that went in there was Disney’s, and he had a ready-made location waiting for it. The fact that the Fair was going to run two years meant he could build more expensively, and Disney priced these projects in a way that the sponsors were paying for everything for a two-year use.”

Disney approached the fair with a certain skepticism, even so. “You don’t like to do those things unless you have fun doing ’em,” he said in 1961, when work on the exhibits was just getting under way “You don’t do ’em for money.” Robert Moses, the imperious road builder who was in command of the fair, “wanted us to develop the amusement area and we looked at it,” Disney said, ‘but it just wasn’t for us. I wouldn’t want to try to do anything in New York. I’m not close enough. . . . On top of that, I mean I don’t know whether I want to do any outside of Disneyland because you don’t want to spread yourself thin.”

Source:
Barrier, Michael. The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney. 1 ed. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007.
(Note: ellipsis in original.)

Nationalizing Health Care: Communists Seized Pharmacy Owned By Ayn Rand’s Father

Source of book images: online version of the NYT review quoted and cited below.

(p. C6) Ayn Rand poses theatrically in her signature cape and gold dollar-sign pin on the cover of a groundbreaking new biography. Rand also poses theatrically in this same Halloween-ready costume (Rand impersonators have been known to wear it) on the cover of another groundbreaking new biography. The two books are being published a week apart. And both have gray covers that make them look even more interchangeable. Yet Rand, whose Objectivist philosophy is enjoying one of its periodic resurgences, loathed the very idea of grayness. She preferred dichotomies that were strictly black and white.
. . .
Ms. Heller’s book is worth its $35 price, which is not the kind of detail that Rand herself would have been shy about trumpeting. When Russian Bolshevik soldiers commandeered and closed the St. Petersburg pharmacy run by Zinovy Rosenbaum, they made a lifelong capitalist of his 12-year-old daughter, Alissa, who would wind up fusing the subversive power of the Russian political novel with glittering Hollywood-fueled visions of the American dream.
. . .
Crucially, both authors understand the reasons that Rand’s popularity has endured, not only among college students dazzled (and thronged into packs) by her triumphant individualism but also by entrepreneurs. From the young Ted Turner, who rented billboards to promote the “Who is John Galt?” slogan from “Atlas Shrugged,” to the founders of Craigslist and Wikipedia, who have found self-contradictory new ways to mix populism with individual enterprise, it is clear that (in Ms. Burns’s words) “reports of Ayn Rand’s death are greatly exaggerated.”

For the full review, see:
JANET MASLIN. “Books of The Times; Twin Biographies of a Singular Woman, Ayn Rand.” The New York Times (Thurs., October 21, 2009): C6.
(Note: ellipses added.)