Books – Page 68 – artdiamondblog.com

Tesla CTO Straubel Likes Biography of Tesla

J.B. Straubel, Chief Technology Officer of Tesla Motors. Source of photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 2) J. B. Straubel is a founder and the chief technical officer of Tesla Motors in Palo Alto, Calif. The company makes electric vehicles that some compare to Apple products in terms of obsessive attention to design, intuitive user interface and expense.

READING I like to read biographies of interesting people, mostly scientists and engineers. Right now, it’s “Steve Jobs,” by Walter Isaacson. One of my favorites biographies was “Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla,” by Marc Seifer, which I read even before Tesla Motors started.
. . .
WATCHING I really like the movie “October Sky.” It’s about a guy who grew up in a little coal-mining town around the time of Sputnik. He fell in love with the idea of building rockets and the movie follows him through his high school years when he’s building rockets and eventually he ends up becoming an engineer at NASA. I watch it every year or so. It’s inspirational. I always come out of it wanting to work harder.

For the full interview, see:
KATE MURPHY. “DOWNLOAD; J. B. Straubel.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., April 7, 2013): 2.
(Note: ellipsis added; bold in original.)
(Note: the online version of the interview has the date April 6, 2013.)

Cities Provide Children “Options for Their Future”

(p. 85) As Suketu Mehta, author of Maximum City (about Mumbai), says, “Why would anyone leave a brick house in the village with its two mango trees and its view of small hills in the East to come here?” Then he answers: “So that someday the eldest son can buy two rooms in Mira Road, at the northern edges of the city. And the younger one can move beyond that, to New Jersey. Discomfort is an investment.”
Then Mehta continues: “For the young person in an Indian village, the call of Mumbai isn’t just about money. It’s also about freedom.” Stewart Brand recounts this summation of the magnetic pull of cities by activist Kavita Ramdas: “In the village, all there is for a woman is to obey her husband and relatives, pound millet, and sing. If she moves to town, she can get a job, start a business, and get education for her children.” The Bedouin of Arabia were once seemingly the freest people on Earth, roaming the great Empty Quarter at will, under a tent of stars and no one’s thumb. But they are rapidly quitting their nomadic life and (p. 86) hustling into drab, concrete-block apartments in exploding Gulf-state ghettos. As reported by Donovan Webster in National Geographic, they stable their camels and goats in their ancestral village, because the bounty and attraction of the herder’s life still remain for them. The Bedouin are lured, not pushed, to the city because, in their own words: “We can always go into the desert to taste the old life. But this [new] life is better than the old way. Before there was no medical care, no schools for our children.” An eighty-year-old Bedouin chief sums it up better than I could: “The children will have more options for their future.”

Source:
Kelly, Kevin. What Technology Wants. New York: Viking Adult, 2010.
(Note: italics, an bracketed “new,” in original.)

Paul Allen’s Account of the Founding of Microsoft

Source of book image: http://www.entrepreneur.com/dbimages/slideshow/idea-man-paul-allen.jpg

(p. C6) The first half of “Idea Man” sets forth Mr. Allen’s version of the Microsoft creation myth, depicting Mr. Gates as a petulant, ambitious and money-minded mogul-to-be and Mr. Allen as an underappreciated visionary. Pictures of them from the 1970s and early ’80s also tell this story, making Mr. Allen look like a hirsute, powerful older brother and Mr. Gates like a kid.
. . .
“Idea Man” is long overdue. It turns out to be as remote, yet as surpassingly strange, as its author, whose receipt of a diagnosis of Stage 4 non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2009 has made it that much more important for him to tell his story. Though it is written in the smoothly proficient style of many a collaborator-assisted memoir, it is a book filled with wild extremes: breakthrough, breakup, power, indulgence, blue-sky innovation. And it winds up offering Mr. Allen’s guarded, partial answer to a universal question: what if you could make your wildest dreams come true?

For the full review, see:
JANET MASLIN. “BOOKS OF THE TIMES; The Reclusive Other Half of Microsoft’s Odd Couple Breaks His Silence.” The New York Times (Tues., April 19, 2011): C6.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date April 18, 2011.)

The book under review is:
Allen, Paul. Idea Man: A Memoir by the Cofounder of Microsoft. New York: Portfolio, 2011.

Modern Cities Are “Successful Former Slums” that Allowed “Vibrant Economic Activity”

(p. 82) Babylon, London, and New York all had teeming ghettos of unwanted settlers erecting shoddy shelters with inadequate hygiene and engaging in dodgy dealings. Historian Bronislaw Geremek states that “slums constituted a large part of the urban landscape” of Paris in the Middle Ages. Even by the 1780s, when Paris was at its peak, nearly 20 percent of its residents did not have a “fixed abode”–that is, they lived in shacks. In a familiar complaint about medieval French cities, a gentleman from that time noted: “Several families inhabit one house. A (p. 83) weaver’s family may be crowded into a single room, where they huddle around a fireplace.” That refrain is repeated throughout history. A century ago Manhattan was home to 20,000 squatters in self-made housing. Slab City alone, in Brooklyn (named after the use of planks stolen from lumber mills), contained 10,000 residents in its slum at its peak in the 1880s. In the New York slums, reported the New York Times in 1858, “nine out of ten of the shanties have only one room, which does not average over twelve feet square, and this serves all the purposes of the family.”
San Francisco was built by squatters. As Rob Neuwirth recounts in his eye-opening book Shadow Cities, one survey in 1855 estimated that “95 percent of the property holders in [San Francisco] would not be able to produce a bona fide legal title to their land.” Squatters were everywhere, in the marshes, sand dunes, military bases. One eyewitness said, “Where there was a vacant piece of ground one day, the next saw it covered with half a dozen tents or shanties.” Philadelphia was largely settled by what local papers called “squatlers.” As late as 1940, one in five citizens in Shanghai was a squatter. Those one million squatters stayed and kept upgrading their slum so that within one generation their shantytown became one of the first twenty-first-century cities.
That’s how it works. This is how all technology works. A gadget begins as a junky prototype and then progresses to something that barely works. The ad hoc shelters in slums are upgraded over time, infrastructure is extended, and eventually makeshift services become official. What was once the home of poor hustlers becomes, over the span of generations, the home of rich hustlers. Propagating slums is what cities do, and living in slums is how cities grow. The majority of neighborhoods in almost every modern city are merely successful former slums. The squatter cities of today will become the blue-blood neighborhoods of tomorrow. This is already happening in Rio and Mumbai today.
Slums of the past and slums of today follow the same description. The first impression is and was one of filth and overcrowding. In a ghetto a thousand years ago and in a slum today shelters are haphazard and dilapidated. The smells are overwhelming. But there is vibrant economic activity.

Source:
Kelly, Kevin. What Technology Wants. New York: Viking Adult, 2010.
(Note: italics, and bracketed “San Francisco” in original.)

How Electricity Matters for Life

Source of book image:
http://media.npr.org/assets/bakertaylor/covers/t/the-spark-of-life/9780393078039_custom-86637e64da2201ed3081e0f26f40e0d139cbbf9d-s6-c10.jpg

(p. C9) Top-drawer scientists always are excited about their field, but many have difficulty conveying this to a general audience. Not so Frances Ashcroft. She is a distinguished physiologist at Oxford University whose work has provided crucial insight into how insulin secretion is connected to electrical activity in cells. Her research has meant that children born with one form of diabetes can control it using oral medication instead of regular and painful insulin injections.

After Ms. Ashcroft made her breakthrough in 1984, she felt as if she were “dancing in the air, shot high into the sky on the rocket of excitement with the stars exploding in vivid colours all around me,” she writes in her engaging and informative “The Spark of Life: Electricity in the Human Body.” Even today, thinking of it “sends excitement fizzing through my veins.”
Like so much else in our bodies, insulin secretion depends on crucial proteins in the cell walls that regulate the flow of ions (electrically charged atoms or molecules) between the interior of the cell and the fluids that surround it. The ions, mostly sodium, potassium and calcium, literally provide “the spark of life.” Ms. Ashcroft uses her research into cellular “ion channels” as an overture to a rich and stimulating account of how electricity and the varied ways in which animals and plants produce it explain so much of evolutionary biology.
. . .
. . . all of Ms. Ashcroft’s themes and variations represent facets of the same underlying ionic mechanism. In describing its wonders, she has produced a gem that sparkles.

For the full review, see:
WILLIAM BYNUM. “Singing the Body Electric.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., September 29, 2012): C9.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date September 28, 2012.)

The book under review, is:
Ashcroft, Frances. The Spark of Life: Electricity in the Human Body. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012.

Technology Brings Choices and Control, Which Brings Happiness

(p. 78) For the past 30 years the conventional wisdom has been that once a person achieves a minimal standard of living, more money does not bring more happiness. If you live below a certain income threshold, increased money makes a difference, but after that, it doesn’t buy happiness. That was the conclusion of a now-classic study by Richard Easterlin in 1974. However, recent research from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania shows that worldwide, affluence brings increased satisfaction. Higher income earners are happier. Citizens in higher-earning countries tend to be more satisfied on average.
My interpretation of this newest research–which also matches our intuitive impressions–is that what money brings is increased choices, rather than merely increased stuff (although more stuff comes with the territory). We don’t find happiness in more gadgets and experiences. We do find happiness in having some control of our time and work, a chance for real leisure, in the escape from the uncertainties of war, poverty, and corruption, and in a chance to pursue individual freedoms–all of which come with increased affluence.
I’ve been to many places in the world, the poorest and the richest spots, the oldest and the newest cities, the fastest and the slowest cultures, and it is my observation that when given a chance, people who walk will buy a bicycle, people who ride a bike will get a scooter, people riding a scooter will upgrade to a car, and those with a car dream of a plane. Farmers everywhere trade their ox plows for tractors, their gourd bowls for tin ones, their sandals for shoes. Always. Insignificantly few ever go back. The exceptions such as the well-known Amish are not so exceptional when examined closely, for even their communities adopt selected technology without retreat.

Source:
Kelly, Kevin. What Technology Wants. New York: Viking Adult, 2010.
(Note: italics in original.)

Wealth from Innovation Is Nobler than Wealth from Litigation

Source of book image: http://ww4.hdnux.com/photos/15/60/06/3604871/3/628×471.jpg

(p. C7) In business, Green routinely sued her competitors. . . .
. . .
It was precisely Green’s vision of life as a zero-sum game, a match between enemies, that proved her flaw. She appreciated the idea that dollars compound, but she never seemed to grasp that the compounding of ideas, innovation, is just as important, that in certain, non-litigious, environments ideas “fructify,” to use a period verb. Litigation like Green’s prevented the kind of innovation in which she might have wanted to invest. Wealth is created when Apple beats Samsung, but more wealth is created when Apple comes up with a new phone.

For the full review, see:
AMITY SHLAES. “Quarrelsome Queen of the Gilded Age.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., September 29, 2012): C7.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date September 28, 2012.)

The book under review, is:
Wallach, Janet. The Richest Woman in America: Hetty Green in the Gilded Age. New York: Nan A. Talese, 2012.

“Lowest-Paid Burger Flipper” Is “Better Off than King Henry”

(p. 76) After going from room to room, skipping none except the garage (that would be a project in itself), we arrived at a total of 6,000 varieties of things in our house. Since we have multiple examples of some varieties, such as books, CDs, paper plates, spoons, socks, on so on, I estimate the total number of objects in our home, including the garage, to be close to 10,000.
Without trying very hard, our typical modern house holds a king’s ransom. But in fact, we are wealthier than King Henry. In fact, the lowest-paid burger flipper working at McDonald’s is in many respects (p. 77) better off than King Henry or any of the richest people living not too long ago. Although the burger flipper barely makes enough to pay the rent, he or she can afford many things that King Henry could not. King Henry’s wealth–the entire treasure of England–could not have purchased an indoor flush toilet or air-conditioning or secured a comfortable ride for 500 kilometers. Any taxicab driver can afford these today. Only 100 years ago, John Rockefeller’s vast fortune as the world’s richest man could not have gotten him the cell phone that any untouchable street sweeper in Bombay now uses. In the first half of the 19th century Nathan Rothschild was the richest man in the world. His millions were not enough to buy an antibiotic. Rothschild died of an infected abscess that could have been cured with a three-dollar tube of neomycin today. Although King Henry had some fine clothes and a lot of servants, you could not pay people today to live as he did, without plumbing, in dark, drafty rooms, isolated from the world by impassable roads and few communication connections. A poor university student living in a dingy dorm room in Jakarta lives better in most ways than King Henry.

Source:
Kelly, Kevin. What Technology Wants. New York: Viking Adult, 2010.

Cooking Allowed the Toothless to Live

Source of book image: http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1344733081l/13587130.jpg

(p. C12) . . . the narrative, ragtag though it may be, is a good one and it starts with the single greatest achievement in cookware–the cooking pot. Originally made of clay, this simple invention allowed previously inedible foods to be cooked in water, a process that removed toxins, made them digestible and reduced the need for serious chewing, a deadly problem for the toothless. (Archaeologists find adult skeletons without teeth only at sites dating from after the invention of the cooking pot.)
. . .
When “Consider the Fork” turns to cultural history, Ms. Wilson’s points sometimes contradict one another. On one hand, she slyly condemns the rich throughout history and their use of cheap cooking labor. Yet she also relates how the Lebanese writer Anissa Helou remembers kibbé being made in Beirut by her mother and grandmother: They pounded the lamb in a mortar and pestle for an hour, a process described in loving terms. So is cooking labor a bedrock of family values or class exploitation?

For the full review, see:
CHRISTOPHER KIMBALL. “The World on a Plate.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., October 6, 2012): C12.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date October 5, 2012.)

The book under review, is:
Wilson, Bee. Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat. New York: Basic Books, 2012.

New Technology Gets Better, Cheaper and More Diverse

(p. 75) Devices not only get better, they also get cheaper while they get better. We turn around to peer through our window into the past and realize there wasn’t window glass back then. The past also lacked machine-woven cloth, refrigerators, steel, photographs, and the entire warehouse of goods spilling into the aisles of our local superstore. We can trace this cornucopia back along a diminishing curve to the Neolithic era. Craft from ancient times can surprise us in its sophistication, but in sheer quantity, variety, and complexity, it pales against modern inventions. The proof of this is clear: We buy the new over the old. Given the choice between an old-fashioned tool and a new one, most people–in the past as well as now–would grab the newer one. A very few will collect old tools, but as big as eBay is, and flea markets anywhere in the world, they are dwarfed by the market of the new. But if the new is not really better, and we keep reaching for it, then we are consistently duped or consistently dumb. The more likely reason we seek the new is that new things do get better. And of course there are more new things to choose from.

Source:
Kelly, Kevin. What Technology Wants. New York: Viking Adult, 2010.