Cal Flyn

2021

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A book one perhaps shouldn't enjoy as much as I did, but as an exploration of what happens when humans leave a landscape – whether one they've polluted or simply one they've abandoned – it's actually quite reassuring even in the midst of it's being shocking.

There is alost nowhere that's so polluted that life of some kind can't regain a hold, given enough time. That (as Flyn herself is at pains to point out) is not an excuse or a invitation to more spoliation, or to not prosecuting polluters; but it is a reminder that we avoid pollution and climate change for ourselves, not because the natural world will be irretrievably damaged if we don't: the climate emergency is about saving ourselves, not about saving the planet.

4/5. Finished 01 April 2023.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Philip Roth

2004

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A carefully-constructed counterfactual of a fictional Lindbergh presidency and of America's descent into fascism – before being saved from itself by the entreaties of a revered and bereaved widow. It's clever and evocatively written from the perspective of a 9-year-old surrogate of Roth himself, and so convincing that the author feels the need to include a summary of the real historical figures he mentions as an appendix.

Reading this book in 2023 brings out some echoes that perhaps wouldn't have been apparent on an earlier reading. There's a lot of consideration of fake news, of misinformation and questionable government initiatives, and even of a "Big Lie" that populists and fabulists can lock onto. And it's shocking that some the anti-Semitism that existed before and during the war still exists today, in an increasingly-less-camouflaged form.

3/5. Finished 01 April 2023.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

James Gleick

2011

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A popular history of information, and of information theory and computing in particular.

Like Gleick's other books, this book walks the fine line between too much science and too little depth. It avoids the maths entirely without ever abandoning the core insights that the maths provides. That's something many scientists long to achieve, but seldom do: focusing on the concepts and treating the maths as a machine that's only valuable once the concepts have been assimilated. Richard Feynman would have approved.

This book is strongest on Shannon and Babbage, two of the geniuses (along with Turing, von Neumann, and a few others) of the information age as it emerged over the course of a century from mathematics and engineering. The excursion into physicists' treatment of information is less convincing (at least from my computer scientist's perspective), not least because of the inevitable confusions thrown up by quantum information.

4/5. Finished 01 April 2023.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Tim Wu

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A history of corporate interactions with government and customers: in particular, the rise and fall of idea of anti-monopoly and the different philosophies that underpin regulators in the US versus Europe. The feeling is one of ... well, if not hopelessness, than of an inadequacy of democratic governance in the face of enormous corporate spending on lobbying and political influence to protect corporate greed and profit.

It's perhaps unfortunate that I read this at the moment when the corporations identified as the major threats – the tech giants – were busily shedding staff and possibly collapsing to a shadow of their former (and intended future) selves. It demonstrates that what sometimes feels like inevitable and inexorable triumph is often just a phase: that the largest, most successful, corporations are often brought low sooner and more unexpectedly than anyone could have conceived in the times of their pomp.

3/5. Finished 01 April 2023.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Helmut Satz

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A great introduction and overview of complex systems.

The definition of complex system is itself ... well, not obvious. Sometimes complex feels like a synonym for not understood, but actually it's more precise than that, referring to systems whose processes can exhibit macro-scale behaviour that isn't simply the aggregation of the micro-scale behaviours of its components: the canonical example is that water freezes, but a single water molecule doesn't. Another approach is to use the term to describe systems where chains of cause and effect are difficult to disentangle.

Whichever definition you prefer, this is a gentle but still very scientific introduction. There's enough maths for it not to feel shallow, but little enough for it to be widely accessible even when dealing with concepts like entropy that are often a challenge to explain clearly. There's a really good discussion of criticality and universality, as well as the irreversibility of phase transitions such as sand pile transitions. It'd be a good introduction for students.

4/5. Finished 16 February 2023.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)