Menno Schilthuizen (2018)

A take on evolutionary biology that sees cities and human-created environments as a positive force on ecology, without in any way diminishing the effects of human-caused demage.

It’s an interesting perspective. Ecologists and the popular press often only see the damage, not the opportunity, of human construction, and regard species being forced from their “natural” habitats as always bad. Schilthuizen argues quite persuasively that habitat destruction has been mitigated by habitat construction, by creating urban landscapes in which (often other) species can thrive possibly more than they did before. This is especially true when we also consider “invasive” species transported from elsewhere, which find niches in their destination cities (often around their ports of entry). In some cases we find species that no longer have or inhabit a “natural” habitat at all.

And habitat destruction often isn’t as complete as it seems. Schilthuizen example is the mice of New York’s smaller parks, which form islands of isolation that in turn cause identifiable genetic differences between the inhabitants of the different tiny patches of land. Singapore similarly has tiny trats of native forest surrounded by city and cut-off from each other. He uses this carefully to argue that evolution requires neither great distinctions in environment nor wide reaches of time in which to operate in.

This is a careful book that doesn’t shy away from the difficult questions that evolution inevitably raises. Plenty of the cases discussed involve a complex mix of genetic evolution, epigenetic adaptation, individual learning, and group-based “culture” to change the animals’ relationships with their environments. It’s good to take on this complexity head-on, and that makes this stand out as a great introduction and illustration of the wider powers of natural selection.

4/5. Finished Wednesday 27 August, 2025.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Stephan Malinowski

The Hohenzollerns are usually treated as bookmarks in histories of the two World Wars, with the Kaiser as an essential instigator of the First and laying the groundwork for the Second despite his defenestration. This book picks up his life in exile in the Netherlands as an increasingly anachronistic character unable to handle the need to explain himself even to his own most loyal followers.

That loyalty and blindness extends to his descendants, who remain pretenders to leadership well into the Nazi period and attempt to ride the storm while simultaneously keeping a distance from it, unable to accept that they’re no longer relevant or even respected except in the most superficial ways. It’s as though they want to take credit for Nazi accomplishments and are untroubled by the atrocities as long as it offers the possibility of a return to the throne – and are similarly untroubled by the fact that that thronw would never actually be a real power centre. The Kaiser’s emphasis on the forms over the functions of royalty have a long reach.

The translation is little grating at times, fascinated by the word caesura. But the pace is good and it deals well with the contradictions and (still continuing) attempts to rewrite family history to remove the taint of association with Hitler – while (coincidentally I’m sure) restoring family property.

4/5. Finished Monday 18 August, 2025.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Ian Pindar (2008)

£5 well spent in a charity shop. This is a collection of essays on different historical mysteries. There’s something for everyone: the building of Stonehenge, the abandonment of the Mary Celeste, and (my personal favourite) the fate of the Princes in the Tower. Perhaps a book best dipped into.

Some of the essays haven’t aged well against subsequent scholarship. That’s inevitable and doesn’t detract from them as decent introductions to a wide range of happenings.

3/5. Finished Friday 1 August, 2025.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Garry Kasparov

Possibly one of the most insightful books on AI that I’ve read – all the more remarkable because it was written in 2017, shortly before the 2020s emergence of large language models and the mass-market appreciation of AI as a force.

It’s built around chess – of course – and around Kasparov’s own journeys through both chess and computers. He was an early adopter: I played against one of “his” chess computers many times during the 1980s. He has a keen technical eye, arguing that more data and more processing will defeat more algorithmic cleverness. That’s not a sentiment I wholeheartedly agree with, because new approaches can overturn the previously accepted wisdom in ways we never get to simply by throwing more computer power at the problem in the same way. (Modern deep learning itself did this, overtaking the more “classical” structured approaches.) But chess computers do provide a good example of how depth of searching beats better positional evaluation.

But it’s also built around Kasparov’s second act as a business strategy consultant. He worries about the effects that automation and AI will have on business, on employment, on human motivation and pursuit of expertise. This part is also immensely relevant as AI is assimilated, at least somewhat, into wider society.

3/5. Finished Monday 7 July, 2025.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Keith Houston

I was expecting a book that was more calculator focussed, perhaps misled by the sub-title. This is a book about pocket (and other) calculators, but it’s more a book about calculation and its mechanical assistants, from the abacus and Napier’s Bones through to computers.

And that having been said, it’s a great history. It addresses the needs that have driven mechanical computation over the centuries, as the applications have changed alongside the technology (and in many ways have driven its development). You can see this in the way that the scale of the machines changes, becoming alternately smaller and more pocket-sized and then larger as the increasing demands require steam or electrical power. (The latter can be miniaturised while the former clearly can’t.)

What we would actually regard as pocket calculators occupy only a tiny part of the story. I think there’s a more detailed history that could still be written about the different processors used, methods of entry used (for example HP’s determined and continued use of reverse-Polish notation), and how these were taken up by sub-groups within science, engineering, and finance and used almost as tribal signifiers (“real engineers use HP”). But that would miss the wider story that this book tells well.

4/5. Finished Monday 9 June, 2025.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)