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Christmas books for 2022

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

This year’s list of books for Christmas, or Isaac Newton’s birthday (in the Julian calendar in use when he was born), returns to its former length, and even includes a book published this year. My book Evidence-based Software Engineering also became available in paperback form this year, and would look great on somebodies’ desk.

The Mars Project by Wernher von Braun, first published in 1953, is a 91-page high-level technical specification for an expedition to Mars (calculated by one man and his slide-rule). The subjects include the orbital mechanics of travelling between Earth and Mars, the complications of using a planet’s atmosphere to slow down the landing craft without burning up, and the design of the spaceships and rockets (the bulk of the material). The one subject not covered is cost; von Braun’s estimated 950 launches of heavy-lift launch vehicles, to send a fleet of ten spacecraft with 70 crew, will not be cheap. I’ve no idea what today’s numbers might be.

The Fabric of Civilization: How textiles made the world by Virginia Postrel is a popular book full of interesting facts about the economic and cultural significance of something we take for granted today (or at least I did). For instance, Viking sails took longer to make than the ships they powered, and spinning the wool for the sails on King Canute‘s North Sea fleet required around 10,000 work years.

Wyclif’s Dust: Western Cultures from the Printing Press to the Present by David High-Jones is covered in an earlier post.

The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won by Victor Davis Hanson approaches the subject from a systems perspective. How did the subsystems work together (e.g., arms manufacturers and their customers, the various arms of the military/politicians/citizens), the evolution of manufacturing and fighting equipment (the allies did a great job here, Germany not very good, and Japan/Italy terrible) to increase production/lethality, and the prioritizing of activities to achieve aims. The 2011 Christmas books listed “Europe at War” by Norman Davies, which approaches the war from a data perspective.

Through the Language Glass: Why the world looks different in other languages by Guy Deutscher is a science driven discussion (written in a popular style) of the impact of language on the way its speakers interpret their world. While I have read many accounts of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, this book was the first to tell me that 70 years earlier, both William Gladstone (yes, that UK prime minister and Homeric scholar) and Lazarus Geiger had proposed theories of color perception based on the color words commonly used by the speakers of a language.

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Christmas books for 2021

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

This year, my list of Christmas books is very late because there is only one entry (first published in 1950), and I was not sure whether a 2021 Christmas book post was worthwhile.

The book is “Planning in Practice: Essays in Aircraft planning in war-time” by Ely Devons. A very readable, practical discussion, with data, on the issues involved in large scale planning; the discussion is timeless. Check out second-hand book sites for low costs editions.

Why isn’t my list longer?

Part of the reason is me. I have not been motivated to find new topics to explore, via books rather than blog posts. Things are starting to change, and perhaps the list will be longer in 2022.

Another reason is the changing nature of book publishing. There is rarely much money to be made from the sale of non-fiction books, and the desire to write down their thoughts and ideas seems to be the force that drives people to write a book. Sites like substack appear to be doing a good job of diverting those with a desire to write something (perhaps some authors will feel the need to create a book length tomb).

Why does an author need a publisher? The nitty-gritty technical details of putting together a book to self-publish are slowly being simplified by automation, e.g., document formatting and proofreading. It’s a win-win situation to make newly written books freely available, at least if they are any good. The author reaches the largest readership (which helps maximize the impact of their ideas), and readers get a free electronic book. Authors of not very good books want to limit the number of people who find this out for themselves, and so charge money for the electronic copy.

Another reason for the small number of good new, non-introductory, books, is having something new to say. Scientific revolutions, or even minor resets, are rare (i.e., measured in multi-decades). Once several good books are available, and nothing much new has happened, why write a new book on the subject?

The market for introductory books is much larger than that for books covering advanced material. While publishers obviously want to target the largest market, these are not the kind of books I tend to read.

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My new kitchen clock

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

After several decades of keeping up with the time, since November my kitchen clock has only been showing the correct time every 12-hours. Before I got to buy a new one, I was asked what I wanted to Christmas, and there was money to spend :-)

Guess what Santa left for me:

Hermle Ravensburg clock.

The Hermle Ravensburg is a mechanical clock, driven by the pull of gravity on a cylindrical 1kg of Iron (I assume).

Setup requires installing the energy source (i.e., hang the cylinder on one end of a chain), attach clock to a wall where there is enough distance for the cylinder to slowly ‘fall’, set the time, add energy (i.e., pull the chain so the cylinder is at maximum height), and set the pendulum swinging.

The chain is long enough for eight days of running. However, for the clock to be visible from outside my kitchen I had to place it over a shelf, and running time is limited to 2.5 days before energy has to be added.

The swinging pendulum provides the reference beat for the running of the clock. The cycle time of a pendulum swing is proportional to the square root of the distance of the center of mass from the pivot point. There is an adjustment ring for fine-tuning the swing time (just visible below the circular gold disc of the pendulum).

I used my knowledge of physics to wind the center of mass closer to the pivot to reduce the swing time slightly, overlooking the fact that the thread on the adjustment ring moved a smaller bar running through its center (which moved in the opposite direction when I screwed the ring towards the pivot). Physics+mechanical knowledge got it right on the next iteration.

I have had the clock running 1-second per hour too slow, and 1-second per hour too fast. Current thinking is that the pendulum is being slowed slightly when the cylinder passes on its slow fall (by increased air resistance). Yes dear reader, I have not been resetting the initial conditions before making a calibration run 😐

What else remains to learn, before summer heat has to be adjusted for?

While the clock face and hands may be great for attracting buyers, it has serious usability issues when it comes to telling the time. It is difficult to tell the time without paying more attention than normal; without being a few feet of the clock it is not possible to tell the time by just glancing at it. The see though nature of the face, the black-on-black of the end of the hour/minute hands, and the extension of the minute hand in the opposite direction all combine to really confuse the viewer.

A wire cutter solved the minute hand extension issue, and yellow fluorescent paint solved the black-on-black issue. Ravensburg clock with improved user interface, framed by faded paint of its predecessor below:

Ravensburg clock with improved user interface.

There is a discrete ting at the end of every hour. This could be slightly louder, and I plan to add some weight to the bell hammer. Had the bell been attached slightly off center, fine volume adjustment would have been possible.

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Christmas books for 2020

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

A very late post on the interesting books I read this year (only one of which was actually published in 2020). As always the list is short because I did not read many books and/or there is lots of nonsense out there, but this year I have the new excuses of not being able to spend much time on trains and having my own book to finally complete.

I have already reviewed The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, and it is the must-read of 2020 (after my book, of course :-).

The True Believer by Eric Hoffer. This small, short book provides lots of interesting insights into the motivational factors involved in joining/following/leaving mass movements. Possible connections to software engineering might appear somewhat tenuous, but bits and pieces keep bouncing around my head. There are clearer connections to movements going mainstream this year.

The following two books came from asking what-if questions about the future of software engineering. The books I read suggesting utopian futures did not ring true.

“Money and Motivation: Analysis of Incentives in Industry” by William Whyte provides lots of first-hand experience of worker motivation on the shop floor, along with worker response to management incentives (from the pre-automation 1940s and 1950s). Developer productivity is a common theme in discussions I have around evidence-based software engineering, and this book illustrates the tangled mess that occurs when management and worker aims are not aligned. It is easy to imagine the factory-floor events described playing out in web design companies, with some web-page metric used by management as a proxy for developer productivity.

Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century by Harry Braverman, to quote from Wikipedia, is an “… examination the nature of ‘skill’ and the finding that there was a decline in the use of skilled labor as a result of managerial strategies of workplace control.” It may also have discussed management assault of blue-collar labor under capitalism, but I skipped the obviously political stuff. Management do want to deskill software development, if only because it makes it easier to find staff, with the added benefit that the larger pool of less skilled staff increases management control, e.g., low skilled developers knowing they can be easily replaced.

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Christmas books for 2019

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

The following are the really, and somewhat, interesting books I read this year. I am including the somewhat interesting books to bulk up the numbers; there are probably more books out there that I would find interesting. I just did not read many books this year, what with Amazon recommends being so user unfriendly, and having my nose to the grindstone finishing a book.

First the really interesting.

I have already written about Good Enough: The Tolerance for Mediocrity in Nature and Society by Daniel Milo.

I have also written about The European Guilds: An economic analysis by Sheilagh Ogilvie. Around half-way through I grew weary, and worried readers of my own book might feel the same. Ogilvie nails false beliefs to the floor and machine-guns them. An admirable trait in someone seeking to dispel the false beliefs in current circulation. Some variety in the nailing and machine-gunning would have improved readability.

Moving on to first half really interesting, second half only somewhat.

“In search of stupidity: Over 20 years of high-tech marketing disasters” by Merrill R. Chapman, second edition. This edition is from 2006, and a third edition is promised, like now. The first half is full of great stories about the successes and failures of computer companies in the 1980s and 1990s, by somebody who was intimately involved with them in a sales and marketing capacity. The author does not appear to be so intimately involved, starting around 2000, and the material flags. Worth buying for the first half.

Now the somewhat interesting.

“Can medicine be cured? The corruption of a profession” by Seamus O’Mahony. All those nonsense theories and practices you see going on in software engineering, it’s also happening in medicine. Medicine had a golden age, when progress was made on finding cures for the major diseases, and now it’s mostly smoke and mirrors as people try to maintain the illusion of progress.

“Who we are and how we got here” by David Reich (a genetics professor who is a big name in the field), is the story of the various migrations and interbreeding of ‘human-like’ and human peoples over the last 50,000 years (with some references going as far back as 300,000 years). The author tries to tell two stories, the story of human migrations and the story of the discoveries made by his and other people’s labs. The mixture of stories did not work for me; the story of human migrations/interbreeding was very interesting, but I was not at all interested in when and who discovered what. The last few chapters went off at a tangent, trying to have a politically correct discussion about identity and race issues. The politically correct class are going to hate this book’s findings.

“The Digital Party: Political organization and online democracy” by Paolo Gerbaudo. The internet has enabled some populist political parties to attract hundreds of thousands of members. Are these parties living up to their promises to be truly democratic and representative of members wishes? No, and Gerbaudo does a good job of explaining why (people can easily join up online, and then find more interesting things to do than read about political issues; only a few hard code members get out from behind the screen and become activists).

Suggestions for books that you think I might find interesting welcome.

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Christmas books for 2018

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

The following are the really interesting books I read this year (only one of which was actually published in 2018, everything has to work its way through several piles). The list is short because I did not read many books and/or there is lots of nonsense out there.

The English and their history by Robert Tombs. A hefty paperback, at nearly 1,000 pages, it has been the book I read on train journeys, for most of this year. Full of insights, along with dull sections, a narrative that explains lots of goings-on in a straight-forward manner. I still have a few hundred pages left to go.

The mind is flat by Nick Chater. We experience the world through a few low bandwidth serial links and the brain stitches things together to make it appear that our cognitive hardware/software is a lot more sophisticated. Chater’s background is in cognitive psychology (these days he’s an academic more connected with the business world) and describes the experimental evidence to back up his “mind is flat” model. I found that some of the analogues dragged on too long.

In the readable social learning and evolution category there is: Darwin’s unfinished symphony by Leland and The secret of our success by Henrich. Flipping through them now, I cannot decide which is best. Read the reviews and pick one.

Group problem solving by Laughin. Eye opening. A slim volume, packed with data and analysis.

I have already written about Experimental Psychology by Woodworth.

The Digital Flood: The Diffusion of Information Technology Across the U.S., Europe, and Asia by Cortada. Something of a specialist topic, but if you are into the diffusion of technology, this is surely the definitive book on the diffusion of software systems (covers mostly hardware).