[jmikeh]

Killers of the Flower Moon. Very good read. Not seen the movie yet

[solvegas]

Killers of the Flower Moon. Very good read. Not seen the movie yet

Saw the movie and it is good. It is 3 1/2 hours long, and it didn't have an intermission. Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio should both be able to get Oscars. Because of its length, you should go to the toilet beforehand since you don't want to go during the movie and miss any of the story. 

[rtpoe]

Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator by Keith Houston

A history of portable - if not "pocket" - calculators, from the abacus and tally boards to the personal computer.

Among those profiled are:

The Curta, a masterpiece of mechanical engineering.
The Casio 14-A, the first all-electronic calculator.
The Olivetti Programma 101, a transistorized programmable desktop model.
The Busicom 141-PF, which relied on the Intel 4004 - the first integrated circuit CPU.

For a lot of them, the business and design history behind them is the real story.

The Sumlock Anita MK VII, with its "nixie" tube display (and using vacuum tubes for the computations):

[solvegas]

My first electronic calculator I bought was the Texas Instruments TI-30 back in 1977. Before that I had a Slide Rule aka slip stick. 

[MaxBigfoot]

I've still got a Texas Instruments TI-36 Solar that I got when I went to technical college in 1989.  It still works fine.   

[rtpoe]

The Good Virus: The Amazing Story and Forgotten Promise of the Phage by Tom Ireland

A "phage" is a virus that attacks bacteria. They're everywhere, and arguably what keeps people who swim in the polluted waters of the Ganges from contracting all sorts of bacterial diseases. Ireland tracks the history of their discovery and early medical use (by a rather eccentric self-taught biologist who kept lying on his resume and pissing off the medical "establishment", and then the no-good Godless Communists in the Soviet Union who wouldn't use good ol' American antibiotics), and just before he gets to the point where you think he's another nutjob pushing an "alternative" medical treatment, he deftly points out some of the problems (and not just bureaucratic) with their use, and checks in with current researchers studying the weird little things.

[rtpoe]

1932: FDR, Hoover, and the Dawn of a New America by Scott Martelle

Not just a look at the presidential campaigns (including the machinations behind the nominations), but the other things going on in the US at the start of the Great Depression. You'll meet Walter W. Waters, the leader and organizer of the "Bonus Expeditionary Force" (Martelle gives a great and wonderfully detailed account of that whole march). Pauline Sabin, of the Women's Organization for the National Repeal of Prohibition. Milo Reno, president of the National Farmers Holiday Association, who organized "farm strikes" that saw farmers withholding their goods from market in protest of ruinously low prices. And in a bit of a sidebar story that encapsulates two other prominent threads in American society in 1932, there's Angelo Herndon, a union organizer in the South who found a welcome in the Communist Party (they didn't care about the color of his skin), who found himself facing the death penalty in Georgia on the charge of calling for insurrection and revolution....

[rtpoe]

My First Printing Backer's Copy arrived yesterday!

Desmond Devlin started writing for MAD in the early 1980s at the age of 19, and eventually became one of the magazine’s most frequent spoof writers.... Tom Richmond...drew a substantial chunk of MAD parodies after 2001’s TV spoof "Malcontent in the Muddle...."

The two decided in the wake of MAD’s not-quite-cancellation that they wanted to keep the tradition alive. Now they are. It won’t be under the MAD banner, but in November the two are releasing Claptrap, a crowdfunded collection of 12 MAD-style movie parodies.

A big part of why MAD struggled to stay relevant, and eventually limited the amount of new material it put out, was that it couldn’t keep up with the rest of the comedy world.

“In the age of the internet with instantaneous commentary on events that happened five minutes ago,” Richmond explains, “having the time it takes to produce a magazine, you couldn’t be timely enough anymore.”

“It’s just a shame,” he continues, “that people prefer memes that somebody puts together in three minutes as opposed to a Jack Davis two-page spread that he spent four days doing.”

https://www.tcj.com/keeping-mad-alive-a-look-at-claptrap/

I haven't finished it yet, but I would like to note that the Table of Contents is done up like a menu from a hoity-toity restaurant, and even the Index has jokes in it!

[rtpoe]

A City on Mars
Kelly and Zach Weinersmith

If someone commits a crime at a lunar base, whose laws apply?

That's one of the questions considered here. Almost everyone who dreams about settling the Moon or Mars talks about the engineering challenges. They forget that there are a LOT of other issues that WILL come up. We know nothing about prenatal development in low gravity, for example. It's going to take at least a year to get to Mars - accidents are going to happen on the way. How do you do surgery in zero-G? What's the difference between res nullius and res communis, and what do those Latin terms have to do with outer space? Oh, and any privately run / corporate-owned outpost will have to be run along the lines of a company town - for good or ill....

The good news is that there ARE legal precedents that can be applied and adapted to the situation (international law is going to be just as important a field for settling the Moon and Mars as biochemistry - so hit the law books!). But we still need a HECK of a LOT of long-term scientific study before we should even begin to think about setting up permanent outposts around the Solar System.

The Weinersmiths favor what they call the "Wait and Go Big" approach. Get all the problems solved *first* - THEN move tens of thousands of people to the off-world colonies....

[TheZookie007]

Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator by Keith Houston

A history of portable - if not "pocket" - calculators, from the abacus and tally boards to the personal computer.

Among those profiled are:

The Curta, a masterpiece of mechanical engineering.
The Casio 14-A, the first all-electronic calculator.
The Olivetti Programma 101, a transistorized programmable desktop model.
The Busicom 141-PF, which relied on the Intel 4004 - the first integrated circuit CPU.

For a lot of them, the business and design history behind them is the real story.

The Sumlock Anita MK VII, with its "nixie" tube display (and using vacuum tubes for the computations):

Sounds like a good read. I love "history of technology"-style books.

[TheZookie007]

Factfulness: Ten Reasons Why We’re Wrong About The World - And Why Things Are Better Than You Think
by Hans Rosling, with Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund

I picked up this book the other day and it's a thought-provoking work.

"None of us has enough mental capacity to consume all the information out there. The question is, what part are we processing and how did it get selected? And what part are we ignoring? The kind of information we seem most likely to process is stories: information that sounds dramatic.

Imagine that we have a shield, or attention filter, between the world and our brain. This attention filter protects us against the noise of the world: without it, we would constantly be bombarded with so much information we would be overloaded and pa ra lyz ed. Then imagine that the attention filter has ten instinct-shaped holes in it -- gap, negativity, straight line, and so on. Most information doesn't get through, but the holes do allow through information that appeals to our dramatic instincts. So we end up paying attention to information that fits our dramatic instincts, and ignoring information that does not.

The media can't waste time on stories that won't pass our attention filters.

...And the unusual stories we are constantly shown by the media paint pictures in our heads. If we are not extremely careful, we come to believe that the unusual is usual: that this is what the world looks like."

[solvegas]

A book I've read, and which remains to this day the most influential book in Naval history and it's considered the US Navy's de facto Bible to this day, written in 1890 and strongly influenced the German Navy whose enormous expansion scared the British and started a Naval race in Europe which was one of the reasons that led to World War 1 (1914-1918) and also influenced the Japanese which led them to whip the Russians in 1905 in the Far East and now has influenced the Chinese to compete against the USA, it is not a warmongering book but it tells nations that the most important asset to maintain their power and deter others from attacking them is due to a need for a more powerful Navy.  Essentially, he who controls the sea, controls commerce and he who controls commerce, controls the world.

[rtpoe]

Ever come across a novel that, while you were reading it, had you thrilled by the action and entranced by the concepts being explored, but when you finished it, had you thinking, "Wait, that actually failed from a storytelling perspective!"?

That's what happened to me with Exordia by  Seth Parkinson.

An alien "thing" appears in a remote valley in Kurdistan. The US sends a team of specialists to investigate and figure out what it is and why and how it's making things around it - including people - get really weird. All while another alien is threatening to wipe out the human race. Sounds cool, doesn't it.

EXCEPT..... Before that even happens, we meet two characters. Anna is a Kurdish refugee with a Trauma in her past (who JUST HAPPENS to be from the Very Place where the alien Thing appeared), and "Ssrin" is an alien she meets and befriends. The whole first section is about them getting to know each other - so you'd think they'd be the focus of the novel. Nope. They are shanghaied by the gov't, who needs a Local Guide for their team of specialists.....and then Anna is shoved aside in the narrative, and the alien is pretty much ignored in the story.

And then at the end, the team takes control of the Thing, finds out it's a spaceship, and decides "Woo hoo! We've got a spaceship! Let's go exploring, and find those aliens that just wiped out human civilization, and, well, we'll figure it out when we get there."

Uh, people? Maybe you shouldn't act so excited? A little sadness and even anger would be appropriate here, considering the Bad Alien a) detonated a globe-spanning EMP that fried 99% of electronics, b) nuked dozens of major cities, and c) your response to that attack was to launch EVERY NUKE YOU COULD (around 4,000 - Parkinson keeps count) at that one valley in Kurdistan in the HOPE that you'd overwhelm the Bad Alien's defenses???

Sorry, but I can't buy a story where the characters end up acting as if nothing ever happened in the hundreds of pages before the final scene.

[MaxBigfoot]

Thanks for the head's up!  That sounds very unsatisfying, and I will stay away from it.

[rtpoe]

Mapping the Darkness: The Visionary Scientists Who Unlocked the Mysteries of **82**
by Kenneth Miller

A mix of science history and biography, Miller follows four scientists who worked to figure out what goes on in our bodies when we **82** - and what happens when the **82** cycle is disrupted.

"In the 1920s, Nathaniel Kleitman founded the world’s first dedicated **82** lab at the University of Chicago, where he subjected research participants (including himself) to a dizzying array of tests and tortures. But the tipping point came in 1938, when his cave experiment awakened the general public to the unknown—and vital—world of **82**. Kleitman went on to mentor the talented but troubled Eugene Aserinsky, whose discovery of REM **82** revealed the astonishing activity of the dreaming brain, and William Dement, a jazz-bass playing revolutionary who became known as the father of **82** medicine. Dement, in turn, mentored the brilliant maverick Mary Carskadon, who uncovered an epidemic of **82** deprivation among teenagers, and launched a global movement to fight it." - publisher's blurb

A fascinating look at How We Found Out About **82**, without being dry and technical.

And we're still not sure WHY we need to **82**.....