Author: smy
Moore’s Law: The Life of Gordon Moore by Arnold Thackray
Moore is famous for the law that bears his name: namely, that the number of transistors that can be squeezed onto a microchip doubles every 2 years. The “law” originated from Moore’s insatiable love of data, his tendency to take copious notes, his reflective, analytical thinking and his affinity for graphs. Moore made this prediction in 1975 and although it is now generally held to have expired, it held true for 30 years, a testament to Moore’s vision for the field. He predicted “portable communications devices” – phones and so forth. Moore himself seems to have been a staid bit…
Nuclear Iran: The Birth of an Atomic State by David Patrikarakos
The interesting thing was how it genuinely started from nuclear energy.
Flying Blind: The 737 Max Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing
One can seethe with rage reading this book.
The Code Breaker by Walter Isaacson
This is a book about some of the most competitive people in science. It’s a joint biography of Jennifer Doudna (who in 2020 won the Nobel prize together with Emanuelle Charpentier) and the CRISPR method for gene editing. The former is significantly less interesting than the latter. Isaacson does his best to wring a few drops of controversy or adversity out of Doudna’s life, but despite growing up white in Hawaii, she seems to have led a rather nice middle-class existence with nice supportive parents. Prior to reading the book, I thought CRISPR (“Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats”) was…
The Expendables by Jeff Rubin
This book remarkably made me wonder if Trump may have had a point on some issues relating to trade.
How to avoid a climate disaster by Bill Gates
The book is not high literature and contains no poetry or rhapsody on the beauty of earth or nature. It is a good practical survey of the climate change problem, paired with an array of plausible technology solutions, very much written by an engineer. I liked the way Gates methodically dissected the planet’s use of energy: “How We Plug In, Make Things, Grow Things, Get Around, Keep Cool and Stay Warm”. I also admired Bill’s pragmatic approach: he does not particularly advocate for lower personal consumption, but recognizes that higher consumption is the means to which most of the planet…
These days I’m reading about crazy ideas and the people who bring them to life.
There’s no shortage of good ideas. The significance of a technology is not really in the idea; it’s in the execution. A mere idea will not change the world. Good leadership, good communication and faultless and execution will. I’m interested in big ideas: the bigger the better. The conquest of the South Pole, the circumnavigation of the North Pole, the genesis of neural networks, the Theranos and WeWork scams, the world domination of the ubiquitous toy LEGO. I’ve enjoyed biographies of Roald Amundsen, who won the race to the South Pole by stratagem, and of Ernest Shackleton, another polar explorer…