An In-Progress Problem

I was watching a video clip of Ken Schwaber talking about scrum software development, and he got into an interesting problem. (Well, interesting to some of us.) This was the "in-progress problem." It arises when you find that you have many tasks started, but few or none of them are being brought to a conclusion.

For the rest of my comments on this problem, as it relates to my reading list, go here.

This takes one in a rather different direction than Mortimer Adler's classic How to Read a Book. I don't think it ever occurred to Adler to provide instructions on how to read fifteen books at one time. Is that because Adler was so systematic that he read only one book at a time? I find that hard to believe. I think all of us like some variety, and what we're reading in the daytime in pursuit of some project may not be what we want to read before going to bed.

I think I got into the habit of having a number of books underway at one time in college, when I was reading textbooks, and other works, for a number of courses at once. I had to have several books going in parallel.

I'd be interested in hearing about other people's experiences and approaches to this reading in-progress problem.

Perry v Schwarzenegger - A New Scopes Trial?

You can click on the title of this post to move over to my other blog, where I posted today on Perry v Schwarzenegger, the challenge to California's Proposition 8 in the Federal courts. There is a link within that post to an article from The Economist providing the factual background.

The Ascent of Money - A Review

Ferguson, Niall. The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World. New York: The Penguin Press, 2008. 442 pages. Acknowledgments. Notes. List of Illustrations. Index. $29.95. ISBN: 978-1-59420-192-9.

Niall Ferguson has become a very popular, very well-known, and probably quite wealthy historian. He has gotten into the business of writing television documentary scripts, which he converts into books that can ride the wave of publicity from the TV version. The Ascent of Money is one such, and I should say now that I did not see the television series. In fact, until I read the Acknowledgements at the end of this book, I was unaware that such a program existed. Its origin as a Ken Burnsian voiceover for a television audience helps to explain the simplicity and clarity of the narrative of The Ascent of Money. This is a very readable book, and it contains some charming and well-told stories.

The basic structure of this book is indicated by the title; Niall Ferguson portrays the development of our financial institutions as a matter of increasing complexity and hierarchical evolution. That’s fair enough, although, just as in biology, there are plenty of simple forms being created today, along with the complicated financial products that triggered the recent crisis. It is, by the way, a good thing, I think, that Ferguson wrote this book in early 2008, before the full dimensions of the crisis were known, and before its impact on the “real economy” was apparent.

The chapters reflect Ferguson’s structural assumptions. “Dreams of Avarice” is about the invention of money and the evolution of banking. While one of Ferguson’s first stories is about a mountain of silver, he makes it clear that, even in Sumerian times, money was as much a matter of accounting and marks on paper as of precious metal. A lesson that is clear throughout The Ascent of Money is that money is trust: credit really does depend upon credo. And that is true whether we’re talking about cash, bank accounts, bonds, stocks, real estate, or derivatives.

“Of Human Bondage” is about the development of bonds and the markets for them. “Blowing Bubbles” concerns stock markets and investment bubbles, primarily the grand-daddy of them all: The Mississippi Bubble. “The Return of Risk” takes up the story of the insurance business. “Safe as Houses” is about the real estate market, and the development of securities based on real property. The last chapter, “From Empire to Chimerica,” is the most speculative, but it does give a clear portrait of the interdependent relationship between Chinese productivity and American debt.

This is a very painless way to learn a lot about finance and something about economics. It may also serve to help some of us to understand some of the events that have shaken the banking system over the past two years. How was it that big insurance companies were so vulnerable to the machinations of supposedly private deals among wealthy investor? Why did the banks’ strategy of passing their mortgage risks off to other people through debt-based securities backfire? Why is it that we still do not know the full extent of exposure of American banks to these problems? And why has 2009 seen 99 bank failures, some of them of very large banks, when the government “rescued” the system a year ago?

I’ll recommend The Ascent of Money to those of you who don’t know much about finance. One of the things I have been learning is that you can’t know too much about the stuff that may determine whether you spend your golden years living in a refrigerator box under a bridge. Another is that most of us casual investors don’t have the time, energy, training, or instincts to understand finance on more than a very superficial level. Reading The Ascent of Money is an enjoyable way to get an overview of a subject that many people think of as dull. But the understanding it provides is, of necessity, less than profound.

Is This Place Dead, or What?

Really, I come here today to post to this blog, and the last post was from March of 2009, and that was mine, too. I think I'm talking to myself. Do we need to bring in a web site coroner to declare this place officially dead?

Monism and Pluralism

Hardly a day goes by that I don’t read about someone warning us against some critical danger facing humanity. Global warming is the most dangerous issue facing us today, threatening unimaginable disaster. Abortion is the most terrible tragedy one could imagine, and it is vital that we do something to stop it. There is nothing more important than stopping the gay agenda, the conservative movement, religious intolerance, Islamic extremism, or corporate bonuses. Holocaust denial is undermining the foundations of Western civilization. “It’s the economy, stupid!”

These warnings have three things in common: a conviction that the issue in question is so important that we should ignore everything else and focus all of our energies and attention on it; a belief that overcoming this challenge will at least lessen, if not eliminate all of our other problems; and a tendency to view dissenters as evildoers. When I say “dissenters,” I don’t mean merely those who disagree with the speaker on the substance of the problem and its solution. I mean particularly those who don’t put the speaker’s issue at the top of their personal catastrophic hit parade.

I was taught by my first political science professor to mistrust monist explanations and to prefer pluralistic accounts. As soon as someone says, “The problem is …” my nonsense detector starts beeping. And when they say, “The solution is …” that beeping rises to a shriek. Life isn’t simple enough for any one thing to be the problem or for any one thing to be the answer to our problems.

Marx believed that everything in society arose from the distribution of economic forces. Even he, however, was forced to introduce the concept of “false consciousness,” in order to explain why people didn’t, in fact, behave according to his view of their economic interests. We have seen this variety of monism more recently, not only in James Carville’s “It’s the economy, stupid,” but from a number of analysts baffled by the tendency of working folk in the red states to persist in voting for Republican candidates. Economics is not the answer, and neither is original sin, man’s violent nature, man’s non-violent nature, women’s non-violent nature, Western imperialism, Zionism, or anti-Semitism.

There are many good examples of this sort of rhetoric in the current healthcare debate. Is the free market the solution to all of the problems we see in healthcare? Is, on the other hand, the creation of a government-owned health insurance company going to put a stop to all of the bad behavior of private insurance companies? Will the Obama administration’s efforts to extend health insurance to more people bring about the end of American civilization? Will they, on the other hand, save our society and economy from all of their problems?

No one problem is going to destroy this country, and no one government program is going to save us from all of our problems. Nor will the rejection of any one government program avert all foreseeable disasters. We have a multiplicity of problems, for which there are a multiplicity of solutions, some of which will raise new problems of their own.

War Games - A Review

Anvil, Christopher. War Games. Edited by Eric Flint. Riverdale, NY: Baen Books, 2008. 468 pages. $22.00.

War Games is a collection of stories with a theme, as indicated by the title. And yet, there are more motives here than just stories about war. The collection contains 18 stories, or, more precisely, a novel of about 200 pages and 17 shorter pieces, gathered into six sections. The dates of original publication range from April of 1957 to February of 1982, so even the newest story (“Top Line”) is more than a quarter-century old.

In my review of The Trouble With Aliens, I noted that Mr. Anvil’s fiction was influenced by the Cold War. The first three sections of this book also reveal the importance of that influence. The Peacekeepers’ Problems includes three stories, all with an ironic, or even a sardonic, bent. “Truce By Boomerang” reminds us that peacekeepers are most likely to be successful when they possess some effective means of sanctioning the other, more heavily-armed, parties. “A Rose By Any Other Name …” puts a twist on the old epistemological question of whether we can think about things we have no words for. “The New Member” is a humorous story, eschewing political correctness to lampoon the pretensions of some of the world’s newer countries.

There are four stories in the Washington’s Headaches group, of which “Babel II,” a fable (I think I’m using that word correctly) about the difficulties raised by overspecialization. As technology advances, could we reach the point that various specialist grouping would take on the significance of religious or ethnic groups? “The Trojan Bombardment” is a nice bit of farce. “Problem of Command” relates to some of the same problems raised by “Babel II.” When everything has become too sophisticated to be known, what is the right mix of technical knowledge and judgment to provide a level of understanding sufficient for control?

Moscow’s Dilemmas has the fine story “War Games,” in which the U.S. and the USSR manage to step back from the brink of war by going to … war. The other stories in the section are entertaining.

The Free Enterprise at Work section has four stories, of which “Top Line,” about technological innovation in the face of obsolescence and economic challenges is probably the best. “Gadget vs. Trend” is interesting, and Anvil has a good time making fun of academic views of real life.

The fifth and largest section has only two stories, “Ideological Defeat” and The Steel, the Mist, and the Blazing Sun, the latter of which was first published by Ace Books back in 1980. These are related stories, set in the same post-war (or is it?) world, in which the survivors in North America have been reduced to barbarism, while the remnants of the Soviet empire seem to have retained some of their sophisticated technology.

“Ideological Defeat” serves as an introduction to the novel The Steel, the Mist, and the Blazing Sun, bringing up the main characters, setting up the situation, and working through a conflict to reveal how this world operates. Arakal, the leader of the remnants of the old democratic regimes of North America is a well-drawn character, and the story revolves around his efforts to oppose a Russian invasion of his territory. The author is quite serious about the distinction he makes in the title between ideological defeats and other kinds of setbacks. Again, we see the Cold War influence at work in Anvil’s writing.

However, it is worth noting that “Ideological Defeat” was published in 1972, while The Steel, the Mist, and the Blazing Sun was issued eight years later. And while the novel embodies a confrontation between democratic and totalitarian principles, the purposes of the actors are not quite what you might expect them to be. Moreover, when the truth is revealed about the “war” that caused the destruction of both American and Soviet society, a considerable shift is required in one’s thinking about the roles of the characters one has met.

In fact, it might be fair to say that The Steel, the Mist, and the Blazing Sun is less about the opposition of “conservative” democracies and “radical” totalitarian states, and more about the totalitarians’ and democrats’ differing attitudes toward risk and innovation. Anvil is quite right that change, innovation, is inherently unsettling. This provokes two responses, which I might refer to as the defensive and the exploitative. In this novel, it is the rugged barbarians who see innovation as a means of solving some of their problems and, thus, something to seize upon, while the apparently more sophisticated servants of the security apparatus are actually playing the part of the French aristocracy in 1788.

The final section, Or Peace, has but a single story, “Philosopher’s Stone.” This is a very well-written story, very nicely set up around the problem of time dilation, which explores how a well-run state might encourage innovation. I was very pleased with this story, as it does a better job than many government programs at defining the right kind of incentives to stimulate the desired behavior.

Altogether, War Games is a most enjoyable reading experience. It includes some very good stories, and I was glad to see a book-length work by Christopher Anvil. I was beginning to wonder if he had every tried longer forms. Now I know he has tried the novel form, and that he was quite successful at it. A good collection that will repay the reader’s time and … well, I won’t say effort, because you won’t have to expend much to get through this collection.

Musicophilia - A Review

Sacks, Oliver. Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. New York and Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007. xiv + 381 pages. Acknowledgments. Bibliography. Index.

Oliver Sacks is a neurologist who has published many essays on his speciality. A number of these have been collected into books. I read and enjoyed The Man Who Mistook His Wife for His Hat some time ago. Musicophilia pulls together a number of essays with a common, rather broad theme: how the brain affects our hearing and enjoyment of music, and vice versa. It should be noted that Sacks doesn’t deal much in the normal brain, but rather with cases of abnormalities due to disease, trauma, genetic accident, or aging. These cases can be very useful at illuminating normal brain function by showing exactly what happens when something goes wrong.

So, what Sacks provides are case studies of patients with particular problems. Despite the almost mind-numbing number and variety of these cases, Sacks never loses his compassion for these people and their families. This books leaves one with the impression of a kind man who is often frustrated by his inability to help people. His joy at the occasions on which he is able to help, through music therapy or other means, is apparent.

The first story in the book is that of Tony Cicoria, a surgeon who was struck by lightning and acquired an “insatiable desire to listen to piano music.” Cicoria started listening to lots of recorded piano music, then he took up the piano after a hiatus of 30 years. While he has continued to practice as a surgeon, he has become a very accomplished pianist, as indicated by a public performance of Chopin’s B-flat Minor Scherzo, together with a piece of Cicoria’s own composition.

Clive Wearing suffered a herpes encephalitis that left him with a memory span measurable in seconds. This case, with some others Sacks mentions, brings up the very interesting distinction between “episodic” memory and “semantic” memory. Clive can carry on a conversation, or at least appear to do so, because he has in his semantic memory a little repertoire of conversation pieces. But he can remember nothing that happened five minutes ago, and has, in fact, the impression of constantly awaking from a state of unconsciousness.

Like several other people here, Clive remembers quite a bit of music. There is one case of a woman who practiced for days to sing at an event at her hospital, and when led up to sing commented that she wished she’d had some notice. She remembered the song perfectly, but she had no memory of the practice sessions, or even that she had been told of the event in advance.

All this with semantic memory reminds me of something I was told when learning French at the Foreign Service Institute: Learning to speak a language is a physical, not an intellectual, exercise. One can’t think about speaking and carry on a normal conversation. Rather, like a game of catch, a conversation is a series of transactions in which one party “tosses” something, and the other has to “catch” it and return it. This answers for me the question of how people can lose their memories almost completely, through Alzheimer’s or other diseases, strokes, or accidents, and yet they can still speak. I suppose that if I reach the point at which I am unable to recognize my children, I’ll still respond “Good morning, and how are you?” when they say “Hi, Dad.” And, in fact, if they were to say “Bonjour,” I’ll probably answer, “Bonjour.”

Another very interesting article has to do with Williams Syndrome, of which I had not heard until I read this book. Williams Syndrome was identified in the 1960s, and its possessors have, like those with Down Syndrome, a particular look. They also have IQ scores in the 40s and 50s, and their brains are about 20% smaller than those of the average person. Despite this, they are capable of learning complex musical arrangements, and they are eager to perform. One Williams Syndrome person, with an IQ of about 49, is a professional singer of opera and art songs. They are articulate and social, but their spatial relationships and drawing abilities are deficient.

Sacks is a good writer, and these are entertaining, sometimes fascinating stories. He seldom attempts to draw conclusions in the higher realms of epistemology or philosophy. About as far as he goes is to state that every mental condition he’s ever seen has a physical source. But that is very important for those concerned with dualism, the mind-body question, and questions of consciousness. Sacks provides me with many, many instances of how the brain not only provides a general substratum for mental processes, but how relatively minor, and very specific changes to the brain are followed by similarly specific changes to knowledge, skills, attitudes, memory, and perceptions.

(Note: I previously published this review on my Knight's Castle blog. I think Musicophilia has some rather interesting implications for the more philosophical bent of Cafe Third Edition.)

Where'd Everybody Go?

Here it is the 28th of January, 2009, and this is the first post to the Cafe Third Edition since December 30, 2008. Thirty dry days, people. I think it's time to make a little racket to find out if anyone is out there checking in on the blog from time to time.

I haven't been as busy as I'd like to have been over at my blog, Knight's Castle. (There's a link from here to there over on the right-hand margin.) I have only posted one item of substance in January: some thoughts on Obama's cabinet selections and what that portends for his administration. I have continued my "Knight's Reading List" series with the numbers for April and May 2008. Those were both pretty short, but June is a whopper, and I hope to publish that one before the end of the month.

I also started a new series of pieces to attract the addicted reader: Foreign Affairs Bestsellers. Those of you who don't subscribe to the premier magazine of American foreign policy and international affairs may not be aware that each bi-monthly issues contains a list the fifteen best-selling hardcover books in the field. There is some overlap from month to month, but new books do come onto the list as older ones fade away. I have published the lists from the January/February, the March/April, and the May June issues of Foreign Affairs. Somewhere in there I hid a link to the Foreign Affairs website, so that you can see the current list without waiting for me or the magazine.

Finally, I've decided to spread out into full-length book reviews. (That means about two pages in 12-point type.) I have published two so far, both on important aspects of the conflict between the West and the Islamic world. The first was Algeria: Anger of the Dispossessed, by Evans and Phillips (2007). The second was Faith, Reason, and the War Against Jihadism: A Call to Action, by George Weigel.

Y'all come by Knight's Castle and see what we're doin' over there. Comment on our posts. If you'd like to be a contributor, just let me know, and I'll set you up.

While you're thinking about blogging, make a contribution to Cafe Third Edition, too.