Discusses semi- and fully-autonomous weapons, our experiences with them, and the debates about their degree of autonomy and the design of policies regarding them. The author is a Pentagon defense expert, who began as an Army Ranger and developed into a defense analyst.

The book is quite interesting. It was published in 2018, so given the advances in AI since then, it feels a little dated. But still much of interest. Could have been significantly shorter. But glad to have read.

Views: 1

March 2024

Book Group: The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heros who Created the Oxford English Dictionary, Sarah Olgilvie, 2023

A pleasant read. I can’t say it was deeply engaging, or that it gave me a new perspective on anything, but it was an interesting snapshot of a time and of the project to produce the OID; and it provided glimpses of the lives of those who contributed words and usage examples to the dictionary.

Views: 24

February 2024

Book Group: Medici Money: Banking, Metaphysics, and Art in Fifteenth Century Florence, Tim Parks, 2005.

My initial impression, after one chapter, is that it will be a pretty straightforward read – it is not clear to me if it will be anything other than a slightly-dramatized history of the Medici’s. Parks is not a historian, cites no references, and has a 4-page “Bibliographic Note” which makes it clear that he doesn’t think much of academics. All this does not make me optimistic.

Final impression: My initial impression was accurate, but I did learn some very general things.

• Most interesting was to understand how chaotic the Italian City States were at the time.
  • There were continual wars conducted by mercenary armies; citizens were taxed to support the wars, and some smaller towns were sometimes looted or ravished, but mostly the wars didn’t involve civilians
  • Many governments were nominally ‘elite republics’ that were governed by councils of members of powerful families, but in practice it appears that one family would typically be in power, and would uses a combination of nepotism and favoritism to stay in power.
  • Italy consisted of five power centers that were continually shifting alliances: Naples in the south, Rome farther north, and then Milan, Florence and Venice. When one would become dominant, a couple others would enter an alliance against ti.
• Also of interest was the way banks worked
  • While banks loaned money and effectively collected interest, that counted as usury and so they used various facades to avoid the appearance of usury
  • Banks also needed to participate in trading to create means of getting repayment for their investments
  • Bankers also, apparently because they were really concerned about their souls, cultivated close relationships with the catholic church to achieve absolution.
• As time went on
  • the Church became more and more corrupt, and became of less use as a way of allowing bankers to ‘purify’ themselves by association
    • bankers, in an effort to cultivate a high social status, made more and more loans to princes and others who could not be counted on to repay them in anything but social capital.
    • the generations of Medici morphed from
      (1) just bankers who kept a low social profile (e.g., Giovani),
      (2) bankers and behind-the-scenes political operators (e.g.,Cosimo);
      (3) primarily politicians and elite patrons with little compentence in banking (e.g., Lorenzo)

Views: 14

December 2023

*The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, David Greaerber and David Wengrow

My book group is reading this. While I find it overly polemical, and prone to rather sweeping statements about what is “commonly” believed, it has interesting material in it, and provokes some interesting perspective shifts. I looked at a couple of reviews, and one concluded by calling it “a glorious mess.” I’d say “interesting mess” is more apropos.

Here is an excerpt that captures a good bit of what I think is correct:

In short, there is simply no reason to assume that the adoption of agriculture in more remote periods also meant the inception of private land ownership, territoriality, or an irreversible departure from actual forager egalitarianism.[…]
It turns out the process was far messier, and far less unidirectional, than anyone had guessed; and so we have to consider a broader range of possibilities than once assumed.
[…]
Experts now identify between fifteen and twenty independent centres of domestication, many of which followed very different paths of development…

David Graeber & David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, p.251-252

At the same time, it feels to me like the authors have raised an army of straw men which they are chopping down one by one. It only seems accurate if we go back to the conception of history that I learned in grade school… now, and for the last many decades, I think they paint with far to broad a brush when depicting what most historians believe.

Here are some more impressions, mostly jotted down in passing as I read

Views: 11