Finished Reading: “The Medieval Machine”

Posted on by Jordan

Heather and I spend the weekend entertaining some friends from Kansas City.

We had a great time, but the combination of gloomy fall weather and a general goal of taking it easy meant there aren’t really any stories to tell, nor are there any interesting pictures.

This gives me a great opportunity to lay out a few of my thoughts after reading The Medieval Machine.

It was a pleasant surprise to find how much I learned from this book. Often I find nonfiction a little harder to read. (have I ever mentioned my every-other rotation goal of fiction/nonfiction? It’s been tougher to maintain than I had hoped.) Having established that I enjoyed learning, I really wanted to argue with the author at every turn about his conclusions and implications.

I suppose a quick summary might be helpful. The book covers the major mechanization of the middle ages (also sometimes called the dark ages). As it turns out, that period was full of advancement and progress, mostly around water and wind power. Access to non-manual forms of energy are easy to take for granted, and the book was eye-opening as it described all the tasks powered by falling water, grinding wheat, crushing ore, and conditioning fabrics, to name a few.

Another aspect that quickly became apparent is how much freedom I take for granted. The book was full of examples where the person who built a new mill was able to force everyone in the region to use it. This compulsion went so far in one case that the local governor sent troops door-to-door confiscating hand mills by sword point, leaving the peasants no way to grind flour except to use the governor’s new mill.

My frustration with the author started in the introduction where he stated with great confidence that there were no innovations left to be had that could significantly impact the course of human progress, and we were doomed to a slow decline… so stated in the year 1970. I may have been so put off by the introduction that I imagined most of my remaining gripes, but I couldn’t help but feel like the author wasn’t sure everything he was describing was actually a good thing. As if he felt that saving millions of man hours grinding wheat was somehow a loss.

In the end, the book made me spend a lot of time thinking. Thinking about the massive wealth of infrastructure we have, thinking about the impact of virtually unlimited access to information regarding nearly anything, and just marveling at how we got here from there.

Given the amount of thought and reflection it generated I find myself willing to forgive most of my gripes and say the book was a good read… although not one I am likely to read again.

-Jordan

Phone Review

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It isn’t like we haven’t done things worthy of blogging about, but I decided I wanted to write down my thoughts on the new phone while it was still kind of new.

First off, what is it: Motorola Droid 2

Touch screen, with a slide-out physical keyboard.

More raw processing power than the computer I so proudly took with me to college 10 years ago. Has more storage space too.

As a phone it works as well as any other phone I have owned.

Beyond being a phone it is little portable computer, complete with internet, GPS and a camera. This let’s it do a lot of things, that don’t seem particularly novel to me right now, but would have been mind-blowing just a few years ago.

Speaking of the GPS and camera… The camera is quite good. Not quite as responsive as my point-and-shoot, making quick snapshots impossible. On the other hand, the quality is more or less on-par, and I always have it with me. Having a camera with you is one of the first steps to actually taking pictures! The GPS is more than functional, but in most applications requires that the screen be lit at the same time you are using it. Running both the screen and the GPS eats the battery in a shockingly short amount of time. This isn’t a limitation when using the phone as an in-car navigation device, as long as I packed a charger, but it means the phone isn’t going to provide constant aid in navigating an all-day hike. To put it bluntly I would guess the phone life when displaying a map and my position is between two and three hours. I did however discover in rare applications when you don’t need the screen on and only want passive monitoring the battery life is much better! Running a tracking tool for recording bike rides only drained about 10% of the battery life in around an hour and a half.

Hmm, so I didn’t even manage to describe all the features without some editorializing… something I have been fighting every time I thought about writing this post.

The problem is, I feel like I need to be using the phone all the time to make it seem like it’s worth it. I know that isn’t really true… but it’s kind of the thought floating around behind anything else I think about the phone. I imagine that will fade, and I can already tell you it would be hard to go back to my old phone (even if it were still working properly)

TL;DR: Great phone, can’t say I *needed* it, but it’s really useful now that I have it.

-Jordan

Quck Book Review, And Other Weekend Notes

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I finished “Pandora’s Star” and it’s sequel finally!

I thought a lot about how I would sum them up. I think my feelings are that it was good, but after plowing through a little over 2000 pages I wanted great! I feel a little unhappy with the author for making me plow through that much book for something that didn’t end up being amazing. I suppose maybe there are people who enjoy having a more substantial read, with well fleshed out supporting characters and tons of trivial sub-plots, but I just didn’t feel like the pay off was there.

If you are ever in the mood for an absolutely massive space-opera style read, I can loan them to you 🙂

Other news this week…

We actually made corn! I don’t know how the entire month of July slipped past without us stopping at a local stand to pickup some fresh corn, but I somehow it happened.

I am forming plans to get some tomatoes from the same stands and make BLTs, but Heather’s aversion to the smell of cooking bacon has been somewhat compounded by a tour of a hog packing plant. Not the most uplifting side of our food production chain I am afraid. The tomatoes should be in season for at least a month, so hopefully there is time for some of the traumatic memories to be repressed or something 🙂

-Jordan

Review: The Millionaire Next Door

Posted on by Jordan

As I mentioned in my initial multi-book review from summer vacation, I really liked this book.

What has started to become apparent to me as I have tried to tell people about it, is that they seem to start out expecting that I read some book about how to become a millionaire, or in some way convinced myself that I found the secret to getting rich.

That is in no way the case! This book is basically just a compilation of facts about people who have a net worth of over one million dollars. The authors provide some commentary, trying to explain why they think trends appeared, and in some cases offer advice.

If I were going to give a one sentence summary it would go like this: “This is the book to read once you are doing the Dave Ramsey thing, and want to start thinking about what the rest of your life looks like”

Again, I want to stress that this isn’t about “getting rich”!!

Basically what you start to realize is that the people who actually accumulate wealth are the people who don’t spend it! Living below their means, and working hard, are  two of the hallmarks of the people this book looked at. In no way do you leave with the impression that doing a few things will let you live in a huge house and have all the toys your heart desires. They are quite clear that most of the people living that way have no hope of sustaining it, ether spending everything they make, or being heavily subsidized by a parent or grandparent.

Like a lot of what you get from Dave Ramsey, nothing in the book is really outside of common sense, but it’s easy to get blinded by day to day life. I found this book so exciting to read, as just an encouragement that the plan Heather and I are pursuing really is where we want to be.

Probably the single biggest point thing I got out of the book, as far as things I can use today, was their information about houses and behavior. Basically, if you live in a “high-consumption” neighborhood, you will spend like the people around you. Apparently it is really hard to live conservatively when surrounded by people who aren’t. Considering there aren’t vast enclaves of budget  conscious people in most cities, the authors  recommended simply living in a house that cost no more than double your annual household income. Last year when Heather and I were looking for houses, I can assure you that the banks will be happy to loan you a lot more than that!

I cannot recommend this book enough if you are looking for encouragement to stick with a budget, or just sticking with a lifestyle that doesn’t have as many toys as the people around you. Outside of that I thought it was just interesting to have my perceptions rocked as to who in this nation actually has wealth as opposed to putting on a show of wealth.

-Jordan

Book Reviews

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As I mentioned in the vacation summary post, I read quite a few books that week.

I thought I could throw up some quick thoughts about them here.

The Lost Fleet Series:

The basic hook in these books remains the complications of communication over solar system sized distances, given the painfully slow speed of light. The rest of the story was ok, but probably wouldn’t have held my attention. It helps that the books are an easy read, of the six books in this saga, I read two of them in a single day (one day per book). Strong points of these books: deals with religion without being disrespectful. The author did invent a faith that is very much not along the lines of Judeo–Christian, but sci-fi books gain points with me just for treating faith with some respect. Another strong point is the author keeping the book inside a PG-13 rating. Some of the other books didn’t and I just don’t see a reason for that. In short, the books are a fun read, but nothing too deep.

The Millionaire Next Door:

This book was amazing! I plan to devote an entire post to it later. The quick summary: “If you want to get excited about saving and living a thrifty lifestyle, read this book!” The book is mostly just detailing things the authors have discovered from years of doing marketing research, but I found it really really interesting, and motivating.

Altered Carbon:

The book boils down to a kind of private-eye story, that incorporates a lot of “way out there” science fiction elements. The story had lots of conspiracy, and suspense… kept me pushing to finish for sure. I keep trying to cut the author some slack for just wanting to have a conflict between religion, and tradition against technology, but I felt like the book really beat up on the Catholic faith more than necessary. I know that the kinds of things they were doing in the book would cause some real conflicts for people and churches, namely the ability to move your contentiousness to another body, more or less at-will. It made for an interesting problem to wrestle with, but given how many other things were made up, I don’t see the point in calling out an existing church. That wasn’t a major element of the book it just annoyed me. I should also include a warning that the language is course, and the book includes both sex and torture scenes that were a little more graphic than I prefer to read. Despite all my complaints, I do plan to pick up the sequel to this eventually.

Black Hawk Down:

The book on which the movie is based. As you might expect, it goes into much more detail about the battle depicted in the movie. I was really shocked at how inexperienced the Rangers were in this book. A year or so ago, I read the book “The Unforgiving Minute” that goes into detail about one man’s path through West Point, Ranger school and then on to Afghanistan. What that book tried to explain, and Black Hawk Down did a better job of explaining, is that, as hard and good as the training provided to the army’s best is, nothing actually prepares you to get shot at. We now have 50 years of practice training special forces, and it still hasn’t changed the fact that “green” troops are going to make a lot of mistakes in their first battle.

The second thing that really stood out to me in the book is how vastly different the culture of Somalia is from ours. The book is full of examples of women and children gladly acting as shields for the tribal fighters. Pregnant women running through gunfire to bring more ammo up to the fighters in cover. Frankly the behavior seemed more alien than some of the stuff I was reading in my sci-fi books. I haven’t nailed down what I think about that, or how a we deal with that without going places nobody wants to be… I probably won’t write whatever conclusions I come up with here…

I thought it was a great book, and I guess I would say if you could handle the violence levels in the movie, and you want to spend some time thinking about the actual conflict, you should check it out.

-Jordan