Fraser Kinnear

Fraser Kinnear rated a book liked it Beyond Geometry: Classic Papers from Riemann to Einstein by Peter Pesic	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Pretty difficult going, in spite of the intended wider audience. The opening essay, written by Reimann himself, sets the stage, while most of the subsequent essays are just commentary on Reimann, until you reach the five essays by Einstein at the end ...more
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Fraser Kinnear rated a book liked it The Antichrist by Friedrich Nietzsche	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
What is good? - Whatever augments the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself, in man. What is evil? - Whatever springs from weakness. What is happiness? - The feeling that power increases-that resistance is overcome Power might have a negativ ...more
Jul 20, 2019 09:05AM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of The Antichrist by Friedrich Nietzsche. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — The Antichrist by Friedrich Nietzsche <iframe id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Fraser Kinnear is now following Silvio Curtis's reviews
Jul 19, 2019 10:10PM · like
Fraser Kinnear rated a book it was ok A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance: Portrait of an Age by William Manchester	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
What exactly was the thesis of this book? It's sort of a confusing wander through European history. My favorite chapters were the few early ones that indeed were about Midevil history and culture. Manchester paints a world nasty, brutish, and short, ...more
Jul 17, 2019 09:41PM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of A World Lit Only by Fire by William Manchester. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — A World Lit Only by Fire by William Manchester <iframe id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Fraser Kinnear rated a book really liked it The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Perhaps chalk this up to my not having read much non-fiction in past years, but I can't recall a more interesting character than Esther Greenwood. I guess Leopold Bloom? Compressed into this little book is a witty, accelerated coming-of-age story, fo ...more
Jul 17, 2019 09:06PM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath <iframe id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Fraser Kinnear rated a book really liked it Jesus Before the Gospels: How the Earliest Christians Remembered, Changed, and Invented Their Stories of the Savior by Bart D. Ehrman Read 4 times	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Bart Ehrman has published a ton of contrarian historical accounts of early Christinity. I remember listening several Teaching Company (now called Great Courses?) lectures by him when I was in high school. After reading Zealot, I was excited to learn ...more
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Fraser Kinnear rated a book liked it White by Bret Easton Ellis	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
The first few essays about his early career are kind of boring, but I enjoyed "Post Sex", "Liking", "Tweeting", and "Post Empire", which were all engaging, if not always convincing. "Post Sex" is paired film review of Moonlight and King Cobra that pa ...more
Jul 11, 2019 10:15PM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of White by Bret Easton Ellis. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — White by Bret Easton Ellis <iframe id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Fraser Kinnear rated a book liked it The Schoolhouse Gate: Public Education, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for the American Mind by Justin Driver	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
The conclusion offers a fantastic summary of the key trials discussed thoughout this book, and is worth quoting at length: Without the Supreme Court, public schools today could still require students to salute the American flag or otherwise face expul ...more
Jul 10, 2019 09:54PM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of The Schoolhouse Gate by Justin Driver. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — The Schoolhouse Gate by Justin Driver <iframe id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Fraser Kinnear rated a book really liked it The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement by Eliyahu M. Goldratt Read 2 times	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Yes, it’s a cheesy cover. Yes, it’s a cheesy story. Yes, it’s virtually useless for anyone who doesn’t work in manufacturing. But I do, and this is now probably my favorite business book. Goldratt is ascribing to the Socratic method of teaching, allow ...more
Jul 09, 2019 10:13PM · like · see review
Fraser Kinnear rated a book liked it Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water by Marc Reisner	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
This took several months of intermittent reading to get to, which works because each chapter mostly stands alone. There’s also a fantastic post-script that was written in 2017, as Trump was entering into office and putting into question much of the e ...more
Jul 07, 2019 06:49PM · like · see review

Fraser Kinnear rated a book liked it

Beyond Geometry: Classic Papers from Riemann to Einstein
by Peter Pesic

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Pretty difficult going, in spite of the intended wider audience. The opening essay, written by Reimann himself, sets the stage, while most of the subsequent essays are just commentary on Reimann, until you reach the five essays by Einstein at the end Pretty difficult going, in spite of the intended wider audience. The opening essay, written by Reimann himself, sets the stage, while most of the subsequent essays are just commentary on Reimann, until you reach the five essays by Einstein at the end. The Helmholtz essay was probably the most approachable, and really fun as he delved into some cool "Flatland" type ideas of life in a finite closed universe.

Einstein's essays make the book, however, and the collection can be viewed in one way as laying the groundwork for the geometrical leap that Einstein relied upon for his theories of relativity. One core idea is that of the rigid body, and how it was first upended by Riemannian geometry and later proven not to exist in the material world by Einstein's Relativity theories. In fact, Einstein credits Reimann's discovery as empowering his own about SR & GR, as those tools were necessary for reconciling the invariant speed of light that comes out of Maxwell's equations with a geometry of spacetime.

Reimann himself makes some observations that come tantalizingly close to Einstein's great discovery. At the end of his essay, he speculates that forces (e.g., gravity) might have an impact on geometry in the real world:

... in a discrete manifold the principle of metric relations is already contained in the concept of the manifold, but in a continuous one it must come from something else. Therefore, either the reality underlying space must form a discrete manifold, or the basis for the metric relations must be sought outside it, in binding forces acting upon it.

Do we live in a discrete manifold or a continuous one? Reimann's earlier remarks opened the door to the possibility that our universe is discrete, and I wish this book was paired with some more contemporary essays, such as one about Planck length, which I take to be the funamental unit of measure for a discrete manifold-type universe.

I really wish I had read this book closer to when I had read Einstein's own book about GR & SR, as they pair nicely. However, there's still a lot I feel like I left on the table here. This book deserves another read one day. ...more

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The Antichrist
by Friedrich Nietzsche

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What is good? - Whatever augments the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself, in man.
What is evil? - Whatever springs from weakness.
What is happiness? - The feeling that power increases-that resistance is overcome

Power might have a negativ

What is good? - Whatever augments the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself, in man.
What is evil? - Whatever springs from weakness.
What is happiness? - The feeling that power increases-that resistance is overcome

Power might have a negative connotation, but if you replace "power" with "freedom", I think this quote resonates with a lot of folks. And power is indeed a means of exercising freedom of will.

But the problem of conflicting wills - or conflicting power - never disappears, and is why Nietzsche's polemics never get back on the rails for me. As Alasdair MacIntyre puts it in "After Virtue", that when Nietzsche gets to writing a positive version of his new morality, he "becomes cloudy and opaque, and metaphorical asertion replaces argument... [and is] at [his] philosophy most powerful and cogent in the negative part of [his] critique."

All of that said, there's some interesting negative criticisms to be had, if only to engage with them. For example, Nietzsche argues Christianity's focus on pity (some may rebrand it as compassion) is damaging to our psyche. "Through pity that drain upon strength which suffering works is multiplied a thousandfold. Suffering is made contagious by pity... Pity thwarts the whole law of evolution, which is the law of natural selection. It preserves whatever is ripe for destruction..." This is, I suppose an uber-libertarian, tough-love, Ayn Randian perspective of the world. I think Nietzsche is arguing that Christianity is too far in the direction of pity, and you see this logical conclusion reached by Tolstoy in "What I Believe".

The god that Nietzsche pines for is one created by a society to justify its own collective success. "He who is rich will give of his riches; a proud people need a god to whom they can make sacrifices...Religion, within these limits, is a form of gratitude." This is the god of the Old Testament (at least the early Tanakh, since that god's power erodes over time, in parallel with the Jewish nation's wane), as well as the Roman / Hellenical dieties. But isn't this also the modern (at least American) Christian god? It is at least the fringe "Prosperity Gospel" flavor of Christianity.

Sprinkled throughout are comparisons between Christianity and Buddhism. While both advocate for passivity, Nietzsche prefers Buddhism because it does not assign any kind of morality to mankind's inevitable, wretched suffering, simply positing that life is suffering in its Four Noble Truths. Buddhism, therefore, is "beyond good and evil". However, Nietzsche doesn't ever address Buddhism's proposed solution - to disassociate from the material world of desire. Once again, I'm not sure how he sqares this example to his goal for man to exercise his will to power.

Nietzsche touches on his ressentiment morality, but leaves most of the heavy lifting with his earlier "Genealogy of Morals", which I've not yet read, but I suppose would have been a better choice than this one.

There's a bit of historical theorizing done about early Christianity, mostly blaming Paul for the direction Christianity took from the historical Jesus's message. This is the same theory that electrified me in "Zealot", that was somewhat tempered for me by Bart Ehrman. Nietzsche polemicizes the idea, writing exciting lines like "...at the bottom there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross." It's interesting to see the historical lineage of this idea tracing back over 120 years ago, but isn't really detailed enough to do the theory (and countertheories) justice.

One last interesting point is a direct criticism of Jesus's martyrdom:

Even to this day the crude fact of persecution is enough to give an honourable name to the most empty sort of sectarianism.-But why? Is the worth of a cause altered by the fact that some one had laid down his life for it? - An error that becomes honourable is simply an error that has acquired one seductive charm the more: do you suppose, Messrs. Theologians, that we shall give you the chance to be martyred for your lies? ...This was precisely the world-historical stupidity of all the persecutors: that they gave the appearance of honour to the cause they opposed - taht they made it a present of the fascination of martyrdom...Is the cross, then, an argument? - But abut all these things there is one, and one only, who has said what has been needed for thousands of years - Zarathustra.
...But blood is the worst of all testimonies to the truth; blood poisoneth even the purest teaching and turneth it into madness and hatred in the heart.

Is the alternative, then, to not admire martyrs because they were weak to have been killed? I would be surprised to learn of any culture that would agree with Nietzsche on this point. It honestly sounds like that Trump ad-lib insulting John McCain, saying he preferred war heroes that didn't get captured. ...more

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A World Lit Only by Fire by William Manchester

A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance: Portrait of an Age
by William Manchester

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What exactly was the thesis of this book? It's sort of a confusing wander through European history.

My favorite chapters were the few early ones that indeed were about Midevil history and culture. Manchester paints a world nasty, brutish, and short, ...more

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The Bell Jar
by Sylvia Plath

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Perhaps chalk this up to my not having read much non-fiction in past years, but I can't recall a more interesting character than Esther Greenwood. I guess Leopold Bloom? Compressed into this little book is a witty, accelerated coming-of-age story, fo Perhaps chalk this up to my not having read much non-fiction in past years, but I can't recall a more interesting character than Esther Greenwood. I guess Leopold Bloom? Compressed into this little book is a witty, accelerated coming-of-age story, followed quickly by a tragic, terrifying descent.

Esther spends the first half of The Bell Jar gadding about Manhattan, and we're treated to hilarious characterization of the other girls and NYC denizens. You've met people like Esther before - she's quiet, intelligent, introverted, and judgmental. Happy to let others fill the void of conversation, while you wonder what kind of internal monologue they're having. In the case of Esther, it's frequently a bigoted one. Throughout the book, Esther casts a disparaging, WASPy gaze over Asian women, black men, Eastern Europeans, and Catholics. She is materialistic ("it was only after seeing Erwin's study that I decided to seduce him"), ambitious, and jealous.

But we forgive Esther, and not simply because she's so much fun to read - she ultimately becomes a sympathetic character. Esther's tragic turn in the latter half of the book reflects a problem that our culture even today has yet to completely overcome. Despite having enormous potential, and probably thanks in part to some undiagnosed predisposition to mental illness, Esther balks at the limited opportunities her gender allows her in the patriarchial mid-century America, and she has a nervous breakdown.

Does 'The Bell Jar' have a dark ending? On first blush, the book concludes on a hopeful note. Esther is going to be released from the clinic and return to society. But return to what? She is healed, but the problem of her ultimate future remains. I'm reminded of "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest", where we're lead to believe that Chief has returned to the asylum after breaking free at the end of the novel.

Can Esther find a way to self-actualization? It's understandable that one would construe Plath's suicide as informing her "intended" direction of the book, but I think this is unfair. Plath chose to end the book where she did for a reason: so we can dwell on many diverging paths Esther may take. Succumb to societal norms with some idiot like Buddy; follow Ms. Cee's ambitious career path; descend back into madness; or carve out a new bohemian direction, for which a mentor is notably absent? All questions any reader may be asking herself about their own life. ...more

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Jesus Before the Gospels by Bart D. Ehrman

Jesus Before the Gospels: How the Earliest Christians Remembered, Changed, and Invented Their Stories of the Savior
by Bart D. Ehrman

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Bart Ehrman has published a ton of contrarian historical accounts of early Christinity. I remember listening several Teaching Company (now called Great Courses?) lectures by him when I was in high school. After reading Zealot, I was excited to learn Bart Ehrman has published a ton of contrarian historical accounts of early Christinity. I remember listening several Teaching Company (now called Great Courses?) lectures by him when I was in high school. After reading Zealot, I was excited to learn Ehrman wrote a book covering much of the same subject matter.

Ehrman actually directly addresses (and validates) Reza Aslan's book, and puts it into context. Aslan doesn't credit them, but the Zealot historical interpretation of Jesus was actually first published (posthumasly) in the 1770's by Hermann Reimarus. And actually, much of Reimarus's scholarship has been since discredited (Ehrman, for example, doubts the violent revolutarionary interpretation that Aslan picks up).

Ehrman goes on to make a broader point, one about history in general. Any narrative about Jesus provided by a historian is going to be told through the lens of that historian's culture and belifs. Aslan wants to provide a story of Jesus the revolutionary, but Ehrman also points out narratives of Jesus in the past few decades through various lenses, including political conservativism (e.g., Bill O'Reilly's book argues Jesus was fighting big government and taxation of Rome), anti-materialism, feminism, an apocolyptic lens (likely stemming from Cold War fears), and a materialism. The irony here is I think this point Ehrman is making was first developed by Derrida, and is known as deconstruction.

Ehrman wants to explain more than just historian narratives of the New Testament. He also leverages cognitive psychology, anthropology, and sociology to explain how and why the New Testament has so many internal contradictions. Ehrman draws from past scholarship to explain how individual persons' false memory, group memories, biased recollection, and loads of other empirically dubious human means of collecting and relaying data breaks down.

The book is made up of dozens of examples, big and small, to illustrate his points. It makes for fascinating story telling, even though it isn't wrapped up into a neat, single contrarian thread about Jesus. That's kind of the point - we're never going to have one consistent "True" narrative, just hodge-podge of ideas that can be organized into more- and less- likely to be historically possible.

It all sounds rather obvious with any degree of thought, but is gratifying to hear a biblical scholar provide countless Biblical examples of stories transforming as they are passed orally from one place to the next over the years, prior to things getting written down.

The most important scholarship that Ehrman references was Form Criticism. This was a kind of scholarship that broke the Bible into template "Form" stories, and compared and contrasted them across the books to better understand how they were written, and which ones likely came first. Here's a nice summary how how this scholarship eventually gets used:

And so, for example, in what context would stories [in the early church in the decades prior to the gospels being written down] emerge about Jesus's conflicts with the Pharises, ending in a clever one-liner? Probably in a context where the Christians themselves were being thretened by non-Christian Jews over their refusal, for example, to keep the Jewish laws of sabbath. Since such stories show how Jesus bested the Pharises on such issues, they would provide a sanction for the behavior of Christians decades later. Or in what context would stories of Jesus healing the sick or raising the dead emerge? Probably in contexts where Christians were trying to prove to outsiders that Jesus was the son of god, who had come in fulfillment of the propheses of the healing power of the coming Messiah. These stories, otherwords, are not so much about Jesus as they are about the community that was telling the stories

I suppose this book wasn't as successful as Aslan's book because Ehrman is taking a much more sober approach to his project. Ehrman is not providing one grand, contrarian, hidden, Da Vinci Code theory of who Jesus was, which was how Aslan portrayed Jesus. Instead, Ehrman wants to explain how messy and multifarious history is, and what it means to one's interpretation of who Jesus was. ...more

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White
by Bret Easton Ellis

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The first few essays about his early career are kind of boring, but I enjoyed "Post Sex", "Liking", "Tweeting", and "Post Empire", which were all engaging, if not always convincing.

"Post Sex" is paired film review of Moonlight and King Cobra that pa The first few essays about his early career are kind of boring, but I enjoyed "Post Sex", "Liking", "Tweeting", and "Post Empire", which were all engaging, if not always convincing.

"Post Sex" is paired film review of Moonlight and King Cobra that passes judgment on gay representation in film and the contamination of virtue signaling on art appreciation. Ellis argues that Moonlight is not a good film on its merits, and its success is largely thanks to a political bias charging our culture. "Your white approval of 'Moonlight' was supposed to make you feel virtuous. And while it's nice to feel virtuous, it's worth considering whether feeling virtuous and being virtuous and being virtuous are actually the same thing." I've not seen Moonlight, so can't make a judgment on its merits as a film, although Ellis's detailed critique of the actual film all sounded fair enough. But is his point above valid? Isn't celebrating the creative accomplishments of previously suppressed voices a virtuous act, if only to empower and enfranchise future artists of similar background? This "affirmative action" of the arts debate has played out for at least a half century - see the fracas over Harold Bloom's School of Resentment. Aesthetic merit is such a subjective measure, I don't know how this conservative position really has much ground to stand on. If we grant Moonlight as not being a well "crafted" work of art, doesn't it still hold artistic merit in terms of sparking this very debate?

The essay hosts a follow-on, and more contemporary complaint: "... this is an age that judges everybody so harshly through the lens of identity politics, that if you resist the threatening groupthink of progressive ideology, which proposes universal inclusivity except for those who dare to ask any questions, you're somehow fucked." This is not unlike the messaging around the Intellectual Dark Web. Ellis returns to this complaint frequently, and argues that we should toughen up, that life is absurd and unfair. That the worst thing and scariest thing to happen is when anyone's voice is shut down, including controversial ones like his own. "Sometimes, one's identity is the punch line. Laugh at everything or you'll end up laughing at nothing. As a young writer in Ireland, James Joyce realized 'I have come to the conclusion that I cannot write without offending people."

The problem is, Ellis always conflates the content of the demands that today's progressive movements make on his attention with the mood and the manner in which they make those demands. This is how we end up with Ellis complaining about the "aesthetics" of the Black Lives Matter movement, or his frustration with his more "shrill" progressive friends, who are terminating their decades-long friendship with him over his opinions. If BLM's message is that blacks are frustrated with the constant threat of state-inflicted physical violence and want change, Ellis's attention turns to - what? The condescending or aggressive or impolite or unlettered or abbreviated tone of the complaint? Would a different tone change his mind on the matter? I'm left with more questions than answers, but his sentiment is not unusual in our country today.

If the Marxist perspective of power dynamics and clashing interests holds any water today, it's that there is a clear scarcity of cultural attention that everyone is jockeying for. In "Post Sex", Ellis is frustrated with the inroads minority voices are making into our cultural attention when he deems their work not up to par. In "Tweeting", it's the signal/noise problem of too many voices with too limited a tableau for discourse:

...it seems that everyone has fallen under the thrall of this dea that we're all writers and dramatists now, that each of us has a special voice and something very important to say, usually about a feeling we have, and all this gets expressed in the black maw of social media billions of times a day. Usually this feeling is outrage, because outrage gets attention, outrage gets clicks, outrage can make your voice heard above the deafening din of voices squalling over one another in this nightmarish new culture - and the outrage is often tied to a lunacy demanding human perfection, spotless citizens, clean and likeable comrades, and requiring thousands of apologies daily. Advocating while creating your own drama and your brand is where the game is now. And if you don't follow the new corporate rules accordingly you are banished, exiled, erased from history.

Artists have always had patrons and therefore have always feared censorship. Now, this power dynamic has played out across the wider culture, as we all become creators who curate ourselves. We're all still getting used to this uncomfortable set of circumstances.

I'm surprised that I most enjoyed "Post Empire", where Ellis provides a contrarian interpretation of the Charlie Sheen meltdown a few years ago. Sheen comes off as something of a tragic hero:

For Sheen to trudge through a sitcom he knew was awful in order to make the big bucks ($1.8 million per episode) had to itself be a kind of princely nightmare. It wasn't as if he was plyaing Don Draper, or even Jack Donaghy from 30 Rock. He was playing an unamusing and watered-down version of Charlie Sheen, and that must have sucked. Performing those scenes and delivering those one-liners week after week after week probably would have sent anyone racing off for drugs and alcohol and hookers

The most fun comes from Ellis tying Sheen to his Patrick Bateman character and Donald Trump, all of whom command attention because of their Dionysian freedom in our Apollonian culture:

Sheen was blowing open the myth that men would outgrow the adolescent pursuit of pleasure, because flickers of that dream would never go out. Even if you were married and had terrific kids, the dream of living without fake rules and responsibilities, of rejecting the notion of becoming an idea, a clean and spotless comrade enthralled by groupthink, the dream of being an individual and not just part of some tribe would always survive. Charlie Sheen was the new reality, and anyone who was a hater now had to hang out with the rest of the collective in Empire's graveyard.

...more

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The Schoolhouse Gate: Public Education, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for the American Mind
by Justin Driver

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The conclusion offers a fantastic summary of the key trials discussed thoughout this book, and is worth quoting at length:

Without the Supreme Court, public schools today could still require students to salute the American flag or otherwise face expul

The conclusion offers a fantastic summary of the key trials discussed thoughout this book, and is worth quoting at length:

Without the Supreme Court, public schools today could still require students to salute the American flag or otherwise face expulsion, a practice that West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette invalidated in 1943. Without the Supreme Court, public schools today could still rely upon explicit state authority to prohibit all racial minorities from attending school with white students, a practice that Brown v. Board of Education invalidated in 1954. Without the Supreme Court, public schools today could still routinely permit teachers to lead students in prayers and Bible-reading exercises, practices that Engel v. Vitale and Abington School District v. Schempp invalidated in the early 1960s. Without the Supreme Court, public schools today could stil preemptively prohibit students from displaying symbols to express controversial ideas to their classmates, a practice that Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District invalidated in 1969. Without the Supreme Court, public schools today could still suspend or expel students without affording them even a brief hearing, a practice that Goss v Lopez invalidated in 1975. Without the Supreme Court, public schools today could still display the Ten Commandments on classroom walls, a practice that Stone v Graham invalidated in 1980. Without the Supreme Court, public schools today could still prohibit unauthorized immagrants from receiving a tuition-free education, a practice that Plyler v Doe invalidated in 1982. Without the Supreme Court, public schools today could still openly embargo books from their library shelves, because of the provocative ideas they contain, a practice that Island Trees School District v Pico cast grave doubt upon in 1982.

Driver argues that some of these decisions, like Brown and Tinker have been the victim of steady erosion since the more conservative courts rose in the 1980s, and he tracks their mixed success.

It all makes for interesting American history, but I was surprised by how many of these cases boil down to the same themes, which we see play out in our broader politics today. Conservative voices argue for local control and complain of judicial overreach, while the progressive voices that won all of the above cases argue for Federal enforcement of civil rights, as conceived in our constitution. Occasionaly, one sees civil right arguments made on both sides. ...more

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The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement
by Eliyahu M. Goldratt

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Yes, it’s a cheesy cover. Yes, it’s a cheesy story. Yes, it’s virtually useless for anyone who doesn’t work in manufacturing. But I do, and this is now probably my favorite business book.

Goldratt is ascribing to the Socratic method of teaching, allow Yes, it’s a cheesy cover. Yes, it’s a cheesy story. Yes, it’s virtually useless for anyone who doesn’t work in manufacturing. But I do, and this is now probably my favorite business book.

Goldratt is ascribing to the Socratic method of teaching, allowing his characters to discover the lessons he wants to convey through trial and error. He’s actually somewhat more creative in doing so than Plato, as many of Goldratt’s characters’ discoveries are made organically in the context of the story than Plato allowed in his texts. Compare Goldratt’s protagonist discovering the value of resource synchronization and bottleneck spotting via a weekend hike with his son’s scout troop vs Plato’s Republic’s frame story of Socrates walking home from the Piraeus, chatting with folks. This form of engagement with the ideas is a step past dry lectures, towards the best form of learning – in the field and away from a book.

Methodology aside, the underlying theory being taught, called Theory of Constraints was exciting and oftentimes novel to my work experience in aerospace.

“The Goal” ends up being defined as: only make changes to a system that simultaneously maximizes throughput while minimizing inventory and operational expense. This means changes that only do one of the three ends up breaking something. Examples provided include keeping idle resources busy with new materials (raising inventory but not improving throughput) or investing in automation in non-bottleneck resources (raising opex and/or inventory, but not improving throughput), or laying off areas with excess capacity (improving opex but not improving throughput and making your system more fragile).

Goldratt has some interesting definitions for throughput, inventory, and opex:
“Throughput is the rate at which system generates money through sales” – this as opposed to completion of finished goods, as the market should be perceived as a constraint and potential bottleneck as well
“Inventory is all the money that the system has invested in purchasing things which it intends to sell” –crucially, Goldratt does not bother with accounting for internal value add (labor + burden) to inventory, which is not GAAP accounting but helps simplify analysis
“Operational expense is all the money the system spends in order to turn inventory into throughput”
As one character describes: Throughput is money coming in, inventory is money inside the system, and opex is the money they pay out to make throughput happen.

Probably the more valuable ideas come Goldratt’s formulations around improving the Goal. A key idea here is planning the factory around bottleneck resources, which are defined as any resource whose capacity is less than the demand place on it. Goldratt’s advice is to make flow through the bottleneck equal to the demand from the market. All non-bottleneck resources upstream (which Goldratt calls Capacity Constraint Resources) should follow the pace of the bottleneck, otherwise they will build up too much WIP, which goes against the Goal.

Because bottlenecks constrain final output, improvements to non-bottlenecks have no inherent value to improving overall throughput. Put another way, an hour wasted at a bottleneck is an hour wasted for the whole plant, which makes improving throughput at a bottleneck very valuable. Put another way, don’t push any work into a bottleneck that is likely to be scrapped, or could be routed elsewhere to reduce demand on that resource. Even reversing improvements to other resources can be justified if they mean improving throughput at a bottleneck.

Goldratt has some contrarian views about resource utilization as well. Arguably, idle time at non-bottleneck resources is acceptable if they are pacing with a bottleneck that they feed. As Goldratt puts it, “activating a resource and utilizing a resource is not synonymous. Utilizing the resource is using it towards the Goal.” Reducing idle time for employees (keeping them busy) doesn’t “save” money, as they’re still on payroll, but does tie up more capital in WIP as materials are pushed for them to work on, and work starts piling up at bottlenecks. While this point can be overstated, what’s important here is to recognize that low utilization can be acceptable while a factory is in transition to a balanced flow.

Setting pace to bottlenecks also helps simplify factory scheduling. Bottlenecks are easy to forecast because you’ve worked hard to define their queue. If you can estimate the lead time of parts passing through the system up until the bottleneck, then you know when to release materials. You can also forward schedule the bottlenecked work to final assembly and then backward schedule all of the material paths for non-bottleneck parts for their material release.

Goldratt also spends some time in discussing how new bottlenecks are identified, through study of “buffers” – tracing part shortages at known bottlenecks and assembly resources back to the slow upstream resource. ...more

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Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water
by Marc Reisner

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This took several months of intermittent reading to get to, which works because each chapter mostly stands alone. There’s also a fantastic post-script that was written in 2017, as Trump was entering into office and putting into question much of the e ...more