"Honorable mention: The Grid, by Gretchen Bakke. This book, about our aging electrical grid, fits in one of my favorite genres: “Books About Mundane Stuff That Are Actually Fascinating.” "
The author of this book was on NPR/Fresh Air in August. It was a great listen/read if you are interested in the subject.
I heard it a couple of days after a weather related power cut and ended up in the rabbit hole of the risk from cyber warfare/terrorism and solar flares. I'm not sure I would recommend that rabbit hole if you have any concerns about the reliance of society on technology and just in time shipping!
> I find this topic fascinating is because my first job, in high school, was writing software for the entity that controls the power grid in the Northwest
I wonder if somewhere in bowels of a northwest utility company there is a machine silently chugging away, running code written by a teenage Bill Gates, helping deliver electricity to the masses.
> My first job—other than being a page in Congress, which isn’t a real job—was doing a computer-software project for Bonneville Power Administration, which is a quasi-governmental entity that controls the power grid in the Northwest. We were computerizing the power grid. And the company that BPA had contracted with, TRW, was behind, so the people there scoured the country to see who really knew how to do a certain type of programming, and they found me, because I was sort of infamous as a boy wonder of a certain type of programming.
I've meet plenty of engineers at BPA. They do everything from generation, transmission, distribution, SCADA, AGC, and monitoring Hydro dams alongside the army corps. I'm really curious what he was doing, but I'm guessing he did a little bit in a very narrow section. I flipped through this book recently and wasn't very impressed to be honest.
This surprised me. Microsoft was started in the mid-70s. I'm in my early 30s and wasn't aware software was getting used in business much until the late 70s/early 80s.
I guess there were mainframes and not minicomputers? Still, surprising a high school kid would get a coding job in the early 70s.
Bill Gates went to an affluent high school that was one of a handful to have a computer students could use, as well as a computer club, this was in the late 60s I believe.
In Paul Allen's (auto?)biography he mentions that it was a group of mothers from the school that paid for the computer (or maybe the teletype terminal). I might be getting details mixed up, it's been a while since I've read his book.
As I remember it it was a teletype. In the same autobio, somewhat later, Allen and Gates got to learn from Steve Russell (of Spacewar) at his local company which I think might've had its own DEC mini. It's been a long time for me too since I read it.
Whoever isn't fascinated by the modern power grid is slightly dead inside. The same applies to a ton of other "mundane" things, like road and rail networks, sewage systems, garbage disposal and recycling, and so on.
>Whoever isn't fascinated by the modern power grid is slightly dead inside. The same applies to a ton of other "mundane" things, like road and rail networks, sewage systems, garbage disposal and recycling, and so on.
I feel like the vast majority of people have absolutely no interest in learning about these things, even in a calamitous context.
Definitely, but how does that relate to the power grid being a mundane system?
Are you saying that we're supposed to take the word of the majority when deciding if something is "mundane"? In that case, almost everything we're discussing and upvoting here on HN is "mundane", because <90% (just a guess) of humans actually give a shit.
I think it's perfectly fine. "Mundane" means "commonplace", "everyday"; it's an antonym of "exotic".
Some people use it in a slightly derogatory fashion because, unlike you, they don't appreciate the complexity and ingenuity of many mundane things. Which is a shame, but I think sadly inevitable, as many (most?) are designed to be unobtrusive; the only time you should notice a sewage system, say, is when it goes wrong.
Agreed: nobody is interested in everything. If someone was talking about the 19th century Slovakian art movement, I'd probably zone out.
But there are some complex systems that form the basis of civilization that just cannot be simply dismissed as "mundane", at least in my opinion. Systems that, without their presence and correct end-to-end operation, would result in absolute collapse of civilization. Systems that have been developed and perfected through the work of countless scientists, engineers, and laborers over the span of decades.
The power grid falls into this category, while the aforementioned 19th century movement does not.
Of course, I'm probably not aware of all such systems, and I'd definitely be delighted when someone points one out. Heck, I only learned about the complexity of HDTV standards throughout history on a HN thread today! It does not fall under the category I noted above, but I still found it deeply interesting.
I am interested in everything - even 19th century Slovakian art movements.
I love talking to people who are interested in anything other than themselves - it really doesn't matter what as long as they are interested in something enough to have learnt and thought about the topic in some depth.
The real shame is so few people are interested in anything at all.
Honestly, that's an awesome attitude to have, as people nowadays have a much shorter attention span (myself included!).
And yes, I agree: it's getting harder and harder to hold a deep conversation with someone on a technical topic, even in a professional setting. Or perhaps I'm just not looking correctly?
It is really hard to get people to open up about their interests. People with interests are so used to being shut down by other people "yeah that is interesting now let's talk more about me" that you need to slowly coax them out. The best way is to listen intently and ask probing questions to draw them out. Once they feel safe you will have some amazing conversations.
Just watch out for the bores that will just parrot whatever they heard on FOX/CNN last night.
I am the same way. Sometimes, when I hear someone get excited/interested about something I know a lot about, I try and shut up and just listen to them talk about it. It is really a great experience.
Would you put wheel design/construction in the "mundane" category? That has similar characteristics, I think, except for the scale and coordination required.
I think I disagree that those characteristics necessitate interest. People can consider the fact that the electric grid is an awesome accomplishment, while also having no care for understanding its history or inner workings.
I'd probably go for automobile manufacturing instead, since (modern) wheel design is a subset of that; i.e., without vehicles, we wouldn't really need advanced tire technology.
That's true. I just feel that a better term could be used, since "mundane" makes it seem like the thing you're talking about is "no big deal". It just feels wrong to use it on something like the power grid.
> The same applies to a ton of other "mundane" things, like road and rail networks, sewage systems,
One of my still-on-the-shelf projects is to photograph, geo-locate and categorize all the manholes from my city that have been installed prior to WW2 in order to document how the city evolved over time (surprisingly enough my city still has manholes from the early 1900s), because a city with no working sewage system cannot be called a "city".
I live in Kyiv, Ukraine. I know a guy here who's hobby is exploring the old underground tunnels – sewage, overflow channels, catacombs. He's making a map of these because there's currently no official complete map. He often finds places there in a very alarming state – like, about to collapse and create a huge hole in the ground – and reports this to muni service so they can fix it and prevent a disaster.
Check with the city first - in the US they often have a management program due to the need to inspect manholes. Depending upon how advanced they are they may even have georeferenced photos and age information.
That's only because those with contempt for the mundane hold sway on the connotation of the word, essentially "of the world", and therefore quite rightly more fascinating than any of the airy fairy arty farty nonsense favoured by those higher ups.
Here's one that may fit into your list of must read books.
Twinkie, Deconstructed by Steve Ettlinger. This book is about the ingredients that go into a Twinkie and how they are created. Super informative on the ingredients of everyday foods.
Coming from the other end, is Christien Meindertsm's PIG 05049
Christien Meindertsma has spent three years researching all the
products made from a single pig. Amongst some of the more
unexpected results were: Ammunition, medicine, photo paper,
heart valves, brakes, chewing gum, porcelain, cosmetics, cigarettes,
conditioner and even bio diesel.
Does anybody know a better book about the subject (covering the history of the development of the grid, but also being technically correct)?
According to the Amazon customers, the mentioned book was written by a non-technical person (actually, I've checked, a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology) and was apparently also without the careful editor. Alternatively, if somebody has read this book, maybe he can say that it's not that bad? I wouldn't like to buy it just to discover it's written like this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13103538
I really like the way he limits his list to 4 books. Most other thought leaders/influencers/CEOs do lists of 10, 20 "hot topic" books that you know they probably haven't read. I find the volume also diminishes the individual importance of each book on the list.
I'll have to pick up String Theory (I love that Bill Gates reads DFW) and The Grid per his recommendations.
It was pretty clear he didn't (or even hardly ever) watched the movies whose stars came on his show. It definitely seemed that, in the case of authors, he generally had a more personal grasp of the book.
I wonder if in some cases his producers would give him "cliff's notes" for the books.
I suspect he reads some of the books but ultimately that's why he has producers to make sure he looks good. I'm sure he has read many of them and the producers read the books he has not.
> He doesn’t spare himself, though. “I have a habit, which I don’t recommend, of finishing essentially every book I start,” he said. “And if I disagree with a book I spend lots of time writing notes in the margins. Perversely, this means that the more I dislike a book, the longer I spend reading it.”
I don't know for sure, of course, since I don't know him - but, from all the interviews I've seen of him where the conversations were variable and unscripted, he has a very broad but also deep knowledge. I'm convinced that he's a voracious reader.
On a tangential note:
Over the years, many people have asked me how I know so many things... and I always give them the same answer: because I wanted to, so I put time into making it be that way. That's it.
While I feel that I should recognise that being reasonably gifted has likely benefited me here, there are _many_ people considerably cleverer than me!
I take pains to attempt to drive home the central point, which is that I believe it's the _attitude_ that matters the most of the two.
Just because I might have had a easier time than many when learning _doesn't_ mean it was easy, or didn't consume a lot of time and effort! No.
I just thought it was important, so I did it. It requires effort. It was an investment.
It greatly irritates me that many jump to the conclusion that some talent negates all the hard work that it required - and still requires. Learning never ends - or, it shouldn't!
I think most people are considerably more capable than they think - they often just don't try.
I remember in an interview Jon saying he read most books before the interview. He would burn through the book a day or two before the interview, but retained very little a week later.
> I really like the way he limits his list to 4 books.
I've been doing this when friends ask for recommendations to cities. Google and guidebooks are already at their disposal, so a manageable list of 3-5 options with some personal insight is better than a comprehensive, but impersonal list of 20.
And if folks haven't read DFW's Roger Federer as Religious Experience in String Theory, you can read it on the Times web site (but you should also look into reading the rest of his works):
Agreed. Anything past 3 to 5 is either "Actually, I'm really not sure" or "Sorry, I can't be bothered. You figure it out." In other words, you're not telling me anything and you're not saving me time. So annoying.
Here's my favorite essay from String Theory that really sums everything that book is about: http://www.esquire.com/sports/a5151/the-string-theory-david-... This version is a bit of pain though since the footnotes are collected at the end and you would have to swap back and forth to read them; the book allows space on each page to make it much more convenient. I think I'm in the minority, but I really wish Infinite Jest handled footnotes in the same way.
A humorous observation: Ever look at an HTML page created by Microsoft Word? Quite a bit of code goes into what should have been a simple HTML document.
Now try viewing source of Mr. Gates' web page here: 6873 lines, the HTML <p> content starts at 5816 and goes for 9 lines to describe the 4 books plus the bonus, for a whopping total of 9 lines of content, 6864 lines of behavior and presentation... Wow.
Bill Gates writes very well in English. It's evidence that he wrote excellent software decades ago. It's interesting that writing software seems to make more money than dealing with English documents as ordinary office workers. However, as one moves up and becomes a successful businessman, he reads and writes in English primarily, and makes much more money than those who write software.
His forte is not really writing software but surrounding himself with good people like Paul Allen who was a way better programmer. Gates is a great businessman who had an eye for the future and could broker a great deal. This is covered in most of the biographic material over the years.
It takes GIGA-hertz machines to achieve that. On highly parallelized architectures. Often with SSD storage. When I started on the Internet I had a 33 MHz 32 bit CPU, just for comparison, and I used a word processor on 8 bit and with WYSIWYG and a modern GUI on 16 bit. So you telling me "it loads really fast and looks nice" leaves me unsure about my feelings, considering a wider context. It's just some (passive) graphics and text!
So what? It still is just text and graphics! The fact that it "looked like shit" was far more attributable to the absence of designers and professionals at the time, and of professionally designed templates.
HTML tables for layout sucked - but you could get graphics and text on the page, nothing more is on that page we are talking about here.
Do you think to get better graphics and better layout options for static HTML pages we needed to first get Gigahertz Intel i5 CPUs, combined with Gigabytes of RAM and capable graphics GPUs?
I thought Shoe Dog was a great book, although my favorite book of the year was a Gates Notes recommendation for summer reading-- The Vital Question, by Nick Lane. If you're interested in biology and the origins of life, it makes some provocative claims, and backs them up. If this doesn't change how you think about life on earth (and elsewhere), I don't know what will...
I will put The Vital Question on my "to read" list. On a similar topic, I've just picked up Sapiens, which was also on Gates' 2016 Summer reading list. A few people in my circles had been talking about it so I decided to pick it up, before even noticing Gates had recommended it.
Econtalk. Russ Roberts is a fantastic interviewer, with only a few weak performances in his decade of weekly podcasts.
He probably skews a bit libertarian for the typical HN'er to agree with, but he gives voice to a lot of points of view, and he brings on good guests. At least half of the podcasts have sufficiently interesting titles that they could be easily voted to HN front page, and the depth of discussion is good for the hour each guests receives.
+1 for Econtalk. Despite the name, the podcast is not about the (relatively boring) econ theory, or even the direct application of it. Econtalk uses economics in the same way as "Freakonomics" - as a framing device to talk about incentives, complex systems, and far reaching effects that are not obvious on the first pass.
I find Econtalk discussions meaningful and rigorous, in contrast to carefree series like "99% Invisible" / Invisibilia / Startup. The latter are great as a chewing gum for the brain, but they are mostly trivia and I do not recall learning anything useful from them over the years.
It's notable that he's getting better over time. I started listening to the more recent ones, then went back and listened to the old ones, and they were quite a lot worse.
Off the top of my head, my favorites have included the episode about how the budget gets passed in the US, the one about justice and the prison system, the food bank market where food gets priced for exchange, and the one about medical ethics and the question of "too much information".
I'd love to have an "EconTalk meetup" in the bay area.
+1, too. EconTalk is amazing. It sounds like I'm listening to a really fascinating conversation between two really smart and really knowledgable people.
I had a second podcast occur to me, thought it stays on a narrower track. There's a five year old podcast called Strong Towns done by a guy who runs a non profit by the same name. The recent stuff isn't so good, but if you go back to the beginning and listen to stuff from 4-6 years ago, you get to listen to this pretty smart civil engineer/planner have his epiphany of why infrastructure is so screwed up in most towns in the US. He deconstructs the problems with our car dependency and living patterns primarily from the angle of how it's bankrupting towns and cities. I listened to it over the summer when I was doing a cross country road trip, which turned out to be a great backdrop for it.
Shoe Dog might have been my favorite read of the year, its a very inspiring and highly entertaining story. Regardless of what you think of Nike you can learn a lot about determination and grit from this book. I would recommend it to anyone with an entrepreneurial spirit.
Awesome to see DFW on HN. Infinite Jest's tennis scenes helped shape the way I view the world. There's one particularly great one where a father is giving some life lessons to his son via tennis. And it is excellent Here's a link to (most of) the scene:
https://books.google.com/books?id=Nhe2yvx6hP8C&pg=PT200&lpg=...
I can confirm Shoe Dog is an incredible book. Bill's summation is right - a how-to on building a company this is not, but it's still very much worth reading.
- Endurance: The story about an expedition to Antartica... gone wrong (http://amzn.to/2g26L5i)
- Crucial conversations: Learn how to argue with people without starting fights. Allowed me to look at the situation more objectively (http://amzn.to/2h8w4yN)
- Relentless: the personal coach of Michael Jordan talks about how you can become a cleaner. Great if you want to understand how great athletes think (http://amzn.to/2gJCerW)
Huge recommendation for Endurance. I could hardly put that book down. It was a shame that the author died before it became popular finally. A cruel twist of fate due to when the book was released.
Would be nice if HN swaps out all those affiliate-links automatically with their own „tag“. I guess they could fund quite some startups with all the $$$ coming in.
While these all do look like excellent books, none of them really seem to be of particular interest to me.
Except maybe "The Grid". Technical infrastructure is always fascinating and awe-inspiring.
...Which brings me to one of the two books that I reccomend on HN every time the subject comes up, because they're just that good.
Exploding the Phone, a fascinating dive into the world of phone phreaking that really needs more attention. It not only discusses the people and culture of the phreaking scene, but also the technology that drew them to the phone. It really manages to capture a bit of the magic that entranced people of the time: If you're not a little bit in awe of the A4 crossbar switch by the end of it... You should be.
I agree. I've been impressed by his selection in previous years. This year seems drab with the exception of The Grid. Also, doesn't he read fiction? My fav book of the year was Ready Player One :)
Shoe Dog is absolutely incredible. When you hear the back stories about the name Nike, the swoosh, Phil's original business plan... Fascinating.
I do recommend that people are generally careful with blindly taking everything as a straight truth, especially when an author seems "trustworthy". It is a known tactic to sneak in lies or exaggerations among the truths.
It just takes picking back up the habit. A year or so ago I started reading books (and cutting down on reading internet drivel) and read ~12 books this year.
Yeah that is the way to go. Wife asked me to block some her websites so that she would have time to do more useful stuff. Suppose I need to same for myself as well.
I agree. One has to realize that good books have much better self-improvement ROI than almost anything else you could be doing - and then adjust your priorities in life to accommodate that insight. :).
Bullshit. As an engineer, I have entirely enough time to read books because I prioritise the importance of doing so. Remember, we all have the same 24 hours in a day.
I wonder, did he read this much when he was founding Microsoft? I ask because, as someone who would love to read, I feel like I never have the time. And strangely, I feel morally guilty for prioritizing other things like career growth etc.
If you can spare an hour a day, and can read at least a page every two minutes, that's 210 pages a week. I understand if you have family obligations and long work hours but I also like to squeeze some reading in during lunch if it's not a social lunch or maybe right before bed. Just like everything else in life you have to find the time for it and then make the time for it.
I manage about a book a week reading for a half hour or so at lunch time. It's not usually heavyweight stuff - fantasy, historical fiction, sci-fi, on my kindle. But hey, it's my lunch break, right?
Gosh, I'm a slow reader. Usually when I read books (mostly non-fiction) it takes me a few days. If I just partitioned it to 30 minutes at lunch time like yourself, it would've taken me two to three weeks to read The New Jim Crow!
Audiobooks are always an option! Since I spend most of my day in front of a computer, I tend to favor audiobooks. You can also listen to em while commuting or eating.
This is one of the reasons why I favor public transport over driving my own car. I know that when driving to work I could listen to an audiobook, but I much prefer reading over listening. I just happend to learn better that way and enjoy it more.
On my last job, I had 30-40 minutes on the bus back and to work every day and got a lot of reading done. Now I live about 8 minutes from my job which unfortunately is not worth it to start reading.
Not saying this is true but what if Gates's favorite books are the only books he may have read in 2016. It would be nice to see a full run down of his list including the ones he did not like.
It would be great if a similar list be curated from HN, if not every month, every quarter. The community here has a much diverse interests and we get to glimpse into different genres.
So many book recommendations. Really suggest people to create the list of books they read in 2016 over at http://shelfjoy.com so that others can bookmark them and this thread is kept alive.
can you elaborate on your first point? i've read fringe theories relating modern healthcare philanthropy with a sublimated form of eugenics, but they've all struck me as somewhat polarized and devoid of evidence
I wouldn't call it eugenics, but there certainly are some ethical concerns about Gates funded research in India on cervical cancer. See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25101547
The TLDR is that the researchers did not prepare subjects sufficiently before they consented to study, so they did not give informed consent. This most likely has lead to the avoidable death of 254 women.
This (and the other) article seems to be adamant that the study was horribly put together. Was the intent of the original study merely to determine the efficacy of screening? That sounds like a really really weird study to want to run, as I'd think you can just get that from already existing cases. (I'm not a medical research person, but I'd expect that there's some cancer.gov database of diagnoses/histories/outcomes that you could chew on.)
I don't know how the Gates Foundation functions, so the level of which Bill should be implicated in the failings of this study are unclear to me. It sounds like the study would have been fairly inexpensive, and thus relegated to maybe just a footnote on one afternoon for Bill.
The eugenics-style arguments seen up in the parent comment seem to be a result of over-extrapolation of his "Innovating to zero" TED talk[1]. He alludes to, but does not cite, statistics correlating quality of life, health, and number of children. I also cannot find a concrete source, but playing around with wolfram alpha, it seems like there is at least a correlation according to their datasets[2].
> If, at any time during the past 15+ years, the 138,624 Indian women in unscreened control groups had been told the simple truth that “even screening women once in a life-time at an appropriate age in low-resource countries may reduce the incidence of cervical cancer by 30%,” these women would have left their control groups and obtained screening on their own. To suggest, as do Sankaranarayanan et al, that Indian women would knowingly consent to be randomly assigned to more death – instead of to more life – is to suggest that Indian women are unimaginably stupid. [0]
Seriously? You're going to have to cite sources on this. His foundation's progress on Malaria alone has saved countless lives around the world. However he earned it, the fortune he amassed is being spent helping those who need it most... in 100 years, he will probably be remembered as one of the greatest philanthropists of all time.
The author of this book was on NPR/Fresh Air in August. It was a great listen/read if you are interested in the subject.
http://www.npr.org/2016/08/22/490932307/aging-and-unstable-t...
I heard it a couple of days after a weather related power cut and ended up in the rabbit hole of the risk from cyber warfare/terrorism and solar flares. I'm not sure I would recommend that rabbit hole if you have any concerns about the reliance of society on technology and just in time shipping!