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5 books with minimal comment:

Farm by Richard Rhodes:

• the part where he accidentally almost shoots his host
• “a cruel saying came into vogue in the 1970s: a farmer is someone who launders government money for a chemical company,” p. 227

The Black Cloud by Fred Hoyle:

• “the human mouth transmits information at some two words per second. The human ear can only receive information at rates less than three words per second. The great brains that control our destinies therefore design their electronic equipment to comply with these limitations even though electronically no such limitations exist.” p.103

The Practical Angler by W.C. Stewart

• N/A

The Virginia Creeper Trail by Davis & Morgan

• Shagbark hickory for smoking hams
• Mt. Rogers is named for the founder of MIT (William Barton Rogers)
• The original blue ridge mountains were 4(!) miles high, rivaling the Himalayas…
• Geographers have divide the contiguous U.S. into 25 provinces based on landforms and geologic history…
• Green Cove Creek tributary of Whitetop Laurel is trout rich/low pressure…

Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa

• the part where he ascends the waterfall with an infected foot
• Ganryu Island duel with Sasaki Kojiro

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3 for for select highlights:

The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman

• Cesar Hidalgo’s research: Why Information Grows…
• “it was as if a group of Korean robots had shown up at Yankee Stadium and beaten America’s all-star baseball team…” [on AlphaGo] p. 118
• “Amazon’s R&D budget alone is $78 billion annually, which would be the ninth biggest in the world if it were a country.” p. 129
• “And yet it was also LeCun who said AlphaGo was impossible just days before it make its first big breakthrough. That’s no discredit to him; it just shows that no one can ever be sure of anything at the research frontier.” p. 130
• Ten steps toward containment

Bureaucracy by Ludwig von Mises

• “….the meaning of Lenin’s program, “to organize the whole national economy like the postal system”” [citing State and Revolution] preface
• “The majority were tied up with the bureaus for life. They developed a character peculiar to their permanent removal from the world of profit-seeking business. their intellectual horizon was the hierarchy and its rules and regulations. ” p. 54
• “There is no need to point out that school attendance, examinations, and years spent in the lower positions do not neccesarily qualify a man for a higher job. This machinery for selection sometimes bars the most competent men from a job and does not always prevent the hiring of an utter incompetent. But the worst effect produced is that the main concern of the clerks is to comply with these and other formalities. They forget that their job is to perform an assigned duty as well as possible.” p. 55
• “In a properly arranged civil-service system the promotion to higher ranks depends primarily on seniority. The heads of the bureaus are for the most part old men who know that after a fews years they will be retired. Having spent the greater part of their lives in subordinate positions, they have lost vigor and initiative. They shun innovations and improvements. The look on every project of reform as a disturbance of their quiet. Their rigid conservatism frustrates all endeavors of a cabinet minister to adjust the service to changed conditions. They look down upon the cabinet minister as an inexperienced layman. In all countries with a settled bureaucracy people used to say: The cabinets come and go, but the bureaus remain.” p. 55
• “The failure of European Bureaucracy was certainly not due to the incapacities of the personnel. It was an outcome of the unavoidable weakness of any administration of public affairs. The lack of standards which could, in an unquestionable way, ascertain success or nonsuccess in the performance of an official’s duties, creates insoluble problems. It kills ambitions, destroys initiative and the incentive to do more than the minimum required. It makes the bureaucrat look at instructions, not at material and real success.” p. 55
• explanation of how above leads to largesse and fixation on rules in absence of P&L p. 62
• “nobody can be at the same time a correct bureaucrat and an innovator. Progress is precisely that which the rules and regulations did not forsee; it is necessarily outside the field of bureaucratic activities.” p. 67
• “the virtue of the profit system is that it puts on improvements a premium high enough to act as an incentive to take high risks. If this premium is removed or seriously curtailed, there cannot be any question of progress. ” p. 68
• “competition cannot be eliminated.. the question is only what kind of competition should exist. The capitalist variety is to outdo other people on the market by offering better and cheaper goods. The bureaucratic variety consists in intrigues at the “courts” of those in power.” p. 105
• “there are, after all, many civil servants whose enthusiastic fervor amounts to unselfish sacrifice. In the absence of an unquestionable yardstick of success and failure it is almost impossible for the vast majority of men to find that incentive to the utmost exertion that the money calculus of profit-seeking business easily provides. ” p. 122
• “the post office is the model for the construction of the New Jerusalem. The post-office clerk is the prototype of future-man. Streams of blood have been shed for the realization of this ideal.” p. 124
• “The champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by a resistance to every kind of improvement. They call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty. They call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent. They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office. Every man but one a subordinate clerk in a bureau, what an alluring utopia! What a noble cause to fight for!” p.125

Two Hundred Years of Muddling Through by Duncan Weldon

• typical English worker of the 1400s worked something like 160-180 days per year. Reformation sliced number of Saints’ Days to up to ~ 260 days per year circa 1600. Another wave 1700s ended practice of “St. Mondays’” whereby workers would just fail to turn up … p. 26
• “any decent labour-saving technology does precisely what it says on the tin: it displaces some workers.” p. 47
• “Writing in 1919 John Maynard Keynes…’the inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantities as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep; he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world.” p. 73
• “the annihilation of distance was a late Victorian cliche.” p. 76
• “in 1870 more than 40% of all global exported manufactured goods by value were made in Britain… PRC global share of manufactured exports in 2018 was only 13 percent.”
• ” In the last great cycle of globalization, Great Britain combined the roles that China, the United States, and Saudi Arabia play in the current cycle.
• “Dreadnought building continued at an increasing pace until the war came. In December 1908, for example, the Admiralty requested six dreadnoughts be laid down in the financial year of 1909/10. The Cabinet pushed back arguing that four could be laid down in 1909/10 and another 4 at the start of the next financial year…. only in the hyper-paranoid atmosphere of Edwardian Britain would eight be an acceptable compromise between 4 and 6. As it turned out, Britain’s lead over Germany was never seriously challenged, despite a few scares. Britain mustered 32 dreadnoughts in 1914 to Germany’s 19; the United States was a distant third at just 10.” p. 119
• 1889 Naval Defense Act, “two-power” standard