It is infrastructure week, my dudes, and the state of America's infrastructure is... well, perennially a D from the American Society of Civil Engineers. Rust isn't exactly the sexist topic. Waldman does his best to jazz it up by finding the human interest stories behind corrosion.


Rust abstract by photographer Alyssha Eve Csuk, who is the subject of one chapter

The story opens with the Statue of Liberty, which was revealed to be literally rusting to bits after a pair of Leftist protestors climbed it in the early 1980s. The book lurches around various topics, but finds its form at the end in a detailed study of Dan Dunmire, a Pentagon official and Star Trek fanatic who became Director of Corrosion Policy and Oversight, and along with trying to eliminate the $30 billion in defense related losses due to corrosion, got LeVar Burton to narrate a series of videos on corrosion to raise awareness about this pervasive menace. A long chapter on using a high-tech sensor laden pig to inspect the Trans-Alaska Pipeline is a delicious exploration of technical excellence under harsh conditions.

The individual stories are interesting, but shy away from the hard technical issues that Waldman discusses, but doesn't have the scholarly chops to full explore (no hostility intended, he's a fine journalist, but not a technical or policy expert). While rust is omnipresent and costs billions of dollars, the practical fight against rust falls into gaps in procurement and maintenance, and particularly in scientific and engineering training. Most engineers will receive a single lecture on corrosion in their education.

Mastering corrosion means a better world, full of things which work better with less human attention, and which also fade away gracefully once we're done with them, rather than scattering litter across the Earth.

I can't tell if Deida is brilliant or insane or insanely brilliant. Masculinity in general is in crisis, and between you, me, and everybody on the internet, my personal masculinity isn't doing so hot. Deida identifies this issue as a blockage in the flow of masculine energy associated with the rise of the counterculture in the 1960s and feminism as a social movement. And the basic fix is to get right with your masculine essence.


"I do not avoid women. But I do deny them my essence."

In Deida's reading people of all genders have both masculine and feminine energies, which are available in various amounts. Men and women are of course legal, political, and social equals, but the private world of an intimate relationship, especially a physical heterosexual relationship, is only truly enacted in the interplay of energies between these two poles.

Assuming that you're a straight man (Deida notes he is writing mostly for straight men, though others can gain insights from this book), getting right with your masculine energy means getting clear about your purpose in life, finding strength in stillness, comfort with fear, and aligning and unblocking your natural impulses.

As this relates to women, to paraphrase, take women seriously but not literally. Feminine energy is about change, flow, and emotion. You can't capture it and hold it without killing it, but you can dive right in and ravish it, which is what women really want. They'll tempt you and distract you and place tests in your path, which you should read as indications of emotional insecurity rather than sincere desires. They don't want you to do what they ask, they want you to be strong enough to resist and impose your will on the situation.

So yeah, it's proto-Jorpian "Wimmenz are teh CHAOS DRAGON!" vibey stuff. But it's provocative, and what the hell, we're due for a vibe shift anyway.

I'm fascinating and terrified by atomic weapons, so a glossy coffee table boom of moody atomic weapons should be right up my alley. The opening has a really nice quick summary of the history and consequences of preparing for nuclear war if you don't have the patience for Richard Rhodes. Yet the actual photographs are mostly not up to the challenges of the material. Only one picture, of the underside of a Titan II missile nozzle, really provoked any sense of the technological sublime.

I think I'll go with the consensus that A Circus of Hells is a weaker entry in the Flandry series. After the Starkand intrigue and a successful stint through intelligence school, which is elided, Flandry is back on the frontier as a scout pilot and junior intelligence officer.

A local gangster suborns him into checking out a rumored lost automated mining station, with the catch that one of the gangster's agents will be aboard. Flandry insists on a pleasant and willing female companion (ugh), but the beautiful and sexy Djana has been suborned by yet another faction.

The criminal intrigues are dropped for a straightforward survival story, when the automated mining station is revealed to have gone rogue and created an ecosystem of hostile robotic creatures, which down and damage Flandry's scout. He and Djana cross a deadly moon with a chess theme to the central hub, which is repaired in a few sentences. But then Djana betrays him, and it turns out the other faction are the expansionist Mersian empire. Gasp, shock.

Flandry and Djana are captured and taken to yet another remote planet, home to a combination Mersian military outpost and xenological research base. The planet has an extreme orbital eccentricity, with annual variation between boiling jungle and glacier covered ice ball, and an ecosystem to match. Djana is suborned by the local Mersian commander, who trains her in unspecified psychic powers, while Flandry joins the scientific mission and plots a daring escape.

Any of the stories is fine on it's own, but there's really too many, and the rogue robotic ecosystem is both the most interesting part and underbaked. Djana's characterization is painfully retrogradedly sexist, and Flandry as one of a few active and decent men in a decay empire is reduced to a tactically clever but strategically void blockhead.

Admiral Stavridis uses biographies of ten famous admirals and his own military career to reflect on the virtues of leadership and character. It's an interesting concept for a book, though one that is perhaps a little over-structured, as Stavridis digests the complexity of an entire career down to a single value, like bravery, innovation, or anger.

For all it's naval overtures, this is hardly a militaristic book. The subjects are lauded more for innovation and organizational transformation over tactical skill or boldness in battle. Some interesting common themes pop out: Leaders are overwhelming leaders of human beings. Themistocles rallied his sailors with brave speeches, and Nelson forged a band of brothers. In the modern era, both Nimitz and Zumwalt used tours in the naval office in charge of personnel as key stepping stones, while Rickover personally selected every officer going into nuclear submarines with infamously torturous interviews.

Character matters, and tempering your own character and knowing the quality of those around you is key. The virtues of character are commonplace: insight, boldness, generosity, knowing when to go along and when to fight, and above all resilience to life's knocks. Apply them is hard.

The Devil's Broker is a fascinating popular account of the life of infamous knight and mercenary commander John Hawkwood. One of the minor English warriors who participated in the 100 Years War under Edward III, after a truce he quit formal service and joined a mercenary company. The difference between royal service and mercenary work was rather theoretical. The English chevauchee was pure economic warfare, wide-ranging looting of the countryside that paid for itself. Mercenary work was much the same.

Hawkwood's company, the White Company, crossed into Italy, and there Hawkwood found his calling. His career was complex, to say the least, with Hawkwood fighting for Milan, Florence, and the Papacy at various points, although contrary to popular beliefs about mercenaries, Hawkwood did not suddenly switch sides on the eve of battle, or avoid battle entirely. Along with sacks and sudden assaults by storm and stealth, he was a master of the feigned retreat, luring his foes into vulnerable positions for a counter-charge. He participated in the brutal Massacre at Cesena while working for the papacy, and then switched to secular service.

Saunders makes the case for Hawkwood as an influential figure of the age. Aside from someone who executed the bloody intrigues of Italian politics, he also served as model for the protagonist of Chaucer's "The Knight's Tale" (the two met several times), and advanced English foreign policy in Italy, a vital market for English wool, and a strategic theater for apply leverage against the French from a second front.

Despite his long career and evident success in battle, Hawkwood died essentially broke, leaving his wife and children to make their own way in the world rather than establishing a major line. Dying in bed at the age of 71 or 72 is more than a lot of his contemporaries could say.

A Distant Mirror, this book, Mercenaries and Their Masters and
The Artist, the Philosopher, and the Warrior would make a solid survey of the era.

I should have checked the reviews before committing. This book is an extension of a viral essay I did not read by New York Times reporter Matt Richtel. Creativity and inspiration is one of the highest human capacities, and also the hardest to achieve. The obvious thing being that creativity can't really be forced: In fact, unfocused time and a personal impunity to fear of failure, along with persistence, seem to be most correlated with creativity. The counter-intuitive result is that intelligence is often a negative force, especially at the top levels where 'never being wrong' is strongly encouraged, such as the SAT. Creative ideas often don't work.

The book wanders and clomps through interviews with various creative people, also framed around the evolutionary creativity of COVID-19, but doesn't quite gel on a bigger theme. There are some very sketched out notions about density and speed of idea, that big cities are more innovative than small towns, and that the 'global village' of the internet is causing more creativity, as opposed to more distraction.

If anything the only useful take-away is a four tier scale of creativity.

1. World-transformative. Shakespeare or Einstein or Lincoln. Truly generational figures.
2. Professionals: Working scientists, artists, inventors, and entrepreneurs who might be known in their own field, but are mostly toiling to push the frontiers of human innovation a little further.
3. Small moments of creativity in your own life. As a dad, that One Weird Trick to stop a tantrum and make bath time a game.
4. Truly miniscule creativity. "What if I added cinnamon to this recipe?"

I think we can all aspire to more creativity at level 2 and 3. So relax, ignore the noise, and just go.

Poul Anderson is one of those names that I've heard a lot, but I don't think I've actually read anything by him before. I bought this book on a recommendation from a friend, and it's pretty good, although not having read any of the other Technic Saga books, I feel like I'm missing some context.

The Terran Empire is a vast enterprise, succumbing under the weight of bureaucratic inertia and the personally corruption and stupidity of the Emperor. When a regional governor's sadism inspires a military revolt, it's up to Dominic Flandry, the last competent man in the room, to salvage the situation.

There's some musing on political stability and corruption, great xenobiology with a tripartate symbiotic alien species, and action and adventure. Flandry is a decent man in service of a bad cause, and it's fun to watch him wheedle and deal in service of a galactic order that promotes bad men and punishes good ones. There's a long, slow, seduction of a beautiful blond, space battles, aliens of all sorts. It's a big kitchen sink setting, and one thing that struck me was how fast everything moves. The longest story arc is a transcontinental journey from a crashed spaceship across a primitive alien world to get back to the spaceport and hijack a ship. Anderson does this in about 50 pages. David Weber and John Ringo wrote an entire series of doorstoppers (March Up Country etc) on the same subject.

I'm sold enough that I'll read the rest of them, assuming I can work out the best way to get ebook omnibus versions.

***

Okay, so I did pick up an omnibus of Flandry, finally working my way to book three, and this is definitely a step up from the unnecessary and somewhat grotesque Circus of Hells Kathryn is definitely an actual strong female character, even if she's more the Madonna side of the Madonna/Whore dynamic. The explanation of Empire, espionage, and the Mersenian threat really needs book 1, but this might be my favorite, for much of its sheer weirdness and the evil of its villains.

Fathering Your Toddler is fine, I guess. Maybe better than fine, since it actually has good advice for taking care of your kid, your relationship, and your self. Though every kid is different, and I didn't find it that applicable to my issues.

Guillotine is an enthusiastic but amateurish history of a grim and powerful symbol. Made infamous during the Terror of the French Revolution, the guillotine remained in service for almost two centuries more, with it's final execution coming in 1977. Yes, hypothetically someone could have seen Star Wars and then gotten a rather fatal shortening.


They got the TV- we got the truth
They own the judges and we got the proof
We got hella people- they got helicopters
They got the bombs and we got the- we got the

We got the guillotine
We got the guillotine, you better run
The Coup - The Guillotine

Originally, the guillotine was supposed to be a modern and merciful form of execution. It's name-sake, the Doctor Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, was a member of the National Assembly who opposed capital punishment entirely, but in bowing to popular pressure, urged an egailitarian reform from the diverse and grotesque ways the Ancien Regime had tortured the condemned to death. He had nothing to do with the design or implementation, aside from suggesting some kind of gravity driven device, and spent the rest of his long life running from the device.

Opie covers the period of the terror in most detail, as fascinated by the device as period French society. Thousands were executed, starting with common criminals, then traitors, then the king and queen, and finally Danton and Robespierre and the worst of the Committee of Public Safety.

The post-revolutionary aftermath of the guillotine is fairly interesting, though briefly treated. There were guillotine memorial balls for people who's had lost loved ones to the People's Razor, where guests wore red ribbons around their necks. The official Parisian executioner, a descendent of the Sansom family, wound up pawning the guillotine due to debts, and lost his post when the government had to redeem it. The Guillotine, the device that killed King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, was likely purchased by Madame Tussaud's museum (Madame Tussaud got her start making wax death masks of guillotine victims) and destroyed in a fire in the 1920s.

The guillotine ambled into the 20th century, used mostly on the worst of ordinary criminals. Compared to other industrial methods of execution: snap-neck hanging, the firing squad, electrocution, and lethal injection, it is relatively simple and error-proof, though extremely bloody. It remains an open medical question of how long a severed head retains awareness, though the likeliest answer is 'mere moments'.