Black holes are scientifically fascinating because their extreme conditions link the worlds of general relativity and quantum mechanics. It is therefore only appropriate that the world's foremost expert on black holes, Dr. Stephen Hawking, is in his own way a social singularity that links the disparate domains of pure science and disabilities studies.

In Hawking Inc, Mialet uses actor-network theory and other tools from the social studies of science to deconstruct the figure of 'Hawking.' Is Hawking the naked mind, working in a rarefied realm of pure geometric visualization; the helpless body at the center of a complex network of sociotechnical supports; the ideological leader of a productive research group; a genius on par with Galileo and Newton or merely a genius for self-promotion. She finds that the closer you get to Hawking, the more he recedes, but there is still worthwhile work to be done in looking at how scientific work is done collectively, and what it means for a person with profound disabilities to live their own life.

Jaron Lanier is very angry about computers. While this book is a necessary antidote to the usual silicon valley cyber-utopianism, Lanier is not nearly as smart as he thinks he is, and this manifesto is plagued by conceptual and organizational difficulties.

The first target of Lanier's wrath is the Singularity, the idea that increasingly powerful computers will lead to an intelligence explosion and the rapture of the nerds. Singulatarians are easy targets for mockery, and Lanier's attack is based around the Hard Problem of Consciousness: explaining the phenomenon of experience. This leads us into some interesting philosophical and mathematical thickets: all computers that we know of are Turing Machines, which are classed as machines which can solve a certain set of formalized mathematical questions (actually, the ones we know how to build are less than Turing Machines because they run in finite time and space). Either brains are Turing Machines, in which case experience is just math, or brains are not Turing Machines, in which case our understanding of math is due for some big changes. Lanier, however, doesn't talk about this (I know about it because I've read Godel Escher Bach several times), preferring to bash Kurzweil et al as robot cultists.

Second are online communities, which he characterizes as Digital Maoism, or blind mobs, primarily interested in trolling. Now, there is a lot of trolling online, and mobs are fickle and sometimes dangerous, and Clay Skirkey is probably a buffoon, but actual scholars doing actual scholarship (cite forthcoming, mostly my friends) have done a lot of interesting work on the social interactions that make up the web. Ethnographic studies are a lot more work than generalized bemoaning about cyber-vigilantes and the ADHD spikiness of internet interests. Of course the internet looks like a mob from on high-from a sufficient distance, nearly everything can be treated as a problem in statistical mechanics. Real social scientists, as opposed to self-proclaimed polymaths, have stopped taking "cyberspace" as an intellectually productive conversation.

Third, and most interesting, is Lanier's attack against Open Source culture. According to his argument, the computer has killed authorship, creative expression, and the middle class, leaving nothing but Cloud Lords and Microserfs. He has some interesting points about hip hop as the last novel/pre-digital artistic movement, the retro sensibilities of modern pop culture, and the triumphs of Open Source software being a clone of UNIX and an encyclopedia rather than something new.

That said, there are some big questions that Lanier doesn't engage with. First, as awful as MIDI and other standards are, (and a friend of mine did an undergrad STS thesis on MIDI), working technologies are by definition 'closed', in the social construction of technology sense of closure. You want tools that can be used; you have to assume those tools' political values as well. A little reading in the philosophy of technology, particular Bowker and Star's Sorting Things Out, would've been immensely helpful here.

Second, Lanier has a rather confused notion of what a computer is, as a box that shows me images which are made out of math. Copyright, authorship, the whole shebang of culture that Lanier cares so much about and takes as reaching its optimum right at 1970 or so, is historically and legally contingent on a bunch of technological and political factors around the reproduction of physical objects. Well, computers make math infinitely reproducible. Stewart Brand's slogan "Information wants to be free" doesn't quite get at how free information wants to be. Given a computer and some math, information is free in the same way that air can't be locked up. It's basically the problem of the 'digital original,' and the question of the value of the original versus copies. Lanier is making some kind of worthwhile point here, but its buried under so much vitriol and romanticism that it's hard to see (much like this review).

In the end, I think Lanier ironically does the exact same thing he criticizes others for doing, in that he blames all the contradictions of Late Stage Capitalism on computers. It's a technologically deterministic argument with a few new twists, but not nearly as novel or rigorous as it could be.

It's not often that I can describe an academic book as 'sexy', but that's practically the only word for Drawing Blood. Wailoo does an incredibly job looking at a century of blood work in terms of technology, diagnosis, and disciplinary authority. A fascinating and critical book in the history of medicine.

The definitive book on the development of drugs for chronic diseases and the creation of the modern pharmaceutical industry. Greene avoids rhetoric and rage to use deep archival researching showing the simultaneous development of new drugs, and new "pre-diseases" defined by numerical risk factors rather than symptoms.

This book is a really interesting look at the difference between scientific and moralistic discourses, and a usefully summary of the state of ADHD research from a critical perspective, but it is ultimately hobbled by by its biases.

The conventional perspective is that ADHD is a real condition, and that while we do not know its precise biological etiology, it's something genetic, neurochemical, or neural circuitry based. The first three chapters do an admirable job at deconstructing the science behind the conventional explanation. The attack on Castellanos' 2002 study on medication and brain development is particularly interesting. Mostly, this effort confirms my belief that in matters of scientific construction and deconstruction, laypeople are alienated by the sheer density of facts, and the nuances of proper experimental design. How can we know which argument is true?

The book begins to falter as it looks for alternative explanations of ADHD, presenting dietary and chemical damage explanations that begin to cross into psuedo-science. The studies of the social and historical aspects of ADHD are cursory, tracing peripheral issues rather than engaging in a serious way with the main trust of ADHD in American society from the mid-1970s onwards. The final section, on how ADHD is a reaction to the post-60s society, falls to griping from boomers about how things just aren't like they were, parents are too permissive, kids just don't have moral fiber etc.

There is room for serious scholarly work on ADHD, but this book isn't quite it. Useful in some respects, but overall, disappointing.

A great little guide for scholars working in discourse analysis. If you're looking for how to figure out what people are *really* saying by doing intensive, word-by-word analysis of their speech patterns, this is the book for you.

I've been trying to get a handle on what innovation is for a while, and Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen is a solid introduction to the corporate perspective. Christensen's study is based on the difference between disruptive and sustaining innovations in business, focusing primarily on hard drives but looping into backhoes and motorcycles, along with other topics.

Christensen's big result is that leading firms tend to fail when faced with disruptive innovation, losing out to new entrants. This is paradoxically the fault of 'good management', listening to customers and investing effort in improving the product. A focus on existing markets leaves the firm unable to grasp opportunities, and vulnerable to disruption from below as entrants push from marginal markets into the mainstream.

Christensen's model of resources, processes, and organizational values is a useful way of looking at how a business makes money, and his data collection is comprehensive, if narrowly focused. From a management perspective, Christensen's work is pessimistic. The only way for an firm to catch a new technology is to set up an essentially independent unit, and if it succeeds, put it at the top of the old business. I'm not sure how realistic that is right now, given the poor performance of electronics conglomerates like Sony, and the rise of cloud and hardware based silos run by Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, etc.

And finally, while I get that innovation is hard to manage and capture and economic return off of, Christensen doesn't address the larger context of what innovation is, or under what circumstances it is desirable or undesirable.

Since this is the first of May, maybe that old anti-globalization chant is right: "Disease, starvation, will not solved by corporations. That's bullshit, get off it, the enemy is profit!"

For a book ostensibly about the AK-47, the AK-47 is by far the least interesting subject covered. Chivers taking a looking, elliptical approach to the automatic rifle, starting with the primitive Gatling guns and Maxims of the 19th century, the slaughter of the trenches in WW1, and after 3 or 4 chapters, finally into the AK-47. Mikhail Kalashnikov is painted as an enigmatic figure, a Soviet prodigy who has altered the facts of his life again and again. But what is undoubtable is that the rifle that bears his name is the most lethal instrument of the 20th century, a cheap, durable, and compact mass produced weapon that can be used equally well by conscript armies and bands of child soldiers. Chivers treats the AK-47 from a distance, taking it as the most durable part of a mostly invisible network of violence at first sponsored by states, but now completely independent of any effort to control it.

This perspective makes the book approachable for a lay-person, but also glosses over the mechanical and historical details that would be of interest to a serious student of the gun. Chivers aims for comprehensive rather than complete, and hits it, but this book just doesn't do it for me. The most interesting parts are a chapter on the early M16, and its disastrous introduction in Vietnam, and a description of a rapid firefight in Kurdistan in 2003 or so. The AK-47, the gun itself, recedes, leaving just a world of all too easy violence.

PKD is a master of a certain kind of paranoid vision. He was obsessed with the aftermath of World War 3, self-replicating weapons, the reality of a man. All these themes come together in what I believe is his best short story, a taut thriller of soldiers surviving in an atomic wasteland inhabited by autonomous robot Claws. I won't spoil the ending, but it is short, most excellent, and available for free at www.manybooks.net. Why haven't you read it already?

Strategy is not an American strength. Strategic plans are written to serve the interests of political parties and the election cycle, factions within the Pentagon and military industrial complex seeking billions of dollars for next-gen weapons system, or at best a small group of dissident colonels seeking promotion or post-retirement sinecures. Everybody has an agenda, and almost nobody is conducting honest analysis in search of the truth. The authors of Unrestricted Warfare are coming from outside the Beltway; way outside the Beltway, as they're officers in the People Liberation Army. With no DC career to worry about, there's at least the potential of some candid truth about the future of warfare, and besides as a Chinese strategic plan, reading this has the same kind of vicarious thrill as reading Guderian's Achtung-Panzer! in 1938.

The book begins promisingly enough, with chapters like "The War God's Face Has Become Indistinct" and "What Do Americans Gain By Touching the Elephant?". The introduction offers as a sensible reframing of modern warfare as I've ever seen. "We acknowledge that the new principles of war are no longer 'using armed force to compel the enemy to submit to one's will,' but rather are 'using all means, including armed force or non-armed force, military and non-military, and lethal and non-lethal means to compel the enemy to accept one's interests'"

The authors take as their key examples Operation Desert Storm, the 1997 Southeast Asia Financial Crisis, and the unlimited potential of cyberattacks carried out by hackers. Their analysis of Desert Storm is perhaps the most conventional section, examining in detail the successful organization of the operation under Norman Schwarzkopf, and the use of precision air power as the preeminent arm. Unfortunately, the financial crisis and the role of George Soros fails to illuminate what I can only describe as the 'Soros Conspiracy Twilight Zone.' While several Asian economies suffered massive reverses, and George Soros made a lot of money in the process, the accusation that he was responsible is not sustained (or unsustained for that matter. The issue remains open, as far as I can tell). Given the centrality of financial, economic, and media warfare to the concept of unresistricted warfare, this section deserves better. Finally, cyber attacks are treated mostly anecdotally, without a rigorous idea of the linkages between cyberspace and physical systems, or virtual attacks and real damage.

That said, there are some very clever insights into the strengths and limitations of America's high-tech Battlespace model of combat, where every soldier is networked into a regional grid that can cause any location to precisely explode at short notice (the deadliest environment on Earth, short of a nuclear firestorm) in terms of it's cost and inability to counter low-tech insurgent forces. For a pre-9/11 work, this book is horrifically prescient in linking Al Qaeda and airplanes. Conversely, key topics in strengthening local governance and legitimacy and fostering robust innovative economies not vulnerable to unrestricted warfare are mostly left out.

The original lacks the hyperbolic and inaccurate subtitle 'China's Master Plan to Destroy America' (my copy is from the nice folks at www.c4i.org). The examples are American, because America is the world's premier power, and are fairly critiqued on their strengths and weaknesses. While some parts of China's military are clearly aimed American capabilities, the ideas advanced here are seem to be more about countering and emulating American power, rather than crippling it.

As a guide to the future, Unrestricted Warfare will probably not have the impact of Clausewitz, Liddell Hart, or John Boyd. While it offers a important alternative perspective to the conventional wisdom, it's too foreign, too abstract, too hard to apply. By the standards of this book, the last 10 years of American foreign policy have been an unmitigated disaster, but I don't think the American government could ever act in such an integrated manner without a clear existential threat. I think the most trenchant critique of this book is that more than 10 years later, it's difficult to detect a coherent unrestricted warfare strategy behind China's domestic policies, provocations in the South China Sea, and African development projects. For now, unrestricted warfare is more theory than practice.