Category Archives: Reviews

As I wrote about My 2023 in Books, I realized I want to write more about what I read.

I just wrote up “Why Big Things Don’t Get Done”, a review of Brent Flyvbjerg’s “How Big Things Get Done”.

If the title is a question, Brent has collected data across thousands of large projects and found an answer that he reveals early. Big things get done over budget, late, and deliver less value than people expected. Or they don’t get done. For the most part. Not by a little bit, either – big things fail by a lot. In a database of “16,000 projecgts from 20-plus different fields in 136 countries” he finds that “99.5 precent of projects go over budget, over schedule, under benefits, or some combination of these.”

And it shouldn’t be this way for big things. These are HUGE EXPENDITURES. Stuff like dams, nuclear power plants, healthcare.gov, and similar massive projects that people depend on succeeding. There should be lots of incentives to get it right.

Brent explores why this happens over and over again. He doesn’t duck the question, he has real answers, like:

  • Many projects start without defining why they need to happen. Without a defined why, decisions aren’t always steering to the north star and not everyone will have the same vision.
  • People act too early and don’t plan well before they get started. He goes into how to do that better – pointing out how Pixar did it really well with low stakes small versions.
  • When people get started early, they get delayed on every new emergency, so it takes longer than expected – and every day late is a chance for a new unexpected incident or emergency. Fast is good once you have a tight plan.
  • People estimate poorly because they think their project is special instead of finding a good match of things that have been done before.
  • People lie about the costs so they can use sunk costs to demand more funding when they exceed the budget. (Robert Caro describes how Robert Moses did this repeatedly in The Power Broker). Some “estimates aren’t intended to be accurate; they are intended to sell the project.”
  • The team doesn’t have enough experience so they can’t anticipate that similar problems will show up as happened on previous similar projects. If you’ve never built an underground train before, you won’t know to keep replacement parts for the digging machine ordered in advance.

The stories are numerous and detailed in here. I was also pleased by how many echoes I found with my other reading. I’d read about the building of the Pentagon and the chaos of the the early building of it. So much was done so fast, but so much had to be redone. I’d listened to the 99pi/Cautionary Tales episode about the building of the Sydney Opera house and how it ruined the architect, who fled the country and never saw it completed. I’m reading Robert Caro’s “The Power Broker” and it’s a great peek behind the scenes to see how and why the author thought his 8 years of research/writing would only take a year.

This book was a big eye-opener for me, articulating things my experience had turned into instincts. I was able to use it before I even finished, referring engineers I work with to find “reference projects” to figure out timelines instead of doing the same things that didn’t work for us and don’t work for anyone else.

If you do things that take longer than a month, this is a pretty valuable book to read. If you do things that are new or haven’t been done before, it’s VERY interesting. I’m going to go on about this a lot to other folks about it.

Jan 2024 Media Diet

Books

I started a couple of good ones as well. I track all that over on bookwyrm.

TV

The Brothers Sun – This was really good. Fun, violent, funny. Real challenges and character arcs and good twists. The fight scene at the driving range was incredible. A deftly shot, well choreographed smash. Loved it. Michelle Yeoh is getting what she deserves. Justin Chien is great.

BLUE EYE SAMURAI – Stunningly smart. The twists are vicious. Gorgeous as well. Gets dark.

Over the Garden Wall – a really off-kilter cartoon from one of the creators of Adventure Time. Kids and I liked it a lot. They said it seemed like Centaurworld, which was also very yum.

I rewatched Shoresy because it really helps me SET THE TONE.

And I’ve been slowly working my way through Moonlighting, which is such a treasure from my childhood. Jason Lefkowitz turned me onto this – I love the casual 4th wall breaking, the bits they throw in to fill time, the Christmas episode that pulls back to reveal the whole production company singing. And the actual episodes are also good!

Krapopolis – I love everyone in this and cannot bother myself to watch another episode unless I want to fall asleep.

Chad and JT Go Deep – a heartwarming dumb silly journey. Half dramedy, half hidden camera prank show, funny. A Tim and Eric flavor sprinkled over it all.

Movies

Maggie Moore is a very light dark comedy. Really enjoyed this – Tina Fey is good at being not just Liz Lemon. Jon Hamm is good at being not just Don Draper. Micah Stock steals the show as a very pathetic villain.

Dredd – I was stuck in bed with a bad back and thought I’d check it out. It’s horrible. It’s one of those movies that takes the fascist joke seriously and makes it unfunny. Very violent and gross and well shot.

The Imitation Game – brilliant. Deserves all the praise it got.

Blackfish City – urban ecopocalypse seasteading heist

Just finished Sam Miller’s beautiful book in the wee dark hours and it is a GEM. Qaanaaq is a place – I can see it and feel it’s culture, smell the noodles and the brine, feel the bitter cold. It’s like a long Geoff Manaugh article come to life. The nano-bonded orca-amazon that opens the book is one of the least weird things in it.

This book is start to finish what Robin Sloan calls gold coins, fascinating little surprises. Beyond the end actually – in the acknowledgments I discovered Bradley Silver’s modern tattoo work at white rabbit studio.

I enjoyed this as much as The Fifth Season, which is to say: immensely. Ended up checking it out twice from the NYPL on my Kobo just to savor through it.

Walkaway by Cory Doctorow

Finished Walkaway last night. It’s the hard utopian bit of wonderful you need in dark times. To live in the first days of a better nation, you have to build and believe that you can be in that nation before it is supported.

In Walkaway, the rich keep getting richer, the poor get poorer, the middle class is gutted out of society, fearfully scrambling to keep out of poverty and ignoring how close they are to being out on the street. Automation keeps progressing and the uber wealthy don’t need surplus people.

There’s no death camps, there’s just no jobs and no safety net and no healthcare for the unneeded.

So some folks walk away from money and just do for each other. That’s a threat to the base of a greed-sick society, so that society moves to protect itself.

The police are sent to deal with these terrorists and thieves.

The walkaway road is very hard and very dangerous and some people die.

I’m more energized than before to act to fix the place where I love, because what I do matters.  (You too.)

Two weeks with the Kobo Aura One

My nook finally died, so I upgraded to a Kobo Aura One. 

I wanted to treat myself to a really good e-reader.

Why not another nook? Meh. I heard that this one was pretty amazing. I don’t really like being locked into one store. Why not a kindle? Amazon already knows a hell of a lot about me and my family, we don’t really need to give them anymore info.

Besides, I heard a group of loyal and passionate readers contributed to the design of this reader. That’s a good sign that they made product testing part of the campaign.

What I like about it:

  • It’s waterproof. I can read in the tub or the rain. Which I do.
  • The integration with Pocket works great. Instead of falling down a twitter hole into an article in the morning, I can just send it to Pocket and set up a bunch of great reading on the subway.
  • You can check out books from the library right from it! This is a big deal – I can’t stand having to hook the thing up to a computer to transfer library books in.
  • I like the auto-warm light for nighttime.
  • Little stats all through it warm my nerd heart! Lots of little measures of how fast you’re reading or how many minutes of book you’ve got left sprinkled throughout the interface.
  • Easy to load on e-pub files!

Could be better:

It’s too big. Only fits in one jacket I own! My nook used to even fit in my back jeans pocket.

Wishlist:

I wish I could buy an e-reader that could integrate with my Calibre library of drm-free epub files. If I’m on a wi-fi network with a Calibre library, why can’t I have some sort of UPNP browsing through the books I’ve got? I’d chip in on development if this were a thing someone was making.

 

Review: The Left Hand of Darkness

The Left Hand of Darkness
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’ve read so much ABOUT this book that I thought I read it. Everyone talks about the gender fluid sex, but it isn’t that big of a deal in the story.

Duality and oneness are the themes – the most upfront example is how gender works on Winter, but there’s also the differences in how the main societies and governments function with openness/decentralized/feudal vs closed/centralized/communal.

The political intrigues that drive our protagonist across societies and from civilization into wilderness are gripping – and then it turns into an endurance adventure. I didn’t see that coming! Also, I’m not that into endurance adventures.

I’m probably going to reread this in a few years to see if I notice more.

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The Shooting by James Boice

Sonder
Guns
Narcissism

Sonder is what you feel when you are sitting on a plane, waiting for people to board and you realize that every person passing you is on a journey. This plane ride is an important part of their life and in their life you are just a minor character, a background actor. In the grand show of their life you’re an extra paid to mumble “rutabaga” to look like you’re talking.

Sonder is when you look down at the city and see people walking around knowing you’ll never know those stories. Everyone of those people are telling themselves and the world a story about who they are, what they’ve done, why. You’re telling a story too. You’ll never know even a hundredth part of the hundredth part of the stories around you. They’ll never know yours, but theirs are just as rich and complex, as painstakingly prepared. The camera of thought pulls back and back and back and the self becomes a dot, a pixel.

Sonder is when the impact of the world crashes into your head and you draw breath and feel not small but part of something huge.
sonder

Guns are a tool for killing. Guns are a tool for equalizing power. Guns are a force multiplier – they let you do a thing you would do, but do it more easily, more powerfully, more irrevocably.

The world is full of nice people and nasty people who want guns for similar and different reasons. Most people say they want guns for hunting animals or protecting themselves from nasty people. Of course, opinions differ as to who the nasty people are. Of course, opinions differ on if there are other, harder to speak reasons for wanting a tool that equalizes power. Guns are very American and our myths are full of people with guns. We love our guns and we hold them tight.

Narcissism is a perspective where the camera of thought is eternally turned in selfie mode. All things are seen with the self in the foreground. A tragedy is seen in terms of the properties one owns near it, not the many stories abruptly shortened by it or the tears of the survivors.

Narcissism is weird because it is very hard. The world is constantly connecting you, shaping you, crashing you into other people and changing you. To stand aside from all that and see it just in terms of yourself requires telling some inventive stories that don’t match with reality and abandoning what is for what isn’t. It’s hard to build the house of your life on something other than earth so it requires constant maintenance to shore up the false foundations, to insulate yourself, protect yourself, buffer against what is.

The Shooting  is a painfully good book about Sonder, Guns & Narcissism by my friend James Boice. Reading it made me happy, then sad, then angry at James for hurting me, then laughing, then happy again, then very happy. The structure of the book is Sonder. The focus of the plot is Guns. The antagonist is Narcissism.

No that’s probably a silly way to put it. It’s about a hurt boy who becomes a man, a shooting, and who got hurt by the shooting. No, that’s not right. The book is really a bunch of people, but the protagonist is Narcissism, the book barely has Guns in it and the antagonist is Sonder, trying to keep a Gun from firing.

I’m sorry, I keep getting this wrong. The book is about America, and how Narcissism takes a Gun and shoots Sonder in the head, then makes the story about itself.

I loved this book, I read it on subways and in bathrooms and finally all at once in bed staying up into the wee hours of the night until it was done. I hope you enjoy it and want to talk about it with me when we see each other.

Review: A Burglar’s Guide to the City

A Burglar's Guide to the City
A Burglar’s Guide to the City by Geoff Manaugh
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’ve always been a fan of Geoff Manaugh’s BLDGBLOG, which is only nominally a study of architecture through strange lenses. (One of the first posts as I write this looks at an art study of the bacteria on money and how it travels through society and compares to seeds being transmitted through ancient boat ballast.)

And who doesn’t love burglary and heist movies – I’m in it for the naughtiness of penetrating forbidden places and urban exploration.

This book is a loving review of how architecture affects burglary, how burglary affects architecture, how the architecture of a city affects the burglary and then affects how policing responds. The helicopter patrols of L.A. sprawl are a response just as the vertical patrols of giant housing projects reflect their own landscapes.

We delve into locks, lockpicking, escaping, getaways, tunnels through earth, air, traffic, and buildings themselves.

At the end is the sobering reflection that all of this is only interesting as the edges of burglary, the mythical kind of burglary. Real burglary is too often full of ugly nastiness, destruction and damage to the lives of those burgled.

I really enjoyed the discussions on Nakatomi space and turning on burglar eyes to see architecture in a different way – it’s an easy read and I’d recommend it.

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