The hard thing about hard things, and accounting for management debt

The Hard Thing: probably the best book for business founders from a practical perspective. Together with Zero To One by Peter Thiel. And Dan Shapiro’s Hot Seat.

Not one of these simple concepts is much blabber la books, but it is very practical and illustrative of many aspects of being the leader in a growing startup.

The CEO is a decision-making machine, making decisions with little information against odds and diverse interests.

About hiring the right team.

Breathes humility—no blasé BS.

Ben Horowitz was the CEO of Netscape, the company that was one of the first to free us from Microsoft’s hold on the computing industry.

Someone writing new functionality for computers no longer wrote for Microsoft’s proprietary platform. Instead, they wrote to the Internet and World Wide Web’s standard interfaces. Once Microsoft lost its grip on developers, it became only a matter of time before it lost its monopoly on operating systems. Along the way, Netscape invented many of the foundational technologies of the modern Internet, including JavaScript, SSL, and cookies.

Horowitz disagrees with the idea that companies should ask customers what they want. Like Steve Jobs, he disagrees and is convinced companies are responsible. This contrasts strongly with current views in larger companies that define the customer’s input as the most valuable factor in determining the way forward with products.

But as Steve Jobs said, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them. Horowitz holds a similar opinion.

It turns out that is exactly what product strategy is all about—figuring out the right product is the innovator’s job, not the customer’s job.

…

The customer only knows what she thinks she wants based on her experience with the current product. The innovator can take into account everything that’s possible, but often must go against what she knows to be true. As a result, innovation requires a combination of knowledge, skill, and courage.

Horowitz provides practical advice, hates poorly run organizations, and has clear views on improving.

In good organizations, people can focus on their work and have confidence that if they get their work done, good things will happen for both the company and them personally. It is a true pleasure to work in an organization such as this….
In a poor organization, on the other hand, people spend much of their time fighting organizational boundaries, infighting, and broken processes. They are not even clear on what their jobs are, so there is no way to know if they are getting the job done or not.

He discusses very practical matters, such as how to hire executives and other staff, manage the sales process, and execute performance evaluations.

Often companies defer putting performance management and compensation processes in place. This doesn’t mean that they don’t evaluate employees or give pay raises; it just means they do so in an ad hoc manner that’s highly vulnerable to political machinations.

I would add cynically that in sick organisations, there is no guarantee whatsoever that this will be different when a formal process is in place. In my experience, this can still be turned into bureaucratic BS, fulfilling only the goal of ticking boxes.

Therefore, you must have a formal, visible, defensible promotion process that governs every employee promotion

Promoting people above their competency is not only a danger to watch out for – the famous Peter principle. But also, if f you unjustly promote someone to a title that is crappy person, he will become the reference – the Law of Crappy People.

… the Peter Principle holds that in a hierarchy, members are promoted so long as they work competently. Sooner or later they are promoted to a position at which they are no longer competent
“The Law of Crappy People states: For any title level in a large organization, the talent on that level will eventually converge to the crappiest person with the title.

He quotes Zuckerberg, who wants engineers at the same level as business

Next, he finds that businesspeople often carry inflated titles versus their engineering counterparts. While he recognizes that big titles help them out externally with getting meetings, he still wants to have an organization where the product people and engineers form the cultural core, so he strives to keep this in check as well.

Horowitz warns that short-term thinking may lead management to make too many business decisions too much.

While it may work to have individual employees who optimize for their own careers, counting on senior managers to do all the right things for all the wrong reasons is a dangerous idea.

…

“technical debt” is now a well-understood concept. While you may be able to borrow time by writing quick and dirty code, you will eventually have to pay it back—with interest. Often this trade-off makes sense, but you will run into serious trouble if you fail to keep the trade-off in the front of your mind. There also exists a less understood parallel concept, which I will call management debt. Like technical debt, management debt is incurred when you make an expedient, short-term management decision with an expensive, long-term consequence. Like technical debt, the trade-off sometimes makes sense, but often does not. More important, if you incur the management debt without accounting for it, then you will eventually go management bankrupt.

What to read next:
Peter Thiel – Zero To One.

What to listen to.
a16z podcast.

Thrilling footnotes in Science History: Lovelace and Babbage illustrated

Sydney Padua wrote and drew the graphic novel / graphic documentary book The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage (see also here).

I hope these types of wonderful books will never be replaced by ebooks. Sydney Padua wrote a beautiful graphical novel or documentary (it’s actually a new type of book) about Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace Byron, the world’s first inventor respectively programmer of the computer.
Padua is an illustrator and documentalist, and has created a piece of art with this comic style documentary.

The stories in the book come in a rough lively graphical style, and are followed by detailed scientific/comical style notes, even by notes to the notes.

Ada Lovelace (née Byron), daughter of the ‘mad poet’ Byron, was forbidden to be
involved with poetry in her youth, to prevent being influenced by the same dangerous poetic infection her father suffered from. Instead she was raised by a mathematics teacher, De Morgan.

Lovelace and Babbage, working together during Ada’s life (she died young of cancer), were the first to recognize
that such a calculating machine might be generalized into a general computer, which might be used for other application than just calculating numbers.

Babbage is the typical socially inapt scientist, is massively stubborn and has no problem shouting at government officials, including pre minister Peel. Strangely he had very few rows with Ada, and notably one when Lady Lovelace refused to include unpleasant remarks from Babbage aimed at the British government about the way they treat his Difference Engine.

In a way they are the opposite of the other founding father of today’s computer, Alan Turing. Where Lovelace and especially Babbage spent a lot of their time on the engineering challenges of building their computer (and Padua in the appendix elaborates on these challenges) Alan Turing totally disregarded the engineering intricacies of building a computer and created a completely abstract ‘platonic’ computer.

Nevertheless both computer scientists avant la lettre had an intricate relationship with the high society of these days. We mentioned government contacts like pre minister Robert Peel, but the list is much longer and includes Mary Evans aka George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Michael Faraday, and even Queen Victoria.

Padua subtly describes how Ada Lovelace could not escape the spell of her father’s inheritance; she suffers from a bipolar disorder, uses drugs (opium and cannabis) and gambling.

Babbage and Lovelace’s interest are very broad and oftentimes far ahead of their time. They include research into a Universal Language, thoughts about an Automatic Novelist generating books, coding and cryptography theory (see also The Information), mathematics and poetry, 4 dimensional space, imaginary numbers, …

In the Appendix Padua elaborates on the complexity of the Analytical Engine that Babbage and Lovelace had in mind, and especially the mechanical challenges of building such a machine. It simply was not possible. They were too far ahead of their time in their thinking, especially in relation to the state of engineering at that time. It would take a century before their ideas could be realized, and then only by applying the newly developed technology of electronics.

Thus, the Analytical Engine was never built, the programs from Ada were never executed, and in that respect Lovelace and Babbage remain strange footnotes in science history, but definitely very interesting ones.

A recipe for idea soup: Steven Johnson on Where Good Ideas Come From

Connectivity and serendipity are key factors in the generation of ideas. Steven Johnson wrote Where Good Ideas Come From and gives us advise how to create your own idea-generating ecosystem.

The community of ideas
Johnson uses natural selection as a metaphor for how successful ideas and innovations occur. He also describes the surprising finding that, according to studies, innovation increases where men live in larger communities.

“A metropolis fifty times bigger than a town is 130 times more innovative.”

And goes into the analysis of how this happens.

“Something about the environment of a big city was making its residents significantly more innovative than residents of smaller towns. But what was it?”

Johnson´s main premise is that ideas are most fruitfully created and enriched not in isolation but in connections with other ideas, where ideas reinforce and generate new ideas.

“If there is a single maxim that runs through this book’s arguments, it is that we are often better served by connecting ideas than we are by protecting them.
…
“A good idea is a network.”

We find a similar notion in Hwang and Horowitt’s The Rainforest (see also the article here).
Hwang says that a social context is key to innovation today. It’s not just about creating the brainpower but also the entrepreneurial context to turn this brainpower into something marketable. The trick is to create a social environment where cross-fertilization takes place.

Where Hwang talks about a soup of entrepreneurial elements, for Steven Johnson, a “flow” should be created, igniting an entrepreneurial life form in a soup of creative ideas to turn into an idea machine, where new ideas flourish and new ideas are created from other ideas.

The next thing possible
The state of technology, concepts, and societal state leads to the concept of “the next thing possible.” Developments move forward in small steps and concepts until a final drop pushes the water over the edge and a flow of water—or, maybe better, soup—is released.

“The scientist Stuart Kauffman has a suggestive name for the set of all those first-order combinations: “the adjacent possible.” The phrase captures both the limits and the creative potential of change and innovation.”

As an example of the adjacent possible (and I love these little facts), Steven Johnson takes the Difference Engine. Charles Babbage invented this Difference Engine in the 19th century, and soon after, several innovations and products were created for mechanical calculation based on the concept of the Difference Engine. One example is William S. Burroughs.

“In 1884, an American inventor named William S. Burroughs founded the American

Arithmometer Company to sell mass-produced calculators to businesses around the country. (The fortune generated by those machines would help fund his namesake grandson’s writing career, not to mention his drug habit, almost a century later.) “

The stirring of the soup
Not only is this concept of idea soup a societal phenomenon, but it also applies on the personal level. The more stirring in the brain soup, the better it is for connecting ideas in the brain. A brain scientist, Robert Thatcher, studied this in children and found.

“Thatcher then compared the brain-wave results with the children’s IQ scores, he found a direct correlation between the two data sets. Every extra millisecond spent in the chaotic mode added as much as twenty IQ points. Longer spells in phase-lock deducted IQ points, though not as dramatically. Thatcher’s study suggests a counterintuitive notion: the more disorganised your brain is, the smarter you are.”

Serendipity, some level of chaos, collisions, mistakes, and for us, readers, Johnson adds that reading is an ideal idea generator.

“While the creative walk can produce new serendipitous combinations of existing ideas in our heads, we can also cultivate serendipity in the way that we absorb new ideas from the outside world. Reading remains an unsurpassed vehicle for the transmission of interesting new ideas and perspectives.”

Exaptation
Johnson further sees similarities in the biological concept of exaptation.

“… first proposed in an influential 1971 essay by Stephen Jay Gould and Elisabeth Vrba: exaptation. An organism develops a trait optimized for a specific use, but then the trait gets hijacked for a completely different function. The classic example, featured prominently in Gould and Vrba’s essay, is bird feathers, which we believe initially evolved for temperature regulation […] A feather adapted for warmth is now exapted for flight.”

Exaptation can be found in cultural developments, such as the evolution of the novel, but also in scientific and technological evolutions.

” In The Act of Creation, Arthur Koestler argued that “all decisive events in the history of scientific thought can be described in terms of mental cross-fertilization between different disciplines.” Concepts from one domain migrate to another as a kind of structuring metaphor, thereby unlocking some secret door that had long been hidden from view.”

Whether it is caused by stirring the soup or exaptation, the key lies in combining different cultures, lifestyles, professions, and passions. The layering and combinatorial movements of different perspectives feed innovation. These are the rainforests from Hwang. This is an explanation for the superlinear scaling of creativity in urban environments. This is not driven by economic incentives; it is driven by open networks. People will innovate regardless of the economic benefit, or even more strongly: economic benefits may get in the way where these will lead to the protection of innovations instead of sharing.

Johnson ends with some advice on how to build an idea-generating environment for yourself, your own little rainforest, or coral reef, Johnson’s metaphor for such an innovative environment.

“… you can create comparable environments on the scale of everyday life: in the workplaces you inhabit; in the way you consume media; in the way you augment your memory. The patterns are simple, but followed together, they make for a whole that is wiser than the sum of its parts. Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle, reinvent. Build a tangled bank.”

Seneca over Fortuna te slim af te zijn en af en toe eens lekker doorzakken

innerlijke rust

In Innerlijke Rust (boekje uit dezelfde serie als De lengte van het leven) geeft Seneca antwoord op vragen van Serenus gesteld in een brief aan Seneca. Serenus was een vriend van Seneca (mogelijk een drinkvriend en tevens het hoofd van de brandweer van Rome – niet ter zake doend detail).
Serieus vraagt Seneca of hij hem kan helpen bij het bereiken van een meer stabiele ‘state of mind’ (hij heeft daar wat meer woorden voor nodig).

“Wat jij wilt is iets groots, iets geweldigs, iets bijna goddelijks: je door niets uit je evenwicht laten brengen. Deze psychische stabiliteit heet bij de Grieken euthymie, en daar heeft Democritus een uitstekend boekje over geschreven. (Ikzelf spreek hier van ‘innerlijke rust’, …)”

En dat is de kern dan van dit boek. (Het boek van Democritus is verloren gegaan volgens de vertaler Vincent Hunink.)
Seneca noemt een aantal symptomen, die steeds op neerkomen op ontevreden zijn met onszelf, en onvervulde verlangens koesteren. Om daar vervolgens helemaal in te verzwelgen.

seneca

“Ze vinden geen uitweg want ze zijn hun verlangens niet de baas en kunnen er ook niets mee doen. Het leidt tot stagnatie en algehele lethargie.”
Wat nu?

Vervul een publieke functie (Serenus vraagt zich af of hij zich terug moet trekken of een publieke functie moet vervullen). Dat traint jezelf en je helpt ook nog anderen. Een grote geest kan zich echter ook in het privéleven ruim ontplooien. En leert ons en passant dat dat geen probleem is want kwaliteit verloochent zich niet.

“Trek jij je dus terug om te schrijven, dan heb je meteen alle weerzin tegen het leven afgeschud. Je hoopt dan niet meer dat het avond wordt omdat je genoeg hebt van het daglicht. Je bent niet langer een last voor jezelf en een overbodige figuur voor anderen. Je trekt veel mensen aan die je vrienden worden. Echte kwaliteit blijft namelijk nooit verborgen, hoezeer die ook in de schaduw staat, maar heeft een duidelijke uitstraling.”

Seneca schrijft ook hoe belangrijk het is bij jezelf te blijven en jezelf te kennen. Bij wat je doet.

“Je moet nagaan of jouw karakter beter past bij praktische ctiviteit of bij rustige studie en reflectie. Vervolgens moet je de kant kiezen waar je talenten liggen.”

Maar je moet jezelf niet overschatten, anders kan je bezwijken onder je ambities, en het moet zinvol en eindig zijn.

Bezit en kapitaal: hecht er niet aan, zegt Seneca want het is slechts een bron van zorgen. Reken er op dat je het kan kwijtraken. Altijd.

“Daarom moeten we bedenken dat kwijtraken veel erger is dan het niet te bezitten.”

En hij verhaalt van Diogenes wiens slaaf vluchtte en hem niet wilde terughalen. Want niet te kunnen leven zonder de slaaf, dat zou pas vreselijk zijn.

“… Mijn slaaf is gevlucht. Beter gezegd: ikzelf ben vrij geworden.”

Seneca leert ons Fortuna niet te vrezen door je steeds te realiseren dat alles geleend is, op tijdelijke basis. En zo is het met spullen, en ook met het leven. En dat is dan een kerngedachte bij Seneca.

“Maar wie beseft dat bij zijn geboorte ook meteen de dood in het pakket zit leeft volgens dat contract. En zijn mentale kracht heeft tegelijk nog een ander effect: niets van wat er allemaal gebeurt komt voor hem onverwacht.”

Seneca gaat verder op zijn pad naar geestelijke rust. Mijd uiterlijk vertoon, leg ongebreidelde ambities aan de ketting. Zorg dat je weing ruimte inneemt, hoe meer je nodig hebt hoe

makkelijker je bent te vinden door vrouwe Fortuna. Bezit de boeken die je wilt lezen, maar bezit ze niet ter decoratie.

“Bij mensen die totaal niet lezen zien je complete collecties retorica en historiografie met boekenplanken tot het plafond.”

Berust toch in je toestand. Laat je verlangens niet de vrije loop, maar in plaats daarvan richt je op de dingen die haalbaar zijn. Maar ook dan moet je beseffen dat het uiteindelijk allemaal niet veel voorstelt. Stel je eigen grenzen om overmaat te voorkomen.

Maak je verder niet zinloos druk, of om zinloze zaken, maar richt je op belangrijke ervaringen. We lazen dit ook al in De lengte van het leven.

“… elke inspanning moet ergens verband mee houden, ergens op gericht zijn.”

En bij alles wat we doen moeten we rekening houden met de tegenslagen die kunnen optreden.

“Vandaar ook dat we zeggen dat een wijs man niets overkomt tegen zijn verwachting.”

Hij zegt het niet met zoveel woorden, maar met deze houding word je zelfs sterker van tegenslagen. Een robuuste houding die opties open houdt. Antifragile avant la lettre, zoals Taleb ook schrijft.
Zoek vrienden, liefst wijs, maar in ieder geval een zo min mogelijk slecht mens. Maar pas op.

“Er is in ieder geval één groep waar je alle contact mee moet vermijden. De negatievelingen. De eeuwige zwartkijkers. De lui die alles zullen aangrijpen voor geklaag en gemopper.”

Want die verstoren jouw innerlijke rust.

Tenslotte schrijft Seneca ontspanning voor, en af en toe doorzakken mag.

“Wie goed uitrust staat op in betere conditie en met meer energie. …
Soms geeft ook een rijtochtje, een reis, een wisseling vang streek nieuwe energie, of een gezellig samenzijn en ‘vrij drinken’.
Een enkele keer mag het ook wel eens komen tot een dronkenschap.”

Vlieg eens uit de bocht, dit brengt goddelijke inspiratie.

“… daarom is afwijken uit de normale baan nodig. Weg galopperen, op de leidsels bijtem, je ruiter meevoeren en naar hoogten brengen waar hij zelf niet naar had durven opstijgen.”

Ik vermoed dat Serenus de kroegmaat van Seneca was.

Een breed leven brengt diepe gerustheid – Seneca over de lengte van het leven

Ik kreeg dit prachtige kleine boekje De Lengte van het Leven. Een moderne, strakke moderne vertaling door Vincent Hunink.
Als eerste introductie tot het stoïcisme las ik eerder al Ryan Holiday, die Marcus Aurelius als rolmodel nam voor zijn The Obstacle is the Way. Zeer benieuwd naar meer door Holiday en ook Ferriss‘ podcasts.
Zoals de titel als suggereert gaat Seneca in dit boekje in op de lengte van het leven, maar belangrijker nog, hoe een lang betekenisvol leven in te richten.

Mensen klagen hoe kort het leven is en hoe snel het voorbij vliegt, maar volgens Seneca is het leven niet kort gooien we het met bakken overboord. Maar het moet goed aangepakt worden.

“.. een bescheiden bezit dat wordt toevertrouwd aan iemand die er goed op past groeit met het gebruik.”

Seneca geeft richting aan het leven en formuleert een aantal adviezen voor zijn lezer. Choose Yourself, zegt Seneca. Richt je leven niet op anderen, om hen te pleasen, maar veel belangrijker is je eigen leven zo rijk mogelijk te maken.

En stel niet uit wat je wilt, denk niet de belangrijke dingen aan het eind van je leven te kunnen inhalen.

“Het is te laat te beginnen met leven bij de finish. Verstandige plannen uitstellen tot je vijftigste of zestigste, je leven willen starten op een punt dat weinigen bereiken: wat een dom gebrek aan bewustzijn van je sterfelijkheid.”

Geen tijd hebben is een hachelijk excuus. Een drukbezet mens is compleet als hij dit weet te combineren met een betekenisvol leven, voor zichzelf.

“Niets past minder bij een drukbezet man dan weten te leven, de moeilijkste leerstof die er is.
…
Het tekent een groot man, geloof me, een die uitsteekt boven de menselijke dwalingen, om niets van zijn tijd te laten weglekken.”

Het leven ligt in het nu, het verleden is geweest, daar ligt de zekerheid, de toekomst in onzeker, en het heden zo kort.

“… Het grootste verlies aan leven komt door uitstel. … Waar kijk je naar? Waar reik je naar? De hele toekomst ligt nog in het ongewisse, leef nu!”

En weet oppervlakkig geluk te vermijden, want dat is van korte duur.

“Juist het grootste en mooiste levert zorgen op… Om zo’n geluk in stand te houden is ander geluk nodig. Nieuwe wensen  formuleren is vereist zodra wensen in vervulling zijn gegaan.”

Dan komt Seneca bij het alternatief. Hoe dan te leven: door de wijzen te volgen. Door kennis te nemen van degenen die voor ons geleefd hebben en hun ervaringen in ons leven te voegen. Seneca zet ons aan tot lezen van boeken, het leven te verbreden door het te vullen met de ervaringen van de wijzen voor ons.

“Mensen die tijd maken voor wijsheid, dat zijn de enigen die rust en vrijheid hebben, de enigen die echt leven. Want het is niet alleen hun eigen bestaan waar zij goed naar kijken, heel het verleden voegen zij daar aan toe.”

Dus neem kennis van de wijzen voor ons (Seneca noemt de Grieken Zeno, Pythagoras, Democritus, Aristoteles, Theophrastus, maar je kan je een moderne varianten voorstellen).

“Elk van deze denkers heeft alle tijd, elk van hen zal een bezoeker gelukkiger en met meer liefde voor zichzelf wegsturen…”

Omhels hogere zaken want dat leidt tot een zinvol  bevredigend leven.

“Maar je kunt je ook bezighouden met heilige, hoogverheven zaken, en dan kom je heel andere dingen te weten.
…
Je moet omhoog, van de grond af… Dat brengt je in een levensstijl waarin jou veel goede inzichten te wachten staan, waarin jij deugden koestert en beoefent en lage passies vergeet. Je hebt dan weet van leven en sterven, en je kent een diepe gerustheid.”

Met grote gerustheid heb ik ook uit dezelfde serie Seneca’s Innerlijke Rust aangeschaft.

From African Drums to Borges’ Library of Babel: a history of information by James Gleick

The Information - James Gleick

James Gleick wrote Chaos. The book that inspired me to write my own fractals (the function of functions z -> z + c where z and c are complex numbers and c is a complex constant). I wrote it in Java and displayed it in an applet in the browser. Slow as hell but it worked. Chaos is a great read, up to the last word.

The experience is similar reading The Information. My notes.

From African drums to the OED

Gleick guides the reader through the development of information and communication systems over the past centuries.

The book sets off with the messaging system of tribes in Africa using drums. Gleick then continues to writing and how that forms and changes the process of thinking.

“The written word – the persistent word – was a prerequisite for conscious thought as we understand it.”

The next step in the development is logic and mathematics, the development of language and dictionaries and formalization of spelling.

Gleick tells the story of the development of the Oxford English Dictionary (the OED). The first creators of the OED used Milton and Shakespeare as the foundation for this English dictionary. Shakespeare stands out as a massive contributor to English. As an inventor or inventor or first recorder of thousands of words as we have seen, he is the most quoted author in the OED as well, with no less than over thirty thousand references.

As a sidenote (and not the last for this article), where Shakespeare in English is a central foundational reference for English Language, the Statenvertaling of the Bible holds a similar position for Dutch. You could write a PhD thesis on the cultural consequences of this fundamental differences, and similarities in these language foundations: one with a creative, theatrical, literary background, the other a formal, religious one.

Computation and logic

Gleick continues with the development of computation, from the creation of logarithmic tables to Charles Babbage, who we could view a the prophet of the modern computer. Babbage thought of programming language and memory, in the 19th century, way before these terms existed in such context. Gleick tells the story about Babbage’s working relation with Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron’s daughter. Where Babbage seemed the inventor of the computing machine before its existence, Ada was the programmer of this non-existent machine, hitting programming problems that could only 100 years later be exercised on real computers.

“How multifarious and how mutually complicated are the considerations which the working of such an engine involve. There are frequently several distinct sets of effects going on simultaneously; all in a manner independent of each other, and yet to a greater or lesser degree exercising a mutual influence.”

(As a sidestep: two recent books have been published on Lovelace and Babbage that I have not yet have time to read. The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage by Sydney Padua – a graphic novel I am really looking forward to. And Ada Byron Lovelace and the Thinking Machine by Laurie Wallmark.)

Charles Babbage

Leaving Babbage, Gleick brings us to the development of the telegraph, a first electric apparatus speeding communication over distances. Communications were coded, and morse code becoming a standard at some point.

The limitations of logic

The need for secrecy was needed lead to the development of cryptography. Entree Claude Shannon who introduced the science of Information theory. Shannon worked on predictability and redundancy in streams of data representing encrypted texts. Claude Shannon invented how logical operations could process information and how to build these operations in systems with relays. Shannon wanted to build these systems to prove theorems.

At about the same time, Kurt Gödel came around and proved that the ideal mathematical world of Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica, where all mathematical theorems could be proved by logic, was false. Gödel proved that any logical system is inconsistent or incomplete. GEBHofstadter has explained this counter-intuitive conclusion in Gödel, Escher, Bach extensively and illustratively and Gleick makes no attempt to improve on that.

Turing at the same time proved a similar notion, the Entscheidungsproblem – by Hilbert – can every proposition be proven to be true or false – and Turings answer was no. He did this through the invention of a theoretical computer, the Turing Machine.

Interestingly, the main protagonist of the book, Claude Shannon, is a secluded mathematician working for Bell Labs. At the same time as Alan Turing, and incidently or not they both worked on cryptanalysis during the war without knowing this from eachother (classified, Turing from England, Shannon from the US), and they even have worked some time at Bell Labs and met up with lunch now and then. (The same Bell labs that is the subject of Douglas Coupland’s Kitten Clone, and the company that still today provides the backbone of our information highway, The Internet.)

The computer

All this work by eventually culminated in the creation of the information processing machine, nowadays knows as the computer.

Shannon continued to develop his Information Theory, looking at quantification of predictablility and redundancy to measure information content. He conducted some tests with his wife, using a Raymond Chandler’s detective Pickup on Noon Street,

“… put his finger on a short passage at random, and asked Betty to start guessing the letter, then the next letter, then the next. The more text she saw, of course, the better her chances of guessing right.”

Shannon and Schrödinger bring physics and information theory were together in the notion of entropy. Information processing, thinking and artificial intelligence notions develop.

DNA and information theory

Information theory is found to apply to nature itself: DNA is discovered. The development of thinking of biology in term of computability, algorithms, procedures gives more insight into the building blocks of life itself. (And as an aside, if we are able to think of the biological mechanisms in terms of algorithms, can we do so too for societal mechanisms to which a human belongs. And to the intellectual developments, meaning can we also build a recipe for the development of information to knowledge to intelligence? Which would be logical in the context of the characteristic of life to move towards negative entropy.)

Richard Dawkins develops his ideas about the Selfish Gene. Which has much in common with the Antifragility thinking of Taleb. Chaitin and Kolmogorov develop a theory to measure how much information is contained in a given ‘object’. Complexity is described in computability terms. And complexity has computability problems, like Gödel’s theory and this was the Chaitin version of incompleteness.

Lastly, Gleick brings us to quantum computing, making computations on an atomic scale.

Dealing with information abundance

The book closes with a view on the proliferation of information, describing the development of Wikipedia. The amount of information we have access to nowadays is becoming a challenge in itself. There’s information in abundance, but to find useful information in the overwhelming pile is the trick. Dissemination, filtering, ordering and search becoming essential tools. This is still something we do not have under control yet.

Gleick leaves the reader with a challenge to self. Learn to deal with the amount of information available. Then I mean not to manage the information, but to being psychologically able to handle information abundance. The FOMO and threat of total information procrastination is real. We will need to learn to ignore. We will also need to our own ways to store, record, share the information we find useful or interesting.

How to manage Borges’ library of Babel.

The book is an achievement on itself. Admirable how much information (no pun intended) Gleick has been able to pack in a book.

This website is an attempt to record, organise and share information that comes to me.

Tim Robinson’s joy for precision

Tim Robinson’s books are amazingly interesting precise works of litarature. He has created a new genre of literature, a landscape biography.

With meticulous labor, Robinson in the two books Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage and Stones of Aran: Labyrinth tells us about the history of the islands. He does this while describing his systematic hikes across the Aran Islands, painting a detailed view of the barren island.

The small Aran Islands are presented meter by meter, crag by crag, fissure by fissure.
As a mapmaker he records every limestone rock, house, barn, wall. But he also talks to the farmers. He talks about the isolation of the islanders. Their strange habits. Their faith. Their own Saint Enda of Aran. Their history.

The people of Aran were extremely poor and permanently threatened by famine. On their small rock island on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, they made a living by fishing, harvesting burning seaweed to sell the kelp (which contained iodine and alkali), and growing potatoes on their fissured rocky field fertilized with seaweed.

“Large families live of the bounties of a few small plots, and save all other income for the rent; the potato thrived on the plenteous labour of those families, the carting of sand and seaweed that created the plots out of rock, the spadework that doubled the shallow soil into ridges, the weeding and watering could be done by children. Fecundity led to overcrowding: the ridges full of low-quality potatoes vulnerable to drought, pests, diseases and prolonged salty winds that scorched their stems…” (Labyrinth)

“The Aranners distinguish about thirty types of seaweed, each with its own advantages and disadvantages as fertilizer, for various crops or as raw materials of kelp. The main division is between feamainn dhubh, blacked and feamainn dhearg, redwood. The former comprises the dark-toned Focus species that grow on the upper and middle shore, …” (Pilgrimage)

They hunt for basking sharks in wobbly boats, called currachs, made of lath and canvas …

“All available tackle – ‘spears, gaffs, bocáns, pocáns, buoys, boreógs, straimpíns, one knives and poles and chains taken from a ship wrecked at Big Cleft’ – was assembled and carried down to Port Bhéal and Dúin; a spear was attached by a rope and a cable to a chain wound around a big boulder in a depp pot-hole of the shore; five three-men in currachs were launched, a shark was eventually speared, and when it had run itself to exhaustion another team of fitted men hauled it ashore.” (Pilgrimage)

And go on life-endangering searches high on the cliffs for eggs and birds.

“Razor bills, guillemots, and black guillemots, puffins and cormorants were the birds usually taken on the cliffs. Both eggs and birds were eaten, …
…
The hunt was conducted as follows. The men would walk across the the cliffs at dusk with the rope, which was often a communal investment. One end of it would be tied around the cliff man’s waist and between his legs, and the other made fast to an iron bar driven into a crevice or wedged in a cairn on the clifftop. A team of up to eight would lower the cliff man, guided by signals from a man stationed out on a headland from which he could watch the progress of the descent. The cliff man would carry a stick to keep himself clear of the cliff face while swinging of the rope…” (Pilgrimage)

A masterpiece of scrupulous investigation. Wonderfully written with massive joy and persistence.