Jeff Goodell is a contributing editor to both Rolling Stone and The New York Times.  He wrote the New York Times bestseller book “Our Story: 77 Hours That Tested Our Friendship and Our Faith“, which covered the Quecreek Mine accident of 2002.  From this writing experience, he became interested in the coal industry as a whole.  What he finds there is a grim reminder of America’s energy reality.

“Big Coal” refers to the coal-mining industry, the railroad-freight industry, and the electricity companies.  Together they have allot of interdependency and allot of clout.  The book’s order roughly covers the mining, transportation, and burning of coal, taking in-depth detours along the way to discuss miner’s safety, environmental safety, pollution ( both in heavy metals and noxious fumes, ) and global warming.

Unfortunately this book is not fresh on my mind, but there were several notable things:

• the interdependency of the coal-mining, railroad, and power companies.
• the ever increasing demands for energy consumption creating more coal-fired plants, despite their ugly environmental & health impacts.
• the undeniable evidence of the G. W. Bush’s administration giving Big Coal a free-pass.

There were other interesting bits, mostly political intrigue, along with some sorta notable technologies like CO₂ sequestration and coal liquidification processes / IGCC power plat design.

Overall, it was a good book.  I just read through it too fast, and didn’t have enough time to reflect upon it.  2.5 of 4 possible stars.

Gweneth Cravens is a writer and journalist, and was a anti-nuclear activist. She met and debated the merits of nuclear power with Dr. D. Richard (Rip) Anderson over the course of many years, and eventually one day Rip asked her: “Why don’t you go on an American nuclear power tour?” This book is the result of that journey.

This book starts out with her background, and her suspicions, her initial interactions with Rip, and then a chapter by chapter walk through the life of nuclear power, “cradle to grave”. Many fascinating comparisons with all other viable energy sources are discussed, safety analysis dissected, and places visited.

The short, inescapable conclusion is that nuclear is the only viable, safe, and plentiful power source that can carry us through the coming decades, centries, and millenia while allowing us to undo man-made damage to the climate and environment, foremost of which is global climate change.

A fascinating journey, and arguable one of the most important issues of my generation. 4 of 4 possible stars.

The main tenant of the book is that human psychology causes us to create meaning and find patterns in what well be randomness, noise, unpredictability, or natural complexity.  He uses the markets as his main analogy, but cites a few philosophers and psychologists work.

Additionally, he also points out that the human mind is not very good at scientific / mathematical thinking.  Simple probability is easily misunderstood.  He also addresses the inability of us consider alternative histories or do Monte-Carlo runs on future possibilities.

Things I found of note were his approach to this subject, which is that of a non-serious, philosophical skeptic.  I find it refreshing.

Reading a bit on Amazon’s review of this book, I see allot of chiding remarks.  Nassim uses many known financial professionals as examples in his book, and it’s apparent that some did not take kindly to it.  However, the auther makes his intentions, those of non-serious dialogue and argument from simple logic deduction, clear in the prologue to the book.  Any who didn’t read that far may well have earned their disappointment.

3 out of 4 possible stars.

The book is broken down into 8 Chapters: several are by popularizers of Fractals, several are republished papers by active researchers, and one covers the making of the educational video. This video and book was endorsed / promoted by the recently deceased Sir Arthur C. Clarke.

I found several chapters of note:

• Chapter 1: “The Nature of Fractal Geometry” is the intro written by Ian Stewart, a mathematician, professor, and prolific popularizer of science. Well written prose that targets laymen with an amateur interest in science and math.
• Chapter 3: “A Geometry Able to Include Mountains and Clouds” written by Benoît Mandelbrot, the central figure in the development of fractal geometry. His article derived from a lecture to a Nobel Conference in 1990, and covers many of the aspect of fractal geometry in more detail:
  • Clouds, mountains and coasts; self-similar natural systems, fractal dimensionality and roughness.
  • Seemingly infinite complexity arising from fundamentally simple transformations.
  • Most striking was the “diffusion limited aggregations (DLAs)”, which show the fractal nature of natural systems growing & evolving over time.
• Overall, I found this article compelling because of the holistic synthesis, and the obviously deep and finessed presentation Mandelbroit gives.
• Chapter 6: “Self-organization, Self-regulation, and Self-similarity on the Fractal Web” is written by Gary Willaim Flake and David M. Pennock, then at Yahoo! Research Labs. This paper addresses many related issues, including:
  • The positive feedback loops of authors, search engines, and readers through a page’s connectedness, its page rank, and its traffic, respectively.
  • The self similarity of network traffic, and the power law distribution of it.
  • Other web metrics which also obey power law distributions, such as inbound & outbound links.
  • Community structures that form into fairly regular bipartite relationships of hubs and authorities.

  Anyway, this paper by far proved the viability of fractal pattern analysis to a very new, vital and familiar technology.

• Chapter 7: “The Human Social Experience Forms a Social Fractal”, written by Robert R. Prechter, J., covers the concept that the financial markets are a fractal phenomena. The analysis given was simplistic, yet the concept was compelling. Thus I’ve picked up a book about that subject exactly to get a better feel… but that’s another post. Interesting concept; weak presentation.

The book also comes with a DVD containing the documentary video. It’s a very simplified intro to fractals, as in elementary / middle school usage. It’s not very detailed or thought provoking on a mathematical / scientific level. However, it’s meant to share the artistic wonder of a fractal, and it does a decent job there. My only lamentation is that the video was not remastered for DVD; there are obvious analog artifacts that distracted me from the intent of the visual experience. Additionally, I felt the Davoid Gilmour soundtrack was unnecessary / dated.

Overall, it was a good investment. 3 / 4 possible stars.

Came across this funny educational video done by the BBC. It is a simplified story of the Western World’s numerical systems, from the Sumerian to the Roman, from the Indian through the Arabic and into the decimal system, and finally its simplification into the binary system. It’s worth watching for some light-hearted and stimulating viewing.