Clifford's Good Deeds

Clifford's Good Deeds by Norman Bridwell

Clifford wants to help out and do good deeds. However, due to his size, most of the good deeds end up backfiring and making things worse. Finally in the end he finds some things where his big size can be helpful. The "good deeds" backfiring is something relatable, even if not in the same way as they occur with Clifford.

Oh, the Thinks You Can Think!

Oh, the Thinks You Can Think! by Dr. Seuss

This is Seuss at is Seussiest. There is page after page of random "thinks" The rhyme and rhythm are consistent and most of the words are easy to read. (Though there are plenty of made up words.)  It is not very long. It  How much water can 55 elephants drink? Would you like to visit the Vipper of Vip? There is also schlop and a balloon swimming pool. It is a fun book that is quick to read.

The Bear Detectives

The Bear Detectives by Stan Berenstain (Author), Jan Berenstain (Author)

This is one of the early Berenstain Bears books. Papa Bear is fairly recognizable in art and actions. The bear cubs are more different from the modern cubs. The bears are called as detectives to find a missing pumpkin. Papa is the bumbling oof. He falls in a pigpen, attacks a scarecrow and does many other silly things. The cubs have a detective book they use to guide them on proper activities. They find that the farmer's wife had taken the pumpkin to make pumpkin pie. It seems the main purpose of the story is just to show Papa as an imbecile. The story is pretty lame.

Puppies, Pussycats & Other Friends

Puppies, Pussycats & Other Friends by Gyo Fujikawa

The book is a random collection of various animals. There are puppies and pussycats, but also a page of small animals and a lion.

Because a Little Bug Went Ka-Choo

Because a Little Bug Went Ka-Choo by Rosetta Stone (Author) and Michael Frith (Illustrator)

The sneeze of a little bug sets off a chain of events which culminates in a complicated mixed up parade. Each step is a mixture of logic and absurdity. There are animals that get mad, thus setting in actions that end up with a bucket flying unto the head of the farmer - and getting stuck there. There is a boat that starts to sink, then gets hauled up by a helicopter, leading to things flying into the city, and running into a parade.

The author is Rosetta Stone, but the copyright notice shows a copyright by Dr. Seuss, making it obvious who the author was. This one is shorter than the typical Seuss book and feels a bit simpler. It also feels like it is a small step down in quality.

The Ramona Quimby Audio Collection

The Ramona Quimby Audio Collection by Beverly Cleary (illustrations by Tracy Dockray )

This is an audiobook collection of the Ramona books. She starts out as a preschooler and ends up in fourth grade. She is rambunctious and cares a lot about how people feel about her. However, she often reads people incorrectly. The books were written over a period of 44 years, with each book seemingly set in an idyllic version of those days - generally in anonymous Portland area.

Beezus and Ramona (1955)

This is the most distinct book in the Ramona series. It is more from the view of the other characters than Ramona herself. Ramona is always getting into trouble. She wants big construction equipment. She invites all of her preschool friends over for a party - without telling anyone else. She is just a big pain. However, mother and her sister had similar issues when they were young.

Ramona the Pest (1968)

Now the series is more from Ramona's point of view. She is in kindergarten. It is interesting that back then it was perfectly normal for kindergarteners to walk to school themselves.

Ramona the Brave (1975)

Now she is approaching first grade. Some kids call his sister a name and Ramona defends her - offending her sister. Ramona does other "brave" things.

Ramona and Her Father (1977)

Her father loses his job. Money is tight. He also smokes at home. Ramona and his sister work to get him to stop smoking. In the end, he gets a job at a supermarket. I was wondering what the smoking thread would be like. Looks like it was new enough to identify smoking as "bad". (Newbery honor book)

Ramona and Her Mother (1979)

Dad has a job he doesn't like. Mom still works her job. There is a fight with mom and dad over pancakes. Mom helps with some sewing. Beeezus wants a haircut from a beauty salon, but it ends up bad. There are other random episodes.

Ramona Quimby, Age 8 (1981)

Romona has a degree of unintentional mischief. She cracks an egg on her head - only to find it is a raw egg. She throws up all over the school. She feels her teacher does not like her. However, it is all a misunderstanding. She is gradually growing up. 

Ramona Forever (1984)

Things start to change. Howie's uncle visits. He later becomes engaged to Ramona's aunt. Ramona's mom is pregnant. Ramona will now have to deal with being a big sister. Ramona and her sister also take care of burying the cat. Dad has teaching jobs far away. However, he decides to take a grocery store manager job instead so they can stay close.

Ramona's World (1999)

Ramona is now in fourth grade. She has a baby sister. She gets a new friend. While playing, she falls through the floor into the downstairs ceiling (and gets stuck there, only to be rescued.) She is old enough to cat sit - and even watch her baby sister for a bit. The world has moved on to be more modern. The author has done a nice trick of moving the life of the characters forward a year at a time, while keeping the setting "modern" as it moves a decade ahead.

Overlay

Overlay by Barry N. Malzberg

Some aliens decide to destroy the earth by focussing on a certain group - those that bet on horses. What follows is more of analysis of people that bet on horses than science fiction. One guy is pretty much of a loser, and likes to bet on horses. He loses a lot, and doesn't really win because that would force him to make decisions on move on with his life. It seemed like an interesting concept, but was not well executed.

Secretariat

Secretariat by William Nack

Secretariat was one of the fastest horses of all time and one of the rare triple crown winners. He had a heart that was larger than the typical horses. The book is a "biography" of the horse, while also providing biography of the breeders and others involved in his life. The focus is on the races and racing. The prose is well written and engaging, though it does go on for a long time. Those interested in horse racing will love it.

Micronesia: Island Wilderness

Micronesia: Island Wilderness by Kenneth Brower

This is a coffee table book with a few pictures from Micronesia and some prose. The prose is somewhat random. There are a few quotes that have a bit to do with Micronesia. There is also a bit about parkland and desires for parks and battle with the military for land on Guam. Then there are a few essays centered around the voyage of a ship through the islands and a seaman's quest for Marijuana. It ends up as a very random amalgamation that give you a rough idea of what the islands mean to a few people.

Mythical Man-Month

Mythical Man-Month, The: Essays on Software Engineering, Anniversary Edition by Frederick Brooks Jr.

The details of software engineering have changed a lot in the last 50 years. There is a section devoted to memory usage and concerns of the cost of using kilobytes of memory. Documentation on paper was a thing as was talking on telephones. Programs had to be punched into a computer and run. A lot of the slow "overhead" has now been reduced. However, some of the core problems remain the same. Engineers do a poor job of estimating. The focus tends to be on the actual coding process, which is likely only a sixth of the actual time needed to develop. Then there is the root problem of the "man month".

There is a temptation to add more programmers to a project to deliver faster. However, this often fails. When done late in the cycle, this can even slow production. New team members need to be trained in the current project and culture. They also need to communicate with others. This causes immediate reduction in productivity of the existing team before producing anything of value. There are also hidden differences. Every person does things a little bit different. Incomplete understanding may cause extra communication or extra work.

Working as a smaller team may seem like a solution. In some sense it is. Start ups typically consist of a few engineers rapidly producing software. This works great for small projects with limited scope, but does not scale out. These small startups end up becoming large corporations with the struggles of large teams. To work together, they must manage different roles and responsibilities. This book proposes a few ways to manage projects, primarily focussing on limiting architects to design and set the spec, with development teams managing implementation of parts. 

The book includes an update from 1995 - which is still almost 30 years ago. The scope of changes from 1975 to 1995 are extreme, especially in comparison to those from 1995 to today. In 1975 development was on mainframe computers. New computers would often have new operating systems. Customers would have custom software written for their computers. Computing resources were costly and limited. There were few programmers, and most programming was very low level. By 1995, microcomputers were everywhere. There was abundant software that could be purchased as well as obtained for free. It is easy to write software on your local computer. Hardware has become commoditized. The same operating system will run an a large number of different hardware configurations and the same program can often be compiled or run on different operating systems.

In the past 30 years, what has changed? Hardware is faster. More memory is available. There are a greater number of tools and they are more easily available. GitHub and StackOverflow allow instant access to code samples and programming questions. AI has potential to write more code for programmers. The book even mentions AI as being something that people hoped would be "almost there" decades ago. It is still "almost there", but the almost seems to be much closer than it was back then.

The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity

The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity by Mark Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut's son left the east coast to drive out to British Columbia. There he joined a few other Swarthmore graduates in a small scale hippie commune. Then he went crazy. His friends tried to help him help himself. He stopped eating, contemplated suicide and had all sorts of other things happen. Much of the central part of the book is told from his first person view at the time. Eventually his friends involuntarily intern him in a treatment facility. He recovers. He has since gone on to be a doctor. He kept the original text, but added additional text related to his modern understanding of mental illness.

The John Updike Audio Collection

The short stories of John Updike were taken from some of his earlier works. There seems to be a regular theme of middle-age adults being bored with their likes and seeking something. Often an affair, a reminiscing of the past or perhaps being upset with the youth of the day. The only one that stuck for me was one about a swimming pool. A family put in a pool. They enjoyed it a lot at first. However, they seemed to use it less as their marriage fell apart. They both moved to separate places, yet kept the house and made sure the pool stayed in order. At first a few neighbor kids snuck in. Then out of obligation, the neighbors joined in. Eventually it became a large community meeting place. Alas, the husband noticed this when he came to visit the house. They eventually sold the house, with the new owners filling in the pool to keep the house safe from their children. The "bad" circumstances ended up being great for the community. However, the individual priorities end up kabashing the community good. It is an interesting take on community property.

Tuck Everlasting

Tuck Everlasting is a whimsy tale of immortality. A girl is "kidnapped" by a family. However, they just want to befriend her. They have drunk from a spring and now cannot age or die. They don't want other people to drink from the spring. However, a man in a yellow suit wants to bottle up the spring water and sell it. He trick's the girl's family into signing over the property in exchange for delivering her back. In an altercation with the family, he is hit and eventually dies. This leaves the possibility of the gallows - which would not be pleasant for somebody that can live forever. However, the girl helps them escape. She also helps toad become immortal via the spring water. At the end of the book, the family visits the girl's grave. She had lived a full life. They also spot the toad, who is now ambivalent to any vehicles that may cross the road.
The book presents immortality as a lonely experience. How can you really have life if you don't have death?

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York

I had always thought of Robert Moses as the evil dictator of New York highways. I had envisioned him as somebody that wanted to destroy Manhattan and transform it into a car-friendly suburban city. He seemed to be someone who wanted cars and highways and did not care about anything else. After reading Caro's Power Broker, I found myself even more disgusted with his life. I couldn't help but feeling how much better the world would have been had this one person been knocked out of commission.

The book did provide insight into the greater complexity of Moses's life. There was still a great degree of racist, classist and "carist" behavior in his actions. However, he had to work to accumulate the power first. He worked hard and got things done. He did create a large number of parks in the city. He would use the plight of the "common tenement dweller" in order to get his parks built. (But then he would turn around and limit their access to parks, by making them remote and easily accessible only by car.) He would fight against rich landowners when he wanted a park built, but would ally with them to get park donations, and willingly move parkways to avoid their land - even at the expense of ruining viable farmland.)

He started his career as a young idealist, eager to reform the corruption in New York City politics. His civil service reforms were beaten down and he was chased out of the city. When he later returned, his focus was on accumulating power. He initially started with parks and the parkways to get people there. Building in long island he was able to be close enough to the city, but far enough away to carve out his own space. Parks were also a valuable public resource that people could not easily fight against. He became the expert and the "parks guy". He knew how to get things done. He would wine and dine those in power, give jobs and lucrative contracts to the right people, and get the press to play into his hand. Initial cost estimates would always be significantly less than the final cost, but with the project in progress, who could refuse the extra allocation to finish it? If somebody didn't want him to build somewhere, he would simply jump start the project to have it in the works before they could complain.

He had a stellar reputation with the prewar press and public and would use it to accumulate more power. He would write the laws to benefit him and his power and gradually held more and more offices in the city and state government. His parkways were an extension of his "park" responsibilities. (And to ensure there would be no rif-raf at his parks, they were built with bridges too low for buses.) Since he was an expert at parkways, bridges and other highways also became his domain. He created a public authority to manage toll bridges such as the triburough bridge. This was a stroke of genius as it allowed him access to some public funds and bonding without public scrutiny. More importantly, it provided a continuing source of revenue that allowed him to further extend his power. He had plans drawn up for other highways. He had the funds and the plans. Even if small changes would save neighborhoods, he could refuse to allow them because the cost for the city to do it on their own was beyond the ability to manage.

Moses destroyed housing in multiple ways. As a housing commissioner, he was responsible for slum clearance. However, what typically happened was that slums were merely turned over to well-connected people who made them even worse while fleecing the residents. As a highway boss, he ripped apart neighborhoods and destroyed housing by adding freeways. He also failed to provide for public transportation, thus justify construction of more freeways in a never-ending feedback loop.

Parks also did not fair well under Moses's watch. While he did build many parks, he also paved over natural areas to provide his parkways. He "improved" parks his way, which may mean more pavement and a park that is less usable for the community.

How did things go so wrong? Robert Moses had power and surrounded himself with yes men. He didn't listen to the public he was serving. In spite of being the foremost highway builder, he didn't drive himself, and would usually work in the back of his car as he was driven around. He was smart and believed he was right. He was also always on the lookout for more power. Providing contracts and construction jobs for the well connected helped him increase his power. Building infrastructure for the well-to-do helped him consolidate his power. More people in cars meant more money and power.

Today, the United States is still suffering from Moses's Power. His model of highway building helped serve as the base for the Interstate Highway system. Vast swaths of cities became inefficiently dedicated to cars. Planners attempted to reduce congestion on roads by building more roads - only to see congestion increase. Public transportation was ripped out in favor of highway building. Only after sprawling suburbs were developed were attempts made to add transit back in (in the name of reducing highway congestion!). By then it was too late. Suburbs were not developed with a transit hub and were thus not efficiently served by transit. While transit was once run profitably by private entities, it is now subsidized by the public. Highways also continue to be publicly subsidized, leaving us with huge transportation outlays, while we still suffer from congestion.

Perhaps if New York would have let Moses's civil service reforms go through, he would not have become the power hungry maniac. Perhaps if the public appropriately limited his power early on (and had him adhere to the "one-office" rules), he would have not been able to destroy so much. If he would have just listened and used his brains to support public transportation, there would have not been a need for so many highways. He could have used the ability to get things done to make the world a better place for people. Alas, he did not, and in a quest to make things better for cars, he made the New York worse for everybody.

Alas, Moses remained in his cocoon. He was able to get things done. Just not the right things. He was regularly threatening to quit his posts. It finally took a Rockefeller to have the courage to let him do it. The governor had enough power and wealth to but Moses in his place. The public had also began to see the full extent of his power and did not have the rose colored lenses they once had. Even the media began to see through the facade. However, even with his resigning his posts, he still had triborough. Here, it required some double-crossing actions to finally get him out. He was enlisted to support the merger into MTA by the promise of a "key role" in the new organization. After the election passed, his key role ended up being as a consultant with no real authority. He was finally out of power, with his last bit of destruction being the cronyism in the World's Fair. At last he was out! He still tried to piece together additional bits of power, but he was through destroying the city. If only somebody had the guts to stop him earlier.

Ancestral voices: Decoding Ancient languages

This book goes through some of the major "decipherments" of ancient language. It covers them in the large historical basis, with stories starting centuries ago with the first hints of the "lost language". (And it is good that they start a while back, since the book itself is a few decades old.)

The author can be verbose, with a chatty, flowery language (even though it is a rather short book.) I have read better books that cover most of the same basic matter. However, this one does go in to more detail of the "long-range" history of identifying and then cracking ancient languages.

Great Train Robbery

This is the historical account of a Victorian-era heist of gold from a moving train. Most of the novel concerns the planning involved in carrying out the robbery. The actual robbery happens near the end (and is appropriately only a small part of the whole operation.) The final bit details the public reaction, along with the capture and escape of the robbers. (The final destination of gold and thieves is not known.)

Though based on true events, it is told in a highly engaging manner similar to Crichton's other thrillers. Instead of scientific details, we get details of mid 19th-century life and criminal activity. The criminals are portrayed sympathetically as smart, highly creative individuals engaged in a complicated plot.

The actual robbery required a number of preparatory actions: to open the safes on the train, the keys needed to be obtained. This required social activity to locate the keys, and even a jailbreak to get someone with the proper skills needed to help obtain and duplicate the keys. There were so many ways that the plot could have failed, it is a wonder that it totally succeeded.