Book - The Drafting Table

From Plato to Pascal

During the pandemic, among other books, I got around to reading some classics that had been on my list for some time: Plato's Republic, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, and Pascal's Pensées. Timeless works like those are hard to say anything new about, so this isn't a review; this post

Review

Mini-Reviews 2022

Last year is well in the rearview mirror by now, but I wanted to compile some of my notes from books I read (and a movie) in 2022 while they're still somewhat in my mind. I did a similar post last year and thought it worked pretty well. Maybe you'll

Quotes

The Power of Some Men Over Other Men

"What we call Man's power is, in reality, a power possessed by some men which they may, or may not, allow other men to profit by. ... From this point of view, what we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument."

Ideas

Bent Work

"'All keep the mines open; it is a work to be shared. But each digs for himself the thing he wants for his work. What else would he do?''It is not so with us.''Then you must make very bent work.'" ~ Out of the Silent Planet, p.105

Water

Big Well(s)

I spent quite a bit of time in southwestern Kansas last year, on account of a couple of projects with my work. On one of these trips, I had a bit of extra time on the (long) drive from Wichita, so I stopped at a small-town museum built around a

World Issues

Prospects for a Multi-Polar World

Contrasting and synthesizing the perspectives of Balaji Srinivasan and Peter Zeihan. Skim down to the section on "Contrasting Geopolitical Outlooks" if you want to get to the main part of this post more quickly. Introduction The present moment certainly feels like we can't take anything for granted anymore. Recent events

Book

Seven Games in Silica

The topic of AI/ML (machine learning) is getting a lot of buzz right now. That makes this book review pretty timely. I. Seven Games: A Human History by Oliver Roeder is a book that came out this year. It is about board and card games, the seven alluded to

Water

Two Rivers in Asia

Travel, geopolitics, and water—this post is a review of two books that sit at the convergence of several of my interests. It can also be seen as the inland accompaniment to this post [https://danbscott.ghost.io/monsoon-prospect/] covering coastal areas in the same general region. The River at

Review

Mini-Reviews 2021

Last year [https://danbscott.ghost.io/2021-year-in-review/] was a busy year on the personal front (due to a growing family) so I didn't have as much time to write reviews of things I read compared to previous years. Still, I wanted to have some highlights and notes to reference in

Map

Cartography in the Wardrobe

The Chronicles of Narnia is one of my favourite children's series. Every good fantasy novel is incomplete without a map. While the Narnia books include some maps, they tend to focus on the area where each book is set; there is a comprehensive map [https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/115249/

History

The Left Bank of the Rhine

This post contains a review of Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country by Simon Winder, along with a bit of programming practice I did recently. Lotharingia is a history/travel book about the swath of Europe where French and Germanic cultural regions come into contact—and frequently, over

Book

Monsoon Prospect

Here's the promised forward-looking Part 2 to the historical book reviews from Part 1 [https://danbscott.ghost.io/monsoon-legacy/]. In the previous part of this series, I wrote about some of the history of the Indian Ocean. In this part, I'll be looking at the geopolitical outlook of the region

History

Monsoon Legacy

This post is the first part of a two-part series I have planned. It is about the history of trade on the western Indian Ocean and is based on reviews of a couple of books I read this year. Part two [https://danbscott.ghost.io/monsoon-prospect/] will look forward at

environment

Harvesting Algae and Other Parts of the Biosphere

This post is a rambling review of a couple of books and a technical paper that are all around a common theme of obtaining renewable resources from photosynthesis. The books I'll be covering in this post are Harvesting the Biosphere by Vaclav Smil [http://vaclavsmil.com/2012/12/21/harvesting-the-biosphere-what-we-have-taken-from-nature/

Book

10 Books Before '20

At the start of September, a friend on Facebook issued a challenge to read 10 books before the end of the year. I decided to share the brief reviews I wrote here. The rules allowed for books you were in the middle of when the challenge was issued, so the

Book

Polynesian Pacific

Sorry about having such a long gap between posting. I've been on a couple of business trips, and when I've been home my social calendar and the hot weather haven't left many good opportunities to sit down at my computer and write. Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia by Christina

Book

Centuries of Rice and Salt

I usually only write reviews of non-fiction books that I read but a novel I read recently was different enough from typical fiction that I thought I'd make an exception. The Years of Rice and Salt, by Kim Stanley Robinson, is an alternate history novel. It starts with a world

Book

Sand and Soil

This post contains reviews of a couple of books I've read recently. They relate to a similar theme as the previous post [https://danbscott.ghost.io/images-of-the-anthropocene/]—how people are reshaping the earth. About the Books Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations [https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520272903/dirt] by Dr.

Book

The Basics of Complexity

This fall I read a couple of books about complexity: A Crude Look at the Whole by John H. Miller [https://www.santafe.edu/people/profile/john-h-miller] and Complexity: A Guided Tour by Melanie Mitchell [https://www.santafe.edu/people/profile/melanie-mitchell]. For my final post of the year (except

Book

Waifs of the Tide

Some poetry, some history, and some Maritime scenery. At the end of September, I took a detour to Grand Pré [https://www.google.com/maps/@45.1196064,-64.3270018,5125m/data=!3m1!1e3?hl=en] after a weekend in Halifax. The landscape there is a UNESCO [https://danbscott.ghost.io/

Book

Facts, Forecasts, & Figures

If you're looking for a break from the doom-and-gloom in the news, this post is for you (I'll also suggest this one [https://danbscott.ghost.io/rational-optimism-about-the-environment/] from last year). Below, I share reviews of two books—so it won't be a short read and I'd recommend grabbing a cup

Travel

fietspaden en droge voeten

This is my final post based off of my trip to the Netherlands. It focuses on reviewing a book about land reclamation and flood control infrastructure in the Netherlands and sharing a couple of bike trips I took out into the countryside around Amsterdam [https://danbscott.ghost.io/noord-holland/] and

Book

Pirates and Vikings

This post contains 2.1 book reviews. The two books are The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates by Peter T. Leeson and The Sea Wolves: A History of the Vikings by Lars Brownworth. The extra 10 percent is two chapters from David Friedman's book Legal Systems Very Different

History

Steppe Cycle

This post is a review of Water on Sand: Environmental Histories of the Middle East and North Africa. The chapters have different authors and mostly stand on their own; the editor of the whole volume is Alan Mikhail [https://global.oup.com/academic/product/water-on-sand-9780199768660?cc=ca&lang=en&#] . One

Computer

Week 7: Haskell

With this post, I've come to the end of my series going through the book Seven Languages in Seven Weeks by Bruce Tate. It was a good experience and I feel like I learned quite a bit (but have a lot more to learn—this really only scratched the surface