1864: Lincoln at the Gates of History amazon By: Charles Bracelen Flood

Summary​

Lincoln worked very hard to preserve the Union. He also did it in such a steady way. I'm left even more impressed with him as a president and man.

Take Aways​

Lincoln had to work very hard to be re-elected. The final result of the 1864 election might have been decisive. However going into the nominating convention in Baltimore there was significant uncertainty. Lincoln was facing strong internal challenges, including from members of his cabinet and generals.

Lincoln was walking multiple tight ropes at once:

• Henry Raymond of New York Times: Caught between radical Republicans on the one hand and so many of the Democrats on the other: "One denounces Lincoln because he didn't abolish slavery soon enough, another because he assumed to touch it at all."

• Pressing his generals (ie Grant) to take the battle to the enemy and take advantage of the Union's strengths in men and material; while at the same time avoiding unnecessary or costly loses.

• Wanting to fire or replace generals but have concerns that they could become political rivals. General Meade, opponent in the 1864 election, was only one example.

• Fighting a war but knowing he had to make peace. Pushing to win an unconditional surrender but knowing that for the Union to survive they couldn't "destroy the village to save it."

Unanswered Questions​

In reviewing the war casualty numbers I was reminded of how much more dangerous disease was vs enemy fire. Often political winds seemed to shift and change based on news from battles. However casualty rates were 2-3 to 1 for disease. So even if there were a particularly deadly battle, the fact that the country was at war was the thing that was deadly, not one particular battle. I wonder if this was discussed at the time or if this was just thought of as the background rate of disease of the day?

Author: Ray Kurzweil

This feels like an update to Kurzweil's continuing series of books on how the singularity is coming. Some of the book is even devoted to defending his record of prediction of the Law of Accelerating Returns (LOAR), as well as refuting critics. These parts of the book were of the least interest to me.

The New Hotness (to me)

What was new to me, and of greatest interest was the portion of the book (first half?) that dealt with descriptions of the latest discoveries in:

• Neuroscience
• Speech recognition
• Artificial vision

The Neocortex as Repeated "Module"

One of the key concepts presented in the book was the algorithm for the neocortex as encoded by the genome. The neocortex is formed by about 500,000 neocortical columns. These columns contain roughly 60,000 neurons each. This column structure is approximately 2mm tall and 0.5mm wide. This columnar structure contains ~600 pattern recognizers (100 neurons each). This sets a brain wide total of pattern recognizers at 300 million.

The routing between these columns/recognizers takes place on a regular grid like structure of neurons that two distant pattern recognizers would use connect. Kurzweil compares this information routing system to Crossbar routing layouts in integrated circuits including FPGAs. He states that there are on the order of one quadrillion (10^15) connections in the neocortex. Assuming these connections were between recognizers, this would imply that average fan-in to a recognizer was roughly 1,600 connections and the average fan-out was the same.

Given 4 bytes to address a recognizer and 1 byte to define the connection weight the routing matrix of a simulated brain would consume 500GB. How the 100 neurons of a recognizer were wired and weighted would be in addition to this.

HHMM - Hierarchical Hidden Markov Models

A large portion of the book was based on Kurzweil's experience working on natural language processing, either written or spoken. The primary tools used to crack these challenges were HHMMs using genetic algorithms to design the structure and "god variables".

This section was a learning edge for me. I feel comfortable'ish with Markov models/chains. Hidden Markov Models sorta make sense but HHMM were the next level that I don't yet have my head around. One quote from the book that encourages me is from John von Neumann, "No one understands mathematics, they just get used to it."

End Notes

It wasn't till about halfway through the book that I noticed the extensive end notes. The book is peppered with references to seminal research papers and longer descriptions of concepts covered in the main text. In a 282 page book the end notes cover 36 pages. They were valuable enough of a resource that I scanned them into Evernote so I can refer back to the links and research paper references.

Author: Piers Platt

I bought this book because I went to boarding school with the author. We were in the same dorm freshman year. I generally like to read books/articles/blogs by people I know because it deepens my personal connection with them. In this case I haven't seen Piers since perhaps the late nineties. What was of personal interest to me was the potential "path not traveled" nature of memoir. My life could have unfolded differently and this book describes a type of experience I may have had.

What Makes it Distinct​

I think I could spend all of my reading time exclusively on books that fit the mold:

• Author goes abroad
• Author has crazy war experiences
• Author grows
• Author returns home
• Author appreciates the little things

In this case the book was not so much about growth as providing the experience of being there to the reader. The quote that has stuck with me was early on when the author was describing his motivation for writing the book. He describes how his friends would ask him what his deployment was like. Piers says he wanted them to understand what it was too hot be able to touch the tanks without gloves and to understand the smell of the place.

The book focuses on all the non-heroic experiences. Basically all the hurry up and wait portions of military life. Essentially if a movie would jump cut to another moment, the boring in between times ended up in the book. I particularly enjoyed the paperwork and compliance requirements to keep the unit on the firing range firing their main guns.

Piers does detail some moments of action. They reinforce the perception that a deployment was a long grind of banality, loud bang, then right back to grinding routine, dirt and stink.

Summary​

This was a fun quick read. Worth the $5.99 I paid for the eBook on Amazon. I would read another book by Piers, if he writes one.

Author: Charles Duhigg

I read this book in about 48 hours. This is an indicator of both my interest in the topic and the ease of digestion of the content. The book has several groups of memes that have stuck with me. They fall into the following groups:

• Frameworks for thinking about how habits effect us
• Anecdotes about how people used these frameworks effectively

Habit Cycle - Framework

This is the core concept of the book. It composed of: input, anticipation and result. Apparently if you don't have any part of the cycle it will not take place. If you have all parts you have no choice but developing the habit.

Marketing Genius - Anecdote

The addition of menthol to toothpaste is to create a sensation necessary in the feedback loop of the habit cycle. Without that sensation the lack of it would not prompt the desire to the complete the loop. Apparently at the time that Colgate (?) was introduced it wasn't the only toothpaste that had the mint oils but it had the dominant advertising that primed consumers to expect the "clean" feeling.

This was the reverse of what almost happened to Fabreeze. In early formulations of the product there was no scent. This led consumes to forget that they needed to use the product. Once a scent was added to new versions of the product it signaled to consumers that the room was now "clean". Apparently we can all get "nose blind" to our own funk :)

Hacking the loop - Anecdote

A whole chapter was devoted to how Paul O'Neill instigated changes in habits at Alcoa. He focused the company on safety. The drive to make Alcoa a zero injury work place was the initiative that enabled cultural changes in other areas.