2023_07_24.md

Oxide and Friends: July 24th, 2023

Books in the Box III

We've been hosting a live show weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour, and recording them all; here is the recording from July 24th, 2023.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers on included Steve Klabnik, Tom Lyon, Ian Grunert, Owen Anderson, phillipov, makowski, and saethlin. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• Elon Jet

• High Noon: The Inside Story of Scott McNealy and the Rise of Sun Microsystems by Southwick, Karen

• Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology by Paul Rabinow

• Sun Labs vs. SunSoft Water Fight 1992

• Cyberville: Clicks, Culture, and the Creation of an Online Town Hardcover by Stacy Horn

• Built to Fail: The Inside Story of Blockbuster's Inevitable Bust Kindle Edition by Alan Payne

• A History of Silicon Valley - Vol 1: The 20th Century Paperback by Piero Scaruffi

• H-E-B

• Moby Dick by Herman Melville (Arion Press)

• A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers

• Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing

• Into the Raging Sea: Thirty-Three Mariners, One Megastorm, and the Sinking of El Faro

• If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future Hardcover by Jill Lepore

• UNIVAC and the 1952 Presidential Election

• NPR: The Night A Computer Predicted The Next President

• Doom Guy: Life in First Person by John Romero

  • NB: recommended prior to reading; Adam would recommend almost any book instead
  • Masters of Doom is an imperfect but far better account of the same events

• From Secret Ballot to Democracy Sausage: How Australia Got Compulsory Voting by Judith Brett

• Bryan had a reading list for his wedding?! (his wife confirms)

  • The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes
  • Harp in the South by Ruth Park
  • Cloudstreet by Tim Winton
  • Death of the Lucky Country by Donald Horne
  • 30 Days in Sydney by Peter Carey
  • Leviathan by John Birmingham

• The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia's Founding by Robert Hughes

• Barbarians Led by Bill Gates by Jennifer Edstrom and, Marlin Eller

• Murray Sargent's account of how his Scroll Screen Tracer got Windows to work in protected mode

• Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure by Jerry Kaplan

• DeviceScript

• Washington: A Life by Chernow

• California Burning: The Fall of Pacific Gas and Electric--and What It Means for America's Power Grid

• Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety by Eric Schlosser

• eBoys: The First Inside Account of Venture Capitalists at Work (and related Acquired Podcast)

• The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein

• Acts of the Apostles: Mind over Matter: Volume Blue by John F.X. Sundman

• Thunder Below!: The USS Barb Revolutionizes Submarine Warfare in World War II by Eugene B. Fluckey

• Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

• The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution by Gregory Zuckerman

• The Predictors: How a Band of Maverick Physicists Used Chaos Theory to Trade Their Way to a Fortune on Wall Street by Thomas A. Bass

• The Eudaemonic Pie: The Bizarre True Story of How a Band of Physicists and Computer Wizards Took On Las Vegas by Thomas A Bass

Some of the other books mentioned in the Discord channel:

• Herr aller Dinge/Lord of All Things by Andreas Eschbach
• Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber
• The Sciences of the Artificial by Herbert A. Simon
• California Burning: The Fall of Pacific Gas and Electric--and What It Means for America's Power Grid by Katherine Blunt
• The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution Hardcover by Gregory Zuckerman
• The Predictors: How a Band of Maverick Physicists Used Chaos Theory to Trade Their Way to a Fortune on Wall Street by Thomas A. Bass
• The Eudaemonic Pie: The Bizarre True Story of How a Band of Physicists and Computer Wizards Took On Las Vegas by Thomas A Bass
• Models.Behaving.Badly.: Why Confusing Illusion with Reality Can Lead to Disaster, on Wall Street and in Life by Emanuel Derman
• It's a Nonlinear World by Richard H. Enns

Not technically books, but suggested reading nonetheless by folks in Discord:

• The Night A Computer Predicted The Next President by Steve Henn, NPR

• How a brilliant debugger (Scroll Screen Tracer by Murray Sargent) turned Windows OS into the IBM OS/2 crusher and gave Microsoft its killer product.

• DeviceScript: TypeScript for Tiny IoT Devices

• Bob and Ray | Slow Talkers of America | Audio Recording (YouTube)

• Ursula K. Le Guin

• The Maintenance Race by Stewart Brand

If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!