kyscg's reviews
249 reviews

I was first aware of the effects of the twin bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki from a Vikram Seth poem almost a decade ago. "A Doctor's Journal Entry for August 6, 1945," writes about the plight of the citizens of Hiroshima immediately after Little Man exploded in the air above their unassuming daily lives. We were made to watch a documentary about the bombing in school. We had to write essays about the inhumanity of the bombing for credit.

A couple of years later, I was introduced to Richard Feynman via his undergraduate level Physics lectures. He talks about his time in Los Alamos in his autobiography. I was reintroduced to the atomic bomb purely from a scientific perspective. The burning and mass murder of an entire city was unimportant in the face of an atom's profound power within its nucleus. And why shouldn't it be? We had come far from the days of Democritus and Aristotle. From Newton to Dalton to Avogadro, all of whom set the atom and the molecule firmly in stone. The electron came to life as a cathode ray when Thomson applied a voltage across two electrodes in a vacuum. Rutherford mentioned an idea for an experiment to Marsden and Geiger, resulting in the famous gold-leaf experiment that showed us the nucleus. Niels Bohr used ideas from Max Plank and Einstein to show how the electrons wouldn't collapse into the nucleus, Rutherford split nitrogen to produce protons, and Chadwick discovered the neutron. And finally, rounding off everything, de Broglie, Schrödinger, and Heisenberg described the complete atom with electron positions as pure probabilities. The atom was whole. All that remained was the task of splitting it.

When you read Feynman's accounts of his time at Los Alamos, you have this impression that he was the main character and that life at Los Alamos revolved around him (or maybe I was too taken by the great man to not see the bigger picture). So it was surprising to me that he's only mentioned thrice in the entire book and only one of those times he's described as doing anything (setting up the radio before the Trinity test). The giants that split the atom were no less impressive than the ones mentioned above. It all started with Henri Becquerel, Marie Curie, Pierre Curie and Rutherford realizing that some nuclei undergo radioactive decay. The energetic Fermi bombarded Uranium with neutrons, leading to Otto Hahn and Lisa Meitner producing Barium from Uranium, which caused Meitner's nephew Frisch to call the process "nuclear fission". Enter Leó Szilárd, who realized that a chain reaction would be possible. After this final hurdle of theoretical understanding was crossed, Szilárd, Teller, and Wigner took Einstein's endorsement and sent the famous letter to Roosevelt. The juggernaut was set into motion, with enigmatic Robert Oppenheimer leading it. Man would learn to harness a tiny bit of the force of nature, and the world would never be the same again.

The writing has the rigour of profound scientific exposition and a thriller novel's pace. I wish I could write like this. Just for the writing, I'd recommend reading the book. The chapter on the bombing is very traumatic to read. I was finally reminded, after all these years, about what I read in Vikram Seth's poem about people walking around like ghosts, their skin hanging off their flesh. Whether or not the US should have dropped the bombs can be argued. I have a controversial take on this, which could border on victim-blaming, that Hirohito should have surrendered earlier. And why couldn't the US have starved Japan via a naval blockade? Was this a case of "Rome conquered the world in self-defence"?

The foreword to the latest edition is very insightful; Rhodes asks, "Why seventy thousand nuclear weapons between us when only a few were more than enough to destroy each other?" One of the great books, in league with all the big ones like The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and War and Peace. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it, being a scientist myself and having looked up to all the superstars that come together in this book. One last comment I'd like to make is about how fast the Manhattan Project moved; if only we could move at that pace for everything we do.

Allen has a line about computer programming being a true meritocracy and how anyone could write programs irrespective of their background. And then, a few pages later, he writes about how he racked hundreds of dollars in compute time and his dad just paid for them. Myopic.

I thought this venture was super interesting, considering how my first academic research was along these lines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traf-O-Data

The book is great, I loved all the parts about Bill, and his unrelenting leadership style. Definitely would have loved to read more about Bill. Paul Allen is super-cool too, with his renaissance man style of living, he probably squeezed more from the lemon than Bill Gates did. The best part is Paul Allen's prescience, it is uncanny, and you start to wonder if his predictions were as trivial to make as he makes them sound. The appendix has a list of ideas to solve in Artificial Intelligence, so many of which are already solved in the last couple years. RIP Paul Allen, you literally, would have loved 2023.

When you read a book of this magnitude, you always have a moment when something profound strikes you. It was when I was nearing the book's midpoint, and I read that John D. had retired, or more like, gave away most duties to Archbold. So that meant that more than half of the book was dedicated to his life after Standard Oil. I wasn't expecting this, but now that I've finished reading the book, I realize how much more should have been there.

Titan, derived from the Greek Τιτάν, initially referring to the offspring of the sky and the earth, were larger than life, primordial to the gods, all-encompassing, all-powerful beings. You tend to lose sight of Rockefeller's status as you read episode after episode of him conducting history-making events. When Chernow addresses him as the Titan a few times in the book, you pause to think about it, and it hits you.

John D. Rockefeller evokes so many conflicting emotions in you; you alternate from admiration to perplexion, to alarm, to wonder, and then back to respect. You can tell what drove him; he made money for the sole purpose of making money and then gave it away with pinpoint precision, aimed at the best causes of his times. He was adamant about his name not going to anything he gave to, which led to me being surprised throughout the book that he was the cause for so many great institutions to rise. To my frustration, he evades all attempts to stereotype him. He makes it even more complicated by being evasive and secretive on purpose. He worked with feverish devotion and made every move after being frustratingly slow and careful; his schedule was rigid, he had no impulses, and he was obsessively pedantic about his money. On the other hand, he retired very young and spent the rest of his life with youthful energy with his family in the estates he built.

There were so many big names sprinkled throughout his life that I did not know that he founded the University of Chicago or was the first to start funding large-scale medical research (the vaccine against hookworm and malaria treatment research). Names like Helen Keller, who was partially given financial assistance by Rockefeller, Ida Tarbell, who was Rockefeller's kryptonite and successfully brought to light the unsavoury aspects of his rise to the top, and Mark Twain, I learnt that the MoMA was founded by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, wife of Junior, Carl Jung who treated his daughter Edith in Europe and then got funded by Rockefeller money, Frederick T. Gates who helped Rockefeller invest and give away his money wisely and Teddy Roosevelt, who was a master politician, and always seemed to get away with double-crossing Standard Oil.

Chernow writes this biography with all the colour of a novel; he takes care to psychologically delve into Rockefeller's early days, which leaves us wanting more. However, I wasn't too fond of all the discussion about Rockefeller's minor satellites, like his work with the Baptist church or Junior's life and heirs. While they were essential to his life, I wanted more of John D. than the others. There's also an unnecessary theme throughout the book that Rockefeller was not as sinister as Tarbell made him out to be, which felt too much like "the lad doth protest too much".

made me look at typewriters to buy, the writing is okay, some stories are better than the others. The foreword about typewriters is some nice writing, so are the chapters with Anna, MDash, and Steve Wong. The rest aren't that great
2.5/5

I've always had a soft spot about Jeff Bezos and the Amazon story. I mean, starting an internet book store and turning it into a global empire worth more than one and a half trillion dollars using leverage, and the power of technology, is extraordinary. I bought a physical copy of Amazon Unbound from a local bookstore, back in 2021, and decided to finally read it this summer.

It's easy to read the book, partly because the story is captivating, but also because Brad Stone can spin a good yarn. So many times, I found myself stopping to think about how unreal what Amazon and Jeff Bezos were doing. Let us give the S-Team some credit too, so this means that the S-Team, and Jeff were working, more often than not, simultaneously, on the following things:
- Echo (Alexa)
- Go stores
- Fresh
- AWS
- Washington Post
- Expansion into India, China, Europe, and Mexico
- Fire Phone
- Kindle
- Primevideo
- Independent delivery system
- Advertisements
- Blue Origin
- HQ2
- Amazon PR
- COVID-19

While reading about Bezos' idea to sell steak on a truck by going around neighbourhoods, I realized that so much of Amazon's seemingly brilliant ideas would never have taken off if they didn't have the capital. So now, the question is, if you gave a lot of people (a statistically significant number) a lot of money, would they reproduce Amazon's results? Culture matters a lot, but are there other cultures that could achieve similar or greater levels of success?

Amazon opened up their store to sellers from China who flooded their market with low-quality ripoffs. So the question is, do you just give everything to the customer and let them make the choice or do you enforce a quality bar that all sellers have to cross? And on the next level, what does it mean for sellers that are making high quality originals if a Chinese clone will always take away their customer base?

Amazon Go and their "Just Walk Out Technology". How do you create the best store in the world?

I don't think Jeff was at his best with Blue Origin, maybe that was one step too much for the great man, maybe he was just unlucky. But Blue Origin should have done so much more.

What is the future of Amazon now? Can they afford to ignore structural and organizational inefficiencies and go innovating again? Or will Jassy have to iron out some kinks first?

These were questions I had, I will end with my favourite leadership principle from Jeff. Principle 8: Think Big. Thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy.