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For the last three months I’ve been borrowing Deb’s Cybook, and I’ve had the opportunity this month to play with a Kindle. I think I’ve finally had enough experience to compare the two.

First, I will be unambiguous: this kind of device is a permanent part of my life. Exactly like John, I thought I’d ultimately be unwilling to part with the physical book experience. I miss (a little bit) the sound and feel of turning pages, but on the whole I discovered exactly what he did: it’s not so much that I love books, rather I love to read.

I do not miss having to hold a five-pound book when I’m laying in bed.

Second, I’m finding that I read more. When I finish a book, there are always a few dozen waiting for me, wherever I am. I can read more than one at a time, so there’s never the problem of not being in the mood for whichever I have on hand.

When it comes to travel, it’s a no-brainer — 5×7″ and 6 oz. holds my entire library. No more avoiding The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich just because I don’t want to haul 1,200 pages around.

I do not miss having three books crammed into my laptop bag, giving me scoliosis.

Finally, I have the unique… challenge? of living in Australia, where books were way more expensive to begin with, but are extra special stupid until they catch up to the reality of the weak US dollar. Not to mention that I don’t want to accumulate a physical library that I must someday dispose of, or crate across the ocean.

With that behind us, a brief comparison of the two devices awaits.

They have identical 8″ e-Ink displays. They both offer variable font sizes (though Kindle’s smallest is not quite small enough for Vlad’s tastes), and support pretty much the same file formats. Both take the same amount of time to turn a page, which is mostly a function of the display.

Cybook pros and cons:

• + charges from USB. This is big.

• + marginally smaller, thinner, and lighter than Kindle

• + easy to add TrueType fonts, though I’m told there may be a hack for Kindle

• + excellent battery life — I get 3-4 weeks of heavy usage per charge

• I dislike the colour of the brown leather cover, but I tolerate it because I dislike scratches even more. One-handed operation is more difficult (but not impossible) without it.

• no wireless book delivery, but USB works fine

• no keyboard (or: no space lost to the keyboard); your outlook on life dictates whether this is a pro or con

• - it lacks the Kindle’s explicit stand-by mode. You can disable automatic shutoff at the cost of some battery life, but I’m not sure how much. [Update: the battery only lasts about a day if it's always on, so that's a non-starter.]

• - from a cold start, it takes 20 seconds to boot, which is about twice as long as Kindle. This is only mildly annoying in practice.

• - very occasionally it drops a keypress (yes, even with the new firmware)

• - it has a generally pretty clunky UI:

  • there are no left-handed buttons
  • there’s no way to see which page # you’re on, so jumping around in the book is hard
  • the Library interface is just a flat list, so it gets progressively worse as you have more books in it
  • it requires way too many button presses to use bookmarks
  • very poor use of the few hardware buttons, which can’t be remapped. Three of the six buttons are dedicated to the music player, functionality I don’t even think it should have.

• - Bookeen violates the GPL on at least one piece of software

On the Kindle side of the ledger:

• + direct wireless delivery of books (in the US)

• + a “standby” mode that makes it basically instant-on, but offers only about a week of battery life

• + some very nice user interface elements, including the alien-technology scrollbar

• + a full keyboard, which allows full text search of your library

• + built-in dictionary and (in the US) Wikipedia search via wireless

• + big, easy-to-press buttons for left- and right-handed use

• some complain that those buttons are in fact too easy-to-press, though that does not seem to be universal

• you can take notes, if that’s your thing

• if you crave DRM, you can buy from the Kindle store

• - no USB charging. There’s an adapter, but it’s yet another cable to pack.

• - no built-in sans-serif font (maybe that only bothers me)

I could recommend the Cybook if it weren’t for the licensing issue. There seems to be no doubt that the device runs Linux (and presumably other GPL-licensed software). According to other customers, Bookeen’s response is that a non-disclosure agreement with the manufacturer precludes the release of code. In that case, they shouldn’t be selling it.

Most of its other negatives could be resolved by a solid firmware update, so there is some small hope for the future.

The Kindle looks perfectly serviceable, though I lump the Kindle store in with the iTunes music store. On the one hand, Amazon are aggressively pushing down the price of books, particularly eBooks (which many publishers price higher than the paper edition). On the other hand, it’s another DRM-based business model that I’d rather not support. Fortunately, Kindle (Mobipocket) books are trivial to decrypt if you believe in exercising any of your fair-use rights.

Some people really want the functionality offered by the keyboard — direct purchase from the Kindle Store; note-taking; full-text searching — and others prefer the smallest possible device. I want the search, but I find myself rarely missing it in practice.

I think the next generation of these devices will resolve a lot of my complaints, but they are already at the point that, if you enjoy reading, I recommend you buy one today. It is one of very few devices that has truly improved my life.

I just finished reading Fahrenheit 451 for the first time — I know — and while I think 1984 is a more accurate chronicle of modern life, Fahrenheit 451 was equally (but unexpectedly) terrifying. One’s mind does not need to execute a triple-lutz or complex pirouette maneuver in order to draw a line between the state of modern civil and academic liberties and Bradbury’s … fiction?

Coincidentally — or not; news like this seems to break about daily from that side of the pond — our brothers-in-arms at Emergent Chaos cheerfully document the UK’s further slide into self-parody as chronicled in “Hats banned from Yorkshire pubs over CCTV fears“. I couldn’t agree more. A hat is basically a burqa, and we all know what that means.

I’m about halfway through Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, the excellent sequel to the equally-excellent The Making of the Atomic Bomb. The sequel has so far spent less time on the basic science of the new bomb and focused more on the political environment of the time, in this case the emerging Cold War.

When it came to Operation Vittles, the 321-day Allied airlift to break the Soviet blockade of Berlin, newly-appointed airlift commander Maj. Gen. Tunner transformed chaos into order, dramatically increasing the airlift’s effectiveness and proving its long-term viability.

Perhaps his most important change was to order that all missions follow instrument flight rules in all weather. This, combined with the instruction that any aborted landing return to base without a second attempt, meant that pilots could be easily and routinely sequenced, a landing every 3 minutes, around the clock, in virtually any weather. Lines of planes, spaced 3 minutes apart, all the way back to the Allied air bases supplying Berlin.

[Tunner] also believed the Soviets underestimated the significance of instrument flying — of navigating with compass and attitude indicator without ground reference, a skill American military aviators had developed in the 1930s, well before radio or radar guidance systems came along. “The Russians were good pilots … but always beneath the clouds, never on instruments. I am convinced that the Russian unfamiliarity with instrument flying led them to take our airlift too lightly… They did not think we could do it.”

If our military aviators had continued to fly on their own visual navigation in good weather, not only would they have been caught off-guard by unexpected North German fog, but the precision sequencing that comes with everyone following the same pre-cleared, published procedures would never have been possible. The airlift that the President had hoped would merely stretch supplies and buy time for negotiation became the salvation of West Berlin, a plane touching down each minute at its peak.

(Operation Little Vittles was pretty excellent too, while we’re on the topic.)

That the 747 is my favourite airliner is no closely-guarded secret, and it’s not a difficult affinity to defend: the 747 literally created and sustained the intercontinental travel market that we know and enjoy today. Its safety, range, and capacity were all unprecedented in 1970, and for the most part are still as unique as its silhouette.

The 747 offers a spaciousness and configurability that changed the entire economics for both passenger service and the air freight industry. If you’re fortunate enough to sit upstairs, you almost can’t believe how high off the ground you are. Parked at the gate you can see clear across the apron over those puny single-aisle, single-deck jets.

At any rate, 747 is the story of designing and building this wonder, written by the leader of the engineering team, and it was so completely fascinating that I had to buy a copy for shaver, too. It doesn’t assume any specialized knowledge of engineering or piloting, but it does communicate just how monumental and unknown the challenge was at the time. I was also amazed, particularly in light of what seem to be endless A380 slips, to discover how little time the Boeing team had from conception to delivery.

The reviews from industry peers and other Boeing employees seem to indicate that the author is a pretty straight shooter. He certainly doesn’t hide the fact that he was given the job while the 747 was still very much second-fiddle inside Boeing, with the world expecting supersonic aircraft to dominate. President Reagan gave him a couple votes of confidence when he was awarded the Medal of Technology and asked to serve on the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident.

Even if you’re not as in-love with the 747 as I am, it is easy to recommend for anyone interested in airliners or the birth of modern international travel.

In related news, much ink has been spilled recently about a February 2005 flight in which a British Airways 747 suffered an engine fire immediately after takeoff from LAX, and after some consideration the captain elected to continue the flight to London. Retired 747 captain John Deakin has written his take on the event, including a lot of well-reasoned commentary about why he would make exactly the same choice that the BA crew made.

Having read 747, I can appreciate this even more: engine failures were indeed extremely common on that first generation of P&W engines, and the 747 was designed to handle them — even explosive uncontained failures of the kind that brought down United 232 (itself a fascinating story). The fact is that a three-engine flight in a 747, even after an engine fire, even over an ocean, is simply a non-event. Design genius indeed.

On and off for the last few weeks I’ve been reading from A Review of Criticality Accidents, a document that contains short reports about every known worldwide nuclear criticality accident prior to the year 2000. Some of these occurrences, and the situations surrounding them, are astonishing!

I learned that in the early days of working with fissile material, people could dismiss unusual happenings as unimportant — surprising to me, even considering their lack of criticality training (from process accident #1):

Immediately after disconnecting the hose, the operator noticed foaming and violent gas release from the vessel. … Neither of the two operators had any training in criticality safety and neither recognized that a criticality accident had occurred. They did not expect that there would be any health effects and they elected not to report their observations.

As with every single accident, the investigation showed that multiple procedure violations were the cause; the operator lost both his legs due to acute radiation poisoning.

I learned that the margins between critical and subcritical can be razor thin, and that the most seemingly innocent actions can make the difference (from process accident #3):

Then three of the experimenters manually lifted the vessel and began to move it (in order to directly pour the contents into containers) when the excursion occurred.

They immediately noticed a flash (due to Cherenkov radiation), and simultaneously, fissile solution was violently ejected, reaching the ceiling about 5 m above. … The combination of additional reflection from the three experimenters and the change in the geometry of the solution volume was sufficient to cause the system to exceed prompt critical.

The three experimenters died within a week.

I learned that “unfavorable geometry containers” were contributing factors in very many accidents. I eventually learned that favorable geometry describes a container that prevents criticality by simply not allowing concentration of too much solution in too small a space. A spherical container, for example, is the worst. Depending on the circumstances, a thin cylinder or a shallow flat container could be considered favorable — but the depth margins can be razor thin (from fissile solution systems #4):

The reactivity of such shallow, large diameter assemblies is very sensitive to the solution depth but quite insensitive to changes in the diameter. For this system [0.76 m in diameter, filled to a depth of 130 mm], the estimated difference between delayed criticality and prompt criticality is only 1 mm of depth. … It is thought that the falling scram, a cadmium sheet slightly deformed at the bottom, set up a wave system that must have converged at least once and created a superprompt critical geometry.

I learned that, once again, the cover-up was worse than the crime (from process accident #17, emphasis mine):

The shift supervisor insisted that the radiation control supervisor permit him to enter the work area where the accident had occurred. … In spite of the prohibition, the shift supervisor deceived the radiation control supervisor into leaving the area and entered the room where the accident had occurred.

The shift supervisor’s actions were not observed by anyone. However, there was evidence that he attempted to either remove the [60 litre] vessel from the platform, or to pour its contents down the stairs and into a floor drain. Whatever his actions, they caused a third excursion, larger than the first two, activating the alarm system in both buildings.

The shift supervisor, covered in Pu organic solution, immediately exited the room and returned to the underground tunnel.

For his efforts to conceal the multiple procedure violations, including improvised setups and unfavorable geometry containers, he received a dose of about 2,450 rem and died a month later.

It is a macabre document to be sure, and I’m more than a little surprised that it was even produced, let alone released publicly. But it’s largely understandable to the layperson, and an interesting insight into accidents that occurred in some of the most secretive places in the world.

For years I have put off reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, afraid that it would be a dry tome, failing to deliver literary justice to the most horrific and astonishing years of last century. I was also mildly intimidated by its 1200-page bulk — too big to finish before I left town again, and too big to take with me. Last month I decided that enough truly was enough, and I can now say without hesitation that it is an uttery fascinating, phenominally well-written, grippy tale.

I’m about 80% finished, just past the point where the Nazi army storms across the Eastern front into Russia, thoroughly dominates the brave but woefully underprepared troops, and manages to get within 15 miles of Moscow when winter saves the capital’s (and perhaps the world’s) bacon. Despite all kinds of warnings — which, knowing Hitler as they did, should have tipped them off — it is incredible how surprised the Russians were by the attack:

Almost equally weird to [the German chief of staff of the Fourth Army] was that the Russian artillery did not respond even when the assault began. “The Russians,” he subsequently wrote, “were taken entirely by surprise on our front.” As dawn broke German signal stations picked up the Red Army radio networks. “We are being fired on. What shall we do?” he quotes one Russian message as saying. Back came the answer from headquarters: “You must be insane. And why is your signal not in code?”

A few hundred pages before was the story of Western reaction to the world’s first experience of blitzkrieg tank warfare. Britain and France had done precious little aside from declaring war on paper, in response to the utter extermination — tanks against horses! — of their supposed ally, Poland. This led the German man in the street to coin a new phrase for the purpose of mocking the Western effort — a sitzkrieg.

If you want my advice, you will begin a 1200-page sitzkrieg of your own. I cannot recommend it highly enough to those interested in modern history; and why isn’t everyone?

Adam’s comment is exactly right: I only told half the story.

In the beginning, LTCM had the market to themselves. People apparently didn’t consider bond arbitrage a sexy or lucrative practice yet, and they definitely didn’t yet understand new and complex derivatives. In that environment they cleaned up, using massive leverage to amplify the relatively small but “guaranteed” returns on their trades.

Then other arbitrage desks sprung up, and people caught on. That forced yields smaller, and the margin of error thinner. Instead of rethinking their strategy, they decided that smaller yields require more leverage.

Next, they started to feel the pain from what was described as effectively a blind spot in their diversification strategy. They predicted the likelihood of failure of a given trade with mathematical “certainty”, and didn’t conceive that the markets would simultaneously move against them, all around the world. Well, they did. The crisis in Asia, Russian default, South American devaluations, on and on, spreads widened instead of converged, and their highly leveraged trades lost a lot of money.

At that point, they had lost so much money that they needed additional investment to weather the storm. But these were no longer heady boom times, they were the days of worldwide financial crisis. And nobody was eager to invest in a fund on its way down, sight-unseen. So they reluctantly opened their books to a few banks, hoping that they would gain confidence in the fund, and help raise investment.

Well, once the market learned what was in LTCM’s portfolio, they did exactly as Adam wrote: all of their competitors began to trade against them. Knowing that at some point LTCM’s losses would be too great to bear, and they’d have to close shop and liquidate their trades, they all began to take opposite positions. I assume that this was more about making dump trucks full of money than crippling LTCM, but they didn’t have to choose — it did both.

It’s also worth pointing out that many of their derivatives were highly illiquid. There’s never liquidity in a crisis, but in LTCM’s case it was even worse. In the cases of some of these derivatives, only a few specialized bank desks would make these trades, and they were not helping LTCM to cash out.

And what very few in the market seemed to realize is just how big LTCM were. They made their trades through a dozen or more upstream banks, and each apparently had little clue:

Each bank knew the extent of its own exposure to an individual client, in particular to Long-Term. None bothered to think about whether the hedge fund might be similarly exposed to a dozen other banks. “You’d be doing big chunks of business with them,” recalled Siciliano, the manager at Swiss Bank. “You’d assume you were their number one provider, but really you were number ten. You couldn’t believe they were doing that much volume.”

So when they started to circle the toilet bowl, even the Fed took notice. And before long, the very banks that wanted nothing to do with them — including, grudgingly, even one or two who had no exposure whatsoever — ended up buying the portfolio and weathering the storm themselves, to avoid having to write off so many billions that it might undermine the entire banking fabric.

The week before last I read a short book, something of a lighter and fluffier complement to the backbreaking tome about the Federal Reserve. This one was about the rise and fall of a hedge fund called Long-Term Capital Management, which after a celebrated four-year run up — during which they gave investors a more than 300% return — lost $4.5 billion in about five weeks. Their stunning collapse threatened to bring down more than one of America’s largest banks, who had foolished allowed them to leverage their capital more than 30 to 1, with no oversight into their trading activities.

Why would they do such a thing? Because LTCM had two Nobel prize-winning economists on board, and a team of celebrated arbitrage traders. Everyone, including themselves, believed that they had solved the puzzle, and devised a foolproof strategy for trading in bonds — particularly new and not-widely-understood derivatives. They had complicated models by which they supposedly predicted to the nth decimal place the likelihood that any given trade will fail. Eventually, other arbitrage desks caught on to how these new markets worked, so their yields became steadily smaller. Instead of backing away to safer ground — or closing the fund and returning the money to their investors — LTCM leveraged even more, and the fund collapsed spectacularly. A representative quote:

“You take Monica Lewinsky, who walks into Clinton’s office with a pizza. You have no idea where that’s going to go,” Conseco’s Max Bublitz, who had declined to invest in Long-Term, noted. “Yet if you apply math to it, you come up with a thirty-eight percent chance she’s going to go down on him. It looks great, but it’s all a guess.”

I found it thoroughly fascinating, but it’s not for everyone. When I started talking about the book, Deb looked at me like I had a live hamster in my mouth.

I finally finished reading this 700-page opus about the Federal Reserve, that can probably be summarized roughly with the following quotation:

Like all mortals, [Paul] Volcker was fallible, but his errors were barely noticed. The Federal Reserve chairman, the men and women of his institution, had accomplished the great goal they had set for themselves in 1979. Indeed, they had achieved much more than most people, including themselves, had thought possible. … The triumph was hollow, however, for the nation. Its moral promises to the victims were not kept. For the entire society, its predicted benefits were not realized.

It can be argued — this book was published in 1987, just as Greenspan was taking charge — that in the subsequent 20 years, Volcker’s decisions have been vindicated. I’m not so sure, though.

For one thing, American manufacturing never recovered from the ruinous combination of high interest rates and staggeringly overvalued dollar in the 1980s. Say what you like about creative destruction, but the overwhelming loss of American manufacturing not only sabotaged the blue-collar middle class — the heart of the country — but so hollowed out our domestic industrial capacity as to be an issue of national security.

For another, in hindsight most observers seem to agree that the switch to a monetarist operating method led the Fed to completely misread the economic signals, and unnecessarily tighten credit throughout the mid-80s, choking off the Reagan recovery just when it was getting going. But we’ll never know for sure.

Most of all, I start to wonder if an independent central bank is really the best strategy. I can certainly understand the suggestion that elected politicians can’t be trusted not to manipulate monetary policy simply for electoral advantage. That being said, the current situation puts us in a position where at times, fiscal policy and monetary policy are trying to achieve contradictory objectives. And it allows the Fed and the elected government to point fingers at each other — ultimately, nobody is held accountable.

I’m not so sure that’s worth it.