Tag: Soviet Union
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Love and Math: a review
When I started reading this book by Edward Frenkel (Amazon link here) I became so engrossed in it on my morning commute that I missed my Tube stop – and the next one. I got an insight into life in the Soviet Union on the cusp of perestroika from a contemporary (if somewhat higher achieving…
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A horror story with a happy ending (hopefully)
Command and Control is not a piece of light reading – in any sense. But it is an absolutely essential book. It tells the story of the United States’s nuclear weapons programme from the Manhattan Project to the present day, with an emphasis on safety management (with the story of a particular accident in…
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Unicorns and the Juche
The authorities in North Korea have “reconfirmed” the discovery of a Unicorn lair, reports the Guardian. Happily they were aided by the fact that someone carved the words “unicorn lair” into the rock outside the animals’ home. Given the nature of the state we can only assume that the latest Kim to head the world’s…
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Read this book!
The best book I have read (so far) this year is, without doubt, “Red Plenty”. Better even than the Booker winning “Wolf Hall” (which is not to say that Wolf Hall is anything other than good) or its sequel “Bring Up the Bodies”. Red Plenty tells the story of the scientists and engineers who struggled…
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Not even on Wikipedia…
If you are old enough, like me, to remember the Cold War before the days of glasnost and perestroika, you will also recall that one of the strategic weaknesses of the Soviet Union was that it was forced to steal and copy advanced western technologies, seemingly unable to invent them itself. In many cases that…
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Why you cannot always trust social media: a practical example
Reading more about the excellent Red Plenty – I came across this discussion on the US blog “Crooked Timber”. There are some very odd contributions there – one commentator in particular, Louis Proyect, waxes on and on and in ignorance of the book’s real content (he has not read it, he says), about its flaws……
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Comrades, let’s optimise!
One thing has occupied my free time more than anything else these last few days – Francis Spufford‘s marvellous work of history and imagination, Red Plenty. The book is a marvel in joining linear programming, economics, mathematics, cybernetics, computing, chemistry, textiles, politics, sociology, popular music, genetics and history all in one long fabric. The book…
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Soviet computer science: once ahead of the west?
In my old blog I made a point that I still believe – that the key factor in the downfall of the Soviet Union was not pressure from the arms race but the complete failure of the system: once the country was led by leaders, like Mikhail Gorbachev and his team, who were open to…
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Поехали!
This week marks the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin‘s flight into space – a huge risk for a very brave man: imagine trusting your life to Soviet engineers in such a project! Some years ago I watched a BBC reconstruction of the Vostok 1 flight in which they said that when TASS made its triumphant…
cartesian product ... stuff about computing mostly 