Once upon a time, steel was a metal hard-won, from iron that itself might be coaxed a few drops at a time from a simple blast furnace, or extracted at great hazard through the muscle power of iron puddlers, then to be converted into small bunches of steel in crucibles that took a lot of hand labor in hot conditions to handle properly ( Read more... )

It didn't begin with the Internet.  Frank L. Packard's The Wire Devils, which the University of Minnesota reissue describes as "A Classic Mystery Novel of the American Railroad" has a band of thieves more intent on robbing trains than on blackmailing politicians or running terror rings, and yet the techniques of hijacking the network (back in the ( Read more... )

Book 41: Globality: Competing with Everyone from Everywhere for Everything by Harold L. Sirkin, James W. Hemerling and Arindam K. Bhattacharya - 267 pages

Description from bookdepository.co.uk:
Globalization is about Americans outsourcing product development and services to other countries. Globality is the next step, where rapidly developing ( Read more... )

It didn't begin with the Internet.  Frank L. Packard's The Wire Devils, which the University of Minnesota reissue describes as "A Classic Mystery Novel of the American Railroad" has a band of thieves more intent on robbing trains than on blackmailing politicians or running terror rings, and yet the techniques of hijacking the network (back in the ( Read more... )

Birmingham, Alabama, drew a difficult resource portfolio in the Minerals Lottery.  Although there were commercially useful deposits of iron ore, coal, and limestone close-by, which would seem to confer a locational advantage, those deposits were not as good as Pennsylvania coal or Minnesota ore.  And thus, although the major steel companies ( Read more... )

It’s only taken me a year to finish writing up my 2013 book reviews (and with nearly 30 2014 book reviews to write in the next month), but alas I am here. So what happened in 2013? I got promoted to manager at work; I travelled to Hawaii and went on a cruise to far-north Queensland, as well as visiting the most northern point in Australia for work ( Read more... )

Book 41: Royal Observatory Greenwich: Souvenir Guide by National Maritime Museum, Greenwich - 78 pages

Description from bookdepository.co.uk:
No blurb - its about the Royal Observatory at Greenwich in London. What more is there to say?

Thoughts:
This was another of the various ‘tourist’ books I picked up while living (and therefore travelling) ( Read more... )

Book Review No. 4 is Dave Eggers's The Circle.  It's fiction, dealing with the adventures of a young lady hired on the recommendation of a highly-placed college friend to work in an antitrust nightmare of a technology company combining social-media, search engines, and business software.  This company also appears to manufacture some kind of super- ( Read more... )

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In life, Red China is making territorial claims that aren't sitting well with neighboring countries.  I Threat Vector, the latest from the school of Tom Clancy, the Red Chinese first do all that is within their power to take down the secret, super-competent Counter Terrorism Unit that got its start in Red Rabbit,  passes a few field tests in The ( Read more... )