Something for Andy Fox: A book suggestion

[Zeno]

I saw this book at Borders today about our old mutual friend, and thought that you would like to read it Edward Teller: The Real Dr. Strangelove

I am engaged with too many books at the moment to consider reading this one right now. I am asking you to purchased it, read it during lunch and give a review the same afternoon. Thank You.

There would be a reward for your effort by the way.

-Zeno

[HDPM]

Looks interesting. I happen to be reading a book about Herman Kahn, who some people called Dr. Strangelove after his book On Thermonuclear War and because I think he met with Kubrick while the movie was being written. It is slow going as the writing is driving me nuts. Sort of a feminist liberal grad school style of writing, when what I want to hear about is how the guys at RAND thought about the Big Board. [img]/images/graemlins/smirk.gif[/img]

[Zeno]

I recall reading an essay about the Rand Guys and the MAD concept and some of the development of their thinking etc. It was very interesting but a dry, matter-of-fact essay. But still that would be much better than: "Sort of a feminist liberal grad school style of writing". I have run across this style before, it is rampant in some quarters. John Cole probably eats it up for breakfast. The Apostles of this crowd, that attracts masses of loony lickspittle disciples, should be pillared in a public square for a week and pelted with rotten fruit. For egregious offenders, a lashing is called for.

Le Misanthrope

[HDPM]

lashing or worse??


"Rather than tease apart the details of these disputes, I want to heap together all of the methods for simulating future war and approach them not as a science but as a style, a mood, and an aesthetic. Practitioners of these arts, along with their historians, justly insist on preserving the ramparts that enclose and differentiate their chosen fields. But what I'm looking for are the traces of an aesthetic, which scientific practices surely bear in much the same way that a society's fine arts, politics, and ephemera do." p.126. (Author then goes on to say she is attempting to be like Nietzsche in some form of musical understanding of the subject.)


"So preoccupied have we been with mood and style up to this point, we have neglected to register the principal events of the cold war period. Here is a summary..." P. 103

"...We can more sensitively explore the cold war by referring to a shape of feeling. If we foreground the cognitive and emotional palette of these years rather than its pathology, we can enter vitally into its world." p.85


See why the going is slow? All quotations from The Worlds of Herman Kahn: The Intuitive Science of Thermonuclear War, by Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi. The book is actually interesting although the writing is sometimes infuriating.

[bobman0330]

I like this one:
"We can more sensitively explore the cold war by referring to a shape of feeling. If we foreground the cognitive and emotional palette of these years rather than its pathology, we can enter vitally into its world."
It's hard to imagine how the words in this quote weren't selected totally at random by a computer.

[scalf]

z

just cut to the chase:

being and nothingness

now that's the ticket..

gl

[img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img] [img]/images/graemlins/spade.gif[/img] [img]/images/graemlins/crazy.gif[/img]

[John Cole]

I'd call her writing lucid, indeed pellucid, compared to this sample from Judith Butler (a winner in an academic bad writing "contest"):

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

[andyfox]

Thanks. Don't think I can get to it this week, but I note there seems a rash of new books about Oppenheimer, so I guess it's fitting that his old nemesis gets some words. Maybe somebody else here can take an extra long lunch. [img]/images/graemlins/smirk.gif[/img]

I did pick up a paperback at Borders today called The Prinsoner's Dilemma, which is about Von Neumann and game theory. I know nothing about either so I'm looking forward to it.