Reading and writing

You can tell I am not a natural writer; as I grow more comfortable with my surroundings, the drive to write seems to quickly disappear amid the other events an pressures of life. In fact, this installment is brought to you courtesy of a disruption of my routine: a trip back to southern california to visit friends and my former life. It is wonderful to have so many friends here as it means I have no need to worry about a place to stay or a ride, but it is also a challenge since my friends are much more spread out now. It requires a small feat of organizing to get from place to place to see everyone; but I think I've got the outlines of a plan that will optimally allocate my short visit.

At the moment I am back on HMC awaiting a ride to Pasadena. This evening I got a chance to see Prof King and hear about the often exciting, often frustrating progress of bringing the wireless power monitors we worked on to acceptance. While the technology is fascinating and robust, it is challenging to come up with the business plan to motivate their widespread adoption.

In other news, I just finished another thought-provoking book entitled "God and Gold". The book attempts to describe and understand the history of British and American power/empire in the last few hundred years and its impact on the world. Specifically the author explores how the British rose to power, what made them and later the americans so successful, the way other culture have reacted to "Anglo-American" power, and what the impacts that power has had on the world as a whole. Needless to say this is no small leaflet. It should also be clear that this sort of book could have a wide variety of messages for it's reader depending on the perspective of the author, but I for one was quite impressed with the way Walter Russell Mead approached the subject. He gives an engaging history of Britain's unique position at the dawn of the capitalist era, both geographically, politically and socially. The Book shows the reader how the forces of Tradition, Religion and Reason held each other in check to help the British adapt quickly to the immense changes brought on by the industrial revolution and the rise of capitalism to develop a "maritime system" that established their economic and military power around the globe. As heirs of this culture, This story is one that every American should study closely. While Mead is clearly giving us his perspective of the Anglo-American story and its impacts on our world, his discussion is soaked in the insights of generations of our cultures greatest thinkers and in my opinion reflects an impressive balance of progressive and conservative thinking. I would love to describe more thoroughly the details of his analysis and his discussion of the impact of our power and its outlook going forward, but I cannot condense 400+ pages to a blog entry, so you will have to read it and interact with his conclusions yourself. One thing I found personally interesting was his call to evangelicals in America to study the history of our people to absorb the lessons of the history of our influence on the world; in light of the rest of the book I found this call personally compelling and an avenue for enriching evangelical Christianity and it's impact on the world at large.

Anyway, I guess this blog is turning into a bit of a book review column, but I don't suppose that's such a bad thing. So long as I have supply of good book to read I will have something to write about. And you'll know I'm still living and breathing and pondering.