Category Archives: Books Nonfiction

Turtle of the First

10 August 2023 By in Books Nonfiction, Trading Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Way of the Turtle: The Secret Methods that Turned Ordinary People into Legendary Traders

By Curtis M. Faith

Published by McGraw-Hill

Copyright: © 2007

Curtis Faith — Amazon Picture

(Note: This is the first of 3 reviews detailing the stories and methods of stock market trend followers and traders that collectively became known as ‘Turtles’. Curtis Faith was a turtle and a trader. The two reviews following this one concern publications by Michael Covel a market writer and trading coach who has lectured and written extensively on trend trading and Turtles.)

In 1983 Richard J. Dennis and his partner at C&D Commodities, their Chicago trading firm, budgeted $15,000 to run a recruitment ad in the Wall Street Journal, Barrons, and the International Herald Tribune seeking recruits to train in futures trading:

…Mr. Dennis and his associates will train a small group of applicants in his proprietary trading concepts. Successful candidates will then trade solely for Mr. Dennis: they will not be allowed to trade futures for themselves or others. Traders will be paid a percentage of their trading profits, and will be allowed a small draw. Prior experience in trading will be considered, but is not necessary. Applicants should send a brief resume with one sentence giving their reasons for applying…

From Richard J. Dennis et al ad in the above-mentioned newspapers and magazine.

The ad was the opening volley to proving a nature versus nurture disagreement between Dennis and his partner William Eckhardt. Dennis believed successful trading could be taught. Eckhardt, a mathematician by training turned trader, believed trading was innate, natural, inborn. You either had it or you didn’t, and no amount of teaching could change that.

To settle the debate Dennis agreed to teach his trading style and rules to a select group, letting them learn the craft using his money. From the firm’s ad and a follow-up true and false questionnaire they cobbled together a group of candidates, 23 in two tranches of 14 and 9 that were taught the firm’s trading rules. The traders came to be known as ‘Turtles’ because Dennis had seen a turtle farm, of all things, in Singapore and he believed he could raise traders as efficiently as Singaporeans raised turtles.

Over the next 5 years the ‘Turtles’ as a whole earned, made is probably a better word, $175,000,000. Dennis won the bet, but he worried that no amount of instruction could ultimately overcome human nature. Not sure if the following quote is a contradiction or just plain old irony but he worried his ‘Turtles’ couldn’t remain true to their training, stating “I always say that you could publish my trading rules in the newspaper, and no one would follow them. The key is consistency and discipline.  Almost anybody can make up a set of rules that are 80% as good as what we taught our people. What they couldn’t do is give them the confidence to stick to those rules even when things are going bad” (from Market Wizards, by Jack Schwager).

Curtis Faith was a ‘Turtle’ selected in the first group and began trading under Dennis and Eckhardt’s tutelage in 1984. He was C&D Commodities’ most successful student, reportedly earning $31.5 million for the firm by the end of the experiment. To put that into context the 23 ‘Turtles’ as a whole averaged a little over $7.5 million each. Some twenty plus years later Faith published a book detailing his experience and methods living in ‘Turtle Time’ during the 1980s (apologies to Danny Flowers and Don Williams).

Faith was a risk taker, and he was probably the greatest risk taker of all the ‘Turtles’, even greater than Richard Dennis. Taking and managing risk is what traders do. They buy and sell risk. And you need nerves of steel or as Dennis states above: discipline. When managing risk, one needs a plan to get into a security and a plan to get out. In the immortal words in Don Schlitz’s 1976 song ‘The Gambler‘ made famous by Kenny Rogers: “You got to know when to hold them, know when to fold them…”

Traders buy and sell liquidity and price risk. Market Makers trade liquidity–making money off the spread between buy and sell prices. Speculators trade price risk. Buying low and selling high. Or with ‘Turtles’ buying high and selling higher or vice versa.

Speculators are not long-term investors. Speculators are short-term traders who have no desire or need to find the intrinsic or fundamental value of any security. Their only concern is price and which way is it moving; up, down, or sideways. The statistical analysis of price momentum and sometimes volume are the tools of the trade for the short-term speculators. This is usually referred to as technical analysis and technical trading.

Turtles are speculators, technical traders, playing trends in price that may not have a fundamental basis. Price trends without a fundamental basis are almost by definition irrational.

Adam Smith in his ‘Wealth of Nations’ postulated the first form of the Rational Choice Theory, that an individual’s actions are mostly selfish, which he dubbed the ‘Invisible Hand’. The theory suggests that individuals act in their own best interest and that their behavior is rational. At the beginning of the 20th century the hypothesis that the markets are efficient and rational began to take hold among traders and economists. This led to the Efficient-Market Hypothesis (EMH) or Theory that maintains that valuations or prices for assets such as stocks and bonds reflect all available information and are fairly valued. Only added information will then affect the price of an asset. This implies that it is impossible to beat the market. Just invest in DIAs, IWMs, SPYs, and QQQs and forget about them until you retire.

Faith and the Turtles say bunk to all that market rationality and index investing. Technical trading and trading like a turtle works because market movements are driven by the irrational collective behavior of the market participants or so they believed.

Turtles were trend followers attempting to take advantage of large price increases or decreases over a period of several months. Significant profitable trends happen infrequently with a high percentage of promising trend trades turning south soon after placing them. They experienced significantly more losers than winners but exited their losses quickly, usually around 20% below entry price.

Following trends is geared towards the present and what the market is currently doing. It is never about trying to predict the future. They entered trades when the calculated probabilities, through technical analysis, were in their favor.

The Turtle method was simple and easy to understand. The strategy could be summed up in one sentence. Trade with an edge, manage risk, be consistent, and keep it simple.

Trade with an edge. Have a plan and stick to it. Through experience or preferably back testing find a trading strategy that will have positive returns over the long run.

Manage your risk. Control your risk or in other words don’t bet the bank on a single trade and don’t hang onto your losers hoping for a turnaround.

Be consistent in executing your strategy. Do not jump into trades that look interesting but fail the tactical elements of your plan.

Keep it simple and follow your plan. Most of your trades may be losers but the winners will make up for the shortfall or drawdown. Think in terms of the long game and don’t fixate on the individual losing trades.

The Turtles tactics used in implementing their strategy were also simple.

  • Turtles traded liquid futures such as commodities, currencies, metals, energy, and bonds.
  • The Turtle’s most complicated tactic was position sizing the trades. Generally, the more liquid the market the fewer the contracts they traded.
  • The Turtles identified trends using two similar systems employing price breakouts at 20 and 55 days. They tried to enter as many of these breakouts as possible so as not to miss out on the rare but very profitable, large price movements.
  • All trades had stop losses.
  • Trade exits were set as a 10-day low for long positions and a 20-day high for shorts. They never exited a trade at maximum profitability but only when the end of the trend was evident.

Simple stuff and they made $175,000,000 with it. Dennis reportedly made $200,000,000 trading his own account.

References and Readings:

Bad Bees

30 May 2023 By in Books Nonfiction, Philosophy Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

The Fable of the Bees or Private Vices Publick Benefits

By Bernard Mandeville

Commentary and Analysis by F.B. Kaye

Published by Liberty Fund

Copyright: © 1988

Original Book Publication Dates: 1705/1714/1729/1733

Bernard Mandeville was a free thinker, a contrarian, a troublemaker and likely loved every minute of it. His writings on vice and free living were greedily consumed by the 18th century public, and his notoriety began with a simple poem of 433 eight syllable coupled, rhymed lines, a doggerel of no artistic merit but with a moralistic message that has echoed, in various forms throughout the ages. It was originally titled: The Grumbling Hive or, Knaves turned Honest.

Mandeville was born in 1670 in the Dutch city of Rotterdam where he received a classical education at the Erasmus school and a medical degree from the University of Leiden. In the medical field he developed a special interest in what we would now call psychiatry and the use of talk therapy for curing hypochondriacs, the same branch his father practiced. He anticipated Freud by 175 years. Upon completing his medical studies, he moved to London to learn the language and decided to stay. In London he specialized in treating hypochondriacs, stomach ailments, writing political and philosophical tracts, all in which he achieved minor fame and fortune.

Beyond these meager particulars of his early life very little is known about Mandeville’s personal history. To know him, but not necessarily understand him, one must study his pamphlets and books on politics and philosophy and everything he wrote was soaked with politics and philosophy.

Mandeville’s written works sold so well that dozens of editions were needed to keep up with demand. His most celebrated work was The Grumbling Hive which he published anonymously in 1705. This little ditty immediately became a hit with the public and generated an immense amount of discourse and criticism.

Over the next 25 years or so he expanded the poem with commentary and essays under his own name with the next updated edition coming out in 1714 titled: The Fable of the Bees: or Private Vices, Public Benefits. In 1923 he again expanded the Fable of the Bees with an essay attacking charity schools, free schools for the poor, as nothing more than a vehicle to assuage the guilty conscience of the rich. The schools, while teaching the basics, the three Rs, were also a forum for instructing young minds in morality and religion. Mandeville was not so much against instructing the kids in addition and subtraction but that teaching morality in a capitalistic society was counterproductive.

Mandeville’s premise was that the rich set up and donated to the schools to atone for their gains attained through vice and greed. Mandeville would likely surmise that today’s charity and political donations, such as George Soros’ funding of weak on crime prosecutors, was atonement for their selfish gains in business and the markets. To put it mildly this did not go well with the upper crust, but it did increase the sales of his books.

In 1728 Mandeville expanded the Fable of the Bees again by adding a second volume which provided additional defense of his thesis that vice is good in the form of dialogs: elaborations on the division of labor and their associated economics. The two volumes were published together in 1733, the year of Mandeville’s death.

Mandeville’s basic thesis underlaying the Fable of the Bees was that greed and vice were good for the economy and society. A person’s self-interest in the pursuit of wealth and luxury provides benefits for everyone. A rising tide lifts all boats. The idea of selfishness for the public good certainly predates Mandeville and continues to the present day. The 1987 movie Wall Street, Gordon Gekko played by Michael Douglas argues that the human march of progress is fueled by personal self-interest and greed. Self-interest to accumulate wealth and fame. Morality does not enter into the equation, or it shouldn’t.

Mandeville believed that vice had a negligible effect on the population, but he obviously understood that it was the gateway drug to harder crimes. He understood that victimless crime led to felonious crime. He understood the “Broken Windows Theory” before it had a name. As such he strongly advocated for a robust and universal system of justice. A system that John Adams in 1779 would codify into the Massachusetts constitution as “a government of laws, and not of men.” By laws Mandeville meant the rules of conduct that private society imposed on itself over centuries of trial and error. He was not prescribing a legislative solution to criminal behavior although he offered advice in that arena also. Rather his economic laissez faire attitude carried over to his thoughts on justice. The fewer government mandates the better. He would readily agree with the 20th century Italian political philosopher Bruno Leoni’s notion on government decrees, “legislation…has come to resemble more and more a sort of diktat that the winning majorities in the legislative assemblies impose upon the minorities, often with the result of overturning long-established individual expectations and creating completely unprecedented ones.”

He emphasized the word justice, as in justice for all, without giving much serious thought to the criminal part of the equation. Mandeville’s endeavors at navigating the differences between vice and crime usually led to ambiguous reasoning and muddy waters. He had a wishful belief in a harmless sort of anarchy where everyone didn’t or shouldn’t bother their neighbors — much. Mandeville was stuck between his belief that selfish behavior is good, and that morality is an illusion, leaving no room for compromise. In the end all behavior could be explained by our selfish desires and motives. Altruistic behaviors were just cover for a guilty conscience.

Mandeville’s intellectual, educational, and philosophical journey, with little supporting evidence other than circumstantial bits and pieces, could be a great case study in nature versus nurture. His father and great-grandfather were both respected physicians with the wherewithal to send him to the best schools in Rotterdam.

His formal education began at the local Erasmus school which gave the students a grounding in Christianity, literature, poetry, drama, art, philosophy, languages, and history with an emphasis on lifelong learning. Desiderius Erasmus, a 15th, and 16th century resident of Rotterdam believed that man could only rise above other animals through self-improvement and study.

Another local resident of Rotterdam that had a profound influence on Mandeville was his contemporary, although a few decades older than himself, Pierre Bayle, a philosopher, and skeptic in the purest sense of the word. Bayle believed Christianity did not have a lock on virtuosity and morality. He believed in religious toleration beyond Catholicism for the simple reason that he was persecuted as a protestant. And he believed that one shouldn’t burden one’s conscience with guilt from minor transgressions or sins of the flesh.

Thomas Hobbes, who died in the same decade that Mandeville was born, was an English polymath best known for his treatise on government and the governed: Leviathan. Leviathan is a discussion on how the individual and societies should be governed, and the covenants between the ruled and the ruler(s) that were needed to hold common-wealth, or as he called it, the Leviathan together. One of Hobbes main points about man as an individual in Leviathan, and which Mandeville was certainly familiar with, was that good and evil were constructs, mere names, for human emotional and physical appetites. The desires that make us human. Morality was nonsense.

26 years after Mandeville’s death Adam Smith wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments where he introduced the concept of the ‘Invisible Hand’, a concept of individual self-interest driving the economic advancement of society. Adams stated, “They (ed. society) are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species.” Smith’s ‘Invisible Hand’ is practically interchangeable with Mandeville’s self-interest and greed thesis. Smith expanded upon the ‘Invisible Hand’ in his 1976 publication The Wealth of Nations.

The Theory of Moral Sentiments introduced the ‘Invisible Hand’ but was primarily intended to provide logical reasoning for man’s altruistic nature and furnish a rebuttal to Mandeville and others. Adams believed that morality was more than a word, more than an ethical nicety. Smith believed our sense of morality was real and natural. It was built into our being through the experience of living, and he termed it sympathy, what we would now call empathy. It was natural to care about the lives of others either because we have walked in the shoes of the less fortunate, or we can see with our own eyes what the less fortunate are living with or without. Empathy was the laissez faire sense of justice that Mandeville could not see, but should have, because it was in the opposite direction of selfishness. He wouldn’t look there because he believed it couldn’t be found.

Richard Dawkins’ 1976 book The Selfish Gene asserts that a human gene propagates itself into the future through the individual selfish motives of survival rather than through the desire to better a group or organism. The thought that a gene can be selfish is no more plausible than it can run a 4-minute mile, but it is a useful term to use as a descriptor. Dawkins claims that the selfish gene increases its chances of replication and survival by promoting altruistic behavior between like members of a group or organism. The selfish actions of the individual or the gene leads to unselfish actions of the group or the organism.

In the end Mandeville articulated a theory of self-interest driving societal economic advancement that causes emotional discomfort in most of us, not because it is wrong but because it is only half right. We may be selfish, but altruism and benevolence are part of our nature, a major part of who we are. Selfishness and altruism together advance our species and our society.

Bibliography:

  • 1685 de Medicina Oratio Scholastica. Regneri Leers, Rotterdam. An oration in which BM declares his intent to study medicine at Leyden.
  • 1689 Disputatio Philosophica de Brutorum Operationibus. Abraham Elzevier, Leyde. A dissertation delivered at Leyden in 1689, in which Mandeville defended the Cartesian position that animals are unfeeling automata.
  • 1691 Disputatio Medica Inauguralis de Chylosi Vitiata. Abraham Elzevier, Leyden. Mandeville’s medical dissertation in which he argued that digestion involved fermentation, rather than warmth.
  • 1703 Some Fables After the Easie and Familiar Method of Monsieur de la Fontaine. Printed for and sold by R. Wellington, London
  • 1703 The Pamphleteers. A Satyr, London
  • 1704 Æsop Dress’d or A Collection of Fables Writ in Familiar Verse. Printed for R. Wellington, London
  • 1704 Typhon: Or the Wars Between Gods and Giants. Printed for J. Pero, Little Britain
  • 1705 The Grumbling Hive, or Knaves Turn’d Honest. Printed for S. Ballard and A. Baldwin, London
  • 1709 The Virgin Unmask’d: Or, Female Dialogues Betwixt an Elderly Maiden Lady … Printed, and are to be sold by J. Morphew, and J. Woodward, London
  • 1709 The Female Tatler, by “a Society of Ladies”.  A. Baldwin, London
  • 1711 A Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Diseases. In Three Dialogues. Printed J. Tonson, London
  • 1712 Wishes to a Godson, with Other Miscellany Poems. Printed for J. Baker, London
  • 1714 The Mischiefs that Ought Justly to be Apprehended from a Whig-Government. Printed for J. Roberts, London
  • 1714 The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Public Benefits. Printed and sold by J. Roberts, London
  • 1720 Free Thoughts on Religion, the Church, and National Happiness. Printed, and sold by T. Jauncy, and J. Roberts, London
  • 1723 An Essay on Description in Poetry with A Description of a Rouz’d Lion. Printed in St. James Journal
  • 1723 The Death of Turnus. Printed in St. James Journal
  • 1723 The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Public Benefits. Expanded Edition. Printed for E. Parker, London
  • 1724 A Modest Defence of Publick Stews. Printed by A. Moore, London
  • 1725 An Enquiry into the Causes of the Frequent Executions at Tyburn: and a Proposal for Some Regulations Concerning Felons in Prison, and the Good Effects to be Expected from Them. Letters to the British Journal
  • 1729 The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Public Benefits. Volume II. Printed and sold by J. Roberts, London
  • 1732 An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour and the Usefulness of Christianity in War. Printed for J. Brotherton, London
  • 1732 A Letter to Dion, Occasion’d by his Book called Alciphron. Printed and Sold by J. Roberts, London
  • 1733 The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Public Benefits. Volumes I and II. London

Readings and References:

(Cover page for The Grumbling Hive from UtahState Digital Exhibits. Cover page for Leviathan from Wikipedia.)

More Grease

2 April 2023 By in Books Nonfiction, History, History, Politics Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Great Society: A New History

By Amity Shlaes

Published by Harper

Copyright: © 2019

Amity Shlaes, age 62, is the Presidential Scholar at the King’s College, a Christian, classical liberal arts school in Manhattan where she teaches Coolidge, the subject of her most recent book. She previously taught at New York’s Stern School of Business, also in Manhattan where she lectured on Great Depression economics, a subject of her third book which was released in 2007. She is chairwoman of the board of the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation of Plymouth, Vermont, and chairs the jury for the Manhattan Institute’s Hayek Book Prize located in, well–Manhattan. Shlaes is a past trustee of the German Marshall Fund, a public policy think tank promoting cooperation between North America and Europe, initially funded by the West German government as a memorial to the post WWII Marshall Plan. In the early 2000s she was a senior fellow of economic history at the Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank specializing in U.S. foreign policy and international relations.

Shlaes and Sauvik Chakraverti shared the inagural $15,000 Bastiat Prize, a journalism award given by the Reason Foundation, in 2002 for her political economy writing. (Chakraverti received the award for being the greatest libertarian ever.) She gave the 2004 Bradley Lecture, an American Enterprise Institute program series, on the Schechter vs United States Supreme court case that invalidated parts of the legal and regulatory over-reach during the FDR administration. Shlaes received the $50,000 Hayek Book Prize in 2007 for “The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression. She also recieved the 2007 New York City Deadline Club award, a journalistic Pulitzer type award for opinion writing. Shlaes recieved the 2021 $250,000 Bradley Prize from the Milwaukee based Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, a grassroots and faith-based philanthropic organization, for her work on economic history.

Amity Shlaes has five New York Times bestsellers: The Greedy Hand: How Taxes Drive Americans Crazy, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, The Forgotten Man: Graphic Edition, Coolidge, and Great Society: A New History.

Shlaes has written for numerous publications over years including The New Republic, The New Yorker, the Spectator of London, The New York Times, The Washington Post, the National Review, the Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, Foreign Affairs, Bloomberg News, and Die Zeit. She currently writes a column for Forbes.

Great Society: A New History details Lyndon Johnson’s efforts as president to eliminate poverty in United States. On 22 November 1963, a few hours after the assassination of John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson was sworn in as the 36th president of the United States. Johnson inherited a robust, growing economy with low unemployment. As a life-long politician, inheriting a healthy economy was not something he believed he could run on for the 1964 presidential election and win. He chose to finish Kennedy’s sensible initiatives on tax rate cuts, budget reduction and civil rights guarantees to all while he worked out the details for his own signature plans that became known as the War on Poverty. The purpose of his strategy was not only to eliminate poverty but expand federal government involvement in education, health and finances for the elderly, and providing aid to the working poor and unemployed. Between August 1964 and July 1965 Congress passed and Johnson signed four major programs that were the prime tactics behind the strategy for the War on Poverty. The first bill signed was the Economic Opportunity Act which created the Job Corps and Youth Corps, along with providing work, education, and training for young adults. Additional programs were geared towards college students, rural poor, and migrants. The second bill passed was the Food Stamp Act which provided nutritional subsidies for the poor. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act was the third bill passed and involved grants to schools and states to assist in the education of low-income families. The final bill passed was the Social Security Act of 1965 which created Medicare and Medicaid.

Proponents of the War on Poverty programs state that poverty rates decreased, as defined by the US government’s Census Bureau, from approximately 23% in 1958 to 11.3% in 1973. The Great Society programs were not fully funded and implemented until late 1965 to late 1966 at which time the poverty rates had already dropped below 15% without any of Johnson’s anti-poverty stimulants. Poverty rates since the passage of the Great Society programs have stubbornly remained between 11 and 15%. An alternate interpretation of the Great Society programs is that at best, they did nothing to reduce poverty to, at worst, they cemented poverty forever more into a narrow range between 11-15% of the population. Inflation adjusted cost estimates for the Great Society programs from inception to present are somewhere north of $60 trillion or a little more than a trillion dollars per year.

Shlaes tells us the story of Johnson’s War on Poverty. She begins with the Kennedy years and ends with Nixon, but it is all Johnson in between. Johnson fathered the Great Society, nursed his skinny stepson into the corpulent war in Vietnam, and left before he had to pay child support. She tells the story of the events and happenings that brought us the Great Society, but she tells the story through the people on the ground and in the halls of power. Michael Harrington and Tom Hayden, socialists with the Students for Democratic Society who crafted the Port Huron statement, a communist manifesto which played a starring role in the birth of the Great Society. Abbie Hoffman who took over SDS and morphed it into a violent Maoist offshoot called the Yippies who were always throwing a temper tantrum against something. Walter Reuther, UAW president and king maker for the Democrat party and money man for all things socialist. Sargent Shriver, poster child for the Peter Principle, was the actual architect of the War on Poverty. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, an intellectual with a heart and absolutely no common sense until his epiphany on cause and effect in 1980s. Burns and Nixon who had the dubious distinction of following Johnson like the men walking behind the elephant parade with a broom and an excessively big bucket and they will be hated for it forever. And Paul Volker the man who showed the nation the secret recipe to fix problems caused by fiscally prolificate politicians — a barrel of remarkably high interest rates.

Shlaes tells this story through the eyes of the men and women who were there. She tells their stories and doesn’t offer much in the way of opinion, neither good nor bad. Even in the end she plays the historian without interjecting herself into the story but the story snitches on itself: good intentions and bad ideas are not the basis for public policy.

Shlaes’ books:

Shlaes’ Lectures and Video:

(The picture of Amity Shlaes comes from the Great Society: A New History jacket back cover. The graph of poverty rates is derived from Census Bureau data.)

A New Center

8 March 2023 By in Biography, Books Nonfiction, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Galileo: Watcher of the Skies

By David Wootton

Published by Yale University Press

Copyright: © 2010

David Wootton, age 71, is the Anniversary Professor (a named professor in the British system is equivalent to a full professor in the American system…I believe) of History at the University of York in England. His work ranges from the history of the individual to the wider-ranging histories, and philosophies of ideas that shaped our world. His published interests concentrate on the Renaissance but stretch back to the Greeks and forward to the embryonic American experiment. He is an old-school historian with his scholarship supported by the evidence available coupled with the existing mores of the times. His selection of topics that I have read or perused suggests a thorough dearth of confidence in past historical interpretations and a jaundiced view of present sense and sensibilities. Or more succinctly and in his own words, “History is always about a particular time, a particular place; it is always about groups more than it is about individuals; it is always the history of somewhere.” and if I may so boldly add, it is always the history of (some)time.

Wootton’s written works (books) include:

Wootton’s lectures and pop culture additions include:

Wootton’s biography of Paolo Sarpi, a contemporary and patron of Galileo, likely provided, albeit 27 years later, the impetus and scholarship for Wootton publishing his second biography in 2006 on that aforementioned watcher of the skies. Sarpi, a devout Copernican and a supposedly not so devout Catholic supported Galileo’s heliocentric theories and shielded him, for a time, from his Roman inquisitors. Parenthetically, Wootton in his book on Galileo almost apologizes for writing biographies mainly because his peers look down on the genre, a sentiment I used to harbor but I now appreciate the category because they provide the who to the what, where, and when.

Bad Medicine, Wootton’s second book, postulates that doctors have dispensed more harm than good, beginning with Hippocrates in the fifth century B.C and continuing through to the present day. Covid or the Wuhan Flu pandemic will not provide the medical profession with the needed catharsis to dispel Wootton’s conjecture.

In The Invention of Science Wootton walks us through the birth of the scientific method starting with a supernova shining in the Renaissance night sky of the 1500s and culminating with Newton’s discovery that visible light contains a plethora, or at least 7 wavelengths and hues in the early 1700s.

In Power, Pleasure, and Profit, Wootton expands on the concept of selfishness driving all human progress. A concept, although anathema to all Christian and Western ethics and morality, was espoused by Machiavelli’s The Prince, published in the early 1500s and Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees, also known as The Grumbling Hive, first published in 1705.

Wootton’s Besterman Lecture: Adam Smith, Poverty, and Famine, we find out that charity is not a word in Smith’s vocabulary. Academics and maybe the rest us can really get into the weeds.

And finally, before I get into Galileo, The BBC devoted 40 minutes interviewing four guests, Wootton being one of them, on The Fable of the Bees, written initially as a poem, as stated above, by Bernard Mandeville and expanded into a book length dissertation sub-titled Private Vices, Publick Benefits which proposes that personal pleasure and greed drive human progress not altruism or Christian charity.

Galileo, born in the small city of Pisa, Italy in 1564, lived to the astronomical age of 77, some 25 years beyond the average lifespan for that era. He spent his final years blind, serving a life sentence, originally in a papal prison but eventually the prison was exchanged for confinement to his home located in a small village outside of Florence. His crime was for authoring a book defending the heliocentric model of the universe as theorized by Copernicus in 1543 rather than promoting the geocentric model as demanded by the Catholic Church.

Galileo was a tinkerer and thinker more akin to our modern definition of an engineer rather than a scientist, taking innovative ideas and novel inventions to the next level. He didn’t invent the telescope, Hans Lippershay of the Netherlands in 1608 did, but Galileo’s design quickly became the standard and he eventually increased Lippershay’s 3x magnification to 23-30x. His leaden tube with a convex lens in one end and concave lens in the other end discovered the mountains and plains of the moon, the moons of Jupiter, the rings of Saturn, the phases of Venus, possibly the planet Neptune, individual stars of the Milky Way, and sunspots. Today we can purchase a 30x set of binoculars for less than $100 which we use to peep through our neighbors’ windows and watch songbirds in the meadow across the street. All his discoveries aided in the proof of a heliocentric universe, his universe being mostly what we would refer to today as the solar system. Our discoveries prove that our neighbors are weird.

Galileo was a fascinating man and genus who introduced the world to a new way of advancing our knowledge of the world and the universe. His tinkering and thinking were the rudimentary beginnings of what we now call the scientific method–observe, hypothesize, test, repeat.

His proof of Copernicus’ theory was mostly correct. The Church’s defense of the geocentric model wasn’t. The Church admitted their error in 1992.

Bits and Pieces

25 December 2022 By in Art, Books Nonfiction Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Fernand Leger

By Serge Fauchereau

Translated by David Macey

Published by Rizzoli International Publications

Copyright: © 1994

Fernand Leger in 1916

Serge Fauchereau, born on Halloween in 1939 in France, is an art curator; art critic; professor of literature, art history, and writing; and author of artist biographies and art styles. Fauchereau has spent his adult life educating the public on, and extolling, 20th century avant-garde painting and sculpture, specifically the abstract and cubist styles.

Cubism – The Woman in Blue – Legar 1912

Abstract art attempts to free visual representations of reality from the concrete, expressing form and color spiritually, emotionally, metaphysically without the chains of perspective, fact, or conclusions. Cubism, a mathematical sub-set within the abstract world, takes the whole of reality apart piece by piece, reexamines and reimages the pieces, giving them their own perspective, color, and frame; and then collects the many pieces into something greater than the one. Sometimes this works.

Paul Cézanne, 19th century French post-impressionist painter, is considered the father of Cubism but not actually a Cubist himself. Cezanne stretched the accepted norms of perspective, giving separate objects within his paintings their own reality, their own commentary. Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, along, to a lesser extent, with Fernand Leger, took their cues from Cezanne, developing a style that became known as Early Cubism in the first 15 years of 20th century.

Tubism – Three Women – Legar 1921
Contrast of Forms – Legar 1913

Fernand Leger, born in Normandy, France in 1881, was an extrovert who successfully kept his private life hidden from the public, expressing himself exclusively through his paintings and films. His early works, before 1908, were strongly influenced by the French impressionistic painters. Dissatisfied with his impressionistic efforts he destroyed all his paintings from this period.

Moving on from impressionism, he circulated with the Parisian modern art crowd, where he began to experiment with the Cubist style, finishing his initial works, La Couseuse and Compotier sur la Table in 1909. After WWI, in which he served on the Verdun front and was wounded, he developed his own style, a modified form of Cubism which he called Tubism, more a foray into pop art than a formal artistic movement. Beginning in the early 1920s he collaborates and directs art films beginning with La Roue followed by Skating Rink and Le Ballet Mecanique.

Till the end of his life in 1955 he continued to paint, lecture, exhibit and travel, cementing his reputation as pioneer in the world of modern art. His reputation continues to grow with his Cubist Contrast of Forms selling at a Christie auction in 2017 for $70,062,500.

Giant Before Us

18 December 2022 By in Biography, Books Nonfiction Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Isaac Newton

By James Gleick

Published by Pantheon

Copyright: © 2003

Isaac Newton at 46

James Gleick left Harvard in 1976 with a degree in English and a disposition towards independence from the 9 to 5. His initial attempt at independence after college was launching a weekly newspaper in the midwest city of Minneapolis, Minnesota. This endeavor ended in failure within a year, and it would take another 10 years before he could leave his day job, succeeding as an author of history of science and a provider of internet service in New York City.

His first book, Chaos: Making a New Science, was critically acclaimed and a million copy best seller establishing Gleick as a first-rate storyteller of difficult subjects to the lay public. He wrote two other bestsellers, both biographies, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman in 1992 and Isaac Newton nine years later.

Gleick presents Newton’s life in chronological order, painting a beautiful portrait of his acheivements but also imparting a sense of his being as a human. His accomplishments were beyond exceptional, but his temperament was that of a reluctant member of society at large, not easily befriended, easy to offend, and not quick to forgive. Current hypotheses suggest that Newton may have suffered from Asperger’s Syndrome, one of the milder forms of autism. As a social being he appears a lot like Beethoven, also a genius but also without grace or courtesy.

Issac Newton was born fatherless, on Christmas Day in 1642 according to the Julian calendar, still in use in England at the time, or the less interesting 4 January 1643 by the today’s Gregorian calendar, on a sheep farmstead far north of London in Lincolnshire County. His father died about three months before his birth and in three years he was shuffled off to a grandmother’s care for the next 9 years to keep him away and out of site from his mother’s new husband, Reverend Barnabas Smith. His early education was at the ancient King’s School, already more than two hundred years old when he entered in 1655 and still operates as an all-boys grammer school to this day. Upon finishing at King’s School, he entered Trinity College at Cambridge in 1661 and, except for a year away in 1665, he stayed as a student and professor until 1696. Immediately following Cambridge, he became Warden of the King’s Mint and in 1703 became president of the Royal Society and stayed in that position until he died in 1727.

Newton’s contributions to the world were many and varied. His Three Laws of Motion were revolutionary in the 18th century, and as a testament to their lasting correctness are still taught to every school kid early in their education. The Law of Gravitation explained the orbit of the heavenly bodies and why apples fall and not rise, float, or go sideways. It has since been replaced by Einstein’s General Relativity but is still a particularly good approximation for us lessor mortals. Calculus. Enough said.

Newton also intensely studied the bible, believing that the universe could only exist through the existence of God. He rejected the Trinity believing there is one God, God the Father with Jesus and the Holy Spirit subservient to God. Newton also predicted that the end of times would not come before 2060, 38 short years from now. Still a little early to be maxing out your credit cards.

Newton researched and experimented with alchemy, including looking for the Philosophers Stone and the force that keeps the planets in their orbits. Seeking the Philosophers Stone may have been worthy of Harry Potter but I’m not sure about Newton. Newton never published anything on his alchemy studies, likely because it didn’t make any sense. Now looking for the force that kept planets from falling your head during a walk-in park was worthy of Newton and the rest of the world, especially Einstein. Newton found it and it was called gravity.

My one complaint with Gleick’s book is his derisive commenting on Newton’s fascination with alchemy through today’s lens of knowledge rather than accepting that understanding and meaning in this world changes, sometimes for the better, sometimes not. People respond to the time they live in not to the unknowns of the future. Newton put it this way, “What we know is a drop, what we don’t know is an ocean.” and one can only study the drop that he has.

One of my favorite quotes of Newton or anyone for that matter was, “A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true.” I liked this quote when I first saw it, not because it was profound, it was, but because it was an idea I had promulgated early on in my education, if it didn’t make logical sense, it probably was wrong.

Bourgeois Realism

11 October 2022 By in Art, Books Nonfiction, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

The Impressionists: Their Lives and Work in 350 Images

By Robert Katz and Celestine Dars

Published by Lorenz Books

Copyright: © 2016

A small coterie of Parisian painters, less than a dozen, mostly French, mostly young and middle class, disillusioned with the elite’s adherence to Neoclassicalism and Romantism, began to experiment in the latter half of 19th century with bold colors and light, loose, broad brushwork and forms, simple, pleasing scenes of everyday life and contentment, landscapes painted in the open air: en plein air, painting what their eyes saw, and their hearts felt. Their style came to be known as Impressionism, a term lifted by an art critic who intended censure and derision from Monet’s painting: ‘Impression, Sunrise’ (shown above right). Impressionism, initially disregarded and rejected by the critics and the public, became the solid foundation for all painting to come; Post-Impressionism, Art Noveau, Cubism, and onto what is today casually labeled modern or contemporary art.

As Impressionism birthed the future of painting in the west, the Realists: Millet, Corot, Corbet, and others created the base for Degas, Manet, Monet to which they added something fresh and enjoyable. Realists painted the world as they perceived it: poor, laboring, dismal, dystopian. The Impressionists kept the Realists’ stage, the world as it is, but added cheerfulness and peace by experimenting with light and form.

Monet’s genre masterpiece, ‘Woman with a Parasol-Madame Monet and Her Son (shown above left), captures his wife and son in a leisurely stroll around a blustery Argenteuil, a suburb of Paris, in 1875. The woman and son are looking down on the painter with her umbrella blocking out the sun creating an impression of light dancing through the clouds and sky, imparting a stark contrast for the shadows below moving across the grass and flowers. The woman’s vail and dress ripples across her face and body in tune with the breeze. The boy is in the background giving the painting an added sense of depth. The detail of the painting (above right) shows the broad brushstrokes, bold colors and contrasts that came to characterize Impressionistic art.

‘The Impressionist’ brings form and substance to the lives of six of the greatest artists of the genre: Pissarro, Manet, Degas, Monet, Renoir, and Sisley, who gave birth to something new.

The Other Michelangelo

4 October 2022 By in Art, Books Nonfiction, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

Caravaggio: The Complete Works

By Sebastian Schutze

Published by TASCHEN

Copyright: © 2015

The other Michelangelo, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, was born almost 100 years after the Michelangelo of Florence and Sistine Chaple fame, in the northern Italian city of Milian, at the time a part of the Spanish Empire; coming of age as a painter in the dying days of the Renaissance art period and the birth of Baroque, developing and leading a style with an increased attention to detail, lighting, and volume not so much in contrast, but in addition to the scientific realism of the previous 200 years.

Caravaggio took the Baroque art beyond the biblical themes of the Renaissance while retaining the humanism, maintaining naturalism but with detail likely unavailable to painters before him, improving on perspective and volume through the use of light and dark: Chiaroscuro, and giving the subjects an emotional bearing that communicates to the viewer a deportment not obtainable to the first Michelangelo.

The book cover, Judith beheading Holofernes, detail above with full painting shown below, depicts Judith looking down and to the viewers left with a look, according to some, of revulsion and disgust, but my interpretation is one of apathy and possibly puzzlement, as noted by the slight creases between the eyebrows and the bridge of the nose and the minor squint of the eyes. Panning out may add an unquestioning repugnance to the painting but not to Judith’s countenance, it remains one of bemusement, a ‘is this all there is’ to vanquishing one’s enemy, while an old woman looks over Judith’s shoulder concurring, not seeing the gore of the moment but the moral of the act and feeling ‘Good, it is done’. The detail may be there, but the viewers interpretation is still required.

Caravaggio, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

It Happened Already

25 July 2022 By in Books Nonfiction, Physics Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

The Stars and The Earth or Thoughts upon Time, Space, and Eternity

By Felix Eberty

Translator: Josephine Caruana

Published by Comino-Verlag

Copyright: © 2018

A short read reflecting on the information carried by a photon as it reaches your eye from the far reaches of space.

Originally the book was published in two volumes, both together totaling less than 80 pages, in 1846 and 1847. The book sought the union of physics and religion, metaphysics; for God sees the past and the present as a single point in the space time continuum, time stopping when moving with the light, observing all in three dimensions rather than four. Eberty continues his thesis from an all-seeing God to a time when man’s technological progress allows him to see as God sees or the child of God becomes a god.

Eberty knowing that the speed of light was finite, about 300,000 km/s, contemplated that all visuals captured by any type of eye, human or otherwise, happened in the past. The past including an inconceivably, insignificantly small amount of time in the past, such as a plate of mac and cheese in front of you, is still in the past, what you see has already occurred. Jurgen Neffe, author of a biography of Albert Einstein, stated it succinctly “time travels with light”. Observing light traveling from a billion light years away exhibits events as they happened a billion years ago but if you traveled with those photons for those billion years the past occurs at the same time as your present.

Eberty’s thoughts on the meaning of time and space were recognized at the time not only as novel but metaphysical in nature, maybe not so much today.

You Are Here: Now What?

20 July 2022 By in Books Nonfiction, Red Wine, Religion Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

Return of the God Hypothesis

By Stephen C. Meyers

Published by HarperOne

Copyright: © 2021

An interesting if not an enlightening, but thoroughly tedious treatise.

Meyer, in excruciating detail, examines the evidence for a universe designed, created, and set into motion by the hand of God. His proofs assess how the universe is perfectly tuned to foster our existence, how human DNA’s complexity is beyond random chance, and how the explosion of multi-celled life forms during the Cambrian Period (485-539 mya (million years ago)) is unlikely Darwinian in nature.

The first two proofs are plausible, and his arguments are meticulously developed, while the Cambrian explosion of life does not address the hundreds of millions to a billion years of missing rock section prior to the beginning to the Cambrian Period. The explosion of life may simply be a function of where one begins to sample the evidence.

Meyer’s case for God orchestrating our existence is convincing but you only need to read Part II, about 150 pages in the hardback version of the book, while the other 300 pages can be consigned to doctoral students in logic and religion.