Wednesday 12 July 2017

Auible Books review .. and crazed mini-rant about "THE NAVAL CRISIS"

2015/2016: Prior to New Job [20 Books]

It all started with a external business consultant where I then worked introducing me to the CD format book for the car. Albeit a rather strange book called:

1: How to to Think Yourself Rich (Business Theory)

Which was state of the art thinking circa 1910 (I kid you not). I then found Audible as I was having trouble reading through "7 Habits of Highly Effective People". Listening was easier than reading certain "text book types" for me. I then found the "bug".

Another fourteen books followed, mainly business(ish) (see below, exclude the four from the second picture below that also appear in 2016 new job):



Plus:

2: Connections 2013 Conference (Wargaming Simulation)
3: Connections 2014 Conference (Wargaming Simulation)
4: Connections 2015 Conference (Wargaming Simulation)
5: SCRUM (Project Managing/Computing)

2016: Starting New Job (Longer Commute) [7 Books]

1: SCRUM (Project Management/Computing)
2: Connections 2016 Conference (Wargaming Simulation)
3: Superbetter (Games/Simulations/Computing)
4: Gamify (Games/Computing)
5: Rising Sun (History - WWII Pacific)
6: Brief History of Time (Science)
7: Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors (History WW2 Pacific)

8: Edge of Uncertainty (WIP)

2017: Same Job [26 Books]


1: Edge of Uncertainty - Science
2: Japanese Destroyer Captain – WWII War Pacific 1939-45
3: MIT Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning – Science/Computing
4: Ship of Ghosts – WWII War Pacific
5: The Victorian Internet - Science
6: Miracle at Midway – WWII War Pacific 1942
7: Algorithms to Live By – Science/Computing
8: Neptune’s Inferno – WWII War Pacific 1942/43
9: What We Cannot Know - Science


10: Fleet at Floodtide– WWII War Pacific 1944-45
11: Hackers – Computer Science Pioneers
12: The War That Never Was – History Modern
13: Frazzled (Mindfulness) - Psychology
14: Our Mathematical Universe – Science
15: Why France Collapsed – WWII 1940 History
16: Mindfulness for Women: - Psychology
17: To Rule the Waves: (Naval History)
18: Elon Musk – Innovation/Science/Start-Up/Lean
19: Move Fast and Break Things – Science/Lean/Agile/Start-Up
20: Battle of Dogger Bank – History WWI Naval North Sea
21: The Art of Being Invisible – Computing/Science
22: The Crisis of the Naval War (Jellicoe) – WWI Naval War History
23: Crystal Clear Communication – Business
24: Cyber Security – Computing/Science/Politics
25: Killing the Bismarck – WW2/Naval Atlantic
26: UK Connections 2013

27: Outliers – Science (WIP)


A grand total 53 Books I would not of otherwise read!

All of them were in some way engaging and interesting but one book was alarming! No not the France 1940 book Why France Collapsed (although it did have many strange tales to tell), it was the Jellicoe one: The Crisis of the Naval War.

Scary in that for the 8 hours and 20 minutes of its telling, the first 1 hour twenty minutes described the various Admiralty Departments and Committees "than ran the war" and why the Admiralty was a cumbersome beast to change in a direction it did not want to go. There was a a further hour describing how awkward it was to spare destroyers for anti-submarine work and how clever we were routing ships around the trade roots (cleverly avoiding the delays of convoy congestion - merchant captains would never be able to sail in a formation akin to a battleship squadron and its meticulous station keeping). Jellicoe was a brilliant naval officer (specialising in battleship gunnery) but in his summation of year of crisis he barely mentioned but in passing the convoy system that dramatically turned the tide (less than an hour). The drop off in sinkings once the convoy system was in place told the tale. He focused on developing [ineffective] hydroponic detection (not ASDIC that came much later in between wars) via trawler flotillas and Q-ships to hunt the U-Boats by luring them into attacking them. Detailing types of mines, the efforts to place armaments on merchants ships and statistics of training merchant seamen to fire them.

However the long and the short of it was that without the convoy system the submarine was an invisible killer than no warship could find. By guarding the merchant ships the U-Boats at least had to reveal themselves in attack and thus open themselves up in turn to be attacked. An even more salient point was that "convoys" were actually as hard to find by the act of concentration of many vessels in a tight area as a single ship. The oceans were suddenly denuded of targets. Jellicoe seemed to be the wrong man for the challenge and he had little to say about his political masters forcing the change (Lloyd George).

In all fascinating but scary at the same time, I literally did noy believe what I was hearing (the book was published in 1920).


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