Category: Books

Continuing to listen to Elon Musk…

Musk was not bred for domestic tranquility. Most of his romantic relationships involve psychological turmoil. The most agonizing of them all was with the actress Amber Heard, who drew him into a dark vortex that lasted more than a year and produced a deep-seated pain that lingers to this day. “It was brutal,” he says.

His brother and friends hated her with a passion that made their distaste for Justine pale. “She was just so toxic,” Kimbal says. “A nightmare.” Musk’s chief of staff Sam Teller compares her to a comic-book villain. “She was like the Joker in Batman,” he says. “She didn’t have a goal or aim other than chaos. She thrives on destabilizing everything.” She and Musk would stay up all night fighting, and then he would not be able to get up until the afternoon.

The end finally came after a wild trip to Rio de Janeiro that December with Kimbal and his wife and some of the kids. When they got to the hotel, Elon and Amber had another of their flamethrowing fights. She locked herself in the room and started yelling that she was afraid she would be attacked and that Elon had taken her passport. The security guards and Kimbal’s wife all tried to convince her that she was safe, her passport was in her bag, and she could and should leave whenever she wanted. “She really is a very good actress, so she will say things that you’re like, ‘Wow, maybe she’s telling you the truth,’ but she isn’t,” Kimbal says.

Related:

• Amber Heard: brave and financially independent
• Don’t let the ACLU write your op-eds and other lessons from the Amber Heard libel trial

Continuing to listen to Elon Musk…

Stanford University almost killed him via misdiagnosis of a severe form of malaria (“falciparum”). Musk walked in, freshly back from a safari in South Africa, and the medical geniuses at Stanford diagnosed viral meningitis and sent him home without treatment. Eventually, he found his way to Sequoia Hospital, a community hospital, where a non-academic doc diagnosed the often-lethal form of malaria and parked him in the ICU. Musk got treated just a few hours before he would have likely died (according to the author). What are the Stanford geniuses who almost killed Musk concentrating on right now? Forcing patients to put on masks before their misdiagnoses:

Another attack by a parasite that Musk survived was in the California family court system. Justine Musk had repeatedly demanded that Musk change and suggested divorce if he wouldn’t become a different person. He chose divorce. She rejected an $80 million settlement offer (Business Insider). According to the book, Elon’s legal fees were $170,000 per month despite the theoretically simplifying factor of a prenuptial agreement between the litigants (it was actually signed two weeks after the wedding, which his friends and family had begged him to call off due to their negative impressions of Justine). In the above-cited Business Insider piece by Elon himself, he wrote “What caught me by surprise, and forced me to seek emergency loans from friends, were the enormous legal fees I had to pay my ex-wife’s divorce lawyers. … The legal and accounting bills for the divorce total four million dollars so far, which is an average of roughly $170,000 per month for the past 24 months. … In addition to paying all of her household expenses and anything related to the children, I send Justine $20,000 (after tax) per month for clothing, shoes and other discretionary items. … There is also no dispute about her receiving the family residence in Bel Air, in which she currently lives.”

From Marie Claire (I worked on their web infrastructure at Hearst in 1995):

(Note that a fight over cash, presumably cash far beyond what is spelled out in the prenuptial agreement, is described by the editor as “messiest”, with the implication that emotions are involved beyond the emotional desire for cash.) What does GPT-4 have to say about this?

(it didn’t catch the typo as Google would have; a query for “Justine Musk” does yield a sensible answer; if GPT-4 is smarter than Google, why isn’t it robust to a single incorrect letter? In a world of autocorrect, sussing out the user’s intention is a required skill!)

Elon Musk learned to fly and earned a Private certificate in an intensive two-week program. Isaacson and the editors at Simon & Schuster once again fail to do any basic fact-checking. They incorrectly state that 50 hours are the minimum experience before getting a Private. In fact, it is easy to learn via Google that the minimum is 40 hours (the FAA page, though that doesn’t cover the situation of a FAR 141 school, in which case the minimum can be slightly lower). Even ChatGPT can get this right:

Walter Isaacson is a Harvard graduate who later went to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. He was CEO of CNN. The Simon & Schuster editors presumably have similarly elite educations. This team quotes Elon Musk saying that the “engine” in a Tesla S weighs 4000 lbs.

When SpaceX began producing its first Merlin engines, Musk asked Mueller how much they weighed. About a thousand pounds, Mueller responded. The Tesla Model S engine, Musk said, weighed about four thousand pounds and cost about $30,000 to make. “So if the Tesla engine is four times as heavy as your engine, why does yours cost so fucking much?”

Any numerate reader would immediately have known that this could not be true and that Musk could not have said it. (The average car should weigh about 3,000 lbs. and does weigh about 4000 lbs.; a 2024 Honda Accord is 3,300 lbs.) Had Isaacson used Google, he would have discovered that the entire Tesla S weighs about 4,700 lbs., of which the battery pack is 1,200 lbs. The motor itself (“engine”) is about 100 lbs. Can we have confidence in what CNN reports and what Simon & Schuster publishes if they aren’t skeptical enough to question the accuracy of this quote?

Given Isaacson’s innumeracy, I’m hesitant to credit these numbers, but the book says that Tesla paid -$8 million for the Fremont, California factory that was its center of gravity prior to the Gigafactories coming online in Nevada (batteries), Shanghai, Texas, and Germany. Toyota invested $50 million in Tesla and Tesla turned around to pay $42 million for the plant, a $1 billion asset prior to the GM bankruptcy and taxpayer bailout in 2009.

The copy editors at Simon & Schuster fail to catch problems that Google can easily spot. Here’s a passage regarding Musk’s first wedding to Talulah Riley:

They wed in September 2010 at Dornoch Cathedral, a thirteenth-century church in the Scottish Highlands. “I’m Christian, and Elon is not, but he very kindly agreed to get married in a cathedral,” Riley says. She wore a “full-on princess dress from Vera Wang,” and she gave Musk a top hat and cane so he could dance around like Fred Astaire, whose movies she had turned him on to. His five boys, dressed in tailor-made tuxedos, were supposed to share the duties of ring bearer and attendants, but Saxon, his autistic son, bowed out, the other boys began fighting, and only Griffin actually made it to the end of the aisle. But the drama added to the fun, Riley recalled. The party afterward was at nearby Skibo Castle, also built in the thirteenth century. When Riley asked Musk what he wanted, he replied, “There shall be hovercraft and eels.” It was a reference to a Monty Python skit in which John Cleese plays a Hungarian who tries to speak English using a flawed phrasebook and tells a shopkeeper, “My hovercraft is full of eels.” (It’s actually funnier than I’ve made it sound.) “It was quite difficult,” Riley says, “because you need permits to transport eels between England and Scotland, but in the end we did have an amphibious little hovercraft and eels.” There was also an armed personnel carrier that Musk and his friends used to crush three junked cars. “We all got to be young boys again,” Navaid Farooq says.

If you enter “armed personnel carrier” as a Google search, it says “Including results for armored personnel carrier”.

If this is as good as it gets from America’s best and brightest, I’m glad that we have Chinese people to sweat the details of building most of what we depend on!

I have begun to listen to Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson. A few interesting points so far…

Musk, born in 1971, had three big passions in the early 1990s: electric cars, rockets to Mars, and solar power. Thus, he is today working on the same things that he thought were important when he was 20-22. The author explains that Musk’s interest in solar power was due to a belief that the world was going to run out of fossil fuel in the medium-term. In fact, oil production today is higher than it was in 1990 (source):

Musk didn’t count on fracking, apparently!

The book lays to rest the myth that Musk was born into wealth and privilege. His father had some fleeting financial success when Musk was young, but he had minimal resources by the time Musk needed seed capital.

All of Musk’s friends and family begged him not to marry Justine Musk (originally “Jennifer Wilson”; a friend is fond of saying that only women and insane people change their names). Musk’s mother said, “She has no redeeming feature.” Musk went ahead against this advice and the 6-year marriage produced 6 children (sadly, one died of SIDS after 10 weeks and one changed gender ID, which may be the motivation for Musk’s current opposition to elite ideology).

In a previous book, Isaacson wrongly credited Apple with the invention of the switched-mode power supply (“switching power supply”), which this history says is properly dated to the 1950s. Musk is plagued by confusing descriptions of tech challenges and inaccurate historical context. Isaacson describes the World Wide Web as having been opened up to commercial use in 1994-5 when, in fact, it was open to commercial use from its inception in late 1990. Isaacson also describes this period as one when venture capitalists were throwing huge money at any kind of dotcom startup, which a visit to Wikipedia would have shown did not happen until 1998 or 1999.

Isaacson wrongly credits Musk with having the idea to combine maps with business Yellow Pages-style information in a company that he co-founded, Zip2. Had Isaacson or the editor/publisher been willing to visit the Wikipedia page on geographic information systems, they would have discovered that this idea goes back to the 1960s (all of the Web-based mapping services are essentially Web front-ends to a GIS) and was widely available to consumers in 1994. “Navigating Automobiles By Computer” (NYT, February 8, 1994):

What do you add to a car after you’ve installed a CD player and a cellular telephone? A computerized navigation system, of course.

The new product, which will be announced today by Sony Mobile Electronics and Etak Inc., is designed especially for tourists, traveling salesmen and delivery people. It uses a network of satellites launched by the Pentagon, called the Global Positioning System, and a detailed road map, which includes street names, to display a car’s location on a 5-inch color computer screen. Push a button and little knife-and-fork symbols appear to designate the locations of nearby restaurants, with descriptions from a Fodor’s travel guide. Parks, shops, nightspots, museums and other attractions are also included.

A slightly simpler version called City Streets, also using Etak’s data, goes on sale this month for laptop computers. Sony’s version comes on two compact disks and covers only California, with more disks to come later; City Streets, produced by Road Scholar Software of Houston, covers 170 American cities and 80 more in Europe, but does not give advice on where to eat or visit.

General Motors and Zexel Inc. introduced a similar system early this year at the Detroit Auto Show as a $2,000 option on some Oldsmobiles. That system’s data base was more equivalent to the yellow pages than a travel guide.

Sony also plans a version that can be carried around, like a laptop. Road Scholar, meanwhile, suggests that its program could be useful in a desktop computer without the satellite data; it could be used, for example, to print customized maps to take along on a trip. In addition, if running on a laptop in a vehicle, it can keep a moment-by-moment log of where a vehicle has been, a feature that a delivery company might use.

Zip2 was founded by Elon and Kimbal Musk and Greg Kouri in November 1995 (Wikipedia). That’s more than 1.5 years after the above NYT article. It’s ten years after Etak, which likely had all of these features in the 1980s (would require a bit of research to find out when Etak added a points of interest database, but I think that it was by 1988 or 1989 at the latest) but wasn’t available to every consumer as an off-the-shelf item.

This book will no doubt be referenced by historians and will be considered authoritative, well-researched, and fact-checked. Thus, it serves as a good example of how easily history can be rewritten. I recognize that the history of GIS is not as critical as, for example, the history of the state of Israel, but I think the same process can work to rewrite history on more important topics. American schoolkids, for example, are taught that American colonists were subject to a crushing tax burden, justifying rebellion, when, in fact, they paid some of the world’s lowest tax rates (about 2 percent of total income when residents of England were paying closer to 20 percent) and not a penny of tax revenue collected in the colonies was ever taken back to Britain (the country lost money on what would become the U.S., due to the expense of providing military protection from hostile Native Americans). Nobody challenges this victim narrative.

Related:

• Calculation that working class subsidies to elite owners of EVs are $50,000 per vehicle (direct tax credits, higher costs for gas-powered cars due to EV percentage sales requirements, subsidized electricity)

One of our greatest modern writers, Martin Amis, died recently (New York Times). Cancer got him at age 73. I didn’t know this until I saw his obituary, but he was our neighbor here in Palm Beach County, Florida.

I wrote about one of his books here: Lionel Asbo by Martin Amis. Excerpt:

“DILFs, Des. All divorcees. The lot of them! You know how they do it? First they— first they get theyselves hitched to some old banker for ten minutes. Then they independent for life! And oh, they in gorgeous nick, Des. Superb. And I said to her, I said to this DILF, How old are you anyway? And guess what she said.” “What.”“Thirty-seven! Which means she’s probably forty-three! Think. She’s almost Gran’s age— and there’s not a mark on her. Pampered all they lives, they are. Beauty treatments . Massage. Yoga.”

My notes on one of Amis’s most famous books, The Information:

MIT kids graduate with a profound sense that the world is and should be a meritocracy. There is always then that horrible moment when they are forced to confront the fact that the best things in life go to the ass-kissers and incompetents with big PR budgets. This book is for them. It is about Richard Tull, a brilliant writer of modern fiction. His books are so great that that they are not only unreadable but actually make readers too ill to finish. He starves while watching his friend Gwyn Barry make millions writing tripe with a sentimental appeal.

(I wrote the above 20 years ago and I don’t think the first sentence is true anymore. Young Americans are constantly reminded that there is nothing meritocratic about U.S. society, in which success is primarily based on privilege. Martin Amis, the famous writer son of famous writer Kingsley Amis, actually reinforces this point (unless we think that writing ability is heritable.))

Wikipedia on Martin Amis:

In June 2008, Amis endorsed the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama, stating that “The reason I hope for Obama is that he alone has the chance to reposition America’s image in the world”. … Blaming a “deep irrationality of the American people” for the apparent narrow gap between the candidates, Amis claimed that the Republicans had swung so far to the right that former President Reagan would be considered a “pariah” by the present party

Amis was interviewed by The Times Magazine in 2006, the day after the 2006 transatlantic aircraft plot came to light, about community relations in Britain and the “threat” from Muslims, where he was quoted as saying: “What can we do to raise the price of them doing this? There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? – to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.’ What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan… Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children…It’s a huge dereliction on their part”.

It is unclear when, exactly, Martin Amis moved to Lake Worth, Florida (as we are in the middle of Pride Month, it is important to note that this is the site for Palm Beach Pride, “a two-day festival that celebrates the LGBTQ community, equality and respect in a family friendly environment”).

Related:

• “Martin Amis rounds on Donald Trump and his ‘army of neo-Nazis'” (The Guardian, 2017)

How about this idea for an Arduino project… a puck that can be quietly stuck to the back of a friend’s TV when you’re visiting. After a 72-hour delay, the puck begins emitting the dialog that Winston Smith heard from the telecreens in 1984. An example:

’Attention! Your attention, please! A newsflash has this moment arrived from the Malabar front. Our forces in South India have won a glorious victory. I am authorized to say that the action we are now reporting may well bring the war within measurable distance of its end.

(maybe update the above with reference to Ukraine instead)

Thirty to forty group! Take your places, please. Thirties to forties!

Smith! 6079 Smith W.! Yes, YOU! Bend lower, please! You can do better than that. You’re not trying. Lower, please! THAT’S better, comrade.

THERE, comrades! THAT’S how I want to see you doing it. Watch me again. I’m thirty-nine and I’ve had four children. Now look.

You see MY knees aren’t bent. You can all do it if you want to. Anyone under forty-five is perfectly capable of touching his toes. We don’t all have the privilege of fighting in the front line, but at least we can all keep fit. Remember our boys on the Malabar front! And the sailors in the Floating Fortresses! Just think what THEY have to put up with. Now try again. That’s better, comrade, that’s MUCH better.

(update the last one to refer to Ukraine and replace “his toes” with “his/her/zir/their toes”?)

Now we can see you. Stand out in the middle of the room. Stand back to back. Clasp your hands behind your heads. Do not touch one another.

Smith! 6079 Smith W! Uncover your face. No faces covered in the cells.

Any other updates to Orwell’s 1949 text?

Separately, a few excerpts from the Wikipedia page regarding Orwell...

At the outbreak of the Second World War, Orwell’s wife Eileen started working in the Censorship Department of the Ministry of Information in central London … Eileen went into hospital for a hysterectomy and died under anaesthetic on 29 March 1945 … [1984] was published in June 1949, less than a year before his death. … Sonia was a beauty, and her act of marrying a sick wealthy man, when his death was almost certain, has left many to doubt her intentions.

Orwell was also openly against homosexuality, at a time when such prejudice was common. Speaking at the 2003 George Orwell Centenary Conference, Daphne Patai said: “Of course he was homophobic. That has nothing to do with his relations with his homosexual friends. Certainly, he had a negative attitude and a certain kind of anxiety, a denigrating attitude towards homosexuality. That is definitely the case. I think his writing reflects that quite fully.”

Orwell used the homophobic epithets “nancy” and “pansy”, for example, in expressions of contempt for what he called the “pansy Left”, and “nancy poets”, i.e. left-wing homosexual or bisexual writers and intellectuals such as Stephen Spender and W. H. Auden.

Here’s a possibly useful building block: