What am I up to now?
June, 2026
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I’ve had a lovely May around San Francisco, and I’ve got an exciting June ahead. I’ll spend the first week in DC and then move to London to start my visit at DeepMind. If you’re in DC or London, please say hi!
Redwoods trip
In early May, I went on a week-long camping trip in Del Norte and Humboldt counties to see the largest redwoods. Since the 1850s, we cut down about 95% of old-growth redwood forests,We only cut down about one-quarter of giant sequoias. This is because they were harder to get to, less commercially valuable, and fewer to begin with. and although redwoods grow very fast, half a meter per year, the oldest and largest trees are located very far north, far from cities and people. Muir Woods National Monument, just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, is the most visited redwood grove in California, and it’s where I first saw old-growth redwoods. Muir Woods is the redwoods ambassador to the world.
The very first grove I stopped at on my drive north was Cheatham Grove, and not even because of the redwoods themselves. Cheatham Grove is the only visitable redwood location from Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi. All of the other locations were on private land, and logged soon after filming: the Ewok village, the shield generator, the tree where Leia meets Wicket W. Warrick.
It is a small grove, and like many of the most magnificent groves located on a bend in a river. The parking lot was tiny, with room for just my rental car and the single other car up against a tree. By an accident of timing, I visited Cheatham Grove on May the 4th. This was revealed to me by a couple who had driven up from San Jose, five hours, just to visit the trees which Luke and Leia had raced speeder bikes through. They had matching t-shirts and were very willing to let me join their photoshoot.
I’m writing about Cheatham for two reasons. First, Star Wars is cool. Second, it was the very first grove I stopped at on the drive up, and it was the least impressive set of redwoods I saw the whole week. It wasn’t isolated from highway noise, the trees weren’t particularly tall or broad, and there are no other groves nearby.
And yet Cheatham Grove is spectacular. It made Muir Woods feel like a neighborhood park. The most beautiful tree in the grove wasn’t even a redwood, it was this maple, hidden away at the back, close to the river bank.
Muir Woods is a very effective ambassador, but it is very worth visiting the real redwood country. During the rest of the trip, I camped on Redwood Creek, just across from the tallest tree in the world. I visited three trees so broad you could drive a car through; living trees, with SUV-sized holes in them dating back 150 years. I visited eight redwood-themed giftshops.By far the best is Trees of Mystery, although I didn’t do the aerial walk. The shop at Chandelier Tree is a close second, and less kitschy. But you should go for the kitsch. I visited Fort Ross, the southernmost Russian colonial outpost in America, which has been rebuilt as an historical site with red wood and lots of old cannons.
I couldn’t have done this trip without RedwoodHikes.com and the maps I bought from his shop. I’ve now done every five-star hike on his site north of San Francisco. His maps had campgrounds and viewpoints and trails which LLMs and Google Maps hadn’t surfaced. I entirely recommend.
Reading
I read some great books about boats this month.
Red Storm Rising, Tom Clancy
Tom Clancy was so good at his job that, after The Hunt for Red October came out in 1984, the FBI and the US Navy showed up at his house asking how he found out about all the classified technology in the novel. I’ve always loved his Jack Ryan novels as central examples of the thriller volume. Of all his books, however, my favorite is one of just two from outside of the Ryanverse, Red Storm Rising (1986).
Unlike all of his later books, Red Storm Rising isn’t about a single super spy. It’s an ensemble novel about a World War III taking place in the 1980s between Russia and NATO. Because Clancy is so focused on the technology of the time and how it drives warfare, many of the characters are on submarines and aircraft carriers. But there are almost as many sections which follow infantry in Iceland and pilots over Germany and satellite operators in Arizona, and the effect is to present the totality of a modern war.
The book is also really long. My physical copy is 750 pages long. However, I read the e-book while on the camping trip above, and there is very little fluff. We do get an entire war in those pages, mostly because Clancy designs the war so that it can be started and resolved in that length.
My favorite bits were the bits about boats. Although Red Storm Rising is not as submarine-focused as The Hunt for Red October, the wartime setting lets Clancy do much more complicated and fun things with submarine operations. There’s a lot of competence porn in the navy.
Rickover and the Nuclear Navy
The next book about boats was Rickover and the Nuclear Navy, and it’s about the origin of modern naval competence porn. Admiral Hyman Rickover was the dictator ruling the US Navy’s Naval Reactor Office. Every nuclear ship produced during the Cold War was designed by his office; he personally interviewed every officer serving on a ship with a nuclear reactor until his forced retirement in 1982.
These interviews sound incredibly unpleasant, and Rickover did like 20,000 of them, or two a day, every day, for thirty years. He was “sixty years older than some of the interviewees, who were usually midshipmen, ensigns, or junior grade lieutenants, all of them literally quaking at the thought of the career-determining confrontation ahead.” The interviews were entirely exercises in power.
Portrayed as the admiral’s means of personally ensuring selection of the best candidates for nuclear power training, these interviews have long been known in the navy as his method of asserting personal dominance from the beginning. That they were intended for this purpose alone is obvious from their capricious context. Seldom, if ever, was anything related to nuclear engineering discussed or even mentioned. As usual, the navy surrendered, for there was no other choice.
“The navy had no other choice” is a refrain of the book. The navy had no choice but to make Rickover an admiral, after Congress forced his promotion through.There are 210 admirals in the US Navy, which is often brought up next to the fact that there are only 290 ships in the US Navy. However, even keeping the number of admirals this low is very difficult: the vast majority of captains (the rank directly below admiral) are semi-forcibly retired after aging out at 30 years of service. Due to his unpopularity within the Pentagon, Rickover came within months of aging out in 1953, but his popularity with the press and Congress saved him. ‘To prevent lawmakers from overturning the promotion system’, the civilian Secretary of the Navy convened a special selection board just for him. The navy had no choice other than to accept his preferred contractors; he repeatedly overruled the Bureau of Ships even after they had already selected a shipbuilder. And the navy had no choice but to build the boats he wanted: in 1967, after Secretary of Defense McNamara requested funding for gas-turbine destroyers, Rickover went to Congress and convinced them to fund nuclear frigates instead.Specifically, McNamara had allies on SASC and Rickover had allies on HASC. In conference, the House version with the nuclear frigates and without the destroyers won out.
Rickover’s political and personal force always got him what he wanted, and that’s because he was a control freak. And of course, a control freak is exactly who you want designing the first nuclear-powered warships and the first nuclear power plant.There are lots of nitpicking options here. See the notes on the Wikipedia page.
Rickover and the Nuclear Navy is about what he called “the discipline of technology”: complex technologies won’t adapt to institutions or moments, so institutions should be adapted to novel and complex technologies. It’s a book about managing technology and engineers inside of a large bureaucracy which doesn’t care much about how the technology actually works. For nuclear propulsion, this management came through a highly-protected group of technical experts with unusually high authority on contracting and staffing.
Rickover’s personality is what kept this system going for three decades. It is surprising that the discipline of technology was sufficiently institutionalized to survive after him, as Rickover made sure he had no clear successor, and certainly not one as powerful as himself. Yet the nuclear navy has retained its extreme capability and strength.
The Life and Times of Horatio Hornblower, C. Northcote Parkinson
One more book about boats: The Life and Times of Horatio Hornblower. Horatio Hornblower is a fictional character created by C.S. Forester, and this book isn’t even by Forester. The author is naval historian C. Northcote Parkinson, who treats Hornblower as he would any other Admiral of the Fleet in need of a biography. The dozen or so Hornblower novels tell of his rise through the British Navy from the 1790s into the 1820s, and I had never read any of them.
We know much more about the design of the ships which Hornblower commanded than his emotions, and that is how he would have wanted it. Northcote Parkinson takes it all deadly seriously and fiction doesn’t make it any less real to him. The absurd parts of Hornblower’s story (marrying the Duke of Wellington’s sister, loaning his carriage to Napoleon III, a ridiculous number of successful false flag attacks) are never too much for Northcote Parkinson. He writes in an institutional voice with practiced uncertainty; he makes up stuff which isn’t in any of the novels, and also ignores things in the novels which he feels historians have no way of knowing.
As for the actual operation we may never know what, if anything, was achieved. Unless some new material should come to light, we must rely upon guesswork.
The historical realism was fun, and my lack of knowledge about the Napoleonic era meant I didn’t catch or care about incongruities.
It’s a wonderful and sad book, and the strongest memento mori of the year. Hornblower had to have been born somewhere and die somewhere. But the Hornblower novels are action novels about ships, and as such, take place mostly in on ships or around ships, so they don’t really get into such things. Northcote Parkinson therefore invents a childhood and a senescence. The childhood is easy: what would explain the adulthood of the hero we know from the novels? The senescence is more complicated. I would understand the urge to have him die in battle or on an adventure to the East Indies. But this was the middle of the long 19th century, and there just is not much for a British Admiral of the Fleet to do and anything would feel contrived. So Northcote Parkinson kills him like an Englishman:
being found by Barbara in his study armchair with his eyes closed in sleep and the last volume of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire lying, still open, on the floor.
Links
Last month I linked to a story about life on Tristan da Cunha, a small British island in the Atlantic. Then hantavirus arrived (how?). Because there’s no airport, the British military airdropped a full ICU on the island to isolate and treat anyone infected. The paratroopers left from RAF Brize Norton, a base just west of Oxford which I often visited to planewatch.
This is a lovely piece of mockery of President Eisenhower from 1957: the Gettysburg Address in Eisenhowese:
I haven’t checked these figures but eighty-seven years ago, I think it was, a number of individuals organized a governmental setup here in this country, I believe it covered certain eastern areas, with this idea they were following up based on a sort of national-independence arrangement and the program that every individual is just as good as every other individual.
Here’s a paper I found useful this month: Statistics of Sheep in Medieval England. It turns out that 100 sheep is actually 120 sheep, if you’re in Yorkshire.
A recent travel report from Syria. One travel tip:
I ran into a group staying at said hostel in Palmyra, who explained that Chinese hostels are always a goldmine in places like this: they don’t advertise on English websites, so you can only find them on ChatGPT, and they’re always cheaper and cleaner.
Previously
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