Book memo: Measuring and Managing Information Risk

Measuring and Managing Information Riskby Jack Jones; Jack FreundPublished by Butterworth-Heinemann, 2014

This book is at the foundation of risk management as taught by the FAIR Institute.  FAIR is "Factor Analysis of Information Risk" and is a framework for evaluating cybersecurity risk.  Open FAIR standards are managed by the Open Group.  FAIR has been mapped into the NIST cybersecurity framework as well.

The recent breach of the Oldsmar, Florida water treatment plant, "Compromise of U.S. Water Treatment Facility", is discussed in a FAIR Institute blog post, that tries to take a "realistic look at the risk, applying the discipline of FAIR thinking".  However you may need to read below to understand that analysis.

Book memo: Uprooted

Wiki tells us that Naomi Novik's Uprooted won the 2015 Nebula Award for Best Novel, the 2016 Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel, and the 2016 Mythopoeic Award in the category Adult Literature. It was also nominated for the 2016 Hugo Award for Best Novel. 

This and the NYT review below I found after reading the book (ebook from the public library), a good read for a quiet Saturday.

Naomi Novik skillfully takes the fairy-tale-turned-bildungsroman structure of her premise — the peasant girl selected to serve the terrifying magician, her undiscovered magical talent, an evil wood encroaching on the doorstep — and builds enough flesh on those bones to make a very different animal. Plain but hyper-talented Agnieszka could risk cliché, but even without Novik’s tweaks to the formula, she makes for a gripping narrator, pragmatically personable but tapped into the lyric. The vivid characters around her also echo their fairy-tale forebears, but are grounded in real-world ambivalence that makes this book feel quietly mature, its world lived-in. Even the magic has the low-key, organic feel that you would expect from a farming valley. When the sinister wood infects some cattle, for instance, their owner doesn’t immediately slaughter them — his family has no other animals, and he’s so desperate he delays what’s necessary. Even in the midst of chaos, the villagers don’t vilify him for it. This is a book in which the thinnest threads of understanding can hold the whole enterprise aloft. None of these asides feel burdensome; the plot thickens as quickly as the thorn bushes of the wood cast shadows, and Agnieszka’s brisk narration and shrewd, shorthand observations of character make “Uprooted” a very enjoyable fantasy with the air of a modern classic.

Book memo: The Hydrogen Sonata

Iain M. Banks has a reputation for his science fiction, so I said, why not?  Picked up "The Hydrogen Sonata" at the public library.  Well, I found it OK, not great.  Perhaps I picked up the wrong book?

Book memo: The Clever Gut Diet

The Clever Gut Diet, by Dr. Michael Mosley - probably one of the better books in the genre, because the author seems to hew to the science and not overstate what is known.  I haven't tried the recipes.  I might get a copy for myself - the one I read is from the public library.

Book memo: The Crucible of Islam

The Crucible of Islam by B.W. Bowersock presents what little is known about the history of Arabia in the years preceding the emergence of Islam and immediately after.  Since not a lot is known, the volume is a slim one.

Some of the history appears to be a replay of our times - Arabia as one of the arenas of great power politics, with the Zoroastrian Persians backing the Jews and the Christian empire of Byzantium backing the Ethiopian Christians despite sectarian differences.  Mainly I learned that apparently in 614, when the Persians besieged Jerusalem, the Jews supported them; and in 638 it was the Christians that turned over the city to the armies of the Muslim Caliph 'Umar al Khattab. Archaeology suggests that neither the 614 nor the 638 invasions significantly damaged Jerusalem, and that the kind of Islamization we moderns are more familiar with began only after a generation or so.  I also learned of Michael Lecker's hypothesis about the Prophet's migration to Medina.

Lecker begins with a straightforward observation of a remarkable coincidence-- a coincidence so obvious that it is astonishing to find that it has failed to engage the attention of most historians of the hijra.  The year of the hijra, 622, was precisely the year in which the Byzantine emperor Heraclius began his military onslaught on the Persian Empire......Heraclius must have known from Arabian history of the sixth century that his Persian antagonists supported the Jews, much as the Byzantines supported the Christians, and it was no secret that the Jewish population of Medina was among the most significant community of Jews in northwestern Arabia....He would have certainly seen in the city's Jewish population a political resource that the Persians might exploit against the Byzantine Christians.  This was, after all, exactly what they had done when the captured Jerusalem in 614 by offering support to the Jews in the process of dislodging the Christians and their sacred relics. In planning his Persian offensive in 622 Heraclius would have had every reason to ensure that the Persians would not stir up trouble in the Hijaz of the kind that they had already provoked in the Palestine.   It made perfect sense for him to turn to his Ghassanid clients to address this contingency and what Lecker has now demonstrated is that those clients were in a position to influence the Khazraj and the Jews.  He has meticulously noted the Ghassanid presence in groups that are listed in the Constitution of Medina, notably among both Khazraj and Jews.   This link across the various tribes and religions would explain the otherwise puzzling cooperation of the pagan, anṣa̅r, and Jews, after a recent history of hostility, in both the invitation to Muḥammad and the subsequent incorporation of the Believers into the community of Medina.

 Well, if Lecker is correct, both the Persians and Byzantines were consumed and displaced by what ensued.

Book memo - more Reacher

Without Fail & Persuader.  Fictional world full of nasty people, but the good guy always wins.

Book memo: Billy Bunter & The Schoolboy Broadcasters

"The Schoolboy Broadcasters" is "This week's ripping school story of Harry Wharton & Co. at Greyfriars".  This week is February 12th, 1927, and this is the facsimile edition of The Magnet  published by Howard Baker Press, London.

The students at Greyfriars get a chance to broadcast their stuff over a new experimental radio station, and get into a bigger adventure than one would have imagined. 

The Magnet's Motto: "Clean, Wholesome Literature!".  That it is.