1. 09 October 2007

    Castle

    David Macaulay

    364 days ago

    Taking a look at a castle getting built. A children’s book without much plot, but tremendous illustrations and a fun look at an imaginary castle.

    I got it to read for a french research paper that’s due thursday. I haven’t yet managed to start the paper, but I read these 80 pages and skimmed through a few other books. Wish me luck.

  2. 24 March 2007

    The Batteries of Life

    Christopher Assendorf

    563 days ago

    A look at early technology and the changes coming from it through the history of art and literature. Stuff that turned my head enough for me to get up and put it into the computer:

    “Advertisement on the Firmament” 101

    the clock… a compensation for the failure of our activities to follow each other any longer in a natural way. Musil, 140

    The Metropolis and Mental Life

    Paul Valéry, “The Conquest of Ubiquity” 176

  3. 30 January 2007

    The System of the World

    Neal Stephenson

    616 days ago

    Stephenson wraps up his Baroque Cycle in high style. Read it.

    And man do I wish Stephenson would’ve told what happened to precipitate Jack’s crowd-surfing episode.

  4. 24 December 2006

    Odalisque

    653 days ago

    Stephenson continues with his epic, 3rd book of 8. Reccommended.

  5. 14 December 2006

    King of the Vagabonds

    Neal Stephenson

    663 days ago

    Another Stephenson, supremely good stuff. The book ends in a real rut, can’t wait to get at the next one.

  6. 04 November 2006

    Quicksilver

    Neal Stephenson

    703 days ago

    There isn’t really much that I can say. Here’s some previous stuff on Stephenson, who’s hands down my favorite fiction writer.

    I’m pissed that the last 35 pages of Quicksilver are the first chapter from the next in the series. The ending just ran up behind me and bashed me over the head. Not that it was stunning (a fault lots of people find with Stephenson’s books), but there was still a good chunk of pages between my right thumb and forefinger that threw me.

    The second I got done with it I hopped onto amazon to order the next two. It’s been awhile since I’ve really read at a good pace, much less stuff as good as Stephenson. They pull you through just like pulp/trash novels do, but after reading a Dan Brown or a John Grisham you feel almost guilty because reading the book doesn’t really get you anything. I’ve read a few, and they all just blur together. (If you want, you can switch the pronoun you for me in the rest of this…)

    Stephenson won’t just blow you away for the few days it takes to get through the book (I read 80 pages thursday, ~250 yesterday, and 100 today), but you can actually tell one of his novels from another. Which is a plus. I take it as a sign that they didn’t just rot my brain.

    If I had to describe Quicksilver (I can’t), I’d say it was history/science/fiction. All three about balanced. Its going on in mid 17th century england, featuring scientists at the genesis of the Royal Society in London. Daniel Waterhouse makes friends with Netwon, Liebnitz, and plenty of other bigwigs; not to mention sails through a flotilla of pirates in the second, temporally distant plot line. I’m not describing any more than that, you should read it.

  7. 02 September 2006

    Alaska

    766 days ago

    A good read, though long. I started this a month+ ago, I pulled it off the shelf looking for something to read for the car ride to montana and back. Got 700 pages into it then; but just couldn’t quite finish the last 400. Interesting fictional look at Alaska (but based off real history), somewhere I really want to go.

    While reading it, a prof at my school managed to take a trip there, and I felt great injustice sitting around reading about it as he put up his photos.

    ...neat in his ways, and content to remain aloof. 464

    ...the kind of flight that can re-order a man’s perceptions. 812

    Whitepass Railroad 856

    The Worst Journey in the World 1025

  8. 27 August 2006

    772 days ago

    The Founding Fathers weren't Christians

    The words “In God We Trust” were not consistently on all U.S. currency until 1956, during the McCarthy witch hunts.

    via Kjell Olsen772 days ago

  9. 14 August 2006

    785 days ago

    Ironing the Flag

    On August 15, 2006 21:30 EST the United States will have been at war in Iraq longer than it was at war with Germany in World War II.

    via Kjell Olsen785 days ago

  10. 22 July 2006

    The Metaphysical Club

    Louis Menard

    808 days ago

    A sort of charting of the flow of american philosophical though from the end of the civil war up and to the second world war, inspecting numerous characters in history. The 4 principle are Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James, Charles Pierce, and John Dewey. The notion of pragmatism, that we assume beliefs for the purpose of dealing with what we perceive as the world, and those beliefs hold according to how well they allow us to cope. The system operates outside of absolutes – we strive to believe in what helps us to deal with the world however we may perceive it.

    My thoughts and notes, mostly notes.

    The nation blest above all nations is she in whom the civic genius of the people does the saving day by day, by acts without external picturesqueness; by speaking, writing, voting reasonably; by smiting corruption swiftly; by good temper between parties; by the people knowing true men when they see them, and preferring them as leaders to rabid partisans or empty quacks. Such nations have no need of wars to save them. William James, 148

    [Insert your own quips here, I’ve had it with goddamn politics] But read the speech linked with his name, it really is nice.

    Charles Pierce was considered an intellectual elitist:

    “Do you follow me?” he is supposed to have asked one of his advanced classes during a lecture. No one did. “I’m not surprised,” he said. “I know of only three persons who could.” 153

    All events, even those which, by their insignificance, seem not to follow the great laws of nature, follow them as necessarily as the revolutions of the sun. In our ignorance of the ties that bind these events to the entire system of the universe, we have taken them to depend on final causes or on chance, depending on whether they occur and are repeated with regularity or without apparent order. But these imaginary causes have gradually receded with the widening scope of our knowledge, and they will disappear entirely before a sound philosophy, which sees in them nothing but the expression of our ignorance of the true causes. Pierre-Simon Laplace, 184

    Laplace’s Demon:

    An intelligence which, for a given instant, could know all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective situation of the beings who compose it, if, moreover, it was sufficiently vast to submit these data to analysis, if it could embrace in the same formula the lightest atom – nothing would be uncertain for it, and the future, like the past, would be present to its eyes. Pierre-Simon Laplace, 196

    Determinism, or predestination. You only have to wonder how long it will take for technology to figure out all this elastic metaphysical stuff, cut through all this angsty human deliberation on the world and construct just how things really work. Because we are building some pretty impressive intelligences these days.

    He, my brother, and other long-headed youths have combined to form a metaphysical club, where they wrangle grimly and stick to the question. Henry James, 203

    I think I have a new motto.

    Atheism is speculatively as unfounded as theism, and practically can only spring from bad motives. Chauncey Wright, 212

    I think I developed myself into somewhat of a pragmatist early on, I don’t know if it was the influence of anything in particular, but I hold the view that at some point the human mind got too big for its britches, its capacity exceeded what was necessary to find food and procreate. So we took on this whole thinking/reasoning thing, and have vacillated ourselves all over the place ever since. See religion and science over all the years, 100 years don’t go by without nearly every aspect of the world changing (for the better? surely having changed things in such a way, we would have thought so.).

    If the foundations of human development are cast as a sort of flopping about, not knowing anything better to do with this new capacity of communication and thought, where does that put us now? (And above anything else, I think at this point in life I’d don the cap of cynicist.)

    Belief is only a way to deal with the world. (218) Comes through concretely focusing on John Dewey, having been insinuated by all previous exploration. One of my favorite american figures. The only person within the book I’d really heard of before, I’d studied a bit on his theories of education and really liked them. I’d only heard of him in an educational context, and had no idea he was more than a teacher.

    The purpose of all scientific investigation is therefore to push our collective opinions about the world closer and closer to agreement with each other, and thus closer and closer to the limit represented by reality itself. 228

    It’s all just a game of influence, whoever can convince everybody of everything wins. The hardest thing about pragmatics to me is that it’s a means justify the ends kind of thing, it removes all final objectives. You don’t have goals, because those goals are actually equivalent to whatever means you use to accomplish those goals, and as a fickle human being you conceive of means and end separately, when really they are all tied up in each other. One of the lines of thought in the book I could only half follow, but it’s fun to think about.

    When he was on the Supreme Court, [Oliver Wendell] Holmes used to invite his fellow justices, in conference, to name any legal principle they liked, and he would use it to decide the case under consideration either way. ...When there are no bones, anybody can carve a goose. 340

    I love this. Friggin justices, they’re just messing with us.

    I am against bigness and greatness in all their forms, and with the invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, stealing in through the crannies of the world like so many soft rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water… The bigger the unit you deal with, the hollower, the more brutal, the more mendacious is the life displayed. So I am against all big organizations as such, national ones first and foremost; against all big successes and big results; and in favor of the eternal forces of truth which always work in the individual and immediately unsuccessful way, underdogs always, till history comes, after they’re long dead, and puts them on the top. William James, 372

    I haven’t quite digested this quote fully yet, but it struck me. Very 37signals, right under my nose in terms of having minimalist sentiments. Sort of an organic, way to develop, reminding me also of Christopher Alexander’s thinking on architecture (_invisible molecular moral forces_, patterns in a language).

  11. 02 May 2006

    In search of God & Self

    Donald Wilcox

    889 days ago

    One of the books for my class on Renaissance and Reformation, a good look at 12th to 15th century Europe. For whatever reason I don’t take notes for my schoolwork nearly as well as I do in reading books of my own choosing, and so I’ll just leave you with the last paragraph of the conclusion. The money quote, mentioning this.

    “To live appropriately.” Could a phrase more aptly capture the spirit of an age? It joins the ethical and social concerns of the Renaissance with the introspective force of the Reformation. The Renaissance taught that man is a social being whose own inner life grows by touching the lives of others. The Reformation taught that he has overwhelming power in his inner life; man is a person before he is a member of society, and he must seek fulfillment first as a person. These two perspectives are not easy to blend into a single system. Yet life depends on each, and by calling us to live appropriately, Montaigne summarizes in full measure the wisdom of both the Renaissance and the Reformation.

  12. 12 April 2006

    909 days ago

    Flaubert's Dictionnaire des Idées reçues

    Common wisdom to bourgeois french written by Gustave Flaubert, in and around the 19th century. (Translations are mine, excuse any errors.)

    Chat: Les chats sont traîtres. Les appeler tigres de salon. Leur couper la queue pour empècher le vertigo. (Cat: Cats are traitors. Call them the tigers of the living room. Cut their tail to prevent vertigo.)

    Lion: Est gêreux. Joue toujours avec une boule. (Lion: is generous. Always playing with a ball.)

    Clarinette: En jouer rend aveugle. Ex.: Tous les aveugles jouent de la clarinette. (CLARINET: Playing it blinds. Ex.: All blind people play the clarinet.)

    Dieu: Voltaire lui-même l’a dit: “Si Dieu n’existait pas, il faudrait l’inventer.” (God: Voltaire said it himself: “If god didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent him.)

    égoisme: Se plaindre de celui des autres et ne pas s’apercevoir du sien. (Egoism: To complain about that of others, and not perceive your own.)

    Républicains: Les républicains ne sont pas tous voleurs, mais les voleurs sont tous républicains. (Republicans: Republicans aren’t all thieves, but thieves are all republicans.)

    It all sounds a bit tongue in cheek, but it isn’t.

    via Kjell Olsen909 days ago

  13. 13 January 2006

    What the Doormouse Said

    998 days ago

    The charter tale of how military research with computing machines collided with the 60’s counterculture movements (anti-war, anti-establishment, psychedelics) in southern california and wove the fabric from which todays enormously popular personal computing industry grew.

    A real good read, pulling a whole lot of stuff into more or less one coherent thread.

    Summary

    Quick note: This is a very general recollection of the book I wanted to put down before forgetting everything. I wrote if after reading the last page, and might have a name wrong somewhere. If you find any glaring errors, leave a comment.

    It starts in the late forties with the establishment of two research institutes by Stanford, SAIL (Stanford AI Labs) and SRI (Stanford Research Institute). Computing is done within glass rooms, with colossal mainframes and time-sharing terminals.

    Doug Engelbart comes up with the grandiose vision of augmenting human abilities instead of replacing them with artificial intelligence, which over a period of twenty years grows into NLS, an ultimately failed computer system which rivaled in scope that of today’s internet. NLS failed due to its extreme complexity, but did advanced word processing, email, remote access, hypertext, and was generally way before its time.

    Englebart had been influenced by such subversives as Ken Kesey (and his merry pranksters), LSD, and other recreational drugs. He headed his own lab within SRI (ARC), which was funded by ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency), but regarded by the other groups at SRI as a bunch of hippies.

    As ARC grew it fragmented, and Englebart failed in keeping the lab together and moving it further toward his goals of augmentation for each and every individual. Many of his engineers moved onto the next big deal in what was to become Silicon Valley, Xerox PARC.

    PARC was split into two groups, one still focusing on the development of a timesharing system, and one developing the personal computer as Englebart saw it. Headed by Alan Kay, PARC pioneered computing as we know it today, although their computers were much too expensive to be commercially viable.

    Kay’s group negotiated an agreement with ARC (Englebart’s lab) to further the development of NLS, which never came to fruition. Englebart was a staunch proponent of complexity, he once decided that his finished system would have 55,000 commands to be learned by the layman. Ultimately PARC moved toward simplicity, coming up with a GUI for a word processing application that took no more then an hour to master, and ran on a machine with it’s own display, keyboard, and mouse.

    The west coast attitude of PARC ultimately clashed with that of Xerox, an east coast corporation. Although PARC pioneered the computers that ten years later finally became cheap enough to sell to the people, the focus of the personal computer revolution moved to individuals building their own machines as independents.

    They were never much, and couldn’t compare to the prohibitively expensive and powerful machines with large corporate/military backers, but they finally brought the computer into a situation where it was infinitely valuable.

    The people’s computer company was a storefront in which people could cheaply rent computing time by the hour. Text based games began to catch on. A subset of the BASIC programming language was conceived, Tiny BASIC, to run on the puny PC’s that were obtained.

    Tiny started it’s own movement, and the PCC started a magazine to send out to it’s developers. Text based games were becoming all the rage, and visionaries started teaching how to program text based adventure games to all comers.

    The Homebrew Computer Club was started, which ultimately sparked companies like Apple and Osborne to go into business. Fred Moore, an itinerant engineer, programmer, and radical who, because he though money was the root of all evil, ended up being given $15,000 by Stewart Brand at an epic Demise Party for the Whole Earth Catalog, had finally found something to do with the money: promoting free and easy access to information. Personal computing. Moore tried to start teaching a class on Hardware for PCC, but it wouldn’t happen. He ran sent out a notice as to when and where the first meeting would be held, and people turned up.

    The meetings grew, fostering open discussion and presentation of information about computers. People would bring the machines they’d built to show off. Programs would be exchanged.

    Moore eventually left the club, his idea of freeing information having been realized but also having sprouted all kinds of entrepreneurial enterprises, eventually coalescing into the single largest accumulation of dollars – the personal computer revolution. How ironic.

    Stuff for me to further investigate

    Stewart Brand (The Whole Earth Catalog, 155)

    Information wants to be free, and information also wants to be very expensive. Stewart Brand

    Ren���?⬨�� Daumal 177

    Fred Moore (on money, 193-8)

    Ivan Illich

  14. 01 December 2005

    1041 days ago

    A Little About Vlad Tepes

    The inspiration for Dracula (meaning Son of the Dragon):

    The word “tepes” in Romanian means “impaler”—and Vlad was so-named because of his penchant for impalement as a means of punishing his enemies. Impalement was a particularly gruesome form of execution, wherein the victim was impaled between the legs—to put it politely—upon a large, sharpened stake the width of a burly man’s arm. Vlad especially enjoyed mass executions, where several victims were impaled at once, and their stakes hoisted upright. As they hung suspended above the ground, the weight of their bodies would slowly drag them downwards, causing the sharpened end of the stake to pierce their internal organs. In order to better enjoy these mass spectacles, Vlad routinely ordered a banquet table set up in front of his victims, and would enjoy a leisurely supper amid the pitiful sights and sounds of the dying.

    via Kjell Olsen1041 days ago

  15. 1041 days ago

    Was Ivan the Terrible Really "Terrible"? (or, Why We Should Build a Memory Archive)

    You are born, you live a full life, you gather a head full of memories, and then

    via Kjell Olsen1041 days ago

  16. 24 November 2005

    1048 days ago

    Ward Churchill speaks (by L. Proyect)

    I saw five squaws under a bank for shelter. When the troops came up to them they ran out and showed their persons, to let the soldiers know they were squaws and begged for mercy, but the soldiers shot them all…There were some thirty or forty squaws collected in a hole for protection; they sent out a little girl about six years old with a white flag on a stick; she had not proceeded but a few steps when she was shot and killed. All the squaws in the hole were afterwards killed… The squaws offered no resistance. Every one I saw dead was scalped. I saw one squaw cut open with an unborn child, as I thought, lying by her side…I saw quite a number of infants in arms killed with their mothers.” Robert Bent, in US Senate report The Chivington Massacre

    via Kjell Olsen1048 days ago

  17. 21 September 2005

    1112 days ago

    InTheBeginningWasTheCommandLine - spack.org/wiki

    So many ignorant people could be dangerous if they got pointed in the wrong direction, and so we’ve evolved a popular culture that is (a) almost unbelievably infectious and (b) neuters every person who gets infected by it, by rendering them unwilling to make judgments and incapable of taking stands.

    Windows 95 and MacOS are products, contrived by engineers in the service of specific companies. Unix, by contrast, is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic.

    It is quite inconceivable that superior hacking tools could have been created from a blank sheet of paper by product engineers. Even if they are the brightest engineers in the world they are simply outnumbered.

    The ideal OS for me would be one that had a well-designed GUI that was easy to set up and use, but that included terminal windows where I could revert to the command line interface, and run GNU software, when it made sense. A few years ago, Be Inc. invented exactly that OS. It is called the BeOS.

    via Kjell Olsen1112 days ago

  18. 18 August 2005

    A Short History of Nearly Everything

    Bill Bryson

    1146 days ago

    A delightful trek through the development of the world we live on. A broad and deep look at science from a non scientists point of view.

  19. 08 July 2005

    1187 days ago

    The Democratization of History

    Millions of us have online journals—or, at minimum, send email—where we can take notes about what we’ve experienced, visible to anyone who is interested. Millions of us carry cameras with us wherever we go, allowing us to record events as they happen. Millions of us are now historians.

    via Kjell Olsen1187 days ago

  20. 20 June 2005

    1205 days ago

    The Voyage of Discovery Continues: A Satellite View of the Journey of Lewis and Clark

    Lewis and Clark chronicled in satellite images. I’ve always been interested in their expedition, and have the journals up in my room hopefully to read someday.

    via Kjell Olsen1205 days ago

  21. 17 June 2005

    1208 days ago

    Report on Nagasaki just after the atom bomb hit

    As one whittles away at embroidery and checks the stories, the impression grows that the atomic bomb is a tremendous, but not a peculiar weapon. The Japanese have heard the legend from American radio that the ground preserves deadly irradiation. But hours of walking amid the ruins where the odor of decaying flesh is still strong produces in this writer nausea, but no sign or burns or debilitation. 1

    Men, woman and children with no outward marks of injury are dying daily in hospitals, some after having walked around three or four weeks thinking they have escaped. 4

    Disease X, as it was called, baffled most Japanese Doctors, because in certain cases it resembled radiation poisoning, but in others light burns just kept spreading over the skin and eventually killed the patient.

    At first the a-bomb didn’t appear so impressive…

    The U.S. government at the time wanted to play down the effects radiation had on health and feared that Weller’s story would affect American public opinion and it possibly affected development of a nuclear arms race. >

    On the same day, Weller visited two Nagasaki hospitals and realized the symptoms peculiar to radiation poisoning. He wrote of seeing a woman who had initially suffered only a minor burn, yet was now unable to speak and her legs and arms were speckled with tiny red spots. >

    via Kjell Olsen1208 days ago

  22. Also somewhat recently

      |