"The Fourth Part of the World: The Race to the Ends of the Earth, and the Epic Story of the Map That Gave America Its Name".
A really interesting history book. I'm now in a great part, about how knowledge of geography (and map projections) was disseminated in Europe through a network of scholars and humanists during the 15th century. There was this huge collaborative effort to reconstruct ancient texts and to bring them in line with (then) current knowledge.
I just read 'The Innovator's Dilemma' by Clayton Christensen and it's awesome.
There's all this talk of "disrupting" everything in the tech world right now and a lot of it is really bullshit. This guy is the one who coined the term disruptive technology, and when you dig into it it's a really interesting concept that he actually backs up with great research on the disk drive industry.
The core of the idea is that 'disruptive' technologies are underdog technologies that actually have worse performance than the leading technologies of their time, but also some other attributes (smaller, lighter, etc) that make them valuable to customers in niche, less profitable markets the big guys aren't interested in. Since technology progresses much faster than our demand for it, those cheaper, crappier technologies improve over time and end up killing the big, expensive players who originally dominated the market.
Can anyone recommend some good cypherpunk books, aside from Stephenson? Preferably fiction that communicates ideas revolving around anonymity, crypto, privacy?
I've been trying to read Cryptonomicon, but get turned off by the "hipstery" (for lack of a better word) informal writing style and can't get into it.
I would say “self-congratulatory” rather than “hipstery” — I’m reading this right now too, and although I find it fascinating (like I find reading about any cryptography fascinating), it often feels impenetrable without a cause to be, other than “aren’t these characters all such geniuses, I bet you can barely keep up.”
Also, I get http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobby_Shaftos_Gone_to_Sea stuck in my head for hours afterwords each time.
Nothing's been above my head, it's more like it takes him too many words to make a point or get the jist across. He gets too creative/clever. I would like it to be more straightforward. Then again, I mainly read non-fiction from journalists or government types.
I'm actually reading academic papers from ssrn.com about platforms, shorter than most books and usually just as much information/learning and often times more.
For fiction I'm reading stuff my friends write; currently The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There and David Drake's Hammers Slammers omnibus volumes.
1. Red Mars. Read a chapter and digest it. Packed top to bottom with all kinds of ideas.
2. Cyberspace: First Steps. From the early 90s, a collection of academic essays on the concept of cyberspace. Reading it as a kind of retrospective on where we were and where we thought we were going.
For work: Quine's Word and Object; Dummett's Frege: Philosophy of Language; Plato's Republic; and paper after paper. (I am a philosophy graduate student.)
For pleasure: just started Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse.
1. 'Classical Mechanics' by Herbert Goldstein
2. 'Operational Amplifiers with Linear Integrated Circuits' by William Stanley
3. 'Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer' by Cyrus Mistry
A really interesting history book. I'm now in a great part, about how knowledge of geography (and map projections) was disseminated in Europe through a network of scholars and humanists during the 15th century. There was this huge collaborative effort to reconstruct ancient texts and to bring them in line with (then) current knowledge.