I read Mark Lawrence's "Prince of Thorns" based on Amazon recommendations and I am afraid it is not the thing I was looking for. I am willing to read grimdark, but this was just (as Liz Bourke puts it) "misogynist creepy" rather than cathartic. I was particularly puzzled by the large mutant who didn't seem to mind all that much that the ( Read more... )

I'm reading "The Royalist Revolution" which tells a pretty good story about how the U.S. ended up with a strong executive, and how many of our founding fathers revived Royalist arguments. As in, James-and-Charles-sixteenth-century political thought. It's also a book about how ideas have consequences ( Read more... )

Donald Knuth, "Selected Papers on Fun and Games": This is the last (and definitely my favorite) of his selected papers series published by CSLI. Not everything here is a winner, but there is a lot to love on art projects, word games, vanity license plates, mathematical Christmas cards, and knight's tours. Donald Knuth has been doing "I bet I ( Read more... )

The conventional story of East-West trade is that China accepted only bullion from the Atlantic economies because the Europeans had nothing else to offer that was of interest. But that's not all that's going on.

China had an immense hunger for silver, from all of its trading partners. There were several reasons for this. One was that silver was ( Read more... )

One. I am somewhat willing to believe the Advertising Federation of Minnesota, when they say that advertising taxes don't work. But the arguments for "why tax X is bad" seem cookie-cutter. Drives X across the border? Check. Money that is taxed can't be spent elsewhere in the economy? Check. X is already taxed through personal income and ( Read more... )

I finished James Treadwell's "Advent" which is a fantasy novel that really tries to emphasize how creepy and horrific modern people would find the emergence of magic. So it's almost horror-tinged. Unfortunately what this did for me was make all the characters unsympathetic wibblers. It's a decent story, though, and I'm interested enough to see ( Read more... )

Best typo from "The Signal and the Noise" so far: "At NASA, I finally realized that the definition of rocket science is using relatively simple psychics to solve complex problems."

I finished George Dyson's "Turing's Cathedral." The book is mainly focused on John von Neumann, despite a cover image of Turing who gets more or less a single chapter ( Read more... )

I just started "Turing's Cathedral", which looks interesting, but nobody appears to have told George Dyson how a computer works:Since a 10-bit order code, combined with 10 bits specifying a memory address, returned a string of 40 bits, the result was a chain reaction analogous to the two-for-one fission of neutrons within the core of an atomic bomb ( Read more... )

I finished Rapture of the Nerds today, about which Marissa has more to say in her review. Their future is one in which the inner planets (except Earth, although the fate of Luna was not mentioned) have been disassembled to build orbiting computational substrates, which form a cloud around the sun in order to harvest its energy. Uploaded humans ( Read more... )