Just finished "Heretics of Dune". Now starting "Chapterhouse: Dune". Both are Audiobooks I got from Audible.com. Great production for the whole series.
Any of the ones read by Tim Curry are excellent. His voice characterizations are very good.
What are you reading?
201–210 of 222 posts
Re: What are you reading?
#202Read through _Untimely Thoughts_ a couple of weeks ago, have been meaning to pick up _The Great Melody_ by C.C. O'Brien.
Re: What are you reading?
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth--the man who would make his own fortune no matter where he started. If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if not, it destroys him." - I think she's still basing it on merit. While I disagree with some of what she says, and she says a lot, she does a decent job of staying consistent.
It would be consistent if everyone who was fit to inherit actually did inherit. But that is not the case. Some of those who are fit do not inherit and others do. What is the basis for this inequality? Birth. She destroys the idea of meritocracy that she herself presented so eloquently and discredits libertarianism as yet another excuse for those born wealthy to keep their wealth. If an hair is not equal to his money…
I don't think you would enjoy reading Rand (either you haven't yet read any of her work and are going based solely on what you read in this thread, or you just completely didn't understand her work).
As she argues, money is a means of trading human production and value. To be equal to your money is to provide production and value to society equal to the value of your money. According to Rand, if one who is barely capable of ever making more than $30k per year were to inherit $5m, it would not end well. And actually lottery statistics support this pretty consistently.
Re: What are you reading?
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm bouncing between that book and "The Haskell School of Expression"( http://www.haskell.org/soe/ ). The second seems to be better at describing data structures and building the language in your mind while the first is more of a reference of useful ideas.
It's strange how I never heard of this one, while the other gets a lot of attention. Is it very outdated?
I had a lot of trouble trying to get the libraries they mentioned working. The code examples in the book are so straight forward it was simple to implement them in OpenGL. I have not run across wrong information yet.
On a side note, I went to the Boston Haskell Users Group and their advice was "just read the Haskell Report". I needed a little more gentle introduction before we go jumping into the deep end of the pool.
Re: What are you reading?
#205Finishing "Atlas Shrugged". While ideas and the spirit of the book have aged only slightly, the way of writing seems way too pretentious for our times. But overall the book is interesting. From historic and ideological point of view.
Ayn Rand was able to name so much of what I've felt growing up. While she may have used the literary technique of exaggeration to heighten the contrast between her philosophical views of moral vs. immoral, I don't think she took it "too far" as others are commenting. I think that's like saying Philip K. Dick took the ideas of technological advances and psychic ability too far in his story, "Minority Report", or like…
I don't think she was exaggerating.
Atlas Shrugged was a formative influence during my late teens, but Rand is above all things an extremist. Still, she had some good ideas, she communicated them well, and she got me into philosophy. If you take the best parts of Rand and leave the rest, you'll be well served.
Re: What are you reading?
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ayn Rand was a philosopher. And like most philosophers, she started out with some good ideas and over applied them to everything in life, which leads to some scary conclusions. My favorite Rand book was Anthem. It was short and therefore didn't have space to extrapolate Rand's ideas to their scary conclusion. I just finished reading Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo. It is just as long and pompous as Atlas Shrugged, but…
I once listened to a 80-hour overview of the world's great philosophers, given by modern professors. What amazed me was how many of them came up with a good idea that was new and revolutionary -- and then spent the rest of their life taking the damn thing too far. I guess great people fall so much in love with their great ideas that it never occurs to them that the most important piece is finding the boundaries for w…
Then there's Wittgenstein, who did the same thing, except twice and with entirely separate ideas. He's the philosophical equivalent of one of those bands that makes a major stylistic change halfway through their career, lose a bunch of their fans, and pick up an entirely different set of fans.
Re: What are you reading?
#207I'm reading Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson for the third time, and understanding it more than the second time. It has wonderful technical digressions that seem aimed precisely at geeks/hackers. In fact, on the the main characters is a programmer, and another is a code-breaker in the military who sees an opportunity for geeky analysis in everything he sees. (There are also many accounts of military battles from a so…
I'm about halfway through this. Not sure I liked it at first, because his style seemed a bit too heavy-handed, as if he were a 16 year old with a really big thesaurus, trying to allude to as many different things as possible. It's grown on me though, over the last far-too-many pages. Still not totally happy, but it's interesting.
I'm almost half way through it, I love most of the technical details he has described so far. Interesting on the whole, but I somehow lose interest and switch to another book for a couple of days before coming back to it.
I am also reading "Awaken the Giant within" by Anthony Robbins, the first third seemed to be pretty solid, though I am not sure the NAC stuff works as well as he says.
Re: What are you reading?
#208Assessment of Children: Cognitive Foundations by Jerome Sattler http://www.amazon.com/Assessment-Children-Foundations-Jerome... Assessing Adolescent and Adult Intelligence, Third Edition by Alan S. Kaufman and Elizabeth O. Lichtenberger http://www.amazon.com/Assessing-Adolescent-Adult-Intelligenc... What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought by Keith Stanovich http://www.amazon.com/What-Intellig…
Do you know if baby size at birth is correlated to higher intelligence later in life? Also, what about the amount of hair a child is born with? Any correlation there?
This is a paper by an eminent researcher in the discipline (I have read one of his books and have another at hand) that I Googled up:
Re: What are you reading?
#209Infinite Jest, as a long slow process. The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo/The Girl who Played with Fire, each of which I found myself burning through in a day (the new definition of the genre of Swedish crime writing, which is amazing).
What do you think about IJ? Where are you at in it? I'm ~400; was doing 75 pages a day during my summer break last week, but now that I'm working I'm down to 5 or 6 a day.
I like it, but it's a long march - I'm at about 320, and a had a similar pattern; 40 a day while on holiday, five or so while at work.
Seems like once you clear 200 pages or so, you're in it for the long haul. It's intimidatingly large, but I couldn't think of not finishing it.
Re: What are you reading?
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ayn Rand was a philosopher. And like most philosophers, she started out with some good ideas and over applied them to everything in life, which leads to some scary conclusions. My favorite Rand book was Anthem. It was short and therefore didn't have space to extrapolate Rand's ideas to their scary conclusion. I just finished reading Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo. It is just as long and pompous as Atlas Shrugged, but…
What's interesting is that Ayn Rand thought Victor Hugo was the best novelist ever. She also thought that the philosophy in Les Miserables was at odds with his "sense of life".
She also thought that Frank Lloyd Wright's philosophical and political ideas were at odds with his architecture.