9 Essential Geek Books You Must Read Right Now

Sunday, October 23rd, 2011

Marty Cortinas kicks off Wired‘s list of the 9 essential geek books you must read right now with the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master’s Guide — and continues on with eight more books I have of course read.

Well, I can’t say I finished Gödel, Escher, Bach — but I doubt that’s unusual.

And Snow Crash really rubbed me the wrong way. I keep wanting to like Stephenson, based on the material he covers, but his style makes my skin crawl.

Posted in Media | 5 Comments »

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Aretae says:

October 24, 2011 at 10:05 am

Only 7/9. I feel positively normal.
Nyrath says:

October 26, 2011 at 5:45 pm

Well, I read 8/9, but I skimmed my copy of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and looked at the pretty pictures.

I re-read Gödel, Escher, Bach periodically, but I’m geeky that way.
Isegoria says:

October 28, 2011 at 11:54 am

I think positively normal is 0/9. In fact, I think even typical geeks score fairly low, because they don’t enjoy the many different kinds of geekiness embodied in that list.
Doctor Pat says:

October 30, 2011 at 4:56 am

I only completely missed the D&D book.

Though with Watchmen I just saw the movie. I don’t know if that counts as a half mark, or a negative.
Isegoria says:

November 1, 2011 at 11:38 am

Watching the Watchmen movie is a good proxy for reading the book, but the political subtext of the book is clearer in the original.

bob sykes: Calling Mohamed Farrah Aidid’s militia a mob is a bit much, but they were lightly armed and poorly trained. However, they defeated the US/UN mission to Somalia, or at least fought it to a draw. We’re still fighting Aidid’s grandchildren, and we still haven’t won. The war is now in its 4th decade, with no end in sight. Settling aside our Indian Wars (1607 to 1918). Somalia is the longest US war.
McChuck: Anybody who has ever played a wargame can tell you that your defenses can handle a certain amount of opposition, but when enemy numbers, regardless of quality, exceed that number, you get overrun. The mobs in Mogadishu back in 1993 weren’t well organized, weren’t well equipped, weren’t well trained, and weren’t well led. But there sure were a whole lot of them shooting at the Rangers.
Russell: New article about Thorp https://archive.ph/fq5JC
Phileas Frogg: The class divide in the US is as deep and wide as any as has existed in history, but instead of acknowledging the divide, much less trying to bridge it, we have chosen moralization and mutual animosity, which will be the death of us.
Freddo: https://www.zerohedge.co m/geopolitical/us-drones -are-expensive-and-error -prone-so-ukraine-turns- china
Jim: The principle applies whatever the source of the wall-penetrating radio waves in question.
Phileas Frogg: In conjunction with the Rob Henderson excerpt one can safely conclude that neither drug use, nor sexual immorality, can be meaningfully correlated with class. “But poverty causes crime!” Does it?
Bruce: Green energy is a patronage fraud, and Terraform Industries is working with it. But their tech isn’t a fraud.
Handle: What is Henderson taking about? I was under the impression that it was a broadly believed meme and one frequently portrayed in popular entertainment for several generations before Henderson was born that college kids got drunk and enjoyed / experimented with recreational drugs quite a lot. Maybe Rob’s poorer friends couldn’t afford to watch those episodes of South Park or didn’t hear about George W Bush’s “youthful indiscretions”? Man, the left really is...
Bob Sykes: How effing stupid are we supposed to be. The energy input to make the methane will be several times the energy of combustion when the methane is burned. And, of course, all the methane will become exactly the amount of carbon dioxide originally removed from the atmosphere. Net, no carbon dioxide removal. And considering all the carbon produced during the manufacture of the Terraform system and the solar/wind systems, this proposal actually increases atmospheric CO2. And the cost claims are...
Gaikokumaniakku: If it’s “synthetic,” they could just call it “synthetic methane,” right? Calling it “synthetic natural gas” makes my brain hurt because I like to think that natural things are not synthetic. I love methane tech because I was raised on Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. Typically I like to see it as a way of dealing with dung from agriculture, but I am a fan of methane tech regardless of how they make it.
Bruce: Very glad to see @TerraformIndies here. This could be really big. For example, why not put a Terrform Indies converter on every nuclear power plant in front of those electric heaters in the cooling towers? Closer to where people need natural gas than oil wells where they just burn the natural gas off because it’s not worth transport costs. And if CO2 is bad, like the climate change people say, it’s great to have a way to turn CO2 to something useful. And worse case, it’s a...
Namur: Well, it’s all about EROI (Energy Returned on Invested). Can this machine produce more energy in the form of natural gas than it consumes in the first place? Also, the energy to build and operate it also counts. Now, let’s say that it works: we are still far away for something like it that works for Diesel, the holy grail of our energy society.
Wawa: Misery causes drug abuse, whether rich or poor. Junkies and drunks are just self medicating in a self destructive way. When thousands of American soldiers, who were hooked on heroin, returned from Vietman the vast majority quickly kicked the habit. With the reason for their misery gone they stopped using. I noticed this first hand, when a buddy moved in with his girlfriend. Before she moved in he was a social drinker, after a few months with her he was an alcoholic. When she moved out he fully...
Bob Sykes: While the focus in Ukraine has been on the land war, and how drones have changed it, navies seem to be especially vulnerable. The Russian navy can’t seem to cope with them. I bet the US Navy will also be unable to cope. At 70 ton, $5M tank is easy prey to a cheap, small drone. US/NATO navies are unable to suppress Houthi drones and open the Red Sea. Are aircraft carriers viable? Some think that they would have been eliminated by the Soviet navy and air force in the 70′s.
Freddo: The armies of Ukraine and Russia are showing what can be done if it needs to be ready tomorrow and everything is expandable. Boeing is showing what happens when the procurement channel is filled with DEI hires.
Jim: Fun! https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=bIVzK-h6qao
McChuck: Laser designators also use a coded pulse system. That avoids spoofing and also enables multiple projectiles to be inbound to separate targets simultaneously.
Lucklucky: Yes, one aircraft where that is clear is the Tornado. Under its chin it has the Laser Range Finder and Marked Target Seekers (LRMTS), a laser ranging device to help calculate distances, speed, etc. for the ballistic computer and navigation. If it wants to designate targets for laser guided weapons it needs an external pod like TIALD or LITENING put into a pylon.
Isegoria: The Black Cat Squadron Wikipedia entry explains: During the squadron’s 14 years of existence, five U-2s were shot down by PRC air defenses (using S-75 Dvina missiles), with three pilots killed and two captured. Another pilot was killed while performing an operational mission off the Chinese coast, while seven U-2s were lost during training missions, killing six pilots.

Isegoria

9 Essential Geek Books You Must Read Right Now

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