Dubstepforum.com

Psychoshop by Alfred Bester and Roger Zelazny. Completely bonkers sci fi. Features a time travelling singularity, a shop built around it that lets people trade traits/psyches/bodyparts/etc, animals transformed into intelligent humanoids and a lot of what-the-fuck-is-going-on. Written by 2 sci-fi greats (well, Alfred Bester left an unfinished manuscript after he died, Roger Zelazny completed it)

HaltinG StatE by Charles Stross.



Plot centers around a robbery of digital currency within an MMO in an old fashioned whodunnit story. Told in two main arcs: a Scottish detective who follows the company maintaining the game server where the robbery took place, and a forensic accountant who hires an out of work programmer to help navigate the virtual side of things. Great ideas about the online (gaming) worlds, networks, virtual currencies, and the world of finance that are bogged down by a second person narrative and excessive jargon (a pet love of the author).

magma wrote:

Three chapters in and I'm both awed and depressed. Highly recommended.

I ended up reading most of this on the train to Edinburgh a few weeks ago... really recommend reading it. Pretty depressing at times, but Brad Katsuyama makes me optimistic for my industry's moral future. I want to work for IEX now.

^ I'll add that to the list, cheers for the suggestion!

The Jeffrey Sachs book was really good.. a look at his career, sort of a critique really, from his involvement in transforming the communist countries after the cold war into capitalist countries (and his huge failure in Russia) through free market ideology to his work in Africa and the Millennium Villages Project (sort of as a way of redeeming not only himself but neoliberal ideology) and how hes basically failed to help the very poorest but set up nicely an opportunity for the richest (land owners) to get even richer and create wider inequality. Finally looking at why he became a major spokesperson for Occupy Wall Street and a critic of neoliberalism.. something hes almost been married to throughout his career and how really he isn't 'against' neoliberalism but hes trying to force the Occupy movement down an anti-revolutionary route.

The book really emphasises how similar forcing neoliberalism/free markets are to authoritarian regimes.. pretty much what Americas foreign policy has been like for a long time. Forcing people to be free, bit of an oxymoron.

It was clearly a very well researched book.

Reading:



b2b

Ive not a read a book in ages Just dont have the time anymore

Shum wrote:HaltinG StatE by Charles Stross.



Plot centers around a robbery of digital currency within an MMO in an old fashioned whodunnit story. Told in two main arcs: a Scottish detective who follows the company maintaining the game server where the robbery took place, and a forensic accountant who hires an out of work programmer to help navigate the virtual side of things. Great ideas about the online (gaming) worlds, networks, virtual currencies, and the world of finance that are bogged down by a second person narrative and excessive jargon (a pet love of the author).

It's probably one of his more digestable ones though.

Good read, as would be expected from John Wyndham. Pre-dates X-Men-style mutants, excellent commentary on religious/societal intolerance to the different.

Started this whilst in Edinburgh and am just finishing it off.

Neil Oliver is a better maker of television than books, I fear. Lots of great stuff in here, but not exactly the most engaging writing style.

Good read but quite a difficult one to describe. It basically sets out to show the pointlessness of it al, especially God-fearing religions. There are quite a few brilliant twists.

Interestingly, there's a paragraph in the book which pretty much describes The Cloud. This was written in 1959.

very interesting books above

finally finished my synopsis of Robert Saviano's Gomorrah re the spread of the Neopolitan mafia & its nefarious activities.
and started two books:
the fiction is Turkish Nobel Prize Winner Orphan Pamuk's My Name is Red which is engagingly written from the point of view of a murdered book illuminator
and the non-fiction is In Praise of Nepotism by Adam Bellow which I guesstimate will take me 14 months to read & summarize.

Soon receiving a copy of a history book for the centenary of an "outback" town that I researched and wrote the opening chapters for
including a geological prehistory, when the town's site was underwater in the northern hemisphere,
accounts of Aboriginal massacres and bushranger shoot-outs.

This one's a pretty interesting take on the whole modern-day-scientist-finds-himself-transported-to-a-magical-realm genre. In this case, it's a world where "practicing" things makes them better, ie if you keep hitting a shabby wooden wall without breaking it, the wall slowly becomes a better wall. This was written during David Brin's less-serious phase so it's a pretty light and easy read.

Need to re-read the Uplift Saga.

Finally finished The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism, it was good and I think it'd be a good read if I read it on its own and dedicated an hour or 2 at least every day to reading some of it.. but I found it wasn't very engaging and it took me 3/4 attempts to finish each chapter. Think I read about 6 books in between starting it and finishing it lol. Had some interesting points of view, especially about the geographical nature of capital. Just a bit of a mission to read, definitely gunna re-read at some point.

Finish that last night and these two came today:

Brian Aldiss' Helliconia trilogy. Set on a world which revolves around a sun-like star which in turn orbits around a supergiant star every 2000(ish) years. So the seasons on the planet last for hundreds of years and civilisations rise and fall during an orbit. Each book charts a season, starting with late winter/early spring where human civilisation is just coming out of the stone ages once more.

Much of the book revolves around the tension between the humans on the planet and a native species called Phagors, with a couple other just-sentient species caught in between. There's also an orbiting space station monitoring the developments on the planet over time and beaming events back to Earth in the ultimate reality tv show (this was written in the 80s!).

Good read.

Starting To Have or to Be? by Erich Fromm this weekend.

Read quite a few over the summer (Letters To A Young Contrarian by Christopher Hitchens has been my favorite so far, not that the others haven't been brilliant) but I'm currently reading this:



Only 5 chapters in but so far superb! Decided to buy after I finished reading his 'How The Mind Works' which I strongly recommending to ANYONE interested in gaining an understanding of brain and behavior. I have honestly learned more about human psychology from this book than 3 years of a BPS accredited degree course (even demonstrating how many of the ideas that I've been taught in psychology classes from A-level are outdated, flawed, and fundamentally incoherent!). Pinker cuts right through the politically fueled bullshit and antiscientific attitudes that seem to have enveloped the field of psychology to deliver well-reasoned and truly fascinating science writing (so far I feel the same about 'The Blank Slate').

Muncey wrote:

Let me know what you think of this one! Added to my 'to read' list after watching the talk based on the book on YouTube.

TheIntrospectionist wrote:Read quite a few over the summer (Letters To A Young Contrarian by Christopher Hitchens has been my favorite so far, not that the others haven't been brilliant) but I'm currently reading this:



Only 5 chapters in but so far superb! Decided to buy after I finished reading his 'How The Mind Works' which I strongly recommending to ANYONE interested in gaining an understanding of brain and behavior. I have honestly learned more about human psychology from this book than 3 years of a BPS accredited degree course (even demonstrating how many of the ideas that I've been taught in psychology classes from A-level are outdated, flawed, and fundamentally incoherent!). Pinker cuts right through the politically fueled bullshit and antiscientific attitudes that seem to have enveloped the field of psychology to deliver well-reasoned and truly fascinating science writing (so far I feel the same about 'The Blank Slate').

Nice one... I really enjoyed The Better Angels Of Our Nature from him a couple of years ago. Pinker's great.

TheIntrospectionist wrote:

Let me know what you think of this one! Added to my 'to read' list after watching the talk based on the book on YouTube.[/quote]
same! Dennet is great, and im very interested in that subject

"Paddy Clarke Ha Ha" by Roddy Doyle

Have the Riftwar Saga and Legacy inbound in the mail. Been about 15 years since I read them.

Ripped though:
Decoded by Mai Jia - fell flat on me but translation takes a lot out of it I suspect.
The Occult Tradition by David Katz - Pop(-ish) history of the occult, really well written, the notes are worth the price of entry alone

Cracking on to Anathem by Neal Stephenson which will take a lot longer than those other two.