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December 22, 2006

Update

Cozy Corner has been on hiatus for a bit; and blogging will continue to be light. In addition to increased business at work, I've got a pinched nerve in my back, and the pain has really driven my attention span down. Fortunately, I can still read.

Just finished A Conflict of Visions, by Thomas Sowell. Of any philosophical work I've read, this is the one I'd most recommend to folks out there trying to create a dialogue across the liberal/conservative gap. Simply put, Sowell argues that there are two distinct visions of how the world - and people - operate. Your political philosophy is built atop your belief - and may therefore seem incomprehensible to someone coming from a different foundation.

Finally read A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter Miller, Jr. Wow. I can see a bit of where L.E. Modesitt, Jr gets some of his inspiration from. If you're interested in post-apocalyptic multi-millennial stories, here's a good one.

Also got, and finished, Island in the Sea of Time, by S.M. Stirling. It's a time-travel triggered alternate history - in this case, Nantucket gets cast back three millennia. A very good read, especially if you're a logisitician. Many of you will find the summary of the interaction with the Olmec quite amusing.

And, finally, Lest Darkness Fall, by L. Sprague de Camp. One of the original time-travelling novels - an historian goes back to the fall of the Roman Empire. A nice read, if a little light on some of the logistics. But when you look at what Martin Padway has to fight up against, you can see why the Empire fell.

On the reading list: A War Like No Other, A Meeting at Corvallis, and Hell's Gate.

August 19, 2006

An Army of Davids

An Army of Davids came in the mail last week, and I just finished it. It's really two books - the first half of the hardcover focuses on the advertised theme of the book - how markets and technology empower ordinary people to to beat big media, big government, and other Goliaths. The second half is a look at the future and technology areas.

Overall, it's a very well-written and approachable book. In reading the first half, I was really struck by the theme that the empowerment of the the individual - the david - has been achieved not by lowering the standards of competitiveness, but instead by placing all the tools that used to be only available to large corporations into the hands of the individual. And that the davids are infinitely more flexible and adaptable than the goliaths have been (as a great recent case in point, witness the recent Fauxtography scandal).

The second half of the book felt like a set of introductions to science fiction novels - giving the near term future history of nanotechnology, AI, space travel, and anti-aging - all in preparation for the coming Singularity.

Read it. Think about how you can take advantage of the technology at your fingertips, now and in the future, to do something which historically, only capital-intensive enterprises could do.