Tag: books

The oldest story ever written

There’s no better illustration of the fragility and the power of literature than the history of “The Epic of Gilgamesh,” the oldest known literary work, composed in Babylonia more than 3 ka ago. 400 years later, after one of the ruthless, bloody sieges typical of that time, the epic was buried in the ruins of a Mesopotamian palace. There it lay, utterly forgotten along with the name of the king who once reigned in that palace, until a British archaeologist unearthed it not far from the modern city of Mosul in 1840.

David Damrosch’s artful, engrossing new history, “The Buried Book,” relates how “The Epic of Gilgamesh” was lost and found — or rather how it was found and lost, since he tells the story backward, from the present to the past, in an archaeological fashion.

Reading Thomas Pynchon

Most generally, revel in the language, the fun, and the set pieces. Don’t look for deeper meanings, in my view there ain’t none, and for the better. Pynchon is about the highest-IQ author out there, a mixed blessing. Start with Gravity’s Rainbow, or V, and hope for the best.

an ambitious goal

Investigations

Few people have thought as long and as hard about the origin of life and the emergence of complexity in a biosphere as Stuart Kauffman. Medical doctor, geneticist, professor of biochemistry and biophysics, MacArthur Fellow, and member of the faculty of the Santa Fe Institute for a decade, he has sought to discover the principles which might underlie a “general biology”—the laws which would govern any biosphere, whether terrestrial, extraterrestrial, or simulated within a computer, regardless of its physical substrate. an overview of the principles he suspects, but cannot prove, may underlie all forms of life, and beyond that systems in general which are far from equilibrium such as a modern technological economy and the universe itself.

Germany Media Luddites

Mathias was able to download a complete copy of a current German bestselling book, which was quite delicate considering the company behind VTO supported a lawsuit against Google Book Search because Google allegedly didn’t protect well against the downloading of book texts. But maybe that’s the core of the problem: they want to compete against a tech company (Google) in a technical space (the web), but they’re non-technical themselves, possibly lacking the means to judge the quality of the outsourced work

True Mutations

Interviews on the Edge of Science, Technology, and Consciousness looks at the wild changes that may be coming to the human species during the 21st Century. In a series of interviews, author/host RU Sirius explores a series of (r)evolutions in disciplines ranging from the evolution of clean energy to the possibilities of endless neurological ecstasy; from open-source free access to nearly everything under the sun to self-directed biotechnological evolution; from psychedelic culture mash-ups to the possibilities of a technological singularity that alters not only humanity but the entire universe

popularizing the singularity

The Algebraist

In The Algebraist, Iain M. Banks takes us to a time 1000s of years in the future. The galaxy is very old and has seen wave after wave of civilization come and go. In the current era the bureaucratic, hierarchy obsessed Mercatoria is the dominant galactic civilization and humanity is but one race among many and a pretty minor one at that. And at the edge of the galaxy, in the Ulubis system, is the gas giant Nasqueron and the setting for our story.

OA-like, onto the to read pile