What are you reading?

[dca]

Yamaha MU80- Owners Manual

about halfway through... its riveting

[wolf89]

Plot twist at the end of that is amazing

[DRTY]

martin rees - before the beginning

good read. Saw him at the last Reith lectures too, wonderful

[magma]

Inaccurate, self-contradictory, occasionally entirely fanciful and mainly pretty awkward to read.

Fucking BRILLIANT.

[hugh]

Are there any good books on great conquerors/generals such as Alexander the Great/Hannibal? That sort of ancient era fascinates me

[Laszlo]

Buddahism is confusing. From what ive got from it so far is that if you are a buddist, you dont belive in anything and the world around you is a construction of your mind and that their version of heaven, is the now. Not the present or the future.
Its pretty intresting, only picked it up as having been over to the side of the world where it kicked off, you see alot of statues and monuments but it seemed abit odd to walk into a shop and say "Give me a book on Buddah" liek youd ask for a bible or something.

*past

[HamCrescendo]

Got paid, I'm rolling around in new material



Really good bit of historical fiction about the Reformation, and more specifically Thomas Muntzer and his more radical form of protestantism



Reading this on the train and get a bit embarassed when he starts going on about his erections and pumping lads, but its full of good stuff regardless.

What hope for a country where people will camp out for three days to glimpse the Royal Couple? Where one store clerk refers to another as his 'colleague'?

... God save the Queen and a fascist regime ... a flabby, toothless fascism to be sure. Never go too far in any direction is the basic law on which Limey-Land is built. The Queen stabilizes the whole stinking shithouse and keeps a small elite of wealth and privilege on top ....

The English have gone soft in the outhouse. England is like some stricken beast too stupid to know it is dead. Inglorioulsy foundering in its own waste products, the backlash and bad karma of empre. You see what we owe to Washington and the Valley Forge boys for getting us out from under this den of snobbery and accent, this ladder where everyone stomps discreetly on the hands below them:

"Pardon me, old chap, but you aren't you getting just a bit ahead of yourself in rather an offensive manner?"

... The English thing worked too well and too long. They'll never get all that ballast of unearned privilege up into space. Who wants that dumped in his vicinity? They get out of a spaceship and start looking desperately for inferiors.

Nice bit of science fiction to play off against the historical. Slow, brooding, dark.

[Doctor_Dave]

Lord Jim

[Molzie]

lol reading. nerds.

[DRTY]

fantastic so far

[magma]

fantastic so far

Oooooooooohhh.

[DRTY]

really interesting, and a bit scary! RE your brain thread; no need, computers will be way beyond human brains in 10-20 years O.O

[magma]

really interesting, and a bit scary! RE your brain thread; no need, computers will be way beyond human brains in 10-20 years O.O

I'll be intrigued to see it happen - with IBM now toying about with atoms, we're already starting to hit the physical limits of how we can store data, so the never ending exponential there does have some sort of end. I wonder if we'll hit a similar block in synthetic processing power... quantum computing sounds like it might be on the table, but it's got a lot of progress to make before people take it seriously enough to invest properly unlike every other avenue of squeezing power out of silicon from what I've read... I guess it MUST be possible if organic structures can do it. Maybe we're just waiting for the next tech revolution? A Cold War would sort this out in a few months.

I think I'll give that Kurzweil a squiz... I like this subject!

[DRTY]

really interesting, and a bit scary! RE your brain thread; no need, computers will be way beyond human brains in 10-20 years O.O

I'll be intrigued to see it happen - with IBM now toying about with atoms, we're already starting to hit the physical limits of how we can store data, so the never ending exponential there does have some sort of end. I wonder if we'll hit a similar block in synthetic processing power... quantum computing sounds like it might be on the table, but it's got a lot of progress to make before people take it seriously enough to invest properly unlike every other avenue of squeezing power out of silicon from what I've read... I guess it MUST be possible if organic structures can do it. Maybe we're just waiting for the next tech revolution? A Cold War would sort this out in a few months.

I think I'll give that Kurzweil a squiz... I like this subject!

According to this chap there is almost no limit, the limit for a computer is the entire universe, I'm only at the very beginning (chapter 2 atm) but in first chapter he mentioned knowledge spreading (literally; physically) through all matter. (he says it a tad more eloquently than I do).

protip; get it on ebay, its pricey on amazon

[mIrReN]

was reading master & servant but forgot lol
will start again soonish

[magma]

really interesting, and a bit scary! RE your brain thread; no need, computers will be way beyond human brains in 10-20 years O.O

I'll be intrigued to see it happen - with IBM now toying about with atoms, we're already starting to hit the physical limits of how we can store data, so the never ending exponential there does have some sort of end. I wonder if we'll hit a similar block in synthetic processing power... quantum computing sounds like it might be on the table, but it's got a lot of progress to make before people take it seriously enough to invest properly unlike every other avenue of squeezing power out of silicon from what I've read... I guess it MUST be possible if organic structures can do it. Maybe we're just waiting for the next tech revolution? A Cold War would sort this out in a few months.

I think I'll give that Kurzweil a squiz... I like this subject!

According to this chap there is almost no limit, the limit for a computer is the entire universe, I'm only at the very beginning (chapter 2 atm) but in first chapter he mentioned knowledge spreading (literally; physically) through all matter. (he says it a tad more eloquently than I do).

protip; get it on ebay, its pricey on amazon

Now this is worth big ups.

Big ups.

[kay]

really interesting, and a bit scary! RE your brain thread; no need, computers will be way beyond human brains in 10-20 years O.O

I'll be intrigued to see it happen - with IBM now toying about with atoms, we're already starting to hit the physical limits of how we can store data, so the never ending exponential there does have some sort of end. I wonder if we'll hit a similar block in synthetic processing power... quantum computing sounds like it might be on the table, but it's got a lot of progress to make before people take it seriously enough to invest properly unlike every other avenue of squeezing power out of silicon from what I've read... I guess it MUST be possible if organic structures can do it. Maybe we're just waiting for the next tech revolution? A Cold War would sort this out in a few months.

I think I'll give that Kurzweil a squiz... I like this subject!

According to this chap there is almost no limit, the limit for a computer is the entire universe, I'm only at the very beginning (chapter 2 atm) but in first chapter he mentioned knowledge spreading (literally; physically) through all matter. (he says it a tad more eloquently than I do).

protip; get it on ebay, its pricey on amazon

Now this is worth big ups.

Big ups.

Have a go at reading Charles Stross' Accelerando. Deals with the Singularity, probably one of the few examples in sci fi that tackles the subject straight on and very well.

I'm currently reading Hyperion, have been intrigued for years but kept putting it off. It's pretty good. The story follows 7 protagonists who have been mysteriously selected to make a pilgrimage to time-distorted bunch of artifacts, and potentially meet with a horror known as The Shrike. The story actually consists of each protagonist recounting their past involvement with The Shrike and so is told from 7 different perspectives, each with a very different persona and feel.

[volcanogeorge]

[Muncey]

Has anybody read the Bourne books? If so are they worth reading?

[Johnlenham]

Buddahism is confusing. From what ive got from it so far is that if you are a buddist, you dont belive in anything and the world around you is a construction of your mind and that their version of heaven, is the now. Not the present or the future.
Its pretty intresting, only picked it up as having been over to the side of the world where it kicked off, you see alot of statues and monuments but it seemed abit odd to walk into a shop and say "Give me a book on Buddah" liek youd ask for a bible or something.

*past

Haha yeah duno how I messed that up.
Going to try and find something new to read in waterstones tonight..