Low quality people don't read books.
Name the book or books that you are currently reading.
Here's mine:
"The Philosophy of Space and Time," Hans Reichenbach
Dover Publications, 1958
"The Shape of Space," Jeffrey R. Weeks
Chapman and Hall, 2019
Now list yours.
Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!
Here come the "Alien Space Invaders From Planet Slime."
Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!
Don't go away mad, just go away.
Low quality people ...
...
ObLinux: later on today, we're setting up Mrs. vallor's new Linux
workstation in her office. It already has Mint 21.3 on it, but
I'm bumping that up to Mint 22 for better WiFi happiness. Still
going to use X11, with XFCE, and adding Cairo Dock so she doesn't
feel like a stranger.
Her own Logitech X52 Pro HOTAS is ready to be plugged in for Elite
Dangerous Odyssey goodness. We had it running on her iMac before (under Windows), and she's already flown successfully. Also keeping an eye on Microsoft Flight Sim 2024 for when it gets a little more stable on Linux.
Fine, I'll answer your question:
Last tech book I read was _UNIX: A History and a Memoir_ by Brian
Kernighan, which I finished on our flight to Costa Rica.
Currently reading _Ecolitan Prime_ by L.E. Modesitt, Jr. The Missus was interested in my description of a murder mystery set on the moon, so we're about to read _The Patchwork Girl_ in our very own "book club of two".
A lot of people do plenty of reading nowadays -- it's just at their
computer instead of dead trees, and it's not always dry textbooks.
Low quality people don't read books.
Name the book or books that you are currently reading.
Here's mine:
"The Philosophy of Space and Time," Hans Reichenbach
Dover Publications, 1958
"The Shape of Space," Jeffrey R. Weeks
Chapman and Hall, 2019
Now list yours.
Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!
Here come the "Alien Space Invaders From Planet Slime."
Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!
Don't go away mad, just go away.
I've been checking out 2 to 3 books every 3 weeks, roughly, from the local library. I won't list the books, but they involve mostly stuff related to one
science or another.
Last tech book I read was _UNIX: A History and a Memoir_ by Brian
Kernighan, which I finished on our flight to Costa Rica.
Currently reading _Ecolitan Prime_ by L.E. Modesitt, Jr.
A lot of people do plenty of reading nowadays -- it's just at their
computer instead of dead trees, and it's not always dry textbooks.
But the local library is not the best source for books, i.e.
e-books (all books nowadays are e-books).
On Thu, 9 Jan 2025 11:05:16 -0500, Chris Ahlstrom wrote:
I've been checking out 2 to 3 books every 3 weeks, roughly, from the local >> library. I won't list the books, but they involve mostly stuff related to one
science or another.
That's great!
But the local library is not the best source for books, i.e.
e-books (all books nowadays are e-books).
I won't tell you how, but you should be able to acquire any
book published in the last 75-years (a lot have been scanned)
gratis within 20 minutes or so.
Information wants to be free and it shall be free.
Thanks to GNU/Linux, it is possible for anyone to produce
a publication quality book and then publish the same on
a web site.
The only problem is the cranks.
For example, on sci.physics, a notorious crank with the nym
"Archimedes Plutonium" has actually published books on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/stores/Archimedes-Plutonium/author/B089QBZX8W
Only a fool would ever buy them.
But publishing now belongs to the individual author and not
the grubbing publishing companies.
Nonetheless, sometimes a hardcopy purchased from a publisher is best.
For example, Michael Kerrisk's 1000-page book on "The Linux Programming Interface". Easy to search and far easier to move back and forth.
Not to mention one can glance between two pages easily.
Hardcopy doesn't need batteries either. When the power was out for six
days last summer sitting under the tree reading real books was a nice
switch.
On 10 Jan 2025 20:26:04 GMT, rbowman wrote:
Hardcopy doesn't need batteries either. When the power was out for six
days last summer sitting under the tree reading real books was a nice
switch.
Can't you afford a fucking generator?
An intelligent person requires tens of thousands of books and that
would equate to several TONS of "hardcopy."
No mudslides, hurricanes, earthquakes, or tornadoes could destroy
a house as quickly as several tons of "hardcopy" books.
On 10 Jan 2025 20:26:04 GMT, rbowman wrote:
Hardcopy doesn't need batteries either. When the power was out for sixCan't you afford a fucking generator?'
days last summer sitting under the tree reading real books was a nice
switch.
An intelligent person requires tens of thousands of books and that would equate to several TONS of "hardcopy."
Some types of books must be in hardcopy. Math books. Physics books.
Computer programming books. Grammar books. It has to do with what you do
with it.
I do a lot with a hardcopy book that enriches it and turns it into an extremely useful and fast reference. The electronic forms lack that
feature.
On 9 Jan 2025 13:52:26 GMT, vallor wrote:
Currently reading _Ecolitan Prime_ by L.E. Modesitt, Jr.
I don't approve of fiction.
The world in which we exist is far too stimulating to have
to waste time with (someone else's) fantasies.
Of course, idiot.
An intelligent person requires tens of thousands of books and that
would equate to several TONS of "hardcopy."
Of course, you can't approve anything what's important. Fiction help
develop imagination.
I've probably read tens of thousands of books in my life.
Low quality people don't read books.
Here's mine:
"The Philosophy of Space and Time," Hans Reichenbach
Dover Publications, 1958
"The Shape of Space," Jeffrey R. Weeks
Chapman and Hall, 2019
For one, electronic books chain you to a desktop and from there to your electric receptacles on the wall, your house, the electric company, and whether you have paid your electric bill or not.
The only electronic choice you have is really with the desktop, and it
may not look like it but it is as big as the whole power grid in your
region.
American households are like military barracks for kids. And in France,
they are about 5 times more so.
Just south of Mexican border here, every single year, some cro-magnons disappear, then a week or two later only their heads are found. Never
the rest of the body. The heads, often, have chicken legs hammered into
their ear canals with the paws sticking out on both sides.
On 1/11/25 2:30 PM, Farley Flud wrote:
On Sat, 11 Jan 2025 13:44:22 -0600, Physfitfreak wrote:
American households are like military barracks for kids. And in France,
they are about 5 times more so.
You are not joking.
I often drive through the American suburbs, with their neatly groomed
streets and houses, and I will ask myself: "Where do these kids play?"
I grew up in a working class area next to an industrial zone and the
railroad yards. There were many empty fields and in the late afternoon,
after closing time, a kid could go wild with play opportunity.
And we did.
At one point we even attempted to dig a tunnel under the train
tracks but our adventure was discovered by the railroad employees
and we had to abandon it.
We had so much much wild play it would take years to even describe
it all.
But that's all in the past. Now I am an adult and a scientist/
engineer. I don't need stupid games nor fiction because I've done
it all already.
I pity the readers of fiction.
I pity the players of games.
They are just frustrated children.
That's nothing compared with what we did around the age of 5 in Tehran.
One was, making bombs :) I mean stuff strong enough to blow a 30 kg
stone placed on top of it fly upward three stories high. So when I say
bomb, I'm really not exaggerating.
The hardest ingredient to find in making them was the "kolorate
potasiyom" (Potassium Chlorate). Everything else was easy to find. For sulfur, we used our little hand made slingshots to knock off the white porcelain insulators off of the top of utility poles. Inside them, you'd always find a large amount of sulfur. For powdered charcoal we just
smashed charcoal to a fine powder. In those days, many people have not
yet migrated to electric heaters. People used charcoal in their "Korsi"s
for the winter period and for cooking in other periods of the year. It
was always available, and was among the usual items that every house purchased from stores and bazars.
But for the damn potassium chlorate we had to walk to two neighborhoods
away to a pharmacy that was owned and operated by Jews. Only that
pharmacy sold us potassium chlorate, knowing full well why we were
buying them. Other ones much closer to us, would not sell it to kids, considering them too dangerous.
That mixture created gun powder, and it was one of the ways for us to
create bombs with. We had four or five different ways of making bombs,
using even a certain brand of movie reels of film which were sold to
kids for looking at the negative pictures against a source of light, but
we also used them to make bombs with, cause they were extremely flammable.
And every now and then, some site would begin construction, and we'd get
the material we needed for CO2 based bombs in there placed right on the grounds, easily taken during night. Often in same sites one could find
empty sturdy strong bottles that held thinners and acetone, etc. These bottles were part of the bomb design :) And when they exploded, boy, the scene of everything around it was something to see and enjoy. Hehe :)
On rare occasions, some stupid kid would even throw one of them over the
wall into the yard of a Baha'i neighbor at the instigation of some
suckers much older than us... it was not good and we kids would not
condone it at all because that would mean the end of our fun that day.
We had to run. Within 15 minutes the alley would get filled with police.
I have said nothing of a myriad of other strange things we did. Climbing trees through the branches of which naked live power lines passed.
Running on top of high walls along their whole stretch, sometimes a kid coming down to ground accompanied with half of the wall! And we had
"kids' Jihad!".. the assyrian neighborhood (they were christian) was a
short walking distance away. Oh, we were rough. Strange that any of us
got passed that period unharmed.
On 11 Jan 2025 11:50:00 GMT, Stéphane CARPENTIER wrote:
Of course, you can't approve anything what's important. Fiction helpOnly during childhood during those periods that we call "play."
develop imagination.
| Sysop: | Keyop |
|---|---|
| Location: | Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, UK |
| Users: | 715 |
| Nodes: | 16 (3 / 13) |
| Uptime: | 29:13:14 |
| Calls: | 12,107 |
| Calls today: | 7 |
| Files: | 15,006 |
| Messages: | 6,518,240 |