Tag Archives: book

Bitcoin Standard?

Frances Coppola provided an extensive, harsh, critical review of the hyped “The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking” by Saifedean Ammous.

Not that maximalists would change their mind after appointed issues of the book.  All historical perspective is always selective, of course.  And asserting causation to millenia old economic developments might be an useful intellectual tool.

Moreover, Ammous’s book gives us an interesting account of current Bitcoin economic environment, and such is granted by Coppola.

But Coppola’s critique show how one must be careful before any attempt to decree a necessary outcome from historical fact-picking tale.

The Internet of Money – Andreas M. Antonopoulos

“The Internet of Money – a collection of talks by Andreas M. Antonopoulos” (two volumes)

“Book overview, volume one : While many books explain the how of bitcoin, The Internet of Money delves into the why of bitcoin. Acclaimed information-security expert and author of Mastering Bitcoin, Andreas M. Antonopoulos examines and contextualizes the significance of bitcoin through a series of essays spanning the exhilarating maturation of this technology.Continue reading→

Mastering Bitcoin – by Andreas M. Antonopoulos’s

Mastering Bitcoin by Andreas M. Antonopoulos
(O’Reilly).

Copyright 2014 Andreas M. Antonopoulos, 978-1449374044.

This coming from Antonopolous, the evangelist himself, is defintely worth a closer study.

Book has a rather ‘for newbies’ opening chapters, but warms up into a hands-on sequence that coders may use as a guide to set up as a fully operational Bitcoin node.

The examples are illustrated in Python, C++ and using the command-line of a Unixlike operating system such as Linux or Mac OSX. All code snippets are available in the Github repository (…)

All the code snippets use real values and calculations where possible, so that you can build from example to example and see the same results in any code you write to calculate the same values. For example, the private keys and corresponding public keys and addresses are all real. The sample transactions, blocks and blockchain references have all
been introduced in the actual bitcoin blockchain and are part of the public ledger, so you can review them on any bitcoin system….

 

“The Man Who Wasn’t there” book review by Alun Anderson

Review of “The Man Who Wasn’t There: Exploring the science of the self” by Anil Ananthaswamy.

“For ordinary folk, a unified sense of self is taken for granted. We sit comfortably inside a body we feel is ours, seeing, hearing, touching and smelling. Gloomy or happy, our feelings plainly belong to us.(…) This self appears to us seamlessly and effortlessly as a whole.

The Man Who Wasn’t There could be described as a dedication to a different group – those whose unity of self has fragmented – and to the way they have helped us understand the self through their cooperation with scientists and philosophers, and their long hours in brain scanners.Continue reading→

“Telling Is Listening” review at brainpickings

Maria Popova on “Telling is Listening”, part of Ursula K. Le Guin’s collection of nonfiction writings published at “The wave in the mind : talks and essays on the writer, the reader, and the imagination”

“Every act of communication is an act of tremendous courage in which we give ourselves over to two parallel possibilities: the possibility of planting into another mind a seed sprouted in ours and watching it blossom into a breathtaking flower of mutual understanding; and the possibility of being wholly misunderstood, reduced to a withering weed. Candor and clarity go a long way in fertilizing the soil, but in the end there is always a degree of unpredictability in the climate of communication — even the warmest intention can be met with frost. Yet something impels us to hold these possibilities in both hands and go on surrendering to the beauty and terror of conversation, that ancient and abiding human gift. And the most magical thing, the most sacred thing, is that whichever the outcome, we end up having transformed one another in this vulnerable-making process of speaking and listening.Continue reading→

“The Art of Not-Having-to-Ask” review by Maria Popova

Originally published as a postscript of Amanda Palmer’a The “Art of Asking: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help”

Below an excerpt – read full post at brain pickings.

“We are embodied spirits who need raw material, both physical and spiritual, to create. But we forget that we are also social beasts who need not slash through the bramble of those needs alone.

In Buddhism and other ancient Eastern traditions, there is a beautiful concept connoted by the Pali word dana (pronounced DAH-nah), often translated as the virtue of generosity. But at its heart is something far more expansive — a certain quality of open-handedness in dynamic dialogue with need and organically responsive to it. The practice ofdana has sustained the Buddhist tradition for two and a half millennia — monks give their teachings freely, and the lay people who benefit from them give back to the monks by making sure their sustenance needs are met.Continue reading→

“Future reading” by Craig Mod

Craig Mod’s tale of rise and fall of his enchantment over digital books.  A critical view on how current closed ebooks platforms controlled by Amazon and Apple contributes to stagnating digital books development.  Article from aeon magazine.

“From 2009 to 2013, every book I read, I read on a screen. And then I stopped. (…)

By 2009, it was impossible to ignore the Kindle. (…)

The Kindle was all of that and more. Neatly bundled up. I was in love.

(…) Granite, wood, wax, silk, paper, metal type, the Gutenberg press, Manutius’s octavo editions, Penguin paperbacks, desktop publishing software, digital type, on‑demand printing, .epub: the evolutionary path of ‘books’ has been punctuated by technological changes large and small. And so, too, with the Kindle.

(…) Containers matter. They shape stories and the experience of stories. Choose the right binding, cloth, trim size, texture of paper, margins and ink, and you will strengthen the bond between reader and text. Choose badly and the object becomes a wedge between reader and text.

(…) I was critical of Kindle typography and layouts from day one, but I assumed that these errors would be remedied quickly. My book notes felt locked away in Amazon’s ecosystem, but I assumed they would eventually produce better interfaces or export options for more rigorous readers.

(…)  But in the past two years, something unexpected happened: I lost the faith. Continue reading→

Brain Picking’s on Andre Gide’s Journals

Posted on Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings:

“That nebulous notion is what the great French writer André Gide (November 22, 1869–February 19, 1951), who received the Nobel Prize for his “fearless love of truth and keen psychological insight,” explores with precisely such keen psychological insight throughout The Journals of André Gide (public library) — the most cherished of young Susan Sontag’s favorite books, and the same indispensable volume that gave us Gide on the vital balance of freedom and restraint and what it really means to be yourself.

Gide was one of history’s many celebrators of the creative benefits of keeping a diary, but what makes his journals particularly compelling is his dedicated discourse with the nature of the mind itself, constantly contemplating the inner workings of our highest human faculties — originality, the imagination, and the machinery of the creative process.” read full, original post