History was one of the classes in school i found little use for. Not that i don't enjoy history or see its importance; its just that the emphasis was always towards, what i considered, the least import: names, dates, locations--and almost always centered around politics and war. Much more useful to my mind is what happened, why, and what were the repercussions.

Small | Medium | Large

Enter How we got here: A Slightly Irreverent History of Technology and Markets, by Andy Kessler. In about 200 pages, he describes the parallel evolution of modern technology and economics while staying relevant, often downright amusing, and finally thought provoking.

One topic touched briefly on, making me completely rethink my view of, was the backing of money with gold. I'm not sure which economics book or pseudo-economic propagandist i'd bought into, but i've had the lurking view that money should be backed by something--gold generally comes to mind. On second thought, gold really has no intrinsic value. Fools' gold illustrates this quite nicely:

If people were stranded in some remote location without food, water, and shelter, a mountain of gold would serve no more purpose than so much sand. It would have no price. Gold has no intrinsic value. It merely has a price which is the result of complex factors associated with its subjective price value compared to other commodities. Industrial usefulness of gold as well as human subjectivity that desires gold for personal adornment, etc., does assure that gold will fetch a price in a modern market. But what price? -- Robert Carroll

In any case, i now how some new theoretical filters for viewing the world of technology and money, and i love new philosophical filters.

I friend convinced me to buy the new Paul Graham book, Hackers & Painters: big ideas from the computer age, even though a lot of his essays are up on his webpage. This has to be the most (technically) inspirational book i've read in a long time! Paul Graham's essays were what lead me to rethink learning LISP. He was also the one who put Bayes based spam filters on the map. The new essays in the book (not up on his webpage) are more specifics on his startup, ViaWeb, which he's alluded to in the past, but not fully described. Overall the essays are making me realize why i'm so frustrated working for a big company, and make me think that i would be much more productive (and satisfied) doing contracting again or working on a startup.

Some number of years ago i posted a list of Unix Programming Rules, from an unknown source. Only recently did i discover this was the outline from the book The Unix Philosophy, by Mike Gancarz.

While the rules themselves are timeless, and of utmost value, the book itself is not quite so much so. My suggestion is to look over the Unix Programming Rules, if you don't understand the scope and rational for some of the rules, then i would highly suggest you read this book. Otherwise, it is a good read if unix philosophy grabs your fancy.