John Adams by David McCullough

Before listening to this extraordinary biography of John Adams, I knew but little of the greatest founding fathers of my country .

I didn't know that John Adams was one of the driving forces that led to the Declaration of Independence and that Thomas Jefferson was it's author.

I didn't know that Adams and Jefferson were friends, then enemies, and then friends again. And that once their political passions and ambitions cooled, they managed to reconcile.

I didn't know that they both lived long and productive lives and both expired on the same day; exactly 50 years after July the 4th 1776.

Now I better understand the purity of the principles that they espoused and/or defended

• All men are created equal
• They have certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness
• Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed

I hope that future governments of the United States will return to those principles from which they have currently strayed, because whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new Government.

Spin

Spin by Robert Charles Wilson is a good example of well written hard sci-fi. I liked the way it plays with space time and introduces new ideas that while mind boggling aren't in contradiction with current scientific knowledge.

One of the ideas I particularly liked was the creation of artificial life forms that can colonize the Oort cloud and even colonize other solar systems.

Rushkoff's algorithm

Douglas Rushkoff make the following claim in his algorithm:

In each new era, masses acquire capability of previous one.
Text leads to to a society of 'hearers' read to by priests.
Computer leads to a society of 'bloggers' using interfaces programmed for them.

If algorithm holds, masses, will acquire programming skill only after corporations develop capability to assimilate their programs.

I find it completely preposterous that Rushkoff thinks programmers are the new high priests who hold the keys to power.

Yes being able to program computers to do new things is a new skill that is very powerful. But it isn't more powerful than the written word and other means for people to express their creativity.

There are programmers who don't know how to write well, to create beautiful imagery (this skill doesn't even appear in his "algorithm"), or imagine new services that people find useful.

And above all the power of programming is not confined to big corporations that control people.

Quite the contrary actually! Computer technology and software is so cheap that the price is heading towards zero. Open source software is being created and given away for free by thousands of programmers all over the world.

There has never been a time in our lives when it was so easy for anyone to reach out to an audience of millions without having to go through the gatekeepers of yore.

This is true for practically all areas of human creativity: writing, imagery, programming, music, video, etc.

Perfectly reasonable deviations from the beaten track

Is a collection of letters written by Richard Feynman and collated by his daughter.

Some of the letters are quite interesting, but the overall can't be compared compared with the great collection of his stories and adventures that he wrote himself : "Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman".