>books
>2021
I am only reading shitpost on kc and technical books to learn some shit. Didn't read a book for 5 years already if not more.
What are the latest books you read?
What are you reading now?
This >>105580
Also me not reading for the past 6 month. I just stopped. I used to read every day and have a nice little library of 100-150 books, but one day I just stopped.
This is a slow board Bernd, you can check the catalog: >>105580
I don't know if you're the French Berndie, but if not, last book I finished is on the left and what I'm currently reading is on the right. The first is mainly about the founding of Rome and the events that shaped the political system of the city. It's too mythological and kind of boring. The second is about the Samnite Wars, it's a lot more in-depth and full of eloquent speeches and heroic exploits. His following books on the Pyrrhic War and the First Punic War are lost, unfortunately.
Well, it IS a fairy tale. The first Roman histories was written down by a Greek in the 2nd century B.C., and Romans started writing even a century later. The only things they had from the days past were passed down oral histories, some annals of who ruled when, and things like inscriptions of eulogies on Roman funeral masks. Basically, a bunch of unreliable and uninformative sources. That's why I'm starting to like Livy a lot more as he gets closer to recorded history.
Because unlike AI, the human intelligence is what you use when you don't know what to do.
Our intelligence is permeated with emotions, intuition, spontaneity and association.
The human common sense is nothing rational, but something guided by values.
Our minds are not running on code, but feelings, thoughts words and sentences pull us out of the void and allow us to reflect the world in which we are living.
Meanwhile computers can't even know, what they "know".
In 2016 the South Korean Go Grandmaster Lee Sedol was beaten by Googles AI DeepMind, but the AI did not even understand at all what it did, it doesn't know what Go is and also not why humans even play it.
The lection of computers for us humans is not to see ourselves as imperfect machines, but rather to discover where computers can not replace us.
Computers teach us to rediscover the complex and uncalculatable analog world.
It's bad when you read considerably slower than your ability to follow the author's ideas requires. The enclosed pages from the table of contents should give you an impression whether the book might be interesting for you. It's available on the usual sites but if you want to work with it, consider getting a physical copy, it makes some of the excercises easier.
Hm, the contents looks like nothing specific, I mean, very vogue. If you found it useful, than I'm glad. Tho I really can't imagine that there could be any requirement to the speed of understanding put by ideas. Maybe because I read without troubles any kind of text for a pretty long time already.
Just for Bernds information: there is kind of reading practice that's called Lectio Divina. Invented by monks. They at some point in time invented that thing and it became shit popular for reading sacred texts. Person should read some text, contemplate, pray, then contemplate again. More details on Wiki, ofc. Basically they re-read the same part of text for many times, like poetry, trying to understand something between the lines, not directly what the words convey. I like that shit a lot.
Update: finished books 6-10 as well today + short summaries of books 11-15 (the full works are lost. It was decent history, but only decent. Read book 1 of pic related this night, which was fantastic. Greek historians just do it better. He has an extremely authoritative style. His impartiality and attention for detail made the events feel more convincing and lively.
I found myself looking at the page number constantly when I read Livy. As for Polybius on the other hand, I'm already feeling a bit down about the knowledge that 400 something pages is all we have left of his works...
For most events of this era, there is one source and one source only. So book one covered the First Punic War and the so-called Mercenary War. The only other sources I can look at are more tiny little summaries of Livy (who based his account on Polybius to begin with) and this one 'universal history' written by a Byzantine scholar centuries later. I will read them afterwards, but only out of a sort of completionist mentality.
To really determine what is true and false in such a work, the reader has to be critical and apply logical thinking. Major events can't be hidden. But doubts will arise from time to time. Such doubts concern specific details like time and place, the underlying motivations of actors, and sometimes obscure events that matter little to the course of history. How reliable and believable and author is can be judged through his attributes like writing style, superstition, tendency to report impossible affairs, and of course personal life and motivations to write. It's doable, for the most part.
>What year is your magazine?
The issue (no. 12) I have is a reprint from 2012. It's called Unusual Work. They seem to sporadically publish a couple every year so there are some newer issues. I picked it up on a whim from a small store in my city. In the opening pages they describe the process for getting published in which a submitter must exclusively communicate with the magazine by postal letter and that submitting a piece for publishing means that the author or artist agrees to never publish that work on the internet.
Older/lifestyle anarchists in Australia seem to be quite rough characters and the language used in some of the works reflects a bit of the working class background.
