Fast T Friend's List: Books & Reading

"These Master & Margarita pages are intended as a web-based multimedia annotation to Bulgakov's novel."

"Cory Doctorow's Makers, Part 1 (of 81)" - For online reading

"This Wiki serves as an invitation to collaborate on building a learning and research environment based on Yochai Benkler's book, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, available under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial "

"Martine and Stephen Batchelor" Website. books, confession of a Buddhist Atheist, translations, nagarjuna, etc.

"Wisdom: From Philosophy to Neuroscience, by award-winning science writer Stephen S. Hall, examines ancient concepts of wisdom through the lens of modern brain science.

In a section called “Eight Neural Pillars of Wisdom,” Hall takes a fresh look at human qualities long associated with wisdom–including compassion, emotional regulation, the ability to discern what’s important, and the skill of coping with uncertainty–and suggests that modern neuroscience is providing radical new insights about how these timeless virtues evolved.

Based in part on a 2007 article in The New York Times Magazine, Wisdom is also a meditation on the seeds of wisdom, aspects of wisdom in everyday life, and the future of wisdom in our complex society."

"There is the nightmare of fecundity and the nightmare of the multitude. There is the nightmare of uncontrolled bodies and the nightmare of inside our bodies and all over our bodies. There is the nightmare of unguarded orifices and the nightmare of vulnerable places. There is the nightmare of foreign bodies in our bloodstream and the nightmare of foreign bodies in our ears and our eyes and under the surface of our skin.



There is the nightmare of swarming and the nightmare of crawling. There is the nightmare of burrowing and the nightmare of being seen in the dark. There is the nightmare of turning the overhead light on just as the carpet scatters. There is the nightmare of beings without reason and the nightmare of being unable to communicate. There is the nightmare of being out to get us.



There is the nightmare of knowing and the nightmare of non-recognition. There is the nightmare of not seeing the face. There is the nightmare of not having a face. There is the nightmare of too many limbs. There is the nightmare of all this plus invisibility.



There is the nightmare of being submerged and the nightmare of being overrun. There is the nightmare of being invaded and the nightmare of being alone. There is the nightmare of numbers, big and small. There is the nightmare of metamorphosis and the nightmare of persistence. There is the nightmare of wetness and the nightmare of dryness. There is the nightmare of poison and the nightmare of paralysis. There is the nightmare of putting the shoe on and of taking the shoe off. There is the slithering nightmare and the one that walks backwards. There is the squirming nightmare and the squishing nightmare. There is the nightmare of the unwelcome surprise.



There is the nightmare of the gigantic and the nightmare of becoming. There is the nightmare of being trapped in the body of another with no way out and no way back. There is the nightmare of abandonment and the nightmare of social death. There is the nightmare of rejection. There is the nightmare of the grotes

Book reviews and podcast

"The Hainish Cycle consists of a number of science fiction novels and stories of Ursula K. Le Guin. Most of them are not set on the planet Hain, but have it as a distant background. People from Hain are often present but mostly as secondary characters.

In keeping with Le Guin's soft science fiction style, the setting is used primarily to explore anthropological and sociological ideas.

Notable and award-winning Hainish novels are The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. The short novel The Word for World is Forest and the short story "The Day Before the Revolution" have also won awards."

Over the last two decades, scientific accounts of religion have received a great deal of scholarly and popular attention both because of their intrinsic interest and because they are widely as constituting a threat to the religion they analyse. The Believing Primate aims to describe and discuss these scientific accounts as well as to assess their implications. The volume begins with essays by leading scientists in the field, describing these accounts and discussing evidence in their favour. Philosophical and theological reflections on these accounts follow, offered by leading philosophers, theologians, and scientists. This diverse group of scholars address some fascinating underlying questions: Do scientific accounts of religion undermine the justification of religious belief? Do such accounts show religion to be an accidental by-product of our evolutionary development? And, whilst we seem naturally disposed toward religion, would we fare better or worse without it? Bringing together dissenting perspectives, this provocative collection will serve to freshly illuminate ongoing debate on these perennial questions.

Stephen Baxter web site.
(Evolution)...

"Pierre Menard Author of the Quixote
by Jorge Luis Borges"

"Borges' revisioning of reading in "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote".(Critical Essay)"

Many people have been quoted over the years, we have quotes from 7,640 authors and speakers in the collection. Some of those only have had one or two things that merit inclusions, some appear to have had no impact on the world other than making a couple of pithy remarks. (Yes, I've dug deep looking for several.) The authors on this page are those who have left a significant legacy of quotes and for whom I was able to learn enough biographical detail to profile them.

"Stephen Baxter has written a novel for the long haul – we humans are notorious for believing that our brief existence is of pressing importance, so any novel that spans 600 million years can reasonably be described as taking “the long view” " A worthwhile reading.

Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling owns Harry Potter, and no one owns the methods of rationality.

This fic is widely considered to have really hit its stride starting at around Chapter 5. If you still don't like it after Chapter 10, give up.

See profile (click on where it says "Less Wrong" above) for: Fan art, TV Tropes page, how to learn everything the main character knows, and trigger warnings page (warnings about possible traumatic associations for some readers).

All science mentioned is real science. But please keep in mind that, beyond the realm of science, the views of the characters may not be those of the author. Not everything the protagonist does is a lesson in wisdom, and advice offered by darker characters may be untrustworthy or dangerously double-edged.

"Have you ever wanted a better way to:

* Get great book recommendations from people you know.
* Keep track of what you've read and what you'd like to read.
* Form a book club, answer book trivia, collect your favorite quotes."

The Moral Instinct - Good reading

There is a seductive image of contemporary culture circulating today. Our world, Jean Baudrillard tells us, has been launched into hyperspace in a kind of postmodern apocalypse. The airless atmosphere has asphyxiated the referent, leaving us satellites in aimless orbit around an empty center. We breathe an ether of floating images that no longer bear a relation to any reality whatsoever.1 That, according to Baudrillard, is simulation: the substitution of signs of the real for the real.2 In hyperreality, signs no longer represent or refer to an external model. They stand for nothing but themselves, and refer only to other signs. They are to some extent distinguishable, in the way the phonemes of language are, by a combinatory of minute binary distinctions.3 But postmodernism stutters. In the absence of any gravitational pull to ground them, images accelerate and tend to run together. They become interchangeable. Any term can be substituted for any other: utter indetermination.4 Faced with this homogeneous surface of syntagmatic slippage, we are left speechless. We can only gape in fascination.5 For the secret of the process is beyond our grasp. Meaning has imploded. There is no longer any external model, but there is an immanent one. To the syntagmatic surface of slippage there corresponds an invisible paradigmatic dimension that creates those minimally differentiated signs only in order for them to blur together in a pleasureless orgy of exchange and circulation. Hidden in the images is a kind of genetic code responsible for their generation.6 Meaning is out of reach and out of sight, but not be cause it has receded into the distance. It is because the code has been miniaturized. Objects are images, images are signs, signs are information, and information fits on a chip. Everything reduces to a molecular binarism. The generalized digitality of the computerized society.7

Hakim Bey and Ontological Anarchy:
The Writings of Hakim Bey