Terebrate

*** Liked it Recommend if you like historical battles. Recommend if you have no clue about the War of 1812. Recommend if you don't know much about President Andrew Jackson. I picked up this book because I really couldn’t remember a damn thing about the War of 1812. I knew that we got the Star Spangled Banner national anthem from this war but didn’t remember why. I knew that I thought President Andrew Jackson was a racist son-of-bitch with his treatment of the American Indians and the Trail of Tears. I also knew that Col Andrew Jackson had a victory in New Orleans from Johnny Horton’s song, "The Battle Of New Orleans.” Lastly, I somehow knew that Davy Crocket served with Jackson in New Orleans before he died at the Alamo. But I didn’t know the details. So, I thought I would try to remedy all of that. Here is the setup. Just 20 years after George Washington defeated the British in the U.S. revolutionary war, the British had impressed some 10,000 American sailors to su...

I hate the the KKK.  I know, saying that out loud is not that brave. How can anybody disagree with the notion that, according to the Equal Justice Initiative, this American domestic terrorist organization was either directly or indirectly responsible for the murder of over 4,400 American citizens between the end of the Civil War and the end of WWII by the particularly gruesome method of racial terror lynchings? Just to put that number into perspective. If we counted the dead for these racial terror lynchings the same way we counted the dead for American war efforts, The KKK would be responsible for the 5th largest American body count far exceeding the dead in the Spanish-American War (2,446) and the civilians killed on 9/11 (2,997) but coming in just behind the dead in the Revolutionary War (4,435.) And yet, most non-black Americans don’t know this or if they do, don’t care. It is definitely not taught in our schools. Even last year, I was definitely in that category of...

**** Recommend it When it first came out in 2013, this book took a lot of heat from religious scholars that did not agree with Reza Aslan’s point of view. I think there were some sour greats too because it shot to the top of the NYTs best seller's list and the the many works of these scholars' on the same material did not. One of their main points was that since Reza Aslan was not saying something new about the material, somehow the book had no value. It is the same reaction that scholars give Malcom Gladwell too. These two authors synthesize deep research on complex subjects outside their field and try to make it readable and entertaining for the masses. When you do that, you are going to explain some of the deep-level details wrong or at least with not enough nuance to be completely correct. In other words, instead of writing an entire book on the subject or a chapter, the idea might get a sentence. For a non-scholar like me, I find that valuable.  From my side, the...

I put “Black Hills” into my reading queue a while back because I actually grew up in the Black hills and thought it would be an interesting lark to read a novel about my home town. But because I was disappointed by another book of the same name, "Black Hills” by Nora Roberts, I stayed away. Aside: Really, it was clear to me that Mrs. Roberts had never been in South Dakota. Why she set her romance novel there I will never know.  Later, I read other Dan Simmons' books like “Hyperion,” “Summer of Night,” and “The Terror” and was blown away by his writing skill and his story telling. I cried my eyes out during “Hyperion,” sat up up in bed petrified reading “Summer of Night,” and was gobsmacked about what British sailors had to endure as their officers tried to find the Northwest Passage in “The Terror."  But Simmons’ “Black Hills” is off the charts in terms of level of difficulty compared to these other three. I can’t even describe the skill required to pull off ...

I very much enjoyed Dr. Wolfe’s Great Courses lecture. I have always considered myself to be a science fiction fan, but after listening to these lectures, I learned that there are numerous holes in my science fiction education that I will have to get busy filling.  To my great surprise, I learned that the mother of science fiction is Mary Shelly, the author of ‘Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus,” published in 1818. She was the first author to tell a fictional tale where the catalyst of the entire story arc was a bit of science that was tantalizingly just out of modern reach. Electricity might be able to reanimate dead tissue. What a great idea. The fact that a woman created an entire genre of writing is fascinating by itself but when you consider that she did it when, at the time, respectable women didn’t write novels and especially didn’t write horror/gothic novels, Shelly’s accomplishment is extraordinary. And she wasn’t done there. Some scholars say she is the first a...

Executive Summary When Satoshi Nakamoto published his seminal paper called Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System in October 2008, he started what is arguably the first viable cryptocurrency. Bitcoins have steadily increased in value from its inception to today where one bitcoin is worth some $6,500 and its success has encouraged the development of some thousand other cryptocurrencies. But it begs the question, how does an electronic string of digits contain any value at all and why do the 22 million Bitcoin practitioners in the world today think this is so special? To answer the value question, you have to remember why any currency system has value. The U.S. dollar has value because we all agree that it does. Bitcoins have value because 22 million Bitcoin practitioners have faith that it does too. Bitcoins are also scarce meaning that there is a finite number in the world. This has a contributing affect to why bitcoins have increased in value. To answer why Bitcoin is sp...