This book was largely a response to a response to the French Revolution by Edmund Burke. The French Revolution started in 1789. The aristocracy of England was starting to see the writing on the wall and the French Revolution made them that much more uneasy. So, one of monarchy’s most vocal proponents (Edmund Burke) wrote a book entitled “Reflections on the Revolution of France”. If that book was a Facebook status a good chunk of this book was a comment on Burke’s Facebook status. Paine rips the idea of monarchy to shreds. To summarize his argument in a couple sentences I would say Paine’s main point was this: Government should be formed to protect the existing rights of man and not be looked to as a definition of human rights. Furthermore, that any formal document that is written in order to form a government is a limitation on those rights of man. Therefore, it should be the individuals themselves that define the contract that does so limit each man’s individual freedom. The book itself is a little rant-y hence my Facebook reference. But it would probably be one of the best, and most informed Facebook responses you will ever read. I did not realize that the French revolution was in such close proximity to our own. This makes me interested to contrast the two. One seemed very ‘gentlemanly’ and the other seemed sort of ‘barbaric’. Not sure if this is due to my own ignorance or not.

This is America Don’t catch you slippin’ now Don’t catch you slippin’ now Look what I’m whippin’ now 0/10 On first read through though I thought this book was difficult to understand and made a lot of HUGE assumptions that the readers are just supposed to agree with. It doesn’t seem like this book is a good primer into communism but more like a good closer if you are already leaning in that direction. The book included a chapter of excerpts from various Engles/Marx’s writings which was more helpful to understand why they said what they said. I’ll definitely be doing so more research. ...

I enjoyed this reread a lot more than the first time through. There were some points where he takes tangents and side roads which left me at times bored at other times frustrated. Yet the author is well aware of this tendency and warns the reader that it will happen from time to time, so I don’t really have anyone to blame but myself. There were so many parts of this book where it would feel as if I was reading my own journal, had I been a better writer. Several overlapping points of personality made a lot of his views relatable. I very much liked his humble approach to knowledge and latitude when it came to accepting other’s customs. His love for life as it is, not in concept but in embodied reality was refreshing. Everything in moderation, this goes for thought as well as action. I am sure the older I get, the more I will appreciate and understand from this humorous and likeable man. ...

Really well written in a cheeky way. An easily digestible book. Great allegories in there. I liked the way that the book portrayed the whole universe in a very relatable but strange way. I would like to try a pan galactic gargleblaster sometime. Clever explanation of the simulation idea. Well worth the read, now I can finally watch the movie without feeling bad.

This book caught me off guard. For one I know the Disney movie made from the book so that set certain expectations. Also, this is written by the same dude who wrote Les Misérables. Which made me think he was probably just another rom-com author (joking). But in all seriousness this book started out a little slow for me. Victor Hugo was exiled from France, and it was apparent that he loved France as much as he hated Napoleon (fun fact in looking up how to spell Napoleon to make sure I was doing it right, it turns out napoleon dynamite is more popular on google than Napoleon Bonaparte). He spends about two hours describing the city of Paris as it was back in the 1500s. Frankly, I found this dry as it was hard to visualize because I am an idiot who doesn’t know very much about architecture. But as the book went on the tension kept growing. There is this scene in the book where a priest is in a room that overlooks Notre Dame, and he points at a book, and he says “This will destroy that” pointing at Notre Dame. This launches Victor Hugo into an hour-long discussion of how the invention of the printing press signaled the end of architecture. This was fascinating. As I said the book started off a little slow but like a good Tarantino movie by the end all these unrelated(ish) characters find themselves tangled in destiny like a fly in a spider web(imagery from the book). I don’t think I have read a book that had as much tragic irony as this one had. For the last 20% of the book, you really did feel like you really were watching a fly in a spider web. ...

This is a book a little out of my wheelhouse, but I am glad I read it. The author is an Afghan American who does a brilliant job of describing the life of a privileged Afghan in pre-war Afghanistan. By far the best part about this book was the perspective it gave on life, or at least one life in the middle east. It was also interesting to hear Islam talked about from a neutral point of view instead of either fearmongering or blind acceptance. The book richly describes the culture through food, family and the center of the book kite flying. The book reads as a biography but is in fact a fiction. As for the criticisms of the book there were several literary devices the author overused and some plot choices that seemed a little predictable, but believable. Overall, a very entertaining book.

Dostoyevsky’s underground man, Copernican shame, Darwin, the stone wall, and why consciousness without illusion slides toward spite and inertia.

History as moral narrative versus natural fractal systems—humanity as pattern, not protagonist.

Enumerations for the Reduction of Complexity March 13, 2020 by thepigeonfighter Introduction One of the ever present problems faced by developers is the concept of complexity. Complexity is everywhere; it makes things difficult to analyze and even more difficult to control. When writing programs, complexity is introduced exponentially every time a conditional path is added. With every ‘IF’ statement, you are introducing two possible paths your program could take. This article will start first with principles of conditions. I will then examine possible use cases for enumerations. ...

How Code Becomes Binary November 10, 2019 by thepigeonfighter Humans have been inventing programming languages since the 1940s. But what exactly is a “programming language” and how do computers understand different programming languages? Well read on to find out. The Basics Before we dive into things we have to break down what code is. Code is a series of instructions given to some sort of CPU. It doesn’t matter if you are using Java, C-based language or something silly like PHP. At the end of the day it all becomes just an instruction (or more likely a series of instructions) that is passed to the CPU to be executed. Let’s take a look at a line of code that is written in JACK which is a high level Java-like language. ...