Interesting Stuff - The Sounding Line

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Interesting Reads

In addition to the websites that I regularly link to in the ‘Top News Stories’ column, I also enjoy reading a small collection of independent news aggregators. Here are some of those sites, in no particular order (some links are now dead, unfortunately…):

Live Charts

The employed-to-population ratio:

All the various official inflation measures:

M1 and M2 money supply growth. The Fed no longer tracks M3.

Other Stuff

Here is a disorganized assortment of things that you may find interesting, or not…

Free Speech:

Rowan Atkinson explains what free speech is and what it isn’t:

The freedom to say that which a given society deems non-controversial has been enjoyed by every society in history. Free speech only has meaning when it applies to speech that society finds controversial, rude, wrong, and/or offensive.

Thomas Sowell on Wealth, Poverty, and Politics:

An aside, Dr. Sowell is 85 in the this interview.

Milton Friedman: Free to Choose – 1979

I would have loved to know Milton Friedman’s take on the last decade.

Mike Wallace Interviews Ayn Rand

Calvin Coolidge on taxes and government spending in 1924:

Calvin Coolidge was the last president to write his own speeches.

The Doomsday Gap:

If you’ve ever wondered about the logic behind doomsday weapons like Russia’s cobalt-60 nuclear tsunami torpedoes and nuclear powered nuclear missiles, Peter Sellers summed it up perfectly back in 1964:

Short Stories

George Orwell – You and the Atomic Bomb

Orwell wrote the essay ‘You and the Atomic Bomb’ in 1945 within two months of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. Russia didn’t have the bomb yet. Mao hadn’t seized China yet.

E.M. Foster – The Machine Stops (PDF)

E.M. Foster wrote the short story ‘The Machine Stops’ in 1909, amazingly capturing the phycological landscape of our modern tech dystopia decades before the earliest computer had been invented, let alone video chatting on tablets.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr – Harrison Bergeron (PFD)

Harrison Bergeron, a short story about the tyranny of equality of outcomes, was assigned reading at my public high school. I rather doubt it still is.

Kurt Vonnegut’s life, in and of itself, is a remarkable story.

What Taps Is Reading

Here are some books that I have recently read/listened to and enjoyed enough to mention. One thumbs up means I enjoyed it enough to recommend. Two thumbs up means it’s one of my all-time favorites:

The Case for Space: How the Revolution in Spaceflight Opens Up a Future of Limitless Possibility

Two Thumbs Up – Good riddance to the apcoloypse mongers

The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic

One Thumbs Up – A well crafted history of perhaps the most relevant period of Roman history to modern day America

Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization

One Thumbs Up – Perhaps unavoidably a bit complicated for a single book, but nonetheless highly interesting

The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land

Two Thumbs Up – A wonderfully cohesive history of all of the Crusades. I wish it included more on the ‘People’s Crusade,’ but otherwise excellent

River of Darkness: Francisco Orellana’s Legendary Voyage of Death and Discovery Down the Amazon

Two Thumbs Up – A history of one of the most remarkable voyages of exploration and conquest of the conquistador era

Conquistador: Hernán Cortés, King Montezuma, and the Last Stand of the Aztecs

Two Thumbs Up – A history of one of the most dramatic episodes in human history

The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce, and Obsession

One Thumbs Up – Eclectic, light, a bit repetitive and disorganized, enjoyable

The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World

One Thumbs Up – A guilty pleasure

To be continued…

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