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.

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:

A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War

One Thumbs Up – The book is very clear about what it is not: a chronological history of the Peloponnesian War. Instead, it is a slightly non-linear exploration of what the war was like, who the main characters were, and how it progressed. Of course, that makes it pretty close to being a history of the war without being one, thus I found it a bit awkward. Nonetheless, it is meticulously researched, easy for the layman to follow, and worth the read if only to disabuse the reader of any utopian fantasies about ancient Greece or Athenian democracy. It also provides the reader a very human view into a brutal ancient conflict, which, like all eras, has parallels, stretched and legitimate, with today.

Madhouse at the End of the Earth: The Belgica’s Journey into the Dark Antarctic Night

One Thumbs Up – First non-autobiographical English-language recounting of a formative episode in polar exploration: the first over-wintering in Antarctica. It also serves as a biography of the fascinating Frederick Cook, a man who later claimed to be the first to reach the North Pole and summit Denali (claims disputed) and was convicted of committing a major wildcatter fraud. The title’s emphasis on ‘madness’ miscolors the dynamic.

The Thirty Years War

One Thumbs Up – Too many people named Frederick, Ferdinand, or Christian for easy reading. Nonetheless, an excellent recounting of a conflict I knew very little about. While the book doesn’t emphasize this, it documents the epoch that births the enlightenment. This book make the list for lack of a better alternative. Let me know if you know of one!

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

Two Thumbs Up – In addition to being a pretty accurate and concise walk through of the various technologies that are, or will soon, enable increasing spacefaring, it contains a moral case for exploring space, and a modern defense of classical liberalism. 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. When politics become a blood-sport, democracy is doomed.

Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization

One Thumbs Up – A bit complicated for a single book, ‘text-bookish,’ a starting point for understanding the historical epoch.

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

Two Thumbs Up – This book manages to tie nearly 300 years of history into a cohesive, engaging, authoritative book that is simultaneously informative and a pleasure to read. The author weaves a coherent narrative around numerous actors without creating confusion. I was sad to finish the book. The only critique is that it did not cover the People’s Crusade.

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, and overlooked, voyages of exploration of the conquistador era.

While the nature of the material for this book leaves it with a somewhat
narrower scope than Buddy Levy’s other excellent book, Conquistador: Hernan Cortes…, it is nonetheless masterfully written and a fascinating story of Francisco Orellana’s unintended voyage down the length of the Amazon river. It is both a survival story and a window into the pre-colonization cultures of the Amazon based largely on the accounts of Orellana and his men.

There is a repetitive pattern that develops as Orellana snakes down the Amazon meeting tribe after tribe, but despite this inevitability, book is thoroughly enjoyable.

As more large scale archeological sites are discovered in the Amazon, this story becomes all the more fascinating.

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

Two Thumbs Up – One of the most dramatic episodes in all of human history. Masterful. Read this book.

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

One Thumbs Up – Eclectic, light, repetitive, disorganized, too long, enjoyable.

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

One Thumbs Up – Exactly what you’d expect. A guilty pleasure

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 psychological 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.

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 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:

To be continued…

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