Someone mentioned that I might really enjoy reading Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel”.
The book chronicles the most recent 100 000 years of modern human history with a focus on the last 30 000 years. Diamond discusses early migration of people as hunter-gatherers throughout the world, tool manufacturing, the subsequent rise of agriculture (independently in several areas at various times), animal husbandry and ultimately the rise of chiefdoms, empires and states. Diamond tackles such a diverse array of topics, treating them in a logical cohesive fashion that let me follow his train of thoughts and theories surrounding the ultimate fate of our world. Diamond tackles some loaded questions, namely, why does there appear to be have and have-not cultures in the world? Why, for example, did the Spaniards conquer the Incan empire of Atahuallpa at Cajamarca in 1532 instead of Charles I waking up one morning to the booming cannons of Atahuallpa’s Navy? Indeed, why didn’t the Inca even have ships and vessels? Treating these topics from all angles (people, environment, culture, proximity to others, etc.) helps Diamond give fair and equitable treatment to loaded topics, especially when dealing with the notion that Eurasian states and peoples are somehow inherently better than the peoples they ultimately subjugated. Diamond’s discussion makes it clear that there were many factors, plenty of which were environmental and effectively coincidental that lead to the early rise of Eurasian dominance and it becomes plausible that if we were to have left some other cultures to their own devices on parallel if somewhat delayed tracks, they appeared to be converging on similar technological and cultural advances. Fascinating stuff, especially for a change of pace from my usual bits and blinking lights.
- Title: Guns, Germs, and Steel
- © 1999, 1997 by Jared Diamond
- Author : Jared Diamond
- Publisher : W. W. Norton & co.
- Year : 1997
- ISBN : 0-393-31755-2 (trade paperback) Amazon Google
draft-lawrence-maxforward-problems-00
Problems with Max-Forwards Processing (and Potential Solutions)
This document describes an attack against SIP networks where a small
number of legitimate, even authorized, SIP requests can stimulate
massive amounts of proxy-to-proxy traffic. The document analysis
ways to limit the impact of this kind of attack, and proposes changes
to the SIP protocol to help mitigate the risk. The document also
proposes ways to improve diagnosis of failures caused by the hop
limit being reached.
The purpose of this document is to stimulate discussion of the
identified problem and proposed solutions. Much of the proposed
solution language appears normative, but implementors should not
treat the current document as such.
Comments are solicited, and should be directed to the SIPPING working group list at ’sipping@ietf.org’.
Our October newsletter is now online. Enjoy! (link)
Just a refreshed pointer to my original Apple wake from sleep coma. I found out that Wordpress changes the archive link if I change the timestamp, so I restored the timestamp on the orginal, located here.
TourDeForce: “Engineering school is a rude awakening for most college freshmen.”
An old friend pointed me at this article over lunch today. It’s funny, but also very, very accurate. There is something wrong with a large chunk of our education system , or at least how people typically leverage it. This tends to produce very high failure rates in the disciplines that require subject mastery (more than others). Examples are Engineering, Mathematics, Computer Sciences, Physics, etc.
The article at Kitchen Table Math presents eight points and reads as a tale of experience. For those of us that have been through it, it rings very true. For those that are about to embark on this journey, I’m not sure what to suggest other than:
Learn how to learn.
From the article by KDeRosa :
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You had been coddled the past 13 years by your well meaning K-12 teachers. You were mostly spoon fed the material, at a slow pace, and then tested on how well you could regurgitate the exact same material back to the teacher in the exam. Rarely, if ever, were you required to apply your knowledge to solving new problems. As a result, you could, and probably did get by, with merely inflexible knowledge. You probably never mastered the material to the point of automaticity and you had little time to re-learn it now. This would be most apparent in …
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Algebra…
(Via lunch with a friend at Nellie’s Kitchen.)
