Books

goblin

Noble
I just started the first volume of Forbidden Science by Jacques Vallee and am digging it so far. Very readable.

I'm also reading Summerland by Hannu Rajaniemi. It's... intriguing, and I think I will keep going with it. I have it out of the library. I also have out 2010 by Arthur Clarke which I read not long after it first came out, and decided to reread.

I listen to audiobooks when I am alone in the car; I'm currently making my way through Consider Phlebas by Iain Banks. I read that one back when it first came out in the U.S. Rereading it now it is striking to me how absolutely little I retained from that original read (well, it's been 26 or 27 years). I still love Banks though so it's fun to revisit.

I have loved books and reading since I was a little kid. I have a little library of favorite books but in 2012 when I started spending weeks at a time in L.A. for my job (I live in the Midwest), I bought a Kindle, and quickly converted to preferring to read prose or non-fiction on that device.

One of the few things I am passionate about is cartooning, and most of my print books are collections of old comic strip art. I am into pre World War II comic strips primarily, and Peanuts. For those I like having an actual printed page to study, not something electronic.
 

goblin

Noble
Both books by Robert Damon Schneck, The President's Vampire and Mrs. Wakeman vs. The AntiChrist, come highly recommended from me. They're about weird things that happened in U.S. history, sort of alt-history except it really happened, and Forteana (sp?).

The first book, The President's Vampire, includes the experience that the movie The Bye-Bye Man was very, very, loosely based on -- I haven't seen the movie, but I'm assuming the studio took lots of liberties.

Robert's a great guy, he's on FB as the Historian of the Strange; he's been on Coast to Coast, Project Archivist, and several other podcasts. He's an amazing historian and writer. I can't recommend his work enough.

I have a couple of his books and think they're cool, but he lost me with that Bye Bye Man story. Probably wasn't his fault, I read something that hyped it up and then when I read the actual story felt let down.

I will have to check out some of his interviews.
 

pigfarmer

tall, thin, irritable
Interesting, do you get a similar effect with E ink devices that do not constantly refresh? Perhaps refreshes weary the visual system, sometimes I 'wake up' after surfing the net.

Embarrassingly, I can't say I'm overly familiar with eInk devices. Google tells me there are apps I can use on my iPhone and I think I understand what you're referring to. I don't know that it's the specific format that's at issue - it isn't ease of use just somehow the years of hardwiring for casual reading are proving difficult to overcome. Technical docs are a whole different matter and I can absorb and retain that stuff my the truckload without issue.

I spent decades with Northern Telecom Practices up my ass and the transition to paperless was a godsend.

In fact one day I'll (never) write my autobiography - working title is "Technology in my Ass"
Chapter 1: Electromechanical Technologies - in my ass
Chapter 2: The PSTN - in my ass
Chapter 3: The Birth of PBXs - and how it affected my ass

and so forth .... :)
 

The shadow

The shadow knows!
a book I treasure is hard to find!
images (1).jpeg k276.jpg
I urge all to go find and read this book.
you will thank me later.
 

ChrisIB

Honorable
I don't know that it's the specific format that's at issue - it isn't ease of use just somehow the years of hardwiring for casual reading are proving difficult to overcome. Technical docs are a whole different matter and I can absorb and retain that stuff my the truckload without issue.
As you say attention not memory. My perhaps simplistic understanding is:

Two types of long term memory:
Procedural, say remembering last nights drive
Semantic, say what is the capital of France, just pops into your head

Procedural gets worse with age, semantic improves

Three types of attention:
Top down, thinking about task, say plugging in TV
Bottom up, instinct, say hear growl
Day dreaming

With work related stuff you focus, don't get distracted. As get older, supposedly, if switch attention, you don't switch back as easily or you forget previous train of thought.
 

pigfarmer

tall, thin, irritable
This bothered me a bit more than you might think so I had to sit down and take another look at the plastic pop-tart. At 54 I’m not quite ready for the adult diaper or to have my name and address pinned to my shirt. Once I looked through my Kindle library I actually did remember quite a bit. Not having them sitting on a bookshelf nearby probably has something to do with it. And so, now that I have found this no doubt everyone is waiting for the next pearl of wisdom to emanate from my fingertips.

Flight 39 – Philip P. Peterson

Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War – P.W.Singer

Fata Morgana - Steven R. Boyett & Ken Mitchroney

** Can’t say these are actually good but they passed the time pleasantly. Mental bubble gum. Not all meals have to be gourmet **

Should have bought the hard copy for these. The author (for all listed below) includes a lot of first person detail that really adds dimension to the story which is missing from most accounts. The Guadalcanal campaign specifically both on land and at sea is (to me) absolutely fascinating and this guy puts a new twist on a lot of dusty facts and figures and doesn’t devolve into ‘war porn.’ You can’t write fiction better than reality and the shit they show on TV is just that.

James D. Hornfischer:

Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal

The Fleet at Flood Tide: America at Total War in the Pacific, 1944-1945

The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors: The Extraordinary World War II Story of the U.S. Navy's Finest Hour

Ship of Ghosts: The Story of the USS Houston, FDR's Legendary Lost Cruiser, and the Epic Saga of Her Survivors


** Never mind the military setting. Ship of Ghosts clues you in to what the human body and spirit is actually capable of when necessary. Bridge on the River Kwai was taken from this but doesn't hold a candle to reality **

Sorry to ramble on, it’s as if the FAT table has a problem with Kindle …. and I have revealed myself as a book geek. A positive benefit of being an obese shut in kid, and not too many people care about or want to talk about this stuff.
 

nivek

As Above So Below
some falsehoods in that description, no, abductions aren't in high gear, in fact complex UFO sightings are almost dead

You just deny and derail any thread that doesn't fit your interdimensional religion...:laugh8:

...
 

ChrisIB

Honorable
A higher loyalty by James Comey
Did not realize he is 6' 8"

Encounters With Extraterrestrials by Frank Joseph
The blurb:
Overview: The first, comprehensive military history of armed confrontations between humans and extraterrestrials

• Includes documentation of incidents from World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, and the ongoing hostilities in the Middle East
• Reveals the U.S. Navy’s defeat in Antarctica by ETs, the shoot-down of “flying saucers” at Roswell, alien sabotage of nuclear weapons, in-flight abductions of USAF and Soviet officers, and photographic evidence of the Battle of Los Angeles
• Explains the link between the development of atomic bombs and ballistic missiles and the increase in extraterrestrial intervention in the 20th century
 

nivek

As Above So Below
This link will download a PDF...

The Theory of Celestial Influence

IN EVERY AGE MEN HAVE TRIED TO ASSEMBLE ALL THE KNOWLEDGE
and experience of their day into a single whole which would explain their
relation to the universe and their possibilities in it. In the ordinary way they
could never succeed. For the unity of things is not realisable by the ordinary
mind, in an ordinary state of consciousness. The ordinary mind, refracted by
the countless and contradictory promptings of different sides of human
nature, must reflect the world as manifold and confused as is man himself. A
unity, a pattern, an all-embracing meaning - if it exists - could only be
discerned or experienced by a different kind of mind, in a different state of
consciousness. It would only be realisable by a mind which had itself become
unified.

.

 

starsfall

Believer
I love books ,and now the exams are over I am thinking of buying some ,I would like some advice on booking.
I like every genre supernatural, thriller , inspirational,romance , tragedy (literally everything !!)
Here are books I read this year .{I don't remember all}
1.the lost symbol {dan brown}
2the da Vinci code.{Dan brown}.
3angels and demons {dan brown}
4the hunger games{suzuna Collins}
5.lord of the rings
6.as you like it {Williams shakespeare}
7 Julius caeser { Williams shakespeare}
8 Antony and Cleopatra.{william shakespeare}
9.beyond the light barrier.{Elizabeth clarer}.
10.a midsummer nights dream{ Williams shakespeare}
11.romeo and Juliet {everyone knows thiS one.lol}
12 .Half girlfriend.{chetan bhagat}
13.chariots of the gods {Eric von daniken}
14.the monk who sold his ferrari {robin sharma}.
15.thats all I can remember right now....

Please suggest me some books ,I can't live without them....
I'm a huge fan of the Dan Brown books, have you read the fourth book in the series, Inferno...? I picked it up from a local bookstore a few months ago and haven't gotten the chance to open it yet, and the other day I saw the fifth book, Origin, in Barnes and Noble and realized how far behind I have fallen.... lol...

Unfortunately I haven't really had the time to read a good book besides my school material in well over half a year at this point, but I'm sure Inferno would be right up your alley..... :Alien:
 

ChrisIB

Honorable
Antigravity propulsion by James Morcan
Interesting but uneven booklet drawing from ufo related sources. The usual stuff about Nazis and rotating cylinders:
A series of experiments had taken place in a mine in a valley close to the Czech frontier,” according to Cook. “The experiments required large doses of electricity fed via thick cabling into a chamber hundreds of meters belowground. In this chamber, a bell-shaped device comprising two contra-rotating cylinders filled with mercury, or something like it, had emitted a strange pale blue light … A number of scientists who had been exposed to the device during these experiments suffered terrible side effects; five were said to have died as a result. Word had it that the tests sought to investigate some kind of anti-gravitational effect.
Sparingly sprinkled with government conspiracy
I've been working with Paul Hellyer. He's the minister, the ex-minister of defense, Canada, under Trudeau. He is upset because the Americans are planning the weaponization of space, as though they (ET’s) are enemies …
It came out of a project called Project Paperclip, in which – and this is what Eisenhower warned us against – the sustention of the Military Industrial Complex. In order to extend the power and the funding of the Military Industrial Complex, you have to be afraid of things. Number one was communism. If that petered out, number two is terrorism. That's here for a while. Number three is asteroids. And number four is extraterrestrials.” –Shirley MacLaine. Excerpt from an interview with Larry King on Larry King Live that aired on CNN on November 9, 2007
We already have the means to travel among the stars, but these technologies are locked up in black projects, and it would take an act of God to ever get them out to benefit humanity. Anything you can imagine, we already know how to do.” –Ben Rich, former senior engineer in Lockheed Martin and former Director of Lockheed’s advanced aerospace technology division Skunk Works.
 

pigfarmer

tall, thin, irritable
Boring and dusty to most but I've been on a U-boat binge lately. Twenty Million Tons Under the Sea by Daniel Gallery.

He was the man in charge of the hunter-killer group that boarded and seized the U-505. First person account and very well written - done not long after the war. I want to get back to Chicago at some point and see it again now that they've put it inside and refurbed everything. It was sitting outside and looking a bit forlorn last time I was there.
 

nivek

As Above So Below
The Commanding Self
by Idres Shah

The_Commanding_Self.jpg
 

APIGuy

Independent Field Investigator
My disorganized reading stack includes several books by Leonard Susskind in the Theoretical Minimum sequence, Eric Wojciechowski's Chasing Disclosure (a novel about a fictional character who has written a non-fiction book of the same title), Derren Brown's Happy, a book about statistics I can't remember the title of, and some old Arthur C. Clarke that I had forgotten about.

I need to get started on David Grigg's new novel The Fallen Sun (we're planning a podcast episode about it), and those Yuval Harari books everyone is raving about.

That's just a sample.
 

ChrisIB

Honorable
Evaluating ufology books can be tricky, any thoughts on the following quotes (from the book above):
According to American linguist and bestselling author Charles Berlitz, there was a rumor at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study that Albert Einstein did indeed complete a version of his Unified Field Theory for Gravitation and Electricity – even though officially it remains a never-completed theory.
At first, this theory was published in German and appeared in a few scientific journals. In his papers, Einstein called his purported mathematical proof of the connection between the forces of electromagnetism and gravity as being “highly convincing”.
However, this work was withdrawn as incomplete, although no published reason is given save that Einstein suddenly grew dissatisfied with it.
British mathematician Lord Bertrand Russell considered Einstein’s Unified Field Theory complete, but felt that “Man is not ready for it and shan’t be until after World War III.
According to Dr. Musha, the Bulgarian’s “formulation proves it is possible to create an unbalanced acceleration by creating intense electric and magnetic fields in a dielectric or ferromagnetic medium. These predicted coupling effects for electromagnetic and gravitational fields would be static and thus they should be able to produce a net force to propel a spaceship.”
The Bulgarian scientist wrote two papers on his formula in 1994.
“However,” Dr. Musha claims, these “papers were rejected by two well-known science journals.”
The strong implication is there was a cover-up. Either that or mainstream science was just not prepared to consider such theories on antigravity.
According to Colonel Philip J. Corso’s writings in his aforementioned book The Day After Roswell, the UFO craft recovered at Roswell seemed to have the ability to store as well as conduct a vast amount of electric current. He suspected the craft was simply a capacitor that stored current controlled or vectored by the pilot and able to recharge itself with some form of built-in generator, just like a very advanced flying battery
I have contact with certain diplomats who not only confirm meetings have been taking place between some government officials and an alien race, but have been receiving assistance from this race to advance technology to enable us to meet hostile aliens on a level playing field. My contacts have been present at these meetings and have met these aliens who are benevolent towards us but will not act with aggression towards any life form unless in self defence, but they are prepared to help us advance our technology.” –Tony Dodd. Former British police officer.
The way I think these things work,” Dolan told Sean Stone, “is that the secret becomes privatized increasingly. And again I would emphasize for people to look at the general structure of the US military and to see how that has become privatized. And how secrecy itself has become privatized.
“In other words,” Dolan continued, “if we were working in a black budget program, what are called special access programs, and let’s say I was a Defense Department person and you were a person at Lockheed Martin ... You’d be the contractor and chances are you would have more power in the program than I would. The private contractors, as far as we can determine on these black budget programs, have the upper hand and they really run the show. The secret in other words is not so much classified as it is proprietary … And that appears to me to be how the UFO secret has gone.
 
Top