Home · Book Reports · 2017
Digital Design - An Embedded Systems Approach Using VHDL
2017-12-27
The book assumes a basic understanding of the general principals, concepts, and components of electrical engineering. These basic concepts are expanded upon with more detailed descriptions of digital logic/boolean algebra and slightly more abstracted complex components like flip-flops. These abstractions are introduced and modeled, usually in a well described UML style presentation, and then converted into VHDL. As it progresses, the book combines all of the aforementioned into more complex designs that include finite state machines, soft cores, memories, accelerators, etc. Before a final review of the design process, a case study is presented for the design of a pipelined implementation of a sobel filter video accelerator.
Get Up Why Your Chair Is Killing You and What You Can Do About It
2017-12-26
This book is written in a casual conversational tone and includes many stories that make it an absolute breeze to read. Much of what is presented feels like common sense, such that sitting too much leads to obesity and diabetes, but this common sense backed by a mountain of interesting studies to support the claims. Another somewhat common sense conclusion is that rural and less industrialized populations include more active people which are generally healthier and happier, despite often living in what many westerners would call poverty. Luckily these negative health consequences can be overcome relatively easily with a few lifestyle adjustments such as working at a treadmill desk, having walk-and-talk meetings, of allowing students to move about freely in the classroom. These changes not only counteract the excess sitting, but lead to increased productivity and profitability in the business world while academic performance increases and ADHD diagnosis decrease when fidgety students are given an outlet for their excess energy.
Out of Control - The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World
2017-12-20
It begins by describing various distributed natural ecology systems, like a swarm of bees and their beehive, as vivisystems that which can be the understood as the basis for designing artificial systems. The evolutionary systems of Darwin lead into the artificial evolution of Dawkins' Biomorph Land, computer viruses, and genetic engineering. Finally we get to see some of the ex-WIRED editors techo-utopia by exploring things like virtual worlds and e-money. While the title of the book leads you to believe one thing, the truth is that the entire book hints immodestly at cybernetic, bottom up, herded, predictive, Macy Conference inspired control. Overall it feels like a rough outline of all-too-likely technocracy of the future that employs novelty and pleasure to conceal its true oligarchical totalitarian control behind a smile.
VHDL 101 - Everything You Need to Know to Get Started
2017-12-08
The book is divided into two main parts, the first of which is a review (if you read FPGA 101 first) of coding styles (behavioral, structural, register transfer level) and the design process including synthesis, simulation, and implementation, while the second part is further divided into a 3 pass approach to VHDL, going deeper with each iteration. Part two starts off with the basics including entities and architectures, signals, data types, operators, concurrent statements which give you a solid foundation to build on. The next section builds on this foundation with the introduction of processes, variables, sequential statements, and some of the limitations of simulation versus synthesis. The last, and most detailed, iteration introduces libraries, generics, the generate statement, loops, functions, procedures, and packages. It concludes with a look at a few common libraries and a nice quick reference appendix that is helpful when first learning a language.
FPGA 101 - Everything You Need to Know to Get Started
2017-12-02
This book seemed great for a beginner with its inclusion of a nice list of acronyms, and with all the new terminology was well defined. It starts with the (sometimes too) basics, giving simple examples snippets of VHDL date types and code as well as general programming tips such as commenting and code organization. The connection between hardware and software is well described and elucidate with various diagrams of simple examples of logic gates and their equivalent VHDL. There is a fuller example, complete with VHDL and test bench code, that is used repeatedly for the last part of the book that is complex enough to be interesting and well described enough to follow. The last three-quarters of the book focuses more on the design process phases including- design, simulation, synthesis, implementation, and programming.
Simulacra and Simulation
2017-11-29
History is being rewritten, or more accurately recreated, through the eyes of film specifically and media in general. An exploration of Marshal McLuhan's 'the medium is the message', is taken to new heights. Age old concepts such as the shadow, doppelganger, and the mirror are reexamined in the modern terms of clones and holograms. Universities are claimed to be on the forefront of this implosion into hyperreality since they no longer facilitate a transmission of knowledge, but instead exist to dispense diplomas in a rote fashion. Lastly nihilism and Nietzsche are discussed in relation to the lack of meaning in the modern world, but seen to themselves have no meaning.
Introducing Evolutionary Psychology
2017-11-16
An evolutionary look at psychology assuming that the mind is made up of modules that have evolved independently and in different environments. This view follows the older behaviorist belief that actions were caused, not by the mind, but by environmental stimulation. A core of evolutionary psychology is to look at the mind's computer modules made for processing information. Some of these modules are supposed to lead to certain innately human abilities including language, physical attractiveness, and food preferences that seem to span all cultures. The conclusion is that our minds have evolved in an environment that is totally foreign to our current environment; we are essentially monkeys living in the fast lane.
Practical Electronics for Inventors
2017-11-15
The book is divided into three parts - theory, basic components, and circuits/modules. While it won't give you the tools to be an electrical engineer, it is more than relevant enough to give you all the basic understanding to build projects with arbitrary complexity - provided you can use this information as the foundation when exploring more complex applications. After the basic components are covered, there are several easy to understand sections on op amps, filters, oscillators, and other non-primitive but foundational aspects of electronics. Some of the more advanced topics that are covered include voltage regulators and power supplies. The book culminates with a look at the, from the inventors standpoint, obsolescent logic gates and their modern successor the micro controller and its digital world before rounding out with motors/servos and audio electronics, often depicted as being controlled by a micro controller.
Getting Things Done
2017-09-12
Lists for every occasion. One list for current actions, a waiting list, a list for each of the people you have business with, and more. The use of folders to both keep reference material organized, but also to 'mail' yourself things into the future. A calendar and regular reviews of all your lists to keep your mind free from having to remember what you need to do. Last, but not least, how to put EVERYTHING into your inbox and still make sure that it stays relatively empty.
The Starfish and The Spider - The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations
2017-08-31
At first many examples of centralized and decentralized organizations are given and how one, generally the decentralized structure, overwhelms the other. One major example is the record industry in general, MGM in particular, going after file sharing services, like Napster, in the legal arena only to create an even bigger problem for themselves as Napster was replaced by more decentralized services like Kazaa and eMule, the latter of which no one ever knew the author of the software and there was, therefore, no entity to bring a legal suit against. A more traditional conflict is seen in the example of the Apache Indians versus the Spanish and later USAmerican invaders and how the Apache used a decentralized order in their tribes so that neither invading force could defeat with traditional tactics. GM versus Toyota, the ALF (Animal Liberation Front), and Al Qaeda are three more examples that are used to support the point that the decentralized organization has many advantages over the centralized organization. Lastly there are some rules for understanding, and fighting, decentralized organizations that include centralizing the offending starfish by granting some member the ability to dole out accolades and getting the group to follow a new ideology as was done by giving cattle to the Apache, effectively domesticating them.
Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon - Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops and The Dark heart of the Hippie Dream
2017-08-26
The book offers a chapter for each of the major bands of the scene and offers numerous interesting connections for each to the military and intelligence, often parents and sometimes artists, families that come from old lineages, big money, and sometimes even royalty. The families and the members of the scene are plagued with strange deaths, often ruled suicides, and a lot of houses end up burned to the ground. At the center of success you have the permanent fixture, Vito and his freaks, which the author purports was the cause of the scene's success and not the music that was supposedly quite bad, at least when listened to live. At the physical center of the canyon you have a state-of-the-art studio/military base known as Lookout Mountain Laboratory - an odd hub in such a hippie paradise unless you take into account the military families these hippies hail from. There is also a lot of gun loving, authoritarian, often violent, dual personalities in many of the otherwise hippies of the scene.
Psychological Warfare
2017-08-08
After a whirlwind journey through some historical examples of propaganda as a military tool, the book moves toward a more pragmatic approach. Most propaganda should be suited for long term effects, a glacially slow example being education as propaganda, rather than pinpoint targeting as in more kinetic military engagements. The propagandist must also not let their ideology get in the way of delivering a truthful message that the enemy wants to hear. The second half of the book discusses analysis of both enemy propaganda to determine their position on various topics as well as polling enemy populations and prisoners to understand the effects of propaganda on them. Finally an operational dissection of propaganda covers such topics as format (radio, print), deployment (shelling, air-drop), and target populations (combatants, civilians).
From Versailles to Cybernetics
2017-08-07
The most important things in Bateson's life, as he tells it, were the Treaty of Versailles and the cybernetic 'breakthrough'. All mammals, and thus humans, are concerned only with the patterns of relationship that give rise to abstractions like love, hate, and trust. The Treaty of Versailles was full of deceit to demoralize the Germans and should have been seen to provide the foundation for with WW2 sprung from. We must understand how we got to the present to have any chance at understanding the present. The 'rules of the game' that were laid down with the Treaty of Versailles and the advent of cybernetics need to be changed before the computers lead us into a more rigid world.
Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time
2017-08-05
It begins with a look at the ancient and less recent history of both the west and east. Next there is a long and extremely interesting discussion of economics where the different phases, ranging from very local to global, of economic systems are outlined. Once the more modern economic system is understood if allows for the exploration of economic and media controlled manipulation of nations, specifically the Round Table group and its most prominent member Cecil Rhodes. This manipulation gives great insight into the world wars and depressions as being not failures of organization but were rather the foundations the new, technocratic, age would be built upon. Finally this technocratic world and some of its main features, like Weiner's cybernetics and Shannon's communication theory, are shown to be the true forces, thrust on the world by war, that have been the driving force behind all of the technological changes the world is still undergoing 50+ years after this book was first published.
Cultural Patterns and Technical Change
2017-04-16
First, a culture must be understood by closely watching and documenting the interactions between its members. Next, determine which of the current cultural tendencies can be exploited to introduce a, usually minor, change in habit. Care must be taken to limit the negative consequences, when possible, of the introduced change, which can be far reaching and non-intuitive. Education of the, primarily, younger generation can smooth the transition towards industrialization - children are educated to accept the constant change the new society will be subject to. Money economies and cash crops often obliterate a community - children can skip rites of passage by buying a herd of their own, cash crops introduce malnutrition, and foreign goods often displace traditional roles, such as factory produced clothing replacing woman spinning the family's clothing.
The Doors of Perception
2017-04-11
A first-hand account of Aldous Huxley's first mescaline experience.
The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross
2017-04-07
The ancient peoples of the modern Middle East had worshipped a fertility god that Allegro posits was based on the rain being seen as the sperm of god, giving life to the desert each spring. The mushroom, as Allegro sees it, was a microcosm of the universe in that it would grow quickly after a rain, it had some resemblance to a womb and of course a penis, and it imparted those who ingest it with a kind of communion with god. Allegro gives as evidence the evolution of the written Sumerian language cuneiform into Aramaic, Hebrew, and Indo-European languages such as Greek. The language used in the bible may have been to hide the true purpose, passing down knowledge of the mushroom, of this fertility cult. While it would be impossible for any lay person to make heads or tails of the 'translations' within, this book provides a unique perspective on the roots of modern religions.
The Future of the Army - Today, Tomorrow, and the Day After Tomorrow
2017-04-01
The Army has a reduced budget (reduced increases?) and has to do more (why?) with its limited resources. The first step should be to shut down unneeded bases and move toward a 'build as needed' force that can be ad hoc constructed from larger formations, bringing only the required skills with a limited and mobile footprint. More resources should be stashed around the world in supply depots and on ships; the ones that were deployed have been drawn down. More long term goals include transforming the Army culture away from bureaucratic micromanaging practices and towards reinstating authority to adaptable leaders on the ground. Finally the Army should embrace technology like AI, robots, and drones while simultaneously shoring up the Army's ability to function in a degraded electronic environment with such, nearly lost, skills as navigating with a map and compass.
Fundamentals of Electrical Engineering I
2017-03-25
The course focuses on the creation, manipulation, transmission, and reception of information by electronic means. Elementary signal theory; time- and frequency-domain analysis; Sampling Theorem. Digital information theory; digital transmission of analog signals; error-correcting codes.
The Book of the Law - Liber AL vel Legis sub figura CCXX as delivered by XCIII = 418 to DCLXVI
2017-03-23
The text contains many numbers, mentions mathematical operations and an equation; it feels like encryption. At one point there is a 'random' string of characters and numbers, 4 6 3 8 A B K 2 4 A L G M O R 3 Y X 24 89 R P S T O V A L. Some of the main recurring themes deal ambiguously with hedonism and anti-reason. Additionally, death is worshipped alongside ideals such that compassion is a weakness and the weak should be crushed. It seems to portend the decline into narcissistic consumer culture quite well.
The Philosophic Corruption of Physics
2017-03-23
After an initial review of Newton's numerous contributions to science, his rejection of the arbitrary is likened to modern objectivism. Next the corruption begins with Hume and then Kant rejecting the primacy of existence for the primacy of conciousness. This leads then to Mach and the positivism movement essentially rejecting reality. Einstein still wanted to test reality, but instead placed another nail in the coffin of objectivism with his interpretation of the Lorentz transforms. Lastly we reach the 'crowning achievement' of modern physics, quantum theory and its particle-wave duality triumphing over the little regarded pilot theory of de Broglie (now resurrected by Lewis Little).
Python Algorithms - Mastering Basic Algorithms in the Python Language
2017-03-22
It starts out with an overview of big O running times. Next the basics of graphs and trees are discussed, with more advanced discussion later. Many of the common mathematical equations and concepts are covered as well as more advance topics including proofs, NP hardness, and recurrence equations and their applications and running times. Searching and traversing are covered with basic concepts like depth/breadth first search as well as more advanced algorithms. The appendixes list algorithms, problems, and terminology.
Nicomachean Ethics
2017-01-31
A dense examination of such human characteristics and timeless questions including virtues, means, ends, friendship, happiness, justice, nature, and nurture among others.
Mastering Kali Linux for Advanced Penetration Testing
2017-01-06
The first part deals with identifying a target and then performing active and passive reconnaissance to lookup DNS records, conduct port scans, and utilize various open source intelligence techniques, among many other options. Next, vulnerability databases and tools, like Metasploit and Veil Evasion, that give easy access to potential access points to a system are covered alongside a lighter look at things like shellcode. Less technical attack vectors are explored when looking at social engineering attacks, like spoofing a website, that can be quickly created with tools like SET, the Social Engineers Toolkit. The ubiquitousness of wireless access demands its inclusion but is only touched upon as a general introduction to a potentially detailed topic. Lastly, web application vulnerabilities are tested with frameworks like Beef with some minor asides into some of the specific vulnerabilities - like SQL injection.
The Pragmatic Programmer
2017-01-04
As a programmer you should always be on the lookout for new technologies, improved techniques, and opportunities to refactor your source. Since user requirements are usually not be set in stone, your abstracting away from a specific 'requirement' may produce a simpler or more robust system. Code should not be duplicated as per the DRY methodology and functionality should be sufficiently delegated via modularity (including teams). The model-view system assists in DRY avoidance, especially when drawing from universal data sources like plain-text files for things like configuration or schema. A version control system and automated tests can help locate and remedy a bug as soon as it becomes a bug.
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