What Are You Currently Reading? 2013

[Firn]

1. A question for the moderator first: Can we include MOOCs* in our 'reading' list?

I recently came after some quick personal research to the youtube channel of Standford and became interested first in a specific class and then in the broader concept.

2. General Overview and the Development of Numbers is the specific lecture and it is great from a mathematic but also an broader economic point of view. Great stuff and absolutely logical. Love the Babylonian bank deposits.

It is always a bit funny to hear an Englishman saying Franci, Pisano and so forth. It is of course the same the other way around.

P.S: Ganulv, I missed your reply and enjoyed it now. You will love to see how Didier Cuche skies goodbuy

*Interesting that MMOs, the games that is came first

[davidbfpo]

Firn you asked:

1. A question for the moderator first: Can we include MOOCs* in our 'reading' list?

I see no problems with that; we sometimes link elsewhere to podcasts and the like.

[ganulv]

This was on display at the new book table at my local library and I gave it a read. I enjoyed it well enough, but I was most interested in discussion of the author’s time spent as commander of training at Ft. Bragg and there actually is not a lot of that in the book.

P.S: Ganulv, I missed your reply and enjoyed it now. You will love to see how Didier Cuche skies goodbuy

That is an awesome video, thanks for sharing! I actually own and regularly use both a pair of boiled wool mitts and a set of waxed wool gaiters!

[Firn]

Thanks for the quick answer of the moderator.

Part 3 discusses the 'arab' contributions to mathematics, for example algebra. It is amazing and logical to see the geometric roots of many approaches. Love the influence of business on the devlopment of that noble and 'pure' science.

I loved that show by soft-spoken Didier and it really shows how things have changed in the last couple of years. The Austrians also put up a good farewell for the Swiss rival.* It also reminds me to actually spell-check my posts because it was certainly a nice goodbye and has nothing to do with a good buy. Too much finance ruins your brain, but if you watch the online class it shows that it certainly helped a great deal to develop math. Incentives and utility.

*The Swiss and the Austrians are big rivals, even if it has soften up in the last years. I actually had some nice chats with Italian, Swiss and German coaches at the junior level and all of them say that the Austrians have more funding. The Swiss juniors are training often in Italy because is cheaper and the parents face a much steeper bill for giving their kids the chance to compete at high levels. It is not a healthy sport on the higher levels, and the cousin of one of my classmates, a multiple worldcup winner had to recently give up after another brutal training injury.

The great Ghedina has fun and impresses also the Austrians. He is from the small 'ladin' minority in Italy.

P.S: Love the gaitors. For hunting modern ones tend to be a bit loud. Many use Loden gaitors for short hunts. Good for powder and colder temps but terrible in wet snow on warm days.

[Firn]

The Complete Guide to Tracking: Concealment, Night Movement, and All Forms of Pursuit Following Tracks, Trails and Signs

I actually have owned that book for quite a while now, but with the start of the hunting season I like to refresh mentally some of the basics. It helps a great deal to make use of your rifle and sometimes also after the shot your own or that of others.

Cheap and possibly even cheaper looking - not even basic pictures made it into the book - it is arguably the best manual I know and has helped me a great deal. A very well organized and structed book, it blends tracking with other fieldcraft important for a hunter and offers you an efficient path for learning and improving said skills.

The track pursuit drill with it's 7 steps is a no-nonsense approach to follow a track and to stalk. It helped me to slow down, hone my stalking and to increase my overall awerness. If you know the area well you can stalk well and pick up tracks to get a sense of the game patters. We have a vastly different situation from Austria and Germany as well from a good deal of Italy, with the red deer being very hard to hunt.

It goes very well with Practical Tracking and Mammal Tracks & Signs. Fantastic books. The informations on lynx, bears and wolves are becoming highly relevant for my region.

German-speaking, European readers interested in local fauna should like Tierspuren erkennen & bestimmen or Tierspuren&co.

[davidbfpo]

Thanks to a "lurker" I have finally read 'The Defence of Duffer's Drift' by E.D. Swinton; well a retired police officer takes his time to read classic texts for the military.

Well worth a read, although I suspect many here already have. On a search I found it featured on nearly twenty threads, with Tom Odom especially citing it's value.

There are numerous places to get a copy, here is one I found:http://regimentalrogue.tripod.com/du...fers_Drift.htm

Wikipedia:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Def...ffer%27s_Drift

[Tukhachevskii]

...I too like to read multiple texts (are you Dyslexic Dave?)

Anyway I'm the process of reading or have read the following...

Brian ldiss, The Dark Light Years

K. S. Friedman, Myths of the Free Market

Frederick Forsythe, The Dogs of War. Much, much better than the film.

L. I. Held, The Quirks of Human Anatomy (A real gem)


G. Till, Seapower
&

D. J. Lonsdale, Alexander the Great: Lessons in Grand Strategy

[Red Rat]

Just finished: Blood, Steel, Myth: II SS Panzer Korps at Prochorowka

and about to start

Demolishing The Myth: The Battle of Prokhorovka

The large scale of the fighting highlights the significant impact of what may seem minor variations in TTPs between german Army (Heer) units and Waffen SS as well as the cumulative impact of combat fatigue and the impact of airpower.

On my Kindle I am currently getting through a very readable:

History of the Peloponnesian War

and have just finished:

The Heights of Courage: A Tank Leader's War on the Golan

More big war then small war at the moment.

[Firn]

Thanks to a "lurker" I have finally read 'The Defence of Duffer's Drift' by E.D. Swinton; well a retired police officer takes his time to read classic texts for the military.

Well worth a read, although I suspect many here already have. On a search I found it featured on nearly twenty threads, with Tom Odom especially citing it's value.

There are numerous places to get a copy, here is one I found:http://regimentalrogue.tripod.com/du...fers_Drift.htm

Wikipedia:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Def...ffer%27s_Drift

I finished that book quite recently. I really like the way it presents a problem and helps the reader to interact and to learn step by step. Needless to say that the specific pedagogic approach can be valuable in other areas as well.

From a military point of view firepower certainly made it's weight felt already there and even earlier with all the logical ramifications.

[Backwards Observer]

Advice and Support: The Early Years of the U.S. Army in Vietnam 1941-1960 by Ronald H. Spector.

The idea that the appropriate use of American power will provide a satisfactory outcome to even the most intractable problem in the Third World is far from a novel one. It was succinctly, if inelegantly, expressed in the slogan which one saw everywhere in Vietnam, “Once we have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.” The work presented here suggests a fundamentally different conclusion, but one which was also embodied in an expression commonly heard in Vietnam, “You can’t make somethin’ out of nothin’.”

...

Added to this propensity to make something out of nothing was an American ignorance of Vietnamese history and society so massive and all-encompassing that two decades of federally-funded fellowships, crash language programs, television specials and campus teach-ins made hardly a dent. In Chapter 1 of the present work I attempt to show how infrequent and tenuous were American contacts with Vietnam before 1945 and what little knowledge of IndoChina there was in the U.S. even among specialists. U.S. contacts with Japan and China, however distorted by mutual suspicion, ignorance and prejudice, were rich and varied in comparison to those with Southeast Asia. (from the preface to the 1985 edition)

Advice and Support: The Early Years of the U.S. Army in Vietnam 1941-1960 - amazon



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Something For Nothing (Rush) - youtube