I finished reading A Clockwork Orange. It’s an excellent book, definitely one of my favorites. If you’ve seen the movie, you must read the book, which is much better (or worse, depending on how you look at it). If you haven’t seen the movie or read the book, then first watch the movie and then read the book. Over half the words were completely made up by Anthony Burgess, so watching the movie first helps to give you an idea of how he talks.

If you’ve never heard of it, the story is somewhat of a 1984 meets Peter Pan. A horrorshow book.

The edition of the book that I linked to includes the last chapter, which was previously unavailable in the US version and also cut out from Stanley Kubrick’s movie. This really should be a sin, as the last chapter completely makes the book.

Also, a warning: the movie, and the book even more so, are definitely deserving of the R rating.

I just realized that when I said I had finished reading Ecstasy Club, I never said what it was about. Well, on a literal level it documents the rise and fall of a cult-ish rave club in San Francisco. At it’s worst it’s a drug-induced psychological journey through the collective mind of a bunch of ravers trying to take the human raise to the next evolutionary level through drugs and electronica. At it’s best it’s a paranoid vision of corporate brainwashing and mind control.

“A darkly comic contemporary fable: a brave, very funny, very knowing trip through the neo-psychedelic substrate of the wired world.” - William Gibson

Read it. And don’t do E.

I just realized that I never posted a few days ago when I finished Reading Simulacra: Fatal Theories for Postmodernity. So, yeah, I did. It was interesting, but seemed to dragged on at certain parts. You can tell it heavily influenced The Matrix.

Jason Scott is on the last episode of Radio FreeK America, 99.

I finished reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas last night. That’s a damn good book, in an LSD-induced sort of way. I Think the New York Times Book Review quote on the back does a good job of summing it up

The best book on the dope decade.

Speaking of the back, here’s the excerpt they put on it:

We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half-full of cocaine and a whole galaxy of multicolored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers... Also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether, and two dozen amyls... But the only thing that worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible than a man in the depths of an ether binge...

I can’t wait to see what traffic Google is going to send my way because of that quote.

But, yeah, good book. And short. So read it.

I finished Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick last night. It’s a very good, highly recommended book. My favorite story is the Electric Ant. Go read it.

I finished reading Simon Singh’s The Code Book yesterday. It is a short (350 pages compared David Kahn’s book which is over 1000) history of cryptography from the ancient Greek’s Linear B script all the way up to quantum cryptography. I think it’s unique in that he not only describes the code to you but takes you through the process of breaking it and manages to tie in the intriguing back story, as well. You get cryptography, cryptanalysis, and a mystery story in each chapter. I’d probably recommend it to anyone with an interest in cryptography (no math required).
The last chapter (A Quantum Leap into the Future) also manages to serve as a great introduction to quantum theory. He provides a short overview of the two camps: superposition (the cat is both dead and alive) and the many-worlds interpretation (the multi-verse, the cat is dead in one universe and alive in the other). And yes, this does tie into crypto!

It appears that WiFi will not be used at the 2004 Olympics in Athens because of security reasons. Could this be a sign that the general public is catching on to the insecurities of 802.11b/g/a? Certainly the people who put on the Olympics aren’t the general public but I wouldn’t consider them hackers or geeks, either.

I finally finished Cryptonomicon. Good book.