J.R.R. Tolkien did not write a story about why power is evil but about why domination is evil. //

For example, at the end of the story, Aragorn does not renounce power and wander off into the wilderness to smoke pipeweed. He claims the throne and with it the power that is rightfully his — and he does so with none of the reluctance that Peter Jackson added to the film adaptation. Likewise, characters such as Gandalf and Galadriel do not renounce power as such — indeed, they have and use great power — but they do renounce a certain sort and use of power.

What they reject is the domination that makes people into thralls and slaves. //

But French misunderstands Tolkien. Indeed, if anyone is disqualified on Tolkien’s terms, it is those such as French who reject natural law and the legitimate power of governments to make and enforce laws in accord with it. Unlike French, Tolkien did not urge us to embrace a relativistic legal pluralism that cannot distinguish between good and evil, beautiful and ugly, God and Satan.

Put simply, Aragorn would not have tolerated Uruk-hai story hour.

William Sheridan Allen

Of Captain Teach Alias Blackbeard

Edward Teach was a Bristol man born, but had sailed some time out of Jamaica in privateers, in the late French war; yet though he had often distinguished himself for his uncommon boldness and personal courage, he was never raised to any command, till he went a-pirating, which I think was at the latter end of the year 1716, ... //

Being asked the meaning of this, he only answered, by damning them, that if he did not now and then kill one of them, they would forget who he was.

Clyde S. Kilby joined the faculty of Wheaton College in 1935 at the age of 33 as an assistant professor of English and dean of men.

In 1943 Kilby read a new book published by C. S. Lewis, entitled The Case for Christianity, which changed the course of his life. It was based on two series of broadcast talks Lewis had given for the BBC and was later published as the first two sections of Mere Christianity. “I . . . read it right through feeling almost from the first sentence that something profound had touched my mind and heart.” It was like discovering “something bottomless,” and he was captivated by “the depth and freshness of his observations and the permanency of his expression.”

I've written a third edition of Security Engineering. The e-book version is available now for $44 from Wiley and Amazon; paper copies are available from Amazon here for delivery in the USA and here for the UK.

Here are the chapters, with links to the seven sample chapters as I last put them online for review: //

Here are fifteen teaching videos we made based on the book for a security engineering class at Edinburgh, taught to masters students and fourth-year undergrads: //

The Second Edition (2008)

Download for free here:

In Sex and Culture (1934), Oxford scholar J. D. Unwin studied 80 primitive tribes and 6 civilizations through 5,000 years of history and found a positive correlation between the cultural achievement of a people and the sexual restraint they observe. //

MCP
5.0 out of 5 stars
Sexual repression is the foundation of civilization.
Reviewed in the United States on March 30, 2008
That is the basic thesis of this unjustly forgotten book. According to Professor Unwin, who was influenced by Freud, it is the "limitation of sexual opportunity" which creates the "mental energy" necessary to build a civilization.

He backs this up with exhaustive examples of the historical cycle he proposes. The cycle goes as follows: in a primitive society, people take their pleasure at whim, without commitment or limits. Then the practice of monogamous marriage, including premarital chastity, is instituted. (How he believes this first arises would take far too long to summarize here; read the book!) The sexual repression required for this chastity and fidelity increases the "mental energy" and the inner strength of those who practice it, enabling them to embark on long-term projects such as monumental architecture, agriculture, and conquest. In this early stage, men have enormous power over their wives and children, even when the children have grown up. ... //

Cornelius
5.0 out of 5 starsVerified Purchase
Brilliant and Shocking Exposition of Sexual Regulations and Cultural Advance
Reviewed in Canada on November 27, 2019
Unger surveys eighty so-called 'primitive' civilizations, as well as six advanced civilizations, and finds a stunning correlation between the extent of a society's pre-marital and post-marital sexual regulations, and its civilizational advance (conquest, exploration, abstract thought, industry, commerce, etc.). In general, the more restrained a society is when it comes to sex, the more repressed sexual energy is created; that repressed energy is then transformed into, and given full expression in, productive, outward endeavours. As an anthropologist, Unger is surprisingly careful; since this book was published in 1934, I expected a stereotypical Englishman's exaltation of the white man's superior intellect. Unger does not fall for such preposterousness; he even admits that there is no reason to believe that coloured men have inferior intellects or abilities. In fact, he argues against the racialism that prevailed in his day. Although Unger's correlation is interesting, and his causation convincing, I am not convinced by his proposed mechanism: Freudian sexual sublimation. In fact, there are more direct mechanisms that would explain why repressed sexuality translates into powerful outward displays of productive and expansive energy: 1. When sex is more difficult to procure, people engage in more productive activities. This is a simple opportunity cost formula. 2. Men won't invest resources in children that aren't theirs. Sexual restraint ensures that women are less likely to cheat and conceive children with other men. 3. Hypergamy is dominant: without sexual restraint, men and women expend energy in attaining unachievable sexual partners. Aside from these shortcomings, Unger's book is worth reading if you are interested in why sexual restraints come about, and how they relate to civilizational advance.

The conflict between the natural sciences and Christian theology has been going on for centuries. Recent advances in the fields of evolutionary biology, behavioral genetics, and neuroscience have intensified this conflict, particularly in relation to origins, the fall, and sin. These debates are crucial to our understanding of human sinfulness and necessarily involve the doctrine of salvation. Theistic evolutionists have labored hard to resolve these tensions between science and faith, but Hans Madueme argues that the majority of their proposals do injustice both to biblical teaching and to long-standing doctrines held by the mainstream Christian tradition.

The BookHub — The World of Books

The Permanence and Care of Color Photographs: Traditional and Digital Color Prints, Color Negatives, Slides, and Motion Pictures

by Henry Wilhelm
with
contributing author Carol Brower

But corporate mega-publishers want purchasing a book to be like renting a movie or streaming an album. //

Buying a book should be no different from buying an apple. When you buy an apple, the farmer can’t show up in your kitchen later and decide your time is up, and you’ve got to pay for it again. It’s yours forever—to eat, or paint in a still life, or cut up for a kid’s snack. And thanks to the first sale doctrine of copyright law, codified by Congress in 1909, the books on your shelves are yours forever, too, in exactly the same way your apple is; you’re free to read them (or not), loan them to friends, or sell them to a used bookshop, without restriction. Copyright law balances the public good—our collective right to access information—with the rights it grants to authors and inventors.

Publishers can’t demand more money for the paper books you’ve already bought, but the technology for copying and distributing books has evolved a lot since 1909. So four titanic corporate publishers are currently in court, insisting on the effective right to barge in and demand multiple, recurring payments for digital books–like they do for digital movies, music, and software–and they want to exercise that same power over the books in libraries.

This threat to the ownership of books is what makes the ongoing publishers’ lawsuit against the Internet Archive politically dangerous, and in an altogether different way from earlier challenges and amendments to copyright law. At a time of increasing book bannings and attacks on libraries, public schools and universities, it is not safe for democracy, or for our cultural posterity, to leave an “on/off” switch for library books in the hands of corporate publishers. //

As I’ve argued before, the lawsuit hinges on the question of whether ebooks are books, subject to the existing laws governing the sale of books, or whether the publishers can redefine ebooks as temporary, rental-only media–a new class of unownable goods, like streaming-only films from Disney or subscription-only software from Microsoft. But libraries must have the option to buy and own their books–all their books, including ebooks–and own them absolutely, like an apple. //

In the summer of 2020, Hachette, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, and Wiley accused the Internet Archive of “mass-scale copyright infringement” because of the way the Internet Archive’s Open Library loans its ebooks to patrons. Instead of renting their ebooks from publishers, the Internet Archive scans them from the paper books it owns, stores the paper originals, and loans each scan out to only one patron at a time, a common library practice known as Controlled Digital Lending (CDL). Following the reasoning of expert copyright lawyers and library scholars over the last twelve years, the Internet Archive, along with hundreds of other libraries and archival institutions, maintains that CDL is a fair and logical way to preserve traditional library practices for the digital world. //

The publishers’ objective had been to forbid the Open Library to loan any of their in-copyright books as ebooks. That was the explicit request in the original complaint. But not even this industry-friendly judge was willing to go that far; he sided with the Internet Archive’s interpretation of the decision instead. For now, the Open Library will have to stop loaning only those ebooks for which the publishers are offering their own “competing” ebooks for license. In other words, the order relies solely on the argument that the Open Library is harming the publishers’ revenues from ebooks, a distinction that seems to go to the heart of the dispute. //

The publishers shouldn’t be able to pick and choose the bits of copyright law they want to abide by; as we’ve noted, copyright law balances the public good with commercial rights. If publishers’ ebook revenues are protected by the extant provisions of copyright law protecting rights holders, then, presumably, readers and libraries should also be protected. The Internet Archive, and all libraries, should have the same protections under the first sale doctrine that have always allowed them to preserve and lend books to readers.

Standard Ebooks is a volunteer-driven effort to produce a collection of high quality, carefully formatted, accessible, open source, and free public domain ebooks that meet or exceed the quality of commercially produced ebooks. The text and cover art in our ebooks is already believed to be in the U.S. public domain, and Standard Ebooks dedicates its own work to the public domain, thus releasing the entirety of each ebook file into the public domain. All the ebooks we produce are distributed free of cost and free of U.S. copyright restrictions.

Books On-Line

Anyway, when some champion of human liberty in a Che Guevara T-shirt and Mao jacket was haranguing his audience with claims like “A single Hiroshima bomb set off downtown would annihilate this university and all of us in the blink of an eye”, what better way to burnish one's Strangelovian credentials than to whip out a handy-dandy nuclear bomb computer slide rule, whip—slip—slide, and interrupt, “Naaah…fifteen kilotons at five miles? Surface burst? Why, that's only a quarter to a third of a pound per square inch overpressure—it'll probably break some window glass but that's about it.” Flipping the slide rule over, “The flash isn't even enough to cause sunburn, and the immediate radiation is next to nothing.” For some unfathomable reason, this never seemed to either carry the argument or suitably impress chicks. //

My nostalgia for this particular relic of the Cold War was such that I've had a project to produce an online edition on my to-do list for more than five years. Like many items on this embarrassingly long and all too infrequently shortened list of unrealised ambitions, it's something I half expected someone else to do long before I got to it. This would be perfectly fine with me—I undertake these projects because I want to see them done, and crossing off an item without the wear and tear of doing it myself couldn't make me happier. In fact, scanning (and possibly OCR-ing) The Effects of Nuclear Weapons was an item on my list before the fine folks at Princeton got the job done.

The Web edition of the nuclear bomb effects computer, however handy when you're online, isn't much use when operating under field conditions, in a post-Armageddon environment, or for settling thermonuclear bar bets. Fortunately, with a little time, patience, and access to a suitable printer and office supplies, you can assemble your own pocket slide rule computer, just like the original—no batteries or Internet connection required!

You'll need to be able to print graphics (ideally in colour) from images in PNG (Portable Network Graphics) format with a specified and consistent scale. The rotating discs of the bomb computer must be printed on clear plastic with white areas of the image left clear. Most printers can print transparencies intended for overhead projectors which are suitable for this purpose.

Farming with Dynamite

Of course I like to read nontechnical books, although I read very slowly. Here are some that I heartily recommend:

When he volunteered to teach a Bible study course, Donald E. Knuth, computer scientist, master programmer, creator of TeX, inventor of Literate Programming, and author of The Art of Computer Programming, pondered the two main ways of reading the Bible.

Method 1: We can read it straight through, for context. By reading at normal speed, we can follow the flow of ideas and get intuitive impressions, just as the first readers and hearers of those words might have done. Or, Method 2: We can single out isolated verses, for meditation and/or scholarly study. By focusing on small details, it’s possible to understand the deeper significance of a passage.

Both of these ways are important. Method 2 is most satisfactory for group study, since Method 1 works best when a person can read at leisure and without interruption.

My idea for a Bible class was based on a fourth way to select Bible verses for study, making use of a mathematical principle that provides an effective way to gain knowledge about complicated things: A large body of information can be comprehended reasonably well by studying more or less random portions of the data. The technical term for this approach is stratified sampling.

Knuth’s idea was to pick a chapter and verse number, essentially at random (but with the chapter and verse numbers not so large they excluded too many shorter books and chapters), then examine that chapter and verse from each book in detail.

Author
Southworth, Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte, 1819-1899

Title
Capitola's Peril
A Sequel to 'The Hidden Hand'

Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth (December 26, 1819 – June 30, 1899) was an American writer of more than 60 novels in the latter part of the 19th century. She was the most popular American novelist of her day.

The Declaration of Independence of the United States of America by Thomas Jefferson