What good books have you read lately?

I'll start. Just finished reading "The End of Detoit" which details the demise of the Big Three. Was an OK book, although some points were repetitive.

Currently reading the "The Da Vinci Code." Excellent so far, and as a lover of history it's right up my alley.

I enjoy reading novels as well as European history.

Current favorites are "The Nanny Diaries" - a slightly 'girly' book, very well written, as well as "Inside the Third Reich" by Albert Speer- a classic first hand historical account. Reading it for the second time. Stephan Hunter is another current fav author right now.

Anyone?

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'90 300SE 298k
-300K and it gets put into retirement.
'80 300D 255k Purchased new by family in 1980.

Had a:
1973 220 (gas)
1980 300SD
1992 400E

TEXTBOOKS!!

Hopefully, after school's done, I'll get a chance to read "Teeth of the Tiger" by Tom Clancy. I'm a big fan of the Jack Ryan series; that's the only one that I haven't read yet.

Before school started back up, I read the entire "Cat Who" series (a group of 25 or so short murder mysteries) by Lillian Jackson Braun.

I'm an avid reader; just don't have time at the moment, courtesy of school...normally, I can go through a book in about a week.

If i am so lucky get have time to read, i read about Java programming and application servers..
Not exactly what broadens your mind on the big questions in life but a 'must' for the career..

Freestyler

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Never criticize someone until you've walked a mile in his shoes. That way, when you do, you're a mile away -and you have his shoes!


'86 300E optically converted to '95 E300 (Sold)
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-Black leather
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Mostly I read sci/tech stuff dealing with my job. However, I have as my final mission in life to finish Durel's "History of Civilization". Excellent writing and in 12 volumes covers an awful lot of history. I read the first 3 volumes in a couple of years but getting through vol 4 is tough. I recently read Caesars, "Gallic Campaign" as a result of vol 4.

I'm also reading a survey of phenomenology. Its not easy reading.

A more interesting list is the books I've tried and faled to read. Great literature of ours and all times. "Gilgamesh" half-read and cast aside. "Laws of Thought" begun and now a dust collector on a forgotten shelf. Seminal books of art and science. All picked-up with high goals and dropped in low defeat. Perhaps my greatest failure was "Origin of the Species." I'm a evolutionist and botanist, for goodness sake and can't even read the most important work ever written in the biological sciences.

Similarly, I have been repeatedly defeated by, "Beowulf". Ah-hah, but in that I've cheated! I bought a 2-disc CD set in which Beowulf is translated into modern English and read aloud by an Irish poet. Believe it or not, its a pretty good story.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0141802472/ref=pd_bxgy_text_2_cp/026-3549235-1783618

Botnst

"Opening the XBox"-its about the creation of the XBox and how MS planned to compete with Sony/Nintendo, and how it was designed, etc. Pretty good and interesting to me.

I read threads on Mercedesshop.com

Me too,

also benzworld.org, mb-diesel-cars.com, 500sec.com, need2speed.web.com, mbworld.org , w126.com, mercedes500.de.

The rest of the time I am either working or in school. I need to get a life,... or a girlfriend.

Bruce Anderson's Porsche 911 Perfomance Handbook

Wayne Dempsey's Porsche 911 Engines

About to rebuild & upgrade (to 400 hp) my 911 turbo engine myself - dumb or what.

John Seymour's The New Complete Book of Self Sufficiency. This one deals with small-scale farming, murdering animals, that kind of thing.

Assorted biology papers - usually biodiversity. What is biodiversity - you tell me. Is it an international conspiracy of treehuggers?

I've layed off the 'what is consciousness' philosophy texts recently, they were making my head hurt.

Last book I read for pure entertainment was Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials. Good read, but probably aimed at 'young adults'.

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'79 280SE
'87 560SEL
'83 280CE
'01 Nissan Micra
'98 VW Passat
'83 911 turbo

What, you're not one of the Information Theory guys? I wrote a program one time (mid-80's, FORTRAN IV, Univac) that resampled singletons, then pairwise, then treys, etc looking at the rates of change in conditional probabilities on the assumption that the slope behavior should tell me something about the underlying complexity of the system.

Well, I thought it might. After I got the program coded correctly so far as I could tell, I ran it on real datasets and couldn't understand what the heck I'd done. It was at that moment when I realized that I could devise a clever tool for a use that I didn't understand.

That sent me out of grad school and finally to your, "I've layed off the 'what is consciousness' philosophy texts recently, they were making my head hurt."

Now I make maps.

B

Ah, FORTRAN..I still use it!

Yes, I've thought I had a bright idea & developed a program to apply some fancy method, then realised the output was more complex than the input. Always a bad sign.

I like drawing maps too, but just simple-minded ARC GIS stuff showing polygons & coloured dots etc. Looks good though - amazing how it impresses the admin budget drones who snore at the stuff you think is really clever - show them a coloured map & they think you're a genius.

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'79 280SE
'87 560SEL
'83 280CE
'01 Nissan Micra
'98 VW Passat
'83 911 turbo

Corporate Real Estate: Executive Strategies for Profit Making

Sssssshhhiiiittt man...don't let that out! Daayem, that's the holiest of holies you're so flippant about.

If you want money from gov:

Never use more than three colors;

Never use more than two charts or maps;

Never take more than 7 minutes;

Never reference work funded less than you propose;

Always use at least one colon or semicolon in the title;

Greek symbols are always good;

Always have at least one author from a major university;

Foreign sounding names, especially Chinese or Indian means there's hellish math--get one of those guys on as an author;

Always have the full-blown fifty-page referenced proposal at-hand if somebody asks for it;

Always have an extremely esoteric reprint to hand-out with you as primary author;

Your reprint for hand-out doesn't necessarily have to me related to your proposal;

Always imply a useful payout, even if your intent is theoretical.

Botnst

I can see you're an old hand at this. That's trade secrets you're broadcasting - should the wrong person read this, we could be out of a job, maybe even have to work for a living.

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'79 280SE
'87 560SEL
'83 280CE
'01 Nissan Micra
'98 VW Passat
'83 911 turbo

'The Bell Jar' by Sylvia Plath. creepy look at depression.

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dtf
1994 E320 Wagon (Died @ 308,669 miles)
1995 E300 Diesel (228,000)
1999 E300 Turbodiesel ( died @ 255,000)
2006 Toyota Tundra SR5 AC 4X4 (115,000 miles) rusted frame - sold to chop shop
2011 Audi A4 Avant (165,000 miles) Seized engine - donated to Salvation Army
BMW 330 xi 6 speed manual (175,034 miles)
2014 E350 4Matic Wagon 128,000 miles
2018 Dodge Ram 21,000 miles

"The Enemy Within" by Michael Savage