Adrian > Recent Status Updates

Wow this is the moment of epiphany for me !

This book is definetly top 3 this year.
The way it explains the situation in Mali, Niger , Burkina Faso, Algeria and Sahel, countries which i didn't know shit about is amazing. From Jihadists to ethnicities , conflicts , foreign relations, border enforcement, geography and agricultural/farming problems is more than i have ever expected.
I feel like it opened an entire horizon of knowledge and further study for me.

Algerian jihadi groups destroyed by army (GIA/GSPC) expand into North Mali. Here they provide charity and money to local Tuareg miltias that want to separate from Bamako.
Its so interesting to see that its not a unilateral agreeement between Al Quaeda and local populations. Locals use Al queda for money , for separatist movements for prestige and even for politics etc just as al queda uses them.
Great book so far !

Now i understand why there are so many cities in Latin America with English/Irish names , like Cochrane, O'Higgins.
After the high enrollment during the napoleonic wars, afterwards there were more than 100000 british troops without wars to fight. So most of them started serving as mercenaries under Martin in Chile or Bolivar in Venezuela and Colombia in their wars for independence against the spanish crown.

This is going to be epic asf

Apple and Intel buy chips that can only be produced by Taiwan' TSMC, who, uses EUV litography tools made only by dutch ASML, which, in its machines uses lasers made only by german TRUMPF company, which relies on optics made only by german Carl Zeiss.
An ASML litography machine is 100 millions , a TSMC foundry is 100billion usd.
The monopoly is on a diferent dimension than even oil production and cant be changed.

I just looove how the author goes through the history of the integrated circuit giving insight into how Silicon Valley and big semiconductor companies like Bell Labs, Texas Instruments , Fairchild semiconductors came to be by selling first to the army and thento consumers and optimizing along the way.
Now i am in the mid 60s when Japanesse consumer companies (Sony, Sharp) take off.

This book is killing it ! A couple of pages in and i am already deep inside the production and supply chain of microchips but even mode interesting being the history of its emergence.

During the 80's Saudi starts pouring money to sunni countries to build mosques , and organizations to be seen as the protectors of Islam.
Iran starts pouring money in the Pakistani Shia community.
The lines are drawn, add some thousands of afghan mujahedeen , egyptian refugees (those who assasinated Saddat, including Zawahiri - later leader of Al Quaeda) , and you get a "Petri dish".

Oh America , as i am reading more and more on the subject of Middle East i realise how big you fucked up ousting Saddam Hussein....

Baath Party In Iraq was basically forwarding all the democratic and liberal policies that US has failed again and again to establish in whichever country it tried later on (Iraq,Afghanistan,Libya, Syria).

Iraq was also the only and most powerful bulwark against Revolutionary Iran...

During 1979, three events unfolded which would change the muslim world for the worse : Khomeini's Iranian Revolution, the hostage crysis in Mecca,Saudi Arabia(which transformed the monarchy; the king made a deal with the Wahhabi hardliners.The monarchy would get perpetual political support and would in turn guarantee the application of hardcore Islam domestically and beyond) and the
Soviet Invasion of Afganistan

Khomeini , Nasser, Saddat , Assad , King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, the various guerillas that formed the early Iranian Revolutionary Guardsmen, even frigging Yasser Arafat and Muammar Abbas from Palestine join the fray in this books.
Alrdy love this book !

Oh the irony , persian intellectuals (leftists, marxists etc) used Khomeini while in exile to stir up revolt and make the shah open to make reforms, however they were not aware that once Khomeini landed back in Teheran back to the high clergy, he would be out of their hands , freee to turn the revolution his way into one of the most oppresive regimes of our time, a regime which quickly murderded its former allies

This is going to be epic !

SLeonard Cohen a world known music artist finds himself in a rut , and goes to Israel right during the Yom Kippur war to do some soul searching , looking for inspiration.
He gets it right when performing concerts for the israeli soldiers heading to the Egyptian Sinai front.

Verses of his most famous song "Who by fire" is actually taken from a thousands year old prayer performed in a barracks ceremony. Brilliant!

First chapters covering finite fields and ellyptic curve cryptography even though interesting were actually quite hard to grok between python examples