(Part 3) Best products from r/todayilearned

There seems to be a lot mindless hate here toward him, but being halfway through his biography, The Snowball i see him as a brilliant, humble and rational man, who admires honesty above all things. The hatred we seem to have towards the banking industry culture (and also large investors by association) is vastly different to the way Buffet has approached his life, and i don't mean just by living frugally.

Read the chapter on Salomon where a large financial co in 1991 was thoroughly mismanaged and almost went under. It had a casino like approach (sound familiar?), and whole branches of employees who still expected to be paid huge bonuses as the co was almost going under. The way Buffet approached this when he was made interim president was something quite eye opening considering this all happened in 91.

He has always argued that the rich pay too little taxes. The anecdote about his secretary is something he's been talking about for decades (and not just now when Obama is trying to use some of Buffet's clout to push for these tax increases). He's also consistently argued that capital gains tax should be increased and that the estate tax should never have been reduced/eliminated. He is a big belief that America should never develop a rich class, and that the society created and funded by the government that allowed the rich to get rich in the first place should be given to every one and every generation. The ovarian lottery concept is something i always bring up to those who believe that they earned everything on their on merit (next time someone argues for tax cuts for the rich ask them whether if they had a choice where they were born would they choose to be born in the US with taxes or be born in Bangladesh and pay no tax).

Even some of his conduct has helped shaped financial systems for the better, like making Coca Cola (who hes on the board for) be one of the first companies to put stock options for management on the books. This helped other big co came around and it eventually became mandatory (The very fact that it was optional before seems ludicrous, and shows the many ways the financial industry simply views regulations as constraints on maximizing profit rather than the rules that govern a system to ensure it works efficiently)

There a whole lot of other stuff and I really recommend people read that book (though it is long), merely for a glance at how it is possible to be a moral and ethical investor and manager. It's obviously slanted toward showing him in a favourable light but that doesn't negate any of the good he's done (and i havent even mentioned the philanthropic work hes doing with Gates, or the fact hes giving nearly all of his money away upon his death)

Hey there buddy.

I'm an alcoholic and smoked for 15 years until 8 months ago. I know exactly how you feel and totaly hear what you said in that comment and wanted to share how I quit, cause I tried a million times and couldn't do it until I tried this as a last whim before trying Chantix, which I really didn't want to do.


It sounds crazy, but it was a book with the cheesiest title ever. The Easy Way to Quit Smoking by Allen Carr.


It's hard to explain, but this worked for me, a pack and a half a day smoker of 15 days. Put this book down and put down my last cigarette with it (you're supposed to keep smoking while you read it) and never picked one up again. The craziest part was it actually wasn't that hard. It's called the easy way and it actually made it pretty easy. After that, I loaned it to a friend of mine who was a pack a day smoker for longer than me. He read it in two days and quit also. He is still clean, too. The best way I can describe it is that it made me realize I will not only still enjoy, but enjoy everything I did while smoking even more. Even if it's just standing outside breathing air instead of smoking.


I probably sound like I'm trying to sell books here but I'm really just trying to help another alcoholic smoker quit one deadly vice. Hell, I wlil buy you this book if you want to promise me you'll read it. Just PM me.


Good luck!

Thanks for posting this link, I'm not a smoker, but my significant other is. I've already began reading it, and I don't want this to sound harsh, because I'm confident that this is a good book. I've noticed there are quite a lot of typos in the intro, half the time he says "he" instead of "be" and in a few places there is a number "1" instead of an "I."

You might not know, but are these errors in the hard copy of the book as well? Actually I just noticed that there are entire lines of text missing in a few places, I can't imagine this going through a publisher.

Wow, I just looked it up on Amazon and it has 875 ratings which average 5 stars. I used to work for Amazon and that's the best rated book I've ever seen. I appreciate the recommendation, and this may seem like a silly post, but I've already typed this out aha.

http://www.amazon.com/Allen-Carrs-Easyway-Stop-Smoking/dp/0615482155/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1346436428&sr=8-1&keywords=allan+carr

This is a chapter in Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think by Peter Diamandis.

Book: http://www.amazon.com/Abundance-Future-Better-Than-Think/dp/1451614217/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1377569779&sr=8-1&keywords=abundance+the+future+is+better+than+you+think

I saw Peter Diamandis speak at a convention where he gave away this book. His speech was pretty amazing and the book is even better. Here's a short version of the speech I saw him give, this one was for TED. http://www.ted.com/talks/peter_diamandis_abundance_is_our_future.html Around 7:00 mark he speaks about aluminum. The book/speech are very entertaining as well as educational, do yourself a favor and watch the video and/or go buy the book.

Diamandis is a badass. Plain and simple.

> ... and totally not known even remotely enough in general.

I think this is one of the reasons I'm so open about recommending his work. He seems to have the ability to take topics that most people may not be exposed to and make them comprehensible. It's similar to the way I feel about Mary Roach in books like Stiff, Bonk, and Gulp.

Along with that, Bryson has some purely entertaining works like A Walk in the Woods, Notes From a Small Island, and The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir that are just a joy to read. I guess I'll stop now because I'm starting to feel like shill.

Edit: spelling is hard.

Here's a vegan DHA-EPA Omega-3 supplement: https://www.amazon.com/Deva-Nutrition-DHA-EPA-Delayed-Release/dp/B005R5CARY

You may also want Kelp for iodine: https://www.amazon.com/Natures-Way-Kelp-600mg-VCaps/dp/B00024D1ZA and I know you are already getting your B-12, but for everyone else, I recommend taking as a liquid sublingually https://www.amazon.com/dp/B015YDVT48

Beyond that just make sure you get your leafy greens (kale, collards, spinach, broccoli, etc) for calcium and iron and you should be pretty good to go.

Plugging Can't Stop Won't Stop as it's one of the best chronicles of the origins of the movement/music/culture. DJ Kool Herc was definitely the father of it all.

The book even traces the exact day he took to the turntables at a dance hall for his sisters birthday. Hip Hop history is truly amazing.

If anyone wants to read a really good book about these trees and the people who study them, I recommend The Wild Trees by Richard Preston. Among other really awesome interesting things, it talks about the discovery and exploration of the two trees mentioned in the article.

I recommend anyone interested more about Carlos Hathcock read:

Marine Sniper

Silent Warrior

Marine Sniper is probably one of the greatest accounts of the Vietnam war. Carlos Hathcock is a sniper and long range shooting legend. He is pretty much responsible concepts like the M107 SASR, Hathcock bolted a fixed 8x optic to a M2 and set the record for the longest confirmed kill at something like 2500 yards.

I can't think of any figure who influenced my decision to enlist more than Hathcock, not to be a scout/sniper or anything, but just his examples of selflessness and courage. I read Marine Sniper when I was pretty young, and I swear every year in school when they made us do a book report I would just re-examine it and write something a bit different about it.

As for "embellishment", that is 100% unfounded. The man never bragged about anything in his life.

Less than 30 days later 400,000 people watched a rock concert near Woodstock NY that would have a much larger influence on much of the populace.

> The term Woodstock Nation refers specifically to the attendees of the original 1969 Woodstock Music and Arts Festival that took place from August 15–17 on the farm of Max Yasgur near Bethel, New York. It comes from the title of a book written later that year by Yippie activist Abbie Hoffman, describing his experiences at the festival.

> More generally, however, the term is used as a catch-all phrase for those individuals of the baby boomer generation in the United States who subscribed to the values of the American counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s. The term is often interchangeable with hippie, although the latter term is sometimes used as an oath of derision. The characteristic traits of members of the Woodstock Nation include, but are not limited to, concern for the environment, embracing of left-wing political causes and issues allied to a strong sense of political activism, eschewing of traditional gender roles, vegetarianism, and enthusiasm for the music of the period.

> The Woodstock Nation also counts as members individuals from later generational cohorts, as the underground cultural values and attitudes of 1960s bohemian communities such as Haight-Ashbury and Laurel Canyon have seeped ever more into the mainstream with the passage of time

The influence has been credited up to the early days of the personal computer.

> What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, is a 2005 non-fiction book by John Markoff. The book details the history of the personal computer, closely tying the ideologies of the collaboration-driven, World War II-era defense research community to the embryonic cooperatives and psychedelics use of the American counterculture of the 1960s.

Post Apollo 11 moon missions struggled to find a TV audience.

Not trying to be a pedant but for anyone trying to find the book the title is spelled Daemon. Definitely second the recommendation though, I loved the book. I'd also recommend the sequel, Freedom^^TM.

If anyone wants to read a good account of the tulip craze, read Michael Pollan's "Botany of Desire." It looks at 4 plants as 4 examples of how humans have interacted with plants throughout history for various reasons: tulips for beauty, potatoes for storage, marijuana for changing consciousness, and apples for breeding new varieties. Its a fun read!

PBS has it online for free: http://video.pbs.org/video/1283872815/

The book is here: http://www.amazon.com/The-Botany-Desire-Plants-Eye-World/dp/0375760393

There is a great book written about his experience. It's a great read, and a powerful narrative about life as a soviet fighter pilot.

It's called "Mig Pilot".

I was asked for some by the person who my initial post was a response to.

I provide some sources in my reply:

Another redditor suggest this book

In my reply I suggest, but didn't link to Heroes

Heroes is a great book for understanding history since the end of WWII.

You should check out this book: http://www.amazon.com/Empire-Summer-Moon-Comanches-Powerful/dp/1416591060

I had a customer recommend it to me. I've only gotten a few chapters in, but it's pretty well written and I'm liking it.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned the book Viper Pilot by Dan Hampton. An amazing book by a Wild Weasel pilot who flew the F-16CJ. Although it is packed full of information from how one becomes a pilot in the Air Force, the Wild Weasel mission, to fighter pilot culture, it reads just like a novel. The audiobook is also excellent - the recitation of some of the comms on the 1st night of the Gulf War is alone worth the price of admission. I can't recommend either highly enough.

While looking up the book again, I discovered that the author also released a new book, The Hunter Killers, last year about the original Wild Weasels in Vietnam. I obviously have not read it yet, but I bet it is excellent if you want to dive into the history of the mission.

If anyone is interested I've read two books by Charles Henderson about Carlos Hathcock. They were both great reads and I would recommend them to anyone who's interested in his story.

http://www.amazon.com/Marine-Sniper-93-Confirmed-Kills/dp/0425181650/ref=pd_bxgy_b_text_b

http://www.amazon.com/Silent-Warrior-Snipers-Vietnam-Continues/dp/0425188647/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_b

If you enjoyed watching Fan Boys (and enjoy reading) you should check out Ready Player One. Both the movie Fan Boys and the book Ready Player One were written by the same dude.

Also, his nerd credentials check out. He uses technological/MMO terms correctly without spewing too much made-up bullshit.


Edit: Sorry for the ambiguous wording, I meant that both Fan Boys the movie and Ready Player One, the book, were written by the same guy. As far as I know, there are no plans for a Ready Player One movie.

completely agree ! reading a great book at the moment called "Abundance; the future is better than we think https://www.amazon.com/Abundance-Future-Better-Than-Think/dp/1451614217 which backs up what you just said.

Revolution in The Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made
Written by a member of the original Mac team
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1449316247/ref=mp_s_a_1_3?qid=1394998489&sr=8-3&pi=SY200_QL40

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
The only official biography, very in depth on the later years, but glosses over a lot of the early years when he was in my opinion a giant prick.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1451648537/ref=mp_s_a_1_2?qid=1394998612&sr=8-2&pi=SY200_QL40

What the dormouse said: How the sixties counterculture shaped the Internet

I don't have anything Atari specific to recommend but this book is excellent and covers a lot of the early people and companies that invented all of this

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0143036769/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=1394998761&sr=8-1&pi=SY200_QL40

Just fyi, you're talking about the people that crashed a probe into mars because one guy was using metric and another was using imperial system.

You should read Richard Feynman's What Do You Care What Other People Think?: Further Adventures of a Curious Character and then come back and say what you think of NASA

Well, he could also turn his mansion into a deathtrap to try to get lots of publicity for his video game company. Have his daemon short buy his own video game company right before issuing a press release indicating that that company has a backdoor in it, tanking the stock and giving the daemon a tremendous amount of money to enact the rest of his plan.
If that story sounds exciting, I suggest reading the novel it's from, Daniel Suarez's Daemon.

If you like stuff like this, I recommend reading Ready Player One! by Earnest Cline (also available in audiobook read by Wil Wheaton).

Wasn't this a front page post last week? And it's still complete bullshit. Do you need to own a guitar to like rock music? The people that popularized hip hop like Grand Master Flash and Afrika Bambaataa were already established DJs by 1977.

If you want to learn the actual story of hip hop's creation and rise, read the book Can't Stop Won't Stop. It's fantastic.

I recommend reading The Wild Trees, by Richard Preston. Yes, it is a nonfiction book about trees (mostly Giant Redwoods), but it focuses on people searching for the tallest trees in the world and is a quite fun read.

"What Do You Care What Other People Think?": Further Adventures of a Curious Character

http://www.amazon.com/What-Care-Other-People-Think/dp/0393320928/

The best way to ensure you have enough iodine in your diet is to take a kelp supplement, one pill a day contains more than enough iodine you need.

I take this one.

In Viper Pilot Dan Hampton talks about his time in the air directly after 9/11. He does a good job conveying how much confusion there was. He was actually given the green light from the ground to take out a SEAL team helicopter. Luckily he stayed cool and called everyone off before that chopper was downed.

It's a lot more complex than you might think. I'm not an expert by any means, but it's worth reading some history books to learn more. One I just read that was very interesting was Empire of the Summer Moon

Get his book. Pretty amazing story

Edit: Link fix

Edit2: Actually the title is wrong. On the return trip, he actually ran back instead of crawling. In his book he crawled for three days and inched his way towards his target, ants started to bite him, and NVA patrolled nearly on top of him. He did all this until he reached his location. After he took the shot, he said he woke the hornet's nest. It took him a very short amount of time to run the distance he crawled for 3 days.

Internet search will find quite a few sources verifying. There's a general consensus, it seems, that this is legit.


In his book The Dark Net, author Jamie Bartlett recounts how it went down:

>In 1972, long before eBay or Amazon, students from Stanford University in California and MIT in Massachusetts conducted the first ever online transaction. Using the Arpanet account at their artificial intelligence lab, the Stanford students sold their counterparts a tiny amount of marijuana.

The bongwater-flavored e-commerce origin story isn’t a secret—John Markoff also wrote about it in his 2005 book What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry. But it’s been stuck good in my maw (I am now a 92-year-old prospector) since I read The Dark Net while Ross Ulbricht’s life sentence for his crimes operating the Silk Road came in.


https://gizmodo.com/ask-the-dark-net-author-about-the-internets-underworld-1708463753

The title makes him seem like a bad kid. He was a genius who was able to fashion an incredibly sophisticated device without any help at all. He would pose as a teacher and get elements from agencies and then use household products for the rest. He would have been able to make a full nuclear reactor if he wasn't pulled over with the thing in the back of his car. He didn't think that the radiation would affect him that much and especially not any of his neighbors. The book about him is fascinating.

Thanks for mentioning "Botany of Desire". Sounds very interesting. Will give it a read. (Amazon link)

A good book on the subject is Killing Hope by William Blum

what i was thinking.

I think they've known for a long time that smoking in America in on the decline, so they:

1. target people in other countries and still export tobacco.
   
2. Start buying up 'Quit Smoking' type properties.
   
   
   Sidenote: I quit 4 months ago (probably my 15th attempt) and did it cold turkey for the first time. All I can say is that while nicotine replacement may help some people, it always kept me hooked and coming back for more. Cold turkey + The Easy Way to Quit Smoking are what worked for me.

Freedom^TM is actually a pretty decent book. Make sure to read Daemon first.

I read it in this somewhere, his wife and children got generous shares of Berkshire Hathaway stock. I forgot the amount, but somewhere in the ballpark of 20 million worth of stock (at the time) to each of his kids, enough to live well on but not exactly uber rich.

I read the book. Marine Sniper: 93 Confirmed Kills. It details all of this stuff. He was the father of the Marine Scout Sniper program and an all around BAMF. He is pretty much a god in Marine history, along with Lewis "Chesty" Puller, Dan Daly, Smedley Butler, John Basilone, etc.

It was called "Tulip mania" you can read about it here and here some really crazy stuff.

EDIT: srry, didn't actually click the link haha but regardless some further reading if it piques your interest

Viper Pilot is a great read about the Wild Weasels. http://www.amazon.com/Viper-Pilot-Memoir-Air-Combat/dp/006213034X

The Amazon reviews of this book are great.

It was also mentioned in Ready Player One, in a key part of the story. Great read btw.

"Empire of the Summer Moon" is a great read about her and her son, the last tribal leader of the Comanche

Edit: here's the link, I'm on mobile and can't figure out the high-speed way to rename links... https://www.amazon.com/dp/1416591060/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_Mr50xbSRZVZCR

The reviews on this one are great too: A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates

Was a great book:
http://www.amazon.com/Radioactive-Boy-Scout-Backyard-Nuclear/dp/037550351X

If you like stories like this you should check out Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex. Turns out we've had a lot of weird theories about sex and done some weirder things to test them.

> "The book is a promising reference concept, but the execution is somewhat sloppy. Whatever generator they used was not fully tested. The bulk of each page seems random enough. However at the lower left and lower right of alternate pages, the number is found to increment directly. "

The reviews on Amazon are amazing: http://www.amazon.com/Million-Random-Digits-Normal-Deviates/product-reviews/0833030477/ref=cm_cr_dp_see_all_btm?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending

Warren Buffet definitely has a finely-crafted image. He doesn't exactly come from poverty; his dad was a multi-term US Congressman.

If you read "Snowball" though, you see where a lot of who he is comes from; he owned a farm when he was 13 and had a ton of side businesses on the side growing up. A lot of his business sense is innate. [source]

However the book also goes into how screwed up his life is b/c he's successful, and ends up being more of a cautionary tale than anything else. He never had anything resembling a happy marriage and largely ignored his kids growing up. I think while he comes across as a well-balanced 'everyman', his screwed-up personal life really reflects how he sacrificed so much of his life in running Berkshire Hathaway.

http://www.amazon.com/Marine-Sniper-93-Confirmed-Kills/dp/0425103552

There is a trilogy, if you will, written about him. I read them all a few years ago and they were great.
I think the greatest thing he did was when he earned the Silver star for saving 7 other marines lives. The book also talks about how his spotter, Burke, was killed while serving.

Tall trees are fascinating - http://www.amazon.com/The-Wild-Trees-Passion-Daring/dp/0812975596

Mig Pilot

The edition I have has a caricature of the guy on the front. Kind of looks like Chevy Chase. I'll see if I can find a link and edit it into this comment.

Edit- Found it http://www.amazon.com/Mig-Pilot-Final-Escape-Belenko/dp/0380538687

Also on google books: http://books.google.com/books/about/MiG_Pilot.html?id=KuS4AAAAIAAJ

You should check out his book. It was a very good read.

There is a really good book about this as well...

http://www.amazon.com/Mig-Pilot-Final-Escape-Belenko/dp/0380538687

There's a book about this, too, called The Radioactive Boy Scout. I just finished reading it last week, and it is very good. Not a long read, and it gives you enough chemistry and physics to follow along.

I read the book in about 10th grade by choice (2006) and it was a very interesting book.

I read this book about 4 years ago about Carlos Hathcock. You have no idea. Great read.

http://www.amazon.com/Marine-Sniper-93-Confirmed-Kills/dp/0425181650/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1312396748&sr=8-1

The study that generated the data using a plethysmograph on female genitalia found the most response from the smell of cucumber and good & plenty.

I orginally read it in Mary Roach's Bonk

Apparently it was from a study in 1998 by Hirsch.

I really recommend anyone who is interested in Orwell or Huxley's perspectives also read books like Abundance which lay out a detailed statistical case for why so much shit in the world today is measurably and immeasurably better than it ever has been.

The main positive and negative of the modern age isn't so much we live in some realization of a literary dystopia but that the stakes are much higher as a global society than they ever have been. We can easily mess things up in terms of climate change, nuclear war, and other kinds of societal breakdown but we are also on the verge of eradicating some of the greatest and historical problems mankind has ever faced.

People forget how much a fact of life things like plagues were. Philadelphia just straight up shut down as the US capital three times between 1776 and 1800 alone due to random outbreaks of plague to say nothing of how things were across the world.

ht tp://ww w.amazon.com/gp/product/0833030477?ie=UTF8&tag=danlewissspor-20&linkCode=shr&camp=213733&creative=393177&creativeASIN=0833030477

interesting

Mary Roach devotes a chapter to this in a book about sex.

i read his book in one sitting.

I found it especially interesting to read how he lost faith in his government's propaganda line.

> marine sniper.

Make sure you know what you're talking about when you try to correct people, man.

http://www.amazon.com/Marine-Sniper-93-Confirmed-Kills/dp/0425103552/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1412492245&sr=8-1&keywords=marine+sniper

Given that the first TCP/IP connections were only used by military, banks, and universities, it's not entirely unlikely that the first transaction by a consumer was cannabis. I could picture a group of IS students making a network for such devious deeds.

Still, it will probably never be known because it was 40years ago and a bunch of he said she said to try to find out the literal first transaction. We at least can verify that it is the first known/recorded.

>In 1971 or 1972, Stanford students using Arpanet accounts at Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory engaged in a commercial transaction with their counterparts at Massachussetts Institute of Technology. Before Amazon, before eBay, the seminal act of e-commerce was a drug deal. The students used the network to quietly arrange the sale of an undetermined amount of marijuana.
>
>Source
>
>Article

Funny enough this was also the year that Nixon declared the "War on Drugs", and the Stanford Prison Experiments happened.

Yeah here is a link.

http://www.amazon.com/Marine-Sniper-93-Confirmed-Kills/dp/0425103552

Don't lots of random generators sample atmospheric noise to generate random numbers, things like that? ISn't the problem that something being apparently random is one thing, but a lot of "random" things are, perversely, predictably random.

*Or for a thrilling read: http://www.amazon.com/Million-Random-Digits-Normal-Deviates/product-reviews/0833030477

Viper Pilot by Dan Hampton is a great read about F-16s on Wild Weasel missions in both Iraq Wars. These guys had balls of steel.

In Marine Sniper he describes his escape as being significantly faster than his entry but only because he was crawling prone at a somewhat normal speed, not the snail's pace he used getting into position. Wikipedia says: "He had to crawl back instead of run when soldiers started searching..."

Read Dan Hampton's Viper Pilot: http://www.amazon.com/Viper-Pilot-Memoir-Air-Combat/dp/006213034X/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1462823120&sr=8-5&keywords=dan+hampton

Awesome book. 10% of what is written here is folksy bullshit.

for a different take on climbing redwoods see the book The Wild Trees. Linked the amazon cuz the wiki isnt very helpful

Marine Sniper

Check this book out. Camanches were gnarly

download numbers (.zip)

list of all the numbers (.pdf)

buy the book on Amazon

Marine Sniper

Read this book RIGHT NOW http://www.amazon.com/Marine-Sniper-93-Confirmed-Kills/dp/0425103552

There was a book about it.

Ask the people who led the PC revolution.

Check out the book Viper Pilot by Dan Hampton. Story of F-16 Wild Weasels in Iraq in 2000s.

I'm betting this one: https://www.amazon.com/Allen-Carrs-Easy-Stop-Smoking/dp/0615482155

I could be totally wrong, but I've had multiple patients tell me that this is what got them to quit.

He talks about remorse and duty; members of his branch openly showing disdain, training, well as, training.

Edit- linked the wrong book.

Edit2- not sure why the downvotes. Oh well.

this book

He's also shot an enemy sniper through his scope. They were stalking each other at the time and Carlos said he saw a flash of light, the reflection off the enemy scope, and he fired.

Great book to read: 93 Confirmed Kills

The man is a legend.