A Week ofUps and Downs.

Well, there are good weeks and bad weeks. I guess overall the week rates as neutral.

Good:
My new bike is a Sequoia Elite. Its a lot faster than my old bike. Its a big upgrade from my old hybrid. I've outfitted it with a rack, and I'm still deciding on a bag. Since commuting by metro costs $4 a day, by the end of summer I will have saved in commuting most of the cost of the bike. Unless it rains a lot.

I got the top grade in my strategy class for the paper I wrote. Strategy is my weakest class, even if this is IT strategy.

I had a fantastic dinner Saturday night. DF and I went out to a brewpub near his work. I had Moroccan Chicken on a bed of couscous. Very good spices. And good beer.

Dogfish Head Aprihop. Very good seasonal beer.

The bad:
I lost my keys. It costs $200 per key to get my car keys replaced. It also forces me to get a new bike lock, since I now don't have the key to my BIC-able Kryptonite. I also lost the key to the storage room. Everything else I have a copy of.

Power struggle at work. I am trying to assert some level of consistency in the QA process, and getting very strong push back from everyone else.

I either have bad allergies (which I haven't had before) or a really annoying cold. Runny nose, sneezing, watery eyes. Claritin didn't help. I took the day off today and slept all afternoon.

I lost my replacement checks... then I found them 4 days later. After the check I needed to send in was late. I am undertaking a complete cleaning of my bedroom.... it needs it badly. I can't find anything.

Classical Document Find

News

If they get some of the missing documents from Rome and Greece back, that would be amazing. We have a dearth of knowledge from Greece and Rome. Most of what we can actually read is second hand quotations of the primary sources, and even those are sparse.

It sounds like these fragments are partial, and will only add small amounts to what we know, even with the addition of 5 million words (~120 single spaced 8 1/2 by 11 pages). But its still a lot more than we had.

Political philosophy

From a number of the websites/blogs I've been reading lately, I've discovered that I need to know more about various political philosophies. Namely, that while I know the general gist of something like Jefferson's view on government, I do not know what is actual argument was. I see such comments as 'noone can argue that taxes are more', I know that its not true. I know that someone had extremely valid arguments for them. But I cannot remember them. I have turned to the
wikipedia for a starting list. I have read some of these before.

So, my reading list is:
Plato's Republic (reread, forgotten much of it)
Aristotle's Politics (again, reread)
Magna Carta
Machiavelli's The Prince (reread)
Locke's Two Treatises of Civil Government
Hobbes' Leviathan
Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus
Rousseau's The Social Contract (reread)
Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality
The Federalist Papers
Smith's Wealth of Nations (well, summary of. Its rather dense)
Burke's Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (I think this is a reread)
Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France
Paine's Rights of Man
Emerson's The American Scholar
de Tocqueville's Democracy in America (reread)
Mill's On Liberty
Mill's On Representative Government
Max & Engel's Das Kapital (summary, definitely not that masochistic)
Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
Galbraith's American Capitalism

Unfortunately, once you get to the 20th century this becomes much more difficult, as everything becomes much more specialized. Economists, political scientists, philosophers all exist in their own arenas, whereas before then they tended to be mixed and dealt across areas. Most early philosophers were mathematicians, but now many eschew mathematics. In addition, there are few major thinkers. There are people who are fantastic minds in their area of specialization, but I haven't heard of any book that changes the notion of how we perceive society or government at anything even approaching the scale of these previous books.