Antilibrary

Off the back of a post by Zenpundit regarding Umberto Eco’s ‘antilibrary’, Soob posed the following question: “What are three to five books on your shelf that lay unread and what knowledge do you hope to retrieve from them?”
This is kind of a haphazard tag, but here are my five:
1. Robert Dixon, The Baumgarten Corruption: [...]

Reading: De Landa’s 1000 Years of Nonlinear History

I can recommend Manuel De Landa’s A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (2000) with few reservations. His basic thesis is this:
In a very real sense, reality is a single matter-energy undergoing phase transitions of various kinds, with each new layer of accumulated “stuff” simply enriching the reservoir of nonlinear dynamics and nonlinear combinatorics available [...]