Beren's Blog

Overall, I didn’t feel this book lived up to expectations. It might have been a function of reading it in small, disjointed blocks, but the book never seemed to tie together cohesively. The section on Richelieu’s early life and education and rise to power was good, but as soon as... [Read More]

I’ve just started reading this set of essays - http://ndupress.ndu.edu/Portals/68/Documents/Books/spacepower.pdf, which looks really interesting ( and reminded me that I need to do much more reading on Mahan), but before I start I thought I’d write up some of my own thoughts on space power and space combat, so as... [Read More]

I saw this in a used bookstore and it was so wonderfully obscure that I had to get it. Surprisingly it was actually pretty interesting. Georgia and the caucasus at that time were a meddly of warring factions and intrigue (as they have been throughout history). The general overview is... [Read More]

So, I just had a lecture on Monte-carlo sampling methods such as importance sampling, rejection-based sampling, and the beginnings of MCMC, and it was really interesting. Anyway, importance sampling is a pretty simple idea: [Read More]

I’ve read Massie’s other book on Peter the Great and thought it was good, so I decided to check this one out as well. [Read More]