[Luvianka]

Just because you asked for it, here I show you more Samba videos… Just kidding! Let’s talk about books, guys.

Caesar’s Messiah by Joseph Atwill. This book is fascinating. It’s about the theory that Christianity is a religion created by the Flavian Roman emperors for pure political reasons and that Jesus Christ never, ever existed, but he's a character tailored for vey specific purposes. Yes, the way you read it. The four main points of this book are:
Christianity did not originate among the lower classes in Judea. It was a creation of a Roman imperial family, the Flavians.
The Gospels were not written by the followers of a Jewish Messiah, but by the intellectual circle surrounding the three Flavian emperors: Vespasian and his two sons, Titus and Domitian.
The Gospels were written following the 66-73 CE war between the Romans and the Jews, and many of the events of Jesus’ ministry are satirical depictions of events from that war.
The purpose of Christianity was supersession. It was designed to replace the nationalistic and militaristic messianic movement in Judea with a religion that was pacifist and would accept Roman rule.
The book is divided into 16 chapters. In the first 5 chapters the author makes his point and convinces the reader (well, at least he convinced me) that Christianity is a big hoax and that its purported messiah never existed. For the average reader the book ends at page 156 (the book is 412 pages long) after that, the reading becomes a little dull. Don’t take me wrong the whole book is solid gold; but from the sixth chapter the author makes a very precise, very academic, rigorous exposition of his theory. I guess a Biblical scholar would find this very valuable, but if you are not a specialist the reading becomes slow. I guess it’s just a matter of time before you see this book adapted to the big screen.
Anyway, if you are an Atheist and you want to have an ace up your sleeve next time you have a heated discussion with a hillbilly, or if you have read and liked such books as Josephus’ War of the Jews, Tacitus’ The Annals or Suetonious’ The Twelve Caesars you are going to enjoy this book.


Palimpsest by Gore Vidal. I just reread (just for the sake of it) Gore Vidal’s Palimpsest. This is a memoir of the author’s first 40 years of live (the rest of them are captured in his other book ‘Point to Point Navigation’). Woven throughout are meditations on writing, history, politics and vivid depictions of people he has known such as the Kennedys, Eleanor Roosevelt, Tennessee Williams, Amelia Earhart, Jack Keouac, etc.
The book opens (The Small Bedroom at Merrywood) with a hilarious description of how Jacqueline Kennedy showed Nina Gore Auchincloss (Gore Vidal’s half sister) how to douche post sex just the very day Nina married Newton Steers in St. John’s Church, ‘the church of the presidents’ in Washington, DC.
This book is just fascinating and reads like a thunder, the elegant and energetic prose of Gore Vidal makes its magic.


Google's Page Rank and Beyond: The Science of Search Engine Rankings by Carl D. Meyer and Amy Langville. Have you ever wondered how a search machine works? Have you ever wondered why Google won the Search Machines’ War and just knocked out Yahoo!, All The Web, Lycos, etc., and why Bing is not doing any better than the previous ones? Have you ever wondered why Google searches have always been very precise, but since the coming of social networking (Facebook, Twitter, Blogspot, etc.) such searches have become micrometric, nanometric? Have you ever wondered how a post, a video, or just a tweet becomes viral in just seconds, while a whole and well organized site could be buried in anonymity for years. Well, the answers to those questions are in this book. The authors explained the mathematical principle behind Google: An adjacency gigantic, apocalyptic, infinite matrix that relates hyperlinks to certain words. Then this matrix is adjusted through a diagonalization process using eigenvectors, according to the words typed in the search box, and that is, a search is born. It’s incredible to understand that since the core material Google works is the millions of hyperlinks that interweave Internet, every one of them regarded to one or some words, every time you post something in Facebook, Twitter or a blog you are doing nothing but working for Google and just for free. The text is well organized and the reading is fine. The book includes some Matlab routines the reader can use to assemble his own search machine. Important: This book is not a best seller which tells the story of two graduate students (Larry Page and Sergei Brin) who built an economic empire and become billionaires overnight. It’s not a book about the conspiracy theory which tells that Google and its founders are just a front of a vast NSA and CIA operation to gather private information of literally every person in the World and control the Internet. This is a mathematics book and you need basic knowledge of matrix theory and linear algebra to understand it.

Now, if you care a shit about these three books, please meet Miss World Ass 2012, Colombian model Karen del Castillo: http://goo.gl/y89k2