Coleman McCormick

Topic / books

111 posts
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September 16, 2024 • #

The Tech Canon →

My thoughts on the books that constitute Silicon Valley’s “canon” of essential, influential works.

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May 22, 2024 • #

Book Notes: How Buildings Learn →

My latest post is a deep dive on Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn. If you can’t tell from the length, this book is full of gold, and one of my favorites in a long time:

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March 23, 2024 • #

Dune read by Frank Herbert, vinyl records on Caedmon Records 1977 - 1982. Art by John Schoenherr & Frank Kelly Freas (‘The Banquet Scene’)

Incredible. Would love a hardcover set with these images.

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March 3, 2024 • #

The Zones of thought from Vernor Vinge’s eponymous science fiction series.

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February 22, 2024 • #

Great book, incredible illustrations.

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February 21, 2024 • #

Japanese cover for Gibson’s Neuromancer.

My favorite science fiction novel.

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February 19, 2024 • #

**Japanese cover for Gibson’s Neuromancer. **

My favorite science fiction novel.

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February 10, 2024 • #

The film adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation took some liberties in the narrative. But Alex Garland’s vision on the world, the twisted melange of organisms, the shroom-trip in the Southern Reach — all spot on.

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February 5, 2024 • #

A gene pool is carved and whittled through generations of ancestral natural selection to fit [a particular] environment. In theory a knowledgeable zoologist, presented with the complete transcript of a genome [the set of all the genes of an organism], should be able to reconstruct the environmental circumstances that did the carving. In this sense the DNA is a coded description of ancestral environments.

—In The Living Wild , Art Wolfe (2000)

(from David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity)

The organism is a key to decoding its environment.

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January 26, 2024 • #

The human use of human beings - Cybernetics and Society.

Man ↔ machine symbiosis.

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January 23, 2024 • #

This book is dense and fascinating. Highly recommended to anyone intrigued by how companies, organizations, or groups in general operate — the driving psychologies behind different types of orgs.

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Books of 2022

January 4, 2023 • #

The complete list of reads from 2022.

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A Reverse Dunkirk

November 6, 2020 • #

What if the Germans had used a different strategy in 1940?

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Readwise and Roam Research

September 8, 2020 • #

An overview of Readwise's new integration with Roam Research, to bring your Kindle highlights into your knowledge graph.

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On Legibility

July 31, 2020 • #

Riffs on James Scott's 'Seeing Like a State' and Venkatesh Rao's commentary on the book.

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Library Notes

July 20, 2020 • #

Publishing book summaries and notes in the Library.

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Book Light

July 10, 2020 • #

A new amber-color book light for nighttime reading.

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Current Reads

April 29, 2020 • #

Adding 'current reads' to my library section.

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Library JSON

April 16, 2020 • #

A proposal to build an open format for book data using json.

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Library 2.0

March 6, 2020 • #

Upgrading my library database to use Airtable.

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William Gibson on Agency

January 14, 2020 • #

William Gibson discusses his latest work and writing speculative fiction in the modern era.

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Reading Metrics

January 9, 2020 • #

Metrics about my reading habits in 2019.

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The Infinity Machine

December 22, 2019 • #

A book review and a personal story: immunotherapy and The Elegant Defense.

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Kindle for Mac

December 8, 2019 • #

The reading experience of e-books on a full desktop with Kindle for Mac.

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A Third Force

December 2, 2019 • #

A review of Graham Greene's 'The Quiet American'.

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Weaving Books Into the Web

November 15, 2019 • #

The Internet Archive is working on linking to scanned books for Wikipedia book citations.

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Book Haul, October

October 14, 2019 • #

The latest pickups from Chamblin's in Jacksonville.

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Stripe Press

August 26, 2019 • #

Stripe is publishing their own editions of classic books about human progress.

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Managerial Leverage

August 5, 2019 • #

A review of Andy Grove's 'High Output Management', the most useful business book.

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Shape Up

July 11, 2019 • #

The new ebook from the Basecamp team on product development.

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The Reading Diet

June 26, 2019 • #

A few notes on my recent reading habits, and on buying over renting books.

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Andy Grove on Meetings

June 21, 2019 • #

Andy Grove's timeless thoughts on the meeting as a medium for managerial work.

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A Neural Chernobyl

March 11, 2019 • #

A review of Bruce Sterling's 1992 collection of short stories, 'Globalhead'.

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A Vast Wilderness

January 27, 2019 • #

“The vast wilderness of Alaska in ‘Coming Into the Country’.”

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The Library

November 26, 2018 • #

Creating a library section for book reviews.

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2018 Reading List

October 16, 2018 • #

“Books I’ve read and have on my list for 2018.”

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Books of 2017

December 28, 2017 • #

Looking back at my favorite reads from 2017.

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Spacers and Earthmen

September 18, 2017 • #

Asimov's Caves of Steel and the beginnings of the Robot trilogy.

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Books of 2016

January 18, 2017 • #

A summary of favorite books I read in 2016.

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The Craft of Baseball

July 17, 2015 • #

I just finished reading George Will's 'Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball', his 1989 book that dives deep on the strategy of the game. He sits down with 4 separate professional baseball men to analyze the sport and its component parts: managing with Tony La Russa, hitting with Tony Gwynn, fielding with Cal Ripken, Jr., and pitching with Orel Hershiser.

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Upwhen and Downwhen

October 30, 2013 • #

Looking back at Asimov's time travel story, The End of Eternity.

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Spycraft

July 9, 2012 • #

A review of 'Spycraft', a book about the OTS.

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