Topic
books
- Kindle Features and Areas for Improvement
The Kindle launched in 2007, making ebooks accessible as a format not only because of a compelling device, but also a marketplace for content. Suddenly most books were available instantly for $10 a piece. No more tripā¦
- Books and Microdata
Tom posted a while back about his book review section, and adding schema.org microdata to those pages for book review-related data. The promise of these schema standards is to provide a semantic markup framework for uā¦
- Weekend Reading: Internet of Beefs, Company Culture, and Secular Cycles
š„© The Internet of Beefs Venkatesh Rao has assembled a most compelling explanation for how the internet polarization machine works: The semantic structure of the Internet of Beefs is shaped by high-profile beefs betweā¦
- William Gibson on Agency
A fun piece on William Gibson's latest work of speculative fiction, Agency. I've read a bunch of his bibliography, but my favorites (in order) are still Neuromancer and its sequel, Count Zero. Here's an interesting biā¦
- Reading Metrics
Since I began tracking my books in a spreadsheet in 2018, I've got a bunch of data I can now look at on my reading habits. One thing I took a stab at was a "duration chart" that could show the reading patterns over tiā¦
- Weekend Reading: Bullets in Games, Lessons of History, and BrickLink
š® How Do Bullets Work in Video Games? A cool analysis of methods for rendering bullet physics in games. š Notes on "The Lessons of History" Maksim Stepanenko's notes on Will and Ariel Durant's The Lessons of Historyā¦
- Goal Summary: Books of 2019
I just finished my last book I'll complete this year, making the final tally 54. Here's the full list of everything I read: {% assign books = site.books | sort: 'date_completed' %} {% assign start = '2019-01-01' | datā¦
- Blood is Thicker Than Water
This article is excerpted from Steve Stewart-Williams's latest book, The Ape that Understood the Universe. On the purposes of altruism and kin selection: The details of Hamiltonās theory are complex, but the basic ideā¦
- The Infinity Machine
This one is part book review and part reflection on some personal experience, a chance to write about some science related to a harrowing past experience. A couple of years ago I had a run in with genetics-gone-wrong,ā¦
- The Black Swan, Reviewed by Scott Alexander
This is the greatest, the Slate Star Codex review of Taleb's The Black Swan. Taleb is (in)famous for railing on his intellectual adversaries, and also savaging reviews that (in his view) mis-read his work. Scott plowsā¦
- Kindle for Mac
Periodically I want to read on my computer, particularly when sitting at my desk. Amazon publishes a web app called Cloud Reader for reading Kindle books, which emulates pretty closely what their mobile apps look andā¦
- Weekend Reading: The Worst Year to Be Alive, Chinese Sci-Fi, and Slack Networks
š Why 536 Was the Worst Year To Be Alive You may have thought the entire 14th century was pretty bad, or maybe 1918 with its flu pandemic and millions of war casualties, but how about the 6th: A mysterious fog plungeā¦
- A Third Force
Itās been a while since I wrote a book review here, and a couple months since I read any fiction. A few of Graham Greeneās works have been on my shelf for years, so I decided to pick up his 1955 novel The Quiet Americā¦
- Weaving Books Into the Web
The Internet Archive has transformed 130,000 references to books in Wikipedia into live links to 50,000 digitized Internet Archive books in several Wikipedia language editions including English, Greek, and Arabic. Andā¦
- Rory Sutherland on Alchemy
This is a great conversation from EconTalk with advertising exec Rory Sutherland on his new book Alchemy. He's got interesting ideas on the role of psychology and human emotion when it comes to decision making, marketā¦
- Weekend Reading: Baseball Graphics, the Mind Illuminated, and the Crucial Century
ā¾ļø How Many Outs? Baseball Graphics Compared Some top-notch baseball geekery, with Jason Snell comparing the graphics overlays from Fox, MLB Network, and ESPNās telecasts. Iāve thought about this, too, but have to givā¦
- bookish.tech
This is a handy tool for searching book metadata, built by Tom MacWright. Itās a āuniversal converterā for book IDs in various services, like Goodreads, OpenLibrary, and WorldCat. Itās open source and also has an API.ā¦
- Book Haul, October
I'm up here in Jacksonville for medical follow-ups, so I made my regular trip to Chamblin's to do some shopping. Here are the latest pickups: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Dealers of Lā¦
- The All Things Tech History List
Through a Twitter thread I ran across this running catalog of resources on the history of the tech industry ā books, articles, movies, and more. A definitive list of content. There are some great recommendations hereā¦
- Stripe Press
I found out recently, I think through an EconTalk interview with economist Tyler Cowen, that Stripe has created their own publishing house for books. From their own about page: Stripe Press highlights ideas that we thā¦
- Writing Shape Up
This is a cool little background post from Ryan Singer explaining the origins and his process behind Shape Up, a web book about product development. One of the things he did when getting started (with no solid idea ofā¦
- Weekend Reading: Terrain Mesh, Designing on a Deadline, and Bookshelves
š MARTINI: Real-Time RTIN Terrain Mesh Some cool work from Vladimir Agafonkin on a library for RTIN mesh generation, with an interactive notebook to experiment with it on Observable: An RTIN mesh consists of only rigā¦
- Managerial Leverage
Andy Grove is widely respected as an authority figure on business management. Best known for his work at Intel during the 1980s, his book High Output Management is regularly cited as one of the best in the genre of buā¦
- Shape Up
Ryan Singer and the Basecamp team just released their new ebook on product development, called Shape Up, made available for free online. Me and some of our team here have already dug into it and are finding some interā¦
- Weekend Reading: Satellites, Antilibraries, and Libra
š° How to Profit in Space: A Visual Guide Fantastic visualizations from the WSJ team. Shows the history of satellite expansion divided by country, year, and orbits, both LEO and geosynchronous. A great use of maps forā¦
- The Reading Diet
Books are one purchase I don't restrict my spending on. I'm not a big buyer of "stuff" in general, but I don't hesitate at all about my money going to reading. I do try to be circumspect to not overwhelm myself, and tā¦
- Andy Grove on Meetings
You hear the criticism all the time around the business world about meetings being useless, a waste of time, and filling up schedules unnecessarily. A different point of view on this topic comes from Andy Grove in hisā¦
- Reaching the Early Majority
Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm is part of the tech company canon. It's been sitting on my shelf for years unread, but I've known the general nature of the problem it illuminates for years. We've even experiencedā¦
- Rethinking the American High School
It's not a shocker that American schools don't produce the level of output we expect. I've written here before about this topic, and one of the largest failings I see (even dating back to when I myself was in high schā¦
- Process Not Products
In his new book Loonshots, author Safi Bahcall uses the concept of phase transitions to analyze how companies work. When a substance changes phase, like water going from solid to liquid, the same exact substance is foā¦
- Linguistic Relativity
The linguist John McWhorter has written a plethora of books on the English language. For an academic (heās a professor at Columbia University), he has a very progressive view of Englishās evolution, a supporter of theā¦
- A Neural Chernobyl
The short story is the perfect format for science fiction. A genre that's keen on high concepts that can be very interesting often finds itself overreaching when certain concepts can't sustain themselves through a 400ā¦
- The Origin and Transmutation of Species
Since The Origin of Species, Darwinās theory of natural selection has been the foundation of our thinking about the evolution of life. Along the way there have been challengers to the broadness of that theory, and Davā¦
- Spirituality Without Religion
As Iāve been trying to bootstrap into a meditation practice, most of my learnings have been from various podcast episode discussions and a couple of books on the topic. My approach thus far hasnāt been to try and digā¦
- A Vast Wilderness
I picked up John McPheeās Coming Into the Country this week. You could think of it like a biography of Alaska: the region pre- and post-statehood, its people, the wilderness, wildlife, and its vastness. Woven throughoā¦
- Self Reliance and Introspection
The nearly 2000 year old Meditations by Marcus Aurelius is likely the first ever entry in the āself helpā publishing genre. During his last days as Roman Emperor, reigning from 161-180 AD, he wrote the 12 ābooksā thatā¦
- Books of 2018, Part 2
My wrap up of books of 2018, continued from part 1. The Order of Time & Reality is Not What it Seems, Carlo Rovelli I donāt remember where I ran across Rovelli first; it may have been a YouTube video of one of his lecā¦
- Books of 2018, Part 1
This year was a productive one for reading. Even with all going on in life, I still managed to get through 43 books in 2018. Reading by quantity isnāt the measure of success, of course. I want my selection guided by iā¦
- A Globe of Connections
Borders in todayās world are remarkably static, ever-present lines we all get used to separating territories as if there are hard barriers to interaction between the multicolored countries of your average political maā¦
- Kindle Highlights
I started making this tool a long time back to extract highlighted excerpts from Kindle books. This predated the cool support for this that Goodreads has now, but I still would like to spend some time getting back toā¦
- Progress Report: The Federalist Papers
Iām making my way through The Federalist, which has been on my reading list forever, and for which I had my interest rekindled last year reading Alexander Hamilton. For those that donāt know, itās a collection of essaā¦
- Quanta, Relativity, and the Nature of Reality
Itās quite a daunting task to explain anything in theoretical physics in 250 pages, but this is just what I like about Carlo Rovelliās books. Earlier this year I read The Order of Time, and like that book, Reality isā¦
- An In Depth History of Maps
This is the first book review post since I put up my library section. I hope to do more of this in the future with each new book I add to the collection. Enjoy. The Story of Maps took me a while to get through, but itā¦
- The Library
I just merged in a new project I worked on over the holiday to add a library section to this site. Youāll see it under āBooksā from the top navigation menu. Based around the library database Iāve been adding to over tā¦
- Nonfiction Reading Patterns
My nonfiction interests have evolved quite a bit. When I browse whatās new, recent, or recommended I find most of it uninteresting. I now find myself picking up books I wouldnāt have attempted several years back; Iādā¦
- Additions to the Library
As always during trips to Jacksonville, I made a visit to Chamblin Bookmine, my favorite bookstore. I never have enough time to browse, this time had about an hour before I had to be somewhere. So I had to act fast anā¦
- The Library Database
I've been an avid user of Goodreads for tracking books for the last ten years. Tom MacWright wrote a post and a script utility last year to export and format items from Goodreads into pages that could work in a Jekyllā¦
- 2018 Reading List
I'm on pace this year to read 40 books this year. Here's a quick snapshot of the list so far, in rough order from beginning to end of year. I'm looking forward to writing up a week's worth of posts this year on my favā¦
- Books of 2017
I didn't realize how many things I'd read this year. Looking back at the list, I enjoyed all of them. Here's a snapshot of my favorites from 2017. Political Order and Political Decay ā Francis Fukuyama. 2014. This isā¦
- Spacers and Earthmen
This is part three of a series on Isaac Asimov's Greater Foundation story collection. This post is about the first installment of the Robot trilogy, The Caves of Steel. We're still early in the timeline of Asimov's epā¦