Topic
reviews
- Weekend Reading: Readwise's Next Chapter, Reviewing Revolt of the Public, and the Helicopter State
📚 The Next Chapter of Readwise: Our Own Reading App Great to see this evolution of Readwise to enter the "read-later" app space. None of the options out there seem to be thriving anymore (Pocket, Instapaper, etc.), b…
- Books of 2020
I’ve gotten a lot more selective about books to read in the past few years. My 2020 reading goal was 30 books, giving me space to absorb them and take better notes, and to permit reading longer stuff I could take my t…
- SSC Reviews the Origin of Consciousness
Scott Alexander wrote this review of Julian Jaynes's The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, which presents a fascinating idea about when the "theory of mind" emerges in human history. When…
- Hardy Boys and Microkids
Physicians hang diplomas in their waiting rooms. Some fishermen mount their biggest catch. Downstairs in Westborough, it was pictures of computers. Over the course of a few decades dating beginning in the mid-40s, com…
- Back to the Future
New York Times writer Ross Douthat has a new book out called The Decadent Society, which explores how we've arrived in a period of (in the book's terms) stagnation, repetition, sterility, and sclerosis. This post is a…
- 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,…
- A Third Force
It’s been a while since I wrote a book review here, and a couple months since I read any fiction. A few of Graham Greene’s works have been on my shelf for years, so I decided to pick up his 1955 novel The Quiet Americ…
- Weekend Reading: Baseball Graphics, the Mind Illuminated, and the Crucial Century
⚾️ How Many Outs? Baseball Graphics Compared Some top-notch baseball geekery, with Jason Snell comparing the graphics overlays from Fox, MLB Network, and ESPN’s telecasts. I’ve thought about this, too, but have to giv…
- 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 bu…
- Garmin fenix 5
Wearables have become such a big market these days that there's a wide variety of options to pick from if you want to monitor activity metrics. From the basic Fitbit step counters to more ruggedized outdoor watches to…
- 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 experienced…
- Linguistic Relativity
The linguist John McWhorter has written a plethora of books on the English language. For an academic (he’s a professor at Columbia University), he has a very progressive view of English’s evolution, a supporter of the…
- 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 400…
- The Origin and Transmutation of Species
Since The Origin of Species, Darwin’s 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 Dav…
- Spirituality Without Religion
As I’ve 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 hasn’t been to try and dig…
- Self Reliance and Introspection
The nearly 2000 year old Meditations by Marcus Aurelius is likely the first ever entry in the “self help” publishing genre. During his last days as Roman Emperor, reigning from 161-180 AD, he wrote the 12 “books” that…
- 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 don’t remember where I ran across Rovelli first; it may have been a YouTube video of one of his lec…
- 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 isn’t the measure of success, of course. I want my selection guided by i…
- A Globe of Connections
Borders in today’s 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 ma…
- Quanta, Relativity, and the Nature of Reality
It’s quite a daunting task to explain anything in theoretical physics in 250 pages, but this is just what I like about Carlo Rovelli’s books. Earlier this year I read The Order of Time, and like that book, Reality is…
- 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 it…
- Books of 2016
I haven't done a book roundup in a couple of years. This year was more fiction than non-fiction, and my near-term list will probably continue that trend. Annals of the Former World, John McPhee. 1998. Top of the list…
- Annals of the Former World
I majored in geography in college and always liked earth sciences. I dabbled a bit with classes that were related, but not core to geography study — your basic geology courses and a class in geodesy. One of the…
- The Craft of Baseball
I’m a baseball fan from way back, and grew up as a Braves fan during the early years of their 1990s NL East dominance. As much as I always enjoyed following the sport as a casual fan, I’d never studied the game much,…
- The Year in Books
2013 was busy in so many ways. Our product matured beyond the level I'd hoped it could, we've done some incredible mapping work around the world, and I'm just getting started with my involvement in an awesome local ha…
- Upwhen and Downwhen
This is part one of a series of essays on Isaac Asimov's famous Greater Foundation story collection. In this first one I discuss the time travel mystery The End of Eternity. The prolific science fiction writer Isaac A…
- Spycraft
I recently finished reading Spycraft, Robert Wallace and Keith Melton's chronicle of the CIA's spy tech divisions, specifically OTS (Office of Technical Services), the division responsible for creating technical espio…