Rating: 8.0/10. There are over 6000 languages in the world, but many of them are endangered. Often, they structure their grammar in really weird ways, like keeping track of absolute directions instead of left/right, or needing to specify how one got some information. There are lots of reasons why studying and preserving endangered languages are…
Author: Bai Li
Birth of a Theorem by Cedric Villani
Rating: 7.4/10. Memoir by Fields medalist Cedric Villani describing the process of discovering a mathematical proof. It’s inspiring that even for somebody as smart as him, math is difficult and he doesn’t always know what he’s doing. However, he does a poor job of explaining the math — his expositions are way too technical, aimed…
Brain on Fire by Susannah Cahalan
Rating: 8.5/10. This is a memoir by a 24 year old girl who developed a rare neurological disease, called “Anti-NMDA Receptor Encephalitis”. It’s rare enough that initially, all the doctors were unable to correctly diagnose the disease, instead thinking she had bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. Her condition worsened and she became psychotic, until they identified…
Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson
Rating: 8.2/10. Why is the city of Nogales, Arizona so much richer than Nogales, Sonora, when they’re only separated by a fence? This book explains why some countries like Canada are so much better off than Mexico, and most countries in sub-Saharan Africa are struggling to survive. According to this book, the crucial difference is…
Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Rating: 7.6/10. This is the second book I read by this author, after Black Swan. An antifragile object is something that becomes stronger when stress is applied (up to a certain point). To make it antifragile, it should be exposed to positive black swan events, where it will gain a lot from randomness, and have…
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
Rating: 7.0/10. A pretty famous crime thriller novel at about 650 pages. It was moderately interesting but took me a while to get through because I was busy with other stuff. The journalist Michael Blomkvist and detective Lisbeth Salander investigate a crime involving a disappearance of a 14 year old girl half a decade ago,…
Consider Your Options by Kaye A. Thomas
Rating: 5.0/10. I got this book because options are a big part of tech company compensation and people don’t understand them that well, so I wanted to get a better understanding of them. This book sorta does it, but most of it focuses on all sorts of very technical tax details. It was so taxing…
So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport
Rating: 7.0/10. Life and career advice book by Cal Newport, the guy that writes study blog. He offers a few pieces of advice, kind of similar to Larry Smith’s book: Don’t pursue your passion, because most people don’t have any passion that can be turned into a career Focus on career capital, that is, increase…
The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber
Rating: 6.5/10. Book about how to manage a small business, basically avoid doing all the work in your business and get other people to do it for you in a scalable way, run it as if you were running a franchise. The ideas make sense, but when it comes to specifics, the book doesn’t really…
The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee
Rating: 5.5/10. This book describes the complete history of genetics, from Darwin and Mendel to DNA to modern gene therapy and the Human Genome Project. The book is 500 pages, which is way too long in my opinion. Most of the stuff I already kind of knew from high school biology, the book goes a…
I, Robot by Isaac Asimov
Rating: 5.8/10. This is Isaac Asimov’s collection of short stories about robots, where the three laws of robotics comes from. The laws are, in this order: (1) robots may not hurt humans through action or inaction; (2) robots must obey human orders; and (3) robots must not allow itself to be destroyed. The nine short…
Kokoro by Natsume Soseki
Rating: 8.0/10. A classic Japanese novel, written over a hundred years ago, fairly short novel but quite profound. It’s a story about friendship and loneliness, and is divided into three equal parts. The first part deals with the author and Sensei, a reserved but intellectual man. Sensei seems to be wise but doesn’t really do…