Rating: 8.4/10. Book Review: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo We have a lot of stereotypes about poor people, and these stereotypes influence our foreign aid and intervention policies. The problem is that these preconceptions are often inaccurate. This book, by two MIT economics…
Category: Topics
A Short Course in Digital Photography by London and Stone
Rating: 8.3/10. A good overview of the art and science of photography, suitable for a beginner. Each page is fully colored and has an abundance of photos to serve as exemplars of what good photography looks like. Section 1 talks about basic camera controls including aperture and shutter speed. Both control exposure, but additionally, shutter…
A Death in the Rainforest by Don Kulick
Rating: 8.6/10. Book Review: A Death in the Rainforest: How a Language and a Way of Life Came to an End in Papua New Guinea by Don Kulick Book by linguistic anthropologist about his experiences documenting the Tayap language, spoken in Papua New Guinea. Tayap is a language isolate, spoken by less than a hundred…
Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
Rating: 6.7/10. Influential book by Daniel Kahneman, winner of a Nobel Prize in economics for his work on behavioral economics. The main idea of this book is we have two systems for making decisions, call them System 1 and System 2. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and effortless; System 2 is slow, logical, and takes…
Ishmael by Daniel Quinn
Rating: 7.9/10. While technically a novel, there is not much a plot beyond the narrator conversing with a telepathic gorilla in a Socratic dialogue. Ishmael, the gorilla, teaches willing pupils on how to save the world. According to Ishmael, our civilization has accomplished many impressive feats, but is on a surefire path to self-destruction since…
What the F by Benjamin K. Bergen
Rating: 8.0/10. Book Review: What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves by Benjamin K. Bergen Book by psycholinguistics researcher Benjamin Bergen from UCSD, about the linguistics of profanity. It is unusual to do academic research on swear words like “fuck” and “nigger”, but the author compares it to studying…
The Lover by Marguerite Duras
Rating: 7.7/10. A fairly short novel set in French Indochina (now Southern Vietnam) in the 1930s. It is supposedly autobiographical and is based on the author’s own experiences growing up in the region, but was written several decades later when the author was around 70. It is a romance between a young and poor 15-year-old…
Become an Effective Software Engineering Manager by James Stanier
Rating: 8.4/10. Book for new and aspiring software engineering managers about how to do the job effectively. Unlike an individual contributor, your output as a manager is basically the output of your team (plus others that you influence), so the job is less about your individual output, and mostly about getting others to achieve their…
An Introduction to Political Philosophy by Jonathan Wolff
Rating: 8.1/10. Political philosophy asks questions about the purpose of government and how power should be distributed in a society. To better understand the role of a state, the first chapter considers what would happen in a “state of nature” where there is no government. Hobbes thought without laws, everyone would be at war constantly….
Venture Deals by Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson
Rating: 7.7/10. Book Review: Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist by Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson Book written by two venture capitalist investors, meant to guide entrepreneurs through the VC funding process. After the founders have decided how much money they want to raise, gives a presentation, and the VC is…
Science Since Babylon by Derek de Solla Price
Rating: 8.0/10. Book containing several mostly independent essays about aspects of science, mostly from a historical and sociological perspective. The first essay compares Greek and Babylonian science: Greeks were more geometric while Babylonians were good at calculations, but when their cultures came in contact, new ideas emerged combining their sciences to predict astronomical motion. Essays…
The Emperor’s New Mind by Roger Penrose
Rating: 7.7/10. Book by physicist and mathematician Roger Penrose that touches on a lot of disparate topics in artificial intelligence, computability theory, consciousness, and advanced quantum physics. This book reads like a guided tour for an intelligent but non-specialist audience. The overall thesis is not revealed until the last chapter, where all the different threads…