Rating: 8.3/10. Book about a recent expedition to explore a lost city in the jungles of Honduras. In 2015, a group of explorers and archaeologists discovered ancient ruins that were previously unknown to Europeans and had been abandoned for around 500 years; this book describes how this place was discovered, the expeditions to first study…
Category: Topics
Technical Debt in Practice by Neil Ernst, Rick Kazman, Julien Delange
Rating: 7.1/10. Technical Debt in Practice: How to Find It and Fix It by Neil Ernst, Rick Kazman, Julien Delange Fairly short book that examines technical debt, its causes, and ways to mitigate it. It is nontechnical and does not provide much specific code, languages, tools, etc. It is written by several academics; many of…
Men of Maize by Miguel Angel Asturias
Rating: 7.0/10. Novel that is a work of Latin American magical realism by Guatemalan author and Nobel Prize winner in Literature, Miguel Ángel Asturias. It is challenging to pinpoint exactly what is happening or what the book is about. Broadly speaking, it depicts the struggles between the indigenous Maya people and the maize-growers from a…
A Ticket to the Grand Show by Neil McKinnon
Rating: 7.3/10. A Ticket to the Grand Show: Journeys Across Cultural Boundaries by Neil McKinnon A collection of travel notes from various countries that the author visited, mostly in the 80s-90s, and reflections on how cultures differ in ways that are non-obvious. Through numerous examples, both Canadians and other cultures perceive surprising differences, and being…
The Shopify Story by Larry MacDonald
Rating: 7.3/10. The Shopify Story: How a Startup Rocketed to E-commerce Giant by Empowering Millions of Entrepreneurs by Larry MacDonald Book that tells the history of Shopify, from a humble online snowboard store to one of the largest e-commerce companies and the largest tech company based in Canada. It is meticulously researched, offering extensive details…
Football Hackers: The Science and Art of a Data Revolution by Christoph Biermann
Rating: 7.7/10. Book exploring the efforts of data scientists to analyze top-level football, primarily focusing on European teams, and how they use data and statistics to gain small advantages for their teams. One of the difficulties in analyzing football with data is that many ratings are subjective, determined by a sport commentator’s or journalist’s opinion…
U.S. Immigration Made Easy by Ilona Bray J.D.
Rating: 7.6/10. Book for people interested in U.S. immigration, covering a wide variety of the most common and many of the less common visas for both immigrants and non-immigrants. It provides a good understanding of the differences between categories and how the immigration system works as a whole. Most of the chapters are relatively independent…
Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia by Christina Thompson
Rating: 8.4/10. Book covering the history of the Polynesians and how we came to know about them. The prologue begins in the Hawaiian Islands, first discovered by Cook in 1778 (one of the last major European discoveries. Cook’s arrival coincided with a festival, so he was initially warmly welcomed, but he was later killed there….
Introduction to Time Series Analysis and Forecasting by Montgomery, Jennings, Kulahci
Rating: 8.2/10. Textbook on classical statistical methods for working with time series, mainly focusing on autoregressive, moving average, exponential smoothing, and regression-based models. This book is overall fairly easy to read while being mathematically rigorous and provides examples of working with time series in various statistical packages like JMP, SAS, and R. The examples are…
A Radical Approach to Lebesgue’s Theory of Integration by David M. Bressoud
Rating: 8.0/10. Book on measure theory and integration and serves as a good complement to the book “Measure, Integral, Probability.” I liked it because, rather than being technical all the time, it justifies the theory from a historical context – nobody really set out to invent measure theoretic integration, instead all these ideas were first…
Tangi by Witi Ihimaera
Rating: 7.6/10. A notable New Zealand novel, published in 1973, it is one of the first novels by a Maori writer. It describes a tangi (a funeral), and there is not much plot in the novel, instead it follows the protagonist as he discovers his father has died, prompting him to return to his home…
Measure, Integral and Probability by Marek Capinski and Ekkehard Kopp
Rating: 7.8/10. A textbook on measure theory, which serves as the foundation of probability and also has applications to integration and mathematical finance. A measure essentially defines the length or area of a set in a formal and consistent way, even with infinite sets that arise in continuous probability. When defined in a naive way,…