When a bridge collapses, blaming gravity is a non-answer. Engineers are supposed to design for gravity, and people who design companies should similarly design for financial gravity. This book is about how to do that. Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup", spent most of his career advising early stage startups, but unlike most of the rest of the venture class, he seems to have become…
Without moral ambition, argues Bregman, you just end up as a money maximizing consultant. Or working for big tech on the trend du jour. Overall I found this book to be not especially groundbreaking, perhaps in part because I've been stewing in EA adjacent circles for over a decade. That said it's a good reminder for me as I think about what's next and there were plenty of interesting stories that…
I’m not actually going to recommend this book, but I figured I might as well post a quick review anyway. Becky's pitch of the book is highly attractive: I don't believe in trade-offs. You can have it all, and everyone is good inside. Of course this is a bestseller. It tells highly anxious, guilt-ridden, burnt-out parents exactly what they want to hear, interspersed with heavy-handed cheerleading:…
Loren Eiseley's The Immense Journey is a collection of personal naturalist story-essays from the 1940s and 1950s. It's hard to classify, but I would describe it as a highly imaginative intersection of natural history, poetic memoir, and evolutionary philosophy. I especially loved "The Slit", "The Flow of the River", "The Deeps", "How Flowers Changed the World", and "The Bird and the Machine". Best…
Last month, after a long hiatus, I showed invention.cards to a friend in SF and came away unsatisfied. Indeed, the work was not yet done . Three things drove this revision: It felt incomplete. The experience was built around T-shaped navigation, focusing on a specific card and showing only their ancestors and descendants. It was hard to see where you were in time, hard to feel the shape of…
It’s definitely pulp, but is it fiction? McLuhan would have a heart attack. Am I listening to a game? Am I playing a book? Dinniman bizarrely splices a traditional narrative with literal video game interfaces. While entertaining, it feels like cheating because it borrows the dopamine loops of a different medium rather than offering literary depth. But underneath the veneer of juvenile humor, the…
A recent NYT piece argued we need a mental fitness revolution to combat the cognitive decay caused by algorithmic feeds and generative AI. It's an efficient one-two punch. If you're not brainrotting on short form video content, you're outsourcing all of your thinking to an LLM. The result is a kind of cognitive strip-mining. What's left requires active defense. For me, one way of defending that…
Paul Tillich’s The Courage to Be is a dense, philosophical manual for meaning masquerading as theology. Born from the ashes of post-war Europe, Tillich rails against collectivism with an almost Randian fervor. Beneath this mid-century veneer lies a deeply resonant, borderline heretical framework proposing a "God above God" that feels acutely relevant to our modern crises and reminded me of the…
After falling down a rabbit hole on interoception, the vagus nerve, and cortical overrides, reading Breath was the logical next step. Overall I found it a good pop-sci overview that filled some gaps in my reading, but I wish it was more rigorously written. There are some issues with structure and Nestor takes too many liberties for my taste. The result is that separating the wheat from the chaff…
Note: I listened to the audio version of this book in Russian. The original title (1977) is directly translated as "A Billion Years Before the End of the World", which I prefer to the English translation "Definitely Maybe", which has nothing to do with the Oasis Album (1994) or the romcom (2008). Malyanov and his small circle of Leningrad scientist friends are on the brink of paradigm-shifting…
As it turns out, Buber is surprisingly accessible. This classic reads like a self-help book grounded in Hasidic tradition. The book is fundamentally an exegesis of 18th-century folklore—a sharp contrast to PKD's manic exegesis . My summary of Buber's take: Awaken : Take stock of your situation. How are you spending your life? “Where art thou, man”? Or as my father said in my childhood: окстись!…
Ancillary Justice is a well-crafted book with nice, slow reveals. I was satisfied by how Leckie merged two initially confusing storylines towards the second half of the book. Some scenes especially stuck with me, like Awn's interactions with the Lord of the Radch, throwing emotional fuel onto my pre-existing distaste for military/corporate hierarchies. I especially liked how she handled the…
AI model vendors usually ship their own desktop apps, and aside from coding agents, these tend to be the ways in which I interface with AIs the most. But these apps are sticky by design: each vendor wants you to stay with them and continue to use them. As a result, I tend to have very lumpy usage patterns, focusing on one model at a time to the detriment of the others. This leads to an incomplete…
C. Thi Nguyen frames the book with a provocative question. Why is it that mechanical rules, constraints, and scoring systems lead to such great pleasure in games, but such misery in real world domains where metrics dominate? The answer lies in the tendency to favor achievement play over striving play. In life, unlike games, we cannot easily opt out; the "magic circle" vanishes, leaving us exposed…
Oral history in written form. Style : Laconic, vivid prose. Chatwin learned to compress by cataloguing objects at Sotheby's for years. The book is 97 short vignettes he called Cubist: small pictures tilting toward each other to form a portrait of place. Reminds me of Red Plenty in structure, Hemingway in terseness. Theme : Restless wandering. Chatwin asks whether we have "journeys mapped out in…
A compelling first contact story with many twists. Spiders, Ants, Monkeys, AI, Spaceships, Cryogenics, oh my! Tchaikovsky really crams a lot into this work. Definitely worth a read in and of itself, but also a good example of exploring ideas through fiction (see Power of Fiction ). As usual, some of my highlights follow. Dipping in and out of time One key device in Children of Time are the…
For decades, I've carried a Field Notes notebook and a pen. I mainly used them to capture ideas on the go, but it would also be great to sketch out a diagram, or to journal a little bit, especially while traveling. Fast note-taking via the iPhone's action button has alleviated a lot of my need for quickly capturing ideas. But nothing can replace pen and paper for long form stream-of-consciousness…
Han spends much of The Crisis of Narration mourning a lost world, one where humans were born into compelling, unifying narratives full of wisdom. Over time, this way of life shattered into many little narratives that fail to create the same level of overarching framework. Wisdom collapsed into knowledge, knowledge into information, and information into data. This is well captured in the Data…
Eagleman's book is an easy read given the complexity of the topic. I have a feeling that he is simplifying a lot for dramatic effect. Here are a few big ideas I took away from it: Background: the brain is extremely malleable Eagleman's "Potato Head Model" suggests you can plug any input anywhere and the brain adapts. This was dramatically demonstrated when scientists grafted a third eye onto…
I recently sat down with B^2 and we decided to watch a Chinese film. We considered Wolf Warrior, but Ne Zha 2 had just blown up to become China's most popular film ever made, and currently stands as the #5 top grossing worldwide film in history, so we set out to watch it. I didn't last long. While I did not love the video game rendering style, I felt like I was missing cultural prerequisites to…
The most fruitful moments for contemplation are often the least conducive to capture. I've been working on reducing friction in capturing thoughts, feelings, and ideas wherever I may be and whatever I may be doing. At the same time, I want to stay in the moment and not get distracted by the act of capturing itself. In addition, I want to retain control over all of this data. It should be stored in…
Finally got around to reading this masterpiece of Soviet science fiction. In the distant future, Earth's advanced civilization has achieved spaceflight and discovered a planet populated by humans caught in humanity's medieval past. This world remains locked in early feudalism, both morally and technologically backward. Earth dispatches a team of scientists and historians to observe this society…
I learned about the Old English Poem "Battle of Maldon" from a David Chapman in a recent podcast with Jim Rutt, which I found really insightful. I haven't read meaningness for a long time. But Chapman seems to have reemerged onto my radar recently in a series of compelling articles on his (new?) substack . And so I picked up this lauded Tolkien book in anticipation of something extra amazing, but…
I enjoyed this book so much that I bought a copy for S. It's a slow build, but I found it compelling from the start. Although the overall mystery of the novel is revealed by the end, the explanation the Clark offers is a bit disappointing. Not to brag, but I found it less compelling than some of the alternative theories I imagined while reading the book. As the book unfolded, I enjoyed the variety…
Humans are remarkably successful as a species. Why? Many would say it's because we're just so darn smart compared to other animals, but Henrich suggests that individual intelligence plays a small role. Our collective culture is what gives our species superpowers. Henrich's thesis is that human success is due to our adaptability, which we owe not to individual intelligence but due to collective…
More a journal than an educational treatise, Math from Three to Seven chronicles the uniquely soviet phenomenon known as Математические Кружки (Math Circles), applied specifically to young kids. I personally experienced a version of this growing up in Vancouver courtesy of my parent's Компания (a tight-knit friend-group) where various uncles and aunts DP, AL, GJ, YX, MS, and others took to…
A while ago I began wondering where all the optimistic leftwing voices went. The rest of the camps, I thought, were well represented: Left Right Optimistic ?? "To the moon!!!" Pessimistic Climate doomers de-growthers Automation and fear of job loss Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson attempt to define the left-optimistic camp. Abundance is a rallying cry which provides a positive vision of what the world…
VALIS stands for Vast Active Living Intelligence System , a critical piece in Horselover Fat's vision of God. This revelation comes at a turbulent time in Fat's life, shortly after his wife's suicide and the subsequent suicide of multiple girlfriends in the Bay Area of the 1960s. No one could discern how much was due to drugs. This time in America—1960 to 1970—and this place, the Bay Area of…
I recently watched a movie called "The Bit Player" bankrolled by IEEE, about Claude Shannon and his contributions. The film was informative something was a bit off. In what could be described as a fauxcumentary or docudrama, Shannon was portrayed relatively convincingly by an actor, but rather than creating a narrative arc of his life and work, this fake Shannon was portrayed in a sequence of…
Authoritarian governments have latched onto open-source LLMs like Llama to craft their own models, complete with censorship rules. In places like Russia and China, these censors manifest as an abrupt cutoff, where a stream of text is replaced with an uncanny canned response like "I'd better keep quiet". In this post I'm interested in probing for subtler, more insidious manipulations potentially…
Worth it for the name alone, this is a comprehensive presentation of what happened when the sick man of Europe finally died. It gives excellent background on the complexity of the Ottoman Empire's demographics, enmities between Turk and Arab, Sunni and Sunni-Wahhabi. It paints a vivid picture of the Three Pasha triumvirate, their unforgivable warcrimes, blunders and colorful deaths. It documents…
This is the first in a series of vignettes based on observations I captured while creating invention.cards , a visual chronology of science and discovery. In this series I hope to explore bits of the history of science and technology I found fascinating ("that's funny...") while reading and digesting Asimov's chronology and also examine the limitations of source material. First, let's take a…
I'm pleased to have completed transforming Asimov's Chronology of Science and Discovery into a deck of Magic Cards. Over five years later, all 1477 entries from Asimov's encyclopedia are now represented as illustrated cards on https://invention.cards . The website is rendered based on this master spreadsheet which I compiled with the help of AI and manually vetted. Since AI hallucinations can…
I liked this book, although it could use a bit of additional structure. It came across my radar from a podcast conversation between Rick Rubin and Jason Louv about the book. Although it exaggerates and studies Dee in arguably too much depth, it paints a fascinating picture of the Elizabethan age. Dee's life began at the start of the Lutheran Reformation. In 1543 when Dee was sixteen, two…
This book meanders and takes its time building up to a double twist of a conclusion, leaving the reader winded. Its unusual structure is disorienting and leads to moments of annoyance, but it's ultimately worth it. I found the twist surprising despite there being plenty of foreshadowing, but these tells were only visible in retrospect. Recency bias may be deluding me here, but I think Use of…
What if our pursuit of educational equity is perpetuating inequality? Just as a rising tide lifts all boats, true educational equity must lift all students, regardless of background or ability. In a school setting, equity refers not to the equality of outcomes, but to the equality of opportunities for all students to succeed. In recent years, Seattle Public Schools (SPS) has prioritized supporting…
Labatut's work is a collection of stories strike an unusual balance between fiction and non-fiction. More than historical fiction, these stories are well researched and deeply grounded in science, and the lives of famous scientists. But their lives are subtly embellished, biographical gaps filled, and their personalities augmented in a way that makes their stories more relatable and engaging. What…
Imagine if Microsoft's company guidance was that it would make $100 billion this quarter. The end of the quarter rolls along and as it turns out, they only made $10 billion. This surprising result would lead to a market selloff frenzy. Microsoft's stock would take such a beating that surely their board would demand their CEO's resignation for gross mismanagement. In contrast, Seattle Public…
This book situates the reader as a fly on the wall during multiple personal discussion between Haruki Murakami and his friend Seiji Ozawa. Ozawa was an accomplished classical conductor who was the music director of many world-class symphonies including SF, Toronto, and Boston. I didn't know much about Ozawa before reading the book, but after reading and listening, I liked his interpretations.…
This book came to my attention because of S's interest in "The Developing Mind", Daniel J. Siegel's magnum opus. Some of the ideas related to memory integration and childhood attachment theory sounded interesting enough to delve into, but the book itself was too long. Luckily Siegel is a prolific writer, producing many popularizations of his research for a variety of audiences, from parents to…
Entangled Life is about the world of fungi, especially focused on the symbiosis between mushrooms and plants, called mycorrhiza. This symbiosis is achieved through the entanglement of plant roots and fungal mycelia. Mycelia are underground networks built out of hyphae, thin and long strands of fungal material. Hypha branch and grow and connect with other fungi and plants. In most fungi, hyphae are…
Blindsight was recommended to me by GB, DK, and maybe NA. I resisted for a long time, but as the recommendations piled up, I decided it was time. I was not disappointed. The book is masterfully written, a slow and often baffling build (wtf, vampires?) culminates in an excellent story with lots of twists and turns. This is indeed a hard science fiction book and really shows off how good fiction can…
I used GPT4's multimodal features to accelerate and improve my recently rebooted Visual Chronology of Science & Discovery project now hosted at https://invention.cards . First I used image-to-text models to extract and structure content from pages of Asimov's encyclopedia for accelerated data entry . Then I used text-to-image models to generate visually consistent imagery for each invention and…
This is a Jewish take on parenting from a former psychologist who became disenchanted with her profession and sought wisdom in the tradition of her ancestors. I found myself nodding along in agreement to many of her ideas, which try to synthesize Jewish concepts with "common sense" parenting. Less charitably, this book can also be seen as a conservative reaction to modern parenting trends. Either…
I recently resumed my Visual Chronology of Science & Discovery project , a Civilization-inspired tech tree but for the real life history of science. The content is grounded in Asimov's book with some flourishes added, courtesy of yours truly. Four years since starting the project I'm sharing a significant update. Here's a quick overview of the new viz: And some major improvements vis-à-vis the…
Annihilation was first recommended to me by KO. This book is a creepy combination of Roadside Picnic and Soylent Green. It was advertised to me as Sci-Fi, but I think it really leans into horror, which is Jeff VanderMeer's specialty. I found this to be a captivating read with a very rich atmosphere, despite the world building being extremely shrouded in uncertainty. Nothing can be trusted. Neither…
Inspired to read more about ecology after enjoying Mystery Teachings from the Living Earth by J. M. Greer , I picked up "Sand County Almanac". I'm not sure how I managed to miss this gem for so long. Aldo Leopold was an ecosystems' genius, and this most famous book of his contains deep analysis couched in poetic but accessible prose. Leopold was one of the O.G. environmentalists, perhaps an east…
I recently read The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han , a chaotic, disorganized read full of interesting ideas. "Disappearance of Ritual" continues in the same tradition, but I found the ideas presented in it somewhat weaker and less original than in "Burnout Society". In one section, BCH extols the virtues of beautiful and playful language and laments its disappearance. Yet he writes woeful…
I picked this one up on Sr. B's recommendation and enjoyed it in multi-voice audiobook form. Overall, a fun listen. Very (in-)effable(?). Lots of jokes and satirical observations reminiscent of Doug Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and I think way more Pratchett than Gaiman. I couldn't help but wonder which of the two authors identified and wrote more of the demon Crowley and the angel…
Ecology, complexity, and other interdisciplinary fields can easily slip into woo. Initially I expected this book to suffer from this problem, but luckily there were no dizzying invocations of Deepak Chiopra™ style quantum physics. Instead, Greer presents a grounded worldview, rejecting spiritual stereotypes and "half truths that you create your own reality". The bulk of Greer's book features seven…