Tagged “books”

reading list portfolio page

Graduate-level introduction to graph theory, for Math 530 in Spring 2022 at Drexel University

It depends on the book. Talks about different authors approaches to describing the same scene; the focus is completely different for each, and so each would be read very differently.

Interesting to re-read How I read and see if anything has changed.

Reading is letting someone else model the world for you. This is an act of intimacy. When the author is morose, you become morose. When he is mirthful, eventually you may share in it. And after finishing a very good book one is driven a little mad, forced to return from a world that no one nearby has witnessed.

• Permutation City, by Greg Egan
• Fabric of Reality, by David Deutsch
• Consider Phlebas, by Iain M. Banks

Subtitle "How American Toymakers Sold You Your Childhood".

highlighting new additions in green is cool.

one to print out and read in a cabin

and some alternative suggestions on the topic

Quite fantastic range in there. Just got Remarkably Bright Creatures

By the late Saul Kripke.

.1% improvement per day is apparently 43% per year

Long enough checklist that I don't think I need to read the book.

When map and terrain disagree, believe terrain

The link

The list:

1. Hyde - The Gift
2. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi - Flow
3. Anthony Bourdain - Kitchen Confidential
4. Rene Girard - Violence and the Sacred
5. Susan Sontag - On Photography
6. Peter Kingsley - Ancient Philosophy, Mystery, and Magic
7. Jessie L. Weston - From Ritual to Romance
8. Henry Louis Gates - The Signifying Monkey
9. Robert Graves - The White Goddess
10. Camille Paglia - Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson
11. Mircea Eliade - Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy
12. F.M. Caswell - The Slave Girls of Baghdad

Recommended from Friedberg when talking about fertilisers

Book rec on MR said "it has the added benefit of being quite short". Which was funny from the director of all 5.5 hours of The Mahabharata (1989).

bunch of recs for books about music

Mentioned in Don't be that open source user

A love story in music lessons

Maybe this is what Flavortown is all about.

Why, I wondered, does flavor have such a hold over us? And why do so many scientists carry on as though nutrition starts from the neck down, that what truly matters in food is carbs, protein and fat, and flavor is just some meaningless and frivolous indulgence?

Our flavor sensing equipment—the nose and mouth—takes up more DNA than any other bodily system. Why is there so much DNA devoted to a sense we tend to think of as superfluous?

years worth of book recommendations in an hour

Interesting take on initial novelty (establishing a genre or crossover) followed by then staying in that same style

From CWT with Stewart Brand

how to think about drawing

He has written more reviews than I have read books this year..

Reading this I thought "oh this sounds a lot like Surveillance Capitalism", then checked the author

Article does kinda go on a bit of a nostalgia trip. I still manage to take plenty of shit photos

Good book rec in the comments for Susan Sontag’s “On Photography”

Would like to see more of this kind of write up - description and onboarding experience of a possible alternative to goodreads. Some great explanations in there - account setup, importing CSVs from other places, overview of features.

This post made me feel like an amateur. I have only 3, relatively small book piles.

Can't exactly remember where I found this, but some interesting looking publications on sound and music

The review alone was very well written, quite excited for the book

From Vox explainer of Ready Player One

Notes from an interview over dinner at Mama Chang

Great way to find new books - specific curated lists.

Fantastic interview on her background and reasons she had wanted to tell the story

It is a long lesson that I am still not through, will see if it can live up to the bold claim of its title

All three volumes of Game AI Pro available online! For free!

Some great suggestions - assessing quality of free stuff is always tricky (esp audio), so a high-level filter is a good start

I particularly like the interlude:

no, you can't randomly cite 2,000-page-long books and hope nobody will read them

Solid advice on reading, annotating, and selecting