Recent content by SS-18 ICBM

Narrative Economics is a book about "How stories go viral & drive economic events" by Robert Shiller, one of the winners of the 2013 Nobel Memorial Economic Prize in Economic Sciences. While the book has some important ideas such as the effect of public opinion on economic events and the...

Fulfillment by Alec MacGills is about "Winning and Losing in One-Click America", by using Amazon as a lens to visualize increasing inequality in the US. Personal stories of average Americans are masterfully intertwined with analysis of trends in pursuit of this goal. Amazon's tremendous growth...

The Data Detective is a book by Tim Hartford which proposes 10 "easy rules to make sense of statistics". While the author does propose some sensible guidelines such as checking your emotions and being open-minded, a lot of the rules are just redundant and basically boil down to finding the...

Finished a PDF of War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy after several months of smartphone reading. The Global Grey Ebook download had the Maude translation, which apparently took some liberties like turning a certain character's verbal tic into rhotacism and Anglicizing some names. This doorstopper of a...

Jamer Hunt's Not to Scale discusses a few concepts relating to scale, a nonphysical, quantitative, measured infrastructure that gives form to experiences and things. The overall theme is how scalar concepts are being decoupled from human perspectives. Scales in various fields are examined such...

Towards Sustainable Artificial Intelligence by Ghislain Chetsa discusses controls to keep AI working for the good of all. The main subject is a framework based on the 'human factor", intra-organizational AI understanding, governance, and performance measurement that balances business...

Finished the Penguin Science Fiction Classics edition of Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker. It tells the tale of an Englishmen who travels the vast expanses of time and space to learn the secrets and evolution of the cosmos and the titular Star Maker that set it all into motion. Mostly a first-person...

Finished a PDF of Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan from McMaster University's Archive for the History of Economic Thought. The text is divided into 4 sections. The first outlines Hobbes' theory of mind which relies on sensory information, reminiscent of the empiricist tradition that would be pioneered...

A History of Modern Uganda by Richard Reid takes a thematic approach, forgoing chronological organization for a decentralized approach to history. Maps at the beginning help to illustrate the long-term tendencies brought up in the text such as migrations and kingdoms. Key themes are Uganda's...

Essential Quantitative Methods for Business, Management, and Finance by Les Oakshott is a textbook designed to bring someone with only knowledge of basic arithmetic up to speed on the subject matter. It begins from decimals and fractions and works its way through statistics, data analysis, and...

Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat claims to be a summary of the fundamental notes of cooking and good food. The author Samin Nosrat uses her Iranian upbringing, experience at the renowned Chez Panisse, and various travels as the background for the writing. Cooking Lessons and Flavor Maps illustrated by...

Finished The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, Global Grey Ebooks PDF of the 1906 edition. It tells the tale of the Lithuanian immigrant Jurgis Rudkus' harrowing experiences in the slaughterhouses of Chicago. Sordid scenes of unsanitary and unsafe conditions, outright fraud, and brazen corruption in the...

Finished the first part of Don Quixote, the Global Grey eBooks version using John Ormsby's translation. It begins with the translator's notes which contain an overview of previous translations which is quite critical of them and a biography of the author Miguel de Cervantes. This is then...

Gold, Oil, and Avocados by Andy Robinson is a "Recent History of Latin America in Sixteen Commodities", as its subtitle indicates. Each good gets its own chapter, where historical background to give context and contemporary anecdotes covering the author's visits paint a picture of continuing...