Logging the Read Books
Alternative title: Blogging the Red Books
While reading this, I though, “Why not?” Here’s a list of in-progress books and other books/writings I’ve come across in the past that I simply should share with the whole world wide web. Not being a fan of 3rd party tools that harvest and conveniently classify your information, here is a good enough place to put it for anyone who cares enough to know what is on my mind.
In progress:
The Psychology of Reading
Insup Taylor and M. Martin Taylor
ISBN: 0-12-684080-6
I got lucky and found a hard-copy of this book for 3 dollars 2 years ago. It’s been sitting in my shelf that whole time and afterwards I’ve been using it as a stand because the hard cover binding was the perfect width for one of my projects. I purchased it just to read a few sections that caught my attention when I first looked through it, but when I actually started reading it from the start it seemed to me to be something very fundamental. I read somewhere (probably this book) that language shapes the way you think, and this book goes over not only roman based languages but also the ones form the Eastern world. I warn people never to trust a biology book that was published more than 10 years ago, and physiology is applied biology. So, I don’t know. This version was published in 1983, way before I was born. I’m sure there’s going to be some outdated information (or even entire theories), so I should keep reading it with the idea that some of the stuff in it might not be true anymore.
Reading wish-list:
n/a
Read:
The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
James Gleick
ISBN-13: 978-0375423727
It’s a simple enough read, but it’s structured on themes more than it is chronologically. For example, he keeps referencing back to Shannon in almost every other chapter, but I guess a person can’t write a book about information without mentioning his work. Geick’s limits himself to the decimal definition of a kilobyte and ignores the binary definition of 1024 bytes. This leads me to believe he would also be the type to pronounce gif as jif. But really, it shows how in depth he gets into the technical subjects. The section on qubits was elementary at best, and I assume he included it in the book mainly to claim full coverage. Upon finishing, I couldn’t really figure out what the thesis was to this book. Was it about information overflow? The epilogue sorta left me hanging. I learned plenty on the history side but not so much on the theory side. The flood portion seems rushed at the end. Unless I missed something, Geick seems to have really just dedicated one chapter to it. History was the stronger side of this book.
“X is just another way for Y to make more of X”
#bookSelfie
I don’t mean to be bias with the stuff I post here, but I found that the best books I’ve gone through were the one’s written by folks with Ph.Ds. Maybe it’s because they’re experts on the topics they write on, or because they’ve had 100’s of hours just doing what “writing” is. Therefore, they portray their ideas better than the layman. I don’t even want to give mention to the worst books I’ve come across mostly due to embarrassment of proclaiming I’ve picked them up once upon a time, but you don’t always know that until after you’re more than half-way through the book. We shouldn’t propagate bad ideas, but at the same time we shouldn’t block ourselves from ideas/thoughts we disagree with. It’s a struggle.
To be updated..