On a completely different topic: After watching my first marriage degenerate and my wife asked me to move out, I was fairly well mystified about what was going on. We'd read lots of books about marriage and communication, planned for it to be tough, intended to see it through... so what happened? "The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work" by John Gottman was a book that I read after we'd separated that first sta…
What Makes Love Last is really a good one too. Helped me to really understand that love is about trust and what that meant. John Gottman is a treasure.
I started to read this book but it seems to be full of political bile. How does it compare to Economics in One Lesson?
Can you give an example of "political bile"? Sowell is an incredibly even-keeled writer, and I'm surprised someone would find the book angry (or political, other than believing in traditional economics).
Perhap similarly, on an arduous journey to better my mental health and character I have found much to learn with paradoxical situations arising in zen koans. A good book with plenty of koans was Mumonkan/Gateless gate, in a compilation like this: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/593516.Two_Zen_Classics They've been helpful as a reinforcement (and contrast) to more logical things, as well as therapies (DBT, CBT).
Thanks for the recommendation. I really want to get into Zen Buddhism (as a form of spirituality that meshes better with my atheism), but after that first chapter the Alan Watts book becomes pretty dense and I need serious time and dedication to unpack its arguments. I probably need something easier to digest.
As a recommendation, I found Alan Watts' "You're It" much easier to digest and come back to multiple times. It really can be considered as a Zen way of thinking, whether you are religious, spiritual, or atheistic. Alan Watts also tends to leave judgment aside, which is helpful when coming at his works with different (or no) specific beliefs.
Wavelet transform. This video by Artem Kirsanov made it click immediately, to the point I could implement it in Python right after watching the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnxqHcObNK4.
For the uninitiated, wavlet transform is basically Fourier transform on steroids. Not only does it tell you what frequencies are present in a signal, it also tells you when they are present giving you a time vs. frequency plot (similar to short-time Fourier transform). Of course there is a limit to how well you can know both at the same time (just like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle actually!), but it's a very useful tool for studying signals. In my specific case, I was analyzing signals from a pulse oximeter in order to extract the breathing rate from them (https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3460238.3460254), but it has applications in many other fields such as image processing and compression.
How much of a topic clicking is just reading from several different sources, rather than one source being particularly "good"? I often joke with a coworker that we don't fully understand a topic until we have read several textbooks/papers on it. It doesn't really matter how good any one text is. I've always wondered what the mechanism is for this. Is is just a certain amount of exposure to a topic? Or is there truly…
There is a joke in physics that the best textbook on any topic is the third one you read.
I'd imagine this is very similar to why you have to tell someone something 3 times, 3 different ways for them to understand it.
Pointers! I spent my whole youth, started programming at 7 years old, and believe me, when you don’t know English, reading the GW-BASIC book back-to-back is a performance. But I had always been limited, until 19 years old when a college teacher taught us the pointers.
It’s as if I had seen the world with only 1 dimension instead of 3 for all that time.
The Four Agreements freed me from the self help book cycle. They are the building blocks that all other advice is rooted on. Most sage wisdom, famous quotes, etc, is really difficult to really internalize if you haven't already run into a situation that demands it. However, T4A can be implemented immediately by anyone and gives you a framework that can handle anything you throw at it.
I'm a software engineer, but these have been instrumental in my success in a way no coding book can compare to(though John Ousterhout's "A Philosophy of Software Design" would have, if it came out earlier in my life). Personal time/task management- The classic, Getting Things Done( https://www.amazon.com/Getting-Things-Done-Stress-Free-Produ... ). The power this has on people cannot be understated. Turns out that mos…
Thank you for your super practical list! Going to go through all of those books over the next few months.