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Books I loved reading this year

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Re: Books I loved reading this year

#151

Post by dunefox »

ktta wrote: post #115
dunefox wrote: post #66

I'm reading Dune and I just bought a couple of neuroscience and math books. Maybe I'll even have time to read them!

What neuroscience books did you purchase?

Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, An Introductory Course in Computational Neuroscience, and Principles of Neural Design - all bought used for an okay price. Not exactly very theoretical books, but the topic fascinated me recently and I have to get started somewhere. Recommendations always welcome.

Edit: I even have another half a dozen of them in my cart, but I can't keep buying books...

Re: Books I loved reading this year

#152

Post by kingcharles »

greeneggs wrote: post #83
rememberlenny wrote: post #25

- List for the lazy - A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence, by Jeff Hawkins. The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race, by Walter Isaacson. Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro. Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell. Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir.

Doudna has her own memoir, "A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution." Why would you read Isaacson's third-person account, when you can get the information from the scientist herself? Well, I read both books, and Isaacson's is much better. In fact, Doudna's book was largely written by her coauthor, her then-graduate student Sam Sternberg, based on long interviews. This is the s…

Thank you for that - I'd recently read A Crack in Creation and thought the same question you had posed.

Re: Books I loved reading this year

#153

Post by kingcharles »

99_00 wrote: post #2

I'm super impressed by the production level of his 5 books I loved reading video.

Unreal. That's easily $100,000+ to make that video. The set and prop design team had a lot of fun. Then there are all the extras. The snow machine.

He should have at least pasted affiliate links to get himself an Amazon gift card or two.

Re: Books I loved reading this year

#154

Post by fmvab »

Baeocystin wrote: post #65
adamgordonbell wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Project Hail Mary was so good. I loved The Martian but Artemis not as much. By that measure Project Hail Mary was a return to form. It was just a fun, breezy read that hit the problem solving part of my brain in just the right way, but with a different angle on things than "The Martian".

I liked a lot of the ideas in PHM. I found the protagonist insufferable throughout, though. Perhaps Weir was going for a more flawed character after Watney? (Never read Artemis, so I can't comment there.) I still think it's a good book, and well worth the read. But man did that character grate on my nerves.

Haha. I thought this too but I can’t quite place my finger on it. What exactly made the protagonist so insufferable?

Re: Books I loved reading this year

#155

Post by chestertn »

CrazyStat wrote: post #149
chestertn wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't mean to trivialize Mojica's work, but at the end of the day if not for the later work of Doudna and Charpentier, Mojica's work on CRISPR would be unknown and irrelevant to 99.9999% of the world population. And if Mojica had not discover CRISPR... Anyways. Here's an article if you are interested: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/nobel-crispr The point here is that if Mojica (or Šikšnys) instead of p…

> And if Mojica had not discover CRISPR... And if Janssen had not invented the microscope... clearly all Nobel prizes in medicine and physiology should go to a Dutch guy who died 400 years ago. Mojica made a contribution. Doudna and Charpentier made a contribution which clearly conferred greater benefit on humankind. Šikšnys made a contribution but got scooped, which sucks but that's how science goes sometimes. It ha…

The Nobel prize is 120 years old and I don’t think it can be awarded posthumously.

> but got scooped, which sucks buts that’s how science works sometimes

I work in science. It hasn’t been always like this and it is getting worse. Nobody does basic or risky research anymore.

Re: Books I loved reading this year

#156

Post by munificent »

jnsaff2 wrote: post #143
billfruit wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have anyone read the recently released 'Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity' by David Graeber and David Wengrow. The articles I read about was thinking it was superlative.

I read it a few weeks ago. It is very good and highly recommended. I feel this opened my eyes quite a bit in the following ways: - history is not a linear progression and narrative, sometimes things happen in leaps and also can go "backward" - farming was something that was dabbled in for a millenia before fully committing to it - the idea of "egalitarianism" is quite vague and can be understood in many ways - ideas…

> - ideas about egalitarianism moved from native americans to the french

Humankind touches on this same topic too. Basically, it wasn't until we settled down in one place that humans were able to create massive inequality. In order to protect those levels of inequality, the powerful elite created concepts like property ownership, the divine right of kings, etc.

Egalitarianism had to be essentially rediscovered after it was lost during the transition to agrarianism. Non-agrarian cultures are naturally fairly high in equality.

Re: Books I loved reading this year

#157

Post by davemp »

hyperbovine wrote: post #55
davemp wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google?

I'd hazard a guess there are thousands of machines running Windows to be found somewhere within Google--they write plenty of software for that platform after all, and most on the sales/biz side are going to be trained on it too. Plus a lot of engineers using VSCode. MSFT also own GitHub, and, well, https://github.com/google . Same goes for pretty much all companies listed in the sibling comments as well.

That’s hardly using MS exclusively.

Re: Books I loved reading this year

#158

Post by twinkletwinkle_ »

decebalus1 wrote: post #113
twinkletwinkle_ wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's just Andy Weir at this point. I enjoyed The Martian, but Artemis was horrible. Characters were indistinguishable from one another, they were all just Andy trying to emulate the success of the cocky sarcastic hero from The Martian. After reading that I don't think I need to read any more of his work.

> I enjoyed The Martian, but Artemis was horrible. I personally hated both. With the risk of sounding elitist, the guy writes like /r/SubredditSimulator/

It's kind of like junk food. A little bit is enjoyable, too much makes you sick.

Re: Books I loved reading this year

#159

Post by sphynxie »

HiroshiSan wrote: post #148

I’m surprised to see Klara and The Sun on the list. Though I enjoyed the character of Klara, the book itself felt like a huge letdown and don’t see how it makes it on anyones top 5 list. Would love to hear others thoughts on it?

I was also not blown away (and surprised to see it on the list). I thought the perspectives were good i.e. how a new intelligence would interpret the world, sensory overload, etc., but I don't think it brought anything really new to the table.

Re: Books I loved reading this year

#160

Post by Uhhrrr »

HiroshiSan wrote: post #148

I’m surprised to see Klara and The Sun on the list. Though I enjoyed the character of Klara, the book itself felt like a huge letdown and don’t see how it makes it on anyones top 5 list. Would love to hear others thoughts on it?

I found it very boring. I wonder whether Gates was using it to signal: "Although it takes place in a dystopian future, the robots aren’t a force for evil. Instead, they serve as companions to keep people company. This book made me think about what life with super intelligent robots might look like—and whether we’ll treat these kinds of machines as pieces of technology or as something more."
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