171–180 of 283 posts
Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata It teaches Latin in a very cool way, where the entire book is written in Latin but it starts off with simple sentences anyone with a Romance language background can understand, before diving into deeper sentences, all while being illustrated so one can still follow the plot if they're stuck. It contrasts with very dense Latin books that focus on grammar and spelling, which often bore s…
Especially Baudilino.
(1) Real Mathematical Analysis, by Charles Pugh is a wonderful introduction to pure mathematics for a mathematically inclined engineer. The back cover starts like this > Was plane geometry your favourite math course in high school? Did you like proving theorems? Are you sick of memorising integrals? (2) The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, by Oliver Sacks. I think it's impossible to read this (or a number of other…
Chaos by James gleick for multiple fields in physics
Chaos year after year after year in this class provokes the strongest opinions.
A quarter of the people decide it is the most irritating, irrelevant thing that could possibly have been assigned in the class and hate it.
About half the people never quite figure out what's up with it.
And a quarter of the people, their life is transformed. They no longer have to meditate, they no longer have to have a—just they are at peace. At peace, I tell you.
Because what this book does is introduce this whole radically different way of thinking about biology, taking apart a world of reductionism. For five hundred years we have all been using a very simple model for thinking about living systems, which is, if you want to understand something that's complicated, you break it apart into its little pieces.
And once you understand the little pieces and put it back together, you will understand the complex thing. And what Chaos as an entire field is about—and this was pretty much the first book that was meant for the lay public about it—what Chaos shows is, that's how you fix clocks. That's not how you fix behaviors. That's not how you understand behaviors. Behavior is not like a clock, behavior is like a cloud. And you don't understand rainfall by breaking a cloud down into its component pieces and gluing them back together.
So read through that book. A lot of it is from physical sciences rather than biological, so we'll just be suggesting the chapters you should read.
I will tell you it is the first book since, like, Baby Beluga where I've gotten to the last page and immediately started reading it over again from the front. Because, along with Baby Beluga, it's had the greatest influence on my life. I found this to be the most influential book in my thinking about science since college. So that is a sign.PiHKAL by Alexander and Ann Shulgin is on its face a book about love and chemistry. Taken together it becomes more of a treatise on how psychopharmacology is a method of personal and sociological analysis. Drug use becomes a psychological tool to manifest the phenomena of the mind that are normally hidden, and novel synthesis becomes a tool to then access the areas of the mind unexplored throughout history. Aside of…
https://dailydialectics.com/education/pihkal/PIHKALAnthology...
Though he does such a good job of passionately portraying so many topics in these books I feel they could get people into any one of the earth sciences. Hell, even politics and economics.
Physics & Mathematics - Anyone who seriously pursues these fields learns to embrace the challenges as beautiful and the struggle to unravel their nature as fulfilling. To do this, we embrace the beauty in nature and see the connection with everything around us. Four books come to mind. Physics: 1. Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Adventures of a Curious Character) by Richard P. Feynman 2. The Universe in a Nutshel…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What book on forensic accounting would you recommend for entertainment value? I have some knowledge of french accounting, been exposed to US style, and thoroughly enjoyed long forms involving forensic accounting, money laundering and the like...
Not a book but CNBC's series "American Greed" is great. My favorite episode was about a guy who was (on paper) the second largest biodiesel producer in the country. He was literally just making up fake green energy credit numbers in a spreadsheet and selling them to companies looking to buy green energy credits. The EPA was made aware of him but did nothing even after they physically inspected his biodiesel "factory"…
Did the EPA give any reason?
Chaos by James gleick for multiple fields in physics
Professor Sapolsky on Chaos (class on Human Biology/Biology of Behaviour): Chaos year after year after year in this class provokes the strongest opinions. A quarter of the people decide it is the most irritating, irrelevant thing that could possibly have been assigned in the class and hate it. About half the people never quite figure out what's up with it. And a quarter of the people, their life is transformed. They…