Quotations of the Day
“You become what you think about.” “I’m not going to start something I won’t do the rest of my life” Dan John, Easy Strength Omnibook.
Category: Books
Where did the terms computer “chips” and “debugging” come from?
From an interesting book Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology by Chris Miller. Debugging: Moreover, vacuum tubes made it possible for these digital computers to be reprogrammed. Mechanical gears such as those in a bombsight could only perform a single type of calculation because each knob was physically attached to levers…
My favorite books I read in 2023
These may or may not be published in 2023, but I read them this year. Fiction Too Like the Lightning and The Seven Surrenders by Ada Palmer. These are two books in the Terra Incognita series. These were the best books I read of the year by far. The world building is great. There is…
Quotation of the Day: On travel
Such are the prosaic problems of the modern traveller. The transport part takes no time at all these days; it is the bureaucracy that is interminable. We are constantly being told that we live in a world without borders, in a globalized age, but only if you have the right passport and the right papers.…
Quotations of the Day: On change and familiarity
In politics: He who desires to attempts to reform the government of a state, and wishes to have it accepted, must at least retain the semblance of the old forms; so that it may seem to the people that there has been no change in the institutions, even though in fact they are entirely different…
Quotations of the Day
‘Seek Simplicity . . . and Distrust It’ Alfred North Whitehead And a second… There is no such thing as perfection, only the relentless, thirsty matching of an organism to its environment. Siddhartha Mukherjee in The Gene: An Intimate History
2022 Books of the Year
These are the favorite books I have read this year . They may or may not have been published this year. Relative to other years, I read a fair number of good, but not great books and thus my list is fairly short. Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State by Yasheng Huang. This…
Some good news on inflation
The Economist has an interesting review of the book Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet. The book is an argument that more people in the world is a positive, not a negative development. In recent years, China has used the one-child policy to reduce population growth;…
Book Review: Uncontrolled Spread
If you want to learn more about what went wrong for America’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, a great book to read is Scott Gottlieb’s Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic. Gottlieb is a physician, a former FDA commissioner, and a member of the National Academy of…
Book Review: The Hospital by Brian Alexander
I recently finished reading the book titled The Hospital: Life, Death and Dollars in a Small American Town by Brian Alexander. The premise of the book is very interesting. It takes a detailed look at a hospital in rural America, Bryan, Ohio to be specific. The book touches on the challenges a small-town hospital from…