18 posts about "books"

Wow. I picked this up sight unseen from a recommendation on reddit. Great holiday read, and different. The aliens are refreshingly different and the middle half of the book is quite a ride.

4 stars as there are two strong whiffs of deus ex machina in the plot, which I'll leave for the reader.

The Joe Walker podcast has a great interview with Katalin Karikó, one of the scientists/founders behind mRNA technology.

Some standouts in the coversation - the path from communist Hungary to US, not getting grant funding over and over again, a great explanation of mRNA, women in science... lots more.

A slow start which turns into a great book on race in Australia, and what it means to belong.

Matthieu Aikins follows a brown refugee from Afghanistan through to Europe. It gives you an inside view of a refugees journey, starting from the why, to the how.

I would have preferred to read an account written by an actual migrant first hand, but they are obviously too busy with a ton of real life issues to be writing books on a very dangerous journey.

This is a book about climate change, all hung about on characters. Now Neal is great at learning things and telling them to you, and I've enjoyed his earlier works, info dumps and all. I like fantastical characters, like Jack, Eliza and Enoch Root in the Baroque Cycle, but this book... has a lot of ideas and interesting exposition on how a thing could practically happen, but don't read it for the ppl.

I did mostly enjoy and finish the book but I'm not even sure it is a book, really this should have been a series of long form articles with a lot of the stuff dropped out of it.

A good, easy to read book on how the British exited their Indian empire and left behind a fractured subcontinent.

There are a lot of words on the end of the British empire in India, but many of them suffer from lack of access or a bias towards some of the actors in the bloody saga.

The rise and fall of Arif Naqvi is fascinating, but I found this book a bit wanting.

First, the story itself:

It's a awesome political, economical and yes, climate overview of the planet and where its headed. Too much of future looking literature really holds its tongue. This is a no holds barred overview.

A book extract:

The book to read to get a handle of where Australia is today, and how politics works at the state and federal level.

Too Migrant, Too Muslim, Too Loud is a no-holds-barred memoir and manifesto from outspoken senator, trouble¬maker and multicultural icon Mehreen Faruqi. As the first Muslim woman in any Australian parliament, Mehreen has a unique and crucial perspective on our politics and democracy. It is a tale of a political outsider fighting for her right and the rights of others like her to be let inside on their terms.

So many ideas. It's my favourite first contact book. While some of the ideas might be over the top, they keep coming. Whats really impressive is that this is just book 1 of a trilogy and the ideas keep going.

This is a seminal work in science fiction, the kind which only comes once a decade (if so). I still think about the ideas and philosophies in the book

This is a great statistics primer - Alex Reinhart explains commonly used statistical techniques in use by not just showing how ppl make mistakes, but by explaining them in simple english which actually makes sense, unlike most "real" statistics books.

todo: write as a jupyter notebook showing some of the lessons learned?

Andrew Trask is an AI superstar, having come up with the idea for Generative Adverserial Networks (GANS) - one of the most exicting new AI techniques today - in a bar.

In this book he comes down to earth and explains neural networks from scratch to mere mortals. The book is still being written, but whats there so far is a really good easy to understand introduction to neural networks.

This is a awesome read. In many countries, many people have long stopped wondering or caring about how their country actually functions, and this book takes us through a bunch of really useful government functions, from providing food and shelter to the needy to... just about everything you can imagine.

Than along comes a man (Trump) and his political appointee who could care less about reality and are busy throwing spanners in the very system that runs America - the many agencies which DO ALL THE THINGS.

Oh goody, yet another book written through colonial tinted glasses.

It's a well written, easy reading book so I can see why it's so popular, and if it was labeled fictional, I'd give it four stars, for fictional it is, speaking of a world where the British Raj and it's leaders brought civilization to the masses, but the masses turned the wise Brits away even though they were led by that holiest of holy cows, Lord Mountbatten - and this turning away caused mass bloodshed in the process. It's almost a biblical story, and no wonder so many people still think fondly of empire, they probably read books like this one.