List of books I’ve read in 2020

  • 2020-12-28 Hermann Weyl: Mathematics and Logic - A brief survey serving as preface to a review of The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell 1946
    Good summary of the state of the foundations of maths in 1946
  • 2020-12-19 Charles Duhigg: The power of Habit - Why we do what we do and how to change
    OKish book, journalist style, interesting stories, but not very deep. Also the religious references were a bit off-putting and intellectually questionable.
  • 2020-12-15 J. K. Rowling: Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
    Oh well, a quick read. Very colourful.
  • 2020-12-13 John Brooks: Business Adventures - Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street
    Lovely told business stories from the 60s. E.g. the story of the managers that always winked when telling employees to obey regulation. It’s so interesting how some of them have the knack to repeat in history e.g. “The last great corner” was what happened when dealers shorting Volkswagen could not purchase the shares back and had to make a deal with Porsche which owned most shares. Also the fate of the pound from the last story.
  • 2020-10-14 Seth Gilbert & Nancy Lynch: Brewer’s Conjecture and the Feasibility of Consistent, Available, Partition-Tolerant Web Services
    aka. the CAP theorem proof. Not impressed. Clearly the CAP conjecture is an important observation on the limits of distributed systems, but the paper does not do justice to the issue. The paper avoids clear explanations. On the surface it aims to be precise, but it’s not. Sometimes it uses particular models, not clear how realistic they are. By he end of the paper there is still no clear definition for the core issues of consistency, availability, partition tolerance.
  • 2020-08-27: Christopher Olah: Understanding LSTM Networks
    Also read the paper by Ashish Vaswani et al: Attention Is All You Need. Good intro to recurrent neural networks.
  • 2020-06-22 M. G. Kains: Five Acres and Independence
    Advice from 1935, during Great Depression, with advice for town people moving to the country to set up a farm. Very easy read.
  • 2020-05-27 John Harrison: Vegetable Growing Month by Month
    Grow your own veg for when they’re not available in shops. Good. Easy read.
  • 2020-01-04 James Morton: Super Sourdough
    Bread making book. OK.