Latest Posts

• Book of the Week: The Speed of Sound

  Thomas Dolby has no affiliation of Dolby Laboratories. I got this book, because I thought it was an origin story of Dolby Labs. Instead I got …

• Book of the Week: The Little Book of Common Sense Investing

  This week I read The Little Book of Common Sense Investing by John C. Bogle after finding out he has Enough. First thought is that do I still need to read this book if I’m already an index investor. Does he need to speak to the choir? I’ve been a long time convert after reading Unconventional Success. Beating the stock market is a zero-sum game.

• The Little Book Of Common Sense Investing

  This week I read The Little Book of Common Sense Investing by John C. Bogle after finding out he has Enough. First thought is that do I still need to read this book if I’m already an index investor. Does he need to speak to the choir? I’ve been a long time convert after reading Unconventional Success. Beating the stock market is a zero-sum game.

  Time makes more converts than reason —Tom Paine

  People are irrational, but math wins in the end. You just have to survive long enough to see it win.

  It's amazing how difficult it is for a man to understand something if he's paid a small fortune not to understand it.

  People are finance are stupid and they are paid to stay that way.

• Book of the Week: Enough

  This week I read Enough: True Measures of Money, Business and Life by John C. Bogle, the founder of Vanguard Mutual Fund Group. He had his first heart attack in 1960, but is still alive today. We focus too much on things that can be counted. You get what you measure. I’m tired of the rat race and wonder when I will have enough? What happens when you don’t have enough? Will I ever have enough? Jack can talk about enough since he clearly has enough already. When you’re rich and retired, you need to occupy your time, writing a book is one of those things. I will keep working until the day I have enough. I hope that day was yesterday

• Book of the Week: Bad Paper

  This week I read Bad Paper: Chasing Debt from Wall Street to the Underworld by Jake Halpern. I picked up this book after hearing about it on Planet Money: The Buffalo Talk-Off. The book was better than I expected. I found out about a side of the economy that I would probably never experience, debt collection. I always pay my debts, but most Americans owe money. Debt Market Banks are required to take a loss on a loan after 180 days if you stop payments under generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP). They need to get it off their books. To still extract money from defaulted loans, they will sell them for pennies on the dollar to debt collection agencies. Those agencies try to collect debt and make big profits, but sometimes they can’t collect all the debt and resell what’s left for less than pennies on the dollar. This keeps getting passed to the lower and lower rungs of debt collection agencies until it eventually reaches a lawyer, who will try to sue and get judgment to garnish wages. But there is no paper trail other than a spreadsheet. If you actually show up in court and ask the lawyer to prove their case, they will drop the case, because they can’t. So if you borrow money, ignore debt collectors and show up in court to tell them to prove your case, you never have to repay your loans. You have to be careful about not making a payment, because that could reset the statute of limitations. You’ll just have shitty credit, which doesn’t matter if you deal in the cash economy. Some unscrupulous individuals will try to sell paper without a clear line of ownership and sell the same paper to multiple people. Ex-cons can’t find legitimate jobs except through other ex-cons who run debt collection agencies. Debt collection turns out to be more profitable than selling drugs on the corner. Some debt collections will do illegal things like threatening physical harm or making false statements about jail and lawsuits.

• Book of the Week: Effective Modern C++

  This wee I returned Effective Modern C++ to the library after only reading the first few items. Wasn’t work reading it unless I was currently in the middle of writing C++ code. I found out what auto means. C++ has changed a lot over the years. I have some catching up to do, but C++98 can still get me somewhere.

• Book of the Week: Lombard Street

  This week I partially read Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market by Walter Bagehot, because this book was reference in another book that I read. This book was written in 1873. Normally I’d be really interested in books like these. I am, but I need to focus on cut down on nonessential reading since I can’t absorb any information while my mind is somewhere else. It is funny that money hasn’t changed much in over 100 years. What was applicable back then is still applicable today. Amazing. Ties in nicely with how finance enables large scale projects like railroads and how banking is built on credit and trust. Since I moved to privately published posts, I feel no obligation to write more. Like Marie Kondo says, remove stuff that doesn’t bring joy.

• Book of the Week: How Google Tests Software

  

• Book of the Week: The ETF Book

  This week I read The ETF Book, because I’m procrastinating. I though this would be a really boring and dry subject, but I learned a few things. I learned that Vanguard has a patent on Vanguard Index Participation Receipts (VIPERs), the structure of their ETFs, which are special class shares of their mutual funds. When you’re buying something, you should know what you’re buying. There are many different type of exchange portfolios as detailed below. | Grantor Trusts | Investment Trust | Exchange-Traded Notes (ETN) | Unit Investment Trust (UIT) | RIC Open-Ended ETF | RIC Vanguard ETF
  —|—|—|—|—|—|—
  SEC Registration Act | 1933 | 1933 | 1933 | 1940 | 1940 | 1940
  Company dividend reinvested | No | No | Implied | No | Yes | Yes
  Portfolio pays dividends | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes
  Redemption in-kind option | Yes | No | No | No | No | No
  Tracking error | NA | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes
  Credit risk of issuer | No | No | Yes | No | No | No
  Manager discretion | NA | Yes | No | Restricted | Yes | Yes
  Allows concentrated positions | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No | No
  Traditional fund share class | No | No | No | No | No | Yes
  Economic Cycle Investing

• Book of the Week: Light on Yoga

  This week I read Light on Yoga by B.K.S. Iyengar, because I want to enhance my practice. This is the bible on yoga. It has descriptions and photos of 200 asanas, different yoga postures. The appendix has a 300 week course if you want to be able to do all the poses. Although many fail to get past week 166. It is recommended that you do your practice under a guru. The origins of the word guru come from gu, darkness and ru, light. You need control over the mind to be absent of desire, fear and anger. It is thought that the loss of semen leads to death and its retention to life. 8 Stages of Yoga

• Book of the Week: Never Split the Difference

  This week I read Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It, because I need to get in touch with my emotions. Doesn’t explicitly label and organize within a chapter since stories are mainly a narrative to illustrate techniques. The end of the chapter summarizes points. Can probably just read summary at end of very chapter if you’re busy. Sometimes theory doesn’t match up with the real world. Chris Voss’s real experience as an FBI hostage negotiator was gained by people dying. You can benefit from their deaths by reading this book and finding out what works in practice. Conflict

• Book of the Week: The Most Important Thing Illuminated

  I wanted to read The Most Important Thing, but I wound up reading The Most Important Thing Illuminated, which had added unneeded commentary. I can see why you would annotate something like the bible, but this is not really a book you need to add annotations, especially smack dab in the middle of the text, which breaks the reader’s flow. The author, Howard Marks, is a cofounder of Oaktree Capital Management. The book grew out of a series of memos he sent to his investors. Instead of blog posts turning into a book, this is a bunch of memos turned into a book. If you’re looking for specifics, you won’t find it here. This is a collection of a lot of different “most important things” that investors need to consider in order to be successful. It is not one thing that makes you rich, but a lot of small things.

• Book of the Week: Eat That Frog!

  This week I read Eat That Frog! from SmarterComics, because I wanted procrastinate by reading a book. I intended to read Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time the book, but wound up with the comic book instead. Previously I read Getting Things Done, which already put me in the mindset of doing things to become more productive. There’s no explicit list of 21 items in the comic book, so I’ll just assume each panel in the summary section is one of the 21 ways.

• Book of the Week: Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital

  This week I read Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages by Carlota Perez, because it was recommended by multiple sources. I had to pay money to purchase this book since it was not available at my local library. VC blogger Fred Wilson wrote about bitcoin in the Carlota Perez Framework. The book is divided into three parts. Part I talks about technological revolutions. Part II talks about financial capital in relation to technological revolutions. Part III talks about why this reoccurs. It is a difficult book to read when you have ADD, because it is easy to get lost in all the thoughts. Took me a lot longer than expected to get through the book. I think of the book is analogous to what happens when you crossing the chasm as a society due to technological changes. This isn’t an app you’re trying to get someone to use, but a large technological shift that is push and pulled by financial capital. The Sequence The sequence of technological revolution, financial bubble, collapse, golden age and political unrest is a consequence of capitalism, the interaction between technological revolutions and financial capital. It is not innovation, but how innovation spreads that causes this to be cyclical. You can decompose the sequence into 2 periods, each with 2 phases.

• Book of the Week: Bandit Algorithms for Website Optimization

  This week I read Bandit Algorithms for Website Optimization, because I wanted more reference material for the Problem of the Month: Multi-Arm Bandit post. This book is a starting point if you find things on the internet too mathematical. It has code examples in Python. The figures in the book are plotted using R.

• Book of the Week: Weapons of Math Destruction

  This week I read Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil, mathbabe, because she accuses me of building WMDs. O’Neil is a data scientist with a PhD in mathematics from Harvard, who was previously a professor and a quant for D.E. Shaw during the Financial Crisis of 2008. I have a few issues with the book other than it saying that I have fallen to the dark side of big data. The book goes over how models affect a person’s life through their lifetime starting with school, college, courts, work and voting. O’Neil’s main point is that correlation does not imply causation and unfortunate individuals are lumped into groups by association, which damage their prospects for life. For me, there are probably bigger underlying issues that need to be addressed. The models are merely a reflection of reality. Businesses treat people like cogs, because they are cogs. Weapons of Math Destruction

• Book of the Week: Sprint

  This week I read Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days by Jake Knapp, because I’m impatient and want to solve big problems. I think of the book as a mix of design thinking, agile sprints, usability testing and lean startup. Knapp has refined the sprint process through experimentation and this books serves as a step by step guide. The stories in the book were fresh to me since they were more recent examples and companies in Google Venture’s portfolio. Sprint The purpose of a sprint is to generate and test ideas to solve a problem before fully committing resources.

• Book of the Week: Click

  This week I read Click: The Forces Behind How We Fully Engage with People, Work, and Everything We Do, because I need to learn how to connect with people quickly and effectively. It is easier to accomplish goals with other people than alone. The book is a quick read. Clicking

• Book of the Week: Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain

  This week I read Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards, because I was inspired to improve my drawing skills after finding out about 100 Days of Childhood Memories: The Book. Previously I read The Elements of Drawing, which also talks about drawing. At first I was going to finish the book in a week, but after going through the first part of the book, I need to stop reading it. To get the most value out of the book, you need to read the book and stop and do the exercises, which take about an hour each. Unless you do the exercises in the book, there isn’t a point to reading the book cover to cover. Drawing is not so much as creating art, but having the skill to see the world. Drawing is about seeing as much as it is about putting pencil to paper. Improving your drawing skill will help you notice things about the world that you missed before. I want to improve my drawing skill to better see the world and to better convey ideas to other people. Five Perceptual Skills Drawing can be broken down into 5 perceptual skills.

• Book of the Week: What Women Want

  This week I read What Women Want. Previously I’ve read The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists, which talks about pickup artist (PUA) culture and the different techniques they use to seduce women. I don’t feel good about people using those techniques and people falling for them. For practical purposes of improving your odds at mating, What Women Want is written with that in mind. All you have to do is become a better person who is social and happy and women will mate with you. The previous title of the book was Mate. It gives advice based on science, but it doesn’t have to give any data or stories to back it. It just states things as fact, which is why they are able to fit so much good advice into the book. As I was reading, I thinking saying, “Oh, so that’s why, “. Lot of content, worth a read if you’re single. Choices

• Book of the Week: Grit

  This week, I read Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance by Angela Duckworth, MacArthur grant winner and University of Pennsylvania professor. I thought the name was familiar, but I though it was just because she was a famous person. After I started reading the book, I found out why. She taught high school math. After reading the first part of the book, I didn’t like it, because she says that grit is a combination of passion and perseverance. I believe that passion is bullshit based on personal experience, reading Cal Newport’s So Good They Can’t Ignore You and listening to Ben Horowitz. I judged the book too soon. Duckworth goes on to describe passion in a later chapter that is consistent with Newport, Horowitz and the data she presents. Need to read the whole thing before passing judgement. The book is good, but some things are a little more nuanced. She starts with a simplification and handles the nuance later. If you’re a parent, she talks about how to teach your kids grit. Talent Versus Grit Talent versus grit was some of the initial thing I had issues with. One issue I had was using Lowell High School students as an example. This isn’t exactly a normal school. Students are already prefiltered with those who do well on standardized tests. Also the example of getting a 5 on an AP Calculus exam wasn’t really impressive. Students are taught by the person who writes the exam and usually everyone in the class gets a 5. Grit will always lose to talent plus grit. But I agree most people don’t persevere enough to hit the talent ceiling. There are cases where I’ve tried my best, but I still got demolished by others. She tries to make the point that Grit > Talent but it should be Grit + Talent > Grit > Talent Maybe I haven’t been a teacher and interacted with students who weren’t gritty. This book was focused on how to help those students who weren’t gritty and weren’t talented. They can at least be gritty and they will eventually do better than the talented ones. I’ve been on both sides. There were times where things were easy and I didn’t practice. There were also times where I sucked and I tried my hardest to get better. You can’t get awesome without lots of practice. I know that, but I guess other people don’t. They don’t think about Jerry Rice being the first to practice and the last to leave. They don’t know about him training on The Hill. When you see only the final result and not the path to get there, you think it is genius and something achievable.

• Book of the Week: The End of Alchemy

  This week I read The End of Alchemy by Mervyn King, the former governor of the Bank of England, because he had a front row seat to the financial crisis. This is a very dense book, but it was worth taking my time going through the book to learn about money and banking. Money, paper money was created to be exchanged for gold. Banking transforms secure short-term deposits into long-term risky investments. That is a feat more impressive than changing lead into gold, the focus on traditional alchemy. This book talks about the end of alchemy, and the future of money and banking. There are four concepts that are central to the book.

• Book of the Week: The Newbie's Guide to Cannabis & the Industry

  This week I read The Newbie’s Guide to Cannabis & The Industry, because … I forget. Previously I read Marijuana Gateway to Health about the medical side of cannabis. This book is a great introduction since it practically covers everything you could possibly want to ask about cannabis. There is always more to learn, but I can’t think of a better place to start. Cannabis Cannabis is from India. This is where the name indica comes from. Cannabis grown in this tropical climate is good for medicine. Then the Europeans took cannabis and it adapted to colder climates and grew longer with smaller flowers as sativa, making its fibers useful for rope. There are both female and male plants. Males are useless except for making seeds. For medicine, you want the resin, which is plentiful in the female flowers. The best of which is the cola, the central bud on a female plant that looks like a fox tail. Cannabis is an annual plant, but by manipulating environment, you can get 3-6 generations a year. 18-24 hours of light keeps females from blooming. Switch to a 12 / 12 split of light and darkness for flowering cycle. Keep the temperature between 70-85 F. The plant prefers a 6.5 pH, slightly acidic. When the plant is starting out you want 80-90% humidity for seedings and clones to root. Then switch to 60-70% humidity for growth phase. Finally 40-60% for blooming. History

• Book of the Week: Effective C++

  This week I read Effective C++ Second Edition, because it was on the bookshelf at work. This book was published in 1998, which was around the time I learned C++. I have about 20 years of programming experience. Wow, I’m old. After going through book, I realized I had a really good programming instructor, because most of these tips were ingrained into me by Mr. Simon. Although the book is good, you should probably read the newer edition of the book. I don’t think they program C++ now the same way they did in the 1990s. Some books describe a programming language. This book shows you best practices when using the language.

• Book of the Week: The 10% Entrepreneur

  This week I read The 10% Entrepreneur, because it is the in thing to give your classmates free copies of your book to read and if you don’t read it, I’ll do it for you. Patrick J. McGinnis, originator of FOMO (fear of messing out), got screwed by playing it safe in life. He did everything he was supposed to do, get a Harvard MBA and a job at a company that was too big to fail, AIG. The thing is we know we are supposed to diversify our stock portfolio, which is an investment of our assets, but working for one company doesn’t yield any diversification. Adding an little entrepreneurship to the mix is an insurance policy. Everyone wants to be an entrepreneur, lured by rags to riches origin stories. I’ve learned that these origin stories are written after the fact by marketing forces. In reality most of the work done for the Apple computer was in Wozniak’s cubicle at HP. I learned in Founder’s At Work that he explicitly got written approval from HP that there was no conflict of interest. This book is written for people with good jobs and good skills who are willing to invest a portion their financial and intellectual capital for long term gains. Not very helpful for someone who is poor and stupid, but I finished the book anyway. Being a 10% Entrepreneur is to make small investments that provide for long term growth personally, financially and professionally. 5 Reasons Not to be a Full-time Entrepreneur

• Book of the Week: Zero Waste Home

  This week I read Zero Waste Home by Bea Johnson, because one day I hope to be rich enough to afford to be zero waste. This book has some tinges of the philosophy found in The Life Changing of Magic of Tidying Up, but it feels like Bea’s feelings of focus and uncluttering was a byproduct of her trying to achieve zero waste. This book is more about the tips to replace makeup, household cleaning supplies, grocery shopping, etc. Some are practical, some I find too extreme. I’m not going to bring jars to the fish counter, but I might try some of her vinegar based cleaning solutions. I learned that going commando is wasteful, because you need to wash your clothes more, so I should wear underwear and you should too. Bea admits her methods were a little extreme, like making her own butter, but even she had to relent on having video games in the home, because her children were spending more time at their friend’s place. The 5 Rs A zero waste lifestyle involves applying the 5 Rs to all aspects of your life.

• Book of the Week: The Visual Handbook of Building and Remodeling

  This week I read The Visual Handbook of Building and Remodeling, because the previous book on building a home didn’t have anything about electrical and plumbing. Notice how both books are visual in nature. Easier to look at pictures and point rather than trying to read text. This book talked more about design and regulations, which is a good thing. Regulations are important. They are there, because someone died. Kids so often want to remove themselves from the gene pool by sticking their heads between railings, climbing railings and falling from the third floor or dropping from a window. When you are remodeling a building, you need to be able to picture how people will interact with their surroundings when you’re finished. Sometimes it is easier to gut the place and remodel it. Especially if you have neighbors trying to throw a wrench into things.

• The Visual Handbook Of Building And Remodeling

  

• Book of the Week: A Guide to the Good Life

  This week I read A Guide to the Good Life by William B. Irvine, because I wanted to find out if my life is wasted or not. Doesn’t everybody want the good life? Everyone needs a philosophy for life just like they need an investment policy statement. The book says that we have historically thought of stoicism in the wrong way and they are people who actually get joy out of life. The Greeks created schools of philosophy and the Romans marketed Stoicism to make it more attractive. Ancient ascetics are like modern day homeless people or is that the other way around. If you want to modernize Stoicism, just replace the explanations that invoke Zeus with evolution and you’ll be fine. After reading this book, you can enjoy the good life as a stoic, but don’t tell anyone about it. It is easier to practice Stoicism in stealth. Stoic Psychological Techniques

• Book of the Week: The Complete Visual Guide to Building a House

  This week I read The Complete Visual Guide to Building a House, because if you have a tear down, you need to build a new house from scratch. It is useful to know what your contractor and subcontractors are doing and what needs to be done. The book is fully illustrated, enabling a person like me easily understand things. The book goes over laying the foundation, framing the floors, walls and ceiling, roofing, windows, drywalling, tiling, flooring, stairs, doors and trim. It doesn’t go over electrical or plumbing, so you’ll have to rely on your subcontractors on that. What I did learn is that there are a lot of places to cut corners. Ideally, you get a pallet of construction grade lumber and sort out the straight pieces from the bent pieces. Use the straight pieces where straightness is important and find some other place to stick the not as straight pieces. If I was lazy, I wouldn’t bother sorting the wood and use whatever was quickly accessible. There are a lot of details to get right. The book provides a good general outline of how things are done, but different regions have different building codes. There are a lot of specific details in each part of the construction process. Don’t expect to take your pickup truck to Home Depot (HD) for materials and amigos and be able to build a house after reading this book.

• Book of the Week: Once Upon a Time in Russia

  This week I read Once Upon a Time in Russia by Ben Mezrich, the author of Bringing Down the House. I’m an ant and this book tells you how the world really works. How Russian oligarchs and Putin obtained their wealth and power. What happened in Russia is playing itself out in China, where you have fortunes being made through the privatization of government-owned companies. When you have politics, companies, power and wealth, you will always get corruption. Even in the United States, you have politicians putting their children into power at drug companies to raise the prices and fleece the public. Even throw in a fake MBA degree from a college while you’re at it. The book is mainly about Boris Berezovsky, an oligarch, who put Yeltsin and Putin in power, but ultimately fell out of favor with Putin. It also details the background of Alexander Litvinenko, who was assassinated by polonium poisoning. Roman Abramovich, Boris’ protege and 137th richest person in the world, represents a contrasting oligarch who was willing to play by Putin’s rules. When the house tells you that you should cash in your chips and leave, you should do so. Or you’ll leave in a body bag.

• Book of the Week: The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up

  This week I read The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing by the amazing Marie Kondo. If you watch any videos of Marie, you’ll see why I call her amazing. She’ll change your life for the better. Marie developed her KonMari method after years of running a tidying business. Tidying is not just about making your living space uncluttered, it is about freeing your mind to focus on the things that bring you joy. As I learned in make space, people are heavily influenced by their environment. You must create an environment for people to thrive. This book is more about mindset than technique. You need to change the way your relationship with things, the final state of where you want to people and why you want to be there. Marie is not alone. Other people have reaped the benefit of tidying. James Altucher got rid of most of his possessions and found that minimalism brought him freedom and joy. A lawyer in Shanghai switched careers to run a tidying business just like Marie. Tidying Tidying is composed of two actions: discarding and deciding where to store things. You should not do a little bit of tidying every day. You should allocate time and make this a special event where you set yourself up with the proper habits. When you start tidying you should start by category and not by location. This lets you evaluate everything in that category. Discarding

• Book of the Week: Prison Ramen

  This week I read Prison Ramen: Recipes and Stories Behind Bars, because if I was going to do any recruiting, I would need to know about the most valuable commodity in the prison economy. The ramen recipes provide a backdrop to the prison stories. Prison kind of sucks, but I guess that is the point of it. If you’re not a white male drug taking athlete from Stanford, you could possible end up in jail. There are some stories from celebrities like Danny Trejo and Shia LaBeouf, who talks about his time stealing Pokemon from Kmart. I learned that sugar-filled coffee can help with heroin withdrawal. Although I’d stay away from heroin since there is not much difference between a therapeutic dose and lethal dose. If you want some booze in prison, there’s a pruno recipe too. Racism

• Book of the Week: Founders at Work

  This week I read Founders at Work: Stories of Startup’s Early Days by Jessica Livingston, founding partner of Y Combinator. I had no idea what the book was about. When I opened it up, I thought this is just a bunch of interviews, which could possibly suck. The book is actually great and I learned a lot reading this book. The book came out in 2008, so they had an interview with some guy called Evan Williams who sold Blogger to Google after running out of money and having everyone quit before having a chance to lay everyone off. You get to hear the up and down journeys of well known companies. I gave up on startups early this year, so this was a nice chance to live vicariously. Learnings Some people like to rewrite history. Turns out that Jack thought up the idea to put the Hotmail tagline on each email, not Tim Draper. I need to remember to mention it to Sabeer, the next time I see him in the restroom. Frugality is a saving grace. Steve Wozinak was good, because he didn’t have money, so he spent a lot of time trying to reduce chips and design things on paper. Being frugal is very helpful as a startup founder. It lets you survive like a cockroach. Persistence is another theme. When people say “no”, it is just the start of the negotiation. Hiring good people is important. Y Combinator does not invest in good teams without good ideas. They tried it, but have learned not to do it without a good idea. I think it works, but it doesn’t work if you only have a 3 month time frame to get things done. Investing in good teams works if given enough time. It doesn’t matter what the business plan you used to raise money, you should build what the customers value and are willing to pay for. Most ideas change and don’t survive first contact with the customer. One of the best uses of money was to buy a $15,000 espresso machine. It turned around the company, because it changed the environment. Dealing with customers is a lot about managing feelings. You want everyone to feel great using your product. Actually, people are all about feelings. They are just squishy meatbags of feelings.

• Book of the Week: Cracking the Coding Interview

  This week I read Cracking the Coding Interview by Gayle Laakmann McDowell, the founder of CareerCup. I previously read Programming Interviews Exposed. I don’t like coding interviews, but I had no idea how to answer these questions. Here are a list of things you must know according to Gayle. Data Structures

• Book of the Week: Chaos Monkey

  This week I read Chaos Monkey by Antonio García Martínez. As I read the book, it seemed so candid that it could have only been written by someone with FU money. The book was 500 page long, but it was an enjoyable read as a window into what Silicon Valley is really like. The author dropped out of a PhD in physics at UC Berkeley to work as a quant at Goldman Sachs. Afterwards he moved west to join Adchemy, a tech company. He left Adchemy to start AdGrok through the YCombinator incubator program. AdGrok was acquired by Twitter and Martínez joined Facebook pre-IPO to product manage their ads. Things happen in a flash of the eye. Startups

• Book of the Week: The Only Game in Town

  This week I read The Only Game in Town: central banks, instability, and avoiding the next collapse by Mohamed A. El-Erian. This book sort of just went through me without me absorbing anything. It feels like a brain dump by El-Erian. The chapters are really short and it doesn’t tell me anything I don’t already know. If you lived in the future and wanted to figure out what happened in the past, this might be an okay starting point, but other books go much deeper into specific subjects. The main issue is that we are going through a period of low growth, which has a lot of societal implications like inequality. If you want to read more about that, I recommend Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. El-Erain keeps referring to a T-intersection, where things will get worst or they will get better. If that is the case, I might as well do a long straddle. Issues

• Book of the Week: How to Win Games and Beat People

  This week I read How to Win Games and Beat People by Tom Whipple, because I am tired of losing. The book is a quick read and goes through many games. It does highlight some of the mathematical results, but being a technical person, I’d rather go further in depth.

• Book of the Week: Peak

  This weak I read Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, because I want to become an expert too just like the machine learning expert. If you do deliberate practice, you too can become an expert and gain super powers. It turns out that you can indeed learn perfect pitch and it is not an innate genetic ability. You just need to spend a year and a half at it. I’ve also learned recently that you can become as fit as a Navy SEAL by just religiously following the Navy SEAL training program. Deliberate Practice

• Book of the Week: Influence

  I was told that I can’t keep using violence to persuade people, so I read Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini. You can persuade people by taking advantage of psychological shortcuts that people take when they can not assess the entire situation. Dr. Cialdini also gives ways to say no to persuasion.

• Book of the Week: Narconomics

  Jesus told me to read Nacronomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel to learn more about the business. This book looks at the drug smuggling industry through the eyes of an economist. I learned that there are 3 types of countries. Countries that produce drugs, countries that traffic drugs and countries that consume drugs. You can think about cocaine grown in Colombia and consumed in United States via Mexico. Persuasion

• Book of the Week: Dataclysm

  This week I read Dataclysm by Christian Rudder, because the OkCupid blog, OkTrends, is probably the best example of content marketing with big data. You may wonder why would you need to read the book, if you’ve already read the blog posts. Rudder redid the analysis with new data to double check his previous work and took data from sources other than OkCupid to talk about what brings us together, what pulls us apart and what makes us who we are. You may hear individual anecdotes of racism, but when you aggregated lots of data together, insights rise above the noise. You can actually say something about people. He covers linguistics, employment, beauty, sexuality, race and also the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. You get a lot more than just data about dating from the book.

• Book of the Week: Rocket Surgery Made Easy

  This week, I read Rocket Surgery Made Easy, because I want to go to Mars like Elon Musk. Steve Krug is better known for Don’t Make Me Think, a book about usability of websites. If you’re someone reading this book, it usually means you don’t do any usability testing, so it all rides on you to start doing it. Usability Test But I have web analytics, why do I actually need to talk to people? Doesn’t my web analytics tell me what people are doing on my site already? Aside from most web analytics being difficult to use, they only tell you what happened and not why. The why is what is important. A lot of time on a page is usually good unless they spent time on that page, because they were confused. Facilitator

• Book of the Week: Systematic Trading

  This week I read Systematic Trading by Robert Carver after being introduced to his blog about Investment Idiocy. He also has a public journal on elitetrader detailing his 84.9% profit since April 2014 trading futures. The book is a little dense and you should be ready to get the spreadsheets out.

• Book of the Week: Flow

  This week I read Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, because I want to avoid psychic entropy and focus my psychic energy to bend spoons. I originally thought the book was just going to be about flow, a subject I’ve heard plenty of times in other contexts, but was pleasantly surprised when the book talked about happiness, consciousness, experience and meaning. Reading this book made me feel at peace with my life. I feel a greater understanding of people.

• Book of the Week: Thinking with Type

  This week I read thinking with type, because it was recommended by the author of 100 Days of Childhood Memories. This is a book on visual communication that is divided into three sections: type, text and grid. You start with the basic unit, type, and move up from there. The book goes through the history of fonts and their development. Italic font refers to font from Italy that was designed to mimic handwriting. I also learned that uppercase and lowercase referred to the physical cases where print blocks were stored. I wish I had this book when I was laying out my cookbook. Know I know why certain student scientific magazines look like crap while other profession popular magazines look awesome. The appendix is also great, because it tells when to use em-dash and en-dash and hyphen and gives you what all the editing notation means as well as other good tips. Design books are hard to talk about unless you actually read it and look at the page as you read it. It makes so much sense when you see the actual page in front on you and how the spacings and justification change how the words feel. Great book for anyone publishing a book. Purchase thinking with type on Amazon.com or check it out from your local library.

• Book of the Week: Men's Style

  This week I read Men’s Style: The Thinking Man’s Guide to Dress by Russel Smith, because I want to understand fashion brands better in order to help their businesses and look good doing it. This book goes over the history of fashion and gives you the rules, so you can break them later. This book is for people assembling their grownup wardrobe. Why Bother?

• Book of the Week: Who

• Book of the Week: JavaScript: The Good Parts

  This week, I read JavaScript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford, because it is hard to call yourself a full stack engineer if you don’t know JavaScript well. This book is great. Not SICP great, but great in the sense that it tells you everything you need to know in a condensed manner. Nobody wakes up and says they want to learn how to program with JavaScript. They try to build a website and need to scratch together some JavaScript to do some interactive stuff. The book is about getting things done rather than teaching you things that you will let you show off how smart you are. Nobody cares how smart you are as long as you are writing code that works. Often being too smart makes it harder for other people to understand what you are doing. The book covers all the annoyances and pitfalls that trip up people. The book is short enough to read in an hour. Should be required reading for anyone working with JavaScript. Prototypical Inheritance Everything in JavaScript is an object. Functions are objects. Since there are no classes, people create pseudoclassical classes with prototypical inheritance as an alternative to functional classes. If you don’t understand what this means, then you should read the book. Purchase JavaScript: The Good Parts from Amazon.com or check it out from your local library.

• Book of the Week: The Checklist Manifesto

  This week I read The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande, MacArthur Fellow and professor at Harvard Medical School. I’ve heard about the results of having a checklist, but I’ve never read the source. Everyone should use checklist, because they help when dealing with extreme complexity.There are four expectations of learned occupations: selflessness, skill, trust-worthiness and discipline. Discipline is hard, but checklist help with that. I bet you can imagine the pilot not flying going through the pre-flight checklist. Now imagine this applied to everything else. He goes over how checklist are use in flying, cooking, construction, investing, and surgery. Metrics Dr. Gawande worked with the World Health Organization (WHO) to develop checklist to save lives. There are four big killers in surgery: infection, bleeding, unsafe anesthesia and the unexpected. The first three killers can mitigated with checklist. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOGJMOMHDJk&w;=420&h;=315] Here are some metrics from studies using checklist in surgery.

• Book of the Week: All About Hedge Funds

  This week, I read All About Hedge Funds, 2nd edition by Ezra Zask. First thing I noticed is that the 1st and 2nd edition have different authors. Since the 1st edition was published in 2002, I recommend reading the 2nd edition instead. The financial crisis and increased regulation have changed things. The book goes over what is a hedge fund, the history, how they are structured, how they work, what the different strategies are and how they are measured. The books tries to be objective without giving a moral judgement on whether or not hedge funds are bad. They just are. They exist. Private Placement Memorandum Under the U.S. Investment Company Act of 1940, companies must issues a private placement memorandum (PPM) that typically includes.

• Book of the Week: On the Move

  I forgot how it got on my reading list, but this week I read On the Move by Oliver Sacks. Oliver Sacks is known for writing many books as neurologist and this book is his autobiography that was published shortly before he died. The book is a bit long, but I enjoyed it. Oliver tells stories about the people, giving a face to the neurological conditions. Being a good writer allows him to surface things to the public and medical community that would normally be ignored. Since he was a neurologist, the development of the field and his work as a doctor frames most of the book. His mother, father and two older brothers were also doctors. He grew in up Jewish in Britain, but eventually moved the the United States and stayed there to practice medicine. The historical context in the book is great. He describes riding a motorcycle around the United States and all throughout California before the big interstates. There is a certain romanticism with riding a motorcycle around the country to embrace nature before having to worry about getting run off the road by a car. He would ride a thousand miles during the weekend and go back to work on Monday. When he wasn’t riding his motorcycle on the weekends he was doing drugs. It is amazing that your doctor does hard drugs on the weekends and goes back to work on Monday. Oliver was a man of many talents, he spent time on Muscle Beach and broke a weight-lifting record with a 600-pound squat. He also talks about being gay when it wasn’t acceptable in Britain and how his brother and wife got him a whore in Paris. He eventually got a lot of sex after, especially after moving to San Francisco, California. There’s nothing like two bodies clad in leather up against each other on a motorcycle. [caption id=”attachment_5029” align=”aligncenter” width=”840”] Oliver Sacks at Muscle Beach w/ BMW motorcycle[/caption] Purchase On the Move on Amazon.com or check it out from your local library.

• Book of the Week: A Random Walk Down Wall Street

  This week I read A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burton G. Malkiel. This book first came out in 1973 and gets revised often to reflect current information. The latest is the 11th edition (2016), the book I read was the 10th edition (2011). This book is still relevant 40 years later. I can summarize the book in one statement. Index funds are better than trying to invest in individual securities or actively managed funds. This is one of my favorite investing books. Malkiel explains things so plainly that it should be accessible to all audiences. Part 4 of the book gives practical advice for investors.

• Book of the Week: What Every Real Estate Investor Needs to Know About Cash Flow... And 36 Other Key Financial Measures

  This week, I read What Every Real Estate Investor Needs to Know About Cash Flow… And 36 Other Key Financial Measures by Frank Gallinelli, Columbia professor and founder of realdata.com, founded in 1982. Another real estate with a ridiculously long title. I picked up this book to go through the math needed to evaluate whether or not a property will make a good investment. The book is separated into two parts. The first part is 100 pages of content and the rest of the book goes through 37 different calculations. Most of those calculations are basic like how to calculate compounded interest. The Four Ways to Make Money in Real Estate There are only four ways to make money in real estate.

• Book of the Week: The Wall Street Journal Complete Real-estate Investing Guidebook

  This week I read The Wall Street Journal Complete Real-estate Investing Guidebook by David Crook after I was unsatisfied with The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Real Estate Investing. These books have long titles. It is hard to find a good real-estate investing book, because seems everyone is trying to cheat you out of your money like Donald Trump. The Wall Street Journal is reputable, even though the author’s last name is Crook. This book was published in 2006, before the housing crash, which makes some of the sections of the book interesting. Like how you can get a mortgage with no money down or even get a mortgage for 125% of the value of the property. I found the tax laws I was looking for in this book, but I still want more detailed cash flow analysis to see which real estate projects will be profitable. Real Estate Secrets Making money in real estate comes down to four secrets.

• Book of the Week: The Ultimate Beginner's Guide to Real Estate Investing

  This week I read the The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Real Estate Investing from biggerpockets.com. I was looking for more information about real estate investing before the next bust. I need a list of tax breaks and the math needed to evaluate investments. Didn’t find that in this guide, but it serves as a starting point. The book has links to biggerpockets blog posts which go more in-depth on specific topics. Why Real Estate? First question and most important. Why would I care about real estate if I do passive investing with the Unconventional Success Portfolio? The two most important things about real estate for me are

• Book of the Week: The Achievement Habit

  I was listening to the Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders podcast and they had on this old fart that I really liked. Turns out he wrote a book, so this week I read The Achievement Habit by Bernard Roth, d.school founder and mechanical engineering professor. This book contains things that Roth has learned throughout his years of teaching. It complements everything I know about and have read very nicely. I really liked the book. Enough to make it worth owning. The book has “your turn” exercises, which are probably modeled after exercises he does in his classes. I advise you to do them. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CR8LQTfLvfw&w;=560&h;=315] After reading this book and The No Asshole Rule, it seems that if you’re a professor for a long time, you eventually will make someone cry.

• Book of the Week: Words and Rules

  This week I read Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language by Steven Pinker. Pinker examines how language and the mind works by examining regular and irregular verbs. On this journey, you learn about how scientist measure activity in different regions of the brain, how children learn language, different linguistic theories, what we can learn from neural network models and just generally about things you take for granted. As a person who works with language, I wish I read this book earlier. Words and Rules A word is a memorized association between a sound and a meaning. Rules are productive, symbolic and combinatorial. It doesn’t specify specific things, but how you bring together different kinds of things. You can combine things in any number of ways as long as they follow the rules. There are 6.4 trillion five-word sentences. Not all of them make sense, but you can generate them all based on your words and rules. The rules let you compute the meaning of a combination from the meaning of the words and how they are combined. Sentences are created by taking a set of memorized words), applying rules that combine words and parts of words into bigger words (morphology) and using rules that combine words into phrases and sentences (syntax).

• Book of the Week: Smarter Faster Better

  This week, I read Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Product in Life and Business, by Charles Duhigg, the author of The Power of Habit. I think everyone wouldn’t mind being smarter, faster and better. The books describes concepts related to being smarter, faster and better, but I didn’t come away with concrete things I need to do to make myself better. It was more about how to think about things. Charles found 8 key concepts repeated in his learnings on productivity. Each chapter describes a concept and jumps between a few stories.

• Book of the Week: Programming Interviews Exposed

  I gave advice to someone seeing an internship to read Programming Interviews Exposed and Cracking The Coding Interview, but I confess I haven’t read those books myself. This week, I read Programming Interviews Exposed to see if I gave bad advice. Personally I hate coding interview questions, but they seem to be the norm if you’re looking for a software engineering job. The only way I can keep it from being the norm is by building a successful software company that doesn’t use these type of coding interview questions. In Silicon Valley, monkey see, monkey do. This is another book that takes an effort to be inclusive and not assume that all programmers are male. Isis Anchalee and Tracy Chou would be proud. The first part of the book describes the job hunt in general, which is great if you’re a new graduate, because you have no idea what to expect and have no idea of what to do. Each chapter on questions first covers the topic before diving into the questions. This gives you the opportunity to learn about the topic. Each question is followed by a detailed solution. List of Topics

• Book of the Week: The Special Operations Nutrition Guide

  I’m about half way through with my navy special warfare training program and started hitting some of the minimum requirements. Hopefully by the end of the program I’ll hit all the minimum requirements across the navy seal physical screen test. I’m starting to feel that my body is not keeping up with training. This keeps me from getting better every day. I was advised to read The Special Operations Nutrition Guide by someone else doing the program. The guide is well-written and starts with an executive summary highlighting all the important points. You probably want to read the executive summary and the 1st half of the guide. The 2nd half of guide is specific to special operation forces. Carbohydrates One of the keys to nutrition is balancing energy intake with energy expenditures. You need to take your age, weight and activity level into account when determining your energy requirements. Running a marathon can easily double my energy requirements for the day. Carbohydrates (CHO) are not bad. Eating more CHO than you need is bad. There are also some CHO than are worst than others like trans fat. The usual CPF (CHO: Protein: Fat) breakdown should approximate: 55% CHO, 20% Protein and Fat 25% in terms of calories.

• Book of the Week: The No Asshole Rule

  It started with an article in Harvard Business Review and ended up as a book, The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t. Tons of people wrote to Bob Sutton about their own personal asshole stories. Turns out there are a lot of assholes in the world. I aspire to smart enough to be one. Bob has been known to be an ass and make women cry. Assholes Before you start talking with assholes, we need to precisely define what is an asshole. Some people can be assholes, but some people are assholes. Asshole Test Test One: After talking to the alleged asshole, does the “target” feel oppressed, humiliated, de-energized, or belittled by the person? In particular, does the target feel worse about him or herself? Test Two: Does the alleged asshole aim his or her venom at people who are less powerful rather than at those people who are more powerful?

• Book of the Week: Understanding Wood

  After reading The Fine Art of Cabinetmaking I knew I had to learn more about wood. This week I read Understanding Wood: A Craftsman’s Guide to Wood Technology. After reading all these books about woodworking, I realize that you need long periods of time to do anything with wood. Jimmy Carter had to retire first before deeply immersing himself in woodworking. Woodworking is a way of life. A way of life I will have to wait till later in life to pursue to the fullest. I can probably start with planting some trees now. This book has more than I would ever want to know about wood. Purchase Understanding Wood from Amazon.com or check it out from your local library.

• Book of the Week: The SaaS Startup Founder's Guide

  This week I read The SaaS Startup Founder’s Guide from Salesforce (CRM). It’s free and Salesforce has almost a $50B market cap, so I figured it was worth a read. I was worried it was full of Salesforce propaganda, but it was good since it covered something I know very little about, how to build a sales team. Many companies are portrayed as overnight successes in the media, but that is usually far from the truth. Slack was actually founded in 2008. It usually takes at least 7 years to get to an IPO. Consumer internet companies can become huge in 2 years. 2 years is the amount of time to just get a SaaS company off the ground. Should I Start a Saas Company? Here are three questions to ask yourself.

• Book of the Week: Insight Out

  This week I read Tina Seelig’s Insight Out: Get Ideas Out of Your Head and Into the World. I previously read inGenius by Tina. This book introduces the invention cycle, which describes the stages that bring an idea to life. This book is about bringing ideas to life, not necessarily companies. At the end of each chapter there are assignments to do, which help reinforce the content. At the end of the book Tina talks about how the invention cycle compares to design thinking and the lean startup methodology. When I started reading the book, I was worried that I heard all the stories already and would feel disappointed. I’m glad that wasn’t the case. If I heard the story already, I would read through it quickly and focus on the point that Tina was going to make. I am worried that if you can only refer to the same stories over and over again, maybe things won’t work for you. It’s like saying you can play basketball, here’s the story of Michael Jordan Nine Dots Puzzle I didn’t know that the origin of the phrase, thinking outside the box, is from the 9 dots puzzle. You need to connect all 9 dots by drawing 4 straight lines without lifting your pen. The phrase is enough to give you a clue on how to solve it. Tina’s criticism of the phrase is that it is not actionable. That’s great advice, but what do I do? The Invention Cycle [caption id=”attachment_4779” align=”aligncenter” width=”566”] https://medium.com/@tseelig/inventure-cycle-e89579b328da#.5n3c123h5[/caption] The book is about the invention cycle. It starts with imagination, which leads into creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship. It’s a cycle, so it keeps going in an endless cycle. The important part is how you move from one part of the cycle to the other. What it takes to make that leap. Imagination

• Book of the Week: CIA Lock Picking

  This week I read the CIA Lock Picking: Field Operative Training Manual to add to my repertoire of useful skills that I hope I never need to use. Lock picking is pretty easy if you know how a lock works.

• Book of the Week: Tartine Bread

  This week I read Tartine Bread by Chad Robertson, the co-owner of Tartine Bakery in San Francisco. I confess I’ve never actually eaten their bread, but I’ve heard great things. The good thing about the book is that I don’t have to go their to eat their bread, because Chad tells you how to do it. If you want to bake your own, you can follow the Tartine Country Bread recipe on New York Times if you don’t have the book. The book has more than 60 pages describing that recipe, which forms the base for everything else. Sourdough Starter San Francisco is known for its sourdough bread. It must be the climate and the salty sea air that creates the ideal environment for sourdough. The difficult thing about baking is that you are dealing with something that is living. You need to coax a symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast (SCOBY) to do what you want. The sourness come from the bacteria and the yeast produces carbon dioxide which helps the bread rise. Bread making starts with having a sourdough starter. You can make one yourself from wild bacteria and yeast from your environment. It takes about 2 weeks of feeding it with flour and water for it to stabilize and be usable in bread making. I tried making one, but it died and I had to start over. Having a starter is like having a pet, you need to check on it and feed it regularly. It is a living thing. Making Bread If you want to make bread, you need a scale. Volume measurements using cups are inaccurate. It can very depending on how you pack the cup. Scales are a necessity. When people come over, they think I’m a crack dealer, because I have scales and white powder everywhere. It is also useful to have a journal. When dealing with something alive, things can vary a lot. The temperature of the room changes through the day. You can pick a period of time when your starter is feeling a bit sluggish. It may take a little bit more time for the dough to rise. As you make more, you can see how to respond to the bread to know when it is ready instead of following a blind formula. There is only so much you can control. Flour is cheap, so you can experiment a lot. Baking Bread One of the secrets of this book is the use of a cast iron dutch oven. You get big holes in your bread and a nice crust by baking in a humid environment. Commercial bakers have ovens that can inject steam to achieve this effect. This is why it is hard to make bread at home that is as good as bread you can buy from a bakery. Chad got around this by baking the bread inside a dutch oven. It provides a large enough enclosed space to retain the moisture to make excellent bread without needing to inject steam. You bake the bread in a seal environment first and then take off the top to finish it off to get that nice crust. Bread is such a staple and essential part of food. I think everyone should know how to bake a good loaf of bread. Purchase Tartine Bread from Amazon.com or check it out from your local library. Resources

• Book of the Week: The Fine Art of Cabinetmaking

  This week, I read The Fine Art of Cabinetmaking by James Krenov. Why did I read it? It was on a list. The book has 3 parts. It starts with a section on wood, then it talks about the workshop and tools (how to make hand planes). Finally it covers the details of cabinetmaking. You would think the majority of the book would be about the details of cabinetmaking from title, but the details are only a small part. I don’t like the 3 column format of the book, but the content is good. The book talks about the philosophy and spirituality of working with wood.

• Book of the Week: Principles

  This week, I read Principles by Ray Dalio. Why? Because he’s $15.4 billion dollars worth of rich and I want to be too. Ray Dalio is the founder of Bridgewater Associates, the largest hedge fund in the world. Some people may be familiar with his 30 minute video explanation of How The Economic Machine Works. The video is definitely worth watching. His principles document is also worth reading. The document is divided into 3 parts. The first part talks about principles in general, the second part talks about his life principles and the last part talks about his management principles. The bulk of it is 55 pages, which covers the first two parts and an outline of the third section. If you understand his life principles, the rest should follow. You can read it in one sitting, but it is pretty dense. It was very hard to summarize the book. You should just read it. Ray probably poops gold bricks. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHe0bXAIuk0&w;=560&h;=315]

• Book of the Week: The Proteus Framebuilding Book

  Last week I read about road bike maintenance thinking about how nice it would be to ride a bicycle across America. I thought some more. It would be even nicer to ride across America on a bicycle you built with your own hands. When I heard about the Stanford ME 204 Bicycle Design course, where students build their own bicycle, I felt I had missed out. This week I read The Proteus Framebuilding Book: A Guide for the Novice Bicycle Framebuilder from Proteus Design to learn more about framebuilding so I can build my own bicycle. This book was published in 1975, so the contents are a little dated, but it is short enough for a starting place. The pages look like came out of a typewriter. I wonder if people know what a typewriter is anymore. Construction Methods There 3 main construction methods for making bicycles: TIG, Lugged and Fillet. TIG welding, which melts the filler metal and the frame requires more technique, but less time preparing and sanding joints. Lug and fillet both use brazing, where a metal is melted to join the frame without melting the frame. A lug, which cans like a sleeve for the tubes can be brazed to connect it to the frame. In fillet bikes, there is not lug, so it results in a smoother interface between the frame tubes after you sand it down. The steps for brazing are

• Book of the Week: Zinn & The Art of Road Bike Maintenance

  If you’re planning to ride your bike across america, you should know how to repair and maintain your road bike. This week I read Zinn & The Art of Road Bike Maintenance By Lennard Zinn. I already have the Big Blue Book of Bicycle Repair from Park Tool, but I wanted to expand my knowledge from a non-branded book. This isn’t a book that you read cover to cover. You read the first few chapters on basic stuff and emergency repairs and skim the rest of the hefty book. That way when it comes to fix things, you have a map of where to go. Knowing how to repair and maintain your road bike can be fun and rewarding.

• Book of the Week: Workbenches

  This week I read Workbenches: From Design And Theory To Construction And Use by Christopher Schwarz, an editor of Popular Woodworking magazine. The book describes the parts of a workbench and how each part is used to hold wood firmly in place, so a workworker can work on the wood. There are also detailed designs for two workbenches: the English workbench and the French workbench. Do you need a workbench if you want to work on wood? Probably not. You can get by with 2 sawhorses and a door. But the different ways to hold wood and the heavy base makes thing easier.

• Book of the Week: The Mini Farming Bible

  This week I read The Mini Farming Bible: The Complete Guide to Self-Sufficiency on 1/4 Acre by Brett L. Markham. The book covers a lot in 500 page and provides a good place to start if you want to start growing things. The book begins with the basics of farming, including chickens for meat and eggs and then goes into detail on each type of vegetable. There are some sections on winemaking, vinegar and cheese that I skipped. In terms of calories per dollar, fruit and vegetables are expensive. Your best bet to maximize your calories per dollar is fast food and candy. If you can grow food cost effectively, you can live a healthier life. Also fresh food you grow yourself tends to taste better since you can harvest them when they are ripe, because you don’t need to transport them. Scale and Space For farming to be effective, it needs to be done at a certain scale. When things get bigger, the surface area to volume decreases. Your compost pile needs to be big enough, so it can heat up in the middle to kill pathogens. If it is too small, it’ll stay cold. A greenhouse also benefits from being bigger, providing more thermal inertia. Chicken coups need to stay warm. If you are going to keep 1 chicken warm, you might as well keep a dozen of them warm. To grow enough food for people, you need 1,400 square feet per person, or 4,200 square feet for a family of three. One acre is 43,560 square feet, so a of an quarter acre is 10,890 square feet. Most of the food will be grown in raised beds. About 700 square feet of raised beds per person. A raised bed is typically 4 feet by 8 feet, but it can be longer than 8 feet. That means a person needs 22 raised beds to grow enough food. That’s a lot of raised beds. Since you are trying to grow as much valuable food in a limited space, you should avoid grains, because you can buy them cheaply, they take up a lot of space and it is pain to process them. Yearly Food Requirements Crop | Per-Person Yearly Requirement
  —|—
  Vegetables | 456 lbs
  Fruit | 365 lbs
  Wheat, corn, oats and rice | 250 lbs
  Total lean meats and eggs | 159 lbs
  Average Crop Yields Planted Intensively Crop | Yield in Pounds per 100 Square Feet
  —|—
  Green beans (as a vegetable) | 100
  Green beans (dried, as a protein) | 20
  Beets (just the roots) | 200
  Beets (just the greens) | 200
  Broccoli | 75
  Cabbage | 300
  Cauliflower | 200
  Carrots | 350
  Chard | 550
  Corn (on the cob) | 55
  Corn (dried for corn meal) | 18
  Cucumber | 360
  Eggplant | 100
  Kale | 120
  Leeks | 500
  Leaf Lettuce | 320
  Head lettuce | 180
  Muskmelons | 100
  Onions | 300
  Peppers | 120
  Peas | 100
  Parsnips | 290
  Pumpkins | 120
  Spinach | 130
  Sunflower (shelled seeds) | 6
  Summer squash | 250
  Winter squash | 200
  Tomatoes | 250
  Watermelons | 180
  Barley | 20
  Oats | 10
  Rye | 20
  Wheat | 20
  Self-Sufficiency Farming is really hard work. Just going around and water 22 raised beds is tedious. If it takes 3 minutes each, it’s already over an hour. Not to mention all the time planting and weeding. One of things that set my reading on this track of self-sufficiency was a Wired article about what to grow given different amounts of land ranging from a 3’ by 5’ balcony to a 40’ by 60’ exurban farm. There are things not covered in the book like growing mushrooms and keeping honey bees. Resources

• Book of the Week: Living with a SEAL

  Living with a SEAL is a book about a rich entrepreneur getting an ultra endurance athlete Navy SEAL to live with and train him for a month. The book started out as a him blogging about the experience. This continues the trend of blog to book like The Effective Engineer, Venture Deals and When to Rob a Bank. The book is a quick and enjoyable read, especially if you’re a runner who admires the Navy SEALs. I like the Navy SEALSs so much that I created a website to follow their Navy SEAL training plan. Jesse Itzler Jesse started out his life as a rapper, but when that didn’t work out he started a a private jet company, which was acquired by Berkshire Hathaway. He was also involved in partnering with ZICO coconut water before it got acquired by Coca-Cola (KO). Jesse is married Spanx founder, Sara Blakely, who he met at a charity event. They represent the typical jet-setting power couple running multiple businesses while flying between their multiple homes. He and his wife own a portion of the Atlanta Hawks basketball team. Living this life was not enough for Jesse, he wanted more. He got SEAL to live with him for a month to shake things up after seeing him at an ultramarathon they were competing in. Jesse was on a 6 person relay team and SEAL was doing the whole thing by himself. Navy SEAL

• Book of the Week: The Food Lab

  This week I read The Food Lab by J. Kenji López-Alt, the Managing Culinary Director of Serious Eats. I know the author from two articles: The Science of the Best Chocolate Cookies and The Food Lab’s Definitive Guide to Prime Rib. The cookie article inspired me to look into cookie ingredient substitution and read Flour. The author goes into the why of cooking with recipes and the experiments he did to prove it. This book is more accessible than the textbook On Food and Cooking. Science

• Book of the Week: Good Profit

  After writing about buying elections, I wanted to learn more about Koch Industries, which is the 2nd largest private company in the United States in terms of revenue ($115 billion). Their CEO, Charlie Koch wrote a book about their management philosophy called Good Profit. The first part of the book goes over the history of Koch and Charlie’s father Fred, the founder, and the motivation and background behind Market-Based Management® (MBM). In true corporate fashion, MBM is trademarked. This book reminded me a bit of Zappos’ Delivering Happiness, which mixes corporate culture and company history. After reading this book, I can see why Koch Industries is the 2nd largest private company. Koch Industries

• 2015 Best Books Read

  The end of the year is a time for reflection. These are the best books I read in 2015. Bill Gates listed the 6 best books he read this year. We have one overlap, Mindset. Food I like to eat and this was a pretty good year for books about food.

• Book of the Week: Capital in the Twenty-First Century

  This week I read Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, because I wanted to find out the source of income inequality. Why are other people rich and I’m not and what we can do about it. Thomas uses decades of data to explore the how the relationships between income and capital changed over time. The book is really thick, but it only has a single point. There used to be a lot of income inequality, but then the great depression and the world wars messed that up. We are now returning to a world with a lot of income inequality and the only way to prevent that is a progressive tax on capital. The Economist has a four paragraph summary of the book. Convergence

• Book of the Week: If You Can

  As young people I know enter the workforce and get into investing, I wanted to make an easy primer for them to follow. It was hard for me to write something down that would be short and digestible. Fortunately, William J. Bernstein, author of The Four Pillars of Investing, wrote If You Can: How Millennials Can Get Rich Slowly, which summarizes information and mentions other books for further reading. The ebook is short enough that you should just read it. Portfolio Save 15% of your salary in a 401(k), IRA and/or taxable account and split it equally among 3 funds. Rebalance to maintain 1/3 split once a year.

• Book of the Week: Peopleware

  Peopleware is a book about managing productive software teams that was written over 35 years ago. Some things never change. A lot of the challenges companies face are not technology problems, but how do you get a bunch of people together to solve accomplish a task. Things are different when you deal with knowledge workers that need the proper environment to flourish. There are parts of the book I disagree with, but I don’t have any data to suggest that they are wrong. The Seven False Hopes of Software Management

• Book of the Week: Poor Charlie's Almanack

  This week I read Poor Charlie’s Almanack, which details the wit and wisdom of Charles T. Munger, who is anything but poor. Most people know who Warren Buffett is, but I doubt most people know who is second-in-command is. The poor in the book title is a reference to Poor Richard’s Almanack from Benjamin Franklin of the $100 bill. The book is divided into several sections. Not a book that you read in bed, but more like a coffee table book for people who like Berkshire Hathaway (BRK-A).

• Book of the Week: The Art of Raising a Puppy

  There’s a new puppy at work, so that inspired me to read The Art of Raising a Puppy written by The Monks of New Skete, who train German Shepherds for profit. I doubt I’ll get a puppy since they require a lot of care and time, which is in short supply. I do however want to learn how to train a puppy. According to the ASPCA, approximately 1.2 million dogs are euthanized a year. This is sad, because people don’t take responsibility for their animals, by having them spayed or neutered or taking care of them after adopting them. Stages of a Puppy’s Life As the puppy grows up it goes through several stages.

• Book of the Week: The Happiness Hypothesis

  This week I read The Happiness Hypothesis, which was mentioned in another book I read. I didn’t like the book. Most of the happiness books I read tell things up front and go over different research studies. This book does have some research studies, but I’ve read about those studies in other books. What’s different about this book is that it approaches happiness from historical philosophical and religious perspectives. Ancient wisdom isn’t as compelling to me as peer reviewed research that provides concrete information about happiness. It is good to read books that approach happiness from a different angle even though you may not like it. Divided Self

• Book of the Week: High Output Management

  High Output Management is one of the books that is on the reading list for business people. The book was written by Andy Grove, the former CEO of Intel (INTC). At first I was turned off by the book since it was directed at middle managers. I have a disdain for middle managers, because they don’t really do anything and add to organizational complexity. They aren’t the ones in the trenches doing things. Then Andy mentioned “know-how managers”, who use their specialized knowledge to influence organizations. A manager’s output is the output of their organization and output of other organizations influenced by the manager. Damn it, I’m a middle manager since my output is not solely dependent on myself. Once I got over that, the book was pretty good and I could see why it is on those reading list. There are three ideas in the book.

• Book of the Week: Liar's Poker

  Before Michael Lewis wrote Flash Boys, he was a bond salesman for Salomon Brothers in London. Salomon Brothers was described in When Genuis Failed, but Liar’s Poker goes into more depth inside the company. Fools

• Book of the Week: Getting Real

  Scott Cook, one of the cofounders of Intuit, recommended Getting Real: The Smarter, Faster, Easier Way to Build a Successful Web Application by Jason Fried, during his talk at Stanford. I previously read Rework by Jason Fried. If you wanted a different way of building a web application instead of raising tons of VC money and burning it in Silicon Valley, read this. The book was a quick read, because it condensed all the relevant points. Here are a few sections from the book. Start With No It is important to do one thing well than trying to everything poorly. A fork and a spoon is much better than a spork. How often to see sporks in places other than school cafeteria? In order to do the core things well, you need to say no to feature requests. Hidden Costs If a request makes it past you saying no, you need identify all the hidden costs associated with said request. Then you can say no again. Forget Feature Requests If something is important enough, your customers will bring it up again. No need to track and remember stuff. This is why it is important to get users early on. It is impossible to respond to every feature request. From Idea to Implementation

• Book of the Week: Honeybee Democracy

  This week I read Honeybee Democracy by Thomas D. Seeley after it was mentioned in Simple Rules. This book is about how honeybees make decisions when they swarm.

• Book of the Week: When Genius Failed

  When I read the title, When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management, I thought long-term capital management was a concept and not a company. How little I know. They named the company that way for a reason. This book reminds of this XKCD comic: Engineer Syllogism. Long-Term Capital Management Cast

• Book of the Week: The Alchemist

  I never heard of The Alchemist, but my coworker was reading it, so I thought I’d also give it a read. The Alchemist was originally published in Brazil and subsequently translated from Portuguese into English. It is hard to write about this book without revealing spoilers. It is short enough that you can read it in a sitting or two. Personal Legend The book is about pursuing your Personal Legend, what you have always wanted to accomplish.

• Book of the Week: Modern Romance

  This week I read Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari, the comedian, with Eric Klinenberg, the sociologist. In the past people married people who were local to them through arranged marriages. Times have changed with the smartphone age, which leaves current singles puzzled trying to figure out what the heck is going on. People are left to navigate two worlds: the real world and the phone world.

• Book of the Week: How to Make Mistakes in Python

  After you’ve learned a new programming language, it is important that you get caught up with best practices. This week, I read How to Make Mistakes in Python, because it was free. Most of the content you can read online, but it is nice to have a starting point in once place. The book is written from the point of view of a python web developer. Quick read and good reminder. Environment I can sometimes be difficult to know where each package is installed and the environment matching between your development environment and production environment. You can use virtualenv to setup a self-contained environment to install your python packages. As you development, you tend to collect packages. Jupyter and ipython provide a better REPL than the standard python REPL. You should use them to be more productive. Tab completing is very nice. Best Practices Optimize and check for errors with pylint. Follow a style guide such as pep8 or Google’s python style guide. Add logging. Use nose to run unittest. I also like doctest. Tips Try using strategy pattern instead of if else blocks. Don’t put list as default argument unless you know what you’re doing, because that list will be persistent through all the function calls. You’re not going to get an empty list every time you call the function. [sourcecode language=”python” wraplines=”false” collapse=”false”] def bad(arg=[]): pass def good(arg=None): if not arg: arg = [] [/sourcecode]

• Book of the Week: Simple Rules

  I didn’t really like Simple Rules. One thing that bugged me was when the authors said simple rules outperform complex models, because of overfitting problems. Anybody who builds complex models for a living, should know how to handle overfitting. That’s a bad argument to make. Machine learning algorithms outperform most heuristics now. The book is fairly recent, so some of the things it references feels like it happened yesterday. I tend to think of simple rules are for people who don’t understand what’s happening. In chemistry they teach you rules about how bonds work, but you always encounter exceptions that run contrary to your rules. If you knew quantum physics, you would know why certain things happen contrary to the rules. It’s probably not worth the time to teach all chemistry students quantum mechanics, so you give them a simple rule to follow, which is good enough to get them through med school. Complex Problems Warren Weaver, a director at the Rockefeller Foundation described science progressing through three types of problems: simple, uncertain and complex. For those familiar with material science, you can think of it as the microscopic (simple), macroscopic (uncertain) and mesoscopic (complex). The microscope deals with understanding individual particles. The macroscopic deals with distributions and collective probabilistic behavior. The mesoscopic deals with the middle ground, where theories from the other two don’t work well. Most of my academic research is in the complex region, because the other two are solved problems. Physics can describe a single hydrogen atom well. We can also calculate the properties of a periodic material. What we can’t do well is describe what happens when you have an atom next to an infinite structure. This taxes the limits of current computers. Simple rules are designed to handle the complex problems. Simple Rules Simple rules do 3 things well.

• Book of the Week: An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth

  This week, I read retired Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield’s An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth: What Going to Space Taught Me About Ingenuity, Determination and Being Prepared for Anything. You may recognize Chris from his public outreach efforts when he was on the International Space Station (ISS). If you ever wanted to know how it feels like to be an astronaut (enemas before launch), this book is for you. I’ve read plenty of books about success and happiness, but Chris Hadfield is a person who has lived it. He speaks from personal experience instead of scientific studies. Somehow it seems more real coming from him. Space Oddity Music Video [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaOC9danxNo&w;=560&h;=315] Space Burrito with Chef Traci Des Jardins w/ The MythBusters [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8-UKqGZ_hs&w;=560&h;=315] Astronaut

• Book of the Week: Succeed

  Succeed is about how people can reach their goals. The book goes over goals in the context of relationships, parenting, business, health and sports. It breaks down different aspects of goals to compare and contrast them. But the answer to which direction you should lean to is unclear, because it always depends on the situation. This isn’t that helpful if you’re looking for some rule of thumb to follow. The book has bits and pieces, but other books have gone more in depth into each topic. I think this book is probably more accessible if you want to dip your toes into goals and happiness. If you want to be effective, you need to set specific difficult, but realistic goals. Effort versus Talent

• Book of the Week: Misbehaving

  I’m reading Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics this week, because Thaler is a buddy of Robert Schiller, the author of Irrational Exuberance. The book is a chronological journal of Thaler’s adventures in behavioral economics. The book doesn’t linger too long on a subject. It feels like you’re taking a nice stroll with a friend. Supposedly Irrelevant Factors Thaler abbreviates supposedly irrelevant factors as SIFs throughout the book. Traditional economist based their work on the assumption that there is type of person who behaves completely rational,homo economicus. They call this person an Econ for short. SIFs are things that are not supposed to affect decisions an Econ would make. This book is about all of those SIFs and how they do affect how real people make decisions. Real people don’t behave like Econs. The Endowment Effect People value things they already have more than things they could have. This leads to irrational decisions. AcquisitionUtility vs TransactionUtility Acquisition utility is the traditional utility gained minus the opportunity cost. Transactional utility is the perceived quality of the deal, which is is different between price paid and a reference price. It something looks like it is on sale, it will provide utility in addition to the acquisition utility. This leads to people buying stuff they don’t need, because it is on sale. Sunk Cost Money you already spent shouldn’t affect your future decisions. Your gym membership and Amazon Prime membership are sunk costs. They should not factor into whether or not you should go to the gym or buy stuff from Amazon. House Money Effect

• Book of the Week: Mindset

  Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck talks about how there are two mindsets, the fixed mindset and the growth mindset. These mindsets tint how people perceive the world in all aspects of life leading to success or failure in their endeavors. I’ve read about a study saying that you should praise kids for effort rather than being intelligent if you want them to succeed in life. Carol Dweck did that study. The book describes how the growth mindset is better than a fixed mindset and how these differences play out in business, relationships, sports, school, etc. The fixed mindset resulted in Enron. Fixed Mindset versus Growth Mindset This graphic (available for purchase) by Nigel Holmes provides a good summary. The Praised Generation

• Book of the Week: Elon Musk

  This week I read Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future. I know most of the events and facts (divorce, asking friends for money, etc.) surrounding Elon since bought Tesla stock (TSLA), but this book fills in a little bit more about the person. How his upbringing shaped his risk tolerance and his personality. If anybody makes me feel like I’m not doing enough with my life, it’s Elon Musk. Africa Some stuff happened that he won’t talk about. Also had a messed up childhood which toughened him up. Paypal

• Book of the Week: The Future For Investors

  In Siegel’s previous book, Stocks for the Long Run, he laid out that nothing beats stocks in terms of long term returns. My problem with this is that past performance is not a guaranteed of future gains. There was a 30 year period where stocks did not have any real gains when adjusted for inflation. This book, The Future for Investors, is about which stocks you should buy. Indexes are okay, but Siegel’s analysis shows that you can do better. Growth ≠ Returns

• Book of the Week: The Effective Engineer

  This week, I read Edmond Lau’s The Effective Engineer since one of my coworkers had a copy of the book and suggested I read it. It’s a book about how to be a more effective engineer. By giving me this book to read, my coworker is implying I’m not effective. What a jerk. As I read the book, I’ve noticed that the author references a lot of other books that I have read. If you’re in silicon valley, there is an implicit school of thought and body of knowledge that comes from books and practices being spread around. You don’t really get this by staying at a company. Edmond migrated around a few companies and interviewed a bunch of people to acquire this body of knowledge. This makes this book a good starting point for a new engineer coming into silicon valley, but seems kind of pedestrian to veterans. But it is still good to be reminded of best practices. If you don’t follow best practices, you wind up with something like burning $292 million for healthcare.gov. Although that also was due to consulting firms milking the government for money. Alternatively, you could have gotten a few unicorns from a venture fund with that money. Leverage The book is about leverage and creating as much value as you can as an engineer. Leverage = Impact Produced / Time Invested. You can increase value you product per unit time by:

• Book of the Week: Venture Deals

  I was inspired to read Venture Deals after reading Heidi Roizen’s delightful blog post about How to Build a Unicorn From Scratch – and Walk Away with Nothing. Very often a new entrepreneur will sign something eager to be finally funded without realizing all the repercussions down the line. Why sometimes it is better to raise less money at a more reasonable valuation to avoid a down round. This book covers how entrepreneurs raise money from venture capital firms and what happens behind the scenes to get the deal done. A must read if you are raising funds. Also read the errata, since there was a error on the term sheet calculations. Term sheets are complicated. The book points out a lot of things to watch out for and tells you how you should negotiate and focus your lawyers. Gender Pronouns I’ve notice a trend that more recent books use the female pronoun “her” when referring to a scientist, an engineer, an entrepreneur, etc. Brad tried writing the book with both genders, but it was confusing, so he stuck with the male pronoun. I would have just used the female pronoun if you make it a point to call it out on your book. It’s like saying, I tried and failed, but I still believe in women. Venture Capital Firm

• Book of the Week: Irrational Exuberance

  This book is about speculative bubbles by Nobel Prize winning Yale economics professor, Robert J. Shiller. Each new revision of the book was close to a bubble that popped. The first edition was close to the stock bubble. The second edition was close to the real estate bubble. This third edition published in 2015 has news sections on the bond bubble. Shiller is known as the great predictor of bubbles. The later edition also comments on the previously predicted bubble that popped. I expect a fourth edition that covers a new bubble with commentary on the bond bubble that popped after the release of the third edition. The book is divided in sections that talk about the structural factors, cultural factors and psychological factors to lead to irrational exuberance.

• Book of the Week: inGenius

  This week, I read inGenius: A Crash Course on Creativity, because I wanted to read another book by Tina Seelig, but this one was available. I found the book fairly thin on new content, but full of stories. Stories that I have heard before and some new ones. If you already know of Tina’s creativity class at Stanford, you could probably skip this book. Innovation Engine The inside of the engine

• Book of the Week: On Food and Cooking

  This week I read On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen by Harold McGee since it was one of the recommended books for the Harvard class about food on edx, Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to Soft Matter Science. Harold McGee worked with Thomas Keller at the three Michelin star restaurant, The French Laundry. These guys know their food. The book is over 800 pages long, so I treated it as a reference book and did not read the whole thing. The Four Basic Molecules Food is made up of four basic molecules: water, lipids, carbohydrates and proteins. Water is everywhere. How things interact with water accounts for a lot of the action. How things dissolve in water and how water changes state affect your results. Lipids don’t like water and have high boiling points. Fatty food tastes better. Carbohydrates are mixed with water and show up as sugars and starches. Proteins are sensitive and change a lot depending on pH and temperature. Cooking is manipulating these molecules from their raw form into something delectable and amazing. Harvard I wonder why type of prep school student would take class on food at Harvard. It’s not likely they are going to cook themselves since they’ll be eating at fancy restaurants such as The French Laundry, which doesn’t even do your laundry for you. Some seek knowledge to impress other people rather than the pure pursuit of knowledge. This reminds me of the bar scene from Good Will Hunting and Richard Feynman talking about the name of a bird. Some people try to use their fancy pants knowledge to make others feel less about themselves, so they can feel better. I imagine having dinner with some student who took the course wanting to impress others with their knowledge. On the other hand, maybe a student of the class with pursue baking after getting degree in Applied Mathematics and Economics like Joanna Chang, who started Flour Bakery. Her cookie recipe from Flour got me plenty of compliments. I shouldn’t pick on Harvard. I sat in a seminar on BBQ at a physics conference in Texas. Good food is not reserved for the wealthy. The brisket used to be a cheaper piece of meat that was made edible by cooking it low and slow. Unfortunately, even brisket has been gentrified and now you have people like Franklin Barbecue. Before lobster was food for the poor, so there is no going back. Eggs There is a 50 page chapter on eggs. The chapter talks about the history of eggs, how eggs form biologically, different components of the egg, the chemistry inside the egg, at what temperature do different proteins in the egg solidify, egg dishes, egg safety, egg foams, egg-liquid mixtures, different ways to preserve eggs, how to tell the freshness of the egg, etc. More than what you would ever want to know about eggs. One of the most interesting things I learned is that if you cook an egg for a really long time (7 hours), the glucose in the whites will turn the egg white brown. Ramen I think the book dismissed an entire food group, instant ramen. It has one sentence about it and refers to it as Ra-men.

• Book of the Week: The Art of Homeworld

  Homeworld is one of my favorite computer games. It is a 3D real time strategy game set in space that won game of the year when it was released. The Art of Homeworld accompanied the recent release of the remastered version of the game. I bought the book to use as a reference for my space pirate game. Limited Resources [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrG23qWYG4A&w;=560&h;=315] Since they didn’t have enough resources, they used animatics, which has become part of the signature style of Homeworld. An animatic is made up of hand drawn still images from the storyboard that are animated with sound and dialogue on top. The cut scenes made you feel alone on a journey in cold space. The beautiful backgrounds are also a consequence of having constrained resources. They didn’t have enough texture memory for a background, so the background is all geometry with vertices colored and positioned by hand. Making video games is about being creative and pushing as much as you can out of technology. Spaceships The most amazing part of the game is the sense of scale with the spaceships. You can zoom and track everything from individual fighters and the capital ships. During the game, you can position your fleet in 3D and take advantage of different formations. Sometimes I would just camera track a fighter during an epic space battle. Sometimes we only see the end result. This art book tells you why and how certain choices were made.

• Book of the Week: The Honest Truth About Dishonesty

  The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty is Dan Ariely’s third book. His first book was Predictably Irrational. Most of the conclusions in the book are from studies of college students that used a math problem where cheating was possible, because the evidence of your answers are destroyed at the end of the test. It is amazing how much information you can gain by using the same experiment over and over again with small variations. Although I believe the conclusions, it still bugs me that the data is based on college studies under manufactured situations that may or may not reflect reality. There’s a chapter how on depleting your willpower will make you dishonest. If you want to know more about willpower, there’s a book called Willpower that I read a while ago. I also learned that thinking you’re wearing fake designer products will make you more dishonest. Turns out it was easier to get a fashion expert to send Dan $47k in handbags and sunglasses than going out and buying knock-offs. This book makes you about how you interact with people and how things like Bernie Madoff, Goldman Sachs and Enron occur besides people being greedy bastards. Simple Model of Rational Crime The Simple Model of Rational Crime (SMORC) has three elements

• Book of the Week: Don't Make Me Think Revisited

  Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited by Steve Krug is one of those books at the top of a web designers reading list. I read the latest Revisited edition published in 2014, which includes updates for mobile. He updated the book once in 2006 to make more money on royalties. This time he updated the book to reflect the changes to the web since then, which is mainly mobile. This is a good quick read for anyone who builds websites. Definition of Usability

• Book of the Week: Evil by Design

  This week’s book is Evil by Design. The premise of the book is that for designing for humans, we should start with the seven deadly sins, which are fundamental human traits. Each chapter deals with a deadly sin and gives examples of how those sins are being used to manipulate you. After reading the book, I see evil all around me. It is the devil’s work! The Seven Deadly Sins

• Book of the Week: Hooked

  The last book I read was about the power of habits. This book is about how to create habits in mostly the context of Internet companies. How to build products that cause users to have cravings like a drug addict. We all can’t sell drugs, so they next best thing is to peddle internet products. Each chapter ends with a summary, so you can get a quick read do the book just by reading a one pager for each chapter. You’re probably better off doing that. The Hook Model

• Book of the Week: The Power of Habit

  There are few of copies of The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg (Harvard MBA) around my workplace, so I decided to pick it up and read it. The book is separated into 3 parts: habits of individuals, habits of organizations and habits of societies. This was a good read. Habit Loop The central concept of the book is the habit loop, how it works, how you can change it and how it affects individuals, organizations and societies. The habit loop starts with a cue that makes you follow your routine until you get rewarded. That reward reinforces the loop, so that the next time you see the cue, you’ll be triggered again. This reminds me of Pavlov’s dog experiment where he conditioned dogs salivate when a bells rings by associating the bell with food then removing the food later with the dogs still salivating with no food present. Instead of dogs, this book focuses on people, organizations and societies. The Habits of Individuals Do you know why you use toothpaste? It’s because an advertiser programmed this habit into you. Toothpaste doesn’t really work. The tinglingly minty fresh taste is your reward. Toothpaste doesn’t need to do that, but it sells more when it does. Shampoo doesn’t have to lather to clean effectively, but they add stuff to make suds, because it sells more. Habits are powerful, because they create neurological cravings. Sometimes the brain reacts like it has gotten the reward already from only seeing the cue like Pavlov’s dogs. Cravings make it easier to form new habits. The Golden Rule of Habit Change

• Book of the Week: Let My People Go Surfing

  This is another origin story book about Patagonia, a privately held clothing company that specializes in climbing equipment. The previous origin story books focused a lot of the founders, but this one focuses more on the company rather then the founder, Yvon Chouinard. The book describes how everything started from a metal shop making climbing hardware into the large clothing company it is today. Beginnings Many founders get there start by solving their own problems. Yvon liked to go climbing, but he needed equipment for it. As climbers grew dissatisfied with existing equipment, they innovated, made improvements to satisfy their own urges. They worked only as much to fund their next adventure. Selling extra hardware to friends turned into hiring friends to make more hardware. Eventually they branched out into clothing and spun out the hardware divisions. After seeing the damage their climbing equipment was doing to the rock face, they developed new pieces that were non-destructive. They quickly phased out pitons and educated customers about other ways to climb. They were unafraid to take a loss and cannibalize existing sales in order to develop something new and innovative. This started the road to trying to be a business while staying as environmentally self-conscious as possible even if it meant lower profits. Going Global

• Book of the Week: Just For Fun

  Just for Fun is the origin story of Linux. I like technology origin stories, because they have entertaining characters and I know the ending already. Linux started out as a pet project to read email with a dial up modem as a way for Linus to learn about the 386 processor. It now runs most websites on the internet. It is best to start out and do one thing well and grow organically from there. Meaning of Life The origin story is sandwiched between two chapters on the meaning of life, which appear in the beginning and end of the book. The meaning of life is:

• Book of the Week: When to Rob a Bank

  The authors of Freakonomics and Think Like a Freak turned their blog into a book called When to Rob a Bank. There seems to be a trend of turning blogs into books. I also listen to their podcast. One thing I noticed is that all the their books have deckle edges, where edges of the pages aren’t cut clean. The book feels like they are milking a cow. It is an easy book to pick up and put down without retaining any big ideas. That said, I still read it. Proof of Purchase Insurance In India and San Francisco, you purchase a ticket and get on the train. Your ticket may or may not be inspected while you’re on the train. If you don’t have a ticket when you’re inspected, you get a fine. If they never inspect you, you didn’t to buy the ticket in the first place. In India there is an associated of ticketless travelers.

• Book of the Week: Man's Search for Meaning

  Man’s Search for Meaning was written by Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist who survived The Holocaust. The first part of the book is an account of his experiences in concentration camps and the second part of the book explains logotheraphy, which was another branch of psychotheraphy developed by Viktor. The concentration camps section reminded me of Schindler’s List.

• Book of the Week: Franklin Barbecue

  Since I didn’t want to pay $130 for a ticket for 2 beers, the cookbook and a plate of barbecue at the San Francisco pop-up event, I decided to read the Franklin Barbecue book instead. Even if I did want to pay for the tickets, they were sold out in seconds. This book is about Central Texas barbecue which is focused on beef brisket with no sauce. There aren’t many recipes in the book, because this book is about the process of making good barbecue. Fire + Smoke I was reminded of Alan Ada’s flame challenge when I read the Fire + Smoke chapter, where Aaron explains what happens when wood burns. It is hard to follow a recipe exactly and wind up with great barbecue. There are a lot of variables that go into making fire, especially when you are using a wood fire instead of gas. The skill lies in managing the fire. When to stoke the coals, how to select and arrange the wood and when to add more wood to the wire. Ideally, you want a lot of air for clean and efficient combustion that results in good smoke. Efficient car engines products less pollutants. You want your fire to be efficient. I wouldn’t want to operate a BBQ joint, because barbecue is a lot of work and you smell like smoke all the time.

• Book of the Week: Vagabonding

  

• Book of the Week: The Pumpkin Plan

  The Pumpkin Plan is geared toward entrepreneurs (small business and lifestyle) who can’t scale their business, because they say yes to everything. They spend lots of time and effort working while realizing minimal returns. The Pumpkin Plan uses an analogy to giant pumpkin farmers to help entrepreneurs prune their patch in order to make their pumpkins grow. Pumpkin Growing Process

• Book of the Week: The Four Pillars of Investing

  This week I skimmed through The Four Pillars of Investing by William J. Bernstein. There are summaries at the end of each chapter, so it is easy to skim through. This is a good book for people who want to invest. If you already have an index fund portfolio spread among different asset classes, you can skip this book. If you don’t, then after you read this book, you’ll will. The Four Pillars From the back page.

• Book of the Week: Scaling Up Excellence

  I had the pleasure of attending a talk by Huggy Rao about scaling. Scaling Up Excellence is a book Stanford professors, Huggy Rao and Robert Sutton, wrote about the problems that occur when companies try to scale up. Things start breaking, what worked before doesn’t work anymore. How do you grow without getting into a clusterfug? The book goes over a lot of examples since it is complied from 7 years of talking to people, but it is not as crisp and clear as I wanted it to be since a lot of things are nuanced. Reoccurring Cast It seems I can’t read a book with Silicon Valley start ups without Bill Campbell’s name appearing. Seems like he’s more “the Don” than “the Coach”. Also, when anybody talks about the d.school, they bring up the pediatric MRI example. If d.school and design thinking is truly effective, wouldn’t there be more than one example that really hugs the heart strings? I like design thinking, but only have a singular example makes me lose faith. It is like talking about Michael Jordan when trying to get people to play basketball. You may like basketball, but you aren’t going to fly like Mike. Scaling Mantras

• Book of the Week: Design Patterns

  This week, I take a look at Design Patterns: Elements of Reuseable Object-Oriented Software, which is often recommended to new programmers. When you start out as a programmer, your main concern is writing code that accomplishes a task. As you write more and more code, you notice that you need to do the same things over and over again. You notice patterns. Then you begin to isolate and identify things by giving them names. When you starting talking to other programmers, you need some common vocabulary. Design Patterns provides that common vocabulary. 24 Design Patterns Purpose	Design Pattern	Aspects That Can Vary
  Operation	Abstract Factory	families of product objects
  	Builder	how a composite object gets created
  	Factory Method	subclass of object that is instantiated
  	Prototype	class of object that is instantiated
  	Singleton	the sole instance of a class
  Structural	Adapter	interface of an object
  	Bridge	implementation of an object
  	Composite	structure and composite of an object
  	Decorator	responsibilities of an object without subclassing
  	Façade	interface to a subsystem
  	Flyweight	storage costs of objects
  	Proxy	how an object is accessed; its location
  Behavioral	Chain of Responsibility	object that can fulfill a request
  	Command	when and how a request is fulfilled
  	Interpreter	grammar and interpretation of a language
  	Iterator	how an aggregate’s elements are accessed, traversed
  	Mediator	how and which objects interact with each other
  	Memento	what private information is stored outside an object, and when
  	Observer	number of objects that depend on another object; how the dependent objects stay up to date
  	State	states of an object
  	Strategy	an algorithm
  	Template Method	steps of an algorithm
  	Visitor	operations that can be applied to object(s) without changing their class(es)

• Book of the Week: The Monk and the Riddle

  This week I read The Monk and the Riddle, by Randy Komisar, who works for a VC firm currently being sued by Ellen Pao for gender discrimination. The book is a little unusual, but I liked it. It’s fiction interspersed with Randy’s life and experiences as a VC. There is an overarching story of a caricatured guy trying to raise money for funerals.com and he takes side tangents to go into his background and experiences. Deferred Life Plan

• Book of the Week: The Progress Principle

  This week I read The Progress Principle by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, a husband and wife psychologist team. This book is written for managers. The Progress Principle

• Book of the Week: The Pursuit of Wow!

  I did not like this book at all. I’m used to books conveying a coherent idea. The Pursuit of Wow! is the equivalent of an explosive diarrhea brain dump. There is just shit everywhere and somebody should clean it up. This might be okay as a coffee table book in the lobby of the doctor’s office. This book is written for people with ADD. I don’t need to be told 200 things. I just need to be told one valuable thing. I gave up reading the book, because I couldn’t remember what I had just read.

• Book of the Week: Growth Hacker Marketing

  This week I find out what it means to be a growth hacker with Growth Hacker Marketing. There’s not much to the book. It doesn’t tell you how to be a growth hacker in detail. Traction is better for specific things to do. This is written for old school marketing people who want to find out about this new thing called the Internet. This book is an interesting read after The 4-Hour Workweek, because Ryan worked on marketing Tim’s other book, The 4-Hour Chef. Everyone is linked together someway. Growth Hacker

• Book of the Week: The 4-Hour Workweek

  The 4-Hour Workweek is one of those well known bestseller type of books. I thought I read it before, but after reading it again, maybe I didn’t read it before. Tim offers a 4-step program (DEAL) to work toward a 4-hour workweek and become one of the new rich (NR) instead of living a deferred (D) life. From previous books on wealth, it looks like I have to save to become wealthy. I know I’ll eventually become wealthy if I save, but then what? Does the knowledge of being financially independent help me sleep better at night? Or would I rather live like a millionaire now?

• Book of the Week: The Millionaire Next Door

  I forgot why I wanted to read The Millionaire Next Door. It was probably mentioned in another book. After reading Rich Dad, Poor Dad and I Will Teach You To Be Rich, I was getting tired of reading books about the wealthy. This book was written by two PhDs that study wealthy people. Some areas of the book are heavily focused on material from their research like how the wealthy buy cars. They had the data, so they shoved it into the book. This is a book about the wealthy, not a book on how to become wealthy. 7 Common Denominators of Wealthy People

• Book of the Week: Flour

  After working on cooke recipe substitutions, I needed to learn more about baking. This week I read Flour: Spectacular Recipes from Boston’s Flour Bakery + Cafe by Joanne Chang. These recipes were modified to work in your home kitchen from her bakery. Overachiever Joanne graduated with degrees applied mathematics and economics from Harvard and worked at a management consulting firm before going into the food industry. What’s with Asians food people and degrees from prestiges schools? Ming Tsai majored in mechanical engineering at Yale. She got job after job in the food industry after gliding through brief interviews, so she learned from experience and not culinary school. Eventually she opened up her ownsuccessful bakery called Flour. She also mentions that Chinese meals have no dessert, which is relevant, because she’s Chinese and makes desserts. The last chapter of the Language of Food explains why. Techniques There are a dozen techniques that a home baker should know. She goes over each technique with insightful tips.

• Book of the Week: The Boglehead's Guide to Investing

  I skimmed through The Boglehead’s Guide to Investing. It is a good source if you don’t want to scour the internet and lurk in forums for information about investing. It covers more than you want to know in plain english. I found it more useful than The Bogleheads’ Guide to Retirement Planning.

• Book of the Week: I Will Teach You To Be Rich

  This book was recommended to me. I Will Teach You To Be Rich by Ramit Sethi is a 6-week program that puts you on better financial footing. As I was reading the book, it was like preaching to the choir. The book is written by a young adult for other young adults. It is a quick read, but it covers what that every adult should know about money. Being Rich

• Book of the Week: The Blind Side

  I liked Flash Boys, also by Michael Lewis, so I decided to give The Blind Side a try. The book is a mix of Michael Oher’s story of a poor black kid being picked up by a rich white family because of his physical gifts and the changing way football is played. The Blind Side Bill Walsh developed the west coast offense where the quarterback throws quick short timed passes and the receiver gains yards after the catch instead of long 20 yard bombs. This shifted teams from calling running plays to passing plays, because they became more effective. This made the quarterback more important. For the predominantly right-handed quarterbacks to release the ball in time to complete the pass, they needed protection on their blind side (left side) or they would be drilled into the ground by the defense end. Michael Oher played the left tackle position, which protects the blind side.

• Book of the Week: Life in Motion

  Life in Motion: An Unlikely Ballerina is about Misty Copeland’s journey through adversity to become a principal ballerina. I first heard about her in an NPR interview. She was featured in an under armour commercial. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZY0cdXr_1MA&w;=560&h;=315] Oh, and yeah, she’s black too.

• Book of the Week: The Language of Food

  Dan Jurafsky taught a class, wrote a blog and book on The Language of Food. If you want to get a feel for the book, you can watch a talk he gave at Wit.ai. If you’re from San Francisco, reading the book will give you a bit of nostalgia since he mentions a lot of places to eat. If you speak many foreign languages, you’ll get a lot of the references and see the connections. Looking at the language of food helps you understand how we are all connected. There’s a chapter explaining how ketchup came from Chinese fish sauce. The book is nice break from looking at language from a statistical point of view. [vimeo 114949808 w=500 h=281] Dan Jurafsky - the Language of Food from Wit.ai on Vimeo.

• Book of the Week: Traction

  This week I decided to learn more about marketing by reading Traction, written by the founder of DuckDuckGo and another guy. One of difficult parts about marketing is knowing where to start. This book lists many possible channels and gives some background into each one. Since they cover so many channels, it is hard to go deep into each one, but I learned things that I did not know before. They put channels in relation to each other with the bull’s eye framework. For a company to be successful, you need to develop both your product and distribution channels at the same time. 19 Traction Channels

• Book of the Week: Lean In

  This week I read Lean In. There need to be more women leaders, because women are awesome and the man is keeping them from being awesome.

• Book of the Week: Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track

  Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track is a collection of letters of Richard P. Feynman’s correspondence with his family, friends, fans and colleagues. They are organized in chronological order from his first marriage, the atomic bomb, the Nobel Prize, the Challenger investigation, cancer to his death. The letters give a glimpse into the personal side of Feynman, especially the letters between him and his first wife. I read this book, because Elaine sent me this post about What Problems to Solve concerning a letter from his former student. There’s a TED talk I like by Leonard Susskind about his friend Richard Feynman, but I could not find a letter between the two in the book. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Waurx8e-1o&w;=560&h;=315]

• Book of the Week: The Richest Man in Babylon

  Either Rich Dad, Poor Dad plagiarized from 5,000 year old documents or that the way to get rich is as old as money. The Richest Man in Babylon is a collection of stories that give lessons on building wealth from richest man in Babylon. These principles are still applicable today. It’s not rocket science, yet lots of people are poor, because they don’t save and invest. 7 Remedies for a Lean Purse

• Book of the Week: Essentialism

  Essentialism is about doing less, but better. The book talks about why less is better, the differences between essentialist and non-essentialist and how to achieve essentialism. In order to do less, better, you need to be able to know how to say no. This goes back to saying no (Saying No, Saying No, Part II). Being able to say no is a very important skill to have. Success Leading to Failure

• Book of the Week: The Bogleheads' Guide to Retirement Planning

  This week’s book is The Bogleheads’ Guide to Retirement Planning. I wanted to read something to help me retire. I found out about Bogleheads through the personal finance subreddit. I didn’t find the book that useful. For people getting into retirement planning, it is an okay introduction. I found it easier to read stuff online and read finance books like The Intelligent Investor and Unconventional Success. I’m more concerned with investing than retirement even thought I’m investing for retirement. The goal of investing for retirement is to avoid taxes (money to government) and expenses (money to brokers/managers). The earlier you start investing, the better. IRAs and 401ks have tax benefits. Tax benefits are good. What’s a Boglehead? The founder of the investment management company Vanguard is John C. Bogle. Bogleheads are his cult followers. Putting Money Toward Retirement

• Book of the Week: The Hard Things About Hard Things

  Ben Horowitz is half of the VC firm, Andressen Horowitz. He was previously the CEO of Opsware (formerly Loudcloud) and worked with Marc Andressen, the founder of Netscape. This is a book written by a CEO for other CEOs. Ben has a popular blog, so you may recognize some things, but he goes into more of the backstory behind those ideas. The trend is to turn blogs into books. This is not a business book, because there are no formulas to being a CEO. Being a CEO is hard. The initial phases are easy when you’re building things. Things get hard when you hit the market and things don’t go the way you expected. This isn’t a book that you can summarize easily since there are so many hard things. If you want a taste, you can watch an interview Ben gave at the Stanford about nailing the hard things. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2e3RqL4VWs&w;=560&h;=315] Transparency

• 2013 Best Books Read

  Here are my picks for the best books I read in 2013. How Innovations are Adapted

• 2014 Best Books Read

  This post is for the people who ask for me things to read. Industries These are books that talk about an industry that is ubiquitous, but few people really know about.

• Book of the Week: Rich Dad, Poor Dad

  I read Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki, because I grew up without the benefit of having two dads. In the future more people will grow up with two dads. The poor dad was educated by school while the rich dad was educated by life. Robert takes advice from his rich dad, but is constantly reminded of how everyone else thinks by his poor dad. One of the stupidest things you can do is spending your time getting good grades in school to get a well paying, stable job. Doing so will only guarantee you’ll be poor for the rest of your life. The books explains why people who do everything they are told while growing up end up poor and educated. The book is divided into six lessons. Lesson #1 The Rich Don’t Work for Money

• Book of the Week: Understanding Exposure

  I read Understanding Exposure 3rd Edition by Byran Peterson on a recommendation from a friend who was getting into photography. The 3rd edition was revised to include the advances in digital photography. This book is for people who want to stop using the automatic setting on their cameras and want to explore creatively. The Photography Triangle: ISO, Shutter Speed, Aperture To take a properly exposed photo, you need to understand the photography triangle. Photography is about capturing light and each of the 3 points in the triangle affect how light is captured. ISO determines how sensitive the sensor is. A higher ISO number means the sensor is more sensitive, but can also be noisier. The aperture determines how big the hole that lets in light is. A big hole lets in more light and makes lets things be in focus. A smaller hole makes more things in focus, but lets in less light. The shutter speed determines how long the sensor is exposed to light. The faster the shutter speed, the less light. A faster shutter speed let’s you freeze motion while a longer shutter speed lets you capture and blur flow. If you change one setting, you need to adjust the others to make sure you still have a properly exposed photo. How you make these trades offs depends on what you are trying to achieve creatively. One of the most common things I get asked is how I make the background blurry. I purchase a lens that has a low f-stop, which means it can open the aperture very wide. This makes a small part of the image in focus while the rest is blurred. Another common question is how do I make a photo of water look like it is flowing. This requires a slower shutter speed. One you lower the shutter speed, you need to decrease the ISO to make the sensor less sensitive. You can also make the aperture hole smaller to let in less light. If that still doesn’t cut it, you can put a neutral density filter in front, which will cut the amount of light that passes through the lens. Lastly, it is not the camera you have, but how you use it.

• Book of the Week: The Complete Japanese Joinery

  The final book of my weeklong woodworking book binge is The Complete Japanese Joinery. I picked up this book after watching a video on intricate joins of sashimono woodworking. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8vJ11cXLs4&w;=560&h;=315] The book diagrams how the joints are made without the use of nails. After reading about hand tools it was interesting to get a different perspective on how to work wood. The most noticeable difference is the saws. I doubt I would use any of the techniques since a dovetail works mighty fine by itself. Purchase The Complete Japanese Joinery on Amazon.com or check it out from your local library.

• Book of the Week: Hand Tools

  Continuing on my woodworking binge, the next book is Hand Tools: Their Ways and Workings. If you’re doing traditional woodworking without power tools, then you need to know how to use the various hand tools that exist. It is amazing how many forms wood and steel can take. Some of the sections of the book on rulers, sandpaper and the screwdriver were unnecessary filler. The illustrations were nice, but you’re probably better off watching youtube videos and getting really specific books on workbenches and hand planes. Purchase Hand Tools from Amazon.com or check it out from your local library.

• Book of the Week: The Woodwright's Guide

  The Woodwright’s Guide is another book by Roy Underhilll. More of the same, going from tree to furniture, but is organized by the people who do each task. Since this is a newer book, one should probably prefer to read this one over The Woodwright’s Companion. The people are the

• Book of the Week: The Woodwright's Companion

  Roy Underhill has a PBS show called The Woodwright’s Shop that shows traditional woodworking techniques. The Woodwright’s Companion is a book he wrote. Woodworking Woodworking appeals to the inner creationist in me. It’s about taking a tree and turning it into a piece of functional furniture. Using your hands without electricity to do that is pretty amazing. It is more than thinking of wood as a building material, but rather bringing out the beauty of the wood in your piece. One has to really pay attention to the wood to know how to work it. It expands and contracts with the weather. I’m used to working with cold, unfeeling machines, but wood is alive or at least it used to be. The book is not a how-to for woodworking, but more about telling a story and sharing some history.

• Book of the Week: Luxury Fever

  Luxury Fever was mentioned by one of the books I read. I’m guessing it was from a book on happiness. I found the book too long for what it was. Too many examples, took a long time to get to the point. People spend money on stupid shit. America would be a better societal-wise if we had a progressive consumption tax to keep people from spending money on stupid shit. That’s good to know for policymakers, but what the hell can I do about it? Usually I read books where by the end of it, I learn about ways to improve my life. I’m people, so I spend money on stupid shit too, no matter how rational I may think I am. I know eating that piece of cake isn’t good for me, but it tastes damn good. I’m not going to write about why spending money on luxury goods is bad and why a progressive consumption tax is the solution. You can read the book for that. Income Inequality [caption id=”” align=”aligncenter” width=”602”] Share of pre-tax household income received by the top 1 percent, top 0.1 percent and top 0.01 percent, between 1917 and 2005 (wikipedia)[/caption] People complain about income inequality now, but it was worst when J. D. Rockefeller was alive. Yet despite increasing income inequality, a larger percentage of luxury cars are being sold. It could be that the 1% are buying multiple cars and the poor people are buying cars they can’t afford. Percentage of Luxury Cars Sold | Year
  —|—
  7 % | 1986
  12 % | 1996
  17 % | 2014
  It’s All Relative

• Book of the Week: All My Friends Are Still Dead

  This is the sequel to All my friends are dead. I found the first book on one coworker’s desk and the the sequel on another coworker’s desk. I’m going to keep a look out in case a third one comes out.

• Book of the Week: All My Friends Are Dead

  All My Friends Are Dead is a funny book in a way that the statements are sad, but true. It reminds me a children’s book that you would read to a kid.

• Book of the Week: The Design of Everyday Things

  The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman started out as The Psychology of Everyday Things, which was published in 1988. For comparison, IDEO, a famous design firm known for advocating design thinking was founded in 1991. This book was very influential when it was published, but after new developments in human-centered design and designing thinking, the material and examples in the book began to look a little stale. I’m reading the 2013 revision of the book that also incorporates topics written about by Don in other books that he’s published. He was also more cognizant to choose examples that wouldn’t get dated as quickly. This book reminds me of something that would be assigned reading to a class. Something you read, digest and talk about. If you want to take a class on the book, Udacity has a course called “Intro to the Design of Everyday Things” taught by Don Norman himself. Why Should I Care About Design?

• Book of the Week: Juggling for the Complete Klutz

  Juggling for the Complete Klutz was mention in one of the previous books I’ve read. I can’t juggle, so I wanted to read it. Still can’t juggle, because I haven’t practiced yet. Purchase Juggling for the Complete Klutz on Amazon.com or check it out from your local library.

• Book of the Week: Understanding Comics

  After reading How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big by the creator of Dilbert, I wanted to learn more about what goes into making comics. I picked up Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art by Scott McCloud to learn more. The book is a comic about understanding comics. It starts off with defining that comics are sequential art. Then it goes into the spectrum of comics and where they fit in the symbolism, realism, and iconic abstraction triangle. The middle of book goes over how space and time work. The end of the book goes over the six steps that artists go through in the creation process. When you read a comic, you feel certain things without knowing why. After reading this book, I have more of an appreciation of how the comic artist craft those experiences. Time to draw some comics on OpenSmut.

• Book of the Week: How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big

  How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big was written by Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert. This book is about Scott’s life and contains advice on how to be successful at life. Since cartoon writers are good are reducing things to their core, there isn’t much fluff in the book. This book sums up a lot of the things I’ve read about happiness and success. Goals are for Losers Having a system is better than having goals. A system is something you live and practice. A goal is some you either achieve or you don’t. By employing a system, you should be constantly heading in the right direction. The Success Formula

• Book of the Week: Zero to One

  Zero to One is based on the notes taken by Blake Masters during Peter Thiel’s startup class at Stanford. Chapter 3 of the book and Blake’s notes are available online. Zero to one is about how to impact the future and be financially rewarded doing so. It is easier to go from 1 to N, than from zero to one.

• Book of the Week: Built to Last

  I read Jim Collin’s prequel, Good to Great a few months ago. It was time to read the book he published first, Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies. Companies To determine what the successful habits are, Jim and team looked at what was different between the visionary company and the comparison company. Visionary | Comparison
  —|—
  3M | Norton
  American Express | Wells Fargo
  Boeing | McDonnell Douglas
  Citicorp | Chase Manhattan
  Ford | GM
  General Electric | Westinghouse
  Hewlett-Packard | Texas Instrumetn
  IBM | Burroughs
  Johnson & Johnson | Bristol-Myers Squibb
  Marriott | Howard Johnson
  Merck | Pfizer
  Motorola | Zenith
  Nordstrom | Melville
  Proctor & Gamble | Colgate
  Sony | Kenwood
  Wal-Mart | Ames
  Walt Disney | Columbia
  The Myth of the “Great Idea”

• Book of the Week: How Google Works

  How Google Works is part business book, part storybook on Google. The problem is that there are better business books and better storybooks on Google. If you’re a Google fan, then it is worthwhile read. Slides If you don’t want to read the book, you can just flip through these slides. [slideshare id=40175706?rel=0&w;=427&h;=356&style;=border: 1px solid #CCC; border-width: 1px; margin-bottom: 5px; max-width: 100%;≻=no]

• Book of the Week: The Pursuit of Perfect

  As a follow-up to Happier, I read The Pursuit of Perfect. The book is structured in the same way as Happier. It has 3 sections with embedded exercises. This book expands more on the perfectionist who lives the rat race rather than looking at the world as an optimalist. The second section talks about how pursuing perfect can affect education, work and love. If you’re a parent, the education section is a good read. If you got messed up by the school system, it would also be a good read. Tal references Jim Collin’s Built to Last for the work related ideas. Patterns emerge on what is required to be happy and genuinely good at something after reading many books on happiness, creativity and greatness. The hard part is internalizing those patterns and incorporating them into your everyday life. Perfectionist vs Optimalist The Perfectionist | The Optimalist
  —|—
  Journey as a straight line | Journey as an irregular spiral
  Fear of failure | Failure as feedback
  Focus on destination | Focus on journey and destination
  All-or-nothing thinking | Nuanced, complex thinking
  Defensive | Open to suggestions
  Faultfinder | Failure as feedback
  Fear of failure | Benefit finder
  Rigid, static | Adaptable, dynamic
  The perfectionist is the person who has big goals and relentless pursues them, working themselves into the ground. They head from milestone to another milestone never being happy. When they reach their first failure, they get hit hard and breakdown. They can’t enjoy the journey, because they are rushing toward the destination. They make their decisions around avoiding failure instead of doing what they really want. Safe Place In in a study about organization behavior, Hospitals that had better teamwork had more reported medical errors. This was because those who had better teamwork were more likely to report errors. While the others were more likely to cover up errors. When you analyzed errors that you can’t cover up, like deaths, then the hospitals with better teamwork came out on top. As repeated in books I’ve read about creativity and successful companies, you need to create a place where people feel that they can fail safely. If you never fail, you will never achieve great things. How you deal with failure can change your life a lot.

• Book of the Week: Happier

  Continuing my positive psychology binge, I read Happier by Tal Ben-Shahar, the Harvard professor who teaches the happiness class. The book is divided into three parts. The first part is about happiness. The second part is about happiness applied to education, work and relationships. The third part are thoughts about the nature happiness and its place in our lives. I’ll focus on the first part. Hamburger Model Tal likes food analogies. He mentions the Hamburger Model and Lasagna Principle. In the hamburger model, there are four types of hamburgers.

• Book of the Week: A Whole New Mind

  A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink is about the world shifting from being knowledge worker centered to creatives. Abundance, Asia and Automation Traditional workers are screwed, because of abundance, asian and automation. There are more goods than we know what to do with. Before if you wanted a car, it meant a Ford Model T in black. Now there are a multitude of choices. As things get more abundant, they get cheaper and accessible to a larger proportion of the population. Asia is producing more workers who are willing to do higher skill jobs for cheaper, like reading tax returns, legal research, reading CAT scans, computer programming, financial analysis, etc. If people in Asia aren’t taking your job, then machines will. This paints a bleak picture of the future of workers, but I remember hearing about programming jobs being outsources to Indian after the dotcom bust, yet we have Google, Twitter, Facebook, Dropbox still hiring programmers in these here United States. My stance is that if you need combine both the left brain thinking of the knowledge worker and the right brain thinking of the creatives, you can achieve more. It is not enough for something to work, it must work well in human terms. The Six Senses

• Book of the Week: The Happiness Advantage

  This week I read The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Achor who goes around the world teaching people how to be happy. It is not success that leads to happiness, but happiness that leads to success. To be more successful, we should strive to be happier first. There is a lot in the book, so I’ll only point out things I found interesting. The Seven Principles

• Book of the Week: Change By Design

  Change by Design is written by TIm Brown, the CEO of IDEO, a famous design firm. I previously read Creative Confidence by the founders of IDEO, Tom and David Kelley. I’m a fan of design thinking and this book explains what design thinking is in the first part. The second part of the book reflects on designing thinking and impacting societal change. This book was a refresher, because I heard or read many of the stories before. If I were to get a person interested in design thinking, this book would be okay, but I think watching one of the videos of David talking or the ABC Nightline segment about IDEO designing a shopping cart is an easier introduction. Design thinking is better conveyed by seeing someone do it rather than reading stories of people doing it. The book is still a good introduction to design thinking. I’m not going to go into what design thinking is. You can read the book. Three Spaces of Innovation: inspiration, ideation, and implementation Inspiration is the problem or opportunity that needs a solution. Ideation is when you generate, develop and test new ideas. Implementation is taking the solution it to mark. Going between these three spaces is not a linear path. As you learn more things, you may have to go back to see if you are indeed working on the right problem. Culture and Environment You can’t just walk into the office and tell everyone to do design thinking. People must know they can experiment and take risks. You need to give people permission to fail. Rules for Brainstorming

• Book of the Week: The Dip

  This week I read The Dip by Seth Godin. It is a book that tells you when to quit and when to stick to it. Previously I read the Purple Cow by Seth Godin. I like his books, because they are short and to the point. He conveys information without wasting my time. Quitting is a very important topic that is not discussed as much as it should be. Quitting is stigmatized. This topic has been tackled by Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt in Think Like a Freak. They have a rebroadcast of The Upside of Quitting on their podcast. I recommend listening to it. The Dip

• Book of the Week: Hacking the Xbox

  This week I read Hacking the Xbox, written by bunnie huang. He hacked the xbox while he was a PhD student in electrical engineering at MIT. After Aaron Swartz took his own life, bunnie made his book free to download in Aaron’s memory. Aaron was threatened by lawsuits from publishing companies trying to protect their copyrights on academic research journals. This would be a book I would give to an eager young mind wanting to get into electronics. Academic Publishing Academic publishing stinks. The government gives grants through the NSF, DoD and NIH to conduct research. Part of the grant budget includes fees that researchers have to pay to get their papers into journals. Academic organizations also pay subscription fees to the journals for access to articles. If they want to make the articles accessible to the general population for free, they need to pay even more fees to the publishing companies. When they download the pdfs of the articles, there are also ads on the page. If this seems broken to you, it is. academic publishing is ripe for disruption. Aaron was trying to free the information that tax dollars paid for. Aaron was trying to set knowledge free. Although that does not make what he did legal. Xbox Security Microsoft went to great lengths to secure the Xbox, so people couldn’t use it as a cheap PC. They even put a fake ROM chip with filled with apparent booting instructions to throw off would be hackers. Ultimately persistence and a community sharing their insights lead to the breaking of Xbox security letting anyone run their own software on the Xbox.

• Book of the Week: Bryne's New Standard Book of Pool and Billiards

  I picked up Byrne’s New Standard Book of Pool and Billiards to improve my pool game. After an evening reading the book, my game has already improved. There is a lot of book to read, so I think of it more of a reference book for advanced pool playing. He covers the basics and goes into high level play. The book is composed of two books: Pool and Three Cushion Billiards.Three cushion billiards is really hard and is played on a table without pockets. You are probably going to spending most of your time playing pool. I’ve never seen a three cushion table. Bryne goes over many situations for each type of shot and how things change with english. Cue

• Bryne S New Standard Book Of Pool And Billiards

  

• Book of the Week: Encyclopedia of Ethical Failure

  This week I read the Encyclopedia of Ethical Failure, published by the United States Department. This book was mentioned in Think Like a Freak and the Freakonomics podcast. It details the known ethical failures in the government with what happened, which law they broke and what the punishment was. It was pretty entertaining to flip through. It is nice to know that some of the government wastes are actually being caught. PaySchedule It mentions a lot of pay demotions. The pay grade is denoted by a letter and a number. The letter is the classification and the number is what level. The higher the level, the more you are paid. You can check out what the levels are at U.S. Office of Personnel Management. Things I Learned

• Book of the Week: Think Like a Freak

  From the writers of Freakonomics and SuperFreakonomics. They got tired of answering people’s questions, so they wrote a book to teach everyone to Think Like a Freak. Three Hardest Words

• Book of the Week: make space

  I’ve read about creative confidence and making creative companies, but what happens when you already have an organization. How do you house this organization to make to more creative and collaborative? This book, make space, is about how to create spaces for being creative and making stuff. It came of of ideas developed at the Stanford d.school. The book comes across like a coffee table book, where it is a lot of photos and many sections, so you can pick it up, read a few pages, get some ideas and put it down.

• Book of the Week: The Everything Store

  My book club decided to start with The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon. It is quite fitting that I read the book on an Amazon Kindle. I’ve heard most of the stories about Amazon (AMZN) before, like how he was adopted and how Amazon has two pizza teams. What I learned most were the people around Jeff in the early days. A lot of the mythology of a company surrounds the founder, but it is nice to learn about the other people too. Things get crazy in the early days of startups when there is explosive growth. One wonders how the company survived. Surviving

• Book of the Week: The Frackers

  This week I read The Frackers, recommended to me by a coworker. It is a good book that tells the background of the people who changed the energy equation in the United States through horizontal drilling combined with hydraulic fracturing. These people were risk takers chasing after oil and natural gas. They saw possibilities where other people previously wrote off. If they weren’t relentless in their pursuit of gas from shale, the technology wouldn’t haven’t advanced. The more promising something looks, the more people jump in and the faster things advance. Moonlighting I learned the term moonlighting came from the oil industry where people tried to dodge royalty payments by using patented technology in the middle of the night. Risks and Rewards The Frackers reminds me of what it means to be an American and what the American dream is. It is also the reason why people are not willing to tax the rich, because they hope to be rich someone day. You are never going to be rich if you don’t put your money on the line to take risks or take on debt.

• Book of the Week: The Tipping Point

  Since I liked Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, I decided to read another one of his books, The Tipping Point. Tipping points are important, because they represent a drastic change that presents opportunities for those about to take advantage. One scientific example of a tipping point is when water under goes a phase change at zero degrees Celsius. It suddenly changes from water to ice. Two vastly different properties of a material with a slight temperature difference.

• Book of the Week: Creative Confidence

  Since I was inspired to build a creative company from reading Creativity, Inc., I decided to read Creative Confidence by Tom and David Kelley and so I can be creative myself. Tom and David Kelley started IDEO, a famous design firm. I’ve been a fan of IDEO since watching the Nightline special on redesigning a shopping cart. The founding of Stanford’s d.school has only made me more of a fan. Creative Confidence We are all innately creative, but school beats the creativity out of you. When you’re afraid of looking stupid, you lose ability to be creative. To teach people how to design well, Tom and David had to show people that they can be creative. By using techniques similar to how people get over the fear of snakes, they guided people through baby steps and let people practice their creativity. Eventually something flips in their head and they realize they were creative all along. This book is about developing your creative confidence. Design Thinking

• Book of the Week: The Blackjack Life

  I’ve read books (Theory of Blackjack and Beat the Dealer) on the technical aspects of blackjack, but I hadn’t read books that were devoted to person accounts. It was time to change that with The Blackjack Life recommended to me by a coworker. It was a good read. There is this legend of the MIT blackjack team that makes becoming a professional card counter seem like you need to be a genius. Nathaniel Tilton became a professional Blackjack player without being a genius from MIT. He did it the old fashion way. He spent a lot of time practicing and focusing on perfecting his game. Being a professional blackjack player means you have to treat it like a job. In order to win statistically, you have to play a lot of shoes. That means spending a lot of time going from casino to casino. I think it would be cool to count cards, but I’m probably better off spending my time learning to do something else like curing cancer.

• Book of the Week: The Start-up of You

  Instead of reading about startups this week, I read The Start-up of You by Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn and PayPal mafia member and Ben Casnocha, some other guy. Since Reid created LinkedIn, most of the book is about professional development in trying to find your career path through leveraging your skills and professional network. I would have stopped reading the book if it told me to pursue my passion, but I’m glad the book mentions that most people don’t know their passion. Pursuing your passion is a lie. If you want to know the truth about passion I recommend So Good They Can’t Ignore You. Before people used to work at one company until they died, but this is no longer the case because of globalization and technology. You’re either going to be replaced by someone in India or by some piece of software written by someone in India. This book would be a good gift for someone a year or two from graduating college. It takes time for things to sink in and to put things into practice. ABZ Planning Plan A is what you are doing right now. Plan B is what you pivot to from A that is close enough to be an easier transition. Plan Z is when all else fails. Having a Plan Z let’s you tolerate more uncertainty and risk. The worst things could be if you fail. They also make it a point to differentiate uncertainty and risk. Things can be uncertain, but not risky. Some people are bothered by uncertainty, so they don’t jump on opportunities. In the startup world, there are pivots that companies make when the company takes on a new business direction to survive. Netflix went to movie rentals by mail to dvd subscriptions by mail to movies over the internet to producing their own content. Flickr used to be an online social game. Groupon used to be a platform for people to pledge support to social or civic causes. By treating your own development like a startup, you can achieve bigger and better things. Specifics are in the book. Networks

• Book of the Week: Do Cool Sh*t

  I was browsing books, when I saw Do Cool Sh*t: Quit Your Day Job, Start Your Own Business, and Live Happily Ever After by Miki Agrawal. Not a book that I would go out of my way to read, but since everything I wanted to read was on hold, I wanted to give it a try. I want to do cool shit too. It was also a quick read. Rules and Limits The book is a composed of stories of how she became a successful entrepreneur. Halfway through the book I figured out out why I disliked her. At first I thought it was jealously, because why is she a successful entrepreneur hanging out with Tony Hsieh and I’m not. That wasn’t the case. It is because I’m was brought up in an educational system that taught me to obey the rules. Entrepreneurs break rules. It’s true. The YC application asks about rules that you have broken. I understand why now. She broke the rules and got away with it. In my naïve mind I considered that cheating and unfair. I didn’t like her, because she cheated and got away with it. Hacking in a sense is rule breaking. Hacking involves taking rigid things and bending them so they work together to accomplish a greater goal. After a few more chapters, I couldn’t hold it against her anymore, because she hustled. You have to respect someone who hustles and doesn’t take no for an answer. She did things that I didn’t have the courage to do. Each step she took and I didn’t take was like compounding interest. Over time that builds up. Most limits are self-imposed. That stops people from achieving until someone comes along and shatters the status quo. An example of this is Takeru Kobayashi who developed better ways to eat hot dogs and shattered the world record. He’s not any more predispositioned to hot dog eating than the average Joe. He thought people could do better, so he developed new techniques. Once other people learned his techniques, they also shattered the previous records. If you already have a predefined barrier in your mind, you will only do as well as the barrier. In the real world, there aren’t rules. You do things and other things happen as a consequence. A successful entrepreneur leverages those consequences to accomplish their goals and ambitions. I went from being annoyed to admiration of Miki. I am going to continue doing cool shit.

• Book of the Week: #GIRLBOSS

  This week I read #GIRLBOSS, written by NastyGal’s CEO, Sophia Amoruso. The book is a tale of how she went from dumpster diving, shoplifting and hitchhiking to opening her own vintage eBay store that grew in one of the fastest-growing retailers. I like the book, because it felt really authentic. She seems like one of the people I met in San Francisco growing up. Schooling

• Book of the Week: Creativity, Inc.

  I couldn’t have picked a better book to follow Good to Great. Since I know what it takes to make a good company great, I can see those same things described in this book. In Creativity, Inc., Ed Catmull, cofounder and the CTO of Pixar, talks about the business side of creating a creative culture and protecting that culture. Ed Catmull is not only a legend in the area of computer graphics, but he also went to school with other people who founded Adobe, Silicon Graphics, and Netscape. When I think of great companies, Pixar is on that list. They made hit movie after hit movie. The worst thing about the company is that nobody quits, so there is no upward mobility. If the worst thing about your company is that nobody quits, things have to be pretty good there. The book is divided into four parts: Getting Started, Protecting the New, Building and Sustaining, and Testing What We Know. Team > Ideas

• Book of the Week: Good to Great

  What does it take to make a good company, great? Jim Collins and his research team spent 5 years to find out. Good to Great was published in 2001, before the financial crisis of 2008. At the end of each chapter, there is a helpful summary. The things that make companies great should be something that transcends time periods. The Companies Jim and team developed some stringent criteria based on the stock performance of publicly traded companies to identify the great companies. The 11 companies that made the cut are Abbott Laboratories (ABT), Circuit City Stores, Fannie Mae (FNMA), Gillette Company, Kimberly-Clark (KMB), Kroger (KR), Nucor (NUE), Philip Morris (PM), Pitney Bowes (PBI), Walgreens (WAG) and Wells Fargo (WFC). Fannie Mae is surprising, because their greatness caused the financial crisis due to the creation of mortgage-backed securities and trying to manage risk with them. Gillette merged with Proctor and Gamble (PG), who was painted as a nemesis in the book. Circuit City went bankrupt. Greatness doesn’t always last. The topic of maintaining greatness is covered in Jim’s other book, Built to Last. Level 5

• Book of the Week: Flash Boys

  This week I read Flash Boys by Michael Lewis to find out that I’ve been getting screwed in the stock market this entire time. The book seems like an advertisement of IEX, whose value proposition is that they don’t screw you like everyone else. Milliseconds Thousandth’s of a second matter in the high frequency trading world. If you put it a buy order, it gets routed to several exchanges. Someone who gets information and conducts trades faster than you will buy the shares at a lower price and sell it back to you at a higher price since your order will hit one exchange before it hits the other exchanges. One way to prevent this is to add delays such that your orders hit all exchanges simultaneously or trade on exchange only. Due to some laws and the size of the order, you will probably have to hit multiple exchanges to fulfill your order. High frequency traders will do anything to get an edge like physically putting their computers closer to the exchanges. Small Shops vs Big Banks Big banks suck at high frequency trading, which is dominated by companies most people haven’t heard of. Wall street people are bullshit their way to the top. The problem is that they start believing themselves. Part of bullshitting is to bluff to keep people in the dark about their own value and your own weakness. Everyone is out to screw each other so they can make a buck at your expense. Money can only buy so much. If you want to get good people, you need to appeal with them with something other than money. The people who can do that are leaders. They can convince people to give up stability and comfort to join them in the trenches. Russian Mafia Turns out many high frequency coders are Russians who can code well and know how to work the system. Wall Street is all about working the system to your advantage. A lot of the things that banks and exchanges do are to give high frequency traders more of an advantage. High frequency trading converts information to money without taking any risk. They only have to worry about other high frequency trading companies beating them to the punch. IEX The characters in the story form IEX, an exchange designed not to screw the investor. You follow them on their journey of putting the pieces together to find out how investors are getting screwed to getting IEX to be successful. I wonder if I should ask my broker to route all my trades through IEX now.

• Book of the Week: The Lean Startup

  I try to practice lean startup methodologies, but I have never read the book behind it. This week, it was time to correct that oversight by reading The Lean Startup by Eric Ries, an entrepreneur who has navigated through failure to success. The lean startup method takes a scientific approach to creating a successful company through validated learning. Minimum Viable Product

• Book of the Week: The Knowledge

  When All Hell Breaks Lose covers surviving the initial days after a catastrophic emergency, but I want more than to just survive. I want to be able to rebuild a civilization. Lewis Dartnell’s The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch goes through the thought experiment of the necessary steps and leaps that one would need to make to rebuild. What shortcuts can we take and what is the bare minimum it takes to get something going again? Chemistry I like the chemistry sections, where he explains how you can extract certain compounds and how you can combine those compounds to do useful things. Like using wood ash and fat to make soap or making ammonia by fermenting pots of piss. Or how to make gunpowder. I wonder why I wasn’t taught chemistry in this fashion. Historical The historical information was also interesting. Like how René Laennec invented the stethoscope, because he was uneasy about pressing his ear and check agains the chest of a buxom woman. Or how wars were fought over islands for their guano. Shit was valuable, because it was hard to get nitrogen in usable form before the invention of the Haber-Bosch process. It is hard to imagine having such a large population without that process. You probably won’t be able to rebuild the world after reading this book, but serves as a guide post to reflect on how we got to where we are as a civilization and the things we take for granted.

• Book of the Week: Lonely Planet Road Trip California Highway 1

  This week I decided to read Road Trip California Highway 1 from Lonely Planet in preparation of my road trip. This book was published in October 2003, so it is a little dated. There was a blurb about the best bookstores. I’d bet money that half of those bookstores do not exist anymore. I found myself wanting more information. There are only bits and pieces of outdated information in the book. For food stuff, I can just pull out a smartphone and check out yelp at the spur of the moment. The only thing I found useful was the price comparison of places of lodgings. It listed places where I can setup a tent for cheap. Another thing of interest is how the ticket prices have doubled in the last decade. We are spoiled by having all this information at our finger tips. Back in the days, people just bought a book and drove. Someone people just drove. After I finished reading the book, I was not any closer to planning my road trip. Maybe a road trip isn’t something you plan, but something you just do. Time to hit the road.

• Book of the Week: Maus

  I found out about Maus from reading lists of top graphic novels. After reading it, I can definitely see why Art Spiegelman won a Pulitzer Prize for it. The subject matter is heavy. The book is about a comic artist’s relationship with his dad who survived Auschwitz. He asks his dad about how he survived as a Jew during World World II in Poland. I would put this book in the same ballpark as Schindler’s List. The writing is great, I kept wanting to read page after page. I didn’t pay attention to the art style as much as I did to the words. Usually people like reading about happy things, but I can’t really say it made me as sad and depressed as an account of the Holocaust could have. It is a much more human story. Maus is worth reading as a reminder. People complain about having 1st world problems. After reading Maus, I think it is hard for anyone to complain about even 3rd world problems. If you’re alive, you already have it pretty good.

• Book of the Week: When All Hell Break Loose

  This week I read When All Hell Breaks Loose: Stuff You Need to Survive When Disaster Strikes by Cody Lundin, a survival expert. I learned about Cody Lundin from watching the Discovery Channel’s Dual Survival. The premise of the show is that two survival experts with different philosophies will go through survival scenarios, such as being lost in the jungle or ship capsizing on a deserted island. Most of the drama in the show is from the conflicting philosophies. Cody is the hippy, eat grubs and insects kind of guy. The other survival expert is the build traps, kill animal, take risks type of person. From watching the show, you can tell that Cody is a person who practices what he teaches. I learned a lot about starting fires from watching him on the show. That was enough motivation to read his book. People have this romanticized ideal of camping and living off the land. Living off the land sucks and is really hard. Most people would be dead if they were forced to live off the land. This book deals with that reality. The first part of the book is about the mental game. The second part of the book is about actually doing stuff about keeping warm, securing food, making water potable, sanitation, lighting, cooking, first-aid, etc. There’s useful information, like using newspaper for insulation to keep warm. Although, I already learned that trick from homeless people in San Francisco. I’m not one of those doomsayers who stock up on ammunition, but I have been through the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. One has to be prepared for the next disaster. This book is a reminder to get my preparation in order. Those interested in survival manuals might also want to check out US Army Survival Manual: FM 21-76. The book was okay. I’d rather watch Dual Survival and go camping instead.

• Books for Entrepreneurs

  Here are some books for people who want to start companies. Real books, none of the touchy feely crap. Read these books and your business will have a better chance at succeeding, because you’ll be focusing your time working on the right problems.

• Books for Computer Scientist

  Here are some books that are useful for new hires to read. It makes it easier to convey thoughts and ideas if everyone is on the same page.

• Book of the Week: Moby Dick

  I decided to read Moby Dick months ago, but it has been a long and arduous journey. One that I do not wish to continue for the time being. The quest for Moby Dick has caused me to suffer and slip in other subject areas. When I started reading the book, I didn’t know it was ridiculously long. I kept flipping through pages on my Kindle, but the progress bar barely moved after a few days. Moby Dick written in a time when books were a primary form of entertainment. It amazes me that a person can just make up enough stuff to fill all those pages. Moby Dick seems to be one of those books that everyone knows is about crazy Captain Ahab going after a white whale, but few people have actually read. When I started reading the book, the white whale and captain were no where to be found. So far, the book is definitely interesting. The Kindle is useful to look up Hebrew and seafaring words. This is one of those books that you need to read on a week long vacation to read. I’m putting it off till I get one of those. The white whale still eludes me.

• Book of the Week: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

  

• Book of the Week: The Bootstrapper's Bible

  This week I read the pdf version of the The Bootstrapper’s Bible by Seth Godin. It was a quick and “free for two weeks until December 30th”. Note that it is April 5th 2014 today.

• Book of the Week: The Box

  This week I read The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger by Marc Levinson. I’ve been thinking a lot about how goods move from place to place and how that will change in the future as the sharing economy grows. The Box tells the story of how the shipping container overcame obstacles and became ubiquitous. The world became a much smaller place, because of the shipping container.

• Book of the Week: The Art of the Start

  This week I read The Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki, the original Apple evangelist. The book covers starting, positioning, pitching, writing a business plan, bootstrapping, recruiting, raising capital, partnering, branding, rain making and being a mensch. I liked the book a lot, but a lot has changed in the startup world in 10 years. Not that anything mentioned here is wrong, but it is now gospel is startup land. The ideas are more formalized now. It was a good read since it conveys information efficiently with no bullshit. Bootstrapping and Raising Capital

• Book of the Week: Minecraft

  

• Book of the Week: The Startup Owner's Manual

  If you have taken the Steve Blank’s Lean Startup class on Udacity, you may have heard of The Startup Owner’s Manual. This isn’t one of those books that you read cover to cover. He treats it like an automotive repair manual. You read the sections of the book that you are having problems with. It is only worth reading if you actually have a startup. Reading the book is pointless unless you actually have actions to take. I can read all about repairing an 86’ Supra, but if I don’t have the car, all that knowledge is not going to do me any good. This book represents Professor Blank’s work to make startups more systematic.

• Book of the Week: Marijuana Gateway to Health

  After the legalization of recreational marijuana in Arizona, I decided to learn more about the medicinal uses of marijuana by reading Marijuana Gateway to Health: How Cannabis Protects Us From Cancer and Alzheimer’s Disease by Clint Werner. Cancer and Alzheimer’s Disease Studies show that marijuana decreases the risk of cancer, even lung cancer. This is in stark contrast to tobacco. Makes you wonder why tobacco is legal, but marijuana is not. The effect of making marijuana illegal, lead to growing of strains that had high THC to CBD ratios. THC makes you high, but CBD may have more medical uses. People want to carry around less weed, so they grew strains that were stronger. I didn’t know there were so many strains with different ratios. Legalization of marijuana should improve the genetic diversity of the plant making it better for researching medical cures. Marijuana seems like a miracle drug. Maybe it will lead to a cure for cancer.

• Book of the Week: The Art of Fermentation

  I decided to read The Art of Fermentation after hearing an interview with the author on Science Friday. Fermented foods are a large part of many cultures. It seems that I like reading about fermentation since I already read a book on making alcohol from various plants. I liked this book more than the Drunken Botanist, which was more of a coffee table book. Health When I first read the author’s bio of being a HIV+ homosexual hippy, I was worried the health section of the book would be all touchy-feely without science substance. My worries were unfounded. The bacteria around us and inside us have a large influence on our health and well being. Our ancestors have evolved in a bacteria filled environment, so one would believe that there may be some dependence on them. After all, mitochondria used to be outside our cells and now live inside them. Fermentation is about creating a controlled environment, such that the good bacteria may live. Everybody eats fermented foods, but most people don’t like bacteria. A consequence of this is the rise in allergies linked to the war on bacteria. Food There are so many different types of fermented food. Best to just read the book and then start fermenting yourself.

• Book of the Week: The Score Takes Care of Itself

  In anticipation of the NFC championship game between the San Francisco 49ers and the Seattle Seahawks, I read The Score Takes Care of Itself: My Philosophy of Leadership by Bill Walsh with Steven Jamison and Craig Walsh. Bill Walsh died of leukemia before completing the book. There are a lot of little things in this book, so it is hard to summarize effectively. I liked it, because it provided some insight into how Bill Walsh turned around the 49ers and how Joe Montana and Jerry Rice became Hall of Famers. Bill Walsh turned around the losing 49ers as the general manager and head coach. His first task was to fix the culture and install his “Standard of Performance”. This meant getting rid of many of the existing players and staff. Culture is very important. His culture was not focused on winning, but executing things to perfection. To always get better.

• Book of the Week: Made to Stick

  This week I read Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath to learn how to make my ideas sticky. You can have the greatest idea in the world, but if you can’t make it sticky, it won’t matter. Chip teaches OB 568: How to Make Ideas Stick at Stanford. They mention that this book complements The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell. A tipping point occurs, when you reach the right people at the right time with a sticky idea. Made to Stick details what makes an idea sticky.

• Book of the Week: The Most Powerful Idea in the World

  This week I read a book from the list of the best books that Bill Gates read in 2013. The Most Powerful Idea in the World is about all the pieces that had to go right in order to bring the steam engine to life. The beginning of the book was slow going, but it picked up steam midway before I gave up. Many things had to be in place for the steam engine to exist. Not just technology, put the economics, politics, laws and people. You need people who put in 10,000 hours to become experts, so they can build the invention with ever increasing improvements. The legal protection needs to be there for actors with the financial motivation, but weak enough that other people can enter the playing field. The steam engine contest at the end of the book reminded me of the DARPA challenges. Government has a strong role in advancing technology. I take a lot of things for granted. If I want to make something, I can order parts from a catalog and get custom parts fabricated through CNC milling, laser cutting or 3D printing. What is keeping us from advancing technology? The answer is that there needs to be a market for your advances. Before the steam engine was used for locomotion, it was used to mine and make textiles. Everything has to go right for a game changing technology to flourish. Just because you can build something, doesn’t mean it makes sense to build it. Also what is the cost of our technological advancement. We as inventors are separated from the ecological impact of our inventions. In the Lord of the Rings, you could see the trees being cut down to fuel the fires of Mordor to make metal weapons. The early metal workers had to deal with a lot of deforestation and started importing wood from neighboring countries.

• Books 2013

  List of Books I read in 2013

• Book of the Week: Masters of Doom

  To celebrate the 20th anniversary of Doom, I read Masters of Doom. The book is an account of how the two Johns (Carmack and Romero) came together to make Doom and changed the face of gaming. I had a few flashbacks to my early childhood while reading. I grew up with Commander Keen, Wolfenstein and Doom. Two Johns John Carmack and John Romero balanced each other. They both did not have a respect for authority. When they were starting out, they “borrowed” computers from employer during the nights and weekends. They were focused on making games. They could see things that other people couldn’t.

• eBook of the Week: The Free Beginner's Guide to SEO

  Moz has The Free Beginner’s Guide to SEO. I’m a sucker for anything free, so I read it. SEO stands for search engine optimization. Google also has their Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide. If I have a website and want people to visit it, what can I do to my website to make Google find me and put the links to my website ahead of other website? Being good at SEO translates to bringing more traffic, which in turn should bring more users.

• Book of the Week: Outliers

  Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers talks about why people are successful.

• Book of the Week: The Arabian Nights Entertainments

  Ancient people didn’t have the internet. They got their entertainment from old people telling stories. I imagine an old drunken guy sitting at a bazaar. Old drunk guys survived long enough to tell tales, because alcohol kills bacteria. The Arabian Nights is a collection of those tales in English. I read about The Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor. The seven voyages are all similar.

• Book of the Week: Mature Optimization Handbook

  

• Book of the Week: If I Knew Then

  As part of preparations for the 50th reunion of Harvard Business School’s 1963 class, they collect advice for the younger generation from the alumni. If I Knew Then is a compilation of that advice.

• Book of the Week: Drunken Botanist

  The Drunk Botanist by Amy Stewart describes the relationship between people, alcohol and plants. All civilizations have figured out how to make alcohol from plants. Booze is what brings us all together. If it is a plant, there is probably an alcoholic beverage derived from it.

• Book of the Week: Wicked Bugs

  For a Halloween themed book, I picked Wicked Bugs by Amy Stewart. It covers things you hope to never encounter. The book is a bit about being grossed out while learning a thing or two. I learned that Brazilian wandering spider venom can cause priapism. There are stories about each the bugs to keep it interesting. It is amazing how the lifecycles of different organisms are linked. Toward the middle of the book, I became very appreciative of sanitation. I was distracted and frustrated by the book quoting itself. It makes it harder to read. This might be more of a problem in the eBook. Bot Fly [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23eimVLAQ2c&w;=420&h;=315] Mosquitos

• Book of the Week: Rework

  The most interesting thing about Rework, is who it is written by. Rework is written by 37signals, the creators of Ruby on Rails. If you’ve done any web development, you’ve heard of Ruby on Rails. 37signals intentionally kept their team to 16 people at the time the book was published. They built a business, not a startup. This book is about what they learned about building a business. The book has many small sections that make for a quick, but worthy read. Ideas Ideas are cheap and plentiful. Everyone has ideas, but how many people execute on those ideas. Ideas are amorphous until you will it into being. Henry Ford was a man with ideas and action. The Ford Charcoal company used wood scraps from his production line. One man’s garbage is another man’s Kingsford charcoal company. If you want to start a business, you need to start building. Customers The book mention that you don’t need to write down customer feedback, because you won’t forget the important stuff. If you forget it, then it wasn’t important. I never memorized the periodic table in chemistry, but I looked up the numbers so often that I didn’t need to look them up anymore. You need to change how you interact with the customer, so you can effectively solve the customer’s problems. Relationships with customers are important. Give them a taste of some good stuff and they will keep coming back for more. Teach them how to roll it up properly for maximum satisfaction. More words in a blog post does not necessarily make it better.

• Book of the Week: The Intelligent Investor

  The Intelligent Investor was written by Benjamin Graham, Warren Buffett’s sensei. If reading this book will make me an intelligent investor like Warren, I’m all for it. The first thing you will notice about the book is that is very thick, over 500 pages. The original book was nearly as thick, because my edition 2006 has additional commentary and footnotes. Having more pages does not necessarily increase the value. One of the commentaries suggested that Graham’s advice about avoiding mortgages and junk bonds was outdated, because of new investment vehicles. The same investment vehicles that were responsible for the financial crisis. I’ll think I’ll keep to Graham’s advice. Inflation and Taxes Real gains after accounting for taxes and inflation are what you care about. Which investments you chose depend on your own personal tax situation. One should also be ready to take advantage of any tax savings you can find. Inflation and taxes are just as important as returns. Market There is no market, only underpriced and overpriced stocks. One needs to change the mindset of investing from picking a thoroughbred horse to buying groceries. You’re not out there to pick a winner. You need to find a good deal and eat what’s on sale. Wash Rule I totally forgot about this, because I avoid taking losses. The wash-sale rule states that you if you sell and buy back a stock, you need to wait more than 30 days to buy back the stock in order to take a loss when you sold it the first time. This less you get some tax savings while retaining a stock you want to keep. Value Formula for Growth Stocks Value = Current (Normal Earnings) x (8.5 plus twice the expected annual growth rate) Two Types of Investors There is the passive defensive investor and the active intelligent investor. An important part about being an intelligent investor is to be disciplined enough to stick to a given plan regardless of the market. Being a passive investor is similar to the advice given in David Swensen’s Unconventional Success. Buy market index funds at regular intervals to take advantage of dollar-cost averaging. You can do this by making a habit to buy an index fund every time you get your paycheck. It takes work to be an intelligent investor. You actually have to read the accounting books of the companies and do some analysis to see if they are actually overpriced or underpriced. It is a bit scary to see the different ways companies try to cook the books. Being an intelligent investor is not very glamorous. You either just go on cruise control and track the market or spend a lot of find going over accounting statements. Buy stocks like groceries. Purchase The Intelligent Investor from Amazon.com or check it out from your local library.

• Book of the Week: Effective Java

  Learning a programming language only gives you the lego blocks to build something. The best ways to put the blocks together to make an object without everything falling apart requires more than just knowing the semantics of the programming language. Effective Java gives examples of what not to do and why you shouldn’t do that. Usually you learn these things after experiencing why you shouldn’t do that. Sometimes you pick up a few things from the code review process, but it is better to write effective Java from the start. I’m not a big Java fan, but writing effective Java will make it less painful. Purchase Effective Java on Amazon.com or check it out from your local library.

• Book of the Week: iOS Human Interface Guidelines

  iOS 7 represents the biggest UI change to iOS since its release. The iOS Human Interface Guidelines provides the thinking behind these UI changes and guides you in designing apps that work well in the iOS ecosystem. If you’re going to make an iOS app, it better behave like an iOS app or your users are going to be confused. People’s expectations are built upon their previous experiences.

• Book of the Week: Einstein's Dreams

  

• Book of the Week: OpenGL ES Programming Guide

  The OpenGL ES 2.0 Programming Guide tells you how to write OpenGL for embedded devices such as Android smartphones and the Apple iOS devices. OpenGL ES 2.0 is a subset of OpenGL that is designed to work on embedded systems with higher constraints than desktop applications. They trimmed a lot of the fat and removed multiple ways to do things. I’ve used the previous fixed pipeline in OpenGL 1.x to create 3D graphics for games and data visualization, but programmable pipeline is totally new to me. This book was a great introduction to help me get started. I recommend reading the guide through one time and then going back and to try implementing things. You need to get a sense of all the pieces before you can put it together. Mathematical Background Before programming OpenGL applications, you need to have mathematical computer graphics background. Fundamentals of Computer Graphics and 3D Computer Graphics: A Mathematical Introduction are good places to start. Linear algebra provides mathematical foundation on how the geometry is manipulated. I also recommend reading the sections about quaternions if you’re serious about rotations. Fixed Pipeline vs Programmable **I need to forget that the fixed pipeline ever existed. If I were to teach a class on this, I would totally ignore the fixed pipeline. The early graphics cards were highly specific circuits designed to process 3D graphics information. As time passed, GPUs became more general-purpose highly parallel processing data crunching devices.CUDA leverages GPUs for general purpose computing to cure diseases for scientific computing. In the programmable world, each processor loads a shader program, which determines how geometry and other information will be manipulated to create the final image. As an example in the book, the fixed pipeline is implemented as a shader. There isn’t much work required to replicate the fixed pipeline if you still want to operate in that mindset. Programming for embedded systems can be trickier, because you are more likely to hit constraints you don’t know about. One thing is that some devices only support complied binary shaders and each binary is different for each vendor/device, so there is no portability between them.

• Book of the Week: Enterprise Data Workflows with Cascading

  Enterprise Data Workflows with Cascading describes how to build big data applications with a focus on how data moves without worrying about details. The concept behind cascading reminded of the old Waterworks card game. You connect pipes together with a finite set of pieces to create a complex network bringing resources from one place to another place where it can be better used. The directed graph diagrams can be created with dot from graphivz. $ dot -Tsvg graph.dot -o graph.svg

• Book of the Week: The Affluent Society

  I read The Affluent Society by Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith to find out why people are poor. The book makes a lot of points, but I was lost in the beginning when the names of a bunch of economists were thrown around. I have no idea who these people are and what ideas they have. But it doesn’t matter what they think. Even though this book was written in 1957, economic and societal considerations are similar.

• Book of the Week: The Elements of Drawing

  I found The Elements of Drawing by John Ruskin through the iTunes U course. The book was published in 1857. I had to look up what india-rubber and a penknife are. The drawing instruments have have changed a little bit, but techniques haven’t. The book is divided into three letters. Drawing As a scientist, drawing is about conveying an idea to another person. As an artist, drawing is about what I want to make another feel. Leondardo da Vinici used his skills to create famous technical drawings and paintings. By reading this book, I hope to take a step toward becoming a Renaissance man. Letter I: On Practice There many exercises with explantations of their purpose. The goal is have control of your hand and work on seeing different parts of the world. The practice gives you tools, so you can draw. Drawing is not just reproducting what you see. Letter II: Sketching from Nature

• Book of the Week: Beige Book

  I heard about the Beige Book from NPR. Beige Book The Beige Book is published 8 times a year by the Federal Reserve to summarize economic conditions in each of the twelve Federal Reserve Districts.

• Book of the Week: Theory of Blackjack

  This book details the mathematics behind blackjack with appendices on how the tables are calculated. Beat the Dealer was a good start. The Theory of Blackjack is what I need to write software to study blackjack. Purchase The Theory of Blackjack on Amazon.com or check it out from your local library.

• Book of the Week: Beat the Dealer

  A This American Life episode about Blackjack inspired me to read Beat the Dealer by Edward O Thorp. The first edition of this book brought card counting the masses. This edition details the developments after the first edition. Blackjack Blackjack is the only casino game where you can statistically beat the casino. I thought analyzing blackjack would be easy, but there are variations in rules concerning soft hands, doubling down, insurance, splitting, etc. Each casino has different rules, which can make some casinos more favorable to play at than others. Beating the Dealer Information gained by keeping track of played cards lets you know when you have a statistical advantage. The problem is how to keep track of played cards. One way is to assign points values to each card and keep a running sum. As you get to the end of the deck, you become more certainty about the remaining cards. Play can be broken down into 3 levels.

• Book of the Week: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

  The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey is a popular book. It is not a book you can read quickly and hope to gain anything from it. Habits take conscious effort and time to develop. I was turned off by the book in the beginning, because it was very preachy. It is a book written for managers who aren’t very good at being managers. If you’re good, then you already have these habits. If your manager sucks, then I suggest this book as a gift. Purchase The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People on Amazon.com or check it out from your local library.

• Book of the Week: Little Bets

  Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge From Small Discoveries by Peter Sims discusses how to achieve greatness by starting with little bets. I didn’t know that the Google PageRank algorithm was originally designed for the Stanford Digital Library Project. It was mentioned as an alternative to the h-index when I was reading about measuring quality of research. No wonder, it was what it was designed for that in the first place. Once something becomes big, you forget that it once started out as something small. Making Bets Bets are a way of getting information, because you have no clue. The more bets you make, the more information you can obtain and the better decisions you can make.

• Book of the Week: Setting up a Tropical Aquarium Week by Week

  Reading Setting up a Tropical Aquarium Week by Week, made me think about whether we need books like this anymore. I can read whatever Google shows me about tropical aquariums. Before the internet, if I wanted to learn about tropical aquariums I would have to ask people with tropical aquariums or read books. What I appreciated about the book was that it had lots of pictures with information presented in a logical order. What was lacking was the ability to dive deeper into a topic. The problem with the internet is that there is tons of information, but it is in bits and pieces with some of the information conflicting. It is difficult to aggregate and curate information on the internet. The Aquarium Wiki is good for reference, but not a good introduction. Tropical Fish - A Beginner’s Guide is a community effort to organize information into an ebook. The ebook wins on content, but loses in presentation since it lacks design and layout. If I want to read about another topic it might not have a community-generated ebook. The internet is missing an easy aggregation and presentation layer. Purchase Setting up a Tropical Aquarium Week by Week on Amazon.com or check it out from your local library.

• Book of the Week: Where Good Ideas Come From

  Before I have something to market, I need a good idea. To tackle this problem, I turn to Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation. Johnson discusses 7 patterns that emerged from studying innovation. To save you the time from reading the book, I refer you to a 5 minute youtube video on the subject. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NugRZGDbPFU&w;=560&h;=315] The 7 patterns are the adjacent possible, liquid networks, the slow hunch, serendipity, error, exaptation and platforms. The adjacent possible is why scientist have independently made the same discoveries around same time. The world was ready for the innovation since the framework for it was built. Innovation and creativity is about connecting stuff together. You get a bunch of stuff, some of it good, some of it bad and mix it a bit. It stews and suddenly something triggers and you have a good idea. Johnson makes the argument that cities speed up innovation, because they have enough density to allow for interactions that lead to innovation. Is there an optimal density of people to have? Instead of reading about where ideas come from, how about generating your own good ideas with design thinking. Purchase Where Good Ideas Come From on Amazon.com or check it out from your local library.

• Book of the Week: Purple Cow

  Purple Cow is for the marketing people who were left out of the startup world. The business people read Crossing the Chasm. The Innovator’s Dilemma was a good read for the engineers. These books are all about taking the first step toward creating a remarkable, innovative company. Traditionally hiring marketing and sales people come later. As a founder, you need to go out and do the marketing and sales in the beginning to learn about your customer. Those who hire people to do those roles at the onset are doomed to failure. I would read Crossing the Chasm first.

• Book of the Week: The $100 Startup

  

• Book of the Week: Unconventional Success

  This week, I read Unconventional Success by David F. Swensen, the Chief Investment Officer at Yale. This book is targeted toward the individual investor rather than institutions like his previous book, Pioneering Portfolio Management. This is a good book to read if you are getting into investing. I wish I had read it earlier. TLDR : The best advice is to buy an ETF that tracks the S&P; 500 or Wilshire 5000. On foreign equities

• Book of the Week: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, The Art and Creation of Walt Disney's Classic Animated Film

  There are art books that go on your coffee table and there are art books that you keep on your bookshelf. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: The Art and Creation of Walt Disney’s Classic Animated Film goes on the bookshelf. Before I went to the Walt Disney Family Museum, I thought Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was just another animated movie. It was the first full-length cel animated feature film that started what we know as Disney animated films today. It was amazing to see how many concepts were developed and what did not go into the final cut of the movie. This isn’t a book you look at for the eye candy, but to learn about the decisions that went into making the film. I would watch Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs again before reading this art book. Purchase Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: The Art and Creation of Walt Disney’s Classic Animated Film on Amazon.com or check it out from your local library.

• Book of the Week: Code Complete

  New programmers often ask for what books they should read once they start working. Code Complete 2nd Edition is often at or near the top of this list. This book teaches you what you didn’t learn in school. You learn how to code in school, but you don’t learn how to develop software. It is like learning to write in school versus being a novelist. This book is too thick and I am too busy to read this cover to cover, but in the 15 minutes that I took to flip through the book, I already learned something that will change the way I write code. I only wonder how many more gold nuggets are in it. Purchase Code Complete from Amazon.com or check it out from your local library.

• Book of the Week: Drive

  

• Book of the Week: Stumbling on Happiness

  Happiness is hot field of research. If I had to do college over again, I would major in happiness and become a Chief Happiness Officer after getting my Happiness BS. I previously read Tony Hsieh’s Delivering Happiness. Now it is time for Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. What’s happiness and what can I do to get more of it? Like everyone else, I’ve tried to pursue more happiness. It remains elusive. Everyone could use a little more happiness in their lives. Have you ever lusted after something and pictured yourself with the object of your lust, only to find yourself still unhappy? If thinking about the future can be pleasurable, then it would be a good idea to delay gratification in order to enjoy the wait and contemplation. What are we doing while we are waiting? We are picturing ourselves in the future. Am I any happier being able to buy things on a whim rather than saving money for a period of time to finally be able to purchase the item? How much stuff do we actually use? Your thoughts about the future and what actually happens, differs. Imagination can be a very good or a very bad thing. The flip side of an active imagination is worrying about the future, because we project all the negative things that could occur. Control Like we learned in previous books, control makes people happy. Some of the research conducted to figure this out resulted in the deaths of elderly people. Old people are happier when they can decide the time visitors come and chat. People should talk to more old people. They are dying, because people aren’t talking to them. Lotteries use the illusion of control to trick you. People think they have a higher chance of winning a lottery, because they can pick the numbers. People won’t buy a raffle with the same probabilities. What is Happiness? People are happy because they don’t know what they are missing out on. Think about Apple products. People are content with their current iDevices until the next new thing gets announced. People aren’t as happy with what they have if they know something better exists. Going to see a movie with your girlfriend in college can bring you as much happiness as buying a Porsche during your midlife crisis. Your parents playing with sticks and stones when they were little were probably as happy as your kids playing video games now. People don’t know their own hearts. Finding your passion makes you happy, but most people don’t know their passion, so they can’t predict what would make them happy. Happiness may be different for different people. This makes it hard to define and quantify happiness. Memory How our memory works is used as a guide to explain how we perceive happiness. Our memory sucks. Experiments have shown that information after an event can alter our memories of the event. This is how magic works. Our brain tries to connect the dots. Magic is magical, because it clashes with how we connect the dots. We don’t see what’s between the dots. What We Don’t See In choosing something to accept, we look for the best positive features. To choose what to reject, we choose the worst negative features. We don’t think about what’s missing. This is why we an inability to predict an outlier. Machine learning algorithms also suffer from this defect, because they do their predictions based on what has been observed in the past. Our Imagination is limited by current experiences. Diverse experiences should lead to a better imagination. Predictably Irrational Here are some points that were also raised in Predictably Irrational.

• Book of the Week: How to Stop Worrying and Start Living

  One of the lessons from 30 Lessons for Living is to stop worrying. This week, I divide further into the topic of worry with How to Stop Worrying and Start Living by Dale Carnegie. The same Dale Carnegie who wrote How to Win Friends and Influence People.

• Book of the Week: So Good They Can't Ignore You

  This week’s book is So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love by Cal Newport. Rule #1 Don’t Follow Your Passion “Don’t Follow Your Passion” is something you write to sell your book. Most people give the opposite advice and tell you to follow your passion. People such as the experts in 30 Lessons for Living tell you to pursue passion and purpose instead of taking the job that pays the most. Sounds nice, but the problem with following your passion is that most people don’t know what their passion is. This leads to uncertainty and mind wandering when you’re supposed to be focused on the here and now.

• Book of the Week: 30 Lessons for Living

  My friend recommended 30 Lessons for Living to me. I wish I had read this book sooner. The book is composed of 5 lessons multiplied by 6 topics covering marriage, career advice, parenting, aging, living without regrets and happiness. I’ll ignore the parts on marriage and parenting since I’m not ready to learn those lessons. These lessons were complied from many interviews with experts on life, old timers. The grandpa of one of the old timers was around during the civil war. Hard to imagine, but the math works out. Think about the knowledge amassed from these many years of collective experience. Career Advice I’d rather read accounts from a primary source than to read one of those articles on a webpage that makes you keep clicking to see the next piece of advice. The first piece of advice is: Don’t choose a job because it pays more. I’ve heard this before, many times. If I wanted to be paid a lot, I probably would have chosen a different profession. Money is very tempting, but you’re going to trading your time, which is your most valuable resource. People are pleased when they pursue passion and purpose. If you can’t do that, then you should at least make the most of your situation and learn. End Game Life is short. You live and you die. Don’t forget to live. You also live when you’re old, so remember to take care of your body. Living Stop worrying. An idle person worries. There’s no point in worrying about something that you can’t control. If you can control it, then you should be doing stuff instead of worrying. Worrying is just a waste of time. No more worrying and whining. Say yes to challenges and opportunities for a more interesting life, a life with less regret. Travel Apparently travelling is very important. When you’re old it becomes harder to travel. It’s not material possession, but experiences that make people happy. Travel is full of experiences and stories to share. I should make a list of places I want to visit and so should you. This book makes you feel better about life. Every day is a gift. Purchase 30 Lessons for Living on Amazon.com or check it out from your local library.

• Book of the Week: Willpower

  Willpower is a good book to read after reading Getting Things Done and Predictably Irrational. Throughout the book it keeps referring to Baumeister’s research. I didn’t remember that he was one of the authors of the book in addition to John Tierney. This book answers a lot of questions about how willpower works. There is a finite resivor of willpower, which gets depleted over time. Making many decisions eventually exhausts your willpower. Increasing your blood sugar can give you a lift. Since willpower is limited, we have to learn how to conserve our willpower and use tricks to make it last longer. Knowing more about willpower should help you reach your goals. Purchase Willpower from Amazon.com or check it out from your local library.

• Book of the Week: I'm Feeling Lucky

  I’m Feeling Lucky chronicles the early days of Google from the eyes of employee #59, Douglas Edwards. His point of view was more relatable since he wasn’t an engineer. Here are a few highlights from the book. Definitely worth a read for an inside view of a unique company. Getting Lucky

• Book of the Week: Getting Things Done

  Getting Things Done was recommended to me. The key to getting things done is relaxing. Your brain needs to take a dump. Once you’ve taken a dump, you can work without feeling constipated. Constipation leads to stress. Getting Things Done is not just about work, but about leading a better life. Need to trust your system. Need to be empty, embrace the void. What I like about David Allen’s book is that it mentions why, but leaves the how up to you. Everyone probably has systems which work for them, but it is what the system tries to achieve that is important. As more people shift from doing manual labor into creative work, the problem of getting things done is going to affect more people. Robots are going to take care of all the manual labor, so what will be left is creative work. For me to be productive, I need to get things out of my head and into a system I trust and can rely on. If I can’t rely on something, then I won’t be able to get these things out of my head. Things that may be important, but they aren’t important right now. In a way, this can be thought of as creating your own personal super executive assistant, who you can trust to keep you notified of important things that need your consideration. The other half of getting out of your head is to actually do some processing of your projects into next actions to take. You know where you want to be, so you need to identify all the steps you need to take to get closer to your goals. If these are unclear, then you need to spend some quality time thinking about it. Maker’s Time This is probably related to maker’s time. It takes a while for someone to process things and attain a relaxed state. This relaxed state is when a maker can make and get things done. Tickler File Every time there was a mention of the “tickler” file, I kept thinking of Phil’s BBQ Tickler menu item. Thinking about food and reading don’t mix. I have a Pavlovian response to “ tickler”. Purchase Getting Things Done on Amazon.com or check it out from your local library.

• Book of the Week: Beautiful Data

  The kiwi book, Beautiful Data, is a collection of articles about different data topics. My favorite chapter is about how the image processing software on the Phoenix lander works. Cloud technologies are the hottest thing right now, but there is something very gritty and down to the core about writing software for the lander. The amount of constraints on processing, bandwidth and memory cause you to think a bit differently. I was surprised to find out there is no dynamic memory allocation allowed to protect against software bugs. It’s not if someone can just press reset on a Mars lander. Purchase Beautiful Data on Amazon.com or check it out from your local library.

• Book of the Week: The Black Swan

  This week, I read The Black Swan, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. As I started reading the book, I got the feeling that the author is a guy that likes to hear himself talk. Not to say it is a bad thing, but I was trying to read the book as fast as I could to extract the gold nuggets. If I had more time and education, I would probably enjoy reading more about history and philosophy. What is a Black Swan?

• Book of the Week: Predictably Irrational

  Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational explores the behavioral psychology behind why humans make irrational decisions. Each chapter is a self contained nugget of information, so here are some summaries/thoughts I had about each chapter. Chapter 1 The Truth about Relativity(Why everything is relative, even when it shouldn’t be) People’s perceptions and decision are made by comparisons. Your new iPhone is awesome when it comes out, but when a newer iPhone comes out, it no longer is as awesome even though it is the same phone. A person can be making a lot of money, but if they are making less money than their peers, then they are not as happy. Taking a step back and appreciating what we have will make us happier. Chapter 2 The Fallacy of Supply and Demand(Why the price of pearls and everything else is up in the air) Once people have an anchor, the decisions they make will be compared to the anchor. Subsequent decisions are made with the anchor in mind. To avoid failing victim to this, you need to revaluate old decisions to see if they are still valid. One thing would be reevaluating your current job. Chapter 3 The Cost of Zero Cost(Why we often pay too much when we pay nothing) People would do things for free stuff that they wouldn’t do for things that cost 1 cent. Free is in a category of its own for pricing. We don’t take into account other opportunity costs when factoring for free things. Chapter 4 The Cost of Social Norms (Why we are happy to do things, but not when we are paid to do them) People are more willing to volunteer their time for free than at a reduced rate. Need to appeal to values to truly motivate people.

• Book of the Week: The Innovator's Dilemma

  The Innovator’s Dilemma was the perfect book to read after Crossing the Chasm. While Crossing the Chasm was about users, The Innovator’s Dilemma is about product. The book was first published in 1997, so we know what happened in the future with solid state drives replacing hard drives and the electric car. Knowing the future only reinforces the central thesis in the book. I liked this book. This book is about how being a good company sets up for failure. My point of view is that of the disrupter rather than the manager at a big company. This book like so many of the others I have read is split into two parts. If I had a dollar for every book that was split into two parts, I’d be wealthy. The first part of the book is about “Why Great Companies Can Fail”. This consists of examples to support the central thesis. The second part of the book is about “Managing Disruptive Technological Change”. Examples are given of companies that have successfully managed and those that have not. There are two types of technologies: sustaining and disrupting. Sustaining technologies make the existing product better for the mainstream customer. Disrupting technologies start up worse for the mainstream customer, but eventually get good enough to supersede the previous technology thereby screwing the companies that only invested in sustaining technologies. Being a leader in sustaining technology doesn’t make much a difference in the long run, but being a leader in disruptive technologies can pay huge dividends. When I was almost done reading the book, I realized this is a bit analogous to investing. Warren Buffett can’t invest in small companies now since they don’t make a dent in comparison to Berkshire Hathaway’s market cap. The opportunities may be greater with the small companies, but he has to play in a different league because of his size. The same can be said with companies. Established companies have an established customer base with certain needs and demands. Great companies provide things that the customer needs. Sustaining technologies are suited to taking care of those needs. Disruptive technologies start out unable to compete on the mainstream needs, but offer a different value set. The problem with big companies is that the value set of the disruptive technology does not match up with the value set of their existing customers. New entrants need to find new customers and create new markets for their disruptive technology. The company goals are aligned with the customer needs in this case. As the technology matures, it starts to gain mainstream customers, because old product and new product can fulfill their needs, but new product offers added value. Each disruptive technology is like a startup looking for a market and customer. Big established companies aren’t good at being startups, so a possible course of action is to spin out a separate entity that has separate goals from the parent company. If you decide the rules of the game you’re playing, you can win. A company with a disruptive technology should not play in established markets. They need to create new markets where they can win. A point where great companies failed is that they tried to play in their established market with their new disruptive technology. It seems to mean to succeed at this, you need a two-headed beast. One head to keep existing customers happy and another head to search for new opportunities. This is why there will always be startups that succeed where big companies fail. Purchase The Innovator’s Dilemma at Amazon.com or check it out from your local library.

• Recovering From MacBook Pro Hard Drive Failure

  My computer kept freezing when I was using the Chrome browser. Just recently Chrome was updated to a new version, so I thought the new version was buggy. Turns out the new version of Chrome wasn’t buggy, my hard drive was dying. Recently it made an unhappy noise after I moved it while in bed. I should have known then, but I wasn’t paying enough attention. If I was more vigilant in my backups I would not have to recover the hard drive. I’ve been pretty busy with the Insight Data Science Fellowship that I neglected my backups. It seems like OSX wants to finish writing the journal entry to the hard drive, but when it does that it encounters an error. I know windows is F8 during boot, but I had to look up the startup key combinations for the mac. Command-v | Verbose Mode
  —|—
  C | Start up from a bootable CD, DVD, or USB thumb drive
  I popped in my Ubuntu CD and copied my user directory to a Windows network share. Create Mount Point ` $ sudo mkdir /mnt/MOUNT_POINT Mount Share Drive $ sudo mount -t cifs -o guest //LOCALHOST/SHARE_NAME /mnt/MOUNT_POINT Tar user directory $ sudo bash $ cd /media/Machintosh HD/Users $ tar cvf /mnt/MOUNT_POINT/username.tar username` Directories to backup ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default ~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook ~/Library/Application Support/Adium ~/Library/Application Support/Adium 2.0 ~/Library/Calendars ~/Library/Safari/Bookmarks.plist ~/Library/Mail ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/

• Book of the Week: Crossing the Chasm

  Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey A. Moore is one of those books that gets recommended to young entrepreneurs. This is another book with two parts. The first part describes what the Chasm is and the second part is how to cross it. The book was first published in 1991 and subsequently revised after that. My version was revised in 1999, because the examples were dated. The book should be overdue for another revision, but the internet has changed things quite a bit. It would be a waste of time to revise this book again. I found myself skipping over sections of examples. Not worth my time to read examples if I already agree with the statement. The main premise is that there are different types of customers which adopt your products are different stages. In the beginning there are early adopters, which are different from the mainstream. The way to get the mainstream is to have social proof from others in the mainstream. This is a chicken and the egg problem, which can be solved by segmenting the mainstream market and targeting a niche to takeover. Then adoption will spread from the niche. Early adopters don’t help with the mainstream since their requirements are different. I can see the influence from this book on customer development in the Start Up Owner’s Manual. If I had a product that I sold in return for money, I’d probably hit the chasm. With an internet company, I’m no so sure the same rules apply. The end of the book said growth was more like a stairs than a hockey stick. That is probably closer to the truth. Each new market segment is stair step. Lesson Learned: Don’t go after the whole pie in beginning. Cut yourself a slice first. Eat it, then go back for some more. Purchase Crossing the Chasm on Amazon.com or check it out from your local library.

• Book of the Week: The Art of Blizzard Entertainment

  This week I read, The Art of Blizzard Entertainment. Blizzard is to computer games as Pixar is to computer animated movies, they make nothing but hits by having high quality standards driven by creativity. I was anxious to receive my copy of this art book. This is one case where digital copies can not compete with print. I enjoy reading on my kindle, but art books are inherently visual and large to encompass your vision. Art books are nice to have around to admire time to time. Something you can pick up to escape to another world for a short while. The book covers Warcraft, Diablo and StarCraft as well as a few bonuses. The thing I liked the most is that you get familiar with concept artist’s style. Concept artist are people too. Purchase The Art of Blizzard Entertainment on Amazon.com or check it out from your local library.

• Book of the Week: On Writing

  This is the first Stephen King book I’ve read. It’s a nonfiction book that is about writing. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft.

• Book of the Week: Best of Quora

  Quora distributed a hardbound copy of the Best of Quora 2010-2012 to their top writers. For the rest of us, we can grab a pdf of the book. The book is a collection of questions and answers ranging from topics such as prison life to literature. You gain personal insight from people that would be difficult to find elsewhere. This is what makes quora so special. The awesome thing about reading for pleasure is that you can read only the questions you want to read and skip the rest.

• Book of the Week: Plan B 4.0

  [caption id=”attachment_476” align=”alignnone” width=”584”] Plan B 4.0[/caption] Lester Brown was on Science Friday to promote his new book, “Full Planet, Empty Plates”. I decided to read his older book, Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, available free online at earthpolicy.org. Since the book was published in 2009, it mentioned a lot about things that were scheduled to happen in the future. So it is interesting to compare people thought was going to occur compared to what did occur. This is probably why this is Plan B 4.0 and not just plan B. The book didn’t really excite me, because I pay attention to the topics mentioned in the book. I care about the future and how the shit is going to go down. Even though I was aware of many things, I did learn a few new things. If you’re totally unacquainted with the problems facing humanity, this book is a good starting point, because is a lot of information referenced. For people acquainted, more action is required upon your part than reading. The first part of the book talks about the problems facing the human race. I think we are already screwed. It is not about saving the earth, but saving civilization from collapse. The main problems are food, water, energy and climate. They are all interconnected. Pretty much all of the same problem. I need energy and water to eat, but getting energy screws the climate, which makes it harder to grow food and get water to grow food. The meat of the book is Plan B. How are we as a civilization going to solve this problem. Since I am in the business of solving problems, I pay a lot of attention to this. Every problem is a opportunity. If you want to learn about Plan B, then read the book. There are also updates to Plan B on the earthpolicy.org website. Other Thoughts Here are some other thoughts that came into my head as I was reading the book. China imports chopsticks from Georgia. Georgia, the state, not the country. The quest for resources have led richer nations speculating on land in other countries. Is it really cost effective to go solar? Loyd Case wrote about his experiences going solar. I wouldn’t call his experience in 2008 cost effective, but today might be different. It’s getting there. The air quality in Beijing is deadly. These are the consequences we are living with now since we screwed things up already. Fracking uses precious water to get oil. I’d rather use the water for other purposes, like pooping in it. The byproducts from making ethanol can be used to feed livestock. That is mentioned by a caller on the science friday podcast. When I went beer tasting, the brewery uses the byproducts to feed hogs, resulting in awesome bacon. There’s like a three-way for water use in California: fisheries, farmers and cities. Totally. Reminded of cattle rancher dealing with drought on Marketplace. The earth has self correcting mechanisms: global warming -> fight for food -> nuclear winter -> global cooling and reduced populations. If we want to think about making the most use of resources for food, we can look to NASA and how they will build a Mars Colony. Food production on Mars has to be the most extreme case. What can we learn from that? We can make more efficient use of our land. Growing Power uses greenhouses combined with aquaculture to make food and fish in a small area. In the future, the cheapest way of making protein will be fish (tilapia and perch) and insects. I remember stories of using gray water from the bath to garden since water was rationed in the past. It is only when we don’t have something, do we realize how precious it is. If we all grew our own victory gardens, I wonder how would the world change. Or maybe if there were aquaculture greenhouses dispersed throughout the city. Deforestation happens, but how did the forests get there in the first place? Golden Gate Park in San Francisco used to be all sand dunes. The problems mentioned in Plan B are becoming current problems. Purchase Plan B 4.0 on Amazon.com or check it out from your local library.

• Book of the Week: Build Your Own Telescope

  Build Your Own Telescope: Complete Plans for Five High-quality Telescopes that Anyone Can Build by Richard Berry, Editor of Astronomy magazine. The 5 telescope designs are

• Book of the Week: The Charisma Myth

  Olivia Fox Cabane gave a lecture about charisma at Stanford’s Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Lecture Series. I read her book, The Charisma Myth. Definition of Charisma from Merriam-Webster

• Book of the Week: Change By Design

  This week’s book is Change by Design by Tim Brown, the CEO of IDEO, a well known design firm in silicon valley. This book is also divided into two parts, just like Dead Aid, Tao Te Ching and Flatland. I’m beginning to sense a pattern. The first part of the book fleshes out design thinking with some historical examples and the second part talks about how design thinking can impact the world, the big picture. Before Tim can convince you of design thinking’s impact the world, he describes the techniques used by designers for designing products and how that evolved into designing experiences. A designer is ultimately concerned with how people interact with whatever they are designing, be it a physical product or a service. First ideas are needed. “If you want to have good ideas you must have many ideas. Most of them will be wrong, and what you have to learn is which ones to throw away.” -Linus Pauling By having lots of ideas, it opens up the playing field and covers the problem space before one can narrow down on what is truly important. Ideas start as observations. These observations plant seeds that turn into ideas. The idea is just the inspiration, next comes perspiration. To advance the design process, it is helpful to have quick prototypes, which allow a conversation to take place. These conversations lead to a better product and a compelling story. By using these design techniques, IDEO was able to make innovative products bringing bags of money to the companies they helped. Eventually this grew from designing products into designing interactions and experiences. For the design process to be successful, the company must have design in it’s culture. Tim points out how various companies innovate. Then from companies, the text moves into doing social good in the second part. These are feel good stories. The last chapter is about designing life, things that people and companies can do to embrace design thinking. Design is not some magical thing that only creative people can do. It is a process that results in innovation, which is vital for solving the world’s problems. If you are interested in design, I recommend checking out the Stanford d.school. Purchase Change By Design on Amazon.com or check it out from your local library.

• Heart Bookmark

  Since I started reading books again, I needed a bookmark. A scrap of paper works fine, but an origami heart bookmark just blows that out of the water. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gml2j4bvT88] Thank you Jo Nakashima.

• Book of the Week: Flatland

  In some of the States there is an additional Law forbidding Females, under penalty of death, from walking or standing in a public place without moving their backs constantly from right to left so as to indicate their presence to those behind them;

• Book of the Week: Tao Te Ching

  Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu I’ll file this under a failure. I should have known a bargain bin pickup for an ancient Chinese classic that has lots of photographs wouldn’t be necessarily the best way to read the Tao Te Ching. First off, the Tao Te Ching in Chinese itself is hard for Chinese people to read without being well read and scholarly. The translation given in this book differs a lot from the other translations I have read online. I believe it was probably the intention to provide the essence of the Tao Te Ching for the general public to consume as a coffee table book. It is effective in that sense, but I want to read the Tao Te Ching. I read a similar well illustrated version of the Art of War and it was very readable and comparable to other translations. The meaning is more direct in matters of war, so there is less ambiguity in the translation and less knowledge required. I haven’t been able to find a translation of 東周列國志 by 馮夢龍. Time to learn Chinese.

• Book of the Week: Dead Aid

  I decided to read Dead Aid after watching this TED video. [ted id=1617 width=560 height=315] My favorite part of the video is the hippos. The book is divided into two parts. The first part talks about the history of aid and why aid isn’t working. The second part describes a way to get away from aid. Dambisa Moyo argues that aid has hurt Africa instead of help Africa. Aid gives rise to corruption and the stagnation of growth. Growth is needed to lift a country out of poverty. Aid kills entrepreneurship and the middle class, reinforcing the corrupt government. When you’re dependent on aid, there’s no reason for the government to be accountable to the people. You can think of it a bit like giving someone a fish instead of teaching someone to fish loaning someone money to go fishing. Maybe also a little bit like a crack dealer. The first hit’s free to keep you coming back for more. I think it is pretty easy to agree that aid doesn’t work in Africa. The second part covered various financial avenues (bonds, foreign direct investment, microloans, trade, etc.) to fund Africa’s growth. An important part of the solution is China’s involvement in Africa. Read the book if you want the details. It doesn’t sound nice to say publicly to stop aid to Africa, but that may be the best thing we can do to see Africa grow. Also, it might not even matter what the West does as China increases its involvement in Africa. To summarize as a 6 word story: Cut aid, watch China grow Africa.

• Book of the Week: The Hobbit

  

• Books

  Update: It’s buggy on Snow Leopard, which is probably why they are making codex. I guess there is motivation to roll my own. After I learned java as an undergraduate, I wanted to make an application that read in ISBN numbers through a webcam (before the days where cameras were everywhere) to catalog all my books. Every time I think of a good idea, I ask one of my friends and they show me a website where that has been done before. I got introduced to Delicious Library. I didn’t have a mac at the time, so it would be nice to make a cross platform java version of it. I got as far as looking up how the barcodes get translated into numbers and writing a few lines of MATLAB to read in barcodes from images, but I was stumped by the low resolution and lack of compatibility of the webcams with Java. I couldn’t access the full resolution of the webcam I had or it wasn’t compatible. So I promptly abandoned the project and managed to have a few duplicate books in my library as time went on. Fast forward to today, where cameras are everywhere. I expected there to be a cloud website where I could use my mobile device and keep track of my books. QR codes are hot. I was curious to see why they didn’t put Delicious Library into the cloud, but there seems to be an issue with using Amazon’s API for looking up ISBNs and Amazon’s terms of service for mobile. The quality of other APIs are lacking. Now that I use a mac, I’m reluctant to pay money for something I could probably code up myself easily since I’m only looking for basic functionality. Thankfully I found Books from Audacious Software. They even opened up the source code since they are working on a successor called Codex. It even allows exporting the data, so if I ever need to migrate the data, I can.