Latest Posts

• 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.