Latest Posts

• 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.