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• 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.