Jubbers's Reading List

[Jubbers]

I don't read a lot anymore, a fact which would have shocked my younger self - pre-college, I was a book-a-day person. A lot of factors have contributed to the decline - difficult-to-treat eye problems, (ironically) graduate school, and now work/life issues - but the desire to read is always there. I thought it might be nice to imitate Goiter's things-read-list. This way I can prove to my goldfish mind at the end of the year that I did indeed read things outside of Twitter.

In December, I read Isaac Asimov's Buy Jupiter, a chronologically arranged collection of short stories. I really like how Asimov always inserts biographical bits between the stories in his collections like this, to give the circumstances around why the story was written (eg. I needed money, or I thought of this great pun, etc).

A few weeks ago I read Avengers: Endgame - The Pirate Angel, The Talking Tree, and Captain Rabbit, mostly for the title. It's a kid's book, and was pretty cute. Mostly features Rocket, whose diary Groot is secretly reading.

Just finished John Allen Paulos's Innumeracy, a book that I agree with (people can't math) but that I also feel won't help (those who most can't math aren't going to be picking this up - so it mostly preaches to the choir - and the vocabulary is elevated above the average reader). I just took a statistics class this last fall, so a lot of those concepts were talked about here with examples of how misleadingly they are used in the real world. I'm very aware of how big the trend for data science is right now in business - and how horribly the bare concepts from that field are applied by non-specialists (and specialists under pressure from the non-specialists who are eager to see their gut feelings validated). The last chapter had a small bit on the inappropriate addition of percents, which made me recall the two separate occasions this year I've had to explain to executives, with examples calculating things out out step-by-step, why the year-over-year trend of sales in stores of type A + the trend of sales in stores of type B does not add up to the trend of sales in the total group of stores (A + B), particularly since there was a higher percentage of type B stores in the current year than there had been in the previous (cause pandemic!).

Currently reading Humble Pi by Matt Parker and attempting the first volume of the light novel The Rise of the Shield Hero (盾の勇者の成り上がり) in Japanese.

[Jubbers]

Just finished Humble Pi by Matt Parker.

A lot of the topics are covered on his YouTube channel, Stand-Up Maths, but I enjoyed it. It's a quick read [I've been slow to finish not because of it, but because of the 8-year-old constant interruption in my life], and he strikes a good balance between math/engineering/programming mistakes that are fun to look back at and ones the resulted in mass death.

As a look at the assortment of topics, here is a chunk of the index [no omissions within the chunk]:

scientific notation
Scud missile
sea level
seemingly arbitrary
Sesame Street
should open
skin tight garments
something else
Space Invaders

I'm trying to be more proactive about double-checking things, both programming-wise at work and also just math-problem-wise, as I'm actively taking math classes now working on the prerequisites to enroll in an MA program.

[Jubbers]

Read Tim im Lande der Sowjets (Tintin in the Land of the Soviets).

It's very episodic, in that every group of two-four pages Tim/Tintin attempts to continue on to Moscow, encounters a problem (either because the Soviets want to capture him to keep him from reporting on how bad things are or because something - the car, the plane, etc - breaks down), and then, often through sheer luck, he manages to get away or find some other method to continue on his journey. This is about 140 pages, so that's a lot of individual events, but it is an enjoyable read and doesn't feel plodding or laborious - the timing for everything feels very much like watching a cartoon. I enjoyed seeing what snarky thoughts Struppi/Snowy had throughout all of these close encounters - that's something you don't get in the Spielberg/Jackson movie. There are some uncomfortable stereotypes (not just of the Soviets - there are a couple of Chinese characters as well), though.

It made me think of Seth Rogen and James Franco in The Interview a lot. Tim would see a factory, for instance, and then realize that it was just a for-show-sort-of-set-up. And there is a bit towards the end where Struppi disguises himself as a Big Dog (picture taken from the internet - my set of Tintin comics is all in German).

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[Mal Shot First]

Cool! The first Tintin comic I read was Tintin in Tibet, which also features a lot of uncomfortable stereotypes, as you can imagine. I think to this day, some of these racist depictions are still thrown around somewhat casually in parts of Europe without much awareness of their problematic nature.

Anyway, Tintin in Tibet was similarly episodic and, in fact, the Serbo-Croatian translation I read was split up across several issues of the magazine in which it appeared. I'm pretty sure the comics were originally published in a serial fashion, so it makes sense that each installment would be its own little story. It's perfectly suited for Spielberg's style of filmmaking.

[Scotia]

Currently reading Julian Stockwin's Tomas Kydd nautical series. Loving it.

[colmatrix]

Picked up a paperback copy of The Rhineman Exchange by Ludlum just before my vacation last week. Currently about a third of the way in. When I say "picked up" I mean from one of my own bookshelves, which are a hodgepodge of mine and my wife's from over the years. This one undoubtedly came from my father's collection. He was big on the military/spy genre when I was a kid, and what can I say? I makes me nostalgic.