Jubbers's Reading List
Posted: February 16th, 2021, 12:30 am
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.
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.