Amazon link Tstop recommended this to me in a comment on one of my posts. Here’s the summary: Using cost-benefit analysis is misleading because costs are easily quantifiable in terms of dollars, and benefits (in the case of human life, health, the environment or the future) are difficult, if not impossible, to put in those […]
Category: nonfiction
Selling the Invisible, by Harry Beckwith
Amazon link As previously mentioned, I picked this up in Portland. It’s not a fabulous book or anything, but I like the viewpoint of the author. It’s set up in the form of 200-some vignettes about marketing services, which makes it a great book to read in short chunks. Reading it straight through would be […]
Freakonomics
Amazon link and Official book website I read this NYT magazine article about Steven Levitt a couple years ago and thought it was great. Levitt is an economist at the University of Chicago who spends his time trying to think up interesting ways to sift data to answer hard questions: For instance: If drug dealers […]
Unfinished books
Two books last week I started and quickly gave up on that I figured I’d document for the sake of completeness. I gave it a few days because I thought I might go back and give them another chance, but then my new Amazon order came in, so it’s pretty much a lost cause. One […]
Good to Great, by Jim Collins
Amazon link This and Collins’s previous book, Built to Last, are two standard business books that everybody refers to. I’ve been meaning to read them for a while, but never got around to it. But, at the mega-library trip last Saturday, I saw it, I picked it up, and I read it yesterday on my […]
What should I do with my life?, by Po Bronson
Amazon link I’ve liked Po Bronson’s other works, but when this book came out a couple years ago, I didn’t really feel it was worth checking out. What was the point of reading about how other people had answered the question of what to do with their lives? But it stayed on my to-read list. […]
At Home in the Universe, by Stuart Kauffman
Amazon link This was referenced in the footnotes of some other book that I read, but I can’t remember which one any more (maybe Six Degrees?). Kauffman is a MacArthur Fellow who works at the Santa Fe Institute, which is a center for studying complexity theory (and a place I’ve occasionally dreamed of working at), […]
Moneyball, by Michael Lewis
Amazon link I’ve meant to read this since the day it came out both because I follow baseball and because I’ve liked other books by Michael Lewis, but never got around to it, because I didn’t think it was worth buying. But I finally saw it in my local branch library yesterday, so I picked […]
Politics of Nature part 3
Okay, I said yesterday that part 2 would end my book review, but I lied. There is one crucial aspect of Latour’s book that I didn’t cover yet. To review, part 1 essentially covered chapters 1 and 2, part 2 covered chapters 3 and 4, and today we’ll cover chapter 5, which covers how to […]
Politics of Nature part 2
Continuing yesterday’s summary of Politics of Nature, by Bruno Latour. Today’s subject: Latour’s proposal for a “Constitution” on how we construct reality in a democratic fashion via due process, one that cuts across science and politics and multiculturalists and facts and values. I’m going to sketch out the process first, and then go back and […]
