I saw this book at Borders one evening on my walk through San Francisco. Since I’ve been getting into poker recently, the title intrigued me. I read the first 10 pages or so in the store, and I really liked the tone of the writing. A wry edge to some humorous observations. But I wasn’t […]
Category: books
Managing in a time of great change, by Peter F. Drucker
Drucker is generally considered to be the foremost expert on the art and science of management, and he was heavily cited as the primary influence on the authors of What Management Is, which I liked, so I figured it was time to see what he had to say. This was a collection of essays published […]
Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum series.
Evanovich’s site I started reading these recently on a friend’s recommendation, and have really enjoyed them. Most of the books include several moments which are laugh out loud funny as Stephanie Plum pursues her chosen career as a bounty hunter. The cast of characters that populate her New Jersey town are at once wackily eccentric […]
Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels
After rediscovering the library recently, I took the opportunity to read several of the Pratchett Discworld novels that I had never gotten around to. My personal collection petered out at Feet of Clay (book 15 or so), and I’d lost track of the ones since then. The library had several of the more recent ones, […]
The Little Country, by Charles de Lint
After reading Memory and Dream from the library, I was reminded of the interesting worlds that de Lint constructs, so I picked this up on my next visit. Not much to say – magic is real, faeries are real, you choose what kind of world you live in, etc. Eh.
Neural Computing: An Introduction, by R. Beale and T. Jackson
I borrowed this from a friend when it looked like I might be trying to do something with neural networks at work. It’s a nice little summary of the basic neural network algorithms, with derivations of the equations and things like that. Useful for a quick overview, which was what I wanted, so that worked […]
Shopgirl, by Steve Martin
Steve Martin (yes, that Steve Martin) wrote this little novella about a shopgirl in Los Angeles and her affair with a successful older businessman. In some ways, it’s a more meditative and thoughtful version of his movie, LA Story, focusing more on the isolation and desperation of those who came seeking their fortune in LA […]
Wittgenstein’s Poker, by David Edmonds and John Eidinow
On Oct. 25, 1946, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper, two great philosophers of the twentieth century, met for the first and only time at a philosophy club meeting at Cambridge University. Recollections vary as to exactly what happened, but strong words were definitely exchanged, and Wittgenstein may have picked up the fireplace poker and threatened […]
The Innovator’s Dilemma, by Clayton Christensen
This was a short book on how and why dominant companies consistently get undercut by disruptive technologies. It uses the disk drive industry as a case study to illustrate the decisions that get made by market leaders which make sense in context, but inevitably lead to obsolescence. I thought the second half of the book, […]
A Year at the Movies, by Kevin Murphy
Kevin Murphy, formally associated with MST3K, decided to embark on an unusual (some might even say foolhardy) quest. He decided to watch a movie a day, every day, for an entire year. And to watch movies under as varied conditions as possible. He sees movies at film festivals in Norway and projected onto a bed […]
