I am so far enjoying “The Black Swan: The impact of the highly improbable” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Random House, 2007). In searching briefly for a summary both to inform the rest of my read and to send to Yizhen, I found a review and critique by David Aldous from January 2009. I have no strong opinion on Aldous’s main disagreement about the cumulative impact of non black swan events, but I appreciated more perspective. I should check out the other critiques mentioned and Taleb’s “shorter and more cohesive account”, “The fourth quadrant: a map of the limits of statistics“.
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I am nonreligious, yet religion fascinates me. In particular, evolving knowledge of Jesus has separated his life and teachings from my notion of the Church.
As a young Wisconsinite, I learned the Church, God and Jesus are a
conglomeration, like AOL-Time Warner. Or was it the Holy Spirit and Yahweh and
the Lord Pope? The details eluded me, but there were definitely three
entities, all the same. Or maybe I am thinking of the trifecta of less
important Eastern competitors, Buddhism and Islam and Judaism. Religion was
nebulous. All I knew for sure was in America we are united, under one monopoly
of God.
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Growing up I was not much of a reader, but apparently that has changed. I started using Goodreads earlier this year to track my reading, mostly to encourage me to write some notes upon finishing, and partly to remember what I even read. It has been helping! After some investigation …
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Other books by John McWhorter and Steven Pinker had already stripped away most of my linguistic sense of right and wrong, but “Words on the Move” finished the job. It convinced me the new words and new uses for old words we hear, even if disagreeable to some, are exactly …
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In reading the introduction to the Deep Learning book by Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio and Aaron Courville, I came across the concept “distributed representation.” This idea struck me as parallel to the depiction of genetics in Richard Dawkins’s 1976 book The Selfish Gene.
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More and more I’ve been thinking about life on this planet. In a strange way, it started with reading “The Untethered Soul” by Michael A. Singer. The book has done wonders to catalyze improving my outlook and thinking, which is a story for another time, but it also made me think about thinking and about what makes us us. In the deepest sense, we are not our bodies, nor are we our thoughts or emotions. Those things all somehow exist in front of us, and we can get involved with them or modulate them or ignore them as we please.
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A month ago I started reading the book “Biocode: the new age of genomics” Yizhen left with me after heading back to Chicago. I posted some comments about the personal genomics section, but then I got super busy with work. (That will not be happening again with that particular job; more on that in a future post.)
Organizational struggles
Last week I made time to finish the book. First I had to settle on a note taking system, since I knew I would want to remember to some of the people and places and projects mentioned. Lately I’ve been taking notes on paper, especially when listening to audiobooks on planes and places I don’t want to deal with my computer. But clearly I need a digital solution.
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I started reading a book Yizhen left on my shelf after he headed back to Chicago to begin his second year at Biocode: The New Age of Genomics, by Dawn Field and Neil Davies, is kind of an overview of the state of biotechnology. I apologize in advance to anyone reading this; I just wanted to make a quick comment about the emotional distress warnings for a Stanford class, but this turned into another train of thought whose course was less direct than anticipated and whose destination was so vague the conductor isn’t even sure if we are there yet.
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I’m in Singapore right now, but more on that later. I’m trying to get through some of my email backlog… Tim emailed me a month ago with a recommendation:
Have you heard of David Bohm? Physicist/philosopher, died in 1992. I think you’d be interested in his work. Listen to this summary thing and see.
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Instead of catching up on my photos today, I’ll start gathering some research here regarding ADHD and medications. This isn’t intended to be a cohesive narrative, but a brainstorming work space. It’s public in case it might be of use to someone.
Literature notes
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I finally started listening to Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point,” and toward the beginning he talked about the 250 New York phone book names experiment.
I went through the list (Are You a Connector?) of names and found I knew roughly 72 people with the given surnames.
With the …
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I didn’t finish this book, but I started these notes:
Book notes:
ijtihad, Islam’s tradition of independent reasoning, requires being familiar with Islam’s latest thinkers
The Prophet Mohammad reportedly said religion is the way we conduct ourselves toward others. There’s a distinction between Islam as an …
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While I was searching for electronic formats of my printed books, I stumbled on the book “Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age” by Paul Graham, published by O’Reilly and copyright 2004. I started reading it on a whim and basically got sucked in, reading on the plane and in between things for the past two days. About 250 pages later, I’m antsy to program and move to San Francisco more than ever! But first I’ll take a minute to recall the parts of the book I most want to remember before I don’t.
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Mom lent me the book "Anything You Want" a few months ago, and I finally lay down to read it. Overall I liked it a lot. It's in line with my recent endeavors to reduce my belongings and simplify things. I own way more crap than I should, and motivated by my impending transplant across the country, I've been finding it quite rewarding to get rid of stuff.
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