Against the Grain
Somewhat dry but really interesting thesis that grain agriculture was uniquely suited to taxation which enabled the formation of early states. Emphasized that early states may have been worse places to live than the surrounding areas outside of state control and how states were effectively farms for domesticating, breeding, and enslaving humans.
Read more from the Anthropology category. If you would like to leave a comment, click here: Comment. or stay up to date with this post via RSS from your site.
Pro Git
This book is a good introduction to Git and also covers some of how Git works internally. There were a few useful things that I learned from the book, but for the most part I either already knew it from using Git or it wasn’t something I would need.
Read more from the Computers and Technology category. If you would like to leave a comment, click here: Comment. or stay up to date with this post via RSS from your site.
Mastering Bitcoin
Mastering Bitcoin provides a solid and fairly comprehensive explanation of how Bitcoin works. It started out by going into a bit too much detail on very specific topics before explaining the bigger picture. For example it was talking about vanity addresses and HD wallets before explaining anything about transactions or the blockchain. I prefer to […]
Read more from the Computers and Technology category. If you would like to leave a comment, click here: Comment. or stay up to date with this post via RSS from your site.
Civilized to Death
One of the best books I’ve ever read. Actually I had planned on writing a book on this topic but now I think I can just recommend this one. It summarizes ideas and facts from many other books and studies to show the reader how the effects of civilization are not as good as many […]
Read more from the Anthropology category. If you would like to leave a comment, click here: Comment. or stay up to date with this post via RSS from your site.
The Mind Illuminated
This is probably the best book I’ve read for practical meditation advice. It’s pretty slow and feels repetitive, but it really seems like a thorough guide to the stages of meditation progress. It goes on at length about the kinds of challenges you will face in each stage and techniques for dealing with these challenges. […]
Read more from the Psychology category. If you would like to leave a comment, click here: Comment. or stay up to date with this post via RSS from your site.
Sleeping on a Volcano
This book contains a lot of interesting data and information about macroeconomic forces, particularly demographics and sovereign debt. It painted a convincing picture that the current economic status quo is not only unsustainable but almost unbelievably crazy. It doesn’t go too deep, which makes it a very fast and easy read, so I had a […]
Read more from the Economics and Finance category. If you would like to leave a comment, click here: Comment. or stay up to date with this post via RSS from your site.
What Do You Care What Other People Think?
Based on the description of “A thoughtful companion volume to the earlier Surely You Are Joking…” I was expecting something similar to Surely You’re Joking, but this book was quite different. Publishers Weekly sums it up well: “In this posthumous miscellany, theoretical physicist Feynman displays only sporadically the adventurousness that captivated readers of Surely You’re […]
Read more from the Biography category. If you would like to leave a comment, click here: Comment. or stay up to date with this post via RSS from your site.
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
This book was really more of a long list of “notes to self” that were fairly repetitive and not particularly interesting. Some of them could be used as prompts for reflection, so there may be some value in reading it, but I would think that another book that develops ideas more fully would be more […]
Read more from the Philosophy category. If you would like to leave a comment, click here: Comment. or stay up to date with this post via RSS from your site.
Mahamudra for the Modern World
This is a 38 hour long course on Mahamudra, which is a type of Tibetan Buddhism. It mixes dharma-style explanations with guided practice. The explanatory parts tend to be quite long-winded and sounded like rambling to me. He also didn’t seem very concerned about making them sound scientific as there was a hint of mystical […]
Read more from the Psychology category. If you would like to leave a comment, click here: Comment. or stay up to date with this post via RSS from your site.
High-Intensity Training the Mike Mentzer Way
Mike Mentzer was a world-class bodybuilder and this book explains his approach to bodybuilding. It appears that he had a very scientific approach, although the book doesn’t go into the science much, instead just stating the main points. Some of the big points are: go to failure on each set (excepting some cases like warmup […]