[HN Gopher] Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?
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Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?
Reading a tweet by Tommy Collison1 reminded me that the best book I
have read about musical harmony is practically unknown2 What are
the best unknown books you read? 1
https://twitter.com/tommycollison/status/1215008546657423361 2
https://www.amazon.com/Harmony-its-systemic-phenomenological...
Author : bogoman
Score : 212 points
Date : 2020-01-19 16:09 UTC (6 hours ago)
| mellosouls wrote:
| _Riddley Walker_ by Russell Hoban is not unknown but not hugely
| popular.
|
| Post apocalyptic novel written in a made up language (think
| Clockwork Orange).
|
| Poetic and deeply moving account of a boy's journey through a
| world where scientific knowledge has devolved to primitive ritual
| and incantation; and his dawning realisation that we lost
| _everything_.
|
| I've never read anything else like it.
|
| https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riddley_Walker
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/776573.Riddley_Walker
| mellosouls wrote:
| Here's how it starts off, be warned:
|
| _On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a
| wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs
| any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I
| aint looking to see none agen._
|
| _He dint make the groun shake nor nothing like that when he
| come on to my spear he wernt all that big plus he lookit
| poorly._
|
| _He done the reqwyrt he ternt and stood and clattert his teef
| and made his rush and there we wer then._
|
| _Him on 1 end of the spear kicking his life out and me on the
| other end watching him dy. I said, "Your tern now my tern
| later."_
| kkwteh wrote:
| Reminds me a bit of _Blood Meridian_ by Cormac McCarthy,
| which is an incredible book.
| heatherengland wrote:
| so it's not a completely made up language like klingon but
| just a dialect of english? sounds entertaining for an amateur
| linguist to study!
| mellosouls wrote:
| Yeah, "made up language" was a poor choice by me - its an
| attempt at imagining a transformed English.
| dri_ft wrote:
| But it's surprising how quickly you settle into it, honestly.
| cannam wrote:
| That's an amazing opening. I'd like to read that now. (I have
| heard of this book before, but only in outline.)
|
| Edit: Oh my word! He wrote the text of the children's book
| "Bread and Jam for Frances" (and, I now learn, a whole series
| of others with the same character). That's a lovely bit of
| writing. I had no idea.
| mellosouls wrote:
| Yeah, it's like that all the way through, and some of it is
| inspired
| prepend wrote:
| This sounds like the Sloosha's Crossing last section of David
| Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. Pretty cool.
| mellosouls wrote:
| Good spot! _Riddley_ was influential on Mitchell.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/feb/05/featuresrevie
| w...
| atombender wrote:
| Riddley Walker was probably also a big influence on Iain M.
| Banks' Feersum Endjinn [1]. Most of the chapters are narrated
| by Bascule, a simple-minded (but certainly not stupid) young
| man who writes phonetically: Woak up. Got
| dresd. Had brekfast. Spoke wif Ergates thi ant who sed
| itz juss been wurk wurk wurk 4 u lately master Bascule, Y
| dont u 1/2 a holiday?
|
| The novel is a bit out of character for Banks, and reminds me
| of something Gene Wolfe or Terry Pratchett might have come up
| with. I think it's a wonderfully underrated gem, and Bascule's
| narration is one of its endearing features.
|
| [1] https://www.amazon.com/Feersum-Endjinn-Novel-Iain-
| Banks/dp/0...
| rrgmitchell wrote:
| Riddley Walker is a stunningly good novel.
|
| I've read it twice and I'd read it again. Many years ago there
| was a dramatisation of it at the Edinburgh Festival, very
| powerful.
|
| One bit that sticks in my memory is when Riddley stumbles on
| the overgrown ruins of what must be the M25 motorway that
| encircled London. And he cries: "O what we ben wonce! And what
| we come to now!"
| supernikita wrote:
| Morte d'Urban and Wheat that Springeth Green by J. F. Powers. Who
| could ever imagine that I would thoroughly enjoy a book about
| Catholic priests who are not even solving crimes? Subtle, funny,
| keen-eyed how America and its practicioners of faith change after
| WW II.
| zeristor wrote:
| 'The Extended Organism' by J Scott Turner
|
| I've posted this repeatedly to these lists, but no one else is as
| enthused by it.
|
| From the GoodReads page:
|
| "Can the structures that animals build--from the humble burrows
| of earthworms to towering termite mounds to the Great Barrier
| Reef--be said to live? However counterintuitive the idea might
| first seem, physiological ecologist Scott Turner demonstrates in
| this book that many animals construct and use structures to
| harness and control the flow of energy from their environment to
| their own advantage."
| scanr wrote:
| I thoroughly enjoyed "Constellation Games" by Leonard Richardson
| who coincidentally also wrote BeautifulSoup, the python HTML
| parser.
| mikeymz wrote:
| The Candlemass Road by George Mcdonald Fraser
| kristopolous wrote:
| The Analysis of Art by Dewitt Parker. This was referenced in
| Dynamics of software development by Jim McCarthy. They're both
| pretty good but the Parker book is kinda rare.
|
| Propaganda and Information Warfare in the Twenty-First Century by
| Scot MacDonald, it's purely academic but also a fantastic read.
| Also academic is Technoscientific Imaginaries: Conversations,
| Profiles, and Memoirs by George Marcus, also obscure but at least
| easier to find.
|
| The 60s-80s books from City Lights are nice when you come across
| them. Pretty rare though.
| DyslexicAtheist wrote:
| Jacques Ellul, _The Technological Society (La Technique)_
| https://ratical.org/ratville/AoS/TheTechnologicalSociety.pdf
|
| Jacques Ellul, _Propaganda_
| https://archive.org/details/Propaganda_201512
|
| Thomas Ligotti _The Conspiracy Against The Human Race_
| https://archive.org/details/TheConspiracyAgainstTheHumanRace
|
| and anything written by Peter Wessel Zapffe (an introduction to
| his work https://philosophynow.org/issues/45/The_Last_Messiah)
| smitty1e wrote:
| I'll venture "The Third Policeman" for comic surrealism.
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27208.The_Third_Policema...
| jtth wrote:
| _The Retreat to Commitment_ by WW Bartley III is a book I think
| about almost every day.
| officemonkey wrote:
| Anthony Trollope's "The Warden."
|
| Trollope isn't as well known as Dickens or Austen. I think the
| emotional intelligence of this book makes up for the fact that
| nothing much happens.
|
| There's a vicar who is old friends with the Bishop. He's made
| Warden of an Almshouse for old men in the community. The amount
| of money he's going to get to do basically nothing is
| embarrassingly large.
|
| It's an extremely gentle book about controversy, conspiracy, and
| people taking a moral stand.
|
| It got me hooked on Trollope. His other books are far more
| intricate, worldly, and entertaining. But I like this short novel
| very much.
| sramsay wrote:
| A thousand times yes to Trollope, and I think there are a lot
| of nineteenth-century novelists who are like that (not quite as
| well known as the biggest names, but absolutely superb). Wilkie
| Collins ( _The Moonstone_ , _The Woman in White_ ) is another
| good example from that category.
| timkam wrote:
| Ariel Rubinstein - Economic Fables. For everyone who is
| interested in an intuitive and (self-)critical perspective on
| economic theory. The PDF version is available for free on
| Rubinstein's personal web page, but requires you to provide your
| email address: http://arielrubinstein.tau.ac.il/books.html
| b215826 wrote:
| Ariel Rubinstein is one of the most honest game theorists I've
| come across. He's extremely critical of the claims that game
| theory can be used to accurately predict outcomes of the real
| world [1]. Economic Fables is a semi-biography as well, and has
| details of his life growing up in Israel. I wish more
| scientists (across all disciplines) had the audacity to
| critically assess their own fields of research like Rubinstein.
| He also gives almost all of his books -- including his widely-
| used text "A Course in Game Theory" coauthored with Osborne --
| for free on his website [2].
|
| [1]:
| http://arielrubinstein.tau.ac.il/articles/FRANKFURTER_ALLGEM...
|
| [2]: http://arielrubinstein.tau.ac.il/books.html
| ranprieur wrote:
| Gaiome by Kevin Scott Polk, about the potential for highly
| ecological artificial worlds in space.
| nicholast wrote:
| Check out "From the Diaries of John Henry", a collection of
| essays on material like machine learning, quantum computing, and
| entrepreneurship.
|
| https://www.turingsquared.com
| nealabq wrote:
| The Diary of Opal Whiteley, written around 1910 by an observant
| child using unusual syntax. It's poetic, simple, brilliant. I
| first saw it in the Multnomah (Portland Oregon) library.
|
| Available online: http://www.opalonline.org/
|
| Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opal_Whiteley
| injb wrote:
| East and West by C. Northcote Parkinson. In fact, anything by
| Parkinson. It's an alternative view on what causes empires to
| rise and fall.
|
| The Snow Geese by William Fiennes....just for the sheer
| perfection of the prose.
| RangerScience wrote:
| Travels in Tartary, Thibet, and China, by Evariste Regis Huc
|
| He's an early 1800s French Catholic monk and is possibly the
| greatest travel writer of all time. Not only is the trip amazing,
| but the way he writes about it? Incredible.
|
| In the sequel, the Chinese empire summons him to stand trial for
| being a Christian, since it was mostly illegal to be so in the
| empire at the time. It, too, is amazing.
|
| https://www.gutenberg.org/files/32747/32747-h/32747-h.htm
| phubbard wrote:
| "Finite and infinite games" by James Carse. Philosophy and hugely
| thought provoking.
| tw1010 wrote:
| I'm hearing this advice so often that it's pissing me off.
|
| The book is BS. (I've read it.) There, I said it. It's always
| "this book is hugely thought provoking" (pointing at you Daniel
| Gross), and never ever and expansion on why or what insights it
| actually contains that's interesting. It has mildly interesting
| sentences that feels deep (mostly because they're confusing).
| The book has developed into some BS signalling device like
| Infinite Jest used to be. Everyone has read it, no one
| understands it. Everyone goes "oh yes, that's such a deep book,
| nothing has changed my mind like it since sapiens", and then
| we're all supposed to go silent to independently ponder it's
| many layered-ness, but in reality that's just what we do
| because we wouldn't come up anything remotely insightful if
| pushed into a corner. Frankly, the fact that this book is
| pushed so much makes me totally reconsider oft-repeated meme
| that "tech is low virtue signalling" (or low corruption).
| Clearly not.
|
| (There, rant over. I'm overplaying how mad I actually am, I
| just feel like we need a few more rants against this book
| strewn about whenever this book is mentioned. Please, anyone,
| prove me wrong and a horrific narrow-minded dimwit by writing
| something more in-depth about what you think it contains and
| how it's insightful, I would love you infinitely.)
| prepend wrote:
| For me, I've found the book useful in understanding
| activities in a way that reduces my stress and helps me
| interact with people. Specifically, I don't take things as
| seriously and try not to get wound up in arbitrary or not
| important rules. And that I get that some people get into the
| rules of an activity when I haven't and that helps me
| understand where they are coming from.
|
| I suppose there are many ways to learn that, but, for me, it
| was this book. The lesson helped me a lot.
|
| And it's really short book so I don't feel so guilty
| recommending it. Brothers Karamazov is amazing, but
| recommending it is like giving someone a job.
| jmpman wrote:
| Although it was immensely popular in its time, I haven't found
| anyone else who has read it - "Memoirs of a British Agent"
| chubot wrote:
| I remember getting _Semiology of Graphics_ from the Palo Alto
| library around 2006. At the time it was sort of legendary and out
| of print, but it looks like it 's since been reprinted. I think
| you can get most of the ideas from newer books, but it's well
| done and clearly ahead of its time.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Semiology-Graphics-Diagrams-Networks-...
|
| https://medium.com/@karlsluis/before-tufte-there-was-bertin-...
|
| Interestingly another relatively unknown book I like (and
| bought/read 20 years ago) is also about harmony:
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Harmonic-Experience-Harmony-Natural-E...
|
| I would say there's two kinds of harmony: harmony in equal
| temperament, and "alternative" harmonies based on physics, and
| this is about the latter. I can't tell from the link what the
| other harmony book is about. What's good about it?
|
| As far as computer books, I've read a lot of recommendations here
| over the years like "thinking forth", "Computer Lib" by Ted
| Nelson, etc. They are well known to some audiences but not
| others.
|
| ----
|
| I also enjoy reading what people though the computing future
| would be like. I have "Superdistribution" by Brad Cox:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21833331
|
| And "Mirror Worlds" by Gelertner:
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Mirror-Worlds-Software-Universe-Shoeb...
|
| I'm pretty sure Gelertner claims that the Facebook feed is
| identical to his "life streams". I guess taken literally it's
| hard not to see the current Internet as a "mirror world" that's
| becoming the real world.
| cannam wrote:
| > I also enjoy reading what people though the computing future
| would be like
|
| This prompts me to propose (although it's not obscure)
| "Artificial Intelligence: The Very Idea" by John Haugeland.
| It's an AI textbook that is extremely readable and inviting -
| the best I've seen as a purely readable text, though probably
| far too basic for most readers here - but that is entirely
| drawn from the realm of "good old-fashioned AI", i.e. things
| like logic systems that have very little in common with what is
| understood as practical AI nowadays. Combine the readability of
| the book with the apparent hopelessness of its premise, and you
| have a perfectly nostalgic experience.
| bordercases wrote:
| I would recommend "Graphics and Graphic Information Processing"
| by Bertin over _La Semiologie_ simply because the latter reads
| more like a reference book where Bertin is extremely
| _thorough_. But GGIP gets straight to the point and can frame
| your thinking while going through _Semiologie_ such that you
| won 't lose your way.
|
| Unfortunately GGIP is expensive so I would try to find it at
| your local library. (French copies are online).
| bogoman wrote:
| Thanks for the recommendations. Many look interesting but are
| not books I would organically bump into, which is an
| alternative description of what I was looking for.
|
| As for a Sadai's book: it is an extremely thorough book about
| western harmony from first principles. It treats what is
| perceived - what we hear - as the anchor, and not what we see
| when we analyse the notes on paper. A good example of that is
| how we decide to give names to chords. We tend to name chords
| based on the notes in them, but this can sometime lead to
| misunderstandings because the context and how those notes are
| spread through the chord are also very important. Basics like
| which note is in the bass is taken into consideration, but
| otherwise these factors are often ignored. Sadai shows many
| examples for that throughout the book - as well as such
| "Mistakes" in other famous books. A quote from the book about
| the approach taken: "The conventional analytic approach as
| taught in academies is based primarily upon the depiction of
| the WRITTEN content of a composition by means of symbols and
| concepts inherent to the accepted analytic code. This analysis
| however, which describes mainly what is SEEN, does not always
| succeed in describing what is HEARD - the perceptual musical
| essence".
| clairity wrote:
| i don't know how "unknown" it is, but i accidentally ran across
| the novel _comfort woman_ by nora okja keller at the library a
| few years back and found it heartbreaking, on a subject few
| americans know much about.
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/819654.Comfort_Woman
| qnsi wrote:
| Self-directed behavior - Watson
|
| This is a textbook for behavior change course, but it is 100%
| practical (project to pass subject is to change some kind of
| behavior)
|
| Only tested information Science-based. This book can change your
| life but you wont find it mentioned anywhere
| bordercases wrote:
| Very good book. I forgot how I stumbled into it but it's pretty
| much _the_ text for changing behavior. Only person coming close
| is BJ Fogg 's work on tiny habits who really just distilled the
| material into "You won't believe THAT ONE TRICK, psychologists
| will HATE you!".
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| The Structure and Confirmation of Evolutionary Theory by
| Elisabeth Lloyd has had an outsized effect on my thinking, even
| though I do not work in that field.
|
| https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691000466/th...
| yesenadam wrote:
| I decided to investigate feminist philosophers of science a few
| years ago, since I'd heard they write postmodern garbage, and
| randomly picked Elisabeth Lloyd first. I ended up reading
| everything I could get my hands on, all her books, papers,
| talks, webpages. Totally admirable. She is awesome, and
| responds to critics with tireless patience. 'Feminist science'
| as she does it is just good science. A lot of it points out
| blind spots in the ways various scientific fields have
| operated, because of things taken for granted.
| FranciscusG wrote:
| "Matter, Space, Radiation" by Menahem Simhony.
|
| It explains the Ether (EPOLA, Electron-Positron Lattice) and
| states the many proofs for that, as well as explains many
| hitherto unexplained physics phenomena such as Mass Inertia, the
| speed of light c, Gravity and the Pauli Exclusion Principle.
|
| You'd think the concept of "Ether" is debunked but after reading
| the book you'll be convinced it is real.
| heatherengland wrote:
| after spending all day coding and being deep in erlang,
| algorithms and bug reports, i like to read something that doesn't
| require much thought. parodies work great i find.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Maze-Bummer-Parody-Runner-ebook/dp/B0...
|
| that's the kind of work i have in mind. simple and refreshing.
| riffraff wrote:
| "once upon an ice age" by Roy Lewis (sometimes sold as "how we
| ate father" or "the evolution man", I think).
|
| It's a first person narration of some Pleistocene hominid,
| somewhat educational but mostly just hilarious, in the sense of a
| Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett book.
|
| I know 3 or 4 People who read it, they all loved it, but it's
| virtually unknown.
| Animats wrote:
| "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds"
| (1841). See all the large-scale scams in their original forms.
| neplus wrote:
| Depends on your definition of practically unknown. With that
| said, these are the four that immediately spring to mind as being
| both worth reading and relatively obscure (judging by date of
| publication in conjunction with being either out of print or with
| very few star ratings on Amazon).
|
| Did Monetary Forces Cause the Great Depression? - Peter Termin,
| 1975
|
| Termin is still going strong at MIT. His 1975 book was
| foundational for challenging Friedman on the cause of the Great
| Depression. Given what was to come in the 1980s this book quickly
| became overshadowed and destined for obscurity. However, it still
| provides an appropriate, timely lens to analyze monetary theory
| without the abstraction that has engrossed economics as of late.
|
| The Supreme Court in the American System of Government - Robert
| Jackson, 1955
|
| A series of lectures created for a Harvard lecture series in
| 1954-55 by Justice Jackson. He suddenly died before being able to
| deliver them, but they were compiled in a book now out of print.
| Justice Jackson is widely regarded - across the aisle - as one of
| the most brilliant legal writers of our time (or perhaps of any
| time). While this book doesn't set out his entire judicial
| philosophy, or even do what the title says due to his untimely
| death, it does lay a valuable conception of the proper role of
| the SCOTUS within the Republic. Also recommended, to see both his
| pen and intellect in action, are his opinions in Korematsu v.
| United States and West Virginia State Board of Education v.
| Barnette.
|
| The Opium of the Intellectuals - Aron, 1955
|
| Amazon does a better job of summarizing than I could off the top
| of my head, so here you go: "Raymond Aron's 1955 masterpiece The
| Opium of the Intellectuals, is one of the great works of
| twentieth- century political reflection. Aron shows how noble
| ideas can slide into the tyranny of "secular religion" and
| emphasizes how political thought has the profound responsibility
| of telling the truth about social and political reality-in all
| its mundane imperfections and tragic complexities."
|
| An incredibly difficult read that is worth trying to get through.
| Brimming with ideas and not without its own pitfalls. Tells the
| story of 20th Century intellectual history and thought as well as
| any could, although in a rather indirect way.
|
| The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in America
| (Aristocracy & Caste in America) - Baltzell, 1987
|
| I'll let Amazon summarize again: "This classic account of the
| traditional upper class in America traces its origins,
| lifestyles, and political and social attitudes from the time of
| Theodore Roosevelt to that of John F. Kennedy. Sociologist E.
| Digby Baltzell describes the problems of exclusion and prejudice
| within the community of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants (or WASPs,
| an acronym he coined) and predicts with amazing accuracy what
| will happen when this inbred group is forced to share privilege
| and power with talented members of minority groups."
|
| My summary would be: what will happen (hypothetically, remember
| the date of publication) when an ephemeral class (WASPs) suddenly
| disappear from their previous pedestal of influence? Prescient,
| widely applicable to other countries with their own quasi-
| classes, and deeply interesting for those less familiar with the
| subject.
| bordercases wrote:
| These are some extremely timely books, can't help but think
| that was on purpose or that you're simply good at keeping up!
| neplus wrote:
| Thanks very much. These were all read before the 2016
| election, if that's what you mean. I think they are important
| books for our times certainly though.
| sah2ed wrote:
| Two books first published in the 60s:
|
| "The Science of The Artificial" by Herbert Simon, a multi-
| disciplinary treatise on the goals of _design_ by practitioners
| in the physical sciences (physics, bio. etc), non-physical
| sciences (math, comp. sci, etc) and humanities (econs., psych.,
| etc).
|
| "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" by Thomas Kuhn, coined
| the concept of paradigm shift and used it to revisit the history
| of science that was previously thought to be cumulative and
| linear.
| ska wrote:
| Fwiw, I don't think the Kuhn qualifies as 'unknown'.
| sah2ed wrote:
| Granted.
|
| I must have mentally parsed the "unknown" used by OP as "not
| widely known" (to the HN crowd), and if you look at a lot of
| the contributions, many of the authors are not exactly
| "unknown" either.
| number6 wrote:
| Who is Kuhn?
| zokier wrote:
| I did enjoy The Transylvania (or Writing on the Wall) Trilogy by
| Banffy. It has similar feeling to Tolstoy (Anna Kareina, War and
| Peace) but bit less high-concept and more grounded to reality,
| maybe bit closer to Il Gattopardo by Lampedusa. One nice thing
| about Banffy is that it gives insight on a period and setting
| that was so important, but not that well understood, in
| (European) history; the just before fall of Austro-Hungarian
| empire that eventually then led to triggering first world war.
| The books are fictional, but the author was an actual count from
| that era which lends certain degree of authenticity to it. Of
| course it also means that there are some nostalgic elements to
| it, but that just gives it bit more charm imho.
|
| This is the article that introduced it to me; I don't know it
| counts as "unknown" if it has a Guardian story written about it..
| https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2011/aug/05/writ...
| travmatt wrote:
| "Huey Long" by T. Harry Williams. The politician who very well
| could have defeated Roosevelt and the loose inspiration behind
| Upton Sinclair's "It Can't Happen Here".
|
| "Reminisces of a Stock Operator" by Edwin Lefevre. Thinly veiled
| autobiography of Jesse Livermore, a 1920/30's trader and his
| experiences, including foreseeing the crash of 1929.
| mindcrime wrote:
| _How To Measure Anything_ [1] by Douglas Hubbard.
|
| The basic gist of the book goes something like this: in the real
| world (especially in a business setting) there are many things
| which are hard to measure directly, but which we may care about.
| Take, for example, "employee morale" which matters because it may
| affect, say, retention, or product quality. Hubbard suggests that
| we can measure (many|most|all|??) of these things by using a
| combination of "calibrated probability assessments"[2], awareness
| of nth order effects, and Monte Carlo simulation.
|
| Basically, "if something matters, it's because it affects
| something that can be measured". So you identify the causal chain
| from "thing" to "measurable thing", have people who are trained
| in "calibrated probability assessment" estimate the weights of
| the effects in the causal chain, then build a mathematical model,
| and use a Monte Carlo simulation to work out how inputs to the
| system affect the outputs.
|
| Of course it's not _perfect_ , since estimation is always touchy,
| even using the calibration stuff. And you could still commit an
| error like leaving an important variable out of the model
| completely, or sampling from the wrong distribution when doing
| your simulation. But generally speaking, done with care, this is
| a way to measure the "unmeasurable" with a level of rigor that's
| better than just flat out guessing, or ignoring the issue
| altogether.
|
| [1]: https://www.amazon.com/How-Measure-Anything-Intangibles-
| Busi...
|
| [2]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calibrated_probability_assessm...
| seshagiric wrote:
| As a product manager I can't recommend this book strong enough.
| It has been a saver for me in a number real life situations -
| solving "Fermi" problems in Interviews to handling day2day PM
| stuff (market sizing, analytics etc.).
|
| The writing style makes it hard to read (almost like an
| academic research paper) it's tough to keep urself interested.
| However the learnings are substantial too.
| richev wrote:
| I can really recommend Sweating Bullets: Notes about Inventing
| PowerPoint[1]. Written by Robert Gaskins, inventor of PowerPoint,
| I found it enjoyable and interesting to learn the history and
| design decisions behind a product most take for granted, and some
| object to the overuse of.
|
| [1] https://www.amazon.com/Sweating-Bullets-Notes-Inventing-
| Powe...
| TheGallopedHigh wrote:
| Stoner by John Williams. It is a slow burner, but it's worth the
| effort. It's novel about an average person living an average
| life, but the prose captures the emotion of life.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoner_(novel)
| neonate wrote:
| That book is very widely known.
| CalRobert wrote:
| The Lumberjacks by Donald Mackay
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7797112-the-lumberjacks.
| Tales recorded from British Colombian lumberjacks in the 19th
| century.
|
| I found it completely by accident, picking it up at random off
| the shelf in my university's library while procrastinating.
| Rerarom wrote:
| Fiction:
|
| Mordecai Roshwald, _Level 7_
|
| Alexander Dewdney, _The Planiverse_
|
| Joseph Heller, _God Knows_
|
| Alan Lightman, _Einstein 's Dreams_
|
| Non-fiction:
|
| Jane Goodall, _In the Shadow of Man_
|
| Gian-Carlo Rota, _Indiscrete Thoughts_
|
| C. S. Lewis, _The Discarded Image_
|
| Michael E. Brown, _How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming_
|
| Robert Kegan, _In Over Our Heads_
|
| Michael Harris, _The Atomic Times_
|
| I may add guilty pleasures like the _Legacy of the Force_ series,
| but I don 't think this is what people here are looking for.
| rjkennedy98 wrote:
| "The American Religion" by Harold Bloom. It blew my mind. Its a
| deeply subjective book about our collective consciousness, as
| told by biographies of the religious makers of America.
| futurecat wrote:
| More Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction, by
| Kodwo Eshun. Maybe the best take on Music and Afrofuturism.
| carapace wrote:
| "Neurospeak" by Robert Masters
|
| A psychoactive book, science-based (YMMV).
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/897536.Neurospeak
|
| - - - -
|
| Gurdjieff's "Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson"
|
| Impossible to categorize, incredibly challenging. Gurdjieff was a
| genius on the level of Leonardo da Vinci, but where Leonardo
| studied the outer world, Gurdjieff studied the inner world. This
| three-volume tome is his effort to encode and transmit his
| particular school of thought.
|
| Gurdjieff has had a deep and obscure influence on Western
| culture. For example, in the Monty Python's Flying Circus movie
| "The Meaning of Life" an abridged description of his philosophy
| is given in the boardroom scene about the meaning of life, right
| before Terry Jones asks, "What was that about hats?"
| bordercases wrote:
| Foundations of Decision Analysis by Hubbard.
|
| Most people here may have scraped work on decision theory. But
| Hubbard turns the field into a coherent skillset. Otherwise
| you're just sitting around talking _about_ decision models
| instead of _using_ and _practicing with_ them, for everyday
| living. This is what Hubbard gives you.
|
| "Smart Choices" is a book which may be better known but
| complements FoDA nicely as an entry-level supplement.
| awwx wrote:
| Smart Choices by John S. Hammond?
| mindcrime wrote:
| _Foundations of Decision Analysis by Hubbard._
|
| Sounds interesting, but I couldn't find this in a quick
| preliminary search. Do you have a link handy? The only book
| titled "Foundations of Decision Analysis" I came across was by
| Howard and Abbas.
|
| Also, not sure if this is related to the Hubbard you refer to
| or not, but there's a gentleman named Douglas Hubbard who has
| written some really excellent material in this area. I consider
| his book _How To Measure Anything_ to be one of the best /
| most important books I've read, and it's one I recommend to
| pretty much everybody.
| bordercases wrote:
| Sorry I meant Howard.
| mindcrime wrote:
| Gnarly. Thanks for the recommendation. I think I'm going to
| order a copy of this one.
| _eht wrote:
| The Master & Margarita
|
| Mikhail Bulgakov
| werber wrote:
| Last year I picked up this book Truckstop Rainbows, and it was
| great. Late soviet angstsy gen x snapshot
| rmason wrote:
| The hidden persuaders by Vance Packard
|
| I read this book as a kid, it changed how I view the world and
| I've never forgotten it's lessons. It shows how the ad world is
| working hard to persuade you. It convinced me to always question
| what are represented as facts by ads or the media. A healthy
| skepticism has served me very well.
|
| Most people never deeply question and Packard is correct that
| there's an entire industry trying to persuade you. Not just what
| product to buy but which college to attend or which company to
| work for and yes even which political candidate to vote. Those
| very same hidden persuaders, some of the brightest minds in the
| world, are working on the web still trying to persuade you to
| click.
|
| The closest way to bring it to HN world is PG's famous essay The
| Submarine that talks about recurring themes in the media such as
| 'suits are coming back'. The public relation professionals
| planting those stories are also hidden persuaders.
|
| http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
| thrwaway69 wrote:
| Suicide notes by Mitchell Heisman. Pretty obscure. No idea
| whether to call it good or odd. It raises many questions without
| answers and will probably tell you that the author likely has
| some deep rooted issues.
|
| Book:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20151123024834/http://www.geenst...
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| I will always promote Jose Hernandez-Orallo's The Measure of All
| Minds [1]
|
| It attempts to codify how we should go about measuring and
| evaluating the somewhat fuzzy concept of "intelligence." He
| proposes an extension of his "Anytime Intelligence Test" which
| could be used to test animal and machine intelligence on a level
| playing field.
|
| Measurement of task capability against a baseline is the most
| overlooked problem in AI and as far as I am aware Hernandez-
| Orallo is the only one focusing on it.
|
| Notice that all of the major "breakthrough" moments in AI over
| the last half century had a human baseline that an AI was
| competing against. Those baselines were ones that had been
| already developed over years (sometimes a century) and were part
| of competitive games already. Go, Chess, DOTA etc... had
| leaderboards or international rankings.
|
| For fuzzier things like driving, translation, strategy, trading
| etc... there is no generally accepted and measurable baseline
| test for what is considered human level, only proxies and unit
| specific tests. So we continue to not know when an AI system is
| measurably at or exceeding human level. Without this we can't
| definitively know how much progress we're making on Human Level
| Intelligence.
|
| [1]https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/measure-of-all-
| minds/DC...
| b215826 wrote:
| Among technical books, books by Cornelius Lanczos are some of the
| best (less popular) books I've read. Some quotes from his "The
| Variational Principles of Mechanics":
|
| From the Preface:
|
| _Many of the scientific treatises of today are formulated in a
| half-mystical language, as though to impress the reader with the
| uncomfortable feeling that he is in the permanent presence of a
| superman. The present book is conceived in a humble spirit and is
| written for humble people._
|
| From Chapter 8:
|
| _Put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou
| standest is holy ground. -- EXODUS III, 5
|
| We have done considerable mountain climbing. Now we are in the
| rarefied atmosphere of theories of excessive beauty and we are
| nearing a high plateau on which geometry, optics, mechanics, and
| wave mechanics meet on common ground. Only concentrated thinking,
| and a considerable amount of recreation, will reveal the full
| beauty of our subject in which the last word has not yet been
| spoken._
|
| This book was also on Gerald Jay Sussman's must-read list of
| books [1]. Another great book of his is "Linear Differential
| Operators" -- if you've ever wanted an intuitive explanation for
| why d/dx is not Hermitian but d^2/dx^2 is, this is the book you
| need to read. A quote from the book that resonated with me when I
| first read it:
|
| _Since the days of antiquity it has been the privilege of the
| mathematician to engrave his conclusions, expressed in a rarefied
| and esoteric language, upon the rocks of eternity. While this
| method is excellent for the codification of mathematical results,
| it is not so acceptable to the many addicts of mathematics, for
| whom the science of mathematics is not a logical game, but the
| language in which the physical universe speaks to us, and whose
| mastery is inevitable for the comprehension of natural
| phenomena._
|
| [1]: http://aurellem.org/thoughts/html/sussman-reading-list.html
| lolinder wrote:
| A request: please don't put quotes in code blocks. It makes
| them completely unreadable on mobile.
| b215826 wrote:
| I've italicized them. I wish HN had some other way of
| stylizing quotes.
| K0SM0S wrote:
| I usually indent quotes with ">" (markdown-style), add
| italics for clarity at a glance, and maybe fancy double-
| quotes when it feels right.
|
| > _"I wish HN had some other way of stylizing quotes."_
|
| Me too, also simple ordered lists and ```inline code```.
| mLuby wrote:
| _A Reverence for Wood_ by Eric Sloane.
|
| Accomplished its eponymous goal in a brief 110 pages, many of
| which are beautiful lithographic sketches.
| ttctciyf wrote:
| Severely underappreciated (IMO) is British psychiatrist Marion
| Milner's _A Life of One 's Own_[1] (1934, as "Joanna Field") - an
| extraordinary recounting of the author's subjective yet diligent
| observational study of her own awareness and mental processes
| from first principles and with as few assumptions as possible.
|
| The results were unexpected!
|
| > As soon as I began to study my perception, to look at my own
| experience, I found that there were different ways of perceiving
| and that the different ways provided me with different facts.
| There was a narrow focus which meant seeing life as if from
| blinkers and with the centre of awareness in my head; and there
| was a wide focus which meant knowing with the whole of my body, a
| way of looking which quite altered my perception of whatever I
| saw. And I found that the narrow focus way was the way of reason.
| If one was in the habit of arguing about life it was very
| difficult not to approach sensation with the same concentrated
| attention and so shut out its width and depth and height. But it
| was the wide focus way that made me happy.
|
| The book is full of arresting and innovative insights on
| awareness and perception. For example, the spotlight analogy for
| "covert attention" is often attributed to Francis Crick writing
| in 1984[2], but fifty years earlier Milner writes:
|
| > At any moment there exist in the fringes of my thought faint
| patternings which can be brought to distinction when I look at
| them. Like a policeman with a flash-light I can throw the bright
| circle of my awareness where I choose; if any shadow or movement
| in the dim outer circle of its rays arouses my suspicion, I can
| make it come into the circle of brightness and show itself for
| what it is. But the beam of my attention is not of fixed width, I
| can widen or narrow it as I choose.[3]
|
| On the topic of first person recountings of mental journeys, but
| from the other side of the analyst's couch, it's also worth
| mentioning _Operators and Things: The inner life of a
| schizophrenic_ [4] a powerful first person account of
| schizophrenic hallucination and ideation which comes across a
| little more like a novel than an objective account but is
| fascinating nonetheless.
|
| 1: https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/10/11/a-life-of-ones-
| own-...
|
| 2: e.g. "(The analogy was first suggested by Francis Crick, the
| geneticist.)" -
| https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/06/how-cons...
|
| 3: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ntg6OE7haSgC&pg=PA77
|
| 4: Online at https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/13476 it seems
| - I read it in paperback in the 80s and only turned that site up
| with google just now, so ... but the PDF seems to work.
| yesenadam wrote:
| I came across _A Life Of One 's Own_ as a teenager, and she
| became one of my heroes in courage and self-exploration, a
| great inspiration. The sequels _An Experiment in Leisure_ and
| _On Not Being Able To Paint_ are also excellent. _On Not Being
| Able To Paint_ initially didn 't seem as interesting, but I
| picked up my copy again 20 years later and found that what
| she'd learnt about art was almost exactly what I'd learnt from
| 5 years of writing orchestral music!
| hyperion2010 wrote:
| Lest Darkness Fall by L. Sprague de Camp which appears to
| recently have received a reprinting, my copy is from the 40s.
|
| Deathworld by Harry Harrison. I've been waiting for some
| screenplay writer to stumble across this one, and if I had to
| guess James Cameron probably did, but just didn't tell anyone.
|
| SLAN by A. E. van Vogt.
|
| The Witches of Karres by James H. Schmitz.
|
| Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen, and Paratime by H. Beam Piper.
|
| However the best of all, is maybe only slightly less know, since
| the author is certainly extremely well known: Tuf Voyaging by
| George R. R. Martin. An absolutely fantastic collection of
| stories about an ecological engineer.
| brownbat wrote:
| Andy Kessler's How We Got Here.
|
| Only a few hundred people have rated it on GoodReads, but if you
| wanted to trace a march of technological progress from swords to
| the Internet, it does a good job. There are definitely other
| stories you could tell about this accelerating sweep of
| technological change, but this one was a solid rapid overview and
| really stuck some ideas with me about how changes compound (or
| completely swerve to a new goal) over time.
|
| The original tweet is more about how domain experts would rely on
| books nobody outside that domain has heard of, so maybe I should
| be thinking more about textbooks that stuck with me. Sources of
| Chinese Tradition, the Tractatus, and A Mathematical Theory of
| Computation all left pretty lasting influences in one way or
| another.
|
| Sources of Japanese Tradition discusses the origins of Tendai Zen
| Buddhism, with some bits on Dogen, who once wrote something like,
| "If you want to achieve a certain thing, you must first become a
| certain person. After becoming a certain person, you no longer
| want that certain thing."
|
| That's a pretty good tie in to Kessler's view of the last several
| hundred years of human progress. We were repeatedly solving some
| other problem, which once we had the tools to solve that, it
| became nearly irrelevant compared to what else we could do now.
| chubot wrote:
| FWIW I read most of _How We Got Here_ book last year after
| having it in my reading list for something like 15 years :- /
| Somehow it popped up after all that time.
|
| I thought it was a great concept for a book, and the author has
| a unique viewpoint and knows his stuff, but it wasn't very well
| written. There seemed to be a lot of detail without defining
| terms, but it was also "breezy" and fast. Just my opinion.
| xwowsersx wrote:
| Hmm..reviews on Goodreads seem kind of mixed. Some make it
| sound like it's a bit of an idiosyncratic editing mess with
| disconnected chapters, etc.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| In no particular order, and some of these being more "highly
| underrated" as opposed to "unknown", with the notable exception
| of Smith's _Wealth of Nations_ which is disturbingly un- and mis-
| read:
|
| 1. _Grammatical Man,_ by Jeremy Campbell (1982)
|
| https://www.worldcat.org/title/grammatical-man-information-e...
|
| My introduction to information theory and its diverse set of
| interrelated applications and phenomena.
|
| 2. _Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity,_ by William Ophuls
| (1977)
|
| https://www.worldcat.org/title/ecology-and-the-politics-of-s...
|
| Distills the _Limits to Growth_ issue to its essence, and looks
| at the political implications, with a set of estimates of
| political developments which have played out closely.
|
| 3. _An Inquiry to the Nature and Wealth of Nations,_ by Adam
| Smith (1776)
|
| https://www.worldcat.org/title/inquiry-into-the-nature-and-c...
|
| The best-known, but least-read, and most mis-read book on this
| list. Smith isn't perfect and has flaws. But his message is
| extraordinarily misunderstood and misrepresented. Even where he
| is wrong, he is instructive.
|
| 4. _Commercialism and Journalism,_ by Hamilton Holt (1909)
|
| https://www.worldcat.org/title/commercialism-and-journalism/...
|
| A short but extraordinarily illuminating read on the influence of
| money and advertising on the press, coming near the beginning of
| the era of mass media.
|
| 5. _Unix Power Tools,_ by Mike Loukides et al (1997)
|
| https://www.worldcat.org/title/unix-power-tools/oclc/2584502...
|
| The book that really got me "over the hump" in understanding the
| Unix environment and tools. Now somewhat dated, though still
| highly useful.
|
| 6. _A Short History of Progress,_ by Ronald Wright (2004)
|
| https://www.worldcat.org/title/short-history-of-progress/ocl...
|
| An exploration of the story, question, and future, of progress.
|
| 7. _Entropy and the Economic Process,_ by Nicholas Georgescu-
| Roegen (1971)
|
| https://www.worldcat.org/title/entropy-law-and-the-economic-...
|
| A re-thinking of economics taking thermodynamics into account.
| Famously difficult to read, but well worth the effort.
|
| 8. _On the Damned Human Race,_ by Mark Twain (1962)
|
| https://www.worldcat.org/title/mark-twain-on-the-damned-huma...
|
| A darker, angrier, more bitter side of Twain, cracking open the
| sanitised version those familiar with _Tom Sawyer_ and _Huck
| Finn_ will know, and giving an insight to the darker side of late
| 19th and early 20th century America.
|
| 9. _Energy and Civilization,_ by Vaclav Smil (2017)
|
| https://www.worldcat.org/title/energy-and-civilization-a-his...
|
| A re-casting of history, not according to spiritual or cultural
| progress, Great Men, or social dynamics, but the access to and
| utilisation of energy sources.
|
| 10. _Resistances to the Adoption of Technological Innovations,_
| by Bernhard J. Stern (1937)
|
| https://archive.org/details/technologicaltre1937unitrich/pag...
|
| A fascinating exploration of the organised opposition to numerous
| significant technological innovations through the ages, contrary
| to the conventional story told by mainstream economic and
| innovation models and stories. Stern's research assistant at the
| time he was working on this topic went on to become known as a
| science fiction author, and based one of his first works on this
| notion: Isaac Asimov.
|
| On the question of compiling such lists: I've recently started
| keeping a research journal in which I'm trying to capture works
| of significance that I've read, vaguely inspired by both index-
| card methods (such as Zettelkasten or POIC) and bullet journals.
|
| The organisation is "BOTI" -- best of the interval.
|
| I will start a two-page spread, dated, of a specific class of
| entries -- works, videos, authors, ideas, etc. -- and when that
| closes, start another. Periodically (about every month, for now)
| I'll select the best of those works for a BOTM list, and at the
| end of a year, a BOTY list.
|
| Or at least that's the idea.
|
| This may address the question of keeping track of the most
| significant works (or authors, concepts, ideas, etc.) over time,
| which otherwise tend to become a bit of a jumble.
|
| The BOTI list and periodic aggregations themselves resemble
| round-robin databases, or ring or circular buffers or files,
| though without actually rewriting each specific list. The initial
| capture levels remain accessible (in the journal) for revisiting,
| should something prove to have been more significant on
| subsequent reflection than initially appeared.
| philipkglass wrote:
| "Excuse Me Sir, Would You Like to Buy a Kilo of Isopropyl
| Bromide?" It's a memoir by chemist and businessman Max Gergel,
| full of hilarious and hair-raising anecdotes about how a scrappy
| small American business could operate before the EPA and OSHA
| existed. It's also powerful if anecdotal evidence for why the EPA
| and OSHA were ultimately necessary.
|
| Excerpt, brief review, and link to PDF of the full book here on
| Derek Lowe's excellent blog _In the Pipeline_ :
|
| https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2010/05/27/ma...
| rebuilder wrote:
| "A girl among the anarchists" by Isabel Meredith (pseudonym) -
| found it on Project Gutenberg somehow, it's a contemporary
| (fictionalized) account of anarchist activism in late 19th-
| century Britain and I found it to be a fascinating description of
| fanaticism.
| l0b0 wrote:
| *The Devil's Dictionary[1] by Ambrose Bierce, a collection of
| sarcastic definitions, some of which are still funny today:
|
| > LOGIC, n. The art of thinking and reasoning in strict
| accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human
| misunderstanding.
|
| > SELF-EVIDENT, adj. Evident to one's self and to nobody else.
|
| [1] http://thedevilsdictionary.com/
| yourcelf wrote:
| Radio Gaga: A Mixtape for the End of Humanity, by Stefani
| Bulsara.
|
| An off-kilter, hilarious, inventive, and cutting apocalyptic sci
| fi novel about pop music. Writing style is like Douglas Adams
| meets Tom Robbins, through the lens of Top 40 radio and tabloids.
|
| https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781733712569
| jeromebaek wrote:
| the economy of literature, marc shell. it gives you a semiotics
| of money, a way of understanding money qualitatively. it has been
| 100x more valuable than any economics textbook.
| antoncohen wrote:
| The Union Station (EarthCent Ambassador) series by E. M.
| Foner[1]. They are fun lighthearted sci-fi about the characters
| and their lives. But under the lighthearted fun hides thought
| provoking commentary on society and people. The books are
| included with Kindle Unlimited so if you are a member of that you
| can read the books at no additional cost.
|
| [1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00K4I391A
| kevinali1 wrote:
| Financier: The biography of Andre Meyer by Cary Reich. The book
| goes into the beginnings and psychology of one of the most
| important investment bankers of the 20th century. It also goes
| into great detail of the toxic nature of banking and the Genesis
| of complexity in modern dealmaking.
| alephx wrote:
| Science, Politics and Gnosticism: Two essays by Eric Voegelin,
| https://www.amazon.com/Science-Politics-Gnosticism-Two-Essay...
|
| I found it to be a very interesting and deep take on the
| philosophical and historical origins of many contemporary
| political currents.
|
| The Road to Serfdom, by F. Hayek, a liberal economist.
|
| I found it very well written, amusing and even hilarious in how
| even in the 1940's supporters of communism and progressives where
| making the same kind of arguments that are made today. Hayek
| needless to say, deals brilliantly with these. As relevant today
| as when written. I find its ideas resonate a lot when thinking
| about how systems of all kind come to be and function.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| The Uneasy Case for Progressive Taxation
|
| If you think it's "obvious" that progressive taxes are
| better/worse than flat taxes this is an excellent look at the
| evidence which may make you less confident.
| tzs wrote:
| If instead of doing one tax to cover your whole budget, you do
| it is separate taxes for each item applied serially [1], and
| each of those taxes is a flat rate tax [2] that applies to
| income above a base amount [3], so that you are paying
| thousands of separate taxes, each with a very low flat rate,
| then when you look at the net result it is equivalent to a
| progressive bracket system with a lot of narrow brackets.
|
| That probably says something interesting about the relationship
| of flat rate tax systems (as usually proposed) and progressive
| rate tax systems, although I'm not sure what.
|
| [1] What I mean by "applied serially" is you take you income,
| and apply the first tax. Your income minus the tax amount
| becomes the income for the second tax, and so on.
|
| [2] I say "flat rate" rather than simply "flat" because almost
| no one ever actually proposes a flat tax, which would be the
| same tax amount regardless of income.
|
| [3] ...which makes it not really a flat rate, but rather a
| progressive tax with two brackets. I think that every serious
| "flat" tax proposal I've seen has been this way, so that's what
| I'm using.
| pascalxus wrote:
| I just recently read, "Harry Potter A Sorcerers stone". I must
| say, it's really good.
| abtinf wrote:
| Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology has radically changed my
| view of almost everything, including software development. I'm
| able to cut through a lot of controversial issues by using its
| methods to ask incisive questions.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Objectivist-Epistemology...
| 45ure wrote:
| Aquarium by Viktor Suvorov.
|
| _The "Aquarium" of the title is the nickname given to GRU
| headquarters in Moscow by those who work there. "What sort of
| fish are there swimming there?" asks Suvorov of his boss when he
| learns about it. "There's only one kind there--piranhas."_ -
| Wikipedia.
|
| Book:
| https://archive.org/details/ViktorSuvorovAquariumTheCareerAn...
| ttctciyf wrote:
| Nice!
|
| My "best unknown" in the espionage topic would be Gordon
| Winter's _Inside BOSS_ [1] which tells of the author's stint in
| the employ of South African intelligence during the apartheid
| era.
|
| Sample passage:
|
| > I asked [Intel chief] H. J. van den Bergh how on earth
| British intelligence could obtain all the names of people who
| voted Communist in British elections. Surely the vote was
| secret. H J laughed and said any voter attending a polling
| station automatically had his name checked on the voters' roll,
| which naturally gave his residential address. And when he voted
| he was given a numbered counterfoil. His voters' roll number
| was written on the counterfoil stub which bore the same number.
|
| > 'It is therefore possible for the voting slip to be related
| to the counterfoil stub, which then gives the man's number on
| the voters' roll,' explained Van Den Bergh.
|
| > 'But all the voting slips are locked in big black metal boxes
| and locked away after the elections, so how do British
| intelligence get to them?'
|
| > H. J. van den Bergh shook his head sadly as if he was sorry I
| was such a simpleton.
|
| > 'That's the answer the British authorities will always give
| if anyone claims that ballot papers are secretly scrutinized.
| But let me ask you some very simple questions. First, you agree
| that the voting slips are placed in boxes and then filed away
| in some official building somewhere?'
|
| > 'Yes,' I answered.
|
| > 'And presumably those boxes are placed in a room?'
|
| > 'Yes.'
|
| > 'Does that room have a door?'
|
| > 'Yes, I suppose so.'
|
| > 'Does the door have a lock?'
|
| > 'I should imagine so.'
|
| > 'Is there a key to that lock?'
|
| > 'Yes, there must be.'
|
| > 'Then,' said H. J. van den Bergh triumphantly, 'somebody must
| look after the key.'
|
| > Only then did I realize what he was getting at.
|
| 1: https://archive.org/details/INSIDEBOSS/page/n5
| Merrill wrote:
| MEGAMISTAKES: Forecasting and the Myth of Rapid Technological
| Change by Steven P Schnaars.
|
| From '89, somewhat dated now, but still interesting.
| imgabe wrote:
| Twistor and Einstein's Bridge. Both excellent hard sci-fi novels
| by John Cramer, who's also a working physicist.
| hackerbeat wrote:
| Dirty Havana Trilogy by Pedro Juan Gutierrez - About the
| hardships of making ends meet in Cuba.
| killjoywashere wrote:
| Not exactly a book, _Assessing and Strengthening the
| Manufacturing and Defense Industrial Base and Supply Chain
| Resiliency of the United States_. (1)
|
| It raises some concerns that folks in this forum are probably
| interested in and could do something about. Things like forcing
| US companies doing business in China to transfer dual-use
| technologies, the lack of US suppliers for certain goods, like
| high tenacity polyester fiber, domestic production of PCBs,
| specialized glass for NVG systems, a shortage of software
| engineers, but also shortages in skilled trades, like welders.
|
| The dominance of the Chinese in certain critical industries is
| also problematic. For example one manufacturer produces 70% of
| small drones, which then creates secondary attack surfaces, like
| lack of security on the drone's link. Another is the Chinese
| takeover of solar panel manufacturing, which creates a potential
| energy security risk.
|
| For those skeptical of any report from the current
| administration, I would refer you to Ash Carter's _Inside the
| Five-Sided Box_ (2) which raises many of the same issues.
|
| (1)
| https://media.defense.gov/2018/Oct/05/2002048904/-1/-1/1/ASS...
|
| (2) https://www.amazon.com/Inside-Five-Sided-Box-Lifetime-
| Leader...
| alexashka wrote:
| I'm reading through Behave by Robert M. Sapolsky.
|
| It's a science based look at human behaviour. It's not light
| reading but it's not a textbook either, it's in-between.
|
| This book will remain unknown just by the virtue of it's weight -
| this is not 'how to feel better by meditating 10 minutes a day'
| pop psychology pamphlet, this will take some work to get through
| :)
| yesenadam wrote:
| I watched his 25-part Biology of Human Behavior course years
| ago, it's the best course I've ever done. Maybe covers a lot of
| the same ground. He's a great lecturer!
|
| Lecture I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA
| embit wrote:
| Lost in Mongolia: Rafting the World's Last Unchallenged River By
| Colin Angus
| fao_ wrote:
| I Am A Strange Loop by Hofstadter. The book he wrote many years
| before, GEB, is well-known. However, he was frustrated that so
| many people didn't get what he was trying to convey, so he took
| the central point and distilled it into another book. It's a
| really, really good read.
| corysama wrote:
| Even with GEB he had to add a "This is the central point: __
| __*" to a preface in a later printing.
| Rerarom wrote:
| His other non-GEB books are cool. I especially enjoyed _Fluid
| Concepts and Creative Analogies_.
| mam2 wrote:
| If you speak french only because there is sadly no english
| version :( :
|
| https://www.amazon.co.uk/Flash-Grand-Voyage-Ldp-Litterature/...
| kseistrup wrote:
| Bill Harvey: Mind Magic [?]
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3573948-mind-magic
|
| Make sure you get one of the older editions with mind drills in
| it.
| johncoltrane wrote:
| _When Prophecy Fails. A Social and Psychological Study of a
| Modern Group that Predicted the Destruction of the World_ by Leon
| Festinger, Hank Riecken, and Stanley Schachter. I have no idea if
| it's popular or not but it certainly is fascinating.
|
| A small cult is growing around a woman who claims that the world
| will end at a specific date and that some will be saved in a
| specific way. When the date comes and there's neither end of the
| world nor saving, how will the group react?
| monkeycantype wrote:
| This book is my go to citation on agile as a Multi Level
| Marketing culture
| gargarplex wrote:
| Hopefully this is not a submarine for Scribd- the only location
| where I could legally find a pdf! :). The library system appears
| to have copies as well. I've always wanted to really learn music
| theory, but it's gonna have to wait til I really learn Leetcode
| algos, my primary goal for this year.
|
| My contribution:
|
| Richard Dawkins called Julian Jaynes's 1976 book, _The Origin of
| Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind_ , "either
| complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius"
| bogoman wrote:
| Haha, no, though it would have been an impressive submarine. I
| have a low quality copy I could share. If you do happen to go
| through the book and have questions/want to discuss it with
| someone, feel free to contact me! my twitter is in the profile.
| hogFeast wrote:
| Engines that move markets by Alisdair Nairn
| arikr wrote:
| How to get lucky by Gunther. Based on the premise that luck is
| very useful for getting what you want, and that there are very
| practical techniques you can follow for generating results that
| look like "luck". Absolutely excellent book.
| idlewords wrote:
| "Light and Color in the Outdoors" by Marcel Minnaert. The book
| goes into the physics of a lot of outdoor phenomena; you will be
| amazed at the things you never noticed or thought about before
| reading it.
|
| "The History and Social Influence of the Potato" is a pretty good
| time.
|
| "Politics of Qat: The Role of a Drug in Ruling Yemen" may sound
| way too niche, but it's fascinating as a study of transportation
| in a drug economy. Qat is a perishable leaf (like salad) and the
| politics of the entire region depend on who can more reliably
| deliver it to gunmen.
| pixelpoet wrote:
| Funny coincidence, I bought the Minnaert book recently!
| Especially as a rendering engineer, it's absolutely fantastic.
| abstrakraft wrote:
| Any comments on the cheaper, earlier edition printed by Dover
| as "The Nature of Light and Colour in the Open Air"? Is the
| later edition worth the higher price?
| chubot wrote:
| I just saw the Potato book mentioned last night in _Botany of
| Desire_ by Michael Pollan :) I had no idea that "potato vs.
| wheat" was a "class" issue in Europe, with potatoes coming from
| the Americas, but it makes a lot of sense.
|
| In general Pollan references a lot of great work in all of his
| books. If anyone wants to find some stuff to read his books are
| a good first stop.
| mjklin wrote:
| _The Priceless Gift_ by Cornelius Hirschberg, a very down-to-
| earth book by a man who gave himself an education by reading
| books on the New York subway. Although a bit dated, it includes
| great recommendations on how and what to read to become a widely
| read and curious person. Very motivating too!
| heyhouletsgo wrote:
| It sounds great by your description. Unfortunately I couldn't
| find any version online, so far. I got interested because I
| have a pretty significant commute now, that I use to read
| books. Would be interested in what he recommends!
| lcall wrote:
| Very recently: Spillworthy, by Johanna Harness
| (https://www.amazon.com/Spillworthy-Johanna-
| Harness/dp/099138...).
|
| Might be targeted at a teen audience, but I enjoyed it very much,
| as relaxing, clean, light fiction that makes the reader want to
| be a better person while they enjoy themselves. Very thoughtful
| and enjoyable, hard to put down. Shows a hard situation be
| resolved, from the perspective of the youths involved, and I
| thought it shows a lot of kind thoughtfulness over many years, by
| the author. (Some years ago I knew the author's husband.)
| orloffm wrote:
| A Russian one - "Three Jews" by Muhin. Stupid title, but it's an
| incredible account of author's life and work at a steel plant in
| Soviet Union in 70-80s. Probably not translated, but highly
| recommended for all Russian speakers.
| rland wrote:
| Shipwrecks, by Akira Yoshimura. It's short, cold, meditative, and
| harsh. The author has won several awards in Japan but isn't
| widely known otherwise.
|
| I read all his other books (those that were translated) after it.
| arikr wrote:
| The married man sex life primer 2011 by Kay. Horrible title. Very
| useful book for me as a husband.
| heatherengland wrote:
| what did you find most useful about it?
| number6 wrote:
| He wrote a similar book called Mindfull Attraction Plan for
| none male audience.
| vikingcaffiene wrote:
| House of Leaves. I've literally never read anything like it.
| xwowsersx wrote:
| by Danielewski?
| cannam wrote:
| Your harmony book sets a high bar for obscurity! I'm sure many of
| us with an interest in harmony would like to know more - please
| tell us something about it.
|
| A book I am very fond of that I don't _think_ is widely known
| (though it 's not in the same league as your suggestion) is
| "Resisting the Virtual Life", a 1995 collection of essays on the
| theme of cyber-wariness published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City
| Lights imprint - more often associated with poetry.
|
| Also very obscure for a long time, though easily bought now:
| Mervyn Peake's self-illustrated children's book "Captain
| Slaughterboard Drops Anchor". From the author of Gormenghast, but
| frankly much better. Highly recommended.
| bogoman wrote:
| Yizhak Sadai, formerly head of the Academy of Music in Tel
| Aviv, was a brilliant teacher and philosopher. Many of the best
| musicians in Israel studied with him at some point during their
| career, even if for a brief period of time (As a recent
| example: Tom Oren, winner of the last Thelonious Monk Piano
| Competition, was his student for a year or so). I had the
| privilege to study with him for a year, and this book used to
| accompany our lessons.
|
| The book is a thorough explanation of western harmony in its
| very basic aspects, from first principles. It also includes
| criticism of other, more famous music theory books, which is
| very interesting. One thing I love about it is how every
| theoretical concept comes first from what is perceived (hence
| "phenomenological"). A brief example of that is how some
| chords, which look like dominant chords if you look only on
| their notes, are sometime subdominant chords, because of the
| context in which they are played.
|
| Some quotes:
|
| On the approach of the book: "The conventional analytic
| approach as taught in academies is based primarily upon the
| depiction of the WRITTEN content of a composition by means of
| symbols and concepts inherent to the accepted analytic code.
| This analysis however, which describes mainly what is SEEN,
| does not always succeed in describing what is HEARD - the
| perceptual musical essence"
|
| His definition of tonality which I loved so much that I had to
| memorise it: "Tonality constitutes the organisation of a given
| number of tones in a manner which creates among them
| differences of kinetic potential."
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