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Posted on April 26, 2016 @ 06:55:00 AM by Paul Meagher
Today I will continue my 1 month old tradition of reporting the books that I purchase each month to add to my home library. I usually purchase around 4 books a month. Because I have purchased them, they would appear to have my endorsement, however, I haven't fully read any of them. Without further ado, here is my April 2016 book order.
1. Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (2012) by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
I borrowed this book from the local library and decided I would need a copy to finish reading it and as a reference for ideas related to Antifragility. There are many valuable ideas for startups and investor in this book which I hope to blog about at some future date.
2. The Lucky Years: How to Thrive in the Brave New World of Health (2016) by David B. Agus.
I picked this up because of the testimonials from Howard Stern, Walter Issacson, Arianna Huffington, Al Gore, Larry Ellison, Ashton Kutcher, Michael Dell, etc.., and because it looked like a good resource to learn about some of the health advances that are happening. The first few pages on parabiosis sucked me in as well. It now makes me think about vampirism as science fiction rather than fantasy.
3. Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind (2015) by Andy Clark.
I purchased this book in part because I really liked Philip Tetlock's Superforcasters book and wanted to read more good discussion on uncertainty and prediction. I also purchased this book because I have read some of Andy Clark's previous books. He is an eloquent, clear, and leading thinker on issues at the frontiers of cognitive science and the philosophy of mind. Here is a sample paragraph I read this morning:
Brains like ours, this picture suggests, are predictive engines, constantly trying to guess at the structure and shape of the incoming sensory array. Such brains are incessantly pro-active, restlessly seeking to generate the sensory data for themselves using the incoming signal (in a surprising inversion of much traditional wisdom) mostly as a means of checking and correcting their best top-down guessing. Crucially, however, the shape and flow of all that inner guessing is flexibly modulated by changing estimations of the relative uncertainty of (hence our confidence in) different aspects of the incoming signal. The upshot is a dynamic, self-organizing system in which the inner (and outer) flow of information is constantly reconfigured according to the demands of the task and the changing details of the internal (interoceptively sensed) and external context. (~ p. 3)
The book was brought to my attention by a blog that I recently encountered and quite liked called Judgment and Decision Making: The State of the Art. We are reading some similar research so I took this as a recommendation to read the book.
4. The Oh She Glows Cookbook: Over 100 Vegan Recipes to Glow from the Inside Out (2014) by Angela Liddon.
I purchased this book as a mother's day gift for my wife. My wife is a vegan and likes recipe books so I figured this would be a good match. It is a top rated vegan cookbook on Amazon. The food photos look delicious. Makes me wonder why there are not more vegan restaurants. The fact that vegans cook under the constraint of not including certain food groups does not mean that they don't have alot of tastes and textures still at their disposal to produce delicious meals. It is a different palette of flavors, textures and colors to work from. The Thug Kitchen Cookbook is another popular vegan recipe book with lots of profanity to accompany the recipes.
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