Rating: 7.8/10. Ch1: Introducing Construction Grammar Traditionally, linguistic knowledge is thought of as having a lexicon and grammar component (the dictionary-and-grammar model), but construction grammar proposes that all linguistic knowledge is different constructions. The change is motivated by idiomatic expressions that are a sort of “appendix” in dictionaries. Yet we can’t represent idioms as fixed…
Author: Bai Li
The Left Behind by Robert Wuthnow
Rating: 8.0/10. Fairly short book, describing life in rural America and why they consistently vote Republican. Unlike the cities, rural Americans live in small and medium-sized communities with two characteristics: (1) it feels like everyone knows everyone else, and (2) it feels like everyone thinks the same way. Both of these are not literally true,…
Fundamentals of Data Visualization by Claus O. Wilke
Rating: 8.0/10. Part 1: From Data to Visualization All figures should be reproducible from data and code, should not have to make manual adjustments in Illustrator, or you will be dissuaded from updating them, or you may forget how they’re generated. Figures may be “ugly” (aesthetically unpleasing), “bad” (unclear and confusing), or “wrong” (objectively incorrect)….
Atomic Habits by James Clear
Rating: 6.5/10. Habits are actions that seem insignificant in the moment, but whose effects compound so that the long-term effect is significant. If you become 1% better every day, you will be very good after a year. The habit loop is subconscious and consists of four steps: cue, craving, response, and reward, thus you should…
Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo
Rating: 8.4/10. Written as though it were a novel, this book is actually a true story of several ordinary people in the Annawadi slum of Mumbai, whom the author observed in 2007-2011. The slum was built in 1991 on airport-owned land by migrant Tamil workers, and grew over the years to house several thousand people….
Die With Zero by Bill Perkins
Rating: 9.4/10. Summary This is a personal finance book, but runs contrary to most advice in this genre. A lot of people save a large chunk of their money, but never get around to spending it, and any money that’s still unused when you die is “wasted”, since it represents hours that you put in…
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by Anonymous
Rating: 8.7/10. Poem written in Middle English by an anonymous poet in the 14th century. It is about 2500 lines long (90 pages) and is part of the “alliterative revival” — similar to the style of Old English poetry like Beowulf, but in a regional dialect of Middle English. Unlike Chaucer who is from London,…
Syntax: A Generative Introduction by Andrew Carnie
Rating: 8.4/10. Ch1: Generative Grammar Generative syntax was first developed by Noam Chomsky, to try to capture what we know intuitively about syntax. Use scientific method to gather data, form hypotheses of rules, and check if they agree with native speaker judgements. Source of data can’t be solely from corpora, since these only have correct…
Explosive Growth by Cliff Lerner
Rating: 6.8/10. Book that claims to be about startup growth, but is really the story of the rise and fall of the author’s own company. After seeing his coworkers struggle to find dates online, he quit his job at Lehman Brothers to start an online dating company. In the early stages, especially since the product…
Eat the Buddha by Barbara Demick
Rating: 7.7/10. Summary Book by an American journalist, about the history of modern Tibet, from the 1950s until today. The book focuses on the Ngaba region in Sichuan, which was famous recently for its political activism and monks setting themselves on fire. Ngaba (also called Aba) is technically in the province of Sichuan, but most…
Dream of the Red Chamber (红楼梦) by Cao Xueqin
Rating: 7.2/10. One of the four great classic novels of Chinese literature, written in the 18th century. The novel has several English names: it is most commonly known as Dream of the Red Chamber, but also Story of the Stone. It spans 2500 pages over 5 volumes (David Hawkes’s translation), I got through about 200…
The Death and Life of the Great Lakes by Dan Egan
Rating: 8.0/10. The Great Lakes system contains about 20% of the world’s surface freshwater, but is “ecologically naive”: for thousands of years, its ecosystem has been isolated from the outside world as foreign fish can’t make it through the rapids and up Niagara Falls. This all changed in the 19th century as we opened several…