Rating: 8.2/10. A classic book written in 1962 and a very influential book about the sociology of science. Kuhn describes how science goes through brief periods of revolutions (or paradigm shifts), with longer quieter periods of “normal science” in between. A “paradigm” is a shared set of views in a scientific community about the general…
Category: Type
The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Rating: 7.7/10. Written in 1848 in German, this 40-page book is one of the most influential political books ever written. Marx and Engels see society as divided into two classes, the bourgeoisie (people who hire workers and sell the goods) and the proletariat (people who trade their labor for money). The bourgeoisie class arose out…
Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice
Rating: 7.0/10. [WARNING: SPOILERS!] A short post-apocalyptic novel set in an Ojibwe reservation in Northern Ontario, far from any big towns. The book starts with the power going out and the supply trucks no longer arrive. Only a few people know how to hunt and trap for food, the rest must subsist on a cache…
Construction Grammar and its Application to English by Martin Hilpert
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…
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)….
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…
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…
Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
Rating: 8.3/10. Novel spanning 7 generations, beginning in Ghana around 1760 and following two half-sisters and their family lines. The first sister Effia marries an Englishman in charge of the slave trade; this side of the family remains in Ghana. The other sister Esi is captured and sent on a ship to the Americas; this…
Linguistic Fundamentals for NLP II by Bender and Lascarides
Rating: 7.7/10. Overall an okay but not superb book. The parts about pragmatics were the least familiar to me, but the writing was poor as a lot of advanced concepts were introduced too quickly for me. Ch2: What is Meaning? One way to represent meaning is by assigning logical forms to sentences. Modal logic adds…
Fundamentals of Psycholinguistics by Fernandez and Cairns
Rating: 8.3/10. Ch1: Beginning Concepts Language has finite rules and symbols, but has infinite generation. Can think of language as a system to connect signals (acoustic, or words on a page) to meaning. This is done through phonology, morphology, syntax, etc. Linguistic competence is the knowledge of a language’s lexicon and grammar; linguistic performance is…
Four Views on Free Will by Kane, Fischer, Pereboom, and Vargas
Rating: 8.7/10. Ch1: Libertarianism (Robert Kane) Libertarianism is the view that the universe is not deterministic, and this is necessary for FW; also, FW is necessary for moral responsibility. It’s closest to laymen’s intuitions about FW. Compatibilists attack it in two ways: (1) by claiming that determinism doesn’t conflict with FW, and (2) that indeterminism…