Rating: 8.0/10. Book about recreational drugs, by a scientist from the UK. He was controversial and got fired from his position for claiming that alcohol is more harmful than heroin and crack cocaine. In this book, he describes various topics on different drugs, addiction, legalization, public health policy, etc. To a society, alcohol is by…
Category: Topics
TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking by Chris Anderson
Rating: 7.0/10. I got this book in an effort to improve my public speaking. It provides a bunch of tips on giving talks; the majority of it was either too vague to be useful or very obvious, but some of it was interesting, like the chapters on visuals and stage setup. The problem is this…
The End of Alzheimer’s by Dale Bredesen
Rating: 5.0/10. Book by Dr. Dale Bredesen’s protocol which he calls “ReCODE”, otherwise known as the “Bredesen Protocol”. He claims it can reverse Alzheimer’s, through a mixture of a lot of different lifestyle changes to sleep and diet patterns. This is certainly a miraculous claim, to have a cure for AD when so many others…
The Climate Casino by William Nordhaus
Rating: 9.8/10. This book is about climate change in the eyes of an economist, quite an in-depth treatment about a very complex and politicized topic, and one that’s commonly misunderstood. There are two extremes: conservatives deny it altogether and environmentalists warn about impeding catastrophe. The reality is somewhere in the middle: if we don’t do…
A History of Canada in Ten Maps by Adam Shoalts
Rating: 8.1/10. Canada has a long history of exploration: to European settlers, much of it was uncharted wilderness. This book presents a bunch of expeditions in history that uncovered Canada’s geography, with dramatic storytelling of adventure and danger. In some way, it resembles “The Hobbit”, where a band of brave adventurers venture into the unknown,…
Losing the Nobel Prize by Brian Keating
Rating: 8.0/10. A scientist arrives in Antarctica to make observations with a telescope, then gets a call that his dad is dying, and has to leave. This book has two intertwined parts: one telling the author’s story with cosmology and the second explaining problem in modern physics research and the Nobel prize. The title is…
Fifty Challenging Problems in Probability by Frederick Mosteller
Rating: 6.6/10. A classic book with a bunch of random problems in elementary probability (but not statistics). They are not very difficult, ranging from easy to moderate in difficulty. Some of them touch on significant ideas (like random walks, coupon collector problem, German tank problem), but the majority are quite arbitrary (maybe suitable for a…
Understanding Thermodynamics by H. C. Van Ness
Rating: 9.0/10. Pretty short, 100 page book that gives an intuitive introduction to various topics in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. It’s meant to be a supplementary text, not a main text, so some really important things were omitted, which was confusing to me, but that’s understandable. Some ideas I learned: Energy can’t really be defined…
Indian Horse by Richard Wagamese
Rating: 8.4/10. This book is about the life of an Ojibway Indian, living in northern Ontario and growing up in the 60s. When he was young, they sent him to a residential school where he was badly treated and not allowed to speak his own language. He found hockey and got really good at it,…
Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber
Rating: 6.9/10. A bullshit job is one where the worker feels does not contribute anything useful to society, but is obligated to pretend otherwise. About 40% of all jobs in the USA are bullshit by this definition. People feel unhappy in these jobs because they must pretend to work, yet ultimately the work is pointless,…
Man by Kim Thuy
Rating: 4.9/10. A short novel by a Vietnamese-Canadian refugee, it tells the story of a girl who immigrated from Vietnam to Montreal to escape the war, just like herself. Translated from French, the book is comprised of short chapters of a paragraph to a page each. There is a lot of poetic descriptions of scenery…
The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg
Rating: 7.7/10. Book that discusses various aspects of how habits work. On a high level, habits have three components: cue, routine, and reward. The cue is a set of conditions, such that you automatically perform a routine in order to get a reward. After a while, you will crave the reward when given the cue,…