This awesome comic explains gravitational waves and the amazing experiment that detected/detects them. Einstein was right again!
Yours truly is quoted a couple of times about Twitter Fiction in Verizon Wireless Mobile Living. See “Telling a story, 140 characters at a time,” where a classic Nanoism story from 2013 also makes an appearance (#537).
You may not be familiar with P. T. Barnum, but you’d probably recognize the 19th century showman’s longstanding legacy: the Barnum & Bailey circus. In 1880, he also published the self-help/personal finance book, The Art of Money Getting; Or, Golden Rules for Making Money, which contains essentially everything you’ve ever read in a blog or book about the topic (in old timey English, for bonus points). The book is available for free on Kindle, but here are some of my favorite life lessons: (more…)
From Raffi Khatchadourian’s “The Doomsday Invention” in The New Yorker, a profile of philosopher of Nick Bostrom and discussion of the (highly dangerous) future of artificial intelligence:
He stopped and looked ahead. “What I want to avoid is to think from our parochial 2015 view—from my own limited life experience, my own limited brain—and super-confidentially postulate what is the best form for civilization a billion years from now, when you could have brains the size of planets and billion-year life spans. It seems unlikely that we will figure out some detailed blueprint for utopia. What if the great apes had asked whether they should evolve into Homo sapiens—pros and cons—and they had listed, on the pro side, ‘Oh, we could have a lot of bananas if we became human’? Well, we can have unlimited bananas now, but there is more to the human condition than that.”
Long, but well worth the read.
I sporadically post “best books” recommendations for medical topics, which if you’re reading this you’ve likely also noticed sometimes cover topics that I’m not in expert in and discuss books I haven’t actually read. This is my general methodology, for those curious:
- For specialties and niches, I typically get a first-round of book recommendations from people I trust in the specialty in question.
- I simultaneously scour the Internet for all relevant recs including reading through every thread I can find on various forums as well as the remainder the Internet.
- I then search through Amazon to find additional potential books and read all of the reviews for literally everything.
- I then read through at least a sample of each book on Amazon to get a feel for the organization, quality, depth, style, and other such factors. This also helps me corroborate other people’s opinions that I’ve been exposed to. You might be surprised how good that quick gestalt can be (I highly recommend it before you buy anything).
The potential downside to this method is that I am not necessarily a subject matter expert on every topic or every book that I recommend. I also definitely have not read each (or sometimes any) book cover to cover.
The positive side is that I’m not just one guy telling you my personal opinion about what I personally like; I’m instead building a cohesive viewpoint based on a foundation of broader public opinion, somewhat similar to the old-school Wirecutter or US News cars reviews. I’d like to think it’s refreshing to see a reasonable grouping of book recommendations that can be attributed to a single person. I am not an expert in or even a trainee in every field, but I know from the continued popularity of my medical school posts and initial forays that people find these types of recommendations helpful and a one-stop shop anxiolytic.
I could call the series “good books that will likely serve you well,” but that doesn’t have much of a ring to it. These “best books” of course aren’t necessarily really the best books. Or sometimes they are, but they still might not be the best books for you. Nonetheless, the goal of these posts is to provide you with a simple straightforward reasonable selection of books that you can read or “read” without remorse.
Marie Kondo’s The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up was arguably the biggest ‘self-help’ book of the year (i.e. NYTimes #1 bestseller). The book’s central premise is something that I think everyone deep down knows and that that my wife and I rediscovered for ourselves while preparing for the birth of our first child. Organizational schemas are great, but nothing you do makes a difference if you have too much stuff. Doesn’t matter how you organize if there are more things that you can physically see or get to.
The KonMari method states that if something doesn’t spark joy, then you get rid of it. It doesn’t matter if it’s in perfect shape or if you bought it with every intention of wearing it but never did. The better condition it is, the happier you will make someone else who will have a chance to use it if you don’t need it.1
One of my favorite parts of the book is how she describes a better way to fold your clothing. Her method is one that is so awesome and simple that I can’t believe it’s not simply the default. It’s genius, and it essentially boils down to folding your clothing down tighter than you would otherwise expect, and in doing so, you can arrange your clothing almost like book shelf so that you can see everything contained within the drawer instead of having stacks where the items on the bottom never get worn because they never get seen. Goop has the illustrated guide here.
Oliver Sacks, writer of “neurological novels” and one of my favorite authors, died on August 30 from metastatic ocular melanoma. His last three essays are now available, “Sabbath” in the New York Times, “Urge” in the New York Review of Books, and “Filter Fish” in the New Yorker.
Longform has links to 11 of his best essays, including the titular works from An Anthropologist on Mars and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. He was a titan of medical and compassionate writing.
The Washington Post recently ran “Why eating late at night may be particularly bad for you and your diet,” which discusses emerging research that after dinner snacking is bad for you. The thrust of the article is that calories consumed at night result in more weight gain than the same number of calories consumed earlier in the day. Likewise, even on a calorie-controlled weight loss diet, subjects lost more weight if they didn’t eat before bed. Proposed reasons are multi-factorial, of course.
There sorts of data always make for great popular science reading. If making this one change is the first step someone can use to finally make a positive impact in their health, that’s great. But otherwise, it’s just another in the ever-growing list of “things we do wrong” including eating processed food, salt, gluten, not enough protein, “GMO,” insufficiently paleo, blah blah blah. How does a normal person know when to start? Especially when as a country we conflate eating “healthy” with losing weight, and most of the discussion in the media and online is total BS.2 Eating healthy is great. Being a healthy weight is great. Exercise is also independently great. These things don’t necessarily go together.
I for one would probably never change my gluttonous meal to be lunch instead of dinner.2 And the ability to maintain a change is much more important than the power of the change itself.
Prime Day is here, and while Wal-Mart is copying the idea, I think only Amazon can make a national news story by unilaterally promoting a sale. And while good discounts on some Kindles, other miscellany, and fabled “lightning” deals every 10 minutes may generate some revenue, I have no doubt that the main thrust of the promotion is to drive new Prime memberships. After all, you can still join Prime and experience the fun with a free 30-day trial (or Amazon Student for 6 months free with a .edu address), and Amazon believes that once you go Prime, you never go back.
