fighting the lack of good ideas
I have read, and reread, Flatland several times. It’s subtitle, “A Romance of Many Dimensions”, would most likely have been surprising when it was originally published in 1884. Edwin A Abbot weaves a tale of exploration, heresy, discovery, enlightenment, geometry, and more in a mere 81 pages (in the copy I have). We are introduced…
I had high hopes for Martin Langfield’s book, The Secret Fire when I purchased it several months ago. The cover headline reads, “the world is under threat… from a weapon launched in 1944”. Sounded good. The back cover, likewise, sounded pretty good, too: Sotheby’s, London, 1936 A paper by Sir Isaac Newton is sold at…
Several years ago, Cliff Stoll’s amazing, true-life account of espionage and system administration in the 1980s was recommended to me. Mr Stoll started his professional life in astronomy, but, due to budget cuts at Lawrence Berkeley Lab, he moved into systems administration. Interspersed through the book are both political commentaries (he was after all at…
While I was living in Singapore, I read The Host by Stephanie Meyer (of Twilight fame). I had completed the Twilight series, and had, overall, enjoyed her writing style and was interested to see if she would be able to write a story that did not involve vampires, werewolves, and a bizarre romance between a…
I have now read a few items by Malcolm Gladwell, but so far have liked Outliers most. The premise is Mr Gladwell’s research that if you hit ~10000 hours working on something, you become fabulous. That, and being born right after an age cutoff (say, 3 Jan when the age cutoff is 31 Dec) will…
One of the [very] few novels I have ever reread is Without Remorse by Tom Clancy – and I’ve reread it several times: each time noticing something I hadn’t before, and each time reacting quite viscerally to how the book’s main character (I hesitate to call him a “hero”) goes about his desired objective. If…
Upon the recommendation of my friend Steven, I picked-up a cheap copy of Tim Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Body. My first observation is that Tim Ferriss is not one to necessarily edit his speech patterns for writing. While not rife with them, there are a fair number of vulgarities throughout the book – all of which…