Five stars: highly recommended (in order of recommendation)

Category: Broad reading | Life sciences | Popular science

Why We Get Sick: Chinese edition cover

Review: Excellent popular science, looking at medicine and biology from an evolutionary/Darwinian perspective and proposing meaningful conjectures and questions. The evolutionary bugs in the human eye, respiratory tract and esophagus are classics; not long ago I saw someone on Zhihu use them to argue against intelligent design. More than twenty years have passed since the first English edition in 1994, and I am quite interested in what related developments evolutionary biology has seen since. It is even more engaging alongside knowledge of genetic programming and genetic engineering—two entirely different fields despite both being “genetic”—or when you happen to be ill yourself. Just kidding.

Appendix: excerpts from the whole book.

Four stars: good (most recent reading first)

Review: Covers some common data mining algorithms. The title seems somewhat misleading next to the content, unless every dataset counts as “collective.” It skims over the various algorithms. This time I used it as an index from which to search and consolidate some basic knowledge. Some application scenarios and details are well explained, but without the corresponding technical terms or references, beginners struggle to go deeper. I didn't really get into the code and experiments, except for the implementation in the genetic programming chapter. I gained a lot from the random optimization chapter: cost functions, representations of constrained problems, and similar solutions yielding similar results.

  • Kokoro Fiction | Novel | Japan

Review: One review put it well: indecision and ambiguity come from distrust of oneself and others, eventually leading people to hand their fate over to the external world.

Review: Very good ideas, some exactly the same as points in the articles I am writing… One star off for American-style verbosity, but it did provide some material for my writing.

Appendix: excerpts.

  • Dune Fiction | Novel | Science fiction

Review: Interesting worldbuilding, with a strong legendary quality.

Review: Second reading. Tang Nuo now does seem a little verbose and showy with his erudition. But what he wants to express is complex; perhaps redundancy and a network of connections are the only way to approach precision? One star off, but still worth reading.

Appendix: excerpts.

Review: Aligns with some of my thoughts and practices. Improvisation is relaxed concentration. In the author's account, it includes both flow itself and ways to increase the chance of entering flow. Even blind optimism is better than never starting. Putting doing before thinking is something I hope to manage. The view that humor has little value in itself is also worth thinking about.

Appendix: excerpts.

Review: Jin Yong's plotting is certainly solid, although sometimes rather rambling. The seven wives feel assigned by decree; in the last dozen or so chapters they become complete extras. Like the Sun Moon Holy Cult, the Mystic Dragon Cult has traces of its real-world model that perceptive readers should recognize. The male chauvinism remains severe. The best emotional writing may actually be between Wei Xiaobao and Kangxi.

Review: After three years writing Python, this is still the first book about it I have finished, and I learned from it. At my current level of understanding, the book reads smoothly and gets to the essentials. Everything it introduces is explained thoroughly, with clear definitions, continuity between concepts, and the author's practical experience and deep understanding. Each chapter ends with exercises and debugging advice. Even someone who has never encountered a programming language could start writing code with this book.

Review: A very good introduction to early complex network research and its applications. Without background knowledge, you can enjoy the spectacle; with it, the book serves as a simple survey. One gain is seeing some of the early history of complex networks, particularly the move from static random graphs to growth mechanisms—nodes appearing and disappearing—plus preferential linking. It also helped me appreciate the widespread presence of complex networks and the discovery of power laws in all kinds of networks. Any complex system may well have a network behind it. The spread and treatment of AIDS and systems of gene–protein interactions are quite interesting. The Achilles' heel section is also fascinating: scale-free networks governed by power laws withstand random attacks or failures well, but targeted attacks on hubs overwhelm them. Which end of the dice lands on an unimportant or important node becomes critical. But what if a hub's interior is itself a fairly decentralized subnetwork, as behind Google.com? Although some passages become cluttered with too many citations, overall this is a very good book for popular science or an introduction to research.

Appendix: excerpts.

Review: A little scattered, with too much unnecessary peripheral material and abrupt turns in much of the main plot. The good parts include learning swordsmanship, Plum Manor, and portions of the relationships with the three women. Yang Lianting has a big beard, haha.

Review: A good book. For an outsider like me, it offered a reasonably systematic understanding of film scripts and stories, helping me appreciate others' work and examine my own ideas.

Appendix: excerpts.

Roundup

  • Some simple figures:
  • Overall: approximately 107.5 hours, averaging 9.0 hours a month; 18 books.
  • Categories: fiction 6; broad reading 10; intensive study 2.
  • Ratings: five stars/highly recommended 1; four stars/recommended 11; three stars/all right 6.
  • Progress: the earlier plan to finish 2.5 books a month would mean 30 in a year. Sigh. Eighteen just scraped a passing grade. One unfinished book of intensive study that I should continue is Deep Learning; so far I have finished only the first part.
  • New goals for 2019: reach 200 hours of reading, complete at least five books of intensive study, keep broad reading at ten or more, and try to produce more writing.

Compiled from the books and short reviews I recorded on Douban. Book links and cover images are from Douban; all Douban links on this page are in Chinese. English renderings accompanying untranslated Chinese titles are descriptive.