⭐⭐⭐⭐ Count Down by Swan
Full Title
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Count Down: How Our Modern World Is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development, and Imperiling the Future of the Human Race
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Authors
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Shanna H. Swan, Stacey Colino
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Year Published
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2021
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Date Read
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February 02, 2023
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Rating
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4/5 stars
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Scary stuff. Kind of tough to stomach when it seems like so much of the causes seem to be out of our control.
February 2, 2023
Book Reviews
⭐⭐⭐ Four Thousand Weeks by Burkeman
Full Title
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Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
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Authors
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Oliver Burkeman
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Year Published
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2021
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Date Read
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November 21, 2022
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Rating
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3/5 stars
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Useful reminder that productivity is not about getting more done, it’s about deciding what few things actually matter and being comfortable throwing the rest away. Makes me think of the concept of “
maintenance syndrome”; the gist reproduced below:
Constantly cleaning up, organizing files on our hard drive, running errands, putting out little fires and making inconsequential project todo lists: these are all symptoms of Maintenance Syndrome.
Maintenance tasks in our life and in our projects are usually very clear-cut. They seductively offer a clear problem and a clear solution. The structure-seeking part of or brain loves this and will endlessly procrastinate important ambiguous tasks in favour of taking these on.
When we are pulled into this game we usually think: “let me just check all these things off my list first, then I’ll do the hard thing”. There’s one big problem with that: there’s absolutely no end to these kinds of minor tasks in life. They will grow to take as much space as we have to offer — completely crowding out creation.
November 21, 2022
Book Reviews
⭐⭐⭐ Die with Zero by Perkins
Full Title
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Die with Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life
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Authors
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Bill Perkins
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Year Published
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2020
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Date Read
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November 11, 2022
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Rating
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3/5 stars
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Not bad. Feels a little too focused on the “any time you’re working you’re not living,” which is a concept that I really used to espouse maybe 5 years ago but have since mostly moved away from — one finds out after voluntarily not working that doing so brings with it its own set of trade-offs. Still, an interesting concept that was explored was general maximization of what you’re getting out of life, which doesn’t just boil down to spending money on the right things; it also might mean something like enhancing your memory of past good times. I hadn’t really considered this angle much before.
November 11, 2022
Book Reviews
⭐⭐ The Box by Levinson
Full Title
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The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger
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Authors
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Marc Levinson
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Year Published
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2006
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Date Read
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November 01, 2022
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Rating
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2/5 stars
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Kind of cool to learn about how containerization changed the game in the physical world, especially after seeing how impactful it’s been in the software world. However, the book spent too much time on regulations, standardization, etc. Wish it had rather focused on something like a case study of a business that it enabled. Probably would not recommend.
November 1, 2022
Book Reviews
⭐⭐⭐⭐ The Art of Gathering by Parker
Full Title
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The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters
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Authors
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Priya Parker
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Year Published
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2018
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Date Read
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July 15, 2022
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Rating
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4/5 stars
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Really great book. Not only has it changed the way that I think about how I’d like to host my own events, I think just as importantly it has really put how I perceive others’ efforts for events I attend in a new light. For example, many events that bring people together that may be essentially strangers use “icebreakers” and equivalent tools to try to create bonds between attendees. My prior perception of these kinds of events was pretty cynical, and typically I wouldn’t necessarily participate fully.
Parker helped me understand that these are just portions of the larger event, and if they go poorly (for example, if a big enough proportion of participants don’t buy-in), it may put the entirety of the experience at risk. We cannot simply isolate a pre-conference dinner from the conference itself, or a scavenger hunt portion of a team off-site from the talks that surround it.
It also helped me understand that not all people are welcome at all events. My mental model
previously was that, hey, why not invite this friend or that significant other. However, the specific participants of an event are probably the most important factor that determines how the event itself goes. We must take care to select this grouping carefully, lest we lose our control over where the event is going.
Had to really go back-and-forth between 4 and 5 stars. Highly recommended.
July 15, 2022
Book Reviews
⭐⭐⭐ Against the Gods by Bernstein
Full Title
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Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk
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Authors
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Peter L. Bernstein
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Year Published
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1998
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Date Read
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July 04, 2022
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Rating
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3/5 stars
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Some cool explorations here. It’s crazy how recent our thinking on risk and probability is — basically just starting in the Renaissance. Funny too how the first forays into this area came from trying to optimize gambling or as a result of playing with toy math problems, not really as a way to solve problems in economics, finance, or business (which I perceive to be today’s biggest users of the innovations discussed).
Bernstein does a good job of investigating reasons as to why even otherwise-advanced cultures earlier didn’t make the leap to probability, in particular focusing on the Greeks’ obsession with truth as derived from proofs rather than from experimentation. To come up with the concept of chance, you’re thinking less from first principles and moreso observing results of trials and trying to deduce what that might mean empirically. Of course, having a better numbering system than Roman numerals would have helped too. But even without such a numbering system the
conceptualization of risk and “this event is more probable than this other one” could have been possible.
I am only giving three stars because I found there to be too many threads going on at once across the length of the book. The number of individuals that are presented — ancient Greek philosophers, Renaissance mathematicians, economists from the 1900s… keeping the competing concepts from each of these individuals in my head proved to be difficult. Perhaps I can return to this book and get more value once I gain more familiarity with the character set.
Recommended in particular for folks with an existing good background in at least two of the three aforementioned groupings of individuals. Maybe a skip until then for others.
July 4, 2022
Book Reviews