Reading

If Taleb convinced me that Mathematics was beautiful philosophy, Ben Orlin is the one made me fall in love with it. Change is the Only Constant is beautiful and funny at the same time. It’s the story of Calculus over the ages and through domains. It weaves through life and time, through people, interesting and otherwise. And the way Ben tells it, it bears no resemblance to the dry crap that is taught in schools and colleges. It’s beautiful and wonderful, but not paramount and still subject to the vagaries and complexities of life and nature. ...

Really good book. Gave me a new set of mental models. Notes follow. “Focus on the process, not the luck” “Attention is a powerful mitigator to overconfidence: it forces you to constantly reevaluate your knowledge and your game plan, lest you become too tied to a certain course of action. And if you lose? Well, it allows you to admit when it’s actually your fault and not a bad beat” ...

In a world where Atomic Habits, did not exist, I’d call Tiny Habits the best book on behavioural change and habit building. Or maybe, I am biased because I read James Clear’s book first. Just like Cal Newport took Anders Ericsson’s work and ran with it; so did James build on BJ Fogg’s. Tiny Habits is lovely, has pretty tables and is a lovely engaging read. If you want to change your behaviour, you simply cannot go wrong by learning from the man, who has taught many of our modern day influencers like Ramit Sethi or Instagram founder, Mike Kreiger. ...

It’s an Audible Original. And it’s “free”, if you are an Audible member. A look into what Empire means today. It’s a series of engaging podcast episodes on what being a part of the British Empire meant/means for its subjects and its descendants, with stories from across the globe. My only quibble being they did not go deep enough. The people being interviewed are mostly, subject descendants of British origin (and not as I would expect, an actual survivor from the partition or someone here in India, or Somali coast or Sierra Leone.) ...

Just the two popular ones here … Dickens writes such fluid prose here, I would quote the whole book. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way–in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only. ...

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face … forever. That, probably is the quotable line, I found. The book’s terrible, and I hated the story (too bleak, too dystopian). The only reason for its popularity is that events in real life, are proving Orwell right.