Review

Viking John Wick 2. Add in some divine wrestling matches and skyr. I’m in.

Great primer on the mechanics of literacy, not much surprising but better depth and tips for how to do something with the research findings to help your kids.

Hero worship, winner’s bias, and superficial journalist book all rolled into one. Got this book from the y-combinator startups book list, and I’m judging every founder in y-combinator for it. There was some useful advice, but had to wade through a sea of inspirational get-rich tiktok quotes to get there. ** 2.5 stars. ** ** 85th book of 2022 **

2.5 stars. Scattered and more surface level than I would have liked.

**Forgotten Scent of the Madeleine ** If time is the fading cognitive impression of lower entropy states, then The Order of Time is timeless. And by that, I mean it left no impression. Carlos Rovelli is an expert in quantum gravity even if * there has not yet been a theory of quantum gravity accepted by the scientific community or has obtained experimental support*. So, he writes popsci books with more literary references than math equations. This strategy (minus the literary references) worked for What is Real, and From Eternity to Here, but after finishing Order of Time I was hoping for more meat to the discussion of entropy or even the most cursory dealings with quantum waveforms to support and define his claim that time is an illusion. ...

Unfinished Business

Viking John Wick combined with Viking Golden Compass combined with Norse Military Vocabulary 101. Page turner.

** Divine Dark Night of the Soul ** I, too, would like a word with God on the eve of life’s most important battle. The Bhagavad Gita is one episode among many in the epic poem Mahabharata. In Gita, we find our hero Arjuna despairing at the impending carnage and seeking advice from his God companion Krishna. Through this dark night of the soul, the conversation meanders to many ethical and moral issues, resulting in the text becoming one of the holy scriptures of Hinduism. ...

** Gateway Drug Philosophy ** Most of us want to do the right thing most of the time, but outside of god, law, and politics, modern society offers little guidance on what that right thing is. Somewhere between virtue signaling and the gnawing truth that people are starving in Africa, it’s too easy to give up. The state of modern ethics doesn’t help, so How to Be Perfect offers an irreverent ethics 101 course with just enough distractions to keep a lay reader engaged. ...

** Ships Passing in the Night ** Between the adherents of rival moralities, there exists no court of appeal. If you want to learn about ethics, don’t start here. A Short History of Ethics is not a history in the sense that it tells the story about the interconnection of events in western civilization’s ethical timeline. Instead, it is a chronological critique of different ethical viewpoints, with a thesis that most ethical systems do not effectively interact. ...