therunnerman

I really like that this book exists: a lot of its suggestions are the opposite of conventional knowledge around startups. If you follow Signal vs Noise, their blog, as I do, it's less worthwhile to buy the book. Many of the chapters are already shared as blog posts.

Some of the advice could be stronger if it thought harder about the opposing argument, rather than dismissing it as greedy or thoughtless.

It's a solid book, but it's trying to be different things at different points. He starts with lots of biographical detail - too much, for my taste, since I don't particularly care whether Oppenheimer had a nice childhood. And then it transitions into a methodical explanation of the atomic experimentation and industry, and then finally into a decently robust argument for nuclear power. The first 80% is completely non-rhetorical, but you really feel it speed up and energize in the last 20%, and I was left wishing he had chosen one or the other.

This one... what an odd read. Definitely amongst the saddest books I've read, but near the end, I started thinking about [b:Der Fremde Freund / Drachenblut 1514969 Der Fremde Freund / Drachenblut Christoph Hein http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1184547651s/1514969.jpg 1506667] (in English), which resonated so much more deeply with me. Everyman's main character is at first almost relatable, but by the end of the book, there's a feeling that all of the sadness is entirely physical in nature - that he's caring so much about his body without any real plans of what to do with it, and without a shred of caring for other people. Roth plays with this in the last scene - in which the gravedigger is a far more relatable character, and someone who has a really different feeling on the passing of life.

I'm having a hard time deciding whether I liked this book less than the rest of Vonnegut's, or such time has passed since my Vonnegut phase that I wouldn't like others either anymore. Regardless, it didn't click: the ratio of insight to connecting narrative seemed off, such that the book felt like a disjointed series of one-liners.

Good, possibly awesome, surprisingly comic and lighthearted. It was an unusual pairing with reading The Immoralist, which talks about some of the same emotional states but makes an entirely different statement about them. Possibly this didn't have an epic impact only because its sort of cold matter-of-factness has been adopted by many authors with less mojo than Camus.

Kind of a ridiculous book. There are one or two good notes, like pointing out how people often offer rewards they themselves would enjoy without considering the other party.

But besides that, it's absurd: there's a serious anti-intellectual bent combined with crazy culture (offering suggestions of what to do at “the club”). Science and studies cited are loose, with guesstimated statistics. Although the observations about human nature - brutal realism of people as plastic, self-centered, and fragile creatures - are usually valid, their portrayal here make the follower of directions act without allowing people to rise above these expectations.

I think that this book really picked up in the end - for quite a while it seemed to be floating in details and personal conflict without enough personal description to make you care deeply.

The points about how the Longitude Act would transfer ownership of the design could have had a really interesting segue into how governments in general fund and use R&D - stuff like how France bought early photography technology and freely licensed it to its citizens - could have been fascinating.

Definitely worth reading, as one of the somewhat few books that not only talks about the fast-paced now-times but also potential ways to add some anchors and stability.

I would have loved to read more about the clock and previous thinking around time - the kairos/chronos distinction could be elaborated on a lot more and it would have been great.

It has drawbacks: nearly every reference to technology makes a bad bet. It quotes Jaron Lanier, one of the least likable and most unproductive voices in tech. And it often flows into a sort of ‘but let's raise some more questions' type writing which is somewhat disappointing in light of the fact that authors have enough time to think and say something.

Gleick's ‘Time Travel' includes one scene with a physicist rolling his eyes wearily, explaining that, yes, time travel is possible in the case of black holes, but that he would rather not talk about it. Unfortunately I felt like that guy when I was reading this book.

There are only so many times I can read that time is like ‘a river', or read a paragraph-length biography of someone's life in order to support their two sentences of historical contribution. The historical viewpoint, too, gives the story a sort of interrupted flow. Sure, it makes a lot of sense to ‘start from the beginning' but I wish that the physical approaches (time as a field, as a measure of entropy, as relative or absolute) were enumerated rather than unveiled one by one, deep in mostly unnecessary context.

This might sound like a review written by some guy who heard about time travel and wants a time machine as soon as possible, with as little interference as possible. And maybe I've worn out my nonfiction reading ability by overdosing on these mile-deep scientific/literary history books. But anyway, Time Travel seemed, well, like a lackluster use of my time, a book that tried to be too much in and of itself and that never really developed into anything or built on itself, perhaps like our thinking about time travel itself.

A pretty satisfying read: from a tech standpoint, most books that ‘dabble' in tech are littered with mistakes. Krebs knows his subject and explains it well. His prose isn't magical - sometimes the scene-setting and phrasing will lack grace, but it's never bad enough to overpower the well-constructed plotline and good background research.

This was a fascinating time in history, and the book starts out with some great anecdotes, but the writing is terrible. I understand that history authors need to manufacture dialogue, but what he comes up with is chock-full of unbelievable cliches. And the entire ‘war' is described only through the eyes of marketers, with everything else - the technological development, financial situation, view from the perspective of kids - elided.

Overall, not recommended. I hope someone writes a book about the same topic but spares us the dialogue.

This book is taking me forever to read.

But anyway, thoughts.

The author's neutrality towards God is incredibly impressive and quite a relief after a few of the works I've read lately. Although I do wish that there were more time spent on non-Abrahamic religions, there just aren't many other major monotheistic ones...

The account of the creation of the Trinity, which I feel like I've read at least four times in different places, really annoyed me... the unknowable paradox of the Trinity, which I had always thought (back in the dizzle) was something basic to Christianity, seems to be just the haphazard result of lots of stupid bickering. And then now that real Christian philosophy dies, we get an oversimplified, anthropomorphisized, really... backwards attempt to package all facets of God into Jesus. The fact is, belief in Jesus as divine and all-encompassing just isn't ‘original' or, really, fundamental to Jesus's teachings.

So says I, at least. I'll add more as I think more.