Finished reading: Once Upon an Algorithm by Martin Erwig 📚 I liked the premise of this book - algorithms taught with examples from classic children’s tales. I didn’t finish it, however - it was just too wordy (I got about halfway through). In fairness, I started with a very similar …
Finished reading: The Book of Why by Judea Pearl 📚 This was the topic of a book club at work but I’m really glad I read it. My scepticism going in was probably typical of someone not all that familiar with causal analysis, believing that we can just throw all the variables at a regression …
Finished reading: The Self-Taught Computer Scientist by Cory Althoff 📚 This is the book I wish I’d read before doing Advent of Code - a full blog post on that will eventually be on my main blog; I finished both parts of all 25 exercises in (strictly) base R, and am more than halfway through …
Finished reading: Living in Data by Jer Thorp 📚 (previously) As a data person, this book spoke to me deeply. As someone who has worked with collected data many times, it offered a fresh insight into understanding nuances of data, where it has come from, how it is never collected without human …
Finished reading: The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande 📚 I honestly didn’t know what I was getting when I placed a library hold on this book - a recommendation from somewhere, but I assumed it was about something like how to write good checklists or manage priorities. This is not that book. …
Finished reading: Our Data, Ourselves by Jacqueline D. Lipton 📚 I abandoned this book after a few chapters. I wasn’t sure how much I really wanted to read a book about technology and data where the author claims on page 10 that “RFID can be monitored at a distance. You do not need a …
Currently reading: Living in Data by Jer Thorp 📚 I picked this up browsing shelves in a (particularly beautiful) brick and mortar book store thanks to a voucher I received for a journal article review. So far I’m loving it. This was my first introduction to Johanna Drucker’s framing of …
Finished reading: Loonshots by Safi Bahcall 📚 This was recommended by someone at work and this time I’m very glad they did. The author carefully details the history of some of the most significant breakthroughs and, as a physicist, isn’t shy with the specifics. It was staggering to me at …
I’m wrapping a (stateless, hit-every-time) REST API and my design was challenged with an alternative opinion - which is great! I get to have a more serious think about design and what might work best. I have an internal function which does the actual talking to the server, e.g. .get_from_API() …
Finished reading: Neuromancer by William Gibson 📚 I was recommended this on one of the socials and figured it was about time to get around to it. As the ‘first’ “cyber” sci-fi book it was well-written and despite being conservative in its predictions for the future, many of …
Finished reading: Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action by Simon Sinek I posted about this one after a few chapters because it started to get on my nerves. I think I hate-finished it. The author makes some more questionable connections (a bow needs to pulled away from the …
Finished reading: Sea of Tranquility: A novel by Emily St. John Mandel I don’t know if it was timely or unfortunate that I read this book so close to The End of Eternity - both had very similar themes, but Asimov is just so good at weaving the threads together into an engrossing story. I think …
Finished reading: 12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next by Jeanette Winterson My library had several copies of this on the shelf, so I assumed it was popular or new. The latter is certainly true (2021). This is a collection of short essays detailing the journey from the first analytical …
Finished reading: The New Childhood: Raising Kids to Thrive in a Connected World by Jordan Shapiro Another break from biology, certainly more towards psychology. This one I found randomly (promoted) at the library and given that it’s my kids' school holidays at the moment and they’re …
Finished reading: The End of Eternity by Isaac Asimov Easily one of the greatest science fiction writers of all time, and it’s easy to see why. I’ve loved many of them, but I haven’t read anywhere near all of Asimov’s works. I saw this one on a shelf and figured it would be a …
Currently reading: Start With Why by Simon Sinek I was recommended this book by someone whose opinion I hold in high regard, but so far I’m not enjoying this book. Not necessarily for the material - I think I can appreciate the points being made about having a defined ‘why’ behind …
Finished reading: The Cell by Joshua Z. Rappoport 📚 I enjoyed this book - it started with a good overview of the cellular biology but did move on to more organ-based systems, which was perfect for me. The explanations of the lab and microscopy techniques, advancements, innovations, and discoveries …
Currently reading: The Cell: Discovering the Microscopic World that Determines our Health, our Consciousness, and our Future by Joshua Z. Rappoport Continuing with the technical theme, so far this is a deep dive into the very specific mechanisms of molecular biology without (yet) too much emphasis …
Life Unfolding: How the Human Body Creates Itself by Jamie A. Davies How a single cell develops into a full human, and a lot of the molecular biology along the way. I thoroughly enjoyed this read - every chapter had highly interesting points about the particular pathways involved and how the cells …
(backlog from March 2022) Life from an RNA World: The Ancestor Within by Michael Yarus This was a nice tour of how the complex mechanisms of DNA replication came to be, and how the process works to produce proteins and phenotypes. This was the first time I really felt I understood the difference …
I love small projects for helping me learn, especially programming. I’m still learning Julia, and have found myself wanting more “little silly things” I can digest and learn from. A lot of the projects I see in Julia are big mathematical models, and I’m just not ready to dive …
As part of what will hopefully become a larger post, I’m interested in finding an R way to achieve the following: given an n x n matrix of zeroes with a single non-zero element of some value v, fill the surrounding entries such that each other element is at most one less than those surrounding …
I’m still fairly new to Julia, even though I’ve been trying to learn it for a few years. It’s extremely powerful (fast, expressive, … whatever metric you want to use) but with that comes some complexity. I saw this post in my feed and it seemed like a great bite-sized chunk …
I like blogging, but in the spirit of lowering the resistance to getting posts out, I’ve started a micro blog jcarroll.xyz where I’ll capture shorter, less polished pieces and random thoughts / snippets. This is my first post, testing all the functionality. DNS might still take a little …