book

Rated Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle 10/10

Finished reading Pattern Recognition

Rated Hockey Abstract Presents... Stat Shot: The Ultimate Guide to Hockey Analytics 10/10

Rated Science and Development of Muscle Hypertrophy 8/10

Rated One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War 10/10

Finished reading Virtual Light

Finished reading I'm Glad My Mom Died

Wants to read Writing a C Compiler: Build a Real Programming Language from Scratch

Wants to read Astrophysics for People in a Hurry

Rated The Genius of Birds 8/10

A really interesting look at cognition in birds, which is much more complex than we used to think, and how it compares to our own. Many species of birds display kinds of intelligence that evolved separately from humans. Goes into concepts like tool use, the ways birdsong resembles language, social behavior and navigation. It makes me think about human intelligence more - how contingent it is evolutionarily and how many other animals display bits and pieces of it - planning, decision-making, memory and recognition, problem-solving. Intelligence is a funny, fuzzy concept and the lines between ours and other animals' is not clear-cut. Highly recommend this - it's a little long and sometimes technical but mostly pretty absorbing and enjoyable.

Wants to read Radio Free Albemuth

Finished reading Why the West Rules—for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future

Wants to read The Curse of Chalion

Wants to read The Partings of the Ways: Between Christianity and Judaism and Their Significance for the Character of Christianity

Wants to read The Art of the Scribe: Practical Projects Inspired by the Calligraphy and Illuminations of Medieval Manuscripts

Finished reading City of Blades

Rated Even Zombie Killers Get The Blues 8/10

An interesting take on the zombie apocalypse genre, especially for military buffs.

Wants to read 100 Things We've Lost to the Internet

Wants to read Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism

Wants to read The Originalism Trap: How Extremists Stole the Constitution and How We the People Can Take It Back

Wants to read Shaping Femininity: Foundation Garments, the Body and Women in Early Modern England

Wants to read House of Lilies: The Dynasty That Made Medieval France

Finished reading It

Rated The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness 10/10

This book is very tough to read but, I think, very important to read as well. The basic outline of her case is irrefutable - that the criminal justice system, and in particular the set of policies and practices that comprise the drug war, have a large-scale and pervasive effect of racial discrimination. <br/><br/>I am reasonably well-informed and pretty pessimistic about these issues, but even given that, I still found a lot of facts in here that are astonishing, and she lays out her case clearly and powerfully. <br/><br/>The things she talks about - politics, policing, the court system, employment, housing - all interlock to form what she calls "a set of structural arrangements that locks a racially distinct group into a subordinate political, social, and economic position" - and it's easy to see how it can become self-perpetuating, and how it's essentially unrelated to actual crime rates. <br/><br/>I highly recommend it; I think it's a really well-made argument and an important issue to confront.

Reading Excession