Action Figure Daniel

Category: Reading

  • The Epic of Gilgamesh

    I was recently watching some old Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes and watched a highly acclaimed (though not particularly liked by me) episode called “Darmok”. In this episode, Darmok (the alien) is trying to teach Picard how to converse. Darmok’s people use stories to communicate everything which makes it very difficult for Picard to understand because the stories mean nothing to him. To overcome this, they tell each other cultural stories:

    I used to hate this episode… then Picard mentioned Gilgamesh. Then I read several versions of The Epic of Gilgamesh. Then I decided that this episode was alright.

  • “The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs” by Dougal Dixon

    Dixon’s book is a very tastefully illustrated and fairly modern book about dinosaurs.

    Interesting tidbit: T-Rex had long arms compared to many of its cousins.

  • “The Princeton Field Guide to Dinosaurs” by Gregory S Paul

    Dinosauria is such a fascinating subject. This book opens with a rather in-depth overview of what we know (and what we are guessing) about dinosaurs and attempts to catalog most of the better know dinosaurs.

    Interesting tidbit: We have actual preserved impressions of dinosaur skin (in “mummified” samples). In some case, we even know what colors it was.

  • “When Life Nearly Died” by Michael J Benton

    Benton does a fantastic job detailing the evolution of geology, paleontology and other related sciences over the past couple of centuries. The author actually details the two largest mass extinctions, though he gives extra coverage to the larger of the two (which is the namesake of the book).

    Interesting tidbit: most of our knowledge of these past two (of the five great extinction) has been put together over the past two decades. Sometimes I think that everything we know about the ‘dinosaurs’ we have known forever, but no, it is common for us to have only recently figured it out.

  • “The Signal and the Noise: Why so many predictions fail–but some don’t” by Nate Silver

    Though a long, dense read, Silver delves into the delightful world of data analysis with full force, sometimes barely slowing long enough to give a primer to the uninitiated. Topics range from the recent housing market crash to baseball. With each examination, Silver explain how data analysis function in the given field and work he has done in the field (if not to improve the analysis itself then to review the poor work of others).

    Interesting tidbit: Statistical analysis today is based mostly on the work of a man named Fisher who (in 1959) was arguing that there was no correlation between smoking and lung cancer.