Literate Scientist

This is an encyclopedic work I bought in a local book shop and finally finished reading today. It took me a year to read from cover to cover and pages were falling out of the glue but I continued to read. Highly recommended for education and another view on human history. The review of Freud was enlightening to me because I didn’t know about the recent scholarship criticizing his work. In fact, I so liked this book that just bought it again in a hardcover version from Folio Society and start rereading it again soon.

Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud

The second encyclopedic book seems was written before the previous one but looks like the logical sequel to it. I’m starting reading it next week.

The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century

- Dmitry Vostokov @ LiterateScientist.com -

OpenTask plans to publish the extended and edited version of this blog as a book:

Literate Scientists and Their Books: An Independent Guide to Understanding Reality (ISBN: 978-1906717520)

- Dmitry Vostokov @ LiterateScientist.com -

I remember from my school days during Soviet Union times about pollution in dying capitalist societies. I came upon this book a few years ago while preparing for my environmental study assignment in University. Being curious about diverse reviews I bought this book. I started reading it a few months ago during my lunch time and I would recommend it to everyone to learn how to do statistics right.

The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World

- Dmitry Vostokov @ LiterateScientist.com -

This one I discovered last year and just finished reading. Interesting collection of articles written in the late 70’s and early 80’s about application of mathematics. My favourite were two articles about statistics and two articles about Husserl. The article about Kant biography was nice as well.

Discrete Thoughts

- Dmitry Vostokov @ LiterateScientist.com -

This one finished reading yesterday. I don’t want to repeat my review you can find here:

Review of Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

Just want to add that I carried it in my pocket during flight that evening and perhaps avoided black swans. Knowledge-driven superstition…

- Dmitry Vostokov @ LiterateScientist.com -

Just finished reading this book written by Steven Sloman. Very readable explanation about a causal modeling framework involving probability distributions and causal graphs, explanation of counterfactuals, logic of intervention, Markov equivalence, explanation discounting, causal structures and language, reasoning and decision making, the difference between observation and action. I became interested in causality from software troubleshooting and debugging perspective where we need to diagnose causes (defects) from symptoms (failures) and this book was a good introduction to me.

Causal Models: How People Think about the World and Its Alternatives

- Dmitry Vostokov @ LiterateScientist.com -