Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz is a deeply analytical, and yet hilarious, look at what Internet users tell us through their behaviors, as opposed to what they might directly tell us if we asked them. Stephens-Davidowitz digs deep into… Read More »
Reinventing American Healthcare is a pleasurable antidote to the ongoing misinformation about the ACA and the US healthcare system. In Part 1, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel describes in great detail how the American healthcare system has evolved into its current overly complex state, riddled with misaligned incentives. As has happened in other industries, well-intentioned changes resulted… Read More »
An American Sickness is a meticulously reported book on the troubled US healthcare industry. Rosenthal clearly lays out deeply compelling facts, but the book is much more than that. She weaves in a fantastic collection of her personal stories and those of many others regarding significant impacts on their lives from complex and unjustifiably high… Read More »
I recently stumbled upon a fix for a very annoying Evernote issue that caused no windows to display, not even the Preferences window. Hopefully, my solution below helps someone else. After changing my password on a work laptop running Sierra, I finally rebooted after about 10 days. After a long series of prompts indicating different… Read More »
A little over two years ago I was no longer able to log in to my WordPress install. This happened around the time Dreamhost moved my MySQL databases to a new host. I don’t know if those events were connected, but two years later I finally got the motivation to dive in and fix it.… Read More »
In Naked Statistics, Charles Whelan does a great, and often very funny, job of not only explaining statistics in very simple terms, but also explaining why you should understand statistics. Statistics can be used to simplify complex situations to a small set of indexes or metrics, many of which are meaningful only for relative comparisons.… Read More »
I like the first hand, get involved, stick my head into a large object style of science writing that characterizes Mind Wide Open. While perhaps not as personal as when Mary Roach had sex with her husband during a functional MRI in Bonk: the Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, I think Johnson deserves some… Read More »
Although it took two attempts separated by over a year for me to read the entirety of The Brewmaster’s Table, it was time very well spent. Garrett Oliver has written the best book I’ve read on beer and food pairing. In addition, it’s a fantastic introduction to how beer is made, including in depth discussions… Read More »
How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking by Jordan Ellenberg is a very funny and beautiful book about math and is my favorite book of the year so far. It’s very rare that when I finish a book, I have the urge to read it again. But, that’s how I felt after finishing How Not to Be Wrong,… Read More »
Despite celebrating Mardi Gras as the most important holiday for most of my life, I knew very little about the origin of New Orleans Carnival. Krewe filled in a lot of blanks, while still leaving some open, and creating even more. One big surprise for me is that the founders of New Orleans Carnival were mostly… Read More »