Content here is by Michael Still, mikal@stillhq.com.
This is the textbook for a course I am doing at the moment. To be honest the book is kind of old and nothing special, but I read it so it gets at least a brief mention here. Overall the book is too dated to be particularly useful, and I find it hard to believe…
Another short and fun sci-fi read. Our favorite anxious and depressed murderbot is off trying to solve the mystery of why in fact he murdered all those nice people. Along the way he meets a mildly annoying but actually kind of friendly AI transport ship with a lot of unexplained capabilities. Definitely worth a couple…
While being a fairly transparent metaphor for refugees, this book is also an excellent read with a relatively believable premise. I especially like the ending, which I thought was quite unexpected. I don’t want to ruin any of this for anyone, but I really really enjoyed this book. Title: Children of Time Author: Adrian Tchaikovsky…
This is a book about common sense. Specifically, it’s about how when you’re told a fact it seems obvious — common sense — that it’s true. Interestingly, this can be the case even if that fact is in fact untrue. This is at least partially because common sense is mostly practical, that is it’s more…
This is yet another accidental purchase of a self-published book, although I think this one makes a lot of sense as a self published work. Writing a technical reference book isn’t a particularly lucrative pastime for most authors, and self publishing likely makes it more worthwhile than the traditional publisher route, especially if you can…
This book was a short but fun read. Sufficiently short in fact that perhaps it was a little over priced, but not outrageously so. It follows an adventure of a slightly rogue but generally nice cyborg SecUnit which has charmingly named itself MurderBot. That’s confusing, because said cyborg is too busy being depressed and anxious…
This book argues that technology, especially social media, has been deliberately engineered by Silicon Valley to be addictive, and that often there are detrimental impacts to the products we all use every day. That argument makes sense in that these products are measured by the amount of time they are used per user (and thus…
This book is an interesting read coming straight off the back of Human Origins. The book starts out by explaining the impact the invention of the plow had on humanity — it asserts that farmers being able to produce substantially more than they needed for their own subsistence was a driving factor in the creation…
In 1986, Clifford Stoll and his coworkers were frustrated by what they thought was a billing error of 75 cents in their monthly accounting. Suspecting a software bug, the new guy (Clifford) was put on to working out the error as a starter problem while he got familiar with the systems he was to manage……
I’ve owned this book since it was new in the year 2000, but it has sat on the shelf alone and unloved for at least 20 years. I think I did probably read it back then, but it pre-dates blogged notes about books like this one. However, with my new found interest in assembly language…