Now this is out of the blue – I read “The notebook”. It was a gift and I surprisingly (to myself) liked it. If you plan to read one romantic love story a decade, this would be a good one to pick. Well since my sampling is essentially 1, this is not statistically significant recommendation!

This books goes into detail about why you should go with your gut reaction and not over-analyze situations. What I found most interesting in the book wasn’t really this concept. One of the chapters was devoted to how humans react under stress and the authors covers this notion of slowing down time and how during an emergency your heart rate goes up and you are simply doing instinctive reactions rather than thinking things through. Applied to police shootings this makes sense and he also discusses how repeated exposure to this type of stress can help slow down heart rate and thus help the brain react more logically. You can live your life very well without reading this book

Ray Kurzweil’s projection of the development of technology. He “defines” singularity as the point when the change in the pace of technology will be so rapid and deep that human life will be transformed forever. He presents a good historical and encyclopedic view of computing, biology, and philosophy/consciousness. His mile-high analysis of different fields and how they come together to influence civilization in general is quite impressive. The main theme in the book is to break down technology in terms of Genetics, Nano-technology, and Robotics and how the 3 integrate together to create the singularity. Again he presents a mile-high view on how strong-AI and nano-technology will augment humans and includes a rich set of scientific references for further reading. The treatment of consciousness and ethics I found kind of shallow and not very interesting though. A very useful read for anyone contemplating technology trends for the long term.

This book is by Alain de Botton. Discusses the primitives of how different architectures evoke different emotions. I found it very interesting. The writing is a bit too flowery and detailed for my liking, but perhaps apt for the material.  I found one interesting quote in it: “You think philosophy is difficult, but I tell you its nothing compared to the difficulty of being an architect”, said by Ludwig Wittgenstein after he tried building a house for his sister.

Charts the course of the Chandler project. Provides an amazingly encyclopedic view of software development. Scott Rosengberg gets through the Open Source software movement, intricacies of software development, good overview of Fred Brook’s mythical man month, and lots more. James Fallows calls this the successor to “Soul of the New Machine”. I don’t quite agree, but a worthy software and modern-day version of Soul of the New Machine. If Mythical-man month is too technical, this is a great replacement. I liked reading the book and it does a good job of explaining software engineering and the fundamentals behind writing good software.

After reading the book though I was left wondering what hope(if any) there is for the new constructs for parallel programming triggered by multi-core! If programming sequential programs is already so hard and is resulting in missed deadlines is there any hope in the real world for the added complexity of concurrent programs, notwithstanding the so-called atomicity and isolation benefits of transcations.

For people in software engineering this may be blase, but I found this observation (quoted in book) from Richard Gabriel, distinguished engineer at Sun, interesting.

“My view is that we should train developers the way we train creative people like poets and artists…what do people do when they’re being trained, for example, to get a master of fine arts in poetry? They study great works. Do we do that in software engineering?….No. You don’t look at the source code for great pieces of software…So you don’t study the literature of the thing you’re trying to build.”

This is a pretty bad book. It extends this hypothesis that the 60s counter-culture revolution shaped the modern computer industry. Creates all kinds of convoluted connection between LSD in the 60s, Vietnam war protests, ARPA, Engelbart etc. Seems like a concocted web more than anything else. The one insightful thing I found in the book was the observation that, all the intellectual heavyweights in the 60s and 70s were firmly behind a network centric computing paradigm, but for some reason when personal computing actually took off in the 80s PCs became stand-alone units primarily. The book didn’t explain why this occured – yet another weakness of the book.

This is to trigger me into reading atleast 2 non-technical books a month. Creating the tag books.