I didn’t find these books particularly inspiring or helpful. I had read them because I wanted to inspire myself to become successful again, after my abusive parents had destroyed my academic career by threatening my life and blaming me for making them angry and unhappy every time I did anything that an academic is expected to do.

The basic message of these books is that you’ll become successful if you pay attention to what you’re doing and keep doing the right things. The problem is that they presuppose that the reader is free to do so. I suspect that many people are unable to do what they want to with their lives because of the expectations or prohibitions of others, and usually those others are their parents. But the fact that there aren’t famous self-help books with titles like “How to Get Away with Doing What You Want To in Spite of Your Parents” means that most people facing that problem aren’t willing to confront it directly, opting instead to look for inspiration in self-help books that don’t even apply to their situation.

– davinci

Related posts:

1. A life in books

The Physics of Star Trek by Lawrence M. Krauss is geared more towards Star Trek fans than towards physicists. I remember thinking that it needed some equations, although I’m probably not the typical reader of this book. It has just the right depth to satisfy fans of the series, but not enough detail for anyone who is actually really interested in the (pseudo-)science behind the series’ plot devices. The take-home message of the book is that traveling to another galaxy is very, very impossible — at least according to our currently known laws of physics.

– davinci 11864

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1. Theoretical Physics by Joos and Freeman
2. Perimeter Scholars International — Master’s program in Theoretical Physics

This textbook was a gift from Dr. John Percy, professor of astronomy at the University of Toronto. I did some research on Be stars with Dr. Percy while I was in high school, and I had expressed to him my interest in studying astronomy and astrophysics in university.

Because it is an introductory textbook, it’s very glossy and elementary. I regret not having become more familiar with the materials in it, because it would have given me more things to discuss with my former colleagues who work at the Perimeter Institute, while I was there.

This textbook is apparently still in use. The latest edition appears to be the 11th edition. I have the 4th edition, so I’m seven editions out of date.

– davinci 11805

No related posts.

Fuzzy logic was pioneered by Dr. Lotfi Zadeh, whom I met when he gave a lecture at the University of Toronto.

I don’t have a very strong impression of McNeill and Freiberger’s book. I had read it a long time ago, and it’s just what you would expect. Nothing from it in particular stuck to my memory, except that while fuzzy logic caught on in Japan, it had completely failed to capture the public’s imagination in North America.

Kosko’s book was more memorable. I found it charming, but elementary, repetitive, and overly mystical. A reader is not likely to learn very much from it on the technical aspects of fuzzy logic, but will get a glimpse into the mind and personality of one of its proponents and practitioners.

– davinci 11788

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It was a very thoughtful and romantic gift. I didn’t want to keep it, and it would be wrong to sell it, so it’s now in the possession of a random stranger.

– davinci 11787

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This was my English reference dictionary throughout elementary school and high school. Nowadays, I mostly use a computer or online dictionary. But I do miss the experience of flipping through a paper dictionary to look up a definition, which can often result in learning new things when it opens to an unintended page, or your eyes fall on an unrelated item on the same page as the word you’re looking up.

When I was first learning English, I spent hours and hours flipping through this dictionary learning random words. I actually once tried to read it from beginning to end, but obviously couldn’t make it past more than a few pages before getting bored out of my mind.

Now I wish that I’d taken a picture of it from the side, because then it would show just how blackened the edges of the pages had become with use.

– davinci 11786

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The Turing programming language (named after Alan Turing) was developed at the University of Toronto as an introductory language for teaching computer programming at the high school level. It was (and apparently still is) widely used in Ontario.

I had actually won this software package in a University of Toronto programming contest in high school.

The difficulty with teaching computer programming to high school students is that skill levels will vary widely among the students. Students who already know how to program are probably already familiar with C/C++, Pascal, Basic, or Java, and would find a teaching language such as Turing very confining. These students likely know far more about how to program than the teacher does. At the other end of the class, there are students who barely know how to type, and they’re unlikely to pick up very many programming concepts no matter how simple the language they’re taught with.

At least, that was the situation back when I was in high school. Given the proliferation of personal computers and other consumer electronic devices such as cell phones, today’s teenagers are, on average, much more tech-savvy than before. And so the knowledge gap between the best students and the teacher (a technologically-behind-the-times adult) might be even worse than when I was in high school. But on the other hand, the latest crop of today’s high school teachers also come from the first generation to grow up with widespread personal computing technology, so maybe the playing field has been leveled somewhat.

The objected-oriented extension of Turing was a new product at the time. (I had version 1 of the software.) By the time it rolled out, however, C++ had been around for a while, and Java was about to appear. So anyone who was intent on learning object-oriented programming had better options.

And, generally speaking, students don’t like to learn languages designed for teaching because they understand that the minor possible increase in ease of learning comes with a very steep reduction in economic payoff. Nobody will pay you to be a great programmer in Turing, but even a mediocre C++ or Java programmer can make a decent salary.

My friends and I wrote numerous programs — mainly games — in Turing, which we shared amongst ourselves. Unfortunately, I’ve lost many of them, or they’re on floppy disks which I no longer have the hardware to read.

The software and reference books are now available for free at the web site for Holt Software, the company which used to produce Turing.

– davinci 11785

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Beside it in the photograph above is Dragons of Crime by James Dubro, a book about Asian criminal organisations in Canada.

What can I say? When I was in high school, I was very interested in criminal and extremist organisations, and I didn’t discriminate on the basis of race or ideology.

– davinci 11783

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I’ve read the book but haven’t studied it with the attention that deserves.

One of the oddest references to this book that I’ve ever come across is on the cover of the Origin, Marvel’s graphic novel about the origin of Wolverine, in which that graphic novel is compared in stature to Maus.

– davinci 11782

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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany, by William L. Shirer, is one of the standard reference books on World War II. The book that I owned was actually the illustrated and abridged version of this work. Abridged versions of books are very rarely better than the original, but this one is an exception, due to the inclusion of many large high-quality colour photographs which the non-abridged edition does not have.

This photograph of the book doesn’t really give an idea of its size (it isn’t thick, but it has a large surface area):

I had bought the book partly for history class in high school, and partly because of a personal interest in totalitarian movements. (The photographs were very useful for various world history projects, and before the Internet took over the world, good photographs of Nazi-era Germany were not easy for a high school student to find, and could lead to awkward situations.)

I really like the book, but can’t keep it because it takes up too much space, and also because I don’t really have a use for it any more. And, due to its appearance and subject matter, it’s not the kind of book you leave lying around your house “for décor”.

I tried to sell it to some used bookstores, but they wouldn’t take it, apparently because books decorated with giant Nazi swastikas attract the wrong kind of crowd.

This book is among a bunch that I’ve donated to the Waterloo Public Library. I hope the librarians are less shy about having books about important periods in history on display than booksellers, and that high school students in the area will find it useful for their history projects just as I did.

– davinci 11781

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1. A life in books