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Noah Brier @heyitsnoah
, 8 tweets, 4 min read Read on Twitter
I plan to write this up properly on the blog, but there have been a series of plagues sweeping through my house over the last two weeks and I haven’t been able to sit at a computer. So here, in a few tweets, are five favorite books I read in 2018.
Going into the year I made a decision to read books instead of articles. I may still have read enough to do a best longform of 2018, but almost all my reading time this year went to books (got through 50 of them). FWIW, here’s last years article list: noahbrier.com/archives/2018/…
I discovered physics this year, which became a bit of an obsession in the second half. It started with David Bodanis’ E=mc2: A Biography, which walks through the most famous equation in physics letter by letter. amazon.com/mc2-Biography-…
Following that, and inspired by this lecture - - I read Einstein’s 1905 by physicist John Rigden, which goes through the five papers Einstein published in what was one of the most incredible years of thought anyone has ever had. amazon.com/Einstein-1905-…
Later in the year, as my interest went deeper, I tried to wrap my head around quantum with @philipcball’s Beyond Weird - amazon.com/Beyond-Weird-E… - which was probably my favorite book of 2018. Here’s a great lecture version:
In between all those I read lots of other stuff, including two favorites about systems/complexity. The first is Donella Meadows’ Thinking in Systems - amazon.com/Thinking-Syste… - which has been on my list for a long time and is by far the best systems thinking primer I’ve read.
Finally, @MelMitchell1’s Complexity: A Guided Tour. I’ve read a bunch of books about complexity science, but none of them painted such a clear picture of how all the different components that make up the discipline fit together. amazon.com/Complexity-Gui…
A few others I enjoyed (in no specific order):
Michael Lewis - The Fifth Risk
Brian Christian - Algorithms to Live By
Stephen Hawking - A Brief History of Time
@KimZetter - Countdown to Zero Day
Steve Martin - Born Standing Up
Vonnegut - God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
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🚢🤔📈🧐📉

So. The #Lifeline case has descended into another Aquarius case. Meanwhile, 16 leaders of EU Member States meet for an #EUCO informal meeting on #migrationEU.

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