arsyed + books   639

Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil by Tom Mueller – review (Alex Renton, observer)
"We had a dozen oils, and a panel consisting of an importer, an Italian deli owner and a couple of eminent foodies: the results were so embarrassing and confusing the piece was never published. The importer went into a fugue after he was informed that he'd pronounced his own premium product "disgusting"; the deli owner chose a bottle of highly dubious "Italian extra virgin" as his favourite (it had cost £1.99 at the discount store TK Maxx); and both the foodies gave a thumbs-up to Unilever's much-derided Bertolli brand.

[...]

More serious – for aficionados and olive farmers – Bertolli and its supermarket rivals corrupted the meaning of extra virginity, a controlled definition of high-quality oil since 1960. "Gentle", "smooth" and "not peppery on the throat" are the sort of words Bertolli and its rivals used in ads promoting their generic extra virgin oil. But true extra virgin oil is peppery – it bites the back of the throat so fiercely it can make you cough. The flavours are vivid. "Peppery" is an official, positive attribute of "extra virgin" whereas smoothness will reliably indicate a low-quality oil."
olive-oil  books  reviews  via:aaronsw 
february 2012 by arsyed
Analysis of Boolean Functions (Ryan O'Donnell)
"I am writing a book about Fourier analysis of boolean functions. I will serialize it on this blog; I hope to publish two new sections each week.

Besides covering the basic theory, I intend to describe applications in theoretical computer science and other areas of math, including combinatorics, probability, social choice, and geometry."
blogs  books  math  compsci  functions  boolean 
january 2012 by arsyed
Avril Coghlan
"I recently wrote a short book, A Little Book of R for Biomedical Statistics, on using the statistics software R to carry out biomedical statistical analyses

I also wrote two other short books, A Little Book of R for Time Series, and A Little Book of R for Multivariate Analysis."
statistics  R  courses  books  tutorials 
january 2012 by arsyed
How the poor debtors still sell their daughters, How in the drought men still grow fat (Gabriel Rossman)
"Graeber’s Debt: The First Five Thousand Years [...] Large parts of the book could better be called Commerce: The First 5,000 Years or Exchange: The First 5,000 Years."
books  reviews  commerce  debt  history  via:cshalizi 
december 2011 by arsyed
Computational Physics with Python (Mark Newman)
"I'm in the process of writing a book on computational physics using the Python programming language."
books  python  scicomp  physics 
december 2011 by arsyed
What I’ve been reading (Tyler Cowen)
"1. Garry Kasparov on Garry Kasparov, Part 1: 1973-1985, by Garry Kasparov. Self-recommending! His chess books are full of history, drama, and suspense, in addition to the chess, he is simply a great mind."
chess  books  history  gary-kasparov 
december 2011 by arsyed
Salander. Sula. (Walter Jon Williams)
"In the second book, The Girl Who Played With Fire, Stieg Larsson made a big mistake. He fell in love with his character.

Now I think it's great when readers fall in love with fictional characters. I pat myself on the back for the number of readers who have fallen for Sula. But the problem with writers falling for their own character is that they start giving them too many expensive presents."
stieg-larsson  books  reviews  writing 
december 2011 by arsyed
Interactive CCmaps
"CCmaps is free dynamic Java application for producing conditioned choropleth maps in integrated visual analytic environment."
ccmaps  mapping  visualization  choropleth  micromaps  software  books 
december 2011 by arsyed
Boosting - The MIT Press
Boosting, Foundations and Algorithms
Robert E. Schapire and Yoav Freund
books  machine-learning  ensemble  boosting  via:cshalizi 
november 2011 by arsyed
Morgan Meis and S. Abbas Raza: Violence and Human Progress (Boston Review)
"You are correct—and characteristically observant—to note that being alive is a prerequisite for being in love." :)
books  reviews  steven-pinker  violence  war  history 
november 2011 by arsyed
a6omcl2la0ivlxsn3o8m.jpg (3800×2300)
"a guide to navigating npr's top 100 science fiction and fantasy books"
scifi  fantasy  books  infographics 
october 2011 by arsyed
Nature of Computation (Cristopher Moore and Stephan Mertens)
"“To put it bluntly: this book rocks! It's 900+ pages of awesome. It somehow manages to combine the fun of a popular book with the intellectual heft of a textbook, so much so that I don't know what to call it (but whatever the genre is, there needs to be more of it!).” —Scott Aaronson" (ok, i'm sold!)
books  computation  complexity  via:vaguery 
august 2011 by arsyed
English As She Is Spoke - Wikipedia
"Mark Twain said of English as She Is Spoke that "Nobody can add to the absurdity of this book, nobody can imitate it successfully, nobody can hope to produce its fellow; it is perfect.""
language  english  translation  books  humor 
july 2011 by arsyed
Performance and Recording: “Everyone sing the chorus—including intellectuals!” (John Holbo)
"I just read two books back to back to good effect: Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy and Elijah Wald’s How the Beatles Destroyed Rock n Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music"
books  music  writing  history  culture 
july 2011 by arsyed
Reading Al Qaeda In Karachi (Cafe Pyala)
Inside Al Qaeda And The Taliban: Beyond Bin Laden and 9/11, Syed Saleem Shahzad
books  journalism  pakistan  terrorism 
july 2011 by arsyed
The Architecture of Open Source Applications
"the authors of twenty-five open source applications explain how their software is structured, and why"
swarch  opensource  programming  books 
july 2011 by arsyed
Book Review - The Secret Knowledge - By David Mamet (Christopher Hitchens, nyt)
"This is an extraordinarily irritating book, written by one of those people who smugly believe that, having lost their faith, they must ipso facto have found their reason."
reviews  books  david-mamet  christopher-hitchens  via:aaronsw 
june 2011 by arsyed
Connecting the Dots (Cosma Shalizi)
Networks, Crowds, And Markets: Reasoning about a Highly Connected World. David Easley and Jon Kleinberg
books  reviews  networks  sna 
june 2011 by arsyed
Technical books that influenced my career (Grig Gheorghiu)
"Lessons Learned in Software Testing" - Cem Kaner, James Bach, Bret Pettichord
programming  books  testing  tdd  swdev  rec 
june 2011 by arsyed
Winning the Future (Archon Fung, Boston Review)
"Should Political Scientists Care More About Politics?" review of Winner-Take-All Politics, Jacob S. Hacker & Paul Pierson
polisci  books  reviews 
may 2011 by arsyed
In 1493, Columbus reunited the biological family tree (Jason Kottke)
"Tyler Cowen says that Charles Mann's 1491 (a taste of which can be read here) is "one of my favorite books ever, in any field", to which I add a hearty "me too". Mann's been hard at work at a sequel, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, which is due out in August, just in time for some seriously awesome beach reading."
books  rec  history  new-world  columbus 
may 2011 by arsyed
My three must-read U.S. foreign policy books for aspring politicians (Daniel W. Drezner)
"Walter Russell Mead, Special Providence. ... David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (for Democrats); James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans (for Republicans). ... Richard Neustadt and Earnest May, Thinking in Time."
politics  polisci  intlrel  books 
may 2011 by arsyed
I Wrote a Book ( Khoi Vinh)
"“Ordering Disorder” is an overview of all of my thoughts on using the typographic grid in the practice of Web design."
books  web  design  grid  layout 
may 2011 by arsyed
Calendarists.com
"calendrical calculations", recommended by sl
calendar  date  datetime  calculation  books 
april 2011 by arsyed
#31: Flavors of Geometry
"An Elementary Introduction to Modern Convex Geometry, by Keith M. Ball, 1-58
Hyperbolic Geometry, by James W. Cannon, William J. Floyd, Richard Kenyon, and Walter R. Parry, 59-115
Complex Dynamics in Several Variables, by John Smillie and Gregery T. Buzzard, 117-150
Volume Estimates and Rapid Mixing, by Béla Bollobás, 151-194"
books  math  geometry  convex 
march 2011 by arsyed
The Social Animal by David Brooks: A Scornful Review (Will Wilkinson)
"I linger so long on this example because it captures what is so irritating and crooked about this book. Brooks’ characters are constantly saying and thinking the sort of thing Brooks says and thinks in his opinion columns. They’re constantly made to express what are quite clearly elements of the author’s conception of human nature, sociality, and political life."
books  reviews  david-brooks 
march 2011 by arsyed
After the Sauds (Crooked Timber)
"it’s worth noting that Phil Howard concludes, in Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy[1], that a) diffusion of ICTs in the region correlate positively with democratization and, b) the one Get-Out-Of-Democratization-Free card anyone has been able to find is oil. Which, mirabile dictu, the House of Saud seems to have a lot of.
[...]
Howard has written the most important book on the subject of ICTs, democracy, and the Middle East EVAR, which has not gotten nearly the attention it deserves, because the post-mortem of the first phase of the Green Wave basically killed the conversation. This lack of attention to Howard’s work is a crime, and should be fixed." [Clay Shirky]
books  rec  democracy  ict  middle-east 
march 2011 by arsyed
« earlier      

related tags

*  a&s  aaronSwartz  abstract  academia  acm  activism  adaptive  addiction  afghanistan  agents  aggregate  agresti  ai  aid  alan-kay  albert-hirschman  algebra  algorithmic-learning  algorithms  allele  altruism  amartya-sen  amazon  analysis  analytics  anarchy  andrew-gelman  animation  anova  antilibrary  ants  apache  approximation  architecture  art  asia  asimov  athens  atlas  authors  autism  automata  automatic-differentiation  awk  ayan-hirsi-ali  bacteria  banking  bayesian  beef  behavior  bernard-henri-levy  best-of  bibliography  bigdata  biography  bioinformatics  biology  biostatistics  biplots  blender  blogging  blogs  book  books  boolean  boosting  brad-efron  brain  brianHayes  buddhism  bugs  build  business  c#  ca  calculation  calculus  calendar  career  cas  caseStudy  categorical  category  cattle  causality  ccmaps  cellular  change-detection  chaos  charles-manski  charlesDarwin  charlesPetzold  charlesStross  check  chess  china  choice  choropleth  christopher-hitchens  cities  cjDate  clash  class  classic  classics  classification  clay-shirky  clean  climate  clt  code  cogsci  collective  collective-cognition  collectiveAction  college  columbus  combinatorics  comics  commerce  commodore  commons  community  compiler  complex-systems  complexity  compsci  computation  computer  computer-vision  computerVision  computing  concurrency  conditional  convex  cookbook  cookbooks  cooking  coordination  corruption  cosmology  couchdb  counting-processes  courses  covers  craft  crash  crawley  crime  crisis  critique  crowdsourcing  culture  curveFitting  customs  cute  cybernetics  cyoa  darpa  data  data-mining  dataAnalysis  database  dataflow  datasets  date  datetime  david-brooks  david-mamet  debates  deborah-mayo  debt  decay  decision  decisionTheory  decoration  democracy  demographics  denotational-semantics  derek-parfit  design  detroit  development  dewey  diagnostic  diagrams  dictionary  differential  differentialEquations  dip  directory  discrete  discussion  disruption  distributions  divergence  documentaries  dsge  dubai  dynamic-concentration  dynamical  dynamicalSystems  ebooks  ecological  ecology  econometrics  economics  eda  education  effect-size  eisenstein  elections  electronics  emanuel-derman  emh  emilyPost  emotion  emotions  empirical  empirical-bayes  energy  engineering  english  ensemble  entropy  eosl  eoWilson  epidemiology  epub  error  essays  estimation  etiquette  euclid  europe  event-history  evolution  evolutionary  experiment  ezra-klein  F#  facebook  faith  fan-chung  fantasy  fermi-questions  feynman  fiction  finance  fit  flynn-effect  food  forecasting  forms  forth  foundations  fractals  france  fransDeWaal  freakonomics  free  functional  functions  funny  future  fxt  galileo  game  game-theory  games  garrisonKeillor  gary-kasparov  garyKing  gelman  gender  gene  genetic  genetic-programming  genetics  genghisKhan  genomics  geo  geometry  geopolitics  gg-kay  ggobi  ggplot  gianCarloRota  gilbert-harman  gilKalai  git  glenn-shafer  globalization  gof  grammar  graph  graph-rewriting  graph-theory  graphical-models  graphics  great-depression  greek  grid  group-theory  gtd  gutenberg  guy-steele  hadoop  handbook  hardware  harper-collins  haskell  herbert-simon  hierarchical  high-dim  hinduism  hip-hop  history  horror  huber  humor  hungary  huns  hypothesis-testing  ict  ideas  identification  identity  igonvalue  illustration  immigration  implementation  incest  india  induction  industrial-revolution  industrialRevolution  inequalities  inequality  inference  infographics  information  information-geometry  information-theory  infrastructure  innovation  institution  institutions  integration  intelligence  internet  intlrel  introduction  introductory  invisibleHand  iq  ir  islam  it  italy  jackCrenshaw  jamesGalbraith  janeAusten  janeJacobs  japan  java  javascript  john-dewey  john-von-neumann  jonathanLethem  jonathanZittrain  jonKleinberg  journalism  judaism  judeaPearl  ketchup  kevinKelly  keynes  kindle  knowledge  lance-fortnow  langauge  language  lattice  lawrence-lessig  layout  learn  learning  learning-theory  left  liberal  liberalism  libraries  library  libs  licklider  lifehacks  likelihood  limits  linear-algebra  linearAlgebra  linearB  lingpipe  linguistics  links  linux  list  lists  literature  lme  lme4  lobbying  logic  logo  lotr  lovecraft  lucene  machine-learning  machines  malcolmGladwell  mandelbrot  manifold  manuscripts  mapping  mapReduce  maps  mark-kleiman  marketing  markets  marketsInEverything  markov  markov-chain  markov-random-fields  math  mathematical  matrix  matthewYglesias  mattTaibbi  maven  max-weber  measure  measures  measureTheory  mechanics  med  media  medieval  meditation  mefi  meme  memetics  memoirs  memory  meta-analysis  metabolism  methods  micromaps  middle-east  migration  mind  mining  miranda  mixed-effects  mixedEffects  mmds  mml  modal  model  model-selection  modeling  models  molecular  money  mongodb  mongolia  mongols  morality  movies  moving-average  multilevel  multiple-testing  multivariate  music  myths  nationalism  nature  net  networks  neuralNet  neuro  neurons  neurophysiology  neuroscience  new-world  newspaper  niall-ferguson  nlp  nltk  nonlinear  nonparametric  notes  nourielRoubini  numeracy  numeric  objectivism  ocaml  oil  olive-oil  online  online-learning  ontology  oop  open  opensource  operationsResearch  opinion  optimization  order  oreilly  organization  originOfSpecies  osgi  owl  pac  pakistan  pankaj-mishra  papers  parenting  parody  parsing  patrick-french  pattern  patterns  paul-berman  paul-krugman  paulGraham  pca  pdk  people  perception  performance  personality  pharma  philosophy  photos  physics  pillaging  pkd  pkg  plays  plc  plotting  policy  polisci  politics  pop  popsci  power-analysis  powerLaw  powershell  practice  prediction  preferences  presentation  pricing  printing  probabilistic  probability  process  processes  proglang  programming  projectManagement  prolog  proofs  psychology  psychometrics  public  public-domain  publishing  pulp  puzzles  pygame  python  qualitative  quant  queueing  queueing-theory  quotes  R  race  random  random-walk  randomHouse  rap  ratings  rationality  rdbms  rdf  read  reading  reality  reason  reasoning  rec  recessive  recovery  recs  recurrentEvents  ref  refactoring  reference  regression  regulation  reinforcement  relational  religion  renaissance  renewable  representation  research  review  reviews  richardRoyall  richardStevens  risk  rituals  robertBolaño  robertoBolaño  robots  roman  romanEmpire  rome  routine  ruby  rules  russia  rvedecon  sampling  sanjeevKulkarni  scala  scalability  scaling  scheme  schools  scicomp  science  scifi  scottMeyer  search  seasonality  sed  seduction  selection  selfishness  selfReplicating  semantic-web  semantics  semiparametric  sensory  sentiment  sequential  shakespeare  sheenaIyengar  shell  significance  simulation  singapore  slums  sna  social  social-software  society  sociology  sockets  software  solutions  south-asia  spatial  spectral  sql  stack  stackOverflow  statcomp  statistical  statistics  stats  stem-cell  stephenWolfram  steven-pinker  stevenPinker  stieg-larson  stieg-larsson  stimulus  stochastic  stochastic-processes  stress-testing  stringTheory  subject  superorganism  survival-analysis  swarch  swdev  sweng  sysadmin  system  systems  tacit  tactics  taleb  tariq-ramadan  taxonomy  tcpip  tdd  teaching  tech  technology  temporal  terrenceTao  terrorism  testing  tests  text  textbooks  textMining  texts  theory  tigana  time  time-series  tips  tobuy  tolib  topology  trade  traffic  translation  trend  trilogy  tufte  tutorial  tutorials  tyler-cowen  tylerCowen  types  typography  ui  umberto-eco  uncertainty  universal  unix  urban  usability  vegetarian  via:aaronsw  via:arthegall  via:boxofbox  via:chl  via:cshalizi  via:ded_maxim/blog  via:erindanielson  via:gappy  via:jaukia  via:mcroydon  via:mreid  via:nikete  via:shivak  via:slackenerny  via:stochastix  via:vaguery  via:vermilliona  violence  visual  visualization  vladimir-vovk  vm  voronoi  wam  war  warren  web  webdesign  webServices  wiki  wikis  wilcox  william-easterly  win32  winbugs  work  writing  xts  zen  zhaoZiyang  zoo 

Copy this bookmark:



description:


tags: