I started my career in international development, and the book above provides a dozen case studies on states using scientific management, stats, etc. to try and control their growth/populations/economies and failing miserably.

It is a beautiful book in that it illustrates how difficult it is to actually manage a country and economy well, especially if you are trying to completely change it (i.e., "develop" it, solve poverty, etc.). It humbled me as a 22 year old "professional" wanting to fix the world.

"The Death and Life of Great American Cities" by Jane Jacobs is a close second to this theme of economic, technocratic development.

EDIT: I notice 22 upvotes. WOW! If you are a fan of this book or curious to hear more, please comment. Happy to elaborate. If you want a third book, The Evolution of Civilizations[1] is another fun one here. It tries to apply scientific principles and hypothesis testing to historical analysis!

[1] https://10millionsteps.com/review-evolution-of-civilizations

Poor Economics is a book in a similar vein that talks about how policies that sound like they would be effective can backfire.

(I am a software engineer and found both of these books approachable and interesting.)

There is this great article about the story of Singapore[0], it was also discussed on HN some time ago. I believe one of its main takes really resonates with "Seeing like a State" thesis.

    Decision-makers must rely on simplified models to make their decisions. All schemata are by nature imperfect representations of reality. Indeed, a scheme that reflected reality perfectly would be cluttered and uninterpretable. The reality is always more complex than the plan. In large countries, the planner is further from ground reality than in tiny city-states. Abstractions and errors inevitably compound as the distance increases

   Ironically, Lee Kuan Yew himself had no patience for other people’s models. In his words, “I am not following any prescription given to me by any theoretician on democracy or whatever. I work from first principles: what will get me there?” If there is a lesson from Singapore’s development it is this: forget grand ideologies and others’ models. There is no replacement for experimentation, independent thought, and ruthless pragmatism.

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24382249

I find this quite interesting. As a programmer I find you can only get to the real requirements by experimenting and going back and forth with the customer.

Applied to politics it would be really helpful if we could easily experiment "in the small" and then incrementally scale what works. However democratic processes, at least in my country, are so slow that most people go for the "go big or go home" approach.

It would therefore be helfpul to have incremental laws where you say start the implementation at city level, maybe in a few test cities, if that seems favorable automatically scale to a few states, and if that still works scale to the whole country.

In a complex economy you need these small "tests" to maybe patch issues before scaling it to the whole country. And you would avoid costly mistakes, trying things that sound good on paper but eventually don't work out well.

I don't know if Singapore does that or not. Do you have a POV?

I've been meaning to read Lee Kuan Yew's "From Third World to First" to learn more but haven't found the time.

[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-lik...

It’s likely that increasing socioeconomic wealth would have naturally followed that trajectory, but it’s unarguable that Chinas fertility policies accelerated the drop.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy#/media/File:B...

I think the latter Chinese policy in particular wasn't too restrictive and 2 children were a large enough limit to not skew numbers too much. That policy didn't push people from stopping to want those 2 children. Their previous policy worked much better.

If I wanted to stop people from having children I would promote hookup culture, feminism and economically reward unstable families. A touch of propaganda on how scary and life ruining it is to have a baby and in a couple of generations the birth rate should drop below replacement rate.

> National Health and Family Planning Commission spokesman Mao Qunan said the agency’s work had reduced the number of births in China over the years by “400 million”.

Nothing much about the effect of the removal of the policy either.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy#/media/File:B...

It was introduced (officially) in the 80s

[1] Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down by J.E. Gordon. Goodreads link: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/245344.Structures

https://dailydialectics.com/education/pihkal/PIHKALAnthology...

Ratsch,C - Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Plants

Unlike many other books on this subject matter, it is very well researched and referenced, but at the same time also contains personal anecdotes and experiences from the author himself.

One of the books I liked (since I actually studied Linguistics in my Bachelor's) and what drew me towards CS was "Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software" by Charles Petzold.

Same is true for Steven Levy's Hackers.

This book will take you from knowing nothing other than high school algenbra to knowing both practical applications and theoretical foundations and best practices for AI. If you're interested in AI and machine learning, you need this book.

If nothing else it will deepen your understanding of modern deep learning considerably, while giving you practical skills in the field

Language and linguistics: "Metaphors We Live By" by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphors_We_Live_By

Systems thinking: "An Introduction to General Systems Thinking" by Gerald M. Weinberg (1975): https://geraldmweinberg.com/Site/General_Systems.html

I still often use Weinberg's Systems Triumvirate when feeling stuck on a problem:

1. Why do I see what I see?

2. Why do things stay the same?

3. Why do things change?

Thanks very much for reminding about this one, though. Feeling inspired to look into it again now.

A great accomponiment to the first two, and a great read for those in AI related fields to start thinking about cognition more holistically and less computationally.

What really gets people interested is the narrative behind these subjects. What interesting thing happened within that field of study? What are the current problems we can solve and where are we headed? And the less the technical mumbo-jumbo, the better.

Michio Kaku's books - "Physics of the Future", "The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind (", etc. are the sort that would really influence young, fresh minds to pursue physics. He details what happens, and what could be to a sufficient detail without overloading the user with the mathematical rigour associated with these math heavy subjects.

Strangely enough nothing is coming to mind for my field, technical writing. Docs for Developers is great at covering the end-to-end basics of a high-quality documentation process. But I feel like there is some book out there that has inspired me to think more deeply about how to effectively communicate ideas and instructions to other people, which is the true heart and soul of technical writing as an art and science. How We Learn by Benedict Carey is the right direction but I don't remember thinking of it as a masterpiece.

[1] https://documentation.divio.com/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4vKPhjcMZg

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20613616-ways-of-curatin...

For me personally this helped a lot with the decision to create an international art center (small, and still under construction!) instead of just pounding my artist head against the wall of the market forever.

But generally speaking, it’s an eye opener and a great illustration of how to generate influence from enthusiasm. It’s probably hard to read if you aren’t already familiar with European contemporary art, but it rewards patience.

Alternately "The Unreality of Time" by McTaggart, it has less than 20 pages and argues that time doesn't exist since it is logically incoherent.

Not sure if this would get someone hooked up but for me those two were extremely fun reads.

EDIT: Just to be clear – both are meant as philosophy books, even if they touch on other things. :)

From the classics I'd also recommend Hume. The "Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding" is short, very well written and argues, among other things, that causality is an illusion :)

Do not, do not miss the transcripts of the lessons held by Imre Lakatos at the London School of Economics (LSE), "Lectures on Scientific Method" - available in

-- Motterlini, Matteo (ed.), For and Against Method, including Lakatos’s Lectures on Scientific Method and the Lakatos-Feyerabend Correspondence (1999), Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Simon Blackburn: The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (not intended as an introduction but IMO it makes a really fun introduction)

Thomas Nagel: What Does It All Mean? A Very Short Introduction to Philosophy

The book that got me into neuroscience was Phantoms in the Brain by V. S Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee. A 22-year old book that wowed 20-year-old me. Principles of Neural Design by Peter Sterling and Simon Laughlin is a more recent book. It is brilliant, beautifully written and probably should be required reading for anyone looking to do graduate studies in neuroscience. In a field inundated with data and siloes and jargon, it bats for a focus on jargon-free understanding of principles that can explain much of the complexity. It was hugely inspirational for us when doing our own book (plug alert!).

I hope that Journey of the Mind: How Thinking Emerged from Chaos, a book I co-authored, a book which drew inspiration from these two books, is able to do the same for many looking to study neuroscience and AI now.

Phantoms in the Brain https://www.amazon.com/Phantoms-Brain-Probing-Mysteries-Huma...

Principles of Neural Design https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Neural-Design-MIT-Press/dp...

Journey of the Mind https://www.amazon.com/Journey-Mind-Thinking-Emerged-Chaos/d...

Or so the code breakers would have us believe…

So far, I've gotta give the +1 on this one.

The rule of accouting is that if anything excites you about accounting you shouldn't do accounting. The most fun I had studying accounting was learning about tax evasion, money laundering, defrauding stakeholders etc. Any academic book about forensic accounting could be deemed interesting if you just read only the case studies.

I have some knowledge of french accounting, been exposed to US style, and thoroughly enjoyed long forms involving forensic accounting, money laundering and the like...

The EPA was made aware of him but did nothing even after they physically inspected his biodiesel "factory" and discovered it was basically just an empty warehouse.

What finally brought him down was his taste for expensive sports cars and his being an asshole neighbor. He was always parking his sports cars pn the street, blocking school bus stops, etc. Local parents suspected he might be a drug dealer because of how many cars he had and how lavishly he spent his money, and they asked the local police to look into him. It was the local investigation that uncovered the fraud and brought him down.

https://advancedbiofuelsusa.info/rodney-hailey-sentenced-to-...

Did the EPA give any reason?

Sounds like hacking.

It teaches Latin in a very cool way, where the entire book is written in Latin but it starts off with simple sentences anyone with a Romance language background can understand, before diving into deeper sentences, all while being illustrated so one can still follow the plot if they're stuck.

It contrasts with very dense Latin books that focus on grammar and spelling, which often bore students. LLPSI instead takes readers on an entertaining journey.

https://vivariumnovum.it/risorse-didattiche/propria-formazio...

That has a functioning link for the same content as the nina.coffee page tries to link to. There are several more French texts, as well as English, Italian, Spanish, and German.

There's an Icelandic text which isn't totally in Icelandic but, IIRC, is in the same vein as these. PDFs of it can also be found online pretty easily. I have not explored any languages beyond these as the two languages I'm interested in learning/practicing are Italian and Spanish, this content was sufficient for me.

Consider the perspective someone who does not know anything about this book previous to reading your comment. Searching Amazon for Hans H. Ørberg is not likely to make it clear which book (or books) you are actually recommending.

LLPSI Pars II, Roma Aeterna

These are the two main books. Each has companion books such as exercise books and teachers' guides. After these two, you should be able to read Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Gallico, but Ørberg also has other books.

As for whether the workbooks are worth it, I never used them, but then again I only read the main book for leisure, not in an academic setting or for serious study. If you're in the latter, then I'm sure the workbooks would help.

- Benjamin Kennedy's Revised Latin Primer

- Wheelock also remains a standard treatment.

I recommend the classical pronunciation by Ørberg himself.

Not my current job, but understanding the basics of accounting was related to technical jobs I previously held (in ERP) and finance/investing is useful in general.

I'd highly recommend "The Accounting Game" for anyone that quickly wants to understand accounting basics (U.S. accounting) and how everything fits together. It basically walks you through being a child with a lemonade stand and doing the accounting for it. Similarly if you want a quick overview of some of the multiples and what they mean for finance/investing, I'd recommend "Visual Finance".

The most fascinating book that I've read in the accounting/finance domain is "Financial Shenanigans" which outline different ways to manipulate financial statements. It would be my recommended goto book for the field of financial fraud.

For personal investing, my goto is "Quantitative Value" which methodically walks through different value investment strategies and backtesting them. I think the overall recommendation of buying companies that have low acquisition costs relative to their operational profits is good and it's how I screen stuff I buy, but the general mindset and systematic approach is what makes this book very valuable. This is not a book that will "attract anyone" but I'm pretty sure it's the one investment book I'd recommend to an analytical/scientific kind of person which I'd say is what the HN crowd is for the most part.

All started with Steven Strogatz' book sync. https://www.stevenstrogatz.com/books/sync-the-emerging-scien...

I then found the amazing intro course on Complexityexplorer:

https://www.complexityexplorer.org/courses/136-nonlinear-dyn...

by Liz Bradley.

Since then I am hooked :)

The type of problems in that space usually didn't work well with linear control theory, although I'm not strong in theory ... at the time mostly playing with some signal processing packages in matlab (e.g. Kalman Filtering).

Recently, I got interested in group and social dynamics (we recorded a couple of large scale datasets). I found an approach found in some of the non-linear dynamics practitioner's lectures/works intuitive and fun for me. You could call it "Explorative Experimental Computational Mathematics": 1. find an interesting phenomenon 2. record data, run simulations and plot data 3. look at the visualizations 4. fit a model /formulas based on the visualizations Iterate.

If I have completely misrepresented a field/research please forgive me. Just an enthusiast amateur here.

This "Don't Make me Think" which the parent suggested and "About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design" are my "UXy" books on the shelve.

It really teaches a few simple concepts that apply in wide ranging areas.

Particularly entertaining is his 'A pure waste of paper' (Appendix A of 'LOCUS SOLUM') (https://girard.perso.math.cnrs.fr/0.pdf). I could flip to a random page of his 'appendix' and just sink in.

A fine introductory work of his to the subject would be 'PROOFS AND TYPES' (https://people.mpi-sws.org/~dreyer/ats/papers/girard.pdf).

[1]: https://raytracing.github.io/

https://archive.org/details/StuffMatters

Very accessible and fun to read, and the book is structured around introducing a lot of fundamental materials science concepts in the context of everyday objects (silverware, chocolate, etc)

I haven’t found a streaming link yet, but these (related?) clips look pretty interesting https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01hkyfr/clips

That's just because the solution space is (fortunately) still rich... But

Brian Christian; Tom Griffiths - Algorithms to Live By - The Computer Science of Human Decisions

is an unmissable work in Computer Science and *Economics*. Surely some of us have been drawn to Economics, as then patently a "Science of optimization", after having read this jewel (and after the further focus on the theory of optimization that CS gained with the boom on function automation, e.g. ANNs. Even this is part of the book, e.g. the paragraphs on "simulated annealing"). Tom Griffith (Princeton, dept. of Psychology) also gave a "TED talk" - a tiny fraction of the book, but a good appetizer for some.

By the way: I just found Tom Griffith also published a

Griffiths, T. L., Lieder, F., & Goodman, N. D. (2015). Rational use of cognitive resources: Levels of analysis between the computational and the algorithmic. Topics in Cognitive Science, 7, 217-229

...given his masterpiece divulgational book, this article could be another gem...

I first read its non-fiction companion book, the DevOps Handbook, which got me drinking the Kool-Aid, but this is also a wonderful, breezy read (no small feat for such a technical topic) that is an even more gentle introduction.

Not only did these two books make me come to appreciate DevOps, they also taught me about Kaizen and Toyota Production Model, which DevOps began as a software translation of. Subsequently, I have also applied these principles to the field of screenwriting.

I think I wouldn't unequivocally recommend it because it could be hit or miss, so a bad choice for "one book only", but overall: yes, worth reading.

The reason I recommend it is because of how accessible it is. If I tell my friends to read a DevOps book, their eyes will glaze over a few sentences into my pitch. But when I tell them about this crazy idea for a book, they're usually interested enough to give it a shot.

> Was plane geometry your favourite math course in high school? Did you like proving theorems? Are you sick of memorising integrals?

(2) The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, by Oliver Sacks. I think it's impossible to read this (or a number of other works of Sacks') and not be mesmerized by the workings of the human brain. Disclaimer: I wouldn't call neuroscience my "field of study" even though I did study it.

"The Pleasure of Findings Things Out" for science

"How To Draw: Drawing And Sketching Objects And Environments From Your Imagination" for concept art / industrial design

Original poster: Did you mean "tome" when you said "epitome"?

And to a lesser extent "The Black Swan"

He's not the most straightforward authors to read on these topics but his self awareness is refreshing compared to some of the charlatans in the industry (I'm thinking of a large tech oriented ETF here...)

The Vital Question by Nick Lane made me think that were I to start over, be young and finish school, I'd study biology and biochemistry.

Industrial development and political economy, it really is a must read for anyone even mildly interested on the field, then you could go to Joan Robinson's criticism of Ricardian economics, but these are slightly more in depth topics

Ha-Joon Chang - Economics: The User's Guide

is a very, very good primer.

Gives a great and accessible overview of the incredible work that happened at Bell Labs from it's inception till it demise. Bell Labs is what happens when you bring the greatest minds of your time under one roof and give them creative freedom. It's was fascinating to read how much engineering discipline progressed due to direct result of the inventions made there and how they influence pretty much every aspect of our modern lives.

  Chaos year after year after year in this class provokes the strongest opinions.
  
  A quarter of the people decide it is the most irritating, irrelevant thing that could possibly have been assigned in the class and hate it.
  
  About half the people never quite figure out what's up with it.
  
  And a quarter of the people, their life is transformed. They no longer have to meditate, they no longer have to have a—just they are at peace. At peace, I tell you.
  
  Because what this book does is introduce this whole radically different way of thinking about biology, taking apart a world of reductionism. For five hundred years we have all been using a very simple model for thinking about living systems, which is, if you want to understand something that's complicated, you break it apart into its little pieces.
  
  And once you understand the little pieces and put it back together, you will understand the complex thing. And what Chaos as an entire field is about—and this was pretty much the first book that was meant for the lay public about it—what Chaos shows is, that's how you fix clocks. That's not how you fix behaviors. That's not how you understand behaviors. Behavior is not like a clock, behavior is like a cloud. And you don't understand rainfall by breaking a cloud down into its component pieces and gluing them back together.
  
  So read through that book. A lot of it is from physical sciences rather than biological, so we'll just be suggesting the chapters you should read.
  
  I will tell you it is the first book since, like, Baby Beluga where I've gotten to the last page and immediately started reading it over again from the front. Because, along with Baby Beluga, it's had the greatest influence on my life. I found this to be the most influential book in my thinking about science since college. So that is a sign.

Hell, CS is not attractive to a lot of people working in the field. They work because it pays the bills.

So no, at the risk of sounding like I’m full of myself, I’d say there’s simply ZERO such books at least for computer science.

It’s a very specific field that many people get zero exposure to from school till the end. Unlike fields like history, arts, even medicine/diseases etc.

Although we may not currently have as many cool electronics and computing enthusiast magazines as they had back then, we do have a few of them including Make:, Linux Format, and RasPi. (Not to mention the internet and youtube, but sometimes it's hard to know where to start and where to go, and print media are good for that.)

In the area of computer music production, I rather like Computer Music; a typical issue provides music production apps and plugins that you can download and use as well as instructional articles and video explaining how to use them.

Recently I was also inspired by wizardzines.com - I think we need more books (or zines) in a fun and tutorial style!

If you, as the reader, are at the point where you can dive into a technical textbook and keep focus enough to read it - chances are you're already somewhat interested in the field, or have some exposure to related field.

I don't think there's any book that can attract ANYONE to the field. Had the question instead been "Which lecture / article / video", then I'd say that there's tons of good bite sized pieces that can light a fire for most people...but whole / complete books? That's gonna be a particular type of audience.

Even undergrad 101 books are made for people with a certain level of interest.

I think it is more due to the failure of the CS "Intelligentsia" to popularize Computing(theory) and Computer(machines) Sciences for the Layman.

Computers have ushered in a most radical change in our societies and yet they are a complete mystery to most "ordinary" people. There are more popular science books on "Quantum Physics" than on "Computing/Computer Science" which is sad to say the least.

But i think there is hope for the future with books like a) Code by Charles Petzold b) Algorithmics by David Harel becoming more popular.

> I’d say there’s simply ZERO such books

Sorry but that's plainly illogical. "Read them, come back and report." (Can you notice that the form of that very sentence shows a clash against the mentality that could align with a passion for CS? A CS specialist that formed such expressions would signal to be forcing against inclination.)

Burns, Marilyn (1975) I hate Mathematics Book, Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. https://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Brown-Paper-School-Books/...

Mathematics, philosophy, music, molecular biology/biochemistry, computer science, visual art, poetry, cognitive science:

Hofstadter, Douglas R. (1979) Gödel, Escher, Bach - An Eternal Golden Braid. New York, NY: Basic Books. ("GEB")

Computer Science:

Abelson, Harold and Gerald Jay Sussmann (1984) Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ("SICP")

Stoll, Clifford (1989) The Cuckoo's Egg. New York, NY: Doubleday.

Linguistics:

McCrum, Robert, Robert MacNeil, William Cran (1986). The Story of English. New York, NY: Viking. https://archive.org/details/storyofenglish000mccr

Accounting: n/a

Physics:

1. Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Adventures of a Curious Character) by Richard P. Feynman

2. The Universe in a Nutshell by Steven Hawking

Mathematics:

1. Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences by J.A. Paulos

2. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by D. Hofstadter

These books brilliantly illuminate the beauty in these fields. They show you that underneath all of that complex notation and "math speak" are beautiful ideas about life, the universe, and the nature of reality. These fueled me, even in to my PhD research. I still love them today.

I'd love to hear a non-programmer/non-mathematician's take on it because I kinda didn't like it at all. I found it very elaborate and slow-developing with no real insight (maybe because the concepts weren't new or maybe because I'm more someone who prefers reading an encyclopaedia over watching a historically correct movie about something).

They young mind is opened by being shown relations it did not yet see.

Read the extreme in that direction:

Italo Calvino - Le città invisibili

(which not only masterfully connects ideas, but most of the realm of existence and experience) - you should be able to see that principle at its apex. And there is no technical teaching: just an education to see the subtle.

Hofstadter is clearly a brilliant person, a polymath. He clearly loves wordplay and classical music. But his ramblings are so often tangential and self-indulgent that probably half the book could be trimmed out without cutting anything insightful. Gödel is important to the book. Escher...makes pictures that, if you squint real hard, could be construed as kind of relevant. Bach...well, the author just likes Bach and decided that he needed to be present. The latter two figures are essentially just used for some examples that could probably have been explained more clearly without using music as the context, given that it then requires him to delve into all the details about how fugues are different from canons, etc. etc.

Let's just say, reading the author's introduction to the 20th anniversary edition of the book states his main premises much more succinctly, to the point where you can skip the rest of the 700+ pages of the book.

When you consider how much worth-while reading remains for each of us and how little time we have, I've come to think such prolix authors have bad manners of the self-indulgent kind.

Yes, absolutely, without a doubt. A "spirit of mathematics" and a proficiency in the (practical) details of the discipline are very different things.

https://www.amazon.com/How-Maps-Third-Mark-Monmonier/dp/0226...

The Armchair Economist by Steven Landsburg for economics.

The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman for design in any aspect.

Closer to my field of organisational performance/psychology.

The Fearless Organisation by Amy C Edmondson.

Non-technical but very interesting and emotive to most people.

Healthcare analytics

It's an in depth analysis of the elements of drawing and, more importantly, what those elements actually do. It really celebrates the expressive and creative aspects of drawing, in a way that's both beautiful to look at, and accessible to read.

It isn't a group of heady physics textbooks, but they do seem to unlock interest and understanding in the fields they address for a layperson. Probably precisely because they embrace that quite a lot of explanations only hold within particular models.

History of cryptography, really fascinating.

The Code Book, by Simon Singh is a very accessible history of cryptography and its role in historical events.

The Nazi Census, by Aly, Roth and Black, is an important survey of how data collection methods get used for bad things, and I recommend it to anyone doing large scale systems architecture, or working in privacy. (replace statisticians with 'epidemiologists', and you start to see a theme.)

The Mathematical Theory of Communication, by Claude Shannon is beautiful, and gives you an intuition for concepts like bandwith, signal, message entropy, finite fields, among others.

Power, by Jeffery Pfeffer, when combined with the Dictator's Handbook by Smith and DeMesquita forms the foundation for any serious management and strategy consulting.

GEB, by Hofstader was a way to have an intuitive frame of reference about cognitive science and theories of mind, which I think are going to be the next great cultural battle ground, and also relevant in the context of machine learning, and consulting.

My field? Security, privacy, and risk management.

Overcoming Gravity: A Systematic Approach to Gymnastics and Bodyweight Strength

This book turned out to be infinite knowledge source about physical training and how our body works in general. At first I wasn't convinced as the author looks more like a computer geek than ultra strong gymnast - but once you read it, you get to understand what strength really is, and why size of your muscles do not convey how strong you are.

Puts recent developments by SpaceX in context, and shows how we really are about to settle the cosmos in an economically sustainable way. A call to action to anyone who wants to participate to start making space companies now.

Radical Abundance by K. Eric Drexler.

Re-introduces the concept of atomically precise manufacturing (aka molecular nanotechnology) and shows how it can solve basically all major global problems from climate change to energy crisis to wars over resources.

1. The Trivium: The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric : Understanding the Nature and Function of Language by Sister Miriam Joseph.

2. Introduction to Logic by Irving Copi.

3. Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective by Randall Bryant and others.

5. Prolog Programming by Ivan Bratko.

6. Information Theory, Inference and Learning Algorithms by David MacKay

7. Geometry by Brennan.

8. Understanding Poetry by Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brookes

And then maybe during the fractal wave The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants.

It's a nice book for hobbyists, though.

I’m not a physicist, but this book took me very close to abandoning my CS career and getting into theoretical physics.

"Don't Make Me Think" by Steve Krug

"Design of Everyday Things" by Donald Norman

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Threaded-Interpretive-Languages-R-G...

It's quite easy to get into and you can expand it and have all sorts of fun with it. Certainly not a revered epitome.

[0] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Derek-Holton-Problem-Solving-Series...

This just emerged right in front of our eyes. Highest quality. Way better than Real World Ocaml.

Graham Hutton's Programming in Haskell 2ed (plus his video courses).

Programming in Scala Fourth Edition.

Not my field of study or existence, but what happened in a bare hundred years to make public execution private, and prisons into factories into schools?

It's a great book, you should read it.

The Republic (Plato)

How do you get someone to listen to you? (first answer: threaten them with violence). "Footnotes to" etc.

After the recent death of the myrmecologist EO Wilson, I decided to order a couple of his books and have spent the last few nights reading "Journey to the ants". It has been completely fascinating, I can't put it down.

Lowe, Derek B. (2016). The Chemistry Book: From Gunpowder to Graphene, 250 Milestones in the History of Chemistry.

Two great books that could lure a curious mind into sales. However, I recommend both to everyone.

I'm not aware of anything of the sort. If anyone else knows, let me know :)

How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39026990-how-to-invent-e...

It's written in a comedic style, and takes you through what you would need to build to "reimplement modern civilization" if you found yourself stuck back in time.

About David Fleming and the book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Fleming_(writer)

Apparently there's also an online version of the whole work: https://leanlogic.online/

Though he does such a good job of passionately portraying so many topics in these books I feel they could get people into any one of the earth sciences. Hell, even politics and economics.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manga_Guides

I'm hoping to enable people to get into this amazing field of ours so that they can enjoy a better life with better options and long term economic prospects.

Especially Baudilino.

Modernist Cuisine by Nathan Myhrvold is perhaps the most beautiful group of cook books, although quite pricey.

Professional Goldsmithing by Alan Revere is hands down one of the best books on jewelry fabrication in precious metals.

For field archeology: The Making of the English Landscape by Hoskins.

Fun/easy reading: Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years of Lockheed (Ben R. Rich)

Textbook:

Shigley's Mechanical Design (recent editions are by Budynas/Nisbett by older editions with Shigley as an author are just as good as an intro)

Mark Forsyth's Etymologicon

, which I promptly found and read: not only it is a must-read in general (if you speak, read or write), but surely it should lure one into an interest in studies concerning language.

https://wtf.tw/ref/carse.pdf

"A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility"

Short Read, very dense, and fully free.

(I'm a fantasy fiction writer)

Anyway, it may be for the best (think Matrix 3 and 4).

"The Slow Regard of silent things" is also a beautiful book that builds slowly and expands a little detail of the world of "The name of the wind"

But Rothfuss just takes every one of those tropes and wires them together into absolute riveting story telling. He basically perfects the genre.

If it takes another 5 years for the last book to be released, I might just take up fantasy writing myself and come up with an ending for it, I guess it invites the reader into the field that way..

- Steve Wozniak’s autobiography

- The Phoenix Project

- The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson