If you are going to stop smoking, the advice is to tell as many people of your intention. The reasoning going something along the lines of ‘if you tell a lot of people, and you fail, failure is embarrassing, so you put more effort into not failing’. Respect seems to be a powerful motivator!

I don’t smoke, but I do read, and I’m going to go all Philip Morris on some books by telling people of my intention to read more of them.

To start with, the book I’m reading now, ‘The Black Swan’. This is a bit ranty, but it goes through a few biases with an interesting slant. My favourite bit so far has been ‘given that a coin lands 98 times in a row on heads, and it is a fair coin, what is the likelihood of it landing tails the next time?’ and then it gives two answers

  1. 50:50, it has the same chance it had the first time you flipped it.
  2. >1% if you say 50:50 you are a mug, if it has landed that many times on heads it must be rigged.

It is a good warning against taking too computational approach to things. (although, I fear that this isn’t the central message of the book).

So far, it’s an enjoyable read, so you might as well have a crack at it.

Next up is Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences. This comes highly recommended by both Erika, and the author of Irrationality, so it gets on the list. My mathematical abilities have atrophied beyond recognition, so I need to get on top of them quick smart!

This book is more specifically related to my major study topic (which will be revealed in the next couple of weeks). It’s another collection of essays and papers about the issues surrounding human enhancement.

I’ve recommended this to lots of people who have all enjoyed it. It is a really easy read, which is remarkable considering the difficulty of the subject matter - should we allow/endorse human genetic enhancement. I’m going to be controversial and try and make this my text for the ‘texts on trial’ 2nd year history and theory seminar. I think it’ll get their brains working in a new way and hopefully make them better designers by virtue of being better thinkers.

I’ve been trying to temper my cynicism about ‘green architecture’ with some facts, and this seems like a good place to start! I’ve heard very good things about this book, and it is available as a PDF here.

This is another one directly for my major study. I’ve read about half of it already, but as they are papers, it needs to be read with Google in one hand and the book in the other. There are good videos the accompany the book from the conference here.

This is likely to be the main text for Sophie’s (my housemate) masters thesis, so I’m intrigued to find out what it’s all about. I have to admit that I have a considerable amount of cynicism about it’s main message, but I’ve gleaned most of that from reading posts that reference it on treehugger and inhabitat. It seems to have too large a following to be rubbish, so I’ll read it with an open mind. I’m a big fan of lifecycle design in industrial design, so it’ll be interesting to see how much PLM comes through in here.

I think that’ll do for the moment, I’ll pop up a review when I finish these, and then I’ll post the next list.