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Dune, Frank Herbert
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The Churn, James S. A. Corey
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Planets: A Very Short Introduction, David A. Rothery
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The Gene: An Intimate History, Siddhartha Mukherjee
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Four Thousand Weeks: Time and how to use it, Oliver Burkeman
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Drive, James S. A. Corey
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Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro
This is a book about what it means to be human. How we learn as we grow (but don’t have the vocabulary to understand or express the process). How we learn what our emotions are. How we interpret the motivations of those around us, including those that could be deliberately self-serving. What it means to […]
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Reading in 2021
Check this out!
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Devotions, Mary Oliver
As I was reading this, I realized I was highlighting or bookmarking pretty much every page!
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Good Poems, American Places, Garrison Keillor
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The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, Joseph Henrich
This is easily my book of the year, and possibly the last ten years. Not for the writing, but for the ideas that it generated and the understanding that I have hopefully developed. This book picks up where Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel ends. The author focuses on the difference between Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, […]
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AoC: Day 07
The Problem Given a set of ‘rules’, figure out which bags could contain a given bag, and in part 2, how many bags could be contained in the given bag. My Solution In the prior year, the difficulty level ratcheted up fairly quickly, and I was beginning to get worried this year! Not to worry, […]
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Anthem, Ayn Rand
I read this with my daughter and lead to great conversations about the society that we live in and that we would want to live in. Very topical, considering what has been going on in Afghanistan. Also very depressing, since the mentality that would result in this type of dystopia is too prevalent everywhere we […]
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AoC: Day 06
The Problem We have to combine all the single-character responses from groups of people in part 1, and count only the unique responses in part 2. My Solution Thankfully, a bit of sanity. I recognized both these as sets so just used the union and intersection operators. Quite happy with my input parsing as well — split into groups based […]
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AoC: Day 05
The Problem We need to convert a string that encodes the seat row and column to a seat number. In part 2, we have to find the missing seat number in the input data My Solution I came to AoC after a bit of a break and just wanted to get it done in time. […]
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Good Poems for Hard Times, Garrison Keillor
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AoC: Day 04
The Problem We’re given a bunch of data in key:value pairs that we have to count (part 1) and validate (part 2). If it walks like a dict and talks like a dict… My Solution I was consciously looking for opportunities to do a bit of comprehension, so figured out how to do just that. […]
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A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L’Engle
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AoC: Day 03
The Problem We’re still in the relatively easy phase. In this problem, we’re given a map with trees marked in, and on a straight-line path, we have to count how many trees we encounter. The only thing to account for is that the map repeats horizontally, we have to replicate it as many times as […]
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Deserts: A Very Short Introduction, Nick Middleton