Image – Page 4

Normandy is the place to be for any painter with a fascination for light

Claire Maingon and Hélène Rochette – Le grand guide de la Normandie (in French)

Charming take on a tourist guide, revisiting the favorite spots of impressionist painters to recreate their magic.

Through an anthropological lens, the English can be characterized as a withdrawn, class-conscious, ironic, understatement-loving and uptight tribe, whose members loosen up only in the pub

Light read with amusing observation, stretched out over slightly more pages than necessary to convey the message.

Phrenology started out as an honest attempt to study the brain scientifically, but evolved away from the scientific method and was put to despicable uses

Theo Mulder – De hersenverzamelaar (The brain collector, read in Dutch)

The book is mostly written from the historical perspective free from contemporary judgements, which allows the writer to tell a nuanced story on a sensitive topic.

There are no less than 12 primary imperatives that explain how the evolution of technology creates economical, cultural, and social value

Kevin Kelly – The inevitable

A brave attempt to put up a framework for assessing technological innovations, that is rich of ideas, which are in many cases [in 2023] still relevant (e.g. Cognifying in the light of GenAI), but sometimes feel out-dated (e.g. Sharing is a post-truth world).

The histories of science and religion are intricately entangled and the conflict between the two is over-emphasized

Magisteria – Nicholas Spencer

The author underplays the role of religious power structures in suppressing novel scientific ideas that go against traditionalist dogmas, which makes the book read more like a christian apology than a balanced historical narrative.

The Mediterranean has been the pivotal connection between great European, North African, and Asian cultures and economies

David Abulafia – The great sea

The best parts are the details (e.g. on laws governing responsibilities at sea in medieval times), but these facts buried in a thorough, impressively complete historical overview.

Various scandals illustrate the despicable role that big consultancies play in the global capitalist system, while they try to reap benefits of their worthless services by applying dubious marketing and sales tactics

Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington – The big con

The book paints a naive caricature of the consulting industry, downplays the role and responsibility of other actors and, unfortunately, lacks a realistic alternative for flexibly solving skill and capacity deficits (especially in the public sector); thereby undermining any justified concerns.

There are many documented anecdotes illustrating that Medieval monks were only human and struggled with focus and concentration

Jamie Kreiner – The wandering mind

The book loses a lot of specificity and power due to the suppression of differences in denomination and gender and even more because the writer does not really seem to have a clear point to make.

To counter the Big Evil of the New York Times you should put the truth on the blockchain ledger and solve world politics through technology

Balaji Srinivasan – The Network state

Some fair nuggets of socio-economical diagnosis mixed with personal pet-peeves and drained in a techno-utopian rant.

Classical strategy consulting ploys translate seamlessly to the language of IT architecture

Eben Hewitt – Technology Strategy Patterns

The ‘cookbook’ approach does a lot to demystify Strategy and Architecture, while the digressions into philosophy make the relatively basic content also palatable for the advanced reader.

If the talent density in your organization is high enough and your corporate culture strong enough, you could give extreme freedom to your people to increase te level of innovation

Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer – No Rules Rules

Pretty strong boundary conditions need to be fulfilled in order for this scheme to work; including broad acceptance of a high level of interpersonal ruthlessness.

There are a huge number of ways in which Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) can take over the world, rendering humanity essentially useless

Max Tegmark – Life 3.0

Nov. 2017: Interesting exploration of the implications of AGI, faulted by the typical preference of Analytical Philosophy for construction of intricate, highly theoretical scenario’s, under-emphasizing basic challenges (in the case of AGI: lack of robustness / antifragility).

Jun. 2023: The writer has leveraged the recent rise of LLMs like ChatGPT to further fuel fear about an AGI break-out – even though other AI-related risks require more imminent attention.

When you push the laws of physics to their extremes, weird things can – and will – happen

Katie Mack – The end of everything

Highly entertaining take on building a rudimentary astrophysics.

Over her impressive and long career, Agatha Christie evolved from an ground-breaking writer into a global brand

Lucy Worsely – Agatha Christie

The book over-indexes a bit on the domestic context, which does not help in de-mystifying the genius of its subject.

Neuroscience increasingly provides evidence how the Arts influence psychology and social behavior

Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross – Your brain on art

Interesting to read how advances in brain science lead to confirmation of intuitive but traditionally hard-to-prove hypotheses.

Crowd-sourced analysis of publicly available data can be a powerful tool in exposing lies, as is proved by an impressive track record of impactful scoops.

Eliot Higgins – We are Bellingcat

The book raises the question what happens if online sleuth methods are applied for profit maximization rather than for truth seeking.

If you update the brain-in-a-vat argument to the current state of technology, it reads: ‘We cannot prove that we are not in a simulation.’

David Chalmers – Reality+

The vocabulary of ‘sims’, and ‘VR’ makes for entertaining examples of traditional philosophical concepts; but the author’s core arguments about simulation and physical reality seem to implicitly assume a suspicious form of Cartesian dualism.