craig robert martin

Decisions That Carry: How Leaders Build Trust Through Judgement, Data and Story by Fiona McDonnell My rating: 5 of 5 stars The author has an authentic voice: her writing and books are practical and accessible. Her first book Two Mirrors And A Cheetah: Think Differently, Own Your Career & Succeed By Being Yourself offered honest, open insight into anxiety and debilitating panic attacks. This second and timely book opens with a very personal medical condition that took her and her family by surprise and caused her to think carefully about data, real data, and how we use it to make decisions that will have long-term consequences. But Fiona doesn't dwell on the situation. Instead, she buys a boldly coloured (Yellow) handbag - retail therapy, perhaps - and uses it as a metaphor to carry her decision-making tools in. I liked the first-hand stories from a wide range of industry experts. In Two Mirrors and a Cheetah, I felt as if I was sitting down ...

Decisions That Carry: How Leaders Build Trust Through Judgement, Data and Story by Fiona McDonnell My rating: 5 of 5 stars I had the privilege of being a beta reader, and then I just read the final version on my Kindle. Fiona is an authentic person and, naturally, an authentic writer - I know that firsthand, having studied with her more than a quarter of a century ago. I like that her writing and books are practical and accessible. Her first book Two Mirrors And A Cheetah: Think Differently, Own Your Career & Succeed By Being Yourself offered honest, open insight into anxiety and debilitating panic attacks. This second and timely book opens with a very personal medical condition that took her and her family by surprise and caused her to think carefully about data, real data, and how we use it to make decisions that will have long-term consequences. But Fiona doesn't dwell on the situation. Instead, she buys a boldly coloured (Yellow) handbag...

Against the Machine by Paul Kingsnorth My rating: 4 of 5 stars The Grid is a physical manifestation of the values of the Machine on the landscape itself, and it is, I think, replacing the nation, just as it is replacing the culture and antiquated notions of 'tradition' and the like. Paul Kingsnorth writes with passion about his lifelong journey to rail against the progress he sees as a vanguard for dark forces. His book goes beyond the normal P(Doom) of Artificial Intelligence and the dangers of AGI. It captures what Kingsnorth sees as a moral and cultural decline due to technology writ large. The author lives a relatively off-grid life with his family in rain-scoured western Ireland, giving him the time and room to develop his writing. He is well-read and researches similar thinkers from across the centuries, bringing some obscure prophets to light. His conclusions are fairly stark: a force active in the world lies beyond us. It is a supern...

Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare by Edward Fishman My rating: 4 of 5 stars View all my reviews

The Wind Knows My Name by Isabel Allende My rating: 4 of 5 stars View all my reviews

The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory by Brian Greene My rating: 3 of 5 stars View all my reviews

The Welch Labs Illustrated Guide to AI by Stephen Welch My rating: 5 of 5 stars This a beautifully conceived and put together text book. I was blown away with the quality of the videos on YT and hence not surprised that the author has managed to put together such a high quality production in physical form. The book is heavy - in terms of weight - which meant it took some time and cost some dollars to ship to Singapore, but it was a joy to find it waiting outside my house. The book is hefty - in that it covers 70 years of machine learning from Rosenblatt’s perceptron to attention models and diffusion. When I started building neural networks in 1990 there were few accessible textbooks. I had to bribe one computer-scientist author with a bottle of wine to explain how to implement some of self organising algorithms. This has it all. Diagrams, models, beautiful illustrations and code. It also has some exercises, and the author has left wide margins for th...

Great Ideas Miracles and Idolatry by Voltaire My rating: 3 of 5 stars View all my reviews

Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History by Moudhy Al-Rashid My rating: 4 of 5 stars View all my reviews

Solaris by Stanisław Lem My rating: 4 of 5 stars View all my reviews

Ulysses by James Joyce My rating: 5 of 5 stars I first read Ulysses almost thirty-five years ago, when I was roughly the same age as Stephen Dedalus - one of the first characters we meet in the book. I was backpacking across Indonesia on the cheap with a friend, eating Gado-Gado and Nasi Goreng, and climbing volcanoes. In Sumatra, where I first opened the pages of the book, a cramped day-long mini-bus odyssey across the equatorial jungle cost a few dollars, accommodation a dollar, lunch just 25 cents. In truth, I enjoyed the sights and sounds and smells and tastes of Indonesia more than I enjoyed the book back then, and I recall swapping the finished book with some satisfaction at one of the many travellers' shops for a couple of Julian Barnes’s novels. ‘Look, it’s almost 1000 pages; that must be worth two books.’ Ulysses is this year’s family project - we intend to visit Dublin on Bloomsday, the long summer day when the book's protagonist jo...

Ulysses by James Joyce My rating: 4 of 5 stars I first read Ulysses almost thirty-five years ago, when I was roughly the same age as Stephen Dedalus - one of the first characters we meet in the book. I was backpacking across Indonesia on the cheap with a friend, eating Gado-Gado and Nasi Goreng, and climbing volcanoes. In Sumatra, where I first opened the pages of the book, a cramped day-long mini-bus odyssey across the equatorial jungle cost a few dollars, accommodation a dollar, lunch just 25 cents. In truth, I enjoyed the sights and sounds and smells and tastes of Indonesia more than I enjoyed the book back then, and I recall swapping the finished book with some satisfaction at one of the many travellers' shops for a couple of Julian Barnes’s novels. ‘Look, it’s almost 1000 pages, that must be worth two books.’ Ulysses is this year’s family project - we intend to visit Dublin on Bloomsday, the long summer day when the book's protagonist jo...

Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear My rating: 5 of 5 stars I am always a bit wary of the 'Top-Selling' books; I know.. I have an underlying streak of 'Road-less-travelled' that could be misread as a Frosty arrogance. It's not, I promise. Atomic Habits is an excellent book. I listened to the audio version, and it had lots of practical tips and protocols (yay - just like Huberman). The book doesn't replace [book:The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business|12609433, but augments it. 'Habits reduce cognitive load and free up mental capacity, so you can allocate more attention to other tasks.. its only by making the fundamentals of life easier that you can create the mental space needed for free thinking and creativity' I would definitely recommend the book, and also the audiobook (read by the author James Clear) is excellent. I gave it five sta...

Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear My rating: 5 of 5 stars View all my reviews

Ulysses Unbound: A Reader's Companion to James Joyce's Ulysses by Terence Killeen My rating: 5 of 5 stars An excellent guide to a notoriously difficult classic. I re-read Ulysses earlier this year ahead of a family holiday in Dublin, timed to coincide with Bloomsday - the day the book is set in. Killeen provides an easy and enjoyable way to distil the essence of Joyce’s masterpiece. His systematic approach to each episode (chapter) with a good and clear description of the Homeric parallels, should appeal to the novice Joycean (me) as well as more learned students of literature. I enjoyed walking through this book, as much as I did walking the scenes for real this June. We started off at the Martello tower - and after lunching in Sandymount, progressed through to Davy Byrnes for a glass of Burgundy. The book, of course, carries on to 2am, which is past my bedtime. I have read Ulysses twice, in full chronological order, and collapsed exhausted ...

The Art of Spending Money: Simple Choices for a Richer Life by Morgan Housel My rating: 5 of 5 stars View all my reviews

The Last Days of Budapest: The Destruction of Europe’s Most Cosmopolitan Capital in World War II by Adam LeBor My rating: 3 of 5 stars View all my reviews

The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin My rating: 5 of 5 stars This was a delightful book, reminding me how great a travel writer Chatwin was. I have followed his footsteps in the mountains of Lijiang and the wind-swept ports of Chilean Patagonia. I have filled Moleskine after Moleskine of fragments during the past 20 years, but none like the delicate observations recorded in Songlines. I started using Moleskine notebooks in 2005 in homage to Chatwin. In France, these notebooks are known as carnets moleskines: 'moleskine', in this case, being its black oilcloth binding. Each time I went to Paris, I would buy a fresh supply from a papeterie in the Rue de l'Áncienne Comédie. The pages were squared and the endpapers held in place with an elastic band. I had numbered them in series. I wrote my name and address on the front page, offering a reward to the finder. To lose a passport was the least of one's worries: to lose a notebook was a catastroph...

The Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafak My rating: 4 of 5 stars View all my reviews

The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin My rating: 5 of 5 stars View all my reviews