Books I read in 2018

4 min readDec 23, 2018

I took back up the habit of reading again this year.

I enjoyed:

Steve Grand

It was good to think about how the behavior of small parts put together into a larger system gets new behaviors to form. The new behaviors aren’t coded in any of the individual parts, but meta-rules form from the smaller rules. This was the inspiration for Amazon’s AWS and other things. Plus I remember playing Creatures when I was a kid.

The Case for Mars:
The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must

Robert Zubrin

Written in a time before BFR, Starship, Super Heavy, or even SpaceX at all, this shows how we’d get to Mars using 1996 technology. Of particular interest is the in-situ return propellant generation on Mars. Not sure if we should go to Mars? Zubrin can explain it to you.

Structures:
Or Why Things Don’t Fall Down

J.E. Gordon

I didn’t do mechanical engineering in college. But after reading this, I feel as if I now at least have a basic idea of the tradeoffs and concerns with materials and assembling them into larger things. Stress fractures, tension, torsion, compression, arcs, giant cracks in ships that cause ships to just break it half. Worth the read.

The Infinite Monkey Cage:
How to Build a Universe

Robin Ince and Prof. Brian Cox

This books is sort of a cross between a QI/Fish book, and a Steven Hawking . I actually don’t remember much from it though.

The Black Swan

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Oh man, Nassim waffles. He goes on and on, name dropping all these people he’s read and talked to. But his point is great. And can be summed up in about one sentence: That the biggest risks are the ones that aren’t modeled. I’m still working my way through this one.

Made In America

Sam Walton

This guy loves retail. Really. Shows what you can do with persistence, and waking up at 5am every morning to pour through numbers. And how to grow a business by opening new stores faster than you should. Reminds me of the growth of McDonalds in The Founder movie. It just takes that sort of personality to open store after store, until one day, four decades later, you are America. You can see why Bezos read this.

The Space Barons

Christian Davenport

Even if you’ve read Quest For The Fantastic Future or Everything Store, this has a lot of background on what it actually took to start a space company. The timing was pretty right, with NASA starting to consider funding commercial crew programs, but it also took driving a rocket to the White House. Can you imagine moving to the USA and driving a missile to the White House? Seems… audacious.