2021

  1. Leanardo Da Vinci A great biography of Leonardo Da Vinci. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. Learning about the life of Da Vinci inspired me to start building my drawing habilities. Moreover reading about his life has made realize the power of observation as well as the benefits of being curious about a wide field of things. Da Vinci’s genius is really the mix of those two things, uncanny observation habilities paired with relentless curiosity. It is obvious that such observational skills were developed in response to his choosen trajectory as a painter and drawer. The great news as the author of the book points out. Observational skills are just like any other skill and can be developed and improved over time. I finished this book encouraged to broaden my curiosity, think about how to be more observant and not feel bad about unfinished creative work.
  2. The call of the Wild I have never read a book written from the point of view of the animal, a dog in this case. I enjoyed it, though, at times, the content was violent making it hard to read. This book made crave for the outdoors. Jack London has great talent in using words to describe nature. A bit short.
  3. Courage to be disliked. An interesting read describing the ideas of Alfred Adler. Some of my key takeaways from the book is that the individual manages his/her decisions, and they are not( I choose to believe they are minimally) influenced by his/her past. This is a somewhat contrarian view currently, where most of us believe that our choices are heavily influeced by our past experiences(good or bad). The other key idea of this book is how many of our problems are rooted in relantionship problems, we look for approval from people arounds, or fail to realize that contribution to a community is the point of life. Yes Alfred Alder unambiogously identifies contribution to a community as a path to a happy life.
  4. Seveneves A fantastic science fiction book on human extra-terrestrial life and its possibilities. I learned how much I don’t know about orbital mechanics and sometimes the description of orbital paths were hard to follow.
  5. [The man who solved the market]() A recount of the history of Reinnasance technologies and the application of math specifically hidden markov chains for the price prediction (in the commodities market)
  6. [A Crack in creation]() A book describing crisper and its applications. One surprising part was the fact high turnover rate of our cells.
  7. [Pratical Deep Learning]() Learning about deep learning
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2020

  1. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky. I have tried reading this book before, and this year I finally finished. I had high expectations about the philosophical content on it, unfortunately I was a bit dissapointent when I actually read it. I also found the practice of using different names for the same character extremely confusing(probably why I stopped reading the book earlier).
  2. Why the Dutch are different by A summary of Dutch history and culture. Very entertaining though a little light on the historical content.
  3. 1493 1493 is an excellent book about the encounter of the American and European continent. I find shocking that I never learned about many of the facts of found in this book. Moreover it highlights the importance of SouthAmerica in the development of world. I think a lot of these ideas need to be taugh widely to provide more tools to understand the current state of America, and to help heal the wounds created by the euro-american encounters. Here are some facts that were completely unknown to me before I read this book: The Andean region in South America, provided a key ingredient for the stabilization of the European continent and its eventual economical sucess. Embargoes imposed on Haiti, starting after its independence, have caused great damage to its economy. Further, the first embargo imposed on Haiti, was in retaliation to Haitian’s successful independence!!. In the sixteen century, many of the globe’s richest cities located in South America and Mexico.
  4. Quantum Computing for Computer Scientists. A book on the basic of quantum computing
  5. 21 lessons for the 21st century An interesting book on how different current events can/will shape the next decades of human society. Harari makes a good argument on why developing skills such as kindness, generosity, self-knowledge will be more important than ever. I felt this book had a dystopian tone on the average. The one idea that stuck to me through the book was the fact people around the world are more similar to each other now more ever before. I certainly have more in common with someone aroudn my same age living in say Vietnam, than someone who lived in my same from geographical location 100 or even 50 years ago.

2019

  1. The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book, it exposed in more intuitive way to the concept of emerging complexity. David’s ideas on complexity theory, epistemology, evolution and quantum mechanics as the foundation of knowledge are certainly bold, specially the claim that all there is to know can be known by understanding those. I appreciated his thoughs on inductivism and the perils of it when applied to science. I’d like to keep investigating more Popperian philosophy.
  2. The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knight by John Steinback. This was my first book John S. and actually my first literary encounter with King Arthur’s tales. The book was very fast paced and at a times I felt I was missing a lot of details, overall I was entertaining read.
  3. Quantum computing since Democritus by Scott Aaronson not a simple read, but very entertaining. I enjoyed learning about the many other of complexity classes even though at times it was hard to comprehend. I thoroughly enjoyed his explanations on quantum mechanics and negative probabilities and the chapter that was least accessible to me was the hidden variables chapter. Analyzing the power of computers in the presence of CTC or the PCTC complexity class was a entertaining and informative excercise. I borrowed this book from the library by I wish I owned it as I am sure I would go back and re-read a lot of the chapters.
  4. [Algorithm Desgin]() by Steven Skiena. Nothing new here, except for the annealing technique which I found to be extremely interesting.

2018

  1. The undiscovered self
  2. How not to be wrong (audiobook)
  3. El chulla Romero y Flores
  4. On Strategy Harvard Business Review (unfinished)
  5. Gulp
  6. Seneca life is short
  7. Death’s end
  8. The dark forrest
  9. Sailing a serious oceans
  10. Mr Midshipman Hornblower by C.S Forester
  11. Reality is not what it seems by Carlo Rovelli I really enjoyed reading this book and learning about Carlo’s ideas on time. It was fascinating to think about space not as a continous phenomena but as a discrete process and more importantly a non-infinite discrete processes. I enjoyed reading about the authors and scientists behind our current understanding of spacetime and it was enlighting to learn that Einstein genious was not his command of physics or mathematics but his creatitivy and tenacity. This book also made me realize that general relativity and quantum mechanics have been with us for around 100 years, yet we teach it mostly at the college level(this was my experience anyway), why?.
  12. Las costumbres de los ecuatorianos by Osvaldo Hurtado This books was pretty hard to read of because his harsh criticism on the ecuadorian society. I, howwever, do think this is something more ecuadorians should read. It also made me realize that Ecuador is still healing its culture and I remain positive this process will positively affect the country in years to come. I was pleasantly surpprised to read about Azuay

Papers: SGX and Novel Applications, A First Look at the Usability of Bitcoin Key Management, A First Look at the Usability of Bitcoin Key Management, Raft concensus, Self control relies on glucose level, Stellar, The psychology of human missjudgement, O(n) sorting at scAle with machine learning, Programming as an experience, Tracking Causal Order in AWS Lambda Applications, Function as a service runtime implementation, Serverless Beyond the Cloud, Introduction to quantum computing,

© Esteban Ginez 2020