Posted October 12, 2016 at 10:44 am

Wednesday Book Reviews!

Lesser Beasts (Essig) A fun little book on the history of the relationship between humans and pigs. The use of pigs as a tool for conquest (really!) was especially interesting.

Weapons of Math Destruction (O’Neil) This is a great book. O'Neil is a mathematician who went to finance and was appalled by some of the things she saw. The topic of the book in particular is the way we create mathematical models and then become beholden to their weird results, in many areas ranging from finance to education.

We (Zamyatin) A really interesting novel, written in the 1920s, and which may be an early entry in the genre we now think of as Orwellian dystopia. It's one of those books that's both an enjoyable read and an interesting look into historical views of the organization of society.

Arms and the Man (Lowther) Probably the best book on Gerald Bull, whose life I've been really into lately.

The Mind Club (Wegner, Gray) Another great book! This is a book on the philosophy and neuroscience that goes into how humans decided what counts as a conscious mind, and what creatures thereby derive ethical rights. It's not just reporting on what scientists and philosophers think, either - this is a theoretical framework for how we make those judgments.