Erik Novales

I decided to try setting up Calibre on my machine to manage my e-books, and rather than use the e-mail sync functionality with my Kindle, I figured I would just sync it via USB. I attached it through another micro-USB cable that I happened to have attached to my computer, but I had weird issues [...]

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Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue (Kindle version) is a book that my wife gave me awhile back, and to which I finally got around to reading. It’s a bit of a strange book – it purports to challenge existing dogma about the origins of modern English, but does so in a manner that seems too casual [...]

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I just finished reading Yeager (Chuck Yeager’s autobiography), having retrieved it out of the local library’s "buck-a-bag" book section along with a few other selections. It’s a pretty decent read, and paints an interesting picture of a man who was in the thick of many of the most exciting aviation developments from the ’40s through [...]

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I’ve been reading quite a bit lately, so I figured that I would write capsule reviews or summaries of the books that I’ve read. The United States of Arugula is a look behind the evolution of “American cuisine,” the popularization and adoption of local and organic foodstuffs, and how the perception of cooking in this [...]

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The title of this entry is taken from the book of the same name by Paul Shirley, occasional NBA player and basketball wordsmith. It’s a very funny book, mixing insight into the sometimes surreal lives of basketball mercenaries, along with ruminations on more philosophical questions. Given the occasional crazy outburst by an NBA player, it’s [...]

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I recently got done reading The Artist and the Mathematician, a book about the fictitious mathematician Nicolas Bourbaki and his influence on 20th century math. Bourbaki was a pseudonym for a group of French mathematicians who were intent on not only revamping the state of math education in France (it having suffered greatly from the [...]

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I recently finished reading the book Poincare’s Prize, by George Szpiro. The book covers the history of topology and of Henri Poincaré, the attempts to prove his famous conjecture, and the techniques that were developed along the way. Proving the conjecture was one of the seven Millennium Prize problems that were published by the Clay [...]

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I’ve finished reading Phil Jackson’s The Last Season, and Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air. I’ve also finished a bunch of Sudoku puzzles in Brain Age. I haven’t used my MP3 player yet, but I have been keeping up on the day’s news with my phone. The question now is: Charles Petzold’s Code or Nick Hornby’s [...]

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I have recently been reading a few books on business and entrepreneurship, with the goal of trying to determine if starting a business is something I’d be interested in exploring. In the past, I’ve browsed through various business books at the bookstore, but never really committed to reading one all the way through. Part of [...]

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I just read a book titled The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King: Inside the Richest Poker Game of All Time. The book tells the story of a rich Texas banker who, on a bit of a lark, challenges some of the world’s best poker players to increasingly higher stakes limit hold ‘em games [...]

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