Category: Reflection
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Reading Notes: Weapons of Math Destruction
My first non-fiction of the year is one of the often talked about books in the data circle, Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction. I don’t necessarily like the fear mongering metaphor, but the book does point out serious repercussions of our society’s increasing reliance on data and algorithms to make decisions that impact people’s…
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Retrospective 2017
Major Accomplishments: Grew out my nails (my greatest accomplishment in 30 years) Bought a house Finished my reading challenge Started a new project 365 Trips: January – Morocco March – San Francisco April – Nicaragua May – Philadelphia July – San Francisco August – Denver September – Acadia October – Durham, Vegas December – San…
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Guns, Germs, Steel, Sapiens, Seveneves
I read Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Harari earlier this year, and thought it one of the most intriguing books I’ve read. The author ambitiously goes through 2 million years of human history, from the first appearance of homo habilis all the way to modern times, all in the course of 400 pages.…
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Reading Notes: Evicted
I joined a non-fiction book club and this was my first book. It’s interesting to be in a book club with strangers, because you don’t necessarily know who they are and why they picked the book they did. But I’m pretty happy about this first choice. It was a short read that took less than…
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Underground Railroad
The sense of guilt that I felt while reading The Underground Railroad on a beach in Nicaragua seemed silly. As a first generation immigrant, it’s not like anyone in my family can trace their ancestry back to a plantation. Yet precisely because I was an immigrant, the fear of racism still lurks in the shadows. Knowing that the…
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You Laugh But It’s True
The first time I heard the name Trevor Noah, the press was making a big deal because he made some bad jokes about Jewish people, and that made him a bad candidate for replacing Jon Stewart as the host of the Daily Show. Unfortunately they didn’t find more dirt and Jon left anyway and I still…
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Home Sweet Home
In the summer of 2011, I received a university fellowship to study US-China relations in China and went back to my homeland for the first time in 7 years. As a victim of theft, I lost my green card, and my return was delayed for three weeks as I scrambled…
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On Being – Paulo Coelho
I have given up on PokemonGo (applause please). During my two weeks of obsessing over the game, I started walking to and from work (2.5mi each way) to catch more Pokemon and hatch Pokemon eggs. My obsession has died down, but I did keep the habit of walking to work on my off (from the gym)…
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Life is suffering
I never write about tragedies because tragedies are confusing. Tragedies evoke emotional responses that encourage people to look at the world and see it in black and white. Tragedies divide people into us and them. Tragedies suck. The world we live in today is better than the world of yesterday. I know that’s hard to…
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