Mind the Gap: Navigating Between Rules and Reality
Bureaucracy is stupid, David Graeber writes in The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. As the premise for a book, it’s more fertile than it sounds.
#reviews
9 posts
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Mediocre Books
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →I'm afraid of flying.
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Review: The Lady Tasting Tea
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →David Salsburg's The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century is a book that doesn't know its audience. Billed as a history of statistical theories, it is more like a biography of the various statisticians who proposed those theories. Salsburg describes his intentions fairly well in the second to last paragraph of the introduction:
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Review: The Signal and the Noise
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →When Nate Silver correctly called the winner of all 50 states in this year's presidential election (and 31 out of the 33 Senate races), how many people rushed out to buy his book, eager to learn how to make such spot-on predictions? How many were disappointed?
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On Killing
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →(A discussion at last Tuesday's Iron-Blogger meetup reminded me of this review I wrote a few years ago.)
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Seriously.
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →The other day at work, while I was hanging around the coffee machine, I saw a flyer for an IAP (read: Jan Term) course on "Serious Games". It looked neat, so I emailed the instructor to get the syllabus, and I've started playing my way through. I figured I'd post my half-formed thoughts about how these projects work both as games and as tools to educate/persuade/mobilize people.
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The Perfect Woman
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →My family and I watched Agora, the new movie about Hypatia of Alexandria, over Thanksgiving weekend. We were all very excited about this, having been intrigued by Hypatia ever since we watched the segment of Carl Sagan's Cosmos on her - the same clip which apparently inspired Alejandro Amenábar, the director of and force behind Agora.
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Why the Stars Shine
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →A few months ago I was browsing through a comic book store with my friends Orli and Skim. You'd think a nerd like me would be a devourer of comic books/graphic novels, but I've actually only read a few series. Although those series (Y: The Last Man, Sandman) & Transmetropolitan, for the curious) have been pretty roundly fabulous, I've just never started reading regularly. In fact, at that point I'd never bought a single comic book.
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The Man Who Knew Too Much
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →With a subject as complex and influential as Alan Turing, how could this biography fail to be fascinating? The premise of the book is an examination of Turing as an outsider, someone prone to working alone, a trait which helped him come up with outside-the-box ideas of universal machines. It explores Turing's deep-seated sense of isolation and to what extent it was caused by his position as an unashamed but closeted gay man and how he feared his homosexuality would be used to discredit his ideas. As Turing once wrote in a syllogism: