Book Review

After reading this book I have to say it is currently the number 1 recommendation I give if somebody wants to try to understand how the human brain works. Starting from eukaryotes Max Bennett tried to reason about what it means for a living organism to be intelligent. Not only did he summarize the current literature he also synthesized the main ideas into 5 breakthroughs: Steering Reinforcing Simulating Mentalizing Speaking One important note about the whole story is, that it is about the human lineage in the evolutional history, and therefore about animals, vertebrates, mammals and primates. ...

Do you trust your calculations? This book review is about The Los Alamos Primer, the first lectures on how to build an atomic bomb, by Robert Serber. The review focuses on the basic calculations and physics knowledge of the Manhattan Project scientists. Since the Primer is a collection of 1943 lecture notes combined with Serber’s hindsight commentary, it corrects some of the original calculations and measurements by comparing them with modern values. This makes it fascinating to see how close—or off—the physicists were at the time. For anyone interested in the topic, I highly recommend reading both the Primer and The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes, one of my all-time favorite books. ...

The Mystery of Inequality Why are some countries rich and stable while their neighbors are poor and chaotic? In their 2012 book Why Nations Fail, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson argue that the answer isn’t geography, culture, or luck. It comes down to one thing: institutions. The authors open with a perfect real-world experiment: the city of Nogales. A fence cuts the city in half. North (Arizona, USA): Residents have property rights, a functioning legal system, and can vote people out of office. They are relatively wealthy and healthy. South (Sonora, Mexico): Just a few feet away, residents face corruption, unreliable laws, and economic instability. They earn a fraction of what their northern neighbors do. Both sides share the same geography, the same climate, and the same culture. The only difference is the system they live in. ...