Books I’ve read 2012
Most of my reading is done over at Readmill, but a few paperbacks squeezed in as well among all the ebooks. All in all I read 46 books this year. 6 shy of 52. Damn. I managed to get stuck on both Nate Silver’s book and one about Interaction design. But all in all a good reading year.
The list is in chronological order, starting from the bottom.
- The Icarus Deception Seth Godin
- Ben & Jerry’s: The inside scoop Fred Lager
- Super Sad True Love Story Gary Shteyngart
- Montercore Jonas Hessem Kemiri
- Den Amerikanska Högern Martin Gelin
- Cloud atlas David Mitchell
- How to make a japanese house Cathelijne Nuijsink
- The Blockbuster toy Gene Del Vecchio
- Players Don DeLillo
- Play: How it shapes the soul, Opens the imagination and Invigorates the soul. Stuart Brown, Christopher Vaughan
- Reality is broken Jane McGonigal
- The Pixar Touch David A. Price
- The power of play David Elkind
- Anything you want Derek Sivers
- Enemies Tim Weiner
- Livet längs linjen Erik Niva
- A fair maiden Joyce Carol Oates
- Slaughterhouse 5 Kurt Vonnegut
- Mrs Dalloway Virgina Woolf
- Let my people go surfing Yvon Chouinard
- One Click: Jeff Bezos and the rise of amazon.com Richard Brandt
- All Tom friends are superheroes Andrew Kaufman
- Monster Michael Dahlén
- The power of habit Charles Duhigg
- The Waves Virgina Woolf
- Den nya världsfotbollen Erik Niva
- Why Nations Fail Daron Acemoglu
- Shape of design Frank Chimero
- Design is a job Mike Monteiro
- The information diet Clay A. Johnson
- Once upon a secret Mimi Alford
- Private games James Patterson
- Given Sam Lipsyte
- Thinking fast and slow Daniel Khaneman
- Annabel Scheme Robin Sloan
- Great by choice Jim Collins
- Bossypants Tina Fey
- Adaptive web design Aaron Gustafson
- Good to great Jim Collins
- The marriage plot Jeffery Eugenides
- The Sense of an ending Julian Barnes
- Bootstrap Seth Godin
- Blue nights Joan Didion
- Boomerang Michael Lewis
- Moonwalking with Einstein Joshua Foer
1:39 am • 31 December 2012
"Our income statement makes us look like an internet company, but when it comes to the balance sheet it looks more like a financial institution: 80 per cent of our assets are associated with our financial business."
— From Pinterest to Kobo, how Japan’s Rakuten is building a global internet giant (Wired UK)
11:34 pm • 22 August 2012
How Tech Has Changed How We Cook - The Atlantic
Technology’s ability to make tasks not just easier, but faster. With the free time that is the gift of our gadgets, we have even more opportunity to cook something good.
My thought exactly.
(via thenextweb)
10:27 am • 13 August 2012
"He is a connoisseur of ancient battles; whenever he makes a film, he takes along Livy’s history of the Second Punic War. “I read it for consolation when times get dire,"
— Herzog! Profiles: The Ecstatic Truth : The New Yorker
9:48 am • 10 August 2012
"But I don’t like to argue to be right. I like to argue because that’s how I get to the truth."
— A way of trying to understand his extreme views and thinking. John Mackey, C.E.O. of Whole Foods : The New Yorker
9:31 am • 10 August 2012
They replaced the 21,000 words found in your everyday dictionary with whatever shows up first for each word in Google’s image search
“Conceptually it’s whatever you make of it,” writes Ben. The sad reality of shrinking attention spans, collective media fatigue or how an expert reference book is no match for the convenience of Google, for example. “It’s really an unfiltered, uncritical record of the state of human culture in 2012,” concludes Ben. So, how are we faring? “I would estimate about half of the book is revolting medical photos, porn, racism or bad cartoons.”
The first Google image for every word in the dictionary - Creative Applications
2:10 pm • 28 May 2012
"Most companies have to create those kinds of users, but Google just has them sitting around in droves. It’s those people rooting around in Scholar and Books and Earth. It’s those people uploading ridiculous amounts of photos to Picasa. It’s those people who built large networks of Google Reader friends. They are the ones who make a social network awesome and therefore worth visiting."
— Technology - Alexis Madrigal - How Google Can Beat Facebook Without Google Plus - The Atlantic
1:55 pm • 27 May 2012
"The 1920s and ‘30s were a golden age of plastic innovation, with companies like Dow Chemical, DuPont, and I. G. Farben creating hundreds of new varieties of plastic for thrilled consumers. Cellophane became a cult. Nylons became a cult. A plastics trade show in 1946 had 87,000 members of the public lining up to view the wonders. New fabrics came along—Orlon and Dacron—as colorful as the deluge of plastic toys—Barbie, the Frisbee, Hula hoops"
— What Common Objects Used to Be Made Of | Beyond The Beyond | Wired.com
1:43 pm • 27 May 2012
"
The second reason is something casinos have known for a long time. To illustrate, let me ask you if you know what the most profitable part of a casino gaming floor is? Slot machines. Slot machines are extremely powerful earners because they employ a principle called “random payout”. Turns out if you pull a handle and it pays out predictably, you very quickly figure it out and stop pulling. But, make the reward random and people have a very hard time stopping. Some pulls are nothing, some pulls give you a little, and occasionally, you get a jackpot.
Think about text messages or email alerts from your phone in this context. Some aren’t important. Some are. And occasionally, something very urgent comes in. its random payout in your pocket.
"
— Joe Kraus Blog
1:36 pm • 27 May 2012
"Optimism, pessimism, fuck that; we’re going to make it happen. As God is my bloody witness, I’m hell-bent on making it work."
— #TeamRocket Elon Musk (via ninakix)
(via iamdanw)
12:23 pm • 27 May 2012
"
New paradigms tend to start in technologies that are cheap to build, and spread to technologies that are expensive to build. They spread from text to software to hardware. (…) To see a further into the future of hardware, we might look at what’s happening with text today. When we look at Twitter and SMS, we still see communication and gift. But more strikingly, we see smallness.
If software follows content, I imagine we’ll start to see lots of APIs that do small things. But they will easily interact with one another to together do big things. And if hardware then follows software, I imagine that we will see lots of small devices that do simple things alone, but complex things together. They might remind us of ants.
"
— Sep Kamvar - Software ecologies
8:04 am • 21 May 2012
