10% Happier. How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works—A True Story

By Dan Harris.

Part Biography of Dan Harris. Part guide to secularish meditation. The book spends the bulk of its time on Harris's experience learning and practicing meditation.

I enjoyed.

• Think of mediation as practice concentrating. The part when you notice your thoughts going astray, and then bring them back—that's meditation. It's not the part where your mind goes blank and you zen out.
• You have to be practical through all of this. The goal of detachment, of mindfulness, isn't to become disconnected. It's to not let your choices be so emotionally driven.

Harris thinks of Buddhism as advanced common sense.

The Big Fat Surprise. Why Butter, Meat, and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet

By Nina Teicholz

Not a diet book. This is really a book that covers western food science for the past 50 years. It has issues with the low fat diet, arguing that it is less healthy than a diet with beef and saturated fat.

How did we get here? How could 50+ years of research still not conclusively settle our diet debates. It's long and complex.

The nutritionists have always known that it would take decades to settle the questions about what diets are best for your health. The hypotheses, (guess really) that fat makes you fat, isn't a bad one as fat affects total cholesterol, which at one time was the only predictor for heart disease.

But the study results are never clear cut. While low fat diets lower your cholesterol, they don't lower mortality.

The book also covers the history of trans fat. The science on trans fat is far less settled than you'd think. The author doesn't like it, but she is more concerned that we have replaced trans fat with an array of processed fats and other chemicals that we really know nothing about.

The book also covers the Mediterranean diet and it's history. Apparently there are other local diets (German, Serbian) that result in just as little heart disease. However various Mediterranean authorities (From Italy, Spain & Greece) put much time and money into selling the Mediterranean diet.

I'm a little worried that parts of the book are very thick on the rhetoric. Small studies that support the safety of saturated fat "Raise intriguing questions." While Small studies that support low fat diets "Have too little data to be considered valid." I wish she would have been more consistent with the standards uses.

What do I think? I think that food science is very unsettled. You can swap butter for Olive Oil all you want, and the impact won't be as great as if you eat a variety of foods, especially vegetables, in moderation.

 

 

Wishful Drinking

By Carrie Fisher.

 

Wikipedia calls this an autobiographical humor book.

 

I can see that. It's pithy, jokie, lots of small stories about the insanity in her life and a few great observations about addiction.  Reading this after Fisher's death makes it as memorable for what she left out as what she wrote down.

 

What's odd is that she avoids discussing the painful parts of her life. She discuss the painful parts of her mothers life, for example. But she never really covers the details of her addictions.

 

 

Deep Down Things: The Breathtaking Beauty of Particle Physics

I like this book. It's a little more math heavy than most layman's physics books. Since I have a strong math background this gave me a deeper understanding. The book offers a good intro to Lie Groups and Gauge Theory.

With Einstein and relativity, Einstein had a deep insight—light always travels the speed of light regardless of your frame of reference. As he explored this insight he created special and general relativity which were validated with some amazing predictions.

The Standard Model of physics is different. It's more like the physicists are observing the data and then retro fitting models to explain that data. After a century they have created the Standard Model. This is frustrating in that it all feels very ad hoc. It doesn't offer deeper insight on why this should be so. On the other side, the Standard Model is very accurate. It has predicted many Deep Down Things with great precision.

The book stops with the Standard Model. It doesn't cover string theory and entanglement.

 

 

1493

 

Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

By Charles C Mann

How has the world changed since 1493? Since Columbus introduced east and west? In many deep and broad ways…

The honey bee and the earth worm are both European. How North America soil turns over is fundamentally different than 500 years ago. This used to be driven by fire, beavers and other insects. Think of beavers building ponds everywhere. Think of fires (driven by Native Americans) being lit every fall.

Slavery—Black slaves were more immune to malaria and yellow fever giving them an advantage in the south and the carribean.

The introduction of bouncing. Latex and rubber balls were first invented in South America. When Europeans first saw rubber balls it caused a small bouncing craze.

The introduction of global trade. The book has a very nuanced view on global trade. Not black or white. Of course global trade gives its partners access to economic opportunities that didn't exist before. It also upsets long standing relationships. Trade is often the tool of Governments and the elites. Global trade creates a new way for countries to interact and manipulate each other. Sometimes conflicts result.