Posts tagged as:

books

Knowledge and causality in inquiry and design

June 3, 2010

The structure of science and engineering, a big mistake, and a book

See also: “The Antiparallel Structures of Science and Engineering”

An effect may have one possible cause, or many. The weight of a stone has a single cause, gravity, but the flight of a stone coming over a wall could have one of many [...]

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My MIT dissertation — a draft of Nanosystems —
is now online

September 26, 2009

My MIT doctoral dissertation, “Molecular Machinery and Manufacturing with Applications to Computation”, is a draft of Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing, and Computation, and MIT has now made it available as a 30 MB pdf. You can download it here.
The Nanosystems project began as notes for a seminar that I taught at Stanford, grew toward a [...]

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The Paradox of Choice

June 3, 2009

In standard theories of rationality, it is practically axiomatic that having more choices is always better. It should come as no surprise that this isn’t true of real human beings: Too much choice can make us miserable.
In The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, Barry Schwartz unfolds a broad picture of the perversities of [...]

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Predictably Irrational

February 5, 2009

If you’ve read Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, you’ve probably recommended it to a friend. I you haven’t read it, then I think you’ll like it provided that:

You like to learn strange facts about how the human world really works, and
You sometimes enjoy well-written books on science by scientists who know [...]

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Nudging Toward a Better Future

January 9, 2009

A new book, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein describe surprising opportunities to improve the world today, and in doing so, they show how to make a future of accelerating change more livable for poorly informed human beings. The information and concepts have changed my way of thinking about some important issues.

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Black Swans

December 5, 2008

It seems that whenever I recommend The Black Swan to a friend, the response is “Yes, people have been saying I should read it”, or words to that effect (Rosa and I first heard it recommended by a speaker at a WEF meeting in Dalian, China). In The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly [...]

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