Help me learn new things! – The Recap

I wrote this back in 2010:

A couple of years ago, I was reading a biography of Albert Einstein.  I was struck by how much he, and scientists like him, we versed in philosophy.  I realized it was one of the areas in which my education was deficient.

This seemed like a big hole, especially given the rhetoric being flung around about health care reform.  People cited the values of our founders, those of America, and how they would feel about reform.  I realized I knew shockingly little about this.  I did what I usually do in that situation – I took a whole pile of books and spent many summer evenings reading in my backyard with a glass of scotch.  My wife is still making fun of me.

That summer led to this post. It also led to this paper. And then years passed.

I like learning new things. I think it’s important. It keeps me fresh. It makes me a better person. I decided, last December, that I wanted to dedicate a significant amount of time this year to learning more about topics I knew little about. I asked for your help in picking them, and in suggesting things I should read or watch. Each month, I wrote up what I learned, and reviewed the materials.

I only missed two months, which isn’t that bad considering I still had a full-time job, wrote 30 or so columns for the NYT, made a hundred videos for Healthcare Triage, wrote a handful of times for the JAMA Forum, and two dozen more for the AcademyHealth blog. Not to mention blogging for TIE. Oh, and I wrote a book.

The individual posts are still available from both The Schedule and here. I wanted to collect all of the sources together in one place, though. The bolded green entries are those I especially recommended. When I look at the list altogether, I can’t believe I managed to get it done. I’m pretty proud of this.

January – History of water and growth in So Cal (and maybe elsewhere)

• William Mulholland and the Rise of Los Angeles, by Catherine Mulholland
• Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, by Marc Reisner
•  The West without Water: What Past Floods, Droughts, and Other Climatic Clues Tell Us about Tomorrow, by B. Lynn Ingram and Frances Malamud-Roam
• Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States, by Kenneth Jackson
• Deadbeat Dams: Why We Should Abolish the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and Tear Down Glen Canyon Dam, by Daniel Beard

February – Wine

• Drink This: Wine Made Simple, by Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl
• True Taste: The Seven Essential Wine Words by Matt Kramer
• The Oxford Companion to Wine
• Somm (The Documentary)
• Sideways (The Movie)
• Windows on the World Complete Wine Course, by Kevin Zraly
• Wine Folly: The Essential Guide to Wine, by Madeline Puckette

March – Game Theory

• Game Theory 101: The Complete Textbook, by William Spaniel
• Thinking Strategically: The Competitive Edge in Business, Politics, and Everyday Life by Avinash K. Dixit and Barry J. Nalebuff
• Game Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)
• Game-Changer: Game Theory and the Art of Transforming Strategic Situations, by David McAdams
• Prisoner’s Dilemma, by William Poundstone
• Game Theory for Applied Economists, by Robert Gibbons
• The Compleat Strategyst, by J.D. Williams
• Games of Strategy, by Avinash K. Dixit, Susan Skeath, and David H. Reiley
• ECON 159: GAME THEORY (Open Yale Courses)

April – Cryptography

• The Code Book, by Simon Singh
• Crypto, by Steven Levy
• Secrets and Lies, by Bruce Schneier

May – Art History

• The Story of Art, by E.H. Gombrich
• Air Guitar, by Dave Hickey
• The Shock of the New, by Robert Hughes
• The Lives of the Artists, by Giorgio Vasari (Author), Julia Conway Bondanella (Translator), Peter Bondanella
• Look! Art History Fundamentals, by Anne D’Alleva

June – The history of railroads in the US

•  Nothing Like It In the World: The Men Who Built  Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869, by Stephen Ambrose
• Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America, by Richard White
• The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914, by David McCullough

July – Oceanography

• Flotsametrics and the Floating World: How One Man’s Obsession with Runaway Sneakers and Rubber Ducks Revolutionized Ocean Science by Curtis Ebbesmeyer and Eric Scigliano
• Climate and the Oceans, by Geoffrey Vallis
• Do Dolphins Ever Sleep?, by Pierre-Yves and Sally Bely
• Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas, by Stephan Helmreich
• Essentials of Oceanography, by Alan P. Trujillo and Harold V. Thurman

August – Football (strategy and theory)

• Take Your Eye Off the Ball 2.0, by Pat Kirwan and David Seigerman
• The Essential Smart Football, by Chris Brown
• The Art of Smart Football, by Chris Brown
• Blood, Sweat & Chalk: The Ultimate Football Playbook: How the Great Coaches Built Today’s Game, by Tim Layden

September/October – Chaos Theory

• Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick
• The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, also by James Gleick
• Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos: With Applications to Physics, Biology, Chemistry, and Engineering, by Steven H. Strogatz
• Turbulent Mirror: An Illustrated Guide to Chaos Theory and the Science of Wholeness, by John Briggs
• Does God Play Dice? The New Mathematics of Chaos, by Ian Stewart.

November – Linguistics

• The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker
• The Fight for English, by David Crystal
• The Power of Babel, by John McWhorter
• How English Works, by Anne Curzan and Michael Adams
• Course in General Linguistics, by Ferdinand De Saussure

I hope you enjoyed this as much as I did. I think I might try something else in 2017. More on that to come.

@aaronecarroll