What are you reading?

[DroppingPlates]

                                                 Abstract
    Many methods can fit models with higher prediction accuracy, on average, than least squares linear
regression. But the models, including linear regression, are typically impossible to interpret or visualize.
We describe a tree-structured method that fits a simple but non-trivial model to each partition of the
variable space. This ensures that each piece of the fitted regression function can be visualized with
a graph or a contour plot. For maximum interpretability, our models are constructed with negligible
variable selection bias and the tree structures are much more compact than piecewise-constant regression
trees. We demonstrate, by means of a large empirical study involving twenty-seven methods, that the
average prediction accuracy of our models is almost as high as that of the most accurate “black-box”
methods from the statistics and machine learning literature.
...




...ok, time to relax now
 

[Mr. Magoo]

finished Mill's Subjection of Women, now i'm rereading Rawls's Theory of Justice, then I'll read Law's Empire by Dworkin.

[Mr. Magoo]

How about balancing out Rawls with Anarchy, the State, and Utopia right after?

already have it (and read it).

EDIT: Oh and the reason I'm rereading Rawls is for his egalitarian conception of the person and compensation of chance versus choice that I'm writing a paper on.

[Mr Nobody]

Rip Van Winkle. I am trying to figure out how to sleep 20 hours a day and still make money.

[Mr. Magoo]

Isn't school out? That seems like serious stuff for a summer course.

In all honesty, this is what I do for fun.

[dr.chimps]

Just finished Elmore Leonard's 'Djibouti.' What a turd. Book was on the bargain table, and I figured Elmore Leonard: I can't lose. Wrong. Hard to follow plot, silly goal, forgettable characters, all in a foreign city. A rare clunker from the master. Get us back to Detroit, Elmore.

[_bruce_]

The sickest, nastiest, FREAKIEST book I've ever read....needed to read it on an empty stomach....def. a Getbigger's Book of the Month Club.

So Stark hired a ghost writer... 

[garebear]

Just finished this. Very good book about Afghanistan.

[JBGRAY]

What is the book about? Looks like the same artist that did "The Wall".

Its about an alien race of goblins that utilize Nazi-era symbology and style and kidnaps children from the world kidland.  They use the children as brutalized slaves to make toys...the children are also melted down and used as a cider-like drink for the goblins to consume.  The goblins are also ever on the lookout for the "freshest assholes."  It is rather difficult to fully explain, lol.

Its Bizarro fiction.....kind of a dark closet at the end of the dark forgotten hall of modern-day horror literature.

[JBGRAY]

But.....back to more serious reading. 

[CalvinH]

Just finished "Spartacus" by Ben Kane.


....very well done.

[Benny B]

[Mr. Magoo]

Euclid in the Rainforest: Discovering Universal Truth in Logic and Math

it was free.

[dr.chimps]

Finished Claire Letemendia's 'The Best of Men,' a historico-fiction about the English Civil War. A big book, with a kind of dashing protagonist, and battles, and intrigue and spycraft...and it all falls kind of flat. The historical background is unexciting/muted and the hero has all the boxes checked but is two-dimensional, and the intrigue was, well, unintriguing. I kept checking to see how many pages I had yet to read, rather than hoping that it would continue.

[Mr. Magoo]

Finished Claire Letemendia's 'The Best of Men,' a historico-fiction about the English Civil War. A big book, with a kind of dashing protagonist, and battles, and intrigue and spycraft...and it all falls kind of flat. The historical background is unexciting/muted and the hero has all the boxes checked but is two-dimensional, and the intrigue was, well, unintriguing. I kept checking to see how many pages I had yet to read, rather than hoping that it would continue.

I don't see how you can read so much fiction

[dr.chimps]

I don't see how you can read so much fiction

I read non-fiction as well, but people tend to get a little 'personal' when it comes to non-fiction, so I generally just do fiction.   

[Jack T. Cross]

I stopped reading reading fiction several years ago, and now cannot stand to even consider reading a single page of fiction.  Don't know why.  

Maybe I'll dig through this thread for something good, from a trusted poster.

[Jack T. Cross]

Judging by some of the claims made on here, and looking at the poster who makes the claim, I'd say the thread itself could be the biggest piece of fiction to be found anywhere.

[FighterLover]

Danielle Steele...A Long Way Home...

[syntaxmachine]

Mr Magoo, I'm hoping we can have a conversation on logic textbooks. Do you have a single favorite book or combination of books? What logics did/do you decide to focus upon and do you ever deploy it on other texts you read or do you just go through the logic books for fun?

I'll start by saying that for me the perfect set of books is:
1. Logic and Philosophy by Hausman et al. (2009)
2. Logic for Philosophy by Sider (2010)
3. Schaum's Outline of Logic by Rohatyn and Varzi (2011)
4. Any basic intro on set theory

1. has the most accessible and practical treatment of the standard propositional logic + quantification theory (with identity) that I am aware of, and of course this package is the first step in mastering logic. I'm also happy with 2.'s treatment of modal logic, which I'm sure you know is a very popular (if not universally accepted) extension of standard logic and one full of important concepts. Finally, I felt 3. had a set of great chapters (and I was surprised by this, as I was expecting the book to be crap) on inductive logic, second-order logic, the probability calculus, the logic of functions, and the logic of definitive descriptions. The book really meshes well with the others because these enhancements to first-order logic are powerful, and yet they are not covered as a group in 1., 2., or any other text I am aware of. Finally, the basic concepts of set theory are helpful for a more complete understanding of logic. There are a bunch of cheap introductory books that could fill slot 4.

It seems like after all of this is synthesized, one has a more or less complete system in place for handling anything related to logic. Any further study boils down to reinforcing/refreshing one's knowledge of the system by doing problem sets in the other textbooks.

[Mr. Magoo]

Of the books you listed, Sider is the only one I have read. I enjoyed it very much. Logic is just a hobby, but it's very useful in my regular work and  it keeps me sharp. I've read most of the intro books like Lemmon's Beginning Logic, Lepore's Meaning and Argument, Quine's Methods of Logic, Grayling's intro to philosophical logic, Grovier's practical study of argument, Sandford's If P then Q, The Logic Book (did all the problems in that one), etc. I'm not really enjoying Euclid in the Rainforest, the logic is too basic. Next I'm going to work through Priest's intro to non-classical logic. What I enjoy most is Modal Logic.

[phreak]

Read a lot of fiction lately, especially zombie fiction. I've tentatively started on my first book, which should address all fuckups that always irk me about other peoples' zombie books and movies. So reading this was more work than play. Read 27 of them in the last 60 days (according to my cc statement), so I have no idea about authors/titles.

Also, Tribal Leadership by Logan, King, Fischer-Wright. My thoughts: Meh.

[funk51]

this

[garebear]

Anyone read this?

Pretty good.

[dr.chimps]

Finished HHhH, by Laurent Binet. Came with a lot of advance praise, and details the rise and the and death of Reinhard Heydrich, at the hands of Czech/Slav resistance fighters. HHhH, or, 'Himmler's Brain is called Heydrich,' is an odd mix of historical fact with an omnipresent narrator, and it all works surprising well. The author has done his history homework, and is up front about the limitations of fiction with regards to his narrative. Kind of Nazi meta-fiction. Author has won the big french book prize with this novel. Usually this is a warning signal to me. In this case, it could be warranted. Solid 8/10