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luisvilla's reviews
1000 reviews
Envisioning Information by Edward R. Tufte
informative
reflective
slow-paced
Tufte, to me, is aspirational, or perhaps… taste-making? I’m not a designer and will never be, but I like to think that taking in Tufte from time to time makes me a more discerning consumer of the data arts, and hopefully at least somewhat more careful about what I put out into the world.
Energy: A Human History by Richard Rhodes
informative
slow-paced
3.0
The last chapter of this ended up ruining an otherwise great book for me. It is partially an artefact of when the book was written (2017, an eternity ago in wind and solar) but the chapter gets some things very deeply wrong about our relative ability to improve nuclear (very slow) and improve wind/solar/batteries (it turns out, very fast), and as a result lands on the wrong policy prescriptions to deal with the climate crisis. Despite the failed contemporary policy analysis, it’s a great backward-looking history.
These Burning Stars by Bethany Jacobs
adventurous
fast-paced
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
3.0
The writing in this is fairly basic, and lots of it is reasonably predictable, but boy when it goes it really goes- hard to put down at the end. And pretty self-contained for the first book of a planned trilogy, which many sci-fi/fantasy authors don’t do these days.