What non-fiction books are you reading?

Skirting a little on the board topic which is more for fiction, but...a topic in which you list whatever non-fiction books you're reading, whether it's historical, botanical, essay, etc.

Just finished reading Bad Science by Ben Goldacre (the updated version). A pretty good read, but a lot of it felt redundant since I already read his later book, Bad Pharma.

Reading Walter Isaacson's biography of Albert Einstein, which is supposedly the first one written since _ALL_ of Einstein's (known) private and classified documents and papers were released.

It's a pretty fascinating read, but there's one thing that I must point out: one of his favorite things to say was (roughly) "Blind trust in authority is the greatest enemy of truth". Given the amount of times partisans such as in the political realm like to use his more favorite line about human stupidity being infinite, that first line is a fantastic rebuttal.

And then Steve Jobs' biography, again by Isaacson. It's a fascinating read at times, but wow Jobs was an asshole. And while I had heard about the whole Mercedes license plate thing likely helping to cause his cancer, his obsession with weird diets (all apple diet, eating enough oranges to turn green, etc) didn't help.

Dynasty: The Fall of the House of Caesar by Tom Holland.

Or I would be if I could grip things properly. I have a repetitive strain injury from working too hard.

'The Everything Store : Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon' paints a pretty good picture of the history and daily rat-race at Amazon. Given the amount of moments the author writes about the high-octane environment of working at Amazon and the amount of data that goes into making delivery ever quicker, more reliable and more costumer-friendly, I find it hilarious that Bezos claims he doesn't know about the burnout that can occur as written by the NY Times a while back (and several years ago, investigations of warehouses which also included multiple incidences of heat exhaustion).

'The Signal and the Noise' written by Nate Silver, who runs FiveThirtyEight. It gives some good examples of statistical failures, discusses a number of statistical methods and cases where they are and aren't being applied properly, etc.
I think it's really sad how statistically illiterate people are. More than even having a financing class or job-finding stuff in high school like writing a resume, I think there needs to be more mandatory statistical stuff beyond the really really basic stuff.

Reading through 'Rise to Greatness', a history book on Canada that is an absolute door stopper at over 1000 pages in small text, covering from the early 1600s up to 2015. About 250 pages through. The author relates a lot of European and some U.S. history and political interaction to provide the behind-the-scenes context to events leading to the colonisation of Canada. There's some criticism that it skimps out on Indigenous history, which is true, but it also skips out a lot on early English Canada history as well (Atlantic Canada in the 1700s is almost completely omitted) to put an enormous, exhaustive amount of focus on New France/Quebec. On that note, it's rather disturbing how many times a skirmish or military campaign is described, and it's mentioned 'and the natives scalped the losers/ignored white flags/exterminated entire villages or tribes/committed cannibalism'. Like damn. I know enough of history not to buy into the noble savage myth, but it's still disturbing to see the sheer number of incidents history is rife with.

`The Cure for Everything` by Tim Caulfield. A look at health and fitness, the pervasive marketing and junk science surrounding health and fitness, why health and fitness can be considered two different things (health is general healthiness of the body, fitness in the social use of the term is more about appearance), the science behind good health (spoilers: eating less is the biggest, exercise is still important but a distant second, high-intensity weghts training trumps anything else for exercise), and a blast at pharmaceuticals for perverse incentives causing them to suppress any information that could cost them money, even against public health rationale.

It's only just shipped, but my Pistols of the Warlords will be the next non-fiction book I read.

It's about Chinese domestic pistols during the civil war in the early part of the 20th Century. You can find more details here.

I read Factfulness, by Hans Rosling. It goes through and explains a number of cognitive biases and statistical method no-nos. It then uses examples of these to show how the world is a much better place and improving at a better pace than people realise, or more accurately, are willing to accept as truth. Hans Rosling did a lot of conferences where he took a lot of surveys, with questions like what percentage of the global population gets at least one vaccination, what percentage of girls get at least six years of education, and what global life expectancy is.

Dismally, a lot of the groups surveyed, including economists, journalists, Nobel laureates, and UN workgroups did worse on average than they would have if they just randomly guessed on each answer (each question was multiple choice with 3 answers avaiable). Strangely, I know that I would have gotten absolutely a majority of the questions correct. I might have been somewhat biased merely by the premise of the book into thinking of the most optimistic answer in most questions (of course, one of them dealing with climate change had the most pessimist as the answer), but even without that bias, I still think I would've gotten most of them correct. I do consider myself reasonably well-read, but it's also probably that I expect technology will pick up the pace and improve quickly enough to overcome a lot of the degradation humans have done (for context, while I expect global temperatures will get hotter, I also think CO2 emissions are broadly flatlining and will soon come down, and in 3-4 decades we'll have so much cheap energy we will literally be ripping out billions of tons of carbon out of the year and putting it back in the ground).