Book Recommendations

These are the books I read in my free time during military service.

I thought of rating the books, but then remembered that there was an unavoidable problem with measuring opinion. So I constructed a utility graph, with engagement level on the y-axis and the enlightenment level on the x-axis. Because the best books are immensely superior to the good and the worst, and the worst books are vastly inferior to the good and the best, it would be most accurate to express my opinion by dividing the axes into thirds: the first third would be logarithmic in magnitude, the middle third linear, and the final third again logarithmic.

Though this chart includes a fair number of books, the scope of the topics is severely limited to my fields of interest: Economics, Sociology, Philosophy, Religion, Policymaking, Psychology and Fiction. One reason for this is that these are the topics that I am naturally interested in. But another reason is that the Amazon fed my interests and book browsing history into its algorithms, recommending books that I would most likely enjoy. This is analogous to a mole exploring deep into the ground, only to dig so deep that it gets trapped in its own hole that it made. I can only hope that I stumble upon new topics and avoid this tragedy.

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A Question on Reincarnation

Does reincarnation maintain the number of organisms living in the world? Suppose there is a world where there are only three living organisms, and they are reincarnated when they die. What happens when one is about to die? If the remaining two reproduce sexually, will they forced to procreate as the third one dies, thereby maintaining the number of organisms in that world? What if two individuals die at once? Would single celled organisms naturally evolve out of protein? Perhaps the number of living organisms and souls is not strictly maintained. This would explain the exponential growth and decay of populations. But if everything is reincarnated, how would this be possible? Where would new life come from?

Deromanticizing Numbers

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P vs NP Behavior

Today, our police squad went to a mountain in Seoul, looking for an elderly man who was suspected of attempting suicide. (After 6.5 hours of searching, we were ordered to end the search. As of the time of this writing, the man has not yet been found.) Because I drive our squad's bus, I had the privilege to wait inside the bus. This was in case someone tried to break in, or in case someone needed me to relocate the bus. I parked the bus on the side of the road, just below the hiking trail. During the long wait, hikers passed by left and right. I noticed that the hikers coming from the left would pause, look, and (if they had companions) mention the existence of the police bus before moving on. Meanwhile, hikers from the right rarely paused. Pause vs No Pause I believe that this behavior could be explained by an amount of time that is needed to appreciate an unexpected sight. I will call this duration surprise time . Highly unusual and intriguing moments have long surpr

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