The Heart: A History

Author: Thomas Hager

Sandeep Jauhar is another famous Doctor-Author of mine. I first read his book on the sorry plight of doctors in the US and was shocked to learn the details of how much money the US was spending on terminal care. This book is a history on arguably most important organ in the human body, our heart. 

There is a healthy mix of history and interesting information about the heart, some of which I made a note of

• The heart naturally beats on its own and can continue to beat for weeks after an animal is dead
• The French Nobel laureate Alexis Carrel demonstrated that a properly nourished chick heart tissue cultured in a medium of blood plasma and water will pulsate for months and can remain  alive for more than 20 years
• Strong emotions can have a lasting impact on the health of our heart. There’s apparently a technical term for this “takotsubo cardiomyopathy” or broken-heart syndrome. Severe emotional trauma or stress can cause the heart to balloon up and in extreme cases stop beating altogether resulting in cardiac arrest.
• Cardiac tamponade is when fluid fills in the pericardium (sac around the heart) and puts pressure on the heart preventing it from filling up. The solution is to pierce a needle into the pericardial sac and suck out the fluid. Reminded me of the scene in pulp fiction where John Travolta jabs a syringe into Uma Thurman’s chest, which unusurprisingly has no medical basis!

In summary, this book is well written and very informative.

Algorithms to Live by

Author: Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths

The authors attempt to translate algorithms from computer science to relate to problems that we encounter in our daily life. The first couple of chapters are compelling and keep with this theme. The subsequent ones, seemed more inclined towards explaining computer science algorithms and their parallels in our everyday life. They were interesting to folks like me who knew the algorithms only from a computer science perspective. The book gave me a whole new way to look at some of the workhorses of computer science like sorting, searching, queueing, etc. However, they did little in terms of being useful in my everyday life. 

Let me start with my most favorite part of the book which is the chapter on the Optimal Stopping Problem. It is algorithmically well established that if you have to select a candidate from a large number of unknown candidates, you are best served by letting the first 37% go by, and then choosing the first one that is better than all the prior candidates. You can apply this to renting or buying a house, finding a parking spot, choosing a secretary or even more importantly choosing your mate. The last one might need some tweaking if you account for the fact that your choice may not resonate with the other person.

The chapter on sorting is interesting as well and highlights the trade off between the time spent upfront sorting your entries versus the time spent later on searching for the items that you’re interested in. This might be useful when you are considering whether to carefully file away your notes in some well defined way, or simply make it searchable, like I do, so you pay for it marginally while trying to retrieve the right piece of information.

The chapter on Bayes’s rule gives some good insights into human behavior. I could not agree more with the authors that “what we project about the future reveals a lot — about the world we live in, and about our own past”. The more prior information we have about a problem the more likely we are to be biased about the future. The proliferation of social media might exacerbate this problem as fake news can spread quickly and skew our internal statistics of experience.  

Another useful reminder from the authors is Occam’s razor principle which says that the simplest possible hypothesis is probably the right one. 

Overall, this is a great read for the algorithmically inclined. The best parts are in the first few chapters. Stick around for the rest if you are a nerdy computer scientist. 

The Long Haul: A Truckers Tales of Life on the Road

Author: Finn Murphy

This was one of my first audiobooks, and boy, was I in for a treat. The narrator is the author himself and there’s something to be said about listening to a memoir in the authors own voice. Finn Murphy dropped out of the University of Colorado in the late 1970s and stumbled into a career as a long-haul trucker. 

He shares many anecdotes about the trucking industry starting with the seventies and all the way to the more recent complexities of the rules and regulations that govern truckers today. His stories bring out the life of truckers, how important the rest stops are and how they combat loneliness on the road. There are many humorous adventures that are sprinkled throughout the book and some of them are quite thought-provoking especially when he talks about the dynamics between the trucker, the labor he employs and the rich customers that he serves. 

I thoroughly enjoyed listening to this audio book and have recommended it to numerous people.