I have been spending time trying to get the Jetson Nano to work and I have only made slight progress to get it to where I can use it effectively. In a previous post, I reviewed several books that I read recently and I gained a lot of knowledge, but something was missing. The books talked about the principles at a high level, but I think some of the lower level thoughts experiments were missing. I have decided to pause on the practical application for a bit, maybe a month or two, and focus on getting a deeper understand of the math.

Math is one area of focus, but on twitter I have been chatting with someone on social issues and it made me realize that there was a large section of my knowledge base that was void. Even more introspectively I realized that I am not great at making an argument. I know the content, but my ability to frame and stay on target is an issue. Given that, here are the new three books that I am reading:

The fire next time by James Baldwin.

I am only a quarter way through, but his detail of how he was raised and the paths that were available to him were small. Seeing his explanation of how the world (white America) changed how they seem themselves and the effects that it has on psyche is mind-boggling.

How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking – by Jordan Ellenberg

This book is hard to put down. It takes you through a lot of examples where decision making happens and the mathematics that you can apply. This isn’t an exhaustive book on math, but it hits just write for where I am. In short, this book is awesome.

Deep Learning – by Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio, and Aaron Courville

I am holding off cracking the cover of this one until I finish the two above. This one is an actual textbook so I have high expectations. It digs pretty deep into the mathematics, so if I do this right I should have a much better footing than I have now.

In short, I am looking to learn math, social justice and argument. This political climate is brutal right now, so I am trying to stay off the television as much as possible to reduce my stress.

Please vote on November 3rd, our democracy is at stake.

Cheers