Monthly Archives: January 2022

Readings of last year

I did not blog for a while. Last year I read a few books that I found productive, inspiring. On the professional side I read mostly blog posts and specific sites on machine learning. On the general side I found these books particularly compelling:

How we learn by Stanislas Dehaene. This is the second book I read by this French neurologist. The first one was about the brain and mathematics. In this book Dehaene goes more into how learning processes happen in the brain and he does some useful comparison between our neural networks and the very primitive networks used in machine learning.

Gates of Europe by Harvard professor Serhii Plokhy presents a comprehensive history of Ukraine. This is really fascinating reading for those interested in the whole debate about history and politics of the Poland-Ukraine-Russia-Belarus region.

Tussen drie plagen by Jaan Kross: I have not finished this yet, it is over 1200 pages long, three books in one. Jaan Kross was a famous Estonian writer. He wrote this tetralogy between 1970 and 1980. It deals with the life of Balthasar Russow and the Livonian war. I am reading the Dutch translation of the book, which got a prize for the best translation from Estonian into another language in 2020. It is an amazing book also for those interested in that corner of the world. Trivial but not so trivial fact: back then you could travel in winter by sleighs pulled by horses from Tallinn to what later became Helsinkin. Nowadays that part of the Baltic Sea does not freeze like that at all. You learn a lot about the relations with the rising empire of the Muscovites, with the Swedes, with the Germans and also a bit about other Slavic groups living in areas constantly fought for between Germans and Poles.

Jaan Krooss in 1938 Image