A title.
A few clues.

Fiction: Mordecai Roshwald, Level 7 Alexander Dewdney, The Planiverse Joseph Heller, God Knows Alan Lightman, Einstein's Dreams Non-fiction: Jane Goodall, In the Shadow of Man Gian-Carlo Rota, Indiscrete Thoughts C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image Michael E. Brown, How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming Robert Kegan, In Over Our Heads Michael Harris, The Atomic Times I may add guilty pleasures like the Legacy of the Force series, but I don't think this is what people here are looking for.

after spending all day coding and being deep in erlang, algorithms and bug reports, i like to read something that doesn't require much thought. parodies work great i find. https://www.amazon.com/Maze-Bummer-Parody-Runner-ebook/dp/B0... that's the kind of work i have in mind. simple and refreshing.

Andy Kessler's How We Got Here. Only a few hundred people have rated it on GoodReads, but if you wanted to trace a march of technological progress from swords to the Internet, it does a good job. There are definitely other stories you could tell about this accelerating sweep of technological change, but this one was a solid rapid overview and really stuck some ideas with me about how changes compound (or completely swerve to a new goal) over time. The original tweet is more about how domain experts would rely on books nobody outside that domain has heard of, so maybe I should be thinking more about textbooks that stuck with me. Sources of Chinese Tradition, the Tractatus, and A Mathematical Theory of Computation all left pretty lasting influences in one way or another. Sources of Japanese Tradition discusses the origins of Tendai Zen Buddhism, with some bits on Dogen, who once wrote something like, "If you want to achieve a certain thing, you must first become a certain person. After becoming a certain person, you no longer want that certain thing." That's a pretty good tie in to Kessler's view of the last several hundred years of human progress. We were repeatedly solving some other problem, which once we had the tools to solve that, it became nearly irrelevant compared to what else we could do now.

Andy Kessler's How We Got Here. Only a few hundred people have rated it on GoodReads, but if you wanted to trace a march of technological progress from swords to the Internet, it does a good job. There are definitely other stories you could tell about this accelerating sweep of technological change, but this one was a solid rapid overview and really stuck some ideas with me about how changes compound (or completely swerve to a new goal) over time. The original tweet is more about how domain experts would rely on books nobody outside that domain has heard of, so maybe I should be thinking more about textbooks that stuck with me. Sources of Chinese Tradition, the Tractatus, and A Mathematical Theory of Computation all left pretty lasting influences in one way or another. Sources of Japanese Tradition discusses the origins of Tendai Zen Buddhism, with some bits on Dogen, who once wrote something like, "If you want to achieve a certain thing, you must first become a certain person. After becoming a certain person, you no longer want that certain thing." That's a pretty good tie in to Kessler's view of the last several hundred years of human progress. We were repeatedly solving some other problem, which once we had the tools to solve that, it became nearly irrelevant compared to what else we could do now.

I think you would like The Story of B By Daniel Quinn and his other books. They are light and fun, that one especially. Additionally allthough maybe a little more involved Tom Robbins' books are in this vain as well.

This is a thread after my own heart! I love finding out and reading old, less well-known and thought provoking books on a variety of subject matters. I have come to the conclusion that "popular" almost always equals "lowest common denominator" and "fad of the month" particularly given today's media hype cycles. Moreover one has to guard against having ones mental models bounded within a box. By actively seeking out lesser known and out of the way viewpoints one truly grows. Some books from my collection which i have not seen mentioned here (in no particular order or categorization); * The Natural History of Nonsense by Bergan Evans * Programming on Purpose, Essays on Software Design by P. J. Plauger * Management: A Political Activity by Ted Stephenson * The Energy of Life: The Science of What Makes Our Minds and Bodies Work by Guy Brown * Patterns for Time-Triggered Embedded Systems: Building Reliable Applications with the 8051 Family of Microcontrollers by Michael Pont. * UNIX Systems for Modern Architectures: Symmetric Multiprocessing and Caching for Kernel Programmers by Curt Schimmel. * Maxims and Reflections (Ricordi) by Francesco Guicciardini There are a bunch more i have to root around for :-)

"The Method of Paired Comparisons" is a 1980s dissertation which discussed a strange form of statistics called paired comparisons. It is the fundamental math behind the ELO system (chess matchmaking) and other tournament designs. It was originally for psychology experiments. My ELI5 version is... Imagine data of the form Alice > Bob (Alice beat Bob in one match). Because many matches take place, the data can be contradictory, like Alice > Bob and Alice < Bob. (Alice won the first match, but Bob won the second match). There can be loops, like Alice > Bob > Carole > Alice. In the face of these apparent contradictions, how do you linearize the data, or in ELI5 terms... How do you assign a score to each player? ELO is probably the most popular methodology, but there are many kinds of linearization strategies, Bradley Terry for example is another one that ELO was in fact based upon. The math is very well formed, and is likely a secret weapon for fantasy sports players. But it doesn't seem like many people know about this form of math at all.

Oh! I will look for it. There's something... special, about finding these in old printings. I found the sequel to the one I linked at, of all places, a flea market in Temple Bar in Dublin, as a circa 1850s print. As in the book itself was over a century old! I look forward to finding a printing of yours that's nice and old, too!

I'm hoping someone else remembers it and furnishes the title. I was a kid when I read it, and the book was already old, so publication date circa 1970-80. Best I can do. I trawled through book cover images but no love. - - - - edit to add: It's probably "Auto Mechanics Fundamentals" by Stockel. I'm still looking for pictures of the insides of the book, but going by what I can see here, it's very likely: https://archive.org/details/automechanicsfun00stoc/page/n5 The typography matches my memory, and the description in the introduction sounds spot on, eh? Cheers!

Internal Combustion Engines by Ganeson