Dec 21, 2020
Chinese culture has the concept of the "four great inventions" (四大發明) - inventions from ancient China that are points of pride in Chinese history, and symbolic of Chinese technical and scientific sophistication. The inventions in question are the compass, gunpowder, the printing press, and paper. One could say...
Dec 14, 2020
Range is a book that I saw in a bookshop and called out to me like little else can. Subtitled "Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialised World", I felt as though it were written for me personally. It seems as though the way to "get ahead" is to specialise early and specialise hard, drilling deeply into a single topic...
Dec 7, 2020
When we speak about people who have achieved a lot in their lives, we usually apply a single noun to describe them. Winston Churchill - politician; Nicolaus Copernicus - astronomer; Isaac Newton - mathematician; Christopher Wren - architect; Omar Khayyam - poet.
In The Polymath, Waqas Ahmed reminds us that this is...
Nov 30, 2020
People often talk about how to work better, but it is rare to hear discussion of how to rest better. Take the famous so-called "10,000 hour rule". This is adapted (with some distortion) from the work of K. Anders Ericsson, the late great psychologist of expertise. The nature and volume of practice among top...
Nov 23, 2020
Having looked into research on first language vocabulary development over two recent episodes, now it's time to get into literacy more generally. What happens in people's minds when they read? And how do they learn to read?
This book breaks down the cognitive elements of the process of reading. Starting from written...