I’m glad I read this book. Nevertheless, if I was going to read just one book about slums across the world, I’d probably read Neuwirth’s Shadow Cities instead.

This book taught me a lot

This book was over my head. It throws a lot of neat mathematical recreations at you with very little explanation. When it talked about things that I already knew, I nodded and understood. When it talked about things I didn’t already know, I shook my head and did not understand.

The good news is that you can flip through this book more quickly than you can flip through your complete collection of Mathematical Games articles, and maybe find something more quickly. The bad news is that if you didn’t already study that topic in a Mathematical Games article, and if you’re not a frickin’ genius, you might not get much out of this book.

This is a good introduction to economics, I guess. I started reading it, because I’d heard it recommended as a book about economics. I didn’t hear that “introduction” part, which is a pity. If you’ve already taken “Economics 101,” you’ve already learned anything this book might teach you.

The best thing about this book is its title.

This book was a collection of essays. Some were informative; some were interesting; some were content-free bloviation. If you put on your hip boots and wade through the academic babble, you might pick up some facts.

Two ounces of good ideas in a five-gallon bucket

Everything I thought I knew about the early days of Xerox PARC was wrong.

We must remember that cotton is our friend, but it is our morally tangled friend.

Engineers, scientists: sometimes it is wise to let your society tell you what your duty is. But sometimes it is wiser to tell society what your duty is.