Spencer Perry – Data Scientist

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  • Investing in your brain during a new age of cognitive offloading and ultra-processed mental numbing

    Investing in your brain during a new age of cognitive offloading and ultra-processed mental numbing

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  • May 2025 reading recap

    May 2025 reading recap

    I had a great time reading in May, with lots of progress made during commutes to Salt Lake and on a trip to the east coast. The quality and pacing of the books helped, as did tackling a series.

    Here’s a recap of the books I enjoyed in May!

    My brilliant sister Grace graduated with her BS in Civil Engineering at the beginning of the month. I hope she has much more free time to read great books now that she’s done with school!

    Grace and Calvin Clark wave to the crowd at Utah State University's College of Engineering Graduation Ceremony in May 2025.

    Mistborn: The Final Empire

    by Brandon Sanderson

    The cover of Mistborn: The Final Empire, by Brandon Sanderson; Vin, the main character of the series, flies above the capital city of the final empire.

    An outstanding introduction to a new world (Scadrial) that sets the Era 1 sequels up to succeed in a big way. Overall, I had a great time following this group of misfits as they joined together to attempt to overthrow a demigod.

    This series has a lot to say about mercy, the dynamics of trying to start a revolution, and trust. I’m grateful to Janelle for recommending it to me!

    As with any Brandon Sanderson book, the magic system is well-developed and character arcs are sincerely earned.

    Books two and three in the series (The Well of Ascension and The Hero of Ages) raise the stakes. Weirdly, I learned as much about the American Revolutionary War from book two as I’ve learned from great books on the subject (e.g. Thomas Ricks’s First Principles or David McCullough’s 1776).

    The cover of Mistborn 2, our protagonist steel-pushes over a wall.
    The cover of Mistborn 3, a Mistborn floats while overlooking a city as volcanic ash drifts across the landscape.

    Jumping between fiction and nonfiction is a cheat code for life. If you’ve been spending most of your time in nonfiction land, give this series a try!

    Good Strategy, Bad Strategy

    by Richard Rumelt

    Rereading books you loved has an amazing side-benefit of jumping through a time machine to high-five past versions of yourself.

    I’ve read Good Strategy, Bad Strategy each year for the past four years. I gained more from my fourth time through than my first.

    Flashback to early 2022: I had no idea what real strategy looked like before I joined the Health Sciences Strategy team at the University of Utah. During the hiring process I asked everyone on the team for books to help understand what they do. “Good Strategy, Bad Strategy” was the best recommendation. Since then it’s become a favorite.

    Things that were especially important this time through:

    1. A reminder of how silly the business world felt about the dot-com bubble in the mid 2000s.
    2. A first-hand recap of how the world transformed throughout the computer/network revolution.
    3. The clearest and most useful thoughts on what strategy should be vs what it often is including:
      • A successful strategy relies on understanding what’s really going on in the market/company
      • Easiest way to communicate your strategy: what are you doing differently from your competitors?
    4. Rumelt bucks the “each person has one good book in them” principle, as his sequel The Crux is also very good.

    If someone were to ask me what I do for a living, I would point them toward this book (even though I’m technically a data scientist) and say “I’m trying to do what this guy is talking about, though I fail most days”.

    Thanks for reading! I’m part-way through a couple of books and look forward to more reading this summer. I hope you find time to read, too!