Andrej Karpathy mentioned An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth by Chris Hadfield 2 times

fun read

— Andrej Karpathy

I was very happy to finally pop this book off my to-read stack. Chris is a rock star Canadian astronaut famous for all the time he's spent on educational outreach videos recorded onboard the ISS on what it's like to live in space, as well as his "Space Oddity" cover. I remember following many of his videos as they were being posted on YouTube and also following his active Twitter account to catch glimpses of what day-to-day life is like on the ISS. The book is eloquently written, easy to read, and pretty much exactly what you'd want: a large set of fun anecdotes from his life as an astronaut that you can't find anywhere else. The inspiring story starts with a kid with a dream, it takes you through all the hard work and sacrifices made along the way, against all kinds of odds and difficulties, to successful end of a long career, and reflections on how the experience has shaped his outlook on life. There's also quite a few mentions of personal impacts on his family along the way which collectively made his wife sound like a saint who has consistently, unconditionally and selflessly supported his costly career. She emerged for me almost as the unsung hero of the entire book - that really didn't sound easy at all! Among some of the high-level and philosophical points there are also plenty of nuggets of fun anecdotes about life in space, or life of an astronaut aspiring and preparing to go to space: an interesting story about his eyes tearing up during spacewalk (an innocent problem that almost jeopardized a spacewalk, the mission, and millions of dollars), stories of amusing difficulties with peeing in space, relative perceptions of "up" on ISS (4 people in single module could all be doing different things and all with different concept of what way up is), stories of bees and snakes inside cockpits during flights, on historical significance of peeing on tires of shuttles, of competitions in chasing bubble wrap around the ISS, of Soyuz crashing and rolling down the hills or burning fields on landing, list goes on :) On a slightly negative side of things, I don't think I'll be taking away too many of his life insights as I believe them to be either fairly specific or then fairly generic (e.g. prepare a lot for important things!), and sometimes I found myself wishing he'd stop bringing up how much he worked or studied or practiced when I felt the point has already been made several times-- astronauts are a highly selective crop of people and take years of hard (and often unglamorous) work to train. In my final opinion, it's too bad he didn't throw in even more anecdotes and eased off a bit on the advice parts. Based on the parts I personally enjoyed, I'd rather read something more similar to "Surely You're Joking Mr. Hadfield", but this still comes close enough for a nice recommended read! 4/5

— Andrej Karpathy

2014-01-11 on goodreads.com