A personal curriculum, planned like a university's
By Ayoub Khallok
What if I planned my own learning in semesters, with syllabi and exams? more
12 October 2026
Library
A personal knowledge library: notes on books, quotations worth keeping, and ideas still taking shape.
Book notes
Summaries, key ideas and takeaways from books I have read.
Stephen Hawking · 1988
Stephen Hawking's tour of space, time, black holes and the origin of the universe, written for anyone curious enough to ask.
Astrophysics for People in a Hurry
Neil deGrasse Tyson · 2017
Neil deGrasse Tyson's short, clear tour of the universe, written for readers with little time and lots of curiosity.
Charles Darwin · 1859
Charles Darwin's case for evolution by natural selection, the book that changed how we understand life.
Carl Sagan · 1994
Carl Sagan's reflection on a single photograph of Earth, and what our place in space should mean for how we live.
Confucius · c. 400 BCE
The sayings of Confucius, gathered by his students, on learning, character and how to live well with others.
Brian Greene · 1999
Brian Greene's explanation of string theory and the search for a single theory that unites all of physics.
Steven Weinberg · 1977
Steven Weinberg's account of what happened in the first minutes after the Big Bang, and how we know.
Richard Dawkins · 1976
Richard Dawkins's gene's-eye view of evolution, and the book that introduced the word 'meme'.
Erwin Schrödinger · 1944
Erwin Schrödinger's short, influential attempt to explain living things in the language of physics.
Carl Sagan · 1980
Carl Sagan's tour of the universe, and of the people who learned to understand it.
Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow · 2010
Why is there something rather than nothing? Hawking and Mlodinow's attempt to answer the biggest questions with physics.
Marcus Aurelius · 180
The private journal of a Roman emperor, and why it still reads like advice from a friend.
Benjamin Graham · 1949
Margin of safety, Mr. Market, and the temperament that investing really requires.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Thomas S. Kuhn · 1962
Paradigms, anomalies and how scientific fields actually change their minds.
Don Norman · 1988
Affordances, feedback and why a confusing door is a design failure, not a user failure.
Reading list
Books I want to read next, before they get notes of their own.
Black Holes and Time Warps
Kip Thorne · 1994
The history of the ideas behind black holes, wormholes and gravitational waves, told by a physicist who helped shape them.
A Universe from Nothing
Lawrence M. Krauss · 2012
An argument that modern cosmology can explain how a universe could begin, and a look at what 'nothing' means in physics.
The Gene: An Intimate History
Siddhartha Mukherjee · 2016
The history of the gene, from Mendel and Darwin to genome sequencing and gene editing.
Your Inner Fish
Neil Shubin · 2008
How the human body still carries the history of its evolution, told by one of the scientists who found the fossil Tiktaalik.
The Vital Question
Nick Lane · 2015
Why life is the way it is, and the role energy played in the origin of complex cells.
Quotations
“Learning without thought is labour lost; thought without learning is perilous.”
Confucius
Ideas
Thoughts and hypotheses at every stage, from seed to mature.
Notes as a graph, not a pile
By Ayoub Khallok
Linking every note to at least two others, and seeing what clusters appear. more
4 August 2026
One big question per month
By Ayoub Khallok
Picking a single question and reading everything I can on it for thirty days. more
20 June 2026