Wonders of the World
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Stunning pictures. A good reference for travel ideas.
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August 20, 2009
Simplexity
Author: Jeffrey Kluger
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The subtitle of the book reads, “Why Simple Things Become Complex (and How Complex Things Can Be Made Simple)”. It sounds appealing. Indeed, many things become overly complicated just because they are not handled properly. If the book could shed some light on how to avoid it, it would be very useful. To my disappointment, I end up not finishing the book after reading about one third. What the author does is just applying some trivial mathematics results to explain social science phenomenons. Others have done that. IMHO, it is a common mistake that non-science background writers often make.
May 19, 2009
Um…
Author: Michael Erard
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The book caught my attention when I first saw it in Book. Inc store. Now I finally got time to read it. The topic of the book are stumbles, blunders and so-called filler words, such as ‘um’, ‘uh’, ‘you know’ and etc. the words that we deem as inefficient and try to remove from our speaking. In fact, Michael Erard demonstrates that these ‘wastes’ serve certain goal in our language and there are a lot to be studied.
The author starts the book by introducing the origin of spoonerism, a professor named Reverend Spooner, who is famous for his frequent verbal slips, in the beginning of 20th century. Freud is one of early researchers who studied this phenomenon, inevitably, explain it with his omnipotent sub-conscious theory. The LOL example the author gives is Bush’s goof, “an erection … an election in Iraq”, which can be translated to “an erection I lack” by Freud, but is simply a switch of Consonant, reveals the different views of the researchers. Erard goes on to categorize different blunders and shows that they are not random meaningless mistakes, instead, they have patterns and plausible indications.
The rest of book discuss how our society view these blunders, why do we want to erase them? what is “well-spoken”? Or even how to make money from them? I actually that only until recent history have removing blunders and fillers become important in speech. This is because ancient speakers didn’t really have a lot of audience. When what they said is recorded on paper, all defects were removed. With the invention of radio and recoding devices, not only what but also how speakers say it can reach a lot of more people and be reviewed countless times. Purity becomes necessary in the public speech.
Another interesting observation is, although, like ToastMaster tells us, we try to remove every defects in our speech, a perfect speech doesn’t mean it is more effective. A good example is Brack Obama’s speech. He has quite a lot seemingly unnecessary stops. However, Obama is no question a very effective speaker. These pauses become part of his image of thoughtfulness and intelligence. Often time, a fluent speech distance the speaker from the audience. That explains that given that Bush made so many slips in his speeches, he was elected twice because he was considered as someone whom can have a beer with.
February 7, 2009
Blink
Author: Malcolm Gladwell
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The author starts the book with an event around Getty’s collection of a kouros sculpture: how historians hunch the kouros sculpture might be a fake at the first sight, but all the scientific approaches fail to discover. The author then introduces the center phrase of the book, “thin-slicing”, the human ability to grasp the key of the objects in a very short period of time, and argues it is often more accurate then calculated decisions, because the calculated decision can be polluted by overflowed information and specious evident. Gladwell draw more examples ranging from arts, war-simulation, and medicine to advertising, fire-fighting, sports and speed-dating to demonstrate how we rely on this mostly unconscious ability in our day-to-day life.
Then, Gladwell explains mis-using of thin-slice could also lead to unwanted and sometimes devastating results. This is because our snap judgments are greatly influenced by superficial and biased opinions. That is why talk and good-looking guys are more likely to be elected and black people are often linked with violence symbols. The author hopes by analyzing or at least recognizing the failure can help us avoid the misjudgments.
The problem with the book is, even a lot of interesting examples are presented, the author fails to draw any conclusions on how to know if a blink of decision is good or bad and how to train ourselves to better thin-slicing and avoid mistakes. It seems the only conclusion is the snap decision can be either correct or wrong. It is better to rely on the experts and experienced persons because their decisions are more likely to be right. We gain nothing compared with what we know before reading the book.
More importantly, contradict to what the author tries to prove, I believe more information is always better than less. The only reason that more information sometime becomes misleading is because of our lacking of ability to digest the information. The war-simulation is a perfect example; the simulating team maybe loses today, by adjusting the parameters and aiming the right target, with the help more and more computing power, eventually they will be the winner. This is how Deep Blue defeated Kasparov in 1997, and this is how our human beings advanced over tens of thousands of years.
June 3, 2008
A Beautiful Math
Author: Tom Siegfried
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John Nash became known to many people because of the movie “A Beautiful Mind”, but the movie only focused on his personal struggles and almost ignored what made him a Nobel laureate. In this book, Tom Siegfried sets out to let people know Nash’s contribution to the science world. But it seems to me that the writer just tries too hard. From Adam Smith to Freud to Maxwell, the writer wants to get everyone on board. There must be continuity in the history of human being understanding the nature and ourselves, but trying to associate the game theory to every possible science fields but only covering them inch deep just diminish the serious science into something that gives a lot of promise but fails to deliver.
The logics are often broken and sometime preposterous. At one chapter, the writer states the game theory, like thermodynamics, is to study the statistics result of human behaviors; and in a later chapter, the writer spends a big portion to explain the behaviors are so different in different cultures; and then in the next chapter, the writers seems forgets all these and starts talking about Neuoreconomics. To me, the most worth reading are some of the experimental games. Those are more interesting.
January 5, 2008
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Author: Bill Bryson
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I am really amazed by the vast amounts of human knowledge that this 560-page book covers: From pre-history to the current event; from the quark to the black hole; from the bottom the sea to the rim of the universe; from the sing-cell to our human being; the author touches almost every aspects of the natural science. What makes this book stand out is, unlike common popular science books, Bill Bryson tells the story not by the discoveries themselves but by the people who made the discoveries. It’s a fun reading experience.
August 20, 2007
