JPOD

I just finished reading this book by douglass coupland. It was really good. Very different read, black humour with a dash of techno bable. I esp recomend this to Craig as it is about some techno gebons (that is in fact a compliment).

Mark Haddon

This guys 1st book was a really good read. The curious incident of the dg in the night time.

It is one of the most different books that i have read in a long time as it is written from the perspective of a kid with Autism. The aurthor manages to portray the childs way of veiwing the world exceptionally well and as a reslut left me pondering my own obervations.

Any hoo it is a really easy read, , but no pictures sorry boys. It’s not some bullshit crap about finding your personal legand or any of that shit. You might have to actually search for the meaning in this one rather then have it spoon fed to you.

Apparently his second one isn’t as good.

‘The Black Swan’

(Sorry for the long post)

I am almost finished reading ‘The Black Swan’ by Nassim Nicholas Taleb; it is his second book one the subject of humans inability to predict the future and it is completely unlike anything I have read before. It is hard to effectively sum up what it is all about in a simple way because in doing that I would be going against a lot of what the book is talking about. For the sake of this post I will try and give a little overview but there is a good chance I have missed some of the points of the book.

The books main premise is that humans are epistemologically arrogant and we think the quality and depth of our knowledge is a lot better than it actually is; this leads to us making predictions for the future that is primarily based on the past and because of this we discount the possibility and impact of ‘Black Swans’ that we do not see coming. A ‘Black Swan’ is an unexpected event that has a big impact. I will go into how the name came about later.

Throughout the book a contrast is made between two worlds ‘Mediocristan and Extremistan’ (nothing to do with terrorism). In Mediocristan things are easy to predict and the ‘Gaussian bell curve’ explains things nicely; in Extremistan the bell curve is useless and fails to explain the probability (or impact) of an event occurring. Another way to look at is, in Mediocristan no single observation with make much difference to the average of a set of data. For example: Take a room with 1000 people in it; think of the heaviest person in the world, say 400kg in the extreme. If someone of that size entered the room, the mean weight would not change very much at all. Now take those same people and the average net worth; if Bill Gates walked into the room the average net worth would increase dramatically. Wealth is in the realm of Extremistan and it is not inconceivable that one person will have a net worth of ten ‘Standard Deviation’ away from the mean; how the hell do you account for that using ‘Gaussian’ probability??

The book also talks about how we tend to mistake no evidence of something with evidence of it not happening. An example is black swans and it is how the book got its title. Until Australia was discovered it was thought that all swans were white; every white swan that people saw confirmed their belief that this was the case. That was until they saw a black swan in Australia; this single sighting completely invalidates the theory of white swans. People were mistaking no evidence of black swans with evidence of no black swans.

The author used to be a trader of both securities and foreign currency so he knows a bit about how finance works. His recommendation for a financial portfolio is 80% – 85% of your money in the safest possible investment, say treasury bills and the remaining money in the highest risk category available. His reasoning is that you both simultaneously shield yourself from the effect of any negative black swans whilst leaving a small about of your money open to positive black swans (e.g.: a biotech company that discovers the cure for a major disease). The theory being that if you benefit from a positive black swan your pay off will be huge from the small amount you invest and if you lose out to a negative black swan you won’t lose anymore than 20% of your money. I don’t know how sound this theory is but to me, with my limited knowledge it certainly looks as though it has some merit. Leigh? Your thoughts??

I would love to talk about this book with someone who has read it so I strongly recommend one of you does.

Here is another review of it as well.

http://www.platformonomics.com/BookReviewTheBlackSwan.aspx

The Weather Makers

I have almost finished reading “The Weather Makers” by Tim Flannery; you may have heard of it being talked about recently.

It is a book on the history and future impact of climate change and some of the things in it are to be quite honest pretty scary.

Without having seen “An Inconvenient Truth” yet I can only assume it backs up this book but does it by aiming it at the LCD (which is not a bad thing as everyone needs to be aware of what is going on). This book however goes into a little more scientific detail and makes for quite an interesting read.

The World Is Flat.

I am creating a new category “recommended readings” so you can let us all know good books, blogs, magazines, etc… That you have read.

First off I am going to recommend “The World Is Flat” by Thomas L Friedman; if you want an idea of where the globalised world is heading i strongly recommend this book. I guarantee you will be amazed at some of thin things that are going on in the world of business today.

I can honestly say that most of us have no idea just how much the world is changing with because of the internet. I know it sounds cliché but if you read this it will give you a little bit of an idea. So many jobs and skills are becoming completely commoditised (not sure if this is entirely the right word) and while this is not a new phenomenon you will be surprised at just what can be done for next to nothing anywhere in the world.  

At almost 600 pages long it does require a bit of commitment from you to read but believe me it is a good read and very well written.