Category: Read You Tweed

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A Curmudgeon's and Improv's Guide to Outliers: Chapter 2

Part three in my continuing pedantic slow-as-molasses walk through Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell.

List of posts here: introduction, ch 1, ch 2.

SPOILER ALERT: Dude, I can’t talk about the book without giving away what the book is about, so if you don’t want the book’s main ideas to be spoiled, don’t continue reading.

IDIOT ALERT: I’m in no way qualified in most of the fields Gladwell will touch on, so please, a grain of salt, before you start complaining about my ignorance. Yes I’m an idiot, please tell me why!

Continue reading “A Curmudgeon's and Improv's Guide to Outliers: Chapter 2”

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A Curmudgeon's and Improv's Guide to Outliers: Chapter 1

Moving on to Chapter 1 in my ongoing pedantic plodding through Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success. See here for what this is all about. Note that I really am doing this as I read the book (I’m reading it really really slowly), so what I say here may be outdated by the time I get further into the book.
List of posts here: introduction, ch 1.
SPOILER ALERT: Dude, I can’t talk about the book without giving away what the book is about, so if you don’t want the book’s main ideas to be spoiled, don’t continue reading.
IDIOT ALERT: I’m in no way qualified in most of the fields Gladwell will touch on, so please, a grain of salt, before you start complaining about my ignorance. Yes I’m an idiot, please tell me why!
Continue reading “A Curmudgeon's and Improv's Guide to Outliers: Chapter 1”

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A Curmudgeon's and Improv's Guide to Outliers: Introduction

So I picked up Malcolm Gladwell’s newest book Outliers: The Story of Success the other day, as I’m sure many of you will be doing on your next trip to the airport (where stands of Gladwell’s hardcover book, marked down thirty percent, block your every exit through the already cramped airport bookstores.) Gladwell’s books are fun, but I find myself often disagreeing with his analysis, so I thought it would be entertaining to take my time reading his latest and jot down my thoughts as I progress. Well “entertaining” in that “holy shit dude you are pedantic” sort of way. Note that I really do like Gladwell’s books, and indeed for me, reading with critical eyes is exactly the reason I like his books. Ah, the life of a curmudgeonly pedant, revealed before your eyes, here on these there intertubes!
To balance things out, I’ve also included some thoughts from the improv part of my brain: the part that takes ideas at more than face value and tries to run with them.
SPOILER ALERT: Dude, I can’t talk about the book without giving away what the book is about, so if you don’t want the book’s main ideas to be spoiled, don’t continue reading.
IDIOT ALERT: I’m in no way qualified in most of the fields Gladwell will touch on, so please, a grain of salt, before you start complaining about my ignorance. Yes I’m an idiot, please tell me why!
Continue reading “A Curmudgeon's and Improv's Guide to Outliers: Introduction”

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Damn You Thomas Jefferson!

A while back I added my library to librarything.com. In adding this books I tagged my books with various keywords. As you can imagine there were a lot tagged as “physics.” Indeed when I entered the books there were only a few people who had a comparable number of physics tags, among them a user called lasermazer. Recently I checked in, and damnit, there is now a library that has a lot more physics tags books:
Yes that is the Thomas Jefferson! A cool feature of library thing are “legacy libraries” where you can compare your overlap with other historic libraries. But wait. Thomas Jefferson is cheating. I mean I don’t have a copy of “Advice to shepherds and owners of flocks on the care and management of sheep”, which is tagged “Physics” but it seems to me that this book is most probably not about physicists (managing physicists is not like managing sheep, it’s like managing cats.)
The books I share with Thomas Jefferson are:

L’eloge de la folie by Desiderius Erasmus
The meditations of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus by Emperor of Rome Marcus Aurelius
The plays of William Shakspeare : in ten volumes : with the corrections and illustrations of various commentators by William Shakespeare
Titi Lucretii Cari De Rerum Natura Libri Sex by Titus Lucretius Carus

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ACM Classic Books

Via Michael Nielsen’s friendfeed, I am led to ACM Classic Books Series. If you’ve got ACM subscription access, some of the book are even in electronic form. Cool. I love the introduction to “The Computer and the Brain” by John von Neumann:

Since I am neither a neurologist nor a psychiatrist, but a mathematician, the work that follows requires some explanation and justification. It is an approach toward the understanding of the nervous system from the mathematician’s point of view. However, this statement must immediately be qualified in both of its essential parts.

I feel like I need to use an intro like this everytime I submit a paper to a computer science conference.

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Drunkard's Tennis and the Advice of Winners

Writing grants and teaching, not to mention trying to get some actual research done, has taken up a considerable amount of my time this quarter. I mean, sheesh, I’ve barely had any time to read! This has, of course, made me grumpy. So when the publisher of The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow offered me a review copy of the book, I was very happy. I mean, I love probability and I love, um, well….you know 🙂
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