The Signal and the Noise

"The Signal and the Noise: Why Most Predictions Fail, but Some Don't", by Nate Silver, is a study on how people make predictions in a wide variety of fields, and why they are wrong most of the time. Silver is the author of the 538 Blog, which gained a bunch of Fame over the last two election cycles for very accurately predicting congressional and state presidential elections. In this book, he explains how people in everything from baseball to earthquakes predict things in their fields and why they seem to do so poorly most of the time (it is normally for one of a few reasons - their models are wrong, they have an agenda besides correctness, or they don't know how to account for rare events). He does love weathermen though - on average, their prediction accuracy had increased significantly even over the last 20 years. Their predictions are good because they make a ton of them, it is easy to see if their predictions are right, and they improve their models when they fail.

Overall, I liked this book, but it felt like a collection of essays rather than a coherent whole. It took me a looooong time to get through it, but that is probably because it is so densely packed with interesting information. An interesting read.

Inside the Kingdom; Kings, Clerics, Modernists, Terrorists and the Struggle for Saudi Arabia by Robert Lacey

Well, this book was way our of the normal reading I do and I have to say I liked it!  I bought this book for Dad but since he is so ensconced with Churchill, I read it before he did.  It is a fascinating look from an insiders view of Saudi Arabia.

The author (I think he is British) has either lived in or been a part of the kingdom for thirty years.  In this writing, he depicts the nation in it's most recent years - beginning in the late 70's up to the publishing of this book in 2009 - which I believe is banned in Saudi.  (I would be surprised if it isn't.)  Lacey explains and peels back the layers of the culture, the beginnings of the jihadist ideology, and addresses the issues women face there even now.  It is written in a rather personal style rather than an accounting of dates, facts and nameless figures.  Instead he gives personal stories, details of interviews, photographs and important for me, a glossary of names and Arabic terms.  There are so many citizens that want to turn the clock back to the time of Mohammed and this book helps explains the why and how as well as the consequences of that mission. 

It is a very interesting read and I would recommend it.

January Recap

In January, I finished three books:

"A Man Called Intrepid" - this was a fascinating look at the secret war behind World War II, particularly focused on British work in the United States in the period of American neutrality. It centers on the work of Bill Stevenson, code name Intrepid, who ran the British Security Coordination activity in New York. Officially, it was unacknowledged, but in fact it was a British effort to put their secret warfare activities somewhere outside England in case Hitler invaded. They also tried to influence America to enter the war on the side of the Allies. I didn't realize the extent to which the Nazi sympathisers were involved in US politics, even at very high levels. The Brits ran an incredible spy operation right out of New York City, and also helped birth the OSS, which was a precursor to the CIA. Fascinating book, and looooooong, but worth the read.

"The Quantum Thief" - good hard science fiction. The author is a theoretical physicist, specializing in string theory, and you can tell. The narrative is convoluted, the technology is crazy, the story is fantastic. It's kinda nuts, but it's also very good. There are spies, quantum artificial intelligences, interstellar wars, and bizarre references to video game culture. Worth a read if you like the genre.

"The Hobbit" - I can't believe how long it has been since I've read this. It's not as good as the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but it's good in its own right. We saw the movie in December, so I had to reread it to remind myself of the real story. The movie is faithful enough to the book, but actually makes the dwarves out to be more heroic than they are in the book. If you haven't read this, it should be high on your list.

In the Heart of the Sea

This last week on my business trip I read "In the Heart of the Sea" by Nathaniel Philbrick. This is the story of the sinking of the whale ship Essex and the 90 day, 4500 mile trip the survivors made in open lifeboats in the Pacific. The sinking was the inspiration for "Moby Dick", and Melville may have even met the captain of the Essex.

The physical and mental anguish these men went through is staggering - they survived on about 500 calories a day of hardtack, eventually running down to 200 calories or so. They eventually resorted to cannibalism, which probably saved the lives of the men who made it.

What I found most interesting was the way that the various leaders on the crew dealt with things. When the ship sunk, they were only something like 800 miles from the Societies islands. The captain said they should sail for those islands, but the first and second mates were terrified of cannibals (somewhat ironic, right?) so they talked the captain into a scheme that would, in optimal circumstances, give them about one or two extra days of starvation rations. It was a terrible plan, but the captain was shell shocked and didn't assert his command. The real kicker? There weren't any cannibals on the islands.

I thought this was a fascinating book, and an amazing story of what people can survive. I could have done with a little less graphic description of cannibalism, but it certainly drove home the point.

Killer Elite

On my business trip this week, I finished "Killer Elite" by Michael Smith. It's a history of a special ops unit in the US military that focuses on on-the-ground intelligence gathering and what is euphemistically referred to as "battle space preparation" - things like sabotage and prepping landing zones, etc. This book was written by a British reporter, so it has a slightly different perspective on the increased role of special operations units in the US military.

This book was mediocre at best. Started off pretty interesting, but as the story progressed, things got more and more vague. It sounds like he had a good source for the early days of the unit's history, but had to go on declassified and rumored stuff for the more current events. It also had a lot of 'we have an awesome plan, but Brass won't let us do it' stories. These were some cool plans, but it's not very interesting to know what was planned but never executed. It's also very one sided, as it's always the brave heroes of The Activity versus the stuffy and unimaginative upper echelons of military command. Never mind that some of what they planned probably could have been considered war crimes.

Anyway, there's a new edition of this book that was published in 2011 - maybe he developed better sources after the 2007 edition was published.

Third Base For Life

"Third Base for Life" by Josh Berkowitz is an interesting book. It's the story of a youth baseball team that heads to Cooperstown to play in one of the most prestigious baseball tournaments in the country. The only problem? Most of the kids have never played baseball before, and they certainly are not all stars like the rest of the kids in the tournament. You feel like this should be a Bad News Bears kind of story, but it takes some interesting turns. As a dad, I thought it was a touching story, and as a baseball fan, I got caught up in the drama of the game.

Overall, a good read. It's a moving story about baseball, being a dad, and what success really means. It's also a quick one - even given the length.

Thunderstruck

About a week and a half ago I finished 'Thunderstruck' by Erik Larson. It's the story of Marconi's invention of radio telegraphy and a story about the "murder of the century" right around 1900. The book is well written and it is an interesting look at how science was done at the end of the Victorian age - nobody knew enough about how electromagnetism worked to have any real theoretical basis for Marconi's work! He basically guessed how he thought it should work and then kept trying until he got the result he was looking for. The book implies that he didn't consider the idea of polarization until long after the episodes portrayed. This is like someone figuring out how to build a bridge without really understanding physics - sure you can do it, but it's also a bit of a surprise when it works.

There was also some frame story about a murder, designed to show off how telegraphy - particularly at sea - changed how criminals were pursued and caught. While this is true, I thought the parts about Marconi were much more interesting and better written. I found myself slogging through the murder mystery parts.

Interesting book about an interesting time. There are probably better biographies of Marconi, but if you are looking for something to evoke the end of the Victorian era, this is a good atmospheric look at two important events of the time.

Skunk Works

I just finished Skunk Works by Ben Rich. Rich was the second director of Lockheed's Skunk Works division, which was responsible for the U2 spy plane, the SR-71, and the F-117A stealth fighter, among other neat airplanes. This is a really interesting look at what the aerospace industry looked like before all the regulation and red tape in the acquisitions process - the director of Skunk Works went in with an idea for an airplane at one point, and the director of the CIA wrote him a personal check to get his assembly line started. Everyone involved would go to jail if that happened today. Seeing how these guys wee able to develop stealth technology with essentially the equivalent of pocket calculators is fascinating, and honestly, and incredible story. Also, the way you hear it, our brave, brilliant American scientists came up with stealth ex nilo. As it turns out, the key idea of stealth (the faceted surfaces that reflect radar off away from the receiver) was developed by a Russian scientist and published in an obscure journal that a Skunk Works employee happened to read. Of course, the Soviets ignored the original developer, and Skunk Works went on to develop stealth, and the rest, as they say, is history.

From a managerial perspective, the Skunk Works model is really interesting. They worked on high risk, high payoff projects that revolutionized aerospace design. They had virtually no oversight from upper management, and the only reason they were allowed to do what they did was because they were incredibly good at it. You have to hire the absolute best and give them a lot more rope than you are probably comfortable with. They also have to have a parent organization to borrow tools, people, and production lines from (and return to after they finish a product). It's a model that a lot of people have tried to emulate and very few have recreated successfully, which should tell you something about how easy it is. Also, the current acquisition process basically prohibits this kind of development, which is kind of an important difference.

Well worth a read. The technical stuff is fascinating, and the personal dynamics are very interesting.

The Omnivore's Dilemma

I know most of you have already read this, so I'll skip the summary. I thought this was a very interesting book, and it really made me think about my food. I can barely eat at fast food restaurants any more, so thanks for that, Mr. Pollan.  Thinking about our food systems and how we get food on the plate is very important, but I am not sure I would go as far as he does in terms of the animal rights stuff. I did have a moment of wanting to quit my job and start a post-organic farm though. Anyway, this book is worth reading, especially the first two sections (the bit at the end about foraging is kind of ridiculous, and the author acknowledges it).

The biggest criticism I have of this book is that he doesn't really present any alternatives to the problems he sees. For example, we can't all live close to management intensive grazing farms, and if we could, not everyone would be able to afford to eat food from one. He points out that people in other countries spend a lot more of their income on food, but they also starve to death in much higher numbers too.

I have been talking about thus book pretty much nonstop since I read it, so that's probably a good sign. Well worth a read. (Ironically, I bought my copy of this book at Costco.)

Peopleware: Productive Products and Teams

I finished "Peopleware: Productive Products and Teams", by DeMarco and Lister, the other night.  It was a really good collection of "management" essays about how to lead teams of knowledge workers.  It's mostly focused on software developers, but it has some applicability to other fields as well, I think.  One of the more interesting chapters in it was the chapter on Teamicide -- things you do as a manager that make it impossible for your team to jell into a cohesive team.  It was particularly interesting that there's nothing you can do to make a team jell, but there are certainly things that you can do that guarantee it won't happen.

A lot of the strategies and particulars were things that I don't have the authority to influence (yet), but it's a good picture of making teams that work well together and are more productive, and probably more fun to be on.

Next up: "In Defense of Sanity" -- a collection of essays by G.K. Chesterton!

Killing Lincoln

Tonight, I finished Killing Lincoln, by Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard.  This was a good pop-history account of Lincoln's assassination, but it was modeled way too much on a James Patterson mystery paperback for my taste. It has no references, very little background information, and the Notes section is an informal bibliography (most charitably). I had the hardest time with the insinuations that there was "more to the conspiracy than we know", presented without actually saying what the accusation was, or sourcing the accusation. The notes section mentioned a few "controversial" books, but it never said where the most out-there conspiracy theories came from.  It did helpfully note that the source for a lot of the conspiracy theory stuff has been thoroughly discredited by the historical community.

Basically, I thought this book did a good job of telling the story of the assassination, but it's not a useful piece of history writing, and if you'd paid attention in US history class, you'd have heard about 80% of it before. 

TL;DR: Good read, but feels like one of those History Channel shows you watch when you're home sick at 2 in the afternoon.

Moonwalking with Einstein

Last week, I finished Moonwalking with Einstein, by Joshua Foer.  This book is about memory - how it works, how people train their memories, and what happens when our memories don't work quite right. Foer started it as a "creature feature" on people who compete in memory challenges. Assuming that they were some sort of freaks with photographic memories, he was surprised to discover that they were pretty much ordinary folks who had trained their memories for these specific tasks. As a challenge, Foer decided to dedicate a year of his life to training, and ended up winning the national competition (not a spoiler, as it is on the dust jacket).

Overall, this is a good look at one of the most interesting things we take almost entirely for granted.  The structure of training for the competition is a good frame for a bunch of different aspects of investigating memory.  He describes the memory palace technique that Pastor Oien used to memorize his sermons... As it turns out, that was one of the first recorded techniques for memorizing complex sequences of things, pioneered after a banquet hall collapse in Greece in the 5th century BC.

(As a heads up:  this is an interesting book, but it's not a how-to on improving your memory.)