{ Monthly Archives }
If you’re a computer science geek, check out John Siracusa’s review of Leopard at Arstechnica.
Its a wonderfully written review which digs deep into the internals of Leopard as an OS, and some really interesting issues right from human interface guidelines to kernel scheduling are discussed. I wish the tech press wrote more often like this instead of churning out simply whatever is sensationalist and superficial.
I picked up a Star Wars book after a long time. This is the first book of the Dark Nest Trilogy, set after the completion of The New Jedi Order series.
A new species is starting to colonize the Galaxy, near the borders of Chiss space - a species with a collective mind. A collective mind that can influence and absorb the will of some Jedi. As the younger Jedi Knights of the New Jedi Order go and answer the Colony’s call, the elders - Luke, Mara, Han and Leia rush to their side in the interest of preventing war and restoring sanity.
Although the book starts off a tad slowly, the plot gets really interesting; and had me totally absorbed. A number of subplots, including one where R2D2 is trying to hide something from Luke make the story really interesting. What I like most about Star Wars books is the ever greater challenges that the authors come up with for the Jedi - and that the solutions to these are always complex and never black and white. Let me stop before I give away the plot.
In fact, I’d always like to remember how I read this book - I finished it off by sitting in a coffee shop (Gloria Jean’s at Raffles City Tower) for three and a half hours with a blueberry cheesecake and a cup of coffee. Something I hadn’t done in a long time - sipped caffeine and got myself a sugar high while being totally absorbed in a galaxy far, far away and reminding myself what I often forget - reality is overrated.
Oh, and Star Wars fans of extended universe fiction can rejoice - although this book is the first in a trilogy, it actually has a reasonably decent ending and a conclusion, though of course there are enough loose threads. Some Star Wars trilogies are notable for ending bang in the middle of a sentence. I’m looking forward to reading the other two books.
Rating: 4 / 5
This book is actually statistics explained in layman’s language, and how it applies to our daily lives. It’s actually less about the mathematical parts of statistics, and much more about the hidden assumptions and surprising results that are counter-intuitive but built-in to statistics - what we perceive as success may be pure luck, or vice versa.
The author has been a trader in the investment industry for most of his life, and thus a most of the examples given are finance and trading related. The markets are particularly prone to randomness and the material therefore is all the more interesting.
The book does extend its results and principles to life in general. One of the most interesting points that is reiterated is Karl Popper’s observation that science should be taken with a grain of salt - simply because anything based on experimentation suffers from the black swan problem - no matter how many white swans you see, you cannot conclude that all swans are white. See one black swan, however, and you can conclude that not all swans are white. Positive results, as such, are extremely hard to prove.
Another principle that I enjoyed reading about is thinking of success probabilistically - while a given trader may make more money than a given dentist - in expectation, given all possible twists of the dentist’s career, the dentist is far more likely to enjoy reasonable success compared to the trader, who is far more affected by events that are random.
The writing flows very nicely and is very easy to understand - I highly recommend this book. It certainly gives a few fresh perspectives to life.
Rating: 4 / 5