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books

Courage

This may be the first book I’ve read that was written by a so-called mystic. I’m not even sure what a mystic is. I checked out some wiki thoughts on mysticism and without twisting things too much, I think we can assume that a mystic is some sort of spiritual leader who is usually not validated by any of the mainstream religions.

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The Gun

Occasionally I’ll read Wired Magazine. Mind you, I could do without magazines, they seem to clutter up the place. Heck, if it’s worth reading consistently, I’ll just subscribe online. However, my wife is an infovore so we do end up having a ton of magazines in our home (including Wired) and I do hammer through many of them. Same issue with cable; I’ll say, “I don’t need cable,” just before embarking on a ten hour college football watching binge. If it’s there, I’ll use it. I’m no stranger to hypocrisy. Anyway, because of all the magazines lying around, I happened to stumble upon an article in last month’s Wired about the AK-47 and I was compelled to get the book.

It’s called The Gun and it was written by a guy named C.J. Chivers. It’s part history, part social studies, and part politics. It’s all good. The gun referenced in the title is the Avtomat Kalishnikova 47. Avtomat because it’s an automatic – excess energy from the bullet is captured to work the mechanism such that the next bullet is seated and ready to fire without any human intervention. Kalishnikova because the man credited for it’s invention was one Michael Kalishnikov, although we will find out that he was definitely not solely responsible. And 47 because the year that the invention was basically complete and settled on was 1947.

Here’s the point of the AK-47 according to Chivers:

It was so reliable, even when soaked in bog water and coated with sand, that its Soviet testers had trouble making it jam. And its design was a testament to simplicity, so much so that its basic operation might be grasped within minutes, and Soviet teachers would soon learn that it could be disassembled and reassembled by Slavic schoolboys in less than thirty seconds flat. Together these traits meant that once this weapon was distributed, the small-statured, the mechanically disinclined, the dimwitted, and the untrained might be able to wield, with little difficulty or instruction, a lightweight automatic rifle that could push out blistering fire for the lengths of two or three football fields. For the purpose for which it was designed—as a device that allowed ordinary men to kill other men without extensive training or undue complications—this was an eminently well-conceived tool.

Chilling stuff isn’t it? Chivers is an ex-Marine and shared a Pulitzer for coverage of the war in Afghanistan. He seems to be qualified to sort through the history of this gun and makes it highly interesting. It’s about a lot more than the AK-47 though. He starts back in the Civil War, when Richard Gatling wrote a letter to Abe Lincoln describing the benefits of his hand-cranked machine gun. Gatling gave way to Hiram Maxim, who’s gun, unlike Gatling’s, was automatic. By the end of World War I, machine guns were everywhere, but one had still not been built that was small enough to be wielded effectively by one man; especially a small, untrained, dimwitted man, as Chivers would say. The German’s broke through thanks to Hugo Schmeisser and the American’s invented the Tommy Gun, but these had drawbacks that would eventually be addressed by the AK-47.

The former Soviet Union got this thing right. Notice, I didn’t say Kalishnikov got this thing right. Sure, he was instrumental, but for the most part, the invention “flowed from official directives and widespread collaboration and not from a flash of inspiration.” It was well-conceived and well-made, but then it got pushed it out to Soviet allies, and distribution went through the roof. Chivers talks about how other countries tweaked it throughout the 1950s making it even better, so by the time the Vietnam war rolled around it was decades ahead of the M-16, America’s flawed answer to the assault rifle. We really botched things. This quote by Chivers encapsulates things pretty well:

On the level of anticipating security threats, the Pentagon did not recognize the risks to its forces or its allies from the AK-47’s capabilities and global production. And as for designing infantry firearms, it remained obstinately committed to high-powered cartridges and rifles that fired them. Part of the bedrock belief was tradition. As with the European affection for bayonet and cavalry charges at the turn of the century, America was the victim of romance—with old-fashioned rifles and the sharpshooting riflemen who carried them.

Man, we screwed up, and it had a hugely negative effect on our ability succeed in Vietnam. Chivers puts it out there, that the AK-47 was a major factor in how obstinate our enemies were in Vietnam. He really throws the Army and Robert McNamara under the bus in a big way:

The early M-16 and its ammunition formed a combination not ready for war. They were a flawed pair emerging from a flawed development history. Prone to malfunction, they were forced into troops’ hands through a clash of wills and egos in Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara’s Pentagon.

He lays this thing at McNamara’s feet and details the negative reaction our troops in Vietnam had to using the M-16 and how vocal they were about it’s drawbacks. It’s not a pretty picture (don’t worry, we eventually figured it out and now the M-16 is solid). But in truth, Vietnam was a drop in the bucket compared to the fame that the AK-47 would achieve. In 1972, it figured prominently in the abduction of Jewish athletes in the Munich Olympics. This allowed the gun to make a leap, an infamous leap:

… After Munich, the Kalashnikov’s utility in crimes against civilians and public order would be demonstrated repeatedly, in hijackings, hostage seizures, assassinations, suicide rifle attacks, and summary executions, sometimes before video cameras, designed to sow hatred and fear.

This is what the AK-47 is today, the weapon of choice for terrorists and drug dealers, along with huge guerilla armies, often supplied by the US.

In this way, the United States military, since 2001, became one of the largest known purchasers of Kalashnikov assault rifles, which it has handed out by the tens of thousands in Afghanistan and Iraq.

These things aren’t going away either.

The final factor will be time. Kalashnikovs are sturdy, but not indestructible. They can and do break—sometimes when backed over by an armored vehicle or car, sometimes when struck by bullets or shrapnel, occasionally when warped by fire. If left exposed and unattended long enough, they can succumb to pitting, corrosion, and rust. With the passing of many years, the combined tally of these forces will bring an end to these weapons. But in another half-century, or century, the rifles will have broken, one by one, and the chance exists that they will no longer be a significant factor in war, terror, atrocity, and crime, and they will stop being a barometer of the insecurity gripping many regions of the world. Until that time, they will remain in view and in use.

I love the wry humor (“sometimes when backed over by an armored vehicle or car”). They’ve reached saturation folks, they’re all over the place in numbers so innumerable that it may not make any sense to try and systematically rid the world of them, like we attempt to do with nukes and land mines. So instead, let’s learn from it. Let’s try and duplicate it’s success in our business and personal lives. This product is still thriving after more than 60 years. Sixty years! Here are a few lessons Chivers conveys.

  • Don’t stray from project goals. Analyze the desired use case, set goals, and stay the course.
  • Design for the lesser skilled, the least knowledgeable, the careless, and the destructive.
  • Buck conventional wisdom for the sake of simplicity. Prioritize form over function, know when heavy and loose is not a negative.
  • Make upgrades and iterations simple, and do them rapidly. Testing and debugging are part of the process, not an afterthought.
  • State projects benefit greatly from openness and competition. All organizations should be cognizant of the fact that a closed-door procurement session could be suboptimal.

I’m sure there are other lessons. It’s too bad such an item of mass destruction gets to reinforce these ideas.

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books

The Wave

I read a book a few years ago called The Devil’s Teeth by Susan Casey and I liked it a lot. Actually, I may have listened to it. I don’t do audiobooks that often any more – not sure why. I think it’s because I’ve become addicted (dork alert) to a few tech podcasts which occupy about all of my time on the treadmill, so I don’t have time for audiobooks.

Casey is a former competitive swimmer and writes a lot about the ocean. This book is specifically about big ocean waves. I’ve been to the North Shore of Oahu during January and it’s mesmerizing to sit on the beach and watch a pack of surfers trying to catch some of the best waves on the face of the earth. That day inspired me to buy a few surf movies, like Step into Liquid and Riding Giants. Great stuff. And yes, secretly I harbor dreams of taking surfing lessons some day. We’ll see about that. I wouldn’t say I’m consumed by big waves or anything, although I’m highly interested, so I bought The Wave.

Casey takes you through ocean waves from the perspective of three groups; boat people, scientists, and big wave surfers. Most of the book, I’d say two thirds, focuses on the surfer people. A big wave surfer is usually defined as someone who seeks out waves that cannot be ridden by just paddling into them because they’re moving too fast. To catch the waves, they have to be towed in on something like a jet ski, thus the often used name tow surfers.

The grandaddy of all tow surfers, and a main character in this book, is Laird Hamilton. Casey moved to Hawaii for at least a few years and spent a lot of time with Hamilton and his crew of surf buddies on Maui, which boasts one of the grandest big waves of all – Pe’ahi, or Jaws (just off the north central coast). Here is how Casey described her first encounter with Jaws:

The result is sixty-, seventy-, and eighty-foot waves, so beautifully shaped and symmetrical that they might have come from Poseidon’s modeling agency. The white feathering as the wave begins to crest, the spectrum of blues from rich lapis to pale turquoise, the roundness of its barrel, the billowing fields of whitewater when it comes crashing down—when you envision the cartoon-perfect giant wave, the gorgeous snarling beast of Japanese landscape paintings, what you are seeing is Jaws.

That’s Casey. It’s reminiscent of her descriptions of the sharks in The Devils Teeth. Her book puts you there for all of the big waves on the earth. I knew most of their names already because I’ve paid occasional attention since my trip to Hawaii in the early 2000s. There are only a handful or so of these big waves. Casey’s descriptions are well done, here is how she describes the others in the world:

Teahupoo (Tahiti):

I heard it before I saw it, the exploding curtain of glass that hammered onto the reef, the lip of a thirty-foot barrel hitting the earth like a liquid apocalypse. From a visual standpoint, Teahupoo was a looker. Rich lapis, deep emerald, pale aquamarine—its waters were the color of jewels, and its heavy white crest glittered in the sun. But even though the wave was gorgeous, it had the personality of a buzz saw. As Teahupoo reared up it drained the water from the reef, turning the impact zone—a lagoon that was mercilessly shallow to begin with—into a barely covered expanse of sharp coral, spiky sea urchins, and volcanic rock. This happened in seconds, in an area maybe three hundred feet long. I stared. I had never seen a wave behave like this one. “Yeah, it’s different,” Miller said, seeing my stunned expression. “Kind of like a shotgun unloading.”

Mavericks (Half Moon Bay, CA):

If, as the surfers claimed, every big wave has a distinct personality, Mavericks was an assassin. While other waves glimmer in the tropical sun, Mavericks seethes above a black chasm. Perched just north of Monterey Bay’s abyssal canyons, it’s surface is as impenetrable as one-way glass. The Aleutian swells thunder three thousand miles across the North Pacific, barging past the continental shelf until their progress is rudely halted by a thick rock ledge that juts offshore about a mile from Pillar Point, near Half Moon Bay’s harbor. When it hits this shallower depth, the wave energy rears up, shrieking and screaming, forming the clawed hand that is Mavericks.

Todos Santos (Mexico):

By this point I had seen plenty of waves in the fifty foot range, and though they were truly impressive, until now I hadn’t felt the kind of awe that this wave inspired. Because, I now knew, when a wave grows beyond sixty feet tall, it does something different. As the wave stood up to its full towering height it hung there, poised on the brink, and instead of immediately beginning to break, the lip plunging over the face and expelling the energy, it advanced as a vertical wall. It was the ocean’s ultimate threat, and so the ocean let it hang out and show off and strut for an extra few beats, its crest feathered with white spray and its face booby-trapped with boils, bumps, and turbulent eddies. And as the wave hung in the sky, suspended between beauty and fury, those seconds stretched like elastic, like a terrible void into which all things could be swallowed up forever.

You can see how these adrenaline junkies get off on this stuff. Casey is an adrenaline junky herself and gets dragged along by Hamilton on a few big wave endeavors. She spends a lot of time just relating conversations told amongst the group of guys who hang with Hamilton in Maui. You’re there. It’s cool.

These big wave people have a lot of stuff in common with mountain climbers. Both endeavors are dangerous outdoor pursuits where the participants are at the mercy of nature. But at least with mountains you know they aren’t going anywhere. There is consistency as to time and place. Heck, if you’re climbing Everest, your only option is to head up there every year around May and June. But with big waves, you just don’t know when they’re going to happen. You have to monitor the global weather or stand on the shore at Pe’ahi and wait…and wait. Then when something big appears to be coming, you scramble to catch it. It’s a strange dynamic that makes for a lot of drama.

But the whole book is not about bronzed surfer dudes, there is a more scientific chunk. Casey’s intellectual conversations about freak waves of the earth with scientists and boaters comprises about another third of the book (time measurement is purely gut instinct). Recently, there seems to be a higher rate of these freakishly large waves and Casey is looking for some sort of explanation. She doesn’t come right out say that scientists blame it all on climate change, but I do sense that she feels the bulk of the scientific community attribute much of it to climate change. That’s not really the point though.

The point is that we are powerless when the oceans rear their ugly head in the form of a giant wave and not many other natural disasters can be as destructive. Casey captures this well.

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books

The Strain

I’m feeling like I need a little horror to round out the year. I usually group horror with sci-fi and fantasy and consider it the same genre. I’ve done sci-fi already this year and in most circumstances that would give me enough of a fix to cover the whole genre, but this has been a different year. Different mostly because this whole Girl With the Dragon Tattoo thing has raised the bar for surreal action and excitement.

Sure, I’m looking forward to reading standby fiction authors like Sue Grafton and James Lee Burke, and I know I’ll have a great time doing so, but I just felt the need for something different and a little more mindless. This is due partly to the fact that I’m reading six books right now, five of which are non-fiction or instructional/self-help. It’s just not pretty and I’m angry that I got myself into this situation. I found myself not wanting to read because I didn’t know which book to pick up. Really stupid. In the end, I gravitated to this book because it was the simplest, resulting in me only finishing one book in December.

It wasn’t a bad book, but I’m not sure if I’ll read the whole trilogy. It’s a vampire book, pure and simple. I’ve never read a vampire book but I loved the movie I Am Legend (which inspired me to read Richard Matheson’s 7 Steps to Midnight), so I keep trying to find some cool horror books. But they just leave me with an empty feeling. Maybe horror is just a genre that works better on the screen rather than in a book.

** PLOT KILLERS FOLLOW **

Regardless, if I do read the next one, I’ll have to remember this:

  • Ephraim, Nora, Fet, Zack, and Setrakian are in Kelly’s house recovering from the big battle with the Master (who got away, despite being exposed to the sun).
  • Kelly (Ephraim’s ex and Zack’s mother) is a vampire and will reappear based on my keen analysis of some foreshadowing.
  • New York City is overrun with the plague.
  • A group of vampires (called The Clan, based in Pennsylvania) appears to be poised to fight back against the Master’s incursion in New York. It appears they have recruited Gus Elizalde to aid them somehow.
  • I can’t remember what happened to the rich dude who brought the Master to New York. Oh well, I don’t think it matters.

All in all, not that great really. But I can see myself reading the next one if I’m looking for some horror later in 2011. But it’s also just as likely that I forget all about this.

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books

The Emperor of Ocean Park

Stephen Carter has been on my radar ever since I read a review of New England White a few years ago; it sat on my Amazon wish list for a while mostly as a placeholder for Carter. So a few weeks ago I was looking for some new fiction (to me at least) and I decided on The Emperor of Ocean Park rather than New England White. You know me, I’ll choose the route of reading an author in chronological order if given the choice (The Emperor of Ocean Park is Carter’s first book).

It’s a mystery/thriller with a running commentary on race, class, and politics. The main character is Talcott Garland, a black law professor at a fictional northeastern university who is trying to understand the circumstances of his father’s death. His father was a famous conservative judge who was disgraced years ago during confirmation hearings for Reagan’s supreme court and finished out his life as a legal consultant of sorts. Garland is insecure but I found him highly likable. His internal struggles with black and white, liberal and conservative, and rich and poor make things interesting and add a lot of character depth. Throw in some wife problems and some work problems and you have a very complicated guy. You also have plenty of opportunity for some family carnage, which I love.

And I haven’t mentioned anything of the mystery, a great common man forced to become a detective style of thriller. This thriller came along at the right time. I was feeling a little down because I wasn’t sure if I could match the thrill-level that I experienced this year during TGWTDT (it has polluted me temporarily I think). But Carter tossed a story at me that I couldn’t put down; one that I read during family get-togethers instead of talking with other humans; one that I read every night for a few weeks without the threat of falling asleep. It always feels good to have another author that I’m damn sure I’ll like every word he puts on paper.

Carter only has four works of fiction. He released this in 2002, then took a break from fiction for five years. Since then he has released one book a year for the three years from 2007 to 2009. I’ll get to these. Here is the question: Since I know I’m going to read them, should I just buy them and put them in my library? No, probably not. That backlog is too much pressure, I’d rather be JIT. I really loved it, but I feel like I need to space them out because what if he stops at four?

I loved how he hid the plot points from me to build up the excitement without leaving me frustrated. Then he delivered the reveal with a deadpan style that I haven’t felt in other thrillers. His style is deliberate and he fills space with a fair amount of meandering diatribes (redundant?) on life, so it may feel slow to some, but not to me. Here’s an example of a meandering diatribe, check this out:

THE FOLLOWING TUESDAY, twelve days after the death of my father, I return to my dreary classroom, populated, it often seems, by undereducated but deeply committed Phi Beta Kappa ideologues—leftists who believe in class warfare but have never opened Das Kapital and certainly have never perused Werner Sombart, hard-line capitalists who accept the inerrancy of the invisible hand but have never studied Adam Smith, third-generation feminists who know that sex roles are a trap but have never read Betty Friedan, social Darwinists who propose leaving the poor to sink or swim but have never heard of Herbert Spencer or William Sumner’s essay on The Challenge of Facts, black separatists who mutter bleakly about institutional racism but are unaware of the work of Carmichael and Hamilton, who invented the term—all of them our students, all of them hopelessly young and hopelessly smart and thus hopelessly sure they alone are right, and nearly all of whom, whatever their espoused differences, will soon be espoused to huge corporate law firms, massive profit factories where they will bill clients at ridiculous rates for two thousand hours of work every year, quickly earning twice as much money as the best of their teachers, and at half the age, sacrificing all on the altar of career, moving relentlessly upward, as ideology and family life collapse equally around them, and at last arriving, a decade or two later, cynical and bitter, at their cherished career goals, partnerships, professorships, judgeships, whatever kind of ships they dream of sailing, and then looking around at the angry, empty waters and realizing that they have arrived with nothing, absolutely nothing, and wondering what to do with the rest of their wretched lives. (Kindle loc. 2,095)

That, my friends, is all one sentence. Below is another passage I want to remember:

… I have long been comfortable living without perfect knowledge. Semiotics has taught me to live with ambiguity in my work; Kimmer has taught me to live with ambiguity in my home; and Morris Young is teaching me to live with ambiguity in my faith. That truth, even moral truth, exists I have no doubt, for I am no relativist; but we weak, fallen humans will never perceive it except imperfectly, a faintly glowing presence toward which we creep through the mists of reason, tradition, and faith. So much to know, so little time. (Kindle loc. 13,242)

These are the musings of the main character during his quest for answers surrounding his father’s death. All this fits in nicely with the mystery at hand and really sucked me in. What a great year of reading it has been, and still a few books to go. Back to some nonfiction for now.

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books

Daniels’ Running Formula

My buddy suggested this book. He runs fast. Damn fast. So I figured I’d give the Daniels running formula a whirl to help me kick ass (in a relative sense, of course) in 2011 running events. It feels like I figured right, at least it does sitting here with the winter ahead of me and plenty of time to plan my 2011 running season. Daniels’ book is a comprehensive treatise on running. He’s been a runner and a coach for a long time so he has reservoir of knowledge pertaining to any distance or skill level.

For the immediate future, I’m using this book to put together my 24-week training plan for a 2011 half marathon. I have the Google Spreadsheet set up so that once a I decide on my fall date, it automatically backfills the dates for my 24-week training schedule. This 24-week training schedule is the main takeaway from this book. Daniels feels that it is the most productive way to peak for your event.

But first, I’m angry at the Kindle version of this book because it leaves out some important pictures. I was reading along and it would reference a picture, then it would say “This image has been removed.” WTF? I glanced through the Amazon site and I didn’t notice them mentioning that they were going to leave pix out. I think I’m gonna have to buy the damn paperback. Oh, by the way, I still love the Kindle, but lesson learned – rant finished!

So Daniels breaks down the steps to running success nicely. Here they are:

  1. Map your season.
  2. Break down the training into four, six-week phases.
  3. Determine the amount of quality training.
  4. Plot a weekly schedule
  5. Include planned breaks.

As you can tell, if you clicked on my link, I’m on top of steps one and two. Now I’m spending time figuring out the whats, whys, whens and wherefores of my quality training. I have time because at the earliest my 24 week session won’t start until early April. Until then I’m going to get my mileage up and do strength training to prevent injury. I feel relatively focused, but concerned about my execution because I’m pretty lazy.

So here’s the deal, if you really want to improve you have to spend some time doing some figuring in three main areas. First, you have to understand the different types of training paces that your program should consist of and how to get the most of those sessions. Second, you have to make an honest assessment of your ability so you can set the appropriate paces, paces that don’t lead to overtraining or undertraining. And finally, you have schedule your sessions with the prescribed variety of training paces for 24 weeks leading up to your event.

Daniels’ prescribed programs mix the following different training paces. This stuff is right from the book.

  • Easy pace (E) is for warm-ups, cool-downs, and long runs.
  • Marathon pace (M) is a little faster than E and can be used as an alternative to easy runs when conditions are good and there is adequate time for recovery.
  • Threshold pace (T) is used for tempo runs and cruise intervals.
  • Interval pace (I) is used for interval workouts with a 3-5 minute duration.
  • Repetition pace ( R ) is usually race pace or faster (faster if you’re training for a longer race).

Daniels puts numbers to each of these paces, which is one of the coolest parts of the book. But first, you need to pick a VDOT. I’m not going to get into the details of VDOT because it’s complicated. Suffice it to say that it’s Daniels’ preferred method for “measuring a runner’s aerobic profile.” He gives you tables to back into your VDOT based on previous race performances or by testing yourself at certain distances. It’s up to you to make an honest assessment of your abilities. Once you do so, he has a VDOT table that gives you your training paces.

For instance, I’m going to go out on a limb and say my VDOT is 40. That corresponds roughly to someone who can run a 7:07 mile at top speed or can do a 1:50:59 half marathon. I know, I only did a 1:55:21 half marathon in September, but I think I’m faster than that (I want to run a sub 1:50:00 half marathon). I have a few months to figure it out, so I’ll retest myself in the 1Q some time. Consider this an example. But pressing forward with a VDOT of 40, here are my training paces:

  • E pace – 10:11 mile
  • M pace – 8:46 mile
  • T pace – 8:12 mile
  • I pace – 1:52 for 400 meters
  • R pace – 1:46 for 400 meters

Daniels’ secret sauce is how to combine all of this quantitative information for an optimal 24-week training plan. It’s great stuff, intellectually challenging and fun to figure out, kind of like a puzzle.

The first 6-week session is mostly easy running, it’s not hard to schedule that. It’s the last three sessions that get a little more complicated because you need to schedule two or three quality sessions a week. The quality sessions are mostly threshold runs, intervals, or reps. Occasionally Daniels throws in a long run at marathon pace as a quality run depending on what distance you’re training for. Daniels describes it all in detail and throws in plenty of sample training plans for all different levels of ability. It’s the heart of the book.

But that’s not all, he fills the spaces with a ton of tangential information about running. He has sections on:

  • Training at altitude
  • Coming back from injury
  • What to do when you’re sick
  • Training in humidity
  • Racing strategies
  • Cross-training options and examples

There’s more, believe me. This is a rich book that I don’t hesitate to refer to as a training bible. The more I talk about it, the more I feel like I need to get this in paperback. Wouldn’t it be cool to have a tattered paperback version of this with margin notes and bookmarks? Yeah it would. But it would be cooler to run a damn 1:45:00 half marathon next year. Whoa there Johnny, let’s not get ahead of ourselves, you’re short and fat, remember.

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The Black Swan

I saw on Facebook that a friend of mine from high school liked this book. That’s the only research I did before I bought it. This friend of mine is smart, damn smart. I’m not, which is a problem because the concepts behind The Black Swan are complicated. In fact, this is probably the most intellectually challenging book I’ve read in at least five years. I’ll try, through this note, to make sense of the concepts so I can apply them to my business and personal life.

This book advocates a method of thought that most people don’t engage in. It debunks Nobel Prize winners (like Myron Scholes), famous philosophers (like Plato), and bestselling authors (like Malcolm Gladwell). In fact, Taleb throws some highly conventional scientific and mathematical theories (like the Gaussian Bell Curve) under the proverbial bus. He then stomps on them and calls their mothers a bad name.

Taleb is an interesting and funny man, with a self-deprecating sense of humor. He does not write in a linear manner, rather, he ruminates on pages. My small brain found an endless supply of knowledge nuggets but I continuously struggled with fitting it all together. That’s what this time is for. I’m reading through my Kindle notes trying to make sense of the monster and using, for the first time, Scrivener for the writing activity. I’m serious about this because I don’t want to have to do a whole re-reading to make sense of this beast.

So what is this Black Swan? Taleb outlines three traits of a Black Swan.

First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact (unlike the bird). Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable. (Kindle ref. 375)

Taleb is interested, I think, in Black Swans for a few reasons. First of all, he’s a scholarly type and he just likes thinking about this stuff. Second, he has an ego and certainly takes great satisfaction in trying to prove other scholarly types wrong. Finally, I think he cares about the state of this world and desires to promote some change to make the world, in his view, a better place.

So what is, if any, this change he’s trying to promote? This quote from Taleb should give you some indication:

The central idea of this book concerns our blindness with respect to randomness, particularly large deviations: Why do we, scientists or nonscientists, hotshots or regular Joes, tend to see the pennies instead of the dollars? (Kindle ref. 397)

This blindness could lead not only to bad decisions, but to tragedy. To start remediating this blindness we must recognize the particular “state” we’re in with respect to randomness. Are we in Mediocristan or are we in Extremistan? These are Taleb’s proxies for certain states of the world that we must be able to recognize when we start down this road of analyzing Black swans.

In Mediocristan, you can use standard decision making techniques and apply some of the statistics you learned in college to survive and thrive. There are no Black Swans in Mediocristan. It’s a simple world, described by Taleb as such:

I can state the supreme law of Mediocristan as follows: When your sample is large, no single instance will significantly change the aggregate or the total. The largest observation will remain impressive, but eventually insignificant, to the sum. (Kindle ref. 1203)

Extremistan is a much different place.

In Extremistan, inequalities are such that one single observation can disproportionately impact the aggregate, or the total. (Kindle ref. 1223)

For the most part, Extremistan more closely approximates the world we live in today. It is the place where Black Swans happen. It is a world of stock market crashes, bank failures, and 9/11. If you don’t recognize when the situation calls for you to view things as if you’re in Extremistan, then you’re ripe for making bad decisions and giving inadequate explanations for all aspects of life, love, economics, and politics; you’re ripe for falling prey to the Black Swan.

However, it’s within our power to change our method of thought so we don’t imperil ourselves to Black Swans. Or better yet, so we can take advantage of Black Swans. To do so, in general, Taleb feels we must gain some erudition.

Let me insist that erudition is important to me. It signals genuine intellectual curiosity. It accompanies an open mind and the desire to probe the ideas of others. Above all, an erudite can be dissatisfied with his own knowledge, and such dissatisfaction is a wonderful shield against Platonicity, the simplifications of the five-minute manager, or the philistinism of the overspecialized scholar. Indeed, scholarship without erudition can lead to disaster (Kindle ref. 1507)

This erudition is necessary in ceding that the human mind makes some thought errors that could cause “Black Swan blindness.” Taleb embarks on a lengthy chapter on each of five thought errors.

  1. We focus on preselected segments of the seen and generalize from it to the unseen: the error of confirmation.
  2. We fool ourselves with stories that cater to our Platonic thirst for distinct patters: the narrative fallacy.
  3. We behave as if the Black Swan does not exist: human nature is not programmed for Black Swans.
  4. What we see is not necessarily all that is there. History hides Black Swans from us and gives us a mistaken idea about the odds of these events: this is the distortion of silent evidence.
  5. We “tunnel”: that is, we focus on a a few well-defined sources of uncertainty, on too specific a list of Black Swans (at the expense of others that do not easily come to mind). (Kindel ref. 1531)

When he gets through describing these, we’re half way through the book, kind of (there’s a postscript that’s pretty long, but pretty rich). So far, Taleb has shown us the pitfalls in our understanding of the world. He now endeavors to explain just how poorly we humans are at predicting. Taleb is fixated on prediction because, as he says, “Prediction, not narration, is the real test of our understanding of the world.”

Our understanding of the world is what’s at stake folks. Taleb is trying to help us figure out “what’s going on” around here. But we are intrinsically horrible at predicting, so what do we do? Taleb seems to be saying that corporate profits and book sales and blockbuster inventions are mostly lucky, so are we to just sit around and hope that we have more good luck than bad luck?

Well, Taleb’s reason for loving America may provide some insight:

In fact, the reason I felt immediately at home in America is precisely because American culture encourages the process of failure, unlike the cultures of Europe and Asia where failure is met with stigma and embarrassment. America’s specialty is to take these small risks for the rest of the world, which explains this country’s disproportionate share in innovations. (Kindle ref. 4499)

This culture allowed him to get rich using a “barbell strategy” or, as he puts it, “to be as hyperconservative and hyperaggressive as you can be instead of being mildly aggressive or conservative.” (Kindle loc. 4515) He advocates, for instance (as an alternative to medium risk investments), socking away 85-90% of your money in T-bills (extremely safe, for money you’re not willing to lose) and putting the rest in extremely speculative bets – taking some small speculative risks that result in more failures than successes, but exposing you to the potential for one or more huge payoffs (I’m paraphrasing from chapter 13, not sure how much is a direct quote).

He runs through implementation of this “barbell strategy” with 5 key recommendations. They’re great reading, but I won’t list them here. Buy the book! I’ve reread them multiple times and still think I’m going to have study them to understand how to implement them. He sums it up like this:

All these recommendations have one point in common: asymmetry. Put yourself in situations where favorable consequences are much larger than unfavorable ones.

Indeed, the notion of asymmetric outcomes is the central idea of this book: I will never get to know the unknown since, by definition, it is unknown. However, I can always guess how it might affect me, and I should base my decisions around that.

Wow, we still have a large, complicated, but optional portion of the book to go. It’s evident that I’m going to have to do a second reading. Taleb starts digging deeply into methods to turn Black Swans into Gray Swans, the pitfalls of the Gaussian Bell Curve (which he calls GIF, Great Intellectual Fraud), and some heavy philosophy. It’s confusing and I should have stopped and rehashed things before I moved on. He states in the intro to this section that it can be skipped. And even if you press on, he forewarns you periodically about parts that can be skipped. He clearly cares about his readers.

I really liked Taleb’s tone, his humor, and his delivery. The guy is a genius and he wants nothing more than to sit around the rest of his life and think about Black Swans. He said early on that he wants to be “a flâneur, a professional meditator.” It would be a beautiful thing to have such a luxury.

And I loved his parting shot:

I am sometimes taken aback by how people can have a miserable day or get angry because they feel cheated by a bad meal, cold coffee, a social rebuff, or a rude reception. Recall my discussion in Chapter 8 on the difficulty in seeing the true odds of the events that run your own life. We are quick to forget that just being alive is an extraordinary piece of good luck, a remote event, a chance occurrence of monstrous proportions.

Imagine a speck of dust next to a planet a billion times the size of the earth. The speck of dust represents the odds in favor of your being born; the huge planet would be the odds against it. So stop sweating the small stuff. Don’t be like the ingrate who got a castle as a present and worried about the mildew in the bathroom. Stop looking the gift horse in the mouth-remember that you are a Black Swan. And thank you for reading my book. (Kindle loc. 6192)

You are most welcome NNT, and I hope to be diving back in occasionally.

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books

Black Ops

Well, The Presidential Agent Series may have just nuked the fridge. Yeah, I don’t think it means I’m going to be moving on, but my respect for the series has taken a little hit. Maybe respect isn’t the right word. I’m struggling with how I feel, but I’ll sort it out by the end of this post.

This was a decent thriller, with Charley Castillo and the whole crew back again still sorting through the Iraq arms-for-food scandal that has been present for basically all of the books. The scandal provides good continuity and is a decent backdrop for the action, spy-craft, and political wrangling that Griffin has enamored me with over the last four books. The dialogue is still crackling and characters are still quirkily flawed, but cool.

This book started stretching things a little thinly though.

** PLOT KILLERS FOLLOW **

In the end, when he meets up with this secret society interested in protecting the interests of the United States, it just seemed to deviate from what heretofore has been something not too far off the charts of the plausibility scale. Listen, I know it’s always been implausible, and I don’t run from implausibility. But it’s clear that the next step is that Castillo continues saving the world on his own dime. Sure, that’s fine.

I find it interesting that this comes as Griffin’s son joins as co-author for the next book. Reading the preview, it really sounds fantastical. I’m okay with that, I’ll change my latitude a little and enjoy it.

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books

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest

Well, I’m done with the Dragon Tattoo girl series. What an epic ride it was; full of peaks and valleys, sometimes fast and sometimes slow, not boring for a second. I thought early on that my only option was to read all three books this year and I was correct. I had no choice.

There are a ton of things happening in these books and for some readers, I imagine, it may seem meandering to a point of boredom. But I liked the new characters and the plot deviations introduced in this final book of the trilogy. I think Larsson did them justice. Heck, this book may even be able to stand alone, but I would advise strongly against reading them out of order.

What will be the point of seeing the movies? I know how everything ends so there will be no surprises. I guess the visual depiction of this work of art could provide some moments of appreciation. And of course, from a social and pop culture standpoint, it’s probably going to be required viewing. I’ll probably just wait for the video though. We’ll see what Ebert says. My movie viewing nowadays is based on time, place, and situation. I don’t really seek movies out, they just kind of happen occasionally.

It’s a wrap. I’m moving on.

Categories
books

The Downhill Lie

I like Hiaasen and I love golf. I should have read this when it came out. I’m not sure what took me so long. This is Hiaasen’s story of his quest to pick up the game of golf after giving it up about 30 years ago when he was 20.

I had a hiatus from the game also. It wasn’t as long as Hiaasen’s, it ran from about 1993 to 1998. After I came crawling back to the game my love for it increased considerably. Unlike my return, Hiaasen’s return wasn’t met with love. But I’m not surprised, my love didn’t arrive in earnest until a few years after picking up the sticks again.

And anyway, love isn’t funny. Pain and frustration is funny. And if you play the game you know about pain and frustration. Hiaasen goes into his own pain and frustration in great detail it’s funny as all get-out. Plus it’s full of keen insights into the game.

Hiaasen is smart. He didn’t go into this endeavor with dreams of glory:

When I decided to reconnect with the game, I had no illusions about getting really good at it. I just wanted to be better at something in middle age than I was when I was young.

That’s realistic, and highlights one of the beautiful things about golf. You can actually improve all the way into your 60s I think. This potential for improvement does not make it any less painful when you dump a $4 Pro V1 in the drink:

Hooking a new Pro V1 into the drink is like totaling a Testarossa while pulling out of the sales lot. It makes you want to puke.

That’s my man. I would love to meet this guy and just have a conversation with him. He cracks funny on a ton of stuff. Here is his take on golf magazines:

That’s because most players drift from weekend to weekend in a fog of anxious flux; they play well in streaks and then, for no plain reason, fall apart. They are seldom more than one poor round away from stammering desperation, and to these unhinged souls every golf article dangles the most precious enticement: hope.

It should be fun, but it’s so difficult to make it fun. Says Hiaasen:

Sure, I want this game to be fun.

I also want peace in the Middle East, a first-round draft pick for the Miami Dolphins and a lifetime of reliable erections.

Wanting, however, won’t necessarily make it happen.

In the end, even with the frustration, you gotta keep things in perspective, which I feel like I learned a few years ago after having some tough times. Hiaasen’s take on the frustration level:

Trying to be good at something isn’t a bad idea. But, in the turbulent and random scroll of life, topping a tee shot is a meaningless if not downright comic occurrence. A few players I know appreciate this truth; they shrug off their flubs and placidly move along. Such inner peace is as enviable as it is elusive.

I made a list about 10 years ago about why golf is fun even when you’re playing bad. I eventually brainwashed myself into appreciating being outside, hanging out with family and friends, and the potential for a comeback, such that I now have achieved a certain amount of that elusive inner peace on the course. It’s important to get there, not just for your own self-preservation, but for the people you play with. Hiaasen has this lament about playing on Sundays with his dad:

I’m wondering if he knew what those Sundays meant to me; if he understood that even when I was playing poorly and fuming like a brat, there was nowhere else I’d rather have been, and no one else I’d rather have been with. I hope I told him so, but, sadly, I cannot remember.

Stop for a moment, please, thanks. Keep playing, even though it sucks sometime.

No matter how frustrating it gets, and how much it sucks, there are those moments of total brilliance that anyone can achieve:

That’s the killer. A good shot is a total rush, possibly the second most pleasurable sensation in the human experience. It will mess with your head in wild and delusive ways.

Bissinger talked about this in 3 Nights in August, about the feeling a pitcher gets when his heater slaps the back of the catcher’s glove and the batter didn’t even get close to it. I’m paraphrasing, but any pitcher, he says, would think it’s simply a feeling worth having again. That’s why we play sports; sports are rife with chances for having a pleasurable feeling that’s worth having again. They don’t come often, but they come. Try and duplicate that dynamic during work, watching TV, or partying.

Okay, maybe it’s not a fair comparison. Maybe this elusive feeling is not a great justification for pouring time and energy into sports. But Hiaasen and I feel it is.