FAN: SuperFreakonomics

I don't get out to bookstores half as much as I'd like to anymore and that's how I used to keep in touch with what I like to read. While Christmas shopping I went into one and saw that there was a sequel to Freakonomics, one of my favorite books. To a guy who loves numbers and statistics, the words on these pages morph into crack for my brain.

I didn't buy it then but I did order it recently off of Overstock.com in hardback for a ridiculous price. I also threw in Gladwell's "What The Dog Saw" which is a collection of his writings for The New Yorker. I could read Gladwell all day. His series of books are all in my top 10 - The Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers. All genius. Books for a numbers geek!

So I don't want to ruin the book for would be readers so if you plan to read and want to be surprised don't read much more. The subject matter is equally priceless this time - fascinating even.

The economy of prostitution opens the book. It details how and why you have your $10,000 Ashleigh Dupree types and your $5 crack whore types. It details pricing as per location just a few city blocks apart and why the prices relative to everything else have fallen so much since the 30's and 40's....and why oral used to be double the cost of conventional.

Another section is about the guy who profiled terrorists based on their money trail. They had no idea how stupid they were being after people started paying attention post 9/11. There is one mistake the guy wouldn't tell, but other ones were very interesting. For instance, they have no life insurance! Why would they? Most of them are planning to die. Pretty funny. They also don't make any transactions during their praying times or temple times. Holy terrorist nuts don't miss a service or a prayer.

Maybe the best part of the book is debunking global warming or at minimum cheap ways to fix the latest trend. It was amazing to me to read about the articles Newsweek and the like were printing in the 70's about global cooling. Hilarious. It was determined that a huge volcano eruption caused that cooling by creating a makeshift shield in the atmosphere of particles. It lasted several years. A lot of the particles were carbon related. Some top global warning scientists have now changed their minds and accepted these new findings....that everyone trying to use less carbon is actually making the temperature rise because there is less of a shield in the atmosphere without all the particles.

Every cheap answer seems to be instead of not releasing carbon, releasing something like 1.5% more carbon into the high atmosphere than what is there right now. That would be enough to reverse the last decade or two of temps rising. I'm not a scientist, well technically I am, but if the biggest table pounders for global warming are signing off on this theory - it's hard to deny. Of course Al Gore won't even recognize the science, but he laughed at the people who wouldn't recognize his science. Fat loser.

Finally, another short part that made me laugh was about teahcing economics to monkeys with special coins. They tied the last chapter to the first by having documented accounts of a male monkey giving a coin to a female monkey, humping her unmercifully for 8 seconds, and then the female monkey took her coin and bought food with it. Priceless! I'm off to read "What The Dog Saw".

Stilladog, what did you see?

FAN: Randy Pausch = Good Dude

Back when it was viral, people sent me the link for Randy Pausch's The Last Lecture. I never watched it. For Christmas two years ago Mrs. Fan gave me the book. I never read it. I put it on the shelf and planned to, but never got around to it. I don't read much fiction at all and almost everything I read is about business or autobiographies. This was kind of a gray area for me for books. Hard to classify. Probably should be under self help!

I found myself out of reading material last week so I went to the bookcase and picked it out. I read it in 3 days and I'm glad I did. Very inspiring. Some of the chapters hit a little too close to home. Another cool aspect of reading the book was realizing that he worked on ALICE at CMU. My daughter currently uses ALICE in TEC Club. Cool stuff...you learn about programming without knowing you are learning about programming. It allows you to create a virtual clip about anything you want. It's very impressive but what else would you expect from CMU?

A friend of mine from high school went to CMU and majored in CS so it would be interesting to look her up and see if she knew him or had a relationship with him at all. Looking back and reading about his time in school and teaching there, it makes me kind of wish I went somewhere where it was a bit more creative and hands-on. I get it though, that's why you're paying the big bucks and I don't even know if I would have been accepted. I think grade-wise and SAT wise I may have been slightly below CMU standards, but I learned from the book that the interview process can change all of that and I may have excelled there. Who knows?

Anyway, I don't need to go over who the man is or what happened to him. You probably already know. If not, point your browser over to Wikipedia and key him in.....maybe pick up the book if you get a chance.

The Long Winded

During my recent lovefest with business books, specifically ones that can be categorized under economics, I've been giving good word-of-mouth to almost everything I've read - Freakonomics, The Tipping Point, Blink, Made To Stick, The Economic Naturalist. I followed some recommendations online which lead me to The Long Tail, which is pretty ironic since The Long Tail discusses recommendations online at great length. I just finished it last night and it took me forever to read because I just couldn't get into it. I started a new book last night when I finished The Long Tail and to compare my enthusiasm for it, I'm already on page 68. When I am interested in something, I'll get through it very quickly. My issue with The Long Tail is simple - it didn't need to be a book. It started as an article in Wired, which I subscribe to and enjoy, and it should have stayed that way. We get it. The hits are the head, everything else is the tail. With the advent of the internet and unlimited virtual shelf space - the tail never ends. If you add up all the sales of the tail items - it can be a significant chunk of the entire pie. That about sums it up. Anderson dissects buying music, books and dvds online as they exemplify the Long Tail perfectly. I just felt like the same examples were used over and over to the point where I wanted to just turn pages without reading them, which is really weird for me when dealing with newer books on subjects like this. I think I can sum up why I feel the way I do about the book like this: I've been online since 1994 and I've been net shopping since the beginning. A lot of topics in the book have been lunch topic material for me and my friends for a long time. I guess if you "get" the concepts in the book or already accept them - there isn't much more to gain from reading it. However, if you are new to this arena or interested in learning more about how items are chosen for distribution through places like Wal-Mart....pick it up. It's not a bad book at all and I don't want to give that impression, in fact he has great quotes from a ton of bigtime net players on the jacket, it's just that if you already accept the theory of TLT and understand it and the possibilities that come from it, you aren't going to gain a ton of new info from it.

I Swear I Didn't

I recently had an interview at a local software company and it ended with a phenomenon that is becoming more popular according to my peers - the trick question. How did my interview go? I thought it went smashing but I didn't get hired.....there. This striped bass might be heading back to a small pond though in two weeks. More details later in the week. Anyway, I don't want to get into the specific question I was asked or the giant holes I was able to shoot in the interviewer's logic on my drive home. Why I didn't think of them there I'll never know. For the first time in my life I felt like George Costanza: "yeah, well the jerk store called and they're running out of YOU". I thought about creative ways I could come up with to email the guy back and let him know I came up with holes in his logic, but both Still A Wife and Still A Sis thought for once I should let go and not look back. For heaven's sake - for all I knew, I landed the job. I wanted to be like "um, hey, mister giant I didn't know the answer either until I read the book hiring person, um, my wife hires a ton of people and she was wondering where you got such a clever question and she's looking for more and oh, by the way, did your stupid book consider THIS.....". Then I would pounce on his faulty logic like Rosie O'Donnell on a sand crab during Survivor Celebrity Edition. Whatever. I can lose a battle every once in a while. In my mind I can still win the war by landing a better position at a higher salary than what Alex Trebec was offering. So, that story really has nothing to do with the post. Just a huge back story to say I was book shopping online after talking to a good friend of mine whom we'll call "Missuer Wolf", for the book in the picture above. He recommended it because he too had his brain teased by an interviewer who smugly sat and watched for beads of sweat to start their long trip from brow to chin. Amazon only had paperbacks and I've started building a nice collection of business book hardcovers so I went to ebay to continue my quest. Finally - and this is the true subject of the post - why do people feel the need to claim that a used book is "unread"? I was able to buy a used "but never read" copy of the hardcover for $4.50 plus $4.00 shipping. Not too shabby, but quit the lying for goodness sake. Sure, they might not be lying if only one out of every 100 used books made the claim, but for the 31 used copies of this book on ebay - I think 25 of them have never been read. If I read a book, thought it served no purpose on my shelf and I wanted to sell it on ebay, I might say "No Dog Ears!". I might say "Perfect Spine!". I might say "No rips, tears, markings of any kind!". I might say "I read this book without ever having the read and unread portions farther than 2 inches apart making it damn near impossible to read what was close to the middle". However, I don't think I would ever claim that I didn't read it. I have books that I've read three times that look brand spanking new, pages as tight as a frog's waterproof anus.....guaranteed. I just can't imagine myself looking for a used book and everything seems perfect until I see "Read only once!". Well, Shit. That's a deal breaker right there. Mother Hubbard read the book and he's trying to sell it? Why would I want that?

Dan Rooney's Book

I finished reading Dan Rooney, My 75 Years With The Pittsburgh Steelers and The NFL last night. I have to admit that I enjoyed the first part of the book much more than the last. The beginning of the book told more stories of Dan and his brothers growing up under the tutelage of The Chief. It seemed like once Dan started working for the Steelers in a business capacity, the stories weren't as enlightening and they just followed a basic "..and then I" or "...and then he" approach. From my perspective, there wasn't enough new information. They relegated the decision to hire Mike Tomlin over the two incumbents to one page. I thought an entire chapter might be devoted to this. However, some meetings of the owners 20 years ago are gone over in great detail. I was impressed to learn that Dan was a standout player in high school and that he once scored 6 TDs in a game. That eclipses Al Bundy's mark by 2 for those that are counting. A lot of the information wasn't consistent in the manner in which it was presented. For example, for one of the early Super Bowl runs, each playoff game almost went through a late drive history but then for another Super Bowl run, you would just get the playoff scores. I think in the end, this guy has spent over 55 years working in the NFL....and that's after growing up with The Chief. How you can squash all of that down into less than 300 pages is going to leave a lot open for debate. I think Dan told his stories to the two ghost writers and then they sorted them out and put the book together. When he got to praising the players from certain eras, it also got a bit boring because there were so many from each and after describing one of the Steel Curtain in a single paragraph, how can the next three sound any different when you are only giving each one paragraph? It's a minor complaint, but with all the stars from the 70's, it almost seemed like you could just switch their names around because the praise was so generic. One thing that is not arguable from reading the book is that there is no love lost between The Rooneys and Al Davis. Had I been counting, there must have been at least 5-7 disparaging stories told about Al. According to Dan, he prevailed in most of the disagreements. If Al told the stories, maybe Al would prevail in most of them. Rooney doesn't have a negative thing to say about anyone minus Al Davis. He truly seems like one of the most gracious and thoughtful people on the planet. I guess in this age of pop culture and "in your face" media I was looking for a little more "Wow" factor from the book. I was looking for behind closed door stuff with Cowher during the bad years or something. The two non playoff years were summed up neatly in a page or so by saying "my confidence never wavered in Bill...." or something like that. It's vanilla for juicy details, but in retrospect, what else would you expect from a bread and butter team? The book is a good solid 7 for information, but I found the cadence and presentation of information lacking in something.

Stick This

Here's another really good business book I just finished. I picked it up strictly based on it's cover one day while I had my daughter at the bookstore. Once I saw that the authors wrote it as kind of a companion to The Tipping Point, I had to read it. It's really good. It breaks down the components of creating better messages. It gives many examples of two attempts to get the same point across.....one obviously being much better than the other. One of the better stories is how Subway's national advertisers passed on the original story of Jared. However, a local Subway refused to give up thinking it was a great story and used it and eventually the national arm came crawling back once they realized their mistake. Another great example was the media blitz on how bad movie popcorn is for your health. The group delivering the message needed the idea to stick so they came up with the idea of visually showing people the amount of fat and cholesterol that was in a normal serving. It had a much greater effect than just writing a number down that doesn't mean much to anyone. The book is loaded with examples like this and the next time you're asked to present something in any context - it will really make you think and try to construct a better message so that your idea will "stick".

The Economic Naturalist

I just finished another good book. It's called The Economic Naturalist by Robert H. Frank. When I first picked it up in the bookstore and read a few pages - it reminded me a lot of Freakonomics, The Tipping Point and Blink. The subtitle is "In Search of Explanations for Everyday Enigmas". He teaches economics and the collections in the book are papers that students turned in for their final grade - expanded upon and edited by Frank himself. To give you a flavor of the book, some of the searches include "Why does milk come in square containers and soda round?", 'Why is there a light in the refrigerator but not the freezer?", "Why are DVDs packaged in huge boxes when they could be in the same size packages as CDs?", "Why is squatting legal?", "Why can you rent a $20,000 car for $40 a day, but a $400 tuxedo rents for $125?". These types of things interest me as I like to know how things work. What the book is trying to get you to do is to understand that there are a myriad of reasons behind the costs associated with consumer goods. The more of these snippets you read - the more likely you'll be able to come up with the next answer yourself. It's also broken up into very small sections making it a good book for the pool or before bed. If something comes up, you usually only to have read a little further to get to the next snippet. While it's not as good as the other books I mentioned here - it's good enough to satisfy the curious reader.

Oprah Should Suggest This Book!

Everybody that has a daughter has to cringe when they hear the horror stories coming out on news magazine type shows about how our kids keep getting more and more mature at an earlier age. I know I do. One of the biggest influences on our kids besides us parents are the other kids they hang around and spend time with. My wife and I are very picky about our daughter's friends and to this day, there are only a handful of families that we feel completely comfortable with when she is not with us. In a perfect world, if she is spending the day with a friend and another family, we'd like those parents to have the same parenting style and values that we have. The person who recommended this book to me is just such a person. Hopefully our daughters will still be close when they hit the teenage years because the lessons in this book are even more valuable then - and if they double date, I can rest assured knowing that we will be delivering the same type of speeches to the young lads who come knocking on our doors. I don't want to get into too much detail from the book. I already subscribed to a lot of the ideas that are presented and there are a few small items that I actually don't agree with 100%, but you don't have to agree with everything the author says to gain a lot of knowledge from the book. I starting reading this as soon as it was recommended to me and then halfway through, it got lost in the shuffle of the Christmas season. I recently "found" it again and finished it quickly as it's not very long at all. Anyway - the book gets my highest recommendation and it's nice to know that the dads I see the most (Chrissy Two Coats, Nova Joe, CC, 6-Mo, Doug E. Fresh & Add A Lot) have a lot of the same beliefs that I do.

A Good Read

I finished my second Malcolm Gladwell book this weekend - blink. It's a very good book on par with The Tipping Point. Not sure which one I like better as they are both food for thought for curious people. The book deals with what goes on inside your unconscious when you make a split second decision. One cool topic was "thin slicing". A study was done where a psychologist (www.gottman.com) interviewed couples...hundreds if not thousands of them. He video taped the interviews (30 minutes) and then played them back frame by frame looking for micro expressions and charting their feelings based on facial expressions and body language. He was able to predict whether the couple would still be married a set time in the distance with uncanny accuracy. He got so good at it that he could "thin slice" a conversation he overheard or just a very short clip from one of the interviews and still predict divorce while only dropping slightly in success rate of prediction. Another group of scientists mapped every facial muscle and every expression you can possibly make and then named them in a coded fashion (Facial Action Coding System which is now taught and studied). They also look for micro expressions and can predict lying better than any machine by simply reading faces and almost disregarding what is being said. They were able to watch tape of a famous Russian spy case where the accused was acquitted. Watched at regular speed you couldn't see anything, but when slowed down and examined - they could catch the micro expressions of the man actually smirking for hundredths of a second before he lied. It's really cool stuff. Another theory is that we stop mind reading when our hearts go above a certain rate so we stop making good decisions and rely on our most basic instincts. An entire chapter is dedicated to the killing of Amadou Diallo by 4 police officers. It's theorized that as their adrenaline and heart rates increased - they stopped paying attention to external clues about what was really happening at the time of the shooting. I can't do it justice in a few sentences, but it's very interesting to read what went through each officer's mind at the time of the shooting. Everything seemed plausible from the way they described it, but in the big picture - it made little sense. Those are just a few of the concepts talked about. There are many more. I totally recommend it.

The Tipping Point

I just finished another outstanding book. I needed to finish it before Christmas because I'm getting another book by the same author that morning (at least I asked for it). This is a book I enjoyed almost as much as Freakonomics. Malcolm Gladwell has a curious mind and raises some very interesting points. I don't want to go into too much detail, but here is a sampling of some of the parts I enjoyed. The crime wave in NYC was cleaned up using the broken window methodology. Meaning, fix the small stuff first because people seeing broken windows signals something deep inside them that allows them to think that area isn't cared for - and if there are broken windows and grafitti everywhere - crime takes place there. He goes into talking about how social epidemics spread - like how did Hush Puppies come back into fashion after almost being forced out of business. He talks about what he calls the Stickiness factor and how people remember things. He uses examples I'm very familiar with - Sesame Street and Blue's Clues scripts. The information I took from this is way cool. They actually watch toddlers watching the show and they know which bits work and which ones do not. A simple tweak can make all the difference and to hear what some of them were throughout history is amazing because I remember a lot of examples they gave. He also talks about social connections and tells the story of the other rider besides Paul Revere who went out that night in a different direction to warn that the British were coming and why he never became known for the same act. It's a very practical book and what I took from it was - the next time I'm faced with a problem at home or at work - whether it's engineering a new project with the house or dealing with a software problem at the office - sometimes you can't overthink things. Sometimes, one very small decision or just talking to the right person is enough to arrive at a "tipping point". I recommend reading it. At the very least, it's good conversation filler.

Great Book - 100 People

Wow. I'm getting better at picking good books to read. The last two, Freakonomics and 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America were both fantastic. In 100 PWASUA, Bernard Goldberg takes a capsule look at 100 Americans who usually turn out to be HUGE hypocrites.....saying one thing and doing another or simply people who push so hard for what they believe that they actually end up crossing lines that shouldn't be crossed. It also doesn't hurt that most of the 100 mentioned are bleeding heart liberals. Not honest democrats or even slightly left of the democrat's center - the people on the list seem to be on the fringe of being taken seriously - yet they hold high positions everywere from universities, news magazines, news shows and yes - elected offices. Celebrities also get a much deserved pile-on. A great feature of the book is that it allows you to read it in 2-3 page sections so you still proceed even if you have only minutes to spare. If you love America and I won't say hate (but strongly despise) those who do nothing but continually trash their own country and align President Bush with the Nazis.....then this book is for you. Even if you are a die hard liberal (I'll pray for you) you should still read this so you understand just what some of your elite philosophers are really thinking and doing. Good job Mr. Goldberg, and might I say I really enjoy your work on HBO's Real Sports. Thank God there are still journalists around who won't just nod and accept any answer that is given to them. Can I add Bill Maher to your list?

Read This Book...Freakonomics

I finished up book 2 of 3 last night and it's fantastic. I give it a 10 on my nonfiction scale. The book is Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and it will open your eyes as to which variables really drive society as a whole. Levitt crunches numbers and raw data to explain a myriad of complex issues. Some of his theories and chapter content: Legalizing abortion dramatically dropped crime rates 15-25 years later, Can we catch teachers who cheat on standardized tests for their students, Why Klan members are like Real Estate Agents, Can your name predict your success (and why do African Americans continue to give their children names that could be hurting them), Could tracking thievery from a bagel delivery man predict the current market, Is a child's success based on "who" their parents are (as people in general) or "what" their parents do (as far as parenting is concerned), Why do drug dealers still live with their moms?
As a guy with math as half of his dual major - I absolutely loved this book and wished it was twice as long. I think I'll go over to his blog on www.freakonomics.com and sign up. Buy it - you'll love it. Or if you ask real nice, maybe I'll let you borrow mine.

How cool is the Internet?

I recently read the last chapter of one of the three books I'm currently reading (don't ask). The book is First Shot and it's all about the reported sinking of a Japanese mini mub by the US Ward 2 hours before the attack on Pearl Harbor. It also goes into great detail about submarines in general and how they came about. Some people in the military didn't believe the Ward sunk a mini sub. Some thought it may have been a whale, even though a pilot also called in the sub report. Had the commanders at Pearl Harbor listened to the Ward and had "all hands on deck", they still would have had major fleet losses, but maybe many lives could have been saved. The last chapter in the book takes you on the hunt for the missing sub which never turned up anywhere after the war...leaving the crew of the Ward sure they had sunk it since they found all of the remaining mini subs but 2. After a few expeditions turned up nothing, they rented some top of the line sonar equipment and labeled close to 30 "possibilities" near the site of the shots. With time running out on the last expedition - they finally came across the sub and it was described brilliantly. I was intrigued by the ending and wanted to read more about the sub and possibly see pictures of it. I found a website affiliated with the expedition and they have video clips you can stream. They actually have the edited video clip online of the exact moment the sub comes into view and focus and you can hear the crew's reaction. Within the course of 24 hours I went from imagining what the sub looked like when they found it to actually seeing it. Pretty cool indeed. Now maybe I can finish book 2 of 3.....