I just received the brand-new Amazon Kindle 3G last weekend and I love it! I’ve been thinking about getting an e-reader for a while but up to now I didn’t like the form factor. But this newest edition of the Kindle is smaller, lighter, has even better contrast and more memory, among other things. The [...]
After reading Fooled By Randomness a while back, I’m looking forward to reading Taleb’s new book, The Black Swan. I grabbed a copy of it today and it looks like it will be a good read.
Here’s a neat little animated map showing the different empires that conquered the Middle East over the last 5,000 years. If there’s one lesson to be learnt, it seems to be this: all large empires in human history have followed similar patterns, from growth to ultimate collapse. This map reminds me of a book I [...]
New reading material: Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope (go Barack!!) and Geeta Anand’s The Cure. Looking forward to kicking back with these books over the weekend…
Part of the reason why I love chess is the amazing complexity of the game. As David Shenk explains in his fabulous book The Immortal Game: After the first round of moves (meaning, white makes its first move and black responds with its first move), there are 400 possible board positions, as white has twenty [...]
I love books. So anytime I walk past a bookstore, I just can’t help myself – I can’t seem to leave without buying a few books. Same thing today, so I ended up with two more for my library. I’m very excited about one in particular, The Immortal Game. Thumbing through it, it looks like [...]
I added some more blog bling, which you can see at the bottom of the left sidebar. This nice little widget from the great LibraryThing randomly displays ten books out of all the books that are currently on my book shelves.
Here’s a very interesting article in the NY Times by Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt, authors of the fascinating Freakonomics which I read a while back. As they do in the book, the authors take a topic that you wouldn’t necessarily associate with the word “economics” and disect the, well, economics of it. [...]
I finished Douglas Coupland’s JPOD last weekend, and I guess the best way I can describe it is: bland. It didn’t do anything at all for me. Moving right along to the next book… I’m going to take on Jack Welch’s Straight from the Gut, which has been sitting on my bookshelf for way too [...]
OK, so after finishing Dan Brown’s Deception Point last week on the plane ride back to California, I figured I’d also give Digital Fortress a shot, the only Dan Brown book left that I hadn’t read. I finished it today and I must say it’s by far his worst book. It really sucked. The last [...]
Sweet. I am on a Lufthansa flight from LA to Frankfurt, and I got upgraded from Business Class to First Class. Traveling like this sure is fun… I’ve got more space than I need, and they have a great selection of snacks (everything from caviar to Thai Shrimp), champagne, wines, etc. And of course, the [...]
Just finished reading Fooled By Randomness, a very interesting book. The author appears just a tad bit eccentric and somewhat arrogant at times, but the central thesis of the book is quite interesting – we tend to assign too much determinism to things when often times, all there really is is randomness. The author makes [...]
I read a great little book last weekend, Chasing Daylight by Eugene O’Kelly. It’s a powerful memoir that makes you think. Going 100 miles an hour as CEO of KPMG, O’Kelly was suddenly diagnosed with brain cancer and told that he had less than 100 days left to live. The book chronicles those last few [...]
Every now and then, I’ll get distracted from the book I am currently reading. Today was such a day. I haven’t finished “Barbarians at the Gate” yet, but as I walked through a bookstore around lunchtime, I picked up a book that I’ve been meaning to read: Monkey Business : Swinging Through the Wall Street [...]
I just started reading a book that’s been sitting around on my bookshelf for quite some time: Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco. I am glad I finally got around to reading it. Barely 100 pages into the book, it is already promising to be a great thriller – LBO madness, power [...]