“Unexpected Insights for Business and Life”

Classes started today and neither of my classes seem too difficult.  Hopefully this means good things for my ability to continue blogging throughout the semester!  This evening I had time finish Click, my 006 book, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.  Like the author, I have to admit that I love data.  And this book describes a data-miner’s dream.  The author has information about the searches made and websites visited by 10 million users (!) and has demographic information for about a quarter of them.

The Black Swan

From the beginning, I could tell this book was going to be tough going.  I’ve read several similar books attacking conventional wisdom, including Freakonomics (right before starting this project) and Wrong (reviewed here).  Of the three, this book was by far the least conversational and most intellectual (ie most difficult to read!).    The book took a lot of time to make a few simple points.  There were also many chapters that started with anecdotes not clearly related to the subject of the book.  This gives the disorienting sensation of having walked into a room and realizing you don’t remember why you decided to head to that room in the first place!

The Books Are Winning

Yesterday I was in the library for twenty minutes and left with 9 books.  I even know how it happened.  First, I was just going to pick up a book in the 003’s (Systems) and the 004’s (Data Processing and Computer Science), so I did – easily grabbing just the one book which stood out to me in each section.  Then I thought, surely my blog readers would like to hear a little about why I picked the books I did and it should be easy enough to write about the very few other books available.

Bookends – Continuing Series and The Secret

Current Fiction Readings

I found the most awesome website this week, called lendle.me, which allows kindle users to lend each other books!  Courtesy of some other very nice “lendlers” (as the site calls us), I was able to read both Catching Fire and Mockingjay this week, finishing the Hunger Games trilogy.  I was planning on waiting for my monthly free book which I can borrow as a member of amazon prime, so I was thrilled to be able to read them sooner!  I’ve even been putting off starting other fiction books so I wouldn’t interrupt my involvement in the series.  Yes, I was that drawn into it.

001 – The First Book!

One book down, only about 998 to go!  Wrong – Why Experts Keep Failing Us And How To Know When Not To Trust Them was a really interesting a read, a good start to the project 🙂  What shocked me most in the book was the finding that 2 in 3 high-end research papers are later refuted by other papers!  As someone who will probably cite other scientists work a lot and perhaps pursue time-consuming projects based on this work, I found this kind of terrifying.

Of UFO’s and Trivia

My first thought looking at this section was to wonder if I’d wandered into the fiction section by mistake!  Who knew that tales of chasing Sasquatch and interviews with politicians about government contact with aliens were categorized under 001 in the Dewey Decimal system?  This category also included some collections of interesting facts and other books pertaining to the categories official label, “Knowledge”.  Strangest of all was a book about “the allies of humanity”, which you can view here.  It looks incredibly bizarre, but I might have to add it to my reading list since I don’t want to judge it too harshly until I’ve given it a chance.

For now, I’ve decided on an interesting looking book entitled “Wrong” and subtitled “Why Experts* Keep Failing Us – And How to Know When Not to Trust Them”.  As a hopeful scientist-to-be, I think this could be  really worthwhile read.  I don’t know if I will agree with the criticisms in the book, but either way I’ll learn something! If not mistakes to be avoided than certainly something about public misconceptions about science.  Starting out, I anticipate a little of both.

For those of you wondering what happened to 000:  Having just finished my undergrad degree in computer science, I couldn’t bring myself to read more computer books for fun!  So at least for the moment, I’m planning on skipping zero, but perhaps I’ll come back to it later.