Archive for the ‘Books’ Category
Best Books Read in 2015
Thinking about closing this blog — I’m down to one post a year! Here’s a list of best books read in 2015. Again, no particular order
Mastering Bitcoin: Unlocking Digital Cryptocurrencies
Andreas M. Antonopoulos
Seize the Daylight: The Curious and Contentious Story of Daylight Saving Time
David Prerau
My Best Mathematical and Logic Puzzles
Martin Gardner
Erwin Schrodinger
A Mind For Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science (Even If You Flunked Algebra)
Barbara Oakley
For Good and Evil: The Impact of Taxes on the Course of Civilization
Charles Adams
Rodney Stark
Best Books Read in 2014
Paul Samuelson the Investor
From Economic Principals:
It turns out that the great MIT economist was influential in the creation of one of the earliest and most influential hedge funds. Launched in 1970, Commodities Corp. blazed a trail of extremely high returns throughout the 1970s and early ’80s, before disappearing in various pieces into Bermuda mailboxes and Goldman Sachs. Many of its star traders – Bruce Kovner of Caxton and Paul Tudor Jones, chief among them—formed successful hedge funds of their own. Samuelson thus had a ringside seat at the birth of an influential industry that is still only poorly understood.
About the same time, he invested a substantial amount in shares of Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. It was in 1970, too, that he won the Nobel prize in economics, the second to be awarded. Long famous for the fortune that his pioneering textbook earned him after 1948, it turns out that Samuelson may have made more money as an investor than as an author. He was both smarter and richer than is generally understood: as an investor, a bigger winner, perhaps, than the more volatile John Maynard Keynes.
Via Tyler Cowen at MR. More evidence for the Paul-Samuelson-as-Isaac-Newton theory?
Fixed Points in the Publishing Industry
From an interview of Lonely Planet’s Gus Balbontin on O’Reilly Radar:
The essence of what the print people have known for 500 years is still the same in the digital world: you still have to publish great content. Yes, the tone may change a little. Yes, the experience might be slightly different. But at the end of the day, the people creating the content are humans. The people consuming it are also humans. The same humans that consume print consume digital. It’s not different.
…
In terms of the next 10 or 20 years, the essence of what publishers are doing won’t change at all. This is what should make publishers feel comfortable about the future. The reason why you’re there and the problems that you can solve for customers won’t change. That’s what you need to keep focusing on.
The Ontology of Property Rights (Again)
On a walk with my daughter this morning, I was thinking again about last week’s comment on how property rights evolve. At one time in my life, I was very anxious to answer Holmes’s theory of property rights with natural law. (I have not given that up entirely; natural law might be rehabilitated as a kind of evolutionary theory of law, which emphasizes the stability of certain fixed points within a constellation of legal concepts.) But my daughter, who is not quite two, gave me a vivid illustration of the artificial, socially constructed ontology of property.
For most of the past two years, I have carried her on our walks in the morning. For the last week or two, I’ve been letting her walk a shorter route with me beside her. Part of what I do each morning, as we walk through our neighborhood, is keep her on the sidewalk. She wants to run and play in every yard and driveway we pass. I keep her on the sidewalk through a combination of verbal and physical restraint and misdirection. She doesn’t understand the difference between private and public spaces yet, although she already understands “mine” and “not mine.”
If the concept must be taught to a child even at this late stage in human evolution, I can imagine that it did not come easy to us as a species. Yet at least some of us go from no understanding to credit derivatives in a few short decades. These are things that inspire awe in me.
Part of the reason that I’ve been on this topic lately is my reading of Searle’s latest, Making the Social World. I like Searle, and his is the only style of philosophy I can stomach. And I think I agree with every premise of his in this book. But I didn’t end up enjoying the text all that much. The stuff that was presented as if novel looks kind of familiar, even humdrum to this practicing lawyer. Some other stuff I’m not sure was correct. It’s been a while since I read any philosophy carefully, and it looks like it might be another while again.
Neuroscience Book List from David Brooks
Interesting list. The description of Ogle’s work caught my eye:
Ogle is a populariser of the work of a philosopher named Andy Clark, who emphasises that ideas don’t just exist in one head, but they exist outside the mind, in a whole bunch of minds at once. And one of the traits of unconscious thinking is that we’re intensely social, we catch ideas and thoughts in ways we’re not consciously aware of from each other. According to Ogle, we’re embedded in what he calls ‘idea-spaces’, what most of us would call culture. So, for example, the simple illustration is Picasso, who existed in one culture, the culture of western art. He came across a separate culture, of African masks, and he really merged these two cultures to create Cubism. The creativity came from these two idea-spaces merging together. Ogle’s book is really about how that happens, ranging from Picasso to the invention of the personal computer.
I only wish it were available to my Kindle.
Books which have influenced me most
With encouragement from Tyler Cowen, here’s my list. “Influential” to me means it has changed the way I understand the world. In some cases, that happened fast. In others, slowly as I reread. In some cases, both.
To elaborate on something Tyler eluded to — in preparing this list my awareness of how much it was people rather than books that influenced me was heightened.
I’m also grouping a few in one because their length was physically limited by technology in a way that makes the group comparable in length to only a portion of others on the list.
- Galatians (what does it mean to be free?), 1 John (what is love?), Job (why evil? why not nihilism?), 1 Samuel (for the stories about David).
- Feynman Lectures, especially the lecture from volume II on principal of least action.
- Conceptual Physics by Hewitt, which I studied over the summer in seventh grade and credit as much as any book for my interest in physics.
- Problematics of Jurisprudence by Posner, which I read the summer before law school. Posner sets the bar for intellectual courage.
- The Common Law by Holmes, which led me to understand law as a complex adaptive system long before I had heard the terms.
- The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham, Zwieg edition, which gave me the theory I needed to understand corporate finance after I had learned how to prepare and read financial statements.
- Buffett’s letters to his shareholders as collected by Cunningham, which together with Charlie Munger’s almanack (honorable mention) took my understanding of Graham’s theory to a point where I could connect it up with mathematical principles I learned studying physics.
- Waddell & Bodek on the Rebirth of American Industry, which awakened me to the way in which accounting rules are responsible for commercial culture.
- The Happiness Hypothesis by Haidt, which gave me a reason to start reading psychology and sociology literature for the first time.
- Creativity by Csikszentmihalyi, which gave me the last few puzzle pieces I needed to connect up the many domains of knowledge I have studied formally and informally (physics, law, economics, psychology, sociology) into an integrated whole.
Easley and Kleinberg on Synchronization
From Chapter 21 of their treatise on Networks, Crowds, and Markets:
When looking at public-health data, it is natural to look at periodic oscillations in the number of cases of a disease and to try positing external causes for the effect. For example, cycles in the prevalence of syphilis across the U.S. over the past 50 years have traditionally been attributed to large-scale societal changes, including changes in sexual mores and other forces [194]. While such factors clearly play a role, recent research has shown that oscillations and synchronization over time can in fact result largely from the contagion dynamics of the disease itself, and that similar patterns can be created in direct simulations of the disease using the types of models we have been considering here [194, 264].
We now describe how such effects can be produced using simple epidemic models. The
crucial ingredients appear to be a combination of temporary immunity and long-range links
in the contact network. Roughly, long-range links produce coordination in the timing of
flare-ups across dispersed parts of the network; when these subside, the temporary immunity
produces a network-wide deficit in the number and connectivity of susceptible individuals,
yielding a large “trough” in the size of the outbreak that directly follows the “peak” from the earlier flare-ups. We now describe how to make this intuitive picture concrete using simple models.
Want an explanation for how markets all over the world seem to have become more correlated?
As financial institutions have become more densely coupled through new financial instruments and leverage, what used to be only local bubbles and crashes are now global epidemics.
Broken Symmetry 