As someone who knows very little about linguistics, I feel that I was able to understand the book’s arguments but not critique them – it seemed pretty reasonable, but without a more thorough background in the subject I’m sort of hesitant to embrace it as truth. I did find it very amusing and interesting that the author, John McWhorter, went on a bit of a tangent to attack one of the more interesting bits of language-related theory that I had read about in college: the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. Back in college, I remember having some doubts about its veracity (namely, that it seemed unbelievable that a people could be limited in their ability to participate in the “modern” world just by virtue of quirks of their native tongue), but McWhorter brings up several other reasonable objections to the theory and its formulation.

All in all, I can recommend it as a thoughtful, dense, and short read. It’s unlikely to spark any epiphanies for the average person, but still an interesting book nonetheless.

It is a drive that I can somewhat relate to — I have been known to get wrapped up in my work and any number of subjects that I find interesting, although probably not nearly to the degree that Yeager does. In a sense, the nomadic life of a career military man can really reinforce those tendencies — moving constantly, and spending most of your time in remote locales with your co-workers and support staff (who also happen to be your buddies) means that you’re talking shop and thinking about "work" all the time. The book periodically drops into anecdotes written by others, including Yeager’s first wife, Glennis, and many of his friends — the ones written by Glennis Yeager vividly illustrate the hardscrabble life of an Air Force family in that era, and her words contrast quite a bit with the passages written by Chuck, a man who is simply thrilled to be moving along from challenge to challenge. "Slick" Goodlin wanted $150,000 to risk his neck breaking the sound barrier — Chuck Yeager only wanted (and got) his normal Air Force pay for doing the same thing, and for many years his family was living a very modest existence in spite of his fame.

The book, apart from the sections relating to the pioneering X-1 supersonic flights, is fairly light on the technical details of flight, but provides a lot of interesting detail about the post-war test flight programs. Particularly interesting is his general contempt for the early fliers of NACA (the predecessor to NASA) — almost without exception he calls them out as lightweights and deficient pilots, reluctant to seek advice from military fliers and especially Yeager, a lightly-educated hillbilly from West Virginia. The accounts of his near-misses are also pretty interesting.

Another aspect of his life (on which considerable space is spent in the book), one which doesn’t match up with my personality, is all of the general hell-raising and debauchery in which he engages. He is pretty much the living embodiment of what you might call a hell-raising rock-and-roll lifestyle (except back in the day) — boozing, chasing skirts, engaging in high-speed pranks and hijinks, and generally bending or breaking every rule that stood in his way. It comes as no surprise to me that, after his wife’s death, he eventually remarried, to a woman 36 years his junior. What is surprising, though, is that apparently he is engaged in a lawsuit against his own children related to the marriage and handling of his financial affairs. Crazy stuff.

Overall, it’s a pretty decent book, and if you’re interested in the subject matter, it’s worth checking out.

• The United States of Arugula is a look behind the evolution of “American cuisine,” the popularization and adoption of local and organic foodstuffs, and how the perception of cooking in this country changed from necessity to esteemed hobby. For someone like myself who was born in the 1970s, the book serves to fill in the food history of the U.S. before my birth, as well as the culinary scene on the West Coast (a place which, like your average New Yorker, I haughtily ignored during my upbringing). It also explains the appearance of the “Blade Cuisinart” in the Wizardry games, as the Cuisinart was a marketing sensation around that time. The semi-lurid personal details of the lives of the culinary pioneers profiled may raise an eyebrow, but such discussion is actually germane to the narrative for several reasons. For anyone interested in the topic, it’s worth a read.
  
• Comic Wars: How Two Tycoons Battled Over the Marvel Comics Empire–And Both Lost has an impressively long title (necessary to disambiguate it during Internet searches, I discovered). It’s a recap of the Marvel Comics bankruptcy, one of the more acrimonious in business history. The struggle between owner Ron Perelman and corporate raider Carl Icahn resulted in an improbable turnabout — the merger of the struggling Marvel with Toy Biz, a small toymaker with whom Marvel had an unusual licensing deal. The book is fairly dry, focusing almost entirely on the business aspects of the bankruptcy (and the quirks and faults of the people involved), and ignoring the creative aspect of the business. Marvel’s suffering was due, in part, to overpaying for companies like Fleer, Skybox, and Panini, whose early-90′s success would never again be duplicated.

  What’s interesting about the book in hindsight is that it post-dates the release of the first X-Men movie (a movie for which, due to a bad deal, Marvel earned very little money), but pre-dates the release of Spider-Man, which cemented Marvel’s status as an intellectual property goldmine, and sent its stock soaring. The book ends with guarded optimism about the future prospects of Marvel.

  The book is mostly a curiosity now — I would only recommend it to those interested in the business aspects of Marvel.
  

• I finally picked up Game of Shadows (the book about the BALCO steroids scandal) in the bargain bin, one day after the Mitchell report was released, and gave it a read. It confirmed what I had heard and read earlier — that Barry Bonds is an execrable human being and teammate. I was also enlightened with regards to the shadowy world of track and field, which was also a big part of the BALCO scandal (and the source of the break in the investigation). The course of events described in the book lends credence to those who say that the cheaters will always be one step ahead of testing — the lynchpin of the investigation is (as frequently happens) a tip-off, followed up with diligent investigation and other human intelligence. This is not a conclusion that should bring a smile to the face of any professional sports fan — nevertheless, as it appears that actual progress may be in the pipe with regards to performance enhancers in baseball, I remain optimistic that the game’s integrity can be restored.

The book, which is really a compilation of journal entries kept over four years by Shirley, doesn’t dwell too long on any other individuals. There are some interesting (to me, at least) cameos, among them fan-mail-trashing Shareef Abdur-Rahim, talk of the lack of skill of ex-Hornet (and current member of the Utah Flash) James Lang, and one-time Dallas Maverick Chris Anstey (at the time, playing for UNICS Kazan — a team that was also the one-time home of another late-90′s Mavs flameout, Martin Müürsepp). Undoubtedly, though, the book is really more about Paul Shirley and his travels than anything else. That’s fine, though — his writing and wit are both worthy of praise. Strangely, I found the section of the book dealing with his time as a benchwarmer for the Phoenix Suns to be probably the least interesting (with the notable exception of an anecdote about Bo Outlaw and the “kiss cam” shtick used at sporting events).

It’s a quick read — I burned through it in a few hours after borrowing it from the library — but definitely worth a read.

I found the parts of the book dealing with Bourbaki and the persons behind the pseudonym to be mostly acceptable. The author, Amir Aczel, delivers the story in a somewhat stilted, somewhat meandering fashion, but on the whole the narrative is readable, interesting, and enjoyable. However, I find the thesis of Bourbaki’s influence on the structuralist movement to be poorly supported (with the sources admitting only an ephemeral connection between the parties involved). If there is a connection, I personally believe it to be more indirect than what is implied.

This may be somewhat mean-spirited, but I must say that I feel the author’s sentiment of amazement regarding the birth of structuralism in anthropology to be akin to awe at the sight of watching a caveman bang rocks together. The way the story is told, an encounter with André Weil and a brief introduction to set theory saves the dissertation of Claude Lévi-Strauss (which would be published later as The Elementary Structures of Kinship), who then pioneers a new movement in anthropology. The apparently insurmountable problem that Lévi-Strauss faced, formalizing notions of marriage restrictions in aboriginal society, can be reduced to a set membership problem that I think any intelligent sixth grader could solve. Lévi-Strauss turned this into his meal ticket, trying to find any way he could to deduce “structure” from anthropological data, constructing theories that had no visible means of support. While doing a bit more reading on the topic, I was amused to find this summary of structural anthropology provided by Wikipedia: “…a great weakness of structuralism is that its main propositions were not formulated in a way so that they could be subject to verification or falsification. Lévi-Strauss did not develop a framework that could prove the existence of his concept of the fundamental structures of human thought but simply assumed them to be there, an unfortunate mistake considering that this concept underpinned all of his work.”

The book contains additional howlers on the subject of economics, psychology, and literature. The work of Jacques Lacan on the “mirror experiment” is “analyzed…using the assumption of hidden structure. This led him to results that confirmed the structuralist approach.” (It should surprise no one that assuming a hidden bogeyman exists would lead you to interpret data in such a fashion as to confirm the existence of the bogeyman.) Aczel also somehow seeks to appropriate the supply and demand curve (an idea which was formulated much earlier, and which has remained largely unchanged since the end of the 19th century) as validation for the ideas of structuralism in economics. Having attempted this bizarre feat, the lack of an attempt to concoct some connection between fractals and micro/macroeconomic behavior seems like uncharacteristic restraint. The coup-de-grace is the description of the Oulipo group, a group of “literary” madmen whose work can essentially be described as a combination of Mad Libs and Eliza, wholly worthless.

Overall, I would say that the book was a disappointment. While the topics of Nicolas Bourbaki and the history of French mathematics in the 20th century were interesting, the book’s detours into other realms of study resulted in a pretty spectacular decline in quality. These sections provoked a palpable sense of outrage — while I felt compelled to finish the book, I also felt compelled to point out these problems. The book’s lack of actual mathematical content was just the cherry on top…

• Perelman refused to accept a Fields Medal for his work, becoming the first person to ever refuse the honor. In an article in the New Yorker, he suggests that his refusal was motivated by a perceived lack of ethical standards in the mathematics community.
• Perelman also refused to submit his work in accordance with the Millennium Prize judging criteria. As of now, the prize remains unclaimed.
• A pair of Chinese mathematicians released a controversial paper around the time that other mathematicians published papers on Perelman’s work (which were intended to clarify his work and present a full proof of the Poincaré conjecture). The Cao-Zhu paper initially contained language claiming that it was, essentially, the first proof of the Poincaré conjecture. This is a position that has not been accepted by the mathematics community at large. Additionally, a section of the Cao-Zhu paper was determined to be plagiarized from the work of the other aforementioned mathematicians.

Even though I haven’t ever really been seriously interested in topology (nor displayed much aptitude for the frequently mind-bending concepts involved), I thoroughly enjoyed the book. In reading it, I began to feel that perhaps math educators (at all levels) were wrong in focusing their attempts to interest students in math solely on applied examples. I honestly can’t remember any math teacher or professor with whom I’ve interacted making much of an effort to interest students in pure math. Granted, careers in pure math are few and far between, but it seems wrong to practically steer students away from the field.

Through the book I also learned of the existence of arxiv.org, an e-print archive maintained by Cornell. I guess my prior searches for academic papers always wound up leading me to individual school sites, and not this archive. (They also appear to have a somewhat hostile attitude towards indexers!) I may have to spend some quality time plowing through the computer science sections to find articles to read — I’m sure I could find lots of things to interest me in there.

Apart from that, having been bitten by the math history bug, I now have The Artist and the Mathematician sitting on my book queue. I had read the short book Chance, by the same author, recently as well, and thought enough of it that I figured I’d give this other book a shot too.

Rather than worry about possibly subsidizing poor business writing, I decided to just borrow some books that looked decent at the library. It’s amazing how liberating it can be to make choices like this when money is not a factor, and when my time is in relatively abundant supply.

The first book I read in this recent binge was Bruce Judson‘s Go It Alone!. The basic premise of the book is that the advances in communication and business in the Internet age have made it possible for individuals to carve out their own niches and construct successful businesses. This can be done because there is a lot of business functionality out there for sale on the Internet, which can be leveraged by a motivated individual to construct a profitable business. A good example of the types of software and services Judson talks about is WordPress, the free software behind this blog. WordPress is relatively easy to use, even for someone like me who’s been out of the loop with regards to Web software and technology for 7 years now. And, at the same time, it’s robust and scalable enough for companies like Ford to use it. For a prospective user, the only expenses would involve Web hosting and time spent learning to use the system.

The prevalence of open source software and services has really changed the landscape of the software industry — it’s now possible to construct software systems that can compete with almost anyone out there, without needing to have massive capital and hardware expenditures. Look at Google, perhaps the most famous example of this — their entire search business is based around commodity hardware, and clever ways of using it.

Unfortunately, Judson sometimes strays a little too close to the “trendy couple sipping Chardonnay in their living room” model lampooned by Joel Spolsky, where entrepreneurs simply string together off-the-shelf software components and sit on their sofa while the cash pours in. While he does stress that any new business venture has to have added value somewhere in its chain, the idea that custom software can fill this role receives short shrift in the book. As a matter of fact, there’s a passage in the book describing his experience with custom software as being very negative — his philosophy is, “wait 6-18 months, and you’ll be able to buy that functionality for pennies.” Personally, I think this does his readership a disservice by suggesting that it’s never a viable option. I’m sure that some of this is because of Judson’s background, but completely dismissing the idea of building a startup around custom software is short-sighted in my opinion.

As it turns out, you can actually read this book for free on his website, so give it a whirl if you’re curious. It’s a pretty quick read.

The other two books that I picked up have been less useful. Starting on a Shoestring is really focused on more capital-intensive businesses, about which I’m not really interested. It does present some interesting anecdotes about thrift, legal protection, and starting businesses almost entirely with other people’s money. Likewise, The Entrepreneur’s Information Sourcebook also focuses on more traditional business types. It’s more of a collection of pointers to more detailed information about topics related to starting a business, with very little authored content. I found the sections relating to legal aspects of a business and accounting to be useful, but most of the rest of it was either inapplicable to the kinds of things I would be interested in, or a rehash of things that I had learned from the other books.

I’m sure I’ll be reading some more on these topics in the future — after all, I have a long string of plane flights coming up soon, and a need to kill a lot of time sitting in airports. I’ll be making another visit to the library to get some fresh reading material…

The final amounts of dollars won and lost aren’t really important. What is important is that a relatively untrained amateur was able to find ways to reduce the advantage of professionals who had been playing for years, to the point that the end result was something of a toss-up. Beal took a sabermetric approach of deep analysis to the game, co-writing a computer program (in BASIC, which made me chuckle) to perform statistical analysis of hold ‘em, and, although it is not explicitly stated in the book, appears to have found that professionals do not play optimally. This is not a surprise — each decision point in poker has a fair number of branches, and players have imperfect and incomplete information at their disposal. However, it is intimated that some of the professionals make decisions that can be quantitatively described as “incorrect” — unfortunately, the details are glossed over in the book.

Another way that Beal’s game evolved was through the use of devices like a timing buzzer in his shoe (to randomize his reaction time), along with a modified wristwatch to serve as a random number generator. The former I found particularly interesting — I had heard that ‘tells’ were not really as significant as they were made out to be, and that proper strategy was of paramount importance. Yet, it appears that this (along with other measures) had some effect on the pros who played him.

The story of the richest poker game of all time seems to validate some of the ideas presented in another book I read recently, The New Brain. The author, a neurologist at GWU, makes the claim that most people, with motivation and dedicated, effective practice, can reach a level of mastery that is about 95% of that possessed by the geniuses and masters in a particular field. In other words, Woody Allen was right — 90% of life is just showing up. Anecdotally, this appears to have some weight behind it. This would seem to imply that underachievement is primarily a motivational problem, not an aptitude problem, and honestly, I would not really disagree with that.