Thursday, March 31, 2011

Pet Peave on Books

I read a lot of non-fiction books - typically several at the same time. Some of these books never get finished and some never understood. But I like having a constant stream of new ideas and perspectives.

One thing I have noticed - and it bothers me - is that most mass-market non-fiction books have only one core idea and the entire rest of the book is fluff around that idea. The better version of these books have their core idea placed near the front, and then repeat it in different ways for the rest of the book. With these books, as long as the idea is neat, you get the payoff early and you can either appreciate the repetition for the rest of the book, or you can stop reading and still feel like the book was worthwhile.

Unfortunately, I seem to have stumbled across several "idea" based books that start the book with fluff and bury the idea somewhere nearer the middle or the end. With these books, I'm left to wonder when and if the idea will ever show up and is there any reason to keep reading. These books often end up sitting buried under something in my car or beside my bed with a dog-eared page about a third of the way through.

One such book is Why Beauty is Truth - A History of Symmetry by Ian Stewart. I am now about 60 pages into this and I'm really starting to wonder when this guy will say something interesting. Clearly the book is about symmetry and beauty and math - it says that on the cover. But all I have read so far are seemingly pointless stories about ancient mathematicians. Hopefully these stories will tie into something eventually, but I may not make it that far.

Another book is The Checklist Manifesto - How to Get Things Done Right by Atul Gawande. I bought this book partly due to the great recommendations on the book cover - probably not a good idea.  I have read the first 35 pages and so far the book is a waste of time. All the book has said in 35 pages is the super-obvious "the world is a complex place".

So when do I give up on these books? For novels I have a rule of thumb that says:  if I get half way through and I don't care about the characters or what happens next, I say it is OK to stop reading. What about these nonfiction books? Does the same half-way rule apply?

This topic was probably not worth a blog - but these books are ticking me off.

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Wrong Steps

When I was an early teenager, I remember I had a brief flirtation with the idea of becoming a geologist. I quickly gave up on this idea when I decided that nothing could be more boring than thinking about a bunch of static rocks. Plus, I knew a geologist and he seemed pretty boring to me.
I am now starting to think that giving up on geology may have been a mistake.

I think my idea that rocks are static was wrong. Its all a matter of perspective. Sure rocks may look like they don't change or move, but that is because I am measuring them in terms of my own short human perspective. If the earth is more than 4 billion years old, then that is plenty of time for a rocks to do a lot of cool stuff. Plus - as recent events in Japan show, occasionally rocks move a lot, even in our time frame.
I sometimes think that if rocks were sentient beings, their sense of time would be so long that we would never recognize them as sentient, and conversely, the rocks would never recognize us as sentient. They would say, "How could anything with such a short lifespan develop consciousnesses?"

But the real reason I'm starting to think I wrote geology off too soon is that I now keep finding that a lot of geologists think interesting things that don't strictly deal with rocks. I'm sure I mentioned before about geologists modeling earthquakes with networks and power laws (Pareto distributions) [cool stuff!]. I have also mentioned the book Why Stock Markets Crash by Sornette - a professor of geophysics [financial cool stuff]

Today I went through a forgotten corner of my bookshelf and I stumbled upon a book I bought many years ago. It is called Chaos Theory Tamed by Garrett Williams. The great thing about this book is that while it goes into a lot of the math of chaos theory, it tries to teach the theory along the way, not just present it. The writer really seems interested in sharing the what he thinks is a cool subject with his readers. And low and behold, they guy was a retired geologist/hydrologist.

When I got into finance, I figured I had stumbled into an intellectual nirvana. I now see financial theory as hidebound and static, especially compared to what I am reading by geologists. I wonder if it is because financial theory is really geared around making money today - or tomorrow - and the fact that given its short time perspective it is bombarded by too much information. Geologist on the other hand take a long view.