What I Just Read

Capably told story about a group of physicists who figured out how to beat the house at roulette. If you're a serious geek about risk management, bet sizing or other aspects of gambling theory I'd recommend this book, but for most readers Ben Mezrich's  Bringing Down the House  tells a similar story better. That said, it was interesting to see how gambling intersected with a group of physicists during the '70s and '80s, during the days of the first widely commercialized semiconductors and computer gear that people could use to "homebrew" their own computer setups. This book was in some ways a fun retrospective on Boomer-era computer geekery, kind of like Steven Levy's (really good) book  Hackers . These physicists (many of them peaceniks who refused to work for captured universities, or worse, defense contractors) formed a utopian partnership just to figure out how to beat the game of roulette and stick it to greedy casinos. It took them years and it ...

Short helpful book on applying Ayurvedic concepts to sleep, along with many helpful reminders and suggestions for improving your sleep hygiene. Also gives readers a deeper understanding of various cyclical and biological functions of our body, as well as a deeper understanding of how the various artificialities of modernity mess with our biology. I also found this book to be a good mini-intro to Ayurvedic medicine, which on some level shares characteristics with functional medicine ( see my review of Mark Hyman's  The Ultramind Solution  for more on functional medicine).  While I can't change the fact that I grew up in the "water" of Western medicine, learning about domains like Ayurveda allow us to step outside the (often oxymoronic) "Western health" paradigm--so we can better see the flaws as well as the strengths of allopathic medicine. And over the past several years, as we've seen accelerating capture and corruption of many agents of Western medicin...

There are some genuine insights here, but this book is generally disappointing and repetitive. After reading  The Spirit of Enterprise , Gilder's excellent history of the Simplot family--which improbably built a starter fortune growing potatoes in Idaho and then, more improbably, built a titanic fortune financing Micron Technology and the development of DRAM--this book was a terrible comedown.  You'll see Karl Popper's ideas on falsifiability fully explained to the reader twice (and just nineteen pages apart!), you'll see Kurt Godel and his incompleteness theorem appearing in inexplicably repetitive instances, as well as other examples of poor organization and editing. The reader gets the impression that this was just a loose collection of essays intended for serial publication in some online magazine. Sadly, they were never cleaned up once combined into a book. Honestly, this book should have been shortened into a  New Yorker  article, one of those too-long  Ne...

Mournful, mid-1960s-era mystery with an even more mournful ending. This is the first "Travis McGee" novel (of twenty-one!), and it's diverting enough to make me read maybe a few more. I think of Travis McGee as a sort of proto-Jack Reacher (see Lee Child's novels and short stories), although McGee is less perfect, less imposing and more believable.  The author also has a knack for dropping a cute noirish quote here and there ("Never sit in the first row at the ballet" and "Let's just start by assuming it's hopeless and go on from there"), and he occasionally sings out in passages showing how life really grinds people down, especially the young and unlucky: This novel is competently done with good pacing, accelerating right to a surprise ending. To Read: Mark Harris: The Southpaw; Bang the Drum Slowly; A Ticket for a Seamstitch; It Looked Like For Ever   (four part "Henry Wiggin" novel series)

This book is geared for the intermediate-level investor, and might be useful to anyone not conversant in (but curious about) the various intellectual fads in academic finance over the past four or five decades. Likewise it will be revelatory for anyone who hasn't really thought to apply ideas from biology or evolution to investing.  An advanced investor, however, will find this book breaks little new ground and thus is not a good use of time. Let's be a bit blunt.  Adaptive Markets was harder to get through than it should have been. It should have been a much more readable and competent review of academic financial thought--and it should have been shortened by at least a third. Readers will likely find it irritating to have to wait until page 185 to actually learn the author's theory, after first having to sit through long lectures on orthodox academic finance (including EMH, CAPM, and other equally useless ideas), then a review of evolution, biology and evolutionary psych...