The Art of Travel

by Alain de Botton.

I enjoy de Botton's writing; the way he marries the philosphical with the practicle, his clever and insightful phrasing.

The Art of Travel is no different. de Botton writes about the travels of many poets and artists of history-- Van Gogh, Wordsworth and many others. And then he relives some of these journies for greater insite. For example, he travels to the south of France in Van Gogh's footsteps. This trip leads him to a greater understanding of Van Gogh's art-- his novel use of colour, his distinct style.

At some point I will re-read this book.

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

By Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

I find it difficult to distinguish between "The Black Swan" and Taleb's previous book "Fooled By Randomness." You could easily move chapters between the two and not notice the edits.

This doesn't change the fact that Taleb deals with deeply important themes-- randomness and our perpetual inability to distinguish between luck and skill.

These are difficult subjects. He does have great points when argues that success and successful people have luck to thank as much as their own skill. On the other hand, you try telling that to a millionaire.

The book also covers predictions-- spotting the kind you can trust, spotting pure fiction, and how to plan for it all.

Contingency and opportunity planning play a large part in Taleb's world.

Stylistically, the book is a fun read. Taleb is fond of ornate examples and interesting stories that illustrate his points. This can work against him a little though in that it's hard to take the book seriously.

Details I want to remember....

There are different kinds of randomness. Taleb refers to this as comming from Mediocristan or Extremistan.

Randomness from Mediocristan is simple and predictable and easy to model. For example, if you weigh a thousand people, you will come up with an average and distribution for that sample. If you then add the worlds heaviest or worlds lightest person to that sample, your average wouldn't change much. Our weights are random but from Mediocristan.

Contrast this with randomness from Extremistan. If you calculated the average wealth of one thousand people, you would also come up with an average and a distribution. But, if you added the worlds richest man to this sample, his wealth would totally blow your average and distribution out of the water.

This difference brings us to the center of Taleb's thesis; due to various biases especially survivor bias, and because we often assume that randomness is from Mediocristan and when it really from Extremistan, we make choices that are really gambles because we are not aware of the risks.

Google Voice and wireless speculation...

Prediction-- Within five years, you will be able to make free wireless calls in major cities. No cell plan. No contracts. This service will be very practical; not a hacker gimic.


Why do I predict this-- two things. Google Voice and the plethora of free wireless internet hotspots.


Google voice is a VOIP service from Google. I tried it out because it lets me call home, to Canada, for free.

Even better, through Google voice I can get a phone number for free.


The service works very well. I've called many times now. The call quality is excellent. Setup was simple, I just had to plug a headset into my laptop and install the Google Voice plug-in for my browser.


On to free wireless hot spots. I use the internet regularly on my cell, yet I don't have a data plan. Open 802.11. A/B/G/N endpoints are very common. Of course work and home are covered. Bout, out in the street, I seldom have to walk more than one hundred feet to find one. Granted, these tend to be unintentionally open Linksys routers with the default password. Still, many places intentionally offer free wireless access--- coffee shops, restaurants, hotels, library's, malls. I'm not talking about crappy low speed access. I'm talking high quality, high speed access.


If you combine these two ideas-- free VOIP and free internet access, you get free wireless phone service. A combination that works today. Give it a few years to smooth out the internet coverage and this will become common.

A Whole New Mind

By Daniel Pink.

Pink's argument... if a job can be done more cheaply by some one in the 3rd world or by a computer. or if the job is irrelivant in an age of plently, then job will be a comodity. The jobs of the future require more creative, right brained thinking.

Pink is careful to not say that right brained thinkers will rule. Rather he argues that we need both sides of the brain. None-the-less he spends the bulk of his time discussing right brained thinking.

For Pink, the six right brain skills are...
1. Design
2. Story
3. Symphony (Seeing the whole picture)
4. empathy
5. Play
6. meaning

How the Mighty Fall

By Jim Collins. Collins digs into the collapse of several large companies to uncover the themes driving the collapse.

Collins contends that collapse goes through five stages...

Stage 1. Hubris born of success. The companies views success as an entitlment. When “we are successful because we do these specific things” replaces penetrating understanding and insight from “we are successful because we understand why we do these specific things,” decline will likely follow.

Stage 2. Undiciplined persuit of more.

The greatest warning sign for declining companies is a declining proportion of key seats filled with the right people. Collins covered this in "Good to Great" as well. He strongly belives that great people drive success more than great vision or process.

Stage 3. Denial of risk and peril. when those in power blame others or external factors for what has gone wrong, rather than confronting the frightening reality that the company may be in serious trouble. Another manifestation of denial that occurs in stage 3 is obsessive reorganisation. Reorganising and restructuring can create a false sense that you are actually doing something productive. When you begin to respond to data and warning signs with reorganisation as a primary strategy, you may well be in denial

Stage 4. Grasping for salvation. begins when an organisation reacts to a downturn by lurching for a silver bullet. The key point is that they go for a quick, big solution to jump-start a recovery rather than embarking on the slower more arduous process of rebuilding long-term momentum. The signature of mediocrity in dying companies is not an unwillingness to change, but chronic inconsistency.

That's in important point-- silver bullets don't work, or rather they don't appear reliably enough to use as a strategy.

Stage 5. Capitulation to irrelevance or death.