The (Honest) Truth about Dishonesty.

By Dan Ariely

We all are dishonest, just a little. But not so much so that we think we are bad people.

Honest goes way up when in situations where people think you can double check on them. So, if you want more honesty around you, then politely do so. Trust but verify.

A Random Walk down Wall Street

By Burton G. Malkiel.

Buy and hold low expense index funds. Everything else in this book tells you why. Malkiel asserts (and I agree with him) that no investment expert can consistently beat the market in he long run. Especially when you consider expenses and tax.

Many investment strategies eat themselves up. Take the dogs of the Dow for example, the idea that you invest in the highest yield Dow stocks and regularly adjust your portfolio accordingly. If you think about it, if enough people doe this this, then low yield stocks never drop price enough (which boots yield) to make the strategy work.

Diversifying according to the market size (which an index fund accomplishes) is self reinforcing. It doesn't fail because many people do so.

But that's not the only reason to invest in low expense index funds. Read the book if you want all the details.

The Player of Games

By Ian M. Banks.

I enjoy the world Banks has created-- the world of the Culture-- an intergalactic society advanced and powerful. All basic human needs can easily be met. All the work, including most of the thinking is done by machines and computers.

I don't so much like his lead characters. This book is far better than the last though.

I will definitely read the next.

The Gluten Lie

And other myths about what you eat. By Alan Levinovitz, PHD

How do you tell good science from bad? I've thought over that question many times. It's tough to answer. Bad science often offers clarity, hope and a compelling story… if you eat the good nutrients and stay away from the bad, then your diseases will go away. Here are the studies to back it up.

Good science is more nuanced… Yes some nutrients are helpful, and too much of others can be harmful, but there is no promise that eating more of one and less of the other will ride you of your disease. Here are a bunch of contradictory studies. The science isn't settled yet.

Levinovitz spends the bulk of the book telling the history of four modern diet fads-- gluten free diets, sugar as a toxin, low salt diets and super foods. Each fad follows a familiar trajectory. In our natural past we didn't eat that thing. We were healthy and happy then. Then we became modern and started eating that thing. We got sick and obese. I returned to the natural diet of our past and stopped eating that thing. Now I am healthy and happy. That thing is evil.

That narrative goes way back. The sugar-is-a-toxin fad comes and goes a few times a century.

For most people, gluten, sugar, fat, salt are not bad. Eat them in reasonable quantities and you'll be OK.

When a disease has the same symptoms as panic or anxiety disorder, then you should suspend judgment on the causes of that disease.

Any dietary discipline is better than no dietary discipline. When you are careful with what you eat (perhaps in a misguided attempt to avoid a particular bad nutrient) then of course you will loose weight.

The book includes a bonus fake fad diet-- the unpacked diet, which the author goes over pointing out all the fallacies in. It's a fun read, but kind of unnecessary. I suspect it's only there because the auther needed to pad out the length of the book.

For most people, Polon's food rules are still our best guide… "Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants."

the life-changing magic of tidying up.

The Japanese art of decluttering and organizing.

I didn't know that decluttering is not a word. Yet as I write this, I see a little red squiggly under it. The suggested alternatives are cluttering and uncluttering.

As a society are we currently so obsessed with tidying up that we now need a new word  to describe it?

Anyways-- "the life-changing magic of tidying up" is a nice little book…

1. Discard things first. Only keep things that spark joy in you.
2. Tidy up by category, not by location.
3. Tidy up as a special event, not every day.
4. Storage space should be assigned to make things easy to put away, no to get things out.
5. Store things vertically, not in piles.
6. Put photos and mementos in albums and display cases. Throw them out if you cannot do so.

The book who is also a little bombastic. As much as I like a clean room, anyone who suggests that tidying up is life changing magic, may need to get out of the house a little more often.

Discarding is always hard.  I have a large collection of things packed away, for years, that I keep for no good reason. Every now and then, as luck would have it, a situation will pop up where I need one of those thingamabobs. I'm sure that if I did a cost benefit analysis of all the thingamabobs in storage, that throwing them away would be the right thing to do. But I will need one of them just often enough to make the decision tough.

The Measure of Reality. Quantification and Western Society, 1250-1600

By Alfred W. Crosby

This is a history of how western society incorporated quantification into it's daily life. Numbers went from being magical things in and of themselves to being quantities that measured something else.

Out go Roman Numerals. In come Indo-Arabic digits.

The clock, the ruler and algebra dramatically changed our lives. And not without controversy. Some questioned the necessity of clocks and calendars-- "My serfs know when it's morning, noon & night, spring & fall."

Visualization, Music, Painting, Book Keeping all underwent dramatic changes once they were learnt in terms of quantification.

Brainwashed. The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience.

Neuroscience just isn't ready to be a trusted day to day technology for lie deduction, product marketing and the like.

Remember the amygdala and the amygdala hijack that supposedly occurs when rage takes over your brain? Well, the amygdala is responsible for much more than processing anger. It also processes novel experiences. So what emotion does a lite up amygdala indicate?

If I say "Pin, syringe, thread, haystack, prick. ' and then ask you if you head the world 'needle' Your brain scan will indicate you are telling the truth if you said 'yes'