Tag Archives: books

Recommended book: The Ascent of Money

Posted on September 15, 2011 by | Leave a comment

This is a very interesting book by Niall Ferguson that has already been reviewed here and here. It also has a companion TV documentary.

Behind each great historical phenomenon there lies a financial secret, and this book sets out to illuminate the most important of these. For example, the Renaissance created such a boom in the market for art and architecture because Italian bankers like the Medici made fortunes by applying Oriental mathematics to money. The Dutch Republic prevailed over the Hapsburg Empire because having the world’s first modern stock market was financially preferable to having the world’s biggest silver mine. The problems of the French monarchy could not be resolved without a revolution because a convicted Scots murderer had wrecked the French financial system by unleashing the first stock market bubble and bust.

This should be required reading or viewing for everybody who handles money every day i.e. for all of us. For good or ill our livelihood depends on understanding the financial events around us but in order to graduate from high school you need to understand science, biology and language but not how to calculate compound interest. Money, as they say, is portable power. Get something to eat and watch the full TV documentary below (also divided by episodes in the PBS website).

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Recommended book: The Black Swan

Posted on March 28, 2011 by | Leave a comment

It took me a really long time to finally read this 2007 book (not related at all to the current Natalie Portman movie of the same name).

The whole point of this book is to make a long, winded argument about why the impact and occurrence of the highly improbably is consistently underestimated, with huge consequences for everybody. While it is a rambling, philosophical book whose point could have been put much more succinctly in half the amount of paper, it is also a very interesting (and some would say prophetical) way of looking at the world as one can see from the interview below.

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Recommended book: The Muslim discovery of Europe

Posted on November 23, 2010 by | Leave a comment

I’ve always been interested in finding out “the other side of the story”. That was one of my main incentives in learning foreign languages, and the reason why I usually scan international newspapers.  As a recent project put me in constant contact with Turkey, I was able to pick up this book at Istanbul airport and was able to read it through.  While this blog gives a longer review of the book than I’d be willing to write here, the most interesting bit of the whole book was that for the peoples comprising Medieval Islam, Europe was an uninteresting barbaric fringe following an antiquated superseded religion, and so approached their contact with Europeans from a stand of perceived moral superiority.  Not unlike the way Europeans viewed the peoples of the New World in the 1500′s.

The book then gives a summary of how those attitudes changed with the faster European development of the Renaissance to a situation where while European technical, scientific & military expertise was sought after, cultural contact was still avoided.  300 years later, the situation is starting to change as can be seen in the TED talk below:

Disclaimer: I know Turkey is in general much less traditionalist than other Muslim countries. It is generally agreed that the push West was started by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, which was not covered in this book.

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Recommended book: The pleasures and sorrows of work

Posted on August 26, 2010 by | Leave a comment

Just another day at work
I was going to write a review of this Alain de Botton book whose theme is why and when work is meaningful (answer: when it creates delight or reduces suffering in others), but obviously somebody else had made a better job of it.

Somehow I found this ode to how important and significant jobs which we wouldn’t otherwise notice such as power transmission engineering or fishing and food logistics strangely uplifting for a simple reason: I can fully identify with the drive to create delight in others through the results of my efforts.

We end up coming back to the same thing: maybe empathy is what makes us human?

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Recommended Book: The Facebook Effect

Posted on June 30, 2010 by | Leave a comment

A very readable, if slightly biased, book on the origins and philosophy behind Facebook.  If you want to know more about how startups grow and how Facebook works (or says it works), read this book.

More info: Facebook Effect fan page, Techcrunch

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Recommended Book: Wake

Posted on March 25, 2010 by | Leave a comment

Robert J. Sawyer, one of my favourite sci-fi authors (moderately famous now that his novel Flashforward has been adapted as a TV series of the same name) scored another coup with his latest novel.  I won’t spoil it for you, but it touches upon how it is to live with blindness, Chinese censorship of the WWW and emerging consciousness.
The good news is that it’s the first of a trilogy to be completed in the next couple of years, so I’ll be gladly waiting for more.

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Recommended Book: Grown Up Digital

Posted on March 25, 2010 by | Leave a comment

Chances are if you were born after1980 like countless others (including yours truly) you are marveled, intrigued and annoyed by the way older people see you, your habits and your value systems.  You understand (but don’t always sympathize with) the way your elders understand technology and the web… or don’t. You are used to have the TV on at the same time as your music player while you read a book, browse the web and have friends coming over.  For you video games are as much a social experience as a way to relax and pass away time, and there is no way you would look at them as “The Big Satan”.  If you’re already working, you might have a hard time adjusting to hierarchies, but are a diligent team worker and require honesty from the company that employs you.

If you want to get a broader perspective of why these characteristics set you apart from your elder peers, or if on the other hand you are looking inside these brats’ fenced garden see how it all came to this ;)   this is the book you want to read.

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Recommended book: The age of the unthinkable

Posted on August 22, 2009 by | Leave a comment

You know that the times are a-changin’ when terrorists armed with paper cutters are a serious menace to the world’s largest superpower, unpaid networks of developers can build an operating system that is now used in enterprise-grade IT solutions and when strategies designed to erradicate a problem such as terrorism or poverty add more fuel to the fire.  While this book is geared towards an American audience and focuses on the ramifications  of this phenomenon in foreign policy, I have been thinking about what kind of lessons this can provide business.

The author introduces in this book the concept of resilience, where instead of trying to have grand monolithic strategies to anticipate every single scenario we should instead focus on having different approaches towards a problem, “gardening” our way to ride the ever-coming waves of change and take advantage of them.  This idea resonates on many levels with many concepts I use as part of my daily life, which I will make a list of (and no, I’m not Chinese =P):

  • One of the main lessons in aikido, which is using the forces of others to your own advantage.  You don’t oppose a force with another force, you channel it so that it goes where you want to.
  • Systems intelligence, where an individual accepts that life is a set of interdepentent relationships where there are feedback mechanisms that can be tweaked to one’s own advantage with huge effects due to the non-linear character of the system.
  • Social media,  technological convergence, creativity and other related professional interests of mine.

The interesting conclusion to which the author arrives, which I also find very appealing, is the need for empowering diverse change agents who can drive different approaches to solving a problem to work as a sort of “immunity system” for an organisation, be it a country, a company or the world.

It’s not a complicated book (in reality, I found it a little bit too light as I would have wanted a few more examples from other fields and more detail on the conceptual framework) but definitely a recommended read.

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Favourite sci-fi books

Posted on August 18, 2009 by | 1 Comment

On seeing my sci-fi book collection (of which you can see but a tiny part to the right) a friend asked me what were my favourite books.  While it’s a little like asking a parent who is his/her favourite son, I do have some sci-fi books I’ve reread more than others.

  • The Gods Themselves, Isaac Asimov: Parallell universes, love and the laws of physics, what’s not to like?
  • The Mars Trilogy, Kim Stanley Robinson: The 200-year history of the colonization of Mars from arrival of the first settlers to terraformation.  Heavy on ecological, economic and sociological themes.
  • Flashforward, Robert J. Sawyer: Instead of destroying life, the universe and everything, the LHC shows the whole population of earth their selves 20 years in the future.  Now becoming a TV series.
  • The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (a trilogy in five parts), Douglas Adams: Spaceships, aliens and Englishmen were never so funny.
  • Spares, Michael Marshall Smith: A bleak, totally dystopian future where clones are raised to replace the body parts of the rich.
  • The Postman, David Brin: One of the biggest cinematic flops by Kevin Costner is based on a very solid post-apocalyptic novel, with survivalism as a cancer of society and the difference of science and magic being the main themes of the novel.
  • The Forever War, Joe Haldeman: War against aliens on relativistic spaceships means in Earth a 1000 years pass, while our main character ages less than a year.  A stinging commentary on the Vietnam War.
  • Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke: An absolute classic. You might have probably seen the first movie, but that’s not the end of it.
  • Foundation Series, Isaac Asimov: Another classic.  The Galactic Empire is falling, and a man has foreseen it aided by the scientific approach he has created.  He cannot stop it, but he can try to alleviate it.  Eventually these books were merged with others written by Asimov, charting a fictitious human history spanning 25,000 years.
  • Dune Series, Frank Herbert: Last classic series I’ll write about here.  15,000 years of human history.  Rebellions against robot overlords, political intrigue and a big exploration of the nature of religion.
  • The Man in the High Castle, Phillip K. Dick:  The Nazis and the Japanese Empire won World War II.  The US doesn’t exist anymore, but the former axis plot against each other.
  • The Years of Rice and Salt, Kim Stanley Robinson: The black death exterminates the population of Europe, and we follow a jāti of several characters through several reincarnations until the year 1423 after Hegira (2002 A.D.).  Every chapter follows a different literary style based on literature of the culture in question.
  • The Thrawn Trilogy, Timothy Zahn:  Did you think I wouldn’t mention any Star Wars books?  The series that reignited the Star Wars franchise in the 1990′s has it all, including a memorable villain.

Any other sci-fi fans amongst my readers?  Any books/universes you’d like to add or recommend?

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Recommended book: Why your world is about to get a whole lot smaller

Posted on August 17, 2009 by | Leave a comment

You might have heard of peak oil, the idea explaining the point in time when we have reached the maximum amount of oil produced, after which starts a decline that affects the world as we know it (and yes, I’m using this phrase on purpose).  Jeff Rubin, a Canadian economist, took the issue head-on in this book, explaining not only why in his view the current economic crisis is at its source one huge oil price shock, but also how will the world economy change once oil is not so plentiful, more expensive and there are more economies hungry for it.

Basically, what he predicts is an end to the current version of globalisation, where you have distributed value chains, cheap travel and products from all over the world at your doorstep.  I don’t know about you, but even if I live more or less ecologically, use renewable energy where possible and don’t have a car, such a future would wreak havoc with my lifestyle as it would be impossible for me to find the food I want and be able to visit my family over the holidays.  The subtitle of this blog is “musings from a child of globalisation” after all, isn’t it?

I think it is time to sweep this issue under the rug every time it is brought up and start thinking about what kind of innovations are needed.  Who’s with me?

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