Flotsam & Jetsam
Recently read:
Achewood Volume 2: Worst Song, Played On Ugliest Guitar, by Chris Onstad
The first 135 or so Achewood strips, along with commentary and character backstories. Achewood got off to a (very) slow start and the strips are, in any case, available online for free, so there’s no point to buying this unless you’re a serious fan. That being said, Onstad’s comments on the individual strips are usually entertaining or informative (my favorite: “This strip exemplifies my frustrations with the medium. This needs audio to work properly; it also needs decent writing. I hate that comics sometimes have stupid writing that goes nowhere.”), and the prose “A History of Achewood” is excellent.
The Merchant’s War, by Charles Stross
Of the six books in the Merchant Princes series, this is (bizarrely, given that it’s book four) the only one not available as an ebook.
Jonathan Weinstein on basketball coaches sitting players in foul trouble:
Conventional wisdom seems to regard foul management as a risk vs. safety decision. You will constantly hear something like, “a big decision here, whether to risk putting Duncan back in with 4 fouls.” This is completely the wrong lens for the problem, since the “risky” strategy is, with the caveats mentioned, all upside! Coaches dramatically underrate the “risk” of falling behind, or losing a lead, by sitting a star for too long. To make it as stark as possible, observe that the coach is voluntarily imposing the penalty that he is trying to avoid, namely his player being taken out of the game!
(via Kottke)
Recently read: The Big Short, by Michael Lewis
Lewis’s account of the sub-prime bubble is essentially Moneyball for finance; it’s the story of several outsiders who realized that the models being used to price mortgage-backed securities were seriously flawed and bet against the bonds which would come to be known as “toxic assets”. It’s a compelling and educational story, and certainly the best explanation of what actually happened that I’ve read.
“My nightmare scenario is that people keep talking about their nightmare scenarios.”
Recently read: The Family Trade, The Hidden Family, and The Clan Corporate, by Charles Stross
Though I’m a big Stross fan, I’ve been avoiding his Merchant Princes series, primarily because it is labeled and marketed as fantasy. However, his post mortem on the series got me interested, especially this explanation of the underlying theme:
[I]t’s implicitly about sociology and economics, and more specifically, about the development trap … how it is that the ruling elite of a very poor country can live an imported developed-world lifestyle, but fail to spark economic development in their general population.
The other motivating factor was that I got one of these recently and wanted to try out the Kindle and iBooks apps. I’m not willing to spend $15 or $20 on DRMed ebooks in place of hardcovers, but when it comes to ebooks vs. mass-market paperbacks, I’m on board with this (except for the intraword capitalization): “eBook rule of thumb for book lovers: if you’d be ok buying the paperback, buy the eBook.”
Based on having read the first two of the above in the Kindle app and the third in iBooks, I think I prefer the Kindle experience. Strange as it feels to say, given that the opposite holds for the two companies’ hardware offerings, the Kindle app is clean, simple, and elegant, whereas iBooks is more visually complex and imposes more of a cognitive load.
Kindle
No faux-realistic visual metaphors, no controls, no distractions.
iBooks
The cell/WiFi reception indicators, clock, and battery meter are distractions, as is the page number (the Kindle app gets this exactly right: you can tap to see the page number, but it’s not always there, reminding you how far you still have to go). Also, the physical book metaphor is overdone—especially the overly-elaborate page-turning animation, which is cool the first time you see it but gets old fast.
Glenn Greenwald on the newest Supreme Court nominee:
It’s anything but surprising that President Obama has chosen Elena Kagan to replace John Paul Stevens on the Supreme Court. Nothing is a better fit for this White House than a blank slate, institution-loyal, seemingly principle-free careerist who spent the last 15 months as the Obama administration’s lawyer vigorously defending every one of his assertions of extremely broad executive authority.
[…]
It’s even less surprising that Obama would not want to choose someone like Diane Wood. […] Do you think that an administration that just yesterday announced it wants legislation to dilute Miranda rights in the name of Scary Terrorists — and has seized the power to assassinate American citizens with no due process — wants someone like Diane Wood on the Supreme Court?
Steven Strogatz makes a valiant attempt to explain why there are different magnitudes of infinity, but I have my doubts about how convincing it will be to non-mathematicians.
18 notes (via magicmolly)
