I was recommended this book some time ago by a friend, and after checking the summary I added it to my list of book to read right away. This book is the first book I have tried to read using the “How to Read a Book” method, so take my opinion with an extra grain of salt: probably my experience reading it would have been very different if I had read it the usual way.
So, the executive summary would be that the ideas in the book are quite interesting, but it’s way too long and it’s often, in my opinion, annoying to read due to the author’s arrogance (you can probably imagine what I mean by looking at his website “Fooled By Randomness“).
The rest of this post is my random notes that sort of serve as a summary. They’re meant mostly for myself (or at least someone who has actually read the book) and probably fairly bad, but hey, it’s the first book I read like this, so bear with me. If you haven’t read the book and want to read them anyway, at least you have to know what a “Black Swan” is: it’s an event that it’s basically unpredictable, and changes the world in a substantial way. Just go to Wikipedia and check it out.
From page 8: History is opaque. Reasons:
Illusion of understanding: the world is more complex and random that everyone thinks.
Retrospective distortion: we assess matters after the fact and look for tidy, regular explanations.
Overvaluation of factual information and experts: we “Platonify” the world.
Page 12 (about the second point above): history makes jumps, not small increments of change. Yet we believe in nice, tidy, incremental changes.
Page 30: About scalable vs. non-scalable jobs (writer vs. nurse; getting paid for your time or not), “talent” comes from success, not the other way around.
Page 49: the book is not about avoiding risks, but about knowing which ones to take and know what we don’t know.
Page 50: Black Swan blindness, related themes:
We focus on preselected segments and generalise from them: confirmation error.
We believe in tidy explanations: the narrative fallacy.
We behave as if Black Swans don’t exist.
We don’t see all it’s there: we hide Black Swans under other explanations.
We “tunnel”: we focus on well-defined sources of information.
Page 58, about the “confirmation error” above. Experiment: given 2, 4 and 6, people are asked to guess the rule they follow. Each person can give any number of three-number series and the experimenters will say if the series follows the rule. In that experiment, people tend to first build a theory and then try to confirm it. So, most people never guess that it’s simply “ascending numbers”.
Page 71, about people behaving as if Black Swans didn’t exist: When you remember something, you change the story at each remembrance. We renarrate the past to make it “more logical”.
Page 114, about hiding Black Swans under other explanations: We don’t hear the stories of the non-successful, so the information we have comes mostly from the lucky ones.
Page 120, still about the same topic: When survival is in play, we look for cause and effect. We believe in the “because” and not in randomness. It may have been just luck, but we always try to find a cause.
Page 138 has a summary about chapter 10 (all notes up to and including page 158 belong to this chapter). There are two main topics in this chapter: (a) we are arrogant about what we think we know, and (b) that has implications when predicting. Why do we predict so much, even if we know we make so many mistakes?
Page 144. Ideas are sticky: once we have a theory, it’s hard to change our minds. We have trouble interpreting information that contradicts our opinions. Experiment with horse race prediction: knowing the 10 most useful variables, people predicted. Then, when given extra variables, the accuracy of predictions didn’t increase, but the confidence in the predictions did.
Page 151: When you predict wrong, you tend to think you couldn’t know because it was an aspect you don’t know that well (e.g. about predicting the fall of the Soviet Union when having an excellent knowledge of the political workings, one would think that it turned out to be economic reasons, so you couldn’t predict it).
Page 158: We anchor: when we see a number before a prediction, even if it’s random and we know it, we make predictions “close” to that number. This, by the way, I had read before, I think in “Predictably irrational“.
Page 203: Advice: be human, admit your arrogance and ignorance. Avoid large scale, harmful predictions.
Page 205: Advice: put 85-90% of your resources in something very low risk, and 10-15% in something very high risk. Avoid “medium risks”.
Page 207: Closing tricks:
Make a difference between positive and negative contingencies. When you have a limited loss, you have to be as aggressive, speculative and “unreasonable” as you can.
Don’t look for the precise and local. Don’t be narrow-minded. Do not try to predict precise Black Swans. Invest in preparedness, not prediction. Infinite vigilance is not possible.
Seize any opportunity, or anything that looks like one. They’re much rarer than people think.
Beware of precise plans by governments.
Do not waste time trying to fight forecasters.
In summary, I liked the ideas in the book, even if sometimes I wasn’t very convinced by the arguments or the evidence provided… and it was sort of boring to read at times.
These are interesting times in the browser world: not only there are more browsers than ever, but now even Internet Explorer is starting to become competitive again, so in a year or two it might not even be safe to assume that every other browser is better. Go figure.
So anyway, recently Opera released 10.60, which is awesome news because finally Linux has a modern stable release, because of the amount of new eye candy in the UI, the new supported web standards (like Geolocation or WebM video, yay!) and… because of the amazing speed (“much faster than a potato“).
On Saturday, DailyTech published an article comparing the speed of several browsers, Opera 10.60 included. Obviously the conclusion was that Opera is the fastest (I wouldn’t link to that article from this post if it wasn’t the case, would I? :-P), and shortly after reading that, I came across this hilarious video that sort of follows up on that:
I mean, the video even mentions Opera Link, I have to like it :-P (although yeah, the claim is not correct, Chrome does have something similar). My favourite quotes are:
In the last batch of books I ordered from The Book Depository I had “97 Things Every Project Manager Should Know“. It was a thin book and one of the first to arrive, so I figured it was a good one to start. The book is a collection of 2-page articles about project management. It has 198 pages, but I just read until around page 70, then “speed-read” the rest because I was so disappointed that I just wanted to get it over with. This has been the most disappointing book I’ve read in many years, and I rarely stop reading books even if I don’t like them that much (especially if they are as short as this one).
But I hate not trying to be constructive, and just saying that it was disappointing for me won’t tell you much about the possibility of it being disappointing for you, so here we go:
The choice of articles seemed “random”: clearly some of the authors had very good things to share, but many others didn’t sound that experienced or having so much interesting to say. I could imagine myself writing some of those articles.
Many articles read like they want to give “general” advice, but extrapolating from circumstances that I may never have (like making a rule out of a “this happened to me once” kind of experience).
I didn’t find it “inspiring” at all, if I wasn’t a project manager already I would not want to become one. The idea of working as a project manager felt dry, boring, and too focused on processes.
Many articles feel written for someone that doesn’t have any project management experience whatsoever. That’s cool, but it’s useless for me and should have been clearer in the book I think.
Many other articles seem written for project managers from other industries (or even simply “managers”) that are going to start managing a software project. That is not only plain useless to me, it also bores me to death. Seriously, WTF is with the definitions of super basic concepts? If you don’t know what an “iteration” or a “hack” is and you won’t check yourself out of curiosity you shouldn’t be allowed to manage a software project. Period.
Many articles felt too “corporate” to me, there was too much jargon and too many references to job titles, methodologies and contractors instead of really essential stuff based on experience.
Reading some of the more or less interesting stuff, I couldn’t help thinking that those things would be obvious for someone who has been working as a software developer for years and wants to become a project manager because she finds it interesting.
Other articles were interesting, but lacked depth to make them really useful.
Don’t get me wrong, there are useful articles, but the book as a whole doesn’t feel that useful. Certainly not worth the time reading the whole thing.
And finally, something that kept popping in my head, even if the comparison is unfair (it’s a different kind of book), is that this book is in many respects the opposite of the things I loved about Making Things Happen (an excellent book that you should read if you have any interest in project management). Oh well.
Google Test Automation Conference. In India. Sounds great, doesn’t it? That’s what I thought too, so I applied. For that, though, I had to shoot not only one, but two videos: one explaining the full-length talk I wanted to present, and a video of a lightning talk. As both of them were related to talks, I figured they’d be much better off having the slides on the video when they were referenced. That way the videos would be easier to follow and wouldn’t be just a boring static shot.
But that meant I had to edit video. Which I had never done before. And I figured it wouldn’t be trivial if I only wanted to use Free Software tools under Linux. I was partly wrong, because after looking around a bit I found OpenShot, which I found pleasant enough to use (at least for my very basic, very limited needs). However, the final footage I used made OpenShot export corrupted videos. I know it was something specific to that source video (a MOV format, H.264 codec, EPICly HD resolution (1920×1080) video) because I had tried to do exactly the same things with earlier, lower-resolution, MPEG-format takes, and it had worked like a charm.
In any case, I was sort of fucked because I couldn’t get the final edited video out, so I had to resize it and change the format somehow. I won’t list here everything I tried (that includes trying to download and use several programs on Windows, as well as using mencoder on Linux), but after a very long and frustrating process, only ffmpeg did the trick for me. My first attempt with ffmpeg did export the video, but with awful quality. After looking around a bit, I found what worked for me:
The trick to get a decent result was forcing the bitrate (“-b” option), which will hopefully help someone in need. Meanwhile, I’m going to stop typing so I can go back to crossing my fingers to get picked for GTAC ;-)
This is a quick post to say that I just came from watching “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, played by students of the TITAN theatre school in Vigeland Sculpture Park. It was amazing, probably the most engaging and fun play I’ve seen. Admittedly, I haven’t been that many times to the theatre, but still. The actors were really good, the play was super fun to watch and having it in the Vigeland Park, moving around for different scenes, made it extra enjoyable.
They are going to play it again tomorrow (Sunday, 30th May) so don’t miss this opportunity if you are in Oslo! One word of warning though: the actors speak pretty fast and for me it was fairly hard to follow the story by the dialogue. Luckily I knew the story so it wasn’t a problem. Thus, by all means go see them tomorrow if you can, but read a summary of the story if you don’t know it already, it will make sure you can follow everything ;-)
My first impression is fairly good: even though it’s the first decent Android phone and quite old now, I find it very nice to use and quite customisable (which is great, considering all the applications and widgets available for the platform). And even when using an old version of Android (1.5) I don’t find it slow. At least not enough to be irritating.
However, there are several annoyances and things I found out that I figured I’d share:
It doesn’t automatically import SMS from the SIM card, let alone use the SIM card as the SMS storage. I find that really silly, but to be honest it doesn’t bother me that much. You can of course import your backed-up SMS using some utilities (I haven’t bothered).
It took me a good deal of effort to import my contacts from the old phone. I tried some app called vCardIO, which sounded awesome but it didn’t work for me. The final solution was using a utility called “Import Contacts” that doesn’t seem to be in the Android Market (?). I had exported my contacts using gammu/wammu, but I had just in case removed the X-GAMMU-* lines from it. I don’t know if it had anything to do.
I found the default mail application to be kind of sucky, so I looked around and found K-9 Mail. I’m quite happy with it.
The default browser is some sort of bad joke, but luckily there’s Opera Mini. Opera Mini 5 totally rocks, especially with Opera Link.
Over the past few weeks I’ve become increasingly concerned about Facebook. I even considered deleting my account (idea I haven’t really discarded), but the amount of people I’m going to lose contact with is making me hesitate.
So, why the concern? I’m glad you asked. You can get a rough idea by reading these articles:
After reading all that, for me it’s pretty clear that Facebook doesn’t give a flying fuck about your privacy. Actually, even Zuckerberg presumably said so. That is for me the big issue: the exact problems we might have now, the current workarounds, the fact that you now have this or that option to counter some of the automatic changes by Facebook… is all irrelevant. To elaborate a bit:
Facebook started as a much more “private” space in which you only shared information with your friends. This has radically changed, and I somehow find it disrespectful toward their users. We’re not talking about evolution here, but of pretty big “philosophical” changes. This is not what I signed up for.
It has happened several times that Facebook has changed your privacy settings on updates. Some of those changes can’t even be countered, or it’s fairly hard to do so. That pisses me off.
The “Facebook messing with your privacy settings” will no doubt happen again. So now, instead of using/enjoying the service, I have to fight against it.
So the current situation is that I know that Facebook can, at any moment, change something I don’t want it to, and I’ll have to read a bunch of articles to understand the threat and counter it. I don’t want to review my privacy settings from time to time “just in case”. I don’t want to wonder if my data is available to more people I’d like it to. I don’t see the point in using a service that is designed to do the opposite of what I want. And that makes me wonder why do I bother at all. Or if I want to support a company or service that behaves like that.
I have to say I wasn’t sure about buying this book, especially after seeing some video on YouTube called “Book Brief”. Fortunately, after mentions in a couple of places I finally decided to go for it. My advice is don’t watch the “book brief” video, and do read the book if you’re interested in presentations. If you’re really into videos, you can go to the slide:ology O’Reilly site for a much better one.
The core of the book is about what’s wrong with many presentations. The points are made in a clear way and there is a lot of useful advice to improve your presentations and your slides. There are many examples, some of the most enlightening ones being of the “before and after” type.
After reading the book I felt I had learned a bunch of useful things, so I decided to go over the slides for a talk I had prepared but not given yet, to try to improve them. Looking at them with a new perspective made some of the problems evident. Also, I felt that correcting those problems wasn’t very hard: the hard part was seeing them in the first place.
I have to say I’m very happy with both the book and the results of having gone through my slides. I totally recommend slide:ology if you want to learn more about presentations and how to prepare slides.
Lately I’ve been reading a bunch of books that were recommended by Scott Berkun in one way or another. The next book I’m going to review (slide:ology) actually falls into this category too, but basically I’m done with that batch so I’m reading other things now :-D
I don’t read that much fiction (except in comic form), but Scott’s review really intrigued me and made me want to read it. I should warn you, though, that his review is sort of a spoiler, not in the sense that it gives away the story, but in the sense that it talks about many the kind of things that you can think of while reading it.
I don’t want to risk spoiling anything, so I’ll only say that it’s a (very) dark survival tale involving a man and his son. It’s certainly not for everyone, but if you can cope with it you’ll most probably love it. Here’s two anecdotes regarding how dark and powerful the book is:
After a couple of days I stopped reading it before going to bed, because the next morning, when waking up, I’d feel anxiety.
I can’t remember when it was the last time that a book made me cry. The first time it happened with this book the page number had a single digit (namely, it was page 9). As I said I don’t read much fiction, but still.
The style of the book is really crude, and it matches the theme perfectly: there aren’t “chapters”, the characters don’t have names (they’re simply “the man” and his unnamed son) and he doesn’t even use apostrophes for negations (he writes “dont know” and “I cant”, never “don’t know” or “I can’t”). I found the vocabulary quite complex and I had trouble with a lot of words, but not enough to not be able to follow the story.
A couple of days after finishing the book I actually gave the film adaptation a shot (I didn’t even know there was one when I decided to buy the book). I have to say that, while I didn’t hold my hopes up for a good film, I actually ended up enjoying it quite a bit. It’s sort of a summary of the book (too much to cover in a film), but I think the end result was very good. So, if you’re lazy about reading the book, at least you can watch the film ;-)
I learned about this book when reading “Confessions of a Public Speaker” (see my review). My idea was learning a bit about acting, which theoretically would help me being more comfortable when speaking and would teach me a couple of things about behaving on stage. Not that you can learn a lot of acting by reading, I was thinking more of an inspiration thing. But anyway.
The book is not written as a typical “textbook”, but as a sort of novel telling the story of a group of people that is going to acting lessons. That was really surprising at first, and felt awkward, but after a couple of pages I got used and it wasn’t a problem at all. Actually the result is probably better than what it could have been with a normal “textbook” style. The content itself really changed the way I see acting and strengthened the respect I have for actors (in that sense it reminded me of “Off-Off Broadway”, that episode of “Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends“). However, it felt like learning by reading something that is only tangentially related to what I wanted to improve (speaking in public) didn’t help me a whole lot. Now what I want is to take some improvisational theatre classes (see Teresa Brazen’s chronicle to see what I mean) :-D
In summary, it’s a very good book and it looks like a useful companion if you are interested in theatre and you are learning (by doing!), but I’m not sure how much it helped me in my goal.
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