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Teppo

Here’s a few (more leisurely) books I have been reading recently, lake-side in Finland while vacationing:

Ross King, The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade that gave the World Impressionism. Quick take: Highly engaging, well-written and researched - an excellent book.  Lots of very interesting metatheoretical subthemes embedded in the emergence of impressionism regarding institutions, art, judgment, aesthetics, organizations etc (also see this previous post).

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Quick take: If you’re familiar with the Gaussian v. extremes discussion, Mandelbrot etc – don’t necessarily bother, though, the general narrative is very interesting (for an organizational angle on extremes etc - start with this).  

Herman Melville, Moby Dick. Quick take:  It really is a classic.

John Barrow, Impossibility: The Limits of Science and the Science of Limits. Quick take: Interesting tid-bits.

Chris Anderson, The Long Tail: How Endless Choice is Creating Unlimited Demand.  Quick take: The wiki entry on long tails easily gives you the upshot (the book is rather light reading), though, this whole discussion has some very interesting repercussions that have yet to be explicated.  (For example, how do we reconcile Mandelbrotian/Black Swan logic with long tails – what are statistical and theoretical repercussions?  And more practically, how do we reconcile Schwartzian logic [i.e., less choice is more] with the long tail? For me, more is always better!)

 And no, despite my precommitment, I have not finished War and Peace.