No question about the fact that book reading is great. After completing college education, only way to grow further is by reading books. But reading a book also means time commitment. Typically a week to few weeks of reading every day. So it becomes necessary to select books with care. Though there is always the option of reading few pages or few chapters but that also results in waste.

Over the years my book selection process has become somewhat refined. Before the advent of blogs or even web the way to find good books was word of mouth, newspapers or magazines. There were best seller lists and books of the year but that meant that one would miss good but obscure books. Also the books from past would be missed too. For example there is no way I was going to find about Thomas Schelling’s “Micromotives and Macro behavior” from best sellers list. With blogs this selection process has become really easy and very effective. Since one only subscribe to authors one likes iis quite likely that the books recommended by them on their blogs would be to your taste. And when one is fond of bibliophiles like Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution it is bonus time.

Most of the blog authors when talking about books point to its page on big river aka Amazon. Once at Amazon it is easy to find what other’s are talking about the books in customer reviews. This is all good but what I am really excited about is the ability to check if the book is available at one of the branches of local Santa Clara County libraries (SCCL). This is possible by a little greasemonkey script on firefox that was written for Seattle Public Library which I improvised for SCCL. So now I have a blog filtered stream of books whose reviews I can read on Amazon and check their availability in the local libraries. An optimized solution, just what the good engineer ordered.

In his 1995 speech “The Psychology of Human Misjudgment” given at Harvard Law School, Charlie Munger said

“Well I think I’ve been in the top 5% of my age cohort all my life in understanding the power of incentives, and all my life I’ve underestimated it. And never a year passes but I get some surprise that pushes my limit a little farther.”

Coming from Mr. Munger, incentives as the very first cause or bias in Human Misjudgment, learning about incentives is quite important. And now Tyler Cowen, an economist and author of very famous blog Marginal Revolution has written a complete book on incentives called “Discover your inner economist” Continue Reading »

I have started reading “A Random Walk Down Wall Street” over this July 4 long weekend after reading about it on Joel On Software book reviews. Very enjoyable read. My personal experience has been with the dot-gone bubble of late 90s and may be the present bubble or froth as quoted by Alan Greenspan in the real estate markets. Some of the excerpts from the chapter “Madness of Crowds” are so relevant that I am surprised we never seem to learn from old mistakes.

Consider this when Burton G. Malkiel talks about the tulip craze and the call-options which happened in Holland in 1630s

“Part of the genius of financial markets is that when there is a real demand for a method to enhance speculative opportunities, the market will surely provide it”

Isn’t what markets did when every mom-and-pop dot.com company went IPO in the 90s or the interest only loans and adjustable ARMs of today.

I am equally amazed at reading the story British South Sea Company and the South Sea Bubble. Can’t imagine its share between 1717-1722 went from 100 pounds to 1000 pounds and then back to nothing. Or how about the RCA shares back in America rose from $94.25 to $505 from March 3, 1928 to September 3, 1929; a cool 434.5% growth in 18 months. I think this beats the growth of modern day darling Google. That too when we are in correction mode after the 90s.

This last paragraph of the chapter is what is most intriguing to me. I have read something to the same effect in quite a few articles. But it still beats me how this can be so simple. The business of making more money from existing money or investing

It is not hard, really, to make money in the market. As we shall see later, investors who select a portfolio of stock listings in the Wall Street Journal can make fairly handsome long-run returns. What is hard to avoid is the alluring temptation to throw your money away on short, get-rich-quick speculative binges.

Notice the “really”. Do you think so.

I first read about “Feed by MT Anderson” at FutureSalon. I found it interesting and brought the book home. I didn’t read it for quite some time. But yesterday while at work in an elevator it came to my mind that it would be quite possible to get rid of keyboard and monitor. I mean come to think of it these are just one of the input and output mediums we use to interact with our intelligent machines The idea is not novel at all. Since I knew it is also the theme of Feed. This renewed interest in this idea led me to reading this little fiction for young adults.

Feed is about the few teens in future. They have some sort of chip implanted in their brains which keeps feeding them all this information about where ever they look. It was marketed as a great tool for the kids as they will have access to all information via the feed. I haven’t read the complete book. I liked it so much that I recorded one of the paragraphs where Titus, one of the teens after having lost feed in a hacking incident, is thinking about the past when people didn’t didn’t had feeds. Listen to it

Feed from the Feed

Nilesh, our resident bekaar bheja aka idle mind was on a trip to Silicon Valley as a part of his MBA at Johnson. They call it networking . I took him to the Santa Clara City Library and he suggested “Against the Gods” as a good reading. I am glad he did that. It is a lucid tale of Risk. I will write about it detail in another post. The following paragraph intrigued me so I am posting it over here.

Our lives teem with numbers, but we sometimes forget that numbers are only tools. They have no soul; they may indeed become fetishes. Many of our most critical decisions are made by computers, contraptions that devour like voracious monsters and insist on being nourished with ever-greater quantities of digits to crunch, digest and spew back.

To me one of the most beautiful sight to watch is some one doing their job efficiently. It could be a carpenter working on wood or a coder tapping on the keyboard. Browsing thru the excellant Santa Clara City Library I came across this book – Execution-the dicipline of getting things done. The word execution immediately struck a chord in me and brought the same feeling I wrote earlier. When I checked out the book from library, I was thinking of execution at a personal level. But it turned out focus of the book is much larger and it is execution at the organization level. In other words it is a good book for CEOs. But then somewhere in everyone there is this feeling to be one someday. So it was a good education to me on what CEOs face in day to day life. How organizations work and what does is the best way to run them. Continue Reading »

I have been reading Brad De Long’s writings for some time and he is a fan of Paul Krugman’s writings. While reading my daily dose of blogs I noticed Brij has mentioned Paul Krugman’s “The Great Unraveling” as a book to read. On my next trip to Santa Clara City Library I picked this book and am I glad to read this book.

The book is about corporate scandals and how for short term political benefits political parties can ransom the future. Authors approach of telling economic facts and theories is marvelous. Back in engineering school my good friend Arun Sharma used to say if you know a concept very well then you would be able to describe it by making common analogies. That’s what the professor does. I liked how in A Retirement Fable author writes

“There once was a land where people lived only two years. In the first year they worked; in the second year they lived off their personal savings.

There came a time when the government decided to help out the elderly. So it instituted a system called Social Security”

to talk about the impending social security crisis. Or how bulls and bears are described in The Ice Age Cometh. I smiled reading Two Thousand Acres when author concludes that

According to my calculations, my work space occupies only a few square inches of office floor. You may find this implausible, but I’m using a well-accepted methodology. Well accepted, that is, among supporters of oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

It was fascinating to read the real cause of California Electricity Crisis or Asian Currency trouble was just plain greed. Overall a great read. Check it at out at Amazon.