“A Million Little Pieces” is the other book I read while travelling last week. In this autobiographical novel James Frey describes his time in rehab attempting to recover from ten years as an alcoholic and three as a crack addict. It’s a powerful, raw piece of writing that will give you insight — more than you ever wanted — into the mind and soul of an addict. Not for the faint of heart.
Along with “The Wisdom of Crowds”, I’ve added this to my Really Good Stuff list.
I’ve just returned from a great week-long trip to Costa Rica. In-between the beach, pool, and misguided attempts at surfing, I spent a good chunk of time buried in books. So in this post and the next I have some reading recommendations to share with you.
First, check out The Wisdom of Crowds, by James Surowiecki. This is a great book on the intersection of economics, groups, and decision-making.
I just got a call from my ex-Microsoft buddy Aaron Goldfeder, who is on the 3rd leg of his 20-segment trip around the world. Over the last few weeks he put together Brave Orbit, a free travel blogging service that lets you share your travel details and discover what others have already published. It’s worth checking out, even if you don’t have any trips in your near future. And if nothing else, Aaron’s itinerary will give you lots of cool ideas for great places to go on your next journey.
Bon voyage Aaron!
Announced today on the del.icio.us blog. In hindsight it was only a matter of time before one of the big three bought them.
Looksmart owns Furl. Who’s next, I wonder?
I’ve just finished setting up a little experiment on sharing recommendations. The basic idea is to publish an ongoing list of the “really good stuff”… the shortlist of things you view as worthwhile enough to recommend to other people.
Check it out and leave a comment with your thoughts. Useful? Wrongheaded? Know of another tool that does the same thing, or achieves the same goal in a better way? Let me know.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt coauthored a Newsweek article with Berkeley professor Hal Varian on getting the most out of knowledge workers. As an ex-Microsoftie, it makes interesting and eerily familiar reading for me. Here’s a comparison of Schmidt’s golden rules with the way things work at Microsoft:
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A bunch of things lately have really got me thinking about what human qualities can and cannot be digitized. (This is inbetween more mundane tasks like shopping for winter tires. I’ll bet Greek philosophers didn’t have to shop for winter tires right in the middle of theorizing. Geez.)
Here’s a list of things that cannot be digitized:
* Sensation. Many people have been working on this for decades — vision, voice reco, smell, tactile, taste — with slow progress. I do think this will eventually be cracked for many practical applications. But not all?
* Aesthetic appreciation, e.g. of art, music, sunset, poetry, that sound you hear in sea shells
* Emotion
* Creativity
* Dialog. Remember Eliza? I wonder what the state of the art is now. Not much better I’ll bet, because you need…
* Understanding of context. Surely there is a shorter word for this concept? Lack of contextual comprehension is the reason voice recognition is stuck at 95%.
* Consciousness. Although reading wikipedia’s definition, I think humans are losing ground to machines on some aspects of consciousness. [5 minutes pass….] Wow, it’s worth reading that definition and just spending a few minutes clicking the outbound links from it.
So we still have some high ground on the algorithms. But the list is disconcertingly short! And it isn’t normalized; “consciousness” seems like it subsumes so many other things. What have I missed? Help me make a better list, or point me to someone who already has.
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