Tinkly jangler

(EDIT: Formatting messed up a bit again, so it's better if you read this post here)

tinkly (adj.): tinkling; like the short high ringing sound of a small bell; "sounding brass and a tinkly cymbal"

jangler (n.): an idle talker; a babbler; a prater

If we replaced the 'a' in 'jangler' with an 'i', we'd have a tautology =). Anyway, jangler is a fairly interesting word... I need to start using some of these words more often. Today's post won't be about math, but it will be about something nearly as boring to the majority of the population... books! Anyway, onward ho!

Things I've had the (dis)pleasure of reading recently

I put the (dis) not for irony but because occasionally I might actually rant about a book I disliked considerably. Since I read all the below mainly out of free will (the occasional exception being whatever school forces me to read - and school reading does seem to consist of under 5% of all my reading, so it truly is occasional), chances are if I bothered finishing it, I probably enjoyed it to some extent. Of course, you probably won't enjoy everything (even more likely, anything) I do, but that's your problem.

Mongo: Adventures in Trash by Ted Botha

Mongo is trash. So, this book is about people that collect trash. Really. But it's about interesting trash.

What do I mean by interesting trash? First editions of Finnegan's Wake, signatures of Benjamin Disraeli and Aaron Burr, bottles dating back to the eighteenth century, and old coins and jewelery. Perhaps even more interesting are the people that do this - like "Dave" who digs through piles of sludge in landfills and marshes to find antiques and old jewelery. Or "Steven" who is a rare-book collector - who gets all his books from the street. "Christiana" goes around and finds old broken computers and electronics and repairs them. Dan and Scott go excavate ancient outhouses. A group of anarchists reject consumerism and live entirely off the streets. We also have our standard crowd of black baggers and canners. Enough interesting character for a play or two. Admittedly some sections are more interesting than others, but that's fine - it shouldn't make a difference whether you decide to skip a chapter or not.

Very interestingly, all these stories take place in New York, and the collectors admit that New York is the best for 'mongo' collecting. Goes to show the culture and wealth of the city.

Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapcott and Anthony Williams

If you're not impressed with Wikipedia, you should be. Seriously impressed.

Perhaps you should be impressed by the fact that it has over two million articles now, mostly accurate. Or that Google often returns a Wikipedia page in the first five entries on a search for almost anything. But I, on the other hand, have always been more impressed by something else - Wikipedia manages to get thousands of mindless drones to do its work for free!

Of course, Wikipedia is non-profit, and no money is really generated from this work. But it does create wealth. And if, like me, modern civilization has brought you to believe that people only generate wealth for money, you will find this very strange. Very, very, strange. What incentive could these people possibly have to spend hours of their lives adding content for free to a website that they won't even (mostly) be credited for?

Wikinomics basically addresses questions like this, so if they at all interest you, you might enjoy the book. From Wikipedia to Linux and open-source software, to MySpace, Flickr, and YouTube, and even to the mass collaborations that allowed for the success of the Human Genome Project, there are lots of successful examples of how mass collaboration somehow created wealth in a weird way never seen before. Of course, there are also examples where open-ness does not equal free-ness. These include things such as InnoCentive, who offers money prizes to whoever best solves a certain scientific problem (http://www.innocentive.com/), and the Goldcorp Challenge, where the big gold company Goldcorp (ticker: G.TO) basically said "Here's all our geological data of this really large region - now tell us where to dig for gold, and we'll give the best suggestion some large amount of money" - to great success. Actually, TopCoder fits right into these examples, where they get other people to develop software cheaply for them, give the developers and designers about $1000-$2000, and then sell the created components to companies that need them.

Back to the question I asked earlier - and the answer obviously is, there isn't a very clearcut one. Wikinomics wisely doesn't offer an answer either, but rather talks about the factors that seem necessary to adopt this new 'business strategy' for a given problem (admittedly, this might because the book is mainly written for business leaders, but since I'm not a business leader, let's conveniently ignore this fact =)).

Honestly though, if you think about it, you can see why getting people to do things for free might work. Take this blog for example. You could claim that I am wasting my time every time I make a post because I don't get anything out of it and you all reap the benefits of my obvious intellect (of course). Yet I claim that I do get something out of writing blog posts - it allows me to put my thoughts in order, whenever I want. Wouldn't it be better, more convenient, and more selfish for me just to write for myself and say, write a collection of essays in a journal or such (contrary to what you may think, an essay is really just a piece of prose that is supposed to help you clear up your thoughts, not an evil torture created by English teachers so that you need to slave away several hours figuring out how mood is established in the Life of Pi)?

Truth is, not really. Writing for other people forces you to arrange your thoughts in a certain manner. And you gain experience doing that. This seems to hold universally - whether it's adding content for free on Wikipedia or contributing to open-source projects, you get drawn into an online community, and inevitably, you learn things. These things are quite useful in some cases - several companies (usually the best companies, in fact) are more impressed if you led an open-source project than by random credentials like "oh, I went to such a good university and got such good marks".

So, in the end as a result, we have this strange symbiotic relationship that benefits both parties. Of course, not everything should go completely open or try to use mass collaboration - this would lead to something akin to communism and widespread low-quality - but it's definitely an expanding frontier.

Essays by Paul Graham

Everyone should definitely read these. Seriously. This guy writes well. Well to the point that he is very, very, convincing, at least to me (perhaps my personal biases creep in here, but usually I disagree to some extent with almost anything I'm reading - here I almost mindlessly accepted the conclusions). They're all pretty good, but I understand not everyone is completely caught up with the state of startups, programming, and the Internet that reads this. Try How to Be Silicon Valley, Good and Bad Procrastination, Inequality and Risk, and News from the Front.

You'll notice there's also a link on the sidebar =).

Neversfall by Ed Gentry

So, I guess this is your standard fantasy book. It wasn't really amazing to the point that I'd read it again, but it was okay in that I didn't pull out my hair in frustration. I really need to start finding some good fantasy soon - recently all I've read has been pretty mediocre.

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Of course, this is for school. But it's not bad, and pretty good for Victorian literature actually. Much better than say, Pride and Prejudice. I could see myself reading this even if I wasn't forced to by school.

Coding and Information Theory by Richard Hamming

This book is fairly hard to find now, but it's really good. I believe I posted a bit about it when I got it - basically, if you've ever wondered about problems like "what's the most efficient way to store some piece of information?" or "how would one measure the randomness of a sequence" then this book is almost a must-have.

Although, I do admit it is hard to find. You can always try MIT's electronic textbook on "Information and Entropy" here.

Elementary Linear Algebra by A. Wayne Roberts

Hurray for 25 year old textbooks. I know perhaps this isn't the best textbook on linear algebra, but shamefully enough, it's the only one I've read =P. They have nice vignette's though - every five pages or so, they show some interesting open problem that you can use linear algebra to help solve - such as finding Fourier series, or applying Kirchoff's Laws to a general graph, or the theory of Markov chains. Too bad I can't really compare it well.

Books I just picked up

Well, I went to Chapters yesterday and picked up the following books.

The Golden Compass by Phillip Pullman

An Incomplete Education: 3,684 Things You Should Have Learned But Probably Didn't by Judy Jones and William Wilson

Interred With Their Bones by Jennifer Lee Carrell

Well, they made a movie about the Golden Compass, so the book must be at least a bit of a pageturner - it'll be interesting to see if I actually liked it or not. I'm quite divided on so called "popular children's books". Harry Potter was pretty bad and Artemis Fowl was amusing in parts but didn't really leave any impression at all, but the Bartimaeus Trilogy, particularly the ending, was surprisingly good (although the second book was a bit mediocre but whatever - you can't expect too much from page turners).

An Incompete Education is a pretty funny book - it's basically a book full of things that if you know will make you look intelligent at cocktail parties =). Nice as a reference book or just to leaf through.

Interred With Their Bones seems to be some mystery book about a lost work of Shakespeare - as if we haven't had tons of these before. The title comes from the following well-known quote from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar: "The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones."

Books I plan on picking up soon

Unfortunately, Chapters, while having a 'wide variety' of books, sort of "caters to the masses" - i.e., they lack a lot of intellectual stuff. I don't just mean math and science books (which their collection is rather limited, not surprisingly) but even things like Benjamin Franklin's autobiography, which is considered one of the best autobiography's of all time. So, here is what I'll probably pick up soon, given the chance.

A New Kind of Science by Steven Wolfram (yes I know this book is a bit controversial, but the excerpt was interesting - of course, I'll probably take most claims he says about how modelling and computer automata and chaos theory are the future of science with a grain of salt - they might not be all that wrong though... And yes, he probably should have put references in, but do you always see references in a novel?)

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin

The Theory of Money and Credit by Ludwig von Mises

Actually, right now I'm interested in any books by Franklin or von Mises. I can get all their works online easily, but I would prefer them in book version (easier to read). Of course, Chapters doesn't have them and even Amazon doesn't have them in stock (you can order copies from other sellers, but I find this doesn't always work the best). So I'll either have to pick them up from the University library or find a bookstore that sells these things (ironically, neither of Coding and Information Theory or Elementary Linear Algebra were from Chapters or Amazon either - Coding and Information Theory I picked up from Gerstein library at U of T, and I snagged Elementary Linear Algebra from the University of Montreal when they had a bunch of free books available for us to take). Unfortunately I live in suburbia, so my chances of finding a bookstore like that anywhere closeby are virtually nil.

Anyway, that's all I'll bore you for now. I've recently been playing around with catching Pokemon on Pokemon Diamond and I might post soon about how Pokeballs work. If you have any good fantasy (or other) book recommendations, tell me!

-squid out.