Defenestrating Thoughts from the Bivouac

A while ago I finished the fourth book of George RR Martin’s A Song of Fire and Ice series, entitled A Feast for Crows. Like the previous three books, I did enjoy it. But this one seemed to move slowly and there were lots of distracting throwaway subplots. And again, none of the characters can get a break; I think they are all cursed like the tragic families of Greek mythology.

A strange thing with this book is that it only includes about half the characters from the previous books. The author notes that this was necessary because the length of the book was already too long. He could either tell half the story for all the characters (with a “To be continued…”) or tell the full story for half the characters.

I’m not sure what the better method of the two is, but I think most people would have preferred that both books would be released at the same time. The less wait, the better.

So with the story slowing down, half the characters missing, and the doom and gloom plot, this one wasn’t as good as the previous ones. When the next volume is released, I’ll probably just get it from the library instead of rushing to buy it immediately.

We had a party this weekend for St. Patrick’s Day which was a lot of fun with people staying over hanging out until past 4 am. I love weekends, but they make it really hard to wake up on weekdays. :-)

Crissy and I have gotten much more efficient at cooking and cleaning for our parties and the preparation for this party was going pretty well, until there was a BANG and very hot, blue glass went flying everywhere. I was making a lasagna and I accidently turned on the wrong burner so our nice blue Pyrex bake dish, which is not stovetop friendly, became an unintentional IED.

Fortunately we were both a few feet away and the glass didn’t reach a high velocity. Unfortunately, there was a high probability that glass shards flew into the yet to be assembled lasagne noodles and stuffing. Crissy took charge (with crisis management skills forged in the classroom) and sent me to the grocery store for new ingredients (we didn’t want to feed a spinach and glass lasagna to our friends), while she cleaned the mess.

Like my adventures in beard trimming, I was surprised how many people had very similar experiences. Almost everyone at the party had this happen before, including the slightly melted kitchen floor from the hot glass. In fact some people had it happen so recently that they told us that we could replace the broken dish at Fred Meyer since they are currently on sale. :-)

Today’s post is nothing more then a slightly organized stream of thoughts that have been swirling around my head this morning. I’d like to think that they are related in a subtle and amazingly insightful way, but I haven’t quite found it yet. :-)

A lot of books talk about how many people should be in an organized group of people. In management books, they talk about how the maximum size for a project team is 150. The reasoning is that in small groups order is maintained by personal interactions and loyalties — in groups this size everyone knows everyone. Once you have a large amount of people, it’s easier to “hide and slack”. In larger companies and organizations this can be very apparent.

Related to this, though I’m not sure where I heard it (probably The Tipping Point), is the idea that in a social group or setting, people will end up in groups of 5 to 7 at most. This seems related to the ideas in The Mythical Man-Month, which basically says that the number of interconnections in a group increase exponentially compared to the number of people.

And you’ve probably seen this in action. At parties, people always break into groups of around 5 people to chat and socialize.

The thing I find most interesting is that these ideas were first proposed after observing primates in the wild. I guess we do have a lot in common with our hairy brethren. :-)

Somehow related is the Fundamental Attribution Error theory which was developed 40 years ago, and was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in the Tipping Point. The basic idea is that people tend explain a person’s action by attributing it to their personality disproportionally compared to the situation.

The last thing that was swirling in my mind was how susceptible we are to what we see and hear. That’s why commercials are so effective; why wouldn’t you get hungry when watching TV, every other commericial is for some sort of food!

So there are some obvious and interesting connections between the ideas, but I’m still not seeing anything super insightful. Oh well, I tried. :-)

Last week I finished A Storm of Swords, the third book in George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire. Like the previous two books in the series, this book has plenty of murder, betrayal, and intrigue. Again there is very little resolution to the plot; every time a main character is killed, it seems like two more jump out to prominence.

A friend of mine told me the other day that these books are going to be turned into a series on HBO. Each book will take place over a season of shows, so there should be plenty of time to tell the story. My worry with this and all book-to-screen conversions is that they are either horrible or awesome. In this case, the book spends a lot of time with the characters thinking, so either the TV show either needs to have narration from the characters point of view or maybe have the characters thoughts voiced for the viewer (like J.D. on Scrubs, but sinister).

Also, I really like how each chapter of the book is told from a different character perspective and I think it would be cool if the TV episodes retain that type of point of view. Given the great things I’ve heard about HBO dramas like Rome and Deadwood, I think that this series should be pretty good. Of course, since I don’t have HBO, I’ll have to wait to buy the DVDs.

Again, I’d recommend the book. This one seems to have a bit of a slower pace in the second half of the book, while some important portions seem rushed. Also, some of the subplots in this installment seem a little unnecessary and the series continues to be a bit depressing as the main characters keep dying. Maybe I’ll try to read something a little uplifting before finishing the next book in the series. :-)

Well, the past few days have been interesting to say the least. Crissy’s little sister, Jill (to the right of me in this picture), got really sick so Crissy and I flew out to Columbia to be with her. I’m very happy and relieved to say that’s she much better now, and I just got back in Seattle and Crissy’s coming back tomorrow.

Jill had been diagnosed with pre Type II diabetics and it seemed to be all under control with her new diet. But, last week, Jill went into diabetic shock and was in the ICU, so we rushed to see her. Now Jill is back at home mostly back to normal, but needs to have regular blood sugar tests and insulin injections. She’s not a fan of getting the shots and having blood drawn; she very succinctly described it all, “I hate blood sugar! I hate diabetes!”

Crissy and I really happy and thankful that she’s better. But we’re still a little stressed and shocked from the ordeal. I realized on the plane ride back that we’re incredibly fortunate to have jobs that we can get time off for things like this and have enough money that we can afford last minute travel across the country.

And, of course, access to the healthcare was helpful too. :-)

For my birthday (way back in November), Crissy’s parents gave me a very large and generous gift certificate to Barnes and Noble. And finally, after neglecting it for a few months, I used it and bought myself a very belated birthday gift:

• Lord of the Rings Box Set (Extended Editions) - The extended versions of this trilogy was been on my “want” list for a long time and when Barnes and Noble emailed me a 15% any item coupon, it seemed like a no brainer to get it. Of course, I now feel the need to seriously upgrade my tv and sound system in order to fully enjoy the movies. :-)
• Gandhi (Anniversary Edition) - I learned about this edition’s recent release from a “products you may be interested in” email from B&N. Since it had a really good sale price (woohoo!) and I remember the movie being excellent, I ordered myself a copy. And it’s another data point to support those “products you may like” emails.
• Sir Thomas More’s Utopia - I’ve read lots of discussion, never the original work, about More’s fictional island society where everything is uniform through the country’s many cities; whether it’s religion, customs, or education. The island has no concept of wealth, and everything is distributed equally with all property being communally owned.
• Plato’s Republic - “What is justice, and why should we be just, especially when the wicked seem happier and more successful?” are the central questions to this classic. This work is considered one of the greatest works ever produced for it’s profound impact on Western thought. If you ever watched me debate (NFL Lincoln Douglas) in high school, you would know that this is one of my favorite topics to discuss. Senior year, all my cases used “justice” as a core value, regardless if I assigned to be for or against the resolution. :-)
• Aesop’s Fables - a lot fables have similarities across cultures and religions, so I’m looking forward to comparing the stories of Aesop’s Fables with the stories in my copy of the Panchantantra.
• Machiavelli’s The Prince and Other Writings - this is another work that I’ve read lots about, but haven’t really taken the time to read thoroughly. I generally disagree with Machiavelli’s assertions about human nature and the “ends justify the means” political philosophy, so I’m excited to learn about more it.

The books that I bought are part of Barnes and Noble’s Classic Series. They are a nice package with the original work and lots of supporting material (biographies, discussions, and comments by other authors). Plus they have good binding, most have a hard cover, and they all have a low price.

The downside to this purchase is that it significantly increases my “to read” list. And, since the books I borrow from the library generally get read first (they need to be returned in 3 weeks after all), who knows when I’ll get around to reading these. :-)

When it first came out, I added Freakonomics to my “to read” list, but I never got around to it. Recently, the book was featured on Beauty and the Geek (the beauties had to read it and then interview the author, Steven Levitt). So I figured, if it’s good enough for them, it’s a solid part of pop-culture, so I should at least take a look at it. :-)

Unfortunately, like most of the books that are on the top 10 lists for non-fiction or business, the book had some interesting anecdotes, but not that much substance. A lot of the stuff really boiled down to common sense; which is disappointing because the book is supposed to answer lots of life’s mysteries by asking the right questions and drawing connections.

Malcolm Gladwell (author of The Tipping Point) endorses this book and is quoted on the cover saying, “Prepare to be dazzled.” While it must have really helped Freakonomics sales by getting Gladwell’s fan-base to buy this book, after reading through it, I was left undazzled. And I had spent so much time preparing for “dazzlement”. :-)

One of the big things that bothered me about the book was the ridiculous amount of self-promotion. Every chapter started with an excerpt of an article lavishly praising Levitt. Technically these parts were written by the co-author, but hiring someone to sing praises about you is just silly. Plus, I’m already reading the book, there’s no need to continually sell yourself, unless you’re afraid that your content won’t stand on it’s own.

Levitt asserts that he uses advanced statistics (regression analysis) to separate out all the variables; this process, he says, allows him to bypass the old adage, “Correlation doesn’t imply causation”, to actually finding the causes. For example, he asserts:

If you both own a gun and have a swimming pool in the backyard, the swimming pool is about 100 times more likely to kill a child than the gun is.

I’m not doubting his analysis, I’m sure that if you do run the numbers to model all the occurrences of a child being in the same house with a pool and a gun, the pool is more dangerous. But that being said, a truer comparison would be with the instances where the child is using with both.

I would venture a guess that in Levitt’s data set, the child was using the pool orders of magnitude more often than the child was using the gun. So Levitt’s analysis is comparing the “risk of a child using a swimming pool” vs “the risk of a child being in a house that happens to have guns.” It’s slightly disingenuous because the conclusion implies the comparsion of usage between the two.

In any event, it’s still remarkably enlightening data that directly challenges most people’s conceptions of guns. After all, most parents would be perfectly happy with their kids swimming at a friend’s house, but would be uneasy about sending their kids to friend’s house where their parents have guns locked up.

One thing Levitt discussed was the role of hype and emotional manipulation, rather than using logic and reason, to convince people of something (which fits in nicely with my last post on Global Warming):

An expert must be bold if he hopes to alchemize his homespun theory into conventional wisdom. His best chance of doing so is to engage the public’s emotions, for emotion is the enemy of rational argument. And as emotions go, one of them — fear — is more potent than the rest. The superpredator, Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, mad-cow disease, crib death: how can we fail to heed the expert’s advice on these horrors when, like that mean uncle, telling too-scary stories to too-young children, he has reduced us to quivers.

Fear is a powerful force; fear of the imminent and uncontrollable is even worse. That’s why people are more scared on airplanes then when driving cars (lack of control in the airplane). It’s also why people are more scared of terrorism than a much more probable future death from heart disease.

Levitt’s big idea in the book, the idea that got him on all the talk shows to advertise his book, was his claim that the legalization of abortion caused a drop in crime 20 years later, since all the unwanted babies would have likely been criminals. All I can say is “Bah!”. His data supporting his assertion was lacking at best; his footnotes often referred to his own works or other pop-nonfiction.

Plus regression analysis isn’t without it’s own limitations. Unless Levitt’s model can predict trends in data other than the data used to create it, it is of limited value. And nowhere in the book am I led to believe that’s the case.

Also the book is full of pseudo-intellectualism. For example, when discussing the moral outcry on his conclusion about crime and abortion, he says,

If morality represents an ideal world, then economics represents the actual world.

Huh? That doesn’t even mean anything! Especially since his so-called “economics” at times depend on faith as much as morality does.

The book also had a discussion about raising children and if smart parents will have smart kids. The whole discussion is full of interesting correlations. Kids with lots of book at home tend to do better school. But is this because of the books themselves, or because parents with books at home are more likely to value education? Or is it because if you have books you’re likely more wealthy and thus have access to better education?

Ultimately it’s hard to tell. It’s like an old post I wrote about home-schooling: are home-schooled kids doing better at tests because of the home-schooling or is it that they tend to be part of the set of kids that are more likely to have parents that value education?

Anyway, Freakonomics is a quick read and has some interesting stories in it. I’d say to get it from the library. Don’t buy it; it’s not that thought-provoking and the shameless self-promotion will make you a little ill.