As I’ve said before, Danny Wallace is a funny guy. This very short book is about his trip to Wallace, Idaho, the self-proclaimed center (or centre, if you’re from the U.K.) of the universe. It’s amusing, but the topic is too limited and the book too short to provide much scope for his talents.
This is the story of the founding and early years of the Prediction Company, an early-90′s pioneer in computerized market analysis. The book is a a typical startup tale. It’s good reading if you like that sort of thing, which I do. The question that’s never quite answered is, “were their models accurate, or lucky?” The main characters (some of who also appeared in Bass’s excellent “The Eudaemonic Pie“) are pioneers of chaos theory and were attempting to apply their mathematical concepts to the possibly random, possibly chaotic, possibly manipulated world of finance.
Although not a technical book, “The Predictors” does contain some cautionary tales for people attempting to apply computer modeling to the markets. It’s also interesting to see the seeds – in this 1999 book – of our current derivative-generated recession.
This is a pretty good history of the origins of blogging. There are some good stories here, and Rosenberg does a particularly good job on the history of political bloggers. He tends to ignore tech bloggers and has far too little to say about RSS and RSS readers. His analyses of “what it’s becoming” and “why it matters” have far less substance than the historical parts of the book though he has some interesting observations on the interaction of blogs and traditional media.
Six hundred pages of very similar interviews with prominent software developers would probably put most people to sleep. As a programmer with three decades of experience, though, I found this pretty fascinating. The book has it’s faults: the interviews don’t seem very interactive - Seibel seems more interested in his prepared questions then in following up on interesting things his subjects mention. It’s also biased towards the craft’s elder statesmen. That’s not entirely bad, especially when the old guys’ opinions agree with mine. For example, many of them are not fond of IDE’s, think C++ is an abomination, have little interest in Java, and some shun debuggers. OK, I’m a dinosaur.
Many of the interview subjects equate programming more with literature than with math or even science, something I’ve long thought to be the case. Writing code and writing prose seem to use the same parts of the brain. It has never seemed odd to me that the father of Perl, Larry Wall (who is notably absent from “Coders at Work”), was a linguistics major.
This would be an excellent book for somebody considering taking up the software trade. It’s also a good book for people who want an “inside baseball” look at software development.
Like Polsky’s first memoir (“I Bought Andy Warhol“), this book consists mostly of anecdotes about the world of contemporary art. During the time covered in this volume, Polsky made the transition from dealer to “art financial advisor”. Consequently, it’s more about dollars than art, but it’s an interesting read nevertheless, albeit a little impersonal compared to his first book.
This memoir is an amusing series of anecdotes about the art business of the 80′s loosely organized around the author’s quest for a Warhol painting that he could afford. I’m not a Warhol fan and not fond of modern art, but I enjoyed Polsky’s stories, many of which left me wondering how some of of these dealers manage to stay in business. It’s about buying, selling, dealing, partying, and posturing.
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