The What Are You Reading Thread!
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Murphy, by Samuel Beckett.
mike_field
Vital Football Legend
This thread.
KRS186
Vital Champions League
I've been reading Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged.
It's quite possibility one of the worst things I've ever read, unmitigated garbage, it's going on the fire when I've finished, thank God I only paid for the cost of postage on amazon.
I find it hilarious than Rand received social security and Medicare payments as the old bitch was dying with cancer. So much for practicing what you preach.
The fact that she's the poster girl of contemporary American Libertarianism tells you that the contemporary Libertarian scene is strictly for the mentally retarded only.
It's quite possibility one of the worst things I've ever read, unmitigated garbage, it's going on the fire when I've finished, thank God I only paid for the cost of postage on amazon.
I find it hilarious than Rand received social security and Medicare payments as the old bitch was dying with cancer. So much for practicing what you preach.
The fact that she's the poster girl of contemporary American Libertarianism tells you that the contemporary Libertarian scene is strictly for the mentally retarded only.
Cheshire Villan
Vital 1st Team Regular
I started to read Ben Miller's It's Not Rocket Science yesterday (the Miller out of Miller & Armstrong - seems he studied Physics at Cambridge). Tiny bit patronising in style but after Chapter 2 I now understand what the Large Hadron Collider does and is for! I am using this book as prep for The Quantum Universe: Everything That Can Happen Does Happen by Brian Cox & Jeff Forshaw. I didn't get on with science particularly well at school (which was a long time ago) and I feel I should be up to speed. Watching Brian Cox on the TV kind of ignited the curiosity.
KRS186
Vital Champions League
Nassim Taleb: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
Ok, before I attempt a review, let me just say, this book is fucking bollocks, and another case of me being happy that I only paid the cost of postage.
Taleb's thesis is that investors, or more specifically 'quants' put too much stock in their models and fail to recognise the truly stochastic (random).
He points to things like regression models that assume that residuals follow a normal distribution (if they don't it's often standard practice to fit dummy variable in to essentially remove an outlier or outliers), and other models such as the Black-Scholes-Merton model that blew up in the faces of the academics that created it, as the crisis in Asia in the early/mid 90s saw their Long Term Capital Asset Management fund sink and require the government to bail them out.
Yes, this thesis is interesting but hardly new, people have know this for decades. Anyway, Taleb adds nothing new to this, rather he just provides a hundred different ways of re-stating the same thing. As well as this he continually alludes to how rich and successful he is, and some psycho-babble involving some fictional characters called Yevgenia and Nero Tulip.
This book was 'highly' recommended by the NY times and the Financial Times.
Really, it's a piece of pseudo-intellectual nonsense that offers absolutely nothing to anyone's understanding of finance or statistical modelling. It's simply one of the worst books that I've ever read.
Here he is on Newsnight:
[youtube=ABXPICWjFIo]
Nothing but truisms and no substance, very much like his book.
Ok, before I attempt a review, let me just say, this book is fucking bollocks, and another case of me being happy that I only paid the cost of postage.
Taleb's thesis is that investors, or more specifically 'quants' put too much stock in their models and fail to recognise the truly stochastic (random).
He points to things like regression models that assume that residuals follow a normal distribution (if they don't it's often standard practice to fit dummy variable in to essentially remove an outlier or outliers), and other models such as the Black-Scholes-Merton model that blew up in the faces of the academics that created it, as the crisis in Asia in the early/mid 90s saw their Long Term Capital Asset Management fund sink and require the government to bail them out.
Yes, this thesis is interesting but hardly new, people have know this for decades. Anyway, Taleb adds nothing new to this, rather he just provides a hundred different ways of re-stating the same thing. As well as this he continually alludes to how rich and successful he is, and some psycho-babble involving some fictional characters called Yevgenia and Nero Tulip.
This book was 'highly' recommended by the NY times and the Financial Times.
Really, it's a piece of pseudo-intellectual nonsense that offers absolutely nothing to anyone's understanding of finance or statistical modelling. It's simply one of the worst books that I've ever read.
Here he is on Newsnight:
[youtube=ABXPICWjFIo]
Nothing but truisms and no substance, very much like his book.
BodyButter
Vital Football Legend
I'm almost finished Without Fail, another Jack Reacher book. It's good. Enjoyable. Like all of these books. I'm going to have to get something a little heavier when I get to the book shop next.
BTW, if you are a fan of the Jack Reacher series, I'd suggest you avoid the cinemas next Christmas. They've made a film based on the books but it stars Tom Cruise so it's only very, very loosely based on the books.
BTW, if you are a fan of the Jack Reacher series, I'd suggest you avoid the cinemas next Christmas. They've made a film based on the books but it stars Tom Cruise so it's only very, very loosely based on the books.
BodyButter
Vital Football Legend
I bought A Communist Manifesto in the book shop yesterday. Hopefully, it'll be more interesting than Mein Kampf.
