Books reviews, current events, and other musings

 
rec.humor.funny had a good line about the Iraqi war.

It's not true that the French are ungrateful for what the Americans did in WW2. In fact they're so inspired by the American example that they plan to wait two years until they personally are attacked, then join the coalition and pretend the war against Saddam was all their idea.

And they also had one of the best puns that I've heard in a while.

Benjamin Curtis, the annoying guy ("Dude, yer gettin' a Dell") from recent Dell commercials, was recently arrested while purchasing a small amount of marijuana.

The advertising department at Dell was shocked and dismayed, as it dispels the myth that marijuana is a Gateway drug...

posted by Julian at 12:15 AM

 
I took my car to a garage today for a tune-up and oil change. To compensate for the hour I had to wait last time I picked up my car there, the garage owner gave me a bottle of Pedro's Auto Clinic Fine Wine (according to the bottle label). The wine was potent, if not fine, and went reasonably well with the tacos my fiance and I had for dinner.
posted by Julian at 10:50 PM

 
In Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk, investment advisor Peter L. Bernstein provides a history of risk management and analysis. He starts with early research into probability and statistics and works towards contemporary financial concerns.

Bernstein focuses more than half of the book on mathematics and its history, topics that he's not qualified to write about. He makes a few blatant errors, such as claiming that 1 is prime, making me wonder whether he bothered to ask a mathematician to look over his book before publication. More significantly, his explanations are often sloppy or incomplete; they would probably confuse anyone who didn't already know the material. Though Bernstein spends at least as much time describing the life histories of Gauss, Pascal, Galton, the Bernoulli's and others as he does on their discoveries.

The later parts of the book, involving economics and portfolio analysis, were a definite improvement. Bernstein possesses a stronger grasp of those topics, as implied by the book's strong endorsements by the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, and John Kenneth Galbraith, while the material was less familiar to me. Presumably, Bernstein presented accurate summaries of how Kenneth Arrow, Frank Knight, John Keynes, Oskar Morganstern, and Harry Markowitz viewed economic risk.

The most fascinating chapter involved psychological studies about how people perceive risk. Psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, influential researchers in that area, suggest an intriguing example. Suppose you purchase theater tickets for $40, but when you arrive at the show you can't find them. Would you pay another $40 for new tickets? Logically you should, since you've already decided that the entertainment value of the production is worth a $40 expenditure, but many people are reluctant to do so.

Overall, Against the Gods is a mixed bag. The discussions of risk psychology, economic theories, and financial derivatives were worthwhile. Still, you can easily envision a better treatment of the material.
posted by Julian at 11:00 PM