Cousin Bryan suggested this to me on my Netflix friends list a while back and despite his picks usually being spot-on I admit I was a bit reluctant to watch this (esp. since it’s seven episodes on two DVDs). After the first episode you pretty much forget that you’re watching two celebrities ride really sweet bikes with the support of a massive crew. You just get drawn in to the story of two guys riding their bikes around the world.

There’s something refreshing about watching Ewan McGregor deal pretty honestly with the setbacks and frustrations that he encounters while crossing Russia and Mongolia. His perspective as he compares the lives of the people he encouters to the rediculousness of making movies is also inspiring.

It’s a big time investment to watch the entire series and if you’re not pulled in after the first episode you probably won’t dig it. But if you are pulled in you’ll pretty much end up watching all the episodes back to back and be inspired to get the hell off the couch and do something when you’re done. And that makes it worth watching.

I’m not sure if Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a pompous asshole or not. If he’s not, his too-frequent, post-modernish, narrator-rising-through-the-surface-of-the-narrative interjections in Fooled By Randomness certainly don’t help his case much. I don’t mind John Barth popping through the pages of his novels and I welcome Tom Robbins offering me a champagne toast, but every time Taleb offers one of his parenthetically whispered asides about what a smart, sensitive guy he is you want to scream at him to get over himself already.

As much as I’d like to argue the merits of the book on the contents, Taleb makes it impossible to separate the book from the author. He would have done better to present his arguments and keep his own enormous ego out of the pages. You certainly get the sense that Taleb is the guy at the party who looks for every possible opportunity to drop some sort of hint about how bright he thinks he is. His enthusiasm for conveying this message blinds him to the fact that he’s not nearly as subtle as he believes himself to be.

So, the book. Despite a well structured outline-based TOC that Taleb shares with the reader early in the book, the message still manages to wander. Taleb’s premise that most people tend to mistake skill for luck, certainty for probability and signal for noise isn’t entirely off-base. Nor is it entirely original. Perhaps what makes Fortune Magazine call this One of the Smartest Books of All Time is that Taleb illustrates that investors and traders are just like everyone else in that they mistake skill for luck, etc.

Taleb concedes that our minds are not wired in such a way as to really discern skill from luck. Unfortunately, he refuses to acknowledge the vast amount of research that shows that people who attribute success to skill and failure to (bad) luck are in fact much happier than their peers. Whenever HH the Dalai Lama has an opportunity to drop some truth on a crowd, he makes a point of saying that “we’re here to be happy.” I’ll take the DL over Taleb as a source of wisdom any day. Taleb is charting a course for his own personal misery by choosing to be right instead of happy. Maybe that’s why he feels so obligated to parenthetically interject his success into the book. Knowledge isn’t wisdom, etc.

The one originally presented idea that makes me say this book is worth reading has to do with distilled thinking and the difference between noise and information. Taleb applies this idea to monitoring a stock portfolio, e.g. “Over a short time increment, one observes the variability of the portfolio, not the returns…one sees the variance and little else.” Meaning, even if your portfolio is doing well, if you look at it too frequently, you’ll see it go down almost as frequently as it goes up. I think about this same notion in the context of information in general (not as it pertains to my portfolio) but using the terms resolution and attention to describe it. What is the correct resolution vs. attention that a given object warrants? Do I need to hear about the war in Iraq for 10 minutes a day or read about it for 45 minutes a month? Do I need to check my aggregator every 5 minutes for new feed items or can I just let some feed items roll through without landing on my radar and instead just check my feeds once a week, still gleaning what is going on with the web?

Taleb’s book got me thinking a lot about attention (how long/frequently to look at something) and resolution (how deeply to look at something) and that’s a good thing. Hence, reading it wasn’t really a complete waste of time.

A couple weeks ago I came across a Postal Service remix of Mushaboom via http://webjay.org. After a few listens I bought the CD and have really been digging it.

Here is a link to Mushaboom via webjay. If you dig this track you’ll most definitely like her cover of the Bee Gee’s Inside and Out.

My first exposure to this album was to the cover of “handle with care.” I was really disappointed. However, in the context of the entire album the half-assed cover totally works. Difficult to explain why.

I’ve been enjoying the Rilo Kiley material for a couple of years now. Their song arrangements are especially interesting and the lyrics are always interesting. This album is a bit more country/gospel and the genre doesn’t provide for the same flexibility with arrangements but it does allow for the infectious lyrics to take center stage.