I know, I can’t believe I’d never read it before now either. It’s great stuff, although the descriptive travelogue sections are a little eye-glazing. Overall I think I prefer 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, but the ending of Around the World in 80 Days is supremely well crafted.
You don’t look for complex characterisation in adventure stories like this, so I was unsurprised by the numerous similarities between Captain Nemo and Phileas Fogg, who are both of a rather fantastic type: silent, stong, deeply rational, and almost superhuman in their abilities. They both sprang to mind when I was, quite coincidentally, reading this article about psychopaths, found floating around on Reddit this morning. I couldn’t help thinking that Phileas Fogg has quite a few psychopathic character traits, so I decided to do an evaluation of his personality using a completely unscientific method based very loosely on the PCL-R checklist lifted from the Wikipedia page on psychopathy.
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1 comment 2007-05-25 11:46 Categories: Books, Reviews
Many of the chapters in Irrationality end with a succinct list of morals
detailing how one should act when attempting to behave rationally. Here are three typical examples:
Think carefully before announcing a decision publicly: you will find it harder to change.
No matter how much time, effort or money you have invested in a project, cut your losses if investing more will not be beneficial.
Don’t take important decisions when under stress or strong emotion.
Stated like this they appear stunningly obvious, yet throughout this splendid book Stuart Sutherland details numerous cases of people and organisations acting directly counter to these sorts of basic rational principles. Each moral is set out as a response to a particular flavour of irrationality demonstrated every single day by supposedly intelligent human beings the world over.
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2 comments 2007-05-23 19:29 Categories: Books, Geek Stuff, Reviews, Science & Maths
In chapter three of Reckoning With Risk, Gigerenzer recites a famous quotation, habitually attributed to H.G. Wells, by way of justification for his book:
Statistical thinking will one day be as necessary for efficient citizenship as the ability to read and write.
Perhaps Wells was being unduly optimistic. That day has not yet arrived: most people (myself included) get away from school without understanding the most basic statistical principles. Gigerenzer is not labouring under any illusion as to our abilities as statistical thinkers, and he expands on themes dealt with in works like John Allen Paulos’s excellent Innumeracy to reveal some worrying areas of general ignorance. (more…)
0 comments 2007-05-19 13:07 Categories: Geek Stuff, Reviews, Science & Maths
Opening an Ali Smith novel is risky when you have an important meeting at half-nine the next day; if you’re anything like me you may well end up awake until four in the morning because once you’ve started the thing you can’t actually get to sleep without finishing it. A story of questions and mysteries, Like is Smith’s first novel, and whilst it may not be as ambitious or expansively inquisitive as Hotel World or The Accidental, it is as well realised in its own way as either of those later works, and is just as hard to put down.
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0 comments 2007-05-16 12:49 Categories: Books, Reviews