Aron 2 Blue

We listened to the second two books of the Cane Chronicles, from Rick Riordan, about Egyptian gods and their interactions with the Cane family on the drive to Florida for Thanksgiving. They are engrossing and entertaining. Interpreting the different gods in a modern context leads to fun characterizations, like Bast the cat god and Bas, the ugly dwarf who can scare things to death by yelling "boo". Also read the first Outlander book. I've watched the TV show, so there weren't any real surprises, but the comparison was interesting. Overall pretty good. Next: The Martian, by Andy Weir - I like it so far. The summary I heard of "magyver on mars" is pretty accurate - except he's just trying to survive.

I don't normally use Linux, so it's been an adventure trying to get Ubuntu configured on a persistent USB stick boot. Particularly using NVIDIA drivers, since that's what I need to test the OpenGL based volume renderer which is having the issue. I managed to make it boot to a black screen by removing said NVIDIA drivers. :( But I figured out that I can change the /boot/grub.cfg file following hints from another tutorial and just change 'quiet splash' to 'text' and it boots into the console. Now to see if I can install those nvidia drivers again.

Hmm, not memorable this far after the fact!

I keep meaning to post what I've read... Reality is Broken: Why are games so much more satisfying than real life? How can we make life more like a game to motivate game-players? Stuck in my mind: Tombstone hold-em, played in a cemetery to help use think about death in a non-depressing way. Headstones make up the two-card hold. Wings of Fire series - kids books, my son William read them first, dragons! 5 book series with each book told from the viewpoint of one of the 'dragonets of destiny', who are supposed to stop a dragon war. Lost years of Merlin - read aloud to my family. The Penderwicks - read aloud. Stuck: OAP == 'oldest available Penderwick' i.e. whose in charge, or who gets blamed. The Knowledge - still in progress - what you need to know to reboot civilization after it collapses for some reason. Cool distillation of many cool facts about technology and science. Did you know rubbing steel wool on a 9V battery can start a fire? Game of Thrones - f...

The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — but Some Don't, by Nate Silver. Amazon link . Do you know what Bayesian thinking is? It's a specific formula for figuring out how to predict something. Nate Silver has an interesting background, having tried professional gambling, and doing political forecasting at http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/ . I liked the variety, and examinations of how hard some things (like the stock market) are to predict, and how bad we are at estimating how well we predict things. Most people can't predict the stock market, but I can!  Thinking hard about how likely an event is lets you take new information into account to update your prediction, using a Bayesian method. I need to learn that formula... Recommended!

A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World, by Gregory Clark This is economic non-fiction, so it's not for everyone. I keep thinking about this one, a few months after I finished it. It seems that Clark thinks that Malthus had a completely correct theory about how economic development worked, that fell apart completely for all subsequent development, because of the industrial revolution. England led the industrial revolution because the upper class had more children, who pushed down into the middle and lower classes, diffusing the necessary work ethics and knowledge/ideals throughout British society. Hmm. The editorial reviews at Amazon are a clue...

Reads like a who-dunnit thriller. It's pretty amazing that Lewis can make derivatives and credit-default swaps engaging and understandable.I found it a really good survey of what got us into the 'great recession'. It's told from the perspective of the people who foresaw the collapse, and bet that it would happen by shorting stocks or buying investments on the other side. Some of them eventually understood that they were enabling the system by providing a market for some of these credit default swaps. Recommended for those who have an interest in this area!