Another great book by Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.
Goes through time and around the world and looks at how societies build up and how most inevitably collapse. My favorite chapter was on Easter Island - I think of it as a barren landscape w/ cool statues, but as the book […]

I recently read Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything and it was a good, quick, fun, intriguing read.
Each chapter goes over an interesting “economic” analysis of a non-traditional area for such analysis. The most controversial chapter looks at the reason for a dip in crime in the 90’s, and […]

It has been years since I’ve read any biographies or autobiographies, but on the same trip to London recently I read iCon Steve Jobs : The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business in one direction and Chronicles, vol 1 by Bob Dylan in the other direction.
These books couldn’t be more different: iCon was […]

I recently read Guns, Germs, and Steel and it was great. He talks about the development of mankind from thousands of years ago, and the effect geography and luck had on human development.
One classic great section was covering the period around the year 1300 when something like 20 Spainards were taking over the Inca empire […]

On my recent trip to London I read “iCon: Steve Jobs The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business”.
It was a nice fun read - I haven’t read any other books on Steve Jobs, nor have I followed his career too closely, and unfortunately I’ve never owned a Mac either :(.
Assuming the […]

Dom is doing a great job of telling about his misadventures in China.
I just got back from a quick trip to London for a 2 day meeting. I left LAX at 8am Sunday, arrived at 8am Monday in London, and was in mtgs for ~ 2 days.
While Dom’s dealing with rip off taxi drivers and […]

I liked this quote:

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards

And this Zen-like wording:

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness […]

I was at a trade show in Nice, France in May and had some free time on and off to walk around. I really enjoyed the Old Town area - in fact, I find the rest of Nice too urban.
The best discovery was the yummy street food: Socca. A French guy described it as […]

This was a fun article in the LA Times yesterday: Poker Faced. It was suprising to me that they act like Poker bots are not that good and that bluffing is important even for a computer which knows the odds perfectly.
On my reading list is The Challenge of Poker and other papers from […]

This is a reference to an article on stock options:
stock options and the lying liars who dont want to expense them