Recent Reading

I read a bunch of really good books lately, most of them recommended to me.
The first was MoneyBall, by Michael Lewis, which was about a paradigm shift in baseball revolving around accurate evaluations of players worth, and the market inefficiencies created by the subjective valuation that was occuring in most of the league as the Oakland A's bought out all of the undervalued players from both the majors and the minor leagues. I found it particularly interesting as a discussion of applied markets theory.

Another particularly good book was Amusing Ourselves to Death, by Neal Postman. While a bit overly pessimistic (though, scarily, I found it to be particularly realistic,) it stands as the only real refutation of the institution of television that I have read. It was particularly well formulated, while attempting to rely as little as possible on moral judgements, pointing out taht there has been a shift in the way popular culture behaves that can be traced to the limited modes of discussion used by the public when most Americans receive almost all of their information from television.

And in a rather different vein, A Discourse on the Nature of Reason, by Rene Descartes. He discusses his attempt to create a completely non-subjective frame of reference, by doubting everything possible and attempting to reason from the famous "I think, therefore I am" to, as Douglas Adams put it, "[deduce] the existence of rice pudding and income tax." While the first part was very interesting (particularly his description of the way he invented cartesian geometry) the later sections dealt much more with anatomy, which was only interesting in terms of the theories of why blood moved in the fashion it does.

Anyways, That's my most recent reading list.