52 Books: Book 33

It's been a while since I wrote a book post. It has not been from a lack of reading, the two books on my night stand both happened to be over 400 pages and Moby Dick has proven to be quite tedious at times. Hopefully I will wrap it up in the next week.

The other book in my possession was What the Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell. First off I have to say that I adore Gladwell's style of writing and his way of looking at the world. Tipping Point and Blink rocked my world and Outliers was good {though I didn't like it as much as these other three books}.

What the Dog Saw follows the same structure as the previous books, looking into the psychology and economics of why things are the way they are. It is my favorite way of looking at the world.

This book covers topics like: the collapse of Enron; the effect birth control has had on increasing the risk of cancer in women; what really constitutes plagiarism; can homelessness be solved by getting rid of soup kitchens and homeless shelters; and are pit bulls really dangerous… it really makes you think. 

I enjoyed every moment and I am sad that my journey with Gladwell is over.

Excerpts from the book:

...we associate the willingness to risk great failure – and the ability to climb back from catastrophe – with courage. But in this we are wrong... there is more courage and heroism in defying the human impulse, in taking purposeful and painful steps to prepare for the unimaginable.

The world is not the world it was. And some of the risks that go with the benefits of a woman getting educated and not getting pregnant all the time are breast cancer and ovarian cancer, and we need to deal with it.

Simply running soup kitchens and shelters allows the chronically homeless to remain chronically homeless.

Under copyright law, what matters is not that you copied someone else's work. What matters is what you copied, and how much you copied. Intellectual-property doctrine isn't a straightforward application of the ethical principle "Thou shalt not steal." At its core is the notion that there are certain situations where you can steal.

"creeping determinism" – the sense that grows on us, in retrospect, that what has happened was actually inevitable – and that the chief effect of creeping determinism is that it turns unexpected events into expected events.

In the real world, intelligence is invariably ambiguous. Information about enemy intentions tends to be short on detail. And information that is rich in detail tends to be short on intentions.

Making warning systems more sensitive reduces the risk of surprise, but increases the number of false alarms, which in turn reduces sensitivity.

...sometimes genius is anything rarefied; sometimes its just the thing that emerges after twenty years of working at your kitchen table.

What does it say about a society that it devotes more care and patience to the selection of those who handle its money than of those who handle its children?

The dogs that bite people are, in many cases, socially isolated because their owners are socially isolated, and they are vicious because they have owners who want a vicious dog.