Tiger of the Snows, the autobiography of Tenzing of Everest
by Tenzing Norgay, with James Ramsey Ullman, 1955

Very interesting throughout. The autobiography of the Sherpa who summited Everest with Hilary in 1953. Tenzing was born in Nepal and raised in India and went on lots of different expeditions with both Easterners and Westerners, so he learned to speak a lot of languages. He knew English well enough to dictate the book to the writer Ullman, which was necessary because, despite speaking many languages, Tenzing could not read or write. His native Sherpa language does not have a written form.

It took the work of hundreds of porters, Sherpas, and climbers and a lot of oxygen tanks to get two people to the top of Everest. Ambitious endeavor. I don’t think I would like being in such wind/cold for weeks at a time and having to climb ice tethered to other climbers. I’ll stick with the more reasonable peaks I’ve done in Colorado.

Interesting note about the copy of the book I have: I got it from my dad when everyone moved out of my childhood house a couple years ago. It’s a library copy from the Pikeville, KY High School Library, with a 14-day checkout occurring to Mike Webb on October 27, 1970. Oops. What’s the statute of limitations on that fine?

Powering the Future: How we will (eventually) solve the energy crisis and fuel the civilization of tomorrow
by Robert B. Laughlin, 2011

An interesting little book full of tidbits that make you say “What?!”. Lots of best-guesses about what will happen when fossil fuels are exhausted in the coming centuries. Laughlin has a smart way to think about it: certain already developed technologies will provide a ceiling on energy/electricity costs that new technologies will have to beat to be competitive.

The book has 122 pages of text and 91 pages of notes, so you go in depth on a lot of the claims if you wanted. I did not do this.

Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World
by Michael Lewis, 2012

I listened to this book on tape, and it was more entertaining than I was expecting. You get to hear Michael Lewis making fun of Icelandic, Irish, and Greek people. You get to understand a little bit about what caused their meltdowns and cultural inefficiencies. And you get to make fun of California at the end.

Be responsible with money.

Energy for Future Presidents
by Richard A. Muller, 2013

I highly recommend this book as an even-handed look at new energy technologies and as a suggestion for future energy policies. It has a good discussion of shale gas and oil, nuclear energy, climate change, energy security, promising renewables, and not-so-promising innovations (hydrogen fuel cells, electric vehicles, etc). Very well-written.

Cloud Atlas
by David Mitchell, 2004

This is a guest book review from Maria:

Last week was my spring break, and I had committed to reading Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell (recommended and borrowed from a friend) during the break. Eric and I had tried to watch the movie several months ago, but like some other discs from the library we’ve encountered, it was unfortunately too scratched up to watch. We had some glimpses of characters and pieces of the music, but no idea what was happening.

I read the book almost straight through in about 10 hours. It’s a thick book and I read pretty quickly, but I literally could not put it down. I even read it while making and eating lunch (which I almost forgot to eat because I was simply in another world within the book). It was incredibly engrossing. I had to know where it was leading and what would happen next.

The story follows multiple incarnations of the same character across the span of time. Each story is somehow connected to the next story in line, and by extension all the stories following it. The book is built up like a bunch of open parentheses followed, eventually, by each mated pair. It was both fun and excruciating to read like that, because cliffhangers are great literary tools but all I want to get to is the resolution. (Also, I am a computer scientist and open parentheses make me uncomfortable when I don’t see the closing one.) The stories themselves are all really interesting and set both in the past and the future. Reading some of the dialect is difficult but doable once you get a few pages in. There are some overarching themes (anti-slavery/freedom, knowledge, time/history repeating itself, reincarnation). The book itself also references other pieces the author has written (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_Atlas_%28novel%29#Structure_and_style), which is neat and totally something I would do if I wrote novels.

I think it would be harder to watch the movie and almost impossible to listen to this on CD. I needed to reference the end of the first half of each story to remember what exactly had been happening when it left off to go into the next story (even though I had read that story just a few hours prior). I would recommend checking out the Cloud Atlas Sextet that was written for the movie, though.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdiLxyGH8Lg
It’s beautiful music.

I recommend reading Cloud Atlas, especially if you have some time to devote to it.

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies
by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, 2014

The abilities of machine learning/artificial intelligence have improved greatly lately. You can expect the abilities of computers to continue to grow exponentially. This book calls the economic upheaval caused by computers “The Second Machine Age”, with the first machine age being the physical abilities of machines in industry and on assembly lines. Just as the first machine age displaced the jobs of many manual workers, you can expect the second machine age to displace the jobs of many intellectual workers. Are the computers/robots coming for your job? Maybe not immediately, but probably eventually.

I’m fascinated by what is going to happen when a significant portion of the population (the proportion that does not play well with technology) is totally unemployable. Their skills, if any, are unneeded because computers/robots have automated away their job. Is this portion already at 5%? What if it hits 40% due to automation of more jobs? A huge amount of people are employed as drivers of some sort. Self-driving cars are probably 5-20 years away. Who’s going to pay for a driver when self-driving cars/trucks/taxis are cheaper and safer? And that’s just one technology. What if 90% of people are eventually not employed and all money goes to 10%? Vast inequality should be planned for. Will we institute a minimum income for everyone? Will we vastly expand social programs? What happens?

I listened to this book on CD. I thought it was pretty interesting, though it does start slow. The links below are related and supplementary.

Relevant other books/links:
The Great Stagnation by Tyler Cowen
Average is Over by Tyler Cowen
Video: Humans Need Not Apply by C.P.G. Grey

Event History Modeling: A Guide for Social Scientists
by Janet M. Box-Steffensmeier and Bradford S. Jones

This book covers event history modeling in depth. It was suggested by George Ball during his job talk at IU. I needed the insights provided by this book for better understanding of my call center project. In that project, we are looking at the determinants of how long a customer will stay on hold once they hear an announcement about the expected wait. We model the patience of the customer as certain covariates vary. This book encompasses the field of survival analysis, which is named for the medical literature that studies how certain covariates affect survival rates.

The book is about 200 pages, and I highly recommend it for someone that is new to survival analysis or event history modeling. It covers the Cox Proportional Hazards model in depth, along with various parametric models. It covers issues of model selection, time-varying covariates, mis-specified models that go against assumptions, heterogeneity, and multiple events. Of most use to me was Chapter 8, which discusses diagnostic methods for determining if your model is performing properly. I will apply these methods to my project to ensure it is working as expected (and to appease referees).

Einstein’s Dreams
by Alan Lightman, 1992

Lightman’s novel is short, but beautiful. Every five pages gives a different description of time in an alternative universe. Some are familiar, others are strange or terrifying.

This is a good book for a lazy afternoon when you want to take your mind off of your typical troubles.

Calico Joe
by John Grisham, 2012

In a departure from judicial dramas, John Grisham wrote a book about the personal effects of a beanball. Maria and I listened to this, on CD, last weekend, just in time for Spring Training. The story weaves a pair of fictional baseball players (one hero and one villain) into the real world of 1970’s baseball. The villain, motivated by a number of personal shortcomings and perceived slights, throws a beanball at the hero. The hero is hit in the face, and his promising but short career is ended. The story catches up with the characters 30 years after the incident to see if closure can be obtained.

While I appreciate baseball books and most of John Grisham’s stuff, this isn’t his best work by a long shot. A lot of the backstory on the narrator (the villain’s son) just makes you want to cringe, while the closure at the end seems like an odd combination of predictable and unrealistic.