I’m doing a school visit in CT tomorrow and have just heard from the teacher of one of the classes I’m visiting that a very religious student will not be able to attend if I read anything about magic, um, I mean witchcraft. Oy. Now I have sections I can read that have no magic in them at all, but I don’t think I’ll be able to talk about my books much if we have to keep steering the conversation away from magic. Magic is what my books are about.
Why are so many religions so terrified of temptation? Isn’t religion supposed to strengthen you against temptation?
Fear and faith must go hand in hand.
Not a fantasy novel, The Black Swan is a non-fiction polemic about randomness and the inapplicability of the bell curve to the real world. Although I completely agree with the premise, this 300 page book could have been as well done in about 50. Taleb is actually much more interested in showing off how much he knows about everything, and making up metaphors and thought experiments that make no sense, and never really explaining what he’s talking about (except in three late chapters which he actually suggests non-technically inclined readers should skip), than he does in actually making his case.
Which is a good one. The bell curve doesn’t work in assessing risk at all. As the fincial markets proved last year.
My latest blog post is up over at SFNovelists.
Interesting Op-Ed piece by Calvin Trillin in today’s NYTimes: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/14/opinion/14trillin.html?ref=opinion
What makes it doubly interesting is that I’ve heard the first part of the argument before. Often. Trillin is of my father’s generation, and my father always said the same thing. The smart guys he knew were all lawyers or doctors or academics. None of them went into banking.
And then in the ’80s the bankers started making more money than anyone else and everything changed
“Because the plastic brain can always allow brain functions that it has brought together to separate, a regression to barbarism is always possible, and civilization will always be a tenuous affair that must be taught in each generation and is always, at most, one generation deep.”
Norman Doidge, The Brain That Changes Itself.
Even cooler, she’s a political scientist, not an economist.
I used to like this movie. Not any more. I just get crankier and crankier as I age. Never realized Welles could be so much like David Lynch, and if you think I like nothing, some day I’ll tell you how much I don’t like David Lynch. Art Noir is not my cup of tea.
I worship the guy and all, but this seems a little premature. From what I’ve read, the prize seems to have been awarded more to tweak W’s nose than because of anything Obama has done, and that’s not a good reason to award so prestigious a prize. And this from the same clowns who gave the prize to Begin and Sadat years ago when Carter was the one who did all the work.
On the other hand, the literature award has been more political than literary lately. Maybe they should just have given Obama the literature award and the other guy the peace prize.
The Republican whackos are going to have a field day with this.
No, I do not mean she is the official hunting dog of a city in Germany. I mean that this beautiful, speedy whippet, a dog who might have hunted with Diana herself, likes to sniff along at the grass, dig up whatever worms she smells, and then rub her back on their squiggly sliminess.
We still think of her as a princess.
