Well, I've actually been reading bits and pieces of a fair amount of books, but I read The Signal and the Noise today and thought I'd blog on just this one.
First off, I will be submitting my resume and cover letter as requested since I was able to pick out the two actual stock market charts from the random data. To me it was incredibly obvious, but I was looking at it visually and not trying to make any judgments on the data. The actual market charts weren't as bold. They were thin and pretty. But I'd have to see more to judge whether it was just luck or not, but I'm pretty sure I could do it again.
Aside from that, I really liked the book. I feel that more people should read it and start thinking about their own biases. Actually, the housemate/coworker that actually owns this book needs to read it immediately. We had a pretty heated discussion at one point and just about every single thing we talked about is brought up in this book. Though I'm not sure he should at this point since I labeled him a hedgehog and if he reads the book he'll know what I mean. But then he'll understand about Laplace's demon and chaos theory and uncertainty and it would just be brilliant all the way around.
I must admit I zoned out a bit when reading about baseball. I'm not a baseball person. I can barely tolerate soccer on a good day, and I'll only seek to watch a few late season football games if my team is playing (Who Dat! ...sorry, I'm so, so sorry...) But even when he was talking about sports, his writing was engaging, even for someone like me who zones out at the mere mention of baseball.
The chapters on meteorology and chaos theory were my favorite, but I think that just might be because that was the success story and I like success stories. I like the idea that things can be predicted if we have the correct model and can analyze the correct data. That's one of my biases, and I know it.
The only thing I dislike about the book is that the black ink of the cover is now on my finger tips. It looks like I'm growing a strange mold and it's not scrubbing off. I feel like I've just read a particularly inky newspaper.
We're about to be moving to a new home/office soon, so I'm going to be fairly busy and I might only be able to blog about snippets of things I've read. I don't even have time for tinykittens.com right now between the move and creating widgets from biodigitalhuman.com!
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