…the silent peer pressure of my book group led me to finish the book. You can certainly write a book with unlikeable characters, but to have this dislike spring from their passivity, rather than their actions (yes, yes, taking no action is, in effect, acting, I know), spells disaster for a rambling tome of 540 pages.
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I’d certainly take a dislike to a character who only finishes book because of peer pressure. Is there a lot of book peer pressure these days? Does the new trotting out stories of people waiting at midnight to buy the latest Harry Potter count as peer pressure? Only if you think they are your peers. And perhaps one can choose peers more carefully…
April 8th, 2008
There’s a 95% chance that Super Crunchers will increase my understanding of statistical analysis by 75%. I’m just saying I had to pick one class to sleep through in school, and math was a frequent victim. This book has some great examples of predictive uses for deep stat analysis and how it almost always seems to trump intuition. It’s a step up in knowledge for those of us not so statistically astute - or who thought we were, and need some schooling in that regard.
This book also has more uses of the term “Super Crunchers” than any other written work in human history. The writing led one to keep on reading, and it’s a rapid lesson on how to make use of big piles of data, but Ian Ayres sure loves that phrase. It might be explained by the plans by General Mills for Super Crunchers breakfast cereal. The shapes inside include percentage signs, marshmallow graphs, and strawberry standard deviations.
April 1st, 2008
