Fingerprints of God

I added this book to my wishlist after hearing the story about the book on NPR. Almost two years later, I finally read it. It's very interesting. You get to read about all sorts of spiritual experiences people had, like encounters with God, near death experiences, spiritual conversions... and then an explanation of what's going on from the neurological perspective. There were quite a few interesting stories. The writer shares her own spiritual experience, which wasn't quite as interesting, but relevant. The book comes down to the idea that there's a part of the brain that seems to be involved in pretty much everyone's spiritual experiences, which Hagerty likens to piece audio hardware, and poses the question is it more like a radio, receiving real signals from a real God (some people's radios work better than others) or is it more like a CD player, where everything is just in our heads?

Here's a link to the story on NPR: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=104466652

Water for Elephants

It was entertaining. It didn't get into circuses or elephants as much as I hoped it would. The love story was a little weak. I'll be interested to see how they handle the "twist ending" in the movie... probably after it's on netflix and it makes its way through my queue.

The End of Overeating

Got a little repetitive after a while, but it had some interesting ideas and facts. Some really revealing things about the food industry. Like how a lot of the food we eat when we go out have been essentially engineered to be addictive. Foods are described as layers of salt, fat, and sugar, and this layering has a special affect on our brains. 
They keys seem to be to recognize what food really is, and also to change our attitude towards food. Of course to do any of that, you need to think to do it, first. You'll probably like this book if you liked Fast Food Nation or Omnivore's Dilemma.

Mobile blog

Using blogger app on phone. Expect (not so) great things!

Nothing to Envy

Lately I've been fascinated by North Korea.  There's been a lot of news lately about what has to be one of the strangest countries in the world, and I like keeping up with the latest news items that pop up around the internet. Most things you'll see online are pretty short, though. Little snippets of news here and there.  This book tells the stories of a few defectors from North Korea, I think maybe 5 or so.  They're all from around the same region of the country, and you learn a lot about what their lives were like growing up, surviving the famines (called "the Arduous March" by North Koreans) in the 90's, how they got by as the country deteriorated, how they escaped, and a little about what their lives are like now, outside of North Korea.  Their stories are amazing, like how they survived and how they escaped, yet familiar; they deal with the same family relationship issues as any of us, though with the added twist if they were ever to be marked as "counter-revolutionary", truthfully or not, the whole family is punished, 3 generations.  Reading this book made me think about how similar these people are to me, yet from such a completely different world.  Also made me imagine what my life would have been like if my grandparents never made it to South Korea before the war.  Well I guess I would have never existed because my mother's family is from the South, but anyway... This was a very interesting book, and it was not hard to read.  You might imagine it would read like a very long news article, but the writer makes an effort to narrate the stories so that it's almost like a novel.  There's even a bit of a love story, so, something for everyone, haha.

The Wisdom of Crowds

I started this book much earlier this last year (happy new year!), but finally finished it during our long flights to and from California over the Christmas holiday.  The general idea of the book is how the collective wisdom of a diverse and independent group is better than even the most expert member of the group when solving particular sorts of problems.  It also shows how when some of those conditions of the components of the group, like diversity and independence, are absent, the results can be disastrous. It uses a lot of interesting and contemporary topics like economic bubbles and the SARS epidemic as examples.  It also touched on some ideas about our (sometimes quite irrational) social behaviors that I found interesting, like how people will act irrationally (from an economic point of view) to punish what they deem as unfair behavior, which acts to help improve the wisdom of the crowd.  Also interesting are some of the ways that people have tried to harness the wisdom of crowds by aggregating the groups knowledge using a market, to do things like help make company decisions or to try to predict events like elections results.  I think that we're all somewhat pre-wired to rely on the wisdom of the crowd.  Like when making a big ticket purchase, we like to go with bestsellers, since presumably they wouldn't be bestsellers if they weren't good buys.  Surowiecki explains how from an evolutionary standpoint it is advantageous for members of a society to work this way.  It allows for specialization and more efficient use of individuals knowledge.  Of course, we do have our own brains, and we ought to think for ourselves, too.  At the least, Surowiecki's analysis of the conditions required for the crowd's decision to be of high quality helps us to look out for cases when it might not be the best idea to go with the crowd.