Author: Eric Weiner

I forget who it was that had brought my attention to this book. Smart money is on Somsekhar Baksi. If you are inclined towards learning very quickly about some of the key points about quite a few philosophers – some of who, I guarantee you have not heard of and some you may not think of as a philosopher either (e.g. Gandhiji), this is a great read.

As always with every book, each time you read it, a few points hit home runs for you. One of those winners for me was actually from the author himself – not any particular philosopher. And it deals with 10 points about How to Grow Old.

Here are some memorable quotes from the book that might pique your interest.

1. Miles Kington – “Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad”
2. Albert Camus – “Suicide is the one truly serious philosophical problem”. Is life worth living or not?
3. Jacob Needleman – “The Heart of Philosophy” – “Our culture has generally tended to solve its problems without experiencing its questions.
4. John Stuart Mill – Pleasure Paradox – Happiness is a by-product, never an objective
5. Thoreau – Doubt is essential. It is the vehicle that transports us from one certainty to another.
6. Idealism – Everything we experience is a mental representation of the world, not the world itself. Physical objects only exist when we perceive them. (fridge light example)
7. Music speaks to the essence of life. An image of heaven even a secularized one, may or may not have paintings and statues. We take it for granted that there will be music.
8. We lead telephoto lives in a wide angle world
9. We lose objects suddenly, but experience the loss gradually.
10. Everyone hopes to reach old age, but when it comes most of us complain about it.

Book Review: Calendar – Humanity’s Epic struggle to Determine a True and Accurate Year
David Ewing Duncan

I am not sure who had referred me to this book, but it was in the comment section of some other Book Review I had written. Unfortunately, this book is not available in the digital format. I got the paper version, but since I do not often carry a book with me, I never got around to actually reading this. Till now.

A fascinating book on how we came up with calendars. The numerous mistakes, the number of lives lost (yes, just because of calendar design), the arbitrary dropping of dates in calendar (different countries did in different times) all make for a great read. The author narrates this more as a history lesson than anything else. And he does a great job.

He starts almost on a philosophical note when he talks about how today, we are constantly looking backward and forward in time but never contented with the present. In a way that our ancestors who tilled fields and lived and died according to the great cycles of nature would have never comprehended.

The story he takes us thru starts with the Cro-Magnon man. One of whom would have realized the curious nature of how the moon every night changed and came back to the same position ever so often (about 29 days) as evidenced in bones with telling marks from those days. And thus, almost all calendar journeys for us started with the moon and lunar calendars. Even to this date, lunar calendars are followed in many parts of the world (including my own Bengali calendar – which has been later adapted to take into account the sun’s movement).

Later, the need to take into account the “seasons” came in – especially as farming and harvesting became more prevalent. And that started the eternal struggle to figure out how to calculate a calendar year. Because any which way we divided the cycle of seasons (about 365 days and change) it could never fit well within an integral number of cycles of the moon (about 29 days and change). The resultant was that for the most of the our known human history, our seasons and equinoxes and all that never came “on time”. We were always in error.

The Babylonians, who were very good in astronomy compromised with a “lunisolar” year but it was the Egyptians that truly embraced the sun and ditched the moon to fix the “year”. They Mayans came up with an even more complicated calendar (it was a three calendar system). The Egyptians had figured out that there was another quarter day after 365 to make it a full year but they ignored it for the most part.

The Romans, in the meanwhile, were a mess. It was Caesar who after coming to help Cleopatra got to know about the Egyptian system and then more or less bulldozed a far more modern system in the Roman empire. Which continued for a fairly long time.

Eventually, biggest need for time accuracy that the West felt was the Easter date. The most sacred date at that point of time, celebrations of the same would have been blasphemy if it did not happen on the right date. Ironically, the calendar then was somewhat of a “secret” with the church having a stranglehold on it and they would announce dates often abruptly. Sometimes to favor themselves or kings they liked.

It was Constantine who gave the next big thrust to fixing a calendar year with the great conference in Nicaea that more or less standardized the calculation of the Easter day. It was a fairly onerous task involving nearly 15 equations.

Then came a long period of decline of the Church, the Roman Empire and the West in general. Meanwhile, Islam started their own calendar and the fact that the Indian and Chinese had their own calendars (all mostly moon based) came to the fore as knowledge of other lands started gaining a stronghold in the West.

While Aryabhata from India was a big influence in how the calendar eventually shaped up, the Indian civilizations biggest contribution to the calendar was possibly cracking the positional system. Like 365 means 3 hundreds, 6 tens and 5 unit. It seems so natural now – but imagine the world before that. Just think about the Roman numerals that we are so familiar with. Here is a paradox – even though the Indians knew and depicted fractions (one number up, one number down) – it is not known why they never cracked the decimal system (which is also positional) to represent fractions.

Interestingly, that simple twist delayed the calendar year determination. Basically, we did not know how to represent what we already knew (couldn’t write fractions !!). The Arabs cracked that problem and then they get the credit for calculating a year to the greatest accuracy in those days (12 digits after the decimal). The Europeans did not care about the importance of this “slip”. Incidentally, the person who calculated this is Omar Khayyam. Most of us in the West think of him as the brilliant poet. He was much more.

In the West, the Church continued to thwart efforts by others like Copernicus, Galileo to scientifically fix the year in what can be described as the Dark Ages of the Calendar. Eventually, Pope Gregory XIII called a Niceae style conference to resolve the Easter date once and for all. The person who gets full credit for solving the calendar problem finally is one doctor called Aloysius Lilius who was not even alive when the conference took place. His brother presented his case – with a lot of support from Clavius.

Just because this Gegorian calendar was enacted in 1582 does not mean everybody adopted it. The Protestant countries simply refused to, as an example – for no other reason than that it was done by the Catholic Pope! But the other reason was that this change involved dropping 10 days from the calendar to make adjustments to prior errors. Politicians, true to their colors, often used this to confuse the masses who were completely irate that somebody was “stealing 10 days of their lives”. England waited nearly 150 years! Japan adopted in 1873! Russia in 1918 !! China in 1949 !

And then in 1972, we switched to following the oscillations of a Caesium atom to determine a year (about 3 million trillion oscillations) for accuracy – and sometimes in a year adjust the clock by a second to take into account the variations in earth’s speed and tilt. But for the common man, we stay with the 365 days, one leap day every four years, but no leap day on the century year unless it is divisible by 400, in which case, we will have a leap day. For the most part, this will work out for the next 3 thousand years.

Two thumbs up! If anybody in Atlanta wants it, you can borrow my copy. (Too many highlighter marked passages though)

This book was referred to me by Juli Johnson from our company. I believe there is an audio book version of this. I am still a “you read a book, not hear it” kind of guy 🙂

First, this is a very atypical book for me to review – I usually do not study too many books that has to do with work. Second, I am very, very skeptical of any book or any person who tries to teach how to manage talent. My personal experience is that every human being is unique and trying to generalize anything as talent principles is at best, misguided. Remember those books from a few years back that were inspired by Jack Welch’s views on how to deal with the “bottom 10%”. Yes? Good. I am using some of them as doorstop for my music room. Right next to the books on Atkinson’s diet, Paleo diet etc.

Of course, the answer cannot be to throw away everything. You still need some kind of framework of thinking. The key point is to understand that every aspect of talent management is, in all likelihood, over generalization or sometimes, outright, wrong. In fact, most of the “research” cited have one common flaw – they cannot control for other variables. And when we talk about human beings – it is very difficult to control for “other” variables.

The point is to be aware of these flaws in any system. This allows one to recognize the limitations of the frameworks and therefore allows for judgmental calls. As infuriating as it can be (“Where is the fairness?”), evaluating any professional is fundamentally a subjective call. It is subjective depending on the rater, the rated and even the time when the rating is done.

If not anything else, this book will make you think of how deeply flawed our basic assumptions and often quoted, catchy phrases about Talent management is. I also want to suggest that the authors do not necessarily give answers that always make much sense to me. Some do. But maybe you will understand the others better than me.

Here are the top 9 Lies the authors want to highlight to you. The portions in [ ] are my comments. The rest are from the book.

Lie #1: People care which company they work for
People might care about which company they join, but after that, they care which team they are on.

Lie #2: The best plan wins
Company level plans do not predict the future. It merely tells you where you are. The world moves too fast for plans. What wins is providing data and intelligence (what is happening) to everybody quickly and accurately.

Lie #3: The best companies cascade goals
Company goals top down defeats the purpose. Better way would be show the employees what you value. And let the goal setting happen locally.

Lie #4: The best people are well rounded
[This one spoke a lot to me; I still get miffed by performance reviews that talk about Strengths and Weaknesses].
Best people are spiky. They excel in one or two things. Better than most. And they leverage this/these traits to produce outsize results. Uniqueness is a feature. Not a bug.

Lie #5: People need feedback
People need attention. Not feedback. The attention people need is to what they are doing best – not what they are not doing well. We all want to be seen for what we are best at.

Lie #6: People can reliably rate other people.
[This one spoke to me a lot too. If you get a chance, look up Idiosyncratic Rate Effect].
Most raters are terrible in judging others – if there was even a benchmark to measure against. They have deep biases and often are judging based on very little data. What we can reliably rate is our own experience.

Lie #7: People have potential
Like potential is a thing inherent to a person (like a trait). This is a function of the environment and opportunities as much as the person. Every brain is capable of learning – the speed differs based on the environment and opportunities. People have different momentum – we move through the world differently depending upon environment and opportunities.

Lie #8: Work-life balance matters most
Love in work matters most. That is what work is really for.

Lie #9: Leadership is a thing
[This, I found very interesting.]
There is no such thing as leadership skills. Take the name of 10 leaders and you will see there is no pattern to their traits. Some like Steve Jobs was even lacking in some basic ethics area. What does make a leader a leader – and this is a common trait – is that they have followers.
[The authors then spend quite a few pages on why people follow. I found that very intriguing.]

Highly recommend you read it if you care about talent issues.

I got interested in this book when I saw this in a picture of pile of books a school friend of mine had read thru during his bout of Covid in India. It is an interesting book but I would not suggest it for most people. People who are willing to understand the fallacies of arguments in a heated debate (but really can’t use it to make the other person change his/her mind) might find this interesting. It is like knowing the theory but not being able to put it to practice (or at least much of it).

That said, Eugenia – a British mathematician – does a good job of explaining what is logic, when it works, when it does not work and why it is often not an effective instrument in convincing the other person in a debate.

One quick point she brings upfront in the book is the difference between math and all other subjects. It is the use of logic that enables mathematicians to reach agreements that withstand the test of centuries whereas other subjects – notably science – is continuously refining its points of view.

Math uses logic and science uses evidence. Logical implication means that something is definitely true. Evidence simply means that it contributes to the probability that something is true. To be fair, she does point out that even in math, the whole construct of logic is built upon mutually agreed axioms.

Usually, logic fails due to involvement of emotions, too much data, too little data or too much randomness.

Logic is a great way to verify truth. But that is not the same as convincing others of truth. When we use language, the primary aim of normal language is to simply communicate (as opposed to the primary aim of logical language – which is to remove ambiguity). Verifying and conveying are two different things.

Again, read this is if you try to understand some of the background of why there are so many deeply formed divisive opinions – politics is a prime example today but religion used to be before. It is not going to make you any more effective in trying to change minds though.

The Intelligence Trap – Why smart people make dumb mistakes.

The title itself is enough to pick up the book from a shelf. Once you open it, you cannot keep it down. David’s story telling style (the story on the very first page will get you) and the explanation of research to lay it down to a layman why smart people have such dichotomy of deeply held beliefs – from vaccination to climate to evolution and so on is remarkable.

The book not only explains some of the evolutionary reasons of why and how our biases lead us down these parting ways but also spends quite a few pages explaining how you can try not falling in these traps.

Here are some interesting ideas from the book to pique your interest….

1. Core thesis is when we talk of intelligent people – we reflect on “analytical” intelligence. But judgment requires two other kinds of abilities – “creative intelligence” – ability to invest, imagine and suppose and “practical intelligence” – ability to plan and execute an idea to overcome life’s messy, ill formed problems in a pragmatic way – which needs one to have metacognition (judging your own strength and weakness) and read motives of others (often referred to as social or emotional intelligence)

2. Intelligent and educated people are less likely to learn from their own mistakes, are less able to recognize the flaws in their own logic and when they do err, they build elaborate arguments to justify their reasoning.

3. A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices

4. Academic tests are timed, usually. We are taught that speed of reasoning is a quality of our minds. Hesitation and indecision is undesirable. Being “slow” is stupid. And yet, hesitation, indecision and being slow is exactly what is required to understand one’s own error in judgment.

5. People with high IQs have shown to be equally likely to be in financial distress (miss mortgage payment, bankruptcy, credit card debt) as lower IQ people!!

6. “Myside bias” (confirmation bias) is highest when it speaks to our sense of identity. This explains why we come to very quick decisions (System 1 – or Fast Thinking) when it comes to opinions on religion, politics, nationality or even sports teams! Smart people do not apply their superior intelligence for truth seeking so much as promoting their interests or opinions. Greater education and intelligence simply helps people to justify their beliefs that match their points of views. This explains anti-vaxxers, climate deniers and evolution deniers. They are as intelligent as the other side.

7. Our beliefs are first borne out of emotional needs. Intellect kicks in later to rationalize.

8. Human thought are less about truth seeking. It is about persuading others to our point of view and be skeptical of the other side (most likely from evolution). Thus biased reasoning is not a side effect of increased brainpower – it is the reason for it.

9. “Experts” come with two big challenges – their inability to see the other side (goes against their sense of identity – see above) and others tend to believe them even when what they are saying has nothing to do with with their area of expertise. “The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world, the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt” – Bertrand Russell. Experts confuse their current level of understanding with their prior peak level of understanding. Therefore, they find it very difficult to to say “I do not know”.

10. Hearing the same opinion from different people has the same ability to convince you as hearing the same opinion from the same person repeatedly!!!

This guy – Somshekhar Baksi – is what you might call a Renaissance Man. My meeting a few years back is something I savor every moment reminiscing about it. Once a year, I get to talk to him on his birthday. (Which, regrettably ends when he realizes I have taken too much of his time). Today was no exception.

Our big topic today was Montaigne. If you are not much into philosophy, this is your cue to exit. Baksi – as we used to call him in our MBA school days – led me to yet another book – not Montaigne’s “Essays” per se… but the biography written by Sarah Bakewell.

This is what I came up on Page 1… Nothing has described why I blog about mundane details about my life better than this… Or why I will never write a book…

“shared self-revelation is the best way to develop trust and cooperation around the planet, replacing national stereotypes with real people.”

For, in describing what makes me different from anyone else, I simply reveal what I share with everyone else: the experience of being human. This idea—writing about oneself to create a mirror in which other people recognize their own humanity— while not unique, is often overlooked.

Nicholas is a renowned doctor and sociologist who has done some great research into Covid-19 and other pathogens. His research is detailed enough to show the map of rooms on the 9th Floor in the Hotel Metropole to show how the spread of the virus was fairly unpredictable. (who will get it and who will not).

He gets into some interesting descriptions of why people resort to not believing science or how pandemics end. How pandemics bring the worst out of humans and also the best out of humans. He also details how pandemics – this being no exception – mostly highlight and heighten inequality.

But mostly, he gives a gripping day by day account of what happened in the early stages of 2020 when we were learning about the virus for the first time.

A fascinating paragraph from the book:

“It is not clear why human beings should be favored to win against microbes in an evolutionary arms race. Microbes have been around a lot longer than humans, are far more numerous, do not mind dying and can mutate rapidly, evading our defenses.”

Some of the things you will learn about pandemics and pathogens:

1. Concept of IFR and CFR (infection fatality rate and case fatality rate) as well as RE and R0 (called R naught) to understand how bad a virus can be.And how the value of R0 defines what percentage of the population need to get vaccinated to reach herd immunity.

2. There are only seven types of coronavirus that infect humans. Four of them cause common cold!

3. SARS-1 was fundamentally different from SARS-2 since a SAR-1 patient could not infect BEFORE being symptomatic. (mismatch period was virtually 0)

4. Future mutations of virus get increasingly WEAKER not stronger. Due to Darwinian evolutionary pressures, it is AGAINST the interest of the virus to kill the host. It simply wants – like everybody else – to multiply and spread.

5. Irony in our education – we dedicate pages after pages in history books for wars – like World War 1 – and none for pandemics like the 1918 influenza. Yet the latter killed far more people than the former!!

6. The term “quarantine” goes back to the days when ships were kept offshore for 40 days in case there was an infection onboard. The number 40 has many references in the Bible (e.g. the flood that had Noah building the ark lasted 40 days)

7. Contrary to what most people think, medicine has actually played a surprisingly small role in the decline of most infectious diseases across time. In fact a vaccination was always found decades after the peak of deaths. We managed with socioeconomic improvements and public health measures

8. The book predates the Covid-19 vaccine. First time in our history, we have managed to find a medical solution (vaccine) with the pandemic barely completing a year. This once, medicine WILL play a big role in the decline of deaths. Which made me think – could it be that as we get into more respiratory pandemics (about once every 20 years), we will find medical solutions in a matter of a couple of months – ultimately technology triumphing the microbes?

9. While most pandemics are U shaped (if you plot age on X-axis and fatality on Y axis) or L shaped (and in some cases W shaped) – Covid-19 has been an exception in the sense, it is J shaped (fatality rises sharply at the older ages).

10. The author predicts that our practice of shaking hands in the Western world will go the way of spittoons in movie halls and cigarette smoking in airplanes.

11. The reason why we had toilet paper shortages is not entirely explainable by hoarding. In fact, in a 24 hour day, taking away 8 hours of sleep, with no office to go to, time spent in home doubled (from 8 to 16). Increasing demand for TP in every home by a factor of two (moved the demand from office bathrooms to home bathrooms). But the supply chain for paper products to home versus office are completely different and it takes a lot of time to switch!

12. 38% of Americans believe that God created humans in their present form sometime in the last ten thousand years! Over 25% Americans believe that the sun revolves around the earth!! And 61% cannot identify Big Bang as the origin of the universe.

13. All modern plagues are zoonoses coming to us from wild animals. Our other major contagious diseases (smallpox, TB, measles etc) came to us from animals we have domesticated.

Anyways, I hope you will enjoy it as much as I did. Two thumbs up for this book.

As mentioned before (see here) this is a book recommended to me by Avi Basu. As I had mentioned there, the author’s basic premise is that while we remember an invention for its immediate effect, in reality, there are a lot more profound downstream effects that we do not pause to realize. One example he talked about was how the printing press led to telescopes and microscopes. In a fashion that you will fail to connect – even after I tell you that one led to the other.

He calls this the “hummingbird effect”.

The six “inventions” the author focuses on are Glass, Cold (as in air conditioning), Sound (recreation of sound), Clean (-liness), Time and Light.

To me, the book starts on a high note, maintains the level of excitement for a couple of more chapters but towards the end (Time and Light), I found the discussions to lose the energy and sometimes the point the author was trying to make to be a little abstruse.

But that should not take away any merit from the very interesting and unique way Steves has tried to tie together the tapestry of various inventions.

Did you know that the world renowned glass making island of Murano (we visited in 2015 and got this from there) was a result of protecting public safety? (the glassmakers were banished there)

Did you know the origins of air conditioning included cutting up huge ice pieces from lakes in Massachussetts and then shipping them to the tropics? The invention of air conditioning not only circulated air molecules, it circulated people too! Hitherto barren lands – now called Texas, Florida and California rapidly saw people move there due to the tolerable temperatures that could be created inside. Florida went from less than a million people in 1920s to the Top 4 populous state in under 50 years!

This has had a very interesting effect – on Presidential Elections!! The redistributing of electoral colleges that air conditioning effected decisively moved election attention to the Sun Belt.

The ability to recreate sound quickly gave rise to the radio and then jazz. The author asserts that jazz – which created overnight celebrities (mostly Africa-Americans) led to a profound breakthrough – for the first time, white America welcomed African-American culture into its living room. Eventually paving the path to the birth of the civil rights movement.

In another interesting example, the author traces how a dangerous and unauthorized experiment with chlorine (lime) released into a New Jersey water tank proved the thesis a John Seale had – chlorine disinfects water of its contamination – and how that eventually led to people taking daily showers (a rather modern less-than-100-year practice in the USA). Which then led water to be used for as social entertainment – the swimming pool – which then led women to shed multiple layers of clothing that was the common practice to exposing almost all skin in public in a very short period of time!!

Go figure!!

One interesting point in the book – while we remember a person for an invention (Edison for light bulb, as an example), it is rarely one person who actually invents anything. (In fact, Edison did not invent the lightbulb but that is a story for another day). All inventions are fundamentally built on work (and other inventions) done by others and sometimes within a small period of time, multiple people invent the same thing. The time and forces of nature are just right at that point.

Easy reading. Recommend it.

This time it is a recommendation from Avi Basu – Steven Johnson’s “How We Got To Now”. This book focuses on six inventions and the surprising downstream long term changes they have brought – “Hummingbird Effect” – as he calls it. These are inventions that you will not come up with very quickly – glass, air conditioning etc.

And that is his point – while we easily understand the short term, immediate effect of these inventions, if you think thru it a few more steps, you will realize that the long term effects have been profound for these seemingly innocuous inventions. As an example, he cites how the printing press gave way to our understanding of the edges of the universe.

While the connection is not apparent at first, the author points out how spread of printed material made people realize they are farsighted (could not read as well the smaller scripts) which gave rise to glasses (lenses) which gave rise to microscopes on one end and telescopes on the other. Without the need to read the small print so often, we would have never stumbled upon lenses, the author argues.

Will continue to enjoy reading the book by the fire the next few evenings.

This is an absorbing book if you have any cursory interest in numbers and how they came about. Alex Bellos, a British journalist has a good story telling style and presents fairly well some of the mysteries behind numbers.

For example, did you know…
… if we did not go thru math classes, we would naturally think of numbers in logarithmic scale? We would think 1,2,3, a few, many… We understand ratios better than differences. (Remember that example from a previous post on why we would not walk 50 yards to buy a car for one buck less but will do so for a 2-buck coffee?).

… that base 10 is very inconvenient? 12 is the most convenient base (explaining 60 minutes to an hour, 12 inches to a foot…). But 10 became standard because it was easier to count with our fingers that way. Ever wondered why a finger is also called a ‘digit’?

… there are some fascinating stories about Pi. You can read about them in a prior post here

… why do we call a variable “x”? Originally we used upper case vowels for variable and consonants for constants. Descartes switched to lower case. He denoted variables from the end… “z”, “y”… and constants from the front “a”, “b”… But while publishing his book, the printer started running out of “z”s and asked if he could use “x”. (there was not much use of “x” in words). Descartes replied that he did not care. The rest became history. If not for the printer running out of letters, we could have had Z-Rays to check your chest infection today or Malcolm Z !!

… what an ambigram is? See this post on how I now have started writing my name in ambigram.

… that the largest number smaller than 1 simply does NOT exist?

… that leaves tend to sprout out at 137.5 degrees relative to the previous leaf? (if you see from the top of the shoot) This is rooted in the Golden Ratio and Fibonacci sequence. (It maximizes the sunlight the plant can get regardless of the number of leaves)

… (speaking of Fibonacci numbers)… that most flowers have petals that is a number in the Fibonacci sequence? So do the spirals in a pineapple, spruce cones, sunflowers…

This and many other fascinating facts that our teachers never used to make math really interesting to us can be found in this book. You do not need to know math to enjoy this easy reading book

Highly recommend it.