Books
I've been fortunate to read some extremely interesting books lately, and here they are (listed in order of preference, at least for me, but they're all good reads):Fortune's Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System that Beat the Casinos and Wall Street (William Poundstone)
Goofy title, great book. It's a detailed look at the research of Claude Shannon, creator of information theory (and someone whose intellect was ranked near Einstein's), as well as some of his cohorts, particularly physicist John Kelly and mathematician Edward Thorp.
You might think that the lives of mathematicians and physicists are bland, but these guys certainly steamroll that stereotype. Edward Thorp is the man who analyzed blackjack and realized that a counting cards system could actually give a mathematical edge to the player. He also wrote "Beat the Dealer," a book which explained the counting system and led to Las Vegas outlawing card counters (as well as taking other steps to be sure they couldn't be successful). Thorp went on to run the Princeton-Newport Partners hedge fund, which was one of the most profitable hedge funds in history. Kelly, meanwhile, devised something called the "Kelly formula," which was a mathematical way to determine the most profitable amount of a bet (or stock market investment) under any set of circumstances.
These guys were involved with mobsters and white collar criminal legends (Michael Milken) and everybody in between. It's amazing how many lives they touched, both personally and through the brilliance and far-reaching implications of their work.
Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly (Anthony Bourdain)
This is way out of my regular subject areas, but DQ reader Mark recommended it and he was right. It's written by a chef, it's about life as a chef (at some prestigious restaurants), and it's both scathing and profane. And very, very funny. You will find out restaurants are not only stranger than you imagine, but they are stranger than you can imagine (apologies to Arthur Eddington, although I'm quite certain you're dead, sir).
You'll also find out why you never want to order fish on Monday.
True Story (Michael Finkel)
This is a true story with some of the oddest circumstances I've ever seen. In the same week that Journalist Michael Finkel was exposed for falsifying parts of an article he'd written for the New York Times Magazine, he found out that Christian Longo (who murdered his family) had assumed his identity in Mexico while he had been on the run from the police. This led Finkel to contact Longo, and the course of their relationship over the next several years is both fascinating and discomforting at the same time.
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