ranjit mathoda's recent posts

Recent public posts (showing 1-20 of 29).

Oh I don't think the Baroque cycle is a particularly easy read. Not like Snow Crash (that still has to be the most fun of his books). But somewhere in his discourse on semantic machines and what life was like amongst the French aristocracy and how banking arose among the Dutch and how to make steel I was like holy crap I'm learning a lot from this.

Cryptonomicon was cool, but Stephenson's Baroque Cycle books left me in awe of how much the guy knows. He's just ridiculous.

i loved these books as a kid but i recently read po bronson's book about raising kids and it points out that the nice berenstain bear books actually teach kids a certain form of aggression. i do remember liking them as a kid a lot, and i do remember learning from them... haha.

i met jeff hawkins when he came to the LA public library to discuss this book. cool thoughts about how important feedback loops are to consciousness and how modern computers aren't set up right to give rise to human type intelligence. although i told him i totally disagreed that his approach couldn't be modeled using math. and eventually he launched a company doing just that... i wonder if he remembers our conversation...

i already knew a lot about wal-mart but it did add to my understanding about how it appears from a vendor perspective

oh no! you've gone from the real world to the virtual world. whatever will goodreads do about the real world now?

Hi Katie,
It's a review of how to analyze an income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow statement. It analyzes the standard for profit business type; one that has inventory and equity investors. The principles could be applied to other business types, and perhaps even non profits, but it's not directly on point. It doesn't get too severely into timing of cash flows or accounting. What it does do well is show real world examples of fraudulent statements.
Ranjit

oh i didn't know it was an HBO show!

Loved the great depictions of certain situations (particularly liked the loan workout, and the gay art show for Atlanta high society). The greek philosophy was cool too. I like Tom Wolfe's observations, even as his uncool way of describing cool things sometimes makes me wince.

i judge books like this by how much i learn from them. maybe the subject matter is one i'm already too familiar with but i didn't learn much from it, and i thought in some ways it is pretty misleading.

jarvis buys into some pretty big group think that's going on in the internet world right now, the biggest of which is that open systems will beat and are preferable to closed ones. i don't think that's true, or at least its truth is very contextual. to jarvis's credit he brings up apple at the end of the book as a contrary example to what he's saying, but he really should have asked himself: in what situations will open beat closed, and vice versa?

i think the products that win are the ones that fix what sucks, and sometimes that's helped by openness, but sometimes it's hurt by openness (google pagerank, apple's app store, facebook). what people really want is, as zuckerberg has said, elegant organization.

for more on my thoughts about common beliefs people hold about the internet age that strike me as mythical, see my blog post: http://mathoda.com/archives/195

i gave it to my sister as one of her xmas gifts :-)

While a lot of the book was the usual banalities (health care needs more information technology, etc.) there was some really good analysis of what really causes health care costs (5 ailments), who pays for health care (the rich mostly), and how the health industry is structured. The author is the head of Kaiser.

I wanted to see what it said about using Google Spreadsheets to pull in financial statement data, whether there was anything undocumented. Apparently not.

Unlike the movie the book is much more of a cat and mouse story about a terrorist (in the quaint pre Al Qaeda vein) and his pursuer eluding and chasing through very clever spycraft. It may be dated now but a decade ago when I read it I remember how impressed I was that Forsyth extracted so much suspense from small details of the intelligence craft.

alot of people really love it. but i judge this type of book by how much i learn and i didn't feel i learned that much from it.

experiences will vary and it may be good for you. i didn't hate it; it did create some food for thought.

i'm extremely critical of statements that are literally untrue but passed off with breathless optimism. for example, hill says "whatever your mind can conceive and believe it can achieve." my mind has been conceiving and believing that i can levitate for years now. so far it hasn't worked, except in dreams. i really don't like this kind of sloppy statement. in the past i've criticized the way philosophers go gaga over socrates statement that the unexamined life is not worth living http://mathoda.com/archives/207

finally if you really want to grow rich, there are far better books out there on the topic. like graham dodd's security analysis or graham's the intelligent investor or ben franklin's autobiography. a large number of very rich people have credited those books with making them rich, whereas i feel hill is read alot by people who aspire to be wealthy but don't actually achieve it as a result of their reading.

i gave it one star because i didn't learn a single thing from the book. sure i know mass collaboration has worked in certain circumstances, like wikipedia, but when does it work and when does it not? there are so many things they could have gotten into but they are so in love with the idea of mass collaboration that they suffer from the trait of we have a hammer, so everything in the world is a nail ...

great summary :-)
i second your recommendation, this is a fantastic book. i also will be watching you carefully to see if you are trying to take advantage of reciprocity vis a vi me.

Banks' culture universe series of books is very imaginative in terms of technologies, behaviors, etc., but this is the best book in that series by far. It has one narrative thread that is fairly standard space opera moving forward in time to a greater and greater crisis, with fairly standard goals, stop the devastating war through all kinds of trickery and use of weapons. It has another narrative thread that follows one of the major characters backwards in time, so you get greater and greater insight into his motivations. The shocking climax reconciles all of the new found knowledge the reader has, and forces a reinterpretation of all prior events the reader has been told.

I wrote this on September 21, 2005: http://mathoda.com/archives/12

I knew the people buying mortgage debt were being dumb, but I didn't know the banks had held onto the debt themselves and held derivatives effected by the same. Being a full time lawyer put a crimp on doing that kind of research ...

Richard Posner, the famous judge, author and lawyer professor, has written a criticism of Gladwell's Blink. If I was interviewing Gladwell I'd take a look at Posner's critique and then ask Gladwell a few questions based on it.

http://www.law.uchicago.edu/news/posner-...