Book Nate Silver Makes My Bracket Picks Apologies to my readers for not having a post last weekend. I was on the road for my job and had to put blogging on the back burner. My post this week is a review of the book The Signal and the Noise: Why so Many Predictions Fail—but Some
Yemen Yemen In 2012, I had the opportunity to travel to Yemen for my job (a couple of my photos from that trip are at the end of this post). Since then, that country has held a special interest for me. So one time when I was in The Midtown Scholar [http:
History Whence Finance? This post is a review of The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson. I got it from my favourite used bookstore: the Midtown Scholar [http://www.midtownscholar.com/] (pictured below) in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Niall Ferguson [http://www.niallferguson.com/], a historian at Harvard, wrote
Book The Expanse and the human Stop me if you've heard this one before: a closely-knit crew fly around in a spaceship getting in and out of trouble, against a backdrop of intrigue and sinister forces. The Expanse series by James S. A. Corey [http://www.danielabraham.com/james-s-a-corey/] (the nom-de-plume of a pair
History History Through a Liquid Lens This post is a review of Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization by Steven Solomon (2010). To start with, I have some general comments on the book itself, and then I'll delve into some of the issues it covers. It's a long book,
Re-Published Marq de Villiers' lecture at UNB For World Water Day / Canada Water Week [http://canadawaterweek.com/events/all] 2014, I decided to repost these lecture notes from a couple of years ago (originally shared on Facebook). Introduction On 15 March 2012, I went to a public lecture at the University of New Brunswick by author/journalist
Book A Journey Through Ukraine With the current events in the Ukraine, I thought it would be a good time to pick up and read Where the West Ends by Michael J. Totten. Michael Totten [http://www.michaeltotten.com/] is an independent foreign correspondent that I've followed for a while. He initially grabbed
Book Neal Stephenson's Writing An author that I've really gotten into over the past year is Neal Stephenson. His writing is hard to classify, ranging from futuristic hard sci-fi to historical fiction, but has some common themes such as information theory [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory]. So far, I'
History A 'Riveting' Book on the Industrial Revolution The Industrial Revolution is a period of history that has long fascinated me. Largely because of the technological developments and sense of potential, and also for the way that engineering and modern business were shaped during the era. William Rosen wrote The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story