A Life Spent Reading

This is a very interesting book. Sub-titled “The Impact of the Highly Improbable”, it deals with our (in)ability to predict events, and the meaning that this has for people in their non-everyday lives.

Taleb is an elegant and wide-ranging writer, and the book is full of pithy quotes (“Doubting the consequences of an outcome will allow you to remain imperturbable”; “We tend to use knowledge as therapy”) and odd connections. He likes to tease the reader a bit, and he’s not afraid to take a stand against conventional wisdom, especially when said wisdom makes things seem more certainly predictable than they really – according to Taleb – are. He deals with probability in an engaging and accessible way; readers without a strong background in math need not worry.

Basically, Taleb’s thesis is as follows: Conventional probability studies (using the Gaussian or “bell” curve that all of us remember from college) are of limited application. Much of what happens around us is understandable only by throwing away the Gaussian and using a Mandelbrotian (i.e., exponential) approach. Things that seem unimaginably unlikely (because they lie so far outside the tails of the bell) are in fact not so unimaginable at all when seen through a Mandelbrotian lens…rather, they are downright likely to happen given enough time. And that time is shorter than what you think.

Taleb’s background is in finance, so he uses the market to illustrate much of what he says. And many of his arguments seem convincing, especially when it comes to options valuation and the like. But some of his examples would seem to ring false. For instance, he says that the October 1987 market crash was unpredicted, and happened for no discernible reason. But some of the world’s best traders and investors apparently did see the crash coming, because they got out of the market and into cash with, in some cases, uncanny timing, and then jumped right back into the market when it was about to turn around and go up again. There are also investors like Jim Rogers who seem to be right time after time, over decades, which would also seem to argue against Taleb’s idea that the markets are basically unpredictable.

Or maybe it’s just the case that with six or seven billion people on the planet, the odds are that a few of them are going to be right. I really don’t know.

I would think that anyone with an interest in finance or investing, as well as those people who just enjoy having their minds expanded a bit, would want to read this book. I bought it in hardcover, and found it to be well worth the price.

This is a quick but well-researched read into the life and times of one Nick Zappetti, ex-pat New Yorker and would be yakuza/mafioso. The book deals with the half-century after the war in Japan, and Zappetti’s activities along the way to becoming one of the most successful (and heavily investigated) foreigners in Japan. Along the way, it delves deeply into the ties that exist between the Japanese government and organized crime, the question of who really runs the country, and the way that a person like Zappetti, who spent most of his life in Japan and took Japanese citizenship but never bothered to learn much of the language, could rise and fall so dramatically.

The political stuff is covered in far more detail in Karel Van Wolferen’s seminal The Enigma of Japanese Power (probably the most impressive book of its sort that I’ve seen), but only those with a very intense interest in Japan will be able to wade through the whole thing. Tokyo Underworld is far more accessible, and sketches a quick line-portrait of how things work in Japan for the more casual reader.

One of Tim Ferriss’ recommendations for traveling light is the Pack Towel. I thought the idea was kind of cool, so I decided to get one. Below is my unsolicited, impartial review of this towel.

First, when you get the towel you definitely want to wash it out once or twice before you use it. This will accomplish three things: one, it will dilute the chemical smell and coloring (green, in my case) of the towel a bit; two, it will make the towel significantly softer once it’s dried; and three, if you do what I did, which was to run a sink full of water and push the towel down into it, you will get to observe just how absorbent the towel really is.

There really isn’t too much you can say about a towel, so I’ll just stick to the claims made about it, along with a few personal impressions.

Claim: The towel is lighter than a conventional towel.
This is true. So if you’re really worried about eliminating every possible ounce from your luggage, go for it. If you’re a mountaineer or something, one of those guys who saws his toothbrush in half to save weight, this will likely matter to you. But I have to say that the whole idea of a normal traveler, especially someone as young and robust as Ferriss, objecting to an extra couple of ounces in his bag seems a little odd. You would think that a guy who can put on 34 pounds of muscle in a month wouldn’t be that worried about how much his grip weighs.

Claim: This towel can dry your body more effectively than a regular towel.
I don’t find this to be true. The drying performance seems to be about the same as a regular towel. To be fair, this is something that Ferriss said, not the towel manufacturer.

Claim: The towel can absorb nine times its weight in water.
This is true. It is weirdly impressive to submerge the towel into a sink full of water, take it back out and watch half of the water disappear. It’s also fun to watch the towel change shades as you wring it out. On the other hand, this X-factor absorbency is mitigated a bit by the towel itself not weighing much, if you see what I mean. Also, plain old cotton can absorb about twenty-five times its own weight in water, a fact that the Pack Towel touts don’t really mention much.

Absorbency claims are fine, but the real point is the next one:

Claim: The towel will wring 90% dry immediately, and dry fully within about 3-4 hours.
The towel does wring very dry compared to cotton. And it did dry much faster than two other towels that were hung out with it in my personal experiment. This, in my opinion, is the main reason to buy the thing; if you’re traveling, there’s nothing worse than having a hump of wet cloth in your bag. You could always just carry a plastic bag if you were toting a regular towel, but that wouldn’t be very high-tech. Plus, the weight factor really would come into play here, as — generally speaking — water tends to be heavy in most countries.

Some other observations:

How does the towel feel?
After three washings and about fifteen usages, the towel is getting softer. But it still feels a little strange against my skin. Sort of halfway between using a piece of chamois and a piece of cardboard. I think that if I order another one, I’m going to spend the extra few bucks and get the new softer version.

Is that hanging snap thing really useful?
Yes, very. All towels should have one.

The best place I found to order from was Walkabout Travel Gear, which sells the large towel for $13.25. This is especially true if you’re going to order internationally; they only charged me seven bucks for shipping, as opposed to a few other sites I checked that wanted as much as $20 for the towel and another $40 for shipping. Gotta wonder sometimes…