Posts filed under 'Books I read'
Just done with reading the book Phantoms in the brain: Probing the mysteries of the human mind by Prof. V.S. Ramachandran. It is one of the best books I have read so far. Dr. Ramachandran explains the mystery of how the human brain works in such simple terms that even a person with no medical background can enjoy reading the book. The way he explains the problems of his patients and the way he explains the reasons behind their behavior is really enthralling. I became a fan of Dr. Ramachandran when I watched his TED video (V S Ramachandran on your mind) prior to reading the book. The solution he came up for people suffering from phantom hands was ingenious. This demonstrates how complicated problems can be solved by simple ways if you think differently instead of blindly following the established ways. The various experiments he performs to understand patient’s problems better is simply awesome. The best part of the book is about the phantoms although the other cases discussed are equally interesting. I got slightly bored at the end, especially the last chapter, where he discusses about consciousness, meaning of self and the parts of the brain that might be involved. For people who are interested in knowing about human brain, this book is definitely a fun and easy way to quench their thirst.
August 6th, 2011
Blood and Oil by Michael Klare gives a good insight into the dependence of America on oil and the resulting conflicts with other countries. The book starts with explaining the oil dependency and the dilemma about how and where to procure more oil from. And then the detailed explanation of how US got into alliance with Saudi Arabia for oil and how that dragged US into more regional conflicts there is very interesting. The author also explains how the growing resentment against America’s presence in Saudi resulted in increase of terrorism. The book also discusses the issues with Iran, Iraq and other Persian Gulf nations.
But after a few chapters, it kind of becomes repetitive when it comes to issues in the Caspian sea, Africa or other oil producing nations. Everywhere the issues are almost similar with the exception of names of places and people. Nevertheless the author drives his point home about the cost to be paid to get oil from these unstable and authoritarian regimes. And the cost is almost always blood of soldiers.
Apart from focusing on just America and it’s energy policy, the author also discusses about the growing competition from Russia and China to get cheap oil. Though these three nations do have a common goal of keeping the oil flowing without any interruptions, there is also a natural tendency to have more control than the other nations often resulting in tensions.
Towards the end I liked the solutions proposed and especially the first one which says that America’s energy policy should be separated from it’s foreign policy. The administration must stop getting into agreements that basically result in supporting the repugnant and undemocratic regimes thereby going against the basic human values.
On the whole, it’s a good read for people who are interested in knowing the details of at what cost the oil we use daily is procured and what lays ahead of us if something is not done now.
April 17th, 2011
This book by John Newhouse gives a very good overview of the aircraft industry of the 60′s and 70′s. Though an old book, I liked it a lot as it dealt with the history of aviation industry and what all the manufacturers and the airlines had been through. I was surprised to know how big a player Pan am was in the early days. It was the launch customer of Boeing 707, the DC-8 and Boeing 747 
.
The most interesting part of the book was the introduction of Boeing 747 which almost took Boeing, Pan am and Pratt & Whitney to the verge of bankruptcy. I liked the way Boeing handled it’s troubles during the 747 period and how it learned from it mistakes eventually becoming one of the best and most productive manufacturers. This particular period in 60′s was when everyone predicted (of course wrongly) too much growth and went ahead unnecessarily with the wide-body planes. One key take away here for me is that mistakes do happen but the point is to learn from those and take some bold steps to come back (like Boeing did) instead of giving up.
The last chapter dealing with problems of American companies and the Japanese way of doing things was also good. The book slightly took away my respect for Rolls-Royce aircraft engines. Though it was good at cars, the way it could not stick to some of the promises it made for the Lockheed L-1011 was a bit disappointing and the way Haughton (the then Lockheed’s head) came up with a solution to save Rolls-Royce and eventually Lockheed by going ahead with L-1011 is appreciative. On the whole, the book ends with the rise of the Airbus Industrie and the beginning of the Airbus A-310 & A-320 programs. That’s the time when Airbus started posing a real threat to the American companies.The level of politics and the stakes involved in this industry is very interesting. It’s a good read for any aviation industry enthusiast and would definitely suggest it.
February 23rd, 2011
Just finished the book viral loop by Adam Penenberg. It was a good read and gave a good insight into how most of the companies based on viral growth have succeeded along with details of companies that failed to grow virally. This concept of viral growth and viral factor in a business was something new to me. Though I knew about almost all of the companies (and ofcourse their core business) that the author mentions about, this book gives a new perspective of looking at them. Starting from the days of Tupperware to Facebook, each chapter discusses about the different viral growth companies that came up and how they succeeded or failed. Along with viral factor in a business, the author also talks about how scalability becomes an issue in such businesses and how few of the companies could not survive as they could not handle the scalability issues. Also in a chapter or two, he discusses about the trade-off between the high viral factor and scalable architecture of the business.
On the whole, this is a good read for anyone who would like to know about how all the online businesses and social networks we have now started and are surviving. As a person with keen interest in reading about companies, mergers & acquisitions, start-ups, etc., its a real good addition to my library.
Now slowly I am moving towards slightly different set of books and to begin with, just started reading Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. Came across this book after reading a post by gibberer 
and then also there was a mention about this book in viral loop. I now have a long list of books to read of which some are related to history as well.
Digressing from the topic, I had my first bad experience with macbook pro yesterday 
. I had to do a hard shutdown after it stopped responding . Never expected that I would get to see this on my mac so soon……was just watching a movie in vlc and nothing else was running but somehow it decided to freeze. Actually whenever I run vlc, I see some issue with the video being not clear sometimes or getting stuck for few seconds. Will observe it for few more days and see what could be going wrong…could be an issue with the vlc player for mac as well and not an actual issue with mac itself …..yes I do love apple products 
.
August 13th, 2010
Downloaded this french movie few days back after I came across one of my friend’s facebook status about the movie. Watched it yesterday and it immediately reminded me of Russian Roulette. Strange coincidence I guess, I just started my second attempt at reading Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb and the author mentions about Russian Roulette in the first or second chapters. And here I am watching a movie based on a modified version of Russian Roulette.
Basically, the movie is about a lethal game with all the participants standing in a circle with a revolver each. In the first round, each one loads a single bullet and shoots at the next person. After this round, the game proceeds with two bullets in the barrel with whoever was not dead in the first round. It goes on until there is a duel and here 3 rounds are put in the barrel and each one aims at the other. Finally, one man comes out as the winner (provided at least one person is left). And in the background, there would be people betting hundreds of thousands on each of the players.
Was a really good movie though the outcome of the game could anyway be predicted. But the way the movie ended was good. Had it been a typical Bollywood movie, I am sure what would happen at the end .Though it was a 2005 movie, it was all in black & white and also this was the first black & white movie in which I saw cell phones being used (of course it was taken in 2005 ).
June 21st, 2010
I had a list of books that I always wanted to read and The Alchemist was one of them. But somehow never got a chance and today read this book and now I feel like I learnt a lot or rather I knew all those but needed something/someone to help me re-discover and here it was in the form of this book.
It was such a simple story yet reveals the facts of life. One thing that I would always remember is to never give up and keep trying to realize our dreams no matter whatever comes in the way. Like in the case of Santiago, though during his journey to realize his dream he could have settled with what he achieved, he never gives up his quest to realize his actual dream. He could have gone back from the crystal shop with all his savings and settled as a shepherd with more sheep or he could have settled in the oasis as a counsellor and lived with Fatima for ever. But he never got distracted from his ultimate dream of going to the Pyramids inspite of all the hurdles and the riches he made during his journey.
There were a few points made in the story that hit the nail straight on the head and will never forget them. Most favourite one was “When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it“. And then the story that the king tells Santiago about the boy and the wise man. The boy was given a spoon with few drops of oil and then the wise man asks him to have a look at his castle. But the boy was so engrossed in taking care of not to spill the oil that he could barely look at the castle. And when he was told the second time to have a look at the beautiful castle, he comes back with all the entire oil spilled. That’s when the wise man advices the boy – “The secret of happiness is to see all the marvels of the world, and never to forget the drops of oil on the spoon“. And then what the Englishman says to Santiago – “It was the fear of failure that kept him from attempting the Master work for 10 years and he is happy that at least he didn’t wait for 20 years”. And finally what the Alchemist tells Santiago – “You must understand that love never keeps a man from pursuing his destiny. If he abandons that pursuit, it’s because it wasn’t true love……the love that speaks the Language of the World”.
In fact there are many more such instances that have appealed to me but of course cannot write them all here. In short its a very good read and yeah that’s the reason its transalted into 67 languages winning the Guiness World Record and sold more than 65 million copies in more than 150 countries (Source: Wikipedia).
And digressing from alchemist now, thanks to my Asus router, I have started watching IMDB top 250 movies and hope to complete most of them soon .
December 6th, 2009
Karthik bought this book for me saying that I would definitely like it and yes he was absolutely right. Its a very good read. It talks about a new breed of people called Economic Hit Man’s (referred to as EHM’s from now) who can go to any extent in exploiting the poorer oil rich countries for the benefit of United States. Their strategy is fairly simple – convince the poorer countries to accept development loans and then to make sure the development projects were given to U.S. companies so that the money would be back to U.S. And then when the countries are neck deep in debts, they start exploiting them by taking favours like military cooperation, political support, access to natural resources like oil supply or control over water bodies/canals, etc.
The author John Perkins himself was an EHM and throughout the book he talks about all the dirty deeds done by him as an EHM. Another interesting aspect mentioned in the book is when the EHM way does not work out in any country, the next level is to use the CIA (termed as jackals in the book) to carry out any assasinations and the final approach would be U.S. military intervention when everthing else fails. Was it not for this book, I guess we would have never known that such kind of events actually took place. It shows how deceptive the news we get through newspapers, raidos & televisions can be. The underlying facts are not always evident directly.
The book starts with how the author’s childhood, education, etc., has contributed to his becoming an EHM. Then he starts describing his assignments, success stories and the way the poorer countries were forced into debts and ultimately driven into extreme poverty. The book gave me a clear picture of many of the events that occurred in the last few decades. Though nothing can be done about them now, knowing the inner details has given me a new perspective of looking at things, to actually look at the hidden side of the events. This reminds me of the book Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. The EHM’s in the disguise of Economists are set out to exploit the weaker nations.
Out of all the events described by the author, what I liked the most are – Panama Canal & Saudi Arabian issues and the two Presidential deaths (Ecuador & Panama) which were the best examples of CIA assasinations. War on Iraq was the best example where in both the EHMs and the jackals failed and ultimately U.S. had to resort to military intervention. Another example wherein both the EHMs & jackals failed was in Venezuela. But there was no military intervention due to the war on Iraq and Afghanistan issues. On the whole the book covers some of the major events from the 1960s to 9/11 attacks on WTC.
One more interesting aspect that I found in the book was the reasons why the author had actually chosen the EHM way. It was basically because of his childhood experiences, his brought up and his inner frustrations. As the author grew up he always wanted to try out what all he had dreamed of as a child but could not do because of restrictions at home. It was his vindictive nature that actually led him to accept the role of EHM. The benefits of being an EHM lured him to accept it and in a way he was actually trying to overcome all the frustrations that he had since childhood. I have seen this kind of a behaviour in real life as well wherein people just do something to actually take revenge against what they could not do till then. They get into things for the wrong reasons and end up in troubles. What they do not realize is that they are actually doing more harm to themselves than to anyone else.
And to end this long post I would like to mention about the non-profit organization called Dream Change started by John Perkins to transform global consciousness.
October 31st, 2008
Read the book “The Last Lecture” by Randy Pausch today. The book is more or less about his childhood dreams, how he realized them, his family & kids and how they were trying to get things in proper shape before his time would come. But most of the points that he talks about apply to everyone in general. I found quite a few interesting things in it. Though we know most of the stuff that he mentions, its a good read.
For those of you who don’t have any clue about who this Randy Pausch is and what is this last lecture about, here is a brief introduction about him and the background of the book…………..Randy Pausch was a professor in CS department of Carnegie Mellon University. At the age of 47, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and had few months to live. That’s when he had delivered his last lecture in CMU titled “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams” and then he came out with this book. He says all this was for his children so that when they grow up and he would not be with them then, the lecture and the book would tell them who his dad was, what he wanted to tell them when they grew up, etc.
Now coming to what I liked in the book, it goes like this – The first point that I liked the most was when he says “When you’re screwing up and nobody says anything to you anymore, that means they’ve given up on you“. The moment I read this it reminded me of my good old friend Jayant . The book says – Critics are often the ones telling you they still love you and care about you and want to make you better. I think that’s 100% true and its only your good friends who would take time and the pains to tell you that you are not doing the right thing.
Then I liked his concept of head fake . Not the literal meaning of a head fake in football but the one that he defines as – the one that teaches people things they don’t realize they’re learning until well into the process. And the best example of head fake that he mentions of is the Alice software developed in Carnegie Mellon. Another interesting one was when he mentions about the attitude of Shatner a.k.a Captain Kirk of Star Trek. He was a man who knew what he didn’t know, was willing to admit it and would not leave until he understood that. I strongly feel that this is the kind of attitude that everyone should have. Have the courage to admit what you don’t know.
Then I liked the attitude of Disney World workers. Ask them “What time does the park close?” and they would answer: “The park is open until 8 p.m.” And then when he talks about brick walls (hurdles) that come in our life, he mentions that they actually give us a chance to show how badly we want something. And then he says don’t ever obsess over what people think about us. That would save a substantial amount of time in our life. Just carry on with your work not bothering about what others might be thinking about it. That said I don’t mean we need not care about others….it just means that dont worry about what people might be thinking about our capabilities.
Another point that appealed to me the most was – Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted. At every failure that we might encounter in life, its worth considering the above phrase. I would say, failures are also definitely essential in life. A person who had failed would definitely know how to avoid future failures.
There are many other good points mentioned in the book….but I won’t be writing about all those here now……..just a few other points worth mentioning before I would end this post are – Always be prepared for the worst-case scenario……..have a contingency plan for when everything goes wrong. And lastly he mentions, sometimes all you have to do is ask and it can lead to all your dreams coming true. Just ask and more often than we would suspect, the answer we will get would be positive. Particularly this last point that I mentioned now and the point about brick walls definitely have got relevance to what is currently going on with me . I think atleast some of the people who might read this post will definitely agree to it . Lets see how am I going to tackle the brick wall that’s infront of me right now .
October 5th, 2008
Found this book just by chance in a bookstore in garuda mall in bangalore. Its really interesting and for any aircraft enthusiast its a very good read. I am a big fan of Air Crash Investigations in NGC and also any other program related to aircraft manufacturing, etc. Now I even got two small toys….one is a space shuttle and another one is an airplane that I always have in my backpack (You can see the pics below).
This book has given me a good insight into the aviation business and how the two aircraft manufacturing biggies (Boeing & Airbus) compete in getting the deals. It also talks about the effects of the engine manufacturers, the wing designers, government aid, political influences that go into the making of a single aircraft. I could know about what other players existed before and how only two of the companies ended up being on t
he field.
The chapters that interested me the most were the ones with the details of engine makers, toyota manufacturing techniques, how airbus competed boeing with its A320….. the equivalent of Boeing 737, the Airbus A380, etc. One of the most interesting parts in the book was the one about the potential challenge from Asia especially China. I was surprised to know how Chinese government tries to get its political interests in any commercial deal with other countries. Also the japanese market scenario was quite interesting. It also mentions about the Indian market and the huge growth that is expected in the Indian aviation industry. The emirates case was also a good one. Finally, the book ends with the different scandals that Boeing was involved with in the military segment aircrafts. I was really surprised to know about corruption at such a high level even in US defence sector.
One point worth mentioning here is that Boeing definitely has the advantage of US government support in selling its aircrafts. This is definitely evident considering the Japanese market where Airbus has got just about 1% market share. And in the Indian context this is evident from the purchase of 68 Boeing planes (that includes 23 777′s and 27 787′s apart from other smaller aircrafts) in 2006 just after President Bush agreed to sell civil nuclear technology to India in July 2005. Same is the case with Chinese market as well. And just after reading this book my respect for SIA (Singapore Airlines) has further increased . I would always personally rank SIA in first position.
The way Boeing has made many mistakes like taking the markets for granted and being stubborn has helped Airbus a lot in grabbing the market share. But ofcourse now its the same scenario in the Airbus stable as well . Boeing has also the advantage of using the latest technology developed by US military research, thereby reducing its costs in coming out with newer aircrafts. But at the same time even Airbus has got a lot of government aids from the European Union that helps it in getting the launch aid for any new aircrafts that it comes out with.
There are quite a few other interesting points in the book but that would make this post too long . I would definitely suggest anyone interested in aircrafts to read this book.
October 2nd, 2008
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