The Da Vinci Code #3

After finishing the Da Vinci Code, I must say that it is a thrilling and exciting book, and I would highly recommend this book. It is thrilling, complex, and entertaining. It had an easy to follow but hard to predict plot that led to a very exciting read.

                During our second meeting with Mr. Perlman, one of the questions he had wrote on the board was something along the lines of “How does the author develop a distinction between fiction and nonfiction. I will be addressing this question, as a realistic book, with as much realistic qualities made it tough to distinguish what was real and what wasn’t. Dan Brown attempted to make this book ass believable as possible, he incorporated historical ideas and figures, such as the Holy Grail, Jesus, and of course, Leonardo Da Vinci and his artwork, particularly The Last Supper. He also uses real places throughout France and London throughout the book. On page 297, when Brown writes, “Thirty seconds later Fache was packing up and preparing to leave Chateau Villette. He had just learned that Teabing kept a private jet nearby at Le Bourget Airplane.” In this one sentence, Brown references two real-world places in France, which are with 60 miles of each other. Brown does an excellent job of molding his story around real world places and events. Also when he has one of the characters explained the significance and the history of the Holy Grail, (will not quote because it would spoil a lot of the story) he references Leonardo Da Vinci’s famous piece “The Last Supper” he points out what are “hidden messages” Da Vinci was sending with the painting (most are not true, but are believable). This book could probably pass as non-fiction if the ideas and the concepts Brown created were not so radical.

                  Even though the book was fiction, I had still learned a lot about religion from it. It made it difficult to learn while reading because you had to distinguish what was fiction and nonfiction on your own. For example, the religious group Opus Dei, a prevalent and powerful fixture in this story, is actually a real group, however many of their religious techniques are exaggerated in the story. This story has often been criticized for its anti-Catholic views and its inaccurate portrayal of the group, however I think too many people are taking this book as if it is non-fiction, and Dan Brown (most likely) did not mean to insult the Catholic church, just to write a story.

I would say that this is a must read for anyone wanting to learn about history and religion while also being on the edge of their seat.

 

Interesting link on symbolism throughout the story:

http://www.chiff.com/a/da-vinci-code-symbols.htm

The Da Vinci Code #2

Through the first half of The Da Vinci code, I must say I’m thoroughly enjoying it. It is a very thrilling book that is filled with twists and turns. I would say that the first half was everything that I expected it to be from its immensely positive reputation.

The books started out with a murder (coincidentally, so did the first book I read). A man named Jacques Saunière, an extremely wealthy man in Paris, had scheduled a meeting with Robert Langdon, the protagonist and a professor of symbology at Harvard. However, the night before their conference, Jacques is murdered inside of Grand Gallery of the Louvre. On his body however, he leaves a code on his body, written in blood, and also leaves his body in a very strange position. Robert Langdon teams up with Jacques granddaughter to team up to solve, all while Robert Langdon is on the run from the police, framed by an affluent organization with close relations to the police. As you can see, it makes for a very interesting plot.

 The author of the book, Dan Brown, does a very good job of providing suspense to complement mystery. One of the main ways Brown utilizes suspense is how he ends almost every chapter with an exciting discovery by one of the characters, which is then further explained at the beginning of the next chapter. This draws the reader into the book so they “can’t put the book down.” There are several examples of this, such as at the end of chapter 9. Brown closes the chapter on page 53 with Langdon listening to a voicemail on his phone; “Mr. Langdon, do not react to this message. Just listen calmly. You are in danger right now. Follow my directions very closely.” This also happens in the chapter 11, when Langdon sees that there was a fourth line written on Jacques body that he had not seen before, and it applied directly to him  (For the sake of not spoiling the story, I will not quote it).

This is realistic fiction, so Vonnegut’s shapes of stories would be applicable. It looks like this story will turn out like the “man in hole,” which consists of starting out well off, and then falling into a terrible position, and then spending the story trying to dig yourself out of the hole. It looks like Langdon will be doing this throughout the story, as he started off as a successful professor at one of the best colleges in the country, to being chased by the police for murder, and then I predict that he will eventually right the case and prove that it was not him, digging himself out of the hole.

Overall, I would say that I have greatly enjoyed the first half of this book and can only hope that the second half of this book is as exciting.

The Da Vinci Code #1

           I decided to read The Da Vinci Code as my free read choice. I have not heard much about this from other people in my classes, but I have heard a lot about it because of the massive amount of popularity it had received. What I have heard is that it is about an undercover organization that has to do with Christianity. That is certainly not an overwhelming amount of information, however I have heard that this is book is the kind that you won’t be able to put down. That will be a pretty big change when in comparison to my previous Reader’s Workshop books. Hopefully this book lives up to its immense reputation.

The Signal and the Noise #3

I really enjoyed completing this book. This book, was much more than an enjoyable read, but something I learned a lot from and can apply this information to my life when I am put in a scenario when I have to make prediction. As I had mention in my previous blogs about this book, the purpose of this book is to inform the readers on how to distinguish useful information (the signal) between the distracting information (the noise) in order to make more accurate predictions. Nate Silver, the author, uses each chapter as a new strategy when predicting and then proceeds to give either a personal anecdote, such as with his chapter about the poker bubble, or a popular issue today, like his chapter Rage Against the Machine, which examines Artificial Intelligence in technology today, and how that effects their predictions.

This has been my favorite book so far in this reader’s workshop.  I particularly enjoyed how Silver uses very topical issues to analyze. My favorite part of the second half of the book was his analysis of technology and human nature or your “gut” feeling and how these two opposites play a role in the prediction. He concludes that both play a significant role in an attempt to predicting an outcome or result. His main examples were two that I recognized, the story of a Lakers fan and Deep Blue. He talked about how a fan, trusted his gut, which was telling him that the Lakers were going to win the NBA championship, despite the 6.5-1 odds against him. The fan’s reasoning behind this was that the Lakers were lacking chemistry, which no statistic has found out how to measure accurately, and that was the reasoning for their slow start. The fan trusted his gut, bet his life savings on the Lakers winning the championship, and won half a million dollars. Silver explained that the fan had though the Lakers odds were better than 1 in 6, and the fan had said he though there odds were about 1-4. Silver introduced a formula he uses for predictions, which he explains in reference to the Laker’s fan’s bet on page 238, “The theoretical profit of the bet was $70,000 dollars, and that consisted of a 25 percent chance of winning 520,000 and a 75 percent chance of losing 80,000 averaged together.”

Outcome	Probability	Net Profit
Lakers Win Championship	25%	520,000
Lakers Do Not Win Championship	75%	-80,000
Expected Profit		70,000

When putting predictions into this formula, it is obvious to see why this was a smart prediction   The same fan also placed several bets on the Cleveland Cavaliers scoring more points in their game than expected. His reasoning behind this was because their point guard was a free agent next year and would try harder, and also play at a quicker pace so they could more possessions, which would therefore increase his stats that season.

 On the other hand there was Deep Blue. Deep Blue was a chess machine that was designed by IBM which used statistics to determine which move had the greatest probability of guaranteeing a win. He said how both  of these are in some way successful, they both have their faults, as the Lakers fan only won about 58% of his bets. Deep Blue had also lost to Grandmaster in chess, when the grandmaster, Garry Kasparov, did as Silver explained on page 271, “Kasparov had taken the database out after just three moves. As we have learned throughout this book, purely statistical approaches toward forecasting are ineffective.”  I thought that this part can be applied to life in many scenarios in life and will therefore be very useful.

I would recommend this book to anyone, before reading I would advise having some knowledge about the economy in this decade, especially in the recent recession, as multiple chapters in this book are devoted to uncovering the reasons why no one was able to predict the recession. This is a book that you can truly learn something from that will benefit you later in life, which is why I think everyone should read it.

The Signal and the Noise #2

As I am about halfway done The Signal and the Noise, I must say that I am thoroughly enjoying it, and it thus far has been my favorite book I have read for this blog. Nate Silver, due to his background as a statistician rather than a writer (See first post for this blog) brings a very unique writing style to the book. I find it very interesting to read about the unique viewpoints he looks at things through. In his opening chapter, he talks about Johannes Guttenberg, he then goes on to talk about how Guttenberg had invented the printing press. His reasoning for telling the story of Guttenberg was, as Silver says on page 2, “Johannes Guttenberg’s invention in 1440 made information available to the masses, and the explosion of ideas produced had unintended consequences.” Silver is that the printing press led to a spike in information which in effect led to a spike in technology which increased the amount of information we have today, but the unintended causes is that today we have more information than we need when solving the majority of things.  With a plethora of information today, we need to be able to separate the information that is real evidence, which he refers to as the signal, and the information that distracts us from the evidence, which he refers to as the noise. Silver uses this book to analyze people’s predictions. He focus on wide variety which jumps from predictions about what the economy will do, what Dustin Pedroia will do in his baseball career, what the weather will be like, to the chances of an earthquake happening.

 I particularly enjoy the similes and analogies he uses to illustrate complicated events in simpler way. In example of this would be why house prices had increased such a huge amount and made them unaffordable to many Americans. He introduces the terms negative and positive feedback. To describe negative feedback, his example is kids running a lemonade stand, and if kids across the street open up a stand, the price of the original stands lemonade will more than likely go down due to competition. This would be an example of negative feedback, and then he describes the housing industry as having positive feedback, as to determine the price of house, we often use comparisons, so if one house’s price rises, another few probably will, which will cause another few after that, until the price of the average home has skyrocketed and the market has imploded. He humorously states the effect of positive feedback on a lemonade stand, writing on page 30, “Eventually you’re charging 46,000 for a glass of lemonade-the average income in the United States each year-and all 300 million Americans are lined up around the block to get their fix.

 I also think he does a very good job of describing how “the noise” is very often our own human bias. He describes on page 137, with a graph, he how weatherman often will stray from predicting there is an exactly 50% chance of rain, as then it is a toss-up and the listeners will be disappointed they won’t know if it will rain tomorrow. Silver also had discovered that when there is a 50% chance of rain and weatherman don’t want to say 50%, they will more often than not go to 60%. The reason behind this, as Silver explains, is that if you say it probably isn’t going to rain and it does, then you ruin everyone’s picnic, however if you say it’s going to rain, and it doesn’t, then people are delighted and view it as an “extra” day of sunlight.  

                  

             (Prediction on X axis, actual result on Y axis)

He also mentions how on a TV show which features former politicians debating what will occur next in political races, they often tend to dramatize for the television. For example, Silver found out that if one guy said that something was certainly going to occur, it would only occur about 75% of the time. He also keyed in on an episode in the week leading up to the Obama-McCain election, in which out of the four contestants, only one said Obama would win in a large margin, as he was favored to and as he did, and the other three either gave Obama a slight advantage or said it was too close to call. Their goal of this, as Silver writes, is to make it seem the race is much closer than it actually is, so people will continue to tune in to hear updates.

This book is similar to Malcolm Gladwell’s books, however, rather than scientific studies, this book is a lot more statistically and mathematically focused, as many of the chapters are filled with graphs, charts and tables. However, I think he uses graphs, charts and tables very effectively. A great example of this is on page 81-83, in which he presents two graphs of the average baseball player’s performance in relation to his age. He first presents a graph that would accurately represent the curve that a player goes through as he rises at a younger age until about 27 years old, and then they start to decline. Then, two page later he presents a “noisy” graph that is misleading and that you cannot draw as many conclusion from.

(Accurate graph on the left, noisy graph on the right)

  As I had stated earlier, I am greatly enjoying this book and I look forward to finishing it.

 

The Signal and the Noise #1

            For my nonfiction book I will be reading the signal and the noise, by Nate Silver. The reason I am reading this book is because my dad had brought up Nate Silver in a car ride while the two of us were talking about March Madness Brackets. My dad told me that Nate Silver was an ingenious statistician who, among other things, runs a website called 538.com, had predicted all 50 of the state results correctly in the 2012 presidential election, and 49 of the 50 correctly in 2008, he missed Indiana by 1%, but also got all 35 winners of U.S. senate races that year. He had also developed a system for forecasting the performance and career development of Major League Baseball players, which he sold to Baseball Prospectus in 2003 and this year he developed a formula that predicts the percent of each team in the tournament to make it to each round (Right image). In 2009 he ranked one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Times magazine. In this book, Nate Silver will examine the world of prediction, investigating how we can distinguish a true signal from ever increasing data, and to do so, he looks at a wide variety of fields. I predict that this book will be the most difficult on I have read yet, as whenever my dad gives me a book it is more often than not filled with business jargon, however, I think I will enjoy this book a lot because I am very interested in the field of statistics.

Animal Farm #3

I thought this book was a pleasurable read. It had a very unique plot which made it very interesting to you read and helped simplify the issue. However, I usually enjoy more of an exciting book, and this plot was mostly predictable, however they may be my fault for looking into it too much, because it seemed pretty obvious at most points what was going to happen. I was a little disappointment with the actual literature too. I was expecting this to be a more advanced book because of the popularity of it and the awards that it had won. I thought the actual literature and plot were around a Middle School level, and though it had a unique plot, I think you could make the argument that this book was overhyped. I liked what George Orwell did with each character representing someone in Russia, such as the two pig leaders, Napoleon and Snowball, are represent Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky. However, I think that with the actual acts of communism, they were too blatantly obvious about which parts were supposed to represent communism. In the middle of a speech being given by Snowball, on page 53, the book says “Napoleon stood up and, casting a peculiar sidelong look at Snowball uttered a high pitch whimper.” Then in the next paragraph it says “Nine enormous dogs wearing brass-studded collars came bounding into the barn. They dashed straight for snowball, who only sprang from his place just in time to escape their snapping jaws.” It also was very repeatable, as there were three times in this book that a commandment was changed for a higher standard of living for the upper class. It would have been more interesting if you had to discover the signs, like in real communism, where it is not as predictable and obvious. The ending, although it was interesting, didn’t quite come together completely.  I would say that this book is a nice short read, however it wasn’t something that you could delve into or obsess over. It was nice to read but didn’t quite reach my expectations.

(Napoleon and the person he symbolizes, Joseph Stalin)


I enjoyed it, but still...