Archive for the ‘Books’ Category

Everyone knows that the world sits on the back of four elephants. That are themselves standing on the back of a giant turtle. The elephants themselves are also pretty big. That is just how it is. Obviously it would be nonsense to suggest there was once a fifth elephant. Yet some people actually believe that!

In the 24th novel of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, Sam Vimes travels to Ãœberwald to take care of some sensitive negotiations. In the usual way that Sam Vimes deals with things. Obviously a recipe for success.

It was a really good novel. While I generally prefer the goings-on of Ankh-Morpork, it was nice to get out and about a little to explore some more of the Discworld. You can’t beat a good underground dwarf fortress. Well, maybe goblins can. But they are still really cool.

Carpe Jugulum is the twenty-third novel in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. It features The Witches (you know, the maiden, the mother, and the other one) battling vampires trying to take over Lancre.

Despite my state school education I even managed to work out that “Carpe Jugulum” meant “seize the throat”.

Good novel, even if nobody used the phrase “that’s what being a witch is all about”. I also found out that Lancre even has a royal historian. It’s Shawn Ogg.

The twenty second novel in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series is “The Last Continent”. It features Rinsewind and The Wizards, and is set in a continent that is not Australia, but is very much like it. It was brilliant. Discworld novels are usually funny, but a lot of this was laugh out loud funny. One of my favourite so far.

Today I’m pleased to announce the launch the 2nd edition of the Leeds Restaurant Guide. The new edition contains 14 brand new restaurant reviews and updates to another 18 entries. This takes the total reviews to 200! It is available from tomorrow from the Kindle Store.

Added

• Aria
• Belgrave Music Hall
• Cosmo
• Crowd of Favours
• Harry’s Bar & Brasserie
• Prezzo
• Rare
• Roast + Conch
• Shears Yard
• The Atlas Pub
• The Pit
• The Pour House
• The Tetley
• Trinity Kitchen

Updated

• Ambiente
• Angelica
• Baby Jupiter
• Bar Fibre
• Bewley’s
• Brasserie Blanc
• Brasserie Forty-Four
• Dish
• Ho’s
• La Tranquillite
• Las Iguanas
• Little Tokyo
• Malmaison
• Nation of Shopkeepers
• Primo Restaurante
• Red’s True Barbecue
• Sam’s Chop House
• Sukhothai

The 21st novel in the Discworld series is Jingo. It sees Ankh-Morpork face off against Klatch in a territorial dispute over a new island. It was not one of my favourites.

The plot is a bit predictable. The two armies line up to fight each other, but never actually do, which reminded me strongly of “Interesting Times“. Of course Lord Vetinari has a plan all along, as always. I am also left wondering just how many extra titles and promotions can possibly forced upon Samuel Vimes.

Ray Kroc is founder of McDonald’s Corporation. I found out he had written an autobiography, entitled Grinding it out: the making of McDonald’s, when I was listening to one of Mark Knopfler’s songs. “Boom, Like That” was obviously about McDonald’s, so I did a little reading up on it and sure enough, it was inspired by Kroc’s story, this book being cited.

The book itself is short and simple. At under 200 pages it only took me a week to get through it without much perseverance. In some ways this was a little disappointing as the book never really goes into much detail. You do not feel like you are gleaming so many secrets to success as you might feel you were if you were reading Duncan Bannatyne’s or James Khan’s autobiographies. But there is valuable content in there and given the length, comes at an easy price. Kroc did always place an emphasis on value as well as quality after all.

It has somewhat dated. It was written in 1977, Kroc having died in 1984, and the ages shows. He finishes up by talking about how he now has 4,000 restaurants and is dreaming of 5,000, maybe even 10,000. McDonald’s now has over 34,000 restaurants worldwide. Similarly, at the time it only had 21 restaurants outside of the United States, now I would be very surprised if the majority are not elsewhere in the world. Not that this detracts from the reading much.

The real take-away message from the book though is that Kroc only founded McDonald’s when he was 55! Too often we hear about the success of irritating people like Sebastian Vettel who is now a four-times Formula One world champion, despite being younger than me. I haven’t even won one yet. Kroc however, spent his whole life grinding out a living, and it was only after many would consider you are past your prime (especially in 1954) that he built a multi-billion dollar business empire in less than two decades. It is comforting to know that there is a possibility, however slim, that I could spend the next 30 years of my life messing around and still have the chance to make it big.

Given the popularity of the 20th Discworld novel, Hogfather, I started to think that given the anticipation I had built up on finally reaching it, it could only really be a disappointment.

I was a little. It had all the right ingredients, and by that I mean it had Death in it. Also The Wizards. But it just did not do it for me. I am not a big fan of Susan Sto Helit, she is just a bit too normal.

Terry Pratchett’s nineteenth Discworld novel, Feet of Clay, looks at golems and the City Watch. What more could you want? I probably say that in all my blog posts about Discworld books. I really did enjoy this one though, it might be my favourite Discworld novel so far.

After several series of short stories, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle returned Sherlock Holmes to the setting of a full-length novel in 1901 with “Sir Arthur Conan Doyle”. It was originally serialised in The Strand.

For me, the novel represents one of the most interesting stories I have read so far in the Sherlock Holmes series. Doyle’s writing had continued to improve and parts of the book created a genuinely chilling setting without going into extensive details about the locations explored throughout the book.

Nate Silver is the man who correctly predicted 51 of the 52 states in the 2008 US Presidential Election, and then all 52 in the 2012 election.

With an increasing number of people recommending I read his book “The Signal and the Nose”, I decided to give it a read. It looks at why we, as a society, are pretty bad at making predictions. Why did nobody see the 2008 financial crisis coming? Why is our best guess at when the next earthquake will hit no better than random chance? Why can’t we even predict if it will rain or not?

Actually, the last one, we can. Weather forecasts have become far more accurate over the last few decades. However, they are one of the few fields in which the large scale application of data and computing power to process that data has truly been effective.

Silver claims that one of the biggest problems is that as we now live in the “information age”, there is simply too much data to work out what is actually a useful predictor (the signal) and what is merely correlated (the noise). A great example of this is that the Super Bowl winner (AFC or NFC) was an accurate predictor of how the economy would do. But obviously that is just random chance and has proved erroneous in the past few years.

Ultimately the book has a simple message – you need to use a Bayesian model and apply regression. None of this is a new concept to me, nor indeed you would hope anyone working in the field of statistics. But judging by some of the meetings I have had recently, it is shocking the amount of people that do not follow this advice.