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In the latest Curmudgeon’s Corner with Sam and IvГЎn:
Length this week – 1:04:18
In the latest Curmudgeon’s Corner Sam and IvГЎn talk about:
Length this week – 1:01:53
In the latest Curmudgeon’s Corner Sam and IvГЎn talk about:
Length this week – 1:08:50
In the latest Curmudgeon’s Corner Sam and IvГЎn talk about:
Length this week – 2:00:06 – Longest ever! We broke 2 hours!
Envisioning Information is the second of the series of information design books from Edward Tufte. After the first book, I thought, yeah, he makes some good points, but he is a bit overhyped. It has been a long time since I read the second book, but I don’t remember anything that changes that assessment. In addition though, it seemed that most of the good points were made in the first book and there was a lot of repetition in the second book. More and different examples to be sure, but used to make the same general points over and over again. Some of the points Tufte makes (making sure what you present is clear and uncluttered by “chart junk” for instance) I think are great. Others, such as where he pushes the idea of super high density information displays of information I think are not as well placed. SOMETIMES having those sorts of things that are jam packed with information that you can explore for hours is great. But MOST of the time, having something that as clearly as possible focuses in on the specific things you are looking at can be far more useful. There is indeed a place for both of course. Anyway, there are of course lots of nice examples of information design. Some Tufte calls out as wonderful, some he calls out as horrible. Sometimes I agreed with him, sometimes I did not. And don’t get me wrong, a lot of this is fun to look at, and there is good discussion. I just felt I had probably gotten most of what I was going to get out of it in the first book. And of course, this isn’t the last of the series. And now, the ranking of the last 10 books reviewed by reading speed (ones with kindle locations first, then ones with only page speeds):
And now the graphs: % of the last 20 books I reviewed that are now available on Kindle:
% of the last 20 books I read (including 27 I haven’t reviewed yet) that I actually read on Kindle:
(I bought my Kindle when the first ratio hit 50%. I will do these charts until each ratio gets to 90%. We are close, but not quite there yet.)
This is not the last Enderverse book, but this is the book that Brandy had gotten me for Christmas/Birthday/Something that had prompted me to systematically use all my fiction slots from May 2009 to February 2011 for reading all of the Ender Series books up until that point. I liked the series, but for the most part it started strong and got weaker as it went. And almost two years of no fiction other than Orson Scott Card was probably a bit much. I’m not sure I’ll give that sort of special treatment to a series again, even if I am gifted a book that is not the next in the series I have to read. After this book was read, the next Ender Series book… Shadows in Flight is on my big list of potential fiction to read but is not given any preferential place relative to anything else. Which means, at the moment, it has a 1 in 203 chance of being picked the next time I pick a fiction book to read. Anyway, how was the book itself? Well, the whole enjoyment score I mentioned in my last post is out the window, because I read a physical paper version of this book. But my 2+ year old memory of it is basically that it was OK. Not great. Nothing special. But OK. It filled some additional gaps in Ender’s life that hadn’t been covered in the previous books, and it started typing things together with the Bean books in the series. So, fine for Ender completists, but unless you are making sure you read all the Ender books, I probably wouldn’t bother. I can’t use the locations per day as a score, but it still can be ranked within the physical books by page per day, so lets give that a shot. The last ten books reviewed at this point are:
And now the graphs: % of the last 20 books I reviewed that are now available on Kindle:
% of the last 20 books I read (including 26 I haven’t reviewed yet) that I actually read on Kindle:
(I bought my Kindle when the first ratio hit 50%. I will do these charts until each ratio gets to 90%. We are close, but not quite there yet.)
So, this was a book that my manager at work had picked to be the focus of a little reading group sort of thing where several of us would read this and every couple of weeks or whatever we would discuss a bit of it over lunch. Well, that never materialized, but I read it anyway. Slowly. Over a long period of months. This is another one of those books where I never got the compelling feeling of needing to turn the page, where instead it felt like somewhat of a chore. So, since that reading group was not actually happening, the result was I would read a few pages, then put the book down for a month or whatnot before reading more. This is a short book. It is an “easy read”. The whole thing could be read in a couple of hours. In fact, I finished it when one day I just decided I wanted to be done so I could move on to the next book, so I finished it off that afternoon. But I never felt, on my own, that this was an exciting text where I was eager to get to the next page. Now, that aside, the actual content itself… this is one of that whole cottage industry of books on how to be a good manager. The key elements of this one are basically around recognizing the differences between the innate qualities people have vs things that are changeable and adaptable… and basically that you should work to figure out the best ways to take advantage of natural innate strength and not spend a lot of time or energy trying to “change people” to make them match expectations in a particular role. There was more nuance of course, and they backed things up through studies and illustrated them with anecdotes… and they made a few other points as well. But I think that was the main one. I guess my primary take away from this was that some of the points probably should be obvious, but are clearly not. Other things seemed like good insights. But it could have all been fit as a few general statements on a poster or something, it didn’t seem like stuff that really needed a whole book, even a pretty light 271 page book to get across. OK, I guess laying it out methodically and having a lot of illustrative anecdotes can be helpful to get the point across and to put weight behind what would otherwise just be declarative aphorisms. OK, I get that. I just was feeling “OK, I get that point already, lets move on” pretty often. It did have some good points though, and probably highlighted some things that even if I was aware of, I have not been fully utilizing at work, and perhaps I should… so that is good I guess. :-) |
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