Make Your Own Rules: A Renegade Guide to Unconventional Success

Wayne Rogers accidentally ended up in acting. He had a successful career in film and TV as well as in business. This book is a business advice book that primarily relies on his personal anecdotes. He had various business experiences that turned out well, as well as some that did not. Sometimes (like in a vineyard), the adversity helped spawn innovation that led to future success. While he does detail luck involved in business decisions, he also stresses the importance of doing homework and understanding why a "good deal" is there.

American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America

American Nations postulates the history of the United States as explained by a group of 11 rival nations. Each nation has its distinct characteristics and origin.

The "Deep South" was started by immigrants from the Barbados who brought the slave culture. They tended to be people that liked to look down on others with a strong hierarchy. Tidewater was a more conservative nobelist culture. These were people that considered themselves elite. They had indentured servants and later adopted slavery. Appalachia was the much more independent group of "southerners". They occupied the most hostile territory. They wanted to be independent and left alone. These groups had very different outlooks, but become more aligned during the reconstruction era. 

El Norte is the region around the US/Mexican border. They are more aligned with their own region than with the US or Mexico. New France is another enclave of French, primarily in Quebec and Louisiana. New Netherlands was originally in the New York area. Despite the short Dutch occupation, the Dutch cultural values remain today. Yankeedom was dominated by Puritans, while the Midlands had Quaker influence. The First Nations were the people already on the continent before the Europeans. Finally there were the Far West and Left Coast which were primarily populated by other groups.

These different groups have spread out to other parts of the country. Populations have been moving about to other parts of the country. Many of the conflicts in the country can be traced to different worldviews among the different groups. The alliances among groups also shift, with groups aligning on different issues at idfferent times. 

The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

David Deutsch is a physicist by training. In The Beginning of Infinity, he weaves in physics with the theory of science, philosophy and the future. He has an optimistic view of society. He gives little credit to stories that "the world is doomed." While in school, a professor told everyone that global cooling would lead to an imminent food shortage. That didn't happen. Today we are concerned with global warming. Sometimes people are obsessively concerned with whether the warming is caused by humans or naturally occurring. However, if there are negative consequences to warming, the cause is irrelevant. The scientific method can be used to help find solutions. Political "fixes" will often set things back, in part by forcing effort in the wrong area.

He also gives the example of somebody who thought color televisions were a needless luxury. There was little that color TVs could do that could not be done with black and white screens. Color TVs also depended on rare elements of limited supply, thus would only be available to a limited set of wealthy people. Today, color screens are everywhere. The dependency on rare elements, however, is gone, with CRTs pretty much nonexistent these days. New technology made the previous problems irrelevant. The new technology was built upon the previous technology.

The enlightenment enabled humankind to master the world. The problems we solve today were likely not thought of previously. Scientific explanations can be used to explain everything. They are constantly subject to re-evaluation. He feels that science should seek to explain things based on observations and theories that can be disproved. Supernatural or religious explanations cannot be easily disproved and are not "scientific". (It could be argued that that science and religion live on different planes. They are trying to do very different things. There is little need for them to try to compete with each other.)

The book goes into long discussions about Infinity and the "Infinity Hotel". Greek Philosophers also get significant coverage. Quantum theory, the theory of relativity and Newtonian physics are all covered with their inherent conflicts. There are many different theories of the universe today. Static societies think they have all they need today. These societies eventually die when faced with an external shock they cannot deal with. The Enlightenment helped enable dynamic societies. They use the existing knowledge. However, they also seek to gain new knowledge, possibly throwing out beloved theories in the process. There is no single source of authority other than the truth. (The author has some negative things to say about "post-modernism" which seems to say everything is relative, but only is acceptable if approved by certain "authority figures") 

America's cultures seems at odds with the "enlightenment views" advocated. The left tends to favor "science", but also is subject to adopting certain "beloved beliefs" regardless of new knowledge. The right tends to be more conservatively static, however, it also encourages more freedom of action. A good future for science needs a bit of both.

The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics was Reborn

The Age of Entanglement talks about entanglement and quantum physics. More accurately, it presents the conversations of the physicists as they talked about it. This is barely a step above a primary source. I would prefer a little more narrative in the structure. There are ties to Einstein, the atomic bomb and the red scare. Some people create complex proofs, while others find more simple ones. There is also a relationship between the philosophy and science. Qunatum phsyics creates a number of philosophical dilemmas that require efforts from scientists and philosophers. There are also a difference in the work by theorists and sentimentalists. They are all on the forefront of physics. Alas, this book will give you a lot of history of the process of learning, but not a quick summary of the science that was learned.

Einstein of Money

Benjamin Graham was patron saint of value investing. His book, The Intelligent Investor, still pops up on best seller lists, decades after he passed away. Other investors, such as Warren Buffett see him as a significant influence on their investing style. Graham's investing style puts the focus on long term value, regardless of short term market fluctuations. Depending on the dedication of the investor, they can employ screens to narrow down the the list of companies to consider. (Doing these screens were much more difficult a century ago when he started investing.)
Einstein of Money interleaves the story of Graham's life with details of his investing framework. The structure almost works. However, it is easy to get lost as it shifts gears. The writing style can also be very patronizing. The author revere's Graham, and is willing to brush aside his failures (especially with women and family.) He regularly talks about Graham's strong ethics, but does not spend much time in giving positive examples.
Graham was born into a fairly well-to-do Jewish family that had immigrated to the US. The temporary time in New York ended up becoming a permanent residence. The family was initially very well to do. However, they became impoverished as the family business failed and his father passed away. Ben learned to work and study hard and value money. He ended up attending Columbia on scholarship where he studied a multitude of subjects. He expected to go to law school, but ended up with a job on Wall Street. He had great success, eventually starting his own firm and weathering through the great depression. He eventually retired to California, where he taught a class at UCLA on investing. In his "spare time", he had many interests. He wrote plays, translated a book from Spanish, and proposed an economic alternative to the gold standard. He did have trouble keeping a marriage together, and was married multiple times, eventually living the waning days of his life with a mistress. He lived most of his life comfortably, and continued to influence many investors, including Warren Buffett whom he hoped would continue to work at his firm after her retired. Alas, the "Oracle of Omaha" decided he would much rather be back in Nebraska once Graham was retired.

Automate This: How Algorithms Came to Rule Our World

Wall Street discovered that computers could rapidly sniff out arbitrage opportunities to make "free money" by exploiting differences in buy and sell prices in financial instruments. Sometimes it was as simple as buying it in New York and selling in Chicago. However, as more players became involved, algorithms needed to be improved (eliminating even a few nanoseconds could save tons of money.) Even the current internet was not seen as fast enough. The expense of building a more direct fiber route between the exchanges would be worth it in the fractions of a second that could be saved. No expense would be spared in snapping up all the brightest scientists and engineers to make better algorithms. When things go right, companies can make fortunes. When things don't? Well, we can have micro-crashes and great meltdowns like the recent sub-prime crash.
Christopher Steiner originally set out to focus his book on algorithms' impact on the financial markets, but expanded it to cover other areas of our life that are being taken over by computers. Markets had for centuries relied on an open-outcry system where person-to-person contact was key to any trades. These traders were seen as essential to the well functioning system. The NASDAQ market started to sneak on to the turf with an electronic trading system. However, even it required traders to manually enter trades in a terminal. Alas, somebody eventually was able to hack the system by connecting the terminal to a computer that could analyze quotes and quickly enter optimal trades. Once the NASDAQ caught wind of this, they tried to stop it by mandating that orders must be entered on the keyboard. Not to be deterred, the company created a system of "key-pressers" to manually key in the orders (and a screen reader to read data from the screen.) The engineers had their toe-hold on wall street and would soon go to take over. This has lead to greater transparency and lower costs for retail traders. However, it has also contributed to wild price gyrations and increasing challenges for big purchasers (such as mutual funds).
Other parts of society have also seen computers make significant inroads. Even in something as seemingly lowly as customer service, companies such as e-loyalty use voice scanning algorithms to help provide a better matching customer service agent and faster resolution. Some of the examples have not aged very well since the books publication in 2012. (Gaming company Zynga's algorithms have not helped it's financial condition.) The spends some time looking at some of the key contributors in mathematics and science that have helped us reach our current state. However, the focus is on the future. The author sees a need for more scientists and engineers. Alas, due in part to the tough math requirements, many students end up in liberal arts majors. Improving high school math could help with this. (Unmentioned is the fact that much of the math work is not needed in the day to day work of many of the algorithm coders.) Medicine is seen as a field that is ripe for greater automation, but also one that will still need a human hand. Career prospects are meek for those who cannot code. Being a hacker (in the good sense) is seen as the only career path that will continue to be viable. The book doesn't explore the possibility that we can automate coding and thus spend our lives eating bon-bons while our computers serve us. That may bea good thing.