A tale of two remakes: Nikita and Conan, The Barbarian

The remake of La Femme Nikita wins on production values over the original. That’s good, because it loses on almost everything else.

Story: both use unthinking action scripts. The running backstory for the original was that of an internally crypto-fascist organization that was working towards the common good (mostly); the remake suffers from the 2000s TV show problem of trying to make political points.

Guns: Much better guns in the remake and much more poorly used. In the original, characters used handguns, MP5s, and the occasional sniper rifle, usually when appropriate. In the remake, the weapons are so overdone that Nikita shoots a HS50 .50 BMG into a hotel to take down a bad guy from across the street. That slug would take down the bad guy and pass through all the internal walls of the hotel, then continue across a few more buildings. It’s an anti-materiel weapon designed to be shot from a mile away! But looks good with her outfit.

Michael: Good God Almighty, could the remake Michael be more of a whiner? Ron Dupuis’s wooden acting was precisely what a cold-blooded killer requires. Michael Samuelle never complained or argued, even when sent on a suicide mission. The new Michael is “modern man” and, in the current parlance, needs to man up. And shut up.

[Added 3/5/12.] Lyndsy Fonseca. Whenever she’s on screen, I root for Zetrov. The original had likable sidekicks, at least.

Nikita: Fashion model vs. martial arts movie star. No contest, Peta Wilson wins by miles: she’s gorgeously charming, her Nikita has been unjustly dragooned into service unlike Maggie Q’s, and her australian accent softens everything she says. Neither is credible as a commando, obviously. Maggie Q may know martial arts, but that doesn’t mean that she could knock out a OMON-trained 250Lbs-of-muscle Zetrov bodyguard with a punch. Peta’s Nikita uses her smile more than her fists, which plays to the actress’s strengths.

— • —

The remake of Conan, the Barbarian also has much better production values than the original. It shares a few names and minimal context with the original. Otherwise it’s a completely different movie.

Story: Are you kidding me? Story? Ok: fight; fight; more fight; fight; damsel in distress; fight; fight; fight in extremis with the bad guy; Conan wins. Oh, should I have put SPOILER there?

Gore: Not for the squeamish. Think John Woo-level detail of blade-vs-flesh encounters and some really disgusting expulsion of assorted body parts and bodily fluids. 

Bad Guy: Stephen Lang plays to his strengths as a bad guy (as in Avatar) and exhibits stereotypical bad guy leadership (unlike his good guy leadership in Terra Nova). His makeup is so good that I didn’t recognize him; the voice sounded familiar so I paid attention in the credits. But James Earl Jones plays a better bad guy: he was calmly evil, while Lang’s is too involved and comes across as insecure and immature in his evil-ness.

Young Conan: Great scene of young Conan doing the Cimmerian version of a SEAL Evolution which turns into a real fight. Nothing like this in the original. Definitely a plus for the remake.

Conan: Jason Momoa, who provided comic relief and hand-to-hand combat scenes in Stargate Atlantis, acts much better than the original Conan, Arnold Schwarzenegger. (Not that hard, really: he’s basically playing his Stargate Atlantis Ronon Dex character with minimal changes.) But he doesn’t really look like comic book Conan. Ahnuld might be a terrible actor, but he had the muscles for the part. As with the original we are subjected to a gratuitous and unnecessary shot of Conan’s naked buttocks.

Verdict

Nikita is worth watching — if there’s no Masterpiece Mystery — for Maggie Q, for laughing at  bad tactics and gun use, and for Xander Berkeley’s great acting (playing “Operations”).

Conan, the barbarian is a good action movie, not for the squeamish. It would be better if it had a different title character and didn’t try to link itself to the original or the comic book character.

MASS CUSTOMIZATION IN THE PUBLIC SPEAKING BUSINESS

Tailoring presentations to the audience is important; building them for mass customization from the start is efficient.

The picture above is a pixelated edit of one of my slides depicting “the three changes that are rewriting the DNA of business, as we speak.” (That’s my opener slide and a paraphrase of my opening statement.)

How to mass customize the presentation of these changes? Easy. There are eleven possible presentations, depending on emphasis:

1. General overview of all the changes and their intersections (which are real-world interactions, not just some technical curiosity).

2-4. A short general overview of the changes and a detailed analysis of one of them.

5-7. A short general overview of the changes and a somewhat detailed analysis of two of them.

8-10. A short general overview of the changes, a slight elaboration on two of them, and a detailed analysis of the intersection of those two.

11. A short general overview of the changes, with some added detail on each, and a detailed analysis of the three-way intersection.

(Yes, theoretically there could be more, say General + A + A∩B + A∩B∩C, but the structure of the subject doesn’t really allow for this.)

On top of these structural changes I try to find examples and models appropriate to the audience, but that’s a minor adaptation compared to the major possible structures: One master presentation set, eleven variations.

— — — —

Technical note: my projection images are made with Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop; I gave up trying to match these professional-grade tools with the mass market tools in iWork. I did try seriously.

Or: how some hate mailer gets things so wrong all it shows is its small-mindedness.

Amidst some hate mail steming from my post explaining that universities do more than infuse student minds with content and that if creators can’t make a good living off of content the quantity of high-quality content will decrease, I received one that accused me of being anti-technology. Because I like fountain pens and sailboats.*

Ignore for the moment my declared pro-technology stance, my engineering degrees, my many years teaching EECS, my constant defense of nerds — especially engineers —, and my ruinous expenditures at Fry’s.

Fountain pens and sailboats are terrible things to criticize.

Writing with a fountain pen is an occasional pleasure; less than one-hundredth of the words I write are handwritten to begin with, and of those less than one-tenth are written with a fountain pen. I do like the discipline it enforces: thinking before writing is an habit that would have served the hate-mailer well.

Sailboats are incredibly advanced pieces of technology in their own right. Considering how low-tech the average motorboat’s engine is, relative to other engines, a modern sailboat is usually a much more advanced technological icon. After all, the minor technological addition of an engine doesn’t begin to compare with the design problems of using wind alone for propulsion. 

Sailboats require real understanding of the water and the wind, real skill. And they are silent. Silence is very important — it’s conducive to thinking.

I like fountain pens and sailboats because they require thought, discipline, and skill to use, while providing tranquility in return.

Oh, and I stand by every word in that digital content post.

— — — —

* Cheese and crackers! The degree to which some people go spelunking in my various blogs, online photo albums, and videos to find something objectionable — and only finding objections based on their own misunderstanding — baffles me.

WHY I DON’T WEAR JEANS

When looks matter, I remember that Pierce Brosnan is the only male over thirty who looks good in jeans. And I’m no Pierce Brosnan, as many female acquaintances keep reminding me. So, when looks are important — and for work — I wear chinos or serious trousers. With a tie, to distract from my face.

When looks don’t matter, some people wear jeans for practicability or comfort. But I find that cargo pants, especially tactical pants, are more comfortable and practical than jeans. Consider:

1. The fabric of cargo pants is much more pliable than the rough cotton canvas of jeans. Typically it includes some elastic fibers, is moisture-wicking, and resists stains better.

2. The gusseted knees, crotch, and seat of cargo pants make them much easier to move in without having to wear them oversized.

3. Pockets, pockets, and more pockets — designed for accessibility even when sitting down.

4. You can do this (well, theoretically):

Above are examples of cargo pants I own, which I wear for the tactical purposes of: grocery shopping, hiking, travel, and photography.

Most people who wear cargo pants in the city do so for the looks and not the practicality. Bad idea: cargo pants are practical but even less stylish than jeans.

Even Pierce Brosnan wouldn’t look good in them.

I refer, of course, to the hatchet job the NYT did on Apple.

On page 5, we learn of a poor engineer, Mr. Saragoza, whose job disappeared when the Elk Grove plant essentially moved to Asia. But why? Apparently the costs were too high, not because of wages, but because of lead times and inventory. To solve that, the plant would have to increase work hours (with commensurate pay, obviously, given american law — something the NYT chooses to overlook).

Mr. Saragoza explains his position with regards to this survival measure: “We were told we would have to do 12-hour days, and come in on Saturdays,” Mr. Saragoza said. “I had a family. I wanted to see my kids play soccer.” 

As per the NYT piece:

A few years after Mr. Saragoza started his job, his bosses explained how the California plant stacked up against overseas factories: the cost, excluding the materials, of building a $1,500 computer in Elk Grove was $22 a machine. In Singapore, it was $6. In Taiwan, $4.85. Wages weren’t the major reason for the disparities. Rather it was costs like inventory and how long it took workers to finish a task.

For some unexplainable reason (as far as the NYT is concerned, it was possibly the evil evil evil pursuit of profit), the factory ended up as a call center.

The NYT then tells us of the fate of Mr. Saragoza:

Mr. Saragoza was too expensive for an unskilled position. He was also insufficiently credentialed for upper management.

I’m not so sure that the “credentialed” part was the important issue; I’d venture that the “would rather watch kids play soccer” attitude was more dispositive. After all, management — for all the disparagement it gets — requires a gung-ho attitude and dedication to the business objectives. Possibly some other engineer was willing to do it.

As a counterpoint to this poor family-loving engineer, the NYT tells us of the evil top executives who paid themselves large amounts of stock options (which — a point that seems to have escaped the NYT — are only valuable if they stay with the company for a while and generate enough shareholder value to raise the price of the stock, i.e. if they do their jobs).

After reading in Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs what these executives went through, and comparing them with the statement of Mr. Saragoza above, I can only say: Duh! These executives should receive trauma pay for what went on inside Apple.

Apple in 1995 was recovering from having just been teetering on the brink of extinction. Apple now is a high-tech powerhouse. Monomaniacal management has many faults, but it certainly worked well there.

It’s not Apple that’s the issue. It’s the general attitude that jobs are an entitlement and don’t depend on the willingness to do things one might find disagreeable or inconvenient.

I’ve met people who worked in large multinational consultancies and had Mr. Saragoza’s attitude; call them Type S. There’s nothing wrong with that attitude: life is much more than work and a trade-off must be made. Their trade-off was in favor of family, a generally laudable choice.

Type S associates typically don’t make partner.

I’ve also met people who have made partner in those multinational consultancies. Among those is X, who had a family vacation planned for D day and on D minus one day got a phone call from a client requesting X’s services immediately. Were X of type S, the consultancy would probably have lost this multi-million dollar yearly billings client. X sent the family away on vacation and went to meet the client.

That’s why X is a partner in a multinational consulting firm.

There’s nothing inherently better or more moral about X or the S types. But there’s a clear difference in terms of firm economics: if there aren’t enough Xs, there will be no jobs for the S types — clients will simply choose a different firm, one that has more Xs.

The NYT, of course, ignores this minor problem; it’s only the fundamental cause of western decline, but who cares about that when they have their journalism degrees to feel a warm glow in the NYT offices.

Until there’s no one to pay for it, that is.

Continuing what has emerged as the blog topic for this weekend, the digital life (first post, iTunes U post, second post), I have some thoughts on content itself.

Starting with a startling omission from my content list: comic books. I haven’t bought any comic books (paper or electronic) in more than a year (and before this app, in more than two decades), but I had to re-download them when Marvel updated the iPad app.

I think the Civil War series is worth rereading, as is the Iron Man Vol 3 (complete, which I don’t own but will probably buy later). For reasons that I explained in one of my first long posts for this blog, Iron Man is a good role model for a kid.

But here’s a problem: all this content is moated inside an app. (Forget walled gardens, this app has a moat with alligators in it.) And if I had upgraded the app and then got onto a plane without opening it first, I wouldn’t have any of the purchased content available to me, since it had to be re-downloaded (I didn’t download all the purchased comic books). This also happens with the Kindle apps for MacOS, which is unbelievably annoying.

Speaking of which:

Those John E Stith books are a testament to the power of blogging, digital delivery, free samples, and low prices: someone whose blog I follow made a point about the good physics in Redshift Rendezvous, I downloaded the sample from Amazon, got hooked, bought the book, read it in one afternoon, then bought another, etc.*

Talk about long tails — these were old books and yet, I ended up buying them all. (This was during the 2010 summer teaching trip, coincidentally. That trip as also when I bought most of the comic books, to demonstrate the iPad to my brother-in-law, a comic book aficionado. But I like them, nevertheless, and may still complete that Iron Man Vol. 3 collection.)

The Kindle app does need a better way to organize itself; those were some books I haven’t read in a long time, but would like to sort  into a “science fiction” category (except the non-fiction More money than God). Like I did easily on iBooks:

(Yep, those were all free. I have yet to buy my first iBook.) Staying with free content, I downloaded the iTunes U app and subscribed to a few courses, starting (not surprisingly) with the Stanford one on Machine Learning:

(iTunes U also took some old content from the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco from the iTunes app for itself. Well caught.)

Given the travel focus of the first post, the Netflix app was not relevant. Interestingly enough, though, this is one app I use a lot, to watch movies on the iPad while my computers are busy running R code.

What I need now is a way to download all posts from my RSS feeds into the iPad so that I can browse them offline. I’m sure there’s an app for that (I have NetNewsWire, but it doesn’t do a good job of offlining all content — certainly not the multimedia pages).

— — — —

Why, yes, I’m a geek. How could you tell?

LIVING A DIGITAL LIFE — And life before digital content.

I was decommissioning an old computer and found a packing list for summer teaching in 2000. Clothing was essentially the same as in my packing list for the upcoming summer session but everything else (which means content and equipment) is completely different. Well, I still take a computer, of course.

I used to take several paper books, including a full size textbook for the class, notebooks and a binder with class notes, a ZIP drive for backups, ZIP disks, paper photos for the family, a magazine or two to read at the airport, a Discman and CDs (being at the forefront of packing technology, I used a CD pouch instead of the jewel boxes), and a few DVDs.

(The following year I got my first MP3 player and my first digital camera. And a ginormous 5GB firewire external drive!)

Now: all content is digital and travels in my laptop, backed up on a 1TB portable hard drive, several 16GB flash drives, and the cloud. I might still take a [disposable] magazine, but otherwise my music, audiobooks, eBooks, research papers, teaching materials, photos, movies and TV shows, and computer code all travel as files.

A new cultural meme has arisen where people ask casual acquaintances what is on their content consumption devices, so in that spirit, here’s what I’d put on my iPod Touch and iPad if the trip was tomorrow (engagement takes about four weeks):

Music: Vivaldi, Handel, Bach, Purcell, Chopin, Liszt, and Fauré playlists, a playlist of 216 “classical” albums, my standard Jazz playlist, an auto-generated 1024-track playlist of “classical” music that I haven’t heard in at least three months, a nostalgia playlistlist of 70s-80s-90s music, and a few new jazz albums I bought from Ted Gioia’s “Best of 2011” list. (Except for the last ones, all of these reside permanently in my iPod Touch and iPad.)

Podcasts: Back To Work, MacBreak Weekly, TED talks (video), SALT from the Long Now foundation.

Audiobooks: Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen and Hot Water by P.G. Wodehouse, On China by Henry Kissinger, Quantum Man by Lawrence Krauss, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinford by Evelyn Waugh, and Worm by Mark Bowden. That should be enough for the flights and the various train rides, plus elliptical exercising (for oxygenation) in the hotel gym.

Movies: Since ripping DVDs with Handbrake to watch the movies on the iPad is a violation of the DMCA, I can’t have any movies on the iPad, can I? In an alternate universe I’d load the second season of V (2011), the first season of Sherlock, the first season of Hawaii Five-O (2011), the latest season of House, Cowboys and Aliens, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Despicable Me (a feel-good movie for all occasions), The Incredibles (ibidem), Margin Call, Moneyball, and Wall St: Money Never Sleeps.

Kindle books: Civilization by Niall Ferguson, Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens, The Ware Tetralogy by Rudy Rucker, Notes from the Hard Shoulder by James May (of TopGear), The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco, The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie, and Holidays in Heck by PJ O’Rourke.

iBooks: Walter Bagehot’s Lombard Street (shown above), Émile Zola’s Le Ventre de Paris, and Voltaire’s Candide. (I downloaded several public domain iBooks.)

PDF: All my class readings, many additional research papers and reference materials, and the O’Reilly books Beautiful Visualization and R in a Nutshell.

Games: I usually don’t play computer games, but my iPad has Solitaire, Mahjong, and a few crossword puzzles.

According to Google Analytics, the most popular post of 2011 across my three blogs was my 2009 post on preparing presentations. The one that opens with

Most presentations are terrible, and that’s a choice made by the presenter.

(Well, since almost every post I write about presentations here or on the essay blog links back to that one, that’s not very surprising.)

The 2011 essay post that got most page views was the post “Angelina Jolie shows problems with some economics models.” Though it’s not really surprising, given the title, I hasten to point out that Ms Jolie was not my choice; it was the original Freakonomics blogger choice. Fave line:

Ms. Jolie is rich and famous, so she didn’t get the job by sexing the producer.

The runner-up was the post “Why can’t copyright ‘reformers’ understand minor business points.” This post was the clear winner in email annoyances generated. I felt positively like Mark Helprin, in the beginning of his book Digital Barbarism. Fave line:

A first step towards a rational discussion of copyright is to accept that actions other than content creation have value. Cory still hasn’t taken that step.

The long post on this blog that got most views was “Free software and obstructed minds,” which also was the one that generated most email traffic. My fave line:

That really bothers some people. All those free bits, just zeros and ones, and Mr. Jobs became a billionaire selling them. Why didn’t he give his bits away for free?

Activity in my online commonplace book of teaching and research material is limited since its target audiences are the classes I’m teaching starting in 2012; there are already followers and page views, but the numbers are too small for a statistician to take them seriously as an indication of anything.

Strangely enough, one of the old specialized teaching blogs, the one for the 2010 Consumer Behavior class at TheLisbonMBA continues to get several page views per day, with the most viewed post of 2011 being “A look back at the last five years of social media.”

My most viewed photo of 2011 was “Working on paper, mostly,” which is an artifact of the “getting things done” tag. But I think it’s a useful photo, so here:

My most viewed video of 2011 was a review of my SLR sling bag:

Background: Kara Swisher of AllThingsD made a presentation at a TEDx event; while praising her content, Les Posen remarked on her delivery; Ms. Swisher told him to go pound sand; Les blogged a thorough critique.

I agree with Les that it would be nice if people making presentations put some work into presentation design, rehearsal, and delivery. That said, I think Les suffers from a mild case of presentationism.

Presentationism (n): An affliction in which otherwise reasonable people start treating presentations as objects in themselves instead of vehicles for content. Symptoms include the inability to filter out annoying details while watching presentations, and a loss of focus on the content being delivered. (Yes, I made that neologism up.)

Having watched Ms. Swisher’s presentation, I  have some notes on structure and argument; her sardonic remarks are a style of public speaking — one which I, like Les, happen to dislike, but speakers’ styles should be their own; I agree that minor stagecraft and a speaker’s display would make a big difference in the delivery.

But none of that matters, really.

Ms. Swisher is a journalist and writer, and a very busy one at that. As I said in my post on preparing presentations, those of us for whom presenting is a big part of the job can be expected to invest serious time in preparation and rehearsal; for others, like Ms Swisher, that would be a wrong trade-off to make. I certainly don’t want fewer articles on AllThingsD, which — time not being elastic — would probably be the cost of Ms. Swisher preparing presentations more thoroughly.

In the end, for those of us not suffering from presentationism, content is what matters most. I’d rather listen to monotone, heavily German-accented Henry Kissinger talk about geopolitics (I don’t like him but he knows his geopolitics) than to slick presentations by razzle-dazzle “globalization” experts know-nothings.

Content should be king, for the presenter and for the audience.

— — —

And speaking of, erm, uh, you know, verbal tics, I looked at Tufte’s presentation at the State Department again and noticed two things about his opener:

1. It’s a summary of his presentation: “The goal of analytical design is to make people smarter.” This is one great opener, instead of the too-common list of thanks and acknowledgments wasting the prime time of audience attention. That I had noticed immediately; like James Humes, I believe that the choice of opener is a great predictor of the quality of the presentation.

2. He delivered it thusly:  ”The, uh, goal of, eh, analytical design is to make people smarter.” I never noticed till now. I hope to continue not noticing.

George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, his chronicle of the Spanish Civil War, is under copyright in the US, which means that Project Gutenberg doesn’t have it. Now, I could go on to one of the many file sharing sites that I’m told exist (I never visit them, of course ☺) and find a pirated copy.

But the world is a global place, with different rules and regulations. Which means that Project Gutenberg Australia can legally share Orwell’s works. And the interwebs go to Australia almost as fast as they go to Palo Alto. Which is how I’m now reading about the bad living condition of spaniard peasants during the war:

The constant come-and-go of troops had reduced the village to a state of unspeakable filth. It did not possess and never had possessed such a thing as a lavatory or a drain of any kind, and there was not a square yard anywhere where you could tread without watching your step. (Chapter 2.)

(I read Homage to Catalonia many years ago and there are several copies in my family, so I don’t feel particularly bad about not paying for yet another copy.)

Think globally, then act in the local where it’s most advantageous. It’s the rule for operational outsourcing in corporations, so why not for books by long deceased authors?

For a while now I’ve been using low-intensity repeated motion exercises to provide a daily oxygenation workout. Real exercise, I do for about 15 minutes once or twice a week using high-intensity training principles at a gym. The low-intensity repeated motion doesn’t make any inroads in my capacity, so it doesn’t interfere with recovery, while it provides additional oxygenation and BDNF creation.

In addition to oxygenation, I use the time in the repeat motion activities to absorb content. Here are some observations:

Rowing on a Concept IIc: as a general rule I listen to podcasts or other low information density sources, as the noise and motion interfere with attention.

Running on a treadmill: I almost never do this now, but the same rule applies as for indoor rowing. The reasons why I don’t do it: (1) it’s high impact; (2) it’s a bad representation of actual running, so it doesn’t transfer to a usable skill, which is the common reason to do it; (3) where I live there are usable places to run outside, which is much better; (4) running, even at low speeds, interferes with the recovery from real exercise.

Walking: if in a safe-from-being-run-over-by-oblivious-drivers environment (like a path in the park or by the bay, but never walking the streets of San Francisco), I listen to audiobooks or art music (because it doesn’t have a beat and therefore doesn’t interfere with walking rhythm). Audiobooks are educational, but they interfere with the mind-clearing power of an outdoors walk, so I tend to go for music — though sometimes I just listen to Oscar Wilde, P.G. Wodehouse, P.J. O’Rourke, H.L. Mencken, or Evelyn Waugh with similar mind-clearing results.

Elliptical running: this is my usual form of low-intensity oxygenation exercise, and almost always with an audiobook. I’ve tried to watch movies on the iPad, but the greatest advantage of the elliptical machine is the ability to do it with my eyes closed.

Recumbent indoor bicycling: I’ve been able to read academic papers (on paper), prepare classes, watch movies, read dead-tree books, answer email, tackle the RSS monster, etc, on recumbent bikes; I go exceedingly slow by any exercise standards, and the level of oxygenation is very low compared to the elliptical. On the other hand, the seating position in the recumbent bikes in the building gym is more comfortable than the (admittedly not very good for office work) dining room chairs I sit on when I’m not working at my standing desk.

Since I have decided to skip any non-essential purchases till 2012, I can now make a top-ten non-work book list for 2011. Just for fun, since top-ten lists are arbitrary and numerological.

1. The book of the year is Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs. 

2. My favorite living fiction author, Neal Stephenson, wrote an action-cyberpunk book, REAMDE. Neither as research-intensive as The Baroque Cycle nor as speculative as Anathem, but a good read with plenty of parallel threads. The usual 1000-plus pages, of course.

3. Charles Stross, who has overtaken William Gibson and conquered the second spot on my favorite living fiction author list, wrote a sequel to Halting State, Rule 34, which gives some serious food for thought in addition to being fast-paced cyberpunk peppered with little in-jokes for us members of the Großdeutsches Reich European Union.

4. Donald Norman’s Living With Complexity is a small tome with a big idea: that complexity is unavoidable but complication is unnecessary. Complexity is a characteristic of the world and the tasks we do in it; complication is the result of poorly designed choices and products. (This book was published November 2010, but I read it in 2011.)

5. Duncan Watts’s Everything is Obvious (once you know the answer) is a very interesting book about the illusion of ex-post explanations for observed outcomes. A lot of food for thought there and a number of examples that really drive home some points that one knows “in theory but not in practice.”

6. Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow is a nice overview of the cognitive psychology landscape from the vantage point of one of the grandees of the field.

7. Tim Harford’s Adapt is an interesting book about the importance of experimentation and the God complex of many decision-makers. There are a few points that I find weak and an entire chapter I skipped, but overall the book is well worth reading.

8. Niall Ferguson’s Civilization: The west and the rest purports to describe the “killer apps” of civilization, that is the six elements that make a civilization successful (like a “killer app” makes a platform successful). There are a lot of objections and questions about his methodology, but the book is certainly thought-provoking.

9. Kevin Mitnick’s autobiography Ghost In The Wires was entertaining, but it shows how far we are now from those halcyon days of phone phreaking and dial-up access. Compared with the new cyber threats in Jeffrey Carr’s Inside Cyber Warfare, Mitnick’s book is almost quaint. Still a good read for us cyber-security aficionados.

10. It’s old, but I read it in 2011: Daniel Silva’s The Unlikely Spy is a good, old-fashioned — World War II — spy novel. Much better than most modern action thrillers that try to politick for one side or the other of the american political spectrum (by many authors; science fiction writers were the worst in this respect, which explains why I’ve pretty much given it up).

And a notation: Umberto Eco has published a historical novel (Inner sarcastic voice: Really? Eco writing historical novels? You don’t say!), The Prague Cemetery. I only learned of it after having decided to skip non-essential purchases so I haven’t read it. From past Eco oeuvre I can surmise that it would have been somewhere near the top, though not ahead of Steve Jobs.