Taivo Lints Blog

A book in Estonian, from 2008, which is mostly a translated collection of four English books by Jackson J. Adam: The Secrets of Abundant Health (1995), The Secrets of Abundant Wealth (1996), The Secrets of Abundant Love (1996), and The Secrets of Abundant Happiness (1998).

The book provides a collection of sound advice which can hardly be called "secrets" anymore nowadays thanks to the proliferation of personal development and self-help literature and audio, but given how low is the number of people actually following such advice it doesn't hurt to have yet another book on it. What makes "Ennast leida, ennast hoida" different from a typical self-help book is its way of presentation -- the advice is packed into fictional but quite realistic-sounding narratives -- which makes it an easy read and also helps with the impact factor (think of fairy tales as a good example of memorable educational narratives). The pattern used in each section is the following: a young man is in distress, an old Chinese guy shows up, talks a bit and gives the young man a list of ten names with phone numbers, and goes away. The young man then visits those people, each of whom describes how they met with the Chinese guy years ago and what was the main advice they got out of the encounters with the old man and with the ten other people that were on the list they got from the Chinese guy.

There are a few dubious explanations on how and why some of the "secrets" work (some of those even explicitly corrected by the Estonian translator), but the main points are good and valuable. The "secrets" of health listed are the power of thinking and imagination, breathing, healthy eating, laughing, resting, posture, living environment, faith, and love; the "secrets" of love are the power of thought, respect, giving, friendship, touching, freedom, communication, faithfulness, desire, and trust; the "secrets" of happiness are mentality and attitudes, bodily factors (physical exercise, anchoring, posture, food, etc.), embracing every moment, the power of imagination and positive affirmation, goals, humor, forgiveness, giving, relationships, and faith; the "secrets" of wealth are the power of unconscious beliefs, strong desires, clarity of wishes and goals, detailed plans, domain-specific knowledge, willpower and persistence, control of expenditures, honesty, faith, and charity.

All in all, it is a good collection of useful advice. While it would be a very good idea to get the deeper knowledge about each point from other sources, this book serves as a handy reference list for occasional quick memory refresh.

More info about "Ennast leida, ennast hoida":
http://www.rahvaraamat.ee/?id=62&no=R110192

and the originals by Adam J. Jackson:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0061044245/
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0722536909/
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0722539436/
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0722536895/

(umm, some of the third-party prices at Amazon are, to put it mildly, CRAZY, though)

A book from 2007, about the positive and negative sides of diversity in human groups. The main focus is on the diversity of perspectives and heuristics, NOT identity diversity like race or gender.

The central point of the book is "The Diversity Trumps Ability Theorem" that applies to problem solving by groups. Roughly, it says that given the problem is difficult and the problem solvers are not stupid and no solution except the global optimum is a local optimum simultaneously for every individual in the group and both the initial problem solver population and the selected group are large enough, a randomly selected collection of problem solvers should outperform a collection of the best individual problem solvers. In the model that Page gives, the diversity always trumps ability, given those four conditions hold, but the book also describes how various human factors may make the theorem not work in some cases.

There's also "The Diversity Prediction Theorem": Given a crowd of predictive models, the Collective Error = Average Individual Error – Prediction Diversity. Here a group of randomly selected predictors does not necessarily predict more accurately than a group of the best predictors.

The discussions in the book are well supported with mathematical / computer models (though details are left to referenced papers, keeping the text easy to read), and while it is in general pro-diversity, it is NOT slogan'ishly pro-identity-diversity, but instead specifies what kind of diversity is good in which situations, and what are the accompanying costs that may sometimes cancel out the benefits.

For me, the book was quite an interesting read.

More info at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0691128383 and at Princeton University Press: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8353.html

A book originally from 2000.

Gives a good overview about what happens to physiological processes of humans in high altitudes, deep oceans (or other pressurized locations), hot and cold climates, outer space, and during physical exercise. Occasionally there are also a few notes about other animals, plus a whole chapter about extremophile lifeforms (mostly microorganisms), but all in all it's still a book about humans.

The book is very readable and aimed for the general public, but fortunately it still retains enough scientific information to be interesting for more serious readers as well (though unfortunately there seem to be a few factual mistakes, too; see the PubMed review). In general I liked it.

More information at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0520234200/

and at PubMed Central: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1119655

A book from 1998. It is apparently written with the goal to explain the concept of emergence to a broader audience, but I'm not so sure if the broader audience would actually like it...

While trying to make clear what emergence is, the book touches on the following subjects: model building (especially in computers), board games, game theory, machine learning, agent-based modeling, metaphors and innovation. For understanding and studying the essence of emergence, John Holland proposes a concept constrained generating procedures, explained by him as follows: "The models that result are dynamic, hence procedures; the mechanisms that underpin the model generate the dynamic behavior; and the allowed interactions between the mechanisms constrain the possibilities, in the way that the rules of a game constrain the possible board configurations."

I found the book somewhat interesting, but not particularly attractive.

More information at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0192862111

The book discusses the notion of time (reversible vs. irreversible), gives a mathematical overview of transformation groups and statistical mechanics (Gibbs style), time series, information and communication (Shannon style), explores feedback and stability of systems containing feedback, and then goes on by trying to apply all that to understanding how organisms and brains work.

It apparently is a classic book, and most likely was state-of-the-art, innovative and influential when it first came out in 1948. However, I, in 2007, did not much enjoy reading it as most of the content is nowadays either well known or disproven. What I did get out of it was a quick glimpse into the state of science more than half a century ago.

More information at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/026273009X