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Bursts: The Hidden Patterns Behind Everything We Do, from Your E-mail to Bloody Crusades
The bestselling author of Linked returns with a ground breaking new theory that will enthrall fans of The Tipping Point
Can we scientifically predict our future? It's a mystery that has nagged scientists for perhaps thousand of years. Now Albert-László Barabási-the award-winning author of the sleeper hit Linked - explains how the digital age has yielded a massive, previously unavailable data set that proves the daily pattern of human activity isn't random, it's "bursty." We work and fight and play in short flourishes of activity followed by next to nothing.
Compellingly illustrated with the account of a bloody medieval crusade in sixteenth-century Transylvania and the modern tale of a contemporary artist hunted by the FBI, Bursts reveals that we are far more predictable than we like to think.
Can we scientifically predict our future? It's a mystery that has nagged scientists for perhaps thousand of years. Now Albert-László Barabási-the award-winning author of the sleeper hit Linked - explains how the digital age has yielded a massive, previously unavailable data set that proves the daily pattern of human activity isn't random, it's "bursty." We work and fight and play in short flourishes of activity followed by next to nothing.
Compellingly illustrated with the account of a bloody medieval crusade in sixteenth-century Transylvania and the modern tale of a contemporary artist hunted by the FBI, Bursts reveals that we are far more predictable than we like to think.
320 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2010
121 people are currently reading
1538 people want to read
About the author
Albert-László Barabási
18 books394 followersAlbert-László Barabási is a physicist, best known for his work in the research of network science. A Hungarian born native of Transylvania, he received his Masters in Theoretical Physics at the Eotvos University in Budapest, Hungary and was awarded a Ph.D. three years later at Boston University. Barabási is the author of six books, including the forthcoming book "The Formula: The Science of Success." His work lead to the discovery of scale-free networks in 1999, and proposed the Barabási-Albert model to explain their widespread emergence in natural, technological and social systems, from the cellular telephone to the WWW or online communities.
Barabási is both the Robert Gray Dodge Professor of Network Science and a Distinguished University Professor at Northeastern University, where he directs the Center for Complex Network Research, and holds appointments in the Departments of Physics and Computer Science, as well as in the Department of Medicine, Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women Hospital, and is a member of the Center for Cancer Systems Biology at Dana Farber Cancer Institute.
Barabási is a Fellow of the American Physical Society. In 2005 he was awarded the FEBS Anniversary Prize for Systems Biology and in 2006 the John von Neumann Medal by the John von Neumann Computer Society from Hungary, for outstanding achievements in computer-related science and technology. In 2004 he was elected into the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and in 2007 into the Academia Europaea. He received the C&C Prize from the NEC C&C Foundation in 2008. In 2009 APS chose him Outstanding Referee and the US National Academies of Sciences awarded him the 2009 Cozzarelli Prize. In 2011 Barabsi was awarded the Lagrange Prize-CRT Foundation for his contributions to complex systems, awarded Doctor Honoris Causa from Universidad Politcnica de Madrid, became an elected Fellow in AAAS (Physics) and is an 2013 Fellow of the Massachusetts Academy of Sciences.
Barabási is both the Robert Gray Dodge Professor of Network Science and a Distinguished University Professor at Northeastern University, where he directs the Center for Complex Network Research, and holds appointments in the Departments of Physics and Computer Science, as well as in the Department of Medicine, Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women Hospital, and is a member of the Center for Cancer Systems Biology at Dana Farber Cancer Institute.
Barabási is a Fellow of the American Physical Society. In 2005 he was awarded the FEBS Anniversary Prize for Systems Biology and in 2006 the John von Neumann Medal by the John von Neumann Computer Society from Hungary, for outstanding achievements in computer-related science and technology. In 2004 he was elected into the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and in 2007 into the Academia Europaea. He received the C&C Prize from the NEC C&C Foundation in 2008. In 2009 APS chose him Outstanding Referee and the US National Academies of Sciences awarded him the 2009 Cozzarelli Prize. In 2011 Barabsi was awarded the Lagrange Prize-CRT Foundation for his contributions to complex systems, awarded Doctor Honoris Causa from Universidad Politcnica de Madrid, became an elected Fellow in AAAS (Physics) and is an 2013 Fellow of the Massachusetts Academy of Sciences.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 141 reviews
May 5, 2010
Here is my dilemma; I truly did enjoy reading this book. Every page of it. But the author seems to be schizophrenic. In the beginning of the book Barabasi shows that so many seemingly random events behave, not as from a Poisson distribution, but obey a power law distribution, instead. This is very interesting; so many events in our lives and in nature, occur in bursts, rather than at random intervals in time.
But then the author starts a historical outline of a revolution attempt that occurred in Hungary, in the year 1514. He alternates sections between contemporary life; to-do lists, productivity, homeland security, the Internet--and a story that occurred 500 years ago. Fully a third of the book is dedicated to this intriguing story. But at the end of the book, there is no credible linkage between the theme of the Hungarian revolution attempt and the main theme of the book. Well, the author attempts to correlate the 16th-century predictions of Telgedi with the modern problem of predicting future events. It just doesn't tie together.
Barabasi bemoans the fact that predicting future events is difficult because human dynamics are so complex. That would have sounded reasonable to me a month ago, but at the same time I was reading this book, I was also reading "The Predictioneer's Game" by Bruce Bueno De Mesquita. De Mesquita claims (and backs up his claims) that using game theory, he can predict future political, economic, diplomatic, judicial, and commercial events with 90% accuracy. But Barabasi makes no reference to the game theory approach--he does not even mention it to refute its credibility.
I like Barabasi's writing style--I gave his previous book, "Linked" a 5-star rating. But "Bursts" just makes me feel like a pinball.
But then the author starts a historical outline of a revolution attempt that occurred in Hungary, in the year 1514. He alternates sections between contemporary life; to-do lists, productivity, homeland security, the Internet--and a story that occurred 500 years ago. Fully a third of the book is dedicated to this intriguing story. But at the end of the book, there is no credible linkage between the theme of the Hungarian revolution attempt and the main theme of the book. Well, the author attempts to correlate the 16th-century predictions of Telgedi with the modern problem of predicting future events. It just doesn't tie together.
Barabasi bemoans the fact that predicting future events is difficult because human dynamics are so complex. That would have sounded reasonable to me a month ago, but at the same time I was reading this book, I was also reading "The Predictioneer's Game" by Bruce Bueno De Mesquita. De Mesquita claims (and backs up his claims) that using game theory, he can predict future political, economic, diplomatic, judicial, and commercial events with 90% accuracy. But Barabasi makes no reference to the game theory approach--he does not even mention it to refute its credibility.
I like Barabasi's writing style--I gave his previous book, "Linked" a 5-star rating. But "Bursts" just makes me feel like a pinball.
February 10, 2012
I should have given up on this book but I finished it anyway, expecting a payoff late in the text. Unfortunately, my initial impression was correct, and this is a magazine article pretending to be a book.
The basic idea - that most human activity occurs in short, concentrated bursts - is interesting enough, but all the author's supporting evidence could have fit into about three pages. The alternating chapters may be interesting to someone really into Eastern European history, but to me they read like someone who corners you at a party and wants to tell you all about his fascinating ancestry (one of the historical figures is an ancestor of the author). These parts of the book don't do much to hold up the thesis, and seem spliced in more for the author's own enjoyment that for any kind of clarity or evidence.
I may still give his earlier book a try, since it sounds like it's more scientifically rigorous, but my dislike of this one has pushed it way down on my reading list.
The basic idea - that most human activity occurs in short, concentrated bursts - is interesting enough, but all the author's supporting evidence could have fit into about three pages. The alternating chapters may be interesting to someone really into Eastern European history, but to me they read like someone who corners you at a party and wants to tell you all about his fascinating ancestry (one of the historical figures is an ancestor of the author). These parts of the book don't do much to hold up the thesis, and seem spliced in more for the author's own enjoyment that for any kind of clarity or evidence.
I may still give his earlier book a try, since it sounds like it's more scientifically rigorous, but my dislike of this one has pushed it way down on my reading list.
October 16, 2010
Being in the middle of a neurology/psychology book spate when I picked this up, I figured it would be more or less something between the two.
Instead, it was a clumsy combination of historical tale tied to the drab thesis which basically stated that people do things in flurries of activity . Very uninformative. Two stars is potentially generous.
Instead, it was a clumsy combination of historical tale tied to the drab thesis which basically stated that people do things in flurries of activity . Very uninformative. Two stars is potentially generous.
September 28, 2019
Előjáróban leszögezném, hogy Barabási Albert László annyira olvasmányosan, annyira sodró lelkesedéssel ír, hogy Frei Tamás ezt látva üveges szemmel dobálja a kandallóba 2020 című könyvének kéziratlapjait. Másrészt viszont Barabási Albert László könyve tudományos szövegként komolytalan. Amikor a nebraskai fegyverkiállításról egy 1514-es bíborosi konklávéra ugrik, majd onnan 1917-be, ahol egy meteorológust szemrevételez, onnan pedig Bangladesbe, és így tovább, az engem arra emlékeztet, ahogy a bűvész felzavarja a színpadra a bögyös bikinis asszisztenseit, így terelve el arról a figyelmünket, hogy közben a háttérben épp egy nyulat tömköd bele a cilinderébe. Persze lehetséges, hogy szó sincs átverésről – de maga a szándék, hogy itt mintha el akarnák terelni a figyelmemet, már gyanakvást kelt. Hiszen ha Barabásinak igazán lenne mondanivalója, akkor elmondaná – gondolom magamban -, ezzel szemben csak pörög ide-oda, néha pedig elidőz totálisan lényegtelennek tűnő részeknél (mint amilyen a nagyszebeni kutatás egy latin nyelvű levél után), és még a könyv felénél sem hajlandó kibökni, hogy voltaképpen mi hogy jön ide. (Megjegyzem, később is alig-alig*.) Fejtegetései totálisan olyanok, mint az épp általa említett örvénylő folyadékban lebegő apró részecskék: „hatalmas ugrásokat tesznek, azok között pedig idegesítően szöszmötölnek.” Szóval: ez egy diffúz könyv.
Vegyük például ezt a Székely „Dózsa” György szálat. Tulajdonképpen a könyv felét kiteszi, de vesszek meg, ha valaki meg tudja nekem indokolni ennek szükségességét. Persze nagyon jó kis Dózsa-értekezés ez, csak az a baj vele (az indokolatlanságán túl), hogy történelmi tanulmánynak bajosan vehető. Lehet, hogy szőrszálhasogató vagyok, de ha olyat olvasok egy szakmunkában, hogy Bakócz Tamásnak „forogni kezdett a gyomra”, akkor kicsit elkedvetlenedem. Majd ha a Szent Péter bazilikában talált verejtékmaradványok izotópos vizsgálatából kiderül, hogy 1.) a verejtékcsepp Bakócz Tamáshoz tartozik 2.) a verejtékcsepp kémiai összetétele arra utal, hogy Bakócz ideges volt – na, akkor majd mondhat ilyet. Amúgy meg csak mellébeszélés. Blöff. Egyébként is az egész Dózsa-ügy olybá tűnik nekem, mintha Barabási álma lett volna írni egy történelmi regényt. Van itt párviadal, csodás események, kitágult orrlyukakkal vágtató paripák, de még Eötvös Magyarország 1514-ben című könyvéből is átvesz egy monológot (történelmi erejű bizonyíték! muhaha!). Ami szép meg jó, és ismétlem: élvezet volt olvasni, de biztos, hogy ide való?
Amúgy Barabási a következő nagyívű ígérettel nyitja e könyvet: "Ha minden jól megy, mire a könyv végére ér, Ön is eljut a felismerésig, hogy akármilyen spontán embernek gondolta magát, valójában sokkal kiszámíthatóbb, mintsem hajlandó lenne beismerni." Az a problémám ezzel, hogy Barabási innentől kezdve mintha következetesen összemosná az emberi cselekedetek statisztikai megjósolhatóságának tényét az én egyéni spontaneitásommal – ami azért egészen más tészta. Arra gyanakszom, hogy írónk a varázsló szerepében akar tetszelegni, holott „csak” tudós. Az is szép szakma, üzenem neki innen a boltból, tessék vele megelégedni. Mert maga az elmélet, az nem tagadom, káprázatos lehetőségeket rejt magában: a hálózatok tudományát kiterjeszteni az emberi viselkedés magyarázatára. Hiszen valóban, a műholdak korában az emberek mozgásáról már annyi adat gyűlt össze, hogy csak legyen, aki győzi feldolgozni, és az is tuti, hogy ezekből a feldolgozott adatokból nagyon érdekes következtetéseket lehet majd (ismétlem: majd!) levonni. De ez nem mágia – csak kreatív adatfeldolgozás. Vagy ahogy Barabási definiálja: humán dinamika. Ami viszont e könyv alapján nem tudománynak tűnik, csupán egy tudomány ígéretének. (Ami persze szintúgy nem kevés.)
Másrészt itt vannak ugye ezek a fránya villanások – azok az előre kiszámíthatatlan szabálytól való eltérések, amelyek torzítják a statisztikai adatokat, megnehezítve ezzel azok feldolgozását. Mivel Barabási címül is őket választotta, némi joggal reméltem, hogy mond majd róluk valamit – akár azt, hogyan lehet előre jelezni őket. (Na, ez valóban a humán dinamika Szent Grálja lett volna.) Ezzel szemben az író elköveti azt a bravúrt, hogy háromszáz oldalon keresztül alig ejt róluk egy tiszta szót – még definiálni sem képes őket rendesen. Amit velük kapcsolatban felhoz, az egy rakás analógia: hogy mintha villanások lennének felfedezhetők a majmok, az albatroszok, a bankjegyek, meg még ki tudja mik mozgásában is – ami tök jó, tök érdekes, de egy analógia még nem tudományos bizonyíték, pláne ha ilyen kevéssé meggyőző. Merthogy így oldalog be a Dózsa-féle parasztfelkelés is a sztoriba: mint történelmi analógia. Hiszen az is milyen kiszámíthatatlan volt. Legalább ennyire kiszámíthatatlan volt persze az is, hogy édesapám bejelentette, holnap nálunk alszik, mégsem írok róla százötven oldalt. Ráadásul nevetségesnek találom, hogy konkrétan prófétát csinál egy Telegdi nevű nemesből, csak mert megjósolta előre az eseményeket. Még ilyet! Kitalálta, hogy ha felfegyverzik a parasztokat, akkor azok esetleg fölkoncolnak pár nemest! Orákulum volt a csávó! Én meg ezennel megjósolom, hogy ha adok egy filcet Kornél fiam kezébe, akkor összefirkálja a falat. Hihetetlen, mi?
Minden tiszteletem Barabási lendületének és intelligenciájának. Biztos vagyok benne, hogy ebből a témából lehengerlő egyórás előadást tud összeállítani – de ez így egy habos-babos izé. Tulajdonképpen annyi a slusszpoénja, hogy Karl Popper „Állításával ellentétben nincs rá szilárd bizonyíték, hogy a társadalmi rendszereket nem lehet előre jelezni.” (281. oldal) Értjük: az a konklúzió, hogy nem bizonyíthatjuk, hogy nem lehet. Igaz, azt sem tudjuk bizonyítani, hogy lehet. Na, ezért érdemes volt megírni ezt a könyvet… Összességében: tudományos munkának 1 csillag, viszont ha valamiféle Pynchon-féle posztmodern regénynek tekintem, akkor 5. Így jön ki a 3.
* "Az Olvasó talán időnként eltűnődik rajta, hogy mit keres Székely György, a tizenhatodik századi hős – vagy gazember – egy humán dinamikával foglalkozó könyvben? Mi köze a természettudománynak a történelemhez?" Nem „időnként”, László, hanem állandóan ezen töprengek, amióta ebbe a könyvbe belekezdtem. Úgyhogy ha már így a 278. oldalon megkérdezted, húsz oldallal a vége előtt, hát lepj meg végre a válasszal, kérlek, mert már marhára ideges vagyok.
Vegyük például ezt a Székely „Dózsa” György szálat. Tulajdonképpen a könyv felét kiteszi, de vesszek meg, ha valaki meg tudja nekem indokolni ennek szükségességét. Persze nagyon jó kis Dózsa-értekezés ez, csak az a baj vele (az indokolatlanságán túl), hogy történelmi tanulmánynak bajosan vehető. Lehet, hogy szőrszálhasogató vagyok, de ha olyat olvasok egy szakmunkában, hogy Bakócz Tamásnak „forogni kezdett a gyomra”, akkor kicsit elkedvetlenedem. Majd ha a Szent Péter bazilikában talált verejtékmaradványok izotópos vizsgálatából kiderül, hogy 1.) a verejtékcsepp Bakócz Tamáshoz tartozik 2.) a verejtékcsepp kémiai összetétele arra utal, hogy Bakócz ideges volt – na, akkor majd mondhat ilyet. Amúgy meg csak mellébeszélés. Blöff. Egyébként is az egész Dózsa-ügy olybá tűnik nekem, mintha Barabási álma lett volna írni egy történelmi regényt. Van itt párviadal, csodás események, kitágult orrlyukakkal vágtató paripák, de még Eötvös Magyarország 1514-ben című könyvéből is átvesz egy monológot (történelmi erejű bizonyíték! muhaha!). Ami szép meg jó, és ismétlem: élvezet volt olvasni, de biztos, hogy ide való?
Amúgy Barabási a következő nagyívű ígérettel nyitja e könyvet: "Ha minden jól megy, mire a könyv végére ér, Ön is eljut a felismerésig, hogy akármilyen spontán embernek gondolta magát, valójában sokkal kiszámíthatóbb, mintsem hajlandó lenne beismerni." Az a problémám ezzel, hogy Barabási innentől kezdve mintha következetesen összemosná az emberi cselekedetek statisztikai megjósolhatóságának tényét az én egyéni spontaneitásommal – ami azért egészen más tészta. Arra gyanakszom, hogy írónk a varázsló szerepében akar tetszelegni, holott „csak” tudós. Az is szép szakma, üzenem neki innen a boltból, tessék vele megelégedni. Mert maga az elmélet, az nem tagadom, káprázatos lehetőségeket rejt magában: a hálózatok tudományát kiterjeszteni az emberi viselkedés magyarázatára. Hiszen valóban, a műholdak korában az emberek mozgásáról már annyi adat gyűlt össze, hogy csak legyen, aki győzi feldolgozni, és az is tuti, hogy ezekből a feldolgozott adatokból nagyon érdekes következtetéseket lehet majd (ismétlem: majd!) levonni. De ez nem mágia – csak kreatív adatfeldolgozás. Vagy ahogy Barabási definiálja: humán dinamika. Ami viszont e könyv alapján nem tudománynak tűnik, csupán egy tudomány ígéretének. (Ami persze szintúgy nem kevés.)
Másrészt itt vannak ugye ezek a fránya villanások – azok az előre kiszámíthatatlan szabálytól való eltérések, amelyek torzítják a statisztikai adatokat, megnehezítve ezzel azok feldolgozását. Mivel Barabási címül is őket választotta, némi joggal reméltem, hogy mond majd róluk valamit – akár azt, hogyan lehet előre jelezni őket. (Na, ez valóban a humán dinamika Szent Grálja lett volna.) Ezzel szemben az író elköveti azt a bravúrt, hogy háromszáz oldalon keresztül alig ejt róluk egy tiszta szót – még definiálni sem képes őket rendesen. Amit velük kapcsolatban felhoz, az egy rakás analógia: hogy mintha villanások lennének felfedezhetők a majmok, az albatroszok, a bankjegyek, meg még ki tudja mik mozgásában is – ami tök jó, tök érdekes, de egy analógia még nem tudományos bizonyíték, pláne ha ilyen kevéssé meggyőző. Merthogy így oldalog be a Dózsa-féle parasztfelkelés is a sztoriba: mint történelmi analógia. Hiszen az is milyen kiszámíthatatlan volt. Legalább ennyire kiszámíthatatlan volt persze az is, hogy édesapám bejelentette, holnap nálunk alszik, mégsem írok róla százötven oldalt. Ráadásul nevetségesnek találom, hogy konkrétan prófétát csinál egy Telegdi nevű nemesből, csak mert megjósolta előre az eseményeket. Még ilyet! Kitalálta, hogy ha felfegyverzik a parasztokat, akkor azok esetleg fölkoncolnak pár nemest! Orákulum volt a csávó! Én meg ezennel megjósolom, hogy ha adok egy filcet Kornél fiam kezébe, akkor összefirkálja a falat. Hihetetlen, mi?
Minden tiszteletem Barabási lendületének és intelligenciájának. Biztos vagyok benne, hogy ebből a témából lehengerlő egyórás előadást tud összeállítani – de ez így egy habos-babos izé. Tulajdonképpen annyi a slusszpoénja, hogy Karl Popper „Állításával ellentétben nincs rá szilárd bizonyíték, hogy a társadalmi rendszereket nem lehet előre jelezni.” (281. oldal) Értjük: az a konklúzió, hogy nem bizonyíthatjuk, hogy nem lehet. Igaz, azt sem tudjuk bizonyítani, hogy lehet. Na, ezért érdemes volt megírni ezt a könyvet… Összességében: tudományos munkának 1 csillag, viszont ha valamiféle Pynchon-féle posztmodern regénynek tekintem, akkor 5. Így jön ki a 3.
* "Az Olvasó talán időnként eltűnődik rajta, hogy mit keres Székely György, a tizenhatodik századi hős – vagy gazember – egy humán dinamikával foglalkozó könyvben? Mi köze a természettudománynak a történelemhez?" Nem „időnként”, László, hanem állandóan ezen töprengek, amióta ebbe a könyvbe belekezdtem. Úgyhogy ha már így a 278. oldalon megkérdezted, húsz oldallal a vége előtt, hát lepj meg végre a válasszal, kérlek, mert már marhára ideges vagyok.
December 8, 2017
People do things in bursts. As opposed to randomly or sequentially and organized. So ... that's the book. Ok ... bye.
To the author's credit, some ideas don't show value until others start making use of them. This was an idea he was putting out there that he had discovered which comes from deep inside our biology. Our molecules act in bursts. Animals are bursty. Humans, bursty. Our habits, also bursty. The value to this will be left to those that can monetize it, I guess. Best of luck to ya'll.
Uhm ... oh, so it's a valid idea, right? But the book doesn't give an idea about what to do with it. Right after I read this book, I read an economic article about how people were out of ideas. About how the economic growth rate was basically because of a few great inventions, but that's over now and we'll go back to centuries of near 0% economic growth. Until ... another ... burst of invention and ideas. Neat, eh? The article wasn't written about the book. It was mutually exclusive. Just happened to converge.
So, instead of one star, I gave it two because if we understand our natural bursty behavior, we can make better predictions. Ones that aren't based on expecting randomness or expecting organized sequences.
To the author's credit, some ideas don't show value until others start making use of them. This was an idea he was putting out there that he had discovered which comes from deep inside our biology. Our molecules act in bursts. Animals are bursty. Humans, bursty. Our habits, also bursty. The value to this will be left to those that can monetize it, I guess. Best of luck to ya'll.
Uhm ... oh, so it's a valid idea, right? But the book doesn't give an idea about what to do with it. Right after I read this book, I read an economic article about how people were out of ideas. About how the economic growth rate was basically because of a few great inventions, but that's over now and we'll go back to centuries of near 0% economic growth. Until ... another ... burst of invention and ideas. Neat, eh? The article wasn't written about the book. It was mutually exclusive. Just happened to converge.
So, instead of one star, I gave it two because if we understand our natural bursty behavior, we can make better predictions. Ones that aren't based on expecting randomness or expecting organized sequences.
December 6, 2018
The tagline oversells it. There's nothing groundbreaking or controversial and certainly nothing revolutionary. The random bits of Hungarian history add no value and are of no interest to me and I suspect anyone else who isn't Hungarian.
May 9, 2012
Albert-laszlo Barabasi the Author of "Bursts" asks the question: "Can human behavior be predicted by applying the quantum physics principles of the Dispersion Theory of Particles?" If the answer is yes, then the trajectory of disease, ideas, innovation, and human activity could be predicted with a reasonable amount of confidence.
The book weaves the story of a medieval hungarian knight, who when appointed to lead a crusade to the Holy land, turns his army of peasants against the Hungarian nobility with probalilty, mathematics and physics theories.
The author's theory of Bursts is rooted in Albert Einstein's ideas on the dispersion of particles. In a 1905 paper, Eisnstein correctly predicted that particles typically move in a back and forth, zigzag motion and the typical particle would move a distance proportional to the square root of the time elasped since its release. Described in another way, the motion and distance of a specific particle cannot be predicted, but the mean or average of particles movement can be predicted. The typical particle will travel a certain distances in a certain amount of time. Quadrupal the amount of time and in the typical particle will not travel four times farther but twice the distance from its release point.
In addition to Einstein's Dispersion theory, the book introduces the reader briefly but effectively to Poisson distributions, Gaussian dristributions, power laws, Levy flight, the random walk, entropy, outliers, predictability and several other mathematical models and theories. These models or theories can be used to predict human behavior if human behavior is termed random rather than unpredictable.
The book worked for me. I would have preferred deeper explanations of the theories and models described in the book. The story of the medeival knight was interesting but was not germaine to the subject of the book. The book was easy to read and provided a good introduction to the way consumer behavior is being predicted by corporate merchants and internet providers. The message is that our behavior can be predicted with a very accuratly and there is no longer any privacy unless we are an "outlier" in the probability models or we do not use the internet, credit cards, telephones and that we used random number generators to make our decisions.
We need to find out how to predict our own behavior so we cut down on our mistakes. In that the companies that have developed the methods to make such predictions are strictly guarded secrets, it would not appear that will happen soon.
The book weaves the story of a medieval hungarian knight, who when appointed to lead a crusade to the Holy land, turns his army of peasants against the Hungarian nobility with probalilty, mathematics and physics theories.
The author's theory of Bursts is rooted in Albert Einstein's ideas on the dispersion of particles. In a 1905 paper, Eisnstein correctly predicted that particles typically move in a back and forth, zigzag motion and the typical particle would move a distance proportional to the square root of the time elasped since its release. Described in another way, the motion and distance of a specific particle cannot be predicted, but the mean or average of particles movement can be predicted. The typical particle will travel a certain distances in a certain amount of time. Quadrupal the amount of time and in the typical particle will not travel four times farther but twice the distance from its release point.
In addition to Einstein's Dispersion theory, the book introduces the reader briefly but effectively to Poisson distributions, Gaussian dristributions, power laws, Levy flight, the random walk, entropy, outliers, predictability and several other mathematical models and theories. These models or theories can be used to predict human behavior if human behavior is termed random rather than unpredictable.
The book worked for me. I would have preferred deeper explanations of the theories and models described in the book. The story of the medeival knight was interesting but was not germaine to the subject of the book. The book was easy to read and provided a good introduction to the way consumer behavior is being predicted by corporate merchants and internet providers. The message is that our behavior can be predicted with a very accuratly and there is no longer any privacy unless we are an "outlier" in the probability models or we do not use the internet, credit cards, telephones and that we used random number generators to make our decisions.
We need to find out how to predict our own behavior so we cut down on our mistakes. In that the companies that have developed the methods to make such predictions are strictly guarded secrets, it would not appear that will happen soon.
January 22, 2016
this book has one of the most unusual web promos, I feel compelled to share it.
Found here
http://brsts.com/
Some interesting points about
tracking bills with Where's George
identifying suspected terrorists with statistics ( and how that can go horribly wrong),
weekend release of Harry Potters books mirrors huge dips in children emergency room visits
your friends obesity impacts your risk of obesity.
There is a huge running theme in this book about Transylvanian/Hungarian medievel history that I just don't get the point.
Started and stopped this book many times and quit it with only 5o pages to go in 2012. finished it last night.
Found here
http://brsts.com/
Some interesting points about
tracking bills with Where's George
identifying suspected terrorists with statistics ( and how that can go horribly wrong),
weekend release of Harry Potters books mirrors huge dips in children emergency room visits
your friends obesity impacts your risk of obesity.
There is a huge running theme in this book about Transylvanian/Hungarian medievel history that I just don't get the point.
Started and stopped this book many times and quit it with only 5o pages to go in 2012. finished it last night.
February 2, 2011
I wanted to like this more than I did. Was a fan of Barabasi's last book on networks but I couldn't help but find this one a bit weak. While the concept of "bursts" as a pattern to explain much of human activity over time is interesting it just doesn't seem to resonate like the power laws of the last book did. Also found the constant switching back and forth between the present time and some of the historical stories a bit annoying and staged. There were many interesting bits throughout the book but I came away wishing it had just been written with less affectation and more directness.
November 8, 2020
Human activities tend to follow short bursts of intensity (power law) + our daily schedule is pretty predictable.
Two takeaways the author tool way too long to explain.
Two takeaways the author tool way too long to explain.
February 22, 2013
Nothing we do is random. Everything is within a routine or expected area of acting. Very interesting read.
June 13, 2013
Excelent.
February 16, 2023
I listened to the audiobook and it turned out to be very different than the opening story made me believe.
While it was interesting much of it was about mathematical equations of which I'm not familiar, and many related to Poisson, and while I'm familiar with Poisson and know he was a famous mathematician I had no idea how many formulas were related to him or how they impact our lives.
The stories at the end were gruesome as the author warned and I like that Barabas bounced around among several story lines before tying them all together at the end.
The premise of the book is as the title suggests, much of what we do, happens in short bursts, rather than over long periods of time and while many things are random much of our lives can be predicted by data and algorithms and now AI.
If you like science and math I recommend this book, if not you may not enjoy it.
While it was interesting much of it was about mathematical equations of which I'm not familiar, and many related to Poisson, and while I'm familiar with Poisson and know he was a famous mathematician I had no idea how many formulas were related to him or how they impact our lives.
The stories at the end were gruesome as the author warned and I like that Barabas bounced around among several story lines before tying them all together at the end.
The premise of the book is as the title suggests, much of what we do, happens in short bursts, rather than over long periods of time and while many things are random much of our lives can be predicted by data and algorithms and now AI.
If you like science and math I recommend this book, if not you may not enjoy it.
August 29, 2015
Conclusion:
The pattern of human beings, animal migrations, e-mails, diseases, and various other assorted subjects is sort of like the following sentences:
................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................There is a whole lotta nothing or normal behavior followed by a BURSTOFACTIVITYTHATCANNOTBEACCOUNTEDFOR soon to be followed by:.............................................................a whole lotta nothing and average everyday normal behavior.......SoontobefollowedbyANOTHERBURSTOFRANDOMOUTLYINGACTIVITY.
Along the way we are introduced to such statistical concepts as Levy flights (no that is not an ad campaign for those old school Levi's commercials where the guy uses his pants to travel across a clothesline to another building before the boyfriend of the hussie he was just banging catches him.) We are also introduced to the concept of the power law, and in the end it is determined that "Hey we just can not predict human behavior but we do believe that it might one day become an easier task than we all currently think".
Barabasi throughout manages to keep everything very entertaining with random jumps (Get it? BURSTS?) back and forth between a crusader uprising against the nobility in the 16th century to modern studies of the Albatross (A huge freaking bird) to Hasan Elahi (A modern artist mistaken for a terrorist by homeland security).
SPOILER ALERT:
The ending scene where Gyorgy Dozsa Szekely is tortured is something out of a hell realm from a Clive Barker novel. I was expecting the Hell Priest of the Cenobites to make a cameo halfway through the horrendous torture Szekely was forced to endure by the twisted hellish minds of Transylvania's "nobility". Seriously these people were extremely f*cked up. I can see why someone like Vlad the Impaler came from these parts. Thank God for that Muslim army that finally put an end to his hellish crazy impaling reign.
The pattern of human beings, animal migrations, e-mails, diseases, and various other assorted subjects is sort of like the following sentences:
................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................There is a whole lotta nothing or normal behavior followed by a BURSTOFACTIVITYTHATCANNOTBEACCOUNTEDFOR soon to be followed by:.............................................................a whole lotta nothing and average everyday normal behavior.......SoontobefollowedbyANOTHERBURSTOFRANDOMOUTLYINGACTIVITY.
Along the way we are introduced to such statistical concepts as Levy flights (no that is not an ad campaign for those old school Levi's commercials where the guy uses his pants to travel across a clothesline to another building before the boyfriend of the hussie he was just banging catches him.) We are also introduced to the concept of the power law, and in the end it is determined that "Hey we just can not predict human behavior but we do believe that it might one day become an easier task than we all currently think".
Barabasi throughout manages to keep everything very entertaining with random jumps (Get it? BURSTS?) back and forth between a crusader uprising against the nobility in the 16th century to modern studies of the Albatross (A huge freaking bird) to Hasan Elahi (A modern artist mistaken for a terrorist by homeland security).
SPOILER ALERT:
The ending scene where Gyorgy Dozsa Szekely is tortured is something out of a hell realm from a Clive Barker novel. I was expecting the Hell Priest of the Cenobites to make a cameo halfway through the horrendous torture Szekely was forced to endure by the twisted hellish minds of Transylvania's "nobility". Seriously these people were extremely f*cked up. I can see why someone like Vlad the Impaler came from these parts. Thank God for that Muslim army that finally put an end to his hellish crazy impaling reign.
November 11, 2015
It's fascinating. And it's at least just another intro into some field of modern research. It's rather aome kind of a non fiction novel that tells what it means to be a scientist and especially a social scientist. Barabasi somehow interwinded predictiveness, math, Hungarian medieval history, privacy and many other topics into a exciting and provoking story.
Highly recomended
Highly recomended
April 28, 2018
This is one of my favorite books of all times. It outlines how everything happens. What starts a revolution is an idea based in human behavior and someone's curiosity that turns into a worldwide technology that grows and grows. A thought becoming things that becomes more things. This is a fascinating book and thought provoking.
September 8, 2024
It's an amazing book about the randomness of what we do and human dynamics. Fantastic explanations about the world and how people behave. I recommend it to everyone!
December 4, 2013
Barabási, Albert-László (2010). Bursts: The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do. London: Dutton. 2010. ISBN 9781101428429. Pagine 323. 19,34 $
Letto subito dopo la sua uscita, nella primavera-estate del 2010, ma poi non recensito.
Barabási è un fisico di origine ungherese, nato in Transilvania nella comunità Székely. Questo ne spiega, anche se non ne giustifica, l’acceso nazionalismo: gli ungheresi ritendono, forse a ragione, di essere stati penalizzati nel trattato di Trianon, al termine della 1ª guerra mondiale, a vantaggio della Romania. Il suo nome è legato soprattutto alla teoria delle reti, e in particolare delle scale-free networks, di cui trattava il suo precedente volume destinato al pubblico non specialistico, Linked: The New Science Of Networks (Link. La scienza delle reti). Quando l’ho letto, una decina d’anni fa, nella torrida estate del 2003, ne sono stato fortemente e favorevolmente colpito. Mi era anche capitato, per motivi professionale, di leggere qualche cosa di più tecnico e più accademico di Barabási, che ormai guardavo con ammirazione e rispetto.
Bursts ha in parte tradito le mie aspettative e vedo, dalle recensioni che si trovano in rete, che non sono il solo. Il problema è che, in questo libro, Barabási divaga in continuazione. Non che questo mi spiaccia: anzi, mi diverte molto e mi ci riconosco anche. Però, in tutto questo divagare, rischia di perdersi il messaggio principale: è questo che – nonostante i molti riferimenti al libro che costellano questo blog (a proposito della trilogia di John Twelve Hawks, ma anche di un suo articolo sulla “rete dei sapori” pubblicato su Nature) – mi aveva finora dissuaso dalla recensione.
La tesi centrale di Bursts è che i comportamenti umani siano caratterizzati da bursts, esplosioni di attività all’interno di lunghi periodi di (relativa) quiete (il titolo del libro è tradotto in italiano Lampi, ma mi sembra renda meno di scoppi o esplosioni; allora forse meglio sprazzi). Pensate a come rispondete ai vostri messaggi di posta elettronica: benché i messaggi vi arrivino pressoché di continuo, soprattutto se ne ricevete molti dall’estero e dunque la loro cadenza non è influenzato dai ritmi circadiani del posto in cui vivete, è probabile che tendiate a limitare alcuni momenti della vostra giornata a rispondere. Il perché è molto semplice: le cose da fare sono tante, il tempo è poco. Perciò, istintivamente, date alle cose da fare delle priorità; e quelle che non ricadono tra quelle prioritarie, spesso giacciono inevase: per giorni, per mesi, per sempre.
Paradossalmente, proprio perché bursts e priorità sono ineluttabili, prevedere il comportamento umano è più facile, non più difficile.
Our tasks and responsibilities are poised to queue thanks to a shortage of time. If we could simultaneously work on an arbitrary number of tasks, no one would need a priority list. Time is our most valuable nonrenewable resource, and if we want to treat it with respect, we need to set priorities. Once we do that, power laws and burstiness become unavoidable. [posizione Kindle 1822]
Peccato che questi due importanti messaggi, esposti con chiarezza e rigore, si disperdano in un libro che fa del detour la sua cifra.
Tanto per cominciare, oltre metà del libro (14 capitoli su 28, cui vanno aggiunte 15 immagini originali dell’artista transilvano Botond Reszegh: «There is a theorem in publishing that each graph halves a book’s audience. Its corollary for e-books: Each image halves the number of devices that can properly display it.», pos. 4468) è dedicata alla storia di un eroe Székely, Dózsa György alias György Székely che, se non ricordo male, non ha moltissimo a che fare con il suo tema principale. Fino allo spaventoso supplizio del trono incandescente che vedete raffigurato qui sotto.
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia
Condivido largamente, a questo punto, la recensione di Clive Thompson sul Wall Street Journal del 30 aprile 2010:
Mr. Barabási worries that burstiness makes us trackable online by corporations and government, particularly as digital tools like mobile phones produce records of our goings and doings.
This is genuinely fascinating stuff, and when he focuses on the science, Mr. Barabási is a superbly clear writer. But science constitutes a surprisingly small fraction of “Bursts.” Mr. Barabási spends much of the book delivering real-life stories that are supposed to illustrate his principles. Some, like an account of Albert Einstein’s correspondence in 1919 with a little-known scientist, neatly illustrate how bursts govern our lives. But other stories aren’t so successful— particularly Mr. Barabási’s elaborate account of how a Crusade in 16th-century Hungary turned into a gore-splattered civil war. On its own, the Hungarian conflict makes a riveting story, but Mr. Barabási devotes more than a quarter of the book to its telling—yet never convincingly connects the tale to his theme. It became, for me, a maddening distraction. In the end, Mr. Barabási has written a thought-provoking book. But the most rewarding passages appear only, as it were, in bursts.
* * *
Naturalmente, data la classe di Barabási, il libro è colmo di riflessioni e spunti interessanti (consueti riferimenti alla posizione Kindle):
[…] exploding prevalence […] [552]
We live in a data-rich world.
Putting these data to lucrative use propels the development of further technologies that aim to discover even more about each of us. [555]
Once again, the truth failed to cooperate […] [951]
The problem wasn’t his method but his data. [981]
In 2007, eleven years after its initial discovery, the Lévy character of animal foraging was no longer considered a hypothesis but a well-established scientific fact and had inspired hundreds of publications by ecologists, animal researchers, mathematicians, and physicists. Thus the entire scientific community was shocked when they read that year’s October 25 issue of Nature: a paper coauthored by Edwards, Sergey, and many others concluded that any likeness the path of the wandering albatrosses had to a Lévy trajectory was an artifact of the measurements. [2541]
Science itself often follows a Lévy pattern—a huge jump ahead is trailed by many small, localized steps that appear to take us nowhere, or perhaps even backward in some instances. These are not wasted moves, however, but necessary to testing the boundaries of the new paradigm. [2608]
Predictably Unpredictable
Since the publication in 2005 of The Traveler, a New Age “high-tech paranoid-schizophrenic thriller” with an Orwellian twist, a peculiar debate has absorbed cyberspace. The book takes us into a world where life is free of crises and surprises, a world of ennui-inducing normality. This peace and apparent security is maintained by a worldwide system of computers called the Vast Machine, fed by millions of surveillance cameras, sensors, and detectors. Only the members of a once-powerful ancient society and their sword-carrying protectors, the Harlequins, are aware of the Vast Machine’s reach and are willing to stand up to it.
The ongoing debate this book continues to inspire on blogs and bulletin boards alike might easily focus on the eerie parallels between our own post-9/11 society and the tightly monitored world described in it. But it does not. It might also center on the book’s literary merits, except that, as one critic put it, the writing “is pitched to perhaps a seventh-grade reading level,” an assessment few would challenge. The debate is instead about John Twelve Hawks, its author.
The blockbuster sales and movie rights ought to have elevated Hawks to national celebrity, putting him among the likes of Stephen King and Dan Brown. Yet they did not. And it isn’t because the media shuns him either. The real reason that you never hear about Hawks is that nobody seems to know him. He does not sign books and does not participate in promotional tours. In fact, he has never been seen in public and supposedly communicates even with his editor only through an untraceable satellite phone. Just like the Harlequins on perpetual run from the Vast Machine, John Twelve Hawks lives off the grid, a paranoid seclusion that fuels ongoing speculation regarding his true identity.
The book’s central character is a Harlequin who preserves her off-the-grid anonymity by never using credit cards, opening bank accounts, or staying at permanent addresses. Aware that “any habitual action that showed a Harlequin taking a daily, predictable route to some location” will allow the Vast Machine to predict her whereabouts, she “cultivates randomness.” That is, she relies on a random-number generator, or RNG, to guide her decisions. “An odd number might mean Yes, an even number No. Push a button, and the RNG will tell you which door to enter,” freeing her actions from predictable patterns.
The book is a tale of a battle between good and evil that takes us briefly into something like that fifth dimension Theodor Kaluza proposed to Einstein, throwing into the mix Japanese sword fights and quantum computing. It also again begs the question, could one build a Vast Machine that foresees our actions?
We find it perfectly acceptable that particle physicists can predict within a picometer of accuracy the trajectory of a proton or that rocket scientists can launch a satellite that nine months later drops a robot on Mars. Unlike protons or satellites, however, humans tend to seek new experiences in a continually changing world, making it impossible to foresee their long-term actions. Indeed, given my hectic travel schedule, until recently I found any attempt to predict my whereabouts a few weeks in advance to be a hopeless exercise, fueling my hope that the Vast Machine will always stay where it belongs—in the realm of science fiction. Lately, however, I have begun to have my doubts. [2761: la mia recensione alla trilogia è qui]
Given how impenetrable our past has become, perhaps it’s no small wonder that our future is uncertain. [2976]
Today each person doing research on human dynamics increasingly faces a similar dilemma: How do we avoid contributing to the creation of a surveillance state or conglomerate, a back-to-the-future ticket to Orwell’s 1984?
Hasan has a refreshing answer to this question.
“Intelligence agencies, regardless of who they are, all operate in an industry where their commodity is information,” he observes. “The reason their information has value,” he adds, “is because no one has access to it.”
His solution? Give it up, and it becomes worthless. “It is the secrecy applied to the information that makes it valuable,” he says. And with that, he joins the Szeklers and hides in plain sight, pouring his life out onto his Web site. [3215]
As we have seen, predicting an individual’s behavior is getting steadily easier. And the future is far more valuable than the past, as our travel and purchasing plans are possibly the most potent commodity in our economy. And while secure firewalls and privacy laws protect our pasts, our futures, predicted by sophisticated algorithms, are up for grabs. With that we arrive at a new paradigm I call prospective privacy. It boils down to this: Who owns the information about our future actions and behavior? Who should profit from it? [3244]
But no physicist has ever successfully predicted the trajectory of 10^23 molecules in a gas, either, and that hasn’t stopped us from predicting the gas’s pressure and temperature—arguably far more important than the trajectory of each individual molecule. The same is true for human dynamics. Our deep-rooted unpredictability does not need to bubble up at the level of the society. If we carefully distinguish the random from the predictable, we might be able to foresee many features of the social fabric. [3711]
Any discussion about privacy is a discussion about trade-offs. Giving up the privacy of our medical records may allow the insurance companies to refuse coverage, but not sharing the data could limit the quality of the medical care we receive and thwart research toward the development of better cures. Giving up information about our shopping habits may be perceived by some as an uncomfortable loss of privacy, but others are more than willing to part with it for free or discounted services. Giving up information about our employment history and communication patterns may expose us to potential criminal investigation, but may also reward us with higher security and decrease our chances of being caught in a criminal activity or terrorist attack. [4348]
Letto subito dopo la sua uscita, nella primavera-estate del 2010, ma poi non recensito.
Barabási è un fisico di origine ungherese, nato in Transilvania nella comunità Székely. Questo ne spiega, anche se non ne giustifica, l’acceso nazionalismo: gli ungheresi ritendono, forse a ragione, di essere stati penalizzati nel trattato di Trianon, al termine della 1ª guerra mondiale, a vantaggio della Romania. Il suo nome è legato soprattutto alla teoria delle reti, e in particolare delle scale-free networks, di cui trattava il suo precedente volume destinato al pubblico non specialistico, Linked: The New Science Of Networks (Link. La scienza delle reti). Quando l’ho letto, una decina d’anni fa, nella torrida estate del 2003, ne sono stato fortemente e favorevolmente colpito. Mi era anche capitato, per motivi professionale, di leggere qualche cosa di più tecnico e più accademico di Barabási, che ormai guardavo con ammirazione e rispetto.
Bursts ha in parte tradito le mie aspettative e vedo, dalle recensioni che si trovano in rete, che non sono il solo. Il problema è che, in questo libro, Barabási divaga in continuazione. Non che questo mi spiaccia: anzi, mi diverte molto e mi ci riconosco anche. Però, in tutto questo divagare, rischia di perdersi il messaggio principale: è questo che – nonostante i molti riferimenti al libro che costellano questo blog (a proposito della trilogia di John Twelve Hawks, ma anche di un suo articolo sulla “rete dei sapori” pubblicato su Nature) – mi aveva finora dissuaso dalla recensione.
La tesi centrale di Bursts è che i comportamenti umani siano caratterizzati da bursts, esplosioni di attività all’interno di lunghi periodi di (relativa) quiete (il titolo del libro è tradotto in italiano Lampi, ma mi sembra renda meno di scoppi o esplosioni; allora forse meglio sprazzi). Pensate a come rispondete ai vostri messaggi di posta elettronica: benché i messaggi vi arrivino pressoché di continuo, soprattutto se ne ricevete molti dall’estero e dunque la loro cadenza non è influenzato dai ritmi circadiani del posto in cui vivete, è probabile che tendiate a limitare alcuni momenti della vostra giornata a rispondere. Il perché è molto semplice: le cose da fare sono tante, il tempo è poco. Perciò, istintivamente, date alle cose da fare delle priorità; e quelle che non ricadono tra quelle prioritarie, spesso giacciono inevase: per giorni, per mesi, per sempre.
Paradossalmente, proprio perché bursts e priorità sono ineluttabili, prevedere il comportamento umano è più facile, non più difficile.
Our tasks and responsibilities are poised to queue thanks to a shortage of time. If we could simultaneously work on an arbitrary number of tasks, no one would need a priority list. Time is our most valuable nonrenewable resource, and if we want to treat it with respect, we need to set priorities. Once we do that, power laws and burstiness become unavoidable. [posizione Kindle 1822]
Peccato che questi due importanti messaggi, esposti con chiarezza e rigore, si disperdano in un libro che fa del detour la sua cifra.
Tanto per cominciare, oltre metà del libro (14 capitoli su 28, cui vanno aggiunte 15 immagini originali dell’artista transilvano Botond Reszegh: «There is a theorem in publishing that each graph halves a book’s audience. Its corollary for e-books: Each image halves the number of devices that can properly display it.», pos. 4468) è dedicata alla storia di un eroe Székely, Dózsa György alias György Székely che, se non ricordo male, non ha moltissimo a che fare con il suo tema principale. Fino allo spaventoso supplizio del trono incandescente che vedete raffigurato qui sotto.
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia
Condivido largamente, a questo punto, la recensione di Clive Thompson sul Wall Street Journal del 30 aprile 2010:
Mr. Barabási worries that burstiness makes us trackable online by corporations and government, particularly as digital tools like mobile phones produce records of our goings and doings.
This is genuinely fascinating stuff, and when he focuses on the science, Mr. Barabási is a superbly clear writer. But science constitutes a surprisingly small fraction of “Bursts.” Mr. Barabási spends much of the book delivering real-life stories that are supposed to illustrate his principles. Some, like an account of Albert Einstein’s correspondence in 1919 with a little-known scientist, neatly illustrate how bursts govern our lives. But other stories aren’t so successful— particularly Mr. Barabási’s elaborate account of how a Crusade in 16th-century Hungary turned into a gore-splattered civil war. On its own, the Hungarian conflict makes a riveting story, but Mr. Barabási devotes more than a quarter of the book to its telling—yet never convincingly connects the tale to his theme. It became, for me, a maddening distraction. In the end, Mr. Barabási has written a thought-provoking book. But the most rewarding passages appear only, as it were, in bursts.
* * *
Naturalmente, data la classe di Barabási, il libro è colmo di riflessioni e spunti interessanti (consueti riferimenti alla posizione Kindle):
[…] exploding prevalence […] [552]
We live in a data-rich world.
Putting these data to lucrative use propels the development of further technologies that aim to discover even more about each of us. [555]
Once again, the truth failed to cooperate […] [951]
The problem wasn’t his method but his data. [981]
In 2007, eleven years after its initial discovery, the Lévy character of animal foraging was no longer considered a hypothesis but a well-established scientific fact and had inspired hundreds of publications by ecologists, animal researchers, mathematicians, and physicists. Thus the entire scientific community was shocked when they read that year’s October 25 issue of Nature: a paper coauthored by Edwards, Sergey, and many others concluded that any likeness the path of the wandering albatrosses had to a Lévy trajectory was an artifact of the measurements. [2541]
Science itself often follows a Lévy pattern—a huge jump ahead is trailed by many small, localized steps that appear to take us nowhere, or perhaps even backward in some instances. These are not wasted moves, however, but necessary to testing the boundaries of the new paradigm. [2608]
Predictably Unpredictable
Since the publication in 2005 of The Traveler, a New Age “high-tech paranoid-schizophrenic thriller” with an Orwellian twist, a peculiar debate has absorbed cyberspace. The book takes us into a world where life is free of crises and surprises, a world of ennui-inducing normality. This peace and apparent security is maintained by a worldwide system of computers called the Vast Machine, fed by millions of surveillance cameras, sensors, and detectors. Only the members of a once-powerful ancient society and their sword-carrying protectors, the Harlequins, are aware of the Vast Machine’s reach and are willing to stand up to it.
The ongoing debate this book continues to inspire on blogs and bulletin boards alike might easily focus on the eerie parallels between our own post-9/11 society and the tightly monitored world described in it. But it does not. It might also center on the book’s literary merits, except that, as one critic put it, the writing “is pitched to perhaps a seventh-grade reading level,” an assessment few would challenge. The debate is instead about John Twelve Hawks, its author.
The blockbuster sales and movie rights ought to have elevated Hawks to national celebrity, putting him among the likes of Stephen King and Dan Brown. Yet they did not. And it isn’t because the media shuns him either. The real reason that you never hear about Hawks is that nobody seems to know him. He does not sign books and does not participate in promotional tours. In fact, he has never been seen in public and supposedly communicates even with his editor only through an untraceable satellite phone. Just like the Harlequins on perpetual run from the Vast Machine, John Twelve Hawks lives off the grid, a paranoid seclusion that fuels ongoing speculation regarding his true identity.
The book’s central character is a Harlequin who preserves her off-the-grid anonymity by never using credit cards, opening bank accounts, or staying at permanent addresses. Aware that “any habitual action that showed a Harlequin taking a daily, predictable route to some location” will allow the Vast Machine to predict her whereabouts, she “cultivates randomness.” That is, she relies on a random-number generator, or RNG, to guide her decisions. “An odd number might mean Yes, an even number No. Push a button, and the RNG will tell you which door to enter,” freeing her actions from predictable patterns.
The book is a tale of a battle between good and evil that takes us briefly into something like that fifth dimension Theodor Kaluza proposed to Einstein, throwing into the mix Japanese sword fights and quantum computing. It also again begs the question, could one build a Vast Machine that foresees our actions?
We find it perfectly acceptable that particle physicists can predict within a picometer of accuracy the trajectory of a proton or that rocket scientists can launch a satellite that nine months later drops a robot on Mars. Unlike protons or satellites, however, humans tend to seek new experiences in a continually changing world, making it impossible to foresee their long-term actions. Indeed, given my hectic travel schedule, until recently I found any attempt to predict my whereabouts a few weeks in advance to be a hopeless exercise, fueling my hope that the Vast Machine will always stay where it belongs—in the realm of science fiction. Lately, however, I have begun to have my doubts. [2761: la mia recensione alla trilogia è qui]
Given how impenetrable our past has become, perhaps it’s no small wonder that our future is uncertain. [2976]
Today each person doing research on human dynamics increasingly faces a similar dilemma: How do we avoid contributing to the creation of a surveillance state or conglomerate, a back-to-the-future ticket to Orwell’s 1984?
Hasan has a refreshing answer to this question.
“Intelligence agencies, regardless of who they are, all operate in an industry where their commodity is information,” he observes. “The reason their information has value,” he adds, “is because no one has access to it.”
His solution? Give it up, and it becomes worthless. “It is the secrecy applied to the information that makes it valuable,” he says. And with that, he joins the Szeklers and hides in plain sight, pouring his life out onto his Web site. [3215]
As we have seen, predicting an individual’s behavior is getting steadily easier. And the future is far more valuable than the past, as our travel and purchasing plans are possibly the most potent commodity in our economy. And while secure firewalls and privacy laws protect our pasts, our futures, predicted by sophisticated algorithms, are up for grabs. With that we arrive at a new paradigm I call prospective privacy. It boils down to this: Who owns the information about our future actions and behavior? Who should profit from it? [3244]
But no physicist has ever successfully predicted the trajectory of 10^23 molecules in a gas, either, and that hasn’t stopped us from predicting the gas’s pressure and temperature—arguably far more important than the trajectory of each individual molecule. The same is true for human dynamics. Our deep-rooted unpredictability does not need to bubble up at the level of the society. If we carefully distinguish the random from the predictable, we might be able to foresee many features of the social fabric. [3711]
Any discussion about privacy is a discussion about trade-offs. Giving up the privacy of our medical records may allow the insurance companies to refuse coverage, but not sharing the data could limit the quality of the medical care we receive and thwart research toward the development of better cures. Giving up information about our shopping habits may be perceived by some as an uncomfortable loss of privacy, but others are more than willing to part with it for free or discounted services. Giving up information about our employment history and communication patterns may expose us to potential criminal investigation, but may also reward us with higher security and decrease our chances of being caught in a criminal activity or terrorist attack. [4348]
July 17, 2021
More Insight into the Hidden Aspects of Going Viral - Given my earlier reading of Barabassi’s “Linked” and more recently his “The Formula: Laws of Success” (see my reviews), I gave this book a glance then apprehending its more pertinent aspects ended up finishing this book as well. More particularly, early on the author refers to the case of a researcher concerned with better understand human movement to deal with spread of infectious disease. Thus, during the COVID-19 virus conditions in place as I began to read, this material took on added significance.
However, I can see where a number of reviewers have expressed confusion and frustration as the author skips from aspects of different stories to his research often making it hard to follow and to derive his main points. Such reactions are understandable and it is unfortunate as I believe Barabassi is trying to illustrate and make his work interesting and pertinent. Perhaps he and his editors were trying to demonstrate how such hidden patterns are discovered during the course of the book.
In any case, the contents of the book include 27 chapters as follows: (1)The Best Bodyguard in the Business, (2) A Pope is Elected in Rome, (3) The Mystery of Random Motion, (4) Duel in Belgrade, (5) The Future is Not Yet Searchable, (6) Bloody Prophecy, (7) Prediction or Prophecy, (8) A Crusade at Last, (9) Violence, Random and Otherwise, (10) An Unforeseen Massacre, (11) Deadly Quarrels and Power Laws, (12) The Nagylak Battle, (13) The Origin of Bursts, (14) Accidents Don't Happen to Crucifixes, (15) The Man Who Taught Himself to Swim by Reading, (16) An Investigation, (17) Trailing the Albatross, (18) "Villain!," (19) The Patterns of Human Mobility, (20) Revolution Now, (21) Predictably Unpredictable, (22) A Diversion in Transylvania, (23) The Truth About LifeLinear, (24) Szekler against Szekler, (25) Feeling Sick is Not a Priority, (26) The Final Battles, (27) The Third Ear, and (28) Flesh and Blood.
While I kept reading to find out what happened in the different stories, my favorite parts were those where the author explained his aims and tried to bring it together in practical ways. For instance, on Page 7, he laments “Most of the technological advances we enjoy today, rest on hundreds of years of scientific inquiry driven by an unwavering belief that natural phenomena can be understood, described, quantified, predicted, and eventually controlled . . . Unfortunately, this enlightening revolution came to a halt at the outer gates of the natural sciences, never reaching the behavior of individuals and human societies.” On Page 11, he clarifies that “. . . the fundamental goal of this book: I will show evidence of a deeper order in human behavior, one that can be explored, predicted, and no doubt exploited . . . The closer we look at them, the more obvious it will become that human actions follow simple, reproducible patterns governed by wide-reaching laws . . . My goal is to address what is normal and what is unique when it comes to human activity.” On Page 25, he relates these studies to situations such as what we are currently facing, saying “The question about the next deadly pandemic is not if it will happen—but when. And, once it is here, how many people will be affected? How to halt the next outbreak is not a question of biology and virology, as vaccines against new strains take months or even years to develop, by which time there might be no one to cure. The best short-term defense is to prevent the spread of the virus. And to do this we must first understand how people move.” Later in the book, on page 119, the author relates “By mid-2004 my lab had observed bursts and power laws each time we monitored human behavior.” At various points, he describes and explains ways bursts and power laws come into play as well as their implications. Then, there are the tie backs to correspondence interactions (e-mail and letters), time management/priority setting, and privacy, information security and control (see my reviews of Lawfare Institute’s “Huawei, 5G and National Security,” and Jaron’s “Who Owns the Future), as well as the Crusades/Medieval culture (see Robertson’s “Essays in “Medieval Culture” and Khanna’s “Connectography”), and Barabassi’s Transylvanian/Romanian/Hungarian heritage.
As I neared the conclusion of the book, I came back to what the author quips on page 51, “Could it be that if we refine our scientific methods we can one day achieve similar metamorphoses with human behavior? Could we turn it into an accurate, predictive science? Could we stop the next pandemic by auguring the virus’s path, telling you exactly what street to avoid tomorrow to avoid contagion?” While like other books that foretold this need (see Kahn and Patrick’s “The Next Pandemic: On the Front Lines Against Humankind's Gravest Dangers”), hopefully more work along these paths and our current difficulties, will help do a better job with such circumstances in the future.
However, I can see where a number of reviewers have expressed confusion and frustration as the author skips from aspects of different stories to his research often making it hard to follow and to derive his main points. Such reactions are understandable and it is unfortunate as I believe Barabassi is trying to illustrate and make his work interesting and pertinent. Perhaps he and his editors were trying to demonstrate how such hidden patterns are discovered during the course of the book.
In any case, the contents of the book include 27 chapters as follows: (1)The Best Bodyguard in the Business, (2) A Pope is Elected in Rome, (3) The Mystery of Random Motion, (4) Duel in Belgrade, (5) The Future is Not Yet Searchable, (6) Bloody Prophecy, (7) Prediction or Prophecy, (8) A Crusade at Last, (9) Violence, Random and Otherwise, (10) An Unforeseen Massacre, (11) Deadly Quarrels and Power Laws, (12) The Nagylak Battle, (13) The Origin of Bursts, (14) Accidents Don't Happen to Crucifixes, (15) The Man Who Taught Himself to Swim by Reading, (16) An Investigation, (17) Trailing the Albatross, (18) "Villain!," (19) The Patterns of Human Mobility, (20) Revolution Now, (21) Predictably Unpredictable, (22) A Diversion in Transylvania, (23) The Truth About LifeLinear, (24) Szekler against Szekler, (25) Feeling Sick is Not a Priority, (26) The Final Battles, (27) The Third Ear, and (28) Flesh and Blood.
While I kept reading to find out what happened in the different stories, my favorite parts were those where the author explained his aims and tried to bring it together in practical ways. For instance, on Page 7, he laments “Most of the technological advances we enjoy today, rest on hundreds of years of scientific inquiry driven by an unwavering belief that natural phenomena can be understood, described, quantified, predicted, and eventually controlled . . . Unfortunately, this enlightening revolution came to a halt at the outer gates of the natural sciences, never reaching the behavior of individuals and human societies.” On Page 11, he clarifies that “. . . the fundamental goal of this book: I will show evidence of a deeper order in human behavior, one that can be explored, predicted, and no doubt exploited . . . The closer we look at them, the more obvious it will become that human actions follow simple, reproducible patterns governed by wide-reaching laws . . . My goal is to address what is normal and what is unique when it comes to human activity.” On Page 25, he relates these studies to situations such as what we are currently facing, saying “The question about the next deadly pandemic is not if it will happen—but when. And, once it is here, how many people will be affected? How to halt the next outbreak is not a question of biology and virology, as vaccines against new strains take months or even years to develop, by which time there might be no one to cure. The best short-term defense is to prevent the spread of the virus. And to do this we must first understand how people move.” Later in the book, on page 119, the author relates “By mid-2004 my lab had observed bursts and power laws each time we monitored human behavior.” At various points, he describes and explains ways bursts and power laws come into play as well as their implications. Then, there are the tie backs to correspondence interactions (e-mail and letters), time management/priority setting, and privacy, information security and control (see my reviews of Lawfare Institute’s “Huawei, 5G and National Security,” and Jaron’s “Who Owns the Future), as well as the Crusades/Medieval culture (see Robertson’s “Essays in “Medieval Culture” and Khanna’s “Connectography”), and Barabassi’s Transylvanian/Romanian/Hungarian heritage.
As I neared the conclusion of the book, I came back to what the author quips on page 51, “Could it be that if we refine our scientific methods we can one day achieve similar metamorphoses with human behavior? Could we turn it into an accurate, predictive science? Could we stop the next pandemic by auguring the virus’s path, telling you exactly what street to avoid tomorrow to avoid contagion?” While like other books that foretold this need (see Kahn and Patrick’s “The Next Pandemic: On the Front Lines Against Humankind's Gravest Dangers”), hopefully more work along these paths and our current difficulties, will help do a better job with such circumstances in the future.
April 2, 2022
The author Albert Laszlo Barabasi is preeminent researcher on the science of networks, but turns out to also be a surprisingly good journalist & historian & writer. He shares his inconclusive work on the predictability of humans & human events with his primary insight being : along with parallels on how cells connect proteins & how animals hunt food, Human individuals & groups seem to work and fight and play in short flourishes of activity followed by periods of nothing. The pattern isn't as random as we think. It follows a non-Gaussian nor Poisson distributions, but rather a Levy pattern (akin to local concentrations of "random walks" then connected by a long leg away by "Levy-flights") he calls "bursty."
Inspired by his observation that: We all tend to make no phone calls then several. We send no emails then several. We have routes that we keep very regularly without variation & then we have bursts of random travel (vacation). ...When he investigates further historical data shows this burst pattern is even true all through history across hunter gatherer patterns & how wars erupt. So Barabasi wonders if , with all our digital trails of time stamped texts, voicemails, and internet searches, which add up to a massive data set of statistics that track our movements, our decisions, our lives... Could AI predict our future locations? Our future choices?
It's an interesting inquiry & Barabasi is clearly a very bright & creative mind, but 2 things didn't work for me: The 1st is that the premise is all we get, there aren't many other insights nor breakthroughs. & the 2nd is that while the structure of the book is very artful --> He changes the channel back & forth, jumping across a series of parallels : from this inspiration for his research & personal life, then recounting a 16th century nightmarish medieval crusade launched in his homeland of Transylvania, & an exposé of sorts telling the story of an unfortunately post-9/11 arabic innocent artist profiled & repeatedly detained by the FBI & the artist turns the years into very original art by documenting himself & making it all public
All good stories , to be sure, & well-written... But I think they distracted rather than added. All this being said, Barabasi is a person with whom I'd love to have dinner.
Inspired by his observation that: We all tend to make no phone calls then several. We send no emails then several. We have routes that we keep very regularly without variation & then we have bursts of random travel (vacation). ...When he investigates further historical data shows this burst pattern is even true all through history across hunter gatherer patterns & how wars erupt. So Barabasi wonders if , with all our digital trails of time stamped texts, voicemails, and internet searches, which add up to a massive data set of statistics that track our movements, our decisions, our lives... Could AI predict our future locations? Our future choices?
It's an interesting inquiry & Barabasi is clearly a very bright & creative mind, but 2 things didn't work for me: The 1st is that the premise is all we get, there aren't many other insights nor breakthroughs. & the 2nd is that while the structure of the book is very artful --> He changes the channel back & forth, jumping across a series of parallels : from this inspiration for his research & personal life, then recounting a 16th century nightmarish medieval crusade launched in his homeland of Transylvania, & an exposé of sorts telling the story of an unfortunately post-9/11 arabic innocent artist profiled & repeatedly detained by the FBI & the artist turns the years into very original art by documenting himself & making it all public
All good stories , to be sure, & well-written... But I think they distracted rather than added. All this being said, Barabasi is a person with whom I'd love to have dinner.
March 4, 2022
This book represents the author’s impassioned pursuit of the big mystery around how humans tend to work on one thing for a little while, then move on and work on something else. Like did you ever notice that you often answer a few emails at a time, and then move away and don’t look at your email for a while–rather than answering one at a time, evenly spaced throughout the day? He failed to make me see why this was groundbreaking.
The thread of his theories are interspersed with (I didn’t say “interwoven” because that would imply that it serves some sort of rhetorical point) many seemingly unrelated anecdotes, written with a sort of breathless urgency that drives home the lack of anything interesting actually being said.
A great many of these anecdotes are about the 16th-century military career of a local Transylvanian hero, who the author spent many childhood hours reading about in the small museum where his dad worked. This story ostensibly illustrated that “burstiness” of human behavior–except that those patterns really seem to be most visible on the large scale, rather than in any individual actions. Instead, it seemed like he just wanted to write about this guy, and, failing to find an American publisher for the story, interleaved it with whatever he told his publisher he was writing about.
It didn’t help my grumpiness to find him occasionally being sloppy about ideas. For example, he introduces the concept of a half-life of a news story (the amount of time it takes for an online article to receive half the clicks it will ever get), and then several times after that, refers to that number as the “lifetime” of the story. Or how at one point he contrasts the version of history presented by a Communist institution against the version recounted by “generations of less ideologically biased historians”. All humans have some ideological bias, and it’s incumbent upon every researcher to consider how their sources might be biased.
The thread of his theories are interspersed with (I didn’t say “interwoven” because that would imply that it serves some sort of rhetorical point) many seemingly unrelated anecdotes, written with a sort of breathless urgency that drives home the lack of anything interesting actually being said.
A great many of these anecdotes are about the 16th-century military career of a local Transylvanian hero, who the author spent many childhood hours reading about in the small museum where his dad worked. This story ostensibly illustrated that “burstiness” of human behavior–except that those patterns really seem to be most visible on the large scale, rather than in any individual actions. Instead, it seemed like he just wanted to write about this guy, and, failing to find an American publisher for the story, interleaved it with whatever he told his publisher he was writing about.
It didn’t help my grumpiness to find him occasionally being sloppy about ideas. For example, he introduces the concept of a half-life of a news story (the amount of time it takes for an online article to receive half the clicks it will ever get), and then several times after that, refers to that number as the “lifetime” of the story. Or how at one point he contrasts the version of history presented by a Communist institution against the version recounted by “generations of less ideologically biased historians”. All humans have some ideological bias, and it’s incumbent upon every researcher to consider how their sources might be biased.
August 26, 2017
The main question of the book, "Can human behavior be predicted by applying the quantum physics principles of the Dispersion Theory of Particles?" The answer shows that innovation and disease can be tracked with a reasonable confidence. This book jumps into stories about a Hungarian knight and a travelling immigratnt in the USA. The stories are easy to follow but the theory is a bit more difficult to comprehend. This book is difficult to recommend unless you have a pre-notion about Einstein's particle dispersion theory.
For more details , see spoiler:
For more details , see spoiler:
October 9, 2017
Interesting book, the author is hunting an answer for the human predictability two questions: are human beings predictable, and if yes to what extent. The author ventured (seems like one of his habits) from seemingly unrelated topics and accounts to weave an argument that makes his point, which in this case we are predictably unpredictable, and the sweet spot of behavior that allows that is what so called bursts. The account is basically bursting with stories as you keep folding the pages, from Hasan Elahi, to Gyogry and Telgadi, to how his last name plateaued (after dropping l from it) and all over the place pieces. Not only it is difficult to keep the stitches of this dress but you almost want to shrug it off because of its heaviness, and non-relatedness to me, as I am not interested in the 1514 Hungary revolution. But that does not come at a surprise if you read the linked book, the author almost wanted to say the whole graph theory thing is "Made in Hungary", I don't mind a little bit of patriotism here and there but too much salt is not fun.
Sia, the Australian pop singer, does not like to appear in her video cause she doesn't want her art to be shadowed by her existence, and Barbasi sun blinded me. The author is on the bright side for sure (and very creative) and I give him the credit for his bravery, I wish i could do the same for his brevity.
Sia, the Australian pop singer, does not like to appear in her video cause she doesn't want her art to be shadowed by her existence, and Barbasi sun blinded me. The author is on the bright side for sure (and very creative) and I give him the credit for his bravery, I wish i could do the same for his brevity.
June 24, 2019
It’s the book’s subtitle — the hidden pattern behind everything we do — that kept me nudging forward, past an extraordinarily deep history of just three months in what is today Hungary during the Inquisition; the movement and tracking of dollar bills; the mathematics of randomness, Poisson distributions, Levy patterns, and power laws; Einstein’s correspondence rates; the travel pattern of an international artist post 9/11; the flight patterns of albatross, the predictability of people’s movement in a surveillance state. And much more that I’ve already forgotten. But all this for the insight that we, humans (and animals and proteins etc.) don’t work steadily or efficiently or consistently, but rather in bursts of activity. Work measured over time comes in bursts. It’s still not clear to me how this was related to the historical writing on Hungary in the 1500s — great writing that perhaps should have been its own book. Not recommended.
November 6, 2017
A peculiar shuffling of two subjects: a layman's presentation of scientific research on patterns of human mobility; and a recounting of historical events for Hungary and Transylvania in the early 16th century.
Barabási's ancestors are from Transylvania and thus his historical account is somewhat personal. He also sprinkles the text with medieval words such as voivode -- it means 'warlord' -- but his intention is to use this historical account as an example of a successful prediction. As part of his discussion of the difficulty, but not impossibility, of predicting human behavior and events.
Along with this is mixed the author's opinions of diminishing privacy in the age of cellphones and big data.
While I did read this to the end, I give it halfhearted praise for keeping my interest and providing education. I don't think I really learned much, other than the bit of Hungarian history and a cool old word. But yes, Barabási is a decent writer who can hold your interest presenting unusual topics.
Barabási's ancestors are from Transylvania and thus his historical account is somewhat personal. He also sprinkles the text with medieval words such as voivode -- it means 'warlord' -- but his intention is to use this historical account as an example of a successful prediction. As part of his discussion of the difficulty, but not impossibility, of predicting human behavior and events.
Along with this is mixed the author's opinions of diminishing privacy in the age of cellphones and big data.
While I did read this to the end, I give it halfhearted praise for keeping my interest and providing education. I don't think I really learned much, other than the bit of Hungarian history and a cool old word. But yes, Barabási is a decent writer who can hold your interest presenting unusual topics.
January 21, 2019
I have mixed feelings about this. It was a really informative and gave me lots of other reading topics I want to explore, but I also think the experimental plot was . . . well. It was experimental so I guess not everyone is going to love it.
I kind of felt like I was reading two books. One of historical and the other a modern exploration of the question of whether or not humans can scientifically predict the future.
Eh, it was interesting. And I do feel like I learned a lot, just not about the actual topic being discussed.
I kind of felt like I was reading two books. One of historical and the other a modern exploration of the question of whether or not humans can scientifically predict the future.
Eh, it was interesting. And I do feel like I learned a lot, just not about the actual topic being discussed.
September 7, 2018
About half this book is Hungarian history. This turns out to be the better half of the book, and the reason the book works at all is thanks to Barabási's very entertaining historical writing. The rest of the book is based on an interesting premise that's explained clearly, but repetitively. In addition, I suspect an elision between *where we are* and *what we are doing* is made, and leads to some rather grandiose statements about the predictive powers of work in the field.
April 3, 2021
Surprising in many ways!
This book mixes many disciplines in delightful and surprising ways...part history, part physics, part data science and part social science this book is a great read. Wonderfully relevant more than 10 years after publication, even if living with COVID was not imaginable when this book was written that doesn’t detract from the message. Lots in here to think about!
This book mixes many disciplines in delightful and surprising ways...part history, part physics, part data science and part social science this book is a great read. Wonderfully relevant more than 10 years after publication, even if living with COVID was not imaginable when this book was written that doesn’t detract from the message. Lots in here to think about!
July 5, 2021
Izgalmas könyv! A téma szempontjából Dózsa szerintem picit erőltetett, de az is igaz, hogy azok a részek a legolvasmányosabbak. Mint tudóselme olvasó ugyanakkor hiányolom a könyv villanásainak definiálását. Hatványeloszlás, Gauss-görbék stb. ok de egzakt magyarázatra még próbálkozás szintjén sincs semmi adva a villanásokra, csak a csodás példák és az “érzés” hogy van valami kiszámítható abban amit nem értünk.
August 5, 2022
After "The Black Swan", this was a let down - Gaussian vs Poisson, to-may-toe vs to-mah-toe, it's all the same*, none of it describes our world well**, and I still don't know what to do about it. This book leans heavily on the narratives, and the narratives don't hold it up.
* if you want to split mathematical hairs, you don't want to read this book
** actually, a tomato is probably the best descriptor of the three, with its thin outer layer, gooey center, and oblate shape.
* if you want to split mathematical hairs, you don't want to read this book
** actually, a tomato is probably the best descriptor of the three, with its thin outer layer, gooey center, and oblate shape.
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