Books Review

Long after Da Vinci Code reading Masonic mumbo jumbo from Dan Brown would be a totally a wastage of time. The sheer size of the book also kept me away from the book. Compared to other books this is a huge volume (133 Chapters). It took around five nights to read it speaks about its gripping story line. The beauty of Dan Brown's novels is that one is exposed to such elaborate half-fact / half-fiction that one is amazed at how he manages to maintain consistency and interest is maintained. Such is the power of Brown's narration that one is made starts to make a movie in the mind. Thanks to the movies now one can only imagine Tom Hanks for Robert Langdon ! 1. Historical Perspective The Lost Symbol's major strength is that history is discussed at a flashing speed. One moves from century to century and then back and forth in the matter of sentences. So seamless is continuity that the frequent back and forth between historical references (which Brown at times ...

Benoit Mandelbrot sits down at the TED Talk and talks about fractals for  twenty minute. The legend talks about Fractals so beautifully and simply that one is astonished by all the fractal designs. The Julia Sets in four dimensions are simply amazing.  Fractals are extremely complicated objects that are defined by extremely simple formulas.  The examples of clouds and valleys being created by inputting a number (the roughness number).

Daniel Pink surprised me with the statement that "Money does not motivate rather is counter productive to creativity". The first question that comes to mind is that what motivates then? The answers to this question has been explored / researched by Daniel Pink over the years. What he comes up is in the video and wonderful books . The idea of rewards works for mechanical tasks, working in the carrot-stick reward-punish system. If you work well you will receive rewards otherwise you will be punished. As soon as the work required rudimentary cognitive skills the larger rewards actually bog down the creative mind and resulted in negative impact on performance. The corner stone of Pink's motivation philosophy are the following. 1. Mastery Mastery is the human instinct to get better at things. No matter if there is a reward associated or not with it. One needs to become better at the skill. For example all the open source developers have been writing tons of code just to ...