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New Books

Now that university is over I can try and go back to my regular reading. I purchased these books recently, not sure how long it will take to get through them all.

What Happened by Scott McClellan
Suicide of the West by Kock Smith
Your Government Failed You by Richard Clarke
Epicenter by Joel Rosenberg
The Complete Turtle Trader by Michael Covel
Trend Following by Michael Covel
I Am American and So Can You by Stephen Colbert
God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens
The Day of the Barbarians by Alessandro Barbero
Market Wizards by Jack Schwager
New Market Wizards by Jack Schwager
Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism by Robert Pape
Chasing the Flame by Samantha Power
The Post American World by Fareed Zakaria
The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It by Jonathan Zittrain
China Rises by John Farndon
The Making of the Fittest by Sean Carroll
Descent into Chaos by Ahmed Rashid
Hitler’s Empire by Mark Mazower (Proof copy)

In the post

I ordered some books this week for the first time in a while. Some relate to a new-found interest in day-trading as oppose to spread betting. But I won’t be going down that road for some time yet. Others are the normal politics/economics stuff.

The Age of Turbulence
, Alan Greenspan.

Invest Like a Shark: How a Deaf Guy with No Job and Limited Capital Made a Fortune Investing in the Stock Market
, James DePorre

A Random Walk Down Wall Street, Completely Revised and Updated Edition, Burton Malkiel

Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, Robert Pape

I Am America (And So Can You!)
, Stephen Colbert

Market Wizards: Interviews with Top Traders, Jack D. Schwager

The New Market Wizards: Conversations with America’s Top Traders, Jack Schwager

Meaning and life

I meant to post this last week but I read a very good book review in the Economist

Adam Jacot de Boinod, a BBC researcher, has sifted through more than 2m words in 280 dictionaries and 140 websites to discover that Albanians have 27 words for moustache—including mustaqe madh for bushy and mustaqe posht for one which droops down at both ends—that gin is Phrygian for drying out, that the Dutch say plimpplamppletteren when they are skimming stones and that instead of snap, crackle, pop, Rice Krispies in the Netherlands go Knisper! Knasper! Knusper!

And..

Words for work, money, sex, death and horrible personal habits may well tell you more about national attitudes than anything else. Why would Russian have a special word, koshatnik, for someone who deals in stolen cats and Turkish another, cigerci, for a seller of liver and lungs, or Central American Spanish a particular name, aviador, for a government employee who shows up only on payday?

Old jokes are often the best jokes, and many of the most amusing examples are of terrible errors that can be made in different languages: there is fart (Turkish for talking nonsense), buzz (Arabic for nipple), sofa (Icelandic for sleep), shagit (Albanian for crawling on your belly), jam (Mongolian for road), nob (Wolof for love), dad (Albanian for babysitter), loo (Fulani for a storage pot), babe (SisSwati for a government minister), slug (Gaulish for servant), flab (Gaelic for a mushroom) and moron (Welsh for carrot).

Not that The Economist does not occasionally face linguistic problems: a cover story entitled “The meaning of Lulaâ€? (see article) in October 2002 resulted in a huge mailbag, not from Brazilians who were impressed at our analysis of the recent election, but from Pakistanis eager to tell us that the meaning of lula in Urdu is penis.

This book is a gem, and there are still 91 shopping days till Christmas.

Moron is Welsh for carrot hehe. I think that will definately make a good Christmas present. Bit early to be thinking about it though.

Currently Reading

Following on from watching Robert Kaplan’s interview on Book TV, and on the advice of both my uncle and indeed Peter, I have started to read the History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides. It is the Rex Warner translation published by Penguin, and after reading the first part involving the dispute between Corinth and Corcyra (Corfu) over Epidamnus, I have found the translation to be adequate, and after the first few pages, easy to read. Hell it certainly beats Kant. There are also some great ancient maps on the net, if I find the Penguin ones to be inadequate.

I think I will quote some of the best passages I find, some of you might find it interesting. To save me typing out quotes I will quote from the MIT site translated by Crawley.


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