I’ve been reading Friedman’s The World Is Flat but I keep getting distracted by mental floss as all of my favorite writers release their summer junk. I got sucked into Stuart Woods’ Two Dollar Bill on a flight home on Friday; today it was Robert Parker’s latest Spenser (and Hawk) novel Cold Service.

I like Spenser, I adore Susan, but I want to come back as Hawk in another life (combining Hawk, Jack Bauer, and Harlan Coben’s Myron Bolitar would be sweet.)  Cold Service is way more about Hawk than about Spenser, which is fun for a change.  Denver to Seattle and back equals one book and it was fun.  Time to go brush my teeth, eat my Wheaties, and finish off The World Is Flat.

Ah – it’s spring time and all of the writers who crank out summer mental floss books are seeing their books hit the stores now.  Stuart Woods new Stone Barrington novel – Two Dollar Bill – is out.  Stone is my hero – an ex-cop turned “legal problem solver” (e.g. the law firm he’s associated with gives him the weird shit they don’t want to deal with) who gets laid constantly by the female protagonists but always manages to get involved in something that messes up his relationships.  In the middle of the mess that is his personal life, he takes endless rafts of shit from his ex-cop-partner Dino (who is the son-in-law of a big time mafioso and – try as hard as he can to not end up being pegged for a cop – wears black rubber shoes, white socks, and eats donuts on stake outs.)  Oh – and each book has a bad guy problem that Stone and Dino get mixed up in and inevitably have to solve through lots of car chases, stake outs, explosions, kidnapings, random killings, and eventually a complex plot twist. 

I covered a lot of mileage this week – Boulder to Dallas to Palo Alto to Boston to Boulder – and decided that I deserved a Stone Barrington novel for the flight home from Boston (instead of email or something heavier, such as Friedman’s The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century.)  $29.50 later (the book and a powerbar for the flight) and I made four hours disappear.

Last summer, I decided to read all of Stephen Frey’s books.  Most were good, a few were not so good, but it was clear that Frey was becoming a better mental floss writer with every book.  His books are about Wall Street, power, intrigue, finance, and most recently private equity.  As a managing director at a private equity firm, he speaks from experience.

Thanks to Stephanie Miller from Return Path who sent me a copy of Frey’s latest book, The Chairman, as a gift.  I thought it was his best one yet and a great start to the “summer reading extravaganza” that’s in front of me.

As a runner, I love a good running book.  The Greatest – the biography of Haile Gebrselassie – a man who dominated distance running for a decade – was extremely inspiring.  It balanced the racing with the personal story of Haile, along with a great overview of the Ethiopian running scene and the opportunities and challenges facing the country.  In addition to being a champion athlete, Haile has become a very successful Ethiopian businessman and the vignettes about his businesses, why he does them (when he clearly doesn’t have to), and how he is focused on continuing to help Ethiopia evolve as a country was powerful.  Heroic running, riveting race stories, good Ethiopian history, the passing of the torch of a champion to the next generation, and a guy that everyone would like – what more could you want from a running biography?

If you love dogs, strong women, Colorado, hockey, ranches, complicated yet lifelike characters, and beautiful writing, Sight Hound is a must read.  I haven’t read Pam Houston’s other books, but they are also highly acclaimed.  It’s a little tough getting your bearings since each chapter is told in first person from a different character’s point of view, including several dogs and a cat, but once you put it together it’s a fast ski ride down a huge snow covered mountain on a warm spring day.

Dean Karnazes, the writer and subject of Ultramarathon Man, is a wild man.  As the leader of Team Dean (which has a nice support crew consisting of his family, but only one athlete), Karnazes describes in great detail several of his ultramarathon feats (feets?) including his first Western States 100, a failed Badwater Ultramarathon, the first marathon at the South Pole (and one of two people to run around the world naked – try to figure that out), and his first (and the first) solo effort of The Relay (199 mile relay race from Calistoga to Santa Cruz). 

In the middle of the running stories and descriptions of his feet, his digestive challenges, his food intake (if you burn 600 calories an hour and you run for 48 hours, how do you manage to choke down 29,000 calories just to stay even? – see p. 280 of the book), he takes a crack at talking about how he does it, why he does it, what he eats, and whether or not he is sane.  His philosophy is good, the running stories are awesome, and the motivational lift (yeah – I’ll be running a lot this week) is huge.

If you are a marathoner, you’ll love this book.  If you want to be a marathoner, you need this book.  If you are a soul searcher, you’ll enjoy this book.

Thanks Team Dean for bringing us Dean.

There was plenty of buzz last week about the new company – Numenta – that Jeff Hawkins (inventor of Graffiti and the PalmPilot, Visor, and Treo products) and Donna Dubinsky (CEO of Palm and Handspring) have started.  It was coincidental that I was reading Hawkins book – On Intelligence – which describes his theory of intelligence, the working of the brain, and how he thinks it will lead to the creation of truly intelligence machines.

I haven’t spent any time studying neural science, the brain (my biggest effort was probably not very successfully grinding through the Scientific American issue on Better Brains), or any of the contemporaneous efforts at “next generation Artificial Intelligence” (I was at MIT in the 1980’s during the peak of the last wave of AI research and subsequent commercialization attempts – I fondly remember being amazed at Symbolics – they are still around in a new incarnation called Symbolics Technology – Macsyma has been hard to kill off) .

So – I don’t know much about brain research, theories of intelligence, the biology behind it, or much of anything else.  As a result, I thought On Intelligence was superb. I don’t expect that it’s right (nor does Hawkins) – he’s clear that it’s a framework and work in process (as it should be).  I found it extremely accessible, very provocative, and mostly internally consistent (which is important whenever you are trying to learn about something you know very little about – it can be wrong, but at least it hangs together in a way you can understand it.)

The book and theory is based on the work being done at the Redwood Neuroscience Institute, of which Hawkins is the founder and director.  Beyond just doing research, part of RNI’s mission is to “encourage people to enter and pursue this field of research.”  Hawkins is consistent in his message in the epilogue of his book where he says “I am suggesting we now have a new more promising path to follow.  If you are in high school or college and this book makes you want to work on this technology, to build the first truly intelligent machines, to help start an industry, I encourage you to do so.  Make it happen.  One of the tricks of entrepreneurial success is that you must jump head first into a new field before it is one hundred percent clear you can be successful.  Timing is important. If you jump too early, you struggle.  If you wait until the uncertainty lifts, it’s too late.  I strongly believe that now is the time to start designing and building cortical-like memory systems.  This field will be immensely important both scientifically and commercially.  The Intels and Microsofts of a new industry built on hierarchical memories will be started sometime within the next ten years.  It is challenging doing new things, but it is always worth trying.  I hope you will join me, along with others who take up the challenge, to create one of the greatest technologies the world has ever seen.”

Hawkins thoughts and writing are fused with his obvious entrepreneurial energy.  He approaches things as an ultimate pragmatist (unlike so many scientists, his examples and analogies are extremely understandable – very reminicient of Richard Feynman), an outsider (he acknowledges that mainstream brain research has huge problems with many of the things he is saying), and recognizes that any fundamental breakthrough typically requires a paradigm shift in thinking about the specific domain.

If you are an entrepreneur who likes to challenge yourself intellectually with things you know nothing about, you’ll love this book.  If you are a brain researcher or scientist, you’ll probably be frustrated, but it’ll stretch you in good ways.  If you are a brain expert, you’ll probably hate it.  In any case, it’ll be fun to watch what Hawkins, Dubinsky, Numenta, and RMI do next – remember, they’re the ones that brought you the Palm Pilot / Handspring Treo based on the revolutionary notion that humans should learn to write different (e.g. Graffiti), not the ones that brought you the Go Whatever or the Apple Newton who thought that the computer should be able to recognize your handwriting.

I was totally fried from my week so I stayed away from my computer all day yesterday.  I had a fun breakfast with Lucy Sanders of NCWIT and Krisztina Holly of the MIT Deshpande Center, got a massage, and then laid on the couch and chewed down two books.

The first was Guy Kawasaki’s The Art of the Start.  Like all of Guy’s books dating back to The Macintosh Way, it’s a must read for all entrepreneurs as Guy continues to pile on anecdotes and lessons that everyone can learn from.  And – in a move that is after my own heart, he spends the better part of a chapter explaining how to make better powerpoint presentations. 

Adhering to my cycle of “two books of mental muscle followed by one book of mental floss” (ok – I don’t adhere to it – it’s merely a goal) I took on The Innocent by Harlen Coben.  My friend Jenny Lawton who runs Justbooks sends me piles of advanced manuscripts and makes sure I get every one of Coben’s the second they show up in her store.  Coben is one of my all time favorite mental floss writers – he’s deep, dark, romantic, twisted, violent, and logical all in one package, creates great characters, and always has some nerdy stuff in the mix.  His books automagically come together in the last few chapters so they are simply a rapid romp through exotic brain candy for a couple of hours.  Yum. The Innocent didn’t disappoint.

I must have a fascination with books with the word bullshit in the title, as On Bullshit by Harry Frankfurt is the second I’ve read in the last twelve months (the other one was Another Bullshit Night in Suck City).

Frankfurt, a Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Princeton University, has written a delightful half-book (half-book =< 100 pages). In this book, Frankfurt proposes to “begin the development of a theoretical understanding of bullshit.”  You know you are in for a good time when the first sentence of the book is “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.”  Frankfurt asserts that even though bullshit is all around us, “the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern, nor attracted much sustained inquiry.”

Given the massive proliferation of blogging, this seems like a highly relevant topic to explore, as anyone that reads blogs knows that bullshit is everywhere.  The basis of Frankfurt’s discussion is that lying and bullshit are different constructs, as a liar cares about the “truth-value” (e.g. the notion that what he is saying is false) while the bullshitter doesn’t care about the truthfulness of the statement or idea he is discussing.  Frankfurt suggests that “bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about.  Thus the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person’s obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic exceed his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic.” 

Sound familiar – or is this just more self-referential or recursive bullshit?