Fat Cheating Bastards

If any of you read the book Freakonomics, you'll doubtless remember their analysis of sumo matches in Japan and how statistical analysis showed that rigging matches was a rather common phenomenon.

Now there is an interesting post over at the Freakonomics blog, talking about how the authors had expected a Japanese media frenzy over their conclusions. To their surprise, Japanese media have largely taken a pass on the story, except for cases that involve foreigners. There is a sensible rejoinder to this interpretation in the comments.

The situation reminds of a case in China a couple years ago. As usual, China was drawing heavy fire for its unwillingness to crack down on pirated movies, software, etc. Finally the Chinese government issued a detailed judicial ruling spelling out stiff fines and other penalties for trafficking in counterfeit goods. A short time later, Chinese authorities triumphantly announced their first arrests under the new legal guidelines -- a pair of Americans.

Hey, you said you wanted us to get tough on piracy, right?

Books of the Year

Man, I was weak on the book front this year. I think I only read 19 or so, down a full third from 27 the year before. A few of those were really long, though. One fantasy trilogy was 3,000 pages and I read another sci-fi book of about 800 pages.

I partly attribute the decrease in books read to decreased commute time that began shortly after mid-year when I discovered the commuter bus that shaved a good 30 minutes off my daily round-tip commute. Another reason was there was about one full month where all I read was magazines, front to back. And not bullshit like Time, Newsweek or Juggs, but meaty stuff like Discover and The Atlantic Monthly.

I also read a lot of decent, but not great, books this year. Only a couple really stood out as being incredible, gripping reads. Here is what I would say are my top 5:

5. The Blind Side, Michael Lewis: Another fine sports tale by one of my favorite authors. Learn how a combination of blood-thirsty defensive ends, a family of lily-white evangelical Christians, and freakish physical talents transformed a ghetto-dwelling youngster into one of football's hottest commodities.

4. Inside Intel, Tim Jackson: A great expose of everyone's favorite semiconductor company.

3. A Game of Thrones, George R. R. Martin: A gritty, detailed fantasy that is what you get when you take hobbits and that whole good-evil struggle thing out of Tolkein.

2. Light, M. John Harrison: A poignant little sci-fi tale that combines the grit and melancholy of William Gibson with the light, witty touch of Douglas Adams.

1. Guests of the Ayatollah, Mark Bowden: A detailed, engrossing account of the Iran hostage crisis. Amazingly reported and written, with nary a dull moment, this was easily my favorite book of the year.

Here are my bottom 5:

5. Orphans of Chaos, John C. Wright. Wright penned one of the most remarkable sci-fi trilogies in recent years with his space opera The Golden. Orphans was not so much bad as simply disappointing. Book two is coming out soon and I am hoping it's an improvement on the first.

4. An Army of Davids, Glenn Reynolds: The Instapundit posts his wisdom in book form. I suppose if you were new to him you'd find his musings on nanotech, media, space policy and terrorism interesting but for me it was just a dead-tree edition of his blog.

3. A Feast of Crows, book four in the fantasy series mentioned in my Top 5. I dropped it after about 100 pages. I reluctantly started it out of a sense of duty to keep up with the epic, but then I realized that if you can't be bothered to wrap up a story in your first 3,000 pages, I can't be bothered to continue reading your stuff.

2. Coffee: A Dark History, Antony Wild: An economically illiterate look at the coffee industry by a former bean trader who feels guilty about his past job for some reason but is too intellectually lazy to do anything other than rely on Noam Chomsky and anti-globalization activists to inform his view.

1. Vellum, Hal Duncan: Another book I didn't actually finish, this one is a fantasy novel about the ongoing struggle between the angels. I am always down for some good War in Heaven action, but what decent writing there was wasn't enough to overcome the confusing structure and numerous nonsequiters.

What were your best/worst reads of the year?