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Malcolm Gladwell on outliers, maths and rice
The Chinese are good at maths because their number words are remarkably brief, says Malcolm Gladwell in his book, Outliers. He quotes from The Numbers Game by Stanislas Dehaene, who wrote: “Most of them can be uttered in less than one-quarter of a second (for example, 4 is “si” and 7 “qi”). Their English equivalents…
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Software billionaires like 19th century tycoons…
Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Steve Ballmer, Steven Jobs and Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy are all about the same age, says Malcolm Gladwell. So were John Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Jay Gould and JP Morgan, the biggest 19th century tycoons, he adds. Some generations are luckier than others and benefit from extraordinary opportunities, Gladwell writes in…
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Before and since Harry Potter
Book lovers will enjoy this trip down memory lane with Robert McCrum (left), who stepped down as literary editor of the Observer this month after 10 years on the job. McCrum, who has written about the English language (The Story of English) and a biography of PG Wodehouse (PG Wodehouse: A Life), writes about the…
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Blink: Not what it’s blurbed to be
“Trust your instincts. Don’t think — blink,” says the blurb. But I am beginning to have doubts about my instincts after reading this. “Blink is all about those moments when we ‘know’ something without really knowing why,” says the blurb. But I thought the book showed our first impressions could be both right and wrong.…
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