Steven Landsburg is an economics professor at the University of
Rochester. I had run across his work in Slate, a guest-blogging
stint at The Volokh Conspiracy,
and a number of other publications. He describes himself
as a "hard-core
libertarian", which is OK with me, even though I'm softer-core
myself. His writings are accessible and witty, so I was a natural
audience for this book. If you're interested, he set up an
associated website here.
As the title implies, Landsburg isn't messing around with trivia here.
The questions he outlines in (just) part 1: "What exists, and why? What
are we made of, what are our minds made of, and what is the Universe
made of? How should we think about God, and the ultimate causes of
things?"
This might strike you as arrogant. It could appear so, in the hands
of a less able writer. Landsburg points out in his introduction
that he merely means to provide what he considers
to be plausible answers for the Big Questions. Like all
good thinkers, the "I might be wrong, but" is always hanging around.
At times he might seem glib; I think he wandered down the wrong
path in a couple of places. (For example, some of his refutations
of alternate views involve speculation on the internal
inconsistencies of the holders of such views. No fair.)
But that's a quibble;
it's a very entertaining read, and if you ever wanted a layman's
explanation of Gödel's Theorem, or the Uncertainty Principle,
or a knock-down of protectionism, or a host of many other topics,
this is a pretty good choice.
IMDB users, as I type, have rated this movie as #177 of the
top 250 movies of all time. I don't know about that,
but it's pretty good. Its got eight Oscar nominations,
including Best Picture, Director, Actor, and Screenplay.
I was able to suspend my distaste for the jerk
screenwriter,
Aaron Sorkin.
It's the story of Mark Zuckerberg (played by
Jesse Eisenberg), and how he, with a little
help from his friends, founded Facebook. He went from being just
another genius Harvard undergrad in 2003 to (according to Forbes)
just another genius Harvard dropout worth $4 Billion. Along the way,
there's plenty of drama, as Zuckerberg shafts (first) a couple of
jock entrepreneurs who hired him to work on their (arguably similar)
idea for a Harvard website, and (then) his partner Eduardo Saverin,
who found himself edged out of the company when his vision differed
from Mark's.
Many critics have claimed that Zuckerberg is portrayed as an asshole,
and that's not without merit. But the larger truth is that he had
a capital-V Vision about where he wanted Facebook to go, and (like
most Visionaries) he was single-minded and relentless
about pursuing that Vision. (He forms an instant bond with
investor Sean Parker (played by Justin Timberlake), who recognizes
and buys into the Vision himself. I buy that narrative.
I enjoyed the movie's more-or-less accurate flinging
around of Linux-geek terminology: Apache, emacs, wget, Perl, Python, etc.
They must have had a consultant to get that right. Otherwise, there's
a lot of controversy about the movie's relationship to actual
reality; here is an example.
Local angle: Zuckerberg graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy,
just down the road.
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