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Just over a year ago, we wrote a post on why men should read more fiction. I asked readers to suggest their favorite pieces of manly fiction in the comments so I could create a master “AoM Fiction for Men” list. We got a really good response, and we finally finished compiling the suggestions into a list. If you’re looking for some ideas on what to read this summer, check it out. The list has a nice mix of genres so you’re bound to find something that suits your tastes. I’ve added several of them to my own “to-read” list. If you have any more recommendations for books you think an AoM Man would enjoy, please share them in the comments, and we’ll add them to the master list. Enjoy!

	American Gods by Neil Gaiman. Shadow Moon tries to rebuild his life after being released from prison, but gets caught up in a showdown between the old gods who came over to America with the country’s early immigrants and the new gods “of credit card and freeway, of Internet and telephone, of radio and hospital and television, gods of plastic and of beeper and of neon.” Musings about the role of technology in modern life and the meaning of death, set in the real and mythical American landscape.
	Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. This long novel leaps between the story of a secret WWII Allied unit who try to keep the Nazis from discovering they have cracked their Enigma code, and the cryptanalysts’ grandchildren who seek to create a secure data haven in the modern age, and discover a far-reaching conspiracy in the process.
	A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Readers said that the Princess of Mars is much, much better than the blockbuster movie-version flop John Carter. This book is the first in the Barsoom series, consisting of ten novels, the first five of which, it should be noted, are available for free at Project Gutenberg. This sci-fi adventure is said to have inspired some of the science fiction greats like Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, and others.
	Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa. This historical novel is a fictionalized account of real-life Samurai warrior Miyamoto Musashi as he seeks to master not only the Way of the Sword, but the path to honorable, spirited manliness. Musashi is famous in Japan for being a master swordsman and also writing the philosophy/tactical work, The Book of Five Rings, which is still studied today.
	The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach. This book received a ton of accolades when it was published in 2011, including being named in the NY Times Top Ten of the Year and Amazon’s Best Book of the Year. USA Today said this about it: “The Art of Fielding belongs in the upper echelon of anybody’s league, in this case alongside Bernard Malamud’s The Natural, Scott Lasser’s Battle Creek, and W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe.” I read this book earlier this year and really enjoyed it. It’s a coming-of-age story with baseball serving as the backdrop. One of the better modern novels I’ve read in a long time.
	Lord of the Rings Trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien. This well-known fantasy favorite was unsurprisingly recommended numerous times by readers. Follow Frodo Baggins and his trustworthy friend Samwise Gamgee and learn about friendship, loyalty, dedication to a good cause, and many other manly virtues. You’ll also find one of the wisest characters in literature in Gandalf. J.R.R. Tolkien had one of the greatest imaginations of his time and created an entire LOTR universe, complete with new languages, maps of various lands, and even histories of how these lands came to be. If you’re interested in some of the Middle-earth back story, get your hands on The Silmarillion.
	From Here to Eternity by James Jones. I read From Here to Eternity this year at my father-in-law’s suggestion. One of the best war novels I’ve read. The movie adaptation from 1953 happens to have made it onto our Top 100 Movies list, so be sure to check that out as well. Set in Hawaii, the novel is loosely based on author James Jones’ own experiences.
	Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. This is a behemoth of a book, coming in at over half a million words, but from what people say, the effort is well worth it. Wallace took the title from a line in Hamlet (another work that all men should read), and although he committed suicide in 2008, has lately become regarded as one of the more influential writers of the latter part of the 20th century. As this is his magnum opus, it’s a great place to start.
	The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré. le Carré is considered the greatest spy novelist of all time. Check out his most lauded work and what is often called the greatest spy novel of all time, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. This particular novel was influential in informing the public about common Cold War espionage practices. Whereas James Bond novels and movies romanticize the world of spies, le Carre gives us brutal realism.
	Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott. Many readers suggested checking out the work of Sir Walter Scott, who James Bowman called “the man who did the most to resuscitate honor for the modern era.” This work from 1820 is a great adventure story set in medieval times and deals with knighthood and chivalry. We also see appearances from Knights Templar and Robin Hood (Locksley, in this novel). What fella doesn’t want to read about that? Available for free as an ebook.
	Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry. This book was recommended to me by small town advocate, Uncle Buzz. Turned out to be one of my favorite books of all time. A book about the life and unrequited love of a rural barber named Jayber Crow. From his barber chair, he learns about listening, community, life’s tough questions, and much more. The book really made me want to move to the country to become a barber.
	World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks. This popular book is a fictional account of the zombie war, told from the point of view of a journalist who is conducting interviews many years later. It’s not so much blood and gore, but about the political and sociological ramifications of such a catastrophe. It’s set as a series of interviews, so it somewhat lacks a cohesive plot, but it’s still riveting. I’ve also heard the audio version of this is fantastic. You’ll want to read/listen to it before this summer’s release of the film version starring Brad Pitt.
	The Aubrey/Maturin Series by Patrick O’Brian. Reader Tom Smedely said this of the 20+ volume series: “Patrick O’Brian’s novels probe the mysteries of manliness. 20+ volumes starting with Master and Commander take us into a lost world of wooden ships and iron men. Even a patriotic American will find himself grieving the setbacks of the British navy during the War of 1812!” Even more awesome is that the series closely follows the heroics of real-life captain Thomas Cochrane.
	Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis. One of the best novels on what it means to get in touch with your inner Wild Man. The narrator is a young intellectual who is in love with his books. After a stinging encounter, he decides to leave his books behind for a while, and do some self-discovery. You’ll be dancing and shouting “Opa!” like Zorba by the end.
	All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren. This 1947 Pulitzer winner is one of the best pieces of political fiction ever written. It’s loosely based on the career of Louisiana governor Huey P. Long. Interestingly enough, the author said it was “never meant to be a book about politics.” Indeed, there are larger lessons about humanity to be learned, and this is a great example of how hubris can destroy a man.
	Independent People by Halldór Laxness. Reader Jordan explains this pick: “Iceland’s Laxness won the Nobel Prize in Literature the year after another great manly fiction writer, Hemingway. Independent People is his most important work about an Icelandic farmer who strives to be his own independent man when all else is against him. Laxness’ prose captures the harsh beauty of the Icelandic way of life and poetically blends myth and reality in this moving epic.”
	Legends of the Fall by Jim Harrison. You’ve seen the movie, now read the novella that it’s based on. Here’s what dannyb278 had to say about Harrison: “Nobody writes better concerning the 20th century male. Ignore the movie, the novella Legends of the Fall is one of the greatest works in modern American Fiction.”
	Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry. I kicked off 2012 by reading this classic Western. It’s a new favorite of mine, and I can’t wait to read it again in a few years. Another Pulitzer winner here, this is the third installment of the Lonesome Dove series of four novels (although the first published). This story of some retired cattle drivers carries lots of insight on what it means to be a man (look for a post in the future on that very theme!).
	Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. This oft-suggested sci-fi classic is supposedly one of the funniest books ever written. It’s been on my to-read list for while. Think I’ll get to it next. This wildly successful franchise includes six novels, video games, stage acts, TV series, movies, comic books, etc. Must have somethin’ going for it!
	Masters of Rome Series by Colleen McCullough. If you’re a Roman history buff, reader Evan M. suggests checking out the Masters of Rome series. It chronicles the end of the Roman empire and the lives and careers of Gaius Marius, Lucius Cornelius Sulla, Pompeius Magnus, and Gaius Julius Caesar. There are seven books in the series.
	For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway. Naturally, several readers suggested “anything by Hemingway.” If you’ve never read Hemingway, start with For Whom the Bell Tolls. In the novel, we follow the experiences of a young American dynamiter in the Spanish Civil War. Much of it is pulled from Hemingway’s own experiences as a journalist reporting on the war.
	A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin. Thanks to HBO, many gents are now discovering this series. A Game of Thrones is the first of the five-part series (with more coming) which is a classic fantasy epic set in a world invented by Martin. The series is known for killing off main characters to keep you on your toes.
	Blood Meridian or The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Lots of commenters said, “Anything by Cormac McCarthy,” and I couldn’t agree more. Blood Meridian explores the violence between Native Americans and the white settlers in the 19th century, while The Road follows a father and son as they walk through a post-apocalyptic America. Both terrifying and touching — one of the only books that has ever made me cry.
	What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver. This collection of short stories by Raymond Carver center on uneducated, seemingly normal American people. They have problems, and they aren’t all shiny and polished. His writing is often compared to Hemingway’s in its simplistic style. Anything compared to Papa is good enough for me!
	Raise a Holler by Jason Stuart. If you’re a Southern gent, Nick suggests Raise a Holler. According to Jedidiah Ayers, “It’s, more or less, The Hobbit re-imagined as a series of southern-fried crime misadventures.”
	Discworld Series by Terry Pratchett. While it’s a young adult fantasy series, several people suggested the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett. Its 39 novels will keep you busy for a very long time, and there are supposedly more to come. As the title suggests, this world is a flat disc that is set upon the backs of four elephants. The books often focus and speak to a specific theme, such as religion, business, current events, etc. They also parody many common elements and cliches of fantasy and sci-fi literature.
	The Plot Against America and American Pastoral by Philip Roth. Reader Hal said, “Philip Roth is good and comes with the added benefit that you can then say you have read Philip Roth. The Plot Against America is a good way in.” American Pastoral won a Pulitzer for its portrayal of life in the Lyndon Johnson years, and The Plot Against America is an alternate history novel in which FDR is defeated by Charles Lindbergh in the 1940 election.
	The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene. Reader Caleb S. suggested anything by Graham Greene. “He is a twentieth-century writer of novels and short stories, and his works are filled with men faced with complex moral conflicts. All of his novels are both entertaining and literary, which is a rarity these days, and perfect for someone looking to begin a fiction-reading habit.” Check out The Power and the Glory, which deals with the power struggle between the Roman Catholic church and the Mexican government, to get started with Mr. Greene.
	The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler. Several readers suggested Raymond Chandler. If you like detective stories, you can’t go wrong with this master of the genre, who is praised as being the most lyrical of crime writers, as well as having some of the best dialogue in the genre. The Big Sleep (his first) is a favorite of mine.
	The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. My favorite of all time. Read it again (yes, I’ll assume you’ve already read it at least once) before you go see DiCaprio take on the iconic role of Jay Gatsby at the movies. We learn about the fallacy of the American dream in this short 1920s classic.
	Deadwood by Pete Dexter. Marc has something in common with my dad. They both recommend western author Pete Dexter’s Deadwood, a fictional narrative of Wild Bill’s last days.
	Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein. Reader Tom G. likes sci-fi writer Robert Heinlein. “His characters have, in a very large part, defined what I conceptualize ‘manliness’ to be.” If you’re a man who likes to think deep, Tom suggests Stranger in a Strange Land. It’s considered to be essential sci-fi, and tells the story of a Martian human who comes to Earth in early adulthood.
	Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. Several recommendations for Ender’s Game. I finally got around to reading it this year. It’s a kid’s book, but it tackles some pretty adult themes. Another sci-fi classic, this novel is set during Earth’s future, when kids are trained for battle in preparation for an expected attack. It is still suggested reading in many military organizations, and has ballooned into a series of 12 novels and 12 short stories.
	David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. Dickens had several votes, and is widely considered the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. That means you should read his works. You can’t go wrong with David Copperfield, which Dickens himself called his favorite. It’s a semi-autobiographical work that tells the life story of a boy who grows up in poverty in London, but escapes his miserable childhood to be become a successful novelist. Available free as an ebook.
	Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield. A fictional account of the Spartan 300. Manly. This book is a military favorite and is taught at West Point, the Naval Academy, VMI, and Marine Corps Basic School. If those guys read it, so should you.
	Southern Victory Series by Harry Turtledove. Gabe recommended alternate history writer Harry Turtledove. Find out what would have happened had the South won the Civil War, all the way through 1940, in the eleven novels of the Southern Victory Series. Hint: The world is a very different place; your globe would not have the same boundaries.
	Captains Courageous by Rudyard Kipling. Hearty recommendations for anything by Rudyard Kipling, author of the manliest poem ever written, “If.” Most people suggested starting off with Kipling’s Captains Courageous. The story tells of a wealthy young boy’s transition to manhood after being saved from drowning by a fishing boat in the North Atlantic. Fun Fact: This novel was written while Kipling was living in Vermont, which is our favorite vacation spot. Free as an ebook.
	Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk. An insomniac finds relief in a secret club. No explanation needed for this one. If you’ve seen the movie, it’s time to read the book. It’s also interesting to note the author’s intent in writing: “…bookstores were full of books like The Joy Luck Club and The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and How to Make an American Quilt. These were all novels that presented a social model for women to be together. But there was no novel that presented a new social model for men to share their lives.”
	Metro 2033 by Dmitry Glukhovsky. Reader Jake Warner suggested Russian post-apocalyptic novel Metro 2033: “It’s a bit hard to find in English, but Dmitry Glukhovsky’s Metro 2033 is an excellent post-apocalyptic novel.” The name comes from survivors of a nuclear holocaust retreating to metro train tunnels, in which they begin their new way of life. The book has spawned a very popular video game as well.
	Water Music by T.C. Boyle. Water Music follows the wild adventures of Ned Rise, thief and whoremaster, and Mungo Park, a Scottish explorer, through London’s seamy gutters and Scotland’s scenic highlands, to their grand meeting in the heart of darkest Africa. Sounds good.
	The Rediscovery of Man by Cordwainer Smith. Kent said everyone should check out the The Rediscovery of Man, a collection of sci-fi short stories by Cordwainer Smith. “His science fiction explores the nature of humanity after mankind has spread out among the stars and begun to diverge.”
	His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman. Grumpy Typewriter (fantastic pseudonym, by the way) is a fan of the His Dark Materials trilogy. You’ve probably seen the movie the book inspired, The Golden Compass. Grumpy Typewriter says the books are much better. Always are, always are. The epic trilogy is a coming of age story of two kids who travel through a series of alternate universes, and is said to be a re-telling and repudiation of John Milton’s classic, Paradise Lost.
	Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. Several readers suggested anything by Joseph Conrad. ”He speaks to the masculine in all of us to some extent,” said commenter Graham. If you’ve already read Heart of Darkness, try reading Lord Jim. There are also expanded versions of Heart of Darkness based on Conrad’s notes if you just can’t get enough. Conrad’s works are available free as ebooks.
	A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor. A few suggested Flannery O’Connor, a female author known for her Southern Gothic style. Her stories are pretty raw and highlight complex ethical and moral questions. For a good sampling of her work, pick up the collection of her short stories entitled, A Good Man Is Hard to Find.
	The Sportswriter by Richard Ford. This is a novel about a failed novelist turned sportswriter who experiences an existential crisis after the death of his son. Its sequel, Independence Day, won a Pulitzer, and there is also a third installment.
	Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. You might be surprised, but several readers suggested Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. LG, a ninth-grade English teacher, said this about the book: “Although all of Austen’s novels are great, I think Pride and Prejudice especially is worth a man’s time to read for its examples of good, noble, self-sacrificing men from every social class, as well as its counter-examples. On the ‘bad guy’ side, you’ve got a womanizing manipulator, a father who shirks his duties and lives to regret it, a pompous moral weakling, and a man whose arrogance blinds him to his own faults.” If you still think Austen is too girly for your tastes, Chris suggests Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.
	The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett. Several recommendations for Hammett’s Sam Spade detective novels. Couldn’t agree more. Start off with The Maltese Falcon. If you need convincing, the New York Times calls Hammett the dean of the school of detective fiction.
	Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. A book that begins with a boxing match and explores what it means to be an independent man when you feel pushed to conform to others’ stereotypes and expectations.
	Dune by Frank Herbert. Several readers suggested books by Frank Herbert for those who love sci-fi. Dune is a good place to start. Set in the far future, the Dune universe finds planets controlled by individual noble houses. The story focuses on the Atreides family as they gain control of a planet with a very valuable commodity. Although not confirmed, it is said to be the bestselling novel of all time in its genre. Like many sci-fi series, prequels and sequels have been added both by Herbert and others for a total of well over 20 novels.
	The Richard Hannay Series by John Buchan. Trev recommended the Richard Hannay series. “They were written during and about WWI and are great adventure stories.” There are five novels that star Richard Hannay, the first three of which are available for free as ebooks.
	The Stand by Stephen King. Lots of people suggested Stephen King, and The Stand got several recommendations. Find a more recent, uncut version. At first publishing, King’s editor forced him to cut nearly 400 pages. You’re getting into a 1,200-page book, but seeing the literal fight of good vs. evil in post-apocalyptic America is well worth it. His non-horror books are good too (e.g. The Green Mile and Shawshank Redemption).
	The Poe Shadow by Matthew Pearl. A novel about a young lawyer who tries to solve the mystery of Edgar Allan Poe’s death. All of Pearl’s novels deal with some kind of literary mystery. So if you like classic literature and modern mysteries, his works will be a win-win.
	The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara. If you like learning about the Civil War, then you can’t go wrong with The Killer Angels. You’ll get to experience the Battle of Gettysburg from the point of view of General Lee. General Norman Schwarzkopf called it “the best and most realistic historical novel about war that I have ever read.”
	Call of the Wild by Jack London. Lots of hearty recommendations for Jack London. He wrote some pretty manly stuff, and his life is just as interesting as his prose. You probably read The Call of the Wild in middle school, but it won’t hurt to read it again. Also try White Fang and The Sea-Wolf. All of London’s works are available for free in the public domain.
	The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson. “The Lottery” is one of the most haunting things you’ll ever read, and a must-read as perhaps the most well-known short story in American literature.
	The Professional by W.C. Heinz. A book about boxing that’s more than a book about boxing. It’s considered one of the greatest sports novels ever written. Ernest Hemingway himself said it was “the only good novel I’ve ever read about a fighter, and an excellent novel in its own right.”
	The Jack Reacher Series by Lee Child. If you like thrillers, several readers suggested the Jack Reacher series by Lee Child. Reacher is an ex-MP and drifts around the country with not much more than his heavy-duty boots and a pack. There are currently 17 novels, with another due out this summer.
	Moby-Dick by Herman Melville. A story about the perils of obsession. I think men relate to this book so much because we have a tendency to put up the blinders like old Ahab. It’s also frequently referenced in culture, and is regarded as one of the great novels of all time. For those reasons alone you should have this book in your bank of cultural knowledge.
	Hondo by Louis L’Amour. Several suggested “anything by L’Amour.” The man cranked out Western novels like a machine. Granted, his books aren’t Pulitzer material, but they’re definitely enjoyable and pretty darn manly. Great for road trips. Hondo is one of L’Amour’s most well-known novels. But with over 100 other works, you can stay busy for a good long while.
	The Winter King by Bernard Cornwell. James recommends the Warlord Chronicles. It’s a trilogy about how King Arthur became a great warlord of Britain, and eventually brought peace and unity to the nation as they battled other foreign armies.
	The Leopard and the Cliff by Wallace Breem. Alex said this about The Leopard and the Cliff: “It’s about a British soldier in turn-of-the-century Afghanistan. Duty, honor, loyalty, courage under fire — powerful stuff that’s about as manly as you can get.”
	A Prayer For Owen Meany by John Irving. Apparently this book inspired the movie Simon Birch. Our narrator is set in the present and telling the story of his childhood with his best friend, Owen Meany, as they grew up in New Hampshire. We also get themes of religion, social justice, and fate. Not too shabby. Irving also wrote The Cider House Rules, which turned into another popular movie.
	The Corps Series by W.E.B Griffin. Several suggested The Corps series, which includes 10 novels for your indulgence. It follows a tight-knit cast of Marines in the WWII and Korean War years. As would be expected of a series about the marines, the ideas of sacrifice, honor, and brotherhood come through in a major way.
	Safely Home by Randy Alcorn. For you Christian gents, Randy recommends Safely Home. It’s about the friendship between two Harvard roommates, one American and one Chinese, who reconnect in present-day China after 20 years. 100% of the proceeds for his books go towards missions work.
	The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. Alexandre Dumas got a manly vote of confidence from several commenters. The Count of Monte Cristo is a good place to start. It’s an adventure story primarily concerned with themes of hope, justice, vengeance, mercy, and forgiveness. At around 1,500 pages, prepare yourself.
	One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. It’s about a single day of a prisoner in a 1950s Soviet labor camp. It was a major literary event in Russia, as it opened people’s eyes to the horror of Stalinist camps in a way that had never been so openly done before.
	The Rigante Series by David Gemmell. If you like fantasy, Jamie suggests checking out the Rigante series. It includes four novels published between 1999 and 2002. One reviewer on Amazon describes it perfectly: “The main characters are typical Gemmell: passionate, resourceful and proud. Full of revenge and destiny, envy and greed. Gemmell’s plots often revolve around simple passions and motivations. Not one dimensional, but just driven by basic human nature.”
	Magician by Raymond E. Feist. Mark Sweeny said this about Magician: “The best fictional read I had had is Magician by Raymond E. Feist. It was recommended to me by a chance conversation with the man sitting next to me on a long flight from the U.K. to America. I took a chance and read it, and I was not disappointed. I don’t think you will be either. Go on, take a chance!” The story is about Pug, an orphan boy who becomes the apprentice of a magician. As aliens invade their world, Pug gets caught up in the battle. This novel is the first part of a trilogy, and is often published in two parts: Magician: Apprentice and Magician: Master.
	The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Lots of recommendations for Dostoevsky. The Brothers Karamazov seemed to be the most suggested novel to start off with. Its Amazon description says it better than I can: “Three brothers, involved in the brutal murder of their despicable father, find their lives irrevocably altered as they are driven by intense, uncontrollable emotions of rage and revenge.” This was Dostoevsky’s final novel, and was intended to be an epic series, but he died four months after publication.
	King Solomon’s Mines by H. Rider Haggard. Several said, “Anything by Haggard.” He was one of the best adventure writers of all-time. King Solomon’s Mines is a classic. Tromp through Africa and find, as the title suggests, King Solomon’s fabled treasure. Haggard supposedly wrote this piece over the course of just a few months because of a wager with his brother. Available free as an ebook.
	Day of War by Cliff Graham. Day of War is a fictional account of King David’s epic battles that are recorded in the Bible in 2 Samuel 23 and 1 Chronicles 11. I read this a few months ago and enjoyed it.
	Sword of Honour Trilogy by Evelyn Waugh. Joe Bones had this to say about the Sword of Honour trilogy: “I cannot recommend Evelyn Waugh enough. His Sword of Honour trilogy is a complex, insightful and hilarious study of a man’s motivations in war. It is solidly rooted in the temporal but illustrated by the spiritual. It also features an exploding portable toilet and a one-armed Brigadier with an eye patch…”
	The Complete Chronicles of Conan by Robert E. Howard. thserry likes the Chronicles of Conan. “Most people write off Conan as being a silly Arnold movie, however, the original stories are masterpieces. The stories consist of everything from short 3-page (‘Frost Giant’s Daughter’) stories to full novels (Hour of the Dragon). My favorite of all the stories is ‘The Tower of the Elephant.’ Beautiful works, and life lessons on being your own man.”
	Joe Ledger Series by Jonathan Maberry. If you like zombies, and plenty of people do these days, you’ll like the Joe Ledger series. Start off with Patient Zero. The series currently has four installments, with three more planned through 2015.
	The Trilogy by Henryk Sienkiewicz. Harland likes anything by Henryk Sienkiewicz. “His works, especially The Trilogy, are fantastic novels of pride, repentance, honor, and epic love stories all set in the time when Poland was a democracy and set upon from outside powers.” Available free as ebooks.
	Heaven Has No Favorites by Erich Maria Remarque. A novel by the same guy who wrote All Quiet on the Western Front. It’s a story of passion and love with the backdrop of automobile racing.
	Mitch Rapp Series by Vince Flynn. The Mitch Rapp series follows a CIA assassin who focuses on thwarting Middle Eastern terrorist attacks on the U.S. Like Jack Bauer, Rapp is often willing to take extreme measures that go beyond allowable protocol. There are currently 14 Mitch Rapp novels.
	Shane by Jack Shaefer. Gary recommended anything by Jack Shaefer for those who like Westerns. Shane is good novel to start off with, and focuses on a mysterious gunslinger who arrives into town to help out a group of homesteaders in 19th century Wyoming. It’s a classic struggle for land and honor in the wide open expanses of the west. A great film too.
	Sum of All Fears by Tom Clancy. Several commenters recommended anything by Tom Clancy. You’ve probably seen the movies and played the video games based off his work. It’s about time you read the novels. Great summertime reading. The Sum of All Fears is about a 20-year-old lost nuclear warhead that gets reconstructed by terrorists and set to be detonated at the Super Bowl. Can hero Jack Ryan save the day? You’ll have to find out yourself.
	The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Emmuska Orczy. A few suggested The Scarlet Pimpernel. It’s about a disguised superhero living in the aftermath of the French Revolution. This novel inspired the masked superhero genre and ultimately led to the likes of Zorro and Batman. Available for free as an ebook.
	2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke. Lots of recommendations for the works of sci-fi great Arthur C. Clarke. 2001: A Space Odyssey is a classic (and a darn good movie). The movie and book were created in conjunction, with the book actually being released after the movie. A manned spacecraft is sent to Saturn to investigate an ancient mystery. The crew, however, must deal with the self-aware HAL 9000 robot in order to achieve their goals. Themes of technological dependency, nuclear war, and space exploration in general are heavy here.
	The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. Journey with a young man through Egypt who is searching for treasure. Ultimately, the treasure he’s seeking ends up being much more valuable than gold. Learn about accomplishing your greatest dreams and how gold isn’t as valuable as it may seem. This allegorical tale has been translated into over 50 languages, a rarity.
	The Bourne Trilogy by Robert Ludlum. Jason Bourne is about as manly as it comes on the screen. He’s even more so in the books. The action and intrigue never stops as Jason Bourne tries to figure out who he is, and why several different groups of people are trying to eliminate him. That’s a recipe for great reading. The series started with three novels, but has been continued on by a new author with an additional seven novels. I’ve only read the originals, so I can’t vouch for the new ones.
	Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank. SG from the AoM community has this to say about it: “Read it in High School and I have gone back to it over the years. It is about surviving a nuclear war in the late 50s, based on what was out there then and what was ‘known.’ It is a good book even if some of it looks dated now. The hero really becomes a man in the course of leading his family, and later the town.”
	Robert Langdon Series by Dan Brown. Several recommendations for this uber-popular and also controversial series of books. Langdon is a professor who ends up in some ancient mysteries, mostly involving religious themes. The Da Vinci Code is the most well known, but start with Angels & Demons, the first of the series. The fourth novel, Inferno, came out this month and revolves around Dante’s Inferno.
	Early Autumn by Robert Parker. This one got a couple recommendations. A detective is charged with looking after a boy who is mired in a custody battle. We see what a true mentorship can look like, and how important role models are for children. There’s some detective stuff in there as well.
	Leatherstocking Tales by James Fenimore Cooper. This pentalogy is best known for its second installment, The Last of the Mohicans, which takes place during the French and Indian War in which France and Great Britain battle for control of the North American colonies. Available for free as ebooks.
	Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton. The movie that won three Oscars pales in comparison to the book that spawned it. All of Crichton’s novels are known for their heavy scientific research that often make the outlandish seem possible. Crichton, sadly, died much too young and won’t be able to give us any more novels. Start with Jurassic Park (which has some wild twists and turns that you don’t see in the movies) and read all of his other novels as well, which range from Viking lore to global warming.
	The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. A young boy is taken by his father into an old library of forgotten and lost-in-time books that have been preserved by a select few. The young boy is allowed to select one book and take care of it for life. You get a story within a story as you also get to read parts of the book the boy selected.
	Space Trilogy by C.S. Lewis. Lewis is more well-known for The Chronicles of Narnia, but I’ve always heard rave reviews about his Space Trilogy, where he takes a stab at sci-fi. Jump from Mars, to Venus, and back to Earth again. One reviewer likened it to a combination of Tolkien (for creating an imagined reality) and Stephen King’s The Stand (for its portrayal of good vs. evil). Not too shabby!
	The Four Feathers by A.E.W. Mason. Learn about redemption when a young, cowardly soldier quits the army but redeems himself through acts of courage. As with any good adventure novel, there’s also a gal involved. Available for free as an ebook.
	High Country by Willard Wyman. A good friend told me this about it: “High Country takes readers back in history to a time when men could still explore the mysteries of America’s rich natural lands. The story follows the life Ty Hardin, who learns the trade of packing in the Montana Rockies from a seasoned mentor, and in the process, evolves from boy to man. This book is for any man who appreciates the tradition of hard work, exploration, and enjoys stories of America’s expansion into The West.”
	Fall of Giants by Ken Follett. This is the first part of Follett’s epic Century Trilogy. Winter of the World came out last year, with the third installment slated for 2014. At 1,000 pages each, it’s quite a ride. Fall of Giants starts in pre-WWI Europe and takes us all the way through the war while following a cast of unrelated characters who end up crossing paths in various ways. Beyond being just entertaining fiction, you get a real history lesson of World War I, and how folks from each side were likely feeling. Great read.
	Peace Like a River by Leif Enger. Another spot-on recommendation from Uncle Buzz and a personal favorite of both Kate and I. When 11-year-old Rube’s older brother goes on the lam, Rube and his father and sister set out in search of him and must decide what to do when they find him. Full of clever references to historical and literary characters, and beautifully and almost magically written, the book touches on faith, family, and fatherhood and will stay with you for a long time after you read it.

With just 20 hours of focused, deliberate practice, you can go from knowing absolutely nothing to performing noticeably well. That's the message from Josh Kaufman, author of The First 20 Hours. In the video above, he reveals the four steps to learning any new skill, fast.

Read more...

Last Friday, we had 17 people over for dinner. No, we haven’t moved to a larger apartment. No, my kitchen hasn’t grown to the size of a normal one (though some mornings I tiptoe in, hoping it will surprise me). No, I hadn’t really expected almost all of my friends to be able to make it when I invited them, but I wasn’t the least bit sad when I found out they’d all come, mostly because my vision of the ideal apartment gathering resembles the party scene from Breakfast At Tiffany’s. And boy, we get closer every time.

The precursor to this was when, about a month ago, I moped, as I often do, to my husband that we never entertain anymore and that we should just do it, just throw a party and have enough aperatifs around that pesky details such as cranky child up past their bedtime and who needs chairs? pull up a corner of carpet to sit on! and oops, did we invite more people than we have forks for again? would cease to matter. Wine solves everything, doesn’t it?

... Read the rest of two classic sangrias on smittenkitchen.com

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© smitten kitchen 2006-2012. | permalink to two classic sangrias | 144 comments to date | see more: Drinks, Photo

This excerpt from neurologist-philosopher Daniel Dennett's new book Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking lays out a set of rhetorical habits that I immediately aspired to attain:

How to compose a successful critical commentary:

1. Attempt to re-express your target's position so clearly, vividly and fairly that your target says: "Thanks, I wish I'd thought of putting it that way."

2. List any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement).

3. Mention anything you have learned from your target.

4. Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.

And if that wasn't enough: "whenever you see a rhetorical question, try – silently, to yourself – to give it an unobvious answer. If you find a good one, surprise your interlocutor by answering the question." And then, "A good moral to draw from this observation is that when you want to criticise a field, a genre, a discipline, an art form …don't waste your time and ours hooting at the crap! Go after the good stuff or leave it alone."

Daniel Dennett's seven tools for thinking (via O'Reilly Radar)

With just 20 hours of focused, deliberate practice, you can go from knowing absolutely nothing to performing noticeably well. That's the message from Josh Kaufman, author of The First 20 Hours. In the video above, he reveals the four steps to learning any new skill, fast.

Read more...

Almost exactly two weeks till Trial of the Clone 2 launches. What a grand opportunity for you to grab a copy of the first book!

proudlybigotedmisandrist:

defranco:

edwardspoonhands:

tyleroakley:

Oops.

lolololol

hehehe

ignore the part with tyler oakley

Piled Higher & Deeper by Jorge Cham		www.phdcomics.com
title: "Happy for them?" - originally published 5/22/2013 For the latest news in PHD Comics, CLICK HERE!

The Misconception: You should study the successful if you wish to become successful.

The Truth: When failure becomes invisible, the difference between failure and success may also become invisible.

In New York City, in an apartment a few streets away from the center of Harlem, above trees reaching out over sidewalks and dogs pulling at leashes and conversations cut short to avoid parking tickets, a group of professional thinkers once gathered and completed equations that would both snuff and spare several hundred thousand human lives.

People walking by the apartment at the time had no idea that four stories above them some of the most important work in applied mathematics was tilting the scales of a global conflict as secret agents of the United States armed forces, arithmetical soldiers, engaged in statistical combat. Nor could people today know as they open umbrellas and twist heels on cigarettes, that nearby, in an apartment overlooking Morningside Heights, one of these soldiers once effortlessly prevented the United States military from doing something incredibly stupid, something that could have changed the flags now flying in capitals around the world had he not caught it, something you do every day.

These masters of math moved their families across the country, some across an ocean, so they could work together. As they unpacked, the theaters in their new hometown replaced posters for Citizen Kane with those for Casablanca, and the newspapers they unwrapped from photo frames and plates featured stories still unravelling the events at Pearl Harbor. Many still held positions at universities. Others left those sorts of jobs to think deeply in one of the many groups that worked for the armed forces, free of any other obligations aside from checking in on their families at night and feeding their brains during the day. All paused their careers and rushed to enlist so that they help to crush Hitler, not with guns and brawn, but with integers and exponents.

The official name for the people inside the apartment was the Statistical Research Group, a cabal of geniuses assembled at the request of the White House and made up of people who would go on to compete for and win Nobel Prizes. The SRG was an extension of Columbia University, and they dealt mainly with statistical analysis. Other groups with different specialities were tied to Harvard, Princeton, Brown and others, 11 in all, each a leaf at the end of a new branch of the government created to help defeat the Axis – the Department of War Math.

Actually…no. They were never officially known by such a deliciously sexy title. The were instead called the Applied Mathematics Panel, but they operated as if they were a department of war math.

The Department, ahem, the Panel, was created because the United States needed help. A surge of new technology had flooded into daily life, and the same wonders that years earlier drove ticket sales to the World’s Fair were now cracking open cities. Numbers and variables now massed into scenarios far too complex to solve with maps and binoculars. The military realized it faced problems that no soldier had ever confronted. No best practices yet existed for things like rockets and radar stations and aircraft carriers. The most advanced computational devices available were clunky experiments made of telephone switches or vacuum tubes. A calculator still looked like the mutant child of an old-fashioned cash register and a mechanical typewriter. If you wanted solutions to the newly unfathomable problems of modern combat you needed powerful number crunchers, and in 1941 the world’s most powerful number crunchers ran on toast and coffee and wore ties to breakfast.

Here is how it worked: Somewhere inside the vast machinery of war a commander would stumble into a problem. That commander would then send a request to the head of the Panel who would then assign the task to the group he thought would best be able to resolve the issue. Scientists in that group would then travel to Washington and meet with with top military personnel and advisors and explain to them how they might go about solving the problem. It was like calling technical support, except you called a computational genius who then invented a new way of understanding the world through math in an effort to win a global conflict for control of the planet.

For instance, the Navy desperately needed to know what was the best possible pattern, or spread, of torpedoes to launch against large enemy ships. All they had to go on were a series of hastily taken, blurry, black-and-white photographs of turning Japanese war vessels. The Panel handed over the photos to one of its meat-based mainframes and asked them to report back when it had a solution. The warrior mathematicians solved the problem almost as soon as they saw it. Lord Kelvin, they told the Navy, had already worked out the calculations in 1887. Just look at the patterns in the waves, they explained, see how they fan out in curves like an unfurling fern? The spaces tell you everything; they give it all away. Work out the distance between the cusps of the bow waves and you’ll know how fast the ship is going. Lord Kelvin hadn’t worked out what to do if the ship was turning, but no problem, they said. The mathematicians scribbled on notepads and clacked on blackboards until they had both advanced the field and created a solution. They then measured wavelets on real ships and saw their math was sound. The Navy added a new weapon to its arsenal – the ability to accurately send a barrage of torpedoes into a turning ship based only on what you could divine from the patterns in the waves.

The devotion of the mathematical soldiers grew stronger as the war grew bloodier and they learned the things they etched on hidden blackboards and jotted on guarded scraps of paper determined who would and would not return home to their families once the war was over. Leading brains in every scientific discipline had eagerly joined the fight, and although textbooks would eventually devote chapters to the work of the codebreakers and the creators of the atomic bomb, there were many groups whose stories never made headlines that produced nothing more than weaponized equations. One story in particular was nearly lost forever. In it, a brilliant statistician named Abraham Wald saved countless lives by preventing a group of military commanders from committing a common human error, a mistake that you probably make every single day.

Colleagues described Wald as gentle and kind, and as a genius unsurpassed in his areas of expertise. His contributions, said one peer, had “produced a decisive turn in method and purpose” in the social sciences. Born in a Hungary in 1902 on a parcel of land later claimed by Romania, the son of a Jewish baker, Wald spent his childhood studying equations, eventually working his way up through academia to become a graduate student at the University of Vienna mentored by the great mathematician Karl Menger. He was the sort of student who offered suggestions on how to improve the books he was reading, and then saw to it those suggestions were incorporated into later editions. His mentor would introduce Wald to problems that made experts in the field rub their beards, the sort of things with names like “stochastic difference equations” and the “betweenness among the ternary relations in metric space.” Wald would not only return within a month or so with the solution to such a problem but politely ask for another to solve. As he advanced the science of probability and statistics, his name became familiar to mathematicians in the United States where he eventually fled in 1938, reluctantly, as the Nazi threat grew. His family, all but a single brother, would later die in the extermination camp known as Auschwitz.

Soon after Wald arrived in the United States he joined the Applied Mathematics Panel and went to work with the team at Columbia stuffed in the secret apartment overlooking Harlem. His group looked for patterns and applied statistics to problems and situations too large and unwieldy for commanders to get their arms around. They turned the geometry of air combat into graphs and charts and they plotted the success rates of bomb sights and various tactics. As the war progressed, their efforts became focused on the most pressing problem of the war – keeping airplanes in the sky. 

In some years of World War II, the chances of a member of a bomber crew making it through a tour of duty was about the same as calling heads in a coin toss and winning. As a member of a World War II bomber crew, you flew for hours above an entire nation hoping to murder you while suspended in the air, huge, visible from far away, and vulnerable from every direction above and below as bullets and flak streamed out to puncture you. “Ghosts already,” that’s how historian Kevin Wilson described Word War II airmen. They expected to die because it always felt like the chances of surviving the next bombing run were about the same as running shirtless across a football field swarming with angry hornets and making it unharmed to the other side. You might make it across once, but if you kept running back and forth, eventually your luck would run out. Any advantage the mathematicians could provide, even a very small one, would make a big difference day after day, mission after mission.

As with the torpedo problem, the top brass explained what they knew, and the Panel presented the problem to Wald and his group. How, the Army Air Force asked, could they improve the odds of a bomber making it home? Military engineers explained to the statistician that they already knew the allied bombers needed more armor, but the ground crews couldn’t just cover the planes like tanks, not if they wanted them to take off. The operational commanders asked for help figuring out the best places to add what little protection they could. It was here that Wald prevented the military from falling prey to survivorship bias, an error in perception that could have turned the tide of the war if left unnoticed and uncorrected. See if you can spot it.

The military looked at the bombers that had returned from enemy territory. They recorded where those planes had taken the most damage. Over and over again, they saw the bullet holes tended to accumulate along the wings, around the tail gunner, and down the center of the body. Wings. Body. Tail gunner. Considering this information, where would you put the extra armor? Naturally, the commanders wanted to put the thicker protection where they could clearly see the most damage, where the holes clustered. But Wald said no, that would be precisely the wrong decision. Putting the armor there wouldn’t improve their chances at all. 

Do you understand why it was a foolish idea? The mistake, which Wald saw instantly, was that the holes showed where the planes were strongest. The holes showed where a bomber could be shot and still survive the flight home, Wald explained. After all, here they were, holes and all. It was the planes that weren’t there that needed extra protection, and they had needed it in places that these planes had not. The holes in the surviving planes actually revealed the locations that needed the least additional armor. Look at where the survivors are unharmed, he said, and that’s where these bombers are most vulnerable; that’s where the planes that didn’t make it back were hit.

Taking survivorship bias into account, Wald went ahead and worked out how much damage each individual part of an airplane could take before it was destroyed – engine, ailerons, pilot, stabilizers, etc. – and then through a tangle of complicated equations he showed the commanders how likely it was that the average plane would get shot in those places in any given bombing run depending on the amount of resistance it faced. Those calculations are still in use today.

The military had the best data available at the time, and the stakes could not have been higher, yet the top commanders still failed to see the flaws in their logic. Those planes would have been armored in vain had it not been for the intervention of a man trained to spot human error.

A question should be forming in the front of your brain at this point. If the top brass of the United States armed forces could make such a simple and dumb mistake while focused on avoiding simple and dumb mistakes, thanks to survivorship bias, does that mean survivorship bias is likely bungling many of your own day-to-day assumptions? The answer is, of course, yes. All the time.

Simply put, survivorship bias is your tendency to focus on survivors instead of whatever you would call a non-survivor depending on the situation. Sometimes that means you tend to focus on the living instead of the dead, or on winners instead of losers, or on successes instead of failures. In Wald’s problem, the military focused on the planes that made it home and almost made a terrible decision because they ignored the ones that got shot down.

It is easy to do. After any process that leaves behind survivors, the non-survivors are often destroyed or rendered mute or removed from your view. If failures becomes invisible, then naturally you will pay more attention to successes. Not only do you fail to recognize that what is missing might have held important information, you fail to recognize that there is missing information at all.

You must remind yourself that when you start to pick apart winners and losers, successes and failures, the living and dead, that by paying attention to one side of that equation you are always neglecting the other. If you are thinking about opening a restaurant because there are so many successful restaurants in your hometown, you are ignoring the fact the only successful restaurants survive to become examples. Maybe on average 90 percent of restaurants in your city fail in the first year. You can’t see all those failures because when they fail they also disappear from view. As Nassim Taleb writes in his book The Black Swan, “The cemetery of failed restaurants is very silent.” Of course the few that don’t fail in that deadly of an environment are wildly successful because only the very best and the very lucky can survive. All you are left with are super successes, and looking at them day after day you might think it’s a great business to get into when you are actually seeing evidence that you should avoid it.

Survivorship bias pulls you toward bestselling diet gurus, celebrity CEOs, and superstar athletes. It’s an unavoidable tick, the desire to deconstruct success like a thieving magpie and pull away the shimmering bits. You look to the successful for clues about the hidden, about how to better live your life, about how you too can survive similar forces against which you too struggle. Colleges and conferences prefer speakers who shine as examples of making it through adversity, of struggling against the odds and winning. The problem here is that you rarely take away from these inspirational figures advice on what not to do, on what you should avoid, and that’s because they don’t know. Information like that is lost along with the people who don’t make it out of bad situations or who don’t make it on the cover of business magazines – people who don’t get invited to speak at graduations and commencements and inaugurations. The actors who traveled from Louisiana to Los Angeles only to return to Louisiana after a few years don’t get to sit next to James Lipton and watch clips of their Oscar-winning performances as students eagerly gobble up their crumbs of wisdom. In short, the advice business is a monopoly run by survivors. As the psychologist Daniel Kahneman writes in his book Thinking Fast and Slow, “A stupid decision that works out well becomes a brilliant decision in hindsight.” The things a great company like Microsoft or Google or Apple did right are like the planes with bullet holes in the wings. The companies that burned all the way to the ground after taking massive damage fade from memory. Before you emulate the history of a famous company, Kahneman says, you should imagine going back in time when that company was just getting by and ask yourself if the outcome of its decisions were in any way predictable. If not, you are probably seeing patterns in hindsight where there was only chaos in the moment. He sums it up like so, “If you group successes together and look for what makes them similar, the only real answer will be luck.”

If you see your struggle this way, as partly a game of chance, then as Google Engineer Barnaby James writes on his blog, “skill will allow you to place more bets on the table, but it’s not a guarantee of success.” Thus, he warns, “beware advice from the successful.” Entrepreneur Jason Cohen, in writing about survivorship bias, points out that since we can’t go back in time and start 20 identical Starbucks across the planet, we can never know if that business model is the source of the chain’s immense popularity or if something completely random and out of the control of the decision makers led to a Starbucks on just about every street corner in North America. That means you should be skeptical of any book promising you the secrets of winning at the game of life through following any particular example.

It might seem disheartening, the fact that successful people probably owe more to luck than anything else, but only if you see luck as some sort of magic. Take off those superstitious goggles for a moment, and consider this: the latest psychological research indicates that luck is a long mislabeled phenomenon. It isn’t a force, or grace from the gods, or an enchantment from fairy folk, but the measurable output of a group of predictable behaviors. Randomness, chance, and the noisy chaos of reality may be mostly impossible to predict or tame, but luck is something else. According to psychologist Richard Wiseman, luck – bad or good – is just what you call the results of a human beings consciously interacting with chance, and some people are better at interacting with chance than others.

Over the course of 10 years, Wiseman followed the lives of 400 subjects of all ages and professions. He found them after he placed ads in newspapers asking for people who thought of themselves as very lucky or very unlucky. He had them keep diaries and perform tests in addition to checking in on their lives with interviews and observations. In one study, he asked subjects to look through a newspaper and count the number of photographs inside. The people who labeled themselves as generally unlucky took about two minutes to complete the task. The people who considered themselves as generally lucky took an average of a few seconds. Wiseman had placed a block of text printed in giant, bold letters on the second page of the newspaper that read, “Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.” Deeper inside, he placed a second block of text just as big that read, “Stop counting, tell the experimenter you have seen this and win $250.” The people who believed they were unlucky usually missed both.

Wiseman speculated that what we call luck is actually a pattern of behaviors that coincide with a style of understanding and interacting with the events and people you encounter throughout life. Unlucky people are narrowly focused, he observed. They crave security and tend to be more anxious, and instead of wading into the sea of random chance open to what may come, they remain fixated on controlling the situation, on seeking a specific goal. As a result, they miss out on the thousands of opportunities that may float by. Lucky people tend to constantly change routines and seek out new experiences. Wiseman saw that the people who considered themselves lucky, and who then did actually demonstrate luck was on their side over the course of a decade, tended to place themselves into situations where anything could happen more often and thus exposed themselves to more random chance than did unlucky people. The lucky try more things, and fail more often, but when they fail they shrug it off and try something else. Occasionally, things work out.

Wiseman told Skeptical Inquirer magazine that he likened it to setting loose two people inside an apple orchard, each tasked with filling up their baskets as many times as possible. The unlucky person tends to go to the same few spots over and over again, the basket holding fewer apples each visit. The lucky person never visits the same spot twice, and that person’s basket is always full. Change those apples to experiences, and imagine a small portion of those experiences lead to fame, fortune, riches, or some other form of happiness material or otherwise, and you can see that chance is not as terrifying as it first appears, you just need to learn how to approach it.

“The harder they looked, the less they saw. And so it is with luck – unlucky people miss chance opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else. They go to parties intent on finding their perfect partner and so miss opportunities to make good friends. They look through newspapers determined to find certain type of job advertisements and as a result miss other types of jobs. Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there rather than just what they are looking for.” – Richard Wiseman in an article written for Skeptical Inquirer

Survivorship bias also flash-freezes your brain into a state of ignorance from which you believe success is more common than it truly is and therefore you leap to the conclusion that it also must be easier to obtain. You develop a completely inaccurate assessment of reality thanks to a prejudice that grants the tiny number of survivors the privilege of representing the much larger group to which they originally belonged.

Here is an easy example. Many people believe old things represent a higher level of craftsmanship than do new things. It’s sort of a “they don’t make them like they used to” kind of assumption. You’ve owned cars that only lasted a few years before you had to start replacing them piece by piece, and, would you look at that, there goes another Volkswagon Beetle buzzing along like it just rolled off an assembly line. It’s survivorship bias at work. The Beetle or the Mustang or the El Camino or the VW Minibus are among a handful of models that survived in large enough numbers to become iconic classics. The hundreds of shitty car designs and millions of automobile corpses in junkyards around the world far outnumber the popular, well-maintained, successful, beloved survivors. According to Josh Clark at HowStuffWorks, most experts say that cars from the last two decades are far more reliable and safer than the cars of the 1950s and ‘60s, but plenty of people believe otherwise because of a few high-profile survivors. The examples that would disprove such assumptions are rusting out of sight. Do you see how it’s the same as Wald’s bombers? The Beetle survived, like the bombers that made it home, and it becomes a representative of 1960s cars because it remains visible. All the other cars that weren’t made in the millions and weren’t easy to maintain or were poorly designed are left out of the analysis because they are now removed from view, like the bombers that didn’t return.

Similarly, photographer Mike Johnston explains on his blog that the artwork that leaps from memory when someone mentions a decade like the 1920s or a movement like Baroque is usually made up of things that do not suck. Your sense of a past era tends to be informed by paintings and literature and drama that are not crap, even though at any given moment pop culture is filled with more crap than masterpieces. Why? It isn’t because people were better artists back in the day. It is because the good stuff survives, and the bad stuff is forgotten. So over time, you end up with skewed ideas of past eras. You think the artists of antiquity were amazing in the same way you associate the music of past decades with the songs that survived long enough to get into your ears. The movies about Vietnam never seem include in their soundtracks the songs that sucked.

“I have to chuckle whenever I read yet another description of American frontier log cabins as having been well crafted or sturdily or beautifully built. The much more likely truth is that 99% of frontier log cabins were horribly built—it’s just that all of those fell down. The few that have survived intact were the ones that were well made. That doesn’t mean all of them were.” – Mike Johnston at The Online Photographer

You succumb to survivorship bias because you are innately terrible with statistics. For instance, if you seek advice from a very old person about how to become very old, the only person who can provide you an answer is a person who is not dead. The people who made the poor health choices you should avoid are now resting in the earth and can’t tell you about those bad choices anymore. That’s why it’s difficult not to furrow your brow and wonder why you keep paying for a gym membership when Willard Scott showcases the birthday of a 110-year-old woman who claims the source of her longevity is a daily regimen of cigarillos, cheese sticks, and Wild Turkey cut with maple syrup and Robitussin. You miss that people like her represent a very small number of the living. They are on the thin end of a bell curve. There is a much larger pool of people who basically drank bacon grease for breakfast and didn’t live long enough to appear on television. Most people can’t chug bourbon and gravy for a lifetime and expect to become an octogenarian, but the unusually lucky handful who can tend to stand out precisely because they are alive and talking.

The mentalist Derren Brown once predicted he could flip a coin 10 times in a row and have it come up heads every time. He then dazzled UK television audiences by doing exactly that, flipping the coin into a bowl with only one cutaway shot for flair. How did he do it? He filmed himself flipping coins for nine hours until he got the result he wanted. He then edited out all the failures and presented the single success.

Advertisements for weight loss products and fitness regimes operate just like Derren Brown’s magic trick, by hiding the failures and letting your survivorship bias do the rest. “Those always use the most positive claims, the most outrageous examples to sell a product,” Phil Plait, an astronomer and leading voice in the skeptical movement, explained to me. “When these things don’t work for the vast majority of customers, you never hear about it, at least not from the seller.” The people who use the diet, or the product, or the pill, and fail to lose weight don’t get trotted out for photo shoots – only the successes do. That same phenomenon has become a problem in science publications, especially among the younger sciences like psychology, but it is now under repair. For far too long, studies that fizzled out or showed insignificant results have not been submitted for publication at the same level as studies that end up with positive results, or even worse, they’ve been rejected by prominent journals. Left unchecked, over time you end up with science journals that only present the survivors of the journal process – studies showing significance. Psychologists are calling it the File Drawer Effect. The studies that disprove or weaken the hypotheses of high-profile studies seem to get stuffed in the file drawer, so to speak. Many scientists are pushing for the widespread publication of replication, failure, and insignificance. Only then, they argue, will the science journals and the journalism that reports on them accurately describe the world being explored. Science above all will need to root out survivorship, but it won’t be easy. This particular bias is especially pernicious, said Plait, because it is almost invisible by definition. ”The only way you can spot it is to always ask: what am I missing? Is what I’m seeing all there is? What am I not seeing? Those are incredibly difficult questions to answer, and not always answerable. But if you don’t ask them, then by definition you can’t answer them.” He added. “It’s a pain, but reality can be a tough nut to crack.”

Failure to look for what is missing is a common shortcoming, not just within yourself but also within the institutions that surround you. A commenter at an Internet watering hole for introverts called the INTJForum explained it with this example: when a company performs a survey about job satisfaction the only people who can fill out that survey are people who still work at the company. Everyone who might have quit out of dissatisfaction is no longer around to explain why. Such data mining fails to capture the only thing it is designed to measure, but unless management is aware of survivorship bias things will continue to seem peachy on paper. In finance, this is a common pitfall. The economist Mark Klinedinst explained to me that mutual funds, companies that offer stock portfolios, routinely prune out underperforming investments. “When a mutual fund tells you, ‘The last five years we had 10 percent on average return,’ well, the companies that didn’t have high returns folded or were taken over by companies that were more lucky.” The health of the companies they offer isn’t an indication of the mutual fund’s skill at picking stocks, said Klinedinst, because they’ve deleted failures from their offerings. All you ever see are the successes. That’s true for many, many elements of life. Money experts who made great guesses in the past are considered soothsayers because their counterparts who made equally risky moves that failed nosedived into obscurity and are now no longer playing the game. Whole nations left standing after wars and economic struggles pump fists of nationalism assuming that their good outcomes resulted from wise decisions, but they can never know for sure.

“Let us suppose that a commander orders 20 men to invade an enemy bunker. This invasion leads to a complete destruction of the bunker and only one dead soldier from the 20 person team. An amazingly successful endeavor. Unless you are the one soldier who was shot through the head running up the hill. From his standpoint, rapidly ascending to the spirit world, it seems like a gigantic waste and a terrible order, but we will never hear his side of things. We will only hear from the guys who survived, how it was tough going until they made it over the rise. How it was sad to lose one guy, but they knew that they would make it. They just had a feeling. Of course, that one guy had that feeling to, until he felt nothing.” – Unknown author at http://www.spacetravelsacrime.com

If you spend your life only learning from survivors, buying books about successful people and poring over the history of companies that shook the planet, your knowledge of the world will be strongly biased and enormously incomplete. As best I can tell, here is the trick: When looking for advice, you should look for what not to do, for what is missing as Phil Plait suggested, but don’t expect to find it among the quotes and biographical records of people whose signals rose above the noise. They may have no idea how or if they lucked up. What you can’t see, and what they can’t see, is that the successful tend to make it more probable that unlikely events will happen to them while trying to steer themselves into the positive side of randomness. They stick with it, remaining open to better opportunities that may require abandoning their current paths, and that’s something you can start doing right now without reading a single self-help proverb, maxim, or aphorism. Also, keep in mind that those who fail rarely get paid for advice on how not to fail, which is too bad because despite how it may seem, success boils down to serially avoiding catastrophic failure while routinely absorbing manageable damage.

Before we depart, I’d like to mention Wald one more time. Like many of the others who joined the armed services to fight Hitler with numbers, Abraham Wald went down in history, but not for the bombers and bullet holes story. He is best remembered as the inventor of sequential analysis, another achievement he earned while working in the department of war math. He married Lucille Land in 1941. Two years later they had their first child, Betty, followed four years later by another they named Robert. Three years after that, at the top of his career and enjoying an exotic speaking tour, after saving the lives of thousands of people he would never meet, he and Lucille died in an airplane that crashed against the side of the Nilgiri mountains in India. Perhaps there is an irony to that, something about airplanes and odds and chance and luck, but it isn’t the interesting part of Wald’s story. His contributions to science are what survives his time on Earth and the parts of his tale that will endure.

In 1968, the National Academy of Sciences issued a report saying the application of mathematics in World War II “became recognized as an art” and the lessons learned by the mathematicians were later applied to business, science, industry, and management. They saved the world and then rebuilt it using the same tools each time – calculators and chalk.

In 1978, Allen Wallis, Director of SRG said of his team, “This was surely the most extraordinary group of statisticians ever organized.” The bomber problem was just a side story for them, a funny anecdote that only surfaced in the 1980s as they all began to reminisce full time. When you think of how fascinating the story is, it makes you wonder about the stories we’ll never hear about those numerical soldiers because they never made it out of the war and into a journal, magazine, or book, and how that’s true of so much that’s important in life. All we know of the past passes through a million, million filters, and a great deal is never recorded or is tossed aside to make room for something more interesting or beautiful or audacious. All we will learn from history reaches us from the stories that, for whatever reason, survived.

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Sources

• Ask HN: Survivor Bias. Why don’t we focus more on startups that fail? 21 November 2012. 15 January 2013 <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4812480&gt;.

• Association, The American Statistical. “Resolution in Honor of Abraham Wald.” The American Statistician February 1951: 19.

• Bodanis, David. E=mc2: A Biography of the World’s Most Famous Equation. Penguin, 2004.

• —. Einstein the Nobody. 11 October 2005. 15 January 2013 <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/einstein-the-nobody.html&gt;.

• Clark, Josh. Are modern cars less problematic? 22 March 2013 <http://auto.howstuffworks.com/under-the-hood/diagnosing-car-problems/mechanical/cars-less-problematic.htm&gt;.

• Cohen, Jason. Business Advice Plagued by Survivor Bias. 17 August 2009. 15 January 2013 <http://blog.asmartbear.com/business-advice-plagued-by-survivor-bias.html&gt;.

• Dickersin, K.; Chan, S.; Chalmers, T. C.; et al. (1987). “Publication bias and clinical trials”. Controlled Clin Trials 8 (4): 343–353.

• Edmunds.com. Volkswagen New Beetle History. 22 March 2013 <http://www.edmunds.com/volkswagen/new-beetle/history.html&gt;.

• Gould, Stephen Jay. “Wide Hats and Narrow Minds.” New Scientist 8 Match 1979: 776-777.

• INTJoe. How often do you consider the “Survivorship Bias”? 2009 November 2011. 22 March 2013 <http://intjforum.com/showthread.php?t=26327&gt;.

• James, Barnaby. Spolsky on Survivor Bias. 8 February 2009. 15 January 2013 <http://www.survivorbias.com/2009/02/spolsky-on-survivor-bias.html&gt;.

• Johnston, Mike. The Trough of No Value. 6 February 2009. 15 January 2013 <http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2009/02/the-trough-of-no-value.html>.

• Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012.

• Klinedinst, Mark. Interview in person David McRaney. 21 May 2013.

• Menger, Karl. “The Formative Years of Abraham Wald and His Work in Geometry.” The Annals of Mathematical Statistics 23.1 (1952): 14-20.

• Morgenstern, Oskar. “Abraham Wald, 1902-1950.” Econometrica 19.4 (1951): 361-367.

• Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. The Black Swan: Kindle Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Random House , 2011.

• Pettie, Andrew. Derron Brown: The System. 26 Jan 2008. 15 January 2013 <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/3670756/Derron-Brown-The-System.html>.

• Plait, Phil. Interview via email exchange David McRaney. 2013 March.

• Psych File Drawer. <http://www.psychfiledrawer.org/TheFiledrawerProblem.php >.

• Rees, Mina. “The Mathematical Sciences and World War II.” The American Mathematical Monthly October 1980: 607-621.

• Samaniego, Marc Mangel and Francisco J. “Wald’s Work on Aircraft Survivability.” Journal of the American Statistical Association 79.386 (1984): 259-267.

• ScepticaTV. Derren Brown – The System (Full). February 2011. 9 May 2013 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9R5OWh7luL4&gt;.

• Scherer, Sina. Bias in psychology: Bring in all significant results. 1 June 2012. 15 2013 January <http://jeps.efpsa.org/blog/2012/06/01/falsification-of-previous-results/&gt;.

• Smith, M. D., Wiseman, R. & Harris, P. (2000). The relationship between ‘luck’ and psi. Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 94, 25-36.

• Smith, M. D., Wiseman, R., Harris, P. & Joiner, R. (1996). On being lucky: The psychology and parapsychology of luck. European Journal of Parapsychology, 12, 35-43.

• Tête, Annie. SciTech Tuesday: Abraham Wald, Seeing the Unseen. 13 November 2012. 15 January 2013 <http://www.nww2m.com/2012/11/scitech-tuesday-abraham-wald-seeing-the-unseen/&gt;.

• Unknown. Our National Survivor Bias. 13 December 2010. 15 January 2013 <http://spacetravelsacrime.blogspot.com/2010/12/our-national-survivor-bias.html&gt;.

• Wallis, W. Allen. “The Statistical Research Group, 1942-1945.” Journal of the American Statistical Association 75.370 (1980): 320-330.

• —. “The Statistical Research Group, 1942-1945: Rejoinder.” Journal of the American Statistical Association 75.370 (1980): 334-335.

• West, Walt. Examining Your Failures Can Lead to More Success: Beware Survivor Bias Mistakes. 7 April 2011. 15 January 2013 <http://www.practicemanagementacademy.com/2011/04/survivor-bias/>.

• Wilson, Kevin. Men of Air: The Doomed Youth of Bomber Command. Orion, 2007.

• Wiseman, Richard. “The Luck Factor.” The Magazine For Science And Reason May 2003.
• Wolfowitz, J. “Abraham Wald, 1902-150.” The Annals of Mathematical Statistics 23.1 (1952): 1-13.

Remember when resumes were one-page, black and white documents you handed to someone in person? Well, those days are long gone and if you want to stand out in today’s job market, you need to make sure your resume is both modern and attractive. This infographic can help you achieve both goals by concerning yourself with fonts, social networks and hyperlinks.

Of course, there are some things that will never change: you should always make sure your resume looks clean and error-free and also avoid cliche job seeking terms like “goal-oriented” and “multi-tasking.”

Also, don’t forget to create a well-written cover letter for each employer you contact that specifies why you would be a good match with the available position. Cover letters are particularly important for employees who are new to the job market and light on past experience, as they provide you an opportunity to make a case showing why you are qualified despite your formal experience.

 

Just recording a video resume won’t help you get hired; You need to record a hire-worthy video resume: 6 Tips For Creating A Hire-Worthy Video Resume

The post Crafting A Perfect Modern Resume appeared first on Lifehack.

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This week, Zero Punctuation reviews System Shock 2.

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Hannelore was talking about something like this:

We have two delightful new prints available in the QC Store!

VanCaf is this weekend! I will be there! You should also be there!

I've debated writing this post for a little while now, but at this point I figure I've discussed everything from my OB-GYN visits to my bra size with you guys, so hey, why not?

[Note: Gentlemen, there is nothing in this post that speaks to your interests, unless of course your interests include a lady friend who suffers from menstrual cramps. You have been warned.]

So here's the deal: back when I last cosplayed as Lady Vadore, I was unfortunately right smack in the midst of my womanly miseries*. I've always struggled with severe cramps and PMS and all the joys that go with them, so you can imagine how I felt that morning when I crawled out of bed and contemplated the Dreaded Corset.

[*If you read that fast it looks like "womanly miniseries." Ha!]

I was already in pain, but I gritted my teeth, swallowed two Tylenol, and had John lace me in. (OOPH.) I did have him loosen it quite a bit, though.

Within minutes I was feeling much better, but of course I attributed that to the pain pills. 



That day I went about seven hours in costume, and I felt fantastic - no pain at all, even long after the Tylenol should have worn off. I was too distracted to think much of it, though, until we were packing up at the car to go home that evening. Since it's mighty uncomfortable to sit in a car that long laced in a tight corset, I swapped it out for a loose overshirt. 

Within approximately three minutes of removing the corset - perhaps sooner - it felt like a sledgehammer hit me right in the gut. I've never had such a sudden onset of menstrual pain in my life, as I literally went from feeling on top of the world to curling into a ball and sobbing in agony. 

Needless to say, this raised a few questions. Namely, does a corset stop cramps, and if so, how or why?

My internet research turned up lots of anecdotal evidence: plenty of ladies claiming corsets *do* stop or help cramps, but nothing more "official" or offering a medical explanation as to why. I also found a lot of links to scammy looking sites pimping something called a "premium beautiful corset" (yes, really) for menstrual pain. There was also a slightly less scammy-looking site selling a compression belt contraption for the same purpose, which seemed to support all the anecdotal evidence.

As to WHY a corset would relieve cramps, all I found were some dire-sounding warnings about corsets stopping menstrual bleeding all together, usually listed in articles bashing corsets as dangerous and unhealthy. On the other hand, there are just as many (if not more) sites defending regular corset-wear as perfectly healthy - assuming you wear them correctly, of course.

So, does compressing your uterus trigger it to stop shedding its lining, or does it alleviate the cramping for some other reason - maybe by just supporting the muscles/organs? Beats me. All I know is that it definitely works. 

How do I know? Well, for the last couple months I've been wearing a tight compression band on the days I start to cramp - and it really, really works, you guys. Happily you don't have to wear a corset, though, or even anything all that tight. All you need is one of these babies:


Those are underbust shapewear camisoles you can find almost anywhere - assuming you don't already have one in your closet - or you can order one off of Ebay for less than $7 with shipping. (I think I found mine at Ross for ten or twelve bucks.)

The one I had kept cutting into my underarms with those straps, so one day I got out the scissors and hacked 'em off. Now it's just a stretchy tube for my abdomen, and I tuck the top edge under my bra band to keep it in place. They also sell "slim belts," though, which are essentially the same thing:


This one is $9 with shipping on ebay. (Note: I know nothing about these sellers, so of course do your own comparison shopping.)

These shapewear pieces are snug but extremely stretchy, so odds are you'll forget you're even wearing them. And even though the very LAST thing you want to do when you're cramping is put on tight-fitting clothing, believe me when I say this will absolutely alleviate some or all of the pain*.
[*Someone just pointed out I sound a little snake-oil huckster-y here; sorry! I should say I *believe* it will help you, but of course everyone is different and there are no guarantees.]

In fact, I've cut down drastically on the amount of pain pills I need each month - last month I think I even skipped them entirely, if you can believe it - thanks to this compression thingy and one other trick I stumbled across online: Magnesium supplements. I take one 200 mg tablet of magnesium citrate the second I start to feel the pain coming on, and then another with each meal and when/if I take any Tylenol, and I could swear it actually prevents the cramps from getting worse. (It looks like there's plenty of evidence to support this, too; here's one from the University of Maryland, for example, or just google "magnesium menstrual cramps" for more.)

You guys might recall that the last time I mentioned my uterus I was gunning for a hysterectomy - solely due to the pain each month -  so believe me when I say this is a HUGE improvement. Fingers crossed it lasts.

Oh, and the only negative side effect to magnesium is that it can be a diuretic/laxative if you take too much of it - but that's actually kind of a good thing for a lot of us around that time, am I right? JUST SAYIN'. (I'm so glad we can have these chats, you guys.) Magnesium is cheap, too, so if nothing else you've got very little to lose by giving it a try!

As with everything concerning your health, though, always do your own research and/or talk to your doctor if you have questions. I can only tell you what's worked for me, and while I don't think either of these suggestions can harm you, again, please do your own research.

Speaking of which, I know there are (at least) several doctors who read Epbot, so if any of you would care to weigh in on this in the comments, I'd love to hear from you! Ditto for any of you regular corset-wearers out there. Let us glory in all our glorious womanhood, my lady friends, and freak out the men-folk with our talk of chocolate-cravings and heavy flows! WOOT WOOT!