is Dan Ariely's sequel to Predictably Irrational. While the book is subtitled "The Upside of Irrationality", the reality is, there's not actually a lot of upside to being irrational, but Ariely's found a ton of workarounds.For instance, in the chapter on online dating, he discovers that online dating sites are a horrible way to meet people. You effectively have to spend 9 hours searching, writing, and corresponding with prospective dates for every hour you actually get to go on an actual date. He found a workaround, though, in that if you gave people an online place to chat and gave them something to chat about (even something as abstract as shapes would do), they'd have a lot more fun and be more eager to meet in person. This example is also an illustration of where Ariely's limited business experience comes into play. He never asks, "If that's the way to do it, how come nobody has done it?" It turns out that the online dating business has a conflict of interest with respect to its customers. If they're too successful, their customers leave. If their customers don't feel like there's another prospect over the horizon, they'll leave too. As a result, all the emphasis on those sites is on customer acquisition and retention, not really on helping you to date better, or get to a date faster. This kind of second-order effect analysis is completely absent from Ariely's book.
The section on bonuses affecting outcome is already covered in other books like Drive, and again, the lack of second order analysis there is glaring. What can we as a society do about this? There's no suggestions, because the true implications of understanding the effect of pay has political ramifications, and Ariely probably doesn't want to get into those.
I did enjoy the chapters on NIH-syndrome, on assortative mating, and why we over-value what we put time into making. Overall, the book is just as enjoyable as the first one, and a lot of fun to read. I'd recommend it for airplane reading. Just be wary that it's not very deep and would trigger more questions in an intelligent reader than the author is willing to answer.
was China Mieville's second novel. After I read 
, ghost-written by 
is the last of Jack Campbell's "Lost Fleet" novels. Well, there's room for a sequel series, but the story line started in 
instead, which nicely clipped into the pannier's compression straps, worked reliably on AAA batteries, and cost 1/10th as much.
. These shoes are butt ugly, but when I first put them on the experience was amazing: they were light! I went home and weighed them and they weigh less than the Five Fingers! I bought a pair for myself and a pair for Lisa (who managed to get the red version).
produced all the pictures you saw in my 
, Geotagged with data from the 
which would take better pictures because of its much larger sensor, but because of the size of the camera, he had to stop and take it out of his handlebar bag every time he wanted to shoot, which meant that Lisa shooting from the back of the tandem would shoot more often and therefore get more shots. For a cycle tour, I think it is far better to carry a camera you can keep in your jersey pocket so you can shoot on the move. You will throw away more photos, but as the late 
has built in GPS tagging, 720p video, and costs less. My other brother's 
also has GPS, 1080i video, and a burst mode that will capture a full panorama with one sweep without having to bother with shot-to-shot waits. Those are the cameras I would take if I wasn't willing to pay for Lightroom, or bother with shooting RAWs and post-processing them. That means that the S90 is for better or worse, a photography enthusiast's camera, not really a casual user's camera.
came through the tour with flying colors. It was reliable, surviving wind, sweat, rain, and several hikes. The 
from Roberto for this trip. Like my 
