The central theme of this book is — major governments & central banks around the world have been waging a war on “gold” to keep its price low. The reason being, they want everyone to believe in their fiat currency, so that they can print away the money to solve their temporary problems. The author strongly believes that by 2020, no amount of “managing gold price” tactics will work. Dollar will lose its supremacy and gold prices will skyrocket to represent its true value.

Monaco has the highest life expectancy at birth, 89.57 years as per 2014 estimate. One might think that the country has exceptional living conditions that have given rise to such a stellar life expectancy level. However the actual reason for such a statistic is explained via, “Inspection Paradox”, a famous paradox from Renewal theory. Link : On the Persistence of Bad Luck (and Good)

One of my friends sent me a paper titled, “Path to Purchase: A Mutually Exciting Point Process Model for Online Advertising and Conversion”. Not knowing most of the marketing jargon in the paper, I had to read it slowly. After going through the paper, I have realized that it is a superb application of point processes to measuring effectiveness of online advertising. In finance, there are tons of papers published that use Hawke’s process for modeling.

This book is written by Amit, a self-proclaimed witness to Mother Divine!. In his current incarnation, he calls himself Om Swami and runs a website – www.omswami.com. This book talks about his journey from a successful tech entrepreneur(again a self-claimed one) to a spiritual guru. I found the book to be total crap. This guy decides to take a spiritual path in 2009, renounces everything and heads to Varanasi, then to Himalayas and ends up meditating in a cave for over 150 days.

I have enjoyed reading Nicholas Carr’s previous book titled “The Shallows”, that discusses at length various ways in which Internet impacts our brain. In this book, the author takes “automation” as the subject and explores its human consequences. In this blog post, I will summarize the main points of various chapters. Alert for Operators This chapter opens with a terse notice issued by Federal Aviation Administration on Jan 2013. This note was addressed to all the US.