Books 2014

I don't read as much as I used to, but here are the best:

The Particle at the End of the Universe - Sean Carroll
http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Particle-End-Universe-Discovery/dp/1780742320
An account of the confirmation of the Higg's Boson by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in 2012. Carroll makes a crucial and often ignored point about Science when he quotes:

 "My hope for what the LHC will find is 'none of the above'. I honestly think it's going to be a surprise, because I think nature is smarter than we are [...] and we're going to have a hell of a fun time trying to figure it all out".

As it turned out, the theorists were correct. But sometimes they are not, and unlike politicians, economists,  priests, quacks, frauds and the rest they aren't looking for confirmation of what they already believe. They want to be wrong.

Why Nations Fail - Acemoglu and Robinson
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Why-Nations-Fail-Origins-Prosperity/dp/1846684307
The basic thesis here is a simple one. Trying to avoid the conventional Left vs Right axis, the authors coin two terms with less emotional loading, 'extractive' and 'inclusive'. Successful polities they propose are those in which citizens believe that if they work hard they can make money and use it to better themselves. They are 'included'. Extractive regimes by contrast offer no incentives aside from basic survival to most workers.
One example taken is Nogales, a town on the USA/Mexican border. Another is the two Koreas.

The Book of Barely Imagined Beings - Caspar Henderson
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Book-Barely-Imagined-Beings-21st-century/dp/1847082440
Inspired by Borges' famous bestiary, equally extraordinary but nevertheless real creatures become a springboard to all kinds of subjects.

Bird Sense - Tim Birkhead
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Bird-Sense-What-Its-Like/dp/140883054X
What is it like to be a bird? Each sense is considered including one humans don't have, being able to detect the Earth's magnetic field.

The Signal and the Noise - Nate Silver
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Signal-Noise-Art-Science-Prediction/dp/0141975652 
Having tried various predicting money making schemes - poker, baseball, the stock market - the author found fame by being getting every State right in the 2012 US election. He covers these and other subjects in which we often try to fool others but only succeed in fooling ourselves.

Crowd numbers

I just spent a happy half hour googling around on the subject of crowd numbers (yes, the recent rallies in Washington DC sparked this off).

CBS News was slated by supporters of Glenn Beck for its estimate of his rally attendance (87,000), so they published the methodology and here's their estimate for the Rally for Sanity (215,000). Both have a 10% margin of error. Their estimate for the Obama inauguration was 800,000 by the way, lower than others.

• Blog by the expert partnering the survey company. It has plenty of links and information about the subject.
• Plenty of first hand accounts of the latter rally.
• Overhead view of the main crowd areas - in both cases more people were further away:

When I looked up rational estimates by supporters, one reason for disparity was obvious - crowd density. In camera shots taken from the ground (or even the top of monuments) density isn't clear, but the company CBS hired used a robot balloon camera that could do both overhead shots and oblique ones to see beneath trees. It was on the spot and could tour the whole crowd, later estimators were not.

The conclusion is much as usual. How was the data obtained? What is the margin of error? Why do you suppose you can understand any of this without having done Statistics 101 or switched your brain on before reading?

Also, take a look at who is giving you different data with no sources and no proof. If they claim that a source is wrong because they don't like what it says and then next week that the same source is totally accurate, alarm bells should be ringing in your head.