Books I've Read This Week

Mind the Gap Volume 1: Intimate Strangers by Jim McCann and art by Rodin Esquejo is a book I love. When it was originally announced with Esquejo on interior art duties I was excited as I love his covers on Morning Glories and having Eisner award winning McCann providing scripting duties it seemed like it couldn't miss. It doesn't miss, it delivers in spades. Mind the Gap is a bit hard to explain as it is structured not unlike a murder mystery but in this case the investigator is also the victim, Elle Peterssen. You see Elle is in a coma but can her spirt can still interact with the mortal plain. I know it sounds a bit crazy but it really works. McCann has said all the information you need to solve the mystery is contained in the story which has me reading and re-reading the book. Just recently I picked up on something I'd never seen before which caused me to re-evaluate all of my theories. Highly recommended for lovers of graphic novels.

The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver is a really interesting book about what a lot of people find to be a boring topic, statistics (not me I'm a stats nerd). Specifically how one can make better predictions by learning to separate good information, the signal, from extraneous information, the noise. There are some really great chapters in here on weather, baseball and political predictions. I particularly enjoyed reading that we've gotten much better at weather predictions in the past 15 years. When I used to work at the Department of Meteorology a 4 day forecast was the best you could do with even a 30% accuracy. Now we've gotten out to fairly accurate 7 day forecasts. As an aside days 8 to 14 of a 2 week forecast are crap, don't plan anything around them. Plus there is a name check to the company I work for when he talks about Kasparov and Deep Blue.