Digitizing The World » books

Color Management

sbennett — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 05:50:26 +0000

Questions involving color management are among the most common technical questions that we face at Pixmonix. Often, I recommend books to people to help make sense of this topic.

To add to the information that we have on the website about color management (including a review of Fraser’s Color Management book), we have added a book review of Color Management in Digital Photography by Brad Hinkel. This is a great book for people new to color management.

The New New Thing, Michael Lewis

sbennett — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 18:49:00 +0000

The New New Thing, by Michael lewis

This book is a sort of biography of Jim Clark. Clark founded Silicon Graphics and Netscape (most notably). The book spends much time looking at Clark’s compulsive need to move on – from one business to the next, from one wife to the next, from one boat to the next – and how this helped to bring about the Internet revolution (and perhaps more important for some) the Internet bubble of the 1990s.

I spent most of the book just thinking what an ass Jim Clark is. I’m not sure if I should be nastalgic for the boom or angry over the whole thing. I spent the boom years at Intel, wondering what life would be like over the hedge. I toyed with a couple of ideas with fellow Intel people, but never made a move away from the comfort of the big company until long after the bubble was over. (The guys I was kicking ideas around with are still at Intel). So maybe I’m just a little bitter that I didn’t partake in any of the tremendous riches created during the period.

Pixmonix has a decidedly different approach. I am not interested in venture capital and extremely rapid growth. We have more of a small (but growing) small business approach while at the same time leveraging all of the web and new media tools that are out there. This is a traditional small business but with a decidely new economy approach: you can appeal to people outside of your geographc area and still be a small business using web tools. In some ways, this is the true legacy of Jim Clark and his ilk who made and lost fortunes during the bubble years – they left behind a great deal of infrastructure that is now useful, even without venture capital, even though nobody had a clue about how to use it at the time of creation. I don’t know how the sailboat industry fared; I suspect that the rise of Wall Street has continued to fuel the boat industry even after Silicon Valley returned from the stratosphere.

The book is a good read. If you were even tangentially involved in the tech boom of the past 20 years, you will find it interesting.

Against The Gods, Peter Bernstein

sbennett — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 06:18:00 +0000

(click to buy on amazon.com)

This is a remarkable book.

Bernstein tells the story of the development of statistics and risk modeling from ancient times to the (almost) present. He has an obvious love for the material in addition to a great knowledge of the field and its history.

The story told here is deep and broad. A large number of men (no women mentioned that I can remember) and their contributions leading up to the development of risk theory are detailed – from advent and use of the arabic number system, through the Renaissance and Age of Reason, to the giants of 20th century economic thought – Keynes, Morgenstern, Arrow.

I was interested to see von Neumann as a player in this space. As a computer scientist and architect I think of him as one of the original inventors of the modern computer; I forget that he was a mathematician at heart. I had no clue that he played a role in the development of game theory – and hence the development of theories of risk.

The story ends with a short introduction to derivitives. We have been hearing a lot about these beasts over the last 12 months. This story stops in the late 90’s when the book was published. Some of the players of interest in the derivitives markets over the last year are mentioned – Chase, Bank of America, Citibank – but players like AIG and instruments like mortgage-backed securities are not mentioned. Now that I have a better understanding of this area, I am ready to tackle some more current material on this topic. Anyone have a suggestion?

This is not a trivial book to read. It took me a couple of months to get through it. I am a better person for having done so, however. It is well worth the effort. More of us need to be up to the challenge of texts like this because so much of our economic lives hinge on these ideas which can’t be easily summed up in a two page Newsweek article.