Tuesday, May 06, 2008

Page 123 Meme

I always was late handing in assignments, so of course I'm late with this meme. Here's the first five sentences from page 123 of the nearest book with more than 123 pages. (Taken from Red Queen and Chanson.) No tags, cause everybody's already done it, but feel free to leave a comment with yours, especially if you don't have a blog!

"You can actually calculate the average bubble factor for any point in a super-satellite using the following formula:
(Players left -1)/(Eliminations left)
So with 15 players left in a 10-prize satellite, the average bubble factor is (15 - 1)/(5) = 2.8.
Remember that this is the average bubble factor around the table. Big stack clashes have much higher numbers."

Yeah, that would be a poker strategy book belonging to JSM. Looking around for the nearest book that belongs to me, (and cheating slightly because I'm in the study and went looking for the nearest book that belongs to me that wasn't in the bookcases in the study) we find:

"Leland noted, "Consumers are asking others to help themselves develop self-control because so many companies are not showing any restraint."
Bloggging about overspending is important and useful, but as we saw in the last chapter, on emotions, what we truly need is a method to curb our consumption at the moment of temptation, rather than a way to complain about it after the fact.
What could we do? Could we create something that replicated the conditions of Gaurav's class, with some freedom of choice but built-in boundaries as well? I began to imagine a credit card of a different kind--a self-control credit card that would let people restrict their own spending behavior."

That's from Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational, chapter 6, "The Problem of Procrastination and Self-Control."

That's our interests in a nutshell. Poker and Strategy, and Behavioral Economics. Remarkably precise.

3 comments:

The Red Queen said...

My bookshelves are full of English classics, big dry poly sci theory and philosophy books, and stuff about torture.

I think your list is healthier.

AnnM said...

The big dry poly sci books aren't torture?

The Red Queen said...

Not for me. I loves me some theory.