Thursday, December 30, 2010

[Book] Butterfly Effect

No, we are not talking about the movie by Ashton Kutcher. We are going to talk about the Butterfly Effect which is a concept in chaos theory, which says

A flap of butterfly's wings in Brazil can set out a tornado in Texas. 

More generally, few insignificant random events can cause a big impact. This phenomena occur a lot in our daily life. But perhaps, it is referred to as fate, rather than the Butterfly Effect. For example, had Bruce Willis not gone to at attend an Olympic event in 1984, he might have not been a star today, or had you not gone to study abroad, you might have not found the love of your life.



Source: The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow, Chapter 10 [Read the Book Review] [Read the Previous Part] [Read the Next Part].

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Book or Audiobooks?

Personally, I prefer audiobooks. It's fun, and I can listen when I'm doing something else. It also makes other activities (e.g., jogging) a lot more fun. For more detail about audiobooks, please read [this post].

There is one more reason that may encourage you to go for the audiobook version. You can get it now  for FREE. Audible offers you a free trial for 14 days. Even if you get the book and cancel the subscription right away (so that you don't have to pay), you can keep the book. And, don't worry if you lost the audiobook file. Just log into audible.com. You can keep downloading the over and over again.


About the summary: It takes time to finish up a book. And, when you do, sometimes, you want to review what you learn from the book. If you do not make notes as you read, you might have to go through the book once again. This can be time-consuming when you are dealing with a book. But you can still flip through the book and locate what you are looking for

However, when the material is an audiobook, it is extremely hard to locate a specific part of content. Most likely you will have to listen to the entire audiobook once again.

This book summary will help solve the pain of having to go through the book all over again.

I am leaving out the details of the books. Most books have interesting examples and case studies, not included here. Reading the original book would be much more entertaining and enlightening. If you like     the summary, you may want to get the original from the source below.

No comments: