Books: "The Numerati," Stephen Baker, and "The Gun Seller," Hugh Laurie

“The Numerati,” Stephen Baker

• "Turning us into simple numbers was what happened in the industrial age. That was yesterday’s story…We’re witnessing (as well as experiencing) the mathematical modeling of humanity. It promises to be one of the great undertakings of the twenty-first century."


• "A Carnegie Mellon University study recently showed that simply by disclosing gender, birth date, and postal zip code, 87 percent of people in the United States could be pinpointed by name."

“The Gun Seller,” Hugh Laurie

• "'We want different things. Men want to have sex with a woman. Then they want to have sex with another woman. And then another. Then they want to eat corn flakes and sleep for a while, and then they want to have sex with another woman, and another, until they die. Women,’ and I thought I’d better pick my words a little more carefully when describing a gender I didn’t belong to, ‘want a relationship. They may not get it, or they may sleep with a lot of men before they do get it, but ultimately that’s what they want. That’s the goal. Men don’t have goals. Natural ones. So they invent them, and put them at either end of a football pitch. And then they invent football. Or they pick fights, or try and get rich, or start wars, or come up with any number of daft bloody things to make up for the fact that they have no real goals.’
  ‘Bollocks,’ said Ronnie.
  ‘That, of course, is the other main difference.'"