hitting the books
inspired by a good friend, i’ve decided one of my new year’s resolutions should be to never stop learning. this year i’m attempting to educate myself via nonfiction literature. appropriately i guess, i’ve picked up several books on the history of the israeli-palestinian conflict to begin with.
recently i saw on facebook that one of my friends had written a.. rather opinionated commentary about the war in gaza. he took exactly the position i’d assumed he would based on his background. call it the communications major in me, but so many times amidst controversy i wonder how much actual fact is involved in the shaping of one’s opinion and how much of it comes from the deep ideologies we already have. if nothing else, i’ve learned to recognize that in myself and want to hold off on formulating an opinion until i look further for the truth. as much truth as i can find, mediated, anyway. i scoured the headlines and online sources for awhile but honestly it just makes me frustrated how terribly biased everything is. i wanted someone to give me just the facts–the dates and names and wars and treaties and why things happened…
and so i’m reading. readers, textbooks, documentaries, commentaries. and i love it, which was a surprise to me, since i absolutely hated it in college. i’ll be the first to admit i know very little on the topic, but seriously, the beauty of it is that we can fix that so simply.. by just wanting to learn.
anyway. it’ll take me some time to get through this but my NEXT topic of interest will be… how wall street works. if anyone has any recs, gimme a holler. :)
Wall Street doesn’t work, har har… but my rather opinionated commentary comes from my background as an engineer who feels that his performance is unfairly judged by a bunch of suits on a trading floor who know nothing about what he’s doing. And even when he and his peers are doing a great job, the stock price goes down for no good reason other than maybe what the suits had for breakfast that day (it’s actually based on how they feel we’ll do in the future [nutshell], but still… it’s a feeling nonetheless, and the feeling could have been influenced by breakfast).
Er, as far as reading recommendations, wikipedia’s always a good place to start. I also subscribe to Money magazine (it was free, I figured “what the heck I’ll try it” and it wasn’t that bad), as well as some blogs like MyMoneyBlog. And some helpful videos explaining some concepts in layman’s terms can be found at http://vimeo.com/marketplace/videos.
Hope your learning journey is fruitful! :)
Comment by Jeff — January 15, 2009 @ 2:18 am