Weren’t people a lot shorter back in the Bible times? I think I saw that mentioned somewhere. If so then a 6’6” Goliath might seem gigantic
Of the hour.
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Colonial era Euros were notably runty, sickly and filthy in comparison to many of the people they conquered. idk about biblical times or Mesopotamia.
Does he have any views on how all the animals got in the Ark?
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he sounds like he’s gargling marbles
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Could only listen to that crap for a minute and a half. Might revisit if I have trouble falling asleep.
I’ve had this on in the background. MM is, to put it mildly, not engaging. Can easily imagine how terrible it would be for him to be at my table if this is any indication.
Also, the discussion of poker coaches around 1 hour in is just terrible.
What’s so bad about it?
Paraphrasing:
In tennis, you have to do 2 things: learn how to play (how to hold the racket, where to hit the shots) and then actually execute those things. But for poker, it’s just knowing how to play. Once you know how to play, you don’t need to be coached about executing it - there’s nothing tricky about physically pushing the chips towards the center of the table or handing your cards to the dealer when you fold.
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LOL
Serena Williams might say there’s nothing tricky about tennis. It’s not her fault the rest of us are differently abled.
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Mason is one of those people who dismisses anything he doesn’t have any knowledge of as being irrelevant to everyone.
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The chapter on Isabella has two sources listed at the end, the first chapter to do so. Flipping through the book, it seems like chapters that list sources primarily tend to cite non-English sources, so this doesn’t seem like Mason’s work. It’s inconsistently done and one chapter merely had one source listed as “Wikipedia” when I skipped ahead to look at how often this was done.
I’m not sure why the “C” is capitalized in the phrase “During the 16th and 17th Centuries”. There’s a lot of weird capitalization choices and I am not going to list every one.
There are a lot of sentences that begin with the word “But”. The language tends to be clunky, like a 5th grade book report. This is not written by a good storyteller who is gifted at crafting narratives. It feels more like someone adding unnecessary verbiage to pad the word count. I could probably cut 10% of the length of this book just by tightening the language.
I am not a fan of the tracking in the typography which leads to some lines in the narrow spaces next to an illustration looking like there is a full space between every letter.
The bouncing around of tenses is becoming increasingly annoying.
The chapter on the Emancipation Proclamation quotes the unattributed phrase “the last shriek of retreat”. This comes from Wikipedia, but it is also a quote and Wikipedia properly cites Doris Goodwin’s Team of Rivals.
The chapter on U-Boat warfare begins by crediting a listverse article by Larry Jimenez (misspelled as “Jiminez”).
The opening Wikipedia article sentence “The U-boat Campaign from 1914 to 1918 was the World War I naval campaign fought by German U-boats against the trade routes of the Allies” gets rewritten as “The U-boat Campaign, which lasted from 1914 to 1918 ,was the naval campaign fought by German U-boats during World War I.” The next sentence, “It took place largely in the seas around the British Isles and in the Mediterranean”, is unchanged.
I can’t seem to find the source for the quoted phrase "‘Orthodox Bolsheviks’ thought the Red Army should rely on volunteers — conscription was a detested relic of the czarist past " from the Trotsky article. It doesn’t appear to come from a Wikipedia article.
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Oh man you have way more patience than I do.
I am just happy these morons were the more “technical” of the poker writers in the early 2000. They made a lot of dumb people think they were good at poker following what is a basic and purely robotic exploitative style. (By all accounts Klansky still plays this way). Imagine how much money they all made everyone who bothered to figure it out for themselves rather than ingest the garbage published by 22. If we had actual smart people actual using game theory and math to solve poker there is no poker boom. It would have been impossible to make 6 figures a year pre-uigea playing 10/20 limit holdem, etc.
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Some of this stuff is just in my wheelhouse. If Mason wrote 300 pages about topics that you care about the most, you’d be wading your way through the muck with more enthusiasm.
Spite is also a powerful motivator. To a certain degree, I can handle the shitty politics and poor grasp of history, but for some reason, I am greatly offended by the weak writing and amateurish editing.
I also sometimes read non-fiction for entertainment so I’m more used to reading this sort of stuff than you are. Also, I have no life and haven’t been outside since the lockdowns began outside of going to the grocery, so I have plenty of time.
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In the chapter on Szilard, they quote Wikipedia, leaving in the comma which should be replaced by a period.
For some reason, this sentence stands out to me as good example of the book’s clunky prose style (and, yes, that is gratuitous capitalization of “uranium”…also “Strassmann” is misspelled):
What had happened was that in 1939 the discovery of Uranium fission by German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strasman had taken place, and Austrian-Swedish physicist Lise Meitner had “identified it as nuclear fission” which generated intense interest among physicists.
It is noted that a letter was written to a Belgian ambassador without explaining why. (To warn Belgium because the Belgian Congo could be targeted for its uranium ore.)
In “How Churchill Gave Britain a Chance”, Churchill is not described as actually doing anything. As described, it sounds more like “How Churchill Luckboxed into Having a Chance Because Hitler Shifted Targets for No Good Reason”.
The book is inconsistent on whether it wants to use “US” or “U.S.”
Weirdly, the full url for an article is given in the Gandhi chapter, when it wasn’t in the U-Boat chapter.
They can’t decide if it is “Mohatma” or “Mahatma”.
Mason states that “many of the gambles in this book can be represented by an expectation equation.” So far, he has failed to represent any of the gambles in that form, which should be the perspective of a good modern gambler.
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I’m appalled. And apparelled.
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There’s so much that is wrong with this book that wiki-plagiarism seems like a minor fault.
I’m not going to track down every Wikipedia quote. The ones that catch my eye tend to be the ones where Wikipedia is obviously quoting another work, using language that is not very encyclopedia-esque.
I wonder if Mason had the Spanish historian write the whole book himself and Mason slapped his name on it in the end.
Perhaps the Spanish guy typed the whole thing in Spanish and Mason published the Google Translate version.
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