Links

The Carroll Culture: "He Focuses On Your Purpose Beyond The Game" (LINK) [If anyone knows of other articles describing great cultures like this, please feel free to pass along. Thanks. And while I've only read one of them so far, I've seen recommended that three of the best books on examples of great cultures are the three listed at the top of the list HERE.]

Of all the things that help shape Carroll’s philosophy on coaching—on life really—one of the most important is an idea that sounds simple, but is actually rather complex in its application: helping people be the best they can be. And an important distinction to make here is that the focus isn’t on helping an athlete be the best football player he can be, but on helping that individual be the best person he can be. Take care of that first, and the football part will follow

Nassim Taleb's Foreword to Ed Thorp’s Memoirs, A Man for All Markets (LINK)

Ed was initially an academic, but he favored learning by doing, with his skin in the game. When you reincarnate as practitioner, you want the mountain to give birth to the simplest possible strategy, and one that has the smallest amount of side effects, the minimum possible hidden complications. The genius of Ed is demonstrated in the way he came up with very simple rules in Black Jack. Instead of engaging in complicated combinatorics and memory–challenging card counting (something that requires one to be a savant), he crystallizes all his sophisticated research into simple rules. Go to a Black Jack table. Keep a tally. Start with zero. Add one for some strong cards, minus ones for weak ones, and nothing for others. It is easy to just increment up and down mentally, bet larger when the number is high, smaller when it is low, and such a strategy is immediately applicable by anyone with the ability to tie his shoes or find a casino on a map. Even while using wearable computers at the roulette table, the detection of edge was simple, so simple that one can get it while standing on a balance ball in the gym; the fanciness resides in the implementation and the wiring.

Google and the Limits of Strategy - by Ben Thompson (LINK)

Amazon rolls out Prime Reading, giving Prime members free access to more than 1,000 books and magazines (LINK)

Weird orange crocodiles found gorging on bats in Gabon’s caves (LINK)

Cod may have regional accents, scientists say (LINK)