Working

Well, I've had my first few days at Google, and it's every bit as fun and exciting as hoped. And they feed us a lot. But there's a lot to learn. I haven't really had time to go out and do New Yorky things, but I was excited to find a NYSC open till 11 near my hotel. It's sort of strange that 24-hour gyms are common in the otherwise non-24-hour San Diego, but not in the very-much-always-open New York.

Speaking of hotels, I'm fairly annoyed with hotels.com. I had deliberately chosen them thinking I would have more flexibility than with Hotwire. But in the fine print they mention no "early checkouts." This has the rather peculiar result that once you check in on a reservation, you're bound for the duration, even though you have up to the time of the reservation to cancel with some penalty. This might possibly make sense if they cut some deal based on the duration of the stay, but they usually lay out the pricing as the sum of the prices of the individual days stayed (there are some duration discounts). Very stupid. I might as well have booked 7 individual reservations. Their customer support was quite rude. I do not recommend them.

I'm in the middle of reading The Wisdom of Crowds, which is a much more reasoned approach to the idea of emergent intelligence than other things I've read. Before that, I was in the middle of Six Degrees before I had to return it to the library, and it was actually very complementary to Wisdom. I think Six Degrees does a good job emphasizing the science, compared to Linked, although the explanation of percolation is kind of poor and the story of his rivalry with Barbasi comes off akwardly.