Albert-László Barabási

The award-winning author of the best-selling Linked outlines a theory about how to predict behavior, drawing on seven years of research while demonstrating the mathematical properties of seemingly random events, from the spread of epidemics to the history of wars.

The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do

Bursts

Nick Gracilla

It’s the book’s subtitle — the hidden pattern behind everything we do — that kept me nudging forward, past an extraordinarily deep history of just three months in what is today Hungary during the Inquisition; the movement and tracking of dollar bills; the mathematics of randomness, Poisson distributions, Levy patterns, and power laws; Einstein’s correspondence rates; the travel pattern of an international artist post 9/11; the flight patterns of albatross, the predictability of people’s movement in a surveillance state. And much more that I’ve already forgotten. But all this for the insight that we, humans (and animals and proteins etc.) don’t work steadily or efficiently or consistently, but rather in bursts of activity. Work measured over time comes in bursts. It’s still not clear to me how this was related to the historical writing on Hungary in the 1500s — great writing that perhaps should have been its own book. Not recommended.

Bursts The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do

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