Monday, May 11, 2009

How David Beats Goliath

Illustration by Zohar Lazar

Fascinating article by Malcolm Gladwell in this week's New Yorker.  Called Annals of Innovation: How David Beats Goliath. Covers everything from girls basketball using the full-court press, to computer-designed naval war games, to, of course, the giant versus the shepherd. 

This kind of thinking is at the core of our martial art, so I found it particularly interesting. 

4 comments:

Jay Gischer said...

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. I read the article yesterday. It struck me, like so much of Gladwell's writing, as having everything to do with martial arts.

Rory said...

Very nice article. Thanks, Steve.

William Adams said...

Amusingly Douglas Lenat went on to a career in artificial intelligence and is famous for having the ``microlenat'' measure of ``bogosity'' named in his ``honour''.

William

Steve Perry said...

Welcome back, Rory. Kinda-sorta back, I mean, relatively speaking, from where you were to where you were ...

There was another nice piece in that issue, by John Colapinto, on neuroscience, profiling an Indian-born doctor, Vilaynur S. Ramachandran. Only the abstract is available online:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/11/090511fa_fact_colapinto

but it's worth reading if you can find the treeware.

More on Ramachadran:

http://www.lankanewspapers.com/news/2009/4/42308_space.html