The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell

Loved it. Very good pop science—summaries of real science, real-life examples, all in a crystal clear writing style that, while fluent and actually quite lovely, did not distract from the actual material, which is, after all, the purpose of journalistic writing. It's an interesting topic too—the theory of the history of ideas, trends, fads, even diseases.

Important Ideas from the book:

The 80/20 principle—20% of the participants will do 80% of the work. Thus, 20% of criminals commit 80% of crimes, 20% of beer drinkers drink 80% of the beer, 20% of drivers cause 80% of all car accidents. It's like group work, only more so.

There are three types of people important for the spread of an idea, epidemic, trend, whatever: Connector, Maven, Salesman. Connectors know a lot of people, especially "weak link" acquaintances, and bring them together. Mavens know a lot of information—sometimes on a certain subject, sometimes on a number of subjects—and like to share it. Salesmen are just what they sound like—they like to persuade people. Without their role, lots of people may know about the ideas, but they won't take any action.

Rod Steiger is the best connected actor of all time, in Kevin Bacon terms. Kevin Bacon can be connected to anyone in an average of 2.8312 steps, but that's only ranking 669^th.

Mutual exclusivity: children, when learning a language, don't believe that one object can have two different names. This is helpful because then if they already know "apple" and "red" and someone tells them the object is "round," then they know to assign that word to another quality of the apple, not "apple" or "red." Sounds logical and all, but I wonder when they gain the capacity for synonyms?

Research of small children shows that they often use narratives or conversations with themselves to make sense of their world; in these conversations, their language is much more complex than their language when conversing with their parents. I find the same thing when learning a foreign language—I have a much better accent, grammar, etc when I'm talking to myself. Why is this? I've always attributed it to performance anxiety, but is it possible that little children suffer the same sort of performance anxiety that a foreign language learner does?

The rule of 150: that's about the maximum number of people that can be in any group and still have the group feel close and small, with personal connections between each member of the group. (How big are wards nowadays?)

In one experiment, a psychologist put people in pairs, half of them dating couples, half of them strangers, and had them read a number of sentences with underlined words. In the end, the dating couples remembered the tasks better. The psychologist then concluded that "when people know each other well, they create an implicit joint memory system—a transactive memory system—which is based on an understanding about who is best suited to remember what kinds of things. Hence, divorces and breakups are so painful partially because it means a loss of that memory." This should also be why it's easier to remember memories with a person when you're actually with them—while KT and I were close friends, for example, we had no problem remembering our complex system of hand gestures, but now that I don't have her around anymore, I find my memory failing.

Children of smokers are twice as likely to become smokers themselves, but, as it turns out, children of smokers who are adopted and raised by nonsmokers are also twice as likely; in the end, it's the genes, not the childhood, that count.

All in all, a fascinating read.