Bursts

It's fortunate that Albert-László Barabási writes elegantly. Were it not for that, I may not have made it through Bursts.

The book is inherently about unpredictability. There appears to be an element of randomness to life that confounds our ability to make accurate predictions despite the wealth of statistical distributions and models (e.g. Poisson or Gaussian) at our disposal. Consequently, we are constantly surprised by what people actually do, which more often than not seems lacking in noticeable patterns.

Yet Barabási contends that there is an underlying pattern to human activity. "What we do" is best described not by the usual statistical distributions but by "power laws": that is, that the incidence of an event varies by some power (or scale) of some characteristic it possesses. Ever notice that the emails we send tend to be concentrated at specific intervals during our day? Or that some people go many months without traveling long distances, only to have trip after trip after trip scheduled? Or isn't it a wonder that few conflicts in human history have brought about such massive loss of life as the two World Wars? It is in this regard that applying the notion of power laws to human behavior is most illuminating, for it would appear that people have long periods of inactivity or low activity followed by sudden "bursts" of activity.

In this regard, Bursts offers a glimpse into the field of human dynamics, an area of study that "seek[s] to develop models and theories to explain why, when, and where we do the things we do with some regularity." Yet it is an unorthodox window into the field, given how Barabási frames the discussion. Yes, Bursts is to some degree a technical exposition of the subject. At the same time, however, it is also: a brief history of how power laws came to figure in statistics from its native physics; a series of anecdotes following Barabási's enquiries into human dynamics; and a historical narrative of an aborted 16th Century Crusade in Barabási's native Transylvania.

It goes without saying that such an approach can be a bit...much (and it is). Indeed, Bursts tends to meander rather than keep to the point, and I fail to see the relevance of weaving the medieval history into the text, regardless of the reasons Barabási expresses for including it. Yet I will concede that it made the book much more interesting than it otherwise would have been, especially considering that the underlying point -- that power laws apply to human behavior, too -- hardly requires book-length treatment (personally, I would have taken the point at face value had I been told as much).

Overall, Bursts is informative and entertaining, if a little unusual. But it's easy to forgive the strangeness, unlike the idiosyncratic writing in some other books I know that should also appeal to the statistics inclined, precisely because Barabási has a knack for injecting clarity and drama into intelligent erudition.