The Technic Alley

Electromate-400 is a power-pack, jump-starter and air compressor, all rolled into one – a very handy device to carry in your car on road trips.

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
by Malcolm Gladwell
This is Malcolm Gladwell’s second book after “The Tipping Point.”  In The Tipping Point, Gladwell writes about how sometimes things considered little and insignificant can unexpectedly cause big changes. Blink is about something very different; it is about how much information processing is done by our mind at [...]

Outliers: The Story of Success

by Malcolm Gladwell
This book, Malcolm Gladwell’s latest, focuses on something completely different from his earlier ones, “The Tipping Point,” and “Blink.” The Tipping Point is about how small factors can add up to cause a big change, or, to tip something over. It’s about the proverbial “straw that broke the camel’s back.” Blink [...]

I have been listening to the audio-book “How Doctors Think” by Dr. Jerome Groopman for the last few days. I will write a review when I have listened to it fully — and may be one more time — but something  I heard today kept me thinking.
Dr. Groopman describes how doctors sometimes are influenced by [...]

Over the end-of-the-year holidays, I have been busy remodeling some rooms in my house. We recently had new flooring installed, and so all the rooms had been cleared for that job. We decided to take advantage of that and do some more remodelling. We have been wanting to get rid of the “popcorn” ceilings for [...]

I just created a Collection of Book Reviews at the portal site, using links to all the book reviews in this blog. Once again, the “book” feature of Drupal proved quite handy.

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make A Big Difference
by Malcolm Gladwell
After listening to this book twice, I am beginning to appreciate how seemingly miniscule things often change the outcome in many situations. We tend to focus on the “big” things and wonder why something didn’t quite turn out as expected. Why do [...]

“Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior”
Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman

I was looking forward to this book after listening to two other eye-opening books on Behavioral Economics: Predictably Irrational and Freakonomics. In fact, I had learned about this upcoming book from Dan Ariely, the author of Predictably Irrational. I just finished listening to the [...]

I set up my 55-gallon freshwater aquarium about two years ago, and Fluval 305 was my choice for the filter. This has been a quiet, reliable and low-maintenance workhorse ever since. This filter is rated to service aquariums upto 70-gallons, and so I chose this as it would have some extra capacity when [...]

While flipping through the pages of the book “Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior” by Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman, I came across this interesting analysis. This is where a participant in the TV show “Who wants to become a millionaire?” being shown in France, is asked the question that goes something like:
What goes [...]