There's so much talk all the time about how kids are natural multi-taskers - they're on 4 MSN conversations, watching a YouTube video, doing an math assignment while listening to their iPod.  I guess I must be old, because the extent of my "multitasking" is reading... At any given time, I'm usually reading 2 or 3 books - something on the fiction side, something from the business press and often something in politics.  Of course, I don't literally read them at the same time... but you get the idea.

Anyway, I've just finished Ayn Rand's Fountainhead and Malcolm Gladwell's blink.

Fountainhead is pure fiction - a classic, I'm told by my much-better-read wife, whose writing began in the late thirties.  If you like your fiction (or at least some of it) heavy on the philosophy side, this book is for you.  I quite enjoyed it and read it through.

blink, is pure Gladwell and I'm not sure I'm that big a fan.  This is my second attempt at blink, and I only made it to page 147 - about 1/2 way which isn't bad for something from the business press.  The subtitle pretty much sums up the hypothesis - "The power of thinking without thinking".

The opening 17 pages from blink, describe the 'blink' scenario.  Basically, scientist spend years proving that a statue from the 6th century B.C. is authentic.  But when an expert looked at it, his first instantaneous reaction was 'fresh' - not what you'd expect for a statue that is 2500+ years old.  But the expert in an instant, did what scientists couldn't do in years - that is, detect a fake.

And then, I'm reading Fountainhead - "He stopped, looking at a sketch.It was one that had never satisfied him....He had spent nights staring at this sketch, wondering what he had missed.  Glancing at it now, unprepared, he saw the mistake that he made."  And here, you see the same sentiment from blink and expressed 70 years earlier - that there are certain things that the brain can analyze better in an instant than it can with hours (or years) of analysis.

It's Gladwell's thesis that you can train yourself to be better at this instantaneous analysis, and to be better at figuring out what you'll analyze better in an instant than an hour.  It's a powerful powerful idea, and one that I hope to explore further.

If you make it though blink, or already have, let me know what I missed in the second half.

I was surprised when I heard the announcement that Sun was getting into the Rich Internet Application (RIA) Platform business.  But they are, with an offering called JavaFX.  I've dropped a couple of posts comparing Silverlight with Flash, but clearly I need to go to work and start looking at JavaFX.  There's still a good chance, in my opinion, that either or both of Apple and Google get into this space as well - but beyond those 5 (Adobe, Microsoft, Sun, Apple, Google), I don't see any other competitors on the horizon.  And so, what once looked like a market locked up by Adobe is suddenly wide open.

A good intro to JavaFX is provided here, by Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz.

I'm still tucking into JavaFX.  Look for more content over the next week or so here.