I borrowed this book from the library. It was published in 1994, commissioned by The Seagram Museum to commemorate “200 years of tradition” of the making of Canadian whisky. This counts from 1794 when Lieutenant John Graves Simcoe introduced the first still tax. He also set 10 gallons as the minimum capacity for a still essentially promoting commercial production.

The subject matter is interesting and the book is full of pictures, documents, and labels, but it essentially reads as a literature review.

There are some particularly interesting facts though.

With 147 distilleries and 96 breweries serving a population of 500,000 in Upper Canada in 1842, someone was obviously drinking.
(Chapter 1; Old Customs in the New World; Drinking in Pioneer Canada; page 1)

I have often wondered how with the temperance movement, the consolidation fo breweries and the rise of craft brewing, all with the growing population, how the number of breweries have changed over the years. Well, here’s one datum.

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When I was in VanCity before I went to the northwest., Chuffy lent me the book Moneyball. The book tells stories about how managers and scouts in baseball made flawed judgements about players and strategy, how baseball fans developed better ways of evaluating players, and how Oaklad A’s General Manager Billy Beane took advantage of the inefficiencies in the market for baseball players to make the A’s successful for it’s payroll.

I am not a baseball expert, but the book was accessible and interesting to me. The author, Michael Lewis, strikes a good balance between the stories and the analysis of statistics and ideas. Like with many things my preference would be for more data and analysis.

While reading it I realized that I had read an excerpt before. I recognized the scene with Billy, Asistant GM Paul DePodesta and the scouts where Paul pulled statistics off his laptop as they discussed drafting various players.

While reading it, I thought of how these ideas could be applied elsewhere.

In baseball, because of the structure of the game it is easier to isolate the performance of individual players. It would be interesting to look for ways of tracking performance by players in soccer where play is more fluid. Would it be useful to track how a ball carrier performs in relation to a defending challenger or from where on the field shooters score.

Then in the context of the recent sub-prime lending crisis in the U.S., how do lenders evaluate the risk of certain borrowers. Similarly with insurance how to insurers evaluate clients. I am currently working on getting coverage for a social-benefit (an affirmative description of not-for-profit) group I volunteer with and rates vary greatly based on the classification of the organization.
I think also of evaluating people in other situations. A while ago Google had a project of collecting information on their current employees to try to develop a profile to match against prospective employees.

While thinking of that I tend to think of how universities evaluate prospective students. At UW they have an adjustment factor to try to standardize marks from different schools.

Anyway, I would recommend the book.