Bursts: The Hidden Patterns Behind Everything We Do, from Your E-mail to Bloody Crusades Paperback – Illustrated, May 31, 2011

Dr. Barabasi is good; not just good at explaining the esoteric relationships between Albert Einstein's desk, your e-mail inbox, Brownian Motion, Levy Flights and simple random walks, his book is an outstanding example of how to teach. Dr. Barabasi posits that the efforts of all living and, presumably free, creatures follow certain statistical rules and that ultimately an understanding of such rules may allow scientists to predict human behaviors as they now predict the weather. He concludes that as our understanding of human behaviors and ability to amass data increases, we are not approaching a Brave New World so much as recreating the small close-knit villages of years past, something to be both welcomed and feared.By combining the exposition of the science behind his thesis with a gripping historical narrative about a famous Hungarian revolutionary, the author has created a story that pulls the reader through the difficult ideas. The book is much more interested in explaining how knowledge and understanding have advanced than it is in explaining the minutiae of the science itself. By drawing analogies from familiar events and situations, the author skillfully hooks the reader for an illuminating journey. This book would be a great present for students of any age because it portrays the glamorous side of the scientific endeavor and the fact that new truths are hiding in everyday experience.It is a cliche to be sure, but I could not put the book down once I started it. Such tension is expected in some genres, but to be achieved by one of the limited offerings of general science was a fine surprise--one that I hope to share with others.Highly Recommended

Barabasi is clearly a great thinker on this topic, but seems to know more than he shares in this book. The patterns of our behaviour seem completely predictable, but the book is a bit hard to follow sometimes and lacks concrete examples to support its case. That's not a big problem, because it is still great fun to read and discusses some major problems of today.

Much maligned by some reviewers, especially those who liked his first book Linked. But I think Barabasi is making a shrewd and subtle point about the nature of reality (and people's behavior). Some have said, "Bursts, huh? How obvious." It's there, you overlook it everyday, so one says 'if it's easy to overlook, what's the big deal?' Yeah but what are you going to do when the burst happens? I'll bet you never thought about that. It's a tool of analysis. If you've got somebody who's priorities you know clearly, you can predict what they're going to do. If you've got somebody who's priorities are all messed up, you can predict what they're going to do too. That's at the heart of what Barabasi is talking about and that's valuable.

Given my earlier reading of Barabassi’s “Linked” and more recently his “The Formula: Laws of Success” (see my reviews), I gave this book a glance then apprehending its more pertinent aspects ended up finishing this book as well. More particularly, early on the author refers to the case of a researcher concerned with better understand human movement to deal with spread of infectious disease. Thus, during the COVID-19 virus conditions in place as I began to read, this material took on added significance.However, I can see where a number of reviewers have expressed confusion and frustration as the author skips from aspects of different stories to his research often making it hard to follow and to derive his main points. Such reactions are understandable and it is unfortunate as I believe Barabassi is trying to illustrate and make his work interesting and pertinent. Perhaps he and his editors were trying to demonstrate how such hidden patterns are discovered during the course of the book.In any case, the contents of the book include 27 chapters as follows: (1)The Best Bodyguard in the Business, (2) A Pope is Elected in Rome, (3) The Mystery of Random Motion, (4) Duel in Belgrade, (5) The Future is Not Yet Searchable, (6) Bloody Prophecy, (7) Prediction or Prophecy, (8) A Crusade at Last, (9) Violence, Random and Otherwise, (10) An Unforeseen Massacre, (11) Deadly Quarrels and Power Laws, (12) The Nagylak Battle, (13) The Origin of Bursts, (14) Accidents Don't Happen to Crucifixes, (15) The Man Who Taught Himself to Swim by Reading, (16) An Investigation, (17) Trailing the Albatross, (18) "Villain!," (19) The Patterns of Human Mobility, (20) Revolution Now, (21) Predictably Unpredictable, (22) A Diversion in Transylvania, (23) The Truth About LifeLinear, (24) Szekler against Szekler, (25) Feeling Sick is Not a Priority, (26) The Final Battles, (27) The Third Ear, and (28) Flesh and Blood.While I kept reading to find out what happened in the different stories, my favorite parts were those where the author explained his aims and tried to bring it together in practical ways. For instance, on Page 7, he laments “Most of the technological advances we enjoy today, rest on hundreds of years of scientific inquiry driven by an unwavering belief that natural phenomena can be understood, described, quantified, predicted, and eventually controlled . . . Unfortunately, this enlightening revolution came to a halt at the outer gates of the natural sciences, never reaching the behavior of individuals and human societies.” On Page 11, he clarifies that “. . . the fundamental goal of this book: I will show evidence of a deeper order in human behavior, one that can be explored, predicted, and no doubt exploited . . . The closer we look at them, the more obvious it will become that human actions follow simple, reproducible patterns governed by wide-reaching laws . . . My goal is to address what is normal and what is unique when it comes to human activity.” On Page 25, he relates these studies to situations such as what we are currently facing, saying “The question about the next deadly pandemic is not if it will happen—but when. And, once it is here, how many people will be affected? How to halt the next outbreak is not a question of biology and virology, as vaccines against new strains take months or even years to develop, by which time there might be no one to cure. The best short-term defense is to prevent the spread of the virus. And to do this we must first understand how people move.” Later in the book, on page 119, the author relates “By mid-2004 my lab had observed bursts and power laws each time we monitored human behavior.” At various points, he describes and explains ways bursts and power laws come into play as well as their implications. Then, there are the tie backs to correspondence interactions (e-mail and letters), time management/priority setting, and privacy, information security and control (see my reviews of Lawfare Institute’s “Huawei, 5G and National Security,” and Jaron’s “Who Owns the Future), as well as the Crusades/Medieval culture (see Robertson’s “Essays in “Medieval Culture” and Khanna’s “Connectography”), and Barabassi’s Transylvanian/Romanian/Hungarian heritage.As I neared the conclusion of the book, I came back to what the author quips on page 51, “Could it be that if we refine our scientific methods we can one day achieve similar metamorphoses with human behavior? Could we turn it into an accurate, predictive science? Could we stop the next pandemic by auguring the virus’s path, telling you exactly what street to avoid tomorrow to avoid contagion?” While like other books that foretold this need (see Kahn and Patrick’s “The Next Pandemic: On the Front Lines Against Humankind's Gravest Dangers”), hopefully more work along these paths and our current difficulties, will help do a better job with such circumstances in the future.