In case you missed it, here’s as few reads that’ll be intellectual bran with your morning cereal! (Okay, not the best opening but it’s a grey, wet morning and I’m packing for a flight. They’ll get better, I promise.)

Super Typhoon Neoguri is heading for the Japanese coast – A ‘once in a decade’ super typhoon is heading for the Japanese island of Okinawa, with sustained winds of 180km/hr gusting up to 250km/hr. The storm is expected to make landfall in Okinawa Tuesday. The presence of two nuclear plants on Okinawa has raised concerns another Fukushima disaster could occur, although truth be told the circumstances are fairly different and this is likely more a test of the Japanese (and international) collectively psychology regarding nuclear power than a true apples to apples comparison with the circumstances of the Fukushima disaster.

Transformers 4 is the most important development in China-US cultural relations since sliced bread (okay, Avatar) - Transformers 4 has widely been hailed panned one of the worst movies of the year by US film critics, but it’s on pace to be China’s top grossing movie of all time. The film is expected to surpass Avatar‘s $218 million gross in China in 2010, with Chinese box office expected to make up a good portion of the film’s total gross following a simultaneous release in China and the US over the July 4th holiday weekend. While the simultaneous release cut down on the time bootleggers had to put out pirate copies of the film, (I’m told) the film is also full of Chinese product placements, features a prominent Chinese olympian beating the tar out of an American and generally casts the Chinese government in a favourable light compared to the US government. So there’s lots there to love if you’re Chinese… or a fan of large robots that go boom. Whatever. This probably means more of this godforsaken franchise and Michael Bay stays gainfully employed for another year. Ugh.

And in other China news… IBM is using big data to combat big pollution – Beijing has a pollution problem. A big pollution problem. To the point that there’s non-Olympics reasons to do something about it. So Beijing’s working with IBM to install a network of pollution sensors across the city to monitor pollution rates down to the sub-neighbourhood level to better identify trends and help officials combat polluters. It’s an innovative approach and one that’s worth watching for other urban areas.

HAL is more likely to be your stockbroker than spaceship pilot – An interesting and highly likely piece on where the first conscious machines will be developed. If the last 30 years of the finance industry has taught us anything, it’s that the greatest minds of our times are by-in-large sucked up by the finance industry in the quest to make smarter and smarter algorithms to extract more and more capital from markets without anyone looking (including regulators). While I’d like to think that post-global financial meltdown, the greatest minds would focus on doing something useful for the world like curing cancer or eliminating poverty, but human history guarantees doesn’t suggest a change. So I, for one, welcome our new robot trading overlords!

The book everybody’s reading is the book everybody’s least likely to finish – The hottest book of the year among the intellectual reading set has been also one of the most unlikely chart-toppers on the NYT Best-Sellers list, Thomas Piketty’s “Captial in the Twenty-First Century”. This treatise exploring a new take on Marxist capitalist theory has been a must-read for everybody who aspires to be interesting at a dinner party, with extra points if you didn’t wait for the translation and read it in the original French. Thomas Picketty’s been celebrated in literary and media circles since, well, European tastemakers decided it was a must-read. It seems everybody’s reading Picketty and Picketty reading circles are springing up across the land as the masses finally come to realize the joy of casually reclining on the dock with a cold beer and the latest discourse on Marxists capitalist theory. Only apparently not (mon dieu!) Based on new stats on how far readers got in e-reader editions of various works (didn’t know they could track that, did you?), Mr Picketty’s page-turner saw approximately 2.4% of its pages turned before people put it down. Which is about what you’d expect when you really think about it. But that’s not really the point after all, it’s having the book now isn’t it. So don’t feel ashamed if you didn’t get through it. Put it beside your copy of A Brief History of Time and feel better. (In a related finding that will give hope for the future of mankind, Fifty Shades of Grey only had an average of 25.9% completion before people put it down. Don’t get too excited though, as that’s probably just people searching for the sexy parts then realizing what’s crap it is.)

I’ll be off for a couple of days, so catch up on your Piketty and prep your notes for the next reading club meeting.