Non-Fiction Author Blog of the Day

Sonya Huber

Torrenting Textbooks

Is this legal?

Torrent my Textbooks

The Great Brain Race

How Global Universities Are Reshaping the World

Science Podcast of the Day

THE DISCOVERY OF RADIATION;

Today the word ‘radiation’ conjures up pictures of destruction. But in physics, it simply describes the emission, transmission and absorption of energy. And the discovery of how radiation works has allowed us to identify new chemical elements, treat cancer and work out what the stars are made of.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, physicists from Thomas Young through Michael Faraday to Henri Becquerel made discovery after discovery, gradually piecing together a radically new picture of reality. They explored the light beyond the visible spectrum, connected electricity and magnetism - and eventually showed that heat, light, radio and mysterious new phenomena like 'X-rays' were all forms of 'electromagnetic wave'.

In the early twentieth century, with the discovery of radioactivity, scientists like Max Planck and Ernest Rutherford completed the picture of the 'electromagnetic spectrum'. This was a cumulative achievement that transformed our vision of the physical world – and what we could do in it.

Further Reading;

Al-Khalili, Jim, Quantum: A Guide for the Perplexed (Phoenix, 2004)

Al-Khalili, Jim, and Bizony, Piers, Atom (Icon, 2008)

James, Frank (ed.), The Correspondence of Michael Faraday (Institute of Engineering and Technology, 2009)

Close, Frank, Antimatter (Oxford University Press, 2009)

Marion, Jerry B. and Heald, Mark A., Classical Electromagnetic Radiation (Thomson Learning; 3rd Revised edition 1994)

Maxwell, James Clerk, A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism Vol 1 & 2 (Oxford Classic Texts in the Physical Sciences, 1998)

Lützen, Jesper, Mechanistic Images in Geometric Form: Heinrich Hertz's 'Principles of Mechanics' (Oxford University Press, 2005)

Borrowing Brilliance

BORROWING BRILLIANCE: The Six Steps to Business Innovation by Building on the Ideas of Others by David Kord Murray

Where did Dave borrow the idea for this website from?
First he went to the sites of some of his favorite authors. He looked at the Heath brothers site www.madetostick.com and got some ideas for overall structure and layout. He looked at Laura Reis’s site and how she effectively used video’s to present herself and her ideas at www.ries.com. He liked the way the authors of Freakonomics made their site look very similar to their book, so he borrowed ideas from www.freakonomics.com, too. Then he went to the site www.hulu.com which is a new site that shows streaming television and movies and borrowed how they present these videos to the user. These and other things were combined and put together by his designer, Chris LaValle at www.dacapoco.com.

The Leadership Secrets of Genghis Khan

Dread!

Dread: How Fear and Fantasy have Fueled Epidemics from the Black Death to the Avian Flu
by Philip Alcabes

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Philip Alcabes
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Economic Crisis First 100 Days

Uranium

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Tom Zoellner
comedycentral.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Economic Crisis Political Humor

Uranium by Tom Zoellner;

Uranium’s history is a geological ugly duckling tale. Aside from occasional use as a dye, the ore was most often seen as trash — its German name, Pechblende, meant “bad-luck rock,” Zoellner says — and silver miners who found the greasy gray uranium dirt just left it in piles nearby. It was only with Marie and Pierre Curie’s discovery of radium in uranium ore that people started to take notice — the Curies, after all, touted their find as a cure for cancer. Experiments on radium led in 1932 to the discovery of the neutron, which the Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard grasped might be able to set off catastrophically powerful chain reactions. The rest, more or less, is history.

Which is a bit of a problem for Zoellner. The genre of pop microhistory into which his book fits — “Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World,” “Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World,” and “Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color That Changed the World” — is predicated on the idea that these are not things people normally understand to be world-changing. Nuclear weapons, however, are not in this category. As a result, large portions of the story Zoellner tells have been explored in more depth in other popular accounts.

Perhaps to address this, Zoellner intersperses the history with descriptions of his own globe-trotting, from the Congo to Mongolia, from the American West to Eastern Europe to Australia. He pokes around in old mines and tours a uranium refining plant. He calls at the offices of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in Vienna, and the World Nuclear Association, in London. He interviews the Yemeni minister of electricity, is almost kidnapped on the way to a mine in Niger and knocks back Chechen grappa with border guards responsible for keeping black-market uranium from being smuggled from Russia into Georgia.

How Ukraine Became a Market Economy

How Ukraine Became a Market Economy and Democracy by Anders Åslund

How Pirates Created Constitutional Democracy

The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates by Peter T. Leeson

During summer 2007, the University Press approached Leeson about a writing a book on the economics of piracy. He decided the book was the perfect opportunity to propose to his then-girlfriend, Ania Bulska, by printing the proposal on the dedication page.

“After I was approached to write the book, after a week or two, the idea hit me — I don’t know how to describe it,” Leeson, an economics professor at George Mason University, said. “I thought it was innovative, different, perfect for her.”

For the Press, keeping Leeson’s planned proposal secret presented several unfamiliar challenges, employees said.

“This is the first time I’ve ever seen someone propose to anyone in a book,” said Press senior editor Seth Ditchik, who worked with Leeson on the book. “Everyone really got behind it and made sure that anything we did for the book didn’t ruin the surprise for his then-girlfriend and now fiance.”

Expert Political Judgment

The expert on experts is Philip Tetlock, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His 2005 book, “Expert Political Judgment,” is based on two decades of tracking some 82,000 predictions by 284 experts. The experts’ forecasts were tracked both on the subjects of their specialties and on subjects that they knew little about.

The result? The predictions of experts were, on average, only a tiny bit better than random guesses — the equivalent of a chimpanzee throwing darts at a board.

“It made virtually no difference whether participants had doctorates, whether they were economists, political scientists, journalists or historians, whether they had policy experience or access to classified information, or whether they had logged many or few years of experience,” Mr. Tetlock wrote....

Mr. Tetlock called experts such as these the “hedgehogs,” after a famous distinction by the late Sir Isaiah Berlin (my favorite philosopher) between hedgehogs and foxes. Hedgehogs tend to have a focused worldview, an ideological leaning, strong convictions; foxes are more cautious, more centrist, more likely to adjust their views, more pragmatic, more prone to self-doubt, more inclined to see complexity and nuance. And it turns out that while foxes don’t give great sound-bites, they are far more likely to get things right....

So what about a system to evaluate us prognosticators? Professor Tetlock suggests that various foundations might try to create a “trans-ideological Consumer Reports for punditry,” monitoring and evaluating the records of various experts and pundits as a public service. I agree: Hold us accountable!

-Learning How to Think

Peter Singer on Poverty

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Peter Singer
comedycentral.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Mark Sanford

The Life You Can Save: Acting now to end world poverty

Father of the Analysis of Algorithms

In the fall of 1999, Donald was invited to give six public lectures at MIT on the general subject of relations between faith and science, during which he touched upon such topics as the interaction of randomization and religion, language translation, art and aesthetics, and the 3:16 project. During his talk at Google, Donald will similarly be focusing on the interactions between faith and science.

Knuth has been called the father of the Analysis of Algorithms and he explains his decision to embark in this particular field. He says, "If I consider the entire class of all interesting algorithms, then it's bound to be full of problems just as interesting as queuing and hashing...So that's why, right at that point, I said 'Hmm, that wouldn't be bad...to spend a lifetime on it, because you have a huge number of problems, not only do they have beautiful mathematical structures that tie together, you know, hang together in nice patterns, but also there are customers out there; so that when you solve the problem, the people say, 'Hey, thanks for solving the problem, Don.' So it's a great field to embark in."

Some books recommended by Knuth;

* Life A Users Manual by Georges Perec (perhaps the greatest 20th century novel)
* Gaudy Night by Dorothy L Sayers (captures Oxford high-table small-talk wonderfully)
* An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears (also Oxford but in the 1660s)
* Death of a Salesperson by Robert Barnard (who is at his best in short stories like these)
* The Haj by Leon Uris (great to read on a trip to Israel)
* Marjorie Morningstar by Herman Wouk (in-depth characters plus a whole philosophy)
* On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee (applied biochemistry in the kitchen)
* Food by Waverley Root (his magnum opus, a wonderful history of everything delicious)
* The Golden Gate by Vikram Seth (the Great California Novel, entirely in 14-line sonnets)
* The Age of Faith by Will Durant (volume 4 of his series, covers the years 325--1300)
* Efronia by Stina Katchadourian (diaries and letters of a remarkable Armenian woman)
* The Man Who Knew Infinity by Robert Kanigel (biographies of Ramanujan and Hardy)
* Hackers by Steven Levy (incredibly well written tale of our times)
* The Abominable Man by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö (one of their brilliantly Swedish detective novels)

Why Not? How to Use Everyday Ingenuity to Solve Problems Big and Small

“Why Not? How to Use Everyday Ingenuity to Solve Problems Big and Small.”

The Two Cultures asscociated with Wine and Beer

Grape vs. Grain- A Historical, Technological, and Social Comparison of Wine and Beer

Why is wine considered more sophisticated even though the production of beer is much more technologically complex? Why is wine touted for its health benefits when beer has more nutritive value? Why does wine conjure up images of staid dinner parties while beer denotes screaming young partiers? Charles Bamforth explores several paradoxes involving these beverages, paying special attention to the culture surrounding each. He argues that beer can be just as grown-up and worldly as wine and be part of a healthy, mature lifestyle. Both beer and wine have histories spanning thousands of years. This is the first book to compare them from the perspectives of history, technology, nature of the market for each, quality attributes, types and styles, and the effect that they have on human health and nutrition.

The Leadership Challenge

The Leadership Challenge

How can you know when someone is bluffing?

Honest Signals: How They Shape Our World
Alex (Sandy) Pentland

How can you know when someone is bluffing? Paying attention? Genuinely interested? The answer, writes Sandy Pentland in Honest Signals, is that subtle patterns in how we interact with other people reveal our attitudes toward them. These unconscious social signals are not just a back channel or a complement to our conscious language; they form a separate communication network. Biologically based "honest signaling," evolved from ancient primate signaling mechanisms, offers an unmatched window into our intentions, goals, and values. If we understand this ancient channel of communication, Pentland claims, we can accurately predict the outcomes of situations ranging from job interviews to first dates.

Pentland, an MIT professor, has used a specially designed digital sensor worn like an ID badge—a "sociometer"—to monitor and analyze the back-and-forth patterns of signaling among groups of people. He and his researchers found that this second channel of communication, revolving not around words but around social relations, profoundly influences major decisions in our lives—even though we are largely unaware of it. Pentland presents the scientific background necessary for understanding this form of communication, applies it to examples of group behavior in real organizations, and shows how by "reading" our social networks we can become more successful at pitching an idea, getting a job, or closing a deal. Using this "network intelligence" theory of social signaling, Pentland describes how we can harness the intelligence of our social network to become better managers, workers, and communicators.

Obama's reading style- a magpie approach to reading

More recently, books have supplied Mr. Obama with some concrete ideas about governance: it’s been widely reported that “Team of Rivals,” Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book about Abraham Lincoln’s decision to include former opponents in his cabinet, informed Mr. Obama’s decision to name his chief Democratic rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton, as Secretary of State. In other cases, books about F. D. R.’s first hundred days in office and Steve Coll’s “Ghost Wars,“ about Afghanistan and the C.I.A., have provided useful background material on some of the myriad challenges Mr. Obama will face upon taking office.

Mr. Obama tends to take a magpie approach to reading — ruminating upon writers’ ideas and picking and choosing those that flesh out his vision of the world or open promising new avenues of inquiry.

His predecessor, George W. Bush, in contrast, tended to race through books in competitions with Karl Rove (who recently boasted that he beat the president by reading 110 books to Mr. Bush’s 95 in 2006), or passionately embrace an author’s thesis as an idée fixe. Mr. Bush and many of his aides favored prescriptive books — Natan Sharansky’s “Case for Democracy,” which pressed the case for promoting democracy around the world, say, or Eliot A. Cohen’s “Supreme Command,” which argued that political strategy should drive military strategy. Mr. Obama, on the other hand, has tended to look to non-ideological histories and philosophical works that address complex problems without any easy solutions, like Reinhold Niebuhr’s writings, which emphasize the ambivalent nature of human beings and the dangers of willful innocence and infallibility.

What’s more, Mr. Obama’s love of fiction and poetry — Shakespeare’s plays, Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick” and Marilynne Robinson‘s “Gilead“ are mentioned on his Facebook page, along with the Bible, Lincoln’s collected writings and Emerson’s “Self Reliance“ — has not only given him a heightened awareness of language. It has also imbued him with a tragic sense of history and a sense of the ambiguities of the human condition quite unlike the Manichean view of the world so often invoked by Mr. Bush....

For Mr. Obama, whose improbable life story many voters regard as the embodiment of the American Dream, identity and the relationship between the personal and the public remain crucial issues. Indeed, “Dreams From My Father,” written before he entered politics, was both a searching bildungsroman and an autobiographical quest to understand his roots — a quest in which he cast himself as both a Telemachus in search of his father and an Odysseus in search of a home....

In a 2005 essay in Time magazine, he wrote of the humble beginnings that he and Lincoln shared, adding that the 16th president reminded him of “a larger, fundamental element of American life — the enduring belief that we can constantly remake ourselves to fit our larger dreams.”

Though some critics have taken Mr. Obama to task for self-consciously italicizing parallels between himself and Lincoln, there are in fact a host of uncanny correspondences between these two former Illinois state legislators who had short stints in Congress under their belts before coming to national prominence with speeches showcasing their eloquence: two cool, self-contained men, who managed to stay calm and graceful under pressure; two stoics embracing the virtues of moderation and balance; two relatively new politicians who were initially criticized for their lack of experience and for questioning an invasion of a country that, in Lincoln’s words, was “in no way molesting, or menacing the U.S.”

As Fred Kaplan’s illuminating new biography (“Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer”) makes clear, Lincoln, like Mr. Obama, was a lifelong lover of books, indelibly shaped by his reading — most notably, in his case, the Bible and Shakespeare — which honed his poetic sense of language and his philosophical view of the world. Both men employ a densely allusive prose, richly embedded with the fruit of their reading, and both use language as a tool by which to explore and define themselves. Eventually in Lincoln’s case, Mr. Kaplan notes, “the tool, the toolmaker, and the tool user became inseparably one. He became what his language made him.”

-From Books, New President Found Voice

High Altitude Leadership

High Altitude Leadership: What the World's Most Forbidding Peaks Teach Us About Success

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