Chocolate and Chess- Book Recommendation

Alex Bandy: Chocolate & Chess - Unlocking Lakatos

A Portrait of Paul Erdös

Artist of the Day - Norman Rockwell, the Buddhist Painter !

Norman Rockwell;

“To me the most important part of Rockwell’s work is that it illustrates compassion and caring about other people,” the filmmaker George Lucas, who lives in Marin County, Calif., said recently. “You could almost say he was a Buddhist painter.”

William Farr- the inventor of medical statistics?

In 1858, a British epidemiologist named William Farr set out to study what he called the “conjugal condition” of the people of France. He divided the adult population into three distinct categories: the “married,” consisting of husbands and wives; the “celibate,” defined as the bachelors and spinsters who had never married; and finally the “widowed,” those who had experienced the death of a spouse. Using birth, death and marriage records, Farr analyzed the relative mortality rates of the three groups at various ages. The work, a groundbreaking study that helped establish the field of medical statistics, showed that the unmarried died from disease “in undue proportion” to their married counterparts. And the widowed, Farr found, fared worst of all.

Farr’s was among the first scholarly works to suggest that there is a health advantage to marriage and to identify marital loss as a significant risk factor for poor health. Married people, the data seemed to show, lived longer, healthier lives. “Marriage is a healthy estate,” Farr concluded. “The single individual is more likely to be wrecked on his voyage than the lives joined together in matrimony.”

While Farr’s own study is no longer relevant to the social realities of today’s world — his three categories exclude couples living together, gay couples and the divorced, for instance — his overarching finding about the health benefits of marriage seems to have stood the test of time. Critics, of course, have rightly cautioned about the risk of conflating correlation with causation. (Better health among the married sometimes simply reflects the fact that healthy people are more likely to get married in the first place.) But in the 150 years since Farr’s work, scientists have continued to document the “marriage advantage”: the fact that married people, on average, appear to be healthier and live longer than unmarried people.

via NYT

The following bit about him was also interesting;

There was a major outbreak of cholera in London in 1849 which killed around 15000 people. Early industrialisation had made London the most populous city in the World at the time, and the River Thames was heavily polluted with untreated sewage. Farr subscribed to the conventional theory that cholera was carried by polluted air rather than water - the miasmic theory.

As a result of studying this outbreak, the physician John Snow proposed what is now known to be the actual mechanism for transmission - that people were infected by swallowing something and that it multiplied in the intestines.

There was another epidemic in 1853, and Farr gathered statistical evidence to try to support the miasmic theory. He demonstrated statistically that cholera was spread by polluted air by showing that the likelihood of dying of the disease was linked to the height that the victims lived above the River Thames. He interpreted this as support for the miasmic theory - the air at lower altitudes being dirtier. However he also obtained details of where different water companies drew their water, and generated statistics on the number of deaths per water company. He discovered that people supplied with water from two companies in particular- the Southwark & Vauxhall and the Lambeth water companies - which drew their water directly from the Thames were particularly likely to suffer. Although he did not agree with Snow's waterborne theory, he gave him a great deal of help in collecting data to support it; in particular by providing the addresses of people who had died.

There was a further epidemic in 1866, by which time Snow had died. Farr had by now come around to believe Snow's explanation. He produced a monograph which showed that mortality was extremely high for people who drew their water from the Old Ford Reservoir in East London.

We recommend the The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson

Link of the Day

UCTV on Nobel Laureates

The Myths of Innovation

Scott Berkun

The King of Vodka

The King of Vodka: The Story of Pyotr Smirnov & the Upheaval of an Empire

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.

32 Ways to Be a Champion in Business

Earvin "Magic" Johnson

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)

Development Lecture of the Day

Jeffrey D. Sachs - "Achieving Global Cooperation on Economic Recovery and Long-term Sustainable Development"

International Conference on Thinking

The International conference on Thinking is a major conference with a twenty two year history and is coordinated by an International Standing Committee led by Prof Dr David Perkins of Harvard University, USA. The conference has been previously held by many countries including Fiji, Singapore, USA, United Kingdom, New Zealand, Canada, Australia and Sweden.

Keynote Speakers include;

Edward de Bono
Tony Buzan
Howard Gardner

Related;
The GoodWork Project

Training the Brain: Cultivating Emotional Skills

Project Zero

World Center for New Thinking

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