Recommended Good Books (most recent first)

• I have only listed books which I have read and would recommend (to promote interest in science and sci-fi books)
• My primary passion is electronics and computers but there are no books of that kind listed here except for a few exceptions like Digital Apollo which stand head-and-shoulders above all others
• Listing my favorite books is one guaranteed way for me to tweak humanity's path by affecting internet search engines like Google and BING
  • or it was until online book-retailers began allowing customer feedback; now my original efforts have been severely diluted and I may delete this page sometime soon (after all, who would really care what I think about anything?)
• Locate new-or-used out-of-print books via www.bookfinder.com

Read + Reviewed (most recent first)

The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science and Reality (2012)
by Chris Mooney

From climate change to evolution, the rejection of mainstream science among Republicans is growing, as is the denial of expert consensus on the economy, American history, foreign policy and much more. Why won't Republicans (conservatives) accept things that most experts agree on? Why are they constantly fighting against the facts?

Science writer Chris Mooney explores brain scans, polls, and psychology experiments to explain why conservatives today believe more wrong things; appear more likely than Democrats ("liberals" for those people outside of the USA) to oppose new ideas and less likely to change their beliefs in the face of new facts; and sometimes respond to compelling evidence by doubling down on their current beliefs.  

• Goes beyond the standard claims about ignorance or corporate malfeasance to discover the real, scientific reasons why Republicans reject the widely accepted findings of mainstream science, economics, and history—as well as many undeniable policy facts (e.g., there were no “death panels” in the health care bill).
• Explains that the political parties reflect personality traits and psychological needs—with Republicans more wedded to certainty, Democrats to novelty—and this is the root of our divide over reality.
• Written by the author of The Republican War on Science, which was the first and still the most influential book to look at conservative rejection of scientific evidence. But the rejection of science is just the beginning…

Certain to spark discussion and debate, The Republican Brain also promises to add to the lengthy list of persuasive scientific findings that Republicans reject and deny.

NSR Comments:

• This book has nothing to do with intelligence or so-called "theories involving hardwiring of the brain" (because the human brain is hardwired to be softwired). For those who think in terms of "nurture vs. nature" this is more of a "nurture issue" as much of this behavior is initially learned from those around us. (And, perhaps, unlearned by expanding beyond our local groups as usually happens when shipped off to college).
• Do not read this book if you think you can change the other side. Like the Amish, they have all your facts but have come to different conclusions. If change comes it will be their personal decision.
• Do read this book if you are curious as to why conservatives think-what-they-think, say-what-they-say, and believe-what-they-believe
• The author gives evidence to support the assertion that, on average, your liberalism knob increases as you become more educated. On the flip side, your conservative knob increases as you become more wealthy. I'm not sure which takes president when you are both educated and wealthy.
• The author gives evidence to support the assertion that, on average, conservatives tend to see issues as black-or-white while liberals tend to see issues as shades-of-gray. He also quotes conservative publishers who support this claim. I wonder if a liberal US president would have authorized attacking Iraq in 2003 on the flimsy evidence surrounding WMDs (Weapon's of Mass Destruction) which turned out to be nonexistent.
• Conservatives play politics as a team sport (maybe twice as much as liberals). If a conservative team member says something stupid, conservatives tend to collectively circle the wagons rather than publically criticizing. Meanwhile if a liberal says something stupid then this error will be criticized by both sides (much to the delight of conservatives) 
• Observation: almost everyone alive today has some difficult understanding arguments used by the Roman Catholic Church (between 1610 and 1633) against Galileo who dared publish a book claiming "the Earth was not the center of the universe".
  1. First off, it is plain to all that Galileo was the role of "liberal" in this debate while the Church was playing the role of "conservative". (if we were only talking about Christianity then Jesus played the liberal role (change) while the Sanhedrin played conservative (status quo).
  2. Secondly, the arguments used by the church only make sense if they were using "their own facts". Which set of facts "were more correct" could have been solved by simply staying up late a few evenings to view (through a telescope) four moons orbiting Jupiter. But there are no records indicating representatives of the Church ever did this. So in the final analysis this affair was managed as if hosted by lawyers rather than scientists.
  3. Likewise, today we see arguments where each side presents "their own facts" from "their own experts" on issues like "vaccines" and "climate change" and which facts are correct could be resolved by doing further observational tests (reading peer reviewed publications from qualified experts who employed the scientific method first published in Europe by Francis Bacon then popularized by Isaac Newton). Not doing this places us firmly in the same lawyer-vs-scientist conflict as happened ~ 400 years ago.
  4. Many people today see the modern world in a binary split between left and right which, I think, drops humanity into an "us verses them" scenario. I have never bought into that paradigm and, instead, see most of humanity (perhaps 60%) is in the middle with some (perhaps 20% each) occupying the extremes at each end of the political/cultural spectrum. Perhaps human society performs best when there is an equal balance between left-and-right. (something like yin-yang)

The Universe Within: Discovering The Common History Of Rocks, Planets, And People (2013)
by Neil Shubin

From one of our finest and most popular science writers, and the best-selling author of Your Inner Fish, comes the answer to a scientific mystery as big as the world itself: How are the events that formed our solar system billions of years ago embedded inside each of us?

In Your Inner Fish, Neil Shubin delved into the amazing connections between human bodies—our hands, heads, and jaws—and the structures in fish and worms that lived hundreds of millions of years ago. In The Universe Within, with his trademark clarity and exuberance, Shubin takes an even more expansive approach to the question of why we look the way we do. Starting once again with fossils, he turns his gaze skyward, showing us how the entirety of the universe’s fourteen-billion-year history can be seen in our bodies. As he moves from our very molecular composition (a result of stellar events at the origin of our solar system) through the workings of our eyes, Shubin makes clear how the evolution of the cosmos has profoundly marked our own bodies.

The Universe Within: From Quantum to Cosmos (CBC Massey Lecture) (2012)
by Neil Turok
(Director of Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada)

"With [this book's] deeply thoughtful reflections on the place of science in society, on the need to educate the underserved, and on plenty of other topics rarely addressed in this sort of book, Turok takes you where no physicist has gone before. It's well worth making the journey with him." - TIME Magazine

Longlisted for the Charles Taylor Prize and selected as an Amazon.ca Best Book

The most anticipated nonfiction book of the season, this year's Massey Lectures is a visionary look at the way the human mind can shape the future by world-renowned physicist Neil Turok.

Every technology we rely on today was created by the human mind, seeking to understand the universe around us. Scientific knowledge is our most precious possession, and our future will be shaped by the breakthroughs to come.

In this personal, visionary, and fascinating work, Neil Turok, Director of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, explores the transformative scientific discoveries of the past three centuries -- from classical mechanics, to the nature of light, to the bizarre world of the quantum, and the evolution of the cosmos. Each new discovery has, over time, yielded new technologies causing paradigm shifts in the organization of society. Now, he argues, we are on the cusp of another major transformation: the coming quantum revolution that will supplant our current, dissatisfying digital age. Facing this brave new world, Turok calls for creatively re-inventing the way advanced knowledge is developed and shared, and opening access to the vast, untapped pools of intellectual talent in the developing world. Scientific research, training, and outreach are vital to our future economy, as well as powerful forces for peaceful global progress.

Elegantly written, deeply provocative, and highly inspirational, The Universe Within is, above all, about the future -- of science, of society, of ourselves.

NSR Comments:

• What a treat. I you can't think of a Christmas gift or stocking stuffer for the science student or science buff in your family, then consider gifting this book. In five essays the author boots-up the reader's mind to a higher level. No previous level of science or mathematics is required.

The Leap: How to Survive and Thrive in the Sustainable Economy (2011/2012)
Chris Turner

 highly recommended for citizens and investors alike

The most vital project of the twenty-first century is a shift from our unsustainable way of life to a sustainable one--a great lateral leap from a track headed for economic and ecological disaster to one bound for renewed prosperity. In The Leap, Chris Turner presents a field guide to making that jump, drawing on recent breakthroughs in state-of-the-art renewable energy, cleantech and urban design. From the solar towers of sunny Spain to the bike paths and pedestrianized avenues of the world's most livable city--Copenhagen, Denmark--to the nascent "green-collar" economies rejuvenating the former East Germany and the American Rust Belt, he paints a vivid portrait of a new, sustainable world order already up and running. In his 2007 book, The Geography of Hope, Chris Turner wrote about an emerging world of cleantech possibility. This led to a two-year stint as sustainability columnist for the Globe and Mail, during which many of the fringe developments covered in his book became vital. By the time those two years were up his reporting tracks were being retraced by mainstream outlets like the New York Times. In The Leap, he once again charts the world's near-future course.

NSR Comments:

1. Almost every Ontario (Canada) resident would agree that the McGuinty Liberals did a poor job explaining to voters how a version of Germany's FIT (Feed In Tariff) is intended to transform Ontario's economy via the Green Energy Act 2009. This book (especially chapter 3) does a much better job explaining why FIT (Feed In Tariff) might be the only rational approach to reducing energy costs and CO₂ emissions while simultaneously creating a high number of tax-paying  green-collar jobs .
   • Video lecture by Chris Turner at Toronto's Rothman School of Management on March 8, 2012.
     • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Awp2qZiBZ1I - 55 minutes
   • Preview of chapter-3: http://www.booklounge.ca/features/previews/index9780307359223.html
   • Chapter 7 explains how our current Dumb Grid needs to be replaced with a Smart Grid
     • Quote: A smart grid, in other words, [is] a twenty first century design [meant] to supplant the mostly deaf, mute and blind grid designed by Thomas Edison in the 1880s
   • Dr. Hermann Scheer
   • Renewable energy in Germany
   • Feed-in tariffs in Germany
   • http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/2008-2009/the_gospel_of_green/
      
2. FIT (Feed In Tariff) deals with humanity's CO₂ emissions from the opposite end of the problem.
   1. no carbon taxes
   2. no carbon trading schemes or emission trading schemes
   3. no dependency on intergovernmental agreements like Rio, Kyoto, or Copenhagen which would be almost impossible to verify or enforce (think about the current state of international anti-drug and anti-arms agreements)
   4. no government handouts (no subsidies or tax credits)
      • Germany's FIT program is funded by adding approximately 1-cent per KWH to consumers power bills which average $50 per household per year.
      • This created ~ 250,000 tax-paying energy-related jobs over the first 10 years
         
3. Unlike Germany's actions, Ontario's were more of a stumble in the correct direction
   • The first implementation of FIT in Ontario (a.k.a. FIT 1.0) was introduced in 2006 and did not follow German recommendations
     • name: Renewable Energy Standard Offer Program 2006
     • higher administrative costs to build, connect, and run
     • emphasis on fixed costs (and contracts)
     • lower tariffs than Germany
     • lots of resistance (no pun intended) from Ontario Hydro
   • The second implementation of FIT in Ontario (a.k.a. FIT 2.0) was introduced in 2009 and is closer to German recommendations
     • name: Green Energy Act 2009
     • lower administrative costs to build, connect, and run
     • emphasis on what electricity passes through the meter back to the grid
     • higher tariffs than FIT 1.0 for small installations under the new microFIT program
       • microFIT rates: http://microfit.powerauthority.on.ca/ (installations ≤10 kW)
       • FIT rates: http://fit.powerauthority.on.ca/what-feed-tariff-program (installations >10 kW)
        
4. There was a time before the 1860's when numerous products from artificial lighting to locomotive lubricants were manufactured from Whale Oil.
   1. No one in those days would have believed it possible that humanity:
      • would have the ability to hunt all whales to extinction (they could not see the end in sight)
      • would have the ability to produce massive power projects (Niagara Falls and Boulder Dam are two noteworthy examples)
      • would have the ability to alter massive water ways (the Panama Canal and the Suez Canal are two noteworthy examples)
      • would have the ability to send twelve men to the surface of the moon then return them safely to the earth (in those days, polar expeditions were not as successful)
      • would have enabled an era of liquid-fuel powered "personal" machines including: automobiles, boats, airplanes, snowmobiles, lawn movers, whipper-snippers, etc.
      • would have enabled an era of personal communications devices which include: telephones, telegraph, internet. radios, televisions, computers, GPS receivers, MP3 players, etc.
   2. Everyone alive today will acknowledge that our modern technological society would never have been developed had humanity stayed with Whale Oil. Humanity is at a similar juncture today. Many citizens are unaware of the fact that a continually growing human population (currently at 7 billion and growing one billion every 12 years) will only cause humanity to burn through the remaining fossil-fuel resources faster while we ignore natural renewable energy around us in the form of falling water, wind, solar, and tide.
   3. A massive changeover to renewables will not hurt the fossil fuel industry as much as many business people fear. Humanity will always need energy-dense liquid fuel to power rockets, cargo ships, cruise liners, jet aircraft, trains, and tractor-trailer trucks to only name a few.
       
5. There was a time before 1970 when the computer industry (sales, installation, maintenance, programming, operation, etc.) was done by a relatively small number of people working for a handful of large companies whose installations included: government, military, universities, and large corporations. Since those days we've seen a transition from main-frame computers to mini-computers to micro-computers resulting in just about everyone personally knowing one, or more, computer professionals. Likewise, FIT could potentially turn every power consumer into a power producer while creating a large number of new  green-collar jobs .
    
   
6. Just as telephone companies were an obstacle to humanity shifting from "analog circuit switching" to "digital packet switching", large entrenched interests in the existing power system seem to be blind to the opportunities. The hub-and-spoke model for communications (mostly) went out the window with the internet and now the same is happening to power.

Blade Runner 2: The Edge of Human (1995)
K. W. Jeter

Blade Runner 2: The Edge of Human is a 1995 book by K. W. Jeter meant to be a sequel to Ridley Scott's 1982 movie titled Blade Runner. According to the dust jacket, K. W. Jeter reportedly worked with Philip K. Dick before Dick's death in 1982 (the dustcover shows a picture of them standing over a desk; could this be fake? Better get out your Voight-Kampff machine)

I previously read this book back in 1995 but decided to reread it after Ridley Scott announced his intention to do a movie sequel to his movie. No one ever hinted that Scott's sequel would be based upon Jeter's book but here is something to ponder:

1. Jeter produced very believable explanation(s) for "who was the sixth replicant"
2. When Scott released his redigitized Blade Runner Five-Disc Ultimate Collector's Edition back in 2007, he overdubbed Bryant's dialog to now say "two of them got fried running though an electrical field" to fix Bryant's anomalous replicant count

Click here to read more about this book including story spoilers (don't worry, you need to click them to see them).

Rendezvous with Rama (1973)
Arthur C  Clarke

The new celestial body that appears in the outer reaches of our solar system in 2130 believed at first to be an asteroid, and named Rama by earthlings, soon proves not to be a natural object. It is a vast cylinder - about thirty-one miles long and twelve and a half across, with a mass of at least ten trillion tons - that is moving steadily closer to the Sun. The five-thousand-ton spaceship Endeavour lands on Rama, and when Commander Bill Norton and his crew make their way into its hollow interior they find a whole self-contained world - a world that has been cruising through space for at least 200,00 years and perhaps for more than a million. They have, at most, three weeks to explore Rama: a dead world, as it seems at first, though not without its perils, and with intensifying perils when it proves to be, in its own astonishing way, very much alive. Yet in the end it is Homo sapiens who poses the greatest menace, and whose exploits bring a continuously absorbing narrative to its highest pitch of excitement.

I read this book 39 years ago but did not realize (until now) that I had forgotten 90% of it.

Note: my just-like-new 1953 hard-cover copy was purchased here: www.bookfinder.com

Childhood's End (1953)
Arthur C  Clarke

Large spaceships appear over Earth's largest cities. The Overlords have announced that they will not to show themselves until 50 years have past, but they do have a few demands: put a stop to racism; put a stop to war; put a stop to animal cruelty (like bull fighting).

I thought I had read this book but I was mistaken.

Note: my just-like-new 1953 hard-cover copy was purchased here: www.bookfinder.com

Applied Cryptography : Protocols, Algorithms, and Source Code in C, 2nd Edition (1996)
ISBN: 978-0-471-11709-4
Eighteenth Printing, 784 pages
by Bruce Schneier

 highly recommended for software developers

• Author's web site: www.schneier.com/book-applied.html
• If buying from a used book site like www.bookfinder.com then be sure to only get the second edition which is 50% larger and contains a lot of corrections. I recently (2012) purchased an Eighteenth Printing by John Wiley & Sons

The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars (2012)
by Michael Mann

 highly recommended

The ongoing assault on climate science in the United States has never been more aggressive, more blatant, or more widely publicized than in the case of the Hockey Stick graph -- a clear and compelling visual presentation of scientific data, put together by Michael E. Mann and his colleagues, demonstrating that global temperatures have risen in conjunction with the increase in industrialization and the use of fossil fuels. Here was an easy-to-understand graph that, in a glance, posed a threat to major corporate energy interests and those who do their political bidding. The stakes were simply too high to ignore the Hockey Stick -- and so began a relentless attack on a body of science and on the investigators whose work formed its scientific basis.

The Hockey Stick achieved prominence in a 2001 UN report on climate change and quickly became a central icon in the "climate wars." The real issue has never been the graph's data but rather its implied threat to those who oppose governmental regulation and other restraints to protect the environment and planet. Mann, lead author of the original paper in which the Hockey Stick first appeared, shares the story of the science and politics behind this controversy. He reveals key figures in the oil and energy industries and the media front groups who do their bidding in sometimes slick, sometimes bare-knuckled ways. Mann concludes with the real story of the 2009 "Climategate" scandal, in which climate scientists' emails were hacked. This is essential reading for all who care about our planet's health an dour own well-being.

• 377 pages, 106 of them are cross references (I checked many of them - NSR)
• quote from page 254: I can continue to live with the cynical assaults against my integrity and character by the corporate-funded denial machine. What I could not live with is knowing that I stood by silently as my fellow human beings, confused and misled by industry-funded propaganda, were unwittingly lead down a tragic path that would mortgage future generations. How could we explain to our grandchildren that we saw the threat coming, but did not do all we could to ensure that humankind took the necessary precautions.

Turing's Cathedral: The Origins Of The Digital Universe (2012)
by George Dyson

 VERY highly recommended (a must-have for "computer hardware engineers" and "program coders")

In Turing’s Cathedral, George Dyson focuses on a small group of men and women, led by John von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, who built one of the first computers to realize Alan Turing’s vision of a Universal Machine. Their work would break the distinction between numbers that mean things and numbers that do things—and our universe would never be the same.

Using five kilobytes of memory (the amount allocated to displaying the cursor on a computer desktop of today), they achieved unprecedented success in both weather prediction and nuclear weapons design, while tackling, in their spare time, problems ranging from the evolution of viruses to the evolution of stars.

video: http://ww3.tvo.org/video/173792/george-dyson-origins-digital-universe

NSR Comments:

1. CPU memory was based upon forty Williamson Tubes
   • 1024 bits stored as dots on the screens of forty war-surplus oscilloscope tubes; as each dot began to fade, it needed to be refreshed. This is not much different than the refresh cycle demanded by modern DRAM technology.
   • Bit Calculation: 40 x 1024 / 8 = 5 KB
2. This book is mistitled. Although Alan Turning's contributions to mathematics, science, computing and war-time decryption are covered, this book it mainly about:
   1. John von Neumann and the people surrounding him at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Studies.
   2. How the Institute for Advanced Studies designed and built a computer and (MANIAC) computer architecture (von Neumann) still in use today (albeit smaller and faster)
   3. Why these early computers were:
      • instrumental in creating the hydrogen bomb (they ran simulations in Neutron Diffusion) as well as...
      • early attempts at weather and climate prediction (funded by the Air Force who required better forecasts before committing to bomber missions) as well as...
      • simulations of self-reproducing automata
3. Unexpected developments in weather forecasts and climate models:
   • Quote from page 155: In 1945, meteorology became a science while [weather] forecasting remained an art. Forecasts where generated by drawing up weather maps by hand, comparing the results with map libraries of previous weather conditions and they making predictions that relied partly on the assumption that weather would do whatever it had done previously and partly on the forecasters intuitive feel for the situation and ability to guess.
   • World War II, with its growing dependence on air craft [including fighters and bombers,] increased the demand for forecasts
   • Scandinavians helped develop the theory of frontal waves and otherwise lead to the understanding what weather might do next. [These red and blue lines are still scene on today's weather maps]
   • This led to a numerical analysis of weather which was later "computerized"
   • Computer weather analysis yielded to the first climate models (yep, all run in 5k of memory)
   • [During the 1940s and 1950s, computers helped accurate weather forecasts to be expanded from 2 days to better than a week]

Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier (2012)
by Neil deGrasse Tyson

Neil deGrasse Tyson is a rare breed of astrophysicist, one who can speak as easily and brilliantly with popular audiences as with professional scientists. Now that NASA has put human space flight effectively on hold—with a five- or possibly ten-year delay until the next launch of astronauts from U.S. soil—Tyson’s views on the future of space travel and America’s role in that future are especially timely and urgent. This book represents the best of Tyson’s commentary, including a candid new introductory essay on NASA and partisan politics, giving us an eye-opening manifesto on the importance of space exploration for America’s economy, security, and morale. Thanks to Tyson’s fresh voice and trademark humor, his insights are as delightful as they are provocative, on topics that range from the missteps that shaped our recent history of space travel to how aliens, if they existed, might go about finding us.

If you think North American governments should return to manned spaceflight, then this book is for you.

• Neil deGrasse Tyson was working on a book about the need for an American space program when the Obama administration trimmed 20% from NASA’s 2013 budget (at least one MARS mission was immediately cut)
  • NASA's 2012 budget is $17.8 billion (a 20% cut will reduce it to $14.24 billion). Compare this amount of money to the defense budget which is over $800 billion and a complete waste of money with no return on investment (ROI)
• So Tyson, and his editor, sped up the release of the book (titled “Space Chronicles”) which was released on Monday, February 27, 2012.
  • It is not enough to add more STEM (science technology engineering math) teachers if there are no jobs waiting after graduation. So he is calling for a doubling of NASA’s budget in order to stimulate the economy.
• By Wednesday he was invited to speak before the congress (Commerce. Science and Transportation Committee) on March 7, 2012.
• On Thursday he appeared on FOX
  • http://video.foxbusiness.com/v/1483676909001/the-costs-of-cutting-nasas-budget/ (4 minute must-view video)
• Later that day he was invited to give a presentation to Obama in the Whitehouse. Not sure what the date will be.
• On Friday he spoke for an hour on NPR’s “Science Friday”http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/201203024
  • http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/sciencefriday/scifri201203024.mp3 <<--- audio
• http://www.haydenplanetarium.org/tyson/
• http://www.haydenplanetarium.org/tyson/watch
• http://www.startalkradio.net/ - listen live, Sundays at 6:00 PM Eastern
  • http://tunein.com/radio/StarTalk-Radio-p334521/
• Neil deGrasse Tyson Testifies Before Senate Science Committee, March 7, 2012 (SR-253)
  • http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=rmKlA_UnX8c#t=35s (a call to double NASA's budget)

The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True (2011)
by Richard Dawkins

• Magic takes many forms:
  1. Supernatural magic is what our ancestors used in order to explain the world before they developed the scientific method
  2. Stage magic involves everything from card tricks to rabbits in hats to communicating with the dead
  3. Poetic magic involves the awe and wonder you experience when observing stars in the night sky
• Packed with clever thought experiments, dazzling illustrations and jaw-dropping facts, The Magic of Reality explains a stunningly wide range of natural phenomena. What is stuff made of? How old is the universe? Why do the continents look like disconnected pieces of a puzzle? What causes tsunamis? Why are there so many kinds of plants and animals? Who was the first man, or woman? This is a page-turning, graphic detective story that not only mines all the sciences for its clues but primes the reader to think like a scientist as well.
• Richard Dawkins, the world’s most famous evolutionary biologist and one of science education’s most passionate advocates, has spent his career elucidating the wonders of science for adult readers. But now, in a dramatic departure, he has teamed up with acclaimed artist Dave McKean and used his unrivaled explanatory powers to share the magic of science with readers of all ages. This is a treasure trove for anyone who has ever wondered how the world works. Dawkins and McKean have created an illustrated guide to the secrets of our world—and the universe beyond—that will entertain and inform for years to come.

My parents were conservative Lutherans who refused to accept evolution primarily due to the fact that they possessed no scientific education whatsoever, and their church told them not to (you do not need to give up your belief in God to accept the evidence of Darwin's Theory). While reading this unexpected gem, I kept thinking "I wish my parents were still alive so they could read this lucid explanation of evolution (in chapter one)". Although not a book targeted toward young adults, I would have no problem gifting this book to pre-teenagers about to enter secondary school. What an unexpected surprise.

Our Angry Earth: A Ticking Ecological Bomb (1991)
by Isaac Asimov and Frederik Pohl

What a shock (and ecological gem). This 1991 book is still very very accurate. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Angry_Earth

• This 1991 book can still be purchased in both paper and audiobook formats from: www.bookfinder.com
   
• You can listen to this audiobook for free on YouTube:
   

  Link	Chunk	Time
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Jw2AIVD7KYo	(1/2)	7 hours, 11 minutes
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=taPjqDAFvOs	(2/2)	5 hours, 9 minutes

Steve Jobs (2011)
by Walter Isaacson

Shocking revelations:

• giving a speech to university students telling them the secret to success is "loss of virginity" and consuming LSD
• constantly crying through-out his whole life. (was this due to LSD or unhappiness due to a vegan diet?)
• studied Zen Buddhism and meditated throughout his life but appeared to be the most materialistic person in North America (and yet, remained a first-class prick)
• appeared to hate the social imperatives of the French (re: Danielle Mitterrand's questions during her tour of the Macintosh factory) and yet thought of himself as an artist and considered living in Paris.
• accused others, including Microsoft, of stealing Apple's ideas then released adverts with quotes like "good artists copy, but great artists steal".
• telling people "their software was crap" when he didn't know how to program
• closing the Macintosh architecture just after IBM opened the PC architecture (IBM was attempting to emulate the openness of the Apple 2)
  then having the gall to release an advert suggesting IBM was like "big brother" in George Orwell's book 1984 while Apple was in the role of the athletic woman smashing the screen.

• Sticking with 1984 as a metaphor:
  • it was Jobs who projected the cult of personality
  • it was Jobs who was the purveyor of newspeak and doublethink (see IBM comment above)
  • it was Jobs who engaged in propaganda and historical revisionism
  • if Big Brother actually existed, he would have been envious of Jobs' Reality Distortion Field.
• I am convinced dropping LSD would produce many more societal dropouts than corporate success stories. Don't follow his example.
• Throughout the book, I thought "either Jobs was constantly on LSD, or was bipolar, or schizophrenic, or all three". But the remark about Narcissistic Personality Disorder on page 266 seemed to hit the mark.
• Why are people still referring to this guy as a genius? True Apple talent could be found in people like Steve Wozniak, Bill Atkinson, and Andy Hertzfeld to only name three of many. Wozniak is fond of saying that he would be nowhere without Jobs but I think the reverse is true. Wozniak would have eventually hooked up with someone less egocentric while more humane.
• Steve Jobs told everyone he was a Buddhist. I hope he believed in Karma and I hope he will be reborn as a software developer who will work for an immature boss who drops LSD and throws temper-tantrums.

Forged: Writing in the Name of God --
Why the Bible's Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are (2011)
by Bart Ehrman

The evocative title tells it all and hints at the tone of sensationalism that pervades this book. Those familiar with the earlier work of Ehrman, a distinguished professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and author of more than 20 books including Misquoting Jesus, will not be surprised at the content of this one. Written in a manner accessible to non specialists, Ehrman argues that many books of the New Testament are not simply written by people other than the ones to whom they are attributed, but that they are deliberate forgeries. The word itself connotes scandal and crime, and it appears on nearly every page. Indeed, this book takes on an idea widely accepted by biblical scholars: that writing in someone else's name was common practice and perfectly okay in ancient times. Ehrman argues that it was not even then considered acceptable—hence, a forgery. While many readers may wish for more evidence of the charge, Ehrman's introduction to the arguments and debates among different religious communities during the first few centuries and among the early Christians themselves, though not the book's main point, is especially valuable.

The Inquisition of Climate Science (2011)
by James Lawrence Powel

• Climate deniers are under the impression they are some sort of modern day Galileo but they've got it backwards: Their views represent the traditional view of the Vatican
• Modern science is under the greatest and most successful attack in recent history. An industry of denial, abetted by news media and "info-tainment" broadcasters more interested in selling controversy than presenting facts, has duped half the American public into rejecting the facts of climate science -- an overwhelming body of rigorously vetted scientific evidence showing that human-caused, carbon-based emissions are linked to warming the Earth. The industry of climate science denial is succeeding: public acceptance has declined even as the scientific evidence for global warming has increased. It is vital that the public understand how anti-science ideologues, pseudo-scientists, and non-scientists have bamboozled them. We cannot afford to get global warming wrong -- yet we are, thanks to deniers and their methods.
• The Inquisition of Climate Science is the first book to comprehensively take on the climate science denial movement and the deniers themselves, exposing their lack of credentials, their extensive industry funding, and their failure to provide any alternative theory to explain the observed evidence of warming. In this book, readers meet the most prominent deniers while dissecting their credentials, arguments, and lack of objectivity. James Lawrence Powell shows that the deniers use a wide variety of deceptive rhetorical techniques, many stretching back to ancient Greece. Carefully researched, fully referenced, and compellingly written, his book clearly reveals that the evidence of global warming is real and that an industry of denial has deceived the American public, putting them and their grandchildren at risk.
• quote from page 46: By now, the conservative administration of U.S. President Ronald Reagan had begun to worry that action to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions could hurt the American economy. [snip] Growing alarm over carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels might lead to a Montreal-like protocol to reduce carbon emissions, allegedly crippling the economy -- and on Regan's pro-business watch. To have scientists meeting where they liked, saying whatever they pleased, issuing disquieting statements, could force the government to respond. The solution was to create a new, international scientific body and endure that government representatives vetted it reports. The U.S. signed off on a proposal from the United Nations to create an overarching climate advisory committee called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), mandated to "provide the decision makers and others interested in climate change with an objective source of information". Governments would appoint their own scientists to the panel. Diplomats and government bureaucrats form scores of nations would oversee the scientists' work and edit their reports. The structure guaranteed that the IPCC reports would neither appear too rapidly nor overdramatize the extent of global warming. From the get-go, by design, the IPCC was a conservative organization predestined for understatement.
• quote from page 136: Oceans, land plants and animals emit about 780 gigatons of carbon annually, and absorb nearly all of it. Human activities emit 29 gigatons of carbon per year but absorb almost none of it (so it ends up in the atmosphere).
• quote from page 175: In the 1920s, to increase crop production, Soviet leaders forced farmers to give up their land to large collective farms. The farmers grew restive, production fell, and in the "breadbasket of Europe," millions starved. Then came the Rasputin of Soviet science, Trofim Denisovitch Lysenko, who claimed he could make wheat flower earlier, putting more farmers to work and increasing grain production. That was biologically possible but Lysenko went further to claim that the offspring of "vernalized" wheat would also flower earlier, as though a parent who lifts weights will have more muscular children. Genetics showed instead that characteristics are passed on by genes, which are unaffected by traits the parent has acquired. Lysenko denounced geneticists as bourgeois, fascist, pseudoscientists: "fly-lovers and people haters". Lysenko's image as the peasant genius outwitting the world's biologists dovetailed perfectly with Soviet mythology. In 1938 the authorities placed him in charge of the Academy of Agricultural Sciences, and in 1948 they fired all the geneticists and outlawed dissent from Lysenkoism. Purges sent his opponents to prison, some to the executioner. Lysenko accused his scientific opponents of trying to "wreck" the Soviet economy. (sound familiar?)
• NSR Comment 1: many of today's climate deniers think "they" are smarter than professional scientists; think scientists are part of some sort of world-wide liberal conspiracy; think addressing the issues of climate change will "wreck" the economy. A much smaller number of deniers have actually suggested killing some scientists. Do any of these points sound familiar?
• NSR Comment 2: prior to the 1990s, Soviet peoples wasted much bandwidth labeling everything as either "bourgeois this" or "proletariat that" and I thought it made them sound ridiculous. Since the 1990s, Americans seem to be unable to discuss anything without including labels liberal or conservative. I wonder why this ideological shift has gone unnoticed?

Knocking on Heaven's Door:
How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World (2011)
by Lisa Randall

• From one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people in the world, a rousing defense of the role of science in our lives The latest developments in physics have the potential to radically revise our understanding of the world: its makeup, its evolution, and the fundamental forces that drive its operation. Knocking on Heaven's Door is an exhilarating and accessible overview of these developments and an impassioned argument for the significance of science.

Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality (2011)
by Manjit Kumar

 science lover's "must have"

Quantum theory is weird. As Niels Bohr said, if you aren't shocked by quantum theory, you don't really understand it. For most people, quantum theory is synonymous with mysterious, impenetrable science. And in fact for many years it was equally baffling for scientists themselves. In this tour de force of science history, Manjit Kumar gives a dramatic and superbly written account of this fundamental scientific revolution, focusing on the central conflict between Einstein and Bohr over the nature of reality and the soul of science. This revelatory book takes a close look at the golden age of physics, the brilliant young minds at its core, and how an idea ignited the greatest intellectual debate of the twentieth century.

• Covers all the usual suspects from Albert (Einstein) to (Anton) Zeilinger even giving a brief description of Hugh Everett III

Quantum Man: Richard Feynman's Life in Science (2011)
by Lawrence M. Krauss

Physicist Richard Feynman has a reputation as a bongo-playing, hard-partying, flamboyant Nobel Prize laureate for his work on quantum electrodynamics theory, but this tends to obscure the fact that he was a brilliant thinker who continued making contributions to science until his death in 1988. He foresaw new directions in science that have begun to produce practical applications only in the last decade: nanotechnology, atomic-scale biology like the manipulation of DNA, lasers to move individual atoms, and quantum engineering. In the 1960s, Feynman entered the field of quantum gravity and created important tools and techniques for scientists studying black holes and gravity waves. Author Krauss (The Physics of Star Trek), an MIT-trained physicist, doesn't necessarily break new ground in this biography, but Krauss excels in his ability, like Feynman himself, to make complicated physics comprehensible. He incorporates Feynman's lectures and quotes several of the late physicist's colleagues to aid him in this process. This book is highly recommended for readers who want to get to know one of the preeminent scientists of the 20th century.

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood (2011)
by James Gleick

In a sense, The Information is a book about everything, from words themselves to talking drums, writing and lexicography, early attempts at an analytical engine, the telegraph and telephone, ENIAC, and the ubiquitous computers that followed. But that's just the "History." The "Theory" focuses on such 20th-century notables as Claude Shannon, Norbert Wiener, Alan Turing, and others who worked on coding, decoding, and re-coding both the meaning and the myriad messages transmitted via the media of their times. In the "Flood," Gleick explains genetics as biology's mechanism for informational exchange--Is a chicken just an egg's way of making another egg?--and discusses self-replicating memes (ideas as different as earworms and racism) as information's own evolving meta-life forms. Along the way, readers learn about music and quantum mechanics, why forgetting takes work, the meaning of an "interesting number," and why "[t]he bit is the ultimate unsplittable particle." What results is a visceral sense of information's contemporary precedence as a way of understanding the world, a physical/symbolic palimpsest of self-propelled exchange, the universe itself as the ultimate analytical engine. If Borges's "Library of Babel" is literature's iconic cautionary tale about the extreme of informational overload, Gleick sees the opposite, the world as an endlessly unfolding opportunity in which "creatures of the information" may just recognize themselves.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)
by Philip K. Dick

I "think" something has happened to "my brain" in the past 30 years. I first read this book at age of 29 but I got way more out of it at age of 59. For some reason I do not understand, portions of this book seem a lot closer to the movie Blade Runner than I previously thought. It is apparent to me now that this book could not be translated directly into a movie because the emphasis on human defectives (chicken-heads and ant-heads), which Dick included to be a literary foil for andys (replicants), would hurt the feelings of too many human movie goers.

Link: DADOES vs. Blade Runner (from a recent re-read in 2011)

The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War (1998)
by Robert B. Strassler

• This revised edition of Richard Crawley's classic 1874 translation is enhanced with more than 100 maps, extensive annotations, brief biographies of important figures, and invaluable historical, political, and cultural background.
• Thucydides called his account of two decades of war between Athens and Sparta "a possession for all time," and indeed it is the first and still most famous work in the Western historical tradition. Considered essential reading for generals, statesmen, and liberally educated citizens for more than 2,000 years, The Peloponnesian War is a mine of military, moral, political, and philosophical wisdom. However, this classic book has long presented obstacles to the uninitiated reader. Robert Strassler's new edition removes these obstacles by providing a new coherence to the narrative overall, and by effectively reconstructing the lost cultural context that Thucydides shared with his original audience. Based on the venerable Richard Crawley translation, updated and revised for modern readers. The Landmark Thucydides includes a vast array of superbly designed and presented maps, brief informative appendices by outstanding classical scholars on subjects of special relevance to the text, explanatory marginal notes on each page, an index of unprecedented subtlety, and numerous other useful features. In any list of the Great Books of Western Civilization, The Peloponnesian War stands near the top. This authoritative new edition will ensure that its greatness is appreciated by future generations.
• Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War is one of the great books in the Western tradition, as well as its first true historical narrative. Editor Robert Strassler has annotated this classic text to make it more accessible to modern readers and added dozens of maps for easy reference. A helpful introduction places Thucydides in proper historical context and a series of short appendices focus on particular aspects of life and war during the period. But the bulk of the book itself, where Thucydides chronicles the long struggle between Athens and Sparta, enjoys an unexpected freshness on these pages--partly due to Strassler's magnificent editorial labors, but mostly because it's a great story resonant with heroes, villains, bravery, desperation, and tragedy. Every library should have a copy of Thucydides in it, especially libraries on military history, and The Landmark Thucydides is without question the best version available.
• NSR Initial Comments:
  • Strassler thought this project would require two years of his time but he invested nearly 10 years.
  • A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens compares the life of peasantry living in London and Paris in the years leading up to the French Revolution
  • This book may as well have been named A Tale of Two (Hellenistic) Cities as it compares the lives of citizens living in Peloponnesia (Sparta) with those living in Athens during the time of the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BCE) which broke Greece in every way imaginable
  • Peloponnesia was first settled by Pelops (a very rich man) who thought that being rich was a sign you had hade made it (meritocracy). Therefore, poor people should not be supported by the rich. In fact, poor people should not be allowed to vote. Pelops' decendants inherited his wealth while their friends inherited political power (oligarchy). These rich families practiced the art-of-war by placing their own male children in military schools starting at the age seven. With no Peloponnesians to work the fields, they attacked neighboring states taking captured prisoners home work the fields as slaves. When the area of Peloponnesia was starting to become too full, the Peloponnesians blocked immigrated and even discussed building high walls.
  • In the end, the Spartans attacked Athens for no other reason than these two:
     1) the Spartan conservatives feared their way of life was being threated by the Athenian liberals
     2) the Spartans thought the Gods would be punish them in the next life for not taking action in this one.

    Peloponnesia/Sparta	Attica/Athens
    conservative	liberal
    oligarchy	democracy
    superstitious	less so
    religious	less so
    militaristic	more interested in developing: philosophy, logic, mathematics, science
    army	navy (during times of war; merchant marines otherwise)
    institutionalized slavery (required so that Spartan men could join military schools starting at age 7 rather than working in other ventures like agriculture)	slavery was frowned-upon

  • Republican/TEA-party conservatism in the USA seems an awful lot of Sparta. The Republican party has been taken over by rich business men and lobbyists who want to pay little, or no, taxes while refusing to reduce Pentagon budgets and/or defense contracts (are these people militaristic or do they just want to make a buck while supporting the military industrial complex?). Meanwhile, Republican governors and legislatures in certain US states are now attempting to lay blame at what they consider to be over-paid educators (US teachers are paid, on average, half the level paid to teachers in Ontario, Canada). Putting the art-of-war ahead of education is very Spartan indeed.
  • Modern Europe reminds me of Athens. Europe and the EEC seem to be going out of their way to negotiate a civilized end to Europe's financial problems. On top of that, their commitment to research through such programs as:
    • the Large Hadron Collider at CERN (where the world-wide-web was invented by the way)
    • the EELT (European Extremely Large Telescope
    prove to me that European are more committed to advancing human progress than Americans.
  • Hey, America and Europe even have the same West-East relationship to each other as did Sparta and Athens. Hmmm.....
  • Last night on the news I learned that American colleges and universities are receiving tons of money from alumni to support college sporting events and programs. Meanwhile, these same institutions are seeing cuts in academic areas like philosophy, science, mathematics, engineering. Maybe all of America is becoming Spartan. What's next? Gladiatorial Games?
• Related Links:
  • Free audio books: http://librivox.org/the-history-of-the-peloponnesian-war-by-thucydides/
  • June-2011 program on CBC radio: http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/episodes/2011/06/07/thucydides-the-first-journalist/ (54 minutes)
  • Major Greek Wars:

    Conflict	Time Period
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Persian_Wars	499 BC - 449 BC
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Peloponnesian_War	460 BC - 445 BC
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peloponnesian_War	431 BC - 404 BC
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corinthian_War	395 BC - 387 BC

The Relativity of Wrong: Essays on Science (1988)
by Isaac Asimov

Lots of neat stuff, but here is some material about chapter 17

• Today it appears that religious, political, and economic extremists are actually cultivating ignorance.
   
• For this reason, I hope that this 7-minute video will help end the madness.
   
• This video is based upon Isaac Asimov's rebuttal to a letter he received from a student critical of science and progress. A copy of the original letter can be found here
   

Idea Man: A Memoir by the Cofounder of Microsoft (2011)
by Paul Allen

• For those who don't already know, Paul Allen is to Bill Gates (Microsoft) as Steve Wozniak is to Steve Jobs (Apple)
• I didn't know that minicomputers were the key to Microsoft's 8-bit BASIC? Apparently all target micro platforms were simulated on minis. Gates and Allen started doing this at Harvard when they wrote Altair 8800 BASIC on a DEC PDP-10 running TOPS-10. They continued this in Albuquerque by leasing PDP-10 time from local schools. When they moved to Washington they decided to buy a brand new DEC 2020
• I didn't know that Microsoft wrote TRS-80 BASIC (for the Radio Shack "trash 80"), Commodore BASIC for the Commodore PET, and AppleSoft BASIC for the Apple ][ (a.k.a. Apple 2)
• Okay so I skipped over the few chapters related to owning sports teams because I just do not care about that stuff

Three "oldies" from Isaac Asimov

A few months back I was routing through an box of old paperbacks when I rediscovered "Science, Numbers and I". It was too fragile to read but brought back lots of good memories so I used www.bookfinder.com to buy used hardcover copies of:

• "Science, Numbers and I" (1968)
• "Realm of Numbers" (1969)
• "Please Explain" (1973).

What a pleasure to reread. I didn't encounter any errors but found the description of "Neutron Decay" in "Science, Numbers and I" a little anachronistic since there was no mention of a down quark turning into an up quark. However, this level of detail was probably beyond the scope of a popular science book. The third book titled "Please Explain" does contain three short essays involving quarks.

Dance of the Photons: From Einstein to Quantum Teleportation (2010)
by Anton Zeilinger

• Einstein's steadfast refusal to accept certain aspects of quantum theory was rooted in his insistence that physics has to be about reality. Accordingly, he once derided as "spooky action at a distance" the notion that two elementary particles far removed from each other could nonetheless influence each other's properties--a hypothetical phenomenon his fellow theorist Erwin Schrodinger termed "quantum entanglement." In a series of ingenious experiments conducted in various locations--from a dank sewage tunnel under the Danube River to the balmy air between a pair of mountain peaks in the Canary Islands--the author and his colleagues have demonstrated the reality of such entanglement using photons, or light quanta, created by laser beams. In principle the lessons learned may be applicable in other areas, including the eventual development of quantum computers
   
• Light is the research focus of Zeilinger, a physicist in Austria who studies photons’ ghostly quantum behavior. Here Zeilinger introduces the fictional Dr. Quantinger, who assigns two students to experiment on an apparatus that sends photons to separate detectors that they observe. Alice and Bob periodically report their findings, proffer theories to account for the results, listen raptly to Dr. Quantinger’s hints about quantum states of light, such as entanglement and polarity, then repair to their detectors to watch more photons. Sometimes Zeilinger suspends this fictional device to address readers directly about the quality of entanglement––the property of pairs of particles, no matter how far separated, whether by the Danube in Alice and Bob’s case or by light-years of space, to “know” the quantum state of its partner. This faster-than-light talent of quantum particles bothered Einstein but excites Zeilinger, who describes the technologies that entanglement could in principle permit, such as quantum computers or quantum teleportation. An innovative presenter of a complicated topic, Zeilinger will appeal to the futurists of the science set. --Gilbert Taylor
   
• Personal comments:
  • some readers may wonder why Professor Zeilinger employed the fiction of "two junior experimenters discussing their measurements with academics who then dragged them through the thought processes of the original quantum scientists". I attended one of Professor Zeilinger's public lectures (in 2005 at PI in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada) and I remember him telling us that the English word "entanglement" poorly approximates to the German word "Verschränkung" coined by Erwin Schrödinger.
    • http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=551&Itemid=568&lecture_id=3775
    • http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/65060/title/Everyday_Entanglement
    • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schrödinger's_cat - Schrödinger's Cat
    • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_Schrödinger - Erwin Schrödinger
       
  • "Bob" and "Alice" are standard labels used in cryptology and/or signal communications

The Master Switch (2010)
by Tim Wu

• In this age of an open Internet, it is easy to forget that every American information industry, beginning with the telephone, has eventually been taken captive by some ruthless monopoly or cartel. With all our media now traveling a single network, an unprecedented potential is building for centralized control over what Americans see and hear. Could history repeat itself with the next industrial consolidation? Could the Internet-the entire flow of American information-come to be ruled by one corporate leviathan in possession of "the master switch"? That is the big question of Tim Wu's path-breaking book.
   
  
• According to Columbia professor and policy advocate Wu (Who Controls the Internet?), the great information empires of the 20th century have followed a clear and distinctive pattern: after the chaos that follows a major technological innovation, a corporate power intervenes and centralizes control of the new medium--the master switch. Wu chronicles the turning points of the century' s information landscape: those decisive moments when a medium opens or closes, from the development of radio to the Internet revolution, where centralizing control could have devastating consequences. To Wu, subjecting the information economy to the traditional methods of dealing with concentrations of industrial power is an unacceptable control of our most essential resource. He advocates not a regulatory approach but rather a constitutional approach that would enforce distance between the major functions in the information economy--those who develop information, those who own the network infrastructure on which it travels, and those who control the venues of access--and keep corporate and governmental power in check. By fighting vertical integration, a Separations Principle would remove the temptations and vulnerabilities to which such entities are prone. Wu' s engaging narrative and remarkable historical detail make this a compelling and galvanizing cry for sanity--and necessary deregulation--in the information age.
   
• The main thesis of this book is The Cycle which describes major technologies which come along every 40 years. For the first 20 years these technologies are open; then the technologies are acquired by large corporations only to become closed; at this point, the big companies actually stifle innovation; here are some technologies discussed in the book:
  • telephone
    • voice communications (local) compete with telegraph (long distance)
    • AT&T is formed as a Bell subsidiary to connect local phone companies
    • AT&T takes over its parent company, Bell Telephone
  • radio
    • started by amateurs
    • RCA (a defense contractor) fights publically against AT&T's radio division (including AT&T's broadcast company called NBS)
    • NBS is spun off to become NBC
  • film
    • although invented in Europe, was heavily patented by New York companies which fought for a while then formed a "Film Trust" to control what theatres show as well as forcing them to paying a weekly royalty
    • industry outsiders rebel then move their own competing film production companies to Hollywood, California.
  • cable TV
    • NBC and CBS employ the FCC to block the development and implementation of cable TV (and later, satellite TV)
  • computer communications
    • AT&T (and the Bell System in general) used the FCC to block the connection of all so-called "foreign devices" including answering machines (invented by Bell Labs in the 1930s but relegated to the basement until they appear again from foreign markets after the government breaks up the Bell System in 1984), FAX machines, and computer modems.
  • the internet (which is only 20 years old if you start counting from the creation of the web in 1991) was initially blocked by AT&T. Why? AT&T could make more money from traditional "circuit switching" than they could from "packet switching". Translation: blocking innovation to protect their traditional income
  • Apple vs. Google (closed vs. open)
    • like business tycoons of yesterday, Steve Jobs of Apple Computer (rebranded Apple Inc. in 2007) built cozy relationships with AT&T (where Apple introduces new iPhone models) and Hollywood (where Apple sells their music and movies).
    • Apple controls (sanctions or blocks) all apps you want to place on your iPhone. In 2007, Apple decided to block Skype and Google Voice (GV) probably to support their partner, AT&T.
    • Google was worried that their world would be very different if communications where dominated by Apple's iPhone (where Apple could block access to any web destination) so they responded with the idea of gPhone along with the Android operating system (based on Linux) which they provide (virtually for free) to the Open Handset Alliance.
    • Personal Observation:
      • Apple was a purveyor of the open technology religion when they manufactured and sold the Apple 2 line of 8-bit computers (Apple II, Apple ][, Apple //e, Apple //c, Apple IIgs, etc.)
      • When IBM was developing their personal computer which would be called the IBM-PC, they copied Apple's "open design" by creating ISA (industry standard architecture) slots which would accept adapter cards made by any manufacturer.
      • Around this same time, Apple decided they could make more money on closed architectures and so were working on machines like the Apple Lisa and Apple Macintosh.
      • Today it is difficult to think about the IBM-PC without thinking about MS-DOS and MS-Windows. But many people think the IBM-PC product line became dominant not because IBM produced it but because the design was open (while at the same time their main competitor was going to closed)
      • Today, IBM is not the dominant player in PCs and this was caused, in part, by IBM moving away from open technology (like ISA) to closed proprietary technology MCA (Micro Channel Architecture) which allowed other open manufacturers like Compaq, Dell, and HP, to jump in.
      • Rule of thumb: open always wins out (eventually)

Einstein Wrote Back: My Life in Physics (2010)
by John W. Moffat

 science lover's "must have"

An entertaining memoir about the peculiar and competitive world of modern physics.

John W. Moffat was a poor student of math and science. That is, until as a young man in the early 1950s in Copenhagen he read Einstein's famous paper on general relativity and Einstein's current work seeking a unified theory of gravity and electromagnetism. Realizing that he had an unusual and unexplained aptitude for understanding complex physics and mathematics, Moffat wrote two papers based on Einstein's unified field theory. Soon, he found himself being interviewed by Denmark's most famous physicist, Niels Bohr, and giving a seminar on unified theory at the Niels Bohr Institute. When he faced derision and criticism of Einstein's current research by the audience of physicists at the Bohr Institute, Moffat went home and wrote a letter to Einstein that would change the course of his life. Einstein replied to Moffat and they exchanged a series of letters in which they discussed both technical matters relating to the scientific papers and their views on the current state of physics. This correspondence led to Moffat being interviewed by influential physicists in Britain and Ireland, including Erwin Schrödinger. Their recommendations resulted in Moffat being enrolled in the PhD physics program at Trinity College, Cambridge, the first student in the College's 400-year history to be enrolled without an undergraduate degree.

Moffat and Einstein did not continue their correspondence, as the great man died shortly after Moffat began his studies. However, Moffat continued, over the next fifty years, to modify and expand on Einstein's theory of gravity.

Einstein Wrote Back tells the story of Moffat's unusual entry into the world of academia and documents his career at the frontlines of twentieth-century physics as he worked and studied under some of the greatest minds in scientific history, including Niels Bohr, Fred Hoyle, Wolfgang Pauli, Paul Dirac, Erwin Schrödinger, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Abdus Salam, among others.

Taking readers inside the classrooms and minds of these "giants" of modern science, Moffat affectionately exposes the foibles and eccentricities of these great men, as they worked on the revolutionary ideas that, today, are the very foundation of modern physics and cosmology.

Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured
the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (2010)
by Naomi Oreskes & Erik M. Conway

 highly recommended  for any citizen wondering about science denial or the efforts of lobbyists

• Oreskes and Conway tell an important story about the misuse of science to mislead the public on matters ranging from the risks of smoking to the reality of global warming. The people the authors accuse in this carefully documented book are themselves scientists—mostly physicists, former cold warriors who now serve a conservative agenda, and vested interests like the tobacco industry. The authors name these scientists—all with powerful connections in government and the media—including Robert Jastrow, Frederick Seitz, and S. Fred Singer. Seven compelling chapters detail seven issues (acid rain, the dangers of smoking and second-hand smoke, the ozone hole, global warming, the Strategic Defense Initiative, and the banning of DDT) in which this group aimed to sow seeds of public doubt on matters of settled science. They did so by casting aspersions on the science and the scientists who produce it. Oreskes, a professor of history and science studies at UC–San Diego, and science writer Conway also emphasize how journalists and Internet bloggers uncritically repeat these charges. This book deserves serious attention for the lessons it provides about the misuse of science for political and commercial ends.
   
• UCSD (University of California at San Diego) Professor of History and Science Studies Naomi Oreskes Ph.D. presented this 58 minute lecture on the History of Global Warming Science titled The American Denial of Global Warming
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T4UF_Rmlio <--- 58 minute video lecture by Naomi Oreskes Ph.D.

Chapter Titles:

• Introduction
  • Quote from page 8: Over the course of the past twenty years these men did almost no original scientific research on any of the issues in which they weighed in. Once they had been prominent researchers, but by the time they turned to the topics of our story, they were mostly attacking the work and reputations of others. In fact, on every issue, they were on the wrong side of scientific consensus.
• 1) Doubt is Our Product
• 2) Strategic Defense. Phony Facts, and the Creation of the George C. Marshall Institute
  • Ronald Reagan wanted SDI (a.k.a. Star Wars) because he was convinced that a nuclear conflict was winnable; Around this time, scientists were just beginning to understand how dinosaurs became extinct 65 million years ago after a 10 km asteroid struck the earth triggering an "impact winter"; more than 6500 American scientists (including Carl Sagan) were convinced that a nuclear war would result in "nuclear winter" which (according to climate models) would catastrophically reduce the food supply for years to come; cold-warrior atomic scientists (friendly to the white house) were employed to cast doubt on any science which did not support their political objectives; this included attacks on the usefulness of climate models which would reappear during the attacks on climate change.
  • NSR comment: the US congress allocated 60 billion dollars to implement SDI which was nearly a total waste of money (although defense contractors did very well). Think about this next time you notice the now decaying American infrastructure which used to be the envy of the world.
• 3) Sowing the Seeds of Doubt: Acid Rain
• 4) Constructing a Counternarrative: The Fight over the Ozone Hole
• 5) What's Bad Science? Who Decides? The Fight over Secondhand Smoke
  • Quote from page 154: Peer-review is a topic that is impossible to make sexy, but it's crucial to understand, because it is what makes science science -- and not just a form of opinion. The idea is simple: no scientific claim can be considered legitimate until it has undergone critical scrutiny by other experts. At minimum, peer-reviewers look for obvious mistakes in data gathering, analysis, and interpretation. Usually they go further, addressing the quality and quantity of data, the reasoning linking the evidence to its interpretation, the mathematical formulae or computer simulations used to analyze and interpret the data, and even the prior reputation of the claimant. (If the person is thought to do sloppy work, or has previously been involved in spurious claims, he or she can expect to attract tougher scrutiny). Scientific journals submit all papers to peer review. Typically three experts are asked to comment. If the reviews are very divided, the editor may seek additional voices, and he may weigh in his judgment as well. Many papers go through two or more rounds, as authors try to correct concerns raised by reviewers. If they fail, the paper will be rejected, and the authors go back to the drawing board -- or try another, less prestigious, journal. Conferences are usually less strict, which is why conferences papers are not generally considered serious -- and generally do not count in academic circles for promotion and tenure -- until published in peer-reviewed journals. The reviewers must also be real experts -- they must know enough to be able to judge the methods used and the claims made -- and they must not have a close relationship, either personal or professional, with the person whose work is being judged. Editors spend considerable time finding people who meet these criteria. And this is all done for free. Scientists review papers as part of a communal system in which everyone is expected to review other people's papers, with the understanding that others will in turn review theirs.
• 6) The Denial of Global Warming
• 7) Denial Rides Again: The Revisionist Attack on Rachel Carson
  • Why would these people find it necessary to attack Rachel Carson's book "Silent Spring"? Because to some people her book represents "a failure of free market economics which could only be fixed by government regulation".
  • Today there seems to be a revisionist view of the ban on DDT which is linked to a huge loss of life in Africa and India. In fact, some modern science denialists claim Rachel Carson killed more people than Hitler or Stalin. Here are a few facts:
    • the US ban was (obviously) domestic and did not apply it to other countries. DDT was always manufactured for export to the rest of the world
    • insects were already exhibiting resistance to DDT around the time it was banned in the US. How could this happen? DDT was used both "to control disease locally with spot spraying" and "applied broadly on farms, parks, and wild life refuges". This is not much different than the widespread use of antibiotics on farms today which lead to more virulent forms of bacteria including e-coli.
    • NSR Comment: My personal recollection of this time involved not seeing any birds of prey (owls, hawks, falcons, and eagles) for almost 20 years because DDT had accumulated in their reproduction systems which resulted in too little calcium going into their eggs. If DDT could accumulate in birds at the top of the food chain then a reasonable doubt existed for human health. Science and government regulation worked during this time and the Nixon Administration did the correct thing by banning the widespread domestic application of DDT (but not its manufacture for export). IMHO, the allowing widespread use of DDT would be tantamount to allowing the unrestricted use of antibiotics.
  • The authors made a very good comparison between today's misrepresentation of facts with themes found in George Orwell's book "1984" (newspeak, revising history, censorship of truth for political reasons, etc.). Modern attacks on real peer-reviewed science by purveyors of junk science seem to be found everywhere and the internet and blogs only seem to add to the confusion. Is it any wonder, then, that modern citizens believe junk science? (for example, that vaccines cause autism even though peer-reviewed science has proved that the autism rates are nearly identical in groups of people vaccinated compared to groups of people not vaccinated)   
• Conclusion: Of Free Speech and Free Markets
  • Quote from page 261: Again we turn to Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom where he claimed that "the great advances in civilization, in industry or in agriculture, have never come from centralized government". To historians of technology, this would be laughable had it not been written (five years after Sputnik) by one of the most influential economists of the second half of the twentieth century.
  • NSR Comment: So here are just a few examples of great advances done by, or paid for, centralized government:
    • Requiring machines to manufacture interchangeable parts (for the American Civil War's munitions industry). Using machines to produce products is what really kicked-off the industrial age.
    • Aircraft (sponsoring commercialization of the Wright Brothers initial design; sponsoring mail plane service, military development of bombers and jets which fed back into the commercial aircraft industry)
    • RADAR + SONAR
    • Nuclear power
    • Space craft (including weather and communications satellites)
    • Computers (initially developed for computing artillery trajectories)
    • Interstate Highway System (Dwight D. Eisenhower)
    • Transistors
    • Integrated Circuits also known as chips. For 10 years the American government was the only customer willing to take a chance with chips:
      1. guidance systems for Minuteman missiles.
      2. Onboard electronics for the Gemini and Apollo spacecraft
    • Internet (originally called ARPAnet because funding came from ARPA which was later renamed to DARPA; ARPA was established during 1958 in response to the Soviet launching of Sputnik)
    • World Wide Web (graphic applications running on the internet; web-servers and web-browsers are just two examples)
    • Solid matter computer displays (LED, LCD, Plasma)
    • Antibiotics
    • Genome Sequencing including the start of the human genome project (which was finished with public-private cooperation). BTW, since the public portion of this project was distributed to universities around the world, this effort required: the internet, computers, and sequencing robots which were all based upon chips.
• Epilogue: A New View of Science
  •  this chapter was so stimulating that I read it twice.
  • The main thesis here is that (contrary to popular belief) science is almost never done by lone scientists working away in their own labs. Science is done by a scientific community where each scientific hypothesis is judged by a jury of one's peers (namely, peer review).
  • So science did not advance as much by the efforts of individual heroes (e.g. Galileo, Isaac Newton) as much as it did by the efforts of scientific organizations like the Accademia dei Lincei (1603), Royal Society of London (1660), Académie des sciences (1666). This theme resonated with another book I was reading at this time titled Seeing Further: The Story of Science and The Royal Society
• Acknowledgements
• Permissions
• Notes
  • 1047 citations and external references (making this book more of a documented history of how some American scientists allowed their cold war politics to confuse almost every issue; they were assisted by right-wing think tanks to hoodwink unsuspecting news broadcasters and print publishers who thought they were only presenting "a balanced view")
• Index

 This book is VERY highly recommended to anyone who...

• wonder why "peer-reviewed scientists" are attacked by "non-peer-reviewed scientists working for big tobacco, big pharma, the fossil fuel industry, as well as political and economic think tanks"
• wondered how conservative politics shifted from "the environment" to "big money"
  Facts:
  • Conservative presidents from Theodore Roosevelt through to Richard Nixon equated some part of their administration to also conserving air, land, and water.
    • Theodore Roosevelt's administration was well known for setting aside large tracts of wilderness areas for recreational use by current and future citizens
    •  Richard Nixon's administration created: The EPA (Environmental Protection Agency), "The Clean Air Act", "The Clean Water Act", "Banned DDT", etc.
  • Conservative presidents starting with Ronald Regan (stating: "government was in the way") openly attacked government organizations like the EPA while turning a blind eye to the efforts of big business. Meanwhile people supporting these pro-business changes labeled environmentalists as left-wing liberals, tree-huggers, and enviro-nazis. Then the Bush-Cheney administration had no problem opening protected wilderness to oil and mining companies.
• wondered why some people have such faith in the "unfettered free market". Can anyone give me one example where pollution control targets were ever adhered to without government legislation?
• wondered if the "science denial movement" (which was started by conservative scientists working for "big tobacco") might have been extended by that other large faction of conservatives, namely "the religious right".
  • a few right-wing organizations you may wish to inspect (be sure to: search for words like "tobacco", "second hand smoke", "climate change", etc. be sure to: check funding)
    • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_C._Marshall_Institute
    • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heartland_Institute
• wondered why conservatives claim that a liberal-bias exists in the US media when in 2010, the US was home to 76 right-wing think tanks but only 4 left-wing think tanks. (NSR Comment: I don't think there should be any think tanks; but when you also include right-wing newspapers and magazines as well as Rupert Murdoch's FOX Broadcasting Company, the whole of American society looks pretty much right-wing to me) 

Seeing Further: The Story of Science and The Royal Society (2010)
edited by Bill Bryson

 science lover's "must have"

• 22 essays celebrating the 350^th anniversary of the Royal Society of London
• The Society of London began in November 1660 when a dozen men gathered at Gresham College to discuss advances in science and promote science education. A royal charter from King Charles II triggered a name change to the Royal Society of London. This organization was responsible these two (of many) advances:
  1. shifting science publications from Latin to English opened this field to a larger segment of the population
  2. requiring peer-review prior to publishing (was the only way to end the repetition of nonsense)
• The Royal Society of London only enforced a few rules:
  • no discussion of religion
  • no discussion of politics
  • no discussion of news unless it relates to science
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Society
• http://royalsociety.org/
  • http://350.royalsociety.org/

In Search of the Multiverse (2009)
by John Gribbin

Personal Comment: For some reason I don't fully understand, many members of the public learned about quantum weirdness then use it to justify any other weird idea. IMHO, the many worlds interpretation of Quantum Mechanics only throws gasoline on the problem (so to speak). That said, this book is still worth a read even if just to understand why this idea hasn't been discarded by all scientists.

• Chapter 1 (The Coming of Quantum Cats) takes us through to the world of Hugh Everett (the theorist who gave us the "many worlds interpretation")
• Chapter 2 (Cosmic Coincidences Revisited) justifies the purchase of this book. Here is just one observation relating the strength of gravity to other fundamental forces:
  • In order to move to a more stable configuration, atoms less massive than iron would like to fuse via the strong force into more massive atoms, but the force of Electromagnetic Repulsion (between the two nuclei) attempts to block it.
    • If the EM force was only a little stronger then the universe would consist of only lighter elements like hydrogen and helium because there would have been no fusion (no carbon = no humans)
    • If the EM force was only a little weaker then the universe would consist of only heavier elements because everything would have already fused all the way up to iron (no carbon = no humans). 
  • gravity is of zero importance at the atomic level
  • gravity in a star is able to overwhelm the electromagnetic force to enable fusion (thus converting hydrogen into heavier elements)
  • the mass of a carbon atom is: 1 x 10 ^-26 Kg
  • the mass of our sun is: 2 x 10 ³⁰ Kg
  • the mass of an average adult human is 1 x 10 ² Kg
  • Just counting zeros, a human is 28 zeros more massive than a single carbon atom while the sun is 28 zeros more massive than a human. Ignoring for the moment that whales are much heavier than humans while ants are much lighter, isn't it fascinating that humans are almost exactly in the middle between where gravity is of zero consequence (atoms) to where gravity can overwhelm the electromagnetic force (sun)?

Asimov's "Robots and Foundation" 15-book Set

In one of Richard Feynman's books I recall him stating something like "If you really want to understand something then you must acquire books then be willing to read them at least twice". While I'm certain that Feynman was referring to math and sciences, no one would argue that this is also the key to fully understanding the collected works of William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, or Arthur Conan Doyle.

 very highly recommended

It had been 7-years since I had read Asimov's Favorite Fifteen in the order recommended by the author. For this reason (along with the fact that I was in another sci-fi dry spell) I began reading Asimov's Favorite Fifteen again. Just like what happens whenever you replay a piece of classical music from Bach or Mozart, I am getting much more out of Asimov's stories.

1. I, Robot
2. Caves of Steel
3. The Naked Sun
4. Robots of Dawn
5. Robots and Empire
6. The Currents of Space
7. The Stars, Like Dust
8. Pebble in the Sky

The Greatest Show On Earth: The Evidence for Evolution (2010)
by Richard Dawkins

 science lover's "must have"

• I have read almost every popular publication by Dawkins and can tell you that this is his best work yet. I liked it so much that I immediately read it a second time.
• Chapter 4 ("Silence and Slow Time")
  • Excerpt from page 85:
    If the history-deniers who doubt the fact of evolution are ignorant of biology, those who think the world began less than ten thousand years ago are worse than ignorant, they are deluded to the point of perversity. They are denying not only the facts of biology but those of physics, geology, cosmology, archaeology, history and chemistry as well. This chapter is about how we know the ages of rocks and the fossils embedded in them. It presents the evidence that the timescale on which life has operated on this planet is measured not in thousands of years but in thousands of millions of years.
  • pages 91-107 contain a superb explanation of "radioactive clocks" including Carbon-14 (half-life: 5,730 years), Potassium-40 (half-life: 1.260 billion years), as well as eight others. By the way, these clock prove the Earth is 4.6 billion years old.
  • http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/nuclear/clkroc.html
• Chapter 5 ("Before Our Very Eyes") contains a detailed explanation of a stunning experiment done by Richard Lenski and his colleagues at Michigan State University. In the experiment, 12-isolated colonies of e-coli are encouraged to grow beyond the their food resources every day (inducing a competitive pressure) over a 20-year period and are seen to evolve.
• Chapter 9 ("The Ark of the Continents") contains a superb explanation of "plate tectonics" (previously known as the Continental Drift Hypothesis) and how it affected evolution on planet earth (marsupials only in Australia; lemurs only in Madagascar; entire order of Edentata only in South America)

god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007/2010)
by Christopher Hitchens

• The title "god is not Great" is derived from the fact that Saddam Hussein inscribed the phrase "God Is Great" on the Iraqi flag (page 25). Since Saddam's actions were much more secular than sectarian, one can only assume he changed the flag to stir up religious and cultural emotions. Hitchens' properly quotes "Humans are only partly rational; Our frontal-lobes are too small and our adrenal glands are too large" so it seems that until we begin to reign-in our emotions we will be forever screwed.
• Read this book if...
  • if you wondered why people of faith are more comfortable with the death penalty than members of secular society
  • if you suspected you were not hearing the whole truth from the news publishing business. For example:
    • "fighting between Croats, Serbs and Muslims" sounds better than what really happened "fighting between Catholics, Orthodox Christian and Muslims"
    • "ethnic cleansing" is less objectionable than "religious cleansing"
  • if you thought there was something wrong with statements from religious people like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson who claiming that "the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York was God's way of punishing America"
  • if you thought there was something wrong John Ashcroft saying "that America had no King but Jesus" while the first and sixth amendments to the US  Constitution clearly state that there is no place for religion in government.
  • if you ever wondered why many Christian and Jewish leaders defended the Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa on Salman Rushdie
  • if you ever wondered why the amount of religious initiated violence far outweighs secular initiated violence (including the contributions of Genghis Khan, Hitler, Stalin, Mao)
• Personal Comment: I was a self-described DEIST-Naturalist when I started reading this book and haven't changed my position. However, Hitchen's is a self-described ATHEIST so I am wondering why his book contains the word "god" written in lower case :-)
  One religious friend told me that anyone who is not a THEIST is considered an ATHEIST (this may be a fundamentalist position) so maybe Hitchens is really a DEIST or AGNOSTIC
• Major Unofficial Categories from www.religioustolerance.org
  • Theist
  • Deist
    • includes most of the American "Founding Fathers" including Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, John Adams and James Madison. Also includes revolutionary writer "Thomas Paine" and Civil War president Abraham Lincoln.
    • www.religioustolerance.org/deism.htm
    •  www.deism.com - "God gave us reason, not religion"
    • en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deism
    • http://freethought.mbdojo.com/foundingfathers.html - Our Founding Fathers Were Not Christians
    • http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/farrell_till/myth.html - The Christian Nation Myth
  • Agnostic
  • Atheist

The Prism and the Pendulum (2003)
by Robert Crease

 science lover's "must have"

• Chapters (A thought-provoking interlude exists after each chapter):
  1. Measuring the World: Eratosthenes' Measurement of the Earth's Circumference
     Interlude: Why Science is Beautiful
  2. Dropping the Ball: The Legend of the Leaning Tower
     Interlude: Experiments and Demonstrations
  3. The Alpha Experiment: Galileo and the Inclined Plane
     • Paraphrased from Galileo's notebooks and correspondence (re: rolling a ball down an inclined plane):
       As the time increases in a single unit progression (1, 2, 3, ...) then the distance traversed by the object between each succeeding beat increases according to the odd-numbered progression (1, 3, 5, ...)
       Comments:
       1. summing the odd-number progression results in the sequence: 1, 4, 9, ...
       2. the phrase "succeeding beat" is curious. Did Galileo (who was also a musician) really employ a water timer or did he use cat gut to produce a click or beat? If he used cat gut, then wouldn't this source of friction skew the numbers?
     Interlude: The Newton-Beethoven Comparison
  4. Experimentum Crucsis: Newton's Decomposition of Sunlight with Prisms
     Interlude: Does Science Destroy Beauty?
  5. Weighing the World: Cavendish's Austere Experiment
     • In a fifty-year career of obsessive work, he wrote fewer than twenty articles and no books. As a result, Ohms' Law (which describes the relationship among electrical voltage, resistance, and amperage), and Coulomb's Law (which describes the force between two electrically charged bodies) were not named for the man who first came across them. (namely Henry Cavendish)
     Interlude: Integrating Science and Popular Culture
  6. Light a Wave: Young's Lucid Analogy
     Interlude: Science and Metaphor
  7. Seeing the Earth Rotate: Foucault's Sublime Pendulum
     Interlude: Science and Subline
  8. Seeing the Electron: Millikan's Oil-Drop Experiment
     Interlude: Perception in Science
  9. Dawning Beauty: Rutherford's Discovery of the Atomic Nucleus
     Interlude: Artistry in Science
  10. The Only Mystery: The Quantum Interference of Single Electrons
      Interlude: Runners-Up
      Conclusion: Can Science Still Be Beautiful
• Author's web site: http://www.robertpcrease.com/books.html

The Great Equations: Breakthroughs in Science from Pythagoras to Heisenberg (2008, 2009)
by Robert P. Crease

 science lover's "must have"

• Although most people can recite Einstein's famous little equation, even if we don't know quite what it means, who has heard of the 18th-century mathematician Leonhard Euler, let alone know anything at all about his famous equation? Crease, a Stony Brook philosophy professor and popular science writer, has already taken on the ten most beautiful experiments in science in The Prism and the Pendulum, and in this enjoyable book he explores 10 rather beautiful equations. He begins with the beguiling simplicity of the equation that bears Pythagoras' name (although he says the Greek wasn't the first to discover it) and moves on to Newton's second law of motion and law of universal gravitation, the second law of thermodynamics, Maxwell's celebrated equations, discoveries by Einstein and Schrödinger and, finally, Heisenberg's famous uncertainty principle. Crease explains the significance of each of these formulas for science and, in brief interludes between chapters, explores the journeys these scientists took from ignorance to knowledge, and the social lives of their theories—their impact on the larger culture. Any reader who aspires to be scientifically literate will find this a good starting place.
• Comments:
  • I purchased this book with the intention of only reading Chapter 6 (James Clerk Maxwell) but am now reading the whole thing because of the high signal-to-noise ratio.
  • This material is heavily cross-referenced (a good thing since most stuff published on the internet is not)
  • Chapters (An interlude exists after each chapter):
    1. Pythagoras's Theorem (~700 BC).
    2. Newton's Second Law of Motion (1666).
    3. Newton's Universal Gravitation Law (1666).
    4. Euler's Equation (1740's).
    5. The Second Law of Thermodynamics (1840's - 1850's).
    6. Maxwell's Equations (1860's).
    7. E=mc^2 (1905) from Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity
    8. Einstein's General Theory of Relativity (1915).
    9. Schrödinger's Equation (1926).
    10. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle (1927).
• Author's web site: http://www.robertpcrease.com/thegreatequations.html
• Caveat: page 99 of the hardcover edition describes equation "y=2^x" but the shows a graph for equation "y=x^2". I just checked the soft cover edition which contains the correct graph. That said, this is still a highly recommended book.

The Discovery of Global Warming (2008)
by Spencer R. Weart

 very highly recommended  for anyone interested in science or climate change

• Author Spencer Weart was originally trained as a physicist but is now a science historian
• This book The Discovery of Global Warming is a true gem containing no-nonsense facts.
• The second edition (2008), extensively revised and updated
• You should really buy this book but if you can't then please check out the online edition here: http://www.aip.org/history/climate/
• Recommendations:
  • A Discover Top Science Book of the Year
  • A USA Today best book of the year
  • A Scientific American "Editors Recommend" selection
  • http://www.aip.org/history/climate/reviews.html
• Excerpt: In 1973, Nicholas (Nick) Shackleton nailed it all down for certain. What made it possible was the new magnetic-reversal dates established by radioactive potassium, plus Shackleton's uncommon combination of technical expertise in different fields. A splendid deep-sea core had been pulled — "one of the best and most complete records of the entire Pleistocene that is known" — the famous core Vema 28-238 (named after the Lamont Observatory's oceanographic research vessel, a converted luxury yacht). It reached back over a million years, and included the most recent reversal of the Earth's magnetic field, which geologists dated at a bit over 700,000 years ago. This calibrated the chronology for the entire core. As a further benefit, Shackleton managed to extract and analyze the rare foraminifera that lived in the deep sea, and which reflected basic oceanic changes independent of the fluctuating sea-surface temperatures. The deep-sea forams showed the same isotopic variations as surface ones, confirming that the variations gave a record of the withdrawal of water to form ice sheets. When Shackleton showed his graph of long-term change to a roomful of climate scientists, a spontaneous cheer went up. The core Vema 28-238 and a few others contained such a long run of consistent data that it was possible to analyze the numbers with a mathematically sophisticated "frequency-domain" calculation, a well-established technique for picking out the lengths of cycles in a set of data. Detailed measurements and numerical calculations found a set of favored frequencies, a spectrum of regular cycles visible amid the noise of random fluctuations. The first unimpeachable results (well, almost unimpeachable) were achieved in 1976 by James Hays, John Imbrie and Shackleton. The trio not only analyzed the oxygen-isotope record in selected cores from the Indian Ocean, but checked their curves against temperatures deduced from the assemblage of foraminifera species found in each layer. The long cores proved beyond doubt what Emiliani had stoutly maintained — there had been not four major ice ages, but dozens. The analysis showed cycles with lengths roughly 20,000 and 40,000 years, and especially the very strong cycle around 100,000 years, all in agreement with Milankovitch calculations. Extrapolating the curves ahead, the group predicted cooling for the next 15,000 years. As Emiliani, Kukla, and other specialists had already concluded several years earlier, the Earth was gradually — indeed, perhaps quite soon as geologists reckoned time — heading into a new ice age. These results, like so many in paleoclimatology, were promptly called into question. For one thing, there was no solid reason to suppose that our current interglacial period would be of average length and was therefore nearing its end. (And in fact, as noted below, improved orbital calculations and paleoclimate data would eventually show that the natural end of the current interglacial is tens of thousands of years away.) But the main results withstood all criticism. Confirmation came from other scientists who likewise found cycles near twenty and forty thousand years, give or take a few thousand. The most impressive analysis remained the pioneering work of Hays, Imbrie, and Shackleton. They could even split the 15,000 year cycle into a close pair of cycles with lengths of 19,000 and 23,000 years — exactly what the best new astronomical calculations predicted. By the late 1970s, most scientists were convinced that orbital variations acted as a "pacemaker" to set the timing of ice ages. Science magazine reported in 1978 that the evidence for the Milankovitch theory was now "convincing," and the theory "has recently gained widespread acceptance as a factor" in climate change.

SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes,
and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance (2009)
by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

• Introduction: Putting the Freak in Economics
• Chapter 1: How is a street prostitute like a department-store Santa?
• Chapter 2: Why should suicide bombers buy life insurance?
• Chapter 3: Unbelievable stories about apathy and altruism
• Chapter 4: The fix is in---and it's cheap and simple
• Chapter 5: What do Al Gore and Mount Pinatubo have in common?

Collider: The Search for the World's Smallest Particles (2009)
by Paul Halpern

A history of experimental particle physics (particle accelerators to colliders) from Ernest Rutherford to the LHC (Large Hadron Collider). This book also contains some shocking information about how and why the SSC (Superconducting Super Collider) was shut down after $2 billion was already spent and 13 miles of tunnel was already dug.

Blackberry The Inside Story of Research in Motion (2010)
by Rod McQueen

The BlackBerry is — quite literally — everywhere. President Barack Obama admits he can't live without it. Oprah Winfrey declared on her show that the BlackBerry is one of her "favorite things." BusinessWeek put the case for owning one bluntly in an article entitled "No BlackBerry: No Life." Launched in 1984 by Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie with on a $15,000 loan, Research in Motion (RIM) has grown into one of the largest and most profitable companies in the world. The reason: the BlackBerry. RIM had sold more than 50 million BlackBerrys by 2009 and sales of the handheld device generates annual profits in excess of $11 billion. BlackBerry: The Untold Story of Research in Motion is bestselling author Rod McQueen’s fascinating and absorbing biography of the device’s incredible popularity, as well as a never-before-seen glimpse into its origins and development — and the geniuses who were its inspiration.

2010: Odyssey Two (1982)
by Arthur C. Clarke

• In January of 2010 I watched a DVD copy of the 1984 film 2010: The Year We Make Contact and was so moved that I decided to purchase a hard-cover copy of the book 2010: Odyssey Two ($8). What a joy to reread.
• While the movie begins with a discussion at the VLA (Very Large Array) in Arizona, the book begins on the detector assembly of the 300 m (1000 ft) radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico.
• Chapter 4 (titled "SAL 9000") is almost identical to what you saw in the movie
• From the book we learn that Heywood Floyd is a little uncomfortable of the 20 year difference between himself and his second wife. So on reason why he agrees to go on the mission to Jupiter is that hibernation will suspend 2.5 years of his life which might improve their subsequent time together.
• I had forgotten the final chapter titled Epilogue 20,001
• No where does Clarke tell us what SAL 9000 means (could it just be Secondary ALgorithmic computer?)
• Chandra mentioned that the information he learned during the restart of HAL 9,000 will allow him to begin work on HAL 10,000

The Evolution of Charles Darwin (2009)
by CBC Audio

 very highly recommended  for people wanting more details about Darwin, and the times in which he lived.

• this 4-disc package from CBC Audio is a bargain at $40. I recently listened to it a second time and was shocked by the amount of stuff I missed (or forgot). Perhaps I will listen to it every February as a memorial to Darwin's birth.
• if you don't want to buy it you can still listen to it free-of-charge here:
  http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/features/darwin/index.html
• No where in Darwin's book "On the Origin of the Species" can you find...
  • that man is descended from apes (although he did believe that humans and apes are descended from a common ancestor)
  • the word evolution although the word creation was used over 100 times
  • god does not exist (because Darwin was not an atheist but called himself a deist in his autobiography)
• Darwin's idea for evolution was inspired by geologist Charles Lyell's book Principles of Geology
  • this book was given to Darwin by Robert FitzRoy who was captain of HMS Beagle
  • Darwin experienced an earthquake in Chile and so immediately accepted the principle of Lyle's book that the Earth keeps changing.
    
• These next links have nothing to do with the 4-disc set but is worth a visit nevertheless:
  • http://archives.cbc.ca/science_technology/natural_science/topics/3696/
  • http://darwin-online.org.uk/
  • http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/beta/evolution/intelligent-design-trial.html

Einstein's Mistakes (2008)
by Hans Ohanian

• One theoretical physicist critiques the works of others
• This book is not an attack on Einstein, it just proves he was a gifted mortal
• Provides a good overview of Galileo's inquisition by the Catholic Church
• Galileo suffered from hatter's syndrome (lead poisoning cause by his alchemy experiments)
• E=mc² was known before Einstein's five papers of 1905.

He Knew He Was Right (2008)
by John Gribbin

Younger Next Year: Live Strong, Fit, and Sexy Until You're 80 and Beyond (2007)
by Chris Crowley and Henry S. Lodge M.D.

• This book was loaned to me by a family member while on vacation and it turned out to be something of a surprise.
  It is written by two authors:
  1.  Chris Crowley (a lawyer ) wrote most of the odd chapters which contain mostly general health and exercise information.
  2. Henry S. Lodge (a board certified medical doctor) wrote most of the even chapters containing biological and scientific details. Includes lots of good information about how single cells evolved into fungus and jelly fish then into mammals and humans.
• This is the first book I've read which contains a simplified explanation of the "use it or lose it" principle seen in human biology
  • Use It:
    • Exercise triggers a large release of C-6 (Cytokine-6 which is an interleukin) to tear down (catabolic) muscle fibre damaged by exercise. Then, large amounts of C-6 trigger the release of C-10 to build up (anabolic) muscle fibre just destroyed
  • Loose It:
    • Not exercising allows your body to release a background trickle of C-6 which is below the threshold level for triggering C-10. The background trickle will cause you to waste away.
• Quote: 40-years ago it was considered normal behavior to smoke two packs of cigarettes a day (just watch an old video of NASA launch control rooms). Today it is not considered normal behavior to smoke at all. In 20 years time it will be considered normal behavior to exercise 6-days a week (only 45 minutes minimum). Two light workouts followed by one heavier workout.
• This is also the first book I've seen which describes (and teaches) the difference between Theoretical Maximum Heart Rate (the old "220 minus your age" thing) vs. your "Actual Maximum Heart Rate"
• Why do the authors suggest exercising at least 6-days a week? It has to do with how humans evolved in Africa. Fundamentalist Christians who have a problem accepting this point of view will be restricted to the biblical average life span of thee-score-and-ten (70 years)

Thomas Paine's Rights of Man: A Biography (Books That Changed the World)
by Christopher Hitchens

• Thomas Paine's critique of monarchy and introduction of the concept of human rights influenced both the French and the American revolutions, argues Vanity Fair contributor and bestselling author Hitchens (God Is Not Great) in this incisive addition to the Books That Changed the World series. Paine's ideas even influenced later independence movements among the Irish, Scots and Welsh. In this lucid assessment, Hitchens notes that in addition to Common Sense's influence on Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence, Paine wrote in unadorned prose that ordinary people could understand. Hitchens reads Paine's rejection of the ministrations of clergy in his dying moments as an instance of his unyielding commitment to the cause of rights and reason. But Hitchens also takes Paine to task for appealing to an idealized state of nature, a rhetorical move that, Hitchens charges, posits either a mythical past or an unattainable future and, Hitchens avers, disordered the radical tradition thereafter. Hitchens writes in characteristically energetic prose, and his aversion to religion is in evidence, too. Young Paine found his mother's Anglican orthodoxy noxious, Hitchens notes: Freethinking has good reason to be grateful to Mrs Paine.
  
• NSR Comments:
  • Thomas Paine (1737-1809) wrote about many things including:
    • worker's rights and the labor movement
    • racial equality including proposals to abolish slavery 100 years before Lincoln
    • the importance of the separation between church and state
    • democracy including "no taxation without representation" (which is different from what modern tea-party people want which is "no taxation" or "no government)
    • 1776: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Sense_(pamphlet)
    • 1791: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rights_of_Man
    • 1794: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Reason
    • Click the following link to watch a PBS video discussion about Thomas Paine
      www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/06122009/watch2.html

Thomas Paine and the Promise of America (2005)
by Harvey Kaye

• The second chapter covers 18th century life in England (which helped forge Paine's intellect) and justifies the purchase of this book. For example, while it was true that all Englishmen had civil rights, full civil rights were only granted to:
  
      Men, who owned land, who earned more than £40 per year, who were Anglican.
  
  This meant that a wealthy upper class had more rights than members of the lower classes, and god help you if you were up against one of them in a court of law. Life in 18th century America was not much different where you only needed to be a White Man of property.
• NSR Comments:
  • Thomas Paine (1737-1809) wrote about many things including:
    • worker's rights and the labor movement
    • racial equality including proposals to abolish slavery 100 years before Lincoln
    • the importance of the separation between church and state
    • democracy including "no taxation without representation" (which is different from what modern tea-party people want which is "no taxation" or "no government)
    • 1776: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Sense_(pamphlet)
    • 1791: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rights_of_Man
    • 1794: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Reason
    • Click the following link to watch a PBS video discussion about Thomas Paine
      www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/06122009/watch2.html

First Principles: The Crazy Business of Doing Serious Science (2009)
by Howard Burton

• how Howard Burton (MA, PhD) and RIM CEO Mike Lazaridis create Waterloo's Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics
• Howard Burton was a freshly-minted physics PhD from the University of Waterloo when a random job query resulted in a strange—albeit fateful—meeting with Research-in-Motion founder and co-CEO Mike Lazaridis. Mike had a crazy idea: he wanted to fund a state-of-the-art science research facility and bring in the most innovative scientists from around the world. Its mission? To study and probe the most complex, intriguing and fundamental problems of science. Mike was ready to commit $100 million of his own money to get it started. But that wasn’t his only crazy idea. He wanted Howard to run it. First Principles is part-biography and part lively rumination on the world—and the world of science in particular—by the engaging physicist and former director of the prestigious Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario. Since its founding in 1999, the Institute has received more than $125 million in government grants, not including the eye-popping sum of $150 million that Mike Lazaridis has donated from his own personal fortune.

Climate Wars (2008)
by Gwynne Dyer

 highly recommended  for everyone in the modern world

• Although the current warming trend began with the industrial revolution, it really ramps with global industrialization after World War 2. During this time industrialization of farms enables human population to grow from 2 billion (in 1927) to 6 billion (by 1999) with a projected value of 7 billion by 2012.
• Average atmospheric CO2 levels:
  • 180 ppm during the previous ice age
  • 280 ppm after the previous ice age
  • 380 ppm after the beginning of the industrial age
  so human activities are equal to the changes which moved our planet out of an ice age
• Since oceans are colder than land, global temperature averages can be very misleading. For example, an average temperature increase of 1.3°C would translate into 2°C over land and 4-5°C over the polar regions.
• Melting winter snow and glacial ice is responsible for most river water in the summer time. A warmer planet will cause three major changes:
  • rivers will be higher in the winter but much lower in the summer
    • the Tibetan plateau feeds 6 rivers running through India, Pakistan, and China. What will happen when these people can't feed themselves?
    • Rivers feeding California will eventually run dry in the summertime.
  • the ocean levels are already 20 cm higher since 1880 which means that storm surges will destroy human communities situated too close to river deltas (perhaps Hurricane Katrina at New Orleans was the first "heads up" warning for the west; people in India and indo-china have been experiencing these surges for a lot longer)
  • Hadley Cells involve ocean evaporation at the equator which results in rainfall north and south of the equator. A hotter ocean means the cells can rise to a higher height before falling as rain. This higher height will result in more droughts and desertification (Australia has been experiencing increased droughts for the past 6 years)
• Chapter 7 contains shocking information from paleontologists like Peter Ward. It appears that four out of five mass extinctions were due to climate change (one was due to an asteroid strike 65 million years ago).
  We all know that "people who refuse to learn history are doomed to repeated it". I now believe this statement also refers to information from sources like the "fossil record", analysis of "ice cores", etc. - NSR

The Upside of Down : Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization (2007)
by Thomas Homer-Dixon

• http://www.theupsideofdown.com/ be sure to click on the various horizontal buttons like ROME
• The author starts by making a detailed analysis of how much energy was required to build the Roman Coliseum 1900 years ago then uses this data to show how we might be repeating the same mistakes.
• Petroleum:
  • World-wide Petroleum discovery peaked in the 1960s
  • EROI (Energy Return On Investment)
    • 1930s:
      • the energy found in 1 barrel of oil was required to produce ~ 100 barrels of oil (from depths of 1000 feet or less)
    • 2000s:
      • the energy found in 1 barrel of oil is required to produce ~ 16 barrels of oil (from depths of 2000 feet or more)
      • the energy found in 1 barrel of oil is required to produce ~ 4 barrels of oil from the Alberta Tar sands (proof that the low hanging fruit is almost gone)
• Since no one can live without food, shouldn't we make sure that all our farmers have enough petroleum to feed us all? This means that other human activities may need to be powered by technologies like nuclear, wind, solar.

The Currents of Space (1950, 2009)
by Isaac Asimov

• First published in 1952 and republished in hardcover on May-2009
• it is one of the 15-Books Suggested by Asimov
• This was a very pleasurable read. Even through the story is now 57 years old, it is still relevant while standing the test of time.
  (I do not understand how Asimov was able to write this story so that is didn't become "dated"; perhaps it has something to do with paying slightly more attention to humanity and slightly less attention to technology)
  • I recently read Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes story "The Adventure of the Six Napoleons" and marveled at the timelessness it. While reading Asimov's The Currents of Space it became apparent to me that Isaac Asimov, and his work, will become immortalized like that of Shakespeare and Arthur Conan Doyle.

Moon Lander: How We Developed the Apollo Lunar Module (2004)
by Thomas J. Kelly

• published by Smithsonian Books in 2004, this hardcover edition weighs in at 283 pages.
• Unlike other Apollo books, this book is more about engineering than space flight. That said, anyone working in a technical field will find this an enjoyable read.

Apollo in Perspective (2000)
by Jonathan Allday

 highly recommended  for space enthusiasts

• Subtitled "Spaceflight Then and Now", this hardcover book weighs in at 320 pages.
• What a surprise. An internet friend suggested I buy this book just to read chapters 5 (The Apollo Command and Service Modules) and 6 (The Lunar Module) but I decided to read the whole thing because it is a treasure trove of information. Here are the chapter names with a few comments thrown in:
  • 1) Apollo in Outline
  • 2) The Best Driver in Physics
    • falling, momentum (P=mv), the physics of rocket motors
  • x) Intermission 1: The Saturn V booster rocket
  • 3) Rocketry
    • Thrust, Impulse, Propellant (fossil, cryogenic, hypergolic, solid), Applying Newton's Laws to a Spacecraft, Real Rocket Engines, Staging, A Typical "Saturn V" Launch, Future Developments in Rocketry (including nuclear engines, solar sails, ion motors)
    • Thrust (T=u • Δm/Δt   where: u=exhaust velocity)
    • Impulse (I=u/g   where: u=exhaust velocity)
    • Given: F=ma   Since: m=Δv/Δt   Then: F=m • Δv/Δt   Then: FΔt=mΔv (note: one definition of impulse is: FΔt)
  • x) Intermission 2: From Mercury to Gemini
  • 4) Orbits and Trajectories
    • including: Orbits, Centripetal Forces, Gravity and Orbits, Other Orbits (includes Elliptical Orbits), Simulating Gravity (includes examples of Babylon 5), Changing Orbits (includes Circularization Burns and when to do them, Hohmann transfers), Flying to the Moon (includes: The Apollo third stage was under fueled so that the CSM would require 3 days to get to the moon rather than one; why? because a faster velocity meant more breaking would be required to be captured by lunar gravity but the SPS engine was too small for this), Trajectories to Mars (includes: why a lower delta-V is required to get to Mars than than to the Moon), Space Stations
  • 5) The Apollo Command and Service Modules
    • Mission Modes, The Command Module (includes a scary description of the Apollo 1 fire), The Service Module
  • x) Intermission 3: Inertial Guidance and Computers
    • The Need for a Guidance System, Guidance and Control Systems, The Apollo Computer, The Apollo Computer in Perspective
  • 6) The Lunar Module
    • Designing the First Spacecraft, The Ascent Stage, The Descent Stage, Space Suits, The Lunar Rover, The Ascent to Orbit
  • x) Intermission 4: The Three 'ings' (Eating, Sleeping, Excreting)
  • 7) The Shuttle and its Followers
    • The space shuttle, Shuttle Components,
  • x) Intermission 5: The Politics of Apollo
  • 8) Mars
  • x) Intermission 6: Godspeed John Glenn (for both of his missions with a 36-year gap)
  • 9) Journeys to the Stars
    • Orion and project Daedalus, Laser propulsion, Ramjet, Antimatter Drive, Colony ships, Wormholes, etc.
  • x) Appendix 1: Glossary
  • x) Appendix 2: Apollo Mission Summary
  • x) Appendix 3: Development of Boosters
  • x) Appendix 4: Deriving Some of the Maths
  • x) Appendix 5: Further Information
  • x) Index

Reinventing Gravity (2009)
by John W Moffat

  highly recommended  for people interested in science

• This book is a delightful read which begins with a short overview of physics from Galileo and Newton through to Einstein. It explains how scientists struggle with their models while new data is introduced from various sciences including: electromagnetic waves, gravity, quantum mechanics, nuclear energy, and string theory. Sometimes gaps in our knowledge were attributed to things like "ether" and the author thinks that we've made the same thing by inventing "Dark Energy", etc.
• Chapters:
  • Part 1
    1. The Greeks to Newton
    2. Einstein
  • Part 2
    3. The Beginnings of Modern Cosmology
    4. Dark Matter (was invented to explain why galaxies cluster together rather than fly apart)
    5. Conventional Black Holes
  • Part 3
    6. Inflation and Variable Speed of Light (VSL)
    7. New Cosmological Data
  • Part 4
    8. Strings and Quantum Gravity
    9. Other Alternative Gravity Theories
    10. Modified Gravity (MOG)
  • Part 5  
    11. The Pioneer Anomaly (the velocities of these satellites do not agree with Newton or Einstein)
    12. MOG as a Predictive Theory
    13. Cosmology Without Dark Matter
    14. Do Black Holes Exist in Nature?
    15. Dark Energy and the Accelerating Universe
    16. The External Universe
  • End (51 pages)
    • Epilogue
    • Notes
    • Glossary
    • Bibliography
    • Acknowledgements
    • Index

Playing With Planets (Dutch: 2006, English: 2009)
by Gerard 't Hooft

• If you think the future is a mystery, think again. With a solid foothold in realism, an extraordinary insight into scientific and technological developments, and a dry sense of humor, Nobel laureate Professor Gerard 't Hooft confidently dissects fact from fiction and shows us what our future might really hold. Professor 'T Hooft takes the reader firmly by the hand and, within the boundaries of solid physics and proven laws of nature, takes us on a ride into the world of the future, which holds remarkable surprises for us all. "Do you dream of intergalaxy space travel, time warps, and mini-mes?" 'T Hooft asks. "Then please, get yourself some more science fiction books, for fiction it is. But for those who are interested in the real world, let me tell you what we can expect for the future". We meet robots with a sense of irony, ride elevators into space, and build floating cities; let us just say that "Playing with Planets", which is translated from the original Dutch edition by Professor 'T Hooft's daughter Saskia, supports the old adage that truth is indeed stranger than fiction.
• Recommended reading for anyone interested in Hard-Sci-Fi and speculation

Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? Inside IBM's Historic Turnaround (2002)
by Louis V Gerstner, Jr.

• Gerstner quarterbacked one of history's most dramatic corporate turnarounds. For those who follow business stories like football games, his tale of the rise, fall and rise of IBM might be the ultimate slow-motion replay. He became IBM's CEO in 1993, when the gargantuan company was near collapse. The book's opening section snappily reports Gerstner's decisions in his first 18 months on the job-the critical "sprint" that moved IBM away from the brink of destruction. The following sections describe the marathon fight to make IBM once again "a company that mattered." Gerstner writes most vividly about the company's culture. On his arrival, "there was a kind of hothouse quality to the place. It was like an isolated tropical ecosystem that had been cut off from the world for too long. As a result, it had spawned some fairly exotic life-forms that were to be found nowhere else." One of Gerstner's first tasks was to redirect the company's attention to the outside world, where a marketplace was quickly changing and customers felt largely ignored. He succeeded mightily. Upon his retirement this year, IBM was undeniably "a company that mattered." Gerstner's writing occasionally is myopic. For example, he makes much of his own openness to input from all levels of the company, only to mock an earnest (and overlong) employee e-mail (reprinted in its entirety) that was critical of his performance. Also, he includes a bafflingly long and dull appendix of his collected communications to IBM employees. Still, the book is a well-rendered self-portrait of a CEO who made spectacular change on the strength of personal leadership.

The Stars, Like Dust (1951, 2008)
by Isaac Asimov

• First published in 1951 and republished in hardcover on December-2008 for the Christmas season
• it is one of the 15-Books Suggested by Asimov
• This was a very pleasurable read. Even through the story is now 57 years old, it is still relevant while standing the test of time.
  (I do not understand how Asimov was able to write this story so that is didn't become "dated"; perhaps it has something to do with paying slightly more attention to humanity and slightly less attention to technology)
• From page 37: a poem recited after the first jump into hyper-space
  The stars, like dust, encircle me
  In living mists of light;
  And all of space I seem to see
  In one vast burst of sight.
• Asimov is a hard sci-fi author which means that he publishes things that close to reality. So I think I have discovered a spot where one of his editors might have taken a liberty. On page 100 we read the following "and backward, watching the massometer, which indicates the distance from the planet's surface by measuring the intensity of the gravitational field". Asimov had a PhD in Chemistry so it is inconceivable to me that he confused "mass" with "weight". Starting on page 106, Gillbret describes a previous trip where a meteor (meteoroid?) hit the ship. Then on page 107 he properly explains that energy is a product of mass times velocity which tells me he was aware of the difference
• What a wonderful ending. And, if memory serves, was the basis for an episode of Star Trek: The Original Series. Click here if you are curious as to which episode.  

RELENTLESS: True Story of Ted Rogers (2008)
by Ted Rogers

• As president and CEO of Rogers Communications Inc., Ted Rogers is at the head of a communications and media company that operates Canada’s largest wireless carrier, its largest cable provider, 53 radio stations, 70 consumer and trade magazines, the OMNI and CityTV networks, and other properties as diverse as The Shopping Channel and the Toronto Blue Jays. Outspoken, sometimes controversial and always forward-thinking, Rogers is a legendary innovator whose brand stands among the top in Canadian business. Now, for the first time, Ted Rogers tells the story of how he built Rogers Communications into one of the largest companies in Canadian history—and in only one generation. The tragic, premature death of his father, radio pioneer Ted Rogers Sr., left his family with little except the burning desire to reclaim what they had lost. From an early age, Ted was fascinated with radio and television; he once strung wires out of his dorm room to a roof-top antenna to bring in U.S. programming to Toronto before the city had any stations. As a law student, he invested everything he had in an FM station, buying CHFI when only five percent of the market actually owned an FM radio. Success with CHFI led to the creation of Agincourt TV station CFTO. Rogers is characteristically frank about his successes and his failures. Over the years, he has faced challenges to his domain, sometimes risking so much that it nearly cost him everything. Each time, however, he has returned stronger than ever. Written in a highly accessible style, A Practical Dreamer will appeal as much to Main Street as to Bay Street. Filled with backroom deals, on-air battles and the often outrageous exploits of this communications visionary, A Practical Dreamer will ring true as the most fascinating business memoir of the year.
• CFRB = Canada's First Rogers Batteryless
• CFTR = Canada's First Ted Rogers
• Ted Rogers Senior was the inventor of the A. C. Vacuum Tube (a.k.a. Alternating Current Valve).
  http://www.ieee.ca/diglib/library/electricity/pdf/P_one_2.pdf
  Note: this following information was not described in this book:
  • Prior to the development of the A. C. Vacuum Tube, radio transmitters and receivers were powered with three battery strings. The "A" string was used to power the filament (a.k.a. cathode), the "B" string was used to power the anode, the "C" string was used to bias control grid. When your table-top radio was dead, you had to take it to the local radio shop for repair (or call the local neighborhood geek)
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_(vacuum_tube)
  • Before Rogers' invention a naked filament acted as the cathode. Rogers modified the cathode by replacing the filament with a metal emitter which is only heated by the filament. Since the filament is electrically isolated from the emitter, it can now be powered by A. C. rather than D. C.

...Related...

Edward Samuel Rogers and the Revolution of Communications (2000) by Ian A. Anthony

• A book about Edward (Ted) Rogers Sr. and his contributions to radio communications including the A. C. Vacuum Tube and Toronto radio station CFRB (Canada's First Rogers Batteryless)

On The Way To The Web (2008)
by Michael A. Banks

• describes how Sputnik started a technological revolution with one path leading to development of computer communications channels via leased lines. This evolved into circuit-based switching then finally packet-base switching.
• How ARPAnet morphs into DARPAnet.
• how the @ symbol became the separator between user-name and destination computer
• this book may be too detailed for most people

Hacking: The Art of Exploitation (2008 2nd Edition)
by Jon Erickson

• quote: "hacking is the continual pursuit of excellence in technology"
• contains a cool hacker's boot strap of how to program in "C"
• contains a cool hacker's boot strap of how to open connections on the internet (this stuff was always available in the RFCs but it is always neat when someone takes a different approach to teaching this stuff)

Valley Boy (2007)
by Tom Perkins

• This guy is somewhat of a cool character with an EE-CS from MIT and an MBA from Harvard.
• He made his first million by setting up a company named University Laboratories Inc. to manufacture and sell research lasers. His next big success was to transform Hewlett-Packard's computer division into a world wide megalith. After that he was involved in the creation of Tandem Computers. As a venture capitalist, he was  behind Compaq, Genentech, SUN Microsystems, and Google.

Classic Feynman: All the Adventures of a Curious Character (2006)
by Ralph Leighton

• covers the stories of Richard Feynman (1918-1988)
• includes a CD-ROM recording of Feynman titled "Los Alamos from Below" (~ 78 minutes)
• All engineering and space enthusiasts need to re-read the last few chapters about the Challenger (Space Shuttle) Investigation 

Good Calories, Bad Calories (2007)
by Gary Taubes

• A well researched and extensively referenced book describing how the marketing of "low fat food" by government and industry has made us all much fatter.
• This book begins with a popular low-carb weight-loss program in 1862 which was popularized by William Banting
• I was shocked to learn that people in modern medicine routinely ignored the scientific method while preferring to stick with preconceived notions "knowing that the science was just around the corner" (I guess medicine really is an art rather than a science). Each of the chapters begins with a little prolog containing snippets of the scientific method which, in my opinion, is the only tool for separating the proverbial "wheat from the chaff".
• I was shocked to learn how persuasive personalities, like that of Ancel Keys (the "K" in K-rations), were able to negatively change the direction of the whole western world without requiring any objective science. Keys' theories seem to be based on "over analysis of limited data"
• In November of 2007 I  heard a radio interview with the author which ended with professionals from the medical community calling in to attack personally attack him and his book. Some of their arguments sounded like a witch-hunt so I guess you'll need to read the book then decide for yourself. (but while listening to the medical people I remembered the old adage that "medicine is an art rather than a science")
• Lots of information touches on missionary records about Africa, India and China. Apparently there were no instances of diabetes, cancer, hemorrhoids, etc. until the natives started to consume a western diet. And just like smoking cigarettes, it takes approximately 18 years of abuse to make the damage permanent.
• Fat doesn't make you fat, carbs make you fat.
• NSR Rating: 4.5/5 (Everyone needs to read this book)

Arthur C. Clarke - The Authorized Biography (1992)
by Neil McAleer

• 430 pages and published in 1992
  Caveat: This book covers Clarke's life from 1917 up to 1991 but every true fan knows that he died in 2008 and published many books between 1992 and 2008. 3001: The Final Odyssey is just one example. Rumor has it that there are a few more books waiting to be published.
• I was shocked to learn about the Heinlein initiated feud with Clarke which was apparently started after Clarke publicly criticized Ronald Regan's SDI (Strategic Defense Initiative) commonly known as Star Wars. Apparently, Heinlein was a stanch supporter of the Republican party and didn't think a British snob should be lecturing Americans. Think about this political bias next time you read Heinlein's  "Starship Troopers".

Cosmic Consciousness (1901/2008)
by Richard Maurice Bucke

• Dr Maurice Bucke died soon after writing his treatise in 1901. He conceived his experience of Brahmic Splendour as a cosmic consciousness (divine illumination). The term has a modern ring to it but in fact, unsurprisingly, the Hindu's got there first, two and a half thousand years ago. Incredibly, they and the ancient Greeks also embraced the concept of atoms pervading earth and the cosmos. Were Dr Bucke alive today, he would assuredly have seized upon the profound implication particle physics has for our understanding of cosmic consciousness (the title of his book). Dr Bucke Revisited brings his treatise up to speed. Even so, he laid down a marker in his treatise, a stepping-stone to further our understanding of our spiritual selves.
• http://www.cosimobooks.com/bookstore_a/book_description.php?book=1766
• This book has been constantly in print since 1901
• I originally read this book in 1970 but have recently reread it after numerous discussions with my dentist and friend, Vijay. During my 1970 read, personal biases and the haste of youth limited my readings of the "accounts section" to only Jesus and Paul (I skimmed the rest). During my 2008 read I received great enjoyment from a detailed reading of all of the "accounts sections" including Buddha and Mohammed.
• Surprisingly, Bucke's main thesis is based more upon biological evolution than religion. He describes the procession from no conscious, to simple consciousness, then to self consciousness. Although this happened during the evolution of humans in the past, it also happens today as a human baby develops into an adult (this second fact can be used as a indicator to tell us when traits appeared in our evolution). And just as new traits are introduced slowly over time (like color vision), he claims that all of humanity will eventually evolve past self consciousness into a new state which he calls Cosmic Consciousness. He claims that people like Buddha, Jesus, Paul of Tarsus and Mohamed were the first humans to cross over, but eventually this trait will be in the majority rather than the minority.
  
  Modern criticism of the evolutionary argument: while having enhanced vision or hearing will lead to increased survival and reproductive opportunities for the animal in question, I fail to see how the "Cosmic Sense" will be of any value in this area. However, like "Self Consciousness" before it, maybe you have to posses this mental state before any of the advantages become apparent. However, if it means less war and terrorism then I'm all for it. Perhaps the Dalai Lama is the only one making any sense in today's world.

Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight (2008)
by David A. Mindell (MIT Press)

 highly recommended  for space enthusiasts and computer enthusiasts

• 360 pages and published in 2008
• Chapters 1-4 discuss flight engineering controls from the Wright Brothers through to the X-15 days at Edwards-Dryden
• Chapter 5 discusses designing Apollo Guidance systems at MIT (which got its start in Polaris)
• Chapter 6 discusses various management styles between NASA, contractors and sub-contractors. It also mentions a scheme to do in-flight repair of the AGC (this plan was cancelled once the AGC started to employ integrated circuits)
• Chapter 7 discusses AGC hardware design which started out using discrete transistors and finished using 2-gate integrated circuits. At the peak in mid-1965, 600 people worked on AGC hardware.
  Note: even though the AGC software was written using METRIC MEASUREMENTS, the astronauts requested analog displays like "feet per second". The AGC was then required to do the conversion in order to drive these displays.
• Chapter 8 presents an overview of AGC software which seems to have cropped up almost as an afterthought.
  • In 1960 NASA thought the computers would be programmed by mathematicians but this work turned out to be an engineering discipline.
  • In mid-1965 there were approximately 250 people working on AGC software. This number peaked at 400 in mid-1968.
  • Due to the small memory footprint, MIT employed a software interpreter rather than writing the programs in assembler.
  • This chapter also describes the low-tech LPD (landing point designator) which is comprised of colored  markings on the commander's window.
• Chapter 9 (Apollo 11) discusses "executive overflow" alarms 1201 + 1202 and AGS memory location 413
• Chapter 10 (Apollo 12, 14 - 17) also discusses VERB + NOUN syntax as well as detailed descriptions of each landing
• Chapter 11 briefly touches on many things including: installing an Apollo AGC in an F-8, The Shuttle, CEV (Crew Exploration Vehicle), glass cockpit of the Airbus A-320, etc. 
• Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight @ amazon.com

Robot Visions (1990)
by Isaac Asimov

• I just (March-2008) purchased a good-quality used hard-cover copy via http://www.bookfinder.com
• A book of 18 short stories mostly about Robots including "Evidence (I... I... a robot?)" and "The Bicentennial Man". My favorite story was "The Evitable Conflict" which seems to open the door to the zeroth law of robotics.
• This book also contains 16 thought-provoking essays which should be read by anyone going into artificial intelligence research or robotics
• Three of the stories (REASON, LIAR!, and EVIDENCE) mention that certain robot restrictions exist for the Earth. This reminded me that Replicants (Blade Runner) are illegal on Earth.
• ROBBIE was Asimov's first story and was published in 1940. A rewrite of this story appeared in "I, ROBOT" in 1950 which includes an encounter with a teenage SUSAN CALVIN in a New York museum
• ROBOT VISIONS is the best short story I've read in 10 years. It has a very cool surprise ending.
• People who only get sci-fi from TV might think that James T Kirk was the first person to trap a robot in a logical dilemma (see the 1968 Star Trek episode "The Changeling") but Dr Susan Calvin did it much earlier in the 1941 story LIAR!
• It has been many years since I read EVIDENCE (which was prior to reading Asimov's 15-book set) but after rereading it, I now realize that this may be one of his best short stories. Here are a few of my reasons:
  • the paranoia of human impostors amongst us (Blade Runner, Battle Star Galactica, Terminator, The Sarah Connor Chronicles, etc.). Quotes:
    • You are perfectly well acquainted, I suppose, with the strict rules against the use of robots on inhabited worlds
    • You are also aware that all positronic robots are leased, and not sold; that the Corporation remains the owner and manager of each robot, and is therefore responsible for the actions of all
    • Not the positronic brain, sir. Too many factors are involved in that, and there is the tightest possible government supervision. (in BR: one reason why the Tyrell Corporation buildings resemble a pyramid is so the world government COULD detonate explosives causing the whole thing to collapse inward upon itself; they would only do this if they detected a Replicant insurgency)
    • "It's been done experimentally by U.S. Robots," he said reluctantly, "without the addition of a positronic brain, of course. By using human ova and hormone control, one can grow human flesh and skin over a skeleton of porous silicone plastics that would defy external examination. The eyes, the hair, the skin would be really human, not humanoid. And if you put in a positronic brain, and such other gadgets as you might desire, you have a humanoid robot."
  • the seed of the zeroth law of robotics is explored during a debate on how a robotic attorney might find it necessary to violate the first law of robotics by recommending, or supporting, a human death sentence. (bad for the human, good for humanity)

Robot Dreams (1986)
by Isaac Asimov

• I just (February-2008) purchased a good-quality used hard-cover copy via http://www.bookfinder.com
  • it was sold to me by a London England book seller who purchased it from the Maze Political Prison in Belfast Northern Ireland which was closed in 2000. So now I can't stop picturing Irish political prisoners sitting around their cells reading about a better life in Asimov's usually-utopian sci-fi future.
• A book of 21 short stories
• a few of the AI stories are about robots; one which includes "Robot Dreams" which is about Susan Calvin's (U S Robots and Mechanical Men Inc.) discovery of a robot with rather disturbing dreams
• other AI stories seem to be about mainframe computers usually with a name similar to "multivac"
• two of the stories "Does a Bee Care?" (1957) and "Spell My Name with an S" (1958) seem to contain alien-contact themes also found in "2001: A Space Odyssey". I'm not insinuating plagiarism on the part of Arthur C Clarke. Synchronicity tells us that these themes may have been part of the late 1950s culture.
• Many of these stories predate computer programming. It is interesting to note that Asimov labels computer programmers (like Susan Calvin) "robot psychologists" while supercomputer programmers (like Noel Meyerhof) are labeled "grand masters".
• The last story is titled "Lest We Remember" and shows, to my satisfaction, that Asimov was aware of the debate concerning IQ vs. EQ (Intelligence Quotient vs. Emotional Quotient)

"Pebble in the Sky"
by Isaac Asimov

• First published in 1950 and republished January-2008 in hardcover for the Christmas season
• This was a very pleasurable read. Even through the story is now 58 years old, it is still relevant while standing the test of time.
  (I do not understand how Asimov was able to write this story so that is didn't become "dated" over the years; perhaps it has something to do with paying slightly more attention to humanity and slightly less attention to technology)
• I can see where Asimov developed the ideas for his 15-book set
• Whether you read this book or not, at least reader the Wikipedia overview.
• Page 131 mentions a three dimensional chess set composed of 8 transparent levels played with twice the number of pieces. Up until this point I had always credited Star Trek: TOS with this idea

First Born - A Time Odyssey: 3 (December-2007)
by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter

• first published in December-2007
• this is the third, and final, book in their "A Time Odyssey" trilogy
• book-1 was A Time Odyssey: Time's Eye
• book-2 was A Time Odyssey: Sunstorm
• book-3 is First Born - A Time Odyssey: 3
• Although book-2 stands on its own, I don't think book-3 can be enjoyed fully unless you've first read the previous two. I enjoyed it; but then again I am a big fan of Arthur C. Clarke

"Russ Manning's Magnus, Robot Fighter"
by Dark Horse Books

• Volume-1 contains Magnus, Robot Fighter comic book issues 01-07 (1963-02-xx to 1964-08-xx) 205 pages
  • Also contains a Russ Manning biography
  • click this preview and you'll see Asimov's First Law of Robotics in the lower left
  • many of these stories seem to be the basis for many other sci-fi products, like:
    • The Matrix
      • Story #1 tells how one robot kidnapped 1,000 people then connected them electronically to form a giant computer. In the Matrix, all of humanity is connected to a computer to keep us dreaming while our bodily fluids are drained off to run a power plant.
    • Star Trek: TOS (The Original Series)
      • Magnus is replaced with a robot equivalent then other people don't know which one is human as is seen in the episode What Are Little Girls Made Of?
      • Magnus is beamed 60,000 light years (through sub-space) to the robot planet called Malev-6 and then is taken captive by installing a remote-controlled metal ring around his neck as is seen in the episode The Gamesters of Triskelion
      • The robot planet of MALEV-6 was created 1,500 galactic years ago when a robot ship crash landed. Over the eons, hard radiation from Malev corrupted/modified the ship's self repair system. This is a variation of the story present in the episode The Changeling
      • humans are too dependent on robots as is seen in the episode I, Mudd
      • although the evil genius-scientist Xyrkol is human with a beard, he does have a prominent set of pointed ears which look just like those on Mr. Spock.
    • Babylon 5
      • the last story tells us how the 1,000 people from the first story are telepathic (were they selected as computer processors because they were telepaths, or did they become telepathic as a result of the experience?) and how they all held hands to increase their psychokinetic powers so they can assist Magnus on Malev-6. This sounds just like something that happened in Babylon-5 episode "A Race Through Dark Places"
• Volume-2 contains Magnus, Robot Fighter comic book issues 08-14 (1964-11-xx to 1966-05-xx) 197 pages
• Volume-3 contains Magnus, Robot Fighter comic book issues 15-21 (1966-08-xx to 1968-02-xx) 176 pages
  • Even though I read this stuff 40 years ago, I remember some of the artwork including one scene where robots are feeding morbidly obese humans

  • Story #21 ("Space Specter" which was published 1968-02-xx) is about an attack on North Am which affects everyone except descendants of Blackfoot Indians. Magnus uses their help to defeat the alien presence affect two robot geniuses. This story caused me to recall the Star Trek episode titled The Paradise Syndrome which aired 1968-08-1.

"God's Mechanics" (2007)
by Guy Consolmagno

• This book is written for techies (math, science, computer, etc.) and touches on logic, philosophy, science + religion
• The author attended MIT for seven years (earning two degrees then spending 3 years as a postdoc) then became a Jesuit Brother
• He is one of many Vatican astronomers.
• He thinks that the Intelligent Design theory which is being promoted to help religion, will eventually hurt religion.
• quote: techies already accept many abstract concepts on faith (electrons, quarks, black holes). God is just another abstract concept.

"The God Delusion" (2006)
by Richard Dawkins

• This book is the author's response to the attacks on America 2001-09-11 (aka 9/11) and London 2005-07-07 by Islamic Extremists but is equally critical of Christian and Jewish fundamentalists. It is an attempt to increase rationalism.
• Many people told me this book was very one sided but I must disagree. I found it a joy to read. The Darwinian speculations on why every society contains a religious component reminded me of "The Selfish Gene". If you liked that book you'll like "The God Delusion"
  p.s. this book will not convert you into an atheist but reading it will make you much less likely to do violence in the name of religion.
• definition of faith from www.dictionary.com
  1. confidence or trust in a person or thing: faith in another's ability.
  2. belief that is not based on proof: He had faith that the hypothesis would be substantiated by fact.
  3. belief in God or in the doctrines or teachings of religion: the firm faith of the Pilgrims.
• definition of sectarian from www.dictionary.com
  1. of or pertaining to sectaries or sects.
  2. narrowly confined or devoted to a particular sect.
  3. narrowly confined or limited in interest, purpose, scope, etc.
  4. a member of a sect.
  5. a bigoted or narrow-minded adherent of a sect.
• definition of secular from www.dictionary.com
  1. of or pertaining to worldly things or to things that are not regarded as religious, spiritual, or sacred; temporal: secular interests.
  2. not pertaining to or connected with religion (opposed to sacred): secular music.
  3. (of education, a school, etc.) concerned with nonreligious subjects.
  4. (of members of the clergy) not belonging to a religious order; not bound by monastic vows (opposed to regular).
  5. occurring or celebrated once in an age or century: the secular games of Rome.
  6. going on from age to age; continuing through long ages.
  7. a layperson.
  8. one of the secular clergy.
• secularists aren't necessarily atheists. They just keep their religious beliefs to themselves. For example, Gandhi once stated "I am a Hindu, I am a Moslem, I am a Jew, I am a Christian, I am a Buddhist".
• religiously speaking, people come in four unofficial categories: theists, deists, agnostics, atheists.
  • People like George Washington, Thomas Paine and Voltaire called themselves deists (apparently I fall into this category)
  • Albert Einstein called himself an agnostic despite claims to the contrary by theists
    Quote: “I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings”
  • Many of America's founding fathers (like Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and John Adams) were atheists despite claims to the contrary by America's religious right wing. (personal note: in those days anyone who was not a theist was considered an atheist. Only a detailed examination of their writings will allow us to re-label
  • Check out this definition from Brewer's Dictionary
    • A theist believes there is a God who made and governs all creation; but does not believe in the doctrine of the Trinity, nor in a divine revelation.
    • A deist believes there is a God who created all things, but does not believe in His superintendence and government. He thinks the Creator implanted in all things certain immutable laws, called the Laws of Nature, which act per se, as a watch acts without the supervision of its maker. Like the theist, he does not believe in the doctrine of the Trinity, nor in a divine revelation.
    • The atheist disbelieves even the existence of a God. He thinks matter is eternal, and what we call “creation” is the result of natural laws.
    • The agnostic believes only what is knowable. He rejects revelation and the doctrine of the Trinity as “past human understanding.” He is neither theist, deist, nor atheist, as all these are past understanding.
• America started out as a secularist country and has since migrated toward calling itself a Christian nation. Check out the Treaty Of Tripoli which was drafted under the presidency of George Washington and signed by President John Adams:
  "As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries."
• Official records show that after President John Adams sent the treaty to the Senate for ratification in May 1797, the entire treaty was read aloud on the Senate floor, including the famous words in Article 11, and copies were printed for every Senator. A committee considered the treaty and recommended ratification, and the treaty was ratified by a unanimous vote of all 23 Senators. The treaty was reprinted in full in three newspapers, two in Philadelphia and one in New York City. There is no record of any public outcry or complaint in subsequent editions of the papers.

My own 2-cents worth:

• Like music, art, or theatre, religion is a cultural expression of human society. No one would ever strap on a suicide belt to promote Bach over Beethoven so I find it incomprehensible that someone would do it to promote one flavor of religion over another
• Successful religions may be the cultural glue required to unify people when things are going badly. For example:
  • Judaism was the religion that successfully unified twelve tribes of Israel at a time when these people were under attack by their neighbors. Other religions up until that point failed to unify them. The myth of a world-wide flood unified these unrelated tribes under a belief that they were all sons of Noah. ("Semitic" is an adjective derived from Shem, one of the three sons of Noah in the Bible)
  • Christianity was the religion that successfully unified the Roman empire in Italy at a time it was under attack by so-called Barbarians (Goths, Visigoths, Vandals, etc.). During a time of political strife, the empire splits leaving the world with two founding faiths: Roman Orthodox and Greek Orthodox.
  • Islam was the religion that unified peoples living in the Arabic peninsula who were being attacked by Barbarians (many of the same ones which brought down Rome), Arabic tribes, Meccan authorities, and Jewish clans. It was the pursuit of peace which caused the exodus to Medina.
• Question: So how do we know when religion (the Earthly manifestation of worship and spirituality) has out-lived its usefulness? Answer: when the religion stands in the way of promoting world peace. We don't need to get rid of the various religions, just modify them by suppressing the violent xenophobic portions while accepting that each religion is just a cultural expression of human society. Comment: you may think my suggestion is sacrilege but people worshipping Zeus or Odin might have had similar thoughts.

"Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning" (2006)
by George Monbiot

Just a few interesting facts from the first couple of chapters:

• being a technological-Luddite will make things worse: when used as a light source, a candle is 71 times less efficient than than an old fashioned incandescent bulb and 357 times less efficient than a compact florescent model (page xxii)

• sometimes actual facts are counter-intuitive: burning a liter of kerosene in an engine, to drive a generator, to power a fluorescent lamp, can produce 250-450 times more useful light than burning the same amount in an oil lamp (page xxiii)

• In 2004, an article in Science reported the results of a survey of scientific papers containing the words 'global climate change'. The author found 928 of them on the database she searched. None of the papers, she discovered, disagreed with the consensus position. Politicians, economists, journalists and others may have the impression of confusion, disagreement, or discord among climate scientists, but that impression is incorrect. (page 4)
  (to put it another way, lobbyists have manipulated the facts to protect their own financial interests)

• Web sites are popping up all over America to cast doubt on real science. These web sites are funded by companies like oil producer ExxonMobil and tobacco companies Philip Morris and "Brown and Williamson". These web sites sometimes publish articles by actual scientists with no experience in Climatology. As is true on the web, these biased articles spread like wild-fire across the net and eventually get published by newspapers.

• Carbon trading won't work but carbon rationing will (if you're dumb enough to buy an SUV, then when you use up your carbon rations for the year you'll need to buy rations from someone who is behaving a little more responsively. This will shift the carbon burden away from industries who will never accept it (Oil, Airline, etc.) and place it directly on the consumer.

my 2 cents worth: Rather than save the planet for future generations, most older people seem more interested in ensuring their last 10 years of life are comfortable (makes you wonder why they bothered to have children). So all other open minded people need to lobby our politicians to take this topic seriously. And why not? Big businesses are lobbying.

Copyrighted excerpt from "Heat: Forward to the Canadian Edition"
In the court of international opinion, Canada has been let off lightly. Ask anyone who knows a little about climate change which nations are the worst offenders, and they will name the United States and Australia. This isn't surprising perhaps: the governments of both countries have not only refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, but have actively sought to sink it, by filibustering the negotiations and launching a rival initiative ("the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate") without binding targets or timetables for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. So it's a shock to discover that there is scarcely a whisker of difference between Canada's greenhouse gas emissions and those of the U.S. and Australia. In Europe climate change campaigners are-as we should be-heartily ashamed of our nations' contribution to the destruction of the biosphere. In the United Kingdom, we each produce an average of 9.5 tonnes of carbon dioxide in a year. The Germans turn out 10.2 tonnes, and the French 6.8. But the Canadians emit an average of 19.05 tonnes a year-just 50 kilos less than the Australians and a tonne less than the Americans. While emissions across much of Europe are falling, in Canada they have been rising for over 10 years. Yours is not the worst figure in the world. Gibraltar-that preposterous redoubt of British empire-somehow contrives to generate an average of 146.6 tonnes a year, largely because it has a tiny population which depends on shipping and tourism. But if you strip out the Gulf States and one or two curiosities among the very small nations, the only country whose emissions are significantly larger than yours is Luxembourg. You think of yourselves as a liberal and enlightened people, and my experience seems to confirm that. But you could scarcely do more to destroy the biosphere if you tried. I admit that yours is both a big country and a cold one. Crossing Canada requires a great deal more fossil fuel than crossing Britain. To us quivering limeys, your winters are unimaginably gruelling. But the climate doesn't care. It brooks no excuses. Every tonne of carbon you produce, however necessary you believe it to be, has the same impact on the climate as a tonne emitted by anyone else. Nice and well-intentioned as you are, you do as much to drown Bangladesh or starve the people of the Horn of Africa as the most obdurate throwbacks in the shrinking state of Bushistan. My calculations suggest that the sustainable limit for carbon dioxide emissions per capita is 1.2 tonnes. That's one-16th of what you currently produce. Thanks to the efforts of Stephen Harper and your environment minister, Rona Ambrose, Canada's global reputation is now beginning to catch up with its performance. When they say that Canada cannot reach its Kyoto targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions, they mean that they do not intend to try. Their surrender within the first few months in office is an astonishing instance of political cowardice. Having presented himself to the Canadian people as a man who can make tough choices, Harper declared himself an irresolute wimp as soon as he was faced with a choice between upsetting a few industrial lobbyists and helping to save the planet. Keeping Canada's promise to cut emissions by six percent, he says, is just too hard. When I first heard that, I couldn't help bursting into bitter laughter. The calculations in this book suggest that Canada should cut her carbon emissions by 94 percent between now and 2030. It is true that the Liberal Party scarcely made it easy for him. When Harper took office, Canadian emissions were (depending on whose figures you believe) either 24 percent or 35 percent higher than in 1990. The Liberals waited until 2005 before publishing their plan for tackling climate change. They talked a better line than Harper, but presided over just as much environmental destruction.

Links:

• www.TurnUpTheHeat.org - promotional site for the book
• www.Monbiot.com - promotional site for the author

"Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed The Bible and Why" (2005)
by Bart Ehrman

When world-class biblical scholar Bart Ehrman first began to study the texts of the Bible in their original languages he was startled to discover the multitude of mistakes and intentional alterations that had been made by earlier translators. In Misquoting Jesus, Ehrman tells the story behind the mistakes and changes that ancient scribes made to the New Testament and shows the great impact they had upon the Bible we use today. He frames his account with personal reflections on how his study of the Greek manuscripts made him abandon his once ultraconservative views of the Bible. Since the advent of the printing press and the accurate reproduction of texts, most people have assumed that when they read the New Testament they are reading an exact copy of Jesus' words or Saint Paul's writings. And yet, for almost fifteen hundred years these manuscripts were hand copied by scribes who were deeply influenced by the cultural, theological, and political disputes of their day. Both mistakes and intentional changes abound in the surviving manuscripts, making the original words difficult to reconstruct. For the first time, Ehrman reveals where and why these changes were made and how scholars go about reconstructing the original words of the New Testament as closely as possible. Ehrman makes the provocative case that many of our cherished biblical stories and widely held beliefs concerning the divinity of Jesus, the Trinity, and the divine origins of the Bible itself stem from both intentional and accidental alterations by scribes -- alterations that dramatically affected all subsequent versions of the Bible.

NSR Comments:

• http://www.cbc.ca/tapestry/archives/2007/072207.html (includes a 53 minute audio interview with the author)
• contains lots of information about literacy and church life over the past 2,000 years and much more information than I have listed here:
  • since Christianity was illegal in the second and third centuries, books of the Bible were copied by church volunteers rather than professional scribes
  • professional scribes were copying these books very early on in Alexandria Egypt and it these books that appear to have the fewest errors but still differ greatly from the words we read today
  • professional Christian scribes changed the text to:
    • reduce women from a position of equality to a position of inferiority
    • cause a separation between Jews and Christians and possibly the beginnings of anti-Semitism (even though we all know that Jesus was a Jewish rabbi who observed Jewish laws and customs AND predicted the fall of Jerusalem, some of these whacko scribes actually believed that Jerusalem was destroyed in 70 AD as a punishment by God for enabling Christ's crucifixion)
    • remove most material being used by heretics and deniers.
  • while doing research for the Vulgate Bible Saint Jerome discovered that in every source available to him, the final page of the Book of Revelation (by John) was missing. So he just reverse translated Greek sources into Latin
  • over the past 1700 years many academics have been involved with documenting differences between various sources. In 1707 one English scholar by the name of John Mill published a book documenting 30,000 differences between ~ 100 New Testament manuscripts.
  • even though Jesus had just died, various Christian sects had wildly varying beliefs in the first century A.D. including:
    • there is only one God:
      • so Jesus is the adopted son of God. This event takes place during Jesus' baptism by John the Baptist
      • Jesus is actually divine at birth (thus fulfilling Hebrew scripture)
    • there are two Gods who are in conflict with each other: one of the old testament and one of the new Testament
      • in one view the new testament God possess the body of Jesus during Jesus' baptism by John the Baptist and then releases Jesus at the time of the crucifixion
    • there are actually 12 Gods
    • there are actually 365 Gods
  • and much much more...
• This book will not convert a believer into an atheist but I am convinced, more than ever, that anyone who does violence to anyone else in the name of any religion is a fool.
• It would be illogical to assume that any religion has access to their original writings.

"Inside the Machine: An Illustrated Introduction to Microprocessors and Computer Architecture" (2007)
by Jon Stokes

• Publishers promotional site: http://www.nostarch.com/insidemachine.htm
• I wished I had a book like this when I was beginning my career 30 years ago
• Published in 2007, the second half of the book proves that this publication is more than an introduction.
• Chapters:
  • Chapter 1: Basic Computing Concepts
  • Chapter 2: The Mechanics of Program Execution
  • Chapter 3: Pipelined Execution
  • Chapter 4: Superscalar Execution
  • Chapter 5: The Intel Pentium and Pentium Pro
  • Chapter 6: PowerPC Processors: 600 Series, 700 Series, and 7400
  • Chapter 7: Intel's Pentium 4 vs. Motorola's G4e: Approaches and Design Philosophies
  • Chapter 8: Intel's Pentium 4 vs. Motorola's G4e: The Back End
  • Chapter 9: 64-Bit Computing and x86-64
  • Chapter 10: The G5: IBM's PowerPC 970
  • Chapter 11: Understanding Caching and Performance
  • Chapter 12: Intel's Pentium M, Core Duo, and Core 2 Duo
• The first four chapters take you from no knowledge at all through microprocessor basics by building two hypothetical architectures called DLW-1 and DLW-2. Includes:
  • Pipelined Execution
  • What the terms "Scalar", "Vector", and "Superscalar" really mean
  • Superscalar Execution including:
    • Branch Prediction
    • Speculative Execution
    • Register Renaming
    • OOE (Out of Order Execution)
  • Caching (L1, L2, L3) and performance
• Other chapters cover popular implementations:
  • Intel's Pentium, PentiumPro, Pentium-II, Pentium-III, Pentium-4, Pentium-D, Pentium-M, Core, Core2 Duo
  • IBM-Motorola's PowerPC Processors from 601 to 604, 750 (a.k.a. G3), and 7400 (a.k.a. G4)
  • IBM PowerPC 970 (a.k.a. G5)
  • 64-bit technology including:
    • AMD's x86-64 (Intel's EM64T version is mentioned in passing)
    • Intel's Itanium and Itanium2 (a.k.a. IA-64) are mentioned in passing

iWoz (2006)
by Steve Wozniak and Gina Smith

• Steve Wozniak designed the Apple-1 and Apple-2 single handedly with no help from anyone else
• Steve Jobs is an enabler:
  • He enabled Apple to startup as a company
  • He convinced Wozniak to quit HP and work fulltime at Apple
  • He convinced Wozniak to use Alan Shugart's new 5.25 inch (13.3 cm) floppy disk drive in Wozniak's Apple DOS system
• How could a cool technology engineering company have morphed into a technology marketing company?
• When I read how the Apple-3 and Macintosh employees basically shit upon the Apple-2 employees (who were carrying everyone else), I was reminded of one of the chapters of "Inside Stupidity" where many companies produce products to compete with themselves. It's almost like the egos of the "incoming suits" in are trying to trump the efforts of the "outgoing suits" and all other issues are secondary.

The Theory of Almost Everything (2005)
The Standard Model, the Unsung Triumph of Modern Physics
by Robert Oerter

science lover's "must have"

• While the man on the street searches for scientific answers in popular explanations in string theory, multi-verses and other popular voodoo, the poorly named "Standard Model of Elementary Particles" is largely ignored. And yet this theory is the crowning achievement of humanity.
  
• This book describes the most successful and important theory in physics today, fully explained to general readers
  
  • This book does for "the Standard Model" what Brian Greene did for "String Theory"
  • Historical perspective begins in the 19th century and explains where we are today and where we are heading next.
    Includes:
    • how people like Einstein and Noether kicked off Relativity
    • how people like De Broglie, Schrödinger, Heisenberg and Pauli kicked off quantum mechanics
    • how people like Feynman, Schwinger and Tomonaga kicked off QED (Quantum Electro Dynamics)
    • how people like Gell-Mann and Zweig kicked off QCD (Quantum Chromo Dynamics)
  • Compelling writing full of rich metaphor and analogy (similar to Feynman's lectures)
  • 70 illustrations present concepts to readers visually
    
• Although many people are talking about string theory, it may only amount to a passing fashion: It hasn't yet been confirmed by experiment, the real test. What has? Where do we really stand? Robert Oerter shows what the next step in physics will without question be based on: The Theory of Almost Everything; the single theory that has dominated particle physics for the past 30 years. Cobbled together by many brilliant minds throughout the 20th century, and modestly known as the Standard Model of Elementary Particles, it is the most wide-ranging and precise theory in the history of physics. From the chemical reactions that power all living things to the nuclear reactions that power the sun, except for gravity, it describes all known physical interactions.
  
• Robert Oerter teaches physics at George Mason University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland. He has done research in the areas of supergravity, especially as applied to superstring theories, and in the quantum mechanics of chaotic systems. He lives in Maryland.

The Code Book (2000)
by Simon Singh

 highly recommended  for people interested in computers, communications, or mathematics

• Subtitled: "The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography"
• Lots of code information from ancient India, Sparta (scytale), and Rome (Caesar Cipher described in The Gallic Wars) to the present day
• Information about Hitler's Enigma Machine (used to send orders to the rank-and-file) and the Lorentz SZ40 (used to send messages between Hitler and his generals) 
• Information about England's Bletchley Park where German codes were broken using Turing Bombes (Enigma) and Colossus (Lorentz)
• Contains good layman descriptions of advanced technologies concepts like: Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange, DES, symmetric vs. asymmetric keys, RSA, PGP, etc.
• Appendix-J "The Mathematics of RSA" is the first time I've seen mathematical examples in a layman's text
• Chapter-8 "A Quantum Leap into the Future" contains the best description I've ever seen on how the keys are exchanged securely using polarized photons.
• Highly recommended with only one caveat: every book I've ever read on this topic seems to conclude that Quantum Cryptography is a necessary next step. IMHO the following technologies will allow silicon computers to remain more than reasonably secure for a long time:
  • SECURID key fobs (and products like them)
    which provide a cheaper alternative to delivering keys via handcuffed courier and yet they are not "sent in the channel". These fobs present a pseudo-random 6-digit pass code for 60 seconds; you enter this number into your VPN client along with two other piece of personal information such as "an employee I.D. string" and a corporate password; the computer you are connecting to contains the same algorithm as your fob and knows what it should contain at that time of day.
  • Elliptical Curve Cryptography
    which provides a key generation method not involving prime numbers (the RSA method involves a key which is the product of two primes; improvements in either "mathematics" or "raw computer power" could allow fast methods of factoring).
• www.simonsingh.net/The_Code_Book.html

Journey to the Moon: The History of the Apollo Guidance Computer (1996)
by Eldon C. Hall

• published by the "American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics" ( www.aiaa.org )
• The Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) sits squarely between the mainframe punched-card readers of the 1950s and the microprocessor-based desktop personal computers of the 1970s (Apple II, TRS-80, Commodore PET). This book gives the best view of what the American aerospace industry was capable of building in the 1960s and how Apollo stimulated the electronics industry to produce standardized semiconductor technologies like RTL (resistor-transistor logic) and DTL (diode-transistor logic).
• Excerpt From Page 19: This action made NASA's Apollo Program the single largest single consumer of integrated circuits between 1961 and 1965. Design and production of the Block I Apollo computer consumed about 200,000 (Fairchild Inc.) Micrologic elements.
• During the lunar landing phase of Apollo 11, computer program alarms 1201 + 1202 caused some concern to everyone listening in. Pin-headed reporters will have you believe that someone had mis-programmed the computer. This notion is completely wrong. In fact, the AGC was truly fault-tolerant and continued to function even though it was too busy to process all the incoming information. These alarms basically mean "I am too busy to do all you are asking of me so I'm only go to pay attention to the important stuff". During missions after Apollo-11 the astronauts would avoid this situation by just turning off the rendezvous radar (which is only needed when trying to fly back to the CSM in lunar orbit above)
• Part I - History
  1. Computer Hardware
  2. Computers (Educational, Commercial, Aerospace)
  3. MIT Instrumentation Laboratory
• Part II - Apollo Hardware
  4. Requirements
  5. In The Beginning - Apollo Computer
  6. Winds of Change Were Blowing (Discrete Transistors to Integrated Circuits)
  7. Block I Computers (1963)
  8. System Integration
     • EMI problems, TC (Transfer Control) Trap Alarms, Uplink Interference
  9. Naysayers and Advice from Outside Experts
  10. Next Generation - Block II (1964)
  11. Naysayers Revisited
  12. Reliability
• Part III - Apollo Software
  13. Software Development
      • NASA originally thought that the AGC software would be created by mathematicians. Later on, contractors provided "computer programmers" and "system engineers".
      • Fortran and MAC (an MIT algorithmic programming language) were the only two software tools originally considered. Later on, macro assemblers were developed and then run on AGC simulators implemented in mainframe computers from IBM and Honeywell.
  14. Mission Software
  15. Finale
• Other
  • Appendices + Index
  • 43 Photographic Plates on 32 pages
  • Page 8 contains the coolest picture of core memory similar to this one.
  • Click here to try out a really cool PC-based "Apollo Lunar Landing Simulator" with a working AGC

The Eternity Artifact (2006)
by L.E. Modesitt Jr.

1. the Comity
2. the Covenanters (Judeo-Christians ?)
3. the Sunnite Alliance
4. the Middle Kingdom (Chinese ?)

The more things change the more they stay the same :-)

(or maybe this author is telling a story 5k years from now in order to comment on the problems of today)

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968/2000)
by Arthur C. Clarke

After rewatching this movie on New Year's day (2007-01-01), I visited www.bookfinder.com to purchase a 1999 hardcover copy of the book. What a treat; so timeless and yet still relevant.

Some Observations (and spoilers):

• there were many monoliths on Earth
• the monoliths were transparent rather than black
• one of the monoliths accidentally killed one of Moon-Watcher's companions during "the experiments"
• Heywood Floyd flies by plane to the Kennedy Space Center and lands on a runway near the VAB (vehicle assembly building). Clarke published this story in 1968 which would have predated the shuttle's runway by almost 15 years.
• The space-plane was named Orion which happens to be the project name for NASA's return to the moon in 2020. Click here for more details.
• While flying to the moon on the Aries-1B, Heywood reads an electronic newspaper which sounds suspiciously similar to connecting to the internet and then doubling-clicking on an icon. Here is an excerpt from P.52:
  
  
  ...he would plug his foolscap-sized Newspad into the ship's information circuit and scan the latest reports from Earth. One by one he would conjure up the world's major electronic papers; he knew the codes of the more important ones by heart, and had no need to consult the list on the back of his pad. Switching to the display's short term memory, he would hold the front page while he quickly searched the headlines and noted the items that interested him. Each had it's own two-digit reference; when he punched that, the postage-stamp-sized rectangle would expand until it neatly filled the screen and he could read it with comfort. When he had finished he would flash back to the complete page and select a new subject for detailed examination.
  
  So there you have it. Clarke's imagination preceded the Apple Macintosh (1984), Microsoft Windows (1985), the merged-protocol Internet (1973), and using a computer for communication rather than number crunching. I wonder if he was ever called to testify in the court case between Apple and Microsoft regarding the graphic interface? :-)
• At Clavius base, the office equipment includes typewriters, office computers, and telephones (see Page 60)
• Once properly heated by the first sunlight in 3 million years (it was dug up during the 14 day lunar night), the monolith emits 5 radio burst.
• Deep Space Monitor 79 was designed by Americans scientists, built by British engineers and launched by Russians. (see Page 80). Did Clarke foresee the collapse of the USSR as well?
• destination:
  • book: The Discovery mission was originally planned for Jupiter but was diverted to Saturn after the radio wave is emitted by TMA-1.
  • movie: They only go to Jupiter because Stanley Kubrick worried that he might not be able to produce believable rings for Saturn.
• The thin, card-sized plate, of the AE-35 unit lay on the bench under a powerful magnifying lens. It was plugged into a standard connection frame, from which a neat bundle of multicolored wire led to an automatic test set, no bigger than an ordinary desk computer.
• problem with Hal:
  • book:
    • Frank does the first EVA to retrieve the primary AE-35
    • The AE-35 passes bench-testing so Dave notifies Earth
    • Earth says there might be a problem with Hal
    • Hal now predicts a fault with the second AE-35
    • Just as Earth begins to tell Dave and Frank how to disconnect Hal, the antenna is moved and communications are lost. Hal claims this is due to a failure of the second AE-35 (or related subsystem) which he has predicted.
    • Frank does the second EVA to repair the antenna.
    • Hal kills Frank
    • While Dave attempts to do a manual revival of Whitehead, Hal attempts to kill them both by opening the pod bay doors and vent the atmosphere to space
    • Dave ducks into an emergency shelter to put on a space suit
    • Hal kills the three hibernating astronauts
  • movie:
    • Dave does the first EVA to retrieve the AE-35
    • The AE-35 passes bench-testing so Hal suggests they put it back and let it fail
    • Frank does the second EVA to put back the original AE-35
    • Hal kills Frank
    • Dave leaves Discovery to rescue Frank's body but is then locked out of Discovery
    • Hal kills the three hibernating astronauts
    • Dave reenters Discovery by coming in through the emergency air lock (without his helmet)
    • Hal is disconnected from Discovery
• star gate
  • book:
    • the entrance to the star gate is inside TMA-2 ( a two mile high black monolith on the lighter-side of the Saturnian moon, Japetus)
  • movie:
    • TMA-2 is floating in orbit around Jupiter
• room at the end
  • book:
    • refrigerator is full of blue food
    • ceiling TV above the bed displays programs collected over the past two years (must have been collected by TMA-2 after a wake-up-call from TMA-1). Dave's hotel room is seen in a TV program (so that's where his hosts got the reference)
    • Dave goes to bed and turns out the lights
      • then the room dissolves around him
      • his memory is relived in reverse order (and transferred somewhere?) until he becomes a baby
      • the monolith reappears, turns transparent, then reprograms the baby (just like it did 3 million years ago to Moon-Watcher's clan on Earth)
  • movie:
    • no refrigerator
    • no TV
    • Dave goes to bed but the lights stay on
• Star Child
  • book:
    • he looks at the Earth then destroys the orbiting weapon systems
  • movie:
    • he looks at the Earth but does nothing

The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (2005)
by Ray Kurzweil

Chapter Titles:

• The Six Epochs
  1. Physics and Chemistry
     • information in atomic structures
  2. Biology and DNA
     • information in DNA
  3. Brains
     • information in neuronal patterns
  4. Technology
     • information in hardware and software designs
  5. The Merger of Human Technology with Human Intelligence
     • the methods of biology (including human intelligence) are integrated into the (exponentially expanding) human technology base
  6. The Universe Wakes Up
     • patterns of matter and energy in the universe become saturated with intelligent processes and knowledge
• A Theory of Technology Evolution: The Law of Accelerating Returns
• Achieving the Computational Capacity of the Human Brain
• Achieving the Software of Human Intelligence: How to reverse Engineer the Human Brain
• GNR: Three Overlapping Revolutions (Genetics, Nanotechnology, Robotics)
• The Impact
• "Ich bin ein Singularitarian"
• The Deeply Intertwined Promise and Peril of GNR (Genetics, Nanotechnology, Robotics)
• Response to Critics
• Epilogue
• Appendix
• Notes ( 105 pages of references )
• Index

NSR Personal Comments:

1. Whenever conversations come around to "biology merging with technology", people usually dismiss the subject by mentioning disasters in popular entertainment like The Borg of Star Trek or the Replicants of Blade Runner. Although mankind must be aware that such disasters are possible, it is far more interesting to consider using computers to tweak our DNA. I hope humanity's future is more like Isaac Asimov's Robots and Empire. And while I'm on the subject, let's seriously consider building-in his Three Laws of Robotics
    
2. I might be proved wrong, but I doubt that individual nanotechnology machines will ever be fully autonomous. Intelligence, I feel, requires a minimum size which I believe has a natural lower limit this side of visible.
    
   
   1. mice are reasonably smart and independent for their size
   2. wasps and bees are not as smart as mice and need their activities indirectly orchestrated by a queen
   3. ants are dumber than bee and are also blind
       
   p.s. DNA is good for building creatures from scratch or repairing existing creatures, but not much is accomplished when biology is in a growth or repair mode. It is for this reason the DNA can not be compared to ROM or other electronic memory technology.
    
   (in fact, once an organism is up and running the majority of DNA remains disabled in tightly coiled rings; it can only be accessed after enzymes first uncoil the required gene.)
    
   
3. I do believe, however, that practical nanotechnology will be possible when the actions of individual machines are directed by a near-by computer sending commands by radio. Let's hope the controlling computer doesn't get infected by a virus or worm at this time.
    
   
4. This book is very thought provoking and may be more correct than not. However, we must all be aware of the elephant in the room: "an exponential growth in the power of computer technology (Moore's Law)" is not directly proportional to an exponential improvement in human life span. So I am convinced that humans will ever achieve immortality but they man might increase quality of life up to 120.
    
5.  Even if Kurzweil's predictions are greater than 80% correct, consider the following push back from modern people this side of Y2K:
   
   1. many humans (old order Mennonites, Hutterites, remote indigenous people) reject modern technology (electric power, etc.)
   2. many humans deny the value and efficacy of vaccines to prevent disease.
   3. some humans think vaccines cause diseases like autism (even though this link was thoroughly disproved in 2002).
   4. many humans don't believe the vaccines cause disease
      1. twenty percent of all cancers are caused by viruses
      2. many don't believe that HIV (human Human immunodeficiency virus) causes AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome)
      3. many people don't believe that HPV (human papilloma virus) causes cervical cancer
         • many humans feel comfortable creating religious obstacles to progress (since HPV is an sexually transmitted disease then agreeing to administer an HPV vaccine to your children may be interpreted as interfering with God's plan)

NSR - 2006-09-14

Related Links:

• www.Singularity.com
• Read a recent Ray Kurzweil article (titled Reprogramming Biology) in the July 2006 issue of Scientific American.
• Similar articles can be found here: www.KurzweilAI.net
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity_Is_Near
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Kurzweil

DEC Is Dead, Long Live DEC: The Lasting Legacy of Digital Equipment Corporation (2003, 2004)
by Edgar H. Schein

Digital Equipment Corporation achieved sales of over $14 billion, reached the Fortune 50, and was second only to IBM as a computer manufacturer. Though responsible for the invention of speech recognition, the minicomputer, and local area networking, DEC ultimately failed as a business and was sold to Compaq Corporation in 1998. This fascinating modern Greek tragedy by Ed Schein, a high-level consultant to DEC for 40 years, shows how DEC's unique corporate culture contributed both to its early successes and later to an organizational rigidity that caused its ultimate downfall.

• introduction
  1. Purpose and Overview
  2. Three Developmental Streams: A Model for Deciphering the Lessons of the DEC Story
• part one: The Creation of a Culture of Innovation: The Technology, Organization, and Culture Streams are One and the Same
  3. Ken Olsen, the Scientist-Engineer
  4. Ken Olsen, the Leader and Manager
  5. Ken Olsen, the Salesman-Marketer
  6. DEC's Cultural Paradigm
  7. DEC's "Other" Legacy: The Development of Leaders (by Tracy C. Gibbons)
  8. DEC's Impact on the Evolution of Organization Development
• part two: The Streams Diverge, Causing an Organizational Midlife Crisis
  9. The Impact of Changing Technology (by Paul Kampas)
  10. The Impact of Success, Growth, and Age
  11. Learning Efforts Reveal Cultural Strengths and Rigidities
  12. The Turbulent 1980s: Peaking but Weakening
      • DEC Launches Three PCs
      • Gordon Bell's Departure and its Consequences
      • Turmoil in the Engineering Organization: Competition with IBM, and PRISM, Aquarius, and Alpha [and MIPS]
      • for a continuation of this story line, read the next book review titled: "Showstopper! The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft"
  13. The Beginning of the End: Ken Olsen's Final Efforts to Save DEC
• part three: Lessons and Legacies
  14. Obvious Lessons and Subtle Lessons
  15. The Lasting Legacy of Digital Equipment Corporation
• Appendixes
  1. DEC's Technical Legacy
  2. DEC's Manufacturing: Contributions Made and Lessons Learned (by Michael Sonduck)
  3. DEC, the First Knowledge Organization (a 1991 Memo by Debra Rogers Amidon)
  4. Digital: The Strategic Failure (by Peter DeLisi)
  5. What Happened? A Postscript (by Gordon Bell)

MIT Sloan School of Management Professor Edgar Schein does a marvelous job telling the story of the rise and fall of Digital Equipment Corporation, the former #2 computer maker in the world behind IBM. The business reasons behind DEC's economic failure have been widely reported (missing the advent of the PC, having too many projects going at once, failure to market products effectively, etc.) However, the big question to be answered is why did these failures occur? To quote one passage, "Why did an organization that was wildly successful for thirty-five years, filled with intelligent, articulate powerful engineers and managers, fail to act effectively to deal with problems that were highly visible to everyone, both inside and outside the organization?"

Schein looks at DEC's failure through the lens of its corporate culture, and how it prohibited their executives from making the decisions, and taking the actions necessary to survive. Fans of Ed Schein will know his famous "Three Cultures of Management" paper, in which he describes the "Executive", "Line Manager" and "Engineering" cultures, all of which must exist and be balanced against one another for an organization to survive. Schein argues that DEC was dominated by the engineering culture, which valued innovation and "elegant" design, over profits and operational efficiency. This engineering culture dominated even the top levels of DEC, where proposals to build PCs out of off the shelf parts that were readily available in the marketplace, were shot down because the machines were thought to be junk compared to the ones DEC could build themselves.

That DEC was able to survive for as long as it did was largely attributable to its ability to innovate in a field that was so new it had not yet coalesced around certain standard systems, software and networks. However, as the computer industry became in effect a commodity market, and the buyers began to value price over innovation, DEC found itself increasingly unable, and in fact, unwilling to compete. The engineering culture which valued innovation and required creative freedom, did not want to subject itself to the requirements of being a commodity player which demanded autocratic operational efficiency and control over how resources were allocated.

Although DEC is now long gone, even readers who were too young to use computers at the time of its demise will find familiar truths in this book. As the old saying goes, the fish in the tank does not see the water it is in. Neither do we often see the cultures in which we are ourselves embedded. The real lesson of this wonderful book is to show us how our corporate cultures often prohibit us from doing the right things, even when we can see them clearly. Sometimes culture is most easily visible in the things you need to discuss, but that are simply "not on the table" for discussion.

There are many lessons here too, for companies that seek to innovate new products and services, and how to balance the creative freedom desired by the engineering culture with the "money gene" culture of sound executive management. The names of companies that have failed to realize the full financial benefits of their technical innovations is too long to list here. But the DEC story is a must read for anyone who seeks to balance innovation with sustainable economic success in any organization.

Showstopper! The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft (1994)
by G. Pascal Zachary

• The 1994 version of this book is titled "Showstopper!" while the 2009 version of this book is titled "Show Stopper!" (note the space between the words)
• This book should be considered a historical continuation of the book "DEC is Dead, Long Live DEC" starting with the PRISM project
• This book is a riveting description of the development of Windows-NT (which later morphs into Windows-2000, Windows-XP, Windows-Vista, Windows-7).  If you enjoyed either one of "Hackers" or "Soul of a New Machine" then you'll like this book.
• Sixty percent of this book is about "Decies" (DEC people at Microsoft including Dave Cutler) with the remaining stuff being about the "Microsofties" including Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer and others.
• Here are just a few highlights (a few of these items are from the book "DEC is Dead, Long Live DEC")
  1. Dave Cutler was the lead designer of DEC's VMS operating system (which ran on VAX) but socially gruff and considered  diamond in the rough
  2. Gordon Bell was Cutler’s patron at DEC who thought that Cutler was the most productive s/w developer at DEC
  3. Cutler wanted to leave Digital in 1981, but Bell convinced him to set up a research arm away from Maynard (which turned out to be Seattle)
  4. When Bell left DEC in 1983 after suffering a heart attack, Cutler lost his patron
  5. Nathan Myrhvold was concerned about three major things at Microsoft: UNIX, RISC, and portability (and kept sending memos to Bill Gates reminding him of these potential problems in Microsoft's future)
  6. Without Bell around to protect Cutler’s group in Seattle, DEC was able to shut it down (other groups had patrons, Cutler’s group did not)
  7. Nathan Myrhvold heard about the demise of Cutler’s RISC project and set up the meeting between Cutler and Gates
  8. Gates only wanted Cutler’s s/w people but Cutler wouldn’t agree to a deal without bringing along his hardware people.
  9. Cutler wanted to bring along DEC hardware people who would help Microsoft change the technical direction of the PC industry
  10. Gates became Cutler's patron at Microsoft (it seems that Cutler always needed a patron to compensate for his gruff personality)
  11. The first version of this multi-personality (DOS, OS/2, Windows, whatever) portable OS was called “Portasys” and ran on a custom PC designed by Cutler’s group which was based upon the Intel i860 CPU. It was never meant to be sold; only used internally to develop a portable OS.
• There was a whole lot of stuff I didn't know about Windows-NT like: many of the Microsofties wanted to keep/extend DOS (FAT32) or the OS/2 file system while the Decies pushed for the development of a new file system called NTFS.

How the World was One (1992)
by Arthur C. Clarke

• From The Dust Jacket:
  Arthur C. Clarke, visionary author of both science fact and science fiction, first conceived of satellite communications in 1945--and twenty-five years later his dream became reality. Now, in this new personal and colorful nonfiction work, Clarke examines the rapid transformation of our society by technology and communication. As the infant field of communications began growing in the early part of this century, so did the boy named Arthur C. Clarke--who watched, wide-eyed, as his small English village was transformed overnight. In his job as the village switchboard operator he once overloaded the circuits, excitedly eavesdropping on his first transatlantic call. From there his involvement grew more and more technical, culminating in his now-famous paper "Extra-Terrestrial Relays," which anticipated many of the developments of the next fifty years. For five thousand years communication never advanced beyond the speed of horse and wind-driven ship--but in the explosive span of thirty years, it changed forever. Newer, faster communication toppled tyranny, won wars, and changed history all the way from the second Russian Revolution to the Gulf war. Here is the story of the stranger-than-fiction mishaps, oversights, capricious acts of fate, and incredible human energy that eventually transformed the earth into our modern global village. Clarke brings unique expertise and a lifetime of experience to How the World Was One. Beginning with submarine cables, through the development of fiber optics and communications satellites, and then projecting far into a future of neutrino, gravitational, and tachyon (faster than light) communications, Arthur C. Clarke shows how these remarkable innovations shaped and changed the earth--and made the world one.
• Excerpt from Preface, Page 1, Paragraph 3
  Nevertheless, Toynbee was essentially correct. Except for a few dwindling tribes in (alas) equally dwindling forests, the human race has now become almost a single entity, divided by time zones rather rather than by natural frontiers of geography. The same TV news networks cover the globe; the world's markets are linked by the most complex machine ever devised by mankind -- the international telephone/telex/fax/data transfer system.
• Excerpt from Preface, Page 2, Paragraph 2
  Despite the linguistic, religious, and cultural barriers that still sunder nations, the unification of the world [by telecommunications] has passed the point of return...
• Excerpt from Chapter 1, Page 1, Paragraph 3
  This state of affairs has existed for the greater part of human history. When Queen Victoria came to power in 1837, she had no swifter means of sending messages to the far parts of her empire than had Julius Caesar -- or, for that matter, Moses.
• Excerpt from Chapter 27, Page 200, Paragraphs 3-4
  Telstar (and its successor Telstar 2, launched May 7, 1963) showed that active satellites could do everything that had been claimed for them, and with very modest powers -- as long as they were backed up by massive ground equipment. The Bell System had built an even larger horn-antenna for the Telstar than for Echo; the giant ear at Andover, Maine, weighed 370 tons yet was able to track the speeding satellite to an accuracy of better than a twentieth of a degree.
  And that was the big problem. Because of its relatively low altitude (between 950 and 5,600 kilometers) Telstar 1 circled the Earth several times per day; its orbital period was only a fraction of the magic twenty-four hours.
• Excerpt from Chapter 27, Page 201, Paragraphs 3
  ... paradoxically, it takes rather more energy to park [a satellite] twenty two thousand miles up than to land on the ten-times-more-distant moon.
• Contents:

  WIRING THE ABYSS Introduction (to electrical / electronic communications) The Coming of the Telegraph Channel Crossing A Great American (Cyrus West Field) Lord of Science (William Thomson a.k.a. Lord Kelvin) False Start (to laying an Atlantic telegraph cable) Triumph of Disaster Postmortem The Brink of Success Heart's Content (the first successful cable is laid) Battle on the Seabed (they try to grapple for a dropped cable) Girdle Round the Earth The Deserts of the Deep The Cable's Core VOICE ACROSS THE SEA The Wires Begin to Speak (Alexander Graham Bell) The Man Before Einstein (Oliver Heaviside) Mirror in the Sky (the ionosphere is discovered) Transatlantic Telephone "Wireless" (Clarke's boyhood recollections of crystal and valve (vacuum tube) radios Exploring the Spectrum A BRIEF PREHISTORY OF COMSATS Beyond the Ionosphere "You're on the glide path... I think..." How I Lost a Billion Dollars in My Spare Time "If you've got a message..." The Making of a Moon (a reprinted short story) "I Remember Babylon" (a reprinted short story) STARRY MESSENGERS Echo and Telstar Syncon Early Bird The United States of Earth Satellites and Saris At the UN Coop's Troop Appointment in the Vatican Happy Birthday, Comsat! The Clarke Awards CNN Live Peacesat LET THERE BE LIGHT! Cable Comeback Talking with Light As Far As Eye Can See (like this book's title, Clarke appears to have a sense of humor :-) Epilogue: Fin de siecle -- or Dawn of a New Millennium Postscript: The Second Russian Revolution Appendix A Appendix B

• Very Cool quote:

• NSR Comments: I was surprised to learn that many transoceanic telegraph cabling projects were doomed to failure because overly optimistic participants (many of them investors and/or people of title) refused to learn Ohm's Law which was known as of 1827. These idiots were just "playing around with technology" which resulted in the loss of many billions of dollars reminiscent of the losses associated with the DOT COM (dot con?) economic meltdown of 2000-2002. We never seem to learn from our mistakes...

Brother Astronomer - Adventures of a Vatican Scientist (2001)
by Guy Consolmagno

• the Vatican operates astronomical observatories world
• the Vatican owned a really large meteorite collection
• that Galileo would not have been arrested (and that whole embarrassing episode in church history would not have happened) if the Jesuits would not have been pushed out of favor during the century of the incident
• the Vatican sees no conflict between religion and the theory of evolution as long as one acknowledged the creator acting this way
• great men in science and religion:

  Albert the Great	- Father of Geology
  Roger Bacon	- Father of Chemistry
  Gregor Mendel	- Father of Genetics
  Christopher Clavius	- "second Euclid" of the renaissance
  Angelo Secchi	- father of Astrophysics
  Georges Lemaitre	- father of the Big Bang theory

The Pentium Chronicles (2005)
by Bob Colwell

Robots and Foundation Series (15 book collection)
by Isaac Asimov

 highly recommended  for people interested in sci-fi

Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe (2005)
by Simon Singh

 science lover's "must have"
http://www.simonsingh.net/Big_Bang.html

Albert Einstein once said: 'The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.' Simon Singh believes geniuses like Einstein are not the only people able to grasp the physics that govern the universe. We all can. As well as explaining what the Big Bang theory actually is, the book will address why cosmologists believe that it is an accurate description of the origin of the universe. It will also tell the story of the scientists who fought against the establishment idea of an eternal and unchanging universe. Simon Singh, renowned for making difficult ideas much less difficult than they first seem, is the perfect guide for this journey. Everybody has heard of the Big Bang Theory. But how many of us can actually claim to understand it? With characteristic clarity and a narrative peppered with anecdotes and personal histories of those who have struggled to understand creation, Simon Singh has written the story of the most important theory ever.

Sojourner: An Insider's View of the Mars Pathfinder Mission (2004)
by Andrew Mishkin

American Empire? (hopefully this title got your attention)
Excerpt from the book "Colossus" (2004) by Niall Ferguson

The European Dream: How Europe's Vision of the Future Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream (2005)
by Jeremy Rifkin

1. The European Dream
2. The European Dream (Promo) Jeremy Rifkin
3. European Dream (@ Amazon)

quote: "Europeans should congratulate themselves for producing the most humane approach to capitalism ever attempted"

For a fair economic comparison of the USA to Europe the author asserts that you must create a table comparing American "States" to European "Countries" (think "United States of Europe") ordered by economic output, then compare the entries line-by-line. Here is a partial list taken from page 65/66. Notice how Europe wins every time? So why does America cling to the fallacy that they are number one in anything?

European Country	GDP ($ Billion)	GDP ($ Billion)	American State
Germany	$1,866	$1,344	California
United Kingdom	$1,400	$799	New York
France	$1,300	$742	Texas
Italy	$1,000	$472	Florida
Spain	$560	$467	Illinois

Failure is not an Option: Mission Control from Mercury to Apollo-13 and Beyond (2000/2009)
by Gene Krantz

Gene Kranz was present at the creation of America's manned space program and was a key player in it for three decades. As a flight director in NASA's Mission Control, Kranz witnessed firsthand the making of history. He participated in the space program from the early days of the Mercury program to the last Apollo mission, and beyond. He endured the disastrous first years when rockets blew up and the United States seemed to fall further behind the Soviet Union in the space race. He helped to launch Alan Shepard and John Glenn, then assumed the flight director's role in the Gemini program, which he guided to fruition. With his teammates, he accepted the challenge to carry out President John F. Kennedy's commitment to land a man on the Moon before the end of the 1960s. Kranz was flight director for both Apollo 11, the mission in which Neil Armstrong fulfilled President Kennedy's pledge, and Apollo 13. He headed the Tiger Team that had to figure out how to bring the three Apollo 13 astronauts safely back to Earth. (In the film Apollo 13, Kranz was played by the actor Ed Harris, who earned an Academy Award nomination for his performance.) In Failure Is Not an Option, Gene Kranz recounts these thrilling historic events and offers new information about the famous flights. What appeared as nearly flawless missions to the Moon were, in fact, a series of hair-raising near misses. When the space technology failed, as it sometimes did, the controllers' only recourse was to rely on their skills and those of their teammates. Kranz takes us inside Mission Control and introduces us to some of the whiz kids -- still in their twenties, only a few years out of college -- who had to figure it all out as they went along, creating a great and daring enterprise. He reveals behind-the-scenes details to demonstrate the leadership, discipline, trust, and teamwork that made the space program a success. Finally, Kranz reflects on what has happened to the space program and offers his own bold suggestions about what we ought to be doing in space now. This is a fascinating firsthand account written by a veteran mission controller of one of America's greatest achievements.

The Trouble with Islam: A Wake-up Call for Honesty and Change (2004)
by Irshad Manji

www.Muslim-Refusenik.com The official website of Irshad Manji, author of "The Trouble with Islam"
Quote: "Mulsim-Refusenik doesn't mean I refuse to be a Muslim, It simply means that I refuse to join an army of automatons in the name of Allah"

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (1984/1994/2001)
by Steven Levy

In this context, the term Hacker means someone who develops elegant hardware and software solutions rather than someone who does illegal things. But I had no idea that hacking began at MIT as part of their "model railroad club".

Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (1988/1990)
by Hans Moravec

[Mind Children] has the accuracy of a college text and the can't-put-it-down appeal of a good novel. Moravec has turned the flights of mind of one of the world's foremost roboticists into hard copy. And he has written a tremendously good book in the process.
--Eric Bobinsky (Byte)

Reviews Located Elsewhere on this site:

• Is Earth home to "Rare Intelligent Life"?
  

• Also, the "Life and Death of Planet Earth"
  

• Click Millennial Project to discover how to halt pollution and starvation right now while laying the foundations for moving humanity into space. This is not a cult, joke or scam; this is based upon currently available engineering.
  
  • Teaser 1: Virtually free electrical energy can now be generated from a solar powered device called an OTEC (Ocean Thermal Energy Converter).
    
  • Teaser 2: NASA's current launch locations and technology are wrong. NASA launches too far from the equator; NASA launches too close to sea level where the lower atmosphere is the thickest; NASA's first stage chemical boosters should be replaced with a "OTEC powered" maglev; The author has picked several sites - one of them is an extinct volcano in Africa.

Specialty Stuff: Genetics

The Epigenetics Revolution (2012) Nessa Carey
Subtitled: How Modern Biology Is Rewriting Our Understanding of Genetics, Disease, and Inheritance

Epigenetics can potentially revolutionize our understanding of the structure and behavior of biological life on Earth. It explains why mapping an organism's genetic code is not enough to determine how it develops or acts and shows how nurture combines with nature to engineer biological diversity. Surveying the twenty-year history of the field while also highlighting its latest findings and innovations, this volume provides a readily understandable introduction to the foundations of epigenetics.

Nessa Carey, a leading epigenetics researcher, connects the field's arguments to such diverse phenomena as how ants and queen bees control their colonies; why tortoiseshell cats are always female; why some plants need cold weather before they can flower; and how our bodies age and develop disease. Reaching beyond biology, epigenetics now informs work on drug addiction, the long-term effects of famine, and the physical and psychological consequences of childhood trauma. Carey concludes with a discussion of the future directions for this research and its ability to improve human health and well-being.

NSR comments:

• Wow. This book was a good follow-up to Epigenetics: The Ultimate Mystery of Inheritance

Epigenetics: The Ultimate Mystery of Inheritance (2011) by Richard C. Francis

"The potential is staggering. The age of epigenetics has arrived." Time, January 2010
Epigenetic means "on the gene," and the term refers to the recent discovery that stress in the environment can impact an individual's physiology so deeply that those biological scars are actually inherited by the next several generations. For instance, a recent study has shown that men who started smoking before puberty caused their sons to have significantly higher rates of obesity. And obesity is just the tip of the iceberg many researchers believe that epigenetics holds the key to understanding cancer, Alzheimer's, schizophrenia, autism, and diabetes. Epigenetics is the first book for general readers on this fascinating and important topic. The book is driven by stories such as the Dutch famine of World War II, Jose Canseco and steroids, the breeding of mules and hinnies, Tasmanian devils and contagious cancer, and more.

NSR Comments:

• the material in this book is heavily referenced in the last 60 pages (good)
• the root of epigenesis is not "genetics" but "genesis"
• the chapter on x-women (who posses one muted X-chromosome resulting in them seeing two additional colors) was fascinating
• the author provides many examples where environmental factors appear to be more important than genetic information (anyone who has seriously about the question "Is it nature or nurture?" probably already knew the correct answer was "It is nature AND nurture", but now you've got actual proof)
• the author makes some very good arguments against the metaphor for genes being software. As a computer programmer I think this claim may only be true dependent upon how you define software.
  • For example, one view of software is as a fixed function operation like "a sorting algorithm". But consider something more modern like the Windows operating system which has built-in USB support for numerous devices but does something a little differently when it sees a flash drive for the first time (resulting in the loading and installation of file-system software for that device).
  • In the past few years I have come to think about genes as subroutines with the thread-of-execution being controlled by enzymes. Think about this for a moment: during the execution of gene 123 an enzyme might be manufactured which will enable the jump (GOTO statement) to gene 456. How did this jump occur? Maybe the enzyme unrolled (thus enabling) a neighboring DNA strand or maybe it just provided a primer to begin transcription elsewhere. We also know that eating certain foods will enable the production of a digestive enzyme to aid in the assimilation. Did the food directly trigger a gene OR did another helper processes monitoring stomach contents intercede? Not sure. 

The Code of Codes: Scientific and Social Issues in the Human Genome Project (1993/2000)
edited by Daniel Kevles and Leroy Hood

Another popularization of the Human Genome Project, this one has the distinction of being the first published as an anthology, and among its contributors are some leading scholars, scientists, and social critics. The three parts of the book present essays covering topics in "History, Politics, and Genetics," "Genetics, Technology, and Medicine," and "Ethics, Law, and Society." Some of the essays are quite provocative, especially editor Kevles's "Out of Eugenics: The Historical Politics of the Human Genome" (creepy to read but necessary so humanity doe not repeat this mistake - NSR) , Dorothy Nelkin's "The Social Power of Genetic Information", Ruth Schwartz Conan's "Genetic Technology and Reproductive Choice", and James D. Watson's "A Personal View of the Project." Still, there is a good deal of substantive overlap among the essays and, while the discussions by experts are more sophisticated and specialized than those appearing in other books, little new information is presented for general readers. Public libraries with either Jerry Bishop and Michael Waldholz's Genome ( LJ 7/90) or Robert Shapiro's The Human Blueprint ( LJ 9/1/91) do not need this title, but academic libraries should consider it.

Leroy Hood, MD, PhD, President and co-founder of the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, is a pioneer in systems approaches to biology and medicine. Dr. Hood's research has focused on the study of molecular immunology, biotechnology and genomics. His professional career began at Caltech, where he and his colleagues developed the DNA sequencer and synthesizer and the protein synthesizer and sequencer--four instruments that paved the way for the successful mapping of the human genome and lead to his receiving this year's prestigious Russ Prize, awarded by the Academy of Engineering. A pillar in the biotechnology field, Dr. Hood has played a role in founding more than fourteen biotechnology companies, including Amgen, Applied Biosystems, Darwin, The Accelerator and Integrated Diagnostics. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine, one of only 10 people in the world to be elected to all three academies. In addition to having published more than 700 peer reviewed articles, he has coauthored textbooks in biochemistry, immunology, molecular biology and genetics, as well as a popular book on the human genome project, The Code of Codes. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Lasker Award, the Kyoto Prize and the Heinz Award in Technology. Dr. Hood has also received 17 honorary degrees from prestigious universities in the US and other countries.

NSR Comments:

• I purchased a signed copy of this book last night (2011-05-04) after attending a public lecture by Leroy Hood at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.

The Eighth Day of Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Biology (1979/1996/2004)
25th Anniversary Edition
by Horace Freeland Judson

In the foreword to this expanded edition of his 1979 masterpiece, Horace Freeland Judson says, "I feared I might seem the official historian of the movement"--molecular biology, that is. If by official he means "authoritative; definitive; the standard against which all others are measured" then his fears are warranted. Detailed without being overly technical, humane without being fulsome, The Eighth Day of Creation tells of molecular biology's search for the secret of life. "The drama has everything--exploration of the unknown; low comedy and urgent seriousness; savage competition, vaulting intelligence, abrupt changes of fortune, sudden understandings; eccentric and brilliant people, men of honor and of less than honor; a heroine, perhaps wronged; and a treasure to be achieved that was unique and transcendent." And in Judson this drama found its Shakespeare.

This lay history of molecular biology now contains material on some of the principal figures involved, particularly Rosalind Franklin and Erwin Chargaff. The foreword and epilogue sketch the further development of molecular biology into the era of recombinant DNA.

NSR Comments:

• I previously read this in 1981 then lost that copy. I recently purchased the 25^th anniversary edition and found it a joy to re-read. It is still very relevant today and would make a good gift to any first year college student working in this dicipline.

DNA: The Secret of Life (2003/2004) by James Watson

What makes DNA different from hordes of competitors purporting to help readers understand genetics is that it is written by none other than James Watson, of Watson and Crick fame. He and his co-author Andrew Berry have produced a clear and easygoing history of genetics, from Mendel through genome sequencing. Watson offers readers a sense of immediacy, a behind-the scenes familiarity with some of the most exciting developments in modern science. He gleefully reports on the research juggernaut that led to current obsessions with genetic engineering and cloning. Aided by profuse illustrations and photos, Watson offers an enthusiastic account of how scientists figured out how DNA codes for the creation of proteins--the so-called "central dogma" of genetics. But as patents and corporations enter the picture, Watson reveals his concern about the incursions of business into the hallowed halls of science. After 1975, DNA was no longer solely the concern of academics trying to understand the molecular underpinnings of life. The molecule moved beyond the cloisters of white-coated scientists into a very different world populated largely by men in silk ties and sharp suits. In later chapters, Watson aims barbs at those who are concerned by genetic tinkering, calling them "alarmists" who don't understand how the experiments work. It is in these arguments that Watson may lose favor with those whose notions of science were born after Silent Spring. Nevertheless, DNA encompasses both sides of the political issues involved in genetics, and Watson is an enthusiastic proponent of debate on the subject.

Who better than James Watson to lead a guided tour of DNA? When he and his English colleague, Francis Crick, discovered the double helix structure of the DNA molecule in 1953, little could they imagine that a mere 50 years later scientists would be putting the finishing touches on a map of the human genome. In this magisterial work, Watson, who won the Nobel Prize with Crick for their discovery, guides readers through the startling and rapid advances in genetic technology and what these advances will mean for our lives. Watson covers all aspects of the genome, from the layout of four simple bases on the DNA molecule through their complex construction into genes, then to the mechanisms whereby proteins produced by genes create our uniquely human characteristics-as well as the genetic mutations that can cause illnesses or inherited diseases like Duchenne muscular dystrophy and Huntington's disease. Watson may have mellowed a little over the years since he displayed his youthful brashness in The Double Helix, but he still isn't shy about taking on controversial subjects. He criticizes biotech corporations for patenting genes, making diagnostic medical procedures horribly expensive and damping further basic research. He notes that while China and other countries with large populations to feed have eagerly grasped the potential of genetically modified foodstuffs, America squandered $100 million on a recall of taco shells and the genetically modified corn used in them. He pleads passionately for the refinement and widespread use of prenatal genetic testing. Watson will probably provoke the most controversy with his criticism of scientists, corporations and government funding sources for their avoidance of important areas of research-notably the genetics of skin coloration-for political reasons. Every reader who wants to understand their own medical future will want to read this book. 100 color and b&w illus.

Specialty Stuff: Engineering Math

"Understanding the FFT" by Anders E. Zonst
 -and-
"Understanding FFT Applications" by Anders E. Zonst

 highly recommended  for hackers and math geeks

Anders E. Zonst is a retired aerospace engineer who authored two really good books each covering DFT (Discrete Fourier Transform) and FFT (Fast Fourier Transform).

• The first book is titled Understanding the FFT (1995/2000)
  • This book is subtitled "A Tutorial on the Algorithm & Software for Laymen, Students, Technicians & Working Engineers" and weighs in at 180 pages. I wish I would have owned a copy of this book 10 years earlier because I would have saved considerable time and money.
  • 4 chapters on DFT
  • 6 chapters on FFT
  • 10 appendices
• The second book is titled Understanding FFT Applications (1997/2004)
  • This first edition of this book (1997) is subtitled "A Tutorial for Laymen, Students, Technicians, & Working Engineers", weighs in at 415 pages.
  • This second edition of this book (2004) is subtitled "A Tutorial for Students, Technicians, & Working Engineers", weighs in at 278 pages, and comes with a CD-ROM
  • All books contain example programs written in GWBASIC so that Fourier concepts can be more easily demonstrated. First edition books required purchasing floppy disks at a nominal cost to cover shipping. Second edition books contained a common CD-ROM
  • Citrus Press has granted me permission to redistribute their copyrighted BASIC source code.
    • zip for floppy disk #1 (362k): CP-FFT-1.zip for Understanding the FFT (first edition)
    • zip for floppy disk #2 (387k): CP-FFT-2.zip for Understanding FFT Applications (first edition)
    • zip for CD-ROM folder #1 (928k): FFT2DSK.zip for Understanding the FFT (second edition)
    • zip for CD-ROM folder #2 (1.2m): APS2DSK.zip for Understanding FFT Applications (second edition)
  • Click here to locate a free Vanilla (non GUI) BASIC interpreter for your FFT experiments.
  • Mostly free, Vanilla (non GUI) BASIC sources:
    • GWBASIC 3.23 (editor/interpreter)
      • http://www.geocities.com/KindlyRat/GWBASIC.html
      • http://www.geocities.com/jsgwbasic/
    • QBASIC 1.1 (Microsoft BASIC editor/interpreter)

      • Microsoft Windows CD-ROM	Directory
        Win95	E:\other\oldmsdos
        Win98	E:\tools\oldmsdos
        Win98SE	E:\tools\oldmsdos
        WinME	E:\tools\oldmsdos

      • http://www.angelfire.com/ns/gooeyfiles/files.html
      • http://www.qbcafe.net/english/ Germany
    • QBASIC 4.5 (Microsoft BASIC editor/interpreter)
      • http://www.qbcafe.net/english/ Germany
    • QuickBASIC 7.1 (Microsoft BASIC editor/interpreter/compiler)
      • http://qbutil.hypermart.net/files/QB71.ZIP
      • http://www.qbcafe.net/english/ Germany
    • PowerBASIC (console compiler) very cool but not free
      • http://www.powerbasic.com/products/pbcc/
    • RealBASIC
      • http://www.realbasic.com - Create your own software for Windows, Linux, Mac
    • RunBASIC
      • www.runbasic.com - works on Windows, Mac OS-X, and Linux. Interfaces directly without CGI (which is built-in)

The Scientist & Engineer's Guide to Digital Signal Processing (1997) by Steven W. Smith
  -and-
Digital Signal Processing: A Practical Guide for Engineers and Scientists (2002) by Steven W. Smith

• The Scientist & Engineer's Guide to Digital Signal Processing (Hardcover) (1997) by Steven W. Smith
  • weighs in at 626 pages
  • 40 example programs written in BASIC so that Fourier concepts can be more easily understood
  • very thorough; starts with signals, filtering, sampling, then continues through DSP algorithms, DSP hardware, and DSP applications
  • free PDF download from this site: www.dspguide.com or purchase the printed book online (better idea)
• Digital Signal Processing: A Practical Guide for Engineers and Scientists (Paperback) (2002) by Steven W. Smith
  • weighs in at 650 pages and comes with a CD-ROM

Other Literary Diversions

The Coming Dark Age (a collection of articles and books)

1. Download a free PDF copy of the 418-page 2002 publication: The Phoenix Principle and the Coming Dark Age by Marc Widdowson (British military analyst and educator) 
   • subtitled: Social catastrophes – human progress 3000 BC to AD 3000
   • PDF: https://skydrive.live.com/?cid=A578E86D89199CB9&id=A578E86D89199CB9!186
   • Marc Widdowson's original web site at www.darkage.fsnet.co.uk appears to have fallen into the bit-bucket sometime after 2008. But you can still access much of the original material (including charts and diagrams which are not in the current PDF) via the Way Back Machine: 
     • 2008-10-27: http://web.archive.org/web/20081027105939/http://www.darkage.fsnet.co.uk/index.htm
     • partial index: http://classic-web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.darkage.fsnet.co.uk
   • The chart above (also seen here) illustrates the rise-and-fall of six major empires. Notice the amplitude and period are decreasing.
   • These tables, which were published 5-years before the 2007-2008 American-caused world-wide financial debacle, seem shockingly accurate.
2. Download ($10) an eBook of The Coming Dark Age by Roberto Vacca - 153 pages in PDF format
   • This book was first published in 1973 then updated in 2000
   • Click here for a free view "Contents, Foreword, Introduction and the First Chapter"
   • "I read this book in a palsied fascination of horror. I have never read a book that was at the same time so convincing and so frightening." - Isaac Asimov
3. Purchase ($10) the 2005 book Dark Age Ahead by Jane Jacobs
4. Business Week - Coming Dark Age for Innovation?
5. New Scientist - Entering a dark age of innovation
6. While there are many complicated and interacting reasons for the fall of the Roman Empire, I am now convinced that Edward Gibbon was correct when he stated that the primary reason was due to the the effects of organized religion. Today's world might collapse for nothing more that the reasons of religious intolerance or greed (materialism is another form of religion)
7. Religious Method (dogma): Fiction, Assertion, Suppression
   Scientific Method (pragma): Observation, Hypothesis, Experiment (test), Debate. Then publish and repeat.
   Galileo's Defense Against Catholic Persecution: The bible tells you "how to go to heaven", not "how the heavens go".
   (Therefore the bible cannot be relied upon to tell you when: life begins, how the world was created, how old the world is, etc. On the flip side, science will never be able to prove, or disprove, the existence of God. Like music and art, science and religion are just two human cultural expressions. They must never be allowed to merge or you will exchange democracy for theocracy)

1. General Motors employed over 400,000 North American employees in 1970. (this is the same peak employment number of the people who worked on Apollo). GM got rid of those pesky technical workers while the number of white collar workers sky rocketed to over to over 40,000 by the mid 2000s. Before 2004, GM paid more money per car to advertisers than they did to hourly workers.
2. Detroit-headquartered manufacturers claimed that Asian products were garbage while Detroit produced crappy products like the Chevy Vega, Ford Pinto, and the AMC Gremlin. Detroit then claimed that American products were superior to Asian  products even though Detroit was already manufacturing in places like Mexico and Brazil. (this obfuscation could be better described by the phrase "Jedi hand wave" which only works on the weak minded)
3. In the 1980's, big newspaper publishers started calling paid advertising "copy" while the news content was referred to as "noise". Around this time, newspaper started to acquire each other. Publishers started by getting rid of those pesky reporters while reaping 30-35% annual ROI (return-on-investment) on their acquisitions. We know this now because newspapers have had to open their books during recent bankruptcies. So the internet didn't kill newspapers, newspaper owners and managers just sucked out all the money until it wasn't worth paying for.
4. The stupidity of the Iraq War is comparable to the Vietnam war. I am tempted to say that Americans don't learn from history but I would be partly wrong: The American public was mostly against the War in Vietnam because of the draft even though it partly destroyed their economy. Bush-Cheney knew about the draft so were careful to never invoke one for their Iraq War. This means that many Americans are still under the deluded belief that the Vietnam War could have been won. So are American politicians stupid or just political ideologues?
5. Between 1927 and 1999 the human population tripled from 2 billion to 6 billion and this was only possible due to the industrialization of farms. Since the majority of farms get water from rivers that begin in glaciers, and global warming is destroying them, rivers will begin to run dry in the summer months which means that people will die. Six large rivers begin in the Tibetan plateau eventually feed India, Pakistan, and China. When these nuclear powers run out of food there will be war.

The Roman Republic (1966)
The Roman Empire (1967)
both by Isaac Asimov

• I had always intended to read The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon. Last month I found new hardcopy copies in a Toronto book store but was shocked to see that a boxed set of volumes 1-6 encompassed 4100 pages of small print. Although the price was very reasonable, I just didn't want to read this much history at this time. (that said, I will purchase these box sets for my home library). After seeing the retail box sets, further research caused me to stumble upon Asimov's smaller book titled The Roman Empire.

The Roman Republic (1966) by Isaac Asimov

• weighs in at 257 pages and covers the years of 1000 BC to 753 BC (first year of Rome) to 27 BC (Octavian is named Augustus)
• several tidbits of many:
  • "Senate" is derived from the Latin word for "old men". Senators advised the government as a wise father would advise his family. Therefore, senators were known as "patricians" which is the Latin word for "father"
  • "Circus Maximus" literally means "large ring". Gladiators get their name from their broad short sword which was called "a gladius"
  • Early rulers were given the title "Praetor" which is derived from Latin words meaning "to lead the way". Later on when two leaders were required by law, the title was replaced with "Consul" meaning "partner". Consuls needed to "consult" each other on every decision.
  • "Proletariat" comes from a Latin term meaning to bring for children, since to the ruling aristocracy, the poor seemed to have no other use than providing children to serve in the legions)
  • "Plebeians" come from a Latin word meaning "common people".
  • Plebeians were allowed to appoint representatives who were known as "Tribunes" (a name originally given to the leaders of a tribe)
  • "Censor" comes from a Latin word meaning "to tax".
• Chapters: The Seven Kings, The Republic Survives, The Conquest of Italy, The Conquest of Sicily, Hannibal, The Conquest of the East, Internal Troubles, Sulla and Pompey, The Triumvirate, Caesar, The End of the Republic, Table of Dates

The Roman Empire (1967) by Isaac Asimov

• weighs in at 277 pages and covers the years of 26 BC to 476 AD
• several tidbits of many:
  • Octavian was given...
    • the title "Princeps" which means "first citizen". This word is later developed into "Principate" and also "Prince".
    • the title "Augustus" which implies "one who is responsible for increasing (augmenting) the good of the world"
    • the title "Imperitor" which means leader. It is from this word that we end up with "Empire"
  • Senatorial historians were always rewriting history to make emperors seem much more evil. Although it is true that Tiberius  retired to the isle of Capri, his old age along with his Stoic life-style makes it highly unlikely that retired to a life of sexual debauchery as portrayed in many movies.
  • Starting in 142 AD, the Romans began constructing Antonine Wall in Northern Scotland which was about 160 km (100 mi) North of Hadrian's Wall. (I knew about Hadiran's Wall but had never heard of this one)
• Chapters: Augustus, The Line of Augustus, The Line of Vespasian, The Line of Nerva, The Line of Severus, Anarchy, Diocletian, The Line of Constantius, The Line of Valentinian, The Germanic Kingdons, Genealogies, Table of Dates

Other Roman Stuff:

• "Ben-Hur" (1880, abridged edition 2005 by Elm Hill Books) by Lew Wallace
• "Ben-Hur" (1880, unabridged) by Lew Wallace
  • http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/2145
  • Not in any way similar to the 1956 or 2009 movies. For example, this book begins with the meeting of three travelers on the desert. The first man was an Egyptian named Balthazar. The second man was a Hindu named Melchior. The third man was a Greek named Gaspar. It appears that these are the three wise men.
  • The language used in this book (1880) coupled with things like the speeches of Abraham Lincoln (1812-1865) convince me that our language skills are in decline.
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben-Hur_(novel)
    
• "De Bello Gallico" (50 BC) and Other Commentaries by Julius Caesar
  • http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/10657
    • Book V - Chapter XLIV. In that legion there were two very brave men, centurions, who were now approaching the first ranks, T. Pulfio, and L. Varenus. These used to have continual disputes between them which of them should be preferred, and every year used to contend for promotion with the utmost animosity. When the fight was going on most vigorously before the fortifications, Pulfio, one of them, says, "Why do you hesitate, Varenus? or what [better] opportunity of signalising your valour do you seek?
  • http://classics.mit.edu/Caesar/gallic.5.5.html
    • Chapter 44 In that legion there were two very brave men, centurions, who were now approaching the first ranks, T. Pulfio, and L. Varenus. These used to have continual disputes between them which of them should be preferred, and every year used to contend for promotion with the utmost animosity. When the fight was going on most vigorously before the fortifications, Pulfio, one of them, says, "Why do you hesitate, Varenus? or what [better] opportunity of signalizing your valor do you seek? This very day shall decide our disputes." When he had uttered these words, he proceeds beyond the fortifications, and rushes on that part of the enemy which appeared the thickest. Nor does Varenus remain within the rampart, but respecting the high opinion of all, follows close after. Then, when an inconsiderable space intervened, Pulfio throws his javelin at the enemy, and pierces one of the multitude who was running up, and while the latter was wounded and slain, the enemy cover him with their shields, and all throw their weapons at the other and afford him no opportunity of retreating. The shield of Pulfio is pierced and a javelin is fastened in his belt. This circumstance turns aside his scabbard and obstructs his right hand when attempting to draw his sword: the enemy crowd around him when [thus] embarrassed. His rival runs up to him and succors him in this emergency. Immediately the whole host turn from Pulfio to him, supposing the other to be pierced through by the javelin. Varenus rushes on briskly with his sword and carries on the combat hand to hand, and having slain one man, for a short time drove back the rest: while he urges on too eagerly, slipping into a hollow, he fell. To him, in his turn, when surrounded, Pulfio brings relief; and both having slain a great number, retreat into the fortifications amid the highest applause. Fortune so dealt with both in this rivalry and conflict, that the one competitor was a succor and a safeguard to the other, nor could it be determined which of the two appeared worthy of being preferred to the other.
  • Anyone watching the Rome series on HBO will recognize these characters as Titus Pullo and Lucius Vorenus
  • Titus Pullo @ Wikipedia
  • Lucius Vorenus @ Wikipedia
  • De Bello Gallico @ Wikipedia
  • Rome_(TV_series) @ Wikipedia