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 Posted: Wed Nov 07, 2007 4:09 pm Post subject: |
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A Pocket Full of Rye
Hardcover
By Agatha Christie
| Quote: | "And the cause of death?"
"There will have to be an autopsy, naturally. Very interesting case. Very interesting indeed. Glad I was able to be in on it."
The professional gusto in Bernsadorff's rich tones told Inspector Neele one thing at least.
"I gather you don't think it was natural death," he said dryly.
"Not a dog's chance of it," said Dr. Bernsdorff robustly. "I'm speaking unofficially, of course," he added with belated caution.
"Of course. Of course. That's understood. He was poisoned?"
"Definitely. And what's more - this is quite unofficial, you understand - just between you and me - I'd be prepared to lay a bet on what the poison was."
"In-deed?"
"Taxine, my boy. Taxine."
"Taxine? Never heard of it."
"I know. Most unusual. Really delightfully unusual! I don't say I'd have spotted it myself if I hadn't had a case only three or four weeks ago. Couple of kids playing dolls' tea-parties - pulled berries off a yew tree and used them for tea."
"Is that what it is? Yew berries?"
"Berries or leaves. Highly poisonous. Taxine, of course, is the alkaloid. Don't think I've heard of a case where it was used deliberately. Really most interesting and unusual ... You've no idea, Neele, how tired one gets of the inevitable weed-killer. Taxine is a real treat. Of course, I may be wrong - don't quote me, for Heaven's sake - but I don't think so. Interesting for you, too, I should think. Varies the routine!" (-- p. 8) |
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| Posted: Wed Nov 07, 2007 4:41 pm Post subject: |
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Making History
Hardcover
By Stephen Fry
| Quote: | Physics is way hip. If you see a couple of literature students in conversation these days, chances are they'll be talking about Schrodinger's Kitten or Chaos and Catastrophe. Twenty-five years ago the coolest cats on campus were E.M. Forster and F.R. Leavis; next came the Structuralists, Stephen Heath and his liggers and groupies on the Difference and Deconstruction tour; now American tourists hang around in Niels Bohr T-shirts in the hope of touching the tyres on Stephen Hawking's wheelchair and having the secrets of the universe zapped into them.
The Alpha and Omega of science is numbers. Mean to say, a man don't get nowhere without them.
The above two sentences, for instance, they don't work with numbers. The Alpha and Omega of science are numbers, I'd have to say, and a man doesn't get anywhere without them.
The part of my brain that operates numbers is only slightly larger than the area that concerns itself with the politics of New Zealand or the outcome of the PGA Masters tournament. I have schoolboy French and I have schoolboy arithmetic. Just enough to get by in shops and restaurants. If I pay for a thirty pence newspaper with a one pound coin I am smart enough to expect seventy pence back. If I bet five pounds on a three-to-one Derby winner I will be pissed off not to finish fifteen quid richer. Price the horse at seven-to-two however, and sweat will begin to break out on my brow. Numbers suck. (From Making Waves, A window on the world, pg. 69) |
| Quote: | Making History
Narrated by its charming author
Audio Cassette ONLY!
(Why do publishers think so small?)
We haven't heard this one yet, but Fry is a wonderfully able and precise reader. Please check back for updates after we've obtained a copy for review. |
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| Posted: Wed Dec 19, 2007 2:47 pm Post subject: |
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Passionate Minds
The great love affair of the Englightenment, featuring the scientist Émilie du Châtelet, the poet Voltaire, sword fights, book burnings, assorted kings, seditious verse, and the birth of the modern world
Hardcover
By David Bodanis
| Quote: | She (Émilie) and the great writer Voltaire were lovers for nearly a decade, though they certainly took their time settling down, having to delay for frantic gallopings across France, sword fights in front of besieged German fortresses, a wild affair (hers) with a gallant pirate's son, and a deadly burning of books (his) by the public executioner at the base of the grand stairwell of the Palais de Justice in Paris. There was also rigging the French national lottery to guarantee a multimillion-franc payout, and investing in North African grain futures with the proceeds.
... When they ran out of money, Emilie would sometimes resort to the gambling tables at Versailles - since she was so much quicker than anyone else at mathematics, she could often be counted on to win. Voltaire wrote proudly that "the court ladies, playing cards with her in the company of the queen, were far from suspecting that they were sitting next to Newton's commentator."
Voltaire wasn't much of a scientist, but Emilie was a skilled theoretician. Once, working secretly at night at the chateau over a single intense summer month, hush ing the servants not to spoil the surprise for Voltaire, she came up with insights on the nature of light that set the stage for the future discovery of photography, as well as of infrared radiation. Her later work was even more fundamental, for she played a key role in transforming Newton's thought for the modern era. The research she did on what later became termed the conservation of energy was crucial here, and the "squared" in Einstein's famous equation E=mc2 (squared) came, in fact, directly from her work. (From the Preface, pgs. 1-2) |
The lottery scam:
| Quote: | ... The city government had recently defaulted on its municipal bonds, which meant that there were a lot of wealthy individuals who owned valueless bonds. If the government left it at that, thos individuals whould be very wary of ever investing in future bond issues. To show good faith - and make up for some of the investors' losses - the city government now decided to offer a lottery, to which only owners of those now valueless bonds could apply. Since the angry bondholders wouldn't participate in an ordinary lottery (having been so misled before), the government decided to go further and add substantial extra funds to the total lottery amount. The government felt this was safe, since it expected only a few holders of the original bonds to invest, despite the sweetener of the increased payment per ticket.
What it didn't reckon with was Voltaire's ingenuity, aided by his new friend the mathematician La Condamine. Voltaire had been audacious and creative in leterature. Now he applied the same skills to finance. What if someone went around and bought all the valueless bonds that were in default? It was easy enough, for the owners of the bonds were still so upset at having lost all their money in the city's original default that they didn't really believe the promises the city gave that there would be extra money in the lottery.
In fact, though, these bonds weren't quite valueless, for Voltaire - and La Condamine, and a very few others he brought into his syndicate - weren't blinded by that recent experience of financial loss, and so understood that the bonds were "tickets" they could use to enter the city's lottery. And since the city genuinely had added extra funds to sweeten the lottery... (From Exile and Return, pgs. 59-60) |
The tax scam (foiling the Fontainebleu cheats into the bargain):
| Quote: | What she realized, after just a few weeks, was that there would be a great demand in France for some organization that could supply decent streams of cash at reasonable interest rates. Large workshops and trading companies needed that, but there was no stock market and no well-developed bond market to supply it.
Now she thought of another way. Taxes in France weren't collected directly by the government - as we saw, there was no civil service capable of that. Instead, the king let a few private individuals collect taxes, for a high fee. After those individuals had collected enough to pay that fee, they got to keep the rest.
She couldn't take over that role, for the individuals who had the rights to it wouldn't let go. But those tax collectors themselves often needed money to organize the large private bureaucracies they required to collect taxes from across the nation. What if she offered to pay them for the right to get some of that money they'd earn in the future? Since hardly anyone was aware of this opportunity, she could buy what they'd be earning in the future at a low price. Once she had the tax collectors signed up, she could then tell the court gamblers (whose money she'd "lost"), that she'd pay them back by giving them some of that future money when it arrived.
It was a modern form of derivatives, and she didn't even need to keep it running until she had the full 84,000 francs she owed. The Fontainebleau cheats knew they'd gone too far, since they of course had also been violating the royal honor by rigging the games played at the queen's table. In exchange for accepting partial payment as a settlement, Emilie quietly promised that she wouldn't use her family connections to start an embarrassing investigation into how they'd arranged their cheating. The whole maneuver didn't cost Emilie anything, for the tax collectors were so dim that they had accepted the promise of a fairly low amount of money for the right to their future earnings. When those earnings did start coming in, months or years later, Emilie would get a profit. (From the chapter, To Sceaux, pgs. 217-218) |
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| Posted: Sat Dec 22, 2007 5:14 pm Post subject: |
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The Calculus Wars
Newton, Leibniz and the Greatest Mathematical Clash of All Time
Hardcover
By Jason Socrates Bardi
| Quote: | Halley met Hooke and Christopher Wren in a cofee shop some time in the spring of 1684. Coffeehouses flourished in London in the seventeenth century, and by the end of the century there were thousands. These provided a forum for meetings, and I imagine them to be like the best coffee shops today with strange men reeking of tobacco meeting each other and sitting leaning over broad thick tables stained black with coffee bean oil. Halley was curious about the comet that today carries his name, and he posed a simple question to these two other men: what sort of path would a celestial object like a comet take?
Hooke had a physical explanation, and it was the right one. Celestial objects, he said, would follow an inverse square law of attraction. Wren, perhaps, unconvinced, asked Hooke to demonstrate how he knew it was an inverse square law, but Hooke demurred. Wren challenged Hooke to prove it, promising that he would reward him with a valuable book worth forty shillings if he could do it, but Hooke had no such mathematical proof, so this was not a bet that he could accept. Instead he declined. Meanwhile, Halley sat there unsatisfied. He thought he had the answer, but how could he be sure? (From The Beginning of the Sublime Geometry, pgs. 121-122) |
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| Posted: Sat Feb 16, 2008 3:06 pm Post subject: |
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Moments of Reprieve
Paperback
By Primo Levi
| Quote: | Eddy waited for me to get up, then asked to whom I was writing. I answered in my bad German that I was not writing to anyone. I happened to find a pencil and was writing on a whim, out of nostalgia, in a dream. Yes, I knew very well that writing was forbidden, but I also knew that getting a letter out of the Camp was impossible; I assured him I never would have dared to break Camp rules. I knew Eddy certainly would not believe me but I had to say something, if only to arouse his pity. If he were to denounce me to the Political Section, I knew it was the gallows for me, but before the gallows an interrogation - and what an interrogation! - to find out who my accomplice was, and perhaps also to obtain from me the address of the recipient in Italy. Eddy looked at me with a strange expression, then told me not to budge, he'd be back in an hour.
It was a long hour. Eddy came back to the cellar with three sheets of paper in hand, mine among them, and I immediately read on his face that the worst would not happen. He must have been quite clever, this Eddy, or maybe his tempestuous past had taught him the basics of the sad profession of interrogator. He had looked among my companions for two men (not just one) who knew both German and Italian, and had gotten them separately to translate my message into German, warning them that if the two translations did not turn out to be identical, he would denounce not only me but also them to the Political Section.
He made a speech to me that I find difficult to repeat. He told me that, luckily for me, the two translations were the same and the text was not compromising. That I was crazy - there was not other explanation. Only a madman would think of gambling in such a way with his life, that of the Italian accomplice whom I certainly had, my relatives in Italy, and also his career as Kapo. He told me that I deserved that slap, that in fact I should thank him because it had been a good deed, the kind that earns you Paradise, and that he, Strassenrauber, a street-thief by profession, certainly needed to perform good deeds. That, finally, he would not have recourse to denunciation but even he could not exactly say why. Maybe just because I was crazy. But then Italians are all notoriously crazy, good only for singing and getting into trouble. (From The Juggler, pgs. 31-33) |
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| Posted: Mon Feb 18, 2008 12:26 pm Post subject: |
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Not Even Wrong
The Failure of String Theory and the Continuing Challenge to Unify the Laws of Physics
Hardcover
By Peter Woit
| Quote: | Since my research interests involved the parts of quantum field theory closest to mathematics and I did not want to do superstring theory, it seemed that it would be a good idea to try my luck looking for employment among the mathematicians. I moved back to Cambridge, where the physics department at Harvard let me use a desk as an unpaid visitor, and the mathematics department at Tufts hired me as an adjunct to teach calculus. From there I went on to a one-year postdoctoral research associate position at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute at Berkeley, followed by a four-year non-tenture track junior faculty appointment in the mathematics department at Columbia.
This change of fields from physics to mathematics turned out to be a wise move, and I have now been at Columbia in the maths department for more than sixteen years. Currently, I'm happily in the non-tenured but permanent faculty position of 'Lecturer', with one of my main responsibilities being to make sure that the department's computer system keeps functioning properly. I also teach classes at the undergraduate and graduate level, as well as continuing to do research in the area of the mathematics of quantum field theory.
My academic career path has been rather unusual and I'm very much aware that it has been based on a significant amount of good luck. This began with the good fortune of having parents who could afford to send me to Harvard. It continued with being in the right place at the right time to take advantage of an uncommon opportunity to work in an excellent maths department surrounded by talented and supportive colleagues. (Introduction, pgs. 4-5) |
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| Posted: Fri Feb 29, 2008 10:13 am Post subject: |
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From Impossible Odds:
The New Yorker
Magazine Subscription
A Reporter at Large
Big Foot
In measuring carbon emissions, it's easy
to confuse morality and science.
By Michael Specter
Feb. 25/08
| Quote: | Greenhouse-gas emissions have risen rapidly in the past two centuries, and levels today are higher than at any time in at least the past 650,000 years. In 1995, each of the six billion people on earth was responsible, on average, for one ton of carbon emissions. Oceans and forests can absorb about half that amount. Although specific estimates vary, scientists and policy officials increasingly agree that allowing emissions to continue at the current rate would induce dramatic changes in the global climate system. To avoid the most catastrophic effects of those changes, we will have to hold emissions steady in the next decade, then reduce them by at least 60-80 per cent by the middle of the century. (A delay of just 10 years in stopping the increase would require double the reductions.) Yet, even if all carbon emissions stopped today, the earth would continue to warm for at least another century. ...
A person's carbon footprint is simply a measure of his contribution to global warming. (CO2 is the best known of the gases that trap heat in the atmosphere, but others - including water vapor, methane, and nitrous oxide - also play a role.) Virtually every human activity - from watching television ot buying a quart of milk - has some carbon cost associated with it. We all consume electricity generated by burning fossil fuels; most people rely on petroleum for transportation and heat. Emissions from those activities are not hard to quantify. Watching a plasma television for three hours every day contributes two hundred and fifty kilograms of carbon to the atmosphere each year; an LCD is responsible for less than half that number. Yet the calculations required to assess the full environmental impact of how we live can be dazzlingly complex. ... A few months ago, scientists at the Stockholm Environment Institute reported that the carbon footprint of Christmas - including food, travel, lighting, and gifts - was 650 kg per person. That is as much, they estimated, as the weight of "one thousand Christmas puddings" for every resident of England. ...
Many factors influence the carbon footprint of a product: water use, cultivation and harvesting methods, quantity and type of fertilizer, even the type of fuel used to make the package. Sea-freight emissions are less than a 60th of those associated with airplanes, and you don't have to build highways to berth a ship. Last year, a study of the carbon cost of the global wine trade found that is actually more "green" for New Yorkers to drink wine from Bordeaux, which shipped by sea, than wine from California, sent by truck. That is largely because shipping wine is mostly shipping glass. The study found that "the efficiencies of shipping drive a 'green line' all the way to Columbus, Ohio, the point where a wine from Bordeaux and Napa has the same carbon intensity."
The environmental burden imposed by importing apples from New Zealand to Northern Europe or New York can be lower than if the apples were raised fifty miles away. "In New Zealand, they have more sunshine than in the UlK, which helps productivity," (Adrian) Williams (agriculture researcher at the Natural Resources Department of Cranfield University, in England) explained. That means the yield of New Zealand apples far exceeds the yield of those grown in northern climates, so the energy required for farmers to grow the crop is correspondingly lower. It also helps that the electricity in New Zealand is mostly generated by renewable sources, none of which emit large amounts of CO2. Researchers at Loncoln University in Christchurch, found that lamb raised in New Zealand and shipped 11,000 miles by boat to England produced 688 kg of carbon-dioxide emissions per ton, about a fourth of the amount produced by British lamb. In part, that is because pastures in New Zealand need far less fertilizer than most grazing land in Britain (or in many parts of the U.S.). Similarly, importing beans from Uganda or Kenya - where the farms are small, tractor use is limited, and the fertilizer is almost always manure - tends to be more efficient than growing beans in Europe, with its reliance on energy-dependent irrigation systems. ...
... We are going to have to reduce our carbon footprint rapidly, and we can do that only by limiting the amount of fossil fuels released into the atmosphere. ... Each time we drive a car, use electricity generated by a coal-fired plant, or heat our homes with gas or oil, carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases escape into the air. We can use longer-lasting light bulbs, lower the termostat (and the air-conditioning), drive less, and buy more fuel-efficient cars. That will help, and so will switching to cleaner sources of energy. Flying has also emerged as a major carbon don't - with some reason, since airplanes at high altitudes release at least 10 times as many greenhouse gases per mile as trains do. Yet neither transportation - which accounts for 15 per cent of greenhouse gases - nor industrial activity (another 15 per cent) presents the most efficient way to shrink the carbon footprint of the globe. ...
(John O.) Niles, the chief science and policy officer for the environmental group Carbon Conservation, argues that spending $5 billion a year to prevent deforestation in countries like Indonesia would be one of the best investments the world could ever make. "The value of that land is seen as consisting only of the value of its lumber," he said. A logging company comes along and offers to strip the forest to make some trivial wooden product, or a palm-oil plantation. The governments in these places have no cash. They are sitting on this resource that is doing nothing for their economy. So when a guy says, 'I will give you a few hundred dollars if you let me cut down these trees,' it's not easy to turn your nose up at that. Those are dollars people can spend on shcools and hospitals."
... According to the latest figures, deforestation pushes nearly six billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year. That amounts to 30 million acreas - an area half the size of the UK - chopped down every year. Put another way, according to one recent calculation, during the next 24 hours the effect of losing forests in Brazil and Indonesia will be the same if 8 million people boarded airplanes at Heathrow Airport and few en masse to New York.
... From both a political and economic perspective, it would be asier and cheaper to reduce the rate of deforestation than to cut back significantly on air travel. It would also have a far greater impact on climate change and on social welfare in the developing world. Possessing rights to carbon would grant new power to farmers who, for the first time, would be paid to preserve their forests rather than destroy them. Unfortunately, such plans are seen by many people as morally unattractive. "The whole issue is tied up with the misconceived notion of 'carbon colonialism," Niles told me. "Some activists do not want the Third World to have to alter their behavior, because the problem was largely caused by us in the West." (-- pgs. 44-52) |
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| Posted: Wed Mar 12, 2008 12:01 pm Post subject: |
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New York Times Magazine
Newspaper Subscription
The 7th Annual Year in Ideas
Rock-Paper-Scissors is Universal.
By James Ryerson
Dec. 9/07
| Quote: | The children's game rock-paper-scissors has a simple yet elegant structure: rock beats scissors; scissors beats paper; paper beats rock. Of the three possible moves, each defeats one, only to be defeated by the other. It's almost karmic. Indeed, it's a kind of equilibrium that scientists now say may govern conflict throughout the universe.
At least among lizards. ...
The three types of lizard, which the scientists monitored over several years in the French Pyrenees, are locked in a cyclical sort of standoff. For a time, the deceivers flourish at the expense of the intruders, who are too busy marauding to pay attention. Then the cooperators win out over the deceivers, who can't slink past the guards. And then the intruders vanquish the cooperators, whose openness exposes them to aggression.l Then the cycle repeats. It takes about four years.
.. It's a phenomenon big and small. In 2002, biologist Bejamin Kerr announced his discovery of a "real-life game of rock-paper-scissors" among bacteria. In their recent paper, Sinervo and his colleagues even speculate that such games may describe human behavior in the corporate world, where strategies of force (takeovers), deception (fraud) and cooperation (mergers) also seem to supplant one another in an endless loop.
The pattern is "quite deep," Sinervo says. "I think it's a philosophical point. You have 'take by force,' deception and cooperation. Each beats one but not the other. It's the way the very fabric of social systems is structured." (-- p. 96) |
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| Posted: Sun Mar 16, 2008 1:03 pm Post subject: |
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Living Cosmos
Our Search for Life in the Universe
Hardcover
By Chris Impey
| Quote: | The theorists use math to tease regularity out of the seemingly random motions of small planetary bodies. Widely separated rocks in space can have their orbital periods synchronized by the ratios of whole numbers. In a phenomenon called resonance. It's an echo of the Pythagorean music of the spheres. There is synchrony in the interactions of planets and their moons - Mimas sweeps out Cassini's division. Cordelia and Ophelia shepherd a slender ring of Uranus, and our Moon turns one cheek toward us, like a doting lover. Solar systems operate with a curious mixture of regularity and chaos.
The current best bet on how planets form is called the core-accretion model. It starts with the rapid growth from dust particles into rocks and then into mountains and then into terrestrial planets. This amazing progression in size from microns to meters to kilometers to a rock as big as the Earth is actually the most reliable part of the story - gravity depends on mass, so it acts to accelerate the growth. Harvard researcher Scott Kenyon has said, "The dust bunnies under your bed grow in a similar way. After a million years, a dust bunny can get pretty big." Forming Earths is easy. (From Forging Exoplanets, p. 239) |
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| Posted: Tue Apr 08, 2008 10:51 am Post subject: |
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Storm World
Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming
Hardcover
By Chris Mooney
| Quote: | | To explain the difference between weather and climate, RealClimate.org used the analogy of rolling a die: You never know what's going to come up n any given roll, but over time and across many rolls, you can get a very good sense of the odds (and thus, whether or not the die is loaded). (From the Prologue, p. 5) |
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| Posted: Thu May 01, 2008 1:36 pm Post subject: |
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From Gambling on God:
Galileo's Daughter
A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith and Love
Hardcover
By Dava Sobel
| Quote: | Galileo, now fifty-nine, also stood boldly alone in his worldview, as Suor Maria Celeste (*his equally brilliant daughter whom he cloistered in a nunnery because despite his 'genius' he lacked the foresight to imagine what hell his decision not to marry his mistress would cause his subsequent children - esp the girls!) knew from reading the books he wrote and the letters he shared with her from colleagues and critics all over Italy, as well as from across the continent beyond the Alps. Although her father had started his career as a professor of mathematics, teaching frist at Pisa and then at Padua, every philosopher in Europe tied Galileo's name to the msot startling series of astronomical discoveries ever claimed by a single individual.
In 1969, when Suor Maria Celeste was still a child in Padua, Galileo had set a telescope in the garden behind his house and turned it skyward. Never-before-seen stars leaped out of the darkness to enhance familiar constellations; the nebulous Milky Way resolved into a swath of densely packed star; mountains and valleys pockmarked the storied perfection of the Moon; and a retinue of four attendant bodies traveled regularly around Jupiter like a planetary system in miniature.
"I render infinte thanks to God," Galileo intoned after those nights of wonder, "for being so kind as to make me alone the first observer of marvels kept hidden in obscurity for all previous centuries."
The newfound worlds transformed Galileo's life. He won appointment as chief mathematician and philosopher to the grand duke in 1610, and moved to Florence to assume his position at the court of Cosimo de' Medici. He took along with him his two daughters, then ten and nine years old, but he left Vincenzio, who was only four when greatness descended on the family, to live awhile longer in Padua with Marina (his mistress).
Galileo found himself lionized as another Columbus for his conquests. Even as he attained the height of his glory, however, he attracted enmity and suspicion. For instead of opening a distant land dominated by heathens, Galileo trespassed on holy ground. Hardly had his first spate of findings stunned the populace of Durope before a new wave followed: He saw dark spots creeping continuously across the face of the Sun, and "the mother of loves," as he called the planet Venus, cycling through phases from full to crescent, just as the moon did. ...
... In 1616, a pope and a cardinal inquisitor reprimanded Galileo, warning him to curtail his forays into the supernal realms. The motions of the heavenly bodies, they said, having been touched upon in the Psalms, the Book of Joshua, and elsewhere in the Bible, were matters best left to the Holy Fathers of the Church.
Galileo obeyed their orders, silencing himself on the subject. For seven cautious years he turned his efforts to less periolous pursuits, such as harnessing his Jovian satellites in the service of navigation, to help sailors discover their longitude at sea. He studied poetry and wrote literary ciriticism. Modifying his telescope, he developed a compound microscope. "I have observed many tiny animals with great admiration," he reported, "among which the flea is quite horrible, the gnat and the moth very beautiful; and with great satisfaction I have seen how flies and other little animals can walk attached to mirrors, upside down." (From She Who Was So Precious to You, pgs. 6-7) |
* Reason 4, 3444, 119, 567, 689 why many of us have a hard time admiring the 'genius' men of science - PU!
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| Posted: Fri May 23, 2008 8:30 am Post subject: |
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This England
THE MATHEMATICAL GENIUS OF AN ENGLISH COUNTESS
By Bel Bailey
Summer, 2007
| Quote: | The famous Lord Byron fervently hoped that his daughter, Augusta Ada, would never become a poet like himself. His wish was granted as she was destined to become famous for her scientific and mathematical genius instead.
Born in 1815, Ada's parents separated when she was only a few months old and her father left Britain forrever. He never fought his wife Annabella for custody of their child so Ada was brought up by her mother. Unfortunately, she was a harsh and narrowly religious woman who dominated her daughter all her brief life.
Ada was educated privately by tutors and then self-taught. Augustus de Morgan helped her in her advanced studies however. He was first professor of mathematics at London University and developed the theories and techniques behind modern computer programs.
Another early computer pioneer, Charles Babbage, was also introduced to Ada and they became close friends and allies. Learning that he was in the process of designing a revolutionary calculating machine - the first of all computers - Ada eagerly offered to help him.
She was rather an enigma to her friends in society as she was an attractive and high-spirited girl, fond of fashion and dancing, yet sincerely claimed that subjects they regarded as heavy - astronomy, algebra, trigonometry - were "true refreshment!"
By the age of 18 she was very interested in Babbage's machines. Even her marriage two years later, the birth of her three children and her becoming the Countess of Lovelace in 1838, did nothing to diminish that interest.
Ada was one of the first mathematicians to see that Babbage's "Analytical Engine" had tremendous implications and would be one of the great breakthroughs of the century.
An Italian engineer and mathematician, Luigi Federico Menabrea, had written an article on Babbage's invention and this was translated by Ada in 1843, and expanded with her own notes and examples based on computing mathematics.
After publication, Ada's clear explanations were praised as extremely helpful, especially her description of how Babbage's "Analytical Engine" could be programmed to compute Bernoulli numbers. She described the engine "weaving algebraic numbers, just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves," an original and striking thought!
Alas, so keen were Babbage and Ada to raise money for this great invention which obsessed them both, and they wanted to develop further, that they created fresh problems for themselves. The pair gambled desperately, working on systems to predict the outcome of horse races. Here they came badly unstuck in an unscientific field. Their money-raising efforts were a disaster and the pair came close to financial ruin.
This worry caused Ada's very robust health to deteriorate and she died at the early age of 37 - just one year older than her father had been at his death.
She had always craved to know her father better and mourned his passing when she was only nine years old. Byron would indeed have been delighted with her fame in a field so different from his own.
Since the time of King John the name Ada had been in the Byron family and today it lives on in a different context. As she was the first computer programmer, the universal programming language developed by the American Defence Department in the 1970s was called Ada in honour of the unique Countess of Lovelace. (-- p. 53) |
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editor
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| Posted: Wed Jun 04, 2008 3:13 pm Post subject: |
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BC Business
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Deep Freeze
Joanne "Joey" Freeze is a wife, a mother and a geologist. As
president and CEO of a local mioning company, she also happens to be sitting on a promising deposit of copper in northern Peru.
By Susan Hollis
February, 2008
| Quote: | ... Freeze’s curiosity for the workings of the earth’s crust was a given from the start. “My dad was in the oil business, so I understood the exploration mentality and pioneering and such,” she says, adding that when she entered the mineral-exploration field, women were not a common entity. “I was very lucky that when I started, it was just the right time when people were realizing that women can do it too. The women who were a little bit older than me definitely had a harder time getting jobs. What surprises me is how few women have come into the end of the business that I’m in, as an executive or running a company… In university we were 25 to 30 per cent women, but it’s not 25 to 30 per cent women in the business end now.”
Graduating from the University of Western Ontario in 1978 with a BA in geography and from UBC in 1981 with a BSc in geology, Freeze cut her teeth in mineral exploration across Northern B.C. and Chile before moving to Peru with her family in 1994. Employed as consultants, she and her husband soon had a keen understanding of the geological bounty to be discovered in the area. ... It was during this period that Freeze met Candente co-founder Fredy Huanqui, who at the time was well known in Peru as the “Inca with a Midas touch.” While working with Freeze for Arequipa Resources Ltd in Peru, Huanqui was a key player in the discovery of a large gold deposit. The find, dubbed Pierina after Huanqui’s daughter, sold to Barrick Gold Corp. for about $1 billion in 1996.
“It was one of those phenomenal discoveries of the day; everybody in the industry was talking about it,” says Freeze. “That kind of ties into one of the misunderstandings of the industry. A lot of people seem to think we go to South America because it’s cheaper to mine there, but we go there because it’s very rich in minerals, and most of the ground hasn’t been walked, so there is still a lot to be discovered.” Roused by the momentum of the Pierina find, Huanqui and Freeze formed Candente in 1997, just in time for mineral prices to plummet. It was during this period that Candente acquired rights for the Cañariaco Norte Copper Deposit in northern Peru. Seven years, 26,000 metres of rock and 82 drill holes later, Candente’s preliminary explorations suggest a significant amount of copper. With improved mineral market prices, the company is now looking at developing the mine single-handedly. Projected costs vary, depending on how the company extracts the copper. It would cost around $142 million to extract the copper through leaching, which has an associated recovery rate of 60 per cent. Milling, which has a recovery rate of 90 per cent, would double the cost. Freeze says they’ll start raising the money through banks and Peruvian pension funds as soon as a feasibility study is wrapped up next year. (-- pgs. 88-95) |
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| Posted: Wed Oct 22, 2008 8:26 am Post subject: |
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God Is Not Great
How Religion Poisons Everything
Hardcover
By Christoper Hitchens
| Quote: | ... Steven Hawking is not a believer, and when invited to Rome to meet the late Pope John Paul II asked to be shown the records of the trial of Galileo. But he does speak without embarrassment of the chance of physics "knowing the mind of God," and this now seems quite harmless as a metaphor, as for example when the Beach Boys sing, or I say, "God only knows ..."
Before Charles Darwin revolutionized our entire concept of our origins, and Albert Einstein did the same for the beginnings of our cosmos, many scientists and philosophers and mathematicians took what might be called the default position and professed one or another version of "deism," which held that the order and predictability of the universe seemed indeed to imply a designer, if not necessarily a designer who took any active part in human affairs. This compromise was a logical and rational one for its time and was especially influential among the Philadelphia and Virginia intellectuals, such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, who managed to seize a moment of crisis and use it to enshrine Englightenment values in the founding documents of the United States of America.
... It is not quite possible to locate the exact moment when men of learning stopped spinning the coin as between a creator and a long complex process, or ceased trying to split the "deistic" difference, but humanity began to grow up a little in the closing decades of the eighteenth century and the opening decades of the nineteenth. ... If one had to ... come up with the exact date on which the conceptual coin came down solidly on one side, it would be the moment when Pierrre-Simon de Laplace was invited to meet Napoleon Bonaparte.
Laplace (1749-1827) was the brilliant French scientist who took the work of Newton a stage further and showed by means of mathematical calculus how the operations of the solar system were those of bodies revolving in a vacuum. ...
... in his childish and demanding and imperious fashion, he (Napoleon) wanted to know why the figure of god did not appear in Laplace's mind-expanding calculations. And there came the cool, lofty and considered response. "Je n'ai pas besoin de cette hypothèse." Laplace was to become a marquis and could perhaps more modestly have said, "It works well enough without that idea, Your Majesty." But he simply sated that he didn't need it.
And neither do we. ... (From The Metaphysical Claims of Religion, pgs. 65-67) |
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editor
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| Posted: Tue Nov 04, 2008 1:03 pm Post subject: |
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The New Yorker
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The Forbidden World
Did a sixteenth-century heretic grasp the nature of the cosmos?
By Joan Accocella
Aug. 25/08
| Quote: | ... Eventually, a copy of Erasmus’s proscribed “Commentaries,” with notes by Bruno in its margins, was found in the latrine that he used. Even at the height of the Counter-Reformation, which this was, such offenses, distributed over ten years in the monastery, seem trifling. They sound like notations from the F.B.I. file of some poor professor who dared to teach Gorky in the fifties. Nevertheless, Bruno, at around the age of twenty-seven, was informed that he was being investigated by the Inquisition. Was someone trying to get rid of him? (Why the latrine search, an unpleasant task in the sixteenth century?) Was he trying to get out of the priesthood? (Why annotate the Erasmus? Why not just read it?) Whatever the real story, Bruno, hearing of the proceedings, discarded his priest’s garments and headed north, eventually crossing the border into Switzerland. To the Church authorities, that was as good as a confession; they defrocked and excommunicated him in absentia. To Bruno, apparently, it was a liberation, and he became the man we know, or think we know: the freethinker, the heretic, the man who would be burned.
For fifteen years, he travelled—to Geneva, Toulouse, Lyon, Paris, London, Oxford, Wittenberg, Prague, Helmstedt, Frankfurt, Zurich, Padua, Venice—never staying more than two or three years in any city. Wherever he went, he looked for a job teaching philosophy, and in some places he got one. In Paris, he gave a series of thirty lectures on logic and metaphysics. Elsewhere, he had less luck. At Oxford, when he gave a tryout presentation, the audience laughed at his accent and his Neapolitan way of talking with his hands. (He hated the English ever after. They “look down their noses,” he said, “laugh at you . . . fart at you with their lips.”) Sometimes he damaged his own cause. During his stay in Geneva, he published a broadsheet listing twenty mistakes that a highly placed professor had made in a single lecture. He was sued for slander and had to leave town in a hurry. ...
Another idea of his, which has not attracted as much attention, because it is not a heresy, had to do with “artificial memory,” the science of improving recall. This was not a side project. It was the subject of many of his Latin writings, and often the source of his income during his wandering years—he tutored people in memory skills. Ancient orators had used artificial memory systems, mentally attaching their ideas onto statues, or objects in the rooms of a building, so that later, in their minds, they could revisit those statues and rooms, retrieve their ideas, and thus give seven-hour speeches without note cards. Closer to Bruno’s time, a Catalan mystic named Ramon Llull had refined the method, imagining memory as a system of concentric wheels. Bruno adopted Llull’s schema and enlarged it. ...
How marvellous, and how utterly incomprehensible! And this was only one of his systems. But Bruno may have used such methods—he was known for his prodigious memory—and with their endless numbers of combinations, as in a giant slot machine, they obviously contributed to his vision of an infinite cosmos.
Inconveniently, that vision was heresy from end to end. If there were countless worlds besides ours, this sidelined the Christian story. Creation, expulsion, salvation: such things might have happened, but somewhere off in a corner, while other things were happening on other planets. Also eliminated was God’s difference from humanity. If, as Bruno saw it, God was present in every atom of the universe, then transubstantiation became a silly idea. (God was already in the wine.) Ditto incarnation. Bruno later said that he started having doubts about Jesus at the age of eighteen; in his mature philosophy, the Messiah has no place. Nor does original sin, or pretty much any sin. God “makes his sun rise over good and bad,” Bruno wrote. Even devils were going to be pardoned. To lead a virtuous life, you had only to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. As the reader may have noticed by now, much of this constitutes liberal Christian thought in our time. (What Bruno discarded was the Church’s literalism—exactly what many of today’s believers have done.) Likewise, Bruno’s cosmology anticipated modern physics and astronomy. But it did not accord with the views of the sixteenth-century Church. It sounded like Protestantism, or worse. ... (-- pgs. 77-78) |
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