| View previous topic :: View next topic |
| Author |
Message |
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
 Posted: Tue Oct 26, 2004 12:43 pm Post subject: Gambling Scientists |
 |
|
WELCOME!
Gambling Scientists:
Genius
The Life and Science of Richard Feynman
Hardcover
By James Gleick
Well, John von Neumann, actually. Get this:
| Quote: | | ...How should the bomb assembly be configured to assure a stable detonation? What kind of fireball would ensue? Such questions required a workable formula for the propagation of a spherical detonation wave in a compressible fluid, the "compressible fluid" in this case being the shotput-size piece of plutonium liquefied in the microseconds before it became a nuclear blast? The pressure would be more intense than at the earth's center. The temperature would reach 50 million degrees Centigrade. The theorists were on their own here; experimentalists could offer little more than good wishes. All during 1944 the computation effort grew. John von Neumann served as a traveling consultant with an eye on the postwar future. Von Neumann -- mathematician, logician, game theorist (he was more and more a fixture in the extraordinary Los Alamos poker game), and one of the fathers of modern computing -- talked with Feynman while they worked on the IBM machines or walked through the canyons. He left Feynman with two enduring memories...(-- p. 182) |
| Quote: | Memoirs:
A Twentieth-Century Journey in Science and Politics
Hardcover
By Edward Teller
|
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=1511#1511
Last edited by editor on Sun Oct 25, 2009 11:19 am; edited 20 times in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
 |
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Fri Jan 07, 2005 3:52 pm Post subject: |
|
|
Albert Einstein
The Human Side
New Glimpses from his Archives
Paperback
Selected and Edited by Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman
| Quote: | Einstein was very unhappy about this apparent randomness in nature. His views were summed up in his famous phrase, 'God does not play dice'. He seemed to have felt that the uncertainty was only provisional: but that there was an underlying reality, in which particles would have well defined positions and speeds, and would evolve according to deterministic laws, in the spirit of Laplace. This reality might be known to God, but the quantum nature of light would prevent us seeing it, except through a glass darkly.
Einstein's view was what would now be called, a hidden variable theory. Hidden variable theories might seem to be the most obvious way to incorporate the Uncertainty Principle into physics. They form the basis of the mental picture of the universe, held by many scientists, and almost all philosophers of science. But these hidden variable theories are wrong. The British physicist, John Bell, who died recently, devised an experimental test that would distinguish hidden variable theories. When the experiment was carried out carefully, the results were inconsistent with hidden variables. Thus it seems that even God is bound by the Uncertainty Principle, and can not know both the position, and the speed, of a particle. So God does play dice with the universe. All the evidence points to him being an inveterate gambler, who throws the dice on every possible occasion. (From the public lecture, Does God Play Dice? by Prof. Stephen Hawking) |
More of the quotation and its context:
The Portable Atheist
Paperback
Lovingly compiled by Christopher Hitchens
| Quote: | | "The finest emotion of which we are capable is the mystic emotion. Herein lies the germ of all art and all true science. Anyone to whom this feeling is alien, who is no longer capable of wonderment and lives in a state of fear is a dead man. To know that what is impenetrable for us really exists and manifests itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, whose gross forms alone are intelligible to our poor faculties - this knowledge, this feeling ... that is the core of the true religious sentiment. In this sense, and in this sense alone, I rank myself among profoundly religious men." ... -- Albert Einstein, letter to Hoffman and Dukas, 1946; from Albert Einstein, the Human Side. (-- p. 160) |
| Quote: | | ... "Nobody, certainly, will deny that the idea of the existence of an omnipotent, just, and omnibeneficent personal God is able to accord man solace, help, and guidance; also, by virtue of its simplicity it is accessible to the most undeveloped mind. But, on the other hand, there are decisive weaknesses attached to this idea in itself, which have been painfully felt since the beginning of history. That is, if this being is omnipotent, then every occurrence, including every human action, every human thought, and every human feeling and aspiration is also His work; how is it possible to think of holding men responsible for their deeds and thoughts before such an almighty Being? In giving out punishment and rewards He would to a certain extent be passing judgment on Himself. How can this be combined with the goodness and righteousness ascribed to Him? ... -- Albert Einstein, Science Philosophy and Religion; from Einstein's Out of My Later Years, pp. 26-29 (-- p. 161) |
| Quote: | | "The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions. Our inner balance and even our very existence depend on it. Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life. To make this a living force and bring it to clear consciousness is perhaps the foremost task of education. The foundation of morality should not be made dependent on myth nor tied to any authority lest doubt about the myth or about the legitimacy of the authoirity imperil the foundation of sound judgment and action." -- Albert Einstein, letter to a minister November 20, 1950; from Albert Einstein, the Human Side, p. 95. (-- p. 158) |
Einstein updated:
The Economist
Magazine Subscription
In the beginnings
Jan. 15/05
| Quote: | | ...The universe is flat, infinitely prolonged, and the more common something is in it, the less we know about it. Oh, and as far as making planets is concerned, God may not play dice, but He is a mean hand at snooker. |
More of Hawking:
A Brief History of Time
Audio CD
By Stephen Hawking
Narrated by Michael Jackson, who pronounces the p
in Ptolomy - more than once.
| Quote: | | Scare yourself into a math spasm listening to this one. If you're cool with it, try a few of these. |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=1902#1902
Last edited by editor on Fri Oct 23, 2009 10:41 am; edited 16 times in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Mon Mar 28, 2005 9:19 am Post subject: |
|
|
Electric Universe
The Shocking True Story of Electricity
Hardcover
By David Bodanis
| Quote: | The idea that our world is permeated by invisible waves was so strange that it took a giant engineering project, deep under the cold waters of the Atlantic, to begin to convince the majority of researchers that it was true. Before the nineteenth century was out, a determined experimentalist found ways to release these waves from inside copper wires and send them flying free. This discovery led to the first experiments with cell phones (and a primitive mobile phone was operating on London's Portland Place in 1879, outside the present-day BBC Broadcasting House). A few decades afterward, television and radar took shape as well, hitching a ride with the same invisible waves. In the second and third parts of the book, I show how those waves were used: first for peace, then for war.
In the twentieth century the door opened even further. A few physicists were finally able to look directly at the face of electricity. The younger ones were awed by what they saw; many of the older ones -- including even the great Einstein -- pulled back, saying that what was now revealed was something they could never accept.
What the researchers had found was that the atoms inside us don't really look like miniature solar systems, with electrons orbiting like miniature planets around a tiny sun. Rather, these electrons -- which are central to how electricity affects us -- can wildly teleport from one location to another. It was the only partially predictable nature of these jumps that Einstein was thinking of when he famously said, "God does not play dice with the universe." (And it was to that dictum that his friend Niels Bohr exasperatedly replied, "Einstein, stop telling God what to do!") (From Introduction at pgs. 7-8). |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=2134#2134
Last edited by editor on Wed Dec 19, 2007 2:37 pm; edited 2 times in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Mon Mar 28, 2005 9:54 am Post subject: |
|
|
Chance
A Guide to Gambling, Love, the Stock Market & Just About Everything Else
Hardcover
By Amir D. Aczel
| Quote: | Letters to a Young Gambling Addict
The essence of the mathematical theory of probability emerged in France in the 1600s as a result of an unusual partnership between a gambler and a mathematician. The gambler was the Chevalier de Mere, who wanted to find out how to win in the casinos of Europe. The mathematician was none other than the famous philosopher, physicist, and mathematician Blaise Pascal. De Mere came to Pascal and asked him about the probability of winning at two different complex games popular in Europe at that time (we will see them later). Pascal wrote to an older mathematician, the famous Pierre de Fermat, and through their correspondence, the mathematical rules of probability were derived. These rules, as expanded through the centuries, are the subject of this book. (From Introduction at p. xiii) |
According to a computer science history website the work of PhD candidate Michelle Hoyle:
| Quote: | At the age of fourteen, Pascal started to attend Mersenne's meetings. Mersenne belonged to the religious order of the Minims, and his cell in Paris was a frequent meeting place for Fermat, Pascal, Gassendi and others. By the age of sixteen, Pascal had written his Treatise on Conic Sections, which included his famous theorem of hexagons (Pascal's Theorem), and presented it to Mersenne. Already the young Pascal was on equal footing with some of the great scientific minds of his day.
The company of Mersenne may have been Pascal's first introduction to the idea of sprituality but it was not to be his last. Sometime during his father's stay in Normandy as a high official in the government, Étienne sustained an injury which resulted in his being provided with care by a local order of Jansenite priests. It was through this family involvement with the priests that Pascal acquired a strong interest in religion, which was to last until his death. As a result of his forays into the realm of spirituality, he wrote many religious works.
Perhaps the most famous of these religious works is Pensées, a collection of personal thoughts on human suffering and faith in God. "Pascal's wager" claims to prove that belief in God is rational with the following argument:
| Quote: | | "If God does not exist, one will lose nothing by believing in him, while if he does exist, one will lose everything by not believing." |
|
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=2137#2137
Last edited by editor on Sun Oct 25, 2009 11:16 am; edited 5 times in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Mon May 30, 2005 1:06 pm Post subject: |
|
|
The Good Thief
Based on the French classic,
Bob le Flambeur
DVD
| Quote: | Bob: (in a church, trying to shake Roger, the determined police detective who has dogged Bob throughout his checkered past between various prison terms) Roger, I've given up my studies on the probability theory.
Roger: Oh, really?
Bob: Yeah, all that computation addles the brain. All I can say now, "What a coincidence!"
Roger: No, no coincidence. I was following you.
Bob: Hot damn! Wrong again.
Roger: You found religion?
Bob: I'm paying my respects to my mother. Do you remember that village where she was born?
Roger: Yeah, Barcelot.
Bob: Yeah, that GI that came out of the sky.
Roger: Was he your father?
Bob: Yeah, they moved here to the old town. He became a junkie. And when he up and left, she became one of those ladies in black you see over there lighting candles, praying for her husband's return.
Roger: Were her prayers answered?
Bob: Well, the way all prayers are answered - not in the way she wanted. He turned up again when I was seven, clean as a whistle, with a new wife named Dora. Took me to a new life in America. And by the time I made it back here, well, she wasn't lighting candles anymore.
Roger: Yeah. You know, that's the third version you've told me.
Bob: Well...that's the truth.
Roger: So is it true what they're saying?
Bob: I dunno. What are they saying?
Roger: Well, they say you're back in business. No?
Bob: The only business I'm in, Roger, is the business of recovery. Three weeks. I'm clean.
|
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=2214#2214
Last edited by editor on Mon Jun 23, 2008 12:06 pm; edited 2 times in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Thu Jan 05, 2006 7:51 pm Post subject: |
|
|
Essays on Cooperative Games
Hardcover
Edited by Gianfranco Gambarelli
| Quote: | | In the 1930s and 1940s, Princeton had become a living science museum. Here grand old men met, just as in a gentlemen's club, leaving youth to conquer the world. But the minds of the old scientists resonated and the fundamentals that would rule our century were born: new theories in physics, computer science, mathematics, economics. In this greenhouse, ideas germinated, exploiting the synergies of experts from different fields, and from this, modern Game Theory emerged. The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior was in fact the collaboration of the mathematician John von Neumann and the economist Morgenstern (1944). Morgenstern recalled nostalgically in 1976 how they occasionally spent evenings together in the company of men such as Einstein, Bohr, and Weyl, and how the ideas for their book matured. (From The Coming of Game Theory at p. 5) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=2366#2366
Last edited by editor on Sun Oct 25, 2009 11:20 am; edited 3 times in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Sat Feb 04, 2006 3:38 pm Post subject: |
|
|
New Scientist
Magazine Subscription
One million people, one medical gamble
A huge scheme is under way to find out how our genes and the environment interact, but at what cost?
By Andy Coghlan
Jan. 21-27/06
| Quote: | You might donate blood to help save someone's life. But would you donate your blood, your DNA, and your most intimate medical secrets on a promise that it may help save a life years from now?
Half a million people will be expected to do just that in the coming months, with another half a million people to follow, as two huge medical research projects get under way in the UK and the US. The British project, called Biobank, is due to start within weeks, after five years of preparation. The American project, announced in 2004 by the National Human Genome Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, is still at the planning stage.
Both of the projects aim to revolutionise medical research by gathering information that will allow scientists to study in unprecedented depth how our genes and environment interact over the years to cause disease. That could one lead to new treatments for disorders such as cancer, heart disease, asthma, multiple sclerosis and cystic fibrosis. But the projects are not without their critics, who say they could produce misleading results and raise fundamental questions about who should own our medical details and have access to them. These details not only document our medical past, but might also reveal which medical conditions we and our relatives are likely to suffer from in the future. (Opening three paragraphs) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=2396#2396
Last edited by editor on Sun Oct 25, 2009 11:23 am; edited 5 times in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Fri Feb 17, 2006 4:33 pm Post subject: |
|
|
Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track
The Letters of Richard P. Feynman
Hardcover
Edited and with an Introduction by Michelle Feynman
| Quote: | RICHARD P. FEYNMAN TO VIKTOR WEISSKOPF, JANUARY 6, 1976
A wager was made immediately after Feynman won the Nobel Prize. Professor Weisskopf was convinced that Feynman would succumb to a career in administration, or what Feynman once referred to, in a letter Paul Olum, as an "occupational disease."
Prof. W. Weisskopf
Physics Department
M.I.T.
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Dear Professor:
I have found the document describing our wager and find that you gave me too much money so here's $15 back. For your records, may I state in writing that as of this date, January 6, 1976, I am not holding, nor during the last ten years have I held, a responsible position as defined in the contract of the wager. Therefore I consider that the wager has been paid by Professor Weisskopf and that's that!
Sincerely,
Richard P. Feynman
| Quote: | --On this the FIFTEENTH DAY of DECEMBER of the YEAR ONE THOUSAND NINE HUNDRED AND SIXTY FIVE, at a Luncheon given at the Laboratories of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), Meyrin, Geneva, the following WAGER was made between Professor Viktor F. WEISSKOPF and Professor Richard P. FEYNMAN.
The terms of the WAGER are as follows:
-- Mr. FEYNMAN will pay the sum of TEN DOLLARS to Mr. WEISSKOPF if at any time during the next TEN YEARS (i.e., before the THIRTY FIRST DAY of DECEMBER of the YEAR ONE THOUSAND NINE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY FIVE), the said Mr. FEYNMAN has held a "responsible position."
--Conversely, if on the THIRTY FIRST DAY of DECEMBER of the YEAR ONE THOUSAND NINE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY FIVE, the said Mr. FEYNMAN shall have held or be holding no such position, Mr. WEISSKOPF will be deemed to have forfeited his WAGER and will be in duty bound to pay the sum of TEN DOLLARS to Mr. FEYNMAN.
--For the purpose of the aforementioned WAGER, the term "responsible position" shall be taken to signify a posiiton which, by reason of its nature, compels the holder to issue instructions to other persons to carry out certain acts, notwithstanding the fact that the holder has no understanding whatsoever of that which he is instructing the aforesaid persons to accomplish.
--In case of contention or of non-fulfillment of the aforementioned conditions, the sole arbiter shall be Mr. Giuseppe COCCONI.
Signed at Meyrin on this the FIFTEENTH DAY of DECEMBER of the YEAR ONE THOUSAND NINE HUNDRED AND SIXTY FIVE.
Richard P. Feynman
Viktor F. Weisskopf
Signed and witnessed: G. Cocconi |
(From the chapter 1976-1981 at pgs. 296-297). |
| Quote: | | Editor's Note: Feynman's letters, contained in 12 filing cabinet drawers and carefully selected for the book by his daughter, Michelle, are enough to make us want to change our major and start again with Algebra I. We love his bitter hatred of bad math teachers and even worse math texts, both of which continue to poison public education in the U.S. (and Canada!) Feynman's joyful understanding of the physical world and the fun he had teaching are legendary, but we did not expect such precision with language nor the intimacy and deep feeling he evoked as a writer. A simple love letter to his first wife two years after her death is as full of longing as the tenderest sonnet by South American poet Pablo Neruda. |
Listen:
Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track
The Letters of Richard P. Feynman
Edited and with an Introduction by Michelle Feynman
CD Audio
Read by Richard Poe and Johanna Parker
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=2417#2417
Last edited by editor on Sun Oct 25, 2009 11:26 am; edited 5 times in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Mon Mar 27, 2006 11:27 am Post subject: |
|
|
Scientific American
Magazine Subscription
Lady Luck
More Americans cannot resist rolling the dice
By Roger Doyle
April, 2006
| Quote: | The social cost, including that for treatment of gambling addiction, bankruptcy, divorce and crime, is significant; however, it has not been adequately measured, because addicted gamblers tend to have other problem behaviors, such as substance abuse, antisocial personality disorder and depression. Such behaviors are difficult to separate from gambling addiction.
Despite the social ills, substantial arguments can be made in favor of legal gambling. For most people, it is a pleasant diversion. For older people, it is a social pastime that may enhance memory, problem solving, concentration and coordination. Furthermore, legalization may help limit the participation of organized crime. (-- p. 30) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=2451#2451
Last edited by editor on Sun Oct 25, 2009 11:43 am; edited 4 times in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Tue Nov 07, 2006 11:37 am Post subject: |
|
|
Irish Times
Private enterprise cannot tackle world's problems.
The ideological choice is not between unbridled capitalism or an overbearing, rapacious state. Successful governance, particularly for major, global problems, needs a mixture of both.
By Tony Kinsella
Oct. 28/06
| Quote: | Next month, the embryo of our new world order - China, the EU, India, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the U.S. - will effectively hand over a cheque for five billion euros to build a 20,000-tonne experiment at Cadarache, near Aix-en-Provence in southeastern France. A further five billion euros will follow to operate the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (Iter) over the next 20 years.
If Iter works, we will have managed to harnass nuclear fusion, the energy source of our sun, offering abundant electricity with almost no radioactive waste, no carbon emissions, and no weapons material - and all from seawater. Scientists have been working on nuclear fusion since the 1940s. By the mid-1980s they knew they needed a bigger experimental 'tokamak" reactor and that given the costs, our world could only afford to build one of them. They finished its design in 2001.
It has taken 30 governments a mere five years to agree on the budget, the distribution of task and costs, and location.
Iter remains a scientific and engineering gamble - a 10-billion-euros bet. If it works we can look forward to abundant and sustainable electricity by the middle of the century, with significant quantities of hydrogen for fuel cells as a by-product.
It is an educated, even indispensable gamble. A wager only governments can afford. No private corporation, however wealthy, could convince its shareholders to invest two billion euros a year for 20 years in something that might or might not work. (-- p. 15) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=2604#2604
Last edited by editor on Sun Oct 25, 2009 11:57 am; edited 4 times in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Fri Dec 01, 2006 11:19 am Post subject: |
|
|
Road-side Dog
Hardcover
By Czeslaw Milosz
Translated by the author and Robert Haas
| Quote: | The gods of ancient Greece were capricious. Human fates depended upon their will, yet humans had a hard time trying to guess what would win the gods' favor, what would provoke their anger.
... Considering that the Creator of the universe had already lost much of His authority in the eighteenth century, when He was magnanimously granted the title of the Great Clockmaker who, once having put machinery in motion, did not meddle with its functioning; considering that the terrible suffering of people in the ensuing centuries, provoked by wars and genocide, made interventions by Providence seem even less probable; considering, finally, that the human mind learned to link the notion of scienfitic truth with empirical proof - cosmologists attempting to find out how the universe came into being carefully avoided any ideas that would suggest their affiliation with religion. Some scientists, though, wondering at the precision of the laws governing matter after the Big Bang, were not loath to postulate the existence of powerful intelligences which act in a manner incomprehensible to us, possibly for their own amusement. One of these men of science, * Sebastian Kuo, even expressed the opinion that our universe might be their experiment based upon quantum mechanics, or even a simulation. His book, however - which, he himself concedes, is on the border of science fiction - has for its primary subject our life on earth and examines the highly enigmatic role in it of chance and coincidence. We are inclined - goes the argument - to intuit a logic behind events which we can almost grasp, yet it eludes us and we are sentenced to ignorance again. Should we not imagine two teams, endowed with intelligence inaccessible to us, engaged in a sort of game of chess, using us as if we were symbols in a computer? This would explain glimpses of logic in our personal histories, so that we are inclined sometimes to believe in Fatum, when a sudden departure from regularity occurs, when obviously another hand has entrered the game. What the Greeks told themselves about the gods' councils, loves, and mutual entities, on which the adventures of mortals depended, was clever, for it proved - reasons the scientist - that they had an intuitive grasp of the distance separating our will from a higher sort of calculation, indifferent to our desires and laments. (From Olympians' Games at pgs. 167-169) |
| Quote: | | Editor's Note: We can find no presence on the Internet of either the scientist, Sebastian Kuo, or the text to which the poem refers. Visitors with information are warmly invited to pass it along to legal@pokerpulse.com. |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=2613#2613
Last edited by editor on Sun Oct 25, 2009 12:10 pm; edited 3 times in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Mon Mar 05, 2007 4:06 pm Post subject: |
|
|
Global Warming - the solution and the politics -
Hell and High Water and What We Should Do
Hardcover
By Joseph Romm
| Quote: | | We are on the brink of taking the biggest gamble in human history, one that, if we lose, will transform the lives of the next fifty generations. I will not focus here on the history of how we came to current understanding of global warming or on the thousands of brilliant scientists whose work brings us this knowledge. That story has been well told already, particularly by Spencer Weart, a physicist and historian, who has put on the web his extensive "hypertext history of how scientists came to (partly) understand what people are doing to cause climate change." (Chapter One, opening paragraph) |
Notable early climate change warning:
Gentlemen, Scholars and Scoundrels
A Treasury of the Best of Harper's Magazine
1850 to 1972
Hardcover
Edited by Horace Knowles
| Quote: | As (Columbia University geophysicist Maurice) Ewing and (geologist-meteorologist William) Donn read the evidence, an Ice Age will result from a slow warming and rising of the ocean that is now taking place. They believe that this ocean flood - which may submerge large coastal areas of the eastern United States and western Europe - is going to melt the ice sheet which has covered the Arctic Ocean through all recorded history. Calculations based on the independent observations of other scientists indicate this melting could begin within roughly one hundred years.
It is this melting of Arctic ice which Ewing and Donn believe will set off another Ice Age on earth. They predict that it will cause great snows to fall in the north - perennial unmelting snows which the world has not seen since the last Ice Age thousands of years ago. These snows will make the Arctic glaciers grow again, until their towering height forces them forward. The advance south will be slow, but if it follows the route of previous Ice Ages, it will encase in ice large parts of North America and Europe. It would, of course, take many centuries for that wall of ice to reach New York and Chicago, London and Paris. But its coming is an inevitable consequence of the cycle which Ewing and Donn believe is now taking place. (From The Coming Ice Age: A True Scientific Detective Story by Betty Friedan, September, 1958, p. 574.) |
Other popular movements spearheaded by Friedan:
The Feminine Mystyque
Hardcover
Seminal treatise on contemporary feminism.
By Betty Friedan
Another big American noise on climate change:
An Inconvenient Truth
Al Gore's environmental trombone
DVD
Better still:
The Last Generation
How Nature Will Take Her Revenge for Climate Change
Hardcover
By Fred Pearce
| Quote: | All the world's governments are committed to preventing 'dangerous' climate change. They made that pledge at the Earth Summit at Rio de Janeiro in 1992. The signatories included the US and Australia, which both refused to ratify the subsequent Kyoto Protocol and its national targets for emissions reductions. But what constitutes dangerous climate change? And how, in practice, can we prevent it?
For some people dangerous climate change is already a reality. Many devastated by recent hurricanes, floods and droughts believe they are victims. Such claims are usually impossible to prove. But that doesn't mean that our weather is not changing, says Myles Allen of Oxford University. In essence, climate change is already loading the dice in favour of weird and dangerous weather. 'The danger zone is not something we are going to reach in the middle of this entury. We are in it now,' he says. The 35,000 Europeans who died in the heatwave in 2003 were victims of an event that would almost certainly not have happened without the insidious increase in background temperatures that turned a warm summer into a killer. (From Appendix, The Trillion-Tonne Challenge at p. 297) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=2747#2747
Last edited by editor on Sun Oct 25, 2009 11:58 am; edited 7 times in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Wed May 09, 2007 9:03 am Post subject: |
|
|
Smithsonian
Magazine Subscription
Greg Carr's Big Gamble
"I had the idea at 25 that if I made a lot of money, I could do whatever I wanted," says the Boston entrepreneur. And so, in one of the largest private commitments in African conservation, he's putting $40 million into a spectacular national park in war-ravaged Mozambique.
By Stephanie Hanes
May, 2007
| Quote: | The park (Gorongosa National Park) was once one of the most treasured in all of Africa, 1,525 square miles of well-watered terrain with of the highest concentrations of large mammals on the continent - thousands of wildebeest, zebra and water buck, and even denser herds of buffalo and elephant than on the fabled Serengeti Plain. In the 1960s and '70s, movie stars, astronauts and other celebrities vacationed in Gorongosa; tourists arrived by the busload. Tippi Hedren, who starred in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, was inspired by Gorongosa's lions to build her own exotic cat preserve outside Los Angeles. Astronaut Charles Duke told his safari guide that visiting Gorongosa was as thrilling as landing on the moon.
They called it the jewel of Mozambique," says Frank Merry, a visiting scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center, which has received a grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation to study Carr's project. "You've got an iconic resource there... In the U.S., you might think of Yellowstone."
But all of that was before Mozambique's 16-year civil war, which erupted soon after the country won independence from Portugal and set up a socialist, single-party government in 1975. As was common across post-independence Africa, antigovernment forces took refuge in national parks, a ready source of hidden shelter and food. They set up headquarters just outside Gorongosa, and the park itself became a battlefield: land mines were planted, the main camp was shelled and the animals were slaughtered.
"There were government forces, you had the rebel force, you had displaced people - they all used the park," says (Roberto) Zolho, the current warden, who was a ranger in Gorongosa when the rebels attacked. "We closed the park in '83 because it was impossible."
Outside the park, government asoldiers forced villagers into towns or "communal villages" dozens of miles away, often along the main road linking Zimbabwe to Mozambique'es port of Beira. It was a traumatic move for people who had spiritual connections to the land and for families accustomed to living at some remove from one another. (-- pgs. 87-88) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=2851#2851
Last edited by editor on Sun Oct 25, 2009 12:09 pm; edited 5 times in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Tue Oct 16, 2007 10:53 am Post subject: |
|
|
Second Space
New Poems by Czeslaw Milosz
Hardcover
Translated by the author and Robert Hass
| Quote: | The beauty of nature is suspect.
Oh yes, the splendor of flowers.
Science is concerned to deprive us of illusions.
Though why it is eager to do so is unclear.
The battles among genes, traits that secure success, gains and losses.
My God, what language these people speak
In their white coats. Charles Darwin
At least had pangs of conscience
Making public a theory that was, as he said, devilish.
And they? It was, after all, their idea:
To segregate humans, write off as a genetic loss
Some of their own species and poison them.
"The pride of the peacock is the glory of God,"
Wrote William Blake. There was a time
When disinterested beauty by its sheer superabundance
Gratified our eyes. What have they left us?
Only the accountancy of a capitalist enterprise.
(-- p. 25) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=3019#3019
Last edited by editor on Sun Oct 25, 2009 12:11 pm; edited 1 time in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Mon Nov 05, 2007 9:59 am Post subject: |
|
|
Endless Universe
Beyond the Big Bang
Hardcover
By Paul J. Steinhardt
and Neil Turok
| Quote: | At a small town in the Midwest, a gentleman about seventy years old got on the bus. Soon he started excitedly telling everyone he was going to Las Vegas. He had withdrawn his life savings and was going to gamble it all in a last-ditch attempt to make it rich. The two of us laughed at how naive he was, but in retrospect, we weren't so very different. We were pinning our hopes on new and incredibly ambitious lines of research.
The Aspen Center for Physics is specifically designed to promote innovative research and collaborations. A chic little town nestled high up in the Rocky Mountains, Aspen also has a strong hippie streak. Once during the workshop, I answered the phone at the center only to find the caller earnestly asking, "Is this the Aspen Center for Psychics?" The question seemed oddly appropriate. The workshop I was attending was attempting to divine some of nature's deepest mysteries, albeit using mathematics and physics rather than a Ouija board. (From Inflation and the Tale of Two Cosmologists, p. 111) |
| Quote: | | In 2008, the European Space Agency (ESA) will launch the Planck satellite experiment; it will begin to report results a year or so afterward. This satellite is designed to improve measurements of the temperature variations of the cosmic background radiation to obtain a map with even higher resolution than the WMAP image. The satellite will also measure the polarization of the cosmic background radiation and could significantly improve on the WMAP limit. In 2001, shortly after the first paper on colliding branes appeared, we both spoke about the ekpyrotic model at a major conference in Cambridge called M Theory Cosmology. Stephen Hawking, the preeminent theorist who had pioneered studies of the initial singularity and made important contributions to inflationary theory, is a close colleague of Neil's and was in the audience. At the end of Neil's talk, Hawking made a public bet that the Planck satellite would detect the gravitational waves from inflation and rule out the ekpyrotic model. Neil readily accepted the wager, at even odds, for any amount Stephen would care to mention. Perhaps out of a gracious unwillingness to bankrupt Neil, Stephen has resisted naming financial terms. But he stands by the bet, and a suitable prize will be negotiated by the time the Planck satellite flies. (From the chapter entitled, Seeing Is Believing, p. 213) |
| Quote: | | But in the interim - even now- a schism may be emerging. Many outstanding leaders in cosmology, astrophysics, and string theory, including Andrei Linde, Martin Rees, and Leonard Susskind, have come to believe that the uncontrollable features are essential, to be celebrated rather than tamed. Others, like David Gross, hold firm to the conviction that the current situation is unacceptable and that a better theory must be possible. There is a real conflict developing between the two points of view. For example, after Gross, quoting Winston Churchill, exhorted his colleagues, "Never, never, never, never give up!," Susskind retorted, "But the field of physics is littered with the corpses of stubborn old men who didn't know when to give up." In his opening address at a meeting entitled Expectations of a Final Theory, Weinberg offered an intermediate perspective: "I noticed for sale the October issue of a magazine called Astronomy, having on the cover the headline 'Why You Live in Multiple Universes.' Inside I found a report of a discussion at Stanford at which Martin Rees said that he was sufficiently confident about the multiverse to bet his dog's life on it, while Andrei Linde said he would bet his own life. As for me, I have just enough confidence about the multiverse to bet the lives of both Andrei Linde and Martin Rees's dog."[/b] The repartee is chosen to amuse, but behind it lies a serious statement about differing visions of what is and is not valid science and how close scientists are to a final theory today. (From Inflationary Multiverse or Cyclic Universe, p. 241) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=3089#3089
Last edited by editor on Sun Oct 25, 2009 12:20 pm; edited 3 times in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
|
FAQ 
Search 
Memberlist 
Usergroups
Profile 
Log in to check your private messages 
Log in 
