Deighton, Len, Winter: A Berlin Family 1899-1954, HarperCollins Publishers 1996 Amazon editorial review From Library Journal 'Brothers Peter and Paul Winter, separated by World War II, are reunited at the Nuremberg trials. Peter, a U.S. army colonel, is on the staff of prosecuting attorneys; Paul, a former influential Gestapo lawyer, may soon be on trial for his life. Through the Winter brothers, their influential financier father and American-born mother, their friends and colleagues, Deighton gives a recognizably human form to the shape of German history from 1900 through 1945 and makes comprehensible the awful appeal of Nazism to people of different persuasions. The somewhat contrived ending does not diminish the power of this fine novel, which again shows that Deighton's mastery is not limited to the spy story.' BOMC alternate. Charles Michaud, Turner Free Lib., Randolph, Mass. Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. 
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Hawking, Steven W, and G F R Ellis, The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time, Cambridge UP 1975 Preface: Einstein's General Theory of Relativity . . . leads to two remarkable predictions about the universe: first that the final fate of massive stars is to collapse behind an event horizon to form a 'black hole' which will contain a singularity; and secondly that there is a singularity in our past which constitutes, in some sense, a beginning to our universe. Our discussion is principally aimed at developing these two results.' 
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Veltman, Martinus, Facts and Mysteries in Elementary Particle Physics, World Scientific 2003 'Introduction: The twentieth century has seen an enormous progress in physics. The fundamental physics of the first half of the century was dominated by the theory of relativity, Einstein's theory of gravitation and the theory of quantum mechanics. The second half of the century saw the rise of elementary particle physics. . . . Through this development there has been a subtle change in point of view. In Einstein's theory space and time play an overwhelming dominant role. . . . The view that we would like to defend can perhaps best be explaned by an analogy. To us, space-time and the laws of quantum mechanics are like the decor, the setting of a play. The elementary articles are the actors, and physics is what they do. . . . Thus in this book the elementary particles are the central objects.' 
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Wilczek, Frank, The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces, Basic Books 2008 ' In this excursion to the outer limits of particle physics, Wilczek explores what quarks and gluons, which compose protons and neutrons, reveal about the manifestation of mass and gravity. A corecipient of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics, Wilczek knows what he’s writing about; the question is, will general science readers? Happily, they know what the strong interaction is (the forces that bind the nucleus), and in Wilczek, they have a jovial guide who adheres to trade publishing’s belief that a successful physics title will not include too many equations. Despite this injunction (against which he lightly protests), Wilczek delivers an approachable verbal picture of what quarks and gluons are doing inside a proton that gives rise to mass and, hence, gravity. Casting the light-speed lives of quarks against “the Grid,” Wilczek’s term for the vacuum that theoretically seethes with quantum activity, Wilczek exudes a contagious excitement for discovery. A near-obligatory acquisition for circulating physics collections.' --Gilbert Taylor  
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Landauer, Rolf, "Information is a physical entity", Physica A, 263, 1, 1 February 1999, page 63-7. 'This paper, associated with a broader conference talk on the fundamental physical limits of information handling, emphasizes the aspects still least appreciated. Information is not an abstract entity but exists only through a physical representation, thus tying it to all the restrictions and possibilities of our real physical universe. The mathematician's vision of an unlimited sequence of totally reliable operations is unlikely to be implementable in this real universe. Speculative remarks about the possible impact of that, on the ultimate nature of the laws of physics are included.'. back

Li, Jesse W-H, John C Vederas, "Drug Discovery and Natural Products: End of an Era or Endless Frontier?", Science, 325, 5937, 10 July 2009, page 161-165. Science: Review: 'Historically, the majority of new drugs have been generated from natural products (secondary metabolites) and from compounds derived from natural products. During the past 15 years, pharmaceutical industry research into natural products has declined, in part because of an emphasis on high-throughput screening of synthetic libraries. Currently there is substantial decline in new drug approvals and impending loss of patent protection for important medicines. However, untapped biological resources, "smart screening" methods, robotic separation with structural analysis, metabolic engineering, and synthetic biology offer exciting technologies for new natural product drug discovery. Advances in rapid genetic sequencing, coupled with manipulation of biosynthetic pathways, may provide a vast resource for the future discovery of pharmaceutical agents.'. back

Ambrose Bierce, Pray, “Pray, v. To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner, confessedly unworthy.” back

American Physical Society, "The Happiest Thought of My Life": 100 years of General Relativity, 'Soon after Einstein published his theory of special relativity in 1905, he started trying to incorporate gravity into a more general theory. He envisioned a universe where gravity was not a force but a geometric property of curved spacetime, warped around massive objects. Einstein famously called this "the happiest thought of my life". John Wheeler, renowned black hole physicist, later summed up general relativity as "spacetime tells matter how to move; matter tells spacetime how to curve".' back

Aquinas 593, Does happiness consist in wealth, 'Next we must consider happiness, first in which it consists, second what it is and third, how we are able to achieve it. . . . ' back

Arie Freiberg, When institutions et child sexual abise happen, that should be a crime, 'The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse has published a research paper that suggests organisations be held criminally responsible when their negligence results in harm to children. Released on July 17, it proposes, among other matters, the creation of offences that would hold organisations criminally responsible for the creation and/or management of risk of harm and for their response when harm is done to a child.' back

Arie Freiberg, Hugh Donelly and Karen Gelb, Sentencing for Child Sexual Abuse Institutional Context, 'The individualistic orientation of the criminal trial and sentencing tends to produce explanations for offending behaviour grounded in the individual offender’s motivations or pathologies. However, focusing on individual motivations for crime fails to recognise organisational and institutional contributions to the problem of CSA. Institutions themselves may be criminogenic. If institutions or organisations are directly or indirectly responsible for criminal behaviour such as CSA, then the law should hold them to account. Historically, attempts to ascri be criminal responsibility to organisations have been difficult. There are many ways of holding organisations to account. but the basic principle advocated in this report is that an organisation should be held criminally responsible for the creation, management and response to risk when it has materialised in harm to a child.' back

Broken Rites reseacher, Paedophile priest Peter Searson worked under various bishops, including George Pell, 'For years, the Melbourne Catholic Archdiocese knew that Father Peter Searson was committing sexual offences against boys, girls and women but he was allowed to continue in parishes, including at the Doveton parish (in Melbourne's south-east), where he survived for years under the supervision of the regional bishop for the south-eastern suburbs, Auxiliary Bishop George Pell. The Victoria Police investigated Searson for sexual offences in parishes but found it difficult to extract evidence from "loyal" church people. Eventually, after 35 years as a priest, when Searson's record was about to become public, the church authorities dumped Searson from parish work. Later, hoping to protect the church's public image, the church also removed his name from the published list of retired priests.' back

Christine Kenneally, Large DNA Study Traces Violent History of American Salvery, ' More than one and a half centuries after the trans-Atlantic slave trade ended, a new study shows how the brutal treatment of enslaved people has shaped the DNA of their descendants. The report, which included more than 50,000 people, 30,000 of them with African ancestry, agrees with the historical record about where people were taken from in Africa, and where they were enslaved in the Americas. But it also found some surprises. For example, the DNA of participants from the United States showed a significant amount of Nigerian ancestry — far more than expected based on the historical records of ships carrying enslaved people directly to the United States from Nigeria.' back

Electrical conduction system of the heart - Wikipedia, Electrical conduction system of the heart - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'The normal electrical conduction in the heart allows the impulse that is generated by the sinoatrial node (SA node) of the heart to be propagated to, and stimulate, the cardiac muscle (myocardium). The myocardium contracts after stimulation. It is the ordered, rhythmic stimulation of the myocardium during the cardiac cycle that allows efficient contraction of the heart, thereby allowing blood to be pumped throughout the body.' back

Elizabeth Farelly, Links between gut and mental health suggest we should squat when going to the loo, 'This gut-brain, first popularised in The Second Brain (1998) by Michael Gershon​, chairman of anatomy and cell biology at Columbia University Medical Centre, is why we neglect our guts and also why we shouldn't. The gut-brain comprises about 100 million neurons arranged in sheaves in the wall of nine-metre tube between oesophagus and anus. It means that gut activity, unlike most muscle movement, can continue even if the brain is severed. And it has a significant impact on our emotional life. You knew it. Gut feeling is real.' back

Elizabeth Warren, To Fight the Pandemic, Here's My Must-Do Lisrt, ' Americans stayed at home and sacrificed for months to flatten the curve and prevent the spread of the coronavirus. That gave us time to take the steps needed to address the pandemic — but President Trump squandered it, refusing to issue national stay-at-home guidelines, failing to set up a national testing operation and fumbling production of personal protective equipment. Now, Congress must again act as this continues to spiral out of control.' back

Entrepreneur - Wikipedia, Entrepreneur - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Entrepreneurship is often difficult and tricky, resulting in many new ventures failing. The word entrepreneur is often synonymous with founder. Most commonly, the term entrepreneur applies to someone who creates value by offering a product or service, by carving out a niche in the market that may not exist currently. Entrepreneurs tend to identify a market opportunity and exploit it by organizing their resources effectively to accomplish an outcome that changes existing interactions within a given sector. Observers see them as being willing to accept a high level of personal, professional or financial risk to pursue opportunity. Business entrepreneurs are viewed as fundamentally important in the capitalistic society. Some distinguish business entrepreneurs as either "political entrepreneurs" or "market entrepreneurs," while social entrepreneurs' principal objectives include the creation of a social and/or environmental benefit.' back

Eugene Wigner, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences, 'The first point is that the enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and that there is no rational explanation for it. Second, it is just this uncanny usefulness of mathematical concepts that raises the question of the uniqueness of our physical theories.' back

Gut-brain axis - Wikipedia, Gut-brain axis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'The gut–brain axis refers to the biochemical signaling taking place between the gastrointestinal tract and the nervous system, often involving intestinal microbiota,[1] which have been shown to play an important role in healthy brain function.' back

Hannah Jane Parkinson, Instagram, an artist and the $100,000 selfies - appropriation in the digital age, 'Richard Prince and the art of ‘rephotographing’ Richard Prince is a New York-based artist famous for appropriation. His work relies heavily on the work of others. Not all of his pieces or projects are appropriated, but his most famous pieces owe their existence to the technique.. . . Now, Prince is back in the spotlight. His current exhibition – New Portraits – opened in June at the Gagosian gallery in London, having debuted in New York in 2014. The portraits, however, are not new to everyone – and certainly not new to their subjects. This is because Prince’s New Portraits series comprises entirely of the Instagram photos of others.' back

Henrietta Cook, Catholic archbishop warned aginst 'tolerating' gay students, back

Henry Fountain & Acacia Johnson, Gold vs Salmon: An Alaska Mine Project Just Got a Boose, ' From the air it looks like just another tract of Alaska’s endless, roadless tundra, pockmarked with lakes and ponds, with a scattering of some of the state’s craggy mountains. But this swath of land, home to foraging bears and spawning salmon about 200 miles southwest of Anchorage, has been a battleground for years. The fight is over what lies just below the surface: one of the richest deposits of copper, gold and other valuable metals in the world. It sets two of the state’s most important industries, mining and fishing, against each other.' back

Untermensch - Wikipedia, Untermensch - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Untermensch (German for underman, sub-man, subhuman; plural: Untermenschen) is a term that became infamous when the Nazis used it to describe "inferior people" often referred to as "the masses from the East," that is Jews, Roma, and Slavs (including Poles, Serbs, Belarusians, Russians, and Rusyns). The term was also applied to black people. Jewish people were to be exterminated[4] in the Holocaust, while the Slavs in Generalplan Ost were to be mostly deported to Siberia or Germanized. While the Nazis were inconsistent in the implementation of their policy, its genocidal death toll was in tens of millions of victims.' back

Jeffrey Nicholls, Prolegomenon to Scientific Theology, ' This thesis is an attempt to carry speculative theology beyond the apogee it reached in the medieval work of Thomas Aquinas into the world of empirical science (Aquinas 2019). Since the time of Aquinas, our understanding of the Universe has increased enormously. The ancient theologians not only conceived a perfect God, but they also saw the world as a very imperfect place. Their reaction was to place God outside the world. I will argue that we live in a Universe which approaches infinity in size and complexity, is as perfect as can be, and fulfils all the roles traditionally attributed to God, creator, lawmaker and judge.' back

John von Neumann, The Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, ' Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics by John von Neumann translated from the German by Robert T. Beyer (New Edition) edited by Nicholas A. Wheeler
Princeton UP Princeton & Oxford Preface: ' This book is the realization of my long-held intention to someday use the resources of TEX to produce a more easily read version of Robert T. Beyer’s authorized English translation (Princeton University Press, 1955) of John von Neumann’s classic Mathematische Grundlagen der Quantenmechanik (Springer, 1932). This content downloaded from 129.127.145.240 on Sat, 30 May 2020 22:38:31 UTC
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Kerry Armstrong, Cardinal George Pell criticizes Pope Francis over climate change stance, 'Cardinal George Pell has publicly criticised Pope Francis' decision to place climate change at the top of the Catholic Church's agenda. Cardinal Pell, a well-known climate change skeptic, told the Financial Times the church had "no particular expertise in science". "The church has got no mandate from the Lord to pronounce on scientific matters," he said, "We believe in the autonomy of science." Advertisement His comments come a month after Pope Francis released an historic encyclical calling on humanity to fight global warming.' back

Lorena Allam, Gomeroi custodians lose bid to protect sacred sites from NSW Shenhua coalmine, ' Gomeroi custodian Dolly Talbott was suing the environment minister, Sussan Ley, in the federal court, alleging Ley made an error of law in deciding not to make a declaration to protect the Aboriginal heritage. . . . Under the ATSIHP, the environment minister has the power to protect areas of cultural heritage if she is satisfied they are significant areas that are under threat of injury or desecration. Ley has acknowledged the sites “retain immeasurable cultural values and connection to country” and “are of particular significance to Aboriginal people” but decided the mine’s potential economic and social benefits outweighed their heritage value.' back

Marcos Balter, His Name Is Joseph Boulogne, Not 'Black Mozart', ' Few musicians have led a life as fascinating and multifaceted as Boulogne’s. Recounting it, however, is an exercise in educated guesswork. What is known is scantily and contradictorily documented, when not purely anecdotal. . . Very little is known about Boulogne’s musical training. But when François-Joseph Gossec, one of France’s pioneering symphony writers and most prominent conductors, founded the Concert des Amateurs series in 1769, he invited Boulogne to join its orchestra, first as a violinist and later as its concertmaster. Boulogne’s first documented compositions are from 1770 and ’71. While these are clearly works by a composer still searching for his voice, they already demonstrate his commitment to the new and unexplored.' back

Moment of inertia - Wikipedia, Moment of inertia - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'The moment of inertia, otherwise known as the angular mass or rotational inertia, of a rigid body determines the torque needed for a desired angular acceleration about a rotational axis. It depends on the body's mass distribution and the axis chosen, with larger moments requiring more torque to change the body's rotation. It is an extensive (additive) property: the moment of inertia of a composite system is the sum of the moments of inertia of its component subsystems (all taken about the same axis).' back

Namwall Serpell, Learning From the Kariba Dam, ' The Kariba Dam is failing. Since the late 1950s, it has sat on the Zambezi River, on the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe, in one of the zigzagging gorges that ripple the land there. It provides 1,830 megawatts of hydroelectric power to both countries and holds back the world’s largest reservoir. For the last decade, scientists and reporters have issued warnings about the dam’s potential to cause ecological disasters — of opposite kinds. On one hand, low rainfall has yielded water levels that barely reach the minimum necessary to generate electricity. On the other hand, heavy rainfall has threatened to flood the surrounding areas.' back

Pope Francis, Laudato Si': On care of our common home, '1. “LAUDATO SI’, mi’ Signore” – “Praise be to you, my Lord”. In the words of this beautiful canticle, Saint Francis of Assisi reminds us that our common home is like a sister with whom we share our life and a beautiful mother who opens her arms to embrace us. “Praise be to you, my Lord, through our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us, and who produces various fruit with coloured flowers and herbs”. 2. This sister now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her. We have come to see ourselves as her lords and masters, entitled to plunder her at will. The violence present in our hearts, wounded by sin, is also reflected in the symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air and in all forms of life. This is why the earth herself, burdened and laid waste, is among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor; she “groans in travail” (Rom 8:22). We have forgotten that we ourselves are dust of the earth (cf. Gen 2:7); our very bodies are made up of her elements, we breathe her air and we receive life and refreshment from her waters.' back

Steven Perlstein, Wall Street doesn't care if Trump loses. Here's why., ' So [today’s investors and business executives] are left to hope that a polarized politics, a weakened economy and some well-financed lobbying will stymie the Democratic agenda. That may have once been possible, but no longer. Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell and the Freedom Caucus changed all that, as did the killing of George Floyd. Now the faux populism of the Republican Party is about to give way to the real populism of angry and vengeful Democrats. And by all appearances, the Wall Street wiseguys don’t have a clue about what’s coming their way. ' back

The Girl in the Fog - Wikipedia, The Girl in the Fog - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' The Girl in the Fog (Italian: La ragazza nella nebbia) is a 2017 Italian psychological thriller film based on the novel of the same name by Donato Carrisi. ' back

Thomas Aquinas, Summa, I, 2, 3, Does God exist?, 'I answer that, The existence of God can be proved in five ways. The first and more manifest way is the argument from motion. . . . ' back

Thomas L. Friedman, Trump's Wag-the-Dog War, ' “. . . in a desperate effort to salvage his campaign, Trump turned to the Middle East Dictator’s Official Handbook and found just what he was looking for, the chapter titled, ‘What to Do When Your People Turn Against You?' “Answer: Turn them against each other and then present yourself as the only source of law and order.” ' back

Unmoved mover - Wikipedia, Unmoved mover - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' The unmoved mover (Ancient Greek: ὃ οὐ κινούμενον κινεῖ, romanized: ho ou kinoúmenon kineî, lit. 'that which moves without being moved'] or prime mover (Latin: primum movens) is a concept advanced by Aristotle as a primary cause (or first uncaused cause) or "mover" of all the motion in the universe. As is implicit in the name, the unmoved mover moves other things, but is not itself moved by any prior action. In Book 12 (Greek: Λ) of his Metaphysics, Aristotle describes the unmoved mover as being perfectly beautiful, indivisible, and contemplating only the perfect contemplation: self-contemplation. He equates this concept also with the active intellect. This Aristotelian concept had its roots in cosmological speculations of the earliest Greek pre-Socratic philosophers and became highly influential and widely drawn upon in medieval philosophy and theology. St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, elaborated on the unmoved mover in the Quinque viae. ' back

Wojciech Hubert Zurek, Quantum origin of quantum jumps: breaking of unitary symmetry induced by information transfer and the transition from quantum to classical, 'Submitted on 17 Mar 2007 (v1), last revised 18 Mar 2008 (this version, v3)) Measurements transfer information about a system to the apparatus, and then further on – to observers and (often inadvertently) to the environment. I show that even imperfect copying essential in such situations restricts possible unperturbed outcomes to an orthogonal subset of all possible states of the system, thus breaking the unitary symmetry of its Hilbert space implied by the quantum superposition principle. Preferred outcome states emerge as a result. They provide framework for the “wavepacket collapse”, designating terminal points of quantum jumps, and defining the measured observable by specifying its eigenstates.' back