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Revealing Vatican attempts to propagate its religion by international treaty

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Acemoglu, Daron, and James Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty, Crown Business 2012 "Some time ago a little-known Scottish philosopher wrote a book on what makes nations succeed and what makes them fail. The Wealth of Nations is still being read today. With the same perspicacity and with the same broad historical perspective, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson have retackled this same question for our own times. Two centuries from now our great-great- . . . -great grandchildren will be, similarly, reading Why Nations Fail." —George Akerlof, Nobel laureate in economics, 2001
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Aristotle, and (translated by P H Wickstead and F M Cornford), Physics books I-IV, Harvard University Press, William Heinemann 1980 Introduction: 'The title "Physics" is misleading. .. "Lectures on Nature" the alternative title found in editions of the Greek text, is more enlightening. ... The realm of Nature, for Aristotle, includes all things that move and change ... . Thus the ultimate "matter" which, according to Aristotle, underlies all the elementary substances must be studied, in its changes at least, by the Natural Philosopher. And so must the eternal heavenly spheres of the Aristotelean philosophy, insofar as they themselves move of are the cause of motion in the sublunary world.'
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Bell, John S, Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics, Cambridge University Press 1987 Jacket: JB ... is particularly famous for his discovery of a crucial difference between the predictions of conventional quantum mechanics and the implications of local causality ... This work has played a major role in the development of our current understanding of the profound nature of quantum concepts and of the fundamental limitations they impose on the applicability of classical ideas of space, time and locality.
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Christie, Agatha, Parker Pyne Investigates, HarperCollins Publishers 2003 Amazon Editorial Review Book Description 'Agatha Christie is more than the most popular mystery writer of all time. In a career that spans over half a century, her name is synonymous with brilliant deception, ingenious puzzles, and the surprise denouement. By virtually inventing the modern mystery novel she has earned her title as the Queen of Crime. Curious? Then you're invited to read....PARKER PYNE INVESTIGATES. The personal ad posed a simple question: Are you happy? If not, consult Mr. Parker Pyne. The answer is a resounding no for a jealous wife who suspects her husband of infidelity....for a lonely widow driven to assume a new identity....for a distraught mother whose son has been kidnapped....and for the fiancee of a strangely reclusive bride-to-be. But what sort of detective would solicit in the personals? The sort who has a knack for investigating affairs of the heart. For therein lie the darkest motives for murder. And they are proving most lucrative for the hopelessly romantic-and highly suspicious Inspector Parker Pyne.'
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Davies, Paul C W, and David S Betts, Quantum Mechanics, Chapman and Hall 1994-1995 Jacket: 'Quantum mechanics is the key to modern physics and chemistry, yet it is notoriously difficult to understand. This book is designed to overcome that obstacle. Clear and concise, it provides an easily readable introduction intended for science undergraduates with no previous knowledge of quantum theory, leading them through to the advanced topics usually encountered at the final year level. Although the subject matter is standard, novel techniques have been employed that considerably simplify the technical presentation. The authors use their extensive experience of teaching and popularizing science to explain the many difficult, abstract points of the subject in easily comprehensible language. Helpful examples and thorough sets of exercises are also given to enable students to master the subject..
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de Witt, Bryce S and Neill Graham (eds) , and Hugh Everett III, J A Wheeler, B S DeWitt, L N Cooper, D van Vechten, N Graham (contributors), The Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, Princeton UP 1973 Jacket: 'A novel interpretation of quantum mechanics, first proposed in brief form by Hugh Everett in 1957, forms the nucleus around which this book is developed. The volume contains Dr Everett's short paper from 1957, "'Relative State' Formulation of Quantum Mechanics", and a far longer exposition of his interpretation, entitled "The Theory of the Universal Wave Function", never before published. In addition, other papers by De Witt, Graham and Cooper and van Vechtem provide further dicussion of the same theme. Together they constitute virtually the entire world output of scholarly commentary on the Everett interpretation.'
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Diamond, Jared, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, W W Norton and Co 1997 'Diamond's book is complex and a bit overwhelming. But the thesis he methodically puts forth--examining the "positive feedback loop" of farming, then domestication, then population density, then innovation, and on and on--makes sense. Written without favor, Guns, Germs, and Steel is good global history.' Amazon.com
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Diamond, Jared, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Viking Adult 2004 'As suggested by its title, this book is about societal collapses - past, present and future - and the factors that cause human societies to fail. ... [Diamond's] primary mission is to determine the ecological, political and cultural conditions that lead to collapse and to contrast these with the conditions that favour success. ... Collapse is based on a series of detailed case studies. ... Diamond then provides a fuller exploration of the many rich parallels between these historic cases and select modern societies. ... What emerges most clearly from [his] analysis is the central role played by environmetnal decay in undermining human societies. ... In the end, [his] painstaking toil in the deep mines of history rewards him with sufficient nuggets of hope that he emerges 'cautiously optimistic' about the human prospect. ... The most important lesson to be drawn from Collapse is that resilient societies are nimble ones, capable of long term planning and of abandoning deeply entrenched but ultimately destructive core values and beliefs. This, in turn, requires a well informed public, inspired leadership and the political will to go against the established order of things. ... ' William Rees, Nature 433:15, 6 January 2005.
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Everett III, Hugh, and Bryce S Dewitt, Neill Graham (editors), The Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, Princeton University Press 1973 Jacket: 'A novel interpretation of quantum mechanics, first proposed in brief form by Hugh Everett in 1957, forms the nucleus around which this book has developed. The volume contains Dr Everett's short paper from 1957, "'Relativge State' formulation of quantum mechanics" and a far longer exposition of his interpretation entitled "The Theory of the Universal Wave Function" never before published. In addition other papers by Wheeler, DeWitt, Graham, Cooper and van Vechten provide further discussion of the same theme. Together they constitute virtually the entire world output of scholarly commentary on the Everett interpretation.'
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Lonergan, Bernard J F, and Robert M. Doran, Frederick E. Crowe (eds), Verbum : Word and Idea in Aquinas (Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan volume 2) , University of Toronto Press 1997 Jacket: 'Verbum is a product of Lonergan's eleven years of study of the thought of Thomas Aquinas. The work is considered by many to be a breakthrough in the history of Lonergan's theology ... . Here he interprets aspects in the writing of Aquinas relevant to trinitarian theory and, as in most of Lonergan's work, one of the principal aims is to assist the reader in the search to understand the workings of the human mind.'
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Lonergan, Bernard J F, Insight : A Study of Human Understanding (Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan : Volume 3), University of Toronto Press 1992 '... Bernard Lonergan's masterwork. Its aim is nothing less than insight into insight itself, an understanding of understanding'
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Nilsson, Nils J, Artificial Intelligence: A New Synthesis, Morgan Kaufmann 1998 Preface: This introductory textbook employs a novel perspective from which to view topics in artificial intelligence (AI). I will consider a progression of AI systems or "agents", each slightly more complex than its predecessor. I begin with elementary agents that respond to sensed properties of their environments. Even such simple machines allow me to treat topics such as machine vision, machine learning and machine evolution. Then by stages I introduce techniques that allow agents to exploit information about the task environment that cannot be immediately sensed. ... Because the progression follows what plausibly might have been milestones in the evolution of animals, I have called the approach evolutionary artificial intelligence. I intend the book to be as much a proposal about how to think about AI as it is a description of AI techniques. Examples will be used to provide motivation and grounding.' p xix.
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Papers

Dalrymple, William, "Letter from Pakistan: Days of Rage: Challenges for the Nation's Future", The New Yorker, 83, 20, 23 July 2007, page 26-35. 'Imran Khan, the country's great sporting hero, who retired from cricket to enter politics and founded a party called Tehrik-e-Insaaf, or the Movement for Justice, in 1996, initially believed that Musharraf seriously intended to reform the system. But he has joined the lawyers. "This is the first time in our history that the judiciary has asserted its independence", he told me. "Normally. it just sides with whoever is in power. Change is irreversible. You can't have prosperity without genuine democracy and an independent judiciary."'. back

Surwiecki, James, "The financial page: Fuel for thought", The New Yorker, 83, 20, 23 July 2007, page 25. ' ... between 1984 and 2002 the average vehicle got twenty percent heavier and its zero-to-sixty acceleration improved twenty-five per cent, while fuel efficiency stagnated. (By contrast, between 1975, when fuel-economy standards were first introduced, and 1984, average fuel economy improved sixty-two percent, without any decline in performance.) This is not because of technological difficulties or a conspiracy on the part of the auto industry. it is because the automakers have listened to car buyers, and put their energy into making vehicles bigger and faster rather than more efficient. In calling for a law requiring better gas-mileage in our cars, then, voters are really saying that they're unhappy with the collective result of the choices they made as buyers. Sometimes, they know, we need to save ourselves from ourselves.'. back

Links

Dominicans Dominicans: Order of Preachers 'WWW.OP.ORG is the official international Web site of the Order of Preachers (the Dominicans). The branches of the Dominican family are multiple: brothers, contemplative nuns, congregations of contemplative and apostolic sisters, lay persons in fraternities or secular institutes, secular priests in fraternities. "Each one has its own character, its autonomy. However by taking part in the charism of saint Dominic, they share between them a single vocation to be preachers in the Church (Chapter of Mexico, 1992)."' back

Fourier analysis - Wikipedia Fourier analysis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'Fourier analysis, named after Joseph Fourier's introduction of the Fourier series, is the decomposition of a function in terms of a sum of sinusoidal basis functions (vs. their frequencies) that can be recombined to obtain the original function. That process of recombining the sinusoidal basis functions is also called Fourier synthesis (in which case Fourier analysis refers specifically to the decomposition process).' back

Harmonic analysis - Wikipedia Harmonic analysis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'Harmonic analysis is the branch of mathematics that studies the representation of functions or signals as the superposition of basic waves. It investigates and generalizes the notions of Fourier series and Fourier transforms. The basic waves are called "harmonics", hence the name "harmonic analysis," but the name "harmonic" in this context is generalized beyond its original meaning of integer frequency multiples. In the past two centuries, it has become a vast subject with applications in areas as diverse as signal processing, quantum mechanics, and neuroscience.' back

Jean le Rond d'Alembert - Wikipedia Jean le Rond d'Alembert - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'Jean le Rond d'Alembert (November 16, 1717 —1783) was a French mathematician, mechanician, physicist and philosopher. He was also co-editor with Denis Diderot of the Encyclopedie. D'Alembert's method for the wave equation is named after him.' back

Joseph-Louis Lagrange - Wikipedia Joseph-Louis Lagrange - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'Joseph-Louis Lagrange, comte de l'Empire (January 25, 1736 — April 10, 1813; b. Turin, baptised in the name of Giuseppe Lodovico Lagrangia) was an Italian mathematician and astronomer who made important contributions to all fields of analysis and number theory and to classical and celestial mechanics as arguably the greatest mathematician of the 18th century.' back

Leonhard Euler - Wikipedia Leonhard Euler - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'Leonhard Paul Euler (pronounced Oiler; . . . (April 15, 1707 — September 18 [O.S. September 7] 1783) was a pioneering Swiss mathematician and physicist, who spent most of his life in Russia and Germany. He published more papers than any other mathematician in history.' back

Marxism and religion - Wikipedia Marxism and religion - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'The founder and primary theorist of Marxism, the nineteenth century German sociologist Karl Marx, had an ambivalent attitude to religion, viewing it primarily as "the opium of the people" that had been used by the ruling classes to give the working classes false hope for millennia, while at the same time recognizing it as a form of protest by the working classes against their poor economic conditions.[1] In the Marxist-Leninist interpretation of Marxist theory, developed primarily by Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, religion is seen as negative to human development, and socialist states that follow a Marxist-Leninist variant are atheistic and explicitly antireligious. Due to this, a number of avowedly Marxist governments in the twentieth century, such as the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, implemented rules introducing state atheism. However, several religious communist groups exist, and Christian communism was important in the early development of communism.' back

Probability axioms - Wikipedia Probability axioms - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'In probability theory, the probability P of some event E, denoted P(E), is defined in such a way that P satisfies the Kolmogorov axioms.' back

Quantum entanglement - Wikipedia Quantum entanglement - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'Quantum entanglement, also called the quantum non-local connection, is a possible property of a quantum mechanical state of a system of two or more objects in which the quantum states of the constituting objects are linked together so that one object can no longer be adequately described without full mention of its counterpart&mdasheven if the individual objects are spatially separated in a spacelike manner. This interconnection leads to non-classical correlations between observable physical properties of remote systems, often referred to as nonlocal correlations.' back

r/K selection theory - Wikipedia r/K selection theory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'Typically, r-selected species exploit empty niches, and produce many offspring, each of whom has a relatively low probability of surviving to adulthood. In contrast, K-selected species are strong competitors in crowded niches, and invest more heavily in much fewer offspring, each of whom has a relatively high probability of surviving to adulthood.' back

Renormalization group - Wikipedia Renormalization group - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'In theoretical physics, renormalization group (RG) refers to a mathematical apparatus that allows one to investigate the changes of a physical system as one views it at different distance scales. In particle physics it reflects the changes in the underlying force laws as one varies the energy scale at which physical processes occur. A change in scale is called a "scale transformation" or "conformal transformation." The renormalization group is intimately related to "conformal invariance" or "scale invariance," a symmetry by which the system appears the same at all scales (so-called self-similarity).' back

Secularity - Wikipedia Secularity - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'Secular and secularity derive from the Latin word saecularis meaning of a generation, belonging to an age. The Christian doctrine that God exists outside time led medieval Western culture to use secular to indicate separation from specifically religious affairs and involvement in temporal ones. This meaning has been extended to mean separation from any religion, regardless of whether it has a similar doctrine.' back

Sensorium - Wikipedia Sensorium - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'The term sensorium (plural: sensoria) refers to the sum of an organism's perception, the "seat of sensation" where it experiences and interprets the environments within which it lives. The term originally enters English from the Late Latin in the mid-17th century, from the stem sens- (see: sense). In earlier use it referred, in a broader sense, to the brain as the mind's organ (Oxford English Dictionary 1989). In medical, psychological, and physiological discourse it has come to refer to the total character of the unique and changing sensory environments perceived by individuals. These include the sensation, perception, and interpretation of information about the world around us by using faculties of the mind such as senses, phenomenal and psychological perception, cognition and intelligence.' back

Stochastic - Wikipedia Stochastic - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'Stochastic (from the Greek στόχος for aim or guess) is an adjective that refers to systems whose behavior is intrinsically non-deterministic, sporadic, and categorically not intermittent (i.e. random). A stochastic process is one whose behavior is non-deterministic, in that a system's subsequent state is determined both by the process's predictable actions and by a random element. However, according to M. Kac and E. Nelson, any kind of time development (be it deterministic or essentially probabilistic) which is analyzable in terms of probability deserves the name of stochastic process.' back

Wave equation - Wikipedia Wave equation - Wikipedia. the free encyclopedia 'The wave equation is an important second-order linear partial differential equation for the description of waves – as they occur in physics – such as sound waves, light waves and water waves. It arises in fields like acoustics, electromagnetics, and fluid dynamics. Historically, the problem of a vibrating string such as that of a musical instrument was studied by Jean le Rond d'Alembert, Leonhard Euler, Daniel Bernoulli, and Joseph-Louis Lagrange.' back

Notes

Sunday 29 July 2001

Monday 30 July 2001

Tuesday 31 July 2001

Wednesday 1 August 2001

Thursday 2 August 2001

Friday 3 August 2001

Saturday 4 August 2001

Further reading

Books

Papers

Links