Christie, Agatha, Passenger to Frankfurt, Amereon 1983 Amazon Customer Review: 'Agatha Christie wrote several novels that deal with international organizations trying to take over the world. While I prefer her works set in the cozy country estates with families full of suspects, this is an enjoyable foray into this type of her work. Tones of neo-Nazism, drug trafficking, international finance, and a scientific discovery that could change the world are some of the elements that make up this story. The characters are interesting: Sir Stafford Nye, an unambitious member of the British diplomatic corps caught up in this caper; his great-aunt Matilda, an aristocratic lady reminiscent of Miss Marple in that she has a remarkable memory of things that happened long ago; a young girl with three identities who fears for her life, and a young man rumored to be the son of Adolph Hitler are among the characters that come to life in this novel.' Antoinette, Hoover, Alabama. 
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Jaynes, Julian, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Mariner Books 2000 Jacket: 'At the heart of this book is the revolutionary idea that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but is a learned process brought into being out of an earlier hallucinatory mentality by cataclysm and catastrophe only 3000 years ago and still developing.' 
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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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Sands, Philippe, East West Street: On the Origins of "Genocide" and "Crimes Against Humanity", Knopf 2016 'A profound and profoundly important book—a moving personal detective story, an uncovering of secret pasts, and a book that explores the creation and development of world-changing legal concepts that came about as a result of the unprecedented atrocities of Hitler’s Third Reich.' 
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Archdiocese of Baltimore, Baltimore Catechism Part 1, ' A Catechism of Christian Doctrine, Prepared and Enjoined by Order of the Third Council of Baltimore, or simply the Baltimore Catechism, is the official national catechism for children in the United States. It was the standard Catholic religion school text in the United States from 1885 to the late 1960s.' back

Boson - Wikipedia, Boson - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'In particle physics, bosons are particles with an integer spin, as opposed to fermions which have half-integer spin. From a behaviour point of view, fermions are particles that obey the Fermi-Dirac statistics while bosons are particles that obey the Bose-Einstein statistics. They may be either elementary, like the photon, or composite, as mesons. All force carrier particles are bosons. They are named after Satyendra Nath Bose. In contrast to fermions, several bosons can occupy the same quantum state. Thus, bosons with the same energy can occupy the same place in space.' back

Cal Flyn, 'My relative was a mass murderer of Australia's Gunai people. Can I make amends?, 'In 2011 I made an uncomfortable discovery about my family history. I had a famous great-great-great uncle, I learned: Angus McMillan. He was an explorer of early Australia, but in recent years he has also been identified as the man responsible for a series of massacres of the Gunai (sometimes referred to as the Gunaikurnai) people of Gippsland in the south-eastern state of Victoria. These attacks were cold-blooded and without mercy. Men with guns descended upon unsuspecting encampments, killing men, women and children; they were killed, as one settler wrote later, “whenever [the Gunai] can be met with”. In the first 10 years of settlement in Gippsland, the Gunai population fell by more than 90%, to little more than 100 individuals.' back

Cosmology - Wikipedia, Cosmology - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Cosmology (from the Greek κόσμος, kosmos "world" and -λογία, -logia "study of"), is the study of the origin, evolution, and eventual fate of the universe. Physical cosmology is the scholarly and scientific study of the origin, evolution, large-scale structures and dynamics, and ultimate fate of the universe, as well as the scientific laws that govern these realities. Religious or mythological cosmology is a body of beliefs based on mythological, religious, and esoteric literature and traditions of creation and eschatology.' back

Craig Gidney, My Quantum Circuit Simulator, 'I've been working on a quantum circuit simulator that runs in your browser. It's called Quirk. Quirk is open source (github repository: Strilanc/Quirk), and there's a live instance you can play with at algorithmicassertions.com/quirk' back

Daniel Andrews, 'Unimaginably wrong' Victoria's gay conviction apology speech in full, 'It all started here. It will end here, too. To our knowledge, no jurisdiction in the world has ever offered a full and formal apology for laws like these. So please, let these words rest forever in our records: On behalf of the parliament, the government and the people of Victoria … For the laws we passed. And the lives we ruined. And the standards we set. … we are so sorry … humbly, deeply, sorry.” ' back

Feynman diagram - Wikipedia, Feynman diagram - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' In theoretical physics, Feynman diagrams are pictorial representations of the mathematical expressions describing the behavior of subatomic particles. The scheme is named after its inventor, American physicist Richard Feynman, and was first introduced in 1948. The interaction of sub-atomic particles can be complex and difficult to understand intuitively. Feynman diagrams give a simple visualization of what would otherwise be an arcane and abstract formula. As David Kaiser writes, "since the middle of the 20th century, theoretical physicists have increasingly turned to this tool to help them undertake critical calculations", and so "Feynman diagrams have revolutionized nearly every aspect of theoretical physics".' back

Field (physics) - Wikipedia, Field (physics) - Wikipedia,the free encyclopedia, 'In physics, a field is a physical quantity associated to each point of spacetime. . . . Defining the field as "numbers in space" shouldn't detract from the idea that it has physical reality. “It occupies space. It contains energy. Its presence eliminates a true vacuum.” [Wheeler] The vacuum is free of matter, but not free of field. The field creates a "condition in space" "[Feynman] "The fact that the electromagnetic field can possess momentum and energy makes it very real... a particle makes a field, and a field acts on another particle, and the field has such familiar properties as energy content and momentum, just as particles can have" [Feynman].' back

Gardiner Harris, At Hiroshma Memorial, Obama Says Nuclear Arms Require 'Moral Revolution' , 'HIROSHIMA, Japan — President Obama laid a wreath at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial on Friday, telling an audience that included survivors of America’s atomic bombing in 1945 that technology as devastating as nuclear arms demands a “moral revolution.” . . . “Technological progress without an equivalent progress in human institutions can doom us,” Mr. Obama said, adding that such technology “requires a moral revolution as well.” ' back

Gauge theory - Wikipedia, Gauge theory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' In physics, a gauge theory is a type of field theory in which the Lagrangian does not change (is invariant) under local transformations from certain Lie groups. The term gauge refers to any specific mathematical formalism to regulate redundant degrees of freedom in the Lagrangian. The transformations between possible gauges, called gauge transformations, form a Lie group—referred to as the symmetry group or the gauge group of the theory. Associated with any Lie group is the Lie algebra of group generators. For each group generator there necessarily arises a corresponding field (usually a vector field) called the gauge field. Gauge fields are included in the Lagrangian to ensure its invariance under the local group transformations (called gauge invariance). When such a theory is quantized, the quanta of the gauge fields are called gauge bosons. If the symmetry group is non-commutative, then the gauge theory is referred to as non-abelian gauge theory, the usual example being the Yang–Mills theory. ' back

Higgs mechanism - Wikipedia, Higgs mechanism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'In the Standard Model of particle physics, the Higgs mechanism is essential to explain the generation mechanism of the property "mass" for gauge bosons. Without the Higgs mechanism, or some other effect like it, all bosons (a type of fundamental particle) would be massless, but measurements show that the W+, W−, and Z bosons actually have relatively large masses of around 80 GeV/c2. The Higgs field resolves this conundrum.' back

Jerome Martin, Everything You Always Wanted To Know About The Cosmological Constant Problem (But Were Afraid To Ask) (2012), Abstract: 'This article aims at discussing the cosmological constant problem at a pedagogical but fully technical level. We review how the vacuum energy can be regularized in flat and curved space-time and how it can be understood in terms of Feynman bubble diagrams. In particular, we show that the properly renormalized value of the zero-point energy density today (for a free theory) is in fact far from being 122 orders of magnitude larger than the critical energy density, as often quoted in the literature. . . . ' back

Jon Schwartz, Pentagon Official Once Told Morley Safer That Reporters Who Believe the Government are "Stupid", 'An agency man raised the problem that had preoccupied Ambassador Maxwell Taylor and [U.S. spokesman] Barry Zorthian — about the credibility of American officials. Responded the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs: “Look, if you think any American official is going to tell you the truth, then you’re stupid. Did you hear that? — stupid.” ' back

Kate Smolski, The case of Bulga village is part of a broader pattern that's hurting NSW, 'After more than six years of legal wrangling and collusion by the Baird Government with mining giant Rio Tinto, residents of the Hunter Valley village of Bulga have withdrawn their court appeal against Rio's Warkworth mine expansion. . . .In the Bulga case, when the NSW courts overruled the planning system and knocked back Rio's project because of unacceptable environmental and social impacts, Rio whinged to the government and the government changed the law so the company could re-apply under more favourable rules.' back

Mark Trodden, Electroweak Baryogensis, 'Contrary to naive cosmological expectations, all evidence suggests that the universe contains an abundance of matter over antimatter. T his article re- views the currently popular scenario in which testable phys ics, present in the standard model of electroweak interactions and its mode st extensions, is responsible for this fundamental cosmological datum. A p edagogical ex- planation of the motivations and physics behind electrowea k baryogenesis is provided, and analytical approaches, numerical studies, u p to date develop- ments and open questions in the field are also discussed.' back

Michael Slezak, Australia scrubbed from UN climate change report after government intervention, 'Guardian Australia can reveal the report “World Heritage and Tourism in a Changing Climate”, which Unesco jointly published with the United Nations environment program and the Union of Concerned Scientists on Friday, initially had a key chapter on the Great Barrier Reef, as well as small sections on Kakadu and the Tasmanian forests. But when the Australian Department of Environment saw a draft of the report, it objected, and every mention of Australia was removed by Unesco. Will Steffen, one of the scientific reviewers of the axed section on the reef, said Australia’s move was reminiscent of “the old Soviet Union”.' back

Milne model - Wikipedia, Milne model - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'The Milne model was a special-relativistic cosmological model proposed by Edward Arthur Milne in 1935. It is mathematically equivalent to a special case of the FLRW model in the limit of zero energy density (in other words, an empty universe) and it obeys the cosmological principle. The Milne model is also similar to Rindler space, a simple re-parameterization of flat Minkowski space. Since it features both zero energy density and maximally negative spatial curvature, the Milne model is contradicted by cosmological observations. Cosmologists actually observe the universe's density parameter to be consistent with unity and its curvature to be consistent with flatness.' back

Philippe Sands, How the Nuremberg trials found names for the Nazis' crimes, 'In this extract from his book East West Street, human rights lawyer Philippe Sands tells the personal stories of how genocide and crimes against humanity were first defined in law.' back

Quantum field theory - Wikipedia, Quantum field theory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Quantum field theory (QFT) provides a theoretical framework for constructing quantum mechanical models of systems classically described by fields or (especially in a condensed matter context) of many-body systems. . . . In QFT photons are not thought of as 'little billiard balls', they are considered to be field quanta - necessarily chunked ripples in a field that 'look like' particles. Fermions, like the electron, can also be described as ripples in a field, where each kind of fermion has its own field. In summary, the classical visualisation of "everything is particles and fields", in quantum field theory, resolves into "everything is particles", which then resolves into "everything is fields". In the end, particles are regarded as excited states of a field (field quanta). back

Rhonda Lynette-Smith and Ian Martin McDonald, More competition may not be the answer to reforming the aged care system, 'The Harper Inquiry report shows that even if competition delivers efficiency gains, it may not deliver services of the desired type or quality and it may result in some groups in society being disadvantaged. The report cautioned that: “Governments should retain a stewardship function, separating the interests of policy (including funding), regulation and service delivery,” whilst also recognising the need for “ensuring minimum standards of quality and access in human services.” ' back

Robert Mickens, Does Dialogue Require "Renunciation of Truth", 'If you step back and survey Francis’s first three years in office you can see through so many of his initiatives and actions that he has tried to forge peace among broken families, bickering Catholic factions, divided Christians, folks of other religions and no religion at all, and even among rivaling world leaders and society figures. But it is the manner in which he has tried to bring about peace in all these areas that is most striking and which marks a shift from the style of his most recent predecessor. Pope Francis has sought and pursued peace through encounter and dialogue.' back

Srinivasa Ramanujan - Wikipedia, Srinivasa Ramanujan - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Srinivasa Ramanujan (22 December 1887 – 26 April 1920) was an Indian mathematician and autodidact. Though he had almost no formal training in pure mathematics, he made extraordinary contributions to mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series, and continued fractions.' back

Standard model - Wikipedia, Standard model - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'The Standard Model of particle physics is a theory that describes three of the four known fundamental interactions between the elementary particles that make up all matter. It is a quantum field theory developed between 1970 and 1973 which is consistent with both quantum mechanics and special relativity. To date, almost all experimental tests of the three forces described by the Standard Model have agreed with its predictions. However, the Standard Model falls short of being a complete theory of fundamental interactions, primarily because of its lack of inclusion of gravity, the fourth known fundamental interaction, but also because of the large number of numerical parameters (such as masses and coupling constants) that must be put "by hand" into the theory (rather than being derived from first principles) . . . ' back

Steven Weinberg, The Search for Unity: Notes for a History of Quantum Field Theory, 'In its essentials this point of view has survived to the present day, and forms the central dogma of quantum field theory. The esential reality is a set of fields, subject to the rules of special relativity and quantum mechanics; all else is derived as a consequence of the quantum dynamics of these fields'
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Timothy Ean, A Walk in the Dead Woods, 'The collapse of the conifers is blamed in large part on a beetle the size of a grain of rice that has metastasized with climate change. In record warm years — which is to say, nearly every year of the last decade — the trees’ natural defense systems weaken and beetles reproduce in large numbers. The infestation killing forests all over the Western Hemisphere has been called the largest insect outbreak in global history.' back