Blum, William, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions since World War II - Updated Through 2003, Common Courage Press 2003 Amazon customer review: ' Written by a former State Department employee, the author's wealth of knowledge and experience are thoroughly impressive, and this book is very easy to read and follow. Beginning at the end of WWII, the author lists, by country, US military involvement in chronological order. Readers will find the consequences - some of which are being seen today - profoundly interesting. Another reviewer mentioned that the book had a "blame America first" slant, but I sincerely doubt that reviewer read the entire book. Whilethe book does specifically mention US involvement in the overthrow of democratically elected governments in places like Iran, Chile, and Indonesia, these incidents are generally known now. The people responsible are blamed, not the American people who were not privy to such Washington secrets. It is interesting to read why Washington powerbrokers chose military intervention: In some cases bowing to political interests, in other cases with fine intentions, in most cases not foreseeing the negative consequences for the US and the world. This book provides a concise background for the state of the world today.' Mary F Czach (APO, AP United States) 
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Christie, Agatha, Why Didn't They Ask Evans?, Minotaur Books; New Dell Edition 2002 'Was it a misstep that sent a handsome stranger plummeting to his death from a cliff? Or something more sinister? Fun-loving adventurers Bobby Jones and Frances Derwent's suspicions are certainly roused--espeically since the man's dying words were so peculiar: Why didn't the ask Evans? Bobby and Frances would love to know. Unfortunately, asking the wrong people has sent the amateur sleuths running for their lives--on a wild and deadly pursuit tod discover who Evans is, what it was he wasn't asked, and why the mysterious inquiry has put their own lives in mortal danger...' 
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Farmelo, Graham, The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom, Basic Books 2009 Amazon Editorial Review: From Publishers Weekly 'Paul Dirac (1902–1984) shared the Nobel Prize for physics with Erwin Schrödinger in 1933, but whereas physicists regard Dirac as one of the giants of the 20th century, he isn't as well known outside the profession. This may be due to the lack of humorous quips attributed to Dirac, as compared with an Einstein or a Feynman. If he spoke at all, it was with one-word answers that made Calvin Coolidge look loquacious. Dirac adhered to Keats's admonition that Beauty is truth, truth beauty: if an equation was beautiful, it was probably correct, and vice versa. His most famous equation predicted the positron (now used in PET scans), which is the antiparticle of the electron, and antimatter in general. . . . ' Copyright Reed Business Information 
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Feynman, Richard, Feynman Lectures on Computation, Perseus Publishing 2007 Amazon Editorial Reviews Book Description 'The famous physicist's timeless lectures on the promise and limitations of computers When, in 1984-86, Richard P. Feynman gave his famous course on computation at the California Institute of Technology, he asked Tony Hey to adapt his lecture notes into a book. Although led by Feynman, the course also featured, as occasional guest speakers, some of the most brilliant men in science at that time, including Marvin Minsky, Charles Bennett, and John Hopfield. Although the lectures are now thirteen years old, most of the material is timeless and presents a "Feynmanesque" overview of many standard and some not-so-standard topics in computer science such as reversible logic gates and quantum computers.'  
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Hofstadter, Douglas R, Goedel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Basic/Harvester 1979 An illustrated essay on the philosophy of mathematics. Formal systems, recursion, self reference and meaning explored with a dazzling array of examples in music, dialogue, text and graphics. 
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Kagan, Robert, The Jungle Grows Back, Alfred A. Knopp 2018 ' Recent years have brought deeply disturbing developments around the globe from declining democracy to growing geopolitical competition. American sentiment seems to be leaning increasingly toward going it alone or withdrawing in the face of such disarray. In this powerful urgent essay, Robert Kagan elucidates the reasons that American withdrawal or selfish unilateralism would be the worst possible response, based on a fundamental and dangerous misreading of the world.' 
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Misner, Charles W, and Kip S Thorne, John Archibald Wheeler, Gravitation, Freeman 1973 Jacket: 'Einstein's description of gravitation as curvature of spacetime led directly to that greatest of all predictions of his theory, that the universe itself is dynamic. Physics still has far to go to come to terms with this amazing fact and what it means for man and his relation to the universe. John Archibald Wheeler. . . . this is a book on Einstein's theory of gravity. . . . ' 
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Neuenschwander, Dwight E, Emmy Noether's Wonderful Theorem, Johns Hopkins University Press 2011 Jacket: A beautiful piece of mathematics, Noether's therem touches on every aspect of physics. Emmy Noether proved her theorem in 1915 and published it in 1918. This profound concept demonstrates the connection between conservation laws and symmetries. For instance, the theorem shows that a system invariant under translations of time, space or rotation will obey the laws of conservation of energy, linear momentum or angular momentum respectively. This exciting result offers a rich unifying principle for all of physics.' 
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van der Waerden, B L, Sources of Quantum Mechanics, Dover Publications 1968 Amazon Book Description: 'Seventeen seminal papers, dating from the years 1917-26, in which the quantum theory as wenow know it was developed and formulated. Among the scientists represented: Einstein,Ehrenfest, Bohr, Born, Van Vleck, Heisenberg, Dirac, Pauli and Jordan. All 17 papers translatedinto English.' 
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von Neumann, John, and Robert T Beyer (translator), Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, Princeton University Press 1983 Jacket: '. . . a revolutionary book that caused a sea change in theoretical physics. . . . JvN begins by presenting the theory of Hermitean operators and Hilbert spaces. These provide the framework for transformation theory, which JvN regards as the definitive form of quantum mechanics. . . . Regarded as a tour de force at the time of its publication, this book is still indispensable for those interested in the fundamental issues of quantum mechanics.' 
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Whitehead, Alfred North, and Bertrand Arthur Russell, Principia Mathematica (Cambridge Mathematical Library), Cambridge University Press 1962 The great three-volume Principia Mathematica is deservedly the most famous work ever written on the foundations of mathematics. Its aim is to deduce all the fundamental propositions of logic and mathematics from a small number of logical premisses and primitive ideas, and so to prove that mathematics is a development of logic. Not long after it was published, Goedel showed that the project could not completely succeed, but that in any system, such as arithmetic, there were true propositions that could not be proved.  
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Lim, May, Richard Metzier, Yaneer Bar-Yam, "Global Pattern Formation and Ethnic/Cultural Violence", Science, 317, 5844, 14 September 2007, page 1540-1544. 'We identify a process of global pattern formation that causes regions to differentiate by culture. Violence arises at boundaries between regions that are not sufficiently well defined. We model cultural differentiation as a separation of groups whose members prefer similar neighbours, with a characteristic group size at which violence occurs. Application of this model to the area of the former Yugoslavia and to India accurately predicts the locations of reported conflict. This model also points to improved mixing or boundary clarification as mechanisms for promoting peace.' . back

Liu, Jianquo, et al, "Complexity of Coupled Human and Natural Sysems", Science, 317, 5844, 14 September 2007, page 1513-1516. 'Integrated studies of coupled human and natural systems reveal new and complex patterns and processes not evident when studied by social or natural scientists separately. Synthesis of six case studies from around the world shows that couplings between human and natural systems vary across space, time, and organisational unity. They also exhibit nonlinear dynamics with thresholds, reciprocal feedback loops, time lags, resilience, heterogeneity, and surprises. Furthermore, past couplings have legacy effects on present conditions and future possibilities.'. back

Active intellect - Wikipedia, Active intellect - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'The active intellect (also translated as agent intellect, active intelligence, active reason, or productive intellect) is a concept in classical and medieval philosophy. The term refers to the formal (morphe) aspect of the intellect (nous), in accordance with the theory of hylomorphism.' back

Al Jazeera and Agencies, Russia warns of arms race if US quits weapons treaty, ' Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said on Monday that Russia would be forced to act if the United States pulled out of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty and began developing new missiles. "Because what does scrapping the INF treaty mean? It means that the United States is not disguising, but is openly starting to develop these systems in the future, and if these systems are being developed, then actions are necessary from other countries, in this case Russia, to restore balance in this sphere," Peskov told reporters at a press conference in the Russian capital, Moscow.' back

Alan Turing, On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem, 'The "computable" numbers may be described briefly as the real numbers whose expressions as a decimal are calculable by some finite means. Although the subject of this paper is ostensibly the computable numbers, it is almost equally easy to define and investigate computable functions of an integral variable of a real or computable variable, computable predicates and so forth. . . . ' back

Alexander Titov, Orthodox Church: the biggest split in a thousand years triggered over Ukraine, back

Anil K. Seth and Manos Tsakiris, Being a Beast Machine: The Somatic Basis of Selfhood, 'We conceptualise experiences of embodied selfhood in terms of control-oriented predictive regulation (allostasis) of physiological states. We account for distinctive phenomenological aspects of embodied selfhood, including its (partly) non-object-like nature and its subjective stability over time. We explain predictive perception as a generalisation from a fundamental biological imperative to maintain physiological integrity: to stay alive. We bring together several cognitive science traditions, including predictive processing, perceptual control theory, cybernetics, the free energy principle, and sensorimotor contingency theory. We show how perception of the world around us, and of ourselves within it, happens with, through, and because of our living bodies. We draw implications for developmental psychology and identify open questions in psychiatry and artificial intelligence.' back

Archie Dick, How the apartheid regime burnt books -- in their tens of th0usands, ' On the advice of the State Librarian one fine day in the 1970s, a truck transported thousands of books and magazines from Pretoria’s Central Police Station to a dark hall at the Iscor state steel company, just outside the South African capital. A large mechanical shovel scooped up and dropped them into a 20 metre high oven, causing it to spew flames and smoke. This was another truckload of material that had been banned for political reasons and was routinely burned in furnaces across South Africa from the 1950s to the 1970s.' back

Bad Times at the El Royale - Wikipedia, Bad Times at the El Royale - Wikipedia, the free enecyclopeida, ' Bad Times at the El Royale is a 2018 American neo-noir thriller film written, produced and directed by Drew Goddard. The film stars Jeff Bridges, Cynthia Erivo, Dakota Johnson, Jon Hamm, Cailee Spaeny, Lewis Pullman, Nick Offerman and Chris Hemsworth. Set in 1970, the plot follows seven strangers who each are hiding dark secrets that come to a head one night in a shady hotel on the California-Nevada border. ' back

Chris Patterson, Jamal Khashoggi: why stating the truth is getting a lot of journalists killed, ' In April 2019 a momentous 20-year anniversary will pass with little notice – an anniversary which, to my mind, marks the more realistic start of the end of global order. . . . This was the destruction in 1999, by US-led NATO forces, of the Serbian public broadcaster in Belgrade, resulting in the murder of 16 civilian media workers who shared the misfortune of being on the wrong night shift. A NATO spokesman said the next day they had be bombed because the US and its NATO partners did not approve of “their version of the news”.' back

Counter-Enlightenment - Wikipedia, Counter-Enlightenment - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' The Counter-Enlightenment was a term that some 20th-century commentators have used to describe multiple strains of thought that arose in the late-18th and early-19th centuries in opposition to the 18th-century Enlightenment. The term is usually associated with Isaiah Berlin, who is often credited with coining it, though there are several earlier uses of the term, including one by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote of Gegenaufklärung at the end of the 19th century. ' back

Emmy Noether, Invariant Variation Probems (English Translation), M. A. Tavel’s English translation of “Invariante Variation sprobleme,” Nachr. d. K ̈onig. Gesellsch. d. Wiss. zu G ̈ottingen, Math-phys. Klasse , 235–257 (1918), which originally appeared in Transport Theory and Statistical Physics,1 (3), 183–207 (1971). 'The problems in variation here concerned are such as to admit a continuous group (in Lie’s sense); the conclusions that emerge from the corresponding differential equations find their most general expression in the theorems formulated in Section 1 a nd proved in following sections. Concerning these differential equations that arise from pro blems of variation, far more precise statements can be made than about arbitrary differential equ ations admitting of a group, which are the subject of Lie’s researches. What is to follow, there fore, represents a combination of the methods of the formal calculus of variations with those o f Lie’s group theory.' back

Gavin Scmidt, How Scientists Cracked the Climate Change Case, ' For the past 100 years we have documented good, independently confirmed observations of change at the surface of the planet, and for the past 40 years satellites and comprehensive measuring efforts have provided a much fuller view of changes throughout the earth system. These observations show clearly that among other things, the surface of the planet has warmed, the upper atmosphere has cooled, the oceans are gaining an enormous amount of heat, sea level is rising, Arctic ice has greatly receded and glaciers around the world are in retreat.' back

Gödel's incompleteness theorems - Wikipedia, Gödel's incompleteness theorems - Wikipedia, 'Gödel's incompleteness theorems are two theorems of mathematical logic that establish inherent limitations of all but the most trivial axiomatic systems capable of doing arithmetic. The theorems, proven by Kurt Gödel in 1931, are important both in mathematical logic and in the philosophy of mathematics. The two results are widely, but not universally, interpreted as showing that Hilbert's program to find a complete and consistent set of axioms for all mathematics is impossible, giving a negative answer to Hilbert's second problem. The first incompleteness theorem states that no consistent system of axioms whose theorems can be listed by an "effective procedure" (i.e., any sort of algorithm) is capable of proving all truths about the relations of the natural numbers (arithmetic). For any such system, there will always be statements about the natural numbers that are true, but that are unprovable within the system. The second incompleteness theorem, an extension of the first, shows that such a system cannot demonstrate its own consistency.' back

Haridimos Tsoukas, Davos in the desert: businesses are right to put principles before profit and pull out of the Saudi investment conference, 'Companies can decide which issues on which to take a stance. Human affairs, as Aristotle noted, are inherently variable – so much so that there cannot be general rules for how a leader should act. Details, history and context matter. The important thing is to have good judgment – to want to do the right thing in a way that is most effective in the circumstances you face. For that you need a moral compass, not a moral manual.' back

Hope Springs Eternal - Wikipedia, Hope Springs Eternal - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Hope springs eternal in the human breast; Man never Is, but always To be blest: The soul, uneasy and confin'd from home, Rests and expatiates in a life to come. – Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man' back

Human Connectome Project, Human Connectome Workbench, 'Connectome Workbench is an open source, freely available visualization and discovery tool used to map neuroimaging data, especially data generated by the Human Connectome Project. The distribution includes wb_view, a GUI-based visualiation platform, and wb_command, a command-line program for performing a variety of algorithmic tasks using volume, surface, and grayordinate data. wb_command is necessary for running HCP data processing pipelines.' back

Know thyself - Wikipedia, Know thyself - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' The Ancient Greek aphorism "know thyself" . . . is one of the Delphic maxims and was inscribed in the pronaos (forecourt) of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi according to the Greek writer Pausanias (10.24.1). The phrase was later expounded upon by the philosopher Socrates who taught that: "The unexamined life is not worth living." In Latin the phrase, "know thyself," is given as nosce te ipsum or temet nosce.' back

List of wars involving the United States - Wikipedia, List of wars involving the United States - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' This is a list of wars fought by the United States of America.' back

Matthew Karnitschong, Long Before Trump, Governments Were Murdering Their Enemies, ' For anyone who still believes the personal isn’t political, Saudi Arabia has a bone saw on offer. Ever since the Wahhabite kingdom’s leadership allegedly dispatched a hit squad to Istanbul a few weeks ago to bump off journalist Jamal Khashoggi and dispose of his body Narcos-style, the anterooms of Western capitals have been hot with angst over the breakdown of the “rules-based order.” ' back

Narcissus (Mythology) - Wikipedia, Narcissus (Mythology) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'In Greek mythology, Narcissus (/nɑrˈsɪsəs/; Greek: Νάρκισσος, Narkissos) was a Hunter from Thespiae in Boeotia who was known for his beauty. He was the son of the river god Cephissus and nymph Liriope. He was proud, in that he disdained those who loved him. Nemesis noticed this behavior and attracted Narcissus to a pool, where he saw his own reflection in the water and fell in love with it, not realizing it was merely an image. Unable to leave the beauty of his reflection, Narcissus drowned. Narcissus is the origin of the term narcissism, a fixation with oneself and one's physical appearance.' back

NATO - Wikipedia, NATO - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' The North Atlantic Treaty Organization . . . is an intergovernmental military alliance between 29 North American and European countries. The organization implements the North Atlantic Treaty that was signed on 4 April 1949. NATO constitutes a system of collective defence whereby its independent member states agree to mutual defence in response to an attack by any external party.' back

Order of Preachers, Dominican Province of the Assumption - Australia, 'Preaching the Gospel of Jesus Chriust in Australia, Aotearoa-New Zealand and Papula New Guinea' back

P. A. M. Dirac, On the Theory of Quantum Mechanics, 'Abstract 'The present theory is shown to account for the absorption and stimulated emission of radiation, and also shows that the elements of the matrices representing the total polarization determine the transition probabilities. One cannot take spontaneous emission into account without a more elaborate theory involving the positions of the various atoms and the interference of their individual emissions, as the effects will depend upon whether the atoms are distributed at random, or arranged in a crystal lattice, or all confined in a volume small compared with a wave-length. The last alternative mentioned, which is of no practical interest, appears to be the simplest theoretically. It should be observed that we get the simple Einstein results only because we have averaged over all initial phases of the atoms.' back

Paul Dirac, The Fundamental Equations of Quantum Mechanics, It is well known that the experimental facts of atomic physics necessitate a departure from the classical theory of electrodynamics in the description of atomic phenomena. This departure takes the form, in Bohr's theory, of the special assumptions of the existence of stationary stats of an atom, in which it does not radiate, and certain rules, called quantum conditions which fix the stationary states and the frequencies of the radiation emitted during transitions between them.' back

Stephen Weinberg, The Cosmological Constant Problems, 'Abstract. The old cosmological constant problem is to understand why the vacuum energy is so small; the new problem is to understand why it is comparable to the present mass density. Several approaches to these problems are reviewed. Quintessence does not help with either; anthropic considerations offer a possibility of solving both. In theories with a scalar field that takes random initial values, the anthropic principle may apply to the cosmological constant, but probably to nothing else.' back

Tony Romm, Apple's Tim Cook delivers searing critique of Silicon Valey, ' Apple chief executive Tim Cook on Wednesday warned the world’s most powerful regulators that the poor privacy practices of some tech companies, the ills of social media and the erosion of trust in his own industry threaten to undermine “technology’s awesome potential” to address challenges like disease and climate change.' back

William Harvey - Wikipedia, William Harvey - Wikipedia, the fre encyclopedia, 'William Harvey (April 1, 1578 - June 3, 1657) was an English medical doctor, who is credited with being the first to correctly describe, in exact detail, the properties of blood being pumped around the body by the heart. Although Spanish physician Michael Servetus discovered circulation a quarter century before Harvey was born, all but three copies of his manuscript Christianismi Restitutio were destroyed and as a result, the secrets of circulation were lost until Harvey rediscovered them nearly a century later.; back

William James, Psychology: The Briefer Course, 'The definition of Psychology may best be given in the words of Professor Ladd, as the description and explanation of states of consciousness as such. By state of consciousness are meant such things s sensations desires emotions cognitions, reasonings, decisions, volitions, and the like. Their 'explanation' must of course include the study of their causes, conditions, and immediate consequences, as far as these can be ascertained. 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. In quantum Darwinism, they are the progenitors of multiple copies spread throughout the environment -- the fittest quantum states that not only survive decoherence, but subvert it into carrying information about them -- into becoming a witness.' back