Abelard, Peter, and Blanche Beatrice Boyer, Richard Peter McKeon, Sic Et Non:A Critical edition, University of Chicago Press 1978 Amazon custoimer review By MARGARET& PETER on March 15, 2006 'Petrus Abaelardus is one of the indispensable, original early thinkers of Western civilization, who has had a proverbial bad press through the centuries. There has been somewhat of a fairer appreciation in recent times by H.O. Taylor, Jacques Verger et al. Therefore, this edition of his magnum opus is very much appreciated, and well done. As an aside, anyone who wants to understand or defend Western Culture needs to beef up on his/her Latin, or support its revitilization in the educational system. We're all standing on Abaelard's shoulders, and need to read him in his own words. This now becomes possible with this fine critical edition.' 
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Axelrod, Robert, The Evolution of Cooperation, Basic Books, Revised Edition 2006 'The Evolution of Cooperation provides valuable insights into the age-old question of whether unforced cooperation is ever possible. Widely praised and much-discussed, this classic book explores how cooperation can emerge in a world of self-seeking egoists-whether superpowers, businesses, or individuals-when there is no central authority to police their actions. The problem of cooperation is central to many different fields. Robert Axelrod recounts the famous computer tournaments in which the “cooperative” program Tit for Tat recorded its stunning victories, explains its application to a broad spectrum of subjects, and suggests how readers can both apply cooperative principles to their own lives and teach cooperative principles to others.' 
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Kreyszig, Erwin, Introductory Functional Analysis with Applications, John Wiley and Sons 1989 Amazon: 'Kreyszig's "Introductory Functional Analysis with Applications", provides a great introduction to topics in real and functional analysis. This book is part of the Wiley Classics Library and is extremely well written, with plenty of examples to illustrate important concepts. It can provide you with a solid base in these subjects, before one takes on the likes of Rudin and Royden. I had purchased a copy of this book, when I was taking a graduate course on real analysis and can only strongly recommend it to anyone else.' Krishnan S. Kartik  
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McGregor, Richard, The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers, Harper 2010 Amazon editorial review: From Publishers Weekly 'McGregor, a journalist at the Financial Times, begins his revelatory and scrupulously reported book with a provocative comparison between China's Communist Party and the Vatican for their shared cultures of secrecy, pervasive influence, and impenetrability. The author pulls back the curtain on the Party to consider its influence over the industrial economy, military, and local governments. McGregor describes a system operating on a Leninist blueprint and deeply at odds with Western standards of management and transparency. Corruption and the tension between decentralization and national control are recurring themes--and are highlighted in the Party™s handling of the disturbing Sanlu case, in which thousands of babies were poisoned by contaminated milk powder. McGregor makes a clear and convincing case that the 1989 backlash against the Party, inexorable globalization, and technological innovations in communication have made it incumbent on the Party to evolve, and this smart, authoritative book provides valuable insight into how it has--and has not--met the challenge. ' Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. 
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Rousseau, Jean-Jaques, Confessions, Everyman's Library 1992 Amazon book description: 'Rousseau's ideas have influenced almost every major political development of the last two hundred years, and are crucial to an understanding of phenomena as diverse as the French Revolution, modern educational theory, and the contemporary environmental movement. This is reason enough to draw attention to his startlingly alive autobiography. But the Confessions is also among the greatest self-portraits in world literature -which suggests, even more than the impact of Rousseau's thought, the extent to which the very high opinion he had of himself was ultimately justified.' 
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Snowden, Edward, Permanent Record, Macmillan 2019 Jacket: ' In 2013 twenty-nine-year-old Edward Snowden shocked the world when he broke with the American intelligence establishment and revealed that the United States government was secretly pursuing the means to collect every single phone call, text message and email. The result would be an unprecedented system of mass surveillance with the ability to pry into the private lives of every person on earth. Six years later Snowden reveals for the very first time how he helped to build this system and why he moved to expose it.'  
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Stedman Jones, Gareth, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion, Bellnap Press 2016 Acknowledgements: '. . . However interesting Marx's life was, his enduring importance derives from the impact of the ideas he developed in a remarkable series of texts, whose status and meaning have been the occasion of fierce political arguments since their inception. Perhaps in order to steer clear of once violent and still simmering political passions surrounding these texts, scholarly biographers of Marx have tended to offer descriptive account of Marx's theoretical writings, and have preferred to concentrate on his life. By contract, I have decided to may as much attention to his thought s to his life. I treat his writings as the interventions of an author within particular political and philosophical contexts that the historian must carefully reconstruct. For all his originality, Marx was not a solitary explorer advancing along an untrodden path toward a novel and hitherto undiscovered theory. Instead, whether as a philosopher, political theorist or critic of political economy, his writing were intended as interventions in already existing field of discourse. . . . That is why I have paid as much attention to the utterances and reactions of contemporaries as to Marx's own words.' 
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Claude Shannon, Communication in the Presence of Noise, 'A method is developed for representing any communication system geometrically. Messages and the corresponding signals are points in two “function spaces,” and the modulation process is a mapping of one space into the other. Using this representation, a number of results in communication theory are deduced concerning expansion and compression of bandwidth and the threshold effect. Formulas are found for the maximum rate of transmission of binary digits over a system when the signal is perturbed by various types of noise. Some of the properties of “ideal” systems which transmit at this maximum rate are discussed. The equivalent number of binary digits per second for certain information sources is calculated.' [C. E. Shannon , “Communication in the presence of noise,” Proc. IRE, vol. 37, pp. 10–21, Jan. 1949.] back

If wishes were horses, beggars would ride - Wikipedia, If wishes were horses, beggars would ride - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' "If wishes were horses, beggars would ride" is a proverb and nursery rhyme, first recorded about 1628 in a collection of Scottish proverbs, which suggests if wishing could make things happen, then even the most destitute people would have everything they wanted. It has a Roud Folk Song Index number of 20004.' back

Julie Dunne, Discovery of prehistoric baby bottles shows infants fed cow's milk 5000 years ago, 'How did people look after their children in the Stone Age? It turns out that prehistoric parents may not have been so different to modern mums and dads. Clay vessels that have been found in Germany could have been used to supplement breast milk and wean children more than 5,000 years ago. They became more common across Bronze and Iron Age Europe and are thought to be some of the first-known baby bottles.' back

Katherine Kornei, A New Timeline of the Day the Dinosaurs Began to Die Out, ' The giant asteroid’s impact into shallow waters in the Gulf of Mexico 66 million years ago was bad enough. But then an amalgam of additional disasters ensued: Rocks fell from the sky, wildfires ignited and tsunamis inundated distant shorelines. It was the beginning of the end of the Mesozoic Era when dinosaurs ruled the world. Scientists released a new record of this day of chaos in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday.' back

Light cone - Wikipedia, Light cone - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'A Light cone is the path that a flash of light, emanating from a single event E (localized to a single point in space and a single moment in time) and traveling in all directions, would take through spacetime. Imagine the light confined to a two-dimensional plane, the light from the flash spreads out in a circle after the event E occurs—and when graphed the growing circle with the vertical axis of the graph representing time, the result is a cone, known as the future light cone (some animated diagrams depicting this concept can be seen here.) ' back

Nicholas Hoare, Hidden women of history: Marau Ta'aroa, the Sydney-schooled 'last Queen of Tahiti', ' From Tongan Princes to the daughters of Sāmoan political leaders, elite Australian schools have long been considered desirable locations for the children of high-ranking Pacific families. One such student was a young Tahitian named Joanna Marau Ta‘aroa who attended Sydney Ladies’ College from 1869 to 1873.' back

Owen Churchill, Chinese students' association loses status at Canadian university after protest of Uygur activist's talk was allegedly coordinated with Chinese consulate, ' The student union at a Canadian university has revoked the club status of the school’s Chinese Students and Scholars Association (CSSA) after an appeal by students seeking to decertify the group over concerns about alleged links to the Chinese government. Objection to the CSSA’s official status at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, near Canada’s largest city Toronto, stemmed from a protest campaign it spearheaded in February in response to a talk given on campus by Rukiye Turdush, a Uygur activist.' back

Rolf Landauer, Information is a Physical Entity, 'Abstract: 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

Samuel G. Freedman, 'Church Militant' Theology is Put to New, and Politicized, Use, ' A week after Stephen K. Bannon helped engineer the populist revolt that led to Donald J. Trump’s election, Buzzfeed unearthed a recording of him speaking to a Vatican conference of conservative Catholics in 2014. In his presentation, Mr. Bannon, then the head of the hard-right website Breitbart News and now Mr. Trump’s chief strategist, called on the “church militant” to fight a global war against a “new barbarity” of “Islamic fascism” and international financial elites, with 2,500 years of Western civilization at risk.' back

Sean P. S. Gulick et. al. , The first day of the Cenozoic, ' Abstract Highly expanded Cretaceous–Paleogene (K-Pg) boundary section from the Chicxulub peak ring, recovered by International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP)–International Continental Scientific Drilling Program (ICDP) Expedition 364, provides an unprecedented window into the immediate aftermath of the impact. Site M0077 includes ∼130 m of impact melt rock and suevite deposited the first day of the Cenozoic covered by <1 m of micrite-rich carbonate deposited over subsequent weeks to years. We present an interpreted series of events based on analyses of these drill cores. Within minutes of the impact, centrally uplifted basement rock collapsed outward to form a peak ring capped in melt rock. Within tens of minutes, the peak ring was covered in ∼40 m of brecciated impact melt rock and coarse-grained suevite, including clasts possibly generated by melt–water interactions during ocean resurge. Within an hour, resurge crested the peak ring, depositing a 10-m-thick layer of suevite with increased particle roundness and sorting. Within hours, the full resurge deposit formed through settling and seiches, resulting in an 80-m-thick fining-upward, sorted suevite in the flooded crater. Within a day, the reflected rim-wave tsunami reached the crater, depositing a cross-bedded sand-to-fine gravel layer enriched in polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons overlain by charcoal fragments. Generation of a deep crater open to the ocean allowed rapid flooding and sediment accumulation rates among the highest known in the geologic record. The high-resolution section provides insight into the impact environmental effects, including charcoal as evidence for impact-induced wildfires and a paucity of sulfur-rich evaporites from the target supporting rapid global cooling and darkness as extinction mechanisms.' back

United Kingdom Supreme Court, Judgement: R v Prime Minister, ' 70. It follows that Parliament has not been prorogued and that this court should make declarations to that effect. We have been told by counsel for the Prime Minister that he will “take all necessary steps to comply with the terms of any declaration made by the court” and we expect him to do so. However, it appears to us that, as Parliament is not prorogued, it is for Parliament to decide what to do next. There is no need for Parliament to be recalled under the Meeting of Parliament Act 1797. Nor has Parliament voted to adjourn or go into recess. Unless there is some Parliamentary rule to the contrary of which we are unaware, the Speaker of the House of Commons and the Lord Speaker can take immediate steps to enable each House to meet as soon as possible to decide upon a way forward. That would, of course, be a proceeding in Parliament which could not be called in question in this or any other court.' back

Youth (2015 film) - Wikipedia, Youth (2015 film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' Youth is a 2015 Italian comedy-drama film written and directed by Paolo Sorrentino. It is the director's second English language film, and stars Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel as best friends who reflect on their lives while holidaying in the Swiss Alps. It is a story of the eternal struggle between age and youth, the past and the future, life and death, commitment and betrayal. The cast also includes Rachel Weisz, Paul Dano, and Jane Fonda.' back