Abbott, Walter M, and Joseph Gallagher (translation editor), The Documents of Vatican II: in a new and definitive translation, with notes and commentaries by Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox authorities, Geoffrey Chapman 1972 Jacket: 'All 16 Documents of Vatican II are here presented in a new and readable translation. Informed comments and appraisals by Catholics and non-Catholics make this book essential reading for anyone, of whatever shade of belief, who is interested in the changing climate of today's world.' 
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Ashby, W Ross, An Introduction to Cybernetics, Methuen 1956, 1964 'This book is intended to provide [an introduction to cybernetics]. It starts from common-place and well understood concepts, and proceeds step by step to show how these concepts can be made exact, and how they can be developed until they lead into such subjects as feedback, stability, regulation, ultrastability, information, coding, noise and other cybernetic topics.' 
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Dawkins, Richard, Climbing Mount Improbable, W. W. Norton & Company 1997 Amazon editorial review: 'How do species evolve? Richard Dawkins, one of the world's most eminent zoologists, likens the process to scaling a huge, Himalaya-size peak, the Mount Improbable of his title. An alpinist does not leap from sea level to the summit; neither does a species utterly change forms overnight, but instead follows a course of "slow, cumulative, one-step-at-a-time, non-random survival of random variants" -- a course that Charles Darwin, Dawkins's great hero, called natural selection. Illustrating his arguments with case studies from the natural world, such as the evolution of the eye and the lung, and the coevolution of certain kinds of figs and wasps, Dawkins provides a vigorous, entertaining defense of key Darwinian ideas.' 
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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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Keynes, John Maynard, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, Macmillan 1936-1964 The classic twentieth century economics text that revealed that there are more ways to get an economy to grow than simply balancing the books.back

Knox, Ronald, Let Dons Delight: Being Variations on a Theme in an Oxford Common Room, Sheed and Ward 1958 Jacket: When Mgr. Knox died, many of his panegyrists singled this book out as the best of its kind he ever wrote - which in this case is saying much. Certainy, he alone could have done it. To create eight sets of Simon Magus dons, from 1588 to 1938, conversing and arguing with eachother each in the very voice of his age and in terms of the topics of his day - for that you really have to know your Oxford, your dons, your history, classics and English literature.'back

Lodge, David, The Art of Fiction, Illustrated from Classic and Modern texts., Penguin Books 1992 Jacket: 'Brings to criticism the verve and humour of his own novels. DL has provided essential reading for students of literature, aspirant writers, and anyone who wishes to understand how literature works.'  
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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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Stiglitz, Joseph E, Freefall: America, Free Markets and the Sinking of the World Economy, W. W. Norton & Company 2010 Amazon Product Description ' . . . The Great Recession, as it has come to be called, has impacted more people worldwide than any crisis since the Great Depression.

Few are more qualified to comment during this turbulent time than Joseph E. Stiglitz. Winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics, Stiglitz is “an insanely great economist, in ways you can’t really appreciate unless you’re deep into the field” (Paul Krugman, New York Times). In Freefall, Stiglitz traces the origins of the Great Recession, eschewing easy answers and demolishing the contention that America needs more billion-dollar bailouts and free passes to those “too big to fail,” while also outlining the alternatives and revealing that even now there are choices ahead that can make a difference. The system is broken, and we can only fix it by examining the underlying theories that have led us into this new “bubble capitalism.” ' 
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Streater, Raymond F, and Arthur S Wightman, PCT, Spin, Statistics and All That, Princeton University Press 2000 Amazon product description: 'PCT, Spin and Statistics, and All That is the classic summary of and introduction to the achievements of Axiomatic Quantum Field Theory. This theory gives precise mathematical responses to questions like: What is a quantized field? What are the physically indispensable attributes of a quantized field? Furthermore, Axiomatic Field Theory shows that a number of physically important predictions of quantum field theory are mathematical consequences of the axioms. Here Raymond Streater and Arthur Wightman treat only results that can be rigorously proved, and these are presented in an elegant style that makes them available to a broad range of physics and theoretical mathematics.' 
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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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Marton-Lefevre, Julia, "Biodiversity Is Our Life", Science, 327, 5970, 5 March 2010, page 1179. 'Julia Marton-Lefèvre is the director general of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, Gland, Switzerland.
2010 is the International Year of Biodiversity, in recognition of life on Earth. Eight years ago, more than 190 countries agreed, through the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, to reduce biodiversity loss by 2010. This October, the Convention will meet in Nagoya, Japan, to evaluate progress and agree on new biodiversity targets for the world. Shortly before that, the UN General Assembly will address the biodiversity crisis for the first time.'. back

Angel investor - Wikipedia, Angel investor - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'An angel investor or angel (also known as a business angel or informal investor) is an affluent individual who provides capital for a business start-up, usually in exchange for convertible debt or ownership equity. A small but increasing number of angel investors organize themselves into angel groups or angel networks to share research and pool their investment capital.' back

Bansari Kandar & Sheyasee Das, Women grow as much as 80% of India’s food – but its new farm laws overlook their struggles, ' Indian women are left behind on farms to make ends meet as more men in India migrate from rural areas to cities, seeking higher incomes and better jobs. Nearly 75% of the full-time workers on Indian farms are women, according to the international humanitarian group OXFAM. Female farmers produce 60% to 80% of the South Asian country’s food. So it’s little surprise women are playing a visible role in the monthslong nationwide protests against agricultural reforms passed last September by the Indian government.' back

Clay Lucas, Power failure: Homes hit by solar limits as distributors protect network, and profits, ' Thousands of Victorian homeowners having solar power installed are being told by the state’s distributors they will not be able to feed electricity into the network, as a rising tide of sustainable power hits the energy grid. The block on new solar power feeding into Victoria’s grid comes despite a decade of warnings by regulators to the state’s power distributors they need to spend money on upgrading their networks.' back

Eugene Wigner, On Unitary Representations of the Inhomogeneous Lorentz Group, ' 1. 0RIGlN AND CHARACTERIZATION OF THE PROBLEM: It is perhaps the most fundamental principle of Quantum Mechanics that the system of states forms a linear manifold, in which a unitary scalar product is defined. The states are generally represented by wave functions in such a way that ψ and constant multiples of ψ represent the same physical state. It is possible, therefore, to nornalize the wave function, i.e., to multiply it by a constant factor such that its scalar product with itself becomes 1. Then, only a constant factor of modulus 1, the so-called phase, will be left undetermined in the wave function. The linear character of the wave function is called the superposition principle. The square of the modulus of the unitary scalar product (φ , ψ) of two normalized wave functions φ and ψ is called the transition probability from the state φ into ψ or conversely. back

French Exit (2020 film) - Wikipedia, French Exit (2020 film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' French Exit is a 2020 surreal comedy film directed by Azazel Jacobs, based on the novel of the same name by Patrick deWitt, who also wrote the screenplay. It tells the story of a Manhattan heiress (Michelle Pfeiffer) who moves to Paris with her son (Lucas Hedges) with the little money they have left. The film had its world premiere at the New York Film Festival on October 10, 2020, and was theatrically released in the United States and Canada on February 12, 2021. It received mixed reviews from critics, although Pfeiffer's performance was praised. For her role, she was nominated for Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Comedy or Musical. back

Geoff Brumfiel, Quantum uncertainty not all in the measurement, ' The researchers made a ‘weak’ measurement of the photon’s polarization in one plane — not enough to disturb it, but enough to produce a rough sense of its orientation. Next, they measured the polarization in the second plane. Then they made an exact, or 'strong', measurement of the first polarization to see whether it had been disturbed by the second measurement. When the researchers did the experiment multiple times, they found that measurement of one polarization did not always disturb the other state as much as the uncertainty principle predicted. In the strongest case, the induced fuzziness was as little as half of what would be predicted by the uncertainty principle.' back

Hylomorphism - Wikipedia, Hylomorphism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Hylomorphism (Greek ὑλο- hylo-, "wood, matter" + -morphism < Greek μορφή, morphē, "form") is a philosophical theory developed by Aristotle, which analyzes substance into matter and form. Substances are conceived of as compounds of form and matter.' back

Jeffrey Nicholls (2021), Quantum theology: Scientific revolution = paradigm change, ' A new idea does not, in the first instance, change physical reality, only the mental states of the people who conceive it and understand it. What it does change in society is our appreciation of the possibilities. Newton's laws opened the way for space travel and Bernoulli showed us how to fly. The idea behind this site is to totally change our vision of the world and ourselves. We are not aliens in an alien and damaged world, we are divine members of god. Quantum mechanics takes us deep into the heart of this divine world.' back

Katerina Malofieieva, ‘Pure terror’: COVID-19 on the front lines of Ukraine’s war, ' Koryak, who has lived in Stanytsia Luhanska since 2000, was one of the few doctors who remained during the fighting. The others were mostly surgeons who had to work 48-hour shifts treating soldiers and civilians caught up in the war. Doctors like Koryak were on hand to carry stretchers and care for the wounded and frostbitten – for nine months the town had no electricity and, during that first winter of the war, temperatures dropped as low as -24C (-11.4F) – as well as psychological disorders triggered by the conflict. According to the UNHCR, approximately 13,200 people have been killed in the conflict in Ukraine, about a quarter of them civilians.' back

Kenneth Chang, 2 Win Abel Prize for Work That Bridged Math and Computer Science, ' Two mathematicians will share this year’s Abel Prize — regarded as the field’s equivalent of the Nobel — for advances in understanding the foundations of what can and cannot be solved with computers. The work of the winners — László Lovász, 73, of Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, and Avi Wigderson, 64, of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. — involves proving theorems and developing methods in pure mathematics, but the research has found practical use in computer science, particularly in cryptography. The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, which administers the prize, cited Dr. Lovász and Dr. Wigderson “for their foundational contributions to theoretical computer science and discrete mathematics, and their leading role in shaping them into central fields of modern mathematics.” ' back

Luke Buchmaster, My Name Is Gulpilil review – sublime, humane, elegant traversal of Indigenous actor's life in film, ' Nobody in the world has ever had “it” quite like the great Yolŋu actor David Gulpilil, a titanic force in Australian cinema and now the subject of director Molly Reynolds’ superb, sad, yet in its own way wonder-filled documentary, which achieves the intimidating task of doing justice to the life and career of this extraordinary artist. Reynolds understands that Gulpilil isn’t just a great actor but a portal to a different way of thinking, a different way of being, even a different state of consciousness. If you think that sounds like hyperbole, you have not seen a David Gulpilil movie.'˜ back

Mridula Nath Chakraborty, Friday essay: is this the end of translation?, ' The act and the art of translation requires the permission to transcend borders, the permission to make mistakes, and the permission to be repeated, by anyone who feels the tempestuous tug, and the clarion call, of the unfamiliar. To rein in such liberty through categories and compartments that imprison our creativity is a disservice to the human imagination. So let a thousand translations bloom: that would be a start and not an end to translation as we know it now.' back

Ofer Aderet, Dozens of Zionist Pioneers Committed Suicide When Their Dreams Shattered in Palestine. This Is One of Them, ' A short item in the newspaper Hapoel Hatza’ir (The Young Worker) in early November 1911 reported a “sad case” that had occurred in the Jewish village of Kinneret. “The shepherd Alexander took his life with a pistol shot. Two days earlier he didn’t go to work, claiming he was sick. The incident noted above happened in the morning, and he died in the evening.” . . . Stories of pioneers who took their lives are not new. What makes Brekner’s case exceptional, even from a remove of 110 years, is that he left behind a detailed diary in Hebrew. “His diary is so rich that it encapsulates the whole period of the Second Aliyah through the prism of one pioneer,” says Gur Alroey, a professor of history in the Israel Studies department at the University of Haifa.' back

Rentier state - Wikipedia, Rentier state - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'A rentier. . . is an individual who depends on income derived from rents, which, in turn, are defined as “a reward for ownership of all natural resources”, or the “income derived from the gift of nature.” A rentier state is a term in political science and international relations theory used to classify those states which derive all or a substantial portion of their national revenues from the rent of indigenous resources to external clients.' back

Roger Penrose (2011), Uncertainty in quantum mechanics: faith or fantasy?, ' The word ‘uncertainty’, in the context of quantum mechanics, usually evokes an impression of an essential unknowability of what might actually be going on at the quantum level of activity, as is made explicit in Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, and in the fact that the theory normally provides only probabilities for the results of quantum measurement. These issues limit our ultimate understanding of the behaviour of things, if we take quantum mechanics to represent an absolute truth. But they do not cause us to put that very ‘truth’ into question. This article addresses the issue of quantum ‘uncertainty’ from a different perspective, raising the question of whether this term might be applied to the theory itself, despite its unrefuted huge success over an enormously diverse range of observed phenomena. There are, indeed, seeming internal contradictions in the theory that lead us to infer that a total faith in it at all levels of scale leads us to almost fantastical implications. back

Roger Penrose (2020), Nobel Lecture: Black Holes, Cosmology, and Space-Time Singularities, ' Roger Penrose The Nobel Prize in Physics 2020 Born: 8 August 1931, Colchester, United Kingdom Affiliation at the time of the award: University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom Prize motivation: "for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity." ' back

Room in Rome - Wikipedia, Room in Rome - Wikipedia, the free encylopedia, ' Room in Rome (Spanish: Habitación en Roma) is a 2010 Spanish erotic romantic comedy-drama film, depicting the emotional and sexual relations of two women (Alba and Natasha) throughout a single night in a hotel room in Rome. . . . Over the next 10 hours, Alba and Natasha grow closer to each other as Natasha becomes more relaxed and comfortable around Alba with their lovemaking. Alba and Natasha share stories, periodically stopping to illustrate their points with pictures on the Internet, talk about the artwork in the hotel room, and explore each other's nude bodies through sex. . . . . Eventually, the two women tell each other the truth.' back

Self-adjoint operator, Self-adjoint operator, ' In mathematics, a self-adjoint operator on a complex vector space V with inner product ⟨ ⋅ , ⋅ ⟩ . . . is a linear map A (from V to itself) that is its own adjoint: ⟨ A v , w ⟩ = ⟨ v , A w ⟩ . . . If V is finite-dimensional with a given orthonormal basis, this is equivalent to the condition that the matrix of A is Hermitian, i.e., equal to its conjugate transpose A*. By the finite-dimensional spectral theorem, V has an orthonormal basis such that the matrix of A relative to this basis is a diagonal matrix with entries in the real numbers. In this article, we consider generalizations of this concept to operators on Hilbert spaces of arbitrary dimension.' back

Von Neumann universal constructor - Wikipedia, Von Neumann universal constructor - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' John von Neumann's universal constructor is a self-replicating machine in a cellular automata (CA) environment. It was designed in the 1940s, without the use of a computer. The fundamental details of the machine were published in von Neumann's book Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata, completed in 1966 by Arthur W. Burks after von Neumann's death. . . . Von Neumann's goal, as specified in his lectures at the University of Illinois in 1949,[2] was to design a machine whose complexity could grow automatically akin to biological organisms under natural selection.' back