Fodor, Jerry A, The Modularity of Mind, MIT Press 1983 Jacket: 'This monograph synthesizes current information from the various fields of cognitive science in support of a new and exciting theory of mind. Most psychologists study horizontal processes like memory. Fopdor postulates a vertical and modular psychological organisation underlying biologically coherent behaviours. This view of mental architecture is consistent with the historical tradition of faculty psychology while integrating a computational approach to mental processes. One of the most notable aspects of Fodor's work is that it articulates features not only of speculative cognitive architectures but also of current research in artificial intelligence.' Prof. Alvin Liberman, Yale University, 
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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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Kaku (1998), Michio, Introduction to Superstrings and M-Theory (Graduate Texts in Contemporary Physics), Springer 1998 ' Called by some "the theory of everything," superstrings may solve a problem which has eluded physicists for the past 50 years -- the final unification of the two great theories of the twentieth century, general relativity and quantum field theory. This is a course-tested comprehensive introductory graduate text on superstrings which stresses the most current areas of interest, not covered in other presentation, including: string field theory, multi loops, Teichmueller spaces, conformal field theory, and four-dimensional strings. The book begins with a simple discussion of point particle theory, and uses the Feynman path integral technique to unify the presentation of superstrings. Prerequisites are an aquaintance with quantum mechanics and relativity. This second edition has been revised and updated throughout.' 
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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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Pais (1982), Abraham, 'Subtle is the Lord...': The Science and Life of Albert Einstein, Oxford UP 1982 Jacket: In this . . . major work Abraham Pais, himself an eminent physicist who worked alongside Einstein in the post-war years, traces the development of Einstein's entire ouvre. . . . Running through the book is a completely non-scientific biography . . . including many letters which appear in English for the first time, as well as other information not published before.' [Raffiniert ist der Herr Gott, aber boshaft is er nicht] 
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Pétrement, Simone, and Raymond Rosenthal (translator), Simone Weil: A Life, Schocken 1988 Jacket: 'A French Jew who broke with Judaism and wavered on the edge of Roman Catholicism, the daughter of a respected physician, the sister of one of the century's greatest mathematicians, Simone Weil devoted her life to the search for truth and God amid the poverty and misery of the poor.

Since her death in 1943 at the age of thirty-four, Simone Weil has become a person of legend. T S Eliot, Dwight Macdonald, Leslie Fiedler and Robert Coles spoke of her as the saint of the twentieth century who lived the contradictions of our era more intensely and continuously than anyone else.' 
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Sacks, Oliver, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat; and Other Clinical Tales, Touchstone 1998 'Oliver Sacks’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat tells the stories of individuals afflicted with fantastic perceptual and intellectual aberrations: patients who have lost their memories and with them the greater part of their pasts; who are no longer able to recognize people and common objects; who are stricken with violent tics and grimaces or who shout involuntary obscenities; whose limbs have become alien; who have been dismissed as retarded yet are gifted with uncanny artistic or mathematical talents.' 
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Landauer, Rolf, "Information is a physical entity", Physica A, 263, 1, 1 February 1999, page 63-7. '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

Landauer, Rolf, "The Physical Nature of Information", Physica A, 217, 4-5, 15 July 1996, page 188-93. 'Information is inevitably tied to a physical representation and therefore to restrictions and possibilities related to the laws of physics and the parts available in the universe. Quantum mechanical superpositions of information bearing states can be used, and the real utility of that needs to be understood. Quantum parallelism in computation is one possibility and will be assessed pessimistically. The energy dissipation requirements of computation, of measurement and of the communications link are discussed. The insights gained from the analysis of computation has caused a reappraisal of the perceived wisdom in the other two fields. A concluding section speculates about the nature of the laws of physics, which are algorithms for the handling of information, and must be executable in our real physical universe.'. back

Landauer, Rolf, "Irreversibility and Heat Generation in the Computing Process", IBM Journal of Research and Development, 5, 3, 1961, page 183-191. 'Abstract: It is argued that computing machines inevitably involve devices which perform logical functions that do not have a single-valued inverse. This logical irreversibility is associated with physical irreversibility and requires a minimal heat generation, per machine cycle, typically of the order of kT for each irreversible function. This dissipation serves the purpose of standardizing signals and making them independent of their exact logical history. Two simple, but representative, models of bistable devices are subjected to a more detailed analysis of switching kinetics to yield the relationship between speed and energy dissipation, and to estimate the effects of errors induced by thermal fluctuations. '. back

Alexander Durie, France remembers Paris massacre amid tensions with Algeria, ' Paris, France – Sixty years ago, Algerians in Paris were arrested, killed, and drowned in the Seine by French police. They were peacefully demonstrating against a curfew on them months before the end of the Algerian war. Historian Fabrice Riceputi says this is because what happened on October 17, 1961, in central Paris was a “colonial massacre”. “One of the characteristics of all colonial massacres in history is that it is impossible to make precise assessments,” he told Al Jazeera.' back

Bombich Software, Carbon Copy Cloner, 'Spinning for years at 75MPH, your hard drive's catastrophic crash could really hinder your productivity. Use CCC to make a bootable backup of your digital life today!' back

Charles P. Pierce, It's Time for Some Country to Use Secular Law to Disestablish the Institutional Catholic Church, ' The institutional Roman Catholic Church has been marinating in cruelty and scandal for so long that investigating its inexcusable and inhuman conduct now has a sense of archaeology about it. It has functioned in this area as an international criminal conspiracy to obstruct justice for longer than most people can remember. And yet there are members of the Clan of the Red Beanie in this country who are stamping their tiny velvet slippers at the very idea that the president—who, by the way, on the basis of current evidence, is a better Catholic than the entire French hierarchy—might receive holy communion. It’s time to ship many of these ermined conspirators off to ancient monasteries in the Sinai, so they can atone for the sins they’ve committed against charity and the gospel. back

Cybernetics - Wikipedia, Cybernetics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' Cybernetics is a transdisciplinary approach for exploring regulatory systems, their structures, constraints, and possibilities. Cybernetics is relevant to the study of systems, such as mechanical, physical, biological, cognitive, and social systems. Cybernetics is applicable when a system being analyzed is involved in a closed signaling loop; that is, where action by the system generates some change in its environment and that change is reflected in that system in some manner (feedback) that triggers a system change, originally referred to as a "circular causal" relationship.' back

Emille Dotte-Sarout & India Ella Dilkes-Hall, Friday essay: invisible no more – putting the first women archaeologists of the Pacific back on the map, ' History is the study of “present traces of the past”, as historian Judith Allen once put it. In our Pacific Matildas research project, we are recovering the hidden traces of the first female archaeologists in the Pacific. Historians of western science have well documented the “Matilda effect”: how female scientists were written out of history, with barriers to accessing education, qualifications and professional roles. . . . Archaeology, the discipline that uses material remains of the past to trace human history, has long been associated with the image of a solitary masculine adventurer rather than a woman with a trowel in hand. . . . Pacific Matildas focuses on our own region, Oceania, to tell the stories of the first women in the field, to understand the barriers they faced and highlight their legacies.' 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

Gary Ayton, Electromagnetic radiation and optics - a historical account, 'Rene Descartes (-1676): used a bull's eye to prove the eye worked like a camera obscura 1st to write that Alhazen's rule that angle of reflected ray is same as incident ray. theorised Snell's law at same time that Snell developed it using experimentation' back

Grzegorz Kiarszys, A Nuclear Generator of Clouds: Accidents and Radioactive Contamination Identified on Declassified Satellite Photographs in the Mayak Chemical Combine, Southern Urals, Abstract The Mayak Chemical Combine was one of the most secretive places in the Soviet Union. It was built in the southern Urals, close to Kyshtym. The facility produced weapons-grade plutonium and other radioactive isotopes for the Soviet nuclear military programme. Fugitives from behind the Iron Curtain mentioned the site, usually due to accidents and peculiar, unexplained observations. Such reports were often treated in the West as exaggerated or fictional, as they spoke of large-scale disasters, deportations and vast landscape transformations. This paper aims to present the research potential of declassified Cold War intelligence records for archaeological landscape studies of off-limits military sites. To outline a somewhat broader perspective, I will combine those sources with contemporary historical knowledge and modern remote sensing data. The analysis will be focused on the Central Intelligence Agency [CIA] satellite imagery (CORONA and GAMBIT) from the 1960s to the beginning of the 1970s. The discussed sources recorded outcomes of nuclear disasters, hundreds of square kilometres of uninhabited wasteland, abandoned villages, disappearing lakes, dying forests, diverted rivers, and other features related to this clandestine plutonium facility. back

John C. Eccles, Innovation in Science: The Physiology of Imagination, ' Our task here is to see how far our present ideas on the working of the brain can be related to the experiences of mind. The way to the imagination, the highest level of mental experience, lies through the lower levels of sensory experience, imagery, hallucination and memory, and that is the path we shall traverse. All that we shall learn must itself, of course, be the product of perceiving, reasoning and imagining by our brains! back

John Eccles (neurophysiologist) - Wikipedia, John Eccles (neurophysiologist) - Wikipedia. the free encyclopedia, 'Sir John Carew Eccles, AC FRS FRACP FRSNZ FAAS (27 January 1903 – 2 May 1997) was an Australian neurophysiologist who won the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on the synapse. He shared the prize with Andrew Huxley and Alan Lloyd Hodgkin. back

Landauer, Irreversibility and Heat Generation in the Computing Process, 'Abstract: 'It is argued that computing machines inevitably involve devices which perform logical functions that do not have a single-valued inverse. The logical irreversibility is associated with physical irreversibility, and requires a minimum heat generation, per machine cycle, typically of the order of kT for each irreversible function. The dissipation serves the purpose of standardizing signals and making them independent of their exact logical history. Two simple, but representative, models of bistable devices are subjected to a more detailed analysis of switching kinetics to yield the relationship between speed and energy dissipation, and to estimate the effects of errors induced by thermal fluctuations.' back

Mukesh Kapila, Circles of impunity: why sexual violence by humanitarians and peacekeepers keeps happening , ' I first visited the North Kivu region of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in 1994 during the genocide in neighbouring Rwanda. In Goma’s emergency hospital, I witnessed rows and rows of rape survivors who had fled across the border. A quarter-century later, it is hurting again in the same place, for the same reason: sexual violence. But what is different is that the alleged perpetrators are humanitarians, sent to save the community from a deadly Ebola outbreak.' back

Nicholas Shaxon, The City of London Is Hiding the World’s Stolen Money, ' In 1969, two years after the Cayman Islands, a British territory, passed its first law to allow secretive offshore trusts, an official government report struck an ominous note. A tide of glossy propositions from private developers, it warned, was washing through the islands. Cayman was fast becoming a state captured by shady finance. Those were the pungent beginnings of a modern system brought to light by the Pandora Papers, an enormous data leak coordinated by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.' back

Nsmot Gbadamosi, Stealing Africa: How Britain looted the continent’s art, ' The Benin Bronzes, a collection made up of carved ivory, bronze and brass crafted sculptures and plaques, are not mere artworks but catalogue the story of Benin – its achievements, explorations and belief systems. They ended up in more than 160 museums globally. The largest collection – 928 – is at the British Museum where an exhibition took place within months of the kingdom being razed. . . . “It was purely a colonial power exerting power on the community. They looted and burned down everything and carted away what they took off the people,” Tijani, of Nigeria’s National Commission for Museums and Monuments, tells Al Jazeera.' back

Once Upon a Time in the West - Wikipedia, Once Upon a Time in the West - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' Once Upon a Time in the West . . . is a 1968 epic Spaghetti Western film directed by Sergio Leone, who co-wrote it with Sergio Donati based on a story by Dario Argento, Bernardo Bertolucci and Leone. It stars Henry Fonda, cast against type, as the villain, Charles Bronson as his nemesis, Claudia Cardinale as a newly widowed homesteader, and Jason Robards as a bandit. The widescreen cinematography was by Tonino Delli Colli, and the acclaimed film score was by Ennio Morricone. . . . In 2009, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant".' back

Oxford Martin Programme on Global Development, Our World in Data, ' No other university in the world hosts a research organisation like the Oxford Martin School. Humanity stands at a crossroads; the sheer speed of change across sectors and systems, including technology, population, health and climate, means that we now have the power to destroy possibilities for future generations. Equally, we have the potential to dramatically improve the wellbeing of people across the planet. It is this combination of urgency and optimism that characterises all our work at the Oxford Martin School. Our academics work across more than 30 solutions-focused, pioneering research programmes that cut across disciplines to find solutions to the world's most urgent challenges.' back

Pascal's Wager - Wikipedia, Pascal's Wager - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Pascal's Wager (also known as Pascal's Gamble) is an argument in apologetic philosophy which was devised by the seventeenth-century French philosopher, mathematician, and physicist, Blaise Pascal. It posits that humans all bet with their lives either that God exists or does not exist. Given the possibility that God actually does exist and assuming the infinite gain or loss associated with belief in God or with unbelief, a rational person should live as though God exists and seek to believe in God. If God does not actually exist, such a person will have only a finite loss (some pleasures, luxury, etc.).' back

Shotgun sequencing - Wikipedia, Shotgun sequencing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopdia, 'In genetics, shotgun sequencing, also known as shotgun cloning, is a method used for sequencing long DNA strands. It is named by analogy with the rapidly expanding, quasi-random firing pattern of a shotgun.
In shotgun sequencing,[1][2] DNA is broken up randomly into numerous small segments, which are sequenced using the chain termination method to obtain reads. Multiple overlapping reads for the target DNA are obtained by performing several rounds of this fragmentation and sequencing. Computer programs then use the overlapping ends of different reads to assemble them into a continuous sequence.' back

Superselection - Wikipedia, Superselection - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' In quantum mechanics, superselection extends the concept of selection rules. Superselection rules are postulated rules forbidding the preparation of quantum states that exhibit coherence between eigenstates of certain observables. It was originally introduced by Wick, Wightman, and Wigner to impose additional restrictions to quantum theory beyond those of selection rules. back