Free Thought

Another bunch of lists for your reading, gift-giving and collection development pleasure. Every year for the last bunch of years I've been linking to and posting about all the "year's best sciencey books" lists that appear in various media outlets and shining a bit of light on the best of the year. All the previous 2011 lists are here. This post includes the following: Publishers Weekly Best Books 2011 The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick Council on Foreign Relations: Michael Levi Holiday Reading The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World by…
Another list for your reading, gift-giving and collection development pleasure. Every year for the last bunch of years I've been linking to and posting about all the "year's best sciencey books" lists that appear in various media outlets and shining a bit of light on the best of the year. All the previous 2011 lists are here. This post includes the following: Five Social Media Books you Should Read. Yeah, I know this really isn't science -- and I'm not even labelling it as such -- but this is an pretty good list of books from a marketing blog for non-profits so I do see it as being for…
Another list for your reading, gift-giving and collection development pleasure. Every year for the last bunch of years I've been linking to and posting about all the "year's best sciencey books" lists that appear in various media outlets and shining a bit of light on the best of the year. All the previous 2011 lists are here. This post includes the following: A Brilliant List of Science Books for People Who Want Their Minds Blown. Blood Work: A Tale of Medicine and Murder in the Scientific Revolution by Holly Tucker Eruptions that Shook the World by Clive Oppenheimer Radioactivity: A…
Another list for your reading, gift-giving and collection development pleasure. Every year for the last bunch of years I've been linking to and posting about all the "year's best sciencey books" lists that appear in various media outlets and shining a bit of light on the best of the year. All the previous 2011 lists are here. This post includes the following: New Scientist (via Culture Lab blog). The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life by Robert Trivers The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True by Richard Dawkins The Better Angels of Our Nature:…
Another list for your reading, gift-giving and collection development pleasure. Every year for the last bunch of years I've been linking to and posting about all the "year's best sciencey books" lists that appear in various media outlets and shining a bit of light on the best of the year. All the previous 2011 lists are here. This post includes the following: Last-Minute Shopping List by Sean Carroll on Cosmic Variance. Knocking on Heaven's Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World by Lisa Randall The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has…
Another list for your reading, gift-giving and collection development pleasure. Every year for the last bunch of years I've been linking to and posting about all the "year's best sciencey books" lists that appear in various media outlets and shining a bit of light on the best of the year. All the previous 2011 lists are here. This post includes the following: The Technology and Learning blog by Joshua Kim. The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World by Daniel Yergin Aerotropolis: The Way We'll Live Next by John D. Kasarda and Greg Lindsay Triumph of the City: How Our…
Another list for your reading, gift-giving and collection development pleasure. Every year for the last bunch of years I've been linking to and posting about all the "year's best sciencey books" lists that appear in various media outlets and shining a bit of light on the best of the year. All the previous 2011 lists are here. This post includes the following: Kirkus Reviews. The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World by David Deutsch Deep Future: The Next 100,000 Years of Life on Earth by Curt Stager First Contact: Scientific Breakthroughs in the Hunt for Life Beyond…
Another list for your reading, gift-giving and collection development pleasure. Every year for the last bunch of years I've been linking to and posting about all the "year's best sciencey books" lists that appear in various media outlets and shining a bit of light on the best of the year. All the previous 2011 lists are here. This post includes the following: Science, Non-Fiction. Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science by Michael Nielsen The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman Blue Revolution:…
Another list for your reading, gift-giving and collection development pleasure. Every year for the last bunch of years I've been linking to and posting about all the "year's best sciencey books" lists that appear in various media outlets and shining a bit of light on the best of the year. All the previous 2011 lists are here. This post includes the following: Marginal Revolution Very Best Books, Best General Non-Fiction. Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined by Stephen Pinker Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys over Girls, and the…
Another bunch of lists for your reading, gift-giving and collection development pleasure. Every year for the last bunch of years I've been linking to and posting about all the "year's best sciencey books" lists that appear in various media outlets and shining a bit of light on the best of the year. All the previous 2011 lists are here. This post includes the following: American Public Media Marketplace Best Business Books Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science by Michael Nielsen Chicago Sun-Times Best Bet Holiday Gift Books Steve Jobs by Walter…
Another list for your reading, gift-giving and collection development pleasure. Every year for the last bunch of years I've been linking to and posting about all the "year's best sciencey books" lists that appear in various media outlets and shining a bit of light on the best of the year. All the previous 2011 lists are here. This post includes the following: The Economist Books of the Year. The Quantum Universe: Everything That Can Happen Does Happen by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman Global Warming Gridlock: Creating More Effective Strategies for…
Nick Swisher, the prospect the traditional scouts and statisticians agreed upon. After watching the film "Moneyball" with my young son about professional baseball and the struggle to build a strong team on a shoestring budget, I wondered "What really determines a player's salary?" Is it how telegenic they are? Provocative, reckless? A reliable hitter? How many walks? What do you think? A research group at MIT took on this question from, of course, a mathematical and computer science point of view. To address this and many other questions, they developed an entirely new way to mine…
Another list for your reading, gift-giving and collection development pleasure. Every year for the last bunch of years I've been linking to and posting about all the "year's best sciencey books" lists that appear in various media outlets and shining a bit of light on the best of the year. All the previous 2011 lists are here. This post includes the following: Physics World Top 10 books of 2011. Engineering Animals: How Life Works by Mark Denny, Alan McFadzean Measure of the Earth: the Enlightenment Expedition that Reshaped the World by Larrie Ferreiro The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes…
Is it possible to perform operations on encrypted data, while keeping it secure from all prying eyes (or circuits), even if that data is stored remotely, in the "cloud?" Will our end result still be encrypted, and when we decode it with our private decryption key, will our result be correct? To put it another way, could we allow sensitive data - say private medical information - to be monitored on-line and feel completely secure in the knowledge that no one can access it without our express permission? Can we use a cloud service to store our encrypted data and perform a search on that data…
Another list for your reading, gift-giving and collection development pleasure. Every year for the last bunch of years I've been linking to and posting about all the "year's best sciencey books" lists that appear in various media outlets and shining a bit of light on the best of the year. All the previous 2011 lists are here. This post includes the following: Globe and Mail Gift Books. A History of The World in 100 Weapons by Chris McNabb Voyages: To The New World and Beyond by Gordon Miller Explorers: The Most Exciting Voyages of Discovery - From the African Expeditions to the Lunar Landing…
Another list for your reading, gift-giving and collection development pleasure. Every year for the last bunch of years I've been linking to and posting about all the "year's best sciencey books" lists that appear in various media outlets and shining a bit of light on the best of the year. All the previous 2011 lists are here. This post includes the following: Brain Pickings The 11 Best Science Books of 2011. The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World by David Deutsch Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout by Lauren Redniss The Physics Book:…
This guest post was written by Brookhaven Lab physicist Kostas Nikolopoulos. Today's public seminar at CERN, where the ATLAS and CMS collaborations presented the preliminary results of their searches for the Standard Model (SM) Higgs boson with the full dataset collected during 2011, is a landmark for high-energy physics! The Higgs boson is a still-hypothetical particle postulated in the mid-1960s to complete what is considered the SM of particle interactions. Its role within the SM is to provide other particles with mass. Specifically, the mass of elementary particles is the result of their…
Another list for your reading, gift-giving and collection development pleasure. Every year for the last bunch of years I've been linking to and posting about all the "year's best sciencey books" lists that appear in various media outlets and shining a bit of light on the best of the year. All the previous 2011 lists are here. This post includes the following: Washington Post Top 10, 50 Best Non-Fiction Books, Great photobooks of 2011. Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President by Candice Millard In the Plex: How Google…
...A door had slammed shut for Thompson and Ritchie in March of 1969, when their employer, the American Telephone & Telegraph Co., withdrew from a collaborative project with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and General Electric to create an interactive time-sharing system called Multics, which stood for "Multiplexed Information and Computing Service." Time-sharing, a technique that lets multiple people use a single computer simultaneously, had been invented only a decade earlier. Multics was to combine time-sharing with other technological advances of the era, allowing users to…
Another bunch of lists for your reading, gift-giving and collection development pleasure. Every year for the last bunch of years I've been linking to and posting about all the "year's best sciencey books" lists that appear in various media outlets and shining a bit of light on the best of the year. All the previous 2011 lists are here. This post includes the following:Greg Laden's Blog Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: the History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians by Richard Sugg Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America by Shawn Lawrence Otto The…