imagining objects and moments into existence
By Frederik Pohl, 2000, 336 pages, amazon This book is the second one in the (sci-fi) Heechee saga (preceded by Gateway). Even though it is quite self-contained and can be read separately, I would not recommend doing that. In fact, I would not recommend the book at all, read the Gateway instead. Why? Not quite sure, it just doesn’t feel…
ďalej...By Jennifer Block, 2007, 336 pages, amazon The Painful Truth About Childbirth and Modern Maternity Care This book is not an easy reading. It brings tears and fear. Not of childbirth, but of US hospitals. Belongs to the same category as the movie The Business of Being Born. Why is it so scary? Because it tells stories of women who…
ďalej...By Orrin H. Pilkey & Linda Pilkey-Jarvis, 2006, 221 pages, amazon Or why environmental scientists can’t predict the future? The answer given by the authors is simple. Because the scientists are trying to find exact answers to quantitative questions using models in which many parameters and interactions are still unknown. They demonstrate this using various examples from fishing industry, sea-level…
ďalej...By G. H. Hardy, 1940, 153 pages, partial text, amazon I propose to put forward an apology for mathematics; and I may be told that it needs none, since there are now few studies more generally recognized, for good reason or bad, as profitable or priceworthy… A mathematician does need not now consider himself on the defensive… The public does…
ďalej...By Ian Stewart, 1989, 317 pages, partial text, amazon This is a book about chaos. Not the chaos you have in your closet after three years of not cleaning it up but the mathematical chaos. And it is written with almost no equations at all, which makes it highly readable for non-mathematicians, but leaves the mathematicians somewhat hungry by not…
ďalej...By Lawrence Weinstein and John A. Adam, 2008, 301 pages, amazon What does guesstimation mean? Something between guess and estimation or even better – a little bit of both. Subtitle of this book is “Solving the world’s problems on the back of a cocktail napkin” suggests what this book is about. Shows you how to guess/estimate answers to some not…
ďalej...By William W. Litton, 2002, 363 pages, partial text, amazon The introduction to this book (which talks about the foundations of computational neuroscience) is hilarious: This book is for undergraduates and beginning graduate students…because the malleable mind of the undifferentiated stem-person of college age is likely to be capable of making conceptual leaps that more ossified brains cannot… these are…
ďalej...By Khaled Hosseini, 2003, 371 pages, amazon I’ve read some good reviews about this book and then (without reading it first) gave it as a Christmas present to one of my friends (of course, with the intention to borrow it one day). Sometime later I asked her how was the book. She told me she had to stop reading it….
ďalej...By Christof Koch, 2004, 429 pages, partial text, amazon People know Francis Crick as one on the discoverers of the DNA structure. What they usualy do not know is that for the rest of his life he was pondering another, maybe even more exciting, problem: the question of consciousness. Where does it originate? What is that awareness inside our heads?…
ďalej...By Edwin A. Abbott, 1884, 144 pages, full text, amazon As we can read in the introduction to Flatland: Here is a stirring avdenture in pure mathematics, a fantasy of strange spaces peopled by geometrical figures; geometrical figures that think and speak and have all too human emotions. This is no trifling tale of science fiction … it is written…
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