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Summary
The battles over evolution, climate change, childhood vaccinations, and the causes of AIDS, alternative medicine, oil shortages, population growth, and the place of science in our country - all are reaching a fevered pitch. Many people and institutions have exerted enormous efforts to misrepresent or flatly deny demonstrable scientific reality to protect their nonscientific ideology, their power, or their bottom line. To shed light on this darkness,...
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This book makes concepts of physics easier to grasp by relating them to everyday knowledge. Addressing some of the models and metaphors that physicists use to explain the physical world, Martin H. Krieger describes the conceptual world of physics by means of analogies to economics, anthropology, theater, carpentry, mechanisms such as clockworks, and machine tool design. The interaction of elementary particles or chemical species, for example, can...
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Lowell Institute lectures volume 1925
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The famed mathematician and philosopher takes readers on a journey into a new scientific age, exploring topics from relativity to religion.
Alfred North Whitehead, one of the great figures in the philosophy of science, wrote this prescient work nearly a century ago. Yet, in an era that has us reckoning with science and technology's place and meaning in our lives, it remains as relevant as ever. Science and the Modern World puts scientific discovery...
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"The successful 1776 revolt against British rule in North America has been hailed almost universally as a great step forward for humanity. But the Africans then living in the colonies overwhelmingly sided with the British. In this trailblazing book, Gerald Horne shows that in the prelude to 1776, the abolition of slavery seemed all but inevitable in London, delighting Africans as much as it outraged slaveholders, and sparking the colonial revolt....
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"Would you read this book if a computer wrote it? Would you even know? And why would it matter? Today's eerily impressive artificial intelligence writing tools present us with a crucial challenge: As writers, do we unthinkingly adopt AI's time-saving advantages or do we stop to weigh what we gain and lose when heeding their siren call? To understand how AI is redefining what it means to write and think, linguist and educator Naomi Baron leads us on...
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In this hip, hilarious and truly eye-opening cultural history, menstruation is talked about as never before. Flow spans its fascinating, occasionally wacky and sometimes downright scary story: from mikvahs (ritual cleansing baths) to menopause, hysteria to hysterectomies-not to mention the Pill, cramps, the history of underwear, and the movie about puberty they showed you in 5th grade.
Flow answers such questions as: What's the point of getting...
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In What We Sow, Jennifer Jewell brings readers on an insightful, year-long journey exploring the outsize impact one of nature's smallest manifestations--the simple seed. She examines our skewed notions where "organic" seeds are grown and sourced, reveals how giant multinational agribusiness has refined and patented the genomes of seeds we rely on for staples like corn and soy, and highlights the efforts of activists working to regain legal access...
11) The sane society
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Social psychologist Erich Fromm's seminal exploration of the profound ills of modern society, and how best to overcome them One of Fromm's main interests was to analyze social systems and their impact on the mental health of the individual. In this study, he reaches further and asks: "Can a society be sick?" He finds that it can, arguing that Western culture is immersed in a "pathology of normalcy" that affects the mental health of individuals. ...
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"A new era in the scientific community has arrived, and it is an era of multinationalism and cooperative reach. Globalization, the Internet, and digital technology all play a role in making this new era possible, but something more fundamental is also at work. In all scientific endeavors lies an ancient drive for sharing ideas and knowledge. Communication serves as the driving force behind turning brilliant ideas into world-changing realities. Yet,...
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Drunk cuts through the tangle of urban legends and anecdotal impressions that surround our notions of intoxication to provide the first rigorous, scientifically-grounded explanation for our love of alcohol. Drawing on evidence from archaeology, history, cognitive neuroscience, psychopharmacology, social psychology, literature, and genetics, Slingerland shows that our taste for chemical intoxicants is not an evolutionary mistake, as we are so often...
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"Aged just seven, Suzanne Heywood set sail with her parents and brother on a three-year voyage around the world. What followed turned instead into a decade-long way of life, through storms, shipwrecks, reefs and isolation, with little formal schooling. No one else knew where they were most of the time and no state showed any interest in what was happening to the children. Suzanne fought her parents, longing to return to England and to education and...
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"The world's mass adoption of digital technologies portends the beginning of a new era for humanity in the realms of economics, health, travel, and culture. In this new digital age, technology will solve our most ancient problems, create new challenges, and transform life as we know it"--
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An unprecedented look at that most commonplace act of everyday life--throwing things out--and how it has transformed American society.
Susan Strasser's pathbreaking histories of housework and the rise of the mass market have become classics in the literature of consumer culture. Here she turns to an essential but neglected part of that culture--the trash it produces--and finds in it an unexpected wealth of meaning.
Before the twentieth century,...
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All across America, people are knitting for peace. In yarn shops and private homes, churches and synagogues, schools and even prisons, they meet on weekday evenings or weekend afternoons to knit afghans for refugees, mittens for the homeless, socks for soldiers, or preemie caps for AIDS babies. The tradition goes back as far as Martha Washington, who spearheaded knitting efforts for the soldiers of the Revolutionary War, and has seen a recent flourishing...