Tag Archives: short

Three Laws of Nature – R. Stephen Berry

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Three Laws of Nature

A Little Book on Thermodynamics

R. Stephen Berry

Genre: Physics

Price: $11.99

Publish Date: March 12, 2019

Publisher: Yale University Press

Seller: Yale University


A short and entertaining introduction to thermodynamics that uses real-world examples to explain accessibly an important but subtle scientific theory   A romantic description of the second law of thermodynamics is that the universe becomes increasingly disordered. But what does that actually mean? Starting with an overview of the three laws of thermodynamics, MacArthur “genius grant" winner R. Stephen Berry explains in this short book the fundamentals of a fundamental science. Readers learn both the history of thermodynamics, which began with attempts to solve everyday engineering problems, and ongoing controversy and unsolved puzzles. The exposition, suitable for both students and armchair physicists, requires no previous knowledge of the subject and only the simplest mathematics, taught as needed.   With this better understanding of one science, readers also gain an appreciation of the role of research in science, the provisional nature of scientific theory, and the ways scientific exploration can uncover fundamental truths. Thus, from a science of everyday experience, we learn about the nature of the universe.  

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Three Laws of Nature – R. Stephen Berry

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On the Future – Martin Rees

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On the Future

Prospects for Humanity

Martin Rees

Genre: Science & Nature

Price: $13.99

Publish Date: October 16, 2018

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Seller: Princeton University Press


A provocative and inspiring look at the future of humanity and science from world-renowned scientist and bestselling author Martin Rees Humanity has reached a critical moment. Our world is unsettled and rapidly changing, and we face existential risks over the next century. Various outcomes—good and bad—are possible. Yet our approach to the future is characterized by short-term thinking, polarizing debates, alarmist rhetoric, and pessimism. In this short, exhilarating book, renowned scientist and bestselling author Martin Rees argues that humanity’s prospects depend on our taking a very different approach to planning for tomorrow. The future of humanity is bound to the future of science and hinges on how successfully we harness technological advances to address our challenges. If we are to use science to solve our problems while avoiding its dystopian risks, we must think rationally, globally, collectively, and optimistically about the long term. Advances in biotechnology, cybertechnology, robotics, and artificial intelligence—if pursued and applied wisely—could empower us to boost the developing and developed world and overcome the threats humanity faces on Earth, from climate change to nuclear war. At the same time, further advances in space science will allow humans to explore the solar system and beyond with robots and AI. But there is no “Plan B” for Earth—no viable alternative within reach if we do not care for our home planet. Rich with fascinating insights into cutting-edge science and technology, this accessible book will captivate anyone who wants to understand the critical issues that will define the future of humanity on Earth and beyond.

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On the Future – Martin Rees

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Wild Thoughts from Wild Places – David Quammen

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Wild Thoughts from Wild Places

David Quammen

Genre: Nature

Price: $0.99

Publish Date: October 16, 2012

Publisher: Scribner

Seller: SIMON AND SCHUSTER DIGITAL SALES INC


In Wild Thoughts from Wild Places, award-winning journalist David Quammen reminds us why he has become one of our most beloved science and nature writers. This collection of twenty-three of Quammen's most intriguing, most exciting, most memorable pieces takes us to meet kayakers on the Futaleufu River of southern Chile, where Quammen describes how it feels to travel in fast company and flail for survival in the river's maw. We are introduced to the commerce in pearls (and black-market parrots) in the Aru Islands of eastern Indonesia. Quammen even finds wildness in smog-choked Los Angeles — embodied in an elusive population of urban coyotes, too stubborn and too clever to surrender to the sprawl of civilization. With humor and intelligence, David Quammen's Wild Thoughts from Wild Places also reminds us that humans are just one of the many species on earth with motivations, goals, quirks, and eccentricities. Expect to be entertained and moved on this journey through the wilds of science and nature.

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Wild Thoughts from Wild Places – David Quammen

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Periodic Tales – Hugh Aldersey-Williams

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Periodic Tales

A Cultural History of the Elements, from Arsenic to Zinc

Hugh Aldersey-Williams

Genre: Science & Nature

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: March 29, 2011

Publisher: HarperCollins e-books

Seller: HarperCollins


In the spirit of A Short History of Nearly Everything comes Periodic Tales. Award-winning science writer Hugh Andersey-Williams offers readers a captivating look at the elements—and the amazing, little-known stories behind their discoveries. Periodic Tales is an energetic and wide-ranging book of innovations and innovators, of superstition and science and the myriad ways the chemical elements are woven into our culture, history, and language. It will delight readers of Genome, Einstein’s Dreams, Longitude, and The Age of Wonder. 

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Periodic Tales – Hugh Aldersey-Williams

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Fox Host Claims She’s in Talks to Replace Sean Spicer

Mother Jones

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Is Sean Spicer a dead man walking?

Nearly a week after he survived one of the most tumultuous episodes of the young Trump administration, it appears as though Spicer’s tenure as White House press secretary could be coming to an end. Kimberly Guilfoyle, the co-host of Fox’s The Five, told the Mercury News Tuesday that she is in active discussions with several White House officials about taking Spicer’s job, and she signaled she would accept the position.

“I’m a patriot, and it would be an honor to serve the country,” Guilfoyle told the San Jose-based paper. “I think it’d be a fascinating job, it’s a challenging job, and you need someone really determined and focused, a great communicator in there with deep knowledge to be able to handle that position.”

Though she declined to go into details about her conversations with the White House, Guilfoyle described Spicer as a “patriot” and acknowledged that the role of press secretary was a “very tough position.”

In his short time as press secretary, Spicer has committed numerous gaffes in his attempts to justify President Donald Trump’s policies and erratic behavior, provoking ridicule both in the media and among White House officials. Trump has hardly kept his own disdain for Spicer a secret: According to a recent New York Times report, the president openly talks about replacing Spicer and purposely keeps him in the dark concerning major decisions, such as last week’s firing of FBI Director James Comey.

As for Guilfoyle, she appears to be a good fit for the Trump White House. She has praised Russian President Vladimir Putin and once suggested that Secret Service agents should “kill” rappers Snoop Dogg and Bow Wow for making disparaging comments about the president.

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Fox Host Claims She’s in Talks to Replace Sean Spicer

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Wednesday Was the Most Dangerous Day So Far of the Trump Presidency

Mother Jones

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By now we all know the story of President Trump’s sudden U-turn on NAFTA earlier this week. But just to refresh your memories, here is the Washington Post:

“I was all set to terminate,” Trump said in an Oval Office interview Thursday night. “I looked forward to terminating. I was going to do it.”…At one point, he turned to Kushner, who was standing near his desk, and asked, “Was I ready to terminate NAFTA?”

“Yeah,” Kushner said, before explaining the case he made to the president: “I said, ‘Look, there’s plusses and minuses to doing it,’ and either way he would have ended up in a good place.”

The basic story here is that Trump is a child. He was all ready to pull the trigger, but then his advisors brought in a colorful map showing that lots of red states and counties would be harmed by pulling out of NAFTA. Eventually Trump calmed down and normalcy reigned for another day.

But here’s the part of the story I still don’t understand: what happened on Wednesday that suddenly put a burr up Trump’s ass to pull out of NAFTA? Just a few weeks ago he sent a list of negotiating points to Congress, and both Mexico and Canada have agreed the treaty needs some updating. Things were moving along fairly normally, and then suddenly Trump woke up one morning and decided to light off a nuclear bomb.

What was that all about? Was it really because of Trump’s obsession over having some kind of accomplishment to show for his first hundred days? Did he eat a taco that didn’t agree with him? Did Steve Bannon have a late-night talk with him?

This was the reason all along that Trump was a far more dangerous candidate than Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio. From a liberal point of view, his incompetence was a bonus that might restrict the short-term damage he could do. But Trump also brought to the table a noxious racist appeal, an ugly nationalism, an appalling level of ignorance, and a mercurial temperament. All of these were on display Wednesday. Apparently out of nowhere, and for no particular reason, he just strolled into the Oval Office and decided he wanted to formally withdraw from NAFTA.

Why? And what are the odds he’s going to do this again on something more important? Something that, for whatever reason, his aides can’t talk him out of with a colorful map and another diet Coke?

I’m not sure everyone realizes that this is the most dangerous thing Trump has done so far. It was a close-run thing, but next time it might not be. And we still have 1,361 days left to go of Trump’s presidency.

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Wednesday Was the Most Dangerous Day So Far of the Trump Presidency

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The Short, Happy Valley of Obamacare

Mother Jones

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Back in the past, about 17 percent of Americans went without health insurance. In the future, according to the CBO, about 17 percent of Americans will go without health insurance if AHCA, the Republican health care bill, passes. In between is the short, happy valley of Obamacare, when we got that number down to about 10 percent:

The CDC has precise numbers for the present if you’re interested. The Obamacare smile in the chart above is just approximate. Bottom line: if AHCA passes, not only will all the good work of Obamacare be wiped out, but uninsurance rates will actually be higher than they used to be when we had no legislation at all. I’m not quite sure how Republicans managed to pull that off, but it’s an impressive feat of callousness and greed.

Are you interested in additional detail about exactly which groups will be less insured under AHCA? The answer is: all of them. Here’s the absolutely appalling CBO estimate:

Poor people will have less insurance. Working-class people will have less insurance. Middle-class people will have less insurance. The young will have less insurance. The middle-aged will have less insurance. The old will have less insurance. Everybody will have less insurance. Except for the rich, of course, who will also get an $882 billion tax cut.1

This is what Paul Ryan calls “encouraging.” I’m not sure how he looks at himself in the mirror every morning.

1In fairness, they have to share this tax cut with big corporations.

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The Short, Happy Valley of Obamacare

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Here Are Our Top 20 Imports From Mexico

Mother Jones

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How much would a 20 percent tariff on Mexican imports cost us? I think it’s pointless to delve very deeply into this until President Trump and congressional Republicans produce a serious plan of some kind. Relying on random tweets and leaks from GOP gatherings will just drive us all crazy, as we try to analyze every dumb idea that gets run up the flagpole. Hell, even Paul Krugman says he’s a little confused about some of this stuff, and his Nobel Prize was for international trade.

However, there is one bit of raw data that you might as well get familiar with, since it’s not going to change. Here are our top 20 imports from Mexico:

I’ve highlighted a few of the categories that get the most attention: cars, televisions, crude oil, and produce. Generally speaking, if we tax these things at X percent, their price in the US is going to increase X percent. It won’t be quite that much, since trade will adjust based on the taxes, and in the long run the dollar will rise. Probably. And this all assumes there’s no retaliation from Mexico, which there probably would be.

Still, in the short and medium term, a 20 percent tax will increase the price of Mexican goods by 20 percent. That means a Ford Focus will cost 20 percent more, flat-screen televisions will cost 20 percent more, and avocados will cost 20 percent more. The problem, of course, is that Ford can’t increase the price of a Focus by 20 percent. Nobody would buy them. So they’ll just have to keep prices low and take it in the shorts.

Bottom line: in some cases, prices will go up, which will be bad for US consumers. In other cases, importers who are stuck with Mexican factories will have to accept lower profits, which is bad for US companies. In yet other cases, imports will just cease and plants will be shut down, which will be bad for Mexico.

So who will this be good for? That’s a very good question. In the case of cars and TVs, probably Japan and South Korea. In the case of produce, maybe Chile. In the case of crude oil, maybe Iran.

Of course, if we decide to put a tax on all imports from everywhere—not just Mexico—then consumer prices of just about everything will go up with no release valve. This would violate every trade treaty we’re part of, which means that the entire world would probably retaliate. In the end, prices would go up and American factories would either keep production unchanged or even cut back some. This would be pretty disastrous for the working class folks who voted for Trump.

But that’s what everyone is talking about.

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Here Are Our Top 20 Imports From Mexico

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And Now For a Short Dental Interlude

Mother Jones

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I’m off to the dentist. My teeth are actually in fine shape, but when you hit your 50s all the fillings you got in your 20s and 30s apparently start to go south, so they have to be removed and refilled. Or so my dentist says, anyway. Today I get two or three of them replaced. I don’t remember exactly. Hopefully she does.

UPDATE: It was three. Two of them were old silver fillings, which she hates because of the mercury. So out they came.

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And Now For a Short Dental Interlude

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Vampire Weekend Played This Classic Song in Honor of Bernie Sanders in Iowa

Mother Jones

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Caucus season in Iowa produces weird, unexpected scenes. As I walked into a coffee shop in downtown Iowa City on Saturday afternoon for a writing pit stop between campaign events, I noticed a growing crowd in the far back of the room. Turns out the indie band Vampire Weekend (joined by a member of fellow Brooklyn hipster band Dirty Projectors), scheduled to play a major rally for Bernie Sanders later this evening, had announced on Twitter that they’d be playing a pre-show warm-up set at the coffee house, and the college kids from the University of Iowa had quickly flocked. Pressed into a corner in a packed room, it was difficult to get a good head count, but the wall-to-wall crowd easily numbered into the several hundred.

Was the young crowd there for Bernie, or just a free show? Mostly the latter from my vantage point. Joey Sogard, a sophmore at Iowa State University, made the two-hour drive for the rally. So a big Bernie supporter, right? “Well, more Vampire Weekend and Foster the People,” Sogard said, mentioning another band scheduled to play at Sanders rally. Well, would he at least be caucusing for Sanders? “I don’t know what caucusing is, I’ve been explained a thousand times, but I don’t know,” he said with a laugh.

The friends he had roadtripped with were more definitive Sanders fans, though. Zoey Mauck, an Iowa-native familiar with the caucusing process, said she would be in Sanders’ camp Monday night. “I just like his stance on a lot of issues, especially the environmental stuff,” she said. “Something about Bernie I just really like. But if it goes Hillary, I don’t really care.”

Nearby, a woman wearing a zebra-patterned-bear backpack was handing out buttons and stickers emblazoned with a Donald-Trump-as-fly-covered-feces design.

When the band took the stage, they encouraged the crowd to come to watch Sanders speak later in the evening—”that’s what this is all about,” lead singer Ezra Koenig said—but the crowd mostly saved its applause for Vampire Weekend’s hits. Still, Koenig did his best to keep things focused on the Bern, explaining that they mostly wanted to play a pre-rally set in order to tune up, since “we cannot embarrass ourselves in front of Bernie.”

The short, six-song set ended with a rendition of “This Land is Your Land,” which Koenig said was in honor of the album of folk covers Sanders recorded in 1987.

“How dope would it be to have a recording artist in the White House,” Koenig wondered to the students.

“Kanye 2020!” Came a shout from the crowd.

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Vampire Weekend Played This Classic Song in Honor of Bernie Sanders in Iowa

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