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Thinker's Ideas

Mostly - Where we've been, why we do what we do, where we're going and why, intentionally and unintentionally, primarily from the science perspective

EARLY Draft - 1.1 Initiated 7/8/04  Updated 05/27/08

Purpose:

A pseudo-random collection of happened-upon links to thinkers whose ideas are probably useful if only I understood them.

Be careful as protection in the world of ideas is required.

Science Book Reviews:

American Scientist Bookshelf
http://www.americanscientist.org/template/BookshelfLanding

Directory of Book Reviews on the Web (AquWeb, Vanderbilt)
http://acqweb.library.vanderbilt.edu/acqweb/bookrev.html

New Scientist
http://www.newscientist.com/opinion/opbooks.jsp

Scientific American Reviews
http://www.sciam.com/books/index.cfm?location=reviews

Thinkers:

Bak, Per, physicist, self-organized criticality, complexity,  (LOH - see book reviews)
http://isihighlycited.com/author.cgi?&id=393

Bartimus, Tad

Calvin, William H., neurophysiologist, U of Wash. (brains, climate, evolution; where we've been and where we're heading.)
http://williamcalvin.com/index.html

Christian, David

Dawkins, Richard, (selfish gene)
http://www.world-of-dawkins.com/index.shtml (unofficial)

Friedman, Milton

Friedman, Thomas - The World is Flat (Amazon)

Gapingvold (Hugh MacLeod)

  • Cartoons drawn on the back of business cards

Gladwell, Malcolm, science writer, "innovation diffusion process", "diffusion of innovations" (E Rogers),
http://www.gladwell.com/

The Tipping Point: How little things can make a big difference (Amazon)
http://www.gladwell.com/books.html

Blink : The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (Amazon)

Gershenfeld, Neil (MIT engineering professor)

The Center for Bits and Atoms: MIT FAB lab central

FAB: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop--From Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication (book) Amazon

MAS.863 How to Make (Almost) Anything (MIT)

Articles

Python language (used in FAB controllers)

Kahane, Adam - Generon Consulting > The Sustainable Food Laboratory

  • Solving Tough Problems: An Open Way of Talking, Listening, and Creating New Realities (Amazon)
  • The U-Process: A Social Technology for Addressing Highly Complex Challenges (pdf)

Kashyap, Vipul - semantic web in medicine

Kauffman, Stuart A.
http://www.santafe.edu/sfi/People/kauffman/

At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity

Kotlikoff, Laurence J. (BU economics professor - leveling vs. financial planning)

  • Federal Reserve: U.S. headed for bankruptcy Report: Coming $65.9 trillion fiscal gap 5 times GDP, twice size of national wealth (WorldNetDaily, 7/16/06)
  • Is the United States Bankrupt (pdf)

Krugman, Paul (economist)

Kurzweil, Ray - AI, OCR, synthesizers

Lakoff, George

Levitt, Steven (economist - U Chicago)
http://www.src.uchicago.edu/users/levit/
http://www.src.uchicago.edu/users/levit/recentpublications.htm

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (SD Levitt, SJ Dubner) (Amazon)
http://www.harpercollins.com/global_scripts/product_catalog/book_xml.asp?isbn=006073132X

Ideas http://ideas.repec.org/e/ple59.html

Lynch, John M., zoologist, history of biology, Arizona State U
http://www.public.asu.edu/~jmlynch/
http://darwin.bc.asu.edu/blog/

Mankiw, Greg, economist, Harvard

Rollin, Bernard E., ethicist, Colorado State University

Peters, Tom

  • Juan Enriquez - As the Future Catches You
  • Richard Florida interview - The Rise of the Creative Class, The Flight of the Creative Class

Phillips, Kevin

  • Bad Money (2008)
    • Slip sliding away: Are new cracks in U.S. economy portents of lean days ahead? (4/6/08)
    • The decline and fall of the American empire of debt (Salon - 4/14/08)
    • 'Bad Money' Criticizes Wall Street, U.S. Finances (4/15/08)
  • American Theocracy
  • Clear and Present Dangers (New York Times Books 3/19/06)

Sachs, Jeffrey D.  (economist)

Sahtouris, Elisabet

Senge, Peter

Silver, Lee M.

  • Challenging Nature: The Clash of Science and Spirituality at the New Frontiers of Life - book website
    • A Nasty Mother: think only the religious right is anti-science? How about the spiritual left? The Scientist, July 2006, pp.48-53. (pdf)

Smith, Amy - MIT D-Lab - application of appropriate technology to problems of LDCs - development. design, dissemination

Stuart, David

Anasazi America: 17 Centuries on the Road from Center Place

Sunstein, Cass, U Chicago School of Law

Surowiecki, James

  • The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, 2004 (Amazon)
    • How to save the world blog

Taleb, Nassim

Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets, 2005 (Amazon)

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, 2007 (Amazon)

  • Black swan theory - wiki
  • Learning to Expect the Unexpected (Edge 4/19/04)
  • Nassim Taleb's "The Black Swan" - Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference and Social Science blog (4/9/07)
  • The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Chapt 1 - NY Times 4/22/07)
  • You Can't Predict Who Will Change the World (Forbes, 5/24/07)

Wilson, Edward O.

Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (Amazon)

Counter to "The Future to Life"
http://home.comcast.net/~neoeugenics/eow.htm

Wisdom, Jack (MIT ) solar system dynamical chaos
http://swiss.csail.mit.edu/users/wisdom/

Wolfram, Stephen
http://www.stephenwolfram.com/

Conversations in the Audience

Borrell, Lee
http://www.fortunecity.com/emachines/e11/86/index.html

Loane, Marcus
http://www.jarkazz.co.uk/musings/

Wilkins, John S.
http://members.dodo.com.au/wilkinsjandp/darwiniana.html

Economics

Butterfly Economics: A New General Theory of Social and Economic Behavior by Paul Omerod,
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0465053564/qid=1089913494/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_1/104-8403331-5039132

Ethics

  • Peter Singer
    • Peter Singer in Salon (Pharyngula 4/8/06)
    • The practical ethicist (Salon post)
    • The Utilitarian Horrors of Peter Singer: Other People's Mothers (PETER BERKOWITZ, The New Republic January 10, 2000 html)

On-line Books

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (MIT first computer course)
http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html

 

Book Lists / Writers

Books

Aventis Prizes for Science Books (was Rhône-Poulenc Prize for Science Books, Royal Society)
http://www.aventisprizes.com/home_welcome.htm

American Booksellers Association
http://www.bookweb.org/

Australian Museum Eureka Prizes
http://www.amonline.net.au/eureka/science_book/index.htm

The Booklist Center
http://home.comcast.net/~dwtaylor1/index.htm

Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science and Technology
http://www.latimes.com/extras/bookprizes/winners_byaward.html#science

Phi Beta Kappa Book Award Winners - Science
http://www.pbk.org/scholarships/bookwinners.htm#Science

Infectious Agents: Historical and Emerging Threats

Microbial Threats to Health: Emergence, Detection, and Response (National Academies Press)
http://www.nap.edu/openbook/030908864X/html/index.html

Plagues and Epidemics

History of Epidemics and Plagues (P Bugl, U Hartford)
http://uhavax.hartford.edu/bugl/histepi.htm

Medical History --- Plagues and Epidemics (MA Faria)
http://www.haciendapub.com/faria4.html

Plagues & Epidemics (plumbing history website)
http://www.theplumber.com/plague.html

The Black Death 1347-1350
http://www.insecta-inspecta.com/fleas/bdeath/

Hays, JM (1998). The Burdens of Disease: Epidemics and Human Response in Western History.

Kiple, K (ed.). The Cambridge World History of Human Disease. Cambridge U Press, ISBN 0521332869

Oldstone, MBA (2000). Viruses, Plagues, and History.  ISBN: 0195134222

WHO

Global Geophysical Events

BBC

Nature 'mankind's gravest threats'
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3549812.stm

Fossil Diversity / Periodic Die-offs

Muller, Richard A.
http://muller.lbl.gov/

Physics for future Presidents

Gamma Ray Burst

Lieberman, Bruce S. (U Kansas)
http://www.ku.edu/~paleo/geo/lieberman.html

Melott, Adrian L. (U Kansas)
http://kusmos.phsx.ku.edu/~melott/Melott.html

Hazard Research Centre (Bill McGuire, director)

Large Asteroid Impacts

Bedout High, Australia (Becker, Luann)
 http://beckeraustralia.crustal.ucsb.edu/

The Great Dying
 http://www.planetary.org/news/2004/bedout_high.html

Chicxulub Crater, Mexico (Cretaceous-Tertiary (K/T) boundary)
 http://miac.uqac.ca/MIAC/chicxulub.htm

When the sky fell on our heads: Identification and interpretation of impact products in the sedimentary record
http://www.agu.org/revgeophys/claeys00/claeys00.html

Impact Events and Their Effect on the Origin, Evolution, and Distribution of Life (David A. Kring)
http://www.geosociety.org/pubs/gsatoday/gsat0008.htm

Mega-tsunami: Wave of Destruction
http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2000/mega_tsunami_info.shtml

Near Earth Objects (asteroid, comet impacts)

Asteroid and Comet Impact Hazards (NASA)
 http://impact.arc.nasa.gov/

Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs)
 http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/neo/pha.html

Open Letter to Congress on Near Earth Objects
 http://www.congressneoaction.org/documents/NEOletter_enc2wbio.pdf

Volcanism

Lava Plateaus and Flood Basalts

Deccan traps, Siberian traps (Flood basalts)

Lava Plateaus and Flood Basalts (USGS)
http://vulcan.wr.usgs.gov/Glossary/LavaPlateaus/framework.html

"Super" volcanoes (Yellowstone, Toba, ..)

Super-eruptions: global effects and future threats (S Sparks, S Self, D Pyle, C Oppenheimer, H Rymer, J Grattan)
http://www.geolsoc.org.uk/template.cfm?name=Super1

Yellowstone Volcano Observatory
http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/yvo/

Toba, Somatra, Indonesia
http://volcano.und.nodak.edu/vwdocs/volc_images/southeast_asia/indonesia/toba.html

Stanley Ambrose: hypothesis of Toba eruption causing a bottleneck in human evolution 75,000 yrs ago

  • Ambrose, SH. 1998. Late Pleistocene human population bottlenecks, volcanic winter, and differentiation of modern humans. J Hum Evol 35:623-651.
  • Ambrose SH (2003). Did the super-eruption of Toba cause a human population bottleneck? Reply to Gathorne-Hardy and Harcourt-Smith J Hum Evol 45(3): 231-237.

Non-supporting:

  • Oppenheimer, C. 2002. Limited global change due to the largest known Quaternary eruption, Toba 74kyr BP? Quaternary Science Reviews 21(14-15): 1593-1609.
  • Gathorne-Hardy, FJ, WEH. Harcourt-Smith. (2003). The super-eruption of Toba, did it cause a human bottleneck? J Hum Evol 45:227-230.

Universe

Planetary systems and their changing theories
http://www.astro.su.se/~pawel/blois/blois.html

The Real Armageddon: Will the Universe accelerate out of sight, or collapse in a fiery Big Crunch? Despite recent reports of acceleration, the far future cannot be predicted. But the prospects for life are more dismal than ever. by Lawrence M. Krauss
http://www.firstscience.com/site/articles/krauss.asp

humanity

Leadership

Jim Collins "Good to Great" (Amazon) - recommendation of Michael A. Paul
http://www.jimcollins.com/

Entrepreneurship

Drucker, Peter F.

  • Innovation and Entrepreneurship, 1993 (Amazon)

Entrepreneurship - QuickMBA

The Conservative Nanny State How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer (2006, Dean Baker, webpage)

Websites

Honest Intellectual Inquiry
http://www.dakotacom.net/~depriest/index.htm

Selected Science Sites
http://www.dakotacom.net/~depriest/sci.htm

Asteroid/Comet Impact Craters and Mass Extinctions
http://www4.tpg.com.au/users/tps-seti/crater.html

The Biological Anthropology Web - anthropological genetics; human adaptation, behavioral ecology; and evolutionary biology

ChangeThis
http://www.changethis.com/

ClueTrain Manifesto
http://www.cluetrain.com/

Dana Foundation: Information about brain research, immunology, arts education
http://www.dana.org/

Darwinia and Evolution: Links to our Past, News of the Present, Insight for the Future (Bob Patterson)
http://www.origins.tv/darwin/indexpage.htm

Essays
http://www.origins.tv/darwin/essays.htm

If you could teach the world just one thing . .  (Spiked's E = mc2 centenary survey)
http://www.spiked-online.com/sections/science/sciencesurvey/

'Last Days on Earth' August, 2006, ABC 20/20 story

Lew Rockwell (libertarian economics for food policy)
http://www.lewrockwell.com/

Natural Hazard Research Center
http://www.benfieldhrc.org/index.htm

Apocalypse: a Natural History of Global Disasters by Bill McGuire (Cassell, London, 1999)

New Scientist Hot Topics
http://www.newscientist.com/hottopics/

No Beliefs for Freethinkers
NoBeliefs.com (Freethinkers)

The Edge (of the world's knowledge - John Brockman)
http://www.edge.org/

The Future of Things

The Talk.Origins Archive
http://www.talkorigins.org/

Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement (USC)
http://www.usc.edu/dept/LAS/tylerprize/index.html

Laureates
http://www.usc.edu/dept/LAS/tylerprize/previous.html

2think.org (book reviews by Orin Ryssman)
http://www.2think.org/

Public Engagement with Science

A Brief History of Biotechnology Risk Debates and Policies in the United States (Philip Regal, U Minn)
http://www.edmonds-institute.org/regal.html

National Center for Science Education
http://ncseweb.org/

Public Understanding of Science (Sage)

Science and Religion
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/science/index.shtml

The Why? Files
http://whyfiles.org/welcome/index.html

 

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