Science Friday (audio)

When homo sapiens made their entrance 100,000 years ago they were confronted by a wide range of other early humans - homo erectus, who walked better and used fire; homo habilis who used tools; and of course the Neanderthals, who were brawny and strong. But shortly after their arrival, something happened that vaulted the species forward and made them the indisputable masters of the planet.

Stuart A. Kauffman studies the origin of life and the origins of molecular organization. Thirty-five years ago, he developed the Kauffman models, which are random networks exhibiting a kind of self-organization that he terms "order for free." He asks a question that goes beyond those asked by other evolutionary theorists: if selection is operating all the time, how do we build a theory that combines self-organization (order for free) and selection?

from “The Brain Wars: The Scientific Battle Over the Existence of the Mind and the Proof That Will Change the Way We Live Our Lives.” – Mario Beauregard

We are, he explains, the only species to experience a distinct plateauing in mid-life, as opposed to the steady wind-down from young adulthood to death experienced by everything from hamsters to elephants. And this, he insists, is thanks to centuries of evolutionary biology.

Mathias is better known as Casper, an albino preacher who had healing ways in his youth. Back in his hometown of Joplin, Missouri seeking rest from years of hurt, Casper soon finds himself with the pregnant teenage prostitute Angelike outrunning their pasts on the great road south. Dangers follow them, characters as crazed and colorful as America’s own history greet them, and Casper finds himself on the unexpected road to salvation.

Articles and news about Web searching and Internet use. Includes search tools, online news, email, current awareness tools, and general use

Great Britain circa 1985: time travel is routine, cloning is a reality (dodos are the resurrected pet of choice), and literature is taken very, very seriously.

The Great Divide: The Rocky Mountains in the American Mind

Jamestown Narratives: Eyewitness Accounts of the Virginia Colony – Edward Wright Haile

Jeff Noon

Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (and How to Take Advantage of It)
– William Poundstone

You are hopelessly gullible. You have no firm idea of what anything should cost, so advertisers, marketers, and salespeople regularly lead you astray. If you're sure that you're too smart for their pricing tricks, that makes you dumber still, because you don't even realize you're being exploited.

– Seth Godin
The economy has changed, probably forever. School hasn't.

The Myth and Mystery of UFOs – Thomas E. Bullard

Try as we might to imagine ETs that are not like us, we remain the baseline. In The Myth and Mystery of UFOs, Thomas Bullard suggests that this may be more interesting than merely evidence of compulsive anthropocentrism and a limited imagination.

The Indo-European problem can be solved today because archaeological discoveries and advances in linguistics have eaten away at problems that remained insoluble as recently as fifteen years ago.

Thinking, Fast and Slow – Daniel Kahneman

Among the book’s most fascinating facets are the notions of the experiencing self and the remembering self, underpinning the fundamental duality of the human condition — one voiceless and immersed in the moment, the other occupied with keeping score and learning from experience.

The Happiness Hypothesis – Jonathan Haidt

But automatic processes have been around for millennia, giving them plenty of time to perfect themselves. Higher cortical functioning came on the scene only around 40,000 years or so ago, and is weak and buggy by comparison. This, Haidt points out, "helps to explain why we have inexpensive computers that can solve logic, maths and chess problems as well as any human can" but no robot that can walk in the woods as well as a six-year-old child.

Volk is a journalist with the Philadelphia Magazine covering 'normal' news stories; such as crime, politics, and other assorted city stuff. Having experienced an unusual event in childhood (possibly a ghost or perhaps just a water pipe), Volk set out to research just what there might be behind paranormal events.

The Dervish House is set in 2027 Istanbul, in a future in which Turkey and the Queen of Cities have moved into the EU, where "the sick man of Europe" has boomed again, the center of a new practical nanotech revolution that has high-achieving school-kids and high-flying commodities traders snorting vials of tailored nano to help them cope with their days.

Mutants & Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal
by Jeffrey J. Kripal

Seeing Further: The Story of Science, Discovery, and the Genius of the Royal Society

They did more than wonder: they experimented. They choked chickens, gagged fish, strangled dogs and dissected living cats. They transfused blood from a sheep to a human. They tried to imprison a spider inside a circle of powdered unicorn's horn. They also suffocated mice; but according to their first chronicler, they themselves breathed "a freer air" and conversed quietly "without being ingag'd in the passions, and madness of that dismal Age". These men lived in a world of plague, fire, war, public execution, witchcraft, alchemy, religious hatred, political ferment and precarious patronage: but they made it a rule to discuss neither God nor politics, nor news "other than what concern'd our business of Philosophy".

The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
by Steven Pinker

Elaine Pagels

What the prophets did is, they took the most ancient version of the creation story — it's not the one you find in Genesis. The most ancient creation story tells how the God of Israel had to fight a giant dragon. This is a Babylonian story. It goes back to the god Marduk. But they took the story about God fighting a dragon in the beginning of time, and they applied it to the crisis of the war. The prophet Jeremiah talked about how the king of Babylon is a beastly sea monster whom God spears and slaughters. The prophet Isaiah calls on God to wake up and fight against Israel's foreign enemies. Isaiah pictures Israel's enemies. It's the Babylonian empire. He says, "That old serpent, the dragon, Leviathan, the dragon that lives in the sea." Isaiah also pictured Israel's foreign enemies as a rich and decadent whore. When John of Patmos, who was steeped in these writings, asks, "How long is God going to allow evildoers to triumph over Israel?" he says Jesus told him what the earlier prophets had said, that God is about to come and finish the cosmic war he started in the beginning of time, and kill the dragon who embodies the forces of evil once and for all. John of Patmos triumphantly says that today's Babylon, which is Rome, although it's raging like Leviathan, is decadent as the whore, is about to fall as Rome triumphs.

Just a note that this Book of Revelation doesn't contain things that many of its contemporary admirers claim to find. It doesn't have anything about a rapture. It doesn't have anything about a requirement that Jews become Christian. Although, for over a thousand five hundred years, John's book has been in the New Testament, John had no anticipation of a New Testament, because his only scriptures were the Hebrew Bible. John regarded himself as a Jew who had found the Messiah. And would have been shocked to learn that his future readers regarded him as a Christian. As far as he was concerned, Christianity hadn't yet been invented. John never uses the term Christian. He wouldn't have applied it to himself, even if he knew the term. We don't know if he knew it, because it was probably coined by Roman soldiers to identify gentiles, that is, non-Jews, accused of atheism, because they didn't worship the gods of Rome, and accused of treason because they were now devoted to a cult that followed the seditionist, Jesus of Nazareth.

In her new book Revelations: Visions, Prophecy and Politics in the Book of Revelation, Princeton University religious professor Elaine Pagels places the Book of Revelation in its historical context and explores where the book's apocalyptic vision of the end of the world comes from.

Reamde - Neal Stephenson

Christopher Moore on Lamb

Spenser, Sunny Randall, Jesse Stone

Winifred Gallagher

Winifred Gallagher

This year for the first time more ebooks were sold than hardbacks. Publishers have responded by bringing out exquisite new releases and revamps of classics

A celebration of archives, archival material, and the amazing history that they protect.

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Penguincubator

The History of Science Fiction