Tag Archives: renaissance

The Math Book – DK

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The Math Book

DK

Genre: Mathematics

Price: $2.99

Publish Date: September 3, 2019

Publisher: DK Publishing

Seller: PENGUIN GROUP USA, INC.


Discover more than 85 of the most important mathematical ideas, theorems, and proofs ever devised, and the great minds behind them, with this original and colorful book. Take a journey through the fascinating story of fractions, numbers, patterns, and shapes in order to better understand the complex world we live in. Continuing the "Big Ideas" series' trademark combination of authoritative, clear text and bold graphics to chart the development of math through history, the book explores and explains some of the most complex and fascinating mathematical subjects. Delve into everything from the mathematical ideas and inventions of the ancient world such as the first number systems, magic squares, and the Chinese abacus, through to the developments in mathematics during medieval and Renaissance Europe, to the rise of group theory and cryptography more recently. This diverse and inclusive account of mathematics will have something for everybody: for those interested in the maths behind world economies, secret spies, modern technology and plenty more, taking readers around the world from Babylon to Bletchley Park. Tracing maths through the Scientific Revolution to its 21st-century use in computers, the internet, and AI, The Math Book uses an innovative visual approach to make the subject accessible to everyone, casual readers and students alike.

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The Math Book – DK

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Strange Medicine – Nathan Belofsky

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Strange Medicine

A Shocking History of Real Medical Practices Through the Ages

Nathan Belofsky

Genre: History

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: July 2, 2013

Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group

Seller: Penguin Group (USA) Inc.


Strange Medicine casts a gimlet eye on the practice of medicine through the ages that highlights the most dubious ideas, bizarre treatments, and biggest blunders. From bad science and oafish behavior to stomach-turning procedures that hurt more than helped, Strange Medicine presents strange but true facts and an honor roll of doctors, scientists, and dreamers who inadvertently turned the clock of medicine backward: • The ancient Egyptians applied electric eels to cure gout. • Medieval dentists burned candles in patients’ mouths to kill invisible worms gnawing at their teeth. • Renaissance physicians timed surgical procedures according to the position of the stars, and instructed epileptics to collect fresh blood from the newly beheaded. • Dr. Walter Freeman, the world’s foremost practitioner of lobotomies, practiced his craft while traveling on family camping trips, cramming the back of the station wagon with kids—and surgical tools—then hammering ice picks into the eye sockets of his patients in between hikes in the woods. Strange Medicine is an illuminating panorama of medical history as you’ve never seen it before.

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Strange Medicine – Nathan Belofsky

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One of Obama’s Favorite Writers Redefines Spirituality

Mother Jones

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“Unfashionable” is a word that Marilynne Robinson has used to describe herself, but the world appears to disagree.

The “self-declared Calvinist from northern Idaho” has been held up as one of the most iconic writers of our time, with an uncommon gift for finding the sacred in the everyday. Her fans include President Obama, who recently sat down with the author in Des Moines for an expansive interview in the New York Review of Books.

Robinson published Housekeeping, her first novel, in 1980, and for most of the years since she has taught at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. She describes the process of writing a novel as though it were a forming star—a nebulous voice that comes to her on its own accord and gradually gains shape, accumulating narrative heft. Recently, those voices have called out from a fictional, mid-century town in Iowa called Gilead, resulting in an award-winning trilogy of novels. Gilead won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005, Home was honored with the Orange Prize in 2009, and Lila was named to the long-list (among the finalists) for the Man Booker Prize this year.

But Robinson is also the author of penetrating nonfiction that has tackled topics from the roots of her Calvinist faith to nuclear contamination. In her latest collection, The Givenness of Things, out this Tuesday, Robinson casts John Calvin, the 16th century theologian whose doctrine is often today simplified as predestining some for heaven and others for hell. In Givenness, Calvin is portrayed as a misunderstood scholar who saw human curiosity and inventiveness as “unmistakeable proofs of the existence of the soul.”

The new essays, like their author, evade easy categories, pairing theological arguments with sweeping critiques of brain research, Shakespearean conspiracy theories, and a broad cross section of American politics (“Those who hate Fox News are as persuaded by its representation of the country as are its truest devotees”). But those quarrels drive at a more hopeful conclusion: that grace and wonder live on in modern times.

courtesy of FSG

Mother Jones: You describe discovering a story by slowly finding and nurturing a voice. Does your nonfiction form that way?

Marilynne Robinson: It happens fairly often that something I hear or read strikes me as false or somehow in error. This can happen because I have information I trust that is at odds with it. Sometimes my doubt seems intuitive, but most likely it derives from an implausibility or a logical problem I may at first find difficult to identify and articulate. It is interesting to me to work through questions that arise in this way.

MJ: What led you to undertake this deep investigation of the history and literature related to your faith?

MR: Faith takes a great many forms, suited to a variety of sensibilities, and mine happens to suit me very well. So I have studied it for the pleasure of the work, and for its good effect on my mind. The classic theology of my tradition comes from the French Renaissance. Shakespeare was born in 1564, the year Calvin died, and that theology was very influential in England in his lifetime. I think Shakespeare was attentive to questions raised by it, about human nature, history, reality itself. I find the two literatures to be mutually illuminating.

MJ: While working on the essays, did you come across any surprises in Calvin’s life or work?

MR: I had been reading about Calvin for years and had been studying the English Renaissance for many more years, and it had never occurred to me to think of them together. I learned that Calvin was the most widely read writer in England in Shakespeare’s lifetime. He was translated and published in many editions. His theology emphasizes the sanctity of conscience, the sanctity of companionate marriage, and the obligation of those in power to attend to the well-being of the people in general, especially the poor. Interestingly, for the interpretation of Hamlet, for example, he forbids even the thought of revenge. This is not the Calvin of myth, but when the Elizabethans read him there was no such myth, nor would there be now, if he were read.

MJ: What are you reading now?

MR: Lately I’ve been reading in the period leading to and including the English Civil War—Edward Coke, the political writing of John Milton, Calvin’s letters to the Earl of Somerset. I just got four volumes of the letters and speeches of Oliver Cromwell. He is prominent among the great unread, and treated so oddly by history that I wanted to hear his side of things.

MJ: In the essays, you describe the civil rights era as a third great awakening that stirred both religious and civic change. Was that part of what drew you to set your novels in the 1950s?

MR: It is true that America in the moments just before that era began interests me a great deal. It seems we are always about to realize again how much the complacencies of the majority culture have hidden from them. Now the issues of policing and incarceration have arisen, very grave issues that somehow are only recently acknowledged. Thank God these awakenings come, though it is grievous thing that they are always necessary. There is a mystery in this pattern of self-deception, then shock. It has everything to do with the moral competence of society, which we are generally much too ready to assume and rely on.

MJ: As I read about Calvin in The Givenness of Things, the children of your fiction often came to mind—their curiosity unencumbered by preconceived expectations. Lila is someone who doesn’t seem to lose this quality in adulthood. What do those perspectives bring to your work?

MR: Calvin treats experience as essentially visionary and revelatory from moment to moment, addressed to the individual perceiver, the individual soul. Where this is assumed preconceptions can only distract and obscure, though, of course, as human beings we can never wholly free ourselves of them. John Ames is acculturated by his faith to try to see given experience as visionary. Lila is very slightly acculturated and sees the world quite directly. Their worlds meet. I believe that reality is vastly richer than the cursory attention we usually give it permits us to understand. I like to write through a consciousness that allows me to suggest something of this richness.

MJ: In that vein, you’ve lived in Iowa City for 25 years and your recent novels have offered an intimate portrait of a single community. You don’t appear to be in a rush to pack up and move on from places, in life or in literature.

MR: I do assume that a character or a place is inexhaustible and will always reward further attention. In the nature of things, limitation is a strategy of thought, not a property of anything real. It seems there may be vast complexity within, so to speak, subatomic particles. Limitation is a good discipline because it discourages inappropriate generalization, which distracts attention from the profound, particular complexity that characterizes anything at all.

MJ: Given that perspective, and because you’ve been critical of media coverage and oversaturation of information in the past, it’s surprising that you seem warm to the potential of the internet in your essays. Where does your optimism come from?

MR: I don’t think I would worry about an oversaturation of information if it was indeed information. It is the slovenly, hasty traffic in cliché and sensationalism and bad reasoning that bothers me. I love finding arcane primary texts on the web. The people who think to put them up are heroes of mine. The accessibility and effective immortality of actual information is a magnificent phenomenon, a beautiful extension of human consciousness. It is too bad people find so many ways to abuse the internet, but that’s just how things are.

MJ: In your essay on realism from The Givenness of Things you write, “I wish that I had experienced my earthly life more deeply.” That’s a surprising, humbling admission. What do you mean by it?

MR: I think I am like most people in letting myself worry about things that didn’t matter. Concepts like quotidian and humdrum prevented me for years from really absorbing the miraculous strangeness of bombing around a star on a tottering planet, of watching the world unfold in time. I’m amazed at what I have taken for granted. How to truly take in our situation I don’t know, but I wish I had started asking myself that question earlier than I did.

MJ: You’ve said we can expect a return to Gilead in the future. Can you say what you have in the works?

MR: Is it haunting my mind? Yes. Have I written a few pages? Yes. Does this mean that it is in the works? We’ll see.

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One of Obama’s Favorite Writers Redefines Spirituality

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Capitalism and Machines Go Together Like Peanut Butter and Jelly

Mother Jones

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James Pethokoukis says that economist Deirdre McCloskey has written “the most powerful defense of market capitalism you will ever read.” It’s based on the chart on the right, which shows the fantastic growth of the world economy since about 1800:

Now, McCloskey does not like the word “capitalism.” She would prefer our economic system be called “technological and institutional betterment at a frenetic pace, tested by unforced exchange among all the parties involved.”

Or perhaps “fantastically successful liberalism, in the old European sense, applied to trade and politics, as it was applied also to science and music and painting and literature.”

Or simply “trade-tested progress.”

I am a considerable fan of capitalism by nearly any standard (aside from the current Republican Party one, which essentially holds that you’re a socialist if you believe in any regulation of large corporations at all). So sure: capitalism or free market exchange or whatever you want to call it certainly deserves plenty of credit here.

But was it the main driving force of the post-1800 economy? McCloskey says the Great Expansion wasn’t the result of “coal, thrift, transport, high male wages, low female and child wages, surplus value, human capital, geography, railways, institutions, infrastructure, nationalism, the quickening of commerce, the late medieval run-up, Renaissance individualism, the First Divergence, the Black Death, American silver, the original accumulation of capital, piracy, empire, eugenic improvement, the mathematization of celestial mechanics, technical education, or a perfection of property rights.” Those had existed for a long time. Rather, it’s the fact that European elites “came to accept or even admire the values of trade and betterment.”

But does that seem right? I don’t know much about China or India—and I might be wrong about Europe too—but I’ve always thought that trade and commerce were also relatively free during, say, the height of the Roman Empire. The landed elites made a lot of money in trade, and if merchants weren’t quite pillars of society, they were hardly social lepers either. The legions were routinely used to protect trade routes. Corruption was endemic, but tariffs and regulations on trade were fairly mild. The pursuit of wealth was respectable, and accounting practices were sophisticated.

Is that right? Maybe I’m woefully misinformed. But it seems like the big difference between AD 0 and AD 1800 wasn’t so much attitudes toward trade as it was the obvious thing that McCloskey left off her list: machines. As long as humans and animals were the only source of power, there was a limit to how much wealth could be generated. But if the Romans had invented steam engines and electrification, we’d all be speaking Latin today and arguing about what made Roman culture so special.

This is something that’s been a subject of academic study for a long time, and I hardly expect to break any new ground here. But while a respect for fairly free trade might be a prerequisite for exponential economic growth, the example of Rome suggests that more than that is needed. The truly interesting question, then, is: why did 18th century Europeans invent machine power but 1st century Europeans didn’t?

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Capitalism and Machines Go Together Like Peanut Butter and Jelly

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Why Are These Hedge Fund Kingpins Dumping Millions Into the Midterms?

Mother Jones

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Hedge fund pioneer James Simons during a 2007 interview Mark Lennihan/AP

As Democrats and Republicans battle for control of the Senate, hedge funds are dumping millions of dollars into congressional campaigns. Most of these companies are lining up behind one party or the other. But the second-biggest spender, Long Island-based Renaissance Technologies, is playing both sides of the aisle. As of early September, the firm’s CEO, Robert Mercer, had given $3.1 million to Republican candidates and super-PACs. Its founder and chairman, James Simons—a brilliant former National Security Agency code breaker—had donated $3.2 million to their Democratic counterparts.

Neither man has spoken publicly about his motives, but the donations coincide with at least two federal investigations into Renaissance’s business dealings. In July, Renaissance executives were hauled before a Senate subcommittee and grilled about the company’s use of complex financial instruments to dodge billions of dollars in taxes and skirt federal leverage limits, which protect the financial markets from swings and crashes. As Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) put it during the hearing, “excessive leverage” can “bring down not just a reckless borrower, but the financial institution that lent it money, and that failure can ripple through the entire financial system.”

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Why Are These Hedge Fund Kingpins Dumping Millions Into the Midterms?

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Africa’s biggest wind farm starts spinning

Africa’s biggest wind farm starts spinning

Shutterstock

Ethiopia’s infamous droughts don’t just condemn the country to periodic famine; they also deprive it of electricity.

In a major step toward diversifying a power system that’s almost entirely reliant on hydropower, the country has built Africa’s largest wind farm. Power production started at the $290 million Ashegoda Wind Farm on Saturday, four years after construction began. From Reuters:

The 120 MW, 84-turbine farm — straddling a sprawling field of grassland dotted by stone-brick hamlets more than 780 kilometers north of Addis Ababa — is part of a plan to mitigate the impact of dry seasons on the country’s dams.

At present, Ethiopia’s energy resources are almost completely derived from hydropower projects.

“It compliments hydropower, which is seasonal. When you have a dry water season we have higher wind speed,” said Mihret Debebe, CEO of the Ethiopian Electric Power Corporation.

“There is harmony between the two sources of energy.”

Last week, Ethiopia also signed a preliminary agreement with a U.S.-Icelandic firm for a $4 billion private sector investment intended to tap its vast geothermal power resources and produce 1,000 MW from steam.

During a speech at the weekend inauguration, Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn said “there is potential to harness abundant wind energy resources in every region of Ethiopia.”

But Ethiopia is still looking to boost its hydropower generation. The country plans to build a 6,000-megawatt Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on a tributary of the Nile. If completed as planned, it will cost $4.2 billion and be the largest dam in Africa. Downstream neighbors like Egypt would probably prefer a lot more wind turbines.


Source
Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan Mull New Probe Nile Dam Impact, Bloomberg
Ethiopia opens Africa’s largest wind farm to boost power production, Reuters

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Africa’s biggest wind farm starts spinning

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