Searching for Sasquatch

Searching for Sasquatch
Author: B. Regal
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2011-04-11
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0230118291

The first academic study of this subject is an entertaining look at the search for Sasquatch which considers not just the nature of monsters and monster hunting in the late 20th century, but the more important relationship between the professional scientists and amateur naturalists who hunt them—and their place in the history of science.

Physics on the Fringe

Physics on the Fringe
Author: Margaret Wertheim
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 317
Release: 2011-11-01
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0802778739

For the past fifteen years, acclaimed science writer Margaret Wertheim has been collecting the works of "outsider physicists," many without formal training and all convinced that they have found true alternative theories of the universe. Jim Carter, the Einstein of outsiders, has developed his own complete theory of matter and energy and gravity that he demonstrates with experiments in his backyard,-with garbage cans and a disco fog machine he makes smoke rings to test his ideas about atoms. Captivated by the imaginative power of his theories and his resolutely DIY attitude, Wertheim has been following Carter's progress for the past decade. Centuries ago, natural philosophers puzzled out the laws of nature using the tools of observation and experimentation. Today, theoretical physics has become mathematically inscrutable, accessible only to an elite few. In rejecting this abstraction, outsider theorists insist that nature speaks a language we can all understand. Through a profoundly human profile of Jim Carter, Wertheim's exploration of the bizarre world of fringe physics challenges our conception of what science is, how it works, and who it is for.

Which Way to the Future?

Which Way to the Future?
Author: Stanley Schmidt
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2004-03-04
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780765301055

"It's easy to imagine ways the future can be ugly and depressing. It's harder, but more worthwhile, to imagine plausible ways we can make it better," says Stanley Schmidt, and he should know. As the editor of Analog (and a science-fiction writer himself), he's thought about the future more than most. Since the golden age of John W. Campbell (editor from 1938-72), Analog magazine has been renowned for editorials that provoke, prod, inspire, anger, and ignite the magazine's readers into thinking, questioning their own assumptions, and looking at the world with fresh insights. From 1978 to the present, the man challenged to light a fire under the readers month after month has been editor Stanley Schmidt. He has succeeded in exemplary fashion, which helps to explain why he's a twenty-two-time nominee for the best editor Hugo Award. Now, for the first time, thirty-five of his stimulating essays have been gathered in book form. In "King of the Hill (No Matter What)" he considers the questions of animal and machine intelligence. "The Fermi Plague" offers a frightening answer to Enrico Fermi's famous paradox about the apparent absence of alien civilizations. "Invisible Enemies, Intelligent Choices" examines the proper role of science in public policy. Running the gamut from how to challenge scientific orthodoxy to the flaws of our educational system, from the serious value of humor to the difficult choices between jobs and conservation, all the pieces are, in different ways, answers to the question asked by the title: Which way to the future? Schmidt's answers will engage anyone with an eye on tomorrow.

The Death of Science

The Death of Science
Author: Andrew Holster
Publisher: Universal-Publishers
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2016-07-26
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1627340769

Modern science is in unprecedented crisis. It is a crisis at many levels, continuous with larger crises of modern society. It is a crisis for the vocation of the scientist working within the modern institutionalised structures of science. It is a crisis for our capacity to use science benevolently to help solve larger material, organisational, and ultimately political problems of the modern era. And it is a crisis for philosophy, for the role of natural science to help inform our world-view. The Death of Science is an account of deeper causes of this malaise. It starts by taking up the reins of López Corredoira's (2013) The Twilight of the Scientific Age, a recent critique that concludes with modern science on its death bed. It dissects key themes in detail, illustrated in the same frank style, drawing on personal examples. It starts with deep issues in the philosophy of science, recounting failed modern concepts of scientific progress, method and truth, going on to failures of peer review and gate-keeping as quality control systems, the domination of propaganda and marketing channels as the critical tools for professional success, and the major outcome for creative scientists themselves: the destruction of scientific creativity and exclusion of heterodox thinkers in this degraded environment. It connects the behavioural symptoms with a psycho-social analysis of the bureaucratic mode of organisation under which science, like all other modern vocations, is now subsumed. The account supports López Corredoira's appraisal, which sees a modern science industry driven by greed and ambition, repressing imagination and freedom, destructive of novelty and diversity of ideas, controlled by bureaucratic-academic power hierarchies. While science is irrevocably corrupted by its modern mass-institutionalisation, the true spirit of science can only be sustained by individuals with a real vocation as scientists, or natural philosophers, who seek understanding and meaning and wisdom, rather than technocratic specialisation and careers. But it is increasingly impossible for scientists to withstand forces of professional conformity, and maintain their personal sense of value. A number of current controversies in some core sciences are also discussed, and it is argued that the greatest revelations of real science are yet to come. While Establishment Science has locked itself into dogmatic paradigms, the failures of present theories show that we are really on the cusp of major revolutions, spanning sciences of physics and cosmology, information and intelligence, biology and evolution, and mind and consciousness. If these are realised, they will profoundly change our understanding of the nature of the world and ourselves. But any such revolutions challenge a Science Establishment locked into the self-interest of its power-brokers, and are unlikely to occur except through independent scientists working outside the institutional system. The book concludes with a brief discussion of the place of independent scientists.

Conceptual Structures for Discovering Knowledge

Conceptual Structures for Discovering Knowledge
Author: Heather D. Pfeiffer
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 343
Release: 2013-01-06
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 3642357865

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Conceptual Structures, ICCS 2013, held in Mumbai, India, in January 2013. The 22 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 43 submissions for inclusion in the book. The volume also contains 3 invited talks. ICCS focuses on the useful representation and analysis of conceptual knowledge with research and business applications. It advances the theory and practice in connecting the user's conceptual approach to problem solving with the formal structures that computer applications need to bring their productivity to bear. Conceptual structures (CS) represent a family of approaches that builds on the successes of artificial intelligence, business intelligence, computational linguistics, conceptual modeling, information and Web technologies, user modeling, and knowledge management.

California Fruits, Flakes, and Nuts

California Fruits, Flakes, and Nuts
Author: David Kulczyk
Publisher: Linden Publishing
Total Pages: 201
Release: 2013-11-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1610351940

A freewheeling catalog of misfits, eccentrics, creeps, criminals, and failed dreamers, this compendium profiles 45 bizarre personalities who exemplify the Golden State’s well-deserved reputation for nonconformity. In the pages, Gold Rush pioneers are revealed as murderous madmen; Hollywood celebrities are shown to be drug-addled sex maniacs; early hippies are just 1950s weirdos; and even seemingly ordinary Californians have a talent for freakish, crazy, and criminal behavior. From frontier lunatic Grizzly Adams, whose head was one massive wound after multiple bear attacks, to I Love Lucy star William Frawley, a racist, misogynist, foul-mouthed drunk, and legendarily awful film director Ed Wood, California Fruits, Flakes, and Nuts is a side-splitting look at the people who made California the strangest place on earth.

Crackpot Or Genius?

Crackpot Or Genius?
Author: Francis D. Reynolds
Publisher:
Total Pages: 212
Release: 1993
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN:

Reynolds shows how to be truly innovative and know how to turn a worthy invention into a welcome product, examining the legal and commercial aspects of the trade.