The Complete Guide to Absolutely Everything (Abridged)

The Complete Guide to Absolutely Everything (Abridged)
Author: Adam Rutherford
Publisher: National Geographic Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2023-01-03
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1324051035

The complete story of the universe and absolutely everything in it (minus the boring parts). Despite our clever linguistic abilities, humans are spectacularly ill-equipped to comprehend what’s happening in the universe. Our senses and intuition routinely mislead us. The Complete Guide to Absolutely Everything (Abridged) tells the story of how we came to suppress our monkey minds and perceive the true nature of reality. Written with wit and humor, this brief book tells the story of science—tales of fumbles and missteps, errors and egos, hard work, accidents, and some really bad decisions—all of which have created the sum total of human knowledge. Geneticist Adam Rutherford and mathematician Hannah Fry guide readers through time and space, through our bodies and brains, showing how emotions shape our view of reality, how our minds tell us lies, and why a mostly bald and curious ape decided to begin poking at the fabric of the universe. Rutherford and Fry shine as science sleuths, wrestling with some truly head-scratching questions: Where did time come from? Do we have free will? Does my dog love me? Hilarious sidebars present memorable scientific oddities: for example, hypnotized snails, human-sized ants, and the average time it takes most animals to evacuate their bladders. (A surprisingly consistent twenty-one seconds, if you must know.) Both rigorous and playful, The Complete Guide to Absolutely Everything (Abridged) is a celebration of the weirdness of the cosmos, the strangeness of humans, and the joys and follies of scientific discovery.

Rutherford and Fry's Complete Guide to Absolutely Everything (Abridged)

Rutherford and Fry's Complete Guide to Absolutely Everything (Abridged)
Author: Adam Rutherford
Publisher: Corgi
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2022-10-13
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 9780552176712

In Rutherford and Fry's comprehensive guidebook, they tell the complete story of the universe and absolutely everything in it - skipping over some of the boring parts. This is a celebration of the weirdness of the cosmos, the strangeness of humans and the fact that amid all the mess, we can somehow make sense of life. Our brains have evolved to tell us all sorts of things that feel intuitively right but just aren't true- the world looks flat, the stars seem fixed in the heavenly firmament, a day is 24 hours... This book is crammed full of tales of how stuff really works. With the power of science, Rutherford and Fry show us how to bypass our monkey-brains, taking us on a journey from the origin of time and space, via planets, galaxies, evolution, the dinosaurs, all the way into our minds, and wrestling with some truly head-scratching questions that only science can answer- What is time, and where does it come from? Why are animals the size and shape they are? What is a thought? How horoscopes work (Spoiler- they don't, but you think they do) Does my dog love me? Why nothing is truly round Do you need your eyes to see?

The Complete Guide to Absolutely Everything (Abridged): Adventures in Math and Science

The Complete Guide to Absolutely Everything (Abridged): Adventures in Math and Science
Author: Adam Rutherford
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2022-01-25
Genre: Science
ISBN: 039388158X

The complete story of the universe and absolutely everything in it (minus the boring parts). Despite our clever linguistic abilities, humans are spectacularly ill-equipped to comprehend what’s happening in the universe. Our senses and intuition routinely mislead us. The Complete Guide to Absolutely Everything (Abridged) tells the story of how we came to suppress our monkey minds and perceive the true nature of reality. Written with wit and humor, this brief book tells the story of science—tales of fumbles and missteps, errors and egos, hard work, accidents, and some really bad decisions—all of which have created the sum total of human knowledge. Geneticist Adam Rutherford and mathematician Hannah Fry guide readers through time and space, through our bodies and brains, showing how emotions shape our view of reality, how our minds tell us lies, and why a mostly bald and curious ape decided to begin poking at the fabric of the universe. Rutherford and Fry shine as science sleuths, wrestling with some truly head-scratching questions: Where did time come from? Do we have free will? Does my dog love me? Hilarious sidebars present memorable scientific oddities: for example, hypnotized snails, human-sized ants, and the average time it takes most animals to evacuate their bladders. (A surprisingly consistent twenty-one seconds, if you must know.) Both rigorous and playful, The Complete Guide to Absolutely Everything (Abridged) is a celebration of the weirdness of the cosmos, the strangeness of humans, and the joys and follies of scientific discovery.

The Mathematics of Love

The Mathematics of Love
Author: Hannah Fry
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 128
Release: 2015-02-03
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 1476784884

"A mathematician pulls back the curtain and reveals the hidden patterns--from dating sites to divorce, sex to marriage--behind the rituals of love ... applying mathematical formulas to the most common yet complex questions pertaining to love: What's the chance of finding love? What's the probability that it will last? How do online dating algorithms work, exactly? Can game theory help us decide who to approach in a bar? At what point in your dating life should you settle down?"--Amazon.com.

Hello World

Hello World
Author: Hannah Fry
Publisher: Black Swan Books, Limited
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2019
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 9781784163068

_______________ 'One of the best books yet written on data and algorithms. . .deserves a place on the bestseller charts.' (The Times) You are accused of a crime. Who would you rather determined your fate - a human or an algorithm? An algorithm is more consistent and less prone to error of judgement. Yet a human can look you in the eye before passing sentence. Welcome to the age of the algorithm, the story of a not-too-distant future where machines rule supreme, making important decisions - in healthcare, transport, finance, security, what we watch, where we go even who we send to prison. So how much should we rely on them? What kind of future do we want? Hannah Fry takes us on a tour of the good, the bad and the downright ugly of the algorithms that surround us. In Hello World she lifts the lid on their inner workings, demonstrates their power, exposes their limitations, and examines whether they really are an improvement on the humans they are replacing. A BBC RADIO 4- BOOK OF THE WEEK SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2018 BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE AND 2018 ROYAL SOCIETY SCIENCE BOOK PRIZE

The Book of Humans: A Brief History of Culture, Sex, War, and the Evolution of Us

The Book of Humans: A Brief History of Culture, Sex, War, and the Evolution of Us
Author: Adam Rutherford
Publisher: The Experiment, LLC
Total Pages: 303
Release: 2020-05-12
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1615195327

“Rutherford describes [The Book of Humans] as being about the paradox of how our evolutionary journey turned ‘an otherwise average ape’ into one capable of creating complex tools, art, music, science, and engineering. It’s an intriguing question, one his book sets against descriptions of the infinitely amusing strategies and antics of a dizzying array of animals.”—The New York Times Book Review Publisher’s Note: The Book of Humans was previously published in hardcover as Humanimal. In this new evolutionary history, geneticist Adam Rutherford explores the profound paradox of the human animal. Looking for answers across the animal kingdom, he finds that many things once considered exclusively human are not: We aren’t the only species that “speaks,” makes tools, or has sex outside of procreation. Seeing as our genome is 98 percent identical to a chimpanzee’s, our DNA doesn’t set us far apart, either. How, then, did we develop the most complex culture ever observed? The Book of Humans proves that we are animals indeed—and reveals how we truly are extraordinary.

Art & Crime

Art & Crime
Author: Stefan Koldehoff
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Total Pages: 351
Release: 2022-07-12
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1644211203

A thrilling, eye-popping look at true crime in the billion-dollar art world. The art world is one of the most secretive of global businesses, and the list of its crimes runs long and deep. Today, with prices in the hundreds of millions for individual artworks, and billionaires' collections among the most conspicuous and liquid of their assets, crime is more rampant than ever in this largely unregulated universe. Increased prices and globalization have introduced new levels of fraud and malfeasance into the art world--everything from "artnapping," in which an artwork is held hostage and only returned for a ransom, to forgery and tax fraud. However, the extent of the economic and cultural damage that results from criminality in the global art scene rarely comes to light. The stories of high-stakes, brazen art crimes told by art experts Stefan Koldehoff and Tobias Timm are by turns thrilling, disturbing, and unbelievable (the imagination for using art to commit crimes seems boundless). The authors also provide a well-founded analysis of what needs to change in the art market and at museums. From the authors of False Pictures, Real Money (about the Beltracchi art forgery case), Art and Crime includes a chapter on art owned by Donald Trump. It is a thoroughly researched, explosive, and highly topical book that uncovers the extraordinary and multifarious thefts of art and cultural objects around the world.

The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic

The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic
Author: Emily Croy Barker
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 741
Release: 2013-08-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1101585579

An imaginative story of a woman caught in an alternate world—where she will need to learn the skills of magic to survive Nora Fischer’s dissertation is stalled and her boyfriend is about to marry another woman. During a miserable weekend at a friend’s wedding, Nora wanders off and walks through a portal into a different world where she’s transformed from a drab grad student into a stunning beauty. Before long, she has a set of glamorous new friends and her romance with gorgeous, masterful Raclin is heating up. It’s almost too good to be true. Then the elegant veneer shatters. Nora’s new fantasy world turns darker, a fairy tale gone incredibly wrong. Making it here will take skills Nora never learned in graduate school. Her only real ally—and a reluctant one at that—is the magician Aruendiel, a grim, reclusive figure with a biting tongue and a shrouded past. And it will take her becoming Aruendiel’s student—and learning magic herself—to survive. When a passage home finally opens, Nora must weigh her “real life” against the dangerous power of love and magic. For lovers of Lev Grossman's The Magicians series (The Magicians and The Magician King) and Deborah Harkness's All Souls Trilogy (A Discovery of Witches and Shadow of Night).

The Decline of the West

The Decline of the West
Author: Oswald Spengler
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 500
Release: 1991
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780195066340

Spengler's work describes how we have entered into a centuries-long "world-historical" phase comparable to late antiquity, and his controversial ideas spark debate over the meaning of historiography.

Behave

Behave
Author: Robert M. Sapolsky
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 801
Release: 2018-05-01
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0143110918

New York Times bestseller • Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize • One of the Washington Post's 10 Best Books of the Year “It’s no exaggeration to say that Behave is one of the best nonfiction books I’ve ever read.” —David P. Barash, The Wall Street Journal "It has my vote for science book of the year.” —Parul Sehgal, The New York Times "Immensely readable, often hilarious...Hands-down one of the best books I’ve read in years. I loved it." —Dina Temple-Raston, The Washington Post From the bestselling author of A Primate's Memoir and the forthcoming Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will comes a landmark, genre-defining examination of human behavior and an answer to the question: Why do we do the things we do? Behave is one of the most dazzling tours d’horizon of the science of human behavior ever attempted. Moving across a range of disciplines, Sapolsky—a neuroscientist and primatologist—uncovers the hidden story of our actions. Undertaking some of our thorniest questions relating to tribalism and xenophobia, hierarchy and competition, and war and peace, Behave is a towering achievement—a majestic synthesis of cutting-edge research and a heroic exploration of why we ultimately do the things we do . . . for good and for ill.