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In this entertaining book packed with fascinating tidbits, Parsons explores the science behind such basic cooking methods as chopping, mixing, frying, roasting, boiling, and baking. You'll learn why soaking beans can't offset their gaseous effects, why green vegetables shouldn't be cooked under a lid for long, which fruits you can buy unripe and which you should buy fully ripened, which thickener to choose for your turkey gravy, which piecrust is foolproof for a beginner.

In this entertaining book packed with fascinating tidbits, Parsons explores the science behind such basic cooking methods as chopping, mixing, frying, roasting, boiling, and baking. You'll learn why soaking beans can't offset their gaseous effects, why green vegetables shouldn't be cooked under a lid for long, which fruits you can buy unripe and which you should buy fully ripened, which thickener to choose for your turkey gravy, which piecrust is foolproof for a beginner.

Looks like a great book. I am going to buy it today for a gift.

For the DIY/Geek Chef that has not gone to culinary school, here are three must haves:

The Professional Chef
Gastronomique
La Technique Culinaire

Essentially, textbooks from most schools including the CIA.

Looks like a great book. I am going to buy it today for a gift.

For the DIY/Geek Chef that has not gone to culinary school, here are three must haves:

The Professional Chef
Gastronomique
La Technique Culinaire

Essentially, textbooks from most schools including the CIA.

Looks like a great book. I am going to buy it today for a gift.

For the DIY/Geek Chef that has not gone to culinary school, here are three must haves:

The Professional Chef
Gastronomique
La Technique Culinaire

Essentially, textbooks from most schools including the CIA.

Go to barnesandnoble.com. Do a book keyword search for "medireview". I got 20,031 titles matching. The first so many that I perused didn't even contain the word "medireview". Hmmm...

I'm surprised that nobody mentioned this excellent compilation called OHM.
check it here
This one covers all the pioneers of electronic music including Cage, Stockhausen, Theremin, Henry, etc and stops at Brian Eno. This could be a good introduction before getting into more contemporary stuff...
The included booklet is also quite informative...

For a source on the origins of the `America created AIDS' myth as a Soviet Active-Measures propaganda program, check out The Sword and the Shield: the Mitrokhin archive and the secret history of the KGB by Christopher Andrew and Vasily Mitrokhin, which is one of the best histories of the KGB written since declassified records have become available with the end of the cold war (including the Mitrokhin archive, which is a collection of copies of KGB archival material smuggled over the Finish border by a defecting KGB archivist as the USSR crumbled), and can be purchased here.

Actually, most of the MBA-crowd literature, from the scholarly to the popular is chok full of remarks on disruptive innovations. The most specific on on this subject, however is (aptly enough) The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen.

There are a few really good, more general books on the subject, but i'd have to be at home to find the titles.

Here are some other useful books on the subjects:

Learning XML - also an O'Reilly book

Perl in a nutshell - a good starter book on perl

Here are some other useful books on the subjects:

Learning XML - also an O'Reilly book

Perl in a nutshell - a good starter book on perl

The full title of this book is Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

There are quite a few jokes related to occultism or magic(k), like the literal demonization of (Aleister) Crowley.

Excuse me?

Actually half the reason we have as much waste as we do is because of the moratorium on breeder reactors. The U-238 (nuclear waste/depleted Uranium) coming out of traditional Light Water Reactors can be used in Breeder Reactors to generate more power (and reducing the need to store waste materials). This end product of the process, however, is weapons grade Plutonium-239 and some more U-238 (a smaller amount of U-235 is required as an initiator for the reaction).

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/nucene/ fasbre.html

What alarmists also fail to note is that the resulting Plutonium can be used to fuel yet another form of nuclear reactor. Plutonium Pellet based reactors are not only very efficient, but also one of the safer forms of reactor.

Unfortunately concerns about both weapons grade and reactor grade plutonium (the latter produced in small amounts by standard reactors) being potentially used in nuclear weapons has prevented the widespread construction of breeder reactors and a number of moratoriums for such projects came into being.

Most of the problems occurring in areas such as Iraq caused by depleted uranium dust are related to children ingesting it from untreated drinking water that has become contaminated by UN/NATO forces spent ammunition.

The "military" aspect is also at the root of the public's biggest misconception about plutonium; that the radiation off of plutonium is the "strongest". Plutonium in fact gives off mostly alpha particles which can be stopped by shielding as weak as a piece of normal writing paper or the layer of dead skin cells that covers your body.

Plutonium is however very toxic and radioactively hazardous if ingested or placed on open wounds/etc.

http://www.vnh.org/BUMEDINST6470.10A/Plutonium.htm l

Something else that bothers me about everyone screaming bloody murder over the Yucatan and similar storage facilities is this bizzare belief by people that these materials are somehow magical evil concoctions that were given form in a lab. Most people honestly do not understand that uranium is mined from the ground like any other ore. And that the danger posed by nuclear waste is less one of radiation than of toxicity (radioactive damage stems mainly from consumption or absorbtion into the bloodsteam). The concept of shorter half-lifes being more radioactive also seems to elude people.

You are in far far more danger from walking into your house then you are from nuclear storage.

Most people in the US that are getting into a panic over relatively safe nuclear materials being stored in secure facilities many miles away are not even aware of how near they live to a superfund site. Most superfund sites revolve around heavy metals and other exceedingly toxic substances and are far more common than people think.

Nuclear power is (right now) one of the cleanest and safest power sources available. Too many people are stuck in some sort of a terrified cold war stupor and have been failing to do enough research.

And everyone reading this has to go read Zodiac

The storyline for those is already written. Go check out the Rogue Squadron series. Start here

By the score of 0, it looks like other slashdot members have never read Tracy Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine. (Gollum & Coke were the names of the two wire-wrap prototypes). That book got me started in software development. I actually worked with an Eclipse MV-8000 in college -- nice machine, but old, even then.

Harrumph. Back on topic.
I'm amazed at 20TB of online storage, with another 45TB of near-online storage. But... maybe that's not so impressive today - using RAID5 and 120GB drives, that would only be about 500 drives, or about 192U of rack space - the size of two large (for the USA) refrigerators.

Chip H.

All a Wizard does is increase the success of "usability trials;" it does not actually make the system more usable. I could just regurgitate a bunch of information, but Joel Spolsky wrote an excellent book called User Interface Design for Programmers . It's a good read, if a bit overpriced. Check it out at your local library, or just go to a bookstore and sit down to read it. That might violate the DMCA, however.

Secondly Hoovers willingness to release known false "facts" casts doubt on any claim that these people were really soviet agents and didn't just have left leaning political views.

With due respect, the end of the cold war has resulted in the declassification of millions of pages of information by both sides, and it is no longer credible to claim this -- for all the liberal pieties, we have more evidence of the guilt of Hiss, the Rosenbergs, and many others than ever before, including the Venona intercepts, which are a comprehensive decryption of much of the communication back to the Soviet Union by their intelligence network here, the Mitrokhin archive, which is a large part of the KGB's archival records copied and smuggled out of Moscow as the Soviet Union fell, and a large number of casefiles which both the Soviets and Admericans have declassified.

I'd suggest you start with this book if you want a comprehensive history of Soviet intelligence activity in that period and beyond.

I recently went back to school to get my M.S. in Computer Science and the book A Transition to Advanced Mathematics helped me get back up to speed after not doing any serious math for a while. It gave me the solid foundation I need to get through the difficult math ahead.

It starts out with basic logic, moves on to various proof methods, then to set theory, induction, relations, functions, groups.

This material is to a person who studies mathematics as learning how to read is to a person who studies literature,

I was in the same situation as you are now in 15 years ago when I started my electrical engineering course. I refreshed und extended my mathematical knowledge by use of the Springer Series UTM (Undergraduate Texts in Mathemathics). Nearly all of the volumes have a short but precises introduction to notation and background in the first couple of charpters.
Of particular use were Marsden/Weinstein Calculus I/II/III as well as Lang's introductory book on Algebra.

May your quest for knowledge be a happy one.

I was in the same situation as you are now in 15 years ago when I started my electrical engineering course. I refreshed und extended my mathematical knowledge by use of the Springer Series UTM (Undergraduate Texts in Mathemathics). Nearly all of the volumes have a short but precises introduction to notation and background in the first couple of charpters.
Of particular use were Marsden/Weinstein Calculus I/II/III as well as Lang's introductory book on Algebra.

May your quest for knowledge be a happy one.

A good general book that I picked up a few years ago and am slowly working my way through is 'Mathematics From the Birth of Numbers' by Jan Gullberg.

It provides a very intelligent of the whole topic of Mathematics, from the point of view of an adult reader wanting to learn more. The author goes into a lot of the interesting historical and cultural background behind the math.

It's truly a book that belongs in everyone's library.

The Man Who Counter is a very good book to read and full of Mathematics. It is a good start if you're trying to think Mathematics, not just applying formulae.

I'm sure you'll enjoy it.

Don't let the title fool you--although he uses C++ for his examples, the concepts he talks about (splitting code into components, why each component should be in its own file, levelization of components, etc.) make sense in any OO language.

I consider this book a must-read for anybody working on large programs.

It's not only clear, it's definitive. At the end of FotR, you can find the following text:

The second part is called THE TWO TOWERS, since the events recounted in it are dominated by ORTHANC, the citadel of Saruman, and the fortress of MINAS MORGUL that guards the secret entrance to Mordor; it tells of the deeds and perils of all the members of the now sundered fellowship, until the coming of the Great Darkness.

Unfortunately, this isn't printed in the latest movie versions of the volumes, so if you don't have one of several previous printings, you won't see it.

It's not only clear, it's definitive. At the end of FotR, you can find the following text:

The second part is called THE TWO TOWERS, since the events recounted in it are dominated by ORTHANC, the citadel of Saruman, and the fortress of MINAS MORGUL that guards the secret entrance to Mordor; it tells of the deeds and perils of all the members of the now sundered fellowship, until the coming of the Great Darkness.

Unfortunately, this isn't printed in the latest movie versions of the volumes, so if you don't have one of several previous printings, you won't see it.

It's not only clear, it's definitive. At the end of FotR, you can find the following text:

The second part is called THE TWO TOWERS, since the events recounted in it are dominated by ORTHANC, the citadel of Saruman, and the fortress of MINAS MORGUL that guards the secret entrance to Mordor; it tells of the deeds and perils of all the members of the now sundered fellowship, until the coming of the Great Darkness.

Unfortunately, this isn't printed in the latest movie versions of the volumes, so if you don't have one of several previous printings, you won't see it.

He expanded his scary essay into a scary book, which I highly recommend.
Obedience to Authority

There are ALOT of books that deserve to be thrown away or even burnt...

Here is a few examples of what is called a waste of a renewable resource.

In fact, I have seen behind the local Dollar store cases of "Business at the speed of thought" in the dumpster.... People wouldn't even buy it for $1.00..

Just because it was published and bound in a nice hardcover DOES NOT mean that it is literature, let alone GOOD literature... there are thousands of books published yearly that are pure and utter crap.

d00d,

Not so much into the whole anime thing, myself. But right next to Other Music on 4th Street in the Village is a place called Anime Crash . I haven't been down there in a while, so I'm not sure if they're still there. But they were the last time I was in the neighborhood. Both stores are right across the street from Tower Records (blech!).

Both stores being right next to one another is very convenient. Because, if you're geeky enough to like Anime, you're likely very geeky about the music you listen to as well. And OM is staffed by obsessed music geeks who may consider "Nurse With Wound" a little too mainstream. Think of the music store from High Fidelity, on steroids!

Okay, so that was a little offtopic, but still usefull knowlege IMHO if you're heading down that way.

Anyway, Anime Crash is to obsessive Anime geeks what OM is to music nerds. Check them out.

Also, in NYC you'll find Jim Hanley's Universe useful, which is mostly a comic store but also has a nice supply of Anime. Same thing with Village Comics .

Also, a really good resource (and I'm surprised I didn't think of this first, because I am not entirely convinced that Anime Crash is still open) is Toy Tokyo which is also in the Village but has a location up on 73rd St as well. They are definitely still in the biz, I was just there last Tuesday. They have lots of nice Asian and obscure American toys, as well as a comprehensive collection of Anime. And of course, don't forget your old stand-by in the City, Forbidden Planet .

And that's just what I can think of off the top of my head. I think this list'll be pretty useful to you in Central Jersey, I'm from there myself. Now I'm living in Union City and commuting into New York. If you're determined to be mall-bound in suburban NJ, SunCoast Video actually has a very surprisingly good selection to choose from in terms of video releases.

New York, however, has EVERYTHING you could possibly wish for, for good or ill. You can get crack cocaine, you can get heroine, you can get prostitutes, Anime, Hentai...everything your little ole heart desires! Except, of course, egg and cheese on a bagel after 10:30 in the morning! ;)

You can easily arrive at the one in ten rule yourself, if you do a little web research. It's surely the leaast controversial thing I said!

Now you, and others, keep claiming this, but the fact remains that every single government which has described itself as communist has been murderous and totalitarian. Every single one. And every single one has said, as you say, that `what went before was not really communism. We are the true communism.'

So, while you may say `trust us, we'll be different this time, we mean it', you'll have to forgive us if we're not willing to take that chance.

You believe that because you've only read the history that tells you about the totalitarian ones. Read "Rogue State" by Philip Blum. When you've finished that, try "A People's History of the United States" by Howard Zinn, and "Heroes" by John Pilger.

The fact is that there have been many attempts at democratic socialist and communist states, e.g. Kerala state in India, Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, and they have been mostly been stamped down hard by murderous, totalitarian right-wing regimes, usually assisted by the United States gov't. I'm talking about murderous, totalitarian right-wing regimes like Indonesia, Peru, Chile and Colombia, with murderous totalitarian dictators like Batista in Cuba, Pinochet in Chile, Stroessner in Paraguay, Somoza in El Salvador, the Shah of Iran, etc. President Reagan once described Gen. Efrain Rios-Montt, the butcher of Guatemala, as "totally dedicated to democracy", and complained that he'd had a "bum rap" on human rights.

For that matter, the US is happy enough to support China, which is about as "Communist" today as it has ever been, to the point of extending them Most Favored Nation trading status, regardless of their brutal totalitarian practices. It's not the ideology that the US objects to you, you see, it's the money. So long as the money flows, so long as there's oil, or chromium, or bauxite, or new markets for Nike and Microsoft, or whatever else the US govt is after that week, "Communist" or "Capitalist", it makes no difference.

I was raised to believe the same right-wing propaganda as you were, pal. It never occurred to me that my teachers and parents could have got it so completely wrong. Go read the history for yourself, and decide for yourself whether ideology has any connection with totalitarianism.

Now you, and others, keep claiming this, but the fact remains that every single government which has described itself as communist has been murderous and totalitarian. Every single one. And every single one has said, as you say, that `what went before was not really communism. We are the true communism.'

So, while you may say `trust us, we'll be different this time, we mean it', you'll have to forgive us if we're not willing to take that chance.

You believe that because you've only read the history that tells you about the totalitarian ones. Read "Rogue State" by Philip Blum. When you've finished that, try "A People's History of the United States" by Howard Zinn, and "Heroes" by John Pilger.

The fact is that there have been many attempts at democratic socialist and communist states, e.g. Kerala state in India, Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, and they have been mostly been stamped down hard by murderous, totalitarian right-wing regimes, usually assisted by the United States gov't. I'm talking about murderous, totalitarian right-wing regimes like Indonesia, Peru, Chile and Colombia, with murderous totalitarian dictators like Batista in Cuba, Pinochet in Chile, Stroessner in Paraguay, Somoza in El Salvador, the Shah of Iran, etc. President Reagan once described Gen. Efrain Rios-Montt, the butcher of Guatemala, as "totally dedicated to democracy", and complained that he'd had a "bum rap" on human rights.

For that matter, the US is happy enough to support China, which is about as "Communist" today as it has ever been, to the point of extending them Most Favored Nation trading status, regardless of their brutal totalitarian practices. It's not the ideology that the US objects to you, you see, it's the money. So long as the money flows, so long as there's oil, or chromium, or bauxite, or new markets for Nike and Microsoft, or whatever else the US govt is after that week, "Communist" or "Capitalist", it makes no difference.

I was raised to believe the same right-wing propaganda as you were, pal. It never occurred to me that my teachers and parents could have got it so completely wrong. Go read the history for yourself, and decide for yourself whether ideology has any connection with totalitarianism.

No, Intel gave a lot of thought to that. It takes several years to develop a complex CPU like the pentium family.

Besides, the much-vaunted new feature of the PPro was the CISC->RISC translator, and it shouldn't take much to rejig that to handle 16-bit mode more effectively if the market (asses that they are) demands it.

-jhp

Or so Brin's theory goes. The problem is that the privacy asymmetry parallels a power asymmetry. They can and do watch us because they have all the power. We don't get to watch them because we don't. All of this is dressed up in the rhetoric of national security to help stifle protest, but those are the plain facts.

I used to consider charges that the US was becoming a police state to be alarmist, perhaps absurd. Now I see the things happening which have always been missing before, and I know our time has come. The next few years (at the very least) are going to suck mightily.

Please, for the love of Pete, read Rapid Development . If you read, understandd and apply that book, you'll be head and shoulders above most project managers.

Not Prix, altho it's a common mistake, I guess because so many pilots are.

For an in-depth study of databases, check out Database Systems: The Complete Book or at least the first ten chapters in A First Course in Database Systems.

For an in-depth study of databases, check out Database Systems: The Complete Book or at least the first ten chapters in A First Course in Database Systems.

I'd say you give the game away when you pick Noam Chomsky, who is at the rabid fringe of the left as your example of a mainstream liberal. Certainly, most actual liberals would contest any characterization of Mr. Chomsky's inanities as `mainstream'.

As for bias in the media, I would like to point out that on a normal evening on Fox I can see representatives from a wide range of left and right groups debating the issues, while CNN (and much more so ABC, CBS, and NBC) do not seek to provide such balance. Indeed,if you tried to describe the broadcast networks as `center' or `mainstream' to most Americans, they would laugh at you -- there's a reason Bernard Goldberg's book Bias is a nationwide best-seller while the broadcast networks are losing viewers hand-over-fist to Fox.

As others have posted, O'reilly makes excellent books. Essential System Administration is great, and Practical UNIX and Internet Security is a good oine. There are lots of others good ones from them.

Outside of Oreilly, things get thinner. For a seriously solid networking overview, the Voice and Data Communications Handbook is a truly great book. Voice networking is something niglected by geeks, but a common necessity with employers. History, a whole bunch of 'whys', and a well-rounded technical overview is presented. This is one of the few computer books that I've honestly felt wiser for reading.

I use my Cisco CCNA Exam Guide as a general networking book. It's well-written, thorough, and has an absolutely great explanation of the OSI model.


rhadc
Atlanta, GA

For more information see W3C's SVG web site

for useage of SVG see: The Apache batik project

There is also an excelent O'Reilly book by J. David Eisenberg

If you truly want to be on the cutting edge of graphics then you should look into SVG.

Sgis

"Truth is a personal pronoun." (john 14:4)

And here, we find that all accross the US, counties which have legalized concealed carry have seen the rates of violent crime of all sorts go down. Correlation does not show causation in and of itself, but such a consistent correlation is very suggestive.

See John Lott's More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws for more details.

No, it's not a sex book. You're thinking of Justine , which couldn't be more different.

Candide is said to be Voltaire's most important work, yet it's a readable narrative (like Abbott's Flatland ) rather than a dry and dusty tome (like James's Pragmatism ).

No, it's not a sex book. You're thinking of Justine , which couldn't be more different.

Candide is said to be Voltaire's most important work, yet it's a readable narrative (like Abbott's Flatland ) rather than a dry and dusty tome (like James's Pragmatism ).

No, it's not a sex book. You're thinking of Justine , which couldn't be more different.

Candide is said to be Voltaire's most important work, yet it's a readable narrative (like Abbott's Flatland ) rather than a dry and dusty tome (like James's Pragmatism ).

No, it's not a sex book. You're thinking of Justine , which couldn't be more different.

Candide is said to be Voltaire's most important work, yet it's a readable narrative (like Abbott's Flatland ) rather than a dry and dusty tome (like James's Pragmatism ).

There are some newer technologies that extend the old concept of "search", in order to make browsing much easier online. For example, check out Barnes and Nobles BookBrowser. It organizes books by overlapping categories, and makes it much easier to find books you didn't know about. I picked up a couple books I'd never heard of, by exploring their science fiction categories.

Powers of Ten
Powersof10.com and Eames Office - Powers of Ten
Quarks to Quasars
`Powers of Ten' scales (additional links)
The book at Amazon, Barnes & Nobel.

Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps, by Kees Boeke (1957)
Cosmic View
Cosmic View (another version)

A Powers of Ten variant (my own)
How Big Are Things? (comments encouraged)
Scaling the universe to your desktop

Other PoT presentations of length
Length
Orders of magnitude - Distance
Scales of Measurement (ASCII version) from Niel Brandt's Timelines and Scales of Measurement Page

- Mitchell Charity

I tried to view Slashdot.org, but all I saw were advertisments for SourceForge...

I mean really. This actually reminds me of Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000. That's the book, not the movie, folks (the movie only covered half the book, perhapse for the best). Anyway, the Psyclo altered their entire social culture through invasive brain surgery, not helmets. Overall, the effect would be the same likely :p

A few weekends ago, a friend recommended Rich Dad, Poor Dad to me. No, it's not an investment book. Rather, it's an interesting look into the ways that those of different economic levels teach their kids what money is, and how to earn money.

It's pretty good so far. Nothing mind-blowing, but there's certainly some logical thought in there that had never occurred to me.

I mention the book, though, because he freely admits that your typical "employment" lifestyle that most Americans have isn't enough to make you "rich", and is hardly enough to help you retire comfortably. However, he also realises people have to start out somewhere. You can't invest if you have zero. Thus, fiscal responsibility is entirely necessary, especially in the beginning, and something that most of us (yes, you, Slashdot reader) don't have.

I know and/or have known way too many people who make way too much more money than me to be living paycheck-to-paycheck like they do. Granted, I make an okay salary, but I've known tonnes of people who've made six-figures USD and can't control their finances. It's asanine, but it's not an anomaly -- US News and World Report recently that some enormous percentage of Americans had saved less than $50,000 for retirement.

The author of that NYT article was right, to some degree. Americans are fairly rich. We also, however, spend a lot of money on absurd things. The author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad is right, too: Americans don't know where to put their money, spending it on liabilities, not assets, and have a pitifully wrong understanding of it.