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Multipliers is not a programming book, but it will make you a better programmer.

Multipliers looks through the lens of the tech industry to show examples of people who are a "multiplier" and people who are a "diminisher". The idea being that when working with a multiplier, people feel that they are working hyper-efficiently, while with a diminisher they are working at sub-optimal.

This book changed the way I think about teamwork: it's not just about being a rock star yourself, but about making your team the rock star. It helped me identify facets of my working style and past experiences that, if acted on differently, will enable people on my team to shine with minimal additional effort from myself.

Or, Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman were right, and it's just a sign that God has a sense of humor:

Current theories on the creation of the Universe state that, if it was created at all and didn't just start, as it were, unofficially, it came into being between ten and twenty thousand million years ago. By the same token the earth itself is generally supposed to be about four and a half thousand million years old.

These dates are incorrect.

Medieval Jewish scholars put the date of the Creation at 3760 B.C. Greek Orthodox theologians put Creation as far back as 5508 B.C.

These suggestions are also incorrect.

Archbishop James Usher (1580-1656) published Annales Veteris et Novi Testamenti in 1654, which suggested that the Heaven and the Earth were created in 4004 B.C. One of his aides took the calculation further, and was able to announce triumphantly that the Earth was created on Sunday the 21st of October, 4004 B.C., at exactly 9:00 A.M., because God liked to get work done early in the morning while he was feeling fresh.

This too was incorrect. By almost a quarter of an hour.

The whole business with the fossilized dinosaur skeletons was a joke the paleontologists haven't seen yet.

The whole first chapter* of Good Omens is on the Harper Collins website: http://www.harpercollins.com/features/pratchettBooks/excerpt.aspx?isbn=9780060853969

* I *think* that it's the intro + first chapter, as I believe the first chapter started 'It wasn't a dark and stormy night.'

Dutch cardiologist Dr. Pim van Lommel did a real scientific study of Dutch cardiology surgery patients. Recorded what happened to all the cardiology surgery patients at several Dutch hospital over a certain period of time. Found real scientific evidence confiming the existance of some kind of near-death-experience happening.

http://profezie3m.altervista.org/archivio/TheLancet_NDE.htm

http://www.harpercollins.com/books/Consciousness-Beyond-Life-Pim-Van-Lommel/?isbn=9780061777257

ok, you're clearly retarded, so continuing this debate seems pointless, but i'll make one last, half assed attempt.

http://classiclit.about.com/od/atreegrows/fr/aafpr_treegrows.htm

http://www.harpercollins.com/books/9780060736262/A_Tree_Grows_in_Brooklyn/index.aspx

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14891.A_Tree_Grows_in_Brooklyn

http://classicreads.wordpress.com/2010/03/28/a-tree-grows-in-brooklyn-schedule/

http://www.teachwithmovies.org/guides/tree-grows-in-brooklyn.html

http://www.powells.com/biblio?isbn=9780060736262

http://www.librarything.com/work/1475

http://kimbofo.typepad.com/readingmatters/2005/11/a_tree_grows_in.html

And again, Betty Smith is not a 'classic' author, but one of the few books she wrote is a classic book. Can you really not understand that very simple concept, or are you just grasping at straws in a desperate attempt to not have to admit you're wrong?

On the other hand, they had a pretty interesting scientific backstory for the movie. When I was watching the movie, when the guy set down the "unobtanium" on a platform and it floated, I immediately thought, "Huh... I bet that's supposed to be a room-temperature superconductor. Which would explain the demand." And indeed, that's exactly the intent. According to the backstory, part of the reason for the intense initial interest in the moon was the very high magnetic field strength it displayed. And since superconductors expel magnetic fields, leading to stable levitation, the floating mountains and continents are actually scientifically plausible in such a scenario. The very high magnetic field and the presence of the moon orbiting in the radiation belt of a gas giant leads to very high levels of ionizing radiation at the poles and at the intense local distortions in the magnetic field from the "unobtanium" -- to the degree that they're not just deadly, but also lead to a large current flowing through the planet.

The explanation for the mineral name is that scientists frustrated on Earth used began using the name "unobtanium" in reference to high temperature superconductors (before stable versions were found on Pandora) that it stuck.

"Will you call me goddess? Will you pray to me? Will you worship me with your body?"

Why does it stop 120 pages in? Because the next page is where the plot starts. Everything up to then is just world building.

Why humanoid?! Well, DUH!

They should just shut up and read Small Gods by Terry Pratchett: "Gods on the Discworld exist as long as people believe in them and their power grows as their followers increase. This is a philosophy echoing the real-world politics of the power of religion and is most detailed in the novel Small Gods. If people should cease believing in a particular god (say, if the religion becomes more important than faith) the god begins to fade and, eventually, will "die", becoming little more than a faded wispy echo."

From the mosquito noise, it looks suspiciously like the applet downloads a bunch of JPEGs. Doing a bit of analysis with tcpdump shows that it requests URLs of the form: http://browseinside.harpercollins.com/Services/GetPage.aspx?isbn13=9780060558123&pageguid=684604239068659&reqtype=0 which then gives an image URL which gives the picture (yup, a JPEG).

If you're persistent, you could probably set your web browser to go through a logging proxy and then record all its GetPageImage requests to get the jpeg files, and you could then browse those offline. But if not, I can't see any download link. You could download the applet, but you'd still have to be online to read the book itself.

Your aunt?

for those who want to learn more about penguins check out this new book. http://www.harpercollins.com/books/9780060891268/S mithsonian_Q__A_Penguins/index.aspx the author is one of the leading experts on penguins. Claus

A great book, recently published, by Bart D. Ehrman, called Misquoting Jesus might be good reading for you.

The book, The Customer Comes Second: Put Your People First and Watch 'em Kick Butt is over ten years old, with the updated second edition still around two years old.

It was the ducks that finally pushed him over the edge. The world must be warned!

(if you don't get it, look at Neil Gaiman's journal for January 20, 2004)

Or the Dwarf King's Axe from The Fifth Elephant

Parent poster is exactly right. The semantic web is designed exactly for just this kind of thing, and would drastically reduce the amount of computing power needed to do it.

For a good discussion of the semantic web, and why we need to get going and build it, read the relevant chapter in The Unfinished Revolution by Michael Dertouzos. I didn't quite understand what Tim Berners-Lee was getting at when he described the semantic web in Weaving the Web. Dertouzos explains it better, I think.

I had an idea earlier this week about broken links. I use Amaya as my primary word processor, and I use hyperlinks to connect related documents. But directory structures change over time as different areas change in importance. For instance, it may have made sence to keep your financial aid status documents in the 'School' folder during the summer, but after the semester begins that folder fills up with lecture notes. Then those lecture notes are partitioned into child folders for separate subjects. Maybe now you want to move your financial aid documents to a child folder called 'Financial Aid'. It would be really nice if the application (or the operating system) kept track of changes to the directory structure and updated the link urls in the documents. Perhaps it could leave a pointer in the old place for a certain amount of time, just in case the change is only temporary.

It shouldn't matter where the document is - on my local machine in a certain folder, on a removable disk, on a network share, or on the Web. Things get trickier when the document is on the web, which is where this technology could help.

My brother (who works for IBM) recently sent me an article on USA Today about the system IBM and Honda have developed for speech-interface with a GPS-enabled navigation computer. Really cool stuff.

For those of you who haven't read it, check out The Unfinished Revolution by Michael Dertouzos. I don't agree with all of his analysis (he was a little lacking in pragmatism on some points), but overall this book was very insightful. This book, along with Weaving the Web by Tim Berners-Lee, caused a big paradigm shift in my thinking about computer technology.

The title plays upon Francoise Sagan's Bonjour tristesse. In case someone was interested...

I expound on this a bit in my blog entry Suburban development: the new serfdom.

That is why "left vs. right", "conservative vs. liberal", "Republican vs. Democrat" in the U.S. is a false dichotomy -- the real battle should be over individual liberty vs. fascism, not over whether fascism should be in the form of large corporations or government.

Unless you read The Truth"

actually, linux, before it even had a name, was a terminal emulator. read the book. it discusses the origins of linux...i don't recall, and can't find, anything saying he copied any bit of code. only things like "...because the Minix file system was well-documented...I made my file system compatible with the Minix file system." (p78)

Am I the only one reminded by this of Terry Pratchett's Reaper Man ?

For those not familiar with the story, Death gets outsourced. In the ensuing chaos, shopping trolleys appear as the larval stage of a city-eating mall.

It's not right that people should have to speculate in what things would be like without Microsoft. The whole situation is so out of balance, so out of control, that something will have to give or a cataclysm will otherwise force a change. Personally, I think Scott Adams's weasels rule: people are too cowardly to take action. They'll wait until the man (Gates) is down and then they'll pummel him mercilessly, but while he's standing they will not make a move.

He has done an audio interview on rense.com and onNPR (can't find the link)

What he describes sounds similar to the problems laid out by the Columbia Accident Investigation Board.

Hmmm... don't think that'll help my procrastination.

So get a procrastinator then

We are in disagreement here. Show people tux when the discussion is about operating systems, and they have heard something about "that Linux thingy". Hell, Linux is not a geek thing any more - one of our major national newspapers (Die Zeit, I'm from Germany) brought a two-page article at the front-liner of their economics section this week. To speak with Geoffrey Moore, it has crossed the chasm. I'm writing position papers for CIOs about OSS, and that's definitively mainstream. (Incidentially, background research on the community is part of the reason I follow Slashdot.)

Think about it this way - if I worked for Fox News and I wrote a scathing book about GWB on my own my own time then I shouldn't be surprised if I was fired the next day.

Didn't Terry Pratchett already write about that strange red light being another "planet" on a collision with "Earth"? Now that would be a spectacle to witness...

The Web is not a visual medium. Yes, it contains a lot of visual content, but there's also plenty of text content that can be presented just fine in a non-visual manner.

Right. This is like saying "A car is not a means of transportation. Yes I can use it for transport, but I can also use it to house my pot plants." Well of course I can do that, but that is stretching the useage to a new area and beyond it's designed for purpose.

The designed-for purpose of the Web wasn't visual at all. That's clear from the first chapter of Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web by Its Inventor .

I'm wondering what written text is, if not visual...

Written text is just content. You can present it visually in a dead-tree book or on a computer screen, or you can have it spoken to you, or you can read it using a Braille tactile feedback device.

There's nothing visual about the comment that I'm writing now. There's no reason why it can't be read aloud or through a Braille device.

While these books may seem well researched and informative, it is important to note their main financial contributer while doing their research was the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints(Mormons). In fact, the publishers of these two books was founded in New York, but moved it's headquarters to Salt Lake City, Utah, and is majority owned by the Mormons.

Why does all that matter? Conflict of interest. Remember, the mormons are the ones that claim their founder, Joseph Smith, translated a previously "hidden" "message from God" into english from ... Egyptian heiroglyphics. And while his translation has been completely debunked, millions of Mormons continue to believe. And the Mormon church wants nothing more than to trick more people. So they Have hired Lesley and Roy Adkins to slowly add credibility to their story of "enlightenment from God through their prophet".

This is one of the wealthiest institutions in the world, and they are trying to legitimize their claims. In fact, Mormons have already invaded much of the U.S. political system and once in power, they will censor all other belief systems and, using their overseas propoganda army they will attempt to take over the world.

If you buy into these books, you are buying in to the Mormon conspiracy.

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I wonder if they included this book in the meta-study...

The Physics of Baseball
by Robert K Adair, Ph.D.

This book may not be exactly what your looking for, but it does put across some of the fundamental principles of real world physics in an easy to read format. One nice thing is that the equations are explained, but completely skippable. There's also a lot of interesting history pertaining to each topic.

I personally enjoyed reading it, even though I'm not a baseball fan.

there is a sweepstakes over at harpercollins where you can win copies of several pratchett books and (!?) a clock autographed by him.

also, there is a scan of a few pages from the book.

there is a sweepstakes over at harpercollins where you can win copies of several pratchett books and (!?) a clock autographed by him.

also, there is a scan of a few pages from the book.

over there at harpercollins.com... here and here

over there at harpercollins.com... here and here

The ISBN is 0066620724.

These were released -- on this side of the Atlantic, at least -- a few years ago by HarperCollins, who have their own Tolkien imprint. There's a double cassette of the great man, not only reading, but singing all those elven things that I tend to skip over in the book.
If you're interested, wander over to here (which is a frame inside this)

Say to thorin 'carry me'|say to thorin 'go window'|se|e|se|e|get ring|n|d|n|go crack

This sounds similiar to an article I remember reading in IEEE magazine around 1993 or 1994. The author postulated four ages of mankind. The first age was the hunter-gatherer age and lasted about 10000 years. The second was the agrarian age and lasted about 1000 years. The third was the industrial age and is lasted 100 years. The fourth is be the information age and will only last 10 years. After this society begins living in "real time" when the rate of change as accelerated so rapidly that no one can possibly keep up. Intellectual property becomes irrelevant because by the time another company can copy and manufacture what you are selling, you don't care as you are no longer using it. I believe we are close to this point, as I remember reading in Fortune magazine that 90% of Intel's 1998 revenue came from products that were not even in the marketplace in 1997. The author of the article (I believe it is the same person) now was a web-site to sell a book he wrote about this The Friction Free Economy by Ted G. Lewis. Some of this stuff is hinted at in the preface which is available online.