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C++ is a terribly documented language. Powell's Bookstore in Portland, Oregon, one of the biggest bookstores in the world, had 16 books about C++. All of them were about the many tiny details of C++, with no attempts to show how the language should be used.

Powell's Books | The World's Largest Independent Bookstore

The Powell's technical bookstore closed, but Powell's opened a replacement called Powell's 2. This was a smaller store with fewer books, but it was right across the street from the "City of Books" main store.

However, Powell's 2 also closed. I guess the technical books are just in the main store now because they no longer list a special location for technical books.

http://www.powells.com/locations

http://www.powells.com/biblio/...
Blackett's War: The Men Who Defeated the Nazi U-Boats and Brought Science to the Art of Warfare
by Stephen Budiansky

ISBN13: 9780307743633

Actually, no. Eventually you won't be able to go for a swim because the accompanying Canfield Ocean effect is leading to anoxia and eventually copious amounts of hydrogen sulphide gas being spewed from the oceans into the atmosphere....... You won't be able to breathe.

Powell's Books is quite searchable, they have quite a lot of books, and they have lots of old and rare volumes that are likely to be hard to find elsewhere.

The website is actually quite poorly searchable, as an exact author name of a somewhat obscure author (James Elliott) doesn't hit a match until the 17th result. In addition, none of the books by that author that aren't actually available as physical books are listed. Amazon has similar problems in the first way (although the 2nd result is a match for a different author with the same name), but not in the second. Even if it isn't available anywhere, if Amazon ever sold it, it's in their catalog.

As for "hard to find elsewhere", I pretty much guarantee you that anything they have will have 10x the listings on ABE.

They also have a rather nice store that one can visit and simply browse, on the off chance that they don't actually know precisely what they want going in, and want the opportunity to see what is available on the shelves or to communicate with the knowledgable staff.

Once suggestion engines got going well, "browsing" in a bookstore pretty much went away. Wandering up and down the aisles looking for a title that sounds interesting or a book cover that grabs attention is pretty much guaranteed to cost you a lot more time and result in less success than using Amazon, etc., to do the same thing. I understand that some people like to do this, but some people also just like to walk around the mall looking for "something to buy".

As for the "knowledgeable staff", if a book isn't in their catalog, I'm pretty sure they would give the same blank stares as every place else for anything outside their comfort zone.

Powell's Books is quite searchable, they have quite a lot of books, and they have lots of old and rare volumes that are likely to be hard to find elsewhere. They also have a rather nice store that one can visit and simply browse, on the off chance that they don't actually know precisely what they want going in, and want the opportunity to see what is available on the shelves or to communicate with the knowledgable staff. Of course, the original point was that people still go to physical bookstores for whatever reason, not that you should go to a particular physical bookstore.

If it isn't better, why would you do it?

Small online book shop - you didn't hear about them so .... they don't exist? Is that what you're implying?

Read this article about a commercial dispute between Amazon and a large publisher (Hachette). It was on the Colbert Report, a US news comedy show. The hosts book was caught up in this dispute and so he told people to go buy his book and others at Powell's Books, which I can only describe as a small (relative to Amazon) online book store.

...that consumers dump Amazon in favor of Powell's Books.

That doesn't necessarily mean that paper books are dying, but it certainly means that selling paper books in physical locations instead of an online shop is no longer a profitable activity.

Exactly the point of why monopolies like Amazon are not good for society. Amazon's day of reckoning is coming, I'm surprised the European Union has not already taken them to task. It will happen.

Sure, you say, "How are cheaper books not good for me?" Amazon destroys local economies. If you want to race to the bottom and live in Soylent Green or A Clockwork Orange, you have no problems with this.

Here in the USA, if you must buy via the Internet, try http://www.powells.com/

Swiss Child Psychologist Alice Miller devoted twenty years to treating the very worst kinds of child abuse, then decided to stop all treatment of actual patients in hopes of putting a permanent end to that child abuse by writing a great many profoundly insightful books.

Her book For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty In Child-Rearing And The Roots Of Violence has just four chapters. One of the chapters makes a pretty good case for Adolf Hitler, World War II, NAZI Germany and the Holocaust all being to the fact that Alois Schicklgruber beat the young Adolf Schicklgruber every single day of his young life.

One day when he was thirteen or so - I don't clearly recall when - Adolf stood stoically and calmly for his beating, then at the end of it, told his father how many times his father had hit him, thanked him then calmly walked away. Everyone who witnessed this thought Adolf had gone insane. Perhaps he had.

Most of Miller's books are hugely popular with mental health professionals. Powells always has a whole bunch of copies of each book on its shelves in Portland, Oregon.

Quite likely you can find For Your Own Good in any decent bookstore.

I expect they've been translated to many languages. I'm not sure but I think Miller's Mother Tongue was German. She spoke English, but not very well, so the English-language editions of her books are all translated by experts.

Private companies have set up their own spying operations. Bloomberg Financial is spying on Goldman Sachs. and Murdoch is running saboteur operations against his competitors. And these same people keep calling to tougher measures against hackers.It is as if the entire international power structure walked out of a Vladimir Voinovich novel. Sigh.

Laurel's Kitchen was pretty much the canonical vegetarian reference cookbook in the 80s - as with Joy of Cooking, it has recipes, but it also has a lot about ingredients and technique, and a lot of data about nutrition, cooking times, how much water to use for different grains, suggestions about what different foods go together to make interesting meals, etc.

Tassajara Cooking is much less about recipes and more about cooking and experiencing food - what kinds of ingredients are there, how do they taste and feel like, how do different cooking techniques affect taste and texture, how do you decide what things go together. It's not a collection of manual pages, it's a book about learning to hack food. It's especially useful if you're cooking for one or two people, because you're not usually going to bother with fancy recipes.

Meat eaters have a choice of good cookbooks that talk about techniques and complexities for dealing with meat, and all that Maillard reaction stuff about what happens to proteins and fats and blood vessels as you change temperature and timing. Most of those cookbooks don't spend much time on vegetables, except saying "here's some stuff to put next to the meat", or "here's something you can crunch on while you're waiting for the meat to cook", or "different veggies for different kinds of meat." Ok, the section on "dessert" is useful, and some of them do ok with bread.

Moosewood Cookbook was the vegetarian cookbook I started with (besides Joy of Cooking, of course), because they had been the local hippie vegetarian restaurant where I had gone to college, the recipes were reasonably accessible, it had big hand-drawn print and pictures, and it also had a lot of good discussion of how to combine different kinds of dishes to make good friendly meals. It was fun, and valuable, but isn't something I've gone back to much after the first year or so.

The last food-related book I bought was named something like Asian Vegetables, because now that I live in California there are all these things in the markets that I had no clue what they are or how to use many of them, and this had a page or two each about a lot of different ingredients.

Laurel's Kitchen was pretty much the canonical vegetarian reference cookbook in the 80s - as with Joy of Cooking, it has recipes, but it also has a lot about ingredients and technique, and a lot of data about nutrition, cooking times, how much water to use for different grains, suggestions about what different foods go together to make interesting meals, etc.

Tassajara Cooking is much less about recipes and more about cooking and experiencing food - what kinds of ingredients are there, how do they taste and feel like, how do different cooking techniques affect taste and texture, how do you decide what things go together. It's not a collection of manual pages, it's a book about learning to hack food. It's especially useful if you're cooking for one or two people, because you're not usually going to bother with fancy recipes.

Meat eaters have a choice of good cookbooks that talk about techniques and complexities for dealing with meat, and all that Maillard reaction stuff about what happens to proteins and fats and blood vessels as you change temperature and timing. Most of those cookbooks don't spend much time on vegetables, except saying "here's some stuff to put next to the meat", or "here's something you can crunch on while you're waiting for the meat to cook", or "different veggies for different kinds of meat." Ok, the section on "dessert" is useful, and some of them do ok with bread.

Moosewood Cookbook was the vegetarian cookbook I started with (besides Joy of Cooking, of course), because they had been the local hippie vegetarian restaurant where I had gone to college, the recipes were reasonably accessible, it had big hand-drawn print and pictures, and it also had a lot of good discussion of how to combine different kinds of dishes to make good friendly meals. It was fun, and valuable, but isn't something I've gone back to much after the first year or so.

The last food-related book I bought was named something like Asian Vegetables, because now that I live in California there are all these things in the markets that I had no clue what they are or how to use many of them, and this had a page or two each about a lot of different ingredients.

Laurel's Kitchen was pretty much the canonical vegetarian reference cookbook in the 80s - as with Joy of Cooking, it has recipes, but it also has a lot about ingredients and technique, and a lot of data about nutrition, cooking times, how much water to use for different grains, suggestions about what different foods go together to make interesting meals, etc.

Tassajara Cooking is much less about recipes and more about cooking and experiencing food - what kinds of ingredients are there, how do they taste and feel like, how do different cooking techniques affect taste and texture, how do you decide what things go together. It's not a collection of manual pages, it's a book about learning to hack food. It's especially useful if you're cooking for one or two people, because you're not usually going to bother with fancy recipes.

Meat eaters have a choice of good cookbooks that talk about techniques and complexities for dealing with meat, and all that Maillard reaction stuff about what happens to proteins and fats and blood vessels as you change temperature and timing. Most of those cookbooks don't spend much time on vegetables, except saying "here's some stuff to put next to the meat", or "here's something you can crunch on while you're waiting for the meat to cook", or "different veggies for different kinds of meat." Ok, the section on "dessert" is useful, and some of them do ok with bread.

Moosewood Cookbook was the vegetarian cookbook I started with (besides Joy of Cooking, of course), because they had been the local hippie vegetarian restaurant where I had gone to college, the recipes were reasonably accessible, it had big hand-drawn print and pictures, and it also had a lot of good discussion of how to combine different kinds of dishes to make good friendly meals. It was fun, and valuable, but isn't something I've gone back to much after the first year or so.

The last food-related book I bought was named something like Asian Vegetables, because now that I live in California there are all these things in the markets that I had no clue what they are or how to use many of them, and this had a page or two each about a lot of different ingredients.

Now lots of online businesses peddling second hand goods will spring up in no time.

You're right, it's happening already! Look at these evil merchants of second hand books I found just searching online:

http://www.amazon.com/New-Used-Textbooks-Books/b?ie=UTF8&node=465600
http://www.abebooks.com/
http://www.powells.com/

If somebody doesn't do something soon, we'll be seeing merchants of second-hand records and CDs and videos as well!! I've even hear rumors that there are some brick-and-mortar institutions springing up and collecting second hand materials and LOANING THEM OUT FREELY TO ANYONE WHO ENTERS! Have we reached such a nadir of respect for commerce and capitalism that we're going to allow every moocher and freeloader in the 47% to simply BORROW someone's intellectual property without paying for it?! I'm shocked the Supreme Court would hand such a victory to the Marxists and Linuxists.

I read Gladwell's book Outliers a few months back. I thought he made some reasonable, if somewhat obvious points, until he went completely off the rails when he discussed differences in math schooling between China and the US.

In short, he said that the way chinese count gives them an edge in learning calculus, because the chinese say the number 13 as "three and ten", building the number out of simpler, more fundamental numbers, whereas in the US children must learn an entirely new word: "thirteen". He ignored how studying calculus concepts like differentials and integrals at a young age (I think around junior high age) is the norm in China, whereas in the US, students only get a watered-down "pre-calc" in their senior year of high school unless they're really ambitious and they take AP classes in their later teens.

There's an excellent review of Outliers that was published in The New Republic available here, for those with a lugubrious interest in learning precisely why we should ignore Gladwell.

Yeah, but you've got Powell's Books all over California while I can't find one in the Twin Cities so it balances out. :)

Meanwhile, the engineer is creating ways to save lives, feed millions, and travel to Mars.

And also ways to kill millions, to destroy the biosphere's ability to sustainably renew itself, and to broadcast propaganda and mind-numbing "entertainment" to the population so that it thinks all this is hunky-dory.

Science is a tool for finding out about the universe; engineering is a tool to making changes in the world around us. But we need some sort of disciplined critical thinking to decide what questions about the universe we "ought" to explore, and what changes in the world we "ought" to make. That should be the domain of philosophy. Unfortunately, when you get into areas like epistemology, philosophy as it is practiced today indeed tends too much towards the navel-gazing.

By the way, for anyone who hasn't read it yet: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (affiliate link) is a book every techie should read. Fixing a motorcycle is close enough to fixing code that the book should produce a number of "ahas!" for the hacker; and the narrator (or rather, his earlier self) gets in and wrestles with some of those old Greek guys.

OTOH, I find the sequence "Woodward, Bernstein, Assange" distasteful.

Right. Because Woodward has spent the last 30-plus years as a sycophant to power and Assange has never done anything as reprehensible as writing Bush at War .

Probably because I'm not over Amazon's de-listing debacle, I like to remind everyone that there other bookstores on the Internet.

Powell's
Indiebound
Barnes & Noble

Heaven forbid the onus is put on the consumer to determine what they should and should not purchase.

Heaven forbid indeed, because a whole lot of people died needlessly back when that sort of "caveat emptor" attitude ruled. Go read The Poisoner's Handbook, which is about the birth of forensic medicine in the U.S. -- and about the many different ways people were being poisoned a few decades ago, often by quite ordinary consumer products .

it's you nanny-state socialists...

Socialism has nothing to do with product safety regulation. It's about an economic system run by, and for the benefit of, the people who actually create value by their labor, rather than a system run by and for a parasitic investment class.

A libertarian idea: strip away all powers not enumerated in the constitution.

Regulating interstate and international commerce is right there in Article I, Section 8. The feds are well within their Constitutional powers to say "you can't import this into the country, or sell it across state lines, unless X, Y, and Z."

Is that how the Founders foresaw this power being used? Probably not. But not only is that legally irrelevant, I don't think it's practical or ethical to limit our solutions to what a bunch of slave-holding members of the landed gentry dreamed about 223 years ago when they thought about the small agrarian nation they had in mind.

Here's a truly libertarian idea, in the original sense: tear up all corporate charters, land deeds, patents, and copyrights, and eliminate rent, the private ownership of capital, and all forms of government-enforced privilege. And when you deliberately sell shoddy products that injure or kill people, I have the right to come over and shoot you in the face.

If the federal government had limited powers as it did at design, what would they be lobbying for (maybe excise taxes)? They would be forced to lobby to individual states who now hold more of the power

You can probably buy about 50 state legislators for what a Congressman goes for, no problem. Part of the reason that the original Progressives sought to expand federal power was because the state governments had been thoroughly corrupted. Again, this right-wing view that everything would be ok if we devolved regulatory authority back to the states is ahistorical, as well as impractical -- some large corporations turn profits (not reciepits, but profits) that are greater than the gross state product of smaller states.

At least with corporations there's a choice to trust them or not; what choice does federal coercion and many times, outright extortion leave you?

No, you don't get a meaningful "choice" when a handful of mega-corporations take over a market. "Gee, will I buy my Kraft food products grown from Monsanto seeds at Wal-Mart or at Target? So many choices!"

Corporations are creations of government -- they exist only because of government-issued charters. It's not only fair, it's essential the government leash the immortal sociopaths to which it gives birth.

The book will still be publicly available after things like specific names and other sensitive bits of information get sanitized. By not doing so, lives and missions are placed in jeopardy with little real benefit for society.

Our current state secrets regime is based on a Supreme Court case, United States v. Reynolds, which protected Boeing from revealing information regarding the deaths of three engineers in a plane crash because it would endanger national security. From the blurb for Claim of Privilege:

But the Air Force, at the dawn of the Cold War, refused to hand over the accident reports and witness statements, claiming the documents contained classified information that would threaten national security. The case made its way up to the Supreme Court, which in 1953 sided with the Air Force in United States v. Reynolds. This landmark decision formally recognized the "state secrets" privilege, a legal precedent that has since been used to conceal conduct, withhold documents, block troublesome litigation, and, most recently, detain terror suspects without due-process protections.

Even with the case closed, the families of those who died in the crash never stopped wondering what had happened in that B-29. They finally had their answer a half century later: In 2000 they learned that the government was now making available the top-secret information the families had sought long ago, in vain. The documents, it turned out, contained no national security secrets but rather a shocking chronicle of negligence.

In other words, the very case that gave us the state secrets BS that Obama is latching on to harder than Bush II, was based on a COVERUP of NEGLIGENCE, not for any actual national security reasons. Boeing and the Air Force killed these smart geeks, and then LIED to protect their ass. That's what the state secrets doctrine is about -- it isn't about protecting anyone but the fuckwads ruining our country. Wake up already.

You can also listen to the TAL report, it is the second story.

It's the same thing as a library except you can't steal the book.

One cannot "steal" an downloaded e-book. One can only make unauthorized copies of it.

Copying is not theft.

When I borrow a book from my local wonderful public library, if I don't return it, they can't lend it to someone else. When I "borrow" an e-book from somewhere, if I don't surrender access to it...what happens? Nothing.

So, no, this is nothing at all like a library.

What this is, is an attempt to push us closer to a "pay-per-view" model of content. Read RMS's The Right to Read if you want to see the future that DRM pushers have in mind for us. (In fact, I'll plug RMS's whole book, Free Software, Free Society .)

... At least since 2003.

If you can't write programs better than you phrased your question you will be no good to anybody. Learn to think and write clearly.

I suggest you start with a book similar to, "Programming Logic and Design" by Farrell http://www.powells.com/biblio?inkey=17-9781418836337-0 . This approach teaches you how to think about solving problems using computers, and you will not be stuck in any specific language. There are already too many people out there who learned a computer language and jumped to the conclusion they were programmers.

When you do pick a language, pick a GOOD source for learning. I like the books written by Charles Petzold or the books produced by Deitel and Deitel. Pick a useful language like C/C++ if you can.

Make a list of all the things you would like to program if you could, then start with the smaller ones and work forward. Learning to program Excel spreadsheets will teach a a LOT about regular programming, including how to relate to a database. If you are serious about database applications read Joe Celko's books; they will save you LOTS of time and save you from writing too many embarrassing apps.

When you get so you can produce some decent programs, polish up and get some depth by learning Assembly and LISP.

With all this as a foundation, you will have a terrific overview and some solid competency in programming. You can do whatever you want. You will have the mental skills to learn any language and do good work.

You might wonder if you can actually learn programming by reading on your own; the answer is NO! You must program to attain the skill. I have a friend who used to be an electronic organ repairman. He saw that the future was not in his knowledge of electronics, but in swapping out cards in the organs. He took a job on an oil rig for six months and learned to program from Petzold's book on Windows Programming during his off time. Three years later he was earning over $200/hr as a contract programmer. Much of his success has to do with the high standards he sets for himself.

Since it won't happen overnight, you might want to think about short courses offered by DeVry or a similar institution.

Good Luck, and have fun.

If the choice is between DDR and world of warcraft, then even Lance Armstrong is going to benefit from choosing DDR.

That depends on the goals. World of Warcraft and other games, while not doing much for physical fitness, can help cognition. What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy: Revised and Updated Edition. A therapist I saw suggested I get some computer strategy games to play. Two she had me play while I saw her was Building Perspective and Hot Dog Stand.

Falcon

We don't need to fear and change the government, we need to fear and change the power corporations have over us.

I just finished reading Market Forces by Richard K. Morgan and I'm afraid you might be right.

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?

There's even one book by Stephenson more or less about it.

Stephenson's Diamond Age isn't about mined diamonds, it's about when we're so capable of satisfying our every need with nanotechnology, that diamonds are cheap and easily fabricated (with interesting societal implications)... by far, my favorite Stephenson book.

Trouble is, when given the choice, the vast majority of people would choose to not pay for military support, thinking "everyone else is paying for it, it won't matter if I don't".

That's alright by me, I've said for years we should have a citizens military with a small core of professionals. We don't need a military as big as we have, or one spread all over the world.

Bank runs don't make for stable economies. I suspect you're not an economist - a lot of economists put a lot of thought into what the government is doing, and a lot of them think it was the best course of action.

And other economists who put as much if not more thought into it opposed the bailouts.

A lot of us citizens don't necessarily mind bailing out the banks (given sufficient oversight), but like I said, if you don't like it, you can always vote for someone who shares your views. (You're about to complain that such a person would never get elected. Shouldn't that tell you something about the views of the majority of Americans?)

No, that tells me government has gotten too big and exists outside the limits put on it by the Constitution of the USA. Fine, if you want government to do something it does not have the power to do, propose an amendment, don't treat the Constitution as toilet paper.

Falcon

The Constitution does go past the 10th Amendment...something about regulating something or ether between the states...

There are many local ISPes that do not serve interstate. In my greater area there are a number of local ISPs that only serve the area.

And if you look at the Constitution it provides for flexibility. For example, General Welfare, which is mentioned twice.

Yes, it allow mentions liberty. The Preamble says:
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
Now if you look the definition for "welfare" it says:
"welfare n. 1. health, happiness, or prosperity; well-being."
Thomas Jefferson said of the 'general welfare clause":
"I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I traveled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer." In Federalist No 41 James Madison said
"the general welfare clause is neither a statement of ends nor a substantive grant of power. It is a mere "synonym" for the enumeration of particular powers, which are limited and wholly define its content."

As you say the feds have gone after people in California for marijuana after the state legalized medical marijuana.

Rather atrocious. It boggles the mind that it's conventional wisdom that Prohibition was a complete failure with alcohol, yet we insist on continuing Prohibition 2.0: WOD.

Agreed bigtime!!! All these politicians and drug warriors have their heads stuck in the sand. There never has been much debate about it, but hopefully it's a good sign that CNN's Anderson Cooper has been having part of his show AC 360 all week about "America's High: The case for and against pot" with drug legalization proponents debating drug warriors on legalization. Now I haven't watched all of them in their entirety but what I did see it looked like the legalization hands were better.

The whole reason we have regulation and oversight is because we already tried free market Libertarianism

No, we have not tried free markets. The closest we came to free markets was in the 1830s. Alexis de Tocqueville was so overwhelmed by what he saw when he toured the USA in 1831 he wrote his books "Democracy in America" extolling how free people were. As there was still slavery, which Thomas Jefferson wanted to end, there wasn't a compleat free market but it's the closed we've had to one. Since then big businesses have become more and more powerful and have bought politicians to write laws favorable to them. In a free market businesses wouldn't have the power to buy them off and the politicians wouldn't have the power to enact bad laws.

Oh, and that Daily Kos link does not say those problems cited were caused by a

1,2,3...Infinity
Metamagical themas :questing for the essence of mind and pattern
Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

1,2,3...Infinity
Metamagical themas :questing for the essence of mind and pattern
Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

1,2,3...Infinity
Metamagical themas :questing for the essence of mind and pattern
Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

ID says look at the signal, analyze it, try to find other explanations for apparent "design", if there isn't one, label it "designer unknown".

No. Evolution is an explanation for apparent "design", yet IDists and Creationists reject it out of hand.

Those scientists who proposed ID have never been given enough of a hearing to develop any type of tests for the hypothesis that some element was designed or not.

It isn't the job of the scientific establishment to hear anyone who has a crackpot idea. It is up to those challenging the scientific establishment to show that their explanation is better than the current one. They've had twenty-two years since Edwards v. Aguillard to propose a testable theory of Intelligent Design, and they haven't done anything.

Just look at the reply just after yours for someone who doesn't even consider that some characteristics of life may fit the same category of information as SETI is based on.

SETI is looking for signals that are artificial, that cannot be explained by natural processes. The effort is huge, because the number of natural signals is overwhelming. ID, on the other hand, rejects well-known natural processes that account for the appearance of design, that are supported by many different independent lines of evidence.

The fact that some of the people who have adopted the idea of ID have gone on to extend it in religious ways does not invalidate the idea itself any more than the fact that many atheists have gone on to say that the Theory of Evolution proves there is no God invalidates Evolution.

Except that the earlies Intelligent Design writing, Of Pandas and People, is a search-and-replace edit of Creationist materials. s/Creator/Intelligent Designer/, and a few other terms. There was no "idea of ID" independent of Creationism.

Well if you own the book look for a copy on piratebay because honestly it took me 8 hours to roughly do 2 rare out of print 400 page books. Don't reinvent the wheel. I shared the two books for a day or so and had at one point people in a dozen different countries downloading just those two books. Who knows, depending on your library, if you take the time to scan something in and share it you could make a real difference to a lot of people who would have no ability to get that information otherwise. I am still trying to get these for instance and would really appreciate someone sharing them, I don't think Oppenheimer would mind.

I second this recommendation; Eli Maor's book one of the best math books I've ever read. The specifics of some of the math presented are going to be beyond the skills of most HS students, but understanding the math is not critical to enjoying the history. I've found that math history is a good way to get students engaged in math. So often, concepts in math are presented in a way that makes them seem like they were handed down to us by the gods at the dawn of time. My experience is that students become a little more interested when they realize there was a real person (or persons) behind any given concept, and sometimes, the skills they're learning, were completely unknown to anyone on earth 500 years ago.

In this vein, I would also recommend Charles Seife's "Zero". The math in this book is much more accessible (should prove no problem for HS students), yet it drives home some very important ideas that are crucial to understanding higher math.

If you haven't already, anybody who expects to have any clue about this at all should watch the Paul Stamets video of his presentation to the TED conference about fungi. And then buy and read Mycelium Running his overview book on the commercial and process implications of fungi. If you have any understanding of process engineering at all it will blow your mind.

The fungus in TFA is one of thousands that are only now being discovered and anybody who has done as I suggest above isn't likely to be terribly surprised at this news.

I know that I seem like I'm exaggerating, but effective exploitation of fungus-based techniques and technology may eventually be looked upon as more important than the development of the microchip. Seriously. And unlike microchips, fungus-based systems are done every day of the year in the basements of homebrewers, many of the /.ers.

IOW, if you find this stuff interesting, you can probably join the race to develop this stuff by the end of November. Which makes me glad that I live in Portland, home of tons of biotech companies and more beermaking experts then you can shake a bottleopener at.

Hell. yeah.

No, no, no. You're getting it wrong. The outlaws get shipped to the moon!

Cobber.

Yeah, the intent *is* to make a business. What's your point? Do you have any idea how many startups get helped out in one way or another by folks not expecting to buy the product or become stockholders? Whether it's the retail outlet that gets cut a more payable price because the landlord likes their concept or the software company that gets shipped a free SDK because the vendor would like to see their software on his or her platform, it's entirely normal for people to offer a company a helping hand simply to help strengthen the ecosystem their products sell into or simply because they feel like it.

Frankly, after all these years, I'm getting a bit tired of the fantasyland that so many /.ers seem to live in of "pure" capitalist successes and the omnicient and infallable Force Of The Market. Those of us who actually work in startups know better. I wish that you guys would go out and read Accidental Empires or The Eudaemonic Pie or any of the other many books on how companies actually get started and grow. It's messy, it's difficult, and it's rarely doable without plenty of assists from plenty of people. All that I'm suggesting is that we take a thing that's already normal and add /. to the equation in a more straightforward and effective way.

I could argue this point by point but for once Wikipedia actually is pretty good. So I'll just quote them where they say:
Woodward has been accused by a few critics of being too close to the Bush administration, and some say his relationship with the current administration is in stark contrast to his investigative role in Watergate.

But, as usual, they miss a lot of the story. As I've already mentioned, the most important spadework that he's done for the Reagan-Bush-Bush crowd is the way that he wrote and promoted Veil, which was a crucial tool in the effort to let the Reagan crew get away with Iran-Contra and a slew of other criminal underminings of our country. Ya see, Woodward gave the impression that damn near every unethical thing ever done under Reagan had been done by Casey without anybody else' knowledge or approval. Very convenient since Casey had just died and couldn't be ordered to testify. Well, in the years since it's become clear just how many other Reagan White House officials were involved in this though I'm pretty damn sure that we still don't have much of the picture. But Woodward bought them crucial time. And I suspect that this is why Bush gave him unprecedented access to the White House.

Think about it. With everything that we know about the Bush administration, does it really pass the smell test that Dubya would give Woodward such unique and comprehensive access to the administration if he genuinely were as dedicated an opponent of corruption as his press makes him seem?

I'm not just criticizing Woodward as a spur-of-the-moment impulse. I've been wary of that bastard for almost twenty years now. But evidently the rest a y'all either never knew or have forgotten.

A.) It takes a hell of a lot of technicians to run a sub reactor. How comfortable are you with adding, oh, thirty crew members to your complement just to run the reactor?
B.) Sub reactors work as well as they do in part *because* of all that water around them. Water conducts heat well and has a formidable thermal mass. Vacuum is the opposite. How many tons of water are you up for pushing out of the gravity well for your "not a big deal" reactor?
C.) Another factor in cooling is yet more tons of pumps and valves, most of which have been designed for fifty years to take advantage of gravity. Gawd knows a sub has to be able to keep running even with some degree of shift in attitude but I can't help thinking that zero-g would be a whole different kettle of neutrons.
D.) In addition, sub reactors haven't run as flawlessly as most people assume. Just including the scrams listed in, say, Blind Man's Bluff , we've seen some pretty damn scary reactor failures. Given how reliably we have found that the military covers up failures, even decades later, we have to assume that however many failures we know about, the actual safety record is even worse. I wouldn't be so ready to take their word for it or believe the conclusions of fanboys like Tom Clancy if I were you.
E.) Having said all of that, if we're going to talk about nuclear power in space, why don't we talk about existing successful examples of nuclear power IN SPACE? Voyager, anybody? Nuclear power is used in space all the time. RTGs have been in use since before most of the people on this site were born. Let's give them the cred they (and their designers and builders) deserve.

There are a number of Heinlein's novels that were aimed at the young-adult-to-adult category. Some of my favorites are:

'Have Space Suit, Will Travel.' This is my top pick. Best of all, there's a full-cast audio edition available that's nothing short of a radio play. Outstanding stuff!

Some of my other favorites from Heinlein, though not necessarily available (yet) on audio, are: "Starman Jones," "Rocket Ship Galileo," "Space Cadet," "Between Planets," "Red Planet," "Farmer in the Sky," and "The Puppet Masters."

Others have suggested Anne McCaffrey's works. There are lots of good books from her, true, though I have to say I'm not fond of what I see as a downgrade in quality of writing from her over the last decade or so. If you're going after her stuff, I highly recommend the earlier works, notably the earlier 'Dragonriders' books. Of those, two of my all-time favorites are "The White Dragon" and "The Dolphins of Pern."

I would also strongly recommend the "Inheritance" trilogy from Chris Paolini. The first book in the series, "Eragon" (and the book, BTW, was orders of magnitude better than that horrid excuse for a movie which has, thankfully, faded to obscurity) lays the groundwork. The second, "Eldest," picks up where it leaves off. The third and final one in the series, "Brisingr," is coming Sep. 20th of this year.

There are a couple of lesser-known authors that I went bonkers over as a kid, and I still re-read them to this day. If you can find a book club edition of "The Roads of Heaven," by Melissa Scott, do so. If not, there are three books in her "Silence Leigh" series: "Five-Twelfths of Heaven," "Silence in Solitude," and "Empress of Earth."

If your youngsters are interested in the ocean and its inhabitants, at least one lesser-known author I would recommend is Carl Biemiller. He did a trilogy called "The Hydronaut Adventures" that I found to be a terrific read.

Yet another recommendation (I'm just full of them today) I'd make is the books of James Schmitz who, sadly, is no longer with us. However, he left us a marvelous legacy in the form of wonders like "The Witches of Karres" and the Telzey Amberdon stories.

One of my all-time favorites from Schmitz is a book called "The Demon Breed." Among its other endearing characters, it features a pair of oversize, sentient, mutant otters.

Oh! One more... If you can locate a copy of Edward Ormondroyd's "David and the Phoenix," grab it!

There's probably others I'll think of after I hit "submit," but I think you'll have a pretty good start with this. As for getting the books, many of which are out of print, you would do well to search Powell's Books, as well as abebooks.com, a wonderful site that links together literally thousands of new and used book dealers.

Happy reading!

Actually, as Edison & The Electric Chair documents quite nicely, Edison originally intended to run all of his utilities through purpose-built subsurface channels. It actually made economic sense with late eighteen-hundreds technology. Almost. Unfortunately, waterproofing technology wasn't ready yet, so he eventually gave in and used raised power lines. Why we *still* do this over a hundred years later isn't so easy to justify. And the fraud that this kind of approach makes very easy helps protect the telecoms at times like this. I suspect that one of the many reasons that they fear the prospect of municipal service-providers is that once a few have been built, it will start becoming obvious how much the telcos lie about their costs and procedures.

As many of you have seen me say before, I think that we should build more public service tunnels along our rights of way of the sorts that private business have used for generations. You may know them better as the "steam tunnels" so key to many cheesy seventies slasher flicks.

The only real point in x86 is Windows compatability. Linux runs fine on ARM and many other architectures. There are probably more ARM Linux systems than x86-based Linux systems (all those Linux cellphones run ARM).

Apart from some very low level stuff, modern code tends to be very CPU agnostic.

::Angels sing:: http://www.powells.com/psection/ScienceFictionandFantasy.html Notice they have a used book button ^.^ and there's a $7 and under link. ^.^ ^.^ Anyway, that's where I'd go to get books. I used to live close enough to walk into the main store. Then, I'd look to see if any of my favorite authors had signed any of the posts, while I found a book... It's not a book club thing, so you're not going to get stuff sent to you. You can buy whenever, it's MUCH better than Barnes and Noble and there's a lot more choice than there is at the library. Trust me, I know, the sci-fi and fantasy sections are like the last stocked at the library. There's hardly ever anything there...

Note to self: Buy some more books from Powells.

I understand perfectly well that it is in Michael Powell's best interests to make such a response, but in the idiotic (and often overwhelming) tide of mommy-government "we know what's best for you" sophism, it is nothing less than delightful to see a vendor actually put up a fight instead of rolling over.

Note to everyone else: If you're a technical person, and you're not familiar with Powell's technical bookstore, you owe it to yourself to at least look around.

My only connection with Powells is that I've bought books from them.

I read an interesting review of what looks to be a great book on this very subject. I recommend reading it:
The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow Into Depressive Disorder by Allan V. Horwitz

Reviewed by Sally Satel

Evolution does not negate epiphanies. The argument that it's all evolution is a twisting of the idea that no one really invents anything, and is foisted off by people who simply have not invented something. That's my take-away from L. Sprague DeCamp's book, The Ancient Engineers - here's a crappy synopsis of it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ancient_Engineers and here's a better one: http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-0345320298-4

I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in this controversy.

I'm not sure how to take seriously someone who says in 2008 that you're screwed if you want a non-bestselling book. We live in a time of unprecedented availability of books...

If you know that book you want, yes. But with books still in print, it was always that case that your local bookseller could order it for you. Internet sellers add just a little bit of convenience to that.

What internet sellers really add is better access to used books. (I love Powells.com!) Still, you have to know what you want.

The "bookstore experience" is about tripping over some book you never knew existed, would never have thought to look for. At a little used and rare bookstore in Ellicott City, I've found things like a WWII era Naval Aviation boxing training manual; a 1950's dictionary, fascinating for tracking changes in grammar and usage; an edition of Emerson's journals, that flipping though I found relevant to a project I'm working on.

Independent bookstores enable you to know that books exist and to sample them.