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You've strayed from the topic a bit, but since you're into culinary stuff, I'd recommend Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat if you haven't read it already. More of a food science book than a cookbook, it gave me a much deeper appreciation of salt and how to properly use it.

There's a lot of good food science in that book, and if you dork out about cooking at all, I'd highly recommend it as a solid reference book to have around. I've tweaked some of the things that I make regularly based on stuff I learned from that book and they've gone from pretty damn good to "ruined eating this in a restaurant forever". When you can make something better than most restaurants for 1/3 of the cost, it's really hard to justify ordering that out.

Salting properly is one of those really important techniques.

Professor Matthew Walker, Director of UC Berkeley’s Sleep and Neuroimaging Lab, published "Why We Sleep" last month. http://www.simonandschuster.co... I devoured the book; it's good science and remarkably well written. It covers a lot of the current work, and that work would go a long way to explaining this effect. There is so much going on when we sleep that is key to mental and physical health, it's not just "downtime", and to a degree I had not imagined. Sadly, I now realize I must consume less of my beloved coffee. Gladly, my sleep habits were already pretty good and the kids in my house have an early bedtime, no tech in the bedroom rule.

I know it's not fashionable to RTFA but the IPCC report does propose actual solutions and costs those solutions (which will have negligible net cost)... they are the well-know solutions of more renewables, nuclear power and carbon sequestration along with a carbon tax.
The problem is that the corporations which have become rich on the current high CO2 emission path control the world's economies and governments so I can safely predict that nothing meaningful will be done and that we are all literally toast.

For more information (and interesting read), Naomi Klein's "This Changes Everything"
http://books.simonandschuster....

eBooks are a bonanza for publishers and authors right now. They're pretty good for the minor players in the eBookstore market (ie: BN.com, the iBookstore, etc.), but terrible for Amazon. Why? Amazon discounts, and the discount comes entirely from Amazon's margin.

The publisher's recommended price for an eBook is called the list price. The way a company like Amazon get eBooks is that it decides how many copies it's likely to sell, and then send the publisher 70% of list price times the number of copies. An eBook I was recently interested in purchasing, for example, is Firethorn by Sarah Micklem. List price is $16.99, which is the price both Apple and BN charge. This means that Amazon is paying $11.89 per copy. If they give a 20% discount off list price they would only charge $13.79, which would mean all their overhead (including Jeff Bezos salary) would have to be covered by $1.90. And 20% discounts are quite common. My current read ("Like a Mighty Army," by David Weber) is listed at $14.99, but Amazon sells it for $12.99. But Firethorn is a bit different.

Their price? $6.83. They lose $5.06 whenever anybody buys that book. It's a 60% discount, and 30 of those percentage points are a loss to Amazon. I wouldn't be surprised to find out they're getting a special deal of some sort with this book, but OTOH I also wouldn't be surprised if they're just eating the five bucks.

If Amazon can convince Hachette to reduce their portion of the sale to 60% then Amazon can increase it's standard discount to 25% and still increase eBook revenue by roughly a third (it goes from 10% of list price to 15%). Then they could seriously consider doing things Wall Street loves like paying dividends.

All jobs suck at one level or another. Grow up, suck it up, and keep working. You need to learn to work to live, not live to work.

The same advice I gave a coworker when we were discussing this same topic in -- of all places -- a children's library. I pointed him to this award-winning discussion of this topic.

I think your kids would also enjoy it, albeit on a different level.

The book is called @Large.

http://books.simonandschuster.com/At-Large/David-H-Freedman/9780684835587 Cuckoo's Egg might be the classic popular text from that era.

http://www.amazon.com/Cuckoos-Egg-Tracking-Computer-Espionage/dp/0743411463

Douglas Adams, the author and staunch Mactivist, never released a Mac version of his games because it would have bankrupted the company -- which would have benefited no one.

Oh, really? Funny, there seems to be a MacOS version of Starship Titanic sitting on my bookshelf at home. I wonder where it came from?

Oh, I know. The darn cat must've set off our portable infinite improbability generator again. What a rascal!