background preloader

Books & readings

Facebook Twitter

Download Audio Books, iPod And Digital Audio Books. Krugman Nails WSJ Pulitzer Winner For Misleading Inequality Claim. Breaking news: The Wall Street Journal editorial page is full of it. Filthy Lucre. When you fly Virgin Upper Class out of Heathrow, you go through a separate set of airport security. With a ticket that costs $4,000 round-trip, you swipe your boarding pass, go up a sleek private elevator, and pass through security and passport control that is delighted to see you.

How You Might Come to Believe You've Been Abducted by an Alien. Unless, you know, you’ve actually been abducted.

How You Might Come to Believe You've Been Abducted by an Alien

On a night in October 1957, a 23-year-old Brazilian farmer named Antonio Vilas-Boas, still out plowing the fields, looked up to see a strange red light in the sky. Then he noticed it was getting closer. It looked, he said, egg-shaped, with a spinning top. Three legs emerged from the craft as it descended upon the field where Vilas-Boas worked. British Genre Fiction Hitlist: Early November New Releases. From the fold of the British Genre Fiction Focus comes the British Genre Fiction Hitlist: your bi-weekly breakdown of the most notable new releases out of the United Kingdom’s thriving speculative fiction industry.

British Genre Fiction Hitlist: Early November New Releases

Steelheart. Steelheart is Now Available!

Steelheart

If you haven’t seen the Steelheart book trailer, the prologue, or the teaser chapters (Chapter Ten and Chapter Eleven), please go give them a look. Introduction There are no heroes. Every single person who manifested powers—we call them Epics—turned out to be evil. Here, in the city once known as Chicago, an extraordinarily powerful Epic declared himself Emperor.

Why do adolescents take crazy risks? – Guy Claxton – Aeon Magazine. It is every parent’s nightmare.

Why do adolescents take crazy risks? – Guy Claxton – Aeon Magazine

The sea wall at Plymouth Hoe is 65ft high and a line of boys, aged from 11 to 15, are leaping off the wall into the aptly named Dead Man’s Cove, each of them egged on by their friends. This is ‘tombstoning’ — the idea is to enter the water feet-first, as upright and rigid as a tombstone. Functionalism. First published Tue Aug 24, 2004; substantive revision Wed Jul 3, 2013 Functionalism in the philosophy of mind is the doctrine that what makes something a mental state of a particular type does not depend on its internal constitution, but rather on the way it functions, or the role it plays, in the system of which it is a part.

Functionalism

This doctrine is rooted in Aristotle's conception of the soul, and has antecedents in Hobbes's conception of the mind as a “calculating machine”, but it has become fully articulated (and popularly endorsed) only in the last third of the 20th century. Majority of Gamers Today Can’t Finish Level 1 in Super Mario Bros. Egg Freckles. Now 7.2 billion humans, and counting. United Nations demographers declared a day last week (July 11, 2013) as World Population Day, at the same time saying that our global human population has now reached 7.2 billion and counting.

Now 7.2 billion humans, and counting

The 7.2 billion number appears in the most recent of the biannual reports from the UN Population Division called World Population Prospects, which you can find here. This report also gave current projections for future population: According to the 2012 Revision of the official United Nations population estimates and projections, the world population of 7.2 billion in mid-2013 is projected to increase by almost one billion people within the next twelve years, reaching 8.1 billion in 2025, and to further increase to 9.6 billion in 2050 … And why they may no be worth finishing. ... Aeon Magazine - Spoken Essays - David Barash - Is there a war instinct? Download AGOGO Add to GOAdd to GOAdd To Listen LaterAdd To Listen LaterShare As Heard Via Aeon Magazine.

Aeon Magazine - Spoken Essays - David Barash - Is there a war instinct?

49 Breathtaking Libraries From All Over The World. Nelletorres's blurblog. It’s another whimsical Sunday morning, a perfect time to re-examine assumptions, and the one I’m working on this morning is when smaller business is actually better, where by “better” I might mean from the perspective of someone inside the business or from the perspective of the public.

nelletorres's blurblog

I came to this question by way of two articles I’ve read recently. Women CEO’s First up we havethis article from the Wall Street Journal, written by Sharon Hadary, which is entitled, “Why Are Women-Owned Firms Smaller Than Men-Owned Ones?” And basically wrings its hands about how self-defeating women are when it comes to owning businesses, how they never dream big enough. Hey, that seems super irrational of women!

Nelletorres's blurblog. It’s another whimsical Sunday morning, a perfect time to re-examine assumptions, and the one I’m working on this morning is when smaller business is actually better, where by “better” I might mean from the perspective of someone inside the business or from the perspective of the public.

nelletorres's blurblog

I came to this question by way of two articles I’ve read recently. Women CEO’s First up we havethis article from the Wall Street Journal, written by Sharon Hadary, which is entitled, “Why Are Women-Owned Firms Smaller Than Men-Owned Ones?” And basically wrings its hands about how self-defeating women are when it comes to owning businesses, how they never dream big enough. Hey, that seems super irrational of women! Nelletorres's blurblog. It’s another whimsical Sunday morning, a perfect time to re-examine assumptions, and the one I’m working on this morning is when smaller business is actually better, where by “better” I might mean from the perspective of someone inside the business or from the perspective of the public.

nelletorres's blurblog

I came to this question by way of two articles I’ve read recently. Women CEO’s First up we havethis article from the Wall Street Journal, written by Sharon Hadary, which is entitled, “Why Are Women-Owned Firms Smaller Than Men-Owned Ones?” And basically wrings its hands about how self-defeating women are when it comes to owning businesses, how they never dream big enough. Equal-opportunity malware targets Macs and Windows. Researchers have uncovered a family of malware that targets both Windows and OS X.

Janicab.A, as the trojan is known, is also unusual because it uses a YouTube page to direct infected machines to command-and-control (C&C) servers and follows a clever trick to conceal itself. The threat first came to light last week, when researchers from F-Secure and Webroot documented a new trojan threatening Mac users. Like other recently discovered OS X malware, Janicab was digitally signed with a valid Apple Developer ID. Blog » Multisystem Trojan Janicab attacks Windows and MacOSX via scripts. On Friday, July 12th a warning from an AVAST fan about a new polymorphic multisystem threat came to an inbox of AVAST.

Moreover, an archive of malicious files discussed here were attached. Some of them have been uploaded to Virustotal and therefore they have been shared with computer security professionals on the same day. A weekend had passed by and articles full of excitement about a new Trojan for MacOs started to appear on the web. We decided to make a thorough analysis and not to quickly jump on the bandwagon. » Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable Clay Shirky. Back in 1993, the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain began investigating piracy of Dave Barry’s popular column, which was published by the Miami Herald and syndicated widely. In the course of tracking down the sources of unlicensed distribution, they found many things, including the copying of his column to alt.fan.dave_barry on usenet; a 2000-person strong mailing list also reading pirated versions; and a teenager in the Midwest who was doing some of the copying himself, because he loved Barry’s work so much he wanted everybody to be able to read it.

One of the people I was hanging around with online back then was Gordy Thompson, who managed internet services at the New York Times. I remember Thompson saying something to the effect of “When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.” I think about that conversation a lot these days. Consumer Reports Investigation. Nelletorres's blurblog. Love Love Love. BBC NEWS: FBI 'saves 105 trafficked children' in 76 US cities. The Vitamin Myth. Hunger Games Catching Fire Changes May Anger Fans. By Jill Pantozzi | 12:55 pm, August 10th, 2013.

Historical guilt in America and Germany – Susan Neiman. On 22 December 2012, the distinguished African-American film director Spike Lee tweeted: ‘American Slavery Was Not A Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western. Working-Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty. How chemistry works: Gorgeous vintage science diagrams from 1854.

By Maria Popova Illustrated retro reactions from the father of Popular Science. Edward Livingston Youmans (1821-1887), best-remembered as the founder of Popular Science magazine, was one of history’s greatest science writers and editors. Links I Like. The Moral Equivalent of Space Aliens. The Weekly Flickr celebrates Mother’s Day. IRS targeted groups critical of government, documents from agency probe show. The staffers in the Cincinnati field office were making high-level decisions on how to evaluate the groups because a decade ago the IRS assigned all applications to that unit.

The Short Life & Fast Times of Fusion Drive. Fusion Drive, we barely knew you. Announced as part of an Apple event held on October 23rd, 2012. Fusion Drive combined the large capacity of a conventional hard drive with the speed of a 128 GB flash storage to create a single logical volume with the space of both drives combined. The operating system automatically managed the contents of the Fusion Drive so the most frequently accessed files, applications, documents, photos and other data are stored on the faster flash storage, while infrequently used items moved or stayed on the hard drive.

Users benefited from the affordable large-capacity data storage Fusion Drive provided, while still experiencing the quick boot times and fast application launch speeds of an SSD. Unfortunately many of Apple’s most popular Macs could not accommodate Fusion Drive due to a lack of space. InstaPocketability. Nelletorr : I'm now reading 'A Storm of... Remarkable books for kids. The Collective Legal Guide For Designers (Contract Samples) CLAS. The Value of Big Data Isn't the Data - Kristian J. Hammond. Supreme Court Upholds First Sale Rule: Librarians Thrilled, Publishers Unhappy.

Riveting storytelling by women. Community-curated collection of free books for the intellectually curious. Community-curated collection of free books for the intellectually curious. Stunning Vintage Illustrations of Don Quixote by Spanish Graphic Design Pioneer Roc Riera Rojas. We’re releasing the files for O’Reilly’s Open Government book. What Our Thinkers Think. The Quiet Wikideath of BBS History. Books Worth Reading / Top New Science Fiction on Goodreads, September 2012. Books Worth Reading / Top New Science Fiction on Goodreads, August 2012.

Interview with Kovid Goyal of Calibre. Great Big Ideas: Free Course Features Top Thinkers Tackling the World’s Most Important Ideas. NASA Presents “The Earth as Art” in a Free eBook and Free iPad App. The Book Cover Archive. Perfectionists Are Often The Best At 'The Art Of Procrastination' Brain Pickings' Best Books of 2012. The Best History Books of 2012. The power of zero spend. Rs manifesto. Listen to J.R.R. Tolkien Read a Lengthy Excerpt from The Hobbit (1952) Fairy tales. Monsanto Seed Patent Case Gets U.S. Supreme Court Review. Summer Reading - Summer Reading Guide 2012 Reading List - Book Finder. Mo Yan's 'Hallucinatory Realism' Wins Lit Nobel.