Sparta: Rise of a Warrior Nation


Philip Matyszak - 2017
    They are portrayed as the stereotypical macho heroes: noble, laconic, totally fearless and impervious to discomfort and pain. What makes the study of Sparta so interesting is that to a large extent the Spartans lived up to this image. Ancient Sparta, however, was a city of contrasts. We might admire their physical toughness and heroism in adversity but Spartans also systematically abused their children. They gave rights to citizen women that were unmatched in Europe until the modern era, meanwhile subjecting their conquered subject peoples to a murderous reign of terror. Though idealized by the Athenian contemporaries of Socrates Sparta was almost devoid of intellectual achievement. Philip Matyszak explores two themes: how Sparta came to be the unique society it was, and the rise of the city from a Peloponnesian village to the military superpower of Greece. But above all, his focus is on the Spartan hoplite, the archetypal Greek warrior who was respected and feared throughout Greece in his own day, and who has since become a legend. The reader is shown the man behind the myth; who he was, who he thought he was, and the environment which produced him.

The Kennedy Conspiracy: 12 Startling Revelations About the JFK Assassination


Bill Sloan - 2012
    Author Bill Sloan, award-winning journalist and co-author of JFK: THE LAST DISSENTING WITNESS, was working at the City Desk of the DALLAS TIMES HERALD just four blocks away when the fatal shots were fired. He helped cover the fast-moving sequence of events that followed, and later interviewed many of the people involved. Accounts in THE KENNEDY CONSPIRACY include those of Ed Hoffman, who saw the man who shot the president (and it wasn’t Oswald)—but was unable to communicate it to the authorities because he was deaf and mute; Gary Cornwell, deputy chief counsel of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, who saw the classified information still withheld from the public, and reveals how the FBI turned the investigation into “a joke, a farce, and a national disgrace”; James Tague, who was wounded by a bullet that the Warren Commission insisted was never fired; and Dr. Joe D. Goldstritch, who was in the Parkland ER when Kennedy’s body was brought in, and who witnessed the surgical procedure that destroyed the neat entry wound in the president’s throat.

Mathematics and Its History


John Stillwell - 1997
    Even when dealing with standard material, Stillwell manages to dramatize it and to make it worth rethinking. In short, his book is a splendid addition to the genre of works that build royal roads to mathematical culture for the many." (Mathematical Intelligencer)This second edition includes new chapters on Chinese and Indian number theory, on hypercomplex numbers, and on algebraic number theory. Many more exercises have been added, as well as commentary to the exercises explaining how they relate to the preceding section, and how they foreshadow later topics.

Handbook of Applied Cryptography


Alfred J. Menezes - 1996
    Standards are emerging to meet the demands for cryptographic protection in most areas of data communications. Public-key cryptographic techniques are now in widespread use, especially in the financial services industry, in the public sector, and by individuals for their personal privacy, such as in electronic mail. This Handbook will serve as a valuable reference for the novice as well as for the expert who needs a wider scope of coverage within the area of cryptography. It is a necessary and timely guide for professionals who practice the art of cryptography. The Handbook of Applied Cryptography provides a treatment that is multifunctional: It serves as an introduction to the more practical aspects of both conventional and public-key cryptographyIt is a valuable source of the latest techniques and algorithms for the serious practitionerIt provides an integrated treatment of the field, while still presenting each major topic as a self-contained unitIt provides a mathematical treatment to accompany practical discussionsIt contains enough abstraction to be a valuable reference for theoreticians while containing enough detail to actually allow implementation of the algorithms discussedNow in its third printing, this is the definitive cryptography reference that the novice as well as experienced developers, designers, researchers, engineers, computer scientists, and mathematicians alike will use.

The Shape of Inner Space: String Theory and the Geometry of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions


Shing-Tung Yau - 2010
    According to theorists, the missing six are curled up in bizarre structures known as Calabi-Yau manifolds. In The Shape of Inner Space, Shing-Tung Yau, the man who mathematically proved that these manifolds exist, argues that not only is geometry fundamental to string theory, it is also fundamental to the very nature of our universe.Time and again, where Yau has gone, physics has followed. Now for the first time, readers will follow Yau’s penetrating thinking on where we’ve been, and where mathematics will take us next. A fascinating exploration of a world we are only just beginning to grasp, The Shape of Inner Space will change the way we consider the universe on both its grandest and smallest scales.

The Complete Pyramids: Solving the Ancient Mysteries


Mark Lehner - 1997
    In this fully work on the major pyramids of Ancient Egypt, the author surveys the history, building and use of the pyramids. He examines both the practicalities and logostics of their construction and their conceptual aspects - their cosmology and iconography and their intriguing texts.

The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine


Lindsey Fitzharris - 2017
    She conjures up early operating theaters--no place for the squeamish--and surgeons, working before anesthesia, who were lauded for their speed and brute strength. These medical pioneers knew that the aftermath of surgery was often more dangerous than their patients' afflictions, and they were baffled by the persistent infections that kept mortality rates stubbornly high. At a time when surgery couldn't have been more hazardous, an unlikely figure stepped forward: a young, melancholy Quaker surgeon named Joseph Lister, who would solve the deadly riddle and change the course of history.Fitzharris dramatically recounts Lister's discoveries in gripping detail, culminating in his audacious claim that germs were the source of all infection--and could be countered by antiseptics. Focusing on the tumultuous period from 1850 to 1875, she introduces us to Lister and his contemporaries--some of them brilliant, some outright criminal--and takes us through the grimy medical schools and dreary hospitals where they learned their art, the deadhouses where they studied anatomy, and the graveyards they occasionally ransacked for cadavers.Eerie and illuminating, The Butchering Art celebrates the triumph of a visionary surgeon whose quest to unite science and medicine delivered us into the modern world.

Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction


Richard S. Sutton - 1998
    Their discussion ranges from the history of the field's intellectual foundations to the most recent developments and applications.Reinforcement learning, one of the most active research areas in artificial intelligence, is a computational approach to learning whereby an agent tries to maximize the total amount of reward it receives when interacting with a complex, uncertain environment. In Reinforcement Learning, Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto provide a clear and simple account of the key ideas and algorithms of reinforcement learning. Their discussion ranges from the history of the field's intellectual foundations to the most recent developments and applications. The only necessary mathematical background is familiarity with elementary concepts of probability.The book is divided into three parts. Part I defines the reinforcement learning problem in terms of Markov decision processes. Part II provides basic solution methods: dynamic programming, Monte Carlo methods, and temporal-difference learning. Part III presents a unified view of the solution methods and incorporates artificial neural networks, eligibility traces, and planning; the two final chapters present case studies and consider the future of reinforcement learning.

The Sumerians


Leonard Woolley - 1928
    The Sumerians had reached a very high level of culture by 3500 B.C.E., and may be said with some justice to be the forerunners of all the Old World civilizations of Egypt, Assyria, Asia Minor, Crete, and Greece. This book will appeal to everyone interested in the early history of humankind.

The Lady and Her Monsters: A Tale of Dissections, Real-Life Dr. Frankensteins, and the Creation of Mary Shelley's Masterpiece


Roseanne Montillo - 2013
    The Lady and Her Monsters by Roseanne Motillo brings to life the fascinating times, startling science, and real-life horrors behind Mary Shelley’s gothic masterpiece, Frankenstein.Montillo recounts how—at the intersection of the Romantic Age and the Industrial Revolution—Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein was inspired by actual scientists of the period: curious and daring iconoclasts who were obsessed with the inner workings of the human body and how it might be reanimated after death.With true-life tales of grave robbers, ghoulish experiments, and the ultimate in macabre research—human reanimation—The Lady and Her Monsters is a brilliant exploration of the creation of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley’s horror classic.

Dialogue with Trypho


Justin Martyr - 2003
    ca. 165), a convert to Christianity from traditional Greek religion. The Dialogue purports to be a two-day dialogue that took place in Asia Minor between Justin and Trypho, a Hellenized Jew. Justin argues extensively on the basis of lengthy Old Testament quotations that Christ is the Messiah and God incarnate, and that the Christian community is the new Israel. In the beginning of the work Justin recounts how he converted to Christianity.The Dialogue remains of great, and varying, interest. It has important information on the development of Jewish-Christian relations, on the development of the text of the Old Testament, and on the existence and character of the early Jewish Christian community. Justin's story of how he became a Christian is one of our earliest conversion accounts. The Dialogue is an ideal textbook for classes investigating the development of religion in Late Antiquity since it touches on many aspects of religion in the Roman Empire.This edition of the Dialogue with Trypho is a revision of Thomas B. Falls's translation, which appeared in Fathers of the Church, vol. 6. Thomas P. Halton has emended the translation in light of the 1997 critical edition by Miroslav Marcovich, and he has provided extensive annotation to recent scholarship on the Dialogue. Michael Slusser has edited the volume to bring it into conformity with the new Selections from Fathers of the Church series.ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR:Thomas P. Halton is Professor Emeritus of Greek and Latin at the Catholic University of America. He has served as the general editor of the Fathers of the Church series since 1983.

Doing Bayesian Data Analysis: A Tutorial Introduction with R and BUGS


John K. Kruschke - 2010
    Included are step-by-step instructions on how to carry out Bayesian data analyses.Download Link : readbux.com/download?i=0124058884            0124058884 Doing Bayesian Data Analysis: A Tutorial with R, JAGS, and Stan PDF by John Kruschke

The Human Experiment: Two Years and Twenty Minutes Inside Biosphere 2


Jane Poynter - 2006
    Imagine being sealed into a closed environment for two years — cut off from the outside world with only seven other people — enduring never-ending hunger, severely low levels of oxygen, and extremely difficult relationships. Crew members struggled to survive in Biosphere 2, where they swore nothing would go in or out — no food or water, not even air — all in the name of science. For the first time, biospherian Jane Poynter — who lived and loved in the Biosphere — is ready to share what really happened in there. She takes readers on a riveting, fast-paced trip through shattered lives, scientific discovery, cults, love, fears of insanity, and inspiring human endurance. The eight biospherians who closed themselves into the Biosphere emerged 730 days later… much wiser, thinner, and having done what many had said was impossible.

An Introduction to Probability Theory and Its Applications, Volume 1


William Feller - 1968
    Beginning with the background and very nature of probability theory, the book then proceeds through sample spaces, combinatorial analysis, fluctuations in coin tossing and random walks, the combination of events, types of distributions, Markov chains, stochastic processes, and more. The book's comprehensive approach provides a complete view of theory along with enlightening examples along the way.

Why Us?: How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves


James Le Fanu - 2009
    The first is the astonishing achievement of the Human Genome Project, which, it was anticipated, would identify the genetic basis of those characteristics that distinguish humans from their primate cousins. The second is the phenomenal advance in brain imaging that now permits neuroscientists to observe the brain 'in action' and thus account for the remarkable properties of the human mind.But that is not how it has turned out. It is simply not possible to get from the monotonous sequence of genes along the Double Helix to the near infinite diversity of the living world, nor to translate the electrical firing of the brain into the creativity of the human mind. This is not a matter of not knowing all the facts. Rather, science has inadvertently discovered that its theories are insufficient to conjure the wonder of the human experience from the bare bones of our genes and brains.We stand on the brink of a tectonic shift in our understanding of ourselves that will witness the rediscovery of the central premise of Western philosophy that there is 'more than we can know'. Lucid, compelling and utterly engaging, ‘Why Us?’ offers a convincing and provocative vision of the new science of being human.