The October List - Free Preview (first 4 chapters)


Jeffery Deaver - 2013
    . .#1 bestselling author Jeffery Deaver has created the most riveting and original novel of the year-a race-against-the-clock mystery, told in reverse.THE OCTOBER LISTGabriela waits desperately for news of her abducted daughter.At last, the door opens.But it's not the negotiators. It's not the FBI.It's the kidnapper.And he has a gun.How did it come to this?Two days ago, Gabriela's life was normal. Then, out of the blue, she gets word that her six-year-old daughter has been taken. She's given an ultimatum: pay half a million dollars and find a mysterious document known as the "October List" within 30 hours, or she'll never see her child again. A mind-bending novel with twists and turns that unfold from its dramatic climax back to its surprising beginning, THE OCTOBER LIST is Jeffery Deaver at his masterful, inventive best.

The Five Great Philosophies of Life


William De Witt Hyde - 2012
    This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Reinventing Gravity: A Physicist Goes Beyond Einstein


John W. Moffat - 2008
    But what if, nonetheless, Einstein got it wrong?Since the 1930s, physicists have noticed an alarming discrepancy between the universe as we see it and the universe that Einstein's theory of relativity predicts. There just doesn't seem to be enough stuff out there for everything to hang together. Galaxies spin so fast that, based on the amount of visible matter in them, they ought to be flung to pieces, the same way a spinning yo-yo can break its string. Cosmologists tried to solve the problem by positing dark matter—a mysterious, invisible substance that surrounds galaxies, holding the visible matter in place—and particle physicists, attempting to identify the nature of the stuff, have undertaken a slew of experiments to detect it. So far, none have.Now, John W. Moffat, a physicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada, offers a different solution to the problem. The cap­stone to a storybook career—one that began with a correspondence with Einstein and a conversation with Niels Bohr—Moffat's modified gravity theory, or MOG, can model the movements of the universe without recourse to dark matter, and his work chal­lenging the constancy of the speed of light raises a stark challenge to the usual models of the first half-million years of the universe's existence.This bold new work, presenting the entirety of Moffat's hypothesis to a general readership for the first time, promises to overturn everything we thought we knew about the origins and evolution of the universe.

The Lost Valley


William Meikle - 2019
     A small team of prospectors and their local guides are looking for gold. What they find is blood and terror and death. The valley's monstrous inhabitants are not about to let go of its secrets lightly.

Dr. Quantum's Little Book Of Big Ideas: Where Science Meets Spirit


Fred Alan Wolf - 2005
    Quantum) is, as Deepak Chopra states, "one of the most important pioneers in the field of consciousness." Featured in the wordofmouth indie hit, What the Bleep Do We Know?!, Dr. Wolf is a physicist who knows how to put complex sciencebased ideas into terms that even sciencephobes can understand. With clarity and a sense of humor, Dr. Quantum presents Big Ideas in the form of both short quotes and longer excerpts and covers topics ranging from the construction of our everyday reality to our relationship to one another. Dr. Quantum's Little Book of Big Ideas is a perfect gift for anyone interested in the realm where science meets spirit.

Treachery in Death / New York to Dallas 2-in-1 Collection


J.D. Robb - 2015
    D. Robb Treachery in Death Eve Dallas and her partner, Peabody, are following up on a brutal, senseless crime—an elderly grocery owner killed by three stoned punks for nothing more than kicks and snacks. And for the first time, Peabody is primary detective on the case, which means she has to get used to a new level of authority and responsibility. Good thing she learned the ropes from a master like Eve.But after rounding up the perps, Peabody stumbles upon a much trickier situation. Determined to start working out as hard as she grills suspects, she chooses to do it at the old, rarely-used gym at Central. After a grueling workout, she squeezes into one of the narrow shower stalls, happy to have the place to herself. Just after she shuts the water off, the gym door clatters open—and while she cringes inside the stall, trying not to make a sound, Peabody overhears two fellow officers, Garnet and Oberman, arguing. References are made to delivering product, and a house in the islands, and someone named Keener who’s supposed to look like an OD. It doesn’t take long for a naked and vulnerable Peabody to realize that both officers are crooked—guilty not just of corruption but of murder as well. Fortunately, the two clear out of the locker room without realizing there was a witness.Eve Dallas may have trained Peabody well—but this is too dangerous for one person to take on alone. Now Peabody, Eve, and her husband, Roarke, must try to get the hard evidence they need to bring the dirty cops down—knowing all the while that the two have already killed to keep their secret, and are no doubt willing to do it again. New York to Dallas It was one of Eve Dallas’s earliest takedowns, back in her uniform days. A monster named Isaac McQueen had been abducting young victims and leaving them scarred in both mind and body. Thanks to Eve, he wound up where he belonged, removed from civilized society in Rikers. But he’s not behind bars anymore.After his escape, McQueen has two things in mind. One is to take up where he left off, preying on the young and innocent—when necessary, with the help of a female partner all too willing to be manipulated and to aid and abet his crimes. His other goal: to get revenge on the woman who stopped him all those years ago, now a high-profile lieutenant in the NYPSD and married to one of the city’s richest men.Commanding Eve’s attention with a chilling and brazen crime, McQueen sets off the chase—forcing Eve down a road marked with blood and tears, a road that eventually leads southwest to Dallas, Texas, the home Eve fled long ago. And each new twist brings her closer to the harrowing memory of when she wasn’t a hardened detective but a vulnerable girl just like McQueen’s innocent prey. As her husband, Roarke, tries to rescue her from the nightmares that claw at her mind, and her partner, Peabody, doggedly works to support her, Eve must confront—and call upon—the darkest parts of her own soul in order to survive.

Summary: The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck


Mark Manson - 2018
    If you don't have time to read the whole book?then this Summary is for you!

Bill Bailey's Remarkable Guide to British Birds


Bill Bailey - 2016
    Half-digested pieces of eel and water vole skull on your head is not a good look. Just so you know.'Bill Bailey's Remarkable Guide to British Birds is all about comedian Bailey's love of birds. A visual feast - it is packed with illustrations, sketches and notes by Bailey - as well as informative, it is funny and insightful, and positively crackles with energy, knowledge and wit as he takes us on a journey around the British isles, zooming in on those birds that enthuse him the most. Whether it's what they eat, where they fly to or how they communicate, these birds are always fascinating, and Bailey introduces us to their weird and wonderful ways in a manner that is always entertaining. If you're a parent who'd like to appear a bit clever when your child asks you the name of a bird; if you want to find a new and healthy hobby that takes you outdoors; or whether, quite simply, you want to understand a bit more about our natural environment and have a laugh at the same time, this is the perfect companion book to have.Alongside music and stand-up, one of Bailey's favourite pastimes is birdwatching, which he has been doing since he was a child in the West Country. His fondest memories are of family outings with parents, grandparents and cousins, ticking the birds off in his little Observer's Book of Birds. As he has said about those formative years, 'birdwatching gave a purpose to the day and a love of the natural world which has carried on into my adult life'. A beautifully and originally designed hardback, it will delight Bailey's fans as well as those who like a bit of armchair escapism.

Powering the Future


Robert B. Laughlin - 2011
    Laughlin transports us two centuries into the future, when we've ceased to use carbon from the ground--either because humans have banned carbon burning or because fuel has simply run out. Boldly, Laughlin predicts no earth-shattering transformations will have taken place. Six generations from now, there will still be soccer moms, shopping malls, and business trips. Firesides will still be snug and warm.How will we do it? Not by discovering a magic bullet to slay our energy problems, but through a slew of fascinating technologies, drawing on wind, water, and fire. Powering the Future is an objective yet optimistic tour through alternative fuel sources, set in a world where we've burned every last drop of petroleum and every last shovelful of coal.The Predictable: Fossil fuels will run out. The present flow of crude oil out of the ground equals in one day the average flow of the Mississippi River past New Orleans in thirteen minutes. If you add the energy equivalents of gas and coal, it's thirty-six minutes. At the present rate of consumption, we'll be out of fossil fuels in two centuries' time. We always choose the cheapest gas. From the nineteenth-century consolidation of the oil business to the California energy crisis of 2000-2001, the energy business has shown, time and again, how low prices dominate market share. Market forces--not green technology--will be the driver of energy innovation in the next 200 years. The laws of physics remain fixed. Energy will still be conserved, degrade entropically with use, and have to be disposed of as waste heat into outer space. How much energy a fuel can pack away in a given space is fixed by quantum mechanics--and if we want to keep flying jet planes, we will need carbon-based fuels. The Potential: Animal waste. If dried and burned, the world's agricultural manure would supply about one-third as much energy as all the coal we presently consume. Trash. The United States disposes of 88 million tons of carbon in its trash per year. While the incineration of waste trash is not enough to contribute meaningfully to the global demand for energy, it will constrain fuel prices by providing a cheap supply of carbon. Solar energy. The power used to light all the cities around the world is only one-millionth of the total power of sunlight pouring down on earth's daytime side. And the amount of hydropump storage required to store the world's daily electrical surge is equal to only eight times the volume of Lake Mead. PRAISE FOR ROBERT B. LAUGHLIN -Perhaps the most brilliant theoretical physicist since Richard Feynman---George Chapline, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory -Powerful but controversial.--- Financial Times -[Laughlin's] company ... is inspirational.- --New Scientist

The Universe Within: From Quantum to Cosmos


Neil Turok - 2012
    Every technology we rely on today was created by the human mind, seeking to understand the universe around us. Scientific knowledge is our most precious possession, and our future will be shaped by the breakthroughs to come. In this personal and fascinating work, Neil Turok, Director of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, explores the transformative scientific discoveries of the past three centuries -- from classical mechanics, to the nature of light, to the bizarre world of the quantum, and the evolution of the cosmos. Each new discovery has, over time, yielded new technologies causing paradigm shifts in the organization of society. Now, he argues, we are on the cusp of another major transformation: the coming quantum revolution that will supplant our current, dissatisfying digital age. Facing this brave new world, Turok calls for creatively re-inventing the way advanced knowledge is developed and shared, and opening access to the vast, untapped pools of intellectual talent in the developing world. Scientific research, training, and outreach are vital to our future economy, as well as powerful forces for peaceful global progress.

The Brutal Telling / Bury Your Dead


Louise Penny - 2017
    Everybody goes to Olivier's Bistro―including a stranger whose murdered body is found on the floor. When Chief Inspector Gamache is called to investigate, he is dismayed to discover that Olivier's story is full of holes. Why are his fingerprints all over the cabin that's uncovered deep in the wilderness, with priceless antiques and the dead man's blood? And what other secrets and layers of lies are buried in the seemingly idyllic village?Gamache follows a trail of clues and treasures―from first editions of Charlotte's Web and Jane Eyre to a spiderweb with a word mysteriously woven in it―into the woods and across the continent, before returning to Three Pines to confront the truth and the final, brutal telling.It is Winter Carnival in Quebec City, bitterly cold and surpassingly beautiful. Chief Inspector Armand Gamache has come not to join the revels but to recover from an investigation gone hauntingly wrong. But violent death is inescapable, even in the apparent sanctuary of the Literary and Historical Society--where an obsessive historian's quest for the remains of the founder of Quebec, Samuel de Champlain, ends in murder. Could a secret buried with Champlain for nearly four hundred years be so dreadful that someone would kill to protect it?Meanwhile, Gamache is receiving disquieting letters from the village of Three Pines, where beloved Bistro owner Olivier was recently convicted of murder. "It doesn't make sense," Olivier's partner writes every day. "He didn't do it, you know."As past and present collide in this astonishing novel, Gamache must relive a terrible event from his own past before he can begin to bury his dead.

Philosophy of Science


Jeffrey L. Kasser - 2006
    Kasser launches an ambitious and exciting inquiry into what makes science science, using the tools of philosophy to ask: * Why is science so successful? * Is there such a thing as the scientific method? * How do we distinguish science from pseudoscience? * Is science rational, cumulative, and progressive? Focusing his investigation on the vigorous debate over the nature of science that unfolded during the past 100 years, Professor Kasser covers important philosophers such as Karl Popper, W. V. Quine, Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, Imre Lakatos, Carl Hempel, Nelson Goodman, and Bas van Fraassen.All of these thinkers responded in one way or another to logical positivism, the dominant movement influencing the philosophy of science during the first half of the 20 th century. Logical positivism attempted to ground science exclusively in what could be known through direct experience and logic.It sounds reasonable, but logical positivism proved to be riddled with serious problems, and its eventual demise is an object lesson in how truly difficult it is—perhaps impossible—to secure the logical foundations of a subject that seems so unassailably logical: science.

World of Ptavvs/A Gift from Earth/Neutron Star


Larry Niven - 1994
    

In Search of Nature


Edward O. Wilson - 1996
    Wilson has scrutinized animals in their natural settings, tweezing out the dynamics of their social organization, their relationship with their environments, and their behavior, not only for what it tells us about the animals themselves, but for what it can tell us about human nature and our own behavior. He has brought the fascinating and sometimes surprising results of these studies to general readers through a remarkable collection of books, including The Diversity of Life, The Ants, On Human Nature, and Sociobiology. The grace and precision with which he writes of seemingly complex topics has earned him two Pulitzer prizes, and the admiration of scientists and general readers around the world.In Search of Nature presents for the first time a collection of the seminal short writings of Edward O. Wilson, addressing in brief and eminently readable form the themes that have actively engaged this remarkable intellect throughout his career.""The central theme of the essays is that wild nature and human nature are closely interwoven. I argue that the only way to make complete sense of either is by examining both closely and together as products of evolution.... Human behavior is seen not just as the product of recorded history, ten thousand years recent, but of deep history, the combined genetic and cultural changes that created humanity over hundreds of thousands of years. We need this longer view, I believe, not only to understand our species, but more firmly to secure its future.The book is composed of three sections. ""Animal Nature, Human Nature"" ranges from serpents to sharks to sociality in ants. It asks how and why the universal aversion to snakes might have evolved in humans and primates, marvels at the diversity of the world's 350 species of shark and how their adaptive success has affected our conception of the world, and admonishes us to ""be careful of little lives""-to see in the construction of insect social systems ""another grand experiment in evolution for our delectation.""The Patterns of Nature"" probes at the foundation of sociobiology, asking what is the underlying genetic basis of social behavior, and what that means for the future of the human species. Beginning with altruism and aggression, the two poles of behavior, these essays describe how science, like art, adds new information to the accumulated wisdom, establishing new patterns of explanation and inquiry. In ""The Bird of Paradise: The Hunter and the Poet,"" the analytic and synthetic impulses-exemplified in the sciences and the humanities-are called upon to give full definition to the human prospect.""Nature's Abundance"" celebrates biodiversity, explaining its fundamental importance to the continued existence of humanity. From ""The Little Things That Run the World""-invertebrate species that make life possible for everyone and everything else-to the emergent belief of many scientists in the human species' possible innate affinity for other living things, known as biophilia, Wilson sets forth clear and compelling reasons why humans should concern themselves with species loss. ""Is Humanity Suicidal?"" compares the environmentalist's view with that of the exemptionalist, who holds that since humankind is transcendent in intelligence and spirit, our species must have been released from the iron laws of ecology that bind all other species. Not without optimism, Wilson concludes that we are smart enough and have time enough to avoid an environmental catastrophe of civilization-threatening dimensions-if we are willing both to redirect our science and technology and to reconsider our self-image as a species.In Search of Nature is a lively and accessible introduction to the writings of one of the most brilliant scientists of the 20th century. Imaginatively illustrated by noted artist Laura Southworth, it is a book all readers will treasure."

Spinward Fringe Broadcast 10.5: Carnie's Tale


Randolph Lalonde - 2017
    The material was recorded while he was on Iora, a technically advanced world as the holocaust virus struck it. She is to review all materials and create a report that includes insights into the young pilot's personality, strategic information about Iora and any other details that could help Haven Fleet. Before long, Alice becomes personally invested in the plight of her subject, and makes discoveries that could change her forever. Meanwhile, a permanent government is taking hold in Haven Shore, and the Fleet is undergoing one last shakeup that could break the Apex class apart. All the while Alice is left to wonder where her father and his ship, the Revenge have gone while they wait for the rest of their active fleet to return from the Iron Head Nebula. The Spinward Fringe saga continues in Carnie's Tale, the connective tissue between Spinward Fringe Broadcast 10: Freeground and Spinward Fringe Broadcast 11: Revenge, telling Alice's story between those books from a more personal perspective. Version 2.