Albert Einstein

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pages: 282 words: 89,436

Einstein's Dice and Schrödinger's Cat: How Two Great Minds Battled Quantum Randomness to Create a Unified Theory of Physics by Paul Halpern

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, clockwork universe, cosmological constant, dark matter, double helix, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, luminiferous ether, Murray Gell-Mann, New Journalism, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, seminal paper, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, time dilation

Barbour (Boston: Birkhäuser, 1994), 218. 250 Notes 8. Albert Einstein to Erwin Schrödinger, January 22, 1946, Albert Einstein Duplicate Archive, Princeton, NJ, 22-093. 9. Erwin Schrödinger to Albert Einstein, February 19, 1946, Albert Einstein Duplicate Archive, 22-094. 10. Erwin Schrödinger to Albert Einstein, March 24, 1946, Albert Einstein Duplicate Archive, 22-102. 11. Albert Einstein to Erwin Schrödinger, April 7, 1946, Albert Einstein Duplicate Archive, 22-103. 12. Erwin Schrödinger to Albert Einstein, June 13, 1946, Albert Einstein Duplicate Archive, 22-107. 13. Albert Einstein to Erwin Schrödinger, July 16, 1946, Albert Einstein Duplicate Archive, 22-109. 14.

George Prior Woollard, “Transcontinental Gravitational and Magnetic Profile of North America and Its Relation to Geologic 249 Notes Structure,” Geological Society of America Bulletin 54, no. 6 (June 1, 1943): 747–789. 29. “Schroedinger’s New Theory Confirmed,” Irish Press, June 28, 1943, 1. 30. Erwin Schrödinger to Albert Einstein, August 13, 1943, Albert Einstein Duplicate Archive, 22-075. 31. Albert Einstein to Erwin Schrödinger, September 10, 1943, Albert Einstein Duplicate Archive, 22-076. 32. Erwin Schrödinger to Albert Einstein, October 31, 1943, Albert Einstein Duplicate Archive, 22-088. 33. Albert Einstein to Erwin Schrödinger, December 14, 1943, Albert Einstein Duplicate Archive, 22-090. 34. Reported in Walter Moore, Schrödinger: Life and Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 418.

Erwin Schrödinger, Space-Time Structure (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 114. 12. Ibid., 116. 13. Albert Einstein to Erwin Schrödinger, September 3, 1950, Albert Einstein Duplicate Archive, 22-171. 14. Erwin Schrödinger to Albert Einstein, May 15, 1953, Albert Einstein Duplicate Archive, 22-210. 252 Notes 15. Albert Einstein to Erwin Schrödinger, June 9, 1953, Albert Einstein Duplicate Archive, 22-212. 16. Robert Romer, “My Half Hour with Einstein,” Physics Teacher 43 (2005): 35. 17. Albert Einstein, quoted in Werner Heisenberg, Encounters with Einstein (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 121. 18.


pages: 349 words: 27,507

E=mc2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation by David Bodanis

Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, Berlin Wall, British Empire, dark matter, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, Erwin Freundlich, Fellow of the Royal Society, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Mercator projection, Nelson Mandela, pre–internet, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Stephen Hawking, Thorstein Veblen, time dilation

George Rosen (New York: Knopf, 1947, revised 1953), p. 17. 5 “displayed some quite good achievements”: Albrecht Fölsing, Albert Einstein: A Biography (London: Viking Penguin, 1997), pp. 115-16. 7 . . . jokingly called his department of theoretical physics . . . : The phrasing is recalled by a visitor, Rudolf Ladenburg; in Folsing, Albert Einstein, p. 222; see also Anton Reiser, Albert Einstein, a Biographical Portrait (New York: A. and C. Boni, 1930), p. 68. 7 “I like him a great deal . . .”: Folsing, Albert Einstein, p. 73. 7 . . . feeling “the greatest excitement”: Reiser, Einstein, p. 70. 7 “The idea is amusing . . . that I cannot know.”

Later the young man returned. It was Einstein; finally the two said hello. From von Laue’s account in a 1952 letter in Carl Seelig, Albert Einstein: A Documentary Biography (trans. Mervyn Savill (London: Staples Press, 1956), p. 78. 89 “I have to tell you . . .”: Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, vol. 1. I’ve rearranged material from the letters given in documents 39, 72, 76, and 70. 90 The myth that she had been responsible for . . . : The story was first promoted in In the Shadow of Albert Einstein, published in Serbo-Croat in 1969 by the retired schoolteacher Desanka Trbuhović-Gjurić. It was developed in Andrea Gabor’s Einstein’s Wife (New York: Viking, 1995), and received a great public boost when Jill Ker Conway, onetime Smith College president, reviewed Gabor’s book most favorably in The New York Times.

Mileva was a good physics undergraduate, but no muse. See John Stachel’s “Albert Einstein and Mileva Marić: A Collabora- notes tion that Failed to Develop” in Creative Couples in Science, ed. H. Pycior, N. Slack, and P. Abir-Am (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995). The real quality of their relation is best seen in Albert Einstein, Mileva Marić: The Love Letters, ed. Jurgen Renn and Robert Schulmann; trans. Shawn Smith (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992). 91 Compared with this . . . child’s play: Banesh Hoffmann, Albert Einstein: Creator and Rebel (New York: Viking, 1972), p. 116. 8.


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The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever by Christopher Hitchens

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boeing 747, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, cosmic microwave background, cuban missile crisis, David Attenborough, Edmond Halley, Georg Cantor, germ theory of disease, index card, Isaac Newton, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, phenotype, Plato's cave, risk tolerance, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Thales of Miletus, Timothy McVeigh, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics

I believe that we have to content ourselves with our imperfect knowledge and understanding and treat values and moral obligations as a purely human problem—the most important of all human problems.” —Albert Einstein, 1947; from Banesh Hoffmann, Albert Einstein: Creator and Rebel, New York: New American Library, 1972, Chapter 11. “I am a deeply religious nonbeliever…. This is a somewhat new kind of religion.” —Albert Einstein, in a letter to Hans Muehsam, March 30, 1954; Einstein Archive 38–434; from The Expanded Quotable Einstein, Chapter 29. “I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.” —Albert Einstein, upon being asked if he believed in God by Rabbi Herbert Goldstein of the Institutional Synagogue, New York, April 24, 1921, published in The New York Times, April 25, 1929; from Einstein: The Life and Times, Ronald W.

For this reason, people of our type see in morality a purely human matter, albeit the most important in the human sphere.” —Albert Einstein, letter to a Rabbi in Chicago; from Albert Einstein, the Human Side, pp. 69–70. “I have never imputed to Nature a purpose or a goal, or anything that could be understood as anthropomorphic. What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism.” —Albert Einstein, replying to a letter in 1954 or 1955; from Albert Einstein, the Human Side, Chapter 5. “I do not believe that a man should be restrained in his daily actions by being afraid of punishment after death or that he should do things only because in this way he will be rewarded after he dies.

The proper guidance during the life of a man should be the weight that he puts upon ethics and the amount of consideration that he has for others.” —Albert Einstein; from Peter A. Bucky, The Private Albert Einstein, Kansas City: Andrews & McMeel, 1992, Chapter 10. “Scientific research is based on the idea that everything that takes place is determined by laws of nature, and therefore this holds for the action of people. For this reason, a research scientist will hardly be inclined to believe that events could be influenced by a prayer, i.e. by a wish addressed to a supernatural Being.” —Albert Einstein in response to a child who had written him in 1936 and asked if scientists pray; from Albert Einstein, the Human Side, Chapter 5.


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Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel by Stephen Budiansky

Abraham Wald, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, business cycle, Douglas Hofstadter, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, four colour theorem, Georg Cantor, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, John von Neumann, laissez-faire capitalism, P = NP, P vs NP, Paul Erdős, rent control, scientific worldview, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, Turing machine, urban planning

From Eros to Gaia. New York: Penguin, 1995. —. Maker of Patterns: An Autobiography Through Letters. New York: Liveright, 2018. Dyson, George. Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe. New York: Random House, 2012. Einstein, Albert. The Albert Einstein Archives. Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. albert-einstein.org. —. Collected Papers of Albert Einstein. Digital Einstein Papers, Princeton University Press. einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu. —. Director’s Office: Faculty Files. Institute for Advanced Study Archives, Princeton, N.J. Ellenberg, Jordan. “Does Gödel Matter?” Slate, 10 March 2005.

CHAPTER 6: THE SCHOLAR’S PARADISE 1.Taussky-Todd, “Remembrances of Gödel,” 32; Manifest of Alien Passengers for the United States Immigration Officer at Port of Arrival, SS Beregaria, Passengers sailing from Cherbourg, 23 September 1933. 2.Manifest of Alien Passengers for the United States Immigration Officer at Port of Arrival, SS Aquitania, Passengers sailing from Cherbourg, 30 September 1933, Arriving Port of New York, 6 October 1933; Abraham Flexner to Edgar Bamberger, 26 September 1933, IAS, Faculty Files, Pre-1953. 3.Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral, 24; Stern, “History of Institute,” 1:24–25. 4.Klári von Neumann quoted in Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral, 24. 5.Stern, “History of Institute,” 1:26, 47–48. 6.Stern, “History of Institute,” 1:48–49. 7.Stern, “History of Institute,” 1:56. 8.Stern, “History of Institute,” 1:2–3, 8. 9.Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral, 28; Stern, “History of Institute,” 1:15–17. 10.Stern, “History of Institute,” 1:1–3. 11.Stern, “History of Institute,” 1:4. 12.Flexner, “Useless Knowledge”; Stern, “History of Institute,” 1:77–82, 134. 13.Oswald Veblen quoted in Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral, 31–32. 14.Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral, 32. 15.Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral, 18–19, 21; Goldstine, OH, 4. 16.Oswald Veblen quoted in Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral, 26; “A Memorial to a Scholar-Teacher,” Princeton Alumni Weekly, 30 October 1931; Tucker, OH, 16. 17.Tucker, OH, 7–8. 18.Stern, “History of Institute,” 1:73 n. 7, 139, 189 n. 19, 193 nn. 63 and 65, 194 n. 85. 19.Stern, “History of Institute,” 1:195–96 n. 111. 20.Stern, “History of Institute,” 1:219. 21.KG to MG, 29 September 1950; he mentions having written to her back in 1933 about “the local beauties of nature” in KG to MG, 28 May 1961. 22.Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise, 40, 47. 23.Maynard, “Princeton in Confederacy’s Service”; Watterson, I Hear My People, 79. 24.Albert Einstein to Elisabeth of Belgium, 20 November 1933, Einstein, Archives, 32-369. 25.Carl Ludwig Siegel to Richard Courant, 18 September 1935, quoted in Siegmund-Schultze, Mathematicians Fleeing Nazi Germany, 247. 26.Kreisel, “Kurt Gödel,” 154. 27.Dawson, Logical Dilemmas, 97–98; KG to MG, 3 October 1948. 28.Albert Einstein to Hans Reichenbach, 2 May 1936, quoted in Siegmund-Schultze, Mathematicians Fleeing Nazi Germany, 226 (I have slightly adjusted the translation from the original German); Blaschke, “History of American Mathematical Society”; Segal, “Mathematics and German Politics,” 131–32. 29.Albert Einstein quoted in Siegmund-Schultze, Mathematicians Fleeing Nazi Germany, 225; Birkhoff, “American Mathematics,” 2:277; Abraham Flexner to George Birkhoff, 30 September 1938, quoted in Institute for Advanced Study, Refuge for Scholars, 8, and Siegmund-Schultze, Mathematicians Fleeing Nazi Germany, 226. 30.Halperin, OH, 14; Klári von Neumann quoted in Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral, 54; Graham, “Adventures in Fine Hall.” 31.Whitman, Martian’s Daughter, 16–17. 32.Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral, 54; Churchill Eisenhart quoted in Graham, “Adventures in Fine Hall.” 33.Graham, “Adventures in Fine Hall.” 34.KG to Oswald Veblen, 31 March 1933, Veblen, Papers, 6/5. 35.KG, “Foundation of Mathematics,” CW, 3:45. 36.KG, “On Undecidable Propositions,” CW, 1:346–71 (lectures at IAS); KG, “Existence of Undecidable Propositions” (NYU talk); Engelen, ed., Notizbücher, 394 (depressed afterward); John Kemeny quoted in Graham, “Adventures in Fine Hall.”

., 19, 88. 8.KG to MG, 4 May 1941 (“I only had 3 listeners left by the end”). 9.KG, “Cantor’s Continuum Problem,” CW, 2:186. 10.Hao Wang interview, W&B, 241; Wang, Reflections on Gödel, 116, 131–32. 11.Kreisel, “Kurt Gödel,” 158. 12.Schewe, Freeman Dyson, 119–22; Huber-Dyson, “Gödel and Mathematical Truth”; Kreisel, “Gödel’s Excursions,” 146; Feferman and Feferman, Tarski, 228. 13.Huber-Dyson, “Gödel and Mathematical Truth”; Schewe, Freeman Dyson, 122; Feferman and Feferman, Tarski, 273–76. 14.Graham, “Adventures in Fine Hall.” 15.Holton and Elkana, eds., Albert Einstein, 4. 16.Pais, Subtle Is the Lord, 473; OMD, 7 December 1947. 17.KG to MG, 21 July 1946; Dyson, Gaia to Eros, 161; Ernst Straus in Holton and Elkana, eds., Albert Einstein, 422; Straus in Woolf, ed., Strangeness in Proportion, 485. 18.KG to Carl Seelig, 7 September 1955, CW, 5:249; OMD, 7 December 1947, 10 February 1951. 19.KG to MG, 31 July 1947, 16 April 1949, 26 February 1949, 5 January 1955. 20.KG to MG, 31 July 1947. 21.OMD, 11 June 1946; KG to MG, 19 January 1947. 22.OMD, 29 March 1946, 20 September 1958, 18 July 1969. 23.OMD, 9 December 1969. 24.OMD, 7 October 1941. 25.OMG to MG, 22 January 1946; OMG to RG, 21 September 1941; Frank Aydelotte to Dr.


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Horizons: The Global Origins of Modern Science by James Poskett

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clockwork universe, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, complexity theory, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, Dmitri Mendeleev, Donald Trump, double helix, Drosophila, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, German hyperinflation, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, lone genius, mass immigration, megacity, Mount Scopus, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, personalized medicine, polynesian navigation, Republic of Letters, Silicon Valley, social distancing, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Virgin Galactic

Reinders, The Life, Science and Times of Lev Vasilevich Shubnikov: A Pioneer of Soviet Cryogenics (Cham: Springer, 2018), 23–32. 28Reinders, Lev Vasilevich Shubnikov, 171–92. 29Kojevnikov, Stalin’s Great Science, 85–8, Hargittai, Buried Glory, 109–10 and 125, and Josephson, Physics and Politics, 312. 30Hargittai, Buried Glory, 128. 31Hargittai, Buried Glory, 112 and 122. 32Hu, China and Albert Einstein, 58–9, Gao Pingshu, ‘Cai Yuanpei’s Contributions to China’s Science’, in Dainian and Cohen, eds., Chinese Studies, 399, and Dai Nianzu, ‘The Development of Modern Physics in China: The 50th Anniversary of the Founding of the Chinese Physical Society’, in Dainian and Cohen, eds., Chinese Studies, 208. 33Hu, China and Albert Einstein, 89–92. 34Hu, China and Albert Einstein, 92–7. 35Hu, China and Albert Einstein, 58–61 and 133. 36Hu, China and Albert Einstein, 66–9, and Gao, ‘Cai Yuanpei’s Contributions’, 397–404. 37Hu, China and Albert Einstein, 127, and Dai, ‘Development of Modern Physics’, 209–10. 38Danian Hu, ‘American Influence on Chinese Physics Study in the Early Twentieth Century’, Physics in Perspective 17 (2016): 277. 39Hu, China and Albert Einstein, 44–6. 40Hu, China and Albert Einstein, 116–7, and Mary Bullock, ‘American Science and Chinese Nationalism: Reflections on the Career of Zhou Peiyuan’, in Remapping China: Fissures in Historical Terrain, eds.

., Chinese Studies, 208. 33Hu, China and Albert Einstein, 89–92. 34Hu, China and Albert Einstein, 92–7. 35Hu, China and Albert Einstein, 58–61 and 133. 36Hu, China and Albert Einstein, 66–9, and Gao, ‘Cai Yuanpei’s Contributions’, 397–404. 37Hu, China and Albert Einstein, 127, and Dai, ‘Development of Modern Physics’, 209–10. 38Danian Hu, ‘American Influence on Chinese Physics Study in the Early Twentieth Century’, Physics in Perspective 17 (2016): 277. 39Hu, China and Albert Einstein, 44–6. 40Hu, China and Albert Einstein, 116–7, and Mary Bullock, ‘American Science and Chinese Nationalism: Reflections on the Career of Zhou Peiyuan’, in Remapping China: Fissures in Historical Terrain, eds. Gail Hershatter, Emily Honig, Jonathan Lipman, and Randall Stross (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 214–5. 41Hu, China and Albert Einstein, 116–7, and Bullock, ‘American Science and Chinese Nationalism’, 214–6. 42Hu, China and Albert Einstein, 116–9, and P’ei-yuan Chou, ‘The Gravitational Field of a Body with Rotational Symmetry in Einstein’s Theory of Gravitation’, American Journal of Mathematics 53 (1931). 43Hu, China and Albert Einstein, 119–20, and Bullock, ‘American Science and Chinese Nationalism’, 217. 44Hu, China and Albert Einstein, 119–20, and Dai, ‘Development of Modern Physics’, 210–13. 45Zhang Wei, ‘Millikan and China’, in Dainian and Cohen, eds., Chinese Studies. 46Dai, ‘Development of Modern Physics’, 210, Zuoyue Wang, ‘Zhao Zhongyao’, in New Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed.

Gieben, 1993), 1–3 and 149–50. 87Tetsumori Yamashima, ‘Jokichi Takamine (1854–1922), the Samurai Chemist, and His Work on Adrenalin’, Journal of Medical Biography 11 (2003), and William Shurtleff and Akiko Aoyagi, Jokichi Takamine (1854–1922) and Caroline Hitch Takamine (1866–1954): Biography and Bibliography (Lafayette: Soyinfo Center, 2012), 5–14. 88Yamashima, ‘Jokichi Takamine (1854–1922)’, and Shurtleff and Aoyagi, Jokichi Takamine, 224. 89Bartholomew, The Formation of Science in Japan, 63, and Koizumi, ‘The Emergence of Japan’s First Physicists’, 82–4. 90Koizumi, ‘The Emergence of Japan’s First Physicists’, 84–7. 91Koizumi, ‘The Emergence of Japan’s First Physicists’, 90–2, Eri Yagi, ‘On Nagaoka’s Saturnian Atom (1903)’, Japanese Studies in the History of Science 3 (1964), and Hantaro Nagaoka, ‘Motion of Particles in an Ideal Atom Illustrating the Line and Band Spectra and the Phenomena of Radioactivity’, Journal of the Tokyo Mathematico-Physical Society 2 (1904). 92‘Liste de membres du Congrès international de physique’, 156, Koizumi, ‘The Emergence of Japan’s First Physicists’, 89, and Tanakadate and Nagaoka, ‘The Disturbance of Isomagnetics’. 93Eri Yagi, ‘The Development of Nagaoka’s Saturnian Atomic Model, I – Dispersion of Light’, Japanese Studies in the History of Science 6 (1967): 25, and Eri Yagi, ‘The Development of Nagaoka’s Saturnian Atomic Model, II – Nagaoka’s Theory of the Structure of Matter’, Japanese Studies in the History of Science 11 (1972): 76–8. 94Yagi, ‘On Nagaoka’s Saturnian Atom’, 29–47, Lawrence Badash, ‘Nagaoka to Rutherford, 22 February 1911’, Physics Today 20 (1967), and Ernest Rutherford, ‘The Scattering of α and β Particles by Matter and the Structure of the Atom’, Philosophical Magazine 21 (1911): 688. 95Koizumi, ‘The Emergence of Japan’s First Physicists’, 65. 96Bartholomew, The Formation of Science in Japan, 199–201. 97Koizumi, ‘The Emergence of Japan’s First Physicists’, 96. 98‘In Memory of Pyotr Nikolaevich Lebedev’, Physics-Uspekhi 55 (2012). 99Morus, When Physics Became King, 167. 100Koizumi, ‘The Emergence of Japan’s First Physicists’, 18. Part Four: Ideology and Aftermath, c.1914–2000 7. Faster Than Light 1Josef Eisinger, Einstein on the Road (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2011), 32–4, Danian Hu, China and Albert Einstein: The Reception of the Physicist and His Theory in China, 1917–1979 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 66–74, Albert Einstein, The Travel Diaries of Albert Einstein: The Far East, Palestine, and Spain, 1922–1923, ed. Ze’ev Rosenkranz (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 135, and Alice Calaprice, ed., The Ultimate Quotable Einstein (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 419. 2Eisinger, Einstein on the Road, 34–51, and Einstein, Travel Diaries, 143. 3Eisinger, Einstein on the Road, 36–46, and Seiya Abiko, ‘Einstein’s Kyoto Address: “How I Created the Theory of Relativity”’, Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 31 (2000): 1–6. 4Eisinger, Einstein on the Road, 58–63, David Rowe and Robert Schulmann, eds., Einstein on Politics: His Private Thoughts and Public Stands on Nationalism, Zionism, War, Peace, and the Bomb (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 95–105 and 125–6, and Richard Crockatt, Einstein and Twentieth-Century Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 77–106. 5Eisinger, Einstein on the Road, 58–63, Calaprice, ed., Quotable Einstein, 194 and 202, and Rowe and Schulmann, Einstein on Politics, 156–9. 6Calaprice, ed., Quotable Einstein, 165. 7Calaprice, ed., Quotable Einstein, 292, Crockatt, Einstein and Twentieth-Century Politics, 29, Rowe and Schulmann, Einstein on Politics, 189–97, and Kenkichiro Koizumi, ‘The Emergence of Japan’s First Physicists: 1868–1900’, Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 6 (1975): 80. 8Ashish Lahiri, ‘The Creative Mind: A Mirror or a Component of Reality?’


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Hemingway Didn't Say That: The Truth Behind Familiar Quotations by Garson O'Toole

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, en.wikipedia.org, Honoré de Balzac, Internet Archive, Lao Tzu, Mahatma Gandhi, New Journalism, ought to be enough for anybody, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Steve Jobs, Wayback Machine, Yogi Berra

Another now defunct website called imfunny.net displayed an elaborate nine-panel composite image dated November 3, 2012, with the title “The Day That Albert Einstein Feared May Have Finally Arrived.” Eight panels showed people preoccupied by phones. The ninth panel presented the following saying superimposed on a picture of Einstein. No name was given for the person posting the message:3 “I fear the day that technology will surpass our human interaction. The world will have a generation of idiots.” —Albert Einstein The “Talk” webpage for Albert Einstein at the Wikiquote website lists a third version of the quotation in a section titled “Unsourced and Dubious/Overly Modern Sources.”

“The Day That Albert Einstein Feared May Have Finally Arrived,” imfunny.net, November 3, 2012. The website imfunny.net is now defunct, but the webpage cited here can be found via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, which captured a snapshot of the webpage on November 10, 2012, although, unfortunately, the picture with the quotation was not part of the snapshot. (The Internet Archive Wayback Machine does not always store all images.) See https://web.archive.org/web/20121110025042/http://imfunny.net/the-day-that-albert-einstein-feared-may-have-finally-arrived/. 4. “Talk:Albert Einstein,” [discussion page], Wikiquote, https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Albert_Einstein.

Ripley delivers the quotation, and Reed immediately ascribes it to Einstein: Donald Ripley: It’s become appallingly clear that our technology has surpassed our humanity. Jeremy Reed: Albert Einstein. Donald Ripley: I look at you, and I, I think that someday our humanity might actually surpass our technology. The statement in this dialogue is not identical to the quote popularly ascribed to Einstein. For example, Ripley’s remark uses the words “clear” and “surpassed,” while the common Einstein-attributed saying uses “obvious” and “exceeded.” But semantically they are quite close. Albert Einstein did make a famous statement in 1946 that was thematically consonant with the movie Powder’s expression.


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Surfaces and Essences by Douglas Hofstadter, Emmanuel Sander

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Flynn Effect, gentrification, Georg Cantor, Gerolamo Cardano, Golden Gate Park, haute couture, haute cuisine, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, l'esprit de l'escalier, Louis Pasteur, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, Norbert Wiener, place-making, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, theory of mind, time dilation, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

Moreover, using the word “dude” strongly resonates with using the word “one”, and vice versa — indeed, when used together, these two words paint a vivid portrait not only of Albert Einstein but of a certain brand of English speakers who are prone to use this kind of phrase. To put it more explicitly, probably most native speakers of American English have developed a category in their minds that could be labeled “the kind of person who goes around saying ‘one smart dude’ ”. However, the category is not as narrow as this label suggests. To be sure, it would be instantly evoked if one were to hear the above remark about Albert Einstein’s intelligence, but its evocation doesn’t depend on having heard the specific words “smart” and “dude”; it would also be evoked by remarks like “Doris Day was one cute cookie” or “That’s one bright lamp!”

Analogy-making and Categorization: Two Sides of the Same Coin If you were now to run across some photos of Albert Einstein, you might well think, “An excellent example of the category Twain/Grieg!” As a result, your mental entity Twain/Grieg would slightly change, taking into account this third member. The outcome would be a more general category, and as such it would deserve a new label, just as when a small company grows large, it no longer belongs solely to the two people who founded it many years earlier. As a matter of fact, your category initially based on the facial resemblances of Mark Twain and Edvard Grieg (and then Albert Einstein), as it came to include more similar-looking people, could, in view of its growing generality, change its name, perhaps adopting the acronymic label “TGE”, or it could even lose its label completely.

This saga, rather troubling but at the same time enlightening, beautifully illustrates Einstein’s ability to put his finger on the true essence of a physical situation where his colleagues either saw nothing of special interest or saw only a fog without any recognizable landmarks. For us, the story of this analogy constitutes an example of human intelligence at its very finest. The Marvelous Conceptual Slippages of Albert Einstein What is the most famous equation in the world? The most plausible candidate, other than “1 + 1 = 2”, would surely be “E = mc2”, the celebrated formula by which Albert Einstein revealed a profound but unsuspected relationship between the concepts of mass and energy. In the next several sections of this chapter, we will concentrate our attention mainly on the process by which the Technical Expert, Third Class gradually deepened his understanding of the meaning of his discovery.


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Erwin Schrodinger and the Quantum Revolution by John Gribbin

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, Arthur Eddington, British Empire, Brownian motion, double helix, Drosophila, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gregor Mendel, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, lateral thinking, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, the scientific method, trade route, upwardly mobile

One of the most intriguing aspects of Schrödinger the physicist, and one that lies at the heart of his antipathy to the revolution he participated in, is that although he made a major contribution to the new science of the twentieth century, he was brought up in the scientific tradition of the nineteenth. He graduated from high school and started at university in 1906, the year after Albert Einstein published his classic papers on the special theory of relativity and quantum physics. But Einstein, of course, was an exception; his ideas on quantum physics, in particular, were not taken seriously for at least another ten years, and the real quantum revolution took place at the hands of Young Turks such as Werner Heisenberg (born in 1901) and Paul Dirac (born in 1902), who, along with the likes of Niels Bohr, Louis de Broglie, and Einstein, all come into the story of Schrödinger’s life and work.

His first attempt to get away from Nazi-influenced Europe came to nothing when he turned up in Oxford with both his wife and his mistress, offending the academic establishment there by making no attempt to conceal their living arrangements, with which his wife, who had her own lovers, was quite happy. The possibility of a post in Princeton alongside Albert Einstein fell through for the same reason. Schrödinger eventually landed up in more tolerant Dublin, where at the behest of Éamon de Valera, the Taoiseach (Irish Prime Minister), the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies was set up to provide him with a base. Schrödinger was also unconventional in other respects.

The five-storey building was divided into five separate apartments, and in 1890 “our” Schrödinger and his parents moved in to the spacious fifth-floor accommodation, with views overlooking St. Stephan’s Cathedral. Most of what we know about Erwin’s early life comes from the recollections of his aunt Minnie, which should be taken with the same pinch of proverbial salt as similar recollections made (much later in life) by relatives of Albert Einstein about his precocious childhood. But in both cases the reminiscences surely contain seeds of truth. From an early age, Erwin was interested in astronomy: he would persuade Minnie to stand representing the Earth while he ran round her to be the Moon, and then make her walk in a circle around a light representing the Sun while he continued to run round her.


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Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life by Ozan Varol

Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Boeing 747, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, dark matter, delayed gratification, different worldview, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake news, fear of failure, functional fixedness, Gary Taubes, Gene Kranz, George Santayana, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Inbox Zero, index fund, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, late fees, lateral thinking, lone genius, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, move fast and break things, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occam's razor, out of africa, Peter Pan Syndrome, Peter Thiel, Pluto: dwarf planet, private spaceflight, Ralph Waldo Emerson, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skinner box, SpaceShipOne, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subprime mortgage crisis, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra

Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept of Nature: Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College (Cambridge: University Press, 1920), 163. Chapter 3: A Mind at Play 1. The opening section on Albert Einstein’s thought experiments is based on the following sources: Walter Isaacson, “The Light-Beam Rider,” New York Times, October 30, 2015; Albert Einstein, “Albert Einstein: Notes for an Autobiography,” Saturday Review, November 26, 1949, https://archive.org/details/EinsteinAutobiography; Walter Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007); Albert Einstein, The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, vol. 7, The Berlin Years: Writings, 1918–1921 (English translation supplement), trans.

Visit ozanvarol.com/rocket to find worksheets, challenges, and exercises to help you implement the strategies discussed in this chapter. 3 A MIND AT PLAY How to Ignite Breakthroughs with Thought Experiments When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge. —ALBERT EINSTEIN WHAT WOULD HAPPEN if I chased after a beam of light?1 A sixteen-year-old Albert Einstein pondered this question after he had run away from his unimaginative German school that emphasized rote memorization at the expense of creative thinking. His destination was a reformist Swiss school founded on the principles of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, who championed learning through visualization.

NASA, “Dark Energy, Dark Matter,” NASA Science, updated July 21, 2019, https://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus-areas/what-is-dark-energy. 25. James Clerk Maxwell, The Scientific Letters and Papers of James Clerk Maxwell, vol. 3, 1874–1879 (New York: Cambridge University Press 2002), 485. 26. George Bernard Shaw, toast to Albert Einstein, October 28, 1930. 27. Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions: Based on Mein Weltbild (New York: Crown, 1954), 11. 28. Alan Lightman, A Sense of the Mysterious: Science and the Human Spirit (New York: Pantheon Books, 2005). 29. The discussion on Steve Squyres is based on the following sources: Squyres, Roving Mars; University of California Television, “Roving Mars with Steve Squyres: Conversations with History,” video, YouTube, uploaded August 18, 2011, www.youtube.com/watch?


Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-Up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World by Lesley M. M. Blume

Albert Einstein, British Empire, clean water, disinformation, Doomsday Clock, Norman Mailer

., Einstein on Politics: His Private Thoughts and Public Stands on Nationalism, Zionism, War, Peace, and the Bomb (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 376. horrific destruction: Albert Einstein letter to Niels Bohr, December 12, 1944, as reprinted in David E. Rowe and Robert Schulmann, eds., Einstein on Politics, 364. “Today, the physicists…”: Albert Einstein, “The War Is Won, but the Peace Is Not,” speech, Hotel Astor, New York, December 10, 1945, as reprinted in David E. Rowe and Robert Schulmann, eds., Einstein on Politics, 381. every… population on earth vulnerable: Albert Einstein, “The Real Problem Is in the Hearts of Men,” New York Times Magazine, June 23, 1946, as reprinted in David E.

But once “Hiroshima” ran in the New Yorker, the genie could not be put back into the bottle. Now that the cover-up was blown, the reality of nuclear aftermath was a matter of permanent, policy-influencing international record. Hersey had made it impossible for Americans to avert their eyes and, as physicist Albert Einstein put it, “escape into easy comforts” again. That said, the Manhattan Project’s General Leslie Groves—who had played a central early role in distorting and hiding information about Hiroshima and the weapon he’d helped create—did play a surprising role in bringing “Hiroshima” to the masses. And the U.S. government and military would find their own unlikely and cynical utility in the article once it had been published.

Here was America at leisure again. The editors chose to keep Martin’s summery picture on the “Hiroshima” issue. After reading the story inside, this bucolic scene would likely take on unnerving connotations for readers: perhaps this was a sleepwalking, apathetic America that had indeed “escape[d] into easy comforts,” as Albert Einstein had put it just months earlier, while ignoring the perils of the atomic age. Or it could have been seen as echoing the obliviousness of Hiroshima’s residents as they went about their daily routines on the morning of August 6, 1945, just before 8:15 a.m. (Some of the story’s readers might have found the cover scene especially sinister after realizing that a comparable public park in Hersey’s story—Asano Park—had ended up serving as an evacuation site for blast survivors, and within twenty-four hours was littered with scalded corpses.)


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The Age of Radiance: The Epic Rise and Dramatic Fall of the Atomic Era by Craig Nelson

Albert Einstein, Brownian motion, Charles Lindbergh, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, El Camino Real, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John von Neumann, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, music of the spheres, mutually assured destruction, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, oil shale / tar sands, Project Plowshare, Ralph Nader, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, Ted Sorensen, TED Talk, too big to fail, uranium enrichment, William Langewiesche, éminence grise

At the dawn of the Atomic Age, physicists were elevated in the public mind to the role of secular priests, their study of subatomic particles appearing to lead them, simultaneously, to spiritual and moral truths. Notably, Albert Einstein and Marie Curie became heroes to millions around the world, role models for a new era. Along with many civilians, E. O. Lawrence, Enrico Fermi, and both generations of Curies believed that their scientific discoveries would inexorably lead to benefits for all humankind. Instead, that sweet hope, along with their current reputations, has been battered by a history of thermonuclear-winter terrors and run-amok power plants. Following the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the great pacifist Albert Einstein, who had nothing to do with fission beyond his letters to Roosevelt, was depicted on the cover of Time magazine against a mushroom cloud and his most beloved equation, E = mc2, while Mme.

“After these three laws were read”: Rittenmeyer and Skundrick. “The Jewess endangers the institute”; “nothing more could be done”; “The great misfortune has happened”: Sime. “It is considered undesirable”: Rife. “is like a sensitive child”: Letter to Ehrenfest, May 4, 1920, in Albrecht Fölsing, Albert Einstein: A Biography (London: Viking, 1997). “appeared to me like a miracle”: Paul A. Schilpp, ed., Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist (New York: MJF Books, 1969). “Bohr loved paradoxes”: Teller. “I wanted her to be provided for”; “The danger consisted in the SS’s”: Hahn. “You have made yourself as famous”: Rife. “No, but I was told”: Segrè, From X-Rays to Quarks.

Under the Thrall of a Two-Faced God Photographs Heartfelt Thanks About Craig Nelson Notes Sources Photo Credits Index For Stuart—You are the best in the world at what you do. The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as of all serious endeavor in art and science. He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. —ALBERT EINSTEIN Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we fear less. —MARIE CURIE 1 Radiation: What’s in It for Me? YESTERDAY you dashed your breakfast eggs with dried spices that had been irradiated against bacteria, germination, and spoilage.


pages: 385 words: 98,015

Einstein's Unfinished Revolution: The Search for What Lies Beyond the Quantum by Lee Smolin

adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, Brownian motion, Claude Shannon: information theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, Ernest Rutherford, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, Schrödinger's Cat, Stephen Hawking, Stuart Kauffman, the scientific method, Turing machine

NOTES Preface 1. J. S. Bell, “On the Einstein Podolsky Rosen Paradox,” Physics 1, no. 3 (November 1964): 195–200. Chapter 1: Nature Loves to Hide Epigraph Albert Einstein, “A Reply to Criticisms,” Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, ed. P. A. Schillp, 3rd ed. (Peru, IL: Open Court Publishing, 1988). 1. Einstein to Max Born, December 4, 1926, in The Born-Einstein Letters: The Correspondence Between Albert Einstein and Max and Hedwig Born, 1916–1955, with Commentaries by Max Born, trans. Irene Born (New York: Walker and Co., 1971) 88. Chapter 2: Quanta 1. Tom Stoppard, Arcadia: A Play, first performance, Royal National Theatre, London, April 13, 1993; act 1, scene 1 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 9.

David Bohm, “A Suggested Interpretation of Quantum Theory in Terms of ‘Hidden’ Variables, 1,” Physical Review 85, no. 2 (January 1952): 166–79. 2. Albert Einstein, quoted in Wayne Myrvold, “On Some Early Objections to Bohm’s Theory,” International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 17, no. 1 (March 2003): 7–24. 3. Albert Einstein, quoted in E. David Peat, Infinite Potential: The Life and Times of David Bohm (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 132. 4. Albert Einstein, “Elementäre Überlegungen zur Interpretation der Grundlagen der Quanten-Mechanik,” in Scientific Papers Presented to Max Born (New York: Hafner, 1953), 33–40; quoted in Myrvold. 5.

Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2013. Hoffmann, Banesh, with Helen Dukas. Albert Einstein: Creator and Rebel. New York: Viking Press, 1973. Klein, Martin J. Paul Ehrenfest. Vol. 1: The Making of a Theoretical Physicist. New York: American Elsevier, 1970. Overbye, Dennis. Einstein in Love: A Scientific Romance. New York: Penguin, 2000. Pais, Abraham. Niels Bohr’s Times: In Physics, Philosophy, and Polity. Oxford, UK, and New York: Clarendon Press / Oxford University Press, 1991. Pais, Abraham. Subtle is the Lord: The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein. Oxford, UK, and New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.


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Einstein's Fridge: How the Difference Between Hot and Cold Explains the Universe by Paul Sen

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, anti-communist, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, Ernest Rutherford, heat death of the universe, invention of radio, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, John von Neumann, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Richard Feynman, seminal paper, Stephen Hawking, traveling salesman, Turing complete, Turing test

Chapter Nineteen: Event Horizon Bekenstein and Hawking were the first: From The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safer for Quantum Mechanics by Leonard Susskind. Your idea is so crazy: Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics by John Archibald Wheeler with Kenneth Ford. “happiest thought of my life”: From The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Vol. 7: The Berlin Years. “For an observer in free fall”: From Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Vol. 7. “That gravity should be”: From a letter from Isaac Newton to Richard Bentley, 1692–93. In early 1916: “Über das Gravitationsfeld eines Massenpunktes nach der Einsteinschen Theorie” by Karl Schwarzschild, February 1916. evocative nickname: black holes: During a 1967 talk at NASA’s Goddard Institute, the lecturer John Wheeler asked the audience to suggest a shorter term to describe a “gravitationally completely collapsed object.”

In the following pages, I shall therefore celebrate the heroes and heroines of science and show their quest to discover the truth about the universe as the ultimate creative endeavor. Sadi Carnot, William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), James Joule, Hermann von Helmholtz, Rudolf Clausius, James Clerk Maxwell, Ludwig Boltzmann, Albert Einstein, Emmy Noether, Claude Shannon, Alan Turing, Jacob Bekenstein, and Stephen Hawking are among the smartest humans who ever lived. To tell their story is a way for all of us to comprehend and appreciate one of the greatest achievements of the human intellect. Ludwig Boltzmann, one of the heroes of this story, put it this way: “It must be splendid to command millions of people in great national ventures, to lead a hundred thousand to victory in battle.

That in turn meant that the entire edifice of statistical mechanics that Boltzmann had built was suspect. His probabilistic explanation for the way entropy increases was worthless if the objects it depended on, namely atoms and molecules, could not be observed directly. Many scientists in the German-speaking world were attracted to phenomenalism at that time, including the young Albert Einstein. In later years he recalled how Mach’s ideas made him realize that time and space have no meaning unless there are clocks and rulers to measure them, and that in turn helped inspire his theories of relativity. But the cost for Boltzmann was high. He found himself drawn into exhausting debates over the existence of the atoms and the molecules that he claimed were in constant, violent motion.


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Big Bang by Simon Singh

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, Andrew Wiles, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Astronomia nova, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, Brownian motion, carbon-based life, Cepheid variable, Chance favours the prepared mind, Charles Babbage, Commentariolus, Copley Medal, cosmic abundance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, dark matter, Dava Sobel, Defenestration of Prague, discovery of penicillin, Dmitri Mendeleev, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Charles Pickering, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Erwin Freundlich, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, fudge factor, Hans Lippershey, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, horn antenna, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Index librorum prohibitorum, information security, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Karl Jansky, Kickstarter, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, Magellanic Cloud, Murray Gell-Mann, music of the spheres, Olbers’ paradox, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Paul Erdős, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, scientific mainstream, Simon Singh, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, time dilation, unbiased observer, Wilhelm Olbers, William of Occam

JAMES JEANS The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy. STEVEN WEINBERG In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it’s the exact opposite. PAUL DIRAC The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible. ALBERT EINSTEIN Table of Contents Cover Title Page Dedication Epigraph Chapter 1 IN THE BEGINNING Chapter 2 THEORIES OF THE UNIVERSE Chapter 3 THE GREAT DEBATE Chapter 4 MAVERICKS OF THE COSMOS Chapter 5 THE PARADIGM SHIFT Epilogue What is Science? Glossary Further Reading Index P.S. About the author About the book Read on Acknowledgements About the Author From the reviews of Big Bang: By the same author Copyright About the Publisher Chapter 1 IN THE BEGINNING Science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths.

It just seemed so utterly obvious that the Sun revolved round a static Earth, and not the other way round. In short, a Sun-centred universe ran counter to. Good scientists, however, should not be swayed by common sense, because it sometimes has little to do with the underlying scientific truth. Albert Einstein condemned common sense, declaring it to be ‘the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen’. Another reason why the Greeks rejected Aristarchus’ Solar System was its apparent failure to stand up to scientific scrutiny. Aristarchus had built a model of the universe that was supposed to match reality, but it was not clear that his model was accurate.

It has brought us much nearer to grasping that plan that underlies all physical happening. HERMANN WEYL But the years of anxious searching in the dark for a truth that one feels but cannot express, the intense desire and the alternations of confidence and misgiving, and the final emergence into light – only those who have experienced it can appreciate it. ALBERT EINSTEIN It is impossible to travel faster than the speed of light, and certainly not desirable, as one’s hat keeps blowing off. WOODY ALLEN During the course of the early twentieth century, cosmologists would develop and test a whole variety of models of the universe. These candidate models emerged as physicists gained a clearer understanding of the universe and the scientific laws that underpin it.


Turing's Cathedral by George Dyson

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, Abraham Wald, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Danny Hillis, dark matter, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, finite state, Ford Model T, Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, IFF: identification friend or foe, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, machine readable, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Neal Stephenson, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, phenotype, planetary scale, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, SETI@home, social graph, speech recognition, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Turing complete, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture

Klára von Neumann, Two New Worlds. 12. Oswald Veblen to Frank Aydelotte, n.d., IAS. 13. Oswald Veblen to Abraham Flexner, March 19, 1935, IAS. 14. Science, New Series 74, no. 1922 (Oct. 30, 1931): 433; Herman Goldstine, interview with Albert Tucker and Frederik Nebeker. 15. Oswald Veblen to Albert Einstein, April 17, 1930, IAS-BS. 16. Albert Einstein to Oswald Veblen, April 30, 1930, IAS-BS. 17. Herbert H. Maass, Report on the Founding and Early History of the Institute, n.d., ca. 1955, IAS; Abraham Flexner, “The American University,” Atlantic Monthly, vol. 136, October 1925, pp. 530–41; Maass, Report on the Founding and Early History of the Institute. 18.

Metropolis and Frankel did not belong to either group and mysteriously just showed up. “All I was told was that what Metropolis came out for was to calculate the feasibility of a fusion bomb,” remembers Jack Rosenberg, an engineer who had designed, built, and installed a hi-fi audio system in Albert Einstein’s house for his seventieth birthday in 1949, using some of the computer project’s spare vacuum tubes and other parts. “That’s all I knew. And then I felt dirty. And Einstein said ‘that’s exactly what I thought they were going to use it for.’ He was way ahead.”10 The new machine was christened MANIAC (Mathematical and Numerical Integrator and Computer) and put to its first test, during the summer of 1951, with a thermonuclear calculation that ran for sixty days nonstop.

Equations for gravitation, relativity, quantum theory, five perfect solids, and three conic sections were set into leaded glass windows, and the central mantelpiece featured a carving of a fly traversing the one-sided surface of a Möbius strip. “Every little door knob, every little gargoyle, every little piece of stained glass that has a word on it, was something that Veblen personally supervised,” noted Herman Goldstine in 1985.14 In April 1930, Veblen wrote to Albert Einstein requesting permission to inscribe a remark Einstein had made in Princeton in 1921—“Raffiniert ist der Herr Gott aber Boshaft ist Er nicht” (translated at the time as “God is clever, but not dishonest”)—above the fireplace in the Professors’ Lounge. “It was your reply when someone asked you if you thought that [Dayton C.]


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Crucible: The Long End of the Great War and the Birth of a New World, 1917-1924 by Charles Emmerson

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, British Empire, continuation of politics by other means, currency peg, disinformation, Eddington experiment, Etonian, European colonialism, Ford Model T, ghettoisation, Isaac Newton, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Monroe Doctrine, Mount Scopus, new economy, plutocrats, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, trade route, W. E. B. Du Bois

Winter 1918 Rosa Luxemburg quotation from ‘Der Anfang’, Die Rote Fahne, 18 November 1918. BREST: ‘tense voyage’: Badger, Life in Ragtime, 162. ‘do not recognise’: Sammons and Morrow, 190. • STOCKHOLM: for Einstein’s life see Philipp Frank, Einstein: His Life and Times, 1948; Albrecht Fölsing, Albert Einstein: A Biography, 1997 (trans. Ewald Osers); and Walter Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe, 2007. ‘milk and sugar’: to Hans Albert Einstein, 25 January 1918, CPAE VIII, 615, note 4. ‘torment me’: from Mileva Einstein-Marić, 9 February 1918, CPAE X, 141–143. • KANSAS CITY: ‘get into aviation’: to the Hemingway family, 2 January 1918, LEH I, 71. ‘still a Christian’: to Grace Hemingway, 16 January 1918, LEH I, 76–77.

STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN: The Nobel Prize Committee receives a letter from an Austrian physicist recommending a former patent clerk in Switzerland, now working at one of the German Kaiser’s most prestigious scientific institutes in Berlin, for the award of the Nobel Prize in Physics. Over the next few days, several more letters pile up suggesting the young Albert Einstein, still only in his mid-thirties, for the award. PLESS CASTLE, SILESIA, THE GERMAN REICH: The German Kaiser is in no mood for compromise. ‘The war’, he explains, ‘is a struggle between two Weltanschauungen, the Teutonic-German for decency, justice, loyalty and faith, genuine humanity, truth and real freedom; against the worship of mammon, the power of money, pleasure, land-hunger, lies, betrayal, deceit.’

VIENNA: The following morning, at 9 a.m. precisely, a spectacle of quite a different kind gets under way in Vienna’s central criminal court: a sensational murder trial involving the assassination of the Austrian Premier in one of the city’s finest restaurants last year by Friedrich Adler, the son of the leader of the Austrian Social Democrats, Victor Adler. All Vienna’s attention is riveted on proceedings. Albert Einstein writes a personal letter to Emperor Charles pleading for the actions of his friend Friedrich–who is a physicist as well as a revolutionary–to be treated as a tragic accident rather than a crime. Freud writes to a friend: ‘our inner conflict here is perhaps nowhere so plainly revealed as it is by the extremely notable trial of Fr.


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Coming of Age in the Milky Way by Timothy Ferris

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Atahualpa, Cepheid variable, classic study, Commentariolus, cosmic abundance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, dark matter, delayed gratification, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Garrett Hardin, Gary Taubes, Gregor Mendel, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Henri Poincaré, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Karl Jansky, Lao Tzu, Louis Pasteur, Magellanic Cloud, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, music of the spheres, planetary scale, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, source of truth, Stephen Hawking, Thales of Miletus, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, time dilation, Wilhelm Olbers

.: Harvard University Press, 1986. Hodson, F.R., ed. The Place of Astronomy in the Ancient World. London: Oxford University Press, 1974. Hoffmann, Banesh. Albert Einstein, Creator and Rebel. New York: Viking, 1972. Nontechnical study of Einstein’s life and work, by his former collaborator. —————. Relativity and Its Roots. San Francisco: Freeman, 1983. Einstein and the aether. Holton, Gerald, and Yehuda Elkana, eds. Albert Einstein, Historical and Cultural Perspectives. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982. —————. The Scientific Imagination. London: Cambridge University Press, 1979. —————.

THE PERSISTENCE OF MYSTERY ADDENDUM TO THE PERENNIAL EDITION GLOSSARY A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSE NOTES BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX About the Author Books by Timothy Ferris Copyright About the Publisher One thing I have learned in a long life: that all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike—and yet it is the most precious thing we have. —Albert Einstein The wind was flapping a temple flag, and two monks were having an argument about it. One said the flag was moving, the other that the wind was moving; and they could come to no agreement on the matter. They argued back and forth. Eno the Patriarch said, “It is not that the wind is moving; it is not that the flag is moving; it is that your honorable minds are moving.”

To be sure, Galileo recognized, as he put it, that “reason must step in” only “where the senses fail us.” But since he lived in a time when the senses were aided by none but the most rudimentary experimental apparatus—he had, for instance, no timepiece more accurate than his pulse—Galileo found that reason had to step in rather often. In the words of Albert Einstein, the greatest all-time master of the thought experiment, “The experimental methods of Galileo’s disposal were so imperfect that only the boldest speculation could possibly bridge the gaps between empirical data.”12 Consequently it was more by thinking than by experimentation that Galileo arrived at new insights into the law of falling bodies.


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Neutrino Hunters: The Thrilling Chase for a Ghostly Particle to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe by Ray Jayawardhana

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, Higgs boson, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Johannes Kepler, Large Hadron Collider, Magellanic Cloud, New Journalism, race to the bottom, random walk, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, seminal paper, Skype, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, time dilation, undersea cable, uranium enrichment

More recently, neutrinos were blamed for heating the Earth’s core, triggering ferocious earthquakes and floods, in the Hollywood disaster flick 2012 directed by Roland Emmerich. Despite neutrinos’ quirky appeal as cultural icons, few people outside the physics community paid much attention to the science of real-life neutrinos until they made headlines recently for possibly breaking the cosmic speed limit set by Albert Einstein back in 1905. A large international collaboration of physicists known as OPERA (acronym for the unwieldy title Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus) made the startling announcement in a research paper posted online and at a press conference in late September of 2011. The particles appeared to travel faster than light between CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research and its Laboratory for Particle Physics in Geneva, Switzerland, and an underground detector 454 miles away in Gran Sasso, Italy, arriving 60 nanoseconds sooner than expected.

On the cosmic scale, the special and general theories of relativity altered our understanding of space, time, motion, and gravity in truly fundamental ways. On the subatomic scale, the newfangled theory of quantum mechanics revealed a weird world full of strange phenomena where uncertainty rules the day and paradoxes run free. The iconic Albert Einstein proposed the special theory at the tender age of twenty-six, while working as a clerk in the Swiss patent office, in 1905. The idea behind it was not entirely new: Galileo had pointed out three centuries earlier that all motion is relative and that there is no absolute state of rest. (That is why objects on a ship sailing at a uniform speed behave the same way as they do when the ship is docked at harbor.

Pauli’s outspoken manner did not endear him to everyone, but he earned the respect of many of his colleagues not just for his brilliance but also for his honesty and forthrightness. Many of them saw him as the “conscience of physics,” and often asked, “What does Pauli think?” when they were presented with a new idea. Albert Einstein and Wolfgang Pauli (Pauli Archive, CERN) After extended visits to Göttingen and Copenhagen to work with prominent physicists, Pauli took up a research assistant position in Hamburg. While there, at the age of twenty-five, he formulated what is now known as the “Pauli exclusion principle” in quantum mechanics, a key insight for understanding not only the behavior of a class of subatomic particles known as fermions (which includes electrons, protons, and neutrons) but also the inner workings of stars.


Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions by Temple Grandin, Ph.D.

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, air gap, Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Apple II, ASML, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, defense in depth, Drosophila, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, GPT-3, Gregor Mendel, Greta Thunberg, hallucination problem, helicopter parent, income inequality, industrial robot, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, language acquisition, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, neurotypical, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, ransomware, replication crisis, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Robert X Cringely, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, space junk, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, TaskRabbit, theory of mind, TikTok, twin studies, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, US Airways Flight 1549, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, web application, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

In the Mind’s Eye: Visual Thinkers, Gifted People with Dyslexia and Other Learning Difficulties, Computer Images, and the Ironies of Creativity. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2009. Witelson, S. F., D. L. Kigar, and T. Harvey. “The Exceptional Brain of Albert Einstein.” Lancet 353 (1999): 2149–53. Wolff, B., and H. Goodman. “The Legend of the Dull-Witted Child Who Grew Up to Be a Genius.” The Albert Einstein Archives, 2007. http://www.albert-einstein.org/article_handicap.html. Wolff, U., and I. Lundberg. “The Prevalence of Dyslexia among Art Students.” Dyslexia 8, no. 1 (2002). doi.org/10.1002/dys.211. Wonder, S. Interview with Mesha McDaniel, Celebrity Profile Entertainment, March 23, 2013.

“Make Me an Offer: Ari Emanuel’s Relentless Fight to the Top.” New Yorker, April 26 and May 3, 2021. Bucky, P. A. The Private Albert Einstein. Kansas City, MO: Andrews and McMeel, 1993. Carey, R. “The Eight Greatest Quotes from Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview.” Paste, March 6, 2013. https://www.pastemagazine.com/tech/the-eight-most-important-passages-from-steve-jobs-the-lost-interview/. Carrillo-Mora, P., et al. “What Did Einstein Have That I Don’t? Studies on Albert Einstein’s Brain.” Neurosciences and History 3, no. 3 (2015): 125–29. Carson, S. “The Unleashed Mind.” Scientific American, May/June 2011, 22–25.

“Pathological Game Use in Adults with and without Autism Spectrum Disorder.” Peer Journal (2017). doi:10.7717/peerg3393. Everatt, J., B. Steffert, and I. Smythe. “An Eye for the Unusual: Creative Thinking in Dyslexics.” Dyslexia, March 26, 1999. Falk, D. “The Cerebral Cortex of Albert Einstein: A Description and Preliminary Analysis of Unpublished Photographs.” Brain 136, no. 4 (2013): 1304–27. Falk, D. “New Information about Albert Einstein’s Brain.” Frontiers in Evolutionary Neuroscience (2009). doi.org/10.3389/neuro.18.003.2009. Felicetti, K., and Monster. “These Major Tech Companies are Making Autism Hiring a Priority.” Fortune, March 8, 2016. Fishman, C.


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Thinking in Pictures: And Other Reports From My Life With Autism by Temple Grandin

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, factory automation, Gregor Mendel, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), social intelligence, source of truth, theory of mind, twin studies

New York., Little, Brown A. Grant 1885 Charles Darwin. New York., Appleton Grant V. W. 1968 Great abnormals. New York., Hawthorn B. Hermelin 2001 Bright Splinters of the Mind. London., Jessica Kingsley R. Highfield, P. Garter 1993 The private lives of Albert Einstein. New York., St. Martin' Jamison K. R. 1993 The private lives of Albert Einstein. New York., St. Martin' G. Kevin 1967 Inspired amateurs. Freeport, New York., Books for Libraries Press J. Kincheloe L. S. Steinberg R. D. Tippins J. 1992 The stigma of genius. Durango, Colorado., Hollowbrook Landa R., Piven J., Wzorek M. M. Gayle J.

And sudden movements that will cause sensory confusion should also be avoided. Children who are echolalic—who repeat what they hear— may be at a midpoint on the sensory processing continuum. Enough recognizable speech gets through for them to be able to repeat the words. Dr. Doris Allen, at the Albert Einstein Hospital in New York, emphasizes that echolalia should not be discouraged, so as not to inhibit speech. The child repeats what has been said to verify that he heard it correctly. Research by Laura Berk, at Illinois State University, has shown that normal children talk to themselves to help them control their behavior and learn new skills.

However, I want to direct the autistic child's interests into more constructive activities. Genetics and Autism Research during the last ten years confirms that autism, PDD, and Asperger's all have a strong genetic basis. Craig Newschaffer, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, estimates that 60 to 90 percent of autism cases are genetic. Dr. Isabel Rapin and her colleagues at Albert Einstein College of Medicine reviewed papers published between 1961 and 2003. They concluded that interactions between multiple genes explain the highly variable nature of autism. Genome scans of families with many cases of autism indicate that at least ten genes are involved. They also found that the probability of having a second autistic child is 2 to 8 percent.


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Under the Knife: A History of Surgery in 28 Remarkable Operations by Arnold van de Laar Laproscopic Surgeon

Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, Ayatollah Khomeini, clean water, Great Leap Forward, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Louis Pasteur, Neil Armstrong, placebo effect, the scientific method, wikimedia commons

What are the principles of shock, cancer, infection and the healing of wounds and fractures? What can be repaired by an operation and what cannot? Why did the most common operations arise and who thought of them? Most of the chapters describe operations on famous figures and contain interesting details. Did you know, for example, that Albert Einstein lived much longer than was actually possible, Houdini gave his final performance while suffering from acute appendicitis, Empress Sisi was stabbed at the age of sixty, John F. Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald were operated on by the same surgeon, or that a man from Amsterdam cut a stone out of his own bladder?

As the son bore the same name, however, and was also a consul before Pliny wrote his anecdote about the operation, it is possible that it refers to an unknown son of Apronius Junior. That would, of course, have made the story much less fascinating … 16 Aneurysm The Relativity of Surgery: Albert Einstein MODERN SURGERY IS not absolute. It is a science of probabilities and calculating chances. It is probable, for example, that an inflammation of the gall bladder will be accompanied by fever, but it is far less likely that someone with a fever is suffering from an inflamed gall bladder. After all, in general, fever occurs more often than gall-bladder inflammations.

In modern surgery, therefore, it is not about a clear yes or no, but a greater or lesser degree of probability, with a greater or lesser chance of success. Of course there are exceptions. Patients who prove that the improbable can occur, by displaying a surprising diagnosis or by surviving against all expectations, are incontestable proof of the relativity of surgery. Albert Einstein, the father of relativity, was one such patient. He had a life-threatening disease of the aorta, but his symptoms resembled those of an inflammation of the gall bladder and he lived longer with the disease than was actually considered possible. The aorta is the largest blood vessel in our bodies.


Life Is Simple by Johnjoe McFadden

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, animal electricity, anthropic principle, Astronomia nova, Bayesian statistics, Brownian motion, Commentariolus, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, COVID-19, dark matter, double helix, Edmond Halley, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, gentleman farmer, Gregor Mendel, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, horn antenna, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, lockdown, music of the spheres, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Plato's cave, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, William of Occam

The journey has persuaded me that simplicity is not just a tool of science alongside experimentation, it is as central to science as numbers are to mathematics or notes to music. Indeed, in the final analysis, simplicity is, I believe, what separates science from the countless other ways of making sense of the world. In 1934, Albert Einstein insisted that ‘The grand aim of all science [is] to cover the greatest number of empirical facts by logical deduction from the smallest possible number of hypotheses or axioms.’5 Occam’s razor helps us find ‘the smallest number of hypotheses or axioms’. Nor is the work of Occam’s razor done.

It works, but doesn’t it appear a little suspicious? Occam would surely have had something to say about it along the lines of: why put mass into the gravity equation in the first place? Yet if we leave out mass then gravity isn’t behaving like a Newtonian force at all. What then is gravity? Three centuries later, another great physicist, Albert Einstein, would ponder this same question and come up with a very different understanding of gravity. There were however two more entities in Newton’s cosmos, which do not cancel each other out: absolute space and absolute time. The need for both is apparent if we ask the question: what would the concept of acceleration mean in a universe with no reference frame to measure space or time?

HEISENBERG: Nature leads us to mathematical forms of great simplicity and beauty… You must have felt this too: the almost frightening simplicity and wholeness of the relationships which nature suddenly spreads out before us… EINSTEIN:… That is why I am so interested in your remarks about simplicity. Still, I should never claim that I truly understood what is meant by the simplicity of natural law. Werner Heisenberg in conversation with Albert Einstein, 19261 When we left physics to explore biology in Chapter 13, nineteenth-century scientists had already made enormous advances in their application of simple laws to both terrestrial and heavenly motion. Indeed, physicists claimed that physics was, pretty much, complete. Yet at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science towards the close of the nineteenth century, the Northern-Irish physicist Lord Kelvin (1824–1907) warned that this rosy assessment was contradicted by ‘two small clouds’ on the horizon, two problems that physics had yet to solve.


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Infinity in the Palm of Your Hand: Fifty Wonders That Reveal an Extraordinary Universe by Marcus Chown

Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Carrington event, dark matter, Donald Trump, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, gravity well, horn antenna, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, microbiome, Neil Armstrong, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, space junk, Stephen Hawking, Turing machine

The exchange particles that give rise to nature’s fundamental forces are not quite like the kind with which we are familiar. They are known as virtual particles. See QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter by Richard Feynman (Penguin, 1990). 34. No Time Like the Present 1. Letter written by Albert Einstein to the bereaved family of Michele Besso when his long-standing friend died in 1955. 2. “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” by Albert Einstein (Annalen der Physik, Vol. 17, p. 891, 1905). 35. How to Build a Time Machine 1. See Chapter 26: “Bungalow Benefits.” 2. A black hole is a region of space where gravity is so strong that nothing can escape—not even light, hence its blackness.

—EDWARD WITTEN ISAAC NEWTON WAS FIRST to realize that, at a fundamental level, all there is to the universe is particles of matter and the forces that bind them together. We now know of four fundamental forces, of which gravity and the electromagnetic force that glues together the atoms in your body and powers our electrical world are the most familiar. As discussed in Chapter 26, it was Albert Einstein who in 1915 realized something unexpected about one of these forces. As we saw in the previous chapter, the force of gravity does not actually exist. As previously mentioned, according to Newton, the force of gravity between the sun and the earth is like an invisible tether between the bodies that keeps the earth forever trapped around the sun.

THE VOICE OF SPACE The black-hole merger detected by its gravitational waves on September 14, 2015, pumped out fifty times more power than all the stars in the universe combined “If you ask me whether there are gravitational waves or not, I must answer that I do not know. But it is a highly interesting problem.” —ALBERT EINSTEIN, 1936 “Ladies and gentlemen, we did it. We have detected gravitational waves.” —DAVID REITZE, FEBRUARY 11, 2016 NEAR THE TOWN OF Livingston, Louisiana is a four-kilometer-long ruler made of laser light. Three thousand kilometers away in Hanford, Washington State is an identical four-kilometer-long ruler made of laser light.


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The Clock Mirage: Our Myth of Measured Time by Joseph Mazur

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Arthur Eddington, computer age, Credit Default Swap, Danny Hillis, Drosophila, Eratosthenes, Henri Poincaré, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Pepto Bismol, quantum entanglement, self-driving car, seminal paper, Stephen Hawking, time dilation, twin studies

Henri Poincaré, “La mesure du temps,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 6 (1898): 1–13. 2. Albert Einstein correspondence with Michele Besso, March 6, 1952. 3. Peter Galison, Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of Time (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 37, 40. 4. Albert Einstein and Hermann Minkowski, On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies, translated by M. N. Saha and S. N. Bose (Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1920), 3. 5. Ibid., 5. 6. Since velocity is distance divided by time, we know that time is distance divided by velocity. 7. Albert Einstein, “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” (1905), 2, available at https://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/specrel/specrel.pdf. 8.

Albert Einstein, “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” (1905), 2, available at https://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/specrel/specrel.pdf. 8. Albert Einstein and Michele Besso, Correspondance avec Michele Besso, 1903–1955 (Paris: Harmann, 1979), 537–38. 9. Some current thinkers suggest that the speed of light at the time of the big bang was far faster than it is now. See Andreas Albrecht and João Magueijo, “Time varying speed of light as a solution to cosmological puzzles,” Physical Review D 59 (1999): 043516. 10. The Born-Einstein Letters: Correspondence between Albert Einstein and Max and Hedwig Born from 1916 to 1955 with Commentaries by Max Born, translated Irene Born (London: Macmillan, 1971), 159. 10.

By Newton’s rules, two objects leaving the same place at time A, wandering in different directions and returning to that same place at time B, will have each traveled for the same amount of time, which should turn out to be B − A time units. That was a reasonable rule until the dawn of the twentieth century, when time changed from being absolute to being relative. Newton’s rule about duration was no longer valid after Albert Einstein’s theory of special relativity. For Einstein, objects leaving the same place at time A, wandering in different directions, to different locations, and returning to the same place at time B might not have each traveled for B − A units of time. It’s a hard notion to absorb completely, given how much influence our language of time has on our thoughts.


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From Dictatorship to Democracy by Gene Sharp

Albert Einstein, conceptual framework

There, it was translated into Indonesian, and published in 1997 by a major Indonesian publisher with an introduction by Abdurrahman Wahid. He was then head of Nadhlatul Ulama, the largest Muslim organization in the world, with thirty-five million members, and later President of Indonesia. During this time, at my office at the Albert Einstein Institution we only had a handful of photocopies from the Bangkok English language booklet. For a few years we had to make copies of it when we had enquiries for which it was relevant. Later, Marek Zelaskiewz, from California, took one of those copies to Belgrade during Milošević’s time and gave it to the organization Civic Initiatives.

Between 2003 and 2008 there have been twenty-two. The great diversity of the societies and languages into which translations have spread support the provisional conclusion that the persons who initially encounter this document have seen its analysis to be relevant to their society. Gene Sharp January 2008 Albert Einstein Institution Boston, Massachusetts Preface ONE OF MY MAJOR CONCERNS for many years has been how people could prevent and destroy dictatorships. This has been nurtured in part because of a belief that human beings should not be dominated and destroyed by such regimes. That belief has been strengthened by readings on the importance of human freedom, on the nature of dictatorships (from Aristotle to analysts of totalitarianism), and histories of dictatorships (especially the Nazi and Stalinist systems).

Rather, it opens the way for hard work and long efforts to build more just social, economic, and political relationships and the eradication of other forms of injustices and oppression. It is my hope that this brief examination of how a dictatorship can be disintegrated may be found useful wherever people live under domination and desire to be free. Gene Sharp 6 October 1993 Albert Einstein Institution Boston, Massachusetts 1 Facing Dictatorships Realistically IN RECENT YEARS VARIOUS DICTATORSHIPS – of both internal and external origin – have collapsed or stumbled when confronted by defiant, mobilized people. Often seen as firmly entrenched and impregnable, some of these dictatorships proved unable to withstand the concerted political, economic, and social defiance of the people.


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Massive: The Missing Particle That Sparked the Greatest Hunt in Science by Ian Sample

Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Donald Trump, double helix, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, Gary Taubes, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, synthetic biology, uranium enrichment, Yogi Berra

Whichever way you look at it, this story is massive. 1 Long Road to Princeton The drive up to Princeton could take the better part of a day, and that was if you were lucky. The route followed the coastline up the eastern seaboard, looped around the broad expanse of the Chesapeake Bay, and went on to Washington, Baltimore, and Philadelphia before finally arriving in the town that was once home to the greatest physicist of all, Albert Einstein. Peter Higgs packed some clothes and a folder full of research notes and went out to the car with his wife, Jody, and their six-month-old son, Christopher. He swung the suitcase in the back and had a long look at the road map. Satisfied with the directions, he pulled away, working north and east through the tree-lined streets and out toward the highway as the town eased itself to life beneath the spring morning sun.

If Newton had had the last word on mass—that it was simply a measure of matter—then adding up the masses of the individual quarks should give the right answers. But Newton knew only part of the story. The missing mass came from somewhere else. There is more to mass than meets the eye. How much more became clearer in 1905, when a twenty-six-year-old Albert Einstein, while holding down a day job at a patent office in Bern, Switzerland, published a paper entitled “Does the Inertia of a Body Depend on Its Energy Content?” To cut to the chase, the answer is yes. Einstein showed that mass and energy are interchangeable, that mass can be considered a measure of how much energy an object contains.

The institute was home to some of the brightest physicists in the world, and some of them were certain to disagree with Higgs’s theory. Renowned scientists had flocked to the institute since Louis Bamberger, an American philanthropist, had established it in the 1930s. Its most famous resident, Albert Einstein, who had died in 1955, had spent the last twenty-five years of his life there, trying to explain how the forces of nature were born. The Austrian-American logician Kurt Gödel was still there, redefining the limits of human knowledge. He and Einstein had been friends, though he had vexed Einstein by pointing out that his famous theories allowed time travel to be possible.21 The father of modern computing, John von Neumann, was also at the institute, turning the mathematics of poker into a political strategy to win the Cold War.22 Robert Oppenheimer, the towering figure who had led the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb, had become head of the institute in 1946, only adding to the intimidating aura of the place.


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The Scientist as Rebel by Freeman Dyson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Asilomar, Boeing 747, British Empire, Claude Shannon: information theory, dark matter, double helix, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Gregor Mendel, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, kremlinology, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Norbert Wiener, Paul Erdős, Plato's cave, precautionary principle, quantum entanglement, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, undersea cable

,” Science, Vol. 278 (1997), pp. 1582–1588, cited by Smil. 6 WITNESS TO A TRAGEDY THOMAS LEVENSON IS a filmmaker who produces documentary films for public television. He has a sharp eye for the dramatic events and personal details that bring history to life. His book Einstein in Berlin1 is a social history of Germany covering the twenty years from 1914 to 1933, the years when Albert Einstein lived in Berlin. The picture of the city’s troubles comes into a clearer focus when it is viewed through Einstein’s eyes. Einstein was a good witness, observing the life of the city in which he played an active role but remained always emotionally detached. He wrote frequent letters to his old friends in Switzerland and his new friends in Germany, recording events as they happened and describing his hopes and fears.

After 1918 he extended his revolutionary rhetoric from mathematics to physics, solemnly proclaiming the breakdown of the established order in both disciplines. In 1922 Schrödinger joined him in calling for radical reconstruction of the laws of physics. Weyl and Schrödinger agreed with Spengler that the coming revolution would sweep away the principle of physical causality. The erstwhile revolutionaries David Hilbert and Albert Einstein found themselves in the unaccustomed role of defenders of the status quo, Hilbert defending the primacy of formal logic in the foundations of mathematics, Einstein defending the primacy of causality in physics. In the short run, Hilbert and Einstein were defeated and the Spenglerian ideology of revolution triumphed, both in physics and in mathematics.

Among the leading scientists of the nineteenth century, professionals such as Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell were the rule and amateurs Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel were the exceptions. In the twentieth century the ascendancy of the professionals became even more complete. No twentieth-century amateur could stand like Darwin in the front rank with Edwin Hubble and Albert Einstein. If Ferris is right, astronomy is now moving into a new era of youthful exuberance in which amateurs will again have an important share of the action. It appears that each science goes through three phases of development. The first phase is Baconian, with scientists exploring the world to find out what is there.


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Day We Found the Universe by Marcia Bartusiak

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Arthur Eddington, California gold rush, Cepheid variable, Copley Medal, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Charles Pickering, Fellow of the Royal Society, fudge factor, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, horn antenna, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur, Magellanic Cloud, Occam's razor, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pluto: dwarf planet, William of Occam

This new cosmic outlook came about through a unique convergence—the perfect storm—of sweeping developments. Not only did a burgeoning economy provide the money—and new technologies the instruments—to make these discoveries, but newly introduced ideas in theoretical physics supplied some answers. No less a scientific figure than Albert Einstein had arrived on the scene with a novel theory of gravity that provided a unique explanation for the universe's bewildering behavior. A dynamism entered into the universe's workings. Einstein's equations introduced the idea that space and time are woven into a distinct object, whose shape and movement are determined by the matter within it.

It took a rebel—a cocky kid who spurned rote learning throughout his schooling, always questioned conventional wisdom, and had an unshakable faith in his own abilities—to blaze a trail through this baffling territory, one that involved an entirely new take on space, time, gravity, and the behavior of the universe at large. Before anyone else, Albert Einstein discerned that a drastic change was needed, “the discovery of a universal formal principle,” as he put it. This was not the iconic Einstein—the sockless, rumpled character with baggy sweater and fright-wig coiffure—but a younger, more romantic figure with alluring brown eyes and wavy dark hair.

It “does not make sense to me,” he wrote. Where was the “world material” in his cosmos, where were the stars? It didn't seem based in reality. In Einstein's eyes, de Sitter's solution was physically impossible. The properties of space could not be determined, he believed, without the presence of matter. Albert Einstein and Willem de Sitter working out a problem at the Mount Wilson Observatory's Pasadena headquarters in 1932 (Associated Press) De Sitter was certainly making a huge assumption by considering a cosmic density so low that the universe could be regarded as devoid of matter. But what was exciting about his model was that it was testable.


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The Joys of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning, Revised and Updated by Gautam Baid

Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, backtesting, barriers to entry, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, book value, business process, buy and hold, Cal Newport, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commoditize, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, do what you love, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, equity risk premium, Everything should be made as simple as possible, fear index, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, follow your passion, framing effect, George Santayana, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, Henry Singleton, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, index fund, intangible asset, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Masayoshi Son, mental accounting, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive income, passive investing, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, power law, price anchoring, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, six sigma, software as a service, software is eating the world, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, subscription business, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, tail risk, Teledyne, the market place, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, time value of money, transaction costs, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, wealth creators, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

This illustrates what I experienced in 2018, after many years of determined efforts amid repeated setbacks. Resilience is a superpower. Source: “5 Things I Learned from Elon Musk on Life, Business, and Investing,” Safal Niveshak (blog), September 16, 2015, https://www.safalniveshak.com/elon-musk-on-life-business-investing/. “Compound interest,” Albert Einstein reputedly said, “is the most powerful force in the universe.” So what happens when you apply such an incredible power to knowledge building? You become a learning machine. One person who took Buffett’s advice, Todd Combs, now works for the legendary investor. After hearing Buffett talk, Combs started keeping track of what he read and how many pages he was reading.

Maslow described the good life as one directed toward self-actualization, the higher need. Self-actualization occurs when you maximize your potential by doing your best. Maslow shared the names of those individuals he believed to be self-actualized, including Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein, to elaborate the common characteristics of the self-actualized person. According to humanistic psychologist Albert Ellis, “self-actualization involves the pursuit of excellence and enjoyment; whichever people choose to desire and emphasize.”1 This focus on achieving excellence and enjoyment (even more than a focus on the realization of potential) prioritizes well-being and shows the relation between self-actualization and positive psychology.

We live in a society in which inactivity is often frowned upon, but part of our focus should be not just on doing but also on deeply understanding the parameters of what we need to do, now and in the future. Learning and understanding the upfront and changing parameters of the field in which you are participating will help you focus on the right place. As Albert Einstein said, “You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play better than anyone else.” These are incredibly powerful words in the context of focus. Buffett’s genius is that he prioritizes learning so that he can have higher quality insights. Many people would see this as totally unproductive, but many of my best business solutions and money problem answers have come from periods of just sitting and thinking.


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The Intelligence Trap: Revolutionise Your Thinking and Make Wiser Decisions by David Robson

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Atul Gawande, autism spectrum disorder, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, classic study, cognitive bias, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, deep learning, deliberate practice, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, Dunning–Kruger effect, fake news, Flynn Effect, framing effect, fundamental attribution error, illegal immigration, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, post-truth, price anchoring, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the scientific method, theory of mind, traveling salesman, ultimatum game, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

7. 50 Schweber, S.S. (2008), Einstein and Oppenheimer: The Meaning of Genius, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 282. See also Oppenheimer, R. (17 March 1966), ‘On Albert Einstein’, New York Review of Books, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1966/03/17/on-albert-einstein/. 51 Hook, S. (1987), Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the 20th Century. London: Harper & Row. See also Riniolo, T. and Nisbet, L. (2007), ‘The Myth of Consistent Skepticism: The Cautionary Case of Albert Einstein’, Skeptical Inquirer, 31(1), http://www.csicop.org/si/show/myth_of_consistent_skepticism_the_cautionary_case_of_albert_einstein. 52 Eysenck, H. (1957), Sense and Nonsense in Psychology, Harmondsworth: Penguin, p. 108. 53 These are exceptional cases.

Miller, The Adventures of Arthur Conan Doyle, chapter 20. 46 Bechtel, S. and Stains, L.R. (2017), Through a Glass Darkly: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the Quest to Solve the Greatest Mystery of All, New York: St Martin’s Press, p. 147. 47 Panek, R. (2005), ‘The Year of Albert Einstein’, Smithsonian Magazine, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-year-of-albert-einstein-75841381/. 48 Further examples can be found in the following interview with the physicist John Moffat, including the fact that Einstein denied strong evidence for the existence of black holes: Folger, T. (September 2004), ‘Einstein’s Grand Quest for a Unified Theory’, Discover, http://discovermagazine.com/2004/sep/einsteins-grand-quest.

The web is full of people with groundless opinions, of course – but we don’t expect astrologers and AIDS denialists to represent the pinnacle of intellectual achievement. Yet Kary’s full name is Kary Mullis, and far from being your stereotypically ill-informed conspiracy theorist, he is a Nobel Prize-winning scientist – placing him alongside the likes of Marie Curie, Albert Einstein and Francis Crick. Mullis was awarded the prize for his invention of the polymerase chain reaction – a tool that allows scientists to clone DNA in large quantities. The idea apparently came to him during a flash of inspiration on the road in Mendocino County, California, and many of the greatest achievements of the last few decades – including the Human Genome Project – hinged on that one moment of pure brilliance.


pages: 695 words: 219,110

The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene

airport security, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, clockwork universe, conceptual framework, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, dematerialisation, Eddington experiment, Hans Lippershey, Henri Poincaré, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, luminiferous ether, Murray Gell-Mann, power law, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, seminal paper, Stephen Hawking, time dilation, urban renewal

There is some controversy as to the role such experiments played in Einstein’s development of special relativity. In his biography of Einstein, Subtle Is the Lord: The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 115–19, Abraham Pais has argued, using Einstein’s own statements from his later years, that Einstein was aware of the Michelson-Morley results. Albrecht Fölsing in Albert Einstein: A Biography (New York: Viking, 1997), pp. 217–20, also argues that Einstein was aware of the Michelson-Morley result, as well as earlier experimental null results in searching for evidence of the aether, such as the work of Armand Fizeau.

To Isaac Newton, space and time simply were—they formed an inert, universal cosmic stage on which the events of the universe played themselves out. To his contemporary and frequent rival Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, “space” and “time” were merely the vocabulary of relations between where objects were and when events took place. Nothing more. But to Albert Einstein, space and time were the raw material underlying reality. Through his theories of relativity, Einstein jolted our thinking about space and time and revealed the principal part they play in the evolution of the universe. Ever since, space and time have been the sparkling jewels of physics. They are at once familiar and mystifying; fully understanding space and time has become physics’ most daunting challenge and sought-after prize.

The classical conceptions of space, time, and reality—the ones that for hundreds of years had not only worked but also concisely expressed our intuitive sense of the world— were overthrown. The relativity revolution, which addressed the first of Kelvin’s “clouds,” dates from 1905 and 1915, when Albert Einstein completed his special and general theories of relativity (Chapter 3). While struggling with puzzles involving electricity, magnetism, and light’s motion, Einstein realized that Newton’s conception of space and time, the corner-stone of classical physics, was flawed. Over the course of a few intense weeks in the spring of 1905, he determined that space and time are not independent and absolute, as Newton had thought, but are enmeshed and relative in a manner that flies in the face of common experience.


pages: 257 words: 80,100

Time Travel: A History by James Gleick

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Arthur Eddington, augmented reality, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, crowdsourcing, Doomsday Book, Eddington experiment, index card, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, luminiferous ether, Marshall McLuhan, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Plato's cave, pneumatic tube, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, telepresence, The future is already here, time dilation, Wayback Machine, wikimedia commons

At some point he sees a printed advertisement for a contraption called Hacker’s Home Bicycle: a stationary stand with rubber wheels to let a person pedal for exercise without going anywhere. Anywhere through space, that is. The wheels go round and time goes by. The turn of the twentieth century loomed—a calendar date with apocalyptic resonance. Albert Einstein was a boy at gymnasium in Munich. Not till 1908 would the Polish-German mathematician Hermann Minkowski announce his radical idea: “Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.”

Here is an obvious contradiction: “the first contradiction in the whole proceeding.” • Time goes at a certain rate, and this rate must be the same for everyone, everywhere. “Two objects or systems” cannot have “different rates of displacement or change in time”—obviously. Pitkin scarcely knew what devilishness Albert Einstein was conjuring in Berlin. • Traveling through time must obey rules of arithmetic, just like traveling through space. Do the math: “To traverse a million years in a few days is exactly like traveling a thousand miles in one inch.” A thousand miles does not equal one inch; ergo, a million years cannot equal a few days.

“Chaliapin and Melba would sing to us, President Coolidge and Mr. Baldwin would talk to us simply, earnestly, directly; the most august in the world would wish us good evening and pass a friendly word; should a fire or shipwreck happen, we were to get the roar of the flames and the cries for help.” A. A. Milne would tell stories to children and Albert Einstein would bring science to the masses. “All sporting results before we went to bed would be included, the weather forecast, advice about our gardens, the treatment of influenza, and the exact time.” Yet for Wells the dream had turned sour. Asked by the New York Times to assess the state of radio for its readers, he ranted bitterly, disillusioned as a child finding lumps of coal in the Christmas stocking.


Wonders of the Universe by Brian Cox, Andrew Cohen

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, California gold rush, Cepheid variable, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, Dmitri Mendeleev, Eddington experiment, Eyjafjallajökull, Ford Model T, heat death of the universe, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, Karl Jansky, Large Hadron Collider, Magellanic Cloud, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method, time dilation, trade route

This is because we lack a theory of space and time before this point, and consequently have very little to say about it. Such a theory, known as quantum gravity, is the holy grail of modern theoretical physics and is being energetically searched for by hundreds of scientists across the world. (Albert Einstein spent the last decades of his life searching in vain for it.) Conventional thinking holds that both time and space began at time zero, the beginning of the Planck era. The Big Bang can therefore be regarded as the beginning of time itself, and as such it was the beginning of the Universe. There are alternatives, however.

The breakthrough was made by the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell, who, in a series of papers in 1861 and 1862, developed a single theory of electricity and magnetism that was able to explain all of the experimental work of Faraday, Ampère and others. But Maxwell’s crowning glory came in 1864, when he published a paper that is undoubtedly one of the greatest achievements in the history of science. Albert Einstein later described Maxwell’s 1860s papers as ‘the most profound and the most fruitful that physics has experienced since the time of Newton.’ Maxwell discovered that by unifying electrical and magnetic phenomena together into a single mathematical theory, a startling prediction emerges. Electricity and magnetism can be unified by introducing two new concepts: electric and magnetic fields.

The answer is that the ‘light barrier’ is of a totally different character and cannot be smashed through, even in principle. The reason for this is that light speed plays a much deeper role in the Universe than just being the speed at which light travels. A true understanding of the role of this speed, 299,792,458 metres (983,571,503 feet) per second, was achieved in 1905 by Albert Einstein in his special theory of relativity. Einstein, inspired by Maxwell’s work, wrote down a theory in which space and time are merged into a single entity known as ‘spacetime’. Einstein suggested we should not see our world as having only three directions – north/south, east/west and up/down, as he added a fourth direction – past/future.


pages: 293 words: 74,709

Bomb Scare by Joseph Cirincione

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Dr. Strangelove, dual-use technology, energy security, Ernest Rutherford, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, nuclear taboo, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, technological determinism, uranium enrichment, Yogi Berra

March 2008 THE ATOM Figure from the Department of Energy FISSION Figure from Ohio State University, Department of Physics CENTRIFUGE Figure from Cirincione, Wolfsthal, and Rajkumar, Deadly Arsenals: Nuclear, Chemical, and Biological Threats (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2005) CHAPTER ONE BUILDING THE BOMB Albert Einstein signed the letter. Years later he would regret it, calling it the one mistake he had made in his life. But in August 1939, Adolf Hitler’s armies already occupied Czechoslovakia and Austria and his fascist thugs were arresting Jews and political opponents throughout the Third Reich. Signing the letter seemed vital.

They believed it to be a weapon of genocide: “The use of this weapon would bring about the destruction of innumerable human lives; it is not a weapon which can be used exclusively for the destruction of material installations of military or semi-military purposes. Its use therefore carries much further than the atomic bomb itself the policy of extermination of civilian populations.”3 Even if the Soviets developed the H-bomb, they argued, the United States could deter its use with atomic weapons. The scientists’ views did not prevail. Albert Einstein wrote in March 1950, “The idea of achieving security through national armaments is, at the present state of military technique, a disastrous illusion. . . . The armament race between the USA and the USSR, originally supposed to be a preventive measure, assumes hysterical character.”4 The Super project inaugurated the design and testing of the advanced weapon that now composes the large majority of modern arsenals.

In the middle of the last century, when the United Kingdom, France, and China were developing nuclear arsenals, there was a pervasive view among political elites in many nations that nuclear weapons were acceptable, desirable, even necessary. The increasing size of nuclear arsenals and alarm over the spread of deadly radioactive fallout from nuclear tests, however, stoked fears of nuclear dangers. Distinguished philosopher Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein (in one of his last acts before his death) issued the Russell-Einstein Manifesto in July 1955. “We have to learn to think in a new way,” they wrote. “We have to learn to ask ourselves, not what steps can be taken to give military victory to whatever group we prefer, for there no longer are such steps; the question we have to ask ourselves is: what steps can be taken to prevent a military contest of which the issue must be disastrous to all parties?”


Geek Wisdom by Stephen H. Segal

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 13, battle of ideas, biofilm, Charles Babbage, fear of failure, Henri Poincaré, Jacquard loom, Large Hadron Collider, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, nuclear paranoia, Saturday Night Live, Snow Crash, Vernor Vinge, W. E. B. Du Bois

This is why science fiction and role-playing games make up the enduring popular image of modern-day geekdom, mind you, because those are the places where math and myth intersect: literature built on the infinite possibilities of science, improv sword and sorcery shaped by the numerical output of 20-sided dice. Hence Geek Wisdom: the first compendium of sacred teachings from the wide-ranging “holy scriptures” of geekdom, that weird mass of pop culture and high art ranging from blockbuster movies to esoteric novels to cult-classic T-shirt slogans. Star Wars. The Princess Bride. Albert Einstein. Stan Lee. From such sources we’ve gathered (and mused thoughtfully upon) the deepest, purest, most profound ideas and sayings to be found. The ones that cut right to the heart of life in the twenty-first century. The ones we quote as if they’d come from the Bible, or from Shakespeare. The ones that, increasingly, have emerged from the underground to form the cellular structure of a true new culture canon.

Tim Allen tried to dodge around it, and that’s why his dishwasher exploded. King David said to hell with it and had his lover’s husband killed, and that’s why he had epic family problems for the rest of his life. Paris Hilton seems oblivious to the very concept, and that’s why animal lovers have long been inclined to worry about her poor, poor dog. And Albert Einstein realized the full, inhuman horror of it—that’s why he wrote to Franklin Roosevelt to explain the possibility of an atomic bomb. Sure, the seed of the truism can be found in Luke 12:48 (“To whom much is given, much is expected”). But although the word of that uppity young Jewish carpenter from Nazareth may be eternal, it took an uppity young Jewish comic-book writer from New York City to put it in terms that ring true to the modern ear.

—ROD SERLING, THE TWILIGHT ZONE “I WAS BOLD IN THE PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE, NEVER FEARING TO FOLLOW TRUTH AND REASON TO WHATEVER RESULTS THEY LED, AND BEARDING EVERY AUTHORITY WHICH STOOD IN THEIR WAY.” —THOMAS JEFFERSON THE WORLD is most often changed by ideas rather than by guns, bombs, and fists. Albert Einstein. Karl Marx. Thomas Jefferson. Carl Sagan. Men like these have sparked revolutions and given us new ways to see and understand our world. This is no surprise; geeks throughout history have long known the power of the mind. It wasn’t until the twentieth century, however, that we developed a robust subculture that embraced the kind of flights of fancy that have come to define us.


pages: 1,041 words: 317,136

American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird, Martin J. Sherwin

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, British Empire, centre right, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, desegregation, disinformation, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, fear of failure, housing crisis, index card, industrial research laboratory, John von Neumann, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, post-industrial society, public intellectual, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, seminal paper, strikebreaker, traveling salesman, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment

Hammond, “A Meeting with Robert Oppenheimer,” written October 1979, courtesy of Freeman Dyson. 379 “We were close”: JRO, “On Albert Einstein,” New York Review of Books, 3/17/66. 379 “Einstein is a landmark”: Time, 11/8/48, p. 70. 379 When Oppenheimer’s name: Regis, Who Got Einstein’s Office?, p. 135. 379 “I could be”: Smith and Weiner, Letters, p. 190. 379 “Certainly Oppenheimer has made”: Regis, Who Got Einstein’s Office?, p. 136. 380 “unusually capable man”: Fölsing, Albert Einstein, p. 734. 380 “completely cuckoo”: Smith and Weiner, Letters, p. 190. 380 “the good Lord”: Fölsing, Albert Einstein, p. 730. 380 “see me as a heretic”: Ibid., p. 735. 380 “extraordinary originality” and subsequent quotes: JRO, “On Albert Einstein,” New York Review of Books, 3/17/66. 381 “watched him as he”: Lilienthal, The Journals of David E.

For more on Houtermans’ fascinating story, see Powers, Heisenberg’s War, pp. 84, 93, 103, 106–7, and David Cassidy, The Uncertainty Principle. 63 “Great ideas were”: Helge Kragh, Quantum Generations, p. 168. 64 “Heisenberg has laid”: Gribbin, Q Is for Quantum, pp. 174, 417–18. 64 “An inner voice”: Daniel J. Kevles, The Physicists, p. 167; Albrecht Fölsing, Albert Einstein, pp. 730–31. In 1929, Einstein qualified his critique by explaining that he believed “in the profound truth contained in this theory, except that I think that its restriction to statistical laws will be a temporary one.” But shortly later he hardened his views, insisting that it was “not possible to get to the bottom of things by this semiempirical means.” (Fölsing, Albert Einstein, pp. 566, 590.) 64 “Einstein is completely”: Smith and Weiner, Letters, p. 190 (JRO to Frank Oppenheimer, 1/11/35).

., p. 735. 380 “extraordinary originality” and subsequent quotes: JRO, “On Albert Einstein,” New York Review of Books, 3/17/66. 381 “watched him as he”: Lilienthal, The Journals of David E. Lilienthal, vol. 2, p. 298. 381 Oppenheimer arranged to have: Georgia Whidden, interview by Bird, 4/25/03. 381 “This is not a jubilee”: Denis Brian, Einstein: A Life, p. 376. 381 “unprepared to make”: JRO to Einstein, undated (reply to Einstein’s letter of 4/15/47), JRO Papers. 382 “He did not have”: Ronald W. Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times, p. 719. 382 “You know,” Einstein told him: JRO, “On Albert Einstein,” New York Review of Books, 3/17/66. 382 “Something odd just”: Pais, A Tale of Two Continents, p. 240. 382 “a Hoover Republican”: Stern, “A History of the Institute for Advanced Study, 1930–1950,” pp. 613–14, unpublished manuscript, IAS Archives. 383 “I was struck”: Pais, A Tale of Two Continents, p. 327. 383 “The episode marks”: Stern, “A History of the Institute for Advanced Study, 1930–1950,” pp. 672–73, 688, unpublished manuscript, IAS Archives. 383 “political controversy”: Ibid., pp. 679–80, 691. 383 “Oppenheimer plans to have”: Harry M.


The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science by Michael Strevens

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Atul Gawande, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Fellow of the Royal Society, fudge factor, germ theory of disease, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, heat death of the universe, Higgs boson, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johannes Kepler, Large Hadron Collider, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, Peace of Westphalia, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, systematic bias, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, William of Occam

Indeed, in their thinking about the connection between theory and data, scientists seem scarcely to follow any rules at all. CHAPTER 2 Human Frailty Scientists are too contentious and too morally and intellectually fragile to follow any method consistently. AS THE MOON’S DISK CREPT across the face of the sun on May 29, 1919, a new science of gravity hung in the balance. Just a few years earlier, Albert Einstein had formulated his theory of general relativity, a conceptually radical replacement for the gravitational theory that made Isaac Newton famous at the beginning of modern science, more than two hundred years before. Whereas Newton held that massive bodies exert upon each other a “force of gravity,” Einstein said that they rather bend the space and time around them, giving it a characteristic curvature.

The case of quantum mechanics, then, is the perfect exemplification of the supremacy, in modern science, of Newton’s precept that, for the purposes of “experimental philosophy,” derivation of the observable is the only kind of explanation that counts. The first hints of superposition came in the initial decade of the twentieth century in a series of theories designed to make sense of puzzling phenomena involving radiation and light. Perhaps the most iconic of these was Albert Einstein’s explanation of the photoelectric effect, in which light striking certain substances causes the emission of electrons. Light, Einstein posited, which usually behaves like a wave, in this case behaves like a stream of particles—“photons.” Descartes had argued that light is made of particles. Nineteenth-century scientists had shown that it must be a wave.

In his own eyes, he was reasoning his way toward truth, but the plausibility rankings that went into his reasoning—in particular, his estimate of the probability of a systematic Brazilian astrographic breakdown—were twisted by his hopes and expectations for what that truth might be. Figure 7.2. Albert Einstein and Arthur Eddington enjoy a quiet moment together at the University of Cambridge Observatory in 1930. All this is, of course, just to repeat and to underscore the lesson learned from the collapse of the Great Method Debate: scientific reasoning is inflected always and everywhere with subjectivity.


pages: 1,437 words: 384,709

The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes

Able Archer 83, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, death from overwork, Donner party, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, Etonian, fixed income, full employment, God and Mammon, Isaac Newton, jitney, John von Neumann, Louis Pasteur, nuclear winter, publish or perish, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, the scientific method, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, Works Progress Administration

Wells’ newest ‘dream of the future’ is its own brilliant justification,” The Times praised, obscurely.3, 4 The visionary English novelist was one among Szilard’s network of influential acquaintances, a network he assembled by plating his articulate intelligence with the purest brass. In 1928, in Berlin, where he was a Privatdozent at the University of Berlin and a confidant and partner in practical invention of Albert Einstein, Szilard had read Wells’ tract The Open Conspiracy.5 The Open Conspiracy was to be a public collusion of science-minded industrialists and financiers to establish a world republic. Thus to save the world. Szilard appropriated Wells’ term and used it off and on for the rest of his life. More to the point, he traveled to London in 1929 to meet Wells and bid for the Central European rights to his books.6, 7 Given Szilard’s ambition he would certainly have discussed much more than publishing rights.

Just as he arranged for a passport, at the beginning of August, the Kun regime collapsed; he managed another passport from the right-wing regime of Admiral Nicholas Horthy that succeeded it and left Hungary around Christmastime.18 Still reluctantly committed to engineering, Szilard enrolled in the Technische Hochschule, the technology institute, in Berlin. But what had seemed necessary in Hungary seemed merely practical in Germany. The physics faculty of the University of Berlin included Nobel laureates Albert Einstein, Max Planck and Max von Laue, theoreticians of the first rank. Fritz Haber, whose method for fixing nitrogen from the air to make nitrates for gunpowder saved Germany from early defeat in the Great War, was only one among many chemists and physicists of distinction at the several government- and industry-sponsored Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes in the elegant Berlin suburb of Dahlem.

Szilard’s good friend and fellow Hungarian, the theoretical physicist Eugene Wigner, who was studying chemical engineering at the Technische Hochschule at the time of Szilard’s conversion, watched him take the University of Berlin by storm. “As soon as it became clear to Szilard that physics was his real interest, he introduced himself, with characteristic directness, to Albert Einstein.” Einstein was a man who lived apart—preferring originality to repetition, he taught few courses—but Wigner remembers that Szilard convinced him to give them a seminar on statistical mechanics.20, 21 Max Planck was a gaunt, bald elder statesman whose study of radiation emitted by a uniformly heated surface (such as the interior of a kiln) had led him to discover a universal constant of nature.


pages: 470 words: 137,882

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, desegregation, Donald Trump, global pandemic, Gunnar Myrdal, mass incarceration, microaggression, Milgram experiment, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, Peter Eisenman, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, social distancing, strikebreaker, transatlantic slave trade, W. E. B. Du Bois, zero-sum game

Einstein, learning of this: Matthew Francis, “How Albert Einstein Used His Fame to Denounce American Racism,” Smithsonian Magazine, March 3, 2017, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/​science-nature/​how-celebrity-scientist-albert-einstein-used-fame-denounce-american-racism-180962356/. “Being a Jew myself, perhaps”: Einstein to Peter Bucky, quoted in Jerome and Taylor, Einstein on Race, p. 151. children of black faculty: Ken Gewertz, “Albert Einstein, Civil Rights Activist,” Harvard Gazette, April 12, 2007, https://news.harvard.edu/​gazette/​story/​2007/​04/​albert-einstein-civil-rights-activist/. “The separation of the races”: Jerome and Taylor, Einstein on Race, p. 88.

Classification: LCC HT725.U6 W55 2020 (print) | LCC HT725.U6 (ebook) | DDC 305.5/122—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020012794 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020012795 Ebook ISBN 9780593230268 randomhousebooks.com Title-page art by Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos Cover design: Greg Mollica Cover photograph: Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos ep_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0 Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Epigraph The Man in the Crowd Part One: Toxins in the Permafrost and Heat Rising All Around Chapter One: The Afterlife of Pathogens The Vitals of History Chapter Two: An Old House and an Infrared Light Chapter Three: An American Untouchable An Invisible Program Part Two: The Arbitrary Construction of Human Divisions Chapter Four: A Long-Running Play and the Emergence of Caste in America Chapter Five: “The Container We Have Built for You” Chapter Six: The Measure of Humanity Chapter Seven: Through the Fog of Delhi to the Parallels in India and America Chapter Eight: The Nazis and the Acceleration of Caste Chapter Nine: The Evil of Silence Part Three: The Eight Pillars of Caste The Foundations of Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents Pillar Number One: Divine Will and the Laws of Nature Pillar Number Two: Heritability Pillar Number Three: Endogamy and the Control of Marriage and Mating Pillar Number Four: Purity Versus Pollution Pillar Number Five: Occupational Hierarchy: The Jatis and the Mudsill Pillar Number Six: Dehumanization and Stigma Pillar Number Seven: Terror as Enforcement, Cruelty as a Means of Control Pillar Number Eight: Inherent Superiority Versus Inherent Inferiority Part Four: The Tentacles of Caste Brown Eyes Versus Blue Eyes Chapter Ten: Central Miscasting Chapter Eleven: Dominant Group Status Threat and the Precarity of the Highest Rung Chapter Twelve: A Scapegoat to Bear the Sins of the World Chapter Thirteen: The Insecure Alpha and the Purpose of an Underdog Chapter Fourteen: The Intrusion of Caste in Everyday Life Chapter Fifteen: The Urgent Necessity of a Bottom Rung Chapter Sixteen: Last Place Anxiety: Packed in a Flooding Basement Chapter Seventeen: On the Early Front Lines of Caste Chapter Eighteen: Satchel Paige and the Illogic of Caste Part Five: The Consequences of Caste Chapter Nineteen: The Euphoria of Hate Chapter Twenty: The Inevitable Narcissism of Caste Chapter Twenty-one: The German Girl with the Dark, Wavy Hair Chapter Twenty-two: The Stockholm Syndrome and the Survival of the Subordinate Caste Chapter Twenty-three: Shock Troops on the Borders of Hierarchy Chapter Twenty-four: Cortisol, Telomeres, and the Lethality of Caste Part Six: Backlash Chapter Twenty-five: A Change in the Script Chapter Twenty-six: Turning Point and the Resurgence of Caste Chapter Twenty-seven: The Symbols of Caste Chapter Twenty-eight: Democracy on the Ballot Chapter Twenty-nine: The Price We Pay for a Caste System Part Seven: Awakening Chapter Thirty: Shedding the Sacred Thread The Radicalization of the Dominant Caste Chapter Thirty-one: The Heart Is the Last Frontier Epilogue: A World Without Caste Dedication Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography By Isabel Wilkerson About the Author Because even if I should speak, no one would believe me. And they would not believe me precisely because they would know that what I said was true. —JAMES BALDWIN If the majority knew of the root of this evil, then the road to its cure would not be long. —ALBERT EINSTEIN The Man in the Crowd There is a famous black-and-white photograph from the era of the Third Reich. It is a picture taken in Hamburg, Germany, in 1936, of shipyard workers, a hundred or more, facing the same direction in the light of the sun. They are heiling in unison, their right arms rigid in outstretched allegiance to the Führer.

Where would the planet be had the putative beneficiaries been freed of the illusions that imprisoned them, too, had they directed their energies toward solutions for all of humanity, cures for cancer and hunger and the existential threat of climate change, rather than division? * * * —— In December 1932, one of the smartest men who ever lived landed in America on a steamship with his wife and their thirty pieces of luggage as the Nazis bore down on their homeland of Germany. Albert Einstein, the physicist and Nobel laureate, had managed to escape the Nazis just in time. The month after Einstein left, Hitler was appointed chancellor. In America, Einstein was astonished to discover that he had landed in yet another caste system, one with a different scapegoat caste and different methods, but with embedded hatreds that were not so unlike the one he had just fled.


pages: 335 words: 95,280

The Greatest Story Ever Told--So Far by Lawrence M. Krauss

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, Ernest Rutherford, Higgs boson, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Magellanic Cloud, Murray Gell-Mann, Plato's cave, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, the scientific method, time dilation

Maxwell showed that the speed of an electromagnetic disturbance that emanates from an oscillating charge can be rendered precisely in terms of the measured strength of electricity and the measured strength of magnetism, which are determined by measuring the constants A and B in the laboratory. When he used the data then available for the measured strength of electricity and the measured strength of magnetism and plugged in the numbers, he derived: Speed of electromagnetic waves ≈ 311,000,000 meters per second A famous story claims that when Albert Einstein finished his General Theory of Relativity and compared its predictions for the orbit of Mercury to the measured numbers, he had heart palpitations. One can only imagine, then, the excitement that Maxwell must have had when he performed his calculation. For this number, which may seem arbitrary, was well known to him as the speed of light.

No experiment you can perform on the plane, if its windows are closed, will tell you whether the plane is moving or standing still. While Galileo started the ball rolling, both literally and metaphorically, in 1632, it took another 273 years to fully lay to rest this issue (issues, unlike objects, can be laid to rest). It would take Albert Einstein to do so. Einstein was not a revolutionary in the same sense as Galileo, if by this term one describes those who tear down the dictates of the authorities who came before, as Galileo had done for Aristotle. Einstein did just the opposite. He knew that rules that had been established on the basis of experiment could not easily be tossed aside, and it was a mark of his genius that he didn’t.

This is so important I want to repeat it for the benefit of those people who write to me every week or so telling me that they have discovered a new theory that demonstrates everything we now think we know about the universe is wrong—and using Einstein as their exemplar to justify this possibility. Not only is your theory wrong, but you are doing Einstein a huge disservice: rules that have been established on the basis of experiment cannot easily be tossed aside. • • • Albert Einstein was born in 1879, the same year that James Clerk Maxwell died. It is tempting to suggest that their combined brilliance was too much for one simple planet to house at the same time. But it was just a coincidence, albeit a fortuitous one. If Maxwell hadn’t preceded him, Einstein couldn’t have been Einstein.


pages: 312 words: 89,728

The End of My Addiction by Olivier Ameisen

Albert Einstein, epigenetics, fake it until you make it, meta-analysis, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), statistical model

In memory of my parents It is harder to crack a prejudice than an atom. —ALBERT EINSTEIN Miracles only happen in the soul of one who looks for them. —STEFAN ZWEIG Contents Foreword by Jeffrey S. Borer, M.D. Note to the Reader 1. Moment of Truth 2. A Remedy Gone Wrong 3. Under Treatment and “In Recovery” 4. Doing Great and Feeling Awful 5. Falling Down 6. Against Medical Advice, or, The Life of Afterward 7. Cutting Through Craving 8. The End of Addiction? 9. How Baclofen Works: What We Know, and Need to Know Appendix Baclofen and Complete Suppression of Alcoholism Case Report 1: Ameisen, O.

A counselor at Marworth spoke about this issue and told us, “Look at yourself in the mirror. Look, and like yourself. Do as they say in AA, ‘Fake it till you make it.’ You hate what you see in the mirror, but fake that you like it. Smile at yourself and say, ‘I’m an attractive person.’” The counselor looked like Albert Einstein on a bad hair day with no sleep. When he said, “I look at myself in the mirror and I love what I see,” we all laughed. But I took his advice, and even though I thought I was ugly, I wound up liking what I saw in the mirror. Marworth’s life lessons also included writing daily gratitude and next-day planning lists.

One thing missing from the baclofen-related research I had found so far was support for baclofen’s safety at high doses. But then one day, searching for articles on “oral high-dose baclofen,” I hit something promising. In 1991 C. R. Smith et al., of the Medical Rehabilitation Research and Training Center for Multiple Sclerosis at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, had published a paper in Neurology entitled “High-dose oral baclofen: experience in patients with multiple sclerosis.” The abstract referred to MS patients taking more than 80 milligrams of baclofen a day and said that “taking a high dose was not associated with discontinuing treatment.”1 I checked around Paris for the article, but could not find a library that carried Neurology.


pages: 524 words: 120,182

Complexity: A Guided Tour by Melanie Mitchell

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic management, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, bioinformatics, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, clockwork universe, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, dark matter, discrete time, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Eddington experiment, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Garrett Hardin, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Henri Poincaré, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John von Neumann, Long Term Capital Management, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, Paul Erdős, peer-to-peer, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, scientific worldview, stem cell, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine

Gödel, in spite of suffering from on-and-off mental health problems, continued his work on the foundations of mathematics in Vienna until 1940, when he moved to the United States to avoid serving in the German army. (According to his biographer Hao Wang, while preparing for American citizenship Gödel found a logical inconsistency in the U.S. Constitution, and his friend Albert Einstein had to talk him out of discussing it at length during his official citizenship interview.) Gödel, like Einstein, was made a member of the prestigious Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and continued to make important contributions to mathematical logic. However, in the 1960s and 1970s, his mental health deteriorated further.

His question was, “Under what conditions will cooperation emerge in a world of egoists without central authority?” Axelrod noted that the most famous historical answer to this question was given by the seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who concluded that cooperation could develop only under the aegis of a central authority. Three hundred years (and countless wars) later, Albert Einstein similarly proposed that the only way to ensure peace in the nuclear age was to form an effective world government. The League of Nations, and later, the United Nations, were formed expressly for this purpose, but neither has been very successful in either establishing a world government or instilling peace between and within nations.

Physicists Jim Crutchfield, Doyne Farmer, Norman Packard, and Robert Shaw voiced this view very well: “[T]he hope that physics could be complete with an increasingly detailed understanding of fundamental physical forces and constituents is unfounded. The interaction of components on one scale can lead to complex global behavior on a larger scale that in general cannot be deduced from knowledge of the individual components.” Or, as Albert Einstein supposedly quipped, “Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love.” So if fundamendal physics is not to be a unified theory for complex systems, what, if anything, is? Most complex systems researchers would probably say that a unified theory of complexity is not a meaningful goal at this point.


pages: 158 words: 49,168

Infinite Ascent: A Short History of Mathematics by David Berlinski

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Benoit Mandelbrot, Douglas Hofstadter, Eratosthenes, four colour theorem, Georg Cantor, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Murray Gell-Mann, Stephen Hawking, Turing machine, William of Occam

—that Camille Jourdan published a reasonably accurate and complete account of Galois’ theories in his treatise on algebra, Traité des substitutions et des équations algébriques. Galois’ work entered fully into scientific consciousness at what is virtually the beginning of the modern era, just ten years before the birth of Albert Einstein. When in 1907 Hermann Minkowski recast Einstein’s theory of special relativity so that it made mathematical sense, he expressed the fusion of space and time that Einstein had foreseen in the language of groups. The publication of Galois’ ideas allowed mathematicians to see that a system of architecture lay exposed beneath the shifting surface of the numbers themselves—not only groups, but semi-groups, simple groups, semisimple groups, Abelian groups, Lie groups, and beyond the groups, rings, fields, lattices, and ideals.

Isolated and alone and immured in his own immature fury, it was Évariste Galois who brought this magnificent structure into being. FEW MATHEMATICAL SUBJECTS SEEM quite so irresistibly lurid, the very words non-Euclidean suggesting an exotic universe in which embarrassing extra dimensions pop up in space and things by curving manage simultaneously to turn themselves inside out and upside down. When in 1915 Albert Einstein advanced a theory of gravity in which old-fashioned Newtonian forces vanished in favor of curved space and time, the impression was widespread that things were far weirder than anyone might have imagined. These impressions are not so much mistaken as misconceived. There is weirdness in non-Euclidean geometry, but not because of anything that geometers might say about the ordinary fond familiar world in which space is flat, angles sharp, and only curves are curved.

If there is one abstract space, and that one capable of incarnating itself in various ways, then the question of whether the space in which we live is Euclidean, elliptical, or hyperbolic, or even some unsuspected monstrosity in between, is no longer mathematical. We must seek, Riemann wrote, “the grounds of various metrical relationships outside the manifold itself, in the various binding forces which act upon it.…” Not yet born, it was Albert Einstein who heard this remark in the spirit world in which he was waiting as Riemann spoke. The debate between those who take non-Euclidean geometry in stride and those who find it the source of inexpugnable weirdness may now safely be subordinated, at least in so far as mathematics is concerned. Weirdness?


pages: 167 words: 49,719

Goodbye, Things: The New Japanese Minimalism by Fumio Sasaki

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, death from overwork, fixed-gear, Lao Tzu, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mirror neurons, Skype, Steve Jobs

By minimizing your possessions and settling into a focused, simple life, you’ll find that the weight on your shoulders has become lighter and you’re living in a way that’s gentler on the environment. And you know what? It gives you a pretty good feeling. I’m healthier and safer. A table, a chair, a bowl of fruit and a violin; what else does a man need to be happy? —ALBERT EINSTEIN Minimalists are slim I’ve met a lot of minimalists but none of them (at least so far) have been overweight. I wonder why? I’ve read in a lot of books on de-cluttering that weight loss is an added bonus that results from discarding your extra things. Since I became a minimalist, I’ve lost about ten kilos (about twenty-two pounds) myself.

There will be fewer risks in any type of situation, and you can move around quickly regardless of what may happen. That feeling of security can energize us, and reduce our stress levels even further. My interpersonal relationships are deeper. The value of a man should be seen in what he gives and not in what he is able to receive. —ALBERT EINSTEIN Don’t look at people as objects I have a favorite book series by the Arbinger Institute that talks about how you can step out of your own little box. Put simply, it explains how personal relationships get disturbed and how they can be put back on track. There’s one example that often comes up.

You won’t need to depend on your possessions for happiness because we’re already equipped with systems that let us feel happy simply by connecting with the people around us. I can savor the present moment. The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. —ALBERT EINSTEIN I don’t think about the future I’ve said goodbye to a lot of things. Every time I’ve parted with my possessions, I’ve continued to ask myself if I need them now, not some day in the future. As I’ve kept on asking myself about the present and erased the concept of someday, a strange thing has happened.


pages: 998 words: 211,235

A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar

Al Roth, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Bletchley Park, book value, Brownian motion, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, Dr. Strangelove, experimental economics, fear of failure, Gunnar Myrdal, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, linear programming, lone genius, longitudinal study, market design, medical residency, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, prisoner's dilemma, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, second-price auction, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, spectrum auction, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, upwardly mobile, zero-sum game

Nash would climb another mountain altogether and from that distant peak would shine a searchlight back onto the first peak.”5 No one was more obsessed with originality, more disdainful of authority, or more jealous of his independence. As a young man he was surrounded by the high priests of twentieth-century science — Albert Einstein, John von Neumann, and Norbert Wiener — but he joined no school, became no one’s disciple, got along largely without guides or followers. In almost everything he did — from game theory to geometry — he thumbed his nose at the received wisdom, current fashions, established methods. He almost always worked alone, in his head, usually walking, often whistling Bach.

He had married a beautiful young physics student who adored him, and fathered a child. It was a brilliant strategy, this genius, this life. A seemingly perfect adaptation. Many great scientists and philosophers, among them René Descartes, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Immanuel Kant, Thorstein Veblen, Isaac Newton, and Albert Einstein, have had similarly strange and solitary personalities.20 An emotionally detached, inward-looking temperament can be especially conducive to scientific creativity, psychiatrists and biographers have long observed, just as fiery fluctuations in mood may sometimes be linked to artistic expression.

Princeton was full of purists — topologists, algebraists, number theorists — and Duffin especially regarded Nash as someone obviously suited, by interest and temperament, for a career in the most abstract mathematics. “I thought he would be a completely pure mathematician,” Duffin recalled. “Princeton was first in topology. That’s why I wanted to send him to Princeton.”57 The only thing Nash really knew about Princeton was that Albert Einstein and John von Neumann were there, along with a bunch of other European émigrés. But the polyglot Princeton mathematical milieu — foreign, Jewish, left-leaning — still seemed to him a distinctly inferior alternative. Sensing Nash’s hesitation, Solomon Lefschetz, the chairman of the Princeton department, had already written to him urging him to choose Princeton.58 He finally dangled a John S.


pages: 439 words: 104,154

The Clockwork Universe: Saac Newto, Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern WorldI by Edward Dolnick

Albert Einstein, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Arthur Eddington, clockwork universe, complexity theory, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Leo Hollis, lone genius, music of the spheres, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Richard Feynman, Saturday Night Live, scientific worldview, Simon Singh, Stephen Hawking, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

Microscopes and telescopes were the glamorous innovations that drew all eyes—Gulliver’s Travels testifies to Swift’s fascination with their power to reveal new worlds—but new instruments were only part of the story of the age. The insights that would soon transform the world required no tools more sophisticated than a fountain pen. For it was the mathematicians who invented the engine that powered the scientific revolution. Centuries later, the story would find an echo. In 1931, with great hoopla, Albert Einstein and his wife, Elsa, were toured around the observatory at California’s Mount Wilson, home to the world’s biggest telescope. Someone told Elsa that astronomers had used this magnificent telescope to determine the shape of the universe. “Well,” she said, “my husband does that on the back of an old envelope.”

Since his early years at Cambridge, Newton had largely abandoned mathematics. Now his mathematical fever surged up again. For seventeen months Newton focused all his powers on the question of gravity. He worked almost without let-up, with the same ferocious concentration that had marked his miracle years two decades before. Albert Einstein kept a picture of Newton above his bed, like a teenage boy with a poster of LeBron James. Though he knew better, Einstein talked of how easily Newton made his discoveries. “Nature to him was an open book, whose letters he could read without effort.” But the real mark of Newton’s style was not ease but power.

“Ye cause of gravity is what I do not pretend to know,” he wrote in 1693, “& therefore would take more time to consider of it.” Twenty years later, he had made no progress. “I have not been able to discover the cause of those properties of gravity,” Newton wrote in 1713, “and I frame no hypotheses.” Another two centuries would pass before Albert Einstein framed a new hypothesis. In the meantime, Newton declared his peace with his own considerable achievement. “And to us it is enough that gravity does really exist, and act according to the laws which we have explained,” he wrote, in a kind of grand farewell to his theory, “and abundantly serves to account for all the motions of the celestial bodies, and of our sea.”


pages: 436 words: 127,642

When Einstein Walked With Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought by Jim Holt

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, anthropic principle, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, computer age, CRISPR, dark matter, David Brooks, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fellow of the Royal Society, four colour theorem, Georg Cantor, George Santayana, Gregor Mendel, haute couture, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Large Hadron Collider, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, luminiferous ether, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Monty Hall problem, Murray Gell-Mann, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, Paradox of Choice, Paul Erdős, Peter Singer: altruism, Plato's cave, power law, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantum entanglement, random walk, Richard Feynman, Robert Solow, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, selection bias, Skype, stakhanovite, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Thorstein Veblen, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, union organizing, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, wage slave

express the conviction that the “Copernican principle,” “Gödel’s incompleteness theorems,” “Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle,” “Newcomb’s problem,” and “the Monty Hall problem” are all exceptions to Stigler’s law of eponymy (vide p. 292). J.H. New York City, 2017 PART I The Moving Image of Eternity 1 When Einstein Walked with Gödel In 1933, with his great scientific discoveries behind him, Albert Einstein came to America. He spent the last twenty-two years of his life in Princeton, New Jersey, where he had been recruited as the star member of the Institute for Advanced Study. Einstein was reasonably content with his new milieu, taking its pretensions in stride. “Princeton is a wonderful piece of earth, and at the same time an exceedingly amusing ceremonial backwater of tiny spindle-shanked demigods,” he observed.

As the past slips out of existence behind us, the future, once unknown and mysterious, assumes its banal reality before us as it yields to the ever-hurrying now. But this sense of flow is a monstrous illusion—so says contemporary physics. And Newton was as much a victim of this illusion as the rest of us are. It was Albert Einstein who initiated the revolution in our understanding of time. In 1905, Einstein showed that time, as it had been understood by physicist and plain man alike, was a fiction. Einstein proved that whether an observer deems two events at different locations to be happening “at the same time” depends on his state of motion.

Although some thought was given to making the new institute a center for economics, the founders decided to start with mathematics, because of both its universal relevance and its minimal material requirements: “a few rooms, books, blackboard chalk, paper, and pencils,” as one of the founders put it. The first appointee was Oswald Veblen (Thorstein Veblen’s nephew) in 1932, followed by Albert Einstein—who, on his arrival in 1933, found Princeton to be “a quaint and ceremonious little village of puny demigods on stilts” (or so at least he told the queen of Belgium). That same year, the institute hired John von Neumann, a Hungarian-born mathematician who had just turned twenty-nine. Among twentieth-century geniuses, von Neumann ranks very close to Einstein.


pages: 186 words: 57,798

Nonviolence: The History of a Dangerous Idea by Mark Kurlansky

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, continuation of politics by other means, desegregation, Dr. Strangelove, European colonialism, Khyber Pass, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, polynesian navigation, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, working poor

According to conservative estimates, ten million had been killed and another twenty million wounded. IX The kind of pacifism that does not actively combat the war preparations of the governments is powerless and will always stay powerless. Would that the conscience and common sense of the people awaken! —ALBERT EINSTEIN, speech in New York, December 14, 1930 World War I had given war such a bad reputation that, for a moment, most people turned against it. Both youth and veterans groups had large numbers campaigning for peace. Quakers and other antiwar religious groups were expanding in Britain and the United States.

But four years after All Quiet on the Western Front was published, Hitler came to power and ordered the novel burned while its author fled to Switzerland. Still, antiwar sentiment was running high, especially in the United States. The peace movement was becoming mainstream. Leading scientists such as Albert Einstein were outspoken pacifists. Christian clergy were coming forward to vow that they would never again commit the sin of backing war. In 1935 the Central Conference of American Rabbis mailed a questionnaire asking its membership of Reform rabbis if they would in the future refuse to support any war.

And that was exactly what war had become in the nuclear age. Leading scientists, writers, political activists, and the general population around the world agreed on their opposition to nuclear weapons. The so-called “father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb,” So-viet physicist Andrei Sakharov, and Albert Einstein, the Western “nuclear father,” were in agreement. Sakharov took on Clausewitz's famous dictum that war was “a continuation of politics by other means,” saying, “A thermonuclear war cannot be considered a continuation of politics by other means. It would be a means of universal suicide.” While governments were playing out their Cold War, young people in both blocs were having their ideas shaped as they were being taught to crouch under their school desks, which someone somewhere had decided would be the one safe place for them in the event of a nuclear World War III.


pages: 244 words: 58,247

The Gone Fishin' Portfolio: Get Wise, Get Wealthy...and Get on With Your Life by Alexander Green

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, behavioural economics, borderless world, buy and hold, buy low sell high, cognitive dissonance, diversification, diversified portfolio, Elliott wave, endowment effect, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, financial independence, fixed income, framing effect, hedonic treadmill, high net worth, hindsight bias, impulse control, index fund, interest rate swap, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, means of production, mental accounting, Michael Milken, money market fund, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, short selling, statistical model, stocks for the long run, sunk-cost fallacy, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, yield curve

(The average college graduate, for example, makes almost 70% more per year than workers with just a high school diploma.) So when it comes to investing, it’s natural to assume that the smartest investors are the most successful. That’s not necessarily true. Experience shows that more often, it’s humility—not superior knowledge—that leads to success in the world of investing. Albert Einstein, for example, is the universal symbol of genius. He discovered the theory of relativity, won the Nobel Prize in physics, and made scientific advances in gravity, cosmology, radiation, theoretical physics, statistical mechanics, quantum theory, and unified field theory. Wouldn’t an investor be blessed to have an IQ like this?

Its size and unique structure allows it to offer mutual fund investors the lowest costs in the industry. 4. For these, and other advantages I’ll soon discuss, your first choice should be to construct the Gone Fishin’ Portfolio using Vanguard Funds. CHAPTER 7 Your Single Most Important Investment Decision “Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.” —Albert Einstein The Gone Fishin’ Portfolio has two objectives. One is to help you earn a higher return within an acceptable level of risk. The other is to save you time and simplify your life. However, the investment community and financial press spew out so much analysis and so many opinions each week, it’s possible to lose sight of the big picture.

You can’t enjoy the benefits of compounding if you interrupt the process by tapping your portfolio from time to time to buy a new car, remodel the kitchen, or take that trip to Lake Tahoe you’ve been dreaming about. (If you must have these things, save for them separately.) TABLE 7.1 Amount Needed at 8% Annual Return to Reach $1 Million at 65 Albert Einstein famously said that the most powerful force in the universe is money compounding. Let the force be with you. Your Asset Allocation Investors are often surprised to learn that their most important investment decision is selecting the mix of assets to be held in the portfolio, not selecting the individual investments themselves.


pages: 277 words: 87,082

Beyond Weird by Philip Ball

Albert Einstein, Bayesian statistics, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, dark pattern, dematerialisation, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, Murray Gell-Mann, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Stephen Hawking, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes

Here was the man who had just been anointed one of the foremost experts on the topic, declaring his ignorance of it. What hope was there, then, for the rest of us? Feynman’s much-quoted words help to seal the reputation of quantum mechanics as one of the most obscure and difficult subjects in all of science. Quantum mechanics has become symbolic of ‘impenetrable science’, in the same way that the name of Albert Einstein (who played a key role in its inception) acts as shorthand for scientific genius. Feynman clearly didn’t mean that he couldn’t do quantum theory. He meant that this was all he could do. He could work through the maths just fine – he invented some of it, after all. That wasn’t the problem. Sure, there’s no point in pretending that the maths is easy, and if you never got on with numbers then a career in quantum mechanics isn’t for you.

Only a handful of scientists and philosophers, idiosyncratically if not plain crankily, insisted on caring about the answer. Many researchers would shrug or roll their eyes when the ‘meaning’ of quantum mechanics came up; some still do. ‘Ah, nobody understands it anyway!’ How different this is from the attitude of Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr and their contemporaries, for whom grappling with the apparent oddness of the theory became almost an obsession. For them, the meaning mattered intensely. In 1998 the American physicist John Wheeler, a pioneer of modern quantum theory, lamented the loss of the ‘desperate puzzlement’ that was in the air in the 1930s.

How this ‘new physics’ began to disclose increasingly odd implications. How the founders puzzled, argued, improvised, guessed, in their efforts to come up with a theory to explain it all. How knowledge once deemed precise and objective now seemed uncertain, contingent and observer-dependent. And the cast! Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, and other colourful intellectual giants like John von Neumann, Richard Feynman and John Wheeler. Best of all for its narrative value is the largely good-natured but trenchant dispute that rumbled on for decades between Einstein and Bohr about what it all meant – about the nature of reality.


pages: 795 words: 215,529

Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick

Albert Einstein, American ideology, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, disinformation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, gravity well, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, pattern recognition, Pepto Bismol, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Schrödinger's Cat, sexual politics, sparse data, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, uranium enrichment

Dirac, the British theorist whose famous equation for the electron had helped set the stage for the present crisis. It went without saying that they were Nobel laureates; apart from Oppenheimer almost everyone in the room either had won or would win this honor. A few Europeans were absent, as was Albert Einstein, settling into his statesmanlike retirement, but with these exceptions the Pocono conclave represented the whole priesthood of modern physics. Night fell and Feynman spoke. Chairs shifted. The priesthood had trouble following this brash young man. They had spent most of the day listening to an extraordinary virtuoso presentation by Feynman’s exact contemporary, Julian Schwinger of Harvard University.

MIT A seventeen-year-old freshman, Theodore Welton, helped some of the older students operate the wind-tunnel display at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Spring Open House in 1936. Like so many of his classmates he had arrived at the Tech knowing all about airplanes, electricity, and chemicals and revering Albert Einstein. He was from a small town, Saratoga Springs, New York. With most of his first year behind him, he had lost none of his confidence. When his duties ended, he walked around and looked at the other exhibits. A miniature science fair of current projects made the open house a showcase for parents and visitors from Boston.

Wigner said he had heard enough from Wheeler about the absorber theory to think it was important. Because of its implications for cosmology he had invited the great astrophysicist Henry Norris Russell. John von Neumann, the mathematician, was also going to come. The formidable Wolfgang Pauli happened to be visiting from Zurich; he would be there. And though Albert Einstein rarely bestirred himself to the colloquiums, he had expressed interest in attending this one. Wheeler tried to calm Feynman by promising to field questions from the audience. Wigner tried to brief him. If Professor Russell appears to fall asleep during your talk, Wigner said, don’t worry—Professor Russell always falls asleep.


pages: 147 words: 39,910

The Great Mental Models: General Thinking Concepts by Shane Parrish

Albert Einstein, anti-fragile, Atul Gawande, Barry Marshall: ulcers, bitcoin, Black Swan, colonial rule, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, delayed gratification, feminist movement, Garrett Hardin, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, John Bogle, Linda problem, mandelbrot fractal, Pepsi Challenge, Philippa Foot, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ponzi scheme, Richard Feynman, statistical model, stem cell, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem

These are my homage to the idea that we can benefit from understanding how the world works and applying that understanding to keep us out of trouble. The ideas in these volumes are not my own, nor do I deserve any credit for them. They come from the likes of Charlie Munger, Nassim Taleb, Charles Darwin, Peter Kaufman, Peter Bevelin, Richard Feynman, Albert Einstein, and so many others. As the Roman poet Publius Terentius wrote: “Nothing has yet been said that’s not been said before.” I’ve only curated, edited, and shaped the work of others before me. The timeless, broad ideas in these volumes are for my children and their children and their children’s children.

If reality has changed the map must change. Take Newtonian physics. For hundreds of years it served as an extremely useful model for understanding the workings of our world. From gravity to celestial motion, Newtonian physics was a wide-ranging map. _ Would you be able to use this map to get to Egypt? Then in 1905 Albert Einstein, with his theory of Special Relativity, changed our understanding of the universe in a huge way. He replaced the understanding handed down by Isaac Newton hundreds of years earlier. He created a new map. Newtonian physics is still a very useful model. One can use it very reliably to predict the movement of objects large and small, with some limitations as pointed out by Einstein.

Experimenting to discover the full spectrum of possible outcomes gives you a better appreciation for what you can influence and what you can reasonably expect to happen. Let’s now explore few areas in which thought experiments are tremendously useful. Imagining physical impossibilities Re-imagining history Intuiting the non-intuitive Imagining physical impossibilities: Albert Einstein was a great user of the thought experiment because it is a way to logically carry out a test in one’s own head that would be very difficult or impossible to perform in real life. With this tool, we can solve problems with intuition and logic that cannot be demonstrated physically. One of his notable thought experiments involved an elevator.2 Imagine you were in a closed elevator, feet glued to the floor.


pages: 1,396 words: 245,647

The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom by Graham Farmelo

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, cuban missile crisis, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, gravity well, Henri Poincaré, invention of radio, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, Murray Gell-Mann, Neil Armstrong, period drama, Richard Feynman, Simon Singh, Stephen Hawking, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, University of East Anglia

What Dirac did notice was that Heisenberg had not constructed his theory to be consistent with special relativity so, true to form, Dirac played his favourite game of trying to produce a version of Heisenberg’s theory that was consistent with relativity, but he soon gave up.36 At the end of September, Dirac prepared to return to Cambridge, convinced that the non-commuting quantities in the theory were the key to the mystery. To make progress, he needed to find the lock – a way of interpreting these quantities, a way of linking them to experimentally observed reality. One person who, unknown to Dirac, shared his excitement about the theory was Albert Einstein, who wrote to a friend: ‘Heisenberg has laid a big quantum egg.’37 At the beginning of October, Dirac began his final year as a postgraduate student. With Fowler’s encouragement, he set aside his books of intricate calculations based on the Bohr theory, well aware that – if Heisenberg’s theory was right – those calculations were all but worthless.

The application was advertised in the Times Higher Education Supplement, his mother says. 31 This proof copy is in Dirac Papers, 2/14/1 (FSU). 32 An English translation of this paper, together with other key papers in the early history of quantum mechanics, are reprinted in Van der Waerden (1967). 33 Dirac (1977: 119). 34 Interview with Flo Dirac, Stockholms Dagblad, 10 December 1933. 35 Darrigol (1992: 291–7). 36 Dirac (1977: 121). 37 Letter from Albert Einstein to Paul Ehrenfest, 20 September 1925, in Mehra and Rechenberg (1982: 276). 38 Dirac (1977: 121–5). 39 Dirac (1977: 122). 40 Here, X and Y are mathematical expressions of a type known as partial differentials. What is important is the superficial similarity between the form of the Poisson bracket and the difference AB – BA. 41 Eddington (1928: 210). 42 Elsasser (1978: 41). 43 Reference for Dirac, written by Fowler in April 1925, for the Royal Commission of the Exhibition of 1851, 1851COMM. 44 Dalitz and Peierls (1986: 147).

So although Dirac had made another distinguished contribution to quantum mechanics – his second within a year – he had yet to beat all his colleagues to a key innovation in the theory. He had, however, acquired some distinguished admirers, though most of them were struggling to understand his peculiar combination of logic and intuition. One of them was Albert Einstein, who told a friend: ‘I have trouble with Dirac. This balancing on the dizzying path between genius and madness is awful.’26 One evening in Dirac’s lodgings shortly before Christmas, the telephone rang. It was Professor Bohr, Dirac’s landlady told him, as she passed the receiver to him. This was a new experience for him – he had never before used a telephone.27 Knowing that Dirac was about to spend the holiday alone, Bohr was calling to ask if he would like to spend Christmas with him and his family.


pages: 315 words: 93,628

Is God a Mathematician? by Mario Livio

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Brownian motion, cellular automata, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, cosmological constant, Dava Sobel, double helix, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, Future Shock, Georg Cantor, Gerolamo Cardano, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, music of the spheres, Myron Scholes, Plato's cave, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, Russell's paradox, seminal paper, Thales of Miletus, The Design of Experiments, the scientific method, traveling salesman

The famous mathematician John von Neumann (1903–57), who was lecturing on Hilbert’s work at the time, canceled the rest of his planned course and devoted the remaining time to Gödel’s findings. Gödel the man was every bit as complex as his theorems. In 1940, he and his wife Adele fled Nazi Austria so he could take up a position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. There he became a good friend and walking partner of Albert Einstein. When Gödel applied for naturalization as an American citizen in 1948, it was Einstein who, together with Princeton University mathematician and economist Oskar Morgenstern (1902–77), accompanied Gödel to his interview at the Immigration and Naturalization Service office. The events surrounding this interview are generally known, but they are so revealing about Gödel’s personality that I will give them now in full, precisely as they were recorded from memory by Oskar Morgenstern on September 13, 1971.

The events surrounding this interview are generally known, but they are so revealing about Gödel’s personality that I will give them now in full, precisely as they were recorded from memory by Oskar Morgenstern on September 13, 1971. I am grateful to Ms. Dorothy Morgenstern Thomas, Morgenstern’s widow, and to the Institute for Advanced Study for providing me with a copy of the document: It was in 1946 that Gödel was to become an American citizen. He asked me to be his witness and as the other witness, he proposed Albert Einstein who also gladly consented. Einstein and I occasionally met and were full of anticipation as to what would happen during this time prior to the naturalization proceedings themselves and even during those. Gödel whom I have seen of course time and again in the months before this event began to go in a thorough manner to prepare himself properly.

This is certain, that it must proceed from a cause that penetrates to the very centres of the Sun and planets…and propagates its virtue on all sides to immense distances, decreasing always as the inverse square of the distances…But hitherto I have not been able to discover the cause of those properties of gravity from phenomena, and I frame no hypotheses. The person who decided to meet the challenge posed by Newton’s omission was Albert Einstein (1879–1955). In 1907 in particular, Einstein had a very strong reason to be interested in gravity—his new theory of special relativity appeared to be in direct conflict with Newton’s law of gravitation. Newton believed that gravity’s action was instantaneous. He assumed that it took no time at all for planets to feel the Sun’s gravitational force, or for an apple to feel the Earth’s attraction.


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Paradox: The Nine Greatest Enigmas in Physics by Jim Al-Khalili

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, butterfly effect, clockwork universe, complexity theory, dark matter, Edmond Halley, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Ernest Rutherford, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Laplace demon, Large Hadron Collider, luminiferous ether, Magellanic Cloud, Olbers’ paradox, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, time dilation, Wilhelm Olbers

But once it is moving, the same argument applies: namely, that, as time goes by, the distances covered are based on the moving object’s speed, which need not be constant. The Dichotomy argument is then an abstract irrelevance that has nothing to say about true motion in the physical world. I should make one final remark before moving on. Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity teaches us that maybe we should not dismiss the Dichotomy Paradox so confidently. According to Einstein, time can be regarded in a similar way to space—indeed, he refers to time as the fourth axis, or fourth dimension, of what is called space–time. This suggests that maybe the flow of time is just an illusion after all—and, if it is, then so is motion.

I certainly do not plan to use any algebra or draw any technical graphs in order to teach you the basics of relativity, and I could in principle just jump to the resolution of the paradox in the hope that you are happy to trust me on this business of lengths getting shorter at ultra-high speeds. But then again, I could just be making this stuff up. So you have a choice: you can skip to the end of the chapter where I explain away the paradox if you (a) know something about the Special Theory of Relativity already or (b) trust that if Albert Einstein says so then that is good enough for you; or you can allow me to lead you through the arguments carefully and gently. If you go for the latter option it will be worth it in the long run, since the next two chapters, on paradoxes involving the nature of time rather than space, will also depend on what I explain here.

The Michelson-Morley result was the equivalent of both you on board the moving train and the observer watching the train go by agreeing on how fast the passenger was moving! It sounds ridiculous, right? Surely, as I explained before, you see the passenger moving at walking pace while the platform observer sees him whizz past at train speed, plus a little more. Just eight years before Michelson and Morley achieved their disturbing finding, Albert Einstein had been born in Ulm in Germany. That same year, 1879, Albert Michelson, working at a U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, had measured the speed of light to an accuracy of about one part in ten thousand. He wasn’t the first to do this and would not be the last, but it would stand him in good stead when he and Morley conducted their famous experiment.


pages: 264 words: 68,108

Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Buckminster Fuller, Columbine, Honoré de Balzac, index card, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Paul Erdős, placebo effect

Wodehouse Edith Sitwell Thomas Hobbes John Milton René Descartes Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Friedrich Schiller Franz Schubert Franz Liszt George Sand Honoré de Balzac Victor Hugo Charles Dickens Charles Darwin Herman Melville Nathaniel Hawthorne Leo Tolstoy Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky Mark Twain Alexander Graham Bell Vincent van Gogh N. C. Wyeth Georgia O’Keeffe Sergey Rachmaninoff Vladimir Nabokov Balthus Le Corbusier Buckminster Fuller Paul Erdos Andy Warhol Edward Abbey V. S. Pritchett Edmund Wilson John Updike Albert Einstein L. Frank Baum Knut Hamsun Willa Cather Ayn Rand George Orwell James T. Farrell Jackson Pollock Carson McCullers Willem de Kooning Jean Stafford Donald Barthelme Alice Munro Jerzy Kosinski Isaac Asimov Oliver Sacks Anne Rice Charles Schulz William Gass David Foster Wallace Marina Abramovic Twyla Tharp Stephen King Marilynne Robinson Saul Bellow Gerhard Richter Jonathan Franzen Maira Kalman Georges Simenon Stephen Jay Gould Bernard Malamud A Note About the Author ACKNOWLEDGMENTS NOTES Photo Credits/Permissions INTRODUCTION Nearly every weekday morning for a year and a half, I got up at 5:30, brushed my teeth, made a cup of coffee, and sat down to write about how some of the greatest minds of the past four hundred years approached this exact same task—that is, how they made the time each day to do their best work, how they organized their schedules in order to be creative and productive.

So, I try to be a regular sort of fellow—much like a dentist drilling his teeth every morning—except Sunday, I don’t work on Sunday, and there are of course some holidays I take. He told another interviewer that he was careful to give at least three hours a day to the writing project at hand; otherwise, he said, there was a risk he might forget what it’s about. A solid routine, he added, “saves you from giving up.” Albert Einstein (1879–1955) Einstein immigrated to the United States in 1933, where he held a professorship at Princeton University until his retirement in 1945. His routine there was simple. Between 9:00 and 10:00 A.M. he ate breakfast and perused the daily papers. At about 10:30 he left for his Princeton office, walking when the weather was nice; otherwise, a station wagon from the university would pick him up.

New York: Ballantine Books, 2004); interview with the Academy of Achievement, June 12, 2004, http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/upd0int-1. 502. “I would write”: Interview with Samuels. 503. “Around noon the”: Updike, xvii. 504. “I try to”: Interview with Radeljkovic and Hadziselimovic. 505. A solid routine: Interview with the Academy of Achievement. 506. Albert Einstein: Ronald W. Clark, Einstein: His Life and Times (1971; repr. New York: Harper Perennial, 2007). 507. “Einstein would pose”: Quoted ibid., 746. 508. L. Frank Baum: Katharine M. Rogers, L. Frank Baum: Creator of Oz (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2002). 509. “My characters just”: Quoted ibid., 179. 510.


The Little Black Book of Decision Making by Michael Nicholas

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, call centre, classic study, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Donald Trump, Frederick Winslow Taylor, hindsight bias, impulse control, James Dyson, late fees, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, scientific management, selection bias, Stephen Hawking

Grove, Only the Paranoid Survive, HarperCollins Publishers, 1996, p. 3. 2 Moshe Bar, Maital Neta and Heather Linz, Very First Impressions, American Psychological Association, 2006. 3 Robert W. Levenson, Paul Ekman and Matthieu Ricard, Meditation and the Startle Response: A Case Study, PMC, 2013. 7 The Dance of Old and New “The only really valuable thing is intuition.” —Albert Einstein Few would disagree with the idea that Albert Einstein was one of the most influential physicists of the modern age, a great visionary whose intuitive leaps often took years to prove mathematically. Such was Einstein's farsightedness that his reputation and stature in the world of physics grew even more in the decades following his death, as physicists gathered more evidence to support his theories.

Cohen, “Party over policy: The dominating impact of group influence on political beliefs” (2003) Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85: 808–822. 3 Coping with an Era of Acceleration “As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.” —Albert Einstein In 2001, a little-known world record was smashed, changing in an instant the way people thought about their approach to the event in which it took place. For us, it provides a great illustration of how major breakthroughs in performance get enabled. Prior to the event, it probably wouldn't have occurred to many people that the standard approach the competitors were using had been around a while, that the results they were getting with it had largely plateaued, and that the opportunity existed to do much, much better.

In fact, there is a very good neurological reason for that, and it stems from the fact that this mind–brain partnership only works well when we are relaxed. Let's pick up where we left off in Chapter 6, with the challenge of moving from reaction to response. The Fundamental Question “The most important question that we can ask ourselves is whether the inherent nature of the universe is friendly or hostile.” Albert Einstein That creativity requires a relaxed brain is probably unsurprising to you. The problem is simple – when we are stressed, our brain wants to handle anything that appears to be threatening as it would a survival issue, like a predator. It is not the time for learning or creativity when we are about to flee, or fight, for our life!


pages: 138 words: 41,353

The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, cryptocurrency, digital rights, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, high net worth, illegal immigration, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, offshore financial centre, open immigration, Patri Friedman, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, Satoshi Nakamoto, Skype, technoutopianism, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks

Prudent Management of Inflows Under Economic Citizenship Programs,” by Xin Xu, Ahmed El-Ashram and Judith Gold, International Monetary Fund, May 2015. http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2015/wp1593.pdf 82taken note of the country’s progress: ibid. 84investor-citizens spent $2 billion buying passports in 2014: “This Swiss Lawyer Is Helping Governments Get Rich Off Selling Passports,” by Jason Clenfield, Bloomberg Markets, April 2015. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-11/passport-king-christian-kalin-helps-nations-sell-citizenship 87-88“They come twice, once to get a residency card and once to get a passport”: “Malta Offers Citizenship and All Its Perks for a Price,” by Jenny Anderson, New York Times, April 30, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/01/business/dealbook/malta-offers-citizenship-and-all-its-perks-for-a-price.html 91publish a ranking: “The Passport Index,” Arton Capital, March 17, 2015. http://www.artoncapital.com/news/passport-index/ 101who was once stateless: The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Volume 1: The Early Years, 1879–1902, by Albert Einstein, Anna Beck, Peter Havas (Princeton University Press, 1987) 113waiting list for renunciation interviews at embassies abroad: “Want to Shed U.S. citizenship? Get in Line,” by Patrick Cain, Global News, August 21, 2014. http://globalnews.ca/news/1519628/want-to-shed-u-s-citizenship-get-in-line/ 114an “exit tax”: Expatriation Tax, Internal Revenue Service. http://www.irs.gov/Individuals/International-Taxpayers/Expatriation-Tax 122donors at the conference promised $540 million in aid: “Staff Report for the 2010 Article IV Consultation and Second Review Under the Extended Credit Facility,” International Monetary Fund, March 2011. http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/scr/2011/cr1172.pdf 123was just $387 million: Comoros, United Nations Statistics Division. https://data.un.org/CountryProfile.aspx?

That wasn’t enough for Garry Davis, though. The League of Nations and its successor, the United Nations, were in no way committed to ending state sovereignty, and Davis believed that humans should belong to a bigger, more inclusive, almost universal community. This brand of cosmopolitanism was in vogue: Luminaries such as Albert Einstein (who was once stateless), Albert Camus, and Buckminster Fuller began advocating for some variant on a world government. In the United States, World Federalist movements were cropping up and joining forces, hoping to unite humanity to prevent another war. The New Yorker published an editorial in its June 5, 1948 issue about Davis: “renouncing US citizenship in order to become a citizen of the world is an exciting gesture.”


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The Zionist Ideas: Visions for the Jewish Homeland—Then, Now, Tomorrow by Gil Troy

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, demand response, different worldview, European colonialism, financial independence, ghettoisation, guns versus butter model, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Mount Scopus, Nelson Mandela, one-state solution, open immigration, Silicon Valley, union organizing, urban planning, work culture , Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

Then, enveloped in tears and wonder, the nation will ask: “Who are you?” And the two reply quietly, “We are the silver platter on which the Jewish state was given.” This they will say and fall back encased in shadows And the rest will be told in Israel’s chronicles. Albert Einstein (1879–1955) Jewish nationalism as necessary nationalism. Albert Einstein was a most reluctant Zionist. Born in Germany in 1879 to a secular family, Einstein wanted to live in a world without borders—and in some ways intellectually he did. But his internationalism and discomfort with nationalism were no match for German antisemitism.

“Palestine, Setting of Sacred History of the Jewish Race.” Princeton Herald, April 14, 1944. “I am as”: Walter Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007). “person of the century”: Frederic Golden, “Person of the Century: Albert Einstein,” Time, December 31, 1999. “a pitiable attempt”: “The American Council for Judaism,” Albert Einstein Collection no. 42, Philosophical Library (2016). “The Jews of Palestine”: David Rowe and Robert Schulman, eds., Einstein on Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). Eisen, Arnold. “What Does It Mean to Be a Zionist in 2015?: Speech to the 37th Zionist Congress in Jerusalem.”

Contents Foreword by Natan Sharansky Acknowledgments Introduction: How Zionism’s Six Traditional Schools of Thought Shape Today’s Conversation Part 1. Pioneers: Founding the Jewish State 1. Political Zionism Peretz Smolenskin Leon Pinsker Theodor Herzl Max Nordau Jacob Klatzkin Chaim Weizmann Natan Alterman Albert Einstein 2. Labor Zionism Moses Hess BILU Joseph Hayyim Brenner Nahman Syrkin Ber Borochov Aaron David Gordon Rachel Bluwstein Berl Katznelson Rahel Yanait Ben-Zvi 3. Revisionist Zionism The Union of Zionists-Revisionists Ze’ev Jabotinsky Saul Tchernichovsky The Irgun Avraham (Yair) Stern Haim Hazaz 4.


pages: 372 words: 101,174

How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed by Ray Kurzweil

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anesthesia awareness, anthropic principle, brain emulation, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Dean Kamen, discovery of DNA, double helix, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, George Gilder, Google Earth, Hans Moravec, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jacquard loom, Jeff Hawkins, John von Neumann, Law of Accelerating Returns, linear programming, Loebner Prize, mandelbrot fractal, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, strong AI, the scientific method, theory of mind, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, X Prize

There is controversy as to whether or not she would have shared in that prize had she been alive in 1962. 7. Albert Einstein, “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” (1905). This paper established the special theory of relativity. See Robert Bruce Lindsay and Henry Margenau, Foundations of Physics (Woodbridge, CT: Ox Bow Press, 1981), 330. 8. “Crookes radiometer,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crookes_radiometer. 9. Note that some of the momentum of the photons is transferred to the air molecules in the bulb (since it is not a perfect vacuum) and then transferred from the heated air molecules to the vane. 10. Albert Einstein, “Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?”

But we know that the speed of light is a constant, as the Michelson-Morley experiment had shown. Thus he would necessarily see the light beam traveling ahead of him at the full speed of light. This seemed like a contradiction—how could it be possible? The answer became evident to the German boy, whose name, incidentally, was Albert Einstein (1879–1955), by the time he turned twenty-six. Obviously—to young Master Einstein—time itself must have slowed down for him. He explains his reasoning in a paper published in 1905.7 If observers on Earth were to look at the young man’s watch they would see it ticking ten times slower. Indeed, when he got back to Earth, his watch would show that only 10 percent as much time had passed (ignoring, for the moment, acceleration and deceleration).

After we construct a model of how thinking works through this process of self-reflection, we’ll examine to what extent we can confirm it through the latest observations of actual brains and the state of the art in re-creating these processes in machines. CHAPTER 2 THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS ON THINKING I very rarely think in words at all. A thought comes, and I may try to express it in words afterwards. —Albert Einstein The brain is a three-pound mass you can hold in your hand that can conceive of a universe a hundred billion light years across. —Marian Diamond What seems astonishing is that a mere three-pound object, made of the same atoms that constitute everything else under the sun, is capable of directing virtually everything that humans have done: flying to the moon and hitting seventy home runs, writing Hamlet and building the Taj Mahal—even unlocking the secrets of the brain itself.


pages: 364 words: 101,286

The Misbehavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Financial Turbulence by Benoit Mandelbrot, Richard L. Hudson

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, British Empire, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, carbon-based life, discounted cash flows, diversification, double helix, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, electricity market, Elliott wave, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, full employment, Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré, implied volatility, index fund, informal economy, invisible hand, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market microstructure, Myron Scholes, new economy, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, power law, price mechanism, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nelson Elliott, RAND corporation, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, short selling, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, stochastic volatility, transfer pricing, value at risk, Vilfredo Pareto, volatility smile

Long before, the invention of the microscope led to observations of the erratic way that tiny pollen grains jiggled about in a sample of water. A Scottish botanist, Robert Brown, studied this motion, observed that it is not a manifestation of life but a physical phenomenon, and received (possibly inflated) credit for the discovery through the term “Brownian motion.” In 1905, Albert Einstein developed for it equations very similar to Bachelier’s own equations of bond-price probability—though Einstein never knew that. Regardless, one cannot help but marvel that the movement of security prices, the motion of molecules, and the diffusion of heat could all be of the same mathematical species.

But even more miraculous: If the cat happens to brush against an obstacle on the way down, the edge of a table, for instance, its body in mid-air will spontaneously adjust course, to avoid a collision. How does it do it? That was the subject of one of my stranger research collaborations, when I was for a year a visiting professor of physiology at Albert Einstein School of Medicine, in New York. My host, Professor Vahe Amassian, wanted to get to the bottom of this mystery, wiring a cat’s brain to observe the pattern of neuronal firing in mid-flight. (Yes, it is a bit scary to see all those electrodes coming out of its head.) But I urged him to take it easy and first go back to basics: What does the cat’s brain activity look like when nothing is happening?

Further detail can be found in this book’s bibliography and http://www.misbehaviorofmarkets.com and in many cases more directly in http://classes.yale.edu/fractals/index.html. Prelude Introducing a Maverick in Science xiv “Paul H. Cootner…” From Cootner 1964. xv “The grand aim of all science…” An oft-repeated quotation of Albert Einstein, from Life magazine, January 9, 1950. xvii “Mandelbrot’s life story…” All accounts of Mandelbrot’s life in this book are based primarily on conversations between the authors, supplemented by Mandelbrot’s own writings. A summary of his life and work may be found in Gleick 1987. An autobiographical essay plus additional biographical and bibliographical information is available at Mandelbrot’s web site, http://www.math.yale.edu/mandelbrot.


pages: 325 words: 97,162

The 5 AM Club: Own Your Morning. Elevate Your Life. by Robin Sharma

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, dematerialisation, epigenetics, fake news, Grace Hopper, hedonic treadmill, impulse control, index card, invisible hand, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, large denomination, Mahatma Gandhi, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Rosa Parks, telemarketer, white picket fence

Riley’s seaside estate. Spasiba,” she added in a graceful tone and with an earnest wave. “This is so A-list,” observed the entrepreneur as she happily snapped some selfies, uncharacteristically pouting like a fashionista. “Def,” replied the artist, as he photobombed her, sticking out his tongue like Albert Einstein did in that famous photo that betrayed his seriousness as a scientist and revealed his undiminished childlike sense of wonder. As the Range Rover rolled along the highway, tall stalks of sugar cane swayed in the fragrant breezes blown by the Indian Ocean. The quiet chauffeur wore a white cap, the kind you see bellmen at five-star hotels wearing, and a well-pressed dark gray uniform that hinted at an understated yet refined professionalism.

She’s found that people are far less productive when they are constantly interrupting themselves by shifting from one task to another throughout the day because they leave valuable pieces of their attention on too many different pursuits. The solution is exactly what I’m suggesting: work on one high-value activity at a time instead of relentlessly multitasking—and do so in a quiet environment. Albert Einstein made the point exquisitely when he wrote, ‘Only one who devotes himself to a cause with his whole strength and soul can be a true master. For this reason, mastery demands all of a person.’ This really is one of the most closely guarded secrets of the virtuosos and history-makers. They don’t diffuse their cognitive bandwidth.

“That inspires me not to give up on a painting when I hit a wall of self-doubt. Or when I get frustrated by my lack of progress. Or when I get scared others in my field will laugh because I’m producing art that is fresh and original instead of copied and derivative.” “Good,” responded the billionaire as he rubbed his muscular abs. “Albert Einstein wrote ‘Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly.’” “Love that,” spoke the artist exuberantly, displaying an expression that showed his growing pride in trusting his personal vision when it came to his craft.


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The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything by Michio Kaku

Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, fudge factor, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Large Hadron Collider, Murray Gell-Mann, Olbers’ paradox, place-making, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Stephen Hawking, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, uranium enrichment

“For some days”: Fölsing, Albert Einstein, 374. “as if I had been wandering”: Denis Brian, Einstein (New York: Wiley, 1996), 102. “A new scientific truth does not”: Johann Ambrosius and Barth Verlag (Leipzig, 1948), p. 22, in Scientific Autobiography and other papers. “Everyone who had any substantial contact”: Jeremy Bernstein, “Secrets of the Old One—II,” New Yorker, March 17, 1973, 60. Chapter 3: Rise of the Quantum “I think I can safely say”: https://en.wikiquote.org/​wiki/​Talk:Richard_Feynman. “I will never forget the sight”: quoted in Albrecht Fölsing, Albert Einstein, trans. and abridged Ewald Osers (New York: Penguin Books, 1997), 516.

Chapter 2: Einstein’s Quest for Unification “I am nothing but”: Abraham Pais, Subtle Is the Lord (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 41. “A storm broke loose”: Quotation.io, https://quotation.io/​page/​quote/​storm-broke-loose-mind. “I owe more to Maxwell”: Albrecht Fölsing, Albert Einstein, trans. and abridged Ewald Osers (New York: Penguin Books, 1997), 152. “mathematician’s patterns”: Wikiquotes.com, https://en.wikiquote.org/​wiki/​G._H._Hardy. This means that the three: So although special relativity has a four-dimensional symmetry, as seen by the simple four-dimensional Pythagorean theorem X2 + Y2 + Z2 − T2 (in certain units), time enters with an extra minus sign compared to the other spatial dimensions.


pages: 279 words: 75,527

Collider by Paul Halpern

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, Dr. Strangelove, Ernest Rutherford, Gary Taubes, gravity well, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, horn antenna, index card, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Magellanic Cloud, pattern recognition, Plato's cave, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, time dilation

Back on the Meyrin campus of CERN, I noted a similar juxtaposition of old and new. CERN is a laboratory keenly aware of its history. Its streets are named after a wide range of people who have spent their careers trying to discover the fundamental components of nature—from Democritus to Marie Curie and from James Clerk Maxwell to Albert Einstein. Scattered around its museum area are an assortment of accelerators and detectors of various shapes, sizes, and vintage. Comparing the small early detectors to ATLAS served to highlight the unbelievable progress made in particle physics during the last seventy-five years. CERN makes good use of many of its historical devices.

The Higgs field’s initial symmetry, with all angles being equal, has spontaneously broken to favor a single angle. Because the Higgs field sets the baseline for the vacuum (lowest energy) state of the universe, this transforms during the symmetry breaking from a situation called the true vacuum, in which the lowest energy is zero, to a false vacuum, in which it is nonzero. Following Albert Einstein’s famous dictum E = mc2 (energy equals mass times the speed of light squared), the acquired energy becomes mass and is shared among many elementary particles, including the carriers of the weak interaction. In short, the halting of the Higgs field’s “roulette wheel” channels mass into the weak exchange (and other) particles and explains why they are bulky while the photons remain massless.

A famous 1887 experiment by American researchers Albert Michelson and Edward Morley disproved the ether hypothesis by showing that the speed of light is the same in all directions. Still, given the compelling analogy to material waves, it was hard for the scientific community to accept that light is able to move through sheer emptiness. The constancy of the speed of light in a vacuum raised another critical question. In a scenario pondered by the young Albert Einstein, what would happen if someone managed to chase and catch up with a light wave? Would it appear static, like a deer frozen in a car’s headlights? In other words, in that case would the measured speed of light be zero? That’s what Newtonian mechanics predicts, because if two things are at the same speed, they should seem to each other not to be moving.


pages: 381 words: 78,467

100 Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything, From Careers and Relationships to Family And by Sonia Arrison

23andMe, 8-hour work day, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, attribution theory, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Clayton Christensen, dark matter, disruptive innovation, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Frank Gehry, Googley, income per capita, indoor plumbing, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Nick Bostrom, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, post scarcity, precautionary principle, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Simon Kuznets, Singularitarianism, smart grid, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, sugar pill, synthetic biology, Thomas Malthus, upwardly mobile, World Values Survey, X Prize

“This underscores the power of researchers being able to scan the whole genome, and not just limit their searches to their own best hunches.”84 This power also translates into discovering weaknesses in cancer cells, thereby making possible personalized treatment, as well as looking at the genomes of people who live a very long time to see if they possess certain protector genes that regular people do not. There are at least two well-known groups studying centenarians (people who are older than one hundred). One is the Boston University New England Centenarian Study, run by Dr. Thomas Perls, and the other is the Longevity Genes Project at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, run by Dr. Nir Barzilai. According to Dr. Perls’s research, even though lifestyle and habits are important for health, it is clear that “exceptional longevity runs very strongly in families.”85 Dr. Nir Barzilai agrees. The “super agers,” as he calls them, appear to have a heritable genetic makeup that allows them to better avoid cardiovascular disease, insulin resistance, and high blood pressure.86 The key, of course, is to find out exactly what parts of their genetic code keep them so healthy.

Because compounding works by adding accumulated interest back to the principal, interest is continually earned on whatever principal there was plus the interest that the individual has already made. This means that money grows at a much faster rate when saved in this manner than if stuffed in the mattress. Indeed, compounding works so well that Albert Einstein called it the “eighth wonder of the world.” For example, if a person saved $100,000 at age 30, the value at age 65 would be $551,602 and the value at age 130 would be $13,150,126 (assuming, for simplicity, compound interest of 5 percent and no additional savings). This can be contrasted with a person who saves the same amount under the same conditions but doesn’t begin until age 50.

pid=newsarchive&refer=home&sid=aEUlnq6ltPpQ. 83 “Your Genome in Minutes: New Technology Could Slash Sequencing Time,” ScienceDaily, December 31, 2010, www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/12/101220121111.htm. 84 Francis Collins, “A Genome Story: 10th Anniversary Commentary,” Scientific American, June 25, 2010, www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=a-genome-story-10th-anniversary-com-2010-06-25. 85 Boston University School of Medicine, New England Centenarian Study, “Why Study Centenarians? An Overview,” www.bumc.bu.edu/centenarian/overview/. 86 Albert Einstein College of Medicine, “Einstein Launches SuperAgers.com to Spotlight Aging Research,” November 1, 2010, www.einstein.yu.edu/home/news.asp?ID=582. 87 J. Craig Venter Institute, “First Self-Replicating Synthetic Bacterial Cell,” www.jcvi.org/cms/research/projects/first-self-replicating-synthetic-bacterial-cell/overview/. 88 Katie Drummond, “Pentagon Looks to Breed Immortal ‘Synthetic Organisms,’ Molecular Kill-Switch Included,” Wired News, February 5, 2010, www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/02/pentagon-looks-to-breed-immortal-synthetic-organisms-molecular-kill-switch-included/. 89 Aubrey de Grey with Michael Rae, Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime (New York: St.


pages: 265 words: 76,875

Exoplanets by Donald Goldsmith

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Carrington event, Colonization of Mars, cosmic abundance, dark matter, Dava Sobel, en.wikipedia.org, Great Leap Forward, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, Magellanic Cloud, Mars Rover, megastructure, Pluto: dwarf planet, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Stephen Hawking, time dilation

T ­ hese directly imaged planets, modest though their numbers may be, already tend to confirm the hypothesis that many young stars possess equally young planets much more massive than Jupiter that orbit at distances significantly greater—in many cases far greater—­than Jupiter’s distance from the sun. 73 7 • DETECTING PLANETS WITH EINSTEIN’S LENS P erhaps the sweetest, the cleverest, and in some ways the most frustrating technique for finding exoplanets arises from the theory of general relativity, the leap forward in our understanding of the physical universe that made Albert Einstein famous in 1919. This method, which we may call “Einstein’s lens,” allows astronomers to perceive the existence of exoplanets not by observing the planets’ own light, or their stars’ light, but instead by detecting the effect that their gravitational forces have upon light from far more distant stars.

Why c­ an’t the twin on Earth say that she does the traveling? ­After all, she certainly moves with re­spect to the twin on the spaceship. What privileges one motion over another? Why ­doesn’t each twin see the other as aging more slowly? This “traveling twin paradox” has a resolution—­and it’s a good ­thing too, if we hope to continue to re­spect Albert Einstein as the genius that he was. The situation may seem symmetrical so far as the two twins are concerned, but on closer inspection, a­ ctual symmetry does not exist. The crucial difference resides in the fact that the traveling twin (as we may reasonably identify her) turns around in her journey. T ­ hose who find this statement insufficient may enjoy the next few paragraphs, which provide a­ ctual numbers in an example meant to demonstrate the facts that discriminate between the two twins.

, “Gemini Planet Imager Spectroscopy of the HR 8799 Planets c and d,” Astrophysical Journal Letters 794 (2014): L15. 12. G. Chauvin et al., “Discovery of a Warm, Dusty ­Giant Planet Around HIP 65426,” Astronomy and Astrophysics 605 (2017): L9–17. 7. Detecting Planets with Einstein’s Lens 1. Albert Einstein, “Die Grundlage der Allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie,” Annals of Physics 354 (1916): 769–822. 2. John Asher Johnson, How Do You Find an Exoplanet? (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2016). 3. Scott Gaudi interview, May 3, 2017. 4. Calen Henderson statement at Kepler & K2 Science Conference IV, NASA / Ames Research Center, June 20, 2017; see also Calen Henderson et al., “Candidate Gravitational Microlensing Events for F ­uture Direct Lens Imaging,” Astrophysical Journal 794 (2014): 71. 5.


The Pattern Seekers: How Autism Drives Human Invention by Simon Baron-Cohen

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, airport security, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Asperger Syndrome, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, bioinformatics, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, David Attenborough, discovery of penicillin, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Fellow of the Royal Society, Greta Thunberg, intentional community, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jim Simons, lateral thinking, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, neurotypical, out of africa, pattern recognition, phenotype, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, theory of mind, twin studies, zero-sum game

(East Sussex, UK: Brunner-Routledge). On whether Hans Christian Andersen was autistic, see J. Brown (2007), “Ice puzzles of the mind: Autism and the writings of Hans Christian Andersen,” CEA Critic 69(3), 44–64. On whether Albert Einstein was autistic, see N. Fleming (2008), “Albert Einstein ‘found genius through autism,’” Telegraph, February 21, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/3326317/Albert-Einstein-found-genius-through-autism.html. On whether Henry Cavendish was autistic, see S. Silberman (2015), Neurotribes: The legacy of autism and how to think smarter about people who think differently (New York: Penguin Random House).

Bryant’s approach to both basketball and music reveals that his behavior was the product of the Systemizing Mechanism in hyper-mode.32 Some hyper-systemizers, in a range of fields, have been described as autistic. For example, Andy Warhol in the field of art, Ludwig Wittgenstein in the field of philosophy, Hans Christian Andersen in the field of literature, and Albert Einstein and Henry Cavendish in the field of physics, have all been described as autistic.33 In my view, it is unhelpful to speculate if someone—living or not—might be autistic, since a diagnosis is only useful if the person is seeking help and is struggling to function. Diagnosing someone—living or not—on the basis of fragmentary biographical information is unreliable and arguably unethical, since diagnosis should always include the consent of the person and be initiated by them.


pages: 692 words: 127,032

Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America by Shawn Lawrence Otto

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cepheid variable, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, commoditize, cosmological constant, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dean Kamen, desegregation, different worldview, disinformation, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, Exxon Valdez, fudge factor, Garrett Hardin, ghettoisation, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, ocean acidification, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, sharing economy, smart grid, stem cell, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, War on Poverty, white flight, Winter of Discontent, working poor, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

.,11 who endowed the University of Chicago as well as Rockefeller University and Johns Hopkins University’s school of public health. As Hubble began secretly studying astronomy,12 what had captured the imagination of the American public was the growing fame of the former Swiss patent officer with wild hair and a playful face, Albert Einstein. THE HOAX OF RELATIVITY Einstein’s general theory of relativity had made the striking prediction that gravity could bend space and so disrupt the straight-line flow of light. On May 29, 1919, scientists set out to test the theory by carefully observing the way starlight behaved during a solar eclipse.

There had been a certain lack of cooperation between the Europe-friendly science enterprise and the military during World War I, and certain administrative barriers to the military’s adoption of new technologies,4 that Bush was anxious to prevent the United States from repeating, particularly with the vast influx of talent the country was reaping as a result of growing Nazi intolerance. Albert Einstein was the most famous of these immigrants, but there were many others—most of them Jewish. Bush was strongly of the opinion that science and technology would lead to military superiority for whichever country best exploited them. After the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939, Bush became convinced of the need to establish a federal agency that would coordinate US research efforts.

And by so doing, by our participation in making it possible to make these things, we have raised again the question of whether science is good for man, of whether it is good to learn about the world, to try to understand it, to try to control it, to help give to the world of men increased insight, increased power.10 Albert Einstein, who had played a key role in alerting President Roosevelt to the possibility of making such a bomb, shared Oppenheimer’s feelings. He sent a telegram to hundreds of prominent Americans in May of 1946, asking for $200,000 to fund a national campaign “to let the people know that a new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels….


pages: 404 words: 131,034

Cosmos by Carl Sagan

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, clockwork universe, dark pattern, dematerialisation, double helix, Drosophila, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Lao Tzu, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, Magellanic Cloud, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, music of the spheres, pattern recognition, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, time dilation, Tunguska event

In the unlikely event that Beta Andromedae blew itself up last Tuesday, we would not know it for another seventy-five years, as this interesting information, traveling at the speed of light, would require seventy-five years to cross the enormous interstellar distances. When the light by which we now see this star set out on its long voyage, the young Albert Einstein, working as a Swiss patent clerk, had just published his epochal special theory of relativity here on Earth. Space and time are interwoven. We cannot look out into space without looking back into time. Light travels very fast. But space is very empty, and the stars are far apart. Distances of seventy-five light-years or less are very small compared to other distances in astronomy.

His teachers in Germany had told him that he would never amount to anything, that his questions destroyed classroom discipline, that he would be better off out of school. So he left and wandered, delighting in the freedom of Northern Italy, where he could ruminate on matters remote from the subjects he had been force-fed in his highly disciplined Prussian schoolroom. His name was Albert Einstein, and his ruminations changed the world. Einstein had been fascinated by Bernstein’s People’s Book of Natural Science, a popularization of science that described on its very first page the astonishing speed of electricity through wires and light through space. He wondered what the world would look like if you could travel on a wave of light.

Because time slows down close to the speed of light, special relativity provides us with a means of going to the stars. But is it possible, in terms of practical engineering, to travel close to the speed of light? Is a starship feasible? Tuscany was not only the caldron of some of the thinking of the young Albert Einstein; it was also the home of another great genius who lived 400 years earlier, Leonardo da Vinci, who delighted in climbing the Tuscan hills and viewing the ground from a great height, as if he were soaring like a bird. He drew the first aerial perspectives of landscapes, towns and fortifications.


pages: 559 words: 164,795

Berlin: Life and Death in the City at the Center of the World by Sinclair McKay

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, dark matter, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, German hyperinflation, haute couture, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Mikhail Gorbachev, plutocrats, Prenzlauer Berg, uranium enrichment

If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy. List of Illustrations 1. The winter of 1918–19. 2. Rosa Luxemburg. 3. The restored Neue Synagogue. 4. The 1920s Karstadt department store. 5. Weimar Berlin of the late 1920s. 6. Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner. 7. The electrical laboratories of Manfred von Ardenne. 8. Albert Einstein. 9. A scene from Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen (1924). 10. A scene from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926). 11. Albert Speer’s scale models for a future Berlin. 12. Paul Wegener in The Golem (1920). 13. Hannah Arendt. 14. Crown Prince Wilhelm and the Grand Duchess Cecilie. 15. Vladimir Nabokov and his wife Vera. 16.

It was fantastical, bloodthirsty stuff, packed with hazard and death – quicksands, crocodiles, hordes of hungry rats – and these novels held an all-encompassing grip on the German male imagination, even though their author had died in 1912 and had never set foot in America. Among Karl May’s long-term fans were Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann and the artist George Grosz.9 Crucially, another devotee was Adolf Hitler, who had read the books feverishly throughout his Austrian boyhood and returned to them frequently as an adult. Albert Speer, one of Hitler’s inner circle, once observed that the Führer, when discussing military strategy, mentioned ‘Napoleon and Old Shatterhand in the same sentence’.10 Yet, for the boys of Berlin, these stories, combined with their exciting war games, were simply a portal into another dimension, offering ‘magic nights in the open, under a purple moon and amazing stars that have a so much wilder lustre than in European skies’.11 Many of them came from Depression-hit homes: unemployed fathers, the abrasive anxieties and anger of poverty.

Among them was Joseph Goebbels, who, hostile to Einstein’s Jewish heritage, subscribed instead to the ludicrous notion of a specific ‘Aryan Physics’, and who later – by the desperate bunker days of April 1945 – came to believe that the movements of the stars might really hold the mystic secrets of the future, which could be unlocked by horoscopes. By that stage Albert Einstein was a long-time American citizen, and his former home district in Berlin had itself been so intensively targeted by bombers that it too had become an inversion of all that it had been. But, years before all that, his theory of relativity had, for a time, placed Berlin at the centre of the scientific world.


pages: 338 words: 106,936

The Physics of Wall Street: A Brief History of Predicting the Unpredictable by James Owen Weatherall

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Carmen Reinhart, Claude Shannon: information theory, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, currency risk, dark matter, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Modelers Manifesto, fixed income, George Akerlof, Gerolamo Cardano, Henri Poincaré, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jim Simons, John Nash: game theory, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, martingale, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Myron Scholes, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, power law, prediction markets, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stochastic process, Stuart Kauffman, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, tulip mania, Vilfredo Pareto, volatility smile

This seemingly random motion, according to the Roman poet Titus Lucretius (writing in about 60 B.C.), shows that there must be tiny, invisible particles — he called them “primordial bits” — buffeting the specks of dust from all directions and pushing them first in one direction and then another. Two thousand years later, Albert Einstein made a similar argument in favor of the existence of atoms. Only he did Lucretius one better: he developed a mathematical framework that allowed him to precisely describe the trajectories a particle would take if its twitches and jitters were really caused by collisions with still-smaller particles.

The other university in the city, the University of Zürich, was the largest in Switzerland. But it was no Göttingen. Weyl wasn’t ETH’s only recent hire, however. As part of the restructuring, the school had made a number of appointments to the physics department. One of these was a prominent young physicist, an undergraduate alumnus of ETH named Albert Einstein. Einstein had gone on to do a PhD in physics at the University of Zürich, graduating in 1905 — the same year that he published a mathematical treatment of Brownian motion (anticipated, of course, by Bachelier), came up with a theory of the photoelectric effect (for which he would win the Nobel Prize in 1921), and discovered the special theory of relativity, including his famous equation e = mc2.

A few months earlier, Smolin had published an article in the magazine Physics Today, a semi-popular publication whose goal was to explain new developments in physics to physicists who weren’t necessarily experts in the given area. Smolin’s article was an attempt to explain why quantum gravity had not produced a researcher like Albert Einstein, who successfully revolutionized physics by thinking far out of the box. The article was a preview of a book Smolin was just finishing, called The Trouble with Physics. In both the article and the book, Smolin argued that physics, or rather, quantum gravity research, faced a sociological problem.


pages: 266 words: 87,411

The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better in a World Addicted to Speed by Carl Honore

Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 13, Atul Gawande, Broken windows theory, call centre, carbon credits, Checklist Manifesto, clean water, clockwatching, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, Dava Sobel, delayed gratification, drone strike, Enrique Peñalosa, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Exxon Valdez, fail fast, fundamental attribution error, game design, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, index card, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, lateral thinking, lone genius, medical malpractice, microcredit, Netflix Prize, no-fly zone, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, retail therapy, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, ultimatum game, urban renewal, War on Poverty

PLAY: Solving Problems One Game at a Time 14. EVOLVE: Are We There Yet? CONCLUSION: Slow Fixing the Future Notes Resource List Acknowledgements To Miranda, Benjamin and Susannah You cannot solve a problem from the same consciousness that created it. You must learn to see the world anew. Albert Einstein INTRODUCTION Pulling the Andon Rope How poor are they who have not patience! What wound did ever heal but by degrees? William Shakespeare In a small, windowless room, in a busy clinic in south London, a familiar ritual is about to begin. Let’s call it Man with Back Pain Visits Specialist.

“To identify what is really going wrong, you first have to get a full picture of a company in slow motion, you have to do like Toyota and ask why, why and why, you have to slow down long enough to analyze and understand.” That is a neat summary of the next ingredient of the Slow Fix: taking the time to think hard about the problem to arrive at the right diagnosis. When asked what he would do if given one hour to save the world, Albert Einstein answered: “I would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem and only five minutes finding the solution.” Most of us do the exact opposite. Think of your last visit to the GP. Chances are the appointment lasted no more than a few minutes and you struggled to say everything you wanted to. One study found that doctors let patients explain their complaint for 23 seconds before interrupting.

In science, too, a playful testing of the boundaries is often the first step towards the lightning bolts of genius that win Nobel prizes. Sir Isaac Newton once wrote that “to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” Albert Einstein put it more pithily: “To stimulate creativity, one must develop the child-like inclination for play.” Steve Jobs’s personal motto was: “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.” This makes neurological sense. The dopamine released during games not only makes us feel good, it also helps us concentrate and learn and fires up parts of the brain that govern creative thinking and problem-solving.


pages: 266 words: 86,324

The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, correlation coefficient, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Donald Trump, feminist movement, forensic accounting, Gary Kildall, Gerolamo Cardano, Henri Poincaré, index fund, Isaac Newton, law of one price, Monty Hall problem, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Pepto Bismol, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, V2 rocket, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

Ford, “Brownian Movement in Clarkia Pollen: A Reprise of the First Observations,” Microscope 40, no. 4 (1992): 235–41; and Stephen Brush, “A History of Random Processes. I. Brownian Movement from Brown to Perrin,” Archive for History of Exact Sciences 5, no. 34 (1968). 34. Pais, Albert Einstein, pp. 88–100. 35. Albert Einstein, quoted in Ronald William Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times (New York: HarperCollins, 1984), p. 77. Chapter 9: Illusions of Patterns and Patterns of Illusion 1. See Arthur Conan Doyle, The History of Spiritualism (New York: G. H. Doran, 1926); and R. L. Moore, In Search of White Crows: Spiritualism, Parapsychology, and American Culture (London: Oxford University Press, 1977). 2.

After all, if the chests of 5,738 Scottish soldiers distribute themselves nicely along the curve of the normal distribution and the average yearly mileage of 200 million drivers can vary by as little as 100 miles from year to year, it doesn’t take an Einstein to guess that the 10 septillion or so molecules in a liter of gas might exhibit some interesting regularities. But actually it did take an Einstein to finally convince the scientific world of the need for that new approach to physics. Albert Einstein did it in 1905, the same year in which he published his first work on relativity. And though hardly known in popular culture, Einstein’s 1905 paper on statistical physics proved equally revolutionary. In the scientific literature, in fact, it would become his most cited work.32 EINSTEIN’S 1905 WORK on statistical physics was aimed at explaining a phenomenon called Brownian motion.

Francis Galton, quoted in Theodore Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking, p. 130. 30. Peter Doskoch, “The Winning Edge,” Psychology Today, November/ December 2005, pp. 44–52. 31. Deborah J. Bennett, Randomness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 123. 32. Abraham Pais, The Science and Life of Albert Einstein (London: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 17; see also the discussion on p. 89. 33. On Brown and the history of Brownian motion, see D. J. Mabberley, Jupiter Botanicus: Robert Brown of the British Museum (Braunschweig, Germany, and London: Verlag von J. Cramer / Natural History Museum, 1985); Brian J.


The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi, the World's Most Astonishing Number by Mario Livio

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, Benoit Mandelbrot, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, classic study, cosmological constant, Elliott wave, Eratosthenes, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, mandelbrot fractal, music of the spheres, Nash equilibrium, power law, Ralph Nelson Elliott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method

Who could have guessed that this innocent-looking line division, which Euclid defined for some purely geometrical purposes, would have consequences in topics ranging from leaf arrangements in botany to the structure of galaxies containing billions of stars, and from mathematics to the arts? The Golden Ratio therefore provides us with a wonderful example of that feeling of utter amazement that the famous physicist Albert Einstein (1879–1955) valued so much. In Einstein's own words: “The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and science. He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle.”

My aim is to help you glean some insights into the true roots of what we might call Golden Numberism. To this goal, we will now take a brief exploratory tour through the very dawn of mathematics. As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality. —ALBERT EINSTEIN (1879–1955) I see a certain order in the universe and math is one way of making it visible. —MAY SARTON (1912–1995) No one knows for sure when humans started to count, that is, to measure multitude in a quantitative way. In fact, we do not even know with certainty whether numbers like “one,” “two,” “three” (the cardinal numbers) preceded numbers like “first,” “second,” “third” (the ordinal numbers), or vice versa.

.): “The so-called Pythagoreans applied themselves to mathematics, and were the first to develop this science; and through penetrating it, they came to fancy that its principles are the principles of all things.” Today, while we may be amused by some of the Pythagorean fanciful ideas, we have to recognize that the fundamental thought behind them is really not very different from that expressed by Albert Einstein (in Letters to Solovine): “Mathematics is only a means for expressing the laws that govern phenomena.” Indeed, the laws of physics, sometimes referred to as the “laws of nature,” simply represent mathematical formulations of the behavior that we observe all natural phenomena to obey. For example, the central idea in Einstein's theory of general relativity is that gravity is not some mysterious, attractive force that acts across space but rather a manifestation of the geometry of the inextricably linked space and time.


pages: 393 words: 115,217

Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries by Safi Bahcall

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Astronomia nova, behavioural economics, Boeing 747, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, creative destruction, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dunbar number, Edmond Halley, Gary Taubes, Higgs boson, hypertext link, industrial research laboratory, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, Johannes Kepler, Jony Ive, knowledge economy, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mother of all demos, Murray Gell-Mann, PageRank, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, prediction markets, pre–internet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, six sigma, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, tulip mania, Wall-E, wikimedia commons, yield management

In the mid-1930s, guests visiting Loomis’s castle might be guided into a comfortable chair as an assistant materialized with small scissors, snipped some hair, swabbed alcohol onto their scalp, affixed electrodes, and encouraged them to relax. They had just become subjects of his research. (Loomis was an early pioneer of electroencephalography—EEG.) From Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, and other European scientists who visited his lab, Loomis learned disturbing news of advanced German science applied to weapons of war as well as hints of a terrifying German discovery in nuclear physics. Like Bush and Conant, Loomis had worked with the US military during the First World War.

In 1964, Konrad Bloch and Feodor Lynen received the Nobel Prize for explaining how cholesterol is created and processed inside cells. And in 1966, a 33-year-old farmer’s son, raised in a small mountain town in northern Japan, arrived in the United States determined to learn more about this new science. Akira Endo, a scientist from the food-processing division at the Japanese conglomerate Sankyo, joined a lab at New York’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine that specialized in cholesterol research. Endo arrived in the US just as the idea that diet could affect heart disease was taking off. A Time cover story described results from a new study by “the man most firmly at grips with the problem” of diet and health, Ancel Keys, a scientist at the University of Minnesota.

Einstein saw in Kepler a “kindred spirit” who overcame religious persecution, poverty, personal tragedies, disbelieving audiences, and a heritage of mystical thinking. “Kepler’s lifework was possible,” Einstein wrote, “only once he succeeded in freeing himself to a great extent of the intellectual traditions into which he was born.” Kindred spirits: Albert Einstein and Johannes Kepler Unlike Kepler, Einstein benefited from a large and well-established scientific community. As mentioned earlier, the eclipse of 1919 confirmed Einstein’s theory of gravity four years after he published it. Confirmation of Kepler’s ideas proceeded much more gradually. In the decades after Kepler published his “War on Mars,” astronomers and astrologers and navigators slowly realized Kepler’s system worked far better than any earth-centric theory.


pages: 185 words: 55,639

The Search for Superstrings, Symmetry, and the Theory of Everything by John Gribbin

Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, complexity theory, dark matter, Dmitri Mendeleev, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Murray Gell-Mann, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Stephen Hawking

.… In these mind-bending realms, Gribbin's seasoned skills wonderfully simplify matters (and forces) without ‘dumbifying’ them.” —Gilbert Taylor, Booklist BY THE SAME AUTHOR In Search of the Edge of Time Hothouse Earth Being Human In Search of the Big Bang In Search of Schrödinger's Cat The Hole in the Sky Stephen Hawking: A Life in Science (WITH MICHAEL WHITE) Albert Einstein: A Life in Science The Matter Myth (WITH PAUL DAVIES) In the Beginning Schrödinger's Kittens and the Search for Reality Companion to the Cosmos The Case of the Missing Neutrinos Almost Everyone's Guide to Science Thanks to Benjamin Gribbin for editorial assistance Copyright Copyright © 1998 by John and Mary Gribbin Illustrations copyright © 1998 by John Gribbin All rights reserved.

It turned out that the behaviour of light could sometimes only be explained in terms of particles (photons) while the wave explanation, or model, remained the only valid one in other circumstances. A little later, physicists realized that, as if waves that sometimes behave as particles were not enough to worry about, particles could sometimes behave like waves. And meanwhile Albert Einstein was overturning established wisdom about the nature of space, time and gravity with his theories of relativity. When the dust began to settle at the end of the 1920s, physicists had a new picture of the world which was very different from the old one. This is still the basis of the picture we have today.

The odds may be very heavily stacked in favour of one particular outcome, or they may be no better than tossing a coin on a 50:50 basis. But they are clearly and precisely laid down by the laws of quantum physics, and there is no such thing as certainty in the quantum world. This is the point about quantum theory which made Albert Einstein reject the whole thing, with his famous remark about God, ‘that He would choose to play dice with the world… is something that I cannot believe for a single moment’ (often paraphrased as ‘I cannot believe that God does play dice’). But all the evidence is that God does play dice. Every experiment confirms the accuracy of the quantum interpretation.


pages: 626 words: 181,434

I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas R. Hofstadter

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Benoit Mandelbrot, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Georg Cantor, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, John Conway, John von Neumann, language acquisition, mandelbrot fractal, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, place-making, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, publish or perish, random walk, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, telepresence, Turing machine

I also refused to buy leather shoes or belts. Soon I became a fervent proselytizer for my new credo, and I remember how gratified I was that I managed to sway a couple of my friends for a few months, although to my disappointment, they gradually gave up on it. In those days, I often wondered how some of my personal idols — Albert Einstein, for instance — could have been meat-eaters. I found no explanation, although recently, to my great pleasure, a Web search yielded hints that Einstein’s sympathies were, in fact, toward vegetarianism, and not for health reasons but out of compassion towards living beings. But I didn’t know that fact back then, and in any case many other heroes of mine were certainly carnivores who knew exactly what they were doing.

In fact, if colloidal particles are added to a glass of water, then it becomes a locus of Brownian motion, which is an incessant random jiggling of the colloidal particles, due to a myriad of imperceptible collisions with the water molecules, which are far tinier. (The colloidal particles here play the role of simmballs, and the water molecules play the role of simms.) The effect, which is visible under a microscope, was explained in great detail in 1905 by Albert Einstein using the theory of molecules, which at the time were only hypothetical entities, but Einstein’s explanation was so far-reaching (and, most crucially, consistent with experimental data) that it became one of the most important confirmations that molecules do exist. Who Shoves Whom Around inside the Careenium?

The idea I want to convey by the phrase “a symbol in the brain” is that some specific structure inside your cranium (or your careenium, depending on what species you belong to) gets activated whenever you think of, say, the Eiffel Tower. That brain structure, whatever it might be, is what I would call your “Eiffel Tower symbol”. You also have an “Albert Einstein” symbol, an “Antarctica” symbol, and a “penguin” symbol, the latter being some kind of structure inside your brain that gets triggered when you perceive one or more penguins, or even when you are just thinking about penguins without perceiving any. There are also, in your brain, symbols for action concepts like “kick”, “kiss”, and “kill”, for relational concepts like “before”, “behind”, and “between”, and so on.


pages: 864 words: 222,565

Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller by Alec Nevala-Lee

Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, American energy revolution, Apple II, basic income, Biosphere 2, blockchain, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Columbine, complexity theory, Computer Lib, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, declining real wages, digital nomad, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Frank Gehry, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Golden Gate Park, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, hydraulic fracturing, index card, information retrieval, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kitchen Debate, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megastructure, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Own Your Own Home, Paul Graham, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, reality distortion field, remote working, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, Thomas Malthus, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently.” One of the seventeen icons was Buckminster Fuller, who had been featured at the request of Jobs himself. Fuller had crossed paths with many of the other personalities in the commercial, including Albert Einstein, Amelia Earhart, Martha Graham, and Frank Lloyd Wright, and he appeared after John Lennon and Yoko Ono and before Thomas Edison—a suitable place for a man who had been revered by both the counterculture and the establishment. The “Think Different” campaign was meant to sell computers, but it also spoke to an authentic vision personified by Fuller, who thought differently—for better or worse—than just about anyone else.

As the tavern’s resident visionary, Fuller was wary of the guru, but he also praised his “beautiful expressions,” remembering how Gurdjieff offered individual toasts to the thirty-three kinds of idiots, causing everyone to become intoxicated, before asking his followers to “go to work writing his life history.” Frank Lloyd Wright’s third wife, Olgivanna, was among his admirers, which led Fuller to remark afterward that the architect “let Gurdjieff take over.” Fuller was more impressed by an article in the New York Times Magazine by Albert Einstein, whose work he saw as confirming his own conclusions. In the essay, which appeared on November 9, 1930, Einstein affirmed that religions were driven by fear or longing, while “the cosmic religious sense” gave heretics—including scientists—the courage to endure failure. Fuller embraced it as a description of himself, and he came to believe that the piece marked the dawn of a new era in history.

And there was the age difference; nine years was sort of a protection.” This understated Fuller’s weakness for younger women, as well as Noguchi’s sense of betrayal. They reconciled in an unusual fashion. With the help of Diego Rivera, Noguchi was granted permission in Mexico City to paint a sculptural frieze, which would incorporate Albert Einstein’s equation for the equivalence of mass and energy. He cabled a request to Fuller: “Please wire me rush Einstein’s formula and explanation thereof.” Fuller replied in December with a massive telegram: Einstein’s formula determination individual specifics relativity reads quote energy equals mass times the speed of light squared unquote speed of light identical speed all radiation cosmic gamma x ultra violet infra-red rays etcetera one hundred eighty six thousand miles per second which squared is top or perfect speed giving science a finite value for basic factor in motion universe.


pages: 198 words: 57,703

The World According to Physics by Jim Al-Khalili

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, butterfly effect, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, double helix, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, germ theory of disease, gravity well, heat death of the universe, Higgs boson, information security, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Murray Gell-Mann, post-truth, power law, publish or perish, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Stephen Hawking, supercomputer in your pocket, the scientific method, time dilation

COSMOLOGY AND RELATIVITY Sean Carroll, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself (New York: Dutton, 2016; London: OneWorld, 2017). Albert Einstein, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory, 100th Anniversary Edition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015). Brian Greene, The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos (London; Allen Lane; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011). Michio Kaku, Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the 10th Dimension (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). Abraham Pais, ‘Subtle is the Lord …’: The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1982).

CHAPTER 3 SPACE AND TIME In such a short book I am unable to cover all areas of physics, fascinating though so many of them are. Instead, I have distilled our current understanding of the physical universe down to three central pillars: three pictures of reality that come from very different directions. The first of these, introduced in this chapter and the next, is built on the work of Albert Einstein in the early twentieth century. It lays out our present understanding of the way matter and energy behave within space and time on the very largest scales due to the influence of gravity—an understanding that is encompassed in his famous general theory of relativity. In order to paint Einstein’s picture of the world, we must start with the canvas itself.


pages: 211 words: 57,618

Quantum Computing for Everyone by Chris Bernhardt

Albert Einstein, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, discrete time, John von Neumann, low earth orbit, P = NP, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, selection bias, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture

This is the simplest way of combining mathematical models of individual qubits to give one model that describes a collection of qubits. Though the mathematics is straightforward, entanglement is not something that we experience in everyday life. When one of a pair of entangled qubits is measured, it affects the second qubit. This is what Albert Einstein, who disliked it, called “spooky action at a distance.” We look at several examples. The chapter concludes by showing that we can’t use entanglement to communicate faster than the speed of light. Chapter 5. We look at Einstein’s concerns with entanglement and whether a hidden variable theory can preserve local realism.

There is no way from the data that you can tell whether or not I was following the rules or I was cheating. There is no way you can tell whether I am asking my questions before or after you asked yours. There is no causation here, just correlation. As we saw earlier, we cannot use these entangled clocks to send messages between us. But the process is still mysterious. Albert Einstein described entanglement as implying spooky action at a distance. Nowadays many people would say that there is no action, just correlation. Of course, we can quibble about the definition of “action,” but even if we agree that there is no action, there seems to be something spooky going on. Suppose that you and I have a pair of the entangled quantum clocks, and we are talking on the phone to one another.

If they both use the same orthonormal basis, no matter which one, they will still get exactly the same results. 5 Bell’s Inequality We have seen a mathematical model of a small portion of quantum mechanics that concerns the spin of particles or the polarization of photons, and that gives us the mathematics describing qubits. This is the standard model, often called the Copenhagen interpretation after the city where Niels Bohr was living and working. Some of the great physicists of the early twentieth century, including Albert Einstein and Irwin Schrödinger, didn’t like this model, with its interpretation of states jumping with given probabilities to basis states. They objected to both the use of probability and to the concept of action at a distance. They thought that there should be a better model using “hidden variables” and “local realism.”


pages: 316 words: 90,165

You Are Here: From the Compass to GPS, the History and Future of How We Find Ourselves by Hiawatha Bray

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Albert Einstein, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Boeing 747, British Empire, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, crowdsourcing, Dava Sobel, digital map, don't be evil, Easter island, Edmond Halley, Edward Snowden, Firefox, game design, Google Earth, GPS: selective availability, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John Perry Barlow, John Snow's cholera map, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, license plate recognition, lone genius, openstreetmap, polynesian navigation, popular electronics, RAND corporation, RFID, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Thales of Miletus, trade route, turn-by-turn navigation, uranium enrichment, urban planning, Zipcar

The suits dragged well beyond the start of World War I, with predictable results. Sperry was victorious in Britain, but beaten in Germany. If local nationalism wasn’t enough of an edge for Anschütz, he also benefited from the testimony of his expert witness, a veteran Swiss patent inspector named Albert Einstein.10 Ultimately, it did not matter. With the British wartime blockade, Sperry couldn’t sell in Germany. The British and Americans were eager to buy, and after the war the victorious Allies seized all German patents, ensuring that the judgment against Sperry was never enforced. Sperry also pioneered the use of the same technology in airplanes.

One of the world’s leading theoretical physicists insisted that the very laws of nature made inertial navigation impossible. George Gamow, a Ukrainian scientist who had fled life under Joseph Stalin and emigrated to the United States, would play a major role in developing the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe and a minor role in the history of navigation. Gamow asserted that Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity ensured that an inertial navigator would never work. One of the curious consequences of Einstein’s theory was the equivalence of acceleration and gravity. The force of acceleration that pushes you back against your car seat when you step on the gas is indistinguishable from the force of gravity that presses your body downward, toward the center of the earth.

Three years later Navigation Technology Satellite II, the last of the TIMATION family, flew into orbit with a pair of cesium atomic clocks, the most accurate timepieces flown so far. NTS II was arguably the first true GPS satellite, though it was far from capable of real-world use. Instead, its precise radio signals provided the essential data needed to build an operational system. Among the most crucial observations was confirmation of one of Albert Einstein’s odder predictions. Einstein’s theories of general and special relativity held that although time might seem relentless and inexorable to humans, it is actually quite variable. For instance, time passes more slowly for someone on a moving train than it does for a person sitting on a park bench, watching the train roll by.


pages: 356 words: 95,647

Sun in a Bottle: The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking by Charles Seife

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Brownian motion, correlation does not imply causation, Dmitri Mendeleev, Dr. Strangelove, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gary Taubes, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, John von Neumann, Mikhail Gorbachev, Norman Macrae, Project Plowshare, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, the scientific method, Yom Kippur War

—THE ODYSSEY, TRANSLATED BY SAMUEL BUTLER The dream is as ancient as humanity: unlimited power. It has driven generation after generation of scientists to the brink of insanity. In 1905, after centuries of attempts to build perpetual motion machines, scientists discovered an essentially limitless source of energy. With his famous equation, E = mc2, Albert Einstein discovered that a minuscule chunk of mass could, theoretically, be converted into an enormous amount of energy. Indeed, E = mc 2 is the equation that describes why the sun shines; at its core, the sun is constantly converting matter to energy in a reaction known as fusion. If scientists could do the same thing on Earth—if they could convert matter into energy with a controlled fusion reaction—scientists could satisfy humanity’s energy needs until the end of time.

Indeed, the radium would always be hotter than its surroundings, even though there were no external sources of heat. Marie Curie herself was baffled. She suspected that some sort of change was happening at the center of the radium atom, but she didn’t know what it could be—or how such a tiny chunk of matter could produce so much energy. The answer would come a few years later when the young Albert Einstein formulated his theory of relativity. The theory revolutionized the way scientists perceive space, time, and motion. One of the equations that came out of the theory was E = mc2, the most famous scientific equation of all time. E = mc2 showed that matter, m, could be converted into energy, E. This was the secret to the seemingly endless fountain of energy coming from radium.

Theorists like Ludwig Boltzmann realized that you could explain the properties of gases simply by imagining matter as a collection of atoms madly bouncing around. Observers even saw the random motion of atoms indirectly: the jostling of water molecules makes a tiny pollen grain swim erratically about. (Albert Einstein helped explain this phenomenon—Brownian motion—in 1905.) Though a few stubborn holdouts absolutely refused to believe in atomic theory,14 by the beginning of the twentieth century the scientific community was convinced. Matter was made of invisible atoms of various kinds: hydrogen atoms, oxygen atoms, carbon atoms, iron atoms, gold atoms, uranium atoms, and a few dozen others.


pages: 326 words: 88,968

The Science and Technology of Growing Young: An Insider's Guide to the Breakthroughs That Will Dramatically Extend Our Lifespan . . . And What You Can Do Right Now by Sergey Young

23andMe, 3D printing, Albert Einstein, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, brain emulation, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, deep learning, digital twin, diversified portfolio, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Easter island, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, European colonialism, game design, Gavin Belson, George Floyd, global pandemic, hockey-stick growth, impulse control, Internet of things, late capitalism, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, moral hazard, mouse model, natural language processing, personalized medicine, plant based meat, precision agriculture, radical life extension, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, TED Talk, uber lyft, ultra-processed food, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Vision Fund, X Prize

Nir Barzilai—a dear friend, one of the leading lights of longevity research, and author of the brilliant book Age Later: Health Span, Life Span, and the New Science of Longevity. Nir is at the forefront of work with the diabetes drug metformin, which we will learn more about in chapter nine. But he is also head of the Longevity Genes Project at the Albert Einstein School of Medicine in New York City. The project has studied over five hundred people between the ages of 95 and 112, plus some seven hundred of their children, to identify longevity genes that can be targeted to increase health and lifespan. “How much of longevity is really genetic?” I asked Barzilai.

With the help of quantum computing and AGI, it could become so accurate that the emulated you would be indistinguishable from the original you. Using advanced scanning technology, microscopes, and mathematics, Anders believes this is entirely possible. These whole-brain emulations could be deployed anywhere—even in multiple places simultaneously. Want to understand quantum physics? Summon up Richard Feynman or Albert Einstein for a chat. Need a visionary business genius to help your company through its next transformation? Download Steve Jobs or Tony Robbins. Throwing a big bash for your 150th birthday party? The members of Aerosmith are at your service, indistinguishable in looks and performance from the originals!

., “High-molecular-mass hyaluronan mediates the cancer resistance of the naked mole rat,” Nature 499, no. 7458 (2013), https://doi.org/10.1038/nature12234. 10Xiao Tian et al., “SIRT6 Is Responsible for More Efficient DNA Double-Strand Break Repair in Long-Lived Species,” Cell 177, no. 3 (2019), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2019.03.043. 11Nir Barzilai et al., “Longenity,” Albert Einstein College of Medicine, accessed April 3, 2020, https://einsteinmed.org/centers/aging/research/longenity-longevity-genes-projects/longenity.aspx. 12Kristen Fortney et al., “Genome-Wide Scan Informed by Age-Related Disease Identifies Loci for Exceptional Human Longevity,” PLOS Genetics 11, no. 12 (2015), https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgen.1005728. 13Leonardo Pasalic and Emmanuel J.


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Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age by Brad Smith, Carol Ann Browne

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, air gap, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boeing 737 MAX, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Celtic Tiger, Charlie Hebdo massacre, chief data officer, cloud computing, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, data science, deep learning, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Hacker News, immigration reform, income inequality, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, national security letter, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, precision agriculture, race to the bottom, ransomware, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, school vouchers, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, Wargames Reagan, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

But the United States balked at providing the leadership needed for what it perceived were mostly European issues, and Hitler pulled Germany out of the negotiations and then the League of Nations itself, sounding the death knell for the effort toward global peace. Before the diplomatic conference convened in 1932, Albert Einstein, the greatest scientist of his age, proffered a warning that fell on deaf ears. Technology advances, he cautioned, “could have made human life carefree and happy if the development of the organizing power of man had been able to keep step with his technical advances.”35 Instead, “the hardly bought achievements of the machine age in the hands of our generation are as dangerous as a razor in the hands of a three-year-old child.”

There is simply no way the United States would be the global leader in information technology if it had not attracted many of the best and brightest people in the world to come work at leading universities or live in technology centers around the country. Immigration’s role in innovation was important to the United States when the country’s West Coast economy was still dominated by agriculture, and silicon was associated only with sand. The country’s ability to attract Albert Einstein from Germany at the height of the Great Depression played a vital role in awakening President Franklin Roosevelt to the need to create the Manhattan Project.2 Its open door to German rocket scientists after World War II was critical to sending the first man to the moon. With the help of federal investments in basic research at the country’s great universities and President Eisenhower’s support of math and sciences in the nation’s public schools,3 the United States developed an approach to research, education, and immigration that led to decades of global economic and intellectual leadership.

The question is how to promote a thoughtful, respectful, and inclusive global conversation. It was a topic we discussed in a meeting with Pope Francis and Monsignor Paglia. We talked about the development of technology against the backdrop of nations increasingly turning inward, sometimes turning their backs on their neighbors and others in need. I mentioned Albert Einstein’s dire warnings about the dangers of technology in the 1930s. The Pope then reminded me of what Einstein had said after the Second World War: “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”32 Einstein’s point was that technology, specifically nuclear technology, had progressed to the point where it could annihilate everything else.


pages: 476 words: 121,460

The Man From the Future: The Visionary Life of John Von Neumann by Ananyo Bhattacharya

Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Alvin Roth, Andrew Wiles, Benoit Mandelbrot, business cycle, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clockwork universe, cloud computing, Conway's Game of Life, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, DeepMind, deferred acceptance, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Georg Cantor, Greta Thunberg, Gödel, Escher, Bach, haute cuisine, Herman Kahn, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jean Tirole, John Conway, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, linear programming, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, P = NP, Paul Samuelson, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, second-price auction, side project, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Steven Levy, Strategic Defense Initiative, technological singularity, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture, zero-sum game

Though he never shed a Hungarian accent that made him sound like horror-film legend Bela Lugosi, von Neumann felt that János – his real name – sounded altogether too foreign in his new home. Beneath the bonhomie and the sharp suit was a mind of unimaginable brilliance. At the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he was based from 1933 to his death in 1957, von Neumann enjoyed annoying distinguished neighbours such as Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel by playing German marching tunes at top volume on his office gramophone. Einstein revolutionized our understanding of time, space and gravity. Gödel, while no celebrity, was equally revolutionary in the field of formal logic. But those who knew all three concluded that von Neumann had by far the sharpest intellect.

Game theoretical analysis was so ubiquitous, he adds, that ‘the histories of many key geopolitical events of the Cold War era … would be rewritten through this lens, to the point that post hoc analysis and history could become difficult to distinguish’.72 Among the first of RAND’s analysts to study the question of nuclear deterrence was Albert Wohlstetter, whose reputation for hard-nosed, fact-based analysis helped make him one of the most influential ‘defense intellectuals’ of the twentieth century. From the first, Wohlstetter was an unlikely hawk. He was a logician, who as a teenager wrote an article for the journal Philosophy of Science that prompted Albert Einstein to invite him to tea. The physicist, who proclaimed Wohlstetter’s article to be ‘the most lucid extrapolation of mathematical logic he had ever read’, wanted to hash out the finer points of the piece with the seventeen-year-old. At Columbia University, Wohlstetter joined a communist splinter group, the League for a Revolutionary Workers Party.

., 1987, John von Neumann as Seen by His Brother, P.O. Box 3097 Meadowbrook, Pa. Whitman, Marina von Neumann, 2012, The Martian’s Daughter, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor. Wolfram, Steven, 2002, A New Kind of Science, Wolfram Media, Champagne, Ill. Notes INTRODUCTION: WHO WAS JOHN VON NEUMANN? 1. Albert Einstein, 1922, Sidelights on Relativity, E. P. Dutton and Company, New York. 2. Freeman Dyson, 2018, personal communication. CHAPTER 1: MADE IN BUDAPEST 1. Renamed Bajcsy-Zsilinsky Street in 1945 after a resistance hero. 2. John Lukacs, 1998, Budapest 1900: A Historical Portrait of a City and Its Culture, Grove Press, New York. 3.


pages: 797 words: 227,399

Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century by P. W. Singer

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Atahualpa, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, cuban missile crisis, digital divide, digital map, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Frank Gehry, friendly fire, Future Shock, game design, George Gilder, Google Earth, Grace Hopper, Hans Moravec, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, junk bonds, Law of Accelerating Returns, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, Neal Stephenson, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, no-fly zone, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, private military company, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wisdom of Crowds, Timothy McVeigh, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, world market for maybe five computers, Yogi Berra

For example, the difference between a computer and a robot is the former’s lack of effectors to change the world around it. Interestingly, a machine’s sophistication has nothing to do with whether it is a robot. Just like biologic life might range in intelligence from bacteria and Paris Hilton to Homo sapiens and Albert Einstein, man’s artificial creations too show wide levels of complexity. Despite the seeming simplicity of this definition, it is still subject to some debate. For example, some scientists say that in order to be a robot, the machine has to be mobile. Yet this forgets that movement is just one way to change the world around you (as the world now has you in a different location).

He went on to become an advocate for nuclear disarmament, for which the dissident won the Nobel Peace Prize and was put in prison. Ultimately, nuclear scientists from around the world banded together to form an organization to work against the weapons they had once developed. Spurred on by a letter from Albert Einstein (who, ironically, had also sent the letter that initially convinced President Roosevelt to fund the atomic bomb’s research), it had its first meeting in Pugwash, Nova Scotia, in 1957. While what became known as the “Pugwash movement for nuclear disarmament” ultimately won a Nobel Peace Prize, the nuclear refuseniks’ efforts were more than a decade too late.

Many feel this makes America a unique sort of great power. Technology was not just America’s pathway to power, but has entered into American cultural consciousness like no other great power in history. Only in American history did inventors, scientists, and technologic entrepreneurs like Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, and Bill Gates become cultural icons, while the whole system of industrialized technology found its origin in the United States. The result, argue such optimists as George and Meredith Friedman in The Future of War: Power, Technology and American World Dominance in the Twenty-first Century, is that “America is by its nature a technological nation.”


pages: 186 words: 64,267

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Apple Newton, Arthur Eddington, bet made by Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne, Brownian motion, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Magellanic Cloud, Murray Gell-Mann, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking

v3.1 CONTENTS Cover Other Books by This Author Title Page Copyright FOREWORD Chapter One Our Picture of the Universe Chapter Two Space and Time Chapter Three The Expanding Universe Chapter Four The Uncertainty Principle Chapter Five Elementary Particles and the Forces of Nature Chapter Six Black Holes Chapter Seven Black Holes Ain’t So Black Chapter Eight The Origin and Fate of the Universe Chapter Nine The Arrow of Time Chapter Ten Wormholes and Time Travel Chapter Eleven The Unification of Physics Chapter Twelve Conclusion ALBERT EINSTEIN GALILEO GALILEI ISAAC NEWTON GLOSSARY ACKNOWLEDGMENTS About the Author FOREWORD I didn’t write a foreword to the original edition of A Brief History of Time. That was done by Carl Sagan. Instead, I wrote a short piece titled “Acknowledgments” in which I was advised to thank everyone.

Between 1887 and 1905 there were several attempts, most notably by the Dutch physicist Hendrik Lorentz, to explain the result of the Michelson-Morley experiment in terms of objects contracting and clocks slowing down when they moved through the ether. However, in a famous paper in 1905, a hitherto unknown clerk in the Swiss patent office, Albert Einstein, pointed out that the whole idea of an ether was unnecessary, providing one was willing to abandon the idea of absolute time. A similar point was made a few weeks later by a leading French mathematician, Henri Poincaré. Einstein’s arguments were closer to physics than those of Poincaré, who regarded this problem as mathematical.

Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason—for then we would know the mind of God. ALBERT EINSTEIN Einstein’s connection with the politics of the nuclear bomb is well known: he signed the famous letter to President Franklin Roosevelt that persuaded the United States to take the idea seriously, and he engaged in postwar efforts to prevent nuclear war. But these were not just the isolated actions of a scientist dragged into the world of politics.


pages: 217 words: 63,287

The Participation Revolution: How to Ride the Waves of Change in a Terrifyingly Turbulent World by Neil Gibb

Abraham Maslow, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Albert Einstein, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, gentrification, gig economy, iterative process, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kodak vs Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, mirror neurons, Network effects, new economy, performance metric, ride hailing / ride sharing, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, trade route, urban renewal, WeWork

Psychology had emerged as an academic discipline in the second half of the 19th century, part of an explosion of scientific and intellectual growth as the disruptive phase of the Industrial Revolution gave way to social transformation. But Maslow was the first psychologist to focus on what made human beings successful. Prior to this, the discipline had been preoccupied with dysfunction and how to treat it. Maslow interviewed a hundred highly successful people, including Albert Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt, and started to build a model of what he found they had in common (he was not considering merely material success, but people he saw as having a profound sense of satisfaction, achievement and fulfilment). What he realised was that we have a stack of needs as human beings, starting at the bottom with the most basic physiological needs (food, water, shelter, sex), and rising to what he called ‘self-actualisation’ – what could be called our spiritual needs.

Morning Star is organised around one clear defining purpose: “to produce tomato products and services which consistently achieve the quality and service expectations of our customers…” Now clear as this is, it’s fair to say that sexy it is not. No disrespect to Morning Star, but this is not the kind of inspirational line that people will be posting on Facebook alongside quotes from Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, and Gandhi. And it doesn’t have the noble calling that a cause like Alcoholics Anonymous has. They are just tomatoes, for God’s sake! But for Morning Star colleagues, this is a heroic endeavour – one they participate in with an incredible amount of passion, intensity, and commitment.

“But values and core values – those things should not change. “The things that Apple believed in at the beginning are the same things that Apple stands for today.” And with that he started to show imagery and quotes from leaders and people who had been at the source of profound change: Albert Einstein, Miles Davis, the civil rights activist Cesar Chavez. There was not one product or mention of technology. It was all about the big why. What he didn’t talk about – not once – was the one thing that had brought him into the company: revenue. Apple had just shed a third of its workforce. It had sold the factory that Jobs had put a lot of effort into creating and used to talk about with great affection.


pages: 202 words: 62,199

Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown

90 percent rule, Albert Einstein, Clayton Christensen, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Sedaris, deliberate practice, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, impact investing, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, loss aversion, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, microcredit, minimum viable product, Nelson Mandela, North Sea oil, Peter Thiel, power law, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Thaler, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Shai Danziger, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, sovereign wealth fund, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Vilfredo Pareto

It helps us to see possibilities we otherwise wouldn’t have seen and make connections we would otherwise not have made. It opens our minds and broadens our perspective. It helps us challenge old assumptions and makes us more receptive to untested ideas. It gives us permission to expand our own stream of consciousness and come up with new stories. Or as Albert Einstein once said: “When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.”6 Second, play is an antidote to stress, and this is key because stress, in addition to being an enemy of productivity, can actually shut down the creative, inquisitive, exploratory parts of our brain.

But his contribution extended well beyond India. As General George C. Marshall, the American secretary of state, said on the occasion of Gandhi’s passing: “Mahatma Gandhi had become the spokesman for the conscience of mankind, a man who made humility and simple truth more powerful than empires.”3 And Albert Einstein added: “Generations to come will scarce believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth.”4 It is impossible to argue with the statement that Gandhi lived a life that really mattered. Of course, we don’t have to try to replicate Gandhi to benefit from his example as someone who lived, fully and completely, as an Essentialist.

Louis Fischer (1962; repr., New York: Vintage, 1990), xx. 2. “Gandhiji’s Philosophy: Diet and Diet Programme,” n.d., Mahatma Gandhi Information Website, www.gandhi-manibhavan.org/gandhiphilosophy/philosophy_health_dietprogramme.htm. 3. library.thinkquest.org/26523/mainfiles/quotes.htm. 4. Albert Einstein, “Mahatma Gandhi,” in Out of My Later Years: Essays (New York: Philosophical Library, 1950). 5. Henry David Thoreau to H. G. O. Blake, March 27, 1848, in The Portable Thoreau, ed. Jeffrey S. Cramer (London: Penguin, 2012). 6. Proverbs 23:7. APPENDIX: LEADERSHIP ESSENTIALS 1. Guy Kawasaki, “From the Desk of Management Changes at Apple,” MacUser, December 1991, and then a follow-up piece, “How to Prevent a Bozo Explosion,” How to Change the World, February 26, 2006, http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/02/how_to_prevent_.html. 2.


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The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, bank run, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, citation needed, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, clockwork universe, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, discovery of DNA, Donald Knuth, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Henri Poincaré, Honoré de Balzac, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, Louis Daguerre, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, microbiome, Milgram experiment, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, PageRank, pattern recognition, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pre–internet, quantum cryptography, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, Simon Singh, Socratic dialogue, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, talking drums, the High Line, The Wisdom of Crowds, transcontinental railway, Turing machine, Turing test, women in the workforce, yottabyte

“Russell evidently misinterprets my result; however, he does so in a very interesting manner,” he wrote. “In contradistinction Wittgenstein … advances a completely trivial and uninteresting misinterpretation.”♦ In 1933 the newly formed Institute for Advanced Study, with John von Neumann and Albert Einstein among its first faculty members, invited Gödel to Princeton for the year. He crossed the Atlantic several more times that decade, as fascism rose and the brief glory of Vienna began to fade. Gödel, ignorant of politics and naïve about history, suffered depressive breakdowns and bouts of hypochondria that forced him into sanatoria.

.… The night was noisier than the day, and at the ghostly hour of midnight, for what strange reasons no one knows, the babel was at its height.♦ But engineers could now see the noise on their oscilloscopes, interfering with and degrading their clean waveforms, and naturally they wanted to measure it, even if there was something quixotic about measuring a nuisance so random and ghostly. There was a way, in fact, and Albert Einstein had shown what it was. In 1905, his finest year, Einstein published a paper on Brownian motion, the random, jittery motion of tiny particles suspended in a fluid. Antony van Leeuwenhoek had discovered it with his early microscope, and the phenomenon was named after Robert Brown, the Scottish botanist who studied it carefully in 1827: first pollen in water, then soot and powdered rock.

When life remained so mysterious, maybe Maxwell’s demon was not just a cartoon. Then the demon began to haunt Leó Szilárd, a very young Hungarian physicist with a productive imagination who would later conceive the electron microscope and, not incidentally, the nuclear chain reaction. One of his more famous teachers, Albert Einstein, advised him out of avuncular protectiveness to take a paying job with the patent office, but Szilárd ignored the advice. He was thinking in the 1920s about how thermodynamics should deal with incessant molecular fluctuations. By definition, fluctuations ran counter to averages, like fish swimming momentarily upstream, and people naturally wondered: what if you could harness them?


pages: 493 words: 139,845

Women Leaders at Work: Untold Tales of Women Achieving Their Ambitions by Elizabeth Ghaffari

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Bear Stearns, business cycle, business process, cloud computing, Columbine, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, dark matter, deal flow, do what you love, family office, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, follow your passion, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, high net worth, John Elkington, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, Oklahoma City bombing, performance metric, pink-collar, profit maximization, profit motive, recommendation engine, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, thinkpad, trickle-down economics, urban planning, women in the workforce, young professional

They showed an ability to understand complementary disciplines and what those other perspectives might add to their own development or career. They were intrigued by the different ways their profession might grow and benefit through contact with other similar or dissimilar professional interests. That describes Dr. Sandra Witelson—professor, Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurosciences, Inaugural Albert Einstein/Irving Zucker Chair in Neuroscience at the DeGroote School of Medicine, McMaster University (Hamilton, Ontario)—who developed “The Brain Bank” for comparative analysis of the brain's structure. It also describes Dr. Jennifer Tour Chayes, distinguished scientist, mathematician, co-founder, and managing director of Microsoft's NERD Center (New England Research & Development).

Witelson Professor, Department of Psychiatry, McMaster University Born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Dr. Sandra Freedman Witelson is a professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Neurosciences at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. She is the inaugural recipient of the Albert Einstein/Irving Zucker Chair in Neuroscience at the university's Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine. Her current research is focused on the relationship between brain structure and function using postmortem neuroanatomical study of the brains banked in her brain collection at McMaster University—currently an international public resource for neuroscience, neuroimaging, and molecular biology.

Witelson concentrated on expanding the brain bank at McMaster University, as well as her research in cognitive neuroanatomy to understand the relationship between the structure of the brain and the behavior of human beings. In 1995, Dr. Witelson's discovery of significant differences between men's and women's brains, specifically in the density of brain cells in the language region, was reported extensively in the media. She was then invited to study the brain of the late Dr. Albert Einstein, and with her associates, published the research findings in the June 1999 issue of Lancet, a prominent British medical journal. Dr. Witelson has been honored with numerous awards, including the Morton Prince Award of the American Psychopathological Association (1976); the John Dewan Prize, awarded by the Ontario Mental Health Foundation (1978), recognizing an outstanding researcher for contribution to significant new knowledge or concepts bearing upon mental health; and the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry Research Fund Award (1978), awarded for outstanding research in the field of mental health conducted in Canada.


pages: 532 words: 133,143

To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science by Steven Weinberg

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Astronomia nova, Brownian motion, Commentariolus, cosmological constant, dark matter, Dava Sobel, double helix, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, fudge factor, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, music of the spheres, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Pierre-Simon Laplace, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, retrograde motion, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

For instance, leading physicists at the turn of the twentieth century, including Hendrik Lorentz and Max Abraham, devoted themselves to understanding the structure of the recently discovered electron. It was hopeless; no one could have made progress in understanding the nature of the electron before the advent of quantum mechanics some two decades later. The development of the special theory of relativity by Albert Einstein was made possible by Einstein’s refusal to worry about what electrons are. Instead he worried about how observations of anything (including electrons) depend on the motion of the observer. Then Einstein himself in his later years addressed the problem of the unification of the forces of nature, and made no progress because no one at the time knew enough about these forces.

Instead of calculating the trajectories of a planet or a particle, one calculates the evolution of waves of probability, whose intensity at any position and time tells us the probability of finding the planet or particle then and there. The abandonment of determinism so appalled some of the founders of quantum mechanics, including Max Planck, Erwin Schrödinger, Louis de Broglie, and Albert Einstein, that they did no further work on quantum mechanical theories, except to point out the unacceptable consequences of these theories. Some of the criticisms of quantum mechanics by Schrödinger and Einstein were troubling, and continue to worry us today, but by the end of the 1920s quantum mechanics had already been so successful in accounting for the properties of atoms, molecules, and photons that it had to be taken seriously.

Small discrepancies between theory and observation remained, in the motion of the Moon and of Halley’s and Encke’s comets, and in a precession of the perihelia of the orbit of Mercury that was observed to be 43" (seconds of arc) per century greater than could be accounted for by gravitational forces produced by the other planets. The discrepancies in the motion of the Moon and comets were eventually traced to nongravitational forces, but the excess precession of Mercury was not explained until the advent in 1915 of the general theory of relativity of Albert Einstein. In Newton’s theory the gravitational force at a given point and a given time depends on the positions of all masses at the same time, so a sudden change of any of these positions (such as a flare on the surface of the Sun) produces an instantaneous change in gravitational forces everywhere.


pages: 377 words: 97,144

Singularity Rising: Surviving and Thriving in a Smarter, Richer, and More Dangerous World by James D. Miller

23andMe, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, artificial general intelligence, Asperger Syndrome, barriers to entry, brain emulation, cloud computing, cognitive bias, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, en.wikipedia.org, feminist movement, Flynn Effect, friendly AI, hive mind, impulse control, indoor plumbing, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, John Gilmore, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Netflix Prize, neurotypical, Nick Bostrom, Norman Macrae, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, placebo effect, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, supervolcano, tech billionaire, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Turing test, twin studies, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture

We share about 98 percent of our genes with some primates, but that 2 percent difference was enough to produce creatures that can assemble spaceships, sequence genes, and build hydrogen bombs.10 What happens when mankind takes its next step, and births life-forms who have a 2 percent genetic distance from us? But even if people such as Albert Einstein and his almost-as-theoretically-brilliant contemporary John von Neumann had close to the highest possible level of intelligence allowed by the laws of physics, creating a few million people or machines possessing these men’s brainpower would still change the world far more than the Industrial Revolution did.

The next chapter considers what could happen if we push evolution aside by using high-tech genetic manipulation to shape our children’s genes. Might we bring about a Singularity? The present state of the art in rationality training is not sufficient to turn an arbitrarily selected mortal into Albert Einstein, which shows the power of a few minor genetic quirks of brain design compared to all the self-help books ever written in the 20th century. —Eliezer Yudkowsky190 CHAPTER 9 INCREASING IQ THROUGH GENETIC MANIPULATION191 You’re in church, about to marry Pat, when your parents come up to you with a look of horror on their faces.

The stronger the correlation between bathroom and dining room quality, the better the dining room you will get if you succeed in getting a home with fantastic bathrooms. SELECTING AGAINST CERTAIN TYPES OF INTELLIGENCE Embryo selection against autism would likely reduce the number of geniuses. High-functioning autistics often excel at pattern recognition, a skill vital to success in science and mathematics. Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, and Socrates have all been linked to Asperger syndrome, a disorder (or at least a difference) on the autism spectrum.206 Parents with strong math backgrounds are far more likely to have autistic children, perhaps an indication that having lots of “math genes” makes one susceptible to autism.207 Magnetic resonance imaging has shown that on average, autistic two-year-olds have larger brains than their non-autistic peers do.208 A Korean study found the percentage of autistics who had a superior IQ was greater than that found in the general population.209 Some autistics have an ability called “hyperlexia,” characterized by having average or above-average IQs and word-reading ability well above what would be expected given their ages.


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Robots Will Steal Your Job, But That's OK: How to Survive the Economic Collapse and Be Happy by Pistono, Federico

3D printing, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, bioinformatics, Buckminster Fuller, cloud computing, computer vision, correlation does not imply causation, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, future of work, gamification, George Santayana, global village, Google Chrome, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, illegal immigration, income inequality, information retrieval, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jeff Hawkins, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, longitudinal study, means of production, Narrative Science, natural language processing, new economy, Occupy movement, patent troll, pattern recognition, peak oil, post scarcity, QR code, quantum entanglement, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, Rodney Brooks, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, slashdot, smart cities, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, strong AI, synthetic biology, technological singularity, TED Talk, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce

I asked many economists, and I am still waiting for such arguments to be brought up to me. The refusal to explain is probably because they feel like this is basic economic theory, things that I should have learned in academia, and there is no point in wasting time explaining it. But whenever I hear this kind of reasoning, I am reminded of what the great Albert Einstein said118: “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” With years of experience in spreading scientific education and debunking climate change deniers, creationists, and all sorts of nonsense, I can see how Einstein’s quote could not be truer. If mainstream economists see me as I see proponents of “intelligent design”, it should be pretty easy to refute what I say.

I travelled to twenty countries, spent thousands of dollars on seminars, dug deep into the abyss of happiness, so that you did not have to. So here is the moment you have all been waiting for, the very reason you bought this book. I am going to give you the definitive and final secret to happiness. A secret that has been kept for millennia, passed on from genius to genius, from Leonardo Da Vinci to Albert Einstein, now finally to be revealed. Ready? Here it is. If something is going wrong with your life, it is because you are sending out negative vibrations, which then come back to you amplified. So you should force yourself to think positively all the time. Change your thoughts, change your life, change the Universe.

Very few enlightened companies value people over profits. 116 Facebook faces EU curbs on selling users’ interests to advertisers, Jason Lewis, 2011. The Telegraph. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/8917836/Facebook-faces-EU-curbs-on-selling-users-interests-to-advertisers.html 117 Does Facebook sell my information?. Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=152637448140583 118 Albert Einstein quotes. ThinkExist. http://thinkexist.com/quotation/if_you_can-t_explain_it_simply-you_don-t/186838.html 119 Neuroplasticity refers to the susceptibility to physiological changes of the nervous system, due to changes in behaviour, environment, neural processes, or parts of the body other than the nervous system.


pages: 243 words: 66,908

Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Meadows. Donella, Diana Wright

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, clean water, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, game design, Garrett Hardin, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, peak oil, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Stanford prison experiment, systems thinking, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, Tragedy of the Commons, Whole Earth Review

My particular teachers (and students who have become my teachers) have been, in addition to Jay: Ed Roberts, Jack Pugh, Dennis Meadows, Hartmut Bossel, Barry Richmond, Peter Senge, John Sterman, and Peter Allen, but I have drawn here from the language, ideas, examples, quotes, books, and lore of a large intellectual community. I express my admiration and gratitude to all its members. I also have drawn from thinkers in a variety of disciplines, who, as far as I know, never used a computer to simulate a system, but who are natural systems thinkers. They include Gregory Bateson, Kenneth Boulding, Herman Daly, Albert Einstein, Garrett Hardin, Václav Havel, Lewis Mumford, Gunnar Myrdal, E.F. Schumacher, a number of modern corporate executives, and many anonymous sources of ancient wisdom, from Native Americans to the Sufis of the Middle East. Strange bedfellows, but systems thinking transcends disciplines and cultures and, when it is done right, it overarches history as well.

* Definitions of words in bold face can be found in the Glossary. — TWO— A Brief Visit to the Systems Zoo _____________ The . . . goal of all theory is to make the . . . basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of . . . experience. —Albert Einstein,1 physicist One good way to learn something new is through specific examples rather than abstractions and generalities, so here are several common, simple but important examples of systems that are useful to understand in their own right and that will illustrate many general principles of complex systems.

Forrester, Industrial Dynamics (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1961), 15. 4. Honoré Balzac, quoted in George P. Richardson, Feedback Thought in Social Science and Systems Theory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 54. 5. Jan Tinbergen, quoted in ibid, 44. Chapter Two 1. Albert Einstein, “On the Method of Theoretical Physics,” The Herbert Spencer Lecture, delivered at Oxford (10 June 1933); also published in Philosophy of Science 1, no. 2 (April 1934): 163–69. 2. The concept of a “systems zoo” was invented by Prof. Hartmut Bossel of the University of Kassel in Germany. His three recent “System Zoo” books contain system descriptions and simulation-model documentations of more than 100 “animals,” some of which are included in modified form here.


pages: 212 words: 65,900

Symmetry and the Monster by Ronan, Mark

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Bletchley Park, conceptual framework, Everything should be made as simple as possible, G4S, Henri Poincaré, John Conway, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, New Journalism, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Richard Feynman, V2 rocket

They too soon had to stop, and Lie died in February 1899. 1 The reason I have not listed C1, D1, D2, or D3 is that either they are not ‘simple’ or they are included in those already listed. For example, D3 is the same as A3. 6 Lie Groups and Physics How can it be that mathematics, being after all a product of human thought independent of experience, is so admirably adapted to the objects of reality? Albert Einstein While Lie was engaged on his research, the structure of classical physics still seemed fairly secure, but this did not last. When Lie died, shortly before the end of the nineteenth century, the edifice of classical physics was starting to crack. New observations at the microscopic scale, within atoms, and at the cosmic scale eventually led to the development of quantum theory and general relativity, and Lie’s work found a ready audience among some young physicists, as we shall see.

The Nazi government soon destroyed intellectual life, and when a Nazi minister visited Göttingen in the 1930s, and asked David Hilbert – a famous mathematician with a chair at the university there – how mathematics was doing now they had rid the place of the Jewish influence, Hilbert’s response was ‘There is no longer any mathematics in Göttingen.’ Indeed, it was the end of first-rate mathematics in Germany for a long time. The Institute for Advanced Study had just been founded in Princeton, and several of the best minds went there: Albert Einstein and Hermann Weyl, for example, had both spent time in Göttingen. Weyl was a great proponent of Lie’s groups and their use in physics. The centre of gravity in mathematics was shifting, but even before this shift occurred, an important new development in our story had occurred in America. 7 Going Finite The infinite we shall do right away.

We shall come back to this later. In the meantime, at the end of the 1970s, the existence of the Monster was still an open question. No one had yet constructed it, so let us turn to the problems involved. 16 Construction Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. Albert Einstein In early 1977, when Sims and Leon had constructed the Baby Monster on a computer, as a group of permutations, it was natural to ask whether the Monster could be constructed in a similar way. Unfortunately this seemed out of sight, as I mentioned earlier, so an alternative method was needed. Perhaps one could use multidimensional space.


pages: 416 words: 106,582

This Will Make You Smarter: 150 New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking by John Brockman

23andMe, adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, biofilm, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, butterfly effect, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, cognitive load, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data acquisition, David Brooks, delayed gratification, Emanuel Derman, epigenetics, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, Garrett Hardin, Higgs boson, hive mind, impulse control, information retrieval, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, market design, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, microbiome, Murray Gell-Mann, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, open economy, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, placebo effect, power law, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, randomized controlled trial, rent control, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Richard Thaler, Satyajit Das, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, security theater, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Stanford marshmallow experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, sugar pill, synthetic biology, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, Turing complete, Turing machine, twin studies, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

In many cases, a gedankenexperiment is the only approach. An actual experiment to examine retrieval of information falling into a black hole cannot be carried out. The notion was particularly important during the development of quantum mechanics, when legendary gedankenexperiments were conducted by the likes of Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein to test such novel ideas as the uncertainty principle and wave-particle duality. Examples, like that of “Schrödinger’s cat,” have even come into the popular lexicon. Is the cat simultaneously dead and alive? Others, particularly the classic double slit through which a particle/wave passes, were part of the first attempt to understand quantum mechanics and have remained as tools for understanding its meaning.

In one study, a group of participants was asked to play a simple five-finger exercise on the piano while another group of participants was asked to think about playing the same tune in their heads using the same finger movements, one note at a time. Both groups showed a change in their motor cortex, with differences among the group who mentally rehearsed the tune as great as those who did so physically. Losing retention? Decide how far you want to apply Albert Einstein’s law of memory. When asked why he went to the phone book to get his number, he replied that he memorized only those things he couldn’t look up. There’s a lot to remember these days. Between the dawn of civilization and 2003, there were five exabytes of data collected (an exabyte equals 1 quintillion bytes).

Astronomers grappled with this paradox for several centuries, devising unworkable schemes for its resolution. Despite at least one correct view (by Edgar Allan Poe!), the implications never really permeated even the small community of people thinking about the fundamental structure of the universe. And so it was that Albert Einstein, when he went to apply his new theory to the universe, sought an eternal and static model that could never make sense, introduced a term into his equations which he later called his greatest blunder, and failed to invent the Big Bang theory of cosmology. Nature appears to contradict itself with the utmost rarity, and so a paradox can be an opportunity for us to lay bare our cherished assumptions and discover which of them we must let go.


pages: 634 words: 185,116

From eternity to here: the quest for the ultimate theory of time by Sean M. Carroll

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Columbine, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, dark matter, dematerialisation, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Lao Tzu, Laplace demon, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, low earth orbit, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, pets.com, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Schrödinger's Cat, Slavoj Žižek, Stephen Hawking, stochastic process, synthetic biology, the scientific method, time dilation, wikimedia commons

Getting there from here requires a deeper understanding of curved spacetime and relativity, to which we now turn. PART TWO TIME IN EINSTEIN’S UNIVERSE 4 TIME IS PERSONAL Time travels in divers paces with divers persons. —William Shakespeare, As You Like It When most people hear “scientist,” they think “Einstein.” Albert Einstein is an iconic figure; not many theoretical physicists attain a level of celebrity in which their likeness appears regularly on T-shirts. But it’s an intimidating, distant celebrity. Unlike, say, Tiger Woods, the precise achievements Einstein is actually famous for remain somewhat mysterious to many people who would easily recognize his name.53 His image as the rumpled, absentminded professor, with unruly hair and baggy sweaters, contributes to the impression of someone who embodied the life of the mind, disdainful of the mundane realities around him.

For one thing, the rumpled look with the Don King hair attained in his later years bore little resemblance to the sharply dressed, well-groomed young man with the penetrating stare who was responsible for overturning physics more than once in the early decades of the twentieth century.54 For another, the origins of the theory of relativity go beyond armchair speculations about the nature of space and time; they can be traced to resolutely practical concerns of getting persons and cargo to the right place at the right time. Figure 10: Albert Einstein in 1912. His “miraculous year” was 1905, while his work on general relativity came to fruition in 1915. Special relativity, which explains how the speed of light can have the same value for all observers, was put together by a number of researchers over the early years of the twentieth century.

This was problematic, as the Temperance movement was strong in America at the time, and Berkeley in particular was completely dry; a recurring theme in Boltzmann’s account is his attempts to smuggle wine into various forbidden places.193 We will probably never know what mixture of failing health, depression, and scientific controversy contributed to his ultimate act. On the question of the existence of atoms and their utility in understanding the properties of macroscopic objects, any lingering doubts that Boltzmann was right were rapidly dissipating when he died. One of Albert Einstein’s papers in his “miraculous year” of 1905 was an explanation of Brownian motion (the seemingly random motion of small particles suspended in air) in terms of collisions with individual atoms; most remaining skepticism on the part of physicists was soon swept away. Questions about the nature of entropy and the Second Law remain with us, of course.


pages: 612 words: 181,985

Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists to America by Annie Jacobsen

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apollo 11, death from overwork, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, experimental subject, military-industrial complex, operation paperclip, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, éminence grise

Robertson spoke German fluently and was respected by Germany’s academic elite not just for his scientific accomplishments but because he had studied, in 1925, in Göttingen and Munich. Before the war, Dr. Robertson counted many leading German scientists as his friends. World War II changed his perspective, notably regarding any German scientist who stayed and worked for Hitler. While at Princeton, Dr. Robertson had become friendly with Albert Einstein. The two men worked on theoretical projects together and spent time discussing Hitler, National Socialism, and the war. Einstein, born in Germany, had worked there until 1933, becoming director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics and professor at the University of Berlin. But when Hitler came to power, Einstein immediately renounced his citizenship in defiance of the Nazi Party and immigrated to the United States.

“As long as we reward former servants of Hitler, while leaving his victims in D. P. [displaced-persons] camps, we cannot even pretend that we are making any real effort to achieve the aims we fought for.” Eleanor Roosevelt became personally involved in protesting Operation Paperclip, organizing a conference at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel with Albert Einstein as honored guest. The former First Lady urged the United States government to suspend visas for all Germans for twelve years. When professors at Syracuse University learned that a new colleague, Dr. Heinz Fischer, an expert in infrared technology and a former member of the Nazi Party, had been sent by the army to work in one of their university laboratories under a secret military contract, they wrote an editorial for the New York Times.

“Certainly not wishing to jeopardize the legitimate needs of the national defense, and not advocating the policy of hatred and vengeance toward our former enemies, we nevertheless believe that a large-scale importation of German scientists… is not in keeping with the best objectives of American domestic and foreign policy,” the members of FAS wrote. One American scientist was more forthright. “Certainly any person who can transfer loyalties from one idealology [sic] to another upon the shifting of a meal ticket is not better than Judas!” he said. Albert Einstein was the most esteemed figure to publicly denounce Operation Paperclip. In an impassioned letter, written on behalf of his FAS colleagues, Einstein appealed directly to President Truman. “We hold these individuals to be potentially dangerous.… Their former eminence as Nazi Party members and supporters raises the issue of their fitness to become American citizens and hold key positions in American industrial, scientific and educational institutions.”


pages: 513 words: 152,381

The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity by Toby Ord

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, availability heuristic, biodiversity loss, Columbian Exchange, computer vision, cosmological constant, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, defense in depth, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Drosophila, effective altruism, Elon Musk, Ernest Rutherford, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Large Hadron Collider, launch on warning, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, OpenAI, p-value, Peter Singer: altruism, planetary scale, power law, public intellectual, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, seminal paper, social discount rate, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supervolcano, survivorship bias, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, uranium enrichment, William MacAskill

. —(2002). “1955 address to the world’s press assembled in London: The Russell-Einstein Manifesto,” in K. Coates, J. Rotblat, and N. Chomsky (eds.), The Russell-Einstein Manifesto: Fifty Years On (Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, Manifesto 50). Spokesman Books. —(2009). Autobiography. Taylor and Francis. —(2012). “Letter to Einstein, 11 February 1955,” in K. Coates, J. Rotblat, and N. Chomsky (eds.), The Russell-Einstein Manifesto: Fifty Years On (Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, Manifesto 50) (pp. 29–30). Spokesman Books. Russell, S. (2014). Of Myths And Moonshine. https://www.edge.org/conversation/the-myth-of-ai#26015. —(2015).

Just three days after the devastation of Hiroshima, Bertrand Russell began writing his first essay on the implications for the future of humanity.65 And not long after, many of the scientists who created these weapons formed the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to lead the conversation about how to prevent global destruction.66 Albert Einstein soon became a leading voice and his final public act was to sign a Manifesto with Russell arguing against nuclear war on the explicit grounds that it could spell the end for humanity.67 Cold War leaders, such as Eisenhower, Kennedy and Brezhnev, became aware of the possibility of extinction and some of its implications.68 The early 1980s saw a new wave of thought, with Jonathan Schell, Carl Sagan and Derek Parfit making great progress in understanding what is at stake—all three realizing that the loss of uncounted future generations may overshadow the immediate consequences.69 The discovery that atomic weapons may trigger a nuclear winter influenced both Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev to reduce their country’s arms and avoid war.70 And the public reacted too.

Beckstead suggests that longtermists in past centuries would have done better to focus on broad interventions rather than narrow interventions. I think Beckstead may be right about past centuries, but mostly because existential risk was so low until we became powerful enough to threaten ourselves in the twentieth century. From that point, early longtermists such as Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein were right to devote so much attention to the targeted intervention of reducing the threat of nuclear war. EARLY ACTION Some of the biggest risks we face are still on the horizon. Can we really do useful work to eliminate a threat so far in advance? How can we act now, when we are not fully aware of the form the risks may take, the nature of the technologies, or the shape of the strategic landscape at the moment they strike?


pages: 285 words: 78,180

Life at the Speed of Light: From the Double Helix to the Dawn of Digital Life by J. Craig Venter

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 11, Asilomar, Barry Marshall: ulcers, bioinformatics, borderless world, Brownian motion, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, discovery of DNA, double helix, dual-use technology, epigenetics, experimental subject, global pandemic, Gregor Mendel, Helicobacter pylori, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, John von Neumann, Louis Pasteur, Mars Rover, Mikhail Gorbachev, phenotype, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, stem cell, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Turing machine

At first he thought that he had glimpsed “the secret of life,” but after observing the same kind of motion in mineral grains he discarded that belief. The first key step in our current understanding of what Brown had witnessed came more than seventy-five years after his discoveries, when Albert Einstein [1879–1955] demonstrated how the tiny particles were being shoved about by the invisible molecules that made up the water around them. Until Einstein’s 1905 paper, a minority of physicists (notably Ernst Mach [1838–1916]) still doubted the physical reality of atoms and molecules. Einstein’s notion was eventually confirmed with careful experiments conducted in Paris by Jean Baptiste Perrin (1870–1942), who was rewarded for this and other work with the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1926.

This would be the ultimate proof by synthesis. 8 Synthesis of the M. mycoides Genome If we want to solve a problem that we have never solved before, we must leave the door to the unknown ajar. —Richard Feynman, 19881 Many believe that the most important innovations of human creativity are the result of some kind of visionary gift, a gift associated with such extraordinary and singular geniuses as Isaac Newton, Michelangelo, Marie Curie, and Albert Einstein. I don’t doubt the incredible impact of individuals who can make great intellectual leaps, who can see further than anyone before them, and who discern patterns where others see only noise. However, there is also a less dramatic kind of creativity that drives science, a humble variety that is no less important: problem-solving.2 Vaulting a single hurdle to achieve one very particular goal can sometimes result in a technology that can prove to have an extraordinary range of other uses.

While these presentations of teleportation are purely fictional, the concept of “quantum teleportation” is very much a reality and was introduced to a wider audience by Michael Crichton in his 1999 novel Timeline, which was later turned into a movie. The origins of quantum teleportation date back much earlier and rest, in part, on an intellectual disagreement between two of Schrödinger’s most impressive peers in the development of the theory of the atomic world (quantum theory): Albert Einstein, who disliked the theory’s strange take on reality, and Niels Bohr (1885–1962), the Danish father of atomic physics. In 1935, in the course of this dispute, Einstein highlighted one perplexing feature of quantum theory with the help of a thought experiment that he devised with his colleagues Boris Podolsky (1896–1966) and Nathan Rosen (1909–1995).


pages: 272 words: 76,089

Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium by Carl Sagan

addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, classic study, clean water, cosmic abundance, dark matter, demographic transition, Exxon Valdez, F. W. de Klerk, germ theory of disease, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, pattern recognition, planetary scale, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, stem cell, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, zero-sum game

That evening, in his small room in the Strand Palace Hotel, he calculated that only a few pounds of matter, if it could be made to undergo a controlled neutron chain reaction, might liberate enough energy to run a small city for a year ... or, if the energy were released suddenly, enough to destroy that city utterly. Szilard eventually emigrated to the United States, and began a systematic search through all the chemical elements to see if any produced more neutrons than collided with them. Uranium seemed a promising candidate. Szilard convinced Albert Einstein to write his famous letter to President Roosevelt urging the United States to build an atomic bomb. Szilard played a major role in the first uranium chain reaction in Chicago in 1942, which in fact led to the atomic bomb. He spent the rest of his life warning about the dangers' of the weapon he had been the first to conceive.

While I do not think that, if there is a god, his plan for me will be altered by prayer, I'm more grateful than I can say to those— including so many whom I've never met—who have pulled for me during my illness. 266 • Billions and Billions Many of them have asked me how it is possible to face death without the certainty of an afterlife. I can only say it hasn't been a problem. With reservations about "feeble souls," I share the view of a hero of mine, Albert Einstein: I cannot conceive of a god who rewards and punishes his creatures or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves. Neither can I nor would I want to conceive of an individual that survives his physical death; let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egotism, cherish such thoughts. I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and a glimpse of the marvelous structure of the existing world, together with the devoted striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the Reason that manifests itself in nature.

Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors: A Search for Who We Are (New York: Random House, 1992). Chapter 17, Gettysburg and Now Lawrence J. Korb, "Military Metamorphosis," Issues in Science and Technology, Winter 1995/6, pp. 75-77. Chapter 19, In the Valley of the Shadow Albert Einstein, The World as I See It (New York: Covici Friede Publishers, 1934).


pages: 330 words: 77,729

Big Three in Economics: Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes by Mark Skousen

Albert Einstein, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, delayed gratification, experimental economics, financial independence, Financial Instability Hypothesis, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, liberation theology, liquidity trap, low interest rates, means of production, Meghnad Desai, microcredit, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, open economy, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, pushing on a string, rent control, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school choice, secular stagnation, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, Tragedy of the Commons, unorthodox policies, Vilfredo Pareto, zero-sum game

After the war, Sweezy came up for tenure at Harvard, but despite vigorous backing by Schumpeter, was rejected, never to have a permanent academic position again. In 1949, he co-founded Monthly Review, "an independent socialist magazine," whose first issue made a major splash by publishing "Why Socialism?" by Albert Einstein. (Einstein's essay is remarkably Marxist in tone.) Sweezy has been associated with Monthly Review ever since, in addition to collaborating with Paul Baran on writing Monopoly£apital (1966). Yet throughout his career, Sweezy was known for taking "far-fetched and unreal" positions (his words), such as his arch defense of Fidel Castro's Cuba (a nation currently ranked by the UN as the world's worst human rights violator) and his constant anticipation of capitalism's imminent collapse (1942,363).

Some Keynesians, such as Charles Hession and John Kenneth Galbraith, emphatically insist that the correct title is The General Theory of Employment Interest and Money, without the comma. True, no commas were used on the cover of the original, but in the preface, Keynes added a comma after "employment." Keynes identified with the great scientists of the past. Adam Smith and Roger Babson compared their analytical systems to those of Sir Isaac Newton, and Keynes emulated Albert Einstein. Keynes's book title refers to Einstein's general theory of relativity. His book, he said, created a "general" theory of economic behavior while he relegated the classical model to a "special" case and treated classical economists as "Euclidean geometers in a non-Euclidean world" (Skidelsky 1992, 487).

For his popular and scientific works, the academic community has awarded Samuelson virtually every honor it confers. He was the first American to win the Nobel Prize in economics, in 1970. He was awarded the first John Bates Clark Medal for the brightest economist under forty, and beyond economics, he received the Albert Einstein Medal in 1971. There's even an annual award named after him, the Paul A. Samuelson Award, given for published works in finance. His articles have appeared in all the major (and many minor) journals. He was elected president of the American Economic Association (AEA), has received innumerable honorary degrees from various universities, and has been the subject of many Festschrifts, gatherings at which scholars honor a fellow colleague with essays about his work.


pages: 258 words: 79,503

The Genius Within: Unlocking Your Brain's Potential by David Adam

Albert Einstein, business intelligence, cognitive bias, CRISPR, Flynn Effect, Gregor Mendel, job automation, John Conway, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, SimCity, Skype, Stephen Hawking, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray

To find ways to boost the workings of the brain, we need to be more sophisticated and look inside. Could the shape and structure of the brain perhaps offer an insight to the source of intelligence? If so, then it should show up in the brain of a man whose name has become shorthand for genius. The strange story of what happened to Albert Einstein’s brain after his death has been told many times. But it’s still worth recording here some highlights, if only to demonstrate the continuing allure the secrets of intelligence have for modern scientists; secrets that Albert has been reluctant to reveal. Einstein knew his brain would be targeted.

Or maybe the desire to attribute a lack of common sense to intelligent people is just another version of the scorn they receive from some quarters, which may itself be a reaction to the historical superiority claimed by those esteemed men of the Mutual Autopsy Society and their eugenic friends. It’s certainly an impression that some go out of their way to promote. Albert Einstein is often said to have had little common sense. The evidence? He didn’t like to wear socks and he sometimes got lost when walking around Princeton (where he lived well into his seventies) and had to ask for directions to his house. This was a man, it barely needs to be said, who was acutely aware of the impact of his own decision making, and in one case – urging US President Roosevelt to build an atomic bomb – was tortured by the consequences for years afterwards.

‘disclaim it’, Spitzka E. (1901), ‘Report of autopsy on assassin disclaimed’, JAMA 19, p. 1262. ‘father died’, Unknown (1914), ‘Dr Spitzka’s Brain Weighs 1,400 Grams’, New York Times , 15 January. ‘Robert the Bruce’, Deary I. et al. (2007), ‘Skull size and intelligence, and King Robert Bruce’s IQ’, Intelligence 35, pp. 519–525. ‘Albert Einstein’s Brain’, for example, Hines T. (2014), ‘Neuromythology of Einstein’s brain’, Brain and Cognition 88, pp. 21–25. ‘P-FIT,’ Jung R. and Haler R. (2007), ‘The Parieto-Frontal Integration Theory (P-FIT) of intelligence: converging neuroimaging evidence’, Behavioural and Brain Sciences 30, pp. 135–187.


pages: 377 words: 115,122

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain

8-hour work day, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, call centre, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, emotional labour, game design, hive mind, index card, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, new economy, popular electronics, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, telemarketer, The Wisdom of Crowds, traveling salesman, twin studies, Walter Mischel, web application, white flight

* Answer key: exercise: extroverts; commit adultery: extroverts; function well without sleep: introverts; learn from our mistakes: introverts; place big bets: extroverts; delay gratification: introverts; be a good leader: in some cases introverts, in other cases extroverts, depending on the type of leadership called for; ask “what if”: introverts. * Sir Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, W. B. Yeats, Frédéric Chopin, Marcel Proust, J. M. Barrie, George Orwell, Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss), Charles Schulz, Steven Spielberg, Larry Page, J. K. Rowling. * This is an informal quiz, not a scientifically validated personality test. The questions were formulated based on characteristics of introversion often accepted by contemporary researchers.

Just as Tony Robbins’s aggressive upselling is OK with his fans because spreading helpful ideas is part of being a good person, and just as HBS expects its students to be talkers because this is seen as a prerequisite of leadership, so have many evangelicals come to associate godliness with sociability. 3 WHEN COLLABORATION KILLS CREATIVITY The Rise of the New Groupthink and the Power of Working Alone I am a horse for a single harness, not cut out for tandem or teamwork … for well I know that in order to attain any definite goal, it is imperative that one person do the thinking and the commanding. —ALBERT EINSTEIN March 5, 1975. A cold and drizzly evening in Menlo Park, California. Thirty unprepossessing-looking engineers gather in the garage of an unemployed colleague named Gordon French. They call themselves the Homebrew Computer Club, and this is their first meeting. Their mission: to make computers accessible to regular people—no small task at a time when most computers are temperamental SUV-sized machines that only universities and corporations can afford.

—WILLIAM JAMES Meet Professor Brian Little, former Harvard University psychology lecturer and winner of the 3M Teaching Fellowship, sometimes referred to as the Nobel Prize of university teaching. Short, sturdy, bespectacled, and endearing, Professor Little has a booming baritone, a habit of breaking into song and twirling about onstage, and an old-school actor’s way of emphasizing consonants and elongating vowels. He’s been described as a cross between Robin Williams and Albert Einstein, and when he makes a joke that pleases his audience, which happens a lot, he looks even more delighted than they do. His classes at Harvard were always oversubscribed and often ended with standing ovations. In contrast, the man I’m about to describe seems a very different breed: he lives with his wife in a tucked-away house on more than two acres of remote Canadian woods, visited occasionally by his children and grandchildren, but otherwise keeping to himself.


pages: 427 words: 114,531

Legacy of Empire by Gardner Thompson

Albert Einstein, British Empire, colonial rule, European colonialism, facts on the ground, ghettoisation, illegal immigration, lateral thinking, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, means of production, Ronald Reagan, Suez crisis 1956, zero-sum game

Recalling his great-grandfather’s journey in the steamship Oxus to Palestine in 1897, Ari Shavit writes: ‘The worst catastrophe in the history of the Jewish people is about to occur… So, as the Oxus approaches the shores of the Holy Land, the need to give Palestine to the Jews feels almost palpable.’ Shavit continues: ‘The Zionism that emerges in 1897 is a stroke of genius… The Herzl Zionists see what is coming… In their own way they act in the 1890s in order to pre-empt the 1940s’.25 But this is self-serving anachronism; myth, not history. A glance at the life and thought of Albert Einstein is instructive here. He was born in Germany in 1879. Before the First World War, his experience of discrimination was limited. He rejected German citizenship not because of Germany’s anti-Semitism but because of his contempt for its authoritarianism and militarism. Though he was disturbed by rising anti-Semitism in the 1920s, his support of Zionism was limited and conditional.

The Admiralty promoted its large-scale manufacture. Weizmann’s process was a huge success; and Weizmann made the process available to the British for the duration of the war, without payment.43 Chaim Weizmann (1874–1952) Zionist leader and first President of Israel, photographed in New York, 1921, with Albert Einstein and two fellow Zionists, Nehemia Mossessohn (far left) and Menachem Ussishkin (far right). To this extent, chance and circumstances brought Weizmann to London. There, partly through his contribution to the British war effort, he earned the confidence of British leaders. Weizmann took full advantage of his connections and engaged in more than two years of lobbying.

David Ben-Gurion: 1886, born in Poland; 1906, visited Palestine, engaged in agricultural labour and activism; 1919, head of Labour Zionist movement; 1921–35, General Secretary of Histadrut (Zionist Labour Federation); 1936, head of Jewish Agency; 1937, accepted ‘partition’; 1948, first Prime Minister of Israel. 6. Notice once more the British colonial formula. For reasons covered elsewhere, no such legislative council came into being during the mandate years. Chapter Six 1. Albert Einstein, 1929, quoted in Walter Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe, London, New York, Pocket Books, 2007, p. 381. 2. Quoted in Wasserstein, The British in Palestine, p. 88. 3. Quoted in Wasserstein, The British in Palestine, pp. 78, 79. 4. Quoted in Segev, p. 192. 5. Stein, p. 213. Italics added. 6.


pages: 127 words: 51,083

The Oil Age Is Over: What to Expect as the World Runs Out of Cheap Oil, 2005-2050 by Matt Savinar

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, clean water, disinformation, Easter island, energy security, hydrogen economy, illegal immigration, invisible hand, military-industrial complex, new economy, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, post-oil, Ralph Nader, reserve currency, rolling blackouts, Rosa Parks, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Y2K

You didn't see the Marines flushing Uday and Qusay out of that house with anything non-lethal, did you? You think the Marines are going to bust into Osama's cave with non-lethal weapons? No way, they're saving that stuff for you. 83 Part VII: Peak Oil and Global War "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." -Albert Einstein "Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events."

My analysis is leaning me more by the month, the worry that peaking is at hand; not years away. If you think discussing Peak Oil and its likely ramifications are too "pessimistic" ask yourself: 1. Was Winston Churchill being a "pessimist" in 1940 when he told Britain, "I have nothing to offer you but blood, toil, tears, and sweat"? 2. Was Albert Einstein being a "pessimist" in 1939 when he told FDR that Nazi Germany was in the process of developing an atomic bomb? There is a difference between an "optimist" and a fool. An optimist is somebody who looks at bleak facts and decides to make the best of the situation they can. A fool is somebody who looks at bleak facts and decides to ignore them because they are too upsetting.


pages: 124 words: 40,697

The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking, Leonard Mlodinow

airport security, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Buckminster Fuller, conceptual framework, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, fudge factor, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, luminiferous ether, Mercator projection, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, Turing machine

That analysis will show how the laws of nature in our universe arose from the big bang. But before we examine how the laws arose, we’ll talk a little bit about what those laws are, and some of the mysteries that they provoke. The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible. —ALBERT EINSTEIN HE UNIVERSE IS COMPREHENSIBLE because it is governed by scientific laws; that is to say, its behavior can be modeled. But what are these laws or models? The first force to be described in mathematical language was gravity. Newton’s law of gravity, published in 1687, said that every object in the universe attracts every other object with a force proportional to its mass.

Dutch physicist Hendrik Antoon Lorentz and Irish physicist George Francis FitzGerald suggested that in a frame that was moving with respect to the ether, probably due to some yet-unknown mechanical effect, clocks would slow down and distances would shrink, so one would still measure light to have the same speed. Such efforts to save the aether concept continued for nearly twenty years until a remarkable paper by a young and unknown clerk in the patent office in Berne, Albert Einstein. Einstein was twenty-six in 1905 when he published his paper “Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper” (“On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”). In it he made the simple assumption that the laws of physics and in particular the speed of light should appear to be the same to all uniformly moving observers.


pages: 289 words: 87,292

The Strange Order of Things: The Biological Roots of Culture by Antonio Damasio

Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, biofilm, business process, CRISPR, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, double helix, Gordon Gekko, invention of the wheel, invention of writing, invisible hand, job automation, mental accounting, meta-analysis, microbiome, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, planetary scale, post-truth, profit motive, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, Thomas Malthus

.: Princeton University Press, 2011); Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Penguin Books, 2011). 7. See Haidt, Righteous Mind. 8. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents: The Standard Edition (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010). 9. Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, Why War? The Correspondence Between Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, trans. Fritz Moellenhoff and Anna Moellenhoff (Chicago: Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, 1933). 10. Janet L. Lauritsen, Karen Heimer, and James P. Lynch, “Trends in the Gender Gap in Violent Offending: New Evidence from the National Crime Victimization Survey,” Criminology 47, no. 2 (2009): 361–99; Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson, Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1996); Sell, Tooby, and Cosmides, “Formidability and the Logic of Human Anger.” 11.

In the last years of his life, Sigmund Freud saw the bestiality of Nazism as confirming his doubts that culture could ever tame the nefarious death wish that he believed was present within each of us. Freud had earlier begun to articulate his reasons in the collection of texts known as Civilization and Its Discontents (published in 1930 and revised in 1931),8 but nowhere are his arguments better expressed than in his correspondence with Albert Einstein. Einstein wrote to Freud in 1932 seeking his advice on how to prevent the deadly conflagration he saw coming, following fast on the heels of World War I. In his reply, Freud described the human condition with merciless clarity and lamented to Einstein that given the forces at play he had no good advice to offer, no help, no solution, I’m so sorry.9 The main reason for his pessimism, it should be noted, was the internally flawed condition of the human.


pages: 345 words: 86,394

Frequently Asked Questions in Quantitative Finance by Paul Wilmott

Abraham Wald, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, beat the dealer, Black-Scholes formula, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, delta neutral, discrete time, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, fixed income, fudge factor, implied volatility, incomplete markets, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, iterative process, lateral thinking, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, martingale, Myron Scholes, Norbert Wiener, Paul Samuelson, power law, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, risk free rate, risk/return, Sharpe ratio, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stochastic process, stochastic volatility, transaction costs, urban planning, value at risk, volatility arbitrage, volatility smile, Wiener process, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

He proposed a model for equity prices, a simple normal distribution, and built on it a model for pricing the almost unheard of options. His model contained many of the seeds for later work, but lay ‘dormant’ for many, many years. It is told that his thesis was not a great success and, naturally, Bachelier’s work was not appreciated in his lifetime. See Bachelier (1995). 1905 Einstein Albert Einstein proposed a scientific foundation for Brownian motion in 1905. He did some other clever stuff as well. See Stachel (1990). 1911 Richardson Most option models result in diffusion-type equations. And often these have to be solved numerically. The two main ways of doing this are Monte Carlo and finite differences (a sophisticated version of the binomial model).

Prentice-Hall Sloan, IH & Walsh, L 1990 A computer search of rank two lattice rules for multidimensional quadrature. Mathematics of Computation 54 281-302 Sobol’, IM 1967 On the distribution of points in cube and the approximate evaluation of integrals. USSR Comp. Maths and Math. Phys. 7 86-112 Stachel, J (ed.) 1990 The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein. Princeton University Press Thorp, EO 1962 Beat the Dealer. Vintage Thorp, EO & Kassouf, S 1967 Beat the Market. Random House Thorp, EO 2002 Wilmott magazine, various papers Traub, JF & Wozniakowski, H 1994 Breaking intractability. Scientific American Jan 102-107 Vasicek, OA 1977 An equilibrium characterization of the term structure.

Despite this, and the existence of financial theories that do incorporate such fat tails, BM motion is easily the most common model used to represent random walks in finance. References and Further Reading Bachelier, L 1995 Théorie de la Spéculation. Jacques Gabay Brown, R 1827 A Brief Account of Microscopical Observations. London Stachel, J (ed.) 1990 The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein. Princeton University Press Wiener, N 1923 Differential space. J. Math. and Phys. 58 131-74 What is Jensen’s Inequality and What is its Role in Finance? Short Answer Jensen’s Inequality states2 that if f (·) is a convex function and x is a random variable thenE [f (x)] ≥ f (E [x]).


pages: 398 words: 86,023

The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia by Andrew Lih

Albert Einstein, AltaVista, barriers to entry, Benjamin Mako Hill, Bill Atkinson, c2.com, Cass Sunstein, citation needed, commons-based peer production, crowdsourcing, Debian, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Ford Model T, Free Software Foundation, Hacker Ethic, HyperCard, index card, Jane Jacobs, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, jimmy wales, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, optical character recognition, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Stallman, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social software, Steve Jobs, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, wikimedia commons, Y2K, Yochai Benkler

Raul654 was well known in the community as the large, cheery, and bombastic computer science graduate student who never shied away from cleaning Trolls,_Vandals,_and_Sock_Puppets,_Oh_My_181 up messes around Wikipedia. He had taken on obnoxious users in the past and wanted a more systematic way to deal with them. In 2004, he was on the case of a prickly user named Plautus Satire, who had vandalized the articles on [[Albert Einstein]], [[Hubble Space Telescope]], and [[Black Hole]] with nonsensical claims. In the Einstein article, he insisted on pushing the idea that the scientist was a fraud: Einstein performed no experiments and claimed his ideas came to him in dreams. His poor grasp of mathemetics, as evidenced by his failure to pass admissions examinations to engineering schools, prevented him from doing mathematical analyses of the hypotheses he presented, and his method of pure deductive reasoning has been roundly dismissed as unscientific, unproductive and prone to deviate far and wide from reality.70 Raul654 was not amused.

TROLLS, VANDALS, AND SOCK PUPPETS, OH MY 65. http://curezone.com/forums/troll.asp. 66. http://nostalgia .wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Cunctator/How _to_destroy_ Wikipedia& oldid=49164. 67. From “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” p. 65. 68. http://www.firstmonday.org/Issues/issue8_12/ciffolilli/. 69. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.03/wiki.html. 234_Notes 70. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml ?title=Albert_Einstein& diff=2380047& oldid= 2380036 . 71. http://wikimania2006.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proceedings:MP1. Chapter 8. CRISIS OF COMMUNITY 72. http://wwwtcsdaily.com/article .aspx?id=111504A. 73. http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/000060.html. 74. http://www.news.com/In-search -of-the-Wikipedia-prankster—page-2/2008-1029_3 -5995977-2 .html ?

Index Adams, Clifford, 59, 62, 66–67, 73, Atlantic Monthly, 47, 171 140–41 “Atonality” article, 40 Adobe Systems, 52 Attribution ShareAlike, 212 advertising, 22, 31, 33 “Autaugaville” article, 102–3 Wikipedia and, 9, 11, 136–38, 215, 226 Afghanistan, 159 African languages, 157–58 Bambara language, 158 Alabama, 17–18 barn raising, 187–88 “Albert Einstein” article, 181 Beck, Kent, 47 Alexa, 183 “Beer goggles” article, 92 Alexander, Christopher, 46 Beesley, Angela, 184, 196 ALIWEB, 34 Bell, Andrew, 16 “All your base are belong to us” article, 118 Bengali language, 160 Alt, Gary, 204 Benkler, Yochai, 108, 111 Altavista, 22 Berners-Lee, Tim, 51–55, 59 Anthony, Seth (Sethilys), 106–11 Bomis, Inc., 21–23, 31–35, 41, 45, 66, “Anti-tank dog” article, 118 72, 79, 88–89, 136, 137, 171, 174, ants, 81–82, 83 183–84 Apache, 140 Bomis Browser, 22 “Apex” article, 106 “Boston molasses disaster” article, 118 Aphaia, 146–47 Brandt, Daniel, 192–94, 200, 210 Apple Computer, 27, 52, 222 Brief History of Hackerdom, A (Raymond), HyperCard, 47–51, 54–56 85 Arabic language, 144, 156, 157 Britannica, see Encyclopedia Britannica ArbCom (Arbitration Committee), 180–81, browsers, 51–55 184, 197, 223 Bryce, 139 ARPANET, 85–86 bulletin board systems, 83–84, 121, 170 Asian languages, 139–42, 144, 159–60 Bumm13, 109–11 Chinese, 141–44, 146, 150–55 Bush, Vannevar, 47 Japanese, 139, 140, 141–42, 144, “Bushism” article, 117 145–47 “Buttered cat paradox” article, 117 astroturfing, 121 “As We May Think” (Bush), 47 AtisWiki, 62 Calacanis, Jason, 215 Atkinson, Bill, 48, 51 CamelCase, 58, 62–64, 66–67, 73, 221 238_Index Cancelbots, 87, 88 wiki concept created by, 2, 4, 56–60, Canter & Siegel, 87 62, 65–66, 90 “Carmine DeSapio” article, 189 WikiWikiWeb created by, 44–45, 58–60 Catalan language, 152 Cunningham & Cunningham, 56 “Cathedral and the Bazaar, The” CvWiki, 62 (Raymond), 172–73, 175 Cyrillic script, 155–57 Cauz, Jorge, 209, 210 census data, 100–104, 106 Chase, Brian, 193 D’Alembert, Jean le Rond, 15 “Chewbacca Defense” article, 118 Danzig/Gdansk war, 122–30, 146 Chicago Options Associates, 20, 21, 22 Davis, Michael, 20, 184 “Chicken or the egg” article, 92 Death and Life of Great American Cities, China: The (Jacobs), 96–97 proverb from, 183 DejaNews, 86 Wikipedia in, 10, 141–44, 146, 150–55 Denker, Markus, 62 Yongle encyclopedia in, 15 DeSapio, Carmine, 189 Chris 73, 128–29 design patterns, 55, 59 Churchill, Winston, 81 Devouard, Florence, 3, 157, 184 CIA World Fact Book, The, 100 Diderot, Denis, 15, 115 Ciffolilli, Andrea, 175–76 Digg, 86 Citizendium, 190, 211–12 Digital Equipment Corporation, 27 CNN, 219 Digital Universe Foundation, 210–11 “Coase’s Penguin” (Benkler), 108 Digital World Africa 2006 Conference, 157 Cohen, Sacha Baron, 156 directory services, 22 Colbert, Stephen, 201–2 DMOZ, 23, 30, 223 Coleridge, Herbert, 70 Open Directory Project, 30–31, 33, 35 Collier’s Encyclopedia, 17 Discover, 126 Communications Decency Act, 191 discussion forums, 86 communities, 12, 81–83 Disney Corporation, 26–27 peer production in, 108–9 Distributed Proofreaders, 35 sidewalks and, 96–97 DMOZ, 23, 30, 223 Usenet, 83–88, 114, 170, 190, 223 “Dog” article, 90, 140, 212 Wikipedia, see Wikipedia community Dr.


pages: 261 words: 86,261

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman by Richard P. Feynman, Jeffrey Robbins

Albert Einstein, Brownian motion, impulse control, index card, John von Neumann, Murray Gell-Mann, pattern recognition, Pepto Bismol, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, scientific worldview, the scientific method

______ *John von Neumann (1903–1957), a Hungarian-American mathematician who is credited as being one of the fathers of the computer. Ed. *The jerky movements of particles caused by the constant random collisions of molecules, first noted in print in 1928 by botanist Robert Brown, and explained by Albert Einstein in a 1905 paper in Annalen der Physik. Ed. *Sci. Am. July 1985; Japanese Transl.–SAIENSU, Sept. 1985. Ed. 3 LOS ALAMOS FROM BELOW And now a little something on the lighter side—gems about wisecracker (not to mention safecracker) Feynman getting in and out of trouble at Los Alamos: getting his own private room by seeming to break the no-women-in-the-men’s-dormitory rule; outwitting the camp’s censors; rubbing shoulders with great men like Robert Oppenheimer, Niels Bohr, and Hans Bethe; and the awesome distinction of being the only man to stare straight at the first atomic blast without protective goggles, an experience that changed Feynman forever.

Then Wigner came to me and said that he thought the work was important enough that he’d made special invitations to the seminar to Professor Pauli, who was a great professor of physics visiting from Zurich; to Professor von Neumann, the world’s greatest mathematician; to Henry Norris Russell, the famous astronomer; and to Albert Einstein, who was living near there. I must have turned absolutely white or something because he said to me, “Now don’t get nervous about it, don’t be worried about it. First of all, if Professor Russell falls asleep, don’t feel bad, because he always falls asleep at lectures. When Professor Pauli nods as you go along, don’t feel good, because he always nods, he has palsy,” and so on.

I enjoyed that and I took his car and every night I went to Hollywood and the Sunset Strip and hung around there and had a good time, and that mixture of good weather and a wider horizon than is available in a small town in upper New York State is what finally convinced me to come here. It wasn’t very hard. It wasn’t a mistake. There was another decision that wasn’t a mistake. NARRATOR: On the California Institute of Technology faculty, Dr. Feynman serves as Richard Chace Tolman Professor of Theoretical Physics. In 1954 he received the Albert Einstein Award, and in 1962 the Atomic Energy Commission gave him the E. O. Laurence Award for “especially meritorious contributions to the development, use or control of atomic energy.” Finally, in 1965, he received the greatest scientific award of all, the Nobel Prize. He shared it with Sin-Itiro Tomonaga of Japan and Julian Schwinger of Harvard.


pages: 345 words: 84,847

The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World by David Eagleman, Anthony Brandt

active measures, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 13, Burning Man, cloud computing, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Dava Sobel, deep learning, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, Frank Gehry, Gene Kranz, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, microbiome, Netflix Prize, new economy, New Journalism, pets.com, pneumatic tube, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, Simon Singh, skeuomorphism, Solyndra, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the scientific method, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wikimedia commons, X Prize

Similarly, humans have the capacity to generate options at different distances from current standards. For instance, we know Albert Einstein as the scientist whose imaginative leaps remade our understanding of space and time. But he also occupied himself with more practical concerns, contributing novel designs for a refrigerator, a gyrocompass, a microphone, airplane parts, waterproof outerwear, and a new kind of camera. The man who contemplated what happens when you approach the speed of light also patented this blouse: Figure from Albert Einstein’s blouse patent Thomas Edison’s creative mind also flew different distances from the hive.

When the sheets are reheated, they shrink back to their original size, turning the child’s artwork into a miniature. Using a laser jet printer and a toaster, Khine’s team found that they could inscribe channels into the Shrinky Dink, heat the plastic, and shrink it into a functional microfluidic dish. At a cost of pennies per sheet, they had turned a toy into a blood test. When Albert Einstein was working on his Theory of General Relativity, he thought about what it would be like to be in an elevator. If the elevator were sitting on the Earth, then gravity would cause a dropped ball to hit the floor. But what if he were in zero-gravity outer space, in an elevator rocketing upward? A released ball would also seem to drop in exactly the same way – in this case because the floor would be racing to it.


pages: 299 words: 81,377

The No Need to Diet Book: Become a Diet Rebel and Make Friends With Food by Plantbased Pixie

Albert Einstein, confounding variable, David Attenborough, employer provided health coverage, fake news, food desert, meta-analysis, microaggression, nocebo, placebo effect, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, sugar pill, ultra-processed food

Simon and Schuster. Gough, B. (2007). ‘“Real men don’t diet”: An analysis of contemporary newspaper representations of men, food and health’. Social Science & Medicine, 64(2):326–37. 2 WEIGHT AND HEALTH ‘Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.’ NOT ALBERT EINSTEIN* The public health ‘war on obesity’ has, let’s face it, not exactly been successful. Despite the nation going on diet after diet, obesity levels have continued to rise. Why is this? The campaigns to prevent and tackle obesity have placed a huge focus on individual responsibility. Surely it makes sense to focus on weight if you’re trying to get people to not be obese?

Quiz: Check your weight bias Please indicate how much you agree or disagree with each of the following statements: STRONGLY DISAGREE DISAGREE NEITHER AGREE NOR DISAGREE AGREE STRONGLY AGREE Fat people are less physically attractive than thin people. 1 2 3 4 5 I would never date a fat person. 1 2 3 4 5 On average, fat people are lazier than thin people. 1 2 3 4 5 Fat people only have themselves to blame for their weight. 1 2 3 4 5 It is disgusting when a fat person wears a bathing suit at the beach. 1 2 3 4 5 The higher your total score, the stronger your negative attitudes are towards fat people. Ideally you want this score to be as low as possible, so if you have a high score maybe this is something you can work on. * Although this quote is always attributed to Albert Einstein, there is no record of him saying this and it has been thoroughly debunked. But there’s no denying it’s a great quote. † The Foresight obesity model is a map which looks at all the factors that can affect body weight, ranging from biological and medical to food and psychological factors. ‡ NICE is an independent public body that provides national guidance and advice to improve health and social care in England, with some services to Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. 3 EMOTIONAL EATING ‘When people turn to food and they’re not physically hungry, it means that they’re using food for something else besides satisfying the needs of the body.

Upward social comparisons are when we compare ourselves with other people who we perceive as being slightly better than us or who we look up to in terms of certain characteristics, whether it’s appearance, fitness or academic grades. For example, although you likely won’t compare yourself to Albert Einstein, you will compare your grades with those of others in your class, especially those who you perceive to be on a similar or slightly higher level to you. Although upward comparison can be beneficial when it encourages ambition and inspires people to become more like the people they admire, more often than not it has a negative effect.


The Spinoza Problem by Irvin D. Yalom

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, German hyperinflation, Mount Scopus

“But, Friedrich, why involve yourself in a Jewish field?” “It will be a Jewish field unless we Germans step in. Or put it another way: It’s too good to be left to the Jews.” “But why contaminate yourself? Why become the student of Jews?” “It’s a field of science. Look, Alfred, consider the example of another scientist, the German Jew Albert Einstein. All of Europe is buzzing about him—his work will forever change the face of physics. You can’t speak of modern physics as Jewish physics. Science is science. In medical school one of my instructors in anatomy was a Swiss Jew—he didn’t teach me Jewish anatomy. And if the great William Harvey were Jewish, you’d still believe in the circulation of the blood, right?

Moreover, each of the five editions claimed to be published in a different city. The guard beckoned Alfred to come to the desk and sign the guest register. After signing, Alfred flipped through the pages scanning the names of other guests. The guard reached over, turned back a few pages, pointed to the signature of Albert Einstein (dated November 2, 1920), and, tapping the page, proudly said, “Nobel laureate for physics. A famous scientist. He spent almost a whole day reading in this library and writing a poem to Spinoza. Look there,” he pointed to a small framed page of paper hanging on the wall behind him. “It’s his handwriting—he made us a copy.

He espouses pure reason. The Jews cast him out.” “I warned you about studying with Jews long ago. I warned you of entering this Jewish field. I warned you of your great danger.” “You may rest at ease. The danger is past. All the Jews in the psychoanalytic institute have left the country. As has Albert Einstein. As have the other great Jewish German scientists. And the great German non-Jewish writers—like Thomas Mann and two hundred fifty of our finest writers. Do you really believe this strengthens our country?” “Germany grows stronger and more pure every time a Jew or a lover of Jews leaves the country.”


pages: 465 words: 124,074

Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism From Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda by John Mueller

airport security, Albert Einstein, Black Swan, Cass Sunstein, classic study, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, Doomsday Clock, energy security, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, long peace, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, oil shock, Oklahoma City bombing, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, side project, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez crisis 1956, Timothy McVeigh, uranium enrichment, William Langewiesche, Yom Kippur War

As a result, “America’s airwaves, pulpits, and lecture halls were full of such frightening fare … as the nation’s atomic fears were manipulated and exacerbated by the media and by political activists.”22 Consequently, atomic scientist Phillip Morrison mused, “We have a chance to build a working peace on the novelty and terror of the atomic bomb,” and Albert Einstein expressed the hope that the bomb “would intimidate the human race into bringing order into its international affairs,” even as another scientist insisted that “only one tactic is dependable—the preaching of doom.” Meanwhile, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists editor Eugene Rabinowitch indicated that a purpose of his publication was “to preserve civilization by scaring men into rationality,” and J.

The clock has remained poised at a few minutes before midnight ever since, from time to time nudged slightly one way or the other by various events. (Amazingly, in 2006 the Bulletin launched a subscription campaign boldly and unapologetically built around the slogan “Dispensing facts instead of fear for over sixty years.”) Led by the legendary Albert Einstein, many atomic scientists quickly came to conclusions expressed with an evangelical certainty they would never have used in discussing the physical world. “As long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power,” Einstein declaimed, “war is inevitable.”3 Nuclear fears continued to be pronounced over the next decade and a half.

Accordingly, the theatrical form the foreign policy posturing most nearly resembles has been farce. Nuclear weapons did add a new element to international politics: new pieces for the players to move around the board, new terrors to contemplate and to anguish over, new ways to dole out the public treasury. But in counter to Albert Einstein’s famous remark that “the atom has changed everything save our way of thinking,” it seems rather that nuclear weapons changed little except our way of talking, posturing, and spending money.41 That is, although the weapons altered history little, they have very substantially influenced, mostly in a detrimental manner, the way people have gesticulated, scurried about, and expended funds.


pages: 700 words: 160,604

The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race by Walter Isaacson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anne Wojcicki, Apollo 13, Apple II, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, Bernie Sanders, Colonization of Mars, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Dean Kamen, discovery of DNA, discovery of penicillin, double helix, Edward Jenner, Gregor Mendel, Hacker News, Henri Poincaré, iterative process, Joan Didion, linear model of innovation, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, mouse model, Nick Bostrom, public intellectual, Recombinant DNA, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, synthetic biology, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, wikimedia commons

* * * The invention of CRISPR and the plague of COVID will hasten our transition to the third great revolution of modern times. These revolutions arose from the discovery, beginning just over a century ago, of the three fundamental kernels of our existence: the atom, the bit, and the gene. The first half of the twentieth century, beginning with Albert Einstein’s 1905 papers on relativity and quantum theory, featured a revolution driven by physics. In the five decades following his miracle year, his theories led to atom bombs and nuclear power, transistors and spaceships, lasers and radar. The second half of the twentieth century was an information-technology era, based on the idea that all information could be encoded by binary digits—known as bits—and all logical processes could be performed by circuits with on-off switches.

When he earned his doctorate, he applied for fifty jobs and got only one offer, from the University of Hawaii at Hilo. So he borrowed $900 from his wife’s retirement fund and moved his family there in August 1971, when Jennifer was seven. * * * Many creative people—including most of those I have chronicled, such as Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Henry Kissinger, and Steve Jobs—grew up feeling alienated from their surroundings. That was the case for Doudna as a young blond girl among the Polynesians in Hilo. “I was really, really alone and isolated at school,” she says. In the third grade, she felt so ostracized that she had trouble eating.

Basic research in quantum theory and surface-state physics of semiconducting materials led to the development of the transistor. But it wasn’t quite that simple or linear. The transistor was developed at Bell Labs, the research organization of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company. It employed many basic science theorists, such as William Shockley and John Bardeen. Even Albert Einstein dropped by. But it also threw them together with practical engineers and pole-climbers who knew how to amplify a phone signal. Added to the mix were business development executives who pushed ways to enable long-distance calls across the continent. All of these players informed and prodded each other.


pages: 1,373 words: 300,577

The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World by Daniel Yergin

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, book value, borderless world, BRICs, business climate, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, clean tech, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial innovation, flex fuel, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global village, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, index fund, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, John Deuss, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, Malacca Straits, market design, means of production, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, new economy, no-fly zone, Norman Macrae, North Sea oil, nuclear winter, off grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, Piper Alpha, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, technology bubble, the built environment, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, trade route, transaction costs, unemployed young men, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, William Langewiesche, Yom Kippur War

Chapter 29: Alchemy of Shining Light 1 Walter Isaacson, Einstein: The Life of a Genius (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009), ch. 4 (“lazy dog”); Albrecht Folsing, Albert Einstein: A Biography, tr. Ewald Osers (New York: Penguin, 1997), pp. 77, 95 (“exceedingly thorough,” “depressed”). 2 John Stachel, ed., Einstein’s Miraculous Year: Five Papers That Changed the Face of Physics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. 177–98; Isaacson, Einstein, pp. 94–101. 3 Interview with Jean Posbic (“explained it all”). 4 Interview with Ernest Moniz. 5 John Perlin, From Space to Earth: The Story of Solar Electricity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 18 (Siemens). 6 Albert Einstein, Nobel Prize in Physics, 1921, at http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1921/. 7 Perlin, From Space to Earth, pp. 4, 25–26, 31, 202; New York Times, April 26, 1954 (“almost limitless”); Time, October 17, 1955. 8 Stephen E.

But when Goldfine told von Neumann that he was helping develop “an electronic computer capable of 333 multiplications per second,” the conversation abruptly changed “from one of relaxed good humor to one more like the oral examination for the doctor’s degree in mathematics.”25 John von Neumann—born János Neumann in Budapest—had emigrated to the United States in 1930 to become, along with Albert Einstein, one of the first faculty members at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study. Von Neumann would prove to be one of the most extraordinary and creative figures of the twentieth century, not only one of the century’s greatest mathematicians but also an outstanding physicist and, almost as a sideline, one of the most influential figures in modern economics (he invented game theory and is said to have “changed the very way economic analysis is done”).

It takes a variety of forms today—among them, capturing the wind, harnessing the energy that is being created by the giant nuclear fusion furnace of the sun, harvesting energy from the richness of the soil, improving efficiency wherever we use energy, and remaking the vehicles that carry us all about. 29 ALCHEMY OF SHINING LIGHT Albert Einstein possessed a power of mind that would do nothing less than forge a new understanding of the universe. In the summer of 1900, he had a more immediate problem. Diploma in hand, he really needed to find a job. He had hoped for a university position, but it was not to be. None of Einstein’s professors would give him a positive recommendation, in part due to a mediocre diploma essay as well as his reputation for being, as one of his professors put it, a “lazy dog.”


pages: 133 words: 47,871

Flying to the Moon: An Astronaut's Story by Michael Collins

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Charles Lindbergh, Neil Armstrong, place-making

They are always there; they never change position; and they are very far distant. The star closest to us is called Alpha Centauri, and it is over four light-years away. In other words, if we could travel at the speed of light (186,000 miles per second), it would take us over four years to reach the nearest star. According to Albert Einstein, the speed of light is the fastest it is possible to go, so if he is correct, we will never be able to visit any star (except our sun, which is a star) unless we are willing to spend many years traveling. It gives me a strange feeling to think about how big our universe is. For example, let’s say you go out into your back yard on a clear night and find the star Betelgeuse (I pronounce it Beetle Juice).

I think it’s the height of conceit for us Wartians to decide that our planet is better than all the other 999,999,999,999. A more reasonable assumption might be that we are in the middle, which would make us stupid indeed, compared to life on some of the more advanced planets out there. A man who may have been the most intelligent Wartian who ever lived, Albert Einstein, developed a Theory of Relativity which says (among other things) that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. If this theory is correct, and we have discovered no reason so far to doubt it, then visiting other planets with intelligent life won’t be an easy thing to do. The nearest star, Alpha Centauri, is over four light-years away, meaning that it would take over eight years to make a round trip, traveling the entire time at the speed of light, which is not something we know how to do yet.


pages: 435 words: 136,906

The Gifted Adult: A Revolutionary Guide for Liberating Everyday Genius(tm) by Mary-Elaine Jacobsen

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, do what you love, fear of failure, impulse control, Isaac Newton, Mahatma Gandhi, out of africa, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, urban sprawl, Vision Fund, Walter Mischel

Excellence is about authenticity, and living authentically is always a process that is fraught with risk, setbacks, and self-doubt. Nevertheless, Everyday Geniuses are specially equipped to defy the limits of the ordinary and break the mold. All of them—from the person who invented the electric drill (whose name we may not know) to Madame Curie and Albert Einstein—share one overarching trait: the ability and the drive to push progress forward. HOW CAN I KNOW THIS ABOUT MYSELF? Until now, Everyday Geniuses have had no guidebook to assist them in identifying themselves, accepting their traits and abilities, nurturing their creative spirits, and navigating the real world.

As might be expected, we are constantly faced with the dilemma of making a splash with our expanded perspectives or swimming silent laps in the norm pool. This paradoxical “inability” to blend in while standing out must be acknowledged. We are incapable of always successfully approximating “normal.” Just as it is for anyone who is obviously different, we are apt to become targets for discrimination. Peter Bucky, author of The Private Albert Einstein, addressed this question of difference in his conversations with Einstein. In response to Bucky’s inquiry about how the great scientist managed “judgments of the outside world,” Einstein answered: Well, I have considered myself to be very fortunate in that I have been able to do mostly only that which my inner self told me to do.… I am also aware that I do receive much criticism from the outside world for what I do and some people actually get angry at me.

Remind yourself daily that apprehension and unknowns are intrinsic to progress. Learn to wear ambiguity like a comfortable old sweater. Try new things with less fear of appearing foolish, mindful that no matter how brilliant your action, someone will disapprove. Intelligently persist in your efforts the way Albert Einstein did. When asked how he worked, Einstein replied, “How do I work? I grope.” Reward yourself for initiating and staying with boring tasks. Mundane duties are rarely enjoyable but often necessary if there is to be joy in other domains. Value the good feelings and positive gains that come from being a finisher.


pages: 461 words: 128,421

The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street by Justin Fox

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Wald, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big Tech, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, card file, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, collateralized debt obligation, compensation consultant, complexity theory, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, democratizing finance, Dennis Tito, discovery of the americas, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, Edward Thorp, endowment effect, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, floating exchange rates, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Henri Poincaré, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, impulse control, index arbitrage, index card, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Bogle, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, libertarian paternalism, linear programming, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market design, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, Nikolai Kondratiev, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, power law, prediction markets, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, pushing on a string, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, stocks for the long run, tech worker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, transaction costs, tulip mania, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, volatility smile, Yogi Berra

., to establish the law of probability of price changes consistent with the market at that instant.”5 It was a view of the market as a game of chance, like roulette or dice. And just as games of chance can be described mathematically (and had been since the 1500s), Bachelier sketched the probabilities of the exchange. His work was so innovative that when Albert Einstein employed similar mathematical tools five years later to describe the random motion of tiny particles suspended in a fluid or a gas—called “Brownian motion,” after the botanist who first noted it—he helped lay the foundations of nuclear physics. But while physicists, building upon Einstein’s work, were putting together atomic bombs by the 1940s, practical application of Bachelier’s insights would not emerge until the 1970s.

He began consorting with the scientists and mathematicians of Vienna, one of whom steered him toward a 1928 paper about poker written by Hungarian mathematician John von Neumann.4 After emigrating to the United States in 1930, von Neumann became the brightest intellectual light at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, a place that also employed Albert Einstein. He helped plan the Battle of the Atlantic, design the atomic bomb, and invent the computer. In the late 1950s, dying of bone cancer likely brought on by witnessing one too many atomic test blasts, he peddled his doctrine of nuclear brinksmanship while rolling his wheelchair down the halls of power in Washington—providing at least part of the inspiration for Stanley Kubrick’s Dr.

Samuelson set to searching the libraries of Cambridge, Massachusetts, for the book. He found something far more interesting: Bachelier’s 1900 doctoral dissertation, the Théorie de la spéculation. Samuelson recognized almost immediately that Bachelier’s densely mathematical description of market behavior was almost identical to Albert Einstein’s description of Brownian motion—the random movement of microscopic particles suspended in a liquid or gas. The significance of this discovery to the subsequent development of quantitative finance cannot be overstated. Economists and finance professors could claim that one of their own—and they embraced the deceased French mathematician as such—had beaten the great Einstein to a major discovery.


pages: 544 words: 134,483

The Human Cosmos: A Secret History of the Stars by Jo Marchant

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Arthur Eddington, British Empire, complexity theory, Dava Sobel, Drosophila, Easter island, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, founder crops, game design, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Nicholas Carr, out of africa, overview effect, Plato's cave, polynesian navigation, scientific mainstream, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, Skype, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, technological singularity, TED Talk, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, trade route

It seems “rather silly”: Quoted in Galen Strawson, “Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 13 (2006): 3–31. “moment of crisis”: Max Planck, Where Is Science Going? (New York: AMS Press, 1977), 65; quoted in Marin, “ ‘Mysticism’ in Quantum Mechanics.” “philosophical prejudice”: Albert Einstein, The Born–Einstein Letters: Friendship, Politics, and Physics in Uncertain Times: Correspondence between Albert Einstein and Max and Hedwig Born from 1916 to 1955 with Commentaries by Max Born (New York: Macmillan, 2005), 218; quoted in Marin, “ ‘Mysticism’ in Quantum Mechanics.” “the material universe”: Erwin Schrödinger, “Interviews with Great Scientists: No. 4.

Classical physics describes a universe in which objects exist and events occur within a fixed, absolute grid of time and space. It’s an approach that was highly successful for describing everyday events on Earth; by the end of the nineteenth century some physicists thought there was little left to discover. Then Albert Einstein, working in the Swiss patent office in Bern, asked himself what would happen if you could travel at light speed in such a universe, and concluded that for such an observer, light beams traveling in the same direction would appear to stop. Yet according to Maxwell’s rock-solid equations describing electromagnetism, that was impossible; light always travels at the same speed.

“the smart set . . . buried suns”: André Breton and Philippe Soupault, Les Champs Magnétiques (Paris, 1919); discussed in Parkinson, Surrealism, Art and Modern Science, 48–50. a real-life solar eclipse: Confirmation of the theory of general relativity: Abraham Pais, Subtle Is the Lord: The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Parkinson, Surrealism, Art and Modern Science, ch. 1. Accounts of Eddington’s expedition: Frank Dyson et al., “A Determination of the Deflection of Light by the Sun’s Gravitational Field, from Observations Made at the Total Eclipse of May 29, 1919,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 220 (1920): 291–333; Malcolm Longair, “Bending Space-time: A Commentary on Dyson, Eddington and Davidson (1920) ‘A Determination of the Deflection of Light by the Sun’s Gravitational Field,’” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 373 (2015): 20140287; Peter Coles, “Einstein, Eddington and the 1919 Eclipse,” in Historical Development of Modern Cosmology, ASP Conference Proceedings 252 (2001): 21.


pages: 435 words: 136,741

The Gifted Adult: A Revolutionary Guide for Liberating Everyday Genius(tm) by Mary-Elaine Jacobsen

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, do what you love, fear of failure, impulse control, Isaac Newton, Mahatma Gandhi, out of africa, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, urban sprawl, Vision Fund, Walter Mischel

Excellence is about authenticity, and living authentically is always a process that is fraught with risk, setbacks, and self-doubt. Nevertheless, Everyday Geniuses are specially equipped to defy the limits of the ordinary and break the mold. All of them—from the person who invented the electric drill (whose name we may not know) to Madame Curie and Albert Einstein—share one overarching trait: the ability and the drive to push progress forward. HOW CAN I KNOW THIS ABOUT MYSELF? Until now, Everyday Geniuses have had no guidebook to assist them in identifying themselves, accepting their traits and abilities, nurturing their creative spirits, and navigating the real world.

As might be expected, we are constantly faced with the dilemma of making a splash with our expanded perspectives or swimming silent laps in the norm pool. This paradoxical “inability” to blend in while standing out must be acknowledged. We are incapable of always successfully approximating “normal.” Just as it is for anyone who is obviously different, we are apt to become targets for discrimination. Peter Bucky, author of The Private Albert Einstein, addressed this question of difference in his conversations with Einstein. In response to Bucky’s inquiry about how the great scientist managed “judgments of the outside world,” Einstein answered: Well, I have considered myself to be very fortunate in that I have been able to do mostly only that which my inner self told me to do.… I am also aware that I do receive much criticism from the outside world for what I do and some people actually get angry at me.

Remind yourself daily that apprehension and unknowns are intrinsic to progress. Learn to wear ambiguity like a comfortable old sweater. Try new things with less fear of appearing foolish, mindful that no matter how brilliant your action, someone will disapprove. Intelligently persist in your efforts the way Albert Einstein did. When asked how he worked, Einstein replied, “How do I work? I grope.” Reward yourself for initiating and staying with boring tasks. Mundane duties are rarely enjoyable but often necessary if there is to be joy in other domains. Value the good feelings and positive gains that come from being a finisher.


pages: 314 words: 91,652

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn, Ian Hacking

Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, business cycle, cuban missile crisis, experimental subject, Isaac Newton, tacit knowledge, The Design of Experiments, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

Kuhn, “The Caloric Theory of Adiabatic Compression,” Isis, XLIV (1958), 136–37. For the secular shift in Mercury’s perihelion, see E. T. Whittaker, A History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity, II (London, 1953), 151, 179. 5. Quoted in T. S. Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), p. 138. 6. Albert Einstein, “Autobiographical Note,” in Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, ed. P. A. Schilpp (Evanston, Ill., 1949), p. 45. 7. Ralph Kronig, “The Turning Point,” in Theoretical Physics in the Twentieth Century: A Memorial Volume to Wolfgang Pauli, ed. M. Fierz and V. F. Weisskopf (New York, 1960), pp. 22, 25–26. Much of this article describes the crisis in quantum mechanics in the years immediately before 1925. 8.

Whittaker, A History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity, I (2d ed.; London, 1951), 108. 14. See ibid., II (1953), 151–80, for the development of general relativity. For Einstein’s reaction to the precise agreement of the theory with the observed motion of Mercury’s perihelion, see the letter quoted in P. A. Schilpp (ed.), Albert Einstein, Philosopher-Scientist (Evanston, Ill., 1949), p. 101. 15. For Brahe’s system, which was geometrically entirely equivalent to Copernicus’, see J. L. E. Dreyer, A History of Astronomy from Thales to Kepler (2d ed.; New York, 1953), pp. 359–71. For the last versions of the phlogiston theory and their success, see J.


pages: 336 words: 92,056

The Battery: How Portable Power Sparked a Technological Revolution by Henry Schlesinger

Albert Einstein, animal electricity, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, British Empire, Copley Medal, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, index card, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Livingstone, I presume, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, pneumatic tube, popular electronics, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RFID, Robert Metcalfe, Stephen Hawking, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, Thomas Davenport, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Yogi Berra

Still, the idea that nature could be known solely through simple observation and the application of logic became central to European scientific thought and persisted as late as the 1600s. As recently as the early 1900s, Aristotle’s decidedly vague “fifth element”—aether—was still a cause for debate among serious scientists of the day, including Albert Einstein. The more stubborn myths persisted, echoing through the texts, lending credence to unsubstantiated, often incredible claims. The Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder, the master compiler of nature, included myths and fables alongside his own firsthand observations. In his immense Historia Naturalis, the unicorn is given the same credible treatment as the lion.

Born within just a few years of each other—Henry in 1797 and Faraday in 1791—the two scientists saw their most productive years as well as their research overlap. That Henry did not attain the same historic stature as Faraday does not diminish his contributions. Few scientists appear in history books alongside inventors such as Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, or Samuel F. B. Morse. Names like Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, and Isaac Newton are among the handful of exceptions that attest to the rule. One reason is the basic fact that to a large degree, the most enduring legacy of science is knowledge. Scientific experimentation, abstractions, and discovery of underlying principles hold little popular appeal today compared to products that transform everyday life or create vast fortunes.

Radios were portable only in the sense that they were fitted into a sturdy case that included a handle. 14 Distance Dies in the Parlor “I am often asked how radio works. Well, you see, wire telegraphy is like a very long cat. You yank his tail in New York and he meows in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? Now, radio is exactly the same, except that there is no cat.” —attributed to Albert Einstein Just a few years after World War I, vacuum tube technology, if not perfected, was in a significantly better state than it had been before the hostilities. What’s more, companies such as General Electric, Westinghouse, and RCA were investing in research programs and joint marketing agreements.


pages: 315 words: 92,151

Ten Billion Tomorrows: How Science Fiction Technology Became Reality and Shapes the Future by Brian Clegg

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, Brownian motion, call centre, Carrington event, Charles Babbage, combinatorial explosion, don't be evil, Dr. Strangelove, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Future Shock, game design, gravity well, Higgs boson, hive mind, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, machine translation, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, pattern recognition, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, silicon-based life, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Turing test

This provided a bridge between computing and the real world, combining virtual reality with a physical environment, using force fields to simulate real objects and giving the “player” a unique experience that could take them to the African veldt or a nineteenth-century saloon—or, as the character Data famously did, put them in a poker game with Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, and Stephen Hawking—played by the actual scientist and Star Trek fan. Like much science fiction, Star Trek had, ever since the original series, taken shields and tractor beams for granted. We’ll come back to the difficulties with creating a holodeck a little later, but let’s make a start with the basics that would be needed to make it work.

Where the surface was heated, air molecules that come into contact with the glass gain extra energy. As air molecules push away from the surface, the recoil moves the sphere in the opposite direction. In effect, this is controlled Brownian motion. This is the mechanism that causes small particles like pollen grains to dance around in water, as if they are alive. Albert Einstein explained the effect as being caused by impact from the unseen water molecules on the tiny grains. The interesting aspect of the laser “tractor beam” is that the position heated on the surface of the glass spheres can be modified by changing the polarization of the laser light, so that the effect can be used to move the spheres in any desired direction.

Particularly of interest here is the discovery that time on a moving spaceship (or anything else) will run slow, when seen from somewhere else not moving at the same velocity. We are used to thinking of relativity as being difficult, involving complicated equations—and this is true of general relativity, the aspect that explains gravity. Even Albert Einstein had to get help with the math in that case. But for special relativity it really is surprisingly simple. For example, the way time slows down on a moving ship is a relatively simple calculation. When we observe from Earth the time on a spaceship, an elapsed period of time (t) just becomes t/(1-v2/c2)½—where v is the velocity of the ship and c is the speed of light.


pages: 315 words: 89,861

The Simulation Hypothesis by Rizwan Virk

3D printing, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, Benoit Mandelbrot, bioinformatics, butterfly effect, Colossal Cave Adventure, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, DeepMind, discovery of DNA, Dmitri Mendeleev, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ernest Rutherford, game design, Google Glasses, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Andreessen, Minecraft, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, technological singularity, TED Talk, time dilation, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Zeno's paradox

Conscious Beings or Unconscious Simulations—PCs vs. NPCs The Big Picture: Computation Underlies the Other Sciences Parting Thoughts: Bridging the Great Divide Acknowledgements 292 Index 293 About the Author 308 Part 0 Overview Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one. —Albert Einstein Know that all phenomena Are like reflections appearing In a very clear mirror; Devoid of inherent existence —Buddha Introduction The Simulation Hypothesis We are living in a computer-programmed reality, and the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed, and some alteration in our reality occurs.

The Old Physics Before we jump into the crux of this chapter’s point about quantum indeterminacy and how it relates to the simulation hypothesis, some background information will be needed. Let’s take a quick look at what’s often called the old (“classical”) physics models, which were built on the works of Sir Isaac Newton, and the new (“relativistic and quantum”) physics, which began with Albert Einstein but was really fleshed out by a number of eminent physicists in the early 20th century, including Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, Erwin Schrödinger, and others. In the classical view of physics, the universe operates independently of people like us (or observers) and does so in a purely mechanistic way.

It turns out that the whole idea of quantum physics comes from a similar idea: that there is no such thing as continuous motion or continuous transitions but that things happen in discrete quantities at the subatomic level. These discrete quantities are called quanta. This idea of discrete amounts, or packets, of energy, rather than a continuous world-view, is one that took shape in physics over the course of the early 20th century through the work of scientists like Albert Einstein, Max Born, Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr, and many others. This idea was first proposed by theoretical physicist Max Planck and then validated by Einstein in his experiments on the photoelectric effect. Planck first postulated in 1900 that any energy-radiating system could be divided into discrete amounts of energy (quanta) and defined the quantum equation that related this amount to a frequency.


pages: 340 words: 91,416

Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray by Sabine Hossenfelder

Adam Curtis, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, deep learning, double helix, game design, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Large Hadron Collider, Murray Gell-Mann, Nick Bostrom, random walk, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Skype, Stephen Hawking, sunk-cost fallacy, systematic bias, TED Talk, the scientific method

It is the ugly papers which require justification.8 Paul Dirac (1902–1984), a Nobel laureate who has an equation named after him, went a step further and spelled out instructions: “The research worker, in his efforts to express the fundamental laws of Nature in mathematical form, should strive mainly for mathematical beauty.”9 On another occasion, when asked to summarize his philosophy of physics, Dirac took to the blackboard and wrote “PHYSICAL LAWS SHOULD HAVE MATHEMATICAL BEAUTY.”10 The historian Helge Kragh concluded his biography of Dirac with the observation that “after 1935 [Dirac] largely failed to produce physics of lasting value. It is not irrelevant to point out that the principle of mathematical beauty governed his thinking only during the later period.”11 Albert Einstein, who really needs no introduction, worked himself into a state in which he believed that thought alone can reveal the laws of nature: “I am convinced that we can discover by means of purely mathematical constructions the concepts and the laws connecting them with each other, which furnish the key to the understanding of natural phenomena.… In a certain sense, therefore, I hold it true that pure thought can grasp reality, as the ancients dreamed.”12 To be fair to the man, he did in other instances emphasize the need for observation.

If this was a skill that could be learned, it was what I wanted to learn. One of the few popular science books that covered modern physics in the 1980s was Anthony Zee’s Fearful Symmetry.17 Zee, who was then and still is a professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, wrote: “My colleagues and I, we are the intellectual descendants of Albert Einstein; we like to think that we too search for beauty.” And he laid out the program: “In this century physicists have become increasingly ambitious.… No longer content to explain this phenomenon or that, they have become imbued with the faith that Nature has an underlying design of beautiful simplicity.”

When we call a field a quantum field, we mean that the field really describes the presence of particles, and the particles are—as we saw earlier—quantum things. The quantum field itself tells you how likely you are to find a certain particle at a given place at a given time. And the equations of the quantum field theory tell you how to calculate that. In addition to the gauge symmetries, the standard model also uses the symmetries revealed by Albert Einstein in his theory of special relativity. According to Einstein, the three dimensions of space and the dimension of time must be combined into a four-dimensional space-time, and space and time must be treated equally. The laws of nature therefore (1) must be independent of the place and time where you measure them, (2) must not change with rotations in space, and (3) must not change under generalized rotations between space and time.


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The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution by T. R. Reid

Albert Einstein, Bob Noyce, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, cotton gin, discovery of penicillin, double helix, Ernest Rutherford, Fairchild Semiconductor, full employment, George Gilder, Guggenheim Bilbao, hiring and firing, industrial robot, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Menlo Park, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, oil shock, PalmPilot, Parkinson's law, popular electronics, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Turing machine, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

Scientists and engineers tend to divide their work into two large categories, sometimes described as basic research and directed research. Some of the most crucial inventions and discoveries of the modern world have come about through basic research—that is, work that was not directed toward any particular use. Albert Einstein’s picture of the universe, Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin, Niels Bohr’s blueprint of the atomic nucleus, the Watson-Crick “double helix” model of DNA—all these have had enormous practical implications, but they all came out of basic research. There are just as many basic tools of modern life—the electric light, the telephone, vitamin pills, the Internet—that resulted from a clearly focused effort to solve a particular problem.

The job of patent examiner tends to attract people with a curious, probing intelligence; among the trade’s most illustrious alumni was a hard-working physicist who held the position of “Technical Expert, Third Class” at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern at the turn of the twentieth century—a fellow named Albert Einstein. The examiner has to determine whether an idea is “new”—a question that requires searching dozens, hundreds, or thousands of earlier patents, reports, and monographs. He has to decide whether it is “useful,” a determination that demands extensive research in the technical literature. And he has to determine whether the inventor’s application clearly sets forth how the new gadget is to be built.

He published his first scholarly monograph at the age of eighteen and thereafter turned out key papers in a wide variety of fields. In 1930 he sailed west with a tide of refugee European scholars to Princeton, where he held a chair at the university but also became one of the first fellows—along with a fellow named Albert Einstein—of the Institute for Advanced Study. He made important contributions in pure mathematics, but also wrote major works on applications, ranging from chemical engineering and quantum physics to economics and the Theory of Games, a mathematical construct of his own for winning complex games. During World War II, von Neumann was involved with the development of atomic bombs, an engineering task of overwhelming scope that required, among much else, huge numbers of separate mathematical computations.


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The Loop: How Technology Is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back by Jacob Ward

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Abraham Wald, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Amazon Mechanical Turk, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, drone strike, endowment effect, George Akerlof, George Floyd, hindsight bias, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeffrey Epstein, license plate recognition, lockdown, longitudinal study, Lyft, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, natural language processing, non-fungible token, nudge unit, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, QAnon, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, smart cities, social contagion, social distancing, Steven Levy, survivorship bias, TikTok, Turing test

With the idea of a constant medium no longer workable, old theories collapsed, new theories were necessary, and a physicist born in Germany just a few years before Michelson and Morley emerged disappointed from their basement lab came up with the best theory around. In 1931, long after he’d achieved fame for his scientific achievements, Albert Einstein met Albert Michelson for the first and only time at a dinner in Einstein’s honor at Caltech. According to his biographer Albrecht Fölsing, Einstein gave an after-dinner speech for a crowd of two hundred that included the aging physicist, and thanked Michelson directly for the work he had done when Einstein “was still a little boy, hardly three feet high.”

According to his biographer Albrecht Fölsing, Einstein gave an after-dinner speech for a crowd of two hundred that included the aging physicist, and thanked Michelson directly for the work he had done when Einstein “was still a little boy, hardly three feet high.” “It was you,” Einstein said to Michelson, who died just four months later, “who led physicists onto new paths and by your wonderful experimental work even then prepared the road for the development of the relativity theory.”6 What Albert Einstein established from the ashes of the aether was that the universe was a whole lot more complicated than Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Newton, or anyone else had understood. And yet he showed we could measure it. We just couldn’t measure all aspects of it at the same time. His theory of relativity had shown, for instance, that space and time couldn’t be measured separately from one another—they were connected.

I: The Classical Theories; Vol. II: The Modern Theories, 1900–1926. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications. 5. O’Hara, J.G., Pricha, W. (1987). Hertz and the Maxwellians: A Study and Documentation of the Discovery of Electromagnetic Wave Radiation, 1873–1894. London: P. Peregrinus Limited. 6. Fölsing, A. (1997). Albert Einstein: A Biography. New York: Viking. 7. Kronovet, D. (2017, March 28). Objective functions in machine learning. Abacus (blog), http://kronosapiens.github.io/blog/2017/03/28/objective-functions-in-machine-learning.html 8. Patty, J.W., Penn, E.M. (2014). Social Choice and Legitimacy: The Possibilities of Impossibility.


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Six Not-So-Easy Pieces: Einstein’s Relativity, Symmetry, and Space-Time by Richard P. Feynman, Robert B. Leighton, Matthew Sands

Albert Einstein, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Murray Gell-Mann, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, time dilation

Moreover, they go well together and constitute a superb and compelling account of one of the most important general areas of modern theoretical physics. This area is relativity, which first burst forth into human awareness in the early years of this century. The name of Einstein figures preeminently in the public conception of this field. It was, indeed, Albert Einstein who, in 1905, first clearly enunciated the profound principles which underlie this new realm of physical endeavor. But there were others before him, most notably Hendrik Antoon Lorentz and Henri Poincaré, who had already appreciated most of the basics of the (then) new physics. Moreover, the great scientists Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton, centuries before Einstein, had already pointed out that in the dynamical theories that they themselves were developing, the physics as perceived by an observer in uniform motion would be identical with that perceived by an observer at rest.

ROGER PENROSE December 1996 SPECIAL PREFACE (from The Feynman Lectures on Physics) Toward the end of his life, Richard Feynman’s fame had transcended the confines of the scientific community. His exploits as a member of the commission investigating the space shuttle Challenger disaster gave him widespread exposure; similarly, a best-selling book about his picaresque adventures made him a folk hero almost of the proportions of Albert Einstein. But back in 1961, even before his Nobel Prize increased his visibility to the general public, Feynman was more than merely famous among members of the scientific community—he was legendary. Undoubtedly, the extraordinary power of his teaching helped spread and enrich the legend of Richard Feynman.


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The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics by John B. Judis

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, capital controls, carbon tax, centre right, Charlie Hebdo massacre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, first-past-the-post, fixed income, full employment, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, mass immigration, means of production, neoliberal agenda, obamacare, Occupy movement, open borders, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, post-materialism, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, white flight, Winter of Discontent

In 1990, he won Vermont’s seat in the House of Representatives, and in 2006, when Republican Jim Jeffords retired, Sanders won one of the Senate seats. In his Liberty Union campaigns, Sanders advocated for socialism. In the diary he kept of his Senate campaign in 1972, he wrote of a campaign stop, “I even mentioned the horrible word ‘socialism’—and nobody in the audience fainted.” He would recommend Albert Einstein’s essay, “Why Socialism,” to anyone interested. In that essay, Einstein wrote that the only way to remove the “evils” of capitalism was “through the establishment of a socialist economy. . . . In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion.”

Judis, “The Bern Supremacy,” National Journal, November 19, 2015; Harry Jaffe, Why Bernie Sanders Matters, Regan Arts, 2015; Tim Murphy, “How Bernie Sanders Learned to Be a Real Politician,” Mother Jones, May 26, 2015; and Simon van Zuylen-Wood, “I’m Right and Everybody Else Is Wrong,” National Journal, June 2014. 79“nobody in the audience fainted”: Sanders, “Fragments of a Campaign Diary,” Seven Days, December 1, 1972. 79“Why Socialism”: Albert Einstein, “Why Socialism,” Monthly Review, May 1949. 79“I don’t have the power to nationalize the banks”: Baltimore Sun, December 23, 1981. 79“I’m a democratic socialist”: Sanders with Huck Gutman, Outsider in the House, Verso, 1997, p. 29. 80higher standard of living: Michael Powell, “Exceedingly Social, but Doesn’t Like Parties,” Washington Post, November 5, 2006. 80“two percent of the people”: Saint Albans Daily Messenger, December 23, 1971. 81“buy the United States Congress”: “The Rachel Maddow Show,” MSNBC, April 15, 2015. 81“What Bernie Sanders Doesn’t Understand About American Politics:” Jonathan Chait, “What Bernie Sanders Doesn’t Understand About American Politics,” New York, January 27, 2016. 81“facile calls for revolution:” “It Was Better to Bern Out,” The New York Times, June 10, 2016. 82“eat out the heart of the republic”: George E.


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Intertwingled: Information Changes Everything by Peter Morville

A Pattern Language, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, augmented reality, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Black Swan, business process, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Computer Lib, disinformation, disruptive innovation, folksonomy, holacracy, index card, information retrieval, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Kanban, Lean Startup, Lyft, messenger bag, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, Nelson Mandela, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Project Xanadu, quantum entanglement, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, single source of truth, source of truth, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, zero-sum game

Francis Crick speculated that the claustrum, a thin layer of tissue beneath the insular neocortex that has two-way links to nearly all regions of the brain, may be responsible for integrating myriad sensations – sight, sound, touch, taste, smell – into the single, unifying experience of consciousness.lxi Of course, whenever we unify, we also divide. We invent self-other as one in what Albert Einstein famously called the “optical delusion of consciousness.” To make sense of an infinite universe, we create categories to reduce complexity. And we use tools and language to spread the load across mind-body-environment. Despite these devices, our search for the truth is limited by a very small flashlight.

Einstein believed instant information transfer across infinite distance or “spooky action at a distance” to be impossible, but its effects have been shown experimentally. Researchers are exploring the use of entanglement for communication and computation. Recently, Dutch physicists were able to teleport quantum data over a ten foot distance with a replication rate of 100 percent.cxlvi It appears that Albert Einstein was wrong. Figure 5-12. The consequence of quantum entanglement. In his book, Yanofsky explains the philosophical consequences of the nonlocal effects of entanglement. One consequence of entanglement is to end the philosophical position of reductionism. This position says that if you want to understand some type of closed system, look at all the parts of the system.


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Elemental: How the Periodic Table Can Now Explain Everything by Tim James

Albert Einstein, Brownian motion, Dmitri Mendeleev, en.wikipedia.org, Ernest Rutherford, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, Murray Gell-Mann, Silicon Valley

If atoms were real they would need to be so small that even waves of visible light would be too big to bounce off them. It wouldn’t matter how powerful your microscope was, atoms would be impossible to discern by their very nature. Scientists are in the business of testing theories once they’ve been established, but how could you test this one? How could you see the unseeable? EINSTEIN WAS HERE Albert Einstein was a legend in his own lifetime. What’s more impressive is that he deserved the reputation. Publishing over three hundred scientific papers and essentially inventing the landscape of modern physics, Einstein was the epitome of genius. It would be foolish to summarize his many achievements in a few paragraphs, so we’ll focus on the one most relevant to chemistry: a paper he published on July 18, 1905, in which he made the atomic hypothesis testable rather than speculative.

Einstein decided to model the pollen’s trajectory through the water and found it could only be explained as the result of bombardment from water particles. To accurately describe how the pollen moved, you had to factor in the friction of pollen against water, which meant you had to accept the existence of “water atoms.” Despite the persistent rumors that he failed math in school, Albert Einstein was a mathematician par excellence and drew up an equation that related water temperature to the pollen grain’s likely movement. By introducing an equation with a measurable outcome, Einstein changed the game completely. An idea can be debated but a number cannot, so if you can predict a specific value from your hypothesis you have something to search for directly.


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Physics in Mind: A Quantum View of the Brain by Werner Loewenstein

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Bletchley Park, complexity theory, dematerialisation, discovery of DNA, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Henri Poincaré, informal economy, information trail, Isaac Newton, Murray Gell-Mann, Necker cube, Norbert Wiener, Richard Feynman, stem cell, trade route, Turing machine

Genetical implications of the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid. Nature 171:964–967. Weinberg, S. 1992. Dreams of a Final Theory. New York: Pantheon. 13. Expanded Reality A Fine Bouquet Einstein, A. 1956. Autobiographische Skizze. In Helle Zeit—Dunkle Zeit: In Memoriam Albert Einstein, edited by Seelig, C. Zurich: Europa. Főising, A. 1998. Albert Einstein. London and New York: Penguin Books. The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein. 1987. Edited by Johan Stachel et al. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mathematics and Reality Greene, B. 1999. The Elegant Universe. New York: Vintage Books, Random House. Greene, B. 2004. The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality.


pages: 410 words: 101,260

Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World by Adam Grant

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bluma Zeigarnik, business process, business process outsourcing, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dean Kamen, double helix, Elon Musk, emotional labour, fear of failure, Firefox, George Santayana, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, information security, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job satisfaction, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, minimum viable product, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, risk tolerance, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Wisdom of Crowds, women in the workforce

The chances that any one of these inventions will change the world are tiny. Individual creators have far better odds over a lifetime of ideas. When we judge their greatness, we focus not on their averages, but on their peaks. 3 Out on a Limb Speaking Truth to Power “Great spirits have always encountered opposition from mediocre minds.” Albert Einstein In the early 1990s, a high-flying CIA analyst named Carmen Medina went to Western Europe on a three-year assignment. When she returned to the United States, she found that leaving the country had set her career back. After getting stuck with one job after another that didn’t fit her skills and aspirations, she searched for another way to contribute.

The Two Life Cycles of Creativity: Young Geniuses and Old Masters It’s commonly believed that originality flows from the fountain of youth. In the words of famed venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, “People under 35 are the people who make change happen. People over 45 basically die in terms of new ideas.” After publishing his first revolutionary paper on relativity in his midtwenties, Albert Einstein made a similar observation: “A person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of 30 will never do so.” Tragically, innovators often do lose their originality over time. After Einstein transformed physics with two papers on relativity, he opposed quantum mechanics, which became the next major revolution in the field.

Movers and Shapers To his credit, Dalio has been running an investigation of his own. Fascinated with understanding people who shape the world and eager to discern what they have in common, he’s been interviewing many of the most influential originals of our time, and studying historical figures from Benjamin Franklin to Albert Einstein to Steve Jobs. Of course, all of them were driven and imaginative, but I was intrigued by three other qualities on Dalio’s list. “Shapers” are independent thinkers: curious, non-conforming, and rebellious. They practice brutal, nonhierarchical honesty. And they act in the face of risk, because their fear of not succeeding exceeds their fear of failing.


Gaming the Vote: Why Elections Aren't Fair (And What We Can Do About It) by William Poundstone

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, book value, business cycle, Debian, democratizing finance, desegregation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, global village, guest worker program, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, invisible hand, jimmy wales, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, manufacturing employment, Nash equilibrium, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, prisoner's dilemma, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, slashdot, the map is not the territory, Thomas Bayes, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, Unsafe at Any Speed, Y2K

Despite the smiling faces, presidenti,,1 comenders Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow lNilson, and William Howard Taft well kne'F that electionl can be lmfair when there are three Or more candidates. (U.S. Senate Collection. Center for Legislative Archives) To Scott Contents Prologue: The Wizard and the Lizard 3 THE PROBLEM 25 I. Game Theory Kurt Code! • Adolf Hitler· Albert Einstein· Oskar Morgenstern· Bambi· the u.s. Constitution· Joseph Goebbels • God· Kaiser Wilhelm II • John von Neumann" Kenneth Arrow" J\'larxism • Alfred Tarski • intransitivity· Harold Hotelling· ice cream· John Hicks· "Scissors, Paper. Stone" • Duncan Black· the "forty-seven-year-old wife of a machinist liVing in Dayton.

Codel had a visa and an open invitation to work at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. As things worked out, he and Porkert would spend the rest of their lives in Princeton. GAMING THE VOTE The years rolled by. In 1947 G6del decided it was time to apply for American citizenship. He needed two American citizens as witnesses. Two of his best Friends volunteered. They were Albert Einstein and Oskar Morgenstern (an economist). Like all immigrants, GodeJ was supposed to study up on the American system of government. He threw himself into the task. Apparently for the first time in his life, he became interested in the political process. The day before the exam, he informed Morgenstern that he had uncovered a logical contradiction in the u.s.

Some like the psychic satisfaction of casting a negative vote for Wintergreen. eBay lets online buyers and sellers rate one another after each transaction. The three allowed choices are called positive, negative, and neutral. (This is not quite evaluative voting, as eBay ignores the neutral votes in computing the ratings. It's really approval voting with an option to abstain.) Smith quotes Albert Einstein: "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler:' The choices we make in every election are important. They deserve a little extra effort, if that's what it takes. You may now have noticed something extremely odd. It took Nobel Prize-level work to devise the impossibility theorem.


pages: 225 words: 54,010

A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright

Albert Einstein, Atahualpa, Bretton Woods, British Empire, clean water, Columbian Exchange, cuban missile crisis, Easter island, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, invention of agriculture, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, nuclear winter, out of africa, Parkinson's law, post-war consensus, precautionary principle, Ronald Reagan, technological determinism, Thomas Malthus, urban sprawl

But when the bang we can make can blow up our world, we have made rather too much progress. Several of the scientists who created the atomic bomb recognized this in the 1940s, telling politicians and others that the new weapons had to be destroyed. “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking,” Albert Einstein wrote, “and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophes.” And a few years later, President Kennedy said, “If mankind does not put an end to war, war will put an end to mankind.” When I was a boy, in the 1950s, the shadow of too much progress in weaponry— of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and vaporized Pacific islands — had already fallen over the world.

The sound of machinery was almost unknown. A person from 1600 transported to 1800 could have made his way around quite easily. But by 1900, there were motor cars on the streets and electric trains beneath them; movies were flickering on screens; earth’s age was reckoned in millions of years, and Albert Einstein was writing his Special Theory of Relativity. Early in the century, Mary Shelley pondered the new science with her Frankenstein. And Charles Dickens gave the social costs of industry a scalding and prescient critique in Hard Times, asking whether “the Good Samaritan was a Bad Economist,” and foreseeing the new religion of the bottom line: “Every inch of the existence of mankind, from birth to death,” he wrote in 1854, “was to be a bargain across a counter.”39 In his 1872 novel, Erewhon (an anagram of “nowhere”), Samuel Butler created a remote civilization that had industrialized long before Europe, but where the effects of progress had sparked a Luddite revolution.


Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To by David A. Sinclair, Matthew D. Laplante

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Atul Gawande, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biofilm, Biosphere 2, blockchain, British Empire, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, creative destruction, CRISPR, dark matter, dematerialisation, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, Easter island, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, global pandemic, Grace Hopper, helicopter parent, income inequality, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, life extension, Louis Pasteur, McMansion, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, mutually assured destruction, Paul Samuelson, personalized medicine, phenotype, Philippa Foot, placebo effect, plutocrats, power law, quantum entanglement, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, seminal paper, Skype, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, union organizing, universal basic income, WeWork, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Mutations in IGF-1 and the IGF-1 receptor gene are associated with lower rates of death and disease and found in abundance in females whose families tend to live past 100.15 Levels of IGF-1 have been closely linked to longevity. The impact is so strong, in fact, that in some cases it can be used to predict—with great accuracy—how long someone will live, according to Nir Barzilai and Yousin Suh, who research aging at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University in New York. Barzilai and Suh are geneticists whose research focuses on centenarians who have made it to 100—and beyond—without suffering from any age-related diseases. That unique population is a vital study group, because its members provide a model for aging the way most people say they want to age—not accepting that additional years of life need to come with additional years of misery.

When you give rats a high-calorie diet and allow them to burn off the energy, lifespan extension is minimal. Same for a CR diet. If you make food filling but not as calorific, some of the health benefits are lost. Being hungry is necessary for CR to work because hunger helps turn on genes in the brain that release longevity hormones, at least according to a recent study by Dongsheng Cai at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.38 Would a combination of fasting and exercise lengthen your lifespan? Absolutely. If you manage to do both these things: congratulations, you are well on your way. But there is plenty more you can do. THE COLD FRONT Before arriving in Boston in my early 20s, I’d spent my whole life in Australia.

If you’ve been good to your body, and greater than 93.5 percent of your blood’s hemoglobin isn’t irreversibly bound to glucose—meaning it’s mostly the HbA1 type not HbA1c—you’re out of luck, not just because the majority of physicians don’t know the data I just shared with you, but because even if they did, aging isn’t yet considered a disease. Among the people taking metformin—and leading the charge to evaluate its long-term effects on aging in humans—is Nir Barzilai, the Israeli American physician and geneticist who, along with his colleagues at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, discovered several longevity gene variants in the insulin-like growth hormone receptor that controls FOXO3, the cholesterol gene CETP, and the sirtuin SIRT6, all of which seem to help ensure that some lucky people with Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry remain healthy beyond 100. Yes, although genes play a back-seat role to the epigenome, it does seem that some people are genetically primed for longevity at the digital level—enjoying longer lives almost irrespective of how they live, thanks in part to gene variants that stabilize their epigenomes, preventing the loss of analog information over time.


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Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science by Dani Rodrik

airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, bank run, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bretton Woods, business cycle, butterfly effect, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collective bargaining, congestion pricing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, distributed generation, Donald Davies, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, fudge factor, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, liquidity trap, loss aversion, low skilled workers, market design, market fundamentalism, minimum wage unemployment, oil shock, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, price elasticity of demand, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, public intellectual, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, risk/return, Robert Shiller, school vouchers, South Sea Bubble, spectrum auction, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, trade route, ultimatum game, University of East Anglia, unorthodox policies, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, white flight

A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff” (Amherst: University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Political Economy Research Institute, April 15, 2013). 20. R. E. Peierls, “Wolfgang Ernst Pauli, 1900–1958,” Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 5 (February 1960): 186. 21. Albert Einstein, “Physics and Reality,” in Ideas and Opinions of Albert Einstein, trans. Sonja Bargmann (New York: Crown, 1954), 290, cited in Susan Haack, “Science, Economics, ‘Vision,’ ” Social Research 71, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 225. CHAPTER 3: Navigating among Models 1. David Colander and Roland Kupers, Complexity and the Art of Public Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 8. 2.


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The Fire Starter Sessions: A Soulful + Practical Guide to Creating Success on Your Own Terms by Danielle Laporte

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, David Heinemeier Hansson, delayed gratification, do what you love, emotional labour, fake it until you make it, Frank Gehry, index card, invisible hand, Lao Tzu, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Ralph Waldo Emerson, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak

What do you think I could give myself more credit for or celebrate more? In the name of the Fire, The Flame And the Light; Praise the pure presence of fire That burns from within Without thought of time. —John O’Donohue, poet The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once. —Albert Einstein TIME DIETS + STARVING SPIRITS I’ve tried many a time management system: Focus days, buffer days. An emptied in-box, flagged emails. Restrained meandering. Timed phone calls. No phone calls. Quadrants. Categories. Categorizing my life into quadrants of ambition and lists of goals divided by the square root of how many productive milliseconds I could squeeze out of any given day—at least five days a week, but with time off for religious holidays.

Once you’ve created a baseline for entry then you can mix and contrast skills and ambitions with one another’s strengths and weaknesses. And that’s when the party really starts. YOU DESERVE YOUR TRIBE Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people. —Albert Einstein As Seth Godin defines it, “a tribe is any group of people, large or small, who are connected to one another, a leader, and an idea…you can’t have a tribe without a leader—and you can’t be a leader without a tribe.” You may be the leader of the productive, eco-friendly guys in their thirties with kids tribe; or the tribe of beauty and old-fashioned manners; or yoga and self-expression; glamorous self-love; satisfaction for singles; fashion that cares; art that heals; business with heart; or punk rock illumination.


pages: 406 words: 109,794

Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Atul Gawande, Checklist Manifesto, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, deliberate practice, Exxon Valdez, fail fast, Flynn Effect, Freestyle chess, functional fixedness, game design, Gene Kranz, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, knowledge economy, language acquisition, lateral thinking, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, messenger bag, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, multi-armed bandit, Nelson Mandela, Netflix Prize, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, precision agriculture, prediction markets, premature optimization, pre–internet, random walk, randomized controlled trial, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, Walter Mischel, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, young professional

I mean, what an accomplishment that is.” He is also an MD-PhD and a star in his own domains, microbiology and immunology. He has studied AIDS and anthrax, and has illuminated important aspects of how fungal diseases work. His “h-index,” a measure of a scientist’s productivity and how often they are cited, recently surpassed Albert Einstein’s.* So his peers took it seriously when he arrived at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in 2015, as chair of molecular microbiology and immunology, and warned that scientific research is in crisis. In a lecture to his new colleagues, Casadevall declared that the pace of progress had slowed, while the rate of retractions in scientific literature had accelerated, proportionally outpacing the publication of new studies.

Part of the problem, he argued, is that young scientists are rushed to specialize before they learn how to think; they end up unable to produce good work themselves and unequipped to spot bad (or fraudulent) work by their colleagues. The reason Casadevall came to Hopkins, from a comfy post at New York City’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine, is that the new gig offered him the chance to create a prototype of what he thinks graduate science education, and eventually all education, should be. Counter to the prevailing trend, Casadevall—with Gundula Bosch, a professor of both biology and education—is despecializing training, even for students who plan to become the most specialized of specialists.

Einstein was a hedgehog: For one of many references to Einstein’s hedgehoginess, see Morson and Schapiro, Cents and Sensibility. “A consensus seems to exist”: G. Mackie, “Einstein’s Folly,” The Conversation, November 29, 2015. Niels Bohr . . . replied: C. P. Snow, The Physicists, (London: Little, Brown and Co., 1981). Einstein also expresses this idea in: H. Dukas and B. Hoffmann eds., Albert Einstein, The Human Side: Glimpses from His Archives (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 68. In four straight years: W. Chang et al., “Developing Expert Political Judgment: The Impact of Training and Practice on Judgmental Accuracy in Geopolitical Forecasting Tournaments,” Judgment and Decision Making 11, no. 5 (2016): 509–26.


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Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire by Bruce Nussbaum

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, declining real wages, demographic dividend, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, follow your passion, game design, gamification, gentrification, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, industrial robot, invisible hand, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gruber, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lone genius, longitudinal study, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Max Levchin, Minsky moment, new economy, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, QR code, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, reshoring, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, six sigma, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, Tesla Model S, The Chicago School, The Design of Experiments, the High Line, The Myth of the Rational Market, thinkpad, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, We are the 99%, Y Combinator, young professional, Zipcar

Gregory, Lenin’s Brain and Other Tales from the Secret Soviet Archives (California: Hoover Institution Press, 2008), 25–26. 8 He played violin, originally: Brian Foster, “Einstein and His Love of Music,” PhysicsWorld, January 2005, accessed September 13, 2012, http://www.pha.jhu.edu/einstein/stuff/einstein&music.pdf. 8 He struggled in school: Barbara Wolff and Hananya Goodman, “The Legend of the Dull-Witted Child Who Grew Up to Be a Genius,” accessed September 13, 2012, http://www.albert-einstein.org/article_handicap.html. 8 We also know Einstein drew: John S. Rigden, Einstein 1905: The Standard of Greatness. (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2006); Albert Einstein; John Stachel, ed.: Einstein’s Miraculous Year: Five Papers That Changed the Face of Physics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). 8 While Einstein was a patent clerk: “Einstein in the World Wide Web: Akademie Olympia,” accessed September 13, 2012. http://www.einstein-website.de/z_biography/olympia-e.html. 8 Einstein acknowledged the effect: Carl Seelig, ed.; Sonja Bargmann, tr.; Albert Einstein: Ideas and Opinions (New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1954). 8 And we know that Keith Richards: Richards and Fox, Life, 142–43. 8 Oldham, who’d worked for Mary Quant: Ibid., 127–30; Andrew Loog Oldham with Simon Dudfield and Ron Ross, ed., Stoned: A Memoir of London in the 1960s (New York: St.

.: Einstein’s Miraculous Year: Five Papers That Changed the Face of Physics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). 8 While Einstein was a patent clerk: “Einstein in the World Wide Web: Akademie Olympia,” accessed September 13, 2012. http://www.einstein-website.de/z_biography/olympia-e.html. 8 Einstein acknowledged the effect: Carl Seelig, ed.; Sonja Bargmann, tr.; Albert Einstein: Ideas and Opinions (New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1954). 8 And we know that Keith Richards: Richards and Fox, Life, 142–43. 8 Oldham, who’d worked for Mary Quant: Ibid., 127–30; Andrew Loog Oldham with Simon Dudfield and Ron Ross, ed., Stoned: A Memoir of London in the 1960s (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000). 8 It was because of their collaboration: Richards and Fox, Life, 142–43. 9 “What I found about the blues”: Ibid., 94.


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A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond by Daniel Susskind

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, blue-collar work, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, computerized trading, creative destruction, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Hargreaves, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low skilled workers, lump of labour, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, precariat, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, tacit knowledge, technological solutionism, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, wealth creators, working poor, working-age population, Y Combinator

Kennedy, about sixty years earlier, when, using almost identical words, he said that automation carried with it “the dark menace of industrial dislocation.”17 Similarly, in 2016 Stephen Hawking described how automation has “decimated” blue-collar work and predicted that this would soon “extend … deep into the middle classes.”18 Yet Albert Einstein had made a similar threat in 1931, warning that “man-made machines,” which were meant to liberate human beings from drudgery and toil, were instead poised to “overwhelm” their creators.19 In fact, in almost every decade since 1920, it is possible to find a piece in the New York Times engaging in some way with the threat of technological unemployment.20 UPHEAVAL AND CHANGE Most of these anxieties about the economic harm caused by new technology have turned out to be misplaced.

President Kennedy gave his speech at the AFL-CIO Convention, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 7 June 1960; see https://www.jfklibrary.org/. 18.  Stephen Hawking, “This Is the Most Dangerous Time for Our Planet,” Guardian, 1 December 2016. 19.  See “World Ills Laid to Machine by Einstein in Berlin Speech,” New York Times, 22 October 1931. In David Reichinstein, Albert Einstein: A Picture of His Life and His Conception of the World (Prague: Stella Publishing House, 1934), p. 96, the account of that speech reveals that Einstein was worrying, in part, about technological unemployment. 20.  For instance: “March of the Machine Makes Idle Hands,” 26 February 1928; “Technological Unemployment,” 12 August 1930; “Does Man Displace Men in the Long Run?

“Much Ado About Not Very Much.” Daedalus 117, no. 1 (1988): 269–81. PwC. “Global Top 100 Companies by Market Capitalisation.” 2018. ________. “Workforce of the Future: The Competing Forces Shaping 2030.” 2018. Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Reichinstein, David. Albert Einstein: A Picture of His Life and His Conception of the World. Prague: Stella Publishing House, 1934. Remus, Dana, and Frank Levy. “Can Robots Be Lawyers? Computers, Lawyers, and the Practice of Law.” Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics 30, no. 3 (2017): 501–58. Renshaw, James. In Search of the Greeks. 2nd edition.


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Why the West Rules--For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future by Ian Morris

addicted to oil, Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Atahualpa, Berlin Wall, British Empire, classic study, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, defense in depth, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Doomsday Clock, Eddington experiment, en.wikipedia.org, falling living standards, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, global village, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, market bubble, mass immigration, Medieval Warm Period, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, out of africa, Peter Thiel, phenotype, pink-collar, place-making, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Sinatra Doctrine, South China Sea, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Suez canal 1869, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, upwardly mobile, wage slave, washing machines reduced drudgery

Zheng 2005. 604 “great drain robbery”: cited from Kynge 2006, p. xiii. 605 “a threat to world peace”: Ipsos-Reid poll (April 2005), cited from “Balancing Act: A Survey of China,” The Economist, Special Report, March 25, 2006, p. 20 (available at http://www.economist.com/specialreports). 605 threat to global stability: Gallup poll (October 2007), cited from “After Bush: A Special Report on America and the World,” The Economist, March 29, 2008, p. 9 (available at http://www.economist.com/specialreports). 605 “PEOPLE AGONIZED”: China Daily headline (May 1999), cited from Hessler 2006, p. 20. 605 “strategic conspiracy”: Chinese Communist Party resolution (2004), cited from “Balancing Act: A Survey of China,” The Economist, Special Report, March 25, 2006, p. 15 (available at http://www.economist.com/specialreports). 605 “it is more likely”: Graham and Talent 2008, p. xv. 606 “No physical force”: Norman Angell, The Great Illusion (1910), cited from Ferguson 1998, p. 190. 606 “international movement of capital”: Jean Jaurès, cited from Ferguson 1998, p. 190. 606 “must involve the expenditure”: Prime Minister Edward Grey in conversation with the Austrian ambassador to Britain, July 1914, cited from Ferguson 1998, p. 191. 606 “total exhaustion”: Grey, letter to the German ambassador to Britain, July 24, 1914, cited from Ferguson 1998, p. 191. 607 “I do not know”: Albert Einstein, interview with Alfred Werner, Liberal Judaism (April—May 1949), cited from Isaacson 2007, p. 494. 608–609 estimates: Richardson 1960; Smil 2008, p. 245, http://www.thebulletin.org/content/doomsday-clock/overview. 609 “guys with gross obesity”: Anonymous official in the Indian Foreign Ministry, cited from “Melting Asia,” The Economist, June 7, 2008, p. 30 (available at http://www.economist.com). 609 “The first era”: T. Friedman 1999, p. xix. 609 “Globalization 3.0”: T. Friedman 2005, p. 10. 610 “The only salvation”: Albert Einstein, New York Times, September 15, 1945, cited from Isaacson 2007, pp. 487–88. 610 “If the idea”: Albert Einstein, comment on the film Where Will You Hide?

Friedman 2005, p. 10. 610 “The only salvation”: Albert Einstein, New York Times, September 15, 1945, cited from Isaacson 2007, pp. 487–88. 610 “If the idea”: Albert Einstein, comment on the film Where Will You Hide? (May 1948), Albert Einstein Archives (Hebrew University, Jerusalem) 28–817, cited from Isaacson 2007, p. 494. 612 David Douglas, International Energy Agency: statistics in this and the following paragraph cited from T. Friedman 2008, pp. 31, 73, 59–60. 613 “But where are they?” Enrico Fermi, Los Alamos, circa 1950, cited from Jones 1985, p. 3. 615 “We will see”: Steven Metz, interview with Peter Singer, September 19, 2006, cited from Singer 2009, p. 240. 615 “the U.S.”: Roger Cliff, The Military Potential of China’s Commercial Technology (2001), quoted in Singer 2009, p. 246. 618 “human space” etc.: Adams 2001. 621 “They have ridden” etc.: Rudyard Kipling, “The Ballad of East and West,” MacMillan’s Magazine, December 1889. 621 archaeologists and television: Diamond 2005, p. 525.

I will argue later in this chapter that measuring social development shows us what we need to explain if we are to answer the why-the-West-rules question; in fact, I will propose that unless we come up with a way to measure social development we will never be able to answer this question. First, though, we need establish some principles to guide our index-making. I can think of nowhere better to start than with Albert Einstein, the most respected scientist of modern times. Einstein is supposed to have said that “in science, things should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler”: that is, scientists should boil their ideas down to the core point that can be checked against reality, figure out the simplest possible way to perform the check, then do just that—nothing more, but nothing less either.


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Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea by Charles Seife

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Arthur Eddington, Cepheid variable, cosmological constant, dark matter, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Georg Cantor, heat death of the universe, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, machine readable, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking

Even though physicists quickly realized that Planck’s equation was right, they did not accept the quantum hypothesis. It was too bizarre to accept. An unlikely candidate would turn the quantum hypothesis from a pecularity to an accepted fact. Albert Einstein, a twenty-six-year-old patent clerk, showed the physics world that nature worked in quanta rather than in smooth increments. He would later become the chief opponent of the theory he helped create. Einstein didn’t seem like a revolutionary. When Max Planck was turning the physics world on its head, Albert Einstein was scrambling for a job. Out of money, he took a temporary position at the Swiss patent office, a far cry from the assistantship at a university that he wanted.


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The Crowded Universe: The Search for Living Planets by Alan Boss

Albert Einstein, Dava Sobel, diversified portfolio, full employment, Gregor Mendel, if you build it, they will come, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Pluto: dwarf planet, Silicon Valley, space junk, wikimedia commons, zero-sum game

A group of Polish astronomers from Warsaw University had built a 52-inch (1.3-meter) telescope at Carnegie’s Las Campanas Observatory in Chile and were using it to study the myriad of stars toward the center of our Galaxy, in the so-called Galactic bulge. They were searching for microlensing events, where an unseen foreground star would pass in front of a visible Galactic bulge star. As predicted by Albert Einstein in 1936, the foreground star’s gravity could bend the light coming from the visible star, causing the light rays to be concentrated in the direction of the Earth. The visible star would thus brighten for a few weeks and then return to normal as if nothing had happened. Einstein had predicted this gravitational lensing effect but did not believe that it could ever be observed.

See also Doppler effect Doppler-Fizeau effect Double planet system Draper, Henry Dressler, Alan Dwarf planets Dwarf stars . See also G dwarf stars; M dwarf stars; Red dwarf stars Dysnomia(photo) Earth-like planets formation of See also Terrestrial planets Ebel, Denton Eccentric orbits and M dwarf stars Ehrenreich, David Einstein, Albert Einstein ring Elachi, Charles Epsilon Eridani Epsilon Tauri Eris(photo) ESA. See European Space Agency Eta Carina Nebula Europe European Southern Observatory (Chile) European Space Agency (ESA; Frascati, Italy) budget for Cosmic Vision Darwin Mission European Union ExExP (Exoplanet Exploration Program) ExNPS (Exploration of Neighboring Planetary Systems) Exoplanet Exploration Program.


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The Book of Not Knowing: Exploring the True Nature of Self, Mind, and Consciousness by Peter Ralston

Albert Einstein, conceptual framework, different worldview, George Santayana, Isaac Newton, Lao Tzu, Ralph Waldo Emerson

Like traversing a switchback trail, we will encounter the same views again and again, but always from a slightly higher vantage point. Knowing and Not-Knowing Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way. —William James 1:16 Certain names are synonymous with genius. Names like Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, and Galileo live on in our culture because of the remarkable discoveries these people made. Although their fields of expertise were different from one another, each of their impressive contributions began with one simple principle. People like Gautama Buddha, Solomon, and Aristotle are known as sages, people with extraordinary insight and wisdom.

Whether they’re aware of it or not, artists abide in not-knowing when they create, athletes need it to get into the “zone,” lovers use it to allow total communion with another, and scientists must continually return to it before they can make any new discovery. This key to the very source of creativity is available to every human being in every circumstance, and we can all use it to help find our way to a deeper and more genuine experience of ourselves. No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it. —Albert Einstein Self and Being 1:30 Consider the possibility that there are two distinct aspects of yourself. One is what you are originally or naturally. It is your “being,” who you really are without pretense, affectation, programming, or any supplementary process. The other aspect is what you have come to know as yourself—a self-identity that is created and maintained through all the beliefs, assumptions, and knowledge you’ve acquired in life.

I felt like there was no separation between my present experience of being a child standing in my bedroom, and being an old man dying in my bed. This had a profound effect on my experience of life. Aside from being somewhat unnerving, it was probably the time when I first began to grasp what could be revealed through a persistent kind of wondering. It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer. —Albert Einstein 2:11 Some of my questions led to insights, but most only led to more questioning. By the time I was a teenager studying martial arts, it was natural that I would spend as much time “contemplating” Judo as I did practicing it. Unable to train as much as I wanted, I’d spend hours working out the throws in my mind.


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The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values by Sam Harris

Albert Einstein, banking crisis, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, cognitive bias, cognitive load, end world poverty, endowment effect, energy security, experimental subject, framing effect, higher-order functions, hindsight bias, impulse control, John Nash: game theory, language acquisition, longitudinal study, loss aversion, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Monty Hall problem, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, peak-end rule, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, scientific worldview, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, the scientific method, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, ultimatum game, World Values Survey

While I’m not at all sure that it exhausts this mystery, I think there is something to be said for Craik’s idea (Craik, 1943) that an isomorphism between brain processes and the processes in the world that they represent might account for the utility of numbers and certain mathematical operations. Is it really so surprising that certain patterns of brain activity (i.e., numbers) can map reliably onto the world? 77. Collins also has a terrible tendency of cherry-picking and misrepresenting the views of famous scientists like Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein. For instance he writes: Even Albert Einstein saw the poverty of a purely naturalistic worldview. Choosing his words carefully, he wrote, “science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” The one choosing words carefully here is Collins. As we saw above, when read in context (Einstein, 1954, pp. 41–49), this quote reveals that Einstein did not in the least endorse theism and that his use of the word “God” was a poetical way of referring to the laws of nature.

Many people’s reflexive response to the notion of moral expertise is to say, “I don’t want anyone telling me how to live my life.” To which I can only respond, “If there were a way for you and those you care about to be much happier than you now are, would you want to know about it?” 18. This is the subject of that now infamous quotation from Albert Einstein, endlessly recycled by religious apologists, claiming that “science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” Far from indicating his belief in God, or his respect for unjustified belief, Einstein was speaking about the primitive urge to understand the universe, along with the “faith” that such understanding is possible: Though religion may be that which determines the goal, it has, nevertheless, learned from science, in the broadest sense, what means will contribute to the attainment of the goals it has set up.


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Infinite Powers: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe by Steven Strogatz

Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, Astronomia nova, Bernie Sanders, clockwork universe, complexity theory, cosmological principle, Dava Sobel, deep learning, DeepMind, double helix, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, four colour theorem, fudge factor, Henri Poincaré, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Khan Academy, Laplace demon, lone genius, music of the spheres, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precision agriculture, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, Socratic dialogue, Steve Jobs, the rule of 72, the scientific method

By pursuing this ambitious agenda, always in cooperation with other parts of science and technology, calculus has helped make the world modern. Using observation and experiment, scientists worked out the laws of change and then used calculus to solve them and make predictions. For example, in 1917 Albert Einstein applied calculus to a simple model of atomic transitions to predict a remarkable effect called stimulated emission (which is what the s and e stand for in laser, an acronym for light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation). He theorized that under certain circumstances, light passing through matter could stimulate the production of more light at the same wavelength and moving in the same direction, creating a cascade of light through a kind of chain reaction that would result in an intense, coherent beam.

But not on their own—they had to align with known facts and mesh with known theories. When all of that was stirred into the pot, it was almost as if the symbols themselves brought the positron into existence. The Mystery of a Comprehensible Universe For our third example of the eerie effectiveness of calculus, it seems appropriate to end our journey in the company of Albert Einstein. He embodied so many of the themes we’ve touched on: a reverence for the harmony of nature, a conviction that mathematics is a triumph of the imagination, a sense of wonder at the comprehensibility of the universe. Nowhere are these themes more clearly visible than in his general theory of relativity.

The 1928 paper that introduced the Dirac equation is Dirac, “The Quantum Theory.” 298 In 1931 he published a paper: Dirac, “Quantised Singularities.” 298 “one would be surprised”: Ibid., 71. 298 PET scans: Kevles, Naked to the Bone, 201–27, and Higham et al., The Princeton Companion, 816–23. For positrons in PET scanning, see Farmelo, The Strangest Man, and Rich, “Brief History.” 299 Albert Einstein: Isaacson, Einstein, and Pais, Subtle Is the Lord. 299 general relativity: Ferreira, Perfect Theory, and Greene, The Elegant Universe. 299 strange effect on time: For more on GPS and relativistic effects on timekeeping, see Stewart, In Pursuit of the Unknown, and http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast162/Unit5/gps.html. 300 gravitational waves: Levin, Black Hole Blues, is a lyrical book about the search for gravitational waves.


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The Millionaire Fastlane: Crack the Code to Wealth and Live Rich for a Lifetime by Mj Demarco

8-hour work day, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, back-to-the-land, Bernie Madoff, bounce rate, business logic, business process, butterfly effect, buy and hold, cloud computing, commoditize, dark matter, delayed gratification, demand response, do what you love, Donald Trump, drop ship, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial independence, fixed income, housing crisis, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, multilevel marketing, passive income, passive investing, payday loans, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, Ronald Reagan, subscription business, upwardly mobile, wealth creators, white picket fence, World Values Survey, zero day

Your mortality makes time mathematically retarded for wealth creation. If you don't control the variables inherent in your wealth universe, you don't control your financial plan. * * * CHAPTER 13: THE FUTILE FIGHT: EDUCATION The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education. ~ Albert Einstein The Fight Against Uncontrollable Limited Leverage: Education The Slowlaner's natural reaction to the Uncontrollable Limited Leverage (ULL) inherent in their wealth equation is to wage war with intrinsic value by deploying the education weapon. Since ULL defines the Slowlane, the Slowlaner rationalizes that the only variable worthy of escalation is their rate of pay.

A saved dollar is a freedom fighter added to your army. The rich leverage compound interest at its crest, applied against large sums of money. Fastlaners eventually become net lenders. * * * CHAPTER 21: THE REAL LAW OF WEALTH Try not to become a man of success, but a man of value. ~ Albert Einstein Effection, Not Attraction The Law of Effection. Nope, not a misprint. Mathematics is the transcendent language of the universe. It cannot be controverted nor debated. Two plus two equals four. The number 10 million will always be greater than 24. These statements are facts and not subject to interpretation by some mystical theory of philosophy.

Lifestyle extravagances have two costs: the cost itself and the cost to free time. Parasitic debt has to be stopped at the source: instant gratification. * * * CHAPTER 27: CHANGE THAT DIRTY, STALE OIL Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school. ~ Albert Einstein Change the Oil Every 3,000 Miles The first lesson of car ownership: Change the oil every 3,000 miles. Neglect the lesson and your car dies well before its useful life. Frequent oil changes keep your car running efficiently; unchanged oil goes stale and turns the ride rough. Rough rides stall to the shoulder of the road.


Chasing the Moon: The People, the Politics, and the Promise That Launched America Into the Space Age by Robert Stone, Alan Andres

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apollo Guidance Computer, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, Easter island, feminist movement, Gene Kranz, General Motors Futurama, invention of the telephone, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, military-industrial complex, more computing power than Apollo, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, operation paperclip, out of africa, overview effect, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, the scientific method, traveling salesman, Works Progress Administration

Lang hired Oberth, the society’s figurehead president, to be the film’s technical adviser. The film’s studio also engaged Oberth to build a functioning liquid-fuel rocket to promote the movie’s premiere, a project that, despite providing the society needed research-and-development money, was unsuccessful. Albert Einstein and other scientists were among the celebrities who attended the film’s opening, but the only rocket to be seen that night was the one that appeared on the screen, created by the studio’s special-effects department. Although Frau im Mond wasn’t a critical hit, it was historically important for introducing the world’s first rocket countdown.

He watched as scientists and researchers in many disciplines were purged from German academic institutions—primarily for racial reasons—and learned that selected scientific publications were being removed from library shelves. On university campuses, the Nazis conducted public book burnings. Besides scientific works by Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud and literature by Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Mann, the Nazis had also consigned many classic works of science fiction to the bonfires. As he read the news and talked with acquaintances, Ley was alarmed as things he had long opposed were gradually accepted as part of everyday life: a cult of loyalty and blind patriotism, militarism, anti-globalism, superstition, and pseudoscience.

Not long afterward, Lasser was ridiculed on the floor of the House of Representatives as “a crackpot with mental delusions that we can travel to the Moon!” The War Department’s decision to bring scientists and engineers from Hitler’s Third Reich to work for the U.S. government did not go unopposed. Prominent physicists such as Albert Einstein and Hans Bethe as well as former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt criticized Operation Paperclip. But the larger looming reality of the Soviet Union’s brutal domination of Eastern Europe, legitimate fears of domestic espionage, and reports of a possible Russian nuclear-weapons program silenced most public resistance to the program.


pages: 463 words: 118,936

Darwin Among the Machines by George Dyson

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, backpropagation, Bletchley Park, British Empire, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Danny Hillis, Donald Davies, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, finite state, IFF: identification friend or foe, independent contractor, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, launch on warning, low earth orbit, machine readable, Menlo Park, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, pattern recognition, phenotype, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, spectrum auction, strong AI, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture, zero-sum game

“The Institute was a beacon in the descending darkness,” wrote Director Harry Woolf in 1980, reflecting on the first fifty years, “a gateway to a new life, and for a very few a final place within which to continue to work and transmit to others the style and the techniques of great learning from the other shore.”2 After the war the Institute became a permanent home to Albert Einstein, Kurt Gödel, John von Neumann, George Kennan, and other scholars equally distinguished if less well known. J. Robert Oppenheimer reigned as director from 1947 to 1966, presiding over what he described as an “intellectual hotel.” He maintained the Institute’s lead in mathematical physics while hosting transient scholars as diverse as child psychologist Jean Piaget and poet T.

The Institute’s goal was to avoid “dull and increasingly frequent meetings of committees, groups, or the faculty itself. Once started, this tendency toward organization and formal consultation could never be stopped.”9 The Institute for Advanced Study was incorporated on 20 May 1930, with Flexner as first director, followed by Frank Aydelotte in 1939 and J. Robert Oppenheimer in 1947. Albert Einstein and Oswald Veblen were appointed to the first professorships at the end of 1932, joined by John von Neumann, Hermann Weyl, and James Alexander in 1933. The School of Mathematics opened in 1933, followed by Humanistic Studies and Economics in 1935, Historical Studies in 1948, Natural Sciences in 1966, and Social Science in 1973.

Haldane, “Man’s Destiny,” Possible Worlds (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1928), 303. 31.Garrett, Ouroboros, 19. 32.Ibid., 24. 33.Ibid., 100. 34.Ibid., 92. 35.Ibid., 51. 36.Isaac Newton, Opticks; or, A Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections and Colours of Light. The Fourth Edition, Corrected (London: William Innys, 1730); reprinted, with a foreword by Albert Einstein (London: G. Bell, 1931; New York, Dover Publications, 1952), 370 (page citation is to the 1952 edition). 37.Henry David Thoreau, “Walking,” Atlantic Monthly 9, no. 56 (June 1862): 665. INDEX A Aberdeen (Md.) proving ground, 79–80 absolute addressing, 114 Accidents and Emergencies; A Guide for their Treatment before the arrival of Medical Aid (Smee), 45 adaptation, 6, 113, 114 and evolution of software, 57, 185 without natural selection, 176–77 addition, modulo, 66 Adleman, Leonard, 165 AEC (Atomic Energy Commission), 77, 91, 102, 118 Agamemnon (Aeschylus), 131–32 agents (software), 182, 185, 189 Air Force, U.S., 76, 144–45, 152, 178–80, 183. see also nuclear weapons; RAND; SAGE air pump (Boyle), 3, 134 Alamogordo (New Mexico) bomb test, 78 alchemy, 214 Alexander I (Czar), 141 Alexander, James, 96 algae, 112, 129 algebra, 43. see also Boolean algebra; philosophical algebra algorithms, 54, 58, 158 for binary arithmetic, of Leibniz, 37 packet switching, 12, 42, 151 and punched-card data processing, 83–84 alphabet, 49, 62, 132, 137–38, 140, 225 binary coding of, 61, 132–33, 143 genetic, 27, 118 of ideas, and Leibniz, 36–38 of machine instructions, 118, 121 and Turing machine, 55 Ampère, André-Marie (1775–1836) and cybernétique, 6, 141, 161–162 and game theory, 6, 153–54 on telegraphy and electrodynamics, 141 “Analogy Between Mental Images and Sparks” (Richardson), 87 analytical engine (Babbage), 38–43, 59, 68, 103 AN-FSQ-7 computer (Army-Navy Fixed Special eQuipment), 179–81. see also SAGE architecture, computer.


pages: 476 words: 118,381

Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier by Neil Degrasse Tyson, Avis Lang

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Arthur Eddington, asset allocation, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, carbon-based life, centralized clearinghouse, cosmic abundance, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, Gordon Gekko, high-speed rail, informal economy, invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, Karl Jansky, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, Louis Blériot, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pluto: dwarf planet, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, space junk, space pen, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, trade route

The three crew members of Apollo 1 burned to death on the launchpad in 1967. The space shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after launch in 1986, while space shuttle Columbia broke up on reentry in 2003, in both cases killing all seven crew members. Sometimes the risks extend far beyond the discoverers. In 1905 Albert Einstein introduced the equation E = mc 2, the unprecedented recipe that interchanged matter with energy and ultimately begat the atomic bomb. Coincidentally, just two years before the first appearance of Einstein’s famous equation, Orville Wright made the first successful flight in an airplane, the vehicle that would one day deliver the first atomic bombs in warfare.

Shortly after the invention of the airplane, there appeared in one of the widely distributed magazines of the day a letter to the editor expressing concern over possible misuse of the new flying machine, noting that if an evil person took command of a plane, he might fly it over villages filled with innocent, defenseless people and toss canisters of nitroglycerin on them. Wilbur and Orville Wright are, of course, no more to blame for the deaths resulting from military application of the airplane than Albert Einstein is to blame for deaths resulting from atomic bombs. For better or for worse, discoveries take their place in the public domain and are thus subject to patterns of human behavior that seem deeply embedded and quite ancient. Discovery and the Human Ego The history of human ideas about our place in the universe has been a long series of letdowns for everybody who likes to believe we’re special.

But it was self-evident that our galaxy, the Milky Way, was in the center of the expansion of the universe. Having been an attorney before becoming an astronomer, Hubble probably would have won any debate he might have had with other scientists, no matter what he argued, but he clearly could muster the evidence for an expanding universe with us at the center. In the context of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, however, the appearance of being at the center was a natural consequence of a universe that expands in four dimensions, with time as number four. Given that description of the universe, every galaxy would observe all other galaxies to be receding, leading inescapably to the conclusion that we are not alone, and we are not special.


pages: 384 words: 112,971

What’s Your Type? by Merve Emre

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, behavioural economics, card file, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, emotional labour, fake news, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gabriella Coleman, God and Mammon, Golden Gate Park, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, index card, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, means of production, Menlo Park, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, p-value, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, planned obsolescence, Ralph Waldo Emerson, scientific management, Socratic dialogue, Stanford prison experiment, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, women in the workforce

Of all the shades in the personality paint box, one appeared brighter to Katharine than all the others: intuition. It was a wholly abstract concept to her. One could not touch or taste or see intuition at work, she thought, and yet one often heard people declare with great certainty that intuition was the key to genius. “A new idea comes suddenly and in a rather intuitive way,” proclaimed Albert Einstein in 1926, the same year Katharine gathered her courage and wrote the first of many letters she would send to Jung. The letter did not read like a conventional fan letter. It was serious, probing. She asked him to clarify what precisely intuition was and why, on page 547 of Psychological Types, he had referred to it as “the noblest gift of man.”

As a family, the Briggses were also involved with the war effort, although not through the politicization of personality type that Katharine’s unpublished writings on Hitler suggested. In 1939, Lyman, who had served as director of the Bureau of Standards for the past five years, had been asked by President Roosevelt to head the Advisory Committee on Uranium. At about the same time the United States entered the war, three of the world’s leading physicists—Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, and Leo Szilard—had concluded that an enriched element called “uranium-235” was a fissile isotope: a material capable of sustaining a nuclear chain reaction. “This phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable—though much less certain—that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed,” Einstein warned Roosevelt.

“How, then, can a psychologist foretell”: Henry Murray, Assessment of Men: Part 1 (New York: Rinehart and Co., 1948). “Between now and the cessation of hostilities”: Murray, “Analysis of the Personality of Adolph Hitler.” Instead, it preserved: “Newspaper Clippings,” Folder 14, Box 4331, KCB. “Whatever his peacetime sins”: Saunders, Katharine and Isabel, 100. “This phenomenon”: Albert Einstein to Theodore Roosevelt, August 2, 1939, Atomic Heritage Foundation, Washington, D.C. It promised to be an era: Henry Murray, “World Concord as a Goal for Social Sciences,” International Congress of Psychology, Stockholm, Sweden, 1951. “Nothing in the modern scene”: “Type Moralities.” “In the darkest days of World War Two”: Mary McCaulley, “Person Behind the MBTI 1988,” PGP.


pages: 408 words: 114,719

The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began by Stephen Greenblatt

Albert Einstein, Bonfire of the Vanities, classic study, complexity theory, Eratosthenes, George Santayana, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, work culture

“Donne’s Atomies and Anatomies: Deconstructed Bodies and the Resurrection of Atomic Theory,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 31 (1991), pp. 69–94. Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. ———. The Elements of Law Natural and Politic: Human Nature, De Corpore Politico, Three Lives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Hoffman, Banesh. Albert Einstein, Creator and Rebel. New York: Viking Press, 1972. Holzherr, George. The Rule of Benedict: A Guide to Christian Living, with Commentary by George Holzherr, Abbot of Einsiedeln. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1994. Horne, Herbert. Alessandro Filipepi, Commonly Called Sandro Botticelli, Painter of Florence.

“Epicurus and Annihilation,” Philosophical Quarterly 39 (1989), pp. 81–90. ———. “The Symmetry Argument: Lucretius Against the Fear of Death,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 50 (1989), pp. 353–73. ———. “Epicurus on Pleasure and the Complete Life,” The Monist, 73 (1990). Rosler, Wolfgang. “Hermann Diels und Albert Einstein: Die Lukrez-Ausgabe Von 1923/24,” Hermann Diels (1848–1922) et la Science de l’Antique. Geneva: Entretiens sur l’Antique Classique, 1998. Rowland, Ingrid D. Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008. Ruggiero, Guido, ed. A Companion to the Worlds of the Renaissance.

“Shelley and Lucretius,” Review of English Studies 10 (1959), pp. 269–82. Tyndall, John. “The Belfast Address,” Fragments of Science: A Series of Detached Essays, Addresses and Reviews. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1880, pp. 472–523. Ullman, B. L. Studies in the Italian Renaissance. Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1955. Vail, Amy, ed. “Albert Einstein’s Introduction to Diels’ Translation of Lucretius,” The Classical World 82 (1989), pp. 435–36. Valla, Lorenzo. De vero falsoque bono, trans. and ed., Maristella de Panizza Lorch. Bari: Adriatica, 1970. ———. On Pleasure, trans. A. Kent Hieatt and Maristella Lorch. New York: Abaris Books, 1977, pp. 48–325.


pages: 501 words: 114,888

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, call centre, cashless society, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital twin, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental economics, fake news, food miles, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, gigafactory, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hive mind, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, loss aversion, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Lou Jepsen, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, mobile money, multiplanetary species, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, urban planning, Vision Fund, VTOL, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize

Unfortunately, maybe it was the strain of her discoveries, maybe it was just bad luck, but not long after she finished the translation, Ada fell ill. The world’s first computer programmer and one of the most interesting minds in history was dead by age thirty-six. And this raises a second question: How many of us die before we’re done? What might Ada Lovelace or Albert Einstein or Steve Jobs have accomplished with an additional thirty years of healthy life? It’s ironic that as we reach our later years, when we have the most knowledge, the sharpest skills, and the greatest number of fruitful relationships, old age takes us out of the game. This brings us to our final accelerating force, which is an attempt to solve this problem: the extended healthy human lifespan.

Only two months after Hitler became chancellor, the writing was on the wall. Over the next decade, more than 133,000 German Jews fled for America. In context, it’s as if every living soul in Charleston, South Carolina, relocated to Texas or, it would be, if the population of South Carolina also included Albert Einstein and five other Nobel Laureates. To measure the impact of this influx, Petra Moser started with chemistry patents. Then, she expanded into nearly every technical field, measuring the number of patents applied for and received from 1920 to 1970, tracking the impact of migration through the records of more than a half-a-million inventions.

For an overview of this research, see: https://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/august/german-jewish-inventors-081114.html. “More than half of my colleagues at Stanford are immigrants”: Ibid. outpouring began in April of 1933: Petra Moser, “German Jewish Émigrés and US Invention,” American Economic Review, October, 2014. Albert Einstein and five other Nobel Laureates: Andrew Grant, “The Scientific Exodus from Nazi Germany,” Physics Today, September 26, 2018. See: https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.4.20180926a/full/. A 2012 study by the Partnership for a New American Economy: Partnership for a New American Economy, “Patent Pending: How Immigrants Are Reinventing the American Economy,” June 2012.


Succeeding With AI: How to Make AI Work for Your Business by Veljko Krunic

AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, anti-fragile, anti-pattern, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, Bayesian statistics, bioinformatics, Black Swan, Boeing 737 MAX, business process, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, correlation coefficient, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, Gini coefficient, high net worth, information retrieval, Internet of things, iterative process, job automation, Lean Startup, license plate recognition, minimum viable product, natural language processing, recommendation engine, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, six sigma, smart cities, speech recognition, statistical model, strong AI, tail risk, The Design of Experiments, the scientific method, web application, zero-sum game

The professor might make a mistaken assumption, but an objective observer would attribute that to a simple judgment error that anyone could make. But what if this hypothetical class is in the late 1890s? What if it’s a class in physics, and the remarks are coming from a fellow who happens to be named Albert Einstein? What if the professor is short on patience with his comments regardless? I don’t know about you, but my assessment of the professor’s motivation would be far less favorable. I wouldn’t give the professor the benefit of the doubt that they’re mistaking Albert Einstein for a student who’s either skeptical of the value of physics or uninterested in academic accomplishments. At the very least, I would think that the professor has a problem distinguishing between a personality conflict they have with the student and a student who can’t achieve much in physics.

209 Anomaly detection algorithms [166] are likely to flag Einstein being in the physics class as an anomaly. Those algorithms find rare and unusual occurrences in a population (that’s what the term anomaly refers to in this context). In a physics program hosted by a prestigious university, people uninterested in academia or skeptical of the value of physics would be rare. Albert Einstein is certainly rare. While these two individuals look quite different to a human, algorithms don’t have common sense and might declare them both to be simply anomalous. If your algorithm treats all anomalies as the same, a human might perceive its conclusion as a malicious treatment of Einstein.


System Error by Rob Reich

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, AI winter, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deplatforming, digital rights, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, financial innovation, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Goodhart's law, GPT-3, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Lean Startup, linear programming, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, move fast and break things, Myron Scholes, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, NP-complete, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, Philippa Foot, premature optimization, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trolley problem, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, union organizing, universal basic income, washing machines reduced drudgery, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, When a measure becomes a target, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, you are the product

Part II Disaggregating the Technologies What the inventive genius of mankind has bestowed upon us in the last hundred years could have made human life care free and happy if the development of the organizing power of man had been able to keep step with his technical advances. . . . As it is, the hardly bought achievements of the machine age in the hands of our generation are as dangerous as a razor in the hands of a three-year-old child. —Albert Einstein, writing in the Nation, 1932 Chapter 4 Can Algorithmic Decision-Making Ever Be Fair? In 1998, on the heels of a few new acquisitions and a modest IPO, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos set out to articulate the company’s core values. He identified five, including a “high bar for talent.” Though the company was still in its early days, he knew that attracting a high-performing team would be essential to realizing his grand vision of an everything store, something that far exceeded the company’s then identity as “the world’s largest online bookstore.”

Eminent writers and scholars were enlisted as contributors to the several thousand pages that came to make up the work. At the start of the twentieth century, Britannica was—ironically, given its name—acquired by an American firm and continued to grow in eminence, with contributing authors including Nobel Prize winners such as Milton Friedman and Albert Einstein. With the advent of the internet, it was only natural that Britannica would go online. In 2012, the print version was discontinued, and now only digital versions are sold. Presaging the demise of Britannica’s print run, in January 2001 Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, inspired by the open-source software movement, created Wikipedia, an organically grown online encyclopedia.

“In a time of rapid technological change”: Tom Wheeler, “Internet Capitalism Pits Fast Technology Against Slow Democracy,” The Brookings Institution, May 6, 2019, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/techtank/2019/05/06/internet-capitalism-pits-fast-technology-against-slow-democracy/. PART II: Disaggregating the Technologies “the inventive genius of mankind”: Albert Einstein, “The 1932 Disarmament Conference,” Nation, September 4, 1931, repr. August 23, 2001, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/1932-disarmament-conference-0/. CHAPTER 4: Can Algorithmic Decision-Making Ever Be Fair? “high bar for talent”: Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (New York: Little, Brown, 2013), 88.


pages: 44 words: 12,233

Simplify by Joshua Becker

Albert Einstein, Mason jar, white picket fence

But there is one big difference between them: we’ll have to do our taxes again next year (unfortunately), but we only get one shot at this life (unfortunately). Live it for the things that matter by becoming a fan of the invisible, lasting things today. PRINCIPLE #5: PERSEVERE Not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted. — Albert Einstein Goals Shape Us and Change Us My friend Cheryl had a goal in mind. I knew her in high school and her goal was to receive a diving scholarship from the University of Nebraska. All through her high school years, this goal motivated her in incredible ways. It inspired her to wake up early in the morning and hit the gym.


pages: 240 words: 65,363

Think Like a Freak by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner

Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, autonomous vehicles, Barry Marshall: ulcers, behavioural economics, call centre, carbon credits, Cass Sunstein, colonial rule, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Everything should be made as simple as possible, fail fast, food miles, gamification, Gary Taubes, Helicobacter pylori, income inequality, information security, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, medical residency, Metcalfe’s law, microbiome, prediction markets, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, sunk-cost fallacy, Tony Hsieh, transatlantic slave trade, Wayback Machine, éminence grise

Why does that fourth-grader seem plenty smart in conversation but can’t answer a single question when it’s written on the blackboard? Sure, driving drunk is dangerous, but what about drunk walking? If an ulcer is caused by stress and spicy foods, why do some people with low stress and bland diets still get ulcers? As Albert Einstein liked to say, everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. This is a beautiful way to address the frictions that bedevil modern society: as grateful as we are for the complex processes that have produced so much technology and progress, we are also dizzied by their sprawl.

See also: Douglas Heingartner, “Better Vision for the World, on a Budget,” New York Times, January 2, 2010; and “Comprehensive Eye Exams Particularly Important for Classroom Success,” American Optometric Association (2008). For the “four-eyes” stigma and “planos” (in footnote), see Dubner, “Playing the Nerd Card,” Freakonomics Radio, May 31, 2012. 93 AS ALBERT EINSTEIN LIKED TO SAY . . . : Thanks again to Garson O’Toole at QuoteInvestigator.com. 94 LET’S RETURN BRIEFLY TO BARRY MARSHALL: Once again, we drew heavily from the excellent interview of Marshall conducted by Norman Swan, “Interviews with Australian Scientists: Professor Barry Marshall,” Australian Academy of Science, 2008. 96 EXPERT PERFORMANCE: See, for starters, Stephen J.


pages: 239 words: 69,496

The Wisdom of Finance: Discovering Humanity in the World of Risk and Return by Mihir Desai

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, AOL-Time Warner, assortative mating, Benoit Mandelbrot, book value, Brownian motion, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, carried interest, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, follow your passion, George Akerlof, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, housing crisis, income inequality, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Jony Ive, Kenneth Rogoff, longitudinal study, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, Monty Hall problem, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, principal–agent problem, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, tontine, transaction costs, vertical integration, zero-sum game

Why and how were they moving? Soot particles did the same thing, making it clear that the pollen particles weren’t autonomously doing something. The conventional history of subsequent intellectual developments goes like this: in his annus mirabilis of 1905, when he produced four remarkable breakthroughs, Albert Einstein provided the first understanding of the mechanisms of so-called Brownian motion. He demonstrated that many processes that seem continuous (like the motion of dust or pollen) are in fact the product of many discrete particles moving about. In other words, the pollen particles were moving around in a continuous way because they were reacting to tiny water molecules that were bumping them at random.

This narrative concludes that finance lost its way by promoting precision and models over human reality by trying to describe inherently social phenomena with physics and quantum mechanics. This is a convenient narrative that suits those who are dissatisfied with the rise of finance—but it is shoddy intellectual history. In fact, the person who beat Albert Einstein to the punch by five years was Louis Bachelier, a doctoral student in Paris. Rather than studying the movement of particles, he studied the movement of stocks and derived the mathematics to describe all kinds of motion, including the motion of pollen particles observed by Robert Brown. How did he do it?


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The Rise of the Quants: Marschak, Sharpe, Black, Scholes and Merton by Colin Read

Abraham Wald, Albert Einstein, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, Black-Scholes formula, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, collateralized debt obligation, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discovery of penicillin, discrete time, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, Henri Poincaré, implied volatility, index fund, Isaac Newton, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, margin call, market clearing, martingale, means of production, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Paul Samuelson, price stability, principal–agent problem, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, RAND corporation, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, stochastic process, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Chicago School, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Works Progress Administration, yield curve

At the turn of the twentieth century, the French mathematician Louis Bachelier (1870–1946) produced a PhD thesis with the title “The Theory of Speculation.” In this revolutionary thesis, Bachelier was the first to apply the mathematical model of Brownian motion to the movement of security prices. He did so five years before Albert Einstein applied the same model to the movement of small particles. Einstein and Bachelier both noted that, beyond a common drift element, the movement of a particle or a stock from one period to the next is uncorrelated. We now know this phenomenon as the random walk. We return to Bachelier’s model later in our discussion of options pricing theory, and more fully in the next volume of our series on Applications 33 the random walk and the efficient market hypothesis.

This paper was published the following summer as the other bookend to a paper that Samuelson had written on the life cycle of portfolio risk tolerance. In fact, Merton later admitted that his strategy was to learn the mathematics he needed rather than the economics his professors taught, much like Albert Einstein had done as a graduate physics 144 The Rise of the Quants student. He agreed that this was not the best strategy to secure superior grades. However, the proof is in the pudding. He produced five essays for his PhD thesis, three of which were published by refereed finance and economics journals even before his dissertation team could witness his PhD defense.


pages: 212 words: 68,754

Thinking in Numbers by Daniel Tammet

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anton Chekhov, computer age, dematerialisation, Edmond Halley, Georg Cantor, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, index card, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Paul Erdős, Searching for Interstellar Communications, Vilfredo Pareto

Their faces show mild puzzlement, curiosity and nerves. Shortly afterwards, reporters arrive to hold the microphones and man the television cameras. They film the display cases containing astrolabes, compasses and mathematical manuscripts. Someone asks about the blackboard that hangs high on the wall opposite us. Albert Einstein used it during a lecture, the curator explains, on 16 May 1931. What about the chalky equations? They show the physicist’s calculations for the age of the universe, replies the curator. According to Einstein, the universe is about ten, or perhaps one hundred, thousand million years old. Footfalls increase on the museum’s stone steps as the hour approaches.

It is enough. Palms come together; hands clap. Someone lets out a cheer. ‘A new record,’ someone else says: 22,514 decimal places. ‘Congratulations.’ I take a bow. For five hours and nine minutes, eternity visited a museum in Oxford. Einstein’s Equations Speaking about his father, Hans Albert Einstein once said, ‘He had a character more like that of an artist than of a scientist as we usually think of them. For instance, the highest praise for a good theory or a good piece of work was not that it was correct nor that it was exact but that it was beautiful.’ Numerous other acquaintances also remarked on Einstein’s belief in the primacy of the aesthetic, including the physicist Hermann Bondi, who once showed him some of his work in unified field theory.


pages: 204 words: 66,619

Think Like an Engineer: Use Systematic Thinking to Solve Everyday Challenges & Unlock the Inherent Values in Them by Mushtak Al-Atabi

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Black Swan, Blue Ocean Strategy, business climate, call centre, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive bias, corporate social responsibility, dematerialisation, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, follow your passion, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, happiness index / gross national happiness, invention of the wheel, iterative process, James Dyson, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, Lean Startup, mirror neurons, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, remote working, shareholder value, six sigma, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, systems thinking

I was happy that I could talk to my husband about this, without still feeling angry and without snapping and yelling!” Chapter 4 Conceive Conceive /k n si v/ v. Create (an embryo) by fertilising an egg Form or devise (a plan or idea) in the mind Form a mental representation of; imagine Oxford Dictionary “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” Albert Einstein “Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve.” W. Clement Stone As mentioned earlier in the book, every human-made artefact somehow starts in the brain. This is true whether we are talking about a consumer product, a mobile phone app, a bridge, or an airplane. This is also true for other less tangible products such as songs, jokes, symphonies and novels.

Analysing the success of these master performers in different fields reveal that prior to achieving mastery, producing masterpieces, and high level of performance, these masters have failed again and again, learning from their every failure and using failures as stepping-stones towards success. This is true if we study Albert Einstein, Henry Ford or Michael Jordan. Many people use WD40 spray to loosen rusted metal parts, but very few know why the product is named WD40. The reason behind the name is that the manufacturer tried 39 failed formulas before reaching the successful 40th one. The Wrights brothers tried more than 200 wing designs and crashed their plane 7 times before being able to fly, and Dyson tried more than 2,000 failing models before he managed to get his revolutionary vacuum cleaner to work, earning him millions in the process.


pages: 220 words: 66,518

The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter & Miracles by Bruce H. Lipton

Albert Einstein, Benoit Mandelbrot, Boeing 747, correlation does not imply causation, data science, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Isaac Newton, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Mars Rover, nocebo, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, phenotype, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), stem cell, sugar pill

Long before cell biology and studies of children in orphanages, conscious parents and seers like Rumi knew that for human babies and adults the best growth promoter is love. A lifetime without Love is of no account Love is the Water of Life Drink it down with heart and soul Epilogue SPIRIT AND SCIENCE The most beautiful and profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the power of all true science. — Albert Einstein We’ve come a long way since Chapter 1, when I faced my panicked medical students and started my journey to the New Biology. But throughout the book I have not strayed far from the theme I introduced in the first chapter—that smart cells can teach us how to live. Now that we’re at the end of the book, I’d like to explain how my study of cells turned me into a spiritual person.

I am particularly indebted to the following muses who have helped make this book a reality. The Muses of Science: I am indebted to the spirits of science, for I am fully aware that forces outside of myself have guided me in bringing this message to the world. Special blessings to my heroes, Jean-Baptiste de Monet de Lamarck and Albert Einstein, for their world-changing spiritual and scientific contributions. The Muses of Literature: The intention to write a book on the New Biology was spawned in 1985, though it was not until Patricia A. King came into my life in 2003 that this book could come into reality. Patricia is a Bay Area freelance writer and former Newsweek reporter who worked for a decade as the magazine’s San Francisco Bureau Chief.


pages: 257 words: 66,480

Strange New Worlds: The Search for Alien Planets and Life Beyond Our Solar System by Ray Jayawardhana

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Arthur Eddington, Boeing 747, cosmic abundance, dark matter, Donald Davies, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, fake news, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, Late Heavy Bombardment, Louis Pasteur, Neil Armstrong, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Pluto: dwarf planet, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper

The Doppler technique—using spectral line shifts to trace the subtle dance of stars as planets tug on them—has been the most successful in the frst ffteen years. But two other methods have also reached maturity—and are paying off handsomely. Both depend on fnding chance alignments of celestial objects through brightness changes of stars. The frst technique exploits a remarkable property of gravity that Albert Einstein discovered: its ability to bend light, thus to magnify the brightness of a distant star temporarily when a nearer star happens to cross our line of sight to the former. If the nearby star harbors a planet, the planet’s gravity causes an extra blip, betraying its presence. The second method relies on a phenomenon scientists have known about for nearly four centuries.

McCormick had no idea what that meant, but the target was in the direction of the Milky Way’s bulge, high in the sky above Auckland, and easy to acquire. She decided to give it a try. Little did McCormick know that she, a Kiwi mother with no formal scientifc training, was treading on the legacy of Albert Einstein, possibly the most celebrated scientist of all time. In his general theory of relativity, completed in 1915, Einstein proposed a whole new theory of gravity. Instead of the Newtonian idea of gravity as an attractive force, he conceptualized gravity as geometry: a massive object warps the fabric of space-time around it.


pages: 244 words: 68,223

Isaac Newton by James Gleick

Albert Einstein, Astronomia nova, complexity theory, dark matter, Edmond Halley, Fellow of the Royal Society, fudge factor, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Richard Feynman, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

Sir Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and His System of the World. Translated by Andrew Motte (1729), revised by Florian Cajori. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1947. Newton’s Principia: The Central Argument: Translation, Notes, and Expanded Proofs. Dana Densmore and William H. Donahue. Santa Fe: Green Lion Press, 1995. Opticks. Foreword by Albert Einstein. New York: Dover, 1952. The Background to Newton’s Principia: A Study of Newton’s Dynamical Researches in the Years 1664–1684. John Herivel. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965. Certain Philosophical Questions: Newton’s Trinity Notebook. J. E. McGuire and Martin Tamny. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Reports and Papers of the Architectural & Archeological Society of the County of Lincoln 39 (1928). Galileo Galilei. The Controversy on the Comets of 1618. Translated by Stillman Drake and C. D. O’Malley. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1960. ———. Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems—Ptolemaic & Copernican. Translated by Stillman Drake, foreword by Albert Einstein. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967. ———. Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo. Translated by Stillman Drake. New York: Anchor Books, 1957. Garber, Daniel; and Ayers, Michael. The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Gaule, John.


pages: 297 words: 69,467

Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style by Benjamin Dreyer

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Albert Einstein, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, elephant in my pajamas, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Jane Jacobs, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, non-fiction novel, Norman Mailer, pre–internet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, W. E. B. Du Bois

To cite one majestically apposite instance: In July 2017, the writer Colin Dickey stumbled upon a 2013 tweet from the elder daughter of the person who would, eventually, assume the presidency of the United States: “If the facts don’t fit the theory, change the facts.” —ALBERT EINSTEIN As Dickey then himself tweeted, “That Einstein never said any such thing only makes this tweet that much more perfect.” And indeed and in fact, and no matter the hundreds of Google hits suggesting otherwise, the quip had not ever emerged from the mouth or pen of Albert Einstein. It’s simply a bit of unattributable pseudo-cleverness assigned, presumably to lend it weightiness and importance, to someone who, particularly in this case, would never have said it.


pages: 272 words: 66,985

Hyperfocus: How to Be More Productive in a World of Distraction by Chris Bailey

Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Bluma Zeigarnik, Cal Newport, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, correlation does not imply causation, deliberate practice, functional fixedness, game design, imposter syndrome, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Parkinson's law, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, side hustle, SimCity, Skype, TED Talk, twin studies, Zipcar

This chapter is one of the shortest in the book, because the main idea is simple: scatterfocus mode helps us to recharge our ability to hyperfocus, in addition to letting us plan for the future and become more creative. CHAPTER 8 CONNECTING DOTS It’s not that I’m so smart; it’s just that I stay with problems longer. —Albert Einstein BECOMING MORE CREATIVE As well as enabling you to plan for the future and replenish your supply of mental energy, scatterfocus allows you to become more creative. You can use scatterfocus mode to become more creative in two ways: first, by connecting more dots; and second, by collecting more valuable dots—a topic that will be covered in the next chapter.

Like a magician’s, the methods of a genius are mysterious—until you untangle the web of connections that leads to them. These individuals usually have more experience, have put in more hours of deliberate practice, and, most important, have connected more dots than anyone else. As author Malcolm Gladwell wrote: “Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.” Albert Einstein was undoubtedly a genius—he connected more dots, in more unique ways, than almost any other human. At the same time, he was bound by the same mental limits that we all are. To conceive of an idea like the general theory of relativity, he had to collect and connect an incredible number of dots so he could bridge ideas from nature and mathematical concepts, forming connections others hadn’t.


pages: 224 words: 64,156

You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, accounting loophole / creative accounting, additive manufacturing, Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, call centre, cloud computing, commoditize, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, different worldview, digital Maoism, Douglas Hofstadter, Extropian, follow your passion, General Magic , hive mind, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Conway, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Long Term Capital Management, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, Project Xanadu, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, social graph, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, telepresence, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, trickle-down economics, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog

Let’s say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year … One percent of that is 98 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation. So how many seconds of salvaged erstwhile television time would need to be harnessed to replicate the achievements of, say, Albert Einstein? It seems to me that even if we could network all the potential aliens in the galaxy—quadrillions of them, perhaps—and get each of them to contribute some seconds to a physics wiki, we would not replicate the achievements of even one mediocre physicist, much less a great one. Absent Intellectual Modesty There are at least two ways to believe in the idea of quality.

To understand the problem, let’s focus on hard science, the area aside from pop culture where Wikipedia seems to be the most reliable. In fact, let’s consider the hardest of the hard: math. Math as Expression For many people math is hard to learn, and yet to those who love it, doing math is a great joy that goes beyond its obvious utility and puts it in an aesthetic realm. Albert Einstein called it “the poetry of logical ideas.” Math is an arena in which it’s appropriate to have high hopes for the future of digital media. A superb development—which might take place in decades or centuries to come—would be for some new channel of communication to come along that makes a deep appreciation of math more widely available.


pages: 239 words: 56,531

The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine by Peter Lunenfeld

Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, anti-globalists, Apple II, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business cycle, business logic, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, East Village, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, folksonomy, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Free Software Foundation, Grace Hopper, gravity well, Guggenheim Bilbao, Herman Kahn, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, Mother of all demos, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, plutocrats, post-materialism, Potemkin village, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, social bookmarking, social software, spaced repetition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, Thomas L Friedman, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, walkable city, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

What follows here catalogs some of the strategies that these media have followed in this new era. T SIDEBAR The Soviet Man Who Fell to Earth Of all the delightful thought experiments that theoretical physics has given birth to, from Erwin Schrödinger’s cat to Richard Feynman’s Brownian ratchet, my favorite is Albert Einstein’s “twins paradox.”4 This story of two brothers explains the 49 CHAPTER 3 relativity of space and time. The first brother travels into space, while the other stays on Earth. The space farer is on a fast rocket and goes on a ten-year journey. When he returns home, though, he finds out that his brother has aged twenty years during his trip.

It is also important to see Bush’s promotion of the Memex as a way to transform the death-dealing technologies of World War II into something beneficial to all of humankind, and something that expanded the power of these ideas beyond the tiny technical and military communities that were then using them. Like J. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Manhattan Project, Bush was part of a generation of scientists who were more heavily involved in the development of weapons of mass destruction than any other previous one to them. Albert Einstein, a generation older, stood at an Olympian distance from the destruction caused by atomic energy, becoming a secular saint of genius, while Oppenheimer, who had been one of the architects of the bomb, became increasingly despondent about the human capacity for self-destruction. Bush, like Oppenheimer, had been actively involved in the war effort.


pages: 239 words: 70,206

Data-Ism: The Revolution Transforming Decision Making, Consumer Behavior, and Almost Everything Else by Steve Lohr

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bioinformatics, business cycle, business intelligence, call centre, Carl Icahn, classic study, cloud computing, computer age, conceptual framework, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, driverless car, East Village, Edward Snowden, Emanuel Derman, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Future Shock, Google Glasses, Ida Tarbell, impulse control, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of writing, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, lifelogging, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, meta-analysis, money market fund, natural language processing, obamacare, pattern recognition, payday loans, personalized medicine, planned obsolescence, precision agriculture, pre–internet, Productivity paradox, RAND corporation, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Salesforce, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, six sigma, skunkworks, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, The Design of Experiments, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tony Fadell, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, yottabyte

The schism between scientific and “literary intellectuals,” he warned, threatened to stymie economic and social progress, if those in the humanities remained ignorant of the advances in science and their implications. The lecture was widely read in America, and among those influenced were two professors at Dartmouth College, John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz. Kemeny, a mathematician and a former research assistant to Albert Einstein, would go on to become the president of Dartmouth. Kurtz was a young math professor in the early 1960s when he approached Kemeny with the idea of giving nearly all students at Dartmouth a taste of programming on a computer. Kemeny and Kurtz saw the rise of computing as a major technological force that would sweep across the economy and society.

Edwards Deming, the statistician and quality control expert, or Peter Drucker, the management consultant. Who said it first doesn’t matter so much. It’s a mantra in business and it has the ring of commonsense truth. The second quote is not as well known, but there is a lot of truth in it as well: “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” Albert Einstein usually gets credit for this one, but the stronger claim of origin belongs to the sociologist William Bruce Cameron—though again, who said it first matters far less than what it says. Big data represents the next frontier in management by measurement. The technologies of data science are here, they are improving, and they will be used.


pages: 229 words: 67,599

The Logician and the Engineer: How George Boole and Claude Shannon Created the Information Age by Paul J. Nahin

air gap, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Edward Thorp, Fellow of the Royal Society, finite state, four colour theorem, Georg Cantor, Grace Hopper, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, knapsack problem, New Journalism, Pierre-Simon Laplace, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, thinkpad, Thomas Bayes, Turing machine, Turing test, V2 rocket

With his PhD in hand, and after spending the summer of 1940 back at Bell Labs, Shannon used a National Research Council Fellowship for a year’s stay at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where he worked under the great mathematician Hermann Weyl. Also there were such luminaries as John von Neumann and Albert Einstein. He might even have bumped into Richard Feynman, who was working on his PhD in physics at Princeton. Also there with Shannon was his first wife, Norma Levor (born 1920), whom he had married in 1939. Theirs was an intense, passionate, but ultimately doomed brief marriage, and Norma left him in June 1941.

Shannon’s sense of humor was not to be denied, though, and he managed to keep crummy in the text. Speaking of Shannon’s sense of humor, there is a very funny story that Shannon himself was fond of telling that further illuminates his own lack of self-importance. When once giving a talk at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, Albert Einstein came into the room and stayed at the back. After listening to Shannon speak for a few minutes, he leaned over to whisper into the ear of a nearby man; the man whispered a reply and then Einstein quickly left. After the talk Shannon hastened over to the man to ask what the Great Man had said. “He wanted to know,” Shannon was told, “which way to the nearest men’s room.” 7.


pages: 225 words: 65,922

A Grand and Bold Thing: An Extraordinary New Map of the Universe Ushering by Ann K. Finkbeiner

Albert Einstein, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, digital map, Galaxy Zoo, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, Magellanic Cloud, Skype, slashdot

“You know, two times two times two times two is probably worth sixteen.” Gollust apparently agreed with Jerry’s multiplicative thinking and agreed to give the survey money, probably around $2 million. Then Jerry enlisted the support of Princeton’s own heavyweight neighbor, the Institute for Advanced Study, famous for having been the American home of Albert Einstein. Around Prince-ton, it’s just called the Institute. Compared to Princeton’s stone courtyards, the Institute gives the impression of having been built and maintained to budget, but the trees are huge, the surrounding meadows are mowed and conducive to walking, and for a place in the middle of the I-95 corridor, it’s deeply peaceful.

And because cosmologists’ understanding of the universe is based on physics, the cluelessness extends to physics, mankind’s most basic science. Not that the physicists don’t have theories anyway: Maybe it’s just some sort of energy they hadn’t known about. Maybe gravity doesn’t work the way Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity says it does. Maybe Einstein’s famous cosmological constant—which he put into the equations of general relativity to fudge the universe’s expansion and which he later took back out—was right after all and space/time has some weird springiness that acts like antigravity, and we call it dark energy.


pages: 472 words: 117,093

Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future by Andrew McAfee, Erik Brynjolfsson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, asset light, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, backtesting, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, British Empire, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, complexity theory, computer age, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, discovery of DNA, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial innovation, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, law of one price, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Lyft, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Mustafa Suleyman, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, plutocrats, precision agriculture, prediction markets, pre–internet, price stability, principal–agent problem, Project Xanadu, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Davenport, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transaction costs, transportation-network company, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, Two Sigma, two-sided market, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, yield management, zero day

target=apps..social. 167 less than 1% of worldwide smartphone sales: Gartner, “Gartner Says Worldwide Smartphone Sales Grew 3.9 Percent in First Quarter of 2016,” May 19, 2016, table 2, https://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3323017. 167 “Microsoft’s Nokia experiment is over”: Tom Warren, “Microsoft Lays Off Hundreds as It Guts Its Phone Business,” Verge, May 25, 2016, http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/25/11766344/microsoft-nokia-impairment-layoffs-may-2016. 168 more than 20,000 layoffs: ZDNet, “Worst Tech Mergers and Acquisitions: Nokia and Microsoft, AOL and Time Warner,” Between the Lines (blog), February 13, 2016, http://www.zdnet.com/article/worst-tech-mergers-and-acquisitions-nokia-and-microsoft-aol-and-time-warner. 168 almost $8 billion in write-downs: Nick Wingfield, “Cutting Jobs, Micro-soft Turns Page on Nokia Deal,” New York Times, July 8, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/09/technology/microsoft-layoffs.html. 168 the largest in Microsoft history: Gregg Keizer, “Microsoft Writes Off $7.6B, Admits Failure of Nokia Acquisition,” Computerworld, July 8, 2015, http://www.computerworld.com/article/2945371/smartphones/microsoft-writes-off-76b-admits-failure-of-nokia-acquisition.html. 168 By 2009, the BlackBerry operating system powered 20%: Statista, “Global Smartphone OS Market Share Held by RIM (BlackBerry) from 2007 to 2016, by Quarter,” accessed February 5, 2017, https://www.statista.com/statistics/263439/global-market-share-held-by-rim-smartphones. 168 By the end of 2016 the company had announced: Andrew Griffin, “BlackBerry Announces It Will Make No More New Phones,” Independent, September 28, 2016, http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/blackberry-announces-it-will-make-no-more-new-phones-a7334911.html. 168 saw its market value drop below $4 billion: Google Finance, “BlackBerry Ltd (NASDAQ:BBRY),” accessed February 5, 2017, https://www.google.com/finance?cid=663276. 170 “Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler”: Wikiquote, s. v. “Albert Einstein,” last modified January 29, 2017, https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein. 170 The difference between the two: Shane Rounce, “UX vs. UI,” Dribbble, December 7, 2014, https://dribbble.com/shots/1837823-UX-vs-UI. 170 Friendster: Gary Rivlin, “Wallflower at the Web Party,” New York Times, October 15, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/15/business/yourmoney/15friend.html. 170 News Corp bought it for $580 million in 2005: Vauhini Vara and Rebecca Buckman, “Friendster Gets $10 Million Infusion for Revival Bid,” Wall Street Journal, August 21, 2006, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB115612561104040731. 170 “Of the people you know”: Fame Foundry, “DeadSpace: 7 Reasons Why My-Space Is as Good as Dead,” August 1, 2009, http://www.famefoundry.com/382/deadspace-7-reasons-why-myspace-is-as-good-as-dead. 171 MySpace was sold by News Corp: Todd Spangler, “Time Inc.

Concern for the man himself and his fate must always form the chief interest of all technical endeavors; concern for the great unsolved problems of the organization of labor and the distribution of goods in order that the creations of our mind shall be a blessing and not a curse to mankind. Never forget this in the midst of your diagrams and equations. — Albert Einstein, 1931 OVER THE NEXT TEN YEARS, YOU WILL HAVE AT YOUR DISPOSAL 100 times more computer power than you do today. Billions of brains and trillions of devices will be connected to the Internet, not only gaining access to the collective knowledge of our humanity, but also contributing to it. And by the end of the decade, more and more of that knowledge will be accessed by software agents, and created by them.


pages: 433 words: 124,454

The Burning Answer: The Solar Revolution: A Quest for Sustainable Power by Keith Barnham

Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Arthur Eddington, carbon footprint, credit crunch, decarbonisation, distributed generation, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, Ernest Rutherford, Higgs boson, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Michael Shellenberger, Naomi Klein, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Ted Nordhaus, the scientific method, uranium enrichment, wikimedia commons

I hope to explain enough about the application and the physics of both equations to demonstrate an amazing coincidence about humankind. Our civilisation is on the cusp. We are possibly the only civilisation in the universe that did not discover one or other of these crucial equations first. In our civilisation, the equation E = mc2 was discovered and the equation E = hf was explained in the same year by the same man – Albert Einstein. A century later, our civilisation could still go either way; destroying ourselves with E = mc2 like all alien civilisations as Hawking speculates, or achieving sustainability with E = hf like civilisations that may have survived. I want to show you how the equation that can save our civilisation works.

But the equation E = hf is not usually named after Planck alone. It took Einstein’s genius to explain the revolutionary nature of this equation. Meanwhile, in a patent office in Berne … Was E = hf just a mathematical trick? What was needed was a physical picture of what the equation meant. As so often in physics history, Albert Einstein provided the physical picture. In 1905 Einstein was not a practising academic physicist. He was a young patent officer in Berne, Switzerland. But in that one year, in his spare moments, he found time to publish a number of groundbreaking papers. His interpretation of E = hf was but one. He also published his first papers on his theory of relativity and on E = mc2.

In the past, I had spent many happy hours there. I decided I could do worse than look at some papers. Perhaps I might find some guidance on a new research field? Browsing the racks of preprints and the latest journals, I came across a collection of papers from a conference held that year, 1979, to commemorate the works of Albert Einstein. Had he lived, the great man would have been 100. That meant Einstein was only 26 when he started both quantum theory and relativity in the same year. I was then 36. I realised I had better get started if I was serious about a new research career. Standing at the racks, I skimmed through the list of contents marvelling yet again at the unique breadth of Einstein’s contributions to physics.


Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the Transformation of World Food Production by Vaclav Smil

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, invention of gunpowder, Louis Pasteur, military-industrial complex, Pearl River Delta, precision agriculture, recommendation engine, The Design of Experiments

A similar case, which has only recently become better known, comes immediately to mind: the disintegration of the marriage between Albert Einstein and Mileva Maric. She was Einstein’s fellow physics student (the only woman) at the Eidgenösische Technische Hochschule in Zurich, and their illegitimate daughter was given away for adoption (they finally married in 1903). Although no solid evidence supports such a claim, Mileva may have collaborated on some of Einstein key ideas before she transformed herself into a housewife. A great love affair ended in a bitter separation. See Renn, J., and Schulmann, R., eds. 1992. Albert Einstein, Mileva Maric: The Love Letters. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 34.

The German army and the German people are one’’—was signed by 93 scientists.66 Among the prominent names were three past (Paul Ehrlich, Emil Fischer, and Wilhelm Ostwald) and three future (Richard Willstätter, Fritz Haber, and Walther Nerst) Nobel Prize winners, who were convinced that Germany bore no responsibility for the war and that it simply had to defend itself.67 Albert Einstein’s pacifist proclamation attracted four signatures, including his own! But the blind enthusiasm for war was shortlived as it became obvious that Germany would not achieve a lightning victory on the Western front. After the horrendous loss of life brought by an enormous expenditure of munitions during the first Battle of the Marne (September 6–9, 1914) it was realized that trench warfare would require more explosives than foreseen before the war.


pages: 420 words: 121,881

The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution by Jonathan Eig

Albert Einstein, experimental subject, feminist movement, Norman Mailer, placebo effect, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Rosa Parks, Upton Sinclair, W. E. B. Du Bois, women in the workforce

The woman was Margaret Sanger, one of the legendary crusaders of the twentieth century. The man was Gregory Goodwin Pincus, a scientist with a genius IQ and a dubious reputation. Pincus was forty-seven years old, five feet ten and a half inches tall, with a bristly mustache and graying hair that shot from his head in every direction. He looked like a cross between Albert Einstein and Groucho Marx. He would speed into a room, working a Viceroy between his yellowed fingers, and people would huddle close to hear what he had to say. He wasn’t famous. He owned no scientific prizes. No world-changing inventions were filed under his name. In fact, for a long stretch of his career he had been an outcast from the scientific establishment, rejected as a radical by Harvard, humiliated in the press, and left with no choice but to conduct his varied and oftentimes controversial experiments in a converted garage.

Reich was the prophet of the orgasm. He even devised a special box—the Orgone Energy Accumulator—to help harness orgasmic energy, which he believed circulated in the atmosphere and in the human bloodstream. Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, William Steig, and many other intellectuals later sat in the box (Albert Einstein considered it but politely declined). Eventually the federal government labeled Reich a fraud, but by then it didn’t matter. He had already inspired a generation of believers who would become central players in the sexual revolution. After Reich came Alfred Kinsey. At first glance, Kinsey did not look like a radical.

He was on the cusp of what promised to be a brilliant career teaching and conducting research at one of the wealthiest and most prestigious universities in the world. Just like that, it was gone. Pincus may have been the victim of small-mindedness and anti-Semitism, but he was also undone by his own outsized ego. He scrambled. He applied for jobs but received no offers. He arranged a meeting with Albert Einstein. He asked some of his wealthy and influential cousins for help. But he couldn’t find another college willing to hire him. He appealed to his former classmate, Hudson Hoagland, who had left Harvard and gone to work at Clark University in Worcester, where he had taken over a three-man biology department.


pages: 481 words: 120,693

Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else by Chrystia Freeland

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, assortative mating, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, Bullingdon Club, business climate, call centre, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, double helix, energy security, estate planning, experimental subject, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, high net worth, income inequality, invention of the steam engine, job automation, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, liberation theology, light touch regulation, linear programming, London Whale, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, NetJets, new economy, Occupy movement, open economy, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, postindustrial economy, Potemkin village, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, seminal paper, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, the long tail, the new new thing, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wage slave, Washington Consensus, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

Progress and Poverty, George’s most important book, sold three million copies and was translated into German, French, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Spanish, Russian, Hungarian, Hebrew, and Mandarin. During his lifetime, George was probably the third best-known American, eclipsed only by Thomas Edison and Mark Twain. He was admired by foreign luminaries of the age, too—Leo Tolstoy, Sun Yat-sen, and Albert Einstein, who wrote that “men like Henry George are rare, unfortunately. One cannot imagine a more beautiful combination of intellectual keenness, artistic form and fervent love of justice.” George Bernard Shaw described his own thinking about the political economy as a continuation of the ideas of George, whom he had once heard deliver a speech.

Because I’m notorious and when I say [something], people say: ‘Well, he’s the one that thought this out.’ Well, I may just be saying things that other people have thought out before.” The scientist who best exemplifies the self-fulfilling power of fame is, ironically, the one most of us would immediately name as the twentieth century’s brightest example of pure intellectual genius: Albert Einstein. Einstein was indeed a groundbreaking physicist, whose theory of relativity ushered in the nuclear age and transformed the way we think about the material world. But why is he a household name, while Niels Bohr, who made important contributions to quantum mechanics and developed a model of atomic structure that remains valid today, or James Watson, one of the discoverers of the double helix structure of DNA, is not?

“Although comparable data on the past are sparse” “Global Wealth Report 2011,” Credit Suisse Research Institute, October 2011. 93 percent of the gains Saez, “Striking It Richer.” “Probably if you had looked at the situation” CF interview with Emmanuel Saez, February 24, 2011. CHAPTER 2: CULTURE OF THE PLUTOCRATS “Somebody ought to sit down” Scott Turow, Pleading Guilty (Grand Central Publishing, 1994), p. 174. “men like Henry George” Albert Einstein, letter to Anna George de Mille, 1934. http://www.cooperativeindividualism.org/einstein-albert_letters-to-anna-george-demille-1934.html. “the battle cry for all” Joanne Reitano, The Restless City: A Short History of New York from Colonial Times to the Present (Taylor & Francis, 2006), p. 101.


pages: 415 words: 125,089

Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk by Peter L. Bernstein

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Roth, Andrew Wiles, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, cognitive dissonance, computerized trading, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, endowment effect, experimental economics, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, Fermat's Last Theorem, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, full employment, Great Leap Forward, index fund, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, linear programming, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, mental accounting, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Norman Macrae, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Post-Keynesian economics, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, prudent man rule, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, spectrum auction, statistical model, stocks for the long run, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, trade route, transaction costs, tulip mania, Vanguard fund, zero-sum game

Never again would science appear so unreservedly benign, nor would religion and family institutions be so unthinkingly accepted in the western world. World War I put an end to all that. Radical transformations in art, literature, and music produced abstract and often shocking forms that stood in disturbing contrast to the comfortable modes of the nineteenth century. When Albert Einstein demonstrated that an imperfection lurked below the surface of Euclidean geometry, and when Sigmund Freud declared that irrationality is the natural condition of humanity, both men became celebrities overnight. Up to this point, the classical economists had defined economics as a riskless system that always produced optimal results.

He believed that there is too much going on for us to figure it all out by studying a set of finite experiments, but, like most of his contemporaries, he was convinced that there was an underlying order to the whole process, ordained by the Almighty. The missing part to which he alluded with "only for the most part" was not random but an invisible element of the whole structure. Three hundred years later, Albert Einstein struck the same note. In a famous comment that appeared in a letter to his fellow-physicist Max Born, Einstein declared, "You believe in a God who plays with dice, and I in complete law and order in a world which objectively exists."2 Bernoulli and Einstein may be correct that God does not play with dice, but, for better or for worse and in spite of all our efforts, human beings do not enjoy complete knowledge of the laws that define the order of the objectively existing world.

Of Men and Numbers: The Story of the Great Mathematicians. New York: Dodd, Mead.* Nasar, Sylvia, 1994. "The Lost Years of a Nobel Laureate." The New York Times, November 13, 1994, Section 3, p. 1. Newman, James R., 1988a. The World of Mathematics: A Small Library of the Literature of Mathematics from A'h-mose the Scribe to Albert Einstein. Redmond, Washington: Tempus Press.* Newman, James R., 1988b. "Commentary on an Absent-Minded Genius and the Laws of Chance." In Newman, 1988a, pp. 1353-1358. Newman, James R., 1988c. "Commentary on Lord Keynes." In Newman, 1988a, pp. 1333-1338. Newman, James R., 1988d. "Commentary on Pierre Simon De Laplace."


pages: 533 words: 125,495

Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters by Steven Pinker

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, backpropagation, basic income, behavioural economics, belling the cat, Black Lives Matter, butterfly effect, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, clean water, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Attenborough, deep learning, defund the police, delayed gratification, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Easter island, effective altruism, en.wikipedia.org, Erdős number, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, fake news, feminist movement, framing effect, George Akerlof, George Floyd, germ theory of disease, high batting average, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index card, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, libertarian paternalism, Linda problem, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, microaggression, Monty Hall problem, Nash equilibrium, New Journalism, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, Peter Singer: altruism, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, post-truth, power law, QAnon, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, Richard Thaler, scientific worldview, selection bias, social discount rate, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, twin studies, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, Walter Mischel, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

But when we embrace the proposition that all humans are created equal (“if X is human, then X has rights”), we can sequester these impressions from our legal and moral decision making, and treat all people equally. 4 PROBABILITY AND RANDOMNESS A thousand stories which the ignorant tell, and believe, die away at once, when the computist takes them in his gripe. —Samuel Johnson1 Though Albert Einstein never said most of the things he supposedly said, he did say, in several variations, “I shall never believe that God plays dice with the world.”2 Whether or not he was right about the subatomic world, the world we live in certainly looks like a game of dice, with unpredictability at every scale.

Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. The citation does not lead to a primary source, but it was probably a letter to Max Born in 1926. A variant occurs in a letter to Cornelius Lanczos, quoted in Einstein 1981, and three more may be found in Einstein’s Wikiquote entry, https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein. 3. Eagle 2019; randomness as incompressibility, usually called Kolmogorov complexity, is discussed in section 2.2.1. 4. Millenson 1965. 5. Gravity poster: http://www.mooneyart.com/gravity/historyof_01.html. 6. Gigerenzer, Hertwig, et al. 2005. 7. Quoted in Bell 1947. 8.

., The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chance-randomness/. Earman, J. 2002. Bayes, Hume, Price, and miracles. Proceedings of the British Academy, 113, 91–109. Edwards, A. W. F. 1996. Is the Pope an alien? Nature, 382, 202. https://doi.org/10.1038/382202b0. Einstein, A. 1981. Albert Einstein, the human side: New glimpses from his archives (H. Dukas & B. Hoffman, eds.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Eisenstein, E. L. 2012. The printing revolution in early modern Europe (2nd ed.). New York: Cambridge University Press. Eliot, G. 1883/2017. Essays of George Eliot (T.


pages: 741 words: 179,454

Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk by Satyajit Das

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, carbon credits, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, Celtic Tiger, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deal flow, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discrete time, diversification, diversified portfolio, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Goodhart's law, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, Herman Kahn, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Bogle, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, load shedding, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, negative equity, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Nixon shock, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Satyajit Das, savings glut, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, tail risk, Teledyne, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the market place, the medium is the message, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Turing test, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

If you can invest the savings in the market at the end of every year and earn 20 percent each year on your investment, what will you have at the end of 40 years? $10,722,032. If you invest your $121.67 savings from foregone lattes at the end of each month, you will have $20,365,160 in your latte retirement fund. As Albert Einstein supposedly noted “compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world.” Column Inches Columnists, name journalists or authorities known for being famous rather than for their output, express opinions on the topic du jour. Opinion pieces provide opportunities for banks to get their views in front of the masses.

“Since our universe...exists a mere 20 billion years we, finance theorists, would have had to wait for another trillion universes before one such change could be observed.... A truly miraculous event.”25 But nobody wanted to accept that their models were incorrect. Confronted with quantum theory, Albert Einstein refused to believe that God played dice with the universe. But as Stephen Hawking remarked: “Not only does God play dice, but...he sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen.”26 In his 1986 presidential address to the American Finance Association, Fischer Black distinguished between noise and information.

Soviet economists had access to the latest Western economics publications because “the Party ruled that these were mathematical works...purely technical, devoid of ideological content.”29 Models were increasingly the product of data mining, trawling through historical data to find a relationship and prove or reject hypotheses. More data and improved statistical methods overwhelmed common sense. Albert Einstein knew the problem: “As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.” Researchers “saw” patterns in data. But strong correlation does not prove causality. In the late 1940s, before the invention of the polio vaccine, American public health experts thought they had discovered a correlation between polio cases and increased consumption of ice cream and soft drinks.


pages: 68 words: 15,188

The New One Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard, Spencer Johnson, M. D.

Albert Einstein

“Everyone might not do a great job of using the resources at hand, so they may not get an A, but why not set it up so that everyone has a chance to be a winner?” The Manager continued, “I remember once reading that back when practically everyone knew their own phone number, someone asked the genius Albert Einstein what his number was and he went to the phone book to look it up. “He said he never cluttered his mind with information he could find somewhere else. “Now, if you didn’t know better, what would you think of someone in those days who had to look up his own number? Would you think he was a winner or a loser?”


pages: 61 words: 16,429

Just Keep Calm & Take Some Magnesium - Why a "Boring" Mineral Is Suddenly Hot Property for Soothing Bodies and Calming Minds by James Lee

Albert Einstein, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, epigenetics, life extension, planned obsolescence, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), stem cell

Where this area of inquiry will get truly interesting is when we are able to prevent Nlrp3 from doing its job, possibly preventing a range of inflammatory diseases that reduce life expectancy. Indeed, initial mouse experiments have shown that by reducing the activity of Nlrp3 the test subjects appeared to be protected from a range of age-related conditions such as dementia, bone loss and glucose intolerance. Recently Zhang et al, from Albert Einstein College of Medicine found that at least some of the inflammatorily mediated aging we see appears to be related to inflammation in the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus is the part of your brain central to the control of autonomic functions and hormonal control. These researchers found that inflammation in the hypothalamus appeared to trigger a range of age-related health problems such as metabolic syndrome.


pages: 254 words: 72,929

The Age of the Infovore: Succeeding in the Information Economy by Tyler Cowen

Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, behavioural economics, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, cognitive bias, David Brooks, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Flynn Effect, folksonomy, framing effect, Google Earth, Gregor Mendel, impulse control, informal economy, Isaac Newton, loss aversion, Marshall McLuhan, Naomi Klein, neurotypical, new economy, Nicholas Carr, pattern recognition, phenotype, placebo effect, Richard Thaler, selection bias, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, the medium is the message, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Tyler Cowen

It turns out she has developed a system for remembering people by their clothes and that she applied her system very conscientiously and consistently; without the system she would be lost. People such as myself, who have normal face-recognition abilities, usually have no such system. The result was that this woman—some might call her “handicapped”—had a much better sense of the crowd than I did. Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel, Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, Samuel Johnson, Vincent van Gogh, Thomas Jefferson, Bertrand Russell, Jonathan Swift, Alan Turing, Paul Dirac, Glenn Gould, Steven Spielberg, and Bill Gates, among many others, are all on the rather lengthy list of famous figures who have been identified as possibly autistic or Asperger’s.

If you’re wondering, a typical list of historical figures claimed to be on the autism spectrum includes Hans Christian Andersen, Lewis Carroll, Herman Melville, George Orwell, Jonathan Swift, William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, Bela Bartók, Bob Dylan, Glenn Gould, Vincent van Gogh, Andy Warhol, Mozart, Gregor Mendel, Charles Darwin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Henry Cavendish, Samuel Johnson, Albert Einstein, Alan Turing, Paul Dirac, Emily Dickinson, Michelangelo, Bertrand Russell, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, Isaac Newton, and Willard Van Orman Quine, among others. When it comes to any individual life, I have my worries about making any firm judgments. First, for some of these lives I know a bit about, such as Mozart’s, I just don’t see the evidence for autism.


pages: 270 words: 75,473

Time Management for System Administrators by Thomas A.Limoncelli

8-hour work day, Albert Einstein, Big Tech, business cycle, Debian, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, PalmPilot, Steve Jobs

In fact, when I'm working on Project A but worried about Project B, the best thing I can do is to write Project B down in my to do list and try to get it out of my head. Then, I can focus on Project A. I trust the to do list to "remember" B for me, so I don't have to continue to waste mental energy on it. It might be apocryphal, but it is believed that Albert Einstein's closet contained seven identical suits—one for each day of the week. This was, the story goes, so that he could conserve his brain power for physics and not waste it on the mundane task of deciding what to wear each day. Maybe this is why Steve Jobs always wears black turtlenecks. (Personally, I have many pairs of the exact same socks, but that's just so I never have more than one unmatched sock when I do laundry.)

I used to think that the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I remembered who was telling me this. --Emo Philips If it makes your brain feel less insulted, just remember that by not filling it with boring lists of to do items, we are reserving it for the powerhouse tasks. In Chapter 1, I mentioned the story about Albert Einstein trying to reserve as much of his brain as possible for physics by eliminating other brainwork, like deciding what to wear each day. Legend also has it that Einstein didn't memorize addresses or phone numbers, even his own. The important ones were written on a slip of paper in his wallet so as not to use up precious brain capacity.


pages: 278 words: 70,416

Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success by Shane Snow

3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, attribution theory, augmented reality, barriers to entry, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, fail fast, Fellow of the Royal Society, Filter Bubble, Ford Model T, Google X / Alphabet X, hive mind, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, popular electronics, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, social bookmarking, Steve Jobs, superconnector, vertical integration

In a typical US high school, many of the teachers fall into the category of broad but shallow experts themselves. The health teacher becomes the Spanish teacher, then temporarily the geography teacher. But, really, he’s the football coach. Bless his heart, but he’s basically building a road out of mud. And that’s where Finland’s education system found its platform advantage. III. Albert Einstein is famously quoted: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” He didn’t actually say it.* But in the 1990s, Finnish educators decided to take the cliché to heart. Upon landing in Helsinki, Wagner and his crew made a beeline for some local high schools.

In the meantime, absent any clear evidence as to how best proceed, the majority of teachers quite understandably default to more or less the same teaching methods that they themselves experienced. Overwhelmingly that is the traditional method, though the fact that no one has been able to make this approach work (for the majority of students) in three-thousand years does make some wonder if there is a better way.” 93 “The definition of insanity”: Though variously attributed to Albert Einstein and Mark Twain, this phrase seems to have first appeared in World Service Conference (Narcotics Anonymous, 1981), 11. 95 Finnish schools allowed students unrestricted use of calculators: Science and Engineering Indicators 2002 (National Science Board, 2002), chapter 1. Though Tony Wagner’s research and international test scores indicate that Finland’s education trump all in a 2009 journal article in the Teaching of Mathematics, Olli Martio demonstrates that many Finnish students (the bottom 80 percent) had poorer high-level mental math skills in 2003 than in 1981, and blames the use of calculators and the omission of geometry curricula.


pages: 253 words: 80,074

The Man Who Invented the Computer by Jane Smiley

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Bletchley Park, British Empire, c2.com, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, Henri Poincaré, IBM and the Holocaust, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Karl Jansky, machine translation, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, Pierre-Simon Laplace, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Turing machine, Vannevar Bush, Von Neumann architecture

Once his paper “On Computable Numbers” was completed and published in the spring of 1936, Alan Turing’s world expanded again—by the end of that September, he was at Princeton, enjoying (or not) a graduate fellowship there and meeting some of the best mathematical minds in the world. He wrote home in October with a list of those who were around: John von Neumann, Hermann Weyl, Richard Courant, G. H. Hardy, Albert Einstein, Solomon Lefschetz, and Alonzo Church. He regretted having missed Kurt Gödel, who had been there the year before, and perhaps Paul Bernays (of whom he was a bit disdainful—Turing was feeling more and more self-confident). Hardy, whom he knew from Cambridge, was friendly, but Turing found the way Americans talked unpleasant and Princeton disconcerting—casual and familiar, if sometimes fun (an impromptu hockey team of which Turing was a member went to Vassar and played an entertaining game with another impromptu team of girls).

After completing his degrees at Berlin and Zurich (where a paper he wrote was sent to David Hilbert, the man who posed the problem that Turing addressed in “On Computable Numbers,” and so impressed him that he assiduously cultivated the young man), von Neumann went to the University of Göttingen in 1926, just about the same time that Atanasoff was first at Iowa State (and Flowers first went to work at Dollis Hill). In 1930, von Neumann was invited to Princeton, and two years later he was given a professorship at the Institute for Advanced Study, along with Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel. It was there that he met Alan Turing, to whom he offered the job as research assistant in 1938. Clearly, von Neumann’s personality and biography meshed to produce a man who was perhaps preternaturally political in a way that was unusual in a mathematician or an inventor—he was not only completely at ease in all sorts of social situations, he was extraordinarily aware of the ramifications of larger sorts of politics.


pages: 373 words: 80,248

Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle by Chris Hedges

Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bear Stearns, Cal Newport, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, Glass-Steagall Act, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, income inequality, Joseph Schumpeter, Naomi Klein, offshore financial centre, Plato's cave, power law, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, single-payer health, social intelligence, statistical model, uranium enrichment

A few media giants, such as AOL Time Warner, General Electric, Viacom, Disney, and Rupert Murdoch’s NewsGroup, control nearly everything we read, see, and hear. “Private capital tends to become concentrated in [a] few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of the smaller ones,” Albert Einstein wrote in 1949 in the Monthly Review in explaining why he was a socialist:The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature.

Bacevich, The Limits of Power (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008), 172. 2 David Barstow, “One Man’s Military-Industrial-Media Complex,” New York Times, Nov. 29, 2008: 172. 3 Robert Bellah, Habits of the Heart (Berkeley and Los Angeles, Calif.: University of California Press, 1985), 285. 4 Albert Einstein, “Why Socialism?” Monthly Review (May 1949). Rpt. In http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/Einstein.htm. 5 Cited in Glenn Greenwald, “There’s Nothing Unique About Jim Cramer,” Salon 13 (March 2009), www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/03/13/cramer. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “Message to Congress on Curbing Monopolies,” April 29, 1938.


pages: 292 words: 76,185

Pivot: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One by Jenny Blake

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Cal Newport, cloud computing, content marketing, data is the new oil, diversified portfolio, do what you love, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fear of failure, future of work, high net worth, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Lean Startup, minimum viable product, Nate Silver, passive income, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, solopreneur, Startup school, stem cell, TED Talk, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, white picket fence, young professional, zero-sum game

Hobbies encourage you to get out of your comfort zone, and you may even end up serendipitously meeting people who are helpful to your pivot in surprising ways. If you have a hobby that involves being physically active, so much the better. You will get all the happy chemicals from exercise, and the endorphin reward of succeeding as your skills develop. Albert Einstein called this combinatory play, and would often discover innovative ideas during his violin breaks. This practice was so important to his process that he famously said, “Combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought.” LIMIT LINEAR THINKING When asked about his strategy for writing stand-up comedy, Chris Rock said, “Forget being a comedian, just act like a reporter.

The dip: Seth Godin, The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick) (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2007). Building new skills: Jason Shen, “Why Practice Actually Makes Perfect: How to Rewire Your Brain for Better Performance,” Buffer App Blog, May 28, 2013, blog.bufferapp.com/why-practice-actually-makes-perfect-how-to-rewire-your-brain-for-better-performance. Albert Einstein called this: Maria Popova, “How Einstein Thought: Why ‘Combinatory Play’ Is the Secret of Genius,” BrainPickings.org, August 14, 2013, www.brainpickings.org/2013/08/14/how-einstein-thought-combinatorial-creativity/. “Forget being a comedian”: Frank Rich, “In Conversation: Chris Rock,” New York Magazine, December 1, 2014.


pages: 232 words: 72,483

Immortality, Inc. by Chip Walter

23andMe, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Arthur D. Levinson, bioinformatics, Buckminster Fuller, cloud computing, CRISPR, data science, disintermediation, double helix, Elon Musk, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Menlo Park, microbiome, mouse model, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, South China Sea, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Thomas Bayes, zero day

If the drugs reduced senescent cells in painful joints, was it possible your average human would also become generally healthier and younger? It turns out the lab rat trial was right on the money. Human trials were scheduled for 2018, with results expected in 2019. In the Bronx, at the Institute for Aging Research at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, director Nir Barzilai was working to raise $50 million for an FDA trial he felt could slow aging in one fell swoop, using a drug called metformin. It had been around since the 1950s, and was used to lower insulin resistance in people with diabetes. It turns out that the drug has effects similar to Kenyon’s mutated Daf-2 gene.

In separate conversations, he and Kurzweil and de Grey each mentioned to me that if all parties in the scientific world shared their insights, everyone in the field would benefit—and that included Calico. Naturally, theories about how the company came to be and where it was headed abounded. Nir Barzilai, the director of the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and the scientist who was working to raise $50 million for an FDA trial using metformin, said he didn’t know what the company was doing, but whatever it was, it didn’t seem to be attacking the problem. Another scientist who claimed to be familiar with Calico said the company began as a vanity project, “as self-serving as the Medici [family] building a Renaissance chapel in Italy, but with a little extra Silicon Valley narcissism thrown in.”


pages: 265 words: 79,944

First Light: Switching on Stars at the Dawn of Time by Emma Chapman

Albert Einstein, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, Arthur Eddington, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, Edmond Halley, Edward Charles Pickering, endowment effect, Ernest Rutherford, friendly fire, Galaxy Zoo, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, horn antenna, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, loss aversion, low earth orbit, Magellanic Cloud, Neil Armstrong, Olbers’ paradox, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the long tail, uranium enrichment, Wilhelm Olbers

I have described light as a wave so far, but this is only a half-truth. Sometimes light is better understood as a particle. This seems strange, but it is a phenomenon known as wave-particle duality, a consequence of quantum mechanics. We call the particles constituting light photons. German physicist Albert Einstein showed that the wavelength of light was equivalent to a photon that carried a certain amount of energy.18 The shorter the wavelength, the higher the energy the photon had. I think Newton would have been thrilled with this, as he insisted throughout his scientific career that light was ‘corpuscular’, or made of particles.

This is not to cast blame on Russell or admonish Payne-Gaposchkin for not standing her ground. The result was bizarre in the context of the day, and even the most level-headed scientists can be distracted from evidence when it clashes so completely with their embedded world view. One only needs to look at the best-known physicist of all, Albert Einstein, and see the lengths he went to avoid the conclusion that the Universe is expanding. Payne-Gaposchkin moved on to other research, but over the next few years other complementary evidence piled up to support her findings. In only a few short years, Russell published a paper announcing that stars were indeed mostly made of hydrogen.


pages: 478 words: 142,608

The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, Brownian motion, cosmological principle, David Attenborough, Desert Island Discs, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, gravity well, Gregor Mendel, invisible hand, John von Neumann, Jon Ronson, luminiferous ether, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Murray Gell-Mann, Necker cube, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, placebo effect, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, unbiased observer

I recommend the technique to other authors, but I must warn that for best results the reader must be a professional actor, with voice and ear sensitively tuned to the music of language. CHAPTER 1 A DEEPLY RELIGIOUS NON-BELIEVER I don’t try to imagine a personal God; it suffices to stand in awe at the structure of the world, insofar as it allows our inadequate senses to appreciate it. –ALBERT EINSTEIN DESERVED RESPECT The boy lay prone in the grass, his chin resting on his hands. He suddenly found himself overwhelmed by a heightened awareness of the tangled stems and roots, a forest in microcosm, a transfigured world of ants and beetles and even – though he wouldn’t have known the details at the time – of soil bacteria by the billions, silently and invisibly shoring up the economy of the micro-world.

There are many intellectual atheists who proudly call themselves Jews and observe Jewish rites, perhaps out of loyalty to an ancient tradition or to murdered relatives, but also because of a confused and confusing willingness to label as ‘religion’ the pantheistic reverence which many of us share with its most distinguished exponent, Albert Einstein. They may not believe but, to borrow a phrase from the philosopher Daniel Dennett, they ‘believe in belief’.4 One of Einstein’s most eagerly quoted remarks is ‘Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.’ But Einstein also said, It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated.

Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to divine a purpose. From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: that man is here for the sake of other men – above all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness depends. –ALBERT EINSTEIN Many religious people find it hard to imagine how, without religion, one can be good, or would even want to be good. I shall discuss such questions in this chapter. But the doubts go further, and drive some religious people to paroxysms of hatred against those who don’t share their faith.


pages: 505 words: 142,118

A Man for All Markets by Edward O. Thorp

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 3Com Palm IPO, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Brownian motion, buy and hold, buy low sell high, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carried interest, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Edward Thorp, Erdős number, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, Garrett Hardin, George Santayana, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Henri Poincaré, high net worth, High speed trading, index arbitrage, index fund, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Livingstone, I presume, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, Mason jar, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Murray Gell-Mann, Myron Scholes, NetJets, Norbert Wiener, PalmPilot, passive investing, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, Pluto: dwarf planet, Ponzi scheme, power law, price anchoring, publish or perish, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, RFID, Richard Feynman, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical arbitrage, stem cell, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, tail risk, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Predators' Ball, the rule of 72, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, uptick rule, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, Works Progress Administration

Bachelier used mathematics to develop a theory for pricing options on the Paris stock exchange (the Bourse). His thesis adviser, the world-famous mathematician Henri Poincaré, didn’t value Bachelier’s effort, and Bachelier spent the rest of his life as an obscure provincial professor. Meanwhile a twenty-six-year-old Swiss patent clerk named Albert Einstein would soon publish in his single “miraculous year” of 1905 a series of articles that would transform physics. One of these initiated the Theory of Relativity, which revolutionized the theory of gravitation and led to the nuclear age. The second paper, on the particle nature of light, helped launch the Quantum Theory.

Among others it involved Harry Markowitz, who later won a Nobel Prize in Economics, and John Shelton, a leading finance professor and warrant theorist. Though profitable, the gains were not enough to keep it from disappearing from the scene after three years. would transform physics For a full account see the inspiring Annus Mirabilis: 1905, Albert Einstein and the Theory of Relativity, by John and Mary Gribbin, Penguin, New York, 2005. of stock price changes See the article by Case M. Sprenkle in The Random Character of Stock Market Prices, Paul H. Cootner, editor, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1964. riskless interest rate Academic economists and financial theorists have long assumed, as in the Black-Scholes formula, that US Treasury bonds and their short-term version, bills, are riskless.

Note that the average of $37 million, divided by the cutoff of $11.5 million, is 3.2, very close to the result of the same calculation for the wealth distribution of the Forbes 400, suggesting that 2007 superrich taxable income followed the same, or nearly the same, power law as that for wealth. CHAPTER 24 disputed origin The claimed sources include Benjamin Franklin, various Rothschilds, Albert Einstein, Bernard Baruch, and “unknown.” $22 million result These figures do not include trading costs or income taxes. A buy-and-hold investor loses little to trading costs and is taxed only on dividends. Taxes, if any, vary with the investor. less than the last So-called decreasing marginal utility.


pages: 404 words: 134,430

Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time by Michael Shermer

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anesthesia awareness, anthropic principle, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, cosmological principle, death from overwork, discovery of DNA, Eddington experiment, false memory syndrome, Gary Taubes, Higgs boson, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, laissez-faire capitalism, Laplace demon, life extension, moral panic, Murray Gell-Mann, out of africa, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

We would talk about the real far-out ideas in physics, such as the many-histories interpretation of physics. I read Godel's paper on closed time-like curves. I was fascinated by that and went and got a copy of the second volume of Albert Einstein, Philosopher/Scientist. I read that Einstein became aware of this possibility when he was generating the general theory of relativity, and he even discussed the Godel paper. That gave me confidence because the majority of the community of physicists may not believe in the possibility of time travel, but Kurt Godel and Albert Einstein did, and those were not lightweight scientists. (1995) Tipler's first published paper appeared in the prestigious Physical Review.

Pseudoscientists do not correct the errors of their predecessors; they perpetuate them. By cumulative change I mean, then, that when a paradigm shifts, scientists do not abandon the entire science. Rather, what remains useful in the paradigm is retained as new features are added and new interpretations given. Albert Einstein emphasized this point in reflecting upon his own contributions to physics and cosmology: "Creating a new theory is not like destroying an old barn and erecting a skyscraper in its place. It is rather like climbing a mountain, gaining new and wider views, discovering unexpected connections between our starting point and its rich environment.


pages: 440 words: 132,685

The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World by Randall E. Stross

Albert Einstein, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, cotton gin, death of newspapers, distributed generation, East Village, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, Livingstone, I presume, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, plutocrats, Saturday Night Live, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, urban renewal, vertical integration, world market for maybe five computers

Why was it important to know what copra was, it asked, unless one clerked in a grocery store? The Chicago Tribune sent a reporter to the University of Chicago to see how well current students would do on the test and, not surprisingly, they did not do well (no one, in fact, could handle that question on the bounding of West Virginia). When Albert Einstein arrived in Boston, he was confronted with what one paper called the “ever-present Edison questionnaire” and was asked, “What is the speed of sound?” He was not able to say, he replied calmly through his secretary, but pointed out that the answer was readily available in reference books. The headline in the New York Times gave readers this summary of the news story: “Einstein Sees Boston; Fails on Edison Test.”

Without an eponymous company selling new versions of Edison’s inventions, his fame would be subject to the normal wear and tear from the passage of time. It is not a little surprising how durable it has proven to be. One measure is a poll of Chinese who were asked in 1998 to list the best-known Americans: Ahead of Mark Twain, number four, and Albert Einstein, number three, and even ahead of Michael Jordan, number two, was Thomas Alva Edison. In the history of modern invention, Edison fortuitously lived at just the right time, close enough to the present to be associated with the origins of the modern entertainment business and also the basic electrical infrastructure needed for just about everything, yet not too late to be able to get away with claiming sole authorship of the inventions produced in close collaboration with a large but publicly invisible technical staff.

See “Her Answer Proved Intelligence,” NYT, 12 May 1912. This was followed by “Mr. Edison’s Mistake Is Revealed,” NYT, 14 May 1921, which observed that Edison did not understand what a college education was designed to accomplish. The Chicago Tribune: “Can’t Answer Edison,” NYT, 11 May 1921. When Albert Einstein: “Einstein Sees Boston; Fails on Edison Test,” NYT, 18 May 1921. the annoying importuning: Paul Kasakove, untitled reminiscences, n.d., ENHS. Kasakove, a Cornell graduate who had majored in chemistry, tells a story about his first meeting with Edison as an applicant who had replied to a help-wanted advertisement.


pages: 495 words: 136,714

Money for Nothing by Thomas Levenson

Albert Einstein, asset-backed security, bank run, British Empire, carried interest, clockwork universe, credit crunch, do well by doing good, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, experimental subject, failed state, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, income inequality, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, land bank, market bubble, Money creation, open economy, price mechanism, quantitative easing, Republic of Letters, risk/return, side project, South Sea Bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, tontine

That would mean a smidgeon of interest—1/365 of that 10 percent—would be added to the total each day and would in turn begin earning that same 10 percent rate. Repeat that every day as the account updates, and very soon it becomes clear that the effect of such compounding is profound: a 10 percent return, compounded daily, doubles an investment or a debt in a little over seven years. (That’s what inspired the line, unreliably attributed to Albert Einstein, that the greatest invention of all time was compound interest.) Translated into a different mathematical form, Halley’s manipulation of just five years of demographic records from a drowsy, distant town created the basic framework that could describe how much a payment now would be worth as an investment for the purchase of a policy for any number of years, based on an assumption of a given rate of return.

IMAGE CREDITS 1Wikimedia Commons 2Courtesy of Cambridge University Library 3Wikimedia Commons 4Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of the Cambridge University Library 5Wikimedia Commons 6Wikimedia Commons 7Wikimedia Commons 8Wikimedia Commons 9© Bank of England 10© The Trustees of the British Museum 11© The Trustees of the British Museum 12Wikimedia Commons 13Wikimedia Commons 14Wikimedia Commons 15Wikimedia Commons 16Wikimedia Commons 17Wikimedia Commons 18Wikimedia Commons 19Bancroft Collection, Kress Collection, Baker Library, Harvard Business School 20Courtesy of the Wellcome Collection under a Creative Commons BY license 21Bancroft Collection, Kress Collection, Baker Library, Harvard Business School 22© The Trustees of the British Museum 23From Groote tafereel der dwaasheid, 1720; courtesy of the Harvard Business School Baker Library 24From Groote tafereel der dwaasheid, 1720; Kress Collection, Baker Library, Harvard Business School 25Wikimedia Commons 26Bancroft Collection, Kress Collection, Baker Library, Harvard Business School 27© The Trustees of the British Museum 28© The Trustees of the British Museum 29Wikimedia Commons 30Wikimedia Commons BY THOMAS LEVENSON Money for Nothing: The Scientists, Fraudsters, and Corrupt Politicians Who Reinvented Money, Panicked a Nation, and Made the World Rich The Hunt for Vulcan…and How Albert Einstein Destroyed a Planet, Discovered Relativity, and Deciphered the Universe Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World’s Greatest Scientist Einstein in Berlin Measure for Measure: A Musical History of Science Ice Time: Climate, Science, and Life on Earth ABOUT THE AUTHOR Thomas Levenson is a professor of science writing at MIT.

IMAGE CREDITS 1Wikimedia Commons 2Courtesy of Cambridge University Library 3Wikimedia Commons 4Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of the Cambridge University Library 5Wikimedia Commons 6Wikimedia Commons 7Wikimedia Commons 8Wikimedia Commons 9© Bank of England 10© The Trustees of the British Museum 11© The Trustees of the British Museum 12Wikimedia Commons 13Wikimedia Commons 14Wikimedia Commons 15Wikimedia Commons 16Wikimedia Commons 17Wikimedia Commons 18Wikimedia Commons 19Bancroft Collection, Kress Collection, Baker Library, Harvard Business School 20Courtesy of the Wellcome Collection under a Creative Commons BY license 21Bancroft Collection, Kress Collection, Baker Library, Harvard Business School 22© The Trustees of the British Museum 23From Groote tafereel der dwaasheid, 1720; courtesy of the Harvard Business School Baker Library 24From Groote tafereel der dwaasheid, 1720; Kress Collection, Baker Library, Harvard Business School 25Wikimedia Commons 26Bancroft Collection, Kress Collection, Baker Library, Harvard Business School 27© The Trustees of the British Museum 28© The Trustees of the British Museum 29Wikimedia Commons 30Wikimedia Commons BY THOMAS LEVENSON Money for Nothing: The Scientists, Fraudsters, and Corrupt Politicians Who Reinvented Money, Panicked a Nation, and Made the World Rich The Hunt for Vulcan…and How Albert Einstein Destroyed a Planet, Discovered Relativity, and Deciphered the Universe Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World’s Greatest Scientist Einstein in Berlin Measure for Measure: A Musical History of Science Ice Time: Climate, Science, and Life on Earth ABOUT THE AUTHOR Thomas Levenson is a professor of science writing at MIT. He is the author of several books, including The Hunt for Vulcan, Einstein in Berlin, and Newton and the Counterfeiter. He has also made ten feature-length documentaries (including a two-hour Nova episode on Albert Einstein), for which he has won numerous awards. What’s next on your reading list? Discover your next great read! Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author. Sign up now.


pages: 94 words: 18,728

Stop Saving Start Investing: Ten Simple Rules for Effectively Investing in Funds by Jonathan Hobbs

Albert Einstein, diversified portfolio, en.wikipedia.org, financial independence, low interest rates, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI)

This isn’t as difficult to achieve as you may think. Investing pays off over time. The sooner you start investing, the better off you’ll be. CHAPTER 2 THE POWER OF COMPOUNDED INVESTMENT RETURNS “Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it. He who doesn’t, pays it.” Albert Einstein I’m sure you know the story of the tortoise and the hare. The hare sprints ahead of the tortoise in the beginning, before taking a nap under a tree. The slow, plodding, risk managing tortoise eventually takes over the hare and wins the race. The tortoise is patient and knows that the race is long.


pages: 589 words: 197,971

A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon by Neil Sheehan

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, European colonialism, it's over 9,000, John von Neumann, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Norman Macrae, nuclear winter, operation paperclip, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, social contagion, undersea cable, uranium enrichment

Two members of the Advisory Board at the meeting were exceptional men even among the generation of exceptional European minds who had transformed American science and learning in the decades since their arrival in the 1930s. One of the men was John von Neumann, a Hungarian-born mathematical genius, possibly the finest intelligence of the twentieth century after Albert Einstein. The second was another Hungarian, Edward Teller, a physicist of great talent and monomaniacal ambition who claimed to be the sole parent of the hydrogen bomb. The flight of this wealth of intellectual talent across the Atlantic had been a born-in-sorrow gift to America from Europe’s economic and social turmoil after the First World War and the rise of Adolf Hitler and his virulent anti-Semitism.

While they were waiting for their appointment with von Neumann in a combined lounge and small library at the institute, Schriever was surprised by an elderly figure who walked in, apparently on the way to his office. The wildly unkempt mane of white hair and the untidy mustache could belong to only one man—Albert Einstein. Bennie got up and introduced himself and Einstein shook his hand and said a few polite words before moving on. There was a certain irony in the encounter, however fleeting. Einstein, then in his seventy-fourth year, had two years left to live and, as he reflected on his extraordinary life, the act he regretted most was signing the famous 1939 letter to Franklin Roosevelt that was the genesis of the American atomic bomb project.

The 1928 volume of the German edition of the Annals of Mathematics, found among his papers at the Library of Congress, provides a sampling of the scientific talent that the Nazis hounded out of Germany to inadvertently enrich science in the United States. Theodore von Kármán is listed as one of the editors. Albert Einstein is among the contributors. Another is John von Neumann, with a paper on a mathematical model of economics he had just devised. He elaborated the theory in his new home and, in collaboration with a colleague at Princeton, Oscar Morgenstern, published it as a book, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior.


pages: 786 words: 195,810

NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity by Steve Silberman

Albert Einstein, animal electricity, Apollo 11, Asperger Syndrome, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, Bletchley Park, crowdsourcing, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental subject, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, hydroponic farming, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, Kickstarter, language acquisition, Larry Wall, megacity, meta-analysis, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, neurotypical, New Journalism, pattern recognition, placebo effect, scientific mainstream, side project, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skype, slashdot, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, sugar pill, the scientific method, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

., p. 167. Christa Jungnickel and Russell McCormmach: Cavendish: The Experimental Life, Christa Jungnickel and Russell McCormmach. Bucknell, 2001. another socially inept genius: “The Legend of the Dull-Witted Child Who Grew Up to Be a Genius,” Barbara Wolff and Hananya Goodman. Albert Einstein Archives. http://www.albert-einstein.org/article_handicap.html “His theory of the universe”: The Life of the Hon. Henry Cavendish, p. 186. His final instructions to his servants: The Personality of Henry Cavendish, Russell McCormmach. Archimedes, Vol. 36. Springer, 2014, p. 100. a “true anchor”: Ibid., p. 8.

Predictably, what was not on offer at No. 11 was an audience with the proprietor himself. Prospective borrowers were instructed not to disturb Cavendish if they caught sight of him browsing in the stacks and to promptly hasten home with their selections. Obviously he wasn’t much for people, as another socially inept genius, Albert Einstein, observed about himself. But to describe Cavendish as a man of no affections, or a passionless man, also misses the mark. His life was devoted to one single, all-consuming passion: the slow and patient increase of the sum of human knowledge. His mind was like a mirror held up to nature, unclouded by bias, rationalization, lust, jealousy, competition, pettiness, rancor, ego, and faith.

Kanner launched an unlikely business on the side that became a little gold mine for his family: a “Literary Bureau for Dentists.” (Dziunia ended up doing most of the work, composing all the thesis abstracts and doing all the typing, while caring for Anita.) Seeking to raise his public profile even further, he organized public events for prominent Zionists visiting Berlin, including Albert Einstein and Sholem Aleichem. Kanner had a knack for cultivating friendships that he could turn to his social and professional advantage. He once diagnosed himself as a “collector of people.” — ONE OF THE FRIENDSHIPS he cultivated opened a door to an entirely new life. While substitute-teaching a course in electrocardiography in 1923, Kanner met a visiting American doctor named Louis Holtz who became a frequent dinner companion.


pages: 677 words: 206,548

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It by Marc Goodman

23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, don't be evil, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, future of work, game design, gamification, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, high net worth, High speed trading, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, illegal immigration, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, license plate recognition, lifelogging, litecoin, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, national security letter, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, operational security, optical character recognition, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, printed gun, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tech worker, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wave and Pay, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, you are the product, zero day

As incredible as the Target hack was for its size and scope, just over a year later, in August 2014, that number was surpassed by a Russian hacking group that gathered 1.2 billion user names, passwords, and other confidential data from 420,000 Web sites, according to Hold Security. Crime too has entered the age of Moore’s law, and it has exponential consequences for us all. Control the Code, Control the World Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal. ALBERT EINSTEIN As the entire human race drives itself toward ubiquitous connection to the Internet, we are transforming both ourselves and our world. From this global interconnectivity will flow tremendous good. Man grows omniscient as every fact or thought ever recorded becomes available in real time regardless of its source or location.

Reality-altering technologies such as AR will open the door further to even more immersive virtual environments, such as virtual reality systems, which also can be subverted and abused in powerful ways. The Rise of Homo virtualis Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one. ALBERT EINSTEIN Increasingly, as we live our lives through avatars—in video games, online worlds, and social networking sites—our online personas are standing in for us in social situations, commercial transactions, and even sexual encounters. They are there representing us online 24/7, compressing time and space, to interact on our behalf with the rest of the world even as we sleep.

Our defenses are not adapting rapidly enough to match the global systemic risk we face, something our government should be deeply concerned about. Reinventing Government: Jump-Starting Innovation We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them. ALBERT EINSTEIN In 2014, only 13 percent of Americans approved of the job Congress was doing, a slight improvement from the all-time low of 9 percent in November 2013. Trust in government is practically nonexistent—whether it’s the money in politics, the government shutdowns, the partisanship, or the dearth of meaningful legislation.


pages: 956 words: 267,746

Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion ofSafety by Eric Schlosser

Able Archer 83, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, cuban missile crisis, Dr. Strangelove, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, impulse control, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, launch on warning, life extension, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, packet switching, prompt engineering, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Stanislav Petrov, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, too big to fail, two and twenty, uranium enrichment, William Langewiesche

Wells in 1929 and tried, without success, to obtain the central European literary rights to his novels—conceived of a nuclear weapon that would explode instantly. A Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, Szilárd feared that Hitler might launch an atomic bomb program and get the weapon first. Szilárd discussed his concerns with Albert Einstein in the summer of 1939 and helped draft a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The letter warned that “it may become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium,” leading to the creation of “extremely powerful bombs of a new type.” Einstein signed the letter, which was hand delivered to the president by a mutual friend.

The men who attended the conference at Rollins College felt the same way, and they were hardly a bunch of wild-eyed radicals. Among those who signed Holt’s “Appeal to the Peoples of the World” were the president of the Standard Oil Company of Ohio, the chairman of the National Association of Manufacturers, three U.S. senators, one U.S. Supreme Court justice, a congressman, and Albert Einstein. The appeal called for the United Nations’ General Assembly to be transformed into the legislative branch of a world government. The General Assembly would be authorized to ban weapons of mass destruction, conduct inspections for such weapons, and use military force to enforce international law.

Acheson and Johnson had already expressed their support for developing one. The president asked whether the Soviets could do it. His advisers suggested that they could. “In that case, we have no choice,” Truman said. “We’ll go ahead.” Two weeks after the president’s decision was publicly announced, Albert Einstein read a prepared statement about the hydrogen bomb on national television. He criticized the militarization of American society, the intimidation of anyone who opposed it, the demands for loyalty and secrecy, the “hysterical character” of the nuclear arms race, and the “disastrous illusion” that this new weapon would somehow make America safer.


pages: 246 words: 81,625

On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins, Sandra Blakeslee

airport security, Albert Einstein, backpropagation, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Jeff Hawkins, Johannes Kepler, Necker cube, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Ray Kurzweil, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, superintelligent machines, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Turing machine, Turing test

If we were to take the conservative position that the average pyramidal cell has one thousand synapses (the actual number is probably close to five or ten thousand), then our neocortex would have roughly thirty trillion synapses altogether. That is an astronomically large number, well beyond our intuitive grasp. It is apparently sufficient to store all the things you can learn in a lifetime. * * * According to rumor, Albert Einstein once said that conceiving the theory of special relativity was straightforward, almost easy. It followed naturally from a single observation: that the speed of light is constant to all observers even if the observers are moving at different speeds. This is counterintuitive. It is like saying the speed of a thrown ball is always the same regardless of how hard it is thrown or how fast the individuals throwing and observing the ball are moving.

Certainly some of the differences are genetically determined such as the size of regions (individuals can show as much as a three-fold difference in the gross area of V1) and hemispheric laterality (women tend to have thicker cables connecting the left and right sides of the brain than men do). Among humans, some brains probably have more cells or different kinds of connections. It's unlikely that Albert Einstein's creative genius was purely a function of the stimulating environment in the patent office where he worked as a young man. Recent analyses of his brain— which had been thought lost, but was found preserved in a jar a few years ago— reveal that his brain was measurably unusual. It had more support cells, called glia, per neuron than average.


pages: 348 words: 83,490

More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places (Updated and Expanded) by Michael J. Mauboussin

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, Brownian motion, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, complexity theory, corporate governance, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, demographic transition, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, Drosophila, Edward Thorp, en.wikipedia.org, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fixed income, framing effect, functional fixedness, hindsight bias, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, index fund, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, Kenneth Arrow, Laplace demon, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Menlo Park, mental accounting, Milgram experiment, Murray Gell-Mann, Nash equilibrium, new economy, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, statistical model, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, Stuart Kauffman, survivorship bias, systems thinking, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, traveling salesman, value at risk, wealth creators, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

If you are like most people, you had difficulty properly gauging the relationship between the growth rate and the ending value. For example, it is not intuitive to most investors that an increase from 15 to 20 percent growth implies more than a doubling in value after twenty years. That’s why Albert Einstein called compounding the “eighth wonder of the world.” The trick for investors is to make the compounding work for them, not against them. Reality Check In the insightful book, Profit from the Core, Bain & Company consultant Chris Zook reveals a study of the companies that actually achieved sustained growth in the 1990s.2 The sample drew from over 1,800 companies in seven countries that had sales in excess of $500 million.

Treynor, “Market Efficiency and the Bean Jar Experiment,” Financial Analysts Journal (May-June 1987): -53; Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew, Blind Man’s Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage (New York: Perseus Books, 1998), 58-59. 6 Kay-Yut Chen, Leslie R. Fine, and Bernardo A. Huberman, “Predicting the Future,” Information Systems Frontiers 5, no. 1 (2003): 47-61, http://www.hpl.hp.com/shl/papers/future/future.pdf. 31. A Tail of Two Worlds 1 This process is know as Brownian motion. Albert Einstein pointed out that this motion is caused by random bombardment of heat-excited water molecules on the pollen. 2 See GloriaMundi, “Introduction to VaR,” http://www.gloriamundi.org/introduction.asp. 3 Edgar E. Peters, Fractal Market Analysis (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1994), 21-27. 4 Roger Lowenstein, When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management (New York: Random House, 2000), 72.


pages: 262 words: 80,257

The Eureka Factor by John Kounios

active measures, Albert Einstein, Bluma Zeigarnik, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, classic study, deliberate practice, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Flynn Effect, functional fixedness, Google Hangouts, impulse control, invention of the telephone, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, Necker cube, pattern recognition, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, theory of mind, US Airways Flight 1549, Wall-E, William of Occam

However, if insight really were sudden, then this would mean that it’s fundamentally different from analytic thought. Of course, it’s convenient when things are simple. Two kinds of thought are more complicated to explain than one type. However, it’s useful to keep in mind an extension of Occam’s razor that is usually attributed to Albert Einstein and is sometimes known as “Einstein’s razor”: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” AND THE WINNER IS … * * * During the early 1990s, there was not yet a consensus among cognitive psychologists that insight was a unique mode of thought, so it was important to demonstrate that insight differs from analysis.

But if the anterior cingulate is powered up by a positive mood, then it can sense the subtle presence of alternate, creative solutions and direct the prefrontal cortex to play Robin Hood and select an underdog to win. The result is an aha moment. And when the underdog wins, there are unique consequences. REPERCUSSIONS OF THE CREATIVE HIGH * * * Elation is the typical reaction to a breakthrough idea. Albert Einstein once said that conceiving the theory of relativity was “the happiest thought of my life.” Judah Folkman said that an aha moment is “a very big high.” Several things contribute to this emotional boost: the pleasant surprise, the accelerated thought, and the confidence and satisfaction instilled by a solution that seems obvious in hindsight.


pages: 307 words: 17,123

Behind the cloud: the untold story of how Salesforce.com went from idea to billion-dollar company--and revolutionized an industry by Marc Benioff, Carlye Adler

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, business continuity plan, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, digital divide, iterative process, Larry Ellison, Marc Benioff, Maui Hawaii, Nicholas Carr, platform as a service, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, software as a service, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, subscription business

Play #7: Define Your Values and Culture Up Front On March 8, 1999, Parker Harris, Frank Dominguez, and Dave Moellenhoff began working in a one-bedroom apartment I’d rented at 1449 Montgomery, next door to my house. We didn’t have office furniture, so we used card tables and folding chairs. What we lacked in furnishings, we made up for with an amazing view of the San Francisco Bay Bridge. I hung a picture of the Dalai Lama over the fireplace and another of Albert Einstein on the wall. Both were part of Apple’s new ad campaign, and each said, ‘‘Think Different.’’ My summers at Apple had taught me that the secret to encouraging creativity and producing the best possible product was to keep people fulfilled and happy. I wanted the people who built salesforce.com to be inspired and to feel valued. 11 BEHIND THE CLOUD That wasn’t to say there was anything glamorous about those early days.

On the contrary, go out and make money—and lots of it. But know that simply making money will not be enough to sustain you. No one who is successful is driven solely by monetary rewards. The most successful businesspeople are driven by profits—and purpose. Back in high school, when I started my first business, I worked under a poster of Albert Einstein. Because I found inspiration from it, I hung another picture of Einstein in the apartment when we launched salesforce.com. We weren’t always aware of it, but we were guided by his three rules of work: 1) Out of clutter find simplicity; 2) From discord find harmony; 3) In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.


pages: 300 words: 79,315

Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, asset allocation, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, Everything should be made as simple as possible, George Santayana, index card, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex

For most of us, however, the number is more likely to be fifty to 150. In that case it makes sense to subdivide your “Next Actions” list into categories, such as “Calls” to make when you’re at a phone or “Project Head Questions” to be asked at your weekly briefing. Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. —Albert Einstein Nonactionable Items You need well-organized, discrete systems to handle the items that require no action as well as the ones that do. No-action systems fall into three categories: trash, incubation, and reference. Trash Trash should be self-evident. Throw away anything that has no potential future action or reference value.

We know that the focus we hold in our minds affects what we perceive and how we perform. This is as true on the golf course as it is in a staff meeting or during a serious conversation with a spouse. My interest lies in providing a model for focus that is dynamic in a practical way, especially in project thinking. Imagination is more important than knowledge. —Albert Einstein When you focus on something—the vacation you’re going to take, the meeting you’re about to go into, the product you want to launch—that focus instantly creates ideas and thought patterns you wouldn’t have had otherwise. Even your physiology will respond to an image in your head as if it were reality.


pages: 300 words: 84,762

Vaccinated: One Man's Quest to Defeat the World's Deadliest Diseases by Paul A. Offit

1960s counterculture, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, discovery of penicillin, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, germ theory of disease, Isaac Newton, life extension, Louis Pasteur, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan

They never endorse products or sign autographs or fight through crowds of screaming admirers. But at least you know a few of their names, like Jonas Salk, the developer of the polio vaccine; or Albert Schweitzer, the missionary who built hospitals in Africa; or Louis Pasteur, the inventor of pasteurization; or Marie Curie, the discoverer of radiation; or Albert Einstein, the physicist who defined the relationship between mass and energy. But I'd bet not one of you knows the name of the scientist who saved more lives than all other scientists combined-a man who survived Depression-era poverty; the harsh, unforgiving plains of southeastern Montana; abandonment by his father; the early death of his mother; and, at the end of his life, the sad realization that few people knew who he was or what he had done: Maurice Hilleman, the father of modern vaccines.

If founded today, it would have been called the American Scientific Society.) Members of the society included founding fathers such as George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Benjamin Rush, James Madison, and John Marshall as well as scientists such as John Audubon, Robert Fulton, Thomas Edison, Louis Pasteur, Albert Einstein, Linus Pauling, Margaret Mead, Marie Curie, and Charles Darwin; the society’s library houses a first edition of Hilleman’s beloved The Origin of Species. Maurice Hilleman with daughters Kirsten (far left) and Jeryl and wife Lorraine, Vail, Colorado, December 1982. Maurice is the only one not wearing skis.


pages: 294 words: 87,429

In Pursuit of Memory: The Fight Against Alzheimer's by Joseph Jebelli

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, CRISPR, double helix, Easter island, Edward Jenner, epigenetics, global pandemic, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, parabiotic, phenotype, placebo effect, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Skype, stem cell, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traumatic brain injury

Ten years older than Kidd, he had already spent several years in Paris learning how to use the microscope while training to become a pathologist. He had served during the Second World War in the 82nd Airborne Division. His colleagues described him as a ‘tough’, ‘serious’, ‘no-nonsense’ figure.4 Now, at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, New York, he was eager to test the microscope on something original. Which is exactly how he saw Alzheimer’s–as an untouched challenge, something that (as far as he was aware) no one else in the field was looking at. Standing ten feet tall and weighing half a tonne, the electron microscope looks more like the periscope of a naval submarine than a typical microscope.

Walker, ‘The Mysteries of Sleep’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOI45ntO0iA 6. Mander, Marks, et al., ‘β-amyloid disrupts human NREM slow waves and related hippocampus-dependent memory consolidation’. 7. Lucey and Holtzman, ‘How amyloid, sleep and memory connect’. Chapter 14: Regeneration 1. Yamanaka, Lasker Lecture at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQNoyDwCPzM 2. Thomson, Itskovitz-Eldor, et al., ‘Embryonic stem cell lines derived from human blastocysts’. 3. Takahashi and Yamanaka, ‘Induction of pluripotent stem cells from mouse embryonic and adult fibroblast cultures by defined factors’. 4.


pages: 472 words: 80,835

Life as a Passenger: How Driverless Cars Will Change the World by David Kerrigan

3D printing, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, call centre, car-free, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Chris Urmson, commoditize, computer vision, congestion charging, connected car, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Ford Model T, future of work, General Motors Futurama, hype cycle, invention of the wheel, Just-in-time delivery, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, Lyft, Marchetti’s constant, Mars Rover, megacity, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, Nash equilibrium, New Urbanism, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Sam Peltzman, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, Snapchat, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, Thorstein Veblen, traffic fines, transit-oriented development, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban sprawl, warehouse robotics, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Given the population densities in some of these megacities, the relatively young populations and the lack of a historical model of car ownership, there may just be an opportunity for shared self-driving cars to avert a generation of carnage and pollution spreading further around the globe. Framing the Future “The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking” Albert Einstein Just as we don’t know for certain the timeline for truly driverless cars, we also don’t know which will prove to be the biggest barriers. Will it the intense lobbying by people or industries identified as potential losers, ethical dilemmas or will cybersecurity and privacy issues make driverless cars grind to a halt faster than an obstacle detected by their LiDAR?

But it is worth pointing out the change-motivator that in a 10-year period, over 10 million humans will be killed by cars and more than 9 million of those will be attributable to humans driving badly. Skepticism Is Only Human “If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.” Albert Einstein Although many of the wider public are not yet very aware of driverless cars, among those that are, there’s a lot of skepticism - about how successful they’ll be, about whether people will really want to use them, about whether they’re safe. I’ve found talk of driverless cars elicits the full gamut of emotions from skepticism to disbelief to excitement to fear.


pages: 259 words: 85,514

The Knife's Edge by Stephen Westaby

Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, Boris Johnson, call centre, dark triade / dark tetrad, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, presumed consent, stem cell, Stephen Hawking

That was me in a nutshell, although I had no insight into it at the time. I was in New York City when I first registered the reckless absence of fear that enabled me to live life out on the edge. There is a saying – ‘Courage is not the absence of fear but the willingness to face it.’ It was 1972, and as part of a medical students’ scholarship at the Albert Einstein School for Medicine I was working a night shift in the emergency room of Morrisania Hospital in Harlem. In the gloom of the early hours the whole department was struggling with the consequences of drug abuse and gang warfare. A young nurse tried to confiscate some contaminated syringes from a drug-crazed addict who had been wounded in a fight.

A quarter of the beds are occupied by patients who don’t need to be there, but there is nowhere else to look after them.’ My daughter thanked them for their reassuring insight and they moved on. The elderly lady was hypothermic when she eventually reached Addenbrooke’s, just ten miles away. What do Albert Einstein and our treasured NHS have in common? Answer: they were brilliant for their time, but when they reached seventy they both died from something eminently treatable. In Einstein’s case, it was an aortic aneurysm for which he persistently refused surgery, a common obstinacy and resistance to change that is difficult to understand.


pages: 315 words: 85,791

Technical Blogging: Turn Your Expertise Into a Remarkable Online Presence by Antonio Cangiano

23andMe, Albert Einstein, anti-pattern, bitcoin, bounce rate, cloud computing, content marketing, en.wikipedia.org, Hacker News, John Gruber, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, lolcat, Network effects, Paradox of Choice, revision control, Ruby on Rails, search engine result page, slashdot, software as a service, web application

[70] http://dzone.com [71] http://rubyflow.com [72] http://sphinn.com [73] http://www.reddit.com/r/Moderating/comments/cz6zu/identifying_spammers_101 [74] http://news.ycombinator.com/newest Copyright © 2012, The Pragmatic Bookshelf. Chapter 8 Understanding Traffic Statistics Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts. Albert Einstein Immediately after you publish and promote an article, visitors from all over the world will start coming to your blog. This is a very exciting moment. It’s important, however, to fully understand the traffic figures from your web analytics suite as well as to keep track of them over time.

What’s missing from your tool belt is one more chapter about user engagement and then the last two parts of the book, which are dedicated to benefitting from your hard work and further scaling your blogging initiatives for your plans of world domination. For the time being, wax on, wax off. Footnotes [75] https://www.google.com/analytics/web Copyright © 2012, The Pragmatic Bookshelf. Chapter 9 Building a Community Around Your Blog Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. Albert Einstein As a blogger you bother with promotional activities because you want to attract a following. You can then expose this group of readers to your thoughts and writing. Once again, it’s all about getting your content in front of the right audience. The next logical step in this process is to take a closer look at this readership.


pages: 252 words: 80,636

Bureaucracy by David Graeber

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, banking crisis, barriers to entry, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, David Graeber, Future Shock, George Gilder, High speed trading, hiring and firing, junk bonds, Kitchen Debate, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, means of production, music of the spheres, Neal Stephenson, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, Parkinson's law, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, post-work, price mechanism, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, technological determinism, transcontinental railway, union organizing, urban planning, zero-sum game

Indeed, even the structure of U.S. universities has always been based on the Prussian model. True, during these early years, both the United States and Germany did manage to find a way to cultivate their creative eccentrics—in fact, a surprising number of the most notorious ones that ended up in America (Albert Einstein was the paradigm) actually were German. During the war, when matters were desperate, vast government projects like the Manhattan Project were still capable of accommodating a whole host of bizarre characters (Oppenheimer, Feynman, Fuchs …). But as American power grew more and more secure, the country’s bureaucracy became less and less tolerant of its outliers.

And of course just counting university staff is deceptive in itself, since it ignores the burgeoning numbers of administrators employed by foundations, and other grant-giving agencies. 103. Similarly Don Braben, a physicist at University College London, made headlines in the UK by pointing out that Albert Einstein would never have been able to get funding were he alive today. Others have suggested most of his major works would never even have passed peer review. 104. Jonathan L. Katz, “Don’t Become a Scientist!” (wuphys.wustl.edu/~katz/scientist.html). 105. Even worse, as some friends in the industry point out, grant-givers regularly insist it’s the scientists themselves who have to write the applications, progress reports, etc., rather than some subordinate, with the result that even the most successful scientists spend roughly 40 percent of their time doing paperwork. 106.


pages: 308 words: 85,880

How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Andrew Keen, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, death from overwork, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gig economy, global village, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-truth, postindustrial economy, precariat, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech baron, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, the High Line, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

Just as the Hall is an incongruous place to be contemplating the future, so Huw Price, who first met Jaan Tallinn at a conference about the science of time on a Baltic cruise ship, is a strange person to ask about it. That’s because, as a philosopher, at least, Price is skeptical about the very idea of time. Borrowing from Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, Price is a proponent of the “block universe” theory, which suggests that time itself might be what he calls an “anthropocentric” idea.1 “Physics has no sense of past or future,” Price argues, and so time—that seemingly inevitable stream of moments, we intuitively assume, that always links yesterday and today with tomorrow—is an illusion.2 “There’s no difference between the past, the present, and the future,” Price explains.

“It’s a mistake to think of the future as open.” As I chew on my poached salmon, I nod politely. If time doesn’t exist, I wonder to myself, then why is he wearing such a fancy-looking wristwatch? In all seriousness, however, the block universe idea might not be quite as scientifically far-fetched as it sounds. Price quotes Albert Einstein’s letter to the family of a friend who had just died. “For those of us who believe in physics,” Einstein consoled the grieving family, ‘the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” Whether or not it’s scientifically conceivable, this theory certainly has the most deliciously surreal implications.


pages: 306 words: 84,649

About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks by David Rooney

Albert Einstein, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Charles Babbage, classic study, cloud computing, colonial rule, COVID-19, Danny Hillis, Doomsday Clock, European colonialism, Ford Model T, friendly fire, High speed trading, interchangeable parts, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, Nelson Mandela, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Seymour Hersh, smart grid, Stewart Brand, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transatlantic slave trade, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, éminence grise

It is hard to overstate how convulsive were the changes to our lives with the development of electricity and its application to ancient technologies like clocks as well as more recent ones. The moral makeup of Western society was being reshaped by this new modern force. In the Select Committee meeting room considering Daylight Saving in 1908, the electric-clock promoters were selling modernity, as they always had. This was just three years after Albert Einstein had published his theory of special relativity, with its mind-bending proposal that the speed of light was absolute, but time was relative depending on your viewpoint. The STC, the Synchronome company and Johann Antel in Brno were all offering standard time at the speed of light, time that could be changed depending on the moral standpoint of the politicians in power at the time.

An attack on the nation’s clock (as it was characterized by those people who supported the Big Ben bong plan) was an attack on the British identity—an attack on the British people themselves, on what it means to be British. It was an attack, somehow, on Britishness. 11 War Miniature Atomic Clocks, Munich, 1972 The original plan was to fly the tiny clocks to the Moon and back on the Apollo 17 lunar mission. Scientists and astronauts alike were eager to test the effects of Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity, which predicted that clocks run fast or slow when traveling at different speeds and in different gravitational fields. “In fact, there is a feeling,” exclaimed one clock manufacturer in 1972, “the relativity project could be among the most exciting of scientific adventures yet undertaken in space.”1 But the effects would be so slight that only the most precise and accurate clocks would show them up.


pages: 291 words: 80,068

Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil by Kenneth Cukier, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Francis de Véricourt

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, autonomous vehicles, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, circular economy, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, credit crunch, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, DeepMind, defund the police, Demis Hassabis, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, fiat currency, framing effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, game design, George Floyd, George Gilder, global pandemic, global village, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Higgs boson, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, microaggression, Mustafa Suleyman, Neil Armstrong, nudge unit, OpenAI, packet switching, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen

Steve Jobs of Apple, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and Larry Page of Google all enjoyed reputations for stubbornness but at the same time actively sought out alternative views that contradicted their own. They understood the shortcoming of relying on a single frame and the value of being exposed to alternative ones. One of the most notorious examples of a successful reframer becoming too attached to a frame is Albert Einstein. In 1905, at the age of twenty-six, he reframed modern physics by dint of the special theory of relativity. Explaining the vagaries of natural phenomena is a frame—one of an orderly universe in which all physical reality can be explained by principles, qualities, and quantities. When quantum mechanics emerged as a serious theory, he resisted it.

Jennifer Doudna on her discovery: Sabin Russell, “Cracking the Code: Jennifer Doudna and Her Amazing Molecular Scissors,” California, Winter 2014, https://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/winter-2014-gender-assumptions/cracking-code-jennifer-doudna-and-her-amazing. Andrew Wiles and Fermat’s Last Theorem: “Fermat’s Last Theorem,” BBC video, 50 minutes, accessed November 4, 2020, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0074rxx. Einstein’s quote: Albert Einstein and Max Born, The Born-Einstein Letters, trans. Irene Born (New York: Walker, 1971). On unlearning: See, e.g.: Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Delete—The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). On Tesla and German cars: See, e.g.: Martin Gropp, “Autohersteller verdoppeln Investitionen in Elektromobilität,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, June 2, 2019, https://www.faz.net/aktuell/wirtschaft/auto-verkehr/autohersteller-verdoppeln-investitionen-in-elektromobilitaet-16218061.html.


pages: 253 words: 84,238

A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins

AI winter, Albert Einstein, artificial general intelligence, carbon-based life, clean water, cloud computing, deep learning, different worldview, discovery of DNA, Doomsday Clock, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, estate planning, Geoffrey Hinton, Jeff Hawkins, PalmPilot, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Silicon Valley, superintelligent machines, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Turing machine, Turing test

Recall the example of a list of historical facts. One person might arrange the facts on a timeline, and another might arrange them on a map. The same facts can lead to different models and different worldviews. Being an expert is mostly about finding a good reference frame to arrange facts and observations. Albert Einstein started with the same facts as his contemporaries. However, he found a better way to arrange them, a better reference frame, that permitted him to see analogies and make predictions that were surprising. What is most fascinating about Einstein’s discoveries related to special relativity is that the reference frames he used to make them were everyday objects.

Most people would agree that a human is more intelligent than a monkey, that our model of the world is deeper and more comprehensive. This suggests that intelligent machines could surpass humans in the depth of their understanding. This doesn’t necessarily mean that humans couldn’t understand what an intelligent machine learns. For example, even though I could not have discovered what Albert Einstein did, I can understand his discoveries. There is one more way that we can think about capacity. Much of the volume of our brain is wiring, the axons and dendrites that connect neurons to each other. These are costly in terms of energy and space. To conserve energy, the brain is forced to limit the wiring and therefore limit what can be readily learned.


pages: 83 words: 23,805

City 2.0: The Habitat of the Future and How to Get There by Ted Books

active transport: walking or cycling, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, big-box store, carbon footprint, clean tech, cognitive load, collaborative consumption, crowdsourcing, demand response, food desert, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Induced demand, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Kibera, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, McMansion, megacity, New Urbanism, openstreetmap, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, Zipcar

Image: Courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech Emission hunters Scientists transform a city into one big climate lab using an arsenal of space-age technology By John Metcalfe, the Atlantic Cities Southern California’s Mount Wilson is a lonesome, hostile peak — prone to sudden rock falls, sometimes ringed by wildfire — that nevertheless has attracted some of the greatest minds in modern science. George Ellery Hale, one of the godfathers of astrophysics, founded the Mount Wilson Observatory in 1904 and divined that sunspots were magnetic. His acolyte Edwin Hubble used a huge telescope, dragged up by mule train, to prove the universe was expanding. Even Albert Einstein made a pilgrimage in the 1930s to hobnob with the astronomers (and suffered a terrible hair day, a photo shows). The LA basin extends, grimily, from the CLARS observatory atop Mount Wilson. Image: John Metcalfe Today, Mount Wilson is the site of a more terrestrial but no less ambitious endeavor.


The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community by David C. Korten

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, banks create money, big-box store, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, death of newspapers, declining real wages, different worldview, digital divide, European colonialism, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, God and Mammon, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, informal economy, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, joint-stock company, land reform, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Monroe Doctrine, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, new economy, peak oil, planetary scale, plutocrats, Project for a New American Century, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sexual politics, shared worldview, social intelligence, source of truth, South Sea Bubble, stem cell, structural adjustment programs, The Chicago School, trade route, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, World Values Survey

He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Albert Einstein According to conventional wisdom, hierarchies of dominance are required to bring order to human societies because we humans are by nature an inherently unruly and self-centered species prone to violence and lawlessness. We therefore require the discipline of a ruling class and the competition of an unregulated market to impose order.

To navigate successfully the turbulent waters of the Great Turning, we must revisit and update the stories by which we communicate our common understanding of our human origin, purpose, and possibility. This page intentionally left blank CHAPTER 15 Beyond Strict Father versus Aging Clock Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind. Albert Einstein For peoples, generally, their story of the universe and the human role in the universe is their primary source of intelligibility and value.… The deepest crises experienced by any society are those moments of change when the story becomes inadequate for meeting the survival demands of a present situation.1 Thomas Berry Alienated from life and lacking a story appropriate to our time and understanding, we contemporary humans are condemned to seek meaning where it is not to be found.

CHAPTER 19 Leading from Below I am done with great things and big things, great institutions and big success, and I am for those tiny invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which if you give them time, will rend the hardest monuments of man’s pride. William James In nature, change doesn’t happen from a top-down, strategic approach. There is never a boss in a living system. Change happens from within, from many local actions occurring simultaneously.1 Meg Wheatley Albert Einstein famously observed, “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” Our task is to bring forth the higher levels of human consciousness and recreate our cultures and institutions to align with our possibilities. Throughout the twentieth century, most revolutionaries used guns to wrest control of dominator institutions from ruling elites in the name of justice.


pages: 488 words: 150,477

Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East by Sandy Tolan

Albert Einstein, British Empire, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, colonial rule, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, one-state solution, Suez crisis 1956, The Spirit Level, three-masted sailing ship, Yom Kippur War

The transfer cause, in my view, is more important than all our demands for additional territory . . . with the evacuation of the Arab population from the valleys, we get for the first time in our history a real Jewish state." A year later, Ben-Gurion would declare, "I support compulsory transfer." Others sympathetic to the Zionist cause had warned against such measures. Albert Einstein and Martin Buber, for example, had long advocated what Einstein called "sympathetic cooperation" between "the two great Semitic peoples," who "may have a great future in common." The Arabs were as stunned by the Peel Commission's proposal as Ben-Gurion was excited. The Arab Higher Committee, led by the mufti of Jerusalem, promptly rejected it, not only because of the transfer plan, but because of the partition itself.

(The Zangwill "trek" quote is cited at www.geocities.Senate/7854/transfer.html. (The Zangwill "trek" quote is cited at www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Senate/7854/transfer07.html.) A briefer overview of transfer and Zionism comes from liana Sternbaum's "Historical Roots of the Idea of Transfer," www.afsi.org/OUTPOST/2002OCT/oct7.htm. Other Zionists, like Albert Einstein and Martin Buber, advocated coexistence with the Arab population and opposed any transfer plans. See Stanley Aronowitz in "Setting the Record Straight: Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Critics," www.logosjournal.com/issue_3.3/aronowitz.htm. The resumption of the Arab Rebellion and the British crackdown are chronicled in Political Diaries of the Arab World, Vol. 3, pp. 39-49.

The hope in Nasser was expressed by Bashir; Nasser's background, including his roots as the son of a postal worker, are discussed by Heikal on pp. 88-90. Nasser and pan-Arabism are discussed by Sayigh, pp. 29-33, and Heikal, pp. 110-11. Heikal, a close aide to Nasser, relays a fascinating and little-known part of the story: the near intervention of Albert Einstein. "Einstein felt sorry for Palestinians who had been dispossessed by the Jews, just as he had been by the Nazis," Heikal wrote. He asked me to convey a message to the Egyptian leadership [Nasser] expressing his wish to serve as a catalyst for peace. . . . The message was delivered as requested and discussed within Nasser's inner circle.


pages: 550 words: 154,725

The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner

Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, Black Swan, business climate, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, complexity theory, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Ritchie, Edward Thorp, Fairchild Semiconductor, Henry Singleton, horn antenna, Hush-A-Phone, information retrieval, invention of the telephone, James Watt: steam engine, Karl Jansky, Ken Thompson, knowledge economy, Leonard Kleinrock, machine readable, Metcalfe’s law, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Picturephone, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Russell Ohl, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Skype, space junk, Steve Jobs, Telecommunications Act of 1996, Teledyne, traveling salesman, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

In the 1920s, a one-hour colloquium was set up at 5 p.m. on Mondays so that outside scholars like Robert Millikan and Enrico Fermi or inside scholars like Davisson, Darrow, and Shockley—though only twenty-seven years old at the time—could lecture members of the Bell Labs technical staff on recent scientific developments. (Albert Einstein came to West Street in 1935, but was evidently more interested in touring the microphone shop with Harvey Fletcher than giving a talk.)3 Another place to learn about the new ideas was the local universities. The Great Depression, as it happened, was a boon for scientific knowledge. Bell Labs had been forced to reduce its employees’ hours, but some of the young staffers, now with extra time on their hands, had signed up for academic courses at Columbia University in uptown Manhattan.

Perhaps there were deeper and more fundamental properties, Shannon now wondered, that were common to all the different kinds of media—telephony, radio, television, telegraphy included.13 In his letter to Bush, he hadn’t gone far beyond what Hartley had put forward years earlier, but he hinted that he might, under the right circumstance and given some time, be able to work out some kind of overarching theory about messages and communications. Nothing seemed to come of this during his summer at Bell Labs, and nothing seemed to come of it just after, as Shannon took a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where Albert Einstein was in residence. “I poured tea for him,” Norma recalls of Einstein, “and he told me I was married to a brilliant, brilliant man.” Shannon then returned to New York—accepting an offer to officially join the mathematics department at Bell Labs. “I could smell the war coming along,” he would later recall, “and it seemed to me I would be safer working full-time for the war effort, safer against the draft, which I didn’t exactly fancy….

John Pierce, feeling himself in a rut, had retired a few years before his sixty-fifth birthday, accepting a teaching position at his alma mater, the California Institute of Technology, and relocating to the West Coast, not far from where he had attended high school and flown glider planes. “John Pierce is the model of contemporary man,” Baker said at Pierce’s 1971 retirement ceremony, “because he is always ahead of his time by decades and hence can’t avoid eventually being contemporary.” It wasn’t only men such as Albert Einstein or Niels Bohr, Baker added with his usual enthusiasm, who should be heroes of twentieth-century science; those men, brilliant as they were, could never have done what Pierce did, which was to “inject realism into every element of physical science pursued at the Bell Laboratories.” In Baker’s view, Pierce had helped create “usable and visible” technology.


pages: 467 words: 154,960

Trend Following: How Great Traders Make Millions in Up or Down Markets by Michael W. Covel

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Atul Gawande, backtesting, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California energy crisis, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, commodity trading advisor, computerized trading, correlation coefficient, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everything should be made as simple as possible, fiat currency, fixed income, Future Shock, game design, global macro, hindsight bias, housing crisis, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Bogle, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, linear programming, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, market microstructure, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, mental accounting, money market fund, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, new economy, Nick Leeson, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, South Sea Bubble, Stephen Hawking, survivorship bias, systematic trading, Teledyne, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, value at risk, Vanguard fund, William of Occam, zero-sum game

In hindsight, the old-guard Chicago professors were clearly aware of the problem as Nobel Laureate Professor Merton Miller pondered: “Models that they were using, not just Black-Scholes models, but other kinds of models, were based on normal behavior in the markets and when the behavior got wild, no models were able to put up with it.”35 If only the principals at LTCM had remembered Albert Einstein’s quote that elegance was for tailors, part of his observation Chapter 4 • Big Events, Crashes, and Panics 155 about how beautiful formulas could pose problems in the real world. LTCM had the beautiful formulas; they were just not for the real world. Eugene Fama, Scholes’ thesis advisor, had long held deep reservations about his student’s options pricing model: “If the population of price changes is strictly normal [distribution], on the average for any stock…an observation more than five standard deviations from the mean should be observed about once every 7,000 years.

If you want to win, you execute the signal as prescribed. That means you trade at price level 20, and you throw the curve ball when called for by the coach. What do you want? Fun, excitement and glamour? Or do you want to execute correctly and possibly win? Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. Albert Einstein 218 Trend Following (Updated Edition): Learn to Make Millions in Up or Down Markets Process Versus Outcome The Greek philosopher Archilochus tells us, the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one great thing. The fox— artful, sly and astute— represents the financial institution that knows many things about complex markets and sophisticated marketing.

Gerd Chapter 8 • Science of Trading 225 Gigerenzer, featured in Chapter 7, “Decision Making,” is a proponent of the power of statistical thinking: “At the beginning of the twentieth century, the father of modern science fiction, Herbert George Wells, said in his writings on politics, ‘If we want to have an educated citizenship in a modern technological society, we need to teach them three things: reading, writing, and statistical thinking.’ At the beginning of the twenty-first century, how far have we gotten with this program? In our society, we teach most citizens reading and writing from the time they are children, but not statistical thinking.”11 I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious. Albert Einstein One of my favorite examples of statistical thinking is very simple. It is a case study regarding the birth ratio of boys and girls. Consider that there are two hospitals. In the first one, 120 babies are born every day; in the other, there are only 12. On average, the ratio of boys to girls born every day in each hospital is 50/50.


pages: 542 words: 145,022

In Pursuit of the Perfect Portfolio: The Stories, Voices, and Key Insights of the Pioneers Who Shaped the Way We Invest by Andrew W. Lo, Stephen R. Foerster

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, backtesting, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, compound rate of return, corporate governance, COVID-19, credit crunch, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, equity premium, equity risk premium, estate planning, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fake news, family office, fear index, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, index fund, interest rate swap, Internet Archive, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Bogle, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, linear programming, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, managed futures, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, mental accounting, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Journalism, Own Your Own Home, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, prediction markets, price stability, profit maximization, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, selection bias, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, South Sea Bubble, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, tail risk, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, time value of money, transaction costs, transfer pricing, tulip mania, Vanguard fund, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

The notion of random walks can be traced back to 1827, when botanist Robert Brown used a microscope to examine dust grains floating in water and noticed their erratic behavior, later memorialized as Brownian motion. On March 29, 1900, a French postgraduate student, Louis Bachelier, successfully defended his dissertation, “The Theory of Speculation,” in which he proposed a model of Brownian motion to explain a similarly random movement but in security prices rather than dust grains—five years before Albert Einstein famously determined the cause of Brown’s observations, providing evidence that atoms and molecules existed.2 Bachelier’s research was largely forgotten for half a century until it was rediscovered by University of Chicago mathematician Leonard Jimmie Savage, who translated the work and brought it to the attention of Paul Samuelson, the first American recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics.

.… Owning index funds, with their cost-efficiency, their tax-efficiency, and their assurance that you will earn your fair share of the markets’ returns, is, by definition, a winning strategy.… Stay the course!”120 6 Myron Scholes and the Black-Scholes / Merton Option Pricing Model FAMOUS MATHEMATICIANS and physicists often have arcane formulas permanently associated with their names as their legacy. Pythagoras has a2 + b2 = c2, Isaac Newton has F = ma, and Albert Einstein has E = mc2. However, it’s an exceptionally rare honor for economists, who are known more for being dismal than for their mathematical precision. Myron Scholes is that rare exception. Myron Scholes is the co-originator of the Black-Scholes option-pricing formula, a mathematical expression that produces the price of complex securities such as stock options, warrants, and other so-called derivative securities (securities whose payoffs depend on or derive from those of other securities).

His early talkativeness, however, has transformed into his current interest in giving interviews to reporters. An elementary school science teacher encouraged an admiration for science and “true” scientists—as opposed to social scientists such as economists—and he has an interest in details typically only reserved for specialists. Shiller was inspired by Albert Einstein’s 1930 New York Times Magazine article “Religion and Science.” For Einstein, “cosmic religious feeling” was one of a number of impulses through which religious belief developed, belonging to everyone but knowing no dogma and “the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research.” Einstein felt that a life devoted to understanding because of this cosmic religious feeling gives a person strength and that true scientists of all kinds are the ones who are religious people.


pages: 824 words: 218,333

The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, autism spectrum disorder, Benoit Mandelbrot, butterfly effect, CRISPR, dark matter, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Gregor Mendel, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, longitudinal study, medical residency, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mouse model, New Journalism, out of africa, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Recombinant DNA, Scientific racism, seminal paper, stem cell, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Thomas Malthus, twin studies

“Some people got sick of it all”: Crotty, Ahead of the Curve, 108. “The new techniques, which permit”: Gottweis, Governing Molecules, 88. To mitigate the risks, the document: Berg et al., “Summary statement of the Asilomar Conference,” 1981–84. two-page letter written in August 1939: Albert Einstein, “Letter to Roosevelt, August 2, 1939,” Albert Einstein’s Letters to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, http://hypertextbook.com/eworld/einstein.shtml#first. As Alan Waterman, the head: Attributed to Alan T. Waterman, in Lewis Branscomb, “Foreword,” Science, Technology, and Society, a Prospective Look: Summary and Conclusions of the Bellagio Conference (Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences, 1976).

Surprisingly, it was near unanimously accepted. In the aftermath of the Asilomar Conference, several historians of science have tried to grasp the scope of the meeting by seeking an analogous moment in scientific history. There is none. The closest one gets to a similar document, perhaps, is a two-page letter written in August 1939 by Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard to alert President Roosevelt to the alarming possibility of a powerful war weapon in the making. A “new and important source of energy” had been discovered, Einstein wrote, through which “vast amounts of power . . . might be generated.” “This new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable . . . that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed.

In the 1980s and 1990s, DNA-sequencing and gene-cloning technology allowed scientists to understand and manipulate genes and thereby control the biology of cells with extraordinary dexterity. But the manipulation of genomes in their native context, particularly in embryonic cells or germ cells, opens the door to a vastly more powerful technology. What is at stake is no longer a cell, but an organism—ourselves. In the spring of 1939, Albert Einstein, mulling over recent advances in nuclear physics in his study at Princeton University, realized that every step required to achieve the creation of an unfathomably powerful weapon had been individually completed. The isolation of uranium, nuclear fission, the chain reaction, the buffering of the reaction, and its controlled release in a chamber had all fallen into place.


pages: 346 words: 92,984

The Lucky Years: How to Thrive in the Brave New World of Health by David B. Agus

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, autism spectrum disorder, butterfly effect, clean water, cognitive dissonance, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, Drosophila, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, fake news, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, Marc Benioff, medical residency, meta-analysis, microbiome, microcredit, mouse model, Murray Gell-Mann, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, nocebo, parabiotic, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, publish or perish, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, Salesforce, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Thomas Malthus, wikimedia commons

When Miss Lunsford, a nutritionist and graduate student at Cornell University working in the lab of biochemist and gerontologist Clive McCay, shared these results at a gathering to focus on the problems of aging led by the New York Academy of Medicine, no one—not even Lunsford and her teammates—could explain this “age-reversal” transformation. The year was 1955, the same year the Food and Drug Administration approved the polio vaccine, the power of the placebo effect was first written about, Albert Einstein died at the age of seventy-six, and Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were born.2 Miss Lunsford’s procedure, anatomically linking two organisms, had a name by then—parabiosis. But while this wasn’t the first time it had been performed, her explorations were among the first to use parabiosis to study aging.

CHAPTER 9 The Butterfly Effect Get Ready to Flap Your Wings All religions, arts, and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man’s life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence, and leading the individual toward freedom. —Albert Einstein Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability. —Sir William Osler If a jeweler tried to sell you a diamond that looked fake, you’d probably find another jeweler because something in your gut would tell you to move on. If you’ve ever bought a car, you likely used your intuition at some point to know which one would be right for you, walking away from candidates you simply had bad feelings about.


Comedy Writing Secrets by Mel Helitzer, Mark Shatz

Albert Einstein, built by the lowest bidder, David Sedaris, Donald Trump, elephant in my pajamas, fake news, fear of failure, index card, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, the scientific method, Yogi Berra

Choose a topic, then brainstorm for people, places, things, phrases, clichés, and words that are dissimilar to this topic. 3. TALK INSTEAD OF WRITING. Put down the pen and start talking out loud. Use a voice recorder to capture ideas, which may come faster than you can write. 4. IMAGINE INSTEAD OF WRITING. Albert Einstein recognized that the mind's visual powers greatly exceed its verbal abilities, and he used visualization to discover many of his famous theories. Whenever you need to kick-start your imagination, close your eyes and let your mind create a mental movie of you telling jokes to a receptive audience.

Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theater. —Gail Goodwin Props such as puppets, stuffed animals, or costumes can enliven a lecture. Teachers with a theatrical flair can dress and play the part of a historical figure—Abe Lincoln discussing the Civil War, for instance, or Albert Einstein explaining physics. COURSE MATERIALS Humor can add spice to syllabi, handouts, overhead transparencies, and other materials. Examples of POWs include silly names, funny titles or headings, oxymorons, and factitious terms or definitions. Exaggerated humor examples include self-effacing humor; distorted numbers, concepts, or phrases; and outrageous theories or studies.


pages: 327 words: 90,542

The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth Is Unattainable and the Global Economy Is in Peril by Satyajit Das

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, accounting loophole / creative accounting, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collaborative economy, colonial exploitation, computer age, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital divide, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, Emanuel Derman, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, geopolitical risk, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, margin call, market design, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, open economy, PalmPilot, passive income, peak oil, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satyajit Das, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Fry, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the market place, the payments system, The Spirit Level, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Societies and individuals cannot expect to maintain high living standards and survive without a radical transformation in practices and more frugal living, perhaps following the advice of nineteenth-century philosopher John Stuart Mill to “[seek] happiness by limiting…desires, rather than in attempting to satisfy them.” A gedanken or thought experiment, favored by Albert Einstein, illustrates the required adjustments in living standards: People work till they die or are incapable of labor, unless they have enough savings to finance their retirement. Taxes are set at a level sufficient to finance the public services and infrastructure deemed necessary by the citizens.

Epilogue 1 William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun, Random House, 1950, Act I, sc. 3. 2 Adolf Hitler, trans. James Murphy, Mein Kampf (1925) 1939, vol. I, Chapter X. http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200601.txt. 3 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651, Chapter XIII. 4 B. H. Liddell Hart, A History of the First World War, Macmillan, 1970, p. 1. 5 Often attributed to Albert Einstein, the statement derives from William Bruce Cameron, Informal Sociology: A Casual Introduction to Sociological Thinking, Random House, 1963, p. 13. http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/26/everything-counts-einstein/. 6 See Wolf Richter, “If This Ends Badly, How Will Such Reports Be Read, in Hindsight.


Hothouse Kids: The Dilemma of the Gifted Child by Alissa Quart

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, cognitive dissonance, deliberate practice, Flynn Effect, haute couture, helicopter parent, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, Two Sigma, War on Poverty

In fact, almost all of the company’s DVDs are named after a crew of infantilized dead white male geniuses: Baby Galileo, Baby Shakespeare, Baby Wordsworth, and Baby Van Gogh. The Baby Einstein PR rep explains the product name by saying, “Albert Einstein exemplifies someone who was truly curious about the world around him.” Her remark unwittingly undercuts the very premise of the series, suggesting not that babies can be made into Einsteins but that Einstein remained, in some sense, a baby. Additionally, I couldn’t help but recall that Albert Einstein was not an early bloomer. These videos are part of a DVD and toy fad that I call the Baby Genius Edutainment Complex. What I mean by the word complex here is two things.


pages: 374 words: 91,966

Escape from Hell by Larry Niven; Jerry Pournelle

Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, clean water, out of africa, the long tail

“So what did you do?” He looked sad. “I said I thought it was a tactical move, to gain time.” Sylvia laughed. “Brilliant. Of course it was that, for both Hitler and Stalin.” “So you went on making excuses for Stalin.” “Everyone around me did. But I had my doubts. There were these stories. Albert Einstein told me one that bothered me.” “Einstein? You knew Einstein?” Sylvia asked. “Of course I knew Einstein. He told me about a letter he’d got from a Jewish girl in Russia. Her name was Regina Golbinder. Her father had been a Communist Party leader in Berlin. When Hitler came to power they stuck it out for a while.

Hitler started in on the Jews. Golbinder and his family fled to the Soviet Union for refuge. Regina was fifteen then.” “Stalin put the whole family in a camp. But Regina had been to the United States on a trip with relatives, and they had visited Einstein. So she wrote him a letter. To Professor Albert Einstein, Princeton University, United States of America. She mentioned her visit with an uncle who was a physicist. She’d only been a little girl at the time, but she hoped he’d remember her, and could he write to Stalin and ask why they were in this awful labor camp?” “Einstein wrote to Stalin, but nothing came of that.


The Fractalist by Benoit Mandelbrot

Albert Einstein, Benoit Mandelbrot, Brownian motion, business cycle, Claude Shannon: information theory, discrete time, double helix, financial engineering, Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, linear programming, Louis Bachelier, Louis Blériot, Louis Pasteur, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Olbers’ paradox, Paul Lévy, power law, Richard Feynman, statistical model, urban renewal, Vilfredo Pareto

A heavily computational first (real) thesis could be balanced by assigning a philosophical issue. My assignment was long and heavily computational: the then-recent Ph.D. dissertation of the mathematician Yvonne Choquet Bruhat (1923–) asked a key question: Do the equations of gravitation discovered by Albert Einstein have a solution and only one? Physicists found this question of no interest, but mathematicians found it very difficult and hence fascinating. Bruhat managed to prove that it was sufficient for the initial conditions to have well-behaved derivatives at least to the magic order of 7. At my thesis defense, I was reporting on this proof elegantly enough when Darmois suddenly broke in.

My first outside award was the 1985 Barnard Medal for Meritorious Service to Science. It used to be granted every fifth year by Columbia University, in memory of its longtime president, Frederick Barnard, on the recommendation of a committee of the National Academy of Sciences. Earlier laureates included the likes of Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and Enrico Fermi. The previous laureate had been the founder of Bourbaki, my nemesis André Weil! When Ralph Gomory, my manager at IBM, called to announce this forthcoming event, he first asked whether I was sitting down, then read the list of my predecessors. He added that winning this award guaranteed that it would not be my last.


pages: 321 words: 92,828

Late Bloomers: The Power of Patience in a World Obsessed With Early Achievement by Rich Karlgaard

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bob Noyce, book value, Brownian motion, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Sedaris, deliberate practice, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial independence, follow your passion, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Goodhart's law, hiring and firing, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, move fast and break things, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, power law, reality distortion field, Sand Hill Road, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, sunk-cost fallacy, tech worker, TED Talk, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, Toyota Production System, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, working poor

* * * In 1905 a German-born Swiss patent application examiner—a late bloomer who didn’t speak until age six and now at twenty-five was so easily distracted at work that he was repeatedly rejected for promotion at the patent office—wrote, during his nonwork hours, a series of papers that would profoundly change the world. They included a Ph.D. thesis and four additional papers on the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, special relativity, and the relationship between mass and energy. The author summarized the last paper with the famous equation E = mc2. And with them, Albert Einstein altered the foundations of the world as we know it. But 1905 was also notable for another series of papers that continue to define our world today. The author, like Einstein, was a self-taught outsider. Born in Nice in 1857, Alfred Binet was educated as a lawyer, but his interests were varied and quirky.

Thus a child will have more novel perceptions than a middle-aged adult but will lack the context that turns novel perceptions into useful creative insights, or creative yield. But do such findings translate to the real world? Are people still innovative as they age? Well, here’s another surprise, at least for me. At a time when youth is unabashedly celebrated, most award-winning scientists, inventors, and entrepreneurs are getting older. A century ago Albert Einstein and Paul Dirac were in their mid-twenties when they did the work that resulted in each winning a Nobel Prize. William Lawrence Bragg won his Nobel Prize in physics in 1915 at twenty-five for work he did at only twenty-two. (He pioneered the use of X-rays to study the atomic structure of a crystal.)


Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming by Stephen Laberge PHD

Abraham Maslow, active measures, Albert Einstein, classic study, heat death of the universe, Howard Rheingold, Menlo Park, tacit knowledge, the map is not the territory

Even if you became lucid in a dream that doesn’t exactly address your problem, you can still seek the answer. You can look for or conjure up the person or place you need, or seek your solution where you are. It may help to question other dream characters, especially if they represent people who you think might know the answer. For example, if you were trying to solve a physics problem, Albert Einstein might be a good person to ask in your dream. To visit an expert advisor, try using the spinning a new dream scene exercise (page 101). Or simply explore your dream world with your question in mind, while remaining openly receptive to any clues that may suggest an answer. Remember that you unconsciously know many more things than you imagine; the solution to your problem may be among them.

., West Chazy, New York) It might be possible to build a mental model not of a specific problem, but of a workshop for solving all manner of problems or stimulating creative breakthroughs, We’ve already seen evidence for the potential of this approach in the lucid dream garage implied by the mechanic, in the parlor equipped with Albert Einstein and blackboard used by the computer programmer, and in her creative dreams in which the lucid dreamer created tools and situations applicable to the problem. Remember the fairy tale about the cobbler and the elves did his work while he was sleeping? At least one known man of letters, the writer Robert Louis Stevenson created his own dream workshop replete with assistants –– his ““brownies,” as he called them, who helped him produce many of his most famous works.


pages: 172 words: 27,962

Green Smoothie Revolution: The Radical Leap Towards Natural Health by Victoria Boutenko

Albert Einstein

Kugel, “Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and Chronic Back Pain—A Thing of the Past with Ergonomics,” Medical News Today, July 9, 2005. 21D. Heck, “Revision Rates after Knee Replacement in the United States,” Medical Care 36, no. 5 (May 1998):661–669. 22 http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_does_vitamin_K_deficiency_cause 23www.usda.gov 3 THE FIRST GREEN SMOOTHIE When the solution is simple, God is answering. —ALBERT EINSTEIN FOR DECADES DIETICIANS HAVE BEEN EDUCATING THE PUBLIC ABOUT the benefits of greens, but it was never clear how best to incorporate fresh greens into everyone’s daily diet. The only option for eating greens seemed to be the salad. The problem is that in our industrialized world, the taste of greens is not as appealing as the stimulating taste of processed foods.


pages: 825 words: 228,141

MONEY Master the Game: 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom by Tony Robbins

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, active measures, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, addicted to oil, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, clean water, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, Dean Kamen, declining real wages, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, estate planning, fear of failure, fiat currency, financial independence, fixed income, forensic accounting, high net worth, index fund, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, lake wobegon effect, Lao Tzu, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, Marc Benioff, market bubble, Michael Milken, money market fund, mortgage debt, Neil Armstrong, new economy, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, optical character recognition, Own Your Own Home, passive investing, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, riskless arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, survivorship bias, tail risk, TED Talk, telerobotics, The 4% rule, The future is already here, the rule of 72, thinkpad, tontine, transaction costs, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, World Values Survey, X Prize, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game

What’s the biggest misstep most of us make right from the start? Malkiel didn’t even hesitate when I asked him. He said the majority of investors fail to take full advantage of the incredible power of compounding—the multiplying power of growth times growth. Compound interest is such a powerful tool that Albert Einstein once called it the most important invention in all of human history. But if it’s so awesome, I wondered, why do so few of us take full advantage of it? To illustrate the exponential power of compounding, Malkiel shared with me the story of twin brothers William and James, with investment strategies that couldn’t have been more different.

SECTION 2 BECOME THE INSIDER: KNOW THE RULES BEFORE YOU GET IN THE GAME CHAPTER 2.0 BREAK FREE: SHATTERING THE 9 FINANCIAL MYTHS * * * Remember the golden rule: he who has the gold makes the rules. —UNKNOWN You have to learn the rules of the game, and then you have to play better than anyone else. —ALBERT EINSTEIN I know that you want to jump right in and learn where to put your money to obtain financial freedom. And I want to dive in and show you! I absolutely light up when I see someone really “get it” and come to understand and embrace that the game is truly winnable. But it’s not enough to just save your money, get a great return, and reduce your risk.

Write down at least three expenditures you are resolved to eliminate. Calculate how much money this will save you over the course of the next year. CHAPTER 3.4 SPEED IT UP: 2. EARN MORE AND INVEST THE DIFFERENCE * * * Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value. —ALBERT EINSTEIN Okay, let’s kick into second gear. If saving is one way to speed up your plan, there is an even faster way that literally has no limits—if you unleash your creativity and focus, and become obsessed with finding a way to do more for others than anyone else. That’s how you earn more and shift into the fast lane to freedom.


pages: 632 words: 171,827

Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn by Daniel Gordis

Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, facts on the ground, illegal immigration, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mount Scopus, post-oil, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

The movement never had more than about a hundred members, but its influence far outstripped its numbers. Prominent members included Arthur Ruppin, an economist who held a senior position in the Jewish Agency; the philosopher Martin Buber; and Gershom Scholem, the world-renowned philosopher and historian. Albert Einstein never joined the movement but was supportive; so, too, was Judah Magnes, an American Reform rabbi and pacifist who by virtue of his role in shaping the culture of Hebrew University (he was the university’s first chancellor and later its president), was able to influence the thought of generations of Israeli students and scholars.

“We had cooperated” in the approval of partition, he said, “in the conviction that [a Jewish state] was the only practicable solution for some hundreds of thousands of the surviving Jews of Europe.”36 Ben-Gurion saw Israel as a rebirth of Jewish peoplehood; many of American Judaism’s leaders either opposed the idea of a Jewish state, or saw it as merely a solution to the challenge of resettling Europe’s homeless Jews. Indeed, no lesser a figure than Albert Einstein, as close as one could get to Jewish royalty in the United States, told celebrants at a Passover Seder before World War II, “My awareness of the essential nature of Judaism resists the idea of a Jewish state with borders, an army, and a measure of temporal power.” History had changed the Jew, he felt.

Though he lost his political battle against taking German reparations, the fight earned him the reputation among many Israelis as the watchman for the Jewishness of Israel’s soul. David Ben-Gurion, on the other hand, had continually cast Begin as a fascist, a label that stuck even with American Jews. In advance of Begin’s trip to the United States in 1948, leading American Jewish figures—Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt among them—wrote a letter to the New York Times in which they also called him a fascist, noting that Begin “preached an admixture of ultranationalism, religious mysticism, and racial superiority.”4 By 1977, Begin had not shaken the accusation entirely, but many Israelis had come to intuit that he was much more complex than his enemies suggested.


pages: 665 words: 159,350

Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and Everything Else by Jordan Ellenberg

Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, autonomous vehicles, British Empire, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, coronavirus, COVID-19, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, East Village, Edmond Halley, Edward Jenner, Elliott wave, Erdős number, facts on the ground, Fellow of the Royal Society, Geoffrey Hinton, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, government statistician, GPT-3, greed is good, Henri Poincaré, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, John Nash: game theory, John Snow's cholera map, Louis Bachelier, machine translation, Mercator projection, Mercator projection distort size, especially Greenland and Africa, Milgram experiment, multi-armed bandit, Nate Silver, OpenAI, Paul Erdős, pets.com, pez dispenser, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, side hustle, Snapchat, social distancing, social graph, transcontinental railway, urban renewal

He had discovered, by mathematical inspection, the strange geometry that Maxwell’s equations pointed to, but he was not quite bold enough to follow the finger all the way to the strange point at the horizon it indicated. He was willing to accept that physics might not be what he and Newton had thought, but not that the geometry of the universe itself might not be what he and Euclid had thought. What Poincaré saw in Maxwell’s equations, Albert Einstein saw, too, in that same year of 1905. The younger scientist was bolder. And it was Einstein, out-geometrizing the world’s foremost geometer, who remade physics as symmetry instructed. Mathematicians were quick to understand the importance of the new developments. Hermann Minkowski was the first to work out Einstein’s theory of spacetime all the way to its geometrical bottom (thus, what we call here the “scronch plane” is actually called the Minkowski plane, if you need to look it up).

No amount of thought can predict the mosquito’s next move and provide you an advantage. Or, as Bachelier wrote in 1900, asserting what he calls a “fundamental principle”: (“Mathematically, the expected gain of a speculator is zero.”) A VERY UNEXPECTED FACT OF SEEMING VITALITY In July 1905, the very same month Pearson was posing Ross’s question in Nature, Albert Einstein published his paper “On the Motion of Small Particles Suspended in a Stationary Liquid, as Required by the Molecular Kinetic Theory of Heat,” in the Annalen der Physik. The paper concerned “Brownian motion,” the mysterious jittering of small particles floating in a liquid. Robert Brown had first noticed the motion while studying pollen particles under a microscope, and wondered whether this “very unexpected fact of seeming vitality” represented some principle of life that remained in the pollen even after its separation from the plant.

A Brief Account of Microscopical Observations Made in the Months of June, July and August 1827, on the Particles Contained in the Pollen of Plants; and on the General Existence of Active Molecules in Organic and Inorganic Bodies,” Philosophical Magazine 4, no. 21 (1828): 167. The Academy read: Material on the Olympia Academy is from Maurice Solovine’s introduction to Albert Einstein, Letters to Solovine, 1906–1955 (New York: Philosophical Library/Open Road, 2011). Solovine refers to an unspecified “scientific work by Karl Pearson” as the first item read, but other sources identify this as The Grammar of Science. “Nekrasov sharply”: Facts and quote about Nekrasov are from E.


pages: 622 words: 169,014

Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction by Alec Nevala-Lee

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, basic income, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Doomsday Clock, Elon Musk, experimental subject, Ford paid five dollars a day, heat death of the universe, lone genius, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair

As one fan famously observed, “The real golden age of science fiction is twelve.” This impact has both its light and its dark sides. In 1963, Asimov estimated that half of all creative scientists were interested in science fiction, and he acknowledged that this was probably an understatement. Campbell’s magazine counted Albert Einstein and the scientists of Bell Labs among its subscribers, and it made an indelible impression on such fans as the young Carl Sagan, who stumbled across it in a candy store: “A glance at the cover and a quick riffle through the interior showed me it was what I had been looking for. . . . I was hooked.

Taking pity on him, his interviewer proposed that he apply to Seth Low Junior College in Brooklyn, which would allow him to attend classes at Columbia as an upperclassman. It was also predominantly Jewish, which was no coincidence. Asimov went out to tell his father, who agreed that Seth Low was just as good as Columbia, although neither of them really believed it. Later that day, they went to a museum, where they saw Albert Einstein being trailed by a crowd of admirers. If it was a sign, it failed to comfort Asimov. He was a child prodigy, but it hadn’t been enough, and without a scholarship, he couldn’t even afford to attend Seth Low—it had to be City College after all. No matter where he ended up, he had to leave the circle of security that he had created for himself.

“[it] carried in it the seeds” Virginia Heinlein, “Science Fiction and John W. Campbell,” biographical essay in the RAH Archives, UC Santa Cruz. “The real golden age of science fiction is twelve” Hartwell, Age of Wonders, 13. The earliest version of this quote is attributed to the fan Peter Graham. Albert Einstein “As to sending Dr. Einstein a reprint of the December Astounding—not necessary. He’s a subscriber.” JWC to Robert D. Dooley, M.D., January 5, 1953. the scientists of Bell Labs “And you know at that time one of the things we did [at Bell Labs] was to read Astounding Science Fiction. Even some of us wrote for it.”


pages: 299 words: 98,943

Immortality: The Quest to Live Forever and How It Drives Civilization by Stephen Cave

Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, back-to-the-land, clean water, double helix, George Santayana, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Lao Tzu, life extension, planetary scale, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, stem cell, technoutopianism, the scientific method

Having labored diligently for the war effort, Pauling was horrified on the morning of August 7, 1945, when he picked up the daily paper to read “Tokyo Admits Atomic Havoc” and the details of a single bomb that had obliterated an entire city. He was deeply affected by the scale of the destruction—not least because he had been asked to lead the chemistry division of the project to develop the atomic bomb, turning it down only because of his many other commitments. When he was invited the following year by Albert Einstein to form the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, an elite group who would alert the public to the dangers of nuclear technology, he immediately accepted and began speaking out against atomic weapons testing. But this was the era of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who was convinced that Soviet sympathizers were working to undermine America; as a prominent scientist speaking out against nuclear weapons, Pauling could not hope to escape his attentions.

Alexander IV became (albeit, as it turned out, rather briefly) sole king of Macedon, with Olympias as his regent. No doubt she was keen to tell him that the blood of Achilles flowed in his veins too, but more to the point, so did hers. CHIPS OFF THE OLD BLOCK “OUR death is not an end if we can live on in our children,” wrote Albert Einstein, “for they are us; our bodies are only wilted leaves on the tree of life.” In writing this to console the widow of a friend, Einstein captured the essence of biological immortality, the second part of the Legacy Narrative. It is the belief that we live on in our offspring, that we and they are connected in a profound way that makes us in some crucial sense the same being.


pages: 356 words: 102,224

Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space by Carl Sagan

Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, cosmological principle, dark matter, Dava Sobel, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, germ theory of disease, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, linked data, low earth orbit, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, planetary scale, power law, profit motive, remunicipalization, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sparse data, Stephen Hawking, telepresence, time dilation

Well, if we can't find anything special about our position or our epoch, maybe there's something special about our motion. Newton and all the other great classical physicists held that the velocity of the Earth in space constituted a "privileged frame of reference." That's actually what it was called. Albert Einstein, a keen critic of prejudice and privilege all his life, considered * St. Augustine, in The City of God, says, "As it is not yet six thousand years since the first man . . . are not those to be ridiculed rather than refuted who try to persuade us of anything regarding a space of time so different from, and contrary to, the ascertained truth?

Because matter and antimatter, when brought into contact, violently annihilate each other, disappearing in an intense burst of gamma rays. We cannot tell whether something is made of matter or anti-matter just by looking at it. The spectroscopic properties of, for example, hydrogen and anti-hydrogen are identical. Albert Einstein's answer to the question of why we see only matter and not anti-matter was, "Matter won"—by which he meant that in our sector of the Universe at least, after almost all 153 the matter and anti-matter interacted and annihilated each other long ago, there was some of what we call ordinary matter left over.* As far as we can tell today, from gamma ray astronomy and other means, the Universe is made almost entirely of matter.


pages: 330 words: 99,226

Extraterrestrial Civilizations by Isaac Asimov

Albert Einstein, Cepheid variable, Columbine, Eddington experiment, Edward Charles Pickering, Future Shock, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, invention of radio, invention of the telescope, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Louis Pasteur, Magellanic Cloud, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, time dilation

It would take over 1,000 years to get an answer from a planet circling Rigel. This might seem irrelevant to the problem of getting to the stars. If light takes 4.40 years to reach Alpha Centauri, need we not merely build up our speed to where it is faster than light and thus outrace the signal and get there in less time than light does? However, as Albert Einstein (1879–1955) first pointed out in his Special Theory of Relativity in 1905, it is impossible for any object with mass to exceed the speed of light. Einstein set this limit from purely theoretical considerations and it seemed, when it was first suggested, to go against the dictates of “common sense” (and it seems so to many people even today)—but it is true just the same.

The transfer of matter could apparently take place over enormous distances, even millions or billions of light-years, in a trifling period of time. Such transfers can evade the speed-of-light limit because the transfer goes through tunnels or across bridges that do not, strictly speaking, have the time characteristics of our familiar Universe. Indeed, the passageway is sometimes called an Einstein-Rosen bridge because Albert Einstein himself and a coworker named Rosen suggested a theoretical basis for this in the 1930s. Could black holes someday make interstellar travel or even intergalactic travel possible? By making proper use of black holes, and assuming them to exist in great numbers, one might enter a black hole at point A, emerge at point B (a long distance away) almost at once, and travel through ordinary space to point C, where one enters another black hole and emerges almost at once at point D, and so on.


pages: 323 words: 100,772

Prisoner's Dilemma: John Von Neumann, Game Theory, and the Puzzle of the Bomb by William Poundstone

90 percent rule, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, cuban missile crisis, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Frank Gehry, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Herman Kahn, Jacquard loom, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, seminal paper, statistical model, the market place, zero-sum game

A group at the University of Chicago took it upon themselves to pen a World Constitution. Norman Cousins’s book Modern Man Is Obsolete crystallized world government sentiments. Many other intellectuals, among them those in the “hard” sciences, were sympathetic. Astronomer Harlow Shapley and physicist Arthur H. Compton spoke in favor of world government. Albert Einstein, the most famous scientist of his time, called for a “supranational” body to govern atomic power. So did Edward Teller and Robert Oppenheimer, who usually appear as diametric opposites. On October 16, 1945, the Army gave the Los Alamos staff a Certificate of Appreciation. In his acceptance speech, Oppenheimer said: If atomic bombs are to be added to the arsenals of a warring world, or to the arsenals of nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the name of Los Alamos and Hiroshima.

The New York Times judged von Neumann’s appointment “a useful gesture of conciliation toward a larger group of scientists who have been unhappy about the Oppenheimer verdict.” Time magazine said, “People who should know say that Von Neumann is eminently qualified to sit across the atomic table from the Russians in the greatest game in the world.” Asked for comment, Albert Einstein told the press, “Johnny has a very good mind.” The New York Times ran a brief article on von Neumann after his nomination (October 25, 1954). Von Neumann made the usual pleasantries about peacetime uses of atomic power. “But I am convinced,” he told the Times, “it will take a long time before it could be applied economically—especially in this country, where power is so cheap.”


pages: 334 words: 100,201

Origin Story: A Big History of Everything by David Christian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Arthur Eddington, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cepheid variable, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, Columbian Exchange, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, demographic transition, double helix, Easter island, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Ernest Rutherford, European colonialism, Francisco Pizarro, Haber-Bosch Process, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Large Hadron Collider, Late Heavy Bombardment, Marshall McLuhan, microbiome, nuclear winter, Paris climate accords, planetary scale, rising living standards, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, trade route, Yogi Berra

Watch this space, because understanding dark energy is one of the great challenges of contemporary science. Matter appeared within the first second after the big bang. Matter is the stuff that energy pushes around. Until just over a century ago, scientists and philosophers assumed that matter and energy were distinct. We now know that matter is really a highly compressed form of energy. The young Albert Einstein demonstrated this in a famous paper in 1905. That formula—energy (E) is equal to mass (m) times the speed of light (c) squared, or E = mc2—tells us how much energy is compressed inside a given amount of matter. To figure out how much energy is locked up in a bit of matter, multiply the mass of the matter not by the speed of light (which is more than one billion kilometers per hour) but by the speed of light times itself.

Within a decade, the United States and the Soviet Union had also built hydrogen bombs, which released the much greater energies generated by proton fusion, the same mechanism that powers all stars. The first H-bomb was tested in 1952. Much of this innovation was inspired by breakthroughs in the supercharged collective-learning environment of modern science. Albert Einstein developed his theory of relativity in the first two decades of the twentieth century. It improved on Newton’s understanding of the universe by showing that matter and energy warped space and time, and this warping was the real source of gravity. Einstein also showed that matter could be converted into energy, and that insight provided the scientific foundations for nuclear weapons and nuclear power.


pages: 379 words: 99,340

The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium by Martin Gurri

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Ayatollah Khomeini, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Burning Man, business cycle, citizen journalism, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, dark matter, David Graeber, death of newspapers, disinformation, Eddington experiment, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, facts on the ground, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, job-hopping, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nate Silver, Occupy movement, Port of Oakland, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Skype, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, too big to fail, traveling salesman, University of East Anglia, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional

If Science Is the Modern Deity, Then the Public Is on the Verge of Deicide The epochal moment for the prestige of modern science among the public came on November 6, 1919, when the Royal Society, meeting in Piccadilly, London, announced the findings of Arthur Eddington’s expedition to the island of Principe and the city of Sobral in northern Brazil. At stake was the very shape of the universe. Eddington, head of the Cambridge Observatory, had measured the gravitational curvature of light during the solar eclipse of May 29. The Newtonian universe, with its notions of absolute space, predicted a curvature of 0.87 arc-seconds. Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, however, had done away with absolute space. It posited a self-folding universe, finite yet limitless, and predicted a gravitational curvature roughly double that of the old model. “Stars ought to appear to be displaced outwards from the sun by 1.7 seconds of arc,” Einstein had written in 1916.[89] The illustrious scientists gathered in Piccadilly knew they were witnesses to history.

A few decades earlier, Marx had called his political ideals “scientific socialism,” to differentiate them from utopian schemes. In general, the prestige of the scientist derived from the belief that he journeyed to realms of mystery and brought back material benefits for the human race. But certain conditions particular to the event helped amplify the resonance of Einstein’s achievement. 6.1 Albert Einstein (1947)[90] It was the first major scientific breakthrough in the age of mass media – and it occurred in a field that was impenetrable to all but a handful of brilliant specialists. When told that people believed only three scientists in the world could understand general relativity, Eddington grew quiet.


pages: 400 words: 94,847

Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science by Michael Nielsen

Albert Einstein, augmented reality, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, Cass Sunstein, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, conceptual framework, dark matter, discovery of DNA, Donald Knuth, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Freestyle chess, Galaxy Zoo, Higgs boson, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, machine readable, machine translation, Magellanic Cloud, means of production, medical residency, Nicholas Carr, P = NP, P vs NP, publish or perish, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, selection bias, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Singh, Skype, slashdot, social intelligence, social web, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tacit knowledge, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, University of East Anglia, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine, Yochai Benkler

On nearly all crucial issues the participants rapidly agreed on when a line of argument was right and when it was wrong, and on when an idea was promising and when it was not. It was that rapid agreement which made it possible to scale up collaboration. As an illustration of how strongly held these standards are in science, consider the work of the young Albert Einstein, not the scientific icon we know of today, but as an unknown 26-year-old clerk working in the Swiss patent office, unable to find a job as a professional physicist. From that position of obscurity, in 1905 Einstein published his famous papers on special relativity, radically changing our notions of space, time, energy, and mass.

Nature, December 2006. http://www.nature.com/nature/peerreview/debate/nature05535.html. [168] Scott E. Page. The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008. [169] A. Pais. Subtle Is the Lord: The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. [170] Stephen Pinker. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. New York: Penguin, 2003. [171] Elizabeth Pisani and Carla AbouZahr. Sharing health data: Good intentions are not enough. Bulletin of the World Health Organization, 88(6), 2010


pages: 402 words: 98,760

Deep Sea and Foreign Going by Rose George

Admiral Zheng, air freight, Airbus A320, Albert Einstein, bank run, cable laying ship, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Costa Concordia, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Filipino sailors, global supply chain, Global Witness, Google Earth, intermodal, Jones Act, London Whale, Malacca Straits, Panamax, pattern recognition, profit maximization, Skype, trade route, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, urban planning, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche

In 2012 the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) published data from its Vessel Maritime Incident Database which showed that container ships were six times more likely to be involved in destabilizing military and narcotics-related transfers than their share of the world market fleet would suggest. In 1939, Albert Einstein wrote a letter to President Roosevelt about the feasibility of setting off a uranium chain reaction. He thought of dropping his new bomb not by air but by ship. ‘A single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory.’

– The international counter narcotics effort United States Government Accountability Office, Drug Control: Cooperation with Many Major Drug Transit Countries Has Improved, but Better Performance Reporting and Sustainability Plans are Needed, July 2008, p.5. – Six times more likely Griffiths and Jenks, op. cit., p.23. – Carried by boat and exploded in a port Letter from Albert Einstein to F.D. Roosevelt, 2 August 1939, accessed February 2013 from the President Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, http://www.fdrlibrary.marist. edu/archives/pdfs/docsworldwar.pdf 8 Hitting the US economy with every available means Toby Harnden, ‘US casts doubt on bin Laden’s latest message’, Daily Telegraph, 28 December 2001


pages: 317 words: 97,824

Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes by Maria Konnikova

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, availability heuristic, Bluma Zeigarnik, classic study, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, delayed gratification, fear of failure, feminist movement, functional fixedness, Lao Tzu, pre–internet, Richard Feynman, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Walter Mischel

Why then do we tend to miss this softer, almost artistic side and focus instead on the detective’s computer-like powers of rational calculation? Simply put, that view is both easier and safer. It is a line of thinking that is well ingrained into our psychology. We have been trained to do it from an early age. As Albert Einstein put it, “Certainly we should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality. It cannot lead, it can only serve; and it is not fastidious in its choice of a leader.” We live in a society that glorifies the computer model, that idolizes the inhuman Holmes, who can take in countless data points as a matter of course, analyze them with startling precision, and spit out a solution.

Chapter Four: Exploring the Brain Attic For an overview of the nature of creativity, imagination, and insight, I recommend the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, including his books Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention and Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. The discussion of distance and its role in the creative process was influenced by the work of Yaacov Trope and Ethan Kross. The chapter as a whole owes a debt to the writings of Richard Feynman and Albert Einstein. Chapter Five: Navigating the Brain Attic My understanding of the disconnect between objective reality and subjective experience and interpretation was profoundly influenced by the work of Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson, including their groundbreaking 1977 paper, “Telling More Than We Can Know.”


pages: 400 words: 99,489

The Sirens of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World by Sarah Stewart Johnson

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Astronomia nova, back-to-the-land, Beryl Markham, classic study, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, data science, Drosophila, Elon Musk, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Late Heavy Bombardment, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mercator projection, Neil Armstrong, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ronald Reagan, scientific mainstream, sensible shoes, Suez canal 1869

Antoniadi, “On the Possibility of Explaining on a Geomorphic Basis the Phenomena Presented by the Planet Mars,” Journal of the British Astronomical Association, 20:2 (1909), p. 93. THE PIONEERING PSYCHOLOGISTS For more on the psychology of planetary perception, see Chapter 14, “A Stately Pleasure Dome,” in William Sheehan, Planets and Perception: Telescopic Views and Interpretations, 1609–1909 (University of Arizona Press, 1988). THEORY OF SPECIAL RELATIVITY Albert Einstein, “Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper,” Annalen der Physik, 322, no. 10 (1905), pp. 891–921. TO A BACKWATER Much of the useful work done during the interwar years was done by amateurs. “WARMTH OF HIS FIRE” Leonard, Percival Lowell, An Afterglow, p. 42. “ ‘ LIGHT THAT SHIFTS’ ” This is a line from “To the True Romance,” a poem by Rudyard Kipling.

THE PARALLEL POSTULATE Euclid’s fifth postulate is: “If a straight line intersects two other straight lines, and so makes the two interior angles on one side of it together less than two right angles, then the other straight lines will meet at a point if extended far enough on the side on which the angles are less than two right angles.” Euclid, Euclid’s Elements: All Thirteen Books Complete in One Volume: The Thomas L. Heath Translation. AVOIDED USING IT J. J. O’Connor and E. F. Robertson, “Non-Euclidean Geometry,” JOC/EFR (Feb. 1996). KEPT HIS DOUBTS A SECRET Ibid. THEORY OF GENERAL RELATIVITY Albert Einstein, “Der Feldgleichungen der Gravitation,” Königlich Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften (1915), pp. 844–847. PHOTOSYNTHESIS EVOLVED LATE Joseph R. Michalski, Tullis C. Onstott, Stephen J. Mojzsis, John Mustard, Queenie H. S. Chan, Paul B. Niles, and Sarah Stewart Johnson, “The Martian Subsurface as a Potential Window into the Origin of Life,” Nature Geoscience, 11, no. 1 (2018), p. 21; Tanai Cardona, James W.


pages: 365 words: 96,573

Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art by James Nestor

Albert Einstein, epigenetics, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, Khan Academy, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, off-the-grid, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, stem cell, TED Talk

I begged and borrowed (with annotations, mind you) from several dozen elucidating books, interviews, and scientific articles penned by these respiratory renegades: Dr. Michael Gelb; Dr. Mark Burhenne; Dr. Steven Lin; Dr. Kevin Boyd; Dr. Ira Packman; Dr. John Feiner at the University of California, San Francisco Hypoxia Research Laboratory; Dr. Steven Park at the Department of Otorhinolaryngology, Albert Einstein College of Medicine; Dr. Amit Anand at the Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care, and Sleep Medicine at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center; Ann Kearney, doctor of speech-language pathology at the Stanford Voice and Swallowing Center; and, of course, the generous and garrulous Drs. John and Mike Mew.

A study that followed 1,900 children for 15 years found that children with severe snoring, sleep apnea, and other sleep-disordered breathing were twice as likely to become obese compared to children who didn’t snore. Those children who had the worst symptoms had a 60 to 100 percent increased risk of obesity. “Short Sleep Duration and Sleep-Related Breathing Problems Increase Obesity Risk in Kids,” press release, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Dec. 11, 2014. Norman Kingsley: Sheldon Peck, “Dentist, Artist, Pioneer: Orthodontic Innovator Norman Kingsley and His Rembrandt Portraits,” Journal of the American Dental Association 143, no. 4 (Apr. 2012): 393–97. Pierre Robin: Ib Leth Nielsen, “Guiding Occlusal Development with Functional Appliances,” Australian Orthodontic Journal 14, no. 3 (Oct. 1996): 133–42; “Functional Appliances,” British Orthodontic Society; John C.


The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can't Think the Way We Do by Erik J. Larson

AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, Boeing 737 MAX, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, driverless car, Elon Musk, Ernest Rutherford, Filter Bubble, Geoffrey Hinton, Georg Cantor, Higgs boson, hive mind, ImageNet competition, information retrieval, invention of the printing press, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Hawkins, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, machine readable, machine translation, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, retrograde motion, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, superintelligent machines, tacit knowledge, technological singularity, TED Talk, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Yochai Benkler

And when Noam Chomsky, the pioneering linguistics scientist at MIT, was asked in a 1976 interview about his influences, he said, “In relation to the questions we have been discussing [concerning the philosophy of language], the phi­los­o­pher to whom I feel closest and whom I’m almost paraphrasing is Charles Sanders Peirce.”1 BR I LLI A N T BU T A LON E Like Albert Einstein, Peirce was left-­handed and thought in pictures. He sketched out logical inferences in diagrams. In his ­later years, he wrote alone in his home, complaining that he was hungry and cold, 96 T he P rob­lem of I nference too poor to afford fuel for the stove. His few friends worried about him and managed to get him a series of lectures at Harvard on the foundations of logic, in which he explained the types of logical inference with a framework that he thought undergirded the scientific method—­a program for thinking clearly.

If successful in engaging the community, the aim is to have swarms of scientists attacking the major challenges of understanding the brain and its disorders together—in an environment where e­very individual w ­ ill receive credit for his or her contribution.”1 This is a hodgepodge of ideas, from “global collaboration,” which sounds promising, to “swarms of scientists,” which evokes an absurdly deflationary meta­phor for individual scientists’ contributions (effectively disallowing individual discovery itself), to a tack-on bromide about “­every individual . . . ​receiving credit.” Perhaps it was an off day for Hill, a major player in the now infamous H ­ uman Brain Proj­ect underway in Eu­rope. But Henry Markram, 246 T he F ­ uture of the M yth once director of that proj­ect, is also a proponent of Hill’s vision of science, arguing that geniuses like Albert Einstein are now unnecessary: “We are hampered by the general belief that we need an Einstein to explain how the brain works. What we actually need is to set aside our egos and create a new kind of collective neuroscience.”2 But his touting of collective neuroscience was, we now know, his own mythological vision of creating a superintelligent computer brain, using other scientists as resources to pursue a definite but ill-­ advised path. ­


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Can We Talk About Israel?: A Guide for the Curious, Confused, and Conflicted by Daniel Sokatch

activist lawyer, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, European colonialism, facts on the ground, indoor plumbing, Live Aid, lockdown, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mount Scopus, one-state solution, Salesforce, Suez crisis 1956, the map is not the territory, Thomas L Friedman, traveling salesman, urban planning, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Deir Yassin terrified the Palestinian Arabs and shocked the Yishuv—devoted as it was to the idea of “purity of arms.” The massacre was roundly condemned by Ben-Gurion and the Jewish Agency. And it appalled the global Jewish community, which did not expect Jewish fighters to behave in this way. Prominent Jews in the United States, among them Nobel laureate Albert Einstein and the writer-philosopher Hannah Arendt, wrote a letter to the New York Times condemning Irgun leader (and future Israeli prime minister) Menachem Begin and urging American Jews not to support him or his militant organization. As Begin later bragged, there is little doubt that the massacre (or the story of the massacre, as he claimed, avoiding admission that it had actually occurred) encouraged other Palestinians to flee their villages in the face of approaching Jewish forces.

HereBy 1947, the population of Palestine was about 1.8 million people: Smith, Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 136. CHAPTER 5: ISRAEL AND THE NAKBA: INDEPENDENCE AND CATASTROPHE (1947–49) HereThere, they massacred between 100 and 250 people: Tessler, A History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 291. HereProminent Jews in the United States, among them Nobel Laureate Albert Einstein: Ruth Schuster, “1948: N.Y. Times Publishes Letter by Einstein, Other Jews Accusing Menachem Begin of Fascism,” Haaretz, Apr. 12, 2014, https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/.premium-1948-n-y-times-letter-by-einstein-slams-begin-1.5340057. HereAs Begin later bragged, there is little doubt that the massacre: “On 1948,” interview with Benny Morris, YouTube, Mar. 1, 2018, video, 14:10, https://www.youtube.com/watch?


pages: 117 words: 31,221

Fred Schwed's Where Are the Customers' Yachts?: A Modern-Day Interpretation of an Investment Classic by Leo Gough

Albert Einstein, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, book value, corporate governance, discounted cash flows, disinformation, diversification, fixed income, index fund, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, Michael Milken, Northern Rock, passive investing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, short selling, South Sea Bubble, The Nature of the Firm, the rule of 72, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, young professional

It’s a simple mathematical process that produces amazing results. The secret of successful investing is patience. The longer you hold an investment, the more it is likely to grow, simply through the effect of compound interest. DEFINING IDEA… The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest. ~ ALBERT EINSTEIN For example if you invest £100 at a modest real (inflation adjusted) rate of return of 5%, after one year you will have £105. After that, though, you will start getting interest on the interest. In the early years that figure is small. In the later years, however, it starts to grow like a snowball without you having to add any further cash to the investment (as long as you reinvest your dividends).


pages: 139 words: 33,246

Money Moments: Simple Steps to Financial Well-Being by Jason Butler

Albert Einstein, asset allocation, behavioural economics, buy and hold, Cass Sunstein, Cornelius Vanderbilt, diversified portfolio, estate planning, financial independence, fixed income, happiness index / gross national happiness, index fund, intangible asset, John Bogle, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mortgage debt, Mr. Money Mustache, passive income, placebo effect, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Steve Jobs, time value of money, traffic fines, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Vanguard fund, Yogi Berra

MONEY MIND THOUGHTS, FEELINGS AND PERSPECTIVES 1 DUNCE OF THE CLASS HOW SELF-LIMITING BELIEFS AFFECT YOUR FINANCIAL CONFIDENCE AND CAPABILITY ‘Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it ... he who doesn’t ... pays it. Compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe.’ Albert Einstein Maths was never my strongest or favourite subject at school. However, the quality of teaching at both my primary and secondary school was pretty poor. At secondary school I would often put my hand up in a maths lesson and say ‘I don’t understand, can you please explain that again?’ Invariably the teacher would sigh, roll their eyes and say ‘We have to move on Butler, keep up.’


Germany by Andrea Schulte-Peevers

Albert Einstein, bank run, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, call centre, capitalist realism, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, company town, computer age, credit crunch, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Google Earth, haute couture, haute cuisine, Honoré de Balzac, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, low cost airline, messenger bag, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Eisenman, place-making, post-work, Prenzlauer Berg, retail therapy, ride hailing / ride sharing, sensible shoes, Skype, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, V2 rocket, white picket fence

Packing over 80 million people into a pretty tight frame, it’s an economic and political powerhouse with bewitching scenery, pulsating cities, progressive culture and an awareness of a historic legacy teetering between horror and greatness. Few countries have had as much impact on the world as Germany, a land of innovation that has given us the printing press, the automobile, aspirin and MP3 technology. It’s the birth place of Martin Luther, Albert Einstein, Karl Marx, Goethe, Beethoven, the Grimm brothers and other players on the world stage. As you travel around, you’ll have plenty of brushes with such genius but, perhaps, Germany’s scenery lifts the spirit even more. The jagged peaks of the big-shouldered Bavarian Alps unfold above flowering mountain pastures where cows graze lazily.

The US Embassy next door was the last Pariser Platz building to open, in July 2008. The first one was the faithfully rebuilt Hotel Adlon (now called the Adlon Hotel Kempinski, Click here). This posh caravanserai was the original Grand Hotel, where the 1932 movie starring Greta Garbo was filmed. A celeb magnet since its 1907 opening, it has sheltered Charlie Chaplin, Albert Einstein and even Michael Jackson. Remember him dangling his baby out the window? It happened at the Adlon. US president John F Kennedy of ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ fame is the focus of the small Kennedy Museum (Map; 2065 3570; www.thekennedys.de; Pariser Platz 4a; adult/concession €7/3.50; 10am-6pm), an intimate, nonpolitical exhibit set up like a walk-through family photo album.

High-brow types will likely prefer to steer straight towards the Deutsche Guggenheim (Map; 202 0930; www.deutsche-guggenheim.de; Unter den Linden 13-15; adult/concession/family €4/3/8, Mon free; 10am-8pm Fri-Wed, 10am-10pm Thu), a small, minimalist gallery spotlighting top-notch contemporary artists, such as Eduardo Chillida and Gerhard Richter. Opposite, the Alte Staatsbibliothek (Old State Library; Map; Unter den Linden 8) counts the original sheet music of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony among its treasures. Next up is the Humboldt Universität (Map), Berlin’s oldest university where Marx and Engels studied and the Brothers Grimm and Albert Einstein taught. It occupies the palace of Prince Heinrich, brother of King Frederick the Great, whose pompous equestrian statue stands on Unter den Linden outside the university. It was Frederick who created the ensemble of stately structures framing Bebelplatz (Map), the site of the first big official Nazi book-burning in May 1933.


pages: 161 words: 35,911

Going Self-Employed: How to Start Out in Business on Your Own by Steve Gibson

Albert Einstein, fear of failure

Add Interest for Late Payment . . . Tricky one this. I would advocate it but not many people on either side of this arrangement appear to invoke it. Insanity There is nothing that is a more certain sign of insanity than to do the same thing over and over again and expect the results to be different. Albert Einstein Business Skills The running your business bit is all about business skills. In Chapter 1 we looked at your personal skills. But business skills need to run in tandem with your wonderful personal talents. So what business skills do we need? In a typical day I reckon I will use the following skills: Receptionist Meet and greet clients and ask if they want a coffee.


pages: 502 words: 107,657

Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die by Eric Siegel

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, backtesting, Black Swan, book scanning, bounce rate, business intelligence, business process, butter production in bangladesh, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, commoditize, computer age, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data is the new oil, data science, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Everything should be made as simple as possible, experimental subject, Google Glasses, happiness index / gross national happiness, information security, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, lifelogging, machine readable, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, mass immigration, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, personalized medicine, placebo effect, prediction markets, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Shai Danziger, software as a service, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, statistical model, Steven Levy, supply chain finance, text mining, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Davenport, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, X Prize, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

The solution is machine learning—computers automatically developing new knowledge and capabilities by furiously feeding on modern society’s greatest and most potent unnatural resource: data. “Feed Me!”—Food for Thought for the Machine Data is the new oil. —European Consumer Commissioner Meglena Kuneva The only source of knowledge is experience. —Albert Einstein In God we trust. All others must bring data. —William Edwards Deming (a business professor famous for work in manufacturing) Most people couldn’t be less interested in data. It can seem like such dry, boring stuff. It’s a vast, endless regiment of recorded facts and figures, each alone as mundane as the most banal tweet, “I just bought some new sneakers!”

Carving Out a Work of Art In every block of marble I see a statue as plain as though it stood before me, shaped and perfect in attitude and action. I have only to hew away the rough walls that imprison the lovely apparition to reveal it to the other eyes as mine see it. —Michelangelo Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. —Albert Einstein (as paraphrased by Roger Sessions) The decision tree fails unless we tame its wild growth. This presents a tough balance to strike. Like a parent, we strive to structure our progeny’s growth and development so they’re not out of control, and yet we cannot bear to quell creativity. Where exactly to draw the line?


pages: 407 words: 112,767

The Tao of Fully Feeling: Harvesting Forgiveness Out of Blame by Pete Walker

Albert Einstein, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, life extension, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Saturday Night Live

BUSYHOLISM All that is hurrying soon will be over with; only what lasts can bring us to the truth. Young men, don’t put your trust into the trials of flight, into the hot and quick. All things already rest: darkness and morning light, flower and book. – Rilke He who can no longer pause to wonder is as good as dead. – Albert Einstein Busyholism is a term I have coined to define the most common and least recognized form of compulsiveness – constant busyness. (According to The Oxford Dictionary, busyness was the original meaning of business!) “Busyholics” are constantly in action, moving from activity to activity in a never ending quest for “being all they can be.”

When you consistently show your inner child that she is really safe and fully welcome in every aspect of her being, she will become more and more alive and self-expressive. As she experiences you consistently rising to her defense, she will feel free enough to reclaim the emotionality that fuels her innate spiritedness, playfulness, curiosity, and flexibility. How different this approach to fathering is when compared to the traditional approach that Albert Einstein warned against: It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mostly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wreck and ruin without fail.


pages: 363 words: 109,374

50 Psychology Classics by Tom Butler-Bowdon

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, corporate governance, delayed gratification, fear of failure, feminist movement, global village, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, lateral thinking, Mikhail Gorbachev, Milgram experiment, Necker cube, Paradox of Choice, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

Writings from this decade include Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), The Ego and the Id (1923), an Autobiography (1925), and The Future of an Illusion (1927), which aimed to debunk religion. Freud’s long essay Civilization and its Discontents (1930) crystallized his ideas about human aggression and the “death instinct.” With Albert Einstein he wrote Why War? in 1933. After the Nazi regime’s annexation of Austria in 1938 and its banning of psychoanalysis, Freud and family relocated to London. A lifelong heavy smoker of cigars, he died of cancer in 1939. 1983 Frames of Mind “Only if we expand and reformulate our view of what counts as human intellect will we be able to devise more appropriate ways of assessing it and more effective ways of educating it.”

The experiments became the subject of his book Awakenings (1973), which inspired the Harold Pinter play A Kind of Alaska and the Hollywood movie Awakenings starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams. In addition to having a private practice, Sacks is a clinical professor of neurology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and an adjunct professor of neurology at the New York University School of Medicine. He is also a consultant neurologist to the Little Sisters of the Poor religious order. He has received many honorary doctorates. Other books include Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf (1990), An Anthropologist on Mars (1995), The Island of the Colorblind (1996), and Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood (2001). 2004 The Paradox of Choice “Unlike other negative emotions—anger, sadness, disappointment, even grief—what is so difficult about regret is the feeling that the regrettable state of affairs could have been avoided and that it could have been avoided by you, if only you had chosen differently.”


pages: 426 words: 105,423

The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Timothy Ferriss

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apollo 13, call centre, clean water, digital nomad, Donald Trump, drop ship, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, fixed income, follow your passion, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, global village, Iridium satellite, knowledge worker, language acquisition, late fees, lateral thinking, Maui Hawaii, oil shock, paper trading, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, passive income, peer-to-peer, pre–internet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, remote working, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, William of Occam

September 2006 I return to the U.S. in an odd, Zen-like state after methodically destroying all of my assumptions about what can and cannot be done. “Drug Dealing for Fun and Profit” has evolved into a class on ideal lifestyle design. The new message is simple: I’ve seen the promised land, and there is good news. You can have it all. Step I: D is for Definition Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one. —ALBERT EINSTEIN Cautions and Comparisons HOW TO BURN $1,000,000 A NIGHT These individuals have riches just as we say that we “have a fever,” when really the fever has us. — SENECA (4 B.C.–A.D. 65) I also have in mind that seemingly wealthy, but most terribly impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross, but know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their own golden or silver fetters

—HERBERT SIMON, recipient of Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics8 and the A.M. Turing Award, the “Nobel Prize of Computer Science” Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking. —ALBERT EINSTEIN I hope you’re sitting down. Take that sandwich out of your mouth so you don’t choke. Cover the baby’s ears. I’m going to tell you something that upsets a lot of people. I never watch the news and have bought one single newspaper in the last five years, in Stansted Airport in London, and only because it gave me a discount on a Diet Pepsi.


pages: 378 words: 110,408

Peak: Secrets From the New Science of Expertise by Anders Ericsson, Robert Pool

Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, deliberate practice, digital rights, iterative process, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, pattern recognition, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, sensible shoes

For example, the inferior parietal lobule has significantly more gray matter in mathematicians than in nonmathematicians. This part of the brain is involved in mathematical calculations and in visualizing objects in space, something that is important in many areas of math. It also happens to be a part of the brain that caught the attention of the neuroscientists who examined Albert Einstein’s brain. They found that Einstein’s inferior parietal lobule was significantly larger than average and that its shape was particularly unusual, which led them to speculate that his inferior parietal lobule may have played a crucial role in his ability to perform abstract mathematical thinking.

Unale, Sabri Yilmazband, and Cengizhan Ozturkd, “Increased gray matter density in the parietal cortex of mathematicians: A voxel-based morphometry study,” American Journal of Neuroradiology 28 (2007): 1859–1864. [>] abstract mathematical thinking: Sandra F. Witelson, Debra L. Kigar, and Thomas Harvey, “The exceptional brain of Albert Einstein,” The Lancet 353 (1999): 2149–2153. [>] person was born with: Interestingly, that correlation between length of time as a mathematician and size of the region was not found for the left inferior parietal lobule. However, that may simply have been a matter of not having enough subjects in the study to be able to get a statistically valid result, and with a larger study the correlation might appear. [>] supplementary eye field: Tosif Ahamed, Motoaki Kawanabe, Shin Ishii, and Daniel E.


pages: 363 words: 108,670

Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith and Love by Dava Sobel

Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, cognitive dissonance, Dava Sobel, Defenestration of Prague, Edmond Halley, germ theory of disease, Hans Lippershey, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Louis Pasteur, Murano, Venice glass, Neil Armstrong, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Peace of Westphalia, retrograde motion

Isaac Newton is born in England, December 25. 1643 Galileo’s student Evangelista Torricelli (1608-47) invents mercury barometer. 1644 Pope Urban VIII dies. 1648 Thirty Years’ War ends. 1649 Vincenzio Galilei (son) dies in Florence, May 15. 1654 Grand Duke Ferdinando II improves on Galileo’s thermometer by closing the glass tube to keep air out. 1655-56 Christiaan Huygens (1629-95) improves telescope, discovers largest of Saturn’s moons, sees Saturn’s “companions” as a ring, patents pendulum clock. 1659 Suor Arcangela dies at San Matteo, June 14. 1665 Jean-Dominique Cassini (1625-1712) discovers and times the rotation of Jupiter and Mars. 1669 Sestilia Bocchineri Galilei dies. 1670 Grand Duke Ferdinando II dies, succeeded by his only surviving son, Cosimo III. 1676 Ole Roemer (1644-1710) uses eclipses of Jupiter’s moons to determine the speed of light; Cassini discovers gap in Saturn’s rings. 1687 Newton’s laws of motion and universal gravitation are published in his Principia. 1705 Edmond Halley (1656-1742) studies comets, realizes they orbit the Sun, predicts return of a comet later named in his honor. 1714 Daniel Fahrenheit (1686-1736) develops mercury thermometer with accurate scale for scientific purposes. 1718 Halley observes that even the fixed stars move with almost imperceptible “proper motion” over long periods of time. 1728 English astronomer James Bradley (1693-1762) provides first evidence for the Earth’s motion through space based on the aberration of starlight. 1755 Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) discerns the true shape of the Milky Way, identifies the Andromeda nebula as a separate galaxy. 1758 “Halley’s comet” returns. 1761 Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov (1711-65) realizes Venus has an atmosphere. 1771 Comet hunter Charles Messier (1730-1817) identifies a list of noncometary objects, many of which later prove to be distant galaxies. 1781 William Herschel (1738-1822) discovers the planet Uranus. 1810 Napoleon Bonaparte, having conquered the Papal States, transfers the Roman archives, including those of the Holy Office with all records of Galileo’s trial, to Paris. 1822 Holy Office permits publication of books that teach Earth’s motion. 1835 Galileo’s Dialogue is dropped from Index of Prohibited Books. 1838 Stellar parallax, and with it the distance to the stars, is detected independently by astronomers working in South Africa, Russia, and Germany; Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel (1784-1846) publishes the first account of this phenomenon, for the star 61 Cygni. 1843 Galileo’s trial documents are returned to Italy. 1846 Neptune and its largest moon are discovered by predictions and observations of astronomers working in several countries. 1851 Jean-Bernard-Leon Foucault (1819-68) in Paris demonstrates the rotation of the Earth by means of a two-hundred-foot pendulum. 1861 Kingdom of Italy proclaimed, uniting most states and duchies. 1862 French chemist Louis Pasteur (1822-95) publishes germ theory of disease. 1877 Asaph Hall (1829-1907) discovers the moons of Mars. 1890-1910 Complete works, Le Opere di Galileo Galilei, are edited and published in Florence by Antonio Favaro. 1892 University of Pisa awards Galileo an honorary degree—250 years after his death. 1893 Providentissimus Deus of Pope Leo XIII cites Saint Augustine, taking the same position Galileo did in his Letter to Grand Duchess Cristina, to show that the Bible did not aim to teach science. 1894 Pasteur’s student Alexandre Yersin (1863-1943) discovers bubonic plague bacillus and prepares serum to combat it. 1905 Albert Einstein (1879-1955) publishes his special theory of relativity, establishing the speed of light as an absolute limit. 1908 George Ellery Hale (1868-1938) discerns the magnetic nature of sunspots. 1917 Willem de Sitter (1872-1934) intuits the expansion of the universe from Einstein’s equations. 1929 American astronomer Edwin Hubble (1889-1953) finds evidence for expanding universe. 1930 Roberto Cardinal Bellarmino is canonized as Saint Robert Bellarmine by Pope Pius XI. 1935 Pope Pius XI inaugurates Vatican Observatory and Astrophysical Laboratory at Castel Gandolfo. 1950 Humani generis of Pope Pius XII discusses the treatment of unproven scientific theories that may relate to Scripture; reaches same conclusion as Galileo’s Letter to Grand Duchess Cristina. 1959 Unmanned Russian Luna 3 spacecraft radios first views of the Moon’s far side from lunar orbit. 1966 Index of Prohibited Books is abolished following the Second Vatican Council. 1969 American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walk on the Moon. 1971 Apollo 15 commander David R.

” * Later, Galileo thanked him by dedicating Two New Sciences “To the very illustrious nobleman, my Lord the Count de Noailles, Councilor to his Most Christian Majesty; Knight of the Holy Ghost; Field Marshal of the Armies,” et cetera, et cetera. * Posterity completely agrees with Galileo in this assessment of his merits. As Albert Einstein noted, “Propositions arrived at purely by logical means are completely empty as regards reality. Because Galileo saw this, and particularly because he drummed it into the scientific world, he is the father of modern physics—indeed of modern science altogether.” * Galileo invented a rudimentary thermometer, around 1593, for approximating room temperature, but it took until 1714 for Daniel Fahrenheit to improve on the device by sealing mercury in glass and marking the tube with a degree scale calibrated by the freezing and boiling points of water


pages: 331 words: 104,366

Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins by Garry Kasparov

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, business process, call centre, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, computer age, cotton gin, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Drosophila, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, Freestyle chess, gamification, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, job automation, Ken Thompson, Leonard Kleinrock, low earth orbit, machine translation, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, move 37, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, pattern recognition, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, rising living standards, rolodex, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

But I remain confident that we will continue to enjoy chess, and to revere it, as long as we enjoy art, science, and competition. Thanks to the Internet’s matchless ability to spread myths and rumors, I’ve found myself bombarded with all sorts of misinformation about my own intellect. Spurious lists of “highest IQs in history” might find me between Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking, both of whom have probably taken as many proper IQ tests as I have: zero. In 1987, the German news magazine Der Spiegel sent a small group of experts to a hotel in Baku to administer a battery of tests to measure my brainpower in different ways, some specially designed to test my memory and pattern recognition abilities.

If you make a relatively minor error and fall into a difficult position you can hope your opponent will falter in return, especially if you put up a stout defense. German world champion Emanuel Lasker was the greatest proponent of chess as a pitched battle. Lasker was a philosopher and mathematician from the days when chess was still a gentleman’s club pastime and whose biography was prefaced by his peer and admirer, Albert Einstein. Lasker employed psychology and knowledge of his opponent as capably as he applied chess acumen, holding the title for a record twenty-seven years. In his 1910 book, Common Sense in Chess, Lasker made this statement before moving on to how to improve the reader’s opening play: Chess has been represented, or shall I say misrepresented, as a game—that is, a thing which could not well serve a serious purpose, solely created for the enjoyment of an empty hour.


pages: 382 words: 105,819

Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe by Roger McNamee

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, carbon credits, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, computer age, cross-subsidies, dark pattern, data is the new oil, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, game design, growth hacking, Ian Bogost, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, It's morning again in America, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, laissez-faire capitalism, Lean Startup, light touch regulation, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, messenger bag, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Network effects, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content. Version_1 To Ann, who inspires me every day Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral. —Melvin Kranzberg’s First Law of Technology We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them. —Albert Einstein Ultimately, what the tech industry really cares about is ushering in the future, but it conflates technological progress with societal progress. —Jenna Wortham CONTENTS Also by Roger McNamee Title Page Copyright Dedication Epigraph Prologue 1 The Strangest Meeting Ever 2 Silicon Valley Before Facebook 3 Move Fast and Break Things 4 The Children of Fogg 5 Mr.

When called to task, they protected their business model and prerogatives, making only small changes to their business practices. This trajectory is worth understanding in greater depth. 3 Move Fast and Break Things Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value. —ALBERT EINSTEIN During Mark Zuckerberg’s sophomore year at Harvard, he created a program called Facemash that allowed users to compare photos of two students and choose which was “hotter.” The photos were taken from the online directories of nine Harvard dormitories. According to an article in Fast Company magazine, the application had twenty-two thousand photo views in the first four hours and spread rapidly on campus before being shut down within a week by the authorities.


pages: 385 words: 111,807

A Pelican Introduction Economics: A User's Guide by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, antiwork, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, discovery of the americas, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, liberation theology, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, post-industrial society, precariat, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, search costs, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, structural adjustment programs, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey

The fact that happiness may be conceptually a better measure than income does not mean that we should try to measure it. Richard Layard, the British economist who is a leading scholar trying to measure happiness, defends such attempts by saying, ‘If you think something matters you should try to measure it [italics added].’3 But other people disagree – including Albert Einstein, who once famously said, ‘Not everything that counts can be measured. Not everything that can be measured counts.’ We can try to quantify happiness, say, by asking people to rate their happiness on a scale of ten, and come up with numbers like 6.3 or 7.8 for the average happiness of Countries A and B.

China’s stood at 1.5 per cent in 2009 but has been on a fast rising trend, suggesting that the country is rapidly building up its capabilities to generate new technologies.6 Industrialization and Deindustrialization In theory, we can achieve economic development by enhancing our productive capabilities in any economic activity, including agriculture and services. In practice, in the vast majority of cases, economic development has been achieved through industrialization, or, more precisely, the development of the manufacturing sector.† Albert Einstein was definitely right in saying: ‘In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.’ Mechanization and chemical processes make it easier to raise productivity in manufacturing Raising productivity is much easier in manufacturing than in other economic activities, such as agriculture and services.


pages: 407 words: 104,622

The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution by Gregory Zuckerman

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, automated trading system, backtesting, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blockchain, book value, Brownian motion, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, buy low sell high, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, computerized trading, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, Emanuel Derman, endowment effect, financial engineering, Flash crash, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, illegal immigration, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Loma Prieta earthquake, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, Monty Hall problem, More Guns, Less Crime, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, obamacare, off-the-grid, p-value, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Sharpe ratio, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, stochastic process, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, Turing machine, Two Sigma

Those with no exposure to this kind of mathematics, which can be described as abstract or pure, are liable to dismiss it as pointless. Simons wasn’t merely solving equations like a high school student, however. He was hoping to discover and codify universal principles, rules, and truths, with the goal of furthering the understanding of these mathematical objects. Albert Einstein argued that there is a natural order in the world; mathematicians like Simons can be seen as searching for evidence of that structure. There is true beauty to their work, especially when it succeeds in revealing something about the universe’s natural order. Often, such theories find practical applications, even many years later, while advancing our knowledge of the universe.

Thorp’s firm based its trading on computer-generated algorithms and economic models, using so much electricity that their office in Southern California was always boiling hot. Thorp’s trading formula was influenced by the doctoral thesis of French mathematician Louis Bachelier, who, in 1900, developed a theory for pricing options on the Paris stock exchange using equations similar to those later employed by Albert Einstein to describe the Brownian motion of pollen particles. Bachelier’s thesis, describing the irregular motion of stock prices, had been overlooked for decades, but Thorp and others understood its relevance to modern investing. In 1974, Thorp landed on the front page of the Wall Street Journal in a story headlined: “Computer Formulas Are One Man’s Secret to Success in Market.”


pages: 453 words: 111,010

Licence to be Bad by Jonathan Aldred

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, framing effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, full employment, Gary Kildall, George Akerlof, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Linda problem, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, Mont Pelerin Society, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, nudge unit, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, positional goods, power law, precautionary principle, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Skinner box, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, spectrum auction, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, zero-sum game

No one recalls him attending any of the regular classes; nobody saw him with a book. Partly it was because he was dyslexic, but it was also because he thought too much reading would stifle his creativity. He took regular detours down Mercer Street in the hope of catching sight of its most famous resident, Albert Einstein. One day he succeeded. But a few weeks into his first term he decided a remote glimpse was not enough. He made an appointment to see Einstein. He told Einstein’s assistant that he had an idea about gravity, friction and radiation which he wished to discuss with the great man. Einstein listened politely, sucking on his tobacco-less pipe, while the twenty-year-old student wrote equations at the blackboard.

In the decade since the end of the Cold War, the human race has become, with increasing rapidity, a single organism … The organism relies increasingly on a kind of trust – the unsentimental expectation that people, individually and collectively, will behave more or less in their rational self-interest.13 Although, from the 1960s onwards, game theory began to influence everyday thinking, game theorists themselves were focusing on its limitations. In particular, they were becoming aware that in all too many contexts game theory seemed to have little to say. CHICKEN In 1955 the philosopher Bertrand Russell released an influential manifesto, co-authored by Albert Einstein, calling for nuclear disarmament. But Russell had an unintentionally greater impact on the disarmament debate just a few years later, by publicizing a game called Chicken. Painting a picture which could have come from the James Dean hit movie of the era, Rebel without a Cause, Russell imagined the US and the USSR as rival young drivers, speeding towards each other down the middle of a long, straight road.


pages: 363 words: 109,077

The Raging 2020s: Companies, Countries, People - and the Fight for Our Future by Alec Ross

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, clean water, collective bargaining, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, dumpster diving, employer provided health coverage, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, late capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, megacity, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, mortgage tax deduction, natural language processing, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, special economic zone, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, working poor

He’s seen new efforts at organizing and a whole new generation come along and start demanding change. Even if they’re organizing in different ways than he ever has, it gives him hope. “And it’s pretty exciting.” 4 TAXES AND THE WORMHOLE IN THE GLOBAL ECONOMY Tax policy is complicated, quantitative, and mind-numbing. No less than Albert Einstein said, “The hardest thing to understand in the world is the income tax,” speaking to the accountant who prepared his taxes. Very few people understand it, and the ones who do often work as accountants, bankers, and lawyers for multinational corporations and wealthy individuals. However, taxes are a skeleton key for unlocking the problems that emerge out of using a 20th-century set of policies to solve 21st-century problems.

In December 2019, the organization published: “Concrete Examples of Bargaining for the Common Good,” Bargaining for the Common Good, December 20, 2019, https://smlr.rutgers.edu/sites/default/files/ciwo_bcg-memo.pdf; Stephen Lerner, “What Is Not to Be Done,” American Prospect, April 29, 2020, https://prospect.org/labor/what-is-not-to-be-done/. 4: TAXES AND THE WORMHOLE IN THE GLOBAL ECONOMY No less than Albert Einstein said: “Tax Quotes,” US Internal Revenue Service, June 5, 2020, https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/tax-quotes. the billions of ads Google serves: Elisa Gabbert, “25 Fast Facts about Google Ads,” WordStream (blog), November 14, 2018, https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2012/08/13/google-adwords-facts.


pages: 799 words: 187,221

Leonardo Da Vinci by Walter Isaacson

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Bonfire of the Vanities, Commentariolus, crowdsourcing, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, game design, iterative process, lone genius, New Journalism, public intellectual, reality distortion field, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, urban planning, wikimedia commons

Charles Heaton, Leonardo da Vinci and His Works (Macmillan, 1874), 192. 33. CONCLUSION 1 Notebooks/J. P. Richter, 1360, 1365, 1366. 2 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Representation (1818), vol. 1, ch. 3, para. 31. 3 Steve Jobs, Rob Siltanen, Lee Clow, and others, Apple print and television advertisement, 1998. 4 Albert Einstein to Carl Seelig, March 11, 1952, Einstein Archives 39-013, online. 5 Albert Einstein to Otto Juliusburger, September 29, 1942, Einstein Archives 38-238, online. 6 Codex Ash., 1:7b; Notebooks/J. P. Richter, 491. CODA 1 Sang-Hee Yoon and Sungmin Park, “A Mechanical Analysis of Woodpecker Drumming,” Bioinspiration & Biomimetics 6.1 (March 2011).

Benjamin Franklin, a previous subject of mine, was a Leonardo of his era: with no formal education, he taught himself to become an imaginative polymath who was Enlightenment America’s best scientist, inventor, diplomat, writer, and business strategist. He proved by flying a kite that lightning is electricity, and he invented a rod to tame it. He devised bifocal glasses, enchanting musical instruments, clean-burning stoves, charts of the Gulf Stream, and America’s unique style of homespun humor. Albert Einstein, when he was stymied in his pursuit of his theory of relativity, would pull out his violin and play Mozart, which helped him reconnect with the harmonies of the cosmos. Ada Lovelace, whom I profiled in a book on innovators, combined the poetic sensibility of her father, Lord Byron, with her mother’s love of the beauty of math to envision a general-purpose computer.


pages: 579 words: 183,063

Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice From the Best in the World by Timothy Ferriss

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, A Pattern Language, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Bayesian statistics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, corporate social responsibility, cryptocurrency, David Heinemeier Hansson, decentralized internet, dematerialisation, do well by doing good, do what you love, don't be evil, double helix, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, family office, fear of failure, Gary Taubes, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, global macro, Google Hangouts, Gödel, Escher, Bach, haute couture, helicopter parent, high net worth, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, income inequality, index fund, information security, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kevin Kelly, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Mr. Money Mustache, Naomi Klein, Neal Stephenson, Nick Bostrom, non-fiction novel, Peter Thiel, power law, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, sunk-cost fallacy, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Turing machine, uber lyft, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator

We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.” –Chuck Palahniuk Famed American author, best known for Fight Club “Talk less, listen more.” –Brené Brown Research professor, author of Daring Greatly “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.” –Albert Einstein German theoretical physicist, Nobel Prize winner “You learn the secret of this business, which is there’s no secret. Be yourself.” Larry King TW: @kingsthings ora.tv/larrykingnow LARRY KING has been dubbed “the most remarkable talk-show host on TV ever” by TV Guide and “master of the mike” by Time magazine.

We cannot possibly adjust enough to please the fanatics, and it is degrading to make the attempt.” –Christopher Hitchens Author, journalist, and social critic “Those who are easily shocked should be shocked more often.” –Mae West One of the greatest female stars of classic American cinema “If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.” –Albert Einstein German theoretical physicist, Nobel Prize winner “The key to a great life is simply having a bunch of great days. So you can think about it one day at a time.” Mr. Money Mustache TW/FB: @mrmoneymustache mrmoneymustache.com MR. MONEY MUSTACHE (Pete Adeney in real life) grew up in Canada in a family of mostly eccentric musicians.

—Bertrand Russell “For the great enemy of truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived and dishonest—but the myth—persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the clichés of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.”—John F. Kennedy “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”—Albert Einstein “If you set a goal, it should meet these two conditions: 1) It matters; 2) You can influence the outcome.”—Peter Attia In the last five years, what new belief, behavior, or habit has most improved your life? My understanding of hormone replacement therapy (HRT) for both men and women has evolved by leaps and bounds.


How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett

airport security, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, autism spectrum disorder, Drosophila, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, framing effect, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, language acquisition, longitudinal study, luminiferous ether, meta-analysis, nocebo, phenotype, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, Shai Danziger, Skype, Steven Pinker, sugar pill, systems thinking, TED Talk, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

The subsequent war claimed the lives of 175,000 Iraqis and hundreds of coalition forces.8 We are, I believe, in the midst of a revolution in our understanding of emotion, the mind, and the brain—a revolution that may compel us to radically rethink such central tenets of our society as our treatments for mental and physical illness, our understanding of personal relationships, our approaches to raising children, and ultimately our view of ourselves. Other scientific disciplines have seen revolutions of this kind, each one a momentous shift away from centuries of common sense. Physics moved from Isaac Newton’s intuitive ideas about time and space to Albert Einstein’s more relative ideas, and eventually to quantum mechanics. In biology, scientists carved up the natural world into fixed species, each having an ideal form, until Charles Darwin introduced the concept of natural selection. Scientific revolutions tend to emerge not from a sudden discovery but by asking better questions.

After all, it produces very consistent results.24 Each time a scientific “fact” is overturned it leads to new avenues for discovery. The physicist Albert Michelson won a Nobel Prize in 1907 for disproving a conjecture made by Aristotle, that light travels through empty space via a hypothetical substance called luminiferous ether. His detective work set the stage for Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity. In our case, we’ve cast substantial doubt on the evidence for universal emotions. They only appear to be universal under certain conditions—when you give people a tiny bit of information about Western emotion concepts, intentionally or not. These observations, and others like them, set the stage for the new theory of emotion that you are about to learn.

A dandelion is often considered a weed, but it transforms into a flower when placed in a bouquet of wildflowers or if it’s a gift from your two-year-old child. Plants exist objectively in nature, but flowers and weeds require a perceiver in order to exist. They are perceiver-dependent categories. Albert Einstein illustrated this point nicely when he wrote, “Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world.”5 Common sense leads us to believe that emotions are real in nature and exist independent of any observer, in the same manner as Higgs bosons and plants.


The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal by M. Mitchell Waldrop

Ada Lovelace, air freight, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apple II, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Ritchie, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, experimental subject, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, functional programming, Gary Kildall, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, information retrieval, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Rulifson, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Leonard Kleinrock, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Multics, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, popular electronics, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, The Soul of a New Machine, Turing machine, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Von Neumann architecture, Wiener process, zero-sum game

Before his current incarnation-he was liaison officer for the army's computing substation at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Engineering-Goldstine had been a Ph.D. mathematics instructor at the University of Michigan. So he already knew the legends. At age forty, John von Neumann (pronounced fon NaY-man) held a place in mathematics that could be compared only to that of Albert Einstein in physics. In the single year of 1927, for example, while still a mere instructor at the University of Berlin, von Neumann had put the newly emerging theory of quantum mechanics on a rigorous mathematical footing; established new links between formal logical systems and the foundations of mathematics; and cre- ated a whole new branch of mathematics known as game theory, a way of ana- lyzing how people make decisions when they are competing with each other (among other things, this field gave us the term "zero-sum game").

But still, once he arrived at Princeton at the end of that September, he seemed to slip into something of a depression. By rights, of course, he should have been in heaven. In those days the Princeton mathematics department was still housed in the same building as the august Institute for Advanced Study, so the place was swarming with the finest mathematical minds in the world; Albert Einstein himself sometimes wan- dered the hallways. And yet Turing remained the same confirmed solitary he had been at Cambridge. To someone of his semi-upper-crust English back- ground, America felt harsh and pushy. Besides, his long obsession with the de- cidability problem was over-and now what? In December he gave his first talk at Princeton; attendance was poor since he was a total unknown.

"It is perfectly clear. . . that to dissemi- nate information about a weapon in the present state of our civilization is to make it practically certain that that weapon will be used."7 His letter struck a chord with many other scientists who were haunted by that same question of responsibility in the post-Hiroshima world. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, after all, had been launched by Manhattan Project veterans at the University of Chicago expressly as a forum for debate on the implications of nuclear energy. "I greatly admire and approve the attitude of Professor Wiener," said Albert Einstein when a reporter asked him about the letter. "I be- lieve that a similar attitude on the part of all the prominent scientists in this country would contribute much toward solving the urgent problems of national security."8 Nonetheless, Wiener also paid a price for that letter. For one thing, it isolated him from some of the most exciting research of the day, including computer re- search.


Care to Make Love in That Gross Little Space Between Cars?: A Believer Book of Advice by The Believer, Judd Apatow, Patton Oswalt

Albert Einstein, carbon tax, Donald Trump, illegal immigration, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, Saturday Night Live, side project, telemarketer

After a game he’s on top of the world and will sometimes stay in costume for a good two days, but as soon as that giant head comes off he becomes moody and distant, and sometimes sobs uncontrollably. Should he just wear it all the time? That can’t be healthy, right? Ted Chama, NM Dear Ted: While some maintain it’s abnormal that a young man functions best when inside the body of a large fake cat, history tells us he’s in excellent company, as Albert Einstein himself figured out (E=MC2) while prancing across the Princeton campus dressed as their mascot (Go Tigers!). A year later, when he removed the tiger head to accept his Nobel Prize, Albert wailed like a banshee until he put the head back on and then proceeded to skip through the streets of Stockholm chanting, “I won!


pages: 161 words: 38,039

The Serious Guide to Joke Writing: How to Say Something Funny About Anything by Sally Holloway

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, congestion charging, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, lateral thinking

It’s probably good for the soul too! Chapter Eleven (PRACTICAL): The Surrealist Inquisition (Coming at a Subject From Weird & Wonderful Angles) To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science. Albert Einstein …and joke writing. Me It’s nearly the end of the course and time to string the students up and ask them some strange questions: It’s the Surrealist Inquisition! Weirdies, beardies and profound thinkers love this method of writing jokes. It’s for finding new angles on old, well-worn subjects.


pages: 128 words: 38,963

Longitude by Dava Sobel

Albert Einstein, British Empire, clockwork universe, Copley Medal, Dava Sobel, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, lone genius

His friend George Graham and other admiring members of the society insisted that Harrison leave his workbench long enough to accept the Copley Gold Medal on November 30, 1749. (Later recipients of the Copley Medal include Benjamin Franklin, Henry Cavendish, Joseph Priestley, Captain James Cook, Ernest Rutherford, and Albert Einstein.) Harrison’s Royal Society supporters eventually followed the medal, which was the highest tribute they could confer, with an offer of Fellowship in the Society. This would have put the prestigious initials F.R.S. after his name. But Harrison declined. He asked that the membership be given to his son William instead.


pages: 137 words: 36,231

Information: A Very Short Introduction by Luciano Floridi

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, carbon footprint, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, digital divide, disinformation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, George Akerlof, Gordon Gekko, Gregor Mendel, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of writing, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Laplace demon, machine translation, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, Nelson Mandela, Norbert Wiener, Pareto efficiency, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, prisoner's dilemma, RAND corporation, RFID, Thomas Bayes, Turing machine, Vilfredo Pareto

There seems to be no good reason not to adopt a higher and more inclusive, ontocentric perspective. Not only inanimate but also ideal, intangible, or intellectual objects can have a minimal degree of moral value, no matter how humble, and so be entitled to some respect. There is a famous passage, in one of Albert Einstein's letters, that summarizes well this ontic perspective advocated by information ethics. A few years before his death, Einstein received a letter from a 19-year-old girl grieving over the loss of her younger sister. She wished to know whether the famous scientist might have something to say to comfort her.


pages: 168 words: 35,753

Ye Olde Britain: Best Historical Experiences by Lonely Planet Publications

Albert Einstein, British Empire, Isaac Newton, Winter of Discontent

The magnificent buildings, illustrious history and latter-day fame as a location for the Harry Potter films have tourists coming in droves. The college was founded in 1525 by Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, who suppressed 22 monasteries to acquire the funds for his lavish building project. Over the years numerous luminaries have been educated here, including Albert Einstein, philosopher John Locke, poet WH Auden, Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) and 13 British prime ministers. The main entrance is below the imposing Tom Tower, the upper part of which was designed by former student Sir Christopher Wren. Great Tom, the 7-ton tower bell, still chimes 101 times each evening at 9.05pm (Oxford is five minutes west of Greenwich), to sound the curfew imposed on the original 101 students.


pages: 147 words: 37,622

Personal Kanban: Mapping Work, Navigating Life by Jim Benson, Tonianne Demaria Barry

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, Bluma Zeigarnik, corporate governance, Howard Rheingold, intangible asset, job satisfaction, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Ken Thompson, pattern recognition, performance metric, The Wisdom of Crowds, urban planning, Yogi Berra

This insight can result from quantitative or even more experiential measures.7 Personal Kanban is a light system with two rules and two rules only: Visualize your work and Limit your WIP. For those who would like to extend the value of their Personal Kanban, the following suggested metrics can help you analyze your work. Metric One: Your Gut The only real valuable thing is intuition. ~ Albert Einstein Transparency into work sensitizes you to its patterns. With Personal Kanban, you intuitively begin to look for ways to improve work’s flow. This is your gut, your sixth sense, your instinct. This is your first line of defense. Why are we now suggesting that intuition is an acceptable metric, when just a few pages back we demonstrated how unreliable subjective measures can be?


pages: 406 words: 115,719

The Case Against Sugar by Gary Taubes

Albert Einstein, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, epigenetics, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Gary Taubes, Isaac Newton, meta-analysis, microbiome, phenotype, pre–internet, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, selection bias, seminal paper, the new new thing, the scientific method, Works Progress Administration

They would only embrace the possibility that there were multiple perpetrators when the single-suspect hypothesis was proved insufficient to explain all the evidence. Scientists know this essential concept as Occam’s Razor. When Isaac Newton said, “We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances,” he was saying the same thing that Albert Einstein, three centuries later, said (or was paraphrased as saying): “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” We should begin with the simplest possible hypothesis, and only if that can’t explain what we observe should we consider more complicated explanations—in this case, multiple causes.

The Rand Corporation has estimated the total monetary cost of dementia, including Alzheimer’s, at between $157 and $215 billion (Hurd et al. 2013). Alzheimer’s as type 3 diabetes: See, for instance, Guthrie 2007. “We are to admit”: See https://​en.​wikiquote.​org/​wiki/​Isaac_Newton. “Everything should be”: See https://​en.​wikiquote.​org/​wiki/​Albert_​Einstein. “multifactorial, complex disorders” or “multidimensional diseases”: See, for instance, NIDDK 2011: 117–38. At least a tenth of all cases of lung cancer: ALA 2014: 5. “all wars combined”: West 1978: ix. Heavy smokers had twenty to thirty times: See, for instance, Doll and Hill 1964. This confusion still exists: See, for instance, Reynolds 2014; Seidenberg 2015.


pages: 396 words: 117,149

The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World by Pedro Domingos

Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Arthur Eddington, backpropagation, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Benoit Mandelbrot, bioinformatics, Black Swan, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, constrained optimization, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, Filter Bubble, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, incognito mode, information retrieval, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Markoff, John Snow's cholera map, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, large language model, lone genius, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Narrative Science, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, NP-complete, off grid, P = NP, PageRank, pattern recognition, phenotype, planetary scale, power law, pre–internet, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, scientific worldview, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, the long tail, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white flight, yottabyte, zero-sum game

Q387.D66 2015 003′54—dc23 2015007615 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 TO THE MEMORY OF MY SISTER RITA, WHO LOST HER BATTLE WITH CANCER WHILE I WAS WRITING THIS BOOK The grand aim of science is to cover the greatest number of experimental facts by logical deduction from the smallest number of hypotheses or axioms. —Albert Einstein Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations we can perform without thinking about them. —Alfred North Whitehead Contents Prologue Chapter 1The Machine-Learning Revolution Chapter 2The Master Algorithm Chapter 3Hume’s Problem of Induction Chapter 4How Does Your Brain Learn?

In their book Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking, Hofstadter and his collaborator Emmanuel Sander argue passionately that all intelligent behavior reduces to analogy. Everything we learn or discover, from the meaning of everyday words like mother and play to the brilliant insights of geniuses like Albert Einstein and Évariste Galois, is the result of analogy in action. When little Tim sees women looking after other children like his mother looks after him, he generalizes the concept “mommy” to mean anyone’s mommy, not just his. That in turn is a springboard for understanding things like “mother ship” and “Mother Nature.”


pages: 467 words: 114,570

Pathfinders: The Golden Age of Arabic Science by Jim Al-Khalili

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Book of Ingenious Devices, colonial rule, Commentariolus, Dmitri Mendeleev, Eratosthenes, Henri Poincaré, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, retrograde motion, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, time dilation, trade route, William of Occam

Only when the process is reversed do alarm bells start to ring: when one hears the argument that it is not necessary to try to understand the world around us from a scientific perspective since all we ever need to know is already written in the Qur’an anyway. Ultimately, there can be no such thing as Islamic science or Muslim science. Science cannot be characterized by the religion of those who engage in it, as the Nazis in 1930s Germany attempted to do when disparaging Albert Einstein’s great achievements as ‘Jewish science’. The term ‘Islamic science’ may likewise be used by those with similar racist notions who wish to downplay its importance. Just as there is no ‘Jewish science’, or ‘Christian science’, there cannot be ‘Islamic science’. There is just science. The one misgiving I have about my chosen term of ‘Arabic science’ (aside from its likely unpopularity among the population of today’s Iran, Uzbekistan or Turkmenistan, all proud homes of great scholars of the golden age) is that even choosing to name a scientific age by the language of its communication is problematic.

Indeed, he states that he wishes the value to be so precise that, when it is used to calculate the circumference of the universe (according to the then estimated dimensions) the result would agree with the true value to within the thickness of a horse’s hair.12 Al-Kāshi’s best-known contribution to mathematics, however, is the very first derivation of the cosine rule in trigonometry, which allows the calculation of the length of a side of any triangle provided an angle and the other two sides are known. In fact, it is still known in French as the théorème d’al-Kashi. A few years ago, I took part in a light-hearted debate at the Royal Society in London as to whether Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein deserves the accolade of the greatest scientist who ever lived. I was asked to put the case for Einstein. My argument rested on the premise that Einstein had shown how the Newtonian picture of the universe was wrong and needed to be replaced by a grander, more accurate, description of physical reality.


pages: 412 words: 113,782

Business Lessons From a Radical Industrialist by Ray C. Anderson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, biodiversity loss, business cycle, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centralized clearinghouse, clean tech, clean water, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, dematerialisation, distributed generation, do well by doing good, Easter island, energy security, Exxon Valdez, fear of failure, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invisible hand, junk bonds, late fees, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, music of the spheres, Negawatt, Neil Armstrong, new economy, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old-boy network, peak oil, precautionary principle, renewable energy credits, retail therapy, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, subprime mortgage crisis, supply-chain management, urban renewal, Y2K

Neither have I mentioned the disease-spreading insects that now proliferate unchecked because the birds, their predators, are gone. Nor the children who come down with encephalitis as a direct result. You can see what I mean when I say we need to look at the world through a different, wider angle lens. As Albert Einstein once said, “Problems cannot be solved by the same thinking used to create them.” In other words, we need new thinking from a higher level of awareness. So how do we begin? The truth of a new paradigm doesn’t just spring into existence. It will have been there all along, obscured by the old, flawed views of reality.

If I may borrow from his book, Cradle to Cradle (North Point Press), the industrial system this ad hoc evolution created: • puts billions of pounds of toxic materials into the air, water, and soil each year; • produces some materials that are so dangerous they will require constant vigilance by future generations; • results in gigantic amounts of waste; • puts valuable materials in holes all over the planet, where they are difficult if not impossible to retrieve and recycle; • requires thousands of complex rules and regulations—not to keep people safe, but to keep them from being poisoned too quickly; • measures productivity by how few people are working; • creates prosperity by digging up or cutting down natural resources and then burying or burning them; • erodes the diversity of species and cultural practices. Just imagine a creature living in a natural world with even some of those characteristics. Do you suppose it would survive for very long? Yet, our present-day business practices evolved right along with this first industrial revolution. As Albert Einstein’s observation haunts us: “Problems cannot be solved by the same kind of thinking that created them.” And this observation surely applies to redesigning commerce. If the old business practices are what got you into a fix, they probably won’t be much help in getting you out of it. Which business practices am I talking about?


pages: 416 words: 118,592

A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing by Burton G. Malkiel

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bernie Madoff, book value, BRICs, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, compound rate of return, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversification, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental subject, feminist movement, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, framing effect, hindsight bias, Home mortgage interest deduction, index fund, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Japanese asset price bubble, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, money market fund, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Own Your Own Home, PalmPilot, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, sugar pill, survivorship bias, The Myth of the Rational Market, the rule of 72, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, zero-coupon bond

The fundamentalist hopes that a thorough study of industry conditions will produce valuable insights into factors that may be operative in the future but are not yet reflected in market prices. The fundamentalist uses four basic determinants to help estimate the proper value for any stock. Determinant 1: The expected growth rate. Most people don’t recognize the implications of compound growth for financial decisions. Albert Einstein once described compound interest as the “greatest mathematical discovery of all time.” It is often said that the Native American who sold Manhattan Island in 1626 for $24 was rooked by the white man. In fact, he may have been an extremely sharp salesman. Had he put his $24 away at 6 percent interest, compounded semiannually, it would now be worth more than $100 billion, and with it his descendants could buy back much of the now improved land.

Every year you put off investing makes your ultimate retirement goals more difficult to achieve. Trust in time rather than in timing. As a sign in the window of a bank put it, little by little you can safely stock up a strong reserve here, but not until you start. The secret of getting rich slowly (but surely) is the miracle of compound interest. Albert Einstein described compound interest as the “greatest mathematical discovery of all time.” It may sound complicated, but it simply involves earning a return not only on your original investment but also on the accumulated interest that you reinvest. Jeremy Siegel, author of the excellent investing book Stocks for the Long Run, has calculated the returns from a variety of financial assets from 1800 to 2010.


pages: 361 words: 111,500

Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, call centre, cuban missile crisis, Exxon Valdez, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, indoor plumbing, Mikhail Gorbachev, PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, place-making, Pluto: dwarf planet, science of happiness, Silicon Valley, tech worker, Transnistria, union organizing

Every nation has its iconic figures, statues that neatly sum up what the nation is all about: the Marines hoisting the flag at Iwo Jima; Lord Nelson, looking regal, in London’s Trafalgar Square. The Swiss have someone known as Nicholas the Reconciler. His statue is on display here. He has an arm outstretched, palm facing downward, as if to say, “Calm down, everyone; let’s talk about this rationally.” It’s very Swiss. Albert Einstein lived in Bern. This is the city where, he says, he had “the happiest thought of my life.” That thought was the revelation that led to his Special Theory of Relativity. The place was a modest apartment on the city’s main shopping street. It’s now a small museum. It’s been restored to exactly the way it looked when Einstein lived here: a sofa, wooden chairs, a bottle of wine labeled 1893, the carriage for his son Hans, the suit he wore to his job as a clerk at the patent office.

For yet another parallel with Shangri-La, witness this exchange in the book between the British missionary, Miss Brinklow, and Chang, Shangri-La’s inscrutable host. “What do lamas do?” she asks. “They devote themselves, madam, to contemplation and the pursuit of wisdom.” “But that isn’t doing anything.” “Then, madam, they do nothing.” Albert Einstein once said, “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” Economics is long overdue for the kind of radical shift in thinking that Einstein brought to his field of physics. Does Gross National Happiness represent such a breakthrough? Is it the elusive answer that so many of us have been looking for?


pages: 395 words: 118,446

The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Martha Banta

Albert Einstein, classic study, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Donald Trump, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, greed is good, Ida Tarbell, Lewis Mumford, plutocrats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, scientific management, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, W. E. B. Du Bois

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics 1899 Publication of The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of the Evolution of Institutions, title later changed to The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions. 1900 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams; Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie 1901–9 Progressive Era ‘muckrakers’ protest against social evils in the press; President Theodore Roosevelt attacks the Trusts; publication of Frank Norris’s The Octopus and The Pit and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle—exposés of business greed and corruption; Henry James’s The American Scene examines social consequences of the expenditure of great wealth. 1901 Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery 1903 Lester Frank Ward, Pure Sociology; W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk 1905 Albert Einstein submits his first paper on the special theory of relativity. Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth 1906–9 Teaches at Stanford University; divorced by Ellen Rolfe in 1906; dismissed from Stanford for ‘personal affairs’. 1906 Turned down for position as head librarian at the Library of Congress; rejected by Harvard University for a faculty post; dismissed by the University of Chicago over scandals involving relations with various women. 1911–18 Teaches at the University of Missouri. 1911 Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management 1914 Marries Anne Fessenden Bradley, divorcee with two daughters; increasing problems with ill health; publication of The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the Industrial Arts.

Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth 1906–9 Teaches at Stanford University; divorced by Ellen Rolfe in 1906; dismissed from Stanford for ‘personal affairs’. 1906 Turned down for position as head librarian at the Library of Congress; rejected by Harvard University for a faculty post; dismissed by the University of Chicago over scandals involving relations with various women. 1911–18 Teaches at the University of Missouri. 1911 Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management 1914 Marries Anne Fessenden Bradley, divorcee with two daughters; increasing problems with ill health; publication of The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the Industrial Arts. Start of First World War between Germany and the Allies (France and Great Britain). 1915 Publication of Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution. Albert Einstein paper on the general theory of relativity 1917 Publication of An Enquiry into the Nature of Peace and the Terms of its Perpetration. The United States enters the First World War. Abraham Cahan, The Rise of David Levinsky 1918 Works at the Food Administration Bureau during Woodrow Wilson’s administration before moving to New York city as contributing editor of The Dial; rise in power of labour unions (e.g.


pages: 441 words: 113,244

Seasteading: How Floating Nations Will Restore the Environment, Enrich the Poor, Cure the Sick, and Liberate Humanity From Politicians by Joe Quirk, Patri Friedman

3D printing, access to a mobile phone, addicted to oil, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, Celtic Tiger, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Colonization of Mars, Dean Kamen, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, export processing zone, failed state, financial intermediation, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, minimum wage unemployment, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open borders, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, peak oil, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, price stability, profit motive, radical decentralization, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, stem cell, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, undersea cable, young professional

In the future, we expect citizens of floating cities to ask land-based people, “How do you handle earthquakes, tornadoes, and tsunamis? Isn’t it dangerous to be fixed to one spot?” Everything about seasteading is counterintuitive, but solutions to the most difficult problems are always counterintuitive; otherwise we would have thought of them by now. Albert Einstein said, “The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.” To see the wealth of solutions offered by the sea, we must think outside our land-based box. We must come to understand that living on the ocean is safer than you think, and living on land is so dangerous it may be suicidal.

“Our Green Float project [will] put an entirely new paradigm in place, and then work to develop the technologies and business plans needed to bring this vision to life. Revolutions require completely new modes of thinking with regard to processes, technologies, and business models. I have taken to heart the words of Albert Einstein: ‘We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.’ ” A novel translation of the same quote Rutger de Graaf repeats. So why is Green Float modelled after a floating flower? “We’re focusing on technologies that take their inspiration from nature,” he replies.


Little Failure: A Memoir by Gary Shteyngart

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, East Village, glass ceiling, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, launch on warning, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Ronald Reagan, Yom Kippur War, young professional

His name happens to be Omar, the name of the evil scientist in my adolescent novel The Chalenge. And how can I not notice that the prettiest girl in all of Stuyvesant, a brief glimpse of her strong, miniskirt-clad legs in physics enough to lower my average by 1.54 points for the semester, is Puerto Rican? And that the masses around me, blazing their sleepless paths toward the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, are, simply, not white? When the racism goes away, it leaves an empty, lonely place. For so long I have not wanted to be a Russian, but now, without the anger-fueled right-wing fanaticism, I’m really not a Russian. At dining tables across the Eastern Seaboard, among little ryumochki of vodka and slicks of oily sturgeon, I could lean back and join in the hate and be a part of something bigger than myself.

The rules are simple: You take the ball, point to someone, and shout, “I do declare jihad on you.” Then you throw the ball at the jihadee and watch the rest of your friends pile on him. Ben and John are passing around the Proto Pipe, talking, as we all do, veryfast, veryfast, veryfast, Freud, Marx, Schubert, Foucault, Albert Einstein, Albert Hall, Fat Albert, Fats Domino, Domino Sugar refinery. Across the cement expanse of the Park, just a jihad ball’s throw away, sit endless numbers of Asian girls picking away at stir-fry, steamed mandoo dumplings, and thick rounds of vegetable kimbap in white Styrofoam containers. In theory, at least, they are living the Stuyvesant dream of good grades and bright futures.


pages: 369 words: 121,161

Alistair Cooke's America by Alistair Cooke

Albert Einstein, Alistair Cooke, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, double entry bookkeeping, Ford Model T, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, Hernando de Soto, imperial preference, interchangeable parts, joint-stock company, Maui Hawaii, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, strikebreaker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, urban sprawl, wage slave, Works Progress Administration

It was preordained a decade before by a pathological mistake of Hitler’s: in general by his suppression of the intellectuals, in particular by his persecution of the Jews and the dispatch into exile of their most brilliant scientists. These men, whether they were German or neighbors of Germany, saw the handwriting on the wall and fled to America. Among them, Hitler might have trembled to think, if he had been a meditative man and not a mystic, were half a dozen or more of the world’s leading physicists. There was Albert Einstein. There was Enrico Fermi, an Italian. There were Edward Teller, Leo Szilard, and Eugen Wigner, three Hungarians, so obscure that in the summer of 1939 they had to enlist Einstein’s help – and he, in turn, the help of a banker – to reach President Roosevelt with word of the dire consequences that might follow from the secret news that Germany had forbidden all exports of uranium ore from Czechoslovakia.

At Los Alamos today, the primitive lab that created the atomic bomb has been replaced by a gleaming compound that developed the hydrogen bomb and is now involved half in weapons research and half in pure nuclear research. The trouble is that you never know which is going to turn into which. The man who invented the wheel never imagined it would carry artillery. And Albert Einstein, when he devised his famous formula about the nature of energy, never remotely guessed that E = mc2 would come to equal Hiroshima. There are, at Los Alamos, generators whose job is to test the ability of nuclear warheads to withstand hostile environments. But they may also discover a beam that could search out and destroy cancer cells.


Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy by Wolfram Eilenberger

Albert Einstein, Charles Lindbergh, disinformation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, liberation theology, Plato's cave, precariat, scientific worldview, side project, traveling salesman, wikimedia commons

Not his slim, almost athletic, suit, which set him apart from the dignitaries in their traditional tails, not the severely combed-back hair, not his rustic tan, not his late arrival in the hall, and certainly not his choice to mingle with the crowd of students and researchers in the belly of the hall rather than take the seat reserved for him in the front row. Adherence to convention was out of the question, because for Heidegger there could be no philosophizing in falsehood. And just about everything in this kind of learned assembly in a luxurious Swiss hotel must have seemed fake to him. The previous year Albert Einstein had delivered the opening lecture at the Davos University Conferences. In 1929, at age thirty-nine, Heidegger was one of the main speakers. Over the coming days he would deliver three lectures and, by way of conclusion, engage in a public debate with Ernst Cassirer, the other heavyweight philosopher present.

An activity that, if it is not to decline into what Cassirer considers to be the necessary attempt to “go behind all these creations” in order to grab “pure, undistorted life” or “pure, undistorted reality” by the scruff of the neck, must be in active dialogue with the sciences and other areas of knowledge. In those first years in Hamburg, Cassirer’s house in Winterhude itself became a home to such dialogue, what today we would call an interdisciplinary forum. In the winter of 1921, for example, Albert Einstein delivered a lecture there on his theory of relativity (about which Cassirer, in passing and, as he put it, “for the pure purpose of clarifying it to myself,” wrote a small book, of which Einstein thought very highly). DOES THE LANGUAGE EXIST? THAT IS THE PROGRAM of Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms.


pages: 453 words: 114,250

The Great Firewall of China by James Griffiths;

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, bike sharing, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mitch Kapor, mobile money, Occupy movement, pets.com, profit motive, QR code, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, The future is already here, undersea cable, WikiLeaks, zero day

He was lucky, in that the school’s Party secretary was not much of a true believer; Li was dismissed from his teaching duties but allowed to keep his staff accommodation while he searched for another job. ‘There’s no way we can employ you with this material,’ the Party secretary told him, gesturing to a transcript of his speech. ‘But you’re young and bright; you should go to America.’ Two years later, aged twenty-eight, Li did just that. He landed a visa for a research job at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. The Party had hoped to shuffle him out of the way, like so many other dissidents and independent thinkers who were encouraged (or forced) to go into exile. But freed from the watchful gaze of the authorities, and still seething with anger about Tiananmen, Li became far more of a problem for the authorities than he ever was in Beijing.

Index Abbott, Tony, 203 acceptable criticism, boundaries of, 75 Access Now, 236 Adelaide, Australia, 206 Adkins, Heather, 169 Admiralty, camp, 19 Adobe, 170 Africa: China presence, 287–8; Huawei earnings, 304; internet in, 291; Xinhua success, 80 Agora, dark web, 100 Ahmadinejad, Mahmoud, 111 AI software, 200 Ai Weiwei, 170, 214 Albert Einstein College of Medicine, 38 Al-Assad, Bashir, 209 Al-Bashir, Omar, 291 Al-Ghanim, Mohamed Nasser, 231 Algeria, 230 Ali, Guzelnur, 195, 198 Alibaba, 200, 235, 242, 279; Alipay, 281; Taobao online marketplace, 210; Yahoo stake in, 67 Allawi, Ayad, 223 Alphabet, 315 Al Qaeda, 199 American Civil Liberties Union, 245 Amir-Ebrahimi, Masserat, 150 Amnesty International, 280 Andreessen Horowitz, 279 Angola, 289 Anhui province, 78 Anite, Evelyn, 303 Anonymous, 185–6, 188 Anti, Michael, 36, 93, 116 anti-Rightist Movement, Xinjiang avoidance, 133 anti-surveillance tools, 5 Antonov, Polina, 254–5 Antonov, Vadim, 253–4 Apple, 1990s faltering, 277 Applebaum, Jacob, 104–5 APT1, 186–7 Arab Spring, 8, 10, 264, 311 Artux, 132, 134 Asia-America Gateway, underwater cable system, 155 AsiaInfo, 31 Asiaweek, 54 Associated Press, 80 Aum Shinrikyo cult, 49 Australia, censorship, 315 Aximujiang Aimaiti, killing of, 146 Azat, Nijat, 157 baby formula scandal, 204 Badiucao, 175, 178–9, 184, 204–5, 207–8, 211–12, 215; smear attempts, 214; ‘traitor’ accusation, 210; Weibo account deleted, 206 Baidu, 4, 63, 171–2, 242, 260; Baike web site, 210; market share growth, 126; party members, 235; patriotism boast, 124; search engine, 165 balinghou generation, 204 Bandurski, David, 212 Bardin, Valery, 253, 255–6 Barlow, John Perry, 6, 243, 246; utopian language, 7 Barlow, Norman, 243 Barr, Aaron, 185–6, 188 Bastrykin, Alexander, 251 Beach, Sophie, 212 Beidaihe, China resort, 47, 89 Beijing, 29; academia elite circles, 134; Beihang University, 234; Engagement Centre ICANN, 234; jamming signals, 107; Medical University, 37; Niujie mosque, 138; Youth Daily, 73 Berners-Lee, Tim, 252 Besigye, Kizza, 292–3, 295–6; ‘preventative arrest’, 298; treason charge, 299 Big Vs, 180 Bijie, 95 Bildt, Carl, 223 Bingtuan, 134 BitTorrent, 5 Blocked on Weibo, 183 blogging, 93 Bloomberg, 80 Bluetooth, communication use, 19 Brand, Stewart, 244 Brautigam, Deborah, 290 Brin, Sergey, 62–3, 116, 119, 168, 315; family history, 171 Brito, Jerry, 229 broadband connection, 155 Brown University, USA, 85 Burkina Faso, 288 Burkov, Dmitry, 253 Bush, George W., 110, 246 BuzzFeed, 199 Charlie Hebdo, attacks on, 209 Callahan, Michael, 119 Cambridge Analytica, 313, 317 Cambridge University, 162 Canada, 232; Tibet Committee, 85–6 Cankao Xiaoxi, 36 Cao Guowei, 182–3 Carnegie, Dale, 117 Cartoonists, persecution of, 209 Catalonia, 2017 referendum, 316 Causeway Bay, camp, 19 CCTV International, 287 censorship: AI-based, 315; anti-tools, 102–3; in-house, 183; manual, 75; software, 101 Cerf, Vint, 221, 228 CERN, 252 Chan, Connie, 279 Chen Jieren, 171 Chen, Kathy, 312 Cheney, Dick, 243–4 Cheng Jianping, 74 China, People’s Republic of, 137, 204; Academy of Sciences, 49, 51; Africa criticism Western hypocrisy, 290–1; Africa investments, 305; censorship, 27; Central Television, 181; Civil Aviation Administration, 310; courts conviction rates, 198; cyber sovereignty doctrine, 8, 234, 292; cybersecurity law 2017, 280; Cyberspace Administration of, 3; Democracy Party, 41–2, 92; Development Bank, 304;domestic security profits, 201; early internet enthusiasm, 32; elite, 90, 117; elite hackers, 172, 192; entertainment industry, 215; factory sexual harassment, 145; first commercial internet service, 25; globalised online influence, 212; Google compromised, 315; high-speed rail system, 176–7; human rights lawyers, 206; internet companies overseas business, 236; Internet Network Information Centre, 235; Internet Society of, 64; Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 165, 167; Ministry of Public Security, 26; National Electronics Import & Export Corporation, 303; National Defence Daily, 153; nationalised internet, 231; Netcom Communications, 31–2; official aid budget, 289; PLA, see below; Qigong Science Research Society, 48; Qing Empire era, 205; social credit system, 281–3; State Council, 42, 11, 181, 241; tech firms security contracts, 200; Telecom, 30–1, 156; telecoms buying, 30; 2008 Olympics, 180; UN advocacy, 233; Unicom, 156; US Embassy in, 180; -US relations, 109; WTO joining, 91, 92; Youth Daily, 64, 172 China Digital Times, US-based, 76 ChinaNet, 30 Chinese Communist Party (CCP), CCP, 8, 42, 74, 288; internal politics, 312; Politburo Standing Committee, 165 Chinese Golden Shield, 104 Chinese Institute of Computer Applications, 24 Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, 77 choke points, China internet, 29 CIA (US Central Intelligence Agency), 85, 161; Q-Tel venture capital arm, 108 circumvention tools: Tor, 101; user lack, 71 Cisco, 29, 32, 115, 119, 236, 304; basic filtering technology, 32 Citizen Lab, 159–60, 163–4, 276 Civic Square, Hong Kong, 15, 17, 20; pro-democracy rally 2014, 16 ‘civilized behaviour’, as censorship, 240 Clarke, Ian, 99 Clinton, Bill, 43, 246; China internet optimism, 42 Clinton, Hillary, 173, 211, 264 CNET.com, 84 CNN, 56–7 Coca Cola, 187 Cohen, Jared, 111 Cold War, 106 collective action, China surveillance attention, 74 Columbia Law School, 241 Comey, James, 190–1 Comment Crew, 187 Communications Decency Act, USA, 245 Communist Youth League, 171 “Complete IT Intrusion Portfolio”, 293 Confucius Institute, 288 Connaught Road camp, Hong Kong, 17 Contemporary Business News, 64 Crimea, Russian invasion, 267 CQRS, 49 Crowley, P.J., 111 Cuba, 237 Cultural Revolution, 8, 23, 24, 48, 176, 205; Xinjing avoidance, 133 ‘cyber-sovereignty’, China doctrine, 8, 234, 237–8, 242, 250 Cyberspace Administration of China, 181 Da Cankao, 35–6, 79, 91, 93, 97; back issues, 100; defeat of, 92; first issue, 39 Dalai Lama, 84–5, 87, 160, 206, 309; office hacked, 162 Darfur, 291 Deibert, Ron, 159–60 Delta Airlines, 309 Democracy Forum, 65, 66 Democratic National Committee, Russian hacking of, 192 Demos/Relcom, Russia, 252–3, 255–6 Deng Xiaoping, 21–4, 47, 89; martial law declaration, 37 Dharamsala, 85–8, 160, 163, 276; internet, 84, 160 ‘digital divide’, 222 Dilshat Perhat, 150 Ding, James, 30–1 DIT, Broadcasting Board of Governors, 108 Diyarim.com, 150–1, 157 Djibouti naval base, 289 domain name system (DNS), 220 Dorsey, Jack, 111 dot.com bubble, first, 84 Dourado, Eli, 228–32 Dow Chemical, 170 Dow Jones, 81 Downey, Brandon, 314 Dreazen, Yochi, 110 DropBox, 276 Drummond, David, 61–2, 171 Dunhuang, 154 Durov, Pavel, 259–63, 265–6, 268–9, 272; Dubai exile, 270; flight, 267 Dynamic Internet Technology, 104, 106–7; Broadcasting Board of Governors, 108 DynaWeb, 101–2; Foundation, 106 Dzungaria, 136 ‘East Turkestan’, 136, 149; question of, 152 Eastern Buddhas Study Falun Dafa Association, 97 Education Computer Resource Centre, India, 86 Egypt, 230–1; Twitter, 264 Eiffel Tower, website crash, 2 Electronic Frontier Foundation, 244–6 elite, Chinese, 90, 117 email address grabbing, 35 encryption, 268–9 Epoch Times, 96–8 Epstein, Helen, 297 Ethiopia, 10, 289, 304 EU (European Union), WSIS stance, 223 Eudora, 88 Eximbank, 288 Facebook, 18, 242, 264, 282, 286, 297, 301, 303, 312–13, 317; banned, 183; censoring by, 314; Firewall blocked, 259, 278; Internet.org, 291 ‘fake news’ panic, 311, 314 Falun Gong, 9, 28, 45–6, 49, 59, 62, 91, 96, 102, 107–8, 112, 118; anti- campaign, 48, 58; blocking of, 99; China mass detentions, 54; community, 103; CRQS withdrawal, 51; members self-immolating, 56; -neoconservatives link, 98; North America shift, 96–7; online censorship, 55; origins, 47 Research Society, 54 FalunDafa.org, 97 Fang Binxing, 249–50 FBI (US Federal Bureau of Investigations), 186, 190–1 FDC (Forum for Democratic Change, 294–6, 300 Ferzat, Ali, 209 filters, border, 29 financial crash 2008, 8, 289 FinFisher, 293, 294 FireChat, 19 FireEye, 192 foreign media coverage, importance of, 255 France, Rwanda Hutu aid, 291 Freedom House, 104 FreeGate, 95–6, 103, 105, 107–9, 110, 112–13; successful, 104; user-friendly, 102 FreeNet China, 99, 101; 2001 launched, 100 freetibet.org, 163 Friedman, Tom, 90, 246 Friendster, 260 Friends of Tibet, 308 FSB, Russia, 265–6, 269 Fuyou Street, Beijing, 45 Gaddafi, Muammar, 290 Gallagher, Ryan, 314 Gamma Group, 293 Gang of Eight, USSR, 254–5 Gauthier, Ursula, 199 George Mason University, 228 Geshe Sopa, 84 Ghost Remote Administration Tool (Gh0st Rat), 162–3; hackers, 164 Gilmore, John, 244 Github, DDos attack, 1–4, 310 global governance, cycles of, 236 Global Internet Freedom Consortium (GIFC), 102, 110; funding boom, 109; projects, 112 Global Internet Inc, 106 Global Times, 172 GoAgent, 5, 6 Golden Shield project, 26–7, 91 Goldsmith, Jack, 30, 219, 243 gongfu, Chinese martial art, 48 Google, 64, 113; 2002 blocked, 91, 2006 China attitude, 115, 2009 accusations, 167, censorship compliance, 118, censorship reversal, 172, China ‘foreignness’ accusation, 125, China blocked, 166, China brand, 117, China cultural errors, 126, China operating, 116, China strategy, 119, Chinese-language search engine, 62, Congressional hearing, 120, 124, cultural mistakes, 125; Dragonfly, 314, Google China, 61, 62, 165, 246; Google Drive, 162; hacked, 168, Schrage accusation, 121, shareholder critique, 168, US criticism, 173, US media criticism, 115 Google.cn search engine, 117 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 75, 173, 252, 255–6; KGB detained, 253 Gordon, Richard, 176 Gore, Al, 31 government commentators employed, 213 Grateful Dead, 244 Great Cannon, China cyber weapon, 3–4 ‘Great Firewall’, 5, 8, 9, 26–7, 29, 43, 46, 58, 66, 71, 90, 92, 99, 101, 107, 112, 117, 159, 199, 207, 242, 311; Cisco help, 116; costs of fighting it, 106; export of, 10; Google brief ejection, 124; international spreading of, 310; keywords detection, 28; Kremlin copy, 260; Uganda import, 287; upgrading of, 92; US components, 30 Great Hall of the People, 23 Great Leap Forward, 8, 138; Xinjiang avoidance, 133 Great Wall, historical, 25 GreatFire.org, 3–4 ‘Green Dam Youth Escort’, 27, 98 Greenwald, Glenn, 268 Group of 77, 237 Gu Ge, name error, 125 see also NoGuGe Guangdong, 143, 201 Guangxi, 78 Guangzhou, 29 Gulf of Aden, 289 Guo Wengui, 92 Guomindang, 49 Guonei Dongtai Qingyang, 79 Haig, Dan, 83–4, 86–8, 160 Hainan, Lingshui: signals intelligence, 164; servers in, 163 ‘Harmony’ CCP-speak, 72 Harris, Rachel, 151 Harvard, 71, 74, 91; Law, 244 HBGary Federal, 185–6; hack, 188 He Guoqiang, 171 He Zuoxiu, 49 Hefei, anti-corruption case, 280 Hinton, Carma, 176 Hitchens, Christopher, 49 Hoglund, Greg, 186 Holder, Eric, 189 Holdstock, Nick, 137, 149 home routers, 217 Hong Kong: Admiralty, 18; Broadband, 155; Chinese University, 217; Civic Square, 15; independence discussions, 20; Internet Exchange, 217–18; parliamentary elections, 19; Science Park, 200; 2014 effect, 19; Umbrella Movement, 255 Horowitz, Michael, 107, 109 hosts.txt file, 219 HP corporation, 245 Hsu, Stephen, 108 Hu Jintao, 184 Hu Qiheng, 234 Hu Yaobang, 21 Huai Jinping, 234 Huang Cuilian, 145 Huang Shike, arrest of, 280 Huang, Alan, 102 Huawei, 251, 288; military ties, 235; Uganda censorship profits, 304 Hudson Institute, 107 Human Rights in China, New York, 76 Human Rights Watch, 147, 234 Hvistendahl, Mara, 281 IBM Nazi Germany connection comparison, 119, 122–3 ICANN see Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers Ilham, Jewher, 141, 195–8 images, censorship challenges, 208 India, blackouts, 87 Indiana University, 195–6 Infocom, 222; prosecution of, 223 Inner Mongolia massacre, 133 Instagram, 309, 316 intellectuals, anti-qigong, 49 International Centre for Human Rights and Democracy, 30 International Criminal Court, 299 international telecommunications, access as human right, 232 internet: access points, 28; Africa blackouts, 10; China war on, 6; Chinese characters, 31; construction control, 156; content providers government registration, 72; founders, 219; governance, 225, 228; intergovernmental control, 223; unwritten rules, 72; US control conflict, 222; utopianism, 245; workings of, 155 Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, 219, 222 Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), 221–5, 228, 230, 256; China influence, 234; China pushing, 237 Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), 234 Internet Explorer browser, 169 Internet Governance Forum, 224 Internet Society of China, 234–5 IP server connection, 28, 155; addresses workings of, 154; numbers, 219 Iran, 111; Green revolution, 311; social networking blocking, 111; 2009 election protests, 110, 112, 246 Iraq: US invasion of 2003, 223; Uyghur fighters, 199 ‘iron rice bowl’ jobs, 47 Isa, Aziz, 151 Islamic State, 199; internet use, 9; Paris attacks, 269 Islamists, 195 Israeli intelligence, 190 Jacobs, Justin, 137 Jiang Qing, 133 Jiang Zemin, 32, 78, 90–1, 184 Jiangsu province, 74 Jiao Guobiao, dismissal of, 95 Jilin, China, 47–8 Jobs, Steve, 117, 259 Jones, Roy, 307–9 Kadeer, Rebiya, China riots blame, 152 Kaifu Lee, 116–17, 124–6, 165–6, 171–2; government fights, 167; Making a World of Difference, 118 Kalathil, Shanthi, 236 Kang Xiaoguang, 54 Kapor, Mitch, 244 Kaspersky Labs, Moscow, 192 keywords, 184; Chinese language filtering, 208; detection, 28 KGB/FSB (USSR/Russia), 256–7, 265–6, 269 Kirillovich, Vladimir, 249 Kiselyov, Dmitry, 247 Kissinger, Henry, 108 Kleinwächter, Wolfgang, 223 Kot, Edward, 264–5 Kramer, Terry, 228–9, 232–3 Kremlin, deep packet inspection, 266 Kristof, Nick, 46 Krumholtz, Jack, 122–3 Kryuchkov, Vladimir, 253 Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy, 252, 256, 261 LAN protocols, 241 Lantos, Tom, 122 Leach, Jim, 120; censorship accusation, 121 Leavy, Penny, 186 Leo Technology, Urumqi-based, 200 letter substitutions, 107 Leung Chun-ying, 19 Leviev, Lev, 267 Levy, Stephen, 118 Lhasa, 85 Li Chang, 54 Li Changchun, 165–6, 171 Li Dongxiao, 178 Li Gang, 5 Li Hongkuan, 35–6, 38–9, 79, 91–3, 99 Li Hongzhi, 47–50, 53–6, 96–7, 99, 103; books banned, 46; teachings of, 52; USA move, 51 Li Keqiang, 240 Li Peng, 26, 42; martial law declaration, 21 Li Yuanlong, 95; son’s arrest, 96 Li Zhi, 148 Li, Robin, 124–6, 172 Lin Hai, 39 Link, Parry, 73 Liu Xiaobo, 66, 198 LiveJournal, DDoS attack, 264 Lo, Kenneth, 217–18 Lockheed Martin, 187 Lokodo, Simon, 304 love bug, 161 Lu, Phus, 5–6 Lu Wei, 78, 80–1, 207, 237, 242, 249, 312; downfall of, 313; promotion, 181; rise of, 79 Luo Fuhe, 77 Ma Zhaoxu, 173 Ma, Jack, 67 Ma, Pony, 280 MacArthur Genius Grant, 76 MacKinnon, Rebecca, Consent of the Networked, 72 Mail.ru, 267 Makanim.com, 149 Makerere University, 295, 300 Malofeev, Konstantin, 248–51 malware, 162; specialised, 163 Mandiant, malware, 186, 188–90 Manitsme, malware family, 188 Manning, Chelsea, 229; defence fund, 186 Mao Zedong, 184, 240; Anti-Rightist campaigns, 205; death of, 23; Great Leap Forward, 89 Marczak, Bill, 3 Marriott Global Reservations Sales and Customer Care Centre, 307–8; China apology, 309; Chinese language website, 308 Martínez, Antonio García, 317 mass mailings, 103 May Fourth Movement, 176 McLaughlin, Andrew, 117 Medvedev, Dmitry, 263 melamine, contaminated, 204 Messi, Lionel, 278 Micek, Peter, 236 Microsoft, 115–16, 119, 245 Millward, James, 133, 137 Minghui.org, 97 Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, 235–6 Minzu Iniversity, 134 Mirilashvili, Vyacheslav, 260, 267 MIT Media Lab, 243 mobile payments, 279 Moma, Google intranet, targeted, 169 Mong Kok, camp, 19 Montreal, 85 Morozov, Evgeny, 110 Mountain View Google HQ, 116, 169 Mugabe, Robert, 285, 290 Murong Xuecun, 205 Museveni, Yoweri, 285, 287, 292–3, 296–8, 300, 301–3, 305; Kampala opposition, 286; 2016 swearing in, 299 Museveni, Janet, 286 MySpace, 260 Nagaraja, Shishir, 162 Nairobi, Chinese language signs, 288 Namubiru, Lydia, 305 Nanfang Daily, 64 Nanjing, 36; University, 212 Nasa, Goddard Space Flight Center, 99 National Endowment for Democracy, 92, 108 National Reconciliation Day, 158 nationalism, Chinese, 8 Navalny, Alexei, 263–5 Negroponte, Nicholas, 243 Network Solutions, 220–1 New Tang Dynasty Television, 97 Newland, Jesse, 2 Ng, Jason Q., 183 Nigeria, 232 Noah, Trevor, 302 NoGuGe.com, 126 non-aggression, cyber pact, 251 Northrop Grumman, 170 Nossik, Anton, 257, 262 Nur Bekri, 146, 148 Nureli, 157 Nyanzi, Stella, 286–7, 303, 305; imprisoned, 301–2; Stella, persecution of, 300 Obama, Barack, 157, 165, 191, 228, 246; ‘pivot to Asia’, 192 Obote, Milton, 292; overthrow of, 285 Occupy movement, 9 Office of Personnel Management (OPM), 190, Chinese hacked, 191 “Operation Fungua Macho”, 293 Ownby, David, 55, 98 Page, Larry, 116, 168, 171 Palmer, David, 50 Palmer, Mark, 107–9 Pan Shiyi, 180–2 Pan Yiheng, 177 Panama Papers, 251 ‘patriotic hackers’,161 peer-to-peer software, Chinese, 101 Pegasus, early email software, 86 Pentagon, the, 161 perestroika, 75 Perhat, Dilshat, 157 Pfeifle, Mark, 110 Philippines, 161; China boycotts call, 77 Piccuta, Dan, 165–6 Pirate Bay, file-sharing website, 185 PLA (Chinese People’s Liberation Army), 22, 37, 132, 240, 242, 251, 312; Third Technical Department, 164; US indictment, 189 pornography, 91, 105–6 Postel, John, 219, 221–2, 228; ‘benevolent dictator’, 220 Press, Larry, 254–5 Prophet Muhammed, image forbidden, 209 proxies: sharing of, 102; use of, 101 ‘public opinion channellers’, 214 ‘public order’, CCP-speak, 72 Public Pledge on Self-Discipline for the Chinese Internet, 64 Public Security Bureau, 149 Putin, Vladimir, 228, 247, 249, 251, 257, 262–6; internet concern, 261 qigong, 55; enthusiasm for, 47; groups, 50 masters’ absurd claims, 49; opinion shift against, 48 Qin Yongmin, 42 Qin Zhihui, arrest, 182 Qing Gang, 35 QQ, 182, 277 Qzone, 182, 278 Radio Free Asia, 106, 147, 248, 311 Rajagopalan, Megha, 199 Rand Corporation, 192 Razak, Najib, 209 Reagan, Ronald, 248 Rebel Pepper, 212, 215 Red Guards, 133 Reincarnation Party, 209 Relcom see Demos/Relcom Ren Zhengfei, 251 RenRen, 182 Reporters Without Borders, 64 Republic of China (ROC/Taiwan), 288 Reuters, 80–1 RFA, 108; 1994 launch, 107 riots, Urumqi, 148 ‘River Elegy’, TV programme, 20 Robinson, Michael, 30–2 Roldugin, Sergei, 251 root authority, 201 rootkit.com, 186, 188 Rosenberg, Jonathan, 117 Roskomnadzor, 266, 269, 270 Ross, Alec, 264 Rossiya Segodnya, 247–8 RSA, hacked, 187 RT, TV station, 247, 311 Runet, 257, 270 Russian Federation, 10, 237; early years of, 256; FAPSI, 257; firewall urgency of, 251; internet blacklist, 266; internet use surge, 257; liberal internet era, 262; Libertarian Party, 272 nationalised internet, 231; Safe Internet Forum, 248; 2012 election protests, 251 Sadikejiang Kaze, killing of, 146 Safe Internet League, 249–50 Safe Web, Triangle Boy, 108 Sakharov, Andrei, 270 Salkin.com, 157 Samdup, Thubten, 85–6, 160 Saudi Arabia, 230 Saulsbury, Brendan, 190 Schmidt, Eric, 116, 124, 127, 168; China strategy support, 126; Google outvoted, 171 Schneider, Rick, 87 Schrage, Elliot, 120–4 ‘secret backdoors’, 162 Seldon, Tenzin, 170 self-censorship, Google justification, 120 self-immolation, 58 SenseTime, 200 Sha Tin New Town, Hong Kong, 217 Shambaugh, David, 233 Shanghai, 29; Cooperation Organisation, 251; Cyberspace Administration, 308; European Jews haven, 205; Expo 2010, 180; police computer security, 35 Shaoguan incident see Xuri Toy factory Shchyogolev, Igor, 248, 250 Shen Yun, performance group, 97 Shenzhen, 143; public security bureau, surveillance division, 72–3 Shi Caidong, 51–3 Shi Tao, 64–5 67, 76, 116, 119; prison sentence, 66 Sichuan province, 201 Siemens BS2000 mainframe computer, 24 Signal, encryption app, 268 Silicon Valley, 1; biggest companies, 59; private enterprise victory, 7 Silk Road, dark web, 100 Sima Nan, 49 Sina Weibo, 182–3, 278; censors at, 75 Sino-Soviet split, 288 Sither, Lobsang Gyatso, 276–7, 283 Smirnov, Sergei, 266 Smith, Chris, 115 Smith, Craig, 90, 309 Snapchat, 260 Snowden, Edward, 190, 268, 269; revelations of, 313 Sobel, David, 245 social media, companies, 7 Soldatov, Alexey, 256, 261 solidarity: surveillance attention, 74; threat of, 10 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, 5 Song Zheng, 235 South China Sea: Chinese ambitions, 192; international court ruling, 77 spammers, trading among, 39 ‘spear-phishing’, 159, 187 ‘spiritual pollution’, 35 Sprint, 30–1 St Petersburg: briefcase bomb 2017, 269; State University, 260 Stanford Research Institute, 220 State Commission of Machine Industry, 24 Steve Jackson Games, 245 Stevens, John Paul, 245 Students for a Free Tibet, 170 Stuxnet virus, 190 Sudan, 230, 290 Sullivan, Andrew, 110 Sulzberger Jr, Arthur Ochs, 89–90 supremacist ideology, Han, 133 Surkov, Vladislav, 262–3 Sweden, 232 Symantec, 108, 170 Syria, Uyghur fighters, 199 System of Operative Search Measures, Russia, 257 Taiwan see Republic of China Tanzania, 288; Tan–Zam railway line, 287 Tarim Basin, 136 Tarnoff, Ben, 317 tear gas, 18 tech giants, collaboration accusation, 119 techno-libertarians, 243, 246 Telegram app, 268, 272; banned, 269; blocked, 270 Tencent, 182, 235, 279, 281–2; data hoovering, 280; leg up, 278; WeChat, 277; Weibo, 278 The Atlantic, 110 The Gate of Heavenly Peace, subtitled version, 176 The New Republic, 110 The New York Times, 3, 89–90, 100, 111, 179, 211, 223, 257 The People’s Daily, 21, 79, 172, 178, 246 The Wall Street Journal, 110, 309 The Washington Post, 57, 110, 302 Third World Academy of Sciences, 24 Tian, David, 99 Tian, Edward, 30–1 Tiananmen Square, 9, 21, 25, 46, 62, 99, 175; anger, 38; crackdown, 89, 107; massacre, 22, 26, 3, 208; massacre 20th anniversary, 166; Mothers, 65; movement, 20, 76; Papers, 100; protests, 78; self-immolation, 56–7; Tianjin protest, 52–4 Tibet, 83–4, 98, 106, 138, 149, 210; Action Institute, 274, 276; Computer Resource Centre, 86, 161; diaspora battling cyberspies, 276; Freedom Movement fund for, 163; Institute of the Performing Arts, 85; PLA victory, 85; Youth Congress, 85 Tohti, Ilham, 132, 134, 140–1, 143, 150, 152, 158, 195, 199; detention, 157; father killing, 133; harassment experience, 135; trial of, 131, US exile, 140 Tor Browser, 100, 102 Touré, Hamadoun, 228, 231, 236 traffic spikes, websites, 2 Trivedi, Aseem, 209 trolls: Badiucao attacks, 211; pro-China government, 92, 212 Trump, Donald, 192 Tsai Ing-wen, 212 Tsang, Donald, 15 Tunis Agreement 2005, 237 Tunisia, 9; Facebook, 264 Turnbull, Malcolm, 203 Tusiime, Samson, 295–6, 304; arrest of, 300 Twitter, 111, 207, 211, 246, 296–7, 303, 307, 309, 311–12; banned, 183; blocked, 27; ‘Revolution’, 110 UAE (United Arab Emirates), 230 Uganda: Chieftaincy of Military Intelligence, 293; Communications Commission, 303–4; Computer Misuse Act, 300; fake wireless hotspots, 294; security services, China learning, 295, 303; Special Investigations Unit, 300; Telecom, 304; Trojan horse viruses, 294; Twitter, 300; 2016 election, 296–8; ‘walk to work’ protests, 292 UgandaDecides, hashtag, 297 UglyGorilla, 187–8 UK (United Kingdom), 232 Ukraine, 250 Ulhaque, Zulkiflee Anwar (Zunar), 209 UltraSurf, 102, 105, 107–10, 112; programming, 106; successful, 104 Umbrella Movement/generation, 16, 19–20 United Nations, 10, 313; ‘cyber-sovereignty’, concept of, 224; ITU, 225, 227–32, 236; ITRs, 225, 233; WSIS, 222 Unit 61398, 190–1; indictment of, 189 United Arab Emirates, 230 United Russia party 2011 rally, 263 University of British Columbia, 309 University of California, Berkeley, 30 University of Edinburgh, 99 University of Helsinki, 253 University of Southern California, 220–1 University of Toronto, 159; Citizen Lab, 3–4 university servers, 35 URLs: blocking of, 29; proxies, 102–3 Urumqi, 132, 136, 153–4, 201; -Beijing link, 156; Han revenge attacks, 149; internet cut-off, 151; People’s Intermediate Court, 131; police attack, 148; proxies, 102–3; riots, 183; student protest, 146–7 USA: Chinese Embassy protests, 98; -China relationship, 112; Commerce Department, 222; Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, 219; Google Congressional hearing, 122; House Subcommittee on Human Rights, 115; imperialism internet use, 112; National Security Agency, 170, 244, 268, 293, 313; Republican Party, 244; Senate Sub-Committee on Human Rights, 108; State Department, 22, 81, 109–11, 166, 298 UseNet, 253 Usmanov, Alisher, 261, 267 USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics): dissolution of, 256; 1990s internet start, 252 Uyghurs, Chinese language forums, 157, dangerous vagabonds characterised, 132; discrimination against, 138–9, 152; doppa headgear, 132; internet, 143, 150; pervasive unemployment, 134; stereotyping of, 140; terrorism label, 140; Uyghur Online, 131, 135, 139, 151, 157; websites control, 149 Villeneuve, Nart, 159–60, 162–3 VIP Reference, 35 virtual private networks (VPNs), 9, 103, 113, 157, 299; apps, 297; users, 28 VKontakte (VK), 259–60, 262, 267; customer support, 265; groups, 270; user base growth, 261 Voice of America, 106–8, 248, 311 Voice of China, 287 Voice of Russia, 247 “Walk to Work” protests, 294 Walton, Greg, 160–3, 276 Wang Baodong, 109 Wang Dong, 188–9 Wang Lequan, 152 Wang Liming, 209, 210 Wang Yongping, 178 Wang Youcai, 42 Wang Yunfeng, 24, 25 Wang Zhiwen, 54 Wang, Jack, 188 ‘War on Terror’, 290 WCITLeaks, 229–31, 233, 236 Weaver, Nicholas, 3 WeChat (Weixin), 207, 242, 277–8, 281–3; censorship challenge, 268; monopoly of, 278; payments system, 279–80 Weibo, 46, 177–9, 181, 184, 206–7, 210, 268, 277; failure, 215; ingenuity of, 182; microbloggers use, 180; muzzling of, 214; public offering, 182; surveillance sidestep attempts, 208; Weiboscope, 77 Weigel, Moira, 317 Weir, Bob, 244 Wen Jiabao, 79–80 Wenhui Daily, 173 Wenzhou train crash, 177, 179; internet revealed, 178 Westinghouse, 187 Wexler, Robert, 123 WhatsApp, 16, 268, 278, 296, 303, 316 Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link, 244 WikiLeaks, 104, 185–6, 315–16 Wikipedia, specific pages blocked, 27 Wired, 84, 106, 243–4 World Bank, 24 World Conference on International Telecommunications, 227; Leaks see above World Internet Conference 2015, 241 World Uyghur Congress, 152 World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), 234 WSIS 10, 237; US victory, 224 WTO (World Trade Organization), 80–1; China joining, 42, 91–2 Wu, Dandan, 125 Wu, Tim, 30, 219, 241, 243 wumao, 212 wumaodang, recruited students, 213 Wuyi, Zhejiang province, 310 Wuzhen, 239–40 Xabnam.com, 157 Xi Jinping, 81, 181, 191, 203, 207, 238–40, 281, 312; internet clampdown, 78 Xia, Bill, 99–100, 102–3, 107, 112 Xiao Qiang, 76, 21 Xi’an, Shaanxi province, 154 Xinhua, 56–7, 64, 77, 78, 156, 181; commercial offerings, 80; Hong Kong bureau, 79; journalists’ watchdog role, 79; official line, 148 Xinjiang Autonomous Region, 107, 131–2, 135, 140, 148, 156, 195, 199, 210, 280; Beijing terrorism lens, 152; famine avoidance, 138; internet access, 156; internet blackout, 153; new policies of control, 200; Qing Empire, 137; Shanshan county, 201; University, 150 Xu Hong, 39 Xu Wendi, 42 Xue, Charles, 180, 181 Xuri Toy Factory/Shaoguan incident, 143, 146; footage of, 151; Uyghur workers, 144–5 Yahoo, 115, 119, 170; arrest responsibility, 116; China subsidiary, 63–4, 67; informer role criticised, 66 Yanayev, Gennady, 253 Yang Jisheng, 20 Yang, Jerry, 66–7 Yanukovych, Viktor, 267 Yeltsin, Boris, 75, 254–5, 257; resignation, 261 YouTube, 167, 246, 274, 303, 314, 316; blocked, 183 Yu Jie, China’s Best Actor, 80 Yu Wanli, 173–4, 246 Yuan Zengxin, 138 Zambia, 304 Zara, 309 Zhang Zhenhuan, 49 Zhang Jianchuan, 235 Zhang, Shawn, 309 Zhao Houlin, 236–7 Zhao Jing, 36 Zhao Ziyang, 80, 889; house arrest, 21–2 Zhongnanhai complex, 45; 1999 protest, 46, 52–3, 55 Zhou Yongkang, 171 Zhu Rongji, 53 Zhu, Julie, 62 Zhuan Falun, 50; text banned, 52 Zimbabwe, 10, 290, 304 Zorn, Werner, 24–5 ZTE, 288 Zuckerberg, Mark, 260, 312 Zed is a platform for marginalised voices across the globe.


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The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program That Shaped Our World by Vincent Bevins

Albert Einstein, American ideology, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, capitalist realism, centre right, colonial rule, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, land reform, market fundamentalism, megacity, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, South China Sea, structural adjustment programs, union organizing

Harian Rakyat, or The People’s Daily, was always a lean operation, twenty to thirty people working in downtown Jakarta at all hours.24 For a communist newspaper in a heady postrevolutionary environment, The People’s Daily was a remarkably lighthearted read. There were cartoons poking fun at the bumbling Western imperialists, original works of fiction published every day, a children’s section, and educational inserts with explanatory essays on global left-leaning figures like Albert Einstein and Charlie Chaplin. International news, the area that Zain oversaw, was a huge part of the coverage, and the paper paid special attention to events in the rest of the Third World. News from Amerika 1953 was the end of the Jakarta Axiom; independent countries were no longer tolerated just because they had left-wing forces in check.

Ford Motor Company and Citibank collaborated with the disappearance of union workers.14 Even beards were suspect—that’s why a Brazilian piano player named Tenorinho was brought in, thrown on a parrilla, or grill, for torture in Buenos Aires, and then drowned.15 Representatives from Argentina’s military had already been at the meeting that launched Operation Condor in 1975, and the murderous “Triple A” alliance—the Alianza Anticomunista Argentina—had begun unleashing terror under Isabel Martínez de Perón, who served as president from 1974 to 1976. But the true believers were now in power. Admiral Emilio Massera declared Argentina was fighting a “Third World War” between “dialectic materialism and idealistic humanism.” This meant removing the influence of Marx, as well as Freud and Albert Einstein.16 General Antonio Domingo explained how this worked: “First we will kill all subversives, then we will kill all of their collaborators, then those who sympathize with subversives, then we will kill those that remain indifferent, and finally we kill the timid.”17 But the Condor alliance didn’t limit their activities to their own continent.


Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking by Michael Bhaskar

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, call centre, carbon tax, charter city, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cognitive load, Columbian Exchange, coronavirus, cosmic microwave background, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cyber-physical system, dark matter, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Eroom's law, fail fast, false flag, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, Haber-Bosch Process, hedonic treadmill, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, hive mind, hype cycle, Hyperloop, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Watt: steam engine, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, lockdown, lone genius, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megacity, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, minimum viable product, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Gell-Mann, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, nudge unit, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-truth, precautionary principle, public intellectual, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, skunkworks, Slavoj Žižek, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, techlash, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, total factor productivity, transcontinental railway, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, When a measure becomes a target, X Prize, Y Combinator

Inventions like Cyrus McCormick's threshing machine led to a 500 per cent increase in output of wheat per hour.4 Isaac Singer's sewing machine meant the time spent making a shirt was reduced from over fourteen hours to just one hour and sixteen minutes. Big ideas were conceived and executed at what felt like an accelerating pace. The bounds of knowledge shifted – fundamental forces like energy and evolution became tractable. The mystery of disease started to unravel. Just after the turn of the twentieth century, Albert Einstein transformed basic categories like time and space. Culture underwent a revolution. Mass entertainment, from television to radio shows, became a reality, while the nature of art was progressively redefined, from Impressionism to Abstract Expressionism. By the early twentieth century, people could believe neither their eyes nor their ears.

Ludwig Wittgenstein published his first paper in 1913 and was busy working on what would become one of the century's most important books of philosophy – the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Carl Jung had just published The Psychology of the Unconscious (outlining the collective unconscious and causing the first major schism in the new discipline of psychoanalysis) and Freud published Totem and Taboo. Science too was caught up in revolution. Albert Einstein walked with Marie Curie in the Swiss hills, broaching ideas that had first occurred to him in 1907 and would eventually become his General Theory of Relativity, his extraordinary idea of curved spacetime. In one of the most significant insights in the history of science, Niels Bohr provided the link between physics and chemistry, confirming the earlier instincts of Max Planck.


pages: 654 words: 204,260

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Brownian motion, California gold rush, Cepheid variable, clean water, Copley Medal, cosmological constant, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Attenborough, double helix, Drosophila, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Gregor Mendel, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Helicobacter pylori, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, Magellanic Cloud, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, out of africa, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, supervolcano, Thomas Malthus, Wilhelm Olbers

But the landmark event—the dawn of a new age—came in 1905, when there appeared in the German physics journal Annalen der Physik a series of papers by a young Swiss bureaucrat who had no university affiliation, no access to a laboratory, and the regular use of no library greater than that of the national patent office in Bern, where he was employed as a technical examiner third class. (An application to be promoted to technical examiner second class had recently been rejected.) His name was Albert Einstein, and in that one eventful year he submitted to Annalen der Physik five papers, of which three, according to C. P. Snow, “were among the greatest in the history of physics”—one examining the photoelectric effect by means of Planck's new quantum theory, one on the behavior of small particles in suspension (what is known as Brownian motion), and one outlining a special theory of relativity.

Einstein's next idea was one of the greatest that anyone has ever had—indeed, the very greatest, according to Boorse, Motz, and Weaver in their thoughtful history of atomic science. “As the creation of a single mind,” they write, “it is undoubtedly the highest intellectual achievement of humanity,” which is of course as good as a compliment can get. In 1907, or so it has sometimes been written, Albert Einstein saw a workman fall off a roof and began to think about gravity. Alas, like many good stories this one appears to be apocryphal. According to Einstein himself, he was simply sitting in a chair when the problem of gravity occurred to him. Actually, what occurred to Einstein was something more like the beginning of a solution to the problem of gravity, since it had been evident to him from the outset that one thing missing from the special theory was gravity.

And on that rather unsettling note, let's return to Planet Earth and consider something that we do understand—though by now you perhaps won't be surprised to hear that we don't understand it completely and what we do understand we haven't understood for long. 12 THE EARTH MOVES IN ONE OF his last professional acts before his death in 1955, Albert Einstein wrote a short but glowing foreword to a book by a geologist named Charles Hapgood entitled named Charles Hapgood entitled Earth's Shifting Crust: A Key to Some Basic Problems of Earth Science. Hapgood's book was a steady demolition of the idea that continents were in motion. In a tone that all but invited the reader to join him in a tolerant chuckle, Hapgood observed that a few gullible souls had noticed “an apparent correspondence in shape between certain continents.”


pages: 239 words: 45,926

As the Future Catches You: How Genomics & Other Forces Are Changing Your Work, Health & Wealth by Juan Enriquez

Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, borderless world, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, creative destruction, digital divide, double helix, Ford Model T, global village, Gregor Mendel, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, Helicobacter pylori, Howard Rheingold, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, more computing power than Apollo, Neal Stephenson, new economy, personalized medicine, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, spice trade, stem cell, the new new thing, yottabyte

., 500 billion U.S. photocopies, 610 billion global e-mails, 7.5 quadrillion minutes of phone conversations, etc.). All words spoken by all human beings throughout history could be stored with around 5 exabytes.5 Celera had a few competitors … Among them the publicly funded International Sequencing Consortium, which includes: ALBERT EINSTEIN COLLEGE OF MEDICINE Baylor College of Medicine BEIJING HUMAN GENOME CENTER Institute of Genetics CHINESE ACADEMY OF SCIENCES Center for Genetics in Medicine (Perkin Elmer/Washington University) GESELLSCHAFT FÜR BIOTECHNOLOGISCHE FORSCHUNG MBH Genoscope GENOME THERAPEUTICS CORP. Institute of Molecular Biotechnology KAROLINSKA INSTITUTET Center for Molecular Medicine LITA ANNENBERG HAZEN GENOME CENTER Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics JOINT GENOME INSTITUTE JAPAN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY CORP.


pages: 185 words: 43,609

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel, Blake Masters

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Andy Kessler, Berlin Wall, clean tech, cloud computing, crony capitalism, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, heat death of the universe, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, life extension, lone genius, Long Term Capital Management, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, minimum viable product, Nate Silver, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, power law, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, software is eating the world, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, strong AI, Suez canal 1869, tech worker, Ted Kaczynski, Tesla Model S, uber lyft, Vilfredo Pareto, working poor

You can have agency not just over your own life, but over a small and important part of the world. It begins by rejecting the unjust tyranny of Chance. You are not a lottery ticket. 7 FOLLOW THE MONEY MONEY MAKES MONEY. “For whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them” (Matthew 25:29). Albert Einstein made the same observation when he stated that compound interest was “the eighth wonder of the world,” “the greatest mathematical discovery of all time,” or even “the most powerful force in the universe.” Whichever version you prefer, you can’t miss his message: never underestimate exponential growth.


pages: 277 words: 41,815

Lonely Planet Pocket Berlin by Lonely Planet, Andrea Schulte-Peevers

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, call centre, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, G4S, gentrification, haute cuisine, indoor plumbing, messenger bag, Peter Eisenman, Prenzlauer Berg, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal

Nice shop and cafe to boot. (www.deutsche-guggenheim.de; Unter den Linden 13-15; adult/concession €4/3, Mon free; 10am-8pm; U-Bahn Französische Strasse; 100, 200, TXL) 10 Humboldt Universität University Offline map Google map Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were students, and the Brothers Grimm and Albert Einstein teachers, at Berlin’s oldest university (1810), a former royal palace. It has produced enough Nobel Prize winners (29 at last count) to keep the Swedish Academy busy. These days, some 35,000 students strive to uphold this illustrious legacy. Eating 11 Fischers Fritz International €€€ Offline map Google map Even patrons who’d never set foot inside a hotel restaurant must concede that Christian Lohse has earned his two Michelin stars by jazzing up superb fish, meat and seafood into a carnival of flavours.


pages: 130 words: 42,093

Underestimated: An Autism Miracle by J. B. Handley, Jamison Handley

Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, coronavirus, microbiome, neurotypical, Rosa Parks, Stephen Hawking

He’s sitting up straight, completely in command of his bike. The whole ride takes us more than forty-five minutes, and he’s perfect, from start to finish. Perfect. I’m a little stunned and realize I’m doing something that’s been done to Jamie his whole life. I’m reminded of a lesson I did with him on Albert Einstein. At the end, I asked him if he related at all to Einstein? “Yes, because I was underestimated.” The guilt can show up at times like this, too, when I should just be celebrating. How in the hell did I miss this? How did I miss this brilliant boy and let him suffer in silence for so long? The single biggest error I made was that I considered whatever words came out of Jamie’s mouth to be reflective of his cognition.


pages: 347 words: 123,884

The Unwritten Rules of Social Relationships: Decoding Social Mysteries Through the Unique Perspectives of Autism by Temple Grandin, Sean Barron

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, fundamental attribution error, index card, Mars Rover, neurotypical, theory of mind

I think it’s that people’s brains are so rigid in their own way of thinking and perception that they just can’t imagine that a different way exists. Rigid thinking is not just an autistic trait—apparently it’s hard-wired in all of us. But neurotypical people seem to think and feel that it’s okay to be rigid as long as their ideas are shared by enough people. Imagine if Galileo or Albert Einstein succumbed to that line of thinking. Where would we be today? Different thinking is where progress and invention and discoveries lie. When a person thinks in pictures and the rest of the world relates on a verbal basis, it’s nearly impossible for the verbal thinkers to imagine our perspective, although I think it’s easier the other way around, i.e., for people who think in pictures to learn to think with words.

People with ASD can be taught to think flexibly, they can learn why rules exist and what functions they serve. By judiciously monitoring how we teach social rules and through constant vigilant attention to pointing out the exceptions to the rules we teach, social awareness and understanding can grow. Sean speaks: Albert Einstein once made the seemingly innocuous observation that all things are relative. Of course among the “things” he had in mind were the scientific laws that governed the creation of matter and other similar ideas. His statement extends beyond scientific principles to nearly everything in life—something it took my getting rid of autism to understand and appreciate.


pages: 476 words: 120,892

Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology by Johnjoe McFadden, Jim Al-Khalili

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, complexity theory, dematerialisation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Drosophila, Ernest Rutherford, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Late Heavy Bombardment, Louis Pasteur, Medieval Warm Period, New Journalism, phenotype, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, seminal paper, synthetic biology, theory of mind, traveling salesman, uranium enrichment, Zeno's paradox

His theory suggested that energy, instead of flowing out of matter like water pouring continuously from a tap, came out as a collection of separate, indivisible packages—as if from a slowly dripping tap. Planck was never comfortable with the idea that energy was lumpy, but five years after he proposed his quantum theory, Albert Einstein extended this idea and suggested that all electromagnetic radiation, including light, is “quantized” rather than continuous, coming in discrete packets, or particles, which we now call photons. He proposed that this way of thinking about light could account for a long-standing puzzle known as the photoelectric effect, a phenomenon whereby light could knock electrons out of matter.

Such a quantum heat engine does a similar job to a classical heat engine, but with electrons instead of steam and photons of light replacing the heat source. Electrons first absorb photons and are excited to a higher energy. They can then give up this energy, when required, to do useful chemical work. This idea goes back to the work of Albert Einstein and would later underpin the principles of the laser. The problem is that many of these electrons will lose their energy as wasted heat before they have a chance to put it to use. This puts a limit on the efficiency of such a quantum heat engine. You will remember that the reaction center is the final destination for all those oscillating excitons in photosynthetic complexes.


Prime Obsession:: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics by John Derbyshire

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Bletchley Park, Charles Babbage, Colonization of Mars, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, four colour theorem, Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John von Neumann, Paul Erdős, Richard Feynman, Turing machine, Turing test

He was an early supporter of the A PROOF AND A TURNING POINT 165 Hebrew University of Jerusalem (founded in 1925). His many books included The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field (1945), still well worth reading for its insights into the thought processes of mathematicians; I have used some of its ideas for this book. He organized an amateur orchestra at his home; Albert Einstein—a lifelong friend—was a visiting violinist. He was married for 68 years to the same woman. When she died, Jacques was 94 years old. He struggled on for two years; but then the death of his beloved grandson in a climbing accident robbed him of his spirit and he died a few months later, a little short of his 98th birthday.

Should a non-trivial zero of the zeta function show up with order 2 or greater, it would not disprove the Hypothesis, but it would create havoc with some of the computational theory. 386 PRIME OBSESSION CHAPTER 18 103. I am really speaking here about operators, of course. Operators provide a mathematical model for describing dynamical systems. “Ensemble” (this usage of the word, by the way, is due to Albert Einstein) refers to a collection of such operators that share some common statistical properties. 104. To be more precise, Montgomery’s area of interest was the so-called “class number problem,” of which there is a very accessible account in Keith Devlin’s book, Mathematics: The New Golden Age (Columbia University Press, 1999). 105.


pages: 504 words: 126,835

The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard by Fredrik Erixon, Bjorn Weigel

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American ideology, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, BRICs, Burning Man, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, dark matter, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, George Gilder, global supply chain, global value chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Herman Kahn, high net worth, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Martin Wolf, mass affluent, means of production, middle-income trap, Mont Pelerin Society, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subprime mortgage crisis, technological determinism, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transportation-network company, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, University of East Anglia, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, Yogi Berra

Over 95 percent of all start-up investments fail to deliver projected returns, and as many as 30–40 percent burn all invested capital and completely fail, says Harvard Business School’s Shikhar Ghosh.31 What is even more striking is that many of them fail for the same reason, probably leading some to suspect that capitalism conforms to the definition of insanity often attributed to Albert Einstein – doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results. Of all the internet start-ups, for example, three-quarters fail because of “premature scaling” alone, according to the Startup Genome Report.32 Yet here we are, with rising venture capital investment in internet start-ups – many of them rushing to scale up their businesses faster than the others.

Between 2000 and 2020, estimates the Conference Board, growth in real GDP per capita will have fallen much further below its trend of the past decades.4 While such forecasting is notoriously difficult, the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), for instance, estimates potential real GDP per capita between 2014 and 2060 to be a bit higher than in the past decade in the euro area and a bit lower in the United States.5 Over time, small variations make a difference. Albert Einstein once said that compound interest (that is, savers getting interest on accumulated interest) was one of mankind’s greatest innovations, and perhaps the same can be said of compound growth. In the long term, the average annual rate of growth makes a big difference. If the economy grows by 1 percent a year it will take 70 years to double GDP.


pages: 555 words: 119,733

Autotools by John Calcote

Albert Einstein, card file, Debian, delayed gratification, Dennis Ritchie, don't repeat yourself, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Free Software Foundation, place-making, Richard Feynman, seminal paper, Valgrind

I began this book with the statement that people often start out hating the Autotools because they don't understand the purpose of the Autotools. By now, you should have a fairly well developed sense of this purpose. If you were disinclined to use the Autotools before, then I hope I've given you reason to reconsider. Recall the famously misquoted line from Albert Einstein, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler."[161] Not all things can be made so simple that anyone can master them with little training. This is especially true when it comes to processes that are designed to make life simpler for others. The Autotools offer the ability for experts—programmers and software engineers—to make open source software more accessible to end users.

The Autotools offer the ability for experts—programmers and software engineers—to make open source software more accessible to end users. Let's face it—this process is less than trivial, but the Autotools attempts to make it as simple as possible. * * * [161] See http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Albert_Einstein. What Einstein actually said was, "The supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience." UPDATES Visit http://www.nostarch.com/autotools.htm for updates, errata, and other information.


pages: 497 words: 124,144

Red Moon Rising by Matthew Brzezinski

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Columbine, company town, cuban missile crisis, guns versus butter model, Kitchen Debate, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, skunkworks, trade route, Vanguard fund, walking around money, white picket fence

The scathing comments of Walther Riedel, von Braun’s chief design engineer, earned him a subheading in a December 1946 article: “German Scientist Says American Cooking Tasteless; Dislikes Rubberized Chicken.”) The revelation that von Braun’s team was in the country in turn prompted impassioned complaints. On December 30, 1946, Albert Einstein and the Federation of American Scientists wrote to President Truman, arguing, “We hold these individuals to be potentially dangerous carriers of racial and religious hatred. Their former eminence as Nazi party members and supporters raises the issue of their fitness to become American citizens and hold key positions in American industrial, scientific and educational institutions.”

Korolev’s junior by four years, Keldysh was a handsome Latvian mathematical genius, a child prodigy both as a theoretician and as an applied aviation engineer, who had been the youngest member ever elected to the prestigious Academy of Sciences. In Soviet scholarly circles, Keldysh’s name carried the same awe-inspiring weight as that of Albert Einstein or Enrico Fermi. The suave Balt, a master at bureaucratic maneuvering, had used his status and unique position as the Presidium’s science adviser to become the USSR’s earliest advocate of space exploration. Long before Korolev’s breakthrough with the R-5 intermediate-range missile, it had been Keldysh’s political clout that had nudged the satellite proposal gradually up the government ladder.


pages: 482 words: 121,672

A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing (Eleventh Edition) by Burton G. Malkiel

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, asset-backed security, beat the dealer, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, book value, butter production in bangladesh, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, compound rate of return, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Detroit bankruptcy, diversification, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental subject, feminist movement, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, framing effect, George Santayana, hindsight bias, Home mortgage interest deduction, index fund, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Japanese asset price bubble, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, money market fund, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Own Your Own Home, PalmPilot, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Salesforce, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, sugar pill, survivorship bias, Teledyne, the rule of 72, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

The fundamentalist hopes that a thorough study of industry conditions will produce valuable insights into factors that are not yet reflected in market prices. The fundamentalist uses four basic determinants to help estimate the proper value for any stock. Determinant 1: The expected growth rate. Most people don’t recognize the implications of compound growth for financial decisions. Albert Einstein once described compound interest as the “greatest mathematical discovery of all time.” It is often said that the Native American who sold Manhattan Island in 1626 for $24 was rooked by the white man. In fact, he may have been an extremely sharp salesman. Had he put his $24 away at 6 percent interest, compounded semiannually, it would now be worth more than $100 billion, and with it his descendants could buy back much of the now improved land.

Every year you put off investing makes your ultimate retirement goals more difficult to achieve. Trust in time rather than in timing. As a sign in the window of a bank put it, little by little you can safely stock up a strong reserve here, but not until you start. The secret of getting rich slowly (but surely) is the miracle of compound interest. Albert Einstein described compound interest as the “greatest mathematical discovery of all time.” It may sound complicated, but it simply involves earning a return not only on your original investment but also on the accumulated interest that you reinvest. Jeremy Siegel, author of the excellent investing book Stocks for the Long Run, has calculated the returns from a variety of financial assets from 1800 to 2014.


pages: 386 words: 122,595

Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science (Fully Revised and Updated) by Charles Wheelan

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, congestion charging, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, demographic transition, diversified portfolio, Doha Development Round, Exxon Valdez, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, index fund, interest rate swap, invisible hand, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, libertarian paternalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Malacca Straits, managed futures, market bubble, microcredit, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, new economy, open economy, presumed consent, price discrimination, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, school vouchers, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, tech worker, The Market for Lemons, the rule of 72, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game

But you’ve got to have the spare capital first, and the only way to generate spare capital is to spend less than you earn—i.e., save. The more you save, and the sooner you begin saving it, the more rent you can command from the financial markets. Any good book on personal finance will dazzle you with the virtues of compound interest. Suffice it here to note that Albert Einstein is said to have called it the greatest invention of all time. The flip side, of course, is that if you are spending more cash than you earn, then you will have to “rent” the difference somewhere. And you will have to pay for that privilege. Paying the rent on capital is no different from paying the rent on anything else: It is an expense that crowds out other things you may want to consume later.

Other aspects of certification law don’t make much sense either. Private school teachers, many of whom have decades of experience, cannot teach in public schools without jumping through assorted hoops (including student teaching) that are almost certainly unnecessary. Nor can university professors. When Albert Einstein arrived in Princeton, New Jersey, he was not legally qualified to teach high school physics. The most striking (and frustrating) thing about all of this is that researchers have found that certification requirements have virtually no correlation with performance in the classroom whatsoever. The best evidence on this point (which is consistent with all other evidence that I’ve seen) comes from Los Angeles.


pages: 251 words: 44,888

The Words You Should Know to Sound Smart: 1200 Essential Words Every Sophisticated Person Should Be Able to Use by Bobbi Bly

Albert Einstein, Alistair Cooke, Anton Chekhov, British Empire, Columbine, Donald Trump, George Santayana, haute couture, Honoré de Balzac, Joan Didion, John Nash: game theory, Network effects, placebo effect, Ralph Waldo Emerson, school vouchers, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, three-masted sailing ship

nascent (NAY-sent), adjective Having just been born or invented and still in the early stages of growth and development. It’s always amusing to watch the nouveau riche during the NASCENT period of their adjustment to luxury. nationalism (NAH-shin-ul-iz-um), noun The idea that citizens should take great pride in their country and support it to the hilt; extreme patriotism. Albert Einstein called NATIONALISM “the measles of mankind.” natter (NAH-ter), verb To talk ceaselessly; babble. The way Emily NATTERS endlessly about her family’s new yacht is revolting to those of us who have owned several yachts over the years. Nebuchadnezzar (neb-yoo-could-NEZ-er), noun A king mentioned in the Old Testament of the Bible who destroyed Jerusalem and exiled the Israelites to Babylonia.


The Art of Readable Code by Dustin Boswell, Trevor Foucher

Albert Einstein, business logic, don't repeat yourself, Donald Knuth, off-by-one error, web application

The exact details of how you separate these tasks isn’t as important as the fact that they’re separated. The hard part is accurately describing all the little things your program is doing. Chapter 12. Turning Thoughts into Code You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother. --Albert Einstein When explaining a complex idea to someone, it's easy to confuse them with all the little details. It's a valuable skill to be able to explain an idea “in plain English,” so that someone less knowledgeable than you can understand. It requires distilling an idea down to the most important concepts.


pages: 165 words: 47,193

The End of Work: Why Your Passion Can Become Your Job by John Tamny

Albert Einstein, Andy Kessler, Apollo 13, asset allocation, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, cloud computing, commoditize, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, do what you love, Downton Abbey, future of work, George Gilder, haute cuisine, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, Palm Treo, Peter Thiel, profit motive, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, Yogi Berra

That same kind of baseball intelligence characterizes today’s stars too. Consider the Chicago Cubs’ outfielder Kyle Schwarber, an indispensable member of the 2016 World Series champions. Schwarber is “not going to go into macroeconomics and get an A,” says his college roommate Kyle Hart, but “when you get on the baseball field, that kid might as well be Albert Einstein.”37 If you’re hoping to make baseball your life, I’ve got the same exciting news for you that I had for football and basketball lovers. Combined revenue for Major League Baseball’s thirty teams was $8.4 billion in 2015. From 2011 to 2016, team values rose 146 percent on the way to an average of $1.3 billion.38 And as you might expect, player salaries are rising accordingly.


pages: 161 words: 44,488

The Business Blockchain: Promise, Practice, and Application of the Next Internet Technology by William Mougayar

Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, business logic, business process, centralized clearinghouse, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cryptocurrency, decentralized internet, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, fiat currency, fixed income, Ford Model T, global value chain, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, market clearing, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, prediction markets, pull request, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, Satoshi Nakamoto, sharing economy, smart contracts, social web, software as a service, too big to fail, Turing complete, Vitalik Buterin, web application, Yochai Benkler

“Bitcoin Could Help Cut Power Bills," BBC, http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35604674. 14. Grid Singularity, http://gridsingularity.com/. 6 IMPLEMENTING BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world.” –ALBERT EINSTEIN THE MORE FOUNDATIONAL A TECHNOLOGY IS, the more impact it can have. Blockchain technology is not a process improvement technology. At its fullest deployment potential, it is rather a disruptive technology; therefore it must be given that potential when being implemented. Most of the major blockchain platforms have been developed via a transparent, open source, collaborative approach, including a good degree of decentralized contributed work.


pages: 199 words: 48,162

Capital Allocators: How the World’s Elite Money Managers Lead and Invest by Ted Seides

Albert Einstein, asset allocation, behavioural economics, business cycle, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, deliberate practice, diversification, Everything should be made as simple as possible, fake news, family office, fixed income, high net worth, hindsight bias, impact investing, implied volatility, impulse control, index fund, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Lean Startup, loss aversion, Paradox of Choice, passive investing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Sharpe ratio, sovereign wealth fund, tail risk, The Wisdom of Crowds, Toyota Production System, zero-sum game

The staunch proponents of index fund management might want to consider why some of the smartest people in the business have independently chosen to pursue strategies that cannot be indexed. Perhaps the wisdom of this crowd is entirely wrong and investment success is easy, but I doubt it. Albert Einstein once said, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” I believe the active/passive debate is full of nuance that is lost in proclaiming the failure of active management. Both active and passive are valuable tools that can serve important purposes in achieving investment success.


pages: 190 words: 46,977

Elon Musk: A Mission to Save the World by Anna Crowley Redding

Albert Einstein, artificial general intelligence, Burning Man, California high-speed rail, Colonization of Mars, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, energy security, Ford Model T, gigafactory, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Khan Academy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kwajalein Atoll, Large Hadron Collider, low earth orbit, Mars Society, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, OpenAI, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jurvetson, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Wayback Machine

The only bulk value in a company is if you are doing hard work to solve tough problems,”121 Elon explained. He wanted Tesla’s cars to be nothing less than, well, perfect. Period. BOOKSHELF! Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson chronicles the unlikely path and amazing contributions of Albert Einstein, a book that Elon learned a lot from. IT’S COMPLICATED Remember when Elon discovered that the price of rockets was overly inflated? He made a similar discovery about the parts used to make rockets. They were way overpriced. Elon found that irritating. If something cost pennies to make, it shouldn’t cost thousands of dollars to buy.


pages: 469 words: 142,230

The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World by Oliver Morton

Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Apollo 13, Asilomar, Boeing 747, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, Columbian Exchange, decarbonisation, demographic transition, Dr. Strangelove, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy transition, Ernest Rutherford, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Haber-Bosch Process, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kintsugi, late capitalism, Louis Pasteur, megaproject, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, plutocrats, public intellectual, renewable energy transition, rewilding, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, tech billionaire, Ted Nordhaus, Thomas Malthus, Virgin Galactic

Estimates suggested that in many American states more than half the soil that had been there when settlers and slaves first arrived had since been stripped away – sometimes a lot more than half. Understandably downplayed during the Second World War, these worries returned in amplified form in two Malthusian bestsellers published in 1948, Our Plundered Planet – written by Fairfield Osborn and endorsed on the cover by Albert Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt – and Road to Survival – written by William Vogt and introduced by Bernard Baruch, financier and confidant to presidents. Both books decried the fact that erosion was eating away at the Earth’s ability to support its people. Agricultural yields were falling and natural resources becoming exhausted even as the number of people who needed food grew ever faster.

This control would stretch from the Gulf Stream to the genome; Huxley was a convinced eugenicist, believing in the scientific betterment of human stock just as he believed in the scientific betterment of the climate. Von Neumann’s politics were quite different. He had no time for the Baruch plan; while Albert Einstein, whose Princeton office was next door to von Neumann’s, was contributing to ‘One World or None’, the world-government manifesto of the Federation of American Scientists, von Neumann was advocating a pre-emptive nuclear war against the not-yet-nuclear Soviet Union which was occupying his native Hungary.


pages: 566 words: 153,259

The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy by Seth Mnookin

Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, illegal immigration, index card, Isaac Newton, John Gilmore, loss aversion, meta-analysis, mouse model, neurotypical, pattern recognition, placebo effect, precautionary principle, Richard Thaler, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

This story also illustrates the necessity of framing a null hypothesis in the broadest way possible: “At least one swan is black” would not have been a valid null hypothesis, since it would have left room for the discovery of a red swan or a green swan or any other color of swan that would have invalidated the original hypothesis without satisfying the null hypothesis. One of the most famous examples of the null hypothesis at work involves two men often referred to as the greatest scientists the world has ever known: Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton. While still in his mid-twenties, Einstein became obsessed with an apparent contradiction between two widely accepted theories explaining the workings of the physical universe: Newton’s laws of motion and a series of equations formulated by a nineteenth-century Scottish physicist named James Clerk Maxwell.

., The New Quotable Einstein (Princeton: Princeton University Press and Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2005), 291. (This quotation appears in Chapter 19, “Attributed to Einstein.” According to Calaprice, “This may be a paraphrase of sentiments expressed in ‘Induction and Deduction,’ December 25, 1919, CPAE [Collected Papers of Albert Einstein], Vol. 7, Doc. 28.”) 12 This was “not a close case”: Cedillo v. Sec’y of Health and Human Services, No. 98-916V (Ct. Fed. Cl., February 12, 2009), 172. 13 has barred journalists: Ken Riebel, “Listening to Parents at AutismOne,” Autism News Beat, May 29, 2010, http://www.autism-news-beat.com/archives/1030. 13 kicked out parents: Ken Riebel, “Expelled!


pages: 624 words: 127,987

The Personal MBA: A World-Class Business Education in a Single Volume by Josh Kaufman

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Atul Gawande, Black Swan, Blue Ocean Strategy, business cycle, business process, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Heinemeier Hansson, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dean Kamen, delayed gratification, discounted cash flows, Donald Knuth, double entry bookkeeping, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Santayana, Gödel, Escher, Bach, high net worth, hindsight bias, index card, inventory management, iterative process, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, loose coupling, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, Network effects, Parkinson's law, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, place-making, premature optimization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, scientific management, side project, statistical model, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, systems thinking, telemarketer, the scientific method, time value of money, Toyota Production System, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, Y Combinator, Yogi Berra

Assuming Schraga’s assumptions are accurate, it takes twelve years of solid effort just to break even—and that’s assuming everything goes according to plan. If you graduate into a bad job market, you’re screwed. Where Business Schools Came From It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that modern methods of instruction have not entirely strangled the curiosity of inquiry. —ALBERT EINSTEIN, NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING PHYSICIST MBA programs don’t make students more successful because they teach very few things that are actually useful in the working world. As Pfeffer and Fong state in their paper:A large body of evidence suggests that the curriculum taught in business schools has only a small relationship to what is important for succeeding in business . . .

When you’re feeling lost, take heart—it’s just your brain gathering the information it needs to make good decisions. Embracing the impulse to try something new will help you exit Reorganization more quickly. SHARE THIS CONCEPT: http://book.personalmba.com/reorganization/ Conflict The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them. —ALBERT EINSTEIN, RENOWNED PHYSICIST Let’s take a moment to examine everyone’s favorite character flaw: procrastination. Everyone procrastinates to a certain extent: with too many things to do, putting off tasks until they feel urgent is a natural response. How can you focus on something due in the future when there’s something that needs to be done now?


pages: 469 words: 132,438

Taming the Sun: Innovations to Harness Solar Energy and Power the Planet by Varun Sivaram

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, asset light, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, bitcoin, blockchain, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, collateralized debt obligation, Colonization of Mars, currency risk, decarbonisation, deep learning, demand response, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, gigafactory, global supply chain, global village, Google Earth, hive mind, hydrogen economy, index fund, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, low interest rates, M-Pesa, market clearing, market design, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, mobile money, Negawatt, ocean acidification, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shock, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, renewable energy transition, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, SoftBank, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, Ted Nordhaus, Tesla Model S, time value of money, undersea cable, vertical integration, wikimedia commons

Researchers at King’s College London tested this discovery by exposing selenium to candlelight and then abruptly screening the candle; because the selenium’s conductivity dropped immediately, they concluded that fast-moving light, rather than slow-acting heat, was the cause of the electrical activity. This behavior was entirely mysterious to scientists at the time, but that didn’t stop an American inventor, Charles Fritts, from building the first solar panels out of selenium and installing them on a New York City roof in 1884.12 It was two more decades before Albert Einstein finally solved the mystery and explained how light was turning into electricity. In a 1905 paper that in time would win him the Nobel Prize in Physics, Einstein posited that light was composed of tiny packets—or photons—of energy.13 Sometimes, he explained, a photon had enough energy to knock an electron out of its customary orbit around the nucleus of an atom in a metal or semiconductor, and that electron could then move freely.

Catherine Wu, “Global CSP Installed Capacity Increased to 5017 MW by the End of 2016,” CSP Plaza, January 17, 2017, http://en.cspplaza.com/global-csp-installed-capacity-increased-to-5017-mw-by-the-end-of-2016.html. 11.  “Photovoltaic Milestone: 300 Gigawatts of Global Installed PV Capacity,” German Solar Association, January 26, 2017, https://www.solarwirtschaft.de/en/media/single-view/news/photovoltaic-milestone-300-gigawatts-of-global-installed-pv-capacity.html. 12.  Perlin, Let It Shine, 362. 13.  Albert Einstein, “Concerning an Heuristic Point of View Toward the Emission and Transformation of Light,” Annals of Physics 17, no. 132: 1905. 14.  E. D. Wilson, “Power from the Sun,” Power 28 (October 1935): 517. 15.  Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory (New York: Penguin Press, 2012). 16.  “Vast Power of the Sun Is Tapped by Battery Using Sand Ingredient,” The New York Times, April 26, 1954, http://www.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/science/TOPICS_SOLAR_TIMELINE/solar1954.pdf. 17.  


pages: 556 words: 141,069

The Profiteers by Sally Denton

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Boycotts of Israel, clean water, company town, corporate governance, crony capitalism, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, energy security, Fall of the Berlin Wall, G4S, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Joan Didion, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, new economy, nuclear winter, power law, profit motive, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, trickle-down economics, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, William Langewiesche

With an eye once again toward helping Bechtel, McCone’s tenure at the AEC expedited the transfer of the control of atomic energy from military to civilian hands, with Bechtel positioned to rake in billions along the way. Bechtel and McCone had been involved with atomic energy long before the AEC was created, dating back to the Manhattan Project. Officially established in 1942 in response to the report from scientist Albert Einstein to FDR that Nazi Germany was building an atomic bomb, the top secret project was under the direction of J. Robert Oppenheimer at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in New Mexico. Bechtel-McCone was in on the ground floor of the largest, most complex scientific undertaking in the history of the world: the $2 billion Allied project, dispersed among numerous laboratories, which involved more than two hundred thousand people.

During the 1956 presidential election, McCone, then a trustee of the California Institute of Technology, and an avid sponsor of the H-bomb, had tried to get ten Caltech faculty scientists fired when they came out in support of a proposal to suspend the H-bomb testing. Incumbent Eisenhower’s Democratic opponent, Adlai Stevenson, who had been roundly defeated by Eisenhower in the previous presidential election, had proposed a nuclear test ban treaty. An overwhelming majority of the nation’s scientists had embraced Albert Einstein’s criticism of the international community’s failure to control nuclear weapons, as epitomized by his famous remark: “I do not know how the Third World War will be fought, but I can tell you what they will use in the fourth: rocks.” When questioned during his confirmation hearings about his meddling with Caltech faculty, the stern, silver-haired McCone shared with congressmen his accusation that the professors were exaggerating the danger of radioactive fallout.


pages: 368 words: 145,841

Financial Independence by John J. Vento

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, diversification, diversified portfolio, estate planning, financial independence, fixed income, high net worth, Home mortgage interest deduction, low interest rates, money market fund, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, passive income, retail therapy, risk tolerance, the rule of 72, time value of money, transaction costs, young professional, zero day

For many people, the reality is that they have already dug themselves into a huge financial pit, and getting out of it is going to be time consuming and painful. They may need to pay off thousands of dollars of credit-card debt (see Chapter 4, Managing Debt) or enormous school loans (see Chapter 7, Paying for College), before they feel that they can begin to seriously save. This is daunting, to be sure, but not hopeless. Stop the Insanity Albert Einstein defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.” If you have been living beyond your means and not saving—and wondering why you never have any money—now is the time to stop the insanity! Stop splurging on small nonessentials and start saving for the big essentials, the greatest being your own and your family’s financial security.

. • If you are saving money for a special purpose, add that amount to your budget, as an additional line item, and consider opening a separate account for that purpose. • Complete the Comprehensive Wealth Management Questionnaire (see the Introduction) to assist you in establishing your financial priorities and goals. c01.indd 9 26/02/13 11:18 AM 2 C H A P T E R Understanding Taxes The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax. —Albert Einstein, father of modern physics T axes are the price we pay to live in our society. Our federal and state income taxes pay for everything from roads, public schools, public libraries, and hospitals to national parks, dams, the U.S. military services, and the salaries of all the people who work for the U.S. government, including the President of the United States.


pages: 447 words: 141,811

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 11, Atahualpa, British Empire, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, David Graeber, Easter island, Edmond Halley, European colonialism, Francisco Pizarro, glass ceiling, global village, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income per capita, invention of gunpowder, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, life extension, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, out of africa, personalized medicine, Ponzi scheme, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, stem cell, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, urban planning, zero-sum game

When researchers played a recording of the first call to a group of monkeys, the monkeys stopped what they were doing and looked upwards in fear. When the same group heard a recording of the second call, the lion warning, they quickly scrambled up a tree. Sapiens can produce many more distinct sounds than green monkeys, but whales and elephants have equally impressive abilities. A parrot can say anything Albert Einstein could say, as well as mimicking the sounds of phones ringing, doors slamming and sirens wailing. Whatever advantage Einstein had over a parrot, it wasn’t vocal. What, then, is so special about our language? The most common answer is that our language is amazingly supple. We can connect a limited number of sounds and signs to produce an infinite number of sentences, each with a distinct meaning.

Yet tool-making is of little consequence unless it is coupled with the ability to cooperate with many others. How is it that we now have intercontinental missiles with nuclear warheads, whereas 30,000 years ago we had only sticks with flint spearheads? Physiologically, there has been no significant improvement in our tool-making capacity over the last 30,000 years. Albert Einstein was far less dexterous with his hands than was an ancient hunter-gatherer. However, our capacity to cooperate with large numbers of strangers has improved dramatically. The ancient flint spearhead was manufactured in minutes by a single person, who relied on the advice and help of a few intimate friends.


pages: 468 words: 137,055

Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government Saving Privacy in the Digital Age by Steven Levy

Albert Einstein, Bletchley Park, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, disinformation, Donald Knuth, Eratosthenes, Extropian, Fairchild Semiconductor, information security, invention of the telegraph, Jim Simons, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knapsack problem, Marc Andreessen, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mondo 2000, Network effects, new economy, NP-complete, quantum cryptography, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web of trust, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP, éminence grise

But if the process is inverted—if someone scrambles some text with his or her own private key—the resulting ciphertext can be unscrambled only by using the single public key that matches its mate. What’s the point of that? Well, if you got such a message from someone claiming to be Albert Einstein, and wondered if it was really Albert Einstein, you now had a way to prove it—a mathematical litmus test. You’d look up Einstein’s public key and apply it to the scrambled ciphertext. If the result was plaintext and not gibberish, you’d know for certain that it was Einstein’s message—because he holds the world’s only private key that could produce a message that his matching public key could unscramble.


The Unicorn's Secret by Steven Levy

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Buckminster Fuller, card file, East Village, financial independence, Future Shock, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, index card, John Markoff, Marshall McLuhan, Ralph Nader, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, Skinner box, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog

Einhorn marveled to Samuels at how millions of dollars of film-studio money were unable to capture the ad hoc energy and risk taking of that resonant era. After the screening, they dined at a West Philadelphia restaurant, and came back to Einhorn’s apartment for more talk and a smoke. Most of the conversation centered around Ira’s interpretations of Albert Einstein’s theories, but Ira did take time out to tell Samuels that he thought his apartment had been tampered with lately. He showed his friend a place on the living-room window, over his bed, where he thought the caulking had been removed. Samuels left at around two o’clock, and Ira read until a few minutes before six.

Meanwhile, the Einhorn proposals Bill Whitehead was circulating garnered little support at Doubleday. Nothing came of Ira’s would-be biography of Frank Rizzo, to be entitled I Never Saw My Mother Naked. Nor was there enthusiastic response to the proposed E = MC2, a book about Ira’s beloved “white-haired medusa,” Albert Einstein. “There certainly is a need for a book that would explain to the interested but uninformed lay reader the consequences, side realities, etc. of Einstein’s theory,” one Doubleday editor noted, but added that “I doubt very much however that Einhorn can [fill that need].” So, while continuing to write for publications willing to print his unorthodox proclamations, Ira Einhorn—with typical protean vision—focused his energies more clearly.


Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All by Michael Shellenberger

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, Asperger Syndrome, Bernie Sanders, Bob Geldof, Boeing 747, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean tech, clean water, climate anxiety, Corn Laws, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, failed state, Garrett Hardin, Gary Taubes, gentleman farmer, global value chain, Google Earth, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hydraulic fracturing, index fund, Indoor air pollution, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, land tenure, Live Aid, LNG terminal, long peace, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microplastics / micro fibres, Murray Bookchin, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, renewable energy transition, Rupert Read, School Strike for Climate, Solyndra, Stephen Fry, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, WikiLeaks, Y2K

Said Oppenheimer, “It is hard to see how there could be any major war in which one side or another would not eventually make and use atomic bombs.”130 Even advocates of disarmament agreed. “Whatever agreements not to use H-bombs had been reached in time of peace, they would no longer be considered binding in time of war,” acknowledged Albert Einstein and British philosopher Bertrand Russell in 1955, “for, if one side manufactured the bombs and the other did not, the side that manufactured them would inevitably be victorious.”131 Today, just 25 percent of Americans say they believe nuclear weapons can be eliminated.132 When a New York Times reporter asked Oppenheimer how he felt after the bomb was tested on July 16, 1945, the father of the atomic bomb said, “Lots of boys not grown up yet will owe their life to it.”133 After the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Oppenheimer put out word that “the atomic bomb is so terrible a weapon that war is now impossible.”134 9 Destroying the Environment to Save It 1.

., “Report by the Panel of Consultants of the Department of State to the Secretary of State: Armaments and American Policy,” Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952–1954, vol. 2, part 2, National Security Affairs, document 67, January 1953, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1952-54v02p2/d67.Richard Rhodes, Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012), 588. 131. Max Born, Percy W. Bridgman, Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell et al., “Statement: The Russell-Einstein Manifesto,” July 9, 1955, presented at the 1st Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs, Pugwash, Nova Scotia, 1957, https://pugwash.org/1955/07/09/statement-manifesto. 132. “CNN Poll: Public Divided on Eliminating All Nuclear Weapons,” CNN, April 12, 2010, http://www.cnn.com. 133.


pages: 611 words: 130,419

Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events by Robert J. Shiller

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, digital divide, disintermediation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edmond Halley, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, implied volatility, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, Jean Tirole, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, litecoin, low interest rates, machine translation, market bubble, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, moral hazard, Northern Rock, nudge unit, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, publish or perish, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, superstar cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, yellow journalism, yield curve, Yom Kippur War

The US presidential candidate who lost to Herbert Hoover in 1928, Al Smith, wrote in the Boston Globe in 1931: We know now that much unemployment can be directly traced to the growing use of machinery intended to replace man power.… The human psychology of it is simple and understandable to everybody. A man who is not sure of his job will not spend his money. He will rather hoard it and it is difficult to blame him for so doing as against the day of want.34 Albert Einstein, the world’s most celebrated physicist, believed this narrative in 1933, at the very bottom of the Great Depression, saying the Great Depression was the result of technical progress: According to my conviction it cannot be doubted that the severe economic depression is to be traced back for the most part to internal economic causes; the improvement in the apparatus of production through technical invention and organization has decreased the need for human labor, and thereby caused the elimination of a part of labor from the economic circuit, and thereby caused a progressive decrease in the purchasing power of the consumers.35 By that time, people had begun to label labor-saving inventions as “robots,” even if there were no mechanical men to be seen.

Particularly notable was the 2011 book Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, which sold 379,000 copies in its first week on sale,24 became a number-one New York Times best seller, and has over 6,500 reviews on Amazon with an average ranking of 4.5 stars out of 5. Isaacson specializes in biographies of geniuses (including Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, and Elon Musk), but his book about Jobs was by far his most successful. Why did his book about Jobs go viral? Part of the answer was the timing: the publisher wisely dropped it into the market just weeks after Jobs’s death, allowing the news media narrative of his death to interact with the talk about the book.


pages: 475 words: 134,707

The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--And How We Must Adapt by Sinan Aral

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, death of newspapers, deep learning, deepfake, digital divide, digital nomad, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Drosophila, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, George Floyd, global pandemic, hive mind, illegal immigration, income inequality, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lockdown, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, performance metric, phenotype, recommendation engine, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Russian election interference, Second Machine Age, seminal paper, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, skunkworks, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social intelligence, social software, social web, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yogi Berra

This striking trade-off between influence and susceptibility among the 1.5 million people in our study may help to explain the meme in our culture of the trailblazing innovator who is unmoved by critics and naysayers and is committed, with unwavering drive, to their vision: entrepreneurs and pioneers like Steve Jobs and, almost a century before him, Albert Einstein, who bucked the trends of common thinking. Francesca Gino calls them “rebels.” They commit to their vision and are for the most part unmoved by the opinions of others. In social media, the trade-off between influence and susceptibility shows up in what researchers call the “follower ratio,” the number of followers someone has compared to the number of people they follow.

However, Armona’s sample was limited to 760 selective four-year universities, the graduates of which are likely drawn from the high end of the skills distribution. Low-skilled workers studied by Caldwell, Harmon, and Hargittai were mostly excluded from Armona’s analysis as a consequence of his sample. It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity. —ALBERT EINSTEIN Today we’re at a crossroads of privacy and security, free speech and hate speech, truth and falsity, democracy and authoritarianism, inclusion and polarization. While the Hype Machine is not solely responsible for any of these outcomes, it plays a role in all of them. Coming to terms with social media’s influence on our democracy, our economy, and the very fabric of civil society leads to inevitable questions: How can we adapt?


pages: 444 words: 139,784

How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler, Charles van Doren

Albert Einstein, George Santayana, Henri Poincaré, Honoré de Balzac, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, land tenure, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

Until approximately the end of the nineteenth century, the major scientific books were written for a lay audience. Their authors—men like Galileo, and Newton, and Darwin—were not averse to being read by specialists in their fields; indeed, they wanted to reach such readers. But there was as yet no institutionalized specialization in those days, days which Albert Einstein called “the happy childhood of science.” Intelligent and well-read persons were expected to read scientific books as well as history and philosophy; there were no hard and fast distinctions, no boundaries that could not be crossed. There was also none of the disregard for the general or lay reader that is manifest in contemporary scientific writing.

Marcel Proust (1871-1922) Remembrance of Things Past 129. * * Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) The Problems of Philosophy The Analysis of Mind An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth Human Knowledge; Its Scope and Limits 130. * *Thomas Mann (1875-1955) The Magic Mountain Joseph and His Brothers 131. * *Albert Einstein (1879-1955) The Meaning of Relativity On the Method of Theoretical Physics The Evolution of Physics (with L. Inf eld) 132. * *James Joyce (1882-1941) “The Dead” in Dubliners 132. James Joyce, continued Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Ulysses 133. Jacques Maritain (1882- ) Art and Scholasticism The Degrees of Knowledge The Rights of Man and Natural Law True Humanism 134.


pages: 166 words: 49,639

Start It Up: Why Running Your Own Business Is Easier Than You Think by Luke Johnson

Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, business cycle, collapse of Lehman Brothers, compensation consultant, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, false flag, financial engineering, Ford Model T, Grace Hopper, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, James Dyson, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Kickstarter, mass immigration, mittelstand, Network effects, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, patent troll, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Silicon Valley, software patent, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traveling salesman, tulip mania, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators

Begin it now.’ Instead, companies are too often controlled not by titans of the boardroom, but by shadowy hedge-fund managers, faceless critics and corporate governance experts who have never run so much as a whelk stall. ‘Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities’ Albert Einstein Management gurus reckon one of the attributes of an outstanding leader is a high ‘emotional quotient’ – empathy for people. The principle makes sense, although the term sounds a bit awkward. Certainly, charm is helpful. But the most vital talent in leaders I’ve known is an ability to take decisions.


pages: 162 words: 51,445

The Speech: The Story Behind Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. S Dream by Gary Younge

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, immigration reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, urban decay, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight

He who sows the seed of sin shall reap and harvest a whirlwind of evil.” But in the decades since then, the mud that had been slung at him has been cleaned off and his legacy polished to the gleam befitting a national treasure. By 1999 a Gallup poll revealed that King was tied with John F. Kennedy and Albert Einstein as one of the most admired public figures among twentieth-century Americans. He was more popular than Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Pope John Paul II, and Winston Churchill; only Mother Teresa was more cherished. In 2011 a memorial to King was unveiled on the National Mall in DC, featuring a thirty-foot-high statue sited on four acres of prime cultural real estate; 91 percent of Americans (including 89 percent of whites) approved


Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire by Noam Chomsky, David Barsamian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, American ideology, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate personhood, David Brooks, discovery of DNA, double helix, drone strike, failed state, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Julian Assange, land reform, language acquisition, Martin Wolf, Mohammed Bouazizi, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, Powell Memorandum, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, single-payer health, sovereign wealth fund, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Tobin tax, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

There are some talents, if you like, that are useful for the sciences—or for the study of, say, international affairs or personal relations. One important one that everybody has, if they feel like using it, is just the ability to be puzzled. Why do things happen this way? If you look at the history of modern science, that ability has yielded dramatic results at many points. Albert Einstein was interested in the question of what the world would look like if you were traveling at the speed of light. He was puzzled by that. Out of that came important insights. Modern science really developed from a willingness to question things that had always been taken for granted. If I have a cup in my hand full of boiling water, and I let go with both hands, the steam rises and the cup falls.


What Kind of Creatures Are We? (Columbia Themes in Philosophy) by Noam Chomsky

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, classic study, conceptual framework, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, language acquisition, liberation theology, mass incarceration, means of production, phenotype, Ronald Reagan, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Turing test, wage slave

Henri Poincaré went so far as to say that we adopt the molecular theory of gases only because we are familiar with the game of billiards. Ludwig Boltzmann’s scientific biographer speculates that he committed suicide because of his failure to convince the scientific community to regard his theoretical account of these matters as more than a calculating system—ironically, shortly after Albert Einstein’s work on Brownian motion and broader issues had convinced physicists of the reality of the entities he postulated. Niels Bohr’s model of the atom was also regarded as lacking “physical reality” by eminent scientists. In the 1920s, America’s first Nobel Prize–winning chemist dismissed talk about the real nature of chemical bonds as metaphysical “twaddle”: they are nothing more than “a very crude method of representing certain known facts about chemical reactions, a mode of representation” only, because the concept could not be reduced to physics.


Presentation Zen Design: Simple Design Principles and Techniques to Enhance Your Presentations by Garr Reynolds

Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, business intelligence, business process, cloud computing, cognitive load, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Hans Rosling, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, off-the-grid, Paradox of Choice, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, TED Talk, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra

Humans are natural pattern seekers, so be mindful of this aptitude in yourself and in others. Design is a “whole brain” process. You are creative, practical, rational, analytic, empathetic, and passionate. Foster these skills in yourself and in others. 12. Simplify as much as you can—but no more. It was Albert Einstein who said, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” Simplicity is our guiding principle. Simplicity means many things to many people. Scores of books have been written on the subject. For our purposes, simplicity means embracing most of the concepts discussed here to avoid the extraneous.


pages: 194 words: 49,310

Clock of the Long Now by Stewart Brand

Albert Einstein, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Colonization of Mars, complexity theory, Danny Hillis, Eratosthenes, Extropian, fault tolerance, George Santayana, Herman Kahn, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, Kevin Kelly, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, life extension, longitudinal study, low earth orbit, Metcalfe’s law, Mitch Kapor, nuclear winter, pensions crisis, phenotype, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Metcalfe, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog

“The German form of life is definitely determined for the next thousand years,” he declared. “There will be no other revolution in Germany for the next thousand years.” In a square by the University of Berlin twenty thousand books were burned. Other cities did the same. Into the flames went the “subversive” works of Thomas Mann, Erich Maria Remarque, Albert Einstein, Hugo Preuss, Sigmund Freud, Marcel Proust, André Gide, Émil Zola, H. G. Wells, and Jack London. The new propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, told the students at the bonfires, “These flames not only illuminate the final end of an old era; they also light up the new.” Henceforth all cultural activity would be regimented by the state.


pages: 190 words: 50,133

Lonely Planet's 2016 Best in Travel by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, British Empire, David Attenborough, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Kwajalein Atoll, Larry Ellison, Maui Hawaii, sharing economy, South China Sea, Stanford marshmallow experiment, sustainable-tourism, tech billionaire, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, walkable city

Amazingly, Freud only lived in the house for one year – he fled to London in 1938 after the Nazi annexation of Austria and died in 1939 – but his artefacts were preserved by his daughter Anna Freud who lived in the house for 44 years. The Freud Museum is open 12–5pm Wednesday to Sunday; learn more at www.freud.org.uk. 3 Einstein’s apartment, Bern, Switzerland German-born physicist, philosopher of science and all-round icon for crazy-haired geniuses everywhere, Albert Einstein lived in Bern from 1902 to 1909, which he called the happiest and most productive years of his life. Indeed, 1905 was his annus mirabilis, when he wrote four articles that changed modern physics and our views on space, time, and matter, including the special theory of relativity and his famous E=mc2 equation.


pages: 236 words: 50,763

The Golden Ticket: P, NP, and the Search for the Impossible by Lance Fortnow

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, Donald Knuth, Erdős number, four colour theorem, Gerolamo Cardano, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, linear programming, new economy, NP-complete, Occam's razor, P = NP, Paul Erdős, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, seminal paper, smart grid, Stephen Hawking, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William of Occam

Every force applied by one object to another has an equal and opposite force from the second object to the first. Combined with his simple description of gravity, Newton showed how to derive Kepler’s rules for planetary motion. The simple explanations can have great explanatory power. Centuries later, Albert Einstein and others theorized that Newton’s simple laws of motion break down when objects travel close to the speed of light, and experiments have mostly proved Einstein right. Einstein famously remarked, “Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.” But that doesn’t mean Newton was wrong.


pages: 161 words: 49,972

The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War by Malcolm Gladwell

Albert Einstein, feminist movement, Isaac Newton, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, TED Talk, the scientific method, wikimedia commons

Lindemann was a physicist and got his PhD in Berlin just before the First World War—at a time when Germany was the center of the world in physics. Colleagues compared his mind to Isaac Newton’s. He had an extraordinary memory for numbers: as a child, Frederick would read newspapers and recite back reams and reams of statistics from memory. He could demolish anyone in an argument. He also spent a considerable amount of time with Albert Einstein. Once, at dinner, Einstein mentioned some mathematical proposition for which he’d never been able to come up with a proof. The next day Lindemann casually mentioned that he had the answer; he’d figured it out in the bathtub. Everyone talked about Lindemann. And for a writer like Snow, the gossip was irresistible.


pages: 170 words: 47,569

Introverts in Love: The Quiet Way to Happily Ever After by Sophia Dembling

Albert Einstein, big-box store, Burning Man, fake it until you make it, longitudinal study, telemarketer, young professional

By the four hundredth profile they’ve read that claims liking candlelit dinners and walks on the beach, their eyes might be glazing over . . . until they happen upon your profile where you mention you have a penchant for making homemade bread or dabbling in archery or whatever.” (Or you might include a photo of yourself hugging a horse, which is what drew Rebecca to the profile of the man she eventually married. If you don’t have a horse, a ferret would probably be just as intriguing. Or a black lab. Or a Siamese cat. Or a hedgehog. Or a life-sized cutout of Albert Einstein. Whatever you’ve got.) But don’t try so hard to be interesting that you start making stuff up. Don’t lie. It will only come back to bite you. OK, if you want to fudge your age a little to try to show up in a search bracket that you otherwise wouldn’t, that’s moderately permissible, Kimberly says, provided you ’fess up in one of the first emails.


pages: 150 words: 50,821

How to Be Human: An Autistic Man's Guide to Life by Jory Fleming

Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, Isaac Newton, microbiome, neurotypical, public intellectual, Saturday Night Live, Skype, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

I’ve seen very little public consideration for a logical empathy, which is more nuanced, where it’s possible to be good at one part of it and bad at another part of it. LW: There are a lot of lists speculating on different historical and more contemporary figures who may have been autistic. The names include Thomas Jefferson, Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, Michelangelo, Mozart, Isaac Newton, and Nikola Tesla. What are your thoughts when you see lists like that and people making the case that these individuals also may have been on the autism spectrum? JORY: I don’t particularly know why anybody would be overly concerned about that.


pages: 915 words: 232,883

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, air freight, Albert Einstein, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, big-box store, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, centre right, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, corporate governance, death of newspapers, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, fixed income, game design, General Magic , Golden Gate Park, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kanban, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Paul Terrell, Pepsi Challenge, profit maximization, publish or perish, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, The Home Computer Revolution, thinkpad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, vertical integration, Wall-E, Whole Earth Catalog

FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE BESTSELLING BIOGRAPHIES OF BENJAMIN FRANKLIN AND ALBERT EINSTEIN, THIS IS THE EXCLUSIVE BIOGRAPHY OF STEVE JOBS. Based on more than forty interviews with Jobs conducted over two years—as well as interviews with more than a hundred family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues—Walter Isaacson has written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing.

He wanted instead to take a walk so that we could talk. That seemed a bit odd. I didn’t yet know that taking a long walk was his preferred way to have a serious conversation. It turned out that he wanted me to write a biography of him. I had recently published one on Benjamin Franklin and was writing one about Albert Einstein, and my initial reaction was to wonder, half jokingly, whether he saw himself as the natural successor in that sequence. Because I assumed that he was still in the middle of an oscillating career that had many more ups and downs left, I demurred. Not now, I said. Maybe in a decade or two, when you retire.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN GATES AND JOBS When Orbits Intersect Jobs and Gates, 1991 The Macintosh Partnership In astronomy, a binary system occurs when the orbits of two stars are linked because of their gravitational interaction. There have been analogous situations in history, when an era is shaped by the relationship and rivalry of two orbiting superstars: Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr in twentieth-century physics, for example, or Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton in early American governance. For the first thirty years of the personal computer age, beginning in the late 1970s, the defining binary star system was composed of two high-energy college dropouts both born in 1955.


pages: 190 words: 52,570

The Planets by Dava Sobel

Albert Einstein, Colonization of Mars, Dava Sobel, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, friendly fire, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kuiper Belt, Late Heavy Bombardment, music of the spheres, Norman Mailer, Suez canal 1869, Thales of Miletus

“Mercury was the god of thieves,” quipped French observer Camille Flammarion. “His companion steals away like an anonymous assassin.” Nevertheless the quest for Vulcan continued through the turn of the century, and some astronomers were still pondering the whereabouts of Vulcan in 1915, the year Albert Einstein told the Prussian Academy of Sciences that Newton’s mechanics would break down where gravity exerted its greatest power. In the Sun’s immediate vicinity, Einstein explained, space itself was warped by an intense gravitational field, and every time Mercury ventured there, it sped up more than Newton had allowed.


pages: 210 words: 55,131

Organized Simplicity by Tsh Oxenreider

Albert Einstein, Community Supported Agriculture, financial independence, off-the-grid

Choose now to make your home a haven that can serve your family’s desires and dreams, and don’t waste any more time enslaving yourselves as its servant. Life is too short to miss out on the little things. 8 A Home That Works Create Your Family’s Haven for a Simple Life “Three rules of work: Out of clutter find simplicity; from discord find harmony; in the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.” –ALBERT EINSTEIN So far, we’ve discussed streamlining your family finances, gone through ways to keep your family calendar manageable, and created a home management notebook to help you efficiently run your home. Changing your habits in all of these areas is crucial for simplifying your life and living holistically with your life’s purpose.


pages: 157 words: 53,125

The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis

Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Biosphere 2, chief data officer, cloud computing, data science, Donald Trump, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, low interest rates, machine readable, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, Steve Bannon, tail risk, the new new thing, uranium enrichment

Anyway, when I had asked him for the fifth risk, he had thought about it and then seemed to relax a bit. The fifth risk did not put him at risk of revealing classified information. “Project management,” was all he said. In December 1938, German scientists discovered uranium fission. Physicist Enrico Fermi’s report on the Germans’ work made its way to Albert Einstein, and in 1939 Einstein wrote a letter to Franklin Roosevelt. That letter is the founding document of the Department of Energy. By the early 1940s the United States government understood that for democracy to survive it needed to beat Hitler to the atom bomb. There were two ways to build such a bomb—with enriched uranium, or with plutonium.


pages: 198 words: 53,264

Big Mistakes: The Best Investors and Their Worst Investments by Michael Batnick

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, buy low sell high, Carl Icahn, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, endowment effect, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, global macro, hindsight bias, index fund, initial coin offering, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Bogle, John Meriwether, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, multilevel marketing, Myron Scholes, Paul Samuelson, Pershing Square Capital Management, quantitative easing, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, short squeeze, Snapchat, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, stocks for the long run, subprime mortgage crisis, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Y Combinator

We all feel we're above average. In a classic 1977 study, “Not Can, But Will College Teaching Be Improved,” 94% of professors rated themselves above their peer group average.1 If traders and investors were asked the same question, I would guess that the results would be very similar. You don't have to be Albert Einstein to realize this math doesn't add up. As Charlie Munger once said, “The iron rule of life is that only 20% of people can be in the top fifth.” To be in Mensa, the largest and oldest high IQ society in the world, members must score in the top 2% of any standardized intelligence test. This means that there are between four and five million brilliant adults living in the United States alone that would qualify for this prestigious society.


Science...For Her! by Megan Amram

Albert Einstein, blood diamond, butterfly effect, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Dmitri Mendeleev, double helix, Google Glasses, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, pez dispenser, Schrödinger's Cat, Steve Jobs, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, Wall-E, wikimedia commons

* * * AMEDEO AVOGADRO (microscopic physics) Avogadro is most well-known for Avogadro’s number, approximately 6.022 x 1023, which is the number of women he CROTCH-MALLETED (rounded to the nearest trillion)!!!! If you wrote down all the names of all the women Avogadro down-there-mistletoe’d, it would stretch to the moon and back thirty million times (rounded to the nearest thirty million). * * * ALBERT EINSTEIN (special and general relativity) Though many know him as one of the most famous scientists who ever lived, Einstein was also a notorious playboy who invented the condom because he loved to pork but didn’t want any STDs. E = MC squared? U = VD spared! * * * ERWIN SCHRÖDINGER (quantum mechanics) Famous for the hypothetical “Schrödinger’s cat.”


Lonely Planet Pocket San Francisco by Lonely Planet, Alison Bing

Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bike sharing, Blue Bottle Coffee, Burning Man, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Day of the Dead, edge city, G4S, game design, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, Larry Ellison, machine readable, Mason jar, messenger bag, off-the-grid, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, stealth mode startup, Stewart Brand, transcontinental railway, Zipcar

Locals recover from workdays and foggy nights over Scorpion Bowls at Tonga Room Offline map ( www.fairmont.com; Fairmont Hotel, 950 Mason St; cover $5-8; 5-11:30pm Sun, Wed & Thu, 5:30pm-12:30am Fri & Sat; 1, 27; California) , SF's classic tiki bar where thunder­showers erupt over the indoor pool and cover bands play popular music after 8pm. Episcopal Grace Cathedral Offline map ( www.gracecathedral.org; 1100 California St; 7am-6pm Sun-Fri, 8am-6pm Sat; California) , rebuilt thrice since the gold rush, has an AIDS Memorial Chapel altarpiece by Keith Haring, stained-glass windows featuring Albert Einstein and a labyrinth for private meditation. 18 Naked Lunch Sandwiches $ Offline map Google map Unpredictable, utterly decadent cravings worthy of a William S Burroughs novel are satisfied by the ever-changing menu at this lunch stall near the Beat Museum. Foie gras, duck prosciutto and black truffle salt are liable to sprawl across a sandwich, keeping company with salty-sweet, artisan-made chicharrones (fried pork rinds) and sweet-talking Southern cinnamon iced tea.


pages: 178 words: 52,637

Quality Investing: Owning the Best Companies for the Long Term by Torkell T. Eide, Lawrence A. Cunningham, Patrick Hargreaves

air freight, Albert Einstein, asset light, backtesting, barriers to entry, buy and hold, carbon tax, cashless society, cloud computing, commoditize, Credit Default Swap, discounted cash flows, discovery of penicillin, endowment effect, global pandemic, haute couture, hindsight bias, legacy carrier, low cost airline, mass affluent, Network effects, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, price elasticity of demand, proprietary trading, shareholder value, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, supply-chain management, vertical integration

Say a company generates free cash flow of $100 million annually. Its return on invested capital is 20% and it has ample opportunity to reinvest all cash in expansion at the same rate. Sustained for ten years, this cycle of cash generation and reinvestment would drive a greater than six-fold increase in free cash. Albert Einstein famously referred to compound interest as the eighth wonder of the world. Compound growth in cash flow can be equally miraculous. The profound point is that the critical link between growth and value creation is the return on incremental capital. Since share prices tend to follow earnings over the long term, the more capital that can be deployed at high rates of return to drive greater earnings growth, the more valuable a company becomes.


Radiant Rest by Tracee Stanley

Albert Einstein, centre right, COVID-19, epigenetics, rewilding, source of truth

In Why We Sleep, Matthew Walker tells the story of Thomas Edison, who was also a dedicated napper.18 According to legend, the inventor would nap in a chair holding three steel ball bearings and with a metal plate directly underneath him on the floor. The moment he drifted off, the balls would fall out of his hand and onto the plate, waking him up. He would immediately get up and write down all his creative ideas; he called this his “genius gap.” Albert Einstein napped with a metal spoon in his hand and a metal plate on the floor. Einstein’s theory of relativity is said to have come to him during a dream. One can only wonder if Edison and Einstein had discovered the power of yogic sleep and the transition between states, using it as a portal to amplify creativity and genius.


pages: 161 words: 52,058

The Art of Corporate Success: The Story of Schlumberger by Ken Auletta

Albert Einstein, Bretton Woods, data science, George Gilder, job satisfaction, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Ronald Reagan, the scientific method, union organizing

Then Lois Kellogg wrote to say that she would be Krishna’s guardian, and that Krishna could spend winter vacations with her at the Kelloggs’ home in Scottsdale, Arizona, and weekends at their home in Connecticut. After a time, Mrs. Roy consented. In 1945, Krishna Roy went to Wellesley. She was not just another foreign student. She came with letters of introduction from John Dewey and Albert Einstein, both of whom knew her uncle the poet and her uncle the revolutionary. She remembers visiting John Dewey, who cautioned her not to study Western philosophy. She remembers driving to Princeton on a rainy day to meet Einstein. “I walked into this small house, and he asked, ‘How is your uncle?’” she says.


pages: 180 words: 55,805

The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation Is the Key to an Abundant Future by Jeff Booth

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate raider, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, dark matter, deep learning, DeepMind, deliberate practice, digital twin, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, full employment, future of work, game design, gamification, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, Hyman Minsky, hype cycle, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, late fees, low interest rates, Lyft, Maslow's hierarchy, Milgram experiment, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, oil shock, OpenAI, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, software as a service, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, winner-take-all economy, X Prize, zero-sum game

Around the same time that Turing was publishing “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” another eminent thinker named Claude Shannon (1916–2001) was breaking barriers that enabled many of the advances in computers and artificial intelligence that we now take for granted. Shannon was an American mathematician and one of the main architects of the Information Age. Although not as well known, his breakthroughs rival Albert Einstein’s in that he changed the way we think about information. Shannon was interested in how to transmit information in its simplest form and realized that to do so, information must not be confused with meaning. We rarely hear information in exactly the same way the person sending us the information means it; instead, we attach our own emotion to the information and often change the message as a result.


Germany Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, bank run, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, Boeing 747, British Empire, call centre, capitalist realism, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, company town, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Gregor Mendel, haute couture, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, low cost airline, messenger bag, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Eisenman, post-work, Prenzlauer Berg, retail therapy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, sensible shoes, Skype, starchitect, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, V2 rocket, white picket fence

Month by Month Itineraries Outdoor Activities Eat & Drink Like a Local Travel with Children Regions at a Glance Top of section Welcome to Germany Prepare for a roller coaster of feasts, treats and temptations as you take in Germany’s soul-stirring scenery, spirit-lifting culture, big-city beauties, romantic palaces and half-timbered towns. Autumn in the majestic Bavarian Alps F1ONLINE/GETTY IMAGES © BEWITCHING SCENERY Few countries have had as much impact on the world as Germany, which has given us the printing press, the automobile, aspirin and MP3 technology. This is the birthplace of Martin Luther, Albert Einstein and Karl Marx, of Goethe, Beethoven, the Brothers Grimm and other heavyweights who, each in their own way, have left their mark on human history. As you travel the country, you’ll have plenty of brushes with genius, but Germany’s storybook landscapes will likely leave an even bigger imprint on your memories.

Surrounding the square is a trio of handsome 18th-century buildings constructed under King Frederick the Great: the Alte Königliche Bibliothek (Old Royal Library; 1780); the Staatsoper Unter den Linden (State Opera; 1743); and the copper-domed St Hedwigskirche (1783). The palatial building opposite Bebelplatz is the 1810 Humboldt Universität, where Marx and Engels studied and the Brothers Grimm and Albert Einstein taught. In 2012 it became one of Germany’s 11 ‘elite universities’. A mighty equestrian statue of King Frederick the Great stands in the median strip of Unter den Linden. Deutsches Historisches Museum MUSEUM Offline map Google map (203 040; www.dhm.de; Unter den Linden 2; adult/concession €8/4; 10am-6pm; 100, 200, Alexanderplatz, Hackescher Markt) This engaging museum zeroes in on two millennia of German history in all its gore and glory; not in a nutshell but on two floors of a Prussian-era armoury.

Ulm 0731 / POP 122,800 Starting with the statistics, Ulm has the crookedest house (as listed in Guinness World Records ) and one of the narrowest (4.5m wide), the world’s oldest zoomorphic sculpture (aged 30,000 years) and tallest cathedral steeple (161.5m high), and is the birthplace of the physicist Albert Einstein. Relatively speaking, of course. Ulm Top Sights Fischkastenbrunnen C3 Münster C2 Rathaus C3 Stadtmauer C3 Sights 1Albrecht Berblinger PlaqueD2 2 Einstein Fountain & Monument D1 3Einstein MonumentA2 4 Fischerviertel B3 5 Kunsthalle Weishaupt C2 6 Metzgerturm C3 7 Museum der Brotkultur B1 8 Schwörhaus B3 9 Stadthaus B2 10 Ulmer Museum C3 11 Zentralbibliothek C3 12 Zeughaus D1 Sleeping 13 Das Schmale Haus B3 14Hotel am Rathaus & Hotel ReblausC3 15 Hotel Bäumle C2 16Hotel Schiefes HausB3 Eating 17 Barfüsser B2 18 Café im Kornhauskeller C2 Café im Stadthaus (see 9) 19 Cafe Ulmer Münz B3 20 Da Franco B1 21 Gerberhaus B3 22 Yamas C1 23 Zunfthaus der Schiffleute B3 24 Zur Forelle B3 25 Zur Lochmühle B3 Drinking 26 Wilder Mann B3 27 Zur Zill B3 This idiosyncratic city will win your affection with everyday encounters, particularly in summer as you pedal along the Danube and the Fischerviertel’s beer gardens hum with animated chatter.


pages: 516 words: 157,437

Principles: Life and Work by Ray Dalio

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, backtesting, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, cognitive bias, currency risk, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, financial engineering, follow your passion, global macro, Greenspan put, hiring and firing, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, microcredit, oil shock, performance metric, planetary scale, quantitative easing, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, transaction costs, yield curve

All successful people operate by principles that help them be successful, though what they choose to be successful at varies enormously, so their principles vary. To be principled means to consistently operate with principles that can be clearly explained. Unfortunately, most people can’t do that. And it’s very rare for people to write their principles down and share them. That is a shame. I would love to know what principles guided Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, Winston Churchill, Leonardo da Vinci, and others so I could clearly understand what they were going after and how they achieved it and could compare their different approaches. I’d like to know which principles are most important to the politicians who want me to vote for them and to all the other people whose decisions affect me.

I did that for all economic and market movements and was inclined to do it for just about everything, because this approach helps me understand how things work. So it made sense I’d do that to understand shapers too. I started by exploring the qualities of Jobs and other shapers with Isaacson, at first in a private conversation in his office, and later at a public forum at Bridgewater. Since Isaacson had also written biographies of Albert Einstein and Ben Franklin—two other great shapers—I read them and probed him about them to try to glean what characteristics they had in common. Then I spoke with proven shapers I knew—Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Reed Hastings, Muhammad Yunus, Geoffrey Canada, Jack Dorsey (of Twitter), David Kelley (of IDEO), and more.


pages: 592 words: 152,445

The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies by Jason Fagone

Albert Einstein, Bletchley Park, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, cuban missile crisis, Drosophila, Easter island, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Fellow of the Royal Society, General Magic , index card, Internet Archive, Neil Armstrong, pattern recognition, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, two and twenty, X Prize

He and Elizebeth may have decided it would be doubly hard to convince Fabyan to share credit with her, too. Whatever the case, the Riverbank Publications, and the breakthroughs they describe, still seem incredible today. Seven of the eight pamphlets were written in the space of two years, in a little cottage in the middle of Illinois, the cryptologic equivalent of Albert Einstein’s annus mirabilis, when Einstein rewrote the language of light, mass, and time in the space of a single year, at age twenty-six, while working as a patent clerk in Switzerland, staring out the window of his office and bouncing ideas off a fellow clerk. This is the achievement that the NSA interviewer in 1976, Virginia Valaki, kept begging Elizebeth to explain: How?

It was hard for William to avoid drawing a comparison between Vierling and George Fabyan, the American robber baron who built a deviant temple to science—this place was like a Nazi Riverbank. Inside the Laboratorium Feuerstein, William ate a brief supper of hot dogs, potatoes, coffee, and crushed peaches, and he stayed late into the evening with his American colleagues, the topics of their conversations growing spookier, starting with Albert Einstein and the theory of relativity before veering off to more occult topics like the possibility of extrasensory perception. Vierling’s laboratory was only one target of TICOM, the mission to lock down the intelligence secrets of the war. The Allies deployed six TICOM teams to Europe starting in April 1945, each containing eight to fifteen intelligence personnel from both the United States and Britain.


pages: 286 words: 94,017

Future Shock by Alvin Toffler

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, East Village, Future Shock, global village, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, information retrieval, intentional community, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, Menlo Park, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, open immigration, planned obsolescence, post-industrial society, RAND corporation, social intelligence, Teledyne, the market place, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, urban renewal, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game

Whole libraries of philosophical speculation could, by a single stroke, be rendered irrelevant. An answer to this question would open the way for speedy, qualitative advances in psychology, moral philosophy and a dozen other fields. But cloning could also create undreamed of complications for the race. There is a certain charm to the idea of Albert Einstein bequeathing copies of himself to posterity. But what of Adolf Hitler? Should there be laws to regulate cloning? Nobel Laureate Joshua Lederberg, a scientist who takes his social responsibility very seriously, believes it conceivable that those most likely to replicate themselves will be those who are most narcissistic, and that the clones they produce will also be narcissists.

As leisure spreads, they theorize, families will spend more time together and will derive great satisfaction from joint activity. "The family that plays together, stays together," etc. A more sophisticated view holds that the very turbulence of tomorrow will drive people deeper into their families. "People will marry for stable structure," says Dr. Irwin M. Greenberg, Professor of Psychiatry at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. According to this view, the family serves as one's "portable roots," anchoring one against the storm of change. In short, the more transient and novel the environment, the more important the family will become. It may be that both sides in this debate are wrong. For the future is more open than it might appear.


pages: 468 words: 150,206

The Food Revolution: How Your Diet Can Help Save Your Life and Our World by John Robbins

Albert Einstein, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, clean water, complexity theory, do well by doing good, double helix, Exxon Valdez, food miles, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), laissez-faire capitalism, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, profit motive, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Rosa Parks, telemarketer

"If it weren't for our meat-eating ancestors, the vegetarians wouldn't even be around today to complain about dietary choices with which they disagree.... The move away from a purely vegetarian diet triggered the growth of the human intellect." -National Cattlemen's Beef Association15 "Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survival of life on earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet." -Albert Einstein The meat industry comes up with some amazing material. Dan Murphy is the editor of Meat Marketing and Technology, a magazine dedicated to the U.S./Canadian meat processing industry. In 2000, coaching the industry in how to be more persuasive, he wrote, "When it conies to ... the nutritional impact of meat-eating ...

Our power does not lie in looking the other way. Through history there have always been people who have chosen to be vegetarians because they did not feel it was right to kill animals for food when it was not necessary, when there was other nourishing food available. People like Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Einstein, and countless others have been ethical vegetarians for just such reasons. But today, because of the way animals are raised for market, the question of whether or not it's ethical to eat meat has a whole new meaning and a whole new urgency. Never before have animals been treated like this. Never before has such deep, unrelenting, and systematic cruelty been mass produced.


The Matter of the Heart: A History of the Heart in Eleven Operations by Thomas Morris

3D printing, Albert Einstein, Charles Lindbergh, Dr. Strangelove, Easter island, Edward Jenner, experimental subject, Great Leap Forward, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, meta-analysis, New Journalism, parabiotic, placebo effect, popular electronics, randomized controlled trial, stem cell

The aneurysm shrank dramatically, and she lived for over a year before she died from an unrelated bout of tuberculosis.31 This method of ligating the aorta was employed by other surgeons, but with mixed results. Until the 1950s there remained no entirely satisfactory treatment for aortic aneurysm, although several new techniques were tested. There was even a brief vogue for wrapping them in cellophane, which appeared to slow their growth. In December 1948 Albert Einstein became the most famous patient to undergo this procedure for a large aneurysm of the abdominal aorta. He did remarkably well, and was able to return to work within a matter of weeks. He remained in good health for another six years; by the time his original symptoms returned in April 1955, surgery had evolved to the point that it might have cured him entirely.

An operation for the radical cure of aneurism based upon arteriorrhaphy’, Annals of Surgery 37, no. 2 (1903), 161–96 31. Rudolph Matas, ‘Aneurysm of the abdominal aorta at its bifurcation into the common iliac arteries’, Annals of Surgery 112, no. 5 (1940), 909 32. J. R. Cohen and L. M. Graver, ‘The ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm of Albert Einstein’, Surgery, Gynecology & Obstetrics 170, no. 5 (1990), 455–8 33. Théodore Tuffier, ‘Intervention chirurgicale directe pour un aneurysme de la crosse de l’aorte. Ligature du sac’, Presse Medicale, no. 23 (1902), 267–71 34. I. A. Bigger, ‘The surgical treatment of aneurysm of the abdominal aorta’, Annals of Surgery 112, no. 5 (1940), 879 35.


pages: 653 words: 155,847

Energy: A Human History by Richard Rhodes

Albert Einstein, animal electricity, California gold rush, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Copley Medal, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, demographic transition, Dmitri Mendeleev, Drosophila, Edmond Halley, energy transition, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ralph Nader, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Simon Kuznets, tacit knowledge, Ted Nordhaus, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, Tragedy of the Commons, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, Vanguard fund, working poor, young professional

But the human world still largely lingered in the dark for half the earth’s each turning. There were remedies for that condition as well: oils, rushes, tallow, the fat of pigs, coal gas, whales. All would serve in their time. * * * I. Two centuries later, the greatest physicists of the early twentieth century—Ernest Rutherford, Albert Einstein, and Niels Bohr—would similarly dismiss the possibility of splitting the atom to release nuclear energy as “moonshine.” II. Sir William Congreve developed the first British military rockets from Indian models in 1805. It was their “red glare” over Fort McHenry during the War of 1812 that Francis Scott Key evoked in his “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Journal of Nuclear Materials Management 30, no. 2 (2002): 21–23. Hubbert, M. King. “Nuclear Energy and the Fossil Fuels.” Publication no. 95, Shell Development Company, Exploration and Production Research Division, Houston, June 1956 (online). Hunt, Bruce J. Pursuing Power and Light: Technology and Physics from James Watt to Albert Einstein. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. Hunt, Charles. A History of the Introduction of Gas Lighting. London: Walter King, 1907. Hunt, Gaillard. Life in America One Hundred Years Ago. Williamstown, MA: Corner House, 1914. Hunter, John P. A Brief History of Natural Gas: Its Advantages, Use, Supply, and Economy as a Fuel to Manufacturers.


pages: 449 words: 123,459

The Infinity Puzzle by Frank Close

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Arthur Eddington, dark matter, El Camino Real, en.wikipedia.org, Ernest Rutherford, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Murray Gell-Mann, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Simon Singh, Ted Sorensen

Danish physicist Niels Bohr discovered this in the summer of 1912, following a remarkable observation, in 1885, by a Swiss schoolteacher, Johann Balmer. Light, that rainbow or spectrum of colors, consists of electromagnetic waves whose electric and magnetic fields oscillate hundreds of trillions of times each second; what we perceive as color is the brain’s response to the different frequencies of these oscillations. Albert Einstein—most famous for his theory of relativity—won his Nobel Prize for showing that light rays, rather than being a continuous stream, consist of a staccato burst of particles—photons. A photon has no mass, but traveling at a speed of about 300,000 kilometers every second, it has energy. The energy of a photon is proportional to the frequency: Thus, a photon at the highfrequency violet end of the rainbow has roughly twice the energy of one from the low-frequency red end.11 A hot sodium or mercury vapor lamp glows with a characteristic yellow or turquoise hue.

His perfect grades in science and mathematics were not matched by his performance in other subjects. While Schwinger was mesmerizing the faculty at Columbia, Feynman’s application to enter was rejected: In the 1930s, U.S. colleges had limited admission quotas for Jews. He went to MIT. Even though Albert Einstein had had a ticker-tape parade, theoretical physics was not a major pursuit in American universities before the Second World War. By 1941 Schwinger was available for hire, but a long tradition of antiSemitism may have been a reason for his lack of job offers.8 He accepted a lowly position at Purdue University, on the condition that his physics course would not start before noon.


pages: 566 words: 160,453

Not Working: Where Have All the Good Jobs Gone? by David G. Blanchflower

90 percent rule, active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Clapham omnibus, collective bargaining, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, driverless car, estate planning, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, George Akerlof, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, John Bercow, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Nate Silver, negative equity, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, oil shock, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Own Your Own Home, p-value, Panamax, pension reform, Phillips curve, plutocrats, post-materialism, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, quantitative easing, rent control, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, selection bias, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, urban planning, working poor, working-age population, yield curve

Michael Gove, UK secretary of state for justice, made clear in 2016 why voters in the EU referendum should not listen to the economic organizations warning about the impact of a Leave vote. “I think the key thing here is to interrogate the assumptions that are made and to ask if these arguments are good,” Mr. Gove said during an interview with LBC Radio. “We have to be careful about historical comparisons, but Albert Einstein during the 1930s was denounced by the German authorities for being wrong and his theories were denounced and one of the reasons of course he was denounced was because he was Jewish. They got 100 German scientists in the pay of the government to say that he was wrong, and Einstein said ‘Look, if I was wrong, one would have been enough.’ ”60 Aditya Chakrabortty, senior economics editor at the Guardian, was right when he told me in private communication that politics has now become the art of promising the impossible.

At a press conference I did once hear him apologize to the people of South Korea for a comment he had made. 59. Paul Krugman, “The State of Macro Is Sad (Wonkish),” New York Times, August 12, 2016. 60. Ben Riley-Smith and Michael Wilkinson, “Michael Gove Compares Experts Warning against Brexit to Nazis Who Smeared Albert Einstein’s Work as He Threatens to Quit David Cameron’s Cabinet,” Telegraph, June 21, 2016. In a tweet to me Gove even claimed I was “mugged by reality.” The UK economy quickly thereafter went from the fastest growing in the G7 to the slowest. Chapter 7. Sniffing the Air and Spotting the Great Recession 1.


pages: 739 words: 174,990

The TypeScript Workshop: A Practical Guide to Confident, Effective TypeScript Programming by Ben Grynhaus, Jordan Hudgens, Rayon Hunte, Matthew Thomas Morgan, Wekoslav Stefanovski

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, business logic, Charles Babbage, create, read, update, delete, don't repeat yourself, Donald Knuth, fault tolerance, Firefox, full stack developer, functional programming, Google Chrome, Hacker News, higher-order functions, inventory management, Kickstarter, loose coupling, node package manager, performance metric, QR code, Ruby on Rails, SQL injection, type inference, web application, WebSocket

Here are a few examples. The following is the browser output for your_name: Figure 13.1: Browser message for name = your_name The following is the browser output for Matt: Figure 13.2: Browser message for name = Matt The following is the browser output for Albert Einstein: Figure 13.3: Browser message for name = Albert Einstein The names.txt file will increment as follows: Figure 13.4: Log file Exercise 13.08: NestJS In contrast to Express, NestJS is a highly opinionated and fully featured framework for building TypeScript applications. NestJS can be used to quickly bootstrap an application.


Lonely Planet Belgium & Luxembourg by Lonely Planet

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, carbon footprint, centre right, charter city, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, friendly fire, gentrification, glass ceiling, Kickstarter, Louis Pasteur, Peace of Westphalia, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, three-masted sailing ship, urban renewal

De Reyghere ReisboekhandelBOOKS (map Google map; %050 33 34 03; www.reisboekhandel.be; Markt 13; h9.30am-noon Tue-Sat & 2-6pm Mon-Sat) This fabulously well-stocked travel bookshop is an extension of De Reyghere Boekhandel next door: it’s been in the same family for generations. Past shoppers include Albert Einstein. Bacchus CorneliusFOOD & DRINKS (map Google map; %050 34 53 38; www.bacchuscornelius.com; Academiestraat 17; h1-6.30pm) There’s a cornucopia of 450 beers and rare gueuzes (lambic beer), as well as jenevers (gins) and liqueurs flavoured with elderflower, cranberries and cherries. Ask the shop owner if you can try her home-brewed silky smooth jenever, made with real chocolate.

Alternatively, to peruse the area from a distance (for free), walk (or cycle) a thoroughly upgraded 2.8km circular dune path that starts down the promenade from Knokke’s Surfers’ Paradise beach bar, accessed from the easternmost end of Zwinlaan then by walking up Appelzakstraat and turning right. De Haan POP 11,925 Prim and proper De Haan (Le Coq) is Belgium’s most compact and engaging beach resort. Its most famous visitor, Albert Einstein, lived here for a few months after fleeing Hitler’s Germany in 1933. Several fanciful half-timbered hotels and a scattering of tasteful eateries, bakeries and shops form an appealing knot around a cottage-style former tram station, from where Leopoldlaan leads 600m north to the beach passing a distinctive circular park, La Pontinière, that’s perfect for picnicking and sunbathing.


pages: 174 words: 58,894

London Review of Books by London Review of Books

Albert Einstein, cuban missile crisis, David Attenborough, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, failed state, fake news, Jeremy Corbyn, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, Piers Corbyn, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, tulip mania, Wolfgang Streeck

To Hannah the choice is obvious: either something psychedelic, or – if the campus bookstore doesn’t have anything along those lines – a photograph of Einstein. Without totally understanding why Einstein in particular, Selin gets the poster. ‘From that day on, everyone who happened by our room … went out of their way to disabuse me of my great admiration for Albert Einstein. Einstein had invented the atomic bomb, abused dogs, neglected his children.’ A Bulgarian freshman complains: ‘This is the man who beats his wife, forces her to solve his mathematical problems, to do the dirty work, and he denies her credit. And you put his picture on your wall.’ ‘Listen, leave me out of this,’ I said.


pages: 215 words: 60,489

1947: Where Now Begins by Elisabeth Åsbrink

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, British Empire, disinformation, Grace Hopper, Gunnar Myrdal, haute couture, illegal immigration, Mahatma Gandhi, Mount Scopus, trade route

Once Goebbels’s chief ideologue, he had proved to be an asset when it came to spreading malice. In his pamphlet The Jews are Looking at You, published in 1933, he named a number of people who he believed to be Jewish — eminent German politicians, scholars, and artists — published photographs of them, and incited his fellow party members to murder them. One of them was Albert Einstein, who had already left Germany by then. “Not yet hanged,” von Leers noted. But a number of the others he named were abducted and murdered, as though his words had the force of an order. Now he is visiting Malmö. Who purchases his ticket, who meets him at the harbor, who takes him to Per Engdahl?


Interventions by Noam Chomsky

Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, cuban missile crisis, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, facts on the ground, failed state, Monroe Doctrine, no-fly zone, nuremberg principles, old-boy network, Ralph Nader, Thorstein Veblen, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, éminence grise

“The early-warning and control problems plaguing Pakistan, India and other nuclear proliferators are even more acute [and], as these nations move toward hair-trigger stances for their nuclear missiles, the terrorist threat to them will grow in parallel,” Blair writes. All of this, he concludes, constitutes “an accident waiting to happen.” State terror and other forms of threat and use of force have brought the world very close to the edge of nuclear annihilation. The UN would be wise to heed the call issued by Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein fifty years ago: “Here, then, is the problem which we present to you, stark and dreadful and inescapable: Shall we put an end to the human race, or shall mankind renounce war?” The Social Security Non-Crisis MAY 29, 2005 In the debate over Social Security, President Bush’s handlers have already won some victories, at least in the short term.


pages: 209 words: 58,466

Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut

Albert Einstein, British Empire, dematerialisation, Maui Hawaii, search costs, traveling salesman

Rosewater used his science-fiction library hard. “This is the only book I haven’t finished, and I’ll finish it before the sun comes up tomorrow,” said Milo. • • • The novel in question, incidentally, was The Smart Bunny. The leading character was a rabbit who lived like all the other wild rabbits, but who was as intelligent as Albert Einstein or William Shakespeare. It was a female rabbit. She was the only female leading character in any novel or story by Kilgore Trout. She led a normal female rabbit’s life, despite her ballooning intellect. She concluded that her mind was useless, that it was a sort of tumor, that it had no usefulness within the rabbit scheme of things.


pages: 188 words: 57,229

Frommer's Memorable Walks in San Francisco by Erika Lenkert

Albert Einstein, Bay Area Rapid Transit, car-free, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Day of the Dead, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, high-speed rail, retail therapy, South of Market, San Francisco, three-masted sailing ship

Inside, you will find several brilliant stained-glass windows and a series of religious The Haughty Hotels of Nob Hill • 73 frescoes. One group of stained-glass windows, designed by Loire Studios of Chartres, depicts such modern figures as Judge Thurgood Marshall, poet Robert Frost (a San Francisco native), Albert Einstein, and John Dewey, as well as many others. The frescoes, referred to as the World Church Murals, are by Polish-American artist John H. De Rosen and were painted in the late 1940s. The organ dates from 1860, and David Lemon created its Hosea wood sculpture. The Singing Tower (to the right of the main entrance) was given its name because of its incredible 44-bell carillon.


pages: 207 words: 52,716

Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons by Peter Barnes

Albert Einstein, car-free, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, dark matter, digital divide, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, hypertext link, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, jitney, junk bonds, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, money market fund, new economy, patent troll, precautionary principle, profit maximization, Ronald Coase, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, War on Poverty, Yogi Berra

This would let us charge corporations higher (and truer) prices for using the commons, while sharing the benefits of those higher prices broadly. And it would ensure that the quantity of usage rights sold—which is to say, the level of pollution allowed—is set with the interests of future generations foremost in mind. Part 2 A SOLUTION Chapter 5 Reinventing the Commons Imagination is more important than knowledge. —Albert Einstein, 1929 hus far I’ve argued that Capitalism 2.0—or surplus capitalism— has three tragic flaws: it devours nature, widens inequality, and fails to make us happier in the end. It behaves this way because it’s programmed to do so. It must make thneeds, reward property owners disproportionately, and distract us from truer paths to happiness because its algorithms direct it to do so.


The Non-Tinfoil Guide to EMFs by Nicolas Pineault

Albert Einstein, en.wikipedia.org, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Internet of things, off-the-grid, precautionary principle, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter

The dowser, by concentrating on the hidden object, is somehow able to tune in to the energy force or ‘vibration’ of the object which, in turn, forces the dowsing rod or stick to move. The dowsing tool may act as a kind of amplifier or antenna for tuning into the energy.” This is the slightly woo-woo, energetic kind of dowsing, which resembles applied kinesiology — more commonly known as “muscle testing”. Believe it or not, Albert Einstein himself was a dowser. In communications with a colleague in 1946467 he said he believed that “the dowsing rod is a simple instrument which shows the reaction of the human nervous system to certain factors which are unknown to us at this time.” Then, there’s a more scientific way to discover geopathic stress — using the conductive properties of copper rods.


Trend Commandments: Trading for Exceptional Returns by Michael W. Covel

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, business cycle, buy and hold, commodity trading advisor, correlation coefficient, delayed gratification, disinformation, diversified portfolio, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, family office, full employment, global macro, Jim Simons, Lao Tzu, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, market bubble, market microstructure, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, oil shock, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Sharpe ratio, systematic trading, the scientific method, three-martini lunch, transaction costs, tulip mania, upwardly mobile, Y2K, zero-sum game

See http://www.forbes.com/profile/paul-tudor-jones. 12. Man Group front page, March 23, 2011. See http://www.mangroupplc.com/. 13. 2008 Sunrise Capital Chart. 14. 2009 Sunrise Capital Chart. 15. 2010 Sunrise Capital Chart. 16. Mulvaney Capital Management: Global Diversified Program. See http://www.mulvaneycapital.com. 17. Albert Einstein. 18. Michael Covel, Trend Following: Learn to Make Millions in Up or Down Markets. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Education, 2009, p. 230. 19. Jim Rogers, Investment Biker. New York: Random House, 1994. Blowing Bubbles 1. Pink Floyd, “Comfortably Numb.” The Wall, writer Roger Waters, EMI, 1979. 2.


pages: 177 words: 56,657

Be Obsessed or Be Average by Grant Cardone

Albert Einstein, benefit corporation, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, fear of failure, job-hopping, Mark Zuckerberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, white picket fence

You have to embrace this die-trying mentality. There can be no choices and no options. Yes, victory comes at a price—so does settling. Sure, you might be totally and completely insane. But you’re not going to stop. Because history shows that only the obsessed make it—people like Alexander the Great, Joan of Arc, Albert Einstein, Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Elon Musk, Howard Schultz, Oprah, Vincent van Gogh, Steve Jobs, Christopher Columbus, Charlie Chaplin, Mozart, Michelangelo, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Leonardo DiCaprio, Martin Scorsese, Jay Z, Beyoncé, Serena Williams, and on and on. There is no shortage of these people, and like them or hate them, admire them or detest them, we all know them!


pages: 202 words: 59,883

Age of Context: Mobile, Sensors, Data and the Future of Privacy by Robert Scoble, Shel Israel

Albert Einstein, Apple II, augmented reality, call centre, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, connected car, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, factory automation, Filter Bubble, G4S, gamification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Internet of things, job automation, John Markoff, Kickstarter, lifelogging, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, New Urbanism, PageRank, pattern recognition, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, social graph, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, TSMC, ubercab, urban planning, Zipcar

Openness and transparency create a significant opportunity for every startup that has giant-killing already etched into its organizational DNA. If we are right, then the Age of Context will give us an open new world Epilogue Reunion: 2038 I never think of the future—it comes soon enough. Albert Einstein It’s 7:30 AM, September 16, 2038, when a little voice goes off inside Robert Scoble’s head. He is sleeping blissfully in his Napa County home near his vineyards. The comfortable two-story home was the only significant change he made in his lifestyle 25 years ago after Age of Context became a runaway best seller, topping all charts and being read by over 2 million people in more than 50 countries.


Player One by Douglas Coupland

Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, call centre, double helix, Marshall McLuhan, neurotypical, oil shock, peak oil, post-oil, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), uranium enrichment, Y2K

(See also Cartoon Blindness; Cloud Blindness; Metaphor Blindness) Blank-Collar Workers Formerly middle-class workers who will never be middle-class again and who will never come to terms with that. Capillarigenerative Memory The tendency of history to remember people who invent new hairstyles: for example, Julius Caesar, Albert Einstein, Marilyn Monroe, Adolf Hitler, and the Beatles. Cartoon Blindness A brain connectivity issue that makes a person dislike cartoons or information presented using illustration. Specific versions include an aversion to Saturday morning children’s television and the inability to understand and appreciate New Yorker cartoons.


pages: 330 words: 59,335

The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success by William Thorndike

Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Atul Gawande, Berlin Wall, book value, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, Claude Shannon: information theory, collapse of Lehman Brothers, compound rate of return, corporate governance, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gordon Gekko, Henry Singleton, impact investing, intangible asset, Isaac Newton, junk bonds, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, NetJets, Norman Mailer, oil shock, pattern recognition, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, shared worldview, shareholder value, six sigma, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, Teledyne, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, value engineering, vertical integration

As Woody Ives said of his personal stock ownership, “I just wish I’d never sold a share.”11 CHAPTER 8 The Investor as CEO Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway You shape your houses and then your houses shape you. —Winston Churchill The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest. —Albert Einstein Being a CEO has made me a better investor, and vice versa. —Warren Buffett Berkshire Hathaway, a one-hundred-year-old textile company located in New Bedford, Massachusetts, had been owned by the same two local families, the Chaces and the Stantons, for generations. The company, a vestige of the glory days of New England enterprise, was the unlikely target of an early hostile takeover in 1965—hostile, at least, to the company’s stubborn septuagenarian CEO, Seabury Stanton.


pages: 208 words: 57,602

Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation by Kevin Roose

"World Economic Forum" Davos, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, automated trading system, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, business process, call centre, choice architecture, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, disinformation, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, fake news, fault tolerance, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Freestyle chess, future of work, Future Shock, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Google Hangouts, GPT-3, hiring and firing, hustle culture, hype cycle, income inequality, industrial robot, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, lockdown, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Narrative Science, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, OpenAI, pattern recognition, planetary scale, plutocrats, Productivity paradox, QAnon, recommendation engine, remote working, risk tolerance, robotic process automation, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, work culture

We remix ideas, blend genres, and hold vast amounts of random, disparate information in our heads, ready to be mashed together at a moment’s notice. Maria Popova, the creator of the Brain Pickings blog, calls this trait “combinatorial creativity.” She writes that many of history’s great breakthroughs have been generated not by hyper-specialization, but by combining insights from two or more different fields. She cites Albert Einstein, who said that playing the violin helped connect different parts of his brain while working on physics problems, and Vladimir Nabokov, the Russian-born novelist, who credited his hobby as a butterfly collector with making his writing more detailed and precise. For now, combinatorial creativity is a uniquely human skill.


pages: 197 words: 59,656

The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically by Peter Singer

Albert Einstein, clean water, cognitive load, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, David Brooks, effective altruism, en.wikipedia.org, Flynn Effect, hedonic treadmill, Large Hadron Collider, Nick Bostrom, Peter Singer: altruism, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, stem cell, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, trolley problem, William MacAskill, young professional

On the contrary, the authors found it necessary to say, “Caring can be motivated by genuine compassion and need not be manipulatively self-serving, or born of psychopathology.”6 In 2003, when Zell Kravinsky donated a kidney to a stranger, he still had to persuade the hospital that he was serious. Radi Zaki, the director of the Centre for Renal Disease at the Albert Einstein Medical Center, in Philadelphia, said, “We made the process hard for him. We delayed, we put him off. The more impatient he got, the more delay I gave him. You want to make sure this is the real deal.”7 Now attitudes are changing. The U.S. Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network, which is administered by the United Network for Organ Sharing, has, since 1988, kept figures on donations from living “unrelated, anonymous donors.”


Pain Killer: An Empire of Deceit and the Origins of America’s Opioid Epidemic by Barry Meier

Albert Einstein, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill

These qualities also made him a sought-after consultant for pharmaceutical companies that were producing and marketing pain medications. He appeared on television programs and was frequently quoted in newspaper and magazine articles about pain treatment. Twenty years earlier, at the beginning of his career, pain treatment as a specialty barely existed. In 1981, when he was a new resident at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, he was introduced to the hospital’s teaching staff, who took turns describing their areas of expertise. After one physician said his focus was pain treatment, Portenoy smiled, thinking the man was joking. “You can’t do pain,” replied Portenoy, who has a long face with a neatly trimmed beard.


pages: 1,293 words: 357,735

The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance by Laurie Garrett

Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bill Atkinson, biofilm, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, contact tracing, correlation does not imply causation, discovery of penicillin, disinformation, double helix, Edward Jenner, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, germ theory of disease, global macro, global pandemic, global village, Gregor Mendel, Herbert Marcuse, indoor plumbing, invention of air conditioning, it's over 9,000, John Snow's cholera map, land reform, Live Aid, Louis Pasteur, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, megacity, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, phenotype, price mechanism, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, San Francisco homelessness, seminal paper, South China Sea, the scientific method, trade route, transfer pricing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Zimmermann PGP

Eventually one would get a culture dish chock-full of viruses. Meanwhile, panic was growing in North America. Though the absolute number of reported AIDS cases in Canada and the United States was still below 2,000, the dimensions of the epidemic were expanding. Drs. James Oleske at the New Jersey Medical School in Newark and Arye Rubinstein of the Albert Einstein School of Medicine in the Bronx were treating babies and toddlers who seemed to have contracted AIDS from their parents. Oleske was treating eleven such children, Rubinstein twenty-five.89 All of the children had a parent who either used injectable narcotics, had recently emigrated from Haiti or the Dominican Republic, or was “promiscuous,” as the physicians put it.

The city of New York uncovered up to 50 percent underreporting in the region’s largest inner-city hospitals during the 1991 epidemic. It was possible that up to 5,000 cases of the disease occurred in New York City, though only half that number were officially reported.129 In 1993, World Health Organization adviser Dr. Barry Bloom, of the Albert Einstein School of Medicine in the Bronx, announced that the United States had fallen behind Albania, Mexico, and China in childhood vaccination rates. 130 At the World Summit on Children convened by the United Nations in September 1990, the Bush administration was in the dubious position of having, on the one hand, to pledge sweeping concern for the health and survival of the world’s children while hoping no one would publicly note that the health status of America’s impoverished kids rivaled that of children in much of Africa and South Asia.

Impressed by the urgency of pleas for assistance emanating from both the public health community and a terrified HIV-positive population, National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) director Dr. Anthony Fauci convened an emergency meeting on tuberculosis in Bethesda on February 10, 1992. All of America’s leading tuberculosis experts were invited—all forty or fifty of them. Looking around the sparsely attended room, Barry Bloom, a TB expert for WHO and researcher at the Albert Einstein School of Medicine in the Bronx, addressed Fauci directly, saying, “If I were you, I’d ask myself how there could possibly be scientific expertise in this country on tuberculosis if you’re only handing out twenty-three research grants a year.” Acknowledging that total NIH expenditures on TB research had amounted to just $3.5 million a year, Fauci asked, “Yes, but if we throw $50 million at it next year would there be expertise, would we be able to seduce new investigators into this area of research on an urgent basis?”


pages: 240 words: 60,660

Models. Behaving. Badly.: Why Confusing Illusion With Reality Can Lead to Disaster, on Wall Street and in Life by Emanuel Derman

Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, Black-Scholes formula, British Empire, Brownian motion, capital asset pricing model, Cepheid variable, creative destruction, crony capitalism, currency risk, diversified portfolio, Douglas Hofstadter, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, Financial Modelers Manifesto, fixed income, Ford Model T, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, I will remember that I didn’t make the world, and it doesn’t satisfy my equations, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, law of one price, low interest rates, Mikhail Gorbachev, Myron Scholes, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Richard Feynman, riskless arbitrage, savings glut, Schrödinger's Cat, Sharpe ratio, stochastic volatility, the scientific method, washing machines reduced drudgery, yield curve

MAXWELL’S THEORY: THE FIELD ITSELF Since Maxwell’s time, physical reality has been thought of as represented by continuous fields, and not capable of any mechanical interpretation. This change in the conception of reality is the most profound and the most fruitful that physics has experienced since the time of Newton. —Albert Einstein, “Maxwell’s Influence on the Development of the Conception of Physical Reality,” in James Clerk Maxwell: A Commemorative Volume 1831–s1931 (1931), 71. Why the extreme praise? Because Maxwell changed the way physicists do physics. He examined the equations obeyed by the visible world, saw a pattern with something missing, completed it, and deduced the existence of electromagnetic waves.


pages: 204 words: 61,491

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman, Jeff Riggenbach Ph.

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, classic study, disinformation, global village, Index librorum prohibitorum, invention of the printing press, Lewis Mumford, Louis Daguerre, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, the medium is the message

To think about those men was to think about what they had written, to judge them by their public positions, their arguments, their knowledge as codified in the printed word. You may get some sense of how we are separated from this kind of consciousness by thinking about any of our recent presidents; or even preachers, lawyers and scientists who are or who have recently been public figures. Think of Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter or Billy Graham, or even Albert Einstein, and what will come to your mind is an image, a picture of a face, most likely a face on a television screen (in Einstein’s case, a photograph of a face). Of words, almost nothing will come to mind. This is the difference between thinking in a word-centered culture and thinking in an image-centered culture.


pages: 204 words: 63,571

You're Not Doing It Right: Tales of Marriage, Sex, Death, and Other Humiliations by Michael Ian Black

Albert Einstein, fear of failure, life extension, placebo effect, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sugar pill, upwardly mobile

I write down “yes.” Although I am dubious about the accuracy of such a test, I am still excited to get my results. The test reveals that my specific personality type is known as an “INTP,” which stands for “Introversion, Intuition, Thinking, Perception.” And I discover that I am in very good company. Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, and Thomas Jefferson were all INTPs. Huh. Perhaps this test is more accurate than I had originally thought. Surely, I too would make an excellent physicist, naturalist, or author of the Declaration of Independence. Excited, I scroll down to see which career the test believes would be best for me.


pages: 230 words: 63,891

Forever Free by Joe Haldeman

Albert Einstein, heat death of the universe, Magellanic Cloud, Occam's razor, time dilation

A floater crashed through a picture window; I took human shape and ran down the stairs to the basement until things calmed down." "Where were you at the time?" I asked. "Titusville sector. It's part of Spaceport Administration. We went near it on our way here." He took the shape of an oversized statue of Albert Einstein, and sat in the dust, cross-legged, his eyes at our level. "It was a convenient coincidence, since I would have headed for a spaceport no matter where I'd been at the time. Waiting for someone to come explain what has happened." "I don't think we know any more than you," Marygay said. "You know your own circumstances.


pages: 257 words: 68,203

The Talent Code: Greatest Isn't Born, It's Grown, Here's How by Daniel Coyle

Albert Einstein, Bob Geldof, deliberate practice, experimental subject, impulse control, Kaizen: continuous improvement, longitudinal study, Ralph Waldo Emerson

She compared Einstein's brain with identical regions from eleven other control brains of men the same age and found that, when it came to the neurons, the brains were the same. However, when it came to myelin-supporting cells, Einstein's brain had twice as many. See Diamond's “On the Brain of a Scientist: Albert Einstein,” Experimental Neurology 88, no. 1 (1985), 198–204. CHAPTER 4: THE THREE RULES OF DEEP PRACTICE Adriaan de Groot's work can be found in the translated Thought and Choice in Chess (The Hague, Netherlands: Mouton, 1965), as well as in Vittorio Busato, “In Memoriam: Adriaan Dingeman de Groot,” Association for Psychological Science Observer 19, no. 11 (November 2006).


pages: 261 words: 10,785

The Lights in the Tunnel by Martin Ford

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, Bill Joy: nanobots, Black-Scholes formula, business cycle, call centre, carbon tax, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, credit crunch, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, full employment, income inequality, index card, industrial robot, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, pattern recognition, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, technological singularity, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, War on Poverty, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics

While there is little double that the overly restrictive policies of the Fed prolonged the Depression and perhaps turned a run of the mill recession into a disaster, it should not be forgotten that there was a widespread belief at the time that the technological unemployment (and the resulting plunge in consumer demand) that Keynes spoke of played an important role. Even Albert Einstein expressed this opinion when asked for his take on the causes of the Depression during a visit to the United States in 1933. ] Keynes recognized that, in 1930, technological unemployment would be a temporary phenomenon and that the economy would eventually absorb the excess workers. The main thrust of his essay was to attempt to look much further into the future.


pages: 258 words: 63,367

Making the Future: The Unipolar Imperial Moment by Noam Chomsky

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate personhood, creative destruction, deindustrialization, energy security, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Frank Gehry, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Howard Zinn, Joseph Schumpeter, kremlinology, liberation theology, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, precariat, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, structural adjustment programs, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, working poor

The “national persona we project” should make clear “that the United States may become irrational and vindictive if its vital interests are attacked—and that “some elements may appear to be potentially ‘out of control.’” Apart from the dissident margins, the report appears to have elicited no interest. Forty years earlier, Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein had warned that we face a choice that is “stark and dreadful and inescapable: Shall we put an end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war?” They were not exaggerating. Environmental catastrophe is no less a threat to survival, in a not too distant future. A serious approach will surely require significant socioeconomic changes and dedication of resources to technological innovations, particularly harnessing solar energy, many scientists contend.


pages: 274 words: 60,596

Millionaire Teacher: The Nine Rules of Wealth You Should Have Learned in School by Andrew Hallam

Albert Einstein, asset allocation, Bernie Madoff, buy and hold, diversified portfolio, financial independence, George Gilder, index fund, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mary Meeker, new economy, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, price stability, random walk, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, yield curve

Thankfully your friends—if they procrastinate—won’t meet the same fate as Noah’s friends, but your metaphorical ship will sail off into the distance while others scramble in the rain to assemble their own boats. Starting early is more than just getting a head start. It’s about using magic. You can sail away slowly, and your friends can come after you with racing boats. But thanks to the force described by Albert Einstein (some say) as more powerful than splitting the atom, they aren’t likely to catch you. In William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the protagonist says to his friend: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Hamlet was referring to ghosts. Einstein was referring to the magic of compound interest.


pages: 210 words: 62,771

Turing's Vision: The Birth of Computer Science by Chris Bernhardt

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Bletchley Park, British Empire, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Conway's Game of Life, discrete time, Douglas Hofstadter, Georg Cantor, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Henri Poincaré, Internet Archive, Jacquard loom, John Conway, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Ken Thompson, Norbert Wiener, Paul Erdős, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture

Turing at Princeton Princeton, in New Jersey, houses both Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study. In 1936, both the Princeton University Mathematics Department and the Institute were housed in the same building, the original Fine Hall — now renamed Jones Hall. Alonzo Church was a professor at the university, Albert Einstein and John von Neumann were members of the Institute. Kurt Gödel had visited the Institute in 1934 and in 1935, and would become a permanent member in 1939. It was a major center for mathematics and in particular for mathematical logic. In 1936, Church was thirty three years old and already a well-established logician.


pages: 200 words: 60,987

The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America by Steven Johnson

Albert Einstein, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, Danny Hillis, discovery of DNA, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Kevin Kelly, planetary scale, seminal paper, side project, South Sea Bubble, stem cell, Stewart Brand, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, zero-sum game

The sense of gravitas that attended Priestley’s emigration seems somehow fitting to us now, not just because of his individual accomplishments, but also because Priestley was inaugurating what would become one of the most honorable traditions of the American experience. He was the first great scientist-exile to seek safe harbor in America after being persecuted for his religious and political beliefs at home. Albert Einstein, Edward Teller, Xiao Qiang—they would all follow in Priestley’s footsteps. Priestley initially embraced asylum in America with his typical enthusiasm: he was, at long last, in his own element, surrounded by intellectual peers who also happened to be, amazingly enough, the political establishment.


pages: 207 words: 63,071

My Start-Up Life: What A by Ben Casnocha, Marc Benioff

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Bonfire of the Vanities, business process, call centre, coherent worldview, creative destruction, David Brooks, David Sedaris, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, fear of failure, hiring and firing, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Marc Benioff, Menlo Park, open immigration, Paul Graham, place-making, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, superconnector, technology bubble, traffic fines, Tyler Cowen, Year of Magical Thinking

One day, during our early morning class, he forced all students to memorize the Apple Computer “Think Different” poem. I went home and memorized the poem and watched the video ad. The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do, the narrator intoned to images of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Ted Turner, Albert Einstein. I watched the ad again. Then again. It moved me like no other video or movie had before. It made me want to change the world. I didn’t want to wait. And I didn’t. My efforts to impact the world have taken the form of two technology companies. My current company, Comcate, is now the leading e-government/customer service software provider to small and midsize local governments throughout the United States, with thousands of public sector employees using our products each day.


pages: 219 words: 63,495

50 Future Ideas You Really Need to Know by Richard Watson

23andMe, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, BRICs, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon credits, Charles Babbage, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, computer age, computer vision, crowdsourcing, dark matter, dematerialisation, Dennis Tito, digital Maoism, digital map, digital nomad, driverless car, Elon Musk, energy security, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, gamification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, happiness index / gross national happiness, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, hive mind, hydrogen economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, life extension, Mark Shuttleworth, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, peak oil, personalized medicine, phenotype, precision agriculture, private spaceflight, profit maximization, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Florida, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, semantic web, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, smart transportation, space junk, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, telepresence, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Turing test, urban decay, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, women in the workforce, working-age population, young professional

This means lots of potential cybercrime and tightly coordinated electronic spying, some of which is undoubtedly directed at US military installations and defense engineering. “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” Albert Einstein, theoretical physicist Battlefield robots are another example of semiautonomous warfare, and more than 50 governments across the globe are actively seeking to develop robotic killing machines. This is partly because the “value” of human life is increasing due to public opinion, legal redress and the need to win elections, which means that governments will be less willing to risk individual injury and death.


pages: 185 words: 60,638

Be Different: Adventures of a Free-Range Aspergian With Practical Advice for Aspergians, Misfits, Families & Teachers by John Elder Robison

Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, Isaac Newton, mirror neurons, neurotypical, place-making

I think that’s more appropriate than saying, “We have Asperger’s.” There’s no right or wrong—you can say whatever you want, or say nothing at all. Whatever you choose, you’re in good company. Bill Gates is said to be Aspergian. Musician Glenn Gould is said to have been Aspergian, along with scientist Albert Einstein, actor Dan Aykroyd, writer Isaac Asimov, and movie director Alfred Hitchcock. As adults, none of those people would be described as disabled, but they were certainly eccentric and different. If everyone with Asperger’s achieved a high level of success, no one would call it a disability. Unfortunately, those people are the exceptions, not the rule.


pages: 239 words: 60,065

Retire Before Mom and Dad by Rob Berger

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, asset allocation, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, buy and hold, car-free, cuban missile crisis, discovery of DNA, diversification, diversified portfolio, en.wikipedia.org, fixed income, hedonic treadmill, index fund, John Bogle, junk bonds, mortgage debt, Mr. Money Mustache, passive investing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, robo advisor, The 4% rule, the rule of 72, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, William Bengen, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

* * * 31 https://personal.vanguard.com/pdf/morningstar.pdf 3 Key Concepts Fees are one of the few things investors can control. High fees can add years, even a decade, to the time it takes you to reach Level 7 Financial Freedom. Index funds offer both low fees and better performance. Chapter 22 Investing Made Easy “Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.” – Albert Einstein If the last few chapters have your head spinning, this chapter will bring you back down to earth. We are going to look at some very simple yet effective ways to invest. As you’ll see, you can literally build an incredible investment portfolio with just one mutual fund. Let’s begin with what we want our investment portfolio to look like.


pages: 210 words: 62,278

No One Succeeds Alone by Robert Reffkin

Albert Einstein, coronavirus, COVID-19, financial independence, George Floyd, global pandemic, hiring and firing, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Marc Benioff, market design, pattern recognition, Salesforce, Steve Jobs, young professional

Because, while no one succeeds alone, we all get a lot more done together when it’s clear who’s leading on what. 7 Maximize your strengths Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid. —Often attributed to Albert Einstein Happiness comes from being who you actually are instead of who you think you are supposed to be. —Shonda Rhimes Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive. —Howard Thurman We live in a society that’s obsessed with people’s weaknesses.


pages: 221 words: 59,755

Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future by Elizabeth Kolbert

Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, big-box store, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, Donald Davies, double helix, Hernando de Soto, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jacob Silverman, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, lockdown, Maui Hawaii, moral hazard, negative emissions, ocean acidification, Stewart Brand, The Chicago School, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

I stuffed my soggy socks into my pocket. The model delta, which represents a kind of relief map of the future, is supposed to simulate land loss and sea-level rise and to help test strategies for dealing with them. Prominently displayed on one of the walls of the center is a maxim attributed to Albert Einstein: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” At the time of my visit, the model was so new that it was still being calibrated. This involved running simulations of well-documented disasters from the past, like the flood of 2011. In the spring of that year, heavy snowmelt, along with weeks of intense rain across the Midwest, resulted in record-breaking water levels.


pages: 836 words: 158,284

The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman by Timothy Ferriss

23andMe, airport security, Albert Einstein, Black Swan, Buckminster Fuller, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, Dean Kamen, game design, Gary Taubes, Gregor Mendel, index card, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, language acquisition, life extension, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, messenger bag, microbiome, microdosing, p-value, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, Paul Buchheit, placebo effect, Productivity paradox, publish or perish, radical life extension, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, stem cell, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, survivorship bias, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, William of Occam

Track or you will fail. End of Chapter Notes 12. Full disclosure: I am now an adviser to both Posterous and Evernote because I believe in the services. SUBTRACTING FAT Basics THE SLOW-CARB DIET I How to Lose 20 Pounds in 30 Days Without Exercise Out of clutter, find simplicity. —Albert Einstein 11:34 A.M. SATURDAY, JUNE 20, 2009, SAN FRANCISCO Text message from London, eight hours ahead, meant to impress: This is my dinner. Happy times! The accompanying photo: a pepperoni and sausage pizza so large it doesn’t fit on the screen. Chris A., a fellow experimenter, and I were having our weekly virtual date.

Even when my bodyfat was low enough to show veins everywhere else, my frontal six-pack—the rectus abdominus—showed almost no separation. Damnation. Low bodyfat was necessary but not enough. I performed conventional ab exercises for more than a decade with no discernible benefit, somehow convinced it was just a matter of time. Albert Einstein would call this insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Things changed only when I began testing basic assumptions in 2009. It took a week to arrive at a reductionist program of two exercises. I performed these exercises just twice a week on Mondays and Fridays after kettlebell swings.


pages: 680 words: 157,865

Beautiful Architecture: Leading Thinkers Reveal the Hidden Beauty in Software Design by Diomidis Spinellis, Georgios Gousios

Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, business intelligence, business logic, business process, call centre, continuous integration, corporate governance, database schema, Debian, domain-specific language, don't repeat yourself, Donald Knuth, duck typing, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, fault tolerance, financial engineering, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, functional programming, general-purpose programming language, higher-order functions, iterative process, linked data, locality of reference, loose coupling, meta-analysis, MVC pattern, Neal Stephenson, no silver bullet, peer-to-peer, premature optimization, recommendation engine, Richard Stallman, Ruby on Rails, semantic web, smart cities, social graph, social web, SPARQL, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, systems thinking, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, traveling salesman, Turing complete, type inference, web application, zero-coupon bond

A consistent architecture is easier and faster to learn, and once you know a little, you can begin to predict the rest. Without the need to remember and handle special cases, code is cleaner and test sets are smaller. A consistent architecture does not offer two (or more) ways to do the same thing, forcing the user to waste time choosing. As Ludwig Mies van der Rohe said of good design, “Less is more,” and Albert Einstein might say that beautiful architectures are as simple as possible, but no simpler. Given these criteria, we propose some initial candidates for our “Gallery of Beautiful Architectures.” The first entry is the architecture for the A-7E Onboard Flight Processor (OFP), developed at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in the late 1970s, and described in Bass, Clements, and Kazman (2003).

Ensure they have healthy working relationships, as these relationship will inevitably feed into the structure of the code. Making design decisions at the appropriate time, when you know all the information necessary to make them. Defer design decisions you cannot yet make. Good project management, with the right kind of deadlines. Your Turn Never lose a holy curiosity. —Albert Einstein You are reading this book right now because you care about software architecture, and you care about improving your own software. So here’s an excellent opportunity. Consider these simple questions about your software experience to date: What’s the best system architecture you’ve ever seen?


pages: 638 words: 156,653

Berlin by Andrea Schulte-Peevers

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Google Earth, indoor plumbing, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Prenzlauer Berg, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Skype, starchitect, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal

Architect Knobelsdorff created this columned song palace endowed with phoenix-like qualities, having risen from the ashes three times. 6 Alte Königliche Bibliothek Thanks to its curvaceous façade, this handsome baroque building is nicknamed Kommode (chest of drawers). Built to shelter the royal book collection, it has been part of the university since 1914; Lenin used to hit the books in the Reading Room behind the central columns. 7 Humboldt Universität Marx and Engels studied and the Brothers Grimm and Albert Einstein taught at Berlin’s oldest university (1810), a former royal palace. It has produced enough Nobel Prize winners (29 at last count) to keep the Swedish Academy busy. These days, some 37,000 student strive to uphold this illustrious legacy. 8 Reiterdenkmal Friedrich des Grossen Seemingly surveying his domain, Frederick the Great cuts a commanding figure on horseback in this famous 1850 monument, which kept Christian Daniel Rauch busy for a dozen years.

* * * ARCHENHOLD-STERNWARTE Map 534 8080; www.astw.de; Alt-Treptow 1; exhibit adult/concession €2.50/2, tours €4/3; exhibit 2-4.30pm Wed-Sun, tours 8pm Thu, 3pm Sat & Sun; Plänterwald Germany’s oldest astronomical observatory, in the southeastern corner of Treptower Park, is the place where Albert Einstein first introduced his theory of relativity in 1915. The observatory’s other major claim to fame is its 21m-long refracting telescope, the longest in the world, built in 1896 by astronomer Friedrich Simon Archenhold. Demonstrations of the giant usually take place at 3pm on Sunday. Exhibits in the foyer are a bit ho-hum but still impart fascinating nuggets about the planetary system, astronomy in general and the history of the observatory.


pages: 229 words: 64,697

The Barefoot Investor: The Only Money Guide You'll Ever Need by Scott Pape

Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, estate planning, financial independence, index fund, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Own Your Own Home, Paradox of Choice, retail therapy, Robert Shiller, Snapchat

But I don't for a moment believe there's a goldmine in my back yard. The reason house prices are at record highs is that we've taken on record debt at a time when interest rates have fallen to record lows. It's been a wonderful run for the past 24 years, but will it be for the next 24? Why borrowing to invest kills compound interest Albert Einstein said that compound interest is the 8th wonder of the world. What is compound interest? It's when you reinvest your income so you earn interest on your interest. When it comes to buying an investment property, the interest you pay on your borrowings reduces — and, in many cases, totally eliminates — your rental income.


pages: 261 words: 70,584

Retirementology: Rethinking the American Dream in a New Economy by Gregory Brandon Salsbury

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, buy and hold, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversification, estate planning, financial independence, fixed income, full employment, hindsight bias, housing crisis, loss aversion, market bubble, market clearing, mass affluent, Maui Hawaii, mental accounting, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, National Debt Clock, negative equity, new economy, RFID, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, the rule of 72, Yogi Berra

Most of us would immediately think with the right side of our brains, and the emotional charge from this intuitive side would say, “A penny? No way! I’ll take the regular paycheck.” Those who took a moment and pulled from the other side of the brain, pausing for reflection, would be rewarded. That’s because that penny doubling every day for a month grows to $10,737,418. That’s just one example of the power of compounding, which Albert Einstein described as the most powerful force in the universe. What’s more incredible is that halfway though the month, on Day 16, the penny is only worth $327. But given time, compounding can be your best friend. Unfortunately, there is a twist to this story. Everyone must pay taxes. That same penny taxed at a 28% tax rate loses its amazing growth because taxes eat away at the compounding.


pages: 242 words: 68,019

Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, From Atoms to Economies by Cesar Hidalgo

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, assortative mating, business cycle, Claude Shannon: information theory, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Douglas Hofstadter, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Ford Model T, frictionless, frictionless market, George Akerlof, Gödel, Escher, Bach, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, New Economic Geography, Norbert Wiener, p-value, Paul Samuelson, phenotype, price mechanism, Richard Florida, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, working-age population

Time flows in one direction: from past to present, from young to old, from life to death.1 The irreversibility of time, much like the attraction of gravity, is a physical reality so conspicuous that it seems it must have an obvious explanation. But it does not. In fact, up until the twentieth century, the irreversible march of time was a puzzle that left some of the most brilliant minds of our species at a loss. Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein both produced successful theories of motion, which are technically time-reversible.2 They explain the motion of cannonballs, planets, and satellites without a clear distinction between where an object is and where it is going. This symmetry, which is true for simple systems, fails to explain why lions eat and digest gazelles instead of regurgitating whole live animals, and why crashed Bugattis do not self-assemble back into functioning vehicles.


pages: 202 words: 8,448

Blueprint for Revolution: How to Use Rice Pudding, Lego Men, and Other Nonviolent Techniques to Galvanize Communities, Overthrow Dictators, or Simply Change the World by Srdja Popovic, Matthew Miller

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, British Empire, corporate governance, desegregation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Jane Jacobs, Kibera, Kickstarter, Kinder Surprise, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, Rosa Parks, Twitter Arab Spring, urban planning, urban sprawl

Chapter VIII: Plan Your Way to Victory 1. “However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.”: Richard Aldous, Reagan and Thatcher: The Di cult Relationship. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2012). 53. 2. Gene Sharp de nes this all-important principle: Gene Sharp, There Are Realistic Alternatives (Boston: Albert Einstein Institution, 2003), 21. 3. “the conception of how best to achieve objectives in a con ict”: Ibid., 21. Chapter IX: The Demons of Violence 1. “At the beginning of June 1961”: “ ‘I Am Prepared to Die’: Nelson Mandela’s Opening Statement from the Dock at the Opening of the Defence Case in the Rivonia Trial,” United Nations website for Nelson Mandela Day, www.​un.​org/​en/​events/​mandeladay/​court_​statement_​ 1964.​shtml. 2. the Spear launched almost two hundred attacks: Janet Cherry, Spear of the Nation (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2012), 23. 3.


pages: 192 words: 72,822

Freedom Without Borders by Hoyt L. Barber

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, banking crisis, diversification, El Camino Real, estate planning, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial independence, fixed income, high net worth, illegal immigration, interest rate swap, money market fund, obamacare, offshore financial centre, passive income, quantitative easing, reserve currency, road to serfdom, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail

This, combined with the appreciation of the investments themselves, creates higher profits than would normally be attained domestically. There’s a quantum leap effect, too, when the profits can be tax deferred, and, as these dynamics are in play and are permitted to build for the longer term, the outcome is that your nest egg or your retirement funds will have increased quantitatively. Albert Einstein said, “The greatest principle in the universe is the power of compound interest.” That belief holds true here. The annuity anticipates longevity, and, coupled with a life insurance policy that covers you and your heirs in the event of unexpected or sudden death, it’s a double whammy of protection.


pages: 221 words: 67,514

Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris

Albert Einstein, complexity theory, David Sedaris, East Village, Easter island, Great Leap Forward, index card, means of production, rent control

“Hey, Smart Guy,” my father would say, “offer your grandmother another piece of that gum, and you’ll be the one scrubbing your teeth in the bathroom sink.” What did he know? Alone in my bedroom, I studied pictures of intelligent men and searched for a common denominator. There was a definite Smart Guy look, but it was difficult to get just right. Throw away your comb, and you could resemble either Albert Einstein or Larry Fine. Both wore rumpled suits and stuck out their tongues, but only one displayed true genius in such films as Booty and the Beast and The Three Stooges Meet Hercules. My grades sank, teachers laughed in my face, but I tried not to let it get to me. In high school I flirted with the idea that I might be a philosophical genius.


pages: 274 words: 70,481

The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry by Jon Ronson

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Albert Einstein, Ascot racecourse, Carl Icahn, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, false flag, Gödel, Escher, Bach, impulse control, Jon Ronson, Norman Mailer, Ronald Reagan, Skype

Each page seemed to be a riddle with a solution that was just out of reach. A note at the beginning claimed that the manuscript had been “found” in the corner of an abandoned railway station: “It was lying in the open, visible to all, but I was the only one curious enough to pick it up.” What followed were elliptical quotations:My thinking is muscular. Albert Einstein I am a strange loop. Douglas Hofstadter Life is meant to be a joyous adventure. Joe K The book had only twenty-one pages with text, but some pages contained just one sentence. Page 18, for instance, read simply: “The sixth day after I stopped writing the book I sat at B’s place and wrote the book.”


pages: 262 words: 65,959

The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets by Simon Singh

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 13, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, cognitive dissonance, Donald Knuth, Erdős number, Georg Cantor, Grace Hopper, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, John Nash: game theory, Kickstarter, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, P = NP, Paul Erdős, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantum cryptography, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, Schrödinger's Cat, Simon Singh, Stephen Hawking, Wolfskehl Prize, women in the workforce

As Lisa departs, Moe approaches the geeks and bemoans the fact that they are not drinking any beer: “Oh, why did I advertise my drink specials in Scientific American?” Lisa follows Frink’s advice. Indeed, a reporter spots her poring over piles of technical books immediately prior to her first game in charge of the Isotots. This extraordinary sight prompts him to remark: “I haven’t seen this many books in a dugout since Albert Einstein went canoeing.” Lisa’s books have titles such as eiπ + 1 = 0, F = MA, and Schrödinger’s Bat. Although these titles are fictional, the book tucked below Lisa’s laptop is The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, which is a real catalog of the most important statistics in baseball, compiled by one of baseball’s deepest thinkers.


pages: 255 words: 68,829

How PowerPoint Makes You Stupid by Franck Frommer

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, business continuity plan, cuban missile crisis, dematerialisation, disinformation, hypertext link, invention of writing, inventory management, invisible hand, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, new economy, oil shock, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, union organizing

With its deflating comedy, irony paradoxically makes it possible to strengthen a demonstration. These witticisms—a specialty of showmen, particularly Americans—generally come from a pantheon of personalities (and often Web sites that compile undocumented quotations and organize them according to major themes) like Winston Churchill and Albert Einstein, or comic writers like Woody Allen and Groucho Marx. • The “expressive” quotation. Used so as to be retained, like a song tune. This is a creation of the presenter that can function simultaneously as a poetic image and a slogan; for example, in An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore (see chapter 5) intones, simultaneously with its appearance on the screen, the following sentence: “We are witnessing a collision between our civilization and the Earth.”34 • The paradoxical, provocative quotation.


pages: 218 words: 63,471

How We Got Here: A Slightly Irreverent History of Technology and Markets by Andy Kessler

Albert Einstein, Andy Kessler, animal electricity, automated trading system, bank run, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Bretton Woods, British Empire, buttonwood tree, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Corn Laws, cotton gin, Dennis Ritchie, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Fairchild Semiconductor, fiat currency, fixed income, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, GPS: selective availability, Grace Hopper, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Leonard Kleinrock, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Multics, packet switching, pneumatic tube, price mechanism, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, proprietary trading, railway mania, RAND corporation, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, Small Order Execution System, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, systems thinking, three-martini lunch, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, UUNET, Wayback Machine, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

There was a need for a light source that could work in a tight frequency range, travel great distances, and be controllable, meaning you could turn it on and off rapidly. You could shine a flashlight in one end of the fiber and turn it on and off and if you squinted, you might be able to make that out at the other end, but that would be a pretty flimsy modem. In 1917, no less than Albert Einstein (you knew he would be involved in this story somehow) theorized a photoelectric effect. If you shone light on a metal, it would emit electrons. But no one could adequately explain why. Isaac Newton had thought light was made up of particles, but in the early 1800s, it was Thomas Young who set up SOFTWARE AND NETWORKS 139 an ingenious experiment.


pages: 260 words: 67,823

Always Day One: How the Tech Titans Plan to Stay on Top Forever by Alex Kantrowitz

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, anti-bias training, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer vision, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, fulfillment center, gigafactory, Google Chrome, growth hacking, hive mind, income inequality, Infrastructure as a Service, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Jony Ive, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, super pumped, tech worker, Tim Cook: Apple, uber lyft, warehouse robotics, wealth creators, work culture , zero-sum game

And so we have to be really clear on what we want them to know about us. . . . Our customers want to know who is Apple and what is it that we stand for.” In that ad, Apple put forward a defiant message. “Here’s to the crazy ones, the rebels, the troublemakers, the ones who see things differently,” it said, as footage of Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King Jr., John Lennon, and Mohandas Gandhi rolled. Apple’s values were implied: it was among this group, a troublemaker and not a faceless corporation. Today, Apple is no longer crazy, or a rebel, or a troublemaker. It’s a trillion-dollar Goliath with power over the small guys it once counted itself among.


pages: 249 words: 66,492

The Rare Metals War by Guillaume Pitron

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean tech, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commodity super cycle, connected car, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, energy transition, Fairphone, full employment, green new deal, green transition, industrial robot, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lyft, mittelstand, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, spinning jenny, Tesla Model S, Yom Kippur War

Can we not see the absurdity of leaping into an environmental sea change that could poison us with heavy metals before we have even seen it through? Can we seriously advocate Confucian harmony through material wellbeing if it means the very opposite: new health problems and environmental chaos? What is the point of ‘progress’ if it does not help humanity progress? Albert Einstein left us with a powerful statement: ‘We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.’ Only with a revolution of consciousness can an industrial, technical, and social revolution be meaningful. This book has sketched out sparse evidence of such leaps of consciousness in the rare metals industry: German manufacturers opting for more expensive tungsten to maintain the diversity of their supply; attempts by Chinese authorities to end the rare-earths black market in Jiangxi province so as to protect the resource; and in Tokyo, Professor Okabe’s attempts to recycle metals using salt from the high plains of Bolivia.


pages: 231 words: 64,734

Safe Haven: Investing for Financial Storms by Mark Spitznagel

Albert Einstein, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, asset allocation, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, book value, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, cognitive dissonance, commodity trading advisor, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, delayed gratification, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, fiat currency, financial engineering, Fractional reserve banking, global macro, Henri Poincaré, hindsight bias, Long Term Capital Management, Mark Spitznagel, Paul Samuelson, phenotype, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Schrödinger's Cat, Sharpe ratio, spice trade, Steve Jobs, tail risk, the scientific method, transaction costs, value at risk, yield curve, zero-sum game

They will even afford us a certain existential authenticity, allowing us to make our investing consistent with what we believe—to “bet our beliefs” as they say, despite all the external pressures to conform. Principle number one is that investing is a process that happens sequentially through time. Investing is not static. It does not occur in just one interval of time, nor in many intervals of time aggregated together as one. (Albert Einstein purportedly noted that “the only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once.”) Time is the medium through which life takes place, and so it is the medium through which investing takes place. We are stretched across time. Investing and risk are a multi‐period problem; and returns are an iterative, multiplicative process.


pages: 206 words: 68,757

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman

airport security, Albert Einstein, Cal Newport, coronavirus, COVID-19, digital nomad, Douglas Hofstadter, fake news, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Floyd, gig economy, Gödel, Escher, Bach, heat death of the universe, Inbox Zero, income inequality, invention of the steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kanban, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, New Journalism, Parkinson's law, profit motive, scientific management, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs

Rather than trying to do everything, I found it easier to accept the truth that I’d be doing only a few things on any given day. The difference, this time, was that I actually did them. The third principle is to resist the allure of middling priorities. There is a story attributed to Warren Buffett—although probably only in the apocryphal way in which wise insights get attributed to Albert Einstein or the Buddha, regardless of their real source—in which the famously shrewd investor is asked by his personal pilot about how to set priorities. I’d be tempted to respond, “Just focus on flying the plane!” But apparently this didn’t take place midflight, because Buffett’s advice is different: he tells the man to make a list of the top twenty-five things he wants out of life and then to arrange them in order, from the most important to the least.


pages: 232 words: 70,835

A Wealth of Common Sense: Why Simplicity Trumps Complexity in Any Investment Plan by Ben Carlson

Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, delayed gratification, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, endowment effect, family office, financial independence, fixed income, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, index fund, John Bogle, junk bonds, loss aversion, market bubble, medical residency, Occam's razor, paper trading, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, robo advisor, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, stocks for the long run, technology bubble, Ted Nelson, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto

This seems obvious, but it's difficult for people to see the beauty in simplicity when everyone else is in search of complexity. Munger continues, “The simple idea may appear too obvious to be useful, but there is an old two-part rule that often works wonders in business, science and elsewhere: (1) take a simple, basic idea and (2) take it very seriously.” Albert Einstein, the man considered by many to be one of the smartest people to ever live, also practiced simplicity to solve problems. Instead of looking at very specific data to try to solve problems, Einstein would look for very broad, overarching, and simple principles that could be applied with other big-picture theories to create truly ground-breaking work.


pages: 238 words: 67,971

The Minimalist Home: A Room-By-Room Guide to a Decluttered, Refocused Life by Joshua Becker

Albert Einstein, car-free, collaborative consumption, do what you love, endowment effect, estate planning, Lao Tzu, Mark Zuckerberg, mortgage debt, new economy, Paradox of Choice, side hustle, Steve Jobs

The prevalent attitude to fashion is downright silly, if you think about it. As Henry David Thoreau said long ago, “Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.”2 In most cases, it is classic fashion, not the trending pieces and colors, that stands the test of time. In his later years, Albert Einstein usually wore the same suit. Steve Jobs favored a black turtleneck, jeans, and sneakers. Mark Zuckerberg likes to wear a gray T-shirt. Their reputations certainly didn’t take a hit because they simplified their wardrobe decisions. Well, those are all men. Could it be different for women? Evidently not.


Jaws by Sandra Kahn,Paul R. Ehrlich

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, clean water, desegregation, Edward Jenner, epigenetics, Great Leap Forward, hygiene hypothesis, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Indoor air pollution, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, language acquisition, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, out of africa, randomized controlled trial, twin studies, Wall-E, women in the workforce

Growth takes many years; if permanent improvement is to be obtained, a fundamental change in the patient’s oral posture is required, a critical point dental orthopedics overlooks. The behavior that caused the problem must be extinguished, or the problem will return; continued treatment along the same lines would become an example of a definition of insanity usually attributed to Albert Einstein: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. In curing malocclusion, the upper jaw almost always needs to be encouraged to move forward, and that is the foundation of forwardontics. As we’ve indicated, the upper jaw is considered by too many orthodontists to be fixed, which it certainly is not.


pages: 205 words: 71,872

Whistleblower: My Journey to Silicon Valley and Fight for Justice at Uber by Susan Fowler

"Susan Fowler" uber, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Big Tech, Burning Man, cloud computing, data science, deep learning, DevOps, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fault tolerance, Grace Hopper, Higgs boson, Large Hadron Collider, Lyft, Maui Hawaii, messenger bag, microservices, Mitch Kapor, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, TechCrunch disrupt, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, work culture

I couldn’t believe that was the guy I’d spoken to on the phone during my job search back at Penn. With his blond hair, chiseled jaw, broad shoulders, and hazel eyes, he was the most gorgeous man I’d ever seen. I later described him to my friends (who thought I was out of my mind) as a cross between Michael Fassbender and Albert Einstein, “but,” I would add, with a silly grin, “he is hotter than Fassbender and more brilliant than Einstein.” I added him as a friend, and to my complete surprise he accepted. Over the next few months, as our Facebook friendship evolved into liking each other’s pictures and updates, I developed the biggest schoolgirl-style crush on him.


pages: 235 words: 64,858

Sexual Intelligence: What We Really Want From Sex and How to Get It by Marty Klein

airport security, Albert Einstein, do-ocracy, invention of the wheel, Silicon Valley, systems thinking

Inevitably, we’ll soon see a bunch of romantic comedies in which people are texting during sex. If the film Network (1976) were remade today, Faye Dunaway would be texting during sex—and William Holden would be confused and dismayed. They were, if you recall, from different generations. Anyway, you know what Albert Einstein said about multitasking: “Any man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves.” Redefining “Sexy” There’s an apocryphal story about Don Jose, the most accomplished bullfighter in Spain. At the height of Don Jose’s career, some journalists arrange an interview with him.


pages: 194 words: 63,798

The Milky Way: An Autobiography of Our Galaxy by Moiya McTier

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, Burning Man, Cepheid variable, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, Eddington experiment, Edward Charles Pickering, Ernest Rutherford, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, James Webb Space Telescope, Karl Jansky, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, Magellanic Cloud, overview effect, Pluto: dwarf planet, polynesian navigation, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method

Human astronomers are very confident that the density parameter Ω is very close to 1, but they don’t know if it’s slightly more or slightly less. Although the Big Freeze is most consistent with the observations of an accelerating expanding universe, you should keep your mind open to any possible ending. It was only one century ago that the supposedly great Albert Einstein thought the universe was standing still. Your current scientific understanding of the world could be turned on its head at any moment. There could be another end of the universe coming, just waiting for its own Big title. Progress towards better understanding, even of something as unappealing as the end, means the science is working.


pages: 481 words: 72,071

Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before? by Dr. Julie Smith

Albert Einstein, COVID-19, fake news, fear of failure, meta-analysis, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, side hustle, TikTok

In chapter 3 we talked about metacognition. Our ability to not only consciously experience the world, but to also then think about and reassess the experience we had. This is a key life skill that we make use of in therapy. It is the epicentre of any big life change. You cannot change what you cannot make sense of. Albert Einstein reportedly once said, ‘If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend fifty-five minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions.’ This quote often comes to mind when I hear the common misconception that therapy consists of sitting in a room and dwelling on your problems.


Designing the Mind: The Principles of Psychitecture by Designing the Mind, Ryan A Bush

Abraham Maslow, adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, augmented reality, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, cognitive bias, cognitive load, correlation does not imply causation, data science, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, drug harm reduction, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, fundamental attribution error, hedonic treadmill, hindsight bias, impulse control, Kevin Kelly, Lao Tzu, lifelogging, longitudinal study, loss aversion, meta-analysis, Own Your Own Home, pattern recognition, price anchoring, randomized controlled trial, Silicon Valley, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, Walter Mischel

We know it is possible to become great on the keys by practicing diligently and applying the right methods. And we can see that the path of artistic mastery goes deeper and deeper, never really reaching a limit besides the laws of physics. The “10,000 hour rule” popularized by Malcolm Gladwell suggests that the great talents of people like Albert Einstein, Bill Gates, and the Beatles are not simply the innate gifts they are often assumed to be. They can be understood as the result of many hours of development, often falling around 10,000 hours.16 It may not be a mathematical theorem which infallibly dictates success in any field, but the rule goes a long way to explain just how crucial practice and diligence are, even for seemingly supernatural ability.


pages: 209 words: 64,635

For the Love of Autism: Stories of Love, Awareness and Acceptance on the Spectrum by Tamika Lechee Morales

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, Berlin Wall, COVID-19, Elon Musk, Google Hangouts, neurotypical, stem cell, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, TED Talk, TikTok

And autism, you may not know this, but you’ve even become more well-known now than when I was a kid. Dan Aykroyd once mentioned you and said that you, in part, made him successful as an actor. Other celebrities, like Elon Musk, Wentworth Miller, Anthony Hopkins, Daryl Hannah, and Susan Boyle, also have mentioned they are autistic, too. There are even people like Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, and Mozart rumored to be autistic as well. As we learn more about you, I’m excited for our society to try and find more ways to help autistics find more of the strengths it can bring while working with those who have additional needs and may need lifetime care. A lot more people have you, autism, and I hope they can all succeed.


Secrets of the Autistic Millionaire: Everything I Know Now About Autism and Asperger's That I Wish I'd Known Then by David William Plummer

Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, coronavirus, epigenetics, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mirror neurons, neurotypical, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), side project, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, wikimedia commons

Developmental Delays in Language According to the records my mom dutifully kept when I was a baby, it appears that I learned language normally and today I speak and write reasonably clearly as an adult, consistent with what would be an Asperger’s diagnosis under the older DSM III manual. Those with autism that display more profound social and neurological symptoms often tend to have developmental delays with language, particularly in their early years. Albert Einstein, who is often said to have likely been on the autism spectrum, did not speak until he was three years old. Temple Grandin, a renowned scientist and industrial designer who has been formally diagnosed with autism, did not speak until she was three and a half. Some have postulated that the delays in speech may result from a difference in the way the autistic brain hears certain sounds, such as hard consonants.


pages: 252 words: 66,183

Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It by M. Nolan Gray

Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, car-free, carbon footprint, City Beautiful movement, clean water, confounding variable, COVID-19, desegregation, Donald Shoup, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, game design, garden city movement, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, industrial cluster, Jane Jacobs, job-hopping, land bank, lone genius, mass immigration, McMansion, mortgage tax deduction, Overton Window, parking minimums, restrictive zoning, rewilding, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Silicon Valley, SimCity, starchitect, streetcar suburb, superstar cities, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, transit-oriented development, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty

From the invention of Western philosophy to the aesthetic highs of the Renaissance to the dizzying pace of technological change in Silicon Valley, genius does not seem to be not randomly distributed. Rather, it clusters in particular places at particular times.1 Why is that? While few of us will achieve the highs of an Albert Einstein (who was nourished by the intellectual ferment under way in cities like Bern and Zurich) or Alexander Graham Bell (who decamped for Boston to start his pioneering laboratory), cities nonetheless have a way of making each of us slightly better at whatever it is we do. As massive labor markets, cities allow each of us to specialize, or even strike out on our own as entrepreneurs.


pages: 1,737 words: 491,616

Rationality: From AI to Zombies by Eliezer Yudkowsky

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, anti-pattern, anti-work, antiwork, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, backpropagation, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Build a better mousetrap, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, cosmological constant, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dematerialisation, different worldview, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Douglas Hofstadter, Drosophila, Eddington experiment, effective altruism, experimental subject, Extropian, friendly AI, fundamental attribution error, Great Leap Forward, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker News, hindsight bias, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Pasteur, mental accounting, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, money market fund, Monty Hall problem, Nash equilibrium, Necker cube, Nick Bostrom, NP-complete, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), P = NP, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peak-end rule, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, planetary scale, prediction markets, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific mainstream, scientific worldview, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, strong AI, sunk-cost fallacy, technological singularity, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, Turing complete, Turing machine, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Our significant innovations in the art of thinking, like writing and science, are so powerful that they structure the course of human history; but they do not rival the brain itself in complexity, and their effect upon the brain is comparatively shallow. The present state of the art in rationality training is not sufficient to turn an arbitrarily selected mortal into Albert Einstein, which shows the power of a few minor genetic quirks of brain design compared to all the self-help books ever written in the twentieth century. Because the brain hums away invisibly in the background, people tend to overlook its contribution and take it for granted; and talk as if the simple instruction to “Test ideas by experiment,” or the p < 0.05 significance rule, were the same order of contribution as an entire human brain.

It is the way things have always been. * 1. Greg Egan, Quarantine (London: Legend Press, 1992). 2. Robert S. Boynton, “The Birth of an Idea: A Profile of Frank Sulloway,” The New Yorker (October 1999). 238 Quantum Non-Realism Does the moon exist when no one is looking at it? —Albert Einstein, asked of Niels Bohr Suppose you were just starting to work out a theory of quantum mechanics. You begin to encounter experiments that deliver different results depending on how closely you observe them. You dig underneath the reality you know, and find an extremely precise mathematical description that only gives you the relative frequency of outcomes; worse, it’s made of complex numbers.

Tooby and Cosmides, “The Psychological Foundations of Culture.” 253 That Alien Message Imagine a world much like this one, in which, thanks to gene-selection technologies, the average IQ is 140 (on our scale). Potential Einsteins are one-in-a-thousand, not one-in-a-million; and they grow up in a school system suited, if not to them personally, then at least to bright kids. Calculus is routinely taught in sixth grade. Albert Einstein, himself, still lived and still made approximately the same discoveries, but his work no longer seems exceptional. Several modern top-flight physicists have made equivalent breakthroughs, and are still around to talk. (No, this is not the world Brennan lives in.) One day, the stars in the night sky begin to change.


Evidence-Based Technical Analysis: Applying the Scientific Method and Statistical Inference to Trading Signals by David Aronson

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, asset allocation, availability heuristic, backtesting, Black Swan, book value, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, cognitive dissonance, compound rate of return, computerized trading, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, distributed generation, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, equity risk premium, feminist movement, Great Leap Forward, hindsight bias, index fund, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, mental accounting, meta-analysis, p-value, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price stability, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, retrograde motion, revision control, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, riskless arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Sharpe ratio, short selling, source of truth, statistical model, stocks for the long run, sugar pill, systematic trading, the scientific method, transfer pricing, unbiased observer, yield curve, Yogi Berra

For this reason, objective observations lend themselves to the establishment of knowledge that can be shared with and confirmed by others. Subjective thoughts, interpretations, and feelings cannot, and this flaw alone is sufficient to disqualify subjective TA as legitimate knowledge. THE NATURE OF SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE Albert Einstein once said; “One thing I have learned in a long life: that all our science, measured against reality is primitive and childlike—and yet it is the most precious thing we have.”7 Scientific knowledge is different than wisdom gained by other modes of inquiry such as common sense, faith, authority, and intuition.

In the end, however, Newton’s laws proved to be provisionally true, as is ultimately the case for all laws and theories. Although Newton’s laws had worked perfectly for more than 200 years, early in the twentieth century more precise astronomical observations were found to be truly inconsistent with the theory’s predictions. The old theory had finally been falsified and it was time for a new one. In 1921, Albert Einstein responded properly by putting forward his new and more informative Theory of General Relativity. Today, almost one hundred years later, Einstein’s theory has survived all attempts to falsify it. Newton’s theory qualified as scientific because it was open to empirical refutation. In fact, Newton’s theory was not wrong so much as it was incomplete.


pages: 611 words: 188,732

Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom) by Adam Fisher

adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Byte Shop, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, Colossal Cave Adventure, Computer Lib, disintermediation, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake it until you make it, fake news, frictionless, General Magic , glass ceiling, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, popular electronics, quantum entanglement, random walk, reality distortion field, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Salesforce, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, social graph, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, telerobotics, The future is already here, The Hackers Conference, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, tulip mania, V2 rocket, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Y Combinator

It’s future obsessed and forward thinking. It’s technical and quantitative. It’s market oriented. It’s simultaneously practical and utopian. It’s brainy, even in its humor. In short, it’s a nerd culture. And of course there have been nerds since time immemorial. Leonardo da Vinci was a nerd. Ben Franklin was a nerd. Albert Einstein was the quintessential nerd. But the new thing is that the nerd culture is becoming the popular culture. Evidence for that idea, once grokked, is everywhere. Exhibit A: The Big Bang Theory—a show by, for, and about nerds—is one of the highest-rated and longest-running television sitcoms ever.

That was the year Jobs finagled a return to the company which he had founded two decades before but had never actually controlled. This time he would be firmly in charge. The first thing that the older and wiser Jobs did was launch an advertising campaign, “Think Different,” which flattered the Apple faithful with comparisons to Albert Einstein, Buckminster Fuller, Pablo Picasso, and the like. Then he launched a new computer, the iMac, which piggybacked on the vogue for all things internet. The third launch was a clever new product aimed at the Napster generation. The iPod was a way to put an MP3 in your pocket. Apple’s update of Sony’s venerable Walkman idea proved to be a game changer, a completely new direction for the company.


pages: 733 words: 179,391

Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought by Andrew W. Lo

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, Arthur Eddington, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bob Litterman, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, break the buck, Brexit referendum, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, confounding variable, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, democratizing finance, Diane Coyle, diversification, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, double helix, easy for humans, difficult for computers, equity risk premium, Ernest Rutherford, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, Fractional reserve banking, framing effect, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hans Rosling, Henri Poincaré, high net worth, housing crisis, incomplete markets, index fund, information security, interest rate derivative, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Hawkins, Jim Simons, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, language acquisition, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, martingale, megaproject, merger arbitrage, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Neil Armstrong, Nick Leeson, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, p-value, PalmPilot, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, predatory finance, prediction markets, price discovery process, profit maximization, profit motive, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, RAND corporation, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, Shai Danziger, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, statistical arbitrage, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, subprime mortgage crisis, survivorship bias, systematic bias, Thales and the olive presses, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, too big to fail, transaction costs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, ultimatum game, uptick rule, Upton Sinclair, US Airways Flight 1549, Walter Mischel, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Any fair game like a martingale will produce wins and losses in a random pattern like a “drunkard’s walk”—and as Bachelier discovered, so do the prices in the stock market. Today, we call Bachelier’s discovery the Random Walk Model of stock prices. Bachelier’s analysis was decades ahead of its time. In fact, Bachelier anticipated Albert Einstein’s very similar work in physics on Brownian motion—the random motion of a tiny particle suspended in fluid, among other things—by five years.14 From an economist’s perspective, however, Bachelier did much more than Einstein.15 Bachelier had come up with a general theory of market behavior, and he did so by arguing that an investor could never profit from past price changes.

Samuelson changed the course of economics, and in the process he gave everyone in the field a case of physics envy, for better or worse. His impact began with his 1947 Ph.D. thesis which, as mentioned earlier, was ambitiously titled (especially for a graduate student) Foundations of Economic Analysis. Even Albert Einstein never had the chutzpah to title any of his papers, “The Foundations of Modern Physics,” as he had every right to do. Not to give the story away, but history has confirmed what Samuelson already knew back in 1947—his thesis did, in fact, become the foundation of modern economics. Even today, every first-year economics Ph.D. student is required to absorb the ideas in Foundations.


How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States by Daniel Immerwahr

Albert Einstein, book scanning, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, citizen journalism, City Beautiful movement, clean water, colonial rule, company town, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Donald Trump, drone strike, European colonialism, fake news, friendly fire, gravity well, Haber-Bosch Process, Howard Zinn, immigration reform, land reform, Mercator projection, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, pneumatic tube, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, transcontinental railway, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wikimedia commons

Just as her husband was honing his invention, Clara wrote an anguished letter to her former scientific mentor: “What Fritz has gained in these last eight years, that—and even more—I have lost, and what is left of me fills with the deepest dissatisfaction.” Fritz had gained quite a lot. His invention won him the directorship of a new institute in Berlin and a central place within the German scientific establishment (a position he used to promote the career of a gifted young Jewish physicist named Albert Einstein). When World War I erupted, Haber volunteered his services. He suggested that the ammonia now pouring out of German fertilizer plants could be repurposed as explosives to bolster Germany’s dwindling munitions supplies. Since the war had cut Germany off from imported nitrates, this was an essential contribution.

Yet it was also, Churchill recognized, far from reality. English wasn’t a global lingua franca in 1943, and it didn’t seem likely to become one anytime soon. It had a daunting vocabulary, with its largest dictionaries containing some half a million words. Its spelling was a cruel farce. Even Albert Einstein had been brought to his knees by what he called English’s “underhanded orthography.” Churchill took these concerns seriously. In his Harvard speech, he declared his support for Basic, a drastically reduced version of English containing 850 words, only 18 of them verbs (come, get, give, go, keep, let, make, put, seem, take, be, do, have, see, say, send, may, and will).


pages: 651 words: 186,130

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perlroth

4chan, active measures, activist lawyer, air gap, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boeing 737 MAX, Brexit referendum, Brian Krebs, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Vincenzetti, defense in depth, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hacker News, index card, information security, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, lockdown, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral hazard, Morris worm, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, NSO Group, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open borders, operational security, Parler "social media", pirate software, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, Seymour Hersh, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

“The NSA’s fatal flaw is that it came to believe it was smarter than everyone else,” Peter G. Neumann, one of America’s sages of cybersecurity, told me one day. Neumann, now in his late eighties, is one of the few computer scientists—if not the only one—who can brag that he discussed the nation’s inherent vulnerabilities with Albert Einstein. And over the years he became a voice in the wilderness, warning officials at NSA, the Pentagon, and everyone down the chain that security flaws would one day make for disastrous consequences. There was an arrogance to the NSA’s work, Neumann told me. By inserting backdoors into any piece of technology it could get its hands on, the NSA assumed—to the country’s detriment—that all the flaws it was uncovering in global computer systems would not be discovered by someone else.

The whole time I’d been hunting for him in Miami, he was off the grid, walking a lonely narrow dirt path somewhere between Georgia and Maine. PART VI The Twister The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking … the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker. —ALBERT EINSTEIN CHAPTER 17 Cyber Gauchos Buenos Aires, Argentina Our cab charged through a red light, knocking the bumper off another car. I braced for a full stop and assumed we’d check on the other driver, make sure he was okay. But our driver didn’t flinch. Instead, he slammed on the gas, narrowly avoiding another car and a pothole the size of a small mule as we made our way through the Buenos Aires morning rush.


pages: 3,002 words: 177,561

Lonely Planet Switzerland by Lonely Planet

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, bike sharing, car-free, carbon footprint, Eyjafjallajökull, Frank Gehry, G4S, Guggenheim Bilbao, Higgs boson, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, low cost airline, messenger bag, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, smart cities, starchitect, trade route

oZytgloggeTOWER ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; Marktgasse) Bern’s most famous Old Town sight, this ornate clock tower once formed part of the city’s western gate (1191–1256). Crowds congregate to watch its revolving figures twirl at four minutes before the hour, after which the chimes begin. Tours enter the tower to see the clock mechanism from May to October; contact the tourist office for details. The clock tower supposedly helped Albert Einstein hone his special theory of relativity, developed while working as a patent clerk in Bern. oMuseum für KommunikationMUSEUM (Museum of Communication; MAP GOOGLE MAP ; %031 357 55 55; www.mfk.ch; Helvetiastrasse 16; adult/child Sfr15/5; h10am-5pm Tue-Sun) Fresh from extensive renovation and expansion, Bern's Museum of Communication opened its doors in August 2017.

Architectural Pilgrimages La Maison Blanche, La Chaux-de-Fonds Villa Le Lac, Corseaux Schaulager, Basel 7132 Therme, Vals Ballenberg Open-Air Museum, near Brienz E=mc², WWW & LSD: the Scientific Swiss The Swiss have more registered patents and Nobel Prize winners (mostly in scientific disciplines) per capita than any other nationality. It was while he was working in Bern (between 1903 and 1905) that Albert Einstein developed his special theory of relativity. German born, Einstein studied in Aarau and later in Zürich, where he trained to be a physics and maths teacher. He was granted Swiss citizenship in 1901 and, unable to find a suitable teaching post, wound up working as a low-paid clerk in the Bern patent office.


In Europe by Geert Mak

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, classic study, clean water, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, European colonialism, Ford Model T, German hyperinflation, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, Louis Blériot, Mahatma Gandhi, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, new economy, New Urbanism, post-war consensus, Prenzlauer Berg, Sinatra Doctrine, Suez canal 1869, the medium is the message, urban renewal

Perhaps it had to do with the way Wilhelm's Berlin had suddenly deflated like a balloon in 1918, leaving an enormous vacuum behind and the accompanying demand for new content, radically different forms and ideas. A cursory glance at the names of those who fled the city in the 1930s shows us something of the talent that had gathered in Berlin: Albert Einstein, Arnold Schönberg, Alfred Döblin, Joseph Roth, Heinrich Mann and his two children Klaus and Erika, Arthur Koestler, Marlene Dietrich, Hermann Ullstein. In the eyes of many, Berlin was a man-eating monster of machines, factories, anonymous housing blocks and speeding trains and cars. It served as the model for Metropolis, the masterpiece by Viennese-born cineaste Fritz Lang.

And they did not even want to know what those students read: Ernst Jünger's books about the mystical Männerbund that arises between warriors, Alfred Rosenberg's stories about the Jewish conspiracy, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck's treatise on the new Germany, Das Dritte Reich (1923), which envisioned a ‘spiritual volk community’ led by a single führer; each of these books were sold in huge numbers. They were blind, too, to the culture of political murders, to the intimidation to which a person like Albert Einstein, for example, was exposed. ‘I'm going to cut that dirty Jew's throat!’ a right-wing student had shouted during one of Einstein's lectures. Nor did they have a particularly clear view of the country's economic situation, shaky despite the seeming stability. In the cellars of Berlin police headquarters, close to Tempelhof airport, the dirty brown underworld of the 1920s is still on display for the rare visitor.

Every ten minutes a cheerful class of schoolchildren would pass by, led by a prim teacher wearing a lorgnette, and each class greeted him enthusiastically and in unison: ‘Juda verrecke!’ In the end, he was able to escape to London in 1938. Some had drawn their conclusions earlier, however, and had left the country after the 1932 elections. Albert Einstein left for California. George Grosz, who had already received threats, had a nightmare about the coming disaster and immediately, impulsive as he was, bought a ticket for America. Marlene Dietrich had harboured a deep hatred of the Nazis from the start. After 1932, she never set foot in Berlin again.


pages: 2,323 words: 550,739

1,000 Places to See in the United States and Canada Before You Die, Updated Ed. by Patricia Schultz

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, Burning Man, California gold rush, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, country house hotel, David Sedaris, Day of the Dead, Donald Trump, East Village, El Camino Real, estate planning, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, Mars Rover, Mason jar, Maui Hawaii, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murano, Venice glass, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, out of africa, Pepto Bismol, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, sexual politics, South of Market, San Francisco, Suez canal 1869, The Chicago School, three-masted sailing ship, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, wage slave, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

As if that’s not enough, the town was also site of a major battle of the Revolution; hosted the Continental Congress for five months in 1783 (during which time Britain finally recognized U.S. independence); was home to two U.S. presidents (Grover Cleveland and Woodrow Wilson); and was headquarters for Albert Einstein from 1932 to his death in 1955. The campus itself is gorgeous, a veritable garden of learning. At the main Nassau Street entrance, the 1905 wrought-iron FitzRandolph gate was designed by the great New York architectural firm McKim, Mead & White. The college’s first building, Nassau Hall, was constructed in 1756 as the largest academic building in the colonies, and today serves as the office of the university president.

Displays are arranged thematically, with separate galleries covering early flight, aviation milestones, jet aviation, rocketry, the space race, lunar exploration, and other topics. One gallery explains the principles of flight through 50-plus hands-on activities, while a flight simulator allows visitors to test-pilot dozens of different aircraft, including some that are in the museum’s collection. Regularly scheduled shows at the 220-seat Albert Einstein Planetarium simulate the heavens on a 70-foot overhead dome, and an IMAX theater shows films specially prepared for the museum on a screen five stories high and seven wide. The National Air and Space Museum maintains the largest collection of aircraft and spacecraft in the world. WHERE: Independence Ave between 4th and 7th Sts.

., streetcar; Evel Knievel’s Harley; the ruby slippers worn by Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz; 50,000 sound recordings dating back to 1903; a 280-ton steam locomotive; a 1926 Model T Ford; the first iron lung; life jackets from the Titanic; a collection of artificial limbs; the contents of an 1890s drugstore; an original model of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin; Albert Einstein’s pipe; a compass from the Lewis and Clark expedition; an original Jim Henson Kermit the Frog puppet; the bat Stan Musial used to collect his 3,000th hit; Muhammad Ali’s boxing gloves; Duke Ellington’s sheet music; Custer’s buckskin jacket; a display of presidential hair called “Locks of Hair from Distinguished Heads”; and some 150,000 other items, representing only a fraction of the three million in the museum’s total collection … wear comfortable shoes.


pages: 252 words: 74,167

Thinking Machines: The Inside Story of Artificial Intelligence and Our Race to Build the Future by Luke Dormehl

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bletchley Park, book scanning, borderless world, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, deep learning, DeepMind, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Flash crash, Ford Model T, friendly AI, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, hive mind, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet of things, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, out of africa, PageRank, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech billionaire, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

Already we carry out not dissimilar operations on humans for the purposes of life extension, whether it be removing dangerous tumours or giving people potentially life-saving transplants of vital organs. As one might expect from a person who had spent their career investigating intelligence, Minsky was of the opinion that minds were more complicated. He wrote: As a species we seem to have reached a plateau in our intellectual development. There’s no sign that we’re getting smarter. Was Albert Einstein a better scientist than Newton or Archimedes? Has any playwright in recent years topped Shakespeare or Euripides? We have learned a lot in 2,000 years, yet much ancient wisdom still seems sound – which makes me suspect that we haven’t been making much progress. We still don’t know how to deal with conflicts between individual goals and global interests.


pages: 230 words: 76,655

Choose Yourself! by James Altucher

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, cashless society, cognitive bias, dark matter, digital rights, do what you love, Elon Musk, estate planning, John Bogle, junk bonds, Mark Zuckerberg, mirror neurons, money market fund, Network effects, new economy, PageRank, passive income, pattern recognition, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Rodney Brooks, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, software as a service, Steve Jobs, superconnector, Uber for X, Vanguard fund, Virgin Galactic, Y2K, Zipcar

He enjoys his free time. He makes more money than 95 percent of the CEOs in the corporate world. I asked him why he was being so transparent. Why he was telling me everything. “Can’t anyone just copy what you do?” “Sure,” he says. “But I work really hard.” Compound Interest and Compound Abundance Albert Einstein supposedly said, “The eighth wonder of the world is compound interest.” The idea that if you put some money in the bank and let it sit there or invest it wisely it will somehow allow it to “compound” into millions of dollars by the time you need it does sound somewhat wondrous. This quote has been the underpinnings of many books, shows, marketing campaigns, and myths about personal finance.


pages: 237 words: 74,966

The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout

Albert Einstein, estate planning, long peace, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, Milgram experiment, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, risk tolerance, Rosa Parks, twin studies

Of course, though not everyone could be a death-camp commandant, many if not most people are capable of overlooking the horrific activities of such a person, owing to the viscosity of psychological denial, moral exclusion, and blind obedience to authority. Asked about our sense that we are not safe in our own world, Albert Einstein once said, “The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it.” To do something about shameless people, we must first identify them. So, in our individual lives, how do we recognize the one person out of (more or less) twenty-five who has no conscience and who is potentially dangerous to our resources and our well-being?


Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport

8-hour work day, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bluma Zeigarnik, business climate, Cal Newport, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, David Brooks, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, digital divide, disruptive innovation, do what you love, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, follow your passion, Frank Gehry, Hacker News, Higgs boson, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, knowledge worker, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Merlin Mann, Nate Silver, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Nicholas Carr, popular electronics, power law, remote working, Richard Feynman, Ruby on Rails, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, statistical model, the medium is the message, Tyler Cowen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, winner-take-all economy, work culture , zero-sum game

The New York Times called it “a richly textured account,” while the San Francisco Chronicle exulted that the two young writers had “fashioned a Cold War Plutarch.” Less than a decade later, Isaacson reached the apex of his journalism career when he was appointed editor of Time (which he then followed with a second act as the CEO of a think tank and an incredibly popular biographer of figures including Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, and Steve Jobs). What interests me about Isaacson, however, is not what he accomplished with his first book but how he wrote it. In uncovering this story, I must draw from a fortunate personal connection. As it turns out, in the years leading up to the publication of The Wise Men, my uncle John Paul Newport, who was also a journalist in New York at the time, shared a summer beach rental with Isaacson.


pages: 302 words: 74,878

A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life by Brian Grazer, Charles Fishman

4chan, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, Apple II, Asperger Syndrome, Bonfire of the Vanities, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, game design, Google Chrome, Howard Zinn, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Norman Mailer, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, out of africa, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple

* * * Join our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other great books from Simon & Schuster. CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP or visit us online to sign up at eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com Notes * * * Introduction: A Curious Mind and a Curious Book 1. Letter from Albert Einstein to his biographer Carl Seelig, March 11, 1952, cited in Alice Calaprice, ed., The Expanded Quotable Einstein (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). Chapter 1: There Is No Cure for Curiosity 1. This quote—perhaps the most razor-sharp take on curiosity’s power—is widely attributed to the writer and poet Dorothy Parker, but no scholarly or online source has a citation for when Parker might have written or said it.


pages: 258 words: 77,601

Everything Under the Sun: Toward a Brighter Future on a Small Blue Planet by Ian Hanington

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, Day of the Dead, disinformation, do what you love, energy security, Enrique Peñalosa, Exxon Valdez, Google Earth, happiness index / gross national happiness, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, hydraulic fracturing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Medieval Warm Period, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, planned obsolescence, precautionary principle, stem cell, sustainable-tourism, the scientific method, University of East Anglia, urban planning, urban sprawl

And so we’re consuming more, wasting more, polluting more, and using up more of the earth’s resources. Many people are understandably afraid of what we’ve gotten ourselves into. But we’ll never get out of a jam by plugging our fingers in our ears and going “lalalala” or pretending everything’s fine. The great scientist Albert Einstein once said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” Humans are creative and adaptable. We must imagine a brighter future if we are to create it. And we can. But we must apply new ways of thinking and seeing. Some people view the problems we have created as insurmountable.


pages: 290 words: 75,973

The Cloudspotter's Guide by Gavin Pretor-Pinney

Albert Einstein, haute couture, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Lao Tzu, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Seymour Hersh

People sent in their cloud photographs, which I put up on the gallery pages for others to look at. The early trickle of submissions soon swelled to a torrent. Stunning images were arriving of rare and beautiful formations: lenticularis wave-clouds over the peaks of the Swiss Alps, rippled Cirrocumulus layers in the warm hues of the sunrise, Cumulus clouds shaped like elephants, cats, Albert Einstein and Bob Marley. Soon, I had to start charging a nominal membership fee to cover costs, since people were joining from all over the world. They contributed cloud paintings and cloud poetry to be added to the site. I started a chat area, so that visitors would finally have a forum in which to discuss important cloud-related matters.


pages: 243 words: 74,452

Do Over: Rescue Monday, Reinvent Your Work, and Never Get Stuck by Jon Acuff

Albert Einstein, fear of failure, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Ruby on Rails, Skype, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Tony Hsieh

On Christmas day, in the year 1876, author Gustave Flaubert wrote Gertrude Tennant and said, “Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”3 I’m almost positive that “bourgeois” is French for “people who wear powdered wigs,” but that’s not the point. The point is that your willingness to discipline one part of your life creates freedom in another. This is a technique leaders throughout history have taken up. Like a guy named Albert Einstein. According to Forbes, “It has been reported that the famous physicist bought several versions of the same gray suit because he didn’t want to waste brainpower on choosing an outfit each morning.”4 President Barack Obama explained the idea even further, in an article in Vanity Fair written by Michael Lewis: “You also need to remove from your life the day-to-day problems that absorb most people for meaningful parts of their day.


pages: 239 words: 73,178

The Narcissist You Know by Joseph Burgo

Albert Einstein, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, en.wikipedia.org, financial independence, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, megaproject, Paul Graham, Peoples Temple, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, traveling salesman, WikiLeaks

“Nearly every one showed him striking a heroic pose while costumed in brightly colored but vaguely military uniforms that suggested the dandified garb of nineteenth-century European royalty, replete with cape, sword, ruffled collar, and, very often, a crown.”31 Above his bed hung a Last Supper painting that depicted him “sitting at the center of a long table flanked by Walt Disney on one side and Albert Einstein on the other, with Thomas Edison, Charlie Chaplin, Elvis Presley, John F. Kennedy, Abraham Lincoln, and Little Richard” around him.32 Although Michael began life as a Jehovah’s Witness and for many years avoided all drugs and alcohol, he eventually became addicted to prescription painkillers that he began using following injuries sustained to his scalp during the filming of a Pepsi commercial.


pages: 263 words: 75,455

Quantitative Value: A Practitioner's Guide to Automating Intelligent Investment and Eliminating Behavioral Errors by Wesley R. Gray, Tobias E. Carlisle

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, backtesting, beat the dealer, Black Swan, book value, business cycle, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, compound rate of return, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, discounted cash flows, Edward Thorp, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, forensic accounting, Henry Singleton, hindsight bias, intangible asset, Jim Simons, Louis Bachelier, p-value, passive investing, performance metric, quantitative hedge fund, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, statistical model, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, systematic trading, Teledyne, The Myth of the Rational Market, time value of money, transaction costs

There is some weak evidence that a five-year average ratio adds some value at the margin, but the evidence is not strong enough, and neither is it supported by other analyses, to be considered reliable. While it was a humbling exercise, we are now more confident than ever buying value stocks beats the market over the long haul, whichever price ratio we choose to examine. Albert Einstein once said that, “Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius—and a lot of courage—to move in the opposite direction.” Perhaps that is the message. While our results are mixed, one thing is clear: the single-year EBIT enterprise multiple performs very well, and long-term averages or composites can do no better.


pages: 231 words: 73,818

The Achievement Habit: Stop Wishing, Start Doing, and Take Command of Your Life by Bernard Roth

Albert Einstein, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, classic study, cognitive bias, correlation does not imply causation, deskilling, do what you love, fear of failure, functional fixedness, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, school choice, Silicon Valley, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, zero-sum game

Although excuses may seem to get you out of difficulty at the moment, in the long run they are often counterproductive. THE ISSUE OF TIME One of the biggest excuses we have for not getting things done is a lack of time. We all have the same twenty-four hours in a day, and yet what Mother Teresa, Albert Einstein, Bill Gates, and Martin Luther King Jr. accomplished in their days is a lot more than what many others have. The difference comes back to intention and attention. It’s not that they had extra time; it’s that they made time. When something is a priority in your life, you have to be willing to walk away from anything that’s standing in its way.


pages: 284 words: 79,265

The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date by Samuel Arbesman

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, bioinformatics, British Empire, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, data science, David Brooks, demographic transition, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Galaxy Zoo, Gregor Mendel, guest worker program, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, index fund, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, Kevin Kelly, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, Marc Andreessen, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, National Debt Clock, Nicholas Carr, P = NP, p-value, Paul Erdős, Pluto: dwarf planet, power law, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, scientific worldview, SimCity, social contagion, social graph, social web, systematic bias, text mining, the long tail, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation

(While Kuhn did not invent the word paradigm, he used it so much and so often that he is credited with its popularization.) For example, Newtonian gravitation is a very good theory, and has a great deal of explanatory power. But while Newtonian mechanics is actually still used for a large number of engineering applications, it has since given way to the theoretical worldview put forth by Albert Einstein. This change in perspective was termed a paradigm shift by Kuhn. Kuhn argued that switching from one paradigm to another is a messy process and often involves scientists digging in their heels to the extent that their retirement or death—with their attendant replacement by younger and more open minds—might be required for the new paradigm to become accepted.


pages: 240 words: 73,209

The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment by Guy Spier

Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, Bear Stearns, Benoit Mandelbrot, big-box store, Black Swan, book value, Checklist Manifesto, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Exxon Valdez, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Kenneth Arrow, Long Term Capital Management, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, NetJets, pattern recognition, pre–internet, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, risk free rate, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, two and twenty, winner-take-all economy, young professional, zero-sum game

What I really need is a plain, unobtrusive background that’s not overly exciting. And I’m certainly not alone in finding Zurich conducive to clear thought. Historically, the city has provided a space for free contemplation to residents as diverse as Carl Jung, James Joyce, Richard Wagner, Vladimir Lenin, and Albert Einstein—not to mention Tina Turner. It was also important that in Zurich I wouldn’t be surrounded by people in the investment business. This would make it easier to go against the crowd without the risk that their thinking would seep into my own mind. Zurich is also far enough off the beaten track that not too many people would visit me; the friends and relatives who cared the most would come, but I wouldn’t have to devote too much time to relationships that were less central to my life.


pages: 251 words: 76,868

How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, bank run, blood diamond, Bob Geldof, borderless world, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, charter city, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, congestion pricing, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, double entry bookkeeping, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, facts on the ground, failed state, financial engineering, friendly fire, global village, Global Witness, Google Earth, high net worth, high-speed rail, index fund, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, laissez-faire capitalism, Live Aid, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, microcredit, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open economy, out of africa, Parag Khanna, private military company, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, sustainable-tourism, Ted Nordhaus, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, X Prize

Like celebrity diplomats, this new vanguard of civic mediators and reconciliation movements shouldn’t be dismissed simply because they haven’t yet been able to undo the mess colonizers and corrupt governments have made. A peace made without the people is a piece of paper. Making Borders Irrelevant In the mid-twentieth century, Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein engaged in a long exchange of letters on the question “Why War?” They debated whether war originates in the human mind or if it is inherent in social existence, but agreed that war has been a permanent feature of human activity because communities naturally struggle to assert their identities and control territory.


pages: 237 words: 77,224

The Fracture Zone: My Return to the Balkans by Simon Winchester

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, borderless world, invention of movable type, Khyber Pass, mass immigration

., and, their power being harnessed to improve the lot of the then 4.9 million people of the planet, the Cold War ended, the Berlin Wall fell, and the atomic stalemate, which had dogged the global population for half a century, was ended. His conversation then veered into areas I could not possible understand—the nature of the five sub-atomic particles, the coincidence of the five levels of Vedic-inspired consciousness, the overlapping circles of energy, the works of Niels Bohr and Erwin Schrödinger and Albert Einstein, the role of the mantra in stimulating internal vibration. And then, on the verge of losing me, he wondered whether I might not come down to the congress and see the preparations under way to bring peace to the Balkans. The Dubrovnik Peace Project was being held in an airy resort hotel, the Mincenta, at the north end of town.


pages: 258 words: 73,109

The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone, Especially Ourselves by Dan Ariely

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Broken windows theory, cashless society, clean water, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, Credit Default Swap, Donald Trump, fake it until you make it, financial engineering, fudge factor, John Perry Barlow, new economy, operational security, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Shai Danziger, shareholder value, social contagion, Steve Jobs, Tragedy of the Commons, Walter Mischel

One version is the creative set, in which twelve of the twenty sentences include words related to creativity (“creative,” “original,” “novel,” “new,” “ingenious,” “imagination,” “ideas,” and so on). The other version is the control set, in which none of the twenty sentences includes any words related to creativity. Our aim was to prime some of the participants into a more innovative, aspiring mind-set à la Albert Einstein or Leonardo da Vinci by using the words associated with creativity. Everyone else was stuck with their usual mind-set. Once you complete the sentence task (in one of the two versions), you go back to the dots task. But this time you’re doing it for real money. Just as before, you earn half a cent for choosing the left side and 5 cents for choosing the right.


pages: 260 words: 77,007

Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google?: Trick Questions, Zen-Like Riddles, Insanely Difficult Puzzles, and Other Devious Interviewing Techniques You ... Know to Get a Job Anywhere in the New Economy by William Poundstone

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, cloud computing, creative destruction, digital rights, en.wikipedia.org, full text search, hiring and firing, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, index card, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, lateral thinking, loss aversion, mental accounting, Monty Hall problem, new economy, off-the-grid, Paul Erdős, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, sorting algorithm, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, The Spirit Level, Tony Hsieh, why are manhole covers round?, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

A helium balloon does the opposite of what a mass does because it’s a deficit of mass. The real mass—the air—is invisible. Interviewers who ask this question don’t expect you to know much physics. But there is an alternate response that makes use of the theory of relativity. Seriously. It relates to Albert Einstein’s famous thought experiment about the elevator. Imagine you’re in an elevator going to your tax preparer’s office, and a mischievous extraterrestrial decides it would be fun to teleport you and the elevator into intergalactic space. The elevator is sealed, so there’s enough air inside to keep you alive long enough to amuse the alien for a few minutes.


pages: 202 words: 72,857

The Wealth Dragon Way: The Why, the When and the How to Become Infinitely Wealthy by John Lee

8-hour work day, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, butterfly effect, buy low sell high, California gold rush, Donald Trump, financial independence, gentrification, high net worth, high-speed rail, intangible asset, Kickstarter, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, Maslow's hierarchy, multilevel marketing, negative equity, passive income, payday loans, reality distortion field, self-driving car, Snapchat, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, Tony Hsieh, Y2K

Failing is just finding another path that doesn't lead to your destination. The more times you fail, the closer you are to finding the right path. However, don't be stubborn. Don't ignore your failures; you must still learn and accept the ways you can't achieve your dreams. Going down the same path when you know it dead ends is not smart. As Albert Einstein said, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Yes, timing has a lot to do with success, but you must take action and keep taking action, and when your action doesn't produce the results you need, you must take a slightly different action.


pages: 280 words: 75,820

Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life by Winifred Gallagher

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Build a better mousetrap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, do what you love, epigenetics, Frank Gehry, fundamental attribution error, Isaac Newton, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, mirror neurons, music of the spheres, Nelson Mandela, off-the-grid, Paradox of Choice, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Walter Mischel, zero-sum game

Wouldn’t it be great if instead of just working out at the gym, we’d go off and focus on doing something that makes us better people?” PHILOSOPHY, RELIGION, AND psychology not only focus you on a larger reality and the creation of a better self and world, but also, albeit more recently for psychology, on the often overlooked fact that life is good and meant to be appreciated. As Albert Einstein put it, “There are two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” Traditionally, behavioral science has focused less on life’s goodness than on its struggles and pain. When Fred Bryant, a psychologist at Chicago’s Loyola University, combed his field’s archives for research on pleasure, what little information there was suggested that the point of enjoyment is to serve as an occasional “breather” that helps get you through hard times.


Microchip: An Idea, Its Genesis, and the Revolution It Created by Jeffrey Zygmont

Albert Einstein, Bob Noyce, business intelligence, computer age, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, invisible hand, popular electronics, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

A physician by training, Siepmann sidled into theoretical physics for its 218 MICROCHIP therapeutic value: He needed to engage his mind in order to fight off a severe depression that drove him out of medicine in 1998 when he was 38 years old. His musing brought him to conclusions that seemed to correct Albert Einstein's Special Theory of Relatively. When the official science circles spurned him, he set out to prove his ideas by building a device that uses them. The Light Clock he made in 2000 generates pulses at 10 billion ticks per second. Such speed can be very important to people who use computer chips.


pages: 236 words: 77,098

I Live in the Future & Here's How It Works: Why Your World, Work, and Brain Are Being Creatively Disrupted by Nick Bilton

3D printing, 4chan, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Cass Sunstein, death of newspapers, en.wikipedia.org, Internet of things, Joan Didion, John Gruber, John Markoff, Marshall McLuhan, Nicholas Carr, QR code, recommendation engine, RFID, Saturday Night Live, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, TED Talk, The future is already here

A history book about, say, the Civil War could include a video game instead of just having words and maps. After reading about the Battle of Gettysburg, for example, you might go into the battle as a soldier or a general and experience this turning point of the war “firsthand.” Or a biography of Albert Einstein could include an interactive avatar-like program of him. You could ask him questions about his life or about the theory of relativity. You could engage in an interactive conversation with an actor or read his papers together. To me, that sounds like a pretty compelling form of learning. This is the type of stimulation and learning the next generation may demand.


pages: 257 words: 72,251

Nothing to Hide: The False Tradeoff Between Privacy and Security by Daniel J. Solove

Albert Einstein, cloud computing, Columbine, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, invention of the telephone, Marshall McLuhan, national security letter, Oklahoma City bombing, security theater, the medium is the message, Timothy McVeigh, traffic fines, urban planning

Edgar Hoover, still at the helm of the FBI, ordered wiretapping of hundreds of people, including dissidents, Supreme Court justices, professors, celebrities, writers, and others. Among Hoover’s files were dossiers on John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, Charlie Chaplin, Marlon Brando, Muhammad Ali, Albert Einstein, and numerous presidents and members of Congress.19 When Justice William Douglas complained for years that the Supreme Court was being bugged and tapped, he seemed paranoid—but he was right.20 Protecting National Security: New Agencies and More Surveillance During the 1940s and 1950s, enormous threats to national security loomed on the horizon.


pages: 291 words: 77,596

Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything by Gordon Bell, Jim Gemmell

airport security, Albert Einstein, book scanning, cloud computing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Douglas Engelbart, full text search, information retrieval, invention of writing, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, language acquisition, lifelogging, Menlo Park, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, performance metric, RAND corporation, RFID, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Skype, social web, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Ted Nelson, telepresence, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, web application

It will have pictures of you that can be overlaid on a three-dimensional model. If someone should want to impersonate you, your lifelog will be the ultimate gold mine. There has already been some progress making avatars that answer as the individual would have. Carnegie Mellon University researchers have created a program that lets you interview Albert Einstein. I’ve invested in a company called MyCyberTwin, whose software trains an instant messenger (IM) avatar how to answer as you would. You just give it content from your own IM conversations, e-mail, blog, et cetera, and it learns how to imitate you—it becomes your “cyber twin.” MyCyberTwin analyzed transcripts of the television show The Simpsons to create a cyber twin for Bart Simpson, who had the following chat with me: You: What’s up?


pages: 252 words: 79,452

To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death by Mark O'Connell

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Picking Challenge, artificial general intelligence, Bletchley Park, Boston Dynamics, brain emulation, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, computer age, cosmological principle, dark matter, DeepMind, disruptive innovation, double helix, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, Elon Musk, Extropian, friendly AI, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, impulse control, income inequality, invention of the wheel, Jacques de Vaucanson, John von Neumann, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, life extension, lifelogging, Lyft, Mars Rover, means of production, military-industrial complex, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, profit motive, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, Skype, SoftBank, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, superintelligent machines, tech billionaire, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Coming Technological Singularity, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, uber lyft, Vernor Vinge

One drug Laura was especially excited by was a treatment for type 2 diabetes called metformin, which prevented the release of excess sugar into the bloodstream, and slowed the rate of cell turnover. It had been proven in tests, she said, to significantly expand the life spans of mice. Not long after we spoke, I read a news report on how the United States Food and Drug Administration had approved a five-to-seven-year clinical trial of metformin in humans, to be conducted at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, called Targeting Aging with Metformin (or TAME). I did a Google News search for the drug, and found an article in The Telegraph, which featured an interview with Laura—a “science wunderkind” who was “spearheading research into ‘magic’ anti-aging drugs.” The headline, above a photograph of Laura performing tests in her laboratory, was a classic of the just-asking-a-question-here school of newspaper headline writing: “Could This Pill Be the Key to Eternal Youth?”


Yes Please by Amy Poehler

airport security, Albert Einstein, blood diamond, carbon footprint, David Sedaris, do what you love, Donald Trump, East Village, gentrification, Google Hangouts, Pepto Bismol, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Skype, the medium is the message

Scenes were connected, characters lived in different worlds, and most shows were built around a theme. The premise was that a group called the Upright Citizens Brigade worked out of an underground bunker. We rarely used pop culture or parody, except for the always popular Unabomber, Harry Truman, Albert Einstein, and Jesus. RZA from the Wu-Tang Clan once played a neighbor who lived underground next to us and lent the UCB some sugar. The show ran for three seasons, and in those few short years I learned how to be in front of a camera, how to manage an incredibly long workday, and how truly awful it is to wear prosthetics.


pages: 280 words: 71,268

Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World With OKRs by John Doerr

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Big Tech, Bob Noyce, cloud computing, collaborative editing, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Haight Ashbury, hockey-stick growth, intentional community, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, knowledge worker, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, Ray Kurzweil, risk tolerance, Salesforce, scientific management, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, web application, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

What business leaders have learned, very painfully, is that individuals cannot be reduced to numbers. Even Peter Drucker, the champion of well-measured goals, understood the limits of calibration. A manager’s “first role,” Drucker said, “is the personal one. It’s the relationship with people, the development of mutual confidence . . . the creation of a community.” Or as Albert Einstein observed, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” To reach goals almost beyond imagining, people must be managed at a higher level. Our systems for workplace communication cry out for an upgrade. Just as quarterly OKRs have rendered pro forma annual goals obsolete, we need an equivalent tool to revolutionize outdated performance management systems.


pages: 267 words: 71,941

How to Predict the Unpredictable by William Poundstone

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, Bernie Madoff, Brownian motion, business cycle, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, buy low sell high, call centre, centre right, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Edward Thorp, Firefox, fixed income, forensic accounting, high net worth, index card, index fund, Jim Simons, John von Neumann, market bubble, money market fund, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, power law, prediction markets, proprietary trading, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Rubik’s Cube, statistical model, Steven Pinker, subprime mortgage crisis, transaction costs

His MIT master’s thesis described how symbolic logic could be encoded in electrical circuits, and how those circuits might compute using binary 0s and 1s rather than decimal digits. This was one of the founding documents of the computer age. Shannon spent a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. His first wife, Norma, poured tea for Albert Einstein one time, who “told me I was married to a brilliant, brilliant man.” That was before Shannon published the work for which he’s most renowned, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication.” The 1948 paper established the science of information theory. In Shannon’s revolutionary vision, information is one of the world’s fundamentals, on a par with matter and energy, and subject to laws of its own.


pages: 317 words: 79,633

Buzz: The Nature and Necessity of Bees by Thor Hanson

airport security, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, Columbine, Gregor Mendel, Honoré de Balzac, if you build it, they will come, Nelson Mandela, new economy, out of africa, wikimedia commons

When people figured that trick out in the early nineteenth century, production shifted from Mexico (where the orchids and their associated bees are native) to sites throughout the tropics, depriving Mexican growers of what had been a lucrative vanilla monopoly. The Future of Bees To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, One clover, and a bee. And revery. The revery alone will do, If bees are few. —Emily Dickinson, undated CHAPTER NINE Empty Nests The important thing is to not stop questioning. —Albert Einstein, “Old Man’s Advice to Youth” (1955) The meadow stretched seductively across a small mountain basin fringed by oak, fir, and ponderosa. From the edge I could see dozens of different wildflowers in full bloom—spires of purple lupine towering over a riot of asters, geraniums, saxifrage, and vetch.


pages: 273 words: 21,102

Branding Your Business: Promoting Your Business, Attracting Customers and Standing Out in the Market Place by James Hammond

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, call centre, Donald Trump, intangible asset, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, market design, Nelson Mandela, Pepsi Challenge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Steve Jobs, the market place

Businesses need to understand that – more than at any other time in history – the way to a customer’s wallet or purse is not just via the head but must include – and indeed focus on – the heart. Now that we have learned just how important emotions are, we need to understand how we actually trigger them in our customer experience. 3 Perception is reality Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one. Albert Einstein THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK 52 3 How perception creates emotion So far, we’ve seen that emotion is at the heart and core of a powerful brand. But what has to happen, and how, for emotions to be invoked in customers? In the past decade or so, a greater emphasis has been placed on what has become known as ‘customer care’.


pages: 259 words: 73,193

The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection by Michael Harris

4chan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Burning Man, Carrington event, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, dematerialisation, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Google Glasses, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, Loebner Prize, low earth orbit, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, moral panic, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Plato's cave, pre–internet, Republic of Letters, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social web, Steve Jobs, technological solutionism, TED Talk, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, traumatic brain injury, Turing test

I’m a wimp on the beach and my own phone is the jock kicking sand in my face. Is there value, still, in a human memory when a computer’s can surpass it so effortlessly? How much abler, how much more proficient, seems the miracle of computerized recall. What a relief to rely on the unchanging memory of our machines. Albert Einstein said we should never memorize anything that we could look up. That’s practical and seemingly good advice. When I off-load my memory to a computer system, I am freed up, I cast off a certain mental drudgery. But what would Einstein have said if he knew how much of our lives, how much of everything, can be looked up now?


Designing Search: UX Strategies for Ecommerce Success by Greg Nudelman, Pabini Gabriel-Petit

access to a mobile phone, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, business intelligence, call centre, cognitive load, crowdsourcing, folksonomy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Neal Stephenson, Palm Treo, performance metric, QR code, recommendation engine, RFID, search costs, search engine result page, semantic web, Silicon Valley, social graph, social web, speech recognition, text mining, the long tail, the map is not the territory, The Wisdom of Crowds, web application, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Note—Mobile faceted search needs to balance customers’ needs to both refine results and maintain their search-refinement flows against the limited screen real estate and fat-finger issues. You must especially guard against introducing false simple-mindedness in the name of simplicity. Simplicity is a great goal, but as John Maeda said in his masterful book, The Laws of Simplicity (The MIT Press, 2006), “Some things can never be made simple.” Using the words of Albert Einstein, we have to strive to make the most of the available tools and make user interfaces “as simple as possible, but not simpler.” The design patterns that follow make the most of the available screen real estate, while providing intuitive and useful search-results refinement capabilities and improving the mobile faceted search experience.


pages: 244 words: 76,192

Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done by Larry Bossidy

Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, business process, complexity theory, financial engineering, Iridium satellite, Long Term Capital Management, megaproject, NetJets, old-boy network, shareholder value, six sigma, social software, Socratic dialogue, supply-chain management

Shaping the broad picture into a set of executable actions is analytical, and it’s a huge intellectual, emotional, and creative challenge. Nobel Prize winners succeed because they execute the details of a proof that other people can replicate, verify, or do something with. They test and discover patterns, connections, and linkages that nobody saw before. It took Albert Einstein more than a decade to develop the detailed proof explaining the theory of relativity. That was the execution—the details of proof in mathematical calculations. The theorem would not have been valid without the proof. Einstein could not have delegated this execution. It was an intellectual challenge that nobody else could meet.


pages: 238 words: 77,730

Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything by Stephen Baker

23andMe, AI winter, Albert Einstein, artificial general intelligence, behavioural economics, business process, call centre, clean water, commoditize, computer age, Demis Hassabis, Frank Gehry, information retrieval, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, job automation, machine translation, pattern recognition, Ray Kurzweil, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, statistical model, The Soul of a New Machine, theory of mind, thinkpad, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

His concern deepened as Watson started to strike out on questions that should have been easy. One Final Jeopardy clue, in the category 20th-Century People, looked like a cinch. It said: “The July 1, 1946, cover of Time magazine featured him with the caption, ‘All matter is speed and flame’” (“Who is Albert Einstein?”). Watson displayed its top answers on its electronic panel. They were all ridiculous, and to the machine’s credit, it had rock-bottom confidence in them. First was Time 100, a list of influential people that at one time included Einstein. But Watson should have known that the clue was asking for a “him,” not an “it.”


pages: 257 words: 76,785

Shorter: Work Better, Smarter, and Less Here's How by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

8-hour work day, airport security, Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Brexit referendum, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, centre right, classic study, cloud computing, colonial rule, death from overwork, disruptive innovation, Erik Brynjolfsson, future of work, game design, gig economy, Henri Poincaré, IKEA effect, iterative process, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, Johannes Kepler, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, means of production, neurotypical, PalmPilot, performance metric, race to the bottom, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, tech worker, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional, zero-sum game

The problem of coordinating time across thousands of miles, of making all the clocks in a network strike the hour at exactly the same instant—and knowing that you had succeeded—turned out to be exceptionally hard, and building timekeeping systems for railroads occupied the efforts of many clockmakers, especially in Switzerland. These designs passed through the patent office in Bern, where they were read by a young examiner with a keen interest in time. Albert Einstein saw that clockmakers’ efforts raised profound questions about how time and space are related. When he published his famous article on the theory of special relativity, Einstein used the problem of coordinating railroad network time as an illustration of the broader problem of measuring time and space.


Great Continental Railway Journeys by Michael Portillo

Albert Einstein, bank run, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Louis Blériot, railway mania, Suez canal 1869, trade route

The line was eventually completed in 1940, a triumph in Germany’s police state of ‘Drang nach Osten’, or ‘push east’. Railways carried tourists through a stunning river valley to Cologne where they could buy a celebrated scent. But Germany’s railway ambitions elsewhere caused problems for the British government Time travel on the Einstein Express When Albert Einstein (1879–1955) published his paper ‘Relativity: The Special and the General Theory’ in 1916, he used the analogy of a train travelling at speed past an embankment. He was trying to explain one of the trickiest truths for non-mathematicians to grasp – that time passes differently depending on where you are and what you’re doing.


pages: 227 words: 76,850

Scarred: The True Story of How I Escaped NXIVM, the Cult That Bound My Life by Sarah Edmondson

Albert Einstein, dark matter, financial independence, Keith Raniere, Mason jar, Skype, Steve Jobs, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, young professional

The concept of having someone who would hold me accountable to my goals and impart wisdom and transformational practices was a big sell, even if there were other parts of the ESP pitch that didn’t quite resonate. The cover of the pamphlet featured the images of figures like Martin Luther King Jr. and Albert Einstein—people I knew hadn’t achieved their success through NXIVM. OK, I thought, don’t be judgy, Sarah. As I paged through the pamphlet, I found blocks of text with headings like “An Extraordinary Resource That Can Change Your Life!” and the word Ethos, always accompanied by the trademark symbol in superscript; the worksheets they handed out read: Copyright 1999, Executive Success Programs, Inc.


pages: 286 words: 79,305

99%: Mass Impoverishment and How We Can End It by Mark Thomas

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, additive manufacturing, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banks create money, behavioural economics, bitcoin, business cycle, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, circular economy, complexity theory, conceptual framework, creative destruction, credit crunch, CRISPR, declining real wages, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, fake news, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, Gini coefficient, gravity well, income inequality, inflation targeting, Internet of things, invisible hand, ITER tokamak, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Own Your Own Home, Peter Thiel, Piper Alpha, plutocrats, post-truth, profit maximization, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tyler Cowen, warehouse automation, wealth creators, working-age population

In mathematics, the Law of Quadratic Reciprocity has no exceptions – and no exception will ever be found because the law has a rigorous proof. In physics, there were no known exceptions to Newton’s laws until the late-nineteenth century when it became clear that, at speeds approaching the speed of light, reality deviated significantly from Newton’s assumptions. A more accurate description of reality was developed by Albert Einstein with his special and general theories of relativity. Nevertheless, for most normal purposes, Newton’s laws are accurate enough even today. Crucially, scientists are clear about the circumstances when this is not the case. In the case of many economic ‘laws’, however, exceptions are commonplace.


pages: 289 words: 81,679

Why the Jews?: The Reason for Antisemitism by Dennis Prager, Joseph Telushkin

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, ghettoisation, Herbert Marcuse, Mikhail Gorbachev, Norman Mailer

And Third World Marxist countries in which no Jews live (such as China and Vietnam) also have supported groups seeking to destroy Israel and deny Jewish national rights. 23 For example, China voted for the 1975 UN resolution delegitimizing Israel by equating Zionism with racism; in 2002, China refused to permit a long-planned exhibition about Albert Einstein to open unless references to Einstein’s being a Jew and a Zionist were eliminated (the exhibition was withdrawn).Leftists in democratic societies also generally oppose Israel, Zionism, and Jewish nationalism. Soviet Antisemitism From its inception in 1917, the Soviet Union was implacably hostile toward Jewish religious and national expressions.


pages: 235 words: 74,577

Trading in the Zone: Master the Market With Confidence, Discipline and a Winning Attitude by Mark J. Douglas

Albert Einstein, buy and hold, Elliott wave, glass ceiling, pattern recognition, zero-sum game

Beliefs can be altered, but not in the way that most people may think. I believe that once a belief has been formed, it cannot be destroyed. In other words, there is nothing we can do that would cause one or more of our beliefs to cease to exist or to evaporate as if they never existed at all. This assertion is founded in a basic law of physics. According to Albert Einstein and others in the scientific community, energy can neither be created nor destroyed; it can only be transformed. If beliefs are energy—structured, conscious energy that is aware of its existence—then this same principle of physics can be applied to beliefs, meaning, if we try to eradicate them, it’s not going to work.


Genentech The Beginnings of Biotech (Synthesis) -University Of Chicago Press (2011) by Sally Smith Hughes

Albert Einstein, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, barriers to entry, creative destruction, full employment, industrial research laboratory, invention of the wheel, Joseph Schumpeter, mass immigration, Menlo Park, power law, prudent man rule, Recombinant DNA, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley

Boyer would respond, “I don’t know—cure the common cold.” 11 His answer was 7 INVENTING RECOMBINANT DNA TECHNOLOGY dismissive, but his father’s question prompted him to ponder the practical utility of his research. Cohen meanwhile had begun a postdoctoral research fellowship (1965–67) in molecular biology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. It was here he stopped wavering between a career in medicine or science. He decided to pursue both, apparently expecting the rewards of a dual career to outbalance its tensions and frantic pace. He took up research on plasmids, tiny rings of DNA in the cytoplasm of bacterial cells that reproduce outside the main chromosome.


pages: 261 words: 74,471

Good Profit: How Creating Value for Others Built One of the World's Most Successful Companies by Charles de Ganahl Koch

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, big-box store, book value, British Empire, business process, commoditize, creative destruction, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, Garrett Hardin, global supply chain, hiring and firing, income per capita, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, low interest rates, oil shale / tar sands, personalized medicine, principal–agent problem, proprietary trading, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Salesforce, Solyndra, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing

Frederich Hayek, New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics and the History of Ideas (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), pp. 63–64. 2. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary, ed. Steven R. Weisman (New York: PublicAffairs, 2010), p. 2. 3. Paul Arthur Schilpp, ed., Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, 3rd ed., Library of Living Philosophers, vol. 7 (Peru, Ill.: Open Court Publishing, 1970), pp. 659–60. Chapter 12: CONCLUSION 1. http://​www.​washingtonpost.​com/​opinions/​walter-​isaacson-​the-​america-ben-​franklin-saw/​2012/​11/​21/​8094bfca-​3411-​11e2-​bfd5-​e202b6d7b501_story.​html. 2.


pages: 256 words: 73,068

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next by Jeanette Winterson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, digital rights, discovery of DNA, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, flying shuttle, friendly AI, gender pay gap, global village, Grace Hopper, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, housing crisis, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, lockdown, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microdosing, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, OpenAI, operation paperclip, packet switching, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Plato's cave, public intellectual, QAnon, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, spinning jenny, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, TikTok, trade route, Turing test, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

Inside were twelve leather-bound papyrus codices, written in Coptic, probably translated from Aramaic or Greek originals, and dating from the 3rd and 4th centuries, though one of them, the Gospel of Thomas, may be dated as early as 80 years after the death of Jesus Christ. The books were mainly Gnostic texts. Gnosis, in Greek, means ‘knowledge’, but not the knowledge that comes from study; rather, a knowledge of the ultimate essence of Self and World. We know the word in English from agnostic, and Albert Einstein called himself agnostic – someone who doesn’t ‘know’ rather than someone who doesn’t believe in the existence of God, in whatever shape or form. Gnosis isn’t science; science depends on objective measurement and repeatable demonstrations, and how do you measure a deep sense of what is known – that can’t, at least at the time, be proved by any available method or metric?


pages: 296 words: 78,227

The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More With Less by Richard Koch

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, always be closing, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, business cycle, business process, delayed gratification, fear of failure, Ford Model T, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, inventory management, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, knowledge worker, profit maximization, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, The future is already here, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave

In some ways this is worrying, since there is almost nobody in the intelligentsia or society as a whole who can integrate different advances in knowledge and tell us what it all means. But in other ways, the fragmentation is further evidence of the need for and value of specialization. And for the individual, observing the increasing trend of rewards going to the top dogs, this is an extremely hopeful process. You may have no hope of becoming Albert Einstein or even Bill Gates, but there are literally hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of niches where you can choose to specialize. You could even, like Gates, invent your own niche. Find your niche. It may take you a long time, but it is the only way you will gain access to exceptional returns.


The Trauma Chronicles by Westaby, Stephen

Albert Einstein, British Empire, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, James Dyson, lockdown, Nelson Mandela, social distancing, Stephen Hawking

I was well familiar with circulatory support devices used to save dying heart attack patients in the US and Europe. The NHS wouldn’t fund them even in cardiac surgery centres. ‘Scoop and run’ or ‘Stay and play’ Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid. Albert Einstein You may assume from my comments that I have reservations about pre-hospital care. It should go without saying that I have the highest regard for ambulance staff and paramedics who do a difficult job on a daily basis. In fact, I would regularly invite them into the operating theatre to watch their case if they had the time.


pages: 789 words: 207,744

The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning by Jeremy Lent

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Atahualpa, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, complexity theory, conceptual framework, dematerialisation, demographic transition, different worldview, Doomsday Book, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Firefox, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of gunpowder, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jevons paradox, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, language acquisition, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, mandelbrot fractal, mass immigration, megacity, Metcalfe's law, Mikhail Gorbachev, move 37, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, peak oil, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, scientific management, Scientific racism, scientific worldview, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological singularity, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, ultimatum game, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, wikimedia commons

All people are my brothers and sisters; all things are my companions.62 Later Neo-Confucian thought on ren can well be understood as further elaborations of the framework established by this magnificent vision of human existence.63 While this sense of the ultimate unity of the universe might seem unscientific to many in the Western tradition, that was not the perception of perhaps the greatest modern physicist, Albert Einstein. “A human being,” he wrote, “is part of a whole, called by us ‘the Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us.

With its conceptual foundation of li and qi, it provides a coherent framework for systems-based interpretations of age-old Western philosophical issues such as how mind arises from the brain, what the basis of ethics and morality is, and how to live harmoniously and sustainably in the natural world. In Albert Einstein's view, the religious feeling of the scientist “takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection.” This intelligence, for the Neo-Confucians, was the self-organized creation of the natural world manifesting in what they called the Tao.70 In Neo-Confucian thought, the great Western divide between science and spiritual meaning is nowhere to be found.


pages: 602 words: 207,965

Practical Ext JS Projects With Gears by Frank Zammetti

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Albert Einstein, corporate raider, create, read, update, delete, database schema, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Firefox, full text search, Gordon Gekko, Kickstarter, Larry Wall, leftpad, loose coupling, Ronald Reagan, web application

Herman lives in a small town, Pijnacker, in the Netherlands with his wife Liesbeth and their children, Barbara, Leonie, and Ramon. You can reach him via e-mail at herros@gmail.com. xv About the Illustrator ■anthOnY vOLPE. What can be said about Anthony? He draws. He draws really well. He drew the illustrations for this book. His artistic ability is to Frank’s as Albert Einstein’s intelligence is to . . . well, anyone else really! That’s why Anthony’s illustrations have appeared in all of Frank’s books so far. Besides, they are far better than Frank’s stick figures that would otherwise be in their place! Not only that, but he happens to be a longtime friend of Frank to boot.

Here, both of the portlets would “subscribe” to a given type of message that the background process would “publish.” Here’s the way it works. There is an entity, some sort of message processor, or 4 A thought experiment is a proposal for an experiment that would test a hypothesis. Thought experiments are a popular, and sometimes the only feasible, option to test theories in various scientific disciplines. Albert Einstein postulated most of general and special relativity based on little more than thought experiments! 505 506 Ch apt er 9 n Ma Na G ING YOU r FINa NC eS : F I N a N C e M a S t e r message bus as it is often called, that has two methods, publish() and subscribe(). The two portlets call the subscribe() method.


pages: 601 words: 193,225

740 Park: The Story of the World's Richest Apartment Building by Michael Gross

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, Donald Trump, Glass-Steagall Act, Irwin Jacobs, it's over 9,000, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, junk bonds, McMansion, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, plutocrats, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes, short selling, strikebreaker, The Predators' Ball, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, urban planning

Eisenhower took office a month later, and a heartbroken Duke was certain he would be fired but won a six-month reprieve thanks to his brother, who’d met Eisenhower in London just before D-day and prevailed upon him to let Angie stay in El Salvador. “Eventually, he had to give in to the political pressure,” Tony says, but Angie had time to arrange another job that let him stay in the diplomatic arena, president of the International Rescue Committee. Founded in 1933 at the suggestion of Albert Einstein to help refugees from Nazi Germany, and later Mussolini’s Italy and Franco’s Spain, the IRC had, by the 1950s, turned its attention to refugees from the Soviet Union and Communist regimes in Southeast Asia. Duke came on board just before the Soviets crushed the Hungarian revolution in 1956 and began bringing doctors, scientists, and dissidents to safety in the West.

Uncle Sam was perhaps even better known for his philanthropy, raising millions for Jewish causes and running several of the largest, as well as the Red Cross, the Boy Scouts, the United Negro College Fund, and the Young Women’s Christian Association. “I’m the best schnorrer in town,” he’d boast, using the Yiddish word for “beggar.” He was also instrumental in founding the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, New Jersey (where he met and became financial adviser to Albert Einstein), and creating New York University Medical Center (he’d wanted to be a doctor as a child but lacked the funds). He proudly told the story of how he thought it was a hoax the day the elder John D. Rockefeller called to ask advice on how to give away money. He became friends with the family, though he was not, as Tova likes to boast, the godfather of Junior’s children.


pages: 296 words: 86,188

Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong-And the New Research That's Rewriting the Story by Angela Saini

Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, classic study, demographic transition, Drosophila, feminist movement, gender pay gap, Large Hadron Collider, meta-analysis, mouse model, out of africa, place-making, scientific mainstream, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, women in the workforce

When mathematician Emmy Noether was put forward for a faculty position at the University of Göttingen during the First World War, one professor complained, “What will our soldiers think when they return to the university and find that they are required to learn at the feet of a woman?” Noether lectured unofficially for the next four years under a male colleague’s name and without pay. Albert Einstein described her in the New York Times after her death as “the most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced since the higher education of women began.” Even by the Second World War, when more universities were opening up to female students and faculty, they continued to be treated as secondclass citizens.


pages: 298 words: 84,394

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

Albert Einstein, illegal immigration, language acquisition, Schrödinger's Cat, Skype, theory of mind, your tax dollars at work

It wasn’t a bad setting for us, very old-school, as if we’d stepped back a decade or more to our childhoods, though perhaps a bit too brightly lit. The Muzak was even older—Beach Boys and Supremes. “Be True to Your School.” “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.” Our parents’ music. We were the only customers. A waiter who looked like a young Albert Einstein came immediately and took our order for two pieces of banana cream pie. He delivered them with some cheerful remarks about the weather, pointing out the window to where the rain had started again—“The drought is over! The drought is over!”—and then went away. My brother’s face across the table was more and more like our dad’s.


pages: 294 words: 80,084

Tomorrowland: Our Journey From Science Fiction to Science Fact by Steven Kotler

adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, Alexander Shulgin, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Biosphere 2, Burning Man, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Colonization of Mars, crowdsourcing, Dean Kamen, Dennis Tito, epigenetics, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, Helicobacter pylori, interchangeable parts, Kevin Kelly, life extension, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, North Sea oil, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, personalized medicine, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, private spaceflight, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, theory of mind, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

This concept of an indivisible particle, a fundamental building block for all of nature, had staying power, holding fast for nearly two thousand years — then crumbling within thirty. Things got wobbly in the late 1890s, when, in short succession, researchers discovered X-rays, radioactivity, and, finally, the first radioactive elements. Then, in 1905, Albert Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity proposed that a large amount of energy could be stored in a very small amount of matter. Twenty-seven years later, Ernest Walton and John Cockcroft verified this suspicion and proved Democritus wrong. Turns out, the atom is divisible. In 1935, Enrico Fermi and Leó Szilárd leveraged this knowledge to build the Chicago Pile-1, the world’s first nuclear reactor.


The Supermen: The Story of Seymour Cray and the Technical Wizards Behind the Supercomputer by Charles J. Murray

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Charles Babbage, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, John von Neumann, lateral thinking, pattern recognition, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Salesforce, Silicon Valley

He was well-known for his penchant to build revolutionary, rather than evolutionary, products. He had forged a reputation as an engineer who tackled tough projects, then made them work against all odds. In a rare speaking engagement during 1988, he was introduced to the audience by a Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist who joked that he couldn't decide whether to call Cray the "Albert Einstein of supercomputing," or the "Thomas Edison of supercomputing," or the "Evel Knievel of . " supercomputIng. Now, however, Cray Research needed to steer clear of the Evel Knievel mentality. So Rollwagen arranged an extraordinary deal: The company would send Crayon his way to a new facility in Col- orado Springs with $100 million in cash and $50 million in assets.


pages: 312 words: 86,770

Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo by Sean B. Carroll

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Brownian motion, classic study, dark matter, Drosophila, Gregor Mendel, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Stuart Kauffman, the long tail, the scientific method

Steve Paddock, a longtime member of my research group, compiled and arranged the color artwork. I am grateful for the care everyone put into each image and I am thrilled at the results. Much of the artwork was contributed by colleagues around the world and is the fruit of their field and laboratory research. Albert Einstein came close to the mark when he wrote: A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving.


The Disciplined Trader: Developing Winning Attitudes by Mark Douglas

Albert Einstein, conceptual framework, fear of failure, financial independence, prediction markets, risk tolerance, the market place

For a long time the scientific community believed that the atom was the smallest, most fundamental building block of existence, only to discover later that within an atom is energy. What scientists haven't figured out yet is how does something that exists without mass (the energy within the atom) become something that does have mass—the atom. In other words, how does energy go from being non-physical to physical. Albert Einstein was once asked to give his definition of matter and he said "Matter is merely energy in a form that we can perceive by our senses." Even at the atomic level the book you are now reading and the chair you are sitting on to read it appear to your senses as if they are solid. However, that is not the case at all.


Picture by Lillian Ross

Albert Einstein

he asked in a loud voice. He tilted his cigar to a sharp angle and pointed a finger at himself. "Mine," he said. "England was just wonderful in the war," Huston said. "You always wanted to stay up all night. You never wanted to go to sleep," Reinhardt said, "I'll bet I'm the only producer who ever had Albert Einstein as an actor." Attention now focussed on him. He said that he had been making an Army film called "Know Your Enemy—Germany," the beginning of which showed some notable German refugees. "Anthony Veiller, a screen writer who was my major, told me to tell Einstein to comb his hair before we photographed him.


pages: 360 words: 85,321

The Perfect Bet: How Science and Math Are Taking the Luck Out of Gambling by Adam Kucharski

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, butterfly effect, call centre, Chance favours the prepared mind, Claude Shannon: information theory, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, diversification, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Thorp, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Flash crash, Gerolamo Cardano, Henri Poincaré, Hibernia Atlantic: Project Express, if you build it, they will come, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, locking in a profit, Louis Pasteur, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, p-value, performance metric, Pierre-Simon Laplace, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, statistical model, The Design of Experiments, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

With each image, Picasso carved further, keeping only the crucial contours, until he reached the eleventh lithograph. Almost every detail had gone, with nothing left but a handful of lines. Yet the shape was still recognizable as a bull. In those few strokes, Picasso had captured the essence of the animal, creating an image that was abstract, but not ambiguous. As Albert Einstein once said of scientific models, it was a case of “everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” Abstraction is not limited to the worlds of art and science. It is common in other areas of life, too. Take money. Whenever we pay with a credit card, we are replacing physical cash with an abstract representation.


pages: 289 words: 85,315

Fermat’s Last Theorem by Simon Singh

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Arthur Eddington, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, Bletchley Park, Fellow of the Royal Society, Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John von Neumann, kremlinology, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, RAND corporation, Rubik’s Cube, Simon Singh, Wolfskehl Prize

His greatest contribution to mathematics was his development of calculus, and in later years physicists would use the language of calculus to better describe the laws of gravity and to solve gravitational problems. Newton’s classical theory of gravity survived intact for centuries until it was superseded by Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which developed a more detailed and alternative explanation of gravity. Einstein’s own ideas were only possible because of new mathematical concepts which provided him with a more sophisticated language for his more complex scientific ideas. Today the interpretation of gravity is once again being influenced by breakthroughs in mathematics.


Propaganda and the Public Mind by Noam Chomsky, David Barsamian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, deindustrialization, digital divide, European colonialism, experimental subject, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, interchangeable parts, language acquisition, liberation theology, Martin Wolf, one-state solution, precautionary principle, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, structural adjustment programs, Thomas L Friedman, Tobin tax, Washington Consensus

From the 1950s, particularly in the United States, he was bitterly denounced and attacked as a crazy old man who was anti-American. Why? Because he was standing up for the principles that other intellectuals also accepted, but he was doing something about it. For example, Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein, to take another leading intellectual, essentially agreed on things like nuclear weapons. They thought nuclear weapons might well destroy the species. They signed similar statements, I think even joint statements. But then they reacted differently. Einstein went back to his office in the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton and worked on unified field theories.


pages: 272 words: 83,378

Digital Barbarism: A Writer's Manifesto by Mark Helprin

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, computer age, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, Easter island, hive mind, independent contractor, invention of writing, Jacquard loom, lateral thinking, plutocrats, race to the bottom, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, the scientific method, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

And I wonder what my father, whose first automobile, at the beginning of the last century, was actually a horse, would think about the PDA-calendar entries that advertisements present as typical: 11:00 a.m. Power Point Presentation for Putin and Brad Pitt. 12:00 p.m. Sushi with Jason 2:00 p.m. Help Jennifer Move Into Loft 4:00 p.m. Drinks with Albert Einstein at Sphere 6:00 p.m. Sushi with Kaitlin and One-Armed Jack 8:00 p.m. Indonesian Film Festival, Bring Skateboard and Hitler Puppet Not so long ago, it would have been impossible to find people with lives like this: that is, poseurs of fashion with brains the size of cocktail onions.


pages: 285 words: 81,743

Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle by Dan Senor, Saul Singer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, Benchmark Capital, Boycotts of Israel, call centre, Celtic Tiger, clean tech, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Fairchild Semiconductor, friendly fire, Gene Kranz, immigration reform, labor-force participation, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, new economy, pez dispenser, post scarcity, profit motive, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, smart grid, social graph, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Suez crisis 1956, unit 8200, web application, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

Professor Chaim Weizmann, a world-renowned chemist who helped launch the field of biotechnology with his invention of a novel method of producing acetone, commented on this oddity at the inauguration of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem on July 24, 1918: “It seems at first sight paradoxical that in a land with so sparse a population, in a land where everything still remains to be done, in a land crying out for such simple things as ploughs, roads, and harbours, we should begin by creating a centre of spiritual and intellectual development.”16 The Hebrew University’s first board of governors included Weizmann, Israel’s first president, as well as Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, and Martin Buber. The Technion was founded in 1925. The Weizmann Institute of Science followed in 1934 and, in 1956, Tel Aviv University—the largest university in Israel today. Thus by the late 1950s, Israel’s population was only around the two million mark and the country already had the seeds of four world-class universities.


pages: 302 words: 84,428

Mastering the Market Cycle: Getting the Odds on Your Side by Howard Marks

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, business cycle, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, Isaac Newton, job automation, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, secular stagnation, short selling, South Sea Bubble, stocks for the long run, superstar cities, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, transaction costs, uptick rule, VA Linux, Y2K, yield curve

In short, the details are unimportant and can be irrelevant. But the themes are essential, and they absolutely do tend to recur. Understanding that tendency—and being able to spot the recurrences—is one of the most important elements in dealing with cycles. Finally, I want to bring in the definition of insanity that Albert Einstein is credited with: “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” When people invest in things after they’ve been carried aloft because “everyone knows” they’re both flawless and underpriced—thinking they offer high returns without risk of loss—that’s insanity. Such beliefs have been defrocked in the aftermath of every bubble.


Green Economics: An Introduction to Theory, Policy and Practice by Molly Scott Cato

Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, Bretton Woods, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, congestion charging, corporate social responsibility, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, deskilling, energy security, food miles, Food sovereignty, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, gender pay gap, green new deal, income inequality, informal economy, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job satisfaction, land bank, land reform, land value tax, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, Money creation, mortgage debt, Multi Fibre Arrangement, passive income, peak oil, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Rupert Read, seminal paper, the built environment, The Spirit Level, Tobin tax, tontine, University of East Anglia, wikimedia commons

Schumacher (1998) ‘Introduction’, in This I Believe, Totnes: Green Books. See details in Douthwaite, ‘Economics of Responding’. I. Illich (1974) Tools for Conviviality, London: Marion Boyars. PART 3 Policies for a Green Economy 7 The Policy Context We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them. Albert Einstein As the ecological crisis has moved towards the centre of political debate, the pioneers of policy responses have found their consensus over solutions challenged by newcomers with a range of prescriptions based in a whole variety of ideological outlooks. As a colleague recently pointed out to me, before very long the only issue in the social sciences will be the environmental crisis.


pages: 284 words: 84,169

Talk on the Wild Side by Lane Greene

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Boris Johnson, deep learning, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, framing effect, Google Chrome, Higgs boson, illegal immigration, invisible hand, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, machine translation, meta-analysis, Money creation, moral panic, natural language processing, obamacare, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Snapchat, sparse data, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, Turing test, Wall-E

I do not wish to exaggerate this, and it is certainly true that non-Jews too, such as Darwin at the beginning of the period and Lord Keynes in more recent times, have had their nonsense presented as majestic contributions to human knowledge. Nevertheless, if asked to name the three men whose writings had the greatest influence in shaping the modern world, few would go beyond Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein. Explanations for the phenomenon, adequate or otherwise, are suggested elsewhere in other papers that I have written. Here I record only the fact and the inference that can be derived from it. The Jews are entering into what they believe to be their inheritance. Gwynne’s theories don’t stop there.


Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything by Lydia Kang, Nate Pedersen

Albert Einstein, complexity theory, driverless car, Edward Jenner, germ theory of disease, helicopter parent, Honoré de Balzac, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Louis Pasteur, placebo effect, stem cell, the scientific method, traumatic brain injury, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, wikimedia commons, Y2K

., increase orgone levels) by building up your libido through sitting for a long time and having your orgones reflected back at you. Well, hey, after sitting in a box for four hours, sex undoubtedly felt pretty awesome. Now just sit in this box until you feel aroused. Considering that we are literally talking about an empty box to sit in, the orgone boxes were surprisingly popular for a brief period of time. Albert Einstein was even lured into trying one out, but he quickly lost patience with the box—and with Reich’s theories in general—after a short stint inside. William S. Burroughs, the author of Naked Lunch, however, was a dyed-in-the-wool convert. He built his own orgone box (technically against the rules, but Burroughs wasn’t exactly a rule follower) and would spend hours inside as a way to reduce symptoms of “junk sickness” (i.e., heroin withdrawal).


pages: 332 words: 81,289

Smarter Investing by Tim Hale

Albert Einstein, asset allocation, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, classic study, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate governance, credit crunch, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, full employment, Future Shock, implied volatility, index fund, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, John Bogle, John Meriwether, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, managed futures, Northern Rock, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, South Sea Bubble, technology bubble, the rule of 72, time value of money, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Tip 2: Harness the power of compounding and time Compounding, as I am sure you are aware, is the effect of interest-on-interest. For example, a portfolio of £100 that compounds by 10% a year rises to £110 in year one, to £121 in year two, £133 in year three and so on. The effect of compounding returns is central to investing success and goes hand-in-hand with time. Its effects are exponential. Albert Einstein is commonly credited with the often-quoted statement that: ‘[Compounding] is the greatest mathematical discovery of all time.’ Table 2.1 illustrates some simple rates of return compounded over different periods of time. As you can see, compounding and time make a significant difference. While the difference between £100 compounded at 8% versus 10% over five years is only small (£147 versus £161), over forty years you would lose out on over half of your potential future wealth, i.e. £2,172 instead of £4,526.


pages: 309 words: 81,975

Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization? by Aaron Dignan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, basic income, benefit corporation, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, butterfly effect, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, DevOps, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Elon Musk, endowment effect, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, gender pay gap, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Goodhart's law, Google X / Alphabet X, hiring and firing, hive mind, holacracy, impact investing, income inequality, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, loose coupling, loss aversion, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, mirror neurons, new economy, Paul Graham, Quicken Loans, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, remote working, Richard Thaler, Rochdale Principles, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, six sigma, smart contracts, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, source of truth, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The future is already here, the High Line, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, uber lyft, universal basic income, WeWork, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Blockchain and cryptocurrencies enable massively distributed collaboration via decentralized autonomous organizations and other alternatives to traditional incorporation or partnership. A new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels. —Albert Einstein Is a future like that even possible? It depends who you ask. A legacy economist might scoff, but a renegade economist such as Kate Raworth would say we have no choice. Raworth is part of a new movement in economics that’s questioning whether growth is truly the solution to all our problems, or if it might be time to transform our economic OS.


pages: 301 words: 85,126

AIQ: How People and Machines Are Smarter Together by Nick Polson, James Scott

Abraham Wald, Air France Flight 447, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, business cycle, Cepheid variable, Checklist Manifesto, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Edward Charles Pickering, Elon Musk, epigenetics, fake news, Flash crash, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Higgs boson, index fund, information security, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, late fees, low earth orbit, Lyft, machine translation, Magellanic Cloud, mass incarceration, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Moravec's paradox, more computing power than Apollo, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, North Sea oil, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, p-value, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, ransomware, recommendation engine, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, speech recognition, statistical model, survivorship bias, systems thinking, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, young professional

It took the bombing of Pearl Harbor to rouse the American people from their torpor, but roused they were at last. Young men surged forward to enlist. Women joined factories and nursing units. And scientists rushed to their labs and chalkboards, especially the many émigrés who’d fled the Nazis in terror: Albert Einstein, John von Neumann, Edward Teller, Stanislaw Ulam, and hundreds of other brilliant refugees who gave American science a decisive boost during the war. Abraham Wald, too, was eager to answer the call. He was soon given the chance, when his colleague W. Allen Wallis invited him to join Columbia’s Statistical Research Group.


pages: 283 words: 81,376

The Doomsday Calculation: How an Equation That Predicts the Future Is Transforming Everything We Know About Life and the Universe by William Poundstone

Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Arthur Eddington, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, conceptual framework, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, DeepMind, digital map, discounted cash flows, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Elon Musk, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, Higgs boson, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sam Altman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, tech billionaire, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, time value of money, Turing test

Feigenbaum, a pioneer of that theory, demonstrated that many phenomena are fundamentally unpredictable. In 1996 he founded Numerix, a firm using Bayesian probability to price financial derivatives for the so-called rocket scientists of Wall Street. To the right of Mitchell, though easily missed, is the familiar face of Albert Einstein, shown in profile. The speeding rocket and slow-growing hemlock allude to Einstein’s thought experiments of racing trains and light beams, used to develop his theory of relativity. Standing in front of Einstein is Benoit Mandelbrot, the IBM mathematician who described the concept of fractals.


pages: 308 words: 87,238

Apollo 11: The Inside Story by David Whitehouse

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Charles Lindbergh, Gene Kranz, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, operation paperclip

By the autumn, after the typical hot and humid summer, von Braun and the first wave of his engineers were collating the V-2 documents and teaching the military what they knew about rockets. They set about assembling and launching a number of V-2s from the White Sands missile base in New Mexico. Many did not approve of von Braun’s presence in the US. In December 1946 President Truman received a letter signed by Albert Einstein and others protesting at German scientists living and working in the US. ‘We hold these individuals to be potentially dangerous carriers of racial and religious hatred,’ the letter read. They were not allowed to leave their quarters without a military escort, so von Braun and his colleagues jokingly referred to themselves as ‘Pops’ – prisoners of peace.


pages: 432 words: 85,707

QI: The Third Book of General Ignorance (Qi: Book of General Ignorance) by John Lloyd, John Mitchinson

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Boris Johnson, British Empire, California gold rush, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, dark matter, double helix, epigenetics, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, music of the spheres, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, out of africa, Ronald Reagan, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route

Ryan attributed Pugwash’s success to his two competing qualities – greed and cowardice. He said, ‘It may be that the Captain is popular because we all have something in common with him. What would you do if you saw a delicious toffee on the nose of a crocodile?’ After the Second World War a group of scientists, including Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell, published the Russell–Einstein Manifesto calling for nuclear disarmament. Looking for a place to discuss the issues away from government scrutiny, Canadian businessman Cyrus Eaton offered to fund it if they chose his house in Pugwash, Nova Scotia. They called themselves the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs.


Rethinking Money: How New Currencies Turn Scarcity Into Prosperity by Bernard Lietaer, Jacqui Dunne

3D printing, 90 percent rule, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, clockwork universe, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, conceptual framework, credit crunch, different worldview, discounted cash flows, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, happiness index / gross national happiness, holacracy, job satisfaction, John Perry Barlow, liberation theology, low interest rates, Marshall McLuhan, microcredit, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, more computing power than Apollo, new economy, Occupy movement, price stability, reserve currency, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, urban decay, War on Poverty, working poor

With these distinctions between the conventional competitive system and the emergent cooperative money system, how would a new divergent monetary ecology work in practical terms? Chapter Five THE FUTURE HAS ARRIVED BUT ISN’T DISTRIBUTED EVENLY . . . YET! There is not the slightest indication that we will ever be able to harness atomic energy. Albert Einstein, 1932 (13 years before the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima) A quiet revolution is happening that has, for the most part, gone underreported. The number of contemporary cooperative currencies operating in the Western world has grown exponentially from two in 1984 to more than 4,000 mature systems today.


The Armchair Economist: Economics and Everyday Life by Steven E. Landsburg

Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, business cycle, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, first-price auction, German hyperinflation, Golden Gate Park, information asymmetry, invisible hand, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, low interest rates, means of production, price discrimination, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, random walk, Ronald Coase, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, statistical model, the scientific method, Unsafe at Any Speed

Ordinarily, textbooks establish these propositions through graphs, equations, and intricate reasoning. The little story that I learned from David Friedman makes the same propositions blindingly obvious with a single compelling metaphor. That is economics at its best. The Iowa Car Crop 199 V The Pitfalls of Science CHAPTER 22 WAS EINSTEIN CREDIBLE? The Economics of Scientific Method In 1915, Albert Einstein announced his general theory of relativity and some of its remarkable implications. The theory "predicted" an aberration in the orbit of Mercury that had been long observed but never explained. It also predicted something new and unexpected, concerning the way light is bent by the sun's gravitational field.


pages: 292 words: 88,319

The Infinite Book: A Short Guide to the Boundless, Timeless and Endless by John D. Barrow

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Charles Babbage, cosmological principle, dark matter, Edmond Halley, Fellow of the Royal Society, Georg Cantor, Isaac Newton, mutually assured destruction, Olbers’ paradox, prisoner's dilemma, Ray Kurzweil, scientific worldview, short selling, Stephen Hawking, Turing machine

He was burned alive at the stake in Venice on 17 February 1600 and never recanted his beliefs. COSMOLOGY GOES UNDERGROUND ‘Oh dear, what can the matter be?’ Folk song10 Astronomers are still interested in the question of whether the Universe is finite or infinite, but they recognise that there is a raft of subtleties attached to this question. In 1915, Albert Einstein provided us with a new theory of gravity that could describe the Universe as a whole. This theory introduced a new conception of space and time. Both are fashioned by the distribution and motion of the mass and energy they contain. Universes that contain too great a density of matter will have their geometries curved up into a finite volume while emptier spaces can extend unfurled, forever.


pages: 281 words: 79,464

Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion by Paul Bloom

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Asperger Syndrome, Atul Gawande, autism spectrum disorder, classic study, Columbine, David Brooks, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Ferguson, Missouri, Great Leap Forward, impulse control, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Paul Erdős, period drama, Peter Singer: altruism, public intellectual, publication bias, Ralph Waldo Emerson, replication crisis, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, Walter Mischel, Yogi Berra

This argument is sometimes made by academics, which, as Steven Pinker points out, is rather ironic, given that academics “are obsessed with intelligence. They discuss it endlessly in considering student admissions, in hiring faculty and staff, and especially in their gossip about one another.” Some fields are deeply invested in the concept of genius, revering those special individuals like Albert Einstein and Paul Erdős who are of such great intelligence that everything comes easy to them. But when it comes to intelligence, there is a law of diminishing returns. The difference between an IQ of 120 and an IQ of 100 (average) is going to be more important than the difference between 140 and 120.


pages: 227 words: 81,467

How to Be Champion: My Autobiography by Sarah Millican

Albert Einstein, call centre, Downton Abbey, index card, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Nelson Mandela, Nick Leeson

As we walked through briskly, an old Indian man came up to us and asked why there were two Nelson Mandelas. He was a great man but it seemed odd. Then we pointed out to him that the Nelson Mandela standing between Brad Pitt and John Travolta was actually Morgan Freeman. Gary wanted to have his photo taken with Captain Jean-Luc Picard and Albert Einstein, so we nailed those two, but in the world-leader room he decided he wanted a quick picture with Hitler. You know, for a laugh. The room was almost empty so he got in position, arm around his shoulders, like pals on a night out. I took a pic. He started to release his arm. ‘It’s all blurry,’ I said, so I took another.


pages: 260 words: 87,958

A Sting in the Tale by Dave Goulson

Albert Einstein, carbon footprint, Ralph Waldo Emerson, urban sprawl

One old-fashioned technique that was used by butterfly collectors was to place a well-rotted dead rat on a woodland ride. Beautiful though the butterflies are, they have a macabre taste for the juices that leak from such a corpse and are often lured down. CHAPTER SIXTEEN A Charity Just for Bumblebees If honey bees become extinct, human society will follow in four years. Albert Einstein Although this quote is oft-repeated, it is almost certain that Einstein did not actually say this. There is no record of when or where he said it, and I don’t think he was prone to making sweeping statements on subjects in which he had no expertise. It is also almost certainly incorrect. It would undoubtedly be a disaster for some crops, and would put even more pressure on the global food supply which is steadily being stretched ever further by the growing human population.


pages: 312 words: 84,421

This Chair Rocks: A Manifiesto Against Ageism by Ashton Applewhite

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Downton Abbey, fixed income, follow your passion, ghettoisation, Google Hangouts, hiring and firing, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, life extension, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Naomi Klein, obamacare, old age dependency ratio, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, stem cell, the built environment, urban decay, urban planning, white picket fence, women in the workforce

Diverse challenges are best, though, according to a blue-chip twenty-one-year study that looked at which recreational activities benefit the mind, measured against the onset of dementia.20 Board games topped the list, followed by reading, and playing a musical instrument. Frequent partner dancing reduced the risk by a whopping 76 percent—higher than any activity, mental or physical, studied by the Albert Einstein College of Medicine researchers. Note the adjective frequent. Once every so often won’t do the trick for any of these activities. Nor will rote repetition. The key is the split-second decision-making involved in leading or following or learning new dance steps or adjusting to changes in style or rhythm, which integrates several brain functions at once and builds neural pathways.


pages: 263 words: 81,527

The Mind Is Flat: The Illusion of Mental Depth and the Improvised Mind by Nick Chater

Albert Einstein, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, classic study, computer vision, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, double helix, Geoffrey Hinton, Henri Poincaré, Jacquard loom, lateral thinking, loose coupling, machine translation, speech recognition, tacit knowledge

And such freedom and creativity does not depend on rare seeds of genius, or the occasional spark of inspiration; it is fundamental to the basic operation of the brain – how we perceive, dream, talk. Our freedom has its limits, of course. Amateur saxophonists can’t ‘freely’ choose to play like Charlie Parker, new learners of English can’t spontaneously emulate Sylvia Plath, and physics students can’t spontaneously reason like Albert Einstein. New actions, skills and thoughts require building a rich and deep mental tradition; and there is no shortcut to the thousands of hours needed to lay down the traces on which expertise is based. And for each of us, our tradition is unique: with those thousands of hours each of us will lay down different traces of thoughts and actions, from which our new thoughts and actions are created.


pages: 297 words: 84,447

The Star Builders: Nuclear Fusion and the Race to Power the Planet by Arthur Turrell

Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, carbon tax, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, Donald Trump, Eddington experiment, energy security, energy transition, Ernest Rutherford, Extinction Rebellion, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Higgs boson, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), ITER tokamak, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, lockdown, New Journalism, nuclear winter, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, precautionary principle, Project Plowshare, Silicon Valley, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tunguska event

It said that mass and energy were different sides of the same coin. Mass could become energy, and energy could become mass. It was a wild idea. Impressively, the physicist in question had published this theory along with three others that challenged fundamental concepts in physics in 1905. His name was Albert Einstein.11 The Secrets of Atomic Energy The theory of Einstein’s that Eddington had in mind to explain the minute differences in mass of atoms said that the relationship between an object’s mass, when it is not moving, and its energy is E=mc2 where E is energy, c is the speed of light (a gut-wrenching 300 million meters, almost a billion feet, per second), and m is the mass difference that Aston found.


pages: 265 words: 79,747

Happier at Home: Kiss More, Jump More, Abandon Self-Control, and My Other Experiments in Everyday Life by Gretchen Rubin

A Pattern Language, airport security, Albert Einstein, clean water, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Everything should be made as simple as possible, knowledge worker, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, placebo effect, Saturday Night Live, Telecommunications Act of 1996

After the first year, one of my housemates said kindly, “The thing about living with you, Gretchen, is that you don’t subtract, and you don’t add. You never leave a mess, and you never bring home a dessert or call the cable guy.” Which was so obviously true that it didn’t even hurt my feelings. I was always telling myself, “Keep it simple.” But as Albert Einstein pointed out, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” I was made happier by my decision to bring paper plates, not home-baked muffins, to Eleanor’s start-of-school party, but “Keep it simple” wasn’t always the right response. Many things that boosted my happiness also added complexity to my life.


Voyage for Madmen by Peter Nichols

Albert Einstein, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, Etonian, Mercator projection, Stephen Hawking

Beneath the bunk and the saloon seats and into every pocket of the main hull he stored more food, life jackets, flares and signal flags, the film camera given to him by the BBC, sailing manuals, instruction manuals, water jugs, his harmonica, sextant, medical supplies, hot water bottle, pilot books, and the few books he had brought with him: technical reads with titles such as Servo-Mechanisms, Mathematics of Engineering Systems and a couple of sea books, Shanties from the Seven Seas and Chichester’s Gypsy Moth IV Circles the World. He had told Clare he didn’t want any novels. Instead, for inspirational reading, he had brought Relativity, the Special and General Theory, by Albert Einstein. He had enough Tupperware containers filled with electronic parts to start a small factory: boxes and boxes of transistors, condensers, resisters, switches, valves, circuit boards, wire, plugs, and sockets. These were things over which Crowhurst had mastery; they were the components and currency of his particular brilliance, out of which he could always fashion order no matter what chaos lay scattered elsewhere.


When Money Dies by Adam Fergusson

Albert Einstein, British Empire, fixed income, full employment, large denomination, plutocrats, Right to Buy, South Sea Bubble, strikebreaker

He described France's demand of over 3 milliards a year as based on the 'fallacy, which deceives many Frenchmen, that the extremity of France's need enlarges Germany's capacity,' In the meantime, however, Keynes, who was promptly invited with other independent experts to Germany to advise on measures to arrest the mark's fall, considered a 'breathing space' was essential before payments were resumed in even a modest way. Albert Einstein, too, had views on the reparation problem as the fundamental cause of the mark's illness, and forwarded to Lord Haldane an article from the Berliner Tageblatt suggesting that Britain and France participate in German industry to the extent of 30 per cent of the share capital. Einstein, who desired Haldane to arrange 'so that my name shall not be given publicity in connection with this matter' considered it a happy solution.


Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything by Kelly Weill

4chan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Big Tech, bitcoin, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, cryptocurrency, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, income inequality, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, mass immigration, medical malpractice, moral panic, off-the-grid, QAnon, recommendation engine, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, tech worker, Tesla Model S, TikTok, Timothy McVeigh, Wayback Machine, Y2K

When his ship landed in New York after his second voyage in 1931, he was even firmer in his beliefs (he’d determined somehow that Antarctica was like a “rim of mashed potato” around a plate) and spoiling for a fight. He tried picking one with the world’s best theoretical physicist. “Learning that Prof. Albert Einstein, a rival savant who goes in for curves, was in town, Mr. Voliva at once dispatched Carl L. Huth, his secretary, in search of the German scientist with a challenge to debate,” the Chicago Tribune reported. “Unfortunately Prof. Einstein was preparing to sail.” In Einstein’s absence, Voliva attempted to save face by announcing that he’d studied Einstein’s theory of relativity and that “it is pure bunk.


Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks by Keith Houston

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Boeing 747, Charles Babbage, classic study, computer age, cuban missile crisis, Donald Knuth, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, means of production, Multics, packet switching, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, trade route, wikimedia commons

* * * Nowadays it seems natural to consider the asterisk the senior partner and the dagger its subordinate. Most obviously, the asterisk appears before the dagger when used to label footnotes, but it takes the lead in other contexts too: in European typography, dates of birth are marked with an asterisk and deaths with a dagger—“Albert Einstein (*1879),” or “Herman Melville (†1891)”—and in the specialized musical notation of Gregorian chant, the asterisk and dagger indicate long and short pauses respectively.1 The typographer Robert Bringhurst goes as far as to declare that the asterisk is a staggering five thousand years old, which would make it not only the dagger’s elder sibling but also by far the oldest mark of punctuation of any stripe.2 The reality is not so simple.


pages: 736 words: 210,277

1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War by Benny Morris

Albert Einstein, British Empire, family office, friendly fire, illegal immigration, mass immigration, Mount Scopus, Suez crisis 1956

Both former US secretary of state Edward Stettinius, who headed an American-Liberian development company, and Harvey Firestone, whose Firestone Rubber Company owned plantations in Liberia and imported rubber, Liberia's main (or only) export, were mobilized to threaten a boycott unless Liberia voted for partition. Jan Smuts, prime minister and foreign minister of South Africa, was also recruited to pressure Monrovia.95 Liberia duly switched from abstention to "aye." India, represented on UNSCOP, was vigorously lobbied from summer 1947, even though its pro-Arab stance was stark and consistent 96 Even Albert Einstein was mobilized. Hayim Greenberg, a member of the American Section of the JAE and a man of letters, approached the physicist and then drafted Einstein's letter to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.97 Einstein brandished morality rather than political interests or legalisms. The Jews, he wrote, had been history's victims "for centuries."

Both Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the Muslim Indian leader, had written Arab League secretary Azzam early on assuring him that "they regarded Palestine as an Arab country and would support the Arab cause" (Ronald Campbell, Cairo, to FO, z8 April 1947, PRO FO 371-61875)- 97. Hayim Greenberg to Albert Einstein, 5 June 1947; Helen Dukas (Einstein's secretary) to Greenberg, 9 June 1947; and Greenberg to Dukas, 11 June 1947, all in ISA FM 92/34. 98. Einstein to Nehru, 13 June 1947, and Nehru to Einstein, ,, July 1947, both in ISA FM 92/34. The file contains a response to Nehru's letter-drafted for Einstein by another Zionist official, Eliahu Ben-Horin-but it is unclear whether Einstein sent it.


pages: 420 words: 219,075

Frommer's New Mexico by Lesley S. King

Albert Einstein, clean water, company town, Day of the Dead, El Camino Real, machine readable, off-the-grid, place-making, post-work, quantum cryptography, Ronald Reagan, SpaceShipOne, sustainable-tourism, trade route, Virgin Galactic, X Prize

It traces the history of nuclear-weapons development, beginning with the top-secret Manhattan Project of the 1940s, and continues with explanations of nuclear use in power, medicine, and energy. The displays utilize interactive and touch-screen devices—one even calculates your exposure to radiation. There’s also a kid’s area that explores the science of Albert Einstein. You’ll find full-scale casings of the “Fat Man” and “Little Boy” bombs, as well as a running roster of films exploring the atomic age. 601 Eubank SE (at Southern). & 505/245-2137. Fax 505/242-4537. www.atomicmuseum.com. Admission $8 adults, $7 seniors, $7 children 6–17, free for children 5 and under.

Although the museum is run by Los Alamos National Laboratory, which definitely puts a positive spin on the business of producing weapons, it’s a fascinating place to learn about— through dozens of interactive exhibits—the lab’s many contributions to science. Begin in the History Gallery, where you’ll learn about the evolution of the site from the Los Alamos Ranch School days through the Manhattan Project to the present, including a 1939 letter from Albert Einstein to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, suggesting research into uranium as a new and important source of energy. Next, move into the Research and Technology Gallery, where you can see work that’s been done on the Human Genome Project, including a computer map of human DNA. You can try out a laser and learn about the workings of a particle accelerator.


pages: 723 words: 211,892

Cuba: An American History by Ada Ferrer

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, company town, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francisco Pizarro, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Joan Didion, land reform, land tenure, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, rent control, Ronald Reagan, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, yellow journalism, young professional

Havana, according to one popular travel book, was fast “becoming a second home for that section of the smart set which formerly spent its winters on the Riviera.” The pillars of American aristocracy went there: the Vanderbilts, the Whitneys, the Astors. So did celebrities of all kinds: Amelia Earhart, Irving Berlin, Charles Lindbergh, Gary Cooper, Gloria Swanson, Langston Hughes, Albert Einstein, New York City mayor Jimmy Walker, the presidents of Coca-Cola and Chase National Bank. John Bowman, owner of the Biltmore chain of hotels, who already owned one posh hotel in Havana, built the Havana-Biltmore Yacht and Country Club. He advertised it as the “Greatest Place on Earth.” It was so great that the ads for it required that every letter be capitalized: “SOME DAY BILTMORE-HAVANA WILL BE PRESCRIBED BY PHYSICIANS.”

They were salesmen traveling with their wives, earnest honeymooners, church groups, lonely widows and widowers, and just plain, well-meaning vacationers. Some may have seen risqué floor shows, but they also flocked to more sedate diversions, to sunny beaches and first-rate jazz shows, perhaps even to the 1921 World Chess Championship, held in Havana and won by Cuban chess genius José Raúl Capablanca, who retained the title until 1927. Albert Einstein, who visited Havana in 1930 to speak before the National Academy of Sciences, knew that the city had to be more than the sleek hotels and shows and insisted on visiting poor neighborhoods and shantytowns. Other Americans came to fish, to recover their health, to watch winter baseball, or to play it.


pages: 302 words: 87,776

Dollars and Sense: How We Misthink Money and How to Spend Smarter by Dr. Dan Ariely, Jeff Kreisler

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Burning Man, collateralized debt obligation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, endowment effect, experimental economics, hedonic treadmill, IKEA effect, impact investing, invisible hand, loss aversion, mental accounting, mobile money, PalmPilot, placebo effect, price anchoring, Richard Thaler, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, the payments system, Uber for X, ultimatum game, Walter Mischel, winner-take-all economy

If a bottle of expensive shampoo is $16 and one twice the size is $25, all of a sudden the larger, more expensive bottle looks like a great deal, making it easy to forget the question of whether we really need that much, or that brand of, shampoo in the first place. Moreover, the bulk discounting practice also serves to hide the fact that we have no clue how to value the cocktail of chemicals that make up shampoo. Had Albert Einstein been an economist rather than a physicist, he might have changed his famous theory of relativity from E = MC2 to $100 > Half Off of $200. DOLLARS AND PERCENTS We might look at those examples and think, “Okay, I understand how using relativity is a mistake.” That’s good! “Buuuuuuut . . .” you’re probably saying, “Those choices make sense because, as a percentage of what I’m spending, the extra expenditures are tiny.”


pages: 371 words: 93,570

Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet by Claire L. Evans

4chan, Ada Lovelace, air gap, Albert Einstein, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Babbage, colonial rule, Colossal Cave Adventure, computer age, crowdsourcing, D. B. Cooper, dark matter, dematerialisation, Doomsday Book, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, East Village, Edward Charles Pickering, game design, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Haight Ashbury, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, junk bonds, knowledge worker, Leonard Kleinrock, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, Network effects, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, PalmPilot, pets.com, rent control, RFC: Request For Comment, rolodex, San Francisco homelessness, semantic web, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telepresence, The Soul of a New Machine, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Y2K

Grace, still new at the lab but handy with a differential equation, assisted every step of the way. Neither Grace nor Richard knew the specifics of the problem’s application; to them, it was only an interesting mathematical challenge. And von Neumann was a character, a garrulous Hungarian theoretician who was as much of a celebrity in his day as his Princeton colleague Albert Einstein. As Bloch and von Neumann worked on the problem, they’d run back and forth between the conference room and the computer, von Neumann calling out numbers just as the Mark I would spit them out, “ninety-nine percent of the time,” Grace observed admiringly, “with the greatest of accuracy—fantastic.”


pages: 285 words: 86,853

What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing by Ed Finn

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, Charles Babbage, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Claude Shannon: information theory, commoditize, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, DeepMind, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Shoup, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Conference 1984, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Ian Bogost, industrial research laboratory, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, lifelogging, Loebner Prize, lolcat, Lyft, machine readable, Mother of all demos, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, power law, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, ride hailing / ride sharing, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skinner box, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, wage slave

Glott, Schmidt, and Ghosh, “Wikipedia Survey—Overview of Results”; Hill and Shaw, “The Wikipedia Gender Gap Revisited.” 44. Agre, “Surveillance and Capture”; Galloway, Gaming. 45. Agre, “Surveillance and Capture,” 755. Coda: The Algorithmic Imagination Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world. Albert Einstein Machine Learning What does it mean to talk of an algorithmic imagination? In this coda, I want to explore the implications of a world where culture machines are taking on a growing share of the critical and creative work that used to be distinctively, intrinsically human. Google’s DeepMind crossed one such threshold when engineers tasked it with identifying and enhancing various image features on a repeating loop, creating a series of Dalí- or Bosch-like pictures where an algorithmic machine intelligence turned shadows and intersections into eyes, faces, and other recognizable visual elements.


pages: 354 words: 92,470

Grave New World: The End of Globalization, the Return of History by Stephen D. King

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, Admiral Zheng, air freight, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bilateral investment treaty, bitcoin, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global value chain, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, imperial preference, income inequality, income per capita, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, moral hazard, Nixon shock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, paradox of thrift, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, post-truth, price stability, profit maximization, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Skype, South China Sea, special drawing rights, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, trade liberalization, trade route, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Those heading the Brexit campaign were happy to exploit this sense of mistrust. On the eve of the referendum, Michael Gove – chair of Vote Leave – suggested that experts arguing in favour of the UK remaining in the European Union were no better than scientists recruited by the Nazis in the 1930s for the purposes of proving Albert Einstein wrong. For an intelligent man, it was a particularly stupid thing to say – unless, of course, he fully intended to whip up levels of mistrust to an even higher level. In the 2016 US presidential contest, the choice ultimately came down to an increasingly grudging supporter of globalization – Hillary Clinton – and those who had always favoured an isolationist approach.


pages: 346 words: 89,180

Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy by Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, book value, Brexit referendum, business climate, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer age, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, dark matter, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, financial innovation, full employment, fundamental attribution error, future of work, gentrification, gigafactory, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Kanban, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mother of all demos, Network effects, new economy, Ocado, open economy, patent troll, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, place-making, post-industrial society, private spaceflight, Productivity paradox, quantitative hedge fund, rent-seeking, revision control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, TSMC, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, Vanguard fund, walkable city, X Prize, zero-sum game

Indeed, stories that technology would spell the end of employment and lead to social crisis have been a mainstay of economic punditry for over a century. Louis Anslow, an enterprising journalist, collected an archive of news stories to this effect, with examples dating back as early as the 1920s, including a speech by Albert Einstein in 1931 blaming the Great Depression on machines, and the British Prime Minister James Callaghan asking Downing Street civil servants to review the threat to jobs from automation shortly before he was ousted by Margaret Thatcher.2 All this suggests that while technology has the potential to displace jobs and create inequality, it ain’t necessarily so.


pages: 354 words: 93,882

How to Be Idle by Tom Hodgkinson

Albert Einstein, Alexander Shulgin, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, call centre, David Attenborough, David Brooks, deskilling, Easter island, financial independence, full employment, Gordon Gekko, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Lao Tzu, liberal capitalism, moral panic, New Urbanism, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, spinning jenny, three-martini lunch, Torches of Freedom, trade route, wage slave, work culture

Heaven knows why - scientists still scratch their heads - but sleep can solve all our problems. When we are tired and fraught, our worries and duties can seem insurmountable. In the morning, things look better. John Steinbeck put it like this: ' It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it. ' Albert Einstein, whose achievements exceeded Edison 's, made sure he had about ten hours ' sleep a night. In Counting Sheep: The Science and Pleasures of Sleep and Dreams, published in 2002, Paul Martin makes a compelling case for sleeping more. ' The puritans and dull, workaholic sleep-deniers of this world would have us believe that sleep squanders our precious time that should instead be spent in fruitful labour, ' Martin complains.


pages: 310 words: 89,653

The Interstellar Age: Inside the Forty-Year Voyager Mission by Jim Bell

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Edmond Halley, Edward Charles Pickering, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, gravity well, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Pluto: dwarf planet, polynesian navigation, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Virgin Galactic

On this cover are not just the instructions on how to play the record but also how to reconstruct the pictures encoded on the record (using the vibrations of the record needle as proxies for the brightness of each digitally reconstructed pixel), and a map indicating where and when this message was launched (“Earth, 1977”). But what is the best means of conveying this information to beings who would not be likely, by any stretch of the imagination, to understand human languages or conventions? This is where people like Frank Drake were indispensable. “Frank Drake is a bit like Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein rolled into one,” marvels Jon Lomberg. Unlocking the Code. Examples of some of the 116 images encoded onto the Voyager Golden Record. Image 3, defining the mathematical symbols and numbers used elsewhere among the images. (Frank Drake) Image 4, providing a visual definition of the basic units of length, mass, and time used among the images, using the fundamental properties of hydrogen as the basis.


pages: 330 words: 88,445

The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance by Steven Kotler

Abraham Maslow, adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Clayton Christensen, data acquisition, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, do what you love, escalation ladder, fear of failure, Google Earth, haute couture, impulse control, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, life extension, lifelogging, low earth orbit, Maui Hawaii, pattern recognition, Ray Kurzweil, risk tolerance, rolodex, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, SimCity, SpaceShipOne, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, time dilation, Virgin Galactic, Walter Mischel, X Prize

Back then, most of psychology was focused on fixing pathological problems rather than celebrating psychological possibilities, but Maslow thought Benedict and Wertheimer such “wonderful human beings” that he began studying their behavior, trying to figure out what it was they were doing right. Over time, he began studying the behavior of other exemplars of outstanding human performance. Albert Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Frederick Douglass each came under his scrutiny. Maslow was looking for common traits and common circumstances, wanting to explain why these folks could attain such unbelievable heights, while so many others continued to flounder. High achievers, he came to see, were intrinsically motivated.


pages: 353 words: 91,520

Most Likely to Succeed: Preparing Our Kids for the Innovation Era by Tony Wagner, Ted Dintersmith

affirmative action, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Bernie Sanders, Clayton Christensen, creative destruction, David Brooks, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, immigration reform, income inequality, index card, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, language acquisition, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, new economy, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, school choice, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steven Pinker, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the scientific method, two and twenty, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Y Combinator

Consider the kindergarten that canceled its school play to devote more time to preparing its six-year-old students for college and the workplace. As this “truth is stranger than fiction” example painfully illustrates, schools can enact policies that reflect a hopelessly misguided sense of purpose. Aspiration versus Reality Albert Einstein, who had his share of struggles with school, said, “The formulation of a problem is often more essential than its solution.” As administrators, faculty, boards, and parents debate strategic goals, they generally dive into issues around the importance of the goals listed in Question 1 above and the precise wording of their mission statement.


pages: 329 words: 93,655

Moonwalking With Einstein by Joshua Foer

Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, Berlin Wall, conceptual framework, deliberate practice, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, lifelogging, mental accounting, Neil Armstrong, patient HM, pattern recognition, Rubik’s Cube, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, the long tail, W. E. B. Du Bois, zero-sum game

He took each of the hysterical relatives by the hand and, carefully stepping over the debris, guided them, one by one, to the spots in the rubble where their loved ones had been sitting. At that moment, according to legend, the art of memory was born. ONE THE SMARTEST MAN IS HARD TO FIND Dom DeLuise, celebrity fat man (and five of clubs), has been implicated in the following unseemly acts in my mind’s eye: He has hocked a fat globule of spittle (nine of clubs) on Albert Einstein’s thick white mane (three of diamonds) and delivered a devastating karate kick (five of spades) to the groin of Pope Benedict XVI (six of diamonds). Michael Jackson (king of hearts) has engaged in behavior bizarre even for him. He has defecated (two of clubs) on a salmon burger (king of clubs) and captured his flatulence (queen of clubs) in a balloon (six of spades).


pages: 295 words: 89,280

The Narcissist Next Door by Jeffrey Kluger

Albert Einstein, always be closing, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Columbine, dark triade / dark tetrad, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, impulse control, Jony Ive, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, theory of mind, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, twin studies, Walter Mischel, zero-sum game

There is presumption in the Trump persona, too—in his attempt to trademark “You’re fired,” after it became a catchphrase on The Apprentice, his top-rated reality show; in his offer to donate $5 million to a charity of President Obama’s choosing if Obama would release to him, Trump, his college transcripts. There is petulance—in his public feuds with Rosie O’Donnell (“A total loser”), Seth Meyers (“He’s a stutterer”), Robert De Niro (“We’re not dealing with Albert Einstein”) and Arianna Huffington (“Unattractive both inside and out. I fully understand why her former husband left her for a man . . .”). There is, too, an almost—almost—endearing cluelessness to the primal way he signals his pride in himself. He poses for pictures with his suit jacket flaring open, his hands on his hips, index and ring fingers pointing inevitably groinward—a great-ape fitness and genital display if ever there was one.


pages: 302 words: 92,507

Cold: Adventures in the World's Frozen Places by Bill Streever

Albert Einstein, carbon footprint, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, company town, Easter island, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Exxon Valdez, Mason jar, Medieval Warm Period, ocean acidification, refrigerator car, San Francisco homelessness, South China Sea, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, University of East Anglia

Things become increasingly peculiar. For Onnes and his colleagues, trained in classical physics, the properties of matter no longer made sense. Even calling liquid helium a liquid is not quite right. It is more of a superfluid, a phase of matter that behaves something like a liquid but that has almost no viscosity. Albert Einstein weighed in. Working with the Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose, Einstein realized that quantum physics was at play. In the quantum world, atomic motion occurs in incremental steps: it is as though you can travel at one mile per hour, five miles per hour, or ten miles per hour, but not at three miles per hour or four and a half miles per hour or seven and a quarter miles per hour.


pages: 351 words: 93,982

Leading From the Emerging Future: From Ego-System to Eco-System Economies by Otto Scharmer, Katrin Kaufer

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, do what you love, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Fractional reserve banking, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, market bubble, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, new economy, offshore financial centre, Paradox of Choice, peak oil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, technology bubble, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, working poor, Zipcar

But they may not be the root cause of the landscape of pathologies discussed above. So, given all these bubbles and disconnects, what is the force motrice that keeps us reenacting these highly dysfunctional structures? Mental Models That Give Rise to Systemic Bubbles and Disconnects This force is called thinking. As Albert Einstein put it so eloquently: “We cannot solve problems with the same kind of thinking that created them.”10 Thinking creates the world. The structures of yesterday’s economic thought manifest in the structures of today’s institutions and actions. If we want to upgrade our global economic operating system, we need to start by updating the thinking that underlies it; we need to update the essence of economic logic and thought.


pages: 400 words: 88,647

Frugal Innovation: How to Do Better With Less by Jaideep Prabhu Navi Radjou

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bretton Woods, business climate, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, circular economy, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Computer Numeric Control, connected car, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, fail fast, financial exclusion, financial innovation, gamification, global supply chain, IKEA effect, income inequality, industrial robot, intangible asset, Internet of things, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, low cost airline, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, megacity, minimum viable product, more computing power than Apollo, new economy, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, planned obsolescence, precision agriculture, race to the bottom, reshoring, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, smart grid, smart meter, software as a service, standardized shipping container, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, value engineering, vertical integration, women in the workforce, work culture , X Prize, yield management, Zipcar

How corporate leaders across sectors are changing the culture of their organisations as they strive to implement these principles is the subject of the next chapter. 8Fostering a frugal culture One cannot solve a problem with the same kind of thinking that created it in the first place. Albert Einstein CHAPTERS 2–7 OUTLINED the six principles that collectively form a frugal innovation strategy, and explained how leaders can use these principles to reinvent their business model on the basis of frugality. They described how various functional leaders can restructure their divisions to enable the organisation to design, build and deliver affordable and sustainable solutions over the longer term.


pages: 264 words: 90,379

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell

affirmative action, airport security, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, complexity theory, David Brooks, East Village, fake news, haute couture, Kevin Kelly, lateral thinking, medical malpractice, medical residency, Menlo Park, Nelson Mandela, new economy, pattern recognition, Pepsi Challenge, phenotype, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, theory of mind, young professional

When you were faced with the lineup the second time around, what you were drawing on was your memory of what you said the waitress looked like, not your memory of what you saw she looked like. And that’s a problem because when it comes to faces, we are an awful lot better at visual recognition than we are at verbal description. If I were to show you a picture of Marilyn Monroe or Albert Einstein, you’d recognize both faces in a fraction of a second. My guess is that right now you can “see” them both almost perfectly in your imagination. But how accurately can you describe them? If you wrote a paragraph on Marilyn Monroe’s face, without telling me whom you were writing about, could I guess who it was?


pages: 372 words: 89,876

The Connected Company by Dave Gray, Thomas Vander Wal

A Pattern Language, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, Berlin Wall, business cycle, business process, call centre, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, complexity theory, creative destruction, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, disruptive innovation, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, folksonomy, Googley, index card, industrial cluster, interchangeable parts, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, loose coupling, low cost airline, market design, minimum viable product, more computing power than Apollo, power law, profit maximization, Richard Florida, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, two-pizza team, Vanguard fund, web application, WikiLeaks, work culture , Zipcar

JOHN MACKEY & TRUST “John Mackey: Want trust? Let people be their whole selves,” MIX TV, http://www.managementexchange.com/video/john-mackey-want-trust-let-people-be-their-whole-selves. Chapter 20. Managing the connected company Life is like riding a bicycle—in order to keep your balance, you must keep moving. — Albert Einstein The job of management is to design and run the systems that support the company in achieving its purpose. Managers must carefully balance individual freedoms with the common good, involve people in platform decisions, and tune the system to keep the company’s metabolism at the right temperature—too cold and the company sinks into rigid bureaucracy; too hot and the company breaks apart into anarchy and chaos.


pages: 327 words: 88,121

The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community by Marc J. Dunkelman

Abraham Maslow, adjacent possible, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, Broken windows theory, business cycle, call centre, clean water, company town, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, David Brooks, delayed gratification, different worldview, double helix, Downton Abbey, Dunbar number, Edward Jenner, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global village, helicopter parent, if you build it, they will come, impulse control, income inequality, invention of movable type, Jane Jacobs, Khyber Pass, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, Nate Silver, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, Richard Florida, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, the strength of weak ties, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban decay, urban planning, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

At a moment when most American adults had suffered the ravages of the 1930s and 1940s, he thought more mind ought to be paid to other end of the psychological spectrum. How, he wanted to know, did healthy Americans reach their fullest potential? What was it that had enabled the most successful among us, giants like Albert Einstein and Henry David Thoreau, to flourish? In an attempt to draw research into those questions, Maslow published an article in which he unveiled what is now known as “Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.”31 His theory posited that individual desires flow in rough sequential order: once more basic needs are satisfied, we move onto the next set of concerns; and if you keep ascending the hierarchy, you eventually reach what Maslow termed “self-actualization.”


pages: 276 words: 93,430

Animal: The Autobiography of a Female Body by Sara Pascoe

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, meta-analysis, presumed consent, rolodex, selection bias, Stephen Fry, TED Talk, WikiLeaks

A cycle of self-hate: I hate my body and I hate me because I hate my body. And seeing all this written down, it is CRAZY that I don’t think of my body as ‘me’ but as something that my ‘self’ is trapped inside. Any concern with appearance is a time tax. Conditioning, colouring, scrubbing, plucking and shopping. Apparently Albert Einstein had loads of suits but they were all exactly the same so he never had to think about what to wear.* He went on to use that saved brainpower to do something very brilliant like invent the car. It’s scary how much of my inner monologue is consumed by debating food choices, berating myself for what I’ve recently eaten and promising I’ll do better.


pages: 350 words: 96,803

Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution by Francis Fukuyama

Albert Einstein, Asilomar, assortative mating, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, classic study, Columbine, cotton gin, demographic transition, digital divide, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, impulse control, life extension, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, out of africa, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, precautionary principle, presumed consent, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Scientific racism, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sexual politics, stem cell, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Turing test, twin studies

Many of the attributes that were once held to be unique to human beings—including language, culture, reason, consciousness, and the like—are now seen as characteristic of a wide variety of nonhuman animals.31 For example, the primatologist Frans de Waal points out that culture—that is, the ability to transmit learned behaviors across generations through nongenetic means—is not an exclusively human achievement. He cites the famous example of the potato-washing macaques that inhabit a small island in Japan.32 In the 1950s a group of Japanese primatologists observed that one macaque in particular (an Albert Einstein, so to speak, among monkeys) developed a habit of washing potatoes in a local stream. This same individual later discovered that grains of barley could be separated from sand by dropping them in water. Neither was a genetically programmed behavior; neither potatoes nor barley were part of the macaques’ traditional diet, and no one had ever before observed these behaviors taking place.


pages: 319 words: 89,477

The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion by John Hagel Iii, John Seely Brown

Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, barriers to entry, Black Swan, business process, call centre, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, commoditize, corporate governance, creative destruction, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, future of work, game design, George Gilder, intangible asset, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, loose coupling, Louis Pasteur, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Marc Benioff, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Network effects, old-boy network, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pre–internet, profit motive, recommendation engine, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart transportation, software as a service, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, the strength of weak ties, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, TSMC, Yochai Benkler

28 Practicing this type of awareness involves shutting off some of the distracting and often skeptical voices in our heads that would have us prejudge, preconceive, and turn away from new things before we understand them. We have to be willing to risk looking like we don’t know the answer, or maybe even the question. We’ve got to wean ourselves from overdependence on the expertise we’ve labored so hard to accumulate. To paraphrase Albert Einstein, we must avoid letting our education interfere with our learning. Serendipitous Preparedness We can do everything right in terms of picking fertile, serendipitous environments and refining the appropriate serendipity practices described in the previous section. But if we’re not prepared when that unexpected encounter occurs, the encounter will yield only marginal value, if any.


pages: 250 words: 88,762

The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World by Tim Harford

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, business cycle, colonial rule, company town, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, European colonialism, experimental economics, experimental subject, George Akerlof, income per capita, invention of the telephone, Jane Jacobs, John von Neumann, Larry Ellison, law of one price, Martin Wolf, mutually assured destruction, New Economic Geography, new economy, Patri Friedman, plutocrats, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

On another occasion he refused a request to assist with a new supercomputer aimed at solving an important problem, instead furnishing an immediate solution with pencil and paper. Although there were those who delved deeper, nobody was as quick as Johnny. In the popular imagination of the 1940s and ’50s, von Neumann arguably outshined even his Princeton contemporary, Albert Einstein, and his colleagues joked that he was a demigod who, having studied humans intensively, was able to imitate them perfectly. Nevertheless, to understand poker, von Neumann had to break new ground. Poker was not merely a game of chance, requiring probability, or a game of pure logic with neither random elements nor secrets, like chess.


pages: 304 words: 87,702

The 100 Best Vacations to Enrich Your Life by Pam Grout

Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 11, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, complexity theory, David Brooks, East Village, Easter island, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, global village, Golden Gate Park, if you build it, they will come, Maui Hawaii, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, off-the-grid, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, SpaceShipOne, supervolcano, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, urban sprawl, Yogi Berra

Box 117, Yellowstone National Park, WY 82190, 307-344-5566 (Field Seminars and Lodging and Learning Programs), 307-344-2294 (Backcountry courses and Ed-ventures), www.yellowstoneassociation.org/institute. SHOALS MARINE LABORATORY experience marine life at an island campus APPLEDORE ISLAND, MAINE How I wish that somewhere there existed an island for those who are wise and of good will. —Albert Einstein 51 | Most of the four dorms on 95-acre Appledore Island, the largest of the nine Isles of Shoals, are filled with college students getting course credit for such classes as coastal ecology, oceanic law, field marine biology, and forensics for marine biologists. Several times a year, however, the remote “research island,” located 6 miles off the coast of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, invites the public out for three- to five-day adult education programs ranging from marine science to bird study.


pages: 383 words: 92,837

Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Charles Babbage, Columbine, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, endowment effect, facts on the ground, impulse control, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Hawkins, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, out of africa, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Saturday Night Live, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, subprime mortgage crisis, Thales of Miletus, trolley problem

Moreover, it is now clear that photosynthesis operates with quantum mechanical principles in this same temperature range, which further bespeaks the likelihood that Mother Nature, having figured out how to exploit these tricks in one arena, will exploit them elsewhere. For more on the possibility of quantum effects in the brain, see Koch and Hepp, “Quantum mechanics,” or Macgregor, “Quantum mechanics and brain uncertainty.” 30 We are sometimes lucky enough to have a hint of what’s missing. For example, Albert Einstein felt certain that we were stuck in our psychological filters when it came to understanding the passage of time. Einstein wrote the following to the sister and son of his best friend, Michele Besso, after Besso’s death: “Michele has preceded me a little in leaving this strange world. This is not important.


pages: 347 words: 90,234

You Can't Make This Stuff Up: The Complete Guide to Writing Creative Nonfiction--From Memoir to Literary Journalism and Everything in Between by Lee Gutkind

airport security, Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, Columbine, David Sedaris, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Mark Zuckerberg, New Journalism, non-fiction novel, Norman Mailer, out of africa, personalized medicine, publish or perish, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking, synthetic biology, working poor, Year of Magical Thinking

The word “creative” has been criticized in this context because some people have maintained that being creative means that you pretend or exaggerate or make up facts and embellish details. This is completely incorrect. It is possible to be honest and straightforward and brilliant and creative at the same time. Albert Einstein, Jacques Cousteau, Stephen Hawking, and Abraham Lincoln are just a few of the brilliant leaders and thinkers who wrote truthful, accurate, and factual material—and were among the most imaginative and creative writers of their time and ours. The word “creative” in creative nonfiction has to do with how the writer conceives ideas, summarizes situations, defines personalities, describes places—and shapes and presents information.


pages: 293 words: 90,714

Copenhagenize: The Definitive Guide to Global Bicycle Urbanism by Mikael Colville-Andersen

active transport: walking or cycling, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, bike sharing, business cycle, car-free, congestion charging, corporate social responsibility, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Enrique Peñalosa, functional fixedness, gamification, if you build it, they will come, Induced demand, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, megaproject, meta-analysis, neurotypical, out of africa, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, safety bicycle, self-driving car, sharing economy, smart cities, starchitect, transcontinental railway, urban planning, urban sprawl, Yogi Berra

Kids from Felix’s class on a site visit to the roundabout. The class’s model of their proposed changes to the intersection. CHAPTER 18 CARGO BIKE LOGISTICS Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius—and a lot of courage—to move in the opposite direction. Albert Einstein A DHL trike competing in a svajerløb cargo bike race in Barcelona in 2017. Bicycles, like so many finely tuned string and wind instruments, are rewriting the score in our cities. What we see happening now is that bicycles are finally getting some serious accompaniment from a solid and dependable bass section.


pages: 340 words: 94,464

Randomistas: How Radical Researchers Changed Our World by Andrew Leigh

Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anton Chekhov, Atul Gawande, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Swan, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, experimental economics, Flynn Effect, germ theory of disease, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Indoor air pollution, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, microcredit, Netflix Prize, nudge unit, offshore financial centre, p-value, Paradox of Choice, placebo effect, price mechanism, publication bias, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Sheryl Sandberg, statistical model, Steven Pinker, sugar pill, TED Talk, uber lyft, universal basic income, War on Poverty

Talk to people who run a lot of experiments, and you’ll discover a sense of scepticism about how far gut feel can take us. In a world as complicated as ours, one of the things I admire about those who run randomised trials is that they’re modest about their understanding of the world. Many embody the philosophy of Albert Einstein, who once said, ‘The more I learn, the more I realise how much I don’t know.’ The recognition that we can use our failures to do better next time has been dubbed a ‘growth mindset’.14 It contrasts with a ‘fixed mindset’, in which we fear setbacks because we regard our talents and abilities as static.


pages: 423 words: 92,798

No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age by Jane F. McAlevey

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, antiwork, call centre, clean water, collective bargaining, emotional labour, feminist movement, gentrification, hiring and firing, immigration reform, independent contractor, informal economy, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Naomi Klein, new economy, no-fly zone, Occupy movement, precariat, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, The Chicago School, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, women in the workforce

Foster, head of the Communist Party during the years that Davis and Godoff were learning the organizer’s craft, was churning out literature that called on followers to organize “every category of workers, not merely a thin stratum of skilled workers at the top.” Davis and Godoff were not enthusiastic writers of manuals. Davis was barely functional in written English, and in any case they believed that organizers, paid and volunteer, learn through struggle. But a longtime 1199 rank-and-file worker-leader, Bernie Minter, who organized Albert Einstein College of Medicine into the union in the late 1960s, did compile a fifty-one–page manual, typed up in the 1980s, that describes much of the same core technique as Foster’s 1936 Organizing Methods, and includes some identical language. Organizing Private-Sector Nursing Homes in 1199NE When the exact arrangement that Local 775 had accepted for unionizing nursing-home workers was presented to the leaders at 1199 New England in 2004, “We told them to go fuck themselves,” says current 1199NE president David Pickus, paraphrasing then president Jerry Brown.


pages: 304 words: 91,566

Bitcoin Billionaires: A True Story of Genius, Betrayal, and Redemption by Ben Mezrich

airport security, Albert Einstein, bank run, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Burning Man, buttonwood tree, cryptocurrency, East Village, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fake news, family office, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, game design, information security, Isaac Newton, junk bonds, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, new economy, offshore financial centre, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, QR code, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, transaction costs, Virgin Galactic, zero-sum game

But he’d read a guidebook during the flight from JFK, and he knew that the posh district—El Cangrejo—had actually been founded by Jewish immigrants more than a half century earlier. The city still bore many clues to its original inhabitants. In fact, earlier in the day, just a few blocks over, Charlie had walked past an enormous stone statue of Albert Einstein’s head, squatting in the yard of what appeared to be an apartment building. Since the 1950s, most of the Jews had moved out, and the neighborhood was now diverse, cosmopolitan, and so very much alive. This sliver of Central America really was the Wild West: there didn’t seem to be any laws at all, at least laws that you had to follow.


pages: 307 words: 90,634

Insane Mode: How Elon Musk's Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil by Hamish McKenzie

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Ben Horowitz, business climate, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, connected car, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, gigafactory, Google Glasses, Hyperloop, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, megacity, Menlo Park, Nikolai Kondratiev, oil shale / tar sands, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Solyndra, South China Sea, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, Zenefits, Zipcar

“Those people that are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who actually do.” His speech seemed unpracticed and he used no notes. “The theme of the campaign is ‘Think different.’ It’s honoring the people who think different and who move this world forward.” A video started on a screen at the side of the stage. The film opened with black-and-white footage of Albert Einstein smoking a pipe. “Here’s to the crazy ones,” said the voice of the actor Richard Dreyfuss drifting into the room. There was a quick cut to Bob Dylan, seen in profile. Piano and cello played in the background. “The misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes.” Richard Branson.


pages: 339 words: 88,732

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, congestion charging, congestion pricing, corporate governance, cotton gin, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, digital map, driverless car, employer provided health coverage, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, Filter Bubble, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, full employment, G4S, game design, general purpose technology, global village, GPS: selective availability, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, law of one price, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, mass immigration, means of production, Narrative Science, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, post-work, power law, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, telepresence, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vernor Vinge, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Y2K

Shifts in the technology for production and distribution, particularly these three changes: a) the digitization of more and more information, goods, and services, b) the vast improvements in telecommunications and, to a lesser extent, transportation, and c) the increased importance of networks and standards. Albert Einstein once said that black holes are where God divided by zero, and that created some strange physics. While the marginal costs of digital goods do not quite approach zero, they are close enough to create some pretty strange economics. As discussed in chapter 3, digital goods have much lower marginal costs of production than physical goods.


pages: 353 words: 88,376

The Investopedia Guide to Wall Speak: The Terms You Need to Know to Talk Like Cramer, Think Like Soros, and Buy Like Buffett by Jack (edited By) Guinan

Albert Einstein, asset allocation, asset-backed security, book value, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, computerized markets, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, dogs of the Dow, equity premium, equity risk premium, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, implied volatility, index fund, intangible asset, interest rate swap, inventory management, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, margin call, money market fund, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, passive investing, performance metric, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, statistical model, time value of money, transaction costs, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

Rather than your shares appreciating an additional $2,000 (20%) as they did in the first year, they appreciate an additional $400 because the $2,000 you gained in the first year grew by 20% as well. If you extrapolate the process, the numbers can start to get very big as your previous earnings earn returns of their own. In fact, $10,000 invested at 20% annually for 25 years would grow to nearly $1,000,000 without your having invested another dime! Albert Einstein was rumored to have called compounding the eighth wonder of the world. Related Terms: • Annual Percentage Yield—APY • Compound Annual Growth Rate—CAGR • Dividend • Interest Rate • Money Market Account Consumer Price Index (CPI) What Does Consumer Price Index (CPI) Mean? A measure that examines the weighted average of prices of a basket of consumer goods and services such as transportation, food, and medical care.


pages: 357 words: 91,331

I Will Teach You To Be Rich by Sethi, Ramit

Albert Einstein, asset allocation, buy and hold, buy low sell high, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, geopolitical risk, index fund, John Bogle, late fees, low interest rates, money market fund, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Paradox of Choice, prediction markets, random walk, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, survivorship bias, the rule of 72, Vanguard fund

Even if you’re earning a competitive 3 percent or higher from a high-interest online savings account, it will take you a long, long time to get a substantial return. You need a way to put that money to work for you so it earns more than even the highest-yielding savings account, and investing is the first and best way to do it. “Compounding,” Albert Einstein said, “is mankind’s greatest invention because it allows for the reliable, systematic accumulation of wealth.” Rather than earning 0.5 percent interest like most people do in their savings account, or even six times that amount with a high-interest savings account (like the one you now have, right?)


pages: 319 words: 90,965

The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere by Kevin Carey

Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Blue Ocean Strategy, business cycle, business intelligence, carbon-based life, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, declining real wages, deliberate practice, discrete time, disruptive innovation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Downton Abbey, Drosophila, Fairchild Semiconductor, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Google X / Alphabet X, Gregor Mendel, informal economy, invention of the printing press, inventory management, John Markoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, natural language processing, Network effects, open borders, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, Recombinant DNA, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, transcontinental railway, uber lyft, Vannevar Bush

A few years ago I visited Humboldt University in Berlin, named for the inventor of the research university and founded in 1810. In the early years, Humboldt was home to many of the world’s greatest minds, including Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Schelling. Marx and Engels were students there, as were Albert Einstein and Max Planck. Depending on how you count, up to forty Nobel Prize winners are associated with the university. But thirty-eight of those prizes were awarded between 1901 and 1956, all for work performed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Today, one popular world university ranking puts Humboldt at 126th worldwide, only the seventh-best in Germany.


pages: 324 words: 90,253

When the Money Runs Out: The End of Western Affluence by Stephen D. King

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bond market vigilante , British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, congestion charging, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, currency risk, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, endowment effect, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Ford Model T, full employment, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, loss aversion, low interest rates, market clearing, mass immigration, Minsky moment, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, railway mania, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk free rate, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, technology bubble, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working-age population

This was a consequence of the Poincaré stabilization, in which France moved rapidly to stamp out post-World War I hyperinflation. 8. See J. M. Keynes, ‘The Economic Consequences of Mr Churchill’, in Essays in Persuasion (Norton, New York, 1963). 9. In Keynes's case, his dislike of aspects of high finance appears closely connected with his anti-Semitism. Following a meeting with Albert Einstein in 1926, Keynes noted that Einstein ‘is – a naughty Jew-boy, covered with ink – that kind of Jew – the kind which has its head above water, the sweet, tender imps who have not sublimated immortality into compound interest. He was the nicest, and the only talented, person I saw in all Berlin, except perhaps old Fuerstenberg, the banker … and Kurt Singer, two foot by five, the mystical economist from Hamburg.


pages: 336 words: 93,672

The Future of the Brain: Essays by the World's Leading Neuroscientists by Gary Marcus, Jeremy Freeman

23andMe, Albert Einstein, backpropagation, bioinformatics, bitcoin, brain emulation, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, Drosophila, epigenetics, Geoffrey Hinton, global pandemic, Google Glasses, ITER tokamak, iterative process, language acquisition, linked data, mouse model, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, semantic web, speech recognition, stem cell, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, traumatic brain injury, Turing machine, twin studies, web application

A remarkable example was the astronomer Edwin Hubble’s discovery of the expansion of the universe in 1929. Integrating over years of observation, Hubble reported a proportional relationship between redshifts in the spectra of galaxies (interpreted as their recession speeds) and their physical distances. Viewed in the context of cosmological models Albert Einstein and Willem de Sitter formulated earlier, these data strongly supported cosmic expansion. This monumental insight came from a dataset that comprised less than fifty data points, compressible to a fraction of a kilobyte. When it comes to applying theory to “big data,” neuroscience, to put it mildly, has some catching up to do.


pages: 384 words: 89,250

Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America by Giles Slade

Albert Einstein, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, American ideology, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, creative destruction, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, global village, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, indoor plumbing, invention of radio, Jeff Hawkins, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, PalmPilot, planned obsolescence, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, white picket fence, women in the workforce

These women were allowed to buy only two pairs of stockings in a single shade for $1.15 each. As a condition of sale, the women had to complete a questionnaire about their nylons within ten days. Seven months later, on October 30, 1939 —in a month when German invaders had annexed western Poland, and President Roosevelt had received a letter, signed by Albert Einstein, urging the United States to develop the atomic bomb—stockings went on sale to local customers in Wilmington, Delaware, and four thousand pairs were sold in three hours. These early stockings were much thicker and more durable than the progressively fin r nylons produced after the war. Some second-hand accounts support the claim that DuPont reduced the thickness of their nylons in order to make them less durable, although no one has evidence to prove this.15 What can be easily demonstrated is that throughout its long history of nylon production and marketing, DuPont has been keenly aware of its product’s life cycle (PLC) and the role of psychological obsolescence in generating repetitive consumption.


pages: 377 words: 89,000

Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All by Paul A. Offit M.D.

Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, Edward Jenner, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, longitudinal study, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan, Tragedy of the Commons

Lucy Rorke-Adams, a neurologist at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, was a key expert in cases of children suspected of suffering or dying from vaccines. (Courtesy of Lucy Rorke-Adams.) After more than forty years in the field, Rorke-Adams is recognized as one of the world’s foremost pediatric neuropathologists, consulted by colleagues worldwide. When Albert Einstein died, she received a section of his brain to study. It is a testament to the thoroughness and rigor of defense attorneys in vaccine court that they turn so frequently to Rorke-Adams for her expertise. Rorke-Adams has now evaluated the brains of thirty-three children who died after vaccination or whose unexplained seizures required a brain biopsy.


pages: 422 words: 89,770

Death of the Liberal Class by Chris Hedges

1960s counterculture, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, call centre, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbine, corporate governance, deindustrialization, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, food desert, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, hive mind, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, military-industrial complex, Murray Bookchin, Pearl River Delta, Plato's cave, post scarcity, power law, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tobin tax, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, W. E. B. Du Bois, WikiLeaks, working poor, Works Progress Administration

The newsletter and book were published by American Business Consultants, a group established in 1947 by three former FBI agents who were bankrolled by an upstate New York grocery chain magnate, Laurence Johnson, and later a former naval intelligence officer, Vincent Hartnett. It mounted a campaign against writers, including journalists such as Richard O. Boyer, who wrote profiles for the New Yorker, and the New York Times music critic Olin Downes. It attacked writers such as Dashiell Hammett and Ring Lardner Jr., as well as intellectuals including Albert Einstein. Radio and television personalities—many of them commentators and stars—were fired after being named in the pages of Counterattack. Those removed from the airwaves by nervous employers and sponsors included the Texas humorist and radio commentator John Henry Faulk; Ireene Wicker, the “Singing Lady,” who had a popular children’s television show; and Philip Loeb, who played the father on the popular sitcom The Rise of the Goldbergs.


pages: 307 words: 88,180

AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order by Kai-Fu Lee

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, bike sharing, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Chrome, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, if you build it, they will come, ImageNet competition, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine translation, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, pattern recognition, pirate software, profit maximization, QR code, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, SoftBank, Solyndra, special economic zone, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, vertical integration, Vision Fund, warehouse robotics, Y Combinator

This is not an ethical judgment on either of these two systems. Utilitarian government systems and rights-based approaches both have their blind spots and downsides. America’s openness to immigration and emphasis on individual rights has long helped it attract some of the brightest minds from around the world—people like Enrico Fermi, Albert Einstein, and many leading AI scientists today. China’s top-down approach to economic upgrades—and the eagerness of low-level officials to embrace each new central government mandate—can also lead to waste and debt if the target industries are not chosen well. But in this particular instance—building a society and economy prepared to harness the potential of AI—China’s techno-utilitarian approach gives it a certain advantage.


pages: 309 words: 96,434

Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the Twenty First Century City by Anna Minton

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Broken windows theory, call centre, crack epidemic, credit crunch, deindustrialization, East Village, energy security, Evgeny Morozov, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, ghettoisation, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, housing crisis, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Kickstarter, moral panic, new economy, New Urbanism, race to the bottom, rent control, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, Silicon Valley, Steven Pinker, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Spirit Level, trickle-down economics, University of East Anglia, urban decay, urban renewal, white flight, white picket fence, World Values Survey, young professional

Maslow’s ‘hierarchy of needs’ created a diagram relating to what was needed for human survival, with the first layer of the pyramid centring on basic physiological needs such as breathing, food, water, sleep and sex. Subsequent levels focused on safety, love and esteem, culminating in self-actualization at the peak. Maslow was keen for psychology to move away from the study of neurotics and towards a more positive look at exemplary people, such as Albert Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt, and his theory offered what looked like a map to achieve personal growth. While it has been criticized for lacking a scientific research base, the ‘hierarchy of needs’ pyramid remains central to management training and motivational psychology. When it comes to the BIDs pyramid, which is geared towards creating the optimum trading environment, the first layer on which the whole structure depends is the creation of a clean and safe environment, so just as man needs to breathe and eat to survive, these parts of the city have to be clean and safe.


pages: 287 words: 92,194

Sex Power Money by Sara Pascoe

Albert Einstein, call centre, Donald Trump, fake news, Firefox, gender pay gap, invention of movable type, Louis Daguerre, meta-analysis, Neil Kinnock, Ocado, phenotype, Russell Brand, TED Talk, telemarketer, twin studies, zero-sum game

* Gonna flag some heavy sarcasm here cos if I don’t someone will email me in six months that ‘in their opinion it isn’t actually healthy to snoop on a partner’s correspondence’. After my last book I had some smashing messages from readers correcting my stupid jokes. My favourite was a short sentence that informed me angrily, ‘ALBERT EINSTEIN DID NOT INVENT THE CAR.’ † So many words for ‘anus’. I haven’t even used ‘sphincter’ yet. ‡ A cheque is an olden-days money promise which slowed down time as you waited for it to become cash. More Boyfriends, More Porn I hated staying over at Adam’s flat cos he would fall asleep before me and there was nothing to do.


The Humanure Handbook: A Guide to Composting Human Manure by Joseph Jenkins

Albert Einstein, clean water, Y2K

At wastewater treatment plants (sewage plants), the organic material in the wastewater is removed using complicated, expensive procedures. Despite the high cost of such separation processes, the organic material removed from the wastewater is often buried in a landfill. The alternatives should be obvious. Albert Einstein once remarked that the human race will require an entirely new manner of thinking if it is to survive. I am inclined to agree. Our “waste disposal” systems must be rethought. As an alternative to our current throw-away mentality, we can understand that organic material is a resource, rather than a waste, that can be beneficially recycled using natural processes.


Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent by Robert F. Barsky

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, centre right, feminist movement, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Zinn, information retrieval, language acquisition, machine translation, means of production, military-industrial complex, Murray Bookchin, Norman Mailer, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, strong AI, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, theory of mind, Yom Kippur War

First, he was an important influence upon Chomsky's thinking about philosophy and logic; second, he had a similarly profound commitment to the cause of popular liberation; third, he was closely affiliated with the university world as a scholar, while simultaneously acting on behalf of the oppressed lower classes; and fourth, he upheld his views even if it meant jeopardizing his reputation, or even his freedom. Chomsky recently compared Russell to Albert Einstein on the question of social conscience: Compare Russell and Einstein, two leading figures, roughly the same generation. They agreed on the grave dangers facing humanity, but chose different ways to file:///D|/export2/www.netlibrary.com/nlreader/nlreader.dll@bookid=9296&filename=page_32.html [4/16/2007 3:04:57 PM] Document Page 33 respond.


pages: 345 words: 92,063

Power, for All: How It Really Works and Why It's Everyone's Business by Julie Battilana, Tiziana Casciaro

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, benefit corporation, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, deep learning, different worldview, digital rights, disinformation, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, feminist movement, fundamental attribution error, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, Greta Thunberg, hiring and firing, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mega-rich, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, School Strike for Climate, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech worker, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, zero-sum game

Norton, 2010). 2 For an in-depth analysis of the impact of communication technology on social movements, see Manuel Castells, Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2015). 3 Gene Sharp, From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation (Boston: Albert Einstein Institution, 2003). 4 Micah White in discussion with the authors, January and March 2020. 5 Micah White, The End of Protest: A New Playbook for Revolution (Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2016). 6 Julie Battilana, “Power and Influence in Society,” Harvard Business School note 415-055 (2015); Julie Battilana and Marissa Kimsey, “Should You Agitate, Innovate, or Orchestrate?”


pages: 339 words: 95,270

Trade Wars Are Class Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace by Matthew C. Klein

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, centre right, collective bargaining, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, intangible asset, invention of the telegraph, joint-stock company, land reform, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, passive income, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, sovereign wealth fund, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, Wolfgang Streeck

Walter Mayr, “Hungary’s Peaceful Revolution: Cutting the Fence and Changing History,” Der Spiegel, May 29, 2009; Joseph Rothschild and Nancy M. Wingfield, Return to Diversity: A Political History of East Central Europe since World War II, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Adam Roberts, “Civil Resistance in the East European and Soviet Revolutions,” Albert Einstein Institution Monograph Series No. 4, 1991. 3. Mark Kramer, ed. and trans., “Soviet Deliberations during the Polish Crisis, 1980–1981,” Cold War International History Project, Special Working Paper No. 1, April 1999; “Spot Oil Price,” Wall Street Journal, via FRED Economic Data, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OILPRICE; U.S.


Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen by Dan Heath

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Albert Einstein, bank run, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, food desert, high-speed rail, Housing First, illegal immigration, Internet of things, mandatory minimum, millennium bug, move fast and break things, Nick Bostrom, payday loans, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, self-driving car, Skype, Snapchat, subscription business, systems thinking, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

C-section rates vary quite a bit around the world: Cesarean section rates in OECD countries, in 2016 (per 1,000 live births), https://www.statista.com/statistics/283123/cesarean-sections-in-oecd-countries/. In Brazil… 84% of children: Agência Nacional de Saúde Suplementar (Brasil), Cartilha nova organização do cuidado ao parto e nascimento para melhores resultados de saúde: Projeto Parto Adequado—fase 1, Agência Nacional de Saúde Suplementar, Sociedade Beneficente Israelita Brasileira Hospital Albert Einstein, Institute for Healthcare Improvement. Rio de Janeiro: ANS, 2016, 11. manicures and massages to go with the C-sections: Olga Khazan, “Why Most Brazilian Women Get C-Sections,” The Atlantic, April 14, 2014, https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/04/why-most-brazilian-women-get-c-sections/360589/.


pages: 332 words: 93,672

Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy by George Gilder

23andMe, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Asilomar, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bob Noyce, British Empire, Brownian motion, Burning Man, business process, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, decentralized internet, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, George Gilder, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, index fund, inflation targeting, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, OSI model, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative easing, random walk, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, telepresence, Tesla Model S, The Soul of a New Machine, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vernor Vinge, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

They invented probabilistic tools to describe physical phenomena, such as the hidden behavior of atoms and molecules, waves and particles, which could not be seen or measured by the scientific instruments of their day. Their statistical laws of thermodynamics provided theoretical physics a much-needed arrow of time derived from the concept of entropy. Remarkably, the first man to expound and use these statistical tools, several years before they were publically formulated by Markov, was Albert Einstein. In 1905, calculating the hidden behavior of molecules in Brownian motion, he showed that they occupied a chain of states that jiggled at a rate of around two gigahertz following a “random walk,” as in Markov’s concept. Showing the movements of atoms without seeing or measuring them, Einstein translated from what is now termed a Markov sequence of observable states of a gas to his proof of the then-still-hidden Brownian motion of the molecules.


pages: 277 words: 89,004

We Don't Need Roads: The Making of the Back to the Future Trilogy by Caseen Gaines

Albert Einstein, index card, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, out of africa, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Skype

“I put everything into being Doc Brown for six weeks, and I was very worried I wouldn’t be able to live up to my own performance, so to speak.” Of course, his concerns were for naught. Doc Brown was fully realized on the page in Zemeckis and Gale’s script, but the character truly came alive in Christopher Lloyd’s hands. The actor was instrumental in crafting the mad scientist’s look—a hybridization of composer Leopold Stokowski and Albert Einstein—and his commitment to his performance resulted in some of the most memorable moments in the film. “Chris was amazing,” Bob Gale says. “He never did a take exactly the same way, so we’d have all of these different variations on the line readings, and they were all wonderful. It was a good problem to have in the editing room.”


The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World by Iain McGilchrist

Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, classic study, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, computer age, Donald Trump, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, Georg Cantor, hedonic treadmill, Henri Poincaré, language acquisition, Lao Tzu, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, music of the spheres, Necker cube, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, randomized controlled trial, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Schrödinger's Cat, social intelligence, social web, source of truth, stem cell, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury

There is, in other words, overlap: we should not expect absolute differences in order for the differences to be substantial, even dramatic, as in the case of those two countries. A couple of related points are worth making. I have heard it said that ‘the hemispheres are more like than they are unlike’. It’s hard to know exactly what this phrase means; but whatever it means, sometimes in life it is the differences that count. Donald Trump and Albert Einstein are undoubtedly ‘more like than they are unlike’. An old banger and a new Ferrari are both cars, with internal combustion engines, and are in that sense much more alike than not. But when I am buying one, I am interested in their differences. Nor am I ‘dichotomising’. Nature got there before me, beginning with a remarkable physical division at the core of the brain, which she has since made more robust through mechanisms of interhemispheric inhibition.

Benedetto Croce not only endorsed the view, but went so far as to say that ‘language is always poetry, and … prose (science) is a distinction, not of aesthetic form, but of content, that is, of logical form’ (Croce, 1922, p. 329). 49. Ford, 1989, 1991. 50. Everett, 2005. 51. See Dunbar, 2004. 52. Henri Poincaré, ‘Mathematical Creation’, in Ghiselin, 1985, pp. 25–6; Albert Einstein, ‘A letter to Jacques Hadamard’, in Ghiselin, 1985, p. 32. 53. Arnheim, 1977, p. 134. 54. Aust, Apfalter & Huber, 2005; Kuhl & Miller, 1978; Kluender, Diehl & Killeen, 1987. 55. Categorisation is species-specific, ‘but the ability to categorise and to learn categories is remarkably general across taxa’: Finkel, 1988, p. 63. 56.

., ‘Hemispheric asymmetry in reaction time to color stimuli’, Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1977, 45(3, pt. 2), pp. 1151–5 Place, E. J. S. & Gilmore, G. C., ‘Perceptual organization in schizophrenia’, Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 1980, 89(3), pp. 409–18 Planck, M., Where is Science Going? (with a preface by Albert Einstein), trans. J Murphy, Allen & Unwin, London, 1933 ——, ‘Report on the 25th General Assembly of the Kaiser Wilhelm Association for the Advancement of the Sciences’, 10–11 January 1936 Platek, S. M. & Gallup, G. G., Jnr., ‘Self-face recognition is affected by schizotypal personality traits’, Schizophrenia Research, 2002, 57(1), pp. 81–5 Platek, S.


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The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, behavioural economics, belling the cat, British Empire, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Defenestration of Prague, desegregation, disinformation, Dutch auction, epigenetics, Exxon Valdez, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Gregor Mendel, Hobbesian trap, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Joan Didion, language acquisition, long peace, meta-analysis, More Guns, Less Crime, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, Oklahoma City bombing, PalmPilot, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, plutocrats, Potemkin village, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Rodney Brooks, Saturday Night Live, Skinner box, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the new new thing, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, urban renewal, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

And people born with variations on the typical plan have variations in the way their minds work. According to a recent study of the brains of identical and fraternal twins, differences in the amount of gray matter in the frontal lobes are not only genetically influenced but are significantly correlated with differences in intelligence.37 A study of Albert Einstein’s brain revealed that he had large, unusually shaped inferior parietal lobules, which participate in spatial reasoning and intuitions about number.38 Gay men are likely to have a smaller third interstitial nucleus in the anterior hypothalamus, a nucleus known to have a role in sex differences.39 And convicted murderers and other violent, antisocial people are likely to have a smaller and less active prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that governs decision making and inhibits impulses.40 These gross features of the brain are almost certainly not sculpted by information coming in from the senses, which implies that differences in intelligence, scientific genius, sexual orientation, and impulsive violence are not entirely learned.

Life expectancy, economic inequality, homicide, and reproductive timing in Chicago neighborhoods. British Medical Journal, 314, 1271–1274. Wilson, R. A., & Keil, F. C. 1999. The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Witelson, S. F., Kigar, D. L., & Harvey, T. 1999. The exceptional brain of Albert Einstein. Lancet, 353, 2149–2153. Wolfe, T. 1975. The painted word. New York: Bantam Books. Wolfe, T. 1981. From Bauhaus to our house. New York: Bantam Books. Wolfe, T. 2000. Sorry, but your soul just died. In Hooking up. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Wrangham, R. 1999. Is military incompetence adaptive?


Israel & the Palestinian Territories Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

active transport: walking or cycling, airport security, Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, bike sharing, biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, flag carrier, G4S, game design, gentrification, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, information security, Khartoum Gordon, Louis Pasteur, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, special economic zone, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, trade route, urban planning, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

MadaTechMUSEUM (National Museum of Science; MAP GOOGLE MAP ; %04-861 4444, ext 1; www.madatech.org.il; 25 Shemaryahu Levin St; adult/child 75/65NIS; h10am-3pm Sun-Wed, to 5pm Thu & Sat, to 1pm Fri) Fascinating interactive science exhibits fill the impressive first home of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, built in 1913. (Classes didn't begin until 1924 because of a disagreement over whether the language of instruction should be German or Hebrew.) When Albert Einstein visited in 1923, he planted a palm tree that still stands out front. Downtown & Port Area After decades of neglect, Haifa's Downtown (Ir Tachtit) and Port Area (Ezor HaNamal) are experiencing a gradual renaissance, with hostels, restaurants and nightlife moving into rundown storefronts and derelict warehouses.

British forces under General Allenby capture Jerusalem from the Ottomans. 1918 British forces take northern Palestine from the Ottomans. In one of the world’s last cavalry charges, an Indian cavalry brigade captures Haifa. 1925 The Hebrew University of Jerusalem is founded atop Mt Scopus. Members of the first Board of Governors include Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud and Martin Buber. 1929 Arab–Jewish riots erupt due to a disagreement over Jewish access to the Western Wall. Many of Hebron’s Jews are sheltered by Muslim neighbours but 67 are killed by mobs. 1939–45 Six million European Jews are murdered by the Nazis. Many Palestinian Jews volunteer for service in the British Army.


pages: 778 words: 239,744

Gnomon by Nick Harkaway

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Burning Man, choice architecture, clean water, cognitive dissonance, false flag, fault tolerance, fear of failure, Future Shock, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, impulse control, Isaac Newton, Khartoum Gordon, lifelogging, neurotypical, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, place-making, post-industrial society, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, Richard Feynman, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, the market place, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, urban sprawl

There’s no trace of the shut-in old lady smell, the powder and outmoded perfume. Instead, there’s a hint of beeswax from the furniture, damp oil paint and turpentine, but above all the autodidact scent of knowledge. It is almost too much, too self-conscious, like a stage set built to house Leonardo da Vinci or Albert Einstein. This person is bookish. Neith glances down a hallway and sees, yes, more books. The Inspector reaches to her terminal to call up the plan of the house from her files, then remembers that it won’t work, that Hunter cut this place out of the grid with a deliberate hand. She tries anyway, but the isolation is effective.

I know that human beings and fundamental particles share one absolute commonality: they exist in their interactions. In between times, their positions and trajectories are indecipherable even to themselves. I know that in planets, such interactions are called conjunctions, and that Isaac Newton came upon the notion of gravity by the alchemy that is called the attraction of souls. I know that Albert Einstein proposed two persons hanging in space alone in a universe that contained nothing else, and observed that if one of them is spinning, there is no way to determine which. Everything depends upon its relationship to everything else for its meaning. For whom was the trap set? For me? It feels … too big.


pages: 879 words: 233,093

The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis by Jeremy Rifkin

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, animal electricity, back-to-the-land, British Empire, carbon footprint, classic study, collaborative economy, death of newspapers, delayed gratification, distributed generation, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, feminist movement, Ford Model T, global village, Great Leap Forward, hedonic treadmill, hydrogen economy, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, off grid, off-the-grid, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, Recombinant DNA, scientific management, scientific worldview, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, social intelligence, supply-chain management, surplus humans, systems thinking, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, working poor, World Values Survey

Our journey begins at the crossroads where the laws of energy that govern the universe come up against the human inclination to continually transcend our sense of isolation by seeking the companionship of others in ever more complex energy-consuming social arrangements. The underlying dialectic of human history is the continuous feedback loop between expanding empathy and increasing entropy. THE LAWSOF THERMODYNAMICS AND HUMAN DEVELOPMENT Albert Einstein once mused about which laws of science were most likely to withstand the test of time and not be subject to deconstruction, irrelevance, or abandonment by future generations. He chose the first and second laws of thermodynamics. Einstein noted that[a] theory is more impressive the greater is the simplicity of its premises, the more different are the kinds of things it relates and the more extended its range of applicability.

“Quantifying and Mapping the Human Appropriation of Net Primary Production in Earth’s Terrestrial Ecosystems.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA. Vol. 104. No. 31. 2007. p. 12,942. 27 Miller, G. Tyler. Energetics, Kinetics and Life: An Ecological Approach. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1971. p. 46. Quotation by Albert Einstein. 28 Asimov, Isaac. “In the Game of Energy and Thermodynamics You Can’t Even Break Even.” Smithsonian. August 1970. p. 9. 29 Soddy, Frederick. Matter and Energy. New York: H. Holt and Company, 1911. pp. 10-11. 30 Blum, Harold F. Time’s Arrow and Evolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 1968. p. 94. 31 Schrödinger, Erwin.


Lonely Planet Eastern Europe by Lonely Planet, Mark Baker, Tamara Sheward, Anita Isalska, Hugh McNaughtan, Lorna Parkes, Greg Bloom, Marc Di Duca, Peter Dragicevich, Tom Masters, Leonid Ragozin, Tim Richards, Simon Richmond

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, crowdsourcing, Day of the Dead, Defenestration of Prague, Fall of the Berlin Wall, flag carrier, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, low cost airline, mass immigration, pre–internet, Steve Jobs, the High Line, Transnistria, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl

Cafe LouvreCAFE ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; %224 930 949; www.cafelouvre.cz; 1st fl, Národní třída 22; h8am-11.30pm Mon-Fri, 9am-11.30pm Sat & Sun; j2, 9, 18, 22) The French-style Cafe Louvre is arguably the most amenable of Prague's grand cafes, as popular today as it was in the early 1900s when it was frequented by the likes of Franz Kafka and Albert Einstein. The atmosphere is wonderfully olde-worlde, and it serves good food as well as coffee. Check out the billiard hall and the ground-floor art gallery. U MedvídkůBEER HALL (At the Little Bear; MAP GOOGLE MAP ; %224 211 916; www.umedvidku.cz; Na Perštýně 7; hbeer hall 11.30am-11pm, museum noon-10pm; W; mNárodní Třída, j2, 9, 18, 22) The most micro of Prague’s microbreweries, with a capacity of only 250L, U Medvídků started producing its own beer in 2005, though its trad-style beer hall has been around for many years.

The location is as impeccable as the surrounds; smack in the middle of Dorćol and across the road from Bajloni farmers market. oHotel MoskvaHISTORIC HOTEL€€€ (Hotel Moscow; MAP GOOGLE MAP ; %011 364 2069; www.hotelmoskva.rs; Terazije 20; s/d/ste from €129/139/210; aW) Art nouveau icon and proud symbol of the best of Belgrade, the majestic Moskva has been wowing guests – including Albert Einstein, Indira Gandhi and Alfred Hitchcock – since 1906. Laden with ye olde glamour, this is the place to write your memoirs at a big old desk. 5Eating oTo Je ToBALKAN€ ( GOOGLE MAP ; bul Despota Stefana 21; mains 220-800DIN; h8am-midnight) 'To je to' means 'that's it', and in this case, they're talking about meat.


The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape by Brian Ladd

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, full employment, megaproject, New Urbanism, planned obsolescence, Prenzlauer Berg, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, urban planning, urban renewal

Images of the 1920s shape Berlin's reputation in much of the world: Berlin as the city of new architecture (Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Erich Mendelsohn), new theater (Max Reinhardt, Erwin Piscator, Bertolt Brecht), new painting (Max Beckmann, George Grosz, Otto Dix), new music (Arnold Schoenberg, Paul Hindemith, Kurt Weill), the new cinema (Fritz Lang, F. W. Murnau, Marlene Dietrich), and the new physics (Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Leo Szilard). Fixed in the popular memory above all, however, is Berlin's night life and popular < previous page page_110 file:///Volumes/My%20Book/arg/ladd-Ghosts_Berlin/files/page_110.html [24/03/2011 13:48:54] next page > page_111 < previous page page_111 next page > Page 111 entertainmentnot just legitimate theater, but the more experimental cabarets and especially the venues where sexual liberation and uncertain gender identities were on display: the nude stage shows; erotic dance, particularly as demonstrated by the visiting American Josephine Baker; the transvestite balls; and the open celebration of homosexuality.


pages: 347 words: 101,586

Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain by António R. Damásio

Albert Einstein, Benoit Mandelbrot, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, discovery of DNA, experimental subject, longitudinal study, mandelbrot fractal, placebo effect, Richard Feynman, social intelligence, theory of mind

Not surprisingly, Benoit Mandelbrot, whose life work is fractal geometry, says he always thinks in images.14 He relates that the physicist Richard Feynman was not fond of looking at an equation without looking at the illustration that went with it (and note that both equation and illustration were images, in fact). As for Albert Einstein, he had no doubts about the process: The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be “voluntarily” reproduced and combined.


pages: 317 words: 101,074

The Road Ahead by Bill Gates, Nathan Myhrvold, Peter Rinearson

Albert Einstein, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Berlin Wall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, business process, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Donald Knuth, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, glass ceiling, global village, informal economy, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, medical malpractice, Mitch Kapor, new economy, packet switching, popular electronics, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, SimCity, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture

The exponential expansion of computing power will keep changing the tools and opening new possibilities that will seem as remote and farfetched then as some of the things I've speculated on here might seem today. Talent and creativity have always shaped advances in unpredictable ways. How many have the talent to become a Steven Spielberg, a Jane Austen, or an Albert Einstein? We know there was at least one of each, and maybe one is all we're allotted. I cannot help but believe, though, that there are many talented people whose aspirations and potential have been thwarted by economics and their lack of tools. New technology will offer people a new means with which to express themselves.


The New Harvest: Agricultural Innovation in Africa by Calestous Juma

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, business climate, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, conceptual framework, creative destruction, CRISPR, double helix, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, export processing zone, global value chain, high-speed rail, impact investing, income per capita, industrial cluster, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, land tenure, M-Pesa, microcredit, mobile money, non-tariff barriers, off grid, out of africa, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, Recombinant DNA, rolling blackouts, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, structural adjustment programs, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, systems thinking, total factor productivity, undersea cable

We would like to commend Sindiso Ngwenya (Secretary General of the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa, Lusaka) for taking an early lead to present the ideas contained in the first iteration of this book to African heads of state and government for consideration. As a result of his efforts, African leaders as well as the private sector prioritized agriculture and food security. This revised edition is a testament to the development of African agriculture since 2010. INTRODUCTION Albert Einstein said that “an empty stomach is not a good political advisor.” Heeding this warning, African leaders have been paying considerable attention to food security. They have also recognized that investing in agriculture contributes to overall economic development and poverty reduction. The January 2014 summit of the African Union (AU) marked the official launch of the “Year of Agriculture and Food Security in Africa.”1 It also marked the tenth anniversary of the adoption of the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP).


pages: 436 words: 98,538

The Upside of Inequality by Edward Conard

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, bank run, Berlin Wall, book value, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Climatic Research Unit, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, future of work, Gini coefficient, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, liquidity trap, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, new economy, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, survivorship bias, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, University of East Anglia, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game

Success bubbles up from a community of hardworking innovators all pursuing the next advancement, learning from the insights of others, and competing with one another. Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz invented calculus at the same time. Samuel Morse patented the telegraph hours before someone else applied for the same patent. And Hendrik Lorentz published the equation E=mc2 before Albert Einstein. Each shared a common base of knowledge. The evolution of that knowledge and their familiarity with it was critical to their success. At the same time, innovation is just a game of chance. Like mining for gold, the more the world searches, the more gold it will find. Because the chances of finding valuable innovation are small, we need to motivate a large community of wannabe innovators to produce a small number of successes.


pages: 327 words: 102,322

Losing the Signal: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of BlackBerry by Jacquie McNish, Sean Silcoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Andy Rubin, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, corporate governance, diversified portfolio, indoor plumbing, Iridium satellite, Jeff Hawkins, junk bonds, Marc Benioff, Mary Meeker, Michael Milken, PalmPilot, patent troll, QWERTY keyboard, rolodex, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, the new new thing

Life seemed impossible. When the outage ended, users were as committed as ever to mobile messaging. For Research In Motion, however, it was a different story. RIM was losing the signal to the market it created. PART ONE IF AT FIRST, THE IDEA IS NOT ABSURD, THEN THERE IS NO HOPE FOR IT. —ALBERT EINSTEIN 1 REACH FOR THE TOP The students at Prince of Wales Public School had long since stopped paying attention to Reg Nicholls squeaking away on the blackboard. Every few minutes the math teacher frowned, erasing part of his work. Then: more numbers, a spiraling out-of-control formula, and that awful scraping of chalk on blackboard.


pages: 443 words: 98,113

The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay by Guy Standing

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-fragile, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, bilateral investment treaty, Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, cashless society, central bank independence, centre right, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, ending welfare as we know it, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Firefox, first-past-the-post, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, gig economy, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, information retrieval, intangible asset, invention of the steam engine, investor state dispute settlement, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, megaproject, mini-job, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Kinnock, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, nudge unit, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, openstreetmap, patent troll, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Phillips curve, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precariat, quantitative easing, remote working, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, structural adjustment programs, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Y Combinator, zero-sum game, Zipcar

• • • Subsidies to rentiers can take the form of selective tax rates, tax breaks of various kinds and opportunities for tax avoidance (and evasion), as well as direct subsidies. Tax credits to top up low wages are also subsidies to capital, because they reduce firms’ labour costs. SELECTIVE TAX RATES ‘The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.’ Albert Einstein Most countries operate a regressive tax system in which the mix of taxes and subsidies favours the rich. Governments tax different sources of income differently, for the benefit of certain groups or interests. Often, income from assets and wealth is taxed less than income from employment. This is a subsidy for rentiers.


pages: 326 words: 103,170

The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune, and Survival in the Age of Networks by Joshua Cooper Ramo

air gap, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, British Empire, cloud computing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deep learning, defense in depth, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Firefox, Google Chrome, growth hacking, Herman Kahn, income inequality, information security, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joi Ito, Laura Poitras, machine translation, market bubble, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, packet switching, paperclip maximiser, Paul Graham, power law, price stability, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social web, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Vernor Vinge, zero day

The age of industrial war: See also Lars-Erik Cederman, T. Camber Warren, and Didier Sornette, “Testing Clausewitz: Nationalism, Mass Mobilization, and the Severity of War,” International Organization 65, no. 4 (October 2011): 605–38. “In 1793”: von Clausewitz, On War, 591. “There is no logical path to these laws”: Albert Einstein, Essays in Science (New York: Philosophical Library, 1934), 4. Chapter 2. THE AGE OF NETWORK POWER On one side: William J. Baumol, Richard R. Nelson, and Edward N. Wolff, eds., Convergence of Productivity: Cross-National Studies and Historical Evidence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).


Future Files: A Brief History of the Next 50 Years by Richard Watson

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, bank run, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Black Swan, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, cashless society, citizen journalism, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, congestion charging, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, deglobalization, digital Maoism, digital nomad, disintermediation, driverless car, epigenetics, failed state, financial innovation, Firefox, food miles, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, hive mind, hobby farmer, industrial robot, invention of the telegraph, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, linked data, low cost airline, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, mass immigration, Northern Rock, Paradox of Choice, peak oil, pensions crisis, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, RFID, Richard Florida, self-driving car, speech recognition, synthetic biology, telepresence, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Turing test, Victor Gruen, Virgin Galactic, white flight, women in the workforce, work culture , Zipcar

Whether a machine will ever fully replace human or animal contact is a big question, to which most people currently answer no. However, attitudes may shift over time. Chapter 2 Science and Technology: the rise of the machines Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere. —Albert Einstein T he history of human civilization is, to a large degree, the history of technology of one kind or another. Hence the history of the next 50 years will largely be determined by what is invented by boffins in Bangalore and nerds in New York. More precisely, the history of the future will be heavily influenced by what we as societies allow to happen in terms of applying science and technology.


pages: 146 words: 43,446

The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story by Michael Lewis

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andy Kessler, Benchmark Capital, business climate, classic study, creative destruction, data acquisition, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, high net worth, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, PalmPilot, pre–internet, risk tolerance, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, tech worker, the new new thing, Thorstein Veblen, wealth creators, Y2K

"I told Alex to sleep under Jim's bed if he had to," recalls Kramlich. "Jim's a revolutionary, you know. He's out to revolutionize whatever needs to be revolted against." Slusky was a bit like one of those janitors at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton who trailed around after the aged Albert Einstein and took down his random scribblings on the off chance they turned out to be important. His job was to stick to Clark and take notes. When Clark finally decided on his next venture, Slusky was to insist that Dick Kramlich at New Enterprise Associates be allowed to buy a piece of it. "Dick was a little unusual in this view," says Slusky.


pages: 297 words: 96,509

Time Paradox by Philip G. Zimbardo, John Boyd

Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, cognitive dissonance, Drosophila, endowment effect, heat death of the universe, hedonic treadmill, impulse control, indoor plumbing, loss aversion, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Monty Hall problem, Necker cube, overconfidence effect, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, twin studies

As we are about to see, we may live at the fulcrum of reality and illusion, but most of us don’t know our own address. CHAPTER 9 Immune to Reality Upon my back, to defend my belly; upon my wit, to defend my wiles; upon my secrecy, to defend mine honesty; my mask, to defend my beauty. Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida ALBERT EINSTEIN MAY HAVE BEEN the greatest genius of the twentieth century, but few people know that he came this close to losing that distinction to a horse. Wilhelm von Osten was a retired schoolteacher who in 1891 claimed that his stallion, whom he called Clever Hans, could answer questions about current events, mathematics, and a host of other topics by tapping the ground with his foreleg.


Who Rules the World? by Noam Chomsky

Able Archer 83, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, classic study, corporate governance, corporate personhood, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Garrett Hardin, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, liberation theology, Malacca Straits, Martin Wolf, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, nuclear winter, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, one-state solution, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, precariat, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, structural adjustment programs, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, uranium enrichment, wage slave, WikiLeaks, working-age population

Both have refused to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty, along with Israel, and have received U.S. support for development of their nuclear weapons programs. In 1962, war was avoided by Khrushchev’s willingness to accept Kennedy’s hegemonic demands. But we can hardly count on such sanity forever. It’s a near miracle that nuclear war has so far been avoided. There is more reason than ever to attend to the warning of Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein, almost sixty years ago, that we must face a choice that is “stark and dreadful and inescapable: Shall we put an end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war?”49 9 The Oslo Accords: Their Context, Their Consequences In September 1993, President Clinton presided over a handshake between Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO chairman Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn—capping off a “day of awe,” as the press described it with reverence.1 The occasion was the announcement of the Declaration of Principles (DOP) for political settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict, which resulted from secret meetings in Oslo sponsored by the Norwegian government.


pages: 350 words: 103,988

Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets by John McMillan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, Anton Chekhov, Asian financial crisis, classic study, congestion charging, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, Dava Sobel, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, Dutch auction, electricity market, experimental economics, experimental subject, fear of failure, first-price auction, frictionless, frictionless market, George Akerlof, George Gilder, global village, Great Leap Forward, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job-hopping, John Harrison: Longitude, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, lone genius, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market design, market friction, market microstructure, means of production, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, ought to be enough for anybody, pez dispenser, pre–internet, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, proxy bid, purchasing power parity, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, sealed-bid auction, search costs, second-price auction, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Stewart Brand, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, War on Poverty, world market for maybe five computers, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, yield management

Reflecting on life under central planning, Czech Republic President Vaclav Havel said that people nowadays “often forget what it looked like here before the fall of communism. How gray life was, how gray streets were, how the sign for a fruit shop was the same all over the country.”1 How did so many countries come to be centrally planned? The road to hell, as the saying goes, is paved with good intentions. Albert Einstein wrote an article in 1949 called “Why Socialism?”2 His answer: the market economy brings crisis, instability, and impoverishment. “The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil.” The only way to eliminate this evil, he concluded, was by establishing socialism, with the means of production “owned by society itself.”


pages: 389 words: 98,487

The Undercover Economist: Exposing Why the Rich Are Rich, the Poor Are Poor, and Why You Can Never Buy a Decent Used Car by Tim Harford

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, business cycle, collective bargaining, congestion charging, Corn Laws, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Fall of the Berlin Wall, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, market design, Martin Wolf, moral hazard, new economy, Pearl River Delta, price discrimination, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, random walk, rent-seeking, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, special economic zone, spectrum auction, The Market for Lemons, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, Vickrey auction

Auctioning air, like playing poker, is a game of great skill—and one that was played for very high stakes indeed. Love, war, and poker Many of those who knew the mathematician John von Neumann regarded him as the “best brain in the world,” and they had a chance to compare him with some stiff competition, given that one of von Neumann’s colleagues at Princeton was Albert Einstein. Von Neumann was a genius around whom grew a my-thology of almost superhuman intelligence. According to one story, Von Neumann was asked to assist with the design of a new supercomputer, required to solve a new and important mathematical problem, which was beyond the capacities of existing supercomputers.


pages: 337 words: 103,273

The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring on the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World by Paul Gilding

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, biodiversity loss, Bob Geldof, BRICs, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, Climategate, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, data science, decarbonisation, energy security, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fear of failure, geopolitical risk, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), John Elkington, Joseph Schumpeter, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, Medieval Warm Period, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, new economy, nuclear winter, Ocado, ocean acidification, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, purchasing power parity, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, systems thinking, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, University of East Anglia, warehouse automation

It will need strong, dominating government, systemwide intervention, technological fixes, and market mobilization. These are things we’re very good at. I will describe what this approach might look like in some detail in the next chapter, “The One-Degree War.” Many “new economy” thinkers will resist this response, using arguments like the often used quote from Albert Einstein that you can’t solve a problem with the same thinking that created it. They will be partly right and partly wrong. They will be right in the sense that if we don’t challenge the fundamental design problems in the global economy, including our beliefs and values, we cannot solve the underlying cause of the climate and sustainability problem—our economic and social model of progress.


pages: 327 words: 103,336

Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer by Duncan J. Watts

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Swan, business cycle, butterfly effect, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, discovery of DNA, East Village, easy for humans, difficult for computers, edge city, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, framing effect, Future Shock, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Santayana, happiness index / gross national happiness, Herman Kahn, high batting average, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, industrial cluster, interest rate swap, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, lake wobegon effect, Laplace demon, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, oil shock, packet switching, pattern recognition, performance metric, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, prediction markets, pre–internet, RAND corporation, random walk, RFID, school choice, Silicon Valley, social contagion, social intelligence, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game, urban planning, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, X Prize

The famous Ockham’s razor—named for the fourteenth-century English logician William of Ockham—posits that “plurality ought never be posited without necessity,” meaning essentially that a complex theory ought never to be adopted where a simpler one would suffice. Most working scientists regard Ockham’s razor with something close to reverence—Albert Einstein, for example, once claimed that a theory “ought to be as simple as possible, and no simpler”—and the history of science would seem to justify this reverence, filled as it is with examples of complex and unwieldy ideas being swept away by simpler, more elegant formulations. What is perhaps less appreciated about the history of science is that it is also filled with examples of initially simple and elegant formulations becoming increasingly more complex and inelegant as they struggle to bear the burden of empirical evidence.


pages: 357 words: 98,854

Epigenetics Revolution: How Modern Biology Is Rewriting Our Understanding of Genetics, Disease and Inheritance by Nessa Carey

Albert Einstein, British Empire, Build a better mousetrap, conceptual framework, discovery of penicillin, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Fellow of the Royal Society, life extension, mouse model, phenotype, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), stem cell, stochastic process, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, twin studies

Wells’s time traveller and fast-forward over thirty years from John Gurdon in Cambridge to a laboratory in Japan, where an equally obsessive scientist has found a completely new way of cloning animals from adult cells. Chapter 2 How We Learned to Roll Uphill Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex … It takes a touch of genius and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction. Albert Einstein Let’s move on about 40 years from John Gurdon’s work, and a decade on from Dolly. There is so much coverage in the press about cloned mammals that we might think this procedure has become routine and easy. The reality is that it is still highly time-consuming and laborious to create clones by nuclear transfer, and consequently it’s generally a very costly process.


pages: 334 words: 98,950

Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brownian motion, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, en.wikipedia.org, export processing zone, falling living standards, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, liberal world order, liberation theology, low skilled workers, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, mega-rich, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shock, price stability, principal–agent problem, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transfer pricing, urban sprawl, World Values Survey

Over time, there emerged international agreements on IPRs, such as the Paris Convention on patents and trademarks (1883)21 and the Berne Convention on copyrights (1886). But even these international agreements did not end the use of ‘illegal’ means in the technological arms race. The lawyers get involved The year 1905 is known as the annus mirabilis of modern physics. In that year, Albert Einstein published three papers that changed the course of physics for good.22 Interestingly, at the time, Einstein was not a professor of physics but a humble patent clerk (an assistant technical examiner) in the Swiss Patent Office, which was his first job.23 Had Einstein been a chemist rather than a physicist, his first job could not have been in the Swiss Patent Office.


pages: 411 words: 95,852

Britain Etc by Mark Easton

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Boris Johnson, British Empire, credit crunch, digital divide, digital rights, drug harm reduction, financial independence, garden city movement, global village, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, intangible asset, James Watt: steam engine, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, mass immigration, moral panic, Neil Armstrong, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, social software, traumatic brain injury

We are all a misjudged mouse-click away from email embarrassment, a digital movie clip away from national humiliation, an injudicious tweet away from international ignominy. These are small (if nightmarish) risks for people whose lives are essentially private, but for anyone who flirts with fame or has a role on the public stage, error can be terminal. Albert Einstein once said, ‘The only sure way to avoid making mistakes is to have no new ideas.’ There are dozens of business and lifestyle books informing readers how failure is the route to success, how progress is built upon trial and error. Military training is designed to take soldiers to breaking point, to force them to stumble.


pages: 329 words: 97,834

No Regrets, Coyote: A Novel by John Dufresne

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, always be closing, fear of failure, illegal immigration, index card, mirror neurons, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, young professional

“You got it.” Venise and Oliver lived in the house he grew up in. His bedroom had remained exactly as it was on the day he left home for college, which was not so much different than it had been when he was in elementary school. Twin bunk beds, framed photos of Hopalong Cassidy, Mary Hartline, and Albert Einstein on the wall, along with a dartboard and a paint-by-number portrait of a collie. His toys were all in their original boxes and stacked neatly on his bookcase. The same pine dresser and mirror, the same Roy Rogers alarm clock, and the same lamp with cattle brands on the shade. Oliver slept in his bedroom.


pages: 572 words: 94,002

Reset: How to Restart Your Life and Get F.U. Money: The Unconventional Early Retirement Plan for Midlife Careerists Who Want to Be Happy by David Sawyer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, beat the dealer, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Cal Newport, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency risk, David Attenborough, David Heinemeier Hansson, Desert Island Discs, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, financial independence, follow your passion, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, imposter syndrome, index card, index fund, invention of the wheel, John Bogle, knowledge worker, loadsamoney, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, mortgage debt, Mr. Money Mustache, passive income, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart meter, Snapchat, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, The 4% rule, Tim Cook: Apple, Vanguard fund, William Bengen, work culture , Y Combinator

Leave a legacy. Remember The LAHs. And finally... Walter Isaacson[429] is a wise American journalist (ex-editor of Time magazine and CNN). He’s also written acclaimed biographies of some of the most talented people who have ever lived, including Benjamin Franklin, Leonardo da Vinci, Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein. Every human being, he contends, is trying to find “where they fit in”: all “searching” for meaning in life and our place in it[430]. It took me more than 40 years to find mine. Running – we’ll touch on that in Part V – gave me hope, but there’s no higher purpose; digital PR gave me pride and is something I excel in, but it’s a means to an end; decluttering made me see clearly again, got my brain firing and opened up a host of possibilities.


pages: 359 words: 96,019

How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars: The Snapchat Story by Billy Gallagher

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Swan, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, computer vision, data science, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, gamification, gentrification, Google Glasses, Hyperloop, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Justin.tv, Kevin Roose, Lean Startup, Long Term Capital Management, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, Nelson Mandela, Oculus Rift, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, power law, QR code, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, TechCrunch disrupt, too big to fail, value engineering, Y Combinator, young professional

From kindergarten through senior year of high school, Evan attended Crossroads, an elite, coed private school in Santa Monica known for its progressive attitudes. Tuition at Crossroads runs north of $22,000 a year, and seemingly rises annually. Students address teachers by their first names, and classrooms are named after important historical figures, like Albert Einstein and George Mead, rather than numbered. The school devotes as significant a chunk of time to math and history as to Human Development, a curriculum meant to teach students maturity, tolerance, and confidence. Crossroads emphasizes creativity, personal communication, well-being, mental health, and the liberal arts.


pages: 329 words: 102,469

Free World: America, Europe, and the Surprising Future of the West by Timothy Garton Ash

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, centre right, clean water, Columbine, continuation of politics by other means, cuban missile crisis, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, Peace of Westphalia, postnationalism / post nation state, Project for a New American Century, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, Washington Consensus, working poor, working-age population, World Values Survey

The population of the Arab countries is expected to rise from 280 million to somewhere between 410 and 460 million in 2020—roughly equal to the projected population of the E.U. of twenty-five member states in the same year.44 The majority of this population will be under thirty years of age. Roughly half the teenage Arabs interviewed in a recent survey conducted by Arab scholars say they wish to emigrate from their own countries.45 Of those who wish to emigrate, somewhere between a third and a half say they would like to come to Europe.*10 You don’t have to be Albert Einstein to do the resulting equation. If nothing changes in their Arab homelands, tens of millions of young people will want to leave the near East for the near West. If Europe does not bring more prosperity and freedom to these young Arabs, they will come to Europe. So the peaceful economic and political transformation of the near East is an even more vital interest for Europe than it is for America.


pages: 343 words: 101,563

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Blockadia, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Chekhov's gun, climate anxiety, cognitive bias, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, effective altruism, Elon Musk, endowment effect, energy transition, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, failed state, fiat currency, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, it's over 9,000, Joan Didion, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kevin Roose, Kim Stanley Robinson, labor-force participation, life extension, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, megastructure, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, microplastics / micro fibres, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Sam Altman, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, the built environment, The future is already here, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Whole Earth Catalog, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

Another perspective, which offers another model of history, is the cyclical one: familiar from the harvest calendar, the Stoic Greek theory of ekpyrosis and the Chinese “dynastic cycle,” and appropriated for the modern era by thinkers as seemingly teleological as Friedrich Nietzsche, who made the cycles of time a moral parable with his “eternal recurrence”; Albert Einstein, who considered the possibility of a “cyclic” model of the universe; Arthur Schlesinger, who saw American history as alternating periods of “public purpose” and “private interest”; and Paul Michael Kennedy, in his circumspect history lesson for the end of the Cold War, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.


pages: 337 words: 103,522

The Creativity Code: How AI Is Learning to Write, Paint and Think by Marcus Du Sautoy

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Alvin Roth, Andrew Wiles, Automated Insights, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Donald Trump, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fellow of the Royal Society, Flash crash, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Henri Poincaré, Jacquard loom, John Conway, Kickstarter, Loebner Prize, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, Minecraft, move 37, music of the spheres, Mustafa Suleyman, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Peter Thiel, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, stable marriage problem, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wikimedia commons

There is an art to identifying and selecting these qualities. For example, the word might have a strong geographical or chronological association, or be connected to the world of art or sport. It might of course have several of these qualities, in which case its location will be pushed in both of these directions. For example, Albert Einstein would be pushed in the direction of ‘scientist’ and ‘musician’, given that he played the violin. But you’d push him more down the scientist dimension than musician. Analysing 20,000 sample questions, the IBM team found about 2500 different answer types, of which some 200 covered over 50 per cent of the questions that were asked.


pages: 305 words: 98,072

How to Own the World: A Plain English Guide to Thinking Globally and Investing Wisely by Andrew Craig

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, bonus culture, book value, BRICs, business cycle, collaborative consumption, diversification, endowment effect, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Future Shock, index fund, information asymmetry, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, low interest rates, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, mortgage debt, negative equity, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, passive income, pensions crisis, quantitative easing, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Russell Brand, Silicon Valley, smart cities, stocks for the long run, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

If you do start small, no matter how small, you will immediately enable yourself to benefit from the magic of compound interest. What is compound interest and why is it so important? If you take nothing more away from this book than an understanding of the incredible power of compound interest then you will have joined a lucky (and generally wealthy) few. None other than Albert Einstein described compound interest, as “the eighth wonder of the world”. Compound interest is, quite literally, a form of free money … and it is free money that grows like a weed over time. But how can this be? Well, imagine that you invested £1,000 today. Imagine, too, that whatever you invested it in went up by 10 per cent this year.


pages: 261 words: 103,244

Economists and the Powerful by Norbert Haring, Norbert H. Ring, Niall Douglas

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, British Empire, buy and hold, central bank independence, collective bargaining, commodity trading advisor, compensation consultant, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, diversified portfolio, financial deregulation, George Akerlof, illegal immigration, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Jean Tirole, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge worker, land bank, law of one price, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, moral hazard, new economy, obamacare, old-boy network, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Solow, rolodex, Savings and loan crisis, Sergey Aleynikov, shareholder value, short selling, Steve Jobs, The Chicago School, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, union organizing, Vilfredo Pareto, working-age population, World Values Survey

CONTENTS Introduction vii Chapter 1 The Economics of the Powerful 1 Chapter 2 Money is Power Chapter 3 The Power of the Corporate Elite 107 Chapter 4 Market Power 141 Chapter 5 Power at Work 163 Chapter 6 The Power to Set the Rules of the Game 207 47 Afterword 221 References 223 Index 241 INTRODUCTION Whether you can observe a thing or not depends on the theory which you use. It is the theory which decides what can be observed. —Albert Einstein, 1926 Americans often feel exasperated with the economic intransigence of their continental European cousins. To a typical American, the typical non-English speaking European often seems obsessed with big government, large welfare systems and making it hard to do business by interfering with capitalism.


pages: 347 words: 99,317

Bad Samaritans: The Guilty Secrets of Rich Nations and the Threat to Global Prosperity by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, banking crisis, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brownian motion, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, en.wikipedia.org, export processing zone, falling living standards, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, liberal world order, liberation theology, low skilled workers, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, mega-rich, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shock, price stability, principal–agent problem, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transfer pricing, urban sprawl, World Values Survey

Over time, there emerged international agreements on IPRs, such as the Paris Convention on patents and trademarks (1883)21 and the Berne Convention on copyrights (1886). But even these international agreements did not end the use of ‘illegal’ means in the technological arms race. The lawyers get involved The year 1905 is known as the annus mirabilis of modern physics. In that year, Albert Einstein published three papers that changed the course of physics for good.22 Interestingly, at the time, Einstein was not a professor of physics but a humble patent clerk (an assistant technical examiner) in the Swiss Patent Office, which was his first job.23 Had Einstein been a chemist rather than a physicist, his first job could not have been in the Swiss Patent Office.


pages: 326 words: 97,089

Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars by Lee Billings

addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, California gold rush, Colonization of Mars, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dava Sobel, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Ford Model T, full employment, Hans Moravec, hydraulic fracturing, index card, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, Late Heavy Bombardment, low earth orbit, Magellanic Cloud, music of the spheres, Neil Armstrong, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, planetary scale, private spaceflight, profit motive, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, selection bias, Silicon Valley, space junk, synthetic biology, technological singularity, the scientific method, transcontinental railway

Then, the American astronomer Edwin Hubble found that our galaxy was but one of many, and discovered that nearly all other galaxies in the sky were racing away from one another at incredible speeds. The universe was literally expanding, following a course that would soon be elucidated in the relativistic theories of Albert Einstein. Once again, at the largest scales that could then be measured, the cosmos was proving far larger and stranger than most anyone had dared to previously suppose, with our existence nowhere near the center. Meanwhile, far back down the scale, in the realm of stars and their planets, the Copernican Revolution had stalled.


pages: 349 words: 95,972

Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives by Tim Harford

affirmative action, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, assortative mating, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Basel III, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Erdős number, experimental subject, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, Frank Gehry, game design, global supply chain, Googley, Guggenheim Bilbao, Helicobacter pylori, high net worth, Inbox Zero, income inequality, industrial cluster, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Merlin Mann, microbiome, out of africa, Paul Erdős, Richard Thaler, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, telemarketer, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the strength of weak ties, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, urban decay, warehouse robotics, William Langewiesche

As a Jewish woman, Noether had to overcome a double dose of prejudice. “She really was stupendous . . . being ‘averagely brilliant’ would not have been enough.” Emmy Noether laughed when the first students started coming to class wearing Nazi brown shirts, but she was one of the first of Göttingen’s Jews to lose her job. With the help of Albert Einstein she secured a position at Bryn Mawr College near Philadelphia in 1933. * For digital documents, we now have a messier alternative to filing: the tag. A single copy of a document can be in only one folder, but it can be tagged in as many different ways as we like. * The French essayist Paul Valéry argued that if you want to always be able to find your treasured possessions, simply be yourself and put them wherever your instinct tells you.


pages: 370 words: 97,138

Beyond: Our Future in Space by Chris Impey

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Biosphere 2, Buckminster Fuller, built by the lowest bidder, butterfly effect, California gold rush, carbon-based life, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, cosmic abundance, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dennis Tito, discovery of DNA, Doomsday Clock, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Hyperloop, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Late Heavy Bombardment, life extension, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mars Rover, Mars Society, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, Oculus Rift, operation paperclip, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, phenotype, private spaceflight, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, technological singularity, telepresence, telerobotics, the medium is the message, the scientific method, theory of mind, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, wikimedia commons, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize, Yogi Berra

In chaotic inflation, the precursor state was an endless series of space-time quantum fluctuations. Some of these fluctuations might inflate into macroscopic universes, while others would not. This is the multiverse concept. The multiverse is connected to another issue that has been perplexing physicists for several decades: fine-tuning.12 Albert Einstein fervently believed that the laws of physics, when they were fully understood, would be inevitable, elegant, and self-contained. This quality, called naturalness, has been a touchstone in theories of nature ever since. But nature isn’t cooperating. The “standard model of particle physics” precisely explains the interactions of fundamental particles, but the model is governed by more than two dozen parameters, so it’s not elegant or simple and the parameters don’t emerge naturally from an underlying theory.


pages: 304 words: 22,886

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard H. Thaler, Cass R. Sunstein

Al Roth, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, call centre, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, continuous integration, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, desegregation, diversification, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, endowment effect, equity premium, feminist movement, financial engineering, fixed income, framing effect, full employment, George Akerlof, index fund, invisible hand, late fees, libertarian paternalism, loss aversion, low interest rates, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mason jar, medical malpractice, medical residency, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, money market fund, pension reform, presumed consent, price discrimination, profit maximization, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Saturday Night Live, school choice, school vouchers, systems thinking, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, Zipcar

Whether or not they have ever studied economics, many people seem at least implicitly committed to the idea of homo economicus, or economic man—the notion that each of us thinks and chooses unfailingly well, and thus fits within the textbook picture of human beings offered by economists. If you look at economics textbooks, you will learn that homo economicus can think like Albert Einstein, store as much memory as IBM’s Big Blue, and exercise the willpower of Mahatma Gandhi. Really. But the folks that we know are not like that. Real people have trouble with long division if they don’t have a calculator, sometimes forget their spouse’s birthday, and have a hangover on New Year’s Day.


pages: 193 words: 98,671

The Inmates Are Running the Asylum by Alan Cooper

Albert Einstein, Apple Newton, Bill Atkinson, business cycle, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Gary Kildall, General Magic , Howard Rheingold, informal economy, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, lateral thinking, Menlo Park, natural language processing, new economy, PalmPilot, pets.com, Robert X Cringely, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, telemarketer, urban planning

They then turn on the software vendor, demanding that the interaction be made more satisfactory for the end user. Part IV: Interaction Design Is Good Business Chapter 9 Designing for Pleasure Chapter 10 Designing for Power Chapter 11 Designing for People Chapter 9. Designing for Pleasure As Albert Einstein said, "You can't solve a problem with the same thinking that created it." I've just devoted many pages to identifying that old thinking and showing how it doesn't work. Now it's time to talk about a new method that will work. I've been developing this method, called Goal-Directed design, since 1992, and the designers in my consulting firm use it for all of our projects.


pages: 398 words: 100,679

The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch by Lewis Dartnell

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, clean water, cotton gin, Dava Sobel, decarbonisation, discovery of penicillin, Dmitri Mendeleev, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, global village, Haber-Bosch Process, invention of movable type, invention of radio, invention of writing, iterative process, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, Kim Stanley Robinson, lone genius, low earth orbit, mass immigration, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, nuclear winter, off grid, Oklahoma City bombing, Richard Feynman, safety bicycle, tacit knowledge, technology bubble, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, trade route

Practically all modern refrigerators force the condensation step—returning the refrigerant to a liquid so that it can be vaporized again and remove more heat from the compartment—by using an electric compressor pump. But there are alternative methods, the simplest of which is known as an absorption refrigerator (Albert Einstein himself co-invented one version). In this system, a refrigerant such as ammonia is condensed not by pressurizing it but simply by allowing it to dissolve, or be absorbed, into water. The refrigerant is returned to the cycle by heating the ammonia-water mixture to separate the ammonia, which has a far lower boiling point (the same principle of distillation we saw here), using either a gas flame, an electric filament, or just the Sun’s warmth.


pages: 335 words: 96,002

WEconomy: You Can Find Meaning, Make a Living, and Change the World by Craig Kielburger, Holly Branson, Marc Kielburger, Sir Richard Branson, Sheryl Sandberg

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, blood diamond, Boeing 747, business intelligence, business process, carbon footprint, clean tech, clean water, Colonization of Mars, content marketing, corporate social responsibility, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, energy transition, family office, food desert, future of work, global village, impact investing, inventory management, James Dyson, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, market design, meta-analysis, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, pre–internet, retail therapy, Salesforce, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Virgin Galactic, working poor, Y Combinator

We formed Big Change with the founding principle: to really shift things, we need to shake up the way we approach charity for (and with) the next generation—equipping young people with the tools and motivation to lead their own change. “Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.” —Albert Einstein In that first year, we climbed Mont Blanc in France in our epic Big Climb for Big Change to raise £250,000 to support great organizations that were aligned to our values of empowering young people and driving positive change. We hired our first employee (again, never forget the importance of the investing in top talent when it comes to being a true purpose-driven organization) and recruited a young, earnest managing director (M.D.): Alex Walters.


The Pirate's Dilemma by Matt Mason

Albert Einstein, augmented reality, barriers to entry, blood diamond, citizen journalism, creative destruction, digital divide, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, future of work, glass ceiling, global village, Hacker Ethic, haute couture, Howard Rheingold, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Urbanism, patent troll, peer-to-peer, prisoner's dilemma, public intellectual, RAND corporation, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, SETI@home, side hustle, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Catalog

*For the uninitiated, a sampler is a musical instrument that records or samples different sounds that can then be reconfigured in a variety of ways to make new sounds. We Invented the Remix | 81 In essence the remix is a creative mental process. It requires you to do nothing more than change the way you look at something. Albert Einstein once said, “No problem can be solved from the same consciousness that created it”; the remix is that mind-set crystallized. It’s about shifting your perception of something and taking in other elements and influences. It requires you to think of chunks of the past as building blocks for the future.


Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World by Laura Spinney

Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, autism spectrum disorder, British Empire, colonial rule, dark matter, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Jenner, experimental subject, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, global pandemic, Hernando de Soto, Higgs boson, invisible hand, John Snow's cholera map, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, nocebo, placebo effect, social distancing, trade route, urban renewal

‘Victorian science would have left the world hard and clean and bare, like a landscape in the moon,’ wrote Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in 1921, ‘but this science is in truth but a little light in the darkness, and outside that limited circle of definite knowledge we see the loom and shadow of gigantic and fantastic possibilities around us, throwing themselves continually across our consciousness in such ways that it is difficult to ignore them.’5 Conan Doyle, the British creator of that most scientific of detectives, Sherlock Holmes, stopped writing fiction after he lost his son to the Spanish flu, and devoted himself instead to spiritualism–the belief that the living can communicate with the dead. Spiritualism had been popular in the nineteenth century, but it enjoyed a resurgence after 1918, encouraged in part by Albert Einstein’s description of time as a fourth dimension (if there were four, why couldn’t there be more, some of which harboured restless spirits?). In 1926, Conan Doyle was invited to speak to the members of a scientific society at Cambridge University, who listened politely if sceptically to his description of ectoplasm as the material basis of all psychic phenomena.6 In general, the 1920s were a time of intellectual openness, of testing and trampling of boundaries.


The Unusual Billionaires by Saurabh Mukherjea

Albert Einstein, asset light, Atul Gawande, backtesting, barriers to entry, Black-Scholes formula, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, buy and hold, call centre, Checklist Manifesto, commoditize, compound rate of return, corporate governance, dematerialisation, disintermediation, diversification, equity risk premium, financial innovation, forensic accounting, full employment, inventory management, low cost airline, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Peter Thiel, QR code, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, work culture

At the heart of this outstanding performance there have been (a) a strong brand—initially the UTI brand and then over the past decade, the Axis brand—that Indian customers, especially savers, trust; (b) the largest ATM network and one of the largest branch networks in the private sector; and (c) consistent innovation over time in segmenting and tackling groups of customers in novel ways. CHAPTER 7 HDFC Bank: The Power of Textbook Execution ‘Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex. It takes a touch of genius—and a lot of courage—to move in the opposite direction.’ —Albert Einstein ‘Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.’ —Leonardo da Vinci My office in Lower Parel is next to HDFC Bank’s headquarters and whilst from one window of my office I can see the cubicles of HDFC Bank’s top brass, from the other window I can see Kamala Mills, the place where the bank set up its first large office over twenty years ago.


The Last Stargazers by Emily Levesque

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Boeing 747, Carrington event, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, Eddington experiment, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, it's over 9,000, Kuiper Belt, Kwajalein Atoll, lolcat, Magellanic Cloud, mass immigration, messenger bag, Neil Armstrong, Pluto: dwarf planet, polynesian navigation, the scientific method

Eclipse expeditions from previous centuries have filled entire books, including David Baron’s American Eclipse, recounting a worldwide Gilded Age scramble to study the solar eclipse that crossed North America in 1878. The most scientifically famous eclipse observation is undoubtedly Arthur Eddington’s expedition in 1919 to test Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity. According to Einstein, the sun should “lens” background stars as it passes in front of them, bending their light thanks to the effects of the sun’s gravity on space-time and causing them to appear at a slightly different place in the sky. The problem with testing this theory is that normally, the sun is so bright, it outshines the light of all the other stars in the sky.


pages: 599 words: 98,564

The Mutant Project: Inside the Global Race to Genetically Modify Humans by Eben Kirksey

23andMe, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Bernie Sanders, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, double helix, epigenetics, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental subject, fake news, gentrification, George Floyd, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, microdosing, moral panic, move fast and break things, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, special economic zone, statistical model, stem cell, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, technological determinism, upwardly mobile, urban planning, young professional

But sometimes his passion for reading got him in trouble. One day he was put in charge of looking after the family’s prized water buffalo, the animal used to plow the rice paddy before planting. Jiankui took the buffalo up into nearby hills to graze on fresh grasses. While he was absorbed in a book about Albert Einstein, the buffalo wandered off. Family and friends helped track the wayward animal down within a few hours. This incident stands out in the collective memory of the He family: when the young boy became lost in his dreams, it nearly resulted in a major calamity in the real world. “Jiankui was not one of the naughty boys when he was young,” one of his aunties clarified in the regional dialect.


pages: 319 words: 102,839

Heavy Metal: The Hard Days and Nights of the Shipyard Workers Who Build America's Supercarriers by Michael Fabey

Albert Einstein, augmented reality, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, company town, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, desegregation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, George Floyd, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, Minecraft, Ronald Reagan, social distancing, South China Sea, union organizing

Should we go back to steam catapults? Trump wanted to know. That had become a relatively new thing of his, pushing for the carriers to forgo the new electromagnetic cats and put the old steam ones back in there instead. “Steam is very reliable, and the electromagnetic—I mean unfortunately, you have to be Albert Einstein to really work it properly,” Trump had told US service members during a recent Thanksgiving Day call. Trump didn’t know, or didn’t care, but Newport News Shipbuilding had already studied reinstalling steam cats on later Ford-class carriers but rejected the idea as too expensive. The elevator problems came up during a chat between the president and the navy secretary.


pages: 286 words: 101,129

Spaceman: An Astronaut's Unlikely Journey to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe by Mike Massimino

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, carbon-based life, Charles Lindbergh, company town, Gene Kranz, imposter syndrome, James Webb Space Telescope, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mason jar, Neil Armstrong, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, telerobotics, Virgin Galactic, Yom Kippur War

Sheridan and the rest of my committee were lined up in chairs around a coffee table and then there was me, alone, standing at a chalkboard in front of them with nothing but a piece of chalk in my hand to show my work. I needed more than a piece of chalk to save me that day. An oral exam is like a firing squad. It’s their job to tear you apart, challenge your assumptions, force you to defend your conclusions. If they find a weakness in your work, they’ll hone in on it and take you down. Albert Einstein could be up there and they’d tear him to shreds, too. I won’t keep you in suspense: They destroyed me. It was a massacre. They were bombarding me with questions from every angle. Why this? What’s your evidence for that? I was stumbling through my answers, losing my train of thought, trying to go back and start over.


pages: 398 words: 96,909

We're Not Broken: Changing the Autism Conversation by Eric Garcia

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, defund the police, Donald Trump, epigenetics, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, full employment, George Floyd, Greta Thunberg, intentional community, Internet Archive, Joi Ito, Lyft, meta-analysis, neurotypical, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, phenotype, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, short selling, Silicon Valley, TED Talk

Thanks to the work of advocates like Ne’eman, the culture around autism began changing, and in turn, the political rhetoric changed as well. During his last year as president, Obama guest-edited an issue of Wired magazine. In an interview, Obama was asked about autistic researcher Temple Grandin’s theory that Mozart, Nicola Tesla, and Albert Einstein were autistic. Obama responded by saying, “They might be on the spectrum,” showing he understood the vernacular of autism. In that same interview, when he was asked about what would happen to society if autism was eliminated, he said, “That goes to the larger issue that we wrestle with all the time around [artificial intelligence].


pages: 289 words: 95,046

Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis by Scott Patterson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black Swan Protection Protocol, Black-Scholes formula, blockchain, Bob Litterman, Boris Johnson, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, centre right, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, commodity super cycle, complexity theory, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, disinformation, diversification, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, effective altruism, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, energy transition, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Extinction Rebellion, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, Gail Bradbrook, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Greta Thunberg, hindsight bias, index fund, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Joan Didion, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Spitznagel, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, money market fund, moral hazard, Murray Gell-Mann, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, panic early, Pershing Square Capital Management, Peter Singer: altruism, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, proprietary trading, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative easing, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, rewilding, Richard Thaler, risk/return, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rory Sutherland, Rupert Read, Sam Bankman-Fried, Silicon Valley, six sigma, smart contracts, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systematic trading, tail risk, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, value at risk, Vanguard fund, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

Because most other investors weren’t worried about risk, and volatility was near record lows, Universa was able to quickly load up on dirt cheap S&P 500 puts and VIX call options—bets on a spike in volatility—before things went crazy. * * * On January 23, 2020, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved its Doomsday Clock twenty seconds closer to midnight—“closer,” it said, “to apocalypse than ever”—a symbolic one hundred seconds to humanity’s ruin. The group, founded in 1945 by Albert Einstein and others involved in creating the atomic bomb, cited climate change, the ever-present threat of nuclear disaster, and cyber-enabled information warfare as the most prominent factors forcing the heightened threat level. It was the nearest to doomsday since the watchdog group of scientists first published the metric at the dawn of the Cold War.


pages: 307 words: 101,998

IRL: Finding Realness, Meaning, and Belonging in Our Digital Lives by Chris Stedman

Albert Einstein, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, context collapse, COVID-19, deepfake, different worldview, digital map, Donald Trump, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, game design, gamification, gentrification, Google Earth, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, move fast and break things, off-the-grid, Overton Window, pre–internet, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, sentiment analysis, Skype, Snapchat, statistical model, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, TikTok, urban planning, urban renewal

Yes, they’ve taken on a different flavor, perhaps even a new intensity, but ultimately the roots are the same: we’re all struggling with how to show up in the world and understand ourselves and others. Social media shines a light on the curation, posing, and self-editing that’s always occurred. Maybe it’s taken on a more explicit life now, a life in which we’re all amateurs—but that makes the problem easier to identify, and hopefully easier to address. There’s an Albert Einstein quote (I can already feel the eye rolls) that I keep coming back to: “The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.” The way we use the internet is a product of our own desires, needs, and interests. But we can change it if we look at our desires, needs, and interests honestly.


pages: 827 words: 239,762

The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, the Limits of Capitalism, and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite by Duff McDonald

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, deskilling, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, eat what you kill, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, impact investing, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, new economy, obamacare, oil shock, pattern recognition, performance metric, Pershing Square Capital Management, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, pushing on a string, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, survivorship bias, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, urban renewal, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

Born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1866, Flexner had staked out permanent territory as an educational authority with the publication two decades earlier of the Flexner Report, which is credited with sparking the reform of medical education in the United States and Canada. He also cofounded (with Louis Bamberger) the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, with the immodest ambition of “[advancing] the frontiers of knowledge.”1 The institute, which later counted Albert Einstein and John Von Neumann among its faculty, has more than met that goal. Flexner was both a critic and an innovator—a man to be listened to, even if HBS didn’t like what he had to say. And they most certainly did not, starting with his conclusion that the rapid proliferation of professional schools within the university system—with the exception of medicine and law—was a threat to the university’s sacred purpose of the advancement of knowledge.2 And what society most certainly did not need, Flexner argued, was a graduate school of business at Harvard, which, ironically, the Rockefellers’ own GEB had helped bring into being.

“Bob [Kaplan] got really angry when I started saying that management accounting was destructive,” he recalls, “and that the business schools were the single most important influence in developing that thinking, which was teaching managers that you go into business to manage the numbers and that nothing else matters. . . . Milton Friedman had no connection to reality. He said that if your models aren’t borne out by the statistical tests, the first thing to do is check your data, not your theory. But that’s not what Michael Faraday would have said. Or Albert Einstein.” The apostasy cost him. “For the last ten years of my career,” he says, “I worked alone. I retired partly because no one had any regard for what I was doing. . . . They are much more interested in the message that HBS has created and which its people have so successfully spread through society—that the point of it all is simply to accumulate more.”


pages: 1,034 words: 241,773

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Alignment Problem, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charlie Hebdo massacre, classic study, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edward Jenner, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, endogenous growth, energy transition, European colonialism, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, frictionless market, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hacker Conference 1984, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, Laplace demon, launch on warning, life extension, long peace, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mahbub ul Haq, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, obamacare, ocean acidification, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-truth, power law, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, radical life extension, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, Social Justice Warrior, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y2K

The indictment of science seems misplaced, given that since the dawn of the nuclear age, when mainstream scientists were sidelined from nuclear policy, it’s been physical scientists who have waged a vociferous campaign to remind the world of the danger of nuclear war and to urge nations to disarm. Among the illustrious historic figures are Niels Bohr, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Albert Einstein, Isidor Rabi, Leo Szilard, Joseph Rotblat, Harold Urey, C. P. Snow, Victor Weisskopf, Philip Morrison, Herman Feshbach, Henry Kendall, Theodore Taylor, and Carl Sagan. The movement continues among high-profile scientists today, including Stephen Hawking, Michio Kaku, Lawrence Krauss, and Max Tegmark.

The Doomsday Clock, despite adorning a journal with “Scientists” in its title, does not track objective indicators of nuclear security; rather, it’s a propaganda stunt intended, in the words of its founder, “to preserve civilization by scaring men into rationality.”70 The clock’s minute hand was farther from midnight in 1962, the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis, than it was in the far calmer 2007, in part because the editors, worried that the public had become too complacent, redefined “doomsday” to include climate change.71 And in their campaign to shake people out of their apathy, scientific experts have made some not-so-prescient predictions: Only the creation of a world government can prevent the impending self-destruction of mankind. —Albert Einstein, 195072 I have a firm belief that unless we have more serious and sober thought on various aspects of the strategic problem . . . we are not going to reach the year 2000—and maybe not even the year 1965—without a cataclysm. —Herman Kahn, 196073 Within, at the most, ten years, some of those [nuclear] bombs are going off.


pages: 782 words: 245,875

The Power Makers by Maury Klein

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, animal electricity, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, book value, British Empire, business climate, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, industrial research laboratory, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, margin call, Menlo Park, price stability, railway mania, Right to Buy, the scientific method, trade route, transcontinental railway, working poor

After Maxwell, mechanical explanations of electric phenomena no longer sufficed, yet theoretical knowledge of their nature remained far from complete.64 Stupendous discoveries and developments flowed from Maxwell’s concepts. They led most directly to the invention of radio and more abstractly to Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity. At the time, however, many physicists shrank from Maxwell’s argument despite its solid grounding in mathematics. They could not accept the notion that insulators, which confined electric currents within prescribed paths, could also be the seat of electric action. A curious irony arose.

If that was true, the demise of ether theory left a vacuum, and science, like nature itself, abhors a vacuum.72 Although Michelson later carved out a distinguished career that included a Nobel Prize, he remained best known for the experiment that failed. Yet it actually succeeded in quite another respect: It marked the death knell for ether theory and set in motion the emergence of a new era in theoretical physics. During 1905, in one of three epochal papers he published that year, a young and obscure physicist named Albert Einstein unraveled the mystery that had tormented scientists for centuries only to put in its place a still greater one. While trying to explain some seeming anomalies in Maxwell’s equations, he concluded that the only constant in the universe was the speed of the light itself. Even more, without ether theory the universe had no body at rest against which to measure motion.


pages: 936 words: 252,313

Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease by Gary Taubes

Albert Einstein, California gold rush, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, cognitive dissonance, collaborative editing, Drosophila, Everything should be made as simple as possible, experimental subject, Gary Taubes, invention of agriculture, John Snow's cholera map, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, phenotype, placebo effect, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, selection bias, seminal paper, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, twin studies, unbiased observer, Upton Sinclair

The remaining 30 percent will raise LDL cholesterol but will also raise HDL cholesterol and will have an insignificant effect, if any, on the ratio of total cholesterol to HDL. All of this suggests that eating a porterhouse steak in lieu of bread or potatoes would actually reduce heart-disease risk, although virtually no nutritional authority will say so publicly. The same is true for lard and bacon. “Everything should be made as simple as possible,” Albert Einstein once supposedly said, “but no simpler.” Our understanding of the nutritional causes of heart disease started with Keys’s original oversimplification that heart disease is caused by the effect of all dietary fat on total serum cholesterol. Total cholesterol gave way to HDL and LDL cholesterol and even triglycerides.

“Everything should be made…”: Shapiro 2006:231. This quote may be a paraphrase of the following statement: “The supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience” (see http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein). “marginal risk factor”: Gordon et al. 1977:710. Only a few percentage points higher: Castelli et al. 1977. “If you look in the literature…”: Ibid. AHA nutrition guidelines: Krauss et al. 1996; Krauss et al. 2000. “30-percent-fat recommendation…”: Interview, Ronald Krauss. “this conventional notion…”:Ibid.


pages: 941 words: 237,152

USA's Best Trips by Sara Benson

Albert Einstein, California gold rush, car-free, carbon footprint, cotton gin, Day of the Dead, desegregation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Donner party, East Village, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, if you build it, they will come, indoor plumbing, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, McMansion, mega-rich, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, the High Line, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white flight, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration

Designed by Mary Colter for Fred Harvey, the early-20th-century entrepreneur who codified Southwestern style in his hotels and restaurants along the Santa Fe Railroad, this 1929 hotel features elaborate tile work, glass-and-tin chandeliers and Navajo rugs. Colter created some of the most famous buildings in the Southwest, including several that blend magnificently into the limestone of Grand Canyon National Park, but many consider this rambling hacienda to be her masterpiece. Small, period-styled rooms are named for former guests, including Albert Einstein and Gary Cooper, and there’s a decent restaurant. Hit the road before breakfast, as you’ll find better options 60 miles west in historic Flagstaff. With a low-key vibe and an inordinate number of outdoor shops catering to both the fleece-clad local crowd and Grand Canyon visitors, this high-country college town makes a pleasant morning stroll.

To make the most of this national park, you need to devote at least three days to the region. Whether you get to the bottom via mule or foot power is not important, but spending the night at Phantom Ranch on the canyon floor is paramount. Catch a Grand Canyon sunset, an amazing play of light and shadow, from the porch of the El Tovar on your last night. Albert Einstein and Teddy Roosevelt have both slumbered at this rambling 1905 wooden lodge, and so should you. The place hasn’t lost a lick of its genteel historic patina. Loop south from the Grand Canyon and drive through 110 miles of Arizona’s red rock country to Sedona. With spindly towers, grand buttes and flat-topped mesas carved in crimson sandstone the town can easily hold its own against national parks when it comes to breathtaking beauty.


pages: 460 words: 108,654

Time Travelers Never Die by Jack McDevitt

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, index card, indoor plumbing, Johannes Kepler, life extension, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Rosa Parks, Thales of Miletus, walking around money, white picket fence, Winter of Discontent

How could I have known?” “My God, Shel. Where’d you get it?” And suddenly he understood. “Your father.” “Yes.” “It’s how he disappeared out of his house.” “That’s right.” “So where’d he go?” “I don’t know exactly. He said maybe he was going to talk to Galileo. Maybe Ben Franklin. Maybe Albert Einstein. Hell, who knows?” Dave burst out laughing. “Galileo.” “It’s why I need you.” “He’s dead. They’re all dead.” “Come on, Dave. Stay with me.” “You’re going after him.” “Yes. I’m going to try Galileo first.” “And you need somebody who speaks Italian.” “Right again.” “Let me understand what we’re talking about here.


pages: 385 words: 111,113

Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane by Brett King

23andMe, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, congestion charging, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, different worldview, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, distributed ledger, double helix, drone strike, electricity market, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fellow of the Royal Society, fiat currency, financial exclusion, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, future of work, gamification, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, gigafactory, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Lippershey, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Leonard Kleinrock, lifelogging, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, mobile money, money market fund, more computing power than Apollo, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Ray Kurzweil, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart transportation, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Turing complete, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, yottabyte

His paper “Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper” (“On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”), which was published on 26th September 1905, led to both the theory of special relativity, as well as specifically an equation to quantify mass-energy equivalence, known simply as E=MC2. The physicist, of course, was none other than the Nobel laureate Albert Einstein. Prior to Einstein’s revelations, worldwide excitement over Marie and Pierre Curie’s discovery of radium in 1898 launched an era of optimism over the potential benefits of nuclear science. However, H. G. Wells’ imagining of atomic war in The World Set Free in 1914, the Radium Dial Trials of the 1930s and the top-secret Manhattan Project to develop an atomic weapon in 1942 soon revealed a darker side to nuclear science.


pages: 416 words: 108,370

Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction by Derek Thompson

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, always be closing, augmented reality, Clayton Christensen, data science, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Ford Model T, full employment, game design, Golden age of television, Gordon Gekko, hindsight bias, hype cycle, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, information trail, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Roose, Kodak vs Instagram, linear programming, lock screen, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, out of africa, planned obsolescence, power law, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social contagion, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, subscription business, TED Talk, telemarketer, the medium is the message, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vilfredo Pareto, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa, women in the workforce

At the moment, comic book heroes seem rather immortal, but there is no way that comics are the final evolution of film. In this way, all hits can ironically sow the seeds of their own demise, as over-imitation ultimately renders the trend obsolete. “Semi-chaotic industry with Bose-Einstein distribution dynamics”: One hundred years ago, scientists Satyendra Nath Bose and Albert Einstein concluded that gas molecules in sealed containers would aggressively cluster at a time and place that was impossible to predict with certainty. Consider it a metaphor for pop culture, with consumers playing the role of gas molecules. At some point in time, they will cluster around an unforeseeable cultural product by buying the same book or attending the same movie.


pages: 354 words: 105,322

The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites' Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, cellular automata, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, G4S, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global reserve currency, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, jitney, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, large denomination, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, machine readable, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, nuclear winter, obamacare, offshore financial centre, operational security, Paul Samuelson, Peace of Westphalia, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, plutocrats, prediction markets, price anchoring, price stability, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, random walk, reserve currency, RFID, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, tech billionaire, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, transfer pricing, value at risk, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, Westphalian system

It is no dishonor to Ricardo that his theory fails in conditions of globalization. His ideas were brilliant for their time, and advanced the then-young science of economics toward its classical phase. The same can be said of Sir Isaac Newton, whose ideas on celestial mechanics were surpassed by Albert Einstein’s relativity. Newton is counted among our greatest geniuses; Einstein thought so himself. Yet one cannot probe distant galaxies with Newtonian mechanics, nor can one run a twenty-first-century economy on Ricardian principles. You need Einstein to probe galaxies, and you need new trade theories not to wreck the U.S. economy in a globalized age.


pages: 343 words: 102,846

Trees on Mars: Our Obsession With the Future by Hal Niedzviecki

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, anti-communist, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, big-box store, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Colonization of Mars, computer age, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, Future Shock, Google Glasses, hive mind, Howard Zinn, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, independent contractor, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John von Neumann, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, life extension, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Neil Armstrong, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ponzi scheme, precariat, prediction markets, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Virgin Galactic, warehouse robotics, working poor

Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man—the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society.”23 As we gain momentum and hurtle into the computer age, the pronunciations become both more certain and more precise. “Tomorrow,” promises Albert Einstein collaborator John Archibald Wheeler, who coined the famously cryptic phrase ‘it from bit,’ “we will have learned to understand and express all of physics in the language of information.”24 Wheeler sets us on a quest: to pull into information nothing less than the totality of everything that is or was or could be.


Capital Ideas Evolving by Peter L. Bernstein

Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bob Litterman, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, commodity trading advisor, computerized trading, creative destruction, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, diversification, diversified portfolio, endowment effect, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, high net worth, hiring and firing, index fund, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, market bubble, mental accounting, money market fund, Myron Scholes, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, price anchoring, price stability, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, survivorship bias, systematic trading, tail risk, technology bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, yield curve, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

In fact, a recent study reports that 92 percent of the world’s top 500 companies are using derivatives.8 The Edinburgh professor Donald MacKenzie has described options pricing theory as “mathematics . . . performed in flesh and blood.”9 As you read on, keep in mind that the powerful body of knowledge motivating this whole story was conceived in the space of only twentyone years, from 1952 to 1973. That is a remarkable fact.* The resulting theoretical structure had no prior existence and only a few scattered roots in the past. Few triumphs in the history of ideas can compare with this achievement. Think of the centuries from Euclid to Isaac Newton to Albert Einstein or the 160 years in the development of modern economic theory from Adam Smith in 1776 to David Ricardo, Alfred Marshall, and Karl Marx in the nineteenth century, and finally to John Maynard Keynes in 1936. When I started work on this project early in 1989, all of my heroes were still alive, which was my prime motivation for telling the story at that moment.


pages: 380 words: 104,841

The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us by Diane Ackerman

23andMe, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, airport security, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, carbon footprint, clean water, climate change refugee, dark matter, dematerialisation, digital divide, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Google Earth, Google Glasses, haute cuisine, Higgs boson, hindcast, Internet of things, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, Masdar, mass immigration, Medieval Warm Period, megacity, microbiome, mirror neurons, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, personalized medicine, phenotype, Ray Kurzweil, refrigerator car, rewilding, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, skunkworks, Skype, space junk, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the High Line, theory of mind, urban planning, urban renewal, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

This dialogue, a three-ring circus among the genes, a perpetual biological tango performed by multitudes, deserves a better name than the unwieldy crunch of “epigenetics,” but the word is springing from many more lips as doctors search for clues in both a patient’s environmental exposure history and that of his parents. “We’re in the midst of probably the biggest revolution in biology,” says Mark Mehler, chair of the Department of Neurology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. “It’s forever going to transform the way we understand genetics, environment, the way the two interact, what causes disease. It’s another level of biology, which for the first time really is up to the task of explaining the biological complexity of life.” “The Human Genome Project was supposed to usher in a new era of personalized medicine,” Mehler told the American Academy of Neurology at its annual meeting in 2011.


pages: 397 words: 109,631

Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking by Richard E. Nisbett

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, big-box store, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive dissonance, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, cosmological constant, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, do well by doing good, Edward Jenner, endowment effect, experimental subject, feminist movement, fixed income, fundamental attribution error, Garrett Hardin, glass ceiling, Henri Poincaré, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, libertarian paternalism, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, quantitative easing, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Shai Danziger, Socratic dialogue, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, William of Occam, Yitang Zhang, Zipcar

The problem is that we don’t recognize our own strength as theorists. Discussion of theory testing leads us to the question of just what kinds of theories can be falsified and what kinds of evidence could serve to do so. Falsifiability If the facts don’t fit the theory, change the facts. —Albert Einstein No experiment should be believed until it has been confirmed by theory. —Arthur S. Eddington, astrophysicist “It’s an empirical question” is a statement that ought to end far more conversations than it does. Deductive reasoning follows logical rules, producing conclusions that can’t be refuted if the premises are correct.


pages: 389 words: 109,207

Fortune's Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street by William Poundstone

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Albert Einstein, anti-communist, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Bletchley Park, Brownian motion, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, correlation coefficient, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, Henry Singleton, high net worth, index fund, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, publish or perish, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, short selling, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, Teledyne, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, traveling salesman, value at risk, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

As we’ve already seen, the fluctuations of a bettor’s bankroll in a game of chance constitute a random walk (a one-dimensional random walk, since wealth can only move up or down). With time, the gambler’s wealth strays further and further from its original value, and this eventually leads to ruin. At about the time Bachelier was writing, Albert Einstein was puzzling over Brownian motion, the random jitter of microscopic particles suspended in a fluid. The explanation, Einstein surmised, was that the particles were being hit on all sides by invisible molecules. These random collisions cause the visible motion. The mathematical treatment of Brownian motion that Einstein published in 1905 was similar to, but less advanced than, the one that Bachelier had already derived for stock prices.


pages: 323 words: 106,008

Fire in the Ashes: Twenty-Five Years Among the Poorest Children in America by Jonathan Kozol

Albert Einstein, gentrification, ghettoisation

Like Ariella, she had an investigative instinct and she knew a bit about the owner of her building—“lives in Massachusetts, your neck of the woods,” she said—and she had a barrel of well-justified complaints about the disrepair her landlord had allowed and told me of her battle “to keep the rats behind the walls” from “getting out into my kitchen area.” Her background, however, was very different from that of Ariella. She had grown up in the South and came to New York City with her mother when she was thirteen. Her mother was a nurse at Albert Einstein Medical School for twenty-seven years and lived, she said, in one of the nicer sections of the Bronx that hadn’t yet been totally abandoned by white people, although the trend was underway and the schools, as a result, had already started their decline. Her father, from whom her mother was divorced, had moved upstate to Syracuse and, having had some training in “concrete construction,” opened his own business and brought Antsy there to live with him so that she could go to a good high school in his neighborhood.


pages: 442 words: 110,704

The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars by Dava Sobel

Albert Einstein, card file, Cepheid variable, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Dava Sobel, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Charles Pickering, Ernest Rutherford, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, index card, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, luminiferous ether, Magellanic Cloud, pattern recognition, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson

George Ellery Hale thought the disagreement over the spirals an apt subject for a public debate. When he proposed the topic to the National Academy of Sciences late in 1919, he also named general relativity, which had been much in the news, as an alternate theme possibility. The idea of relativity put forth by Albert Einstein in 1915 was changing the nature of space from a passive container of the stars to a fabric warped by the stars’ presence. Einstein’s German roots and the course of the Great War at first slowed the theory’s acceptance, but the English pacifist Arthur Stanley Eddington tested its validity during the May 29, 1919, total solar eclipse, which he observed from the African island of Príncipe.


pages: 460 words: 107,712

A Devil's Chaplain: Selected Writings by Richard Dawkins

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, butterfly effect, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, Desert Island Discs, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, gravity well, Gregor Mendel, Necker cube, out of africa, Peoples Temple, phenotype, placebo effect, random walk, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method

To an honest judge, the alleged convergence between religion and science is a shallow, empty, hollow, spin-doctored sham. 1Indeed, Einstein himself was indignant at the suggestion: ‘It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.’ From Albert Einstein, The Human Side, ed. H. Dukas and B. Hoffman (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1981). The lie is still being systematically spread about, carried through the meme pool by the desperate desire so many people have to believe it – such is Einstein’s prestige. 2This is to give the Pope the benefit of the doubt.


pages: 379 words: 109,612

Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net's Impact on Our Minds and Future by John Brockman

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Asperger Syndrome, availability heuristic, Benoit Mandelbrot, biofilm, Black Swan, bread and circuses, British Empire, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Danny Hillis, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Emanuel Derman, epigenetics, Evgeny Morozov, financial engineering, Flynn Effect, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Google Earth, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of writing, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, lone genius, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Neal Stephenson, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Schrödinger's Cat, search costs, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart grid, social distancing, social graph, social software, social web, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telepresence, the medium is the message, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trade route, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Yochai Benkler

Some postings are full of doctoring and dishonesty, others strive for independence and impartiality, but all are available for the end user to sift through for reasoned consideration. 5. Democratization of Education Most of the world does not have access to the education afforded to a small minority. For every Albert Einstein, Yo-Yo Ma, or Barack Obama who has the opportunity for education, there are uncountable others who never get the chance. This vast squandering of talent translates directly into reduced economic output. In a world where economic meltdown is often tied to collapse, societies are well advised to leverage all the human capital they have.


pages: 398 words: 111,333

The Einstein of Money: The Life and Timeless Financial Wisdom of Benjamin Graham by Joe Carlen

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, Bernie Madoff, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business intelligence, discounted cash flows, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, full employment, index card, index fund, intangible asset, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Bogle, laissez-faire capitalism, margin call, means of production, Norman Mailer, oil shock, post-industrial society, price anchoring, price stability, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, the scientific method, Vanguard fund, young professional

I think this business of greed—the excessive hopes and fears and so on—will be with us as long as there will be people.”28 Not surprisingly, it seems that Graham's “perspective of eternity” (along with his deep skepticism regarding Wall Street) only grew more prominent toward the end of his life. A TRUE INTELLECTUAL In the latter part of Albert Einstein's career, the eccentric physicist was willing to abandon and even discredit his own theories when they no longer made sense to him. For example, in 1926, Einstein complained to a friend about a certain “new fashion”29 in physics. His friend pointed out that what Einstein was complaining about was actually “invented by you in 1905!”


pages: 381 words: 111,629

The Telomere Effect: A Revolutionary Approach to Living Younger, Healthier, Longer by Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn, Dr. Elissa Epel

Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, cognitive load, epigenetics, impulse control, income inequality, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, meta-analysis, mouse model, persistent metabolic adaptation, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), stem cell, survivorship bias, The Spirit Level, twin studies

Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such an achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security. —Albert Einstein, as quoted in the New York Times, March 29, 1972 A long life of good health and wellbeing is our hope for you. Lifestyle, mental health, and environment all contribute significantly to physical health—that is not new. What is new here is that telomeres are impacted by these factors, and thus quantify their contribution in a clear and powerful way.


The Deep Learning Revolution (The MIT Press) by Terrence J. Sejnowski

AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, bioinformatics, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer vision, conceptual framework, constrained optimization, Conway's Game of Life, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Drosophila, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Flynn Effect, Frank Gehry, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Guggenheim Bilbao, Gödel, Escher, Bach, haute couture, Henri Poincaré, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Conway, John Markoff, John von Neumann, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Netflix Prize, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, PageRank, pattern recognition, pneumatic tube, prediction markets, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Socratic dialogue, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stuart Kauffman, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize, Yogi Berra

Along the way, Geoff was elected to the Royal Societies of both England and Canada and I was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Inventors, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a rare honor. I owe Geoffrey Hinton a great debt of gratitude for sharing his insights into computing with networks over many years. As a graduate student at Princeton University, I pursued research on black holes and gravitational waves in general relativity, Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity. After receiving my doctorate in physics, however, I changed fields to neurobiology, and brains have captured my interest ever since. I don’t yet know what my third act might be. Solomon Golomb once told me that careers happen in retrospect, which I confirmed while writing this book.


pages: 344 words: 104,077

Superminds: The Surprising Power of People and Computers Thinking Together by Thomas W. Malone

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asperger Syndrome, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, business process, call centre, carbon tax, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, Garrett Hardin, gig economy, happiness index / gross national happiness, independent contractor, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Rulifson, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, Lyft, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, prediction markets, price mechanism, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Coase, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological singularity, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

For instance, a group of dozens of people could surround an entire herd of wild horses, chase them into a gorge, and then butcher them all.9 Along with their greater social intelligence, early humans also developed much richer ways of communicating than other animals. These human languages could be used not only to coordinate hunting but also to share innovative ideas like how to control fire, how to make bows and arrows, and how to build boats. Even the Albert Einsteins of fire making—whoever they were—wouldn’t have made much difference in the world if they had been unable to communicate their techniques to other people. Their innovations were powerful only because their ideas were shared with groups of humans who could apply and develop them further. By around 30,000 to 70,000 years ago, our human ancestors had bodies and brains that would be indistinguishable from those of modern humans,10 and they used their abilities to move up in the world.


pages: 409 words: 105,551

Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World by General Stanley McChrystal, Tantum Collins, David Silverman, Chris Fussell

Airbus A320, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, Black Swan, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Chelsea Manning, clockwork universe, crew resource management, crowdsourcing, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Flash crash, Frederick Winslow Taylor, global supply chain, Henri Poincaré, high batting average, Ida Tarbell, information security, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, job automation, job satisfaction, John Nash: game theory, knowledge economy, Mark Zuckerberg, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pneumatic tube, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, urban sprawl, US Airways Flight 1549, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

., is no more “right” or “wrong” than a topographical map, but the former is useless for hiking and the latter is useless for catching a train. Nonetheless, we have to avoid the temptation to confuse the map for the terrain—to believe that subway lines are the only true representation of a city, or that lights and stop signs are the only way to manage traffic. In the words of Albert Einstein, “Our theories determine what we measure.” When we urge people to think “outside of the box,” we are generally asking them to discard mental models. In the case of traffic, our mental model is one in a family of models about how the world around us should be run, most of which are mechanistic, with clear rules and demarcations and categories that are readily visible to the naked eye.


pages: 325 words: 110,330

Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration by Ed Catmull, Amy Wallace

Albert Einstein, business climate, buy low sell high, complexity theory, fail fast, fear of failure, Golden Gate Park, iterative process, Ivan Sutherland, Johannes Kepler, Menlo Park, reality distortion field, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, Wall-E

He’d gather a group of his animators, colorists, and storyboard artists to explain how they made Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck come to life. Each week, Disney created a made-up world, used cutting-edge technology to enable it, and then told us how he’d done it. Walt Disney was one of my two boyhood idols. The other was Albert Einstein. To me, even at a young age, they represented the two poles of creativity. Disney was all about inventing the new. He brought things into being—both artistically and technologically—that did not exist before. Einstein, by contrast, was a master of explaining that which already was. I read every Einstein biography I could get my hands on as well as a little book he wrote on his theory of relativity.


pages: 417 words: 109,367

The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-First Century by Ronald Bailey

3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, biodiversity loss, business cycle, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Climatic Research Unit, commodity super cycle, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, dematerialisation, demographic transition, disinformation, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, double helix, energy security, failed state, financial independence, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Gary Taubes, Great Leap Forward, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, Induced demand, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, knowledge economy, meta-analysis, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Neolithic agricultural revolution, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, pattern recognition, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, phenotype, planetary scale, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, rewilding, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, systematic bias, Tesla Model S, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, two and twenty, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, women in the workforce, yield curve

I make no predictions, but increasingly cheap solar panels attached to cheap high efficiency batteries powering miserly lights, appliances, and infotech is not out of the question. Trying to forecast how much energy people living in 2100 will be using and what technologies they will be powering is like assembling a committee composed of luminaries like Thomas Edison, Madame Curie, and Albert Einstein in 1900 to accurately project how much energy we use today and how we use it. Some trends do, in fact, indicate that humanity is withdrawing from the natural world. In a 2014 analysis, Iddo Wernick, a researcher at Rockefeller University’s Program for the Human Environment, presented data on resource consumption trends that suggests that improving efficiency and changing consumer preferences are outrunning the demands from rising population and affluence to actually reduce in many cases the amounts of material that Americans and the rest of the world use.


pages: 518 words: 107,836

How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (Information Policy) by Benjamin Peters

Albert Einstein, American ideology, Andrei Shleifer, Anthropocene, Benoit Mandelbrot, bitcoin, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commons-based peer production, computer age, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Davies, double helix, Drosophila, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Gabriella Coleman, hive mind, index card, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, linear programming, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, power law, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, scientific mainstream, scientific management, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, transaction costs, Turing machine, work culture , Yochai Benkler

A few other examples include the rise of Trofim Lysenko in Soviet biology, whose program on the heritability of acquired characteristics ousted the study of Mendeleev and classical genetics; the condemnation of Linus Pauling’s structural resonance theory by Soviet chemists in 1951; the banning of Soviet Lev Vygotsky’s work, now recognized as a foundation of cultural-historical psychology; the forestalling of structural linguistics pioneered by Ferdinand Saussure, Nikolai Trubetzkoi, and Roman Jakobson; and the excoriation of Albert Einstein’s theories of general and special relativity, quantum mechanics, and Werner Heisenberg’s principles of indeterminacy as distortions and corruptions of the true (that is, Marxist) objective and material nature of the universe.56 In light of these and other examples, the public campaigns against cybernetics strike the contemporary observer as far from masterfully orchestrated or even normal in their regularity.


pages: 371 words: 108,317

The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future by Kevin Kelly

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, bank run, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, Computer Lib, connected car, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Filter Bubble, Freestyle chess, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lifelogging, linked data, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, means of production, megacity, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, old-boy network, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, placebo effect, planetary scale, postindustrial economy, Project Xanadu, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, robo advisor, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, social web, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The future is already here, the long tail, the scientific method, transport as a service, two-sided market, Uber for X, uber lyft, value engineering, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, Whole Earth Review, Yochai Benkler, yottabyte, zero-sum game

So at the end of the day, a world of supersmart ubiquitous answers encourages a quest for the perfect question. What makes a perfect question? Ironically, the best questions are not questions that lead to answers, because answers are on their way to becoming cheap and plentiful. A good question is worth a million good answers. A good question is like the one Albert Einstein asked himself as a small boy—“What would you see if you were traveling on a beam of light?” That question launched the theory of relativity, E=MC2, and the atomic age. A good question is not concerned with a correct answer. A good question cannot be answered immediately. A good question challenges existing answers.


pages: 316 words: 106,321

Switched On: My Journey From Asperger's to Emotional Awakening by John Elder Robison

Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, autism spectrum disorder, cognitive dissonance, Fellow of the Royal Society, Isaac Newton, Minecraft, mirror neurons, neurotypical, placebo effect, traumatic brain injury, zero-sum game

Sometimes, a touch of disability is what makes us great. Consider a few historical figures who were touched by autism, serious eccentricity, or some other disability in addition to their well-recognized gifts: Leonardo da Vinci Michelangelo Ludwig van Beethoven Isaac Newton Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Albert Einstein Today, we might add to the list folks like Bill Gates and Dan Aykroyd.* Where would we be if we’d made those people “normal” in childhood? As Temple Grandin says, “We’d be living in caves and using our social skills to tell each other jokes by firelight.” My vote is for a renaissance in which psychology, psychiatry, neurology, and radiology (with the latest brain imaging techniques) come together to achieve unprecedented success in treating formerly untreatable neurological differences and disorders.


pages: 352 words: 104,411

Rush Hour: How 500 Million Commuters Survive the Daily Journey to Work by Iain Gately

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, Beeching cuts, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business intelligence, business process, business process outsourcing, California high-speed rail, call centre, car-free, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Clapham omnibus, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, connected car, corporate raider, DARPA: Urban Challenge, Dean Kamen, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, don't be evil, driverless car, Elon Musk, extreme commuting, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, global pandemic, Google bus, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Jeff Bezos, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, Marchetti’s constant, planned obsolescence, postnationalism / post nation state, Ralph Waldo Emerson, remote working, safety bicycle, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social distancing, SpaceShipOne, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, Suez crisis 1956, telepresence, Tesla Model S, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, urban planning, éminence grise

European governments, meanwhile, encouraged research into perfect time and competed with each other, as a matter of national pride, as to whose was the most precise. Henri Poincaré put France in the lead with The Measure of Time (1898), a masterpiece of theoretical physics, which gave anyone curious about the matter both barrels. Time was a memory, but did we form memories at the speed of light, or faster? Albert Einstein also linked railway time to physics. He was inspired to wonder whether time might be constant – or not – when commuting to work as a patent clerk in Bern. The clock on the town hall tower showed eight as his tram drew level with it, but its hands scarcely seemed to move when it passed on towards the next stop.


pages: 624 words: 104,923

QI: The Book of General Ignorance - The Noticeably Stouter Edition by Lloyd, John, Mitchinson, John

Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, Barry Marshall: ulcers, British Empire, discovery of penicillin, disinformation, Dmitri Mendeleev, Fellow of the Royal Society, Helicobacter pylori, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, invention of the telephone, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, Magellanic Cloud, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, Olbers’ paradox, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, placebo effect, Pluto: dwarf planet, Stephen Fry, sugar pill, trade route, two and twenty, V2 rocket, Vesna Vulović

He observed that the Mediterranean is more tidal than the Red Sea, and attributed this to the water being sloshed about by the Earth’s spin – which he said acted more strongly on the Mediterranean because it is aligned East-West. This argument was refuted by the eyewitness testimony of seafarers, who pointed out that there were two tides a day, not one as Galileo had assumed. Galileo refused to believe them. Albert Einstein realised that Galileo had also made a mistake in his theory of relativity, or rather that the theory broke down in special circumstances. Einstein’s 1905 work, On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies, was the first to talk about the Special Theory of Relativity, which describes the strange properties of particles moving at close to the speed of light in a vacuum.


pages: 370 words: 112,602

Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty by Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Cass Sunstein, charter city, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, congestion charging, demographic transition, diversified portfolio, experimental subject, hiring and firing, Kickstarter, land tenure, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, microcredit, moral hazard, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Thomas Malthus, tontine, urban planning

Instead they became daily laborers or shopkeepers, or if they were lucky, they made it to some minor clerical position. The slots that they left vacant were grabbed, in all likelihood, by mediocre children of parents who could afford to offer their children every possible opportunity to make good. Stories about great scientists, from Albert Einstein to the Indian math genius Ramanujam, both of whom did not make it through the educational system, are of course well-known. The story of the company Raman Boards suggests that this experience may not just be limited to a few extraordinary people. A Tamil engineer named V. Raman started Raman Boards in Mysore in the late 1970s.


pages: 364 words: 104,697

Were You Born on the Wrong Continent? by Thomas Geoghegan

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, business logic, collective bargaining, corporate governance, cross-subsidies, dark matter, David Brooks, declining real wages, deindustrialization, disinformation, Easter island, ending welfare as we know it, facts on the ground, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, income inequality, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, McJob, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, pensions crisis, plutocrats, Prenzlauer Berg, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, union organizing, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce

My British guidebook at the time had warned me not to expect anything more than a Lionel Richie concert. But still I kept looking for the real Berlin that would deliver more than an ice cup from a wannabe Mister Softee truck, because in college I’d read about the Berlin of— Hannah Arendt, Max Beckmann, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Albert Einstein, Lotte Lenya, Paul Tillich, and Sally Bowles, though not necessarily in that order. Even though I knew the Nazis and the Red Army had pounded all of that Berlin to bits, I knew that something, even in tiny pieces, must still be around. And I dragged my suitcase around the city for those two days trying to find even a halfway decent “Berlin café,” and with two hours left before I had to leave, I went into Tourist Information at the Zoo and said, “Please, before I leave, I want to see . . . something, or anything, that would be . . . you know, the real Berlin.”


pages: 398 words: 108,026

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change by Stephen R. Covey

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, knowledge worker, the map is not the territory, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, zero-sum game

As I travel around the country and work with organizations, I find that long-term thinking executives are simply turned off by psych up psychology and "motivational" speakers who have nothing more to share than entertaining stories mingled with platitudes. They want substance; they want process. They want more than aspirin and band-aids. They want to solve the chronic underlying problems and focus on the principles that bring long-term results. A NEW LEVEL OF THINKING Albert Einstein observed, "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." As we look around us and within us and recognize the problems created as we live and interact within the Personality Ethic, we begin to realize that these are deep, fundamental problems that cannot be solved on the superficial level on which they were created.


pages: 376 words: 110,321

Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat by Bee Wilson

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, British Empire, cotton gin, Easter island, Fellow of the Royal Society, General Motors Futurama, Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Kitchen Debate, lateral thinking, Louis Pasteur, refrigerator car, scientific management, sexual politics, the scientific method, Upton Sinclair, Wall-E

To get around this, the compressor and the motor were sometimes installed in the basement, with the refrigerant laboriously pumped back upstairs to the icebox. The compressors frequently malfunctioned, and motors broke. More worrying was the fact that the early refrigerant gases used—methyl chloride and sulfur dioxide—were potentially lethal. Given that the units were very badly insulated, this was a serious risk. In 1925, the scientist Albert Einstein decided to design a new, better refrigerator, after he read a newspaper story about an entire family killed by the poisonous gases leaking from the pump of their fridge. The Einstein refrigerator—developed with his former student Leo Szilard and patented in November 1930—was based on the principle of absorption, like the Carre machines.


pages: 379 words: 108,129

An Optimist's Tour of the Future by Mark Stevenson

23andMe, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andy Kessler, Apollo 11, augmented reality, bank run, Boston Dynamics, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon-based life, clean water, computer age, decarbonisation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Future Shock, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, Leonard Kleinrock, life extension, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nick Bostrom, off grid, packet switching, peak oil, pre–internet, private spaceflight, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social intelligence, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the scientific method, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, X Prize

The word I come up with, on my journey upstate, is ‘AInimal’ (pronounced ‘ay-nimal’ or ‘ay-eye-nimal’ depending on your preference). A creature with an artificial mind, but a creature nonetheless. CHAPTER 5 Like explaining Shakespeare to a dog I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious. ALBERT EINSTEIN How do you find a truth? Here’s one: some students at Cornell University smoke weed. How do I know this? Because shortly after arriving in the small town of Ithaca I find myself standing outside Insomnia Cookies. ‘Warm Cookies Delivered Late Night’ says the purple neon sign in the window.


pages: 392 words: 108,745

Talk to Me: How Voice Computing Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Think by James Vlahos

Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, Colossal Cave Adventure, computer age, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, Geoffrey Hinton, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jeff Bezos, lateral thinking, Loebner Prize, machine readable, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, OpenAI, PageRank, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, TechCrunch disrupt, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

He had good reason to feel confident. There were now more than more than ten thousand Alexa skills, he announced (a number that would later quintuple). Users could order pizzas, flowers, and Ubers; cue lights, Spotify playlists, or Roombas; get the recipes for palak paneer or a Sazerac; hear quotes from Albert Einstein or Al Bundy; and learn about Mars, prime numbers, or ferrets. Alexa devices were flying off the shelves by the millions, and the technology was being rapidly incorporated into third-party devices as well. “Our vision is to have Alexa be everywhere,” Ram said. So far, this was just cheerleading for the home team.


A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived by Adam Rutherford

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, autism spectrum disorder, bioinformatics, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, dark matter, delayed gratification, demographic transition, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Eyjafjallajökull, Google Earth, Gregor Mendel, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, out of africa, phenotype, sceptred isle, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, twin studies

But it was distasteful and morally repugnant to buy hair from a grotesque prominent Holocaust-denier and Nazi regalia trader, though viewer disgust was slightly mitigated when it turned out not to be from the head of the Führer, but from an Indian man. Tracing the flesh of the dead wasn’t the main point of this genetically illiterate stunt though. ‘Could their DNA reveal what made Marilyn Monroe so attractive, Albert Einstein so intelligent, or Adolf Hitler so evil?’ the furrow-browed presenter intoned with concerned gravitas. ‘No’, is the answer. Admittedly that would’ve been a shorter programme though. Is evil encoded in DNA? No. Is intelligence? It certainly has a heritable component, a significant one, but that is measured across populations, and not in individuals, and the hunt for specific genetic correlates of intelligence has not yet been particularly fruitful.


pages: 374 words: 111,284

The AI Economy: Work, Wealth and Welfare in the Robot Age by Roger Bootle

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, anti-work, antiwork, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, blockchain, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Chris Urmson, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, facts on the ground, fake news, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, general purpose technology, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, low interest rates, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mega-rich, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Ocado, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, positional goods, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Simon Kuznets, Skype, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, synthetic biology, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K, Yogi Berra

Martin’s Press, p. 59. 42 Ford, M. (2015) The Rise of the Robots, London: Oneworld, pp. 76–8. Chapter 3 1 Simon, H. (1966) “Automation”, letter in the New York Review of Books, May 26, 1966. 2 This remark, or something very much like it, is widely attributed to a range of people including Yogi Berra (the baseball coach of the New York Yankees), Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein, and Sam Goldwyn (the movie mogul). 3 This statement is widely attributed to the great sage but I have found it impossible to pin down chapter and verse. 4 Strictly speaking, there should be an increase in the volume of investment, but if the price of investment goods falls sufficiently then the total value of investment spending may not rise.


pages: 335 words: 111,405

B Is for Bauhaus, Y Is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World From a to Z by Deyan Sudjic

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, company town, dematerialisation, deskilling, Easter island, edge city, Elon Musk, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, Guggenheim Bilbao, illegal immigration, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Kitchen Debate, light touch regulation, market design, megastructure, moral panic, New Urbanism, place-making, QWERTY keyboard, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, the scientific method, University of East Anglia, urban renewal, urban sprawl, young professional

It had to be to bring in the bright students, on whom any school depends for success. It had famous faculty members and an international reputation. If it was to survive in a hostile climate – and it was not only card-carrying Nazis who called it un-German – it needed to make the most of its friends, who included Albert Einstein, Marc Chagall and Oskar Kokoschka. There was also friction with potential allies, such as Theo van Doesburg, who implied that he had been invited to teach in Weimar. The Bauhaus suggested that he had invited himself and then set up offcampus with an alternative programme of his own. Within five years of opening, the school was looking for a new home; not because it needed more space, but because it had become too uncomfortable a presence for its hosts when the local elections brought the Right to power.


pages: 378 words: 107,957

Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody by Helen Pluckrose, James A. Lindsay

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", affirmative action, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, centre right, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, conceptual framework, critical race theory, deplatforming, desegregation, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, fake news, feminist movement, gentrification, germ theory of disease, Isaac Newton, late capitalism, meta-analysis, microaggression, moral panic, neurotypical, phenotype, sexual politics, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, transatlantic slave trade, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, women in the workforce

If the challenge is not accepted, or is accepted and the attempt fails, we are far enough from certainty still; but we have done the best that the existing state of human reason admits of; we have neglected nothing that could give the truth a chance of reaching us.4 In fact this story has an interesting twist, which Mill could not have foreseen, and which illustrates his first harm. It turns out that Newtonian mechanics is not correct! It is an amazingly good approximation for nearly all practical purposes, but not exactly correct. This was discovered by Albert Einstein in 1905–1915, more than 30 years after Mill’s death: Newtonian mechanics is replaced and superseded by Einstein’s special and general relativity. But this important advance in science might never have occurred if criticism of Newton’s theory had been forbidden. (And with it, the technological applications—from radiotherapy for cancer to the Global Positioning System (GPS)—that rely, in one way or another, on Einstein’s relativity.)5 Mill was primarily concerned with censorship by governments or ecclesiastical authorities, but the arguments in favor of freedom of debate apply equally well to censorship carried out by corporations or universities, or even by groups of private citizens—self-appointed guardians of public virtue—wielding the power of social ostracism.


pages: 374 words: 110,238

Fall: The Mysterious Life and Death of Robert Maxwell, Britain's Most Notorious Media Baron by John Preston

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, computer age, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, G4S, global village, intangible asset, invention of the wheel, Jeffrey Epstein, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, the market place

But, much to their surprise, the two men hit it off. Idly at first, then with increasing fascination, Maxwell listened as Ferdinand Springer explained how the company had prospered in its heyday. Founded more than a century earlier by Ferdinand’s father, Springer-Verlag had published books by most of the world’s leading scientists, including Albert Einstein and Max Born, the father of quantum mechanics. They also published a large range of scientific journals. The beauty of the business was that the books and journals they produced had a captive readership: every library, every university, every scientific institute, wanted a copy. What’s more, the scientists who wrote these books and journals were so thrilled to see their work in print that they scarcely expected to be paid anything in return.


pages: 403 words: 110,492

Nomad Capitalist: How to Reclaim Your Freedom With Offshore Bank Accounts, Dual Citizenship, Foreign Companies, and Overseas Investments by Andrew Henderson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, bank run, barriers to entry, birth tourism , bitcoin, blockchain, business process, call centre, capital controls, car-free, content marketing, cryptocurrency, currency risk, digital nomad, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Elon Musk, failed state, fiat currency, Fractional reserve banking, gentrification, intangible asset, land reform, low interest rates, medical malpractice, new economy, obamacare, offshore financial centre, passive income, peer-to-peer lending, Pepsi Challenge, place-making, risk tolerance, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, too big to fail, white picket fence, work culture , working-age population

Even with the high price of hotels in Singapore, the grocery chain saved money by sending their employees to the other side of the world for medical care. While Brazil is known for cosmetic procedures – they have more plastic surgeons than any other country on earth – they are branching out into general medicine. Hospital Israelita Albert Einstein is the country’s first JCI accredited hospital and has a five-star rating for care. If I were having a child, I would strongly consider it (especially since my kid would get a passport, to boot). The cost of childbirth in Brazil is as much as 90% less than in the United States. Even prices for plastic surgery are as much as 60% less.


pages: 399 words: 107,932

Don't Call It a Cult: The Shocking Story of Keith Raniere and the Women of NXIVM by Sarah Berman

Albert Einstein, COVID-19, dark matter, Donald Trump, East Village, Jeffrey Epstein, Keith Raniere, lockdown, Milgram experiment, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, systems thinking, TED Talk, white picket fence, work culture

He was standing alone because his alleged partners in crime had agreed with the feds that Raniere was leading a dangerous mafia-like organization. This was a big change for Raniere, who was used to the company of rich and beautiful women. Since the 1980s he’d cultivated a subculture of adoration around him in which he was compared to Buddha and Albert Einstein. The way true believers talked about him, it was as if he had magical powers, perfect recall, the keys to world peace. They commended his contributions to science, his commitment to the harnessing of human potential. This was the myth built up over Raniere’s two-decade career leading NXIVM, an international self-help movement that appealed mostly to dreamers with deep pockets.


pages: 392 words: 109,945

Life's Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive by Carl Zimmer

3D printing, Albert Einstein, biofilm, call centre, coronavirus, COVID-19, discovery of DNA, double helix, Fellow of the Royal Society, gravity well, knapsack problem, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Lyft, microbiome, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Stuart Kauffman, tech worker, uber lyft

Physicists searched for superconductivity in all its forms, eager to find materials to build fundamentally new kinds of technology. But their research remained little more than a game of trial and error for decades. Ordinary physics seemed unable to explain it, and there was no rhyme or reason to why some substances were superconductive and not others. Albert Einstein tried to explain superconductivity with an elegant theory, which turned out to be wrong. So did Niels Bohr, Richard Feynman, and other leading figures in twentieth-century physics. Finally, in the 1950s, John Bardeen, Leon N. Cooper, and Robert Schrieffer came up with a theory that made sense of the senseless.


CRISPR People by Henry T. Greely

Albert Einstein, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, autism spectrum disorder, bitcoin, clean water, CRISPR, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, double helix, dual-use technology, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Gregor Mendel, Ian Bogost, Isaac Newton, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, mouse model, New Journalism, phenotype, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, special economic zone, stem cell, synthetic biology, traumatic brain injury, Xiaogang Anhui farmers

He received his bachelor’s degree from Swarthmore College in 1960. He started his graduate work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology but moved to Rockefeller University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1964 for work with viruses. He went back to MIT for a postdoctoral fellowship, then got training at Albert Einstein College of Medicine before moving, in 1965, to a postdoc at the then-new Salk Institute in San Diego. By 1968 he was back at MIT, this time on the faculty, and there, in 1970, at the age of 32, he discovered reverse transcriptase. This enzyme disproves, or at least qualifies, the “Central Dogma” of molecular biology, announced by the venerable Francis Crick: DNA makes RNA makes protein.


How to Stop Worrying and Start Living by Dale Carnegie

Albert Einstein, British Empire, fear of failure, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Ida Tarbell, Mahatma Gandhi, scientific management

To the amazement of these scientists, they discovered that blood passing through the brain, when it is active, shows no fatigue at all! If you took blood from the veins of a day laborer while he was working, you would find it full of "fatigue toxins" and fatigue products. But if you took a drop of blood from the brain of an Albert Einstein, it would show no fatigue toxins whatever at the end of the day. So far as the brain is concerned, it can work "as well and as swiftly at the end of eight or even twelve hours of effort as at the beginning". The brain is utterly tireless. So what makes you tired? Psychiatrists declare that most of our fatigue derives from our mental and emotional attitudes.


pages: 368 words: 108,222

Parkland: Birth of a Movement by Dave Cullen

3D printing, Albert Einstein, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Columbine, crisis actor, gun show loophole, impulse control, Lyft, megaproject, side project, Skype, Snapchat, uber lyft

More than twenty kids squeezed in for group meetings, leaning against the walls or sitting cross-legged on the floor. The first thing I noticed was I’d never seen some of these people: in person, on TV, or on social media. It was hard to miss the guy in chunky black Rachel Maddow glasses, with flaming red hair radiating in all directions, like an Irish Albert Einstein. I caught them in the middle of a creative session, brainstorming ideas for some complicated Web content, and everyone seemed to be deferring to this guy, all the questions flying his way. But I had promised to be quick about this, so I moved on, and Jackie gave me a tour. There was less space and less furniture than in Cameron’s living room.


pages: 404 words: 107,356

The Future of Fusion Energy by Jason Parisi, Justin Ball

Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, Boeing 747, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Colonization of Mars, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, heat death of the universe, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, ITER tokamak, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, nuclear winter, performance metric, profit motive, random walk, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Stuxnet, the scientific method, time dilation, uranium enrichment

Why do the nuclear forces work in such a weird way? There really isn’t a great answer. All we can say is that it’s for the same reason that a ball rolling down hill gains kinetic energy: physics! Isn’t it remarkable that the laws of physics allow us to extract so much energy from atoms in so many ways? TECH BOX: E = mc2 Albert Einstein’s famous equation is strongly associated with nuclear power and, to some degree, this is appropriate. Two stationary hydrogen-2 nuclei weigh slightly more than a single stationary helium-4 nucleus. When you take this mass difference m and multiply it by the speed of light squared c2 (which is a big number), you find a tremendous amount of energy E.


Pour Your Heart Into It by Howard Schultz

Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, clean water, corporate raider, do well by doing good, Exxon Valdez, fear of failure, job satisfaction, market design, Ray Oldenburg, shareholder value, The Great Good Place, urban renewal, vertical integration, working poor, zero-sum game

It wasn’t until I discovered Starbucks that I realized what it means when your work truly captures your heart and your imagination. CHAPTER 2 A Strong Legacy Makes You Sustainable for the Future A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life depend on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received. —ALBERT EINSTEIN Just as I didn’t create Starbucks, Starbucks didn’t introduce espresso and dark-roasted coffee to America. Instead, we became the respectful inheritors of a great tradition. Coffee and coffeehouses have been a meaningful part of community life for centuries, in Europe as well as in America.


pages: 351 words: 112,079

Gene Eating: The Science of Obesity and the Truth About Dieting by Giles Yeo

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, delayed gratification, Drosophila, Easter island, Gregor Mendel, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microbiome, nudge theory, post-truth, publish or perish, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, twin studies, Wall-E, zoonotic diseases

Robert just shows what happens when it goes one not very large step further. PART 4 A problem of our time ‘One of the greatest problems of our time is that many are schooled but few are educated’. —Thomas More ‘The significant problems of our time cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them’. — Albert Einstein ‘The question isn’t, “What do we want to know about people?” it’s “What do people want to tell about themselves?’” — Mark Zuckerberg CHAPTER 10 Eat like this and look like me Like two billion other people in the world, I have a Facebook profile. I’ve got about 400 ‘friends’, give or take.


pages: 446 words: 109,157

The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth by Jonathan Rauch

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, active measures, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, Black Lives Matter, centre right, classic study, Climategate, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, deplatforming, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, framing effect, hive mind, illegal immigration, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, jimmy wales, Jon Ronson, Louis Pasteur, market bubble, meta-analysis, microaggression, mirror neurons, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer, post-truth, profit motive, QAnon, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Russian election interference, social software, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

If he sees what others cannot, we call it hallucination. It is not ‘my’ experience but ‘our’ experience that has to be thought of; and this ‘us’ has indefinite possibilities.”8 Consider a shaggy-haired man furiously scribbling equations and theories in his room in Bern, Switzerland. Perhaps he is Albert Einstein, discovering new truths which will rearrange the whole universe. Or perhaps he is a madman, writing gibberish. Either way, he thinks he is a genius doing great science. Even in principle, however, he is not doing science as long as he works alone. Only when others look at his scribbles, evaluating and testing them, is science taking place.


pages: 432 words: 106,612

Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever by Robin Wigglesworth

Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big Tech, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, Brownian motion, buy and hold, California gold rush, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, cloud computing, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, data science, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, Henri Poincaré, index fund, industrial robot, invention of the wheel, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John Bogle, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, lockdown, Louis Bachelier, machine readable, money market fund, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, RAND corporation, random walk, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, rolodex, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, the scientific method, transaction costs, uptick rule, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund

While examining grains of pollen under a microscope in 1827, Brown saw tiny particles ejected by the pollen that moved around willy-nilly with no discernible pattern, a phenomenon that subsequently became known as Brownian motion. To better understand the seeming randomness of markets, and to try to estimate the value of financial securities, Bachelier constructed for the first time ever a method to analyze these jittery stochastic movements. He did this a full five years before Albert Einstein independently performed the same in a physics-focused analysis. Today, it is more commonly referred to as a “random walk” similar to that of a drunkard stumbling down a dark road. Markets, by and large, seem to perform the same inebriated wandering that a student might after a particularly heavy day at the university bar.


pages: 489 words: 106,008

Risk: A User's Guide by Stanley McChrystal, Anna Butrico

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, airport security, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 737 MAX, business process, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, cotton gin, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deep learning, disinformation, don't be evil, Dr. Strangelove, fake news, fear of failure, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Googley, Greta Thunberg, hindsight bias, inflight wifi, invisible hand, iterative process, late fees, lockdown, Paul Buchheit, Ponzi scheme, QWERTY keyboard, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, source of truth, Stanislav Petrov, Steve Jobs, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, wikimedia commons, work culture

What steps can you take to avoid narrative drift and keep your teams aligned? the bottom line When our narrative is misaligned to our purpose, values, or strategy, we invite risk into our organization. chapter five Structure PUTTING THE BUILDING BLOCKS TOGETHER Bureaucracy is the death of all sound work. —Albert Einstein Ultimately, organization matters. An improperly assembled weapon will not fire. The Big Green Machine “Dutch, where’s your division?” raged Lieutenant General Walton Walker, the American Eighth Army commander. Standing opposite him, Major General Laurence “Dutch” Keiser was pointing to an acetate-covered operations map marked with grease pencil showing unit locations.


pages: 368 words: 106,185

A Shot to Save the World: The Inside Story of the Life-Or-Death Race for a COVID-19 Vaccine by Gregory Zuckerman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, blockchain, Boris Johnson, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Jenner, future of work, Recombinant DNA, ride hailing / ride sharing, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, WeWork

In 1982, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta gave the disease a name: acquired immune deficiency syndrome, or AIDS. Investigators at both the Pasteur Institute in Paris and National Cancer Institute in Washington, D.C., determined that a new human retrovirus, eventually named the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, was causing AIDS. The virus spread quickly. At Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, five Black infants were admitted showing signs of severe immune deficiency. Anxieties grew, even among professionals accustomed to disease and death. Some pathologists refused to do postmortems, worried they might contract the new disease. Fears raced through the broader society.


pages: 402 words: 107,908

Brain Energy: A Revolutionary Breakthrough in Understanding Mental Health--And Improving Treatment for Anxiety, Depression, OCD, PTSD, and More by Christopher M. Palmer Md

Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Drosophila, epigenetics, impulse control, it's over 9,000, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, neurotypical, personalized medicine, phenotype, randomized controlled trial, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), stem cell, traumatic brain injury

Yes: we have arrived at our common thread, the underpinning factor that lets us answer our tangled questions about causes and treatments, symptoms and overlaps. Mental disorders—all of them—are metabolic disorders of the brain. Part II Brain Energy Chapter 5 Mental Disorders Are Metabolic Disorders The following 1938 observation from physicists Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld is critically important: Creating a new theory is not like destroying an old barn and erecting a skyscraper in its place. It is rather like climbing a mountain, gaining new and wider views, discovering unexpected connections between our starting point and its rich environment.


pages: 415 words: 102,982

Who’s Raising the Kids?: Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children by Susan Linn

Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, cashless society, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, delayed gratification, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, gamification, George Floyd, Howard Zinn, impulse control, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, language acquisition, late fees, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, meta-analysis, Minecraft, neurotypical, new economy, Nicholas Carr, planned obsolescence, plant based meat, precautionary principle, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, techlash, theory of mind, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple

The story of Sir Isaac Newton getting bopped on the head with an apple and coming up with the theory of gravity seems to be apocryphal, but it’s a good metaphor for the necessity of wonder in scientific discovery. Up to that point, we were all tooling along in life taking for granted the fact that objects fall. Discovering new ways of understanding the world involves a first step of recognizing the extraordinary in what others see as ordinary, or don’t see at all. Albert Einstein’s sense of wonder, for instance, that a compass always points north led him, as an adult, to explore invisible forces such as magnetic fields.12 Art also depends on wonder. One quality that differentiates great visual artists from excellent draftsmen is the unique way artists see their environment—the quality of light illuminating a leaf, the pattern left by waves on sand, the droop of skin on an aging face.


pages: 965 words: 267,053

A History of Zionism by Walter Laqueur

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, British Empire, business cycle, illegal immigration, joint-stock company, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, means of production, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mount Scopus, new economy, plutocrats, profit motive, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the market place, éminence grise

.)* The members were dedicated men and women, some of them Ostjuden, recent arrivals from eastern Europe, others from assimilated families who felt acutely the anomaly of Jewish existence even in the relatively mild antisemitic climate of Wilhelmian Germany. Among its leaders, apart from those already mentioned, there was Kurt Blumenfeld, a highly cultured man and a persuasive speaker, who was instrumental in gaining the support of eminent people outside the orbit of Zionism, such as Albert Einstein.† Blumenfeld was secretary of the German Federation from 1909 to 1911, later secretary of the world organisation, and from 1924 president of the German branch. Zionist attempts to establish positions of strength in the Jewish communal organisations were not at first successful. In the internal disputes shaking world Zionism the Germans at first tended to support Wolffsohn and the political trend, but the younger generation was gradually won over to practical Zionism by Weizmann and the Russian leaders, and after the ninth (Hamburg) congress their influence became predominant in the German Federation.

The tug of war continued, however, with leading figures in the movement, such as Ussishkin, among the doubters. But there was also resistance from non-Zionist bodies. In Britain, for instance, the leading Jewish organisations refused to cooperate with the Zionists. But once the American Jewish leaders had given their blessing to the enterprise the road was clear. Together with Leon Blum, Albert Einstein and Herbert Samuel, Louis Marshall, Felix Warburg, Cyrus Adler and Lee K. Krankel, Weizmann appeared on the platform of the foundation meeting of the Jewish Agency. The president of the Zionist movement was to be ex officio president of the Jewish Agency; its main office was to be in Jerusalem, with a branch in London.


The Haskell Road to Logic, Maths and Programming by Kees Doets, Jan van Eijck, Jan Eijck

Albert Einstein, Charles Babbage, Eratosthenes, functional programming, Georg Cantor, P = NP, Russell's paradox

Prove De Moivre’s formula for exponents in Z by using the previous item, plus: 1 (cos(ϕ) + i sin(ϕ))−m = . (cos(ϕ) + i sin(ϕ))m 8.11 Further Reading A classic overview of the ideas and methods of mathematics, beautifully written, and a book everyone with an interest in mathematics should possess and read is Courant and Robbins [CR78, CrbIS96]. Here is praise for this book by Albert Einstein: A lucid representation of the fundamental concepts and methods of the whole field of mathematics. It is an easily understandable introduction for the layman and helps to give the mathematical student a general view of the basic principles and methods. Another beautiful book of numbers is [CG96].


pages: 395 words: 116,675

The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge by Matt Ridley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, adjacent possible, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, altcoin, An Inconvenient Truth, anthropic principle, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Broken windows theory, carbon tax, Columbian Exchange, computer age, Corn Laws, cosmological constant, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, Donald Davies, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Eben Moglen, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Snowden, endogenous growth, epigenetics, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fail fast, falling living standards, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, George Santayana, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, Gregor Mendel, Gunnar Myrdal, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, hydraulic fracturing, imperial preference, income per capita, indoor plumbing, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, land reform, Lao Tzu, long peace, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Necker cube, obamacare, out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit motive, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, smart contracts, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, twin studies, uber lyft, women in the workforce

One could not help but feel that education had not marched forward with technology in the same way that other areas of life had. Science was taught – not just to me, but to my children as well – as if it was a catalogue of facts to be regurgitated, rather than a procession of fascinating mysteries to be challenged. Give them galaxies and black holes, not Boyle’s Law! It is nothing short of a miracle, said Albert Einstein, that ‘the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom’. Nationalisation surely had a lot to do with this failure of innovation. ‘It’s time to admit that public education operates like a planned economy,’ said Albert Shanker, long-serving President of the American Federation of Teachers.


pages: 437 words: 113,173

Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance by Ian Goldin, Chris Kutarna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Dava Sobel, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Doha Development Round, double helix, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental economics, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, full employment, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, Higgs boson, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information retrieval, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johannes Kepler, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahbub ul Haq, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Max Levchin, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, Occupy movement, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, open economy, Panamax, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, post-Panamax, profit motive, public intellectual, quantum cryptography, rent-seeking, reshoring, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, Snapchat, special economic zone, spice trade, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, uber lyft, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, working poor, working-age population, zero day

Where we find it in that moment isn’t set by Isaac Newton’s laws of cause and effect, but rather by laws of probability. Most of the time it’s where Newton would expect, but sometimes it’s not. This weird indeterminacy is completely contrary to our experience and intuition. “God does not play dice,” Albert Einstein, a skeptic of quantum mechanics, famously declared (to which Niels Bohr, a believer, replied, “Einstein, stop telling God what to do.”). Nevertheless, everything acts this way at the subatomic level. Ordinarily we don’t notice anything strange, because at any one moment only a tiny share of the subatomic stuff that makes up, say, this book is doing something really improbable (like passing through your hand).


pages: 350 words: 112,234

Korea by Simon Winchester

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, life extension, Nelson Mandela, placebo effect, union organizing

Face meant you’d never take a risk, never take an intellectual gamble, a stab in the dark, since by failing you would lose your face and suffer shame and ridicule. So, if the tenets of the revolution forced them to reject all foreign influence, there would never be a Chinese Thomas Edison or a Chinese Henry Ford or a Chinese Albert Einstein. And as with China, so with Korea. How many times have I heard in conversation: ‘…and then he made me lose my face’? To a Korean, there can be no greater anguish. The young woman with whom I had argued so strenuously back on Cheju Island had lost her face—her myonmok—in the exchange. The fact of losing the argument was of no consequence by comparison.


Hopes and Prospects by Noam Chomsky

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, colonial rule, corporate personhood, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deskilling, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Firefox, Glass-Steagall Act, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, invisible hand, liberation theology, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, nuremberg principles, one-state solution, open borders, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Seymour Hersh, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus

Furthermore, “it hurts to portray ourselves as too fully rational and cool-headed.” The “national persona we project” should make clear “that the U.S. may become irrational and vindictive if its vital interests are attacked” and that “some elements may appear to be potentially ‘out of control.’”2 Forty years earlier, Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein had warned that we face a choice that is “stark and dreadful and inescapable: Shall we put an end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war?” They were not exaggerating. An extraterrestrial observer attending to the events of the years since might marvel that the species has survived this long in an era of nuclear weapons, and would not take lightly the warning of “Apocalypse Soon” if we pursue our present course; the words of Robert McNamara, joined by many other sober and respected analysts.


pages: 336 words: 113,519

The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds by Michael Lewis

Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, complexity theory, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, endowment effect, feminist movement, framing effect, hindsight bias, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Linda problem, loss aversion, medical residency, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Nate Silver, New Journalism, Paul Samuelson, peak-end rule, Richard Thaler, Saturday Night Live, Skinner box, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, systematic bias, the new new thing, Thomas Bayes, Walter Mischel, Yom Kippur War

As was also his habit, he jotted down in advance little notes—potential topics of discussion—“for fear of blanking.” Not that he intended to say much. Hal Sox, Redelmeier’s superior at Stanford, who would be joining them, had told Redelmeier, “Don’t talk. Don’t say anything. Don’t interrupt. Just sit and listen.” Meeting with Amos Tversky, Hal Sox, said, was “like brainstorming with Albert Einstein. He is one for the ages—there won’t ever be anyone else like him.” Hal Sox happened to have coauthored the first article Amos ever wrote about medicine. Their paper had sprung from a question Amos had put to Sox: How did a tendency people exhibited when faced with financial gambles play itself out in the minds of doctors and patients?


Fortunes of Change: The Rise of the Liberal Rich and the Remaking of America by David Callahan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, automated trading system, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, carried interest, clean water, corporate social responsibility, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Thorp, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial independence, global village, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, income inequality, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Markoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, medical malpractice, mega-rich, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, NetJets, new economy, offshore financial centre, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, power law, profit maximization, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Florida, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, short selling, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stem cell, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, systematic bias, systems thinking, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, working poor, World Values Survey

The ad, narrated by the liberal actor Richard Dreyfuss, said, “Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in a square hole, the ones who see things different. They’re not fond of rules and they have no respect for the status quo.” The ad went on, flashing footage of Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King Jr., John Lennon and Oko Yono, Gandhi, and others. It was the first ad campaign approved by Steve Jobs after his return to Apple. Beyond their noncomformity, techies tend to be highly educated, a trait that correlates closely with liberal politics. Google’s leadership is a case in point.


pages: 302 words: 82,233

Beautiful security by Andy Oram, John Viega

Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, Bletchley Park, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, corporate governance, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, defense in depth, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, Firefox, information security, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, market design, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Leeson, Norbert Wiener, operational security, optical character recognition, packet switching, peer-to-peer, performance metric, pirate software, Robert Bork, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, security theater, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, software as a service, SQL injection, statistical model, Steven Levy, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Upton Sinclair, web application, web of trust, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

Clearly, there’s still a lot of work to be done, and I believe honeyclient technology will be an instrumental part of this process. Sharing both code and results is a critical step forward. 146 CHAPTER EIGHT CHAPTER NINE Tomorrow’s Security Cogs and Levers Mark Curphey Without changing our patterns of thought, we will not be able to solve the problems that we created with our current patterns of thought. —Albert Einstein I NFORMATION SECURITY IS NOT JUST ABOUT TECHNOLOGY . It is about people, processes, and technology, in that order—or more accurately, about connecting people, processes, and technology together so that humans and entire systems can make informed decisions. It may at first seem rather odd to start a chapter in a book about the future of security management technology with a statement that puts the role of technology firmly in third place, but I felt it was important to put that stake in the ground to provide context for the rest of this chapter.


pages: 374 words: 114,600

The Quants by Scott Patterson

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, automated trading system, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Brownian motion, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, Financial Modelers Manifesto, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Haight Ashbury, I will remember that I didn’t make the world, and it doesn’t satisfy my equations, index fund, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, job automation, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, junk bonds, Kickstarter, law of one price, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Spitznagel, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, money market fund, Myron Scholes, NetJets, new economy, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Mercer, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Sergey Aleynikov, short selling, short squeeze, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Predators' Ball, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, volatility smile, yield curve, éminence grise

Brown couldn’t figure out what was causing the motion. After testing a range of other plant specimens, even the ground dust of rocks, and observing similar herky-jerky motion, he concluded that he was observing a phenomenon that was completely and mysteriously random. (The mystery remained unsolved for decades, until Albert Einstein, in 1905, discovered that the strange movement, by then known as Brownian motion, was the result of millions of microscopic particles buzzing around in a frantic dance of energy.) The connection between Brownian motion and market prices was made in 1900 by a student at the University of Paris named Louis Bachelier.


pages: 443 words: 112,800

The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World by Jeremy Rifkin

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Albert Einstein, American ideology, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bike sharing, borderless world, carbon footprint, centre right, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, decarbonisation, deep learning, distributed generation, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Ford Model T, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, income inequality, industrial cluster, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job automation, knowledge economy, manufacturing employment, marginal employment, Martin Wolf, Masdar, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open borders, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, supply-chain management, systems thinking, tech billionaire, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban renewal, Yom Kippur War, Zipcar

There are seventeen rare earth metals—scandium, yttrium, lanthanum, cerium, praseodymium, neodymium, promethium, samarium, europium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, holmium, erbium, thulium, ytterbium, and lutetium—that are used in a wide range of industrial and technical processes and embedded in technologies and products that are critical to the survival and well-being of society. They are called “rare” because they are limited in availability and many are quickly being depleted to meet the needs of a growing population and globalizing economy. Albert Einstein once pondered the question of which laws of science were the least likely to be overthrown or seriously modified by future generations of scientists. He concluded that the first and second laws of thermodynamics were most likely to withstand the test of time. He wrote: A theory is more impressive the greater is the simplicity of its premises, the more different are the kinds of things it relates and the more extended its range of applicability.


pages: 289 words: 113,211

A Demon of Our Own Design: Markets, Hedge Funds, and the Perils of Financial Innovation by Richard Bookstaber

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, butterfly effect, commoditize, commodity trading advisor, computer age, computerized trading, disintermediation, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Thorp, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, frictionless, frictionless market, Future Shock, George Akerlof, global macro, implied volatility, index arbitrage, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loose coupling, managed futures, margin call, market bubble, market design, Mary Meeker, merger arbitrage, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nick Leeson, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, statistical arbitrage, tail risk, The Market for Lemons, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, uranium enrichment, UUNET, William Langewiesche, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Heisenberg’s principle was not something that was inherent in nature; it came from man’s examination of nature, from man becoming part of the experiment. (So in a way the Uncertainty Principle, like Godel’s Undecidability Proposition, rested on self-referentiality.) While it did not directly refute Albert Einstein’s assertion against the statistical nature of the predictions of quantum mechanics that “God does not play dice with the universe,” it did show that if there were a law of causality in nature, no one but God would ever be able to apply it. The implications of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle were recognized immediately, making him famous.


pages: 401 words: 115,959

Philanthrocapitalism by Matthew Bishop, Michael Green, Bill Clinton

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, Bob Geldof, Bonfire of the Vanities, business process, business process outsourcing, Charles Lindbergh, clean tech, clean water, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Dava Sobel, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, digital divide, do well by doing good, don't be evil, family office, financial innovation, full employment, global pandemic, global village, Global Witness, God and Mammon, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, Ida Tarbell, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Dyson, John Elkington, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, junk bonds, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Live Aid, lone genius, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, market bubble, mass affluent, Michael Milken, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, new economy, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, Peter Singer: altruism, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, working poor, World Values Survey, X Prize

But the bank, founded in New York in 1869, has long been a leading practitioner of philanthrocapitalism too, with a corporate culture that encourages, even expects, its leaders to give back to society both through philanthropy and public service. In the early twentieth century, Henry Goldman, son of the firm’s founder and its senior partner for many years, gave substantial sums of money to help develop the science of physics, backing Albert Einstein with research money (and even giving him a yacht for his fiftieth birthday). As a patron of the arts, he funded the training of violinist Yehudi Menuhin, to whom he gave a Stradivarius. Two other early Goldman Sachs leaders played an influential role in the development of the civil rights movement in America.


pages: 425 words: 112,220

The Messy Middle: Finding Your Way Through the Hardest and Most Crucial Part of Any Bold Venture by Scott Belsky

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Anne Wojcicki, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, blockchain, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, data science, delayed gratification, DevOps, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, endowment effect, fake it until you make it, hiring and firing, Inbox Zero, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, old-boy network, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, private spaceflight, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, slashdot, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, subscription business, sugar pill, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the medium is the message, Tony Fadell, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, WeWork, Y Combinator, young professional

“It’s a vague”: Ibid. “You can’t really manage”: Bo Burlingham, “Jim Collins: Be Great Now,” Inc., May 29, 2012, www.inc.com/magazine/201206/bo-burlingham/jim-collins-exclusive-interview-be-great-now.html. MYSTERY IS THE MAGIC OF ENGAGEMENT. “I have no special”: Alice Calaprice and Trevor Lipscombe, Albert Einstein: A Biography (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2005), 2. The leading psychological: Russell Golman and George Loewenstein, “An Information-Gap Theory of Feelings About Uncertainty,” Carnegie Mellon University, January 2, 2016, www.cmu.edu/dietrich/sds/docs/golman/Information-Gap%20Theory%202016.pdf.


Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models by Gabriel Weinberg, Lauren McCann

Abraham Maslow, Abraham Wald, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, anti-pattern, Anton Chekhov, Apollo 13, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Broken windows theory, business process, butterfly effect, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, David Attenborough, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, fake news, fear of failure, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, framing effect, friendly fire, fundamental attribution error, Goodhart's law, Gödel, Escher, Bach, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, housing crisis, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, illegal immigration, imposter syndrome, incognito mode, income inequality, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Nash: game theory, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, lateral thinking, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, LuLaRoe, Lyft, mail merge, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, nocebo, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, p-value, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, Potemkin village, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, premature optimization, price anchoring, principal–agent problem, publication bias, recommendation engine, remote working, replication crisis, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, school choice, Schrödinger's Cat, selection bias, Shai Danziger, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Streisand effect, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, systems thinking, The future is already here, The last Blockbuster video rental store is in Bend, Oregon, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, uber lyft, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, warehouse robotics, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, When a measure becomes a target, wikimedia commons

It’s named after fourteenth-century English philosopher William of Ockham, though the underlying concept has much older roots. The Greco-Roman astronomer Ptolemy (circa A.D. 90–168) stated, “We consider it a good principle to explain the phenomena by the simplest hypotheses possible.” More recently, the composer Roger Sessions, paraphrasing Albert Einstein, put it like this: “Everything should be made as simple as it can be, but not simpler!” In medicine, it’s known by this saying: “When you hear hoofbeats, think of horses, not zebras.” A practical tactic is to look at your explanation of a situation, break it down into its constituent assumptions, and for each one, ask yourself: Does this assumption really need to be here?


pages: 561 words: 114,843

Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business, + Website by Matt Blumberg

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, airport security, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, bank run, Ben Horowitz, Blue Ocean Strategy, book value, Broken windows theory, crowdsourcing, deskilling, fear of failure, financial engineering, high batting average, high net worth, hiring and firing, Inbox Zero, James Hargreaves, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, pattern recognition, performance metric, pets.com, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype

That’s not always possible but it usually is. Below, former DoubleClick and Oracle CFO (and current Return Path board member) Jeff Epstein describes the “OKR” approach to setting and tracking goals. Many of the things you can count, don’t count. Many of things you can’t count, really count. —Albert Einstein As Peter Drucker, one of the world’s most influential writers about management best practices, famously said, “Efficiency is doing things right. Effectiveness is doing the right things.” Of course, we want to be both efficient and effective. To do so, avoid time-consuming activities that produce few results and focus on the handful of things that will produce real results.


pages: 411 words: 114,717

Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles by Ruchir Sharma

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American energy revolution, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, book value, BRICs, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, Gini coefficient, global macro, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, informal economy, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, rolling blackouts, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, The Great Moderation, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, Tyler Cowen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, zero-sum game

To a degree that is unmatched outside small nations such as Finland, the U.S. economy is built to innovate: there are whole industries dedicated to refining the next wrinkle in innovation—the latest are open innovation (basically using open-source software systems on the Linux model) and light innovation (optimizing the use of cheap new software sources like the Amazon cloud for business). So American innovation is no accident. As Albert Einstein said, “Innovation is not the product of logical thought, although the result is tied to logical structure.” The United States is strong across the board in technology, but it’s really in the field of software—the ideas that drive the emerging knowledge economy—that the system produces its greatest advantages and generates the most wealth.


pages: 393 words: 115,263

Planet Ponzi by Mitch Feierstein

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, break the buck, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disintermediation, diversification, Donald Trump, energy security, eurozone crisis, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, frictionless, frictionless market, Future Shock, Glass-Steagall Act, government statistician, high net worth, High speed trading, illegal immigration, income inequality, interest rate swap, invention of agriculture, junk bonds, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low earth orbit, low interest rates, mega-rich, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Neil Armstrong, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, pensions crisis, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, tail risk, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, value at risk, yield curve

What right does the (Goldman-advised) Federal Reserve have to load its balance sheet with toxic assets generated by an irresponsible banking system? Why does the ECB feel it’s OK to make loans to insolvent banks against collateral it knows to be rotten? Why does Mervyn King at the Bank of England feel justified in pouring newly printed money into the banking system? The truth is that, as Albert Einstein remarked, we can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them. Our political leaders and central bankers are precisely mired in the thinking that brought us to this point. It’s as though they’ve been poodles of the banking industry for so long, they’ve forgotten what it is to be a guard dog.


pages: 386 words: 114,405

The Death of Cancer: After Fifty Years on the Front Lines of Medicine, a Pioneering Oncologist Reveals Why the War on Cancer Is Winnable--And How We Can Get There by Vincent T. Devita, Jr., M. D., Elizabeth Devita-Raeburn

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, double helix, Frances Oldham Kelsey, mouse model, personalized medicine, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, stem cell, three-martini lunch

This presentation took place in a small room with only a few people in attendance. The president of the hospital didn’t bother to show up. I tell you this story not to pillory Yale particularly, though it behaved badly with regard to its obligations to the war on cancer and to its patients, just as Mary Lasker had feared. The cancer centers at NYU, Columbia, Albert Einstein, Jefferson Medical College, University of Chicago, University of California, San Diego, UCLA, University of Miami, University of Colorado, Georgetown University, Duke, University of Alabama, University of Virginia, Wake Forest University, Emory, University of Hawaii, and Northwestern University, just to name a few more typical of the genre, had virtually the same problems.


A People’s History of Computing in the United States by Joy Lisi Rankin

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Albert Einstein, Apple II, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Charles Babbage, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, corporate social responsibility, digital divide, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, Howard Zinn, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, language acquisition, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Multics, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, pink-collar, profit motive, public intellectual, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the market place, urban planning, Whole Earth Catalog, wikimedia commons

He recognized this as an opportunity to gather a new group of young and highly talented mathematicians as part of his plan to raise Dartmouth’s academic reputation.16 With the help of his colleague Allan Tucker at Prince­ton, where Kemeny earned his bachelor’s degree in 1947 and his doctorate in mathe­matics in 1949, 18 A ­People’s History of Computing in the United States Morrison was able to hire the bright young mathematician.17 Kemeny was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1926. With his parents, he fled the Nazi persecution of Jews by emigrating to the United States in 1940. As an undergraduate, he spent a year working in the theoretical division at Los Alamos during World War II, where he gained experience with computing.18 At Prince­ton, Kemeny also worked as Albert Einstein’s research assistant.19 Kemeny joined the Dartmouth faculty for the 1953–1954 academic year but arranged for that first year to be a sabbatical. He assumed the chair of the mathe­ matics department in 1955, a­ fter only a year of active teaching at the college.20 Kemeny exhibited broad interests, and he was fluent and comfortable conveying his sometimes unorthodox ideas.


pages: 354 words: 118,970

Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream by Nicholas Lemann

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Black-Scholes formula, Blitzscaling, buy and hold, capital controls, Carl Icahn, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deal flow, dematerialisation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial deregulation, financial innovation, fixed income, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Ida Tarbell, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norman Mailer, obamacare, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Peter Thiel, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, public intellectual, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Snow Crash, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transaction costs, universal basic income, War on Poverty, white flight, working poor

Photographs of him show a bald man in a suit and tie, with rheumy eyes and a droopy mustache, looking more like the small-town banker’s son he was than a German-educated intellectual, a Chicago newspaperman, or a wandering bohemian. Over the years, he traveled, drank, worried about his dwindling inherited means, produced a series of increasingly abstruse books (sample title: Linguistic Analysis of Mathematics), and corresponded voluminously with the likes of Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, and, especially, John Dewey, the pragmatist philosopher; a published collection of the Bentley-Dewey letters runs to more than seven hundred pages. His reputation grew steadily as time passed, mainly because of The Process of Government, which by the time Bentley died was considered the most important study of politics and society ever produced by an American—required reading for anybody studying those fields seriously.


pages: 521 words: 110,286

Them and Us: How Immigrants and Locals Can Thrive Together by Philippe Legrain

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, centre right, Chelsea Manning, clean tech, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, digital divide, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, future of work, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, job automation, Jony Ive, labour market flexibility, lockdown, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, moral hazard, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, open borders, open immigration, postnationalism / post nation state, purchasing power parity, remote working, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rishi Sunak, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, WeWork, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working-age population

And even dynamic models generally define away migrants’ contribution to innovation and enterprise because they assume that new technologies fall like manna from heaven, ignore the role of individual inventors and entrepreneurs, and fail to consider the creative boost of diverse people with different perspectives sparking off each other. Yet how can one explain technological progress if one ignores the role of Albert Einstein, Google co-founder Sergey Brin and Silicon Valley? Fortunately, some economists are now trying to measure the gains from migration more broadly and realistically.13 Florence Jaumotte and co-authors at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) found that by raising the diversity of skills and ideas in advanced economies, migration tends to boost local living standards significantly.14 A one-percentage point rise in the share of migrants in the population tends to lift living standards (GDP per person) by 2 percent longer term.


pages: 358 words: 119,272

Anatomy of the Bear: Lessons From Wall Street's Four Great Bottoms by Russell Napier

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, collective bargaining, Columbine, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, diversified portfolio, fake news, financial engineering, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, hindsight bias, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Money creation, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, price stability, reserve currency, risk free rate, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, short selling, stocks for the long run, yield curve, Yogi Berra

Those factors include low valuations, improved earnings, improving liquidity, falling bond yields, and changes in how the market is perceived by those who play it. The aim of this guide is to help recognise factors that have, in the past, proven to be good markers to the future, and those that have been misleading. Albert Einstein once said the secret of his success was to ask the right questions, and keep going until he got the answer. In financial markets just asking the right questions can be incredibly difficult. This book, by studying financial history, offers the questions to ask when confronted by the bear. You have an advantage over Einstein.


pages: 463 words: 115,103

Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence Is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect by David Goodhart

active measures, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, computer age, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, data science, David Attenborough, David Brooks, deglobalization, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, desegregation, deskilling, different worldview, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Etonian, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Flynn Effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, lockdown, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meritocracy, new economy, Nicholas Carr, oil shock, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, post-industrial society, post-materialism, postindustrial economy, precariat, reshoring, Richard Florida, robotic process automation, scientific management, Scientific racism, Skype, social distancing, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thorstein Veblen, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, young professional

Raising the rewards and prestige attached to Hand and Heart will happen only slowly over generational time, and some of the policies required—chipping away at concentrations of Head wealth, raising wages for care services, celebrating craft skills, education for life—I will consider in the final chapter. Chapter Ten Cognitive Diversity and the Future of Everything Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts. Albert Einstein The title of this book is misleading. It implies that Head, Hand, and Heart, or thought, craft, and feeling, are distinct domains. They are not, of course, and too rigid a division between the three is one of the pathologies of the cognitive era. Many Hand occupations require a great deal of Head.


pages: 424 words: 114,820

Neurodiversity at Work: Drive Innovation, Performance and Productivity With a Neurodiverse Workforce by Amanda Kirby, Theo Smith

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, Automated Insights, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, call centre, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, deep learning, digital divide, double empathy problem, epigenetics, fear of failure, future of work, gamification, global pandemic, iterative process, job automation, lockdown, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, Minecraft, neurotypical, phenotype, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, seminal paper, the built environment, traumatic brain injury, work culture

However, it wasn’t all bad; the Bible mentions the higher numbers of left-handers from the tribe of Benjamin and this was seen as potentially conferring a strategic advantage in battle, somewhat like a left-handed tennis player or footballer today playing against right-handed or footed opponent. We also know of many famous and successful left-handers including Leonardo Da Vinci, Whoopi Goldberg, Lewis Carroll, David Bowie, Albert Einstein and Aristotle! What we are trying to show is that wrong framing around labels and people’s perception of what is in reality part of human variability has real consequences for many. Changing labels over time There has been much criticism for medicalizing patterns of our traits, behaviour and mood which for some are seen as part of the diversity of all humans.


pages: 409 words: 112,055

The Fifth Domain: Defending Our Country, Our Companies, and Ourselves in the Age of Cyber Threats by Richard A. Clarke, Robert K. Knake

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, business cycle, business intelligence, call centre, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, computer vision, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DevOps, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Exxon Valdez, false flag, geopolitical risk, global village, immigration reform, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kubernetes, machine readable, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Morris worm, move fast and break things, Network effects, open borders, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, quantum cryptography, ransomware, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, software as a service, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, undersea cable, unit 8200, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day

“Reinvent the internet” to make it more secure is an often-heard refrain, but no one has yet come up with a plan for how to do that without causing more economic and social harm than the bad actors could do on their worst days. Even sillier are the calls for a “cyber Manhattan Project” or “cyber moon shot.” These demands for a massive national effort always lack the same thing: a clear goal. The Manhattan Project of the 1940s took developing theories of physics, as laid out in a succinct letter from Albert Einstein to President Franklin Roosevelt, and set out an engineering challenge to translate them into an atomic weapon. Kennedy’s goal of the “moon shot” was even clearer: get to the moon. Cyber war has no such neat solution, because achieving peace in cyberspace is not a question of solving an engineering problem or reaching a specific location.


pages: 401 words: 119,043

Checkpoint Charlie by Iain MacGregor

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Bob Geldof, British Empire, index card, Kickstarter, Live Aid, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, open borders, Ronald Reagan, Ted Sorensen

You would think you were in Kent, rather than Eastern Europe. The house had an elegant and tragic history. It had been the holiday home of the famous Berlin pathologist and physiologist János Plesch, who was a lover of the arts and held lavish parties there, hosting the likes of Marlene Dietrich and Albert Einstein. With the rise of the Nazis in 1938, Plesch was warned he needed to flee the country and so quickly sold the property to a Jewish banker, Hans Seligmann, and relocated to London, where he established himself as an innovative heart specialist. Seligmann’s fate under Hitler’s regime is unknown, but it is thought he died in the Holocaust, and the house subsequently came into occupation of the Nazi Gauleiter of Spandau from 1939 until 1945.


pages: 413 words: 115,274

Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World by Henry Grabar

A Pattern Language, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, big-box store, bike sharing, Blue Bottle Coffee, car-free, congestion pricing, coronavirus, COVID-19, digital map, Donald Shoup, edge city, Ferguson, Missouri, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Google Earth, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, Lyft, mandatory minimum, market clearing, megastructure, New Urbanism, parking minimums, power law, remote working, rent control, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Seaside, Florida, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, SimCity, social distancing, Stop de Kindermoord, streetcar suburb, text mining, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, traffic fines, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city, WeWork, white flight, Yogi Berra, young professional

As a young man in interwar Vienna, Gruen was an architect by day and an actor by night. He spent his evenings in the city’s famous coffeehouses running a left-wing theater troupe and performing cabaret routines: slapstick, music, drama. In 1938, he fled from the Nazis to New York, where he founded the Refugee Artists Group. After a personal request from Gruen, Albert Einstein wrote a letter of support for the group’s performances; Irving Berlin helped them polish their tunes before two Broadway runs. Gruen had even more luck in architecture. To pay the bills during his dalliance in musical theater, the Viennese refugee found work in New York on the sensational General Motors “Futurama” exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair.


pages: 414 words: 117,581

Binge Times: Inside Hollywood's Furious Billion-Dollar Battle to Take Down Netflix by Dade Hayes, Dawn Chmielewski

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Big Tech, borderless world, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, data science, digital rights, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, George Floyd, global pandemic, Golden age of television, haute cuisine, hockey-stick growth, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Jony Ive, late fees, lockdown, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mitch Kapor, Netflix Prize, Osborne effect, performance metric, period drama, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, QR code, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, remote working, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, Steve Jobs, subscription business, tech bro, the long tail, the medium is the message, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, vertical integration, WeWork

He liquidated his holdings ahead of the 1929 stock market crash and lived through the Depression in high style, according to Forbes, backing a yachting syndicate that competed in the America’s Cup and acquiring much of Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, for use as a personal playground. He then turned his attention to science, bankrolling an experimental physics lab in Tuxedo Park that attracted such luminaries as Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, and Ernest Lawrence. Reed Hastings grew up in an affluent suburb of Boston with well-educated parents—his mother was a Wellesley grad, his father magna cum laude at Harvard. Hastings attended private schools, then surprised the family by choosing Bowdoin College in Maine, which was a selective and rigorous school but outside of the Ivy League.


pages: 451 words: 115,720

Green Tyranny: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex by Rupert Darwall

1960s counterculture, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Bakken shale, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, centre right, clean tech, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, Donald Trump, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Garrett Hardin, gigafactory, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, hydraulic fracturing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Elkington, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, market design, means of production, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Murray Bookchin, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, Paris climate accords, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, precautionary principle, pre–internet, recommendation engine, renewable energy transition, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Solyndra, Strategic Defense Initiative, subprime mortgage crisis, tech baron, tech billionaire, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, women in the workforce, young professional

Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, co-chair of the WBGU and director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, introduced the conference. For many years, Schellnhuber was Angela Merkel’s top climate adviser and scientific adviser to the president of the European Commission. He has compared himself to Albert Einstein, but Schellnhuber’s math can lead him astray. The IPCC’s bogus claim that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035 was correct and “very easy to calculate,” he told an interviewer in 2009.13 Schellnhuber’s extreme views arouse little controversy in Germany. A member of the Club of Rome, Schellnhuber advocates 1970s-style limits-to-growth politics updated for the age of global warming.


pages: 412 words: 115,048

Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, From the Ancients to Fake News by Eric Berkowitz

Albert Einstein, algorithmic management, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Charlie Hebdo massacre, Chelsea Manning, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, high-speed rail, Index librorum prohibitorum, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minecraft, New Urbanism, post-truth, pre–internet, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, source of truth, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, undersea cable, W. E. B. Du Bois, WikiLeaks

CULTURAL CENSORSHIP BETWEEN THE WARS IN GERMANY AND BRITAIN Over its fourteen-year existence, Germany’s Weimar Republic hosted one of history’s most astonishing outpourings of creative and intellectual energy. Expressionism in art, film, and literature bloomed; the Bauhaus redefined architecture and design; Jews from Albert Einstein to Erich Fromm sat on university faculties; and modernism in all its vivid forms came into its own. Even Joseph Pilates refined his exercise techniques there. Yet this all took place amid economic collapse, volatile politics, and street battles among anarchists, Communists, and extreme-right groups such as Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP).


Words That Work: It's Not What You Say, It's What People Hear by Dr. Frank Luntz

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, citizen journalism, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, death of newspapers, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, glass ceiling, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, It's morning again in America, pension reform, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, school choice, school vouchers, Steve Jobs, upwardly mobile, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white flight

Bounty’s “quicker picker upper” campaign from the 1970s may have mangled the English language, but those three words sounded good together. Likewise, the alliteration at the beginning of the M&M’s slogan, “Melts in your mouth . . .” helps the tagline stick in the memory. Another approach is to butcher the English language. The Mac slogan that appeared on billboards and in print ads with pictures of Albert Einstein and other icons, “Think Different,” was a grammatical travesty (it should have been “Think Differently”), but the company wisely went with the shorter, snappier sounding slogan—and the rules of grammar be damned. Similarly, the latest McDonald’s slogan “i’m lovin’ it” features eye-catching lowercase letters, even when they begin a sentence, and no matter how hard you look, there is no such word as lovin’ in any English dictionary.


pages: 412 words: 116,685

The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything by Matthew Ball

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Apple Newton, augmented reality, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, business process, call centre, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deepfake, digital divide, digital twin, disintermediation, don't be evil, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, game design, gig economy, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, hype cycle, intermodal, Internet Archive, Internet of things, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Gruber, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, non-fungible token, open economy, openstreetmap, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Planet Labs, pre–internet, QR code, recommendation engine, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, satellite internet, self-driving car, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, social web, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, thinkpad, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, TSMC, undersea cable, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, Wayback Machine, Y2K

Then again, for decades humans have been able to produce physical equipment capable of interpreting vibrations as sound, thereby enabling sound to be heard through an artificial observer. But does that count? Meanwhile, the quantum mechanics community today largely agrees that without an observer, existence is at best a conjecture that cannot be proved or disproved—all that can be said is that the tree might exist. (Albert Einstein, who was instrumental in founding the theory of quantum mechanics, took issue with this view.) In Part II, I explain what it will take to power and build the Metaverse, starting with networking and computing capabilities, and then moving on to the game engines and platforms that operate its many virtual worlds, the standards which are needed to unite them, the devices through which they’re accessed, and the payment rails that underpin their economies.


pages: 370 words: 112,809

The Equality Machine: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future by Orly Lobel

2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, barriers to entry, basic income, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Black Lives Matter, Boston Dynamics, Charles Babbage, choice architecture, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, deepfake, digital divide, digital map, Elon Musk, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, game design, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Grace Hopper, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, iterative process, job automation, Lao Tzu, large language model, lockdown, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, microaggression, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, occupational segregation, old-boy network, OpenAI, openstreetmap, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, personalized medicine, price discrimination, publish or perish, QR code, randomized controlled trial, remote working, risk tolerance, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social distancing, social intelligence, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, The Future of Employment, TikTok, Turing test, universal basic income, Wall-E, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, work culture , you are the product

The Dutch airline KLM uses a highly rated genderless chatbot with a neutral name, BB, and no face. In retail we also see these competing paths. Walmart’s new financial technology venture is named Hazel. IKEA’s chatbot Anna was recently renamed Billie. For its TV series Genius, National Geographic (perhaps unsurprisingly) created a male chatbot named Albert Einstein to increase viewer engagement. The bot was a success, with average conversations lasting between six and eight minutes and a user reengagement rate of 50 percent. But increasingly there are also examples of non-binary and non-human bots. Alibaba’s voice bot, AliGenie, is a pet robot that has an animated, gender-ambiguous voice and cartoonish animal eyes.


pages: 386 words: 112,064

Rich White Men: What It Takes to Uproot the Old Boys' Club and Transform America by Garrett Neiman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, basic income, Bernie Sanders, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, clean water, confounding variable, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, Donald Trump, drone strike, effective altruism, Elon Musk, gender pay gap, George Floyd, glass ceiling, green new deal, high net worth, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, impact investing, imposter syndrome, impulse control, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, liberal capitalism, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, occupational segregation, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, white flight, William MacAskill, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

It also ought not to be surprising that in a capitalist system, beginning life with more capital is an advantage and a source of power. In such a system, those who start with more capital benefit from unearned advantage that they can convert into exponentially greater unearned advantage over time. Compound interest—which Albert Einstein described as “the eighth wonder of the world”44—is capitalism’s greatest strength. It enables some people who start life without wealth to transform relatively modest savings into a sizable nest egg. And occasionally, it enables a small number of people—usually white men—to become the rags-to-riches stories that America loves to celebrate.


pages: 1,336 words: 415,037

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Brownian motion, capital asset pricing model, card file, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, desegregation, do what you love, Donald Trump, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, financial engineering, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Golden Gate Park, Greenspan put, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Honoré de Balzac, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index fund, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, medical malpractice, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, money market fund, moral hazard, NetJets, new economy, New Journalism, North Sea oil, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Plato's cave, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, random walk, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scientific racism, shareholder value, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, tontine, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, yellow journalism, zero-coupon bond

When Buffett discovered philosopher Bertrand Russell’s 1962 antinuclear treatise, Has Man a Future?, it affected him powerfully.6 He identified with Russell, admired his philosophical rigor, and frequently cited his opinions and aphorisms. He even kept a small plaque on his desk quoting a phrase from an influential antinuclear “manifesto” on which Russell had collaborated with Albert Einstein: “Remember your humanity, and forget the rest.”7 But it was the antiwar movement that had taken on more urgency in Buffett’s mind after Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964, authorizing President Johnson to use military force in Southeast Asia without formally declaring war, using an alleged but unproven naval attack against a U.S. destroyer as the pretext to attack North Vietnam.

The Westchester mansion’s walls were covered with magnificent Chinese paintings; it boasted every status symbol of the era: an indoor swimming pool, a bowling alley, tennis courts, a massive pipe organ. Kay chose her riding horses from a stable of steeds handsome enough to draw Cinderella’s carriage and was taken on incredible vacations, once visiting Albert Einstein himself in Germany. When Agnes took the children camping to teach them independence, they roughed it accompanied by five ranch hands, eleven saddle horses, and seventeen packhorses. But the children had to make an appointment to see their own mother. They gobbled down their meals because Agnes, served first at the long dining-room table, began eating as the footmen moved around serving everyone else—and had the others’ plates snatched away the instant that she herself had finished.

Jane Olson, Ron’s wife, chaired the international board of Human Rights Watch. Before Dan’s death, the Cowins had donated an important collection of art to the American Folk Art Museum. Charlie Munger gave to Good Samaritan Hospital and education. Walter and Suzanne Scott had donated huge amounts of money in Omaha. Ruth Gottesman served on the Albert Einstein College of Medicine Board of Overseers. Marshall Weinberg was gradually giving away nearly all of his money for scholarships, world health, Middle East issues, and educational research. The others had their own causes. When his turn in the conversation came, Bill Gates said, Shouldn’t the measure of accomplishment be how many lives you can save with a given amount of money?


pages: 405 words: 121,531

Influence: Science and Practice by Robert B. Cialdini

Albert Einstein, attribution theory, bank run, behavioural economics, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, desegregation, Everything should be made as simple as possible, experimental subject, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, Milgram experiment, Norman Macrae, Ralph Waldo Emerson, telemarketer, The Wisdom of Crowds

Explain why, according to the contrast principle, placing the smallest donation figure between two larger figures is an effective tactic to prompt more and larger donations. What points do the following quotes make about the dangers of click-whirr responding? “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” Albert Einstein “The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are sometimes right.” Winston Churchill How does the photograph that opens this chapter reflect the topic of the chapter? * * * Figure 1.2 Charity Request Appeal * * * Chapter 2 Reciprocation The Old Give and Take . . .and Take Pay every debt, as if God wrote the bill.


pages: 476 words: 125,219

Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy by Robert W. McChesney

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, access to a mobile phone, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, AOL-Time Warner, Automated Insights, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, company town, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, death of newspapers, declining real wages, digital capitalism, digital divide, disinformation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Dr. Strangelove, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, fulfillment center, full employment, future of journalism, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, income inequality, informal economy, intangible asset, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, Post-Keynesian economics, power law, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Stallman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, single-payer health, Skype, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Spirit Level, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transfer pricing, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

A trope from the early days of computer science comes to mind: garbage in, garbage out. After describing Shirky’s idea of cognitive surplus at length, Lanier responds, “So how many seconds of salvaged erstwhile television time would need to be harnessed to replicate the achievements of, say, Albert Einstein? It seems to me that even if we could network all the potential aliens in the galaxy—quadrillions of them, perhaps—and get each of them to contribute some seconds to a physics wiki, we would not replicate the achievements of even one mediocre physicist, much less a great one.”32 In his 2011 book, The Filter Bubble, Eli Pariser argues that because of the way Google and social media have evolved, Internet users are increasingly and mostly unknowingly led into a personalized world that reinforces their known preferences.


pages: 390 words: 125,082

Years of the City by Frederik Pohl

Albert Einstein, Buckminster Fuller, card file, East Village, Maui Hawaii, medical malpractice, pattern recognition

The subway got him as far as 23d Street, but the buses were hopeless and there was, of course, no such thing as a visible taxi. So Brandon slogged through the deepening snow all the way across town, wondering how he had got himself into promising to work out Jocelyn Feigerman’s UTM. There wasn’t really a question. He had got himself into it in the same way that Albert Einstein had found himself urging the construction of an atomic bomb, that Werner Von Braun’s aim at the stars had missed and hit London, that scientists all over the world found themselves going along with causes not their own. When you have invented something truly remarkable, you want to see if it will work.


pages: 494 words: 116,739

Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change From the Cult of Technology by Kentaro Toyama

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, blood diamond, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, delayed gratification, digital divide, do well by doing good, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gamification, germ theory of disease, global village, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Khan Academy, Kibera, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, libertarian paternalism, longitudinal study, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, North Sea oil, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, school vouchers, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, Twitter Arab Spring, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, Y2K

If anything, it can be counterproductive by drawing our attention to short-term fixes rather than to long-term foundations. 55.The Internet has amplified both our penchant for catchy fake quotations and our ability to verify actual sources. Variations of this quotation are often attributed to Albert Einstein, but thanks to O’Toole (2010), I was able to trace its true source to sociologist William Bruce Cameron (1963), p. 13. 56.The United States grew to be a major economic power well before we were able to measure GDP. In the 1930s, the economist Simon Kuznets architected the first system of national income accounts.


pages: 387 words: 119,409

Work Rules!: Insights From Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead by Laszlo Bock

Abraham Maslow, Abraham Wald, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Black Swan, book scanning, Burning Man, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, citizen journalism, clean water, cognitive load, company town, correlation coefficient, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, helicopter parent, immigration reform, Internet Archive, Kevin Roose, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, nudge unit, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, power law, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rana Plaza, random walk, Richard Thaler, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, six sigma, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, survivorship bias, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tony Hsieh, Turing machine, Wayback Machine, winner-take-all economy, Y2K

Some may argue that it is nevertheless possible, which is true (and I’ll tell you our approach in chapter 9). There are examples of people who were mediocre performers and went on to greatness, though most of those successes are a result of changing the context and type of work, rather than a benefit of training. Take Albert Einstein, who initially failed to be hired as a teacher and then failed to be promoted at the Swiss Patent Office. He didn’t attend a class that transformed him into the best patent clerk that Switzerland had ever seen. Nor did he get a degree in education and start winning teaching awards. His success came because his day job didn’t require much of his intellect,73 so he was free to explore a completely unrelated field.


pages: 351 words: 123,876

Beautiful Testing: Leading Professionals Reveal How They Improve Software (Theory in Practice) by Adam Goucher, Tim Riley

Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Black Swan, business logic, call centre, continuous integration, Debian, Donald Knuth, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Grace Hopper, index card, Isaac Newton, natural language processing, off-by-one error, p-value, performance metric, revision control, six sigma, software as a service, software patent, SQL injection, the scientific method, Therac-25, Valgrind, web application

By adding fuzzing to your existing testing practices, you can help ensure that users receive a reliable product that conforms to a different standard of beauty—one based on the simplicity and straightforwardness that users expect from office software. 66 CHAPTER FIVE CHAPTER SIX Bug Management and Test Case Effectiveness Emily Chen Brian Nitz I have deep faith that the principle of the universe will be beautiful and simple. —Albert Einstein W HY SHOULD A QUALITY ASSURANCE (QA) ENGINEER CARE how “beautiful” a test and bug management system is? Although no one understands exactly what beauty is, there does seem to be a useful relationship between beauty, simplicity, and truth. When this relationship is applied in mathematics and the physical sciences, it is often known as Occam’s Razor.


pages: 425 words: 122,223

Capital Ideas: The Improbable Origins of Modern Wall Street by Peter L. Bernstein

Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, corporate raider, debt deflation, diversified portfolio, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, interest rate swap, invisible hand, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, law of one price, linear programming, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, martingale, means of production, Michael Milken, money market fund, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Journalism, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, stochastic process, Thales and the olive presses, the market place, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, transfer pricing, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Even though risk and return are inseparable, there are certain schemes that can limit losses while providing virtually unlimited gains. And they are respectable schemes, not crazy gimmicks designed to fleece little old ladies and other innocents. These risk-controlling schemes come under the heading of insurance. Albert Einstein is reputed to have said that insurance is one of humanity’s most brilliant inventions. Insurance makes disaster tolerable. Insurance will restore the value of a house burned to ashes, replace part of the earning power of breadwinners who lose their jobs, pay the medical and hospital bills of a catastrophic illness, protect depositors from bank failures, and even reimburse customers for errors and omissions made by their stock brokers.


pages: 402 words: 126,835

The Job: The Future of Work in the Modern Era by Ellen Ruppel Shell

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, big-box store, blue-collar work, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, company town, computer vision, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, deskilling, digital divide, disruptive innovation, do what you love, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, follow your passion, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, game design, gamification, gentrification, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, human-factors engineering, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial research laboratory, industrial robot, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, John Elkington, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, move fast and break things, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, precariat, Quicken Loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban renewal, Wayback Machine, WeWork, white picket fence, working poor, workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, zero-sum game

I decided to go see for myself whether Finland, too, had any lessons to share. Part IV Thinking Anew The highest reward for a person’s work is not what they get for it, but what they become by it. —JOHN RUSKIN 11 THE FINNISH LINE Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them. —ALBERT EINSTEIN So…allow me to guess what you are thinking: “Finland and the United States are not the same!” Agreed! Finland is a Nordic country, with roughly the population of Colorado, and roughly the acreage of New Mexico. It has no Disneyland, no Grand Canyon, and no Times Square. In Helsinki, the capital city, pedestrians wait patiently for traffic lights to turn green, even when there is no traffic.


pages: 434 words: 124,153

Tobacco: A Cultural History of How an Exotic Plant Seduced Civilization by Iain Gately

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business climate, Cape to Cairo, financial independence, Francisco Pizarro, Great Leap Forward, Isaac Newton, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, Neil Kinnock, profit motive, surplus humans, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, women in the workforce

The illustrator, Aubrey Beardsley, found a cigarette between his subject’s fingers could enhance the proportion of the sitter and the surrealist movement explored the surprising symbiosis of man and plant. In some cases, the smoking implement itself came to the foreground: René Magritte isolated the pipe as one of the emblems of suburban man, suspending the cloud-maker against a plain background. The weed likewise retained its links with men of science. Albert Einstein, the greatest scientist since Darwin, mused over the mysteries of space and time with a pipe in his mouth. Einstein’s reasons for smoking were clear: ‘I believe,’ he said, ‘that pipe smoking contributes to a somewhat calm and objective judgement in all human affairs.’ All over the globe, people were reaching for pipes, cigars, snuff boxes and the newfangled cigarettes.


pages: 476 words: 124,973

The Desert and the Sea: 977 Days Captive on the Somali Pirate Coast by Michael Scott Moore

Albert Einstein, British Empire, clean water, Columbine, drone strike, European colonialism, Filipino sailors, fixed income, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, South China Sea, UNCLOS

Quang Duc had shown a deeper religious instinct: Buddhism promises no personal afterlife, no survival of individual consciousness,* and I figured any man who could sit unflinching, without the prospect of heaven, while his robes and body burned, had learned to loosen the bonds of selfishness and desire. There was no other yardstick for philosophy or religion, from my point of view. I lined up with Albert Einstein: “The true value of a human being is determined by the measure and the sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self,” he wrote in a letter in 1934, and by this brilliant, simple formulation even our devoutest pirates were imbeciles. Rolly put it another way while we sat under the conveyor belt one morning.


pages: 452 words: 126,310

The Case for Space: How the Revolution in Spaceflight Opens Up a Future of Limitless Possibility by Robert Zubrin

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, battle of ideas, Boeing 747, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological principle, Dennis Tito, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, flex fuel, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gravity well, if you build it, they will come, Internet Archive, invisible hand, ITER tokamak, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, Menlo Park, more computing power than Apollo, Naomi Klein, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off grid, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, place-making, Pluto: dwarf planet, private spaceflight, Recombinant DNA, rising living standards, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuart Kauffman, telerobotics, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, time dilation, transcontinental railway, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine

This caused him to guess that light emanating from the sun exerts a force that pushes the comet's tail away. He was right, although the fact that light exerts force had to wait till 1901 to be proven by Russian physicist Peter N. Lebedev, who made mirrors suspended on thin fibers in vacuum jars turn by shining light upon them. A few years later, Albert Einstein provided the theoretical basis for this phenomenon, explaining why light exerts force in his classic paper on the photoelectric effect, for which he later received the Nobel Prize. Well, if light can push comet tails around, why can't we use it to move spaceships around? Why can't we just deploy big mirrors on our spacecraft—solar sails, if you will—and have sunlight push on them to create propulsive force?


pages: 420 words: 124,202

The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention by William Rosen

Albert Einstein, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, barriers to entry, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, computer age, Copley Medal, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, delayed gratification, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Flynn Effect, fudge factor, full employment, Higgs boson, independent contractor, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, iterative process, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, Joseph Schumpeter, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, knowledge economy, language acquisition, Lewis Mumford, moral hazard, Network effects, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Singer: altruism, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Simon Kuznets, spinning jenny, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, zero-sum game, éminence grise

Watt (and, for that matter, Roebuck) would have been happy to grow prosperous replacing the Newcomen engines at England’s coal mines. Changing the world demanded a far larger ambition, and Matthew Boulton was just the man to supply it. It’s no coincidence that Boulton’s grandiloquent promise to “make for all the world” (one that he would, in the event, redeem), like Albert Einstein’s 1939 letter to Franklin Roosevelt warning about possible German development of the atomic bomb, was written in response to a history-shaking example of what is a very nearly universal human phenomenon: the flash of inventive insight. The nature of which is the subject of chapter 6. * Place names like Aberdeen and Culloden testify to the Scottish influence on Jamaican history


pages: 382 words: 120,064

Bank 3.0: Why Banking Is No Longer Somewhere You Go but Something You Do by Brett King

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, additive manufacturing, Airbus A320, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apollo Guidance Computer, asset-backed security, augmented reality, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, bounce rate, business intelligence, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, fixed income, George Gilder, Google Glasses, high net worth, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Infrastructure as a Service, invention of the printing press, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass affluent, Metcalfe’s law, microcredit, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, operational security, optical character recognition, peer-to-peer, performance metric, Pingit, platform as a service, QR code, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, self-driving car, Skype, speech recognition, stem cell, telepresence, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, underbanked, US Airways Flight 1549, web application, world market for maybe five computers

Psychological impact To understand the core psychological drivers at work in the modern, hyperconnected consumer, we need to revisit one of the foundational pieces of work in respect of the theory of motivation—that of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.16 Abraham Maslow studied exemplary people of his era such as Albert Einstein, Jane Addams, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Frederick Douglass, and determined the hierarchical progression of the individual—essentially what amounts to a theory of positive motivation and personal development. Figure 1.1: Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (c. 1943) (Credit: Wikipedia Creative Commons) The growth of technology and more efficient service paths and ways to meet our self-actualisation needs have shifted the way we value our time, set expectations and perceive ourselves in our environment.


pages: 503 words: 126,355

Thirteen Days in September: Carter, Begin, and Sadat at Camp David by Lawrence Wright

Albert Einstein, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Mahatma Gandhi, Mount Scopus, open borders, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Suez crisis 1956, Yom Kippur War

“Begin is a distinctly Hitleristic type,” David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s revered founder and first prime minister, wrote of his lifelong political antagonist. “He is a racist who is willing to kill all the Arabs in order to gain control of the entire land of Israel.” Prominent American Jews, including Hannah Arendt and Albert Einstein, denounced Begin’s career as a terrorist chieftain. “Teachers were beaten up for speaking against them, adults were shot for not letting their children join them,” they wrote to The New York Times in 1948, when Begin made his first trip to the U.S. “By gangster methods, beatings, window-smashing, and widespread robberies, the terrorists intimidated the population and exacted a heavy tribute.”


pages: 428 words: 121,717

Warnings by Richard A. Clarke

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, active measures, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, anti-communist, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, carbon tax, cognitive bias, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, corporate governance, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, deep learning, DeepMind, discovery of penicillin, double helix, Elon Musk, failed state, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, forensic accounting, friendly AI, Hacker News, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge worker, Maui Hawaii, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, mouse model, Nate Silver, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart grid, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, subprime mortgage crisis, tacit knowledge, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tunguska event, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Y2K

Pyrrho’s teachings influenced another Greek philosopher who taught that all beliefs and assumptions should be challenged, that doubt, skepticism, and disbelief are healthy. This later philosopher was Sextus Empiricus, and his name is forever attached in our minds to the empirical method: doubt until proven by data, by objectively true, observable facts. Many Cassandras seem to have incorporated Albert Einstein’s belief that “unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.” When the authority figures to whom they report their warning reject their analysis for what the Cassandras believe are non-evidence-based reasons, our warners begin to lose respect for the decision makers. They often are unable to hide that disrespect well.


pages: 391 words: 123,597

Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower's Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again by Brittany Kaiser

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Asian financial crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, centre right, Chelsea Manning, clean water, cognitive dissonance, crony capitalism, dark pattern, data science, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Etonian, fake news, haute couture, illegal immigration, Julian Assange, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Nelson Mandela, off grid, open borders, public intellectual, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Russian election interference, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, statistical model, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, the High Line, the scientific method, WeWork, WikiLeaks, you are the product, young professional

Do not use underhanded tactics to get people’s attention; dark ads and divisive rhetoric have driven our societies apart too easily, and with just the click of a button. Dedicate yourself to not falling into the trap of convenience. This is not a time to remain idle—we need action from every person. As Albert Einstein said, “I am not only a pacifist but a militant pacifist. I am willing to fight for peace. Nothing will end war unless the people refuse to go to war.” We must fight to fix our democracy before it breaks beyond repair. We can only do this together. Remember: you have agency! It is not only up to big tech and our governments to protect us.


pages: 378 words: 121,495

The Abandonment of the West by Michael Kimmage

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, City Beautiful movement, classic study, deindustrialization, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global pandemic, global supply chain, Gunnar Myrdal, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, Paris climate accords, Peace of Westphalia, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, transatlantic slave trade, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus

During the Cold War, Friedrich’s elitist notions of democracy and of a Euro-Atlantic intellectual aristocracy confirmed the image of the United States as leader of a democratic West, with Harvard at the center of the intellectual-political web. At Harvard, making good on his notion of a Euro-Atlantic intellectual aristocracy, Friedrich was a mentor to two future national security advisors, Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, both of whom were born in Europe. Albert Einstein was the most conspicuous icon of these wondrously talented exiles from Central Europe. Somewhat less well known was another German-Jewish intellectual, Hannah Arendt. Having narrowly escaped the Holocaust, she moved to New York in 1941. Educated at various German universities, Arendt had a mastery of ancient and modern thought, of philosophy and literature and history, that was sui generis on the American scene.


pages: 572 words: 124,222

San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities by Michael Shellenberger

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, business climate, centre right, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crack epidemic, dark triade / dark tetrad, defund the police, delayed gratification, desegregation, Donald Trump, drug harm reduction, gentrification, George Floyd, Golden Gate Park, green new deal, Haight Ashbury, housing crisis, Housing First, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, mandatory minimum, Marc Benioff, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peoples Temple, Peter Pan Syndrome, pill mill, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, social distancing, South of Market, San Francisco, Steven Pinker, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, walkable city

“There’s no one I’ve appointed to any city position whom I regard as radical or extremist.”17 Willie Brown, a powerful state legislator from 1964 to 1995 before becoming mayor in 1996, “seemed oblivious to Jones’ hucksterism and demagoguery,” notes a historian.18 Brown was master of ceremonies at a dinner for Jones in the fall of 1976 attended by an adulatory crowd of the rich and powerful, including Governor Jerry Brown. “Let me present to you a combination of Martin King, Angela Davis, Albert Einstein . . . Chairman Mao,” he said, to loud applause.19 And yet Jones was contemptuous of Brown even as Brown did Jones more and more favors. Jones mocked Brown for his designer suits, sports cars, and women. Once, while Brown was addressing the congregation and Jones was seated onstage behind him, Jones flipped his middle finger up to mock him.20 San Francisco’s establishment stood by Jones even after a California magazine, New West, owned by Rupert Murdoch, published an exposé of Jones’s beatings of Temple members and financial abuses in August 1977.21 The article was written by a San Francisco Chronicle reporter and was meant for the Chronicle to publish.


pages: 451 words: 125,201

What We Owe the Future: A Million-Year View by William MacAskill

Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, carbon tax, charter city, clean tech, coronavirus, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, effective altruism, endogenous growth, European colonialism, experimental subject, feminist movement, framing effect, friendly AI, global pandemic, GPT-3, hedonic treadmill, Higgs boson, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, lab leak, Lao Tzu, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, lockdown, long peace, low skilled workers, machine translation, Mars Rover, negative emissions, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, QWERTY keyboard, Robert Gordon, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, seminal paper, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, stem cell, Steven Pinker, strong AI, synthetic biology, total factor productivity, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, William MacAskill, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

Though both of these effects are important, when we look at the data it’s the latter effect, “picking the low-hanging fruit,” that predominates. Overall, past progress makes future progress harder. It’s easy to see this qualitatively by looking at the history of innovation. Consider physics. In 1905, his “miracle year,” Albert Einstein revolutionized physics, describing the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, the theory of special relativity, and his famous equation, E=mc2. He was twenty-six at the time and did all this while working as a patent clerk. Compared to Einstein’s day, progress in physics is now much harder to achieve.


pages: 371 words: 122,273

Tenants: The People on the Frontline of Britain's Housing Emergency by Vicky Spratt

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, basic income, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, edge city, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, garden city movement, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, global pandemic, housing crisis, Housing First, illegal immigration, income inequality, Induced demand, Jane Jacobs, Jeremy Corbyn, land bank, land reform, land value tax, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, mass immigration, mega-rich, meta-analysis, negative equity, Overton Window, Own Your Own Home, plutocrats, quantitative easing, rent control, Right to Buy, Rishi Sunak, Rutger Bregman, side hustle, social distancing, stop buying avocado toast, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, working-age population, young professional, zero-sum game

You don’t have to look far today for proof that housing wealth has still not trickled down: homes have become increasingly unaffordable and the number of families, including 121,680 children, living in temporary accommodation continues to increase while homeownership has not gone up. The number of young adults living in a home they own remains below 2003/2004 levels. There is a quote, often attributed to Albert Einstein, which goes something like: ‘the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result’. Successive governments have tried to sort housing out by doing the same thing repeatedly: allowing house prices to inflate and weakly attempting to increase homeownership.


pages: 470 words: 125,992

The Laundromat : Inside the Panama Papers, Illicit Money Networks, and the Global Elite by Jake Bernstein

Albert Einstein, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, British Empire, central bank independence, Charlie Hebdo massacre, clean water, commoditize, company town, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, high net worth, income inequality, independent contractor, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, liberation theology, mega-rich, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, offshore financial centre, optical character recognition, pirate software, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Skype, traveling salesman, WikiLeaks

To demonstrate the hubris of Icelandic bankers in the lead-up to the financial crisis, Kristjánsson showed an over-the-top in-house video produced by the Icelandic bank Kaupthing called Beyond Normal Thinking.8 As synthesizers swelled, an announcer declared the bank’s sky-is-the-limit philosophy, accompanied by images of Mother Teresa, Bill Gates, and Albert Einstein, along with clips from movies such as The Matrix and Lawrence of Arabia. Kristjánsson also showed an animation he had created for a news segment on the banks’ market manipulation,9 which featured a Rube Goldbergian circular machine that sliced and diced loans. Perhaps even more than world leaders, what stirred the crowd was the information on the globe’s most popular sport, soccer.


pages: 476 words: 134,735

The Unpersuadables: Adventures With the Enemies of Science by Will Storr

Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, battle of ideas, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bread and circuses, British Empire, call centre, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Credit Default Swap, David Attenborough, David Brooks, death of newspapers, full employment, George Santayana, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jon Ronson, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, Simon Singh, Stanford prison experiment, Steven Pinker, sugar pill, the scientific method, theory of mind, twin studies

And mostly – unsurprisingly – it wants to rebuild you into a hero. I am not sure if I can blame my university myth on these unconscious processes. But the strange thing is that a part of me – most of me, in fact – has somehow come to believe it. The public entrance of Christ Church takes you past a sign that tells of Lewis Carroll and Albert Einstein and the thirteen prime ministers who have studied there. The college building is fatly magnificent, with its arched windows, carved stone balconies and towering roofs. I wander up and down for a while, just looking, imagining. It costs seven pounds for a non-student such as me to enter. I buy my ticket and follow the strictly laid-out tourist route, prevented by bowler-hatted guards from wandering the parts from which the public are prohibited.


pages: 403 words: 132,736

In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India by Edward Luce

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Bretton Woods, call centre, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, company town, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, demographic dividend, digital divide, dual-use technology, energy security, financial independence, friendly fire, Future Shock, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, informal economy, job-hopping, Kickstarter, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, megacity, new economy, plutocrats, profit motive, purchasing power parity, Silicon Valley, trade liberalization, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, urban planning, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y2K

It is hard to believe that the party could be unaware of the record over the last few decades of India’s bureaucracy in siphoning off money. It is true that India’s persistent rural poverty cannot be addressed without effective state intervention. But trying to effect change through an unreformed and unaccountable state can sometimes be worse than doing nothing at all. Albert Einstein once said insanity was “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” The most spectacular example of the Congress Party’s continued faith in an unreformed state is the Rural Employment Guarantee Act that India’s parliament passed in 2005. Much of the law was designed by Aruna Roy, whom we met earlier, and Jean Dréze, an impressive Belgian-born economist, now an Indian citizen.


pages: 431 words: 129,071

Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us by Will Storr

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, bitcoin, classic study, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, gamification, gig economy, greed is good, intentional community, invisible hand, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Lyft, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, Mother of all demos, Nixon shock, Peter Thiel, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, QWERTY keyboard, Rainbow Mansion, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, tech bro, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, twin studies, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, War on Poverty, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

Despite the fractiousness of Fritz’s relationship with the Institute’s founders, they built him a house overlooking the hot spring baths, at the enormous cost of $10,000. He was even given his own section in the brochure. But the King of Esalen was soon to find a rival. Will Schutz was three decades his junior, had taught at Harvard and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and had just written a book that, in his first months at the Institute, would grow into a national bestseller. Its title was Joy, a state Schutz described as ‘the feeling that comes from the fulfilment of one’s potential’. Inspired by Carl Rogers, Schutz believed that humans are born with all the joy they’ll ever need inside them, but society gets in the way of it, suppressing it as we suppress our true selves.


pages: 428 words: 134,832

Straphanger by Taras Grescoe

active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Albert Einstein, big-box store, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, City Beautiful movement, classic study, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, correlation does not imply causation, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Shoup, East Village, edge city, Enrique Peñalosa, extreme commuting, financial deregulation, fixed-gear, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, indoor plumbing, intermodal, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, Japanese asset price bubble, jitney, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, messenger bag, mortgage tax deduction, Network effects, New Urbanism, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, parking minimums, peak oil, pension reform, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, streetcar suburb, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transit-oriented development, union organizing, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, working poor, young professional, Zipcar

Not surprisingly, this would be the headquarters of the county architect, the man who, wielding a T-square and mechanical pencil, would have the ultimate say over the shape and appearance of his fellow Usonians’ homes. In 1943, Wright sent a petition urging the Roosevelt administration to adopt the principles of Broadacre; among its sixty-four signers were Albert Einstein, Nelson Rockefeller, and New York’s master builder, Robert Moses. Before Wright could build his city, however, the old city caught up to him. Just beyond the crooked-armed saguaros, which stand like dejected sentinels whose “Who goes there?” has never been heeded, Scottsdale sprawls for forty miles to the north and south, its subdivisions bleeding seamlessly into the suburbs of metropolitan Phoenix.


pages: 742 words: 137,937

The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts by Richard Susskind, Daniel Susskind

23andMe, 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, Atul Gawande, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Bill Joy: nanobots, Blue Ocean Strategy, business process, business process outsourcing, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, Clapham omnibus, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, death of newspapers, disintermediation, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, Garrett Hardin, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Ethic, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, lump of labour, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Metcalfe’s law, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, optical character recognition, Paul Samuelson, personalized medicine, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Shoshana Zuboff, Skype, social web, speech recognition, spinning jenny, strong AI, supply-chain management, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, telepresence, The Future of Employment, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing test, Two Sigma, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, world market for maybe five computers, Yochai Benkler, young professional

This is the formal name given to a resource that is shared among a group of people. Lawrence Lessig, the Harvard law professor, entertainingly describes several simple cases of commons in The Future of Ideas. Many of our local parks and public streets, for example, are commons. No individual can exclude another from taking a stroll. Great ideas, like Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, are available for all of us to understand (or to try to). No individual can exclude another from reading it. We do not have to ‘obtain the permission of anyone else’ to enjoy these resources. Ownership and control of them is shared out among the group.12 In the commons that we have in mind, this shared resource is practical expertise.


pages: 385 words: 128,358

Inside the House of Money: Top Hedge Fund Traders on Profiting in a Global Market by Steven Drobny

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital controls, central bank independence, commoditize, commodity trading advisor, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, diversification, diversified portfolio, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Greenspan put, high batting average, implied volatility, index fund, inflation targeting, interest rate derivative, inventory management, inverted yield curve, John Meriwether, junk bonds, land bank, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, market bubble, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Maui Hawaii, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nick Leeson, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, out of africa, panic early, paper trading, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, price anchoring, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, rolodex, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, tail risk, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, Vision Fund, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

—John Maynard Keynes Once we realize that imperfect understanding is the human condition, there is no shame in being wrong, only in failing to correct our mistakes. —George Soros After a certain high level of technical skill is achieved, science and art tend to coalesce in esthetics, plasticity, and form. The greatest scientists are always artists as well. —Albert Einstein CONTENTS Foreword by Joseph G. Nicholas (HFR Group) ix Preface xi 1. Introduction to Global Macro Hedge Funds by Joseph G. Nicholas (HFR Group) 1 2. The History of Global Macro Hedge Funds 5 3. The Future of Global Macro Hedge Funds 31 4. The Family Office Manager: Jim Leitner (Falcon Management) 35 5.


pages: 436 words: 141,321

Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness by Frederic Laloux, Ken Wilber

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, blue-collar work, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, different worldview, driverless car, Easter island, failed state, fulfillment center, future of work, hiring and firing, holacracy, index card, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kenneth Rogoff, meta-analysis, ocean acidification, pattern recognition, post-industrial society, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, radical decentralization, randomized controlled trial, selection bias, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, the market place, the scientific method, Tony Hsieh, warehouse automation, zero-sum game

Chapter 2.4 STRIVING FOR WHOLENESS (GENERAL PRACTICES) A human … experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Albert Einstein Historically, organizations have always been places where people showed up wearing a mask, both in an almost literal and in a figurative sense. Literally, we see this in the bishop’s robe, the executive’s suit, the doctor’s white coat, and the uniforms at a store or restaurant, to name a few.


pages: 500 words: 145,005

Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics by Richard H. Thaler

3Com Palm IPO, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrei Shleifer, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black-Scholes formula, book value, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, clean water, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, constrained optimization, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Glaeser, endowment effect, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, George Akerlof, hindsight bias, Home mortgage interest deduction, impulse control, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, late fees, law of one price, libertarian paternalism, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, market clearing, Mason jar, mental accounting, meta-analysis, money market fund, More Guns, Less Crime, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, New Journalism, nudge unit, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, presumed consent, pre–internet, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, Supply of New York City Cabdrivers, systematic bias, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transaction costs, ultimatum game, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, zero-sum game

The full treatment of the formal theory of how to make decisions in risky situations—called expected utility theory—was published in 1944 by the mathematician John von Neumann and the economist Oskar Morgenstern. John von Neumann, one of the greatest mathematicians of the twentieth century, was a contemporary of Albert Einstein at the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton University, and during World War II he decided to devote himself to practical problems. The result was the 600-plus-page opus The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, in which the development of expected utility theory was just a sideline. The way that von Neumann and Morgenstern created the theory was to begin by writing down a series of axioms of rational choice.


pages: 509 words: 132,327

Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History by Thomas Rid

1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alistair Cooke, Alvin Toffler, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Claude Shannon: information theory, conceptual framework, connected car, domain-specific language, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, Extropian, full employment, game design, global village, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, Howard Rheingold, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kubernetes, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Morris worm, Mother of all demos, Neal Stephenson, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, pattern recognition, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Snow Crash, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telepresence, The Hackers Conference, Timothy McVeigh, Vernor Vinge, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, Zimmermann PGP

He saw an opportunity to take a public stance against militarism more generally, and against guided missiles specifically: I cannot conceive a situation in which such weapons can produce any effect other than extending the kamikaze way of fighting to whole nations. Their possession can do nothing but endanger us by encouraging the tragic insolence of the military mind.3 The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists republished the letter the same month. Even Albert Einstein commended Wiener for his courage. Wiener’s eloquent line on the “tragic insolence of the military mind” powerfully resonated with a rising number of postwar critics and pacifists. Yet these were surprisingly naïve statements, coming from a man who had conducted a two-year research project on the antiaircraft problem.


pages: 433 words: 129,636

Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic by Sam Quinones

1960s counterculture, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, British Empire, call centre, centralized clearinghouse, correlation does not imply causation, crack epidemic, deindustrialization, do what you love, feminist movement, illegal immigration, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, obamacare, pill mill, TED Talk, zero-sum game

In 1984, a young doctor came to Sloan Kettering for a fellowship under Foley. Russell Portenoy had grown up in Yonkers and developed an interest in biology as a child. A dapper and articulate man, Portenoy attended Cornell University, then medical school at the University of Maryland. He did a neurology residency at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Portenoy worked among Sloan Kettering cancer patients for almost two years. During the 1980s and 1990s, he and Foley helped midwife a new specialty in American medicine. Palliative care—treating the pain and stress of the seriously ill—grew from a variety of influences: the hospice movement of Cicely Saunders and the idea, then surprisingly uncommon in medicine, that death should be dignified.


Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values by Robert M. Pirsig

Albert Einstein, always be closing, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Lao Tzu, Parkinson's law, the scientific method

A finely tempered nature longs to escape from his noisy cramped surroundings into the silence of the high mountains where the eye ranges freely through the still pure air and fondly traces out the restful contours apparently built for eternity. The passage is from a 1918 speech by a young German scientist named Albert Einstein. Phćdrus had finished his first year of University science at the age of fifteen. His field was already biochemistry, and he intended to specialize at the interface between the organic and inorganic worlds now known as molecular biology. He didn’t think of this as a career for his own personal advancement.


pages: 400 words: 129,841

Capitalism: the unknown ideal by Ayn Rand

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business cycle, data science, East Village, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, Isaac Newton, laissez-faire capitalism, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, profit motive, the market place, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, War on Poverty, yellow journalism

Not the universities with their thinkers, but the places and people in distress, the inmates of asylums and concentration camps, the helpless decision-makers in bureaucracy and the helpless soldiers in foxholes—these will be the ones to lighten man’s way, to refashion his knowledge of disaster into something creative. We may be entering a new age. Our heroes may not be intellectual giants like Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein, but victims like Anne Frank, who will show us a greater miracle than thought. They will teach us how to endure—how to create good in the midst of evil and how to nurture love in the presence of death. Should this happen, however, the university will still have its place. Even the intellectual man can be an example of creative suffering.


pages: 476 words: 132,042

What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, c2.com, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, charter city, classic study, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer vision, cotton gin, Danny Hillis, dematerialisation, demographic transition, digital divide, double entry bookkeeping, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, George Gilder, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, invention of air conditioning, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Conway, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, life extension, Louis Daguerre, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, performance metric, personalized medicine, phenotype, Picturephone, planetary scale, precautionary principle, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, refrigerator car, rewilding, Richard Florida, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, silicon-based life, skeuomorphism, Skype, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, the built environment, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, Vernor Vinge, wealth creators, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, yottabyte

New Yorker, 84 (13). 141 “one third of our ideas”: Nathan Myhrvold. (2009) In discussion with the author. 141 “of when, not if”: Jay Walker. (2009) In discussion with the author. 142 all had the same idea: W. Daniel Hillis. (2009) In discussion with the author. 142 The Inverted Pyramid of Invention: Inspired by W. Daniel Hillis; designed by the author. 144 “merits of both investigators as being comparable”: Abraham Pais. (2005) “Subtle Is the Lord . . .”: The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 153. 144 “even after they read his paper”: Walter Isaacson. (2007) Einstein: His Life and Universe. New York: Simon & Schuster, p. 134. 144 “ten years or more”: Walter Isaacson. (2009) In discussion with the author. 144 “appear the most determined of all”: Dean Keith Simonton. (1978) “Independent Discovery in Science and Technology: A Closer Look at the Poisson Distribution.”


pages: 441 words: 136,954

That Used to Be Us by Thomas L. Friedman, Michael Mandelbaum

addicted to oil, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Andy Kessler, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, centre right, Climatic Research Unit, cloud computing, collective bargaining, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, drop ship, energy security, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, full employment, Google Earth, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job automation, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Lean Startup, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, mass immigration, more computing power than Apollo, Network effects, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, oil shock, PalmPilot, pension reform, precautionary principle, proprietary trading, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, University of East Anglia, vertical integration, WikiLeaks

While FDR did not significantly expand immigration, which had been curtailed in the 1920s, thousands of Europeans, many of them Jews, made their way to America as refugees from Nazi Germany in the middle to late 1930s. Many were elite scientists, physicists, writers, artists, musicians, historians, and intellectuals. This “brain wave,” epitomized by Albert Einstein, played a critical role in shifting the world’s intellectual leadership from Europe to the United States. The administration of FDR’s successor, Harry Truman, saw the enactment of the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, known as the GI Bill of Rights, which provided college tuition and vocational training to returning World War II veterans.


City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age by P. D. Smith

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, Anthropocene, augmented reality, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business cycle, car-free, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, congestion charging, congestion pricing, cosmological principle, crack epidemic, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, edge city, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, en.wikipedia.org, Enrique Peñalosa, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, global village, haute cuisine, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Kibera, Kickstarter, Kowloon Walled City, Lewis Mumford, Masdar, megacity, megastructure, multicultural london english, mutually assured destruction, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, peak oil, pneumatic tube, RFID, smart cities, starchitect, telepresence, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, the High Line, Thomas Malthus, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, young professional

For Jhering, the theatre was part of ‘everyday life’ and, like life in Berlin and other great cities, it was ‘excited, charged, alert, clever, rousing’.9 Berlin between the wars was a deeply troubled city – its population had doubled to nearly four million, it had endured the hyperinflation of 1922–3 when newspaper presses were used to print banknotes, and the Nazis and the Communists were regularly fighting pitched battles for dominance on the city’s streets. But paradoxically it was also an incredibly dynamic city, attracting artists, writers and scientists. Albert Einstein had arrived in the city in 1914 and it was here in November 1915 that he completed his general theory of relativity. It was a ‘great work of art,’ said the physicist Max Born, ‘the greatest feat of human thinking about nature, the most amazing combination of philosophical penetration, physical intuition, and mathematic skill’.10 Thea Alba, ‘The Woman Who Writes with Her Feet and Her Hands’, Berlin, Germany, 1931.


pages: 483 words: 141,836

Red-Blooded Risk: The Secret History of Wall Street by Aaron Brown, Eric Kim

Abraham Wald, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Asian financial crisis, Atul Gawande, backtesting, Basel III, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, book value, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon tax, central bank independence, Checklist Manifesto, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, disintermediation, distributed generation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental subject, fail fast, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, global macro, illegal immigration, implied volatility, independent contractor, index fund, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, market clearing, market fundamentalism, market microstructure, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, open economy, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, pre–internet, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, special drawing rights, statistical arbitrage, stochastic volatility, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, tail risk, The Myth of the Rational Market, Thomas Bayes, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, yield curve

What I do isn’t rocket science, most of it is trivially simple and the rest is more meticulous care than brilliance. But to be historically accurate, we’re stuck with the term, and it does convey some of the spirit of the group. We contrasted ourselves to people we called “Einsteins,” an even stupider name. We had nothing against Albert Einstein, but we disagreed with people who thought risk was deeply complex and could be figured out by pure brainpower, without actually taking any risk or observing any risk takers. “Einstein” was rarely used as a noun. It was more common as an adjective. “He had a good insight, but went Einstein with it,” or “He used to be a rocket scientist but got offered a tenure track position and went Einstein.”


pages: 449 words: 129,511

The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World by Simon Winchester

Albert Einstein, ASML, British Empire, business climate, cotton gin, Dava Sobel, discovery of the americas, Easter island, Etonian, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, GPS: selective availability, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, James Webb Space Telescope, John Harrison: Longitude, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, means of production, military-industrial complex, planetary scale, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, trade route, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

LIGO is an observatory, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. The purpose of this extraordinarily sensitive, complex, and costly piece of equipment is to try to detect the passage through the fabric of space-time of those brief disruptions and distortions and ripples known as gravitational waves, phenomena that in 1916 Albert Einstein predicted, as part of his general theory of relativity, should occur. If Einstein was right, then once every so often, when huge events occur far out in deep space (the collision of a pair of black holes, for instance), the spreading fan of interstellar ripples, all moving at the speed of light, should eventually hit and pass through the Earth and, in doing so, cause the entire planet to change shape, by an infinitesimal amount and for just the briefest moment of time.


The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect by Judea Pearl, Dana Mackenzie

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Asilomar, Bayesian statistics, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, driverless car, Edmond Halley, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Isaac Newton, iterative process, John Snow's cholera map, Loebner Prize, loose coupling, Louis Pasteur, Menlo Park, Monty Hall problem, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, personalized medicine, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, Plato's cave, prisoner's dilemma, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, The Design of Experiments, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Turing test

The simplicity and plausibility of the Baron-Kenny method took the social sciences by storm. As of 2014, their article ranks thirty-third on the list of most frequently cited scientific papers of all time. As of 2017, Google Scholar reports that 73,000 scholarly articles have cited Baron and Kenny. Just think about that! They’ve been cited more times than Albert Einstein, more than Sigmund Freud, more than almost any other famous scientist you can think of. Their article ranks second among all papers in psychology and psychiatry, and yet it’s not about psychology at all. It’s about noncausal mediation. The unprecedented popularity of the Baron-Kenny approach undoubtedly stems from two factors.


pages: 458 words: 137,960

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

Albert Einstein, call centre, dematerialisation, disinformation, escalation ladder, fault tolerance, financial independence, game design, late fees, Neal Stephenson, Pepsi Challenge, pre–internet, Rubik’s Cube, side project, telemarketer, walking around money, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War

“—joining us live from his home in Oregon. Thanks for being with us today, Mr. Morrow!” “No problem,” Morrow replied. It had been almost six years since Morrow had last spoken to the media, but he didn’t seem to have aged a day. His wild gray hair and long beard made him look like a cross between Albert Einstein and Santa Claus. That comparison was also a pretty good description of his personality. The reporter cleared his throat, obviously a bit nervous. “Let me start off by asking what your reaction is to the events of the last twenty-four hours. Were you surprised to see those names appear on Halliday’s Scoreboard?”


pages: 545 words: 137,789

How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities by John Cassidy

Abraham Wald, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, different worldview, diversification, Elliott wave, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, full employment, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Gunnar Myrdal, Haight Ashbury, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income per capita, incomplete markets, index fund, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, mental accounting, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, negative equity, Network effects, Nick Leeson, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, price discrimination, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, rent control, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Two Sigma, unorthodox policies, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, zero-sum game

That judgment is debatable, but von Neumann, who was born in Budapest in 1903, was undoubtedly some sort of genius. The work he did in economics he considered a sideline to his other activities, which included formulating game theory and making significant contributions to logic, set theory, statistics, quantum mechanics, hydrodynamics, and computer science. A colleague of Albert Einstein’s at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, von Neumann played an important role in the Manhattan Project, consulted for the CIA, and served on the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. Loquacious and virulently anti-Communist, he drank heavily, told off-color jokes, was married twice, and died of cancer in 1957, when he was just fifty-three.


pages: 473 words: 132,344

The Downfall of Money: Germany's Hyperinflation and the Destruction of the Middle Class by Frederick Taylor

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, British Empire, central bank independence, centre right, collective bargaining, falling living standards, fiat currency, fixed income, full employment, German hyperinflation, housing crisis, Internet Archive, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, mittelstand, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, quantitative easing, rent control, risk/return, strikebreaker, trade route, zero-sum game

The German government makes illegal the use of foreign currencies as payment within Germany. Inflation accelerates still further. 3,180 November. Growing crisis over German failure to meet reparations demands. Fall of Wirth government. New administration under a non-political businessman, Wilhelm Cuno. Reparations negotiations unsuccessful. Albert Einstein is awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics. 7,183 December. Berthold Brecht’s first play, Drums in the Night, successfully premieres in Berlin. Just before Christmas, Germany is declared in default of reparations. 7,589 1923 January. France and Belgium invade and occupy the Ruhr to enforce reparations.


pages: 448 words: 142,946

Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition by Charles Eisenstein

Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon tax, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, corporate raider, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, degrowth, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, disintermediation, diversification, do well by doing good, fiat currency, financial independence, financial intermediation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, global supply chain, God and Mammon, happiness index / gross national happiness, hydraulic fracturing, informal economy, intentional community, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, land tenure, land value tax, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, liquidity trap, low interest rates, McMansion, means of production, megaproject, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, multilevel marketing, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, phenotype, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Scramble for Africa, special drawing rights, spinning jenny, technoutopianism, the built environment, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons

I am aware that “fair trade” has become in many instances a brand that covers up the usual exploitation of labor and commoditization of culture, but the principle still applies. CHAPTER 21 WORKING IN THE GIFT Strange is our situation here upon earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to a divine purpose. From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: that we are here for the sake of others. —Albert Einstein TRUSTING GRATITUDE The question comes up again and again: How can I share my gifts in today’s money economy and still make a living? Some people who ask this question are artists, healers, or activists who despair of finding a way to “get paid for” what they do. Others have a successful business or profession but have begun to feel that something is amiss with the way they charge for their services.


pages: 934 words: 135,736

The Divided Nation: A History of Germany, 1918-1990 by Mary Fulbrook

Albert Einstein, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, centre right, classic study, coherent worldview, collective bargaining, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, fixed income, full employment, it's over 9,000, joint-stock company, land reform, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, open borders, Peace of Westphalia, Sinatra Doctrine, union organizing, unorthodox policies

In education, there was a purge of teachers lacking the appropriate racial credentials or political views, at both school and university levels. While a large number of school and university teachers in the Weimar Republic had held conservative and nationalist views, by no means a majority were of Nazi leanings. Many leading academics were forced into emigration, including, for example, Albert Einstein. Attempts were made to influence the contents of what was taught, as well as the people who taught it. While topics such as biology, history, and German were fairly readily adapted for Nazi purposes, other scientific and technical subjects were less susceptible to Nazi distortion. Yet even at the level of school mathematics, examples could be used for exercises in arithmetic which sustained or propagated a certain world view.


How I Became a Quant: Insights From 25 of Wall Street's Elite by Richard R. Lindsey, Barry Schachter

Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andrew Wiles, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black-Scholes formula, Bob Litterman, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized markets, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, Donald Knuth, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, global macro, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, implied volatility, index fund, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Ivan Sutherland, John Bogle, John von Neumann, junk bonds, linear programming, Loma Prieta earthquake, Long Term Capital Management, machine readable, margin call, market friction, market microstructure, martingale, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, P = NP, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, performance metric, prediction markets, profit maximization, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, six sigma, sorting algorithm, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Levy, stochastic process, subscription business, systematic trading, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, transfer pricing, value at risk, volatility smile, Wiener process, yield curve, young professional

Wonder what that meant? Putting It to the Test I graduated from MIT on schedule in the spring of 1987 and, having no thoughts other than to pursue my PhD, I found myself at Princeton that fall. I was surrounded by more Nobel-prize-winning physicists than I had ever imagined. This, after all, was the land of Albert Einstein and I myself was following in the footsteps on the great physicist Richard Feynman (he had also gone to MIT as an undergraduate). By October, I was as well-entrenched in class work as in research at Princeton’s premier radio-astronomy lab, where I was studying the nuances of millisecond pulsars.


pages: 436 words: 76

Culture and Prosperity: The Truth About Markets - Why Some Nations Are Rich but Most Remain Poor by John Kay

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bletchley Park, business cycle, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, complexity theory, computer age, constrained optimization, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, electricity market, equity premium, equity risk premium, Ernest Rutherford, European colonialism, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, haute couture, Helicobacter pylori, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, means of production, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, Nash equilibrium, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Phillips curve, popular electronics, price discrimination, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, second-price auction, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, transaction costs, tulip mania, urban decay, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , yield curve, yield management

Either way, the market economy won't produce and disseminate the knowledge it needs. Yet this doesn't really seem to happen. A remarkable feature of modern market economies is the speed with which they do create knowledge-important and unimportant. We complain about information overload, not underload. So how is new knowledge created? And how is it paid for? Albert Einstein, a clerk in the Patent Office at Zurich, devised the general theory of relativity in his spare time. This led to the university appointment that had previously eluded him, and thereafter Einstein worked in universities. Einstein was honored wherever he went. But he never became a rich man. Not rich even by the standards of a competent investment banker.


pages: 537 words: 144,318

The Invisible Hands: Top Hedge Fund Traders on Bubbles, Crashes, and Real Money by Steven Drobny

Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, commodity super cycle, commodity trading advisor, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency peg, debt deflation, diversification, diversified portfolio, equity premium, equity risk premium, family office, fiat currency, fixed income, follow your passion, full employment, George Santayana, global macro, Greenspan put, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, index fund, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, inventory management, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, junk bonds, Kickstarter, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, market microstructure, Minsky moment, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, North Sea oil, open economy, peak oil, pension reform, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price discovery process, price stability, private sector deleveraging, profit motive, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, savings glut, selection bias, Sharpe ratio, short selling, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, statistical arbitrage, stochastic volatility, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, survivorship bias, tail risk, The Great Moderation, Thomas Bayes, time value of money, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, two and twenty, unbiased observer, value at risk, Vanguard fund, yield curve, zero-sum game

Losing less than peers or benchmarks does not provide the annual cash flow needs of pensioners, universities, and charities. Poor portfolio construction by these funds creates a potential cost to society and the taxpayer that is too great to ignore. “The most powerful force in the world is compound interest,” Albert Einstein is said to have declared. However, he neglected to mention that avoiding large drawdowns—which can wipe out years of performance—is an important implicit part of this phenomenon. Building better portfolios and properly managing risk are the first lines of defense against large drawdowns, which should be the primary concern of anyone managing capital against annual cash needs.


pages: 525 words: 131,496

Near and Distant Neighbors: A New History of Soviet Intelligence by Jonathan Haslam

active measures, Albert Einstein, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Bolshevik threat, Bretton Woods, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, falling living standards, false flag, John von Neumann, lateral thinking, military-industrial complex, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, Valery Gerasimov, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, éminence grise

Up to date on the latest developments in science, he must have been aware of recent speculation, widespread in the American press, concerning the feasibility of atomic weapons. Soviet intelligence was, in particular, alarmed to learn that Germany was working on a “super bomb” that would employ atomic energy. News of Albert Einstein’s letter to Roosevelt on October 11, 1939, warning of German progress and Roosevelt’s positive response, confirmed the need for countermeasures. Kvasnikov took the initiative. On the eve of the German invasion, he despatched a circular to a series of rezidentury: London, New York, Berlin, Stockholm, and Tokyo.


pages: 349 words: 134,041

Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives by Satyajit Das

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Bretton Woods, BRICs, Brownian motion, business logic, business process, buy and hold, buy low sell high, call centre, capital asset pricing model, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, currency risk, disinformation, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everything should be made as simple as possible, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, Haight Ashbury, high net worth, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index card, index fund, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Meriwether, junk bonds, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, mass affluent, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, money market fund, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Journalism, Nick Leeson, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Parkinson's law, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, Right to Buy, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Salesforce, Satyajit Das, shareholder value, short selling, short squeeze, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, technology bubble, the medium is the message, the new new thing, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, Vanguard fund, volatility smile, yield curve, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond

Pricing the majority of financial products involves little more than a grasp of compound interest and present value mathematics. For much of my career, rocket science was proficiency with a Hewlett Packard 12-C™. This is an iconic handheld calculator which is displayed in New York’s Museum of Modern Art and won awards for its innovative design. If you had a programmable handheld calculator then you were Albert Einstein. Forwards and swaps are relatively simple to price. Buying forward is the same as buying now and holding the asset until the date of the maturity of the forward contract. This means you take the current price of the asset and add the cost of borrowing the money to buy it. You make an adjustment for any income you get from holding the asset.


pages: 458 words: 134,028

Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow's Big Changes by Mark Penn, E. Kinney Zalesne

addicted to oil, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Biosphere 2, call centre, corporate governance, David Brooks, Donald Trump, extreme commuting, Exxon Valdez, feminist movement, Future Shock, glass ceiling, God and Mammon, Gordon Gekko, haute couture, hygiene hypothesis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, index card, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, late fees, life extension, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mobile money, new economy, Paradox of Choice, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Renaissance Technologies, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Rubik’s Cube, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, the payments system, Thomas L Friedman, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, War on Poverty, white picket fence, women in the workforce, Y2K

And to be sure, at Harvard today, there are only seventy-seven math majors—out of over 6,700 undergraduates. Yale has thirty-eight. That means that this year, these two universities will graduate fewer than fifty people who really understand the ins and outs of higher math. America has often imported its most brilliant math and science talent. Albert Einstein came from Germany when Hitler took over. Dr. Wernher Von Braun, also from Germany, helped us with our first rockets. While there have been classic American inventors, like Thomas Edison, top math and science people in America have not always been American. In 2001, a bipartisan commission on American National Security said that the second greatest threat to American national security—behind only terrorist attacks—was the threat of failing to provide sufficient math and science education in America.


pages: 480 words: 138,041

The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry by Gary Greenberg

addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, back-to-the-land, David Brooks, Edward Jenner, impulse control, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, late capitalism, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, McMansion, meta-analysis, neurotypical, phenotype, placebo effect, random walk, selection bias, statistical model, theory of mind, Winter of Discontent

And really, how hard is it to sell people on a disorder whose “symptoms” can bestow what Lawrence Osborne called “extraordinary gifts”? Osborne wasn’t talking about special education dollars, but about Glenn Gould and Vladimir Nabokov and Ludwig Wittgenstein, all diagnosed—posthumously, of course—into a Hall of Fame that, depending on which website you consult, also includes Isaac Newton, Emily Dickinson, and Albert Einstein. Even for those who will fall short of greatness, the diagnosis has its appeal. And its charms are on the increase, at least according to the Aspie who predicted to Osborne that “society will actually become more and more dependent on people with Asperger’s to usher it through the difficulties ahead.”


The Rough Guide to Prague by Humphreys, Rob

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, centre right, clean water, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, Johannes Kepler, land reform, Live Aid, Mikhail Gorbachev, Peace of Westphalia, sexual politics, sustainable-tourism, trade route, upwardly mobile

The south side of Staroměstské náměstí boasts a fine array of facades, mostly Baroque, with the notable exception of the neo-Renaissance Štorchův dům, adorned with a late nineteenth-century sgraffito painting of St Wenceslas by Mikuláš Aleš. Next door, U bílého jednorožce (The White Unicorn) – the sixteenth-century house sign actually depicts a one-horned ram – was Prague’s most famous salon, run by Berta Fanta. Prague German writers Franz Kafka, Max Brod and Franz Werfel attended, as did Albert Einstein, who worked in Prague for a number of years before the First World War, and liked to bring his violin along to entertain the company during any breaks in the discussions. The Týn church Staré Město’s most impressive Gothic structure, the mighty Týn church (Chrám Matky boží před Týnem; daily 10am–1pm & 3–5pm; free; W tynska.farnost.cz), is a far more imposing building than the main square’s church of sv Mikuláš.


pages: 489 words: 136,195

Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane

Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-communist, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, demand response, Google Earth, Lewis Mumford, megacity, Minecraft, oil rush, out of africa, planetary scale, precariat, sovereign wealth fund, supervolcano, the built environment, The Spirit Level, uranium enrichment

At Boulby they encased xenon in lead in copper in iron in halite in hundreds of yards of rock in order to see back to the birth of the universe. At Onkalo they encased uranium in zirconium in iron in copper in bentonite in hundreds of yards of rock in order to keep the future safe from the present. One of the exhibits in the display area has a life-size model of Albert Einstein sitting behind a desk, pen in hand, paper on desk. ‘See who’s here!’ says Pasi, leading me to Einstein. Einstein looks the worse for wear. His rubber face, which would be a poor likeness under the best of circumstances, has come unstuck from his neck. There is a gaping hole in his throat, through which I can see metal struts and hinges.


pages: 470 words: 130,269

The Marginal Revolutionaries: How Austrian Economists Fought the War of Ideas by Janek Wasserman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Wald, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, different worldview, Donald Trump, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, Internet Archive, invisible hand, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, New Journalism, New Urbanism, old-boy network, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, union organizing, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game, éminence grise

The empire lost its ruler, Franz Joseph, in November 1916. He had sat on the throne since the revolutionary year of 1848. For many, his death was a synecdoche for the death of the empire. The year 1916 also saw political discontent erupt in violence. Fritz Adler, son of the social democratic leader Victor Adler, student of Ernst Mach, and friend of Albert Einstein, assassinated the minister-president of Austria, Count Karl von Stürgkh, in the dining room of the five-star hotel Meissl & Schadn in protest over the war. Adler mounted his own defense, making an impassioned antiwar argument. He was sentenced to death, though the punishment was commuted at war’s end.


pages: 444 words: 127,259

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chris Urmson, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, data science, Didi Chuxing, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, family office, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, hustle culture, impact investing, information security, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lolcat, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, money market fund, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, off grid, peer-to-peer, pets.com, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, WeWork, Y Combinator

Friends and co-workers invariably described him the same way; Ryan Graves was “a good dude.” Graves caught the entrepreneurial bug early. He worshiped entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin, idolizing the way they built something enormously successful out of nothing but an idea and a computer. Graves’s Tumblr was filled with photos of Jeff Bezos, quotes from Albert Einstein, articles about Elon Musk. One personal favorite was an iconic quote from Shawn Carter, better known by hip-hop fans as Jay-Z: “I’m not a businessman. I’m a business, man.” In 2009, he was bored of his job as a database admin at GE’s health care unit in Chicago. He wanted a cool job, perhaps at one of the startups whose apps populated his iPhone home screen.


Virtual Competition by Ariel Ezrachi, Maurice E. Stucke

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Arthur D. Levinson, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, cloud computing, collaborative economy, commoditize, confounding variable, corporate governance, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, deep learning, demand response, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, electricity market, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, experimental economics, Firefox, framing effect, Google Chrome, independent contractor, index arbitrage, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, light touch regulation, linked data, loss aversion, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market friction, Milgram experiment, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, nowcasting, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, power law, prediction markets, price discrimination, price elasticity of demand, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, search costs, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, turn-by-turn navigation, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, yield management

Once the traditional order was placed, these investors moved in and out of positions in milliseconds, changing the market reality through their accelerated capabilities. Ultimately, the insiders imposed, as Lewis described, a small invisible tax on each trade, which amounted to nearly $160 million a day. One cannot help but borrow Albert Einstein’s aphorism: “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.” Technology in an algorithm-driven economy can create multiple versions of the same market, distinguished by the participant’s savviness (or deceit) and wealth. Some compete in the slower lane while others, better placed, compete against them and against each other in the fast lane.


pages: 511 words: 132,682

Competition Overdose: How Free Market Mythology Transformed Us From Citizen Kings to Market Servants by Maurice E. Stucke, Ariel Ezrachi

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 737 MAX, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, commoditize, corporate governance, Corrections Corporation of America, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, delayed gratification, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Chrome, greed is good, hedonic treadmill, incognito mode, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, information asymmetry, invisible hand, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, late fees, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, Network effects, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price anchoring, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, search costs, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Stanford prison experiment, Stephen Hawking, sunk-cost fallacy, surveillance capitalism, techlash, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, Yochai Benkler

Participants who heard the higher sentencing anchor gave considerably higher sentences (mean of 33.38 months) than those given the low anchor (25.43 months).30 As the authors of this study concluded, from this and other similar experiments they conducted, “God may not play dice with the universe—as Albert Einstein reassured us. But judges may unintentionally play dice with criminal sentences.” And these “anchoring effects” may result in rolls of the dice in many other areas of judgment, too, including prices set by hotel reservation sites and real estate agents.31 We may reject the idea that an arbitrary number could have an impact on our own decisions.


East West Street: On the Origins of "Genocide" and "Crimes Against Humanity" by Philippe Sands

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, battle of ideas, British Empire, card file, foreign exchange controls, nuremberg principles

Dark-haired and bespectacled, with a strong face and powerful eyes, he was a private man who inhabited “a world of his own” yet who was also politically engaged and actively involved in Jewish student life. He became president of the Hochschulausschuss, the coordination committee for Jewish student organizations, and in 1922 was elected chairman of the World Union of Jewish Students, with Albert Einstein as honorary president. On the side, he participated in more mundane activity, helping to run a dormitory for Jewish students, which meant hiring a housekeeper. They appointed a young woman called Paula Hitler, unaware that her brother was the leader of the fast-growing National Socialist Party.


pages: 505 words: 138,917

Open: The Story of Human Progress by Johan Norberg

Abraham Maslow, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, anti-globalists, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, carbon tax, citizen journalism, classic study, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, green new deal, humanitarian revolution, illegal immigration, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Lao Tzu, liberal capitalism, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, negative emissions, Network effects, open borders, open economy, Pax Mongolica, place-making, profit motive, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, Republic of Letters, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, spice trade, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, ultimatum game, universal basic income, World Values Survey, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, zero-sum game

One of Haber’s prominent colleagues pleaded to Hitler to spare Haber and told him that these purges would set Germany back a hundred years in physics and chemistry. Hitler retorted: ‘If Jews are so important to physics and chemistry, then we’ll just have to work one hundred years without physics and chemistry.’45 The list of thinkers who escaped Hitler reads like a Who’s Who of the scientific world: Fritz Haber, Albert Einstein, John von Neumann, Niels Bohr, Edward Teller, Erwin Schrödinger, and many more. Most of them escaped to the US, which was safe and far away. ‘It was the most significant influx of ability of which there is any record,’ wrote the novelist and chemist C. P. Snow. ‘The refugees made [the US], in a very short time, the world’s dominant force in pure science.’46 It was an incalculable loss to Germany, not least in terms of military capability.


Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth by Stuart Ritchie

Albert Einstein, anesthesia awareness, autism spectrum disorder, Bayesian statistics, Black Lives Matter, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, citation needed, Climatic Research Unit, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, fake news, Goodhart's law, Growth in a Time of Debt, Helicobacter pylori, Higgs boson, hype cycle, Kenneth Rogoff, l'esprit de l'escalier, Large Hadron Collider, meta-analysis, microbiome, Milgram experiment, mouse model, New Journalism, ocean acidification, p-value, phenotype, placebo effect, profit motive, publication bias, publish or perish, quantum entanglement, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, replication crisis, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Stanford prison experiment, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, Thomas Bayes, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, University of East Anglia, Wayback Machine

Although in the seventeenth century the Royal Society tended to ask some of its members whether they thought a paper was interesting enough to publish in Philosophical Transactions, requiring them to provide a written evaluation of each study wasn’t tried until at least 1831.15 Even then, the formal peer review system we know today didn’t become universal until well into the twentieth century (as you can tell from a letter Albert Einstein sent in 1936 to the editors of Physical Review, huffily announcing that he was withdrawing his paper from consideration at their journal because they had dared to send it to another physicist for comment).16 It took until the 1970s for all journals to adopt the modern model of sending out submissions to independent experts for peer review, giving them the gatekeeping role they have today.17 Peer reviewers are usually anonymous, which is both a blessing and a curse: a blessing because it allows them to speak their minds without concern about repercussions from the scientists whose work they’re criticising (a junior scientist can be truly honest about the flaws of a big-name professor’s work), but a curse because, well, it allows them to speak their minds without concern about repercussions from the scientists whose work they’re criticising.


pages: 643 words: 131,673

How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler by Ryan North

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, Douglas Hofstadter, Easter island, George Santayana, germ theory of disease, GPS: selective availability, Great Leap Forward, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, megastructure, minimum viable product, moveable type in China, placebo effect, safety bicycle, sugar pill, the scientific method, time dilation, trade route, wikimedia commons, zoonotic diseases

* If you’re interested, the answer to the question of “But seriously, how does multiplication work in such a system?” is “Quite well, thank you.” * There is. See Section 5: Now We Are Become Farmers, the Devourers of Worlds, ideally before you are starving from a lack of delicious corn. * Albert Einstein was a scientist who, among other achievements, realized that matter and energy were equivalent and could be described by the equation “energy is equivalent to mass times the speed of light squared,” or “E = mc2.” Hey! Now as far as anyone knows, you’re as smart as Einstein! * As you’ll see in Section 8, while humans hadn’t domesticated any plants before farming, they had managed to domesticate a few animals, including the dog


pages: 470 words: 128,328

Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World by Jane McGonigal

Abraham Maslow, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, citizen journalism, clean water, collaborative economy, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, en.wikipedia.org, fear of failure, G4S, game design, hedonic treadmill, hobby farmer, Ian Bogost, jimmy wales, mass immigration, Merlin Mann, Network effects, new economy, oil shock, peak oil, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Stallman, science of happiness, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, SimCity, smart meter, Stewart Brand, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tony Hsieh, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, We are as Gods, web application, Whole Earth Catalog

Of course, both inside and outside the game industry, when I suggest the idea, I’m often met with skepticism. How could a game possibly accomplish enough real-world good to warrant such a prize? Even on the heels of a project as promising as World Without Oil, it’s true that winning a Nobel Prize is a fairly bold ambition. But consider this: Albert Einstein, who won his own Nobel Prize in physics in 1921, once famously said, “Games are the most elevated form of investigation.” This quotation appears in multiple biographies of Einstein and circulates widely in various collections of famous sayings, but, interestingly, its origins remain elusive. No one seems to have recorded the context of Einstein’s statement—when or where he said it, or what he meant by it.


pages: 453 words: 132,400

Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Bonfire of the Vanities, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, double helix, fear of failure, Gregor Mendel, Herbert Marcuse, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, Necker cube, pattern recognition, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Vilfredo Pareto

There are so many examples of this type of personality that one certainly cannot assume a direct causal relation between external disorder in childhood and internal lack of meaning later in life: Thomas Edison as a child was sickly, poor, and believed to be retarded by his teacher; Eleanor Roosevelt was a lonely, neurotic young girl; Albert Einstein’s early years were filled with anxieties and disappointments—yet they all ended up inventing powerful and useful lives for themselves. If there is a strategy shared by these and by other people who succeed in building meaning into their experience, it is one so simple and obvious that it is almost embarrassing to mention.


AI 2041 by Kai-Fu Lee, Chen Qiufan

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, active measures, airport security, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital map, digital rights, digital twin, Elon Musk, fake news, fault tolerance, future of work, Future Shock, game design, general purpose technology, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, information security, Internet of things, iterative process, job automation, language acquisition, low earth orbit, Lyft, Maslow's hierarchy, mass immigration, mirror neurons, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, OpenAI, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, plutocrats, post scarcity, profit motive, QR code, quantitative easing, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, smart transportation, Snapchat, social distancing, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, synthetic biology, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, trolley problem, Turing test, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, zero-sum game

Army over the next ten years for training to deliver situational awareness, information sharing, and decision-making. VR will also be used for treatment of psychiatric problems like PTSD. We will have educational environments where real and virtual teachers take students to travel in time and witness dinosaurs, visit the wonders of the world, listen to Stephen Hawking, and interact with Albert Einstein. Zoom video conferences could render far more lifelike meetings where people look like they do around a table in the flesh (but they may actually be wearing pajamas at home) and work together on a virtual whiteboard (that feels real). In healthcare, AR and MR could enable surgeons to perform surgery while VR can help medical students operate on virtual patients.


pages: 1,758 words: 342,766

Code Complete (Developer Best Practices) by Steve McConnell

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, call centre, classic study, continuous integration, data acquisition, database schema, don't repeat yourself, Donald Knuth, fault tolerance, General Magic , global macro, Grace Hopper, haute cuisine, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index card, inventory management, iterative process, Larry Wall, loose coupling, Menlo Park, no silver bullet, off-by-one error, Perl 6, place-making, premature optimization, revision control, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, seminal paper, slashdot, sorting algorithm, SQL injection, statistical model, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Turing machine, web application

If the system were a little 12-piece jigsaw puzzle, your one-year-old could solve it between spoonfuls of strained asparagus. A puzzle of 12 subsystems is harder to put together, and if you can't put it together, you won't understand how a class you're developing contributes to the system. If you can't explain something to a six-year-old, you really don't understand it yourself. — Albert Einstein In the architecture, you should find evidence that alternatives to the final organization were considered and find the reasons for choosing the final organization over its alternatives. It's frustrating to work on a class when it seems as if the class's role in the system has not been clearly conceived.

This mental juggling act is one of the most difficult aspects of programming and is the reason programming requires more concentration than other activities. It's the reason programmers get upset about "quick interruptions"—such interruptions are tantamount to asking a juggler to keep three balls in the air and hold your groceries at the same time. Make things as simple as possible—but no simpler. — Albert Einstein Intuitively, the complexity of a program would seem to largely determine the amount of effort required to understand it. Tom McCabe published an influential paper arguing that a program's complexity is defined by its control flow (1976). Other researchers have identified factors other than McCabe's cyclomatic complexity metric (such as the number of variables used in a routine), but they agree that control flow is at least one of the largest contributors to complexity, if not the largest.


Southwest USA Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, Biosphere 2, Burning Man, carbon footprint, Columbine, Day of the Dead, Donner party, El Camino Real, friendly fire, G4S, haute couture, haute cuisine, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), low earth orbit, machine readable, off grid, off-the-grid, place-making, SpaceShipOne, supervolcano, trade route, transcontinental railway, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, Works Progress Administration, X Prize

All lodges are booked through Xanterra (303-297-2757, 888-297-2757; www.grandcanyonlodges.com). Advance reservations are highly recommended. For same-day reservations or to reach any lodge, call the South Rim Switchboard (928-638-2631). El Tovar LODGE $$-$$$ (d $178-273, ste $335-426; year-round; ) Yup, Albert Einstein slept here and so did Teddy Roosevelt, and despite a recent renovation, this rambling 1905 wooden lodge hasn’t lost a lick of its genteel historic patina. Even if you’re not checking into one of the 78 rooms, swing by the hotel for its replica Remington bronzes, stained glass and exposed beams or to admire the stunning canyon views from its wide porches, martini in hand.

Elaborate tilework, glass-and-tin chandeliers, Navajo rugs and other details accent its palatial Western-style elegance. They go surprisingly well with the splashy canvases of Tina Mion, one of the three preservation-minded artists who bought the rundown place in 1997. The period-styled rooms are named for illustrious former guests, including Albert Einstein, Gary Cooper and Diane Keaton. Turquoise Room SOUTHWESTERN $$ (La Posada; breakfast $6-11, lunch $9-13, dinner $17-32; 7am-9pm) Even if you’re not staying at La Posada, treat yourself to the best meal between Flagstaff and Albuquerque at its unique restaurant. Dishes have a neo-Southwestern flair, the placemats are handpainted works of art, and there’s a children’s menu as well.


pages: 421 words: 147,305

The Medical Detectives by Berton Roueche

Albert Einstein, classic study, double entry bookkeeping, germ theory of disease, Louis Pasteur, sugar pill

Cartwright, a graduate of the University of Wisconsin and of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, is a sparkling, white-haired man in his late middle years, small and wiry, with three passionate enthusiasms—backpacking, skiing, and Wilson's disease. Indeed, as Dr. Shields was providentially aware, he is generally considered (along with Irmin Sternlieb and 1 Herbert Scheinberg, both of Albert Einstein College of Medicine, in New York, and J. M. Walshe of Cambridge University) to be among the most eminent contemporary students of the disease. "Of course I remember Carol Terry," he told me. "Carol is one of my best successes. But it was a very near thing. Dr. Reiser caught her just in time.


pages: 464 words: 155,696

Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart Into a Visionary Leader by Brent Schlender, Rick Tetzeli

Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Apple II, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Beos Apple "Steve Jobs" next macos , Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bob Noyce, Byte Shop, Charles Lindbergh, computer age, corporate governance, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, General Magic , Isaac Newton, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, market design, McMansion, Menlo Park, Paul Terrell, Pepsi Challenge, planned obsolescence, popular electronics, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Stephen Fry, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog

And this can’t be about me. It’s about the company.” It was not the decision of an egomaniac, of someone only out for himself. “Which is why,” Clow remembers, “he’s the real genius and I’m just the ad guy.” So on the day of the broadcast, it was Dreyfuss’s voice behind a slide show of portraits of Albert Einstein, John Lennon, Pablo Picasso, Martha Graham, Miles Davis, Frank Lloyd Wright, Amelia Earhart, Charlie Chaplin, and Thomas Edison, among others: Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules.


pages: 497 words: 153,755

The Power of Gold: The History of an Obsession by Peter L. Bernstein

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Atahualpa, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, California gold rush, central bank independence, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Glaeser, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, falling living standards, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, Francisco Pizarro, German hyperinflation, Hernando de Soto, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, large denomination, liquidity trap, long peace, low interest rates, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, old-boy network, Paul Samuelson, price stability, profit motive, proprietary trading, random walk, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route

On May 2, he started work at the Tower, the home of the Mint since 1300. In a single moment, he ceased his career as an introverted, secretive, mysterious scientist-the last of the magicians-and transformed himself into the first of the policy wonks. The break was astonishing in itself, but the choice of new career appears even stranger: imagine Albert Einstein leaving Princeton to become second-incommand at the Bureau of Printing and Engraving in Washington-or even as an Assistant Secretary in the Treasury Department. When Newton took up his responsibilities at the Mint, the Master, or chief of the organization, at that time was Thomas Neale, a lazy man with a strong taste for drink.


pages: 535 words: 151,217

Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World's Superpowers by Simon Winchester

9 dash line, Albert Einstein, Boeing 747, BRICs, British Empire, California gold rush, classic study, colonial rule, company town, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Easter island, Frank Gehry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Kwajalein Atoll, land tenure, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, Maui Hawaii, Monroe Doctrine, ocean acidification, oil shock, polynesian navigation, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, The Day the Music Died, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transcontinental railway, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, undersea cable, uranium enrichment

Chapter 1 THE GREAT THERMONUCLEAR SEA I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita . . . “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” —J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER, JULY 16, 1945, ON THE DETONATION OF THE FIRST A-BOMB, NEW MEXICO The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe. —ALBERT EINSTEIN, MAY 24, 1946, TELEGRAM SENT TO PROMINENT AMERICANS The first hint that the Pacific would be tragically transformed into the world’s first and only atomic ocean came at lunchtime on January 4, when President Harry S. Truman uttered a single cryptic sentence during his State of the Union address for 1950, to this effect: “Man has opened the secrets of nature and mastered new powers.”


pages: 590 words: 153,208

Wealth and Poverty: A New Edition for the Twenty-First Century by George Gilder

accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, clean tech, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, floating exchange rates, full employment, gentrification, George Gilder, Gunnar Myrdal, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, non-fiction novel, North Sea oil, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, power law, price stability, Ralph Nader, rent control, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skinner box, skunkworks, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, volatility arbitrage, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, yield curve, zero-sum game

., 1976), p. 222.10 10 McClelland, The Achieving Society, p. 13. 11 David E. Gumpert, “Future of Small Business May Be Brighter than Portrayed,” Harvard Business Review, vol. 57, no. 4 (July–August 1979), p. 179, and J. Tom Badgett, “Will OEC and IBM Be the Final Winners?” Kilobaud, no. 22 (October 1978), p. 80. 12 Albert Einstein, The World as I See It (London: John Lane, 1935); quoted in A. P. French, ed., Einstein: A Centenary Volume (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 304. 13 Hirschman, “The Principle of the Hiding Hand,” p. 13. 14 John Kenneth Galbraith, The Nature of Mass Poverty (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 62. 15 Ibid. 16 Michael W.


pages: 443 words: 153,085

The Intern Blues: The Timeless Classic About the Making of a Doctor by Robert Marion

Albert Einstein, medical malpractice, medical residency, Mount Scopus, place-making

VP shunt A plastic tube inserted into patients with hydrocephalus and that drains excess spinal fluid from the ventricle of the brain to the peritoneal cavity of the abdomen. V-tach An abnormal cardiac rhythm that, if untreated, can lead to death. About the Author Robert Marion, M.D., a professor of pediatrics and obstetrics and gynecology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, New York, is the director of clinical genetics at both the Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx and Blythedale Children’s Hospital, Valhalla, New York. He is the author of six published books, including The Intern Blues and Learning to Play God: The Coming of Age of a Young Doctor.


pages: 504 words: 143,303

Why We Can't Afford the Rich by Andrew Sayer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, asset-backed security, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, biodiversity loss, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, collective bargaining, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, declining real wages, deglobalization, degrowth, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, demand response, don't be evil, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, G4S, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, green new deal, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", James Dyson, job automation, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land value tax, long term incentive plan, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, patent troll, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, popular capitalism, predatory finance, price stability, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

‘All that we had borrowed up to 1985 was around $5 billion, and we have paid about $16 billion; yet we are still being told that we owe about $28 billion. That $28 billion came about because of the injustice in the foreign creditors’ interest rates. If you ask me, what is the worst thing in the world? I will say it is compound interest.’ (Former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo speaking after the G8 Summit in Okinawa, Japan in 2000)44 Albert Einstein called it ‘the most powerful force in the universe’, and US magnates J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller ‘the 8th wonder of the world’. Napoleon apparently wondered how the human race had not been devoured by compound interest.45 The problem here is not credit but interest, and worst of all, compound interest.


pages: 523 words: 143,139

Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions by Brian Christian, Tom Griffiths

4chan, Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, anthropic principle, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bill Duvall, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Charles Babbage, cognitive load, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, constrained optimization, cosmological principle, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, David Sedaris, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, diversification, Donald Knuth, Donald Shoup, double helix, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, exponential backoff, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, Firefox, first-price auction, Flash crash, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, Garrett Hardin, Geoffrey Hinton, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Google Chrome, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, knapsack problem, Lao Tzu, Leonard Kleinrock, level 1 cache, linear programming, martingale, multi-armed bandit, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, NP-complete, P = NP, packet switching, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, prediction markets, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Robert X Cringely, Sam Altman, scientific management, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, sorting algorithm, spectrum auction, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, stochastic process, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, traveling salesman, Turing machine, urban planning, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/measure-choose-smarter-kpis-incentives/. “dead cops were found”: Grossman and Christensen, On Combat. See http://www.killology.com/on_combat_ch2.htm. officer instinctively grabbed the gun: Ibid. “If you can’t explain it simply”: This quotation is frequently attributed to Albert Einstein, although this attribution is likely to be apocryphal. Tikhonov proposed one answer: See, e.g., Tikhonov and Arsenin, Solution of Ill-Posed Problems. invented in 1996 by biostatistician Robert Tibshirani: Tibshirani, “Regression Shrinkage and Selection via the Lasso.” human brain burns about a fifth: For more on the human brain’s energy consumption see, e.g., Raichle and Gusnard, “Appraising the Brain’s Energy Budget,” which in turn cites, e.g., Clarke and Sokoloff, “Circulation and Energy Metabolism of the Brain.”


pages: 482 words: 147,281

A Crack in the Edge of the World by Simon Winchester

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Asilomar, butterfly effect, California gold rush, content marketing, Easter island, Elisha Otis, Golden Gate Park, index card, indoor plumbing, lateral thinking, Loma Prieta earthquake, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, place-making, risk tolerance, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, supervolcano, The Chicago School, transcontinental railway, wage slave, Works Progress Administration

It was entitled ‘Does the Inertia of a Body Depend upon Its Energy Content?’. The author of the paper – it was already the fourth he had written for the Annalen thus far during 1905, a year that would later come to be seen as the annus mirabilis of his entire career – was a young clerk named Albert Einstein, then working in the Swiss Patent Office in Berne. He conceived of the paper as a footnote, an afterthought to papers that more fully described what would later come to be regarded as his Special Theory of Relativity. But the paper has an enduring fame among scientists, one that derives from a single sentence written just seven lines from the end.


pages: 570 words: 151,609

Into the Black: The Extraordinary Untold Story of the First Flight of the Space Shuttle Columbia and the Astronauts Who Flew Her by Rowland White, Richard Truly

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apollo Guidance Computer, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, Easter island, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gene Kranz, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John von Neumann, low earth orbit, Maui Hawaii, Mercator projection, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, William Langewiesche

A professor of economics at the University of Vienna, Morgenstern was visiting Princeton when the Nazis seized Vienna. He remained at the American university, where he met the Hungarian-born mathematical genius John von Neumann. A prodigy who as a child could memorize and recite the phone book, von Neumann had earned his PhD in mathematics at just twenty-two. Still in his twenties, he took up, alongside Albert Einstein, one of five professorships at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study. Von Neumann’s polymathic brilliance ranged from quantum mechanics to the hydrogen bomb. In 1944, along with fellow émigré Morgenstern, with the publication of the landmark Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, he created game theory, a mathematical model for the prediction and analysis of rational decision making.


Investment: A History by Norton Reamer, Jesse Downing

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, asset allocation, backtesting, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, book value, break the buck, Brownian motion, business cycle, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, California gold rush, capital asset pricing model, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, equity premium, estate planning, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial innovation, fixed income, flying shuttle, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Henri Poincaré, Henry Singleton, high net worth, impact investing, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of the telegraph, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, land tenure, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, means of production, Menlo Park, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, statistical arbitrage, survivorship bias, tail risk, technology bubble, Teledyne, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, time value of money, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, two and twenty, underbanked, Vanguard fund, working poor, yield curve

In fact, his approach bore some similarity to that of Fischer Black and Myron Scholes many years later. Bachelier’s work was the first use of formal models of randomness to describe and evaluate markets. In his paper, Bachelier used a form of what is called Brownian motion.2 Brownian motion was named after Robert Brown, who studied the random motions of pollen in water. Albert Einstein would describe this same phenomenon in one of his famous 1905 papers. The mathematical underpinnings of this description of randomness could be applied not only to the motions of small particles but also to the movements of markets. Bachelier’s work did not seem to have an immediate and profound influence on those markets, however.


pages: 497 words: 144,283

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 9 dash line, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Basel III, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, capital controls, Carl Icahn, charter city, circular economy, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, disruptive innovation, diversification, Doha Development Round, driverless car, Easter island, edge city, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, failed state, Fairphone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, forward guidance, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, ice-free Arctic, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, industrial robot, informal economy, Infrastructure as a Service, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, Khyber Pass, Kibera, Kickstarter, LNG terminal, low cost airline, low earth orbit, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, mass affluent, mass immigration, megacity, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, microcredit, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, openstreetmap, out of africa, Panamax, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Planet Labs, plutocrats, post-oil, post-Panamax, precautionary principle, private military company, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Quicken Loans, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, the built environment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero day

As Guangzhou has graduated from factory town to financial center, its glittering central business district features the aerodynamic 103-story-tall IFC tower, modern art museums one would expect to find in Zurich, and an opera house designed by Zaha Hadid. Just outside the city, the Singapore-run Knowledge City and Guangzhou Science City were built to resemble a low-rise version of Silicon Valley, with leafy boulevards that feature bronze statues of Albert Einstein and the mathematician John von Neumann. Singapore has opened a branch of its elite Chinese-language Hwa Chong Institution while also partnering with the local government to develop new curricula for the South China University of Technology, which already graduates some of the country’s top entrepreneurs establishing companies in digital industries such as cloud computing and GPS navigation, materials engineering, renewable energy, biotechnology, and pharmaceuticals.


pages: 497 words: 146,551

Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals by Robert M. Pirsig

Albert Einstein, Buckminster Fuller, feminist movement, gentrification, index card, John von Neumann, luminiferous ether, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, trade route

What emerges is that the word around, which seems like one of the most clear and absolute and fixed terms in the universe suddenly turns out to be relative and subjective. What is around depends on who you are and what you’re thinking about at the time you use it. The more you tug at it the more things start to unravel. One such philosophic tugger was Albert Einstein, who concluded that all time and space are relative to the observer. We are always in the position of that squirrel. Man is always the measure of all things, even in matters of space and dimension. Persons like James and Einstein, immersed in the spirit of philosophy, do not see things like squirrels circling trees as necessarily trivial, because solving puzzles like that are what they’re in philosophy and science for.


pages: 487 words: 151,810

The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement by David Brooks

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, assortative mating, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, business process, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, clean water, cognitive load, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, fake it until you make it, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial independence, Flynn Effect, George Akerlof, Henri Poincaré, hiring and firing, impulse control, invisible hand, Jeff Hawkins, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, language acquisition, longitudinal study, loss aversion, medical residency, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Monroe Doctrine, Paul Samuelson, power law, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, school vouchers, six sigma, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Walter Mischel, young professional

At the very top of intellectual accomplishment, intelligence is nearly useless in separating outstanding geniuses from everybody else. The greatest thinkers seem to possess mental abilities that go beyond rational thinking narrowly defined. Their abilities are fluid and thoroughly cloudlike. Albert Einstein, for example, would seem to be an exemplar of scientific or mathematical intelligence. But he addressed problems by playing with imaginative, visual, and physical sensations. “The words of the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought,” he told Jacques Hadamard.


pages: 523 words: 148,929

Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 by Michio Kaku

agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Asilomar, augmented reality, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, blue-collar work, British Empire, Brownian motion, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, delayed gratification, digital divide, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, friendly AI, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hydrogen economy, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mars Rover, Mars Society, mass immigration, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Murray Gell-Mann, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, oil shale / tar sands, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, planetary scale, postindustrial economy, Ray Kurzweil, refrigerator car, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, social intelligence, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, telepresence, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Turing machine, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, Walter Mischel, Whole Earth Review, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize

What, I asked myself, could be so difficult that such a great scientist could not finish it? What could possibly be that complicated and that important? To me, eventually this became more fascinating than any murder mystery, more intriguing than any adventure story. I had to know what was in that unfinished manuscript. Later, I found out that the name of this scientist was Albert Einstein and the unfinished manuscript was to be his crowning achievement, his attempt to create a “theory of everything,” an equation, perhaps no more than one inch wide, that would unlock the secrets of the universe and perhaps allow him to “read the mind of God.” But the other pivotal experience from my childhood was when I watched the Saturday morning TV shows, especially the Flash Gordon series with Buster Crabbe.


pages: 790 words: 150,875

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, Atahualpa, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dean Kamen, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Easter island, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, guns versus butter model, Hans Lippershey, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, land reform, land tenure, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, Pearl River Delta, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, retail therapy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, the market place, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, wage slave, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , World Values Survey

Victory over Japan was preponderantly though not exclusively the achievement of the United States, whose Manhattan Project (named after the Manhattan Engineering District where it began in 1942) produced the three war-ending and world-changing atomic bombs tested in New Mexico and dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Inspired by Albert Einstein’s warning to Roosevelt that the Germans might be the first to develop such a weapon, and propelled forward by the British discovery of the fissile properties of the isotope uranium-235 – the significance of which the Americans were slow to grasp – the atomic bomb was an authentically Western achievement.


pages: 696 words: 143,736

The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence by Ray Kurzweil

Ada Lovelace, Alan Greenspan, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, backpropagation, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, Danny Hillis, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Everything should be made as simple as possible, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, flying shuttle, fudge factor, functional programming, George Gilder, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, information retrieval, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jacquard loom, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Norbert Wiener, optical character recognition, ought to be enough for anybody, pattern recognition, phenotype, punch-card reader, quantum entanglement, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Stuart Kauffman, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Whole Earth Review, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K

In 1968, American physicist Steven Weinberg and Pakistani physicist Abdus Salam were successful in their unification of the weak force and the electromagnetic force using a mathematical method called gauge symmetry. 4 The weak force is responsible for beta decay and other slow nuclear processes that occur gradually. 5 Albert Einstein, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory (New York: Crown Publishers, 1961). 6 The laws of thermodynamics govern how and why energy is transferred.The first law of thermodynamics (postulated by Hermann von Helmholtz in 1847), also called the Law of Conservation of Energy, states that the total amount of energy in the universe is constant.


pages: 488 words: 144,145

Inflated: How Money and Debt Built the American Dream by R. Christopher Whalen

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black Swan, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, commoditize, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, debt deflation, falling living standards, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, housing crisis, interchangeable parts, invention of radio, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, liquidity trap, low interest rates, means of production, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, non-tariff barriers, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, plutocrats, price stability, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, special drawing rights, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, women in the workforce

The United States had largely demobilized after WWI and Congress cut appropriations for many different types of war expenditures. General George Patton, who wrote and spoke extensively about the need to rearm during the 1930s, did not receive funding to re-establish the American armored forces within the U.S. Army until 1940, when German tanks and mobile infantry were already rolling across Europe. In 1939, Albert Einstein and other scientists called upon Roosevelt to begin work on an atomic bomb. As former assistant Secretary of the Navy under Wilson, FDR understood defense issues and relished the task. The wealthy, Harvard-educated Roosevelt lent a great deal of respectability to the Democratic Party and did his job as Assistant Secretary of the Navy with great competence.


pages: 511 words: 148,310

Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide by Joshua S. Goldstein

Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, blood diamond, business cycle, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, death from overwork, Doomsday Clock, failed state, immigration reform, income inequality, invention of writing, invisible hand, land reform, long peace, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Oklahoma City bombing, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, selection bias, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, Tobin tax, unemployed young men, Winter of Discontent, work culture , Y2K

Senate, the peace movement lobbied the Warren Harding Administration for disarmament. The resulting 1922 Washington Conference, mandating naval arms reductions, “signaled the finest achievement of positive citizen peace action in the interwar period.” Leading intellectuals called for individual resistance to military service, notably Albert Einstein’s proposal that if just two percent of those conscripted to fight refused, the government would not dare jail them. In 1935, 150,000 protesters on 130 college campuses opposed the rising threat of a new war. The same year, in Britain, a private referendum, the Peace Ballot, drew nearly 12 million participants (more than a third of the adult population) and showed strong support for arms reductions, participation in the League, and collective security even involving military response to aggression.


pages: 547 words: 148,732

How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, Burning Man, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Day of the Dead, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, Golden Gate Park, Google Earth, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, Internet Archive, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Marshall McLuhan, Mason jar, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microdosing, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Mother of all demos, off-the-grid, overview effect, placebo effect, radical decentralization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, satellite internet, scientific mainstream, scientific worldview, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, sugar pill, TED Talk, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Whole Earth Catalog

You can take any number of more accurate perspectives: that we’re a swarm of genes, vehicles for passing on DNA; that we’re social creatures through and through, unable to survive alone; that we’re organisms in an ecosystem, linked together on this planet floating in the middle of nowhere. Wherever you look, you see that the level of interconnectedness is truly amazing, and yet we insist on thinking of ourselves as individual agents.” Albert Einstein called the modern human’s sense of separateness “a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.”* “Psychedelics knock the legs out from under that model. That can be dangerous in the wrong circumstances, leading to bad trips and worse.” Johnson brought up the case of Charles Manson, who reportedly used LSD to break down and brainwash his followers, a theory of the case he deems plausible.


pages: 535 words: 144,827

1939: A People's History by Frederick Taylor

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Brexit referendum, British Empire, collective bargaining, delayed gratification, facts on the ground, false flag, full employment, guns versus butter model, intentional community, mass immigration, rising living standards, the market place, women in the workforce

Fine for Mr Strang in Moscow . . . Fine for Mr Chamberlain, who believed it was peace in our time – his umbrella a parasol! . . . You couldn’t believe it would ever break, that the bombs had to fall.67 EIGHT 1–22 August 1939 ‘To Die for Danzig?’ On 2 August 1939, the exiled German physicist Albert Einstein signed a letter warning President Roosevelt that Germany might be developing an atomic bomb. Since the crucial nuclear-fission experiment using uranium, carried out by Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin the previous December, other physicists in America, Britain and elsewhere had been evaluating this experiment’s significance, tying it in with their own research on nuclear reactions.


pages: 523 words: 143,639

Red November: Inside the Secret U.S.-Soviet Submarine War by W. Craig Reed

Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, cable laying ship, centre right, cuban missile crisis, en.wikipedia.org, fixed-gear, nuclear winter, operation paperclip, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, undersea cable, upwardly mobile

As the film’s title rolled past, LeJeune realized he’d been had. He heard Empey giggling outside the curtain about the same time as Linda Lovelace’s name appeared on the credits of the film. In spite of Empey’s warped sense of humor, LeJeune came to respect the rotund man’s brilliance. He possessed no degrees, but God had granted the man Albert Einstein’s IQ, along with the renowned scientist’s tousled hair. He could multitask like a chess master and chain-smoke like a shipyard worker. When dozen’s of engineering-degreed contractors couldn’t find a problem with a critical piece of equipment, with the entire $150 million Ivy Bells program on the line, Empey saved the day.


pages: 660 words: 141,595

Data Science for Business: What You Need to Know About Data Mining and Data-Analytic Thinking by Foster Provost, Tom Fawcett

Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apollo 13, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bioinformatics, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer vision, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data science, David Brooks, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Gini coefficient, Helicobacter pylori, independent contractor, information retrieval, intangible asset, iterative process, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Louis Pasteur, Menlo Park, Nate Silver, Netflix Prize, new economy, p-value, pattern recognition, placebo effect, price discrimination, recommendation engine, Ronald Coase, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, Teledyne, text mining, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, WikiLeaks

[77] The reader interested in this notion of the maturity of a firm’s capabilities is encouraged to read about the Capability Maturity Model for software engineering, which is the inspiration for this discussion. Chapter 14. Conclusion If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough. —Albert Einstein The practice of data science can best be described as a combination of analytical engineering and exploration. The business presents a problem we would like to solve. Rarely is the business problem directly one of our basic data mining tasks. We decompose the problem into subtasks that we think we can solve, usually starting with existing tools.


pages: 548 words: 147,919

How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales From the Pentagon by Rosa Brooks

airport security, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, big-box store, clean water, cognitive dissonance, continuation of politics by other means, different worldview, disruptive innovation, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, facts on the ground, failed state, illegal immigration, information security, Internet Archive, John Markoff, Mark Zuckerberg, moral panic, no-fly zone, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, personalized medicine, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, technological determinism, Timothy McVeigh, Turing test, unemployed young men, Valery Gerasimov, Wall-E, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Tanks and fighter jets can’t stop disaffected teenagers in Birmingham or Paris or Detroit from being inspired by al Qaeda or ISIS; they can’t stop ISIS from posting gruesome footage of beheaded hostages on YouTube, or halt the spread of Ebola, or prevent cyber espionage and attack. Part of the problem is our own false assumptions. “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought,” Albert Einstein warned President Harry Truman, “but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”30 Implied in Einstein’s famous adage is an assumption that right up until the moment we knock ourselves back into the Stone Age, the technologies of warfare will evolve in one direction only: they will become ever more advanced, complex, sophisticated, and lethal.


pages: 566 words: 151,193

Diet for a New America by John Robbins

Albert Einstein, carbon footprint, clean water, disinformation, Flynn Effect, haute cuisine, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, ocean acidification, placebo effect, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Review

However, it seems to me remarkably limited for us to assume that because an animal does not display intelligence as we know it, it is therefore stupid. It is just like man’s vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions. —MARK TWAIN Even among our own species, we often don’t recognize forms of intelligence that are perhaps a little different from the norm. Albert Einstein’s parents were sure he was retarded because he spoke haltingly until the age of nine and even after that would respond to questions only after a long period of deliberation. He performed so badly in his high school courses, except mathematics, that a teacher told him to drop out, saying, “You will never amount to anything, Einstein.”36 Charles Darwin did so poorly in school that his father told him, “You will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.”37 Thomas Edison was called “dunce” by his father and “addled” by his high school teacher and was told by his headmaster that he “would never make a success of anything.”38 Henry Ford barely made it through school with the minimum grasp of reading and writing.39 Sir Isaac Newton was so poor in school that he was allowed to continue only because he was a complete flop at running the family farm.40 Pablo Picasso was pulled out of school at the age of 10 because he was doing so badly.


pages: 509 words: 147,998

The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth: Popularity, Quirk Theory, and Why Outsiders Thrive After High School by Alexandra Robbins

airport security, Albert Einstein, Columbine, game design, hive mind, it's over 9,000, Larry Ellison, messenger bag, out of africa, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Skype, Slavoj Žižek, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Wisdom of Crowds, trickle-down economics

How could it be any other way? And in my personal view this is a perfect place to observe what’s happening at the dead center of things. . . . The more marginal, perhaps ultimately the more trenchant and observant and finally necessary he’ll become.” Experts say that this kind of vision is why Albert Einstein was able to understand physics’ biggest puzzles. Considered a rebel and a loner as a child, Einstein, said a colleague, “was inclined to separate himself from children his own age and to engage in daydreaming and meditative musing.” He often preferred to tackle mathematical proofs than to socialize.


pages: 504 words: 147,660

In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction by Gabor Mate, Peter A. Levine

addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, corporate governance, drug harm reduction, epigenetics, gentrification, ghettoisation, impulse control, longitudinal study, mass immigration, megaproject, meta-analysis, Naomi Klein, PalmPilot, phenotype, placebo effect, Rat Park, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), source of truth, twin studies, Yogi Berra

*28 In nonaddicts methadone is a more potent analgesic than morphine, but addicts on methadone often become tolerant to its pain-killing effects. Return to text. *29 Dr. Dan Small, a medical anthropologist at the University of British Columbia, and Dr. Ernest Drucker, an epidemiologist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York Return to text. *30 The White House drug czar was actually reported to have said “slow assisted state suicide,” but we can assume this is what he meant. Return to text. *31 And since then, in a nonacademic book for the general public, Magic Trees of the Mind.


pages: 538 words: 147,612

All the Money in the World by Peter W. Bernstein

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, book value, call centre, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, clean tech, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, currency peg, David Brooks, Donald Trump, estate planning, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, George Gilder, high net worth, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, Martin Wolf, Maui Hawaii, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, Norman Mailer, PageRank, Peter Singer: altruism, pez dispenser, popular electronics, Quicken Loans, Renaissance Technologies, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, school vouchers, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, shareholder value, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, SoftBank, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech baron, tech billionaire, Teledyne, the new new thing, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, traveling salesman, urban planning, wealth creators, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce

But the use of IQ scores as a measure of future success, except for gauging results on academic tests, has since fallen out of favor. It seems hard to argue3 that IQs don’t matter when you consider that Bill Gates’s score is reportedly a mind-boggling 170, far above the 130 or so required to become a member of Mensa, the high-intelligence society, and even higher than Albert Einstein’s reputed 160. What’s more, Gates’s successor-to-be at Microsoft, Steven Ballmer (2006 net worth: $13.6 billion), is said to have an equally impressive score. But one of the failings of such tests becomes obvious when you consider that not all high-IQ individuals achieve the financial status of Gates and Ballmer, while many people who score poorly turn out to be megabillionaires.


pages: 496 words: 154,363

I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 by Douglas Edwards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, book scanning, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, business intelligence, call centre, commoditize, crowdsourcing, don't be evil, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, fault tolerance, Googley, gravity well, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, John Markoff, Kickstarter, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, microcredit, music of the spheres, Network effects, PageRank, PalmPilot, performance metric, pets.com, Ralph Nader, risk tolerance, second-price auction, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, stem cell, Superbowl ad, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, The Turner Diaries, Y2K

The mics were not the wireless ones Larry preferred, because our security manager worried that someone outside the building could pick up the signal from a wireless mic. The wall at the back was made of three-foot-wide perforated metal panels that curved in a semicircle and stretched to the ceiling. A row of potted plants marked the front of the stage, and two banners printed with enlarged Google doodle logos hung at the back. On one banner, Albert Einstein peered out of an o. On the other, two aliens sat on the letter g and looked down from the moon on a rising earth. Craig Silverstein, Google's first employee, sat on the floor facing the stage, and an interpreter for the deaf faced the other way, signing for one of our hearing-impaired engineers.


San Francisco by Lonely Planet

airport security, Albert Einstein, Apple II, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Burning Man, California gold rush, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, David Brooks, David Sedaris, Day of the Dead, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, G4S, game design, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, Joan Didion, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Mason jar, messenger bag, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, retail therapy, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, transcontinental railway, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Catalog, Zipcar

Its commitment to pressing social issues is embodied in its AIDS Memorial Chapel, which has a bronze altarpiece by artist-activist Keith Haring. Here his signature figures are angels taking flight – especially powerful imagery as this was his last work before he died of AIDS in 1990. Grace’s spectacular stained-glass windows include a series dedicated to human endeavor, including one of Albert Einstein uplifted in a swirl of nuclear particles. Day and night you’ll notice people absorbed in thought while walking the outdoor, inlaid stone labyrinth, meant to guide restless souls through three spiritual stages: releasing, receiving and returning. Check the website for events at the indoor labyrinth, which include meditation services and yoga.


pages: 543 words: 153,550

Model Thinker: What You Need to Know to Make Data Work for You by Scott E. Page

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic trading, Alvin Roth, assortative mating, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Checklist Manifesto, computer age, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, data science, deep learning, deliberate practice, discrete time, distributed ledger, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, Everything should be made as simple as possible, experimental economics, first-price auction, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Higgs boson, High speed trading, impulse control, income inequality, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, meta-analysis, money market fund, multi-armed bandit, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, Network effects, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, p-value, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, phenotype, Phillips curve, power law, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, race to the bottom, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Robert Solow, school choice, scientific management, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, selection bias, six sigma, social graph, spectrum auction, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Supply of New York City Cabdrivers, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Great Moderation, the long tail, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the rule of 72, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, urban sprawl, value at risk, web application, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

3 The Science of Many Models 4 Modeling Human Actors 5 Normal Distributions: The Bell Curve 6 Power-Law Distributions: Long Tails 7 Linear Models 8 Concavity and Convexity 9 Models of Value and Power 10 Network Models 11 Broadcast, Diffusion, and Contagion 12 Entropy: Modeling Uncertainty 13 Random Walks 14 Path Dependence 15 Local Interaction Models 16 Lyapunov Functions and Equilibria 17 Markov Models 18 Systems Dynamics Models 19 Threshold Models with Feedbacks 20 Spatial and Hedonic Choice 21 Game Theory Models Times Three 22 Models of Cooperation 23 Collective Action Problems 24 Mechanism Design 25 Signaling Models 26 Learning Models 27 Multi-Armed Bandit Problems 28 Rugged-Landscape Models 29 Opioids, Inequality, and Humility About the Author Notes Bibliography Index To Michael D. Cohen (1945–2013) It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience. —ALBERT EINSTEIN Prologue To me success means effectiveness in the world, that I am able to carry my ideas and values into the world—that I am able to change it in positive ways. —Maxine Hong Kingston This book began as the result of a chance meeting with Michael Cohen in 2005 near the flower garden in the mall adjacent to the University of Michigan’s West Hall.


How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, an Epic Race, and the Birth of Private Spaceflight by Julian Guthrie

Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Charles Lindbergh, cosmic microwave background, crowdsourcing, Dennis Tito, Doomsday Book, Easter island, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, fixed-gear, Frank Gehry, Gene Kranz, gravity well, Herman Kahn, high net worth, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, Larry Ellison, Leonard Kleinrock, life extension, low earth orbit, Mark Shuttleworth, Mars Society, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Murray Gell-Mann, Neil Armstrong, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, packet switching, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, pets.com, private spaceflight, punch-card reader, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, side project, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceShipOne, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, urban planning, Virgin Galactic

Skinner declined, saying he thought Mother Teresa was “very narcissistic.” Where John and Skinner came together—and where Peter and John came together—was over central questions of truth: What is the nature of existence? How should one live life, given that so much remains unknown and perhaps unknowable? With Peter, John made the case—quoting Albert Einstein—that “science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” When Peter was in high school and still an altar boy, his priest asked him to give a Sunday sermon. Father Alex often invited parishioners to give prepared talks, and on this day, Peter stood in front of a congregation of about two hundred people.


pages: 678 words: 148,827

Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization by Scott Barry Kaufman

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, classic study, dark triade / dark tetrad, David Brooks, desegregation, Donald Trump, fear of failure, Greta Thunberg, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, imposter syndrome, impulse control, job satisfaction, longitudinal study, Maslow's hierarchy, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, overview effect, Paradox of Choice, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Rosa Parks, science of happiness, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, Stephen Fry, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury

In his paper, Maslow noted that in addition to studying personal acquaintances and friends, and screening three thousand college students, which yielded only one “immediately usable subject and a dozen or two possible future subjects,” he also studied the characteristics of public and historical figures. Two “fairly sure” historical figures were Abraham Lincoln (“in his last years”) and Thomas Jefferson. Seven “highly probable public and historical figures” included Albert Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt, Jane Addams, William James, Albert Schweitzer, Aldous Huxley, and Baruch Spinoza. Despite his so-called methods, however, Maslow admitted that his list of the characteristics of self-actualization were the result not of a systematic line of research but of a composite “global or holistic impression” based on a small number of sources.20 Acknowledging the limitations of his methodology, he put forward the list in the hopes that it might serve as the basis for further study.


The Volatility Smile by Emanuel Derman,Michael B.Miller

Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, Brownian motion, capital asset pricing model, collateralized debt obligation, continuous integration, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, discrete time, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, fixed income, implied volatility, incomplete markets, law of one price, London Whale, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market friction, Myron Scholes, prediction markets, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, risk tolerance, riskless arbitrage, Sharpe ratio, statistical arbitrage, stochastic process, stochastic volatility, transaction costs, volatility arbitrage, volatility smile, Wiener process, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

If there is no jump, the diffusion volatility will be 20% (i.e., 20% per year). Using Equation 24.46 graph the approximate BSM implied volatility smile for strikes from $80 to $120. Epilogue There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them. —Albert Einstein n 1994, when researchers began attempting to explain the volatility smile, many of us hoped that there would be one better model that could replace Black-Scholes-Merton. Instead, we have ended up with a plethora of models, each of which, in its own way and under the right circumstances, can explain some aspects of the volatility smile.


The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations by Daniel Yergin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 3D printing, 9 dash line, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, addicted to oil, Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, American energy revolution, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bakken shale, Bernie Sanders, BRICs, British Empire, carbon tax, circular economy, clean tech, commodity super cycle, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, decarbonisation, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, failed state, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hydraulic fracturing, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, LNG terminal, Lyft, Malacca Straits, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Masayoshi Son, Masdar, mass incarceration, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, new economy, off grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, paypal mafia, peak oil, pension reform, power law, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, super pumped, supply-chain management, TED Talk, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, women in the workforce

Nuclear power remains today the largest source of carbon-free generation, but the gap is narrowing with wind and solar. Although wind and solar are called “modern” renewables, neither is exactly new. Both are about half a century old. The theoretical foundation for today’s solar panels—photovoltaics (PVs)—was provided by Albert Einstein in his 1905 paper “Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light.” The light arriving from the sun, he said, was composed of photons, packets of energy, which could dislodge electrons surrounding the nucleus of an atom, creating an electric current. Einstein was awarded the 1922 Nobel Prize in Physics for this paper, his “discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.”


pages: 807 words: 154,435

Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future by Mervyn King, John Kay

Airbus A320, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, algorithmic trading, anti-fragile, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, bitcoin, Black Swan, Boeing 737 MAX, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, capital asset pricing model, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, DeepMind, demographic transition, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, easy for humans, difficult for computers, eat what you kill, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, experimental subject, fear of failure, feminist movement, financial deregulation, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, Goodhart's law, Hans Rosling, Helicobacter pylori, high-speed rail, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income per capita, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Linda problem, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, Money creation, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monty Hall problem, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, nudge theory, oil shock, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, popular electronics, power law, price mechanism, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, sealed-bid auction, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Socratic dialogue, South Sea Bubble, spectrum auction, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Suez crisis 1956, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Chicago School, the map is not the territory, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Malthus, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, ultimatum game, urban planning, value at risk, world market for maybe five computers, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

—Harry Lime in The Third Man H arry Lime, played by Orson Welles in the film The Third Man , famously observed that ‘in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.’ Like so many people, Lime is unfairly maligning the Swiss; theirs is the country that produced Albert Einstein, Carl Jung, Le Corbusier, Paul Klee and Hermann Hesse, not to mention Ursula Andress and Roger Federer, and more Nobel Prize winners per head of population than any other nation in the world. 2 The cuckoo clock caricatures the country’s genuine strengths in precision engineering. These industries, along with speciality chemicals, have made Switzerland one of the richest countries in the world.


pages: 539 words: 151,425

Lords of the Desert: The Battle Between the US and Great Britain for Supremacy in the Modern Middle East by James Barr

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, false flag, illegal immigration, imperial preference, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Suez crisis 1956, trade route

Since no congressman dared get involved for fear of crossing the Zionist lobby their delegation comprised a Texan judge, a former head of the State Department, a newspaper editor, the former League of Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and a successful Californian lawyer. ‘We had one common characteristic,’ said one of the British MPs, Richard Crossman, ‘a total ignorance of the subject.’18 After hearings in Washington, where the witnesses included Albert Einstein, and the British delegates felt like the accused at a show trial, and then in London, where the Americans correctly realised they were under surveillance, the Committee split and fanned out across continental Europe. Its members were all shocked by what they saw. When they reconvened in Vienna they discussed their shock at the prevalence of anti-Semitism.


pages: 1,132 words: 156,379

The Ape That Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve by Steve Stewart-Williams

Albert Einstein, battle of ideas, carbon-based life, David Attenborough, European colonialism, feminist movement, financial independence, Garrett Hardin, gender pay gap, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, moral panic, out of africa, Paul Graham, Peter Pan Syndrome, phenotype, post-industrial society, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, twin studies

Darwin never explained, however, why it’s usually the males that sport the ornaments and armaments, and usually the females that are ultra-finicky about their mates. The answer to these questions would have to wait until the second half of the twentieth century, and the work of the evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers, a colorful character who’s sometimes described as the Albert Einstein of sociobiology. Among Trivers’ seminal contributions was his parental investment theory.14 To unpack the logic of the theory, let’s start with a quiz. Question 1: What’s the largest number of children that any man has ever had? Take your best guess before reading on. (This is a filler sentence so that you don’t inadvertently read on before guessing.)


pages: 576 words: 150,183

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

Albert Einstein, data acquisition, easy for humans, difficult for computers, gravity well, low earth orbit, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, patent troll, Skype, South China Sea, time dilation

It must have gained that weight from reactions with the air or something.” “No, it was in a vacuum for the test, of course.” “Oh my God.” I was giddy. “Seventeen nanograms…times nine times ten to the sixteenth…1.5 megajoules!” I flopped back into my chair. “Holy…I mean just…wow!” “This was how I felt, yes.” Mass conversion. As the great Albert Einstein once said: E = mc2. There’s an absurd amount of energy in mass. A modern nuclear plant can power an entire city for a year with the energy stored in just one kilogram of Uranium. Yes. That’s it. The entire output of a nuclear reactor for a year comes from a single kilogram of mass. Astrophage can, apparently, do this in either direction.


pages: 499 words: 148,160

Market Wizards: Interviews With Top Traders by Jack D. Schwager

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, beat the dealer, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, commodity trading advisor, computerized trading, conceptual framework, delta neutral, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, fixed income, implied volatility, index card, junk bonds, locking in a profit, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Michael Milken, money market fund, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, short selling, Teledyne, transaction costs, uptick rule, yield curve, zero-sum game

I am already at a high level, but I would like to get the black belt. Also, I have made a study of spiritual traditions and there is a bit more work I would like to do with that. You sound very vague about it. Do you want to be vague? It is very hard to talk about this. Let me see how I can put it. Albert Einstein said that the single most important question is whether the universe is friendly. I think it is important for everybody to come to a point where they feel inside that the universe is friendly. Are you there now? I’m a lot closer. But that’s not where you started off? No. I started off with the feeling that it was an unfriendly place.


pages: 487 words: 147,238

American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers by Nancy Jo Sales

4chan, access to a mobile phone, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, dark pattern, digital divide, East Village, Edward Snowden, feminist movement, Golden Gate Park, hiring and firing, impulse control, invention of the printing press, James Bridle, jitney, Kodak vs Instagram, longitudinal study, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, moral panic, San Francisco homelessness, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, tech bro, TechCrunch disrupt, The Chicago School, women in the workforce

On a daily, sometimes hourly, basis, on their phones, they encounter things which are offensive and potentially damaging to their well-being and sense of self-esteem. I sat next to a fourteen-year-old girl on a New York City bus one day and asked her to show me what she was looking at on her phone. As we traveled down Second Avenue, the posts on her Twitter timeline included a meme that was circulating of a picture of Albert Einstein emblazoned with the words “WHAT WAS THE SMARTEST THING TO HAVE EVER COME OUT OF A WOMAN’S MOUTH? MY DICK.” “I guess it’s supposed to be funny,” the girl said uncertainly. This isn’t a book about how girls are victims. “Victim” isn’t a word I’d use to describe the kind of girls I’ve seen, surviving and thriving in an atmosphere which has become very hostile to them, much of the time.


San Francisco by Lonely Planet

airport security, Albert Einstein, Apple II, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Burning Man, California gold rush, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, David Brooks, David Sedaris, Day of the Dead, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, G4S, game design, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, Joan Didion, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Mason jar, messenger bag, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, retail therapy, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, transcontinental railway, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Catalog, Zipcar

Its commitment to pressing social issues is embodied in its AIDS Memorial Chapel, which has a bronze altarpiece by artist-activist Keith Haring. Here his signature figures are angels taking flight – especially powerful imagery as this was his last work before he died of AIDS in 1990. Grace’s spectacular stained-glass windows include a series dedicated to human endeavor, including one of Albert Einstein uplifted in a swirl of nuclear particles. Day and night you’ll notice people absorbed in thought while walking the outdoor, inlaid stone labyrinth, meant to guide restless souls through three spiritual stages: releasing, receiving and returning. Check the website for events at the indoor labyrinth, which include meditation services and yoga.


Fodor's Essential Belgium by Fodor's Travel Guides

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, bike sharing, blood diamond, car-free, carbon footprint, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, Easter island, Ford Model T, gentrification, haute cuisine, index card, Kickstarter, low cost airline, New Urbanism, out of africa, QR code, retail therapy, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, starchitect, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, urban renewal, urban sprawl, young professional

Often cited as one of the prettiest villages in Flanders, De Haan is an elegant upscale resort full of early-20th-century villas, and is surrounded by attractive expanses of dunes and woodland that make for pleasant hiking. Most of the roads around the village away from the beach area are green and tree-lined, and very much more akin to country lanes than to urban streets. Albert Einstein spent six months in De Haan during the spring and summer of 1933. The home where he stayed, Villa Savoyarde (Shakespearelaan 5), is not open to visitors, but there is a statue of the great man reclined on a park bench—you’ll find it in a small park-let at the junction of Prinses Astridlaan and Normandiëlaan.


The Rough Guide to Brazil by Rough Guides

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-communist, bike sharing, car-free, clean water, Day of the Dead, digital nomad, haute cuisine, income inequality, James Watt: steam engine, land tenure, mass immigration, Murano, Venice glass, Scientific racism, sexual politics, spice trade, Stephen Fry, sustainable-tourism, trade route, trickle-down economics, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, éminence grise

Football There are two major first-division teams based in São Paulo: Corinthians (corinthians.com.br), who play their home games at the new Arena Corinthians in Itaquera (MCorinthians-Itaquera); and São Paulo (saopaulofc.net), who play at Morumbi Stadium (bus #7241 from Praça República). Matches are generally held on Wed and Sat. Ticket prices start at R$50; better seats go for R$180–250. Anyone with even the faintest interest in the sport should make time to visit Pacaembu’s marvellous Museu do Futebol. Health The private Hospital Albert Einstein, Av Albert Einstein 627, Morumbi (11 2151 1233, einstein.br), is considered to be the best hospital in Brazil. For dentistry, Banatti, Av Paulista 925, 13th floor, Cerqueira César (11 3251 0228, benattiodontologia.com.br), is central and English-speaking. Money and exchange Branches are concentrated along avenidas Paulista and Brigadeiro Faria Lima, and Rua 15 de Novembro.


pages: 592 words: 161,798

The Future of War by Lawrence Freedman

Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Boeing 747, British Empire, colonial rule, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Google Glasses, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), John Markoff, long peace, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, nuclear taboo, open economy, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, systematic bias, the scientific method, uranium enrichment, urban sprawl, Valery Gerasimov, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, WikiLeaks, zero day

The community of nuclear scientists who heard the news could see at once that this could mean a new form of explosive. Whereas before Szilard might have hoped that the secret of an atomic bomb might be suppressed, now he began to fear that Nazi Germany might exploit it first. He persuaded his friend Albert Einstein to write to President Roosevelt urging him to authorise an exploration of the possibility of ‘extremely powerful bombs’. It was some time before the United States joined the European war. By then Frisch was in Britain and with another émigré scientist, Rudolf Peierls, had demonstrated for the British government that an atomic bomb was feasible.


pages: 522 words: 162,310

Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History by Kurt Andersen

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, animal electricity, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, Celebration, Florida, centre right, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, corporate governance, cotton gin, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, disinformation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Donner party, Downton Abbey, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, failed state, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, God and Mammon, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herman Kahn, high net worth, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, large denomination, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, McMansion, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, placebo effect, post-truth, pre–internet, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart meter, Snapchat, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y2K, young professional

Atheism is the belief that there is no god, and you declare there is no god: ‘Come, my fellow atheists, let us march together and conquer those idiots who think there is a god—all these other tribes. We’re going to prevail.’ I would even say I’m agnostic because I’m a scientist.” In this he echoes the greatest scientist of the last century. “In my opinion,” Albert Einstein wrote, “the idea of a personal God is a childlike one…but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist….I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being.” Indeed, he wrote, the most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious….He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed….To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness.


pages: 512 words: 165,704

Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt

Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, call centre, cellular automata, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, DARPA: Urban Challenge, Donald Shoup, endowment effect, extreme commuting, fundamental attribution error, Garrett Hardin, Google Earth, hedonic treadmill, Herman Kahn, hindsight bias, hive mind, human-factors engineering, if you build it, they will come, impulse control, income inequality, Induced demand, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, John Nash: game theory, Kenneth Arrow, lake wobegon effect, loss aversion, megacity, Milgram experiment, Nash equilibrium, PalmPilot, power law, Sam Peltzman, Silicon Valley, SimCity, statistical model, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Timothy McVeigh, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, traumatic brain injury, ultimatum game, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, working poor

Much of our trouble, as I will show in the next chapter, comes because of our perceptual limitations, and because we cannot pay attention. How Our Eyes and Minds Betray Us on the Road Keep Your Mind on the Road: Why It’s So Hard to Pay Attention in Traffic Any man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves. —Albert Einstein Here is a common traffic experience: You are driving, perhaps down a mostly empty highway, perhaps on the quiet streets around your house, when you suddenly find yourself “awake at the wheel.” You realize, with a mixture of wonder and horror, that you cannot remember what you have been doing for the past few moments—nor do you know how long you have been “out.”


pages: 558 words: 164,627

The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency by Annie Jacobsen

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Boston Dynamics, colonial rule, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dean Kamen, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, GPS: selective availability, Herman Kahn, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John von Neumann, license plate recognition, Livingstone, I presume, low earth orbit, megacity, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, operation paperclip, place-making, RAND corporation, restrictive zoning, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, social intelligence, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, traumatic brain injury, zero-sum game

He was hired by John Davis Williams, the eccentric director of RAND’s Mathematics Division, on unusual terms: Von Neumann was to write down his thoughts each morning while shaving, and for those ideas he would be paid $200 a month—the average salary of a full-time RAND analyst at the time. Von Neumann lived and spent most of his time working in New Jersey, where he had served as a faculty member at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study since the early 1930s, alongside Albert Einstein. To the RAND scientists playing lunchtime war games, less important than beating von Neumann at Kriegspiel was watching how his mind analyzed game play. “If a mentally superhuman race ever develops, its members will resemble Johnny von Neumann,” Edward Teller once said. “If you enjoy thinking, your brain develops.


pages: 684 words: 173,622

Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief by Lawrence Wright

Albert Einstein, call centre, Columbine, hydroponic farming, Jeff Hawkins, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, Peoples Temple, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, yellow journalism

He acquired a three-story Craftsman-style mansion, with a twelve-car garage, at 1003 South Orange Grove Avenue in Pasadena—a sedate, palm-lined street known as Millionaires Row. The house had once belonged to Arthur H. Fleming, a logging tycoon and philanthropist, who had hosted former president Theodore Roosevelt, John Muir, and Albert Einstein in its oval dining room. The street had also been home to William Wrigley, of the chewing-gum fortune, and the beer baron Adolph Busch, whose widow still lived next door. She must have been appalled to watch as Parsons divided the historic home and the coach house behind it into nineteen apartments, then advertised for renters.


pages: 568 words: 174,089

The Power Elite by C. Wright Mills, Alan Wolfe

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, American ideology, anti-communist, Asilomar, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, full employment, Ida Tarbell, it's over 9,000, Joseph Schumpeter, long peace, means of production, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, one-China policy, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Vilfredo Pareto

Vannevar Bush—World War II Chief of the Office of Scientific Research and Development—felt it necessary to assert flatly that the scientific community was ‘demoralized.’ ‘You won’t find any strikes…’ he said, ‘but scientists today are discouraged and downhearted and feel that they are being pushed out, and they are.’49 In the context of distrust, no less a scientist than Albert Einstein publicly asserted: ‘If I would be a young man again and had to decide how to make my living, I would not try to become a scientist or scholar or teacher. I would rather choose to be a plumber or a peddler in the hope to find that modest degree of independence still available under present circumstances.’50 Although there are perhaps 600,000 engineers and scientists in the United States, only some 125,000 of them are active in research, and of these perhaps 75,000 are researching for industry in its pursuit of new commercial products, and another 40,000 are in developmental engineering.


pages: 710 words: 164,527

The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order by Benn Steil

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, banks create money, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, deindustrialization, European colonialism, facts on the ground, fiat currency, financial independence, floating exchange rates, full employment, global reserve currency, imperial preference, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, lateral thinking, low interest rates, margin call, means of production, Michael Milken, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Monroe Doctrine, New Journalism, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Potemkin village, price mechanism, price stability, psychological pricing, public intellectual, reserve currency, road to serfdom, seigniorage, South China Sea, special drawing rights, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, the market place, trade liberalization, Works Progress Administration

In the United States the book held particular appeal as an intellectual justification for controversial New Deal policies. If today it seems natural to most policy makers that governments should run deficits in recessions to stabilize the economy, it was far from a natural notion in the 1930s; it was Keynes who made the prescription intellectually respectable. Like another great mind of his time, Albert Einstein, Keynes had a preternatural ability to see relationships between complex phenomena entirely differently than generations of experts before him. Though mathematics was the primary analytical tool for both physics and economics, neither Einstein nor Keynes was exceptionally gifted in, nor fascinated by, higher mathematics.


pages: 542 words: 161,731

Alone Together by Sherry Turkle

Albert Einstein, Columbine, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, fake news, Future Shock, global village, Hacker Ethic, helicopter parent, Howard Rheingold, industrial robot, information retrieval, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, lifelogging, Loebner Prize, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paradox of Choice, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rodney Brooks, Skype, social intelligence, stem cell, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Great Good Place, the medium is the message, the strength of weak ties, theory of mind, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, Year of Magical Thinking

See Joseph Weizenbaum, “ELIZA—a Computer Program for the Study of Natural Language Communication Between Man and Machine,” Communications of the ACM, vol. 9, no. 1 (January 1966): 36-45. 2 See Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1976). 3 For whatever kind of companionship, a classical first step is to make robots that are physically identical to people. In America, David Hanson has an Albert Einstein robot that chats about relativity. At the TED conference in February 2009, Hansen discussed his project to create robots with empathy as the “seeds of hope for our future.” See http://www.ted.com/talks/david_hanson_robots_that_relate_to_you.html (accessed August 11, 2010) On Hanson, also see Jerome Groopman, “Robots That Care: Advances in Technological Therapy,” The New Yorker, November 2, 2009, www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/11/02/091102fa_fact_groopman (accessed November 11, 2009).These days, you can order a robot clone in your own image (or that of anyone else) from a Japanese department store.


pages: 614 words: 176,458

Meat: A Benign Extravagance by Simon Fairlie

agricultural Revolution, air gap, Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, Boris Johnson, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Community Supported Agriculture, deindustrialization, en.wikipedia.org, food miles, Food sovereignty, Garrett Hardin, gentleman farmer, Haber-Bosch Process, household responsibility system, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Just-in-time delivery, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, megacity, military-industrial complex, Northern Rock, Panamax, peak oil, precautionary principle, refrigerator car, rewilding, scientific mainstream, sexual politics, stem cell, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, University of East Anglia, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Haber, who invented the process, was one of 93 scientists, including three future Nobel prize-winners, who in 1914 signed Ludwig Fulda’s pro-war manifesto To The Civilized World, which claimed that ‘were it not for German militarism, German civilization would long since have been extirpated’. (Albert Einstein’s pacifist proclamation attracted just four signatures.) Haber’s support for the war effort was not altogether surprising given that synthetic nitrogen was more immediately useful for the production of explosives than for the culture of wheat. Haber went on to develop chlorine gas weaponry – although it was clearly outlawed by the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 – and was directly responsible for the fatal gassing of 5,000 French troops at Ypres on 22 April 1915.


Fodor's Barcelona by Fodor's

Albert Einstein, call centre, Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, haute cuisine, low cost airline, market design, Suez canal 1869, urban renewal, urban sprawl, young professional

. | Santa María Kalea 13 Casco Viejo, | 48005 | 94/416–0364 | www.pensionmendez.com | 12 rooms | In-room: no a/c | AE, DC, MC, V | EP | Station: Casco Viejo. Hotel Carlton. $$$ | Luminaries who have trod the halls of this elegant white elephant of a hotel include Orson Welles, Ava Gardner, Ernest Hemingway, Lauren Bacall, Federico García Lorca, Albert Einstein, and Alfonso XIII, grandfather of Spain’s King Juan Carlos I. During the Spanish civil war it was the seat of the Republican Basque government; later it housed a number of Nationalist generals. The hotel exudes old-world grace and charm along with a sense of history. Squarely in the middle of the Ensanche, the Carlton is equidistant from the Casco Viejo and Abandoibarra area.


pages: 547 words: 172,226

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, Atahualpa, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, bread and circuses, BRICs, British Empire, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of the americas, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, flying shuttle, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, invention of movable type, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, land reform, low interest rates, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, Mohammed Bouazizi, Paul Samuelson, price stability, profit motive, Robert Solow, Rosa Parks, Scramble for Africa, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, working poor

The low education level of poor countries is caused by economic institutions that fail to create incentives for parents to educate their children and by political institutions that fail to induce the government to build, finance, and support schools and the wishes of parents and children. The price these nations pay for low education of their population and lack of inclusive markets is high. They fail to mobilize their nascent talent. They have many potential Bill Gateses and perhaps one or two Albert Einsteins who are now working as poor, uneducated farmers, being coerced to do what they don’t want to do or being drafted into the army, because they never had the opportunity to realize their vocation in life. The ability of economic institutions to harness the potential of inclusive markets, encourage technological innovation, invest in people, and mobilize the talents and skills of a large number of individuals is critical for economic growth.


pages: 579 words: 164,339

Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth? by Alan Weisman

air freight, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, David Attenborough, degrowth, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Jenner, El Camino Real, epigenetics, Filipino sailors, Garrett Hardin, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute couture, housing crisis, ice-free Arctic, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), land reform, liberation theology, load shedding, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahbub ul Haq, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, Money creation, new economy, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Beef industry estimates of just 4.6:1 conversion claim to take into account an animal’s weight before it enters the feedlot; estimates by vegetarian advocacy groups of up to 20:1 claim to calculate how much of a slaughtered carcass is actually edible beef. 4. The others are Denver, Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, Tijuana, and Mexicali—as well as dozens of smaller cities, such as Albuquerque and Tucson. 5. Founder Alan Guttmacher, 1898–1974, was an obstetrician-gynecologist who taught at the Johns Hopkins, Mount Sinai, and Albert Einstein medical schools. During the 1960s, he was president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. 1. The actual 2012 Guttmacher/UNFPA estimate was 222 million women in the developing world whose contraceptive needs are unmet. A 2013 UN Population Division study upped the figure to 233 million by 2015 for all women worldwide currently married or in a union.


pages: 596 words: 163,682

The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind by Raghuram Rajan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Build a better mousetrap, business cycle, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, central bank independence, computer vision, conceptual framework, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, data acquisition, David Brooks, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, facts on the ground, financial innovation, financial repression, full employment, future of work, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Money creation, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Finally, given the criticality of the patenting process to innovation, it is important that more well-trained talented people should be hired into government patent offices. It may be relevant to note that one of the examiners in the patent office in Bern, Switzerland, between 1902 and 1909 was a certain Albert Einstein.12 DATA AS MARKET POWER Information is power today. When an e-commerce platform like Amazon or Alibaba collects data on the sales and receipts of a merchant selling on their platform (and perhaps buying on it), they have a good sense of the merchant’s cash flows, and thus his creditworthiness.


pages: 493 words: 172,533

The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson by Kim Stanley Robinson

Albert Einstein, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Kim Stanley Robinson, late capitalism, Murano, Venice glass, power law, Richard Feynman

The Franck Report called for a demonstration of the bomb before observers from many countries, including Japan. The Scientific Panel decided this was a possible option and passed the Report on to the Committee, which passed it on to the White House. “The Buck Stops Here.” Truman read the report and decided to invite James Franck, Leo Szilard, Niels Bohr, and Albert Einstein to the White House to discuss the issue. Final consultations included Oppenheimer, Secretary of War Stimson, and the military head of the Manhattan Project, General Leslie Groves. After a week’s intense debate Truman instructed Stimson to contact the Japanese leadership and arrange a demonstration drop, to be made on one of the uninhabited islands in the Izu Shichito archipelago, south of Tokyo Bay.


pages: 574 words: 164,509

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom

agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, anthropic principle, Anthropocene, anti-communist, artificial general intelligence, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, bioinformatics, brain emulation, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cosmological constant, dark matter, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, different worldview, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Drosophila, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, epigenetics, fear of failure, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, friendly AI, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hallucination problem, Hans Moravec, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, iterative process, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, longitudinal study, machine translation, megaproject, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, NP-complete, nuclear winter, operational security, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, phenotype, prediction markets, price stability, principal–agent problem, race to the bottom, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, reversible computing, search costs, social graph, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, time dilation, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trolley problem, Turing machine, Vernor Vinge, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

And even if intelligence agencies get it right, political leaders might not listen or act on the advice. Getting the Manhattan Project started took an extraordinary effort by several visionary physicists, including especially Mark Oliphant and Leó Szilárd: the latter persuaded Eugene Wigner to persuade Albert Einstein to put his name on a letter to persuade President Franklin D. Roosevelt to look into the matter. Even after the project reached its full scale, Roosevelt remained skeptical of its workability and significance, as did his successor Harry Truman. For better or worse, it would probably be harder for a small group of activists to affect the outcome of an intelligence explosion if big players, such as states, are taking active part.


pages: 598 words: 169,194

Bernie Madoff, the Wizard of Lies: Inside the Infamous $65 Billion Swindle by Diana B. Henriques

accounting loophole / creative accounting, airport security, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, break the buck, British Empire, buy and hold, centralized clearinghouse, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computerized trading, corporate raider, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, dumpster diving, Edward Thorp, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial thriller, fixed income, forensic accounting, Gordon Gekko, index fund, locking in a profit, low interest rates, mail merge, merger arbitrage, messenger bag, money market fund, payment for order flow, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, proprietary trading, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, riskless arbitrage, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, short squeeze, Small Order Execution System, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, too big to fail, transaction costs, traveling salesman

Stewart noted that a Boesky aide, Reid Nagle, “had no idea where Picower’s money came from; he occupied an unmarked office suite in an anonymous Manhattan tower.” 133 Picower’s trading account at Goldman Sachs: Henriques, “Deal Recovers $7.2 Billion,” and reporting notes made available to the author by her colleague Peter Lattman. 133 Available records show that Picower and his wife withdrew $390 million: Jake Bernstein, “Madoff Client Jeffry Picower Netted $5 Billion—Likely More Than Madoff Himself,” ProPublica.org, June 23, 2009 (subsequently updated), and the accompanying graphic, Dan Nguyen and Jake Bernstein, “Chart: The Picower-Madoff Transfers, from 1995–2008.” 135 a posthumous memoir called Leukemia for Chickens: Roger Madoff, Leukemia for Chickens: One Wimp’s Tale About Living Through Cancer (New York: privately published, 2007). 135 One hospital staff member would poignantly recall Peter gently rubbing ointment: Ibid., pp. 273–74. The scene, two days before Roger’s death, was described in Roger’s book by counselor Larry Dyche of Albert Einstein College of Medicine: “I wound my way through long corridors to Roger’s area. Through the door of his room, I could see a man putting ointment on Roger’s feet. . . . He was Roger’s father, a man renowned on Wall Street. Apologizing for not taking my hand, he rose to let us have the room to ourselves.


pages: 589 words: 162,849

An Impeccable Spy: Richard Sorge, Stalin’s Master Agent by Owen Matthews

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, company town, disinformation, fake news, false flag, garden city movement, Internet Archive, Kickstarter, military-industrial complex, post-work, South China Sea, urban planning

All the while the prisoner stretched the credulity of the Chinese court by continuing to maintain that he was not a secret communist agent – despite the fact that Chinese police had leaked large sections of the secret documents discovered at the Nanking Road apartment to the press. Meanwhile the Comintern had mobilised an international cam-paign to protest the ‘Noulenses’’ incarceration. From Berlin the master propagandist Willi Muenzenberg formed the International Noulens/Ruegg Defence Committee and roped in such luminaries as Albert Einstein, H. G. Wells, Madame Sun Yat-sen and Henri Barbusse to support the cause. The case was discussed in both the British House of Commons and the United States Senate.25 Clearly, the glare of publicity surrounding the Noulens case was hardly the best place for a secret agent to hide. Nonetheless with blithe – or reckless – disregard for its bureau chief’s security, Centre continued to insist that Sorge negotiate with defence lawyers, handle large sums of cash bribes26 and deal with a number of Comintern operatives dispatched to Shanghai with various schemes to free the couple.


pages: 632 words: 166,729

Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas by Natasha Dow Schüll

airport security, Albert Einstein, Build a better mousetrap, business intelligence, capital controls, cashless society, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, deskilling, emotional labour, Future Shock, game design, impulse control, information asymmetry, inventory management, iterative process, jitney, junk bonds, large denomination, late capitalism, late fees, longitudinal study, means of production, meta-analysis, Nash equilibrium, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paradox of Choice, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, profit motive, RFID, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Slavoj Žižek, statistical model, the built environment, yield curve, zero-sum game

Csikszentmihalyi 1993, 184; see also 1985; 1994 Csikszentmihalyi regards flow as a universal phenomenon: “Regardless of culture, stage of modernization, social class, age, or gender, the respondents described it in very much the same way” (1994, 48). Flow as he sees it is not merely the key to our own happiness, but to collective well-being. Citing the work of Émile Durkheim on collective effervescence, Victor Turner on ritual, and Albert Einstein on the value of art and science as forms of escape that create new realities, he argues that culture evolves through flow experience. Early on in his formulation of the concept, Csikszentmihalyi used the word “zone” to describe flow (1975). 2. Csikszentmihalyi clarifies: “in a flow state one is not, in fact, in complete control. … Rather, what happens is that one knows that control is possible in principle.


pages: 625 words: 167,349

The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values by Brian Christian

Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, butterfly effect, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, effective altruism, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, Frances Oldham Kelsey, game design, gamification, Geoffrey Hinton, Goodhart's law, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hedonic treadmill, ImageNet competition, industrial robot, Internet Archive, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Kenneth Arrow, language acquisition, longitudinal study, machine translation, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, multi-armed bandit, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, OpenAI, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, precautionary principle, premature optimization, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, side project, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, sparse data, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, statistical model, Steve Jobs, strong AI, the map is not the territory, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, zero-sum game

“My goal right now,” he tells me, “is to scare people. To terrify them. I feel I’ve succeeded if they’ve stopped and they’ve thought, Oh shit. We really got a problem here.” THE PROBLEM OF THE BLACK BOX Nature conceals her secrets because she is sublime, not because she is a trickster. —ALBERT EINSTEIN The act of giving a reason is the antithesis of authority. When the voice of authority fails, the voice of reason emerges. Or vice versa. —FREDERICK SCHAUER14 Rich Caruana is far from the only one who in recent years has had some version of the thought Oh shit. We really got a problem here.


Inside British Intelligence by Gordon Thomas

active measures, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, country house hotel, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, job satisfaction, Khyber Pass, kremlinology, lateral thinking, license plate recognition, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, old-boy network, operational security, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

A top-secret investigation was launched into how Russia had achieved this. The results of the closed-door inquiry still remain shrouded in secrecy. To this day the one certainity is that Bruno Pontecorvo, the scientist who had betrayed Britain, had arrived in Russia in time to lend his expertise to enable Malenkov to make the claim. The nightmare envisioned by Albert Einstein had materialized. “General annihilation beckons,” he told reporters. The prediction came at a time of major changes in the leadership of both MI5 and MI6. THE APPOINTMENT OF JOHN SINCLAIR AS MENZIES’S successor was a single step up from his position as deputy chief. Sinclair had held the position since 1945 when he replaced Claude Dansey, who had rejected Allen Dulles’s prime intelligence source because he was “too obviously a plant.”


pages: 693 words: 169,849

The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World by Adrian Wooldridge

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business intelligence, central bank independence, circulation of elites, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, Corn Laws, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, COVID-19, creative destruction, critical race theory, David Brooks, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Etonian, European colonialism, fake news, feminist movement, George Floyd, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, intangible asset, invention of gunpowder, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jim Simons, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-oil, pre–internet, public intellectual, publish or perish, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, sexual politics, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, three-martini lunch, Tim Cook: Apple, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, women in the workforce

It was a translation of Thucydides.42 The result of all this intellectual effort was a revolution: the powers that be were forced to concede that it was not only inefficient but also immoral to deny opportunity to talent wherever it appeared. The same was true of other marginalized groups who used meritocratic standards to confound ancient prejudices. Great Jewish intellectuals such as Albert Einstein made a mockery of Nazi ideas of the master race. Great black intellectuals such as Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois proved that blacks could hold their own in the corridors of intellect. Martin Luther King was such a morally compelling figure because he held out the hope of a future in which everyone would be judged by the content of their character rather than the colour of their skin.


pages: 607 words: 168,497

Sex, Time, and Power: How Women's Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution by Leonard Shlain

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, British Empire, Columbine, delayed gratification, double helix, experimental subject, Flynn Effect, George Santayana, Great Leap Forward, invention of writing, Lao Tzu, Marshall McLuhan, open borders, out of africa, sexual politics, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, the medium is the message

Chapter 19 Superstition/Laughter With me the horrid doubt always arises as to whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the lower animals, are of any value or are at all trustworthy. —Charles Darwin1 We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality. It cannot lead; it can only serve. —Albert Einstein Gyna sapiens’ awareness of the cause and implications of pregnancy constitutes the first major breakthrough sapients experienced as a result of acquiring a knowledge of deeptime. The second momentous insight—the certainty of death—would be the prime mover behind a spray of unique mental states and behavior patterns.


pages: 1,351 words: 385,579

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, bread and circuses, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, California gold rush, Cass Sunstein, citation needed, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, Columbine, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, crack epidemic, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, demographic transition, desegregation, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, experimental subject, facts on the ground, failed state, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fudge factor, full employment, Garrett Hardin, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, global village, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, impulse control, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, lake wobegon effect, libertarian paternalism, long peace, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, McMansion, means of production, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, mirror neurons, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, nuclear taboo, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Republic of Letters, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, security theater, Skinner box, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, technological determinism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, Tragedy of the Commons, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, Turing machine, twin studies, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

He was the nineteen-year-old Serb nationalist who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary during a state visit to Bosnia, after a string of errors and accidents delivered the archduke to within shooting distance. White explains his choice: Here’s a man who single-handedly sets off a chain reaction which ultimately leads to the deaths of 80 million people. Top that, Albert Einstein! With just a couple of bullets, this terrorist starts the First World War, which destroys four monarchies, leading to a power vacuum filled by the Communists in Russia and the Nazis in Germany who then fight it out in a Second World War. . . . Some people would minimize Princip’s importance by saying that a Great Power War was inevitable sooner or later given the tensions of the times, but I say that it was no more inevitable than, say, a war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact.

If one were to calculate the amount of destruction that nations have actually perpetrated as a proportion of how much they could perpetrate, given the destructive capacity available to them, the postwar decades would be many orders of magnitudes more peaceable than any time in history. None of this was a foregone conclusion. Until the sudden end of the Cold War, many experts (including Albert Einstein, C. P. Snow, Herman Kahn, Carl Sagan, and Jonathan Schell) wrote that thermonuclear doomsday was likely, if not inevitable.137 The eminent international studies scholar Hans Morgenthau, for example, wrote in 1979, “The world is moving ineluctably towards a third world war—a strategic nuclear war.


pages: 877 words: 182,093

Wealth, Poverty and Politics by Thomas Sowell

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, European colonialism, full employment, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Herman Kahn, income inequality, income per capita, invention of the sewing machine, invisible hand, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, New Urbanism, profit motive, rent control, Scramble for Africa, Simon Kuznets, Steve Jobs, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, very high income, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty

Roosevelt to create the Manhattan Project that produced the first atomic bomb, see Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), pp. 305–314. As for these particular scientists being Jewish, see Ibid., pp. 13, 106, 188–189; Silvan S. Schweber, Einstein and Oppenheimer: The Meaning of Genius (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 138; Michio Kaku, Einstein’s Cosmos: How Albert Einstein’s Vision Transformed Our Understanding of Space and Time (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004), pp. 187–188; Howard M. Sachar, A History of the Jews in America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), p. 527; American Jewish Historical Society, American Jewish Desk Reference (New York: Random House, 1999), p. 591. 39.


pages: 743 words: 189,512

The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet by Nina Teicholz

Albert Einstein, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, Gary Taubes, Indoor air pollution, meta-analysis, phenotype, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, Robert Gordon, selection bias, TED Talk, the scientific method, Upton Sinclair

Thus, in 1998, the AAP officially adopted the standard advice and recommended a diet with 10 percent of calories as saturated fat and 20 percent to 30 percent for fat overall for all children over the age of two. No Harm for Children? Sitting on the AAP nutrition committee at the time was Marc Jacobson, then a professor of pediatrics and epidemiology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. In an interview, I asked him about the possible shortfalls in vitamins and minerals that had turned up among children on a low-fat diet in these trials. He replied that while these deficits were problematic, they were not as important as growth as a measure for good health.


pages: 572 words: 179,024

Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base by Annie Jacobsen

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, disinformation, drone strike, Jim Simons, Maui Hawaii, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, operation paperclip, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Project Plowshare, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, Strategic Defense Initiative, uranium enrichment, urban sprawl, zero day

There was the let-bygones-be-bygones approach, an attitude summed up by the Army officer in charge of Operation Paperclip, Bosquet Wev, who stated that to preoccupy oneself with “picayune details” about German scientists’ past actions was “beating a dead Nazi horse.” The logic behind this thinking was that a disbanded Third Reich presented no future harm to America but a burgeoning Soviet military certainly did—and if the Germans were working for us, they couldn’t be working for them. Others disagreed—including Albert Einstein. Five months before the Juárez crash, Einstein and the newly formed Federation of American Scientists appealed to President Truman: “We hold these individuals to be potentially dangerous… Their former eminence as Nazi party members and supporters raises the issue of their fitness to become American citizens and hold key positions in American industrial, scientific and educational institutions.”


pages: 667 words: 186,968

The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History by John M. Barry

Albert Einstein, Brownian motion, centralized clearinghouse, conceptual framework, coronavirus, discovery of penicillin, double helix, Edward Jenner, Fellow of the Royal Society, germ theory of disease, index card, Louis Pasteur, Marshall McLuhan, Mason jar, means of production, scientific management, seminal paper, statistical model, the medium is the message, the scientific method, traveling salesman, women in the workforce

Although not a doctor, Flexner had been an undergraduate at the Hopkins—he said that even among undergraduates “research was the air we breathed”—and had already demonstrated both a ruthless, unforgiving judgment and a commitment to advancing model educational institutions. In his first job after college, he had taught in a Louisville high school—where he failed his entire class of fifteen students—and had experimented with new ways of teaching. Later he would create the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and personally recruit Albert Einstein to it. Abraham Flexner began his study by talking at length to Welch and Franklin Mall. Their views influenced him, to say the least. He stated, “The rest of my study of medical education was little more than an amplification of what I had learned during my initial visit to Baltimore.” In 1910, the same year the Rockefeller Institute Hospital opened, his report Medical Education in the United States and Canada appeared.


Frommer's San Francisco 2012 by Matthew Poole, Erika Lenkert, Kristin Luna

airport security, Albert Einstein, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Blue Bottle Coffee, California gold rush, car-free, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, El Camino Real, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, high-speed rail, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Mason jar, Maui Hawaii, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, off-the-grid, place-making, Port of Oakland, post-work, San Francisco homelessness, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, Torches of Freedom, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Construction began on the site of the Crocker mansion in 1928 but was not completed until 1964. Among the more interesting features of the building are its stained-glass windows, particularly those by the French Loire studios and Charles Connick, depicting such modern figures as Thurgood Marshall, Robert Frost, and Albert Einstein; the replicas of Ghiberti’s bronze Doors of Paradise at the east end; the series of religious murals completed in the 1940s by Polish artist John De Rosen; and the 44-bell carillon. Along with its magical ambience, Grace lifts spirits with services, musical performances (including organ recitals and evensong, or evening prayer, on many Sun), and its weekly Forum (Sun 9:30–10:30am except during summer and major holidays), where guests lead discussions about spirituality in modern times and have community dialogues on social issues. 1100 California St.


Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy by Philippe van Parijs, Yannick Vanderborght

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, carbon tax, centre right, collective bargaining, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, declining real wages, degrowth, diversified portfolio, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, income per capita, informal economy, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, open borders, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, price mechanism, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, selection bias, sharing economy, sovereign wealth fund, systematic bias, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, working poor

Lady Juliet Rhys-Â� Williams (1898–1964), like Beveridge a liberal politician, made a last attempt in 1943 with her “new social contract,” which included the payment of a universal and individual benefit to all adults, subject to availability for “suitable employment.”52 Beveridge prevailed, however, and the British discussion on basic 81 BASIC INCOME income was extinguished for several deÂ�cades, despite James Â�Meade’s attempt to revive it in the 1970s when he was appointed as chair of a committee on “the structure and reform of direct taxation” in the United Kingdom.53 Meanwhile, not much was happening on the continent. The closest one could find to the idea of a basic income was in Die Allgemeine Nährpflicht (1912), by the Viennese social phiÂ�losÂ�oÂ�pher and reformer Josef Popper-Â�Lynkeus (1838– 1921), “a prophetic and saintly person” according to his friend Albert Einstein: “As an extreme individualist he prized man’s freedom from want and dispensable constraint as the highest aim.” According to Popper-Â�Lynkeus, “EveryÂ�one, without exception—Â�that is, without regard to age, sex, religion, belief, or unbelief, without regard to poÂ�litiÂ�cal opinions or identification with party or no party, without regard to physical and Â�mental capacity, irrespective of one’s moral or Â�mental qualifications—Â�should be guaranteed, as of right, a minimum for subsistence, to preserve his physical and moral integrity.”


pages: 603 words: 186,210

Appetite for America: Fred Harvey and the Business of Civilizing the Wild West--One Meal at a Time by Stephen Fried

Albert Einstein, book value, British Empire, business intelligence, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, City Beautiful movement, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, disinformation, estate planning, Ford Model T, glass ceiling, Ida Tarbell, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, indoor plumbing, Livingstone, I presume, Nelson Mandela, new economy, plutocrats, refrigerator car, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, young professional

If the Cleveland experiment proved successful, it was not hard to imagine Fred Harvey one day running the restaurants and stores in the New York Central’s historic home: Grand Central Station on 42nd Street in New York City. THROUGHOUT THE ECONOMIC crisis of the Depression, the Grand Canyon remained crowded. In the entire Harvey System, it was the only destination where the number of visitors actually rose during those years. And no Grand Canyon outing received more attention than the day Albert Einstein arrived. In December 1930, Einstein left Germany to spend the winter at the California Institute of Technology. It was a prescient time to flee—Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party had just enjoyed its first significant showing in a national election. Einstein and his wife, Elsa, first sailed to New York, where he celebrated Hanukkah with a huge throng at Madison Square Garden and later gave a speech calling for brave men to resist war and refuse military service.


pages: 733 words: 184,118

Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age by W. Bernard Carlson

1960s counterculture, air gap, Albert Einstein, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, creative destruction, disruptive innovation, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, Henri Poincaré, invention of radio, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph Schumpeter, Menlo Park, packet switching, Plato's cave, popular electronics, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, undersea cable, yellow journalism

Tesla continued to live in hotel rooms, moving from one hotel to another when he could no longer pay the bill and after complaints that he was keeping too many pigeons in his room.27 To mark Tesla’s seventy-fifth birthday in 1931, Kenneth Swezey, a young science writer, organized a special party for the Wizard. Swezey asked seventy prominent scientists and engineers from around the world to send letters of congratulations, which he presented to Tesla in a special volume. Included in the volume were messages from Albert Einstein, Sir Oliver Lodge, Robert A. Millikan, Lee de Forest, and Vannevar Bush. The letters were reprinted in Yugoslavia and prompted the establishment of the Nikola Tesla Institution in Belgrade. Time magazine ran a cover story in which the aging inventor held forth on his plans to disprove Einstein’s theory of relativity, on his belief that splitting atoms released no energy, and the importance of interplanetary communications.28 Enjoying the warmth of this publicity, Tesla subsequently held press conferences each year on his birthday (Figure 16.4).


pages: 654 words: 191,864

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Black Swan, book value, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, classic study, cognitive bias, cognitive load, complexity theory, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, demand response, endowment effect, experimental economics, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, feminist movement, framing effect, hedonic treadmill, hindsight bias, index card, information asymmetry, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, libertarian paternalism, Linda problem, loss aversion, medical residency, mental accounting, meta-analysis, nudge unit, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, peak-end rule, precautionary principle, pre–internet, price anchoring, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Shai Danziger, sunk-cost fallacy, Supply of New York City Cabdrivers, systematic bias, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, union organizing, Walter Mischel, Yom Kippur War

Larry Jacoby, the psychologist who first demonstrated this memory illusion in the laboratory, titled his article “Becoming Famous Overnight.” How does this happen? Start by asking yourself how you know whether or not someone is famous. In some cases of truly famous people (or of celebrities in an area you follow), you have a mental file with rich information about a person—think Albert Einstein, Bono, Hillary Clinton. But you will have no file of information about David Stenbill if you encounter his name in a few days. All you will have is a sense of familiarity—you have seen this name somewhere. Jacoby nicely stated the problem: “The experience of familiarity has a simple but powerful quality of ‘pastness’ that seems to indicate that it is a direct reflection of prior experience.”


pages: 661 words: 187,613

The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language by Steven Pinker

Albert Einstein, Boeing 747, cloud computing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, David Attenborough, double helix, Drosophila, elephant in my pajamas, finite state, Gregor Mendel, illegal immigration, Joan Didion, language acquisition, Loebner Prize, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, meta-analysis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, natural language processing, out of africa, phenotype, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Saturday Night Live, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, Strategic Defense Initiative, tacit knowledge, theory of mind, transatlantic slave trade, Turing machine, Turing test, twin studies, Yogi Berra

Nikola Tesla’s idea for the electrical motor and generator, Friedrich Kekulé’s discovery of the benzene ring that kicked off modern organic chemistry, Ernest Lawrence’s conception of the cyclotron, James Watson and Francis Crick’s discovery of the DNA double helix—all came to them in images. The most famous self-described visual thinker is Albert Einstein, who arrived at some of his insights by imagining himself riding a beam of light and looking back at a clock, or dropping a coin while standing in a plummeting elevator. He wrote: The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be “voluntarily” reproduced and combined….


What Makes Narcissists Tick by Kathleen Krajco

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, British Empire, experimental subject, junk bonds, Norman Mailer, risk/return

That painting is dreadful!" Which translates easily in political matters to "You are an idiot!" without ever stating © 2004 – 2007, Kathleen Krajco — all rights reserved worldwide. OperationDoubles.com 386 What Makes Narcissists Tick how so or why. Unfortunately, you can say the sky is purple or that Albert Einstein was an idiot under those ground rules. So, happiness in the intelligentsia depends on political correctness, to avoid getting ganged-up on with such unfair attacks. Academics are among the most forceful at enforcing groupthink. Academia naturally attracts more liberals than conservatives. That isn't necessarily by design, but the situation you end up with makes it easy to get groupthink going and institute a tyranny of the majority.


Never Bet Against Occam: Mast Cell Activation Disease and the Modern Epidemics of Chronic Illness and Medical Complexity by Lawrence B. Afrin M. D., Kendra Neilsen Myles, Kristi Posival

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, epigenetics, Helicobacter pylori, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, megacity, microbiome, mouse model, obamacare, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, pre–internet, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), stem cell

A similar principle can be found in the writings of many earlier philosophers including Thomas Aquinas and John Duns Scotus (13th century), Maimonides (12th century), Ptolemy (2nd century), and even Aristotle (4th century BC). Later expressions, too, of the Razor can be found in the writings of other luminaries such as Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein. The Razor has been key in some of the greatest scientific discoveries including Dalton’s atomic theory, Einstein’s special theory of relativity, and Planck’s theory of quantum mechanics. The “grand unified theory” sought by physicists to explain our entire universe, if ever found, will be the ultimate demonstration of the principle of the Razor.


pages: 615 words: 187,426

Chinese Spies: From Chairman Mao to Xi Jinping by Roger Faligot

active measures, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business intelligence, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, illegal immigration, index card, information security, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, new economy, offshore financial centre, Pearl River Delta, Port of Oakland, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, South China Sea, special economic zone, stem cell, union organizing, young professional, éminence grise

Public opinion in the mid-1930s was hostile to the Japanese, and many books released at that time were strongly influenced by Willi Münzenberg’s Comintern propaganda service. Indeed, Brussels was the hub of these operations, for it was there, in February 1927, that Münzenberg founded the League Against Imperialism, presided over by Albert Einstein, with Ho Chi Minh, Sun Yat-sen’s widow and André Malraux—who, as usual, made a speech—in the front row. As we’ve seen, Madame Sun Yat-sen, like the Gong sisters, was a major figure in the international networks of influence set up by Zhou Enlai and his special services, and in 1928 she attended another Brussels meeting of the League Against Imperialism, where an array of well-known participants showed their support for Chinese communism.


pages: 612 words: 187,431

The Art of UNIX Programming by Eric S. Raymond

A Pattern Language, Albert Einstein, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, Boeing 747, Clayton Christensen, combinatorial explosion, commoditize, Compatible Time-Sharing System, correlation coefficient, David Brooks, Debian, Dennis Ritchie, domain-specific language, don't repeat yourself, Donald Knuth, end-to-end encryption, Everything should be made as simple as possible, facts on the ground, finite state, Free Software Foundation, general-purpose programming language, George Santayana, history of Unix, Innovator's Dilemma, job automation, Ken Thompson, Larry Wall, level 1 cache, machine readable, macro virus, Multics, MVC pattern, Neal Stephenson, no silver bullet, OSI model, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, premature optimization, pre–internet, publish or perish, revision control, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Steven Levy, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, transaction costs, Turing complete, Valgrind, wage slave, web application

When you think you are in a situation that demands caching, it is wise to look one level deeper and ask why the caching is necessary. It may well be no more difficult to solve that problem than it would be to get all the edge cases in the caching software right. Complexity Chapter 13. Complexity As Simple As Possible, but No Simpler Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. -- Albert Einstein At the end of Chapter 1, we summarized the Unix philosophy as “Keep It Simple, Stupid!” Throughout the Design section, one of the continuing themes has been the importance of keeping designs and implementations as simple as possible. But what is “as simple as possible”? How do you tell? We've held off on addressing this question until now because understanding simplicity is complicated.


The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz by Erik Larson

Albert Einstein, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, Cornelius Vanderbilt, plutocrats, traveling salesman, union organizing, Works Progress Administration

Whether one called him Prof or the Prof was a matter of personal preference. Contradiction defined Lindemann. He hated black people, and yet for years played tennis with a doubles partner who was West Indian. He disliked Jews, on one occasion describing a fellow physicist as a “d-dirty l-little Jew,” yet counted Albert Einstein as a friend and, during Hitler’s rise, helped Jewish physicists escape Germany. He was binary in his affections. His friends could do no wrong, his enemies no right. Once crossed, he remained so, for life. “His memory,” wrote John Colville, “was not just comprehensive; in recording past slights it was elephantine.”


pages: 659 words: 190,874

Deep Nutrition: Why Your Genes Need Traditional Food by Catherine Shanahan M. D.

Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, disinformation, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Firefox, Gary Taubes, haute cuisine, impulse control, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, Mason jar, meta-analysis, microbiome, mirror neurons, moral panic, mouse model, pattern recognition, phenotype, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Simon Singh, smart cities, stem cell, the scientific method, traumatic brain injury, twin studies, upwardly mobile, wikimedia commons

I believe it’s quite possible for older men to significantly increase their odds of having perfectly healthy babies if they support their testicular sperm factories by eating well—a powerful strategy in assuring quality control on the sperm production line. In 2014, geneticists working in conjunction with Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York found evidence supporting the idea that low levels of certain nutrients could promote these reproduction errors. Folic acid, B12, and a number of essential amino acids are used for a type of epigenetic bookmarking called methylation; a lack of any one of these vital nutrients would result in undermethylation and critical bookmarks may be omitted.


California by Sara Benson

airport security, Albert Einstein, Apple II, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Blue Bottle Coffee, Burning Man, buy and hold, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Columbine, company town, dark matter, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Donald Trump, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, Frank Gehry, gentrification, global village, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Joan Didion, Khyber Pass, Loma Prieta earthquake, low cost airline, machine readable, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, McMansion, means of production, megaproject, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, planetary scale, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, the new new thing, trade route, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Wall-E, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Grace Cathedral (Map; 415-749-6300; www.gracecathedral.org; 1100 California St; 7am-6pm Sun-Fri, 8am-6pm Sat) has been rebuilt three times since the Gold Rush, and the progressive Episcopal church still continues to keep pace with the times. Additions include an AIDS Memorial Chapel, with a bronze altarpiece by the late artist and AIDS activist Keith Haring; stained-glass windows dedicated to Human Endeavor, including one of Albert Einstein uplifted in a swirl of nuclear particles; and a mystical stone labyrinth, meant to guide restless souls through the spiritual stages of releasing, receiving and returning. Unlike in Nob Hill, more greenery was kept intact among Russian Hill’s modest homes and switchback streets, including the zig-zag section of Lombard St (Map), between Hyde and Leavenworth Sts.

Just around the corner is the Pasadena Museum of California Art (Map; 626-568-3665; www.pmcaonline.org; 490 E Union St; adult/child/student/senior $6/free/4/4; noon-5pm Wed-Sun), where exhibits focus on art, architecture and design created by California artists from 1850 to today. CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY With 29 Nobel laureates among its faculty or alumni, it’s no wonder that Caltech (Map; 626-395-6341; www.caltech.edu; 551 S Hill Ave) is regarded with awe in academic circles (yes, Albert Einstein slept here). Free campus tours leave from the visitors center (355 S Holliston Ave), which also distributes free self-guided tour maps. Tour hours vary; call for information. The Caltech-operated Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL; 818-354-9314; www.jpl.nasa.gov), NASA’s main center for robotic exploration of the solar system, is about 3.5 miles north of here.


pages: 676 words: 203,386

The Platinum Age of Television: From I Love Lucy to the Walking Dead, How TV Became Terrific by David Bianculli

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alistair Cooke, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, fake news, feminist movement, friendly fire, global village, Golden age of television, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, Neil Armstrong, period drama, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Saturday Night Live, Steve Jobs, trickle-down economics, unpaid internship

Movies: Writer and director, The Producers, 1967, Young Frankenstein, 1974; Writer, director, and actor, Blazing Saddles, 1974, Silent Movie, 1976, High Anxiety, 1977, Spaceballs, 1987, Dracula: Dead and Loving It, 1995; Writer and producer, The Producers, 2005; Actor, The Muppet Movie, 1979, To Be or Not to Be, 1983; Voice actor, The Critic (animated film short), 1963, Young Frankenstein, 1974, Mr. Peabody & Sherman (as Albert Einstein), 2014, and Hotel Transylvania 2 (as Vlad), 2015; Producer, The Elephant Man, 1980, My Favorite Year, 1982, Frances, 1982, 84 Charing Cross Road, 1987. Broadway: Sketch writer, Leonard Sillman’s New Faces of 1952, 1952–53; Producer, book, music, and lyrics, The Producers, 2001–7, Young Frankenstein, 2007–9.


pages: 717 words: 196,908

The Idea of Decline in Western History by Arthur Herman

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, bread and circuses, British Empire, David Attenborough, Dr. Strangelove, European colonialism, Future Shock, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, Joan Didion, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Murray Bookchin, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, plutocrats, post scarcity, profit motive, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois

Jews were, in short, without soul.58 The Jews became for the Germanic neo-Gobinians what modern-day Europeans had been for Gobineau: a tainted race. Aware of the curse they bore, the Jews consciously worked to pollute the civilization their Teutonic superiors had built. Capitalism, liberal humanitarianism, and sterile science—“Jewish science,” as Chamberlain called it (referring to Albert Einstein and other proponents of the new theory of relativity)—were all forms of race pollution, the modern instruments of the Jews’ revenge. The history of Europe is no longer Gobineau’s cycle of conquest, corruption, and reconquest, but becomes an apocalyptic power struggle between Aryan Teutons and their Jewish antagonists.


pages: 588 words: 193,087

And Here's the Kicker: Conversations with 21 Top Humor Writers on Their Craft by Mike Sacks

Albert Einstein, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, David Sedaris, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Exxon Valdez, fake news, fear of failure, game design, illegal immigration, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index card, Joan Didion, Martin Parr, Norman Mailer, out of africa, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, upwardly mobile

O.C.D. is a very common theme. Starting at around the age of nine or ten, I would suddenly feel the urge to stick to a very strict routine. I had to do all these very specific tasks before I felt comfortable enough to do much of anything. I was obsessed with death and with order. My mother once showed me a biography of Albert Einstein and told me that he didn't wear socks. And she said, “See? This is one of the greatest minds of all time. And he didn't wear socks! He wasn't perfect, so you don't have to be either.” Did that help? I remember it, so it had some kind of impact. Do you think this preoccupation with death was a Jewish trait?


pages: 647 words: 43,757

Types and Programming Languages by Benjamin C. Pierce

Albert Einstein, combinatorial explosion, experimental subject, finite state, functional programming, Henri Poincaré, higher-order functions, Perl 6, power law, Russell's paradox, sorting algorithm, Turing complete, Turing machine, type inference, Y Combinator

Special Issue: Java for High-performance Network Computing. Zwanenburg, Jan. Pure type systems with subtyping. In J.-Y. Girard, editor, Typed Lambda Calculus and Applications (TLCA), pages 381–396. Springer-Verlag, 1999. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, volume 1581. The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. —Albert Einstein * * * * * * Index symbol Î alternate notation for type membership, 92 ⇒ arrow kind, 441 ⇓ big-step evaluation, 42 Π dependent function type, 463 :: derivation of, 203 ↑ divergence, 16 dom(Г) domain of Г, 101 ⋆ "quick check" exercise, xviii ⋆⋆ easy exercise, xviii ⋆⋆⋆ moderate exercise, xviii ⋆⋆⋆⋆ challenging exercise, xviii ↛ exercise without solution, xviii → function type, 100 :: kind membership, 449 →* multi-step evaluation, 39 → one-step evaluation, 36 ⇛ parallel reduction of types, 454 L record labels, 129 R+ transitive closure of R, 17 R* reflexive, transitive closure, 17 ▸ sample output from system, 25 \ set difference, 15 ↑d() shifting, 79 σ ∘ γ substitution composition, 318 <: subtyping, 181 ↓ termination, 16 ≡ type equivalence, 447, 453 : type membership, 92 _ wildcard binder, 46, 121 α conversion, 71 * * * * * * Index A abbreviations, see also derived forms parametric type-, 439 Abel, 409 abstract data types, 11, 226, 368–372 parametric, 450–453 partially abstract, 406 vs. objects, 374–377 abstract machine, 32 with store, 160 abstract syntax, 25, 53 tree, 53 abstraction full, 143 functional, 52 type abstraction and ascription, 123 abstraction principle, 339 abstractions, protecting user-defined, 3, 5, 368–377 activation record, 174 ad-hoc polymorphism, 340 ADT, see abstract data type Algol-60, 11 Algol-68, 11 Algorithm W (Damas and Milner), 337 algorithmic subtyping, 209–213, 417–436 algorithmic typing, 213–218 aliasing, 155–157 compiler analysis of, 170 allocation of references, 154 allsome implementation, 381–387 alpha-conversion, 71 Amadio-Cardelli algorithm for recursive subtyping, 309–311 Amber, 311 rule, 311, 312 AnnoDomini, 9 annotations and uniqueness of types, 135, 141 datatype constructors as, 355 implicit, 330–331 antisymmetric relation, 16 applications of type systems, 8–9 arith implementation, 23–49 arithmetic expressions typed, 91–98 untyped, 23–44 arrays bounds checking, 7 subtyping, 198–199 arrow types, 99–100 ascription, 121–123, 193, see also casting and subtyping, 193–196 assembly language, typed, 11 assignment to references, 153, 154 associativity of operators, 53 atomic types, see base types Automath, 11 automatic storage management, see garbage collection axiom, 27 axiomatic semantics, 33 * * * * * * Index B β-reduction, 56 Barendregt convention, 75 Barendregt cube, 465 base types, 117–118 and subtyping, 200 behavioral equivalence, 64 beta-reduction, 56 big-step operational semantics, 32, 43 binary methods, 375–377 binary operations on abstract data, 375–377 strong vs. weak, 375 binary relation, 15 binder, 55 binding (OCaml datatype of bindings), 85, 113–115 bisimulation, 284 BNF (Backus-Naur form), 24 booleans, 23–44, see also Church encodings Bot type, 191–193 algorithmic issues, 220 with bounded quantification, 436 bot implementation, 220 bottom-up subexpressions of a recursive type, 304 bound variables, 55, 69–72 bounded meet, 219 bounded quantification, 11, 389–409 and intersection types, 400, 409 existential types, 406–408, 435–436 higher-order, 467–473 joins and meets, 432–435 object encodings, 411–416 typechecking algorithms, 417–436 undecidability, 427–431 with Bot type, 436 bounded type operators, 467, 473 bounds checking, see arrays boxed values, 201 boxed vs. unboxed argument passing, 341 * * * * * * Index C C, 6, 45 C#, 7, see also Java C++, 6, 226, see also Java c0, c1, c2, etc.


pages: 324 words: 166,630

Frommer's Cuba by Claire Boobbyer

Albert Einstein, cuban missile crisis, Easter island, Ford Model T, haute couture, Maui Hawaii

In room: A/C, TV, minibar, safe. H AVA N A 5 W H E R E TO S TAY Hotel Plaza Built in 1909, this is one of the mor e historic hotels in La H abana Vieja. Suite no. 216 is still r ented out, replete with bat and ball and other memorabilia from one of its more famous guests, the Sultan of Swat, Babe Ruth. Albert Einstein and Isadora Duncan were also guests here. The building also served as the headquarters of El Diario de la Marina newspaper. However, historic charm is in greater supply than actual comfort or luxur y; although r ooms have attractive dark-wood furniture and the bathrooms have tubs, they are a little spartan.


pages: 721 words: 197,134

Data Mining: Concepts, Models, Methods, and Algorithms by Mehmed Kantardzić

Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, backpropagation, bioinformatics, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, butter production in bangladesh, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, conceptual framework, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, data acquisition, discrete time, El Camino Real, fault tolerance, finite state, Gini coefficient, information retrieval, Internet Archive, inventory management, iterative process, knowledge worker, linked data, loose coupling, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, NP-complete, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, phenotype, random walk, RFID, semantic web, speech recognition, statistical model, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, text mining, traveling salesman, web application

If, for example, the initial objectives are incorrectly identified or the data set is improperly specified, the data-mining results expressed through the model will not be useful; however, we may still find the model valid. We can claim that we conducted an “excellent” data-mining process, but the decision makers will not accept our results and we cannot do anything about it. Therefore, we always have to keep in mind, as it has been said, that a problem correctly formulated is a problem half-solved. Albert Einstein once indicated that the correct formulation and preparation of a problem was even more crucial than its solution. The ultimate goal of a data-mining process should not be just to produce a model for a problem at hand, but to provide one that is sufficiently credible and accepted and implemented by the decision makers.


The Simple Living Guide by Janet Luhrs

air freight, Albert Einstein, car-free, classic study, cognitive dissonance, Community Supported Agriculture, compound rate of return, do what you love, financial independence, follow your passion, Golden Gate Park, intentional community, job satisfaction, late fees, low interest rates, money market fund, music of the spheres, off-the-grid, passive income, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, telemarketer, the rule of 72, urban decay, urban renewal, Whole Earth Review

How $100 Invested Monthly Will Grow at Various Annual Compound Rates of Return YEARS 5% 7% 9% 5 $6,801 $7,159 $7,542 10 15,528 17,308 19,351 15 26,729 31,696 37,841 20 41,103 52,093 66,789 25 59,551 81,007 112,112 30 83,226 121,997 183,074 35 113,609 180,105 294,178 40 152,602 262,481 468,132 For all of you who never saw a compound interest chart, please refer to the box entitled: How $100 Invested Monthly Will Grow at Various Annual Compound Rates of Return. Make a copy and put it on your wall in a prominent place if that will help you to stick with your pay-yourself goal. Looks pretty good, doesn’t it? You’re in good company if you think earning money from compound interest is a smart thing. When Albert Einstein was once asked what he thought was the most powerful force on earth, he answered: “Compound interest.” Benjamin Franklin described compound interest as “the stone that will turn all your lead into gold.” Compound interest is no more than interest making more interest over and over again. And remember this bit of advice: Whether you invest or not, you will still be 10 years older in 10 years.


pages: 685 words: 203,949

The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload by Daniel J. Levitin

Abraham Maslow, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anton Chekhov, autism spectrum disorder, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, big-box store, business process, call centre, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, complexity theory, computer vision, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Exxon Valdez, framing effect, friendly fire, fundamental attribution error, Golden Gate Park, Google Glasses, GPS: selective availability, haute cuisine, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, human-factors engineering, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, impulse control, index card, indoor plumbing, information retrieval, information security, invention of writing, iterative process, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, language acquisition, Lewis Mumford, life extension, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, more computing power than Apollo, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, optical character recognition, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, phenotype, placebo effect, pre–internet, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, shared worldview, Sheryl Sandberg, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, statistical model, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, traumatic brain injury, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, ultimatum game, Wayback Machine, zero-sum game

We tend not to keep a copy of it, virtual or physical, because we know it will be there later for us when we need it. No curating, no collecting, and no serendipity. This is a downside to digital organization, and it makes opportunities to daydream perhaps more important than ever. “The greatest scientists are artists as well,” said Albert Einstein. Einstein’s own creativity arrived as sudden insight following daydreaming, intuition, and inspiration. “When I examine myself and my methods of thought,” he said, “I come close to the conclusion that the gift of imagination has meant more to me than any talent for absorbing absolute knowledge. . . .


Switzerland by Damien Simonis, Sarah Johnstone, Nicola Williams

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, bank run, car-free, clean water, financial engineering, Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, haute cuisine, indoor plumbing, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, the market place, trade route, young professional

It’s reminiscent of the Astronomical Clock in Prague’s old town square in that crowds congregate to watch it chime – and then wonder why. The clock’s revolving figures begin twirling at four minutes before the hour, after which the actual chimes begin. Tours enter the tower to see the clock mechanism between May and October (contact the tourist office). It’s said the clock tower helped Albert Einstein (see right) hone his theory of relativity, developed while working as a patent clerk in Bern. The great scientist surmised, while travelling on a tram away from the tower, that if the tram were going at the speed of light, the clock tower would remain on the same time, while his own watch would continue to tick – proving time was relative.


The Data Warehouse Toolkit: The Definitive Guide to Dimensional Modeling by Ralph Kimball, Margy Ross

active measures, Albert Einstein, book value, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, data acquisition, data science, discrete time, false flag, inventory management, iterative process, job automation, knowledge worker, performance metric, platform as a service, side project, zero-sum game

The ability to visualize something as abstract as a set of data in a concrete and tangible way is the secret of understandability. If this perspective seems too simple, good! A data model that starts simple has a chance of remaining simple at the end of the design. A model that starts complicated surely will be overly complicated at the end, resulting in slow query performance and business user rejection. Albert Einstein captured the basic philosophy driving dimensional design when he said, “Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.” Although dimensional models are often instantiated in relational database management systems, they are quite different from third normal form (3NF) models which seek to remove data redundancies.


pages: 695 words: 194,693

Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible by William N. Goetzmann

Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Cass Sunstein, classic study, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, compound rate of return, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, delayed gratification, Detroit bankruptcy, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, en.wikipedia.org, equity premium, equity risk premium, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, frictionless, frictionless market, full employment, high net worth, income inequality, index fund, invention of the steam engine, invention of writing, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, means of production, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, passive investing, Paul Lévy, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, spice trade, stochastic process, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, time value of money, tontine, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, wage slave

Bachelier presented his book, Théorie de la Spéculation, as his doctoral thesis in mathematics at the Sorbonne in 1900. In working through the problem of option pricing, Bachelier had to devise a precise definition of how a stock price moved randomly through time. We now refer to this as Brownian motion. Interestingly, Albert Einstein developed a Brownian motion model in 1905, evidently later and independently from Bachelier. Bachelier’s answer to the option pricing problem turned out to be an equation beyond the knowledge of market participants at the time. This presented an interesting philosophical issue. If option prices conformed to a complex, nonlinear multivariate function that was undiscovered until 1900, how then did the invisible hand—the process of speculation—drive them toward efficiency?


pages: 708 words: 196,859

Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World by Liaquat Ahamed

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, centre right, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Etonian, Ford Model T, full employment, gentleman farmer, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, index card, invisible hand, Lao Tzu, large denomination, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, mobile money, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, open economy, plutocrats, price stability, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, rolodex, scientific management, the market place

On November 10, the republic only a day old, Schacht was invited to a meeting and asked to help found a new moderate party, the Deutsche Demokratische Partei (DDP), which would oppose alike the socialism of the left and the nationalism of the right. The DDP itself would briefly do very well, becoming a party of academics, journalists, and businessmen, many of them Jewish, and attracting such luminaries as Max Weber and Albert Einstein. In the 1919 election, it vaulted into third place in the Reichstag, after the Socialists and the Catholic Centrum Party. But Schacht’s brief flirtation with democratic politics was not destined to be very successful. With his financial and business connections, he played an important role in raising funds for the DDP, and helped write the party platform.


pages: 613 words: 200,826

Unreal Estate: Money, Ambition, and the Lust for Land in Los Angeles by Michael Gross

Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, clean water, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cotton gin, Donald Trump, estate planning, family office, financial engineering, financial independence, Henry Singleton, Irwin Jacobs, Joan Didion, junk bonds, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, oil rush, passive investing, pension reform, Ponzi scheme, Right to Buy, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech billionaire, Teledyne, The Predators' Ball, transcontinental railway, yellow journalism

In early March, Pickford finally got her own divorce and married Fairbanks a few days later. Their bridal supper and honeymoon took place in the new house, which a reporter dubbed Pickfair, a name that stuck throughout the couple’s reign as the king and queen of filmdom and of Beverly Hills. They entertained all kinds of visitors there, from European royals to Albert Einstein and Babe Ruth. They expanded their home in the early 1930s with the famed architect Wallace Neff. After divorcing Fairbanks in 1936, Pickford lived on there, finally dying an alcoholic recluse in 1979. The house changed hands several times thereafter—among the owners were Jerry Buss, owner of the Los Angeles Lakers; the Israeli industrialist Meshulam Riklis and his sex symbol wife, the actress-singer Pia Zadora; and Corry Hong, a Korean in the software business—as successive remodelings effectively destroyed any traces of its glorious past.


pages: 720 words: 197,129

The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson

1960s counterculture, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, c2.com, call centre, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, commons-based peer production, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Debian, desegregation, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, eternal september, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Gary Kildall, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Leonard Kleinrock, Lewis Mumford, linear model of innovation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, packet switching, PageRank, Paul Terrell, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Teledyne, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Yochai Benkler

“Consequently, nearly everyone with much expertise but little patience will avoid editing Wikipedia,” Sanger lamented.104 Sanger turned out to be wrong. The uncredentialed crowd did not run off the experts. Instead the crowd itself became the expert, and the experts became part of the crowd. Early on in Wikipedia’s development, I was researching a book about Albert Einstein and I noticed that the Wikipedia entry on him claimed that he had traveled to Albania in 1935 so that King Zog could help him escape the Nazis by getting him a visa to the United States. This was completely untrue, even though the passage included citations to obscure Albanian websites where this was proudly proclaimed, usually based on some thirdhand series of recollections about what someone’s uncle once said a friend had told him.


pages: 698 words: 198,203

The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature by Steven Pinker

airport security, Albert Einstein, Bob Geldof, classic study, colonial rule, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, Ford Model T, fudge factor, George Santayana, language acquisition, Laplace demon, loss aversion, luminiferous ether, Norman Mailer, Philippa Foot, Plato's cave, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, science of happiness, social contagion, social intelligence, speech recognition, stem cell, Steven Pinker, Thomas Bayes, Thorstein Veblen, traffic fines, trolley problem, urban renewal, Yogi Berra

Though Aristotle is identified as a philosopher who was a student of Plato and a teacher of Alexander the Great, we would still identify that man as Aristotle if he had decided to be a carpenter instead of a teacher, or for that matter if he had died at the age of two. Many people think that Christopher Columbus names the man who proved that the earth is round and that Albert Einstein names the man who invented the atomic bomb. These beliefs are mistaken, yet we feel that these misinformed people are still referring to the same men that we are. Similarly, most people know nothing about Cicero except that he was a Roman orator. Presumably he was not the only one, yet when people use the name Cicero, they intend to refer to that guy and that guy alone, not to any old Roman orator.


pages: 741 words: 199,502

Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class by Charles Murray

23andMe, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Asperger Syndrome, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, bioinformatics, Cass Sunstein, correlation coefficient, CRISPR, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark triade / dark tetrad, domesticated silver fox, double helix, Drosophila, emotional labour, epigenetics, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, feminist movement, glass ceiling, Gregor Mendel, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, meritocracy, meta-analysis, nudge theory, out of africa, p-value, phenotype, public intellectual, publication bias, quantitative hedge fund, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, replication crisis, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, school vouchers, Scientific racism, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Skinner box, social intelligence, Social Justice Warrior, statistical model, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, twin studies, universal basic income, working-age population

As these potential extensions of findings about gene expression sank in during the 2000s, the use of the term epigenetics expanded to include all forms of transmission of the phenotype by mechanisms that did not involve changes in the DNA sequence—in other words, to expand beyond Nanney’s emphasis on cellular memory and instead treat the larger realm of transmission of the phenotype through RNA and transcription factors as part of epigenetics.66 For John Greally, director of the Center for Epigenomics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, this is too broad a definition, conflating changes in transcription regulatory effects with cellular memory. This has created pervasive problems of interpretation—among other reasons because a change in DNA methylation can be an effect instead of a cause.67 But for better or worse, the broad interpretation of epigenetics has taken hold and a correspondingly broad research agenda based on it has been pursued for two decades.


pages: 622 words: 194,059

An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood by Neal Gabler

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, company town, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, haute couture, Louis Pasteur, Norman Mailer, power law, security theater, Upton Sinclair, working poor

One writer described him as a “fast-talking Broadway type, who’s got a flippant manner, thinks of himself as a witty man, and has pretty bad taste in the stories he tells.” Almost everyone regarded him as a frustrated comedian who “liked nothing better than telling very bad jokes in a loud voice.” When Albert Einstein visited the studio, Jack boasted of having told him, “You know, I have a theory about relatives, too—don’t hire them.” Scanning a table of Oriental guests at a banquet for Madame Chiang Kai-shek, he said, “Holy cow. I forgot to pick up my laundry.” He dressed in loud jackets, yachting blazers, and patent leather shoes, and “he always sported a big smile; he had a remarkable set of flashing white teeth.”


pages: 562 words: 201,502

Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson

4chan, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, carbon footprint, ChatGPT, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, drone strike, effective altruism, Elon Musk, estate planning, fail fast, fake news, game design, gigafactory, GPT-4, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, hive mind, Hyperloop, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Kwajalein Atoll, lab leak, large language model, Larry Ellison, lockdown, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mars Society, Max Levchin, Michael Shellenberger, multiplanetary species, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, OpenAI, packet switching, Parler "social media", paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, remote working, rent control, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sam Bankman-Fried, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, supply-chain management, tech bro, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, William MacAskill, work culture , Y Combinator

And, as always, Cathy and Betsy. More from the Author The Code Breaker Leonardo da Vinci The Innovators Kissinger The Wise Men Steve Jobs About the Author Walter Isaacson has written biographies of Jennifer Doudna, Leonardo da Vinci, Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, Henry Kissinger, and Benjamin Franklin. He is also the author of The Innovators and the coauthor of The Wise Men. He has been the editor of Time, the CEO of CNN, and the CEO of the Aspen Institute. He was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2023. He is a professor at Tulane and lives with his wife in New Orleans.


pages: 913 words: 219,078

The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War by Benn Steil

Albert Einstein, Alistair Cooke, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, disintermediation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, foreign exchange controls, full employment, imperial preference, invisible hand, Kenneth Rogoff, kremlinology, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, open economy, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, structural adjustment programs, the market place, trade liberalization, Transnistria, Winter of Discontent, Works Progress Administration, éminence grise

The creation of a strong, independent West Germany, integrated into a robust West European economic and North Atlantic security architecture, represented a fundamental departure in policy from the late FDR years, one without which it is difficult now to imagine a peaceful end to the Cold War on American terms. AS MARSHALL PREPARED TO FLY to Moscow in March 1947, Eleanor Roosevelt was organizing a National Conference on the Problem of Germany in New York City, featuring dozens of prominent backers from Henry Morgenthau to Albert Einstein, to protest what was believed to be Marshall’s pro-German agenda. The conference urged the secretary of state not to abandon Yalta and Potsdam for the sake of creating a German “buffer state”—one that would, in the words of publishing titan William Ziff, Sr., “inevitably . . . dominate through sheer force of economic power.”


pages: 518 words: 170,126

City for Sale: The Transformation of San Francisco by Chester W. Hartman, Sarah Carnochan

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Bay Area Rapid Transit, benefit corporation, big-box store, business climate, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, housing crisis, illegal immigration, John Markoff, Loma Prieta earthquake, manufacturing employment, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, Peoples Temple, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rent control, rent stabilization, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, strikebreaker, union organizing, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, young professional

Deborah Layton reported: “During these times, thenCalifornia State Assembly Speaker Willie Brown presided over a dinner in honor of Jim. In his flamboyant introduction of the now powerful and influential church leader, Brown proclaimed, ‘Let me present to you a combination of Martin Luther King, Angela Davis, Albert Einstein and Chairman Mao’ ” (Deborah Layton, Seductive Poison: A Jonestown Survivor’s Story of Life and Death in the People’s Temple [New York: Anchor Books, 1998]). ‡A 1983 laudatory feature on Feinstein in a popular women’s magazine described that earlier image as “Goody Two Shoes: The Straight-Laced, Upper Middle Class Lady in Frilly-Necked Blouses with No Ideology Deeper or More Original Than the Protestant Work Ethic” (Moira Johnston, “The Political Odyssey of Dianne Feinstein,” Savvy [September 1983]: 38–42).


pages: 807 words: 225,326

Werner Herzog - a Guide for the Perplexed: Conversations With Paul Cronin by Paul Cronin

Albert Einstein, Atahualpa, Berlin Wall, classic study, Dr. Strangelove, Francisco Pizarro, Kickstarter, land reform, MITM: man-in-the-middle, out of africa, Pier Paolo Pasolini

Consider also a perfect football match while walking across mountains of sugar beet from Munich to Paris (see Of Walking in Ice); the excesses of African slavery; the hypnotic state of a doomed, archaic society; a plague-ridden city rejoicing in its disintegration; a small-scale, close-knit and well-functioning film crew; imbecilic aliens who land on Earth and get nothing right; travelling on foot to pull together a divided nation (and, en route, saving a young Albert Einstein from choking); space exploration; the ability to fly. Herzog seeks nothing but freedom. Reinhild Steingröver tells us that both nature and culture are presented in Herzog’s work as “inescapably hostile realms.” Werner can do nothing but try to elude the potential menace nonetheless. 7 SURVIVAL Werner lives a life of austerity, asceticism, authenticity.


Saving America's Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age by Lizabeth Cohen

activist lawyer, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, benefit corporation, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, charter city, deindustrialization, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, ghettoisation, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Jane Jacobs, land reform, Lewis Mumford, megastructure, new economy, New Urbanism, Peter Eisenman, postindustrial economy, race to the bottom, rent control, Robert Gordon, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Victor Gruen, Vilfredo Pareto, walkable city, War on Poverty, white flight, white picket fence, young professional

On Brasilia, James Holston, “The Modernist City and the Death of the Street,” in Theorizing the City: The New Urban Anthropology Reader, ed. Setha Low (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999), 245–75; Jonathan Barnett, “The Modern City,” in The Elusive City: Five Centuries of Design, Ambition and Miscalculation (New York: Harper and Row, 1986), 107–56. 103. Milton Cameron, “Albert Einstein, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, and the Future of the American City,” Institute Letter (Spring 2014): 8–9. 104. Dolores Hayden, “‘I Have Seen the Future: Selling the Unsustainable City in 1939,’” Presidential Address to the Urban History Association, October 2010; Robert W. Rydell and Laura Burd Schiavo, eds., Designing Tomorrow: America’s World Fairs of the 1930s (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010); Folke T.


pages: 850 words: 224,533

The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World by Oona A. Hathaway, Scott J. Shapiro

9 dash line, Albert Einstein, anti-globalists, bank run, Bartolomé de las Casas, battle of ideas, British Empire, clean water, colonial rule, continuation of politics by other means, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, failed state, false flag, gentleman farmer, humanitarian revolution, index card, long peace, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, power law, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, spice trade, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, uranium enrichment, zero-sum game

Germany in 1928 was a constitutional democracy—the “Weimar Republic”—basking in the glow of its “Golden Years,” an era of stability and prosperity that produced one of the greatest outpourings of creative genius the world has ever seen. Weimar created Expressionism in film, Art Deco in design, Bauhaus in architecture, modernism in literature, quantum mechanics in physics, logical positivism in philosophy, Pilates in exercise. It has long been a great mystery how a culture that produced an Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Bertholt Brecht, Walter Gropius, Walter Benjamin, Thomas Mann, and Fritz Lang could also spawn a Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess, and Joseph Goebbels. But in August 1928, this was not yet a riddle and optimism was still possible. The Golden Years of Weimar were soon over.


pages: 778 words: 227,196

The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, animal electricity, British Empire, Charles Babbage, Copley Medal, Dava Sobel, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Jenner, Etonian, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gregor Mendel, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Harrison: Longitude, music of the spheres, placebo effect, polynesian navigation, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, trade route, unbiased observer, University of East Anglia, éminence grise

♣ The romantic tale of Paulina Jermyn, the beautiful seventeen-year-old botanist who fell in love at the 1832 British Association meeting at Oxford, perhaps deserves wider currency. See David Wooster, Paula Trevelyan (1879). ♣ This benign and eccentric image defined the Victorian ideal of the scientist, just as the later faintly surreal images of Albert Einstein-riding a bicycle or putting his tongue out-defined the twentieth-century one. The current images of Stephen Hawking, brilliant but paralysed and gargoyle-like in his wheelchair, perhaps better express the uncertainty of contemporary attitudes to science. The wheelchair itself takes us back to Dr Strangelove, but also eventually returns us to Sir Joseph Banks, rolling briskly into one of his scientific breakfasts in Soho Square, keen to meet his next young protégé and launch a new project ‘for the Benefit of all mankind’.


pages: 846 words: 232,630

Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life by Daniel C. Dennett

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, assortative mating, buy low sell high, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, Danny Hillis, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Drosophila, finite state, Garrett Hardin, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, heat death of the universe, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John von Neumann, junk bonds, language acquisition, Murray Gell-Mann, New Journalism, non-fiction novel, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Schrödinger's Cat, selection bias, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Turing test

I realized then that the largely imaginary Queen Elizabeth II of these young children (what philosophers would call their intentional object) was in some regards a more potent and interesting object in the world than the actual woman. Intentional objects are the creatures of beliefs, and hence they play a more direct role in guiding (or misguiding) people's behavior than do the real objects they purport to be identical to. The gold in Fort Knox, for example, is less important than what is believed about it, and the Albert Einstein of myth is, like Santa Claus, much better known than the relatively dimly remembered historical fellow who was the primary source for the myth. This chapter is about another myth — Stephen Jay Gould, Refuter of Orthodox Darwinism. Over the years, Gould has mounted a series of attacks on aspects of contemporary neo-Darwinism, and although none of these attacks {263} has proven to be more than a mild corrective to orthodoxy at best, their rhetorical impact on the outside world has been immense and distorting.


The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World (Hardback) - Common by Alan Greenspan

addicted to oil, air freight, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset-backed security, bank run, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, currency risk, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, double entry bookkeeping, equity premium, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial innovation, financial intermediation, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, information security, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, new economy, North Sea oil, oil shock, open economy, open immigration, Pearl River Delta, pets.com, Potemkin village, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, Suez crisis 1956, the payments system, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tipper Gore, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, We are all Keynesians now, working-age population, Y2K, zero-sum game

We were particularly conscious of the war because our classes had swelled with refugees—mainly Jews whose families had fled the Nazis a few years before. Henry Kissinger was a senior when I enrolled, though we were not to meet for three decades. I remember sitting in math class with John Kemeny, a Hungarian refugee who would one day become Albert Einstein's mathematical assistant and who would coinvent the BASIC computer language with Thomas Kurtz (and still later become president of Dartmouth College). John hadn't been in America long and spoke with a heavy accent, but he was brilliant at math. I wondered if this might be at least in part a result of superior schooling he'd received in Hungary.


pages: 761 words: 231,902

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil

additive manufacturing, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, brain emulation, Brewster Kahle, Brownian motion, business cycle, business intelligence, c2.com, call centre, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, coronavirus, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, David Brooks, Dean Kamen, digital divide, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, factory automation, friendly AI, functional programming, George Gilder, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hype cycle, informal economy, information retrieval, information security, invention of the telephone, invention of the telescope, invention of writing, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, linked data, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mitch Kapor, mouse model, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, oil shale / tar sands, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, phenotype, power law, precautionary principle, premature optimization, punch-card reader, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Rodney Brooks, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, selection bias, semantic web, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Coming Technological Singularity, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, two and twenty, Vernor Vinge, Y2K, Yogi Berra

Neuron-monitoring chemical sensors located on average ~2 microns apart can capture relevant chemical events occurring within a ~5 msec time window, since this is the approximate diffusion time for, say, a small neuropeptide across a 2-micron distance (http://www.nanomedicine.com/NMII/Tables/3.4.jpg). Thus human brain state monitoring can probably be instantaneous, at least on the timescale of human neural response, in the sense of 'nothing of significance was missed.' " 121. M. C. Diamond et al., "On the Brain of a Scientist: Albert Einstein," Experimental Neurology 88 (1985): 198–204. Chapter Five: GNR: Three Overlapping Revolutions 1. Samuel Butler (1835–1902), "Darwin Among the Machines," Christ Church Press, June 13, 1863 (republished by Festing Jones in 1912 in The Notebooks of Samuel Butler). 2. Peter Weibel, "Virtual Worlds: The Emperor's New Bodies," in Ars Electronica: Facing the Future, ed.


pages: 840 words: 224,391

Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel by Max Blumenthal

airport security, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Boycotts of Israel, centre right, cognitive dissonance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, European colonialism, facts on the ground, gentrification, ghettoisation, housing crisis, intentional community, knowledge economy, megacity, moral panic, Mount Scopus, nuclear ambiguity, open borders, plutocrats, surplus humans, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, urban planning, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

He cofounded the American Jewish Committee and was the guiding force during World War I behind the creation of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the chief international Jewish welfare agency. In 1922, he emigrated with his family to Palestine to cofound Hebrew University with Chaim Weizmann and Albert Einstein—and was instrumental in the revival of Hebrew as a language. Erudite, charismatic, and idealistic to a fault, Magnes emerged as the leader along with Henrietta Szold, founder of the Hadassah Women’s Organization, of Ihud, a political party that agitated for the creation of an Arab-Jewish binational state called “The United States of Palestine.”


pages: 756 words: 228,797

Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne C. Heller

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, American ideology, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Bolshevik threat, Charles Lindbergh, conceptual framework, Future Shock, gentleman farmer, greed is good, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Milgram experiment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, open borders, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, rent control, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, wage slave, War on Poverty, Works Progress Administration, young professional

As Time magazine put it, Americans were proud that their resourceful scientists had been able to coax tiny atoms to reveal their mighty secrets. But they were also frightened—by the power of the new weaponry, by the magnitude of the damage to Japan, and by the prospect that the Soviet Union might develop its own bomb and deploy it against the United States. Still, theoretical physicists such as Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and Enrico Fermi, whose work had helped create the bomb, became new American heroes. In this respect, popular opinion caught up with Rand, who from adolescence had loved the luminous rationality of science, engineering, and technological invention. For a few days, Wallis assigned her to a silly gangster movie called I Walk Alone.


pages: 869 words: 239,167

The Story of Work: A New History of Humankind by Jan Lucassen

3D printing, 8-hour work day, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-work, antiwork, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, computer age, coronavirus, COVID-19, demographic transition, deskilling, discovery of the americas, domestication of the camel, Easter island, European colonialism, factory automation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fixed income, Ford Model T, founder crops, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, labour mobility, land tenure, long peace, mass immigration, means of production, megastructure, minimum wage unemployment, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, New Urbanism, out of africa, pension reform, phenotype, post-work, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, reshoring, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, stakhanovite, tacit knowledge, Thales of Miletus, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, two and twenty, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, women in the workforce, working poor

Likewise, we are seeing the pushing back of the boundaries of ‘modernity’, to wit the Dutch economy of 1500–1815 has been characterized by some as ‘The First Modern Economy’.11 In short, the central concepts of capitalism and modernity are now in flux and thus have lost their original analytical function – the drawing of a sharp line in world history.12 That poses a problem for writing a long-term history like this.13 It reminds me of Albert Einstein, who remarked in 1916, ‘Concepts that have proven useful in ordering things easily achieve such authority over us that we forget their earthly origins and accept them as unalterable givens.’14 For this reason, I have refrained from giving the terms capitalism (and the associated class and class struggle) and modern (versus traditional) a central place in this book.


pages: 706 words: 237,378

Full Catastrophe Living (Revised Edition): Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness by Jon Kabat-Zinn

airport security, Albert Einstein, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, Columbine, digital rights, epigenetics, fear of failure, Higgs boson, impulse control, Lao Tzu, Mahatma Gandhi, Mars Rover, medical residency, mirror neurons, New Journalism, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Stewart Brand, sugar pill, traumatic brain injury, Whole Earth Catalog, Yogi Berra

He wrote, “This question [of coming to wholeness] has occupied the most adventurous minds of the East for more than two thousand years, and in this respect, methods and philosophical doctrines have been developed that simply put all Western attempts along these lines into the shade.” Jung well understood the relationship between meditation practice and the realization of wholeness. Albert Einstein also clearly articulated the importance of seeing with eyes of wholeness. In the last class of the eight-week MBSR program, we give our patients a booklet that closes with the following quotation from a letter of Einstein’s that appeared in the New York Times on March 29, 1972. I cut it out of the newspaper on that day and still have it tucked away, now yellowed with age and brittle to the touch.


America in the World by Robert B. Zoellick

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, classic study, Corn Laws, coronavirus, cuban missile crisis, defense in depth, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, energy security, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, foreign exchange controls, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, immigration reform, imperial preference, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, linear model of innovation, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Norbert Wiener, Paul Samuelson, public intellectual, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, Strategic Defense Initiative, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty

If the Nazis had had the V-2 a year earlier, General Eisenhower’s build-up in Britain for D-Day would have turned into a nightmare. German aircraft engines were also better than American models, as were Japanese torpedoes for much of the war.38 Building the Atomic Bomb The greatest venture was the atomic bomb. After being warned by Albert Einstein and other immigrant physicists of the danger in 1939, FDR had established a “uranium committee,” but it was stumbling. In 1940–41, as Bush was trying to demonstrate that the new NDRC-OSRD could produce practical results in a matter of months, he thought at first that the prospect of a nuclear fission bomb seemed remote and likely to swallow all the funds.


God Created the Integers: The Mathematical Breakthroughs That Changed History by Stephen Hawking

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, G4S, Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, p-value, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Richard Feynman, seminal paper, Stephen Hawking, the long tail, three-masted sailing ship, tontine, Turing machine

It is hard to imagine the development of either electrodynamics or quantum theory without the methods of Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier or the work on calculus and the theory of complex functions pioneered by Carl Friedrich Gauss and Augustin-Louis Cauchy—and it was Henri Lebesgue’s work on the theory of measure that enabled John von Neumann to formulate the rigorous understanding of quantum theory that we have today. Albert Einstein could not have completed his general theory of relativity had it not been for the geometric ideas of Bernhard Riemann. And practically all of modern science would be far less potent (if it existed at all) without the concepts of probability and statistics pioneered by Pierre Simon Laplace. All through the ages, no intellectual endeavor has been more important to those studying physical science than has the field of mathematics.

More importantly, this work drew attention in the American mathematical community that led to an invitation for Gödel to be a visiting scholar at the newly founded Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey. Gödel was one of twenty-four visiting scholars at the Institute during 1933 to 1934, its first year of operation. Albert Einstein was one of the Institute’s eight orig-inal permanent faculty members. Gödel and Einstein met during Gödel’s first year at the Institute but did not become close friends for nearly another decade. Gödel returned to a Vienna in tumult after an uneventful year in the peace and quiet of Princeton.


pages: 1,909 words: 531,728

The Rough Guide to South America on a Budget (Travel Guide eBook) by Rough Guides

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Atahualpa, banking crisis, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, centre right, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, company town, Day of the Dead, discovery of the americas, Easter island, Francisco Pizarro, garden city movement, gentrification, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, it's over 9,000, Kickstarter, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, off grid, openstreetmap, place-making, restrictive zoning, side project, Skype, sustainable-tourism, the long tail, trade route, urban sprawl, walkable city

Consulates Argentina, Av Paulista 2313 (11 3897 9522); Australia, Alameda Santos 700, 9th floor, suite 92, Cerqueira César (11 2112 6200); Bolivia, Rua Coronel Artur Godói 7, Vila Mariana (11 3289 0443); Canada, Av das Naçôes Unidas 12901, 16th floor, Itaim Bibi (11 5509 4321); Colombia, Rua Tenente Negrao 140, 7th floor, Itaim Bibi (11 3078 0262); Ireland (moving to permanent offices – check on dfa.ie/irish-consulate/sao-paulo); New Zealand, Av Paulista, 2421 (Edifício Bela Paulista), 12th floor (11 3898 7400); Paraguay, Rua Bandeira Paulista 600, 8th floor (11 3167 7793); Peru, Av Paulista 2439 (11 3149 2525); South Africa, Av Paulista 1754, 12th floor (11 3265 0449); UK, Rua Ferreira de Araújo 741, 2nd floor, Pinheiros (11 3094 2700); Uruguay, Rua Estados Unidos 1284, Jardim America (11 2879 6600); US, Rua Henri Dunant 500, Campo Belo (11 3250 7000 Hospitals The private Hospital Albert Einstein, Av Albert Einstein 627, Morumbi (11 2151 1233, einstein.br), is considered to be the best hospital in Brazil. For dentistry, Banatti, Av Paulista 925, 13th floor, Cerqueira César (11 3251 0228, benattiodontologia.com.br), is central and English-speaking. Laundries 5 à Sec: Rua Nestor Pestana 95, Loja A, Centro; Rua Frei Caneca 655, Bela Vista; Alameda Santos 1283, Cerqueira Cesar.


Global Catastrophic Risks by Nick Bostrom, Milan M. Cirkovic

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, anthropic principle, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, availability heuristic, backpropagation, behavioural economics, Bill Joy: nanobots, Black Swan, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Charles Babbage, classic study, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, death of newspapers, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, Doomsday Clock, Drosophila, endogenous growth, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, false flag, feminist movement, framing effect, friendly AI, Georg Cantor, global pandemic, global village, Great Leap Forward, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, launch on warning, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, means of production, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, mutually assured destruction, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, P = NP, peak oil, phenotype, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, Singularitarianism, social intelligence, South China Sea, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, The Turner Diaries, Tunguska event, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, War on Poverty, Westphalian system, Y2K

The distinction between software and hardware is not always straightforward, and separating human and organizational failure often is not an easy task. Nevertheless, these four categories provide a meaningful foundation upon which to build a total risk management framework. In many respects, systems engineering and risk analysis are intertwined, and only together do they make a complete process. To paraphrase Albert Einstein's comment about the laws of mathematics and reality, we say: 'To the extent to which risk analysis is real, it is not precise; to the extent to which risk analysis is precise, it is not real'. The same can be applied to systems engineering, since modelling constitutes the foundations for both quantitative risk analysis and systems engineering, and the reality is that no single model can precisely represent large-scale and complex systems. 148 Global catastrophic risks 7.2 Risk to interdependent infrastructure and sectors of the economy The myriad economic, organizational, and institutional sectors, among others, that characterize countries in the developed world can be viewed as a complex large-scale system of systems.


pages: 790 words: 253,035

Powerhouse: The Untold Story of Hollywood's Creative Artists Agency by James Andrew Miller

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Bonfire of the Vanities, business process, collective bargaining, corporate governance, do what you love, Donald Trump, Easter island, family office, financial engineering, independent contractor, interchangeable parts, Joan Didion, junk bonds, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Larry Ellison, obamacare, out of africa, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, stem cell, Steve Jobs, traveling salesman, union organizing, vertical integration

When we finished dinner, I went to sleep, got up in the morning, and flew with Ronnie to London, and then from London to L.A. We talked for eleven hours, and from that time to today Ronnie and I have remained the closest of friends. SANDY CLIMAN, Agent: I grew up in the Bronx and graduated first in my class at Bronx Science. That, and four years of research in the neurology labs at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, was my ticket out of the Bronx. Neither of my parents had gone to college. They were career civil servants, but they somehow put me through Harvard College. I believe my mother’s entire salary and a good part of my dad’s went to tuition, room, and board, and I also worked as much as I could.


pages: 898 words: 253,177

Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, California gold rush, clean water, Dr. Strangelove, Garrett Hardin, Golden Gate Park, hacker house, jitney, Joan Didion, Maui Hawaii, megaproject, oil shale / tar sands, old-boy network, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, trade route, transcontinental railway, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

Although few of the people who lived there knew it at the time, the strange squat structures going up in 1943 at the Hanford Reservation, an ultrasecret military installation along the Columbia River near Richland, Washington, were intimately connected to the Manhattan Project. A lot of the history is well-known now: how Niels Bohr was smuggled out of Nazi-occupied Denmark in the wheel well of a British balsa-wood aircraft; how pacifistic Albert Einstein urged Franklin Roosevelt to build the bomb before the Nazis did; how thousands of technicians and scientists descended on the tiny mountain hamlet of Los Alamos, New Mexico, to figure out how to build their catastrophically explosive device. The key material was plutonium-239, an element virtually unknown in nature which has just the right fissile characteristics for an atomic bomb.


How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS by David France

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Donald Trump, East Village, estate planning, facts on the ground, global pandemic, Live Aid, medical residency, placebo effect, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes, sugar pill, trickle-down economics

But the crush of reporters who gathered at the White House didn’t challenge Reagan or his policy development adviser Gary L. Bauer to defend any of the ideologues who stood at their sides. Instead, they rushed the stage to confront a single appointee, Dr. Frank Lilly, the chairman of the department of genetics at the Albert Einstein Medical Center and an expert in immunology, making him the most suited for a position on the commission. The press had been alerted by operatives inside the administration who were offended by his inclusion. Lilly, it turned out, was gay. Anticipating a media storm, Lilly had prepared a statement acknowledging his homosexuality and pledging “to forcefully represent the gay community as well as the biomedical community as a member of this Commission.”


pages: 846 words: 250,145

The Cold War: A World History by Odd Arne Westad

Able Archer 83, Albert Einstein, American ideology, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bolshevik threat, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, collective bargaining, colonial rule, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, energy security, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, full employment, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, imperial preference, Internet Archive, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, long peace, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, out of africa, post-industrial society, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, South China Sea, special economic zone, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez crisis 1956, union organizing, urban planning, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

The conference had been planned by German Comintern agents, primarily the colorful Willi Münzenberg, a master of setting up united-front organizations. Münzenberg used the anti-imperialist campaigns in China, led by the Guomindang, as the summons to the meeting. The conference had attracted international participants ranging from anti-imperialist Europeans, such as Albert Einstein and Henri Barbusse, to Jawaharlal Nehru; Song Qingling, the widow of the first Chinese president, Sun Yat-sen; and other Asian, African, and Caribbean activists. A number of US civil rights organizations were represented, including African-American and Puerto Rican groups. Very soon the Comintern handlers lost control of the proceedings, which turned into a denunciation of European control rather than the celebration of the links between anticolonialism and socialism that they had hoped for.


pages: 891 words: 253,901

The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government by David Talbot

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, independent contractor, information retrieval, Internet Archive, land reform, means of production, Naomi Klein, Norman Mailer, operation paperclip, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ted Sorensen

In 1949, Schlesinger endorsed a crude effort by Luce’s Life magazine—which the young, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian sometimes wrote for—to develop a blacklist of celebrities that the magazine described as “Dupes and Fellow Travelers” of the Communist Party. Along with the predictable stalwarts of the Far Left, Life listed such liberal luminaries as Albert Einstein, Arthur Miller, Norman Mailer, Aaron Copeland, and Leonard Bernstein. Schlesinger gave the Life magazine blacklist his stamp of approval, calling it “a convenient way of checking the more obvious Communist-controlled groups.” Though Schlesinger was an avid New Dealer, he was also a pampered product of the American elite—the son of esteemed Harvard historian Arthur M.


Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World by Margaret Macmillan; Richard Holbrooke; Casey Hampton

Albert Einstein, Bolshevik threat, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, facts on the ground, financial independence, Ida Tarbell, land reform, Monroe Doctrine, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, trade route, traveling salesman, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois

In place of the duty of the mandatory power to develop a self-governing commonwealth, they substituted “self-governing institutions.” Weizmann, traveling endlessly, firing off telegrams and letters, calling on all his extensive contacts, struggled to prevent the British government from making the terms even weaker. He wrote in despair to Albert Einstein: “All the shady characters of the world are at work, against us. Rich servile Jews, dark fanatic Jewish obscurantists, in combination with the Vatican, with Arab assassins, English imperialist anti-Semitic reactionaries—in short, all the dogs are howling.” He was not as alone as he felt. Support kept coming, often from unexpected quarters such as German Zionists, Anglican clergy or Italian Catholics.


pages: 898 words: 266,274

The Irrational Bundle by Dan Ariely

accounting loophole / creative accounting, air freight, Albert Einstein, Alvin Roth, An Inconvenient Truth, assortative mating, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, business process, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, clean water, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, compensation consultant, computer vision, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, Donald Trump, end world poverty, endowment effect, Exxon Valdez, fake it until you make it, financial engineering, first-price auction, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fudge factor, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, IKEA effect, Jean Tirole, job satisfaction, John Perry Barlow, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lake wobegon effect, late fees, loss aversion, Murray Gell-Mann, name-letter effect, new economy, operational security, Pepsi Challenge, Peter Singer: altruism, placebo effect, price anchoring, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Saturday Night Live, Schrödinger's Cat, search costs, second-price auction, Shai Danziger, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Skype, social contagion, software as a service, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, sunk-cost fallacy, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, young professional

One version is the creative set, in which twelve of the twenty sentences include words related to creativity (“creative,” “original,” “novel,” “new,” “ingenious,” “imagination,” “ideas,” and so on). The other version is the control set, in which none of the twenty sentences includes any words related to creativity. Our aim was to prime some of the participants into a more innovative, aspiring mind-set à la Albert Einstein or Leonardo da Vinci by using the words associated with creativity. Everyone else was stuck with their usual mind-set. Once you complete the sentence task (in one of the two versions), you go back to the dots task. But this time you’re doing it for real money. Just as before, you earn half a cent for choosing the left side and 5 cents for choosing the right.


Coastal California by Lonely Planet

1960s counterculture, airport security, Albert Einstein, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, Blue Bottle Coffee, buy and hold, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, company town, Day of the Dead, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, electricity market, Frank Gehry, gentrification, global village, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, Joan Didion, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, low cost airline, machine readable, Mason jar, McMansion, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, Steve Wozniak, trade route, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, white picket fence, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, Zipcar

RUSSIAN HILL & NOB HILL Grace Cathedral CHURCH ( 415-749-6300; www.gracecathedral.org; 1100 California St; suggested donation adult/child $3/2; 7am-6pm Mon-Fri, 8am-6pm Sat, 8am-7pm Sun, services with choir 8:30am & 11am Sun) Rebuilt three times since the Gold Rush, and still this progressive Episcopal church keeps pace with the times. Additions include the AIDS Interfaith Memorial Chapel, which features a bronze Keith Haring altarpiece; stained-glass ‘Human Endeavor’ windows that illuminate Albert Einstein in a swirl of nuclear particles; and pavement labyrinths offering guided meditation for restless souls. San Francisco Art Institute GALLERY (SFAI; Click here ; 415-771-7020; www.sfai.edu; 800 Chestnut St; 9am-7:30pm) Founded during the 1870s, SFAI was the centre of the Bay Area’s figurative art scene in the 1940s and ’50s, turned to Bay Area Abstraction in the ’60s and conceptual art in the ’70s, and since the ’90s has championed new media art in its Walter and McBean Gallery ( 11am-6pm Mon-Sat).


Western USA by Lonely Planet

airport security, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apple II, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Biosphere 2, Burning Man, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cotton gin, Donner party, East Village, edge city, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Frank Gehry, global village, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, intermodal, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mars Rover, Maui Hawaii, off grid, off-the-grid, retail therapy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, starchitect, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supervolcano, trade route, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, young professional, Zipcar

Grace Cathedral CHURCH ( 415-749-6300; www.gracecathedral.com; 1100 California St; suggested donation adult/child $3/2; 7am-6pm Mon-Fri, from 8am Sat, 8am-7pm Sun, services with choir 8:30am & 11am Sun) Take a shortcut to heaven: hop the cable car uphill to SF’s progressive Episcopal church, where the AIDS Interfaith Memorial Chapel features a bronze Keith Haring altarpiece; stained-glass ‘Human Endeavor’ windows illuminate Albert Einstein in a swirl of nuclear particles; and pavement labyrinths offer guided meditation for restless souls. FISHERMAN’S WHARF Aquatic Park Bathhouse HISTORIC BUILDING ( 415-447-5000; www.nps.gov/safr; 499 Jefferson St, at Hyde St; 10am-4pm) A monumental hint to sailors in need of a scrub, this recently restored, ship-shape 1939 streamline moderne landmark is decked out with Works Progress Administration (WPA) art treasures: playful seal and frog sculptures by Beniamino Bufano, Hilaire Hiler’s surreal underwater dreamscape murals and recently uncovered wood reliefs by Richard Ayer.


pages: 872 words: 259,208

A History of Modern Britain by Andrew Marr

air freight, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Beeching cuts, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bletchley Park, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brixton riot, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, congestion charging, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Etonian, falling living standards, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, floating exchange rates, full employment, gentleman farmer, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, Live Aid, loadsamoney, market design, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, new economy, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open borders, out of africa, Parkinson's law, Piper Alpha, post-war consensus, Red Clydeside, reserve currency, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent, working poor, Yom Kippur War

The greatest example of all is the atomic bomb. We now know that Hitler’s scientists were working hard on this new doomsday weapon, and hoped to test it as early as 1944. Scientists from Italy, France and Hungary were struggling with the physics throughout the thirties. The anguished private warning of Albert Einstein to President Roosevelt in a letter of 1939 about ‘extremely powerful bombs of a new type’ has gone down in history. Less well known is the work of two émigré scientists a year later in a laboratory at Birmingham University. Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls were working on the effects of using the isotope uranium 235 for a nuclear weapon.


Coastal California Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

1960s counterculture, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Apple II, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bike sharing, Burning Man, buy and hold, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, company town, Day of the Dead, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, flex fuel, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, income inequality, intermodal, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, low cost airline, Lyft, machine readable, Mason jar, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, Peoples Temple, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, starchitect, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, trade route, transcontinental railway, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Wall-E, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, Zipcar

There’s an attractive cafe downstairs, and a recently introduced spa. Parking is $20. oUS Grant HotelLUXURY HOTEL$$$ ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; %619-232-3121, 800-237-5029; www.starwood.com; 326 Broadway; r from $211; paiW) This 11-stories high 1910 hotel was built as the fancy-city counterpart to the Hotel del Coronado and has hosted everyone from Albert Einstein to Harry Truman. Today’s quietly flashy lobby combines chocolate-brown and ocean-blue accents, and rooms boast original artwork on the headboards. It’s owned by members of the Sycuan tribe of Native Americans. Parking costs $48. Old Town Base yourself in San Diego's Old Town and you may not need a car.


pages: 1,197 words: 304,245

The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution by David Wootton

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, book value, British Empire, classic study, clockwork universe, Commentariolus, commoditize, conceptual framework, Dava Sobel, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, fudge factor, germ theory of disease, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Lippershey, interchangeable parts, invention of gunpowder, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lateral thinking, lone genius, Mercator projection, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Philip Mirowski, placebo effect, QWERTY keyboard, Republic of Letters, social intelligence, spice trade, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

Snow, a Cambridge chemist and a successful novelist, delivered a lecture complaining that Cambridge dons from the sciences and the arts had now more or less stopped speaking to each other.ii It was entitled ‘The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution’ – the revolution being Rutherford’s revolution, which had led to the creation of the atomic bomb.3 In adopting the term ‘the Scientific Revolution’ a decade before Snow, Butterfield was (it is always said) following the example of Alexandre Koyré (1892–1964).4 Publishing in French in 1935, Koyré (a German-educated Russian Jew who had been imprisoned in Tsarist Russia at the age of fifteen for revolutionary activity, had fought for France in the First World War, would join the Free French in the Second, and would later become a leading figure in American history of science) distinguished the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century, which ran from Galileo to Newton, from ‘the revolution of the last ten years’; Heisenberg’s classic paper on quantum mechanics had been published exactly ten years before.iii For Koyré and Butterfield it was physics, the physics first of Newton and then of Albert Einstein (1879–1955), which symbolized modern science. Now we might give equal prominence to biology, but they were writing before the discovery of the structure of DNA by James Watson and Francis Crick in 1953. As Butterfield was giving his lectures the medical revolution represented by the first modern wonder drug, penicillin, was only just getting under way, and even in 1959 C.


Theory of Games and Economic Behavior: 60th Anniversary Commemorative Edition (Princeton Classic Editions) by John von Neumann, Oskar Morgenstern

Abraham Wald, Albert Einstein, business cycle, collective bargaining, full employment, Isaac Newton, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, linear programming, Nash equilibrium, Parkinson's law, Paul Samuelson, profit motive, RAND corporation, the market place, zero-sum game

John von Neumann, Professor of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, N.J., and Dr. Oskar Morgenstern, Professor of Economics at Princeton University. In its present form the theory represents fifteen years of research, apart from the years spent by Dr. von Neumann before 1928 in working out the basic theory of games. Dr. von Neumann, a collaborator of Albert Einstein, who did mathematical work important in the development of the atomic bomb, is recognized by his colleagues as one of the great original workers of the day in mathematics. He is the author of “Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics.” Dr. Morgenstern, former director of the Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research at the University of Vienna, is considered one of the world’s leading mathematical economists.


pages: 913 words: 299,770

A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn

active measures, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American ideology, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, death from overwork, death of newspapers, desegregation, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, friendly fire, full employment, God and Mammon, Herman Kahn, Howard Zinn, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, jobless men, land reform, Lewis Mumford, Mercator projection, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, very high income, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, work culture , Works Progress Administration

Another document shows that after three years of appeal a meeting took place between Attorney General Herbert Brownell and Chief Justice Fred Vinson of the Supreme Court, and the chief justice assured the Attorney General that if any Supreme Court justice gave a stay of execution, he would immediately call a full court session and override it. There had been a worldwide campaign of protest. Albert Einstein, whose letter to Roosevelt early in the war had initiated work on the atomic bomb, appealed for the Rosenbergs, as did Jean-Paul Sartre, Pablo Picasso, and the sister of Bartolomeo Vanzetti. There was an appeal to President Truman, just before he left office in the spring of 1953. It was turned down.


pages: 970 words: 302,110

A Man in Full: A Novel by Tom Wolfe

Albert Einstein, Big Tech, Bonfire of the Vanities, edge city, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, global village, hiring and firing, New Urbanism, plutocrats, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Socratic dialogue, South of Market, San Francisco, walking around money

There were wooden knickknack shelves attached to the walls and filled with dolls, old ones, new ones, astronaut dolls, African dolls, Filipino dolls, Polynesian dolls. There were dolls resting on little knickknack shelves that went around each doorframe and every window, all chosen for the matching or harmonious colors of their clothes, dolls of old people as well as children, dolls of famous people such as Mark Twain, Genghis Khan, and Albert Einstein. Still other knickknack shelves were devoted to the porcelain figurines. In every room, up near the ceiling, which was no more than eight feet high, was a white shelf upon which were white figurines arranged so densely that at first you thought you were looking at some sort of frieze in high relief.


pages: 1,073 words: 314,528

Strategy: A History by Lawrence Freedman

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Blue Ocean Strategy, British Empire, business process, butterfly effect, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, circulation of elites, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, collective bargaining, complexity theory, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, defense in depth, desegregation, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, endowment effect, escalation ladder, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, framing effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Ida Tarbell, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, lateral thinking, linear programming, loose coupling, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mental accounting, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Nelson Mandela, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, scientific management, seminal paper, shareholder value, social contagion, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, strikebreaker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Torches of Freedom, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, ultimatum game, unemployed young men, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Vilfredo Pareto, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

The hype that accompanied the promotion of successive strategic fashions exaggerated the importance of the enlightened manager and played down the importance of chance and circumstances in explaining success. PART V Theories of Strategy CHAPTER 36 The Limits of Rational Choice In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. —Yogi Berra (also attributed to Albert Einstein) THIS SECTION is concerned with the possibility of strategic theory based on the insights of contemporary social sciences. We have already seen how apparently detached intellectual activity was the product of wider social forces, whether the effort put in by the RAND Corporation to develop new sciences of decision-making, the foundation grants that encouraged business schools to adopt these—and which the more sociologically inclined organizational theorists sought to resist—or else the impact of the radical thinking of the 1960s on the relationship between discourse and power.


Gorbachev by William Taubman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Able Archer 83, active measures, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, card file, conceptual framework, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, haute couture, indoor plumbing, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Kinnock, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, trade liberalization, young professional

Added Senator Claiborne Pell, “He spoke very ably, but not very briefly.”68 Another event that afternoon at the Soviet embassy provided more balm to the wounds Gorbachev was suffering at home. An hour and half was allotted in his schedule, but it took more time than that for him to receive five awards: the Albert Einstein Peace Prize, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Freedom Medal, the Martin Luther King Jr. Non-Violent Peace Prize, the Man of History Award, and the Martin Luther King Jr. International Peace Award. One by one representatives of the award-presenting organizations solemnly trooped into the embassy’s lavish reception hall, affixed their banners to the wall, and heaped praise on Gorbachev, as American and Soviet television cameras recorded every word.


USA Travel Guide by Lonely, Planet

1960s counterculture, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Asilomar, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, big-box store, bike sharing, Biosphere 2, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Donald Trump, Donner party, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, edge city, El Camino Real, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentleman farmer, gentrification, glass ceiling, global village, Golden Gate Park, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information trail, interchangeable parts, intermodal, jitney, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine readable, Mars Rover, Mason jar, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, off grid, off-the-grid, Quicken Loans, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, starchitect, stealth mode startup, stem cell, supervolcano, the built environment, The Chicago School, the High Line, the payments system, three-martini lunch, trade route, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, Zipcar

Philosophical Hall Offline map Google map ( 215-440-3400; www.apsmuseum.org; 104 S 5th St; admission $1; 10am-4pm Thu-Sun) , south of Old City Hall, is the headquarters of the American Philosophical Society, founded in 1743 by Benjamin Franklin. Past members have included Thomas Jefferson, Marie Curie, Thomas Edison, Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein. Second Bank of the US Offline map Google map ( Chestnut St, btwn 4th & 5th Sts) , modeled after the Greek Parthenon, is an 1824 marble-faced Greek Revival masterpiece that was home to the world’s most powerful financial institution until President Andrew Jackson dissolved its charter in 1836.

Grace Cathedral CHURCH Offline map Google map ( 415-749-6300; www.gracecathedral.com; 1100 California St; suggested donation adult/child $3/2; 7am-6pm Mon-Fri, from 8am Sat, 8am-7pm Sun, services with choir 8:30am & 11am Sun) Take a shortcut to heaven: hop the car uphill to SF’s progressive Episcopal church, where the AIDS Interfaith Memorial Chapel features a bronze Keith Haring altarpiece; stained-glass ‘Human Endeavor’ windows illuminate Albert Einstein in a swirl of nuclear particles; and pavement labyrinths offer guided meditation for restless souls. FISHERMAN’S WHARF Aquatic Park Bathhouse HISTORIC BUILDING Offline map Google map ( 415-447-5000; www.nps.gov/safr; 499 Jefferson St, at Hyde St; 10am-4pm) A monumental hint to sailors in need of a scrub, this recently restored, ship-shape 1939 streamline moderne landmark is decked out with Works Progress Administration (WPA) art treasures: playful seal and frog sculptures by Beniamino Bufano, Hilaire Hiler’s surreal underwater dreamscape murals and recently uncovered wood reliefs by Richard Ayer.


pages: 1,535 words: 337,071

Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning About a Highly Connected World by David Easley, Jon Kleinberg

Albert Einstein, AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, classic study, clean water, conceptual framework, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Douglas Hofstadter, Dutch auction, Erdős number, experimental subject, first-price auction, fudge factor, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, Gerard Salton, Gerard Salton, Gödel, Escher, Bach, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, information retrieval, John Nash: game theory, Kenneth Arrow, longitudinal study, market clearing, market microstructure, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, Pareto efficiency, Paul Erdős, planetary scale, power law, prediction markets, price anchoring, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, random walk, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, sealed-bid auction, search engine result page, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, seminal paper, Simon Singh, slashdot, social contagion, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, stochastic process, Ted Nelson, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, two and twenty, ultimatum game, Vannevar Bush, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Now, a mathematician’s Erdös number is the distance from him or her to Erdös in this graph [197]. The point is that most mathematicians have Erdös numbers of at most 4 or 5, and —extending the collaboration graph to include co-authorship across all the sciences — most scientists in other fields have Erdös numbers that are comparable or only slightly larger; Albert Einstein’s is 2, Enrico Fermi’s is 3, Noam Chomsky’s and Linus Pauling’s are each 4, Francis Crick’s and James Watson’s are 5 and 6 respectively. The world of science is truly a small one in this sense. Inspired by some mixture of the Milgram experiment, John Guare’s play, and a compelling belief that Kevin Bacon was the center of the Hollywood universe, three students at Albright College in Pennsylvania sometime around 1994 adapted the idea of Erdös numbers to the collaboration graph of movie actors and actresses: nodes are performers, an edge connects two performers if they’ve appeared together in a movie, and a performer’s Bacon number is 48 CHAPTER 2.


Central Europe Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Defenestration of Prague, Fall of the Berlin Wall, flag carrier, Frank Gehry, Gregor Mendel, Guggenheim Bilbao, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, low cost airline, messenger bag, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, Peter Eisenman, place-making, Prenzlauer Berg, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rubik’s Cube, Skype, trade route, urban renewal, white picket fence, young professional

The move – backed by the Swiss Peoples Party (SVP) but opposed by the government – was ultimately accepted in the end by the Swiss government and implemented into law. In 2010, voters also approved a referendum initiative to deport all foreigners who had committed a serious crime. IT ALL HAPPENED IN SWITZERLAND » Albert Einstein came up with his theories of relativity and the famous formula E=MC² in Bern in 1905. » Switzerland gave birth to the World Wide Web at the acclaimed CERN (European Centre for Nuclear Research) institute outside Geneva. » The first acid trip took place in Switzerland. In 1943 chemist Albert Hofmann was conducting tests for a migraine cure in Basel when he accidentally absorbed the lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, compound through his fingertips. » Of the 800 or so films produced by India’s huge movie-making industry each year, more are shot in Switzerland than in any other foreign country.


pages: 1,061 words: 341,217

The Price of Silence: The Duke Lacrosse Scandal by William D. Cohan

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, David Brooks, fixed income, medical malpractice, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, union organizing

He said that as the trial date approached, he would likely ask someone in his office to interview Mangum. He said defense attorneys “seem not to be satisfied with that answer, but it’s the only answer I can give. No matter how many times they ask the question, the answer will be the same. . . . [Albert Einstein] is quoted as having said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. I’m not going to give them a different result because I can’t. Integrity requires that I tell them the truth on this occasion like I have on every other. . . . There is nothing to provide involving the April 11 conversation.”


pages: 976 words: 329,519

The Pursuit of Power: Europe, 1815-1914 by Richard J. Evans

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anton Chekhov, British Empire, clean water, company town, Corn Laws, demographic transition, Edward Jenner, Ernest Rutherford, Etonian, European colonialism, feminist movement, Ford Model T, full employment, gentleman farmer, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Honoré de Balzac, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, imperial preference, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial cluster, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Jacquard loom, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, land bank, land reform, land tenure, Livingstone, I presume, longitudinal study, Louis Blériot, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, New Urbanism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pneumatic tube, profit motive, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, safety bicycle, Scaled Composites, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, source of truth, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, trade route, University of East Anglia, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, vertical integration

Motion pictures, first developed in the 1880s, could speed up time, freeze it, jump over minutes, hours, days or even longer periods in their narratives; even more startlingly, as the brothers Louis (1864–1948) and Auguste Lumière (1862–1954) showed in 1895, they could reverse time by the simple device of projecting a film backwards, so that divers appeared to leap out of the water to land on the diving board, broken eggs put themselves back together in their shells, and shards of glass flew up onto a table and reassembled themselves into the unblemished form of a wineglass. Time began to seem malleable, changeable, uncertain, a development represented in science by the theory of relativity, first announced to the scientific world by Albert Einstein (1879–1955) in 1905. The papers in which he developed his theory were highly specialized but their implications were not: time and space were relative to the observer, so that moving clocks might tick more slowly than an observer’s stationary clock, and if two observers were in relative motion, the same two events could be simultaneous for one but not for the other.


pages: 1,150 words: 338,839

The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made by Walter Isaacson, Evan Thomas

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, Charles Lindbergh, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cuban missile crisis, George Santayana, guns versus butter model, kremlinology, land reform, liberal world order, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, old-boy network, Ronald Reagan, Steve Jobs, Suez crisis 1956, Ted Sorensen, uranium enrichment, éminence grise

Senator Bridges of New Hampshire announced that he would “go after” Acheson. Wherry insisted that Acheson “must go” as a “bad security risk.” China was lost, and Russia had the bomb. Six days after Acheson’s press conference, Truman announced that the U.S. would develop a bigger bomb, the Super bomb. Albert Einstein went on television to say that “annihilation of any life on Earth has been brought within the range of possibilities. . . . General annihilation beckons.” Two days later, Klaus Fuchs, a scientist who had worked on the Manhattan Project, was arrested for giving the secret of the atomic bomb to the Soviets.


pages: 2,054 words: 359,149

The Art of Software Security Assessment: Identifying and Preventing Software Vulnerabilities by Justin Schuh

address space layout randomization, Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, bash_history, business logic, business process, database schema, Debian, defense in depth, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, information retrieval, information security, iterative process, Ken Thompson, loose coupling, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Multics, MVC pattern, off-by-one error, operational security, OSI model, RFC: Request For Comment, slashdot, SQL injection, web application

Therefore, refer back to this material as needed when conducting application assessments. After all, even the best code auditor can easily miss subtle errors that could result in severe vulnerabilities. Chapter 7. Program Building Blocks “The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.” Albert Einstein Introduction When reviewing applications, certain constructs tend to appear over and over again. These recurring patterns are the natural result of programmers worldwide solving similar small technical problems as they develop applications. These small problems are often a result of the application’s problem-domain, such as needing a particular data structure or algorithm for the quick retrieval or sorting of a certain type of data element.


pages: 1,590 words: 353,834

God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican by Gerald Posner

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, book value, Bretton Woods, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, centre right, credit crunch, disinformation, dividend-yielding stocks, European colonialism, forensic accounting, God and Mammon, Index librorum prohibitorum, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, liberation theology, low interest rates, medical malpractice, Murano, Venice glass, offshore financial centre, oil shock, operation paperclip, power law, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

John Cornwell, The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession (New York: Basic Books, 2014). 19 M. De Bujanda and Marcella Richter, ed., Index librorum prohibitorum: 1600–1966, Vol. XI (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2002). 20 Chadwick, A History of the Popes, 356. 21 In a 1907 decree, Pius branded the burgeoning “modernist movement”—represented in part by the works of Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, and Friedrich Nietzsche—as heresy. Intellectuals universally castigated Pius’s thinking as a giant backward step for the church. 22 Archivo Segreto Vaticano, SdS, Spoglio di Pio X, fasc. 1, letter of April 2, 1905; fasc. 10, three receipts for a total of 500,000 lire, dated August 14, 1907, and September 28, 1914; see Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy. 23 Riccards, Vicars of Christ, 67. 24 Pius concentrated on Catholics in Poland, then under Russian control.


pages: 1,157 words: 379,558

Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris by Richard Kluger

air freight, Albert Einstein, book value, California gold rush, cognitive dissonance, confounding variable, corporate raider, desegregation, disinformation, double entry bookkeeping, family office, feminist movement, full employment, ghettoisation, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, junk bonds, medical malpractice, Mikhail Gorbachev, plutocrats, power law, publication bias, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, stock buybacks, The Chicago School, the scientific method, Torches of Freedom, trade route, transaction costs, traveling salesman, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, War on Poverty

He was an odd choice for a President who had been a paragon of passivity in addressing the social ills and health needs of the nation. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Amherst, with a medical degree from Harvard and a law degree from the University of Chicago, the bearded, brilliant Kessler had served six years as hospital administrator at New York’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine before being tapped for the top FDA post. Reputedly instilled with high scruples and a sincerity that political infighting was sure to challenge, Kessler inherited an understaffed and underfunded agency charged with regulating products that registered a trillion dollars in sales annually.


Eastern USA by Lonely Planet

1960s counterculture, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, Bretton Woods, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Donald Trump, East Village, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentleman farmer, gentrification, glass ceiling, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute cuisine, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information trail, interchangeable parts, jitney, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine readable, Mason jar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, Quicken Loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, the built environment, the High Line, the payments system, three-martini lunch, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Philosophical Hall ( 215-440-3400; www.apsmuseum.org; 104 S 5th St; admission $1; 10am-4pm Thu-Sun), south of Old City Hall, is the headquarters of the American Philosophical Society, founded in 1743 by Benjamin Franklin. Past members have included Thomas Jefferson, Marie Curie, Thomas Edison, Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein. Second Bank of the US (Chestnut St, btwn 4th & 5th Sts), modeled after the Greek Parthenon, is an 1824 marble-faced Greek Revival masterpiece that was home to the world’s most powerful financial institution until President Andrew Jackson dissolved its charter in 1836. The building then became the Philadelphia Customs House until 1935, when it became a museum.


Melody Beattie 4 Title Bundle: Codependent No More and 3 Other Best Sellers by Melody Beattie: A Collection of Four Melody Beattie Best Sellers by Melody Beattie

Albert Einstein, call centre, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, fear of failure, out of africa, Own Your Own Home, Ralph Waldo Emerson

Trust and be grateful. I am right here. Soon you will see, and know.” Today, I will remember that God has not abandoned me. I can trust that God is leading, guiding, directing, and planning in love each detail of my life. God as We Understand God: July 13 God is subtle, but he is not malicious. —Albert Einstein Recovery is an intensely spiritual process that asks us to grow in our understanding of God. Our understanding may have been shaped by early religious experiences or the beliefs of those around us. We may wonder if God is as shaming and frightening as people can be. We may feel as victimized or abandoned by God as we have by people from our past.


Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health by Laurie Garrett

accounting loophole / creative accounting, airport security, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, biofilm, clean water, collective bargaining, contact tracing, desegregation, discovery of DNA, discovery of penicillin, disinformation, Drosophila, employer provided health coverage, Fall of the Berlin Wall, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, Gregor Mendel, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, Induced demand, John Snow's cholera map, Jones Act, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, means of production, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mouse model, Nelson Mandela, new economy, nuclear winter, Oklahoma City bombing, phenotype, profit motive, Project Plowshare, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, stem cell, the scientific method, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

But it prompted emergence of imipenem-resistant Pseudomonas aueriginosa, a pneumonia-causing organism. “So the problem just shifted from one microbe population to another,” Rahal sadly concluded. With cleanup so tough, and new superbugs emerging in the best hospitals in America, “I suppose that we’re back in the preantibiotic era now,” said Dr. Matthew Scharff of Albert Einstein Medical School in the Bronx. Speaking before a 1993 gathering of the Irvington Trust, an investment banking group that funded medical research, Scharff said patients who underwent cancer chemotherapy, transplant surgery, radiation, or who had AIDS commonly died of what, for other people, were fairly benign fungal or bacterial infections, even though they received high intravenous doses of antibiotics.


From Peoples into Nations by John Connelly

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, bank run, Berlin Wall, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, land tenure, liberal capitalism, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, oil shock, old-boy network, open borders, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peace of Westphalia, profit motive, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, the built environment, The Chicago School, trade liberalization, Transnistria, union organizing, upwardly mobile, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce

On the eve of World War II, 161 of 165 Yugoslav generals were Serbs.55 Despite Alexander’s pretenses of bringing order to the country, prominent Croat politicians could not be certain of their personal safety under his dictatorship. Some languished in prison, but several also fell victim to assassination. In 1931 the eminent Croatian historian Milan Šufflay was gunned down on the streets of Zagreb, an event so egregious as to catch attention even in the United States. (Albert Einstein and novelist Heinrich Mann drew up a letter of protest.) The killers were known police agents and were never brought to trial.56 In September 1931, the king issued a new constitution featuring universal manhood suffrage, yet instead of a secret ballot, it instituted a voice vote, permitting authorities to identify opponents precisely.


The Rough Guide to England by Rough Guides

active transport: walking or cycling, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, bike sharing, Bletchley Park, Bob Geldof, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, car-free, Columbine, company town, congestion charging, Corn Laws, country house hotel, Crossrail, deindustrialization, Downton Abbey, Edmond Halley, Etonian, food miles, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, housing crisis, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Neil Kinnock, offshore financial centre, period drama, plutocrats, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, University of East Anglia, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl

A wide stone staircase in the southeast corner beneath a stupendous fan-vaulted ceiling leads up to the Hall, the grandest refectory in Oxford, with its fanciful hammer-beam roof and a set of stern portraits of past scholars by a roll call of famous artists, including Reynolds, Gainsborough and Millais. As well as Albert Einstein, William Gladstone and no fewer than twelve other British prime ministers were educated here. Oxford’s colleges So where, exactly, is Oxford University? Everywhere – and nowhere. The university itself is nothing more than an administrative body, setting examinations and awarding degrees.


pages: 623 words: 448,848

Food Allergy: Adverse Reactions to Foods and Food Additives by Dean D. Metcalfe

active measures, Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, bioinformatics, classic study, confounding variable, epigenetics, Helicobacter pylori, hygiene hypothesis, impulse control, life extension, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, mouse model, pattern recognition, phenotype, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, selection bias, statistical model, stem cell, twin studies, two and twenty

Franciosi, MD, MS Department of Medicine, Allergy, and Immunology University of Wisconsin-Madison Madison, Wisconsin, USA Fellow-Physician The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia Division of Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA André Cartier, MD Service de Pneumologie Hôpital du Sacré-Coeur de Montréal Montréal, Québec, Canada Soheil Chegini, MD Assistant Professor of Medicine & Pediatrics Penn State Hershey Medical Center Hershey, Pennsylvania, USA Leslie G. Cleland, MD, FRACP Rheumatology Unit Royal Adelaide Hospital Adelaide, Australia Lourdes B. de Asis, MD, MPH Assistant Clinical Professor Department of Medicine Division of Allergy and Immunology Albert Einstein College of Medicine Bronx, New York, USA Raymond C. Dobert, PhD Lead, Oilseeds Regulatory Affairs Monsanto St. Louis, Missouri, USA George Du Toit, PhD Consultant in Paediatric Allergy Evelina Children’s Hospital Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust Kings College London London, UK Philippe A.


England by David Else

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, colonial rule, Columbine, company town, congestion charging, country house hotel, Crossrail, David Attenborough, David Brooks, Edward Jenner, Etonian, food miles, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, out of africa, period drama, place-making, retail therapy, sceptred isle, Skype, Sloane Ranger, South of Market, San Francisco, Stephen Hawking, the market place, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, unbiased observer, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Winter of Discontent

The magnificent buildings, illustrious history and latter-day fame as a location for the Harry Potter films have tourists coming in droves. The college was founded in 1525 by Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, who suppressed 22 monasteries to acquire the funds for his lavish building project. Over the years numerous luminaries have been educated here including Albert Einstein, philosopher John Locke, poet WH Auden, Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) and 13 British prime ministers. The main entrance is below imposing Tom Tower, the upper part of which was designed by former student Sir Christopher Wren. Great Tom, the 7-ton tower bell, still chimes 101 times each evening at 9.05pm (Oxford is five minutes west of Greenwich), to sound the curfew imposed on the original 101 students.


pages: 3,292 words: 537,795

Lonely Planet China (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, Shawn Low

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, bike sharing, birth tourism , carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, country house hotel, credit crunch, Deng Xiaoping, G4S, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Japanese asset price bubble, Kickstarter, land reform, mass immigration, off-the-grid, Pearl River Delta, place-making, Rubik’s Cube, Shenzhen special economic zone , Skype, South China Sea, special economic zone, sustainable-tourism, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, young professional

The only way to get to Hulun Hu, 39km southeast of Manzhouli, is to hire a taxi. Expect to pay about ¥200 return, including a visit to the nearby Russian Doll Park. Russian Doll ParkPARK (Taowa Guangchang h8am-6pm)F This bizarre park is filled with giant Russian matryoshka dolls, many with portraits of famous historical figures, from Albert Einstein to Michael Jordan. The largest doll is a Russian-style restaurant. Next to the park is a museum of Russian art (admission ¥20). Bus 6 (¥1.50) runs along Liudao Jie past the bus station and the doll park before terminating at the Russian border area, Guomen. 4Sleeping There are a huge number of hotels and guesthouses in Manzhouli.


Europe: A History by Norman Davies

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, centre right, charter city, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, Corn Laws, cuban missile crisis, Defenestration of Prague, discovery of DNA, disinformation, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, equal pay for equal work, Eratosthenes, Etonian, European colonialism, experimental economics, financial independence, finite state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, gentleman farmer, global village, Gregor Mendel, Honoré de Balzac, Index librorum prohibitorum, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, land reform, liberation theology, long peace, Louis Blériot, Louis Daguerre, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Murano, Venice glass, music of the spheres, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, Peace of Westphalia, Plato's cave, popular capitalism, Potemkin village, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, road to serfdom, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Transnistria, urban planning, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois

Born at Ulm and raised in Munich, the refugee student hated the regimentation of German schooling. He disliked his Catholic primary school, and fled his Gymnasium early. He felt very insecure after his family moved to Milan. Like many young ex-Jews, he was anti-religious, pacifist, and attracted by radical socialism. His one talent was with mathematics. Finally admitted to the ETH, Albert Einstein (1879–1955) cut the lectures but conducted electrodynamic experiments of his own in the laboratories. He was friendly with Friedrich Adler, who later assassinated the Austrian Prime Minister in Vienna. When employed at the Swiss patent office in Berne in 1901–5, he continued to puzzle over the theoretical implications of work by Maxwell, Hertz, and Mach.


Great Britain by David Else, Fionn Davenport

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, Beeching cuts, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, Columbine, congestion charging, country house hotel, credit crunch, Crossrail, David Attenborough, Etonian, food miles, gentrification, glass ceiling, global village, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, land reform, Livingstone, I presume, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, mega-rich, negative equity, new economy, North Ronaldsay sheep, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, period drama, place-making, retail therapy, Skype, Sloane Ranger, South of Market, San Francisco, Stephen Hawking, the market place, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Winter of Discontent

The magnificent buildings, illustrious history and latter-day fame as a location for the Harry Potter films have tourists coming in droves. The college was founded in 1525 by Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, who suppressed 22 monasteries to acquire the funds for his lavish building project. Over the years numerous luminaries have been educated here including Albert Einstein, philosopher John Locke, poet WH Auden, Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) and 13 British prime ministers. The main entrance is below imposing Tom Tower, the upper part of which was designed by former student Sir Christopher Wren. Great Tom, the 7-ton tower bell, still chimes 101 times each evening at 9.05pm (Oxford is five minutes west of Greenwich), to sound the curfew imposed on the original 101 students.


pages: 1,800 words: 596,972

The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East by Robert Fisk

Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boycotts of Israel, bread and circuses, British Empire, call centre, clean water, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, dual-use technology, Farzad Bazoft, friendly fire, Howard Zinn, IFF: identification friend or foe, invisible hand, Islamic Golden Age, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, music of the spheres, no-fly zone, Oklahoma City bombing, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, Thomas L Friedman, Timothy McVeigh, Transnistria, unemployed young men, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

The pursuit of peace was “relentless” (Shamir), the “shackles of hatred” had to disappear (Abu Jaber), there was “light at the end of the tunnel” (Abdul Shafi), a “new dawn” (Syrian foreign minister Farouk al-Sharaa) that would emerge from “a long night of darkness” (Abu Jaber again). The quotations were almost a relief: the Koran and Albert Einstein, the Prophet Isaiah and Yassir Arafat, Mark Twain, the Jewish philosopher Yehuda Halevy and the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish were all recited with approval by the appropriate delegates. The creator of Huckleberry Finn was enlisted by Shamir to prove that Palestine was a wilderness before Israel’s existence, Darwish’s poetry to explain why a Palestinian homeland could no longer be represented by a refugee’s suitcase.


The power broker : Robert Moses and the fall of New York by Caro, Robert A

Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, bank run, benefit corporation, British Empire, card file, centre right, East Village, Ford Model T, friendly fire, ghettoisation, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, land reform, Lewis Mumford, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, Right to Buy, scientific management, Southern State Parkway, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

New Yorkers knew who was primarily responsible for the boon they had been given. It would have been difficult for them not to know. For the press was turning Robert Moses into a hero. The lionization was on a scale as vast as the achievement. The Twenties was an age for heroes, of course, and if 1927 was Lindbergh's year in the New York press, 1928 was Moses'. Albert Einstein, who announced his theory of relativity in that year, was all but ignored in the city's thirteen daily newspapers, but New York's reporters strove for new adjectives to describe the park builder, one writer concentrating on his physical attributes ("tall, dark, muscular and zealous"), another on the mental ("a powerful and nervous mind"), a third on the moral ("fearless," "courageous") to describe "Rhodes Scholar" Robert A.