Download or read book 106 Impossible Things Before Breakfast written by Robert Quine and published by Adams Media. This book was released on 2010-11-14 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alice laughed. 'One can't believe impossible things.' 'I dare say you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen... 'Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.' ~Lewis Carroll, Alice Through the Looking-Glass Could there be a knife that never dulls? A gun with no moving parts? A broken clock that tells time? Here, Dr. Michael Laufer and John Nolan reply, "Of course!" Through these conundrums, they show how to unleash the creative energies of the brain to solve even the knottiest enigmas. For instance, one could: Reinterpret the problem. Change the rules. Change the solution. Whether it's showering without water, driving a car without an engine, or using a computer without electricity, these are high-level challenges for breakout thinking. With this book, you'll stretch your minds and be primed to solve the next "impossible" problem before lunchtime.

Download or read book Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast The Evolutionary Origins of Belief written by Lewis Wolpert and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2008-07-17 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Marvelously funny and provocative."—Publishers Weekly Why do 70 percent of Americans believe in angels, while others are convinced that they were abducted by aliens? What makes people believe in improbable things when all the evidence points to the contrary? And don't almost all of us, at some time or another, engage in magical thinking?In Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast, evolutionary biologist Lewis Wolpert delves into the important and timely debate over the nature of belief, looking at its psychological foundations to discover just what evolutionary purpose it could serve. Wolpert takes us through all that science can tell us about the beliefs we feel are instinctive. He deftly explores different types of belief—those of children, of the religious, and of those suffering from psychiatric disorders—and he asks whether it is possible to live without belief, or whether it is a necessary component of a functioning society.

Download or read book Evolving Brains Emerging Gods written by E. Fuller Torrey and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-05 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religions and mythologies from around the world teach that God or gods created humans. Atheist, humanist, and materialist critics, meanwhile, have attempted to turn theology on its head, claiming that religion is a human invention. In this book, E. Fuller Torrey draws on cutting-edge neuroscience research to propose a startling answer to the ultimate question. Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods locates the origin of gods within the human brain, arguing that religious belief is a by-product of evolution. Based on an idea originally proposed by Charles Darwin, Torrey marshals evidence that the emergence of gods was an incidental consequence of several evolutionary factors. Using data ranging from ancient skulls and artifacts to brain imaging, primatology, and child development studies, this book traces how new cognitive abilities gave rise to new behaviors. For instance, autobiographical memory, the ability to project ourselves backward and forward in time, gave Homo sapiens a competitive advantage. However, it also led to comprehension of mortality, spurring belief in an alternative to death. Torrey details the neurobiological sequence that explains why the gods appeared when they did, connecting archaeological findings including clothing, art, farming, and urbanization to cognitive developments. This book does not dismiss belief but rather presents religious belief as an inevitable outcome of brain evolution. Providing clear and accessible explanations of evolutionary neuroscience, Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods will shed new light on the mechanics of our deepest mysteries.

Download or read book In Search of Lost Time written by D York and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2019-04-26 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Do you know that black holes can affect time? that Stonehenge is a giant calendar? that the Oracle Bones of the North China Plain predict the phases of the moon? that the Pyramids are giant compasses? how Jonathan Swift knew that Mars had two moons when he wrote Gulliver's Travels? that the effects of black holes are described i

Download or read book Justice as Integrity written by David Fagelson and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2007-06-01 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Do any moral values underlie the foundations of law and society in America? In Justice as Integrity, David Fagelson argues that morality is indeed a part of the idea of law. Examining controversies of speech and privacy, he does not ignore the conservative communitarian streak in America, but argues that liberal tolerance best fits the social meanings of American political morality. While tolerance plays a critical role, different social practices yield different conceptions of tolerance. Judges must interpret any public text to develop coherent narratives that best explain the use of force in their jurisdiction. In America, Fagelson argues, liberal tolerance is the sovereign principle that the Supreme Court uses as a prism when interpreting social institutions like marriage, speech, and even death, to make them more consistent with personal autonomy.

Download or read book The Devil s Delusion written by David Berlinski and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2009-08-26 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From a bestselling author, an “incendiary and uproarious” assault on the pretensions of scientific atheists (National Review) Militant atheism is on the rise. Prominent thinkers including Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens have published best-selling books denigrating religious belief. And these authors are merely the leading edge of a larger movement that includes much of the scientific community. In response, mathematician David Berlinski, himself a secular Jew, delivers a biting defense of religious thought. The Devil's Delusion is a brilliant, incisive, and funny book that explores the limits of science and the pretensions of those who insist it is the ultimate touchstone for understanding our world.

Download or read book Regular Expression Puzzles and AI Coding Assistants written by Mertz David and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2023-04-11 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Learn how AI-assisted coding using ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot can dramatically increase your productivity (and fun) writing regular expressions and other programs. Regular Expression Puzzles and AI Coding Assistants is the story of two competitors. On one side is David Mertz, an expert programmer and the author of the Web's most popular Regex tutorial. On the other are the AI powerhouse coding assistants, GitHub Copilot and OpenAI ChatGPT. Here's how the contest works: David invents 24 Regex problems he calls puzzles and shows you how to tackle each one. When he's done, he has Copilot and ChatGPT work the same puzzles. What they produce intrigues him. Which side is likelier to get it right? Which will write simple and elegant code? Which makes smarter use of lesser known Regex library features? Read the book to find out. David also offers AI best practices, showing how smart prompts return better results. By the end, you'll be a master at solving your own Regex puzzles, whether you use AI or not. About the technology Groundbreaking large language model research from OpenAI, Google, Amazon, and others have transformed expectations of machine-generated software. But how do these AI assistants, like ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot, measure up against regular expressions—a workhorse technology for developers used to describe, find, and manipulate patterns in text. Regular expressions are compact, complex, and subtle. Will AI assistants handle the challenge? About the book Regular Expression Puzzles and AI Coding Assistants is the perfect starting point for programmers of any experience level who want to understand the capabilities—and the limitations—of these exciting new tools. Author David Mertz presents 24 challenging regex puzzles, their traditional human-made solutions, and the fascinating answers given by popular AI assistants. Alongside these eye-opening puzzles you’ll learn how to write prompts, integrate AI-generated coding suggestions, and interact with the assistant to get the results you want. By the end of the book, you'll have a clear understanding of where AI assistants can reliably write code for you and where you’ll still need a human touch. Plus, you’ll learn a lot about regular expressions! About the reader Code examples use simple Python and Regular Expressions. No experience with AI coding tools required. About the author David Mertz is the founder of KDM Training and an acclaimed contributor to the Python community. He is also the author of The Puzzling Quirks of Regular Expressions, Cleaning Data for Effective Data Science: Doing the Other 80% of the Work, and other books. Table of Contents 1 The map and the territory 2 Quantifiers and special sub-patterns 3 Pitfalls and sand in the gears 4 Creating functions using regex 5 Easy, difficult, and impossible tasks 6 Conclusions Appendix A: Learning to use regular expressions

Download or read book Writing Academic Texts Differently written by Nina Lykke and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-06-27 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited volume combines cutting-edge research on feminist and intersectional writing methodologies with explorations of links between academic and creative writing practices. Contributors discuss what it means for academic writing processes to explore intersectional in-between spaces between monolithic identity markers and power differentials such as gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality and nationality. How does such a frame change academic writing? How does it make it pertinent to explore new synergies between academic and creative writing? In answer to these questions, the book offers theories, methodologies, political and ethical considerations, as well as reflections on writing strategies. Suggestions for writing exercises, developed against the background of the contributors' individual and joint teaching practices, will inspire readers to engage in alternative writing practices themselves.

Download or read book Literary Allusion in Harry Potter written by Beatrice Groves and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-06-14 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literary Allusion in Harry Potter builds on the world-wide enthusiasm for J. K. Rowling’s series in order to introduce its readers to some of the great works of literature on which Rowling draws. Harry Potter’s narrative techniques are rooted in the western literary tradition and its allusiveness provides insight into Rowling’s fictional world. Each chapter of Literary Allusion in Harry Potter consists of an in-depth discussion of the intersection between Harry Potter and a canonical literary work, such as the plays of Shakespeare, the poetry of Homer, Ovid, the Gawain-poet, Chaucer, Milton and Tennyson, and the novels of Austen, Hardy and Dickens. This approach aims to transform the reader’s understanding of Rowling’s literary achievement as well as to encourage the discovery of works with which they may be less familiar. The aim of this book is to delight Potter fans with a new perspective on their favourite books while harnessing that enthusiasm to increase their wider appreciation of literature.

Download or read book Religious Beliefs Evolutionary Psychiatry and Mental Health in America written by Kevin J. Flannelly and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-04-08 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a new perspective on the association between religious beliefs and mental health. The book is divided into five parts, the first of which traces the development of theories of organic evolution in the cultural and religious context before Charles Darwin. Part II describes the major evolutionary theories that Darwin proposed in his three books on evolution, and the religious, sociological, and scientific reactions to his theories. Part III introduces the reader to the concept of evolutionary psychiatry. It discusses how different regions of the brain evolved over time, and explains that certain brain regions evolved to protect us from danger by assessing threats of harm in the environment, including other humans. Specifically, this part describes: how psychiatric symptoms that are commonly experienced by normal individuals during their everyday lives are the product of brain mechanisms that evolved to protect us from harm; the prevalence rate of psychiatric symptoms in the U.S. general population; how religious and other beliefs influence the brain mechanisms that underlie psychiatric symptoms; and the brain regions that are involved in different psychiatric disorders. Part IV presents the findings of U.S. studies demonstrating that positive beliefs about God and life-after-death, and belief in meaning-in-life and divine forgiveness have salutary associations with mental health, whereas negative beliefs about God and life-after-death, belief in the Devil and human evil, and doubts about one’s religious beliefs have pernicious associations with mental health. The last part of the book summarizes each section and recommends research on the brain mechanism underlying psychiatric symptoms, and the relationships among these brain mechanisms, religious beliefs, and mental health in the context of ETAS Theory.

Download or read book Financial Planning Using Excel written by Sue Nugus and published by Butterworth-Heinemann. This book was released on 2009-02-16 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book covers all aspects of budget preparation, from designing and creating a budgetary control system, consolidating data and working with spreadsheets. Now fully updated to include the latest version of Excel, Excel 2007 and for easy budgeting. The book shows how things are done in Excel 2003 and Excel 2007 to ease transition from the previous version to the new version. Now in full colour throughout to aid quick understanding through numerous color screen shots. For those who use Excel on a daily basis in budget planning, this book is a must. It contains a wealth of practical examples, tips, new techniques all designed to help quickly exploit and master Excel to its full advantage and therefore use spreadsheets for more effective management accounting in your firm. covers migration from Excel 2003 to Excel 2007 showing how to do it in both versions new edition now in full colour through out to aid quick understanding practical examples, tips and techniques - exploit Excel 2007 for effective management accounting

Download or read book The Ultimate Book of Saturday Science written by Neil A. Downie and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2012-05-13 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The best backyard experiments for hands-on science learning The Ultimate Book of Saturday Science is Neil Downie's biggest and most astounding compendium yet of science experiments you can do in your own kitchen or backyard using common household items. It may be the only book that encourages hands-on science learning through the use of high-velocity, air-driven carrots. Downie, the undisputed maestro of Saturday science, here reveals important principles in physics, engineering, and chemistry through such marvels as the Helevator—a contraption that's half helicopter, half elevator—and the Rocket Railroad, which pumps propellant up from its own track. The Riddle of the Sands demonstrates why some granular materials form steep cones when poured while others collapse in an avalanche. The Sunbeam Exploder creates a combustible delivery system out of sunlight, while the Red Hot Memory experiment shows you how to store data as heat. Want to learn to tell time using a knife and some butter? There's a whole section devoted to exotic clocks and oscillators that teaches you how. The Ultimate Book of Saturday Science features more than seventy fun and astonishing experiments that range in difficulty from simple to more challenging. All of them are original, and all are guaranteed to work. Downie provides instructions for each one and explains the underlying science, and also presents experimental variations that readers will want to try.

Download or read book Out of the Burning House written by Sandy Hobbs and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2011-05-25 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This unique collaboration, between a Marxist historian and behaviourist psychologist, is a vivid picture of the cultural milieu they experienced at Aberdeen University, and of social forces often overlooked in histories of the time: Scientific Humanism, The New Left, and precursors of the Women’s Liberation Movement. As students together in the MacMillan Era, they shared an attachment to socialist, secular and scientific values. Like Brecht, they saw those unwilling to commit to revolutionary socialism as like people in a burning house asking if it is raining outside before they agree to escape. They followed different paths in their subsequent lives: one became an historian and long-time member of the Communist Party; the other, although a radical behaviourist, unusually focussed on contemporary folklore and child labour.

Download or read book Discourses We Live By Narratives of Educational and Social Endeavour written by Hazel R. Wright and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2020-07-03 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What are the influences that govern how people view their worlds? What are the embedded values and practices that underpin the ways people think and act? Discourses We Live By approaches these questions through narrative research, in a process that uses words, images, activities or artefacts to ask people – either individually or collectively within social groupings – to examine, discuss, portray or otherwise make public their place in the world, their sense of belonging to (and identity within) the physical and cultural space they inhabit. This book is a rich and multifaceted collection of twenty-eight chapters that use varied lenses to examine the discourses that shape people’s lives. The contributors are themselves from many backgrounds – different academic disciplines within the humanities and social sciences, diverse professional practices and a range of countries and cultures. They represent a broad spectrum of age, status and outlook, and variously apply their research methods – but share a common interest in people, their lives, thoughts and actions. Gathering such eclectic experiences as those of student-teachers in Kenya, a released prisoner in Denmark, academics in Colombia, a group of migrants learning English, and gambling addiction support-workers in Italy, alongside more mainstream educational themes, the book presents a fascinating array of insights. Discourses We Live By will be essential reading for adult educators and practitioners, those involved with educational and professional practice, narrative researchers, and many sociologists. It will appeal to all who want to know how narratives shape the way we live and the way we talk about our lives.

Download or read book Dave Sim written by Eric Hoffman and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2013-03-18 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interviews with the creator of Cerebus

Download or read book Randi s Prize written by Robert McLuhan and published by Troubador Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2010 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: James ‘The Amazing’ Randi is a stage magician who says he has a million dollars for anyone who can convince him they have psychic powers. No one has even come close to winning, proof, say sceptical scientists, that there is no such thing as ‘the paranormal’. But are they right? In this illuminating and often provocative analysis, Robert McLuhan examines the influence of Randi and other debunking sceptics in shaping scientific opinion about such things as telepathy, psychics, ghosts and near-death experiences. He points out that scientific researchers who investigate these things at first hand overwhelmingly consider them to be genuinely anomalous. But this has shocking implications, for science, for society and for even perhaps for ourselves as individuals. Hence the sceptics’ insistence that they should rather be attributed to fraud, imagination and wishful thinking. However, this extraordinary and little understood aspect of consciousness has much to tell us about the human situation, McLuhan suggests. And at a time when militants are polarising the debate about religion, its mystical, spiritual element offers an optimistic and enlightened way forward. Randi’s Prize is aimed at anyone interested in spirituality or those curious to know the truth about paranormal claims. It’s an intelligent and readable analysis of scientific research into the paranormal which, uniquely, also closely examines the arguments of well-known sceptics.

Download or read book The Edge of Reason written by Alex Bentley and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2008-11-22 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Should scientists challenge religious beliefs in modern society? This book gives voice to those scientist and theologians whose experience holds direct relevance in the confrontational science and religion debate.