Download or read book The Biology of Luck written by Jacob Appel and published by Elephant Rock Productions, Inc.. This book was released on 2013-10-01 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Odd-job queen Starshine Hart is about to go on somebody else’s perfect date. At 29, the usually carefree Starshine has realized that it is easier to start sleeping with a man than to stop. Her lovers include one of the last underground members of the Weathermen and the dilettante heir to a lawn chair magnate. Both men have staked their romantic future on her. Her only respite is her impending dinner with the nonthreatening but unattractive tour guide Larry Bloom. But Larry, too, has a stake in her future. He has written a book about their impending dinner in which he fantasizes about Starshine’s life on the day he wins her heart. Juxtaposing moments from Larry’s guided tour of New York City on the June day of his “dream date” with excerpts from the novel in which he imagines Starshine’s concurrent escapades, this inventive structure weaves a highly imaginative love story across all five boroughs. Provocative, funny, and keenly observed, an imagined pilgrimage through the underbelly of Gotham becomes a bold new voice in contemporary American fiction.
Download or read book The Serendipity Mindset written by Christian Busch and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-06-09 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Good luck isn’t just chance—it can be learned and leveraged—and The Serendipity Mindset explains how you can use serendipity to make life better at work, at home—everywhere. Many of us believe that the great turning points and opportunities in our lives happen by chance, that they’re out of our control. Often we think that successful people—and successful companies and organizations—are simply luckier than the rest of us. Good fortune—serendipity—just seems to happen to them. Is that true? Or are some people better at creating the conditions for coincidences to arise and taking advantage of them when they do? How can we connect the dots of seemingly random events to improve our lives? In The Serendipity Mindset, Christian Busch explains that serendipity isn’t about luck in the sense of simple randomness. It’s about seeing links that others don’t, combining these observations in unexpected and strategic ways, and learning how to detect the moments when apparently random or unconnected ideas merge to form new opportunities. Busch explores serendipity from a rational and scientific perspective and argues that there are identifiable approaches we can use to foster the conditions to let serendipity grow. Drawing from biology, chemistry, management, and information systems, and using examples of people from all walks of life, Busch illustrates how serendipity works and explains how we can train our own serendipity muscle and use it to turn the unexpected into opportunity. Once we understand serendipity, Busch says, we become curators of it, and luck becomes something that no longer just happens to us—it becomes a force that we can grasp, shape, and hone. Full of exciting ideas and strategies, The Serendipity Mindset offers a clear blueprint for how we can cultivate serendipity to increase innovation, influence, and opportunity in every aspect of our lives.
Download or read book Success and Luck written by Robert H. Frank and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-26 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From New York Times bestselling author and economics columnist Robert Frank, a compelling book that explains why the rich underestimate the importance of luck in their success, why that hurts everyone, and what we can do about it How important is luck in economic success? No question more reliably divides conservatives from liberals. As conservatives correctly observe, people who amass great fortunes are almost always talented and hardworking. But liberals are also correct to note that countless others have those same qualities yet never earn much. In recent years, social scientists have discovered that chance plays a much larger role in important life outcomes than most people imagine. In Success and Luck, bestselling author and New York Times economics columnist Robert Frank explores the surprising implications of those findings to show why the rich underestimate the importance of luck in success—and why that hurts everyone, even the wealthy. Frank describes how, in a world increasingly dominated by winner-take-all markets, chance opportunities and trivial initial advantages often translate into much larger ones—and enormous income differences—over time; how false beliefs about luck persist, despite compelling evidence against them; and how myths about personal success and luck shape individual and political choices in harmful ways. But, Frank argues, we could decrease the inequality driven by sheer luck by adopting simple, unintrusive policies that would free up trillions of dollars each year—more than enough to fix our crumbling infrastructure, expand healthcare coverage, fight global warming, and reduce poverty, all without requiring painful sacrifices from anyone. If this sounds implausible, you'll be surprised to discover that the solution requires only a few, noncontroversial steps. Compellingly readable, Success and Luck shows how a more accurate understanding of the role of chance in life could lead to better, richer, and fairer economies and societies.
Download or read book My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business written by Dick Van Dyke and published by Crown. This book was released on 2012-05-15 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A heartfelt memoir from one of Hollywood's greatest icons Dick Van Dyke, indisputably one of the greats of the golden age of television, is admired and beloved by audiences the world over for his beaming smile, his physical dexterity, his impeccable comic timing, his ridiculous stunts, and his unforgettable screen roles. His trailblazing television program, The Dick Van Dyke Show (produced by Carl Reiner, who has written the foreword to this memoir), was one of the most popular sitcoms of the 1960s and introduced another major television star, Mary Tyler Moore. But Dick Van Dyke was also an enormously engaging movie star whose films, including Mary Poppins and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, have been discovered by a new generation of fans and are as beloved today as they were when they first appeared. A colorful, loving, richly detailed look at the decades of a multilayered life, My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business, will enthrall every generation of reader, from baby-boomers who recall when Rob Petrie became a household name, to all those still enchanted by Bert’s “Chim Chim Cher-ee.” This is a lively, heartwarming memoir of a performer who still thinks of himself as a “simple song-and-dance man,” but who is, in every sense of the word, a classic entertainer.
Download or read book Lucky T written by Kate Brian and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-05-11 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Some girls have all the luck. So far, Carrie Fitzgerald's sixteen years have been pretty sweet. Straight A's, an adorable boyfriend, a starting position on the varsity basketball team... But Carrie's luck is about to, well, change. Suddenly, her boyfriend dumps her (to "hang out with his friends"!), she and her best friend have a massive blowout, and she gets a D on a biology test. Carrie knows what's wrong -- her mom accidentally donated her lucky T-shirt to Help India. That one adorable, perfect T-shirt was the source of all her good fortune. So Carrie does what any girl would do: She's going to India. Cross your fingers and hope that Carries finds adventure, love, and maybe just a little good luck along the way....
Download or read book A Series of Fortunate Events written by Sean B. Carroll and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Fascinating and exhilarating—Sean B. Carroll at his very best."—Bill Bryson, author of The Body: A Guide for Occupants From acclaimed writer and biologist Sean B. Carroll, a rollicking, awe-inspiring story of the surprising power of chance in our lives and the world Why is the world the way it is? How did we get here? Does everything happen for a reason or are some things left to chance? Philosophers and theologians have pondered these questions for millennia, but startling scientific discoveries over the past half century are revealing that we live in a world driven by chance. A Series of Fortunate Events tells the story of the awesome power of chance and how it is the surprising source of all the beauty and diversity in the living world. Like every other species, we humans are here by accident. But it is shocking just how many things—any of which might never have occurred—had to happen in certain ways for any of us to exist. From an extremely improbable asteroid impact, to the wild gyrations of the Ice Age, to invisible accidents in our parents' gonads, we are all here through an astonishing series of fortunate events. And chance continues to reign every day over the razor-thin line between our life and death. This is a relatively small book about a really big idea. It is also a spirited tale. Drawing inspiration from Monty Python, Kurt Vonnegut, and other great thinkers, and crafted by one of today's most accomplished science storytellers, A Series of Fortunate Events is an irresistibly entertaining and thought-provoking account of one of the most important but least appreciated facts of life.
Download or read book Of Flies Mice and Men written by François Jacob and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Tells the story of how the marvelous discoveries of molecular and developmental biology are transforming our understanding of who we are and where we came from. Jacob scrutinizes the place of the scientist in society". -- Jacket.
Download or read book Amazing Things Are Happening Here written by Jacob Appel and published by Black Lawrence Press. This book was released on 2020 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "I am happy to report that the United States has its own Chekhov in Jacob Appel. His stories illuminate the kind of questions that keep us awake at night-Is this love? How do I know for sure? Is anything certain in life? Whether they deal with adolescence, middle- or old-age, Appel's stories depict with poignancy and quirky humor exactly what is at stake. "The Bigamist's Apprentice" made me laugh out loud and should be required reading for anyone with a relative disabled by dementia. These are some of the best short stories I have read in a long time."
Download or read book Hormones written by Martin Luck and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2014 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Martin Luck explains what hormones are, what they do, where they come from and how they work.
Download or read book Lucky Planet written by David Waltham and published by Icon Books Ltd. This book was released on 2014-05-01 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Science tells us that life elsewhere in the Universe is increasingly likely to be discovered. But in fact the Earth may be a very unusual planet – perhaps the only one like it in the entire visible Universe. In Lucky Planet David Waltham asks why, and comes up with some surprising and unconventional answers. Recent geological, biological, and astronomical discoveries are bringing us closer to understanding whether we might be alone in the Universe, and this book uses these to question the conventional wisdom and suggest, instead, that the Earth may have had ‘four billion years of good weather’ purely by chance. If Earth-like worlds don’t have natural stabilising mechanisms, then intelligent observers such as ourselves will only ever look out onto those rare planets where, like the Earth, all the bad things that could have happened to the climate have fortunately cancelled each other out. So before you prepare to meet the aliens, consider that we are probably alone ...
Download or read book Lucky Science written by Royston M. Roberts and published by Wiley. This book was released on 1994-10-14 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An educational and fun book that encourages children to experiment with science by showing them that discoveries may be possible when they least expect it. Every discovery includes history, biography of the discoverer, scientific explanation and a simple, step-by-step experiment to try on their own. In addition to traditional discoveries such as gravity and photography, it features more modern ones like Velcro and Silly Putty. Covers topics in physics, chemistry, astronomy, biology and archaeology.
Download or read book How Luck Happens written by Janice Kaplan and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-03-06 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Creator and host of the podcast The Gratitude Diaries and New York Times bestselling author Janice Kaplan examines the phenomenon of luck--and discovers the exciting ways you can grab opportunities and make luck for yourself every day. After spending a year researching and experiencing gratitude for The Gratitude Diaries, Janice Kaplan is back to tackle another big, mysterious influence in all our lives: luck. And this time she's joined on her journey by coauthor Dr. Barnaby Marsh, a renowned academic who guides her exploration. Together they uncover the unexpected, little-understood science behind what we call "luck," proving that many seemingly random events are actually under your--and everyone's--control. They examine the factors that made stars like Harrison Ford and Jonathan Groff so successful, and learn the real secrets that made Kate Spade and Warby Parker into global brands. Using original research, fascinating studies, and engaging interviews, Kaplan and Marsh reveal the simple techniques to create luck in love and marriage, business and career, and health, happiness, and family relationships. Their breakthrough insights prove that all of us--from CEOs to stay-at-home moms--can tip the scales of fortune in our favor. Through a mix of scientific research, conversations with famous and successful people--from academics like Dan Ariely and Leonard Mlodinow to actor Josh Groban--and powerful narrative, How Luck Happens uncovers a fascinating subject in accessible and entertaining style.
Download or read book Lucky Girl written by Denise Gelberg and published by . This book was released on 2021-04-17 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Irene Adelson's beginnings in post-WWII New York City are nothing if not modest, but her extraordinary gifts begin to make themselves known around the time she begins school. In her youth, when she comes face to face with devastating trauma, she turns to science as a means of coping with the events that cause her so much pain, certain that science will provide the path to unlocking life's mysteries. A college grad at age nineteen, with an MD/PhD in hand by twenty-six, the brave, determined, and whip smart Irene Adelson becomes a physician-scientist who makes a paradigm-changing discovery. The secret sauce in her life is love; a love that soaks deep into her very being, giving her the courage to confront the foes that threaten to derail her life and career, and turning bad luck into something altogether different.
Download or read book The Mask of Sanity written by Jacob M. Appel and published by Permanent Press (NY). This book was released on 2017 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "On the outside, Dr. Jeremy Balint is a pillar of the community: the youngest division chief at his hospital, a model son to his elderly parents, fiercely devoted to his wife and two young daughters. On the inside, Dr. Jeremy Balint is a high-functioning sociopath--a man who truly believes himself to stand above the ethical norms of society. As long as life treats him well, Balint has no cause to harm others. When life treats him poorly, he reveals the depths of his cold-blooded depravity. At a cultural moment when the media bombards us with images of so-called sociopaths who strive for good and criminals redeemed by repentance,The Mask of Sanity offers an antidote to implausible tales of evil gone right. In contrast to fictional predecessors like Dostoyevesky's Raskolnikov and Camus' Mersault, Dr. Balint is a man who already has it all--and will do everything in his power, no matter how immoral, to keep what he has."--Amazon.com.
Download or read book Lucky Us written by Amy Bloom and published by Granta Books. This book was released on 2014-07-31 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Eva's mother abandons her on Iris's front porch, the girls don't seem to have much in common - except, they soon discover, a father. Thrown together with no mothers to care for them and a father who could not be considered a parent, Iris and Eva become one another's family. Iris wants to be a movie star; Eva is her sidekick. Together, they journey across 1940s America from scandal in Hollywood to the jazz clubs and golden mansions of Long Island, stumbling, cheating and loving their way through a landscape of war, betrayals and big dreams.
Download or read book The Immune written by Doc Lucky Meisenheimer and published by Ljs & S Pub. This book was released on 2011 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A biological crisis of epic proportions threatens the world. Genetically manufactured creatures, called airwars, attack and kill at random. Despite having captured and sequestered the airwar's creator, a hastily formed world government appears to be more effective in consolidating power than in managing the crisis. Hope emerges when a navy admiral discovers there are individuals born genetically immune to the deadly stings of the creatures. As the "immunes" struggle to protect humanity, they bemoan escalating governmental control. There is, however, one key immune with the intelligence and leadership to look beyond the crisis. As the government unfolds its secret plans to end the crisis, the future of humanity may well rest on his shoulders.
Download or read book The Free Will Delusion written by James B. Miles and published by Troubador Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2018-10-02 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poverty is not accident, but design. We are not all equal before the law. And the central message of contemporary ethics is that only some people matter.
