Scientific American's The Memory Code - July 2007
Researchers are closing in on the rules that the brain uses to lay down memories. Discovery of this memory code could lead to new ways to peer into the mind.
Anyone who has ever been in an earthquake has vivid memories of it: the ground shakes, trembles, buckles and heaves; the air fills with sounds of rumbling, cracking and shattering glass; cabinets fly open; books, dishes and knickknacks tumble from shelves. We remember such episodes--with striking clarity and for years afterward--because that is what our brains evolved to do: extract information from salient events and use that knowledge to guide our responses to similar situations in the future. This ability to learn from past experience allows all animals to adapt to a world that is complex and ever changing.
The Natural History of the Bible An Environmental Exploration of the Hebrew Scriptures
That environmental factors affect our daily lives is disputed by no one. But can environment, climate and topology play a part in the development of a religious community? Hillel, professor emeritus of environmental studies at the University of Massachusetts and senior research scientist at Columbia University's Center for Climate Systems Research, says yes. He comes to the subject immersed in the lore of ancient Israel, from his grandfather's instruction to his own years living in modern Israel. He sees the Jewish belief system as an amalgam of ideas emerging from an interplay of human beings with both the land and its peoples, "absorb[ing] all the cultural strands... from all the ecological domains of the ancient Near East... and assimilat[ing] them into their own culture." He divides sacred history into seven "domains," dispensations based not on some theological construct but rather on the terrain in which the Israelites lived. What emerges is a largely naturalistic explanation of Israel's beliefs and laws, with a strong emphasis on the impact of culture and environment on the evolving Jewish religion. Hillel recounts, in a richly detailed and beautifully told manner, the origins of the Hebrew Bible in a new and satisfying way.
This book presents the history of English from its obscure Indo-European roots to its twenty-first century position as the world's first language. It shows how English evolved in the British Isles and how it spread to the United States and through the old British empire to every corner of the world. It examines the different versions and roles of the language in every part of the globe and shows how English rose to international pre-eminence.
With approachable but impeccable scholarship fourteen experts chart the history of written and spoken English in all its rich and protean variety. Their accounts are made vivid with examples drawn from an immense range of documentary evidence including letters, diaries, and private records. They explore and explain the mixture of gradual and rapid change in the words, meanings, grammar, or pronunciation of English at different times and in different places. They examine the three-century rise of standard English and received pronunciation and consider their current status and wellbeing.
This book will appeal to everyone with a keen interest in the English language and its development.
Jean-Louis Dessalles explores the co-evolutionary paths of biology, culture, and the great human edifice of language, linking the evolution of the language to the general evolutionary history of humankind. He provides searchingly original answers to such fundamental paradoxes as to whether we acquired our greatest gift in order to talk or so as to be able to think, and as to why human beings should, as experience constantly confirms, contribute information for the well-being of others at their own expense and for no apparent gain: which if this is one of language's main functions appears to make its possession, in Darwinian terms, a disadvantage.
CRC Concise Encyclopedia of Mathematics
The format of this work is somewhere between a handbook, a dictionary, and an encyclopedia.
It is written in an informal style intended to make it accessible to a broad spectrum of readers with a wide range of mathematical backgrounds and interests.The selection of topics in this work is more extensive than in most mathematical dictionaries (e.g., Borowski and Borwein’s Harper-Collins Dictionary of Mathematics and Jeans and Jeans’ Muthematics Dictionary).
