Bayesian Statistics

I have been reading in Kindle the recent book on Bayes' theory about how to figure statistics:  The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes' Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy
The author is Sharon Bertsch McGrayne.  

Here's the Amazon.com link.

This book is hugely interesting as an intellectual history.  Much of the work using these statistics is classified, and substantial parts are missing.

I never really understood what Bayesian meant before.

Modern means Digital, for sure.

Statistics: The Art and Science of Learning from Data, by Alan Agresti and Christine Franklin.

Statistics is a "central science in modern life," this book here.  Why are these books so expensive?

Here is the link to the Times article on a data science company.  From the Times:
"Kaggle, a start-up, has figured out a way to connect these companies with the mathematicians and scientists who crunch numbers for a living or a hobby. On Thursday, it announced it had raised $11 million from investors including Khosla Ventures, Index Ventures and Hal Varian, Google‘s chief economist."

Modern means information-based!

If it's not based on information, it's not modern.

Steve Lohr in The New York Times---here.:
"In a modern economy, information should be the prime asset — the raw material of new products and services, smarter decisions, competitive advantage for companies, and greater growth and productivity."  

Gleick: "Evolution itself embodies an ongoing exchange of information between organism and environment." The place to find this quote in an article for The Smithsonian is here.

The Selfish Gene is a book on evolution by Richard Dawkins, published in 1976.  The Selfish Gene is described in Wikipedia as based on a "gene-centered" view of evolution. This notion helped Gleick with the meme idea as a central, organizing principle.

Have you tried The Lucifer Principle, by Howard Bloom here?   Howard was the one who introduced me to the idea of the meme.

Roger Sperry had the notion that ideas are “just as real” as the neurons they inhabit. Gleick quotes him: Ideas have power, Sperry said:
Ideas cause ideas and help evolve new ideas. They interact with each other and with other mental forces in the same brain, in neighboring brains, and thanks to global communication, in far distant, foreign brains. And they also interact with the external surroundings to produce in toto a burstwise advance in evolution that is far beyond anything to hit the evolutionary scene yet.

In Gleick's Smithsonian article, he wrote: "most of the elements of culture change and blur too easily to qualify as stable replicators." So I guess what we measure things against are "stable replicators."  That's what I'm looking for every day---a stable replicator.

Reality

I'm reading this book now: Manjit Kumar's Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality on my Kindle. Here is Kumar's blog: http://manjitkumar.blogspot.com/.  The book is now out in paperback.

A-Bombs

The book The Bomb: A New History, by Stephen M. Younger, this link  is now out in paperback.    

Spying on the Bomb

Spying on the Bomb - American Nuclear Intelligence from Nazi Germany to Iran and North Korea, by Jeffrey T. Richelson.

The New York Times reviewer said "Richelson writes with admirable clarity."

"His rich material points to issues tht cry out for further analysis," David Holloway wrote in the Times.

Charles Darwin

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0452288886/ref=pe_5050_7289230_pe_snp_886

At Amazon, they're promoting a new paperback version of Darwin's The Descent of Man: The Concise Edition.

Concise is good, considering how Victorian Darwin was. We might describe him as long-winded by today's short-attention-span standards. But there is a lot to like about Darwin. He was an amateur before know-it-all professional experts got the public to believe that experts know everything and ordinary citizens know nothing.

In part because he married his wealthy cousin (they were part of the family that became wealthy making Wedgewood china), Darwin had the luxury of being able to devote himself to interesting projects without having to worry about getting paid for them. He had his basic idea at a relatively young age, like most scientists, apparently. But he mulled over the idea and let it gestate. He spent a long time gathering evidence and collecting his thoughts into a well articulated and coherent statement. In part Origin of Species is so long because he had collected so much data to support the thesis. Our country would be better off if we had more people who devoted themselves to collecting data to support interesting theories. It doesn't happen often now. Maybe it happened rarely in the past, too. Anyway, I think we lack people like Darwin who are careful about making bold assertions and who make bold assertions after gathering a lot of evidence. I admire Darwin.



http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/2300
www.infidels.org/library/historical/charles_darwin/descent_of_man/ - 10k -
http://www.literature.org/authors/darwin-charles/the-descent-of-man/
ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/d/darwin/charles/d22d/

This site purports to be the complete works of Charles Darwin online: http://darwin-online.org.uk/contents.html

Einstein - Legend, myth, idol and icon

Einstein - His Life and Universe, by Walter Isaacson, Simon & Schuster

Einstein - A Biography, by Jurgen Neffe, Farrar, Straus & Giroux

The French

Lavoisier in the Year One: The Birth of a New Science in an Age of Revolution, by Madison Smartt Bell, Norton

Toussaint Louverture: A Biography, by Madison Smartt Bell, Pantheon

Science survey

The Canon, a Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science, by Natalie Angier, Houghton-Mifflin

Empire of the Stars: Obsession, Friendship and Betrayal in the Quest for Black Holes, by Arthur I. Miller, Houghton Mifflin

Conflict in the Cosmos: Fred Hoyle's Life in Science by Simon Mitton, Joseph Henry Press

The Scientist as Rebel, By Freeman Dyson, New York Review of Books

Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way We Think About our Lives, by David Sloan Wilson, Delacorte Press

The Fellowship: Gilbert, Bacon, Harvey, Wren Newton and the Story of the Scientific Revolution, by John Gribbin, Overlook