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  & 1 users

• Current

Type: special

Status: I recommend

Author: bell hooks

Tags: psychology love theory

Description: An excellent treatise on the enigmas of love and how some treatments on the view of love areAn excellent treatise on the enigmas of love and how some treatments on the view of love are trecherous or otherwise beneficial....

2005-11-22

  & 63 users

• Current

Type: educational

Status: I recommend

Authors: Malcolm Gladwell Gladwell Malcom

Tags: psychology culture nonfiction

Description: Blink is about the first two seconds of looking--the decisive glance that knows in an instant.Blink is about the first two seconds of looking--the decisive glance that knows in an instant. Gladwell, the best-selling author of The Tipping Point, campaigns for snap judgments and mind reading with a gift for translating research into splendid storytelling. Building his case with scenes from a marriage, heart attack triage, speed dating, choking on the golf course, selling cars, and military maneuvers, he persuades readers to think small and focus on the meaning of "thin slices" of behavior. The key is to rely on our "adaptive unconscious"--a 24/7 mental valet--that provides us with instant and sophisticated information to warn of danger, read a stranger, or react to a new idea.
Gladwell includes caveats about leaping to conclusions: marketers can manipulate our first impressions, high arousal moments make us "mind blind," focusing on the wrong cue leaves us vulnerable to "the Warren Harding Effect" (i.e., voting for a handsome but hapless president). In a provocative chapter that exposes the "dark side of blink," he illuminates the failure of rapid cognition in the tragic stakeout and murder of Amadou Diallo in the Bronx. He underlines studies about autism, facial reading and cardio uptick to urge training that enhances high-stakes decision-making. In this brilliant, cage-rattling book, one can only wish for a thicker slice of Gladwell's ideas about what Blink Camp might look like....

2005-11-22

  & 33 users

• Current

Type: fiction

Status: I recommend

Authors: Phillip K. Dick Phillip Dick Philip K. Dick K. Dick Philip Dick

Tags: cyberpunk future drugs scifi surreal

Description: "Mind- and reality-bending drugs factor again and again in Philip K. Dick's hugely"Mind- and reality-bending drugs factor again and again in Philip K. Dick's hugely influential SF stories. A Scanner Darkly cuts closest to the bone, drawing on Dick's own experience with illicit chemicals and on his many friends who died from drug abuse. Nevertheless, it's blackly farcical, full of comic-surreal conversations between people whose synapses are partly fried, sudden flights of paranoid logic, and bad trips like the one whose victim spends a subjective eternity having all his sins read to him, in shifts, by compound-eyed aliens. (It takes 11,000 years of this to reach the time when as a boy he discovered masturbation.) The antihero Bob Arctor is forced by his double life into warring double personalities: as futuristic narcotics agent "Fred," face blurred by a high-tech scrambler, he must spy on and entrap suspected drug dealer Bob Arctor. His disintegration under the influence of the insidious Substance D is genuine tragicomedy. For Arctor there's no way off the addict's downward escalator, but what awaits at the bottom is a kind of redemption--there are more wheels within wheels than we suspected, and his life is not entirely wasted."...

2005-11-22

• Current

Type: educational

Status: I recommend

Author: Amir D. Aczel

Tags: art math mathematics cryptography decartes notebook

2005-11-21

  & 1 users

• Current

Type: fiction

Status: I recommend

Author: Institute Historian T. F. Peterson

Tags: pranks hacks mit

Description: The students and engineers of MIT do not hack for because they wish to rebel or cause problems.The students and engineers of MIT do not hack for because they wish to rebel or cause problems. They don't play with engineering because they are engineers, they are engineers because they like to play with engineering!...

2005-09-23

• Current

Type: fiction

Status: I recommend

Author: Bulent Atalay

Tags: art mathematics

Description: Journey through the ingenious and inquistive mind of Leonardo da Vinci and with him, as heJourney through the ingenious and inquistive mind of Leonardo da Vinci and with him, as he travels from town to town, job to job, and invention to invention....

2005-09-23

• Current

Type: fiction

Status: I recommend

Author: Harald Kueppers

Description: A very good book in educating (and self-educating) color theory. A rare but perfect book inA very good book in educating (and self-educating) color theory. A rare but perfect book in understanding how light; additive and subtractive, works....

2005-09-23