[Chris Boyd]

Hello Fellow Bibliophils, Just a reminder for Saturday: Who's in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain by Michael S. Gazzaniga The father of cognitive neuroscience and author of Human offers a provocative argument against the common belief that our lives are wholly determined by physical processes and we are therefore not responsible for our actions. I have heard from some of you on book nominations.  I would like to hear from more of you before Monday, April 15.  Thanks in advance. We have also moved our discussion group and mailing list over to Google groups.  Please e-mail me a response to let me know that you got this message as a test run. Thanks and hope to see you at Le Boulanger, 3:30P, Saturday. Chris Boyd

[Scott Hines]

Hi Chris --

Thanks for the reminder and for soliciting nominations and for getting
the google group and mailing list in order :-)

We very much appreciate all the work you do for our group!

I am getting the BIRG emails perfectly.

Here are my nominations:

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined [Paperback]
Steven Pinker (Author)
Release date: September 25, 2012
A provocative history of violence—from the New York Times bestselling
author of The Stuff of Thought and The Blank Slate
Believe it or not, today we may be living in the most peaceful moment
in our species' existence. In his gripping and controversial new work,
New York Times bestselling author Steven Pinker shows that despite the
ceaseless news about war, crime, and terrorism, violence has actually
been in decline over long stretches of history. Exploding myths about
humankind's inherent violence and the curse of modernity, this
ambitious book continues Pinker's exploration of the essence of human
nature, mixing psychology and history to provide a remarkable picture
of an increasingly enlightened world.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Better-Angels-Our-Nature/dp/0143122010/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1365874190&sr=8-1&keywords=steven+pinker

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and
Religion (Vintage) [Paperback]
Jonathan Haidt (Author)
Release date: February 12, 2013 | Series: Vintage
As America descends deeper into polarization and paralysis, social
psychologist Jonathan Haidt has done the seemingly
impossible—challenged conventional thinking about morality, politics,
and religion in a way that speaks to everyone on the political
spectrum. Drawing on his twenty five years of groundbreaking research
on moral psychology, he shows how moral judgments arise not from
reason but from gut feelings. He shows why liberals, conservatives,
and libertarians have such different intuitions about right and wrong,
and he shows why each side is actually right about many of its central
concerns. In this subtle yet accessible book, Haidt gives you the key
to understanding the miracle of human cooperation, as well as the
curse of our eternal divisions and conflicts. If you’re ready to trade
in anger for understanding, read The Righteous Mind.
http://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Religion/dp/0307455777/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1365874383&sr=1-1&keywords=jonathan+haidt+the+righteous+mind

The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning: Why the Universe Is Not Designed for Us [Hardcover]
Victor J. Stenger (Author)
Release date: April 26, 2011 | ISBN-10: 1616144432 | ISBN-13: 978-1616144432
A number of authors have noted that if some physical parameters were
slightly changed, the universe could no longer support life, as we
know it. This implies that life depends sensitively on the physics of
our universe. Does this "fine-tuning" of the universe also suggest
that a creator god intentionally calibrated the initial conditions of
the universe such that life on earth and the evolution of humanity
would eventually emerge? Some influential scientists, such as National
Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins, think so. Others go
even further, asserting that science "has found God."
In this in-depth, lucid discussion of this fascinating and
controversial topic, physicist Victor J. Stenger looks at the same
evidence and comes to the opposite conclusion. He states at the outset
that as a physicist he will go wherever the data takes him, even if it
leads him to God. But after many years of research in particle physics
and thinking about its implications, he finds that the observations of
science and our naked senses not only show no evidence for God, they
provide evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that God does not exist.
Stenger argues that many of the claims by theists are based on their
misunderstanding of the science. He looks at the specific parameters
and shows that plausible reasons can be found for the values they have
within the existing standard models of physics and cosmology. These
models are introduced in detail so that the reader has the background
needed to understand the role of the parameters claimed to be
fine-tuned and judge the veracity of the arguments.
He also discusses related issues such as whether or not the universe
had a beginning, what quantum mechanics implies about the involvement
of human consciousness in affecting reality, and whether evidence can
be found in nature for a divine plan.
Although Stenger has touched on the subject of fine-tuning in other
books, this is his most thorough exploration of a topic that continues
to intrigue scientists and the lay public alike.
http://www.amazon.com/Fallacy-Fine-Tuning-Why-Universe-Designed/dp/1616144432/ref=la_B000APH2GA_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1365874890&sr=1-4

The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values [Hardcover]
Sam Harris (Author)
Release date: October 5, 2010
Sam Harris’s first book, The End of Faith, ignited a worldwide debate
about the validity of religion. In the aftermath, Harris discovered
that most people—from religious fundamentalists to nonbelieving
scientists—agree on one point: science has nothing to say on the
subject of human values. Indeed, our failure to address questions of
meaning and morality through science has now become the most common
justification for religious faith. It is also the primary reason why
so many secularists and religious moderates feel obligated to
"respect" the hardened superstitions of their more devout neighbors.In
this explosive new book, Sam Harris tears down the wall between
scientific facts and human values, arguing that most people are simply
mistaken about the relationship between morality and the rest of human
knowledge. Harris urges us to think about morality in terms of human
and animal well-being, viewing the experiences of conscious creatures
as peaks and valleys on a "moral landscape." Because there are
definite facts to be known about where we fall on this landscape,
Harris foresees a time when science will no longer limit itself to
merely describing what people do in the name of "morality"; in
principle, science should be able to tell us what we ought to do to
live the best lives possible. Bringing a fresh perspective to age-old
questions of right and wrong and good and evil, Harris demonstrates
that we already know enough about the human brain and its relationship
to events in the world to say that there are right and wrong answers
to the most pressing questions of human life. Because such answers
exist, moral relativism is simply false—and comes at increasing cost
to humanity. And the intrusions of religion into the sphere of human
values can be finally repelled: for just as there is no such thing as
Christian physics or Muslim algebra, there can be no Christian or
Muslim morality.
Using his expertise in philosophy and neuroscience, along with his
experience on the front lines of our "culture wars," Harris delivers a
game-changing book about the future of science and about the real
basis of human cooperation.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Moral-Landscape-Science-Determine/dp/1439171211/ref=pd_sim_b_11

The Irrationals: A Story of the Numbers You Can't Count On [Hardcover]
Julian Havil (Author)
Publication Date: July 2, 2012
The ancient Greeks discovered them, but it wasn't until the nineteenth
century that irrational numbers were properly understood and
rigorously defined, and even today not all their mysteries have been
revealed. In The Irrationals, the first popular and comprehensive book
on the subject, Julian Havil tells the story of irrational numbers and
the mathematicians who have tackled their challenges, from antiquity
to the twenty-first century. Along the way, he explains why irrational
numbers are surprisingly difficult to define--and why so many
questions still surround them.
That definition seems so simple: they are numbers that cannot be
expressed as a ratio of two integers, or that have decimal expansions
that are neither infinite nor recurring. But, as The Irrationals
shows, these are the real "complex" numbers, and they have an equally
complex and intriguing history, from Euclid's famous proof that the
square root of 2 is irrational to Roger Apéry's proof of the
irrationality of a number called Zeta(3), one of the greatest results
of the twentieth century. In between, Havil explains other important
results, such as the irrationality of e and pi. He also discusses the
distinction between "ordinary" irrationals and transcendentals, as
well as the appealing question of whether the decimal expansion of
irrationals is "random".
Fascinating and illuminating, this is a book for everyone who loves
math and the history behind it.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Irrationals-Story-Numbers-Count/dp/0691143420/ref=pd_sim_sbs_b_5

Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet [Hardcover]
Andrew Blum (Author)
Release date: May 29, 2012
“Andrew Blum plunges into the unseen but real ether of the Internet in
a journey both compelling and profound….You will never open an email
in quite the same way again.”
—Tom Vanderbilt, New York Times bestselling author of Traffic

In Tubes, Andrew Blum, a correspondent at Wired magazine, takes us on
an engaging, utterly fascinating tour behind the scenes of our
everyday lives and reveals the dark beating heart of the Internet
itself. A remarkable journey through the brave new technological world
we live in, Tubes is to the early twenty-first century what Soul of a
New Machine—Tracy Kidder’s classic story of the creation of a new
computer—was to the late twentieth.
http://www.amazon.com/Tubes-A-Journey-Center-Internet/dp/0061994936/ref=pd_sim_sbs_b_1

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[Scott Hines]

Oh, and two more nominations, one very recent and one a classic:

The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — but Some
Don't [Hardcover]
Nate Silver (Author)
Release date: September 27, 2012
"Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise is The Soul of a New Machine
for the 21st century."
—Rachel Maddow, author of Drift
Nate Silver built an innovative system for predicting baseball
performance, predicted the 2008 election within a hair’s breadth, and
became a national sensation as a blogger—all by the time he was
thirty. The New York Times now publishes FiveThirtyEight.com, where
Silver is one of the nation’s most influential political forecasters.
Drawing on his own groundbreaking work, Silver examines the world of
prediction, investigating how we can distinguish a true signal from a
universe of noisy data. Most predictions fail, often at great cost to
society, because most of us have a poor understanding of probability
and uncertainty. Both experts and laypeople mistake more confident
predictions for more accurate ones. But overconfidence is often the
reason for failure. If our appreciation of uncertainty improves, our
predictions can get better too. This is the “prediction paradox”: The
more humility we have about our ability to make predictions, the more
successful we can be in planning for the future.
In keeping with his own aim to seek truth from data, Silver visits the
most successful forecasters in a range of areas, from hurricanes to
baseball, from the poker table to the stock market, from Capitol Hill
to the NBA. He explains and evaluates how these forecasters think and
what bonds they share. What lies behind their success? Are they
good—or just lucky? What patterns have they unraveled? And are their
forecasts really right? He explores unanticipated commonalities and
exposes unexpected juxtapositions. And sometimes, it is not so much
how good a prediction is in an absolute sense that matters but how
good it is relative to the competition. In other cases, prediction is
still a very rudimentary—and dangerous—science.
Silver observes that the most accurate forecasters tend to have a
superior command of probability, and they tend to be both humble and
hardworking. They distinguish the predictable from the unpredictable,
and they notice a thousand little details that lead them closer to the
truth. Because of their appreciation of probability, they can
distinguish the signal from the noise.
With everything from the health of the global economy to our ability
to fight terrorism dependent on the quality of our predictions, Nate
Silver’s insights are an essential read.
http://www.amazon.com/Signal-Noise-Many-Predictions-Fail/dp/159420411X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1365876073&sr=1-1&keywords=signal+and+the+noise

An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
[Facsimile] [Paperback]
Adam Smith (Author), Edwin Cannan (Editor), George J Stigler (Preface)
Publication Date: February 15, 1977
Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations was recognized as a landmark of
human thought upon its publication in 1776. As the first scientific
argument for the principles of political economy, it is the point of
departure for all subsequent economic thought. Smith's theories of
capital accumulation, growth, and secular change, among others,
continue to be influential in modern economics.
This reprint of Edwin Cannan's definitive 1904 edition of The Wealth
of Nations includes Cannan's famous introduction, notes, and a full
index, as well as a new preface written especially for this edition by
the distinguished economist George J. Stigler. Mr. Stigler's preface
will be of value for anyone wishing to see the contemporary relevance
of Adam Smith's thought.
http://www.amazon.com/Inquiry-Nature-Causes-Wealth-Nations/dp/0226763749/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1365877967&sr=8-4&keywords=wealth+of+nations