Anna kriger (258 resultados)

Paperback. Condición: new. Paperback. Every movement that ever mattered was angry. So why do some furious, righteous causes remake the world while others, no less furious and no less right, burn out with nothing to show for it?Feminism Beyond Anger argues that we have been asking the wrong question about rage. For a very long time the argument has run in a single groove-is anger a vice to be disciplined away, or a virtue to be defended?-and it has told us almost nothing about what actually turns grievance into change. This book proposes that the fate of collective anger is decided not by its volume but by its route. Anger can be swallowed, and quietly corrode the one who swallows it. It can be discharged in a blaze that feels magnificent and changes nothing. Or it can be forged into structure-and that, it turns out, depends on a capacity most movements never think to build.Ranging from the silencing of women's anger to the strange economics of online outrage, from the disciplined fury of AIDS activism to the patient machinery of legal change, and pausing to examine the contradictory gender scripts we hand one another without noticing, this is a book about learning to treat anger as fuel and information rather than as a moral verdict.It is, in the end, an argument for a hopeful and unfamiliar idea: that a rage which is entirely right still has work to do-and that the work can be learned.The book is based on the academic paper: Kriger, A. (2026). Feminism Beyond Anger: Boundary-Significant Discrepancy, Pathway Selection, and the Structural Efficacy of Collective Grievance. IIIR Computational Humanities and Cultural Systems. 5281/zenodo.21285202Keywords: feminism, anger, social movements, gender, emotion, activism, social change This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - We have quietly performed one of the strangest tricks in the history of belief. We let go of the old story that a creator set us above all living things and handed us the world to use - and then we kept the world anyway. We dropped the doctrine and pocketed the privilege. We still breed, train, cage, eat, and rearrange the lives of other creatures as though a permission slip from heaven were tucked in our back pocket, even after we have announced, loudly, that we no longer believe in the one who signed it.This book begins in that contradiction and follows it everywhere it leads. If we are animals among animals, then we have no natural throne from which to rule the rest of life. And if, by some lingering conviction, we really are higher beings, then height was never a license to dominate - it was a summons to take responsibility. From the atheist's side and the believer's side, the same conclusion comes walking toward us: power is not proof of superiority. Power is an obligation.From there the argument opens outward - into the surprising minds of crows, octopuses, elephants, whales, and the famous grey parrot who learned our words and waited, with more patience than we usually offer in return, for us to learn his. It moves into the daily theater of homes and leashes and dinner tables, where love so easily curdles into ownership and a command gets mistaken for a relationship. And it arrives, at last, at a single quiet idea: the way we treat an animal, a dependent person, a shared park bench, and a borrowed thing are all the same moral muscle, trained either toward domination or toward respect.Written with tenderness for the creatures and a raised eyebrow for our own self-importance, this is not a plea to make animals more like us. It is an invitation to become, finally, more human ourselves. We do not need to humanize animals. We need to humanize ourselves.Keywords: animal intelligence, animal ethics, human-animal relationship, compassion, responsibility, consent and communication, becoming human.…

Paperback. Condición: new. Paperback. A surgeon glances at a patient and says, before any test comes back, that something is wrong. A negotiator hears one sentence and knows the deal is dead. A mother wakes a moment before her child cries. We call this intuition, and we treat it as a small miracle, a whisper from somewhere beyond reason.It is nothing of the kind. It is the most ordinary thing the brain does, running faster than words. The brain is not built to store the past. It is built to bet on the future, to guess what happens next and ready the body before the event arrives. Intuition is that guess reaching us before its reasons do.Long before Western science gave this idea equations, a Russian physiologist named Pyotr Anokhin had already drawn the machinery: a brain that builds a model of the result it expects, acts, and then checks reality against its own forecast. He was persecuted for thinking too freely, published mostly in a language the wider world did not read, and was largely forgotten. The West arrived at the same door decades later and knocked as though no one had ever lived there.This book tells both stories, and it does something more useful than admire a mystery. It shows that intuition can be trusted, doubted, tested, and trained; that the body speaks first for a reason; that trauma can make the past impersonate a warning; and that experience becomes wisdom only when reality is allowed to correct it. A forecast is not a verdict. The mature mind listens to its predictions and still asks them to prove it.KEYWORDSintuition - prediction - Anokhin - predictive brain - feedback - expertise - the body This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. …

Paperback. Condición: new. Paperback. We are taught to treat innocence as a phase. It is the thing the world is supposed to take from us, the softness we are expected to outgrow on the way to becoming serious, competent, unfoolable adults. To be called innocent, past a certain age, is to be gently insulted. This book argues that we have misread one of the rarest and most valuable capacities a human being can possess.Innocence, rightly understood, is not ignorance and not weakness. It is not what a person has failed to learn. It is what a person refuses to betray after learning it. It is the clean heart that has met cruelty, taught itself to lock a door, and still declined to become cruel. Seen this way, innocence is not the condition of someone who has been protected from the world. It is a decision made by someone who has seen the world clearly and chosen, against the pressure of experience, to keep faith with tenderness anyway.Drawing gently on the science of high sensitivity and the idea of the mind as a maker of predictions, and on a long tradition of moral thought, The Wise Innocence explains why gentleness so often irritates the wounded, why certain people study the innocent in order to use them, and why every humane society quietly depends on the very people it is most tempted to mock. It shows how families punish the sensitive child, how groups test and corrupt the trusting adult, and how a soft nature can be trained into an instrument instead of left as an open wound.Above all, this is a book about survival without surrender. It insists that innocence can be guarded rather than hardened, that a clean heart can keep a locked door, that discernment and trust are not enemies but partners, and that the gentlest among us do not have to disappear in order to endure. It is written for anyone who has ever been called too sensitive, too trusting, or too kind, and suspected, quietly, that this was not the whole truth about them.The innocent person does not have to vanish in order to survive. They have to become the guardian of their own light.The book is based on academic paper: Kriger, A. (2026). The Wise Innocence: Moral Perception, Predictive Processing, and the Maintenance of Default Trust. IIIR Computational Humanities and Cultural Systems. 5281/zenodo.21249345Keywords: innocence, sensitivity, empathy, boundaries, moral psychology, resilience, self-knowledge This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - He is the only person ever to win two Nobel Prizes that he did not have to share with anybody. He worked out why atoms hold together at all. He found the shape a protein folds into, and got it right while the best crystallographers in Britain were getting it wrong. He proved that a disease could live inside a single misspelled molecule, and opened the door to molecular medicine. He then spent the last three decades of his life telling anyone who would listen to take rather a lot of vitamin C.Most books about Linus Pauling choose one of those men and quietly bury the other. This one refuses. It argues that there was never more than one Pauling, and that the same restless habit of mind produced both the alpha helix and the megadose: an unmatched gift for stepping sideways out of a problem, paired with an almost complete inability to step back in.The title comes from his most beautiful idea. Benzene, he showed, does not flicker between two structures the way chemists had assumed. It is a blend of structures, none of which the molecule ever actually occupies. The dancing molecule does not dance. Understanding why that is not a cheat, and why Soviet chemistry once put the idea on trial for it, turns out to be the shortest route into the strange business of what science is allowed to say exists.Here are the crystals and the war work and the fallout petitions, the passport the State Department withheld, the night he spent stranded on a cliff above the Pacific, the ridiculed model of the atomic nucleus that anticipated a line of research now being pursued in earnest, and the long unhappy quarrel with the Mayo Clinic in which Pauling was right about the method and wrong about the medicine. No mathematics. Considerable affection. Very little forgiveness for committees.Keywords: Linus Pauling, chemical bond, molecular biology, history of science, vitamin C, Nobel Prize, scientific controversy.…

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - In March 1923, an eighteen-year-old medical student stood at the edge of a pond in Saxony and saw a duck that was not supposed to be there. The species had not been recorded in the region since 1845. The local ornithological club refused to believe him. He was made to travel to Berlin and submit to an interrogation by a man he had never met, who questioned him until he was satisfied, and only then was the duck permitted to exist.The student was Ernst Mayr. He would spend the next eighty-two years asking the same question that pond had put to him: who decides where one thing ends and another begins, and on what grounds Mayr gave the twentieth century its working definition of a species. He described twenty-six species of birds and four hundred and forty-five subspecies - and then spent decades explaining why such categories cannot bear the weight that biology, and later politics, kept piling onto them. He argued that natural selection acts on whole organisms rather than on tidy isolated genes, and said so to Richard Dawkins's face, politely, at length, and without moving an inch. He traced scientific racism not to data but to a habit of thought. He popularised the word teleonomy so that biologists could speak of purpose without smuggling in a purposer. He lived to a hundred, published fourteen of his twenty-five books after the age of sixty-five, and was still writing when the century that he had helped explain was safely over.This book tells his life and takes his central problem seriously. A species, it argues, is best understood the way a topologist understands a shape: not as an object with an essence, but as a structure that persists - a connected region of gene flow that holds together for a long time and then, sometimes, comes apart. Boundaries in nature are real without being sharp, and the sharpness is ours. What looks like design is what persistence looks like from the inside.KEYWORDS Ernst Mayr biological species concept evolutionary synthesisSpeciation population thinking teleonomy philosophy of biology.…

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - Anything that has lasted long enough for us to study it almost always looks as though it had been going somewhere. Species toward complexity, languages toward order, institutions toward sensible design, texts toward their final form. The monograph explains where that impression comes from, and shows that a large part of it arises not in the world but in the fact that we are looking at survivors.The core idea is simple. When we study something that has lasted, we are not studying the ordinary course of events but the course of events given that it did not end. That condition changes the picture: the process acquires a visible movement away from destruction even when no movement was there. The size of this manufactured tendency can be computed exactly. It is larger the closer a system came to disappearing and the more erratically it behaved, and nearly invisible where nothing was ever at risk.Several consequences follow, and they can be tested rather than merely asserted.The past shifts depending on where the observer stopped. Two historians with the same sources, carrying the story to different end dates, will find different tendencies at work in the same century - and each will be right about their own data. In the calculations that discrepancy came to sixteen standard errors.Inside a surviving system, credit for its success is misassigned in a predictable direction. Conspicuous but minor parts get more of it than indispensable ones: what cannot be done without does not vary, and what does not vary is not noticed.And the strongest result. Natural selection turns out to be indistinguishable from sheer durability. A population under selection and a non-reproducing system with the right fragility produce exactly the same picture - not similar, but identical. The difference between the living and the non-living is real, but it lies in the count of failed attempts, which are usually gone. Hence an unexpected conclusion: going somewhere is cheap, and any filter can counterfeit it. What is expensive is staying in place against the noise, and that is what actually requires life.The practical upshot is not skepticism but triage: the book says where the correction matters, where it is small, and gives five ways to measure it.…

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - The failures that ought to trouble us are not the hard ones. Famine relief is complicated; peace settlements are complicated; climate is complicated. The troubling failures are the easy ones. Conflicts that run for thirty years and end on terms both sides could have written in an afternoon. Warnings filed, costed, and ignored until the water arrives. Men in office whom any competent hospital administrator would outperform by lunchtime. Every news bulletin carries three or four of these, and they are not difficult problems badly solved. They are simple problems not solved at all.And the second half of the evidence is worse than the first. Literacy, science, statistics, institutions, computation, now machines that reason faster than we do - every measure of our capacity has climbed for four centuries. The rate at which obvious things go undone has not fallen with it. When a variable rises steeply and the outcome does not move, one is not looking at the governing variable.This book takes four serious explanations for that gap - incentives, ignorance, inherited instinct, and bad institutions - grants each of them everything it can honestly claim, and then measures what is left over. Something is left over. It is the same shape at every scale, from a marriage that ends over nothing to an empire that walks into a war nobody wanted.Faced with a stubborn residue, the reasonable thing is to go back and look at an explanation that was taken off the books without ever being disproved. It is two thousand years old. It holds that the world is good in its making and wounded in its condition, that the wound is not stupidity and cannot be repaired by cleverness, and that the cure is offered continually and refused. Nothing in this book is new. The Fathers said all of it, and said it better.What the old explanation offers, and no rival offers, is a mechanism - and it is set out in the one parable that Christ took the trouble to explain. A sower goes out. The seed is identical in every case, sown without inspection, without preference, on ground that any farmer would have skipped. Three of the four failures happen entirely on the receiving side.KEYWORDSChristianity, parables, human failure, reason and its limits, patristic thought, repentance, Orthodox spirituality.…

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware.

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - James Hutton made his fortune out of soot. He and a friend worked out how to cook the black residue scraped from Edinburgh's chimneys into a pale crystalline salt that dyers and metalworkers would pay for, and which had until then come by ship from Egypt. It was a good business. It left him free to spend the rest of his life doing what he actually wanted to do, which was to climb into ditches and look at rocks.Everyone agreed the world was about six thousand years old. This was not superstition. It was arithmetic, done carefully, from the only continuous historical document anyone had. Hutton, draining a wet Berwickshire farm in the 1750s, noticed how much soil a single winter carried off, multiplied by the thickness of the rock under his boots, and arrived at a number so large that he declined to write it down. He never did write it down. He said instead that it was in vain to seek any computation of the time, and then closed his great paper with the sentence that made him immortal and got him accused of atheism: that in the history of the Earth we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.This book takes that sentence seriously, which almost nobody does. It is not a claim that the world is eternal. It is a claim about the limits of a record that destroys its own evidence - because rock, as Hutton was the first to see clearly, is made of the wreckage of older rock, and every cycle erases what came before. The stone that survives to be read is not a fair sample of what happened. It is what happened to last. That is a much stranger and more modern idea than the one usually credited to him, and it runs from a Scottish sea cliff to the present argument about the age of the universe.Along the way: a doctor who never practiced, a bachelor with a son he supported by post and barely met, a two-thousand-page philosophical treatise that nobody has ever finished, a friendship with Adam Smith conducted over oysters, Lord Kelvin proving from thermodynamics that the geologists were wrong, and a young man named Rutherford in 1904 standing up in a dark room to tell him why he was.>Keywords: geology, deep time, James Hutton, age of the Earth, Scottish Enlightenment, history of science, uniformitarianism.…

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - A schoolmaster's son from Saint Petersburg, stranded for life in a provincial German university where nobody important ever visited, sat down in 1873 to answer a question that had been considered improper for two thousand years. How many numbers are there Not many. Not endlessly many. How many, exactly.The answer Georg Cantor found broke the question in half. Some infinities, he proved, are strictly larger than others, and the proof fits on a postcard. It also fits nowhere in the mathematics of his century. Colleagues told him the work was a disease. A cardinal in Rome read his letters with more sympathy than his own department showed him. He founded the German Mathematical Society mainly because no existing society would have him, spent years arguing that Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare, endured repeated hospitalizations, and died in a clinic in Halle during a wartime famine, three years before David Hilbert announced that nobody would drive anyone out of the paradise Cantor had built.Boris Kriger and Anna Kriger tell that life in full, and alongside it the stranger story of what Cantor's argument turned out to be. The diagonal is not a trick for comparing sizes. It is a general-purpose machine for stepping out of any system that claims to contain everything, and once you have seen it work, you find it everywhere: in Gödel's undecidable sentence, in Turing's halting problem, in Russell's paradox, in the question of whether the physical universe has room for a single one of Cantor's infinities. Which, this book argues, it does not.Along the way: what Aristotle actually banned and why, why a honeymoon was spent talking mathematics, how a theological argument about God's exclusivity nearly settled a question in set theory, what Kurt Gödel and Paul Cohen did to the tower of infinities, and why the hierarchy of the title is not a ladder anyone climbs.Keywords: Georg Cantor, set theory, infinity, mathematics history, philosophy of mathematics, transfinite numbers, continuum hypothesis.…

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware.

Paperback. Condición: new. Paperback. We are taught that generosity is always a virtue, that the person who gives more is the better person, and that love is measured by how much of ourselves we are willing to hand away. But what happens when giving stops coming from fullness and starts coming from fear - fear of being rejected, of being invisible, of not being enough? What happens when kindness quietly becomes a way of begging to be kept?This is a book about the moment generosity turns into a wound. It begins in childhood, in the life of a girl who had everything except belonging - loved at home, envied outside, bullied by classmates and even by teachers, the white crow who learned that having more could make her guilty, and that giving might make her safe. From that early lesson it traces the long arc of overgiving into adult life: the invisible labor of those who always help, the loneliness of being useful, the yes that was never truly free, and the slow disappearance of a person into other people.But this is not only a book about the wound of the one who gives. It is also a book about the responsibility of the one who receives. A person is not a resource, not a function, not a convenience for someone else's comfort. To take advantage of another's inability to say no is its own kind of wound - in conscience, in empathy, in love. And so the book asks the harder question: how do we receive without harming the one who gives?Tender, honest, and quietly radical, this is a meditation on dignity, boundaries, and the courage to be loved without earning it. It moves toward forgiveness - of ourselves, and of the parents who passed down their fear because no one ever healed it in them - and toward a simple, difficult truth: real love does not say, "Since you cannot say no, I will take." It says, "Until your no becomes strong, I will help you guard it."For everyone who has ever given from an empty place and wondered why they still felt unseen, this book offers something rare: not advice on how to give more, but permission to stop disappearing. Generosity, Boundaries, Belonging, Self-Worth, Forgiveness, Healing, Relationships This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…

Condición: New. Print on Demand.

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - Fred Hoyle worked out where you came from. Not in the vague way that phrase is usually meant, but atom by atom: the calcium in your teeth, the iron riding in your blood, the oxygen you are using right now to read this sentence. All of it was assembled inside stars that died before the Sun was born, and a Yorkshire boy who skipped most of school is the reason we know it.He got there by a method that ought to have embarrassed him. Carbon exists in quantity, he reasoned, and carbon is very difficult to make, so the carbon nucleus must have a particular energy level in a particular place, or none of us would be here to argue about it. The physicists said no such level had ever been seen. He asked them to look again. It was there, within a whisker of where he said it would be.Then he used the same method for the next fifty years, and it took him to the steady-state universe, to a field that manufactures matter in empty space, to influenza arriving on comets, to a public accusation that the British Museum was displaying a forged fossil. He named the Big Bang as an insult and watched the name outlive him. He said out loud that Jocelyn Bell should have had the Nobel Prize; nine years later the committee gave his own share to somebody else.This book follows one method through one life, and refuses the two easy stories about him - the martyr and the crank. It also does something no previous account of Hoyle has attempted. In the closing chapters I take up the question he left open and answer it from my own work: the carbon level is not a coincidence and it was not adjusted by anybody. It follows from shape. Three alpha configurations can only arrange themselves in so many ways, and one of those ways sits exactly where Hoyle said the universe needed it to sit. The most famous fine-tuning argument in physics was founded on that level. It does not survive it.A book about stubbornness, stardust, nuclear structure, English academic politics, ice axes, science fiction, and the particular loneliness of being right too early and then wrong too long.Keywords: Fred Hoyle, nucleosynthesis, carbon, steady-state cosmology, anthropic principle, history of astrophysics, nuclear structure.…

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - He was not a doctor. He was admitted to the Academy of Medicine by a majority of exactly one vote, and once, after explaining to that same Academy where chicken cholera comes from, he was challenged to a duel by an eighty-year-old orthopedic surgeon who did not believe in germs and did not intend to start.Louis Pasteur also saved more human lives than anyone else alive in his century.The Invisible World follows him from a tanner's yard in the Jura to a crypt lined with gold mosaic, and argues that everything he did came out of a single stubborn conviction formed when he was twenty-five: that living things can be recognized because they refuse to match their own mirror image. That conviction gave him fermentation, the death of spontaneous generation, pasteurization, and the first vaccine ever manufactured to order. The same conviction made him deny enzymes, dismiss toxins, and reject killed vaccines, including the one his own assistants quietly used to rescue his greatest public triumph while a hundred and fifty spectators and a correspondent from London watched the sheep.Here is a scientist who proved causes not by looking at them but by building them, and who then did the obvious thing with something he had built: he patented it. Long before anyone had heard of a patent on a living organism, Pasteur held one. He fought for priority the way other men fight over land, because priority was the only property he had.>Keywords: Louis Pasteur, microbiology, vaccination, germ theory, history of science, scientific method, nineteenth-century France.…

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - Nobody read him. Not one of his discoveries entered science through him. Every single one had to be found again, from scratch, by people who had never heard his name.This is a book about what that costs - and about the method that produced the discoveries in the first place. Leonardo da Vinci looked at a river and saw an artery. He looked at a tree and found a law of branching that botanists still cite. He looked at a bird and built a wing. The same habit of mind that gave him his finest results also convinced him that blood rises through the body the way sap rises through a plant, which is wrong, and wrong in a way that stopped him cold for years. Analogy is the engine of this book: what it can do, what it costs, and how to tell the difference.Along the way: a job application that was mostly lies, a bronze horse melted into cannon, a mural that began peeling off the wall while the painter was still alive, twenty-five years of litigation with a religious brotherhood, a plaque in the Tuscan hills commemorating a flight that never happened, and the most famous painting on earth, which became famous because somebody stole it.Written with warmth, considerable mischief, and no mathematics whatsoever, this is not a life of a genius. It is a book about how knowledge becomes knowledge - and about a man who found more of it than anyone in his century and handed almost none of it on.Keywords: Leonardo da Vinci, Renaissance, history of science, analogy, anatomy, invention, scientific method.…

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - In January 1912 a thirty-one-year-old meteorologist stood up in Frankfurt and told a room of geologists that the continents move.He was right. He was also, on the question that mattered most to his audience, spectacularly wrong - and the men who threw him out were not fools. They asked what force could shove a continent through the floor of an ocean, and the best answer he had was far too weak to move anything at all. Harold Jeffreys did the arithmetic. It was not close.This is the story of what happens when somebody measures a pattern he cannot explain. Alfred Wegener assembled evidence that has never been overturned - the fit of the coasts at the edge of the shelf, the same fossil fern on five continents, glacial scratches running inland from the sea on three of them - and bolted it to a mechanism that was rubbish. His profession treated the pattern and the mechanism as one claim and discarded both. It took half a century, a world war's worth of naval instruments and a magnetic barcode on the sea floor to pull them apart again.And here is the part that never makes it onto the poster. The force is still being argued about. Geophysicists have not settled what actually drives the plates - sinking slabs, spreading ridges, rising plumes, some conspiracy of all three. The standard Wegener was held to is a standard the winning theory has never met either. What ended the argument was not an explanation. It was a measurement: stripes of reversed magnetism on the ocean floor, and then satellites that simply watch the Atlantic widen while you read this sentence, at roughly the rate your fingernails grow.He did not live to see any of it. He died on the Greenland ice cap in November 1930, in the week of his fiftieth birthday, hauling food to two men at a weather station in the middle of nothing. They buried him with his skis planted upright in the snow, and that is still where he is, somewhere under a great deal more snow, moving very slowly west.>Keywords: Alfred Wegener; continental drift; plate tectonics; history of science; Pangaea; geology; scientific consensus.…

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - Murray Gell-Mann took a mess and made it small. In the 1950s physicists were drowning in new particles, discovering them faster than they could invent names, and one Nobel laureate proposed fining anyone who found another. Gell-Mann invented a quantum number nobody could see, arranged the whole crowded catalog into neat geometrical families, predicted a particle that had to exist and then watched it show up on a photographic plate at Brookhaven, and finally announced that everything in the zoo was built from three things he named after a line in Finnegans Wake. A hundred particles became three letters. He was thirty-four.Then he did something stranger. He left the smallest objects in the universe and went to New Mexico to ask what it means for a description to be short at all. Out of that came effective complexity, an attempt to measure how much regularity a thing actually contains, and a research institute that has been trying to build a general science of complicated systems ever since.>Keywords: Murray Gell-Mann, quarks, particle physics, complexity, information theory, Santa Fe Institute, history of science.…

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware.

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - Nobody invented gene editing. Bacteria have been doing it since before there was oxygen in the air, and the only thing that changed recently is that a species of primate finally noticed and asked to borrow the equipment.This is the story of that borrowing, and of Jennifer Doudna, who spent twenty years on the molecule everyone else considered a courier and consequently was the one person standing in the right place when the courier turned out to be running the whole operation. It is a story with a Spanish saltern in it, a Dutch tuberculosis laboratory that used the system successfully for a decade without knowing what it was, a dairy company defending its yogurt, five rejection letters, a walk through old San Juan, and a patent fight expensive enough to fund a small navy.But this book also asks the questions the celebration usually skips. Who actually did this - not as gossip, but as arithmetic Stories of success are assembled backwards, and the assembly has a direction: it credits whatever survived the telling and quietly deletes the rest. What is this thing, really, once you take away the phrases we repeat without inspecting them The code of life. The gene for. Editing, a word that describes almost nothing that actually happens, since the machine only cuts, and everything afterward is done by a cell with its own priorities and no interest in yours. And why did the world change in eighteen months, when the underlying biology had been sitting in the literature for a quarter of a century The answer to that one is not biological at all. It is the price.Wit is applied throughout to committees, journals, metaphors, and the author. It is withheld entirely from the patients, who are the reason any of this matters and who get the plainest prose in the book.Keywords: CRISPR, gene editing, Jennifer Doudna, biotechnology, history of science, bioethics, molecular biology.…

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware.

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - We are the best-informed, best-supplied, longest-living human beings who have ever existed, and a startling number of us go through the day with the quiet sense that the floor is not entirely attached to the building. Not fear of anything nameable. Just a low hum underneath an ordinary Tuesday, the feeling of standing on something that is holding for now.This book argues that the feeling is not neurotic, not nostalgic, and not a failure of gratitude. It is an accurate reading of a real change, filed under the wrong heading.Two houses in an old story are hit by the same storm. Nobody gets better weather. The difference between them is invisible in fair conditions and total when the water arrives, and it comes down to something unglamorous: one builder did the work, the other only heard about it. That distinction turns out to describe an astonishing amount of contemporary life. Our savings, our skills, our friendships, our beliefs, our insurance, our institutions, our sense of who would show up for us at two in the morning - a great many of these are held in the declared form rather than the done form. Declared foundations cost nothing to lay, look identical to real ones in good weather, and are missing at exactly the moment weight is applied.Anna Kriger takes the reader through the anatomy of that substitution with wit, unsentimental clarity, and a refusal to sell either panic or reassurance. She examines why knowing about a thing has come to feel like having it, why anxiety often functions as a well-calibrated instrument that we insist on misreading, why disaster is always preceded by the sensation that yesterday everything was fine, and why the deep and unrewarding work of digging down to rock has almost no market value until the one day it has all of it.The storm is not the subject of this book. Storms are permanent, universal, and entirely uninterested in our preferences. What can be changed is what is underneath us when one arrives - and the change is smaller, more concrete, and more available than the scale of the anxiety suggests.A book for anyone who has everything they were told to want and still sleeps badly.Keywords: fragility, resilience, modern anxiety, self-knowledge, uncertainty, practical philosophy, meaning.…

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - In 1907 the Swiss Academy of Sciences appointed a committee to publish everything Leonhard Euler had written. The committee is still working. Eighty volumes have appeared, the correspondence has been driven onto the internet for want of paper, and a rotating cast of living mathematicians has spent more than a century failing to catch up with one dead Swiss.Euler gave us the symbols we think in. The letter e, the imaginary unit i, the notation f(x) for a function, the summation sign, the modern use of pi, sine and cosine as functions rather than lines in a diagram - open any textbook in any science and you are reading his handwriting without knowing his name. He founded topology by refusing to measure anything, invented the mathematics of conditions rather than causes, built a musical instrument out of prime numbers, and went blind in the middle of it all, after which his output roughly doubled.He was also, inconveniently for his biographers, happy. No persecution, no madness, no poverty, no feud that cost him a friend. Thirteen children, a good salary, an unshakable faith, and a memory that held the entire Aeneid. Even the invading army that sacked his farm sent him compensation, and the Empress added four thousand roubles on top.This book tells the story of the most productive mind in the history of science through a single gesture he made over and over: throw away everything you can measure, and look at what is connected to what. That gesture built graph theory, topology, and the calculus of variations. It is also the gesture at the heart of my own research programme in structural persistence and information physics, which runs through these pages as the living continuation of an eighteenth-century walk across seven bridges.No equations. No prior training required. Only a long argument, told with affection, about a man who calculated as other men breathe, and about why the shape of a thing so often outlasts its size.Keywords: Leonhard Euler, history of mathematics, topology, Enlightenment science, graph theory, mathematical notation, complex systems.…

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - He solved the problem of the missing planet in a few weeks, and told almost no one how. He worked out the geometry of curved space decades before anyone published it, and locked the pages in a drawer. He wrote his most explosive result about an asteroid as a coded cipher, so that he could claim it later without saying it now. Carl Friedrich Gauss, the bricklayer's son who became the Prince of Mathematicians, spent his life inventing two things: an extraordinary quantity of modern science, and a way of writing it down that removes every trace of how a human being got there.This book follows the second invention, because it is the one we all inherited. Along the way it takes in a duke who bought a boy's education, an asteroid that vanished behind the sun, ten summers of dragging survey instruments across a heath, the first electric telegraph strung over the rooftops of a university town, a magnetic needle that quietly buried a rival theory of the earth, and a young Hungarian whose life was broken by one polite letter. It also takes in an ordinary man: grieving, difficult, tender in the wrong places, counting the days of his friends' lives because he could not stop counting.Boris Kriger writes as a working researcher rather than a spectator, and where he disagrees with his subject he says so. In one chapter he takes an instrument Gauss invented in 1833 and left unpublished, and reports what it shows when applied to the largest structures in the universe. There is not a single equation in these pages. There is a great deal of arithmetic in them, all of it done in words.Keywords: Gauss, history of mathematics, number theory, astronomy, geodesy, magnetism, scientific discovery.…

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - You are not an individual. You are an arrangement.Every cell in your body contains the descendants of bacteria that were swallowed roughly two billion years ago and never digested. They still carry their own DNA. They still divide on their own schedule. They are, by every reasonable measure, guests who have overstayed by a margin no landlord could tolerate, and without them you could not stand up.The woman who insisted on this was named Lynn Margulis, and for two decades she was the least comfortable person in American biology. She was twenty-eight when she wrote the paper. It was rejected roughly fifteen times. When it finally appeared, the discipline responded with a silence so complete that colleagues advised her, kindly, to work on something else. She did not. By the time she died in 2011 her heresy was on page one of every cell biology textbook in the world, and she had moved on to fights she could not win, some of which she should never have started.This book tells her story and follows her question further than she took it. If a cell can be a merger, what else is one Lichens turned out to be committees. Termites digest wood by subcontracting. A quarter of your body weight, roughly, is not you. Somewhere in the Pacific there is a plankton cell in the act of swallowing something right now, and biologists are watching, because for the first time the merger is happening on a timescale a career can accommodate.Along the way it takes up the harder problem underneath: where one living thing ends and another begins, and why the answer has always been decided by committee rather than discovered. It argues, with a formal apparatus kept firmly out of sight, that cooperation is not the exception biology has to explain away but the state a system settles into when nothing is pushing it apart. And it looks squarely at the last decade of Margulis's life, when the same talent that let her step outside one orthodoxy led her straight into positions that were simply wrong, because a mind that cannot be trapped by a frame has no built-in instinct for which way to jump.A book about the deepest merger in the history of life, and about the difficult, funny, impossible woman who would not let anyone forget it.Keywords: evolution, symbiosis, cell biology, history of science, microbiology, scientific controversy, origins of life.…

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - In a laboratory in Birmingham in the early 1950s, a mouse was wearing skin that belonged to a different strain of mouse, and was doing so with complete indifference. It should have destroyed the graft within a fortnight. It never destroyed it. The animal had been injected before birth with cells from the donor line, and that was enough: the foreign tissue had arrived early, and early was all that mattered.Peter Medawar, who ran that experiment with a doctoral student and a postdoctoral fellow and a great deal of nerve, received the Nobel Prize for it in 1960, and transplantation surgery became possible because of it. He is called the father of transplantation, which he would have found funny, since he was not a physician and never treated a patient in his life.This book argues that his experiment proved something larger than the prize was awarded for, and that the field has still not absorbed it. Immunology had christened itself the science of telling self from nonself. But a body that can be talked into adopting a stranger has no way of telling self from anything. It registers what was present when the accounting was done, and treats the rest as a problem. The two rules agree almost always. Medawar built the one arrangement in which they disagree - and the word survived anyway, and steered the clinic toward suppressing the immune system rather than renegotiating with it.Around that argument stands one of the most quotable lives in modern science. A Lebanese father selling British dentures to Brazilians. A school Medawar compared, in print, to a training academy for the SS. A doctorate he never bought because he needed the money for an appendix operation. A wartime glue for severed nerves, made from human blood. Six pages in 1961 that demolished the most fashionable book in Europe. An essay asking whether the scientific paper is a fraud, whose answer was yes. A theory of why we grow old that nobody quotes and everybody uses. And a stroke that struck him down mid-sentence in Exeter Cathedral at fifty-four, after which he wrote his best books with half a body.>Keywords: immunology; transplantation; immunological tolerance; Peter Medawar; self and nonself; history of science; philosophy of biology.…

Condición: New. Print on Demand.

Condición: New. Print on Demand.

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - In 1948 a shy, unicycling engineer at Bell Laboratories published a paper that quietly rebuilt the twentieth century, and he did it by refusing to answer the most interesting question in his field. Claude Shannon wanted to know how much could be sent through a wire. He did not want to know what any of it meant. So he cut meaning out of the problem entirely, like a surgeon removing something inflamed, and discovered that what remained could be measured to the last decimal place.That amputation gave us the bit, the compact disc, the mobile phone, the deep-space probe that whispers home across four billion miles without dropping a syllable, and the strange modern habit of describing absolutely everything, from DNA to consciousness to the universe itself, as information. Shannon spent the rest of his life politely asking people to stop. Nobody listened. He built a mechanical mouse, a machine whose only function was to switch itself off, and a wearable computer for cheating at roulette, and he seems to have enjoyed all of it more than the fame.This book follows Shannon from a barbed-wire telegraph in rural Michigan to the cipher rooms of the Second World War, from the most consequential master's thesis ever written to the noisy-channel theorem that promised something no engineer had dared hope for. It then asks the question Shannon left standing on the table. If information is not a substance, what exactly is it, and what happens to physics when a role gets mistaken for a thing Drawing on the author's own work in Information Substrate Theory, the book traces that mistake through cosmology, the statistics of galaxy fields, the undeciphered script of the Indus Valley, the accounting of the dark sector, and the question of whether invariance is evidence of anything at all.It is a book about measurement, uncertainty, and the discipline of not saying more than you can support. It is also, unavoidably, a book about a man who juggled while riding a unicycle down the corridors of the most serious industrial laboratory on earth.Keywords: Claude Shannon, information theory, entropy, communication, cosmology, philosophy of science, Information Substrate Theory.…