This volume traces W.D. Gann's "Time Factor" and "Law of Vibration" back to the Chaldeans of 3000 BCE Sumer whose principal aspiration was to understand the motion of time. They divided time into years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes and seconds and devised calendars which helped them predict, and therefore survive, their two rivers' ravaging floods. Inadvertently, their findings also solved the mystery behind the ups and down of money markets. From ancient Sumer to Egypt, ancient China to the native peoples of Central and North America, civilisations unlikely to have had contact with each other built remarkably similar monuments according to geometrical proportions designed to embody cosmic knowledge that would last for all time. Each deciphered time cycles, created calendars and made long term projections of natural phenomena. The Square-of-9 is a matrix embodying nature's cosmic clock. Pauline Novak-Reich takes the reader through ancient math, sacred geometry and lore demonstrating the extraordinary achievements of people who lived in tandem with nature. Each one of these civilisations discovered Nature's "Black Box." Gann often reiterated that: "Everything in existence is based on exact proportion and perfect relationship. There is no chance in nature; because mathematical principles of the highest order lie at the foundation of all things...Vibration is fundamental: nothing is exempt from this law. It is universal, therefore applicable to every class of phenomena on the globe."

In this inspirational masterpiece about the role of the human being in the universe, finance trader and author W. D. Gann uses the Bible to explore the secret to successful living. Through direct teachings from the Bible, the reader may learn how to understand, obey and apply the universal laws revealed in the Bible in order to bring about his own latent talents and powers, and in turn be firmly set on the road towards health, happiness and prosperity.

A page-turning novel that is also an exploration of the great philosophical concepts of Western thought, Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World has fired the imagination of readers all over the world, with more than twenty million copies in print. One day fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, with one question on each: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" From that irresistible beginning, Sophie becomes obsessed with questions that take her far beyond what she knows of her Norwegian village. Through those letters, she enrolls in a kind of correspondence course, covering Socrates to Sartre, with a mysterious philosopher, while receiving letters addressed to another girl. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up? To unravel this riddle, Sophie must use the philosophy she is learning—but the truth turns out to be far more complicated than she could have imagined.

National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry

“If you liked Chaos, you’ll love Complexity. Waldrop creates the most exciting intellectual adventure story of the year” (The Washington Post). In a rarified world of scientific research, a revolution has been brewing. Its activists are not anarchists, but rather Nobel Laureates in physics and economics and pony-tailed graduates, mathematicians, and computer scientists from all over the world. They have formed an iconoclastic think-tank and their radical idea is to create a new science: complexity. They want to know how a primordial soup of simple molecules managed to turn itself into the first living cell—and what the origin of life some four billion years ago can tell us about the process of technological innovation today. This book is their story—the story of how they have tried to forge what they like to call the science of the twenty-first century. “Lucidly shows physicists, biologists, computer scientists and economists swapping metaphors and reveling in the sense that epochal discoveries are just around the corner . . . [Waldrop] has a special talent for relaying the exhilaration of moments of intellectual insight.” —The New York Times Book Review “Where I enjoyed the book was when it dove into the actual question of complexity, talking about complex systems in economics, biology, genetics, computer modeling, and so on. Snippets of rare beauty here and there almost took your breath away.” —Medium “[Waldrop] provides a good grounding of what may indeed be the first flowering of a new science.” —Publishers Weekly

The Odyssey of Sacred Knowledge, is the historical sequel to Mystifying Square, Divine Proportions - Nature's Black Box. It chronicles the five-thousand-year-long odyssey of the world's second measuring instrument - the Square-of-9 - from 3000 BCE Babylon to 21st century United States. It tells the story of the men and women who over the ages tapped the secrets of the universe and discovered the matrix of space-time - the heartbeat of all cycles, biological or inanimate. When stripped of its theological content, the Biblical narrative brings to light the era's scientific advances, as well as the troublesome lineage concealed in the Old Testament. It emerges that the Square-of-9 is the centrepiece of the Torah's five books, and that the Hebrew patriarchs' choice of heir dictated the course it would travel over the next five-thousand years. The Odyssey of Sacred Knowledge begins in the Garden of Eden where, according to the Genesis story, the first known humans lived. The serpent coiling round the Tree of Knowledge, the Tree's forbidden fruit, and the awakening of Adam and Eve are the seeds that germinated this volume. The serpent alludes to a spiral, the Garden's trees to a life-supporting environment and to the pristine surroundings humanity was yet to explore.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a documentary from Ken Burns on PBS, this New York Times bestseller is “an extraordinary achievement” (The New Yorker)—a magnificent, profoundly humane “biography” of cancer—from its first documented appearances thousands of years ago through the epic battles in the twentieth century to cure, control, and conquer it to a radical new understanding of its essence. Physician, researcher, and award-winning science writer, Siddhartha Mukherjee examines cancer with a cellular biologist’s precision, a historian’s perspective, and a biographer’s passion. The result is an astonishingly lucid and eloquent chronicle of a disease humans have lived with—and perished from—for more than five thousand years. The story of cancer is a story of human ingenuity, resilience, and perseverance, but also of hubris, paternalism, and misperception. Mukherjee recounts centuries of discoveries, setbacks, victories, and deaths, told through the eyes of his predecessors and peers, training their wits against an infinitely resourceful adversary that, just three decades ago, was thought to be easily vanquished in an all-out “war against cancer.” The book reads like a literary thriller with cancer as the protagonist. Riveting, urgent, and surprising, The Emperor of All Maladies provides a fascinating glimpse into the future of cancer treatments. It is an illuminating book that provides hope and clarity to those seeking to demystify cancer.

After a long time of neglect, Artificial Intelligence is once again at the center of most of our political, economic, and socio-cultural debates. Recent advances in the field of Artifical Neural Networks have led to a renaissance of dystopian and utopian speculations on an AI-rendered future. Algorithmic technologies are deployed for identifying potential terrorists through vast surveillance networks, for producing sentencing guidelines and recidivism risk profiles in criminal justice systems, for demographic and psychographic targeting of bodies for advertising or propaganda, and more generally for automating the analysis of language, text, and images. Against this background, the aim of this book is to discuss the heterogenous conditions, implications, and effects of modern AI and Internet technologies in terms of their political dimension: What does it mean to critically investigate efforts of net politics in the age of machine learning algorithms?

The experience of modernization -- the dizzying social changes that swept millions of people into the capitalist world -- and modernism in art, literature and architecture are brilliantly integrated in this account.

In today's art world many strange, even shocking, things qualify as art. In this book, Cynthia Freeland explains why innovation and controversy are valued in the arts, weaving together philosophy and art theory with many fascinating examples. She discusses blood, beauty, culture, money, museums, sex, and politics, clarifying contemporary and historical accounts of the nature, function, and interpretation of the arts. Freeland also propels us into the future by surveying cutting-edge web sites, along with the latest research on the brain's role in perceiving art. This clear, provocative book engages with the big debates surrounding our responses to art and is an invaluable introduction to anyone interested in thinking about art.