The Logic of Life

The Logic of Life PDF Author: Tim Harford
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN: 0812977874
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
Life sometimes seems illogical. Individuals do strange things: take drugs, have unprotected sex, mug each other. Love seems irrational, and so does divorce. On a larger scale, life seems no fairer or easier to fathom: Why do some neighborhoods thrive and others become ghettos? Why is racism so persistent? Why is your idiot boss paid a fortune for sitting behind a mahogany altar? Thorny questions–and you might be surprised to hear the answers coming from an economist. But award-winning journalist Tim Harford likes to spring surprises. In this deftly reasoned book, he argues that life is logical after all. Under the surface of everyday insanity, hidden incentives are at work, and Harford shows these incentives emerging in the most unlikely places.

The Logic of Life

The Logic of Life PDF Author: Tim Harford
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN: 0812977874
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 267

Get Book Here

Book Description
Life sometimes seems illogical. Individuals do strange things: take drugs, have unprotected sex, mug each other. Love seems irrational, and so does divorce. On a larger scale, life seems no fairer or easier to fathom: Why do some neighborhoods thrive and others become ghettos? Why is racism so persistent? Why is your idiot boss paid a fortune for sitting behind a mahogany altar? Thorny questions–and you might be surprised to hear the answers coming from an economist. But award-winning journalist Tim Harford likes to spring surprises. In this deftly reasoned book, he argues that life is logical after all. Under the surface of everyday insanity, hidden incentives are at work, and Harford shows these incentives emerging in the most unlikely places.

The Logic of Life

The Logic of Life PDF Author: François Jacob
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691000425
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
In The Logic of Life François Jacob looks at the way our understanding of biology has changed since the sixteenth century. He describes four fundamental turning points in the perception of the structure of living things: the discoveries of the functions of organs, cells, chromosomes and genes, and DNA.

The Logic of Life

The Logic of Life PDF Author: C. A. R. Boyd
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
A highly challenging collection of essays by eminent scientists on the theme of integrative approaches to physiological questions, this book discusses the changing boundaries between different disciplines in modern experimental biology. The contributors are experts in the fields of integrative physiology, cellular evolution, control mechanisms, endocrinology, and behavioral biology. Conceived as a tribute to the 1993 International Congress of Physiological Sciences, this important work matches the immense challenge of modern biological science at the end of the twentieth century.

The Inexplicable Logic of My Life

The Inexplicable Logic of My Life PDF Author: Benjamin Alire Saenz
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0544583523
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 469

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Book Description
A “mesmerizing, poetic exploration of family, friendship, love and loss” by the author of Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe (The New York Times Book Review). Sal used to know his place with his adoptive gay father, their loving Mexican American family, and his best friend, Samantha. But it’s senior year, and suddenly Sal is throwing punches, questioning everything, and realizing he no longer knows himself. If Sal’s not who he thought he was, who is he? From the Printz Honor-winning author, this is “another stellar, gentle look into the emotional lives of teens on the cusp of adulthood” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). “The themes of love, social responsibility, death, and redemption are expertly intertwined with well-developed characters and a compelling story line. This complex, sensitive, and profoundly moving book is beautifully written and will stay with readers.” —School Library Journal (starred review “Sal is one of those characters you wonder about after the book is closed.” —Booklist “What the world needs now is a book like this one. . . . Read it.” —Bill Konigsberg, Stonewall Award–winning author of Openly Straight

Hegel's Concept of Life

Hegel's Concept of Life PDF Author: Karen Ng
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190947632
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
Karen Ng sheds new light on Hegel's famously impenetrable philosophy. She does so by offering a new interpretation of Hegel's idealism and by foregrounding Hegel's Science of Logic, revealing that Hegel's theory of reason revolves around the concept of organic life. Beginning with the influence of Kant's Critique of Judgment on Hegel, Ng argues that Hegel's key philosophical contributions concerning self-consciousness, freedom, and logic all develop around the idea of internal purposiveness, which appealed to Hegel deeply. She charts the development of the purposiveness theme in Kant's third Critique, and argues that the most important innovation from that text is the claim that the purposiveness of nature opens up and enables the operation of the power of judgment. This innovation is essential for understanding Hegel's philosophical method in the Differenzschrift (1801) and Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), where Hegel, developing lines of thought from Fichte and Schelling, argues against Kant that internal purposiveness constitutes cognition's activity, shaping its essential relation to both self and world. From there, Ng defends a new and detailed interpretation of Hegel's Science of Logic, arguing that Hegel's Subjective Logic can be understood as Hegel's version of a critique of judgment, in which life comes to be understood as opening up the possibility of intelligibility. She makes the case that Hegel's theory of judgment is modelled on reflective and teleological judgments, in which something's species or kind provides the objective context for predication. The Subjective Logic culminates in the argument that life is a primitive or original activity of judgment, one that is the necessary presupposition for the actualization of self-conscious cognition. Through bold and ambitious new arguments, Ng demonstrates the ongoing dialectic between life and self-conscious cognition, providing ground-breaking ways of understanding Hegel's philosophical system.

Values at the End of Life

Values at the End of Life PDF Author: Roi Livne
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674545176
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
This insightful study examines the deeply personal and heart-wrenching tensions among financial considerations, emotional attachments, and moral arguments that motivate end-of-life decisions. America’s health care system was built on the principle that life should be prolonged whenever possible, regardless of the costs. This commitment has often meant that patients spend their last days suffering from heroic interventions that extend their life by only weeks or months. Increasingly, this approach to end-of-life care is coming under scrutiny, from a moral as well as a financial perspective. Sociologist Roi Livne documents the rise and effectiveness of hospice and palliative care, and growing acceptance of the idea that a life consumed by suffering may not be worth living. Values at the End of Life combines an in-depth historical analysis with an extensive study conducted in three hospitals, where Livne observed terminally ill patients, their families, and caregivers negotiating treatment. Livne describes the ambivalent, conflicted moments when people articulate and act on their moral intuitions about dying. Interviews with medical staff allowed him to isolate the strategies clinicians use to help families understand their options. As Livne discovered, clinicians are advancing the idea that invasive, expensive hospital procedures often compound a patient’s suffering. Affluent, educated families were more readily persuaded by this moral calculus than those of less means. Once defiant of death—or even in denial—many American families and professionals in the health care system are beginning to embrace the notion that less treatment in the end may be better treatment.

Godel

Godel PDF Author: John L. Casti
Publisher:
ISBN: 0786747609
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
Kurt Gödel was an intellectual giant. His Incompleteness Theorem turned not only mathematics but also the whole world of science and philosophy on its head. Shattering hopes that logic would, in the end, allow us a complete understanding of the universe, Gödel's theorem also raised many provocative questions: What are the limits of rational thought? Can we ever fully understand the machines we build? Or the inner workings of our own minds? How should mathematicians proceed in the absence of complete certainty about their results? Equally legendary were Gödel's eccentricities, his close friendship with Albert Einstein, and his paranoid fear of germs that eventually led to his death from self-starvation. Now, in the first book for a general audience on this strange and brilliant thinker, John Casti and Werner DePauli bring the legend to life.

The Logic of Chance

The Logic of Chance PDF Author: Eugene V. Koonin
Publisher: FT Press
ISBN: 013262317X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 530

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Book Description
The Logic of Chance offers a reappraisal and a new synthesis of theories, concepts, and hypotheses on the key aspects of the evolution of life on earth in light of comparative genomics and systems biology. The author presents many specific examples from systems and comparative genomic analysis to begin to build a new, much more detailed, complex, and realistic picture of evolution. The book examines a broad range of topics in evolutionary biology including the inadequacy of natural selection and adaptation as the only or even the main mode of evolution; the key role of horizontal gene transfer in evolution and the consequent overhaul of the Tree of Life concept; the central, underappreciated evolutionary importance of viruses; the origin of eukaryotes as a result of endosymbiosis; the concomitant origin of cells and viruses on the primordial earth; universal dependences between genomic and molecular-phenomic variables; and the evolving landscape of constraints that shape the evolution of genomes and molecular phenomes. "Koonin's account of viral and pre-eukaryotic evolution is undoubtedly up-to-date. His "mega views" of evolution (given what was said above) and his cosmological musings, on the other hand, are interesting reading." Summing Up: Recommended Reprinted with permission from CHOICE, copyright by the American Library Association.

The Folly of Fools

The Folly of Fools PDF Author: Robert Trivers
Publisher: Basic Books (AZ)
ISBN: 0465027555
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Book Description
Explores the author's theorized evolutionary basis for self-deception, which he says is tied to group conflict, courtship, neurophysiology, and immunology, but can be negated by awareness of it and its results.

John Venn

John Venn PDF Author: Lukas M. Verburgt
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022681551X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 436

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Book Description
Presents a biographical sketch of English logician and man of letters John Venn (1834-1923), compiled as part of the MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive of the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Saint Andrews in Scotland. Notes that Venn compiled a history of Cambridge University.