Here are 64 books that The Feynman Lectures on Physics fans have personally recommended if you like
The Feynman Lectures on Physics.
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I became enthused about using mathematical models to understand the natural world as an undergraduate, got trained to do so, and spent my career working on a wide variety of applications. Most recently, I translated ideas from disease modeling to understand cyber variability and security.
To maximize success when applying mathematics to the natural or (for cyber) operational world, one needs to master the appropriate mathematical tools and have a deep knowledge of the subject matter. My recommendations are three really great books that will help you gain proficiency in the needed mathematical tools and how to apply them, and two equally great books on cyber systems.
This is one of two books (the other is Cyberspace in Peace and War) that I think anybody seriously interested in cyber security (which should be everybody) should have on their shelf.
It is filled with insights on a wide range of topics. I refer to it many times in my book, including why biology is a better metaphor for cyber defense than war, how people new to analytical thinking about cyber systems should approach the topic, the general meaning of cyber security, what it means for a cyber system to be resilient, and the need for operational cyber drills (analogous to experiments in biology).
The writing in this book is accessible, and it is both fun to read and really informative.
Dependence on computers has had a transformative effect on human society. Cybernetics is now woven into the core functions of virtually every basic institution, including our oldest ones. War is one such institution, and the digital revolution's impact on it has been profound. The American military, which has no peer, is almost completely reliant on high-tech computer systems. Given the Internet's potential for full-spectrum surveillance and information disruption, the marshaling of computer networks represents the next stage of cyberwar. Indeed, it is upon us already. The recent Stuxnet episode, in which Israel fed a malignant computer virus into Iran's nuclear…
The Victorian mansion, Evenmere, is the mechanism that runs the universe.
The lamps must be lit, or the stars die. The clocks must be wound, or Time ceases. The Balance between Order and Chaos must be preserved, or Existence crumbles.
Appointed the Steward of Evenmere, Carter Anderson must learn the…
I became enthused about using mathematical models to understand the natural world as an undergraduate, got trained to do so, and spent my career working on a wide variety of applications. Most recently, I translated ideas from disease modeling to understand cyber variability and security.
To maximize success when applying mathematics to the natural or (for cyber) operational world, one needs to master the appropriate mathematical tools and have a deep knowledge of the subject matter. My recommendations are three really great books that will help you gain proficiency in the needed mathematical tools and how to apply them, and two equally great books on cyber systems.
This is a wonderfully informative introduction to cyber system variability, and is something to both read from cover to cover and have on your shelf (physical or electronic) to dip into from time to time, as I do.
Libicki’s ideas appear throughout my book, including the advice he gives on page 1 that "…when facing a problem such as the threat from cyberspace it pays to be serious but not desperate."
If you seriously want to understand how to use disease models to understand cybersecurity and variability, the books by Libicki and Singer and Friedman provide a fantastic background in the subject matter.
This updated and expanded edition of Cyberspace in Peace and War by Martin C. Libicki presents a comprehensive understanding of cybersecurity, cyberwar, and cyber-terrorism. From basic concepts to advanced principles, Libicki examines the sources and consequences of system compromises, addresses strategic aspects of cyberwar, and defines cybersecurity in the context of military operations while highlighting unique aspects of the digital battleground and strategic uses of cyberwar.
This new edition provides updated analysis on cyberespionage, including the enigmatic behavior of Russian actors, making this volume a timely and necessary addition to the cyber-practitioner's library.
I became enthused about using mathematical models to understand the natural world as an undergraduate, got trained to do so, and spent my career working on a wide variety of applications. Most recently, I translated ideas from disease modeling to understand cyber variability and security.
To maximize success when applying mathematics to the natural or (for cyber) operational world, one needs to master the appropriate mathematical tools and have a deep knowledge of the subject matter. My recommendations are three really great books that will help you gain proficiency in the needed mathematical tools and how to apply them, and two equally great books on cyber systems.
This is a classic! I have had (and worn through copies) since 1969.
There is no explicit mention of disease in Maynard Smith’s book, but the two chapters on population regulation will give you all the tools you need to start applying ideas from disease biology.
As with the Feynman lectures, there is mathematics in this book – but it begins with arithmetic. I recommend it for much the same reason that I recommend Feynman because it will show you how mathematical reasoning can illuminate biology and was written by one the great mathematical biologists of the 20th century.
The book is written for biologists and has the same quality as Feynman’s lectures of having plenty of words that bring the mathematics to life.
This is a lucid introduction to some of the mathematical ideas which are useful to biologists. Professor Maynard Smith introduces the reader to the ways in which biological problems can be expressed mathematically, and shows how the mathematical equations which arise in biological work can be solved. Each chapter has a number of examples which present further points of biological and mathematical interest. interest. Professor Maynard Smith's book is written for all biologists, from undergraduate level upwards, who need mathematical tools. Only an elementary knowledge of mathematics is assumed. Since there are already a number of books dealing with statistics…
The Guardian of the Palace is the first novel in a modern fantasy series set in a New York City where magic is real—but hidden, suppressed, and dangerous when exposed.
When an ancient magic begins to leak into the world, a small group of unlikely allies is forced to act…
I became enthused about using mathematical models to understand the natural world as an undergraduate, got trained to do so, and spent my career working on a wide variety of applications. Most recently, I translated ideas from disease modeling to understand cyber variability and security.
To maximize success when applying mathematics to the natural or (for cyber) operational world, one needs to master the appropriate mathematical tools and have a deep knowledge of the subject matter. My recommendations are three really great books that will help you gain proficiency in the needed mathematical tools and how to apply them, and two equally great books on cyber systems.
This is a short (about 100 pages) and relatively new (2020) book showing how mathematical modeling of the dynamics of populations can be used to give new insights to the classic experiments by the scientist Georgy Gause on predation by one kind of single-celled organism called Didinium on another single celled organism Paramecium (which may sound familiar from high school biology), where the populations are the numbers of the two species and to the outcomes of classical military battles like Trafalgar, where the populations are the sizes of the forces of each side.
McCue’s book is very well written and most of it is accessible with relatively simple mathematics. It will also show you how we can include the randomness that is inherent to nature (and to all operational situations) in models.
McCue is a top flight operations analyst; as with Feynman and Maynard Smith, reading this book – even…
F.W. Lanchester famously reduced the mutual erosion of attrition warfare to simple mathematical form, resulting in his famous "Square Law," and also the "Linear Law." Followers have sought to fit real-world data to Lanchester's equations, and/or to elaborate them in order to capture more aspects of reality.In Beyond Lanchester, Brian McCue--author of the similarly quantitative U-Boats In The Bay Of Biscay--focusses on a neglected shortcoming of Lanchester's work: its determinism. He shows that the mathematics of the Square Law contain instability, so that the end-state it predictes is actually one of the least likely outcomes.This mathematical truth is connected to…
My interest in kids running their own world largely free of adult intervention probably began with reading Swallows and Amazons and carried on into writing my own book. I love how the kids become important, standing figures, taking on the role of adults while still being kids. It offers the kids an opportunity to take leading roles in their society while also becoming a vehicle by which to potentially explore the true nature of young people. There aren’t very many books that actually do this, and some of them are fairly obscure.
This was a fabulous story, super interesting, that read kind of like a history text/novel, something in between, an effect I really loved. The story was well-developed, with scientific and technical detail and specific stories used appropriately to develop the greater tale, along with broader overviews, capturing the activities of the whole world. The characters were all interesting. The plots, schemes, and machinations are really good. The battles ranged from thrilling to very depressing.
Overall, I thought the book was very realistic and made a lot of sense. The author thought through what would happen in an adultless present-day world. I like how he captured that while kids are often seen as innocent and virtuous, take the adults away and they have not yet learned to appreciate the value of life, etc. It really gives you a lot of food for thought about human nature and especially children.
'Like Ursula K. Le Guin rewriting The Lord of the Flies for the quantum age' NPR 'Cixin Liu is the author of your next favourite sci-fi novel' WIRED Eight years ago and eight light years away, a supermassive star died.
Tonight, a supernova tsunami of high energy will finally reach Earth. Dark skies will shine bright as a new star blooms in the heavens and within a year everyone over the age of thirteen will be dead, their chromosomes irreversibly damaged.
And so the countdown begins.
Parents apprentice their children and try to pass on the knowledge they'll need to…
I began working in prisons 50 years ago. I was just out of grad school and I accepted the challenge of starting a literacy program in the Philadelphia Prison System. The shock of cellblock life was eye-opening, but the most unexpected revelation was the sight of scores of inmates wrapped in bandages and medical tape. Unknown to the general public, the three city prisons had become a lucrative appendage of the University of Pennsylvania’s Medical School. As I would discover years later, thousands of imprisoned Philadelphians had been used in a cross-section of unethical and dangerous scientific studies running the gamut from simple hair dye and athlete’s foot trials to radioactive isotope, dioxin, and US Army chemical warfare studies. My account of the prison experiments, Acres of Skin, helped instill in me an abiding faith in well-researched journalism as an antidote to societal indiscretions and crimes.
Welsome investigates a particularly repugnant episode in medical history; doctors secretly injecting hospital patients with plutonium as part of the Manhattan Project. Designed to weigh the increased threat of cancer during the outset of the atomic era, the book navigates the governmental and scientific concerns of a new nuclear world, the prestigious players who argued for human experimentation, and the unwitting victims - all hospital patients - who’d be used as test material. In addition, Welsome also explores other Cold War examples of atomic abuse such as “radioactive cocktails” given to pregnant women and radioactive breakfast cereal given to five and six-year-old “morons” at state institutions.
In a Massachusetts school, seventy-three disabled children were spoon fed radioactive isotopes along with their morning oatmeal....In an upstate New York hospital, an eighteen-year-old woman, believing she was being treated for a pituitary disorder, was injected with plutonium by Manhattan Project doctors....At a Tennessee prenatal clinic, 829 pregnant women were served "vitamin cocktails"--in truth, drinks containing radioactive iron--as part of their prenatal treatmen....
In 1945, the seismic power of atomic energy was already well known to researchers, but the effects of radiation on human beings were not. Fearful that plutonium would cause a cancer epidemic among workers, Manhattan Project doctors…
Aury and Scott travel to the Finger Lakes in New York’s wine country to get to the bottom of the mysterious happenings at the Songscape Winery. Disturbed furniture and curious noises are one thing, but when a customer winds up dead, it’s time to dig into the details and see…
Being a human is fraught, so I've always been fascinated by stories of sentient animals, long before I sold my first short story at age 19 (about a tiny dragon that lived in a bathtub drain) or my 48th story (which features talking sand cats and is reprinted in my collection The Ramshead Algorithm: And Other Stories). While most of my 90+ published stories star humans, talking animals are a reoccurring motif in my work and in the ????+ books I've read across 40+ years. If you're ready to branch out beyond Watership Down and Redwall, here are 5 books that more fans of sentient animals should know about.
Technically, Brooke Bolander's The Only Harmless Great Thing is a novella and not a novel.
But this story, set in an alternate universe in which hyperintelligent elephants are forced into toxic factory work, packs so much pathos, vivid description, and (especially!) the world-building around elephant culture—I swoon over the voice in which the elephants tell their stories and myths to the reader—it may as well be three times as long.
This is the most modern book on my list, and it did get some excellent critical attention, including the 2018 Nebula Award for Best Novelette. But Bolander's voice of the elephants alone (to say nothing of the other voices, each masterfully different) is so danged magnificent, the more people know of this work, the better.
Finalist for the Hugo, Locus, Shirley Jackson, and Sturgeon Awards
The Only Harmless Great Thing is a heart-wrenching alternative history by Brooke Bolander that imagines an intersection between the Radium Girls and noble, sentient elephants.
In the early years of the 20th century, a group of female factory workers in Newark, New Jersey slowly died of radiation poisoning. Around the same time, an Indian elephant was deliberately put to death by electricity in Coney Island.
These are the facts.
Now these two tragedies are intertwined in a dark alternate history of rage,…
I retired in 2019 after 38 years of teaching journalism, environmental studies, and Native American Studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. About half of my employment time was set aside for writing and editing as part of several endowed professorships I held sequentially between 1990 and 2018. After 2000, climate change (global warming) became my lead focus because of the urgency of the issue and the fact that it affects everyone on Earth. As of 2023, I have written and published 56 books, with about one-third of them on global warming. I have had an intense interest in weather and climate all my life.
Pasternak was one of several journalists who became immersed in the cause of assembling information on exposure of Navajos and other Native American peoples to lethal doses of uranium as a result of mining.
As a veteran who worked with the Los Angeles Times for 24 years, she played an important role in achieving compensation. Yellow Dirt is especially strong on ways in which uranium had pervaded the lives of the Navajo, from the clothes they wore to the food they ate, to the air they breathed.
This investigative feat tells the shocking, heartbreaking story of uranium mining on the Navajo reservation and its terrible legacy of sickness and government neglect, documenting one of the darker chapters in 20th century American history.
Now in paperback, the critically acclaimed Yellow Dirt, “will break your heart. An enormous achievement—literally, a piece of groundbreaking investigative journalism—illustrates exactly what reporting should do: Show us what we’ve become as a people, and sharpen our vision of who we, the people, ought to become” ( The Christian Science Monitor ).
From the 1930s to the 1960s, the United States knowingly used and discarded…
When I decided to write about Catherine Donohue, I searched for everything I could find about her, which was surprisingly little. I traveled to Ottawa, Illinois to read her letters held at a local historical society, and I connected with the son of her attorney, who has kindly uploaded his father’s old newspaper clippings onto the internet. The story of America’s Radium Girls is a tragic warning about where greed and corruption can lead, but it is also a story about courage, faith, and perseverance. It is a privilege to be a part of increasing awareness of their fate. After all, HERstory is history, too.
When I decided I wanted to read more and write about the Radium Girls, this was the only novel I could find featuring them. It is an accessible, young adult novel with a dual timeline. A contemporary young woman discovers a painting at a thrift shop that reveals glow-in-the-dark elements. The story of a fictional early dial painter is told alongside the struggle of the main protagonist in today’s world.
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Lydia is thrilled to join the working girls in the factory, where they paint luminous watch dials for the soldiers fighting in World War I. In the future, these girls will be known as the tragic Radium Girls: factory workers not only poisoned by the glowing paint, but who also had to fight against men who knew of the paint's deadly effect. One hundred years later, Julie, whose life is on hold after high school, becomes intrigued by a series of mysterious antique paintings she finds in a thrift store. When she discovers…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
I retired in 2019 after 38 years of teaching journalism, environmental studies, and Native American Studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. About half of my employment time was set aside for writing and editing as part of several endowed professorships I held sequentially between 1990 and 2018. After 2000, climate change (global warming) became my lead focus because of the urgency of the issue and the fact that it affects everyone on Earth. As of 2023, I have written and published 56 books, with about one-third of them on global warming. I have had an intense interest in weather and climate all my life.
While several other books describe uranium’s effects on the Navajos and other Native American peoples from individual effects of exposure and death, Wastelanding is strongest in building a strong case that all of these individual efforts constitute a clear case that environmental racism, as well as colonization, and gender discrimination, combine with the United States’ hunger for uranium in a new atomic age to make victims of people who had lived in the areas for millennia while leaving the uranium in the ground, which is exactly where the people decided it should stay.
Wastelanding tells the history of the uranium industry on Navajo land in the U.S. Southwest, asking why certain landscapes and the peoples who inhabit them come to be targeted for disproportionate exposure to environmental harm. Uranium mines and mills on the Navajo Nation land have long supplied U.S. nuclear weapons and energy programs. By 1942, mines on the reservation were the main source of uranium for the top-secret Manhattan Project. Today, the Navajo Nation is home to more than a thousand abandoned uranium sites. Radiation-related diseases are endemic, claiming the health and lives of former miners and nonminers alike.
