(Part 2) Top products from r/askscience

My main hobby is reading textbooks, so I decided to go beyond the scope of the question posed. I took a look at what I have on my shelves in order to recommend particularly good or standard books that I think could characterize large portions of an undergraduate degree and perhaps the beginnings of a graduate degree in the main fields that interest me, plus some personal favorites.

Neuroscience: Theoretical Neuroscience is a good book for the field of that name, though it does require background knowledge in neuroscience (for which, as others mentioned, Kandel's text is excellent, not to mention that it alone can cover the majority of an undergraduate degree in neuroscience if corequisite classes such as biology and chemistry are momentarily ignored) and in differential equations. Neurobiology of Learning and Memory and Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuropsychology were used in my classes on cognition and learning/memory and I enjoyed both; though they tend to choose breadth over depth, all references are research papers and thus one can easily choose to go more in depth in any relevant topics by consulting these books' bibliographies.

General chemistry, organic chemistry/synthesis: I liked Linus Pauling's General Chemistry more than whatever my school gave us for general chemistry. I liked this undergraduate organic chemistry book, though I should say that I have little exposure to other organic chemistry books, and I found Protective Groups in Organic Synthesis to be very informative and useful. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to take instrumental/analytical/inorganic/physical chemistry and so have no idea what to recommend there.

Biochemistry: Lehninger is the standard text, though it's rather expensive. I have limited exposure here.

Mathematics: When I was younger (i.e. before having learned calculus), I found the four-volume The World of Mathematics great for introducing me to a lot of new concepts and branches of mathematics and for inspiring interest; I would strongly recommend this collection to anyone interested in mathematics and especially to people considering choosing to major in math as an undergrad. I found the trio of Spivak's Calculus (which Amazon says is now unfortunately out of print), Stewart's Calculus (standard text), and Kline's Calculus: An Intuitive and Physical Approach to be a good combination of rigor, practical application, and physical intuition, respectively, for calculus. My school used Marsden and Hoffman's Elementary Classical Analysis for introductory analysis (which is the field that develops and proves the calculus taught in high school), but I liked Rudin's Principles of Mathematical Analysis (nicknamed "Baby Rudin") better. I haven't worked my way though Munkres' Topology yet, but it's great so far and is often recommended as a standard beginning toplogy text. I haven't found books on differential equations or on linear algebra that I've really liked. I randomly came across Quine's Set Theory and its Logic, which I thought was an excellent introduction to set theory. Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica is a very famous text, but I haven't gotten hold of a copy yet. Lang's Algebra is an excellent abstract algebra textbook, though it's rather sophisticated and I've gotten through only a small portion of it as I don't plan on getting a PhD in that subject.

Computer Science: For artificial intelligence and related areas, Russell and Norvig's Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach's text is a standard and good text, and I also liked Introduction to Information Retrieval (which is available online by chapter and entirely). For processor design, I found Computer Organization and Design to be a good introduction. I don't have any recommendations for specific programming languages as I find self-teaching to be most important there, nor do I know of any data structures books that I found to be memorable (not that I've really looked, given the wealth of information online). Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming is considered to be a gold standard text for algorithms, but I haven't secured a copy yet.

Physics: For basic undergraduate physics (mechanics, e&m, and a smattering of other subjects), I liked Fundamentals of Physics. I liked Rindler's Essential Relativity and Messiah's Quantum Mechanics much better than whatever books my school used. I appreciated the exposition and style of Rindler's text. I understand that some of the later chapters of Messiah's text are now obsolete, but the rest of the book is good enough for you to not need to reference many other books. I have little exposure to books on other areas of physics and am sure that there are many others in this subreddit that can give excellent recommendations.

Other: I liked Early Theories of the Universe to be good light historical reading. I also think that everyone should read Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

I'm assuming you're looking for things geared toward a layman audience, and not textbooks. Here's a few of my personal favorites:

Sagan

Cosmos: You probably know what this is. If not, it is at once a history of science, an overview of the major paradigms of scientific investigation (with some considerable detail), and a discussion of the role of science in the development of human society and the role of humanity in the larger cosmos.

Pale Blue Dot: Similar themes, but with a more specifically astronomical focus.


Dawkins

The Greatest Show on Earth: Dawkins steers (mostly) clear of religious talk here, and sticks to what he really does best: lays out the ideas behind evolution in a manner that is easily digestible, but also highly detailed with a plethora of real-world evidence, and convincing to anyone with even a modicum of willingness to listen.


Hofstadter

Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid: It seems like I find myself recommending this book at least once a month, but it really does deserve it. It not only lays out an excruciatingly complex argument (Godel's Incompleteness Theorem) in as accessible a way as can be imagined, and explores its consequences in mathematics, computer science, and neuroscience, but is also probably the most entertainingly and clearly written work of non-fiction I've ever encountered.


Feynman

The Feynman Lectures on Physics: It's everything. Probably the most detailed discussion of physics concepts that you'll find on this list.

Burke

Connections: Not exactly what you were asking for, but I love it, so you might too. James Burke traces the history of a dozen or so modern inventions, from ancient times all the way up to the present. Focuses on the unpredictability of technological advancement, and how new developments in one area often unlock advancements in a seemingly separate discipline. There is also a documentary series that goes along with it, which I'd probably recommend over the book. James Burke is a tremendously charismatic narrator and it's one of the best few documentary series I've ever watched. It's available semi-officially on Youtube.

I'm not a professional in the field, but my favorite free-time science books are usually focused on evolutionary biology, so here goes. One of the best discussions on this particular topic I've read is in The Ancestor's Tale by Dawkins. It's an excellent 3-page discussion you can read in full by accessing the "Look Inside!" preview of the book on Amazon (link to book page) and scrolling to the bottom of page 430. Do this by searching for "Maynard Smith" and clicking on the result on page 430. You'll need to sign in in order to search.

Anyways, I'll try to summarize the discussion here (although I'm a huge fan of Dawkins' eloquence in this book so I'm afraid I won't do it much justice). At a fairly naive level, sex is an evolutionary paradox. Modern Darwinism says that every organism strives to pass on as many of its genes as possible to its offspring. If this is true, however, why does sex, which is basically throwing away half of your own genes and mixing them with half of those of some other stranger, make any sense? An asexual organism can pass on 100% of its genes to its offspring. A sexual organism can only pass on 50%.

And yet, sexual reproduction is pretty much the norm for multi-cellular organisms. This suggests that the "twofold" cost of sex is somehow "cancelled out" by some other advantage of having two parents. One possibility is if the male commits to the child (instead of just running off to have sex with some other female), the couple can, as a group, produce at least twice as many offspring as the asexual alternative. While it is true that the male puts as much effort into child-rearing as the female in a few species, (emperor penguins, for instance), it is by no means the norm. So there must be something else going on.

Genetic recombination Dawkins hesitates to say that it alone is sufficient to counteract the massive twofold cost of sex, but it is definitely a factor.

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After this Dawkins makes some points that are very interesting but not totally relevant to your question, so I'll just summarize it very quickly. High school biology teaches us that genetic recombination introduces diversity and variety to the gene pool. Dawkins makes the point that sexual reproduction simultaneously has the opposing effect as well because it introduces the very concept of a gene pool. Think about it: an asexual organism shares none of its genes with its brethren. The very idea of a gene pool is nonsensical. In fact, you could say every new creature is a separate species because from that moment on, it's evolutionary path is completely different from that of its brother or sister. Yes, sexual reproduction, through the process of genetic recombination potentially allows for greater diversity and variety. But sexual reproduction introduces a gene pool that tends to diffuse the effects of genetic recombination. Gene pools have a massive "inertia" that a single wayward member cannot easily change. Dawkins forwards this not necessarily as a benefit of sex, but rather a consequence of it.

Well, excited-state calculations aren't that easy. Neglecting magnetic interactions doesn't really simplify things much - they're normally neglected in QC calculations (except for heavy elements where SO-coupling becomes significant).

One idea is that you might try repeating (and perhaps improving on) Pekeris calculations on helium from the 60's, which are fairly well-known. The drawback here is that like Hylleraas method (which he built on), it's not going to tell you much about current methods in 'real world' use. But it's almost certainly the best trade-off for programming simplicity versus accuracy.

If you're more interested in learning something that might be of practical use, then a Hartree-Fock implementation is certainly the best starting point for any atomic/molecular calculation. Nearly all quantum-chemical methods build directly on H-F, so even if you want to do something more accurate, you'll need to start with HF. Szabo and Ostlund is pretty good for HF and post-HF methods, and has Fortran sources to a basic HF program in it. (Despite it's name though, it's a bit dated and doesn't deal with DFT methods at all). So you could start with a basic HF program, and if you still really want to do excited states after that, the simplest more accurate method would be to move to Configuration Interaction. Specifically, you could do a CI-Singles calculation to get the excited states. (at that level, we're talking errors of ~ 1 eV, so you might understand why magnetic interactions are negligible!) If you're really ambitious you could go on and go to higher CI levels.

But if your goal is to learn quantum mechanics rather than quantum chemistry, I wouldn't go too far with it. I'd expect an understanding of the HF method (although not necessarily its practical implementation) to be necessary for a good grounding in QM. And I'd expect any grad student in Q-chem to be able to write an implementation. But going from a basic Hartree-Fock program to a more sophisticated one, and from a HF program to a CI program can take quite a bit of work, very little of which consists of learning any new physics. For someone who knows the HF method well, you could pretty much summarize the entire theory behind CI in five words: "Linear expansion in Slater determinants."

What you've said is mostly close enough that the difference doesn't matter much to a layperson. However this bit:

> Light does not pass through time (which doesn't make sense to me, but I read that somewhere) which is why it is always moving through space at the speed of light.

Is a bit off while also being a very interesting topic. I imagine the source of this statement is related to the fact that photons will always travel at the speed of light, relative to all observers. In other words, if I were to travel towards you at 0.5c, then shine a light towards you, the light would travel away from me at c while simultaneously (from your point of view) approach you at c, not 1.5c.

In essence, if you assume it to be true that the light moves away from me at c, and towards you at c, the only way to reconcile the two statements is that we experience time differently.

This incidentally is a really good starting point for learning about General Relativity (I heartily recommend the book Why Does E = mc² (and Why Should We Care?) if you find this interesting as it does a way better job of explaining it than I could).

One good example from that book is a thought experiment where you have two observers. One observer is on a train. He has with him an extremely precise clock that simply bounces photons from one plate (bottom) to another (top). For this observer, the photons are going completely vertically as long as the train is NOT accelerating. It critically does not matter whether the train is moving relative to the ground or not, only whether it's accelerating or not. However, to the observer on a platform as the train goes by, the position of the photon as it bounces off the bottom plate, is not directly below the point at which it hits the top plate. It's very close, as the train is not traveling at relativistic speeds, but it's definitely not directly above (picture it as a right angled triangle where the light just traveled the hypotenuse).

This means that even in something traveling relatively slowly, the light has traveled further for the observer on the platform, than for the observer on the train, despite being exactly the same photon traveling at exactly the same speed (c). How much further the light traveled depends on the relative speed. One of the interesting things about this though is that the time dilation effect is actually real and measurable even at relatively slow—certainly achievable—speeds. In fact, it actually effects things we use every day. Flights for example are fast enough that it's measurable, but more interestingly, GPS would not work for more than a few days at a time if the satellites we put in orbit for it to function did not take this effect in to consideration!

Here's the thing about optics for astronomy. The reason that we can't see stuff isn't because it's very far or small, but because it's very dim. To see the most interesting things in the sky, you don't really need to zoom, but just collect more light (effectively make your pupil larger). It's also comparatively much less expensive to make a larger light collector than it is to make something with a lot of zoom. Zoom is good for looking at the moon or Jupiter. Light buckets are better for everything else, like galaxies or nebulae.

So my advice to you is to look at 2 options. 1st is a "dobsonian telescope" which is basically a big tube with a concave mirror at the bottom to direct something like 12" of light into your 1/4" pupil. $3000 is more than you need, and many people actually just build them, because the mirror to eyepiece alignment is the important part and the rest is just for making it easy to aim, adjust and transport. The 2nd thing which I recommend you can do inexpensively right now is to buy some astronomy binoculars and a basic camera tri-pod to mount them on. With these you'll be able to find tons of stuff. Most of the stuff you'll look for with 12" dob scope, but just with less definition. These are the ones that I have and they're great!

I don't know about personalities, but for memories/experiences we know that one thing that happens is the connection between certain neurons gets stronger. This is called long-term potentiation. We also know that certain areas of the brain are incredibly important for memory. The hippocampus is especially important for formation of episodic memories (ie new memories). We know this because of rare cases where people have had these areas of the brain [injured](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KC_(patient) or removed.

If you are interested in some of the theoretical aspects, there are some very interesting books on the subject. Phantoms in the Brain is a favorite that addresses the subject of the human brain and consciousness. Highly recommended reading!

Edited to add: The same author has recently come out with another book that addresses the same issue. I haven't read it yet, but it definitely seems like it could answer some of your questions.

I was in the exact same place as you near the end of my undergraduate years. I started college with the idea of getting an MD and joined a lab only to pad my application to medical school. After shadowing doctors, volunteering at free medical clinics, and working in two different research labs, I finally decided to do the PhD. I even went so far as to take both the MCAT and GRE. That turned out to be a good thing since I did well enough on the MCAT to teach MCAT prep for Kaplan and supplement my meager PhD stipend. Have you considered a combined MD/PhD program?

1. A PhD generally takes five years, but the range of people I know is from 4-7 years. The nice thing is that there is no debt. You get paid to go to graduate school. It's not much, but it's enough to live on.
   
   
2. The job market is pretty diverse actually. Academia is certainly a very common path, but tenure track jobs are hard to come by right now. There are lots of opportunities in industry (biotech, pharma), government (policy, advisory roles), legal (patent), or anything where an analytical mind and the ability to quickly adapt to new information is important. I know people who have gone on to all of those types of positions. None of my grad school colleagues are unemployed, but some of them have had to change their paths when their first choice didn't work out. I don't know about more comprehensive statistics on the job market for PhDs though.
   
   
3. If you want to learn more about basic neuroscience, I would recommend a textbook like this one:
   http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Neural-Science-Eric-Kandel/dp/0838577016
   It's a bit out of date, but it's widely regarded as one of the best basic neuroscience textbooks out there. I keep hearing rumors of a new edition, but the release dates keep changing.
   Depending on your level of skill and access, you could always check out new issues of the journals Neuron or Nature Neuroscience. It's a good idea to know a bit about what interests you so you can target your grad school applications.
   
   
4. Right now? Probably cancer. We don't know enough about how to work with these cells yet.

Ah, I feel so smart knowing (what I hope is) the answer to a question. As for the first question, sexual reproduction constantly mixes and matches genes and allows for a much greater diversity within a population. A population that is genetically diverse is much less likely to be wiped out by any single cause, such as a virus or bacteria targeting a specific gene or feature. As hosts we are in an evolutionary arms race, trying to evolve faster than the parasites targeting us. Sex is an efficient mechanism to accomplish this.

As for gender, the answer is similar, but a little more complicated for me to explain (probably because I know so little of the subject). As it turns out, not only do we as hosts compete against parasites that wish to infect us, but it turns out that our genes are also competing against each other to determine which we be passed down. Now genes must work together to some extent, or the organism they exist within may possibly fail to reproduce and pass them on. But it is also possible for genes to be a parasitic freeloaders, or to pass itself along without actually improving the fitness of the organism (transposons). Sex is advantageous to genes because they are allowed to move freely within the population of hosts, and not be stuck with genes that are of poor quality or worse yet, parasitically catching a free ride at their expense (think of a superstar player on a sports team, leaving their losing team to be traded onto a winning one).

As it turns out, the mechanisms through which we have sex are very effective at dealing with these parasitic genes, reducing the chance they may be passed on, as well as filtering out any viruses or bacteria that may also try to accompany the males sperm to the egg (remember, the sperm is stripped of EVERYTHING as it enters the egg, leaving only the genetic material). Gender was the outcome of the process by which two parent cells could form a new cell; the larger immobile gametes (female) could contain the information necessary for the cytoplasmic genes, leaving the male gametes smaller and more mobile (also, since this male gamete only had to pass on its nucleus, this cut down on the risk of infection by any parasitic organisms). This rise of two roles is what created male and female genders. I don’t really have any information on when this process evolved, sorry.

This is the Red Queen Hypothesis, probably poorly explained, and GROSSLY oversimplified. Even better than the wiki page is Matt Ridley's book, The Red Queen, from which I crudely summarized most of this answer (specifically, Chapter 4; Genetic Mutiny and Gender). It is easily one of my favorite books, and if you were curious enough to ask this question I think you would find this fascinating as well.

Ordinary sexual selection explains it without requiring some sort of gene proximity hypothesis. Animals with characteristics that are found attractive tend to pass on their genes more successfully. Attractive characteristics are those that are associated with animals that pass on their genes most successfully. That's the feedback loop, and it can result in all sorts of characteristics being selected for attractiveness.

The common factor between characteristics that are found attractive is that they're generally associated in some way with health - either directly, as with healthy musculature or healthy skin/fur, or indirectly, as in decorative displays that indicate an excess of energy. The peacock's tail is the classic example of a purely decorative feature. Large human female breasts are a combination of decorative and functional.

The book "The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature" provides a very accessible exploration of this topic at a popular level (i.e. it's not a scientific textbook.)

[Edit: relevant post on /r/MapPorn today: Boobs vs. Butt Searches on PornHub].

Wow - that's incredible and I didn't know that. Years ago I read The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind and found the theory to be fascinating even though it technically would be non-testable.

What you're saying supports the idea that conscious thought evolved post-speech development.

For those unfamiliar with Bicameralism the idea is basically this: Humans evolved as social creatures, interacting and evolving the ability to help each other. Passing knowledge on to each other and subsequent generations was key. So imagine this scenario - you're teaching your child how to make a fire and you're talking through the steps to him. Next time when you're alone you find yourself talking through the steps to yourself because it's easier to remember.

In fact, back then maybe it was the only way to remember? Talking difficult problems out loud to ourselves is still something many people do today to help figure through the issue. Almost as if wiring internally in the brain didn't exist and so words have to go out your mouth and into your ears - the "long way around" so to speak.

Anyway, some day, you just don't speak the words out loud, but you hear them in your head instead. Whoa! What was that? Must be the gods talking to me directly.

In any event, the theory doesn't have a lot of supporting evidence beyond the writing styles of the earliest human writings. Julian Jaynes uses epics like the Illiad and Odyssey to show that initially all the characters had gods talking directly to them for specific direction, which eventually gave way to people having their own will irrespective of gods.

It's a fascinating theory that's totally unprovable, but in my heart it just seems to explain so much about the origin of religions, how gods spoke to people directly, why talking to yourself helps you work through a particularly thorny problem, how schizophrenics hear voices today - and now you bringing up how those hallucinations happen in the speech production centers instead of language comprehension.

Well, if you can sink as much time into Wikipedia as I can, that's a good start. And don't skip the references and links at the bottom; that's 90% of the fun!

There are a lot of good, popular-audience books on these topics. I don't know any about BCI in particular, but check out The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat (and other stuff by Oliver Sacks) and Phantoms in the Brain. Those are the ones we read in COGS 1 and they're great. Right now I'm reading Jonah Lehrer's Proust Was a Neuroscientist; How We Decide was also good. Also, don't shy away from academic literature. It's not really so hard to read if you're interested.

Are you or could you be in college? Check my advice here. If you at least live near a college, sit in on some classes. Write to a professor and see if there's lab work to do, maybe as a volunteer. That could get your foot in the door.

The Turing machine answer is a fantastic theoretical one, but if you want to see a practical answer for "how do you build a computer (like most people would think of a computer) from scratch", which seems to be what you were looking for when you wrote this:

> What is going on at the lowest level? How are top-level instructions translated into zeroes and ones, and how does that make the computer perform an action?

...then this book is a fantastical down-to-earth, extremely approachable first read for such things (and designed such that you don't need *any* prior knowledge to start reading it).

Seriously, if you want to dive a little bit deeper, I highly recommend it.


edit: seems someone already recommended Code. Still, can't give it enough praise. Or The Elements of Computing Systems (TECS) which a (only *slightly*) more technical read designed around building everything that a computer "is", piece by piece...

Edit2: And as for "what's going on with the Minecraft ALU", TECS is a good read there as well, since the machine described in that book is what I based the ALU on. Also, the fact that Minecraft can simulate logic gates is what links the "real world" and the "minecraft world" together, because logic gates are all you need to build any computer (that's how Minecraft can let you build Turing Complete devices)

I really enjoyed reading The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes.

Also Thunderstruck by Erik Larson.

Both of these books are fantastic nonfiction accounts of the history of scientific discovery.

On the biology side, anything by Dawkins is a good choice. I recommend The Greatest Show on Earth

My gateway drug was The Panda's Thumb by Stephen Jay Gould

Let's first clarify something: we don't exactly know what it is that allows us to be so intelligent. Sure, we know that the brain does something, but exactly what that is we can't describe to a level of detail sufficient to duplicate. So this is a problem in knowing what to select for.

That being said, we could select for things we think led to the evolution of our brains, like bigger skulls (simply having more space for the brain to grow into might do...this is discussed in the book "The Red Queen" [1]), or perhaps some other physical neurobiological feature that would make their brains at least look like ours. Whether that would generate a human-level intelligence though...it's not possible to tell at this point with any degree of confidence past speculation.

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/Red-Queen-Evolution-Human-Nature/dp/0060556579 )

If you're really interested in this kind of stuff, check out The Ancestor's Tale by Richard Dawkins. In it, he examines our common ancestors with other life in backwards chronological order (our common ancestor with chimps, then our and chimps' common ancestor with the other apes, then apes' common ancestor with all primates, etc). There's lots of interesting information about how genes express and get selected for. For example, one particularly fascinating chapter covers the origin of our tri-chromal color vision, as opposed to the vision of most other mammals, like dogs, and what happened in our genes to bring about that change.

An interesting book I read related to this subject. I'm not one to really tell if his ideas hold water or if he's a total crackpot, but I found it a fascinating read. If you can find it in your local library, I definitely recommend it.

Just read this:
https://www.amazon.com/Flatland-Romance-Dimensions-Thrift-Editions/dp/048627263X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1474906134&sr=8-1&keywords=flatland

and extrapolate to 3 dimensions. You'll have a great understanding, I promise, and it's fun to read. I'm assuming here you're wanting an expression of a 4th SPACIAL dimension, and not an exposition on "time as a 4th dimension of spacetime."

Think of a safe in 2 dimensions...a 3 dimensional person can hover OVER the safe and see everything that's in it. That same person could pluck an item out of the safe with ease. The 2 dimensional person would crap themselves when they opened the safe only to find that object mysteriously missing.

I doubt there are 4 dimensional people who can look into our safes and steal stuff, because, well, they haven't so far. Unless you count my socks that are constantly being stolen out of my dryer.

The Ancestors Tale

Dawkins gets a lot of hate, but the man knows his evolutionary biology and he can write! This is a great read, and a good overview of human ancestry, and if you're interested in the finer details of natural selection, follow it up with The Selfish Gene.

We DON"T know that, its just every time we check on them (do experiments) the results come out that in such a way that makes us think that the laws that we have deduced from previous experiments still hold true. The interesting thing about scientific paradigms is that we do something, then see a result and then try to come up with an explination of why that result happened, the better our explanation explains the result and explains other results and survives repeated testing the better our explanation is to determining how the world really works, from which we can do things that build on our explanation.

This in the end does allow false assumptions to exist in science (think phlogistion chemistry) but as the field of science requires more complicated and complicated excuses for why different events happened, they are replaced with a new paradigm that explains the physical world differently.

In the end we may find at some point down the road something that scientists believe an unquestionable rule of physics is actually incorrect because it cannot explain X,Y, or Z but a new explanation comes forth and explains the stuff the first law explained and X,Y, or Z, in a better, cleaner way.

To read more I suggest : The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn
http://www.amazon.com/Structure-Scientific-Revolutions-Thomas-Kuhn/dp/0226458083

Cooked food is absolutely easier to digest. As for the intestinal tract, my understanding is that it has shrunk since the invention of cooking, but you'd get a better answer from an evolutionary biologist. Richard Wrangham has an excellent book on the topic.

Dan Levitin, a psych prof in my department, has a pretty good book on music and the brain, and he discusses this issue a little bit.

I'd recommend you check it out if you are generally interested in music - why it is important to us, how it is processed in the brain, etc.

> BTW there's some evidence that other parts of the body may be directly sensitive to light - ie, the skin and not just the eyes - but the eyes are most important.

At night I wear these glasses to shield the blue light when using my computer.

When it's convenient and when I remember, I'll wear a sweater at night just to cover as much skin as possible. Sounds kind of OCD but honestly I think these steps help quite a bit - artificial lighting makes our bodies go, "wtf, what time is it?"

I believe I remember reading that V.S. Ramachandran had an insight to this when he was dealing with phantom limb patients. The area of the brain that maps foot and toe sensations is right next to areas which are involved with sexual stimulation. When an area of the brain (especially involved with perception and sensation) lose their means of input and become disused (as in someone losing a limb), those neurons are gradually recruited by nearby brain regions to supplement their functioning. So, in some cases of people losing their lower limbs, those foot-sensation areas became cross-linked with the sexual stimulation areas causing the people to have a sexual reaction when imagining their phantom toes being sucked on.

This may be a neurological explanation for foot-fetishism, but I don't know off the top of my head if this has been followed up with concrete study; it only suggests an avenue for further experimentation. This also does little to explain some of the other, less common fetishes (tickling, scatalogical). It also doesn't concretely answer the question as far as genetic/environmental. We have genetic dispositions for particular brain areas being more interconnected than others, but environmental factors play a huge role in this as well, especially as far as deviations from normal development during childhood. As such, though I don't necessarily agree with them, I also can't 100% discount ideas like sexual imprinting.

tl;dr: This, like most other neurological questions, is really complex and the answer lies somewhere on the continuum between genetics and environmental factors.


edit: Looked it up to be sure. For those that are interested, this was discussed in Phantoms In The Brain.

I would read the book The Greatest Show on Earth by Dawkins. It is well written in plain english that is easy to understand and follow.

If you want to learn more about this, I would recommend a book called This Is Your Brain On Music. It's an amazing breakdown of the brain's ability to process music by a neuro scientist who had been previously been employed as a sound engineer for many prominent bands during the 70's.

http://www.amazon.com/This-Your-Brain-Music-Obsession/dp/0525949690

I'll refer to an example I've gleaned from James Gleick book on Chaos.

He refers to some older work on simulation where data had to be inputted by hand. Those simulations would sometimes crash, and you'd have to re-input the values of the variables for whatever point of the simulation you were at. Sometimes, to save time, they would round off the last digit of the decimals, because life is too short for this shit, and because why would changing a parameter by 0.0001 have any noticeable effect? The results would change a lot, sometimes drastically, from these small roundings.

to quote from one of the earlier linked references:

In the 1960s the weather scientist Edward Lorenz observed that minute variations in the initial values of variables in his twelve-variable computer weather model could result in grossly divergent weather patterns:

Two states differing by imperceptible amounts may eventually evolve into two considerably different states … If, then, there is any error whatever in observing the present state—and in any real system such errors seem inevitable—an acceptable prediction of an instantaneous state in the distant future may well be impossible….In view of the inevitable inaccuracy and incompleteness of weather observations, precise very-long-range forecasting would seem to be nonexistent.

Such sensitive dependence on initial conditions means that the further one goes into the future the more inaccurate predictions become. Systems that are sensitive to initial conditions and bounded are said to be chaotic.

As to the other specifics of your question, you'd need an atmospheric science guy for that ... I'm more of Straight Earth Sci.

This is my go-to review on the subject, written by the man who won a Nobel prize on the subject: Eric Kandel.

He also literally wrote the book on neuroscience.

Also, microbiology is the study of bacteria, viruses and protozoa. The term you want is cellular and molecular biology.

To be clear, everything you see with the naked eye is not a star. You can see galaxies too, and if you know what you're looking at, nebulae. Take a pair of high powered binoculars out some night and it's like you've never seen the sky. Better yet, get a pair of these. You won't be disappointed.

Correct, both ending are interesting to read about.

I recently started reading the book The Five Ages of the Universe by Adams. It's pretty interesting.

The Five Ages of the Universe: Inside the Physics of Eternity https://www.amazon.com/dp/0684865769/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_-g03Cb8EQ6DPP

Things are a bit different for hearing, but the "such and unexplored area" feeling will be the same. For reference, this is what science is.

http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/

OH, also read Thomas Khun's, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions only 200 pages, and you'll probably get the point around page 50. Best book on human knowledge ever.

N-dimensional space. I literally just now started reading Edwin A. Abbott's Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. I highly recommend this book if this type of dimensional thinking intrigues you.

I read a book that had some science of music in it. "This is Your Brain on Music". I don't remember the specifics of it so I won't try to repeat it here because I'll probably say something inaccurate. That book isn't the only one of it's kind (good book by the way). If you are really interested in the subject I'm sure you can find some interesting information.

http://www.amazon.com/This-Your-Brain-Music-Obsession/dp/0525949690

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1400033535/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp_sr_2?pf_rd_p=486539851&pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe-1&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=0525949690&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=02HTPTSMBADCZZE5BDMV

just in case some readers aren't aware... there is a really cool (and short) book called Flatland about 2D creatures that can only conceive of the world in 2D. One of them starts understanding 3 dimensions and things get interesting. Here is a link (normal) for the book I mean:
http://www.amazon.com/Flatland-Romance-Dimensions-Thrift-Editions/dp/048627263X

most of those books looked like they were $2-$4. Go get a copy if you haven't read it yet.

Two good introductions to physics and science in general:

Bill Bryson (popular and quite funny): A Short History of Nearly Everything

Brian Cox (slightly more serious, but still a fairly easy read): Why Does E=mc2?: (And Why Should We Care?)

Just have to say that reading Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick a bit later on in your learning will change your perspective on everything. Such a good, fun read too.

My girlfriend bought me these for my birthday earlier this year. I bring them everywhere I go - especially when I have the opportunity to escape the light pollution barriers of the cities.

I highly recommend downloading Stellarium for you computer, or Google Sky for the android phones. (I'm sure iPhone has something similar). With this tool, you have an interactive star map you can use from anywhere. You can even track satellites!

With high powered binoculars like mine, or larger Newtownian / Cassegrain scopes, my favorite things to look at in the sky are (you can use stellarium or google sky to find them):

• Jupiter and its moons (you can see 4 clear as day, but there are 64 in total!)
  
• Betelgeuse (top left corner red star in Orion)
  
• The Orion nebula (about where the right thigh is)
  
• The moon of course (you can get lost in all of the craters and shadows)
  
• Andromeda
  
• Pleides (M45)
  
• Omega Centauri

For computational chemistry:

You will need to have a solid understanding of Quantum Chemistry. The two commonly used books for this is the following...

Quantum Chemistry: 6th ed. by Levine

Modern Quantum Chemistry by Szabo.

Honestly don't worry too much about the newest edition of Levine. I've been using the 5th edition and not much has changed. Szabo is published by Dover so its dirt cheap.

For actual computational chemistry, Cramer does a decent job.

Richard Dawkin's book The Ancestors' Tale goes in the opposite direction -- from mankind back to the common ancestor of all life -- and tries to estimate the generations along the way. At some point before getting to Amoebas, however, he gives up, because the best approximations are complete guesses. But you could get some insight into your question from that book, I believe.

I don't have my copy on me, and Wikipedia doesn't include his estimates. But check it out! Wikipedia Amazon

I just read Why Does E=mc2?: (And Why Should We Care?) by Brian Cox. Can't say I fully understood it all (only an amateur physics buff) but found it very interesting.

How do you get a 3D display? As others have mentioned, computer screens are 2D. Perhaps a separate screen for each eye? There are also auditory cues to suggest 3D.

It is an interesting question. Some suggest we have a hard time imagining 4 spatial dimensions since we have no experience outside of our 3 spatial dimensions. See Edwin Abbott's Flatland as well as Dewdney's Planiverse.

A computer game world could be set in 4 spatial dimensions. Presently a lot of 4 dimensional polychora exist in digital form. Perhaps a player of this game might become accustomed to 4 spatial dimensions and have a better understanding.

For what it's worth, you could just buy a kill-a-watt or similar product and find out. I own one of these and it has been fascinating to plug all the things into it and see what their active/passive power draws are.

By "chemical reactions" do you mean like chemicals that circulate through the blood or do you mean the mechanism through which brain cells communicate with one another?

Also if you could maybe reference a particular topic that is giving you trouble it'd help.

As for books: "The brain that changes itself" - can't recommend this enough. Even if you don't do your project its worth reading, even coming from a non-science background.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Elements-Computing-Systems-Principles/dp/0262640686

This text book goes through building a computer starting at logic gates and going all the way to building a CPU and writing a compiler. It might take a while to get through, but after you do you will have a really good understanding of how computers work.

A Short History of Nearly Everything

The Hole In The Universe

Universe on a T-Shirt

Light Years

Before The Big Bang

Why Does e=mc^2? (and why should we care?)

Your Inner Fish (about evolution)

And just because it was one of my first pop science books, I'll add The Telescope. Which is of course, about telescopes. It's a lot more interesting than it sounds!

If you are looking for resources to help you learn electronic structure theory, I recommend the textbook by Szabo and Ostlund here.

This book also explains this phenomenon in great detail.

Not that many great books, but most of the popular neuroscience books dedicate at least a section to it. The most popular pop-sci book in this field is The Brain That Changes Itself, which doesn't seem to get that glowing of reviews. If you're scientifically inclined, The Paradoxical Brain, edited by Kapur provides a lot of examples of weird neuroplastic effects across many different fields. It's critical to realize that neuroplasticity is what allows memories to happen, so any popular science book about memory will have to discuss it.

This is an incredibly broad and complex set of questions.

Here is a good video describing why there are so many programming languages.

Wikipedia has multiple pages comparing programming languages. Here is the beginning.

Students will spend years in school learning about the different layers of abstraction in programming and how code gets turned into something the computer will understand. This website along with the companion book is an excellent overview of the subject.

If you have more specific questions after perusing through the resources, I can answer them. The links the other poster and I have posted will give you a high-level overview of what you asked, but if you want all the details, you'd be halfway to a computer science bachelors degree.

As others have pointed out, the rating on the power supply for things is usually an "absolute maximum," not a reflection of how much the device actually draws. These little guys are a pretty cheap way to get the real numbers, though, and it can occasionally be surprising.

As well, wearing these at night is also helpful.

There's been a few studies done showing that dark therapy often completely eliminates most of the symptoms of bipolar disorder, and one or two showing that orange coloured glasses (blocking out blue light) have a similar effect without all the trouble of having to have complete darkness.

It would also be prudent to pair dark therapy with some form of light therapy in the morning, even something as small as leaving your blinds open would help.

And beyond radiometric dating, there is also geology, historical documentation (beer alone was invented over 7000 years ago), evolution (The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution is fantastic), and ice cores (for example).

you expend a lot of energy to break down food in your digestive system, ex: chewing, your gut rumbling around. Additionally, the food is only in the digestive tract for a finite amount of time, and the rate of nutritional uptake would be faster for a pre-blended steak than an unblended one. The same mass of peanut butter vs raw peanuts would give you different net energy gains.

I learned a lot of this from the book, Catching Fire: http://www.amazon.com/Catching-Fire-Cooking-Made-Human/dp/0465013627

Just throwing this out there, but the book THE FIVE AGES OF THE UNIVERSE covers this topic extremely well. (http://www.amazon.com/The-Five-Ages-Universe-Eternity/dp/0684865769)

The five ages are: The Primordial Era, The Stelliferous Era (current), The Degenerate Era, The Black Hole Era, and The Dark Era. It's that last one that you're interested in.

Basically, all matter decays, all energy is scattered, and no new events ever occur.

Most of my sources are textbooks and wikipedia for a quick search... On my desk I have Molecular Biology of the Cell and Principles of Neural Science both of which are decent reference texts to have on your shelf. Beyond that, I think I can scrounge up a few good reviews on the subject if there's any interest, but this being Reddit, most people don't have access to papers behind paywalls...

This book had the same profound effect on me and really helped me understand why people behave the way they do.

edit: Chaos: Making a New Science is also a good read.

Lots of interesting stuff about this in this book:

https://www.amazon.com/Brain-That-Changes-Itself-Frontiers/dp/0143113100

If you like reading. They did a lot of awful things on monkeys to test how the brain reacts to limb removal.

There will definitely be a time when new stars start stop forming, yes. It's a very long time from now, but even then, the universe will go on.

Read the Five Ages of the Universe.

A prominent hypothesis has to do with 3 factors: Lice, Fire, and Smell.

Hair around the armpits, neck, and crotch are very prone to use sweat to amplify hormones and other smell signals. Armpits are noticeably close to the nose, allowing people to sniff out familiar armpits in a crowd.

Lice, and other hair parasites might have been affected by fire and senses of beauty. Obviously, when you have less hair, notable lice are more out in the open. But when you add in the abundance of provided warmth (such as the discovery of fire), the hair is no longer needed in the mid-regions, and sickness-purity-detection would be more revealed.

Regarding your question, I think you can determine the difference between top-of-your-head-hair, which grows in a spiral pattern (visable in the crown of the head approaching a circular point), or a twisted set of pubes, versus non-axial which grows on your arms, legs, back.


Please let me know which of these ideas have been discredited.

Sources:

1-Catching Fire

2, this one helps to disprove usage of clothing as hair-reduction

Ok, I think I have to go buy a kill-a-watt, this just doesn't fly. My electric bill hasn't increased significantly since I started leaving my PC on all day for Bitcoin mining and seeding torrents.

There is an excellent book called The Five Ages of the Universe: Inside the Physics of Eternity that talks about the far, far, far, far, future of the universe (on the order of 10^1500 years and longer), and talks about how long it will take for every proton to decay, every black hole to evaporate, and more, until absolutely nothing is left anywhere.

This book convinced me that immortality would be undesirable.

If you're interested in this kind of question, This book gives a fascinating overview of this whole topic.

It gives the answers, as much as they are known, to questions of why there are sexes at all, why some animals are polygamous or monogamous, why they cheat on their spouses. When science doesn't know the answer, the book details competing ideas and gives the reasons their proponents support them.

Your question was also answered, IIRC, in a particular chapter of Richard Dawkin's "The Selfish Gene".

On your particular question, it boils down to the fact that a female, purely because of biology, invests heavily in their offspring. If they can persuade the male to also invest, that's a win for the female. The male, however - or rather, the male's DNA - has an "incentive" to quickly find as many partners as possible; although, there's also some benefit to staying around hand helping the kids grow.

Imagine the female DNA implements one of two strategies:

• H: hard-to-get: insisting the male go through a long courtship before allowing insemination
  
• F: fast-and-loose: the opposite
  
  On the other hand, suppose the male DNA implements one of these strategies:
  
  
• S: Solid, faithful: willing to stick it out with the partner they chose
  
• C: Cheater: moves on quickly.
  
  If the female population is predominantly F, then the male population will be shifted towards C. Cheaters spread more of their DNA than Solids.
  
  If the male population is predominantly C, then this may be stable, but if (for biological reasons) it's really costly to raise a child as a single mother, the female population may suffer pressure to move from F to H. The hard-to-get females often end up with no partner at all, but when they do find someone, it's a solid man who'll stick around.
  
  So the population of females may shift towards H. When the H predominate, the cheating males have no more luck. The male population undergoes selective pressure to move from C to S.
  
  Finally, if the males are mostly S, the few F females have an advantage - they avoid a costly, time-consuming mating ritual, and still have a good chance of landing a faithful husband. The female population might swing back to F, and the cycle begins again.
  
  You don't always get cycles, it depends on exactly how much each sex's strategy gains or loses in light of the strategies the other sex is using. And creatures with complex brains can switch strategies based on what they observe. And, of course, there are more strategies possible than this: cheating while pretending to be faithful, maintaining a harem, neither sex caring for the young, eating your husband, dispensing with sex altogether, changing sex, being both sexes at once and more are all actually implemented in the animal, plant and other kingdoms. each having their own advantages and disadvantages in different circumstances.
  
  One last thing: a complex, expensive mating ritual makes abandonment less likely. The male in a partnership is more likely to choose to stick around and give his DNA (in his kids) a better chance of propagating, if he expects that finding a new partner will be costly and difficult.
  
  
  
  

Check out some Chaos Theory by James Gleick and the wikipedia article on it. Can't link to both without losing my comment...

Edit: Here

This is the book you want:

A Short History of Nearly Everything

> A quick Google search doesn't seem to show anything on the market that could provide an 'active load' reading

Inexpensive home energy monitors exist, though they're not integrated into the power distribution system the way you describe. You can get the brand-name model for $20 on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/P3-P4400-Electricity-Usage-Monitor/dp/B00009MDBU

If you have a problem with breakers tripping you can use one of these to measure the actual load of appliances on the circuit and figure out how to re-reoute or re-wire things to keep your total demand low.

Julian Jaynes, "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind", 1978

https://www.amazon.com/Origin-Consciousness-Breakdown-Bicameral-Mind/dp/0618057072

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Jaynes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology)

Look into the Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes.

http://www.amazon.com/Origin-Consciousness-Breakdown-Bicameral-Mind/dp/0618057072

You can buy selective filter glasses if what you want to do is selectively filter.

I use these for late night web browsing & for long drives (commercial driver), keeps my eyes from feeling as fatigued if I have to be paying attention to what I see for a long period of time. They pretty much eliminate blue light, so anything that's blue looks black or grey. Greens look weird too - the green is still there but it's hard to describe.

The book he wrote discussing his work on phantom limb sensations is called 'Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind'. I found the experiments and really the whole book fascinating.

The Mirror Box, at least to me, shows how bizarre and flexible the human brain can be while also showing a relatively simple hack that can help reduce the pain and unpleasant sensations from a phantom limb.

Edit: modified some wording

Twlight, f.lux, etc. are steps in the right direction for circadian rhythms, but are relatively useless in my opinion if all other sources of artificial blue/white light aren't filtered out as well, such as lamps. The only way to really block out all artificial blue light is to wear blue light blocking glasses at night.

This is a complicated question.

The fact that it's even a question points out how tempting it is to see our body/mind connection like that of a car and driver. The driver can be having a great day, a shitty day - whatever - but as long as he/she steers the car the same way and pushes the two pedals the same way, it's all the same to the car. The idea that the driver's attitude could somehow affect the car seems downright mystical.

This analogy is way off. Cognition is a feat of the body! We think of emotions as purely brain moods, but emotional states are body states. The next time you have a strong feeling, as yourself how you know. Seriously - how do you know you're angry? It sounds ridiculous, but seriously, try it. You'll find that you can tell because you can feel it in your body.

Most of us have very little many of us are of our own bodily sensation. As Ken Robinson put it, we look at our bodies as transportation for our heads. If you put your mind to it, you'll realize there's a whole ton of body sensation accompanying your emotions.

You are feeling your body making resource planning decisions. When you're angry, for example, adrenaline and fat are released into your blood, in preparation for shouting loudly, waving your arms threateningly, or ultimately fighting. Same for the other emotions. Doesn't seem so weird that your rate of healing is affected by how your body is using its resources.

Apparently, cancerous or semi-cancerous cells occur in our bodies all the time, but most of the time they're dealt by our immune system. (Wish I could cite something; I heard this from an oncologist during hospice training.) Proper immune system function is important, therefore, to preventing cancer - immune system disorders are linked to some types of cancer (e.g. HIV and Kaposi's sarcoma).

Attitude and emotion aren't the same thing. Emotion is a brain/body state, whereas attitude is a decision-making approach, particularly about what thoughts you spend time on. If you're sad, you're sad; but then you use your attitude to decide what to do. Do you acknowledge your sadness and cry? Talk about it with others? Do you ignore it, tough it out and try to think positive thoughts? Lose yourself in video games?

When we talk about a positive attitude (which we can choose), a lot of the time we're talking about positive emotions (which we can't). Emotion is really loaded for most of us. Emotions can be contagious, overwhelming and scary - so we spend a lot of time not expressing our feelings to protect ourselves and those around us. We can be in social fear, desperately sad and lonely, or totally pissed off at a co-worker and be doing our damnedest not to show it.

Thing is, this is terrible for you. Your body is telling you that it has a need, and that it's preparing for something - sleep, activity, whatever - and we ignore it. It's like ignoring an indicator light on your car.

When someone says, "try to have a positive attitude", often what they're saying is, "I'm scared, and your sadness scares me even more. Please don't show me how sad you are." This is is extremely unhelpful. The sick person has enough to deal with without having to be an emotional crutch for his or her family. Ignoring his emotions means ignoring his body sensation, which is a little like never looking at your car's dashboard. It's not helpful right now, and it can build a lifelong habit of dissociation.

There's a lovely XKCD about this, 'Positive Attitude'. The friend isn't being supportive at all, he's placing additional demands on the sick person, who only feels better when he ignores the unsupportive 'advice' and chooses to acknowledge his own feelings instead.

Ever felt emotionally numb? Brain function competes for brain real estate, so ignoring your own emotions can actually reduce your ability to understand them. (This is borne out by people who have overwhelming emotions, such as trauma survivors, whose journey back to being aware of their own body sensations can be long and frightening, though ultimately enlivening.)

Thing is, even if you ignore your feelings, they're still in there, affecting your body and your outlook. Emotions aren't very well compartmentalized - if you're angry at someone and not dealing with it, you'll tend to be angry with others. People who run with a chunk of unexpressed fear seem nervous or high strung. It can be lodged in there for years. Expressing emotion (as long as you do it without hurting anyone, including yourself) is tremendously helpful, and can change your whole outlook on life.

TL;DR Attitude affects your life a lot, but sick people need support expressing their emotions, whatever they are.