FINALLY a book that translates hard science into concise, interesting, and readable text that anyone (even a child) can understand. This book is full of surprises too. I found comfort in understanding that some things I'm afraid are actually quite UNLIKELY to affect me while others I pay no attention to are REAL risks. From "accidents" to "x-rays", 48 chapters include other topics like: Air bags, articificial sweeteners, Bad Backs, Caffeine, School Buses, Mad Cow Disease, biological weapons, indoor air pollution, lead, pesticides, Radon, breast implants, mammography, sexually transmitted disease, and a an eye-opening one on medical errors. A necessary home reference guide with valuable basic knowledge.

The Rough Guide To Southeast Asia is a comprehensive and superbly organized travel guide to Brunei, Cambodia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Laos, Macau, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. Enhanced with a full-color illustrated section introducing Southeast Asian highlights, The Rough Guide To Southeast Asia provides the traveler with accounts of destinations ranging from urban city nightlife to beautiful isolated beaches. A compendium of reviews for the best places to reside, the best foods to eat, the best drinks offered, and the best places to party, The Rough Guide To Southeast Asia also covers a veritable wealth of available activities ranging from a sunrise climb up Mount Bromo to boating down the Mekong River, to diving into the waters off the Philippines. Profusely illustrated with maps and plans for every region, as well as dependable transport details (including border crossings and island ferries), The Rough Guide To Southeast Asia is "user friendly" and highly recommended for anyone planning a visit anywhere in the exotic countries and climes of Southeast Asia.

Merging shapes works more efficiently than USING QUARKXPRESS 4's Bezier tool to draw complicated shapes. Directly appending colors, dashes & stripes, H&J, list and style sheet settings from previous documents gives consistency and saves time. Hexachrome color prints more vibrant, wider color ranges if the print shop also handles high-fidelity color. These are only a few of the countless valuable explanations and tips from expert Kelly Kordes Anton. She came up with the shortcuts for Steven Bain's FUNDAMENTAL QUARKXPRESS 4, and here is her own encyclopedic help desk. Her superbly written and indexed book consolidates Barbara Assadi et al's QUARKXPRESS 4 FOR DUMMIES, David Blatner's QUARKXPRESS 4 BOOK FOR MACINTOSH & WINDOWS, Galen Gruman's MACWORLD QUARKXPRESS 4 BIBLE, William Harrel's QUARKXPRESS 4 IN DEPTH, and Elaine Weinmann's QUARKXPRESS 4.

The Clarks make no bones about it: Sir Issac Newton was one of the greatest scientific minds of the his time. Of all time, in fact. Newton was the symbol of the triumph of science over superstition.

But Newton had a darker side. Despite the fame and recognition he had received, Newton refused to let anyone threaten to overshadow him or stand in his way of greater achievements.

Reverend John Flamsteed was the first Astronomer Royal - a position he held for 44 years serving under 6 kings. He spent his night in the observatory of Greenwich gazing through telescopes, cataloguing the stars. Newton wanted this information to figure out a better way to navigate to oceans, a major problem in his day. He was convinced Flamsteed was holding back the critical information he needed. For that, Newton used all the considerable power at his disposal to end the career of Flamseed. He almost suceeded. It was only because of the dedication of Flamsteed's widow that his 3-volumn Historia Coelestis Britannica was published.

Today, because of Flamsteed's work, we measure longitude from the place he accomlished his work - Greenwich.

The work of Stephen Gray is less known. A commoner trained as a dyer, he was a most unlikely member of the Royal Society.

Gray was a long time friend of Flamsteed. He carried on a regular coorespondence with the elder scientist, sharing with him his own celestial observations.

But it was Gray's pioneering work in using electricity for communications that earned him immortality. Work, that if not for Newton, may have been accomplished 20 years sooner.

Humans need heroes, and those prominent in any field are often portrayed as ideals no matter how flawed they may be in real life. The Clarks, scientists from the UK, have written a fascinating historical study of Isaac Newton, Astronomer Royal Flamsteed, and amateur scientist Gray with the intention of demythologizing Newton and giving Flamsteed and Gray what the authors consider to be their proper place in the development of 17th- and 18th-century science. Gray's contributions to the field of electricity and electrical communications and evidence for Newton's suppression of Gray's work are discussed in some detail together with Flamsteed's work in astronomy; the relationships between Flamsteed, Newton, and Gray; and the political and social climates of the times. The book was not written to demean Newton's accomplishments; the authors devote a fair amount of space to a discussion of Flamsteed's personal foibles that made the feud (concerning Flamsteed's astronomical data supplied t o Newton) between him and Newton difficult to avoid. In the words of the authors, "His [Newton's] genius would survive any detailed scrutiny, but the failure to recognize his aggressive character and his tyrannical behavior meant that the genius of others, including Flamsteed and Gray, was not recognized." All levels.

This is a quick read that is both well-written and well-organized. The authors take few diversions - historical, rhetorical, or empirical - from describing the relations among the characters in the title: the credentialed Newton, the laborious Gray, and the intermediary Flamsteed. The result is a concise and enjoyable report on what is known and what can be reasonably surmised about the relative contributions of these men. There is sufficient detail (and sufficient lack of colouring) to make the book of interest to scientists, and to historians and sociologists of science. But there the book is sufficiently accessibile, and the subject matter sufficiently finite to make it equally appealing to anyone with interest in such topics as politics, organizations, and astronomy, not to mention Newton and his era.

At the turn of the last century, David Hilbert posed 23 problems that he considered to be the most critical ones to be solved in the 20th century. Certainly the best mathematician of his time, the challenge that he put forward has served as a benchmark for progress in mathematics over the last 100 years. This book is a retrospective of what has been done on those problems, a biography of Hilbert and a history of his times. In choosing the problems, he selected only those that he felt would lead to significant mathematics. For example, the recently resolved Fermat's Last Theorem was not on the list.
While many of the problems have been solved, it is a tribute to Hilbert that some are still unsolved and there appears to be no hope that they will be resolved soon. A few of the problems were solved relatively quickly, but most succumbed only after decades of intensive work. All of the problems that he put forward are explained in great detail, and if they were solved, the manner of solution demonstrated. Since these problems are hard, it is not possible to thoroughly describe them without resorting to some advanced mathematics. However, that is kept to a minimum, so it is possible for someone without detailed knowledge to understand most of the explanations.
The German universities were very powerful centers of mathematical progress during Hilbert's lifetime and the story about the interaction of the personalities and the split between pure and applied mathematics makes very interesting reading. Mathematics is in many ways just another human endeavor, subject to petty spats, nationalistic rivalries and personal biases. The saddest part of the book is the description of what happened to the once proud university system when the Nazi party rose to power. An incredible amount of talent was hounded away, which was fortunate for them as most of those who remained and had an incorrect heritage were killed. Hilbert was a firm believer in the value of applied mathematics, so he no doubt would have been frustrated over the split between the pure and applied camps that occurred after the end of the second world war. Given that he was so much of both, I wonder what tone his voice would have had.
Hilbert was an intellectual giant who is known most for his set of famous problems rather than his impressive work on resolving problems. While the emphasis is on the famous 23 problems, enough effort is expended on what else he did to make the book as much a biography of Hilbert as it is on the problems he posed. That alone would make it well worth reading.

Published in Journal of Recreational Mathematics, reprinted with permission.

When I first heard of the hilbert problems, and how important they seemd to be for all of maths that evolved after that, since 1900 until present, I wanted to know more. This book is a very pleasant read for several reasons:
It is easy to read and well explained, even if you don't grasp the full maths, still there is a story around every of the 23 problems that lets you understand the implication, and the full drama of its solution.
It is a nice biography of Hilbert 'the man', intertwined with the 23 problems, so it does not get boring like some biographies do with endless lists of calendar-facts.
There is even a full translation of the original speech he gave in Paris in 1900, which otherwise would be impossible to find.
The problems itself are well explained, as well in the timeframe of 1900, when first posed, as later in our time when maths was ready to solve them. The author did a good job also telling which of the problems really were important, really gave mahts further problems to think about, and which problems didnt give rise to new mathematical areas, and therefore became more or less curiosities after solution.
Reading this book gave me a feeling of how beautiful maths can be, how unexpectedly some problems can and cannot be solved, and evokes some of the drama of the worlds biggest minds at work.
If you are interested in maths and/oir in science and great minds: this is an excellent read!

Nice photos but the material in the book is out of date. Many more books are available now that are more informative.

Very good book - extremely informative and a pleasure to read. Pictures are wonderful. The reviewer before me makes the very useful comment that it is for African Greys only - I would never have guessed ;)

After thinking about purchasing an African Grey for almost a year, I picked up this book at the recommendation of the owner of an exotic bird shop - "an excellent overview of the African Grey." I wanted to get an education before deciding to purchase a pet that could well out-live me. Responsibility equal or greater than to being a parent (since most children eventually move out of the nest...)!

The book provided an excellent overview of this fabulous bird species, including their history, tips on raising, feeding, housing, breeding, caring for them etc. The book was very easy to read and full of very useful information.

The book is printed on quality paper, with a quality binding. The professionally taken photographs are outstanding. The printing technique of the book makes them look like actual glossy photographs - glued into the book! As a bibliophile with thousands of books, and an amateur photographer - I can honestly say I've never encountered such a well-printed book! The pictures alone are worth the price.

The book positively influenced my decision to add another member to my family - an African Grey Parrot.

Though it's rather slow to get going in the initial chapters, Oscar Wilde's "Picture of Dorian Gray" builds up into a splendidly effective piece, written in highly polished prose. Dorian Gray, who is suggestively described as "charming" and "beautiful" ... is painted by his friend and admirer, Basil Hallward. Dorian, a self-centered social luminary whose character is reminiscent of Narcissus, makes a bizarre sub-Faustian wish which tragically comes true: that his beautiful portrait may age, while he retains his youthful looks. The conclusion is disastrous, the culmination of a narrative containing elements of murder, suicide, blackmail, a confrontation in a grimy alley and an episode in an opium den. The characters are very well sketched out, particularly the triad of Dorian, Basil and the intellectual cynic, Lord Henry, Dorian's mentor and the mouthpiece of some of Wilde's most cutting amoral opinions. The style is, typically, marvellous, characterised by brilliant exchanges and aphoristic gaiety. Wilde lacerates English bourgeois culture, the conceptions of sin and virtue and the attitudes towards art of his time with tremendous aplomb. Some of his quips are patently snide, sometimes mysogynistic, as in: "Woman represents the triumph of matter over mind, while man represents the triumph of mind over morals." Oh, isn't that just despicable?! I love it!

The Picture of Dorian Gray, a story of morals, psychology and poetic justice, has furnished Oscar Wilde with the status of a classical writer. It takes place in 19th-century England, and tells of a man in the bloom of his youth who will remain forever young.

Basil Hallward is a merely average painter until he meets Dorian Gray and becomes his friend. But Dorian, who is blessed with an angelic beauty, inspires Hallward to create his ultimate masterpiece. Awed by the perfection of this rendering, he utters the wish to be able to retain the good looks of his youth while the picture were the one to deteriorate with age. But when Dorian discovers the painting cruelly altered and realizes that his wish has been fulfilled, he ponders changing his hedonistic approach.

Dorian Gray's sharp social criticism has provoked audible controversy and protest upon the book's 1890 publication, and only years later was it to rise to classical status. Written in the style of a Greek tragedy, it is popularly interpreted as an analogy to Wilde's own tragic life. Despite this, the book is laced with the right amounts of the author's perpetual jaunty wit.

This sophisticated but crude novel is the story of man's eternal desire for perennial youth, of our vanity and frivolity, of the dangers of messing with the laws of life. Just like "Faust" and "The immortal" by Borges.

Dorian Gray is beautiful and irresistible. He is a socialité with a high ego and superficial thinking. When his friend Basil Hallward paints his portrait, Gray expresses his wish that he could stay forever as young and charming as the portrait. The wish comes true.

Allured by his depraved friend Henry Wotton, perhaps the best character of the book, Gray jumps into a life of utter pervertion and sin. But, every time he sins, the portrait gets older, while Gray stays young and healthy. His life turns into a maelstrom of sex, lies, murder and crime. Some day he will want to cancel the deal and be normal again. But Fate has other plans.

Wilde, a man of the world who vaguely resembles Gray, wrote this masterpiece with a great but dark sense of humor, saying every thing he has to say. It is an ironic view of vanity, of superflous desires. Gray is a man destroyed by his very beauty, to whom an unknown magical power gave the chance to contemplate in his own portrait all the vices that his looks and the world put in his hands. Love becomes carnal lust; passion becomes crime. The characters and the scenes are perfect. Wilde's wit and sarcasm come in full splendor to tell us that the world is dangerous for the soul, when its rules are not followed. But, and it's a big but, it is not a moralizing story. Wilde was not the man to do that. It is a fierce and unrepressed exposition of all the ugly side of us humans, when unchecked by nature. To be rich, beautiful and eternally young is a sure way to hell. And the writing makes it a classical novel. Come go with Wotton and Wilde to the theater, and then to an orgy. You'll wish you age peacefully.

A good survey of the various forms of the bow and their distribution. The book is crippled by the lack of any information whatsoever about arrows. In my opinion, that's a serious oversight as a bow is pretty useless without arrows. Otherwise, a well written and beautifully illustrated book that is still one of a kind.

This is a great book for the bowyer who wishes to be inspired, and the traditional archer who wants an insight into the many different forms of bows having been used throughout the world.
It has lots of good color photos, although only one photo per bow.
The book covers reproductions of traditional bows from all over the world, beginning with prehistoric times. Naturally there are only a few samples from the different continents and ages, and most reproductions are made by people the author knows or have met in USA.
The book does not tell much about the people who used these bows, or how they were shot, rather why they designed and developed them as they did, and how they are made.
I definately recommend this book, especially for the great photos, but you will soon look for other books that go more in depth with a specific area or age. Still, this one is more of a survey, and a great one at that!

This volume is a most savory survey of the archer's bow, both historical reproductions and aboriginal forms, from every continent around the globe. Though not exhaustive, Gray's review is delicious and complete enough to stimulate anyone's interest in the ancient and primitive-style archery, the archery of natural materials. Though Gray admits to being a fan of cable and fiberglass bows and their shooters, his real love for wood bows is obvious, and this is where he concentrates his deliberations in this book. He devotes his attention to single wood construction, but he also describes composite structures involving horn, sinew, and multiple laminations of exotic woods. His lavish full color photos and the high quality paper add to the charm of this mini-encyclopedia. His writing is most clear and definitive, and his nostalgic mood and 'Earthiest' (after Abbey) philosophy permeate throughout. The book has a feel of sharing to it, of commonality, of sympathy, of shaving off the differences among the world's societies through a most interesting venue. This is a marvelous contribution to the literature of archery. Reading it and gazing at the fine pics will urge even the half-hearted to go grab a carving tool, a knotless piece of hickory and begin carving himself or herself a bow. One may choose to pattern it after designs taken from near every geographical area on earth. As a matter of fact, his photos of "paddle" bows (made after the historical patterns of California coastal tribes) tickled my fancy enough to send me to the basement to attempt one myself. I highly recommend this book to any archer, outdoors aficionado, armchair anthropologist, hobbyist, hunter, lover of nostalgia, and any other earth-first thinker of any stripe.

A quarter century ago I noticed that some of the graduate physics students in my university were carrying around copies of Scientific American. Armed with that clue, I dug out every article on the newly discovered fundamental particles. Within the space of a week of fairly easy reading I was able to acquire a good sense of what this subject was all about. These articles explained the basic stuff our professors assumed we must know (but most of us surely didn't).

Brannan, Esplen, and Gray's Geometry accomplish for math what those Scientific American articles did for physics: speaking at a level accessible to anyone with a good high school education, they bring the interested reader up to speed in affine, projective, hyperbolic, inversive, and spherical geometry. They provide the simple explanations, diagrams, and computational details you are assumed to know-but probably don't-when you take advanced courses in topology, differential geometry, algebraic geometry, Lie groups, and more. I wish I had had a book like this when I learned those subjects.

Individual chapters of about 50 pages focus on distinct geometries. Each one is written to be studied in the course of five evenings: a week or two of work apiece. Although they build sequentially, just about any of them can be read after mastering the basic ideas of projective geometry (chapter 3) and inversive geometry (chapter 5). This makes the latter part of the book relatively accessible even to the less-committed reader and an effective handbook for someone looking for just an overview and basic formulas.

The approach is surprisingly sophisticated. The authors do not shy away from introducing and using a little bit of group theory, even at the outset. (Scientific American, even in its heyday, never dared do that.) They present all geometries from a relatively modern point of view, as the study of the invariants of a transitive group of transformations on a set. Many explanations and proofs are based on exploiting properties of these transformations. This brings a welcome current of rigor and elegance to a somewhat static subject long relegated to out of date or sloppy authors (with the exception of a few standouts, such as Lang & Murrow's "Geometry").

One nice aspect is the authors' evident awareness of and appreciation for the history of mathematics. Marginal notes begin at Plato and wind up with Felix Klein's Erlangen program some 2300 years later. Although the text does not necessarily follow the historical development of geometry, its references to that development provide a nice context for the ideas. This is an approach that would improve the exposition of many math texts at all levels.

The authors are British and evidently write for students with slightly different backgrounds than American undergraduates. Obvious prerequisites are a mastery of algebra and a good high school course in Euclidean geometry. Synopses of the limited amounts of group theory and linear algebra needed appear in two brief appendices. However, readers had better be intuitively comfortable with matrix operations, including diagonalization and finding eigenspaces, because matrices and complex numbers are used throughout the book for performing computations and developing proofs. A knowledge of calculus is not needed. Indeed, calculus is not used in the first two-thirds of the book, appearing only briefly to derive a distance formula for hyperbolic geometry (a differential equation for the exponential map is derived and solved). During the last third of the book (the chapters on hyperbolic and spherical geometry), some basic familiarity with trigonometric functions and hyperbolic functions is assumed (cosh, sinh, tanh, and their inverses). Definitions of these functions are not routinely provided, but algebraic identities appear in marginal notes where they are needed.

Now for the quibbles. The book has lots of diagrams, but not enough of them. The problems are usually trivial, tending to ask for basic calculations to reinforce points in the text. The text itself does not go very deeply into any one geometry, being generally content with a few illustrative theorems. An opportunity exists here to create a set of gradually more challenging problems that would engage smarter or more sophisticated readers, as well as show the casual reader where the theories are headed.

This book is the work of three authors and it shows, to ill effect, in Chapter 6 ("non-euclidean geometry"). Until then, the text is remarkably clean and free of typographical and notational errors. This chapter contains some glaring errors. For example, a function s(z) is defined at the beginning of a proof on page 296, but the proof confusingly proceeds to refer to "s(0,c)", "s(a,b)", and so on.

The written-by-committee syndrome appears in subtler ways. There are few direct cross-references among the chapters on inversive, hyperbolic, and spherical geometry, despite the ample opportunities presented by the material. Techniques used in one chapter that would apply without change to similar situations in another are abandoned and replaced with entirely different techniques. Within the aberrant Chapter 6, some complex derivations could be replaced by much simpler proofs based on material earlier in the chapter.

The last chapter attempts to unify the preceding ones by exhibiting various geometries as sub-geometries of others. It would have been better to make the connections evident as the material was being developed. It is disappointing, too, that nothing in this book really hints at the truly interesting developments in geometry: differentiable manifolds, Lie groups, Cartan connections, complex variable theory, quaternion actions, and much more. Indeed, any possible hint seems willfully suppressed: the matrix groups in evidence, such as SL(2, R), SU(1,1, C), PSL(3, R), O(3), and so on, are always given unconventional names, for instance. Even where a connection is screaming out, it is not made: the function abstractly named "g" on pages 296-97 is the exponential map of differential geometry, for instance.

Despite these limitations, Brannan et al. is a good and enjoyable book for anyone from high school through first-year graduate level in mathematics.

This book gives a beautiful overview of geometry of 2 dimensions. All of the book is about many plane geometries I have heard of, but didn't really know. This book changed that.

The first chapter treats some basics about conics. The second chapter is on affine geometry. The third and fourth chapters are about projective geometry. In the fifth chapter you will be led through Inversive geometry which functions as a base for the sixth and seventh chapter. The sixth chapter has as itst title Non-Euclidean geometry, but it is in fact the Hyperbolic geometry of Boljay in a formulation of Henry Poincaré. The seventh chapter is about Spherical Geometry. In the eighth chapter all of these geometries are demonstrated to be special cases of the Kleinian vieuw of geometry: that is, every geometry can be seen as consisting of the invariants of a specific group of transformations of the 2 dimensional plane into itself. It is clearly demonstrated that this is less trivial than you would expect.

I learned two things from this book. The first is, that you can, in principle, prove every theorem of geometry by just using Euclidean geometry. But if you do this, the amount of work it takes can be very huge indeed. It is a far better strategy to try to determine what geometry is best suited for the problem at hand, and solve it within that geometry.

Since the book gives a very clear picture not only of the particular geometries, but also to how the geometries relate to each other, you have, as an extra bonus, insight in the level of abstraction and the scope of your theorem.

The second thing I learned is how you can use geometry to make concepts as simple as 'triangle' precise. What I mean is this: a right angle triangle is not the same as an equilateral triangle. But both are the same in the sense that they are both triangles. The question is this: how can two 'things' be the same and at the same time not 'the same'? The book gives an answer to this 'question about the meaning of abstractions'. It gives the following solution. Take a triangle, ANY triangle. Consider the group of all affine transformations A (which consists of an uncountably infinite set of transformations.) If you subject this one triangle Tr to every affine transformation in this group A, you will have created a set consisting of exactly ALL triangles. In other words, the abstract idea of 'triangle' consists of ONE triangle Tr together with the set of ALL affine transformations. You can denote this as the pair (Tr, A). In the same way you can express the abstract idea of ellipse by the pair (El, A), and the abstract idea of parabola by the pair (Par, A). And, by passing to the more abstract Projective geometry, you can express the abstract idea of 'conic' by giving just one quadratic curve, be it a parabola, ellipse or hyperbola, by the pair (Qu, P), whereby P is the group of all projective transformations.

The book presupposes some group theory and some knowledge of linear algebra. Furthermore you have to know a little calculus. I have very little knowledge of group theory, and I have just about enough knowledge and skill about linear algebra to know the difference between an orthogonal and unitary matrix, and to know what eigenvectors are. I have studied the first 5 chapters of CALCULUS from Tom M. Apostol, which does not go too deep into linear algebra. This proved to be enough.

I have only one point of critique. Virtually all problems in the book are of the 'plug in type', even those at the end of every chapter (from which, by the way, you cannot find the solutions at the end of the book, while the solutions of those in the text can be found in an appendix). If you have understood the text, you have no difficulties whatsoever to solve them. The problems are not challenging enough to give you a real skill in all of these geometries, although they do become more challenging in later chapters. They are only intended to help you to understand the basic principles of all of these geometries, no more, no less. So if you want to have a tool to help you in obtaining a greater skill in, say, the special theory of relativity by studying hyperbolic geometry, this is not a suitable book. That is why I have given it 4 stars, and not the full 5 stars.

I also have a piece of advise. Although the problems are, from a conceptual point of view, not challenging, a mistake is easily made. Therefore it is best to solve the problems by making use of a mathematical program like Maple or Mathematica. If you then have made a mistake, you can backtrack exactly where you have made it, and let the program take care of all of the tedious calculations. This has also stimulated to try to calculate some outcomes by following a different approach, and then to compare the results.

I have enjoyed studying this book immensely.

I'm trying to understand transformations used in computer graphics, for example world transformation used in Windows GDI API. And I found this book to be the best description on the topic, that is affine transformations

This is music from the albulm of the same name. I was hoping that it would be in piano style formate. The music is in guitar tabulature. There is a lot of good piano music on the albulm so I am a little disappointed about that. I have just started to play the guitar music in the book and it is very nice. I would recommend the book to anyone who enjoys Mr. Gray's music and have a desire to learn how to play it.