Think Science .

I just completed reading paulo cohelo’s book brida. So thought of writing review for the book. If you’re interested then read on. The story revolves around the a woman called Brida who is aware of some special gift which God has given her. She feels that she’s the right person to learn about the supernatural powers and become a witch. She wants to trail in the past, present and future. And thus so, with her strong determination, she succeeds in getting these powers. In the process, she meets the Magus and Wicca. The Magus was her male teacher who was supposed to teach her the Tradition of Sun. While Wicca impressively teaches Brida the true power to become a witch.

But in the process, the Magus finds the bright illuminating point on the left shoulder of Brida, which indicates the she’s his Soul-mate. She finds the same on his right shoulder. But Brida is already in love with another man, Lorens, who loved her from bottom of his heart. Brida finds herself in a pickle because with the knowledge of these supernatural powers, she was in love with two men in her life.

Paulo Coelho did succeed in bringing the magic of the supernatural powers to a forefront and how some people can achieve it with true dedication. Somewhere, in the middle of the book, I got really bored with story. But at the end it speeds up with a rather emotional climax. I’ll rate this book as 7/10.

Some beautiful lines from the book:
Accept what life offers to you and try to drink from every cup. All wines should be tasted; some should only be sipped, but with others, drink the whole bottle.
You can only know a good wine if you’ve first tasted a bad one.

This blog post is about review of Richard Dawkins “The Selfish Gene“. The book is a real classic of modern science. Many of the ideas were quite speculative at the time of its writing, but they have held up well over the last thirty years or so since the first printing.It’s an excellent description of a process that appears to be fundamental to all life.

It combines the great insights of Charles Darwin with knowledge of genetics developed since Darwin’s time. The combination is a great synthesis which strengthens Darwinism via a shift of perspective.

The only critiques I have seen of it have been either ideological, i.e creationist, or the result of reviewers getting stuck on their objection to the title without ever getting to what is said in the book. A surprising number of people see the title and have such a strong negative reaction that they miss what the book actually says. It’s a big mistake to take that “selfish” in an anthropomorphic sense. Dawkins certainly didn’t mean it that way.

I thought let’s go back check some interesting books we used to read for study. So this post is about the list of the books.

Maths : *Beginning Algebra* (West Texas A&M)
*Intermediate Algebra* (West Texas A&M)

Maths is interesting and is must if you’re interested in physics,chemistry or any branch with analytical approach.

Classical Mechanics : An intermediate level course on Analytical Classical Dynamics by  R. Fitzpatrick, Univ. of Texas, Austin. A good set of Lecture notes from Harvard.

A short course on Classical Mechanics by  Prof. J. J. Binney

There are lots of options for classical mechanics but some of the worthy are mentioned in this list.

 Statistical Mechanics and Thermodynamics:

The course “Statistical Mechanics” by Alfred Huan Prof. Kelly’s lecture notes on Statistical Physics

Gould/Tobochnik lecture notes

Intermediate level course on Statistical Mechanics by R. Fitzpatrick

Computational Physics : 

Mathematica for Students of Science by James Kelly Angus MacKinnon, Computational Physics

Prof. Mathews’ projects on Numerical Analysis

There are very few books for computational physics and lot of material is scattered around net(mostly in universities sites).

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I would love to add more list of boooks. If you know the list of the books then do please add it in the comments.

I would love to know more about the books refered in the academic and university sylalbus or refered by professors. Do let me know in the comments.

This post is for the book list of astronomy  and some  other books. More will be added soon.

Astronomy 

Hannu Karttunen et al. (eds.): Fundamental Astronomy.

Pasachoff: Contemporary Astronomy

Shu, Frank: The physical universe: an introduction to astronomy

Astrophysical formulae: a compendium for the physicist and astrophysicist Kenneth R. Lang.

Fluid Dynamics

1. D.J. Tritton Physical Fluid Dynamics
2. G.K. Batchelor Introduction to Fluid Dynamics
3. S. Chandrasekhar Hydrodynamics and Hydromagnetic Stability
4. Segel Mathematics Applied to Continuum Mechanics Dover.

Simulations

1. Johnson and Rees Numerical Analysis Addison Wesley
   Undergraduate level broad intro.
2. Numerical Recipes in X (X=c,fortran,pascal,etc) Tueklosky and Press
3. Young and Gregory A survey of Numerical Mathematics Dover 2 volumes.

If you can suggest please do so in comments.

During 2003-2006, there was trend in campus recruiting to ask questions from shakuntala Devi’s puzzle books. Just because Microsoft, google ask their employees puzzles and brainteaser before recruiting, in Silicon Valley and outside it every company started to ask such questions.

Shakuntala devi’s puzzle are indeed hair pulling and teaser ones. Yet they’re interesting as well. and reason they’re introduced in IT company screening process is to check how sharp a student thinks. that indeed a necessity as environment in IT company is like that.

So coming back to the point of shakuntala devi’s puzzles. She wrote more than 6 books on mathematical ability and puzzles. One book she wrote on homosexuals which is published but didn’t get much publicity for it. Some of her famous books are:

• Puzzles to Puzzle You
• More Puzzles to Puzzle You
• Book of Numbers
• Figuring: The Joy of Numbers
• In the Wonderland of Numbers
• Mathability: Awaken the Math Genius in Your Child