Book Description
Professor Murray Gell-Mann is one of the most influential and brilliant scientists of the twentieth century. His work on symmetries, including the invention of the 'quark', in the 1950s and early 1960s has provided a foundation for much of modern particle physics and was recognised by the award of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1969. This book is a collection of research articles especially written by eminent scientists to celebrate Gell-Mann's 60th birthday, in September 1989. The main body of contributions are concerned with theoretical particle physics and its applications to cosmology. ... Read more

Book Description
This digital document is an article from The Humanist, published by Thomson Gale on September 1, 2006. The length of the article is 588 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Murray Gell-Mann (1929-present) 2005 Humanist of the Year.(Biography)
Author: Gale Reference Team
Publication: The Humanist (Magazine/Journal)
Date: September 1, 2006
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 66Issue: 5Page: NA

Article Type: Biography

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

Book Description
Co-published by SITE Santa Fe and Smart Art Press - 64 pages, 36 color plates, hardback or softback, 9 x 11 1/2 inches - Essays by David Ebony and Murray Gell-Mann1999. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

fuzzy robots?
If you're interested in the future uses and directions of digitized images, Alan Rath's joining of digitized images with kinetic sculptures is worth considering. Rath doesn't see kinetic art as alienating, so he's a bit baffled by commentaries on kinetic art such as those in his interview with Meredith Tromble ("There are undoubtedly more electronic circuits in my home than there are bits of painted canvas, yet when I imagine art about daily life I still think of a still life or a family portrait."). Rather he sees our relationship to technology as being just as intimate as our relationship to more culturally established forms of art. His digital video sculptures--built from circuit boards, memory chips, frame buffers and wires--are meant to be playful investigations of people's relationship to machinery and technology. For example, though Rath uses digitized videotaped images of the human eye to lend a psychological presence to his kinetic sculptures, he resists tendencies to anthropomorphize his sculptures in order to discover and create new modes of exchange and social relationships. In Rath's "Watcher," a wall-mounted monitor showing a shifting pair of eyes-neither quite inanimate nor animate-the effect of the image isn't to create a kind of portrait, or suggest any real perceptual ability, but simply to draw attention to our emotional responses as our traditional modes of relating are questioned and thwarted.

A 2-D book format is obviously not the optimal format for experiencing Rath's kinetic sculptures. Nevertheless, if you don't have the opportunity to go to one of his exhibits, the photographs of Rath's exhibited works at SITE Santa Fe is the next best thing. ... Read more

Book Description
A great variety of complex phenomena in many scientific fields exhibit power-law behavior, reflecting a hierarchical or fractal structure. Many of these phenomena seem to be susceptible to description using approaches drawn from thermodynamics or statistical mechanics, particularly approaches
involving the maximization of entropy and of Boltzmann-Gibbs statistical mechanics and standard laws in a natural way.The book addresses the interdisciplinary applications of these ideas, and also on various phenomena that could possibly be quantitatively describable in terms of these
ideas. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Much ado ...
.. about a student-t like distribution. Too much ado. There is no generalization of entropy (see the comment by Nauenberg and Balian in 2005 Europhysics News, e.g.) and no 'generalized thermostatistics. In fact, there is nothing but a postulated distribution that (as do student-ts typically) has a Gaussian limit. So what?

The claim of 'nonlinear Fokker-Planck" and "nonlinear Markov processes" was quite easy to explode: There is no such thing as a 'nonlinear Markov process'. There is no such thing as a 'nonlinear Fokker-Planck equation' for a conditional probability. A conditional probability with initial state memory is nonMarkovian. A conditional probability with initial state memory is not guaranteed to obey a Chapman-Kolmogorov equation and usually doesn't. A Chapman-Kolmogorov equation is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a Markov process. A Fokker-Planck equation with memory of an initial state in its drift and/or diffusion coefficients does not generate a Markov process. A nonlinear diffusion equation does not define any stochastic process at all, in fact a diffusion equation for a 1-point density defines no stochastic process at all. A 1-point density cannot be used to identify/define a stochastic process, both scaling Markov processes and strongly nonMarkov processes like fractional Brownian motion have exactly the same 1-point density, with widely differing conditional densities. For detailed explanations see cond-mat/0701589 and references therein.

It would be of interest to psychologists and sociologists to study and analyze how such 'movements', based on claims hanging in thin air, gain a multitude of followers and hangers-on, as this movement has. The literature over the last 10 years is riddled with wrong and empty papers on such stuff. ... Read more

Amazon.com
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet W.S. Merwin found this slim 1955 novel on a shelf in the house of friends, and, struck with the "plain, succinct evocation and beauty" of Fred Bodsworth's writing, suggested its reissue to a publisher. This is a quick, elegant, devastating read. The Eskimo curlew was a species of shorebird that migrated (and perhaps, in extremely small numbers, still migrates) south from arctic Canada every fall, in a flight that took it eastward across Canada, and then, after feeding, south over the Atlantic to South America--this latter journey nearly 2,500 miles of nonstop flight. The curlew was almost unique among shorebirds for its ability to make this grueling passage.

Bodsworth, a respected ornithologist, makes us care about his fictional bird protagonist--a lone curlew in search of a mate--while still cautiously riding the line between description and anthropomorphism. Of his curlew preparing for a mate, he writes: "He waited within the borders of his territory, flying in tightening circles and calling excitedly as the other bird came nearer. The female was coming. The three empty summers that the male had waited vainly and alone on his breeding territory were a vague, tormenting memory, now almost lost in a brain so keenly keyed to instinctive responses that there was little capacity for conscious thought or memory."

The demise of this species at the hands of hunters and hungry consumers was so rapid and thorough that the "millions that darkened the sky" in Newfoundland in the 1870s during their annual migration were reduced to only a few lone fliers by the 1890s. An afterword by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann and line drawings by Abigail Rorer add context to this remarkable book. --Maria Dolan Book Description
The Eskimo curlew, which once made its migration from Patagonia to the Arctic in flocks so dense that they darkened the sky, was brought to the verge of extinction by the wanton slaughter of game-hunters.

Following the doomed search of a solitary curlew for a female of its kind, Fred Bodsworth’s novel is a haunting indictment of man’s destruction of the natural world. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (8)

Empathy for Endangered Species
This book received excellent reviews from the New York Times and other leading book reviewers because of its moving story.This is an intense little book, very easily read in an evening, about a year in the life of one of the last Eskimo Curlews in existence.

This book takes you on the migration journey of the Curlew and vividly illustrates its struggle for survival.It also showcases historical notes about the slaughter of the curlews in the late 1800's and the notes of alarm raised by scientists that unfortunately did not initiate conservation measures to help this species.

I had read one other book like this about the Passenger Pigeon, that told the story of a species and its struggle to avoid the slaughter of the market hunters of the 1800's. This book though is the best of the type as
Bodsworth is a skilled writer and is able to show the life of the Eskimo Curlew in heart-wrenching detail without anthropomorophism.

I would encourage everyone to read this and pass it around for others to read as it is quickly read but has powerful impact.To have some emotional concern or motivation to help protect threatened species of life on this earth you need empathy and this book is a masterpiece at producing that empathy.

Last of the Curlews
A sad story of human greed and destruction, but one we all should read and learn from.

There's Always Hope...
This is a Classic and recognized as one of the finest Natural History books in North America as well as abroad.First published in 1955 it has been re-issued ,probably as many as 20 times over the years. Suffice it to say ,anyone with any interest in nature,birds, extinct species,conservation,preservation of species,would find this an excellent read.As a matter of fact,I would go so far as to suggest that after reading this book,one would probably agree it is the best natural history book they have ever read.Just look at the other reviews.
The main reason for my writing this review is to tell you that after reading 'The Last of the Curlews'you might want to read some of Bodsworth's other lesser known but also excellent works.
"The Strange One"
"The Sparrows Fall"
"The Atonement of Ashley Morden"
and,
"The Pacific Coast"

Another excellent thing about 'The Last of the Curlews' are the superb scratch board illustrations by T M Shortt,one of Canada's finest artists;so make sure they are in the edition you get.
With regards to my title...for several decades the search has continued without success.There have been a few reports of sightings,but none confirmed.There is a lot of territory in it's range,between the tip of South America and the Arctic Circle where there may be survivors...there's always hope.

I still see Fred on occasion;so let's hope we see another book from him soon.

A must read
This is a wonderful, heart-wrenching short book, a fictionalization of the migration of a lone Eskimo Curlew from the arctic to South America and back.

The Eskimo Curlew was once a plentiful shorebird that was highly sought after by hunters because of the succulence of its flesh and the ease with which it could be taken.Usually flying in dense swarms, a score or more birds could be brought down by a single shotgun blast.In some cases so many were killed, that the hunters left those that could not be transported to market in massive piles.And so it came to pass that by the late 19th-century, the Eskimo Curlew population declined rapidly, to the point where it was virtually extinct at the time Bodsworth wrote the book.

Although a work of fiction, this is a book that should be read by everyone who has an interest in Nature and the environment.

A Haunting Classic ....
Bodsworth is brilliant in his capacity to provide the reader with an emotionally arrousing text, supported by fascinating technical details of bird migration.I cannot imagine that anyone having even a remote interestin birds, nature or life, would not be moved by this great piece. ... Read more