Have you ever pondered how much God thinks about you? Not just what He thinks about you, your life, and your character, but how many times has He considered you? In his book, A Million Grains of Sand, author Danny Formhals Sr. share a powerful insight into what a grain of sand means to God? Sand is both an annoyance, and amazing at the same time. An annoyance when it gets in your eye, and amazing when you see it the way God does. Jeremiah 29:11 (NKJV) states, "For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the LORD, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope." In this book you'll see sand in a new light. And, you will gain a powerful perspective on just one grain, as well as a million of them. Just as you are a product of God, so is a grain of sand.
A finalist for the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award The gripping story of the most important overlooked commodity in the world--sand--and the crucial role it plays in our lives. After water and air, sand is the natural resource that we consume more than any other--even more than oil. Every concrete building and paved road on Earth, every computer screen and silicon chip, is made from sand. From Egypt's pyramids to the Hubble telescope, from the world's tallest skyscraper to the sidewalk below it, from Chartres' stained-glass windows to your iPhone, sand shelters us, empowers us, engages us, and inspires us. It's the ingredient that makes possible our cities, our science, our lives--and our future. And, incredibly, we're running out of it. The World in a Grain is the compelling true story of the hugely important and diminishing natural resource that grows more essential every day, and of the people who mine it, sell it, build with it--and sometimes, even kill for it. It's also a provocative examination of the serious human and environmental costs incurred by our dependence on sand, which has received little public attention. Not all sand is created equal: Some of the easiest sand to get to is the least useful. Award-winning journalist Vince Beiser delves deep into this world, taking readers on a journey across the globe, from the United States to remote corners of India, China, and Dubai to explain why sand is so crucial to modern life. Along the way, readers encounter world-changing innovators, island-building entrepreneurs, desert fighters, and murderous sand pirates. The result is an entertaining and eye-opening work, one that is both unexpected and involving, rippling with fascinating detail and filled with surprising characters.
Explaining the science contained in a simple assembly of grains—the most abundant form of matter present on Earth. Granular media—composed of vast amounts of grains, consolidated or not—constitute the most abundant form of solid matter on Earth. Granular materials assemble in disordered configurations scientists often liken to a bag of marbles. Made of macroscopic particles rather than molecules, they defy the standard scheme of classification in terms of solid, liquid, and gas. Granular materials provide a model relevant to various domains of research, including engineering, physics, and biology. William Blake famously wished “To See a World in a Grain of Sand”; in this book, pioneering researchers in granular matter explain the science hidden behind simple grains, shedding light on collective behavior in disordered settings in general. The authors begin by describing the single grain with its different origins, shapes, and sizes, then examine grains in piled or stacked form. They explain the packing fraction of granular media, a crucial issue that bears on the properties displayed in practical applications; explore small-scale deformations in piles of disordered grains, with particular attention to friction; and present theories of various modes of disorder. Along the way, they discuss such concepts as force chains, arching effects, wet grains, sticky contacts, and inertial effects. Drawing on recent numerical simulations as well as classical concepts developed in physics and mechanics, the book offers an accessible introduction to a rapidly developing field.
The realities of mankind's cognitive situation are such that our knowledge of the world's ways is bound to be imperfect. None the less, the theory of unknowability—agnoseology as some have called it—is a rather underdeveloped branch of philosophy. In this philosophically rich and groundbreaking work, Nicholas Rescher aims to remedy this. As the heart of the discussion is an examination of what Rescher identifies as the four prime reasons for the impracticability of cognitive access to certain facts about the world: developmental inpredictability, verificational surdity, ontological detail, and predicative vagrancy. Rescher provides a detailed and illuminating account of the role of each of these factors in limiting human knowledge, giving us an overall picture of the practical and theoretical limits to our capacity to know our world.
In Buddhism As Philosophy, Mark Siderits makes the Buddhist philosophical tradition accessible to a Western audience. Offering generous selections from the canonical Buddhist texts and providing an engaging, analytical introduction to the fundamental tenets of Buddhist thought, this revised, expanded, and updated edition builds on the success of the first edition in clarifying the basic concepts and arguments of the Buddhist philosophers.
'Brian Aldiss seems to have always had a more oceanic sense of time than most science fiction writers, an almost measured vision of what will transpire in the long run, a time-sense which is reflected both in his fiction and in the pace and course of his career.' Norman Spinrad These nine stories from 1960, early in Brian Aldiss's long and productive career, were originally conceived as a single entity, and form a chronicle of the next forty million years. They are arranged sequentially, beginning with the near-future and ending, with 'The Ultimate Millennia', hundreds of thousands, or even millions of years later. 'One cannot help being struck by the variety of concepts, the mastery of style, the sureness of the dialogue, the depth of characterization, the fertility of ideas, and the urbanity of the wit ... here is a major talent at work.' Science Fiction Writers
Mahaney presents methods of using electron microscopy developed in the past 25 years, and discusses their values in the interpretation of sedimentary environments, the problems inherent in these methods, case studies and future possibilities for research.
A captivating and user-friendly tour of Bayes’s theorem and its global impact on modern life from the acclaimed science writer and author of The Rationalist’s Guide to the Galaxy. At its simplest, Bayes’s theorem describes the probability of an event, based on prior knowledge of conditions that might be related to the event. But in Everything Is Predictable, Tom Chivers lays out how it affects every aspect of our lives. He explains why highly accurate screening tests can lead to false positives and how a failure to account for it in court has put innocent people in jail. A cornerstone of rational thought, many argue that Bayes’s theorem is a description of almost everything. But who was the man who lent his name to this theorem? How did an 18th-century Presbyterian minister and amateur mathematician uncover a theorem that would affect fields as diverse as medicine, law, and artificial intelligence? Fusing biography, razor-sharp science writing, and intellectual history, Everything Is Predictable is an entertaining tour of Bayes’s theorem and its impact on modern life, showing how a single compelling idea can have far reaching consequences.
This is a treatment of the greatest questions we can ask written by a layperson for lay-reading. Accordingly, this book is neither qualified nor intended as an instrument for academic study. At the same time, some degree of general, background, scientific understanding is necessary in order to frame the questions and, indeed, it is only the scientific platform now available to us that makes it possible, for the first time, for us to really address the questions. If you flick through the pages here, don't be put off by the seeming unfamiliar and complex looking diagrams, chemical formulae and the like. In the text, all of this has been reduced to an easy and, hopefully, interesting lay-person's understanding. Should you decide to read the book, I am confident you will come out of it with an added shade of colour to your perception of both yourself and the world in which we live. That, in turn, will justify my effort and intent to make our world a little better.
