. . . a smart and energetic collection of essays on baseball statistics. Curve Ball doesn't play misty-eyed homage to baseball's traditions and conventional wisdoms. . . . This is great stuff. . . . Curve Ball makes clear how pleasurable [stats] can be, and arguably how important, to view the great American game with real precision" - The Wall Street Journal "Rating: 4.5 out of 5. Must own" - Baseballnotebook.com "In [Curve Ball] Albert &amp; Bennett explain the game in ways the conventional press - even titans such as Bill James - cannot" - Baseball America [The book] illustrates how statistical reasoning can be useful in teasing out the role of chance from performance in baseball to better assess ability. . . . Curve Ball represents another advance in the genre of baseball and statistics books" - Journal of the American Statistical Association There is a fascination among baseball fans and the media to collect data on every imaginable event during a baseball game and to use these data to try to understand characteristics of the game. But patterns in baseball data are difficult to detect due to the inherent chance variation that is present. This book addresses a number of questions that are of interest to many baseball fans - including how to rate players, predict the outcome of a game or the attainment of an attainment, make sense of situational data, and decide the most valuable players in the World Series. Curve Ball is directed to a general audience and does not assume that the reader has any prior background in probability or statistics, although knowledge of high school algebra will be helpful.

Curve Ball: Baseball, Statistics, and the Role of Chance in the Game

Science & Math

Albert, Jim

Bennett, Jay

Biological Sciences

Copernicus

I wrote this book because I wanted to learn more about interstel lar flight. Not the Star Trek notion of tearing around the Galaxy in a huge spaceship-that was obviously beyond existing tech nology-but a more realistic mission. In 1989 I had videotaped Voyager 2's encounter with Neptune and watched the drama of robotic exploration over and over again. I started to wonder whether we could do something similar with Alpha Centauri, the nearest star to the Sun. Everyone seemed to agree that manned flight to the stars was out of the question, if not permanently then for the indefinitely foreseeable future. But surely we could do something with robotics. And if we could figure out a theoretical way to do it, how far were we from the actual technology that would make it happen? In other words, what was the state of our interstellar technology today, those concepts and systems that might translate into a Voyager to the stars? Finding answers meant talking to people inside and outside of NASA. I was surprised to learn that there is a large literature of interstellar flight. Nobody knows for sure how to propel a space craft fast enough to make the interstellar crossing within a time scale that would fit the conventional idea of a mission, but there are candidate systems that are under active investigation. Some of this effort begins with small systems that we'll use near the Earth and later hope to extend to deep space missions.

Centauri Dreams: Imagining and Planning Interstellar Exploration

Engineering & Transportation

Gilster, Paul

Automotive

Many of us, especially since 9/11, have become personally concerned about issues of security, and this is no surprise. Security is near the top of government and corporate agendas around the globe. Security-related stories appear on the front page everyday. How well though, do any of us truly understand what achieving real security involves? In Beyond Fear, Bruce Schneier invites us to take a critical look at not just the threats to our security, but the ways in which we're encouraged to think about security by law enforcement agencies, businesses of all shapes and sizes, and our national governments and militaries. Schneier believes we all can and should be better security consumers, and that the trade-offs we make in the name of security - in terms of cash outlays, taxes, inconvenience, and diminished freedoms - should be part of an ongoing negotiation in our personal, professional, and civic lives, and the subject of an open and informed national discussion. With a well-deserved reputation for original and sometimes iconoclastic thought, Schneier has a lot to say that is provocative, counter-intuitive, and just plain good sense. He explains in detail, for example, why we need to design security systems that don't just work well, but fail well, and why secrecy on the part of government often undermines security. He also believes, for instance, that national ID cards are an exceptionally bad idea: technically unsound, and even destructive of security. And, contrary to a lot of current nay-sayers, he thinks online shopping is fundamentally safe, and that many of the new airline security measure (though by no means all) are actually quite effective. A skeptic of much that's promised by highly touted technologies like biometrics, Schneier is also a refreshingly positive, problem-solving force in the often self-dramatizing and fear-mongering world of security pundits. Schneier helps the reader to understand the issues at stake, and how to best come to one's own conclusions, including the vast infrastructure we already have in place, and the vaster systems--some useful, others useless or worse--that we're being asked to submit to and pay for. Bruce Schneier is the author of seven books, including Applied Cryptography (which Wired called "the one book the National Security Agency wanted never to be published") and Secrets and Lies (described in Fortune as "startlingly lively...¦[a] jewel box of little surprises you can actually use."). He is also Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Counterpane Internet Security, Inc., and publishes Crypto-Gram, one of the most widely read newsletters in the field of online security.

Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World.

Schneier, Bruce

Reference

Stephen Webb, author of WHERE IS EVERYBODY?, takes the interested amateur on a thrilling and enlightening tour of the amazing, even bizarre, new ideas of modern physics, including alternatives to the Big Bang, parallel universes, and an imaginary trip to the other side of the black hole.

Out of this World: Colliding Universes, Branes, Strings, and Other Wild Ideas of Modern Physics

Webb, Stephen

This book unites systems thinking and information technology to offer powerful insights and practical strategies to combat obesity. It applies creative, business-tested techniques to personal health, presenting a novel approach to addressing obesity.

Thinking in Circles About Obesity: Applying Systems Thinking to Weight Management

Hamid, Tarek K. A.

In 1996, the supposedly uncrackable US federal encryption system was broken. In this captivating and intriguing book, Matt Curtin charts the rise and fall of DES and chronicles the efforts of those who were determined to master it.

Brute Force: Cracking the Data Encryption Standard

Curtin, Matt

An elegantly dramatized and illustrated dialog on the square root of two and the whole concept of irrational numbers.

The Square Root of 2: A Dialogue Concerning a Number and a Sequence

Flannery, David

Former NASA Astronaut Harrison Schmitt advocates a private, investor-based approach to returning humans to the Moon―to extract Helium 3 for energy production, to use the Moon as a platform for science and manufacturing, and to establish permanent human colonies there in a kind of stepping stone community on the way to deeper space. With governments playing a supporting role―just as they have in the development of modern commercial aeronautics and agricultural production―Schmitt believes that a fundamentally private enterprise is the only type of organization capable of sustaining such an effort and, eventually, even making it pay off.

Return to the Moon: Exploration, Enterprise, and Energy in the Human Settlement of Space

Schmitt, Harrison

Transportation

This book contains scores of intriguing puzzles and paradoxes from Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland, whose interests ranged from inventing new games like Arithmetical Croquet to important problems in symbolic logic and propositional calculus. Written by Carroll expert and well-known mathematics author Martin Gardner, this tour through Carroll's inventions is both fun and informative.

The Universe in a Handkerchief: Lewis Carroll’s Mathematical Recreations, Games, Puzzles, and Word Plays

Humor & Entertainment

GARDNER, MARTIN

Puzzles & Games

Of all of Martin Gardners writings, none gained him a wider audience or was more central to his reputation than his Mathematical Recreations column in Scientific American - which virtually defined the genre of popular mathematics writing for a generation. Flatland, Hydras and Eggs: Mathematical Mystifications is the final collection of these columns, covering the period roughly from 1979 to Gardners retirement in 1986. As always in his published collections, Gardner includes letters commenting on the ideas presented in his articles. These columns show him at the top of his form and should not be missed by anyone with an interest in mathematics.

The Last Recreations: Hydras, Eggs, and Other Mathematical Mystifications

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