Interesting People

Experts in Markov Chain Monte Carlo:  Peter Green and his student David Hastie

Thomas Fletcher is a Computer Science and Maths major at Bath University.  He created a number of facebook applications including the Friend Wheel, which is an interesting way to how the relationships between your friends.  Currently, I am studying how this can be applied to sub-typing Ia supernovae given that one can quantify their similarity.

Margaret Wright from NYU works on optimization algorithms.  I always keep an ear out for new methods in optimization
- I hoped to build a backward Monte Carlo algorithm for HiRes or Auger.  Anyway, her impressive bibliography is here.
(Someday, I'll have time to read it all.)

Unsung philosophers G.W. Leibniz and Gottlob Frege

Jean Baudrillard, "Seer or connoisseur of the obvious?  Fatal strategist or junk consumer?"

Andrew Liddle - visit his paper where he uses the Information Criteria to find the number of parameters need to describe cosmology.Another paper of his, which is a refutation of a paper by a Linder and Miquel, is a brilliant summary of Bayesian statistics.

Marco Pierre White is the chef that trained the infamous Gordon Ramsay of Hell's Kitchen and Kitchen Nightmares.
He's sort of the quintessential rock-and-roll chef, complete with 3 Michelin stars.
Although Marco is a strict disciplinarian in the kitchen, he doesn't bollock people just to be a bully like Ramsay.
For instance, in the first pages of his autobiography, Devil in the Kitchen, (a fascinating book)
he explains his 'bullying' is a reflection of how much he cares about his customers.
Here's a google authors interview with him.  A few years ago he gave up his Michelin stars and then
took over the UK version of Hell's Kitchen from Ramsay, making the show more about food than
bollocking.  In the interview (above) he talks about his new thing is to bring high quality food at low prices to as many people as he can and promote the cooking profession.

Want to go to outerspace without a space suit or shield a city from a rocket or nuclear warhead?  Alexander Bolonkin knows how!  

Music
I'm a fan James Brown's later work.  Although his early work obviously had tremendous significance,
in my opinion, he hit his peak with his Gravity album featuring "Living in America" and "Gravity".  
Check out the Gravity video on youtube.com.  
His "Love Overdue" album is good too, including stuff like "Standing on Higher Ground" and "Dance, Dance, Dance to the Funk".

Hank Williams Jr. retook the stage that his father was thrown off of years earlier to make
a live recording at the Grand Ol' Opry.
The concert was a musical autobiography that included everything from "My Name is Bocephus" and "Working for MCA" to "Family Tradition".
The concert hits a crescendo with "The Ride" and "Country Boy Can Survive" (where you can hear the audience
lose their sanity).  

Favorite Authors
Carl Sagan
Cosmos
Contact
Science as a Candle in the Dark

Milan Kundera
The Unbearable Lightness of Being - a tour de force of the human experience
Immortality
Identity

Thomas Cahill
How the Irish Saved Civilization:  The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role from the Fall of Rom to the Rise of
Medieval Europe
The Gifts of the Jews:  How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels

Noam Chomsky
Agree or disagree with him, if there is one book you should read to understand him, it's
Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky.   Many of his lectures and his early
books are so packed with footnotes and diversions, that it's hard to grasp the larger point
he's trying to make.   However, when he's doing Q&A, he tends to be more concise.  
This book is a compilation of his interviews.  Here is the companion website that
gives footnotes and references.   Here is the Chomsky website - in particular, I like the
debates section, and in particular, the Foucault vs. Chomsky debate on justice and power.

Speaking of Chomsky, check out the William F. Buckley vs. Noam Chomsky debate
on Vietnam.  This is part 1 and here is part 2.  The complete interview is here.  

Also, someone pointed me to this article.  It is a man who believes that he has found a
tribe whose language defies Chomsky's universal grammar, and who
believes Chomsky's ideas of language have become somewhat dogmatic.

Howard Zinn
A People's History of the United States
Voices of a People's History

Peter Irons
A People's History of the Supreme Court - Peter Irons also did an interesting series of lectures on
the Supreme Court for the Teaching Company that are loosely based on the book.  
They trace the history of the formation and increasing importance of the Supreme
Court through the country's history with an emphasis on civil rights cases (as opposed to, say,
corporate rulings).  

John Steinbeck
Of Mice and Men

Robert K. Massie
His book, Nicholas and Alexandra, on the last years of the Romanovs is a classic.
Massie is a historian who originally became interested in the Romanovs as a
family dealing with a child with hemophelia, as his own son was stricken with
the disease.  His book portrays the Romanovs as victims of the disease and
of political and social positions that were forced upon them.  I've read this book a
couple of times.  It reads like a novel and is as sad as it is fascinating.  

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