Joshua Yaffa, The Information Sage, The Washington Monthly, 2011

Rating: 4/5 Link

• Meet Edward Tufte, the graphics guru to the power elite who is revolutionizing how we see data.

Richard W. Hamming, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics, The American Mathematical Monthly, 1980

Rating: 4/5 Link

• Hamming reflects on and extends Wigner's Unreasonable Effectiveness.

Eugene Wigner, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences, Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics, 1960

Rating: 4/5 Link

• Wigner observed that the mathematical structure of a physics theory often points the way to further advances in that theory and even to empirical predictions, and argued that this is not just a coincidence and therefore must reflect some larger and deeper truth about both mathematics and physics.

Tony Rothman, The Man Behind the Curtain, American Scientist, 2011

Rating: 4/5 Link

• Physics is not always the seamless subject that it pretends to be.

Tom Simonite, Reprogrammable Chips Could Enable Instant Gadget Upgrades, Technology Review, 2011

Rating: 4/5 Link

• Changing chip design on demand could allow TVs and other devices to upgrade their own hardware.

Martin Rees, The science of eternity, Prospect Magazine, 2002

Rating: 4/5 Link

• If humans do not destroy themselves they may spread beyond the earth into a universe that could last almost forever. Life would have tunnelled through its moment of maximum jeopardy.

Paul Allen, Microsoft’s Odd Couple, Vanity Fair, 2011

Rating: 4/5 Link 

• It’s 1975 and two college dropouts are racing to create software for a new line of “hobbyist” computers. The result? A company called “Micro-Soft”—now the fifth-most-valuable corporation on earth. In an adaptation from his memoir, the author tells the story of his partnership with high-school classmate Bill Gates, until its dramatic ending in 1983.

Jonah Lehrer, The Truth Wears Off, The New Yorker, 2010

Rating: 4/5 Link

• Is there something wrong with the scientific method?

Graham Bowley, The New Speed of Money, Reshaping Markets, The New York Times, 2010

Rating: 4/5 Link1 Link2 Link3

• The engine of Wall Street has shifted from the stock exchange floor to data centers in New Jersey, where computer-driven trading now accounts for 56 percent of all trading activity. While this Tron landscape is dominated by the titans of Wall Street, it affects nearly everyone who owns shares of stock or mutual funds, or who has a stake in a pension fund or works for a public company. For better or for worse, part of your wealth, your livelihood, is throbbing through these wires.

Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, Deadly Medicine, Vanity Fair, 2010

Rating: 4/5 Link 

• The globalization of the pharmaceutical industry.

Tony Judt, The Glory of the Rails, The New York Review of Books, 2010

Rating: 4/5 Link

• More than any other technical design or social institution, the railway stands for modernity.

John Cheese, 12 Things You'll Wish You'd Never Seen Under a Microscope, cracked.com, 2010

Rating: 4/5 Link

• If you shrink yourself down to microscopic size, you're suddenly living in a completely alien world.
  

Michael J. Hanson and Dylan J. McNamee, Efficient Reading of Papers in Science and Technology, 2000

Rating: 4/5 Link

• This brochure provides an approach to help you read scientific papers efficiently and effectively.
  

C. J. Chivers, How the AK-47 Rewrote the Rules of Modern Warfare, Wired, 2010

Rating: 4/5 Link

• From its unheralded beginning, the Soviet Union’s modest little gun, dubbed the Avtomat Kalashnikova-47, would become one of the most recognizable artifacts of the 20th century.