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THING EXPLAINER: COMPLICATED STUFF IN SIMPLE WORDS
From the No. 1 bestselling author of What If? – the man who created xkcd and explained the laws of science with cartoons – comes a series of brilliantly simple diagrams (‘blueprints’ if you want to be complicated about it) that show how important things work: from the nuclear bomb to the biro. It’s good to know what the parts of a thing are called, but it’s much more interesting to know what they do. Richard Feynman once said that if you can’t explain something to a first-year student, you don’t really get it. In Thing Explainer, Randall Munroe takes a quantum leap past this: he explains things using only drawings and a vocabulary of just our 1,000 (or the ten hundred) most common words.Many of the things we use every day – like our food-heating radio boxes (‘microwaves’), our very tall roads (‘bridges’), and our computer rooms (‘datacentres’) – are strange to us. So are the other worlds around our sun (the solar system), the big flat rocks we live on (tectonic plates), and even the stuff inside us (cells). Where do these things come from? How do they work? What do they look like if you open them up? And what would happen if we heated them up, cooled them down, pointed them in a different direction, or pressed this button?In Thing Explainer, Munroe gives us the answers to these questions and many, many more. Funny, interesting, and always understandable, this book is for anyone — age 5 to 105 — who has ever wondered how things work, and why.
A THOUSAND BRAINS
For all we hear of neuroscience’s great advances, the field has generated more questions than answers. We know that the brain combines sensory input from all over your body into a single perception, but not how. We think brains “compute” in some sense, but we can’t say what those computations are. We believe that the brain is organized as a hierarchy, with different pieces all working collaboratively to make a single model of the world. But we can explain neither how those pieces are differentiated, nor how they collaborate. Neuroscientist and computer engineer Jeff Hawkins argues that it’s so hard to answer questions about the brain because our basic picture of how the brain works is wrong. In A Thousand Brains, Hawkins takes a radically new approach to the brain, with stunning implications. Hawkins’ proposal, called the Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence, is that your brain is organized into thousands upon thousands of individually computing units, called cortical columns. These columns all process information from the outside world in the same way, and each builds a complete model of the world. But because every column has different connections to the rest of the body, each has a unique frame of reference. Your brain sorts out all those models by conducting a vote. The fundamental job of the brain, therefore, is not to build a single thought, but to manage the thousands of individual thoughts it has every moment.With this powerful new framework, Hawkins is able to reassess some of neuroscience’s most stubborn problems, like why pain needs to be painful to be useful, how we can understand that our perspective of a thing changes as we move around it, and why we might be conscious but individual pieces of our body aren’t. And once you understand how the brain works, it is a lot easier to make one yourself. Hawkins is, above all, an engineer, and A Thousand Brains outlines how a new understanding of intelligence could lead to truly intelligent AI. Hawkins explores how we might create machines that can learn on their own, why we need not fear superintelligent systems, and how human and machine intelligence may someday merge. Combining cutting-edge theoretical neuroscience with an ambitious program for tomorrow’s digital minds, A Thousand Brains heralds a revolution in the study of intelligence. It is a big-think book, in every sense of the word.
A bestselling author, neuroscientist, and computer engineer unveils a theory of intelligence that will revolutionize our understanding of the brain and the future of AI
HOW TO
Randall Munroe is . . . ‘Nerd royalty’ Ben Goldacre’Totally brilliant’ Tim Harford’Laugh-out-loud funny’ Bill Gates’Wonderful’ Neil GaimanAN INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERThe world’s most entertaining and useless self-help guide, from the brilliant mind behind the wildly popular webcomic xkcd and the million-selling What If? and Thing Explainer For any task you might want to do, there’s a right way, a wrong way, and a way so monumentally bad that no one would ever try it. How To is a guide to the third kind of approach. It’s full of highly impractical advice for everything from landing a plane to digging a hole. ‘How strange science can fix everyday problems’ New Scientist’A brilliant book: clamber in for a wild ride’ Nature
‘RIDICULOUS, DELIGHTFUL AND, DAMN IT, EDUCATIONAL’ Sunday Times , Books of the Year.
Welcome to t he world’s most entertaining and useless self-help guide, from the brilliant mind behind the wildly popular webcomic xkcd and the million-selling What If? and Thing Explainer
ASIN : B0BMF2CZKP
