Bookmark | Chris Aldrich

🔖 Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi

Bookmarked Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi (Nation Books)

Some Americans cling desperately to the myth that we are living in a post-racial society, that the election of the first Black president spelled the doom of racism. In fact, racist thought is alive and well in America--more sophisticated and more insidious than ever. And as award-winning historian Ibram X. Kendi argues in Stamped from the Beginning, if we have any hope of grappling with this stark reality, we must first understand how racist ideas were developed, disseminated, and enshrined in American society.

In this deeply researched and fast-moving narrative, Kendi chronicles the entire story of anti-Black racist ideas and their staggering power over the course of American history. Stamped from the Beginning uses the life stories of five major American intellectuals to offer a window into the contentious debates between assimilationists and segregationists and between racists and antiracists. From Puritan minister Cotton Mather to Thomas Jefferson, from fiery abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison to brilliant scholar W.E.B. Du Bois to legendary anti-prison activist Angela Davis, Kendi shows how and why some of our leading proslavery and pro-civil rights thinkers have challenged or helped cement racist ideas in America.

Contrary to popular conceptions, racist ideas did not arise from ignorance or hatred. Instead, they were devised and honed by some of the most brilliant minds of each era. These intellectuals used their brilliance to justify and rationalize deeply entrenched discriminatory policies and the nation's racial disparities in everything from wealth to health. And while racist ideas are easily produced and easily consumed, they can also be discredited. In shedding much-needed light on the murky history of racist ideas, Stamped from the Beginning offers us the tools we need to expose them--and in the process, gives us reason to hope.

hat tip to the podcasts Face the Racist Nation and Seeing White

🔖 Theory Of Self Reproducing Automata by John Von Neumann, Arthur W. Burks (Editor) | 9780252727337

Bookmarked Theory Of Self Reproducing Automata by John von Neumann (University of Illinois Press)

Waiting for the price of some of these to drop.

Digital copy available on Archive.org.

🔖 ADN Finder

Bookmarked ADN Finder (adnfinder.herokuapp.com)

Looking for someone? Use the search above to find friends on Twitter, Micro.blog, Mastodon, and App.net. Want others to find you? Use the form below to add yourself.

If only there were a way to also add one’s canonical website…

🔖 On random graphs by Paul Erdős and Alfréd Rényi (1959)

Bookmarked On Random Graphs. I by Paul Erdős and Alfréd Rényi (Publicationes Mathematicae. 6: 290–297.)

Original source of Erdős–Rényi model.

In the mathematical field of graph theory, the Erdős–Rényi model is either of two closely related models for generating random graphs. They are named after mathematicians Paul Erdős and Alfréd Rényi, who first introduced one of the models in 1959,[1][2] while Edgar Gilbert introduced the other model contemporaneously and independently of Erdős and Rényi.[3] In the model of Erdős and Rényi, all graphs on a fixed vertex set with a fixed number of edges are equally likely; in the model introduced by Gilbert, each edge has a fixed probability of being present or absent, independently of the other edges. These models can be used in the probabilistic method to prove the existence of graphs satisfying various properties, or to provide a rigorous definition of what it means for a property to hold for almost all graphs.

hat tip: Linked: The New Science Of Networks by Albert-László Barabási

🔖 Collective Dynamics of Small-World Networks by Duncan J. Watts & Steven H. Strogatz

Bookmarked Collective dynamics of ‘small-world’ networks by Duncan J. Watts & Steven H. Strogatz (Nature | VOL 393)

Networks of coupled dynamical systems have been used to model biological oscillators1–4, Josephson junction arrays5,6, excitable media7, neural networks8–10, spatial games11, genetic control networks12 and many other self-organizing systems. Ordinarily, the connection topology is assumed to be either completely regular or completely random. But many biological, technological and social networks lie somewhere between these two extremes. Here we explore simple models of networks that can be tuned through this middle ground: regular networks ‘rewired’ to introduce increasing amounts of disorder. We find that these systems can be highly clustered, like regular lattices, yet have small characteristic path lengths, like random graphs. We call them ‘small-world’ networks, by analogy with the small-world phenomenon13,14 (popularly known as six degrees of separation15). The neural network of the worm Caenorhabditis elegans, the power grid of the western United States, and the collaboration graph of film actors are shown to be small-world networks. Models of dynamical systems with small-world coupling display enhanced signal-propagation speed, computational power, and synchronizability. In particular, infectious diseases spread more easily in small-world networks than in regular lattices.

hat tip: Linked: The New Science Of Networks by Albert-László Barabási