From my Files: Eight Articles

I was going through my Down­loads folder the other day and doing some sort­ing and throw­ing out of old tor­rents and what not, and noticed a sev­eral arti­cles that I had read in the past year. Just PDFs that I had down­loaded and read. Some of them were sources I used for classes at UNCA, some were just points along my per­sonal learn­ing jour­ney. I think they were pretty inter­est­ing and eclec­tic, and had good mem­o­ries of read­ing them. So I’m shar­ing them, with a brief descrip­tion. I’ve put them in alpha­bet­i­cal order. PDFs will open in a new window.

• Ambi­ent Tem­per­a­ture and Vio­lent Crime: Tests of the Lin­ear and Curvi­lin­ear Hypothe­ses
  • Do changes in tem­per­a­ture cor­re­late to crime rates? If so, what is that rela­tion­ship? Jour­nal of Per­son­al­ity and Social Psy­chol­ogy. Pub­lished 1984, Vol. 46, No. 1, 91–97. 6 pages. 775 kb.
• Apollo 11 Tech­ni­cal Crew Debrief­ing
  • Aldrin, Collins and Arm­strong dis­cuss the entire Apollo 11 mis­sion, from suit­ing up to moon land­ing, return­ing to Earth and com­ments on the nuts and bolts of how every­thing worked from the view­point of the men who had to make it work. National Aero­nau­tics and Space Agency, July 31^st 1969. 156 pages. 1.2 mb.
• Hand­gun Wound­ing and Effec­tive­ness
  • There is a lot of mis­in­for­ma­tion about what makes a gun deadly, and what exactly the effects of a bul­letin on the human body are. Here is a fright­en­ingly well-researched study by the FBI on just that. Bonus: “FOR LAW ENFORCEMENT DISSEMINATION ONLY.” US Depart­ment of Jus­tice, Fed­eral Bureau of Inves­ti­ga­tion. Pub­lished July 14, 1989. 16 pages. 203 kb.
• Hydrofrack­ing: The Need for Respon­si­ble Gas Drilling Reg­u­la­tion and the Role of Nat­ural Gas
  • Looks at the prob­lems of hydrofrack­ing, and assesses what could be done to make it safe way to access energy. More arti­cles from the pub­lisher, an inde­pen­dent energy think­tank, are avail­able here. I don’t smell petro-dollars here, but as always, reader dis­cre­tion is advised. Energy Vision. 2011. 14 pages. 720 kb.
•  McMahon-Hussein Cor­re­spon­dence: Com­ments and a Reply
  • Why does the state of Israel exist? What estab­lished the bor­ders? Who was involved in those deci­sions and how did that make them? McMahon-Hussein is a big piece of that story. Arnold Toyn­bee addresses these ques­tions from an aca­d­e­mic, not a polit­i­cal view­point.  Jour­nal of Con­tem­po­rary His­tory, Vol. 5, No. 4 (1970), pp. 185–201. 18 pages. 518 kb.
• Road to Riches
  • Where does wealth come from? Over thou­sands of years, the stan­dard of liv­ing of humans has crawled slowly for­ward, until about 250 years ago in West­ern Europe. Why? Given Mitt Romney’s recent com­ments about the eco­nomic advan­tages of Israeli cul­ture. The Econ­o­mist, Dec 23^rd 1999. 8 pages. 228 kb.
• Power Notes: Slide Pre­sen­ta­tions Recon­sid­ered
  • Most Pow­er­Point pre­sen­ta­tion are awful. But it can be used with pur­pose and serve to enlighten rather than bore and dis­tract your audi­ence. IIID Inter­na­tional Insti­tute for Infor­ma­tion Design Swin­burne Uni­ver­sity of Tech­nol­ogy. 2011. 67 pages. 7.2 mb.
• A Steampunk’s Guide to the Apoc­a­lypse
  • A fun and styl­ish look at how the tech­nol­ogy of the past could help you sur­vive the dis­as­ter of the future. Steam­punk Mag­a­zine. Octo­ber 2007. 31 pages. 7.9 mb.