Books by "David H. Levy"
8 books found
It was a lucky twist of fate when in the early1980s David Levy, a writer and amateur astronomer, joined up with the famous scientist Eugene Shoemaker and his wife, Carolyn, to search for comets from an observation post on Palomar Mountain in Southern California. Their collaboration would lead to the 1993 discovery of the most remarkable comet ever recorded, Shoemaker-Levy 9, with its several nuclei, five tails, and two sheets of debris spread out in its orbit plane. A year later, Levy would be by the Shoemakers' side again when their comet ended its four-billion-year-long journey through the solar system and collided with Jupiter in the most stunning astronomical display of the century. Not only did this collision revolutionize our understanding of the history of the solar system, but it also offered a spectacular confirmation of one scientist's life work. As a close friend and colleague of Shoemaker (who died in 1997 at the age of 69), Levy offers a uniquely insightful account of his life and the way it has shaped our thinking about the universe. Early in his training as a geologist, Shoemaker suspected that it wasn't volcanic activity but rather collisions with comets and asteroids that created most of the craters on the moon and most other bodies in the solar system. Convincing the scientific community of the plausibility of "impact theory," and revealing its power for penetrating mysteries such as the extinction of the dinosaurs and the timing of the Earth's eventual demise, became Shoemaker's mission. Through conversations with Shoemaker and his family, Levy reconstructs the journey that began with a young geologist's serious desire to go to the moon in the late1940s. Sent by the government to find a way to harvest plutonium, Shoemaker instead found evidence in desert craters for what became his impact theory. While he never became an astronaut, he did become the first geologist hired by NASA and subsequently set the research agenda for the first manned lunar landing. After a series of victories and setbacks for Shoemaker, the collision of Shoemaker-Levy 9 with Jupiter provided the most convincing proof to date of the role of impacts in our solar system. Levy's explanation of the scientific reasoning that guided Shoemaker in his career up to this dramatic point--as well as his personal portrait of a man who found white-water rafting to be an easy way to relax--sets these fascinating events in a human scale. This biography shows what Shoemaker's legacy will be for our understanding of the story of the Earth well into the twenty-first century.
Oxford Textbook of Headache Syndromes
by Michel Ferrari, Andrew Charles, David Dodick, Fumihiko Sakai, Joost Haan
2020 · Oxford University Press
Headache syndromes rank amongst the most common presenting symptoms in general practice and neurology, affecting up to 15% of the adult population. Part of the Oxford Textbooks in Clinical Neurology series, the Oxford Textbook of Headache Syndromes provides clinicians with a definitive resource for diagnosing and managing patients with primary and secondary forms of headaches, either as isolated complaints or as part of a more complex syndrome. Split into 7 key sections with 59 chapters, this comprehensive work discusses the scientific basis and practical management of headache syndromes in a logical format. Each chapter is written by international experts in neurology who share their research and extensive experience by providing a wealth of practical advice for use in clinical situations. In addition, all content is up-to-date and chapters incorporate discussions on the latest International Classification of Headache Disorders 3rd edition when relevant.
This best-selling title, considered for over a decade to be essential reading for every serious student and practitioner of computer design, has been updated throughout to address the most important trends facing computer designers today. In this edition, the authors bring their trademark method of quantitative analysis not only to high performance desktop machine design, but also to the design of embedded and server systems. They have illustrated their principles with designs from all three of these domains, including examples from consumer electronics, multimedia and web technologies, and high performance computing. The book retains its highly rated features: Fallacies and Pitfalls, which share the hard-won lessons of real designers; Historical Perspectives, which provide a deeper look at computer design history; Putting it all Together, which present a design example that illustrates the principles of the chapter; Worked Examples, which challenge the reader to apply the concepts, theories and methods in smaller scale problems; and Cross-Cutting Issues, which show how the ideas covered in one chapter interact with those presented in others. In addition, a new feature, Another View, presents brief design examples in one of the three domains other than the one chosen for Putting It All Together. The authors present a new organization of the material as well, reducing the overlap with their other text, Computer Organization and Design: A Hardware/Software Approach 2/e, and offering more in-depth treatment of advanced topics in multithreading, instruction level parallelism, VLIW architectures, memory hierarchies, storage devices and network technologies. Also new to this edition, is the adoption of the MIPS 64 as the instruction set architecture. In addition to several online appendixes, two new appendixes will be printed in the book: one contains a complete review of the basic concepts of pipelining, the other provides solutions a selection of the exercises. Both will be invaluable to the student or professional learning on her own or in the classroom. Hennessy and Patterson continue to focus on fundamental techniques for designing real machines and for maximizing their cost/performance. * Presents state-of-the-art design examples including: * IA-64 architecture and its first implementation, the Itanium * Pipeline designs for Pentium III and Pentium IV * The cluster that runs the Google search engine * EMC storage systems and their performance * Sony Playstation 2 * Infiniband, a new storage area and system area network * SunFire 6800 multiprocessor server and its processor the UltraSPARC III * Trimedia TM32 media processor and the Transmeta Crusoe processor * Examines quantitative performance analysis in the commercial server market and the embedded market, as well as the traditional desktop market. Updates all the examples and figures with the most recent benchmarks, such as SPEC 2000. * Expands coverage of instruction sets to include descriptions of digital signal processors, media processors, and multimedia extensions to desktop processors. * Analyzes capacity, cost, and performance of disks over two decades. Surveys the role of clusters in scientific computing and commercial computing. * Presents a survey, taxonomy, and the benchmarks of errors and failures in computer systems. * Presents detailed descriptions of the design of storage systems and of clusters. * Surveys memory hierarchies in modern microprocessors and the key parameters of modern disks. * Presents a glossary of networking terms.
Why do aircraft fly? How do their wings support them? In the early years of aviation, there was an intense dispute between British and German experts over the question of why and how an aircraft wing provides lift. The British, under the leadership of the great Cambridge mathematical physicist Lord Rayleigh, produced highly elaborate investigations of the nature of discontinuous flow, while the Germans, following Ludwig Prandtl in Göttingen, relied on the tradition called “technical mechanics” to explain the flow of air around a wing. Much of the basis of modern aerodynamics emerged from this remarkable episode, yet it has never been subject to a detailed historical and sociological analysis. In The Enigma of the Aerofoil, David Bloor probes a neglected aspect of this important period in the history of aviation. Bloor draws upon papers by the participants—their restricted technical reports, meeting minutes, and personal correspondence, much of which has never before been published—and reveals the impact that the divergent mathematical traditions of Cambridge and Göttingen had on this great debate. Bloor also addresses why the British, even after discovering the failings of their own theory, remained resistant to the German circulation theory for more than a decade. The result is essential reading for anyone studying the history, philosophy, or sociology of science or technology—and for all those intrigued by flight.
A fascinating and spectacular exploration of the cosmos that provides readers with a definitive view of the latest discoveries.
This new bedside manual guides you through all the practical aspects of managing patients following cardiothoracic surgery and critically ill cardiology patients. Primarily designed to use in cardiothoracic intensive care units and coronary care units, it covers the perioperative management for the full range of cardiothoracic surgical procedures, the management of complications, and related issues. Core topics in cardiothoracic critical care, such as hemodynamic instability, arrhythmias, bleeding, and mechanical cardiac support, are afforded broad coverage. Also included are sections on advanced ventilatory techniques and veno-venous ECMO for treating severe respiratory failure, as well as nutritional support, treating and preventing infection, renal failure, and care of the dying patient. Concisely written and featuring liberal use of illustrations as well as an integrated, tightly edited style, and a limited number of key references, this volume will become your reference of choice for the care of of cardiothoracic surgery patients and critically ill cardiology patients. Also included is a companion CD-ROM featuring over 700 still and 200 video clips of radiographs, CT scans, MRI scans, and echocardiograms, both transthoracic and transesophageal. Find information quickly with concisely written text. Get a more complete picture with extensive illustrations. Focus on just the information you need using a a limited number of key references. Navigate the complexities of critical care for a fulll range of cardiothoracic surgery patients with in-depth coverage of perioperative care, management of complications, and more. Enhance your knowledge through a companion CD-ROM featuring the latest in cardiothoracic imaging techniques.