As someone who has studied dynamical systems for years, I'm pleased to see so many redditors getting interested in them through the double pendulum system. If you're a student and want to learn more, take a course in dynamical systems. If you're not a student, consider reading this book, which is my favorite math book of all time, and I'm far from alone in that sentiment.
> RIP Sasha.
Amen.
> "Use them with care, and use them with respect as to the transformations they can achieve, and you have an extraordinary research tool. Go banging about with a psychedelic drug for a Saturday night turn-on, and you can get into a really bad place, psychologically. Know what you’re using, decide just why you’re using it, and you can have a rich experience. They’re not addictive, and they’re certainly not escapist, either, but they’re exceptionally valuable tools for understanding the human mind, and how it works."
—Alexander Shulgin, Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story
As for books at the same caliber as OP's, I'd like to recommend:
My favorite science-related leisure reading is Derek Lowe's blog In The Pipeline. He covers new developments in chemistry/biology, the drug discovery industry, and occasionally some other stuff. He writes it in a way would be interesting to anyone that like chemistry and biology regardless of their level of education. I always look forward to reading it over lunch.
​
If you are looking for a book, The Disappearing Spoon is a great set of true short stories about chemistry that is a really fun read.
Go buy this book from Amazon. It is AMAZING if you are looking for food pairings that scientifically taste great.
Disclaimer: I have no association or affiliation with the author other than buying his book. I learned about it from Kenji @seriouseats.
You can try "the case against sugar" its a pretty good book if you want to understand more about sugar and the impact on the brain and body.
https://www.amazon.com/Case-Against-Sugar-Gary-Taubes/dp/0307701646
Personally I still have sugar, I found that having regular candy on hand at least prevents me for reaching for the chocolate.
The best place to start as a beginning, is "Rulebook for Arguments" https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0872209547/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_image?ie=UTF8&psc=1
It's only 104 pages, and arms you with enough to refute any ~~womans~~ unsound arguments. I still refer to it occasionally, even though I have much large volumes on logic. This little book is great as a tutorial.
The P -> Q shit is actually really simple. Want a quick lesson?
The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements
I'm not a pro but I live with one who has been pushing me to stretch myself.
Buy cookbooks written by professional chefs. Study them, cook from them a lot, follow new recipes exactly at least once before you start messing with them.
A pro typically cares more about mastering a technique than following a recipe. For example, last week we had a whole chicken that I wanted to roast low and slow. The recipe I was working with said to spatchcock the chicken and roast it for 2.5 hours at 325F, but I started cooking late in the day and wanted to speed it up, so we cut it into 6 pieces - breasts, legs, thighs - and it was done roasting in about an hour. I knew it would work because I have enough experience roasting a cut-up chicken at different temperatures to be sure. Trying a lot of different recipes for roast chicken gives you a chance to study, develop your intuition as a cook, and deviate from a recipe with confidence. Fundamental techniques like roasting, braising and stewing, making the French mother sauces, stir frying and pan frying, etc, are infinitely adaptable once you've done it enough to have a template memorized.
The other main thing is getting confident with experimenting with flavor. I'm still working on this, and there's a lot of ways you can build your confidence. One is to pick up a couple of cookbooks that focus on exploring the technique of building flavor, like Ottolenghi's Flavor or The Flavor Matrix. You could take a deep dive into an ethnic cuisine to get familiar with flavors typical to that region. Or, you could pick a spice or condiment and challenge yourself to cook with it as much as possible for a couple of weeks to force yourself to get familiar with it. On the savory side, soups are a VERY forgiving vehicle for flavor experiments, and on the baking side, I'd say scones and ice creams have been the easiest for me to mess around with.
I really enjoyed The Alchemy of Air which talks about some of the origins of the field. I had to practice public speaking after getting some negative feedback on my presentation skills at work, and ended up co-opting a lot of the story for this TEDx talk
It will depend on your level and the area. The best beginner book IMO is Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos by Strogatz
Oooo... this image was on the front of my old error analysis book in college. I still have it in my office.
https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Error-Analysis-Uncertainties-Measurements/dp/093570275X
If text is the only information given to it, definitely.
However, you could frame it differently. There's a book called The Flavor Matrix where the author essentially looked at pairings of foods and the common 'pairs' that go beyond basic ingredients - each recipe was encoded w/ info about the chemical composition, 'flavinoids', and impressions of the output taste (what 'flavinoids' are is somewhat subjective but seems to represent at least a good starting point to compare flavor profiles). His analysis was to essentially compile this information, then look at overlaps of commonly paired items, and look for unexpected 'good' pairings (i.e. things that are not traditionally paired, like strawberry and mushroom or coffee and carrot).
What the author essentially did is 'human learning' rather than machine learning - he looked at the overlapping pairs based on the statistics but then analyzed them himself and did the final step himself (recipe creation i.e. measurements and cooking methods).
Another way to approach the above problem would be to use existing recipes as a training data set as the author did, then test it against a set of ingredients that are used a certain way, then letting it run autonomously, and finally picking out only the output recipes that don't previously exist in the database.
If you want to know about guano, nations fought wars over it.
sometimes you are surprised at how good a book can be. Real history that reads like a detective novel.
May I point you toward <em>The Flavor Matrix</em>
100%
It’s not possible to be fat without consuming large amounts of carbohydrates. It’s principally an issue of appetite regulation.
Obesity was basically non-existent in the 1800s and only started to increase in incidence when populations started to consume more sugar and simple, refined carbohydrates.
The Case Against Sugar is a very good read.
I used to worry about this when I was a grad student too. I'm now the lead writer in my scientific collaboration.
You can be comforted that most academic papers are very, very poorly written :)
A couple of things I've learned so far are:
If you want just a collection of "tips" for academic writing in general, I might recommend Style by Joseph Williams. His work applies probably more to essays than scientific papers, but I found his tips for writing very helpful when making my dense papers actually readable (e.g. put all the jargon at the end of the sentence, not the start, make the actor the subject of the sentence etc.). Be advised that most scientific papers are pretty darn unreadable and they certainly don't follow ANY of William's tips, but I include them in mine for that poor grad student trying to introduce themselves to my field.
This book explains a lot of it, including 2C-B in particular. The author was the first person to synthesize and test 2C-B.
https://www.amazon.com/Pihkal-Chemical-Story-Alexander-Shulgin/dp/0963009605
The Alchemy of Air is about the Haber-Bosch process for nitrogen fixation, without which current world population levels would be impossible but at the same time is used for making explosives, making WWI as terrible as it was. It does a great job highlighting the dual-use nature of science but also of humanizing the engineers/scientists behind it all and telling their story.
Organic Chemistry as a Second Language: here
This book helped me a lot in undergrad. I TAed and tutored organic for many years and I always recommended this book as a way of understanding rather than memorizing. They will develop some good chemical intuition with this imo.
The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean
I had the worst chemistry teacher in high school, and have found it less than interesting ever since; this book changed that.
Notes, nothing. You can even write a book about it. Or two. Dr. Shulgin was a respected academic and research chemist.
Funny that the only replies to this are coming years after your post, but I also found this by googling “lime and cinnamon”.
I work in a bar and whenever I have to differentiate between lime and lemon juice I look for a very distinct cinnamon note in the smell. I haven’t had a chance to look up this particular relation yet, but I have this book that chemically breaks down the composition of certain ingredients to scientifically analyze how smells/flavors mix together. If you’re into the science of these things, you might find it interesting. https://www.amazon.com/Flavor-Matrix-Science-Ingredients-Extraordinary/dp/0544809963
You continue to believe that disagreeing with a person's actions, means you hate the person.
There is nothing I can do to convince you of this fallacy. Therefore, I suggest you take part in a Philosophy course, or read some books on logic & rhetoric.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0872209547/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_image?ie=UTF8&psc=1 is a good one that got me started.
You may choose some more pedestrian reading, like The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean https://www.amazon.com/Disappearing-Spoon-Madness-Periodic-Elements/dp/0316051632 .
I would honestly start with some online lectures for a go-at-your-own-pace.
You can also look at lower-than-college intro understanding, and see if you can find a standard high-school course (NY, for example, has state regents exams that Chem students have to pass) that may be more your speed.
A failed industry. The Haber-Bosch process allowed nitrogen to be fixed out of the air rather than dug up as nitrates from Bolivia/Chile.
https://www.amazon.com/Alchemy-Air-Jewish-Scientific-Discovery/dp/0307351793
Dynamical systems theory is a subset of the study of differential equations.
If you want to understand dynamics, you need to analyze the differential equations involved. My suggestion is to look into bifurcation theory and ODE methods since they can be extended to the study of PDEs. Dynamical systems isn't so much about solving the specific partial differential equations as it is about using them to understand the behavior of said system.
If you want an actual primer to the subject, the Strogatz book Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos. Link is a very good way to begin understanding it.
But there isn't a good way to get a decent understanding of dynamical systems without dealing with differential equations because the study of dynamics is the study of differential equations.