Electric Josh

Security expert Bruce Schneier: How long can the country stay scared?

A terrorist alert that instills a vague feeling of dread or panic, without giving people anything to do in response, is ineffective. Even worse, it echoes the very tactics of the terrorists. There are two basic ways to terrorize people. The first is to do something spectacularly horrible, like flying airplanes into skyscrapers and killing thousands of people. The second is to keep people living in fear. Decades ago, that was one of the IRA's major aims. Inadvertently, the DHS is achieving the same thing.

So H. A. Lorentz wrote his lay explanation of Einstein's then-new relativity in 1920, which means that this excellent book is in the public domain. Here it is.

Any one reading [Einstein's book] will, in my opinion, come to the conclusion that the basic ideas of the theory are really clear and simple; it is only to be regretted that it was impossible to avoid clothing them in pretty involved mathematical terms...

The prose is occasionally not a lot less confusing than heavy duty math, and the absence of pictures kind of hurts, but it's mostly a pretty easy read.
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