San Antonio College Library

Emergence is what happens when an interconnected system of relatively simple elements self-organizes to form more intelligent, more adaptive higher-level behavior. It's a bottom-up model rather than being engineered by a general or a master planner, emergence begins at the ground level. Systems that at first glance seem vastly different--ant colonies, human brains, cities, immune systems--all turn out to follow the rules of emergence. In each of these...

"The Old Boys is the first book to trace the evolution of America's fledgling intelligence apparatus from its origins in the aftermath of World War I to its climactic debacle at the Bay of Pigs. This is the never-before told story of how an elite East Coast Ivy League Wall Street clique, patriotic but arrogant, and often amateurish, dominated the OSS and later the CIA. Taking a hitherto unexplored perspective on the years between the wars, Burton...

"From the New York Times bestselling author of Rise of the Rocket Girls comes the never-before-told story of a small cadre of influential female spies in the precarious early days of the CIA--women who helped create the template for cutting-edge espionage (and blazed new paths for equality in the workplace) in the treacherous post-WWII era."-- In the wake of World War II, four agents were critical in helping build a new organization that we now know...

"Unveiling the hidden secrets of a number of the most intelligent and prolific real-life mad scientists, Pickover delights us with unexpected stories of their obsessive personalities and strange phobias. These common threads lead us to wonder if creativity and genius are inextricably linked to madness." Includes profiles of: nikola Tesla, Oliver Heaviside, Samuel Johnson, Richard Kirwan, Jeremy Bentham, Henry Cavendish, Francis Galton, Geoffrey Nathaniel...

Virginia Hall-- rejected from the foreign service because of her gender and her prosthetic leg-- became the first woman to deploy to occupied France, before the United States had even entered the war. At a time when sending female secret agents into enemy territory was still strictly forbidden, Hall coordinated a network of spies to blow up bridges, report on German troop movements, arrange equipment drops for Resistance agents, and recruit and train...

"From a prize-winning historian, the definitive biography of Adolph Hitler. Hitler offers a deeply learned and radically revisionist biography, arguing that the dictator's main strategic enemy, from the start of his political career in the 1920s, was not communism or the Soviet Union, but capitalism and the United States. Whereas most historians have argued that Hitler underestimated the American threat, Simms shows that Hitler embarked on a preemptive...