Sequitur Books Blog

Strangest Biotech Of All - United Therapeutics of Rockville - Annual Report 2010

Critten 10/03/2017 0

Unusual Finds. Strangest Biotech Of All - United Therapeutics of Rockville - Annual Report 2010 I recently acquired the 2010 annual report of United Therapeutics, a Rockville/Silver Spring bio-tech firm. While it may seem dreadfully dull to read the annual report of business from 7 years ago, United Therapeutics is not your average firm. United Therapeutics’s story is unique in bio-tech firms and reflects many of eccentricities the founder, Martine Rothblatt and the "Unitherian" culture. United Therapeutics’s report is illustrated in comic strip form and features the exploits of Dr. Ma...

Brain Pickings – An inventory of the meaningful life

Critten 26/02/2017 0

Brain Pickings – An inventory of the meaningful life. Brain Pickings is the product of Maria Popova’s beautiful mind. The Blog deals with culture, books, literature and a quest for human meaning. I happened on it while researching a Rackham illustrated Alice in Wonderland book we have for sale. See Popova’s: How Arthur Rackham’s 1907 Drawings for Alice in Wonderland Revolutionized the Carroll Classic, the Technology of Book Art, and the Economics of Illustration To me, Popova’s writings echoed many of intellectual voices of the post-war 20th century. What makes Brain Pickings so fun is the...

Integrative Action of the Nervous System by Charles Sherrington

Critten 24/01/2017 0

In 1904 Dr. Charles Sherrington gave a series of ten lectures at Yale on the nervous system. These lectures were compiled in 1906 in his book, The Integrative Action of the Nervous System. "This work stands as the true foundation of modern neurophysiology; it is considered by Fulton to rank in importance with Harvey's De Motu Cordis, while Walshe asserts that it holds a position in physiology similar to Newton's Principia in physics." (Garrison-McHenry, History of Neurology, p. 229) Before publishing The Integrative Action of the Nervous System, Sherrington had spent 20 years engaged in c...

Physical Nature of a Used Bookstore

sequiturbooksadmin 04/12/2016 0

Often when I survey my books I am reminded of a quote from the wonderful Terry Pratchett: “The truth is that even big collections of ordinary books distort space, as can readily be proved by anyone who has been around a really old-fashioned secondhand bookshop, one of those that look as though they were designed by M. Escher on a bad day and has more staircases than storeys and those rows of shelves which end in little doors that are too small for a full-sized human to enter. The relevant equation is: Knowledge = power = energy = matter = mass; a good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole ...

Sarat Das and the Re-Discovery of Tibet

sequiturbooksadmin 05/07/2016 0

The Story of Sarat Das and re-discovery of Tibet. Sarat Chandra Das (1849-1917) was a Bengali scholar of Tibet. Das has been described as "a traveler, explorer...linguist, a lexicographer, an ethnographer and an eminent Tibetologist." (Waller, p. 193) Das was also a British spy. Born in Chittagong, Das trained as an engineer in Calcutta. He became headmaster of the Bhutia Boarding School in Darjeeling. Bhutia was a school for Sikkimese and Tibetan boys, many of who would be trained to fill a special place in the British colonial regime, the role of a Pundit. Das became a "pundit" (and an...

Franklin's Experiments in Elecricity

sequiturbooksadmin 12/06/2016 0

Benjamin Franklin Drawing Electricity from the Sky - Benjamin West In 1751 the Royal Society published Benjamin Franklin's book, "Experiments and Observations on Electricity: Made in Philadelphia in America." Franklin described his scientific findings in a series of letters to Peter Collinson, a Quaker merchant and Society fellow in London who provided Franklin with a Leyden or Leiden jar. A Leiden jar is a primitive capacitor (also known as a condenser) that stores static electricity like a battery. In a 1752 experiment Franklin flew a specially designed kite with his son William in a th...