A highly accessible overview of Western philosophy, from the Greeks to present day, can be found in Frederick Copleston's 9-volume "A History of Philosophy" series.
A sharp person with a high school education, and a willingness to lookup terms or references s/he doesn't understand (with the help of Google, Wikipedia, etc.), would be able to readily digest these books, though even postdocs would find much in them that is challenging and intriguing.
This fact surprises many, but Hubble was actually quite critical of using red-shift as an indicator of cosmological distance. In 1953 (the year before his death) he even convinced Robert Millikan, 1923 recipient of the Nobel Prize for Physics and director of physics at the California Insitute of Technology, that it was probably wrong to interpret red-shift as an expanison of the universe.
Hubble ended his book _Observational Approach to Cosmology_ with the statement: "... if the recession factor is dropped, if red-shifts are not primarily velocity-shifts, the picture is simple and plausible. There is no evidence of expansion and no restriction of time-scale, no trace of spatial curvature, and no limitation of spatial dimensions. Moreover, there is no problem of inter-nebular material. The observable region is thoroughly homogeneous; it is too small a sample to indicate the nature of the universe at large. The univers might even be an expanding model, provided the rate of expansion, which pure theory does not specify, is inappreciable. For that matter, the universe might even be contracting."
Being rich is an enticing prospect. When I consider it, I often imagine it as "the freedom to do/buy/go what/where you want, without delay".
But then the following warning comes to mind and I'm reminded to carefully scope the bounds and purposes of my worldly ambitions:
"Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you that hunger now, for you shall be satisfied ... But woe to you that are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you that are full now, for you shall hunger." (cf. Luke 6:20,21,24,25)
I'm saying a motivated atheist communist has (in his own mind at least) no God before whom he'll stand in judgment for his blunders, failures, excesses, crimes and stupidity.
Communism is one of atheism's terrible and natural fruits, and many of the communist revolutionaries held as a first-rank goal the suppression, if not elimination of, religions and religious institutions.
And on a related note: the most violent and death-dealing ideology in the history of the human race is atheistic communism. For the advancement of its "revolution/s" the cost was untold tens of millions of lives throughout the 20th Century, more than all the wars of religion ever fought, all piled together, with even the most liberal estimates.
Just saying ... man seems to do rather poorly on his own when he departs from the love of God, and the love of his neighbor in view of God's love.
“Love toward men, but love without belief in God, very naturally leads to the greatest coercion over men, and turns their lives completely into hell on earth.”
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
JCoglan's faye (bayeux for node.js) has some built-in "intervals", i.e. timers, which regulate connection reuse and how messages end up bundled together in bulk transmissions -- this can cause an apparent increase in latency, I've run into this problem myself.
By changing the interval and reconnection settings one can reduce the latency, but there are some side-effects, i.e. the faye-client connection seems to become less stable.
I've poked around in the faye codebase myself -- it's non-trivial to try and pull it apart. I've not yet had success in figuring out what could be changed to enhance the library in its service as a near-real-time messaging transport for high bandwidth, very high message count use cases.
The author seems to be a very busy man, but if enough intrest was shown, JCoglan might be willing to work on optimizing it (and documenting it) further.
In a local network setting, in various tests, I've had at times 40Mbps, with message rates in excess of 10,000 requests per second flowing through a single faye process. The latencies were on the order of 10-100 ms And this was sustained over a period of hours.
Coglan has put together code for ruby and eventmachine too, if you prefer those tools over javascript and node.js.
Use faye in combination with redis-node-client and you've got an efficient means to create a high-volume, low latency work queue.
40+ mbps of http traffic and upwards of 20,000 redis requests per second can be serviced by a couple of node processes, using only a few hundred MBs of RAM and a plain-jane Linux VM with access to multiple cores. Tests are ongoing....
Vol 1, as sold on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/History-Philosophy-Vol-Pre-Socratics-P...
A sharp person with a high school education, and a willingness to lookup terms or references s/he doesn't understand (with the help of Google, Wikipedia, etc.), would be able to readily digest these books, though even postdocs would find much in them that is challenging and intriguing.