Hypotheticals

Science is a useful metaphor for understanding our lives, but it is often shown to be as fallible as the flawed humans who lean on it. This lively, thoughtful, and refreshingly speculative debut collection turns scientific method around to question science's faith in certainty, exploring the alternate meaning of "hypothetical" as something that is merely "supposed to be true." Under the poet's wide-angled, open-hearted gaze, scientific investigation begins to mirror the dark art of poetry, reinforcing what we believe about ourselves one minute, then abruptly throwing everything into question. Leigh Kotsilidis lives in Montreal, Quebec, where she works as a freelance graphic designer while completing her MFA in studio arts.

Lisa Yee gives us her most fascinating flawed genius since Millicent Min. Higgs Boson Bing has seven days left before his perfect high school career is completed. Then it's on to Harvard to fulfill the fantasy portrait of success that he and his parents have cultivated for the past four years. Four years of academic achievement. Four years of debate championships. Two years of dating the most popular girl in school. It was, literally, everything his parents could have wanted. Everything they wanted for Higgs's older brother Jeffrey, in fact. But something's not right. And when Higgs's girlfriend presents him with a seemingly innocent hypothetical question about whether or not he'd give her a kidney . . . the exposed fault lines reach straight down to the foundations of his life. . . .

From the creator of the wildly popular webcomic xkcd, hilarious and informative answers to important questions you probably never thought to ask Millions of people visit xkcd.com each week to read Randall Munroe's iconic webcomic. His stick-figure drawings about science, technology, language, and love have an enormous, dedicated following, as do his deeply researched answers to his fans' strangest questions. The queries he receives range from merely odd to downright diabolical: - What if I took a swim in a spent-nuclear-fuel pool? - Could you build a jetpack using downward-firing machine guns? - What if a Richter 15 earthquake hit New York City? - Are fire tornadoes possible? His responses are masterpieces of clarity and wit, gleefully and accurately explaining everything from the relativistic effects of a baseball pitched at near the speed of light to the many horrible ways you could die while building a periodic table out of all the actual elements. The book features new and never-before-answered questions, along with the most popular answers from the xkcd website. What If? is an informative feast for xkcd fans and anyone who loves to ponder the hypothetical.

"Modeling Legal Argument "provides a comprehensive treatment of case-based reasoning and a detailed description of a computer program called Hypo, that models the way attorneys argue with cases, real and hypothetical. The program offers significant advantages over "keyword" case retrieval systems in the legal field and demonstrates how to design expert systems that assist the user by presenting reasonable alternative answers on all sides of an issue and by citing case examples to explain their advice.Hypo analyzes problem situations dealing with trade secrets disputes, retrieves relevant legal cases from its database and fashions them into reasonable legal arguments about who should win. The arguments demonstrate the program's ability to reason symbolically with past cases, to draw factual analogies between cases, to cite them in arguments, to distinguish them, and to pose counter-examples and hypotheticals based on past cases."Modeling Legal Argument "discusses the law as a paradigm of case-based argument, introduces Hypo and its adversarial reasoning process, provides an overview of the Hypo program, and gives extended examples of the model's reasoning capabilities. It describes the case knowledge base, a dimensional index, basic mechanisms of case-based reasoning, and offers a theory of case-based argument in Hypo. Ashley evaluates Hypo's performance and takes up adversarial case-based reasoning beyond the law and extensions of the Hypo model.Kevin D. Ashley is a Research Scientist at the Learning Research an Development Center and Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Pittsburgh. "Modeling Legal Argument is "included in the Artificial Intelligence and Legal Reasoning series, edited by L. Thorne McCarty and Edwina L. Rissland.

Hypothetical thought involves the imagination of possibilities and the exploration of their consequences by a process of mental simulation. In this Classic Edition, Jonathan St B T Evans’ presents his pioneering Hypothetical Thinking Theory; an integrated theoretical account of a wide range of psychological studies on hypothesis testing, reasoning, judgement and decision making. Hypothetical Thinking Theory is built on three key principles and implemented in a version of Evans' well-known heuristic–analytic theory of reasoning. The central claim of this book is that this theory can provide an integrated account of apparently diverse phenomena including confirmation bias in hypothesis testing, acceptance of fallacies in deductive reasoning, belief biases in reasoning and judgement, biases of statistical judgement and numerous characteristic findings in the study of decision making. Featuring a reflective and insightful new introduction to the book, this classic edition discusses contemporary theory on cognitive biases, human rationality and dual-process theories of higher cognition. It will be of great interest to researchers, post graduates as well as advanced undergraduate students.

Fiction. THE HYPOTHETICAL MAN is a darkly humorous collection of stories featuring an assortment of anonymous characters--A, B, and S--all with problems. They work undercover at an amusement park in Illinois or else they work at a secret government facility that would prefer not to be named. They attend a freewheeling sales meeting with death masks on the wall. Some raise pigs, others race goats. One lives in a suburban home where he watches his wife with another man. They are, together, misled, misunderstood, and mistaken often, but their pursuit of answers never ends. "The collaboration of Maliszewski and Weil yields an intellectually frothy collection... The authors display an almost palpable relish in their extended literary jousts. Readers with a similar sensibility will blissfully wallow in these elaborate yarns."--Publishers Weekly "Reading THE HYPOTHETICAL MAN is like eavesdropping on the fevered colloquy of two think-tank eminences expelled for conundrumizing too wisely for their own good about everything crucial and uncomfortable about lives lived with upheaving acuity. Paul Maliszewski and Ryan Weil have written an entrancement of a book, and you'll hang on their every word."--Gary Lutz "These stories? narratives? accusations? recriminations? are the smartest and most fascinating literary inventions you'll read this decade. Imagine an angry, frightened Luis Borges in an argument with himself, or Abbott and Costello if they were very, very well-read. The dueling, hilarious, self-eviscerating, meticulously crafted narratives of A and B make me think of My Dinner with Andre for the era of alternative facts, or Plato and his dialectic transported giddily into contemporary America. Every writer should read these--and anyone else who is interested in the beautiful, confusing disarray of the twenty-first century Western mind."--Clancy Martin "THE HYPOTHETICAL MAN is just the sort of fictional testament our meaning-deficient age demands--hilarious, profound, and relentlessly self-questioning. It is a tale told by two beguiling idiots; the kind of story you'd get if Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were mid-level CIA appointees, Samuel Beckett were a corporate consultant, and modern American life were re-envisioned as one long shaggy tahr story. If there's any justice in our bedraggled world, THE HYPOTHETICAL MAN will attract a grateful horde of real readers."--Chris Lehmann

From Mad Men to MAGA: how nostalgia came to be and why we are so eager to indulge it. From movies to politics, social media posts to the targeted ads between them, nostalgia is one of the most potent forces of our era. On Nostalgia is a panoramic cultural history of nostalgia, exploring how a force that started as a psychological diagnosis of soldiers fighting far from home has come become a quintessentially modern condition. Drawing on everything from the modern science of memory to the romantic ideals of advertising, and traversing cultural movements from futurism to fascism to Facebook, cultural critic David Berry examines how the relentless search for self and overwhelming presence of mass media stokes the fires of nostalgia, making it as inescapable as it is hard to pin down. Holding fast against the pull of the past while trying to understand what makes the fundamental impossibility of return so appealing, On Nostalgia explores what it means to remember, how the universal yearning is used by us and against us, and it considers a future where the past is more readily available and easier to lose track of than ever before. "If nostalgia was a disease in the Good Old Days, then David Berry's cogently argued, intelligent, and witty book should be prescribed reading for anyone wishing to understand what sometimes feels like a peculiarly virulent epidemic of our current times." —Travis Elborough "We're so lucky to have a writer as thoughtful, funny, smart, and cutting as David Berry. Nostalgia dictates so much of our world, and there isn't a better cataloger, critic, and guide through it than Berry." —Scaachi Koul

This book is a provocative and invigorating real-time exploration of the future of human evolution by two of the world’s leading interdisciplinary ecologists – Michael Charles Tobias and Jane Gray Morrison. Steeped in a rich multitude of the sciences and humanities, the book enshrines an elegant narrative that is highly empathetic, personal, scientifically wide-ranging and original. It focuses on the geo-positioning of the human Self and its corresponding species. The book's overarching viewpoints and poignant through-story examine and powerfully challenge concepts associated historically with assertions of human superiority over all other life forms. Ultimately, The Hypothetical Species: Variables of Human Evolution is a deeply considered treatise on the ecological and psychological state of humanity and her options – both within, and outside the rubrics of evolutionary research – for survival. This important work is beautifully presented with nearly 200 diverse illustrations, and is introduced with a foreword by famed paleobiologist, Dr. Melanie DeVore.