Up until the mid-1950s President Dwight D. Eisenhower believed that waging all-out war against an enemy threatening to end your national existence was right, natural, and necessary. In the wake of World War Two this was hardly a controversial position, as memories of Munich, Pearl Harbor, and Adolf Hitler had made the notion of just...

Casino card games such as baccarat and blackjack differ significantly from casino games such as craps, roulette, and slot machines in that they are not indepen- dent trial processes-that is, the cards that already have been played do affect the odds on subsequent hands. Consider for a moment the game of blackjack, where the cards...

Shaped by often very dramatic events, international security and the international system have changed significantly in recent years. The conclusion of the Cold War, the emergence of new political systems, the growth of significant threats such as terrorism, and the development of new security doctrines have driven global transformation. These...

“Weird Worlds” is the third book in David Seargent’s “Weird” series. This book assumes a basic level of astronomical understanding and concentrates on the “odd and interesting” aspects of planetary bodies, including asteroids and moons. From our viewpoint here on Earth, this work features the most...

I was trying to imagine what the world would look like without Western medicine. Gone would be primary care physicians, surgeons, psychiatry—all the various medical specialties. There would be no treatment for trauma, nor fractures. Sufferers from the common cold would need to recover without their physician’s help. There would be...

Computer graphics (or CG) has changed the way we experience the art of moving images. Computer graphics is the difference between Steamboat Willie and Buzz Lightyear, between ping pong and PONG. It began in 1963 when an MIT graduate student named Ivan Sutherland created Sketchpad, the first true computer animation program. Sutherland...

Plasma engineering applies the unique properties of plasmas (ionized gases) to improve processes and performance over many fields, such as materials processing, spacecraft propulsion, and nanofabrication. Plasma Engineering considers this rapidly expanding discipline from a unified standpoint, addressing fundamentals of physics and...

In June 1994 the United States went to the brink of war with North Korea. With economic sanctions impending, President Bill Clinton approved the dispatch of substantial reinforcements to Korea, and plans were prepared for attacking the North's nuclear weapons complex. The turning point came in an extraordinary private diplomatic...