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James Ron Leigh's Blog
2007 Oct 09 2007 Oct 08 During his professional academic career,researching and teaching automatic control systems, Professor Ron Leigh wrote a large number of scientific papers and ten books for Academic Press, Prentice-Hall, Dover, and the Institution of Electrical Engineers on mathematically-oriented topics . Now Emeritus, he has written further books on Artificial Intelligence, Periodic Systems, Tides, Sundials, Corkscrews and on the Goon Shows. Information and links to previews of these books can be found on this page. Books in preparation include "Concise Book of Matrix Methods" and with MS Leigh,“How to become moderately rich in one hour (per week!)”.
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Print: $27.86 Here is everything you could possibly want to know about corkscrews:how they were invented,how they work,which types work best and how pleasurable it is to collect and to use them. The content is a mix of historical, technical, literary, and anecdotal material with corkscrew patents and corkscrew words being systematically discussed.There is a good technical coverage of cork, since many questions about how well corkscrews work, end up being questions involving the complex behavioural characteristics of the material from which the stopper has been cut. There is a wide-ranging gallery of corkscrew photographs and an appendix containing detailed technical back-up.
The presentation is simple with photocopy-quality black and white photographs.
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Print: $9.62 Here is an informally presented collection of questions and answers, all related to Our Earth. Why do we always see the same man-in-the-moon face? At the coast, how far you should be able to see? Still at the coast, you look at the times of high tides. You notice that there are two high tides every 24 hours. The sun exerts a huge gravitational pull on earth, far greater than that from the moon, so why is the moon the main raiser of tides?
How far below your feet is sea-level when you are on top of Mount Everest, 29035 feet (8850 metres) above sea level. Above which sea level is it measured?
Other topics include:
•Why do you weigh less on the equator than at the North Pole ?
•Why are thee TWO tides per day, although the moon passes overhead only once per 24 hours ?
•Why does the moon always show the same face to us?
•How do sundials work ?
In this concise book, twenty topics that might already have intrigued you are discussed and explained in simple terms.
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Print: $17.35 The book is based on papers that I presented to conferences on Intelligence and Cognitive Systems, Intelligent Control, and Intelligent Automatic Control Systems..
The evolution of control systems is the main theme. Machines first took over from humans to replace muscle power, next to replace machine-minding and currently to replace human decision making. With the advent of intelligent machines, not only are tasks being performed by machines but, increasingly, machines are deciding what tasks should be performed. Systems that can learn are already with us and it is interesting to speculate about where this is leading Society. In considering where the ultimate boundaries between Man and Machine lie; it is useful to probe some of Nature’s workings, as well as Man’s deeper behaviours; therefore many diverse topics are involved. The book retains the ‘slide plus text’ style of the original conference presentations, with the intention of maximising readability.
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Print: $13.90 This monograph shows how sinusoidal waveforms play a fundamental role in underlying many important natural and artificial phenomena. Phenomena generated by true circular motions are purely sinusoidal. The means that phenomena driven by planetary motions can be expected to be approximately sinusoidal; we discuss Sundials and the Generation of Tides in our next two chapters.Mechanical Oscillators underlie the generation of musical sounds and they are next discussed in chapters six. Electrical oscillators and resonant circuits are covered in chapter seven, electricity generation by rotating machines in chapter eight and radio waves and radio circuit tuning in chapter nine. Chapters ten, eleven and twelve begin to be more generic and they present a wider and more abstract viewpoint.
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Print: $16.32 This is a highly personalised collection of Goon Show quotes; many just short clips from memory and with no pretension to accuracy; just some pieces I like and hence the title.
I saw Milligan in his two stage shows ,The Bed-Sitting Room and Son of Oblomov, both at the Comedy Theatre in London. Here I have reproduced the programmes and given a few reminiscences about those theatre visits
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Print: $12.67 Tidal ranges in the seas around the old trading harbours of Europe are frequently very considerable and often ships may be able to dock only at certain states of the tide. Sea trade, particularly to river ports, goes back many hundreds of years so there must have been tide tables of some sort for many years. Had tides been more significant in the Mediterranean, then no doubt the Greeks would have analysed them and maybe even solved most of the problems for us. As it was, the great European minds of the 16th and 17th centuries were able to ponder significantly on the causes of these phenomena. After a look at the historical importance of tidal prediction, the book considers tide generating mechanisms and some of the key historical figures who have contributed to understanding the tides. Tidal prediction by harmonic fitting to existing records is next discussed and examples given with plots showing how predictions can be built up. Comprehensive references are given.
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Print: $15.03 Here you can find more than a hundred colour photograhs of corkscrews, categorised according to mechanism.
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