Central Kansas Library System

More than fifty years ago, John Coltrane drew the twelve musical notes in a circle and connected them by straight lines, forming a five-pointed star. Inspired by Einstein, Coltrane put physics and geometry at the core of his music.

One night after an evening out, Jason Dessen, forty-year-old physics professor living with his wife and son in Chicago, is kidnapped at gunpoint by a masked man, driven to an abandoned industrial site and injected with a powerful drug. As he wakes, a man Jason's never met smiles down at him and says, "Welcome back, my friend." But this life is not the one he knows. His wife is not his wife; his son was never born; and he's not an ordinary college...

"A picture-book biography of young Isaac Newton, who "discovered" gravity, developed calculus, and uncovered the secrets of light and color"--

"From the sun to lamps, light is all around us. Learn how shadows are made. Then discover with friends from Sesame Street how objects are transparent, translucent, and opaque"--

As the Highland Games approach, Jim Qwilleran and the citizens of Pickax prepare to celebrate their Scottish heritage. But the revelry is marred when a visiting jewelry dealer is found dead in his hotel room. His assistant is missing, and the winner of the caber-tossing contest disappears as well. Qwill has a lot of mysteries to sort out, including Koko's sudden interest in photos, pennies, and paper towels.

For any task you might want to do, there's a right way, a wrong way, and a way so monumentally complex, excessive, and inadvisable that no one would ever try it. Munroe has created a guide to the third kind of approach. He provides highly impractical advice for everything from landing a plane to digging a hole. Cartoonist Randall Munroe (xkcd) explains how to predict the weather by analyzing the pixels of your Facebook photos. He teaches you how to...