This represents the stack of books I'm currently reading or planning to read based on the fact that they're on the stack. The stack changes with time, as stacks often do...for a list of things on the stack of things I've all ready read and digesting see More Reading

Sit at the foot of a native elder and listen as great wisdom of days long past is passed down. The four agreements are these: Be impeccable with your word. Don't take anything personally. Don't make assumptions. Always do your best.		"Emergence" is the notion that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. John Holland, the "father of genetic algorithms," says this seemingly simple notion will be at the heart of the development of machines that can think for themselves.
	What really goes on inside the world of software development? How do straightforward projects with   well-defined goals mutate into large-scale disasters? How do personalities, ambitions, work environments, time and cost limitations impact the creation of software?		Dyson  argues that new technologies can have as much of an effect on the social and political realms as new ideologies do. In particular, he cites three burgeoning technologies--solar energy, genetic engineering, and the Internet--for their potential to affect a more equitable worldwide distribution of wealth and power in the coming century.
From Sante Fe Institute founder Stuart Kauffman, whose  investigations concern nothing less than the nature of life. "It may be," he said in a Scientific American interview , "that I have stumbled upon the proper definition of life itself."		Organic chemist and accomplished polymath Joel de Rosnay, shows how the sciences of complexity--the study of self-organization and the evolution of complex systems--coupled with the power of modern computing, have ripened into tool powerful enough to help us understand the systems of which we are a part. Nature progresses when structures and functions combine into higher-order assemblies: cells into organisms, organisms into populations, populations into ecosystems. This progression is giving rise to what de Rosnay calls the cybion, a planetary macro-organism consisting of all people and machines, organisms, networks, and nations.
	From a rigorous biological perspective, the ideas of complexity and emergence get their due....emergence happens when a system of simple and numerous parts does something you couldn't have predicted from a description of the parts...well chosen examples of emergence in complex systems.		John Holland's Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems is one of the classics in the field of complex adaptive systems.  Read this book, and even if you don't read it, buy it and display it proudly. Scientists, engineers, and coffee tables the world over should be interested in the seminal book that first gathered and developed the critical mass of ideas from mathematics, computational science, and systems theory necessary to launch and fuel the ongoing revolution in complex innovating systems.
How We Became PostHuman - The title of this scholarly yet remarkably accessible slice of contemporary cultural history has a whiff of  paradox about it: what can it mean, exactly, to say that we humans have become something other than human? The answer, Katherine Hayles explains, lies not in ourselves but in our tools. Ever since the  invention of electronic computers five decades ago, these powerful new machines have inspired a shift in  how we define ourselves both as individuals and as a species.		George Gilder's Telecosm predicts a revolutionary new era of unlimited bandwidth: it describes how the "age of the microchip"--dubbed the "microcosm"--is ending and leaving in its wake a new era--the "telecosm," or "the  world enabled and defined by new communications technology."  A must read for Network Age devotees.
	Out of Control is an accessible and entertaining explanation of why the coming years will probably be the Age of Biology -- particularly evolution and ethology -- and what this will mean to most every aspect of our society. Kelly is an enthusiastic and well-informed guide who explains the promises and implications of this rapidly evolving revolution very well.  This one was suggested by a developer in Seattle who had heard me speak -- thanks Jeremy.		We hear constantly about our current "information revolution." Twenty-four-hour news channels and dizzying Internet technologies bombard us with facts and pictures from around the globe. But what kind of a  "revolution" is this? How has information really changed from what it was ten years or ten centuries ago?  Albert Borgmann offers some riveting answers to these questions in Holding On to Reality.
Even as molecular biologists attempt to reproduce life in vitro, another group of scientists is creating life--or something very close to it--in silico, using computers to produce "organisms" that can move, see, feed, reproduce, and die. This is nothing less than the existence of new varieties of life. Some of these species can move and eat, see, reproduce, and die. Some behave like birds or ants. One such life form may turn out to be our best weapon in the war against AIDS.		What is the nature of life, and how are the shapes and instincts of living organisms determined? Sheldrake's hypothesis, "Formative Causation", proposes that form and function of all living things are passed to succeeding generations by "morphogenetic fields" that extend through space and time. The implications of this theory are staggering, from predicting the course of hurricanes to explaining deja vu. Sheldrake's thinking seems radical because he does not subscribe to orthodox scientific assumptions that the universe operates like a machine; instead, he sees it as much like a living organism.