The short form on real, as-flown-in-1969, surfaces and finishes:

Command Module.

The actual Apollo Command module was covered with strips of mirror finish aluminized plastic micrometeoroid shield and thermal insulation, on the visible surfaces. The ablative heat shield, not visible until the CM and SM are separated, is said to have been painted a light gray color. During re-entry to Earth’s atmosphere, the mylar was mostly burned off and a light-gray painted structure under it became visible. Below that paint appears to have been a composite honeycomb material. I think it is unlikely that the actual pressure vessel that the crew lived in touched the outside surface except at the hatch edges.

In pictures of the remaining, unused, Apollo CSM (the emergency rescue vehicle for Skylab), you can see the stripe pattern of the plastic tape on the CM exterior, but in contemporary photographs, it looks like one piece of mirror polished aluminum. Like an American Airline’s jet airliner.

The fold-flat handles on the outside of the CSM, for astronaut Extra-Vehicular Activities (EVAs) were painted a glossy yellow, like the similar hand-rails on the the Hubble Space Telescope.

The docking capture and latch mechanism mounted on the outside of the tunnel, above the front hatch of the CM, is primarily titanium-looking metal, with a chromed, presumably retractable or spring loaded or damped, shaft.  There are darkened metal handles in the mechanism, probably painted or anodized a dark blue dark gray or black.

The inside of the tunnel itself, behind the docking capture mechanism, is light gray with 12 blue-anodized cylinder-topped arms at the top, some black and some other colors of boxes, and wires,

Service module:

The Service module exterior was  painted with an aluminum paint, except for radiator areas fore and aft which were white, two “ram’s horn” antennas that were white or light gray, and 24 narrow stripes (about 25%) on panels under the RCS thrusters. The area under “United States” may or may not have been light gray, and many labels on the exterior appear to be black text on light gray background.

The main engine exhaust bell is complex, but a bluish gray for the biggest, lower, part, outside, and reddish gray for the upper part, outside, is a good start. The top of the bell joins the reddish part at a flange, with bright bare metal fasteners by the dozen. The top of the bell, the last part visible beyond (below) the Inconel heat shield, is wrapped in the mylar and-or “H-film” ( aka “Kapton”) insulation and micrometeoroid shield. The back of the CM is mostly covered by 4 stamped quadrants what looks like thin Inconel nickel-copper high temp metal. The furthest outer edge of the end of the Service Module is painted with aluminum paint just like the sides.

Lunar Module:

The Lunar Module has two very different areas of finish: The descent (lower) stage is primarily wrapped in thermal insulation / micromedeoroid protection, a multilayer collection of  Kapton (“H film”) and Mylar, and other, exotic, things, with metal evaporated/ plated on them for protection. A lot of what looks ‘black’ is actually a black-finished foil or mylar.

The descent engine has a medium gray exterior and nestles in an Inconel-lined cavity in the descent stage.

The ascent (upper) stage of the Lunar Module is about half black-finished and half anodized Aluminum. Yes, the Aluminum looks like its dark, like Titanium, or has a distinct gray-beige-green tone. All true, many have remarked on the hard-to-describe colors. Grumman’s construction documents for the whole thing, facet by facet, are on line, and they specify Phosphoric acid and Sulfuric Acid anodizing of the various aluminum alloy pieces.  Some Mylar or “H film” wrapping is on the the outside of the ascent module. The ascent engine has a semi-gloss white exterior, with a textile-like “wrapped” texture. This may be thermal insulation, similar to the thick batts of insulation wrapped around the F1 engines of the Saturn V first stage.

There are two dish antennae on the ascent stage, Both have white-painted dishes and are generally black otherwise. The antenna directly above the lunar egress hatch and the front windows has black foil everywhere except the inside of the dish. The signal radiator in the center of the dish is white.

The antenna off on the starboard side of the ascent stage has a semi-gloss black mechanism and flat black on the back on the dish. Black, also, on the 4 legs and the forward reflector in front of the dish.

In more detail:

Command Module.

The Reaction Control System (RCS) engine nozzles on the CM have an oxidized copper color in their throats, and a slightly corrugated texture. Photos of post-re-entry CMs show a ring of the same oxidized copper color outside the nozzles, but the aluminized mylar covers these rings up to the edges of the RCS engine bells.

The forward and side windows for the two outside crew stations have black anti-glare finish around the windows, and red-orange silicone seals at every layer of the windows.

Below or behind the port side windows and the crossed RCS nozzles are a pair of drain valves, white 5/8 spheres with gold-toned dots at the outside. A very similar purge valve is installed on the starboard side of the side hatch.

On both sides, below windows, RCS nozzles, etc and the edge of the ablative re-entry shield, there are translucent white dots. Under the Mylar there are black partial circles around these two translucent circles,. On the Service Module, there are matching white partial circles painted on the fairing at the top edge of the SM

A minor (very minor) mystery is what kind of plastic the reflective stuff on the CM is. The expected temperature range in the space environment was wider than NASA was comfortable using Mylar, generally, uncovered, in the thermal insulation blankets covering the LM Descent Stage. Therefore, the outer layer of those blankets is always Kapton (“H film”), which is usable over the expected temperature range.  Of course, a blanket of up to 25 layers of plastic, using microthicknesses of vacuum deposited metal for insulation, is fundamentally different from a pressurized honeycomb structure wrapped with a layer of glued-on plastic tape. Maybe the thermal mass and inertia of the CM (and the slow-rolling passive thermal control regime) kept conditions on the outside of the CM suitable for Mylar, Maybe the CM plastic has the metal side “out”, unlike the majority of LM applications which are generally plastic side out (hence the gold-amber color: its not gold foil, its aluminized Kapton with the metal in and the plastic out.

Service module:

Inside the main engine exhaust bell is complex. At the bottom, inside the bluish gray outside, are 16 dark metal petals with strong textures. Inside the reddish-gray part of the bell are a set of 6 petals and then a solid ring- all a glossy dark color.  Above the dark, solid, ring, is a white metal ring, something like aluminum colored. Above that is an orangey brown and then at the peak of the engine is a light, metallic-finished plate with 5 stamped spokes and a central cap.

Lunar Module:

How I plan to reproduce these colors:

Command Module:

The glued-flat aluminized mylar on the real thing doesn’t look like any paint, even mirror polished aluminum. It looks like mylar, darker than polished aluminum. I have seen photos on-line of Apollo CMs finished in Bare Metal Foil, in the correct striped pattern. But I don’t see the stripes unless I look very closely in the 1960s photos- they’re easy to see in flash photos taken today, on the leftover CSM lifeboat for Skylab that never flew. But not in pictures of Apollo 11, or 15, or any of the other hardware that was flown.

Sooooo: Bare Metal Foil remains possible, or very thin aluminum foil, polished and clear-coated. “Chrome” spray paint would not be a bad choice. Having the kit part polished and then vacuum coated with aluminum would be very close to the real thing. Brush-painting Testor’s Chrome Silver oil-based paint or another similar non-water-based product is also a thought – the occasional brushmark could be said to represent the stripes of the Mylar…

“Chrome” spray paint or Metalizer Buffable Aluminum rattle can are the top two contenders at the moment. I’m going to do a study with each and see which I like more  watch this space.

Service Module:

Polly-scale Reefer White (that’s as in Refrigerator White, the rail-road color) is my call for the white paint on the lower and upper ring radiators, the two ‘tabs’ containing the ram’s horn antennas, and the white areas near the RCS boxes. My own mix for Boeing Aircraft Company #707 Gray is my first choice for the Light Gray RCS boxes, unless they’re white too, have to check again before I commit myself. The Inconel heat shield could be Polly Scale Stainless Steel, maybe with a bit of yellow added to bring out the nickel ‘color’… Inconel is a copper-nickel alloy and its attraction is that it holds its strength at high temperatures, not that its intrinsically tough stuff like titanium. It actually cuts and polishes pretty readily, but the important thing is that its clearly NOT aluminum. Completely different color. Not unlike stainless steel, which is, itself, not like steel OR aluminum.

Lunar Module:

Led Zep “2″ and “4″, or “II” and “IV”, completely blew me out of the water,
and the arrival of any Led Zeppelin record up through “Presence” was A
Major Event in the subculture I lived in. I like “can’t get any
better” as a review bin- I’ll use it and give you credit. I enjoyed
“I” but only really liked “Immigrant Song” on “III”. But I liked it a
whole lot! They were the soundtrack of my teenage years. Two icons in
the first four records, and one good, and one fair with touches of
brilliance.

But they started losing it at “Houses of the Holy”. The album wasn’t
bad, me and my friends loved “No Quarter”, but it was not another step
along the path blazed by “II” and “IV”. The end came very quickly. I could
have reduced “Physical Graffiti” AND “Presence” to the greatest high
density single, or perhaps EP, of all time. “Kashmir” and “Achilles
Last Stand” are as good as anything they ever did, but I can’t tell
you the name of, or whistle the tune of, any other song on either
album. Two good songs out of three vinyl records. I enjoy the “Fool
in the rain” song, when it comes on the radio, but its not something
I’d pay money for.

By 1980 it was pretty clear (in my weird mind anyway) that Robert
Plant had been the real musical heart and brains of the outfit. Page
wasn’t so much a guitar god as a matchless producer, songwriting
partner for Plant and a hard, hard, worker, at least in the off stage
sense. On-stage, he was apparently a wreck. I heard “The Song Remains
The Same” years before I saw it, and its simply not in the same
territory as “Live At Leeds”, “The Allman Brothers Live At the Filmore
East”, “Hendrix In The West”, “Jimi Hendrix and the Band of Gypsies”,
the live Stones record they did when Brian Jones was still in the
band, or any of the knockout rock performances (Then Years After,
Santana, The Who, Sly and the Family Stone, etc, etc, etc) showcased
in the Woodstock movie. Page’s playing is distinctive, better than
anything I’ll ever do, contains solid original music and acknowledges
its debut to antecedents like Da Blooze. In spite of that, it always
seems to be calculated, a product, rather than some communion with
whatever immortal muse animates Barry Manilow or the guys in Yes. :^)
Ya know what I mean? Its like David Lee Roth and Sammy Hagar. Sammy’s
great at what he does, and gives it his all, but there’s a connection
that Dave makes and Sammy doesn’t. For me, anyway.

Some time after 1981 Lori and I saw “The Song Remains The Same” as a
midnight movie (remember those?) and we laughed ourselves silly. The
playing looked as spotty as it sounded (“Remember *laughter*?”), the
fantasy sequences are only worth it as setups for jokes – like one of
you guys made at Bridalveil Falls. Bonham’s thugish fat guys, shotguns
and motorcycles sequence is so completely repulsive that it took me
years to be able to appreciate how good he had been. And he was an
astounding, technical, musician, at least for the first 4 records.

Plant’s solo efforts were medium to good, I liked Big Log and Pledge
Pin at lot, Robbie Blunt was a neat guitar player, and I bought
several of his solo records. Page was playing occasional pearls with
people who lacked his talent and work ethic (Radioactive, other than
his guitar playing, is downright embarrassing, and overall, I LIKE Paul
Rodgers).

I was delighted when Page and Plant got back together, because Bonham
had seemed to be a liability, and Jones was adept, playing something
that fit and worked, without ever rising above ‘sideman’ quality. It
can’t have been easy to play bass with the other three, but there
wasn’t anything I heard from him that would cause me to listen to what
he did without them.

That Bonham’s kid turned out to be a good drummer (as did Ringo’s kid)
ought to tell us something, and I’d have gone to the re-union if I
could have had a ticket for $50 or so. I can’t believe it would have
been as good as Van Halen was, on some level, but at this point in
their lives, I bet it was the best Led Zeppelin concert they ever
played.

The New Yorker ran a terrifically positive review about the reunion, but
cautioned that this was making good on another reunion they’d done-
Live Aid?, which sucked swamp-water, big-time. Now they could leave on a
high note. Don’t be attached to the possibility of a tour, and if
there is one, it may not be as good as that one show.

The best point in the review was when the writer noted that “Whole Lot
Of Love” is “a song about f***ing, not about making love.” And no
asterisks either. 30 something year later, respectable magazines can
talk directly about the hard rock of the late 1960s. I can’t wait for
their career retrospective on AC/DC :^)

When “The Song Remains The Same” came out, one of my co-workers and I
had a running joke about winning a radio contest and having Led
Zeppelin come to your house… ie, your parents house. “Mom, this is
Bob. Bob, this is my mom…
…this just isn’t going to work, is it? Why don’t you guys wait in
the limo, I’ll be out in a minute.” Bwahahahahah!

I’d love for them to come around, since Page is presumably no longer
so drunk he can’t stand, and Plant has always seemed worth it. I’m
still up for that $50 ticket, and I’ll take my chances. But I bet the
studio records will always be better. The New Yorker’s review
suggested that Page being able to compose things he couldn’t quite
play live was “one of his charms”.

http://www.garlicandgrass.org/issue6/Update_TopTenQuestions.cfm

The first response is Sept 13, 2004, so its from the early days.
And the 10 “unanswered” questions are:

THE TOP TEN UNANSWERED QUESTIONS ABOUT 9-11

1. NONEXISTENT AIR DEFENSE.

Why weren’t Air Force planes sent up to intercept the hijacked planes?
More at: www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline

2. BUSH’S REACTIONS ON 9-11.

Why did George Bush go into a meaningless photo op in an elementary school after hearing that an airliner had crashed into the World Trade Center?
More at: www.cooperativeresearch.net/timeline/main/essayaninterestingday.html

3. THE COLLAPSE OF THE TWIN TOWERS.

Why did the towers collapse? No steel skyscraper had ever collapsed because of fire….it appears that the towers actually fell due to a controlled demolition rather than fire…
More at: 911research.wtc7.net/talks/towers/introduction.html

4. THE COLLAPSE OF WTC BUILDING 7.

Don’t forget about this building. Yet another steel skyscraper collapsed from fire that day. None ever, and then three, in one day…. the 57 floors of the building couldn’t have ‘pancaked’ individually and still reached the ground at freefall speed.

More at: www.wtc7.net/videos.html

5. ATTACK ON THE PENTAGON.

Why won’t the Pentagon release their video footage of this event? The event was perhaps the most bizarre of all. Consider Question #1 again. The plane that supposedly struck the Pentagon was known to have been hijacked for 45 minutes – after two other planes had already been hijacked and flown into the World Trade Center. Yet this plane supposedly flew unchallenged over the most protected airspace in the world, and then crashed into the headquarters of our trillion-dollar military.
More at: 911research.wtc7.net/talks/pentagon/video.html

6. CRASH IN PENNSYLVANIA.

Why was the debris from this plane spread out over eight miles? … Numerous eyewitness accounts suggest the plane was shot down by another, unmarked plane.

More at: www.rense.com/general54/ccover.htm; and http://911research.wtc7.net/planes/attack/flight93.html

7. THE CLEANUP LOOKED LIKE A COVERUP.

Why was the debris from the Pentagon and the World Trade Center destroyed immediately after 9-11? … the steel from the collapsed WTC was immediately shipped to Korea and China, where it was melted down within days…
More at: www.wanttoknow.info/9-11cover-up10pg; and 911research.wtc7.net/wtc/groundzero/cleanup.html

8. INSIDER TRADING.

Who were the big investors who knew 9-11 was about to happen? Although the stock trading on American and United Airlines was up by 1200% the day before 9-11, no public investigations into who profited were undertaken.
More at: www.hereinreality.com/insidertrading.html; and http://www.antiwar.com/justin/j121901.html

9. THE FEDERAL COMMISSION.

Why did Bush block the formation of the 9-11 Commission? …nothing about the 9-11 Commission was independent.

More at: www.joycelynn.com

10. LARGER MOTIVES.

The people running our country right now – Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Libby, Abrams – are all connected to a group called the Project for a New American Century (PNAC)….
More at: www.newamericancentury.org/defensenationalsecurity2000.htm

I couldn’t stop myself and replied, thus:

Ten years later, it may finally be sinking in that 9/11/01 was Al Qaeda’s best day ever. None of the conspiracy theories have the legs of Bush, Cheney, etc, willing to bend any excuse into war with Iraq, right out in public. There is plenty of public record to explain what you present as mysteries:

1) No Air Defense? Correct. Two planes on standby without weapons, orders or authorization. There are tapes and transcripts of all the FAA-USAF conversations you care to hear. Astute people had warned, written thrillers and worried in private that terrorists could hijack an airliner and use it as a weapon. “Bin Laden Determined To Attack US” couldn’t get any attention. And the Republican line was that President Clinton’s cruise missile strikes against Al Qaeda was a wag-the-dog move-. Self inflicted blindness.

2) Bush’s reaction? Are you serious? Entirely consistent with his reactions at any other point. After 7 more years of presidency, I’m confident we saw the authentic, incurious, unprepared President George W. Bush in that classroom.

3) Twin towers brought down by some other agency. Bullshit. Fires weakened the structure, weight did the rest. Once one floor had pancaked, the weight of the multiple floors above the fire was going all the way down and nothing could stop it. The top floors are pretty intact as they disappear into the dust cloud, and there’s nothing left when the dust clears. After essentially a free fall for over 500 feet, what size chunk would you expect?

4) Bullshit. A pancaking building is going to be in free fall after a very few stories go- the dynamic load is gigantic compared to the strength of the building.

5) Sorry, video coverage of the whole country isn’t as good as in a Tom Clancey or Robert Ludlum novel. Watch the video of an F-4 Phantom sledded into a concrete block some time. Much denser and stronger than any airliner, it just turns into crap and flies off in little pieces, inch by inch, as it comes up to the block. That’s where the plane went. Full throttle into a building. The fuselage is a hollow aluminum tube filled with plastic, people, chairs and luggage. All the rest is sheet aluminum, fiberglass or carbon fiber. The only solid bits are the high pressure core of the engines and the landing gear legs.

6) Pieces which may have come off Flight 93 were found some distance from the crash site. Not big pieces. Not 8 miles, that’s an exaggeration of the 6ish-mile road distance, not straight-line, between a general area in which debris was reported and the crater. We don’t know what the flight path of 93 was in its last seconds, what forces it was subject to. At 500mph, a 757 would cover 8.25 miles every minute, the mile or two between debris on the path and the crater were covered in the last 15 seconds of the flight.
Name one “eyewitness” who saw an unmarked plane. Describe the plane. How would they know a plane at several thousand feed was ‘marked’ or ‘unmarked’? Ever been to an airshow? Seen a modern, marked military plane flying? Could you swear to what the markings were?

7) This is simply not true. Debris from the World Trade Center site went to a specific dump where detectives from the New York City Police Department did indeed search for human remains and any other clue to what had happened and who had been killed. They have been interviewed. There is film of them working. They are one reason so many of those killed were positively identified. Over 2000 US service persons are still “missing” from the Korean war. Over 70,000 are still “missing” from WWII. The serious fire was in far less than 5 1/2 floors of either building, so the fire-damaged material was less than 5% of the total rubble- much less, since the fire consumed office contents and anything remotely flammable.

8) There were people who knew, in addition to the 19 guys who did it, and some may have traded. Its been 10 years, surely someone has done some excel spread sheets showing trading volume, time of day, etc, in the year up to 9/11, and the immediate 24 hours before the first impact. You think Elliot Spitzer would have turned that down if there was a case?

9) Who cares how long it took to form the Warren commission, you don’t believe its report either. C’mon. Bush fought tooth and nail because he’d been asleep at the switch and his chicken hawk pals reflexively assumed they knew more than the civil servants and political appointees from the Clinton administration. Because. And then they ignored the actual bad guys and their funding sources and anything else uncomfortably realistic and went after Iraq. Because.

10) Plenty of evidence, see above, suggests that the publicly known outlines of the 9/11 attacks are about right. We know who did it. We know how. We know why. We know where the money came from. We know something about who helped plan and carry out the attacks.

The ensuing 10 years of “war on terror” and its aftermath should surely have demonstrated how the bad guys were able to get away with it. If that isn’t enough for you, have a look at New Orleans, where the only serious shooting was our own cops shooting civilians. None of what happened within the city limits of New Orleans was about ‘nature’. It was a man-made disaster, composed of neglect, hubris, indifference, political, social, racial, ethnic and class hostility, blah blah blah.

Is there any hidden evidence of incompetence, malfeasance, inflexible and incurious habits of thought, or reckless disregard for our country’s values, history, future, standing or founding principles half as damning as that which the Bush administration did in plain sight? How many naked men, dead, bound in duct tape and sealed in a wooden box, do you have to discover, to know that we’ve gone off the rails? How many billions have to go up in smoke? How many pallets of shrink-wrapped $100 bills cast on the wind?

In the end, one should never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity or foolishness. You want conspiracy? Go look at Wall Street and the recent economic catastrophe. Its there. Everyone knows its there. Some will even get addressed. Someday. Posthumously, maybe.

So I did some research on the interTubes and was pointed to

1) sudo chown your_user_name ~/.Trash

Apparently, Lion shipped with the ownership of  ~/.Trash set to root (!) So own your own trash and be surprised at how easy it is to delete things again….

2) the permissions stuff available under “Get Info”.

This is Mac OS and I have, dare I say it, always found “Get Info” to be counter intuitive as a way of setting things. Absolutely, *get* info. Tell me what I need to know. But don’t make me go there, far into the system-y end of the menu bar, to SET fundamental properties I care about.

So when beset by things I didn’t understand, I was all to willing to go apply a tool I didn’t like to solve them, and a pox on all their houses. As if. I COULD fix the problem for one user by manipulating the Get Info users and groups permissions- the ACL. But if I fixed it for one login, it wouldn’t work for another on the same system. The Get Info fixes were strictly single-user-computing solutions. So I read more and found this on the Apple Support Communities:

——————————————————–
ckujau adds:
——————————————————–
Same (similar?) problem here: Finder asks for a password when I try to move any file in my $HOME to the Trash. Turns out that I had some weird ACLs set, dunno where this came from:

$ ls -le .DS_Store
 -rw-------+ 1 bob staff 24580 Aug 7 01:04 .DS_Store
 0: group:everyone deny delete
$ chmod -a "group:everyone deny delete" .DS_Store

After the chmod, deleting foo.txt succeeded. Running with -R on $HOME will remove this ACL from all objects in $HOME.
—————————————————————-

To which I can only say:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3195797?start=30&tstart=0

“This is the real magic. I have several logins on my system and going through the GetInfo display allowed me to enable the primary login’s account, but left the error for other logins. Grrrrrr.

I did see the password required to delete things problem but the big deal was that neither TextEdit or Preview would work, because of the error:

------------------------------------------- Error below!--------------------------------------
 Exception Type: EXC_BAD_INSTRUCTION (SIGILL)
 Exception Codes: 0x0000000000000001, 0x0000000000000000
Application Specific Information:
 dyld: launch, running initializers
 /usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib
 xpchelper reply message validation: sandbox creation failed: 1002
 Saving after update for container (~/Library/Containers/com.apple.TextEdit/Data) failed: NSCocoaErrorDomain:513 You don’t have permission to save the file “Container.plist” in the folder “com.apple.TextEdit”.
 ------------------------------------------ Error above!----------------------------------------

So I tried ls -le and of course I saw  (NOTE: ls -le!!!)

 drwxrwxrwx@ 46 tester staff 1564 Oct 14 16:17 Library
 0: group:everyone deny delete
 1: user:babbott allow list,add_file,search,add_subdirectory,delete_child,readattr,writeattr,readextat tr,writeextattr,readsecurity
 2: group:admin allow list,add_file,search,add_subdirectory,delete_child,readattr,writeattr,readextat tr,writeextattr,readsecurity
 drwxrwxrwx+ 5 tester staff 170 Sep 15 16:02 Movies
 0: group:everyone deny delete
 drwxrwxrwx+ 6 tester staff 204 Sep 15 16:02 Musi

And, it turns out, I had zillions of useless files with this sort of thing

-rw-rw-rw-+ 1 tester staff 4433 Aug 25 20:05 7e4edc06e818c9f05aeed8ec1a1cfbd030136168.xml
 0: user:babbott allow read,write,append,readattr,writeattr,readextattr,writeextattr,readsecurity
 1: group:admin allow read,write,append,readattr,writeattr,readextattr,writeextattr,readsecurity
 -rw-rw-rw-+ 1 tester staff 4518 Aug 31 18:39 7e5e9b963704d7174fd4b3af2988310385d17957.xml
 0: user:babbott allow read,write,append,readattr,writeattr,readextattr,writeextattr,readsecurity
 1: group:admin allow read,write,append,readattr,writeattr,readextattr,writeextattr,readsecurity
 -rw-rw-rw-+ 1 tester staff 4701 Aug 12 16:43 7e64fe4487a73cabb37de30e411b8ed5872c74fe.xml
 0: user:babbott allow read,write,append,readattr,writeattr,readextattr,writeextattr,readsecurity
 1: group:admin allow read,write,append,readattr,writeattr,readextattr,writeextattr,readsecurity

which I’d probably created by “Apply to enclosed items” from the Get Info panel. Live and learn.

So here we were:

prome-1n-dhcp171:~ tester$ ls -le /
 total 30445
drwxrwxr-x+ 38 root admin 1292 Sep 30 13:59 Applications
 0: group:everyone deny delete
 drwxrwxr-x@ 16 root admin 544 Jul 8 13:18 Developer
 drwxrwxrwx 2 root wheel 68 Jul 13 10:39 ISO-Images
 drwxr-xr-x+ 60 root wheel 2040 Sep 30 16:12 Library 0: group:everyone deny delete
 drwxr-xr-x@ 2 root wheel 68 Jun 18 12:44 Network
 drwxr-xr-x+ 4 root wheel 136 Oct 5 13:08 System
 0: group:everyone deny delete
 drwxr-xr-x 8 root admin 272 Jul 27 19:18 Users
 drwxrwxrwt@ 5 root admin 170 Oct 14 17:56 Volumes
 0: group:everyone deny add_file,add_subdirectory,directory_inherit,only_inherit
etc...

etc:

And here’s the solution, in my case:

prome-1n-dhcp171:~ tester$ chmod -a "group:everyone deny delete" /Library
 chmod: Failed to set ACL on file '/Library': Operation not permitted

Ok… use sudo:

prome-1n-dhcp171:~ tester$ sudo chmod -a "group:everyone deny delete" /Library

Ah… happy happy joy joy!

prome-1n-dhcp171:~ tester$ ls -le /
 total 30445
 drwxrwxr-x+ 38 root admin 1292 Sep 30 13:59 Applications
 0: group:everyone deny delete
 drwxrwxr-x@ 16 root admin 544 Jul 8 13:18 Developer
 drwxrwxrwx 2 root wheel 68 Jul 13 10:39 ISO-Images
 drwxr-xr-x 60 root wheel 2040 Sep 30 16:12 Library private/etc  dr-xr-xr-x 2 root wheel 1 Oct 14 18:01 home
 -rw-r--r--@ 1 root wheel 15565404 Aug 9 20:58 mach_kernel

and now, Ta Da! I can use TextEdit and Preview from this login. AND delete stuff!  Nice!!

Bill

Working so far, and better than what I had done…

Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (1962)
This account of the effects of pesticides on the environment launched the environmental movement in the US

We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Familes by Philip Gourevitch (1999)
Gourevitch captures the terror of the Rwandan massacre, and the failures of the international community

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe (1968)
The man in the white suit follows Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters as they drive across the US in a haze of LSD

Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter (1979)
A whimsical meditation on music, mind and mathematics that explores formal complexity and self-reference

The Seven Pillars of Wisdom by TE Lawrence (1922)
A dashing account of Lawrence’s exploits during the revolt against the Ottoman empire

The Periodic Table by Primo Levi (1975)
A vision of the author’s life, including his life in the concentration camps, as seen through the kaleidoscope of chemistry

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (c180)
A series of personal reflections, advocating the preservation of calm in the face of conflict, and the cultivation of a cosmic perspective

Walden by HD Thoreau (1854)
An account of two years spent living in a log cabin, which examines ideas of independence and society

Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche (1883)
The invalid Nietzsche proclaims the death of God and the triumph of the Ubermensch

The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli (1532)
Machiavelli injects realism into the study of power, arguing that rulers should be prepared to abandon virtue to defend stability

The Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan (1967)
This bestselling graphic popularisation of McLuhan’s ideas about technology and culture was cocreated with Quentin Fiore

On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin (1859)
Darwin’s account of the evolution of species by natural selection transformed biology and our place in the universe

The Double Helix by James Watson (1968)
James Watson’s personal account of how he and Francis Crick cracked the structure of DNA

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking (1988)
A book owned by 10 million people, if understood by fewer, Hawking’s account of the origins of the universe became a publishing sensation

The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1973)
This analysis of incarceration in the Soviet Union, including the author’s own experiences as a zek, called into question the moral foundations of the USSR

I would add the following, in no particular order:

In The Shadow of Man by Jane Goodall

Rising from the Plain, Assembling California,and the other 3 volumes of “Annals of the Former World” by John McPhee

The Autobiography of Malcom X by Malcom X and Alex Hailey

The Face of Battle by John Keegan

Genome by Matt Riddley

Endurance by Edward Lansing

Stranger In The Forest by Eric Hansen

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver

Shooting the Boh by Tracey Johnston

Heat by Bill Bruford

Carrying The Fire by Michael Collins

The Wisdom of the Bones by Alan Walker and Pat Shipman

The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes

The Man Who Walked Through Time by Colin Fletcher

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte

The “C” Programming Language by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Richie

Incredible Victory by Walter Lord

How To Keep Your Water Cooled Volkswagen Alive, a Book of Step by Step Procedures for the Complete Idiot by Richard Sealy, illustrated by Peter Aschwanden

Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt

My Family and Other Animals, Birds, Beasts and Relatives by Gerald Durrell

Books from the Guardian’s list that I have but haven’t read or finished:

Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves (1929)
The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank (1947)
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn (1962)
The Art of War by Sun Tzu (500 BC)

The 100 greatest non-fiction books
After keen debate at the Guardian’s books desk, this is our list of the very best factual writing, organised by category, and then by date.

guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 14 June 2011 14.34 BST
Article history

The greatest non-fiction books live here … the British Museum Reading Room.
Art

The Shock of the New by Robert Hughes (1980)
Hughes charts the story of modern art, from cubism to the avant garde

The Story of Art by Ernst Gombrich (1950)
The most popular art book in history. Gombrich examines the technical and aesthetic problems confronted by artists since the dawn of time

Ways of Seeing by John Berger (1972)
A study of the ways in which we look at art, which changed the terms of a generation’s engagement with visual culture

Biography

Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects by Giorgio Vasari (1550)
Biography mixes with anecdote in this Florentine-inflected portrait of the painters and sculptors who shaped the Renaissance

The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell (1791)
Boswell draws on his journals to create an affectionate portrait of the great lexicographer

The Diaries of Samuel Pepys by Samuel Pepys (1825)
“Blessed be God, at the end of the last year I was in very good health,” begins this extraordinarily vivid diary of the Restoration period

Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey (1918)
Strachey set the template for modern biography, with this witty and irreverent account of four Victorian heroes

Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves (1929)
Graves’ autobiography tells the story of his childhood and the early years of his marriage, but the core of the book is his account of the brutalities and banalities of the first world war

The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas by Gertrude Stein (1933)
Stein’s groundbreaking biography, written in the guise of an autobiography, of her lover

Culture

Notes on Camp by Susan Sontag (1964)
Sontag’s proposition that the modern sensibility has been shaped by Jewish ethics and homosexual aesthetics

Mythologies by Roland Barthes (1972)
Barthes gets under the surface of the meanings of the things which surround us in these witty studies of contemporary myth-making

Orientalism by Edward Said (1978)
Said argues that romanticised western representations of Arab culture are political and condescending

Environment

Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (1962)
This account of the effects of pesticides on the environment launched the environmental movement in the US

The Revenge of Gaia by James Lovelock (1979)
Lovelock’s argument that once life is established on a planet, it engineers conditions for its continued survival, revolutionised our perception of our place in the scheme of things

History

The Histories by Herodotus (c400 BC)
History begins with Herodotus’s account of the Greco-Persian war

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon (1776)
The first modern historian of the Roman Empire went back to ancient sources to argue that moral decay made downfall inevitable

The History of England by Thomas Babington Macaulay (1848)
A landmark study from the pre-eminent Whig historian

Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt (1963)
Arendt’s reports on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, and explores the psychological and sociological mechanisms of the Holocaust

The Making of the English Working Class by EP Thompson (1963)
Thompson turned history on its head by focusing on the political agency of the people, whom most historians had treated as anonymous masses

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown (1970)
A moving account of the treatment of Native Americans by the US government

Hard Times: an Oral History of the Great Depression by Studs Terkel (1970)
Terkel weaves oral accounts of the Great Depression into a powerful tapestry

Shah of Shahs by Ryszard Kapuściński (1982)
The great Polish reporter tells the story of the last Shah of Iran

The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991 by Eric Hobsbawm (1994)
Hobsbawm charts the failure of capitalists and communists alike in this account of the 20th century

We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Familes by Philip Gourevitch (1999)
Gourevitch captures the terror of the Rwandan massacre, and the failures of the international community

Postwar by Tony Judt (2005)
A magisterial account of the grand sweep of European history since 1945

Journalism

The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm (1990)
An examination of the moral dilemmas at the heart of the journalist’s trade

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe (1968)
The man in the white suit follows Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters as they drive across the US in a haze of LSD

Dispatches by Michael Herr (1977)
A vivid account of Herr’s experiences of the Vietnam war

Literature

The Lives of the Poets by Samuel Johnson (1781)
Biographical and critical studies of 18th-century poets, which cast a sceptical eye on their lives and works

An Image of Africa by Chinua Achebe (1975)
Achebe challenges western cultural imperialism in his argument that Heart of Darkness is a racist novel, which deprives its African characters of humanity

The Uses of Enchantment by Bruno Bettelheim (1976)
Bettelheim argues that the darkness of fairy tales offers a means for children to grapple with their fears

Mathematics

Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter (1979)
A whimsical meditation on music, mind and mathematics that explores formal complexity and self-reference

Memoir

Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1782)
Rousseau establishes the template for modern autobiography with this intimate account of his own life

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave by Frederick Douglass (1845)
This vivid first person account was one of the first times the voice of the slave was heard in mainstream society

De Profundis by Oscar Wilde (1905)
Imprisoned in Reading Gaol, Wilde tells the story of his affair with Alfred Douglas and his spiritual development

The Seven Pillars of Wisdom by TE Lawrence (1922)
A dashing account of Lawrence’s exploits during the revolt against the Ottoman empire

The Story of My Experiments with Truth by Mahatma Gandhi (1927)
A classic of the confessional genre, Gandhi recounts early struggles and his passionate quest for self-knowledge

Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell (1938)
Orwell’s clear-eyed account of his experiences in Spain offers a portrait of confusion and betrayal during the civil war

The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank (1947)
Published by her father after the war, this account of the family’s hidden life helped to shape the post-war narrative of the Holocaust

Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov (1951)
Nabokov reflects on his life before moving to the US in 1940

The Man Died by Wole Soyinka (1971)
A powerful autobiographical account of Soyinka’s experiences in prison during the Nigerian civil war

The Periodic Table by Primo Levi (1975)
A vision of the author’s life, including his life in the concentration camps, as seen through the kaleidoscope of chemistry

Bad Blood by Lorna Sage (2000)
Sage demolishes the fantasy of family as she tells how her relatives passed rage, grief and frustrated desire down the generations

Mind

The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud (1899)
Freud’s argument that our experiences while dreaming hold the key to our psychological lives launched the discipline of psychoanalysis and transformed western culture

Music

The Romantic Generation by Charles Rosen (1998)
Rosen examines how 19th-century composers extended the boundaries of music, and their engagement with literature, landscape and the divine

Philosophy

The Symposium by Plato (c380 BC)
A lively dinner-party debate on the nature of love

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (c180)
A series of personal reflections, advocating the preservation of calm in the face of conflict, and the cultivation of a cosmic perspective

Essays by Michel de Montaigne (1580)
Montaigne’s wise, amusing examination of himself, and of human nature, launched the essay as a literary form

The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton (1621)
Burton examines all human culture through the lens of melancholy

Meditations on First Philosophy by René Descartes (1641)
Doubting everything but his own existence, Descartes tries to construct God and the universe

Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion by David Hume (1779)
Hume puts his faith to the test with a conversation examining arguments for the existence of God

Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant (1781)
If western philosophy is merely a footnote to Plato, then Kant’s attempt to unite reason with experience provides many of the subject headings

Phenomenology of Mind by GWF Hegel (1807)
Hegel takes the reader through the evolution of consciousness

Walden by HD Thoreau (1854)
An account of two years spent living in a log cabin, which examines ideas of independence and society

On Liberty by John Stuart Mill (1859)
Mill argues that “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others”

Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche (1883)
The invalid Nietzsche proclaims the death of God and the triumph of the Ubermensch

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn (1962)
A revolutionary theory about the nature of scientific progress

Politics

The Art of War by Sun Tzu (c500 BC)
A study of warfare that stresses the importance of positioning and the ability to react to changing circumstances

The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli (1532)
Machiavelli injects realism into the study of power, arguing that rulers should be prepared to abandon virtue to defend stability

Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes (1651)
Hobbes makes the case for absolute power, to prevent life from being “nasty, brutish and short”

The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine (1791)
A hugely influential defence of the French revolution, which points out the illegitimacy of governments that do not defend the rights of citizens

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft (1792)
Wollstonecraft argues that women should be afforded an education in order that they might contribute to society

The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1848)
An analysis of society and politics in terms of class struggle, which launched a movement with the ringing declaration that “proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains”

The Souls of Black Folk by WEB DuBois (1903)
A series of essays makes the case for equality in the American south

The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir (1949)
De Beauvoir examines what it means to be a woman, and how female identity has been defined with reference to men throughout history

The Wretched of the Earth by Franz Fanon (1961)
An exploration of the psychological impact of colonialisation

The Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan (1967)
This bestselling graphic popularisation of McLuhan’s ideas about technology and culture was cocreated with Quentin Fiore

The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer (1970)
Greer argues that male society represses the sexuality of women

Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman (1988)
Chomsky argues that corporate media present a distorted picture of the world, so as to maximise their profits

Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky (2008)
A vibrant first history of the ongoing social media revolution

Religion

The Golden Bough by James George Frazer (1890)
An attempt to identify the shared elements of the world’s religions, which suggests that they originate from fertility cults

The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James (1902)
James argues that the value of religions should not be measured in terms of their origin or empirical accuracy

Science

On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin (1859)
Darwin’s account of the evolution of species by natural selection transformed biology and our place in the universe

The Character of Physical Law by Richard Feynmann (1965)
An elegant exploration of physical theories from one of the 20th century’s greatest theoreticians

The Double Helix by James Watson (1968)
James Watson’s personal account of how he and Francis Crick cracked the structure of DNA

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins (1976)
Dawkins launches a revolution in biology with the suggestion that evolution is best seen from the perspective of the gene, rather than the organism

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking (1988)
A book owned by 10 million people, if understood by fewer, Hawking’s account of the origins of the universe became a publishing sensation

Society

The Book of the City of Ladies by Christine de Pisan (1405)
A defence of womankind in the form of an ideal city, populated by famous women from throughout history

Praise of Folly by Erasmus (1511)
This satirical encomium to the foolishness of man helped spark the Reformation with its skewering of abuses and corruption in the Catholic church

Letters Concerning the English Nation by Voltaire (1734)
Voltaire turns his keen eye on English society, comparing it affectionately with life on the other side of the English channel

Suicide by Émile Durkheim (1897)
An investigation into protestant and catholic culture, which argues that the less vigilant social control within catholic societies lowers the rate of suicide

Economy and Society by Max Weber (1922)
A thorough analysis of political, economic and religious mechanisms in modern society, which established the template for modern sociology

A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf (1929)
Woolf’s extended essay argues for both a literal and metaphorical space for women writers within a male-dominated literary tradition

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans (1941)
Evans’s images and Agee’s words paint a stark picture of life among sharecroppers in the US South

The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan (1963)
An exploration of the unhappiness felt by many housewives in the 1950s and 1960s, despite material comfort and stable family lives

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1966)
A novelistic account of a brutal murder in a town in Kansas, which propelled Capote to fame and fortune

Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion (1968)
Didion evokes life in 1960s California in a series of sparkling essays

The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1973)
This analysis of incarceration in the Soviet Union, including the author’s own experiences as a zek, called into question the moral foundations of the USSR

Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault (1975)
Foucault examines the development of modern society’s systems of incarceration

News of a Kidnapping by Gabriel García Márquez (1996)
Colombia’s greatest 20th-century writer tells the story of kidnappings carried out by Pablo Escobar’s Medellín cartel

Travel

The Travels of Ibn Battuta by Ibn Battuta (1355)
The Arab world’s greatest medieval traveller sets down his memories of journeys throughout the known world and beyond

Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain (1869)
Twain’s tongue-in-cheek account of his European adventures was an immediate bestseller

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West (1941)
A six-week trip to Yugoslavia provides the backbone for this monumental study of Balkan history

Venice by Jan Morris (1960)
An eccentric but learned guide to the great city’s art, history, culture and people

A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor (1977)
The first volume of Leigh Fermor’s journey on foot through Europe – a glowing evocation of youth, memory and history

Danube by Claudio Magris (1986)
Magris mixes travel, history, anecdote and literature as he tracks the Danube from its source to the sea

China Along the Yellow River by Cao Jinqing (1995)
A pioneering work of Chinese sociology, exploring modern China with a modern face

The Rings of Saturn by WG Sebald (1995)
A walking tour in East Anglia becomes a melancholy meditation on transience and decay

Passage to Juneau by Jonathan Raban (2000)
Raban sets off in a 35ft ketch on a voyage from Seattle to Alaska, exploring Native American art, the Romantic imagination and his own disintegrating relationship along the way

Letters to a Young Novelist by Mario Vargas Llosa (2002)
Vargas Llosa distils a lifetime of reading and writing into a manual of the writer’s craft

What have we missed? Help fill in the gaps and join the debate on the blog

• This article was amended on 18 July 2011. The original entry for Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood referred to an account of a brutal murder in Kansas city. This has been corrected.

T H E S E … I  … H A V E …  R E A D :

Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (1962)
This account of the effects of pesticides on the environment launched the environmental movement in the US

T H E S E I O W N B U T H A V E N ‘ T R E A D Y E T :

Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves (1929)
Graves’ autobiography tells the story of his childhood and the early years of his marriage, but the core of the book is his account of the brutalities and banalities of the first world war

The Shock of the New by Robert Hughes (1980)
Hughes charts the story of modern art, from cubism to the avant garde

The Story of Art by Ernst Gombrich (1950)
The most popular art book in history. Gombrich examines the technical and aesthetic problems confronted by artists since the dawn of time

Ways of Seeing by John Berger (1972)
A study of the ways in which we look at art, which changed the terms of a generation’s engagement with visual culture

Biography

Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects by Giorgio Vasari (1550)
Biography mixes with anecdote in this Florentine-inflected portrait of the painters and sculptors who shaped the Renaissance

The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell (1791)
Boswell draws on his journals to create an affectionate portrait of the great lexicographer

The Diaries of Samuel Pepys by Samuel Pepys (1825)
“Blessed be God, at the end of the last year I was in very good health,” begins this extraordinarily vivid diary of the Restoration period

Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey (1918)
Strachey set the template for modern biography, with this witty and irreverent account of four Victorian heroes

The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas by Gertrude Stein (1933)
Stein’s groundbreaking biography, written in the guise of an autobiography, of her lover

Culture

Notes on Camp by Susan Sontag (1964)
Sontag’s proposition that the modern sensibility has been shaped by Jewish ethics and homosexual aesthetics

Mythologies by Roland Barthes (1972)
Barthes gets under the surface of the meanings of the things which surround us in these witty studies of contemporary myth-making

Orientalism by Edward Said (1978)
Said argues that romanticised western representations of Arab culture are political and condescending

Environment

The Revenge of Gaia by James Lovelock (1979)
Lovelock’s argument that once life is established on a planet, it engineers conditions for its continued survival, revolutionised our perception of our place in the scheme of things

History

The Histories by Herodotus (c400 BC)
History begins with Herodotus’s account of the Greco-Persian war

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon (1776)
The first modern historian of the Roman Empire went back to ancient sources to argue that moral decay made downfall inevitable

The History of England by Thomas Babington Macaulay (1848)
A landmark study from the pre-eminent Whig historian

Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt (1963)
Arendt’s reports on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, and explores the psychological and sociological mechanisms of the Holocaust

The Making of the English Working Class by EP Thompson (1963)
Thompson turned history on its head by focusing on the political agency of the people, whom most historians had treated as anonymous masses

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown (1970)
A moving account of the treatment of Native Americans by the US government

Hard Times: an Oral History of the Great Depression by Studs Terkel (1970)
Terkel weaves oral accounts of the Great Depression into a powerful tapestry

Shah of Shahs by Ryszard Kapuściński (1982)
The great Polish reporter tells the story of the last Shah of Iran

The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991 by Eric Hobsbawm (1994)
Hobsbawm charts the failure of capitalists and communists alike in this account of the 20th century

We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Familes by Philip Gourevitch (1999)
Gourevitch captures the terror of the Rwandan massacre, and the failures of the international community

Postwar by Tony Judt (2005)
A magisterial account of the grand sweep of European history since 1945

Journalism

The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm (1990)
An examination of the moral dilemmas at the heart of the journalist’s trade

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe (1968)
The man in the white suit follows Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters as they drive across the US in a haze of LSD

Dispatches by Michael Herr (1977)
A vivid account of Herr’s experiences of the Vietnam war

Literature

The Lives of the Poets by Samuel Johnson (1781)
Biographical and critical studies of 18th-century poets, which cast a sceptical eye on their lives and works

An Image of Africa by Chinua Achebe (1975)
Achebe challenges western cultural imperialism in his argument that Heart of Darkness is a racist novel, which deprives its African characters of humanity

The Uses of Enchantment by Bruno Bettelheim (1976)
Bettelheim argues that the darkness of fairy tales offers a means for children to grapple with their fears

Mathematics

Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter (1979)
A whimsical meditation on music, mind and mathematics that explores formal complexity and self-reference

Memoir

Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1782)
Rousseau establishes the template for modern autobiography with this intimate account of his own life

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave by Frederick Douglass (1845)
This vivid first person account was one of the first times the voice of the slave was heard in mainstream society

De Profundis by Oscar Wilde (1905)
Imprisoned in Reading Gaol, Wilde tells the story of his affair with Alfred Douglas and his spiritual development

The Seven Pillars of Wisdom by TE Lawrence (1922)
A dashing account of Lawrence’s exploits during the revolt against the Ottoman empire

The Story of My Experiments with Truth by Mahatma Gandhi (1927)
A classic of the confessional genre, Gandhi recounts early struggles and his passionate quest for self-knowledge

Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell (1938)
Orwell’s clear-eyed account of his experiences in Spain offers a portrait of confusion and betrayal during the civil war

The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank (1947)
Published by her father after the war, this account of the family’s hidden life helped to shape the post-war narrative of the Holocaust

Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov (1951)
Nabokov reflects on his life before moving to the US in 1940

The Man Died by Wole Soyinka (1971)
A powerful autobiographical account of Soyinka’s experiences in prison during the Nigerian civil war

The Periodic Table by Primo Levi (1975)
A vision of the author’s life, including his life in the concentration camps, as seen through the kaleidoscope of chemistry

Bad Blood by Lorna Sage (2000)
Sage demolishes the fantasy of family as she tells how her relatives passed rage, grief and frustrated desire down the generations

Mind

The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud (1899)
Freud’s argument that our experiences while dreaming hold the key to our psychological lives launched the discipline of psychoanalysis and transformed western culture

Music

The Romantic Generation by Charles Rosen (1998)
Rosen examines how 19th-century composers extended the boundaries of music, and their engagement with literature, landscape and the divine

Philosophy

The Symposium by Plato (c380 BC)
A lively dinner-party debate on the nature of love

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (c180)
A series of personal reflections, advocating the preservation of calm in the face of conflict, and the cultivation of a cosmic perspective

Essays by Michel de Montaigne (1580)
Montaigne’s wise, amusing examination of himself, and of human nature, launched the essay as a literary form

The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton (1621)
Burton examines all human culture through the lens of melancholy

Meditations on First Philosophy by René Descartes (1641)
Doubting everything but his own existence, Descartes tries to construct God and the universe

Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion by David Hume (1779)
Hume puts his faith to the test with a conversation examining arguments for the existence of God

Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant (1781)
If western philosophy is merely a footnote to Plato, then Kant’s attempt to unite reason with experience provides many of the subject headings

Phenomenology of Mind by GWF Hegel (1807)
Hegel takes the reader through the evolution of consciousness

Walden by HD Thoreau (1854)
An account of two years spent living in a log cabin, which examines ideas of independence and society

On Liberty by John Stuart Mill (1859)
Mill argues that “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others”

Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche (1883)
The invalid Nietzsche proclaims the death of God and the triumph of the Ubermensch

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn (1962)
A revolutionary theory about the nature of scientific progress

Politics

The Art of War by Sun Tzu (c500 BC)
A study of warfare that stresses the importance of positioning and the ability to react to changing circumstances

The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli (1532)
Machiavelli injects realism into the study of power, arguing that rulers should be prepared to abandon virtue to defend stability

Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes (1651)
Hobbes makes the case for absolute power, to prevent life from being “nasty, brutish and short”

The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine (1791)
A hugely influential defence of the French revolution, which points out the illegitimacy of governments that do not defend the rights of citizens

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft (1792)
Wollstonecraft argues that women should be afforded an education in order that they might contribute to society

The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1848)
An analysis of society and politics in terms of class struggle, which launched a movement with the ringing declaration that “proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains”

The Souls of Black Folk by WEB DuBois (1903)
A series of essays makes the case for equality in the American south

The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir (1949)
De Beauvoir examines what it means to be a woman, and how female identity has been defined with reference to men throughout history

The Wretched of the Earth by Franz Fanon (1961)
An exploration of the psychological impact of colonialisation

The Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan (1967)
This bestselling graphic popularisation of McLuhan’s ideas about technology and culture was cocreated with Quentin Fiore

The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer (1970)
Greer argues that male society represses the sexuality of women

Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman (1988)
Chomsky argues that corporate media present a distorted picture of the world, so as to maximise their profits

Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky (2008)
A vibrant first history of the ongoing social media revolution

Religion

The Golden Bough by James George Frazer (1890)
An attempt to identify the shared elements of the world’s religions, which suggests that they originate from fertility cults

The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James (1902)
James argues that the value of religions should not be measured in terms of their origin or empirical accuracy

Science

On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin (1859)
Darwin’s account of the evolution of species by natural selection transformed biology and our place in the universe

The Character of Physical Law by Richard Feynmann (1965)
An elegant exploration of physical theories from one of the 20th century’s greatest theoreticians

The Double Helix by James Watson (1968)
James Watson’s personal account of how he and Francis Crick cracked the structure of DNA

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins (1976)
Dawkins launches a revolution in biology with the suggestion that evolution is best seen from the perspective of the gene, rather than the organism

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking (1988)
A book owned by 10 million people, if understood by fewer, Hawking’s account of the origins of the universe became a publishing sensation

Society

The Book of the City of Ladies by Christine de Pisan (1405)
A defence of womankind in the form of an ideal city, populated by famous women from throughout history

Praise of Folly by Erasmus (1511)
This satirical encomium to the foolishness of man helped spark the Reformation with its skewering of abuses and corruption in the Catholic church

Letters Concerning the English Nation by Voltaire (1734)
Voltaire turns his keen eye on English society, comparing it affectionately with life on the other side of the English channel

Suicide by Émile Durkheim (1897)
An investigation into protestant and catholic culture, which argues that the less vigilant social control within catholic societies lowers the rate of suicide

Economy and Society by Max Weber (1922)
A thorough analysis of political, economic and religious mechanisms in modern society, which established the template for modern sociology

A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf (1929)
Woolf’s extended essay argues for both a literal and metaphorical space for women writers within a male-dominated literary tradition

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans (1941)
Evans’s images and Agee’s words paint a stark picture of life among sharecroppers in the US South

The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan (1963)
An exploration of the unhappiness felt by many housewives in the 1950s and 1960s, despite material comfort and stable family lives

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1966)
A novelistic account of a brutal murder in a town in Kansas, which propelled Capote to fame and fortune

Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion (1968)
Didion evokes life in 1960s California in a series of sparkling essays

The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1973)
This analysis of incarceration in the Soviet Union, including the author’s own experiences as a zek, called into question the moral foundations of the USSR

Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault (1975)
Foucault examines the development of modern society’s systems of incarceration

News of a Kidnapping by Gabriel García Márquez (1996)
Colombia’s greatest 20th-century writer tells the story of kidnappings carried out by Pablo Escobar’s Medellín cartel

Travel

The Travels of Ibn Battuta by Ibn Battuta (1355)
The Arab world’s greatest medieval traveller sets down his memories of journeys throughout the known world and beyond

Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain (1869)
Twain’s tongue-in-cheek account of his European adventures was an immediate bestseller

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West (1941)
A six-week trip to Yugoslavia provides the backbone for this monumental study of Balkan history

Venice by Jan Morris (1960)
An eccentric but learned guide to the great city’s art, history, culture and people

A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor (1977)
The first volume of Leigh Fermor’s journey on foot through Europe – a glowing evocation of youth, memory and history

Danube by Claudio Magris (1986)
Magris mixes travel, history, anecdote and literature as he tracks the Danube from its source to the sea

China Along the Yellow River by Cao Jinqing (1995)
A pioneering work of Chinese sociology, exploring modern China with a modern face

The Rings of Saturn by WG Sebald (1995)
A walking tour in East Anglia becomes a melancholy meditation on transience and decay

Passage to Juneau by Jonathan Raban (2000)
Raban sets off in a 35ft ketch on a voyage from Seattle to Alaska, exploring Native American art, the Romantic imagination and his own disintegrating relationship along the way

Letters to a Young Novelist by Mario Vargas Llosa (2002)
Vargas Llosa distils a lifetime of reading and writing into a manual of the writer’s craft

What have we missed? Help fill in the gaps and join the debate on the blog

• This article was amended on 18 July 2011. The original entry for Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood referred to an account of a brutal murder in Kansas city. This has been corrected.

Speaker Boehner,
Budgets, a borrowing limit and taxes are the topic du jur. Here are my priorities:

#1 Raise the debt ceiling. The Tea Party wackos can say anything they want, but they don’t have a majority in the congress to override the veto of the Adult in Chief, nor do they run the Senate. You’re playing “dog in the manger” and it belittles you, your party and our country. You’ve stated your opinion. The nation does not agree. Time to do the people’s business, without gimmicks or gotchas.

#2 Raise my taxes. We’re well off. Really. If we’re paying 17%, of our income in taxes, as Turbotax tells me, then it should probably be 18% or 19%. Thousands more, per year. Giving rich people tax breaks and living on the credit card is crazy. Time to stop. Paying down the accumulated debt would be good too.

#3 Cut spending. Start with all the things people say they now get that they don’t need. Not what other people get, what they benefit from themselves. Don’t cut something that benefits Paula to make Peter happy. People willing to give their own money, in the form of higher taxes, or forgo benefits they enjoy, lower payments, have something to say. People who want to cut other people’s benefits or get a net reduction in what they pay and have someone else fix the problem aren’t worth your time. That would include the majority of the Republican Party and pretty much all of the Tea Party.

Stand tall. Show some leadership. Propose an unconditional rise in the debt ceiling, at this late hour, and see who the real patriots are. Stanley Crouch once observed that not getting what you want is a democratic act. Perhaps the fundamental one. Kings and dictators and juntas rule by inspiration and conviction. Democracies are ruled by compromise.

Cutting billions of dollars in spending at the last minute under intense pressure, while the tinfoil hat brigade just want to wreck everything they don’t understand, isn’t any way for our great nation to be governed. You’ve had months to prepare for this business. Tossing out plans the CPO hasn’t scored yet isn’t doing what I pay you for. Your district elected you, but having asked to be Speaker, you work for me too. You’re doing a terrible job. Come to your senses.

Raise the debt limit. Raise my taxes, and your own. Cut spending on what we can’t afford. Or step aside and let an adult take the job.

Best regards,
Bill Abbott

abbott.bill@gmail.com

What am I talking about??

If your Python program will create file path names for Windows computers, you need to be extra thoughtful as you enter string constants for them.

For example, consider the string "blather\pather\gather"
Give that to the Python Interpreter, and it will show you how it is understood by Python:

>>>
>>> "blather\pather\gather"
'blather\\pather\\gather'
>>>

See what happedened to “blather\pather\gather”?
Python put an escape back slash before each of the (presumably) literal back slashes. Its easy to see if you line them up:

"blather\pather\gather"
'blather\\pather\\gather'

The string delimiters have changed too- python gives ‘ and ” the same meaning, defaults to ‘ and requires them to be used in pairs. ” is an empty string, “” is an empty string, ‘” opens a quoted string inside a quoted string. Better not close it backwards: “”” is an empty string. “‘”‘ is missing a close “.

So far, so good. You might think Python will understand back slashes in things you identify as strings and respect them. That’s nice.

Change the string to
"blather\rather\ather"
>>>"blather\rather\x07ther"

What’s that?? Turns out that Python recognizes “\r” as (carriage return), “\n” a newline and “\t” as a tab. And \a as (control)a, with is slightly startling. But not \G or \g as “bell”…

So they’re compound characters, and they get issued without escapes being added. Why? I don’t know. But I do know that putting an excape backslash before the delimiter backslash results in the text being left alone, and written out exactly the same. And when it goes to Windows, Windows strips off the first backslash and correctly interprets the second one.

Here’s an advantage for Python, as my friend James points out. You can just look at what it does and how it sees things. The realization I’m reporting started wth a Python script trying to call a Windows .bat script… it worked well for some .bat scripts and didn’t work for others. ?!?!?!

You care about two keywords in a file- apples and oranges, and you also care about about their relative positions, for whatever reason. So grepping for each, separately, is nice, but you’d really like to grep for one OR the other.

Did I mention this was grep?

grep -i ‘apple\|orange’ *filename.ext*

The -i makes it case-insensitive, just like you’d want on a first pass. The “|” vertical bar is a familiar OR operator, and the only tricky parts are to a) put the whole thing in a single set of single quotes- the two words and the operator are a single syntactic unit, and b) use a back-slash to mark the vertical bar as an operator and not just a literal vertical bar.

I used apple and orange in the title because they are canonically “unrelated” things, but where this technique is really useful is when the unrelated things are in orthagonal kinds: fruits and deserts. If you’ve got your recipes filed or a cookbook on line, grep -i ‘pie\|apple’ will produce all the refernces to either. Pies involving apples will be found where ‘apple’ has ‘pie’ both above and below… As a human, you have a right to do that last bit in your head, the sorting out that we gatherer-hunters are bred for.