Download or read book Exhalation written by Ted Chiang and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2019-05-07 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR • Nine stunningly original, provocative, and poignant stories—two published for the very first time—all from the mind of the incomparable author of Stories of Your Life and Others Tackling some of humanity’s oldest questions along with new quandaries only he could imagine, these stories will change the way you think, feel, and see the world. They are Ted Chiang at his best: profound, sympathetic, revelatory. Ted Chiang tackles some of humanity’s oldest questions along with new quandaries only he could imagine. In “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” a portal through time forces a fabric seller in ancient Baghdad to grapple with past mistakes and second chances. In “Exhalation,” an alien scientist makes a shocking discovery with ramifications that are literally universal. In “Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom,” the ability to glimpse into alternate universes necessitates a radically new examination of the concepts of choice and free will.
Download or read book Breathmoss and Other Exhalations written by Ian R. MacLeod and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of literary short fiction combines fantasy, science fiction, and horror in vivid settings, peopled with ordinary humans with normal relationships, and the interaction of the mundane with the fantastic. In "Breathmoss," a young girl must cope with the relationship with her family, love, and a community set in rigid custom, where males are a rarity. In "Verglas," a man must decide to leave his humanity by going native on an ice world or abandon his family. The events leading to the formation of the current government, the repression of Jews and homosexuals, and the horrors of being a closet homosexual in such a regime are examined in "The Summer Isles." Other stories encompass a scientist who searches for extraterrestrial intelligence; a rigid, aged man finding magic by a pool; and an 18-year-old girl who gains the reputation of being a death flower during WWII.
Download or read book The Illuminated Breath written by Dylan Werner and published by Victory Belt Publishing. This book was released on 2021-02-23 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From our first breath to our last, we spend our entire lives in a perpetual cycle of inhalations and exhalations. Yet few of us are taught how to breathe, why we breathe, or the ways in which the breath influences us emotionally, energetically, physically, and spiritually. The Illuminated Breath is a revolutionary manual on unlocking the power of the breath. With humor, clarity, and an appreciation for the art of storytelling, revered yoga practitioner Dylan Werner delves into the rich histories of breathing techniques and breath work, while validating these practices with a strong lean toward physiology and science. Using enlightening, practical examples from everyday life, Werner explains how energy flows through the body and how the breath can be used to regulate and control that flow. He walks readers through pranayama, the ancient yogic practice of breath control, and explains the four components of the breath cycle. He then introduces pranayama practices, which can be used on their own or combined into sequences to achieve specific goals. The final part of this book leads readers through a series of targeted breath sequences that are designed to boost athletic performance and recovery, improve sleep, enhance cognitive function, relieve anxiety, promote deep relaxation, and more. Each sequence is customizable and can be modified or used in combination with other sequences to create a personalized breath plan. Embark on a life-changing journey as you learn how to breathe optimally and bring balance to your life, one inhalation and exhalation at a time.
Download or read book Let Me Clear My Throat written by Elena Passarello and published by Sarabande Books. This book was released on 2012-10-09 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A remarkably entertaining and thought-provoking look at the human voice and all of its myriad functions and sounds . . . Wonderful” (Library Journal, starred review). From Farinelli, the eighteenth-century castrato who brought down opera houses with his high C, to the recording of Johnny B. Goode affixed to the Voyager spacecraft, Let Me Clear My Throat dissects the whys and hows of popular voices, making them hum with significance and emotion. There are murders of punk rock crows, impressionists, and rebel yells; Howard Dean’s “BYAH!” and Marlon Brando’s “Stellaaaaa!” and a stock film yawp that has made cameos in movies from A Star is Born to Spaceballs. The voice is thought’s incarnating instrument and Elena Passarello’s essays are a riotous deconstruction of the ways the sounds we make both express and shape who we are—the annotated soundtrack of us giving voice to ourselves. “Standout pieces include a biography of the most famous scream in Hollywood history; a breakdown of the relationship between song and birdsong; and an analysis of the sounds of disgust. Akin to: A dinner party at which David Sedaris, Mary Roach and Marlon Brando are trying to out-monologue one another.” —Philadelphia Weekly “The beauty of Ellen Passarello’s voice is that it’s so confidently its own . . . I began randomly with her essay wondering what the space aliens will make of ‘Johnny B. Goode’ on the Voyager gold record and couldn’t stop after that.” —John Jeremiah Sullivan, author of Pulphead
Download or read book The Merchant and the Alchemist s Gate written by Ted Chiang and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This curious time-travel novella is a gracefully told lesson about accepting fate-or, as better suits this medieval Arabian setting, the will of Allah. A Baghdad merchant discovers an alchemical device that can send a traveler back in time 20 years. Despite the alchemist's warning that "what is made cannot be unmade," and three illustrative tales about others' attempts to alter the past, the merchant is determined to return to an earlier time to save his long-dead wife
Download or read book Your Guide to Forest Bathing Expanded Edition written by M. Amos Clifford and published by Red Wheel. This book was released on 2021-08-01 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The bestselling guide to forest bathing with a new section of hands-on forest bathing practices and space for journal entries and reflections. Simply being present in the natural world, with all of our senses fully alive, can have a remarkably healing effect. It can also awaken in us our latent but profound connection with all living things. This is “forest bathing,” a practice inspired by the Japanese tradition of shinrin-yoku. It is a gentle, meditative approach to being with nature and an antidote to our nature-starved lives that can heal our relationship with the more-than-human world. In Your Guide to Forest Bathing, you'll discover a path that you can use to begin a practice of your own that includes specific activities presented by Amos Clifford, one of the world’s most experienced forest bathing experts. Whether you’re in a forest or woodland, public park, or just your own backyard, this book will be your personal guide as you explore the natural world in a way you may have never thought possible.
Download or read book Silverchest written by Carl Phillips and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2014-07-15 with total page 73 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "After / the afterlife, there's an afterlife." In Silverchest, his twelfth book, Carl Phillips considers how our fears and excesses, the damage we cause both to others and to ourselves, intentional and not, can lead not only to a kind of wisdom but also to renewal, maybe even joy, if we're willing to commit fully to a life in which "I love you / means what, exactly?" In poems shot through with his signature mix of eros, restless energy, and moral scrutiny, Phillips argues for the particular courage it takes to look at the self squarely—not with judgment but with understanding—and extend that self more honestly toward others. It's a risk, there's a lot to lose, but if it's true that "we'll drown anyway—why not / in color?"
Download or read book The Second Wish and Other Exhalations written by Brian Lumley and published by Crossroad Press. This book was released on 2017-07-13 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This may be The Second Wish, but it's the third witch's dozen of nerve-rending stories of the macabre from the man who gave you the internationally bestselling Necroscope and Vampire World series. Brian Lumley's The Second Wish and Other Exhalations maintains the nightmarish tradition established by his Fruiting Bodies and Other Fungi and Dagon's Bell and Other Discords to complete a trilogy of terror. From Lovecraftian tales such as "The House of the Temple", "Rising With Surtsey" and the title story, to such contemporary horrors as "The Sun, the Sea, and the Silent Scream" and "The Luststone", this new collection has been culled from the writings of a true Master of Nightmares. Remember: in the field of no-holds-barred terror fiction, there's Brian Lumley – and then there's the rest… Stories included in this collection: The Second Wish The Sun, the Sea, and the Silent Scream De Marigny's Clock The Luststone Mother Love What Dark God? The Thief Immortal The House of the Temple Back Row Name and Number Snarker's Son Rising With Surtsey David's Worm
Download or read book The Waterless Sea written by Christopher Pinney and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2018-05-15 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mirages have long astonished travelers of the sea and beguiled thirsty desert voyagers. Traditional Chinese and Japanese poetry and art depict the above-horizon, superior mirage, or fata morgana, as exhalations of clam-monsters. Indian sources relate mirages to the “thirst of gazelles,” a metaphor for the futility of desire. Starting in the late eighteenth century, mirages became a symbol in the West of Oriental despotism—a negative, but also enchanted, emblem. But the mirage motif is rarely simply condemnatory. More often, our obsession with mirages conveys a sense of escape, of fascination, of a desire to be deceived. The Waterless Sea is the first book devoted to the theories and history of mirages. Christopher Pinney navigates a sinuous pathway through a mysterious and evanescent terrain, showing how mirages have impacted politics, culture, science, and religion—and how we can continue to learn from their sublimity.
Download or read book Breath written by James Nestor and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-05-26 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Bestseller A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2020 Named a Best Book of 2020 by NPR “A fascinating scientific, cultural, spiritual and evolutionary history of the way humans breathe—and how we’ve all been doing it wrong for a long, long time.” —Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Big Magic and Eat Pray Love No matter what you eat, how much you exercise, how skinny or young or wise you are, none of it matters if you’re not breathing properly. There is nothing more essential to our health and well-being than breathing: take air in, let it out, repeat twenty-five thousand times a day. Yet, as a species, humans have lost the ability to breathe correctly, with grave consequences. Journalist James Nestor travels the world to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it. The answers aren’t found in pulmonology labs, as we might expect, but in the muddy digs of ancient burial sites, secret Soviet facilities, New Jersey choir schools, and the smoggy streets of São Paulo. Nestor tracks down men and women exploring the hidden science behind ancient breathing practices like Pranayama, Sudarshan Kriya, and Tummo and teams up with pulmonary tinkerers to scientifically test long-held beliefs about how we breathe. Modern research is showing us that making even slight adjustments to the way we inhale and exhale can jump-start athletic performance; rejuvenate internal organs; halt snoring, asthma, and autoimmune disease; and even straighten scoliotic spines. None of this should be possible, and yet it is. Drawing on thousands of years of medical texts and recent cutting-edge studies in pulmonology, psychology, biochemistry, and human physiology, Breath turns the conventional wisdom of what we thought we knew about our most basic biological function on its head. You will never breathe the same again.
Download or read book The Lifecycle of Software Objects written by Ted Chiang and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What's the best way to create artificial intelligence? In 1950, Alan Turing wrote, "Many people think that a very abstract activity, like the playing of chess, would be best. It can also be maintained that it is best to provide the machine with the best sense organs that money can buy, and then teach it to understand and speak English. This process could follow the normal teaching of a child. Things would be pointed out and named, etc. Again I do not know what the right answer is, but I think both approaches should be tried." The first approach has been tried many times in both science fiction and reality. In this new novella, at over 30,000 words, his longest work to date, Ted Chiang offers a detailed imagining of how the second approach might work within the contemporary landscape of startup companies, massively-multiplayer online gaming, and open-source software. It's a story of two people and the artificial intelligences they helped create, following them for more than a decade as they deal with the upgrades and obsolescence that are inevitable in the world of software. At the same time, it's an examination of the difference between processing power and intelligence, and of what it means to have a real relationship with an artificial entity.
Download or read book Gaining Ground written by Nancy S. Seasholes and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2018-04-20 with total page 553 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why and how Boston was transformed by landmaking. Fully one-sixth of Boston is built on made land. Although other waterfront cities also have substantial areas that are built on fill, Boston probably has more than any city in North America. In Gaining Ground historian Nancy Seasholes has given us the first complete account of when, why, and how this land was created.The story of landmaking in Boston is presented geographically; each chapter traces landmaking in a different part of the city from its first permanent settlement to the present. Seasholes introduces findings from recent archaeological investigations in Boston, and relates landmaking to the major historical developments that shaped it. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, landmaking in Boston was spurred by the rapid growth that resulted from the burgeoning China trade. The influx of Irish immigrants in the mid-nineteenth century prompted several large projects to create residential land—not for the Irish, but to keep the taxpaying Yankees from fleeing to the suburbs. Many landmaking projects were undertaken to cover tidal flats that had been polluted by raw sewage discharged directly onto them, removing the "pestilential exhalations" thought to cause illness. Land was also added for port developments, public parks, and transportation facilities, including the largest landmaking project of all, the airport. A separate chapter discusses the technology of landmaking in Boston, explaining the basic method used to make land and the changes in its various components over time. The book is copiously illustrated with maps that show the original shoreline in relation to today's streets, details from historical maps that trace the progress of landmaking, and historical drawings and photographs.
Download or read book Stories of Your Life and Others written by Ted Chiang and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2010-10-26 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of Exhalation, an award-winning short story collection that blends "absorbing storytelling with meditations on the universe, being, time and space ... raises questions about the nature of reality and what it is to be human" (The New York Times). Stories of Your Life and Others delivers dual delights of the very, very strange and the heartbreakingly familiar, often presenting characters who must confront sudden change—the inevitable rise of automatons or the appearance of aliens—with some sense of normalcy. With sharp intelligence and humor, Chiang examines what it means to be alive in a world marked by uncertainty, but also by beauty and wonder. An award-winning collection from one of today's most lauded writers, Stories of Your Life and Others is a contemporary classic. Includes “Story of Your Life”—the basis for the major motion picture Arrival
Download or read book On the Growth of Plants in Closely Glazed Cases written by Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward and published by . This book was released on 1852 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Poetics of Breathing written by Stefanie Heine and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2021-05-01 with total page 532 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Breathing and its rhythms—liminal, syncopal, and usually inconspicuous—have become a core poetic compositional principle in modern literature. Examining moments when breath's punctuations, cessations, inhalations, or exhalations operate at the limits of meaningful speech, Stefanie Heine explores how literary texts reflect their own mediality, production, and reception in alluding to and incorporating pneumatic rhythms, respiratory sound, and silent pauses. Through close readings of works by a series of pairs—Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg; Robert Musil and Virginia Woolf; Samuel Beckett and Sylvia Plath; and Paul Celan and Herta Müller—Poetics of Breathing suggests that each offers a different conception of literary or poetic breath as a precondition of writing. Presenting a challenge to historical and contemporary discourses that tie breath to the transcendent and the natural, Heine traces a decoupling of breath from its traditional association with life, and asks what literature might lie beyond.
Download or read book Chimpanzee Travels written by Dale Peterson and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lifelong fascination with primates led Dale Peterson to Africa, which he crisscrossed in hope of sighting chimpanzees in the wild. As with any adventure worth retelling, however, Peterson's detours are as notable as his destinations. With the good-natured fatalism of the tested traveler, Peterson tells of trains and riverboats, opportunists and ecotourists, rain forests and shantytowns as he conveys the pitfalls of going forth on a budget as tiny as the continent is vast. Along the way, we also meet Jane Goodall and several other renowned primate researchers and caretakers. This is travel writing with a purpose, an account that inspires both admiration and concern for Africa's people, places, and natural diversity.
Download or read book The Definitive Book of Body Language written by Barbara Pease and published by Bantam. This book was released on 2008-11-12 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Available for the first time in the United States, this international bestseller reveals the secrets of nonverbal communication to give you confidence and control in any face-to-face encounter—from making a great first impression and acing a job interview to finding the right partner. It is a scientific fact that people’s gestures give away their true intentions. Yet most of us don’t know how to read body language– and don’t realize how our own physical movements speak to others. Now the world’s foremost experts on the subject share their techniques for reading body language signals to achieve success in every area of life. Drawing upon more than thirty years in the field, as well as cutting-edge research from evolutionary biology, psychology, and medical technologies that demonstrate what happens in the brain, the authors examine each component of body language and give you the basic vocabulary to read attitudes and emotions through behavior. Discover: • How palms and handshakes are used to gain control • The most common gestures of liars • How the legs reveal what the mind wants to do • The most common male and female courtship gestures and signals • The secret signals of cigarettes, glasses, and makeup • The magic of smiles–including smiling advice for women • How to use nonverbal cues and signals to communicate more effectively and get the reactions you want Filled with fascinating insights, humorous observations, and simple strategies that you can apply to any situation, this intriguing book will enrich your communication with and understanding of others–as well as yourself.
