Download or read book Gigantic Lengths and Other Vast Megastructures written by Ian Graham and published by QED Publishing. This book was released on 2012-04 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The tallest, the biggest, the longest and the deepest - all these amazing megastructures are revealed in detail with some incredible facts and statistics to absorb!
Download or read book Earths of Distant Suns written by Michael Carroll and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-10-03 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on the latest missions results and supported by commissioned artwork, this book explores the possible lessons we may learn from exoplanets. As the number of known Earth-like objects grows significantly, the author explores what is known about the growing roster of "pale blue dots" far afield. Aided by an increased sensitivity of the existing observatories, recent discoveries by Keck, the Hubble Space Telescope, and Kepler are examined. These findings, once thought to be closer to the realm of science fiction, have fired the imaginations of the general public as well as scientists. All of us are mesmerized by the possibility of other Earth-like worlds out there. Author Michael Carroll asks the tough questions of what the expected gain is from identifying these Earth analogs spread across the Universe and the reasons for studying them. Potentially, they could teach us about our own climate and Solar System. Also explored are the more remote options of communication between or even travel to these distant yet perhaps not so dissimilar worlds.
Download or read book Manmade Modular Megastructures written by Ian Abley and published by Academy Press. This book was released on 2006-04-07 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There will be 8.3 billion human beings on Earth by 2030, and the more the better. We have the opportunity to create a world of expansive megacities - including one around old London. Doing so will advance the art, science and processes of manufacturing. But to deploy those abilities we must shrug off the dogma of sustainability that insists only small can be beautiful. Humanity has come a long way since the first modular mega-structure was built at Ur, on land that is now Iraq. There, four millennia ago, and by hand, the Sumerians built a mud-brick ziggurat to their Gods. Today, the green deities of Nature we have invented for ourselves are worshipped with humility. Eco-zealots argue against the mechanised megaforming of landscape and the modularised production of megastructures. The guest editors, Jonathan Schwinge and Ian Abley of the London based research organisation audacity, call for development on a bold scale. They argue that by rapidly super-sizing the built environment society is not made vulnerable to natural or man-made hazards, and that design innovation surpasses bio-mimicry. Designers can learn from materials scientists working at the smallest of scales, and from systems manufacturers with ambitions at the largest. This issue calls for creative thinking about typologies and topologies, and considers what that also means for Africa, China, and Russia. Megacities everywhere demand integration of global systems of transport, utilities and IT in gigantic structures, constantly upgraded, scraping both the sky and the ground, outward into the sea.
Download or read book Megastructure written by Reyner Banham and published by The Monacelli Press, LLC. This book was released on 2020-06-16 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A long-sought reprint of this classic of architectural history and criticism, surveying a movement that would inspire architects, fantasists, and filmmakers alike. It is an architectural concept as alluring as it is elusive, as futuristic as it is primordial. Megastructure is what it sounds like: a vastly scaled edifice that can contain potentially countless uses, contexts, and adaptations. Theorized and briefly experimented with in built form in the 1960s, megastructures almost as quickly went out of fashion in the profession. But Reyner Banham's 1976 book compiled the origin stories and ongoing mythos of this visionary movement, seeking to chart its lively rise, rapid fall, and ongoing meaning. Now back in print after decades and with original editions fetching well over $100 on the secondary market, Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past is part of the recent surge in attention to this quixotic form, of which some examples were built but to this day remains--decades after its codification--more of a poetic idea than a real architectural type. Banham, among the most gifted and incisive architectural critics and historians of his time, sought connections between theoretical origins in Le Corbusier's more starry-eyed drawings to the flurry of theories by the Japanese Metabolist architects, to less intentional examples in military architecture, industry, infrastructure, and the emerging instances in pop culture and art. Had he written the book a few years later he would find an abundance of examples in speculative art and science fiction cinema, mediums where it continues to provoke wonder to this day. A long-sought study by an author who combined imagination, wit, and pioneering scholarship, the republication of Megastructure is an opportunity for scholars and laypeople alike to return to the origins of this fantastic urban idea.
Download or read book Last Futures written by Douglas Murphy and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2016-02-09 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whatever happened to the last utopian dreams of the city? In the late 1960s the world was faced with impending disaster: the height of the Cold War, the end of oil and the decline of great cities throughout the world. Out of this crisis came a new generation that hoped to build a better future, influenced by visions of geodesic domes, walking cities and a meaningful connection with nature. In this brilliant work of cultural history, architect Douglas Murphy traces the lost archeology of the present day through the works of thinkers and designers such as Buckminster Fuller, the ecological pioneer Stewart Brand, the Archigram architects who envisioned the Plug-In City in the ’60s, as well as co-operatives in Vienna, communes in the Californian desert and protesters on the streets of Paris. In this mind-bending account of the last avant-garde, we see not just the source of our current problems but also some powerful alternative futures.
Download or read book Contagion Capitalism written by Sean Creaven and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-12-15 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contagion Capitalism situates the COVID-19 pandemic within the systems of global political economy and their attendant cultural modes and theorizes that these systems act as facilitators and drivers of global pandemic risk. Contagion Capitalism therefore critiques the institutionalized corporate-capitalist control of the economy, the state, and science, and the grave consequences this has on global public health policy, the ecological crisis of sustainability, and zoonotic pandemic events such as COVID-19. In doing so, this book addresses the failings of what may be termed as “state science” or “establishment science” in managing the pandemic, as personified especially by those elements of the scientific elite placed in the service of the neoliberal state. This book also explores the limitations of corporate pharmacological technoscience in safeguarding public health, arguing that “Big Pharma” offers only partial remedies for problems of human illness and well-being, poses its own dangers to public health, and obfuscates the social bases of public ill-health and of pandemic risk. Contagion Capitalism further argues that COVID-19 will not be the last or even the most dangerous such epidemiological event. This is because the social production and global dissemination of zoonotic diseases is integral to contemporary capitalism, by virtue of its instrumental mode of science, its central dynamic of production for the sake of accumulation, and the consumer mode this sustains as its own condition of existence. These are the drivers of what may be termed as zoonotic accelerationism. Contagion Capitalism will appeal to scholars in the humanities and social sciences with interests in neoliberal ideology and global political economy, and their impact upon social, political and cultural life.
Download or read book Adventures of an Accidental Sociologist written by Peter L. Berger and published by Prometheus Books. This book was released on 2011-06-07 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Peter L. Berger is arguably the best-known American sociologist living today. Since the 1960s he has been publishing books on many facets of the American social scene, and several are now considered classics. So it may be hard to believe Professor Berger’s description of himself as an "accidental sociologist." But that in fact accurately describes how he stumbled into sociology. In this witty, intellectually stimulating memoir, Berger explains not only how he became a social scientist, but the many adventures that this calling has led to. Rather than writing an autobiography, he focuses on the main intellectual issues that motivated his work and the various people and situations he encountered in the course of his career. Full of memorable vignettes and colorful characters depicted in a lively narrative often laced with humor, Berger’s memoir conveys the excitement that a study of social life can bring. The first part of the book describes Berger’s initiation into sociology through the New School for Social Research, "a European enclave in the midst of Greenwich Village bohemia." Berger was first a student at the New School and later a young professor amidst a clique of like-minded individuals. There he published The Social Construction of Reality (with colleague Thomas Luckmann), one of his most successful books, followed by The Sacred Canopy on the sociology of religion, also still widely cited. The book covers Berger’s experience as a "globe-trekking sociologist" including trips to Mexico, where he studied approaches to Third World poverty; to East Asia, where he discovered the potential of capitalism to improve social conditions; and to South Africa, where he chaired an international study group on the future of post-Apartheid society. Berger then tells about his role as the director of a research center at Boston University. For over two decades he and his colleagues have been tackling such important issues as globalization, the secularization of Europe, and the ongoing dialectic between relativism and fundamentalism in contemporary culture. What comes across throughout is Berger’s boundless curiosity with the many ways in which people interact in society. This book offers longtime Berger readers as well as newcomers to sociology proof that the sociologist’s attempt to explain the world is anything but boring.
Download or read book Heaven s River written by Dennis E. Taylor and published by . This book was released on 2021-01-26 with total page 632 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Civil war looms in the Bobiverse in this brand-new, epic-length adventure by best seller Dennis E. Taylor. More than a hundred years ago, Bender set out for the stars and was never heard from again. There has been no trace of him despite numerous searches by his clone-mates. Now Bob is determined to organize an expedition to learn Bender's fate-whatever the cost. But nothing is ever simple in the Bobiverse. Bob's descendants are out to the 24th generation now, and replicative drift has produced individuals who can barely be considered Bobs anymore. Some of them oppose Bob's plan; others have plans of their own. The out-of-control moots are the least of the Bobiverse's problems. Undaunted, Bob and his allies follow Bender's trail. But what they discover out in deep space is so unexpected and so complex that it could either save the universe-or pose an existential threat the likes of which the Bobiverse has never faced.
Download or read book Corridors to Extinction and the Australian Megafauna written by Steve Webb and published by Newnes. This book was released on 2013-02-27 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Extinctions have always occurred and always will, so what is so surprising about the megafauna extinctions? They were caused by humans and were the first of many extinctions that eventually led to the extinction of the Moa, Steller's Sea Cow, the Dodo, Great Auk and countless other species great and small, all attributed to human agency. Therefore, the megafauna were humans’ first great impact on the planet. There is now an increasing realization that the 'blitzkrieg' view of these extinctions may have been wrong. A growing body of evidence and long-term field work is beginning to show that at least Australia's megafauna did not succumb to human agency, not because humans probably did not hunt the odd animal but because the an infinitely more logical reason lies in the climatic conditions of the Quaternary Ice Ages and the affect they had on continental geography, environment, climate and, most importantly, the biogeography of the megafauna. This book presents the evidence of this theory, demonstrating the biogeographic approach to Australia’s megafauna extinction. Written clearly to benefit a diverse level of readers, from those with a passing interest to professionals in the field. Examines future climate change and its effects on the planet by looking at examples buried in the past Presents new evidence from extensive field research
Download or read book Earth Roar written by Nick Cook and published by Voice from the Clouds. This book was released on 2021-12-17 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The time has come for humanity’s last stand against the threat from the stars that unless it is stopped, will wipe out all life on Earth. The final instalment of the Earth Song series heralds the arrival of the Kimprak asteroid ship in our solar system and where the stage will be set for an epic confrontation. Whilst Lauren and the team work to bring Tempest’s systems rapidly online, Eden is throwing all its resources into preparing starship for battle. Production is also working flat out to replace as many of the X-craft as possible after so many were lost at the battle with the Kimprak over Antarctica. With everything now on the line, they must also attempt to create a true alliance with a former enemy if our world to have any chance of defending itself from the alien threat. When the Kimprak mothership is detected passing through the Oort Cloud it soon becomes apparent that the final battle in the orbit of Jupiter will be far worse than anything they could have ever imagined. Lauren will also face the ultimate decision, but will she have the strength to go through what will be asked of her as commander before the end? Earth Roar is the sequel to Earth Scream, and is part of the Multiverse Chronicles, an epic series of interlinked stories that follow humanity’s struggle to survive across parallel universes.
Download or read book SCP Series Two Field Manual written by SCP Foundation and published by Abandondero. This book was released on with total page 4615 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: SCP Foundation anomalies SCP-1000 through to SCP-1999, including containment procedures, experiment logs and interview transcripts. An encyclopedia of the unnatural. The Foundation Operating clandestine and worldwide, the Foundation operates beyond jurisdiction, empowered and entrusted by every major national government with the task of containing anomalous objects, entities, and phenomena. These anomalies pose a significant threat to global security by threatening either physical or psychological harm. The Foundation operates to maintain normalcy, so that the worldwide civilian population can live and go on with their daily lives without fear, mistrust, or doubt in their personal beliefs, and to maintain human independence from extraterrestrial, extradimensional, and other extranormal influence. Our mission is three-fold: Secure The Foundation secures anomalies with the goal of preventing them from falling into the hands of civilian or rival agencies, through extensive observation and surveillance and by acting to intercept such anomalies at the earliest opportunity. Contain The Foundation contains anomalies with the goal of preventing their influence or effects from spreading, by either relocating, concealing, or dismantling such anomalies or by suppressing or preventing public dissemination of knowledge thereof. Protect The Foundation protects humanity from the effects of such anomalies as well as the anomalies themselves until such time that they are either fully understood or new theories of science can be devised based on their properties and behavior. ———————————— About the ebook This ebook is an offline edition of the second series of fictional documentation from the SCP Foundation Wiki. All illustrations, subsections and supporting documentation pages are included. All content is indexed and cross-referenced. Essentially, this is what a SCP Foundation researcher would carry day-to-day in their Foundation-issued ebook reader. The text has been optimised for offline reading on phones and ebook readers, and for listening to via Google Play Book’s Read Aloud feature. Tables have been edited into a format that is intelligible when read aloud, the narration will announce visual features like redactions and overstrikes, and there are numerous other small optimisations for listeners. The SCP text are a living work and the SCP documentation is a gateway into the SCP fictional universe, so links to authors, stories and media are preserved, and will open your reader’s web browser. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License and is being distributed without copy protection. Its content is the property of the attributed authors.
Download or read book Paul Rudolph written by Paul Rudolph and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 78 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exhibition held: October 1 - November 14, 2010, The Arthur A. Houghton, Jr. Gallery, The Cooper Union; curated by Ed Rawlings and Jim Walrod.
Download or read book Ringworld written by Larry Niven and published by Del Rey. This book was released on 1985-09-12 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards for best novel Four travelers come to the ringworld. . . Louis Wu: human and old; bored with having lived too fully for far too many years. Seeking a challenge, and all too capable of handling it. Nessus: a trembling coward, a puppeteer with a built-in survival pattern of nonviolence. Except that this particular puppeteer is insane. Teela Brown: human; a wide-eyed youngster with no allegiances, no experience, no abilities. And all the luck in the world. Speaker-To-Animals: kzin; large, orange-furred, and carnivorous. And one of the most savage life-forms known in the galaxy. Why did these disparate individuals come together? How could they possibly function together? And where, in the name of anything sane, were they headed?
Download or read book Canadian Modern Architecture written by Elsa Lam and published by Chronicle Books. This book was released on 2019-11-19 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Royal Architectural Institute of Canada (RAIC) President's Medal Award (multi-media representation of architecture). Canada's most distinguished architectural critics and scholars offer fresh insights into the country's unique modern and contemporary architecture. Beginning with the nation's centennial and Expo 67 in Montreal, this fifty-year retrospective covers the defining of national institutions and movements: • How Canadian architects interpreted major external trends • Regional and indigenous architectural tendencies • The influence of architects in Canada's three largest cities: Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver Co-published with Canadian Architect, this comprehensive reference book is extensively illustrated and includes fifteen specially commissioned essays.
Download or read book University Planning and Architecture written by Jonathan Coulson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-09-23 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The environment of a university – what we term a campus – has long been the setting for some of history’s most exciting experiments in the design of the built environment. Christopher Wren at Cambridge, Thomas Jefferson at Virginia, Le Corbusier at Harvard, Louis Kahn at Yale and Norman Foster in Berlin: the calibre of practitioners that have worked for universities is astounding. This book comprehensively documents the worldwide evolution of university design from the Middle Ages to the present day, uncovering the key developments which have shaken the world of campus planning. A series of detailed and highly illustrated case-studies profile universally acclaimed campuses that, through their planning, architecture and landscaping, have succeeded in making positive contributions to the field. Drawing on these examples, the book turns to the strategies behind campus planning in today’s climate. Exploring the importance of themes such as landscape, architecture, place-making and sustainability within university development, the book consolidates the lessons learnt from the rich tradition of campus development to provide a ‘good practice guide’ for anyone concerned with planning environments for higher education
Download or read book Dark Skies written by Daniel Deudney and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-02 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Space is again in the headlines. E-billionaires Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are planning to colonize Mars. President Trump wants a "Space Force" to achieve "space dominance" with expensive high-tech weapons. The space and nuclear arms control regimes are threadbare and disintegrating. Would-be asteroid collision diverters, space solar energy collectors, asteroid miners, and space geo-engineers insistently promote their Earth-changing mega-projects. Given our many looming planetary catastrophes (from extreme climate change to runaway artificial superintelligence), looking beyond the earth for solutions might seem like a sound strategy for humanity. And indeed, bolstered by a global network of fervent space advocates-and seemingly rendered plausible, even inevitable, by oceans of science fiction and the wizardly of modern cinema-space beckons as a fully hopeful path for human survival and flourishing, a positive future in increasingly dark times. But despite even basic questions of feasibility, will these many space ventures really have desirable effects, as their advocates insist? In the first book to critically assess the major consequences of space activities from their origins in the 1940s to the present and beyond, Daniel Deudney argues in Dark Skies that the major result of the "Space Age" has been to increase the likelihood of global nuclear war, a fact conveniently obscured by the failure of recognize that nuclear-armed ballistic missiles are inherently space weapons. The most important practical finding of Space Age science, also rarely emphasized, is the discovery that we live on Oasis Earth, tiny and fragile, and teeming with astounding life, but surrounded by an utterly desolate and inhospitable wilderness stretching at least many trillions of miles in all directions. As he stresses, our focus must be on Earth and nowhere else. Looking to the future, Deudney provides compelling reasons why space colonization will produce new threats to human survival and not alleviate the existing ones. That is why, he argues, we should fully relinquish the quest. Mind-bending and profound, Dark Skies challenges virtually all received wisdom about the final frontier.
Download or read book What Should Philosophy Do written by Steven Yates and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2021-07-12 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Philosophy as an academic discipline has fallen on hard times. Its practitioners might retort that never have there been so many books, articles, blogs, etc. But quantity is not quality, and while philosophers are graduating with PhDs few are finding adequate employment, and this is just the most visible problem. The question, What Should Philosophy Do?, is going begging, and the social justice warriors have tried to transform it into one of their political platforms right along with the rest of the liberal arts or humanities. In this book, philosopher Steven Yates revisits the question anew and comes up with a fresh perspective. He argues that philosophy is not a mere academic discipline, that it has a job to do in civilization that transcends its academic niche. He argues that philosophy should identify, clarify, and evaluate worldviews—noting their contributions, noticed as such or not, to the conversations of civilization, examining their capacity to solve problems, their consistency, and their overall adequacy in helping us live. Yates concludes that we should revisit the Christian worldview, and perhaps other worldviews, as part of an intellectual move towards a philosophical pluralism that emphasizes the freedom and intrinsic value of persons and could provide an alternative to the technocratic world order towards which we are presently heading at breakneck pace.
