Download or read book The Disappearing Spoon written by Sam Kean and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2010-07-12 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From New York Times bestselling author Sam Kean comes incredible stories of science, history, finance, mythology, the arts, medicine, and more, as told by the Periodic Table. Why did Gandhi hate iodine (I, 53)? How did radium (Ra, 88) nearly ruin Marie Curie's reputation? And why is gallium (Ga, 31) the go-to element for laboratory pranksters? The Periodic Table is a crowning scientific achievement, but it's also a treasure trove of adventure, betrayal, and obsession. These fascinating tales follow every element on the table as they play out their parts in human history, and in the lives of the (frequently) mad scientists who discovered them. The Disappearing Spoon masterfully fuses science with the classic lore of invention, investigation, and discovery -- from the Big Bang through the end of time. Though solid at room temperature, gallium is a moldable metal that melts at 84 degrees Fahrenheit. A classic science prank is to mold gallium spoons, serve them with tea, and watch guests recoil as their utensils disappear.
Download or read book The Emperor of All Maladies written by Siddhartha Mukherjee and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-08-09 with total page 624 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a documentary from Ken Burns on PBS, this New York Times bestseller is “an extraordinary achievement” (The New Yorker)—a magnificent, profoundly humane “biography” of cancer—from its first documented appearances thousands of years ago through the epic battles in the twentieth century to cure, control, and conquer it to a radical new understanding of its essence. Physician, researcher, and award-winning science writer, Siddhartha Mukherjee examines cancer with a cellular biologist’s precision, a historian’s perspective, and a biographer’s passion. The result is an astonishingly lucid and eloquent chronicle of a disease humans have lived with—and perished from—for more than five thousand years. The story of cancer is a story of human ingenuity, resilience, and perseverance, but also of hubris, paternalism, and misperception. Mukherjee recounts centuries of discoveries, setbacks, victories, and deaths, told through the eyes of his predecessors and peers, training their wits against an infinitely resourceful adversary that, just three decades ago, was thought to be easily vanquished in an all-out “war against cancer.” The book reads like a literary thriller with cancer as the protagonist. Riveting, urgent, and surprising, The Emperor of All Maladies provides a fascinating glimpse into the future of cancer treatments. It is an illuminating book that provides hope and clarity to those seeking to demystify cancer.
Download or read book Out Of Control written by Kevin Kelly and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2009-04-30 with total page 666 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Out of Control chronicles the dawn of a new era in which the machines and systems that drive our economy are so complex and autonomous as to be indistinguishable from living things.
Download or read book Understanding Media written by Marshall McLuhan and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2016-09-04 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When first published, Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media made history with its radical view of the effects of electronic communications upon man and life in the twentieth century.
Download or read book The Language Instinct written by Steven Pinker and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2010-12-14 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A brilliant, witty, and altogether satisfying book." — New York Times Book Review The classic work on the development of human language by the world’s leading expert on language and the mind In The Language Instinct, the world's expert on language and mind lucidly explains everything you always wanted to know about language: how it works, how children learn it, how it changes, how the brain computes it, and how it evolved. With deft use of examples of humor and wordplay, Steven Pinker weaves our vast knowledge of language into a compelling story: language is a human instinct, wired into our brains by evolution. The Language Instinct received the William James Book Prize from the American Psychological Association and the Public Interest Award from the Linguistics Society of America. This edition includes an update on advances in the science of language since The Language Instinct was first published.
Download or read book Counterplay written by Prof. Robert R. Desjarlais and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2011-03-22 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Chess gets a hold of some people, like a virus or a drug," writes Robert Desjarlais in this absorbing book. Drawing on his lifelong fascination with the game, Desjarlais guides readers into the world of twenty-first-century chess to help us understand its unique pleasures and challenges, and to advance a new "anthropology of passion." Immersing us directly in chess’s intricate culture, he interweaves small dramas, closely observed details, illuminating insights, colorful anecdotes, and unforgettable biographical sketches to elucidate the game and to reveal what goes on in the minds of experienced players when they face off over the board. Counterplay offers a compelling take on the intrigues of chess and shows how themes of play, beauty, competition, addiction, fanciful cognition, and intersubjective engagement shape the lives of those who take up this most captivating of games.
Download or read book Female Masculinity written by Judith Halberstam and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Masculinity without men. In Female Masculinity Judith Halberstam takes aim at the protected status of male masculinity and shows that female masculinity has offered a distinct alternative to it for well over two hundred years. Providing the first full-length study on this subject, Halberstam catalogs the diversity of gender expressions among masculine women from nineteenth-century pre-lesbian practices to contemporary drag king performances. Through detailed textual readings as well as empirical research, Halberstam uncovers a hidden history of female masculinities while arguing for a more nuanced understanding of gender categories that would incorporate rather than pathologize them. She rereads Anne Lister's diaries and Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness as foundational assertions of female masculine identity. She considers the enigma of the stone butch and the politics surrounding butch/femme roles within lesbian communities. She also explores issues of transsexuality among "transgender dykes"--lesbians who pass as men--and female-to-male transsexuals who may find the label of "lesbian" a temporary refuge. Halberstam also tackles such topics as women and boxing, butches in Hollywood and independent cinema, and the phenomenon of male impersonators. Female Masculinity signals a new understanding of masculine behaviors and identities, and a new direction in interdisciplinary queer scholarship. Illustrated with nearly forty photographs, including portraits, film stills, and drag king performance shots, this book provides an extensive record of the wide range of female masculinities. And as Halberstam clearly demonstrates, female masculinity is not some bad imitation of virility, but a lively and dramatic staging of hybrid and minority genders.
Download or read book The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience written by Robert Masters and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2000-04-01 with total page 445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most important books written on the effects of LSD on the human psyche. • Its authoritative research has great relevance to the current debate on drug legalization. • Prolific authors Robert Masters and Jean Houston are pioneer figures in the field of transpersonal psychology and founders of the Human Potentials Movement. The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience was published in 1966, just as the first legal restrictions on the use of psychedelic substances were being enacted. Unfortunately, the authors' pioneering work on the effects of LSD on the human psyche, which was viewed by its participants as possibly heralding a revolution in the study of the mind, was among the casualties of this interdiction. As a result, the promising results to which their studies attested were never fully explored. Nevertheless, their 15 years of research represents a sober and authoritative appraisal of what remains one of the most controversial developments in the study of the human psyche. Avoiding the wild excesses taken by both sides on this issue, this book is unique for the light it sheds on the possibilities and the limitations of psychedelic drugs, as well as on the techniques for working with them. With drug legalization an increasingly important issue, The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience provides a welcome and much needed contrast to the current hysteria that surrounds this topic.
Download or read book ACKS Core First Printing written by Macris and published by Autarch LLC. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Your Journey from Adventurer to King Begins Now! Enter a world where empires totter on the brink of war, and terrible monsters tear at the fragile borderlands of men; where decaying cities teem with chaos and corruption, nubile maidens are sacrificed to chthonic cults and nobles live in decadent pleasure on the toil of slaves; where heroes, wizards, and rogues risk everything in pursuit of glory, fortune, and power. This is a world where adventurers can become conquerors - and conquerors can become kings. Will you survive the perils of war and dark magic to claim a throne? Or will you meet your fate in a forgotten ruin beyond the ken of men? The Adventurer Conqueror King System (ACKS) is a new fantasy role-playing game that provides the framework for epic fantasy campaigns with a sweeping scope. With the Adventurer Conqueror King System you can: Play 12 different classes, including the fighter, mage, thief, cleric, assassin, bard, bladedancer, explorer, dwarven craftpriest, dwarven vaultguard, elven nightblade, and elven spellsword. Easily customize your character using a unique, optional proficiency system. Make your fighter a berserker or your mage a necromancer! Buy, sell, and trade common merchandise, precious silks and spices, and even monster parts and magic items in a balanced and integrated game economy. Construct strongholds, establish kingdoms, and carve out a realm for your character. Run a thieves' guild and send your minions to carouse, smuggle, steal, and commit other hijinks. Establish a wizard's sanctum and explore the forbidden arts. Crossbreed horrific monsters in an underground laboratory, enact powerful magical rituals, build golems, craft magic items, or even transform yourself and your followers into undead monsters. Build and run a living world for adventure on a grand scale. With game mechanics built to support emergent play, ACKS is the ultimate RPG for sandbox campaigns. Whether you want to crawl through dungeons, trade with merchant caravans, run a merchant emporium, conquer an empire, or even raise an undead legion, ACKS supports your playstyle with simple, fast-playing game mechanics."
Download or read book A Gravity s Rainbow Companion written by Steven C. Weisenburger and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2011-03-15 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Adding some 20 percent to the original content, this is a completely updated edition of Steven Weisenburger's indispensable guide to Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. Weisenburger takes the reader page by page, often line by line, through the welter of historical references, scientific data, cultural fragments, anthropological research, jokes, and puns around which Pynchon wove his story. Weisenburger fully annotates Pynchon's use of languages ranging from Russian and Hebrew to such subdialects of English as 1940s street talk, drug lingo, and military slang as well as the more obscure terminology of black magic, Rosicrucianism, and Pavlovian psychology. The Companion also reveals the underlying organization of Gravity's Rainbow--how the book's myriad references form patterns of meaning and structure that have eluded both admirers and critics of the novel. The Companion is keyed to the pages of the principal American editions of Gravity's Rainbow: Viking/Penguin (1973), Bantam (1974), and the special, repaginated Penguin paperback (2000) honoring the novel as one of twenty "Great Books of the Twentieth Century."
Download or read book Special Edition Dungeon Master s Guide written by Monte Cook and published by . This book was released on 2005-10 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A deluxe version of the essential core rulebook every D&D Dungeon Master needs, this special release features an embossed, leather-bound cover and premium, gilt-edged paper.
Download or read book The Silent Brotherhood written by Kevin Flynn and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the terrifying story of the most dangerous radical-right hate group to surface since the Ku Klux Klan first rode a century ago. The Silent Brotherhood attracted seemingly average citizens with their call for pride in race, family, and religion and their mission to save white, Christian America from a communist conspiracy. Here is how they became criminals and assassins in their effort to establish an Aryan homeland. 8-page photo insert.
Download or read book Dungeon Master s Guide II written by Jesse Decker and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Building upon existing materials in the "Dungeon Master's Guide," this title was specifically designed to facilitate play, especially when the Dungeon Master has a limited amount of preparation time. Chapters include discussion on running a game, designing adventures, building and using prestige classes, and creating campaign settings.
Download or read book Wall of Fame written by Jonathan Freedman and published by Avid Academic Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As public education declined and many Americans despaired of their children's future, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jonathan Freedman volunteered as a writing mentor in some of California's toughest innercity schools. He discovered a program called AVID that gave him hope. In this work of creative non-fiction, Mr. Freedman interweaves the lives of AVID's founder, Mary Catherine Swanson, and six of her original AVID students over a 20-year period, from 1980 to 2000. With powerful personalities, explosive conflicts, and compelling action, Wall of Fame portrays the dramatic story of how one teacher in one classroom created a pragmatic program that has propelled thousands of students to college. This story of determination, courage, and hope inspires a new generation of teachers, students, and parents to fight for change from the bottom up.
Download or read book Roleplaying Game written by Paizo Publishing and published by . This book was released on 2017-06-20 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Based on the original roleplaying game rules designed by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson and inspired by the third edition of the game designed by Monte Cook, Jonathan Tweet, Skip Williams, Richard Baker, and Peter Adkison"--Title page verso.
Download or read book Player s Handbook II written by David Noonan and published by . This book was released on 2006-05 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This follow-up to the "Player's Handbook" is designed to aid players and provide more character options.
Download or read book Book of Priestcraft written by Richard Baker and published by TSR. This book was released on 1997-10 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
