Download or read book Seashell Beauty and the Concept of Nature at Play written by Richard Raskin and published by Quid Pro Books. This book was released on 2021-02-18 with total page 51 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The poet Pablo Neruda kept a box of seashells on his desk for inspiration and was in awe of their beauty. But does that beauty serve a survival function for the mollusk that produced it? Does it help to attract a mate, to capture prey, to ward off predators? If not, does that very beauty defy the principle that Nature does nothing in vain? In addressing these basic questions, Raskin discusses a controversial answer that many will find intriguing. This little book on seashells (with its many color photos) will deepen your appreciation of their beauty — and invite you to consider nature in a light you may never have expected.
Download or read book The Magical Effects of Color written by Joen Wolfrom and published by C&T Publishing Inc. This book was released on 1992-01-01 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Joen's second book takes up where the popular Landscapes & Illusions left off, further exploring luminosity, highlights, reflections, and transparency in both traditional and contemporary quilts. She discusses the color wheel, explains various visual effects, and encourages observations of nature. Finally information on pattern drafting and perspective helps quilters create their own designs. Twenty-four pages are devoted to some of the leading quiltmakers of our time.
Download or read book The Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature written by Malcolm Budd and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 2003-01-09 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The aesthetics of nature has over the last few decades become an intense focus of philosophical reflection, as it has been ever more widely recognised that it is not a mere appendage to the aesthetics of art. Just as nature offers aesthetic experiences beyond the reach of art, so the aesthetics of nature raises issues not contained within the philosophy of art. Malcolm Budd presents four interlinked essays addressing all the main problems about the aesthetics of nature. These include: how the aesthetic appreciation of nature should be understood; the character of an aesthetic response to nature; what kinds of aesthetic experience nature affords and what kinds of aesthetic judgement it is amenable to; the aesthetic significance of intrusions by humanity into nature; whether aesthetic judgements about nature can be objectively true; the doctrine of positive aesthetics with respect to nature; the aesthetic significance of knowledge of nature and in particular whether scientific knowledge is necessary for serious aesthetic appreciation of nature; and the correct model for the appropriate aesthetic appreciation of nature. The Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature also includes a comprehensive exposition and examination of the thoughts of the greatest philosopher to make a substantial contribution to the subject, Immanuel Kant, and an encyclopaedic critical survey of much of the most significant recent literature. Scholars and students of aesthetics will find valuable resources here, and much to think about.
Download or read book The Algorithmic Beauty of Sea Shells written by Hans Meinhardt and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-06-29 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The pigment patterns on tropieal shells are of great beauty and diversity. They fas cinate by their mixture of regularity and irregularity. A partieular pattern seems to follow partieular mIes but these mIes allow variations. No two shells are identical. The motionless patterns appear to be static, and, indeed, they consist of calcified material. However, as will be shown in this book, the underlying mechanism that gene rates this beauty is eminently dynamic. It has much in common with other dynamie systems that generate patterns, such as a wind-sand system that forms large dunes, or rain and erosion that form complex ramified river systems. On other shells the underlying mechanism has much in common with waves such as those commonly observed in the spread of an epidemie. A mollusc can enlarge its shell only at the shell margin. In most cases, only at this margin are new elements of the pigmentation pattern added. Therefore, the shell pattern preserves arecord in time of a process that took place in a narrow zone at the growing edge. A certain point on the shell represents a certain moment in its history. Like a time machine one can go into the past or the future just by turning the shell back and forth. Having this complete historieal record opens the possibility of decoding the generic principles behind this beauty. My interest in these patterns began with a dinner in an Italian restaurant.
Download or read book Spirals in Time written by Helen Scales and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-05-07 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The beautifully written story of shells and their makers, and our relationships with them. Seashells are the sculpted homes of a remarkable group of animals: the molluscs. These are some of the most ancient and successful animals on the planet. But watch out. Some molluscs can kill you if you eat them. Some will kill you if you stand too close. That hasn't stopped people using shells in many ways over thousands of years. They became the first jewelry and oldest currencies; they've been used as potent symbols of sex and death, prestige and war, not to mention a nutritious (and tasty) source of food. Spirals in Time is an exuberant aquatic romp, revealing amazing tales of these undersea marvels. Helen Scales leads us on a journey into their realm, as she goes in search of everything from snails that 'fly' underwater on tiny wings to octopuses accused of stealing shells and giant mussels with golden beards that were supposedly the source of Jason's golden fleece, and learns how shells have been exchanged for human lives, tapped for mind-bending drugs and inspired advances in medical technology. Weaving through these stories are the remarkable animals that build them, creatures with fascinating tales to tell, a myriad of spiralling shells following just a few simple rules of mathematics and evolution. Shells are also bellwethers of our impact on the natural world. Some species have been overfished, others poisoned by polluted seas; perhaps most worryingly of all, molluscs are expected to fall victim to ocean acidification, a side-effect of climate change that may soon cause shells to simply melt away. But rather than dwelling on what we risk losing, Spirals in Time urges you to ponder how seashells can reconnect us with nature, and heal the rift between ourselves and the living world.
Download or read book Walt Whitman and the Earth written by M. Jimmie Killingsworth and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2009-11 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient, It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions, It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of diseas’d corpses, It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor, It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops, It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last. —Walt Whitman, from “This Compost” How did Whitman use language to figure out his relationship to the earth, and how can we interpret his language to reconstruct the interplay between the poet and his sociopolitical and environmental world? In this first book-length study of Whitman’s poetry from an ecocritical perspective, Jimmie Killingsworth takes ecocriticism one step further into ecopoetics to reconsider both Whitman’s language in light of an ecological understanding of the world and the world through a close study of Whitman’s language. Killingsworth contends that Whitman’s poetry embodies the kinds of conflicted experience and language that continually crop up in the discourse of political ecology and that an ecopoetic perspective can explicate Whitman’s feelings about his aging body, his war-torn nation, and the increasing stress on the American environment both inside and outside the urban world. He begins with a close reading of “This Compost”—Whitman’s greatest contribution to the literature of ecology,” from the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass. He then explores personification and nature as object, as resource, and as spirit and examines manifest destiny and the globalizing impulse behind Leaves of Grass, then moves the other way, toward Whitman’s regional, even local appeal—demonstrating that he remained an island poet even as he became America’s first urban poet. After considering Whitman as an urbanizing poet, he shows how, in his final writings, Whitman tried to renew his earlier connection to nature. Walt Whitman and the Earth reveals Whitman as a powerfully creative experimental poet and a representative figure in American culture whose struggles and impulses previewed our lives today.
Download or read book Annals of Scholarship written by and published by . This book was released on 1980 with total page 566 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Meanings of Abstract Art written by Paul Crowther and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-10-12 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traditional art is based on conventions of resemblance between the work and that which it is a representation "of". Abstract art, in contrast, either adopts alternative modes of visual representation or reconfigures mimetic convention. This book explores the relation of abstract art to nature (taking nature in the broadest sense—the world of recognisable objects, creatures, organisms, processes, and states of affairs). Abstract art takes many different forms, but there are shared key structural features centered on two basic relations to nature. The first abstracts from nature, to give selected aspects of it a new and extremely unfamiliar appearance. The second affirms a natural creativity that issues in new, autonomous forms that are not constrained by mimetic conventions. (Such creativity is often attributed to the power of the unconscious.) The book covers three categories: classical modernism (Mondrian, Malevich, Kandinsky, Arp, early American abstraction); post-war abstraction (Pollock, Still, Newman, Smithson, Noguchi, Arte Povera, Michaux, postmodern developments); and the broader historical and philosophical scope.
Download or read book The Sound of the Sea Seashells and the Fate of the Oceans written by Cynthia Barnett and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2021-07-06 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Science Friday Best Science Book of the Year A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Year A Library Journal Best Science and Technology Book of the Year A Tampa Bay Times Best Book of the Year A stunning history of seashells and the animals that make them that "will have you marveling at nature…Barnett’s account remarkably spirals out, appropriately, to become a much larger story about the sea, about global history and about environmental crises and preservation" (John Williams, New York Times Book Review). Seashells have been the most coveted and collected of nature’s creations since the dawn of humanity. They were money before coins, jewelry before gems, art before canvas. In The Sound of the Sea, acclaimed environmental author Cynthia Barnett blends cultural history and science to trace our long love affair with seashells and the hidden lives of the mollusks that make them. Spiraling out from the great cities of shell that once rose in North America to the warming waters of the Maldives and the slave castles of Ghana, Barnett has created an unforgettable history of our world through an examination of the unassuming seashell. She begins with their childhood wonder, unwinds surprising histories like the origin of Shell Oil as a family business importing exotic shells, and charts what shells and the soft animals that build them are telling scientists about our warming, acidifying seas. From the eerie calls of early shell trumpets to the evolutionary miracle of spines and spires and the modern science of carbon capture inspired by shell, Barnett circles to her central point of listening to nature’s wisdom—and acting on what seashells have to say about taking care of each other and our world.
Download or read book Creative Chords written by Jeff Astley and published by Gracewing Publishing. This book was released on 2000 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of papers provides a synoptic view of the relationship between music, theology and Christian learning. It includes theological reflections on the nature and power of the musical experience, together with psychological, philosophical and educational perspectives; and draws on practical experience and empirical research. Topics covered include: Composing, performing and listening; worship and hymnody; classical music and jazz; Christian theology and spirituality; aesthetics, education and learning, and the psychology of music. Contributors include: James MacMillan, Martin Haselbock, Jeremy Begbie, John Sloboda, Bill Hall, Ian Ground, Michael Sadgrove
Download or read book Nature s Ways written by Ruth Binney and published by F+W Media, Inc.. This book was released on 2006-10-27 with total page 495 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating collection of animal and plant truths, tales, and traditions from the author of Amazing & Extraordinary Facts: Royal Family Life. Trying to understand the ways of the natural world has been a human preoccupation since the earliest times. The knowledge of which animals were helpful and which were dangerous, which plants had the power to heal and soothe and which to harm and kill was of obvious importance, not only to learn, but to remember and pass on. It is therefore hardly surprising that from all corners of the earth, a wealth of stories, signs, symbols, myths and legends about animals and plants have been passed down to us. There are sound principles in some of the traditional advice, wisdom in many of the stories and observations of nature, but there are also highly fanciful superstitions, tall stories and amusing anecdotes. Ruth Binney has collected them all into this entertaining and fascinating volume. There are intriguing tales of everything from mythical monsters and magical plants to domestic pets and humble weeds, as well as generations of advice, both sound and dubious, from age-old country remedies to predicting the weather through the observation of nature. “Whether read from cover to cover in one sitting or dipped into from time to time, there is plenty here to entertain.” —Blackmore Vale Magazine “This is the sort of book that you dip into merely intending to linger for a few minutes, only to find yourself staying for an hour.” —Dorset Magazine
Download or read book Shell Chic written by Marlene Hurley Marshall and published by Storey Kids. This book was released on 2002 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides projects and decorating ideas using shells, along with practical advice on crafting with these gifts of nature.
Download or read book My Jesus Stories written by Allie Garrett and published by Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.. This book was released on 2022-02-01 with total page 94 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We are no doubt living in the most evil time we have ever seen. Good is called evil, and evil is called good. The Word of God is clear in Revelation 12:11 that we overcome the evil one by three things: the blood of the Lamb, the power of our testimony, and by loving not our own life even unto death. This is so simple. We simply plead the blood of Jesus, share what God has done for us, and put Him and others first. It's easy for most people to do one and three, but sharing our testimony can be incredibly difficult sometimes because it's so personal. Sometimes we're embarrassed of situations we got ourselves into in the first place. Or perhaps it's a very personal family or health situation. More often than not, we just want to keep up appearances and not air out our dirty laundry. If all of us together would do these three things, I think we would overcome so much of the evil running rampant in our world today! This book is a collection of my personal testimonies, a raw look into God's perfect grace and mercy in my life. At the end of each chapter, you will find a "Two-Minute Takeaway," which is something from my testimony or God's Word that you can easily and immediately apply to your own life. There's also a journal prompt for you to write your own testimony. You may choose to keep this book private, but I am going to make this very easy for you to share your testimony. There's actually a spot for three readers' entries. The idea is for you to record your real, raw testimony and then pass this book on. This is an opportunity for you to take part in sharing with others how the kingdom of God has impacted your life personally. Be real and be honest. Welcome to my Jesus stories!
Download or read book A Dictionary of the English Language written by Samuel Johnson and published by . This book was released on 1882 with total page 734 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth Century American Poetry written by Kerry Larson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-12-01 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Companion is the first critical collection of its kind devoted solely to American poetry of the nineteenth century. It covers a wide variety of authors, many of whom are currently being rediscovered. A number of anthologies in the recent past have been devoted to the verse of groups such as Native Americans, African-Americans and women. This volume offers essays covering these groups as well as more familiar figures such as Dickinson, Whitman, Longfellow and Melville. The contents are divided between broad topics of concern such as the poetry of the Civil War or the development of the 'poetess' role and articles featuring specific authors such as Edgar Allan Poe or Sarah Piatt. In the past two decades a growing body of scholarship has been engaged in reconceptualizing and re-evaluating this largely neglected area of study in US literary history - this Companion reflects and advances this spirit of revisionism.
Download or read book Hawaiian Shell News written by and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Seashells written by Melissa Stewart and published by Charlesbridge Publishing. This book was released on 2019-04-02 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prolific, award-winning nonfiction author Melissa Stewart reveals the surprising ways seashells provide more than shelter to the mollusks that inhabit them. Young naturalists discover thirteen seashells in this elegant introduction to the remarkable versatility of shells. Dual-layered text highlights how shells provide more than a protective home in this expository nonfiction exploration. The informative secondary text underscores characteristics specific to each shell. Elegant watercolor illustrations create a scrapbook feel, depicting children from around the world observing and sketching seashells across shores.
