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 Complexity written by M. Mitchell Waldrop and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “If you liked Chaos, you’ll love Complexity. Waldrop creates the most exciting intellectual adventure story of the year” (The Washington Post). In a rarified world of scientific research, a revolution has been brewing. Its activists are not anarchists, but rather Nobel Laureates in physics and economics and pony-tailed graduates, mathematicians, and computer scientists from all over the world. They have formed an iconoclastic think-tank and their radical idea is to create a new science: complexity. They want to know how a primordial soup of simple molecules managed to turn itself into the first living cell—and what the origin of life some four billion years ago can tell us about the process of technological innovation today. This book is their story—the story of how they have tried to forge what they like to call the science of the twenty-first century. “Lucidly shows physicists, biologists, computer scientists and economists swapping metaphors and reveling in the sense that epochal discoveries are just around the corner . . . [Waldrop] has a special talent for relaying the exhilaration of moments of intellectual insight.” —The New York Times Book Review “Where I enjoyed the book was when it dove into the actual question of complexity, talking about complex systems in economics, biology, genetics, computer modeling, and so on. Snippets of rare beauty here and there almost took your breath away.” —Medium “[Waldrop] provides a good grounding of what may indeed be the first flowering of a new science.” —Publishers Weekly

Download or read book The Cornell Widow written by and published by . This book was released on 1899 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Enough written by Roger Thurow and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 2010 with total page 558 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than thirty years, humankind has known how to grow enough food to end chronic hunger worldwide. Yet while the ''Green Revolution'' succeeded in South America and Asia, it never got to Africa. More than 9 million people every year die of hunger, malnutrition, and related diseases every year - most of them in Africa and most of them children. More die of hunger in Africa than from AIDS and malaria combined. Now, an impending global food crisis threatens to make things worse. In the west we think of famine as a natural disaster, brought about by drought; or as the legacy of brutal dictators. But in this powerful investigative narrative, Thurow & Kilman show exactly how, in the past few decades, American, British, and European policies conspired to keep Africa hungry and unable to feed itself. As a new generation of activists work to keep famine from spreading, Enough is essential reading on a humanitarian issue of utmost urgency.

Download or read book Stigmata written by Hélène Cixous and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-01-31 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hèléne Cixous -- author, playwright and French feminist theorist -- is a key figure in twentieth-century literary theory. Stigmata brings together her most recent essays for the first time. Acclaimed for her intricate and challenging writing style, Cixous presents a collection of texts that get away -- escaping the reader, the writers, the book. Cixous's writing pursues authors such as Stendhal, Joyce, Derrida, and Rembrandt, da Vinci, Picasso -- works that share an elusive movement in spite of striking differences. Along the way these essays explore a broad range of poetico-philosophical questions that have become characteristic of Cixous' work: * love's labours lost and found * feminine hours * autobiographies of writing * the prehistory of the work of art Stigmata goes beyond theory, becoming an extraordinary writer's testimony to our lives and times.

Download or read book Universe of the Mind written by Юрий Михайлович Лотман and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Universe of the Mind A Semiotic Theory of Culture Yuri M. Lotman Introduction by Umberto Eco Translated by Ann Shukman A major book by one of the initiators of cultural studies. "Universe of the Mind is an ambitious, complex, and wide-ranging book that semioticians, textual critics, and those interested in cultural studies will find stimulating and immensely suggestive." --Journal of Communication "Soviet semiotics offers a distinctive, richly productive approach to literary and cultural studies and Universe of the Mind represents a summation of the intellectual career of the man who has done most to guarantee this." --Slavic and East European Journal Universe of the Mind addresses three main areas: meaning and text, culture, and history. The result is a full-scale attempt to demonstrate the workings of the semiotic space or intellectual world. Part One is concerned with the ways that texts generate meaning. Part Two addresses Lotman's central idea of the semiosphere--the domain in which all semiotic systems can function--presented through an analogy with the global biosphere. Part Three focuses on semiotics from the point of view of history. A seminal text in cultural semiotics, the book's ambitious scope also makes it applicable to disciplines outside semiotics. The book will be of great interest to those concerned with cultural studies, anthropology, Slavic studies, critical theory, philosophy, and historiography. Yuri Mikhailovich Lotman is the founder of the Moscow-Tartu School and the initiator of the discipline of cultural semiotics.

Download or read book The Canterbury Tales written by Geoffrey Chaucer and published by Xist Publishing. This book was released on 2016-03-24 with total page 963 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer from Coterie Classics All Coterie Classics have been formatted for ereaders and devices and include a bonus link to the free audio book. “Then you compared a woman's love to Hell, To barren land where water will not dwell, And you compared it to a quenchless fire, The more it burns the more is its desire To burn up everything that burnt can be. You say that just as worms destroy a tree A wife destroys her husband and contrives, As husbands know, the ruin of their lives. ” ― Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales The Canterbury Tales are collection of stories by Chaucer, each attributed to a fictional medieval pilgrim.

Download or read book Beyond Feelings written by Vincent Ryan Ruggiero and published by McGraw-Hill Humanities, Social Sciences & World Languages. This book was released on 2001 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This succinct, interdisciplinary introduction to critical reasoning successfully dares students to question their own assumptions and to enlarge their thinking world through the analysis of the most common problems associated with everyday reasoning. The text offers a unique and effective organization: Part I explains the fundamental concepts; Part II describes the most common barriers to critical thinking; Part III offers strategies for overcoming those barriers; Part IV offers a selection of contemporary issues that invite students to practice their skills.

Download or read book James Joyce and the Burden of Disease written by Kathleen Ferris and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-10-21 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: James Joyce's near blindness, his peculiar gait, and his death from perforated ulcers are commonplace knowledge to most of his readers. But until now, most Joyce scholars have not recognized that these symptoms point to a diagnosis of syphilis. Kathleen Ferris traces Joyce's medical history as described in his correspondence, in the diaries of his brother Stanislaus, and in the memoirs of his acquaintances, to show that many of his symptoms match those of tabes dorsalis, a form of neurosyphilis which, untreated, eventually leads to paralysis. Combining literary analysis and medical detection, Ferris builds a convincing case that this dread disease is the subject of much of Joyce's autobiographical writing. Many of this characters, most notably Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, exhibit the same symptoms as their creator: stiffness of gait, digestive problems, hallucinations, and impaired vision. Ferris also demonstrates that the themes of sin, guilt, and retribution so prevalent in Joyce's works are almost certainly a consequence of his having contracted venereal disease as a young man while frequenting the brothels of Dublin and Paris. By tracing the images, puns, and metaphors in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, and by demonstrating their relationship to Joyce's experiences, Ferris shows the extent to which, for Joyce, art did indeed mirror life.

Download or read book Refried Elvis written by Eric Zolov and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1999-07-05 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book traces the history of rock 'n' roll in Mexico and the rise of the native countercultural movement La Onda (the wave). This story frames the most significant crisis of Mexico's postrevolution period: the student-led protests in 1968 and the government-orchestrated massacre that put an end to the movement".--BOOKJACKET.

Download or read book Displacement and the Somatics of Postcolonial Culture written by Douglas Robinson and published by . This book was released on 2016-10-28 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Displacement and the Somatics of Postcolonial Culture is divided into three essays covering the refugee experience, colonization and decolonization, and intergenerational trauma.

Download or read book Pragmatics of Human Communication A Study of Interactional Patterns Pathologies and Paradoxes written by Paul Watzlawick and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2011-04-25 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The properties and function of human communication. Called “one of the best books ever about human communication,” and a perennial bestseller, Pragmatics of Human Communication has formed the foundation of much contemporary research into interpersonal communication, in addition to laying the groundwork for context-based approaches to psychotherapy. The authors present the simple but radical idea that problems in life often arise from issues of communication, rather than from deep psychological disorders, reinforcing their conceptual explorations with case studies and well-known literary examples. Written with humor and for a variety of readers, this book identifies simple properties and axioms of human communication and demonstrates how all communications are actually a function of their contexts. Topics covered in this wide-ranging book include: the origins of communication; the idea that all behavior is communication; meta-communication; the properties of an open system; the family as a system of communication; the nature of paradox in psychotherapy; existentialism and human communication.

Download or read book Pushing to the Front written by Orison Swett Marden and published by . This book was released on 1917 with total page 650 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The book tells how men and women have seized common occasions and made them great; it tells of those of average ability who have succeeded by the use of ordinary means, by dint of indomitable will and inflexible purpose. It tells how poverty and hardship have rocked the cradle of the giants of the race. The book points out that most people do not utilize a large part of their effort because their mental attitude does not correspond with their endeavor, so that although working for one thing, they are really expecting something else; and it is what we expect that we tend to get."--Manybooks website

Download or read book Stuff White People Like written by Christian Lander and published by Random House. This book was released on 2008-08-06 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: They love nothing better than sipping free-trade gourmet coffee, leafing through the Sunday New York Times, and listening to David Sedaris on NPR (ideally all at the same time). Apple products, indie music, food co-ops, and vintage T-shirts make them weak in the knees. They believe they’re unique, yet somehow they’re all exactly the same, talking about how they “get” Sarah Silverman’s “subversive” comedy and Wes Anderson’s “droll” films. They’re also down with diversity and up on all the best microbrews, breakfast spots, foreign cinema, and authentic sushi. They’re organic, ironic, and do not own TVs. You know who they are: They’re white people. And they’re here, and you’re gonna have to deal. Fortunately, here’s a book that investigates, explains, and offers advice for finding social success with the Caucasian persuasion. So kick back on your IKEA couch and lose yourself in the ultimate guide to the unbearable whiteness of being. Praise for STUFF WHITE PEOPLE LIKE: “The best of a hilarious Web site: an uncannily accurate catalog of dead-on predilections. The Criterion Collection of classic films? Haircuts with bangs? Expensive fruit juice? ‘Blonde on Blonde’ on the iPod? The author knows who reads The New Yorker and who wears plaid.” –Janet Maslin’s summer picks, CBS.com “The author of "Stuff White People Like" skewers the sacred cows of lefty Caucasian culture, from the Prius to David Sedaris. . . . It gently mocks the habits and pretensions of urbane, educated, left-leaning whites, skewering their passion for Barack Obama and public transportation (as long as it's not a bus), their idle threats to move to Canada, and joy in playing children's games as adults. Kickball, anyone?” –Salon.com “A handy reference guide with which you can check just how white you are. Hint: If you like only documentaries and think your child is gifted, you glow in the dark, buddy.” –NY Daily News

Download or read book Warfare in the American Homeland written by Joy James and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2007-07-20 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVA collection of writings by prisoners and scholars that documents the extension of the violence and the repression of the prison establishment into the larger society. /div

Download or read book Seeking the Beloved Community written by Joy James and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2013-05-01 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Selected essays on radical social change.

Download or read book Beyond Memory written by Diane Neumaier and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Photography possesses a powerful ability to bear witness, aid remembrance, shape, and even alter recollection. In Beyond Memory: Soviet Nonconformist Photography and Photo-Related Works of Art, the general editor, Diane Neumaier, and twenty-three contributors offer a rigorous examination of the medium's role in late Soviet unofficial art. Focusing on the period between the mid-1950s and the late 1980s, they explore artists' unusually inventive and resourceful uses of photography within a highly developed Soviet dissident culture. During this time, lack of high-quality photographic materials, complimented by tremendous creative impulses, prompted artists to explore experimental photo-processes such as camera and darkroom manipulations, photomontage, and hand-coloring. Photography also took on a provocative array of forms including photo installation, artist-made samizdat (self-published) books, photo-realist painting, and many other surprising applications of the flexible medium. Beyond Memory shows how innovative conceptual moves and approaches to form and content-echoes of Soviet society's coded communication and a Russian sense of absurdity-were common in the Soviet cultural underground. Collectively, the works in this anthology demonstrate how late-Soviet artists employed irony and invention to make positive use of difficult circumstances. In the process, the volume illuminates the multiple characters of photography itself and highlights the leading role that the medium has come to play in the international art world today. Beyond Memory stands on its own as a rigorous examination of photography's place in late Soviet unofficial art, while also serving as a supplement to the traveling exhibition of the same title.