Download or read book The Further Inventions of Daedalus written by David E. H. Jones and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1999 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If so, or indeed if not, then Daedalus is your man. This book brings together 148 of his highly scientific proposals on these and allied matters. Daedalus, the court jester in the palace of science and engineering, began his amazing career in 1964 in the weekly magazine New Scientist. His remit, brilliantly achieved, was to confuse the scientific community in general. In 1988 he graduated to The Guardian and also to the prestigious pages of Nature, where he bamboozles the Nobel prizewinners. His delusive proposals steam boldly out along the solid track of accepted science and technology, but somehow rapidly go off the rails -- or do they? This second compilation of his finest schemes includes a look at one from his first compilation (The Inventions of Daedalus, 1982) which did indeed wind up in the Nobel prize lists.
Download or read book The Inventions of Daedalus written by David E. H. Jones and published by W H Freeman & Company. This book was released on 1982 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describes facetious inventions, tongue-in-cheek observations on natural phenomenon, and thought-provoking technological developments.
Download or read book The Aha Moment written by David Jones and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2012-01-24 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about having ideas and—a much longer haul—making them work. David Jones, best known for his Daedalus column, tells a multitude of stories about creators and their creations, including his own fantastical-seeming contributions to mainstream science such as the unrideable bicycle and chemical gardens in space. His theory of creativity endows each of us with a Random-Ideas Generator, a Censor, and an Observer-Reasoner. Jones applies his theory to a wide range of weird scientific experiments that he has conducted for serious scientific papers, for challenging printed expositions, and for presentations to a TV audience. He even suggests new ones, not yet tried! Creativity is as essential to science as curiosity, physical intuition, and shrewd deduction from well-planned experiments. But, says Jones, ingenuity is very uncertain. Even for the greatest inventors, about 80 percent of ideas fail. Jokiness can help, and so can lots of random data. Jones has plenty of clever advice that will help spark that madly brilliant private thought in the first place—and will encourage you to take it further. Neither dense nor demanding, The Aha! Moment is engrossing, edifying, and scientifically serious; yet it is lightly written and asks lots of silly questions. As Jones shows, it can often pay to take an absurd idea seriously.
Download or read book Why Are We Conscious written by David E.H. Jones and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2017-07-20 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are two huge gaps in scientific theory. One, the contradiction between classical and quantum mechanics, is discussed in many publications. The other, the total failure to explain why anything made of atoms (such as ourselves) can be conscious, has little acknowledgement. The main thesis of this book is that to be conscious at all, you need an unconscious mind. The author explores the idea that this mind sometimes makes contact with a whole unknown world, sporadically revealed by paranormal effects, but perhaps discoverable by hitherto uninvented scientific instruments. The book looks at the notion of the unconscious mind, one of the most important hypotheses of the twentieth century. Psychiatrists often deploy it rather informally, but there is no accepted theory of it. No region of the human brain seems to hold it. The author delves into the notion that the unknown world exists and is very weakly coupled to the physical world. He ponders the properties it may have to allow this coupling, looks at several paranormal effects scientifically and points out that many of them seem to imply brief but dramatic changes of the forces between atoms—a possible effect of the unknown world, unexamined by physical science. No existing publication seeks to talk both about paranormal mysteries and scientific theory. If scientists know about the gaps in existing knowledge, they might initiate research into such gaps, or notice experimental oddities they now gloss over. If the general public was aware of the gaps in physical theory, they would be less overwhelmed by the intellectual diktats of some scientists.
Download or read book Fundamentals of Atmospheric Radiation written by Craig F. Bohren and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2006-08-21 with total page 490 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Meeting the need for teaching material suitable for students of atmospheric science and courses on atmospheric radiation, this textbook covers the fundamentals of emission, absorption, and scattering of electromagnetic radiation from ultraviolet to infrared and beyond. Much of the contents applies to planetary atmosphere, with graded discussions providing a thorough treatment of subjects, including single scattering by particles at different levels of complexity. The discussion of the simple multiple scattering theory introduces concepts in more advanced theories, such that the more complicated two-stream theory allows readers to progress beyond the pile-of-plates theory. The authors are physicists teaching at the largest meteorology department in the US at Penn State. The problems given in the text come from students, colleagues, and correspondents, and the figures designed especially for this book facilitate comprehension. Ideal for advanced undergraduate and graduate students of atmospheric science. * Free solutions manual available for lecturers at www.wiley-vch.de/supplements/
Download or read book Gods and Robots written by Adrienne Mayor and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-21 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces the story of how ancient cultures envisioned artificial life, automata, self-moving devices and human enhancements, sharing insights into how the mythologies of the past related to and shaped ancient machine innovations.
Download or read book Small Things Considered written by Henry Petroski and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2004-09-14 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why has the durable paper shopping bag been largely replaced by its flimsy plastic counterpart? What circuitous chain of improvements led to such innovations as the automobile cup holder and the swiveling vegetable peeler? With the same relentless curiosity and lucid, witty prose he brought to his earlier books, Henry Petroski looks at some of our most familiar objects and reveals that they are, in fact, works in progress. For there can never be an end to the quest for the perfect design. To illustrate his thesis, Petroski tells the story of the paper drinking cup, which owes its popularity to the discovery that water glasses could carry germs. He pays tribute to the little plastic tripod that keeps pizza from sticking to the box and analyzes the numerical layouts of telephones and handheld calculators. Small Things Considered is Petroski at his most trenchant and provocative, casting his eye not only on everyday artifacts but on their users as well.
Download or read book The Envy of Daedalus written by Marcello Barbanera and published by Brill Fink. This book was released on 2013 with total page 60 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why the myth of Daedalus, the protos euretes, is connected with envy and murder? The author takes as his starting point Ovid's Metamorphoses, where Daedalus' envy drives him to murder his pupil and nephew Perdix. He also considers the passage of Seneca the Elder, about the painter Parrhasius and the citizen from Olynthus, that he had tortured in order to paint the agony of Prometheus. The first case is a topos of the artist's biography which implies, that the craft of the artisan was held as a guarded secret; the second is related to mimesis. The author questions what role the topos of the artist as murderer plays in text and imagery, from the Middle Ages to modern literature.
Download or read book The Moving Statues of Seventeenth Century Amsterdam written by Angela Vanhaelen and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2022-08-05 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book opens a window onto a fascinating and understudied aspect of the visual, material, intellectual, and cultural history of seventeenth-century Amsterdam: the role played by its inns and taverns, specifically the doolhoven. Doolhoven were a type of labyrinth unique to early modern Amsterdam. Offering guest lodgings, these licensed public houses also housed remarkable displays of artwork in their gardens and galleries. The main attractions were inventive displays of moving mechanical figures (automata) and a famed set of waxwork portraits of the rulers of Protestant Europe. Publicized as the most innovative artworks on display in Amsterdam, the doolhoven exhibits presented the mercantile city as a global center of artistic and technological advancement. This evocative tour through the doolhoven pub gardens—where drinking, entertainment, and the acquisition of knowledge mingled in encounters with lively displays of animated artifacts—shows that the exhibits had a forceful and transformative impact on visitors, one that moved them toward Protestant reform. Deeply researched and decidedly original, The Moving Statues of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam uncovers a wealth of information about these nearly forgotten public pleasure parks, situating them within popular culture, religious controversies, global trade relations, and intellectual debates of the seventeenth century. It will appeal in particular to scholars in art history and early modern studies.
Download or read book The Maze Maker written by Michael Ayrton and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-11-04 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “I address you across more than three thousand years, you who live at the conjunction of the Fish and the Water-carrier,” speaks Daedalus, an artisan, inventor, and designer born into an utterly alien family of heroes who value acts of war above all else, a world where his fellow Greeks seem driven only to destroy—an existence he feels compelled to escape. In this fictional autobiography of the father of Icarus, “Apollo’s creature,” a brilliant but flawed man, writer and sculptor Michael Ayrton harnesses the tales of the past to mold a myth for our times. We learn of Daedalus’s increasingly ambitious artifacts and inventions; his fascination with Minoan culture, commerce, and religion, and his efforts to adapt to them; how he comes to design the maze of the horned Minotaur; and how, when he decides that he must flee yet again, he builds two sets of wax wings—wings that will be instruments of his descent into the underworld, a place of both purgatory and rebirth. A compelling mix of history, fable, lore, and meditations on the enigma of art, The Maze Maker will ensnare classicists, artists, and all lovers of story in its convolutions of life and legend. “I never understood the pattern of my life,” writes Daedalus, “so that I have blundered through it in a maze.”
Download or read book Forthcoming Books written by Rose Arny and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 996 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Inventing the Future written by Nick Srnicek and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2015-11-17 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This major new manifesto offers a “clear and compelling vision of a postcapitalist society” and shows how left-wing politics can be rebuilt for the 21st century (Mark Fisher, author of Capitalist Realism) Neoliberalism isn’t working. Austerity is forcing millions into poverty and many more into precarious work, while the left remains trapped in stagnant political practices that offer no respite. Inventing the Future is a bold new manifesto for life after capitalism. Against the confused understanding of our high-tech world by both the right and the left, this book claims that the emancipatory and future-oriented possibilities of our society can be reclaimed. Instead of running from a complex future, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams demand a postcapitalist economy capable of advancing standards, liberating humanity from work and developing technologies that expand our freedoms. This new edition includes a new chapter where they respond to their various critics.
Download or read book Athena the Proud written by Joan Holub and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-04-29 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Athena wants to upgrade a labyrinth for King Minos, but her approach causes problems in this Goddess Girls adventure. Athena’s arrogance gets the best of her when her attempts to improve King Minos’s labyrinth have unexpected—and disastrous—results!
Download or read book What Light Through Yonder Window Breaks written by Craig F. Bohren and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 2013-02-20 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abounding in lively writing and fun-filled, easy-to-perform experiments, this illustrated volume makes the fascinating world of atmospheric physics accessible to readers without a scientific background. 1991 edition.
Download or read book Metamorphoses Books I VIII written by Ovid and published by . This book was released on 1960 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Science Fact and Science Fiction written by Brian M. Stableford and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2006 with total page 758 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher description
Download or read book Invention written by Norbert Wiener and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An insider's view of the history of discovery and invention.
