Download or read book Useless Musings written by Jeffrey Eugene Hoch and published by Austin Macauley Publishers. This book was released on 2024-06-21 with total page 475 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the hell year of 2020 was drawing to a close, and the collective anxieties of every able-minded person in America were making their threat whispers to never, ever go away no matter how many times you brushed your teeth, Jeffrey Eugene Hoch (the author of this book) had an idea. He would write a poem — or something approximating one — for every calendar day of the upcoming year of 2021. The main reason he wanted to do this was to keep his artistic conscience from atrophying across another potential year of emotional isolation, illness avoidance, and embarrassing cult stupidity. There was some distant hope that something positive would come out of the process, but that something was unknowable and not even particularly hoped for by the author. A year of video games, whiskey, dates, and deli orders later, Useless Musings was “finished.” More accurately, it could just no longer be truthfully worked on because 2021 was over. Anyway, the results of this year-long whatever-it-was are documented here for you to read and maybe have some sort of emotional reaction to. These “musings” felt pretty “useless” as I was writing them (Hi, it’s me, Jeff), but maybe you’ll enjoy them. That would be cool.
Download or read book The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge written by Abraham Flexner and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-02-21 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A short, provocative book about why "useless" science often leads to humanity's greatest technological breakthroughs A forty-year tightening of funding for scientific research has meant that resources are increasingly directed toward applied or practical outcomes, with the intent of creating products of immediate value. In such a scenario, it makes sense to focus on the most identifiable and urgent problems, right? Actually, it doesn't. In his classic essay "The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge," Abraham Flexner, the founding director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the man who helped bring Albert Einstein to the United States, describes a great paradox of scientific research. The search for answers to deep questions, motivated solely by curiosity and without concern for applications, often leads not only to the greatest scientific discoveries but also to the most revolutionary technological breakthroughs. In short, no quantum mechanics, no computer chips. This brief book includes Flexner's timeless 1939 essay alongside a new companion essay by Robbert Dijkgraaf, the Institute's current director, in which he shows that Flexner's defense of the value of "the unobstructed pursuit of useless knowledge" may be even more relevant today than it was in the early twentieth century. Dijkgraaf describes how basic research has led to major transformations in the past century and explains why it is an essential precondition of innovation and the first step in social and cultural change. He makes the case that society can achieve deeper understanding and practical progress today and tomorrow only by truly valuing and substantially funding the curiosity-driven "pursuit of useless knowledge" in both the sciences and the humanities.
Download or read book Let Me Off at the Top written by Ron Burgundy and published by Doubleday Canada. This book was released on 2013-11-19 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The autobiography every true American has been waiting for: a shockingly candid and raw confessional from a national treasure. From his humble beginnings in a desolate Iowa coal mining town, his years at Our Lady Queen of Chewbacca High School to his odds-defying climb to the dizzying heights of becoming America’s most trusted and beloved television News Anchor, Ron Burgundy pulls no punches in Let Me Off at the Top! In his very own words Burgundy reveals his most private thoughts, his triumphs and his disappointments. His life reads like an adventure story complete with knock down fights, beautiful women and double-fisted excitement on every page. He has hunted jackalopes with Bobby Kennedy and Peter Lawford, had more than his share of his amorous exploits, and formed the greatest on-air team in the history of televised news. Along the way, he hobnobbed with people you wish you knew and some you honestly wish you didn't -- celebrities, presidents, presidents' wives, celebrities' wives, dogs, and, of course Veronica Corningstone, the love of his life. Walter Cronkite, Barbra Streisand, Katie Couric, the list goes on. Who didn’t Mr. Burgundy, or “Ron” as he is known to his friends, rub elbows with in the course of his colorful and often criminal life? This may well be the most thrilling book ever written, by a man of great physical, moral and spiritual strength and not surprisingly a great literary talent as well. This book deserves a real shot at a Pulitzer Prize. In fact if it doesn’t win one then we will finally have proof that the Pulitzer is rigged. Ron Burgundy has taken the time to write a book. We owe it to him, as honest Americans, to read it.
Download or read book Midworld written by Alan Dean Foster and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2012-09-11 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A jungle planet must defend against exploitative aliens in this novel by the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. From the rich imagination of science fiction great Alan Dean Foster comes the story of Midworld, a Humanx Commonwealth planet that’s equally fragile and hostile. Covered by a lush rainforest, Midworld is home to a primitive society that lives in harmony with the natural world. But the arrival of an exploitative human company, whose workers know nothing of Midworld’s delicate ecosystem, sparks a conflict. Should Midworld’s villagers aid the humans or stand against them? The hero of Foster’s addictive page-turner, Born, decides to lead two humans across the perilous jungle. His choice propels Midworld toward annihilation—and leads him headlong into a battle for survival.
Download or read book Poetry Is Useless written by Anders Nilsen and published by Drawn & Quarterly. This book was released on 2021-06-29 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New and formally inventive work from a New York Times notable author In Poetry is Useless, Anders Nilsen redefines the sketchbook format, intermingling elegant, densely detailed renderings of mythical animals, short comics drawn in ink, meditations on religion, and abstract shapes and patterns. Page after page gives way under Nilsen’s deft hatching and perfectly placed pen strokes, revealing his intellectual curiosity and wry outlook on life’s many surprises. Stick people debate the dubious merits of economics. Immaculately stippled circles become looser and looser, as craters appear on their surface. A series of portraits capture the backs of friends’ heads. For ten or twenty pages at a time, Poetry is Useless becomes a travel diary, in which Nilsen shares anecdotes about his voyages in Europe and North America. A trip to Colombia for a comics festival is recounted in carefully drawn city streets and sketches made in cafés. Poetry is Useless reveals seven years of Nilsen’s life and musings: beginning in 2007, it covers a substantial period of his comics career to date, and includes visual reference to his works, such as Dogs & Water, Rage of Poseidon, and the New York Times Notable Book Big Questions. This expansive sketchbook-as-graphic-novel is exquisitely packaged with appendices and a foreword from Anders Nilsen himself.
Download or read book Treasure written by Helen Brenna and published by Harlequin. This book was released on 2010-08-01 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jake Rawlings has been searching for the Spanish galleonConcha his whole life. And he's paid a heavy price.Suddenly he's saddled with Annie Miller, a marinearchaeologist who claims she can take him to it. Annie has her own reasons for going back to the Concha. Before their sudden deaths, her parents found theSantidad Cross—an artifact—on board. Since then thecurse of the Santidad Cross has ruined her life. Now shewants to bury the cross at sea—and her bad luck with it. As they set sail for the Bahamas, maybe the real treasureis staring them in the face.…
Download or read book Coldstorm written by Amber Kallyn and published by Dragon Heart Books. This book was released on 2020-03-10 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can two vampires with dark pasts find a way to believe that love is worth the risk? Anca Fieraru's duty is to eliminate problems for the Magic Council as one of their appointed Judges. Her current assignment—find those responsible for the recent, renewed slaughters in Moss Creek, Arizona. In order to track a local vampire traitor, and hunt supernatural killers, she’s forced to partner with a sexy, stubborn clan vampire. Even in the center of danger, their fiery clashes begin to remind Anca there's more to life than holding others at a cold distance. Doctor Matt Dixon has spent centuries healing others, in atonement for his own heinous past crimes. Never mind they were committed while fighting the Arcaine monsters that lurk in the dark, and responsible for destroying everything he ever loved. Now, he's found a place of peace in the Moss Creek clan. Until death once more finds its way into the center of his life. Ordered to work with the Magic Council's deadly assassin, Matt soon realizes there's an intriguing woman beneath Anca's icy façade. Can they overcome the horrors of their pasts, and learn to trust one another, before the present danger consumes them both, and all they care for?
Download or read book The Female Poets of America written by Thomas Buchanan Read and published by . This book was released on 1849 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Final Melody written by Cecilia Randell and published by Blue Wren Publishing. This book was released on 2019-04-09 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bat Sitru and her merry band of fae are officially on the run... Or are they on the hunt? It's hard to tell. Separated from Dub and Shar, Bat can only concentrate on getting through the next steps of their piece-meal plan to defeat Balor of the Evil Eye. They have all the tools to take down the would-be god, now they just have to pull it, and themselves, together. With new and unexpected allies, as well as a horde of sluagh on their heels, Bat and her boys race to find Tir Hudi and the cauldron before their enemies know they're there. In the end, it will be up to her, that once forgotten and abandoned goddess, to restore the balance and prevent the world from descending into chaos... But amidst all that, the hardest part may be holding together the new loves she has found. The Forgotten is a slow burn, reverse harem love story, filled with a weaving of Irish lore and Egyptian mythology; oh, and whiskey and tea and pixies, oh my!
Download or read book The Female Poets of America written by Thomas Buchanan Read and published by Ardent Media. This book was released on 1969 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The American Female Poets written by Caroline May and published by . This book was released on 1854 with total page 610 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Biographical sketches of and selections from 80 poets.
Download or read book Where Drowned Things Live written by Susan Thistlethwaite and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2017-03-03 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Where Drowned Things Live describes the struggles of an untenured professor, Kristin Ginelli, as she tries to counsel a young woman student at her university and get her to reveal who is abusing her. Kristin fails, and the student is found drowned. As a former Chicago cop who quit the force over sexual harassment and the death of her detective husband in the line of duty, Kristin doggedly investigates this mysterious death, pushing back on foot-dragging by the university and obstruction by the Chicago police. Kristin is almost killed twice, but she does not give up on questioning why this student died. The novel is wholly fictional. What is not fiction, however, is that often students at colleges and universities around the country are vulnerable to sexual assault and abuse and they can receive very little help from their schools or from law enforcement. Today more than 300 schools of higher education are being investigated under Title IX for failures to prevent sexual assault and harassment on their campuses, and to deal fairly with reports.
Download or read book The female poets of America ed by T B Read written by America and published by . This book was released on 1852 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book After Midnight written by Kirstyn McDermott and published by Brain Jar Press. This book was released on 2022-07-19 with total page 51 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After Midnight is a tale of royalty, bloodlines, and royal slippers from the award-winning Kirstyn McDermott, sure to appeal to fans of Catherynne M. Valente and Theodora Goss. The Queen who’d once swept up the cinders is exiled to a distant wing of the palace, replaced by a younger, prettier girl who can bear her King an heir. Unwilling to accept the rapid deterioration of her power and desperately clinging to fraying strands of sanity, the exiled Queen journals the choices that led to her sorry state… and those she must make in order to reclaim her rightful place in the kingdom. But there’s more than one prisoner in the castle, and the conspiracy that draws tight around Queen and rival involves graver threats than a return to poverty. After Midnight is the third novella in Kirstyn McDermott’s Never Afters series. Dark, powerful, and brimming with magic, these tales weave a reimagined world in which fairy-tale girls grow up to find both love and heartbreak, family and friendship, and moments of loss and forgiveness.
Download or read book Mental Traps written by Andre Kukla and published by Anchor Canada. This book was released on 2007-07-31 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mental Traps is André Kukla’s immensely enjoyable and down-to-earth catalogue of the everyday blunders we make in our thinking habits, how these traps can affect our entire lives, and what we can do about it. Ever find yourself putting off even relatively minor tasks because of the many other little jobs that you’d have to tackle first? Or spending far too much time worrying about things you can’t change? Or living for the future, not for today? Truth is, we all do — and we all recognize that sometimes our ways of thinking just aren’t productive. When it comes to our daily lives, we often laugh off habits like procrastination as being human nature and just resolve to approach things differently next time. Or, when the issues facing us are enormous or traumatic, we might recognize that we’re dwelling on our problems, or otherwise spending our time on fruitless thinking, but have no idea how to get out of that miserable rut. Either way, it takes up a lot of our mental energy. But as André Kukla makes clear in Mental Traps, what we don’t recognize — or at least admit to ourselves! — is how thinking unproductively about even the smallest elements of everyday life can mount up and keep us from being happy, from living life to the fullest. For what appear to be minor lapses are actually “habitual modes of thinking that disturb our ease, waste enormous amounts of our time, and deplete our energy without accomplishing anything of value for us or anyone else.” So whether we’re dealing with how to attain our major career goals or deciding when to serve the salad course at dinnertime, the end results can be much the same: readily identifiable patterns of wasteful thinking. These, in Kukla’s view, are the mental traps. In his introduction, Kukla compares his method to that of naturalist’s guides, which take a very matter-of-fact approach to providing practical information. He then outlines eleven common mental traps, such as persistence, fixation, acceleration, procrastination and regulation. Devoting a chapter to each, he provides simple examples to help us to identify mental traps in our own thinking — and to recognize why it would be beneficial to change our ways. Our anxiety, our dissatisfaction, our disappointment — these are often the consequences of thinking about the world the wrong way. And it’s in the parallels he draws between the major and minor events of our lives that he truly brings his point home: How is refusing to eat olives like toiling at a job that has long ago lost all satisfaction? How is arriving at the airport too early a symptom of a life never fully lived? Again, what can seem to be a very inconsequential habit can actually signal bigger, more detrimental problems in our ways of thinking. Kukla’s goal — one that we should share, in the end — is to help us realize how much more enjoyable our lives would be if we were a little more attentive to our thought processes. Just as Buddhism, from which the author has drawn many of his ideas, teaches that we should perform all of our acts mindfully, Kukla suggests that we make a conscious effort to step back, clear our minds, and simply observe how our thoughts develop. By doing so, we will begin to recognize unproductive patterns in our own thinking, and then we can try to avoid them. Ultimately, Kukla hopes that Mental Traps will help readers move towards what he calls a “liberated consciousness” — a state in which we no longer allow mental traps to inhibit our experiences. From having more energy to being able to act impulsively, we’d realize the benefits of living in the moment and feel truly free.
Download or read book The Nineteenth Century and After written by and published by . This book was released on 1913 with total page 1384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Abandon Ship written by Tony McCrum and published by Casemate Publishers. This book was released on 2012-04-19 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Captain Tony McCrums naval career started in 1932. He survived the sinking of HMS Skipjack at Dunkirk and went on to serve on minesweepers and at sea during the landings at Salerno. His wartime experiences were recently published as Sunk by Stukas.This book covers the second part of his naval career between 1945 and 1963. Having arrived back in Plymouth from Trincomlee as a lieutenant aboard the destroyer Tarter in November 1945, his first appointment was as senior instructor at the RN Signals School in Devonport. There then followed two appointments as Flag Lieutenant; first to Admiral Pridham-Wippell, CinC Plymouth Command and then Admiral Sir Rhoderick McGrigor, CinC Home Fleet, where he was also Deputy Fleet Communications Officer. He was based on the admirals flagship, the battleship HMS Duke of York which he joined in 1947. The fleet exercised in the Atlantic and Mediterranean and showed the flag in various ports in the USA, Caribbean Islands and the Baltic. In May 1948 he was promoted Lt. Commander. In 1950 he instructed at the main Naval Signals School at Leyedene House near Petersfield.Promoted Commander, now 32 years of age, he was surprised to be appointed to accompany King George VI on a state visit to Australia and New Zealand. This was to be aboard the liner SS Gothic as there was no Royal Yacht at that time. However after months of preparation the voyage was canceled because of the Kings terminal illness and the coronation of Britains new Queen.In November 1954 he took his first command, HMS Concord, a destroyer in the 8th Destroyer Squadron based in Hong Kong. During his eighteen month captaincy of this ship he saw action off the coast of Malaya and a lengthy visit to Australia to assist in the aftermath of a hurricane. After a spell ashore as Training Commander at HMS Ganges and after promotion to Captain in 1958, he was sent to Norway on the staff of the CinC Northern European Command. In November 1960 he was again given a seagoing command. He was to skipper HMS Meon and responsibility for the Amphibious Warfare Squadron in the Persian Gulf. The squadron composed of Meon, two tank-landing ships, four tank-landing craft and a Rhino (a pontoon-like vessel for the shallow-water landing of tanks). He was ordered to cover an area extending from the East African coast, the Red Sea and to the Persian Gulf. Having worked-up this mixed bunch of vessels and their crews, plus army personnel he was confronted with the defense of Kuwait when it was threatened by the Iraqi dictator General Kassem in 1961. He was charged with landing the twelve tanks in his squadron to defend Kuwaits main port of Shuwaikh. This was successfully carried out under difficult circumstances and the Iraqi invasion was defeated. After 42 years in the RN, Tony retired to be with his wife and young family.
