Download or read book Blindsight written by Peter Watts and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2006-10-03 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hugo and Shirley Jackson award-winning Peter Watts stands on the cutting edge of hard SF with his acclaimed novel, Blindsight Two months since the stars fell... Two months of silence, while a world held its breath. Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route. So who do you send to force introductions with unknown and unknowable alien intellect that doesn't wish to be met? You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist—an informational topologist with half his mind gone—as an interface between here and there. Pray they can be trusted with the fate of a world. They may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Download or read book Childfree by Choice written by Dr. Amy Blackstone and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2019-06-11 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Dr. Amy Blackstone, childfree woman, co-creator of the blog we're {not} having a baby, and nationally recognized expert on the childfree choice, comes a definitive investigation into the history and current growing movement of adults choosing to forgo parenthood: what it means for our society, economy, environment, perceived gender roles, and legacies, and how understanding and supporting all types of families can lead to positive outcomes for parents, non-parents, and children alike. As a childfree woman, Dr. Amy Blackstone is no stranger to a wide range of negative responses when she informs people she doesn't have--nor does she want--kids: confused looks, patronizing quips, thinly veiled pity, even outright scorn and condemnation. But she is not alone in opting out when it comes to children. More people than ever are choosing to forgo parenthood, and openly discussing a choice that's still often perceived as taboo. Yet this choice, and its effects personally and culturally, are still often misunderstood. Amy Blackstone, a professor of sociology, has been studying the childfree choice since 2008, a choice she and her husband had already confidently and happily made. Using her own and others' research as well as her personal experience, Blackstone delves into the childfree movement from its conception to today, exploring gender, race, sexual orientation, politics, environmentalism, and feminism, as she strips away the misconceptions surrounding non-parents and reveals the still radical notion that support of the childfree can lead to better lives and societies for all.
Download or read book Bring Back Our Girls written by Joe Parkinson and published by Harper Perennial. This book was released on 2022-11-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A 2021 Daily Telegraph Book of the Year Winner of the Overseas Press Club of America's Cornelius Ryan Award "Everyone should read the testimonies of the Chibok girls who survived the capture. We need to help with efforts to liberate all of them and become more responsible for women and girls' protection in conflicts." -- Malala Yousafzai What happens after you click Tweet? The heart-stopping definitive account of the mission to rescue hundreds of Nigerian schoolgirls whose abduction ignited a global social media campaign and a dramatic worldwide intervention. In the spring of 2014, millions of Twitter users, including some of the world's most famous people, unwittingly helped turn a group of 276 schoolgirls abducted by a little-known Islamist sect into a central prize in the global War on Terror by retweeting a call for their release: #BringBackOurGirls. With just four words, their tweets launched an army of would-be liberators. Soldiers and drones, spies, mercenaries, and glory hunters descended into an obscure conflict that few understood, in a remote part of Nigeria that had barely begun to use the internet. When hostage talks and military intervention failed, the schoolgirls were forced to take survival into their own hands. As their days in captivity dragged into years, the young women learned to withstand hunger, disease, and torment, and became witnesses and victims of unspeakable brutality. Many of the girls were Christians who refused to take the one path offered them--converting to their captors' fundamentalist creed. In secret, they sang hymns, and kept a diary, relying on their faith and friendships to stay alive. Bring Back Our Girls unfolds across four continents, from the remote forests of northern Nigeria to the White House; from clandestine meetings in Khartoum safe houses to century-old luxury hotels on picturesque lakes in the Swiss Alps. A twenty-first century story that plumbs the promise and peril of an era whose politics are fueled by the power of hashtag advocacy, this urgent and engrossing work of investigative journalism reveals the unpredictable interconnectedness of our butterfly-wings world, where a few days of online activism can bring years of offline consequences for people continents away.
Download or read book Indianapolis Monthly written by and published by . This book was released on 2004-09 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Indianapolis Monthly is the Circle City’s essential chronicle and guide, an indispensable authority on what’s new and what’s news. Through coverage of politics, crime, dining, style, business, sports, and arts and entertainment, each issue offers compelling narrative stories and lively, urbane coverage of Indy’s cultural landscape.
Download or read book Men s Health written by and published by . This book was released on 2008-01 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Men's Health magazine contains daily tips and articles on fitness, nutrition, relationships, sex, career and lifestyle.
Download or read book Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays written by Paul Kingsnorth and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2017-08-01 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A provocative and urgent essay collection that asks how we can live with hope in “an age of ecocide” Paul Kingsnorth was once an activist—an ardent environmentalist. He fought against rampant development and the depredations of a corporate world that seemed hell-bent on ignoring a looming climate crisis in its relentless pursuit of profit. But as the environmental movement began to focus on “sustainability” rather than the defense of wild places for their own sake and as global conditions worsened, he grew disenchanted with the movement that he once embraced. He gave up what he saw as the false hope that residents of the First World would ever make the kind of sacrifices that might avert the severe consequences of climate change. Full of grief and fury as well as passionate, lyrical evocations of nature and the wild, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist gathers the wave-making essays that have charted the change in Kingsnorth’s thinking. In them he articulates a new vision that he calls “dark ecology,” which stands firmly in opposition to the belief that technology can save us, and he argues for a renewed balance between the human and nonhuman worlds. This iconoclastic, fearless, and ultimately hopeful book, which includes the much-discussed “Uncivilization” manifesto, asks hard questions about how we’ve lived and how we should live.
Download or read book Crimes Committed by Terrorist Groups written by Mark S. Hamm and published by DIANE Publishing. This book was released on 2011 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a print on demand edition of a hard to find publication. Examines terrorists¿ involvement in a variety of crimes ranging from motor vehicle violations, immigration fraud, and mfg. illegal firearms to counterfeiting, armed bank robbery, and smuggling weapons of mass destruction. There are 3 parts: (1) Compares the criminality of internat. jihad groups with domestic right-wing groups. (2) Six case studies of crimes includes trial transcripts, official reports, previous scholarship, and interviews with law enforce. officials and former terrorists are used to explore skills that made crimes possible; or events and lack of skill that the prevented crimes. Includes brief bio. of the terrorists along with descriptions of their org., strategies, and plots. (3) Analysis of the themes in closing arguments of the transcripts in Part 2. Illus.
Download or read book The Secret of Our Success written by Joseph Henrich and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-17 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How our collective intelligence has helped us to evolve and prosper Humans are a puzzling species. On the one hand, we struggle to survive on our own in the wild, often failing to overcome even basic challenges, like obtaining food, building shelters, or avoiding predators. On the other hand, human groups have produced ingenious technologies, sophisticated languages, and complex institutions that have permitted us to successfully expand into a vast range of diverse environments. What has enabled us to dominate the globe, more than any other species, while remaining virtually helpless as lone individuals? This book shows that the secret of our success lies not in our innate intelligence, but in our collective brains—on the ability of human groups to socially interconnect and learn from one another over generations. Drawing insights from lost European explorers, clever chimpanzees, mobile hunter-gatherers, neuroscientific findings, ancient bones, and the human genome, Joseph Henrich demonstrates how our collective brains have propelled our species' genetic evolution and shaped our biology. Our early capacities for learning from others produced many cultural innovations, such as fire, cooking, water containers, plant knowledge, and projectile weapons, which in turn drove the expansion of our brains and altered our physiology, anatomy, and psychology in crucial ways. Later on, some collective brains generated and recombined powerful concepts, such as the lever, wheel, screw, and writing, while also creating the institutions that continue to alter our motivations and perceptions. Henrich shows how our genetics and biology are inextricably interwoven with cultural evolution, and how culture-gene interactions launched our species on an extraordinary evolutionary trajectory. Tracking clues from our ancient past to the present, The Secret of Our Success explores how the evolution of both our cultural and social natures produce a collective intelligence that explains both our species' immense success and the origins of human uniqueness.
Download or read book The Cognitive Theoretic Model of the Universe A New Kind of Reality Theory written by Christopher Michael Langan and published by Mega Foundation Press. This book was released on 2002-06-01 with total page 94 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Paperback version of the 2002 paper published in the journal Progress in Information, Complexity, and Design (PCID). ABSTRACT Inasmuch as science is observational or perceptual in nature, the goal of providing a scientific model and mechanism for the evolution of complex systems ultimately requires a supporting theory of reality of which perception itself is the model (or theory-to-universe mapping). Where information is the abstract currency of perception, such a theory must incorporate the theory of information while extending the information concept to incorporate reflexive self-processing in order to achieve an intrinsic (self-contained) description of reality. This extension is associated with a limiting formulation of model theory identifying mental and physical reality, resulting in a reflexively self-generating, self-modeling theory of reality identical to its universe on the syntactic level. By the nature of its derivation, this theory, the Cognitive Theoretic Model of the Universe or CTMU, can be regarded as a supertautological reality-theoretic extension of logic. Uniting the theory of reality with an advanced form of computational language theory, the CTMU describes reality as a Self Configuring Self-Processing Language or SCSPL, a reflexive intrinsic language characterized not only by self-reference and recursive self-definition, but full self-configuration and self-execution (reflexive read-write functionality). SCSPL reality embodies a dual-aspect monism consisting of infocognition, self-transducing information residing in self-recognizing SCSPL elements called syntactic operators. The CTMU identifies itself with the structure of these operators and thus with the distributive syntax of its self-modeling SCSPL universe, including the reflexive grammar by which the universe refines itself from unbound telesis or UBT, a primordial realm of infocognitive potential free of informational constraint. Under the guidance of a limiting (intrinsic) form of anthropic principle called the Telic Principle, SCSPL evolves by telic recursion, jointly configuring syntax and state while maximizing a generalized self-selection parameter and adjusting on the fly to freely-changing internal conditions. SCSPL relates space, time and object by means of conspansive duality and conspansion, an SCSPL-grammatical process featuring an alternation between dual phases of existence associated with design and actualization and related to the familiar wave-particle duality of quantum mechanics. By distributing the design phase of reality over the actualization phase, conspansive spacetime also provides a distributed mechanism for Intelligent Design, adjoining to the restrictive principle of natural selection a basic means of generating information and complexity. Addressing physical evolution on not only the biological but cosmic level, the CTMU addresses the most evident deficiencies and paradoxes associated with conventional discrete and continuum models of reality, including temporal directionality and accelerating cosmic expansion, while preserving virtually all of the major benefits of current scientific and mathematical paradigms.
Download or read book Class written by Paul Fussell and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1992 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book describes the living-room artifacts, clothing styles, and intellectual proclivities of American classes from top to bottom.
Download or read book Proverbs of Hell written by William Blake and published by . This book was released on 1982 with total page 27 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book You Must Revise Your Life written by William Stafford and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Included in the book are a selection of Stafford's poetry on the subject of writing, and an essay on the origins and influences of his art."--Page 4 of cover.
Download or read book Love Death and Photosynthesis written by Bela Koe-Krompecher and published by Don Giovanni. This book was released on 2020-02-07 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the heyday of the late '80s indie underground, high school sweethearts Bela Koe-Krompecher and Jenny Mae Leffel moved together from small-town Ohio to the big city of Columbus to pursue education and a dream of something more. When they arrived, the two met Jerry Wick, a prickly malcontent and lead singer of the punk rock band Gaunt, and the trio quickly forged a contentious friendship that would be challenged for the next 20 years by addiction, mental illness, homelessness, divergent whims and tragic paths. They bonded over their obsessive love of music, especially the scrappy, welcoming world of independent labels and bands, where heroes could be a neighbor, a bartender or even a know-it-all behind the counter of a record store. Through the label Koe-Krompecher and Wick launched, and the music Leffel made, these three friends gained fans nationwide and garnered unexpected critical acclaim from The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, SPIN and more while sharing the stage with bands like Superchunk, Mudhoney and Guided by Voices. At its heart, Love, Death & Photosynthesis is a story of the love between friends and the power of music to pull people together--often in spite of themselves--in the universal search for connection.
Download or read book It s Complicated written by Danah Boyd and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2014-02-25 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Surveys the online social habits of American teens and analyzes the role technology and social media plays in their lives, examining common misconceptions about such topics as identity, privacy, danger, and bullying.
Download or read book Talking to Strangers written by Malcolm Gladwell and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2019-09-10 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Malcolm Gladwell, host of the podcast Revisionist History and author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Outliers, offers a powerful examination of our interactions with strangers and why they often go wrong—now with a new afterword by the author. A Best Book of the Year: The Financial Times, Bloomberg, Chicago Tribune, and Detroit Free Press How did Fidel Castro fool the CIA for a generation? Why did Neville Chamberlain think he could trust Adolf Hitler? Why are campus sexual assaults on the rise? Do television sitcoms teach us something about the way we relate to one another that isn’t true? Talking to Strangers is a classically Gladwellian intellectual adventure, a challenging and controversial excursion through history, psychology, and scandals taken straight from the news. He revisits the deceptions of Bernie Madoff, the trial of Amanda Knox, the suicide of Sylvia Plath, the Jerry Sandusky pedophilia scandal at Penn State University, and the death of Sandra Bland—throwing our understanding of these and other stories into doubt. Something is very wrong, Gladwell argues, with the tools and strategies we use to make sense of people we don’t know. And because we don’t know how to talk to strangers, we are inviting conflict and misunderstanding in ways that have a profound effect on our lives and our world. In his first book since his #1 bestseller David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell has written a gripping guidebook for troubled times.
Download or read book Motorcycles Sweetgrass written by Drew Hayden Taylor and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2021-06-01 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A story of magic, family, a mysterious stranger . . . and a band of marauding raccoons. Otter Lake is a sleepy Anishnawbe community where little happens. Until the day a handsome stranger pulls up astride a 1953 Indian Chief motorcycle – and turns Otter Lake completely upside down. Maggie, the Reserve’s chief, is swept off her feet, but Virgil, her teenage son, is less than enchanted. Suspicious of the stranger’s intentions, he teams up with his uncle Wayne – a master of aboriginal martial arts – to drive the stranger from the Reserve. And it turns out that the raccoons are willing to lend a hand.
Download or read book The Art of Being Human written by Michael Wesch and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2018-08-07 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anthropology is the study of all humans in all times in all places. But it is so much more than that. "Anthropology requires strength, valor, and courage," Nancy Scheper-Hughes noted. "Pierre Bourdieu called anthropology a combat sport, an extreme sport as well as a tough and rigorous discipline. ... It teaches students not to be afraid of getting one's hands dirty, to get down in the dirt, and to commit yourself, body and mind. Susan Sontag called anthropology a "heroic" profession." What is the payoff for this heroic journey? You will find ideas that can carry you across rivers of doubt and over mountains of fear to find the the light and life of places forgotten. Real anthropology cannot be contained in a book. You have to go out and feel the world's jagged edges, wipe its dust from your brow, and at times, leave your blood in its soil. In this unique book, Dr. Michael Wesch shares many of his own adventures of being an anthropologist and what the science of human beings can tell us about the art of being human. This special first draft edition is a loose framework for more and more complete future chapters and writings. It serves as a companion to anth101.com, a free and open resource for instructors of cultural anthropology. This 2018 text is a revision of the "first draft edition" from 2017 and includes 7 new chapters.
