Download or read book Follies of Science written by Eric Dregni and published by Chicago Review Press - Fulcrum. This book was released on 2006 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The early twentieth century's futuristic utopian plans for your home and lifestyle--in vivid color and detail!
Download or read book Water Follies written by Robert Jerome Glennon and published by Island Press. This book was released on 2012-09-26 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Santa Cruz River that once flowed through Tucson, Arizona is today a sad mirage of a river. Except for brief periods following heavy rainfall, it is bone dry. The cottonwood and willow trees that once lined its banks have died, and the profusion of birds and wildlife recorded by early settlers are nowhere to be seen. The river is dead. What happened? Where did the water go. As Robert Glennon explains in Water Follies, what killed the Santa Cruz River -- and could devastate other surface waters across the United States -- was groundwater pumping. From 1940 to 2000, the volume of water drawn annually from underground aquifers in Tucson jumped more than six-fold, from 50,000 to 330,000 acre-feet per year. And Tucson is hardly an exception -- similar increases in groundwater pumping have occurred across the country and around the world. In a striking collection of stories that bring to life the human and natural consequences of our growing national thirst, Robert Glennon provides an occasionally wry and always fascinating account of groundwater pumping and the environmental problems it causes. Robert Glennon sketches the culture of water use in the United States, explaining how and why we are growing increasingly reliant on groundwater. He uses the examples of the Santa Cruz and San Pedro rivers in Arizona to illustrate the science of hydrology and the legal aspects of water use and conflicts. Following that, he offers a dozen stories -- ranging from Down East Maine to San Antonio's River Walk to Atlanta's burgeoning suburbs -- that clearly illustrate the array of problems caused by groundwater pumping. Each episode poses a conflict of values that reveals the complexity of how and why we use water. These poignant and sometimes perverse tales tell of human foibles including greed, stubbornness, and, especially, the unlimited human capacity to ignore reality. As Robert Glennon explores the folly of our actions and the laws governing them, he suggests common-sense legal and policy reforms that could help avert potentially catastrophic future effects. Water Follies, the first book to focus on the impact of groundwater pumping on the environment, brings this widespread but underappreciated problem to the attention of citizens and communities across America.
Download or read book Follies of the Wise written by Frederick Crews and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2006-03-10 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bestselling author and Berkeley professor of thirty years Frederick Crews has always considered himself a skeptic. Forty years ago he thought he had found a tradition of thought — Freudian psychoanalytic theory — that had skepticism built into it. He gradually realized, however, that true skepticism is an attitude of continual questioning. The more closely Crews examined the logical structure and institutional history of psychoanalysis, the more clearly he realized that Freud's system of thought lacked empirical rigor. Indeed, he came to see Freudian theory as the very model of a modern pseudoscience. Follies of the Wise contains Crews's best writing of the past fifteen years, including such controversial and widely quoted pieces as "The Unknown Freud" and "The Revenge of the Repressed," essays whose effects still reverberate today. In addition, his topics range from "Intelligent Design" creationism to theosophy, from psychological testing to UFO zaniness, from American Buddhism to the current state of literary criticism. A single theme animates his bracing and witty discussions: the temptation to reach for deep wisdom without attending to the little voice that asks, "Could I, by any chance, be deceiving myself here?"
Download or read book Follies Fallacies in Medicine written by Petr Skrabanek and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The progress of science and the growth of knowledge, claim the authors, depend upon challenging accepted dogma and belief. Their purpose in this book is not to criticize medicine or those who practice it but to advocate the need for criticism in medicine. Doctors, they claim, can discover new ways and improve old ways to ease the human journey from cradle to grave--through rational inquiry, honest admission of ignorance, and by demystifying rituals. No index. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Download or read book Follies of God written by James Grissom and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2016-08-09 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This remarkably illuminating portrait of Tennessee Williams lifts the veil on the heart and soul of his artistic inspiration: the unspoken collaboration between playwright and actor. At a low moment in Williams’s life, he summoned to New Orleans a young twenty-year-old writer, James Grissom, who had written him a letter asking for advice. After a long, intense conversation, Williams sent Grissom on a journey on his behalf to find out if he or his work had mattered to those who had so deeply mattered to him. Among the more than seventy women and men with whom Grissom talked were giants of American theater and film: Lillian Gish, (“the escort who brought me to Blanche”), Jessica Tandy (the original Blanche DuBois on Broadway), Eva Le Gallienne (“She was a stone against which I could rub my talent and feel that it became sharper”), Maureen Stapleton, Julie Harris, Bette Davis, Katherine Hepburn, Elia Kazan, Marlon Brando, John Gielgud, and many more. Follies of God provides dazzling insight into how Williams conjured the dramatic characters and plays that so transformed American theater.
Download or read book American Follies written by Norman Lock and published by Bellevue Literary Press. This book was released on 2020-07-07 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A young woman joins Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Barnum’s circus to rescue her infant from the KKK In the seventh stand-alone book of The American Novels series, Ellen Finch, former stenographer to Henry James, recalls her time as an assistant to Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, heroes of America’s woman suffrage movement, and her friendship with the diminutive Margaret, one of P. T. Barnum’s circus “eccentrics.” When her infant son is kidnapped by the Klan, Ellen, Margaret, and the two formidable suffragists travel aboard Barnum’s train from New York to Memphis to rescue the baby from certain death at the fiery cross. A savage yet farcical tale, American Follies explores the roots of the women’s rights movement, its relationship to the fight for racial justice, and its reverberations in the politics of today.
Download or read book Rescuing Science from Politics written by Wendy Elizabeth Wagner and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-07-24 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines how dominant interest groups manipulate the available science to support their positions.
Download or read book The Borderlands of Science written by Alfred Taylor Schofield and published by . This book was released on 1917 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Foreign Follies written by Doug Bandow and published by Xulon Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The United States once was a traditional republic, remaining aloof from foreign conflicts. Today no problem on earth is exempt from Washington's meddling. The result is an oversize military, perpetual intervention, and consistent conflict, according to Bandow, who says it's time for a new foreign policy.
Download or read book Fearful Spirits Reasoned Follies written by Michael D. Bailey and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2017-11-15 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Superstitions are commonplace in the modern world. Mostly, however, they evoke innocuous images of people reading their horoscopes or avoiding black cats. Certain religious practices might also come to mind—praying to St. Christopher or lighting candles for the dead. Benign as they might seem today, such practices were not always perceived that way. In medieval Europe superstitions were considered serious offenses, violations of essential precepts of Christian doctrine or immutable natural laws. But how and why did this come to be? In Fearful Spirits, Reasoned Follies, Michael D. Bailey explores the thorny concept of superstition as it was understood and debated in the Middle Ages. Bailey begins by tracing Christian thinking about superstition from the patristic period through the early and high Middle Ages. He then turns to the later Middle Ages, a period that witnessed an outpouring of writings devoted to superstition—tracts and treatises with titles such as De superstitionibus and Contra vitia superstitionum. Most were written by theologians and other academics based in Europe’s universities and courts, men who were increasingly anxious about the proliferation of suspect beliefs and practices, from elite ritual magic to common healing charms, from astrological divination to the observance of signs and omens. As Bailey shows, however, authorities were far more sophisticated in their reasoning than one might suspect, using accusations of superstition in a calculated way to control the boundaries of legitimate religion and acceptable science. This in turn would lay the conceptual groundwork for future discussions of religion, science, and magic in the early modern world. Indeed, by revealing the extent to which early modern thinkers took up old questions about the operation of natural properties and forces using the vocabulary of science rather than of belief, Bailey exposes the powerful but in many ways false dichotomy between the "superstitious" Middle Ages and "rational" European modernity.
Download or read book The Brooklyn Follies written by Paul Auster and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2007-04-01 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the bestselling author of Oracle Night and The Book of Illusions, an exhilarating, whirlwind tale of one man's accidental redemption Nathan Glass has come to Brooklyn to die. Divorced, estranged from his only daughter, the retired life insurance salesman seeks only solitude and anonymity. Then Nathan finds his long-lost nephew, Tom Wood, working in a local bookstore—a far cry from the brilliant academic career he'd begun when Nathan saw him last. Tom's boss is the charismatic Harry Brightman, whom fate has also brought to the "ancient kingdom of Brooklyn, New York." Through Tom and Harry, Nathan's world gradually broadens to include a new set of acquaintances—not to mention a stray relative or two—and leads him to a reckoning with his past. Among the many twists in the delicious plot are a scam involving a forgery of the first page of The Scarlet Letter, a disturbing revelation that takes place in a sperm bank, and an impossible, utopian dream of a rural refuge. Meanwhile, the wry and acerbic Nathan has undertaken something he calls The Book of Human Folly, in which he proposes "to set down in the simplest, clearest language possible an account of every blunder, every pratfall, every embarrassment, every idiocy, every foible, and every inane act I had committed during my long and checkered career as a man." But life takes over instead, and Nathan's despair is swept away as he finds himself more and more implicated in the joys and sorrows of others. The Brooklyn Follies is Paul Auster's warmest, most exuberant novel, a moving and unforgettable hymn to the glories and mysteries of ordinary human life.
Download or read book Junk Science written by Dan Agin and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2007-11-27 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An overdue indictment of government, industry, and faith groups that twist science for their own gain.
Download or read book Frontier Follies written by Ree Drummond and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2020-11-17 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times bestseller A down-to-earth, hilarious collection of stories and musings on marriage, motherhood, and country life from the #1 New York Times bestselling author and star of the Food Network show The Pioneer Woman, Ree Drummond. Once upon a time, I lost my marbles and married a sexy, Wrangler-wearing cowboy named Ladd. That single decision would wind up setting the stage for years of rural adventures (and misadventures), and while I can't imagine my life being any different, raising a family in the “idyllic” countryside has not been without a few bumps in the road. (Or were those cow patties? It's hard to tell the difference sometimes.) I'm excited to share this crazy collection of true stories from my full-of-energy, hard-to-tame, wonderfully wild (and very weird) frontier family. From the unique challenges of being married to a rancher to the blood, sweat, mud, and tears of raising country kids, I'll pull back the curtain and let you in on some of the sh*t and shenanigans that have really gone on here on Drummond Ranch over the past two-plus decades. You'll learn about marital spats, run-ins with wildlife, ER visits, my parenting neuroses, triumphs, tribulations, love, loss . . . and how manure has somehow managed to weave its way through all of it. To keep things up to the minute, you'll also hear about more recent family developments that have tested my sanity and pushed me to the brink. (And pleasantly surprised me, too.) This book is both a love letter and a laugh letter, and I hope you get a big kick out of it all: the good, the bad, and the dirty. Mostly, I hope it demonstrates how much I adore this family of mine . . . even if I sometimes have to use rubber snakes to show it.
Download or read book The Lives of Justine Johnstone written by Kathleen Vestuto and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2018-07-26 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a Ziegfeld Follies girl and film actress, Justine Johnstone (1895-1982) was celebrated as "the most beautiful woman in the world." Her career took an unexpected turn when she abruptly retired from acting at 31. For the remainder of her life, she dedicated herself to medical research and social activism. As a cutting-edge pathologist, she contributed to the pre-penicillin treatment of syphilis at Columbia University, participated in the development of early cancer treatments at Caltech, and assisted Los Angeles physicians in oncology research. As a divorced woman in the 1940s, she adopted and raised two children on her own. She later helped find work for blacklisted Hollywood screenwriters and became a prominent participant in social and political causes. The first full-length biography of Johnstone chronicles her extraordinary success in two male-dominated fields--show business and medical science--and follows her remarkable journey into a fascinating and fulfilling life.
Download or read book Supply Side Follies written by Robert D. Atkinson and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2006-10-24 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Supply-Side Follies is a progressive political and economic challenge to the current George W. Bush policies. It debunks commonly held assumptions of conservative economic policies centered on the obsession that tax cuts led to greater productivity and prosperity. These fundamentally flawed policies are setting the United States up for a major economic downturn in the near future. The 21st century knowledge economy requires a fundamentally different approach to boosting growth than simply cutting taxes on the richest investors. The alternative is not, however, to resurrect old Keynesian, populist economics as too many Democrats hope to do. Rather, as Rob Atkinson makes clear, our long-term national welfare and prosperity depends on new economic strategy that fits the realities of the 21st century global, knowledge-based economy: innovation-based growth economics.
Download or read book Silicon Follies written by Thomas Scoville and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2001-08-22 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Welcome to Silicon Valley -- where fortunes are fast, dating's dysfunctional, and computer geeks rule. Meet Paul Armstrong, a late-twenties computer "consultant" who sits in his cubicle at TeraMemory wondering where it all went horribly wrong. "Well, I wasn't always a nerd. I started out as a liberal-arts type in college -- though I aggressively concealed this on my resume. Hiring managers don't like it. Non-technical outside interests. Bad sign." Watch him order a latte from the ofÞce coffee cart and poke at his Chinese lunch special while his longtime pal Steve Hall, hacker extraordinaire, accuses him of selling out to The Man. "When the money dries up, this place will be just like anywhere else. It was never the place, anyway -- that's what The Man will never understand." Meet The Man himself: Barry Dominic, the þamboyant, lecherous, millionaire founder of TeraMemory. He insists they're poised to revolutionize networking with a cutting-edge technology, appropriately called WHIP. "Nobody fucks with Barry Dominic." That's where Liz Toulouse comes in. A Stanford English Lit grad and TeraMemory marketing associate, she accidentally cc's the entire company a snide e-mail about The Man's bad grammar on her very Þrst day.... "If only I'd had any idea. I'd have stayed in school. I'd have changed majors. Gotten a master's. Anything." Welcome to Silicon Follies, a hilarious dot.comedy of ambition and disillusionment in a land of luck, loss, and sometimes even love.
Download or read book The March of Folly written by Barbara W. Tuchman and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 1985-02-12 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Barbara W. Tuchman, author of the World War I masterpiece The Guns of August, grapples with her boldest subject: the pervasive presence, through the ages, of failure, mismanagement, and delusion in government. Drawing on a comprehensive array of examples, from Montezuma’s senseless surrender of his empire in 1520 to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, Barbara W. Tuchman defines folly as the pursuit by government of policies contrary to their own interests, despite the availability of feasible alternatives. In brilliant detail, Tuchman illuminates four decisive turning points in history that illustrate the very heights of folly: the Trojan War, the breakup of the Holy See provoked by the Renaissance popes, the loss of the American colonies by Britain’s George III, and the United States’ own persistent mistakes in Vietnam. Throughout The March of Folly, Tuchman’s incomparable talent for animating the people, places, and events of history is on spectacular display. Praise for The March of Folly “A glittering narrative . . . a moral [book] on the crimes and follies of governments and the misfortunes the governed suffer in consequence.”—The New York Times Book Review “An admirable survey . . . I haven’t read a more relevant book in years.”—John Kenneth Galbraith, The Boston Sunday Globe “A superb chronicle . . . a masterly examination.”—Chicago Sun-Times
