Blindsight
Title | Blindsight PDF eBook |
Author | Peter Watts |
Publisher | Macmillan |
Pages | 388 |
Release | 2006-10-03 |
Genre | Fiction |
ISBN | 1429955198 |
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.
Luxury Arts of the Renaissance
Title | Luxury Arts of the Renaissance PDF eBook |
Author | Marina Belozerskaya |
Publisher | Getty Publications |
Pages | 292 |
Release | 2005-10-01 |
Genre | Art |
ISBN | 0892367857 |
Today we associate the Renaissance with painting, sculpture, and architecture—the “major” arts. Yet contemporaries often held the “minor” arts—gem-studded goldwork, richly embellished armor, splendid tapestries and embroideries, music, and ephemeral multi-media spectacles—in much higher esteem. Isabella d’Este, Marchesa of Mantua, was typical of the Italian nobility: she bequeathed to her children precious stone vases mounted in gold, engraved gems, ivories, and antique bronzes and marbles; her favorite ladies-in-waiting, by contrast, received mere paintings. Renaissance patrons and observers extolled finely wrought luxury artifacts for their exquisite craftsmanship and the symbolic capital of their components; paintings and sculptures in modest materials, although discussed by some literati, were of lesser consequence. This book endeavors to return to the mainstream material long marginalized as a result of historical and ideological biases of the intervening centuries. The author analyzes how luxury arts went from being lofty markers of ascendancy and discernment in the Renaissance to being dismissed as “decorative” or “minor” arts—extravagant trinkets of the rich unworthy of the status of Art. Then, by re-examining the objects themselves and their uses in their day, she shows how sumptuous creations constructed the world and taste of Renaissance women and men.
The Sun, the Earth, and Near-earth Space
Title | The Sun, the Earth, and Near-earth Space PDF eBook |
Author | John A. Eddy |
Publisher | Government Printing Office |
Pages | 316 |
Release | 2009 |
Genre | Business & Economics |
ISBN | 9780160838088 |
" ... Concise explanations and descriptions - easily read and readily understood - of what we know of the chain of events and processes that connect the Sun to the Earth, with special emphasis on space weather and Sun-Climate."--Dear Reader.
The Non-designer's Design Book
Title | The Non-designer's Design Book PDF eBook |
Author | Robin Williams |
Publisher | Pearson Education |
Pages | 241 |
Release | 2015 |
Genre | Art |
ISBN | 0133966151 |
This guide provides a simple, step-by-step process to better design. Techniques promise immediate results that forever change a reader's design eye. It contains dozens of examples.
Literature & Composition
Title | Literature & Composition PDF eBook |
Author | Carol Jago |
Publisher | Bedford/St. Martin's |
Pages | 1568 |
Release | 2010-06-11 |
Genre | Literary Collections |
ISBN | 9780312388065 |
From Carol Jago and the authors of The Language of Composition comes the first textbook designed specifically for the AP* Literature and Composition course. Arranged thematically to foster critical thinking, Literature & Composition: Reading • Writing • Thinking offers a wide variety of classic and contemporary literature, plus all of the support students need to analyze it carefully and thoughtfully. The book is divided into two parts: the first part of the text teaches students the skills they need for success in an AP Literature course, and the second part is a collection of thematic chapters of literature with extensive apparatus and special features to help students read, analyze, and respond to literature at the college level. Only Literature & Composition has been built from the ground up to give AP students and teachers the materials and support they need to enjoy a successful and challenging AP Literature course. Use the navigation menu on the left to learn more about the selections and features in Literature & Composition: Reading • Writing • Thinking. *AP and Advanced Placement Program are registered trademarks of the College Entrance Examination Board, which was not involved in the publication of and does not endorse this product.
Writing and Literature
Title | Writing and Literature PDF eBook |
Author | Tanya Long Bennett |
Publisher | University of North Georgia |
Pages | 284 |
Release | 2018-01-10 |
Genre | Language Arts & Disciplines |
ISBN | 9781940771236 |
In the age of Buzzfeeds, hashtags, and Tweets, students are increasingly favoring conversational writing and regarding academic writing as less pertinent in their personal lives, education, and future careers. Writing and Literature: Composition as Inquiry, Learning, Thinking and Communication connects students with works and exercises and promotes student learning that is kairotic and constructive. Dr. Tanya Long Bennett, professor of English at the University of North Georgia, poses questions that encourage active rather than passive learning. Furthering ideas presented in Contribute a Verse: A Guide to First-Year Composition as a complimentary companion, Writing and Literature builds a new conversation covering various genres of literature and writing. Students learn the various writing styles appropriate for analyzing, addressing, and critiquing these genres including poetry, novels, dramas, and research writing. The text and its pairing of helpful visual aids throughout emphasizes the importance of critical reading and analysis in producing a successful composition. Writing and Literature is a refreshing textbook that links learning, literature, and life.
Speculative Everything
Title | Speculative Everything PDF eBook |
Author | Anthony Dunne |
Publisher | MIT Press |
Pages | 235 |
Release | 2013-12-06 |
Genre | Design |
ISBN | 0262019841 |
How to use design as a tool to create not only things but ideas, to speculate about possible futures. Today designers often focus on making technology easy to use, sexy, and consumable. In Speculative Everything, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby propose a kind of design that is used as a tool to create not only things but ideas. For them, design is a means of speculating about how things could be—to imagine possible futures. This is not the usual sort of predicting or forecasting, spotting trends and extrapolating; these kinds of predictions have been proven wrong, again and again. Instead, Dunne and Raby pose “what if” questions that are intended to open debate and discussion about the kind of future people want (and do not want). Speculative Everything offers a tour through an emerging cultural landscape of design ideas, ideals, and approaches. Dunne and Raby cite examples from their own design and teaching and from other projects from fine art, design, architecture, cinema, and photography. They also draw on futurology, political theory, the philosophy of technology, and literary fiction. They show us, for example, ideas for a solar kitchen restaurant; a flypaper robotic clock; a menstruation machine; a cloud-seeding truck; a phantom-limb sensation recorder; and devices for food foraging that use the tools of synthetic biology. Dunne and Raby contend that if we speculate more—about everything—reality will become more malleable. The ideas freed by speculative design increase the odds of achieving desirable futures.