What a big idea! And what big fun: A whopping oversize book of interactive paper models to appeal to every kid who loves big machines—which pretty much covers all of them. These are the coolest big machines that kids love—each re-created in an oversize paper model that, once built, really moves. The book has everything the reader needs to pop out, fold, and create a full-color model of ten big machines: a dump truck, space shuttle, excavator, ladder truck, front loader, concrete mixer, steam locomotive, steamboat, dirigible, Chinook helicopter. Created by Phil Conigliaro, a gifted paper engineer and artist, the models are printed on sturdy card stock; perforated to pop out and fold; require only gluing (no tape or pins); and come with complete, easy-to-follow step-by-step instructions. And, worth repeating, each one moves: Wheels roll and the mixer turns, helicopter blades spin, and the excavator’s boom and bucket raises and lowers. Additionally there’s the story of each machine—how it works, who invented it, what it’s used for. Kids will learn the history of the steam shovel—the smoking, hissing monster that dug the Panama Canal, the largest engineering feat of the 20th century; how astronauts in a space shuttle could withstand the 3,000 degrees of heat created when it returned to Earth; how the world’s largest dump truck can haul a million pounds. It’s big stuff!

Why the card catalog—a “paper machine” with rearrangeable elements—can be regarded as a precursor of the computer. Today on almost every desk in every office sits a computer. Eighty years ago, desktops were equipped with a nonelectronic data processing machine: a card file. In Paper Machines, Markus Krajewski traces the evolution of this proto-computer of rearrangeable parts (file cards) that became ubiquitous in offices between the world wars. The story begins with Konrad Gessner, a sixteenth-century Swiss polymath who described a new method of processing data: to cut up a sheet of handwritten notes into slips of paper, with one fact or topic per slip, and arrange as desired. In the late eighteenth century, the card catalog became the librarian's answer to the threat of information overload. Then, at the turn of the twentieth century, business adopted the technology of the card catalog as a bookkeeping tool. Krajewski explores this conceptual development and casts the card file as a “universal paper machine” that accomplishes the basic operations of Turing's universal discrete machine: storing, processing, and transferring data. In telling his story, Krajewski takes the reader on a number of illuminating detours, telling us, for example, that the card catalog and the numbered street address emerged at the same time in the same city (Vienna), and that Harvard University's home-grown cataloging system grew out of a librarian's laziness; and that Melvil Dewey (originator of the Dewey Decimal System) helped bring about the technology transfer of card files to business.

Everyone involved in paper making knows Asten as a world class manufacturer of paper machine clothing. Perhaps less well known is that Asten started in this industry more than 120 years ago. Since then the company has taken advantage of modern manufacturing techniques to produce innovative products needed by the growing paper making industry. That is why Asten commissioned Dr. Sabit Adanur to write this book - to continue spreading sophisticated papermaking knowledge throughout the global paper industry. This book discusses how the latest technological innovations help produce quality paper products. It also covers the use of TQM and computers in the papermaking process as basic paper structure and properties.

This book questions the book itself, archivization, machines for writing, and the mechanicity inherent in language, the media, and intellectuals. Derrida questions what takes place between the paper and the machine inscribing it. He examines what becomes of the archive when the world of paper is subsumed in new machines for virtualization, and whether there can be a virtual event or a virtual archive. Derrida continues his long-standing investigation of these issues, and ties them into the new themes that governed his teaching and thinking in the past few years: the secret, pardon, perjury, state sovereignty, hospitality, the university, animal rights, capital punishment, the question of what sort of mediatized world is replacing the print epoch, and the question of the “wholly other.” Derrida is remarkable at making seemingly occasional pieces into part of a complexly interconnected trajectory of thought.