Underbug
Title | Underbug PDF eBook |
Author | Lisa Margonelli |
Publisher | Scientific American / Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
Pages | 308 |
Release | 2018-08-21 |
Genre | Science |
ISBN | 0374712387 |
The award-winning journalist Lisa Margonelli, national bestselling author of Oil on the Brain: Petroleum’s Long, Strange Trip to Your Tank, investigates the environmental and economic impact termites inflict on human societies in this fascinating examination of one of nature’s most misunderstood insects. Are we more like termites than we ever imagined? In Underbug, the award-winning journalist Lisa Margonelli introduces us to the enigmatic creatures that collectively outweigh human beings ten to one and consume $40 billion worth of valuable stuff annually—and yet, in Margonelli’s telling, seem weirdly familiar. Over the course of a decade-long obsession with the little bugs, Margonelli pokes around termite mounds and high-tech research facilities, closely watching biologists, roboticists, and geneticists. Her globe-trotting journey veers into uncharted territory, from evolutionary theory to Edwardian science literature to the military industrial complex. What begins as a natural history of the termite becomes a personal exploration of the unnatural future we’re building, with darker observations on power, technology, historical trauma, and the limits of human cognition. Whether in Namibia or Cambridge, Arizona or Australia, Margonelli turns up astounding facts and raises provocative questions. Is a termite an individual or a unit of a superorganism? Can we harness the termite’s properties to change the world? If we build termite-like swarming robots, will they inevitably destroy us? Is it possible to think without having a mind? Underbug burrows into these questions and many others—unearthing disquieting answers about the world’s most underrated insect and what it means to be human.
Animal Architecture
Title | Animal Architecture PDF eBook |
Author | Paul Dobraszczyk |
Publisher | Reaktion Books |
Pages | 269 |
Release | 2023-05-17 |
Genre | Architecture |
ISBN | 1789147247 |
A provocative call for architects to remember and embrace the nonhuman lives that share our spaces. A spider spinning its web in a dark corner. Wasps building a nest under a roof. There’s hardly any part of the built environment that can’t be inhabited by nonhumans, and yet we are extremely selective about which animals we keep in or out. This book imagines new ways of thinking about architecture and the more-than-human and asks how we might design with animals and the other lives that share our spaces in mind. Animal Architecture is a provocative exploration of how to think about building in a world where humans and other animals are already entangled, whether we acknowledge it or not.
Mind vs. Matter
Title | Mind vs. Matter PDF eBook |
Author | Konrad Koenigsmann |
Publisher | Outskirts Press |
Pages | 213 |
Release | 2016-03-30 |
Genre | Fiction |
ISBN | 1478765984 |
The year is 2067. World War III has come and gone, and the world has been carved into empires. Its people are oppressed and suffering more than ever before. When a mysterious man named Karl von Liebnitz, the leader of a shadowy organization known as Tyrannei, makes plans to take over the planet, there is nothing the empires can do to stop him...until, that is, a new force emerges. Will Hartford and his son, Pierre, have unparalleled mental capabilities, and soon Karl, Will, and Pierre begin to use their mental prowess to battle for control of the world. But as the two sides move closer to their final clash, questions begin to arise. What if the two factions cannot save the world from themselves? What if there is no scenario where the destruction of the world does not happen? Mind vs. Matter is a gripping and thought-provoking novel by an up-and-coming new voice in fiction.
What Is a Human?
Title | What Is a Human? PDF eBook |
Author | James Paul Gee |
Publisher | Springer Nature |
Pages | 276 |
Release | 2020-09-17 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 3030503828 |
In a sweeping synthesis of new research in a number of different disciplines, this book argues that we humans are not who we think we are. As he explores the interconnections between cutting-edge work in bioanthropology, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, human language and learning, and beyond, James Paul Gee advances, also, a personal philosophy of language, learning, and culture, informed by his decades of work across linguistics and the social sciences. Gee argues that our schools, institutions, legal systems, and societies are designed for creatures that do not exist, thus resulting in multiple, interacting crises, such as climate change, failing institutions, and the rise of nationalist nationalism. As Gee constructs an understanding of the human that takes into account our social, collective, and historical nature, as established by recent research, he inspires readers to reflect for themselves on the very question of who we are—a key consideration for anyone interested in society, government, schools, health, activism, culture and diversity, or even just survival.
Thereby Hangs a Tale - Stories of Curious Word Origins
Title | Thereby Hangs a Tale - Stories of Curious Word Origins PDF eBook |
Author | Charles Earle Funk |
Publisher | Read Books Ltd |
Pages | 350 |
Release | 2011-12-09 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1447495853 |
THIS book is the outcome of a collection of material that has been slowly accumulating over the past thirty years or so, since the time when, under the guidance of the late Dr. Frank H. Vizetelly, I began to work as his associate in the editorial department of the Funk & Wagnalls New Standard Dictionary. The ancestry of most of the words that we now use glibly or find in books or other current literature, is prosaic. We can trace their lines of descent back to Old English, or Old French, or Latin, or Greek, or other ancient source, but beyond the bare bones supplied by etymologists, which indicate those sources, and the steps by which they became English words, the dictionaries tell us little—for there is little more that can be told. The ancient Roman or Greek, say, who may have been the first to use a word that has strayed on to us, perhaps could have told the story of its origin. It may have been picturesque, based upon some historic episode, like the word anecdote; it may have come from a tale in some older language, for the languages that we consider ancient were themselves based upon still more ancient sources, but that story, if any, cannot now be determined. Thus what we know about the origins of the great majority of the words in our present language can be found in an unabridged dictionary or in a work dealing with etymologies, such as that compiled by W. W. Skeat about seventy years ago, or the one more recently prepared by Ernest Weekley.
Official Stud Book and Registry of the American Quarter Horse Association
Title | Official Stud Book and Registry of the American Quarter Horse Association PDF eBook |
Author | American Quarter Horse Association |
Publisher | |
Pages | 988 |
Release | 1985 |
Genre | Horses |
ISBN |
Circles where the Head Should be
Title | Circles where the Head Should be PDF eBook |
Author | Caki Wilkinson |
Publisher | University of North Texas Press |
Pages | 83 |
Release | 2011 |
Genre | Poetry |
ISBN | 1574413090 |
The poems in Circles Where the Head Should Be are full of objects and oddities, bits of news, epic catalogues, and a cast of characters hoping to make sense of it all. Underneath the often whimsical surface, however, lies a search for those connections we long for but so often miss, and a wish for art to bridge the gaps.