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The Best Writing on Mathematics 2011

$17.96

$17.96
From:Princeton University Press 0

Document Overview:

This anthology brings together the year's finest mathematics writing from around the world. Featuring promising new voices alongside some of the foremost names in the field, The Best Writing on Mathematics 2011 makes available to a wide audience many articles not easily found anywhere else—and you don't need to be a mathematician to enjoy them. These writings offer surprising insights into the nature, meaning, and practice of mathematics today. They delve into the history, philosophy, teaching, and everyday occurrences of math, and take readers behind the scenes of today's hottest mathematical debates. Here Ian Hacking discusses the salient features that distinguish mathematics from other disciplines of the mind; Doris Schattschneider identifies some of the mathematical inspirations of M. C. Escher's art; Jordan Ellenberg describes compressed sensing, a mathematical field that is reshaping the way people use large sets of data; Erica Klarreich reports on the use of algorithms in the job market for doctors; and much, much more.In addition to presenting the year's most memorable writings on mathematics, this must-have anthology includes a foreword by esteemed physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson. This book belongs on the shelf of anyone interested in where math has taken us—and where it is headed.
Tremendous Trifles

$3.59

$3.59
From:The Floating Press 0

Document Overview:

British author G.K. Chesterton was a prolific writer and daringly original thinker who made his mark in virtually every literary genre. The collection Tremendous Trifles highlights a compelling cross-section of Chesterton's body of work, including sketches, essays, and newspaper columns. It's a perfect compendium for new readers and long-time Chesterton buffs alike.
What I Saw in America

$4.49

$4.49
From:The Floating Press 0

Document Overview:

Like many writers and thinkers of his era, British author G.K. Chesterton toured the United States to get a clearer sense of the country's culture and zeitgeist. The collection What I Saw in America offers Chesterton's impressions of the U.S. in the early twentieth century. Part travelogue, part cultural critique, and part historical analysis, this unique volume is a must-read for Chesterton fans or those with an interest in American history.
The Compleat Motherfucker

$11.70

$11.70
From:Perseus Books Group 0

Document Overview:

How this vulgar slang became a cultural archetype and the subject of Supreme Court rulings.
The Man-Made World

$4.49

$4.49
From:The Floating Press 0

Document Overview:

Early feminist author and advocate Charlotte Perkins Gilman is today best remembered for the haunting short story "The Yellow Wallpaper," which recounts the female protagonist's descent into madness. In addition to her prodigious body of fictional work, Gilman wrote a great deal of non-fiction, including scholarly and persuasive essays about equality and the female condition. This long-form essay details the misogyny that was pervasive in Western culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Thinking Big

$13.46

$13.46
From:Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc. 0

Document Overview:

Leading voices of the Progressive Movement offer their ideas for bold, transformational change in American society.
Sherlock Holmes and Philosophy

$17.96

$17.96
From:Perseus Books Group 0

Document Overview:

This entertaining collection of essays shows that Sherlock Holmes sees things others don't. He sees the world in a different way, and by so doing, allows us to see that same world – and human behavior – in different ways as well. Oh, sure, there have been countless detectives who have followed in his footsteps and who seem to rival his abilities. Just turn on the TV or browse the local bookshop and you'll find idiosyncratic super sleuths using forensics and reasoning to solve a whole host of crimes and misdeeds.And yet no one rivals our dear, dear Holmes. Why does Sherlock reign, even more than a century later, as king? Can this mystery be solved? Unable to reach either Holmes or Watson (or Doyle for that matter, though we've tried every medium we can think of), we've been forced to gather our own team of investigators to practice their powers of observation and perception, to apply their own reasoning and methodologies to the task at hand. The results, I fear, have led us to a number of cases that must be solved first.Is Holmes simply eccentric or a sociopath? Is he human or something from the holodeck? Is he as dangerous on the page as he is in person? Wait – does he even exist? For that matter, do you? (I fear several investigators have been forced to take a much needed holiday after wrestling with that one.)What is the source of his faculty of observation and facility for deduction? Systematic training as Watson surmises? Genetic? Or is he just really lucky?And is this whole logic thing compatible with emotions? Are Holmes and Watson good friends or soul mates? Just what is the nature of friendship? Do they complete each other or just get on each other's nerves? And why all the secrecy? Disguises? Deceptions?The plot thickens. What is the essence of consciousness? Is the observable world subject to our intentions? Why does Holmes debunk mysticism when Doyle so readily embraces it? Why is Holmes our favorite drug user?Our notebooks are filled with clues and, dare
Philip K. Dick and Philosophy

$17.96

$17.96
From:Perseus Books Group 0

Document Overview:

Science fiction writer Philip K. Dick (1928–1982) is the giant imagination behind so much recent popular culture—both movies directly based on his writings, such as Blade Runner (based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), Total Recall, Minority Report, and The Adjustment Bureau plus cult favorites such as A Scanner Darkly, Imposter, Next, Screamers, and Paycheck and works revealing his powerful influence, such as The Matrix and Inception. With the much anticipated forthcoming publication in 2011 of volume 1 of Exegesis, his journal of spiritual visions and paranoic investigations, Dick is fast becoming a major influence in the world of popular spirituality and occult thinking.In Philip K. Dick and Philosophy: Who Adjusts the Adjustment Bureau?, thirty Dick fans and professional thinkers confront the fascinating and frightening ideas raised by Dick's mind-blowing fantasies. Is there an alien world behind the everyday reality we experience? If androids can pass as human, should they be given the same consideration as humans? Do psychotics have insights into a mystical reality? Would knowledge of the future free us or enslave us? This volume will also include Dick's short story "Adjustment Team," on which The Adjustment Bureau is based.Philip K. Dick and Philosophy explores the ideas of Philip K. Dick in the same way that he did: with an earnest desire to understand the truth of the world, but without falsely equating earnestness with a dry seriousness. Dick's work was replete with whimsical and absurdist presentations of the greatest challenges to reason and to humanity—paradox, futility, paranoia, and failure—and even at his darkest times he was able to keep some perspective and humor, as for example in choosing to name himself 'Horselover Fat' in VALIS at the same time as he relates his personal religious epiphanies, crises, and delusions. With the same earnest whimsy, we approach Philip K. Dick as a philosopher like ourselves—one who wrote almost ent
Halo and Philosophy

$17.96

$17.96
From:Perseus Books Group 0

Document Overview:

Since the Doom series, First Person Shooter (FPS) videogames have ricocheted through the gaming community, often reaching outside that community to the wider public. While critics primarily lampoon FPSs for their aggressiveness and on-screen violence, gamers see something else. Halo is one of the greatest, most successful FPSs ever to grace the world of gaming. Although Halo is a FPS, it has a science-fiction storyline that draws from previous award-winning science fiction literature. It employs a game mechanic that limits the amount of weapons a player can carry to two, and a multiplayer element that has spawned websites like Red vs. Blue and games within the game created by players themselves.Halo's unique and extraordinary features raise serious questions. Are campers really doing anything wrong? Does Halo's music match the experience of the gamer? Would Plato have used Halo to train citizens to live an ethical life? What sort of Artificial Intelligence exists in Halo and how is it used? Can the player's experience of war tell us anything about actual war? Is there meaning to Master Chief's rough existence? How does it affect the player's ego if she identifies too strongly with an aggressive character like Master Chief? Is Halo really science fiction? Can Halo be used for enlightenment-oriented thinking in the Buddhist sense? Does Halo's weapon limitation actually contribute to the depth of the gameplay? When we willingly play Halo only to die again and again, are we engaging in some sort of self-injurious behavior? What is expansive gameplay and how can it be informed by the philosophy of Michel Foucault? In what way does Halo's post-apocalyptic paradigm force gamers to see themselves as agents of divine deliverance? What can Red vs. Blue teach us about personal identity?These questions are tackled by writers who are both Halo cognoscenti and active philosophers, with a foreword by renowned Halo fiction author Fred Van Lente and an afterword by leading games sch
Silences in NGO Discourse

$8.99

$8.99
From:Independent Publishers Group 0

Document Overview:

One of the most articulate critics of the destructive effects of neoliberal policies in Africa, and in particular of the ways in which they have eroded the gains of independence, Issa Shivji shows in two extensive essays in this book that the role of NGOs in Africa cannot be understood without placing them in their political and historical context. As structural adjustment programs were imposed across Africa in the 1980s and 1990s, the international financial institutions and development agencies began giving money to NGOs for programs to minimize the more glaring inequalities perpetuated by their policies. As a result, NGOs have flourished—and played an unwitting role in consolidating the neoliberal hegemony in Africa. Shivji argues that if social policy is to be determined by citizens rather than the donors, African NGOs must become catalysts for change rather than the catechists of aid that they are today.
The Words of Abraham Lincoln

$8.99

$8.99
From:HarperCollins Publishers Inc. 0

Document Overview:

From the Four score and seven years ago that every American schoolchild knows to personal notes and dozens of memorable letters, debates, and speeches from a critical time in this nation's history, here is a remarkable collection of Lincoln's writings. Through them, we can follow the sixteenth president's development from country lawyer to healer of a wounded nation. Arranged thematically, The Words of Abraham Lincoln brings together his early writings, his notes on courtship, marriage, and the family, his thoughts on slavery, including the full text of the Emancipation Proclamation, and his letters to his generals during the Civil War, among other subjects. This book includes eight historical photographs and a chronology. Two hundred years after his birth, Lincoln's writing endures. Witty and wise, Lincoln speaks today as powerfully as he did when he was president.
How to Write a Good Poem: Three Essential Elements

$1.79

$1.79
From:Fearless Books

Document Overview:

The co-editor and publisher of the award-winning Fearless Poetry Series offers a concise and inspiring guide to writing a good poem. The three essential skills of Vocabulary, Compression, and Revision are explained, with helpful suggestions for practice. Includes a number of example poems by the author, a widely published poet. Also: live links to other helpful resources.
The Search for the Legacy of the USPHS Syphilis Study at Tuskegee

$53.99

$53.99
From:Rowman and Littlefield Publishing Group 0

Document Overview:

The Search for the Legacy of the USPHS Syphilis Study at Tuskegee is a collection of essays that seeks to redefine the "legacy" of the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study in light of recent findings from other scientific studies that challenge the long-standing, widely-held understanding of the study. These essays are written with thoughtful attention to fully integrate the essayists' perspectives on the impact of the study on the lives of Americans today and place the legacy of the study within the evolving picture of racial and ethnic relations in the United States. Each essayist looks through his or her own personal and professional prism to give an account of what constitutes that legacy today. Contributors include the two leading historians of theTuskeegee Syphilis Study and two former Surgeons General of the United States as well as other prominent scholars from the fields of public health, bioethics, psychology, biostatistics, medicine, dentistry, journalism, medical sociology, medical anthropology, and health disparities research.
Secrets of an Old Typewriter

$4.49

$4.49
From:Open Books 0

Document Overview:

Anyone who has ever lived in a small town certainly knows that secrets are sometimes not so secret.Susie Duncan Sexton has lived her entire life in a small town—indeed, in the same house where she grew up. As an adult, she taught at the same grammar school that she attended as a child, and many of the relationships she cultivated while growing up, including her marriage, have endured over the years. Always one to document the present and offer her sometimes unorthodox ideas and opinions, Susie Duncan Sexton has tickled the keys of her trusty old typewriter for nearly five decades, and now that venerable machine is ready to reveal its secrets.This book may be about small town life, but the ideas contained within it are expansive. The written accounts of the life of a 'smart and sassy small town girl' are as urbane as those of any city dweller. From '50s and '60s nostalgia to modern-day values, and from the drama and insight of America's great books and motion pictures to politics, religion and animal rights, Susie Duncan Sexton's 'secrets' always hit the mark with unexpected candor and a unique perspective.
Uncanny Valley

$23.40

$23.40
From:Perseus Books Group 0

Document Overview:

Shuttling between cultural comedies and political tragedies, Lawrence Weschler's articles have throughout his long career intrigued readers with his unique insight into everything he examines, from the ordinary to the extraordinary.Uncanny Valley continues the page-turning conversation as Weschler collects the best of his narrative nonfiction from the past fifteen years. The title piece surveys the hapless efforts of digital animators to fashion a credible human face, the endlessly elusive gold standard of the profession. Other highlights include profiles of novelist Mark Salzman, as he wrestles with a hilariously harrowing bout of writer's block; the legendary film and sound editor Walter Murch, as he is forced to revisit his work on Apocalypse Now in the context of the more recent Iraqi war film Jarhead; and the artist Vincent Desiderio, as he labors over an epic canvas portraying no less than a dozen sleeping figures.With his signature style and endless ability to wonder, Weschler proves yet again that the "world is strange, beautiful, and connected" (The Globe and Mail). Uncanny Valley demonstrates his matchless ability to analyze the marvels he finds in places and people and offers us a new, sublime way of seeing the world.

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