Baffling & Bizarre Inventions PDF Download

Author: Jim Murphy
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1626365857
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 145

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Book Description
A talking watch. An overcoat for two. A pair of pants for poodles. In his companion to Weird & Wacky Inventions, Jim Murphy shows kids some additional baffling and utterly silly inventions in the form of a guessing game that is both challenging and fun. What is a finger-supporting device used for? Can you really buy that talking watch? What on earth is a beard grinder? Whether it’s a device for shaping the upper lip or a life preserver for horses, this parade of unusual inventions is a real treat for trivia lovers and any curious kid with an interest in science and inventions. Ages: 9–12.

Author: Tom Quinn
Publisher: Robson
ISBN: 1910232475
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
The history of science is littered with mad, bad and delightfully dotty inventions, from the bicycle that relied for its momentum on the rider waggling his head back and forth continually to the Improved Pneumatic Advertising Hat – a bowler that hurled a lit-up billboard into the air at the touch of a button – or the suitcase that turned into a small boat for the nervous ferry passenger. Here is the chance to sample, among other delights, Professor Ray's Nose Adjusting Machine, Admiral Popov's Circular Warship, The Perfect Sleeping Partner (a Japanese pillow shaped just like a man with an arm fitted at the right angle for a comforting cuddle) and last, but by no means least, Calantarient's Improved Dung Trap for Carriage Horses Employed by Ladies of Fashion and those of a Delicate Constitution.

Author: Hanno Sauer
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1668031957
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
What makes us moral beings? How do we decide what is good and what is evil? In the vein of Sapiens comes a grand history of our universal moral values at the moment of their greatest crisis. How did we learn to distinguish good from evil? Have we always been capable of doing so? And will we still be in the world to come? In this breathtaking book, ethics expert Hanno Sauer offers a great universal history of morality in the era of its darkest crisis. He finds that morality existed long before there was talk of God, religion, or philosophy. Its history is, first of all, the fruit of a process of natural selection, going back to the dawn of humanity, in the forests of East Africa which, five million years ago, thinned out owing to climate change. Among the early humans that came down from the trees, there were also our ancestors, who adapted to open spaces by organizing themselves into large groups. Under the pressure of environmental factors, morality emerges as the foundation for cooperation, a quality that is as precarious as it is essential to the survival of the species. Moving between paleontology and genetics, psychology and cognitive science, philosophy and evolutionism, Sauer traces a genealogy of morality and along the journey, marks the main moral transformations in the history of humanity. In the end, he concludes that millions of years of stratifications has led to the moral crisis of our present—and the only way to build a future together is to retrace our history.

Author: Eric Bower
Publisher: Amberjack Publishing
ISBN: 1944995528
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 147

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Book Description
When someone gets ahold of the Barons’ Wonderful Doppelgänger Device, which allows them to transform into anyone, they use it to land Rose in jail by posing as her to cause a small explosion during the Pitchfork Fair. The dastardly villain then ambushes W.B. and abducts him onto a train bound for the other side of the country. With W.B. out of the way, the imposter replaces him until W.B. returns unexpectedly and exposes the plot. Unfortunately, the deadly duplicate is great at impersonation. To save his skin, W.B. must prove himself by W.B.ing harder than he’s ever W.B.ed before.

Author: Peter J. James
Publisher: Random House Digital, Inc.
ISBN: 0345401026
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 702

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Book Description
A guide to ancient accomplishments and inventions unearths the origins of modern creations, including computers in ancient Greece, plastic surgery in India in the first century B.C., and a postal service in medieval Baghdad

Author: Len Fisher
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.
ISBN: 1611459761
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 166

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Book Description
From the man who "puts the fizz in physics" (Entertainment Weekly), an entertaining and thought-provoking foray into the science of the bizarre, the peculiar, and the downright nutty! Winner of the IgNobel Prize in physics and the 2004 American Institute of Physics Science Writing Award, Len Fisher showed just how much fun science can be in his enthusiastically praised debut, How to Dunk a Doughnut. In this new work, he reveals that science sometimes takes a path through the ridiculous and the bizarre to discover that Nature often simply does not follow common sense. One experiment, involving a bed, platform scales, and a dying man, seemed to prove that the soul weighed the same as a slice of bread. But other, no less fanciful experiments and ideas led to the fundamentals of our understanding of movement, heat, light, and energy, and such things as the discovery of electricity, and the structure of DNA; improved engines; and the invention of computers. As in his previous book, Fisher uses personal stories and examples from everyday life, as well as humor, to make the science accessible. He touches on topics from lightning to corsets and from alchemy to Frankenstein and water babies, but he may not claim the last word on the weight of the soul!

Author: Shengqing Wu
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000626970
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
This book presents the first collection of studies of the senses and sensory experiences in China, filling a gap in sensory research while offering new approaches to Chinese Studies. Bringing together 12 chapters by literary scholars and historians, this book critically interrogates the deeply rooted meanings that the senses have coded in Chinese culture and society. Built on an exploration of the sensorium in early Chinese thought and late imperial literature, this book reveals the sensory manifestations of societal change and cultural transformation in China from the nineteenth century to the present day. It features in-depth examinations of a variety of concepts, representations, and practices, including aural and visual paradigms in ancient Chinese texts; odours in Ming-Qing literature and Republican Shanghai; the tactility of kissing and the sonic culture of community singing in the Republican era; the socialist sensorium in art, propaganda, memory, and embodied experiences; and contemporary-era multisensory cultural practices. Engaging with the exciting "sensory turn," this original work makes a unique contribution to the world history of the senses, and will be a valuable resource to scholars and students of Chinese Literature, History, Cultural Studies, and Media.

Author: Terry Castle Professor of English Stanford University
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198024274
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
A collection of the author's essays on the history and development of female identity from the 18th to the early 20th centuries. Throughout the book are woven themes which are constant in Castle's work: fantasy, hallucination, travesty, transgression and sexual ambiguity.

Author: Simon Goldhill
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316512908
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 517

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Book Description
With trademark flair, Simon Goldhill shows how Christianity transformed humanity's relationship with time in ways that resonate today.

Author: Rachel J. D. Smith
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231547935
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
For thirteenth-century preacher, exorcist, and hagiographer Thomas of Cantimpré, the Southern Low Countries were a harbinger of the New Jerusalem. The Holy Spirit, he believed, was manifesting itself in the lives of lay and religious people alike. Thomas avidly sought out these new kinds of saints, writing accounts of their lives so that these models of sanctity might astound, teach, and trouble the convictions of his day. In Excessive Saints, Rachel J. D. Smith combines historical, literary, and theological approaches to offer a new interpretation of Thomas’s hagiographies, showing how they employ vivid narrative portrayals of typically female bodies to perform theological work in a rhetorically specific way. Written in an era of great religious experimentation, Thomas’s texts think with and through the bodies of particular figures: the narrative of the holy person’s life becomes a site of theological invention in a variety of registers, particularly the devotional, the mystical, and the dogmatic. Smith examines how these texts represent the lives and bodies of holy women to render them desirable objects of devotion for readers and how Thomas passionately narrates these lives even as he works through his uncertainties about the opportunities and dangers that these emerging forms of holiness present. Excessive Saints is the first book to consider Thomas’s narrative craft in relation to his theological projects, offering new visions for the study of theology, medieval Christianity, and medieval women’s history.