Author: Alan Hirshfeld Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA ISBN: 0802719791 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 252
Book Description
Many of us know little about Archimedes other than his "Eureka" exclamation upon discovering that he could immerse an object in a full tub of water and measure the spillage to determine the object's weight. That seemingly simple observation not only proved to King Hieron II of Syracuse that a certain amount of silver had been used in what was supposed to be his solid-gold crown, it established the key principles of buoyancy that govern the flotation of hot-air balloons, ships, and denizens of the sea. Archimedes had a profound impact on the development of mathematics and science: from square roots to irrigation devices; planetariums to the stability of ships; polyhedra to pulleys; number systems to levers; the value of pi to the size of the universe. Yet this same cerebral man developed machines of war so fearsome, they might have sprung from a devil's darkest imagination - indeed, weapons that held at bay the greatest army of antiquity. Ironically, Archimedes' reputation swelled to mythic proportions in the ancient world for his feats of engineering: the hand-cranked irrigation device, commonly known as "Archimedes' screw," and his ingenuous use of levers, pulleys, and ropes to pull, single-handedly, a fully laden ship! His treatises, rediscovered after a thousand years of collective amnesia in Europe, guided nascent thinkers out of the Dark Ages and into the Renaissance. Indeed, Archimedes' cumulative record of achievement-both in breadth and sophistication-places him among the exalted ranks of Aristotle, Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton, and Albert Einstein. Eureka Man brings to life for general readers the genius of Archimedes, offering succinct and understandable explanations of some of his more important discoveries and innovations.
Author: Jim Lehrer Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks ISBN: 0812975529 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 258
Book Description
Ever reliable and responsible, Otis Halstead is a father, a husband (one half of a “well-dressed couple of substance”), and the CEO of Kansas Central Fire and Casualty. He has never done anything out of the ordinary. Until now. The change in Otis starts with the acquisition of an antique toy fire truck, the exact model he had pined for at age ten but never received. Next comes a Daisy Red Ryder BB gun. But Otis’s real coup is the purchase of his one true childhood passion: a red 1952 Cushman Pacemaker motor scooter. For his baffled wife, Sally, this is the final straw. She insists that he see a shrink. But when tragedy strikes uncomfortably close to home, Otis decides he wants out of his sensible, safe life in Eureka, Kansas. And so, a few weeks before his sixtieth birthday, Otis leaves town, heading west on old U.S. 56, a corporate CEO riding a forty-year-old motor scooter with a BB gun strapped to the side. One might say he was in for an adventure. Otis would say he was finally about to experience life.
Author: Robert McLiam Wilson Publisher: Arcade Publishing ISBN: 9781559703963 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 412
Book Description
Romantic Ireland is definitely dead and gone. With the exhilarating Eureka Street, Robert McLiam Wilson cheerfully and obscenely sends it to its grave. Jake Jackson, his thoughtful anti-hero, finds Belfast's tragedies are built on comedy: Catholics and Protestants so intent on declaring their differences "resembled no one now as much as they resembled each other…. That was what I liked about Belfast hatred. It was a lumbering hatred that could survive completely on the memories of things that never existed in the first place." He spends a certain amount of time worrying about seeming too Catholic and an equal amount worrying about not seeming sufficiently Catholic. Sometimes, after several drinks, Jake forgets that he's not a Protestant. Each position is as dangerous, and absurd, as the other. His best friend is less torn up. Chuckie Lurgan is a chubby Methodist whose only accomplishments so far have been shaking Reagan's hand, appearing in the same photo as the Pope, and having "an intense and troubling relationship with mail-order catalogues." But Chuckie suddenly surprises Jake with his first entrepreneurial scheme. Though he's placed an ad for an enormous sex toy in Northern Ireland's "only mucky paper," he hasn't any intention of ever fulfilling an order. Instead, he follows legal protocol and sends each disappointed customer a refund check, in the proper amount, stamped GIANT DILDO REFUND. The gamble is that most people will be too embarrassed to cash them. "Chuckie smiled the smile of the just-published poet." And soon he has more than 40,000 pounds in the bank and a lust for big money. He also has a rich, new girlfriend: "He hoped his dreams wouldn't suffer from all this reality."Jake is more preoccupied with the day-to-day. His construction site job gives him ample opportunity to consider his romantic failures and the ever-present symbols of war. There's also a new graffito that has sprouted among the various deadly acronyms. IRA, UVF, and UDA make no more sense than OTG, but at least everyone knows what they stand for. OTG becomes a puzzle to all of Belfast--is it, the authorities wonder, a new terrorist group? (Jake also notes several other phrases, FTP, FTQ, and FTNP--the "T" stands for the and "P" and "Q" for Pope and Queen. The "N" is for Next.) Despite his love for Belfast, Jake loses heart with its zealots and fanatics and, halfway through, Eureka Street threatens to slide into windy bathos. It's only a momentary lapse amid energetic, colloquial poetry and comic realism.
Author: Cris Ramsay Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 1101477547 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 274
Book Description
A Global Dynamics researcher has a breakthrough on her project visualizing another dimension. And since GD's experiments have a bad tendency to affect the entire town, Sheriff Jack Carter heads over to check it out. What he sees blows him away. The project has revealed a parallel universe, complete with another Eureka-one in which Carter doesn't exist! But as the two worlds begin to bleed into each other and residents confront their alternate selves, Carter may be the one man who can keep both Eurekas from being destroyed.
Author: Walker Royce Publisher: Morgan James Publishing ISBN: 1600379443 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 275
Book Description
"[This book] illuminates the communications power as well as the amusement potential of the English language. Instead of highlighting all the hairball rules of English, [the author] leads us through a mentally invigorating workout of English usage - good and bad."--P. [4] of cover.
Author: Eugene Sadler-Smith Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0198871562 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 321
Book Description
This book explores the science behind intuitive decision-making in business, and shows how people's innate capacity for intuition can be nurtured and strengthened to maximize performance. We are all familiar with those perplexing situations when we think we 'just know' without knowing how or why we know. In professional life it might be the job candidate's CV that checks all the boxes but somehow doesn't stack-up: should we perform some due diligence and dig a little deeper? In personal life it could be the apartment that we're looking to rent that just felt right the minute we walked through the front door: should we trust our hunch and grab it while we can? What if time is of the essence? What if there isn't any more data to be had in the time available? In this volume, Eugene Sadler-Smith examines why situations like these often leave us in a quandary, and why these decisions so often leave us in two minds. He reveals that metaphorically speaking, we have two minds in one brain: an 'analytical mind' and an 'intuitive mind', which sometimes come to quite different conclusions about what we ought to do in those consequential decisions that permeate our professional and personal lives. Rather than thinking of our intuitive and analytical minds in constant battle with each other, we might instead think of them as two information-processing systems that have evolved to complement each other. The main idea of this book is that our analytical mind evolved to 'solve' whilst our intuitive mind evolved to 'sense'. Neither is infallible, and our intuitions can be both flawed and marvellous at the same time. The author's clear and detailed explanation of the science behind intuition reveals how we can make intelligent use of our intuition to sense and solve our way through a world that is fast-moving, complex, and uncertain.
Author: John Joseph Adams Publisher: Titan Books (US, CA) ISBN: 1781164517 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 530
Book Description
HOW THE WEST WAS WEIRD! From a kill-or-be-killed gunfight with a vampire to an encounter in a steampunk bordello, the weird western is a dark, gritty tale where the protagonist might be playing poker with a sorcerous deck of cards, or facing an alien on the streets of a dusty frontier town. Here are twenty-three original tales—stories of the Old West infused with elements of the fantastic—produced specifically for this volume by many of today’s finest writers. Included are Orson Scott Card’s first “Alvin Maker” story in a decade, and an original adventure by Fred Van Lente, writer of Cowboys & Aliens. Other contributors include: Tobias S. Buckell * David Farland * Alan Dean Foster * Jeffrey Ford * Laura Anne Gilman * Rajan Khanna * Mike Resnick * Beth Revis * Fred Van Lente * Walter Jon Williams * Ben H. Winters * Christie Yant * Charles Yu *
Author: Alan Hirshfeld
Author: Jim Lehrer
Author: Robert McLiam Wilson
Author: Cris Ramsay
Author: Andrew Jackson Davis
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Author: Walker Royce
Author: Eugene Sadler-Smith
Author: John Joseph Adams
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