Terra Firma PDF Download

Author: David Wardlaw Scott
Publisher: Dalcassian Publishing Company
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Includes bibliographical references and index

Author: James Powell
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1416576789
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
In Mysteries of Terra Firma, James Lawrence Powell tells an engrossing three-part tale of how we came to understand the ground on which we walk, and how that ground holds the key to the greatest secrets of deep space and time. Naming his profound stories Time, Drift, and Chance, he tells of the three twentieth-century revolutions in thought that created the amazing science of Earth -- and of all planets to the edge of the universe. The riddle that drove the first revolution is obvious and yet in 1904 remained impenetrable: how old is Earth? An encounter between the imperious Lord Kelvin and a New Zealand farm-boy-turned-physicist, Ernest Rutherford, set the stage for the solution and launched a golden century of geology. As a result, scientists learned that if the 4.5 billion years of geologic time were compressed into a single twenty-four-hour period, Homo sapiens would have arrived only in the last second. The geological Revolution of Time reveals how long the ground on which we walk has existed, and how briefly we have trod that ground. In the early twentieth century, German meteorologist and polar explorer Alfred Wegener proposed a counterintuitive, heretical theory: that terra firma is not so firm; instead of being fixed in place, continents drift. In 1926, petroleum geologists convened in New York City to discuss Wegener's radical idea, where it was met with outrage and skepticism: "If we are to believe Wegener's hypothesis we must forget everything which has been learned in the last seventy years and start all over again," one attendee said. Forty years later, a new generation did exactly that. The Revolution of Drift, the second part of Powell's narrative, showed us how the ground on which we walk moves. Throughout geologic time, meteorites have incessantly bombarded everything in the solar system. Far from serene and predictable, the planets are ruled by random violence on an unimaginable scale. Once a mountain-sized meteorite flew through space, struck the Earth, killed the dinosaurs and two-thirds of all species, and spared the small hamster-sized creature that happened to be our ancestor. The chance of that happening again is essentially zero. So, the final revolution in Powell's history of a golden century of geology is the Revolution of Chance. Simply put, this revolution in thought has transformed our understanding of how lucky we really are. If we can learn so much from considering no more than the rocks beneath our feet, what will we learn when we begin walking on other planets? Mysteries of Terra Firma is both charming in its storytelling and staggering in its implications. Discovering the ground on which we stand is a fascinating journey into our past -- and our future.

Author: Guy Hands
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1473598788
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
An inside account of the multi-billion pound world of private equity and a masterclass on the art of deal-making. The Dealmaker is a frank and honest account of how a severely dyslexic child who struggled at school went on to graduate from Oxford and become a serial entrepreneur. It describes Guy Hand's career in private equity, first at Nomura and then as head of his own company, Terra Firma. It looks in detail at the huge deals that Terra Firma has done over the years, involving everything from cinema chains and pubs to waste management, aircraft leasing and green energy. And it offers a brutally honest appraisal of the deal that almost bankrupted him - the acquisition of multinational music recording and publishing company EMI in 2007, just as a global financial crash loomed on the horizon. Above all, he gives the reader a real sense of what it's like inside the secretive world of private equity, describing in frank detail the pressures and rewards involved. Insightful and page-turning, The Dealmaker will prove inspirational and essential reading for all those who want to understand how huge business negotiations are done, and what makes one of private equity's biggest players tick.

Author: Fadi Masoud
Publisher: Actar
ISBN: 9781948765381
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
A critical and interdisciplinary exploration of our world's continuously urbanizing and expanding coastline. For centuries, cities have grown and expanded onto previously saturated grounds; "reclaiming" land from estuaries, marshes, mangroves, and seabeds. While these artificial coastlines are sites of tremendous real estate, civic, and infrastructural investments, they are also the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Terra-Sorta-Firma documents the global extent of reclaimed coastal lands, and provides a framework for comparison across varying geographies, cultures, and histories. It renders visible the ubiquity and precarity of urban coastal reclamation in an age of increased environmental and economic indeterminacy. It challenges designers, developers, policymakers, engineers, and urbanists to reconsider the design and construction of land itself, and to re-imagine this most fundamental of all infrastructures along a gradient of inundation.

Author: Frederique Ait-Touati
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262046695
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
Charting the exploration of an unknown world—our own—with a new cartography of living things rather than space available for conquest or colonization. This book charts the exploration of an unknown world: our own. Just as Renaissance travelers set out to map the terra incognito of the New World, the mapmakers of Terra Forma have set out to rediscover the world that we think we know. They do this with a new kind of cartography that maps living things rather than space emptied of life and available to be conquered or colonized. The maps in Terra Forma lead us inward, not off into the distance, moving from the horizon line of conventional cartography to the thickness of the ground, from the global to the local. Each map in Terra Forma is based on a specific territory or territories, and each tool, or model, creates a new focal point through which the territory is redrawn. The maps are “living maps,” always under construction, spaces where stories and situations unfold. They may map the Earth’s underside rather than its surface, suggest turning the layers of the Earth inside out, link the biological physiology of living inhabitants and the physiology of the land, or trace a journey oriented not by the Euclidean space of GPS but by points of life. These speculative visualizations can constitute the foundation for a new kind of atlas.

Author: Barbara Hammond
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1786829622
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 121

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Book Description
TERRA FIRMA is set in a not-so-distant Beckettian future–years after a conflict known as the Big War, in which a tiny kingdom wrestles with the problems of running a nation–and opposing notions of what makes a citizen, a country, and a civilization.

Author: James Monroe Gere
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780916318130
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Author: François Joseph Pons
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Indians of South America
Languages : en
Pages : 390

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Book Description

Author: David Wardlaw Scott
Publisher: Literary Licensing, LLC
ISBN: 9781498021999
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
This Is A New Release Of The Original 1901 Edition.

Author: J. M. Ledgard
Publisher: FSG Originals
ISBN: 0374714460
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 48

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Book Description
From the author of Submergence comes a digital-original triptych of essays that examine humanity in the modern age. Terra Firma Triptych begins in a wilderness in South Sudan. J. M. Ledgard is there in search of a still point, untouched by humankind--a goal complicated by the contingent of armed rangers accompanying him. Next, a trip through Rwanda--taking a borrowed car toward crocodile-infested lakes near the border with Burundi--a road trip that unexpectedly ends up at the site of the country's proposed future in the sky. And finally Ledgard takes us straight into a vision of that very future, of a continent poised to take advantage of current and near-future technological advances--a vision that feels Star Trek fanciful at first, then not just practical but necessary. As a novelist, Ledgard is celebrated for his ability to allow his imagination and ideas to fly wide and free even as he grounds his stories in contemporary political reality, earning simultaneous comparisons to both W. G. Sebald and John le Carré. As a journalist, he has covered East Africa for The Economist for more than a decade. In Terra Firma Triptych, Ledgard is able to summon the searching, soaring, poetic voice of the novelist and to latch it to the gritty vision of the reporter on the ground to show us a world in which connectivity has become paramount, in which isolation and uncharted landscapes verge on obsolete, and yet new frontiers still beckon. Each panel of the triptych informs the one before--each goads us forward even as it questions the acceleration. What is certain is that we are hurtling into tomorrow together, and our potential depends on the generosity of our imagination.