Read Books Online and Download eBooks, EPub, PDF, Mobi, Kindle, Text Full Free.
Gigantic Lengths And Other Vast Megastructures
Download Gigantic Lengths And Other Vast Megastructures full books in PDF, epub, and Kindle. Read online Gigantic Lengths And Other Vast Megastructures ebook anywhere anytime directly on your device. Fast Download speed and no annoying ads. We cannot guarantee that every ebooks is available!
Book Synopsis Gigantic Lengths and Other Vast Megastructures by : Ian Graham
Download or read book Gigantic Lengths and Other Vast Megastructures written by Ian Graham and published by QED Publishing. This book was released on 2012-04 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The tallest, the biggest, the longest and the deepest - all these amazing megastructures are revealed in detail with some incredible facts and statistics to absorb!
Download or read book Megastructure written by Reyner Banham and published by The Monacelli Press, LLC. This book was released on 2020-06-16 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A long-sought reprint of this classic of architectural history and criticism, surveying a movement that would inspire architects, fantasists, and filmmakers alike. It is an architectural concept as alluring as it is elusive, as futuristic as it is primordial. Megastructure is what it sounds like: a vastly scaled edifice that can contain potentially countless uses, contexts, and adaptations. Theorized and briefly experimented with in built form in the 1960s, megastructures almost as quickly went out of fashion in the profession. But Reyner Banham's 1976 book compiled the origin stories and ongoing mythos of this visionary movement, seeking to chart its lively rise, rapid fall, and ongoing meaning. Now back in print after decades and with original editions fetching well over $100 on the secondary market, Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past is part of the recent surge in attention to this quixotic form, of which some examples were built but to this day remains--decades after its codification--more of a poetic idea than a real architectural type. Banham, among the most gifted and incisive architectural critics and historians of his time, sought connections between theoretical origins in Le Corbusier's more starry-eyed drawings to the flurry of theories by the Japanese Metabolist architects, to less intentional examples in military architecture, industry, infrastructure, and the emerging instances in pop culture and art. Had he written the book a few years later he would find an abundance of examples in speculative art and science fiction cinema, mediums where it continues to provoke wonder to this day. A long-sought study by an author who combined imagination, wit, and pioneering scholarship, the republication of Megastructure is an opportunity for scholars and laypeople alike to return to the origins of this fantastic urban idea.
Book Synopsis Earths of Distant Suns by : Michael Carroll
Download or read book Earths of Distant Suns written by Michael Carroll and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-10-03 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on the latest missions results and supported by commissioned artwork, this book explores the possible lessons we may learn from exoplanets. As the number of known Earth-like objects grows significantly, the author explores what is known about the growing roster of "pale blue dots" far afield. Aided by an increased sensitivity of the existing observatories, recent discoveries by Keck, the Hubble Space Telescope, and Kepler are examined. These findings, once thought to be closer to the realm of science fiction, have fired the imaginations of the general public as well as scientists. All of us are mesmerized by the possibility of other Earth-like worlds out there. Author Michael Carroll asks the tough questions of what the expected gain is from identifying these Earth analogs spread across the Universe and the reasons for studying them. Potentially, they could teach us about our own climate and Solar System. Also explored are the more remote options of communication between or even travel to these distant yet perhaps not so dissimilar worlds.
Book Synopsis Manmade Modular Megastructures by : Ian Abley
Download or read book Manmade Modular Megastructures written by Ian Abley and published by Academy Press. This book was released on 2006-04-07 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There will be 8.3 billion human beings on Earth by 2030, and the more the better. We have the opportunity to create a world of expansive megacities - including one around old London. Doing so will advance the art, science and processes of manufacturing. But to deploy those abilities we must shrug off the dogma of sustainability that insists only small can be beautiful. Humanity has come a long way since the first modular mega-structure was built at Ur, on land that is now Iraq. There, four millennia ago, and by hand, the Sumerians built a mud-brick ziggurat to their Gods. Today, the green deities of Nature we have invented for ourselves are worshipped with humility. Eco-zealots argue against the mechanised megaforming of landscape and the modularised production of megastructures. The guest editors, Jonathan Schwinge and Ian Abley of the London based research organisation audacity, call for development on a bold scale. They argue that by rapidly super-sizing the built environment society is not made vulnerable to natural or man-made hazards, and that design innovation surpasses bio-mimicry. Designers can learn from materials scientists working at the smallest of scales, and from systems manufacturers with ambitions at the largest. This issue calls for creative thinking about typologies and topologies, and considers what that also means for Africa, China, and Russia. Megacities everywhere demand integration of global systems of transport, utilities and IT in gigantic structures, constantly upgraded, scraping both the sky and the ground, outward into the sea.
Book Synopsis Heaven's River by : Dennis E. Taylor
Download or read book Heaven's River written by Dennis E. Taylor and published by . This book was released on 2021-01-26 with total page 632 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Civil war looms in the Bobiverse in this brand-new, epic-length adventure by best seller Dennis E. Taylor. More than a hundred years ago, Bender set out for the stars and was never heard from again. There has been no trace of him despite numerous searches by his clone-mates. Now Bob is determined to organize an expedition to learn Bender's fate-whatever the cost. But nothing is ever simple in the Bobiverse. Bob's descendants are out to the 24th generation now, and replicative drift has produced individuals who can barely be considered Bobs anymore. Some of them oppose Bob's plan; others have plans of their own. The out-of-control moots are the least of the Bobiverse's problems. Undaunted, Bob and his allies follow Bender's trail. But what they discover out in deep space is so unexpected and so complex that it could either save the universe-or pose an existential threat the likes of which the Bobiverse has never faced.
Book Synopsis Adventures of an Accidental Sociologist by : Peter L. Berger
Download or read book Adventures of an Accidental Sociologist written by Peter L. Berger and published by Prometheus Books. This book was released on 2011-06-07 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Peter L. Berger is arguably the best-known American sociologist living today. Since the 1960s he has been publishing books on many facets of the American social scene, and several are now considered classics. So it may be hard to believe Professor Berger’s description of himself as an "accidental sociologist." But that in fact accurately describes how he stumbled into sociology. In this witty, intellectually stimulating memoir, Berger explains not only how he became a social scientist, but the many adventures that this calling has led to. Rather than writing an autobiography, he focuses on the main intellectual issues that motivated his work and the various people and situations he encountered in the course of his career. Full of memorable vignettes and colorful characters depicted in a lively narrative often laced with humor, Berger’s memoir conveys the excitement that a study of social life can bring. The first part of the book describes Berger’s initiation into sociology through the New School for Social Research, "a European enclave in the midst of Greenwich Village bohemia." Berger was first a student at the New School and later a young professor amidst a clique of like-minded individuals. There he published The Social Construction of Reality (with colleague Thomas Luckmann), one of his most successful books, followed by The Sacred Canopy on the sociology of religion, also still widely cited. The book covers Berger’s experience as a "globe-trekking sociologist" including trips to Mexico, where he studied approaches to Third World poverty; to East Asia, where he discovered the potential of capitalism to improve social conditions; and to South Africa, where he chaired an international study group on the future of post-Apartheid society. Berger then tells about his role as the director of a research center at Boston University. For over two decades he and his colleagues have been tackling such important issues as globalization, the secularization of Europe, and the ongoing dialectic between relativism and fundamentalism in contemporary culture. What comes across throughout is Berger’s boundless curiosity with the many ways in which people interact in society. This book offers longtime Berger readers as well as newcomers to sociology proof that the sociologist’s attempt to explain the world is anything but boring.
Book Synopsis Contagion Capitalism by : Sean Creaven
Download or read book Contagion Capitalism written by Sean Creaven and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-12-15 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contagion Capitalism situates the COVID-19 pandemic within the systems of global political economy and their attendant cultural modes and theorizes that these systems act as facilitators and drivers of global pandemic risk. Contagion Capitalism therefore critiques the institutionalized corporate-capitalist control of the economy, the state, and science, and the grave consequences this has on global public health policy, the ecological crisis of sustainability, and zoonotic pandemic events such as COVID-19. In doing so, this book addresses the failings of what may be termed as “state science” or “establishment science” in managing the pandemic, as personified especially by those elements of the scientific elite placed in the service of the neoliberal state. This book also explores the limitations of corporate pharmacological technoscience in safeguarding public health, arguing that “Big Pharma” offers only partial remedies for problems of human illness and well-being, poses its own dangers to public health, and obfuscates the social bases of public ill-health and of pandemic risk. Contagion Capitalism further argues that COVID-19 will not be the last or even the most dangerous such epidemiological event. This is because the social production and global dissemination of zoonotic diseases is integral to contemporary capitalism, by virtue of its instrumental mode of science, its central dynamic of production for the sake of accumulation, and the consumer mode this sustains as its own condition of existence. These are the drivers of what may be termed as zoonotic accelerationism. Contagion Capitalism will appeal to scholars in the humanities and social sciences with interests in neoliberal ideology and global political economy, and their impact upon social, political and cultural life.
Download or read book Paul Rudolph written by Paul Rudolph and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 78 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exhibition held: October 1 - November 14, 2010, The Arthur A. Houghton, Jr. Gallery, The Cooper Union; curated by Ed Rawlings and Jim Walrod.
Book Synopsis Canadian Modern Architecture by : Elsa Lam
Download or read book Canadian Modern Architecture written by Elsa Lam and published by Chronicle Books. This book was released on 2019-11-19 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Royal Architectural Institute of Canada (RAIC) President's Medal Award (multi-media representation of architecture). Canada's most distinguished architectural critics and scholars offer fresh insights into the country's unique modern and contemporary architecture. Beginning with the nation's centennial and Expo 67 in Montreal, this fifty-year retrospective covers the defining of national institutions and movements: • How Canadian architects interpreted major external trends • Regional and indigenous architectural tendencies • The influence of architects in Canada's three largest cities: Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver Co-published with Canadian Architect, this comprehensive reference book is extensively illustrated and includes fifteen specially commissioned essays.
Download or read book Earth Roar written by Nick Cook and published by Voice from the Clouds. This book was released on 2021-12-17 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The time has come for humanity’s last stand against the threat from the stars that unless it is stopped, will wipe out all life on Earth. The final instalment of the Earth Song series heralds the arrival of the Kimprak asteroid ship in our solar system and where the stage will be set for an epic confrontation. Whilst Lauren and the team work to bring Tempest’s systems rapidly online, Eden is throwing all its resources into preparing starship for battle. Production is also working flat out to replace as many of the X-craft as possible after so many were lost at the battle with the Kimprak over Antarctica. With everything now on the line, they must also attempt to create a true alliance with a former enemy if our world to have any chance of defending itself from the alien threat. When the Kimprak mothership is detected passing through the Oort Cloud it soon becomes apparent that the final battle in the orbit of Jupiter will be far worse than anything they could have ever imagined. Lauren will also face the ultimate decision, but will she have the strength to go through what will be asked of her as commander before the end? Earth Roar is the sequel to Earth Scream, and is part of the Multiverse Chronicles, an epic series of interlinked stories that follow humanity’s struggle to survive across parallel universes.
Download or read book Dark Skies written by Daniel Deudney and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-02 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Space is again in the headlines. E-billionaires Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are planning to colonize Mars. President Trump wants a "Space Force" to achieve "space dominance" with expensive high-tech weapons. The space and nuclear arms control regimes are threadbare and disintegrating. Would-be asteroid collision diverters, space solar energy collectors, asteroid miners, and space geo-engineers insistently promote their Earth-changing mega-projects. Given our many looming planetary catastrophes (from extreme climate change to runaway artificial superintelligence), looking beyond the earth for solutions might seem like a sound strategy for humanity. And indeed, bolstered by a global network of fervent space advocates-and seemingly rendered plausible, even inevitable, by oceans of science fiction and the wizardly of modern cinema-space beckons as a fully hopeful path for human survival and flourishing, a positive future in increasingly dark times. But despite even basic questions of feasibility, will these many space ventures really have desirable effects, as their advocates insist? In the first book to critically assess the major consequences of space activities from their origins in the 1940s to the present and beyond, Daniel Deudney argues in Dark Skies that the major result of the "Space Age" has been to increase the likelihood of global nuclear war, a fact conveniently obscured by the failure of recognize that nuclear-armed ballistic missiles are inherently space weapons. The most important practical finding of Space Age science, also rarely emphasized, is the discovery that we live on Oasis Earth, tiny and fragile, and teeming with astounding life, but surrounded by an utterly desolate and inhospitable wilderness stretching at least many trillions of miles in all directions. As he stresses, our focus must be on Earth and nowhere else. Looking to the future, Deudney provides compelling reasons why space colonization will produce new threats to human survival and not alleviate the existing ones. That is why, he argues, we should fully relinquish the quest. Mind-bending and profound, Dark Skies challenges virtually all received wisdom about the final frontier.
Book Synopsis Circumference by : Nicholas Nicastro
Download or read book Circumference written by Nicholas Nicastro and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2008 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do you measure the size of the planet you're standing on? "Circumference" is the story of what happened when one man asked himself that very question. Nicholas Nicastro brings to life one of history's greatest experiments when an ancient Greek named Eratosthenes first accurately determined the distance around the spherical earth. In this fascinating narrative history, Nicastro takes a look at a deceptively simple but stunning achievement made by one man, millennia ago, with only the simplest of materials at his disposal. How was he able to measure the land at a time when distance was more a matter of a shrug and a guess at the time spent on a donkey's back? How could he be so confident in the assumptions that underlay his calculations: that the earth was round and the sun so far away that its rays struck the ground in parallel lines? Was it luck or pure scientific genius? Nicastro brings readers on a trip into a long-vanished world that prefigured modernity in many ways, where neither Eratosthenes' reputation, nor the validity of his method, nor his leadership of the Great Library of Alexandria were enough to convince all his contemporaries about the dimensions of the earth. Eratosthenes' results were debated for centuries until he was ultimately vindicated almost 2000 years later, during the great voyages of exploration. "Circumference" is a compelling scientific detective story that transports readers back to a time when humans had no idea how big their world was--and the fate of a man who dared to measure the incomprehensible.
Book Synopsis SCP Series Two Field Manual by : SCP Foundation
Download or read book SCP Series Two Field Manual written by SCP Foundation and published by Abandondero. This book was released on with total page 4615 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: SCP Foundation anomalies SCP-1000 through to SCP-1999, including containment procedures, experiment logs and interview transcripts. An encyclopedia of the unnatural. The Foundation Operating clandestine and worldwide, the Foundation operates beyond jurisdiction, empowered and entrusted by every major national government with the task of containing anomalous objects, entities, and phenomena. These anomalies pose a significant threat to global security by threatening either physical or psychological harm. The Foundation operates to maintain normalcy, so that the worldwide civilian population can live and go on with their daily lives without fear, mistrust, or doubt in their personal beliefs, and to maintain human independence from extraterrestrial, extradimensional, and other extranormal influence. Our mission is three-fold: Secure The Foundation secures anomalies with the goal of preventing them from falling into the hands of civilian or rival agencies, through extensive observation and surveillance and by acting to intercept such anomalies at the earliest opportunity. Contain The Foundation contains anomalies with the goal of preventing their influence or effects from spreading, by either relocating, concealing, or dismantling such anomalies or by suppressing or preventing public dissemination of knowledge thereof. Protect The Foundation protects humanity from the effects of such anomalies as well as the anomalies themselves until such time that they are either fully understood or new theories of science can be devised based on their properties and behavior. ———————————— About the ebook This ebook is an offline edition of the second series of fictional documentation from the SCP Foundation Wiki. All illustrations, subsections and supporting documentation pages are included. All content is indexed and cross-referenced. Essentially, this is what a SCP Foundation researcher would carry day-to-day in their Foundation-issued ebook reader. The text has been optimised for offline reading on phones and ebook readers, and for listening to via Google Play Book’s Read Aloud feature. Tables have been edited into a format that is intelligible when read aloud, the narration will announce visual features like redactions and overstrikes, and there are numerous other small optimisations for listeners. The SCP text are a living work and the SCP documentation is a gateway into the SCP fictional universe, so links to authors, stories and media are preserved, and will open your reader’s web browser. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License and is being distributed without copy protection. Its content is the property of the attributed authors.
Download or read book Leon Krier written by Léon Krier and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 1992 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leon Krier's most important essays and all his projects, including his proposals for Poundbury near Dorchester, and masterplans for Luxemburg's New Quarter and Washington DC, and the new town of Atlantis on the island of Tenerife have been brought together in this work.
Download or read book The Etruscans written by Lucy Shipley and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2023-09-24 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now in paperback, a brief introduction to the mysteries of the enigmatic, ancient civilization in the area of modern Italy. The Etruscans were a powerful people, marked by an influential civilization in ancient Italy. But despite their prominence, the Etruscans are often portrayed as mysterious—a strange and unknowable people whose language and culture have largely vanished. Lucy Shipley’s The Etruscans presents a different picture. Shipley writes of a people who traded with Greece and shaped the development of Rome, who inspired Renaissance artists and Romantic firebrands, and whose influence is still felt strongly in the modern world. Covering colonialism and conquest, misogyny and mystique, she weaves Etruscan history with new archaeological evidence to give us a revived picture of the Etruscan people. The book traces trade routes and trains of thought, describing the journey of Etruscan objects from creation to use, loss, rediscovery, and reinvention. From the wrappings of an Egyptian mummy displayed in a fashionable salon to the extra-curricular activities of Bonaparte, from a mass looting craze to a bombed museum in a town marked by massacre, the book is an extraordinary voyage through Etruscan archaeology, which ultimately leads to surprising and intriguing places. In this sharp and groundbreaking book, Shipley gives readers a unique perspective on an enigmatic people, revealing just how much we know about the Etruscans—and just how much still remains undiscovered.
Book Synopsis Corridors to Extinction and the Australian Megafauna by : Steve Webb
Download or read book Corridors to Extinction and the Australian Megafauna written by Steve Webb and published by Newnes. This book was released on 2013-02-27 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Extinctions have always occurred and always will, so what is so surprising about the megafauna extinctions? They were caused by humans and were the first of many extinctions that eventually led to the extinction of the Moa, Steller's Sea Cow, the Dodo, Great Auk and countless other species great and small, all attributed to human agency. Therefore, the megafauna were humans' first great impact on the planet. There is now an increasing realization that the 'blitzkrieg' view of these extinctions may have been wrong. A growing body of evidence and long-term field work is beginning to show that at least Australia's megafauna did not succumb to human agency, not because humans probably did not hunt the odd animal but because the an infinitely more logical reason lies in the climatic conditions of the Quaternary Ice Ages and the affect they had on continental geography, environment, climate and, most importantly, the biogeography of the megafauna. This book presents the evidence of this theory, demonstrating the biogeographic approach to Australia's megafauna extinction. - Written clearly to benefit a diverse level of readers, from those with a passing interest to professionals in the field. - Examines future climate change and its effects on the planet by looking at examples buried in the past - Presents new evidence from extensive field research
Book Synopsis The Dawn of Everything by : David Graeber
Download or read book The Dawn of Everything written by David Graeber and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2021-11-09 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution—from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy, and inequality—and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation. For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike—either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself. Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what’s really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume. The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision, and a faith in the power of direct action. Includes Black-and-White Illustrations
