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The Natural History Of Nonsense
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Book Synopsis The Natural History of Nonsense by : Bergen Evans
Download or read book The Natural History of Nonsense written by Bergen Evans and published by . This book was released on 1958 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Evans was a public skeptic of the forties and fifties and he wrote this book to prove that an awful lot of people are stupid and gullible and superstitious and not likely to take the scientifically enlightened opinions of their more educated betters for gospel truth. He retails some great anecdotes in several chapters, though certain others (on race relations and differences, for example) have aged poorly. His writing is generally acceptable and sometimes, in fact, he's quite funny. But more often he's merely snide."-- review on Good Reads
Book Synopsis Nonsense on Stilts by : Massimo Pigliucci
Download or read book Nonsense on Stilts written by Massimo Pigliucci and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-05-15 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent polls suggest that fewer than 40 percent of Americans believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution, despite it being one of science’s best-established findings. More and more parents are refusing to vaccinate their children for fear it causes autism, though this link can been consistently disproved. And about 40 percent of Americans believe that the threat of global warming is exaggerated, despite near consensus in the scientific community that manmade climate change is real. Why do people believe bunk? And what causes them to embrace such pseudoscientific beliefs and practices? Noted skeptic Massimo Pigliucci sets out to separate the fact from the fantasy in this entertaining exploration of the nature of science, the borderlands of fringe science, and—borrowing a famous phrase from philosopher Jeremy Bentham—the nonsense on stilts. Presenting case studies on a number of controversial topics, Pigliucci cuts through the ambiguity surrounding science to look more closely at how science is conducted, how it is disseminated, how it is interpreted, and what it means to our society. The result is in many ways a “taxonomy of bunk” that explores the intersection of science and culture at large. No one—not the public intellectuals in the culture wars between defenders and detractors of science nor the believers of pseudoscience themselves—is spared Pigliucci’s incisive analysis. In the end, Nonsense on Stilts is a timely reminder of the need to maintain a line between expertise and assumption. Broad in scope and implication, it is also ultimately a captivating guide for the intelligent citizen who wishes to make up her own mind while navigating the perilous debates that will affect the future of our planet.
Book Synopsis Fashionable Nonsense by : Alan Sokal
Download or read book Fashionable Nonsense written by Alan Sokal and published by Picador. This book was released on 2014-01-14 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1996 physicist Alan Sokal published an essay in Social Text--an influential academic journal of cultural studies--touting the deep similarities between quantum gravitational theory and postmodern philosophy. Soon thereafter, the essay was revealed as a brilliant parody, a catalog of nonsense written in the cutting-edge but impenetrable lingo of postmodern theorists. The event sparked a furious debate in academic circles and made the headlines of newspapers in the U.S. and abroad. In Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science, Sokal and his fellow physicist Jean Bricmont expand from where the hoax left off. In a delightfully witty and clear voice, the two thoughtfully and thoroughly dismantle the pseudo-scientific writings of some of the most fashionable French and American intellectuals. More generally, they challenge the widespread notion that scientific theories are mere "narrations" or social constructions.
Download or read book A Book of Nonsense written by Edward Lear and published by . This book was released on 1862 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of over 100 limericks with the author's original illustrations.
Download or read book Wellsprings written by Frank Chapelle and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Many people consider ground water deep beneath their feet as mysterious, perhaps even supernatural. To clarify matters, hydrogeologist Frank Chapelle has written a definitive history and science of subsurface water in his Wellsprings, a book both accessible to the lay reader while being filled with startling nuggets of information pleasing to the professional water scientist."--Donald Siegel, professor of earth sciences, Syracuse University "This book tells the story of bottled water in the United States in a highly readable and in-depth way, covering both the facts of the subject, and the persons and events that resulted in this now ubiquitous product."--Stephen C. Edberg, professor, Yale University Bottled water is a part of everyday life for millions of Americans. Per capita consumption in the United States now tops fifteen gallons per year with sales over $5 billion in 2002. Even as fuel prices climb, many people are still willing to pay more for a gallon of bottled water than they are for the equivalent in gasoline. At the same time, bottled water has become a symbol of refined taste and a healthy lifestyle. But despite its growing popularity, many people cannot quite put their finger on just why they prefer bottled water to the much less expensive tap variety. Some have a vague notion that bottled water is "healthier," some prefer the convenience and more consistent taste, and others are simply content to follow the trend. The fact is most people know very little about the natural beverage that they drink and enjoy. It is reasonable to wonder, therefore, just what differentiates bottled water from other water? Is it really better or healthier than tap water? Why is it that different brands seem to have subtle variations in taste? As Francis H. Chapelle reveals in this delightful and informative volume, a complex story of geology, hydrology, and history lies behind every bottle of spring water. The book chronicles the history of the bottled water industry in America from its beginnings in Europe hundreds of years ago to the present day. Subsequent chapters describe the chemical characteristics that make some waters desirable, and provide an overview of the geologic circumstances that produce them. Wellsprings explains how these geologic conditions vary throughout the country, and how this affects the kinds and quality of bottled water that are available. Finally, Chapelle shows how the bottled water industry uses this natural history, together with the perceived health benefits of spring waters, to market their products. Accessibly written and well illustrated, Wellsprings is both a revealing account and a user's guide to natural spring waters. Regardless of your drinking preference, this timely exploration will make your next drink of water refreshingly informed.
Book Synopsis Do You Believe in Magic? by : Paul A. Offit, M.D.
Download or read book Do You Believe in Magic? written by Paul A. Offit, M.D. and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2013-06-18 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Medical expert Paul A. Offit, M.D., offers a scathing exposé of the alternative medicine industry, revealing how even though some popular therapies are remarkably helpful due to the placebo response, many of them are ineffective, expensive, and even deadly. Dr. Offit reveals how alternative medicine—an unregulated industry under no legal obligation to prove its claims or admit its risks—can actually be harmful to our health. Using dramatic real-life stories, Offit separates the sense from the nonsense, showing why any therapy—alternative or traditional—should be scrutinized. He also shows how some nontraditional methods can do a great deal of good, in some cases exceeding therapies offered by conventional practitioners. An outspoken advocate for science-based health advocacy who is not afraid to take on media celebrities who promote alternative practices, Dr. Offit advises, “There’s no such thing as alternative medicine. There’s only medicine that works and medicine that doesn’t.”
Download or read book Slime written by Susanne Wedlich and published by Melville House. This book was released on 2023-02-28 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking, witty, and eloquent exploration of slime that will leave you appreciating the nebulous and neglected sticky stuff that covers our world, inside and out. Slime. The very word seems to ooze oily menace, conjuring up a variety of unpleasant associations: mucous, toxins, reptiles, pollutants, and other unsavory viscous semi-liquid substances. Yet without slime, the natural world would be completely unrecognizable; in fact, life itself as we know it would be impossible In this deft and fascinating book, journalist Susanne Wedlich takes us on a tour of all things slimy, from the most unctuous of science fiction monsters to the biochemical compounds that are the very building blocks of life. Along the way she shows us what slime really means, and why lime is not something to fear, but rather something to ... embrace.
Book Synopsis The Natural History of Edward Lear, New Edition by : Robert McCracken Peck
Download or read book The Natural History of Edward Lear, New Edition written by Robert McCracken Peck and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-13 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Edward Lear is well known as the brilliant writer of nonsense poetry, children's books, and travel books who popularized the limerick, and wrote verses such as "The Owl and the Pussycat." But few people are aware that Lear was one of the most talented and accomplished painters of natural history subjects in the nineteenth century, and worked with British scientists, collectors, and publishers to make Britain the nexus for scientific investigation and its circulation. One of the best ornithological artists of his generation, Lear published his first book, a monograph on the parrot family, at age 18, and established a format that would be followed by decades by such publishers as John Gould, with whom he worked closely and often anonymously. Over his career, Lear produced a multitude of drawings of birds and mammals from around the world for scientific publications, public institutions, and individual patrons, not just of English species, but of birds and mammals from Australia, New Zealand, and the Americas. He is also the Lear in the name of the rare species Lear's Macaw. In this book, Peck has assembled the first comprehensive view of this important part of Lear's career. Featuring over 200 illustrations and a foreword by Sir David Attenborough, the book also examines the influence Lear had on modern artists such as Walton Ford and Tony Foster. This new edition includes a new chapter that addresses Lear's continued fascination with wildlife and the natural world after giving up his career as a scientific illustrator, and his fascination with domestic pets, from his own beloved cat which he cartooned repeatedly, to the portraits of dogs owned by his family and friends, alongside thirteen never-before-published illustrations, including fully finished watercolors, rough preliminary sketches, and whimsical cartoons"--
Download or read book Natural History written by Carlos Fonseca and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2020-07-14 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Carlos Fonseca comes a dazzling, kaleidoscopic epic of art, politics, and hidden realities Just before the dawn of the new millennium, a curator at a New Jersey museum of natural history receives an unusual invitation from a celebrated fashion designer. She shares the curator’s fascination with the secrets of the animal kingdom—with camouflage and subterfuge—and she proposes that they collaborate on an exhibition, the nature of which remains largely obscure, even as they enter into a strange relationship marked by evasion and elision. Seven years later, after the designer’s death, the curator recovers the archive of their never-completed project. During a long night of insomnia, he finds within the archive a series of clues about the true history of the designer’s family, a mind-bending puzzle that winds from Haifa, Israel, to bohemian 1970s New York to the Latin American jungles. As he follows this trail, the curator discovers a cast of characters whose own fixations interrogate the unstable frontiers between art, science, politics, and religion. An aging photographer, living nearly alone in an abandoned mining town where subterranean fires rage without end, creates miniature replicas of ruined cities. A former model turned conceptual artist becomes the star defendant in a trial over the very soul and purpose of art. A young indigenous boy receives a vision of the end of the world. Reality is a curtain, the curator realizes, and to draw it back is to reveal the theater of the obsessed. Natural History is a portrait of a world trapped between faith and irony, tragedy and farce. An urgent and impressively ambitious novel in the tradition of Italo Calvino and Ricardo Piglia, it confirms Carlos Fonseca as one of the most daring writers of his generation.
Download or read book Wormwood Forest written by Mary Mycio and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2005-08-29 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When a titanic explosion ripped through the Number Four reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Plant in 1986, spewing flames and chunks of burning, radioactive material into the atmosphere, one of our worst nightmares came true. As the news gradually seeped out of the USSR and the extent of the disaster was realized, it became clear how horribly wrong things had gone. Dozens died - two from the explosion and many more from radiation illness during the following months - while scores of additional victims came down with acute radiation sickness. Hundreds of thousands were evacuated from the most contaminated areas. The prognosis for Chernobyl and its environs - succinctly dubbed the Zone of Alienation - was grim. Today, 20 years after the worst nuclear power plant accident in history, intrepid journalist Mary Mycio dons dosimeter and camouflage protective gear to explore the world's most infamous radioactive wilderness. As she tours the Zone to report on the disaster's long-term effects on its human, faunal, and floral inhabitants, she meets pockets of defiant local residents who have remained behind to survive and make a life in the Zone. And she is shocked to discover that the area surrounding Chernobyl has become Europe's largest wildlife sanctuary, a flourishing - at times unearthly - wilderness teeming with large animals and a variety of birds, many of them members of rare and endangered species. Like the forests, fields, and swamps of their unexpectedly inviting habitat, both the people and the animals are all radioactive. Cesium-137 is packed in their muscles and strontium-90 in their bones. But quite astonishingly, they are also thriving. If fears of the Apocalypse and a lifeless, barren radioactive future have been constant companions of the nuclear age, Chernobyl now shows us a different view of the future. A vivid blend of reportage, popular science, and illuminating encounters that explode the myths of Chernobyl with facts that are at once beautiful and horrible, Wormwood Forest brings a remarkable land - and its people and animals - to life to tell a unique story of science, surprise and suspense.
Book Synopsis The Natural History of Make-Believe by : John Goldthwaite
Download or read book The Natural History of Make-Believe written by John Goldthwaite and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1996-02-22 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Man in the Moon has dropped down to earth for a visit. Over the hedge, a rabbit in trousers is having a pipe with his evening paper. Elsewhere, Alice is passing through a looking glass, Dorothy riding a tornado to Oz, and Jack climbing a beanstalk to heaven. To enter the world of children's literature is to journey to a realm where the miraculous and the mundane exist side by side, a world that is at once recognizable and real--and enchanted. Many books have probed the myths and meanings of children's stories, but Goldthwaite's Natural History is the first exclusively to survey the magic that lies at the heart of the literature. From the dish that ran away with the spoon to the antics of Brer Rabbit and Dr. Seuss's Cat in the Hat, Goldthwaite celebrates the craft, the invention, and the inspired silliness that fix these tales in our minds from childhood and leave us in a state of wondering to know how these things can be. Covering the three centuries from the fairy tales of Charles Perrault to Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, he gathers together all the major imaginative works of America, Britain, and Europe to show how the nursery rhyme, the fairy tale, and the beast fable have evolved into modern nonsense verse and fantasy. Throughout, he sheds important new light on such stock characters as the fool and the fairy godmother and on the sources of authors as diverse as Carlo Collodi, Lewis Carroll, and Beatrix Potter. His bold claims will inspire some readers and outrage others. He hails Pinocchio, for example, as the greatest of all children's books, but he views C.S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia as a parable that is not only murderously misogynistic, but deeply blasphemous as well. Fresh, incisive, and utterly original, this rich literary history will be required reading for anyone who cares about children's books and their enduring influence on how we come to see the world.
Book Synopsis Dry Store Room No. 1 by : Richard A. Fortey
Download or read book Dry Store Room No. 1 written by Richard A. Fortey and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2008 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Dry Store Room No. 1' is an intimate biography of the Natural History Museum, celebrating the eccentric personalities who have peopled it and capturing the wonders of scientific endeavour, academic rigour and imagination. 'This book is a kind of museum of the mind. It is my own collection, a personal archive, designed to explain what goes on behind the polished doors in the Natural History Museum. The lustre of a museum does not depend only on the artefacts or objects it contains - the people who work out of sight are what keeps a museum alive...I want to bring those invisible people into the sunlight.' Behind the public façade of any great museum there lies a secret domain: one of unseen galleries, locked doors, priceless specimens and hidden lives. Through the stories of the numerous eccentric individuals whose long careers have left their mark on the study of evolutionary science, Richard Fortey, former senior paleaontologist at London's Natural History Museum, celebrates the pioneering work of the Museum from its inception to the present day. He delves into the feuds, affairs, scandals and skulduggery that have punctuated its long history, and formed a backdrop to extraordinary scientific endeavour. He explores the staying power and adaptability of the Museum as it responds to changes wrought by advances in technology and molecular biology - 'spare' bones from an extinct giant bird suddenly become cutting-edge science with the new knowledge that DNA can be extracted from them, and ancient fish are tested with the latest equipment that is able to measure rises in pollution. 'Dry Store Room No. 1' is a fascinating and affectionate account of a hidden world of untold treasures, where every fragment tells a story about time past, by a scientist who combines rigorous professional learning with a gift for prose that sparkles with wit and literary sensibility.
Book Synopsis The Field of Nonsense by : Elizabeth Sewell
Download or read book The Field of Nonsense written by Elizabeth Sewell and published by Dalkey Archive Scholarly. This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This magnificent and witty study by an unrecognized innovator seeks to define and explore the nature of "nonsense" in literature. Relying mainly on readings of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, Elizabeth Sewell not only sets out plausible boundaries for what or does not constitutes gibberish, but elucidates just how much of what is considered "sensible" writing must rely on nonsense for its power. Comparable only to the greatest works of Viktor Shklovsky, The Field of Nonsense is a masterpiece of American literary criticism.
Book Synopsis The Complete Nonsense of Edward Lear by : Edward Lear
Download or read book The Complete Nonsense of Edward Lear written by Edward Lear and published by . This book was released on 1947 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Edward Lear was the greatest nonsensicalist of all time. He was the inventor of the limerick and created the Jumblies and The Owl and the Pussycat. This complete edition of Lear's nonsense verse - including the limericks, longer verses, alphabets and his own illustrations - is lovingly restored and beautifully presented, for adults and children to enjoy together.
Download or read book The History of Nonsense written by and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author explores the history and less than certain pedigree of a witty statement attributed to Saul Lieberman: "Nonsense is nonsense, but the history of nonsense is a very important science." (The author concludes that this attribution is credible.) The author asserts that in exploring the history of this bon mot, he wishes to challenge current students of past texts and ideas to contend with the worry that lurks beneath Lieberman's witticism.
Book Synopsis The Natural History of Atheism by : John Stuart Blackie
Download or read book The Natural History of Atheism written by John Stuart Blackie and published by . This book was released on 1877 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis Gaither's Dictionary of Scientific Quotations by : Carl C. Gaither
Download or read book Gaither's Dictionary of Scientific Quotations written by Carl C. Gaither and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2008-01-08 with total page 1895 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scientists and other keen observers of the natural world sometimes make or write a statement pertaining to scientific activity that is destined to live on beyond the brief period of time for which it was intended. This book serves as a collection of these statements from great philosophers and thought–influencers of science, past and present. It allows the reader quickly to find relevant quotations or citations. Organized thematically and indexed alphabetically by author, this work makes readily available an unprecedented collection of approximately 18,000 quotations related to a broad range of scientific topics.
