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The Restless Clock
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Book Synopsis The Restless Clock by : Jessica Riskin
Download or read book The Restless Clock written by Jessica Riskin and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-03-10 with total page 571 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A core principle of modern science holds that a scientific explanation must not attribute will or agency to natural phenomena.The Restless Clock examines the origins and history of this, in particular as it applies to the science of living things. This is also the story of a tradition of radicals—dissenters who embraced the opposite view, that agency is an essential and ineradicable part of nature. Beginning with the church and courtly automata of early modern Europe, Jessica Riskin guides us through our thinking about the extent to which animals might be understood as mere machines. We encounter fantastic robots and cyborgs as well as a cast of scientific and philosophical luminaries, including Descartes and Leibnitz, Lamarck and Darwin, whose ideas gain new relevance in Riskin's hands. The book ends with a riveting discussion of how the dialectic continues in genetics, epigenetics, and evolutionary biology, where work continues to naturalize different forms of agency.The Restless Clock reveals the deeply buried roots of current debates in artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and evolutionary biology.
Book Synopsis The Restless Clock by : Jessica Riskin
Download or read book The Restless Clock written by Jessica Riskin and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-03-10 with total page 571 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “wide-ranging, witty, and astonishingly learned” scientific and cultural history of the concept of the capacity to act in nature (London Review of Books). Today, a scientific explanation is not meant to ascribe agency to natural phenomena: we would not say a rock falls because it seeks the center of the earth. Even for living things, in the natural sciences and often in the social sciences, the same is true. A modern botanist would not say that plants pursue sunlight. This has not always been the case, nor, perhaps, was it inevitable. Since the seventeenth century, many thinkers have made agency, in various forms, central to science. The Restless Clock examines the history of this principle, banning agency, in the life sciences. It also tells the story of dissenters embracing the opposite idea: that agency is essential to nature. The story begins with the automata of early modern Europe, as models for the new science of living things, and traces questions of science and agency through Descartes, Leibniz, Lamarck, and Darwin, among many others. Mechanist science, Jessica Riskin shows, had an associated theology: the argument from design, which found evidence for a designer in the mechanisms of nature. Rejecting such appeals to a supernatural God, the dissenters sought to naturalize agency rather than outsourcing it to a “divine engineer.” Their model cast living things not as passive but as active, self-making machines. The conflict between passive- and active-mechanist approaches maintains a subterranean life in current science, shaping debates in fields such as evolutionary biology, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. This history promises not only to inform such debates, but also our sense of the possibilities for what it means to engage in science—and even what it means to be alive. Praise for The Restless Clock “A wonderful contribution—and much needed corrective—to the history of European ideas about life and matter.” —Evelyn Fox Keller, author of The Mirage of a Space between Nature and Nurture “Engrossing and illuminating.” —Nature “A sweeping survey of the search for answers to the mystery of life. Riskin writes with clarity and wit, and the breadth of her scholarship is breathtaking.” —Times Higher Education (UK)
Download or read book Restless written by William Boyd and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2012-12-01 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is 1939. Eva Delectorskaya is a beautiful 28-year-old Russian émigrée living in Paris. As war breaks out she is recruited for the British Secret Service by Lucas Romer, a mysterious Englishman, and under his tutelage she learns to become the perfect spy, to mask her emotions and trust no one, including those she loves most. Since the war, Eva has carefully rebuilt her life as a typically English wife and mother. But once a spy, always a spy. Now she must complete one final assignment, and this time Eva can't do it alone: she needs her daughter's help.
Book Synopsis Science in the Age of Sensibility by : Jessica Riskin
Download or read book Science in the Age of Sensibility written by Jessica Riskin and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2002-12-15 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Empiricism today implies the dispassionate scrutiny of facts. But Jessica Riskin finds that in the French Enlightenment, empiricism was intimately bound up with sensibility. In what she calls a "sentimental empiricism," natural knowledge was taken to rest on a blend of experience and emotion. Riskin argues that sentimental empiricism brought together ideas and institutions, practices and politics. She shows, for instance, how the study of blindness, led by ideas about the mental and moral role of vision and by cataract surgeries, shaped the first school for the blind; how Benjamin Franklin's electrical physics, ascribing desires to nature, engaged French economic reformers; and how the question of the role of language in science and social life linked disputes over Antoine Lavoisier's new chemical names to the founding of France's modern system of civic education. Recasting the Age of Reason by stressing its conjunction with the Age of Sensibility, Riskin offers an entirely new perspective on the development of modern science and the history of the Enlightenment.
Book Synopsis The Restless City by : Joanne Reitano
Download or read book The Restless City written by Joanne Reitano and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-07 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Restless City: A Short History of New York from Colonial Times to the Present is a short, lively history of the world’s most exciting and diverse metropolis. It shows how New York’s perpetual struggles for power, wealth, and status exemplify the vigor, creativity, resilience, and influence of the nation’s premier urban center. The updated second edition includes nineteen images and brings the story right up through the mayoral election of 2009. In these pages are the stories of a broad cross-section of people and events that shaped the city, including mayors and moguls, women and workers, and policemen and poets. Joanne Reitano shows how New York has invigorated the American dream by confronting the fundamental economic, political, and social challenges that face every city. Energized by change, enriched by immigrants, and enlivened by provocative leaders, New York City’s restlessness has always been its greatest asset.
Download or read book Clock Dance written by Anne Tyler and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2018-07-10 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A novel of self-discovery and second chances from the beloved Pulitzer Prize-winning author—Willa Drake has had three opportunities to start her life over: in 1967, as a schoolgirl whose mother has suddenly disappeared; in 1977, when considering a marriage proposal; and in 1997, as a young widow trying to hold her family together. So she is surprised when in 2017 she is given one last chance to change everything, after receiving a startling phone call from a stranger. Without fully understanding why, she flies across the country to Baltimore to help a young woman she's never met. This impulsive decision, maybe the first one she’s consciously made in her life, will lead Willa into uncharted territory—surrounded by eccentric neighbors who treat each other like family, she finds solace and fulfillment in unexpected places. A bewitching novel of hope and transformation, Clock Dance gives us Anne Tyler at the height of her powers.
Book Synopsis Misconceiving Merit by : Mary Blair-Loy
Download or read book Misconceiving Merit written by Mary Blair-Loy and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2022-06-16 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An incisive study showing how cultural ideas of merit in academic science produce unfair and unequal outcomes. In Misconceiving Merit, sociologists Mary Blair-Loy and Erin A. Cech uncover the cultural foundations of a paradox. On one hand, academic science, engineering, and math revere meritocracy, a system that recognizes and rewards those with the greatest talent and dedication. At the same time, women and some racial and sexual minorities remain underrepresented and often feel unwelcome and devalued in STEM. How can academic science, which so highly values meritocracy and objectivity, produce these unequal outcomes? Blair-Loy and Cech studied more than five hundred STEM professors at a top research university to reveal how unequal and unfair outcomes can emerge alongside commitments to objectivity and excellence. The authors find that academic STEM harbors dominant cultural beliefs that not only perpetuate the mistreatment of scientists from underrepresented groups but hinder innovation. Underrepresented groups are often seen as less fully embodying merit compared to equally productive white and Asian heterosexual men, and the negative consequences of this misjudgment persist regardless of professors’ actual academic productivity. Misconceiving Merit is filled with insights for higher education administrators working toward greater equity as well as for scientists and engineers striving to change entrenched patterns of inequality in STEM.
Download or read book Day Job written by Jon Baird and published by St. Martin's Griffin. This book was released on 2000-10-06 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It's 9:34 a.m. Do you know where your career is headed? Do you have one? More likely, you'd never call what you do from 9 to 5 a career. You'd call it your day job. And what if you were given a single day to record it all, to ask the important questions about life and career, to air out your strongest and most private opinions and thoughts-what would you say? That's the question that has been put to customer service rep Mark Thornton. And his answer is Day Job, a darkly comic, high-velocity run through the modern workplace.
Book Synopsis The Almost Legendary Morris Sisters by : Julie Klam
Download or read book The Almost Legendary Morris Sisters written by Julie Klam and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-08-10 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Washington Post best nonfiction book pick of 2021 “It is biography as an expression of love.” – The New York Times New York Times–bestselling author Julie Klam’s funny and moving story of the Morris sisters, distant relations with mysterious pasts. Ever since she was young, Julie Klam has been fascinated by the Morris sisters, cousins of her grandmother. According to family lore, early in the twentieth century the sisters’ parents decided to move the family from Eastern Europe to Los Angeles so their father could become a movie director. On the way, their pregnant mother went into labor in St. Louis, where the baby was born and where their mother died. The father left the children in an orphanage and promised to send for them when he settled in California—a promise he never kept. One of the Morris sisters later became a successful Wall Street trader and advised Franklin Roosevelt. The sisters lived together in New York City, none of them married or had children, and one even had an affair with J. P. Morgan. The stories of these independent women intrigued Klam, but as she delved into them to learn more, she realized that the tales were almost completely untrue. The Almost Legendary Morris Sisters is the revealing account of what Klam discovered about her family—and herself—as she dug into the past. The deeper she went into the lives of the Morris sisters, the slipperier their stories became. And the more questions she had about what actually happened to them, the more her opinion of them evolved. Part memoir and part confessional, and told with the wit and honesty that are hallmarks of Klam’s books, The Almost Legendary Morris Sisters is the fascinating and funny true story of one writer’s journey into her family’s past, the truths she brings to light, and what she learns about herself along the way.
Book Synopsis The Restless Clock by : Jessica Riskin
Download or read book The Restless Clock written by Jessica Riskin and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis Everyday Words and the Character of Prose in Nineteenth-Century Britain by : Jonathan Farina
Download or read book Everyday Words and the Character of Prose in Nineteenth-Century Britain written by Jonathan Farina and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-14 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the ordinary turns of phrase by which major nineteenth-century British writers created character.
Book Synopsis Temporary People by : Deepak Unnikrishnan
Download or read book Temporary People written by Deepak Unnikrishnan and published by Restless Books. This book was released on 2017-03-14 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing "Guest workers of the United Arab Emirates embody multiple worlds and identities and long for home in a fantastical debut work of fiction, winner of the inaugural Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing.… The author's crisp, imaginative prose packs a punch, and his whimsical depiction of characters who oscillate between two lands on either side of the Arabian Sea unspools the kind of immigrant narratives that are rarely told. An enchanting, unparalleled anthem of displacement and repatriation." —Kirkus Reviews, starred review In the United Arab Emirates, foreign nationals constitute over 80 percent of the population. Brought in to construct and serve the towering monuments to wealth that punctuate the skylines of Abu Dhabi and Dubai, this labor force is not given the option of citizenship. Some ride their luck to good fortune. Others suffer different fates. Until now, the humanitarian crisis of the so-called “guest workers” of the Gulf has barely been addressed in fiction. With his stunning, mind-altering debut novel Temporary People, Deepak Unnikrishnan delves into their histories, myths, struggles, and triumphs. Combining the linguistic invention of Salman Rushdie and the satirical vision of George Saunders, Unnikrishnan presents twenty-eight linked stories that careen from construction workers who shapeshift into luggage and escape a labor camp, to a woman who stitches back together the bodies of those who’ve fallen from buildings in progress, to a man who grows ideal workers designed to live twelve years and then perish—until they don’t, and found a rebel community in the desert. With this polyphony of voices, Unnikrishnan maps a new, unruly global English and gives personhood back to the anonymous workers of the Gulf. "Guest workers of the United Arab Emirates embody multiple worlds and identities and long for home in a fantastical debut work of fiction, winner of the inaugural Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing.… The author's crisp, imaginative prose packs a punch, and his whimsical depiction of characters who oscillate between two lands on either side of the Arabian Sea unspools the kind of immigrant narratives that are rarely told. An enchanting, unparalleled anthem of displacement and repatriation." —Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review "Inventive, vigorously empathetic, and brimming with a sparkling, mordant humor, Deepak Unnikrishnan has written a book of Ovidian metamorphoses for our precarious time. These absurdist fables, fluent in the language of exile, immigration, and bureaucracy, will remind you of the raw pleasure of storytelling and the unsettling nearness of the future." —Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine “Inaugural winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, this debut novel employs its own brand of magical realism to propel readers into an understanding and appreciation of the experience of foreign workers in the Arab Gulf States (and beyond). Through a series of almost 30 loosely linked sections, grouped into three parts, we are thrust into a narrative alternating between visceral realism and fantastic satire.... The alternation between satirical fantasy, depicting such things as intelligent cockroaches and evil elevators, and poignant realism, with regards to necessarily illicit sexuality, forms a contrast that gives rise to a broad critique of the plight of those known euphemistically as ‘guest workers.’ VERDICT: This first novel challenges readers with a singular inventiveness expressed through a lyrical use of language and a laserlike focus that is at once charming and terrifying. Highly recommended.” —Henry Bankhead, Library Journal, Starred Review “Unnikrishnan’s debut novel shines a light on a little known world with compassion and keen insight. The Temporary People are invisible people—but Unnikrishnan brings them to us with compassion, intelligence, and heart. This is why novels matter.” —Susan Hans O’Connor, Penguin Bookshop (Sewickley, PA) “Deepak Unnikrishnan uses linguistic pyrotechnics to tell the story of forced transience in the Arabian Peninsula, where citizenship can never be earned no matter the commitment of blood, sweat, years of life, or brains. The accoutrements of migration—languages, body parts, passports, losses, wounds, communities of strangers—are packed and carried along with ordinary luggage, blurring the real and the unreal with exquisite skill. Unnikrishnan sets before us a feast of absurdity that captures the cruel realities around the borders we cross either by choice or by force. In doing so he has found what most writers miss: the sweet spot between simmering rage at a set of circumstances, and the circumstances themselves.” —Ru Freeman, author of On Sal Mal Lane “Deepak writes brilliant stories with a fresh, passionate energy. Every page feels as if it must have been written, as if the author had no choice. He writes about exile, immigration, deportation, security checks, rage, patience, about the homelessness of living in a foreign land, about historical events so strange that, under his hand, the events become tales, and he writes tales so precisely that they read like history. Important work. Work of the future. This man will not be stopped.” —Deb Olin Unferth, author of Revolution “From the strange Kafka-esque scenarios to the wholly original language, this book is amazing on so many different levels. Unlike anything I've ever read, Temporary People is a powerful work of short stories about foreign nationals who populate the new economy in the United Arab Emirates. With inventive language and darkly satirical plot lines, Unnikrishnan provides an important view of relentless nature of a global economy and its brutal consequences for human lives. Prepare to be wowed by the immensely talented new voice.” —Hilary Gustafson, Literati Bookstore (Ann Arbor, MI) “Absolutely preposterous! As a debut, author Unnikrishnan shares stories of laborers, brought to the United Arab Emirates to do menial and everyday jobs. These people have no rights, no fallback if they have problems or health issues in that land. The laborers in Temporary People are sewn back together when they fall, are abandoned in the desert if they become inconvenient, and are even grown from seeds. As a collection of short stories, this is fantastical, imaginative, funny, and even more so, scary, powerful, and ferocious.” —Becky Milner, Vintage Books (Vancouver WA)
Download or read book Wild Nights written by Benjamin Reiss and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2017-03-07 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why the modern world forgot how to sleep Why is sleep frustrating for so many people? Why do we spend so much time and money managing and medicating it, and training ourselves and our children to do it correctly? In Wild Nights, Benjamin Reiss finds answers in sleep's hidden history -- one that leads to our present, sleep-obsessed society, its tacitly accepted rules, and their troubling consequences. Today we define a good night's sleep very narrowly: eight hours in one shot, sealed off in private bedrooms, children apart from parents. But for most of human history, practically no one slept this way. Tracing sleep's transformation since the dawn of the industrial age, Reiss weaves together insights from literature, social and medical history, and cutting-edge science to show how and why we have tried and failed to tame sleep. In lyrical prose, he leads readers from bedrooms and laboratories to factories and battlefields to Henry David Thoreau's famous cabin at Walden Pond, telling the stories of troubled sleepers, hibernating peasants, sleepwalking preachers, cave-dwelling sleep researchers, slaves who led nighttime uprisings, rebellious workers, spectacularly frazzled parents, and utopian dreamers. We are hardly the first people, Reiss makes clear, to chafe against our modern rules for sleeping. A stirring testament to sleep's diversity, Wild Nights offers a profound reminder that in the vulnerability of slumber we can find our shared humanity. By peeling back the covers of history, Reiss recaptures sleep's mystery and grandeur and offers hope to weary readers: as sleep was transformed once before, so too can it change today.
Download or read book Why We Sleep written by Matthew Walker and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-10-03 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Sleep is one of the most important but least understood aspects of our life, wellness, and longevity ... An explosion of scientific discoveries in the last twenty years has shed new light on this fundamental aspect of our lives. Now ... neuroscientist and sleep expert Matthew Walker gives us a new understanding of the vital importance of sleep and dreaming"--Amazon.com.
Download or read book Newton's Clock written by Ivars Peterson and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1993 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Relates the history of the human search for an understanding of the motions of the moon and planets against the backdrop of the stars
Book Synopsis From Clocks to Chaos by : Leon Glass
Download or read book From Clocks to Chaos written by Leon Glass and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1988-07-21 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an important new contribution to the literature of chaos, two distinguished researchers in the field of physiology probe central theoretical questions about physiological rhythms. Topics discussed include: How are rhythms generated? How do they start and stop? What are the effects of perturbation of the rhythms? How are oscillations organized in space? Leon Glass and Michael Mackey address an audience of biological scientists, physicians, physical scientists, and mathematicians, but the work assumes no knowledge of advanced mathematics. Variation of rhythms outside normal limits, or appearance of new rhythms where none existed previously, are associated with disease. One of the most interesting features of the book is that it makes a start at explaining "dynamical diseases" that are not the result of infection by pathogens but that stem from abnormalities in the timing of essential functions. From Clocks to Chaos provides a firm foundation for understanding dynamic processes in physiology.
Book Synopsis A History of America in 100 Maps by : Susan Schulten
Download or read book A History of America in 100 Maps written by Susan Schulten and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-09-21 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout its history, America has been defined through maps. Whether made for military strategy or urban reform, to encourage settlement or to investigate disease, maps invest information with meaning by translating it into visual form. They capture what people knew, what they thought they knew, what they hoped for, and what they feared. As such they offer unrivaled windows onto the past. In this book Susan Schulten uses maps to explore five centuries of American history, from the voyages of European discovery to the digital age. With stunning visual clarity, A History of America in 100 Maps showcases the power of cartography to illuminate and complicate our understanding of the past. Gathered primarily from the British Library’s incomparable archives and compiled into nine chronological chapters, these one hundred full-color maps range from the iconic to the unfamiliar. Each is discussed in terms of its specific features as well as its larger historical significance in a way that conveys a fresh perspective on the past. Some of these maps were made by established cartographers, while others were made by unknown individuals such as Cherokee tribal leaders, soldiers on the front, and the first generation of girls to be formally educated. Some were tools of statecraft and diplomacy, and others were instruments of social reform or even advertising and entertainment. But when considered together, they demonstrate the many ways that maps both reflect and influence historical change. Audacious in scope and charming in execution, this collection of one hundred full-color maps offers an imaginative and visually engaging tour of American history that will show readers a new way of navigating their own worlds.
