40
(1 vote, average: 3.00 out of 5)
|
Written by Edit-bot
|
|
Wednesday, 20 August 2008 15:08 |
| | | | | | This fascinating book – now updated and available in paperback to mark the 50th anniversary of NASA in 2008 – tells the remarkable history of America’s unrivalled contribution to the exploration of space from the early twentieth century to the present. Award-winning historian Michael H. Gorn covers every US space mission ever undertaken, including those of projects Mercury, Gemini and Apollo, and the development of the Space Shuttle, and brings the story up to date by explaining the functions of NASA’s two windows in space: the Hubble Space Telescope and the International Space Station. This is the first illustrated history of NASA – the National Aeronautics and Space Administration – ever to be published. It reveals the personalities involved – the personal ambitions and temperaments of astronauts, scientists and engineers, and the influence of America’s presidents on the US space programme – as much as the technological advances that have made space exploration possible. Authoritatively and engagingly written, the book is profusely illustrated throughout with 500 stunning photographs. |
|
|
42
(1 vote, average: 4.00 out of 5)
|
Written by Edit-bot
|
|
Wednesday, 20 August 2008 15:08 |
| | | | | | In ancient Greek and Roman thinking, whether the world is flat or spherical it will have imaginary boundaries and liminal areas where the norms of nature and culture are thought to break down. Analogies are constantly drawn between 'primitive' peoples at the 'edges of the world' and 'primitive' people in prehistory. Distance, both in time and space, leads to difference, and the idea that strange things happen out there or happened back then dominates Greek and Roman thinking on other cultures. This book examines ancient ideas of the creation of the world, the beginnings of life and origin of species, humans and animals, utopias and blessed islands, and 'barbarian' cultures beyond the Mediterranean world, before going on to trace the influence of ancient anthropological and ethnological thought on the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. We begin with primordial chaos and end with the invention of the Americas, taking in many strange creatures, from the savages of Britain, Gaul and Ireland, to the Man-faced Ox-creatures of Empedocles, the Dog-heads of India, the Amazons, the Centaurs, and the Tupinamba of Brazil.
|
|
46
(1 vote, average: 4.00 out of 5)
|
Written by Edit-bot
|
|
Wednesday, 20 August 2008 15:08 |
| | | | | | No. It's not a book which shows people how to hack. Rather, Jon Erickson has written a tome for security professionals to help them to understand how we might avoid getting hacked. Includes sections on programming, networking and cryptography. |
|
52
(1 vote, average: 5.00 out of 5)
|
Written by Edit-bot
|
|
Wednesday, 20 August 2008 15:08 |
| | | | | | Peter Mitchell's highly readable and non-technical Introduction to Theory of Mind focuses on the latest exciting research in the field and integrates work carried out on adults, apes and children with autism. The author shows how children develop (or fail to develop) an understanding of the minds of others during infancy and beyond. On one hand, there are circumstances in which toddlers show a surprising insight into the minds of those around them. On the other hand, even the average adult does not always reason effectively about other people's minds. Unfortunately, the development of an understanding of mind can run into serious difficulties, and one form of such abnormal development can be autism. The background to this socially crippling syndrome is introduced for the benefit of the non-specialist and then examined in some depth. |
|
55
(1 vote, average: 5.00 out of 5)
|
Written by Edit-bot
|
|
Wednesday, 20 August 2008 15:08 |
| | | | | | If the first 270 pages of this book had been published separately, they would have made up a lively, insightful, beautifully written history of theoretical physics and the men and women who plumbed the mysteries of the atom. Along with the following 600 pages, they become a sweeping epic, filled with terror and pity, of the ultimate scientific quest: the development of the ultimate weapon. Rhodes is a peerless explainer of difficult concepts; he is even better at chronicling the personalities who made the discoveries that led to the Bomb. Niels Bohr dominates the first half of the book as J. Robert Oppenheimer does the second; both men were gifted philosophers of science as well as brilliant physicists. The central irony of this book, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award, is that the greatest minds of the century contributed to the greatest destructive force in history. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
