Sspeculative Journeys

Download or read book Imagined Life written by James Trefil and published by Smithsonian Institution. This book was released on 2019-09-17 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The captivating possibilities of extraterrestrial life on exoplanets, based on current scientific knowledge of existing worlds and forms of life 2023 Canopus Awards for Interstellar Writing Finalist It is now known that we live in a galaxy with more planets than stars. The Milky Way alone encompasses 30 trillion potential home planets. Scientists Trefil and Summers bring readers on a marvelous experimental voyage through the possibilities of life--unlike anything we have experienced so far--that could exist on planets outside our own solar system. Life could be out there in many forms: on frozen worlds, living in liquid oceans beneath ice and communicating (and even battling) with bubbles; on super-dense planets, where they would have evolved body types capable of dealing with extreme gravity; on tidally locked planets with one side turned eternally toward a star; and even on "rogue worlds," which have no star at all. Yet this is no fictional flight of fancy: the authors take what we know about exoplanets and life on our own world and use that data to hypothesize about how, where, and which sorts of life might develop. Imagined Life is a must-have for anyone wanting to learn how the realities of our universe may turn out to be far stranger than fiction.

Download or read book Renaissance Mad Voyages written by Anthony Parr and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-03 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A vogue for travel ’stunts’ flourished in England between 1590 and the 1620s: playful imitations or burlesques of maritime enterprise and overland travel that collectively appear to be a response to particular innovations and developments in English culture. This study is the first full length scholarly work to focus on the curious phenomenon of ’madde voiages’, as the writer William Rowley called them. Anthony Parr shows that the mad voyage (as Rowley and others conceived it) had surprisingly deep and diverse roots in traditional travel practices, in courtly play and mercantile custom, and in literary culture. Looking in detail at several of the best-documented exploits, Parr situates them in the ferment of such ventures during the period in question; but also reaches back to explore their classical and mediaeval antecedents, and considers their role in creating a template for eccentric English adventure in later centuries. Renaissance Mad Voyages brings together literary and historical enquiry in order to address the implications of an interesting and neglected cultural trend. Parr's investigation of the rash of travel exploits in the period leads to extensive research on the origins of the wager on travel and its role in the expansion of English tourism and trading activity.

Download or read book The Ashgate Research Companion to Feminist Legal Theory written by Vanessa E. Munro and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-01 with total page 548 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a distinct scholarly contribution to law, feminist legal theory is now well over three decades old. Those three decades have seen consolidation and renewal of its central concerns as well as remarkable growth, dynamism and change. This Companion celebrates the strength of feminist legal thought, which is manifested in this dynamic combination of stability and change, as well as in the diversity of perspectives and methodologies, and the extensive range of subject-matters, which are now included within its ambit. Bringing together contributors from across a range of jurisdictions and legal traditions, the book provides a concise but critical review of existing theory in relation to the core issues or concepts that have animated, and continue to animate, feminism. It provides an authoritative and scholarly review of contemporary feminist legal thought, and seeks to contribute to the ongoing development of some of its new approaches, perspectives, and subject-matters. The Companion is divided into three parts, dealing with 'Theory', 'Concepts' and 'Issues'. The first part addresses theoretical questions which are of significance to law, but which also connect to feminist theory at the broadest and most interdisciplinary level. The second part also draws on general feminist theory, but with a more specific focus on debates about equality and difference, race, culture, religion, and sexuality. The 'Issues' section considers in detail more specific areas of substantive legal controversy.

Download or read book The Knowledge Web written by James Burke and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-05-11 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Knowledge Web, James Burke, the bestselling author and host of television's Connections series, takes us on a fascinating tour through the interlocking threads of knowledge running through Western history. Displaying mesmerizing flights of fancy, he shows how seemingly unrelated ideas and innovations bounce off one another, spinning a vast, interactive web on which everything is connected to everything else: Carmen leads to the theory of relativity, champagne bottling links to wallpaper design, Joan of Arc connects through vaudeville to Buffalo Bill. Illustrating his open, connective theme in the form of a journey across a web, Burke breaks down complex concepts, offering information in a manner accessible to anybody -- high school graduates and Ph.D. holders alike. The journey touches almost two hundred interlinked points in the history of knowledge, ultimately ending where it begins. At once amusing and instructing, The Knowledge Web heightens our awareness of our interdependence -- with one another and with the past. Only by understanding the interrelated nature of the modern world can we hope to identify complex patterns of change and direct the process of innovation to the common good.

Download or read book The Ancestor written by and published by . This book was released on 1903 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Power in the Blood written by Richard Porter and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2014-02-21 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Power in the Blood (revised version) is an adventure in ideas that explores many interrelated aspects of philosophy, faith and science in order to highlight the true dimensions of human nature and of the Magnum Mysterium (thus called in mediaeval times) in which we are embodied and imbedded. Those dimensions of body and soul, of science and spirit, are revealed by a nonreductive philosophy of broader reach than what any gospel of godless oblivion as the ultimate arbiter of human fate would have us to believe. Power in the Blood is a metaphor referring in part to the transformative mysteries of Nature, especially shown in life science of whose strangest marvels, many gleaned from sources rare and obscure, plentiful examples are offered. These biological puzzlements tend to support rather than contradict a faith (as the book seeks to explain) that our full human nature has not only sprang from abyssal depths of evolutionary time, but also flowers in Eternity. There are many multi-associative ideas, such as the subjective/objective dichotomy, that Power in the Blood examines on a journey whose pursuit may encourage readers to entertain a deeper measure of existential meaning in all its aspects, real and ideal, objective and subjective. And that measure may also urge their concluding, for example, that consciousness is not simply a magic trick of blindly impersonal physics. To affirm such concepts, that surely favor better than their opposites the long-term continuance of our self endangered species, provided one motive to construct the most promising and least prejudicial world view, enlisting philosophy, faith and science in a trinity of mutual support, that for the author seemed humanly possible. An enriching, immersive experience for anyone interested in exploring the foundation of life. Kirkus Reviews.

Download or read book Business Philosopher written by and published by . This book was released on 1906 with total page 570 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: