Beyond the Barrier

Beyond the Barrier
Author: Eugene Rodgers
Publisher: Naval Institute Press
Total Pages: 589
Release: 2012-04-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1612511880

When this book originally appeared in 1990, it was hailed as an important new work because of the author's access to Adm. Richard E. Byrd's just-released private papers. Previous books on the legendary polar explorer had to rely on sources subject to the admiral's vigilant censorship or the control of his heirs and friends. With this study Eugene Rodgers provides a scrupulously honest and objective account of Byrd's 1929 expedition to Antarctica. Without discrediting the expedition's success or Byrd's leadership, Rodgers shows that the admiral was not the saintly hero he and the press depicted. Nor was the expedition without its problems. Interviews with surviving members of the expedition together with a wealth of other new material indicate that Byrd, contrary to his claims, was not a good navigator--his pilots usually had to find their way by dead reckoning--and that he was not on the actual flight that discovered Marie Byrd Land. The book further reveals a crisis over drunkenness among the men (including Byrd), the admiral's fear of mutiny, and his rewriting of news stories from the pole to embellish his own image.

Beyond the Light Barrier

Beyond the Light Barrier
Author: Elizabeth Klarer
Publisher: Light Technology Publishing
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2009-06-06
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 1622335791

Beyond the Light Barrier is the autobiographical story of Elizabeth Klarer, a South African woman and Akon, an astrophysicist from Meton, a planet of Proxima Centuri that, at a distance of about 4.3 light years, is our nearest stellar neighbor. Elizabeth was taken in his spaceship to Meton, where she lived with him and his family for four months and where she bore his child. Her life on Meton is fascinatingly described. Akon brought Elizabeth back to Earth after the birth of their son, and continued to visit her thereafter. Akon explained how his spaceship's light-propulsion technology operated, and how it allowed him and his people to travel across vast interstellar distances. This technology is explained in detail in the book. Elizabeth was given a standing ovation at the 11th International Congress of UFO Research Groups at Weisbaden in 1975, and her speech as guest of honor was applauded by scientists of twenty-two nations. Light Technology Publishing is proud to bring you the long-awaited American edition in both hard copy and electronic format of Beyond the Light Barrier, which was first published in English in 1980

Beyond the Barrier

Beyond the Barrier
Author: Damon Knight
Publisher: Hachette UK
Total Pages: 129
Release: 2013-05-06
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0575111259

He reached for Churan's throat and his hands closed on air... ...yet the alien had not moved. With a chill of terror, Naismith realized that his arm had passed completely through the ugly, green-skinned body. The aliens' laughter swelled out, malicious and mocking. Behind him, Lall's voice said, "A nice try. But not good enough."

Beyond a Boundary

Beyond a Boundary
Author: Cyril Lionel Robert James
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 300
Release: 1993
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780822313830

In C. L. R. James's classic Beyond a Boundary, the sport is cricket and the scene is the colonial West Indies. Always eloquent and provocative, James--the "black Plato," (as coined by the London Times)--shows us how, in the rituals of performance and conflict on the field, we are watching not just prowess but politics and psychology at play. Part memoir of a boyhood in a black colony (by one of the founding fathers of African nationalism), part passionate celebration of an unusual and unexpected game, Beyond a Boundary raises, in a warm and witty voice, serious questions about race, class, politics, and the facts of colonial oppression. Originally published in England in 1963 and in the United States twenty years later (Pantheon, 1983), this second American edition brings back into print this prophetic statement on race and sport in society.

Hypercomputation

Hypercomputation
Author: Apostolos Syropoulos
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2008-12-10
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 0387499709

This book provides a thorough description of hypercomputation. It covers all attempts at devising conceptual hypermachines and all new promising computational paradigms that may eventually lead to the construction of a hypermachine. Readers will gain a deeper understanding of what computability is, and why the Church-Turing thesis poses an arbitrary limit to what can be actually computed. Hypercomputing is a relatively novel idea. However, the book’s most important features are its description of the various attempts of hypercomputation, from trial-and-error machines to the exploration of the human mind, if we treat it as a computing device.

The Incomputable

The Incomputable
Author: S. Barry Cooper
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2017-05-05
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 3319436694

This book questions the relevance of computation to the physical universe. Our theories deliver computational descriptions, but the gaps and discontinuities in our grasp suggest a need for continued discourse between researchers from different disciplines, and this book is unique in its focus on the mathematical theory of incomputability and its relevance for the real world. The core of the book consists of thirteen chapters in five parts on extended models of computation; the search for natural examples of incomputable objects; mind, matter, and computation; the nature of information, complexity, and randomness; and the mathematics of emergence and morphogenesis. This book will be of interest to researchers in the areas of theoretical computer science, mathematical logic, and philosophy.

Before Brooklyn

Before Brooklyn
Author: Ted Reinstein
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2021-11-01
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 1493051229

In the April of 1945, exactly two years before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in major league baseball, liberal Boston City Councilman Izzy Muchnick persuaded the Red Sox to try out three black players in return for a favorable vote to allow the team to play on Sundays. The Red Sox got the councilman’s much-needed vote, but the tryout was a sham; the three players would get no closer to the major leagues. It was a lost battle in a war that was ultimately won by Robinson in 1947. This book tells the story of the little-known heroes who fought segregation in baseball, from communist newspaper reporters to the Pullman car porters who saw to it that black newspapers espousing integration in professional sports reached the homes of blacks throughout the country. It also reminds us that the first black player in professional baseball was not Jackie Robinson but Moses Fleetwood Walker in 1884, and that for a time integrated teams were not that unusual. And then, as segregation throughout the country hardened, the exclusion of blacks in baseball quietly became the norm, and the battle for integration began anew.

Kafka's Zoopoetics

Kafka's Zoopoetics
Author: Naama Harel
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2020-05-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0472902091

Nonhuman figures are ubiquitous in the work of Franz Kafka, from his early stories down to his very last one. Despite their prominence throughout his oeuvre, Kafka’s animal representations have been considered first and foremost as mere allegories of intrahuman matters. In recent years, the allegorization of Kafka’s animals has been poetically dismissed by Kafka’s commentators and politically rejected by posthumanist scholars. Such critique, however, has yet to inspire either an overarching or an interdiscursive account. This book aims to fill this lacuna. Positing animal stories as a distinct and significant corpus within Kafka’s entire poetics, and closely examining them in dialogue with both literary and posthumanist analysis, Kafka’s Zoopoetics critically revisits animality, interspecies relations, and the very human-animal contradistinction in the writings of Franz Kafka. Kafka’s animals typically stand at the threshold between humanity and animality, fusing together human and nonhuman features. Among his liminal creatures we find a human transformed into vermin (in “The Metamorphosis”), an ape turned into a human being (in “A Report to an Academy”), talking jackals (in “Jackals and Arabs”), a philosophical dog (in “Researches of a Dog”), a contemplative mole-like creature (in “The Burrow”), and indiscernible beings (in “Josefine, the Singer or the Mouse People”). Depicting species boundaries as mutable and obscure, Kafka creates a fluid human-animal space, which can be described as “humanimal.” The constitution of a humanimal space radically undermines the stark barrier between human and other animals, dictated by the anthropocentric paradigm. Through denying animalistic elements in humans, and disavowing the agency of nonhuman animals, excluding them from social life, and neutralizing compassion for them, this barrier has been designed to regularize both humanity and animality. The contextualization of Kafka's animals within posthumanist theory engenders a post-anthropocentric arena, which is simultaneously both imagined and very real.

Breaking the Time Barrier

Breaking the Time Barrier
Author: Jenny Randles
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2005-04-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 0743492595

The race to build the first time machine.