Big Machine

Big Machine
Author: Victor LaValle
Publisher: One World
Total Pages: 386
Release: 2009-08-11
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0385530412

Ricky Rice is a middling hustler with a lingering junk habit, a bum knee, and a haunted mind. A survivor of a suicide cult, he scrapes by as a porter at a bus depot in Utica, New York, until one day a mysterious letter arrives, summoning him to enlist in a band of paranormal investigators comprised of former addicts and petty criminals, all of whom had at some point in their wasted lives heard what may have been the voice of God. Infused with the wonder of a disquieting dream and laced with Victor LaValle’s fiendish comic sensibility, Big Machine is a mind-rattling mystery about doubt, faith, and the monsters we carry within us.

A Curious Moon

A Curious Moon
Author: Rob Conery
Publisher:
Total Pages: 386
Release: 2020-12-13
Genre:
ISBN:

Starting an application is simple enough, whether you use migrations, a model-synchronizer or good old-fashioned hand-rolled SQL. A year from now, however, when your app has grown and you're trying to measure what's happened... the story can quickly change when data is overwhelming you and you need to make sense of what's been accumulating. Learning how PostgreSQL works is just one aspect of working with data. PostgreSQL is there to enable, enhance and extend what you do as a developer/DBA. And just like any tool in your toolbox, it can help you create crap, slice off some fingers, or help you be the superstar that you are.That's the perspective of A Curious Moon - data is the truth, data is your friend, data is your business. The tools you use (namely PostgreSQL) are simply there to safeguard your treasure and help you understand what it's telling you.But what does it mean to be "data-minded"? How do you even get started? These are good questions and ones I struggled with when outlining this book. I quickly realized that the only way you could truly understand the power and necessity of solid databsae design was to live the life of a new DBA... thrown into the fire like we all were at some point...Meet Dee Yan, our fictional intern at Red:4 Aerospace. She's just been handed the keys to a massive set of data, straight from Saturn, and she has to load it up, evaluate it and then analyze it for a critical project. She knows that PostgreSQL exists... but that's about it.Much more than a tutorial, this book has a narrative element to it a bit like The Martian, where you get to know Dee and the problems she faces as a new developer/DBA... and how she solves them.The truth is in the data...

Big Book of Big Machines

Big Book of Big Machines
Author: Minna Lacey
Publisher:
Total Pages: 16
Release: 2017-03-01
Genre:
ISBN: 9781474928946

Open out the giant fold-out pages to find out about some of the world's biggest, strongest and tallest machines. Full of the world’s biggest machines found on building sites, farms, airports and dockyards including one of the biggest machines ever, the bucket-wheel excavator used in mining. For the biggest of machines, the book includes two giant foldout pages. This attractive picture book format replaces the original board book format, ISBN 9781409507314.

Biggest Book of Bread Machine Recipes

Biggest Book of Bread Machine Recipes
Author: Better Homes & Gardens
Publisher: Meredith Books
Total Pages: 434
Release: 2003-09
Genre: Cooking
ISBN: 9780696218538

More than 375 recipes keep fresh loaves of scrumptious bread in the pantry.

Making the Big Red Machine

Making the Big Red Machine
Author: Daryl Smith
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 361
Release: 2009-05-04
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 0786439807

With a line-up that included future Hall of Famers Johnny Bench, Joe Morgan, Tony Perez and Pete Rose, Cincinnati's "Big Red Machine" powered its way in the 1970s to six division titles, four pennants, and two World Series. Three other times in that decade they finished second in their division to the eventual pennant winner. While much has been written about the players and manager Sparky Anderson, no book until now has given adequate attention to the man behind the Machine, general manager Bob Howsam. From his hire in 1967 through the end of his first stint with the Reds in 1978, Howsam brought about a remarkable change in fortune for the Reds, who had claimed only one pennant in the 26 years before his arrival. This detailed history of baseball's last dynasty shows not only how the team performed but why, delving into the off-field strategy and moves behind the Reds' success.

Blood in the Machine

Blood in the Machine
Author: Brian Merchant
Publisher: Hachette UK
Total Pages: 545
Release: 2023-09-26
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 0316487732

"The most important book to read about the AI boom" (Wired): The "gripping" (New Yorker) true story of the first time machines came for human jobs—and how the Luddite uprising explains the power, threat, and toll of big tech and AI today Named one of the best books of the year by The New Yorker, Wired, and the Financial Times • A Next Big Idea Book Club "Must-Read" The most urgent story in modern tech begins not in Silicon Valley but two hundred years ago in rural England, when workers known as the Luddites rose up rather than starve at the hands of factory owners who were using automated machines to erase their livelihoods. The Luddites organized guerrilla raids to smash those machines—on punishment of death—and won the support of Lord Byron, enraged the Prince Regent, and inspired the birth of science fiction. This all-but-forgotten class struggle brought nineteenth-century England to its knees. Today, technology imperils millions of jobs, robots are crowding factory floors, and artificial intelligence will soon pervade every aspect of our economy. How will this change the way we live? And what can we do about it? The answers lie in Blood in the Machine. Brian Merchant intertwines a lucid examination of our current age with the story of the Luddites, showing how automation changed our world—and is shaping our future.

Big Papa and the Time Machine

Big Papa and the Time Machine
Author: Daniel Bernstrom
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 40
Release: 2020-01-14
Genre:
ISBN: 9780062463319

Discover the true meaning of being brave in this tender and whimsical picture book from Daniel Bernstrom (One Day in the Eucalytus, Eucalyptus Tree) and Shane Evans (Chocolate Me!) that follows a grandfather and grandson who travel through time in a beloved 1952 Ford. A little boy who lives with his grandpa isn't reprimanded for being afraid to go to school one day. Instead, Big Papa takes him away in his time machine--a 1952 Ford--back to all of the times when he, himself, was scared of something life was handing him. Full of heartfelt moments and thrilling magical realism, Big Papa and the Time Machine speaks to the African American experience in a touching dialogue between two family members from different generations, and emerges as a voice that shares history and asks questions about one family's experience in 20th-century black America. "Wasn't you scared?" "Oh, I was scared," Big Papa said. "Sometimes you gotta walk with giants if you ever gonna know what you made of. That's called being brave."

The Big Nine

The Big Nine
Author: Amy Webb
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2019-03-05
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1541773748

A call-to-arms about the broken nature of artificial intelligence, and the powerful corporations that are turning the human-machine relationship on its head. We like to think that we are in control of the future of "artificial" intelligence. The reality, though, is that we -- the everyday people whose data powers AI -- aren't actually in control of anything. When, for example, we speak with Alexa, we contribute that data to a system we can't see and have no input into -- one largely free from regulation or oversight. The big nine corporations -- Amazon, Google, Facebook, Tencent, Baidu, Alibaba, Microsoft, IBM and Apple--are the new gods of AI and are short-changing our futures to reap immediate financial gain. In this book, Amy Webb reveals the pervasive, invisible ways in which the foundations of AI -- the people working on the system, their motivations, the technology itself -- is broken. Within our lifetimes, AI will, by design, begin to behave unpredictably, thinking and acting in ways which defy human logic. The big nine corporations may be inadvertently building and enabling vast arrays of intelligent systems that don't share our motivations, desires, or hopes for the future of humanity. Much more than a passionate, human-centered call-to-arms, this book delivers a strategy for changing course, and provides a path for liberating us from algorithmic decision-makers and powerful corporations.

Big Gorgeous Jazz Machine

Big Gorgeous Jazz Machine
Author: Nick Potter
Publisher: Driftwood Press
Total Pages: 132
Release: 2022-03-22
Genre:
ISBN: 9781949065145

Nick Francis Potter's Big Gorgeous Jazz Machine is a collection of experimental graphic works and comics poetry. It includes more traditionally-minded comics (with a lyrical bent) with abstract and conceptual works, including text-based comics and comics inspired by modernist abstractions. Taken together, the work finds kinship with contemporary avant-cartoonists like Warren Craghead, Aidan Koch, and Simon Moreton, while striking out toward something altogether new. Parts of this collection have appeared in Devil's Lake, TYPO Magazine, The Offing, PANK Magazine, Entropy Magazine, Big Other, Horse Less Review, Heavy Feather Review, among others. --"These works-that are a delight to the eye and a dream for the ear-are exactly what I look for in poetry comics. They experiment with visions of text (and absence of text) and our human greed for narrative."-Bianca Stone, author of The Mobius Strip Club of Grief "Nick Francis Potter's Big Gorgeous Jazz Machine is a prismatic, polychromatic machine of penciled comic and poetry, whose magnificent work will ignite you into falling in love with an inextinguishable man wearing a white shirt on fire and into falling in love with violetesque chairs, and other chaotic splendors such as a tablecloth like chapel, skylight, dogs, low-battery jazz machine, armchairs, and even Alvin Dillinger's twin brother, Conrad, who turns worrying and disappearance into a pulsating, sibylline art. Potter is a genius at taking the mundane and converting it into a kaleidoscopic tool of percipient humor and incisive wisdom. His drawings, unlike Edward Gorey's, are a cauldron of colors, globetrot you into a psychedelic voyage, and strap you on a lexical, graphitic seatbelt just so you could feel graphemically and hallucinogenically safe in his supercalifragilisticexpialidocious world."-Vi Khi Nao, author of Fish in Exile