Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
Author: Mary Roach
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2004-05-17
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0393069192

Beloved, best-selling science writer Mary Roach’s “acutely entertaining, morbidly fascinating” (Susan Adams, Forbes) classic, now with a new epilogue. For two thousand years, cadavers – some willingly, some unwittingly – have been involved in science’s boldest strides and weirdest undertakings. They’ve tested France’s first guillotines, ridden the NASA Space Shuttle, been crucified in a Parisian laboratory to test the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin, and helped solve the mystery of TWA Flight 800. For every new surgical procedure, from heart transplants to gender confirmation surgery, cadavers have helped make history in their quiet way. “Delightful—though never disrespectful” (Les Simpson, Time Out New York), Stiff investigates the strange lives of our bodies postmortem and answers the question: What should we do after we die? “This quirky, funny read offers perspective and insight about life, death and the medical profession. . . . You can close this book with an appreciation of the miracle that the human body really is.” —Tara Parker-Pope, Wall Street Journal “Gross, educational, and unexpectedly sidesplitting.” —Entertainment Weekly

Sprint

Sprint
Author: Jake Knapp
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2016-03-08
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1501121774

From inside Google Ventures, a unique five-day process for solving tough problems, proven at thousands of companies in mobile, e-commerce, healthcare, finance, and more. Entrepreneurs and leaders face big questions every day: What’s the most important place to focus your effort, and how do you start? What will your idea look like in real life? How many meetings and discussions does it take before you can be sure you have the right solution? Now there’s a surefire way to answer these important questions: the Design Sprint, created at Google by Jake Knapp. This method is like fast-forwarding into the future, so you can see how customers react before you invest all the time and expense of creating your new product, service, or campaign. In a Design Sprint, you take a small team, clear your schedules for a week, and rapidly progress from problem, to prototype, to tested solution using the step-by-step five-day process in this book. A practical guide to answering critical business questions, Sprint is a book for teams of any size, from small startups to Fortune 100s, from teachers to nonprofits. It can replace the old office defaults with a smarter, more respectful, and more effective way of solving problems that brings out the best contributions of everyone on the team—and helps you spend your time on work that really matters.

Born On A Blue Day

Born On A Blue Day
Author: Daniel Tammet
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2007-01-09
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 141654819X

A journey into one of the most fascinating minds alive today—guided by the owner himself. Bestselling author Daniel Tammet (Thinking in Numbers) is virtually unique among people who have severe autistic disorders in that he is capable of living a fully independent life and able to explain what is happening inside his head. He sees numbers as shapes, colors, and textures, and he can perform extraordinary calculations in his head. He can learn to speak new languages fluently, from scratch, in a week. In 2004, he memorized and recited more than 22,000 digits of pi, setting a record. He has savant syndrome, an extremely rare condition that gives him the most unimaginable mental powers, much like those portrayed by Dustin Hoffman in the film Rain Man. Fascinating and inspiring, Born on a Blue Day explores what it’s like to be special and gives us an insight into what makes us all human—our minds.

The Transhumanist Wager

The Transhumanist Wager
Author: Zoltan Istvan
Publisher:
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2013
Genre: Science fiction
ISBN: 9780988616110

Philosopher, entrepreneur, and former National Geographic and New York Times correspondent Zoltan Istvan presents his visionary novel, The Transhumanist Wager, as a seminal statement of our times. Scorned by over 500 publishers and literary agents around the world, his philosophical thriller has been called "revolutionary" and "socially dangerous" by readers, scholars, and religious authorities. The novel debuts a challenging original philosophy, which rebuffs modern civilization by inviting the end of the human species-and declaring the onset of something greater. Set in the present day, the novel tells the story of transhumanist Jethro Knights and his unwavering quest for immortality via science and technology. Fighting against him are fanatical religious groups, economically depressed governments, and mystic Zoe Bach: a dazzling trauma surgeon and the love of his life, whose belief in spirituality and the afterlife is absolute. Exiled from America and reeling from personal tragedy, Knights forges a new nation of willing scientists on the world's largest seasteading project, Transhumania. When the world declares war against the floating city, demanding an end to its renegade and godless transhuman experiments and ambitions, Knights strikes back, leaving the planet forever changed.

Lila

Lila
Author: Robert Pirsig
Publisher: Bantam
Total Pages: 482
Release: 2013-11-06
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0307764214

In this bestselling new book, his first in seventeen years, Robert M. Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, takes us on a poignant and passionate journey as mysterious and compelling as his first life-changing work. Instead of a motorcycle, a sailboat carries his philosopher-narrator Phaedrus down the Hudson River as winter closes in. Along the way he picks up a most unlikely traveling companion: a woman named Lila who in her desperate sexuality, hostility, and oncoming madness threatens to disrupt his life. In Lila Robert M. Pirsig has crafted a unique work of adventure and ideas that examines the essential issues of the nineties as his previous classic did the seventies.

Go Public!

Go Public!
Author: Susanne Rubenstein
Publisher: National Council of Teachers of English (Ncte)
Total Pages: 244
Release: 1998
Genre: Education
ISBN:

This book is intended for middle and high school teachers who are committed to the process-writing model and are eager to encourage their students in the last step of the process--publication. The book offers specific writing ideas and classroom activities that help students develop the confidence and ability to publish in a wide market, and it features an extensive list of commercial markets and writing contests open to young writers. The book also addresses the issue of evaluation and guides teachers in turning their classrooms into writing communities whose members work together to recognize and reward each writer. This book can serve as a handy reference guide to publishing opportunities for students (a comprehensive appendix lists nearly 150 publishing opportunities for young writers) and as a useful collection of writing ideas that teachers can use within their established English/language arts curriculum. Appendixes include: a comprehensive 150-item list of publishing opportunities--the Market and Control lists; electronic submissions; resources of technical advice for young writers; and sample formats for cover letters and manuscripts. (NKA)

Genius at Play

Genius at Play
Author: Siobhan Roberts
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 480
Release: 2024-10-29
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0691267510

A multifaceted biography of a brilliant mathematician and iconoclast A mathematician unlike any other, John Horton Conway (1937–2020) possessed a rock star’s charisma, a polymath’s promiscuous curiosity, and a sly sense of humor. Conway found fame as a barefoot professor at Cambridge, where he discovered the Conway groups in mathematical symmetry and the aptly named surreal numbers. He also invented the cult classic Game of Life, a cellular automaton that demonstrates how simplicity generates complexity—and provides an analogy for mathematics and the entire universe. Moving to Princeton in 1987, Conway used ropes, dice, pennies, coat hangers, and the occasional Slinky to illustrate his winning imagination and share his nerdish delights. Genius at Play tells the story of this ambassador-at-large for the beauties and joys of mathematics, lays bare Conway’s personal and professional idiosyncrasies, and offers an intimate look into the mind of one of the twentieth century’s most endearing and original intellectuals.

Serena

Serena
Author: Ron Rash
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 387
Release: 2008-10-07
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0061470856

Penned by an award-winning writer, this Gothic tale of greed, corruption, and revenge is set against the backdrop of the 1930s wilderness and America's burgeoning environmental movement.

Three Years in a 12-Foot Boat

Three Years in a 12-Foot Boat
Author: Stephen G. Ladd
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2000
Genre: Adventure and adventures
ISBN: 9780966933734

For anyone who dreams of sailing away, here's an engrossing, gritty memoir of a 15,000-mile solo expedition in a tiny, hand-made boat. Bent on discovery, Ladd ranges from Montana to a harrowing sail along the pirate-ridden coast of Panama and Colombia, across the Andes, down a 600-mile river by night to avoid guerrillas, to the Antilles and the Caribbean. Robbed, capsized, arrested and befriended, he sails and rows through a tumult of uncharted adventures. The cast of characters: Dieter, mad ex-Nazi on a desert island; Hans, the smuggler who disappears at sea; castaways, prostitutes, and fortune seekers. Stow away with a poetic storyteller on a stormy, soulful voyage through nineteen countries, on the razor's edge between freedom and fear, loneliness and love.