Bottom Time

Join author Norbert Weissinger as he narrates his most memorable dives, starting with his first scuba dive while attending college, to the grueling work in the Gulf of Mexico as a commercial oilfield diver. Experience the thrills, terrors, mystifying beauty, and awful monotony of life at sea. Meet the colorful and eccentric personalities that risk their lives daily in the development of offshore oilfields. Commercial divers go under water every day to earn a living. Strangely, they enjoy the abuse of the sea, and if they survive a ten-year career, they can take home a wealth of memories about a world that few have ever seen. Bottom Time is filled with travel anecdotes, dive narratives, and vivid descriptions of the undersea world. While working on the sea floor was sometimes lonely and frightening, the author experienced sublime moments when he felt privileged to be a visitor to an alien realm. The triggerfish, tarpon, groupers, sea turtles, and barracuda became his friends, and he wished that bottom time would never end. After spending countless hours under water, the author found not only beauty and exotic marine life, but inspiration. Life spent on the bottom is truly living in the moment, where past and future dissolve, and nothing matters but a breath.

In the past decade, the field of comparative cognition has grown and thrived. No less rigorous than purely behavioristic investigations, examinations of animal intelligence are useful for scientists and psychologists alike in their quest to understand the nature and mechanisms of intelligence. Extensive field research of various species has yielded exciting new areas of research, integrating findings from psychology, behavioral ecology, and ethology in a unique and wide-ranging synthesis of theory and research on animal cognition. The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Cognition contains sections on perception and illusion, attention and search, memory processes, spatial cognition, conceptualization and categorization, problem solving and behavioral flexibility, and social cognition processes including findings in primate tool usage, pattern learning, and counting. The authors have incorporated findings and theoretical approaches that reflect the current state of the field. This comprehensive volume will be a must-read for students and scientists who want to know about the state of the art of the modern science of comparative cognition.

A guide to help programmers learn how to support computer peripherals under the Linux operating system, and how to develop new hardware under Linux. This third edition covers all the significant changes to Version 2.6 of the Linux kernel. Includes full-featured examples that programmers can compile and run without special hardware