The Impossible Machine

A fresh, though counterintuitive, understanding of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s legal, political, and cultural heritage

Science loving Adam "Einstein" Anderson is back - and more contemporary than ever! Einstein and his best friend Paloma try to stump each other and foil the ever-scheming Stanley as they solve science mysteries. Not only have the characters, stories, dialog and devices been updated, every story now includes a fun science experiment for readers to try. Great stories and hands-on science!

Thermodynamics is fundamental to university and college curricula in chemistry, physics, engineering and many life sciences around the world. It is also notoriously difficult for students to understand, learn and apply. What makes this book different, and special, is the clarity of the text. The writing style is fluid, natural and lucid, and everything is explained in a logical and transparent manner. Thermodynamics is a deep, and important, branch of science, and this book does not make it "easy". But it does make it intelligible. This book introduces a new, 'Fourth Law' of Thermodynamics' based on the notion of Gibbs free energy, which underpins almost every application of thermodynamics and which the authors claim is worthy of recognition as a 'law'. The last four chapters bring thermodynamics into the twenty-first century, dealing with bioenergetics (how living systems capture and use free energy), macromolecule assembly (how proteins fold), and macromolecular aggregation (how, for example, virus capsids assemble). This is of great current relevance to students of biochemistry, biochemical engineering and pharmacy, and is covered in very few other texts on thermodynamics. The book also contains many novel and effective examples, such as the explanation of why friction is irreversible, the proof of the depression of the freezing point, and the explanation of the biochemical standard state.

The most powerful weapon in business today is the alliance between the mathematical smarts of machines and the imaginative human intellect of great leaders. Together they make the mathematical corporation, the business model of the future. We are at a once-in-a-decade breaking point similar to the quality revolution of the 1980s and the dawn of the internet age in the 1990s: leaders must transform how they run their organizations, or competitors will bring them crashing to earth--often overnight. Mathematical corporations--the organizations that will master the future--will outcompete high-flying rivals by merging the best of human ingenuity with machine intelligence. While smart machines are weapon number one for organizations, leaders are still the drivers of breakthroughs. Only they can ask crucial questions to capitalize on business opportunities newly discovered in oceans of data. This dynamic combination will make possible the fulfillment of missions that once seemed out of reach, even impossible to attain. Josh Sullivan and Angela Zutavern's extraordinary examples include the entrepreneur who upended preventive health care, the oceanographer who transformed fisheries management, and the pharmaceutical company that used algorithm-driven optimization to boost vaccine yields. Together they offer a profoundly optimistic vision for a dazzling new phase in business, and a playbook for how smart companies can manage the essential combination of human and machine.

The chapters in this book centre around one main theme, the concept of the machine and its use as metaphor in a variety of contexts. This concept is deeply rooted in western culture and is frequently used to interpret complex systems in nature and society. With the advent of electronic computers, the machine metaphor applied to thinking and the brain has becOIne even more pertinent. The idea of a machine has changed over time. In this book these transformations are made trans parent, various aspects of the machine metaphor are discussed and limitations and pitfalls of the metaphor are elaborated. The chapters are written in a non-technical fashion and are accessible to a large readership of scientists and also laymen interested in the scientific per spectives and logical foundations of the machine concept that has been so influential in western thinking. The idea of the book has its origin in a workshop held at the Sci entific Station in Abisko, Sweden, in May 1990, where several of the present authors participated. The meeting was organized and spon sored by the Swedish Council for Planning and Coordination of Re search (FRN). Since 1983, the FRN has actively promoted a series of such annual events at Abisko, all of which have been devoted to the exploration of various aspects of complex systems and their evolution.

Argues that Indian cinema’s deep nineteenth-century past continues to play a vital role in its twenty-first-century present. In A Very Old Machine, Sudhir Mahadevan shows how Indian cinema’s many origins in the technologies and practices of the nineteenth century continue to play a vital and broad function in its twenty-first-century present. He proposes that there has never been a singular cinema in India; rather, Indian cinema has been a multifaceted phenomenon that was (and is) understood, experienced, and present in everyday life in myriad ways. Employing methods of media archaeology, close textual analysis, archival research, and cultural theory, Mahadevan digs into the history of photography, print media, practices of piracy and showmanship, and contemporary everyday imaginations of the cinema to offer an understanding of how the cinema came to be such a dominant force of culture in India. The result is an open-ended and innovative account of Indian cinema’s “many origins.” Sudhir Mahadevan is Associate Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature, Cinema and Media at the University of Washington.

In Perpetual Motion, Dana slows down long enough to detail his dash through a fast-paced life. This is the inspirational and moving saga of how—historical, cultural, and environmental events influenced a fertile mind, driving him forward on a quest for personal growth and self-expression, in the face of adversity. With remarkable candour and sparkling humour, he relays his coming of age in small-town Southwestern Ontario in the ’60s and ’70s; through his family hardships; struggles with anxiety, depression, and PTSD; and the surprising journey to the creative arts, that resurrected the indelible spirit in him today. Perpetual Motion is infused with love, empathy, and wisdom; culminating in twenty-three life lessons, including “Embrace the Music,” “Take Time to Grieve,” and “Learn How to Make Soup.” Stories told of grief and tragedy but promising a lighted path forward, this memoir will comfort, delight, and inspire readers of all stripes to consider their own life journeys.

In the last days of 1907, the German novelist and exponent of glass architecture Paul Scheerbart embarked upon an attempt to invent a perpetual motion machine. For the next two and a half years he would document his ongoing efforts (and failures) from his laundry-room-cum-laboratory, hiring plumbers and mechanics to construct his models while spinning out a series of imagined futures that his invention-in-the-making was going to enable. The Perpetual Motion Machine: The Story of an Invention, originally published in German in 1910, is an indefinable blend of diary, diagrams and digression that falls somewhere between memoir and reverie: a document of what poet and translator Andrew Joron calls a "two-and-a-half-year-long tantrum of the imagination." Shifting ambiguously from irony to enthusiasm and back, Scheerbart's unique amalgamation of visionary humor and optimistic failure ultimately proves to be a more literary invention than scientific: a perpetual motion of a fevered imagination that reads as if Robert Walser had tried his hand at science fiction. With "toiling wheels" inextricably embedded in his head, Scheerbart's visions of rising globalization, ecological devastation, militaristic weapons of mass destruction and the possible end of literature soon lead him to dread success more than failure. The Perpetual Motion Machine is an ode to the fertility of misery and a battle cry of the imagination against praxis.