Clipmarks | invictus's Books collection

Arthur C Clarke never lost his sense of wonder

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 17:27:06 GMT

clipped by: invictus
clipper's remarks: Saluting Sir Arthur... We lost one of the most inspiring figures of our time, clippers.

Clip Source: entertainment.timesonline.co.uk

His far-sightedness led him to write dozens of science fiction novels, of which perhaps the most famous is 2001: A Space Odyssey — made into a spectacular film by the late director Stanley Kubrick.

Clarke and Kubrick created a vision of outer space that was more than just technology but had a mythic quality that probed the philosophy of the universe.

The original story was a short novella dealing with the idea of Man’s evolution being inspired by the intervention of a distant god-like extra-terrestrial civilisation.

To the end of his life he never lost his sense of wonder, his sense of humour or his strong Somerset accent. While sorely disappointed with the failure of Man’s space flight to achieve the lofty goals that he had foreseen, he always retained an optimism about the Universe and Man’s place in it.

Tags: arthur c clarke, science fiction, science, universe, philosophy, literature

Allegory of the Continents - Great illustrations

Tue, 11 Dec 2007 22:13:30 GMT

clipped by: invictus
clipper's remarks: 16th century illustrations, depicting "the characteristics" of the continents. Awesome scans again, from BibliOdyssey.

Clip Source: bibliodyssey.blogspot.com

Tags: illustrations, art, culture, rare books, scans

Shooting War: A Graphic Novel on Iraq (video)

Sat, 08 Dec 2007 15:34:02 GMT

clipped by: invictus
clipper's remarks: A video preview, based on a graphic novel by Anthony Lappé. Iraq war in 2011.

Clip Source: www.alternet.org

Shooting War, a graphic novel set in Iraq in the year 2011, has been chilling readers and making headlines about its vivid and surreal depiction of the war zone.

It's the year 2011. John McCain is our unpopular president, the war in Iraq rages on, gasoline is $10 a gallon, and Tom Cruise and Mary-Kate Olsen have just called it quits. When videoblogger Jimmy Burns captures on camera a suicide bomb blast that rocks a Brooklyn Starbucks (destroying his apartment above), he's immediately hired by maverick network Global News and packed off to Iraq.

[Video]

Tags: iraq, iraq war, graphic novel, books, video

Notes on a Sick Planet

Sat, 13 Oct 2007 17:45:06 GMT

clipped by: invictus
clipper's remarks:

The authors may reach a bit when they try to sound less square, likening the buying of compact fluorescent light bulbs to “an upgrade on your iTunes software.” But they make the science relevant and enjoyable with abundant visuals and conclude with some meaty ways for kids to make a difference. The old standbys are all there (switch light bulbs, recycle, use canvas bags at the grocery store). But I smiled on noticing something new: the authors suggest some “sustainable careers” kids can consider, like meteorologist and “glacial geologist.”

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

There’s no use avoiding it: our kids need to know about the global environmental crisis — climate change, deforestation, species extinction. And as long as we’re teaching them about all that, we may as well teach them some science at the same time. Learning about evaporation can be as boring as watching a pot boil, but if it’s part of a habitat-destroying, polar-bear-killing, actually-somewhat-interesting environmental disaster, maybe that’s something kids could enjoy reading.

Here are two new books that don’t shy away from the complexity of the science or the gravity of our environmental situation, but which also don’t forget their audience. Never before have so many serious ecological ideas been mixed so heavily with flatulence jokes and sad pictures of cute animals. The details of global warming boggle some of the world’s finest minds, but Laurie David and Cambria Gordon’s “Down-to-Earth Guide to Global Warming” actually makes it easy to understand.

Tags: environment, books, kids, learning, education, earth, book review, science

Google Books Redesign

Thu, 27 Sep 2007 01:27:14 GMT

clipped by: invictus
clipper's remarks: Now it looks much better; like a real online library.

Clip Source: blogoscoped.com

The Google Book search homepage just received a redesign (some of you were able to spot this prototype before, but it just went live for all). It now looks more like book shelf than straight-forward search engine; instead of the typical Google logo + input box, you’ll be seeing a couple of pre-selected covers as images, making for a more explorative approach.

Tags: google, books, book search

Rare Book Room

Tue, 21 Aug 2007 14:19:20 GMT

clipped by: invictus
clipper's remarks: An awesome reference site with a good collection of scanned rare books.

Clip Source: rarebookroom.org

Introduction

The "Rare Book Room" site has been constructed as an educational site intended to allow the visitor to examine and read some of the great books of the world.

Over the last ten years, a company called "Octavo" embarked on digitally photographing some of the world ’s great books from some of the greatest libraries. These books were photographed at very high resolution (in some cases at over 200 megabytes per page).

This site contains all of the books (about 400) that have been digitized to date. These range over a wide variety of topics and rarity. The books are presented so that the viewer can examine all the pages in medium to medium-high resolution.

Tags: books, rare books, reference

The Original Wizard of Oz

Fri, 10 Aug 2007 20:42:01 GMT

clipped by: invictus
clipper's remarks: "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz", with William Wallace Denslow's awesome illustrations, published in 1900.

Clip Source: bibliodyssey.blogspot.com

'The Wonderful Wizard of Oz' was an innovative book not least because of the twenty four full colour plates and myriad monochromatic illustrations in which the colour changed according to the location in the story (Kansas = grey, Emerald City = green and so on). With the illustrative vignettes often encroaching on the text area, the type was cleverly printed over the top of the coloured images. Such elaborate printing techniques again required that Baum and Denslow fund the printing costs and the book was published by George M Hill and Company of Chicago and New York in 1900 for $1.50 per copy. It was apparently successful.

'The Wonderful Wizard of Oz' is online in its entirety at the Library of Congress [Rare Book and Special Collections Division].

'The Wizard of Oz - An American Fairy Tale' exhibition site at the Library of Congress.

Tags: wizard of oz, books, rare books, illustrations, page scans, william denslow

Aztec Mexico: Page Scans From Ancient Manuscript

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 22:41:44 GMT

clipped by: invictus
clipper's remarks: Awesome prints from centuries old manuscripts: Aztec calendar, rituals and culture. Another gem from BibliOdyssey. I recommend visiting the source.

Clip Source: bibliodyssey.blogspot.com

Aztec Mexico

This is an absolutely outstanding collection, with more than 4000 images of 'books, maps, and manuscripts relating to the colonial period of the Americas, North and South, from 1492 to ca. 1825'. I am amazed I had never, to my recall, seen this InsightBrowser site before. I've only had a very modest perusal of their holdings so far, but I will definitely return in the near future. It's great to see any material relating to the Caribbean and the Guyanas, but there is so much more in here. The extent of the background notes is commendable too.

Tags: books, rare books, manuscripts, aztecs, ancient, history, illustrations

Google Books Text Versions

Thu, 05 Jul 2007 21:30:34 GMT

clipped by: invictus

Clip Source: blogoscoped.com

Google Books Text Versions

Some of Google’s full view books can now be seen in a plain text version, additional to the existing images of text. This will allow you to copy the text for personal use, or to create a website of it, or have it be read by a screen reader, or do anything else you want (commercial and non-commercial). To search for full view books, use the advanced search page of Google Books and check the “full view” option. Now when you’re in the book view of a result, click the “view plain text” link at the top right. (Not all full view books were showing this link when I tried.)

Tags: books, google, ocr, character recognition, etext, reference

Happiness wins science book prize

Mon, 28 May 2007 14:32:19 GMT

clipped by: invictus

Clip Source: news.bbc.co.uk

Happiness wins science book prize

Daniel Gilbert beat five other shortlisted titles

A scientific exploration of the various ways people attempt to make themselves happy has won the annual Royal Society Prize for Science Books.

Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness had been tipped as the favourite to win the prestigious £10,000 award.

It beat five other titles including Henry Nicholl's Lonesome George, an account of the last known individual of a subspecies of Galapagos tortoise.

Tags: books, daniel gilbert, happiness, royal society prize

Politicizing Science: The Alchemy of Policymaking (Free Ebook)

Sun, 20 May 2007 10:59:51 GMT

clipped by: Djiezes
clipper's remarks:

In this book leading scientists share their experiences and observations of developing and testing hypotheses, offering insights on the dangers of manipulating science for political gain. It describes how politicization--whether by misapplication, overextension, or outright manipulation of the scientific record to advance particular policy agendas--imposes expenditures of money, missed opportunities, and burdens on the economy.

Clip Source: www.hoover.org

Politicizing Science: The Alchemy of Policymaking

Full-text PDF versions of each chapter can be accessed below by clicking on the desired chapter title.

Tags: politics, science, book, free, ebook, pdf, literature, politicization, policy, gough

"Are We Rome?" - Book Review

Fri, 18 May 2007 16:38:07 GMT

clipped by: invictus
clipper's remarks:

"Are We Rome?" is an essay in polemic, not scholarship, and Mr. Murphy does not set out to analyze the deep structural forces of Roman or American history. Instead, he makes a tour of contemporary American politics, and speculates about Roman parallels to very upto-the-minute problems. In many ways, Mr. Murphy's argument is less about America in general than about the Bush administration in particular. Thus he worries about the transfer of government functions to private contractors like Halliburton, seeing an analogy to the Roman system of patronage.

Clip Source: www.nysun.com

The short answer to the question Cullen Murphy asks in "Are We Rome?" ( Houghton Mifflin, 262 pages, $24) is no. "Press it too far," Mr. Murphy himself confesses near the end of his pithy, provocative book, "or invoke it too literally, and the Rome-and-America analogy breaks down in strategic places." Still, it is no surprise that we are still looking to Rome for omens of our national destiny. The Founding Fathers started the tradition, frequently imagining the new American Republic in terms of the vigilant, virtuous Roman Republic.

This kind of allusion came as naturally as breathing to Hamilton, writing at a time when every educated man knew his Livy as well as he knew his Bible. You only have to visit Washington, D.C., with its monumental imitations of Roman temples, to see how strongly Rome continued to grip the American imagination of power.

Tags: books, cullen murphy, america, rome, history, politics

The World Before The Deluge

Wed, 02 May 2007 23:24:15 GMT

clipped by: invictus
clipper's remarks: An awesome feature again, from BibliOdyssey. Illustrations from a 1872 edition book, depicting the prehistoric world.

Clip Source: bibliodyssey.blogspot.com

"The object of "The World before the Deluge" is to trace the progressive steps by which the earth has reached its present state, from that condition of chaos when it "was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the the deep," and to describe the various convulsions and transformations through which it has successively passed."

'The World Before the Deluge' by Louis Figuier (1872 revision of the 1862 text) is online at 19th century science.

Tags: books, rare books, illustrations, prehistory, art, earth, deluge

Aztec Calendars and Sun Stone (page scans)

Tue, 20 Feb 2007 18:39:26 GMT

clipped by: invictus
clipper's remarks: BibliOdyssey does it again: Here, you can find awesome pagescans from a 1790 book, describing the Aztec finds in Mexico, by Antonio de León y Gama. The pagescans include an awesome illustration of the famous Aztec Sun Stone (a.k.a "Calendar".) BibliOdyssey says, Library of Congress digitized the whole book and added to the online collection - can be found at this link. (The book is in Spanish.)

Clip Source: bibliodyssey.blogspot.com

This is a slight but worthwhile repeat of sorts. Aztec sunstones discovered in Mexico in 1790 were described by Antonio de León y Gama in 'Descripción Histórica y Cronológica de las dos Piedras..' [An historical and chronological description of two stones found under ground, in the great square of the City of Mexico]. Since I last posted (more info) a couple of images, the Library of Congress have digitized the whole book.

Tags: books, archaeology, mexico, aztecs, rare books, page scans

Illusions of Security

Tue, 20 Feb 2007 17:52:16 GMT

clipped by: invictus
clipper's remarks: Are the efforts of "security" in the post 9/11 world achieves any success or do all these surveillance systems and security measures cause new problems for democracies while failing to identify the "real terrorists"? Maureen Webb's new book investigates this critical subject. The below clip is from Democracy Now web site and you can also view an interview with Webb in streaming MP3 format here.

Clip Source: www.democracynow.org

A new book reveals the comprehensive scope of government surveillance, and finds that the use of sophisticated methods to search for terrorists is not identifying the right suspects.

In “Illusions of Security, Global Surveillance and Democracy in the Post 9/11 World,” human rights lawyer Maureen Webb argues the new global security system is threatening both American and global security while also undermining democracy worldwide.

Maureen Webb, author of the new book "Illusions of Security: Global Surveillance and Democracy in the Post-9/11 World" (City Lights). She is a human rights lawyer and activist. She has spoken extensively on post-September 11 security and human rights issues. She is co-chair of the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group and also the Coordinator for Security and Human Rights issues for Lawyers' Rights Watch Canada.

Tags: 9/11, security, surveillance, human rights, terrorism, democracy