Clipmarks | invictus's Books collection

Kundalini, The Mother of the Universe

Sat, 20 Sep 2008 19:32:01 GMT

clipped by: invictus
clipper's remarks: An interesting book from Sacred-Texts.com. Especially those who are into yoga and Kundalini discipline would love to browse it.

Clip Source: www.sacred-texts.com

Kundalini, The Mother of the Universe

by Rishi Singh Gherwal

Contents Start Reading Page Index Text [Zipped]

This little self-published work could be most charitably described as an anthology of material on Kundalini Yoga. Very little of this book was actually written by Gherwal; the majority of the material here consists of long quotes from other authors, notably Arthur Avalon.

Tags: hinduism, kundalini, goddess, yoga, culture, india

Superman tales from 1930's - online archive

Tue, 11 Jul 2006 23:14:43 GMT

clipped by: invictus
clipper's remarks: A great online Superman comics archive. Scanned pages from issues beginning with 1930's to 21st century - full stories.

Clip Source: superman.ws


	*ONLINE COMICS! [next->] SUPERMAN in the...* 1930s \| 1940s Part 1 \| 1940s Part 2 \| 1950s Part 1 \| 1950s Part 2 1960s Part 1 \| 1960s Part 2 \| 1960s Part 3 \| 1960s Part 4 \| 1960s Part 5 1970s Part 1 \| 1970s Part 2 \| 1970s Part 3 \| 1970s Part 4 1980s Part 1 \| 1980s Part 2 \| 1980s Part 3 \| 1980s Part 4 \| 1980s Part 5 1990s Part 1 \| 1990s Part 2 \| \| 1990s Part 3 \| 21st Century
	"Super Adventures" \| "Untold Tales of Krypton" \| "Operation Super-Sons" Fan Fiction \| Batman Part 1 \| Batman Part 2 \| Links
	Metropolis Mailbag \| "The Origins of Superman" About the Comics

Tags: superman, comics, vintage, online comics, sci-fi, entertainment

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

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

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

"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

Quantum Mechanics Made Easy?

Mon, 02 Oct 2006 03:24:40 GMT

clipped by: invictus
clipper's remarks: Some book recommendations about "introduction to quantum physics" here. See also the comments to the post, at the source site.

Clip Source: cosmicvariance.com

Quantum Mechanics Made Easy?

I was recently asked to recommend a good popular-level book on quantum mechanics. I don’t think I know of any, at least not first hand. We had a whole thread on the Greatest Popular Science Book, filled with good suggestions, but none specifically about quantum mechanics. A quick glance through amazon.com reveals plenty of books on particle physics, or even specific notions like quantum computing, but not one book that I could recommend in good conscience to someone who just wants to know what quantum mechanics is all about. It is the greatest intellectual achievement of the twentieth century, after all.

There are some books that either come close, or might very well be perfect but I’m not familiar with them. In the latter category we have The Quantum World by Ken Ford, and David Lindley’s Where Does the Weirdness Go? These might be great, I just haven’t read them. I’m sure that the Mr. Tompkins books by George Gamow are good, since I love One, Two, Three… Infinity (and Gamow was a genius), but I haven’t actually read them. Feynman’s QED is another classic, but focuses more on quantum electrodynamics (duh) than on QM more generally. David Deutsch’s The Fabric of Reality is a fantastic book, especially if you are curious about the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics; but I’m not sure if it’s the best first introduction (I haven’t looked at it closely in years). And David Albert’s Quantum Mechanics and Experience is great for a careful philosophical account of what QM is all about, but again maybe not the best first exposure.

Tags: physics, quantum physics, quantum mechanics, quantum, books, science

Musei Capitolini: Stunning Illustrations from a Rare Book

Fri, 16 Feb 2007 23:02:17 GMT

clipped by: invictus
clipper's remarks:

The images here (click for full size versions) come from a 4-volume set from ~1755, 'Musei Capitolini' which were (pretty obviously) a catalogue of the sculptural holdings of the Capitoline Museums of Rome - a group of art and archaeological repositories atop the Capitoline Hill in Rome. The majority of the engravings appear to be from ancient Roman sculptures but there are occasional items from ancient Greece and Egypt.

An awesome page scan set (again) from BibliOdyssey. This time, it's a 18th century art and history reference book.

Clip Source: bibliodyssey.blogspot.com

Musei Capitolini

Tags: books, rare books, page scans, ancient rome, ancient egypt, ancient greece, history, arts

Stilt Walkers (Illustration scans)

Sun, 17 Dec 2006 22:38:44 GMT

clipped by: invictus
clipper's remarks: Once again, great scans from BibliOdyssey...

Clip Source: bibliodyssey.blogspot.com

Stilt Walkers

Shepherd resting on stilts, knitting. Undated.

Young woman helping a boy walk on stilts. Undated.

Tradecard 1875.

Tags: stilts, illustrations, vintage