Crackpot Or Genius?

Crackpot Or Genius? PDF Author: Francis D. Reynolds
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780760715963
Category : Inventions
Languages : en
Pages : 197

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Book Description

Crackpot Or Genius?

Crackpot Or Genius? PDF Author: Francis D. Reynolds
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780760715963
Category : Inventions
Languages : en
Pages : 197

Get Book Here

Book Description


The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays

The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays PDF Author: Richard Taruskin
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520268059
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 508

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Book Description
"Roth Family Foundation music in America imprint"--Prelim. p.

Understanding Stupidity

Understanding Stupidity PDF Author: James F. Welles
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description


The Genius Checklist

The Genius Checklist PDF Author: Dean Keith Simonton
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262537958
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
What it takes to be a genius: nine essential and contradictory ingredients. What does it take to be a genius? A high score on an IQ test? Brilliant physicist Richard Feynman's IQ was too low for membership in Mensa. Suffering from varying degrees of mental illness? Creativity is often considered a marker of mental health. Be a child prodigy like Mozart, or a later bloomer like Beethoven? Die tragically young, like Keats, or live to a ripe old age like Goethe? In The Genius Checklist, Dean Keith Simonton examines the key factors in creative genius and finds that they are more than a little contradictory. Simonton, who has studied creativity and genius for more than four decades, draws on both scientific research and stories from the lives of famous creative geniuses that range from Isaac Newton to Vincent van Gogh to Virginia Woolf. He explains the origin of IQ tests and the art of estimating the IQ of long-dead historical figures (John Stuart Mill: 200; Charles Darwin: 160). He compares IQ scores with achieved eminence as measures of genius, and he draws a distinction between artistic and scientific genius. He rules out birth order as a determining factor (in the James family alone, three geniuses at three different birth-order positions: William James, firs-tborn; Henry James, second born; Alice James, born fifth and last); considers Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hour rule; and describes how the “lone” genius gets enmeshed in social networks. Genius, Simonton explains, operates in ways so subtle that they seem contradictory. Genius is born and made, the domain of child prodigies and their elders. Simonton's checklist gives us a new, integrative way to understand geniuses—and perhaps even to nurture your own genius!

Transgression and the Aesthetics of Evil

Transgression and the Aesthetics of Evil PDF Author: Taran Kang
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487529090
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
How do we perceive evil? How do we represent evil? In Transgression and the Aesthetics of Evil, Taran Kang examines the entanglements of aesthetics and morality. Investigating conceptions and images of evil, Kang identifies a fateful moment of transformation in the eighteenth century that continues to reverberate to the present day. Transgression, once allocated the central place in the constitution of evil, undergoes a startling revaluation in the Enlightenment and its aftermath, one that needs to be understood in relation to emergent ideas in the arts. Taran Kang engages with the writings of Edmund Burke, the Marquis de Sade, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Hannah Arendt, among others, as he questions recent calls to "de-aestheticize" evil and insists on a historically informed appreciation of evil’s aesthetic dimensions. Chapters consider the figure of the "evil genius," the paradoxical appeal of the grotesque and the disgusting, and the moral status of spectators who behold scenes of suffering and acts of transgression. In grappling with these issues, Transgression and the Aesthetics of Evil questions the feasibility and desirability of insulating the moral from the aesthetic.

John Adair's 100 Greatest Ideas for Smart Decision Making

John Adair's 100 Greatest Ideas for Smart Decision Making PDF Author: John Adair
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0857082221
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
John Adair’s 100 Greatest Ideas for Smart Decision Making is a one-stop of practical advice and tips on problem solving and productive thinking from one of the world’s best-known and most sought after authorities on leadership and management. Inside you will find: 11 Greatest Ideas for Practical Wisdom 8 Greatest Ideas for Problem Solving Strategies 13 Greatest Ideas for How Your Mind Works 8 Greatest Ideas for Clear Thinking 13 Greatest Ideas for Productive Thinking ...and 47 other fantastic ideas, tips and tricks that will give you the confidence, answers, and inspiration you need to succeed.

Broken Genius

Broken Genius PDF Author: Joel N. Shurkin
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 0230552293
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
When William Shockley invented the transistor, the world was changed forever and he was awarded the Nobel Prize. But today Shockley is often remembered only for his incendiary campaigning about race, intelligence, and genetics. His dubious research led him to donate to the Nobel Prize sperm bank and preach his inflammatory ideas widely, making shocking pronouncements on the uselessness of remedial education and the sterilization of individuals with IQs below 100. Ultimately his crusade destroyed his reputation and saw him vilified on national television, yet he died proclaiming his work on race as his greatest accomplishment. Now, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Joel N. Shurkin offers the first biography of this contradictory and controversial man. With unique access to the private Shockley archives, Shurkin gives an unflinching account of how such promise ended in such ignominy.

The Plenitude

The Plenitude PDF Author: Rich Gold
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262543796
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 134

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Book Description
Lessons from and for the creative professions of art, science, design, and engineering: how to live in and with the Plenitude, that dense, knotted ecology of human-made stuff that creates the need for more of itself. We live with a lot of stuff. The average kitchen, for example, is home to stuff galore, and every appliance, every utensil, every thing, is compound—composed of tens, hundreds, even thousands of other things. Although each piece of stuff satisfies some desire, it also creates the need for even more stuff: cereal demands a spoon; a television demands a remote. Rich Gold calls this dense, knotted ecology of human-made stuff the "Plenitude." And in this book—at once cartoon treatise, autobiographical reflection, and practical essay in moral philosophy—he tells us how to understand and live with it. Gold writes about the Plenitude from the seemingly contradictory (but in his view, complementary) perspectives of artist, scientist, designer, and engineer—all professions pursued by him, sometimes simultaneously, in the course of his career. "I have spent my life making more stuff for the Plenitude," he writes, acknowledging that the Plenitude grows not only because it creates a desire for more of itself but also because it is extraordinary and pleasurable to create. Gold illustrates these creative expressions with witty cartoons. He describes "seven patterns of innovation"—including "The Big Kahuna," "Colonization" (which is illustrated by a drawing of "The real history of baseball," beginning with "Play for free in the backyard" and ending with "Pay to play interactive baseball at home"), and "Stuff Desires to Be Better Stuff" (and its corollary, "Technology Desires to Be Product"). Finally, he meditates on the Plenitude itself and its moral contradictions. How can we in good conscience accept the pleasures of creating stuff that only creates the need for more stuff? He quotes a friend: "We should be careful to make the world we actually want to live in."

The Poetry of the American Civil War

The Poetry of the American Civil War PDF Author: Lee Steinmetz
Publisher: MSU Press
ISBN: 1628951648
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 389

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Book Description
Deeply affecting and diverse in perspective, The Poetry of the American Civil War is the first comprehensive volume to focus entirely on poetry written and published during the Civil War. Of the nearly one thousand books of poetry published in the 1860s, some two hundred addressed the war in some way, and these collectively present a textured portrait of life during the conflict. The poets represented here hail from the North and the South, and at times mirror each other uncannily. Among them are housewives, doctors, preachers, bankers, journalists, and teachers. Their verse reflects the day-to-day reality of war, death, and destruction, and it contemplates questions of faith, slavery, society, patriotism, and politics. This is an essential volume for poetry lovers, historians, and Civil War enthusiasts alike.

Song of the Shank

Song of the Shank PDF Author: Jeffery Renard Allen
Publisher: Graywolf Press
ISBN: 1555970923
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 567

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Book Description
A contemporary American masterpiece about music, race, an unforgettable man, and an unreal America during the Civil War era At the heart of this remarkable novel is Thomas Greene Wiggins, a nineteenth-century slave and improbable musical genius who performed under the name Blind Tom. Song of the Shank opens in 1866 as Tom and his guardian, Eliza Bethune, struggle to adjust to their fashionable apartment in the city in the aftermath of riots that had driven them away a few years before. But soon a stranger arrives from the mysterious island of Edgemere—inhabited solely by African settlers and black refugees from the war and riots—who intends to reunite Tom with his now-liberated mother. As the novel ranges from Tom's boyhood to the heights of his performing career, the inscrutable savant is buffeted by opportunistic teachers and crooked managers, crackpot healers and militant prophets. In his symphonic novel, Jeffery Renard Allen blends history and fantastical invention to bring to life a radical cipher, a man who profoundly changes all who encounter him.