The House of Light and Entropy

The House of Light and Entropy PDF Author: Alessandra Ponte
Publisher: AA Publications
ISBN:
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Formerly announced as Maps and Territories, this collection of essays written by landscape historian Alessandra Ponte, begins with an investigation of the American obsession with lawns and then continues to collectively map the aesthetic, scientific and technological production of past and present North American landscapes. These include the American desert as a privileged site of scientific and artistic testing; the faraway projects of electrification of the Canadian North; the transformation of the notion and perception of waste and wasteland during the twentieth century; the photographic medium and its encounters with Native Americans; as well as an introductory essay, 'The Map and the Territory', written specifically for this volume.

The House of Light and Entropy

The House of Light and Entropy PDF Author: Alessandra Ponte
Publisher: AA Publications
ISBN:
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Get Book Here

Book Description
Formerly announced as Maps and Territories, this collection of essays written by landscape historian Alessandra Ponte, begins with an investigation of the American obsession with lawns and then continues to collectively map the aesthetic, scientific and technological production of past and present North American landscapes. These include the American desert as a privileged site of scientific and artistic testing; the faraway projects of electrification of the Canadian North; the transformation of the notion and perception of waste and wasteland during the twentieth century; the photographic medium and its encounters with Native Americans; as well as an introductory essay, 'The Map and the Territory', written specifically for this volume.

Storied Deserts

Storied Deserts PDF Author: Celina Osuna
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040044689
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Storied Deserts makes a crucial and critical intervention in the field of environmental humanities by showcasing an emerging body of research on desert places from around the world. Deserts, despite dominant stereotypes of wasteland and barrenness, are culturally and ecologically abundant places. This edited volume sets out to reimagine the world’s desert places and the very concept of "the desert" itself, taking a boldly interdisciplinary and multicultural approach. Authors engage in literary ecocriticism and ecopoetics, film and visual studies, critical theory, personal and transdisciplinary reflection, creative practices, and historical scholarship. Through their diverse range of perspectives, contributors show how arid lands have been and can be understood as sites of narrative production, places where signs and imaginaries are born from the materialities of space and entanglement. In this way, this volume highlights how the storied matter of the Earth’s deserts informs lived realities, environmental histories, cinematic and literary imaginaries, political conflicts, and even intellectual categories such as "the human" and "the elemental". Ultimately, this book shows that reimagining desert places can help us to grapple with the epochal challenges of the Anthropocene. It is an important and engaging collection for scholars and students across disciplines that helps establish the value of desert humanities.

Landscapes of Memory and Experience

Landscapes of Memory and Experience PDF Author: Jan Birksted
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1135158800
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
It has been argued that the history of landscape and of gardens has been marginalized from the mainstream of art history and visual studies because of a lack of engagement with the theories, methods and concepts of these disciplines. This book explores possible ways out of this impasse in such a way that landscape studies would become pivotal through its theoretical advances, since landscape studies would challenge the underlying assumptions of traditional phenomenological theory. Thus the history and theory of twentieth-century landscape might not only once again share concepts and methods with contemporary art and design history, but might in turn influence them. A complementary sequel to Relating Architecture to Landscape, this volume of essays explores further areas of interest and discussion in the landscape/architecture debate and offers contributions from a team of well-known researchers, teachers and writers. The choice of topics is wide-ranging and features case studies of modern and contemporary schemes from the USA, Far East and Australasia.

A Land Apart

A Land Apart PDF Author: Flannery Burke
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 081653618X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 425

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Book Description
Winner, Spur Award for Best Contemporary Nonfiction (Western Writers of America) A Land Apart is not just a cultural history of the modern Southwest—it is a complete rethinking and recentering of the key players and primary events marking the Southwest in the twentieth century. Historian Flannery Burke emphasizes how indigenous, Hispanic, and other non-white people negotiated their rightful place in the Southwest. Readers visit the region’s top tourist attractions and find out how they got there, listen to the debates of Native people as they sought to establish independence for themselves in the modern United States, and ponder the significance of the U.S.-Mexico border in a place that used to be Mexico. Burke emphasizes policy over politicians, communities over individuals, and stories over simple narratives. Burke argues that the Southwest’s reputation as a region on the margins of the nation has caused many of its problems in the twentieth century. She proposes that, as they consider the future, Americans should view New Mexico and Arizona as close neighbors rather than distant siblings, pay attention to the region’s history as Mexican and indigenous space, bear witness to the area’s inequalities, and listen to the Southwest’s stories. Burke explains that two core parts of southwestern history are the development of the nuclear bomb and subsequent uranium mining, and she maintains that these are not merely a critical facet in the history of World War II and the militarization of the American West but central to an understanding of the region’s energy future, its environmental health, and southwesterners’ conception of home. Burke masterfully crafts an engaging and accessible history that will interest historians and lay readers alike. It is for anyone interested in using the past to understand the present and the future of not only the region but the nation as a whole.

Statistical Mechanics

Statistical Mechanics PDF Author: James Sethna
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191566217
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
In each generation, scientists must redefine their fields: abstracting, simplifying and distilling the previous standard topics to make room for new advances and methods. Sethna's book takes this step for statistical mechanics - a field rooted in physics and chemistry whose ideas and methods are now central to information theory, complexity, and modern biology. Aimed at advanced undergraduates and early graduate students in all of these fields, Sethna limits his main presentation to the topics that future mathematicians and biologists, as well as physicists and chemists, will find fascinating and central to their work. The amazing breadth of the field is reflected in the author's large supply of carefully crafted exercises, each an introduction to a whole field of study: everything from chaos through information theory to life at the end of the universe.

Assemblage

Assemblage PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Architectural criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Book Description


The Entropy Model

The Entropy Model PDF Author: Thomas Tunstall
Publisher: Independently Published
ISBN: 9781982920616
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
Briana Ruiz and Jack McCullough meet in grad school at the University of Texas at Austin. They find themselves conflicted about the current state of economic theory, as well as with each other. There is a disconnect between economics and ecosystems that continues to be unresolved by theory and by public policy discussions at the highest levels.Nearing graduation, Briana must decide whether to accept an offer from Parkus Corporation, a company that seems leading edge, but may be engaging in questionable environmental practices. As Briana starts to understand the truth about Parkus Corporation - aided in large measure by Jack - she realizes the 21st-century economy may have different rules than the ones baby boomers followed. She begins work on a mathematical model - an entropy model which incorporates variables economists have failed to consider - in order to make more accurate predictions.The first wave of environmental anomalies begins, which briefly increases public awareness about the unsustainability of lifestyles in the United States and the developed world. However, when the events cease unexpectedly, people go back to business as usual. While garnering some attention, Briana's entropy model needs more work.Years later, after completing their doctorates, Briana and Jack secure federal government research positions tracking environmental incidents and establishing the first comprehensive system of national accounts to fully allocate costs across industry sectors. Briana uses her model to fill in the missing link between economics and ecosystems. Briana's work brings her and Jack directly into conflict with the Federal Reserve, the White House and the economics' establishment. Once again, environmental anomalies begin to reoccur throughout the world. This time, as they increase in frequency, the stakes get higher. The clash between economics and ecosystems, between economic theory and public policy are taking place in real time, and the stage is set for the next great transition of the human species - whether for good or ill. Time is running out, and Washington doesn't want to hear about it, despite the fact that the bubbles keep getting bigger, and the crashes keep getting worse. As financial systems and ecosystems approach a simultaneous peak, will anyone listen before it's too late to stop the collapse?

Entropy in Bloom

Entropy in Bloom PDF Author: Jeremy Robert Johnson
Publisher: Start Publishing LLC
ISBN: 1597806072
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
For more than a decade, Jeremy Robert Johnson has been bubbling under the surface of both literary and genre fiction. His short stories present a brilliantly dark and audaciously weird realm where cosmic nightmares collide with all-too-human characters and apocalypses of all shapes and sizes loom ominously. In "Persistence Hunting," a lonely distance runner is seduced into a brutal life of crime with an ever-narrowing path for escape. In "When Susurrus Stirs," an unlucky pacifist must stop a horrifying parasite from turning his body into a sentient hive. Running through all of Johnson's work is a hallucinatory vision and deeply-felt empathy, earning the author a reputation as one of today's most daring and thrilling writers. Featuring the best of his independently-published short fiction, as well as an exclusive, never-before-published novella "The Sleep of Judges"--where a father's fight against the denizens of a drug den becomes a mind-bending suburban nightmare--Entropy in Bloom is a perfect compendium for avid fans and an ideal entry point for adventurous readers seeking the humor, heartbreak, and terror of JRJ's strange new worlds.

Biology for AP ® Courses

Biology for AP ® Courses PDF Author: Julianne Zedalis
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781947172401
Category : Biology
Languages : en
Pages : 1923

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Book Description
Biology for AP® courses covers the scope and sequence requirements of a typical two-semester Advanced Placement® biology course. The text provides comprehensive coverage of foundational research and core biology concepts through an evolutionary lens. Biology for AP® Courses was designed to meet and exceed the requirements of the College Board’s AP® Biology framework while allowing significant flexibility for instructors. Each section of the book includes an introduction based on the AP® curriculum and includes rich features that engage students in scientific practice and AP® test preparation; it also highlights careers and research opportunities in biological sciences.

The Practice of Light

The Practice of Light PDF Author: Sean Cubitt
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262326574
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
An account of Western visual technologies since the Renaissance traces a history of the increasing control of light's intrinsic excess. Light is the condition of all vision, and the visual media are our most important explorations of this condition. The history of visual technologies reveals a centuries-long project aimed at controlling light. In this book, Sean Cubitt traces a genealogy of the dominant visual media of the twenty-first century—digital video, film, and photography—through a history of materials and practices that begins with the inventions of intaglio printing and oil painting. Attending to the specificities of inks and pigments, cathode ray tubes, color film, lenses, screens, and chips, Cubitt argues that we have moved from a hierarchical visual culture focused on semantic values to a more democratic but value-free numerical commodity. Cubitt begins with the invisibility of black, then builds from line to surface to volume and space. He describes Rembrandt's attempts to achieve pure black by tricking the viewer and the rise of geometry as a governing principle in visual technology, seen in Dürer, Hogarth, and Disney, among others. He finds the origins of central features of digital imaging in nineteenth-century printmaking; examines the clash between the physics and psychology of color; explores the representation of space in shadows, layers, and projection; discusses modes of temporal order in still photography, cinema, television, and digital video; and considers the implications of a political aesthetics of visual technology.