The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret

The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret PDF Author: Seth Shulman
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 039333368X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Get Book Here

Book Description
Telephone.

The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret

The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret PDF Author: Seth Shulman
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 039333368X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Get Book Here

Book Description
Telephone.

Gambit

Gambit PDF Author: Karna Small Bodman
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1621578518
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Get Book Here

Book Description
“A truly frightening story with the crystal ring of truth and authenticity; well written, well plotted and as topical as a novel can get.” —Nelson DeMille, New York Times bestselling author “Not only does Bodman know the White House inside and out, she also knows how to tell a gripping, fast-paced tale of political intrigue filled with the kind of delicious insider detail most other novelists have to make up.” —Joseph Finder, New York Times bestselling author “A nail-biter…You will not turn out the lights until you have read through to the last page.” —The Washington Times “Bodman’s insider knowledge of government operations and the scary plausibility of the story line make this worth reading.” —Library Journal In this second book of the White House national security thriller series, Dr. Cameron Talbot, a famous expert on missile defense systems, returns to investigate how American airplanes could plummet from the sky—though nothing shows up on radar and none of the usual terrorist suspects have claimed responsibility. With the country in a panic and the economy taking a nose-dive, the beautiful scientist finds herself once again enmeshed in international plots as well as a romantic triangle in the highest levels of government.

The Moral Arc

The Moral Arc PDF Author: Michael Shermer
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 0805096930
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 592

Get Book Here

Book Description
Bestselling author Michael Shermer's exploration of science and morality that demonstrates how the scientific way of thinking has made people, and society as a whole, more moral From Galileo and Newton to Thomas Hobbes and Martin Luther King, Jr., thinkers throughout history have consciously employed scientific techniques to better understand the non-physical world. The Age of Reason and the Enlightenment led theorists to apply scientific reasoning to the non-scientific disciplines of politics, economics, and moral philosophy. Instead of relying on the woodcuts of dissected bodies in old medical texts, physicians opened bodies themselves to see what was there; instead of divining truth through the authority of an ancient holy book or philosophical treatise, people began to explore the book of nature for themselves through travel and exploration; instead of the supernatural belief in the divine right of kings, people employed a natural belief in the right of democracy. In The Moral Arc, Shermer will explain how abstract reasoning, rationality, empiricism, skepticism--scientific ways of thinking--have profoundly changed the way we perceive morality and, indeed, move us ever closer to a more just world.

Telephone

Telephone PDF Author: Percival Everett
Publisher: Picador
ISBN: 1761561456
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 202

Get Book Here

Book Description
Finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction Zach Wells is a perpetually dissatisfied geologist-slash-paleobiologist. Expert in a very narrow area – the geological history of a cave forty-four metres above the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon – he is a laconic man who plays chess with his daughter, trades puns with his wife while she does yoga, and dodges committee work at the college where he teaches. After a field trip to the desert yields nothing more than a colleague with a tenure problem and a student with an unwelcome crush on him, Wells returns home to find his world crumbling. His daughter has lost her edge at chess, she has developed mysterious eye problems, and her memory has lost its grasp. Powerless in the face of his daughter’s slow deterioration, he finds a mysterious note asking for help tucked into the pocket of a jacket he’s ordered off eBay. Desperate for someone to save, he sets off to New Mexico in secret on a quixotic rescue mission. A deeply affecting story about the lengths to which loss and grief will drive us, Telephone is a Percival Everett novel we should have seen coming all along, one that will shake you to the core as it asks questions about the power of narrative to save.

The Chip

The Chip PDF Author: T.R. Reid
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0307432033
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 322

Get Book Here

Book Description
Barely fifty years ago a computer was a gargantuan, vastly expensive thing that only a handful of scientists had ever seen. The world’s brightest engineers were stymied in their quest to make these machines small and affordable until the solution finally came from two ingenious young Americans. Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce hit upon the stunning discovery that would make possible the silicon microchip, a work that would ultimately earn Kilby the Nobel Prize for physics in 2000. In this completely revised and updated edition of The Chip, T.R. Reid tells the gripping adventure story of their invention and of its growth into a global information industry. This is the story of how the digital age began.

A Troublesome Inheritance

A Troublesome Inheritance PDF Author: Nicholas Wade
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0698163796
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 249

Get Book Here

Book Description
Drawing on startling new evidence from the mapping of the genome, an explosive new account of the genetic basis of race and its role in the human story Fewer ideas have been more toxic or harmful than the idea of the biological reality of race, and with it the idea that humans of different races are biologically different from one another. For this understandable reason, the idea has been banished from polite academic conversation. Arguing that race is more than just a social construct can get a scholar run out of town, or at least off campus, on a rail. Human evolution, the consensus view insists, ended in prehistory. Inconveniently, as Nicholas Wade argues in A Troublesome Inheritance, the consensus view cannot be right. And in fact, we know that populations have changed in the past few thousand years—to be lactose tolerant, for example, and to survive at high altitudes. Race is not a bright-line distinction; by definition it means that the more human populations are kept apart, the more they evolve their own distinct traits under the selective pressure known as Darwinian evolution. For many thousands of years, most human populations stayed where they were and grew distinct, not just in outward appearance but in deeper senses as well. Wade, the longtime journalist covering genetic advances for The New York Times, draws widely on the work of scientists who have made crucial breakthroughs in establishing the reality of recent human evolution. The most provocative claims in this book involve the genetic basis of human social habits. What we might call middle-class social traits—thrift, docility, nonviolence—have been slowly but surely inculcated genetically within agrarian societies, Wade argues. These “values” obviously had a strong cultural component, but Wade points to evidence that agrarian societies evolved away from hunter-gatherer societies in some crucial respects. Also controversial are his findings regarding the genetic basis of traits we associate with intelligence, such as literacy and numeracy, in certain ethnic populations, including the Chinese and Ashkenazi Jews. Wade believes deeply in the fundamental equality of all human peoples. He also believes that science is best served by pursuing the truth without fear, and if his mission to arrive at a coherent summa of what the new genetic science does and does not tell us about race and human history leads straight into a minefield, then so be it. This will not be the last word on the subject, but it will begin a powerful and overdue conversation.

The Bell Telephone

The Bell Telephone PDF Author: Alexander Graham Bell
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 492

Get Book Here

Book Description
No other source could ever equal Bell's personal and detailed description of the steps leading to his remarkable invention. This description is included in Bell's testimony before various courts in the years 1879, 1883 and 1887 when his exclusive patents rights were being questioned by the United States Government. In preparing his defense, Bell provided important insights into the process of his own experimentation leading to the first crude telephone. In his introduction, Charles H. Swan describes Bell's testimony as "... the most detailed and best arranged statement of his telephone work".

Reclaiming Conversation

Reclaiming Conversation PDF Author: Sherry Turkle
Publisher:
ISBN: 1594205558
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 450

Get Book Here

Book Description
An engaging look at how technology is undermining our creativity and relationships and how face-to-face conversation can help us get it back.

Singularity Sky

Singularity Sky PDF Author: Charles Stross
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9780441011797
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 356

Get Book Here

Book Description
In a technologically suppressed future, information demands to be free in the debut novel from Hugo Award-winning author Charlie Stross. In the twenty-first century, life as we know it changed. Faster-than-light travel was perfected, and the Eschaton, a superhuman artificial intelligence, was born. Four hundred years later, the far-flung colonies that arose as a result of these events—scattered over three thousand years of time and a thousand parsecs of space—are beginning to rediscover their origins. The New Republic is one such colony. It has existed for centuries in self-imposed isolation, rejecting all but the most basic technology. Now, under attack by a devastating information plague, the colony must reach out to Earth for help. A battle fleet is dispatched, streaking across the stars to the rescue. But things are not what they seem—secret agendas and ulterior motives abound, both aboard the ship and on the ground. And watching over it all is the Eschaton, which has its own very definite ideas about the outcome...

Exploding the Phone

Exploding the Phone PDF Author: Phil Lapsley
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN: 0802193757
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 432

Get Book Here

Book Description
“A rollicking history of the telephone system and the hackers who exploited its flaws.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review Before smartphones, back even before the Internet and personal computers, a misfit group of technophiles, blind teenagers, hippies, and outlaws figured out how to hack the world’s largest machine: the telephone system. Starting with Alexander Graham Bell’s revolutionary “harmonic telegraph,” by the middle of the twentieth century the phone system had grown into something extraordinary, a web of cutting-edge switching machines and human operators that linked together millions of people like never before. But the network had a billion-dollar flaw, and once people discovered it, things would never be the same. Exploding the Phone tells this story in full for the first time. It traces the birth of long-distance communication and the telephone, the rise of AT&T’s monopoly, the creation of the sophisticated machines that made it all work, and the discovery of Ma Bell’s Achilles’ heel. Phil Lapsley expertly weaves together the clandestine underground of “phone phreaks” who turned the network into their electronic playground, the mobsters who exploited its flaws to avoid the feds, the explosion of telephone hacking in the counterculture, and the war between the phreaks, the phone company, and the FBI. The product of extensive original research, Exploding the Phone is a groundbreaking, captivating book that “does for the phone phreaks what Steven Levy’s Hackers did for computer pioneers” (Boing Boing). “An authoritative, jaunty and enjoyable account of their sometimes comical, sometimes impressive and sometimes disquieting misdeeds.” —The Wall Street Journal “Brilliantly researched.” —The Atlantic “A fantastically fun romp through the world of early phone hackers, who sought free long distance, and in the end helped launch the computer era.” —The Seattle Times