The Fifth Hammer

The Fifth Hammer PDF Author: Daniel Heller-Roazen
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781935408161
Category : Cosmology
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
How the ordering of the sensible world continues to suggest a reality that no notes or letters can fully transcribe. An ancient tradition holds that Pythagoras discovered the secrets of harmony within a forge when he came across five men hammering with five hammers, producing a wondrous sound. Four of the five hammers stood in a marvelous set of proportions, harmonizing; but there was also a fifth hammer. Pythagoras saw and heard it, but he could not measure it; nor could he understand its discordant sound. Pythagoras therefore discarded it. What was this hammer, such that Pythagoras chose so decidedly to reject it? Since antiquity, "harmony" has been a name for more than a theory of musical sounds; it has offered a paradigm for the scientific understanding of the natural world. Nature, through harmony, has been transcribed in the ideal signs of mathematics. But, time and again, the transcription has run up against one fundamental limit: something in nature resists being written down, transcribed in a stable set of ideal elements. A fifth hammer, obstinately, continues to sound. In eight chapters, linked together as are the tones of a single scale, The Fifth Hammer explores the sounds and echoes of that troubling percussion as they make themselves felt on the most varied of attempts to understand and represent the natural world. From music to metaphysics, aesthetics to astronomy, and from Plato and Boethius to Kepler, Leibniz, and Kant, this book explores the ways in which the ordering of the sensible world has continued to suggest a reality that no notes or letters can fully transcribe.

The Fifth Hammer

The Fifth Hammer PDF Author: Daniel Heller-Roazen
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781935408161
Category : Cosmology
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
How the ordering of the sensible world continues to suggest a reality that no notes or letters can fully transcribe. An ancient tradition holds that Pythagoras discovered the secrets of harmony within a forge when he came across five men hammering with five hammers, producing a wondrous sound. Four of the five hammers stood in a marvelous set of proportions, harmonizing; but there was also a fifth hammer. Pythagoras saw and heard it, but he could not measure it; nor could he understand its discordant sound. Pythagoras therefore discarded it. What was this hammer, such that Pythagoras chose so decidedly to reject it? Since antiquity, "harmony" has been a name for more than a theory of musical sounds; it has offered a paradigm for the scientific understanding of the natural world. Nature, through harmony, has been transcribed in the ideal signs of mathematics. But, time and again, the transcription has run up against one fundamental limit: something in nature resists being written down, transcribed in a stable set of ideal elements. A fifth hammer, obstinately, continues to sound. In eight chapters, linked together as are the tones of a single scale, The Fifth Hammer explores the sounds and echoes of that troubling percussion as they make themselves felt on the most varied of attempts to understand and represent the natural world. From music to metaphysics, aesthetics to astronomy, and from Plato and Boethius to Kepler, Leibniz, and Kant, this book explores the ways in which the ordering of the sensible world has continued to suggest a reality that no notes or letters can fully transcribe.

The Practice

The Practice PDF Author: Seth Godin
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0593328973
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Get Book Here

Book Description
From the bestselling author of Linchpin, Tribes, and The Dip comes an elegant little book that will inspire artists, writers, and entrepreneurs to stretch and commit to putting their best work out into the world. Creative work doesn't come with a guarantee. But there is a pattern to who succeeds and who doesn't. And engaging in the consistent practice of its pursuit is the best way forward. Based on the breakthrough Akimbo workshop pioneered by legendary author Seth Godin, The Practice will help you get unstuck and find the courage to make and share creative work. Godin insists that writer's block is a myth, that consistency is far more important than authenticity, and that experiencing the imposter syndrome is a sign that you're a well-adjusted human. Most of all, he shows you what it takes to turn your passion from a private distraction to a productive contribution, the one you've been seeking to share all along. With this book as your guide, you'll learn to dance with your fear. To take the risks worth taking. And to embrace the empathy required to make work that contributes with authenticity and joy.

The Fifth Witness

The Fifth Witness PDF Author: Michael Connelly
Publisher: Little, Brown
ISBN: 0316069388
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 467

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this #1 New York Times bestselling thriller, after taking on a foreclosure case, defense attorney Mickey Haller fights to prove his client’s innocence—but first he must follow a trail of black market evidence to its sinister end. Mickey Haller has fallen on tough times. He expands his business into foreclosure defense, only to see one of his clients accused of killing the banker she blames for trying to take away her home. Mickey puts his team into high gear to exonerate Lisa Trammel, even though the evidence and his own suspicions tell him his client is guilty. Soon after he learns that the victim had black market dealings of his own, Haller is assaulted, too -- and he's certain he's on the right trail. Despite the danger and uncertainty, Haller mounts the best defense of his career in a trial where the last surprise comes after the verdict is in. Connelly proves again why he "may very well be the best novelist working in the United States today" (San Francisco Chronicle).

Hammer and Hoe

Hammer and Hoe PDF Author: Robin D. G. Kelley
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469625490
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 412

Get Book Here

Book Description
A groundbreaking contribution to the history of the "long Civil Rights movement," Hammer and Hoe tells the story of how, during the 1930s and 40s, Communists took on Alabama's repressive, racist police state to fight for economic justice, civil and political rights, and racial equality. The Alabama Communist Party was made up of working people without a Euro-American radical political tradition: devoutly religious and semiliterate black laborers and sharecroppers, and a handful of whites, including unemployed industrial workers, housewives, youth, and renegade liberals. In this book, Robin D. G. Kelley reveals how the experiences and identities of these people from Alabama's farms, factories, mines, kitchens, and city streets shaped the Party's tactics and unique political culture. The result was a remarkably resilient movement forged in a racist world that had little tolerance for radicals. After discussing the book's origins and impact in a new preface written for this twenty-fifth-anniversary edition, Kelley reflects on what a militantly antiracist, radical movement in the heart of Dixie might teach contemporary social movements confronting rampant inequality, police violence, mass incarceration, and neoliberalism.

Religion and Technology into the Future

Religion and Technology into the Future PDF Author: Sam Gill
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498580912
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 313

Get Book Here

Book Description
Religion and Technology into the Future: From Adam to Tomorrow’s Eve examines the broad significance of the current trends and accomplishments in technology (AI/robots) against the long history of the human imagination of making sentient beings. It seeks to enrich our understanding of the present as it is trending into the future against the richly relevant and surprisingly long past. Creatively considered in some depth are a wide range of specific examples drawn especially from contemporary film and television, as well as from cosmology, ancient mythology, biblical literature, classical literature, folklore, evolution, popular culture, technology, and futurist studies. This book is distinctive, in part, in drawing on a wide range of resources demonstrating the indispensable interrelationship among these disparate materials. Science, technology, economics, and philosophy are seamlessly interwoven with history, gender, culture, religion, literature, pop culture, art, and film. Written for general as well as academic readers, it offers fascinating and provocative insights into who we are and where we are going.

The Bright and the Good

The Bright and the Good PDF Author: Audrey L. Anton
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1786602385
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 363

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Bright and the Good examines the connection between intellectual and moral virtues both through the history of philosophy and as it can be illustrated in comprehensive examinations of specific virtues. The first part of the book investigates the original assumptions posited by Ancient Western philosophers concerning the apparent connection between moral and intellectual virtues. The second part follows the assumptions through history from the Medieval and Modern periods of philosophy, noting how the assumption has been tweaked to accommodate specific ideological and scientific precepts. The third part showcases inquiries into specific virtues, taking the reader on an investigation unfettered by any specific time period or ideology so as to consider the apparent connection between the moral and the intellectual on a case-by-case basis. These essays relate both historical context and contemporary concerns and examine topics including vice, ignorance, hope, courage, patience, justice and mercy.

The Tone of Our Times

The Tone of Our Times PDF Author: Frances Dyson
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262028085
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Get Book Here

Book Description
Sound, tone, music, voice, and noise as forms of sonority through which our current economic and ecological crises can be understood. In this wide-ranging book, Frances Dyson examines the role of sound in the development of economic and ecological systems that are today in crisis. Connecting early theories of harmony, cosmology, and theological doctrine to contemporary media and governance, Dyson uses sound, tone, music, voice, and noise as forms of sonority through which the crises of “eco” can be read. The sonic environment, Dyson argues, is fundamental to both sense and sensibility, and its delimitation has contributed to the “senselessness” of a world now caught between spiraling debt and environmental degradation. Dyson draws on scenes, historical moments, artworks, and artistic and theoretical practice to situate the reverberative atmosphere that surrounds and sustains us. From Pythagoras's hammer and the transmutation of music into mathematics, to John Cage's famous experience in the anechoic chamber, to the relocation of the stock market from the street to the computer screen, to Occupy Wall Street's “people's microphone”: Dyson finds policies and practices of exclusion. The sound of Pythagoras's forge and the rabble of the market have been muted, rearticulated, and transformed, Dyson argues, through the monotones of media, the racket of financialization, and the gibberish of political speech. Informed by contemporary sound art, philosophy, media and sociopolitical theory, The Tone of Our Times offers insights into present crises that are relevant to a broader understanding of how space, the aural, and listening have shaped and continue to shape the world we live in.

Attunement

Attunement PDF Author: Alberto Perez-Gomez
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262333333
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 300

Get Book Here

Book Description
How architecture can move beyond the contemporary enthusiasms for the technically sustainable and the formally dazzling to enhance our human values and capacities. Architecture remains in crisis, its social relevance lost between the two poles of formal innovation and technical sustainability. In Attunement, Alberto Pérez-Gómez calls for an architecture that can enhance our human values and capacities, an architecture that is connected—attuned—to its location and its inhabitants. Architecture, Pérez-Gómez explains, operates as a communicative setting for societies; its beauty and its meaning lie in its connection to human health and self-understanding. Our physical places are of utmost importance for our well-being. Drawing on recent work in embodied cognition, Pérez-Gómez argues that the environment, including the built environment, matters not only as a material ecology but because it is nothing less than a constituent part of our consciousness. To be fully self-aware, we need an external environment replete with meanings and emotions. Pérez-Gómez views architecture through the lens of mood and atmosphere, linking these ideas to the key German concept of Stimmung—attunement—and its roots in Pythagorean harmony and Vitruvian temperance or proportion. He considers the primacy of place over space; the linguistic aspect of architecture—the voices of architecture and the voice of the architect; architecture as a multisensory (not pictorial) experience, with Piranesi, Ledoux, and Hejduk as examples of metaphorical modeling; and how Stimmung might be put to work today to realize the contemporary possibilities of attunement.

Number to Sound

Number to Sound PDF Author: P. Gozza
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 940159578X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Get Book Here

Book Description
Number 10 Sound: The Musical Way 10 the Scientific Revolution is a collection of twelve essays by writers from the fields of musicology and the history of science. The essays show the idea of music held by Euro th pean intellectuals who lived from the second half of the 15 century to the th early 17 : physicians (e. g. Marsilio Ficino), scholars of musical theory (e. g. Gioseffo Zarlino, Vincenzo Galilei), natural philosophers (e. g. Fran cis Bacon, Isaac Beeckman, Marin Mersenne), astronomers and mathema ticians (e. g. Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei ). Together with other people of the time, whom the Reader will meet in the course of the book, these intellectuals share an idea of music that is far removed from the way it is commonly conceived nowadays: it is the idea of music as a science whose object-musical sound--can be quantified and demonstrated, or enquired into experimentally with the methods and instruments of modem scientific enquiry. In this conception, music to be heard is a complex, variable structure based on few simple elements--e. g. musical intervals-, com bined according to rules and criteria which vary along with the different ages. However, the varieties of music created by men would not exist if they were not based on certain musical models--e. g. the consonances-, which exist in the mind of God or are hidden in the womb of Nature, which man discovers and demonstrates, and finally translates into the lan guage of sounds.

The Historical Roots of Elementary Mathematics

The Historical Roots of Elementary Mathematics PDF Author: Lucas N. H. Bunt
Publisher: Courier Corporation
ISBN: 0486139689
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Get Book Here

Book Description
Exciting, hands-on approach to understanding fundamental underpinnings of modern arithmetic, algebra, geometry and number systems examines their origins in early Egyptian, Babylonian, and Greek sources.