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Just Curious About Animals and Nature, Jeeves (Ask Jeeves)
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Just Curious About Science, Jeeves (Ask Jeeves)
ASIN: 0743427106 |
Book Description
HOW MUCH ELECTRICITY CAN YOU GET FROM AN ELECTRIC EEL? WHEN CAN MISTLETOE BE THE KISS OF DEATH? HOW MANY SHEEP DOES IT TAKE TO GET ENOUGH WOOL FOR A SUIT? WHAT DID BOOK WORMS EAT BEFORE THERE WERE BOOKS? The mysteries of the natural world are endless, but your trusty manservant, Jeeves, has the answers to hundreds of nature's most fascinating mysteries. Based upon questions received at the popular Ask Jeeves® website, Just Curious About Animals and Nature, Jeeves is a fun and freewheeling safari of discovery that can tame even the most savage intellectual curiosity. Packed with incredible facts on everything from the size of a giraffe's tongue (yow, two feet!) to just how fast a fly can fly (4.5mph) to whether dogs have belly buttons (yes, they do), this is a book certain to both amuse and amaze. With a little help from everybody's butler, you'll unlock the secret behind the firefly's glow, wonder at the language of hippos, and scratch your head when you learn the truth about poison ivy. Certain to help you develop the kind of brainpower that will impress your friends and frighten your enemies, Just Curious About Animals and Nature, Jeeves is perfect for fans of flora and fauna, or for anyone who wants to know the whats, whens, whys, and hows of nature.
Book Description
Is it true that King Louis XIV never bathed?
Was Doc Holliday really a doctor?
Who were the twelve knights of King Arthur's Round Table?
And what do Scots traditionally wear under their kilts?
You'll get the answers to these fascinating questions and many, many more in the wildly entertaining, un-put-down-able Just Curious About History, Jeeves. Based on the legion of unexpected questions posed at the popular Ask Jeeves Web site, Just Curious tackles all the puzzlers, bafflers, and stumpers that find their way into our everyday lives. What were the Pig Wars and were they actually caused by pigs? Who were the first gangsters? Did Cleopatra really wear makeup? Was Ivan the Terrible that terrible?
Sure curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought him back. So if you want to know how tall Napoleon was, whether Captain Kidd had any little Kidds, or who the heck Charles the Fat was, look no further than Just Curious About History, Jeeves -- the unequivocal say-all, end-all, be-all authority on history's who, what, where, when, why, and how.
Book Description
Using and accessible style and an interdisciplinary approach, this popular text provides students with fundamental information on current issues and problems common to developing areas, while also offering regional coverage of Latin America, Africa, Asia, the Southern Near Abroad, and the Middle East. The authors describe the similarities and differences among nations within these regions and trace events and issues in selected countries.
Customer Reviews:
Informative, easy to follow........2007-07-21
This is, of course, a college text book. In spite of that, its actually a very interesting read. It does not follow the encyclopedic overview of third world nations, but instead it tells the story of the influences, social conditions, and people who constitute the third world. I like that the chapters are clear and concise to the stated subject. The book flows from one idea to the next, building your understanding of the subject as it describes the places and people who exemplify those ideas. The authors took a novel approach with the layout of a book of this type, but it works; it has managed to keep my attention for the last 7 weeks.
Middle East History is full of holes.......2006-07-10
While overall this is a potentially useful book to the introduction of the "other" world for students, the sections on Israel and the Middle East make some big mistakes. This throws into question the overall usefulness of the whole book. Here are he problems as I see them:
1.The Palestineans are not the direct descendents of the Philistines.
2. The British Mandate of Palestine which happened after WWi (1918-1948) included what is now Jordan, Israel and Palestinean territories. The British in order to thank the Hussein clan for their support during WWi gave them TransJordan in 1922 (modern Jordan) which was carved out of the mandate that the League of Nations gave the British to control (Historic Palestine).
3. The Jews had always had a presence in Historic Palestine, not just a recent 20th century immigration.
4. After the establishment of Israel in 1948 many of the Arab countries forced their Jewish inhabitants to leave, and many went to Israel (approximately 800.000) and were absorbed. More were forced out after the 1967 Six-Day War (especially the Egyptian Jews) The Palestinians (also around 800,000) that choose or were forced to leave what became Israel were never absorbed into the Arab countries because this would have acknowledged the State of Israel.
This resource in just this one section has these claring problems and I am curious as to the whether the other sections were so poorly researched as well.
Incredible visual guide to the Forgotten Third World.......2000-06-14
This book goes into a visual comparision of the powerful Western World and the rest of the World. It depicts through pictures and statistics the growing gap between the have and the have-nots. Very powerful yet still a coffee table book.
Book Description
"Highly personal and philosophical….the next best thing to reading Copernicus."—Publishers Weekly
In 1543, the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus lay on his deathbed, reportedly holding his just-published masterpiece, The Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, in his hands. Placing the sun at the center of the universe, Copernicus launched modern science, leading to a completely new understanding of the universe, and humanity's place within it.
But what did Copernicus really believe? Some argue that he anticipated the vast secularizing impact his ideas would have on history. Others contend that Copernicus was a man of his time and, on the whole, accepted its worldview. William T. Vollmann navigates this territory with the energetic prose and powerful intelligence for which he is known, providing a fresh and enlightening explication of Copernicus, his book, and his time, and the momentous clash between them. 21 diagrams.
Customer Reviews:
The Universe Screams.......2007-07-20
I completely understand the negative reviews this book has received. But I would like to defend this book, which I believe is worth the time and effort.
This is a disappointing book if you are reading it for the wrong reason. The wrong reason is if you are reading this book as an astronomy buff who wants to learn more about Copernicus. Again, that is a very understandable mistake to make. By all appearances, it looks to be a serious academic discussion of the work of Copernicus and its role in the scientific paradigm shift.
The right reason to read this book is not as an astronomy buff but as a William T. Vollman buff. I can't get enough of Vollman's writing. And he can't seem to stop writing so it's a good match (this is a writer, for example, who has completed an over 3,000 page essay on the nature of violence). Vollman has the gift of being able to encompass the full depth of the human experience in every sentence he writes. When he writes of ecstatic happiness, he manages to imbed it with hints of cruelty and suffering. When he writes about tragedy and death, there are twisted traces of sweetness and cathartic joy.
I'm a fan of the history of science and good science writing too. And while this book might not be the most straightforward way to learn about Copernicus, there is factual information here about Copernicus' "On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres." We are also given Vollman's meditations on the nature of scientific revolutions and the way science as a process will always be hampered by human imperfection, by our individual investments in our beliefs, and by the stubborn drag of institutional momentum. "'Revolutions' was profoundly dangerous in its epoch, and hence profoundly necessary."
Why would Vollman take on this task? He tells us this book is the result of an "exercise in explicating a subject slightly beyond my intellectual competence." But, when he marvels at the effort, "the immensity of the force required" and the "solitary years" behind Copernicus' work, we get a sense of the parallel process driving Vollman's own desires to nudge the universe.
Very Disappointing.......2006-08-09
I bought this book with high hopes of finding an interesting and illuminating look at how Copernicus revolutionized astronomy. I was so disappointed that I did something I virtually never do: after about 90 pages, I put the book away with no intention of finishing it. Vollmann is a writer of note, but in this case his writing is so mannered and his exposition seemingly so convoluted that the reader quickly grows fatigued. At least, this reader did.
Snoozefest.......2006-07-08
This is the most uninteresting book on science or a scientific personality that I have read in recent times. I was looking forward to reading about the middle ages, the environment in which Copernicus grew up, the scientific world view at the time, the social mileu, what Copernicus himself was like, what his religious beliefs were, how he arrived at his conclusions, and what his book meant in terms of courage and conviction in that time. And, of course, a lot of actual science.
Instead we get such hard to read, boring, insipid prose dissecting the text of his work that it's a real effort to turn each page. I felt like giving up at every turn till I was half-way through but only sheer will and expectation that it would get better kept me going. But I gave up at the half-way mark.
I had learned very little that stayed with me and I had hardly enjoyed it. For those interested, Bill Bryson's "A short history of nearly everything" is one that succeeds quite well at this attempt to dispense science to the laymen.
save your money and time.......2006-06-16
If you are interested in what Copernicus did, save your money and time and don't buy this book. Instead, get ahold of Thomas Kuhn's masterful account "The Copernican Revolution".
This book is one of a series in which non-scientists present popular accounts of mostly great episodes in science. I say mostly great because there seems to be a certain amount of political correctness in the choice of scientists to write about in the series. But I digress.
Some of the books in this series are successful, for example the one by Madison Smartt Bell on Priestley, Lavoisier, and the chemical revolution. But when you have fiction writers expounding technical subjects, there is potential for trouble, and that is what we get with Vollmann's book on Copernicus.
Vollmann's explanations of the technical aspects of Copernicus' work are superficial and hard to grasp. Kuhn is much better. Vollmann also has a complusion to say snotty things about everyone involved, about their thoughts, motives, habits of mind. One would think that the ancients who constructed early science and astronomy were a bunch of idiots who had to wait for Copernicus to come along, who of course was a dolt because he was "obedient" to Aristotle for the most part, and was incapable of writing clearly to boot. Kuhn is incomparably better at explaining the philsophical, religious, scientific, and historical contexts in which the ancients, Copernicus, and the other early moderns worked. For example, you get a real sense of why the ancient earth-centered system was the reasonable system, that the ancient heliocentric precursors of Copernicus didn't have much in the way of evidence or reason on their side. You get a sense from Kuhn of just what it was that made the heliocentric theory attractive to Copernicus -- the changing context of observational astronomy, and above all the clarity which the heliocentric view gave to the matter of the oddities of the motion of certain of the planets.
If you really want a sense of the greatness of ancient scientific thought, of ancient astronomy, of the magnificence of the accomplishment of Copernicus and his followers in the modern scientific revolution, get ahold of Kuhn's book.
revolution #1.......2006-02-24
It's interesting that so many of the defining moments in history involved Uncentering something from something else. For instance, Thomas Willis realized that the seat of reason and intelligence was neither the heart nor the soul, but a lump of jelly in the skull. Darwin first figured out that the homo sapiens is just one twig in the tree of life. And before Willis and Darwin there was Copernicus, who is credited with discovering that the Earth, far from being the center of the universe, revolves around the sun along with all the other planets.
There's something about human psychology that resists Uncentering, and back then the gecocentrists had mountains of religious and philosophical text to back them up. Needless to say heliocentrism was an unpopular idea, and in 16th century Europe people with unpopular ideas were burned along with their books. Copernicus was spared this fate, partly because of an apologetic (and unauthorized) preface, and partly by the fact that he died of natural causes shortly after the publication of his book in 1543. Copernicus's successors, Bruno and Galileo, ended up taking a lot of the flak.
William T. Vollmann is an excellent writer, and he does a fabulous job of summarizing Revolutions. Using limited astro-jargon and a few figures, Vollmann explains how Copernicus calculated the positions and trajectories of the planets, often arriving quite close to modern estimates without the benefit of a telescope or even binoculars. He also describes how Copernicus had to grapple with the prevalent Ptolemaic system and its philosophical roots. Remarkably, Copernicus, despite his revolutionary worldview, could never bring himself to abandon the philosophical tradition that valued circles for their asthetic appeal. His heliocentric system thus featured circular orbits, and was consequently almost as complicated as Ptolemy's geocentric model. It would be another 50 years before Kepler cleaned up the mess by introducing elliptical orbits to the heliocentric model.
In the end Copernicus was successful in uncentering the Earth. This was a real breakthrough, and not just because he was right about heliocentrism. The Uncentered viewpoint is just the idea that things in the universe can be studied objectively and empirically, without recourse to mysticism. Today we just call it science.
Book Description
New to our On the Shoulders of Giants series, this groundbreaking work of astronomy proposed a heliocentric universe in which planets orbited the sun-daring to challenge the Ptolemaic ideal of the earth as the center of the universe. This essay by Copernicus (1473-1543), revolutionized the way we look at the earth's placement in the universe, and paved the way for many great scientists, including Galileo and Isaac Newton, whose theories stemmed from this model. Featuring a biography of Copernicus and an accessible, enlightening introduction, both written by the renowned physicist Stephen Hawking, On the Revolution of Heavenly Spheres provides a fascinating look at the theories which shaped our modern understanding of astronomy and physics.
Black-and-white illustrations.
Customer Reviews:
Planetary distances is "the chief point of all".......2007-02-06
Copernicus puts the sun in the center of the universe. This is a great achievement not on metaphysical or philosophical grounds but rather because it provides new quantitative information about the universe, namely planetary distances. Suppose the earth is at the center and we have created a model for how the planets move with epicycles and stuff, as Ptolemy did. Such a model can give no information about planetary distances, because we could scale the orbit of Saturn, say, to make it twice as big and it would still look exactly the same seen from earth. But suppose now that we have a similar model but with the sun at the center, which is what Copernicus provides. The (relative) planetary distances are now determined, because if we scaled the orbit of Saturn then it would look the same seen from the sun but different seen from earth. So with the earth in the center we cannot determine planetary distances because we are the center of scaling, but with the sun in the center we would notice scaling and thus the planetary distances are locked, or, as Copernicus puts it, "this correlation binds together so closely the order and the magnitudes of all the planets and of their spheres or orbital circles and the heavens themselves that nothing can be shifted around in any part of them without disrupting the remaining parts and the universe as a whole". Thus he can claim triumphantly that earlier astronomers "have not been able to discover or to infer the chief point of all, i.e., the form of the world and the certain commensurability of its parts. But they are in exactly the same fix as someone taking from different places hands, feet, head, and the other limbs---shaped very beautifully but not with reference to one body and without correspondence to one another---so that such parts made up a monster rather than a man."
A trip back in time.......2006-11-15
Very good book. It really took me back to the 1400's, when everyone thought the earth was the center of the universe, and the sum and stars revolved around the Earth. The style of writing, and the enormity of the meesage was very illuminating.
I have to admit, though, after getting into the math and the scientific explanations, it gets pretty dry. I've only gotten 1/2 way through the book. But, because it's actually written by Copernicus, it is fascinating.
And, he made all these observations almost a century before telescopes were around.
PS i was led to read this, because of the book, Galileo's Daughter, which discusses the life of Galileo, his invention of the telescope, and the persecutions he faced.
Awesome. .......2006-10-18
OK, first of all, "GangstaLawya" seems to not be taking into account the fine work of Kepler, Newton, and Einstein when he suggests that we "remain agnostic" on the issue of heliocentrism. True, Copernicus himself does not excactly refute Ptolemy here (he actually was more worried about how other astronomers and Protestant theologians would react to his heliocentric system than how the Catholic church would see it... and his model wasn't fully accepted until over a hundred years after his death), but this model was later augmented by Kepler and Newton to the point where it does work better than Ptolemy's. And with all due respect, the Ptolmaic system is extremely convoluted, needlessly complicated, and downright ugly at times... so even if there's a simpler way of looking at things that works just as well, that's still a conceptial improvement. Occam's razor, y'know?
But I digress. As with most of my reviews of books like this, my concern isn't necessarily the actual book (which is usually self-evidently worthwhile), but with the presentation. I must say that it's a little awkward to see Stephen Hawking's name appear on the cover in larger type than Copernicus' and not get anything more than a very short introduction by him that doesn't say very much. In fact, there is not very much of a difference between this edition and the one published by Prometheus Books; the text is exactly the same and contains all the same diagrams. The cover is flashier (and says "Stephen Hawking!") and the type is cleaner. That's it. Those are the only real differences. In fact, the only reason I can see for this edition existing is Running Press (and Stephen Hawking) making a few bucks.
Despite all this, there isn't really anything here that detracts from the work. So basically, you can buy this copy or the Prometheus Books edtion and it won't matter; you'll get pretty much the same thing and pay pretty much the same price either way. I'll leave it up to you whether you want the flashy cover (complete with Stephen Hawking's name on it) or the plain one because that's really about as deep as the choice goes.
What A Joy As Well As A Work of Art.......2000-03-25
Never before did I know a man could explain the heliocentric universe as well in this book. Of Course, Copernicus explained it centuries before my birth. But, it seems so foolish to believe the geocentric view, and I'm Catholic. Read "Dialogues" by Galileo to get the full picture of what these two men said, it it truly fascinating.
Product Description
Volume 16
Product Description
Volume 15 of 60
Product Description
Britannica Great Books of the Western World Volume 16. Paperbound Olive cover. 6 X 9" Also includes Introduction, Symbols, and Abbreviations, and a short bibliography to Copernicus and Kepler.
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Wastes for Imported Fill (Ice Works Construction Guides)
P. T. Sherwood
Manufacturer: American Society of Civil Engineers
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 0727703781 |
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