Blindsight

Blindsight

Author: Peter Watts

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2006-10-03

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13: 1429955198

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Hugo and Shirley Jackson award-winning Peter Watts stands on the cutting edge of hard SF with his acclaimed novel, Blindsight Two months since the stars fell... Two months of silence, while a world held its breath. Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route. So who do you send to force introductions with unknown and unknowable alien intellect that doesn't wish to be met? You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist—an informational topologist with half his mind gone—as an interface between here and there. Pray they can be trusted with the fate of a world. They may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.


Luxury Arts of the Renaissance

Luxury Arts of the Renaissance

Author: Marina Belozerskaya

Publisher: Getty Publications

Published: 2005-10-01

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 0892367857

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Today we associate the Renaissance with painting, sculpture, and architecture—the “major” arts. Yet contemporaries often held the “minor” arts—gem-studded goldwork, richly embellished armor, splendid tapestries and embroideries, music, and ephemeral multi-media spectacles—in much higher esteem. Isabella d’Este, Marchesa of Mantua, was typical of the Italian nobility: she bequeathed to her children precious stone vases mounted in gold, engraved gems, ivories, and antique bronzes and marbles; her favorite ladies-in-waiting, by contrast, received mere paintings. Renaissance patrons and observers extolled finely wrought luxury artifacts for their exquisite craftsmanship and the symbolic capital of their components; paintings and sculptures in modest materials, although discussed by some literati, were of lesser consequence. This book endeavors to return to the mainstream material long marginalized as a result of historical and ideological biases of the intervening centuries. The author analyzes how luxury arts went from being lofty markers of ascendancy and discernment in the Renaissance to being dismissed as “decorative” or “minor” arts—extravagant trinkets of the rich unworthy of the status of Art. Then, by re-examining the objects themselves and their uses in their day, she shows how sumptuous creations constructed the world and taste of Renaissance women and men.


Project X Origins: Turquoise Book Band, Oxford Level 7: Hide and Seek: Where's Woody?

Project X Origins: Turquoise Book Band, Oxford Level 7: Hide and Seek: Where's Woody?

Author: Jan Burchett

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2014-01

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780198301639

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In Where's Woody? we go on a hunt with Team X for Woody the stick insect, who has escaped from his cage in the classroom. Luckily there are some leaves nearby that Woody likes, but Max soon realises that stick insects like escaping! This book is part of Project X Origins, a ground-breaking guided reading programme for the whole school.


Out Of Control

Out Of Control

Author: Kevin Kelly

Publisher: Basic Books

Published: 2009-04-30

Total Pages: 666

ISBN-13: 078674703X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Out of Control chronicles the dawn of a new era in which the machines and systems that drive our economy are so complex and autonomous as to be indistinguishable from living things.


Project X Origins: Turquoise Book Band, Oxford Level 7: Discovery: Guided reading notes

Project X Origins: Turquoise Book Band, Oxford Level 7: Discovery: Guided reading notes

Author: Jo Tregenza

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2014-01

Total Pages: 40

ISBN-13: 9780198301592

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Part of Project X Origins, a ground-breaking guided reading programme for the whole school, these notes offer step-by-step teaching support for each book with guidance about phonics, comprehension, vocabulary, fluency, spelling, grammar, punctuation and writing. Each set of notes has in-built assessment and is fully correlated to all UK curricula.


Signs and Symbols

Signs and Symbols

Author: Adrian Frutiger

Publisher:

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Discusses the elements of a sign, and looks at pictograms, alphabets, calligraphy, monograms, text type, numerical signs, symbols, and trademarks.


Historical Painting Techniques, Materials, and Studio Practice

Historical Painting Techniques, Materials, and Studio Practice

Author: Arie Wallert

Publisher: Getty Publications

Published: 1995-08-24

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0892363223

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Bridging the fields of conservation, art history, and museum curating, this volume contains the principal papers from an international symposium titled "Historical Painting Techniques, Materials, and Studio Practice" at the University of Leiden in Amsterdam, Netherlands, from June 26 to 29, 1995. The symposium—designed for art historians, conservators, conservation scientists, and museum curators worldwide—was organized by the Department of Art History at the University of Leiden and the Art History Department of the Central Research Laboratory for Objects of Art and Science in Amsterdam. Twenty-five contributors representing museums and conservation institutions throughout the world provide recent research on historical painting techniques, including wall painting and polychrome sculpture. Topics cover the latest art historical research and scientific analyses of original techniques and materials, as well as historical sources, such as medieval treatises and descriptions of painting techniques in historical literature. Chapters include the painting methods of Rembrandt and Vermeer, Dutch 17th-century landscape painting, wall paintings in English churches, Chinese paintings on paper and canvas, and Tibetan thangkas. Color plates and black-and-white photographs illustrate works from the Middle Ages to the 20th century.


A Book of Porcelain

A Book of Porcelain

Author: Bernard Rackham

Publisher:

Published: 1910

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

It is the experience probably of most Western amateurs of porcelain to pass through three successive stages of development in their appreciation of an art which, even for the uninitiated, --for those who have no knowledge of its history and little understanding of its technical aspects, --is not lacking in charm and fascination.--pg. xiii.