In 2008, Hurricane Ike swept theGulf of Mexicointo Galveston, submerging 75 percent of the city, shredding entire buildings to splinters, and turning out rich and pooralike fromtheir beloved island home. Scores of private interviews expose the politics of recovery, the destitution of loss, and the revelry of rebirth. Award-winning Galveston County Daily News reporters Leigh Jones and Rhiannon Meyers deliver the storyabout one of Americas largest hurricanes through the voices of those who lived it. Survivors who didreturn to the island waded through not only mounds of toxic debris, but also a dense and seemingly endless bureaucracy that threatened to stifle recovery before it even began. Like a phantom reincarnation of its 1900 ancestor, Hurricane Ike wasthe Infinite Monster that would forever cloud the Gulf Coast's future.
A study of the gruesome game characters we love to beat—and what they tell us about ourselves. Since the early days of video games, monsters have played pivotal roles as dangers to be avoided, level bosses to be defeated, or targets to be destroyed for extra points. But why is the figure of the monster so important in gaming, and how have video games come to shape our culture’s conceptions of monstrosity? To answer these questions, Player vs. Monster explores the past half-century of monsters in games, from the dragons of early tabletop role-playing games and the pixelated aliens of Space Invaders to the malformed mutants of The Last of Us and the bizarre beasts of Bloodborne, and reveals the common threads among them. Covering examples from aliens to zombies, Jaroslav Švelch explores the art of monster design and traces its influences from mythology, visual arts, popular culture, and tabletop role-playing games. At the same time, he shows that video games follow the Cold War–era notion of clearly defined, calculable enemies, portraying monsters as figures that are irredeemably evil yet invariably vulnerable to defeat. He explains the appeal of such simplistic video game monsters, but also explores how the medium could evolve to present more nuanced depictions of monstrosity.
Cartan introduced the method of prolongation which can be applied either to manifolds with distributions (Pfaffian systems) or integral curves to these distributions. Repeated application of prolongation to the plane endowed with its tangent bundle yields the Monster tower, a sequence of manifolds, each a circle bundle over the previous one, each endowed with a rank $2$ distribution. In an earlier paper (2001), the authors proved that the problem of classifying points in the Monster tower up to symmetry is the same as the problem of classifying Goursat distribution flags up to local diffeomorphism. The first level of the Monster tower is a three-dimensional contact manifold and its integral curves are Legendrian curves. The philosophy driving the current work is that all questions regarding the Monster tower (and hence regarding Goursat distribution germs) can be reduced to problems regarding Legendrian curve singularities.
Quantum Hughes' life is stuck on repeat. While trapped in The LOOP, he struggles to free himself from a glitch that forces him to re-live the same day over and over.
This collection of essays analyzes the many ways in which comic book and film superheroes have been revised or rewritten in response to changes in real-world politics, social mores, and popular culture. Among many topics covered are the jingoistic origin of Captain America in the wake of the McCarthy hearings, the post-World War II fantasy-feminist role of Wonder Woman, and the Nietzschean influences on the "sidekick revolt" in the 2004 film The Incredibles.
How we reason with mathematical ideas continues to be a fascinating and challenging topic of research--particularly with the rapid and diverse developments in the field of cognitive science that have taken place in recent years. Because it draws on multiple disciplines, including psychology, philosophy, computer science, linguistics, and anthropology, cognitive science provides rich scope for addressing issues that are at the core of mathematical learning. Drawing upon the interdisciplinary nature of cognitive science, this book presents a broadened perspective on mathematics and mathematical reasoning. It represents a move away from the traditional notion of reasoning as "abstract" and "disembodied", to the contemporary view that it is "embodied" and "imaginative." From this perspective, mathematical reasoning involves reasoning with structures that emerge from our bodily experiences as we interact with the environment; these structures extend beyond finitary propositional representations. Mathematical reasoning is imaginative in the sense that it utilizes a number of powerful, illuminating devices that structure these concrete experiences and transform them into models for abstract thought. These "thinking tools"--analogy, metaphor, metonymy, and imagery--play an important role in mathematical reasoning, as the chapters in this book demonstrate, yet their potential for enhancing learning in the domain has received little recognition. This book is an attempt to fill this void. Drawing upon backgrounds in mathematics education, educational psychology, philosophy, linguistics, and cognitive science, the chapter authors provide a rich and comprehensive analysis of mathematical reasoning. New and exciting perspectives are presented on the nature of mathematics (e.g., "mind-based mathematics"), on the array of powerful cognitive tools for reasoning (e.g., "analogy and metaphor"), and on the different ways these tools can facilitate mathematical reasoning. Examples are drawn from the reasoning of the preschool child to that of the adult learner.
Over the course of nearly forty-five years of pastoral ministry, Octavius Winslow (1808–1878) effectively demonstrated the practice of applying doctrine to life through his experimental preaching. In Heart to Heart: Octavius Winslow’s Experimental Preaching , Tanner G. Turley surveys Winslow’s life and ministry and demonstrates how a strong theology of preaching provided the foundation for his preaching methodology. Turley highlights the doctrinal precision and Christological focus of Winslow’s preaching, revealing an aim at holistic change in hearers through the use of application, discrimination, inquiry, illustration, exhortation, and persuasion. By introducing us to this influential preacher of the past, this study shows the significance of Winslow’s homiletic for the church of today. Table of Contents: 1. Life and Ministry 2. Theology and Method of Preaching 3. Preaching Grounded in Doctrine 4. Preaching Centered in Christ 5. Theory and Practice 6. Contemporary Significance Appendix 1: Sermon on Psalm 130:3 Appendix 2: Sermon on Galatians 2:20 Appendix 3: Annotated Bibliography of Winslow’s Works
A Classic Work on the Nature of God by Stephen Charnock Stephen Charnock was a highly regarded seventeenth-century English Puritan theologian whose writings have continued to influence the church for centuries. He is known for his sophisticated approach to topics such as the existence and attributes of God, the person and work of Christ, and the doctrine of sin. This ebook, edited by Mark Jones, contains an updated and unabridged edition of Charnock's classic work, Discourses upon the Existence and Attributes of God, written to instruct and encourage Christian pastors, theologians, and laypeople. Jones precedes each discourse with an introductory summary that explains Charnock's general approach. In this clear, modernized presentation of this classic work, readers will experience his skillful exegesis, his influential way with words, his insight into human nature, his concern with the practical implications of who God is, and his Christ-focused approach to theology. Modernized Language: Archaic punctuation, words, and phrases have been updated for the modern reader Updated Bibliographic Information: In the footnotes, Charnock's sources have been located and updated with fuller bibliographic information, showing how widely read he was Chapter Summaries: Each discourse begins with a summary of the chapter to follow Extensive: Covers Charnock's defense of God's existence and 11 attributes of God Includes In-Depth Chapter on the Life of Stephen Charnock by William Symington
