Within the conspirator realm of a government ruling over this current society, Tyman J. Robinson sheds enlightenment on how esotericism and metaphysics bring understanding to ones spirituality. He ousts the illusion that has captivated the lower self of civilization and captivates a methodology on how important it is to uncover the mysteries of ones own soul.
The Blueprint is a philosophical thriller about our dark, distant future, stranded on an unknown world, entangled in a brutal war against our primordial nature and against a dark, alien force, struggling on the brink of extinction. The reader is taken on an intriguing quest and a ruthless battle with a fossilized enemy that has not yet lost its dark and destructive powers. This quest and struggle gives the book's main characters, the Travelers, a grand and compelling life, in which they are torn between hope and fear, love and hate, friendship and alienation, victory and defeat.People seeking for Blueprint fragments are called Travelers. None of the Travelers knows where the Blueprint came from, why it stranded on their world, and what caused it to split into six zones and shatter into thousands of encapsulated fragments. But every Traveler who ever comes into contact with the Blueprint has been captivated to the end of his days by an unreasonable search for the Blueprint and an unbearable desire to reunite all its fragments. Centuries ago, the first finder found the very first fragment of the Blueprint, a fossilized black egg the size of a human skull, at a depth of miles, in the strata beneath the foundations of the compressed tunnels that undercut all continents and oceans. Since his discovery, the first finder has been a-mortal, driven by an unbearable desire to find and reunite all the fragments, without being able to identify where this will lead.The a-mortal Ralen discovered the first fragment of the Blueprint. Due to his unnaturally long lifespan, Ralen has forgotten that he is the legendary first finder. In the course of the story, when he reads archives in which Travelers have recorded their oldest memories, Ralen rediscovers that he is the first finder. Ralen comes from another world, but that too is a black hole in his memory. During his quests across and underneath continents and oceans, he occasionally experiences flashbacks of this bitterly lonely journey through the forbidden void, reminding him that an unknown enemy from afar is on the way to this world. These are rare moments in which Ralen realizes rationally why the Blueprint should be reunited at all costs. It is the only means that can keep mankind from extinction. Together with Casten, his only reliable ally, Ralen tries to forge the warring Travelers into a united tribe in order to reunite the fragments in time. Ralen's character does not cooperate in this. By nature he is a restless solitary hunter, who prefers to retreat to the jungles. But every time he gives in to that desire, the call of the Blueprint catches up with him and forces him back to the endless tunnels, in search of the last undiscovered fragments and the underground archives in which the excavated fragments lie.
"A dazzlingly erudite synthesis of history, philosophy, anthropology, genetics, sociology, economics, epidemiology, statistics, and more" (Frank Bruni, The New York Times), Blueprint shows why evolution has placed us on a humane path -- and how we are united by our common humanity. For too long, scientists have focused on the dark side of our biological heritage: our capacity for aggression, cruelty, prejudice, and self-interest. But natural selection has given us a suite of beneficial social features, including our capacity for love, friendship, cooperation, and learning. Beneath all of our inventions -- our tools, farms, machines, cities, nations -- we carry with us innate proclivities to make a good society. In Blueprint, Nicholas A. Christakis introduces the compelling idea that our genes affect not only our bodies and behaviors, but also the ways in which we make societies, ones that are surprisingly similar worldwide. With many vivid examples -- including diverse historical and contemporary cultures, communities formed in the wake of shipwrecks, commune dwellers seeking utopia, online groups thrown together by design or involving artificially intelligent bots, and even the tender and complex social arrangements of elephants and dolphins that so resemble our own -- Christakis shows that, despite a human history replete with violence, we cannot escape our social blueprint for goodness. In a world of increasing political and economic polarization, it's tempting to ignore the positive role of our evolutionary past. But by exploring the ancient roots of goodness in civilization, Blueprint shows that our genes have shaped societies for our welfare and that, in a feedback loop stretching back many thousands of years, societies are still shaping our genes today.
Seven-time Grammy award winning artist offers an inspiring blend of God and grit for building a fulfilling life "The Blueprint is a transparent approach to talking about issues-from marriage to politics to sex and religion-and it's from my perspective. Not from a Princeton, mainline, protestant, evangelical or liberal viewpoint, but from a 2010 Christian moderate with swag." --Kirk Franklin Gospel artist Kirk Franklin's faith wasn't always as strong as it is today. His father abandoned his family; his mother constantly told Kirk that he was an unwanted child and left him to be adopted when he was four; his sister became a crack addict; he never saw a black man who was faithful in marriage. Despite his shaky foundation he found strength and success through his music and through God. In The Blueprint, Franklin will explain how by communicating with life's architect, God, he learned to see hardships as necessary life propellants and moved on to become the bestselling gospel musician in recent history, as well as a devoted husband and loving father. This is not a step program, it's a lifelong journey. With Franklin's guidance, you will: -pursue your dreams without losing yourself in the chase -do some lifescaping to eliminate the "weeds" that hold you back -declare your life to be drama-free -get past your fears, so you can live and love fully -pass the baton to future generations by leading by example It's time to take faith out of the church pews and into our everyday lives. With hope, devotion, and strength, The Blueprint offers a plan to help you move beyond hardships to create your own personal Blueprint for life. Watch a Video
No Christian is perfect and no Christian will be on this side of heaven. Every believer is a work in progress, being transformed from who they were to who they will yet be. The technical term is sanctification. Rooted in God’s character and his design in and through creation, sanctification is the process by which a Christian develops into the person God wants him or her to be. Simultaneously challenging and joyous, sanctification does not happen overnight; neither is it a process with a defined end point. It is a lifelong pursuit. The beauty of God’s work in sanctification is that God shapes one’s life into something beyond expectation. By submitting to God’s plan, believers become more like Christ and so fulfill God’s purpose to glorify himself on the earth. The Blueprint of Grace serves as a primer to the beginning of the process of sanctification, how it unfolds, and how it ends.
The first accessible book on a theory of physics that explains the relationship between the particles and forces that make up our universe. For decades, physicists have been fascinated with the possibility that two seemingly independent aspects of our world—matter and force—may in fact be intimately connected and inseparable facets of nature. This idea, known as supersymmetry, is considered by many physicists to be one of the most beautiful and elegant theories ever conceived. According to this theory, however, there is much more to our universe than we have witnessed thus far. In particular, supersymmetry predicts that for each type of particle there must also exist others, called superpartners. To the frustration of many particle physicists, no such superpartner particles have ever been observed. As the world’s most powerful particle accelerator—the Large Hadron Collider—begins operating in 2008, this may be about to change. By discovering the forms of matter predicted by supersymmetry, this incredible machine is set to transform our current understanding of the universe’s laws and structure, and overturn the way that we think about matter, force, space, and time. Nature’s Blueprint explores the reasons why supersymmetry is so integral to how we understand our world and describes the incredible machines used in the search for it. In an engaging and accessible style, it gives readers a glimpse into the symmetries, patterns, and very structure behind the universe and its laws. “As the world’s most powerful particle accelerator revs up, Dan Hooper’s book is essential reading.” —New Scientist “[An] energetic exploration of modern physics.” —Kirkus Reviews
Focusing on the later work of the American photographer Francesca Woodman (1958-1981), Claire Raymond takes up the question of the disintegrative condition of the art she produced in the last year of her life. Departing from the techniques of her earlier compositions, Woodman worked in the diazotype process for many of these late pieces, most importantly the monumental Blueprint for a Temple. Raymond shows that through her use of diazotype, a medium that breaks down when exposed to light, Woodman created art that is both supremely evocative aesthetically and inherently unstable physically. Woodman, Raymond contends, was imaginatively responding to the end of the durable image, a historical reality acknowledged in the way her work plays the ephemeral and evanescent against the monumental and enduring. Raymond focuses on the theoretical and the curatorial issues surrounding Woodman's diazotypes, a thematic and practical distress that haunts much of her later art, especially the artist's book and photo series Some Disordered Interior Geometries and Portrait of a Reputation. Rather than conceiving of Woodman herself as fragile, an artist chronicling and seeming to yearn for her own disappearance, Raymond juxtaposes Woodman's career-spanning documentation of her own image against other post-war witnesses of trauma - an artist standing in the museum ruins where she emerges most distinctly as a figure of postmodernity.
Brimir and Hulda are best friends who live on a small island on a beautiful blue planet where there are only children and no adults. Their planet is wild and at times dangerous, but everything is free, everyone is their friend, and each day is more exciting than the last. One day a rocket ship piloted by a strange-looking adult named Gleesome Goodday crashes on the beach. His business card claims he is a “Dream.ComeTrueMaker and joybringer,” and he promises to make life a hundred times more fun with sun-activated flying powder and magic-coated skin so that no one ever has to bathe again. Goodday even nails the sun in the sky and creates a giant wolf to chase away the clouds so it can be playtime all the time. In exchange for these wonderful things, Goodday asks only for a little bit of the children’s youth—but what is youth compared to a lot more fun? The children are so enamored with their new games that they forget all the simple activities they used to love. During Goodday’s great flying competition, Hulda and Brimir fly too high to the sun and soar to the other side of planet, where they discover it is dark all the time and the children are sickly and pale. Hulda and Brimir know that without their help, the pale children will die, but first they need to get back to their island and convince their friends that Gleesome Goodday is not all that he seems. A fantastical adventure, beautifully told, unfolds in a deceptively simple tale. The Story of the Blue Planet will delight and challenge readers of all ages.
If a spinning disk casts a round shadow does this shadow also spin? When you experience the total blackness of a cave, are you seeing in the dark? Or are you merely failing to see anything (just like your blind companion)? Seeing Dark Things uses visual riddles to explore our ability to see things that do not reflect light. Shadows and holes are anomalies for the causal theory of perception, which states that anything we see must be a cause of what we see. This requirement neatly explains why you see the front of a book's jacket and not its rear when you look at it face-on. However, the causal theory has trouble explaining how you manage to see the black letters on its surface. The letters are made visible by the light they fail to reflect rather than by the light they reflect. Nevertheless, Roy Sorensen defends the causal theory of perception by treating absences as causes. His fourteen chapters draw heavily on common sense and psychology to vindicate the assumption that we perceive absences. Seeing Dark Things is philosophy for the eye. It contains fifty-nine figures designed to prompt visual judgment. Sorensen proceeds bottom-up from observation rather than top-down from theory. He regards detailed analysis of absences as premature; he hopes a future theory will refine the pictorial thinking stimulated by the book's riddles. Just as the biologist pursues genetics with fruit flies, the metaphysician can study absences by means of shadows. Shadows are metaphysical amphibians with one foot on the terra firma of common sense and the other in the murky waters of nonbeing. Sorensen portrays the causal theory of perception's confrontation with the shadows as a triumph against alien attack - a victory that deepens a theory that resonates profoundly with common sense and science. In sum, Seeing Dark Things is an unorthodox defense of an orthodox theory. "Seeing Dark Things is an adventurous philosophical exercise in the ontology and epistemology of the commonsense world. Its treatment of the many puzzles that surround such putative 'negative' entities as shadows and holes will make it a classic on the literature on privations for many yeas to come. The book is also a wonderful example of how philosophy can be done without falling into the traps of the academic rigmarole. Sorensen is truly unique in his capacity to bring together classic philosophers, contemporary authors, and ticklish anecdotes." - Achille Varzi, Columbia University "This is a wonderful book, full of a profound, unsettling cleverness and weirdly satisfying counter-intuitiveness that the subject requires...a great book." - Richard Marshall, Bookforum "Sorensen is an extraordinarily fertile and imaginative philosopher, drawing widely on philosophy, physics, biology and vision science to mine his chosen quarry. His arguments, anecdotes and examples are always engaging. Add them to his effortless style and you have a rare commodity - a book of serious philosophy that many non-professionals will enjoy." - Ian Phillips, Times Literary Supplement "Sorensen's book is certainly fascinating and richly thought-provoking... he argues carefully and clearly in favour of his key claims, all of which merit very serious consideration, even if they sometimes provoke one to construct and defend alternative views. That, however, is surely the hallmark of the very best kind of philosophy writing. Seeing Dark Things is a model of this kind." - E.J. Lowe, Philosophy
There were a million stories in the naked cities of film noir and this ultimate noir compendium tells 'em all--from classics like DOUBLE INDEMNITY and NIGHT AND THE CITY to lost gems such as PITFALL and TRY AND GET ME! Eddie Muller weaves stunning images with a savvy, sharp text that propels you down every side street of those haunting cityscapes. color photos.
